Quick update to point you all to Ineke & Michiel's website where the first wedding pictures have started appearing. More will follow. Also, it's no longer a site with our wedding invitation (it is archived, however), but also intended to host more info, pictures and other loose ends about us.
Location: Home
We interrupt this broadcast for a public service announcement.
Friday the 2nd of July 2010 at 13:00h CET, Michiel Scholten and Ineke Post got married at Castle Assumburg and became mr and mrs Scholten. Lots of pictures were taken, lots of fun was had. Pictures will follow.
Thank you for your time; we will now continue the regular broadcast.
Location: Home
It sure is quiet in here. I should fix that.
How far are you willing to go to spread your knowledge and make world easier for people to use?
Seen on a wall in Berlin.
Posted URL – http://addresstrick.tk/ is actually a really useful one if you’re a Windows user.
No related posts.
If you want to log in using your Google account as OpenID (as Google is a provider), make sure you are logged in with that account and then use this url as ID on the site you're visiting:
[source]
Location: Work
Wireless Community Weekend 2010 at Berlin is a conference of different wireless networks around Europe. One of the sessions we held was on what kind of services people are running on their networks and what should be develop (as a community) next to enrich our infrastructure.
We’ve built the network: what now?
Services
Discovery
Splash screen:
mDNS:
Kiberpipa.net is running:
Other services that people are running
Wishlist:
Want to share your experience in running services on your wireless networks? Share it in the comments.
Related posts:
So I have this nice shiny light laptop (the Samsung X360). It came with Microsoft Vista pre-installed, but I never even booted it; I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it immediately. It's working quite fine, except for some minor issues with its screen's backlight being a bit quirky (it needs a i915.modeset=0 part behind its kernel line in Grub's config).
Of course its manufacturer -- Samsung -- puts out bios updates (thankfully). It seems these could remedy these issues. However, instead of having some DOS-like application which can be run in FreeDOS or something, this is a Windows application which refuses to run under wine (bad idea anyway) and specifically checks whether it is being run on the specific laptop (so I can't extract things from it).
Problem is, Windows has been wiped clean from the machine and I have no intention to put the harddisk through a series of resizing tricks to install it again. I don't even have an install disk from the version it shipped with (a trend I quite hate, despite the laptop not even having an optical drive).
So, dear lazyweb, anyone having an idea how to flash the latest bios on it anyway? A BartPE livecd could be an idea, but I don't have WindowsXP handy...
Location: Home
Stack Overflow is a lot nicer as a source for good technical advice, but Experts Exchange still has quite some answers too; might come in handy for a second opinion/solution on which you can base your own. expert-sexchange is much less annoying with this bit of CSS added to Firefox's userContent.css file:
@-moz-document domain(experts-exchange.com) {
div.qStats {display: none !important;}
div.blurredAnswer {display: none !important;}
div.allZonesMain {display: none !important;}
}
[source]
Location: Work
Ubuntu's GDM still does not have a settings window where you can change looks to your liking. However, there are some tricks to still be able to do just that.
First, open a terminal and type the following command:
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow
You may also want to do the same with display-properties.desktop for setting the resolution of your screen and gconf-editor.desktop to change apps > metacity > general > button_layout to something like "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout".
Then logout, and you'll see an Appearance window pop up (and the other windows if you have copied those .desktop files too). Change it to how you prefer it, then close it and login as usual.
Now, to prevent those windows from appearing every time you get to the login screen, remove the .desktop files again:
sudo unlink /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop
And repeat for the other one or two, if you used them:
sudo unlink /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/display-properties.desktop sudo unlink /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gconf-editor.desktop
Done!
[Based on this how-to]
Location: Home
As we bought a house last year, we're actively following its process of being built. Photograph-loving people as we are, we document the timeline graphically.
The side not facing the street, aka the garden side :)
Location: Home
Soooo, it appears there was some small programming error which broke sessions in my self-written weblog software. This kinda blocked me from posting here. Combined with a rather busy life and me twittering small blurps instead of writing larger posts this led to dammIT be really neglected.
I plan on reviving this weblog. I will likely stop posting those blogmarks, which will stop the 'pollution' of the archive with lots of wrap-up links-this-week postings. This is still my platform of choice for writing larger pieces on Life, the Universe and Everything, so stay tuned.
Oh by the way, be sure to check out the 2D style refresh I did here ;)
Location: Home
I’m at Campus Party EU in Madrid this week and while it was a decent event, the part that it’s interesting is to see how community of over 200 international participants organize themselves as most of the flights back are canceled. As almost here is versed in IT technologies it is safe to say that we’re seeing the future of citizen self-organizing using modern collaboration technologies.
1. Projecting Twitter stream to the stages. This was more of a gimmick and nice to have back channel before, but during the time of the crisis provides an excellent overview of the chatter and what people are saying or trying to organize.
2. Travel Wiki, where people started writing down which cities or towns they need to get and what are different options of travel and prices.
3. Official blog that keeps everyone updated with the latest information. This if of course transmitted to the wiki and twitter stream.
All the solutions, except for the official blog, relay on the crowd to filter the information and self organize while everyone thinks of the solution. It ensures people don’t panic and there are centralized and maintained places to find the latest information, reducing the level of misinformation and things lost in translation.
Related posts:
I got an email back from Michael Bennet after I proposed he put forth a public option amendment to the health care bill.
