fatman in FI

Couple of books I found today

2009-12-08T21:36:00.003+02:00

I had some free time in downtown Helsinki today so I swung by the Stockmann bookstore and was checking out the Technology books section and while there came across a couple of surpriseing books.

The first was Complete Web Monitoring. This book is a written summary of what I have been learning about over the past couple of years. The first part is some simple basic theory about why you should monitor, but the middle to sections where what I have been working on for the last couple of years (the Web analytics not so much but the Web Perfromance and End User Experience was an almost exact match).
The last section on communities is something I have been taking part in as a memember of various communities for the past few years, and again did seem to be just a collection of various writings from around the web.

THe second surprise was to find a friend and former collegue's book on the shelves, The Art of Application Performance Testing.
I had a look and it seemed like a very good summary of all the lessons learnt over the last 10 years of Performance testing.

how to copy in the Nokia N900 browser

2009-11-27T13:06:00.002+02:00

as this is not 100% obvious (at least for me), writing it here.
In order to do this you need to make use of the "mouse cursor" mode.

Swipe from the left bottom quarter of the screen (basically between the ear-piece/speaker-hole and the URL bar area) in approximatley 1cm.
A pointer in a box will appear
tap it to "lock" the cursor (a red-line appears through it)
Now when you draw on the screen it will high light or otherwise behave like a mouse cursor.

To stop the behaviour, click on the Icon (the one that first appeared and now has a line through it).

The icon will disappear if not used after a few seconds.

You can see it demoonstrated in this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUCc2C4JPJE
Learnt about it here - http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=394006&postcount=37

geeking out at ALT-party

2009-10-25T12:43:00.001+02:00

Interesting event, and mix of people.

lots of cool technology, like a Cray CX1, NeXT station, old consoles etc.
YLE had brought a bunch of "stuff" (cameras, consoles etc).

I missed most of the actual content (did not spend so long at the event), but Jeri Ellsworth's talk was inspiring at least.

I'm also over there now

2009-09-08T01:03:00.002+03:00

I have been toying with the idea of having my own domain, and switching to another blogging platform.

Well i have taken the plunge, and you can also find my semi random scribbles over at Sauna Penkki.

My current plan is to post more life/personal stuff here (lets see how that works out eh ;)

Packing list for Camping at unconferences

2009-08-29T18:58:00.004+03:00

Based in part on https://wiki.har2009.org/page/Camping:Some_guidelines, and my experiences at the recent SSWC here is my packing list:

Essentials:
- Tent - be aware most tests seem to be designed for tiny people, so get a slightly bigger one if possible.
- Ground sheet/sleeping mat/air mattress
- pillow
- Towel
- Torch
- Warm jacket
- Waterproofs
- phone charger (unless your phone is one of those really simple ones that can last a couple of weeks on one charge!)

Good to have:
- Spare torch or one of those head mounted ones
- Spare towel
- extra jumper, multiple thin layers
- knife or multitool
- string
- hat/pippo

Things that will make life easier
- multi-block/extension lead - there are never enough power outlets at these events.
- Jesus-tape/gaffer-tape/duct-tape
- bungee cord/luggage strap
- Case trolly - the bigger the wheels the better. Useful if the wheel on you back breaks, easier to clean, if you hurt your back and can't carry your bag.

(I have used Clas Ohlson not because thaey are any good (in fact not sure where i got my stuff from!), but as they have pictures for the things where the name it not 100% obvious, and sell it in Finland and Sweden)

Tab Sweep - Funnies

2009-05-12T15:09:00.003+03:00

Inspired by Tim Bray's Ongoing, here is my first Tab Sweep (basically, a bunch of tabs that are open, but are not worth sending to del.icio.us or twine. These all came from either Jaiku or Twitter links

First, this video, which is a response/inspired by this one (Warning, slightly NSFW if you work somewhere that does not like sexual references or rude words)

Then it seems that Tribbles have arrived

Bit USAian in it's outlook, but still true - the 8 levels of drunkeness

Then, a story about internet sucess from a couple of years ago. Someone submits a picture to deviant art, and then gets a job working drawing the Simpsons.

intersting things happening around Jaiku

2009-04-16T10:05:00.003+03:00

Checking Jaiku this morning, it seems that a couple of potentially significant things have happened over the last 24 hours.

First @lemonad puts up a post announcing that he is looking at getting the Mdot version back up and running.

