Another post on the subject of Thoughts on Mircoblogging

Another slightly long one.

So some of this post has been sitting in the "queue" of ideas fermenting away, and then over the past couple of days a minor flurry of activity was kicked off, that prompted me to finally post this. More on this "controversy" further down.

First, after some thought, here is my current view on the two oldest microblogging services:

Twitter feels more like old school blogging.
From how i see twitter, it has the same "mental model" as blogging.
Someone creates a single post, then there are some responses to that, comments == @ replies and DM == emails.
The difference is that unless you do some work (or use a range of third party tools), it is impossiblevery hard to figure what was said (the original author can figure it out i think, i am not enough of SocialMedia bigshot to have any real experience with that :)
Also Twitter, due to it's limited functionality, but existence of an API that exposes all of that functionality, has caused an eco-system to grow up around twitter. This eco-system also has a secondary effect, in that now there are not only people writing about how to use twitter but also what tools are best to use with it.

Jaiku feels more like a forum.
This is probably due to the threaded nature of the conversations.
The fact that replies can use markdown and can be longer also contributes to this feeling.
The channels also help to separate off some of the noise as well.
Another thing that helps, is that the social circles in Jaiku seem to be slightly tighter, or at least that is my experience. For me this shows up as the same names showing up in threads, even though i am not following that particular person, so i can take a longer time getting to "know" them before following/friending them.

now about what inspired me actually do something with the ideas written above:

Ville Vesterinen put up a post on the Arctic Startup blog, where he outlines his idea that he will be spending more time on Twitter as the majority of the people he met at LeWeb08 were on twitter, and he thinks that he will get more from using that as his primary tool.
This caused a bit of a stir on Jaiku (along with a slight uptick in the number of Finns registered on Twitter i would guess).
Ville, to give him credit, follows this up with a second post and third post about the responses.

Possibly as a response to this (and also due to the general rumblings on #jaiku) Jyri announces in a blog post his understanding of some of the future plans for Jaiku.
Interestingly he also posts it to both Jaiku and twitter.

One of the hightlights of this was the comedy moment when this jaiku thread started up in response twitter post by one of Jaiku's more prolific contributers

Another highlight was @Spongefile's comment here

Jaiku is like a constant huge cocktail party hosted by your friends with interesting conversations to drop in on with semi-strangers.

Twitter is like getting constant voicemail from everyone you know. You can reply via the same method, but that's no way to communicate.

which i think has to be just about the best description/comparison of the two services i have seen in a while.
And also ties in with one of my all time favorite Merlin Mann quotes here

My notes from the afternoon sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

What happens to Seniors? by Summpi
continues/expands on a Lunch time discussion:

--
What happens to designers & Programmers when they get to the Senior level (not how do we help OAP's , as i first thought from title).

Options; change company, become Project manager, Start a company, Consultant.

Reactor as an example.
Interesting projects, good team, good tools
Interesting point - not so good pay, but amazing conditions. Only 3 people have left, now approx 100, can pick clients.

Fjord's senior people get pleasure from mentoring.

Conversation morphed into/onto business models (which had been mentioned during Myles session earlier)

Web2.0 - do it cheep first then monetise.

How to get over the gap (only need a few 10k s to get to an intial level), then need to get 6 months to one year money to get to VC level (few 100K's users)

Jaiku - changed purpose. What was their business model.
--

Tools for Distributed teams by Antti
Antti had prepared slides, but decided to change to a more group discussion type thing

--
Basic idea - Teams should not be distributed.
Discussion : for a more succesful project you must get everyone togeather physically at the start of the project for some period of time (time length depends on number of factors, but few days to a week seemed to be consesous )

Tools used for Project management? Kisko is using Basecamp

37signals - all products are basically a productised wiki.

Yammer.

Campfire used in kisko. Scrumwords.

Timetracking methods;
- enter using emacs & text file this is then parsed via excel.
- checking time spent by svn logs, emails etc.
- Stimmer - Scred team bills by second.
- Github - times stuff via checkins?
- Fogbugz - investigated by

Discussion: Estimating, accuracy and best practices. Joel Spolsky's essay on software estimation was mentioned.
--

Beer - Why does it taste so good by me
Originally i had posted this on the Wiki as the i saw that the proposals were getting a little "heavy", and late one evening after slightly more than one glass of beer it seemed like a good idea.
As there was only a few sessions on the board, i put mine up there (if only to fill the last 10 minutes before going to the pub!)
I basically gave a short summary whiteboard presentation of the Wikipedia pages on beer.
2 main types - Lager and Ale (i started off drinking Ale in UK, and prefer it).
Beer is made of only natuarl ingrediants; water, mated grain (normally barley), hops and yeast.

