Jaanus

I’m a RSS junkie and keep an eye on tons of feeds, both for work purposes and for staying in touch with people I just happen to know. So it’s important for me to have good reading tools. Similarly, I also maintain a number of personal and professional blogs. While all the blog softwares have web-based backends for posting, they all have different shortcomings, and I’ve started to look in client-side posting tools. So the conversion from Windows to OS X was interesting from this perspective.

I start with posting because it’s easier. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to exist any good free software for this under OS X. The “reference experience” is Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. I’ve been bashing Microsoft from time to time, but WLW is a truly useful piece of free software. (Yea yea… free as a beer, not speech. Whatever.) Easy to install and run, with truly useful no-nonsense interface that produces clean HTML and works fine with Movabletype and Wordpress API-s. Especially useful is its Flickr plugin that lets me add pictures from my or anyone else’s Flickr account with a few clicks without copy-pasting anything.

On Mac, nothing like this exists. I know that there’s this Qumana thing that some people use. Its evaluation went very smoothly: it died on me and wouldn’t start up. Bye bye Qumana. Next!

Then there’s ecto. This worked on OS X. It supports many API-s and in some subtle ways has better features than WLW. For example it knows how to post the “body” and “extended entry” fields for MT (WLW has only one big content field which you need to split up in the backend later manually, if you want to use the “extended” field). But I didn’t like the interface and there was no way for me to easily insert Flickr pictures. Yea yea, I know there is some plugin that you can put in your browser to post from Flickr site or whatever, but it wasn’t easy to install and use. Anything more complicated than the WLW way doesn’t cut it, and WLW has set my expectations to a level that is very very hard to beat.

So… after Ecto trial expired, I didn’t find it to be worth my money. I keep using the web-based backends or WLW. On OS X, I’m very inclined to post more complicated posts using WLW running under Windows XP in Parallels. That’s a shame, OS X. You should do better.

I started reading blogs a few years ago with the Sage plugin for Firefox. I quickly outgrew it and switched to FeedDemon that, at the time, seemed like a truly useful piece of software. And it was.

With the OS X switch, I needed to keep reading on multiple computers (I like to use my home desktop when at home). So I also put FeedDemon on my home Windows machine, and I put NetNewsWire trial on OS X. In theory, FeedDemon and NNW are supposed to sync your feeds and read/unread posts through your Newsgator Online account. And it sorta kinda works.

“Sorta kinda works” is the worst enemy of “just works”. NNW and FD synced my feeds most of time, but they didn’t sometimes. Things that you marked read in one client sometimes still appeared unread in the other and so forth. In other words, you couldn’t really trust the software to perform up to your expectations. And it started to suck.

I wasn’t also a big fan of the NNW interface, it was a bit worse than FD and didn’t let me do things as efficiently.

So I started thinking of using a browser-based solution. If I think of it, the only true architectural advantage of a client-based feedreader over a web-based one is that you can read things offline. I thought about how often I actually needed to do this, and concluded “not nearly as often as I initially imagined”. In all other aspects, like the UI and speed and overall look-n-feel, these days web- and client-based applications are competing on equal levels, neither needs a handicap over the other.

I had tried out Google Reader with their first alpha a long time ago, and at the time it sucked very badly. I can’t really remember what exactly was wrong with it, but I just walked away since it wasn’t working or any good. So now when I tried the latest version of Google Reader, I was absolutely blown away. I immediately switched to it and ditched all the clients and haven’t looked back ever since. So I’m sorry, Nick, you and Newsgator can keep the money I gave you for FeedDemon, but I don’t think I’ll look at your products again anytime soon, since Google Reader kicks your ass, and here’s why.

Google Reader is simply the best feed reading and managing experience that I’ve ever seen so far, and this is why I keep using it now. It’s fast and responsive as hell. It lets me very very easily switch between different modes, like reading one feed vs the whole category; reading only unread vs all items; reading things in a “list” vs “expanded” view. With some feeds, I want to quickly scan hundreds of titles and decide if anything there is good. With others, I want to scroll through all the entries, perhaps containing pictures. With yet others, I want to read everything in detail. Google Reader lets me do all that on both OS X and Windows in a no-nonsense way and doesn’t force me to learn different things on different platforms. It keeps things in perfect sync between all my computers.

I’d put it this way, similarly to Scoble, that “Google Reader makes reading blogs and RSS feeds fun again.” It used to be a chore that took ages. Now it’s fun and I can do it literally five to ten times faster than before. Thus, I also see the relevant stuff more quickly. It used to be that I had to put a chunk of time aside to read feeds, and could do it maybe only a few times a week and missed a lot of the timely conversations. With Reader, I can do it ten times a day if I want, and am on top of things again.

WIth client-based solutions, you often want to “jump to the browser” to “do more” with the feeds, like maybe share or blog or bookmark them, since the client doesn’t give you the full browser experience with all the plugins. So you need to jump between the client and browser window. With a browser-based window you’re, well, already in the browser all the time, so you don’t need to jump anywhere.

Google Reader also lets me very easily run a link blog. Mine is here. I’ll also put it in the sidebar one day. And/or perhaps construct a mega-feed that combines my blog, del.icio.us, flickr and Google Reader shared items feeds.

Now… you might argue that there are some privacy implications here with giving your blog reading data to Google. Typically I would agree, I think that people blindly trust too many web- and server-based solutions and they can turn out to be evil like people abusing your data. But I don’t think there’s any such case for feedreaders. To start off, blogs and feeds are public by nature. (There are very very few internal protected feeds that I track, but I don’t do that with Google Reader.) So all I’m giving Google is my “attention data” — the list of feeds that I read, and how exactly I do that. It would be very easy to integrate features in the web UI that track your reading habits (do you use list- or text-based view? Do you use mouse or keyboard? How long do you spend reading which feed and post?).

It was suggested that Google Reader and its shared items may one day overtake Digg. That’s true, but it’s just one tiny example in the huge realm of opportunity that Google has with this. I’m happy to surrender this data to Google with the hope that the smart people there will figure out how to use it to improve my browsing and blog-reading experience, if you will, with “attention management” features or whatever. In the realm of “attention management” there has been a lot of academic talk but very little practical action that would be useful to me as a person. Perhaps Google and its reader will step in that direction.

Or if not, the Google Reader is a great tool as it is.

True, there are some tiny cosmetic grievances with Google Reader. Like it doesn’t display feed favicons. And sometimes it has temporary trouble adding some new feeds. Maybe some other really really tiny stuff. But while the client apps spend a lot of time in getting such details right (like being anally correct about feed favicons), they don’t even get to close to Reader with the core reading experience.

A German tourist ends up in Montana instead of Australia. Just recently some of my colleagues in Tallinn got some letters from the US that had “Thailand” stamped on them. So en route from US to Estonia they had been to Thailand. Tallinn, Thailand, pretty much the same thing. (Via RISKS.)

One of my trades is being a web nerd. I build and mess with websites. Either from scratch or based on some engine. Be it a blog or CMS or who knows what. So one of the first thing I did in Mac OS X was to set up a web development environment where I could continue messing with websites.