“As you may know, I pushed to have as strong public option included in the reconciliation package. My position did not ultimately carry the day. And there were well intentioned people who wanted me and other strong proponents of the public option to amend the reconciliation bill to include a public option. I remain a strong proponent of the public option. Along with my colleagues in the Senate and House, I pushed continuously to include a public option in the reconciliation bill, and was very disappointed it was not included.
But offering an amendment would have jeopardized the entire reconciliation bill. Amending the reconciliation bill would have meant playing games with lives of thousands of Coloradoans and millions of Americans, and I refused to do it. No single amendment was adopted on this measure, because supporters of health care reform realized that reopening the package was playing right into the insurance companies’ hands. Opponents of the new law tried mightily to amend the package in their effort to kill it, but we stuck together and ultimately prevailed. I will continue to fight until we have our vote on a public option, but I refused to risk a much larger and groundbreaking health care reform package.”
But without offering full on single payer or even a public option amendment and by instead mandating health insurance, isn’t this just playing into insurance companies’ hands?
…I hope you lose in the primaries to Romanoff if this is your leadership.
Usability of 3rd party modules is often interesting and you can see evolution of the product through the interface. Breezing Forms is not exception to this, as it uses interesting formation of radio buttons to indicate validation options.
Trick question: what is current setting?
Yep, it’s None. Not Library that it seems from the first glance. Readability of this form can be greatly improved by moving radio button field to the left of text:
The lesson here is that if you’re forms are making you hesitate before clicking, you probably have to rethink them.
Update: D. submitted further improvement in the comments (thanks!):
Related posts:
Slovenian budget is a 12 billion euro monster that most citizens don’t understand or even have remote idea how it’s structured and where does their money go. As it turns out, people are just not good at taking abstract numbers to go into billions and understanding proportions and what it means to spend 50 million on one thing and 1 billion on something else.
That is what I’m trying to solve with this Visualization of budget of Slovenia for 2010. Show where the money is going as well as tell a story of a country that’s so much in debt that it would be a reason for panic if it happened to a person or a company. Yet we don’t seem to talk or address the issue that we’re 3.6 billion EUR short of making budget and that we have to borrow more money to pay our old debts.
(click on image for interactive version)
Income
Spending
(red is debt)
Lesson
Having access to experts or your own understanding of the data you’re trying to visualize is essential. In this case we had to reassemble budget since they form listing in a way that presents debt separately from the rest of the budget.
Related posts:
I finally got around to putting a version of Django Bingo online:
For an example dashboard, see my network monitor.
Note that it is very rough, I hope to improve the code over the next few
weeks. But at least you have something to play with!
Give it a try and let me know what you think (both good and bad).
Historically, the volume applet in Gnome was just that. It was it’s own applet. You added the sound control independently of any notification area or indicator applet. This was awesome! It was better than Windows. It was better than OS X. You could place the volume applet anywhere on the panel and, most importantly to me as someone who uses volume a lot, you could shove it to any of the four corners for easy mouse to a corner and scroll to adjust volume!
In Karmic, the volume applet was removed. It was sucked up by the notification area. You weren’t able to control the exact position where the volume control ended up as it could be pushed by other notification area applets whose order we have no control. This was less cool than previously, as you couldn’t go to a corner and scroll if you wanted to maximized Fitt’s law. At least in Karmic, we could find the volume, hover it, and scroll the wheel though so this had advantages over OS X and Windows.
Enter the suck! As of Beta 1 in Lucid, we have no exact control of the volume, it goes horizontally instead of vertically, and you can’t just hover it and scroll. You have to click the icon, then click and drag the slider. Suck!
Kiberpipa is a large organization with lots of volunteers. This means that whatever you do, you’ll have organizational problems and you’ll see technology as a way to solve them. To a certain degree of course. A few years ago Boštjan and I saw this as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and write our own groupware software. This is is how intranet project (yes, a terrible name from branding perspective) was born almost 5 years ago.
Since then a number of people have picked up the project and used it to improve their Django skills as well as help Kiberpipa get a bit more organized by a way of technology. While learning my way around some video editing software I’ve thrown together a video of commits of pieces of code into intranet’s code repository. Project used to generate frames is an open source Java based code_swarm. I’d like to encourage it to try it out and run it on your own source repositories.
This is the story of the following video. Please watch it in ‘full screen’ for the best experience:
Kiberpipa Intranet Codeswarm (2006 – 2010) from Jure Cuhalev on Vimeo.
Related posts:
My latest released project is focusing on Visualizing Slovenian IT tax spending (139 million euros), the idea here is to take otherwise meaningless numbers and display them visually in a way that tells a story of who is spending how much and on what. The data set comes directly from the government in semi-clean XLS file. Visualization technique I’ve decided on is treemap visualization to represent the data with different box sizes relative to each other.
Give it a try for yourself:
Launch the interactive Slovenian IT tax (in Slovenian)
While visualization itself is nice, there are a two points that you have to be careful about when releasing such visualizations to the public:
Transparency of data and data transformations
In my case, the data set came directly from the government. In order to make sure that everyone can check my calculations I’ve included links to their file as well as provided a local copy in case their version changes or disappears.
You’re loosing and reinterpreting data with every visualization. That is why it’s important to also include transformation scripts so that others can check your work and possibly build on top of it or at least make sure that you didn’t do anything tricky with the data.
