Infedelic Ideas

Blog moved

2005-10-09T15:36:00.000+03:00

Hello,

I have moved my blog. The new address http://tarina.blogging.fi

Improved lessigian powerpoint style

2005-09-19T10:45:00.000+03:00

I found an excellent presentation by Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity entitled "Identity 2.0". It follows the lessigian powerpoint style but is even quicker (almost every word has a a slide), uses more images, animation (mainly character based) and has white background instead of black. When he says something negative, he flashes the word on black background, which is a nice trick to emphasize a point.

I wonder how he is able to sync his speech with his presentation with that speed. He must have some word lists somewhere or he has just memorized the presentation very well. Great performance.

Securing RSS feeds

2005-09-06T19:59:00.000+03:00

Reactivity, Inc. has announced that they have technology to make RSS feeds inside an enteprise secure enough to be used for confidential business information transactions. So far RSS has been hyped only as a news/blog reading protocol, but increasingly RSS is gaining interest in the enterprise. Implementing security in the framework will help RSS to be integrated in the inner communication infrastructure of an organization.

Reactivity solution is properietary and most likely expensive. I bet an open-source alternative will appear soon.

We have made RSS secure in our open-source Dicole platform for internal communication between creative groups of people, but this is not an independant solution for the RSS problem, because the implementation is highly tool spesific. Anyway, our solution is one of the first to enable blogs to be used securely inside an enterprise.

I expect an open-source or otherwise free version for secure lower level RSS work to appear very soon. People at Feedburner, make it happen?

Last major paradigm shift in the computer industry

2005-09-05T22:51:00.000+03:00

A post by The NOSE, History of the Computer Industry in One Slide has a very good illustration of the transition from vertical to horizontal in computer industry. This is something that is happening now in businesses affected by new technology. They move from managing the whole supply chain to focus on their core competence and orchestrate the rest in a networked fashion.

CNN vs Education vs Businesses

2005-09-05T21:50:00.000+03:00

My friend Alan Levine is on the run, a good article about comparing the excellent description of the CNN news gathering method with the way of education. Regarding learning objects, we are still in the stone age compared to what CNN is doing with their own "learning objects" already today.

Of course CNN operates in a business environment with larger budgets than what education institutions could ever dream about, but in the other hand, these tools are already available. You may create a cheap (in finnish I could say "karvalakki") version of the same thing with Open Source components. Throw in some additional programming and support services and your organization will benefit from the surrounding digital spectrum.

Alan's comparison is reality for many traditional businesses as well. Limited budget or lack of ROI lingo are not available excuses for companies that still operate in even less digitalized world than what educational organizations do. There is a lot for all of us to learn from the CNN model.

Imagine your CEO to edit and feed some live information from a conference he is attending back to the "lab" for packaging and distribution to digital workspaces for all people in the organization to play with. Imagine a salesman communicating new customer requirements in real-time and getting the customized product ready for shipping the next day because he did and the infrastructure supported such a reactive business process.

Before thinking about buying expertise and content from the outside, an organization should look at their own way of creating value out of the information flow they already possess. If flow of knowledge and information is improved, operational sensitivity and efficiency will be much better in the big picture.

New Orleans the Achilles Heel of US economy

2005-09-03T22:30:00.000+03:00

An interesting article by STRATFOR points to a bigger picture that the mass media doesn't. The devastation of New Orleans and its effect on global economy is not only an issue about oil, but more about the whole agriculture of the Mississippi region. The region had built the US economy in the first place and it's the place where all the rivers - and therefore - all goods flow. Without people operating a port in the mouth of the Mississippi river and absence of a system to support those people, the result will be a disturbing impact not only on the US economy, but on the global economy as well.

Ancient stick-juggling art

2005-09-03T17:01:00.000+03:00

Lunastix flowersticks

I'm known for having an interest in learning stuff that only a few number of people can do or even know of. One of them is juggling flowersticks. When I play in public, it's common that people come to me curiously and ask what is that kung-fu stuff you're doing. They have never seen something like that before.

I recommend flowersticks as a hobby to anyone. It's easy to learn, helps you concentrate and throw some incredible tricks. It's simply just cool.

