January 2006 Archives

Went from Luxembourg to London City airport in VLM Fokker 50. Weather was what I guess they call CAVOK — very few patches of clouds, mostly fine. I hadn’t done Fokker 50 before. It’s interesting as its landing gear are not under the main fuselage as is the case for ATR-42 which is more common in the Nordics and CSA for this kind of shortish hauls — instead, the gear are in the same compartment as the two turboprop engines, and the main landing gear is pretty much right outside your window so you can observe the wheels rolling. A bit spooky. I was in row 5 which was closest to it.

Flight itself was uneventful and calm. When flying in to London City, we first went pretty much across the whole city — some quite fun views there — damn, why didn’t I have the camera at hand then! Argh. As we turned back towards the runway and crossed over HSBC and other banks’ skyscrapers, that was again spooky because we were at no more than few hundred meters’ height so those towers were pretty close. But a welcome change to having to land in the middle of nowhere all the time.

I liked „Blink”. It illustrates the fact that although the whole drive of Western civilization has been towards rational, organized knowledge, there are aspects of your thinking that do not easily subject themselves to logic and conscious analysis, yet they are immensely useful in everyday life and business, and with careful approach, you can still analyse and train them.

I like the style of writing that tells you actual stories and experiences of people, and talks through them, instead of pure theorizing. It’s easy to build arbitrary theories about anything, but they have to stand the test of practice to be taken seriously for any daily practical use. „Pure” theories are certainly useful for base sciences, but that’s not my ballpark. I’m interested more in life and people. And „Blink” gave me plenty of both.

Socialtext and Ross are throwing another party this Wednesday in London. I’m actually in town on that day but may have to go to another dinner, so I’m passing on the invite.

What is it with Dutch people? On several occasions now, I’ve heard they never close the curtains at the house. First there was someone who knew someone who was Dutch, and then there is someone I know whose husband is Dutch, and it’s all the same story. (The thing with the second couple is, they don’t actually live in the Netherlands, but they keep the custom nevertheless, giving the locals great fun.)

So when I heard about the custom, I was, WTF??? Why would anyone do this? I tried to look around and this sounds like it makes some sense.

Sometime ago I read this book called “Cultural Shock: Holland” or something sounds like that. I read that the traditional dutch will generally not close the curtains on the windows. The idea is that of costly signalling. If you open the curtains on the windows, you signal to people that you are a hardworking housewife and you have kept your house sparklingly clean. So the curtains are open because you are not afraid of close inspection. On the other hand, if you keep the curtains closed, then you signal to people that you are lazy and your house is probably not clean.

Hey, there even appears to be a swear word about it there. “Your mum is so ugly that your neighbors break in to close the curtains.” Weird. Weird stuff. But so are many other local customs.

When you have an ADSL router with a wifi PCMCIA card in it, then ripping the card out to view some data from it, and shoving it back in and hoping wifi just comes up magically itself again is NOT a sign of particularly high intelligence. Yet that’s still what I did. And brought down the wifi of many people for a while.

The “fix” was actually simpler than I feared. I thought (well, started thinking obviously when the damage had already been done) that when you unplugged the card, it lost its settings or something, and you had to log on to the router admin (without anyone having the logon credentials obviously) to reconfigure the WLAN. Fortunately, all that I had to do was to unpower the router, plug the card back in and boot it up and after a while, all was good again in the network land.

Someone pointed me to this talk from 4 years ago, describing how Yahoo! made the case for PHP and MySQL. There’s also a follow-up available on Michael’s page.

I’m kinda baffled by this. PHP and MySQL haven’t really seen, to my knowledge, wide adoption by high-profile web properties like Yahoo!, although they’re definitely used in many businesses. “Serious” businesses use Oracle and Java and Websphere and all those other app layers. So watching Yahoo! go LAMP (well actually FreeBSD in their case) is quite fascinating. Michael also has a blog.

A really smart way to lose 15 minutes of work is to start with a CSV file in UTF-8 without the Byte Order Marker. You then import it into Excel and start messing with it, and it’s not until halfway into it that you realize your UTF-8 data is all garbled up because Excel interpreted it as Latin1. And because most of your file is still ASCII, you didn’t realize it right away.

Solution? Make sure you go over your text input with a decent editor (SciTE is good — w00t — they’ve released many versions since I last updated — upgrade time), and specify correct encoding and save, before using it in Excel. Just fire up file in SciTE, go File - Encoding - UTF-8 - Save, and you’re done. BOM is now properly in your file and Excel plays nice with it.

There’s a new service available that lets you keep track of how much you owe to who.

I don’t get it. I need to go to a website to keep track of what I owe to who and who owes me? Why not, like, just pay the damn thing right away?

