I created a test user account in Windows XP to test out something. Here’s how the desktop looks at first login (click to zoom). Can you say “obnoxious”?

A cool thing for new users is that the desktop itself is reasonably clean of any program icons that you will invariably pile up over the lifetime of your user. However, there’s plenty of stuff that ensure you will have a rich and entertaining (or actually confusing as hell) desktop experience the first time you log on with a user…

• stuff crashing and displaying errors
• device drivers saying hi and offering to configure devices
• applications saying hi and displaying their “how to use/whats new/create account” dialogs. (The one featured here prominently is AppRocket, a cool “Spotlight for Windows” thing.)
• some security warnings from Microsoft’s recent security addons/antispyware things (“change X requires your approval”)
• Windows trying to make your life “easier” and opening a few of its interface components to offer “help” (Start menu open by default, “Take a tour” tooltip)

All in all a darn christmas tree. If I were my mom and seeing this then… I have no idea what I would do. Especially if my English skills weren’t that great and all the text would be pretty much pointless jabber.

DRM is relabelled CRAP. Watch the ZDNet video, it’s short, sweet and to the point.

DRM is one of the reasons I don’t really have many gadgets like iPod and don’t buy stuff from iTMS. And I am double careful when buying albums to steer clear of any proprietary content protection (“rootkit”) schemes.

Another reason why I don’t buy content and pirate it instead? I can’t. Simple. Content providers have this fancy idea of splitting the world up into countries, and only selling their stuff in the “white” countries. If you’re from one of the countries which they label a bushcountry, then even if you want to buy stuff, you just can’t because it’s not “available” in your area. Now what that means or why that is is beyond me, since I have a better internet connection and a “whiter” credit card than most people in the “white” countries. So I’d like to give you quite a few bucks. But since you guys just won’t let me buy stuff, I’ll go and pirate it.

What we need is “content providers with reality checks”. I want to buy content which I know I can play on all devices I have. I don’t pirate it, so even without DRM, I’m not really gonna share it that much with my friends. Or if I do, and they find it’s any good, they will buy it even though they have an unlicensed copy. That’s what I often do with games and music — if it’s any good and I have a warez copy, I buy it later. Sort of advanced “demo/trial” scheme. And if it’s not any good, well then, I’m just glad I found out about it before buying, as I would have been disappointed otherwise after buying.

But as it stands now, it is more convenient for me to download warez mp3-s than go and buy them from a “white” online music store. Convenience of the experience matters a great deal.

From Telegraph through RISKS digest.

A baby boy died after an untrained doctor pressed the wrong button on his bypass machine.

Didn’t equipment, doctors and medical technicians have to be like certified or licensed or something? Now it turns out the health system is such that the people on duty can’t tell machine buttons from one another. Or, as someone put it, “you really have to be in good health to make it to/through the doctor’s”…

I recently heard another story which gave me creeps. And again it was about UK’s medical system. What’s wrong in that country??? There was a pregnant girl who saw the doctors who ran some tests and told her that the baby would be a disabled/retarded one and abortion would be a really good option consider. She went through many tests and all told her the same. She was obviously confused (I can’t even imagine how bad it can be being in such a position), but decided to go ahead and keep the baby. And when the baby was born, not only was he a boy (although the tests said it would be a girl — or was it the other way — anyway, the opposite sex as to what the doctors had told), but he was totally alright and without any visible/tangible sign of abnormality after a few days. So a double shock — first to hear stuff like this from doctors, and second to learn they were wrong.

Some footage from Minsk’s weekend clashes. Hosting it locally just in case it gets taken down in Ukraine. As it says, “no comments”. I feel for the people living there and am glad I’m on the “other side of the fence” and thus safe myself. Europe and the west must get its act together and support freedom in a meaningful way. A bunch of old blokes in suits discussing a zillionth time whether to give a visa ban to top 10 Belarus officials, as shown on the news after events like this, is not what I would call “meaningful”.

This blog is now open. As is moodgeist.com itself. Although we’re still heavily under construction. More posts and docs and stuff to come.

I just helped someone to migrate from pMachine to Wordpress 2. Now there’s this page available that walks and talks you through it and links to a script that supposedly does the conversion.