I’ve noticed a trend over the past few years. Macheads used to be almost exclusively in the domain of advertising and creative design. And maybe also sound engineering. But in the past years after the release of Mac OS X, it’s become “cool” for web nerds to be working on a Mac. Perhaps even not so much for client or hardcore backend developers (it’s kinda hard to write a Windows GUI program in Mac OS X), but exactly for web nerds who build websites.

I think the primary driver for Mac-webnerd love was the release of Mac OS X, derived from NEXTSTEP. Before Mac OS X, I’m not totally sure what was under the hood of the GUI. But I don’t think it was anything incredible really worth talking about from a web nerddom perspective. It was proprietary and not really compatible with the rest of the world and the two large “mass-market kingdoms” of software, the Windows and *NIX worlds.

With Mac OS X, what you got running under the hood is a nice *NIX-like system. With its quirks, for sure, but it’s much closer to *NIX-servers that will are eventually powering many production websites than any Windows box could ever be.

Another contributor to webnerd love is of course the Intel switch which meant that machines got a lot faster and nicer and it was now much more feasible to run virtual machines with Windows, Linux and other OS-es within Mac OS X, so you could instantly check out your work in a multitude of environments — this is essential if you’re working on web frontend development and need to check stuff with multiple browsers or several platforms.

So without more theory blabber, I’ll take a look at the elements of my web toolkit that I’ve found handy on Mac OS X. It’s quite meager comparing to the real web pros and stars, but it does the trick for me. I’m oriented on backend development so you won’t find any hardcore HTML/CSS tools here. I don’t know too much about frontend engineering so I’ll happily leave this trade to the pros.

A good terminal is one of the most important nerd tools, and OSX shines here, with its very fine terminal. The Windows built-in shell is a joke. I can actually get nicer terminal in Windows with PuTTY for remote systems than I can get for my local system. I’m sure you can install all sorts of emulation toolkits like Cygwin or Unixutils and get local Bash shell and whatnot, but why bother when a proper terminal with proper Bash is on Mac OS X out of the box.

The OSX terminal is the first one that I’ve ever seen that can deliver proper CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters in the terminal window. On Windows, I have no idea how to make it work. On Linux, I probably could have made it work with tons of extra font packs. On OS X, it’s just there. (I’ve found one character set that doesn’t work for me on OS X out of the box — Georgian. How do I get Georgian characters without messing anything else up?)

I want to be able to navigate the filesystem. I’m the kind of nerd who you can put behind any fancy system, but who knows that in its guts, there’s still a bunch of files organized in folders/directories. I don’t understand all the details, but I want to be able to at least navigate myself to those files for the peace of my mind.

In OS X, Finder is kinda nice but it has its shortcomings. It doesn’t show me hidden files (e.g .profile in my home directory), or even if it does, it doesn’t let me do anything on those (like right-click and edit). I have to use special commands in my text editor to do that.

By default, Finder doesn’t have a global shortcut for opening itself from any other application. In Windows, there’s only one global key shortcut that I use, but it’s hyper-useful. Winkey+E opens Windows Explorer no matter what else I’m currently doing. So it’s handy to get to my filesystem. Finder doesn’t have this — the best I can do is click with mouse on the Dock icon. However, with Quicksilver it took me exactly 10 seconds to figure out how to create a global shortcut Mac+E (appears unused in most apps) to open a Finder window.

There are some things in Finder that I’ve not got used to yet. In Windows Explorer, you can right-click and drag and drop stuff somewhere and upon release, a context menu opens that asks if you want to move or copy. On OS X, you need to memorize that if you drag, it moves, and if you Alt-drag, it copies… except if you’re working across different volumes, in which case it copies in any case.

And to make things worse, if you’re “copying” folders with same name over each other, then the contents of the destination folder gets OVERWRITTEN, instead of new content being added to old. This is seriously sick.

So for more fine-grained filesystem operations, I got muCommander that presents the familiar Norton/FAR/Windows Commander two-pane interface and navigation. It can also do simple SFTP operations, although it doesn’t work with more complicated setups like ssh portforwarded tunnels, in which case, enter the next app…

Cyberduck. A simple (S)FTP program. Nothing more interesting, but does the job fine differently from mucommander that pukes on more complicated setups and simply doesn’t work, e.g if you’re tunneling through localhost and portforwarding server into several other servers.

A text editor is the basic webnerd tool, since most of the things you’re working with are source files, configuration or scripts or any other plaintext stuff that requires editing. The built-in TextEdit is too stripped-down, but TextWrangler does the job nicely for me. People around me also rave about TextMate, maybe I’ll have to give it a run one day, although I haven’t found anything really missing in TextWrangler, perhaps only folding code blocks.

Enough of the external utilities. The real deal, the server! We want to run code! Oh yes.

Enter MAMP. Like LAMP means Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP, a popular setup for running web applications, MAMP is the same thing but on Mac OS X.

OSX has Apache bundled with it, and looks like PHP too, but the Apache version is old and doesn’t have important modules like mod_ssl by default bundled with it (or there is no default example config for them). Whatever the case, MAMP is easier to manage and configure as it’s totally self-contained and you know where to find and keep everything.

Oh my oh my… now THAT is actually THE easiest Apache-MySQL-PHP setup that I have literally EVER seen. You download the program, drop it in Application folders, and run. Zero configuration — everything is pre-configured with reasonable values. phpMyAdmin to administer MySQL is bundled and pre-configured, so you can start messing with databases right away.

Beautiful. Simply beautiful. All developer servers should be easy like that.

Oh, and mod_ssl is bundled by default in MAMP’s recent versions. If you want to build SSL-enabled websites, say with client certificate authentication, then that’s handy. In Win32, I understand these days you can run it too, but you need to download external libraries from three different places and spend a ton of time configuring. In MAMP, the only thing you need to configure is the site keys and certificates.

For running Apache with SSL enabled, I haven’t found how to do it in GUI though. You need to go to terminal and then…

/Applications/MAMP/bin/apache2/bin$ ./apachectl stop
/Applications/MAMP/bin/apache2/bin$ sudo ./apachectl startssl

In the latter command, you need to use sudo because I’ve used the default HTTPS port of 443, and you need to use sudo for binding to ports lower than 1024. (So you also need to use sudo to stop it later.) You could also use a higher port, but if you’re using Firefox 2, it has decided to become your nanny and you need to manually enter the selected port number in about:config in the setting network.security.ports.banned.override. (I have yet to understand what’s the rationale or security logic for this, since I can’t imagine what or how it makes secure, comparing to the “allow all ports for HTTPS” logic.)

One of the software that I build sites and blogs with is Movable Type, so my next challenge was to get it working on OSX. And since I already had MySQL as part of MAMP, it obviously made sense to reuse the same server also for MT databases.

Perl is core part of OSX, but my default, it doesn’t have the MySQL module. You need to install it yourself from CPAN. CPAN is bundled with OSX and this would be otherwise fine, but it requires the MySQL developer libraries that are not bundled in OSX, as MySQL itself is also not there.

