January 2007 Archives

I’ve posted relatively little over the past few days and generally engaged in relatively few visible “extracurricular” activities. This is because I’m on a mission to teach myself a bit about GUI development on OS X.

As I’ve said before, OS X is a fine machine for a web hacker if you want to develop some web type of stuff. But apart from that, it’s also the world’s finest desktop environment and so I want to learn a bit more about how stuff works and how to build my own.

But why?

I’m actually doing this for two purposes. One, I have some actual stuff that I want to build in OS X. And second, I strongly believe that learning in general is good for you, and learning specifically about different programming and development environments and approaches helps you become a better engineer in general, even if you do not end up using the particular tools. I’ve found that I learn a lot from each new language or environment and can reflect this experience back on the other environments that I’m working with. And if as a byproduct I can produce cool stuff on a Mac, then that’s not so bad either.

I want a “mobile media bus” to unify my communications to the computer, if I’m around my computer. My phone was ringing in my pocket, but I didn’t hear it, as I had headphones on and the vibrator alarm wasn’t apparently enough in an ideal world, it would have said “ring” to my computer over Bluetooth, who would have then displayed an alert on the screen that I was looking at this time.

This blog has been a mess and mix of personal, professional and “junk” type of subjects. So I’m branching things out a bit. This blog, as well as my main Estonian one, will continue to have a professional-technical-study-society-culture orientation across the keywords you can see in the header. As for the “junk/fun” type of things, these will now be on a new site, Misc Random.

I just can’t live without the “light” stuff and only maintain a serious note so Misc Random will be a dumping ground for that kind of things. Oh, and it will be, as the name says, a totally random mix on English and Estonian content, so you’ll live with that.

Many thanks to devil again for making such a versatile skin that can serve across different sites with just a few minutes of tweaking.

Just watched the Macworld keynote from last week, where the main talk was about iPhone. Much of what’s to be said has been said already, so I’m not going to be too original here. Other than saying that from a personal perspective, this COULD be the device that I’ve been looking for. I’m increasingly shifting my online life into the Mac space and the iPhone is going to be much more compatible with that than, say, a Windows Mobile-based solution. And the phone is so important to me that I don’t really care that much about the price.

I’m looking forward to seeing the hardware. A lot of stuff has been said about OS X running on that thing and all the bumpy funky scrolling and such… so two things.

The Venice Project, or TPTWFV (The Project That Was Formerly Venice) shall hereforth be known as Joost. How do you say that? In Estonian, there’s a similarly (?) pronounced word “juust”, meaning “cheese”. And here’s some more comments from a chat that I’m in, not sure how valid this info is but just interesting/fun

too bad they did not consult with any Flamish or Afrikaans speaking people before naming Joost. It is slangish and somewhat derogatory form of “simpleton” or a “village idiot”…
in Dutch it is a boys name, pronounced Johst with a loooong “o” (no, not “oo” as in school but “o” as in host).
The name Joost is also part of an expression: “Joost mag het weten” (free translation: Joost will know) which you say in a desperate mood as a reply to a question you can’t answer because you don’t know.

See also Urban Dictionary.

Microsoft at CES : Full Motion Desktop

Hmm, this is actually interesting — using video as your desktop “picture”. A common desktop environment is fully static, with the icons and desktop image just sitting there. I don’t believe that you really want to have your kids videos on desktop, too much distraction and no potential for continuous loop, but a professionally produced subtle animation might actually contribute something to your “work ambiance”. You could choose desktop animation depending on the mood and pace you need to be in, whether it’s subtle contemplation or processing things at a high pace. Perhaps accompanied also by some ambiance music, if you don’t want to play stuff from your personal media playlist.

Microsoft at CES : Riding with Ford Sync

I’m under-impressed. The visual UI in the car consists only of one monochrome color row of text, plus some buttons on the wheel and maybe elsewhere. 80-s style. My Ford from two years ago has a better panel than that. If you have a high-tech system that reportedly also talks with iPod, Zune etc (though they didn’t show it, I would have really been interested in the iPod bit), it doesn’t cost that much more to make a proper visible panel to the whole thing. As it’s shown here, it just shows obscure strings and numbers, not very friendly. Voice commands and voice recognition are cool, as is text-to-speech SMS, but sometimes you just need unambiguous display and buttons and those didn’t seem to exist here.

As it says. More details on the survey page itself. Just got this e-mail and reposting it here.

Dear Sir,

I am a student studying ‚Human-Computer-Interaction’ at the University of Basel in Switzerland. At present I am writing my Bachelor Thesis concerning users’ preferences with respect to filesharing over the internet.

In order to make the survey and consequently my paper a success I have programmed a survey in order to generate data to evaluate these preferences. For me to be able to conduct an evaluation of the issue at hand it would be of great help if you could support me and distribute this survey via your webpage or other channels in order to generate a larger sample of relevant participants. Of course I would be very glad to share my insights with you upon completion of my paper.

Here you can find the link to be distributed via your channels – if possible – and of course for your own interest as well: http://phpserver.psycho.unibas.ch/filesharing

CES is too big, so for the most part I’m just ignoring it, apart from the Skype stuff. We’ll know after the dust settles what’s important and what’s not. But this is really cool. Be sure to watch the video. Image projected on fountains, yay.

Drove my car all the way in a single sitting. Just wanted to see how it goes. And here I was, 2300 kilometers, 5 tanks of fuel and 30 hours later here are the stages. See also an earlier logbook.

I must say I don’t really endorse or recommend this style of continuous driving as it’s quite stressful and can also be dangerous if you’re not sure of yourself. About 1000 km per day is what you can do reasonably safely.

Jan 6, Tallinn, 6:56, 0 km

Started off early morning to get as much daytime driving as possible. The Estonian part was pretty uneventful.

Here’s something I don’t understand about bank card security. I have the latest-and-greatest chipped VISA card. It has both a chip and the magstrip for older systems. And I’ve experienced a variety of security situations when paying with it. Some of which seem really insecure to me, so I’d like to understand am I misreading something or is this really to be expected.

I’ve been writing about inline car systems. Here’s something hip and cool on this scene. One of these will break through one day, but if it’s Dash or something else remains to be seen.

The only part that I’m not sure about is that they use input from other Dash people to predict traffic patterns — for this to work reliably, they’d have to achieve quite a substantial userbase. But data from network, similarly to how navigation systems update themselves over TMC (Traffic Message Channel) on FM radio channels, is fine.

Just finished reading “iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”.

This was my second “Apple book”, with Jim Carlton’s being the first, and so I also have some comparison fodder.

Here’s a good New Year resolution for all webnerds: “I’ll produce only correct, validating XHTML”. YouTube continues to be a bad offender here, offering people HTML on their site that doesn’t validate. But it’s easy to fix these days. See this for a simple explanation.