Juggling sticks is an ancient performance art. According to some sources, it even dates back to the ancient Egypt and China. Two handsticks are used to manipulate a third stick that has been balanced with weights in the ends. The flowersticks name and the counterpart, devilsticks are names given by later marketers of this juggling art.

The hobby is quite hippy and geeky, so it suites me very well. I can carry them with me on the beach, park or any other place where I might have some free time to entertain myself. I also use my flowersticks when I'm working, mainly to have a break from the computer to think about some intriguing problems. Playing the sticks while I think helps me to concentrate. Some people smoke cigarettes, I play with my sticks.

In the past I've created my own flowersticks but now I finally ordered a quality one from the Lunastix company. My pefectly balanced Equinox Lunastix comes with an Easton Aluminium core and silicone coating. The endings have cups that improve playability and the shorter length results in faster professional play. The fiberglass handsticks are also covered with silicone and have rubber endings to protect it and give a more balanced feel. The product in quality package came to me here in Finland quickly from Salt Lake City, USA, where the company is located.

Quick testing reveals it's the best pair of sticks I've ever played with. I have tried commercially available sticks from local juggling stores, stuff sold on the streets and a number of my own experiments in crafting one myself. I've created about seven different sticks and this one clearly exceeds my favourite one in both playability and quality.

Here is a video of me having a test-run on my balcony in DivX format.

Make your own Linux penguin

2005-09-02T00:01:00.000+03:00

I've written before that as time goes by, we will see distributed Open Source development methodology to emerge in contexts other than content or source code. Some time ago we had free beer, now we have free penguins.. umm soft-toys. This might as well be the ultimate end of the accessorizing business model of Open Source ;)

Behaviour is the missing link of AJAX

2005-08-24T02:14:00.000+03:00

Behaviour is very cool. I've been looking at AJAX for quite some time to make Dicole more responsive, just like Flicr or Google Suggest. Preventing code pollution is a worthwhile goal at the same time, so Behaviour is quite handy.

As a side note, I'm starting to blog here once again after a long summer break. I've also been quiet at Flosse POSSE blog. I have a nice blog coming that focuses on social software, knowledge management, experiential learning and stuff like that. I'm also planning a tech-only blog which I will write on the developer site of Dicole. These and some more coming as we go forward. I wonder what happens to this one as I move more focused writings to other sites.. It's likely this will remain as a personal space which is not that much connected to my professional life.

The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

2005-06-17T10:02:00.000+03:00

Poynteronline features an interesting article titled "The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism".
The article suggests 11 different ways to implement Citizen Journalism in traditional news outlets.

The layers are:

Opening up to public comment
The citizen add-on reporter
Open-source reporting
The citizen bloghouse
Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs
The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version
The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
Add a print edition
The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism
Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors

It also discusses the very successful OhmyNews concept from Korea: a news site that has reqruited some 38,000 citizen reporters to write the news along with the pro journalists. Seems like this concept might be the future of journalism, as it's profitable and challenges the traditional media with a distributed model.

In Finland the number of sites which employ citizen journalism is almost zero. I can only think of Vaasalaisia which just started and is obviously small. These citizen journalism concepts have potential, yet even the term blog is unfamiliar to many in our country. There is a lot of discussion about how citizens could take part in city planning, though...

Podcasting and vodcasting

2005-06-14T23:43:00.000+03:00

Podcasting is really picking up, so is vodcasting (the same with video). The white paper "Podcasting & Vodcasting" from the University of Missouri looks like a good introduction to the latest cool technology, which is pretty much identified as a functional medium for amateur producers of audio and video programs.

Sidenote: We are currently preparing a new website for our Dicole company. A new logo and updated information of what we are offering is on the way. We are pretty much reinventing ourselves.

We aim to make the site sound as human as possible and encourage a conversation. No static pages. Every page -- be it information about the company, product or foresight etc. -- is almost like a blog, always alive, telling a story and ready for outside comments. I bet it's the first in my country to take a very different approach to corporate identity on the web.