I ended up going the hard way, installing the whole mysql-dev developer package from MySQL.com (but not running it, just installing). After this, the Perl MySQL DBD compiled and installed fine.

Now another problem arose. Looks like it’s hardcoded in the MySQL DBD module that when talking with localhost, it expects the socket to sit in /tmp/mysql.sock. Which is indeed the default location in most cases, but MAMP places the socket under its own directory. And you can’t create a permanent symlink in /tmp either, because the socket gets re-created every time that MAMP/MySQL gets run, and the previous link is no longer valid.

So what I ended up doing is, as usual, ugly but works. I put the following piece of code in my .profile. (.profile is a little Bash script in your home directory that gets run every time you open the terminal, assuming you haven’t changed the default config and replaced Bash with something else.)

if test -S /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock
then
    if test -S /tmp/mysql.sock
    then
        rm /tmp/mysql.sock
    fi
    ln /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock
fi

What this does: it checks if the MAMP MySQL socket exists (meaning that MySQL is running). If so, it nukes the previous socket in /tmp if it exists, and links the MAMP one to /tmp. After doing this, Perl can connect to the MAMP MySQL just fine. (Of course, this requires that you run the terminal once before connecting to any Perl MySQL application, but I do this anyway.)

Sometimes you need some Unix tools that are not part of the default OS X installation. You could of course just pull them individually from Darwinports or something, but the preferred solution for this seems to be Fink, a complete package management and installation system. It installs everything in the self-contained /sw root directory, so if you don’t like Fink, I suppose you could just nuke /sw and get rid of its apps.

So… there. That’s how I build sites these days. :)

UPDATE: a reader sent me the following about hidden files.

I stumbled on one of your blog entries while looking for quick setup notes for SSL and MAMP. Assuming you haven’t found it already (old blog entry), there is a Dashboard widget that shows hidden files in Finder.

Mac is the über-multimedia machine, yes? All the cool people use it to produce audio and video. You know, the advertising and marketing types.

And for a reason. It’s a nice machine if you want to do cool things. It has the little things thought through, like fonts and desktop backgrounds and things like that. (No Teletubbyland, thank you, that is the default background in Windows XP.)

Quicktime can play most media formats that you’ll encounter. There’s a DivX codec available for Mac. VLC is an alternative media player (also for Windows) that can do nice things like play things in fullscreen. For playing Windows Media (WMV) files, there’s a free Windows Media Components download available from Microsoft.

There are some annoying things too. The “culture of plugins” doesn’t seem to really exist with iTunes, similarly as it did for Winamp. For example, sometimes I want my songs to be played pitch-and-tempo-shifted at -25% or +25% or some other weird speed. Don’t ask me why, I don’t have to explain. I just want to do that. And for Winamp, there’s the insanely great and simple DSP plugin that lets me to just that with a simple slider. For iTunes, I haven’t found anything like this that would be free and wouldn’t suck. (I can actually do this in standalone Quicktime, but it sucks badly.) I guess that’s another manifestation of the Apple culture of trying to produce great stuff, but missing a few isolated cases, and not letting people mess with your programs. So the easiest solution for me, should I want to exercise this perversion, is to have the MP3-s in a Parallels shared folder and play them back through Winamp running in Windows under Parallels. Kinda silly, but works.

I have another thing I don’t understand with Quicktime video. When pressing Apple-1, 2 or 3, it switches between “original”, “double” and “fit” sizes. Which is cool. But sometimes it does so with a “scaling” effect, dynamically scaling the window from old size to new, which is even cooler. And at other times (most of time), it just “snaps” to the new size without scaling. This is inconsistency that drives me nuts. I want it to behave the same (cool) way at all times, but there’s no setting or anything else seemingly under my control to change this.

And finally there’s the headset mute problem. I’m using a USB headset that I plug in and out quite often. When I plug it out, the system reverts to the internal mic/speakers. Which is nice. And when I plug the USB headset in again, it kinda switches back to it. But it’s nonworking because the device is then in a MUTED state. And to make things crazier, the “mute” indicator in System Preferences is actually OFF. And the outcome is that everything in the UI looks good, except there’s no sound coming out of the system. The “fix” that I’ve found for this is that after plugging my headset back in, I need to go to SysPrefs/Sound and click the Mute switch TWICE, once to really mute it, and the second time to really unmute it, and after this sound is again flowing out of my headset as expected. But it’s strange.

I’ve yet to try plugging my MIDI keyboard in this thing. Last time I tried it with the iMac, it failed because it didn’t like the drivers bundled with the keyboard on the CD, and I couldn’t find any better ones on the web either.

So there are a few quirks, but overall it’s a nice A/V machine. I haven’t yet needed to do things like video importing/editing, but it was one of the reasons to get this machine so that I’d be ready for it. I’m only doing this on entry level anyway so the bundled iMovie will be more than enough for me.

Scoble and others say that Google Reader and its sharing could replace digg. W0rd. I don’t really care that much about digg or techmeme or any of those other niche geek thingies, but Google Reader is THE thing. I’ll write a longer post as part of my “switch” series, but long story short, I tried a number of readers on different platforms, and I’m very picky about interfaces. Google Reader beats everything else hands down and I’ve switched all my reading activity to it. Simple as that.

I’m also maintaining a link blog now which I’ll one fine day somehow add to this blog here. Until then, it’s here. (I wish I could add my Google Analytics to that somehow, or point the feed to Feedburner, so that I could track the stats.)

Wow. Wow. Wow. Even if 20% of this is true, we’d be royally screwed. (“We” as in “everyone using computers.”) The immediate point here is that there’s no rush to upgrade to Vista. Glossy screenshots are hardly the “killer app” if XP works just fine. (Via Bruce.)

The analysis is kinda lengthy but well worth the read, as it’s both informative and entertaining.

The documentation is peppered with sentences like: “It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content”. This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally impossible.  Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis [Note B].

Note J: The “kool-aid” reference may be slightly unfamiliar to non-US readers, it’s a reference to the 1978 Jonestown mass-suicide in which Jim Jones’ followers drank Flavor Aid laced with poison in order to demonstrate their dedication to the cause.  In popular usage the term “kool-aid” is substituted for Flavor Aid because it has more brand recognition.  There’s also an earlier, less well-known link to fruit juice laced with LSD, I’ll avoid the obvious comment about that and some of the thinking behind Vista’s content protection.

Note K: If I do ever want to play back premium content, I’ll wait a few years and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it, not a $1000 Windows PC.  It’s somewhat bizarre that I have to go to Communist China in order to find vendors who actually understand the consumer’s needs.

I’m so tired of being treated like a criminal. More and more engineering resource will go into deliberately degrading and disabling parts of user experience and technology, adding encryption overhead and the like, instead of developing great things that will bring us great experiences. It’s going to be fun to watch where this goes with Vista.