I’ve opted for a github repository where I’ve pushed all the associated files: http://github.com/gandalfar/itproracun. It’s a bit chaotic but it should be pretty self-explanatory to any python and JavaScript developer.
Telling the story
Every data visualization is trying to tell a story. It might not be obvious to the visualization author but it helps to identify this early in the process.
I started with just a simple breakdown based on the institutions:
It’s very noisy and it’s hard to compare different institutions to each other. Initial comments to this were that it’s not shiny enough. Cleaning the interface up I came to the following revision:
It’s much cleaner and what basically showed that I need to find an angle to this data. I decided to focus on the ratio between software and services vs. hardware and network equipment. Final version now tells a story of how police is spending a lot of their IT money on network and hardware equipment, while Tax Office is spending much more money on software and services.
Agenda of this last version of visualization should be clear to anyone who takes a few moments to study it.
Other lessons learned
Visualization toolkit should be powerful on one hand, but offer first results without too much work. JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit does this job very well. There are some interesting tidbits that are not entirely clear from the documentation, but become obvious once you start thinking how the rendering works.
The biggest time sink is parsing and cleaning up the data. Don’t expect that the .xls file will make any sense from the programmatic point of view, even though it mostly looks fine when viewed manually. Small parsing errors, moved cells and strange line breaks made parsing this data the biggest challenge.
Big thanks go the community of Slo-Tech and my brother that gave valuable feedback during the development.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this visualization. Let me know in comments what other points of view you’d like to see as well as your ideas how to further improve it.
Related posts:
OK Go recently released video for their song This Too Shall Pass, of their new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, and it shows that they really understand viral web video and that their target demographic consumes their content on YouTube and Facebook.
First, check out their video, if you haven’t yet. It’s really worth watching, even if you don’t like their music. Analysis after the jump:
As you’ve seen it’s a Rube Goldberg inspired music video that is doing everything it can to keep your attention. It starts with a shock view of singer that looks like he just slaughtered a cow and as that grabs your attentions it gives you an interesting machine to observe as you watch the video. If they kept your attention for 30s you’ve probably managed to be enthusiastic enough about it to instant message it to your friends as well shared it on Facebook etc.
Based on their recent open letter, this is exactly what brings money today to a band – YouTube advertisements and the only way to actually make serious money on YouTube, besides having 500 videos that you released over last 2 years is to go viral with a well thought our video.
This brings to a completely new problem: what sells of the internet is porn, but if you can’t show that, kittens and lolcats will do. So the best tactic for an indie band that would like to get a lot of views would be to get some cute girls and somehow embed fuzzy kittens and puppies into their video. This way you’ll have a few bonus points in terms of views and maybe you’ll be able to achieve tipping point that will allow you to skyrocket the number of your views.
Did you spot any other details in the video that would contribute towards virality and sharing?
Related posts:
Who needs to sleep when you’re having so much with the BarCamp like events, right? Building upon this idea we’ve announcing MobileCamp Ljubljana, that’s going to take place on 27th of March 2010 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.
I’m excited about this MobileCamp for two main reasons: we’ll be bringing local mobile phone developers together for the first time in such numbers. This is important for Slovenian Mobile scene as there many indie iPhone and Android developers that need to see that their peers are active in the industry and that they’re not alone.
The second is that this venue is much bigger in terms of space so we should be able to introduce more people to concept of unconferences as well prepare grounds for a series of smaller MobileCamps later in the year if there will be enough demand.
We’re seeing increasing demand for iPhone and Android developers from companies and entrepreneurs as well as demands for applications from users, so lets expand this market fast and catch-up with the rest of the Europe. This time we’re switching back to English as primary language and we’re hoping to attract broader community also from the neighboring countries.
As always, go to http://www.mobilecamp.si for all the gory details and how to sign-up for your spot at the MobileCamp.
Related posts:
We can say once again that our last event, RealTime WebCampLjubljana, was a great success. We didn’t run out of coffee, there was enough electricity and WiFi as well as a great mix of people and the quality of talks and discussions was astonishing.
There are a few things that we did differently this time that had effect on the ‘camp feeling:
There is still a question – how to encourage people to prepare more sessions and how to time the event. Going for early Saturday morning as a start (8am-ish) seems to work great for now. Regarding more sessions, I’m not sure if we can expect more than 30% of attendees to run their own session, would be interested in recommendations on any literature on the topic of facilitating sessions.
Did I miss anything important that we should take into consideration for our next ‘camps?
Related posts:
Held a presentation yesterday at the first ever Dutch Django meeting held at the ABC Treehouse in Amsterdam. The meeting grew out of the Python Usergroup Netherlands. The turnout was surprisingly large.
More on the meeting here, or grab my slides+notes directly.
The presentation was the first time I openly discussed this Aperte-project: Dashboards for Django (and "Bingo" was his name, o!). It features a web-based query builder and allows you to easily set up dashboards for your Django applications.
Screenshot:
I haven't released the project yet, hope to do so sometime next week. The interest in the project surprised me actually. It seems I'm not the only one who likes pretty graphs and tables, but hates all the work that surrounds building them...
EDIT: Photos of the meeting
Interesting links of this week:
Epic win
What follows is usually an excuse for why the speaker feels that a wiki isn't a worthwhile tool for collaboration in his or her environment. I use the word "excuse" deliberately, because rarely does anyone articulate an actual business reason, such as a lack of need. When I ask deeper questions, I invariably find that the objection isn't to the wiki technology itself, but instead to the concept of collaborative authoring and a perceived loss of control over the content.
