When I met Weinberger last year in Paris, he was in the process of finishing up his latest book, “Everything is miscellaneous”. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve seen him talking about it, and it appears to be a great look into taxonomies and how things are categorized and organized in the world and web. See also a conversation with him at YUI Theater.

I got the book, but thought that before reading it, I’d first read his previous work, and namely “Small Pieces”.

It’s only Tuesday, but this week is truly shaping up as brutal on me. I’m doing pretty good up to now, but not sure how long I can keep up. I haven’t gone at this full steam for quite a while…

Classes started yesterday. They are brutally interesting, but also brutally intense and my work load is pretty high. This means that probably over the next few months, I’ll be quite light on blogging as I’m going to need every bit of writing and time bandwidth that I have to go to writing homeworks and papers and doing meetings and anything else to get my work done. Got a ton of books today… I have like 7 or 8 pretty intense textbooks that I’ll need to grind through this semester.

But of course, when it rains, it pours. First my kitchen light went out, just sent a notice to landlord. They’ve been good about doing timely repairs, hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon before it gets really dark.

I’ve been on iPhone for a week now. While I don’t have the time right now to do any sort of scientific in-depth comprehensive review of the UI, I thought I’d put some blurbs here.

Like I said before, and as I often say about things, it’s not a device to save the world. It has some good things about it and also some bugs. Nevertheless, there’s nothing that would be so serious that I’d consider taking it back to the store or anything like that.

Good

First what’s good about it.

Size. It’s damn small. Looking at all the hype about features, I imagined it would be bigger. It’s actually thinner than my old SonyEricsson T610 (even with protective casing that you’ll most likely want to get), and it’s about 1.5 cm wider and taller. And doesn’t weigh too much — fine to carry around in pocket.

I want to make this last post about last week’s Skype outage because there’s a post on Microsoft Security Response Center blog that raised my eyebrows. I don’t think I’ve seen any of Microsoft’s more high-profile blogs address Skype matters this explicitly before, which further underlines that the outage was a very serious thing. For full context, see also Villu’s original post and clarification.

Some people called my own previous post Skype bashing. It may have had a bit of drama in it, but hey, folks. The facts are thus: Skype had a global outage of two days. None of the cable/Internet/mobile/other-communication companies that I’ve interacted with over the past ten years have had an outage of this length and magnitude. Skype got it fixed, and that’s great. Events like this always eat into the “trust credit limit” that any company has from its customers. What it means in practice and in the long run remains to be seen. I personally was annoyed, but it would be even more annoying and costly for me to look for some other solution because apart from the outage, Skype keeps working great for me and hopefully there won’t be any other glitches of this magnitude any time soon any more. Skype has also posted an explanation of what happened that sounds fairly plausible.

It’s so popular to bash big companies. Apple, Cingular, all those evil monopolists who make people’s lives miserable and treat customers badly. And the underdogs will come and save the world from bad incumbents.

There’s some merit in that thinking. I, for one, am not a big fan of the iPhone exclusive deal either. But when things are as they are, you sometimes just have to play within the bounds of the system. And I got some great service regarding my iPhone that lets me now use it fine.

(“ONYD” means “Oh No You Didn’t”, for those less familiar with Internet lingo.)

I couldn’t get into Skype today. I thought it has been banned here in the local wifi or something… until I saw this and this. With myself now relying more and more on Skype, it’s a nuisance — but fortunately, I don’t have any urgent business communications needs at this moment, so it’s just that, a nuisance and not a serious loss.

But, but, but… one of the selling points of Skype has always been “there’s no central point of failure, so it can’t go down”. Once you’ve authenticated, it should be a-ok. And I’ve been authenticated on both Mac and Windows for many weeks and never had to hit the login server, yet today I can’t get in.

I personally was selling Skype to many people previously on the above promise. This incident leaves both me and the people I sold it to a bad taste. I can’t help but feel a certain relief that I’m no longer sharing the shame and guilt here. And the right thing to do would be to have an ongoing public incident report and debriefing of what’s going on. Which reminds me of a GREAT example I just read the other day — in July, power in a large hosting company’s colo facility blew and many companies and customers were left in the dark. Here’s their archived report. Skype should do the same if it still wants to be an open friendly company.

UPDATE on Friday: it’s great to see communication on Share, About and Heartbeat. Provides at least some level of assurance. All the best to you guys in fixing it. Now if only my Skype would sign in… it’s 11:43 Eastern time here on the US east coast and still down for me.

UPDATE late Friday night: ok, Skype is up now. Panic over. Shows 4M people online.

Let me tell you what cars will be like in five or ten years.

Of course, I have no idea. Neither do you, or any of the manufacturers. But the manufacturers are building it as we speak. And it’s fun to guess.

Why, and the main idea

I drive around a lot, both short and small distances. Sometimes I spend two or three days in a row in my car, using all its features and cursing the ones that aren’t around. (I’ve praised my Ford Focus and its integrated console system previously, but there’s one thing that sucks: it doesn’t have ambient light sensor, and the dashboard and LCD brightness controls are separate. So I must manually adjust the brightness between “night” and “day” mode, whereas it should actually reconfigure itself according to the ambient light level, as my expectations don’t change and I want to maintain a fairly constant relative brightness level.)

So yeah… on one hand I drive a lot, on the other hand I’ve now been working in the IT and communications industry for a while. So I figured I’d do a thought experiment and go… “so… if I take all I know by now about my work specifically and also the world and its current trends in general, and try to throw out the stuff that doesn’t matter, and expand the one that does, and aggregate it all into a four-wheeled moving thing in the form of a passenger car, what would it be like?” And that’s all this is, just a thought experiment. And a prediction. Let’s come back to this in five years and see where I was wrong.

If you bother to read no further, then here’s the main idea. Instead of a vehicle, driving a car will be an open sharable media experience. We will all become “motion producers and consumers”, in public or private form, exactly as we will see fit ourselves. Instead of a whole bunch of anonymous individual movements on the road, the experiences of all cars and drivers will blend into a larger dynamic group community, consumable by other drivers as well as others that are off the road. And for the lack of a better term, I call it “media car”. I could also call it “car 2.0”, but all 2.0 things sound stupid and I’d better avoid that name. And it’s related a lot to media, hence the media car.

Yep. It sounds posh. And empty. So… I tried to analyse this across more meaningful categories. You could surely do different categories, as a lot of this is overlapping, but here’s simply what came to my mind first.

“Star City” was a film production that we entered in Assembly 07 short film competition. It did qualify to the finals and was shown on the bigscreen, which is great, and then it got the last place, which could have been better, of course but… we’re still happy about it, as it got shown to thousands of people and it’s not a shame to lose to such great competition (other entries were really really good and much better than Star City, so be sure to watch them too).

Here’s a low-quality YouTube version. You can download a higher-quality version here (click on one of the “Download from” links).

After a two-year break, myself and some friends went to Assembly 2007 (official page).

Assembly is part of the demoscene movement. I’m not even going to try to explain what this is, the wikipedia article provides enough info and further pointers. But you don’t need to be fully immersed in the full history to appreciate the party ambience. Just imagine a big hall full of about 3000 computers and people. And many of them are playing games and some are also creating this weird oldskool or modern computer art. And there are also tons of other activities around. Like this year, Microsoft was a sponsor and they had set up Xbox 360 consoles around the hall so you could just walk up to them and play. And F-Secure held a reverse engineering challenge. And Fennogrid held a grid computing event. And there was a rock concert at night.

They had a world overclocking record, utilizing liquid nitrogen. And so on. So all in all, almost four days of high-quality digital multimedia entertainment.