January 2007
14 posts
Charting the unknown OS X development territory
I’ve posted relatively little over the past few days and generally engaged in relatively few visible “extracurricular” activities. This is because I’m on a mission to teach myself a bit about GUI development on OS X.
As I’ve said before, OS X is a fine machine for a web hacker if you want to develop some web type of stuff. But apart from that, it’s also the...
Phone media bus
I want a “mobile media bus” to unify my communications to the computer, if I’m around my computer. My phone was ringing in my pocket, but I didn’t hear it, as I had headphones on and the vibrator alarm wasn’t apparently enough ;) in an ideal world, it would have said “ring” to my computer over Bluetooth, who would have then displayed an alert on the screen...
Branching out the blogs
This blog has been a mess and mix of personal, professional and “junk” type of subjects. So I’m branching things out a bit. This blog, as well as my main Estonian one, will continue to have a professional-technical-study-society-culture orientation across the keywords you can see in the header. As for the “junk/fun” type of things, these will now be on a new site,...
iPhone initial thoughts
Just watched the Macworld keynote from last week, where the main talk was about iPhone. Much of what’s to be said has been said already, so I’m not going to be too original here. Other than saying that from a personal perspective, this COULD be the device that I’ve been looking for. I’m increasingly shifting my online life into the Mac space and the iPhone is going to be...
On the "Joost" name
The Venice Project, or TPTWFV (The Project That Was Formerly Venice) shall hereforth be known as Joost. How do you say that? In Estonian, there’s a similarly (?) pronounced word “juust”, meaning “cheese”. And here’s some more comments from a chat that I’m in, not sure how valid this info is but just interesting/fun :)
too bad they did not consult with...
Vista full motion desktop
Microsoft at CES : Full Motion Desktop
Hmm, this is actually interesting — using video as your desktop “picture”. A common desktop environment is fully static, with the icons and desktop image just sitting there. I don’t believe that you really want to have your kids videos on desktop, too much distraction and no potential for continuous loop, but a professionally...
Ford Sync
Microsoft at CES : Riding with Ford Sync
I’m under-impressed. The visual UI in the car consists only of one monochrome color row of text, plus some buttons on the wheel and maybe elsewhere. 80-s style. My Ford from two years ago has a better panel than that. If you have a high-tech system that reportedly also talks with iPod, Zune etc (though they didn’t show it, I would have...
Complete a survey, win an iPod Nano
As it says. More details on the survey page itself. Just got this e-mail and reposting it here.
Dear Sir,
I am a student studying ‚Human-Computer-Interaction’ at the University of Basel in Switzerland. At present I am writing my Bachelor Thesis concerning users’ preferences with respect to filesharing over the internet.
In order to make the survey and consequently my paper a success I...
A cool fountain-projection show from CES
CES is too big, so for the most part I’m just ignoring it, apart from the Skype stuff. We’ll know after the dust settles what’s important and what’s not. But this is really cool. Be sure to watch the video. Image projected on fountains, yay.
Logbook Jan 6-7 Tallinn-Luxembourg
Drove my car all the way in a single sitting. Just wanted to see how it goes. And here I was, 2300 kilometers, 5 tanks of fuel and 30 hours later :) here are the stages. See also an earlier logbook.
I must say I don’t really endorse or recommend this style of continuous driving as it’s quite stressful and can also be dangerous if you’re not sure of yourself. About 1000 km...
Chipped bank card security
Here’s something I don’t understand about bank card security. I have the latest-and-greatest chipped VISA card. It has both a chip and the magstrip for older systems. And I’ve experienced a variety of security situations when paying with it. Some of which seem really insecure to me, so I’d like to understand am I misreading something or is this really to be expected.
The...
Dash - a cool car system?
I’ve been writing about inline car systems. Here’s something hip and cool on this scene. One of these will break through one day, but if it’s Dash or something else remains to be seen.
The only part that I’m not sure about is that they use input from other Dash people to predict traffic patterns — for this to work reliably, they’d have to achieve quite a...
iCon: the second coming of Steve Jobs
Just finished reading “iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business”.
This was my second “Apple book”, with Jim Carlton’s being the first, and so I also have some comparison fodder.
There are three main differences between Carlton’s and this book.
The first, of course, being that Carlton’s was written a while ago when Apple...
Producing YouTube code snippets with valid XHTML
Here’s a good New Year resolution for all webnerds: “I’ll produce only correct, validating XHTML”. YouTube continues to be a bad offender here, offering people HTML on their site that doesn’t validate. But it’s easy to fix these days. See this for a simple explanation.