In a series of experiments around identity and trust, I’ve now enabled OpenID comments on this blog. In the comment area, you see a new “Your blog URL” field. The default wording is a bit confusing, and what’s going on here is that it actually asks for your OpenID URL.

Typekey also remains working, but as you could also use Typekey as OpenID server, it’s kinda redundant. I could hack around this, but I’d prefer that SixApart and the plugin providers provided a bit cleaner solution in the next versions. The comment stuff is still a bit messy. For example, when using the “comment preview” function in Movable Type, you’re no longer signed in at all.

What I don’t like about OpenID here is that in it’s out-of-box configuration, it doesn’t provide “nicknames” for people, only an URL. People have names, not URL-s, even if you are authenticated by an URL.

I’ve been following OpenID for quite a while now and it’s got a big boost in the blogs. For an intro, check Simon’s webcast. I’m using Marc’s MT OpenID-comment plugin.

Someone recently asked me “how can I open multiple SSH tunnels with only one password prompt?” And to make things more complicated, let’s assume that we only work with passwords, i.e we can’t use the PKI where public/private keys would do the authentication.

Now there’s a hard way and an easy way.

The hard way, is of course, to write a script. I knew of the “expect” utility that can interact with app prompts from things like SSH, but I haven’t really worked with the Tcl syntax and I couldn’t get it working. So I went with Python. There’s a very useful pexpect module that lets you do exactly what “expect” does, but in the familiar Python environment.

So here’s my script. Prompts for password only once and re-uses it in the subsequent tunnel setups.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# to run this, install http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/
import getpass
import pexpect
import time
tunnels = (
# some cvs server
'ssh -Nf -L2401:cvs.server:2401 me@my.forwardinghost.net',
# some sftp server
'ssh -Nf -L2222:somesftp.com:22 me@my.forwardinghost.net',
# another sftp server
'ssh -Nf -L2223:anothersftp.com:22 me@my.forwardinghost.net',
)
X = getpass.getpass('Password: ')
for t in tunnels:
    try:
        print "Opening " + t
        ssh_tunnel = pexpect.spawn (t)
        ssh_tunnel.expect ('Password:')
        time.sleep (0.1)
        ssh_tunnel.sendline (X)
        ssh_tunnel.expect (pexpect.EOF)
    except Exception, e:
        print str(e)

Now… this could of course be improved a lot. It’s actually a scaled-down version of a pexpect example script.

Oh, and the easier way… as you see, all those tunnels are using the same forwarding server. And when running ssh from the command line, you can give it multiple -L arguments, i.e multiple tunnels to create. So when going through the same forwarding server, just put the multiple -L arguments on the commandline and be done with it.

Some people have been asking me over the past few weeks what’s up with skypejournal.com (one of the earliest independent Skype-related blogs). Just got a note from one of their editors Jim Courtney, confirming everything is fine and they just need to sort out a few things.

You have not seen Skype Journal for the past few weeks as a result of a combination of factors; however, it will resume shortly once some technical issues are resolved.

I got on TVP beta today. (I don’t have invites. Don’t ask.) And I gave it a quick run.

The one-sentence verdict: it’s an awesome product with huge potential. It’s already very good for a beta for the short period, and it will rock.

Now, in a bit more detail… I won’t post any screenshots, partly because you can’t (because of content copyright), and partly because it will change anyway. So it will be a lot of boring-looking text. But bear with me, as it’s cool.

The TVP technology deserves a writeup of its own at some point, so I won’t go into too much detail here for the time being. They’ve assembled a cool team who also blogs about what they do (just look at the team member blogs from the main TVP blog). I understand the whole thing is built on XULRunner, a cross-platform Mozilla UI toolkit, so they should be able to cross-compile the whole thing for Mac and other platforms in no time, substituting the DirectX references with Quicktime or other relevant native video subsystem calls.

One interesting thing they’re doing is “My Venice Plugins” that are effectively on-screen widgets for various purposes. Being a project based massively on open standards (Jabber for chat, AES for crypto etc), one wonders if these will make use of the W3C Widgets proposal. These days you have Microsoft widgets-gadgets for Vista, OS X ones, Opera, … . One thing to consider in the Widgets spec, though, is that there’s not much standardizing for the context. Should there be? I’m not sure. But I can surely envision widgets that have a common core function set that doesn’t care about the context (interacting with the public Internet and public data sources), but then it has extra objects to interact with. In TVP, the object would be current video/channel and TVP user. In OS X and Vista, it’s the operating system user and the whole OS context (e.g iStat Pro in OS X that displays various OS details). In browser widgets, it would be the current web page.

Uhhh… got off track, back to TVP :)

The initial run is very very important. We’ve set a good “reference” installation experience with Skype, and the TVP was no different. Installation was click-click smooth. The only trick is that you’ll need to provide your e-mail address during installation — I guess your software gets somehow “initialized” with that and the e-mail/user account is the core part of their content protection. (This is also reflected by the fact that if you change your password, you have to do a reinstallation of the whole thing.)

When you first launch TVP and sign in, it first presents you a cool “whats new” trailer. This experience is very similar to another type of digital entertainment… video games. More about that below. But after the trailer, you end up in the “main interface” and can do stuff.

I thought about how to rate the UI. It surely has the fundamentals right. Sometimes you see horrible UI-s that distort pictures in bad ways and have bad fonts and just generally bad organization and have no chance in succeeding. For an exapmle, see MyspaceIM. (At least it was like that a few months ago.)

TVP UI has clearly good fundamentals, good windowing, OK fonts, good interaction with the video subsystem and the layers above (transparency). Then again, some basic things are not done yet. Like none of the elements have tooltips. And while there are some universal idioms used, like “play” is play and “X” means “close”, there are several elements that you can’t make heads and tails of, and the general navigation is more complicated than it should be.

So I give TVP UI the mark between 50% and 66%, meaning it’s only half to two-thirds done and not more. This doesn’t mean that it would be bad in any way, it’s already very good. This just means that they got lots of more work to do if they really want to kick ass, and nothing less would be worth making anyway, so keep the UI press rolling.

One thing that I notice is that streaming works really well and the quality is great. The quality is certainly comparable if not better than, say, the highest quality video podcasts that you get from iTunes. And streaming is one of the best I’ve seen. It provides you much much higher quality than, for example, on YouTube, yet with considerably smaller delay — the show starts pretty much immediately after you start it on my 2 Mbit downlink. True, there is stuttering sometimes and other bugs, but it’s one of the first wider betas, so a lot of work in progress.

TVP says that it uses P2P streaming to distribute content across users. Fine by me. The only question I have is, well, where is it on my computer? Maybe my node is not eligible for content redistribution or they haven’t enabled it or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that I’m not seeing any increased disk usage beyond the basic installation files. Cool. (UPDATE: my bad. The content is actually there, just not under Program Files, but under Application Data.)

