Today, I am beginning a new chapter on this blog. And in my life.

I’m leaving Skype — at least for this time. Today is my last day. And more importantly, I’m going back to school in August.

I did a little show to my colleagues about the demoscene.

There was an interesting “video postcard” in the Eurovision show in Helsinki just a few weeks ago where they showed footage from Assembly demoparty.

There’s one inconsistency in Skype’s lowlevel API design. On a basic level, the Skype API is text-based (like many other protocols on the Internet) — you send and receive text messages. And on some platforms (Linux, Mac), that’s all you have for now. On Windows there are some higher level options (COM), but I want to talk about the text API, particularly in regard to posting chat messages. (And not only talk here but of course also with the chat API engineers.)

So… let’s imagine a common scenario with chats and API. Let’s say you’re building some communication interface that needs to send chat messages to other Skype users, and you will use the regular Skype client API. (And yes, I know the most optimal way to do this would be to eliminate the Skype client from the loop altogether and use some webservice. But today I want to limit myself to client API protocol/messaging design.)

There was a post here, but I was very kindly contacted and asked to remove the associated materials. Nothing to see here, move on. My bad.

My good colleague Duncan Lamb, who’s head of Skype’s Windows product design, gave a talk about usability this week at IT college. See what Sten and Zilmer say about it. And watch it here. His part starts around the 25th minute.

Some new learnings for me there, I didn’t know about the bit with TomTom and John Cleese for example

ASCII art is a well-known old computer art form. It continues to live in people’s creative minds and makes its way to modern online profiles, including Skype. Here’s a cool one that I got today. This is a full name in a profile that immediately depicts something well-known to any music freak — a spectrum analyzer

The shortest character is probably just a period/fullstop one, the longest is probably pipe | or the I character … I’m not sure what is the middle one, but very cool.

I spent the better part of this Sunday switching from one MacBook Pro to another. The old one was Intel Core Duo, the new one is Core 2 Duo with some other specs beefed up as well, so it packs a bit more punch.

There are two main visible differences between the machines. The first one is that the new C2D machine has both FireWire 800 and 400 interfaces and thus one more connector, whereas the old CD one has only FW400 connector. The other difference is that with the built-in iSight, in the upper part of the casing, in the old machine you can see both the camera lens and the LED pinhole that goes green when camera is operating. The new one has these as well, but there is no more LED pinhole visible — it still goes green when active, but when in an idle state, it is somehow hidden behind the casing so that there is no more visible pinhole. So in a newer model, although there is a new connector for FW800, there is actually less visual clutter in the area that you actively look at, and visual noise has been reduced without damaging the functionality.

So… about the actual migration. The idea was to get all my data and settings over as painlessly as possible. With the data being on various places of the hard disk as well as within the Parallels virtual machine (some Windows-specific stuff).

Just watched this talk.

I like Weinberger — not only because he writes great stuff and is one of the authors of “Cluetrain”, but also because I happened to bump into him once and share a ride in Paris metro. And he still owns me a beer for that I made a point to read his latest book and also some of his earlier work that should be arriving shortly.

His latest book deals with a topic that I’m interested in, and that is the organization of things and information in the world. I like small, simple, approachable interpretations of complex subjects, and that’s exactly what this is. Some reviews have said that it’s a great book that doesn’t say much new, but simply organizes known things in a great novel way. And sometimes that’s much more valuable than obtaining profoundly new knowledge.

The “2.0” sphere keeps exploding and people keep making up all sorts of things about semantic web, tagging, search, folksonomies, and build all sorts of products on top of that. “Everything is miscellanous” provides a healthy frame of reference to these things and explains what all of this is really about and why it matters. It also aligns well with values of liberalism, democracy and citizen media — you no longer have these authoritative people making categorization and editorial decisions for you — instead, everyone can make up their own taxonomies about everything if they want to.

The video is a summary of his basic ideas powering the book — or so I think, I haven’t read it yet, but I will. I very rarely watch such talk videos but this one I watched in one sitting and you should too, because not only is the subject matter interesting and relevant if you’re trying to work in the “information economy”, but Weinberger is also simply a great and entertaining speaker.

Technorati has often said how they manage to get rid of porn spam in their index. But lately it’s been surging. For example if you search for “Joost”, this is what you get in the search feed.

Hey guys now… fix it. Spam sucks. You’ve been good at it before so why not get rid of spam now as well.