And then I see @jyri's announcement of a 20% project that has the potential to solve the feed fetching problem, and thereby allow feed fetching back into Jaiku.
Check the FAQ (that is linked in the comments) for what problem this is designed to solve.

Also, by checking the #Jaikuengine channel you can stay (sort of) upto date with whats happening with the development of Jaiku.
The Bug tracker is here while there is a seperate code review tool here.

Next steps for Evolve Design Consultants

2009-04-10T21:52:00.002+03:00

Just checked out my friends new website, looks pretty cool.

Spent some time discussing some ideas how he could take print design into the web and work with the curent media companies to create some exciting things

BarCampHelsinki III

2009-03-25T19:55:00.002+02:00

Fjord have put up a post announcing that they are hosting BarCampHelsinki III.

So far they have been excellent hosts and have managed to even get WiFi working (are rae occurence at most events!!)

MobileDevCamp.fi - Starting to come togeather

2009-02-03T20:24:00.006+02:00

So after answering the call to for volunteers, it seems that the sponsors are coming in to allow us to create the potential for a really good event.

The reason for only saying potential is that it is the people attending that will make an event, and the attendee list so far is looking rather good for an interesting event.

Details of what is happening can be found on the web site

Helsinki Bike Show

2009-02-02T12:41:00.005+02:00

So i went to the Helsinki Motorcycle show on Saturday.

It was interesting as it was much larger this year, and the spreading out allowed it to feel less "crowded".
The effect was to have three "halls" or area's; the mainstream/manufacture's hall, the small dealers/misc-stuff hall and upstairs there was the custom/vintage hall, along with a cinema showing Easy Rider.

The mainstream all was crowded and not so much new, although the Finnish Ploice stand was interesting as it was projecting videos of chases of speeders, and showing what was the average speeds and the actual offical speed limits in those places.
Most of the stands had a couple of girls in tight clothing sitting on bikes.

The small-dealers/misc-stuff hall benefitted from not being crowded by the custom hall, so the ailes could be a bit wider, making it wasier to browse or just walk as you choose (other years the aisles were smaller making it a bit more difficult to just walk around as the people buying/fondling the merchandise would fill up the aisles causing blockages).

The custom hall, was kind of interesting, as the same as last year a couple of the local workshops had transplanted themselves to the hall and were showing their work live(ish).

Overall, a good afternoon out.

My pictures from the event are shown below:

I think i might have figured out why i don't like Twiter

2009-01-21T22:00:00.001+02:00

So at the day job we have finally got more than 50 people signed up for Yammer, and with that number of people the activity has started to get interesting.
This caused a slight parting of the clouds/light bulb moment about why i have struggled with Twitter and why i don't really like it.

The Yammer web interface will show threads (if people use the reply option!), bubbles active threads to the top (like Rejaw), reasonable clients (web, Adobe Air desktop client, SMS, IM...) that offer multiple ways to post, self made groups AND daily summary emails.
If all this sounds rather familiar, it should, this is the feature list of Jaiku (without the presence stuff, but normally you have some form of IM client to do that).

So why do both Yammer and Jaiku work so much better for me?

Well, it finally occured to me that, what i like about this is that i can add my thoughts/comments at a time that is convient for me, and i don't have to be online ALL the time, and can actually do the tasks that the company gives me money to do.

The real-time nature of Twitter might be useful for some, but it fails spectacularly as i see it, because Twitter has no "do not disturb" option like a true IM client does (other than closing the client).

Videos and memes i helped friends discover over the xmas break

2009-01-03T17:18:00.006+02:00

So as i was traveling around the UK visiting various friends and catching up with them in real life, i was telling them about various things that i had seen via various places on the internet.

Everyone seemed to enjoy them, so i thought i would gather them all together here in one place.

Silly ones:

Numa Numa guy
Leave Britney alone
Chocloate rain song
Baby Panda Sneezing
fat cat fail

Interesting ones

Money as debt, very interesting/scary explanation of how the banks work
where the hell is matt, view the three videos and read the FAQ.

I also showed Spotify to a few people. This post is a good explanation of how it works

In other news, I also attended my first Tuttle club meeting, and had some very interesting conversations (and geeked out a little :)

Another post on the subject of Thoughts on Mircoblogging

2008-12-17T22:07:00.014+02:00

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 ~~impossible~~very 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

2008-10-15T22:21:00.005+03:00

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

2008-10-06T23:09:00.004+03:00

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

2008-09-15T22:42:00.005+03:00

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

2008-09-10T14:48:00.017+03:00

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

2008-09-06T14:32:00.002+03:00

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

2008-09-03T07:40:00.002+03:00

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

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...

