Heather describes how they skip resumes at Microsoft that have spelling errors. I’ve also found it pays off to spell correctly when writing anything. Unless you’re doing a “teh kewl” ad or banner, but even in that case, you’d better know really well what you’re doing. So the basic rule of business writing is: spell correctly. Because spelling shows you can have, as also discussed by Heather and the comments, attention to detail, which is a prerequisite to… anything, really, in my view.

Bruce quoting an article from The Register about the UK ID scheme.

Uhh.. don’t even get me started on the ID-s. I used to work for a pretty advanced ID scheme and was in contact with many other European schemes. The short bottom line here is that it’s difficult for me to take seriously any Briton or American who speaks about the subject, since they haven’t implemented or seen a single proper large-scale secure electronic government or private-sector application, with or without the ID-s.

I intend to post more about the subject as the next year and its news unfold but just a few cursory comments about what Bruce and the commenters say.

I never realized that Google Personalized (what’s with the IG?) has got more features since I last checked, and is now much like Windows Live, where you can syndicate your news headlines, blogs, weather and all that kind of stuff onto the homepage. (Gmail’s mail too I guess, either already there or upcoming).

Here’s a hint, Google: don’t be American. Here’s what the weather panel is like:

One critical thing missing is switching the degrees to Celsius. Fahrenheit is useless to me as an European. So try hard as you may, little things like this show you’re too focused on America to care about the rest.

I just finished Call of Duty 2 on the Hardened level.

Sure, I’m a WW2 buff. And sure, COD2 and it’s predecessor, COD with the “United Offensive” are nicely done. But they fail to leave me walking away with a long-lasting impression. They’re repetitive and become dull and boring after a while.

All missions follow more or less the same pattern: overtake one or more enemy strongpoints, and occasionally there’s a follow-up mission of thwarting the counterattack. Both the attack and counterattack suffer from the “infinite respawn” problem which I don’t fancy that much. Apart from the respawn, they claim it to be pretty realistic, and I guess it is — not having been in WW2, I can’t of course judge the realism of the battle, but the scenery is nice and characters are well done, but nothing groundbreaking there. Or I am too lame to appreciate it — I’ve outgrown oohing and aahing about every new tiny pixelshader feature. And my GF5900 is getting old — I had to play at 800x600 at near-max gfx settings, as higher resolution became annoyingly jerky.

Well, not the game itself, but certainly the packaging.

A month ago or so, I bought COD2 from the HMV store in Trocadero in London on Piccadilly square. A few weeks later when back home when starting to install it, I just couldn’t open the box since there was some red tab preventing me from opening it. Initially I couldn’t figure out what it was, except that it was keeping the box absolutely closed. As I tried various methods of opening, it appeared that it’s some sort of anti-piracy/anti-theft device that was supposed to stop you from opening the box unless removed. Which I guess is fine for anti-theft, but for me as the legit owner of this particular box it was annoying. I literally had to tear the case to pieces to get the game DVD out. This is what was left of it.

The red tab is the anti-theft device which was inserted from the right side of the case and kept the two halves of the case locked together until you removed either the device with some specialised removal tool which I of course didn’t have, or tore your case to pieces as I had to do.

What’s especially weird is that there was an anti-theft radio tag on the device, but the alarm never sounded when I left the store. I guess it was deactivated when I paid for the item, but why the counter clerk never removed the red thingie is a mystery to me.

If nothing else, then it’s a lesson of being smarter when I go shop for games or DVD-s next time, and insisting on all the protection being removed and double-checking it myself before leaving.

I absolutely wanted to get this out before the end of the year. I managed, and I’m happy that I did, because this means we have a fancy fun platform to work with in the new year.

The migration, compared to the others I’ve done, was relatively painless. We wrote a custom plugin for our previous blog system that dumped the entries, comments and trackbacks into the Movable Type import format. It almost worked out fine, even all the UTF-8 weirdnesses — just make sure that the file remains UTF-8 at all times.

Ari Paparo Dot Com: Getting it Right. Insightful: how to make mistakes and build something that people won’t find useful, or find useful but you make it too difficult to use. del.icio.us is brilliantly simple and works. I wonder if Josh ever saw blink.com or modelled after it, avoiding its mistakes.