A couple of days later i came across this article about an ancient yeast being used to make beer.

User Experience by Niko Nyman
Niko volunteered to give this as Sergio was not yet back to give his talk.
Niko will be using the same slide set at Web 2.0 Berlin
--
Experience is ...
Excellent ideas and pictures.
Worth of the admission price when presented at ??
Example of hyundai - they provide new purchases with lots of reasons for their purchase after they have bought the car, as they know you will get lots of commetns for your unusual choice.
Dvd player with coffe cup button
He has put his slides up on slideshare now

One thing is that the graph on slide 50 was refered to a number of times in the conversation in the pub afterwards.
--

An excellent presentation of basic fundamental concepts, my notes/wrtie up is short as the session was near the end of the day, and appart for the graph (which kept being used in the beer session in Kaisla afterwards), there was only a single fundamental idea presented.

Niko pointed out that he does similar workshops at corporates to help managers understand design and user experience fundamentals.

Design Ethics by Sergio Palomo
Presentation and discussion of the ideas presented by Gabriel White. The original can be seen here

--
We do not want to be evil.

Ethically is good design enough? Are designer's responsible for their product.
Discussion - Example of guns & knives

Use principles & heuristics
Question - rules for ethics? Is good will enough, or something else

Overview of heuristics.

Discussion - if/how social web sites are addictive

Use of resources (multiple devices not ecological), how to re-use
Make it easy to do double sided printing.
More principles & heuristics - gives a language to have the discussion/negotation.

Discussion on ethics.
--

It was a real shame that this came so late in the day, it could be seen/felt that everyone in the room really wanted to take part, but was really just too tired.

My notes from the before lunch sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

Once again, the sessions were a single stream, with the titles written on the big board.
As was the case last time, it was quite a slow process to get the titles on the board. As there was no better suggestion we took the sessions in the order they were written down in.
I will link the title of each session to the relevant Jaiku thread, where i have already posted my "rough notes", so i don't plan to duplicate those here, but expand on them slightly.

Does Silicon Valley culture work in EU? by Myles Byrne
This was an interesting session as Myles was on a flying visit to Finland, i think around his stealth startup that was doing something with Neuroplasticity.
Myles started off by quoting some "stupid big numbers" such as 170 guadrillion transistors, 55 trillion links, 2mhz freqency of email, 31khz freqency of txts, etc
In Silicon valley this adds up to 1 big machine, this is referred to as "The singularity" (the idea that this 1 machine will soon be equal a single human brain)

There was then an interesting discussion that seemed to conclude that in Finland, generally, people are practical and direct but in the "Valley" there is an environment where dreamers and big ideas can exist. @Pe3 pointed out that it is quite funny to be talking about Finns as all the same.

Myles then talked about the clock of the long now apparently it is featured in the latest Neal Stephenson novel

The discussion then morphed into how the two places viewed risk (mostly with regard to starting your own business.
The conclusion of this seemed to be that the EU was more about Social risk whereas the US was more about financial risk.

Doing one thing properly by Henry Lehto
Presentation available here
An interesting presentation on the idea that it is better to do only one thing really well, rather than multiple things to a good standard.
This lead to a number of interesting discussions, around each of the points raised.
For me one of the eye opening discussions was sparked off by the example of the Disco app, which only does CD (DVD?) burning, costs approximately 20$ to buy, however it duplicates the functionality of the built in OS X burning app, but does not come close to the functionality of Toast. The interesting thing was that Mac users are willing to pay 20$ for an application that is prettier than the inbuilt application. I knew this on some level, but had not realised that the hard core Mac faithful regarded this as normal.


Bridging the gap: explaining RSS to grandma by Tina Aspiala
Tina went back to basics (presentation wise), with a whiteboard based discussion/presentation
She started off with a couple of lists; Two basic platforms that exist today (and hence you should consider when developing a solution) are Computers (Mac's, PC's Desktops, laptops etc) and cell phones.
Changing and/or enabling technologies; RSS, Wiki's, Social media, CMS & blogs. these are things that are obvious to everyone in the room, but hard to explain to non-tech literate people (example of email now used by virtually everybody)
Tina then asked that if there is all this cool stuff "out there" why is it not more used. The discussion came up with a number of reasons, and tina gave an example of how she tried to get the market stalls in Töölöntori to make use of modern technology, but was not able to make them change.
All this was leading to the point that eat.fi had just launched an updated version of the site, and how best to get Restaurant owners to update their own information. There was a good flow of ideas supplied by everyone present (be aware that free advice is worth everything you paid for it!).
Future expansion plans for eat.fi is that no matter where you are in Finland, you will be able to find an eating place near by and have information about that place (average price, quality, opening times, food types etc)

Just one reason i like hanging out on Jaiku

So i check my Jaiku stream this morning and i see this post as shown below

The comment does not seem to relate to the original Jaiku at all!