2008-08-28T01:33:00.002+03:00

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

2008-08-22T15:12:00.003+03:00

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

2008-08-18T21:16:00.004+03:00

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

2008-07-01T15:06:00.009+03:00

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

2008-06-23T22:22:00.004+03:00

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

2008-06-02T19:00:00.004+03:00

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

2008-05-21T23:52:00.004+03:00

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.

2008-05-12T13:36:00.008+03:00

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

2008-05-08T21:58:00.008+03:00

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?

2008-03-16T18:56:00.000+02:00

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

2008-03-09T13:40:00.004+02:00

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

2008-03-05T12:51:00.003+02:00

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!

2008-03-03T17:21:00.003+02:00

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

2008-02-28T21:44:00.004+02:00

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

2008-02-27T14:09:00.017+02:00

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

2008-02-08T21:00:00.001+02:00

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

2008-01-29T13:43:00.000+02:00

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

2008-01-02T16:45:00.000+02:00

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.

Me as a Simpsons character

2007-12-05T16:48:00.000+02:00

Don't want to rush into these things eh ;)

from http://simpsonizeme.com/

ahh, childhood memories

2007-11-16T14:26:00.000+02:00

random suffing link http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/
Bings back childhood memories of walking into the local shop and asking for "a quarter of..."

Salty liquorice mint drinks...

2007-11-15T18:05:00.000+02:00

Sounds so wrong but somehow it works

How i configured GMail IMAP on my E90

2007-11-05T14:05:00.001+02:00

Posted here in case some-one else finds it useful, or i need it again

Use the Wizard to create the account, then open "Email settings", then select "connection Settings"
- incoming e-mail
User name - @gmail.com
Password - Gmail password
incoming mail server - imap.gmail.com
Mailbox type - imap4
Security (ports) - SSL/TLS
Port - 993

- outgoing e-mail
email address - @gmail.com
user name - @gmail.com
password - Gmail password
outgoing mail server - smtp.gmail.com
Security(ports) - StartTLS
Port - 587

details taken from http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78799

Reactivating Widsets on a Phone after a firmware update

2007-10-31T20:10:00.001+02:00

hint for Widsets users, after an update (for instance if there is a new release of a firmware) to re-activate widsets;
* go to website http://www.widsets.com
* login
* on "My profile" select the "settings" option
* there is a button way over on the right (well it is today 2007.10.31) marked reload, this sends an SMS with a download link.
* follow the link to download all of your old widgets (mine was some 200K)

New Gadget from Nokia

2007-10-17T18:20:00.000+03:00

New nokia tablet.
Both touch and Full keyboard
Looks pretty awsome to me.

Found via Engadget

Australian anti-speeding comercial

2007-10-17T12:29:00.000+03:00

you will need to click on the link at the top of the page to get a popup window to watch it, but probably worth it.
http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety/advertisingcampaigns/speeding_pinkie.html

Quite good I thought (found via http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/16/road_safety_vid/)

fun songs

2007-09-08T18:51:00.000+03:00

was suffin round the interwebs today and came across this guy called Jonathan Coulton. He used to do programming for a living, but now is a musician.

Here is a video of him live:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjcH2UmK1uo
the same song (called Re:your brains) with a much bigger audiance, but lower sound quality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2NIhVUUxg

Just signed up with yet another social web thingie

2007-09-07T09:59:00.001+03:00

this time from Nokia - mosh.nokia.com. you can find me as ymb, if you really want to

made me laugh

2007-08-18T20:04:00.000+03:00

http://www.xkcd.com/302/

i needed that

2007-08-18T19:57:00.000+03:00

spent a week (well 9 days) at tyhe family mökki.
Totally relaxing. After three days of totally amazing days (blue skys and +26 C), and really amazing sunsets, like below

Fist day, did a bit of sawing logs, etc. Next three days spent sleeping on the swing bench. did somemore sawing and chopping of logs. Final day was spen collecting mushrooms.

bubble wrap

2007-06-26T23:00:00.000+03:00

http://www.nata2.info/d/flash/f/bubblewrap.swf

New Gadget

2007-06-26T22:27:00.000+03:00

gave in last thursday and got a new Gadget.
Had been looking at this since i saw it on engadget, and living in Finland (home of Nokia), managed to get one early :) Apparently they are selling like "things that sell really well"(TM)

Cool - GPS, full keyboard, 3MP camera (that can do VGA video as well), HUGE screen, reasonable size, things work as expected (a thing that is rarer with technology than you would think!)