One wonders what else you could do with TVP. Recently I’ve come to believe in proximity-based services, so a thing that would be easy and fun would be to have Bonjour support for TVP. (Bonjour is the technology that lets computers and services in nearby/same subnetwork easily discover and interact with each other.) So that you could discover if there are any other “watchers” around you, and see what they’re up to, and maybe chat either in the interface or get together in real life. This has obviously some privacy implications and needs opt-in, for example if I’m watching some goatse porn I don’t want to be too social about it, whereas if I watch Britney Spears videos and someone else watches Paris Hilton then maybe we would want to get together to exchange our deep intellectual insights about those.

The only discussion I have seen around TVP so far is about taking money and viewers away from media companies. Which is fine, but there’s a broader thing here I think, and that is the world of interactive games. For example, the closest you get to interactivity in the modern TV and two-way communication is SMS voting during a show. This is very often limited to certain countries because of roaming issues. None of that would be a problem on TVP. So you could very easily think of mega-shows that extend beyond borders and are available for whole markets. Plus the language question — in Europe, the market is fragmented both economically (see SMS roaming question above) plus across languages. In TVP, it would be dead easy to have several “language tracks” a la DVD.

Beyond that, I’ve played a few games that do not have immense UI-s and interactivity but are merely non-interactive video sequences with a few choices inbetween, that determine the progress of the game. You could imagine the potential of whole seasons of series combined around this, and combined with, uh, I don’t know, for example location-based games? Oh my. I can’t even imagine where this thing will be going.

I’m really looking forward to this thing working on a Mac, since that’s what I (and a lot of other geeks) are using as the “daily machine” to do stuff on. (Did I say that at Le Web 3, 95% of demo/presentation machines on the stage were Macs?) So get the Mac version done, guys, and you’ll have a lot more of early influencers checking out your thing. Plus I could use the Apple Remote, not sure if there’s actually an API for that but it would make total sense and I could actually put that thing to some good use :)

Plus of course content. From a very practical POV, I travel quite a lot and sometimes for long yet I’d still like to stay in touch with my home news, and TVP would be the ideal way to do that. Let me know when you have a channel available for content providers to insert their stuff and I’ll make the connections that I want to see my favourite programs :)

I’d like to bust a myth that I myself had developed a while ago. I’m not really sure how it came about, but somehow I got the impression that Mac OS X is not really good with working with mobile devices for things like syncing data and using the device as a modem.

I proved myself wrong. It’s drop dead easy.

Like for most people these days, be it for work or for private life, my mobile phone is my lifeline. It has all my contacts and numbers and I can call people up. And if it ever lost it, I’d be very much screwed.

I’ve also started to use my mobile increasingly for calendaring. It’s an aging SonyEricsson T610 phone, so data entry is not really that convenient as compared to, say, a full-size mobile keyboard, let alone a computer. But it has worked kinda OK. At least the thing is always with me, always on and gives me reminders. Since I tend to forget things sometimes, it’s great to have external aids for reminders.

The normal thing to do would be to sync your calendar and contacts with your computer, so that they would be backed up and you could enter events in a more convenient way on your computer and have them synced to mobile for reminders. But I need to confess something: over the past three years, I didn’t sync my mobile and computer. Why? Because it was a hassle and I couldn’t be bothered to figure it out.

My calendaring and contact management only consisted of my mobile until I started using a Mac. Why? Because I don’t like using Outlook for e-mail. I like Thunderbird as you may have noticed, and that’s what I use. But TB is only good for email, it doesn’t have a calendar part and its contact management is not really good. But at the same time, people kept sending me meeting invites that I needed to keep track of.

So here’s how it worked. I used Thunderbird daily. For calendar, I had to fire up Outlook separately if I needed to check or add something. (I didn’t keep it running all the time to save some resources.) Needless to say, Outlook is pretty bloated so it takes ages to start up. And neither the calendar nor contacts were synced to my mobile. Because it was a hassle to set up. Bluetooth is fine on a PC, and I could do simple things like if I snapped a photo with the mobile, I could use Bluetooth for transferring the file to PC. And with some messing around, I could also set up a Bluetooth modem (although all that COM ports thing is kinda messy), so I could go on the Internet when wifi isn’t in sight. So this whole thing wasn’t really optimal.

Now… enter Mac OS X. It has Address Book and iCal as two little stand-alone neato applications that don’t take ages to start up. I can keep using my beloved Thunderbird for e-mail, and I can manage contacts in iCal and Address Book.

This is all good. But the greatest “wow” came when I was setting up iSync. I had no idea how to do it, I just heard that there’s this iSync thing that can, well, sync stuff to your mobile. So I fired it up.

I then had to configure my device. Can’t really remember what this one-time wizard was about, except that it was really easy and straightforward. Ah, it was something like it asked me to set the phone in Discovery mode, and then gave me a passkey for pairing Bluetooth, and that was it.

I was completely amazed. It was simply too easy and it worked. There were no stupid wizards and ten-step screens with a hundred options that you had to go through.

But the actual syncing experience is even cooler. It identifies your phone and shows you a picture of it. Little things like that really do a lot to make the experience just smoother. (My phone has a silver cover instead of the purple one, but you get the idea.) Once you want to sync, you just fire up iSync and hit “sync” and it goes through the sync automatically and that’s it.

Try to beat that, Windows. Especially without Outlook (all this comes in the base system with Mac).

Now… there is one thing that could be improved, and that I can probably do myself. I haven’t yet found a way to automate the sync. I need to manually run iSync at this time, but it should run every day at the hours that I schedule. The ultimate automation app is Automator, but it doesn’t know anything about iSync, so I’ll probably need to dig deeper with the likes of Quicksilver or AppleScript. Any good readymade simple solutions for this?

Ahh, it can’t be perfect now, can it? Of course not. There’s this one bug. Well, before the bug is something that you can’t do with Thunderbird easily. People send you invites through Outlook/Exchange and they typically come as what’s called “winmail.dat”. Thunderbird just shows you the attachment but can’t do anything with it. But for Apple Mail, there’s this OMiC thing that can take a “winmail.dat” and turn it into a meeting invite right there. So when someone sends me an invite, I just fire up Mail and import it into the calendar.

And the bug is a pretty annoying one. With some invites from some people, it tells me that I’m not the one who the invite is addressed to, even though the “to” e-mail is very clearly listed on the “Me” contact card in Address Book. I haven’t yet found a solution for this, apart from manually re-creating that invite. But I tend to get these buggy invites fairly seldom so that it wouldn’t really bother me that much.

My friend Andrew blogtagged me. (Hi Andrew… it’s been a while, eh.) If you don’t know it, “blog tag” is a game where you get “tagged” by someone and have to share five things that others (at least on the internet) don’t know widely about you. And then you tag five more people and the game continues. The game seems to have been around for a while, but got its current recent revival from Jeff.

Now… allow me to put in a meta-comment before the five things. I usually find these games silly and would discard them right away. But this one got me thinking. First, it has kinda caught on. I tend to be among the “second tier” adopters these days, I stand back to see if an idea works, and not to be among the first ones to try it out. (I don’t even have a Venice Project beta :) ) If it does, I hop on.

And secondly, this game is not about the blogs and some silly networking technology and graphing, it’s about people behind them. Faces and real persons. In this crazy world, it’s never too much to take a step back and celebrate yourself and your friends.