The conversion seemed to go kinda fine, but the grievance was that the permissions weren’t working after the conversion. Enter the webSWAT team again. Let’s try to dig into this. (I’ve never seen pMachine code. But I did install Wordpress 2 to check stuff out.)

The conversion script is kinda usual code. But these lines are really the problem.

// Importing members
echo “# Importing members… \n\n”;
$pm_members = $pmdb->get_results(‘SELECT * FROM ‘.PM_MEMBERS);
$wpdb->query(“UPDATE $tableusers SET ID=0 WHERE user_login=’admin’”);
foreach($pm_members as $member) {
$query = “INSERT INTO $tableusers (ID, user_login, user_pass, user_nickname, user_icq, user_email, user_url, user_aim, user_msn, user_yim, user_idmode, user_ip, dateYMDhour, user_description, user_level, user_status, user_nicename) VALUES ($member->id, ‘$member->username’, ‘$member->password’, ‘$member->signature’, ‘$member->icq’, ‘”.str_replace(‘_at_’, ‘@’, $member->email).”’, ‘$member->url’, ‘$member->aol_im’, ‘$member->msn_im’, ‘$member->yahoo_im’, ‘nickname’, ‘$member->ipaddress’, ‘”.gmdate(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’, $member->joindate).”’, ‘$member->bio’, ‘0’, ‘0’, ‘”.sanitize_title_with_dashes($member->username).”’)”;
// echo $query;
$wpdb->query($query);
}

First off, it messes up the admin user badly, ripping it off any permissions. In WP2, there are separate tables wp_users and wp_usermeta. Permissions are in the latter. And just by changing an ID in the wp_users, you’re obviously ridding admin of its privileges and special attributes.

Secondly, the import just doesn’t work in WP2, the wp_users columns are different (fewer). There are none of thuse user_msn or user_yim columns so this just fails with WP2.

The solution is just not to do the user import (comment this part of the script out) and fix the post associations later in the backend. Or, if you have posts and comments by multiple authors, then fix the insert (just nuke the nonexisting columns).

I’m allergic to the PPT file format.

OK, occasionally it can be a good thing. There is nothing better than a well-delivered, clear, fun, short presentation about a particular specific idea or topic, especially if you need to discuss with large number of people at the same time — good presentation is a great way to get the discussion going.

What turns me off is PPT-s being used as a tool of interpersonal communication, instead of talking to people.

I was talking to someone today about a decision that they or someone else had made, which I didn’t think was particularly smart. Or rather, it was quite silly. I asked that person, “why was this decision made? I think it’s silly. Can you prove me otherwise?”

To which I was slapped back with, “Can I send you this powerpoint?”

I didn’t respond much at the time. And it really doesn’t matter what particular person or subject that was. But I can certainly respond here since this is my corner on the Internet.

When I’m asking you to explain a decision, I don’t want a goddamn powerpoint. I want simple, frank response to a simple, frank question from whoever made the decision. If you make a decision, you must have the guts to stand up for it — or change it if you’re proven wrong (that happens often to me and I’m always happy to do it if I can learn of a better way). There might be times when there’s a bit of info in a particular “deck” (that’s what they call slideshows these days… blech) that is useful, but forcing another person to go through a zillion slides in response to a simple question shows that something is not quite right and either you don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t have the guts to stand up for it. Both of which are opposites to efficient management, teamwork and achieving goals.

There’s cure for powerpointism. Stay lean, mean and simple. Try to go for the simple rather than complex explanation or answer — because simple is most often the right one that people want to hear.

I registered my PSP on their site a while ago. Now they sent me this package that contained an UMD holder. Here’s how the size compares to a game case. It’s a bit thicker, but can hold five UMD-s, whereas for games you’d have to carry five cases which waste much more space. Plus there are slots for two Memory Sticks. And UMD-s have such a wacko shape that they wouldn’t fit in any of normal accessory holders (for floppies, CD-s etc), yet they have part of them exposed so they definitely need protection, you can’t have them just jumping around in your bag.

So the UMD holder is a perfect accessory for the mobile PSP user and sending it for free to a registered user is a nice touch. At first glance, it’s kinda smart because it’s the one accessory you really need, but at the same time, if you don’t buy all sorts of accessories or junk like I don’t, then you wouldn’t bother to go shop for it and waste more cash than you already did for the PSP.