Not so cool - i seem to have "done something" to the hinge already (does not click like it did when new), down on the cursor thingie is not as "crisp" as the other directions, does not seem to have a way to copy my outlook inbox.

and the MicroSD memory cards are F'ing tiny!!

made me laugh

2007-04-30T23:08:00.000+03:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkenning/464845773/in/set-72157600078099414

via http://daringfireball.net/

how to turn off those annoying snap previews

2007-03-22T09:17:00.002+02:00

visit here and click the javascript link, to change the state of a cookie
Note: it is a "toggle" type thingie so if you click it twice it will re-enable the annoying snap behaviour, grrr

Update (2008.03.01):
Ok, so they have moved the FAQ a bit, but then i found a solution for Opera (my normal browser). Copied here, just in case:

Here’s how to do it in Opera 9:

-Tools -> “Advanced” tab.
-Click on “Content” on the left.
-Click “Blocked Content” button.
-Add http://spa.snap.com/*

Done. Snap Preview begone!

Coke Zero - Slightly less sucky than DietCoke

2007-03-04T14:21:00.000+02:00

Just got back from toys 4 boys, and Coke was giving away Coke Zero, general consensus was that this new Zero tasted slightly better than DietCoke, but not as good as normal Coke.

Other cool things i saw there;
E90 - unfortunalty things not working GPS & WLAN, but feels nice, size is good.
N800 - screen is nice, but not sure about the use case
Light sabers, the two geeks who were dressed as a Stormtrooper and Boba Fett.
Quad bike that had been "pimped"
Masarati Quatroporte, Ferarri 612
The Windows Smart phones, that did not suck as much as expected.

Overall, a good show, worth the price of admission. Lots of stands with cool gadgets and thinks there were nice to have.

good explanation of what is happening on the web NOW

2007-02-11T12:49:00.000+02:00

found this on Craig Cmehil's site

Just watch it - you won't be disappointed.

Nothing new for me, but it was a really clear and simple explanation of a lot of concepts.

talvi tulee

2007-01-21T16:36:00.000+02:00

which i think means that winter has arrived.

It finally started snowing today (and the temperature is supposed to stay low enough for at least the next week). Went for a short walk down to the beach. Unfortunatly i had leaft my camera in the office, so only had my crappy phone cam with me.

In past years by now the sea would be frozen i can go for a long walk on the ice, however, there was at least the interest that currently the sea level is a bit high due to storms apparently.

Literaly 5 seconds after taking this picture a woman walked past to go for a swim!

now if it just ran a REAL os...

2007-01-19T16:52:00.000+02:00

just saw this gadget on engadget, and first reaction was kind of like when i first saw the iPhone -> WANT!.
Then discovered that it will be running Windows. Oh well, maybe someone will get something nice running on it. Specs were (in order of desire), 7" screen with good resolution, bluetooth, 1GB RAM, Hard drive, some other stuff.

THis would not happen in Britain

2007-01-18T15:41:00.000+02:00

surffin the Intawebs and come across this discussion.
I am always having to bite my tongue when talking with my American collegues, as to me they are mis-pronouncing the computer networking device that is used to route packets.

inconceivable!

2007-01-16T14:40:00.000+02:00

that you would not be rushing out and buying this book:

25 year aniversiry edition out now in all good book shops

some useful tips for getting more out of OS X

2007-01-13T16:58:00.000+02:00

Cote at redmonk, had these tips to share.
As ever with Mac, a couple of button presses, gets "COOOOL" emote

interesting stock movement

2007-01-10T11:59:00.000+02:00

with all the chatter about the new iPhone form apple, i wondered how it would affect the big phone handset manufacturers (specifically Nokia, who is 1/3 of finlands econnomy according to the stock market)
So Drew this graph

showing almost no movement of Nokia on NYSE, interesting.

Via James Robertson, saw this graph, showing apple Vs Palm and CrackBerry.

WOW, glad i waited to buy my next gadget...

2007-01-09T22:57:00.000+02:00

in case you live under a rock it seems that that 8no great surprise) the apple mobile was announed.
check engadget for drooling fanboy details.