So i click through and look at the original thread, and suddenly everything become clear

Hierarchy of Communication

Once again, the almost ever happy James Whatley, has posted something that was in my "should post something about this idea" queue, before i manage to get my post out. So in response to that, i have mostly tied up my thoughts and here it is.

I had been thinking about this (but from a slightly different point of view), as i had been rather busy on multiple projects at my job recently. So busy in fact, that i got to mostly dictate the communication methods other people could use (which in fact turned out to be email only).

For me, i think of the various ways that other people send information towards me in a hierarchy of increasing order of interruption (something like):
Social network/microblogging
email
IM
SMS
Phone call
Face to Face meeting

Digging a little deeper into these,
- Microblogging or social networks
they have an "ambient intimacy" idea going for them == i check in when I have time
- Email
I can check this when i get a short break in the day i.e. 2-3 times per day.
- IM
pops-up on your screen, but can be ignored until you are ready to deal with it (or you can set your presence to be do not disturb or away if you need quite/thinking time)
- SMS
again it can be ignored, but is not usually. For me, this is probably my preferred method of communication (low interruption, little expectation of response, i can respond on my schedule if needed, etc.)
In fact, i have found that in Finland SMS is actually a very valid method of business communication.
- phone call
I need to be almost 100% focused for the duration of the call, with conference calls at least i find i can do small "tidying" type tasks (sort out inbox, desktop or temp directories etc.).
To a certain extent i also use the "divert to voice mail" to judge how important the call was (if they leave a voicemail, it was important!).
- Face to Face meeting
The most expensive in terms of interrupting me or stopping me doing something else productive, due to the fact that as well as the duration of the actual event, there is some period of time before and after the meeting where there is not much else i can do because i am focused on the meeting.

Now in terms of the volume of information that is transferred, for the interruption of time, i see it as something like;
Email is best (least intrusive, most information), face to face gives good value as you can draw pictures etc., SMS, phone call, im and microblogging brings up the rear (filtering out the noise from all of the status Updates can be a relatively major task)

Services like Spinvox would probably help me by moving phone calls further down my interruption hierarchy. In fact judging by my current phone behaviour, i might even just leave the phone in "silent" mode and never answer it again.

Getting back to why i was thinking about blogging this, was that i have seen that unlike James' pictures, I don't see the other half of the picture as normally a mirror. From what i have experienced, the order changes slightly, or some options are not even there.
Like most assumptions, this thinking that the other person likes to be contacted in the same way can cause dis-connects and friction.

EDIT: Follwing on from @whatleydude's comment/request, i created a diagram that sort of summs it up.

update on 100 press-ups challenge

So i stumbled across someone else doing the "One Hundred Push Up Challenge" on Jaiku.
Seems they have quite a number of their company has also started.

This lead me to finding a new channel - http://jaiku.com/channel/hundredpushups
This is important to me, as i use Jaiku as my Facebook status update via the rather good Jaikubook application.
What this means in practice is that i think twice about what i post as my main Jaiku, but i am very free with posts to channels and comments.

It then occured to me that once again, somthing that is obvious to me, might be useful for someone else.
As a long time PDA user, it was obvious to me that there must be some sort of "countdown" app out there.
Sure enough some searching later and i came up with this Stopwatch/time application
Much easier than staring at the second hand on my watch.

As to progress, i have gone back to Week 3, but this time doing column 2 instead.
On day 2 i missed the final set by 3 or 4, but yesterdays set was a bit of a disaster.
Oh well, onto week 4

some hints and tips for new Jaiku users

With Jaiku now moving to unlimited invites for everyone, over the weekend i dropped a ton of invites over on Jaiku Invites (and it seems a fair number of other people did the same)
This resulted in a mini-flood of new users on Jaiku, and i could see a need for something like this. Please bear in mind that these are my opinions, and as far as i can tell there are no official etiquette rules on Jaiku, just a bunch of friendly people.