It is not considerably higher effort to go to an Internet bank to make the actual payment to a friend, than it is to go to BillMonk to register it to pay at a later time. So here’s a speculation: BillMonk is only going to take off in communities where access to e- and m-banking channels is sub-optimal. (that’s a nice word for “sucks”)

BillMonk says you can also keep track of costs with a mobile. To counter that — some banks in Estonia are offering mobile payments which are a really really REALLY convenient way of paying between people. Somehow, they have not taken off though, my guess is people still need to get used to the idea of their handset being a payment terminal. Once you get it though (and you have other people to actually pay to who have a similar agreement), it’s a no-brainer to make a mobile payment — as the user flow there is really optimal, my guess is it’s even a smaller effort than BillMonk’s notification.

One bad thing about the mobile payments and other similar value-added services like mobile parking is they only work locally. So you have to get adapted to local models and providers. The moment someone makes this stuff work across boundaries and providers, say, in the whole Euro area, that person is gong to make quite a few bucks.

There’s an additional cost of trust when switching your behaviour over to such services. Who guarantees me they won’t do anything nasty with the data? Can I believe they will still be around in a year (or else, I have shifted all my info over to the service, and am suddenly cut off and left stranded)? With my bank, I have at least some sort of trust relationship going on.

So that leaves us with BillMonk’s value-added services outside payment tracking (which as I suggest can be replaced with “just paying”) — the various models of gifts, “victim”, clubs etc. I guess that’s where the real value and convenience is — if they can make it compelling enough.

I like how Microsoft mocks Firefox users with their MSN8 beta download where someone invited me. Normally, if you approach it with a non-IE browser, it tells you right away you should use IE. Now with MSN8, it’s more conspicuous. It lets you do everything with Firefox — sign in, accept the terms etc — until the very last part which is:

The problem? The Download button is not a link. It’s just a visual page element that doesn’t link anywhere. So you’re stuck at a dead end with Firefox. There’s no indication that your browser isn’t compatible. But it’s really the browser issue — if you do the same thing with IE, the button is fine and links to the download. But you need to be smart enough to figure that on your own if you’re a non-IE user.

So… if you don’t support other browsers with this beta, just tell so and save people some empty clicks. Or maybe it’s just a glitch, since MS actually HAS started to support Firefox and other non-IE browsers with live.com and other initiatives.

Password managers are practical. A while ago, Bruce also said that instead of using weak memorized passwords, it’s more reasonable to use strong ones, different ones for each service, and write them down SECURELY. There are a bunch of products around, both commercial and free, most of which are software on your PC. One great resource is a mobile phone — newer ones usually have a “password safe” function.

I have found that a TrueCrypt volume with a simple text file on it containing the passwords works well for me. Obviously, the password protecting the volume is critical — it’s a strong one and isn’t written down anywhere. But it’s the only one you really have to memorize, others you can just look up.

This is obviously only limited to one PC, but it’s not a good idea to use random PC-s for sensitive operations anyway — you can’t be too sure about what’s running on them.

Last Sunday, I completed what is the longest drive of my current life. I drove all the way from Tallinn to Luxembourg. Well actually from Stockholm, since the Tallinn-Stockholm leg of the trip was a ferry ride. I’ve previously participated in a drive from Tallinn to somewhere near Frankfurt as a copilot/chaperone, but I haven’t driven that long myself. I was a bit scared initially, but as seen below, there was nothing to fear and it all went smoothly. The total distance was about 2500 km (if you also include the ferry ride) and took 48h in clocktime.

It often happens that when you’re building a web page or app, you may want to include some content from a remote server. Say that it’s some statistic figure that the remote outputs as HTML or TXT and you then want to retrieve it and either do something with it or directly display as part of your own page. And you’re working in PHP.

PHP provides a fancy way of opening and including files directly over HTTP, which they call “URL wrappers”. So you might be tempted to do something like

include("http://www.example.com/index.html");

or

$f = fopen("http://www.example.com/index.txt");

Here’s a practical BBC Backstage app. Turns out the BBC is serving real-time traffic information in XML format (the link is in their feed list), and this pal just pulls the XML in Python and filters out his favourite highway. And can do it to his mobile, since it can run apps. Simply great.

Now the only missing link here is that I want to be able to get this info straight into my car’s onboard navigation system and integrate it with the positioning thing. I found the navigation system extremely useful (more coming up sometime later in another post), but I want it to stream realtime traffic data onto it. As far as I understand, radio stations broadcast signals that instruct the onboard radio to auto-tune to a station that broadcasts traffic announcements or simply news, but I don’t think they’re publishing the announcements in digital format that the navigation computer would recognize. As far as I know, those things are not really user-programmable and expandable. Hey, with the web2.0 frenzy, how come I hear nothing about cars? I don’t think I saw a single post or article about how the crazy web2.0 shit will influence cars and their intelligent systems. Yet these days many people spend many days in traffic, and it’s only gonna get worse.

Thunderbird 1.5 was released last week. Grab it.

Gave it a quick whirl over my last 1.0.6. The first noticeable thing is that it found the Enigmail PGP e-mail plugin version that I was using was not compatible with the new version. Offered to auto-update the plugin version. Worked seamlessly.

In the client UI, not many changes — the only really noticeable one was autocheck-spelling-as-you-type. Went to options to turn it off, I don’t like and use those myself, but I can imagine it’s really useful for many, so go ahead and use. (As with many little things that make your life easier, it may happen I eventually start using autospellers. But the urge hasn’t struck yet.)

