Authors of LiveCD's blog too

Wedding pictures and a website of our own

2010-07-23T17:54:15+00:00

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 are married!

2010-07-03T11:08:08+00:00

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

Hello?

2010-06-18T05:46:22+00:00

It sure is quiet in here. I should fix that.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

On spreading knowledge

2010-05-22T22:55:13+00:00

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.

Google Account as OpenID

2010-05-17T13:21:39+00:00

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:

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

[source]

Location: Work

We’ve built the network: now where do we get the content?

2010-05-15T17:54:35+00:00

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

radio and video streaming http://rund.freifunk.net or http://www.livestream.com/dubnighttv/
Voice over IP http://wiki.ninux.org/Elenco_Telefonico_rete_VoIP_di_ninux.org
Public web Cams (over the roofs, bird nest’s – very popular in Berlin)

Discovery

Splash screen:

They don’t really work in most experience. People don’t read them or respond to them.
Intercepts connections and makes a bad experience
Problems when being on dual stack
If you have it: don’t mention money as people will go away (even if just for donations). Explain what will happen after they press the login button.
Use SSID as name that you want to announce (use WWW so people know it’s a website)

mDNS:

Service discovery, networks
Music sharing services (iTunes like sharing (DAAP))
Serverless chat
Good resource: http://wiki.ninux.org/ZeroconfServices

Kiberpipa.net is running:

Video streaming from Cyberpipe (lectures – http://video.kiberpipa.org)
VPN for end users
Local irc server with SSL suport (irc.sioff.net)
VPS to run and learn about Linux (all the servers are accessible inside network + ipv6 only connectivity from the outside world)
Multiple-storages (NAS) for sharing stuff/run your own FTP server
Peering connectivity to other Freifunk networks/hackerspaces

Other services that people are running

Used books
Weather report
Blog server
Radio streaming
DNS servers that do all the fancy remapping (service to all the users)

Wishlist:

WE NEED working SPLASH SCREENS
nodes running their own webserver
automatic name registration system (web site)
alternative domain names redirection (custom zones)
internet caching services (uncensored)
decentralized community radio station / shared radio schedule (gsoc project this year): http://radiomate.org and http://fusoradio.net
game servers (freeciv works!)
mesh-partys (like lan party)
local search engines
good service discovery service. What is the most common way to announce new service around the whole network: mDNS?

Want to share your experience in running services on your wireless networks? Share it in the comments.

Windows-only bios updaters and me

2010-05-15T13:10:34+00:00

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

Experts Exchange

2010-05-07T13:28:17+00:00

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

How to change the looks of Ubuntu 10.04's GDM

2010-04-30T13:09:10+00:00

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

Home update

2010-04-25T15:38:41+00:00

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

Fixed my weblog

2010-04-23T11:13:22+00:00

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

Self organizing travel information in the wake of volcanic ash cloud

2010-04-17T17:49:30+00:00

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.

Michael Bennet’s Lame Response

2010-04-15T04:53:25+00:00

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.

Positioning of radio buttons

2010-04-04T09:31:30+00:00

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!):

Visualizing budget of Slovenia for 2010

2010-03-23T10:03:05+00:00

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.

It's time to Django Bingo!

2010-03-20T16:49:36+00:00

I finally got around to putting a version of Django Bingo online:

Django Bingo at Github

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).

Lucid’s New Sound Indicator Applet Thing or How The Sound Applet Went To Suck

2010-03-19T21:32:02+00:00

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!

Showing a story of Kiberpipa’s intranet opensource project

2010-03-15T08:15:00+00:00

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.

Visualizing Slovenian IT tax spending

2010-03-12T08:25:35+00:00

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.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – How to Create A Viral YouTube Video

2010-03-04T07:45:47+00:00

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?

MobileCamp Ljubljana in late March!

2010-02-26T10:03:57+00:00

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.

RealTime WebCamp reflections

2010-02-25T11:42:39+00:00

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:

Smaller group – instead of going with 150+ we went for 50+ crowd. More intimate and it allowed for more open discussions.
Two tracks only – moved from 3 tracks format to 2 tracks as there was less people and we also had to optimize for the available rooms. We still managed to create a nice balance of tech vs. non-tech oriented talks.
Slovenian language – despite protests from our friends in Croatia, we decided to go with Slovenian as a primary language this time. My current feeling is that this made it easier for everyone involved and we should consider sticking to Slovenian for smaller camps that are not intended for international audience.
‘Hackish venue’ – instead of going for university or conference venue, we crashed in Hekovnik this time, a new hackerspace in Ljubljana. This had a totally different feeling of more ‘ad-hoc’ and less sterile environment. It seemed like people enjoyed this more.

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?

Presented at the first Django Meeting NL: Django Bingo!

2010-02-18T15:13:32+00:00

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

Blogmarks for Sunday 07 February 2010

2010-02-07T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

How To Easily Share Your Wireless Connection in Ubuntu 9.10

Epic win

Getting over the barriers to wiki adoption

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.

This column will change your life: Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do

Ever wondered why your friends seem so much more popular than you are? There's a reason for that.

Why is Everybody So Angry about Apple's iPad?

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).

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All

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

Back to school

2010-02-04T15:34:22+00:00

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

Main website restyled

2010-02-01T21:20:57+00:00

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

Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana

2010-02-01T19:01:50+00:00

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

Blogmarks for Sunday 31 January 2010

2010-01-31T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

A Day in America According to a (Baffled) Foreigner

And you know it's true...

Modern browsers for modern applications

Hear hear. Go Google :)

Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?

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.

Guitar Hero hits the Commodore 64

*wets pants*

Why GPSes suck, and what to do about it

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

2010-01-31T01:22:03+00:00

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..

How do you design? – Free E-Book

18 years old +10

2010-01-30T23:37:08+00:00

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

Do internet memes ever die?

2010-01-24T22:17:15+00:00

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.

Blogmarks for Sunday 24 January 2010

2010-01-24T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

We Are Just a Tiny Station in the Milky Way Subway Map - Milky way transit authority

Good way of visualising our Milky Way galaxy and the tiny spot our little solar system is taking in.

[Dutch] Privacy Barometer - De actuele stand van de politiek over privacy

Site about our policians' stance on privacy etc.

Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

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.

[Dutch] Lieve Majesteit

Great rebuttal to our Queen's rejection of modern communication media in her Christmas speech last year.

Location: Server

Django admin, view-only permissions

2010-01-22T14:20:10+00:00

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.

N900: Just how good is mobile Free software?

2010-01-18T11:25:19+00:00

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.

Blogmarks for Sunday 17 January 2010

2010-01-17T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

in Bb 2.0 - a collaborative music/spoken word project

Awesome pieces of music; works really well when you combine some of the movies and let them jam together. Meshes together magically.

First-Person Tetris

Awesomeness

Talk Urbex - Exploring decaying abandoned architecture

Awesome pictures

Will You Go to Duct Tape Prom With Me?

Wow, elaborate

PHP Must Die

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

Russian Underground Submarine Base

Impressive

10 Awesome Uses of Augmented Reality Marketing

Very interesting

Zarro boogs

So that's where that bugzilla statement comes from

Location: Server

N900: Is that Debian in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

2010-01-15T20:28:55+00:00

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...

