I’m a RSS junkie and keep an eye on tons of feeds, both for work purposes and for staying in touch with people I just happen to know. So it’s important for me to have good reading tools. Similarly, I also maintain a number of personal and professional blogs. While all the blog softwares have web-based backends for posting, they all have different shortcomings, and I’ve started to look in client-side posting tools. So the conversion from Windows to OS X was interesting from this perspective.

A German tourist ends up in Montana instead of Australia. Just recently some of my colleagues in Tallinn got some letters from the US that had “Thailand” stamped on them. So en route from US to Estonia they had been to Thailand. Tallinn, Thailand, pretty much the same thing. (Via RISKS.)

One of my trades is being a web nerd. I build and mess with websites. Either from scratch or based on some engine. Be it a blog or CMS or who knows what. So one of the first thing I did in Mac OS X was to set up a web development environment where I could continue messing with websites.

I’ve noticed a trend over the past few years. Macheads used to be almost exclusively in the domain of advertising and creative design. And maybe also sound engineering. But in the past years after the release of Mac OS X, it’s become “cool” for web nerds to be working on a Mac. Perhaps even not so much for client or hardcore backend developers (it’s kinda hard to write a Windows GUI program in Mac OS X), but exactly for web nerds who build websites.

Mac is the über-multimedia machine, yes? All the cool people use it to produce audio and video. You know, the advertising and marketing types.

And for a reason. It’s a nice machine if you want to do cool things. It has the little things thought through, like fonts and desktop backgrounds and things like that. (No Teletubbyland, thank you, that is the default background in Windows XP.)

Quicktime can play most media formats that you’ll encounter. There’s a DivX codec available for Mac. VLC is an alternative media player (also for Windows) that can do nice things like play things in fullscreen. For playing Windows Media (WMV) files, there’s a free Windows Media Components download available from Microsoft.

Scoble and others say that Google Reader and its sharing could replace digg. W0rd. I don’t really care that much about digg or techmeme or any of those other niche geek thingies, but Google Reader is THE thing. I’ll write a longer post as part of my “switch” series, but long story short, I tried a number of readers on different platforms, and I’m very picky about interfaces. Google Reader beats everything else hands down and I’ve switched all my reading activity to it. Simple as that.

I’m also maintaining a link blog now which I’ll one fine day somehow add to this blog here. Until then, it’s here. (I wish I could add my Google Analytics to that somehow, or point the feed to Feedburner, so that I could track the stats.)

Wow. Wow. Wow. Even if 20% of this is true, we’d be royally screwed. (“We” as in “everyone using computers.”) The immediate point here is that there’s no rush to upgrade to Vista. Glossy screenshots are hardly the “killer app” if XP works just fine. (Via Bruce.)

In a series of experiments around identity and trust, I’ve now enabled OpenID comments on this blog. In the comment area, you see a new “Your blog URL” field. The default wording is a bit confusing, and what’s going on here is that it actually asks for your OpenID URL.

Typekey also remains working, but as you could also use Typekey as OpenID server, it’s kinda redundant. I could hack around this, but I’d prefer that SixApart and the plugin providers provided a bit cleaner solution in the next versions. The comment stuff is still a bit messy. For example, when using the “comment preview” function in Movable Type, you’re no longer signed in at all.

What I don’t like about OpenID here is that in it’s out-of-box configuration, it doesn’t provide “nicknames” for people, only an URL. People have names, not URL-s, even if you are authenticated by an URL.

I’ve been following OpenID for quite a while now and it’s got a big boost in the blogs. For an intro, check Simon’s webcast. I’m using Marc’s MT OpenID-comment plugin.

Someone recently asked me “how can I open multiple SSH tunnels with only one password prompt?” And to make things more complicated, let’s assume that we only work with passwords, i.e we can’t use the PKI where public/private keys would do the authentication.

Now there’s a hard way and an easy way.

Some people have been asking me over the past few weeks what’s up with skypejournal.com (one of the earliest independent Skype-related blogs). Just got a note from one of their editors Jim Courtney, confirming everything is fine and they just need to sort out a few things.