In fact, a corporation does not have an identity, as the corporation is not a human being. Corporations consists of human beings, which have identities. We want to bring the people on the front while pushing that humorlessly crafted corporate identity under the carpet. Everyone should do the same.

Look at your company website. Does it have a spark?

Color pallete tools

2005-05-19T23:00:00.000+03:00

Mambofrog has collected a set of different color pallete tools. If you have difficulty in finding a good color sheme for your site, here are some tools to check out.

I also might add ColorCombos and I Like Your Colors.

Full-circle gaming

2005-05-15T02:12:00.000+03:00

I shouldn't promote Microsoft but it seems they are kicking their dog anyway. It's hard times for them ahead.

But Xbox 360 looks neat. Sony, the bar is set. Check out the specs. I can't hardly wait to have Linux up and running on it. Although I might leave that fun for the last generation consoles. Look at the screenshots. Especially Dead or Alive looks astonishing.

Missed the MTV promotion? Check this video. It shows the box and the specs inside out.

Webcam and voice communication while gaming. Cool.

Old media vs. New media

2005-05-02T14:16:00.000+03:00

Ars Technica writes very well in an article about the decline of the newspaper industry and quotes Rupert Murdoch's probably historical speech. The Economist writes about it as well.

A couple of good points from the article:

Top-tier bloggers themselves are better educated than top-tier newspaper columnists

Commentary from trained specialists and insiders instead of professional outsiders (traditional jouralists)

Audience, which is more media savvy is more interested in being treated as a peer by news sources

Treating as peers by allowing posting comments in context and writing in a more personal, conversational tone

If you want to read about the classy journalist trips and how journalists sell their integrity in favor of corporate gifts, see A Sell-Out's Tale.

Single-signon bookmarklet

2005-05-01T19:04:00.000+03:00

Nic Wolff's single-signon bookmarklet is pretty old news but I haven't spotted it before.

It's a brilliant idea on how to manage all those different passwords you have to access all kinds of web pages with a single master password so that each authenticated web page gets a different password derived from your master password. Good for security:

Each page has a different password, so guessing one doesn't compromise every other site you are on

The master password is not stored anywhere and it's not transmitted over the wire

It's easier to remember a single password than several hundred :) I bet many of you use the same password for all web services. That's bad for security.

This is a simple bookmarklet that asks your master password and generates a password in the password field on the site you are on. It's stored in your bookmarks and you use it to generate the password by clicking the bookmark in your browser.

The only thing you have to remember is your master password and the username. Using the same username in all web services helps a lot :)

[: UPDATE :]
Coolest stuff since sliced bread.. A firefox extension is now available in addition to a DHTML version of the same thing. The firefox extension adds an arrow next to every password field for entering the master password. Neat!

Sharing nicely

2005-04-28T01:51:00.000+03:00

[Note to self:]Read the latest from Yochai Benkler at some point. Also, the Economist reports as well. Coase Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm was excellent and inspiration for many of my latest thoughts. See also Other publications.

Old boring conference format

2005-04-27T00:02:00.000+03:00

Came back from ITK'05, Interactive Technology in Education -conference , which is the largest conference in Finland about information- and communication technology in educational use.

The topic is interactive technology but the conference format is the same as 10 years ago. No interactive technology in sight. No infrastructure to support blogging, virtual meetings along physical ones or any of that kind of stuff.

The place has a WLAN worth 8€ / hour. That's robbery. Doesn't motivate me to write much about the stuff going on there, although I did.

We need a new format and I've got some ideas I've been tossing around with people. Maybe I'll try my ideas next summer of how emerging technologies could change the conference to be more like a conversation, instead of a horde of monologies.

I have nothing against monologies if the presentations are good quality and engaging. and leaves enough time for comments. Unfortunately, I didn't have a very good time this time. Most of the speakers were just reading their bullet points aloud. I was coding a web based RSS/Atom aggregator instead.

Some good things surprised along the way. One of the directors at University of Helsinki, Palmenia continuity centre did some "podcasts" (wavs, not MP3s, though) by recording one minute sessions with various influental people (I'm there, but I don't know if I'm influental) about the future of continuity education (finnish only, sorry). This format kicks bullet points out of the window in no time. Way to go, Mika Tuuliainen, a very good idea. But next time you need a blog to enable a conversation and a way for people to discover your great stuff, probably the best offering at ITK this year.