Slovenian government is trying to censor the Internet

2010-01-14T19:22:09+00:00

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:

From legal aspect it introduces censorship at the price of freedom of speech because part of the government decided that they need it. Who will be next to demand blocking of unwanted content?

From technical aspect it’s really hard if not impossible to block web pages. The only real approach would be using Deep Packet Inspection technique, that requires ISP to analyze each internet package violating privacy of the communication in the process.

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:

Naš veliki kitajski požarni zid (bigger political picture)

Zakon o igrah na sre?o uvaja cenzuro spletnih strani (legal)

Cenzura prometa na stranska vrata? (technical analysis)

Original version of this article appeared on Netokracija

The little things

2010-01-13T22:10:10+00:00

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

Blogmarks for Sunday 10 January 2010

2010-01-10T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

250 animales que no existirían sin Photoshop

Nice collection of 250 animals that wouldn't exist without that notorious tool

60 Humorous Print Advertisements to Tickle Your Bones

Teehee (not all SFW)

Lost: The Last Supper

The ones from the other series are quite nice too

COLOURlovers: Color Trends and Palettes

Also, patterns. Great site for when you're trying to find inspiration for a design.

SimpleRip: Ripping/Encoding DVDs to Xvid with Mencoder

Handy web-based tool to generate the command line for converting movies to xvid

Enable Windows 7 god mode!

That's actually quite handy. If you use windows seven, that is.

Location: Server

OS X tray icon overload

2010-01-09T16:03:39+00:00

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.

Migrating Prevoz.org to GeoDjango/postGIS

2010-01-03T18:47:52+00:00

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.

Prevoz.org in Google Earth

Happy new decade!

2010-01-03T15:21:46+00:00

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!

Blogmarks for Sunday 03 January 2010

2010-01-03T13:53:12+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

[YouTube] It Could Be Worse

It could be raining

Let's stop talking about "backups"

Are you going to be able to restore them?

American Apparel Ads: the 50 Hottest in Company History

That's what you call mature advertisement. I like it.

[YouTube] RF plane with on-board camera flies through fireworks

Fun stuff. Everybody wants to shoot at planes with fireworks ;)

[Silverlight] Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience

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.

The Death Of The Blog Post

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

A very good 2010!

2010-01-01T19:56:28+00:00

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

Social media presence is not what your product needs

2009-12-30T19:01:48+00:00

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?

A confession of newage virtual schizophrenic

2009-12-29T18:09:05+00:00

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.

My simple running resolution for 2010

2009-12-27T18:38:46+00:00

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.

Blogmarks for Sunday 27 December 2009

2009-12-27T10:00:43+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

Mario's Closet

Awesome picture of Mario trying to choose an outfit

Papercraft Self Portrait

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.

The Generation M Manifesto

Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.

How to store Scotch Whisky

Some good tips for keeping your fine whisky fine

Location: Server

On Foursquare and the likes

2009-12-24T15:21:21+00:00

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.

Fog and Morphfest

In need of creating something

2009-12-22T21:45:07+00:00

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

Laško Eliksir #fail

2009-12-22T08:32:16+00:00

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.

dammIT 6 years young, learns how to write

2009-12-21T13:46:33+00:00

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

Buying USA sweets in Europe

2009-12-21T08:37:33+00:00

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.

Web 2.0 conferences in Europe

Blogmarks for Sunday 20 December 2009

2009-12-20T12:17:49+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

Gigapixel-Dresden.de - Large Size Panoramas

26 gigapixels of panorama. Awesome!

Iraqi insurgents using $26 software to monitor Predator video feeds

Hm, I guess they couldn't be bothered encrypting that stream? Or it's a major fuck-up. Interesting.

Idea Killers

Well illustrated: killers of ideas

Think your SSL traffic is secure?

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

2009-12-19T08:15:23+00:00

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.

#uksnow Map 2.0

2009-12-16T14:20:06+00:00

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.

Blogmarks for Sunday 13 December 2009

2009-12-13T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

The Facts About Bottled Water

Same story goes for France and more and more countries; there's perfectly good (better!) water in your tap people!

If they had Facebook in Star Wars…

LOL (yesh, I'm a nerd I guess)

Location: Server

Our [insert project here] is many things to many people

2009-12-12T16:49:46+00:00

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.

Mulled Wine Meetup – Ljubljana Christmas Lights

2009-12-10T14:37:37+00:00

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.

Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine – #Ljudmila #digitaldish

2009-12-09T21:15:01+00:00

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

Airports are transitional spaces without special meaning to people – it’s a non-place. So how can we construct a place inside an airport?
So what’s a sense of place? It’s hard to share and compare your sense of place with each other. Architectural approach might not be the best way to do it.
Sense of place doesn’t have to be attached to a physical space. It’s more of a virtual construct based on social interaction.
The problem: you don’t want to socialize, because you’re in the transit; your’ve very vulnerable and you care only about your travels.

Posters inside washrooms, that you can use to share things with each other. The posters were placed inside toilet doors.

The Ghost in the machine is used to criticize the idea of dualism by Descartes. Dualism – the body is just a vehicle of the mind. By having a belief that body is a slave the mind, it’s the same as saying that we’re just a ghost in the machine.
It’s about how you define the humanity – separation of human and being, human vs. animal. Animals are locked into instincts while humans are of free will.
Animal is the machine, while human is the ghost in the machine; meaning that we’re ghost of the animal.

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:

Anonymity
Degree of interest
Object of desire (something that you can interact with)

Look for it in near future in Ljubljana.

Assumptions of your ecosystem

2009-12-07T14:05:09+00:00

I’ve recently started helping out with limesurvey project, more specifically, their rewrite to CakePHP. One of the latest tickets I help with was to add optional table prefix, so you could have separate installations using the same database.

This is something you would never see in Django world, where everyone can afford as many databases as they have apps and you don’t have such artificial limits.

After discussing the topic of adding support for this, with all the problems it comes with, the reality is pretty grim – while we might have access to a number of servers, most of the [limesurvey] users are on cheap or simply outdated PHP hosting plans and still need this hack.

This is important because if we want to build great open-source application, we have to consider our end users and with it, their ecosystem of apps that they use. If you’re building a PHP software, you just can’t afford to not have table prefixes.

Could a Bug be Deliberately Coded into an Open Source Project for Financial Gain?

2009-12-06T18:42:32+00:00

For some bizarre reason, the thought at the top of my head last night at bedtime was… “I wonder if sometimes… open source developers deliberately code bugs or withhold fixes for financial gain?”

If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon. What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

I brought it up in #morphix to Gandalfar, one of my trusted open source advisors. We debated it shortly and he brought up several good points. While this may happen, the scheme is likely to fall apart quickly. The community is the resolver of situations like this. If the community finds a bug and offers a fix for the problem, then the developer will find themselves in a political combat situation. They would likely try to stifle the fix with some ridiculous excuses and/or start to censor discussion of the subject over mailing lists or on forums. Speculation could be raised about the issue and ultimately, people could start to fork the project elsewhere, unless the license of the project disallows that. In the long run, the community would resolve the situation by simply offering a new solution.