Joel’s writeup on how they made an ad-hoc logistics system. I LOVE THIS. I love hacks. “Hack” is not just something in software, although this system involves software too. Hack is when you put some stuff together ad-hoc to output more stuff in a fun, cool, efficient or innovative way. So it can involve software, but as you read in Joel’s article, in this case it also involves a bunch of services (stamp printing) and hardware (barcode scanning, printing). So it’s a genuine hack.

Word. Not really Gnome-specific logic, and options are always a balancing act, but this is just very clearly put.

This “users are idiots, and are confused by functionality” mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn’t do what I need it to do.

Sounds weird doesn’t it? Excel 2003 is supposed to be able to do everything. And mostly it can. But on the CSV export front it sucks tons more than OpenOffice, which has its own deficiencies.

So here’s the story. In OpenOffice, when exporting data into CSV, you can choose both the field separator (typically comma) and content delimiter (typically double quote). Which is a wise thing, because some other systems that eat CSV as their input can be pretty picky about the input format, and for example, may want the field names to be without quotes, but field content with quotes, or something equally silly. And in OpenOffice it’s fine — you can tweak the export format to your liking and then maybe fix the headers with your editor and you’re done.

Now enter Excel 2003. By default, it dumps data with semicolons without any delimiters, separated by ; (semicolon). When looking for help, here’s what you get:

So to change the delimiter, you have to mess with Windows option. Which kinda makes sense in an obscure perverse way. But there’s no way to edit or add content delimiters.

Now I got my stuff done with some searching-replacing in text editor and a 20-second-to-write Perl script that adds and tweaks all the delimiters, but I’m not sure what those people do that are not so much up for scripting.

I already said Thunderbird rocks. And little by little TB keeps reminding it to me every day.

E-mail wrapping is something you can have tons of fun with. Basically some RFC says that plaintext e-mail should be wrapped, yet many mailers don’t do it when you’re sending your mail. And then mailers behave differently about received mail — some wrap it and some don’t. So all in all it’s a big mess where similarly to HTML, most of the world has applied “creative” approach to standards.

So let’s say you receive an unwrapped e-mail. Thunderbird displays it wrapped to display width, yet if you try to respond to it, the rows are NOT wrapped and you may have 300-column rows where the whole paragraph is contiguous. And it’s just not nice. Yet it’s correct.

You may want to fix this error and have your response and the quotes in it rewrapped nicely. So what does Thunderbird have? A handy “Rewrap” function which neatly rewraps your quote. Simply brilliant for hardcore users.

From ABC news:

Belgium authorities raided homes Wednesday and detained 14 suspects with links to a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq, including a Belgian woman who allegedly carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad.

So wait… the woman first carried out a suicide attack, and probably blew herself up, and was THEN detained? What the writer probably means is that the authorities raided her home, but the sentence is really obscure.

How I would rewrite it to be more clear. I understand it doesn’t really match with the newspaper/news style of “try to say as much as you can with as few words as you can”, but sometimes clarity gets axed in the process, which, if a part of your readership is non-English-native, may not be so good.

Belgium authorities raided homes Wednesday and detained 14 suspects who had links to a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq. One of the raided homes belonged to a Belgian woman who allegedly carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad.

Rondam writes on writing.

There are two main ways to learn to write: 1. Read 2. Write

Another way of saying it, don’t remember who said it but it’s very true. “There are no great writers, only great rewriters.” It’s all about editing.

I just finished Doom 3.

I had my doubts about it. I wasn’t too impressed by the demo — it promised just loads and loads of same ugly-looking boxed corridors. Dynamic lighting is nice, but it can’t save crap playability. Still, it wasn’t so bad that it would have totally discouraged me from going for the full version. Which I did.

I would have been tricked by this too. Not horribly intrusive, kind of fun. Limited reach though. (Via Heather.)

I just realized this morning how my Internet bank uses an extra anti-robot technique in their net bank to prevent automated logins. During an overload, I could see how the page contents was already retrieved but it kept downloading an image which indicated which code from my password card I should enter. The empty spot is indicated with the ugly red circle.