You have not seen Skype Journal for the past few weeks as a result of a combination of factors; however, it will resume shortly once some technical issues are resolved.

I got on TVP beta today. (I don’t have invites. Don’t ask.) And I gave it a quick run.

The one-sentence verdict: it’s an awesome product with huge potential. It’s already very good for a beta for the short period, and it will rock.

Now, in a bit more detail… I won’t post any screenshots, partly because you can’t (because of content copyright), and partly because it will change anyway. So it will be a lot of boring-looking text. But bear with me, as it’s cool.

I’d like to bust a myth that I myself had developed a while ago. I’m not really sure how it came about, but somehow I got the impression that Mac OS X is not really good with working with mobile devices for things like syncing data and using the device as a modem.

I proved myself wrong. It’s drop dead easy.

Like for most people these days, be it for work or for private life, my mobile phone is my lifeline. It has all my contacts and numbers and I can call people up. And if it ever lost it, I’d be very much screwed.

I’ve also started to use my mobile increasingly for calendaring. It’s an aging SonyEricsson T610 phone, so data entry is not really that convenient as compared to, say, a full-size mobile keyboard, let alone a computer. But it has worked kinda OK. At least the thing is always with me, always on and gives me reminders. Since I tend to forget things sometimes, it’s great to have external aids for reminders.

The normal thing to do would be to sync your calendar and contacts with your computer, so that they would be backed up and you could enter events in a more convenient way on your computer and have them synced to mobile for reminders. But I need to confess something: over the past three years, I didn’t sync my mobile and computer. Why? Because it was a hassle and I couldn’t be bothered to figure it out.

My friend Andrew blogtagged me. (Hi Andrew… it’s been a while, eh.) If you don’t know it, “blog tag” is a game where you get “tagged” by someone and have to share five things that others (at least on the internet) don’t know widely about you. And then you tag five more people and the game continues. The game seems to have been around for a while, but got its current recent revival from Jeff.

Now… allow me to put in a meta-comment before the five things. I usually find these games silly and would discard them right away. But this one got me thinking. First, it has kinda caught on. I tend to be among the “second tier” adopters these days, I stand back to see if an idea works, and not to be among the first ones to try it out. (I don’t even have a Venice Project beta ) If it does, I hop on.

And secondly, this game is not about the blogs and some silly networking technology and graphing, it’s about people behind them. Faces and real persons. In this crazy world, it’s never too much to take a step back and celebrate yourself and your friends.

Loic very nicely sums up the feedback and his own reactions. A long read, but good, and I subscribe to it 100%.

One thing that’s really difficult to argue with is that Apple computers, including my silver MacBook Pro, are simply beautiful.

Simplicity, aesthetic appeal and initial user experience are key here. The box contains very little and is easy to unpack. There’s no question where to start. There isn’t a whole lot of junk bundled, just the essentials that get you going.

Pros

Compared to my other/previous computers, this thing is QUIET. This actually means several things. First, the sound hardware is really good and well isolated from the rest of the hardware. All you get from the sound output is sound that you need, and nothing more. On PC-s, I very often get noise from hard disk or network traffic, which is kinda annoying. Doesn’t exist on Mac.

This is a cool remake of an important piece of computer history. A capella performances of one of the classic game soundtracks by these guys. Thanks to Claudius for the pointer. Original composition is by Rob Hubbard.

Does anyone know of more International Karate soundtrack remakes? Press Play On Tape doesn’t seem to have done it. Looks like it was performed here, but is there a recording of this available?

Just finished reading “The art of intrusion” by Kevin Mitnick. It follows his previous work, “The art of deception”, that was about social engineering.

The idea of “The art of intrusion” is simple. Mitnick has some restraints imposed by the court that restricts him from publishing his own hacking stories. I understand these restrictions will be lifted in a few years, so we can expect another publication from him documenting his own history. But for this book, Kevin simply asked other people to send him accounts of their own hacks. A lot of them did, and the book is an edited volume of the best of those.