So while it could theoretically be achieved for short-term gain, in the long run the community makes the approach unsustainable.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I think we all know that closed source entities often engage in this practice. I could point out several examples that I have absolute knowledge of this happening, but I don’t think I have to. I’m not completely absolving open source from this either – look at what “official distributions” do in some situations… Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell (SUSE) for example. But in those situations, if you didn’t want to pay to upgrade the operating system and still resolve your situation, we all know that with the right application of effort and skill you could overcome it.

All in all, this whole thought process ends up with a positive note about open source. If it’s broken, you can fix it yourself or work with others to make it happen. The community – that incredibly large, global groupthink – keeps it all honest.

Or, you can put all your money and eggs into a closed source basket and find out you’re getting screwed when it’s too late.

It’s all about choice, right?

IDC: Linux support sales to break $1bn in 2012 (theregister.co.uk)
Bug in latest Linux gives untrusted users root access (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
Novell’s Work Popular… in Microsoft Blogs (boycottnovell.com)
Mentoring and Open Source (web2learning.net)
What Makes Apache Tick? (grep.codeconsult.ch)

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Blogmarks for Sunday 06 December 2009

2009-12-06T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

50 Best Free Fonts From 2009

Some are loud display ones, but there are some really nice and chique ones in there

40 jQuery Plugins Improving Your Website Look and Feel

Some good stuff in there

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them - Fake user interfaces

Wow, didn't know a single man was behind most of them. Check out Mark Coleran's screen design portfolio.

Social Media Count

Fun little stats meter

11 Fascinating Fractals in Nature

Fractals never cease to be amazing

[VIDEO] Hans Aarsman on the mysterious ways of beauty in photography

Good stuff

The unspoken truth about managing geeks

Recently, though, I have come to realize that perfectly healthy groups with solid, well-adjusted IT pros can and will devolve, slowly and quietly, into the behaviors that give rise to the stereotypes, given the right set of conditions. It turns out that it is the conditions that are stereotypical, and the IT pros tend to react to those conditions in logical ways. To say it a different way, organizations actively elicit these stereotypical negative behaviors.

Interesting read.

Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog?

Some tips to keep your postings interesting and engaging for readers

Location: Server

Mail WTF

2009-12-05T17:22:56+00:00

We got this parcel from our contractor by registered mail, which only I could fetch from the mail agency (as I needed to identify myself). Turns out they blew 8.15 EUR on shipping two chocolate characters. Well, thanks...

Turns out they didn't even have their administration straight, as they sent those because we apparently didn't show up at their party. This party. Whatever.

Location: Home

Captcha is such an ugly word

2009-12-04T08:16:46+00:00

Hat tip to Wikia who gave it a few moments of thought and renamed captcha to blurry word. It still doesn’t tell you why it’s there, but now you can at least find it. Before that, it was just a nonsense term (for someone not in IT/web field).

Python SMTP sink server

2009-12-03T08:49:29+00:00

Debugging email sending in your Web application is always tricky as you need a working SMTP and you also need to watch out that you don’t accidently spam real users (if you’re working on a local copy of real database).

There is a neat one liner that acts as a “sink smtpd” server, meaning that it implements SMTP protocol, so you app can communicate with it, while printing everything it receives on screen:

sudo /usr/lib/python2.6/smtpd.py -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

(via Django Snippets)

#webcamplj – community is alive and how you can help!

2009-12-02T15:01:38+00:00

One of the big questions we’re always wondering is – is there a community in this small country? Aren’t things better in bigger cities?

There are two answers to that:

1. Sure. It’s better out there and we don’t stand a chance here.
2. or we can say – It depends. We just need to give our community a chance to come out.

The fact that #webcamplj could be done so quickly, while attracting such a lot of high quality speakers and participants gives me hope. While Slovenian (web) IT community might have its quirks, it’s alive and more than willing to come out and share the knowledge. It’s not just the BarCamp like events, it’s also weekly web.zen.si events in Kiberpipa, as well as Webmaster piknik, etc.

With this in mind, I just wanted to say that #webcamplj was really a community effort with more than 10 people working in backstage to keep the event running smoothly and some continue working even after event to make sure that we will be able to archive all the collected knowledge.

But there’s a bigger point to this blog post – you can help too. Consider running your event within a specialized field of your interest, so others can learn with you and we can advance the state of your field. You don’t even have to be an expert, just someone who is interested, as research has shown that people learn the most from peers their same level.

Having said that, there are a few things we can offer

1. We have a wide infrastructure that can support a variety of events. From 30 people meetings up to 150+ person events. Relationships with potential venus and experience at what works where and under what conditions.
2. We can help you with promotion as we’re involved with a number of online and offline media projects or help with Facebook groups or Twitter lists.
3. We can also help you with sponsoring and optimizing costs of your event (if any), due to previous relationships.

Who is we? We are a loose community of people who invest our time and money to keep these open places, events and online communities running. Talk to anyone that seems responsible at any of the community events and start the ball rolling inside your field of interest.

H1N1 vaccin

2009-12-02T12:56:53+00:00

Location: Work

Blogmarks for Sunday 29 November 2009

2009-11-29T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

50 Amazing Realistic CG Portraits

Some are uncanny valley, others are jaw-dropping. All have a `wow' effect; what a work. Amazing.

Location: Server

Building a PPA for Ubuntu

2009-11-22T16:17:36+00:00

Ubuntu introduced something called Personal Package Archive, which is essentially just a .deb archive, built using Ubuntu’s build machine. You read that right, if you want to offer your own customized ubuntu packages for some reason (I wanted to build nightly .deb’s), you just have to upload your source packages to your PPA and Ubuntu will build it for you for i386, amd64 and lpia.

The whole process is completely painless. You just have to log into Launchpad, sign their code of conduct and create a new PPA archive. This will allow you to later use dput to upload it to their builders.

With this I’m happy to introduce nightlies of PSPP, free statistical application (a clone of SPSS):

https://launchpad.net/~gandalf/+archive/pspp

Blogmarks for Sunday 22 November 2009

2009-11-22T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

The Five Worst Inventions of 2009 - TIME

And the 50 best inventions of 2009.

Google Labs: Green robot icon

Gmail chat status (those green, orange, and red bubbles) indicates if your friends are online or not. But sometimes my buddies appear green when they're not really "online online" -- they just have chat open on their Android phones.

Your Looks and Your Inbox

Paradoxically, it seems it's women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the "average" member of the opposite sex.

Interesting piece of research

Location: Server

Gazing at the sounds hitting my ear drums

2009-11-21T09:11:48+00:00

http://ledazibao.free.fr/wallpaperfm/

Yay, photos, yay!

2009-11-18T18:37:15+00:00

The blogmark updates are a clue about me not being dead, but this weblog has been awefully quiet lately. I have been rather busy and have been microblogging my blurps at my twitterfeed, but that isn't a good excuse to neglect dammIT so badly.

Minor part of the quietness of my online expressions was our trip through southern Africa, of which I put a photo summary online. Yes, we saw leopards too:

More pictures will appear soonish. Most likely too many for your taste, but damn it was a beautiful trip, full of experiences that are really without a price. In a nutshell: starting off in Cape Town, South Africa, we went north through Namibia, spent some days in Botswana and finished in Zambia, with the magnificent Victoria Falls and a lot of other impressive nature.