Here’s how it looks in its final form after download. Notice there’s no visual distinction between graphics and text, but it’s a good technology (with the image name in source being obfuscated and I assume random-generated at runtime, not hardcoded) for stopping people from writing “screenscraping login robots” which automatically log on to the bank as user and do something on behalf of the user. If all the artefacts on the page were predictable and hardcoded, it would be pretty easy and could open the door for viruses and stuff which, once they have managed to phish your password, do nasty stuff in your bank.

So let’s see now who I talked to and what’s interesting there.

Sarik from OpenBC — some LinkedIn-type thing but not invitation-only, anyone can get in. His brother and the brother’s lady were also around in town later at night. They had been around to some party at the Estonian embassy recently. They said the Estonian ambassador to France was an old gentleman who said he was the oldest of the Foreign Ministry staff and all his bosses were younger than him. Which, knowing relative youth of Estonian public service, could be quite true.

PubSub — a newswatcher that delivers you news about whatever you want from different channels. Just subscribed, don’t know yet how good it is.

Kaywa — some mobile Internet blog thing.

A few weeks ago, i was at the London Web Frameworks where Django, Catalyst and Ruby-on-Rails developers talked about their stuff. I was most intrigued by Django because of the good quality and content of the presentation. I hadn’t heard or seen much about it previously, so I went ahead and took a look. And was still happy.

A “web framework” is something that has standard parts of making web applications abstracted and componentized for you so all you do is define parts of your app that deviate from standard, and the framework does the rest. What different frameworks do differs: in case of Django, the main parts are templating, object-relation mapper (ORM), caching, users, admin backend and roles&rights.

I’ve seen quite a few web “frameworks”/CMS-es previously — both home-cooked and “industrial”. Django has the best price/performance of all — the least amount of code does you the most amount of work. Less code means better time-to-market, less bugs and better maintainability.

I love Thunderbird. It’s killer features for me are quickfilter by text, quickfilter by status (the “View” dropdown), e-mail threading and auto-spamkilling, plus it’s just a nice solid mailer.

There’s one thing I’m missing though. In the “View” quickfilter dropdown, I’d like to be able only messages that are “flagged”. I use flagging to keep track of some stuff in one of my folders. Alas, although I can customize the filter by tons of other properties, flagging doesn’t seem to be included and it’s also AFAIK not one of the message headers so I could do a custom filter. So that’s one missing thing in TB — but that’s pretty much the only one.

UPDATE: apparently this is working in Thunderbird 1.5 (or maybe earlier too where I just couldn’t find it), see comments below. Great.

I’ve been watching Channel 9, but recently I’ve found it quite hard to navigate. It used to be so that their RSS feed contained Microsoft-generated content — videos and things. Which was great. But since a while ago, their RSS is full of the random user forum threads about random stuff. I’m not interested in that as much as what Microsoft itself has to show and say.

So it turns out they now have many feeds — one for forums/user-generated content (this is also the one you find on the frontpage) and one for each type of “media” — videos, photos, screencasts, podcasts. The media appears to be “Microsoft content” that I’m looking for. Couldn’t find out whether there is an aggregated MS media feed which would be most optimal for me — for now, subscribed to all the media ones. If I were making the site, I would make it a bit more clear on the frontpage, and alert users through the feed itself if the feed policy/content changes. (Or maybe they did but I missed it.)

Les Blogs was interesting because it was a mini-model of a group organization using social tools to self-organize in real time. I don’t usually by all this “realtime organizing multimedia collaboration instant seamless 2.0 yadda yadda” stuff, but this was just interesting. The choice of tools was not too wide and everyone was free to use whatever different subset suited him and as much or little as she wanted to contribute.

• the event blog/site
• the wiki linking to the event’s Frappr map and having a self-organized Sunday meetup
• tagged content on various sites
• the backchannel which was essentially a real-time chat channel. Originally they had some weird web-based chat thing which reportedly didn’t work for everyone, so they switched to a standard IRC channel.