I can certainly also see the motivation of spammers about attaching their spam to such “hot” keyword as Joost.

(Saadaval ka eesti keeles.)

It seemed more and more strange to me that I keep going on about the crimes against humanity during World War Two and later in Estonia, yet I haven’t been to their local memorials. I’ve been to all sorts of foreign memorials, from Auschwitz to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to Arlington cemetery in Washington DC, but so far, I hadn’t taken the trouble to visit the local ones. And so I thought I’d go there this Saturday.

Why do I think visiting actual physical places is important? It helps to replace myths with reality. Some element of subjectivity of course remains when talking about history, but when having been to the actual places, it’s much harder for someone to brainwash you about them. People believe all sorts of nonsense about things that they haven’t witnessed firsthand. That’s one of the downsides of media society, you have to rely on mediated experiences and can’t witness everything firsthand. But when you can, you should.

Klooga memorial

The Klooga memorial is at the site of the former Klooga concentration camp. It’s fairly easy to find — when going from Tallinn to Paldiski using the main road, then immediately after a railroad crossing you’ll see this sign that points you onto a humble forest road.

The memorial is a few kilometres into a forest on the lefthand side, overlooking an open field where I guess the camp facilities were located. You walk to it using a footpath.

Interesting story about the events of the day.

In order to ease the complications, the politburo led by Krenz decided on November 9, 1989 to allow refugees to exit directly through crossing points between East Germany and West Germany, including West Berlin. On the same day, the ministerial administration modified the proposal to include private travel. The new regulations were to take effect on November 10. Günter Schabowski, the East German Minister of Propaganda, had the task of announcing this; however he had been on vacation prior to this decision and had not been fully updated. Shortly before a press conference on November 9, 1989, he was handed a note that said that East Berliners would be allowed to cross the border with proper permission, but gave no further instructions on how to handle the information. These regulations had only been completed a few hours earlier, and were to take effect the following day, so as to allow time to inform the border guards. However, nobody had informed Schabowski. He read the note out loud at the end of the conference and when asked when the regulations would come into effect, he assumed it would be the same day based on the wording of the note and replied “As far as I know effective immediately, right now”.

Tens of thousands of East Berliners heard Schabowski’s statement live on East German television and flooded the checkpoints in the Wall demanding entry into West Berlin. The surprised and overwhelmed border guards made many hectic telephone calls with their superiors, but it became clear that there was no-one within the East German authorities who would dare to take personal responsibility for issuing orders to use lethal force, so there was no way for the vastly outnumbered soldiers to hold back the huge crowd of East German citizens. In face of the escalating crowd the guards finally yielded, opening the checkpoints and allowing people through with little or no identity checks. The ecstatic East Berliners were soon greeted by West Berliners on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. November 9 is thus considered the date the Wall fell.

I’ve been hosting my private web operations on Dreamhost. I’m generally really happy with what they are providing me, but recently, there was something that drove me nuts. I wrote Reposter and made it power my Misc Random site. And while everything was OK in testing, entries kept showing up on the live site as duplicates. And I for the world couldn’t figure it out.

Russian Federation continues to wage cyberattacks agains Estonian government websites. The attacks come at least partly from IP addresses connected with Russian Federation government agencies and when continued, may have a potential to harm the functioning of Estonian economy and society, as Estonia currently and increasingly relies on the Internet to conduct its daily life and business.

Previously, Shel and Sten have covered the subject.

Moral qualification of the aggression

Before proceeding any further, I feel that I must morally qualify the current events and specifically the cyber-aggression from my own perspective. I have also previously posted about recent Estonian events, please read these posts and their comments to develop your own view.

In short: Russian Federation continues to actively demonstrate that she is not able and/or willing to act as a well-behaving member of the international community. Russia continues hostile activities against its neighbouring countries, including Estonia. The aim of such activities is to destabilize the situation, instead of promoting cooperation and building bridges and understanding. As my colleague Sten, I am deeply saddened by this, as I would really like to live in a free democratic world where countries respect each other and demonstrate a willingness and ability to cooperate with each other, instead of spreading lies, biased history interpretation and conflict.