Ever wondered why your friends seem so much more popular than you are? There's a reason for that.
About sums it up. It will be great for quite a lot of people, and won't be "the thing" for users that want more control. I really only hope that it won't be the beginning of closing down *all* computers, as that will seriously hamper tinkerers. Tinkerers that are our future developers/hackers/programmers (think about how you started with IT).
I have a major pet peeve that I need to confess. I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know shit when it’s clearly obvious they do not. I’ve been studying it for years and years and still don’t think I know anything. This article is my call for all programmers to finally learn enough about statistics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their confidence in their lacking knowledge is only surpassed by their lack of confidence in their personal appearance.
Location: Server
So tomorrow I'll be off to my university again to follow a course. Interesting sensation. Nice to go to Amsterdam again though :) *puts laptop in bag*
Location: Work
So to unwind from wrapping up stuff for university, I put some time into restyling my main website, aquariusoft.org. It's a lot cleaner, has less links leading everywhere and is easier on the eye. I'll post some before/after pics tomorrow.
Location: Home
It’s been two months after last WebCamp and it’s time for another party. Following the idea of BarCamps with story line, we’ve decided to organize RealTime Social WebCamp Ljubljana.
This time we’ve decided to focus on a single emerging technology space: Real-Time Social Web. If you’re not up-to date with the latest buzzwords, it’s about next generation RSS protocols like HubSubPubBub, RSSCloud, XMPP (that powers GTalk), Synaptic Web, Twitter API and a bunch of other technologies and ways of thinking about the Web and Mobile space.
Intended audience are developers and people who are close to them (e.g. interface designers, product managers, etc.) and will need to innovate in this space in the next 6 months.
We’re doing it a bit more limited this time, just 50 spaces. I’m interested in seeing how a smaller and more focused group changes the dynamics of such gathering.
The rules for the tickets are the same as the last time. Send description of your talk early and you get a ticket, or hope that you can click fast enough for the left-over tickets later. I believe that extra effort should be awarded.
The official language this time is Slovenian since we’ve figured out that locals that are not native speakers understand our geek talk enough that it shouldn’t be a problem and we can understand them as they lecture in their own language.
As always: all the details are at http://www.webcamp.si
Related posts:
Interesting links of this week:
And you know it's true...
Hear hear. Go Google :)
Good piece on the iPad being a device to bring closed computer systems to the masses. Will this mean the beginning of the end of open systems where you are the master of your hardware?
What bothers me is that in terms of openness, the iPad is the same as the iPhone, but in terms of form factor, the iPad is essentially a general purpose computer. So it strikes me as a sort of Trojan horse that acculturates users to closed platforms as a viable alternative to open platforms, and not just when it comes to phones (which are closed pretty much across the board). The question we must ask ourselves as computer users is whether the tradeoff in freedom we make to enjoy Apple’s superior user experience is worth it.
*wets pants*
I'm the lead of the GPSD project, a service daemon that monitors GPS receivers on serial or USB ports and provides TPV (time-position-velocity) reports in a simple format on on a well-known Internet port. GPSD makes this job looks easy. But it’s not — oh, it's decidedly not — and thereby hangs an entertaining tale of hacker ingenuity versus multiple layers of suck.
Location: Server
My current reading list nicely shows the professional interests I am currently persuading. A mix of social media and community engagement (Trust Agents and Tribes), Web Analytic so I can get better insights into web pages, The Four steps to the Epiphany since it’s always good read about product and business creation process and Laws of Simplicity that my brother was kind enough to shared with me to not lose the touch with the design philosophy.
I wonder if I’m missing something..
Related posts:
So, 28. That's 9 years of pretending to be 18 and 10 years away from really being it. Oh well, at least I'm not 30 yet. Yet.
Thanks for another year. This one will be awesome.
Location: Home
While observing 4chan’s attack on Spar’s “create your shopping bag” online tool, I started to wonder if Internet meme’s ever die or they’ll continue to haunt us well into the future. I’m sure that on the trivial level, we’ll soon see in Jeopardy question type: “popular internet meme’s of 90’s”, but there is a different component. Given that a large amount of our current society and youth is influenced by short and not-so-short lived meme’s – what are today’s anthropologists doing to document and conserve this information? Will we need to resurrect it from old Wikipedia dumps, before they get removed for not being notable enough?
One of the notable things happening in this area is that Jason Scott has an archive of 10 million 4chan threads and while he isn’t releasing it to the public just yet, I’m confident that this will happen in a few years time.
I do hope that there is a whole generation of graduate’s in anthropology that are wondering how to capture all the memes so they can build their careers on top of it.
Related posts:
Interesting links of this week:
Good way of visualising our Milky Way galaxy and the tiny spot our little solar system is taking in.
Site about our policians' stance on privacy etc.
Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary? The majority of comp sci graduates can't. I've also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.
Great rebuttal to our Queen's rejection of modern communication media in her Christmas speech last year.
Location: Server
The Django admin by default only has the add, change and delete permissions. These permissions allow you to section off your admin, allowing certain users to only modify certain objects (and with my sub-admin class you can limit permissions at an object-level!).