The first piece of English I ever learned was…

I have a dog
his name is Jack
his coat is white
his nose is black.

This was when I was six years old and we were having exams for this good school where my parents wanted to put me. This wasn’t the only exam, but I passed and looks like it turned out fine, at least I got admitted to the school.

God knows I’m not a saint. But there’s one thing I’m truly proud of. I haven’t ever smoked. This means more than “I tried once, but I don’t currently smoke”. I haven’t ever tried either. I have never held a burning cigarette in my mouth. This also includes hash joints, bongs and what have you. You can recall me doing all sorts of crazy things, but you can’t recall having seen me smoking in the past, and most probably never will. It’s kinda cool to have at least a few of this kind of “never”/”ever” values.

(This also works the other way. I can take smoking when having to face the inevitable like in a pub or club, but if you’re together with me in some neutral setting and I’m annoying you and you can’t get the message across any other way, just start smoking and I’ll be outta there.)

My first paid job was a summer job when I was .. uh .. 13 or 14? I was lifting boxes and crates of goods in a food store where my mom worked as an accountant at the time. It was for a month and hadn’t I been there with a good friend, it would have been incredibly boring and mind-numbing. The proceeds were enough for me to buy a computer game that was on 5.25” floppies, and since my PC had only 3.5” drive, I had to rip it open right there and get it copied to 3.5”-s right there in the store. (The game was Heart of China.)

I have had poor “natural” eyesight since childhood and have had to wear spectacles since the age of 6 or so. One might wonder why not switch them for contact lenses that may be more convenient. I’m not using lenses because my mom once took to the ophtalmologist to try them on, when I had had spectacles for a few years. But at the time, the technology for lenses in this country was much less developed and the procedure to insert them was not convenient at all. In fact, it was quite a traumatic experience for me and this is why I don’t wear contact lenses. Maybe I’ll get “over it” and try again one day, but at this time, there’s just no practical need for me to do that.

I very rarely share the whole story and this is also the case for this game. So #5 will remain a secret :)

Ok, it’s my turn now. I hereby tag Malthe, Ike, Siim, Andres and wolli. (I don’t think all of them will join the game, but oh well.)

Loic very nicely sums up the feedback and his own reactions. A long read, but good, and I subscribe to it 100%.

I can’t believe some of the nonsense and whining I’m reading on the blogs about the event. Like this politicians thing. Like someone said, if you had had George Bush or Condi Rice or John Kerry on some such convention in the US, or say Gordon Brown or Jack Straw or Margaret Beckett in the UK, everyone would go apeshit. But in France, it’s a problem, just because it’s not your country?

And not being able to close your laptops for the time that someone with the relevance of Shimon Peres talks? Do you really think that you and your blog is so important that if you write things on it 30 minutes later, the world will miss something important? I think of it as having a distorted perception of reality and never having worked in a business setting where it’s customary to not look at your laptop when you’re engaged in a meeting, unless you’re the one giving a talk. (Some of my colleagues do that anyway. But none of those who I truly respect.)

You see, such nonsense is why even though I have a blog, I never refer to myself as a “blogger” and don’t like being called one. A “blogger” to me is someone immersing in exactly this kind of whining and throwing it at each other. As if it mattered. No it doesn’t, you just make yourself look silly, that’s all. (And I’m doing it myself here, too, but I’m whining about whining, not the conference organizers who were the guys doing the ACTUAL work so that everyone else could come.)

Thanks again Loic. It was a truly good show. I’m not sure if I’ll attend next year though for various reasons, but it doesn’t decrease the value of this one. I’m looking forward to you and the vpod.tv guys putting the presentation videos online so that I could go over some of them again.

One thing that’s really difficult to argue with is that Apple computers, including my silver MacBook Pro, are simply beautiful.

Simplicity, aesthetic appeal and initial user experience are key here. The box contains very little and is easy to unpack. There’s no question where to start. There isn’t a whole lot of junk bundled, just the essentials that get you going.

Compared to my other/previous computers, this thing is QUIET. This actually means several things. First, the sound hardware is really good and well isolated from the rest of the hardware. All you get from the sound output is sound that you need, and nothing more. On PC-s, I very often get noise from hard disk or network traffic, which is kinda annoying. Doesn’t exist on Mac.

Secondly, the whole thing is quiet also in the room. You can barely hear the hard drive. When there’s some ambient noise in the room, it safely blocks the hard drive noise, so thing is really very quiet. When the fan kicks in, though, it’s a different story, but that doesn’t happen to me too often at all. Another noisy component is the CD/DVD drive, but I don’t use it too often, maybe only to rip audio CD-s or DVD-s or install something.

The CD drive quality is good. I had a problem with an audio CD that just wouldn’t rip with Thinkpad T41 (using the same version of iTunes). It only ripped half of a song. Haven’t yet had any rip problems on OS X.

I didn’t really know how to approach the large support surface below and next to the keyboard. I’ve had laptops and keyboards where the keyboard area has been really packed with keys, and there isn’t really any palm support space so you’ll need to support your palms simultaneously on the computer and on the desk. Whereas in case of MBP you can fully support the palms on the large empty space next to the trackpad. And it’s cool when you get used to it.

Automatic keyboard backlight and auto-dimming screen and keyboard backlight based on ambient light… nice stuff.

And finally the trackpad. I was really wary of it and thought the only way I can work without a real mouse is the red knob that Thinkpads have in the middle. I couldn’t use the trackpads on previous laptops, and thought that was because I was motionally retarded and just incompatible with trackpads. Guess what — no. I couldn’t use my previous trackpads because they all SUCKED. They were simply too inconvenient. Either too small or too unresponsive or too sunken into the rest of the form factor or who the hell knows what else.

Well, the MBP trackpad is a marvel. And I get along with it just fine. It’s responsive, it’s very very convenient for the fingers to use, the button is large enough to not need to twist your fingers in weird ways every time just to click a button. And the two finger scrolling… oh my oh my oh my, this is very very sweet. It’s going to be very difficult for me to ever use another laptop that doesn’t come from the fruit company, since the others just don’t have all this sweet stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. This is definitely NOT an ideal piece of hardware and there are plenty of things to be improved.

The wifi system on MBP is a goddamn princess. Wifi areas good enough for PC-s are not good enough for it. I actually had to upgrade my home router because the MBP just didn’t connect to its signal despite seeing it fine. It didn’t do WPA, WEP, unencrypted, nothing. Looked like it was some low-level signal incompatibility. True, it was an old and crappy router, but the PC-s had always worked fine with it.

This thing gets HOT HOT HOT. And no, it’s not because I have a battery from the exploding series, I checked. It’s not just the battery that gets hot, it’s the whole unit. You can’t really hold it in your lap as you’d toast yourself. And it’s just annoying. When I need a heater, I use a heater, I don’t need a stupid laptop to heat my room.

