The Ill Blog

NYC marathon 2008

Peter Theill — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:37:21 +0000

I managed to get a ticket for running NYC marathon this year and I have just returned back from US after a following vacation.

The marathon went pretty well .. I finished in 4:06 though I had hoped to finish in 3:50. Unfortunately I was down with a cold the week before and was in bed almost the entire day before the race. I had to wake up at 4AM in order to catch my bus down to Staten Island where the race was to begin … at 10AM! That gave me around five full hours of incredible cold morning weather … fortunately with lots of hot coffee. In periods I was however freezing too much to actual be able to drink from the coffee-cup without spilling all over myself.

I should have brought more clothes.

The route was incredible good .. starting on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, continuing through Brooklyn, Queens, across Queensboro Bridge, up through Manhatten with a clear view directly down 1st avenue – amazing, up and around a small visit in The Bronx, then back through Harlem and into the finishing area in Central Park.

Always consider external systems … external

Peter Theill — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:21:57 +0000

Today Amazon S3 has been down for several hours. A lot of sites depends on this service and have been built around it without taking into consideration it could be down. That’s a big mistake and even respected companies such as 37signals doesn’t properly handle this.

It’s important to handle all external systems as being external i.e. you cannot expect it to be up all time and even though it might have a must better up-time than your own service it makes your service look bad when it *is* down.

In the case of just using the S3 link in an image tag, why no go the extra mile of setting an onerror attribute on the image to do a proper fallback.

Handle external systems as being something your service _could_ live without for a limited amount of time; in case you cannot communicate with it, disable your function depending on this and notify your users about it. That’s the best way to ensure reliability towards your customers.

Weekend trip to Porto

Peter Theill — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:36:00 +0000

This weekend I took my girlfriend and flew down to Porto, Portugal. I have a friend living there for six months so I thought it would be a great idea to leave the minus degrees in Denmark to get a weekend of sun and 23 degrees.It was a nice trip but we could easily have used a couple of days more.

Participated in a 24h adventure race

Peter Theill — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 19:58:17 +0000

This morning Jon, Jonas and I completed our first 24-hours adventure race called “DTU Adventure Race”. It’s the largest of its type in Denmark with 118 teams competing.The goal for this first adventure race was to complete it within the 24 hours we had available. We did it in 21 hours and 10 minutes giving us a rank of 48. Lots of room for improvements but we reached out goal so we’re able (and will) set higher goal for our next race.The race started at noon on DTU and after a short sprint we jumped on our bikes and weren’t back before twelve hours later. My only three weeks of training on a mountain bike surely wasn’t enough and I wasn’t fully able to keep up with the other guys .. but they backed me up as a great team and I was able to help up on the running later.We wasn’t really sure how much to eat and drink we had to carry along so after a o-run in the forest immediately followed by another round with bikes we were out of water. Fortunately the adventure race crew had planned a water-spot for the next check point so we were able to get filled up.I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures of the event.

Got an iPhone

Peter Theill — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:35:25 +0000

I’ve been wanting it for some time now and today I finally got it. My boss at ZYB was able to bring back home a couple of these nifty phones

I’ve unlocked it and it works great. The interface is superb and though I have had my hands in an iPhone before it’s so much nicer now I’m able to customize it just the way I want it.

Finally an Open Water diver

Peter Theill — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 21:17:14 +0000

I started an Open Water divers certification through PADI last year and finally managed to complete it today. I took it with a friend of mine and we had quite some troubles finding dates where we both were available.

Now I’m looking forward to my first real trip which probably will be to a shipwreck in Sweden.

A blog available on ZYB

Peter Theill — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:45:27 +0000

I’m working as a developer in ZYB and now we’ve finally had a minute to setup an official blog. We’ll be using this to get you into the loop of what’s going on behind the scenes. We have a lot of stuff in the workings so start get excited if you have anything of value in your mobile phone.

Within a very short period of time (we are talking days now) I’m sure we will help you bring your mobile data to life in an entirely new way.

So jump by our ZYB blog and click that ‘subscribe’ button in your favorite RSS aggregator.

One of my next phones

Peter Theill — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:32:30 +0000

I have now figured out which phone should be one of the next ones I buy. Apple announced their iPhone today and it looks very cool. They’ll not release it till June and then I’ll probably have to wait a bit more for it to work in Denmark but let’s see. The only thing I’m wondering is if it’s preconfigured to synchronize contacts and calendars with ZYB or even if it does support SyncML. In the keynote I didn’t hear Steve talk about it but I can’t imagine they wouldn’t include that.

I can’t wait to code a widget for this phone .. I assume it’ll be similar to coding a Tiger Dashboard widget? It must be.

Visiting Paris

Peter Theill — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:31:48 +0000

I’ve just returned from a one-week vacation in Paris. It was a nice trip and we got around quite a bit – visited sites likes Arch of Triumph, Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, Notre-Dame and Louvre. Furthermore we went for the Moulin Rouge cabaret which was a great experience .. nice shows with some nice looking dancers too

We took a trip down the Seine on a dinner boat as well – that’s recommended.

Competed in Boersen Adventure Challenge 2006

Peter Theill — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:59:39 +0000

I’m just back from Boersen Adventure Challenge 2006 in which my current company is participating. It’s a short four hour event on “Middelgrundsfortet” not too far away of Copenhagen.

We competed with three teams this year – last year we had two teams but too many would like to participate so that was just great. It’s a pretty fun event where we are able to compete with colleagues – and as last year my team was the best team of my company