In other news: today we had an official moment regarding our to-be-built home. The first official moment even, one which everyone had been looking forward a bit for a while yet as there hadn't been any meetings been organised so far, so meeting your future neighbours was still that: something happening in the future.

Well, today we still didn't meet our neighbours, but at least we met some of the people living only a few houses away, which was a pleasant experience. Then we all went outside to witness the placement of the first piece of flooring. Also, I took the first picture of our future home:

Location: Home

Backing up Snow Leopard Server with mlbackups

2009-11-16T01:00:22+00:00

Apple’s Snow Leopard Server product is one lovely implementation of UNIX. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using it for the power and simplicity that it offers. I’ve loved using Apple’s operating systems thanks to the combination of UNIX power and elegant design. Snow Leopard server is no exception to this rule.

The barrier to entry with Snow Leopard server was lowered when Apple reduced the price of the product to $499 USD and offered an unlimited client version only. It was even more palatable when the Mac Mini server version was introduced at $999. Previously, you could build your own Mac Mini server for about $1300 USD, but this new model allows small developers and workshops to get into the product at a very low price point.

With that in mind, I’m anticipating that there’s a number of people that are checking out Snow Leopard server for the first time. You might be enthralled with all of its features and niceties. One of those niceties includes Time Machine. However, when you look at what Time Machine really backs up, you’ll discover that it doesn’t back up any elements of your server data.

That’s right. Snow Leopard server is not backing up your mail data, Open Directory data or anything else of that nature. It’s backing up enough to restore the server to an operational state, but you’ll find yourself rebuilding the Open Directory and mail data from scratch. The Apple documentation states that they offer a number of other command-line utilities for backing up server data. These utilities are a number of powerful little guys like “ditto” and “rsync.” For the uninitiated, this means you’re now plunging into the world of search to discover a backup script that will save your hindquarters.

When I was researching this, I came across SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner most often. While these serve the purpose of making a bootable clone of your server drive, the developers recommend that you do not use their products against Snow Leopard server while the services are running. So, guess what? Now you’re back to looking into a script to stop all of your services, back up the data, then start them back up again.

One side note here: it’s dreadfully easy to stop services with a terminal command or bash script, but I’m not going to go over that here. If interested in this information, let me know and I’ll post it in another article.

After more searching, I came upon a little resource at http://maclemon.at – a site where a fellow has created the backup script “mlbackup.” The site is mainly in German, so it’s not entirely clear what to do with the program. However, it seemed to fit the bill for what I wanted so I decided to check it out.

mlbackup is provided as an installation package. After downloading it, double-click on the pkg to install it. Installation is pretty straightforward but implementation is a different story.

After installing mlbackup, it’s important to know what was placed on your system:

/usr/local/maclemon/* – the binaries for mlbackup and man pages
/etc/maclemon/backup/* – sample configuration file and globalexclusions

Start by copying the sample configuration file to a new file for modification. In my case, I created a backup configuration file that is named after the volume that contains the data for my server. My server’s name is “Ramona” and the server data is stored on a volume named “RA Server Data.” Therefore, I did:

sudo cp demo.mlbackupconf.sample ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf

This creates a copy of demo.mlbackupconf.sample and names it “ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf.” Next, you’ll want to edit that new file and make the necessary changes for your server.

I use “vim” to edit, so I type next:

sudo vim ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf

Using “vim” is an article in and of itself, so I’m certainly not going to cover its usage here. If you’re an innocent newcomer to vim, it can quickly turn you into an innocent bystander of a violent gunfight. Be careful.

Once you’re in vim, hit “i” for insert mode and make the necessary changes to the file. Notably, you’ll want to change some of the items listed below. I’m pasting in the contents of my file and the changes that I made.

# What is the name of this backup set?

MLbackupName=”Ramona_Server_Data”

# What is the name of this backup set?

MLbackupName="Ramona_Server_Data"

...

# What file or directory to Backup. (No trailing Slash for directories)

# Default: $HOME

MLsourcePath="/Volumes/RA Server Data"

...

# Where shall the Backups be stored (local path on the destination machine)

# Default: /Volumes/Backup

MLdestPath="/Volumes/Ramona Backup/mlbackups"

...

# Where to send the eMail notification about the backup to?

# Default: $USER

MLadminEmail="<my email address>"

…

Hit “esc” to get out of insert mode. Then hit “:” and type “wq” and enter. This will save the file.

In case you haven’t deduced it from examining the file, I have two external drives hooked up to this Mac Mini server. One is a firewire800 drive called “RA Server Data.” The other is a larger drive on USB called “Ramona Backup.” My intention is for mlbackup to execute against RA Server Data and back it all up to Ramona Backup. I intend for it to keep 5 sets of backups. mlbackup is pretty nice in that it will automatically clean up the prior backup sets so it only keeps the amount of sets you want. If you’re running this every day, you’ll have 5 days of backups.

One other note here. There’s a bug in the mlbackup script that if the “MLbackupname” parameter contains a space in the name, mlbackup won’t clean up the old backup sets automatically. Found this one out the hard way. If you intend to have a backup set name that contained spaces, replace the spaces with an underscore character to prevent this issue from biting you.

The first half of your mlbackup configuration is complete. You’ve told mlbackup what to do, but now you need to tell it when to do it. The old way of setting up scheduled tasks in OS X was to use a cron job, just like a regular UNIX or Linux implementation. However, Apple has replaced cron with launchd. Now you need to configure launchd.

Launchd is a complex beast. I’ll summarize what I learned about it. Launchd will fire up any tasks on your behalf at any time you define, much like cron used to do. It uses an XML file to define the job and depending on the parameters in the XML file and where you put it, launchd will do different things.

Since it’s so complex, I’m only going to talk about what I did for this launchd task. Your ideas and mileage may vary. I’m interested in hearing what others do with this, so be sure to let me know what you put together.

In my case, I created a new file in /Library/LaunchDaemons. I put it there because I want mlbackup to be executed as root (spare me the speeches, I’m trying to back up server data here) and I want it to have access to the system.

Here’s the contents of the file I created there in /Library/LaunchDaemons. The name of the file is at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
        <string>at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily</string>
  <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>Back up the disk RA Server Data every day.</string>
  <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
  	<true/>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
	<string>/usr/local/bin/mlbackup</string>
	<string>/private/etc/maclemon/backup/ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf</string>
  </array>
  <key>Debug</key>
  	<true/>
  <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
  <array>
  	<dict>
    		<key>Hour</key>
    		<integer>4</integer>
    		<key>Minute</key>
    		<integer>0</integer>
  	</dict>
  </array>
  <key>AbandonProcessGroup</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Again I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail here about what I did, but I will point out a few items of interest.

Note the “ProgramArguments” directive. There, you see that I’m calling mlbackup and giving it the full path of the config file I created earlier. This is vitally important, otherwise mlbackup won’t do a thing.

The “StartCalendarInterval” element tells launchd when to start the task.

The “AbandonProcessGroup” item is required if you intend mlbackup to send you email at the completion of the job. Without this element, mlbackup won’t send an email and may not clean up the backup sets in a way that you intend.