But the more pressing question is, why wasn’t it bundled together with the PSP in the first place? There’s tons of junk in the PSP pack, such as a table footstand and the useless headphones, that could easily have been replaced with this. Is it part of some sinister distribution strategy to keep buyers happier for a longer time and spread out their “ooh-aah” effect over time? So that first time you ooh when you buy the thing, and second time you aah when this UMD holder pops up in your mail.

I liked “Getting Real”. It sounds heavy (171 pages!) but it’s laid out so you actually spend only like 15 seconds per page and its consumable in a few hours or so for the first run, and then you might want to go back and reflect at a later time.

Getting Real isn’t a bible, obviously. As they say themselves, everything should always be taken with a grain of salt. Some stuff there is not applicable to all scenarios blah blah blah etc. But there is a lot in that book that I like. It says its about web applications, but a lot of it is about getting stuff (software) done and efficient teamwork in a broader sense. Old stuff such as “release early, release often”, “work with few rockstars instead of many mediocres”, “interdisciplinary people are good” etc are all put in the web context and into a coherent full package. It’s a lot about avoiding bloat and bullshit bingo. YMMV, but I’ve found the best stuff (and any stuff at all, really) gets done when you cut the crap out of it and get short, sweet and to the point.

A theme that I liked was that “writing matters”. As we become more global and impersonal, being able to write clearly in chats, e-mails and those places becomes more important.

A quote from the book.

Being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly.

Lennart Meri was the president of the Republic of Estonia in 1992-2001 who died today. We can safely call him the greatest statesman of contemporary Estonia. Before doing state stuff, he was a well-known publicist, filmmaker and many other things. See the BBC for more about his life before becoming the president (and before that, becoming the first foreign minister of the newly re-established country). He was well-educated and knew many languages and cultures, which certainly helped in his work.

What the BBC doesn’t say is that during his nine years in the office, Meri’s immense personal contribution and character did a lot to re-establish Estonia on the international scene and reinject the much-needed confidence and future vision to Estonians that the country is now ours and we can rebuild it for a better tomorrow. A great accomplishment of his was signing the treaty to withdraw all Russian troops from Estonian soil in 1994, which de facto ended the 50-year occupation.

We have many funny stories about him. He used to be late to all the meetings, be it with heads of state or whoever. But when he finally arrived, people didn’t mind. Once he drew a circle on George Bush senior’s globe with a pen because it didn’t have Estonia as an independent country on it. In Jordania, he remarked that his face is much like that of a camel and there’s a famous camel painting by an Estonian artist Viiralt to which people likened him after this event. He had a great sense of humor and feel for people and the country.

See also his official page and the official “farewell” page. I like this fact (I didn’t know this before and just came across it on the farewell page): “Lennart Meri can take pride in knowing that the state he helped to build has — for the first time in history — become strong enough for a former Head of State to die in free Estonia.”

bash.org says it has an RSS feed now. Cool stuff, bash is one of my favourite sites. But the feed is not working hope they will get this fixed soon…

We launched this a week ago or so. I’m very happy about the site — I think it’s one of the better ones I’ve done in quite a while. With the rest of team, obviously. My role was helping out with the backend and publishing part which is mostly Movable Type with some twists and tweaks. The functions/code ratio of the site is really good — it’s rich and fun, but driven by insanely small amount of code, so there wasn’t really much complexity to it at all.

Many companies, even the “cool” ones, tend to have boring hiring sites. We hope the Skype site makes a difference in that sector. Also, be a true Skype geek and embed the keywords right into your own site

There was speculation the other day (yesterday… Women’s Day edition) in The Independent that Latvia’s president Vaira Vike-Freiberga is rumored to be one likely candidate for UN Secretary General. A bold move no doubt, but that lady really has guts in a good way and can do politics. In Estonia, I don’t think we have similar candidates of that caliber, so we can only wish her the best.

[14:07:24] x says: they had iPod shuffle already in KGB
[14:07:34] x says: with some 3rd party earphones

Ray Ozzie: Wiring the Web (via Ben Metcalfe).