• read the help pages


• One of the original purposes of Jaiku was to help prevent the two most common questions when starting a mobile phone conversation; where are you, are you free to talk


this means there are a couple of things that people can miss if they are not using the mobile client


• Jaiku is a presence application - shows the in use profile of your phone (silent, vibrate, general)


• location updates. This is done by cell-tower, so you can name places (if you are the first Jaiku user there), so pick a good name (not home, office etc!)


• think about joining some channels that interest you


• #jaiku is a good one :)


• use the search box (on your home page) to find people of channels that you might be interested in


• add your feeds from things like; your blog, LastFM, del.icio.us, flikr, Dopplr etc. to your profile


• FriendFeed & Twitter - no so useful


• use JaikuBook to get your Jaiku's to be used as your facebook status


• this is only your main Jaiku's, not comments or feeds


• feel free to post comments on anything


• use comments, rather than creating new Jaiku's
• from this thread you can see who will see your comments (so no need to create a new Jaiku using the twitter @ syntax!)


• If you are not interested in someone's feeds, you can unsubscribe from just that feed


• you can also unsubscribe from their Jaiku's, but as long as you are following them, you sill still see any comments they make


• there is no need to "block" followers, just stop following them yourself


• to get a "new line" in comments, you need to place a blank line in the comments box


• clever use of "ku" suffix is encoraged


• hence things like; meetku's, jog-ku's...


• if you are looking at a Jaiku of Somones feed, and there is a link which says something like "and 5 more", if you click that link, the "5 more" appear in a box on the left where the google adds normally appear

Some things that are known bugs/features/problems:

• there is no equivalent to Twitter's direct message


• everything in Jaiku is public and we like it that way


• use IM or email, they were designed for that task




• only 12 channels will display in your manage page


• The Jaiku development team is still quite small and is concentrating on the port to Google App Engine


• the mobile (S60) client is a bit old and does not support channels


• realistically, we need to wait for the port to be complete before the team looks at new release


• There is no iPhone client currently, but the recent iPhone DevCamp was looking into this


• use the #wishku channel to ask for features, BUT read it first to see if it has already een asked for

In this post, @acuk gives some good tips on how to gain more followers.
Basically, commeting on other peoples posts will bring you to the attention of other people who might then start following you.
Also, some poeple will follow you if you ofllow them, others will look at your home page, and then decide if they want to follow you.

What makes Jaiku so good...

So during the recent downtime, that saw Jaiku move from a datacenter in Finland to the Google App Engine, i tried out Rejaw.

While there, there was a conversation, and the feature list of Jaiku came out.

Thinking about it, here are the features (in an approximate priority order), that keep me coming back to Jaiku (appart from the people);

• Mobile client
  
• threaded replies (with no character limit on replies, only on initial post)
• Channels
• does the Lifestreaming feed thing
• Post via SMS
• IM interface
• API

BarCampHelsinki2 is GO

So Fjord have once again said that a semi-random group of people could descend on their office for a Saturday of intense conversations, demos and ideas.

More details at the Wiki, go there and update it.

Progress towards 100 pressups

So a little over 3 and half weeks ago, i came across this site one hundred pushups, and thought, that sounds like a good idea.

So i take the first test (this was on a Tuesday), and according to that i should be doing column 3. So i try that on the Wednesday, and it was rather hard to say the least, but i managed it.
I then try the second day on the Friday, and complete fail. I barely manage to do the number as per the first column, and i am in a world of pain, so obviously something is wrong then.

The following week, i decide that i will try column two instead (and as per the site advice, do it on Monday, Wednesday and Friday).
Much better, i can do the recommended numbers and still move afterwards.
Onto week two of the program, and it is all looking good, well, apart from i am on holiday at the family mökki, so some of the day's get moved round a bit.
I had written down the numbers as i had also taken the monday off, and i thought they looked too big, so instead of doing that, i repeated week2's numbers but moved to column 3 instead.

On returning to the city i, re-read the site and realized my mistake.
I had not taken the new test that i was supposed to do at the end of week 2, bit late to change now (or rather i could but it would make tracking things harder), so i continue with doing week 2 again but this time using column 3's numbers.

So this last weekend i did the test and managed 21 press-ups, so that should put me in colum 2 again, but having learnt from my mistake last time, i decided to do column 1.
And glad i did. I managed to do the sets (the last couple of press-ups were really boarderline good form, but...), and i did not manage to reach the minimum for the final set.