Finally, tell launchd that you created the file and you want the system to load it up and pay attention:

sudo launchctl load -w at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily.plist

Launchctl is the terminal command to force launchd to load up the file. For some odd reason, without the -w, it won’t load. Why you have to do this is unclear in the Apple documentation for Snow Leopard. In the past, -w controlled whether the job was enabled or disabled. In Snow Leopard it seems, without using -w, launchctl just looks at you funny.

That should do it. You should receive an email from the root user at the end of the backup task if all goes well. If you didn’t receive an email, be sure to check your backup volume and verify that something was written there by mlbackup.

One other note that I forgot to include. mlbackup is mainly just a bash script, but it does contain a newer version of rsync. mlbackup uses this version of rsync over the one that Apple supplied with OS X because it has some vital optimizations for the backup to take place.

That should do it. Hope this helps get your server backups running well.

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Blogmarks for Sunday 15 November 2009

2009-11-15T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

Mapping voter apathy by age

Interesting trends. Just go to vote if the time is there. Not voting is giving up your right to complain :)

Location: Server

Announcing WebCampLjubljana

2009-11-12T14:36:50+00:00

A while ago I ranted about general BarCamps and the need for more topical unconferences in Slovenia. Because the best way to change the world is to start doing it yourself, I’m happy to present you: WebCampLjubljana, a BarCamp like event focused around web development, design and anything else connected to it. It’s going to take part on the last Saturday of November (28th) at Tehnološki Park Ljubljana, who kindly donated the conference space.

There are three easy things you can do to help promote the event:

Go to WebCamp.si and check out the page
RSVP on Facebook and invite others
Tweet about it

.. and spread the word around.

Can’t wait to meet you at the event!

Blogmarks for Sunday 08 November 2009

2009-11-08T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

The calculus of Caffeine consumption

Great analysis

Location: Server

“Running is bad for your knees”

2009-11-04T17:35:08+00:00

It always amazed me at how two-faced our society is. On one hand, everyone is talking about exercise and healthy living/eating/etc, while on the other they’re criticizing and discouraging anyone who actually decided to follow the advices everyone is so full of.

The first one I always hear is:

running is bad for your knees, you’ll have trouble later if your running on pavement/dirt/at all.

Sadly, this is often the most encouraging thing people can say once they learned that someone decided to start exercising and already went for a few runs. There is often no alternative suggested, beside the one where you go for a beer with them instead.

I imagine the world is full similar excuses for other sports and this is not limited to running.

The second one, that I love is that once I start thinking about the food I eat. Mind you, just thinking and wondering what’s healthy. The answer is usually:

you have to eat meat and diary products because otherwise you’ll get malnutrition and sick

once again, coming from the people who survive their days on pizza and fried steaks, as you suggest that maybe having a more vegetable rich lunch might be a good idea (and I’m not talking about salads). Based on my anecdotal experience, the abuse received from conformist eaters must the be the hardest part of such diet.

Feel free to comment with the excuses you hear for not doing something that is good for you.

Blogmarks for Sunday 01 November 2009

2009-11-01T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

Apes are just like people, or are people just like apes?

What a lovely, emotional photo.

i feel it is incumbent upon me to draw attention to truly sublime works of art

Awesome videoclip from 1977

Dunbar's Number isn't just a number, it's the law

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily.

[Video] Microsoft's Many Multitouch Mice

Interesting. Not all of them are really practical, but there is potential there.

Translation From MS-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Tony Ross' "Distributed Extensibility Submission"

Ah, that's a lot better

Location: Server

Drobo Rebuild Time and Your Sanity

2009-10-30T23:14:54+00:00

I am one of the aspiring new media yahoos that bought into the fever gripping folks everywhere – the Drobo (a play on words for “data robotics.”) Leo Laporte, Scott Bourne and all of those folks loudly proclaimed about what a fantastic device the Drobo is.

I’m here to tell you it sucks.

Now, first a disclaimer – I’m moaning about the generation 1 Drobo. I know that a 2nd generation Drobo and a DroboPro have both been released and I’m sure they are much better devices – but there are still some serious problems here that you, the prospective buyer, need to be aware of. If that’s you, maybe you can skip down to the bullet list for consideration below.

I purchased a Drobo for use in our studio that is expecting to have terabytes of data and loaded it up with 4 1TB Seagate 7200.11 drives. The Drobo saw them, fired itself up and ran beautifully… or so I thought.

I noticed that the Drobo’s throughput was pretty slow. Oddly slow. No, ridiculously slow. It was so abysmally slow that it was clear from minute one that this thing was only going to be useful for long term storage of archived data or as a Time Machine disk. Okie, so it’s so slow that even as a Time Machine disk it’s problematic, but I suffered through it. I was “feelin’ droovy” like everyone in twit.tv said I would.

Then I lost a hard drive.

At first, the Drobo didn’t indicate there was a drive failure. It suddenly acted like it was out of drive space – at least that’s what it tried to indicate by flashing all four of the drive bays red and green. Uhm, okie. Either I lost all four drives or you’re trying to tell me something.

After a reboot of the Drobo, it told me that one of the drives was just bad. It flagged it with a red light and the software, Drobo Dashboard, informed me as such. (NOTE: If you use Snow Leopard, you can forget about using Drobo Dashboard in the 64-bit kernel as they still haven’t updated it yet. Snow Leopard has only been available to developers for almost a year now, guys). If you want to do anything in regards to checking error messages or updating firmware, you have to use the Drobo Dashboard kids. That means you won’t be using the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel. Oh well, Drobo’s not the only folks guilty of this oversight.

Anyway, after going back to the 32-bit kernel and checking to see what’s going on, the Drobo was upset about a drive failure. I ordered a replacement drive from Seagate and brought it into the office and replaced the dead one. Drobo then warned me that it couldn’t protect me from hard drive failures because it was rebuilding the array.

…and it was going to take 1,447 hours to rebuild.

What? Yes, that’s right. Better yet, the time to rebuild changed repeatedly. Sometimes it went to 887 hours, then 2,088 hours, then 48 hours, then back to 1,447 hours. Drobo couldn’t make up his mind. The drives were spinning relentlessly. It was beating on the drives so long and so hard that I became concerned after about a week that another drive might fail in the process. Fortunately, I could access the data on the drives and copy it off just in case, so I did so.

It’s been two weeks and the array is still building. It’s also still copying my data off the drive. That copy has been going on for about three days now. I’m sure the data copy isn’t helping the throughput at all, but having my array in a compromised state for two weeks without an accurate time estimate to completion is completely unacceptable.

I started to research what was going on here and noticed that other people around the net were experiencing incredibly bad performance issues as well, especially as it pertains to array rebuild times. The support kb at Drobo says “it can take some time” (not a direct quote), but two weeks is outrageous. Oh yeah, and it’s still not done by the way.

My copy still has about 11 hours left, so hopefully the data will be copied off the Drobo before it dies completely.

I started thinking about the ramifications of this problem and realized that the Drobo wasn’t entirely a good idea. I thought I’d bullet those out for you here.

