August 2006 Archives

I just upgraded this blog from Movable Type 3.20 to 3.32.

The overall upgrade experience was smooth. You drop the files either over your current installation or in a new directory and go to the backend login. MT automatically detects an older database and offers to upgrade. It does the database schema updates (a few new tables, and a few columns added to old tables), adds some pieces of new data, and even tries to migrate over all your tags that you use previously with some plugin. (Tags are now a native feature.) Alas, the last bit is unsuccessful, see below in “tags migration”. Apart from the tags problem and styles fuckups, the migration works fine.

The plugins Markdown, SmartyPants and Compare also work fine for me. Removed the Tags plugin since it’s no longer needed.

Things to read before doing your own migration…

• Platform changes and plugin incompability notes
• This forum thread with many useful links

Hello hello… how does this look? Kind of works?

As it says. I’m expecting it to go smoothly, except some weirdnesses around the Tags plugin which I’m using, since MT3.3 has a native tags function that’s incompatible with the previous plugin. Will post the experience when I come back alive.

Google Music Trends. Hadn’t seen this one before, just stumbled on it in the Google Labs.

You know how the recent versions of Google Talk can change your “status message” to the song you’re playing? Apparently they’re collecting and aggregating this info on the server side and making it available in this “charts”-like format. Kind of cool actually.

WoW.com Forums -> I played WoW, I became a terrorist (story!)

“Holy cow” is all I can say. This could as well happen to me, I don’t have an iPod but keep losing and dropping stuff at random places. This is exactly the thing that terrorists want: overreaction, panic, FUD. Via Bruce. I guess a good indication of living in a draconian society is that under normal circumstances, you could sue the agencies treating you like this, but with all this “terror” stuff, it would make you a heretic.

Stormhoek is a wine producer in South Africa who’s supposed to be “blogger-friendly”. They’ve used Hugh Macleod’s drawings as marketing technique. And they have a blog on their site alright. Or rather, the blog is their site.

So I thought I’d go check them out and maybe get a bottle or two. South African is good. But the question I have after going to stormhoek.com is… well… WHERE IS THE WINE?

Yes. I can read the blog. I can call people in South Africa and UK. But there’s no “product” catalog where I could actually see what they produce. And there’s no “buy” button so I could buy a bottle or two and have them shipped to my house. What am I missing?

I guess the explanation here is that while you can promo your products all you want, you just can’t sell alcoholic beverages online due to the various import/export regulations and customs. But still. It’s silly. Why make me take interest in a product if I can’t get it.

Part of my job at Skype is running the Skype Forums. I recently completed an interesting project, switching it to a new platform and completely remaking the sign-in system. It’s also one of the most complex things I’ve ever done in this area, and also one of my longest projects ever. I thought I’d document the experience, both for my own future use and also for anyone else who’s interested.

Went to Düsseldorf to see the Madonna “Confessions” gig. I’m not a big fan of hers. No hater either. I just figured this would be a good show. And it was. Although cheesy at times — it was fine when she said Germany had been very supportive of her, but then started giving some United-Nations-peptalk about how wonderful it is to have all these different nations at the gig and how equal everyone is and all that. I mean it is of course true, but is that what I came for? Shut up and sing and flash the lights and things, woman.

Some tracks had social themes as well. All in all the show was really good. The only sucky part being that I got standing places in the main arena, and while I can walk long distances just fine, I really can’t stand at the same spot for too long, so eventually my feet were hurting like hell. But I came out in one piece.

Düsseldorf itself is a funny city. They said it’s the home of the largest Japanese expat community after New York, and our hotel was right in the middle of it. So when walking down some of the streets it was more like Tokyo than Germany.

New features rolled out for Google Talk. Nice.

Among other things, they have an example of the new embedded images feature. (Really really neato!) The chat message says, “Hi! We went to the zoo yesterday. Check out the lion!”

Call me silly and pervert, but that reminded me of another classic photo prank called “Highest tower of the world”. (No, I don’t know that girl. Sorry.)

Ok, I figured it out. Now let’s see if this works too…

UPDATE: yep, it works. Man this Live Writer looks pretty neat.

Why I couldn’t get it to work originally with Movable Type: turns out in your profile you also need to set an API password, in addition to your regular password, specifically for these XMLRPC clients. Once I did that, all is fine and good.

The “insert map” is kinda neat. You can insert a map straight from Microsoft Virtual Earth. I am somewhere here currently … not. Removed the map because it was fux0red, showed complete darkness with one inch corresponding to 7000 miles. Guess it needs some tuning… but I like integrated concepts.

The blog says this already has plugins for Flickr and tons of other stuff… gotta check those out.

Now if I could only figure out the tags part and how it works with the Live Writer… gotta install MT 3.3 first with its “official” tags support.

More: the Live Writer produces pretty clean HTML. Too bad it can’t do Markdown which I’m using when editing myself… good news is that Markdown and HTML mix just fine.

There. It says it all. I have just one word to sum it all up: respect. I like marketing that respects me, and I loathe marketing that doesn’t respect me.

Checked out the Myspace IM client. Man it’s butt ugly. It does some nice things and works indeed, but the UI… oh my oh my.

Ok… it has one nice property. The tray icon is kinda nice. The figures have kinda nice glow around them.

Left to right: Skype, wifi, Myspace, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger. That was fun, let’s try it zoomed to see all the alphas and glows and things…

However… this is where the niceness ends and torture begins.

Did you know that the name of RTL, one of the world’s leading media companies, means nothing more than Radio Tele Luxembourg? I always thought those guys were German but turns up they’re right here in the Grand Duchy. Cool.