What the admin doesn't allow is giving read-only permissions. The reason for this, according to the Django developers, is that you must trust every user logging into the admin interface. Read-only or view permissions means you don't trust your users, thus they shouldn't have access anyway.
Of course, if we continue this reasoning, why would you have permissions at all? If you trust everyone who logs in you wouldn't need the ability to assign add, change and delete permissions. But the reason behind this is probably that the Django admin hasn't been thoroughly tested for security holes and that they'd rather not have anonymous viewing permissions, which makes sense.
I've written a quick add-view-permissions patch for Django 1.1. The results are unremarkable but effective, as the following screenshots show of a user with view-only permissions:
Feel free to use the patch, but be warned: if users logging in to your site really want to change something, they'll probably find a way through.
I've placed a couple of my Django patches together here.
Previous article, N900 hardware
The interface on the N900 has been completely revamped compared to the N810. Maemo 5 (fremantle) is much more suited to being used without the stylus, which makes the N900 much more usable as a phone.
Desktops!
There are 4 desktops, similar to the virtual desktops Unix has had for decades. You easily switch between them by swiping either to the left or right. Swiping seems to be a favorite guesture by the designers as it comes back everywhere: photo browsing, file and app lists, even the x terminal supports it for scrolling.
Each desktop can be arranged as you please with widgets, shortcuts and browser links as the above examples show. By default you get Twitter-shitter, Bookface widgets and the like, but who needs those?
The widgets make customizing your N900 for your own "workflow" very easy. I use my calendar a lot, so my main desktop prominently shows my latest todo's, but someone who mostly calls might put most of his contacts on a number of desktops: it's all up to you. I'll look into widget development in the next article.
From the desktop you only have one button in the top left. It either shows you your currently running applications or goes to the application menu screen:
My phone is Dutch (like you didn't notice) but the icons should show the idea. A lot of effort has gone into making multitasking as easy as possible, anyone that checks his email while reading the headlines and writing a blogpost will appreciate the ease of switching.
Apps
With the current generation of smartphones you're only as good as your applications are. The default apps on the N900 don't disappoint.
The browser is based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. One of the advantages is that it also supports add-ons: the web shouldn't be used without Adblock plus! Clicking on links can be a bit finniky, but the stylus makes that kind of browsing a lot more doable. Web sites render as well as with Firefox. Zooming works by either drawing a circle clockwise or counter-clockwise, easy with both finger and stylus.
The N900 has a fully-featured email application. It supports multiple IMAP folders which has already saved me once this week. Attaching multiple files works fine and emailing/texting is a breeze with the keyboard.
The contacts app is surprisingly useful. Instead of choosing to email, text, call or skype someone you first find the person you are looking for. This then gives you all the options you have to contact that person. Skype chat, google talk/jabber support out of the box, but msn, icq and other IM protocols can be installed.
The calendar application is probably my favorite. But that's probably because it's the one I use the most and without it I'd forget everything. Week-view rocks:
The built-in mediaplayer works as could be expected. The audio socket also supports video-out and the '9'-trailer looked great on my hdtv. Together with flash support and mplayer, you have plenty of options. 32GB of flash storage is built-in and a microSD socket is available for even more space: I finally gave my aging iPod away as I can't see myself using it anymore :)
I could go on about the other pre-installed apps, but what might be better to know is that you can install and run lots of maemo-applications. By default you only have access to the "verified" nokia applications repository but the application manager allows you to add new ones: simply add the maemo extras repository and you have access to hundreds of applications for free.
The Ovi-store has a new N900 section that opened last week. The idea is of course to provide a channel for developers to sell their Maemo-applications, but it should also provide a means to easily get high-quality free software.
Teething issues: battery-life and a limited root filesystem
I mentioned some issues I was having in the previous article I wrote on the N900. The N900 being a new direction for Nokia, it's not strange that not everything is perfect.
My main issue is currently battery-life. With such a lot of features and widgets it's not strange to go overboard and install eveything you could possibly want. This eats up power though, and I felt lucky if I didn't have to hook the N900 up multiple times a day. There seems to be a major issue with wifi that rapidly drains the battery, so I'm sticking with 3G for the time being. The N900 has an option to automatically switch to wifi if a known accesspoint is detected, but this drained the battery in a matter of hours. For now I am cutting down on widgets and background-apps (long live 'top'!) which seems to be doing the trick. Improvements and fixes in this area should go a long way.
A more long-term issue is the limited root filesystem size. 'df' shows that the main filesystem only has 228MB, total, of which I have used 163MB. New applications are stored in this filesystem, instead of the 32GB storage available for 'documents' so I can see this becoming a major pita soon. PyMaemo (more on that next time) already uses mount-binding to limit the amount of space wasted on root.
Once the battery-life improves I'll be able to recommend the N900 to the average user. For now it is wise to take the usb cable or adapter with you, just in case.
Next time I'll look at N900 development. Eating my own dog food, this article has been written on the N900.
Interesting links of this week:
Awesome pieces of music; works really well when you combine some of the movies and let them jam together. Meshes together magically.
Awesomeness
Awesome pictures
Wow, elaborate
I like php for quickly putting a webapp together, but things/bugs like these don't help. Might need to spend more time developing with Django/Python
Impressive
Very interesting
So that's where that bugzilla statement comes from
Location: Server
By popular request, a review of the N900, after being submitted to a week of testing!
What is the N900, and why would you want one?