Day started with video as the medium. People discussed what’s the relation going to be between videoblogging, TV and the web. Some fun video podcasts were shown, but it was a bit unclear to me where the business is in that whole videoblog thing.

Shimon Peres was profoundly interesting. He painted vivid pictures of how the world is “pregnant with a new era” and governments are going to be much less important. And the way to peace and prosperity is not through one ideology winning over another, but just enabling people live their lives through daily work and business. And that Western businesses should simply come to the Middle East. He struck me as a profoundly interesting and wise person, having a long political career and seen all of the world. He is one of those rare politicians who is actually interesting to listen to and has something to say about the world.

This week I’ve taken two trains for the first time: TGV from Luxembourg to Paris and Eurostar from Paris to London.

I like travelling by the train a lot on short-medium distances, certainly more than flying. I don’t really mind flying and I’m not afraid of it or anything, but trains are just more convenient for the following reasons.

There’s no airport hassle. Most trains go straight from centre to centre, whereas in airport there’s the added hassle and money/time cost to get to/from the airports.

Trains are much less noisy. In the airplane, you can’t really listen to music or relax since the noise level is pretty high. The train is more quiet and you can mind your own business more. Good noise-cancelling/inear headphones help in either case. I don’t have good inears but I’m planning to get some shortly.

Trains have more space. Airplanes can be really cramped unless you’re flying business.

I thought of a point to make in favor of flying too, and the only one I could come up with is that you can rise above the clouds and see the sun even on cloudy days

Comparing the Eurostar and TGV, they are comparable experiences, but in Eurostar I’m taking 1st class and on TGV I was 2nd. TGV 2nd class is pretty convenient, from the window Eurostar 2nd class looked much more shabby. There’s a two-course breakfast in Eurostar 1st class. Power sockets are good too. I’m not sure if there are power sockets in Eurostar 2nd class, there certainly weren’t in TGV.

The only reason I took Eurostar 1st class was that turns out they use airline-style pricing structures that can yield silly outcomes. They had some promo where 1st class return trip was cheaper than 2nd class one-way. (I’m not sure how would 2nd class return have compared, didn’t ask for that.) So as it sometimes happens with airlines, the cheapest option is to get a return ticket and just discard the return part.

The party on Monday was at Paris Bodega. The organizers said it isn’t even open to the general public yet and this is one of the first parties there. It looked indeed quite new and nicely furbished. Not a very big club on two floors. I met some people I knew and also some old colleagues I didn’t even expect to meet, so it was quite fine.

The Paris metro runs until about 1am, so if you start going home around midnight, you’ll make it just fine. They way out wasn’t as easy as one might have expected, though, as the cloakroom people didn’t really use any organized system for storing the coats on the hangers for later retrieval. Instead, it was something like “put the coat on the hanger and randomly stash it among others”. So when people started to go out, it wasn’t that they could just retrieve the coat from among the others based on the number (index) of the ticket. Since the hangers were organized totally randomly, they basically had to do what you’d call a fulltext search for every coat, and so it took several minutes per person to retrieve it. And with hundreds of people, it obviously caused a bit of a chaos. Fortunately, I was one of the first ones to exit, I can’t imagine what it was like a bit later.

Then on the way home, we agreed with someone to share a cab back to the hotel. We couldn’t figure out how the cab system works in Paris, as there were plenty of cabs driving by with their lights on and off, and we tried to hail them, but none stopped. So I suggested we instead take the metro since I knew how to get back. And so we did and talked various business-work-life stuff. I don’t think I said something really silly, but it was a bit silly and I made a bit of a fool myself since I didn’t know the person. We only traded cards when we ended up at the hotel, and then I found out it was David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain authors and a Harvard fellow at the Berkman Law Centre). This is what happens on the Internet when you don’t see people’s pictures. (His Wikipedia entry doesn’t have a picture, what can I do ) and I hadn’t seen him before, and his presentation on the stage (which rocked) was not until the following day.

