Someone asked me, “How do you talk with Skype API on Mac OS X from Python via PyObjC”? Sounded like my kind of thing to take a look

PyObjC is, as it says, “The Python <-> Objective-C Bridge”. So it lets you access the rich class API of Mac OS X from Python. You may want to do this for a variety of scripting purposes, as Python is gaining traction as a cool clean scripting language and comes bundled with OS X. One application could be that you want to do another bridge with this and have Python sitting, say, on a read/write socket to where you can connect with yet further apps to talk with the Skype API. Or you may want to collect/analyze/archive data you get from Skype or whatever.

I’ve been reading Apple books recently, such as Jim Carlton’s “Apple” or iCon. Both of them, as well as much of the other literature available for Apple, talk about Steve Jobs and the general history and business on Apple. Much less is available about Steve Wozniak who actually built the original products responsible for Apple’s taking off and current success.

So I thought I’d balance things out a bit and also read about Wozniak. And iWoz is the book that tells you about him. Or rather, he talks about himself.

DarkSide Tetris is a game that my friend Dan and others have been working on for quite a few years now. Congratulations on 1.0 release If you haven’t tried it, you should. It’s a really funky take on the old Tetris theme, with interesting gameplay modes, network play and other goodies. Go to their site to see more.

The bad thing about this version is that it crashes on my XP/Parallels installation upon launch not sure if it’s a function of Parallels (my installation has gone a bit bad) or what. But I’ve seen and played the previous versions and it rules so be sure to give it a try. (UPDATE: works fine on a native XP. So it’s something about my Parallels.)

Here is their original news piece.

March 20, 2007

A new computer game in Estonia

Beau Monde Network, an Estonian organization creating computer games will present its latest work - DarkSide Tetris: The Second Block - on March 23rd, 2007.

The presentation will take place at the ETC 07/Experiment 2007 double tournament on March 23rd. DarkSide Tetris is a skill game which follows the standards of classical tetris games, but adds a multiplayer opportunity. The player can compete with computer controlled opponents or with friends online.

The game is freely downloadable from the webpage http://darkside.bmonde.net/.

“The game is easy and gripping” says Kert Kivaste who has proven himself to be one of the best tetris players in Estonia. “At the same time it does not turn boring thanks to the two gametypes and multiplayer option.”

To commemorate the release, a unique double tournament is held in two cities, Tallinn and Tartu. The lanparties ETC 07 and Experiment 07 are connected to a single network and a DarkSide Tetris tournament will be held on this shared network.

Beau Monde Network is a group of hobby game developers which has been working since 1998. During that time the group has created computer games and organized various events. Up to 20 people have been involved in various Beau Monde projects.

Game webpage:
DarkSide Tetris: The Second Block
http://darkside.bmonde.net/

More info:
Dan Bogdanov
Beau Monde Network
Tel: +372 52 75 525
E-post: dan at bmonde net
Skype: danbogdanov

For a few weeks now, I’ve been struggling between Firefox and Safari, as “which one should I use as my main browser on Mac OS X”. I spend a vast majority of my work days in the browser environment, and so the browser is the single most important tool that I use. So the question of browser is almost critical as the choice of the platform and operating system, in that it’s the single most used tool apart from the OS itself, at least for me.

I was using Firefox on Windows for a long time and it mostly worked fine there. So I continued with FF also on OS X initially, but there were a number of things that I didn’t like about it, so I also gave Safari a run. And now I end up using both constantly for different purposes. Which kinda sucks — I’d like to have one main browser and not jump between them.

So I thought I’d do a little summary here about the main differentiators between them.

Tab bar layout and tab naming

This is the first one because it bothers me most about Safari. If this were better, I’d use less Firefox and more Safari. But it’s one of those little yet crucial features where I can save or lose a lot of my time just because a piece of software has been engineered in a particular way and some little design decisions have been made that don’t matter when viewing a program on its own — but viewing in context with other apps, they suddenly shine through.

The tab bar for Safari is worse than Firefox because of two reasons: 1) the font is smaller, and more importantly 2) it doesn’t show site favicons (even though it shows it for the current site on the address bar). So in windows with many tabs, I find that Firefox is much friendlier to navigate. Just compare these screenshots (click for full width).

fring, that I posted about before, now does SIP. Their site title says “Mobile VoIP application for cellular handsets”. And the “about” page title is “About fring 3G, GPRS and Wi-Fi mobile voice over IP cellular application”. Nice SEO and keyword targeting going on, but still too nerdy to care. I continue to exercise my liberty to not believe in SIP being a consumer proposition at all. But Unicode is nice. And I still don’t have a phone to try any of this out. (This is not a hint, I don’t want one either. Maybe I’ll buy an iPhone when it launches. The phone market is like PC market these days, too noisy for anything except Apple stuff to shine through.)

Hi Jaanus,
We saw your past blog about fring mVoIP (http://www.jaanuskase.com/en/2006/11/fringfreecallsonyour3gha.html) and thought you might be interested in an update on our product development.
fring now supports SIP - meaning you can now use your SIP provider to make calls through fring! The GizmoProject, VoipCheap, VoipStunt and Free World DialUp will automatically be listed on the fring client, and you can also configure other SIP providers very easily just with your user name, password and SIP proxy.
BTW: As far as we know, fring is the FIRST to enable SIP…even on non-SIP handsets!!!!
This all means that fringsters can now communicate between fring, Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN and SIP-based applications over VoIP, GSM, WiFi and PSTN networks.
We’re not yet official launching this SIP capability – we’d like to gather some feedback from users first… so if you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions, please send them to me at jon ‘at’ fring.com. Also contact me or visit our blog if you want more information.
Thanks for your interest in fring – and happy fringing!
Jon (jon ‘at’ fring.com)
p.s. Responding to appreciated feedback, we have also added Unicode and fixed some other bugs, including making sure blocked MSN contacts stay blocked.

Flickr has now Collections. Collections are one level “above” sets, so that you can group sets (or other collections) into collections, and then display the collections in your sidebar. If you have a bunch of sets (like I do), collections are a great way to organize them better. See my sidebar for an example.

Opera is the only mainstream browser that can’t do smartcard-based certificate authentication, rendering it useless with the Estonian ID card. There is a thread going on in the Opera forums advocating this. Hope they can do it soon, or they will miss out some interesting adoption opportunities, as smartcards and other similar secure tokens (RFID? who knows what comes next…) gain adoptance.

There is a directory of eBay blogs on pbwiki. More precisely, not corporate blogs, but the people who are working or have worked at eBay Inc. Their definition also includes Skype so I added myself there. They also request that you don’t add other people which I believe is fair. So if you are a fellow Skyper or eBayer then why not add yourself in that directory and also track what others are up to.

Over the past year, one of the most linked and commented posts on this blog has been the one about the Ford Focus navigation system. I continue to take interest in the news in this field because I think that one of the big innovations in the next years in the car industry will be figuring out how to make the car a true media and Internet device while being subject to the reliability and safety requirements that exceed those of regular desktop computing.

One recent step ahead here comes from Google who now lets you send Google Maps data to your BMW, starting in Germany and working initially only with BMW Assist. They have produced a video that says it all (see below). Maybe the user interface is too complicated with all those knobs and buttons and selectors, not sure, I haven’t used BMW Assist myself yet. But it’s definitely a milestone in car navigation.

And of course the “new Europe” lags behind in implementation and I doubt you will be able to buy these things (or have map data for) anywhere eastwards of Germany any time soon. Just take a look at this screenshot towards the end of this same video and you see that while in practice the road network eastwards of Germany (Poland Baltics etc) is as dense as in Western Europe, in Google Maps you see a lot of empty space there.

The post about Google Maps super-closeups hit me with something that someone else has illustrated with the buttcrack video: with these super-imaging technologies, you aren’t really private anywhere any more.

It used to be so that you could “get away” to some remote island or into the woods, away from other people, paparazzis and such, to do whatever you wanted to do in private, knowing that you’d be alone. Now you can’t really be sure of that, for all you know, there may be a satellite flying over, taking your picture, and it shows up on the Internet the next day. Of course the military have had access to such imaging technologies for decades, but only in the recent years have these been commoditized and popularized by things like Google Earth.

Is there any way to limit this? I think it will end up with some expansion of property rights concept. When property rights first came about for real estate, they were only about land and water where people could walk and swim/ship things, because no one imagined that one day things will be flying over your head and taking pictures of you. So currently, you own only your land and the stuff that you are able to build on it. You don’t own the airspace above your land, this is “managed” by your government. But there’s no reason why property rights could not extend into airspace. Currently, the government needs to negotiate with you if they want to build a road across your land. The airspace has been excluded of this so far, but perhaps there will be a mechanism to limit who can take photos of your stuff from air and fly over it?

Or if this property rights thing sounds too far-fetched, then advances in materials science will bring about new materials that will be cost-effective to “drape” your property with. So that if you have a private beach, you will be able to cover it with something (one-way see-through glass-like plastic?) that will not be disturbing to you when you are sitting on the beach and will let sun and wind through, yet will prevent satellites and paparazzis from taking photos of you. And it will of course be expensive initially and only rich people will be able to afford it, but they are the ones having most trouble with paparazzis anyway so the economy is fair here.

I didn’t really expect this little trick to gain the sort of traction that it has seen by now. I just thought it was a funny little thing to do and maybe some people would take notice. But by now, it has been featured on no less than The Unofficial Apple Weblog and many other sites, plus of course all the comments that I’m getting on Flickr and elsewhere. If anything, it’s surely a big thumbs up to virtualization. And as wolli notes, it is much more than just a way of killing time, and it has many practical applications. For example, all the mobile versions of things, both Skype and otherwise, are developed and tested mostly in virtual machines, and only the final full tests are run on actual devices. It is much more easy and practical to run things in your full computer than install a new build in the (much slower) actual device and mess around with the much more clunkier UI (which of course is necessary when testing the usability side of things, but not so much when you’re just experimenting with the technology).

Thanks, Peeter Marvet, for this video interview with Thad Hall, a US expert on e-voting who was an observer in our last week’s e-vote and sums up parts of his observations in this interview. He says that he will also post his observations on the Election Updates blog.

Today’s Wired News article about the Estonian e-vote is otherwise cool, but contains an unfortunate factual error in a quote.

Once the drivers license-like card is inserted in the reader, the voting application, viewed in Internet Explorer, (“You can’t use Firefox, that’s one big problem,” he grumbled) …

This implies the e-voting thingie only works in IE. I have no idea why Veljo Haamer to who the quote is attributed said so, but it’s not correct. The e-voting works on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms with any browser where you can sign in with your ID card. (Currently this includes IE, Safari and Firefox. I’m not sure about Opera or Konqueror.) In case if IE, voting happens in-place in the browser with the ActiveX component. For others, you get an application to download for your respective platform that does its own online communication and works outside the browser. (See how it works.)

I saw The Singing Revolution documentary last night. It is a film about Estonia from 1939 to 1991 by an American filmmaker Jim Tusty whose father was an Estonian emigree.

There are no more trackbacks here on this blog. I was running into a bit of hosting trouble due to excessive spam. Argh. Apparently the trackback script with Akismet was eating up too much CPU on the server. And since all I ever got was spam anyway, I have just disabled it. If you have anything interesting to say, just post a comment or ping me directly