The N900 is a smartphone, but done differently. Where the typical smartphone is locked to a large degree by telco's and manufacturers, the N900 is completely open to use and abuse. It stems from the Nokia internet tablet series (N700->N810) with the Debian / Maemo operating system but this time they finally were able to make a tablet with which you can call.
The N900 is a remarkable tablet and a decent smartphone, however it is a work-in-progress. It is probably most suited to geeks that want Linux on their phone but want a more freer environment than the Android handsets. Normal users probably should wait a couple of months until all the teething issues have been sorted out, but even with those issues it is a full-featured phone for anyone who needs to be online everywhere.
The hardware
It's tablet-origins are clear when compared to the N810:
On your right you have the N95, on the top the N810 and on the bottom the N900.
The N900 has a qwerty keyboard similar to the N810, however the 4-way directional pad was removed. Instead we have arrow keys like a proper keyboard :) The N900 is rather large compared to a regular phone but comparable in size to a iPhone. It also is quite a bit thicker due to the keyboard. The keyboard itself feels decent and lets you type texts and email in a flash.
The screen is smaller than the N810 and like the N810 is resistive (instead of capacitive like the iPhone). On the downside this means that you actually have to press the screen which needs getting used to if you are used to an iPhone, on the upside you can use the integrated stylus for tasks that are too delicate for your fingers (browsing, copy/paste etc).
The phone sports a 5MP camera with two flash-LEDs which to my non-photographer eyes look quite decent. The GPS works properly and quickly (unlike my old N95). The only port is the same as the N810 (micro-usb?), unfortunately without a separate Nokia charger socket but the N900 comes with an adapter for that purpose. Audio socket, speaker and a standard on the back that keeps the phone in a handy 45-degree angle.
To be continued...
Most forms of gambling is illegal in Slovenia with a few highly regulated exceptions that are given concession from the government. Most notable are Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Lottery) and Športna Loterija Slovenije (Slovenian Sport Lottery) in addition to real-world casinos and gambling places.
With growing popularity of online gambling these organizations as well as government are facing a problem with how to deal with insanely popular betting sites like Bwin, Expekt.com, bet-at-home.com. Government already tried to order ISP’s to block access to these webpages in 2006, but it turned out that they didn’t have legal ground for it so it failed.
That is why they decided to fix the law that would, among other things, require ISP’s to prevent access to web pages that would offer gambling related services. Failing to comply would result in fines from 7.500 EUR to 52.500 EUR and 1.500 to 10.000 for the person in charge. Parliament already approved the law on 18th of December 2008, but it got vetoed at the next stage in the process so they will have to vote on it again.
There are many troubling aspects of these recent developments:
It’s now up to the citizens and experts in the field to carefully analyze answers and proposed government changes to the law to make sure that it does not pass in its current form.
If you can read Slovenian, there are three excellent articles on this topic that you have to read:
Original version of this article appeared on Netokracija
Related posts:
On my way back from work it started to snow tiny flakes. When I stopped at a traffic light, they turned out to be beautiful snow crystals, 3 to 4mm across. Made me smile.
Location: Home
Interesting links of this week:
Nice collection of 250 animals that wouldn't exist without that notorious tool
Teehee (not all SFW)
The ones from the other series are quite nice too
Also, patterns. Great site for when you're trying to find inspiration for a design.
Handy web-based tool to generate the command line for converting movies to xvid
That's actually quite handy. If you use windows seven, that is.
Location: Server
We used to make fun of Windows users and impossible number of tray icon in bottom right corner. Observing my OS X tray today I noticed that it’s almost 700 pixels wide and that it doesn’t look like the trend of expanding will stop.
Does this mean that next version of OS X will slowly start introducing “hide unused tray icons” like with Windows or there is nothing that we can do as we need all of them?
How is your tray? Wider or shorter? Am I missing anything?
No related posts.
Today we finally switched Prevoz.org to new backend that allows us to start offering an option to add international carpools. It looks pretty boring at the end of the day:
In the process we all learned a lot about GIS systems, different GEO API solutions, Geonames and that it’s not a trivial problem.
For now I just want to give thanks to everyone that helped in this transition and I’ll try to blog more details about the transitions and lessons learned in upcoming weeks.
Related posts:
And before you know it 2 months have passed and you're in the Tennies. Best wishes to all!
Last night we returned from France after a week of 'boarding and relaxing:
New years resolutions: How about at least one blogpost each month? That, and a lot more snowboarding!
Interesting links of this week:
It could be raining
Are you going to be able to restore them?
That's what you call mature advertisement. I like it.
Fun stuff. Everybody wants to shoot at planes with fireworks ;)
Too bad it's a silverlight video, but moonlight should do the job. Interesting presentation by Stephan Hoefnagels about how the user experience designers went on their way to make windows7 a better place. I think they even succeeded in their endeavour, which means that windows7 actually is a version that gets out your face like it should. Good stuff.
Let's face it: the classic blog post is boring. Barring the text and images, each one generally has the exact same layout. We see little originality from one post to the next. Of course, consistency and branding are extremely important to consider when designing a website or blog, but what about individuality? Does a blog post about kittens deserve the same layout as one about CSS hacks?
Location: Server
2009 was a weird year; on the one hand it was quite bland, on the other we did some real cool things, like going on a mind-blowing trip through southern Africa, jumping on the wedding train (the actual fact will take place this new year) and buying a house, amongst others. The paradoxic part is that I both got less and more done than anticipated; just in different fields. All-in-all it was a quite OK year.