Now i am really torn;
palm
+ cheap, i know it works
- end of life, expensive add-ons
Fujitsu Loox N560
+ GPS, VGA screen
- expensive, runs Windows

and now the new iPhone
+ runs OS X, reasonable size, sexy as
- unknown how locked down it is, apple tend to botch the first release of a product, no memory card slot, camera

oh my gosh, that was easy

2007-01-04T16:46:00.000+02:00

seems that Windows continues with it's amazing record of security.
Here is a walkthrough of how to get system (root) privaledges.
(yes, i know, nothing for months then three posts in a day)

Security Theatre are reduced at Manchester Airport

2007-01-04T09:14:00.000+02:00

well it seems that shoe bombers are no longer a threat (I did not have to pass my shoes through the scanner this time)
although bottles of liquid and cigarette lighters are the current major red thing that the highly trained security personnel are worried about.
Also unusually, i did not get my random security massage

The Joy of PC's

2007-01-04T08:59:00.000+02:00

just one more reason to hate computers, seems that even though computers need to keep relativley accurate time, they can't.
Seems Jeff Atwood has found that time syncronisation does not work too well.

two teath out and very little pain

2006-11-02T22:13:00.000+02:00

went to the dentist today (again), i have to say that the dentists here in finland are VERY good.

at least the pain killers are working (even if they do make me feel a bit spacey).

On a more possitive note I am doing better than this skunk

Strange things you learn...

2006-08-17T00:56:00.000+03:00

When your farther passes away (slightly unexpectedly)

Find out their lawyers name (or at least where the will is!)

do they have any specific wishes for their funeral

who their firends are

so instead of like me faffing round, it goes all smoothly.

recipe for black pudding

2006-05-29T18:38:00.000+03:00

Pork, pork fat, pearl barley, oatmeal, barley flour, rusk crumbs, onions, salt, herbs, spices

But what i want to know is, what is the blood listed under?

Hauskaa Vappua

2006-05-02T12:22:00.000+03:00

Well, that is the first of the big drinking events of the year over with.

Read details about it at Helsinki Sanomat (the largest circulation finnish newspapaer)

Good weather at last...

2006-04-28T09:36:00.000+03:00

and co-incidently, similar thing happend in Canada found on ongoing

As the weather is nice, the ol' ZZR got dusted off and started up. Hurrah for motorcycles.

But not some much for petrol, as in the six months the bike had been standing it appears that the fuel had "gone off".
How did i find this out, well 20 minutes of attempting to bump-start the bike (after nearly running the battery flat), then a rest, then another 10 minutes, where my friend (who has just bought a Triumph America), helped in the pushing. Before the suggestion that the fuel might be bad. So €10 of fuel to top-up the tank, and one last push up the hill, then HURRAH the sound i have been waiting all winter to hear again.

tomorrow i will be mostly...

2006-04-07T12:54:00.000+03:00

drinking beer at helsinki beer festival.

It's a hard life but someone's got to do it :)

Dumb business decisions

2006-04-04T12:27:00.000+03:00

After a bit of a lay-off i wanted to continue playing WoW, so attempted to give them some money by logging into the account screens.

All day Saturday and Sunday the system would eventually return a "503 Server Busy" error.
Phoned them on Monday, and the answer was "We know, and are working on it", but no clue as to when it would be fixed.
At least they credited me one days play (so i got on last night at least)

nice walk on the ice

2006-03-30T18:33:00.000+03:00

Finally got the energy on sunday to go for a walk across the sea ice near my appartment. Sunny day, and a well trodden path, made for a pleasent afternoon.
And once out of the wind, it got really warm (under the many fleace jackets i was wearing)

emotionally moving stuff

2006-03-06T15:56:00.000+02:00

Found some gut-wrenching stuff via onging. Not the sort of thing you expect to find linked off a fairly hard core tech site.
Well written (just a shame that the "blog" style of top posting makes it hard to read :( )

Also while surffing round today found this story of a hospital visit. Good reminder for anyone who works, "Don't forget the customer!".
Originally i was going to write "good advice for anyone in customer services", but i figure everyone needs to think about customer service. if you don't then you won't be working there for long as the company will have gone under!

Cool sunsets

2006-02-25T19:18:00.000+02:00

last two eveings have had "9" sunsets. one of the many reasons for living here. At some point i might figure out how to do picture posts.

It seems that mid to late febuary is one of the good times here

cool cartoons and WoW

2006-01-31T23:39:00.000+02:00

check out this cool cartoon. last sundays was well funny!

also in case anyone missed it, here is the WoW maps site. Obviuosly after hitting the front pages of both DiGG and Slashdot the site is down currently :(

life is unfair

2006-01-27T15:07:00.000+02:00

how come some people are able to write so clearly and with such subtly about as something as mundane as a review of socks!