Why is the screen tilt angle limited? Sometimes I work with my laptop in really weird positions. I could tilt my Thinkpad screen to 180 degrees if I wanted to. The MBP one seems to be limited at around 120 degrees, just won’t go further. I appreciate the lessons of teaching me to work with my laptop in proper positions, but I’d like to have my own final say, thanks.

Only 2 USB ports???? COME ON! What if I need to plug in my mouse, headset, maybe PSP to experiment with something in Parallels, and my digital camera? That’s already 4. (At least I won’t need a webcam, as it’s built in…) Sometimes it’s really annoying to play these plug-unplug games. Mouse and headset are two permanent connections when working in home or office, and anything beyond that requires me to switch out of work mode and think of whether I want to work without mouse or without sound. STUPID.

I tried to look for a USB hub the other day in London. One that wouldn’t suck, that is. I didn’t find any. Either they were too big and bulky, with a UFO-like base station and tons of wires, or they were just ugly. When I need to replicate USB ports, I don’t need a goddamn UFO on my desk, I need a simple gadget that plugs in the port and just replicates the goddamn ports right there. There was a nice one by Belkin that was exactly that, without any base station or wires, just half-a-matchbox size thingie that has one USB connector at one end and four sockets at the other end, but… it did only USB 1.1. |( So not good for all these high-speed gadgets.

Still, even with all these shortcomings, it’s a nice laptop. :)

This is a cool remake of an important piece of computer history. A capella performances of one of the classic game soundtracks by these guys. Thanks to Claudius for the pointer. Original composition is by Rob Hubbard.

Does anyone know of more International Karate soundtrack remakes? Press Play On Tape doesn’t seem to have done it. Looks like it was performed here, but is there a recording of this available?

Just finished reading “The art of intrusion” by Kevin Mitnick. It follows his previous work, “The art of deception”, that was about social engineering.

The idea of “The art of intrusion” is simple. Mitnick has some restraints imposed by the court that restricts him from publishing his own hacking stories. I understand these restrictions will be lifted in a few years, so we can expect another publication from him documenting his own history. But for this book, Kevin simply asked other people to send him accounts of their own hacks. A lot of them did, and the book is an edited volume of the best of those.

All the details have been changed for obvious reasons, but you can still understand the ideas and details of how the hacks came about and could happen, despite the security measures put in place at the various targeted institutions. The lineup of different businesses is quite fascinating, as we learn about lax security in the US federal prison system, at various biotech and technology companies and banks around the world. One of the funniest stories was how the US troops “hacked” the Iraq communication systems during the Gulf war, injecting their own communications into both high-tech radio systems and the wired phone networks that the Iraqis used, effectively rendering their communication systems useless as they knew it was being tapped and were forced to stop using it. There are also some bits about darker activities such as terrorists recruiting teens, and pedophiles conducting their activities of trying to find next victims in online chatrooms.

It all boils down to having lax security procedures and people not following them properly. Simple accounts are given of things such as tailgating (following people through restricted-access entrances), to be followed by more elaborate descriptions of hacking online systems. So while not all in this book can be verified to be true to the letter, I believe it’s quite a humbling look at the state of modern corporate security systems and a chilling warning to anybody who thinks that the online world can be secured and locked down easily and this is done in most places.

Day started with video as the medium. People discussed what’s the relation going to be between videoblogging, TV and the web. Some fun video podcasts were shown, but it was a bit unclear to me where the business is in that whole videoblog thing.

Shimon Peres was profoundly interesting. He painted vivid pictures of how the world is “pregnant with a new era” and governments are going to be much less important. And the way to peace and prosperity is not through one ideology winning over another, but just enabling people live their lives through daily work and business. And that Western businesses should simply come to the Middle East. He struck me as a profoundly interesting and wise person, having a long political career and seen all of the world. He is one of those rare politicians who is actually interesting to listen to and has something to say about the world.

Danah Boyd talked about the “myspace phenomenon”, how it all started from Friendster and they then kicked people out who went to myspace. And being on myspace in the US for teens is the equivalent of having a mobile phone in Europe — if you don’t have it, you don’t exist. This was interesting to me because I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around this whole “social sites” thing and understanding what parts of it matter and what don’t. So Danah did a good job of making this clearer.

The French presidential candidates Sarkozy and one other didn’t really impress with much and were clearly for the local audience. They at least knew what the Internet and blogs are. It was cool that even though Loic Le Meur, organizer of the conference, declared he supports Sarkozy, one other candidate still showed up and took the trouble to talk with people and even answer a questions. Sarkozy only ran in, delivered a speech and left. (And before that, the whole room was searched by dogs and bomb squads, I guess that’s because he’s a minister who’s currently in office. There was no hard security before Peres, just an ID and bag check to get in the room, but no metal scanners or other more intrusive stuff. Being constantly through intrusive airport security, this was a nice surprise for me.

The gaming sessions were interesting, talking about major online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft, and also location-placed games in real world. Then there were some two crazy funny big dudes in Scottish kilts who liked playing World of Warcraft and had done Combat Cards that is basically World of Warcraft-type combat game INSIDE Second Life ;)

Then the Finnish people took over for a while. Ranging from Blyk, the ad-funded free mobile network operator, to Jaiku that I would call “public mood messages from your mobile”, to Thinglink, a real-life things tagger. I can’t really remember any recent cool stuff from Finland before these. Nokia aside who is increasingly global/non-Finnish anyway, the last interesting things I can think of were F-Secure and SSH and Linus Torvalds. So it’s great to see some activity on the Finnish startup scene.

David Weinberger gave a great show of how blogging and politics are connected and how the Howard Dean campaign, despite not getting the candidate elected, was nevertheless a great example of leveraging blogging.

Hossein Derakhshan explained how Internet filtering works in Iran. He thought that a P2P RSS reader should exist to promote news reading privacy. How about Anothr.com?

Then there was a great panel about net filtering in China. Bo Y. Shao is the guy who sold his company to eBay in China. He explained why many Western companies fail in China, citing also the eBay example. They try to get by without local operations, for example eBay bought his company and then moved the servers and people to their HQ in San Jose, hoping to run it from there. This of course meant that all their traffic was now being filtered by GFW (Great Firewall of China) that previously was not a problem because it did not apply to domestic traffic. Also similar comments about people and decision making. Bo said that a good way to succeed in China is “find a good general manager who you can trust, and then just let him run”, not interfering into daily operations.

This week I’ve taken two trains for the first time: TGV from Luxembourg to Paris and Eurostar from Paris to London.

I like travelling by the train a lot on short-medium distances, certainly more than flying. I don’t really mind flying and I’m not afraid of it or anything, but trains are just more convenient for the following reasons.

There’s no airport hassle. Most trains go straight from centre to centre, whereas in airport there’s the added hassle and money/time cost to get to/from the airports.

Trains are much less noisy. In the airplane, you can’t really listen to music or relax since the noise level is pretty high. The train is more quiet and you can mind your own business more. Good noise-cancelling/inear headphones help in either case. I don’t have good inears but I’m planning to get some shortly.

Trains have more space. Airplanes can be really cramped unless you’re flying business.