I am happy that everyone living in Estonia is united in their willingness to cooperate in continuing to build the happiness and prosperity in this country through means of peaceful cooperation and dialogue. A clear indicator of this is the lack of violence on the streets of Estonia after the shocking events of two April “bronze nights”. This clearly shows that the issue we have to deal with is NOT conflict between ethnicities in Estonia, as some provocateurs would have wished. It is rather having to deal with the challenge of Russian Federation wishing to dominate over her neighbouring countries and disrespecting their sovereignity. One of the tools being utilized by Russian Federation are coordinated, well-orchestrated and government-mandated DDoS cyberattacks.

Yet another weekend and yet another 2276 km behind me, I’m in Tallinn in one piece no major happenings, but as all of these journeys, it wasn’t entirely uneventful. And I killed many bugs. I don’t think my car’s nose has been this “buggy” ever

May 5, Luxembourg, 7:06, 0 km

Kicked off early Saturday morning. As expected, very light traffic. What nutcase would drive this early on Saturday?

I had the GPS calculate me a route from Luxembourg diagonally across Germany to the crossing to Poland at Frankfurt (Oder). It gave me a “southern” route which I have always taken so far, but it also gave me a “northern” one using the A2 in Germany. I haven’t done the northern one so I took that.

Waldek asks in the comments of one of my most popular posts:

So I’m from Poland, new owner CMax (second hands) with out Polish or English instruction book.
Could somebody help me? I can’t connect my mobile phone with navi system via Bluetooth.
By the way! I apologize everyone who have to use Polish roads and because of my poor English.

Let’s start from the end. Your English is fine

Occasionally I get comments to my previous post that are not hate speech or propaganda but instead try to further a meaningful discussion. I figured I’ll answer shorter things amid the comments, but I’ll answer more interesting and longer ones that require some more research and thinking in separate posts such as this one.

So here are the relevant bits from the comment of Mikhail with my responses.

Enough of politics on this blog. Back to technology.

Now, I’m sure that Spirent Communications is a respectable company with great products. But the trouble is that it’s all over my little head. They sent me the two following press releases. It’s difficult for me to understand what they are talking about in the first place, let alone whether it’s any important or good or not. It sounds more like a stylized version of bullshit bingo than meaningful simple English text, it’s so full of terms and buzzwords that it just makes my poor little head go round. Again, I’m sure it’s all fine and dandy and there are many people and businesses out there to who it actually means something, I’m just not one of them and it’s not my area of interest.

Here’s something interesting on top of that. I was going to Spirent’s website and saw that a large part of their product line deals with security. Now here’s something that I get a little more about. But just today, I also read a post on Bruce Schneier’s blog that argues that down the road, the whole IT security industry will become somewhat obsolete, as vendors get more and more incentives to make their products secure in the first place, so that you wouldn’t need to purchase an extra layer of security around that. Of course it’s more complicated than that; read Bruce’s post for the whole thing.

I don’t really want to post too much about political topics or the “Tallinn April thing” any more. I believe I said most things in my last post on this that has also attracted a share of comments from all ends of the spectrum. But there are a few extra remarks.

I’ve had to remove a few comments, and I’ll keep doing that for hate speech and propaganda from any side of the matter. How do I tell the difference? It’s actually real easy, whether I’m reading the comments sent to me or news or government statements. You just look at the text as a whole, regardless of whether it’s framed as a historical discussion or a hot-headed cry, and try to understand its objective.

The objective of hate speech and propaganda is to drive hatred and conflict between communities. Conversely, the objective of peaceful discussion is to build bridges and understanding.

That’s it. I’ve had it with trackbacks. They’re a spam-ridden piece of garbage that simply don’t work. So it’s bye-bye time for them.

So from now on, there’s no longer a “trackback” feature on this site. I only had a few good ones for the past few years anyway.

However, there’s something much better, and namely Technorati “blog reactions” using their Link Count tool. Instead of trackbacks link, you see a link to Technorati with a count of posts indexed there that link back to the given post. And when you click, you’re taken to Technorati where you’ll see the posts linking back here.

In a way, it’s exactly the same thing as trackbacks, only it’s Technorati instead of myself who maintains the database and does the heavy-lifting regarding spam removal and such. I see no inherent reason why locally maintained trackbacks would be any simpler. Their only advantage is security against service provider problems, when Technorati is too slow or decides to go down and sell out altogether. But so far their service has been pretty consistent and not much to complain about.

Technorati “linkbacks”, as I call them, actually provide more links back to me than trackbacks. For a trackback, the site writing about me must implement the trackback protocol. But with Technorati, it’s sufficient if the link back to my post simply exists in the other post’s body, and Technorati does all the rest.