Now the backchannel was interesting, I’ve been to quite a few events of different content and audience but this was the first one where one was used and advertised to such an extent. Well computer parties have their “channel” but it’s a bit different. I was on it and found it kinda neat idea that did definitely add something to the content.

Let’s see now what was up today…

(oh and about Sunday one more thing that I forgot… at the McDonald’s, or Mickey D’s, near my hotel, there were pigeons walking around inside and even on the second floor. That’s that about the “my cat” type of blogging for this post, back to real stuff…)

The program.

Started off with Mena Trott and her saying how people should be so much nicer to each other in the blogs and not be so evil and mean. And then dotBen commented that it’s kinda patronizing, first in the backchannel (more about backchannel later on), but then Mena asked him to stand up and they had a real heated discussion about whether dotBen is mean or Mena is patronizing or backchannel is good or whatnot. Good stuff, livened everybody up in the morning. Not only warm and fuzzy stuff.

Grandness of the Opera…

… and some poor bastard sleeping on its stairs with a sleeping bag. (There was also another one who was Muslim praying at the time so I didn’t shoot that.)

Many people blogged this before but somehow I didn’t pay attention to it initially. Having looked now, it’s kinda interesting. FON: WiFi Revolution. Basically grassroots WiFi aggregation where you share your wifi and in return, can use other peoples’.

I’m not sure it will really fly because of the following reasons. (Although they managed to get a cool domain and name and some nice marketing going on — you get to be a “fonero” .)

• “Bill” and “Linus” names don’t really echo with the non-techies, they have this “geek coolness” to them which non-geeks may fail to appreciate
• at this time too limited support and too techy, you need to be able to flash your router.
• I’m not sure what are the legal implications of other people doing stuff on your wifi. From the uplink service provider’s POV, you’re still accountable for everything happening on your connection, so if someone does something nasty and it is traced back to you, then the burden may be on you to further trace down the person accountable. Not sure if FON’s “accounting” supports that (being able to trace back to original user if need be) — if not, it should.

Nevertheless, they claim they’re present in Spain, France, Sweden. In Estonia where there’s a humongous number of free or paid wifi hotspots it would certainly make sense in urban areas.

Citizen journalism and mainstream media. Interesting folks from Global Voices Online whose mission is to be sort of mediating blog for other blogs outside America and Western Europe. Rebecca who defines herself as “recovering TV-reporter-turned-blogger” had a nice position at CNN but gave it up because she couldn’t do stories like she wanted and the editors wanted her to cover stuff more like a tourist. So now she is doing research and Global Voices.

The Good, Bad and Ugly about investing and money. I couldn’t figure out which was which of the guys on stage. 2.0 buzzwords flying around. Too bad Om couldn’t be there.

“How do blogs influence politics”. Some French guy who is battling the government about something I couldn’t quite understand, something about battling the local government and bashing the mayor every day… but at the same time he is a journalist by profession and socialist party member? “Fair un don - that means Paypal in French.”

Blogs and education. Ewan told how they are experimenting with blogs, like in some classes some guys blog something and other guys blog and comment back and the whole thing becomes kinda fun and interactive.

Apparently it wants that your TypeKey profile “weblog preferences” section contains only the root address of your blog (http://www.jaanuskase.com) and nothing more. The instruction is not horribly clear: “Enter the addresses (URLs) of your application”. And if you enter both the root and the subdirectory, it doesnt work.

Some good stuff here. Scoble and Shel Israel doing their usual cluetrain thing. Obviously no preparation or real subject of any kind, but in this setting not really required either

The panel where I was in was kinda OK, although some people think it came out as too corporate. I wasn’t really sure of the “protocol” so I went for the suit and tie to be sure. Not too many bloggers with tie here, so will go for something lighter over the night and tomorrow.

Didn't see these published anywhere else. Got from a random e-mail list I'm in. Some of them truly entertaining.

From The Weakest Link (BBC2):
Robinson: In Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings trilogy, the third and final book is called The Return Of The... what?
Contestant: Jedi.

From Quiz Night (BBC Radio Lancashire):
Question: Who discovered gravity when an apple fell from a tree and landed on his head?
Answer: William Tell.

