I’m a big fan of transparency and open, archived, accountable communication and conversations on the Internet. I’m also in favour of maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of personal data and giving people control over their own data and deciding over where, when and how they appear. And today, I had to make a value choice between these two.

There’s a lot of discussion online about how we essentially “live our life online” with all the youtubes and web2.0 type of things and leave traces all over the place without really thinking about it. It’s possible to construct wonderful lengthy essays on this full of vague content at best, or absolutely nothing at worst. So I haven’t really plugged in to the discussion because I don’t think I’ve had much to say. However, I believe in real-life stories, and so here’s today’s real-life story.

I received the following e-mail that speaks pretty much for itself. I’ve removed the personal details and references as I don’t want to reference the exact link in question and don’t want to be part of the problem, instead of the solution. It refers to comments on a pretty visible and public blog that I edit.

George W. Bush arrived in Tallinn today, for a one-day visit before moving on to Riga where the NATO summit will be held on Tue-Wed this week. Politics aside, it's definitely a recognition to Estonia to receive the first visit ever from a U.S. President currently in office. Al Gore was here once, and Clinton has been on speaking events many times but only after he left office. Although some jokers said that he's probably going to use this visit just to sleep properly, having come from the US and getting over the jet lag, before moving on to Riga :)

We were chatting with a few friends when we realized that Tallinn had public traffic cams where it's probably possible to see this, since several critical intersections are on the way from the airport to the hotel that are equipped with the cams. So we just set the cam pictures side by side and this is what was caught. The first picture here, showing overview of all of the empty intersections (the traffic was obviously fully closed), was actually the last timewise, just that the three cameras look cool side-by-side. Here are a few photos, you can see all in the Flickr set.

Does this work? Yes? No? Yes?
Here's a new paragraph.

Ok, here's REALLY a new paragraph.

Technorati Tags: puppy

These days, you’d imagine that everyone can handle Unicode and high-bit characters correctly? Think again. This is what I got from Amazon. The weird character combinations are supposed to be “ä” and “õ” and “ü”, but apparently there’s some kind of error in the printing process

I wonder if it’s because I got this from amazon.com and not, say, .co.uk or .de? High-bit characters are common in European languages and I’d imagine they would pay more attention to this in Europe. On the other hand, the item seems to be quite rare and was in stock only in the US store. Although it was still shipped from Frankfurt according to the documents.

I wrestled with a strange problem of a text filter not working correctly with comments in some servers, but working OK in others. It gave completely inconsistent results and I was going pretty nuts. But as usual, turns out there’s a perfectly logical explanation.

When comments are processed with a text filter, the text filter in the processing chain comes BEFORE the comments get sanitized and HTML tags limited. So, for example, if you have a text filter that replaces some text tokens with images, you need to make sure that the image tag is also allowed in the “Limit HTML Tags” option of general settings. Here’s the value that I’m using (the only change from default is the added image tag with the two parameters.

a href,b,i,br/,p,strong,em,ul,ol,li,blockquote,pre,img/ src alt

And why it was working on some servers and not on others was, of course, because I had configured this HTML limiting setting differently.

So… I was previously implementing a plugin that formatted text in a particular way. And implementing it with callbacks was fine until I realized that you can’t really plug into the comment preview mode this way. So if you want comment previews also to look good, you’re screwed

There is, however, another solution that becomes handy here, and leaves your article texts in a much nicer state than the callback machine. This is implementing a text filter. And so I did.

I was in Malta on vacation for a week pretty much exactly one month ago. It put a nice finishing touch on my really great summer... I didn't expect to have 25C in the middle of October (back in Tallinn, it was something like 10C).

Malta is a funny little country. It's one of those places where you go from Estonia and you feel that you're coming from a big place. All in all, some 300 sq km, or as much as one of Estonia's larger islands.

It's all British. They drive on the left and have 3-pin electrical sockets. I go to London often so no biggie there, but for people who have only seen the "continent", it was overwhelming.

The last British troops left at the end of 1970s. We had great Estonian guides who told us a lot about not only the local customs, but how to relate to it. So the Brits leaving Malta was in a way like Soviets leaving Estonia, they got a lot of military junk and deserted buildings around and have no idea what to do with those.

It's one of the few places on Earth where I've been so far where tap water is genuinely not suitable for drinking. (CORRECTION: the tap I'm talking about had a "do not drink" sign.) In many places, they tell you it's not good and have a "do not drink" sign, but you drink anyway and nothing happens. Well, in Malta it just tastes so bad (it's desalinated sea water with lots of chemical traces left) that you don't want it and so you need to resort to cleaner bottled water. (CORRECTION: this certainly cannot be applied to Malta as a whole. I'm only referring to the hotel I stayed in, which admittedly was not the highest class. I have no idea about the quality of water in other parts of the island or Valletta. Maybe it's good. I'm only comparing the hotel's tap water to my home tap water and other hotels in other countries I've been to.) (CORRECTION #2: it wasn't clear from my initial text that the tap in my hotel had a clear "DO NOT DRINK" sign on it, and thus it wasn't technically drinking water at all. Changed above.)