Looks like i will be repeating weeks 3&4, so this is going to take just a little longer than 6 weeks ;)

And, the reason for posting here; lifehack, post your fitness or weightloss plan on the web, and you are more likley to do it.
so expect more in this series of posts

BarCampHelsinki - My notes form an exciting day

This post has been sitting in my TODO for far too long.

First of all, thanks to Fjord for the use of their space. It was a really good space to have this type of event; good WiFi coverage, plenty of power points, Interesting things (asus eee pc, olpc), large boards to write on (and enough space for everyone to sit)

Only thing to remember for next time is that the entrance to their office is a little tricky to find (it is sort of "round the back")
An interesting and diverse group of people came. During the round table introduction there almost seemed to be a "i'm the least technical person here" competition happening :)

The organising of the days agenda went rather smoothly (enough topics had been proposed etc).
Here Antti live posted the agenda as it was made

First there was a split into two rooms as there seemed to be enough content for two tracks (one more technical than the other).

The Microformats session i did not attend.

Antti gave an overview of how he does GTD here is a thread discussing the tools he uses (these were some of the notes i lost)

Although there was a plan to have two tracks it seemed everyone wanted to listen to Petri's session, so that's what we did.
So now the day moved back to a single track, to me this is one of the cool things about BarCamp type activities, the attendees decide what will happen.

Open organizing and wikis by Petri
Yochai Benkler - commons based peer production Too much content for me to take notes (but lots of really important ideas)
@Pe3 contacts have devloped "think tank" culture - micro-contributions Parvi.fi (swarm). Reasearch swarm started in jaiku #tutkimusparvi
Science is not open. End result is open, but process is closed. Experiment in what happens if done in an open way. Need all of mediaWiki to be "localised" before getting full status Wikiversity (wikiopisto) creating "learning prcesses" not "learning materials" Avoin.org - 3 guys writing their phd's Jornalisim is changing - what is it.
link
the revcommended book

Scred by Kris
Billmonk vs scred Cool conerversation "bit" between Peter (a bill monk user) and Kris.
Peter & friends started to build a "debt" tool, but realised that more complicated than first thought.
Why not change; took long enough to get friends onto billmonk -> export tool by built by Scred.
Scred has mobile client that syncs nicely

A short break for lunch (that then extended :)

Tcl session by Kris
Everything is a string
Mature language
Kris gave some examples of why TCL is so cool for a developer.
Developers should remeber that there is a really easy to embed version for your projects.
TCL homepage

Location Based Services by me
Links to sites mentioned:
jaiku - found out in the beer session afterwards, people had not realized that if they have S60 client they can name locations (based on cell towers)
brightkite - US based, Send location to site. Sort of not very good copy of Jaiku location functionality.
locatik.com - not sure of the point of this, but it is in beta (need a GPS enabled S60 phone to take part).
Nokia Sports Tracker - Speed distance maonitoring using the inbuilt GPS of an S60 phone
Nokia Maps - free maps for S60 phones
During discussion, extra site plazes brought up, but no-longer has mobile client, what is the point of it?
interesting discussion comparing Nike sports Vs Nokia Sports Tracker

Systems logic in design by melanie
Explanation/demo of this technique - Common Needs, Context Needs, Context needs, Qualifier needs,
Examples of how to use this technique for Nokia N770 and Wonderbra
Demo of how this applies to advertising (at least i learnt a new thing that wonderbra has a product for "fuller figure" women!) compare&contrast this to French 1970 playtex bra advert.
Really good presentation/session by Melanie (especailly as idea for seesion was only thought of approx 2 hours before session!)

Internationalization / Localization by
Simple 4/5 slide presentation outlining points
Do it now, if not web 2.0 services are too easy to replicate
Formats & localisation (only USA has states, etc)
Google fail * detects ip - causes fail if using proxy from some other country (not too bad for home page, but other serives become hard to use :) * ff - point by Patrik Hirvinen * not using selected location - try searching using Google.de in finland gives results as if searching in FI = FAIL!
Much bigger problem because customer support is most important thing

Hopefully there will be more events like this in the future.

Recent mobile developments

Over the past couple of weeks there have been some rather major announcements in the mobile phone space (something someone living in Finland tends to be interested in!), and rather than a this set of thoughts just turning into another "those guys said it better" type post in a couple of months, here it is (in all of it's <> glory)

iPhone 3G -
Not much from hardware point of view (3G & GPS). The benefit of this (as i see it) is that the first generation owners don't feel so left out in the cold, it also allows those people who need to upgrade a possibility to sell on their first generation phones (as there will be some sort of market for those).

