June 2006 Archives

Lenn just posted about how he’s moving on from Skype to eBay.

He was with Skype for a bit more than a year. I worked with him on a couple of projects. Lenn, thanks for being around. It was a privilege to work with you and you did a lot of good to bring Skype into the great position where it stands today. It was obvious that this was a difficult year for you and I’m happy to see you pulled through.

I tried to find a good image but I unfortunately didn’t have too many of those around. Here you can see Lenn rehearsing his keynote for this year’s eBay Developers Conference on the pre-conference afternoon.

These are hot days so I put a large electric-motor fan in my living room. And it worked fine. But it was also close to TV. And now I have an interesting problem — due to the electromagnetic emissoin from the fan’s engines which were close to the TV (I can’t really think of any other reason), the TV now has developed a gauss effect and its picture is green-tinted on the right and left edges. So I would need to degauss it.

The question is, how the hell do I do that? My monitor has a degauss feature, but not the TV. The wikipedia article says many TV-s have a degauss happening at power-on, but my el cheapo one doesn’t seem to have this feature at all So am I screwed forever until I get a new TV?

On the other hand, when watching football the grass is supposed to be green anyway so it wouldn’t really matter? …

Someone pointed out in my comments that they have made a custom RSS feed for bash.org that appears to be working just fine. Grab it here.

Interesting metaphor: shipping software is like flying commercial airlines from A to B. Haven’t thought of this previously, but it totally makes sense. What’s a web-based system then? I can think of a taxi ride: even if you miss one taxi, you can get the next one with no hassle. (If you screw up something on the web, you can just deploy an update.)

There are also different types of planes. MS Office is Boeing 747 — having done great work for a long time and seeing occasional upgrades. Windows Vista is Airbus A380: both are humongous and made with great fanfare and are “something unseen previously” but serious delays in shipping.

I’d be tempted to call Skype a modern fighter like maybe F/A-18, since it moves with great speed and maneuverability. Or F-117 since it was under most other guys’ radars for a long time. But both are wrong since it’s not designed to carry weapons, shoot other guys down and kill. So maybe it’s a Yak-54 or any other similar acrobatic aircraft, being small, acrobatic and able to make unexpected moves. Or Cessna 172, easy to learn and fly and popular all over the world.

Joel writes how Bill reviewed his spec and asked questions and how he survived. This is a great example of a manager understanding the work of people working for him. And kind of echoes with a discussion I had the other day. Should managers be able to do everything that their subordinates do, and cover their asses if need be?

I just landed from a long-haul Lufthansa flight with their upgraded business class seats. When I went business last time, it was already pretty good, but they had the “old” style seats, so the person in front of you could still come a bit “in your face”. But now coming back from the US, they had the newer electronic cocoon-style seats and it was excellent as it totally exceeded my expectations — which is always the customer experience you want to go for.

There was this control panel which you used to control every aspect of your environment, including the seat and media center. You can see that in the top part of it (here on the left) there is the mini-model of the actual seat that you can twist and turn in all directions, plus there were “presets” for “work/dine”, “relax” and “sleep”.

Brainbench says that Estonia is the most certified nation of all. Followed by Latvia and Belarus. I got a Brainbench certificate too on computer security way back from 2002. Never bothered to update it though.

As part of the eBay Live! staff orientation, we had a presentation-slash-comedy by some folks from Comedy Sportz (not sure which city, probably LA). It was a bit cheesy at times, but certainly informative and fun. There’s nothing new in these things, but it makes sense to go over old things repackaged in new ways.

One of my takeaways from this one was how to bridge communications with “yes, and”. To carry on conversation, you need to use “yes, and”. It has two evil stepsisters, “yes, or” and “yes, but”. The latter two sound like you’re listening and accepting, but in reality, you are not and instead want to push your own agenda at the expense of others. Whereas “yes, and” means acceptance and bridging.

There is something I find really strange about Las Vegas. It’s supposed to be the entertainment capital of the world, yes? Then how come none of the bars can make me a goddamn mojito? Every time I ask, they say they don’t have mint leaves or something… I dunno. Doesn’t matter what they say. Mojito is supposed to be the (evil step)mother of cocktails, the 101 of 21st century mixing, so… wtf?

Other than that, Las Vegas and eBay Devconf are cool. Other folks posted tons of stuff already on this, this post has some links where to find all the info. We haven’t posted much since we’ve been really busy working at days and booz… ehrm, I mean networking at nights. I got some pics now up on Flickr. See the finale of the Bellagio fountains as video

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I was sitting in a long flight with a French colleague. I am always interested in how natives talk about their countries and cultures, and since there wasn’t too much to do, I asked him to tell me his version of what France as the country is like and what differences does it have. Would be interesting to hear from other Frenchmen what do they think of this…

Bretagne and Normandie in the north. Always having this rivalry with each other. Also very much like Northern Europe regarding people’s warmth (or rather, lack of it): people appear cold and reserved, but if you get close to them, you’ll have true friends, unlike south (below).