Me, i get to curse and swear as for no apparant reason that i could see, this morning Windows XP (upgrade, my ar*e), decided that all of my desktop icons should be "auto arranged!.
Grrr, so all of my collegues get to have a free revison lesson in "English and the use of Rude words".
Makes you want to give it all up and go and grow potatoes.

Chav brains in action

2006-01-25T11:16:00.000+02:00

good thing the police are so restrained in this video. *WARNING*- popup happy site that only plays video clip in the browser(after downloading) :(, at least it seems to work in opera.

found via coppers blog

well it made me laugh

2006-01-19T14:38:00.000+02:00

this cartoon made me laugh.

From Dr Fun, which is kind of similar in style to Farside.

good Place to work

2006-01-18T17:48:00.000+02:00

suffing round, and came accross this idea.

If i ever find a company that does this i am *SO* there.

Call Center online again

2006-01-18T12:10:00.000+02:00

Cool, Call center guy is back, hurrah!

On second thoughts, Oh noo, even less chance of me doing work now :(

remember to do documentation

2006-01-17T14:49:00.000+02:00

saw this on this guys site under the talks bit.
Put it here so there is a possabilty that i might remember it, when i am supposed to be creating documents.

When creating documentation for code that you have created, remember that there are three basic audiences:

Tutorial (first time user)

API (return user)

Developer (extender)

And so onto why this corner of the Interweb exists

2006-01-16T15:38:00.000+02:00

- to embarrass Jon K into getting his on-line writing up and running (as this will likly suck big ones!)
- hold some bookmarks online
- everyone cool has already done it

First Post

2006-01-14T20:08:00.000+02:00

welcome to random stuff by a bloke living in finland

fatman in FI

Couple of books I found today

how to copy in the Nokia N900 browser

geeking out at ALT-party

I'm also over there now

Packing list for Camping at unconferences

Tab Sweep - Funnies

intersting things happening around Jaiku

Next steps for Evolve Design Consultants

BarCampHelsinki III

MobileDevCamp.fi - Starting to come togeather

Helsinki Bike Show

I think i might have figured out why i don't like Twiter

Videos and memes i helped friends discover over the xmas break

Silly ones:

Interesting ones

Another post on the subject of Thoughts on Mircoblogging

My notes from the afternoon sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

My notes from the before lunch sessions of BarCampHelsinki2

Just one reason i like hanging out on Jaiku

Hierarchy of Communication

update on 100 press-ups challenge

some hints and tips for new Jaiku users

What makes Jaiku so good...

BarCampHelsinki2 is GO

Progress towards 100 pressups

BarCampHelsinki - My notes form an exciting day

Recent mobile developments

Social Networks or Social Objects

how to get your Dopplr trips to feed into Jaiku

Description of Today's bike accident.

been on a bit of an installing spree on my E90

Not able to find a WIFM around Twitter?

How to get twitterfeed working for Jaiku

a small success in languages

BarCampHelsinki is Go!

Chip&Pin Not secure - not a big surprise

Why i see the iPhone as good For Nokia

wrong on a numer of points

so what is the point of plazes, dopplr etc

New levels of security theater

Me as a Simpsons character

ahh, childhood memories

Salty liquorice mint drinks...

How i configured GMail IMAP on my E90

Reactivating Widsets on a Phone after a firmware update

New Gadget from Nokia

Australian anti-speeding comercial

fun songs

Just signed up with *yet another* social web thingie

made me laugh

i needed that

bubble wrap

New Gadget

made me laugh

how to turn off those annoying snap previews

Coke Zero - Slightly less sucky than DietCoke

good explanation of what is happening on the web NOW

talvi tulee

now if it just ran a REAL os...

THis would not happen in Britain

inconceivable!

some useful tips for getting more out of OS X

interesting stock movement

WOW, glad i waited to buy my next gadget...

oh my gosh, that was easy

Security Theatre are reduced at Manchester Airport

The Joy of PC's

two teath out and very little pain

Strange things you learn...

recipe for black pudding

Hauskaa Vappua

Good weather at last...

tomorrow i will be mostly...

Dumb business decisions

nice walk on the ice

emotionally moving stuff

Cool sunsets

cool cartoons and WoW

life is unfair

Just signed up with yet another social web thingie