Really it was all about the software (latest AllAboutSymbian podcast noticed this) - for instance the inbuilt calculator making use of rotation, finally something other than the gallery and movie viewer app
New development tools are supposed to be really easy to use (drag & drop development, just how realistic is this?)
Enterprise stuff - Cisco VPN client built in & working
Apple tends to release small improvements to it's hardware platforms (at least since i have been watching them recently over the past 3-5 years), but keep supporting previous platforms (within limits of the hardware), everyone else seems to forget the old devices.
This gives you a slight feeling of confidence when buying the hardware, as you know at least next couple of releases of software will run on it.
I have seen quotes floating around the web that the life span of Apple hardware is approximately 5 years (with some form of updated hardware being bought sooner than that and the old hardware being kept on for occasional or emergency use)

Nokia E71 -
Saw the announcement of this and, WOW, shame about the camera (crappy optics apparently) but VERY low cost for the hardware you are receiving.
Reviews:
My-Symbian.com review
AllAboutSymbian Review
AllAboutsymbian multimedia review (in this one there is a quote about QVGA video at 15 fps, which looks wrong according to the specs at Forum Nokia (the front "video call" (has anyone EVER used this functionality?) camera does low quality, while the rear "main" camera does similar to the E90 (full VGA 22 fps)) Update (2008.08.22): Seems that on the Forum Nokia page some one had forgot to edit it fully (probably after copying it from the E90 page), and the E71 only does QVGA (320*240) at 15fps. Not so good :(

Comparing the hardware specs on Forum Nokia:
E90 Vs E71,
you can see that they are almost identical (different processors, more bluetooth "things" in E71, etc).

This almost makes me regret spending approximately 900€ on an E90 last year when they came out, but not quite.
For me the giant internal screen, and the opportunity to use a top of the range device for a year was worth it (especially all the cool stuff i have learnt via Jaiku!).

Which would i buy today, I'm not sure.
These are the main "things" i would think about for each device;
iPhone = big screen, smooth user experience, but VERY walled garden,
E71 = probably excellent build quality, some interesting updates to the core S60 software, good size, but small screen
E90 = big screen, slightly better hardware specs, potential laptop replacement device but big for a phone

So for me, today (if I did not have the E90), i would probably buy the E71 and either an iTouch or an N810/N800 to do the browsing on.

Social Networks or Social Objects

I did have some thoughts on this (and in fact started to write up this post a few months back), but these guys have written about this subject much better than i can, so here are some links instead:
Jyri Engeström
Hugh Macleod
Whatleydude (his points about Social objects are further down, and have a number of good links around this.

Seth Godin also talking about "friends"

how to get your Dopplr trips to feed into Jaiku

been meaning to look to get this working for a while now, and finally figured out how to do it this evening.

turns out it is really simple.

In Dopplr go to the "Your Journal" tab, and then select "show just your trips option".
This will give an RSS feed (actually it seems to be an ATOM feed) with an entry for every trip start and return.

Description of Today's bike accident.

Posting it here, to save me telling everyone individually.
time: 2008.05.12 08.35

Place: Porkkalankatu, Helsinki, Finland.

Accident description:
I am in the lane for/towards töölö, which was being held with a red light. The lane for/towards Kamppi had a green light. So I checked my mirros and saw a gap in the traffic. I then indicated and pulled into that lane. The car at the end of the gap was a Black honda crv. As i pull into the lane i hear a horn and then there is the bonnet then the side of a black car. there is some minor contact between the two vehicles.
I continue forward to safer place to exchange details. The driver of the car is very polite, and when asked speaks english with me.
As I do not know the details of Finnish traffic law in these situations (and UK driving training says to never admint liability in an accident), he calls the police.
During the wait, I phone my insurance company, as there is some sort of Bike resuce in the policy. However, when I get through, the woman at the other end does not speak English. As i am not understanding the questions she is asking, i ask the car driver to talk with her. This apparently means that a case is now open.
Police arrive, and advise me that because i was changing lanes, under Finnish law I am in the wrong.
Breathalyzer tests taken from both of us.
I take photo's of damage to both vehicles:
couple of scratches to the side of his car

and the clutch cover on my bike smashed open


The Police give me a warning, but tell me that no further action/prosecution will be taken.
The Police officer then calls for tow truck (as i was not sure if/how the insurance tow would work). Both officers then help me to push the bike to a safer spot off the road.
I have to say that the professionalism displayed by both of the officers was very high, by providing advice and help.