This is one of the most sensible proposals about innovating on the web and info sharing, re-packing and moving technologies that I’ve seen since… well, forever really. I also thought I’d call this “the only web2.0 thing that has any real content and value to it”. But I hate the whole web2.0 meme, so I don’t.

Clipboard is the ÜBERtool. I’m using it something like hundreds of times a day. The fallback plaintext mode always works. It supports UTF8 so you can move around internationalized content with weird characters with no problems. Some apps sometimes have rich-text-awareness problems and richtext from one app becomes f*ckeduptext in another, but it’s on the way there — at least among apps from one vendor (say Microsoft, or Mozilla/Firefox), it works great, and mostly also across vendors.

As browsers are on the way to become the überUItools for anything and taking over more and more dedicated clientside apps, I’m sure this live clipboard thing will make many things possible that we couldn’t do easily before, especially as they’re sharing it with a Creative Commons license and not keeping it fully proprietary.

Here’s a WW2 shooter with a twist. Commandos Strike Force, re-make of the classic Commando “tactical” series into FPS-type game.

Suppose you have MT blog which uses the tags plugin. And suppose you have a sidebar on every blog page which uses the tags. And the sidebar is on every page.

Now the humanly natural thing to do here is to place the tag-related code into sidebar module which gets included into every page. Which is fine mostly. Except if you have lots and lots of tags. Say just only tens or so. Because soon you’ll notice that category rebuilds start to waste massive amounts of time and soon end up in 500 Internal Server Errors. You think there’s a bug in your code which can also cause this, you go over all the entries and templates… nothing.

Apparently, MT groks when it has to rebuild and reiterate over the same stuff too much, and this throws some sort of timeout or resource overrun or whatever.

The solution is simple. Think of it. The code is the same and its results do not change across rebuilding different pages. So why run it over and over for each page? It makes sense to abstract the code into a separate index template, and the module can just include that index template file with MTInclude as a regular file.

This can rid you of those 500 Errors and massively improve rebuild times. So before going to bash the tool for being slow, go look in the mirror. With or without MT, optimizing your code and template structure can make a MASSIVE difference.

Interesting discussion I had with Martin-Éric based on this article.

Martin-Eric: http://funkyware.livejournal.com/1444.html
Martin-Eric: Ties in with your post that EU seems to be a one-way game rigged at the old member states’ advantage. Martin-Eric: Which it indeed is.
Martin-Eric: I said it back then, too: the former Warsaw PAct countries should have made their own Union, rather than accept an half-assed membership where they are not an equal partner.
Martin-Eric: Then again, the new member states could already sign Schengen treaties among themselves. That is, open borders within the old Warsaw Pact countries. Same idea as Schngen within the old Europe, but applied only among new members, independently of whether the old members allow you to jTHEIR game.
Martin-Eric: create an exclusive territory of your own, where the old member states are not welcome. beat them at their own game.
Martin-Eric: make it easier for canadians and australains to be in the new countries than for citizens of old EU members.
Martin-Eric: piss off the EU 15 countries the same way as they piss you.
Martin-Eric: they might become a lot more friendly when they realize that it’s more difficult for e.g. a finnish or french guy than a canadian guy to work in e.g. slovenia or estonia.
JK: interesting.. though the countries there too immature to pull this through at the time.. these days it would work, we’re doing interest blocks within EU anyway
Martin-Eric: but imagine going to the extreme of making it easier for a canadian or australian to work in Eesti and easier for a Canadian or Australian company to open an office there, than for any of the Schengen countries.
Martin-Eric: that would quickly re-establish a balance of power.
Martin-Eric: imagine the impact of a message saying “we’d rather be flooded with kiwi, aussie or cannuck products and people than let france, finland and germany have our ass for free while getting to call the shots.”
Martin-Eric: and imagine all of the former Warsaw Bloc doing that at the same time.
Martin-Eric: making it excruciatingly painful and in practice impossible for Schengen members to visit or do business in the former Warsaw Pact countries.
Martin-Eric: all while making it a piece of cake for non-EU and non-USA countries to do that.
Martin-Eric: thta would be such a violent message that the Schengen countries would have no choice but to accept you as full-standing, equal partners.