Today was the first day of Le Web 3. Lots of good presentations. They say all will be on video archive, and some of those will be worth watching for the second time. I’ll do a quick braindump…

Overall — a little more “professional”/”produced” event, seats are more inconvenient, there is plenty of power sockets for laptops, but kinda useless as wifi doesn’t really work I don’t think we’ll get the fun that Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe gave us last year. Instead, it’s more high-profile — they say that Shimon Perez, Nicolas Sarkozy and some other dignitories might drop by tomorrow to say hi. I guess this shows that this is not only some geek convention, but having a real impact in France and these people are willing to take their time to come by and say hi.

So… the program…

This site is an intriguing one. When I was reading it, it occurred to me I’ve seen it before. Deja vu. Only where, what?

Then it dawned to me. Maddox. Yep. Same self-confidence and “I don’t give a crap about you world, I just post here”. Only this new one is female and the topics are different and posts more frequent.

Thunderbird died on me today on OS X. After you started the process, it sort of came up, then displayed the “spinning beachball” indefinitely when trying to open an IMAP folder. Force quit and restart didn’t help. Neither did a full cold boot. So I was stuck with a non-working Thunderbird. Not nice, as I really needed the emails.

Solution? I figured this has something to do with the IMAP state gone bad. I haven’t seen this on Windows. Anyway, it helped when I quit Thunderbird and then ran this in the ImapMail folder of my Thunderbird profile. (Do NOT blame me if it messes up something for you. Worked for me.)

jaanus-kases-computer:.../ImapMail jaanuskase$ rm -rf *

In other words: killed the IMAP cached messages in my profile, forcing a full IMAP cached content update. And Thunderbird indeed came up fine after this and re-downloaded all the IMAP stuff.

UPDATE: this apparently also kills all your message filters for those folders I have only a few and don’t mind manually recreating (they need cleaning up once in a while anyway), but some people this may be… er.. a disturbance, so watch out.

UPDATE: damnation, happened again. Needed again to kill cached content. But the good news is that you can kill the cached content without killing the rules. Just look at the individual IMAP account folders in the filesystem. In there, for each, I have INBOX.msf file and INBOX.sbd directory. It’s OK to kill these. The message rules are in another file, msgFilterRules.dat, that now gets preserved.

I needed to learn some things about the keyboard when switching to OS X, and there are some other little things that are just plain annoying and where Windows kicked the ass of OS X

Keys in Windows

The keyboard is a bit different. Most key placements are the same, but some keys like AltGr and Print Screen just don’t exist. When you need to enter extended characters in Windows with AltGr, that’s a bit of a problem.

Useful to know — AltGr, whether in BootCamped or Parallelsed Windows, is simply Ctrl+Alt on the left side. As for PrintScr, I haven’t yet found a keyboard solution. I understand that if you have an external Mac keyboard, PrintScreen is F13. When your keyboard ends with F12, that’s a bit of a problem. The best solution I found for this was in one of the forums where they suggested to use the On-screen Keyboard under from Windows Accessibility tools a bit unorthodocs, but works fine for screenshooting. Except when you need to screenshoot a view that has a menu open (an open menu disappears as soon as you press any key). Haven’t yet found a solution for this.

If you’re a “recovering Windows user” going on OS X like myself, there are effectively two choices that you can go with, if you want to be on OS X but occasionally still do things on Windows. Be it becuase you like IE and Windows-based Office so much, or you have some proprietary app that only runs on Windows. The choices are Boot Camp for doing a dualboot between OS X and Windows, or Parallels, for running Windows (and other OS-es) in a virtual machine inside OS X.

I used to think that nothing beats native boot. I mean, you can’t really get more native and lowlevel than native boot, yeah? And native means speed and stability, right? Wrong.

So I was bashing Firefox 2 a while ago for changing how their tabs work, saying that FF1.5 was infinitely better in that area. Looks like I proved myself wrong yet again.

I was using a PC with FF1.5 still on it, and needed to close some of the INACTIVE tabs. I like to keep my tabs neat and close tabs as soon as I’m “done” with them.

In FF2, you’d just hover your cursor to the close button on each individual tab, and click it, and poof, tab gone.