I then got to practice my Finnish as the Tow/rescue truck driver also did not speak English.
Arriving to the office one of my collegues came and helped to ensure that all the paper work for the rescue is filled in correctly.

Now i get to find out how good the Finnish Insurance system is.

been on a bit of an installing spree on my E90

Past couple of days, i have been adding some apps onto my E90, and i thought i would make a short write up about them here.

First one was Nokia Sports Tracker.
On first install, this did not look too interesting (nice icons, but i could not see what to do).
But then i thought i would see what happens if i make the ride home a "workout". It took a couple of tries to figure out how to get SportsTraker to start tracking - the trick was to sleect the "new workout" option (obvious really), then a nice screen appears with all sorts of timers and stuff on it.
When i stopped the tracking, the real magic happened. Loads of cool stats on the route (speeds, time, distances etc). There was also options to export to Google Earth and a couple of other formats.
I need to look into if it is possible to only record the route (not that interested in speed on the motorbike most of the time :).
Nice use of the in-built GPS circuits. If you want to find me on the site my username is ymb.

Then i signed up for the Beta of Locatik. Not exactly sure what is the aim of this app, but the web site is a sort of cool use of Google maps. If you want to look, you can sort of see where i am when i last updated the site ( http://www.locatik.com//ymbrads )

I then got an invite to Brightkite. Seems like a sort of not quite as good Jaiku, but for Twitter users, so it will probably be really popular in the US.

I have also updated my copy of CorePlayer, as the previous verision had a small bug in that if you were listening to something, and then had a call, it would crash the phone (at least on my e90 this was the case!).

I also finally got Conversations working. I had installed the package ages ago, but it appeared to do nothing, but today i went back to the home page, and noticed that, in fact, TWO packages need to be installed. I downloaded and installed the "Nokia Internet Services Support Package" (as per the instructions) and now it all works.
Pretty cool addition to the built-in contacts app, and apparently has some sort of threading ability or something.

Not able to find a WIFM around Twitter?

So i use jaiku, as i have an S60 device (S60 is the name of the operating system that drives most of the mid and high end Nokia phones), and the native S60 client is really Useful|cool|fun.

Point's of comparison (after only a week or so of being signed up to Twitter admittedly)
* ugliness/difficulty to follow conversations on twitter site, vs the Jaiku site
* staying up (there has be a couple of short down time's after being bought out by Google and the subsequent increase in load)
* Presence (small icon shows profile in use on the phone)
* Location. There are a number of other location apps - plazes, dopplr, and now Yahoo's FireEagle.
* Jaiku has an RSS feed import and export. Although, you will probably need to send the Jaiku feed through Yahoo pipes to "clean" it before TwitterFeed can use it. My notes on this can be found here

In fact, while I was thinking about this , Stefan Constantinescu (Jaikunaut extraordinaire), points out that having to use a second website to be able to make sense of Twitter conversations, could be better done using just Jaiku see here

Some links to other (probably much better written articles) on this topic:
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants by James Robertson
dancingmango
Joi Ito
Mathew Ingram

How to get twitterfeed working for Jaiku

Note here as it took too long to get working (probably due to me missing the RSS link at the bottom of various pages!)

Setup a Twitter account
then login to Twitterfeed (it uses OpenID, so pick one of the listed ones (or maybe use another?)
then enter http://your-jaiku-name.jaiku.com/feed/rss into the box, where your-jaiku-name is the login name you use for Jaiku.

That will get your full Jaiku feed (Jaiku's, blog posts, Del.icio.us links etc). To get just the posts i used a copy of a Yahoo Pipe.

Check this for a link, or search Pipe's for Jaiku, to get a pipe that will filter all the other stuff out.

Once you have the Pipe working, get the RSS link and place it in TwitterFeed.
Don't forget to *SELECT* the description only option. If you leave it on the default Title and description then you will see everything doubled up (look at the output from "View Results" option for your pipe and you can see that the Title basically is the same as the description!)

a small success in languages

Last night i achieved a small step forward in communicating in Finnish, i managed to buy a pair of trousers, using only Finnish!

The shop assistant was not admitting to knowing English, so instead of her going off to find someone else, i attempted to communicate in Finnish.
We managed with a lot of erm's and pointing etc, but finally the transaction was complete.

It is the small things in life eh :)

BarCampHelsinki is Go!

So, via jaiku i signed up to attempt to help out with BarCampHelsinki (and yes it should be written like that :).

Details at BarCampHelsinki. This might be the first bar camp organised over Jaiku, as discussion are planned over at BarCampHelsinki channel on Jaiku
For more details on what is BarCamp, read the links on the RightHand side of the page.