Drobo uses a proprietary technology that is NOT based on RAID. The proprietary technology has marketing materials on it, but that’s about all you’re going to get. It’s the company’s secret sauce. It’s something akin to ZFS, but all in all, you’re just going to have to trust your data to them.
A key selling point to the Drobo is that this secret sauce allows you to use drives that are varying in capacity and it will squeeze every byte out of it that it can. That’s nice, but the performance of the unit is so poor that I no longer give a shit.
Drobo is very, very proud of their proprietary technology. So much so that they’re willing to charge you a premium for the privilege of using it, even if it is slow.
Drobo performs adequately for almost nothing (other than long-term get-it-out-of-my-site storage) until it has an issue.
If it has an issue, you will not know about it under the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel, if you’re not within eyeshot of the unit. The Drobo Dashboard can send you alerts. But if you’re using the 64-bit kernel, it’s not going to send you jack. It’ll blink at you from across the table… that’s about it. Hopefully this changes VERY soon.
The company charges a mandatory fee for firmware updates and support. If you don’t pay them a yearly fee, you will not get any support beyond the knowledge base. You also will not get software and firmware upgrades. I realize that charging for support is not an entirely new thing and many companies do it, but paying a fee for firmware updates is insane. (Garmin, I’m looking at you and those maps you want me to buy for the Nuvi, too).
The last bullet sucks so bad that you should stop considering a Drobo purchase.
Drobo is proprietary, expensive and forces a regular maintenance fee upon you. You are handing your data over to an unknown, unproven algorithm. Don’t do that. I shouldn’t have. I need to remember to be skeptical of things like this, stop buying into the hype and stick with a solution that has been proven (also known as RAID).

I ordered a Promise Smartstor DS4600 to replace the Drobo. It’ll do good ol’ RAID5. Once the copy finishes, I’ll be pulling the drives out of the Drobo and putting them into the DS4600. I’ll put the Drobo someplace else… maybe hang it off the server for large archival storage one day when I feed it some more drives. Until then, forget it.

ONE OTHER NOTE: No, I did not call Drobo Support. Perhaps I should have, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was expecting them to do aside from saying, “Yeah, that will take a while. Sorry buddy!” So I didn’t. Mea Culpa if you want to hold me to that, but I’m sure someone out there understands why I didn’t.

Update: Just in case any of you think I’m off my rocker (which I am, but that’s besides the point) – here’s a screen capture of my Drobo Dashboard. Keep in mind we’re starting on WEEK THREE of the rebuild. Check out the estimated time to completion after two full weeks…

Data Robotics going ‘enterprise’ (ubergizmo.com)
Drobos flying off the shelves (theregister.co.uk)
RAID’s Days May Be Numbered (hardware.slashdot.org)
Mac port of ZFS discontinued (macworld.com)

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A brand new NO CARRIER

2009-10-28T15:11:26+00:00

For those of you who follow my adventures here, but not necessarily my adventures over there, you should be aware that we’ve posted NO CARRIER Episode #11. This episode is very special to my heart because it’s the first show we did in our new studio (Whitey is still over Skype though). I think the audio quality is MUCH better. Of course, we’ll be tweaking as things move on, but the new studio and the new processes we’re using to lay down the audio sound damn fine if I do say so myself.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

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Exploiting Dunbar’s number for your business model

2009-10-27T10:48:11+00:00

Seth talked yesterday about Dunbar’s number, that Wikipedia defines as:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.^[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

One take on this is that there is no way of stretching this number without blurring people over 400 into a meaningless stream of faces that you fail to remember who they are.

I believe there is also a second approach, where you turn constraints into a business model. A big part of the 150 limit will be occupied by your non-professional friends and work colleagues, extended family etc. Leaving you just a limited room for true professional contacts.

Here is where the business model comes in: if you’re willing to sacrifice the relative amount of your personal network, you can in turn resell it to others via introductions and networking facilitation. One could call this occupation community management (as you need to know and have relationship with influencers), but it expends to all sorts of managerial out-reaching roles such CEO or public relations officer. At the end of the day, it also might be the reason why you’re a better freelancer.

How many of your personal contacts are you willing to sacrifice for your career?

Arrr, Slovenia, the land of pirates!

2009-10-26T16:00:23+00:00

After a very sad performance of Slovenian quasi Pirate Party last week, where we could see that they have no idea how copyright works, we now have even more evidence that Slovenia is a land of pirates that have no respect for other people’s intellectual work.

@skatey and @Zealoth point out to a blunt copyright infringement on two very important web pages in our online space.

First is University of Ljubljana, that should act as a basic building block of our society. Evidently, they have no problems with stealing a stock-photo that costs less than a cup of coffee, that has still a watermark on it! That’s the same institution that will gladly expel a student for copying a paragraph of text without proper citation.

Second example is a Startup competition at startup.si (they don’t deserve a link), that once again had no problem with taking stock photo with a watermark:

These two sites, and the institutions that they represent, send a clear message to our students and entrepreneurs:

We don’t respect intellectual property and you don’t need to either. Take note of that in your future professional work and when you form your own business.

Arrrrrrr!

How to achieve complete focus to listen to a podcast

2009-10-24T17:24:44+00:00

There are two ways to read your RSS feeds. You can skim through the text and the titles, getting general idea on the topic, or you can sit down, take a sip of the coffee and contemplate what you are reading. The problem with the second approach is that it takes real-time and dedication as those long posts often include videos that are several minutes long. A lifetime in terms of real-time web!

Somehow a video from Merlin Mann caught my eye yesterday. In the video (embedded below, that I highly recommend), he talks about play and how we have to give our bodies something to distract them while we think and come up with creative solutions. Like playing with pans, balls, etc.

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

The second interesting post I came about, and that I really wanted to talk about was from Dave Winer, where he wrote about Bruce Sterling’s talk at Reboot (mp3 of the talk).

He recommends the talk with the words:

Anyway, most of the time most of us are not in position to do anything about the mess in our lives. But listen to Sterling’s talk. It’s only 43 minutes. It might be the best 43 minutes you’ve ever spent.

So how do you go about listening such an important talk (and I’ve heard Bruce talk before, so I knew it’s good), without being distracted by everything around me?

Simple: put the running shoes on, load the talk on an iPod and go running. Since it’s a rather long talk, a 10km run is just about right.

What you’ll experience is a full submersion in the talk. Since your whole body is preocuppied with breathing and moving the muscles, and your ears are hearing interesting talk that your brain has to process, there is no time for wandering thoughts.

The only problem with this approach is that you have to pick up really stimulating talks that interest you as otherwise you’ll just suffer. But luckily our trusted gatekeepers keep posting links to them all the time, so it’s rather easy to find them.

My Ex Boss, the Linux Hero

2009-10-22T03:32:11+00:00

Tony Maro, the CIO of Evrichart (and also my boss from my old job prior to NASA) was interviewed by ZDNet!

Tony is an awesome, knowledgeable and forward-thinking guy. He’s way ahead of his time in terms of CIO leadership and the IT industry. He makes this look easy and roots his decisions in common sense, not marketing crap. It’s served him and Evrichart well.

Incidentally, we also interviewed Tony on NO CARRIER some time ago. I forget which episode it was, but it was one of the first shows. It’s really meaty on details if you’d like to take a list.

Oh, and I did the initial MySQL database design for that software

Congratulations, Tony! I hope you’re riding high on the success. You deserve it. Here’s also to hoping I can take my little endeavor just as far!

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Resume Layout

2009-10-18T12:34:29+00:00

After reading through a mildly interesting article via slashdot on resume styles and layout, I decided to ignore most of the tips and update my own.