Some random notes and recollections...

It felt a bit like California, with the palm trees and nice maritime climate. (It actually is on the same latitude as southern California, so no wonder.)

I’m quite tired of comment spam. So far I filtered it manually and all comments were held for moderation, but it’s no longer funny.

So here’s the deal. All comments are now filtered with the Akismet filter. This means that if your comment passes the filter, it’s automatically published and no longer waits for me taking a moment to manually review everything. The down side of it is that so far, the filter appears fairly aggressive and filters absolutely everything as spam so if your comment doesn’t appear on the site after publishing, please let me know right away so that I could whitelist it.

UPDATE: there is something still not right in the trackback filter that keeps dying with the errors indicated previously in the blogs, so this particular one still not fixed

Junk Filter Akismet died with: unknown column: entry_id for class MT::TBPing at lib/MT/Object.pm line 283
    MT::Object::AUTOLOAD('MT::TBPing=HASH(0x8a504b8)') called at ..../mt/plugins/mt-akismet.pl line 94
    MT::Plugin::Aski

I haven't seen the Borat movie yet. I've seen the clips and have mixed feelings, but don't think I'd add anything unique to the discussion. But there's one cool thing about the movie.

Some of the visuals in the end credits actually come from really old Estonian TV commercials. By "old", I mean end of 80-s and early 90-s. The originals are available here for watching and download (the later ones are from the more recent period and thus not so iconic, but the earlier ones are the true gems). It doesn't matter that you don't understand the language [UPDATE June 2009: many of the YouTube clips are now subtitled], I recommend to watch them for the audiovisual language used and for a fascinating look into what products were used and promoted at the time and what the life was generally like. For example, there was a constant shortage of fruits due to the fucked up Soviet economic system, so the fact that oranges were available on sale at a particular store warranted a whole ad campaign. (Most Estonians and indeed most Soviet people had never eaten a banana before the end of 80s.)

My favourite is the one promoting minced poultry meat. It's just so surreal. And this ice cream one is legendary for reasons you'll understand when you watch. (Amazingly, it still made it to the screen through the draconian censorship system that was always a backdrop. But it was mostly focused on making sure there were no "nationalist" or anti-communist references, and got much more relaxed towards the end of 80s.)

I actually remember watching some of these myself on TV when I was a kid some 20 years ago. Oh times they change, but I think these clips are a pretty cool cultural landmark from that era.

UPDATE: the Windows Media versions on timeless.ee may not be so accessible to everyone. See the ads on YouTube now. For example, how about this one where the music is a shameless ripoff from Jesus Christ Superstar musical

I got this interesting comment on the post about e-voting.

until there are verifiable paper trails on *all* electronic or internet voting, they are to be viewed as not reliable at best, and a scam to jerrymander the vote at worst. /---/ i feel for your country if they are doing this with no paper trail verification or receipts printed from the machine and available to each voter and the public at large to tally the counts if it is contested.

Now... I must say I don't really believe in paper trails. To illustrate my point, I'll tell you a story that happened to me in ... uh ... 2003. 3 years ago. I was in a foreign country and my wallet got pickpocketed. I had a company credit card that got immediately milked before I managed to close it. Not a fortune, but still considerable damage.

SKIPI is basically Skype buttons on steroids. You enter your Skype Name and can then customize it a bit more than you can with the Skype wizard, especially the graphic part. On the other hand, it seems to offer only the “call” action, there was no option for “view profile” or “chat”.

Here’s a button that I made for myself with their wizard. Neat — only turns into a “callto” link when I’m online. (Then again, this means you can’t call me and get forwarded, and that you can’t leave me voicemail.)

Comes from ADS-click in Switzerland.

uPlayMe is something like last.fm. It sits in your computer, sees what you are playing, and then matches it up with other uPlayMe users. I can’t see how it is different from last.fm, except that it’s much more approachable. In last.fm, the webpage is kinda crowded and you need to dig through many names like Audioscobbler etc, to get it integrate with your music players. Or, it could be that I’m horribly mixing up last.fm and Pandora here and last.fm didn’t have any recommendation/matching thing. Whatever. For me, it’s all one big pot of “social music”. And since I listen to a really small pot of bad music myself and don’t spend too much time “consuming music media”, not too interesting. Could be for others, though, and again, the uPlayMe page is nicely approachable. BUT: the biggest “music users” I know are all Mac fans. As of Nov 2006, uPlayMe Mac version “will be available shortly”. Congrats, you just lost a bunch of people who otherwise may have tried you out after reading this.

