April 2007 Archives

(see postitus on saadaval ka eesti keeles)

Through the past year, I’ve been away from Estonia for quite a while. I’ve been to shorter trips to the US and Europe, and I’ve also lived abroad in chunks of one or two months. At the same time, I’ve read and listened to memories of Estonians about the 20th century history, such as the Second World War and the Soviet times that followed, and also about newer events such as the Iraq war.

During this time, I’ve found myself thinking quite often and deeply about what being an Estonian means to me. You don’t think about it that much when you’re in your home country, but do when you’re abroad. This is important to me because it’s one of the sources of my identity — it’s important to me to know where I come from, who I am, where I’m going and what values of my predecessors I am carrying forward.

This is why the causes and interpretation of this past week’s riots in Estonia matter to me. This is to me directly connected to personally being an Estonian, and the place of Estonia as a country in Europe, the world and next to Russia.

Here’s an email I got from nPost. I’m a big fan of history and the whole time dimension on the Internet, and so it’s cool to see interviews from as far back as 2000 on their site. For example see this Oddpost one from the time before it was acquired by Yahoo. Though I’m not sure if that content is original, licensed or otherwise “acquired”, but interesting nevertheless.

TiVi is “yet another softphone”. They sent me this email a long while ago, and I’m cleaning my inbox and posting some reviews

Site is still up. The mobile site at http://m.tivi.com is nice and easy, you can locate things easily there The full site is here.

TiVi comes from Latvia. This also shows on the site a bit, I tried to use the English version but somehow ended up on the Latvian registration form but got registered fine in the end.

Here’s what their Windows client is like. I got as far as trying to make a call and then it told me “zero balance”. I don’t care too much so I didn’t make any purchases there.

The whole experience is somewhat stale, last news from the company (e.g in the “Jobs” part) come from 2005.

At least Renars did his homework nicely before sending me the email below he refers to this old post about Fring.

The clocks on my OS X Dashboard are toast. Some are missing background and some clock hands are replaced with ? (a placeholder for missing image). And it’s different after every reboot. When I add new clocks, they appear the same. How do I fix these?

Update: a new copy of “World Clock.wdgt” seems to have fixed it.

Interesting question I got. I don’t know the answer. If you know, post a response here.

Hello Jaanus,

I’m looking for a “cheap” service that would enable me to have toll free number in most countries

This would enable most customers from all over the world to call me for free (for them)

So I can have a list like this on my web site :

USA : 0800-123-456
CAN : 0800-???-???
GER : 0800-???-???
UK : 0800-???-???

I live in good old France
So I would need all these phone call to be redirected to my home land line.

I suspect that such a service must be available at a reasonnable price, since voice over IP is widely used.

Can you recommend me any company offering such a service?

Vacation is the best time to write code, isn’t it

I got my act together and somewhat cleaned up the generic reposter code that powers miscrandom.com. You can now immerse yourself in its wikipage with links to downloads and all that. And I made this fancy pic for it too that tries to explain a bit of reposter’s modus operandi.

So… if I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that reposter aggregates feeds and lets you build your own meta-blogs with much more versatility and customization than you could ever get from online aggregator services like FeedBurner.

Following devil’s comment, I tried to fix the volume icon on my LaCie. One collateral of reformatting is that you of course lose all the bundled content, but I made a backup of everything and especially the volume icon.

The first thing I tried was simply opening the icon file in Preview, copying it and then pasting to the volume. The result is this.

It’s so fun to watch all the frenzy around Twitter, Jaiku and other similar more esoteric services that are so hot these days. Everyone is writing up miles-long blog posts trying to sound smart about them and to conceptualize about what they all mean and all that.

I won’t jump on that bandwagon. Why? Because none of them matter. Or rather, that one of them will, but we have no way of telling which one (I’m willing to bet that the “presence winner” hasn’t yet emerged). And since I have no personal stake in any of them, I couldn’t care less about which one exactly it is.

You see, what’s going on in all this herd nerddom is that we/you are busy constructing presence/mood/groupconsciousness stream future at a micro level. It is the outcome of this group behaviour that will determine the winner in the long run. But while it’s fun to be immersed in this, it’s also quite time consuming and gets boring after a while. So I’ll instead take a step back and you can call me back when you’ve determined the winner. In six months, a year or so.

Some people actually ask me what do I think of Twitter and such. I tell them “it’s kinda fun, but I haven’t made up my mind yet.” The two questions I have when analyzing these new phenomena are, “will we remember them in a year’s time or five”, and “would my mom or late grandma understand or care”. For Twitter etc, I’m afraid it’s a negative for both at this time. Can you imagine? There was life before Twitter. And SMS/mobiles. And Internet. And people somehow still got by.

I’ll tell you about my new lamp instead. I find that one much more interesting. (And it’s not LAMP, you nerds. It’s, like, a real lamp. With a bulb and stuff.)

Really. I’m not. Breaking news. So please don’t send me email that you meant to send to Janus Friis. If you do, I’ll delete it. I won’t forward it to him or anywhere else (unless it’s really important, personal, emergency or family etc related — and business opportunities do NOT fall in any of these categories). If you even can’t tell the difference between two people, you don’t deserve your email to be read by either me or him. Sorry. Life is tough.

