June 2007 Archives

My first month of vacation is coming to an end.

I’ve had a really great time. And I spent a lot of that time getting rid of things and organizing them. Like I threw out some things I didn’t need, or took them to a recycling center. And I got some shelves to organize my junk in the storage area better.

I’ve also gone light on the Internet and work-type of things. I threw out most of my RSS feeds, either because they were related to my previous work or they’ve otherwise become obsolete. I haven’t been posting too much on the blog. And I haven’t worked on some of the projects I said I’d be working on. Their time will come. Or if not, they weren’t good ideas to start with

But I’ve been to a lot of other things. I’ve been to many great events and hanged out with cool people and loved ones. I’ve worked on my health and finances. And some personal and team productions that may become public in due time.

Most importantly of all, I’ve managed to clear out any remainder of stress and dark thoughts. I’ve decluttered my mind. My head is empty, and that’s a good thing, as I can then load it up with stuff again. I haven’t felt this good in a very long time. And that’s one of the reasons why I have no remorse about not “working”.

The other reason is that many loved ones and other people I know that I have spoken with hear about my summer and then go, “gosh, I wish I could do the same”. It’s sad to see many people overworked and overstressed and unable or unwilling to have an extended sabbatical once in a while. Typically you can have a month or so of vacation in Europe, but people tend to have it in small chunks. Single days off are also good, but anything less than two weeks won’t let you really tune out of work, and a month or more is necessary to truly recharge.

Up next for me is some European travels in July, including some long-distance driving again plus a great event, Assembly 07 in early August.

Had yet another game of this. Now we’re starting to already understand the rules and the pace is picking up. Last time we only made from Ancient to Medieval age, this time already to Gunpowder/Industrial

I need a bigger table though. This thing is humongous.

I read “The Google Story” by David Vise.

I’ve been pretty unfamiliar with how Google came about, so I figured why not go ahead and educate myself about this a bit, to put things in perspective in relation with other notable tech stories like Apple and Microsoft and such.

Someone pointed me to this interesting study done about online bank authentication and how people react to security measures being removed. (Quick summary: they don’t.) It’s another example of the emerging HCISEC field that examines crossover between HCI and security that I’m interested in. So I read it. (Also covered in NY Times.)

The researches collected a number of people at Harvard campus, most of them students, and told them all individually to go through a number of online banking tasks. Some were using their own personal account info and some were using “role-playing” info for fictional users. They were told to log in to an e-bank (I understand the whole thing was US-based so it was an US e-bank) and do some tasks. What exactly doesn’t matter, because the researchers were only interested in the act of logging in, and disregarded what happened later.

They found that people mostly disregard all sorts of warning pages and indicators and don’t really pay attention to details like HTTPS protocol or security indicators. This again underlines that many of the current user-facing Internet security features have been designed by geeks, for geeks, as patchwork to original Internet design that didn’t have any of it in the first place. The features are good technology but difficult to understand and use for the user, and people tend to disregard things that don’t directly affect their ability to conduct the given “core task”. Whether or not the site has HTTPS indicator doesn’t seemingly affect my ability to check my balance. It may make me less secure in the long run, but since it’s only a risk that’s never 100% materialized (not all computers have malware on them, and not all credentials collected by phishing are used), it’s more cost-effective to me as a person to simply shun this off as “yet another silly error that this computer is showing me but that I can get past with clicking OK”, and get my actual core task done.

It also had interesting lessons for security researchers, noting that there was a notable difference between people who were roleplaying vs people using their own credentials. If you are working with your own personal assets, you obviously think a bit more about what you’re doing and the possible risks.

Today, yet another Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference kicked off with a Steve Jobs keynote. These are big insights into what the company is up to and the video is upcoming shortly.

They talked a lot about different things, but there’s one that grabbed my attention. Apple’s browser, Safari, is now available on Windows. You can download it immediately. It’s a beta and it kind of shows — it crashes often for example it always crashes when I try to manage the bookmarks. Plus just randomly sometimes. So it has some quality work left to do.

But the obvious quality stuff aside, I think this is a very very significant step for Apple to try to enter the Windows browser space. Which they were already in, sort of, with their iTunes and its embedded store. But now they’re launching a full frontal assault to both Microsoft IE and Mozilla Firefox. And not only do they bring their browser, but the (not so) hidden agenda here seems to be to get people used to the idea that Apple stuff is nice also beyond iTunes, which is shown by lots of Aqua UI being ported over in Safari to Windows in the form of e.g. web form controls, that continue to be the nicest of all I’ve seen (and I think I’ve looked at pretty much every browser that has any significance at all).

All the screenshots are from Safari 3 beta running on Windows. Click for larger.

I thought I’d take a closer look at the UI and quickly note some obvious stuff that stood out for me. Some of the below like the search stuff applies to the new Mac version too.

I’ve always said that Skype has privacy features to block unwanted spam and contacts. No one tells me to allow chat from unknown contacts — it’s my choice. And at the same time, my Skype Name is fairly visible on the net so I have firsthand experience about incoming spam. And I want to say this — it’s getting worse, especially in the adult services department.

