This case has really been making headlines for the past week in the Estonian autumn. The only other piece of current news here is the presidential elections, but as that got done last Saturday, the Probo Koala is already somewhat overshadowing it.

I’m happy of its outcome. I think getting this right from now on is bigger than most people in Estonia realize, and is what being part of the wider community of nations, be it the E.U. or U.N., is really all about. I was initially concerned that the Estonian authorities will stay true to their tradition and play the “wait and see” game, sitting on their arses and letting the toxic waste tanker simply slip away. It’s cool that they’ve detained it.

And I like Greenpeace’s blog that provides a much more detailed coverage than the local or international media. A true tribute to citizen journalism.

More on Movabletype. I just hit this bug. When I made a template and named it “_something.php” so that the name started with underscore, I started getting this maketext error as soon as I tried to review the template listing. The only way to fix that was to manually update the template_name column value in the database to no longer start with underscore, and this fixed it, and I could see the templates again. No idea if it’s also a bug in MT3.3.

I was supposed to do a bunch of stuff tonight, but skipped it and instead did my first Movable Type plugin from scratch. Harder than I expected, since it’s Perl which has its own funny conventions. Also I found the documentation on the MT site quite lacking. I could find a lot of useful examples with Google, however, such as this.

So the whole experience consisted of googling for MT plugin examples in both Google and Six Apart site, opening them up, trying things out and going back again. There’s a simple rule of thumb that always helps: start with simple and once you get it working and are sure of what it does, move on to more complex stuff.

I wanted to do something that parses entry and comment text and replaces some strings with other strings based on the plugin configuration. I went for doing a global pre-save hook. Doing a text filter would also have worked and left the texts in the database into a nicer state, but I can’t see how it would have worked without adding another text filter in the filter selector in the editor, and I didn’t want to do that, as the usage had to be really really transparent.

It all kind of makes sense once you figure it out and manage to get around all the funny errors. Also having done regexes for years helps a lot, as they’re the “Swiss army knife” or Perl, but can be quite intimidating initially.

And what does the plugin do, to start with? Hmmm…

Estonian and Canadian relations were quite heated a few years ago. Some years ago, some cultural dignitories were even sent back from Canada for reasons not explained thoroughly enough, and there was a sort of “visa war” going on.

So after a long hiatus on this front, it was great to hear in today’s news that Estonians no longer need a visa to enter Canada. Really cool. I myself got many friends there so here’s one more reason to drop by Canada sometime when I happen to be around in the area.

I’ve toasted a bunch of things lately. Luckily, non-fatally.

First it was the iMac. I thought I’d try Bootcamp and install a dualboot with Windows XP. All the Bootcamp docs said to use XP with SP2 on the disk. “What the heck,” said little Jaanus. “XP is XP, I’ll just use an old boxed vanilla XP which I happen to have, nevermind that it doesn’t have SP2”. And off I went, repartitioned the drive with Bootcamp, started installing XP…

A while ago, we published this piece saying Skype chat is greater than e-mail. (corrected, thanks Jim)

Chatting is one of Skype’s main features apart from calling and contact management. And we’d like to tell you of our hidden agenda of making Skype Chat an e-mail killer.

Yep… this is what I wrote with my own little bare hands.

Yet months go by, and what I find is that in business communications, I still send tons and tons of e-mail. Granted, I’m probably among the top few percent of Skype chat heavy users as well so I “do my part” so to speak, producing all those silly little chat messages but chat hasn’t really killed e-mail for me.

So… how come e-mail is better? What’s Skype chat lacking in? (meaning “what are we working on?”)

Ouch. Apple products and iTunes are generally well-usable, but someone did a sloppy job with this dialog. I watched a video podcast and then wanted to delete it and this is the confirmation dialog. Why does a simple “delete/donotdelete” decision need five rows in two fonts to explain?

Adam asked how to get the Skype API to work with PHP over COM. Sounded like another fun project so I thought what the heck, let’s give it a whirl. And I got it to work. Sort of.

Prerequisites…

• a recent version of Skype for Windows (I’m using a recent internal developer version, which from the API perspective should be pretty close to the latest 2.6 beta)
• installed Skype4COM manually. It’s not bundled with Skype. I’m using Skype4COM 1.0.0.22. Just download the zip, unzip and run “regsvr32 skype4com.dll”. And there’s a handy CHM reference in the zip.
• using PHP5 (I’m on 5.1.6)
• I’m on Apache2 (although I didn’t get to work it through the webserver)

Had a pretty strange travel experience yesterday when coming from Luxembourg to Tallinn. Some bumps in the road, or rather in the airports, but ended up home in one piece still… only to be greeted by other trouble.

Woke up 4:45 (ouch) to reach the 7:00 morning plane from Luxembourg to Paris-CDG. Nothing extraordinary, except they couldn’t book me for the Paris-Tallinn flight and I had to do another checkin at CDG.

I used to work with Foe who’s now doing a “Future Spy” exhibition for kids in the Science Museum. She has put out a call for future spy product ideas. Deadline: Sept 29, so just a few weeks to go.

Just finished Jim Carlton’s “Apple”. Thanks to Priidu, one of the most dedicated Macheads (in a good way), for suggesting and lending it. A fascinating story written before the “Apple comeback” when the company was in serious trouble, the book was completed in mid-1998, before the iPod, iBook and most other Apple’s great achievements of the past 10 years. Instead, it focuses on how the whole thing came about, how Steve Jobs founded it, was kicked out and found his way back and what happened meanwhile.

Coke is said to be moving into coffee market. Based on my experience, Starbucks has nothing to worry about.

I’m a big fan of coffee. And a big fan of Coke too. If they’re in the same bottle though, mixed, and I’m drinking them at the same time, there’s one word for it. “SūKs.”

I’ve had BlāK and didn’t like it one single bit. The cold coffee drinks by Nescafe were a bit better, but still far from what I’d call “good”. I guess cold coffee, differently from ice tea, just isn’t my thing.