There are some historic connections here too… older people in Estonia (maybe elsewhere, but that’s where I’ve picked it up) sometimes nostalgically refer to Radio Luxembourg (“raadio Luksemburg”) as something they could listen to even during the Soviet times as the signal was quite reachable.

Got my first Flickr comment spam. Gotta be the first time for everything… I wonder if the new web2.0 method is spamming other web2.0 sites with your spam? argh. Well thanks osoq, now I know one service which not to check out and waste my time on, so you actually did me a favor.

I have these weird dreams once in a while. Now I had another one about a week ago. As it happens with all the dreams, I forgot most of the details, but this time, managed to remember the essence. It was about corporate structures. (No… I’m not stressed and overworked. It wasn’t really about my work. It was more general, without reference to particular organizations.)

It was called “territorianism”. The basic idea was that your organization’s structure is not a hierarchical tree as we’ve come to know the org chart. Instead, it’s a map, with the various business units as regions.

Windows Live Writer is out now. The reviews say it’s really cool. Hey, I want it too! But it gives me this error with all the Movable Type blogs I’m maintaining. I put in the homepage URL and user/password and then it tells me this. And yes, all the info is correct. Really. I’m not stupid. I tried many many times with different settings. And the MT installs are pretty standard, I haven’t touched any API settings anywhere (AFAIK, there just aren’t any settings for this.) What am I doing wrong?

Had a day off in Brussels.

Weather was hysteric. It rained, and then the sun was shining again, and this cycled for about 20 times in 10 hours. Wacko.

Brussels has an obsession with peeing creatures. Not only have they the boy, but also a girl… and a dog?!

Had some moules frites too. It’s supposed to be some sort of Belgian national dish. Not bad. Not a gourmet experience, but I’m a simple person and just fine with it. Would eat again. The Brussels alleys with zillions of street cafes were really cool — highest concentration of cafes I’ve seen in a long time. And the picture with a bowl and empty mussels shells looks really artistic, but it’s just my bad camera and flash handling — they weren’t really that shiny

The world is not lost yet. Here is someone who gets what strong token-based security is about. I’ve been reading this “ID cards (or any other universal tokens) are bad for security because then government can spy on you” nonsense for too long to even react anymore. So these words from George are simply music to my ears.

The problem is that some people always manage to confuse strong authentication with government tracking and the storing private data on a single card when nothing could be further from the truth. Smartcards or cryptographic tokens are just tiny computers with random numbers inside of them with absolutely no personal data inside of them. It is true that they can store encrypted private data but that is an optional feature not essential to the strong authentication aspect of smartcards or cryptographic tokens. The issue of tracking of people has absolutely nothing to do with strong authentication. /—-/ The same token can be used for as many services as the user desires from corporate VPN to online Banking to online shopping.

Call me up if you want to see how it works in real life. I have a strong authentication token that I can use today in all the e-banks I have an account with, plus to sign in to the government databases to see what those guys have recorded about me and who’s using the data. And I voted in local elections with it last year and will most likely vote again in next year’s parliament elections.

The only true security problem I’ve had with any of these services is that I once got pickpocketed and the bad guys milked my credit card (well technically speaking it was a corporate one so I didn’t bear the cost but it still sucked). We challenged the bank because each transaction is supposed to have a check with my signature of it, but they responded “uh .. yeah .. well you know what, we really don’t care about that and it’s cheaper for us to have you bear the cost than track down the receipts in weird foreign countries”. They actually received a fax with the receipt, and what was on it was nothing like my signature, but then again the fax quality was so bad that it wasn’t that legible in the first place, and blah blah blah, and I think they just dropped the case. After all the amount wasn’t anything humongous and we figured we’d just write it off as learning cost and move on.

They managed to stop a terrorist attack, but are not allowing hand luggage on flights. Boy am I glad that I’m not supposed to fly anywhere over the next few weeks.

I had a nightmare experience at Heathrow a few weeks ago. I was boarding a flight in Heathrow, scheduled to take off 7:30. I’ve been to Heathrow before, but not recently, so I was spoilt by the smooth Gatwick experience and showed up at around 6:15.

It was a zoo. There was literally almost no room to move around with your suitcase, since it was all full of queueing people about to miss their flights and everybody was very nervous. I stood in a supposedly right queue but it didn’t really advance. The display indicated that I should speak to staff if there was less than 40 minutes remaining to my flight, which I did, and was shown to a late check-in counter. They saw that the flight was already “closed”, which sounded spooky, but in practice it meant that I had to take my stuff (including this HUMONGOUS suitcase I have) through the carry-on security. I wonder how this would have mixed with the “no hand luggage” policy… probably I would have just missed my flight. But since there was no attack yet then, I could carry everything all the way to the gate where they still put it onboard the plane and I made it in one piece.

I almost had a heart attack as they found some sharp stuff in my suitcase which would have been fine if they had checked it in previously, but it now suddenly became almost carry-on luggage… but since it wasn’t really terrorist-grade stuff, they just took it away and let me go. Otherwise I would have been in deep deep shite. I’ve had sharp stuff found from my carry-on luggage before (which was left there totally unwillingly and not on purpose, but that’s not really an excuse) and don’t recommend the experience to anyone.

The packing guidelines actually look pretty reasonable. You don’t really need any of this junk onboard anyway — as long as they let me keep my wallet, passport and tickets and won’t lose my bags, I’m fine. The only item I’m worried about is chewing gum, since that isn’t in the “allowed items” list. Through some perverse thinking, you could actually qualify chewing gum as “chemical” which could produce some strange results when mixed with some other liquid. Maybe they saw the “Diet Coke vs Mentos” videos when they made these rules… Or maybe Diet Coke vs Mentos was the plot in the first place?