Here’s a random example from today. This happened to be in English, but it has mostly recently been either in French or in Arabic, probably targeted at those markets but indiscriminately spamming everyone. And I used to get like a few random spams a week, but now I’m getting like several a day, and it’s no longer funny and starts being quite annoying.

Down the road, Skype will need to put some product work into figuring it out and fixing it. There may be many ways out here — like community-based trust and ratings? Or just central blocking? I have no idea what would work best, but I want to be able to choose more strictly who I want contact from and who I don’t.

Just finished playing the singleplayer campaign of Prey.

And the screenshot isn’t made by me, but it’s real as I remember this location in the game. It actually comes from the official site.

As the Wikipedia page says, the game is known for its production delays and was originally supposed to be the companion of Duke Nukem Forever that is still yet to be released. And also Prey went through several iterations and finally runs on the Doom3 engine. And it’s also kind of similar to Doom3 in ambience and gameplay. See also my previous posts about Doom3 and other FPS-es.

The theme is fairly straightforward and similar to Doom3 — “kill all bad aliens”. And it kind of feels the same while playing, although Doom3 was much much more boring in its repetitive levels. There is a lot more variety in Prey and levels don’t get boring.

There were two interesting and original ideas in the game. One is gravity alteration through wallwalks and switches. Who said gravity must only go one way? Changing gravity is key to getting through many locations in the game.

The other interesting idea is “spirit walk” that in the game has some relevance for fights, but not too much. You can kill enemies with your spirit bow, but regular weapons are much more powerful. The spirit mode was much more relevant in some puzzles where you must e.g place your character on a lift, and then “spirit walk” to some other place to activate the switch for that lift.

Also, what made this game easy is that you can’t really ever be killed. When you are killed, i.e your health runs out because the bad guys are shooting at you or biting or hitting you, then you go to some sort of “spirit world” where you can gain some extra health and “spirit energy” — or you can simply sit around and do nothing until you are returned to the game with health about halfway up and you can then continue. Also, you can’t really run out of ammo as in many locations there are stashes of ammo that self-replenish. So they didn’t want to make it too difficult.

The hard mode was unlocked after completing it in normal mode, but I don’t think I’ll bother with redoing it just yet. It took me several months to finish it of course I only played like half an hour a day and there were many days and weeks where I didn’t touch it and only came back a lot later. People say that they have completed it also in 24 hours straight or so. Even still, if I compare it to some other FPS-es then I’d say that Prey is fairly long and as I said, at the same time it doesn’t get boring and has enough variety to keep you going.

Once upon a time, in the land of application icons, there was a time when the Skype program icon on Windows was colored something else than blue. And that distant time continues to haunt me to this day.

Skype for Linux

My first task at Skype in 2004 was to get Skype for Linux out of the door. I hadn’t really used Linux before, but I had come to Skype acknowledging that a big part of the job would be to try out and learn new things and Linux happened to be one of them. So I got a laptop and installed MEPIS that Martin-Éric recommended. Thanks At the time, everyone thought it was a weird distro, but I’ve heard good words about it also these days.

Perhaps it’s a long and confusing title, but it sums up the content. So if you won’t bother to read any further, here’s my take of what happened: I and some other Estonian bloggers had an encounter with the Estonian Security Police where we asked them to publish in the Internet some information about their work that they had been distributing publically on paper, and that they are required to publish on the Internet according to Estonian law. There was some back and forth, but in the end, our laws, democracy, freedom of information and common sense prevailed and they published the information on their homepage.

I just finished my first game of the “Civilization” tabletop game version that I bought a while ago. We played it with a few friends and didn’t really finish it, we never got past the Medieval era but it was great fun.

I originally feared how it would go. Even though we used the simpler Standard rules, it was a bit tough to get started, as all the turns consist of multiple events and you have to do a lot of counting and multiplying. It’s not that difficult, but the first time you’re surely bound to get a few minor things wrong as I did today.

I like Propellerheads Reason. It’s a great piece of software for messing around with digital music.

But sometimes you come across someone else’s song that not even the fastest MacBook Pro can handle someone has put so many samples and tracks and synths into one production that the poor computer pukes under the load, you see your CPU going through the roof and the thing just doesn’t play nicely.

But there are two little things you can do to finetune things. They are both in the Audio preferences of Reason.

Increased buffer size

The first thing you want to do is to increase buffer size. This makes the app a bit less responsive, but reduces CPU load as the audio is precalculated in larger chunks. So if things start to distort due to too high CPU usage, this is the first thing to try — slide the slider to the right, increasing the buffer size.

Reduced sample rate

If the above doesn’t help, here’s another tip I found in Reason’s manual. You can reduce the sample rate, meaning that the song is calculated and played with a lower “resolution”. This makes it sound worse as higher frequencies are lost, but you can still get a quick idea of the song. For full quality, you can always export to WAV.

But here’s the thing: the Mac internal audio (if you’re using headphones plugged into the Mac’s “audio out” port) has 44.1 kHz as its minimum sample rate, so you can’t go below that and you can’t use the trick. However, turns out that on my USB headset, you can set lower sample rates as seen on this picture. So this is what I can use to quickly get an “overview” of a song if it’s too CPU-intensive.