The eastern part close to Belgium, Germany with Strasbourg. Places like Alsace-Lorraine etc. The most “European” part, enthusiastic about this whole EU thing. Feels more “German” (since that’s what it has been a part of for a long time).

Paris. A totally different thing and not really French (like NY in the USA I guess).

The central belt with Lyon. The best place to go if you really want to get the “French life”.

South part. East of it closer to Italy (Cannes etc) and West closer to Spain. People here appear warmer, but in reality it’s all gang-dominated. You get good food, good service and smiles, but unlike in the North, no one really cares about you and people are more superficial.

Now here is something I’ve been thinking about that would be an useful add-on to Skype, and that I know that some entities actually need. For lack of a better name, let’s assign the working name “Skype Identity plugin” to it. It solves a problem that Skype itself at this time does not address and probably never will in the core offering: identity assurance.

Identity WHAT?

In short, identity assurance is making sure that the remote party is really who he claims to be. You could also call it “authentication”, but I find “identity assurance” cooler for the purposes of this post, so I’ll use it. So, if you talk to the Skype Name “niklaszennstrom”, do you really know if it is Niklas, or is it someone claiming to be him? You really have no way of knowing.

Just started Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones on PC. Although I’m only through the first few scenes, it looks like it’s going to be a great game. The story is compelling (well, as compelling as you’d expect from a “kill’em all” game), the cutscenes are great, in-game graphics and playability is excellent, environments are well done, some lighting effects are really spectacular. This game might revitalize my belief in the PoP series, which was a bit shattered after I found that Revelations was just a lame recompile of Warrior Within to PSP.

Some comments say that the T2T fights are even harder than WW: let’s see. I could only complete the final WW fight in cheat mode, but I completed the previous ones with no cheats. So I’ll see how far I get in T2T.

A fairly long writeup about Estonia, Russia, border treaty and recent domestic trouble. Looks objective and fairly accurate also from a native point-of-view if you don’t take sides and rather look at the “big picture”. (Via Global Voices.)

… I would do a personal finance one. A “web2.0”, “getting real” type of no-nonsense service where I could do exactly two things.

• Track and record daily expenses.
• View reports off those expenses over longer periods.

I’m amazed that with all the fuzz around “web 2.0”, people are inventing all sorts of crazy, stupid and mostly useless things about “social networking” and all sorts of content readers and aggregators but no one is really cashing in where the cash (literally) is. If the above was done properly, I’d be among the first to sign up. Let me know if your product does this, or if it’s not available yet, let me know when it’s done.

Completed F.E.A.R.. Another of those “well yeah” type of shooters. Levels were a lot similar to Doom 3, but the gameplay was much less fun. I chose medium or hard as level, but other games call this “novice” or “rookie”. Not once did I get into a really difficult situation — there was always tons of ammo available and the enemies were not that hard either. There were one or two “big guys”, but no real big bosses in the middle or end.

Why do they have to make the levels so booooooring? Corridors after corridors after corridors. This applies to both Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. and many other “future-techno” type of games. Are they really competing for some “most boring level design of the year” award? I never saw it, but maybe it exists. Why not put in some more open-air fun with vehicles, big guns, long distances… I guess I like shooters that involve a bit more of an adventure element.

The puzzles and movements were really easy and the whole experience was totally linear. You just couldn’t go the wrong way. I guess that’s good because you can remain focused on shooting the bad guys, but at the same time it doesn’t really thrill or excite you.

The occasional psycho theme was a bit wacko and it could actually get you scared in some instances. Or at least it did get to me. Not that you couldn’t get sleep or anything, but there were a few “ugh” moments with the cutscenes with ghosts and blur and psycho theme. One interesting character was the transparent shadow warrior who you couldn’t shoot, but could only kick.

So… yeah. Whateva.

Wifi is supposed to be easy, yes? All the standards play nicely with each other and bla bla bla… oh well. In reality, sometimes things just don’t work.

At home, I have…

• DI-614+ Wireless Broadband Router from D-Link
• in my desktop, SMC2402W wireless PCI card from SMC
• in my laptop, until recently, the IBM T41 built-in wireless. But since it kinda broke down recently and didn’t really work, it now has “Linksys Dual-Band Wireless A+G Notebook Adapter ver 1.2”, which is a PC Card type adapter, obviously from Linksys

Now… when I got this place, I didn’t really install any Ethernet cabling because I thought I’d just get wireless and have the Internet fly in radio waves all over the place and lock it down securely and be very happy. HA! The apparatus thinks different obviously.