In FF1.5, closing an inactive tab requires more work. You either activate the tab and then use Ctrl-W or the “close” button on the far right, taking you away from the current active tab, that you may actually want to continue using and will need to switch back to. Or, you hover cursor over the inactive tab, right-click and select “Close tab” from the context menu. So that’s 2 clicks. In FF2, you could just click the close button on the tab.

So closing an inactive tab either way in FF1.5 is, as I often say, “one click too many”, if there’s an easier way.

One thing it demonstrates is that if you’re a quick learner, habits change easier than you think. I’m also looking at changing habits in the “Switch” series.

Today I saw a TV magazine report on how the practice of forced sterilization of Romani women continues in Slovakia to the present day. I’m not sure if it was a syndicated report from something like AP, or whether the Estonian TV crew had actually been on the ground to shoot it locally. Probably it was the former.

Romani women are sterilized without their knowledge or consent in Slovak hospitals. When they go to have a baby, they are told that they need a C-section. They are then sedated and their baby is born, but they are also sterilized in the process. Sometimes they are made to sign papers which say they consent to this, but they don’t really understand what they’re signing.

The most disturbing part was the interviews with Slovak nurses and doctors. They made racist and derogatory generalizations about the Roma like “they all steal, are dirty and practice incest for generations so this is why they are underdeveloped now”. I’ve studied a bit of Nazi history. It sounded exactly like the Nazi officials talking about the Jews. So effectively the Slovak medical system is practicing their own version of Roma genocide.

I found it quite disturbing that something like this is happening in the European Union to the present day and while the EU declares itself to be a community of values and human rights, it doesn’t really do much to stop this practice. I can understand that something like this may happen in a remote third world location, but within the EU itself it’s just incomprehensible.

Report on this

I had to install a Linksys wifi router recently. I like clear labels on things. It's always confusing whether you need to install software first or the hardware. And there's so much junk in the box with all those different manuals and CD-s that you're never sure where to start. So it's nice to see that you're given really obvious glues. Like, this sticker is pasted on the power and Ethernet sockets on the back of the router, clearly telling you to install software before you plug in the cables.

Now, it's of course another matter that their Windows wizard crashed after the 6th or 7th "step". But I don't think I lost anything, as this wizard was nothing more than a series of pictures along the lines of "unplug the cables", "now plug this in there" etc. And once my machine already got an IP address, I could see what was the uplink gateway's (i.e the router's) address, and could then sign in there to do my own configuration.

Apple needs to review their e-mail subject strategy. Here is a genuine Apple mail that I’ve subscribed to, amid all the other junk I’m receiving. “stuffing the stocking with iPod” at first read seems no different from, say, “cheap oem soft shipping”. (Plus I deleted the other, more perverse spams, with which it jingles even more.)

I got a pretty standard 15” MacBook Pro, the only upgrade being the faster hard drive. So it came without any OS installed and the first job was to install OS X from the DVD. A fairly straightforward process that I’ve been through a few times now. Perhaps the only nuisance being the long time it takes to “validate” the DVD. But who knows what’s that good for.

Since I didn’t want to switch everything over to Mac OS X immediately, I decided to install dualboot with Boot Camp. While in hindsight Parallels (that I’m going with now) would have been a much more convenient choice, well, I can say that I’ve been there now

I recently got a new MacBook Pro. It was a long-awaited upgrade over my aging T41 that served me fine for a bit over two years, but got really old in the end. And so it was time to get something new.

I went for MBP because I have many friends that are OS X nerds and so I thought I’d blend in the crowd a bit. Plus, MBP is one of the high-end PC-s out there and can also run Windows, so even if I didn’t switch to OS X, I’d still have a pretty high-end machine on my hands to run Windows.

So in the “switch” series, I’ll document my switch experiences and stories from a “recent convert” perspective. To be precise, there are actually two switches that I’m making — one being from one Windows PC to another Windows PC, and another being from Windows to Mac OS X.

I’ll continue to use Windows on both this new PC and on the other PC-s that I have. However, turns out that I need to switch to it much less than I anticipated and so I’m now spending most of my time on the Mac OS.