Here are a couple of articles with somethings that could do with thinking about.
http://www.capulet.com/weblog/darren/how-to-run-a-great-barcamp
http://www.cleverclevergirl.com/?p=10

Any volunteers?

Chip&Pin Not secure - not a big surprise

via boingboing which links to a google video of how easy it is to hack the terminals.

I have always thought chip&pin was a really dumb idea. Take something (the PIN code) that you use rarely on a very secure network (ATMs are linked using a VERY secure network), and now get ordinary people (mass humanity is never that smart!) to enter these codes multiple times a day.

The old system of using a biometric (your signature), always seemed more secure to me.

Why i see the iPhone as good For Nokia

So now that the general noise has calmed down, i thought i would put down my thoughts on this.
Disclaimer; i have paid, out of my own pocket, for an E90, so i am probably a little biased towards the Nokia/S60 world view.

The best thing, IMNSHO, to come out of the iPhone announcement is that, with all of the coverage of the iPhone (in the various media forms) it has introduced the general public to the term "smart Phone".
It has also allowed Americans to get used to the concept that mobile phones (handsets) can actually cost money and also be objects of desire. From my readings (and i have no first hand knowledge of this) the American market is being held back by the operators, so Apple being able to force one of them into concessions, and remove the operator branding is a good thing.

Now everything has strengths and weaknesses, but here i am listing what i see as the major weakness of each "platform" when compared to the other (i.e. the limitations of one are mostly a strength for the other)

Limitations of iPhone;

• closed platform. Being able to send a short-cut to a web-page/service to the start screen *really* is not that big of a deal.
• no memory expansion. SDHC cards are now up to 8GB, with 16GB a month or so away.
• screen rotation only works for a couple of the applications (pictures and movies, from what i have seen). For me this makes the screen rotation feature a bit "meh"
• officially only available in a couple of markets

Limitations of Nokia's current S60 range:

• QVGA (320*240 or 240*320) just does not cut it any more (and never has for web browsing!)
• the native S60 browser is rubbish. Nokia should go back to bundling Opera Mobile rather than trying to build their own, as the development resources could be better spent elsewhere.
• Synchronisation needs to "just work"(TM). Calendar and contacts as a bare minimum, tasks and notes being a nice to have (for me at least)
• specify the current preferred "data connection" once and all applications should use this, and if it is no longer available *then* prompt for what connection to use. Remember not everyone has a good data package, so if WiFi/WLAN is not available then we do not always want an automatic connection.

Where they are both strong;

• both have lots of "small" software companies developing utilities to extend their platform. Admittedly in Apple's case this is only for their desktop OS currently.
  
• The software on both platforms normally has a "low-price". My experience is that it is in the range of some tens of Euros/Dollars, so quite a low risk to buy.
• Basic usage does the expected thing, but it is possible to extend past this using free scripting tools. My thinking here is Apple has applescript, Nokia has Python.
• Both have their "fan boys" (this is a plus and a minus for both :) )
  

By showing users things that are fun or cool to do once you have good data rates, should help in *forcing* carriers to offer better packages to everyone.
Both Nokia and Apple are doing this. Nokia via it's Ovi.com initiative, and Apple by making almost all of the features need a data rate to provide any real value.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

wrong on a numer of points

so i was on boingboing and came across a link to this article, which attempts to educate people about the Nordic countries, shame they got sauna & Santa Claus in the wrong country.

so what is the point of plazes, dopplr etc

So following on from joining Jaiku, where i finally sort of got the point of some of these Web2.0 things, i had also signed-up for both plazes and dopplr (on the day it came out of closed Beta).

Dopplr i could sort of see a WIIFM (What's In It For Me), in that i could publish up-coming trips and this would then get sent into Facebook, where people i know could see it and try to meet up.
Plazes on the other hand i could not see a use for, it certainly looked nice, but almost no-one i know is all cutting edge web2.0.

But i found this post which made a use case for both. Now i just need someone to mash it up so i only need to enter the data once.

New levels of security theater

Just before the Christmas season I needed to travel to the UK for work for a couple of days, and encountered a new twist in the dance that you need to go through to get on the plane.
I have a Finnish first name and a non-standard (for the UK at least) spelling of my middle name, so i have always used the short form of my middle name.
On these flights, for the first time ever, at both ends the check-in person was upset/concerned that the booking was not in *exaxtly* in the same form as in my passport.
I am not sure how this latest idea helps with security, and when did this change.