July 2007 Archives

(Saadaval ka eesti keeles.)

There’s an interesting Cold War memorial on German A2 east-west Autobahn: the Memorial of the Division of Germany in Marienborn.

SkypeFind is a feature in Skype. It lets you put listings of businesses in Skype with your review and rating, and review and search what others have put there.

I use the services of great many businesses in great many countries. And I’m fairly opinionated. I haven’t seen quite as many things as some other people, but I’ve seen at least something. I think some people would be interested in my reviews and ratings, and I’m also myself interested in what other people have to say.

Yet I don’t list things in SkypeFind, and I rarely find listings by other people I care about. On the face of it, I use features that I like, and I don’t use features that I don’t like. I don’t put things in SkypeFind because I don’t like it too much. But what does it mean? I tried to qualify this “I don’t like it” a bit more for SkypeFind and here’s what I came up with.

Another drive on the same route as last days. Just some short remarks here and the usual log.

July 23, Luxembourg, 7:00, 0 km

Nothing interesting at all.

Refueling and lunch, 12:20-12:57, 467 km

Marienborn visit, 13:54-14:37, 577 km

An interesting Cold War memorial, coming up in a separate post.

Entering Poland, 16:31-16:36, 828 km

I made it to Poland an hour later than the last time, despite having started at the same time in the morning. Due to a business day, the traffic was heavy and also a lot of road repairs, plus I visited the museum.

Ahh… Simplify Media is one app in the “simple and brilliant” category. I very rarely fall in love at first sight, but this is one of those instances. An instant must-have.

I always liked iTunes’ “Shared Music” feature — it lets you legally and safely listen to music of people in your local network. Alas, it works only on a local network. This is not very useful to us mobile people. So what Simplify Media does is simply make this feature in iTunes work over the Internet.

You have to download a little program and add friends to your list, and it then works between you as if you were in a local network. Being a geek, I thought how this works — the sharing itself in iTunes works over Bonjour, and so Simplify Media probably makes some smart bridging between all the people who are connected with one another, to make them part of the virtual local network. Whatever. Bottom line — it works beautifully

They say it’s also coming from Windows Media Player and Winamp, but I don’t care too much for those, I’m only using iTunes these days.

Only one UI gripe — the icon should be on the menu bar instead of the dock. Permanently-running smaller apps should be in the menu bar. Other than that, it works great for me.

Google Reader doesn’t do search.

Coming from Google, the king of search, that’s kinda silly/funny, no? Google does it for web, and I hear Gmail does it wonderfully on mail. (I’m not actively on Gmail myself, I can’t comment how well it actually works.) So why not have Reader do it for feeds?

At least a few times every week now, I’ve had this situation where I come across a feed item that talks about something that another feed also talked and I remember sure as hell that I just read it in some of my other feeds a day or two ago. I know the exact keyword, but I don’t remember which of the other zillion feeds it was. But I’d like to get back to it so that I could maybe post a comment to either blog, helping to make a connection.

So I’d just like to punch the keyword into Google Reader, hit the “Search my feeds” button and get a list of items containing the keyword. I know that Google caches all the feed content on their side anyway, so doing this would be easy peasy for them. I hope that it’s just an oversight that it’s not already done and that it will be out of their pipeline soon.

Following up on my last year’s visits, I visited the remaining memorial sites in eastern Poland in July 2007. I’ll first talk about the plannin, then highlight the impressions that I got from the individual memorials, and then conclude with a more general statement of why I’m doing these visits in the first place, and what I learn from them collectively.

Planning the visits and finding the sites

Last year, I visited Treblinka and Auschwitz that were both marked in my road atlas. This year’s three other sites weren’t, but Wikipedia came to help. The corresponding Wikipedia articles note the geographic position (lat/long) of each site, which you can then use on Google maps to pinpoint the approximate location of the site, and reference back to your road atlas. So I knew the approximate location of each site and just drove there. Once you get close, the sites are all properly signposted or easy to spot from the road, so finding them really is no trouble at all. You can see my driving log with the locations marked on Google Maps.

For example, when you take the north-south road close to the Ukrainian/Belarusian border, this is the sign that shows you the way to Sobibor memorial.

I’m wrapping up a week that was kinda busy for me, even though I didn’t put too much time in my blog or anything else visible. I’ve still got to write some posts about my past travels, and then this weekend I went to the zoo one of the best that I’ve been to — and I’ve been to quite a few. I’m just uploading the pics now. I also did some repairs and shopping for our Luxembourg residence and went to see Die Hard and what not…

… but what I wanted to get to was that I mostly spent the week coding and packaging things up. I had to submit some code samples to my grad school to show them that I can program at some level, and so I’m sending them an old code sample (Moodgeist Pinger for Mac written in Objective-C if you have to know) which I documented and polished a bit. I also did a new thing.

The new thing was a simple Flickr Downloadr in Java whose mission is simply this: it lets you download complete photosets from Flickr, both for yourself and for other people. And the fun part about doing it in Java is that you get a truly multiplatform experience and stay on fairly high level with the code. I guess another way of doing multiplatform would be in Trolltech’s Qt, but then you’d have to work with C/C++ and worry about memory management and such and C really isn’t where I’m best at.

Here’s the Downloadr running on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Just saw Die Hard 4. Classic “action comedy” with Bruce Willis. I understand it’s distributed under the names “Live Free or Die Hard” in the US and “Die Hard 4” in Europe. Hm.

It’s actually a pretty timely movie, as it deals with cyberattacks and the scariest part is that although a lot has been artistically exaggerated to make it more watchable, it’s not as far off the mark as many other scifi-type things. A lot of what’s shown is possible today, for example, social engineering of the OnStar-type system.

I don’t think many utilities are as easy to get to as is shown, but the world is definitely headed towards global always-on interconnectivity, and there will always be spooks to take advantage of it. And already today, some of them appear to be state-sponsored, as Russia refuses to cooperate with Estonia with cyberattack investigations, implying that there’s something to hide.

On July 2 to 4, I again drove from Tallinn to Luxembourg — but also did some travelling in eastern Poland, following up on my last year’s trip. I visited the museums and memorials on the sites of Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór and Belzec Nazi extermination camps. I’ll cover the actual visits in a separate posts, this post is again the “driving logbook” with notes from the road. This was my longest three-day-trip to date, covering a distance of almost 3000 km.

July 3, Tallinn, 6:51, 0 km

I wanted to have an early start since I knew I needed more time in Treblinka than last year where somewhat I ran out of time and could not visit other parts of the camp than the first one. My original plan was to get out already at 6, but I overslept a bit

Latvian border, 8:51, 192 km

Nothing interesting in Estonia, neither in Latvia. Traffic was building up as the day went on, as it was a normal business day.

Small break near Lithuanian border, 11:10-11:17, 375 km

A funny thing happened at the toilet in the gas station where the door was closed and there was a switch nearby with some Latvian writing on it. I thought the switch was to open the door, but turns out it was for turning the light on and off inside, and the man using the facility before me was not too happy about me flicking it oops. Sorry. Duh, put English signs to things on international roads, people.

Lithuanian border, 11:30-11:34, 393 km

Traffic again lighter in Lithuania…

A new style of spam is going around, and this time I suspect the copywriters have been seeing too many lolcats.

Natasha, your piece is otherwise OK, but stylistically it’s a bit weak in the end. Instead of “tks” you should say the iconic “kthxbai” and then it would be much better. Although a nice touch of omitting the space after the final full stop, you have good lolcat potential.