Thumbs up for Alan doing his homework and referring to a relevant post in this blog.

The website is a bit annoying, plays music without me asking for it. On a game site I would understand, on a Skype-related product site not really. Turn it off in lower left corner.

This was sent to me a couple of months ago. The site is still there and there is info about SkyCube as well as the other products they’re doing. I didn’t find any purchase info on the site and it doesn’t (yet?) seem to be available.

I was a bit unclear about what’s the usage scenario for this thing? Does it sit at my home and I connect it to my gateways? Do I carry it around when I travel?

The developer appears to be in Israel judging by the phone numbers and emails.

Hi Jaanus,

My name is Omri Navot and I am part of the team that develops the new SkyQube + SkyQube².

I think you should take a look at this product; I read in your personal page on the web that you are interests at Skype is product and usability design and I am sure (I hope) you find our product interesting.

www.qoollabs.com

Or

www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/2006/04/skyqubethefreedomtoconnectandroam_1.php

If you like to have more info I will be happy to give for you

Skype: navoto

email: omri ‘at’ ugi.co.il

SoliCall installs a virtual audio driver in your computer that does recording and noise reduction in software. Sounds quite useful, probably needs a good CPU when working with Skype because Skype audio encoding and decoding itself is already quite CPU-intensive, and I imagine realtime sound analysis also takes up some CPU.

fring will install an application on your Nokia handset that supports Symbian. It will then let you call other fring, Skype and GoogleTalk users for free, or regular phone numbers for a charge. How it works diagram. It wasn’t really obvious from their site what’s free and what’s not, and there was no “Purchase” link. If they’re offering also the regular phone calling and SMS for free, it must be surely a limited time offer.

They have a downloadable user guide, unlike many other apps including Skype. Nicely written. Turns out from there you have to give it your Skype Name and password?!!!?! Not a good idea security-wise. Apparently it uses these to pull your Skype contact list.

ugenie is a shopping comparison engine that says it can dig through different sites and find you best deals on particular things, focusing on books/music/films and other similar media. What makes it interesting is that 1) it places emphasis on “credit card damage”, that is, the actual amount of cash that the purchase takes away from you (including all charges and shipping, minus coupons) and 2) it says it’s particularly good at finding deals of “bundles”, that is, not individual items but things grouped together.

This example bundle on their homepage is pretty impressive. It says it can get your cost down from $70 to $17. It offers used items, I guess that’s one way to get the cost down.

Comes from India. One of few Indian companies I’ve ever heard of.

Over the past months, I’ve gotten some of e-mails about various online products. Most of them Skype-related, some of them not so much. And they’ve been sitting in my inbox while I’ve been thinking long and hard about what to do about them.

I’m going to Le Web 3. Anyone who wants to say hi and not already registered, make a point to come. It will be fun I was there last year when it was called Les Blogs 2. I don’t go to too many of these “industry events”, but Les Blogs is one of the few ones in Europe that seems worth it with a good program and participant list.

The event program also says that Niklas will be there talking about Skype… I checked with some colleagues and it might be he won’t make it afterall. We’ll see.

I wanted to have a new layout and code here for quite a while. And now it’s here. If you’re reading this through RSS, come take a look at the site itself too for a change.

Credit for the layout goes to my good buddy devil. Thanks! The next will be on me

I put the finishing logic and code touches on it myself and thus also got a fascinating free trip in the world of Movable Type templates and JavaScript.

I’m in the Phoenix hotel in London and am encountering an interesting form of spam. The hotel has free wifi, but every time I open a browser up, the first page that comes up, instead of my homepage, is london-discount-theatre. Is this the kind of revenue model that wifi providers or hotels now use to finance their free wifi in hotels?

The IP I have is 80.177.161.254 that seems to resolve to Demon.

Nabaztag is a fun rabbit. Looks and works just fine. A smooth experience.

… until you get to their subscription pages and want to hand these guys some actual money. Then it becomes a royal torture.

I want to check what subscription I have. And this seems to show it. But they e-mail me my payment didn’t go through and I want to do this manually. But there is simply no such feature. I can’t enter or change my credit card info. Last time, I entered one that’s no longer valid now, and I want to update it. But I just can’t :(

The US Mint (nope, not the candy people… the people who make coins) is experimenting with coin designs.

I wonder what would happen if all these people would find out about Euroland? Where all the coins have the same design on one side, but the other side is different across countries. And they already got something like 10 designs (pardon me for not remembering how many Euro-countries there are) and as the 10 new EU members join it across the coming years, it will only be more fun with the designs. And both the Euro coins and the State Quarter Program coins are in active circulation.