This new year will bear us the fruits of our hard labour this year, which will make it a quite fun year for me and my lovely ega. We are going to enjoy the ride and try to have as much fun as possible on the way!
So, a very good, interesting, healthy and just plain enjoyable 2010 to you all!
Location: Home
Today everyone blogs and we expect everyone to have their own blog, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile etc. Being present on as many services as we can. We can then measure measure engagement levels with one of the many different approaches (number of followers, sales, replies or even Klout rank).
What often don’t see is companies taking a deliberate decision not to be present on every social media fad, but instead decide to focus on a few communication channels and spend the rest of their resources on their actual product.
The one company that does this beautifully is twidroid. They make a deliberate stance that they don’t do tech support over Twitter and that you should use email. Their message is simple and it helps drive customer to the right medium.
We can take this a step further and take a look at different ways some of social media tools can be used:
Facebook Page
Is our audience on Facebook at all? Is this a replacement of Newsletter or do we expect to do tech support and discussions here? Do we just count number of fans so we have more than competition?
Twitter account
Do we plan to become a leader and Tweet about our industry or do we just push announcement every once in a while. Is this account to do tech support over? Do we want followers or engagement? How personal is the voice of the account?
Blog
Do we position ourselves as progressive thinking company that regularly writes in-depth editorials or do we push product announcements and speaking gigs. What would be most useful for our business goals (hyping up vs. consumer focused)?
LinkedIn and everything else
While we all love new social networks the only real question is – do we actually reach anyone on that platform?
Do you know why your social media presence is structured like it is? Or is it legacy setup already?
Related posts:
Hi, I’m Jure and one of the things I do is to help people talk and work with their communities so they can improve their products or services. Often they want to outsource at least part of the talking to me, so I’m given a new online identity. The name is still the same, but you get a new email (with IMAP and everything) and often business cards with this identity. If you’re lucky it’s also a Google Account (via Google Apps) that you need to share calendars, gtalk etc.
As you help different organizations, you keep accumulating these identities that you can’t shut off because you never know who will decide to email you on that address or which account you’ve got registered. On top of that, you almost never completely stop helping them unless the project gets shut down.
So now you have tons of email addresses, that each connect to different identity that you use to talk to bloggers. The only problem is that there is a limited number of meaningful connections that you can have. So you email people from all these identities with different questions, forwards, reply-alls and so on.
This does at the end of the day mean, that I’ll have to talk to myself via different identities, CC other email or info@ accounts (that I control anyway) so that we can make sense of our world. That everyone knows who belongs to who, depending on the email domain.
I have yet to write multiple (personal) Twitter accounts or Foursquare logs, even though I’m sure that this day isn’t far away.
So if you see my replying to myself from a different domain, it’s all normal, it’s just that I don’t want to break online balance of identities.
Related posts:
Running becomes an addiction after a while (some call it a state of mind). It’s very hard to sit still at home while knowing that you could be out – running. In my experience, it takes about two weeks of non-running to get rid of this feeling. After it is gone, you need about 2 runs to get back into the game.
So with this in my mind, my New Year’s resolution for 2010 is:
Go running at least once in the first half of the month.
It’s a realistic goal that should allow me to get back into running every time I stop for whatever reason.
Related posts:
Interesting links of this week:
Awesome picture of Mario trying to choose an outfit
Awesomeness!
I made this as my costume for Halloween 2009. It was kind of inspired by big-head mode seen in videogames. I really wanted to get the faceted geosphere look with wireframe.
Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
Some good tips for keeping your fine whisky fine
Location: Server
Foursquare is like Twitter, many things to many different people. What I would like to start using it is to passively track location of my friends and use that information to decide on my future plans.
Knowing for example that someone else is also at University and that it’s lunchtime and that I’m nearby, would allow me to ping them with food related question.
This is something that is not practical without Foursquare as people don’t tweet their location.
The second important part is that I now suddenly leave breadcrumbs of my past behavior. I’m not exactly sure the depth of usefulness but for now I’d like to be able to draw a heat-map of my favorite places and maybe see how it compares to my friends one.
But there is one major obstacle – we need critical mass of friends on it. Foursquare doesn’t recognize Ljubljana as a city (it thinks it’s Vienna), so we can’t do proper evangelism for it. On the other hand Gowalla recognizes Ljubljana but doesn’t have Android client.
So the war for location tracking is just starting and the one that can deliver the best experience first and is willing to work with local mobile geeks will have an upper hand.
Related posts:
I think I need to create something. It always gives me a lot of energy, something I've been lacking a bit lately.
Location: Home
So apparently there is a new brand of Laško beer – Eliksir, a stronger beer that is normally known as bock. There are advertisements everywhere, urging you to skip your traditional cup of mulled wine and go for the “winter beer”.
The mystical bottle of Eliksir
So why #fail?
It turns out that it’s incredibly hard to find, so hard that we are yet to find a place in Ljubljana that actually heard of it and none actually have it in stock. We’ve tried a number of pizza places and bars around old Ljubljana city center and we failed. We did get lots of Guinness and other dark beers.
Reading their promo material it states that it’s available in supermarkets and in selected pubs. That’s perfectly fine, but you’re doing a good job of hiding a list of places where it’s actually available.