I figured I needed some more disk space and it should be mobile, to match my other mobile adventures. So I got myself a LaCie Ruggable drive. First, congratulations to LaCie, smart marketing with the “rugged” stuff. Take an existing hard drive, put a rubber band around it, label it “rugged” and sell it for more money than other people would. But as you see in my case, it worked. And it has survived one flight in checked baggage so it can’t be too bad and indeed feels a bit more sturdy than some of the more delicate mobile gadgets I’ve seen. But is otherwise a very light nice little thing.

Filesystems

But what I wanted to post about was the filesystems. It’s preformatted for OS X, but I needed to use it on both Windows and OS X without any special drivers or other setup. And Windows doesn’t do OS X filesystem. And I didn’t want to mess around with many different partitions, ideally I would have just one partition that both OS-s could read and write to. (OS X can read, but not write NTFS.)

I witnessed a spectacular crash of all my stock tracker and weather Dashboard widgets in OS X this morning. When I opened Dashboard in a weird network situation, they crashed one by one. Since I had five Weather instances, I also witnessed five Weather crashes.

I’m blaming my weird network situation. Yet it’s one that travellers encounter fairly commonly. The widgets work fine when the Internet is either “on”, meaning you have full fine connectivity, or “off”, where you don’t have a network connection. When you open Dashboard, all widgets attempt to update their data. With Internet working, they get their data fine. With Internet offline, they don’t get new data and stick with old data.

My situation was that I was in a paid wifi zone but hadn’t paid yet. So in this situation, you get an IP address and configuration and everything appears fine. Yet if you actually attempt to open your browser and get to a page, you are redirected to the wifi login/purchase page. So in this situation, my psychic debugging powers tell me that the widgets saw “cool, we have Internet” and attempted to connect to their data sources and download new stuff. But they didn’t factor in being connected to some wifi login page with all HTTP requests, and most likely they retrieved this page and tried to parse it for stock quotes or weather data, assuming it was in whatever format the pages are where they actually connect to. So the data was something other than expected, and due to so some shit coding and improper error checking, they simply crashed instead of failing gracefully.

Typically when using a credit card to pay on the Internet, you enter the card number and such in a blank text form. Here’s a more fun form from a random airport wifi provider, where the form follows the layout of the card, including the security code on the back. Thus people who are less familiar with credit card forms can more easily make a connection. Us nerds are used to all sorts of obscure forms, but for people less versed with technology and online security this may be helpful. Plus it allows you to follow the groupings more logically in any case, entering the numbers as chunks of four (as they are also printed on a card), instead of a big 16-digit blob that you need to enter in most places.

Another OS X hardware/software weirdness. My USB stereo headset suddenly went mono. This means that it only plays crap mono sound and the sound devices widget in System Preferences tells me “no controls for this device”, instead of where should be the left/right balance gauge. So is my headset toast now and tells OS X it’s mono, even though it isn’t? (All the same after multiple plugins/plugouts, reboots and such.)

This seemed to be the most plausible explanation. Until I plugged the headset into another USB port. There it works great again with full quality.

So now I have a headset that works crappy through one USB port and fine through the other. My bet would be on the OS X internal structures enumerating and keeping track of USB devices being a bit boinkers. Any more ideas? And is there a way to fix it? I’d like to use the “other” USB port that currently doesn’t work, as it gives me a neater desk/wires setup.

And while in the process of researching this, I discovered many sites talking about how USB headset support under OS X sucks. Darn. No chance to get rid of another set of cables then (possibly replacing wired headset with wireless), as I need quality sound.

UPDATE: looks like I’ve discovered the cause of this and it’s reproducable now. It happens when I have something playing back and launch Reason at the same time. I guess it polls the sound ports in a weird way or something. So off to talk with their support… as now both of my USB ports are messed up this way

UPDATE: ahh, I wish everything was so easy to fix. Some googling took me to this thread. This had lots of ideas and the one that worked was indeed just fixing device preferences as I had suspected all along. Just needed to go to /Library/Preferences and there I had the file “com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist” that seems to contain the settings for all known devices. So all I had to do was to open this file and kill the key/value pairs for my headset. Then, save and re-plug. Kaboom, the device is again detected properly, being a good USB headset. Great success

A few weeks ago, Jim Courtney posted about user-friendly technologies in Germany. I don’t have too much to add, these just caught my eye, considering that I’m living in that region and big on driving, traveling and usability. Yes, these technologies exist, and the parking thing seems to be standardized (I’m not sure if there’s any legal standard, but I’m talking about de facto) across the whole federal Germany and also has spillover to nearby places like Luxembourg. (I’m not sure about Switzerland and Belgium and Austria, can’t remember / haven’t been.)

I also have to agree about smoking. It’s annoying and I’m looking forward to more European bans taking effect.

One other thing I have to add to the list is food. Check out this conversion list, and especially the item…

In the United States, fruit juice contains: high-fructose corn syrup and 20% real juice; in Estonia, fruit juice contains: juice.

One of the recent books I’ve completed reading is Dan Brown’s “Digital Fortress”. I’ve found it useful to document the books I’ve read here so here goes this one.