One noticeable new feature is the scam warning.

So when you get an email claiming to be from PayPal or eBay or First American Bank or any of the other fine Internet-enabled corporations that grab your cash, TB claims it can detect and spot this. Works adaptively like the junk filter. It started off for me with a false positive, which I guess is better than missing out real threats. I’ve so far classified those as Junk and I get many scams every day, so it will be interesting to see if the scam filter overrides the junk filter or how well it works.

Reportedly, they are so in the US. News reporters are saying these are “the most powerful investigative tool right now”. I could imagine a bunch of other uses for them as well. I don’t think something like this has recently come up in Europe, but in the U.S., commercialism has outweighed privacy once again. (Spotted by Jan.)

Well, they are going to power car and fridge OS-es…

x says: heh, funny caricature in yesterday’s newspaper: som guy filling a bucket with water before going into the sauna notices that the bucket is leaking and asks his wife wtf she bought it. — from Microsoft. they said a service pack would soon be available to plug those holes.
x says: and that was in Helsingin Sanomat, beleive it or not

Damn you Bill and Microsoft. I was just about to be off to bed and clicking around randomly, finishing off the day, when I came upon this: Microsoft and Bill Gates webcast from the International CES 2006. Argh. I started watching and I’m glad I did, because it had a lot of fun stuff in it, detailed below. Recently I’ve watched only Steve Jobs webcasts and this was interesting comparison material.

It started off with Gates showing the “digital lifestyle”. That was one of the interesting parts. You start at your home in the morning, watch the news, see your kids’ drawings and track your family members’ locations all on one big screen. You interact with the news. Then you go to work (watching the news on your mobile during the process) and sit down with 3 bigscreens and continue doing stuff. And at an airport, you place your mobile onto some sort of smart desk where it projects a desktop with which you can work almost like with a normal PC. When you place a businesscard onto it, the desk scans it and then you drag it to your “desktop” and it is entered in your phone’s address book. All kind of neat.

Now the trick here, of course, is that Bill’s company does not have the greatest track record of delivering upon such humongous visions, so it remains to be seen how much and when will actually happen. But as a vision, I actually kinda liked it.

The rest of the presentation was more detail about all of the involved desktop and mobile/media areas.

If you don’t live somewhere without Windows, you must have heard about the WMF vulnerability by now. (That is, unless you haven’t heard about it, of course.)

Anyway… the suggested action, according to the bulletin and other sources like SANS, is to unregister Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (Shimgvw.dll). I guess it makes things more secure, but there’s something that it breaks: in Windows Explorer folder view, when the view type is Filmstrip or Thumbnail, the thumbnails and previews of images are no longer displayed. This is kinda annoying since I sometimes work with graphics and came to sort of rely on that function to gain an overview of the folder contents containing graphics files. Now it doesn’t work.

When the official patch is out, it’d better fix this, or else.

UPDATE: Patch is out together with unofficial info about how to re-register the image preview DLL. MS site doesn’t have info about how and why to re-register the DLL. Hurrah SANS, boo MS.

Good UI analysis. I know there are many iPod fans out there. I never had an iPod or any other portable music player for a long time. (I had a cassette player like 10 years ago, but since switching to CD-s and digitals, I found I simply don’t listen to music when on the move.)

I’d add about the headphones and wires: in early- and mid-90s, there were people with corded mobile headsets (I had one too…) which ran a wire from your mobile to your mics and earphones. And people who were wearing them looked like total dorks. But now that the wires are white, Apple-branded and connected to an iPod, walking about like a dork has suddenly become cool? I guess heavy marketing can turn even the greatest dorkness into cool.

I’m looking forward for Alan Wake. I liked the Max Payne series, although especially the second one was a bit too short, and the first one doesn’t start up on my machine. At the end of Max Payne 2, the Remedy guys hinted there’ll be a third one, but apparently they ditched it in favour of Alan Wake.

Here’s an interview with the lead designer. See also the FAQ. I like how those Finns think (Remedy being a Finnish game house). I like it will be a bit more mission-based and sandbox-like a la GTA. The thing that lost me in the last GTA San Andreas is that its scale is just a bit too grand for me, and I couldn’t get over some of the missions. The small town setting of Alan Wake seems just about right.

Reportedly, the game was a big hit at E3 2005. The trailer looks good and the screenshots look excellent. I love outdoor scenes and landscapes with light and weather effects, and there seem to be plenty of all of those here. Classified as “psychological action thriller”, the whole thing is set in the present day and real world.

Didn’t find much info form the past half-year — hopefully Remedy is hard at work at getting the thing released.

Image from the Eurogamer interview

Interview with Mozilla’s User Experience Lead Mike Beltzner. Good read. Here’s what I want Firefox and Thunderbird to do for me that they currently don’t, and all of these are related to the talk.

I dont really dig blonde jokes, but this is the next level of blonde jokes and sets a whole new standard. Check it out.