My old resume had 3 pages, which were 2 pages too many (that I do agree with the article). Recently I came across a 3-column resume layout and I really liked it: all the information on one page while, if you do it carefully, it doesn't have to feel cramped. Like all resume's my new one is a work in progress, but by scrapping and reorganizing I've finally fit it all on one page.

In other areas I've been working along similar lines: data visualization on a single screen (dashboards). Many of my company projects are screaming for such an application, so I'm slowly developing my own flexible solution for this problem. Watch this space...

How to turn on subpixel rendering on external LCD on OS X

2009-10-10T14:54:59+00:00

A quick tip for all the fellow OS X users. It looks like OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard have problems with automatically turning on sub-pixel rendering for fonts when viewing text on external display. This means that your new huge display will show things differently from your built-in one.

After getting bit by this, I’ve discovered a simple fix in Apple support forums:

Open Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

and then log out and back in.

Check the thread for more commands.

Industy buzzword that needs to die: the “experience”

2009-10-06T21:44:11+00:00

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

One of the industry buzzwords that needs to go to the grave is the user “experience.”

Don’t quote me here, but I recall this buzzword being developed by Microsoft as part of the marketing campaign behind Windows XP. XP was supposed to be “experience” or “expert” or “Xtra stuPid marketing,” I’m not sure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an XP hater. But I’m definitely a hater of the term “experience.”

The user interface is just that, an interface. The term “experience” has its roots in the passive voice. Somewhere in there you’ll find that the user “experience” for computing generally sucks. It’s just a nicer way of saying “our user interface sucks, but it provides an experience.”

Whatever. Drop it. Look, other computing companies are just as guilty on this one (I’m looking at you RIM and Apple), but the fact is – everything great on the Internet is ruined by salespeople and marketers, period.

This is just one example of many.

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Blogmarks for Sunday 04 October 2009

2009-10-04T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

Video: Windows 7 launch party parody is bleeping genius

The original advertisement is downright creepy, the remix quite fun

Location: Server

Count the messages on your Exchange 2007 environment

2009-09-28T20:52:03+00:00

Are you curious about the hard stats of messages running around your organization?

Try this one in powershell on your hub transport server:

get-messagetrackinglog -start “mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss” -end “mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss” -eventid “send” -resultsize 9999999 | measure-object

This will pull stats for messages that were “sent”. To pull the number of messages received, change the “eventid” parameter to “receive.”

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Our Interview with Felicia Day

2009-09-28T02:00:56+00:00

The crops of our quiet labor are starting to bear fruit. Jeffrey Rosado, host/creator of “The Culture of Pop” and “DVD Marquee” landed a nice little interview with Felicia Day at DragonCon.

He’s posted the lovely tidbit here:
http://www.thecultureofpop.com/showarticle.php?id=178

Spread the word about the interview. There’s more to come!

Special thanks to Felicia Day for the time. We know she was INCREDIBLY busy and it was far cool of her to take time out for us.

Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? (geeksaresexy.net)
TV Tonight: Welcome (Back) to the Dollhouse (tunedin.blogs.time.com)
Video: Dr. Horrible Crashes the Emmys (shoppingblog.com)
[Videos] Season 2 of The Guild on YouTube (geeky-guide.com)

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Blogmarks for Sunday 27 September 2009

2009-09-27T04:00:02+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

I Just Made Love

IJML shows on the map of the world places where people just made love.

Okaaay...

The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences

Wow, just... wow

What is a Web Browser? No One Knows!

Sad but true

Four Web Browsers Go To The DriveThru...

So true...

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo

Software should know that after clicking "Okay" countless times in response to the question, we’ll probably click "Okay" this time too, even if we don't mean to. Software should know that we won’t have a chance to think before accidentally throwing our work away.

[Video on TED.com] Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

That's pretty impressive. Tad weird to have a projector on your belly, but it's a quite nifty idea and already worked out to something really interesting

Location: Server

On Leaving Zemanta

2009-09-25T11:17:10+00:00

As you’ve probably heard, I’ve left my job as a community manager and UX expert at Zemanta. It has been an incredible ride these two years and I can say that I’m now fully sold at the idea of startup business lifestyle.

Last three months in San Francisco were a great finish of this adventure, giving me time to think and reflect on how I want to expand my professional career. I realized that lately I wasn’t doing much of the things I love most: product development in every form – from designing, user experience, coding and of course interacting with users once we can get it to them.

With this in mind, the decision was simple. It’s time to find the next startup that I can help or found a new one, using some of the prototypes and ideas that are floating around.

I don’t have any concrete plans as of yet, as I plan to first help some friends with their projects and clean my backlog of things that I volunteered for and never got a chance to get around to. There will also be a lot of running as I prepare for my half-marathon.

If you have an interesting project, lets talk. I can’t wait to see to which city and continent the future will take me.

You know you've been neglecting your weblog

2009-09-25T10:38:18+00:00

... when you think you have forgotten to announce you are getting married, then find out you actually already did. I really should be here more :)

In other news: those getting-married-parties are damn expensive. Not going to get that spiffy new car for a long while I guess...

Location: Work

Fixing Mangled Contact Labels on iPhone

2009-09-24T17:26:49+00:00

: Image via CrunchBase

A coworker sent this along. I’ve had this issue on a few contacts and didn’t really have time to delve into it.

Name removed to protect the innocent and good intentions. Be very careful with this and make sure you have a backup of all data that you plan to manipulate.

—

FWIW …

After serially using every calendar/address book interface under the sun and transitioning to Snow Leopard with Exchange syncing, I ended up with a bunch of munged Address Book extension labels in my iPhone Contacts like:

item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-AssistantPhone>!$_

The extra long labels forces the text to be tiny, and rarely displays even then to say whether this is the work/home number.

If you encounter this problem and you’re a Mac user with a Unix background, I’m sure you can think of a dozen ways to fix this … else see some rudimentary Address Book/iTunes/command line steps below to handle large numbers of Contacts at once.

Caveat emptor.

–

The munged contacts had labels like:

item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-AssistantPhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessFax>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessHomePage>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessPhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-EmailAddress1>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-Home>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-HomePhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-MobilePhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_

… the bracketing parts are the problem. I can live with “HomePhone” versus “Home Phone”. YMMV.

Correcting this involves a few steps and a tiny bit of command line stuff:

- Attach your iPhone to your computer. Let it sync. Leave iTunes open.

- Open Address Book, select all your contacts, then File->Export to your Desktop, call it “backup.vcf” — don’t touch this file — if something goes wrong you’ll restore this.

- Do a second export of all the contacts to another file “munged.vcf”, or some name equally meaningful to you.

- Open a Terminal window, and cd to your Desktop (“cd ~/Desktop”). Just for paranoia’s sake, type “more *.vcf” and use the space bar to step through the files, making sure they contain all your contacts. Type “ls *.vcf” to confirm the files are the same size. Yeah — sheer paranoia, but who wants to reenter all their contacts?

- In the previously opened Terminal window paste this command and press return:

cat munged.vcf | sed -e 's/EX-//' | sed -e 's/_$!<//' | sed -e 's/>!$_//' > fixed.vcf

- in the Terminal window type “more fixed.vcf” — confirm the ABLabel fields are corrected before going onto the next step. If the fixed.vcf file doesn’t look right, stop and consult a local Unix person. You did something wrong or your problem wasn’t the one I had. Bail out or get help.