From See Hear Saturday (BBC2):
Lara Crooks: What is the most abundant gas in the atmosphere?
Contestant: Air.

From Steve Wright in the Afternoon (BBC Radio 2):
Wright: Johnny Weissmuller died on this day. Which jungle-swinging character clad only in a loincloth did he play?
Contestant: Jesus.

Having arrived last night and worked till half into the night, got up early enough for breakfast, and then headed off into the gloomy morning.

Weather not too good, overcast with occasional showers but still walkable outside. First task was to find the conference venue to know where to come tomorrow and that went OK. Then thought of heading into the town by metro but since the weather was not too bad, a walk can often provide you so much more so why not walk… down the alleys and boulevards up to Arc de Triomphe.

Matt and Andy, heading for the same event as myself tomorrow, are having trouble in French. I myself don’t really speak French, but then again, I kind of do. After having been around Europe for a bit, it all just starts to make sense even if you don’t really “speak” the language in the official terms. And a sense of humour and a smile always help to get by in stores and such. Just know the figures and read signs and see that you won’t be ripped off.

Ticketing machines in Paris-CDG airport were strange though, the only relevant ones that sold RER (suburban train) tickets didn’t have switching to English so I had to resort to a cashier.

See you guys at the conference.

Wifi prices at my hotel are ridiculous: 10min 3€, 30min 5€, 1h 10€, 24h 25€. In London it’s also something like 5 pounds for 1h in places. (And in Tallinn, it’s less than 1€ for 24h but not everyone fits into the promised land

So anyway, I sit down at my hotel and start to go hmm, do I really have to pay this nonsense? (And the 24h you can’t just pay with card, you have to go buy some prepay card somewhere.) When suddenly lo and behold, a Skype Zones signal pops up. Turns out the provider is aggregated into the Boingo network that powers Skype Zones. El neato.

From a hotel in Stockholm.

The picture is not horribly clear (I really SO need to get a camera) but there are three vertical columns, indicating three elevator shafts, and the red blurps in them indicate current position of the elevator. The TV was placed right next to the actual three shafts so you get a clear picture of current elevator positions.

Fairly understandable compared to the usual elevator position indicator designs where the current position is either just a number on the display, or one light among many among horizontally placed ones, indicating floors, where you have to do horizontal-to-vertical mapping in your head.

Trying to play a video when sitting in a Paris hotel, and it tells me “Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country. We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.”

Like, WHAT? It’s not like I’m in Mongolia or North Korea or something. I’m in a “tier 1” country and this is what you’re giving me? hmmm.

(Don’t ask about the video. I have weird friends.)

Someone help me understand this. They keep removing people’s cutlery and scissors and knives and what not in the airports. Which I guess is good for security or at least creating an image of it. Yet in the past two years, no one has shown any interest in my laptop security cable that you can use to attach your laptop to the table. The cable, as far as I’m concerned, would be a premier strangulation device, did I really want to hijack something. Yet they let me walk on board aircraft with it happily.

Building a blog with Movable Type is pretty straightforward if you know what you’re doing. I’ve not been a MT user for too long, but once I got my head around it, it’s pretty cool. For me, it goes like this.

Basic install

• get the software from the site
• set up the database
• check with mt-check.cgi that all of the required and most of the optional modules exist (the ones you plan to use)
• install

Now you’re sitting on an empty MT blog. The first thing you want to do is to change your username (unless you’re really called Melody) and password. And then configure your blog.

From the elevator in my hotel in Paris. The text reads: Warning: This area under temporary surveillance by the Homeland Security Advisory system. Do not remove this sticker.

I wonder what that is about? I didn’t notice any DHS agents or tracking devices around. Maybe it’s a prank that some US tourist pasted there? Makes you feel uneasy nevertheless. (What’s DHS doing in Paris anyway?)

Hello world.

I figured it's about time to have an English blog, because some people have asked me for it. And even without that, there's some things that you'd want to write down once in a while. Now I've had an Estonian blog for a while, and will probably continue with it, but for obvious reasons, its readership is pretty limited.