I thought of a point to make in favor of flying too, and the only one I could come up with is that you can rise above the clouds and see the sun even on cloudy days :)

Comparing the Eurostar and TGV, they are comparable experiences, but in Eurostar I’m taking 1st class and on TGV I was 2nd. TGV 2nd class is pretty convenient, from the window Eurostar 2nd class looked much more shabby. There’s a two-course breakfast in Eurostar 1st class. Power sockets are good too. I’m not sure if there are power sockets in Eurostar 2nd class, there certainly weren’t in TGV.

The only reason I took Eurostar 1st class was that turns out they use airline-style pricing structures that can yield silly outcomes. They had some promo where 1st class return trip was cheaper than 2nd class one-way. (I’m not sure how would 2nd class return have compared, didn’t ask for that.) So as it sometimes happens with airlines, the cheapest option is to get a return ticket and just discard the return part.

The party on Monday was at Paris Bodega. The organizers said it isn’t even open to the general public yet and this is one of the first parties there. It looked indeed quite new and nicely furbished. Not a very big club on two floors. I met some people I knew and also some old colleagues I didn’t even expect to meet, so it was quite fine.

The Paris metro runs until about 1am, so if you start going home around midnight, you’ll make it just fine. They way out wasn’t as easy as one might have expected, though, as the cloakroom people didn’t really use any organized system for storing the coats on the hangers for later retrieval. Instead, it was something like “put the coat on the hanger and randomly stash it among others”. So when people started to go out, it wasn’t that they could just retrieve the coat from among the others based on the number (index) of the ticket. Since the hangers were organized totally randomly, they basically had to do what you’d call a fulltext search for every coat, and so it took several minutes per person to retrieve it. And with hundreds of people, it obviously caused a bit of a chaos. Fortunately, I was one of the first ones to exit, I can’t imagine what it was like a bit later.

Then on the way home, we agreed with someone to share a cab back to the hotel. We couldn’t figure out how the cab system works in Paris, as there were plenty of cabs driving by with their lights on and off, and we tried to hail them, but none stopped. So I suggested we instead take the metro since I knew how to get back. And so we did and talked various business-work-life stuff. I don’t think I said something really silly, but it was a bit silly and I made a bit of a fool myself since I didn’t know the person. We only traded cards when we ended up at the hotel, and then I found out it was David Weinberger :o :o :o (one of the Cluetrain authors and a Harvard fellow at the Berkman Law Centre). This is what happens on the Internet when you don’t see people’s pictures. (His Wikipedia entry doesn’t have a picture, what can I do :) ) and I hadn’t seen him before, and his presentation on the stage (which rocked) was not until the following day.

Today was the first day of Le Web 3. Lots of good presentations. They say all will be on video archive, and some of those will be worth watching for the second time. I’ll do a quick braindump…

Overall — a little more “professional”/”produced” event, seats are more inconvenient, there is plenty of power sockets for laptops, but kinda useless as wifi doesn’t really work ;) I don’t think we’ll get the fun that Mena Trott and Ben Metcalfe gave us last year. Instead, it’s more high-profile — they say that Shimon Perez, Nicolas Sarkozy and some other dignitories might drop by tomorrow to say hi. I guess this shows that this is not only some geek convention, but having a real impact in France and these people are willing to take their time to come by and say hi.

So… the program…

Loic’s hi — started 20 minutes late or so, so was just short “hi”.

Niklas and the future of the Internet — I can’t recall NZ really saying anything new or interesting here, just a recap of what he’s been up to recently and what’s up next.

Lorraine Twohill — Marketing Director EMEA Google. I think it’s the first time ever that I’ve seen someone from Google actually deliver a talk at an event. Not a bad one, some insights into the Google culture and management values, will need to take a look at the slides.

Hans Rosling (see Hans at TED). Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet,Co-founder of Gapminder, Stockholm. … WAWAWEWAAAA!!!! Now THIS was a great talk. Easily the best for me in the whole day. I have yet to understand what was its relation to the rest of the program, though. But it doesn’t really matter, as I got to see it :) I guess it was about bringing down ill preconceptions about the world that we have.

The giants’ outlook on Web 2.0… uh… I can’t remember anything interesting that any of them said.

Is open source turning commercial? Gil Penchina from Wikia announced that they’re going to do some sort of open hosting thing. Talked about open-source content. And Tristan from Mozilla showed a bunch of projects that use Mozilla code, The Venice Project among them.

Will there be a Web 2.0 bubble? They agreed that if there will be, it’s not as significant economically as the public market is not involved this time and thus the consequences will be far less catastrophic.

State of the Blogosphere from Dave Sifry. His usual blog increasing and doubling stats. And big French blog providers don’t ping Technorati, which makes French underrepresented on his charts.

The impact of blogs and user generated content in Europe. Cool figures from a media/user research company about the significance of blogs and how much they are trusted by consumers (short answer: trusted about as much as trusted/well-respected product review sites, and much more than the company’s own pitch). And blogs do have a real purchasing/brand impact.

The future of business. Reid from LinkedIn. In the future, your CV will have much more metainfo. Today, you just send some claims about yourself on paper. Down the road, there will be metainfo and links to validate those.

Enterprise 2.0 : distributed capitalism. Lots of buzzwords. Buzzword bingo. Lee Bryant from Headshift called distributed capitalism “a stupid name”. I’ll have to agree, moreover as they never defined it in the first place. I didn’t understand the talk.

Ecommerce… yeah. It’s nice.

Then a bunch of panels and talks about entrepreneurs in Europe vs US, localization, globalization, culture and all that. Martin Varsavsky was the most fun of the whole crowd. He said you can either ignore your identity as a company and be without a home country, appealing to everyone. Or, do what FON has done, and pick a national identity which in their case is Spanish, so they can use all the lingo around Foneras, fiesta, tapas… and people especially in Asia really like that.

Among other things, they referred to the interoperability problems in Europe. And this was indicated throughout the whole day in the SMS polls that were being conducted. Out of 1000 people, they got maybe around 50 responses for each poll. I thought of sending mine too, but out of the 36 represented countries, SMSconnect.com who powered the polls provided SMS sending numbers for only 8 countries, and my Elbonia was of course not included. So if you won’t let me send SMS, I simply won’t, easy :)

Then some other panels that didn’t really shine that much… Enrique Dans was a business school lecturer that showed some fun stuff he’s doing in classes, and said how teachers these days need to be less of stars and more of facilitators of networked conversations among students.

I had to run away before the last part of the last panel as I needed to take a call.

Everybody kept talking about Netvibes as a great European startup (they have their main thing in France). Maybe. I took a look at the product for 20 seconds, I don’t 100% understand what they’re doing. It’s your “homepage”, similar to Windows Live or Google personalized homepage. I guess just with better features, have to revisit. And they are of course sponsoring tonight’s party, which is very nice of them.

I myself was pretty boring through the whole day… didn’t really move around much and talk to too many people. Saw some old colleagues and other people I know. So maybe will see them at the party too later today, can’t miss that part of the show ;)