- Go back to Address Book, select all the contacts (if not still selected), then Edit-> Delete Cards. Delete all your contacts. Paranoia now seems appropriate.

- Go back to the iTunes window. Select the iPhone in the Devices list on the left (if not selected), then select the Info tab at the top of the main window and scroll to the very bottom to the Advanced items, select Contacts under “Replace information on this iPhone:”. Click Apply and let the phone sync. Check the Contacts on the iPhone to see they are gone.

- Go back to the Address Book window and File->Import, selecting (you guessed it) “fixed.vcf” from your Desktop. Check the reloaded vcards/Contacts.

- Go back to the iTunes window, and again select the option to Replace the Contacts info, Apply, and let the iPhone sync.

- Try the Contacts on the iPhone, and the labels should be corrected. Delete all the ancillary files on your Desktop.

- Avoid whatever odd combination of things you did that caused the problem in the first place.

In case you want to mess with any other fields/changes, vcard format is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard.

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Ping timeout

2009-09-24T14:27:03+00:00

So, erm, seen my twitter feed lately? :)

Location: Work

Quick Safari/Snow Leopard Tip

2009-09-24T14:02:02+00:00

If you’re having stupid amounts of trouble with your plugins loading in Safari 4 on Snow Leopard, go to your Finder and open /Applications. Right-click on the Safari app and choose “Get Info.” On that screen, you’ll see a checkbox to run the app in 32-bit mode.

Check that.

Restart Safari if it’s open.

Now you’ll find that your plugins magically work. I guess this whole 64-bit thing has caught developers with their pants down. Not sure how that happened since they’ve only been talking 64-bit on the Mac and Windows side for years.

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Scaling Guidance

2009-09-23T17:39:54+00:00

: Image via CrunchBase

At WWDC 2009, I stood up in a session on Snow Leopard server and lightly rattled Apple’s cage about its poor scaling guidance for the product. They were spending a great deal of time talking about the benefits of Wiki Server 2, but there was little to take away from the session on what to tell any prospective customers regarding cost.

I think in the Apple world, there’s this unspoken rule of “whatever’s good enough” to suffice for an environment. That’s fine, but what I’d really like to be able to do is recommend a solution that will do the job.

In the past, Microsoft was very good about providing specific scaling guidance. Around the Dark Ages (which I define as the day SQL Server 2005 came out and every product hence), Microsoft pulled back on several things. Most notably, they stopped providing specific scaling guidance on products and very clear documentation.

The documentation that was offered with each product varied and was mostly vague and notional. Once my Microsoft TAM asked me as part of some kind of survey if I thought that blog content provided by Microsoft developers and whatnot could be considered as official documentation. It seems like some folks within the organization believe this to be so, but Goddess forbid you end up in the India support organization… where only the script in front of them is official documentation.

Back to Apple. They provide documentation and it’s usually quite good. They provide fairly extensive documentation. Sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s still documentation. It’s something to point to and say, “See here, it says this should function this way.” That’s a nice level of comfort. What they do NOT provide is scaling guidance. They will never ever tell you, “It will take x amount of Snow Leopard servers to run Wiki Server 2 for 10,000 users doing y amount of data.” Why not? I suspect it’s because they don’t know.

As Apple becomes more and more relevant in the enterprise, this has to change. If I’m going to propose an Apple-based solution to any of my prospective customers, I have to have something to work from. It cannot be “we’ll just throw some servers in there, watch it, then buy more.” Most customers… at least the government for sure… do not like that approach.

Ironically, I started this post as a complaint against Microsoft for providing not just vague information on this… but a box full of vague smoked up with an opaque fog on the glass.

That sucks, guys. Stop contributing to the failures of the IT industry and fix it.

I’m looking at you too, Apple.

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Stunning time lapse video

2009-09-20T14:19:35+00:00

I don’t know who this guy is or what he’s up to, but this is one seriously inspirational chunk of digital video that I felt that I had to share.

Another Cloud Reel… from Delrious on Vimeo.

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Blogmarks for Sunday 20 September 2009

2009-09-20T04:00:01+00:00

Interesting links of this week:

The 21 Awesomest Superhero Mods for My Little Pony

Now that made me smile

Location: Server

Authors of LiveCD's blog too

Wedding pictures and a website of our own

We are married!

Hello?

On spreading knowledge

Google Account as OpenID

We’ve built the network: now where do we get the content?

Windows-only bios updaters and me

Experts Exchange

How to change the looks of Ubuntu 10.04's GDM

Home update

Fixed my weblog

Self organizing travel information in the wake of volcanic ash cloud

Michael Bennet’s Lame Response

Positioning of radio buttons

Visualizing budget of Slovenia for 2010

It's time to Django Bingo!

Lucid’s New Sound Indicator Applet Thing or How The Sound Applet Went To Suck

Showing a story of Kiberpipa’s intranet opensource project

Visualizing Slovenian IT tax spending

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass – How to Create A Viral YouTube Video

MobileCamp Ljubljana in late March!

RealTime WebCamp reflections

Presented at the first Django Meeting NL: Django Bingo!

Blogmarks for Sunday 07 February 2010

Back to school

Main website restyled

Announcing RealTime WebCampLjubljana

Blogmarks for Sunday 31 January 2010

My current reading list

18 years old +10

Do internet memes ever die?

Blogmarks for Sunday 24 January 2010

Django admin, view-only permissions

N900: Just how good is mobile Free software?

Blogmarks for Sunday 17 January 2010

N900: Is that Debian in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Slovenian government is trying to censor the Internet

The little things

Blogmarks for Sunday 10 January 2010

OS X tray icon overload

Migrating Prevoz.org to GeoDjango/postGIS

Happy new decade!

Blogmarks for Sunday 03 January 2010

A very good 2010!

Social media presence is not what your product needs

A confession of newage virtual schizophrenic

My simple running resolution for 2010

Blogmarks for Sunday 27 December 2009

On Foursquare and the likes

In need of creating something

Laško Eliksir #fail

dammIT 6 years young, learns how to write

Buying USA sweets in Europe

Blogmarks for Sunday 20 December 2009

Avatar

#uksnow Map 2.0

Blogmarks for Sunday 13 December 2009

Our [insert project here] is many things to many people

Mulled Wine Meetup – Ljubljana Christmas Lights

Monitor and Display: an image of the Ghost in the Machine – #Ljudmila #digitaldish

Assumptions of your ecosystem

Could a Bug be Deliberately Coded into an Open Source Project for Financial Gain?

Related articles by Zemanta

Blogmarks for Sunday 06 December 2009

Mail WTF

Captcha is such an ugly word

Python SMTP sink server

#webcamplj – community is alive and how you can help!

H1N1 vaccin

Blogmarks for Sunday 29 November 2009

Building a PPA for Ubuntu

Blogmarks for Sunday 22 November 2009

Gazing at the sounds hitting my ear drums

Yay, photos, yay!

Backing up Snow Leopard Server with mlbackups

Blogmarks for Sunday 15 November 2009

Announcing WebCampLjubljana

Blogmarks for Sunday 08 November 2009

“Running is bad for your knees”