So Laško, if you’re actually spending this much money trying to convince me to try your new beer, make sure that I can actually buy it.
Related posts:
My weblog is now old enough to start learning how to write itself! Back in 2003 I started a weblog because I was curious to the phenomenon, how it would work out for myself (writing in English, dumping my thoughts online) and just to vent my frustrations with the day-to-day life on.
This year was a tad quiet, with lots of weeks going by only having the generated blogmarks postings. The counter for this year is currently stuck on 212 blogmarks; interesting or just funny sites I wanted to share with you, my loyal reader. 86 rants were posted, of which 46 are those automagic postings. That means I even posted 40 times myself, which is more than I suspected. Still, not *that* active, as it was better in previous years.
It likely didn't help that I started using Twitter this year too, as a lot of minor thoughts and ideas ended up going there instead of being posted here. I might put up a twitter thingee in the sidebar, or just try to remind myself to post ideas here more often, like I should. Either way, you might want to check out my twitterfeed.
Today is Yule and also the shortest day of the year, marking it officially Winter. There's a lot of snow outside and more light than the average winter day, so I'll just revel a bit in the grey-white glow and try to be productive for another day. Or I'll go outside with my camera. Whatever is more fun.
Location: Home
Internet is just one huge amazing opportunity that we’re not even beginning to utilize.
The story goes like this: while chewing on Big Red gum, I’ve started wondering how can I ensure my future supplies of it. A quick search later reveals a magic resource – AmericanSweets.co.uk a service that does exactly that, ensures that EU people have access to USA candy. A very targeted and niche shop that can now sere expats and fans across whole Europe. On top of that, they even ship back to USA (?!?).
So that’s essentially the opportunity and potential of the Internet – infinite amount of highly targeted niches where you’re not bound by local geographical restrictions anymore.
Related posts:
Interesting links of this week:
26 gigapixels of panorama. Awesome!
Hm, I guess they couldn't be bothered encrypting that stream? Or it's a major fuck-up. Interesting.
Well illustrated: killers of ideas
It needs some modifications, but works really well in corporate environments, for example. Scary, as it means that SSL-secured traffic isn't.
Location: Server
Avatar is one of those movies that you see in cinema in 3D and all you have to say is – wow. Stunning effects, rich and beautiful (although a bit color crazy) scenery and a story that works for most for the movie. It’s very much worth the hassle of going to the movies.
The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but maybe it will help you see it. (yes, I’m that psyched about it)
No related posts.
It’s snowing around Europe at the moment and Twitter is trending with term #uksnow. Nothing special about it, besides the fact that’s is a beautiful orchestra of crowdsourced tweets that get aggregated to the #uksnow Map 2.0
Why is this important?
While this is a single focus application, that will probably stop getting attention in a few days, there is no reason why anyone couldn’t go out and build generic mobile and web platforms that would enable such crowd-sourcing and trend aggregation around important public happenings.
We already have great open software for this, e.g. Ushahidi could be a great platform to build on top of.
Interesting links of this week:
Same story goes for France and more and more countries; there's perfectly good (better!) water in your tap people!
LOL (yesh, I'm a nerd I guess)
Location: Server
For the last few weeks, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story of different communities around me. They’re all doing great things, but the general perception, within them, is that the public is not recognizing their efforts and that getting more recognition will help with other aspects of their work (getting funding, members, more feedback, etc.).
Very much inspired by Jono Bacon’s book – The Art of Community, I’ve started analyzing different public pitches, strategies and road-maps that they have. The answer that I hear often or at least is implied is that they’re open spaces and that people make of it, whatever they want.
In case of Kiberpipa, it’s very usual to hear: “Kiberpipa is something else to everyone” and as such it is a very complex idea, that’s hard to communicate clearly.
Which is perfectly fine, if you’re in there for last five years and are practically a founder. The problem is that this is not the story that we can go out and present to upcoming and promising teams. It’s too vague, if feels to big and it’s scary as an empty wiki.
So the big plan for the upcoming weeks is to talk to many people and artificially set constraints on their projects. Not in a way that would prevent them from doing whatever they’re e doing now, but it a way that would home their pitch at least in one direction, making it easier to attract new people and upgrade existing ideas.
In short: let’s decide on one thing that our project is to a few people and build a solid foundation around that, before moving to the next one.
Ljubljana is once again going into overkill with all the December holiday festivities. The good news is that there is nothing better for the community to go out there in the cold, buy insane amounts of mulled wine, roasted chestnuts and just talk about things worth doing over the quiet new year holidays.
Now go out and organize your mulled wine themed meetup.
These are my notes from the talk by Nedine Kachornnamsong – Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine.
Copenhagen Airport project, In Place-Spective, 2005-2006
Posters inside washrooms, that you can use to share things with each other. The posters were placed inside toilet doors.
The Living Machine
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Haraway Reader. 1985. Ed. Haraway, Donna. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7-45.
This new machine becomes a problem because it comes very close to the concept of humanity. So we need to redefine what it means to be a human.
Yes/No/Maybe
Pyshical event that takes elements from the online dating site:
Look for it in near future in Ljubljana.
Alextreme.org
Brendan M. Sleight, His Blog
Jure Cuhalev
The ramblings of g1powermac
Vermyndax's Lair
buranen.info
dammIT
Last updated:
July 30, 2010 02:43 AM
All times are UTC.
Powered by:
