December 2005
37 posts
Spell
Heather describes how they skip resumes at Microsoft that have spelling errors. I’ve also found it pays off to spell correctly when writing anything. Unless you’re doing a “teh kewl” ad or banner, but even in that case, you’d better know really well what you’re doing. So the basic rule of business writing is: spell correctly. Because spelling shows you can have,...
ID fraud
Bruce quoting an article from The Register about the UK ID scheme.
Uhh.. don’t even get me started on the ID-s. I used to work for a pretty advanced ID scheme and was in contact with many other European schemes. The short bottom line here is that it’s difficult for me to take seriously any Briton or American who speaks about the subject, since they haven’t implemented or seen a...
Google Personalized -- American only
I never realized that Google Personalized (what’s with the IG?) has got more features since I last checked, and is now much like Windows Live, where you can syndicate your news headlines, blogs, weather and all that kind of stuff onto the homepage. (Gmail’s mail too I guess, either already there or upcoming).
Here’s a hint, Google: don’t be American. Here’s what the...
Call of Duty 2
I just finished Call of Duty 2 on the Hardened level.
Sure, I’m a WW2 buff. And sure, COD2 and it’s predecessor, COD with the “United Offensive” are nicely done. But they fail to leave me walking away with a long-lasting impression. They’re repetitive and become dull and boring after a while.
All missions follow more or less the same pattern: overtake one or more...
How HMV and Activision made me destroy a game I...
Well, not the game itself, but certainly the packaging.
A month ago or so, I bought COD2 from the HMV store in Trocadero in London on Piccadilly square. A few weeks later when back home when starting to install it, I just couldn’t open the box since there was some red tab preventing me from opening it. Initially I couldn’t figure out what it was, except that it was keeping the box...
My latest baby launched
I absolutely wanted to get this out before the end of the year. I managed, and I’m happy that I did, because this means we have a fancy fun platform to work with in the new year.
The migration, compared to the others I’ve done, was relatively painless. We wrote a custom plugin for our previous blog system that dumped the entries, comments and trackbacks into the Movable Type import...
Why blink.com sucked and del.icio.us doesn't
Ari Paparo Dot Com: Getting it Right. Insightful: how to make mistakes and build something that people won’t find useful, or find useful but you make it too difficult to use. del.icio.us is brilliantly simple and works. I wonder if Josh ever saw blink.com or modelled after it, avoiding its mistakes.
Joel's shipping hack
Joel’s writeup on how they made an ad-hoc logistics system. I LOVE THIS. I love hacks. “Hack” is not just something in software, although this system involves software too. Hack is when you put some stuff together ad-hoc to output more stuff in a fun, cool, efficient or innovative way. So it can involve software, but as you read in Joel’s article, in this case it also...
Word from Linus about usability
Word. Not really Gnome-specific logic, and options are always a balancing act, but this is just very clearly put.
This “users are idiots, and are confused by functionality” mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply...
Excel 2003 can't export proper CSV
Sounds weird doesn’t it? Excel 2003 is supposed to be able to do everything. And mostly it can. But on the CSV export front it sucks tons more than OpenOffice, which has its own deficiencies.
So here’s the story. In OpenOffice, when exporting data into CSV, you can choose both the field separator (typically comma) and content delimiter (typically double quote). Which is a wise thing,...
Thunderbird can rewrap e-mail
I already said Thunderbird rocks. And little by little TB keeps reminding it to me every day.
E-mail wrapping is something you can have tons of fun with. Basically some RFC says that plaintext e-mail should be wrapped, yet many mailers don’t do it when you’re sending your mail. And then mailers behave differently about received mail — some wrap it and some don’t. So all...
Detaining a suicide attacker
From ABC news:
Belgium authorities raided homes Wednesday and detained 14 suspects with links to a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq, including a Belgian woman who allegedly carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad.
So wait… the woman first carried out a suicide attack, and probably blew herself up, and was THEN detained? What the writer probably means is that the...
Learning how to write
Rondam writes on writing.
There are two main ways to learn to write: 1. Read 2. Write
Another way of saying it, don’t remember who said it but it’s very true. “There are no great writers, only great rewriters.” It’s all about editing.
So when starting to write some copy for anything, here’s how I have found it works. Could expand on it tons more but...
Doom 3 -- good stuff
I just finished Doom 3.
I had my doubts about it. I wasn’t too impressed by the demo — it promised just loads and loads of same ugly-looking boxed corridors. Dynamic lighting is nice, but it can’t save crap playability. Still, it wasn’t so bad that it would have totally discouraged me from going for the full version. Which I did.
The good news about Doom3 is that it is...
"Happy Holidays from Starbucks"
I would have been tricked by this too. Not horribly intrusive, kind of fun. Limited reach though. (Via Heather.)
Anti-robot label in Internet bank
I just realized this morning how my Internet bank uses an extra anti-robot technique in their net bank to prevent automated logins. During an overload, I could see how the page contents was already retrieved but it kept downloading an image which indicated which code from my password card I should enter. The empty spot is indicated with the ugly red circle.
Here’s how it looks in its...
Les Blogs business card roundup
So let’s see now who I talked to and what’s interesting there.
Sarik from OpenBC — some LinkedIn-type thing but not invitation-only, anyone can get in. His brother and the brother’s lady were also around in town later at night. They had been around to some party at the Estonian embassy recently. They said the Estonian ambassador to France was an old gentleman who said he...
The Django project rocks
A few weeks ago, i was at the London Web Frameworks where Django, Catalyst and Ruby-on-Rails developers talked about their stuff. I was most intrigued by Django because of the good quality and content of the presentation. I hadn’t heard or seen much about it previously, so I went ahead and took a look. And was still happy.
A “web framework” is something that has standard parts...
Filter by flag in Thunderbird?
I love Thunderbird. It’s killer features for me are quickfilter by text, quickfilter by status (the “View” dropdown), e-mail threading and auto-spamkilling, plus it’s just a nice solid mailer.
There’s one thing I’m missing though. In the “View” quickfilter dropdown, I’d like to be able only messages that are “flagged”. I use...
I don't understand Channel 9 feeds
I’ve been watching Channel 9, but recently I’ve found it quite hard to navigate. It used to be so that their RSS feed contained Microsoft-generated content — videos and things. Which was great. But since a while ago, their RSS is full of the random user forum threads about random stuff. I’m not interested in that as much as what Microsoft itself has to show and say.
So it...
Backchannel and group organization
Les Blogs was interesting because it was a mini-model of a group organization using social tools to self-organize in real time. I don’t usually by all this “realtime organizing multimedia collaboration instant seamless 2.0 yadda yadda” stuff, but this was just interesting. The choice of tools was not too wide and everyone was free to use whatever different subset suited him and...
Les Blogs day 2
Let’s see now what was up today…
(oh and about Sunday one more thing that I forgot… at the McDonald’s, or Mickey D’s, near my hotel, there were pigeons walking around inside and even on the second floor. That’s that about the “my cat” type of blogging for this post, back to real stuff…)
The program.
Started off with Mena Trott and her...
Contrast of the Opera
Grandness of the Opera…
… and some poor bastard sleeping on its stairs with a sleeping bag. (There was also another one who was Muslim praying at the time so I didn’t shoot that.)
FON
Many people blogged this before but somehow I didn’t pay attention to it initially. Having looked now, it’s kinda interesting. FON: WiFi Revolution. Basically grassroots WiFi aggregation where you share your wifi and in return, can use other peoples’.
I’m not sure it will really fly because of the following reasons. (Although they managed to get a cool domain and name and...
Les Blogs - Monday second half and party
Citizen journalism and mainstream media. Interesting folks from Global Voices Online whose mission is to be sort of mediating blog for other blogs outside America and Western Europe. Rebecca who defines herself as “recovering TV-reporter-turned-blogger” had a nice position at CNN but gave it up because she couldn’t do stories like she wanted and the editors wanted her to cover...
Got the TypeKey authentication to work
Apparently it wants that your TypeKey profile “weblog preferences” section contains only the root address of your blog (http://www.jaanuskase.com) and nothing more. The instruction is not horribly clear: “Enter the addresses (URLs) of your application”. And if you enter both the root and the subdirectory, it doesnt work.
Les Blogs first half-day
Some good stuff here. Scoble and Shel Israel doing their usual cluetrain thing. Obviously no preparation or real subject of any kind, but in this setting not really required either
The panel where I was in was kinda OK, although some people think it came out as too corporate. I wasn’t really sure of the “protocol” so I went for the suit and tie to be sure. Not too many...
Worst quiz answers ever
Didn’t see these published anywhere else. Got from a random e-mail list I’m in. Some of them truly entertaining.
From The Weakest Link (BBC2):
Robinson: In Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, the third and final book is called The Return Of The… what?
Contestant: Jedi.
From Quiz Night (BBC Radio Lancashire):
Question: Who discovered gravity when an apple fell from a...
Sunday in Paris
Having arrived last night and worked till half into the night, got up early enough for breakfast, and then headed off into the gloomy morning.
Weather not too good, overcast with occasional showers but still walkable outside. First task was to find the conference venue to know where to come tomorrow and that went OK. Then thought of heading into the town by metro but since the weather was not...
Croissant vs crepes
Matt and Andy, heading for the same event as myself tomorrow, are having trouble in French. I myself don’t really speak French, but then again, I kind of do. After having been around Europe for a bit, it all just starts to make sense even if you don’t really “speak” the language in the official terms. And a sense of humour and a smile always help to get by in stores and...
Free Skype Zones fun
Wifi prices at my hotel are ridiculous: 10min 3€, 30min 5€, 1h 10€, 24h 25€. In London it’s also something like 5 pounds for 1h in places. (And in Tallinn, it’s less than 1€ for 24h but not everyone fits into the promised land
So anyway, I sit down at my hotel and start to go hmm, do I really have to pay this nonsense? (And the 24h you can’t just pay with card, you have to go...
Elevator indicators
From a hotel in Stockholm.
The picture is not horribly clear (I really SO need to get a camera) but there are three vertical columns, indicating three elevator shafts, and the red blurps in them indicate current position of the elevator. The TV was placed right next to the actual three shafts so you get a clear picture of current elevator positions.
Fairly understandable compared to the...
Google video no likey france?
Trying to play a video when sitting in a Paris hotel, and it tells me “Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country. We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.”
Like, WHAT? It’s not like I’m in Mongolia or North Korea or something. I’m in a “tier 1”...
All your cutlery, please
Someone help me understand this. They keep removing people’s cutlery and scissors and knives and what not in the airports. Which I guess is good for security or at least creating an image of it. Yet in the past two years, no one has shown any interest in my laptop security cable that you can use to attach your laptop to the table. The cable, as far as I’m concerned, would be a premier...
How to build a blog in 5 minutes
Building a blog with Movable Type is pretty straightforward if you know what you’re doing. I’ve not been a MT user for too long, but once I got my head around it, it’s pretty cool. For me, it goes like this.
Basic install
get the software from the site
set up the database
check with mt-check.cgi that all of the required and most of the optional modules exist (the ones you...
DHS surveying my hotel?
From the elevator in my hotel in Paris. The text reads: Warning: This area under temporary surveillance by the Homeland Security Advisory system. Do not remove this sticker.
I wonder what that is about? I didn’t notice any DHS agents or tracking devices around. Maybe it’s a prank that some US tourist pasted there? Makes you feel uneasy nevertheless. (What’s DHS doing in...
Hello
Hello world.
I figured it’s about time to have an English blog, because some people have asked me for it. And even without that, there’s some things that you’d want to write down once in a while. Now I’ve had an Estonian blog for a while, and will probably continue with it, but for obvious reasons, its readership is pretty limited.