Lessigian presentation style

2005-04-03T17:21:00.000+03:00

Since I saw the great presentation by Lawrence Lessig about free culture, I have been a big fan of his style of using PowerPoint. Well, his presentations are excellent even in voice-only.

Instead of filling half of your PowerPoint slides with meaningless brand-style of your organization and the other half with hard-to-read bullet points, Lawrence Lessig uses black background and no more than six words on every slide. He emphasizes his points with simple words. There is always something happening on the screen. He might have over 200 slides in one 30min presentation. It's almost like an animation. The viewer is always on track and hears every word, instead of getting confused by trying to read every bullet point on the screen.

We are so used to bullet points. The tools for creating presentations always start with templates that have bullet points to fill. We simply don't see other options. The typical use is to fill each slide with the whole story being told. Presenters often just read what are in their bullet points (why should I travel to a conference to hear someone read the bullet points aloud if I can read them myself on the web anyway?)

We should ban the use of bullet points.

They distract our experience on following a presentation. If you want to deliver all your points in your PowerPoint presentation, the notes part of each slide (given to audience along the slides) is for that purpose. When creating your next presentation, see if you can move all the text you have written on each slide to the notes section. Draw an illustration or just leave max six words, instead.

Larry is a PowerPoint virtuoso.

Some have copied his style and received only laughs. In my opinion, it's a good thing that his style is being copied. Everyone should try it, because it's simply just better for the audience.

Here is another great presentation in Lessigian PowerPoint style by Edward W. Felten:
Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media

It's great. Genius. Funny... and the visual presentation doesn't interfere with the talk.

If you have hard time writing your story, see if the traditional way of writing an act works for you. Some more suggestions from Cliff Atkinson.

Programming language popularity

2005-03-29T22:10:00.000+03:00

While reading the Seul/EDU list I noticed a message from Knut Yrvin about OpenOffice API programming language support. We'll that's not the point of my post but the suggestion from Knut to take a look at what are the most popular programming languages based on different measures.

You can see some statistics for example here and here. The result is that Microsoft platform specific programming languages are not even near the top-list. Many of the languages in the top-lists are more often associated with Open Source programming. If Microsoft is ever going t loose the game, it's because of the programmers.

The TOP-5 is:

C
Java
C++
PHP
Perl

I'm of course in love with Perl. If I had to pick three languages from that list I would pick Perl, C++ and C. Java is not very well designed (compared to Python) as an object-oriented language and PHP just produces a horde of horrible scripts (atleast most I have had a look into).

But as with every other tool, you have to know how to use your tool. Knowing Java or PHP is not the same thing as knowing how to program. Once you are able to program, it doesn't matter what language you use. Some have more hype/sex/business value than others. In the middle of everything there is Perl, the duct tape of the internet...

Ruby is something I would like to look into (like everyone else) in addition to Python. Ruby on Rails is a web-application framework and it is almost like OpenInteract (perl). Reading the code of OpenInteract (written by Chris Winters) resulted in big leaps in my understanding of Perl programming. Chris has expectional application design skills (and snappy fingers in glueing together different APIs).

Yahoo taking advantage of Creative Commons

2005-03-25T14:47:00.000+02:00

Some time ago Yahoo acquired Flickr which is the most popular photo-sharing service. What is interesting is that Flickr has built-in support for Creative Commons licenses, enabling anyone to decide on their images how they will be shared. The service has already gathered tens of thousands of freely available images with no copyright lawayers at sight.

Now Yahoo has introduced a Creative Commons search engine, enabling anyone to search the internet for content available in the Creative Commons. Part of the enabling factor is the fact that Creative Commons has introduced a technical concept for embedding the CC licensing information into web pages, enabling the development of such search engines.

Both Flickr CC and Yahoo CC search and remarkable contributions from Yahoo for shared culture. I look forward for Google to take the next step in the realm of Creative Commons.

Survey results of blog readership

2005-03-24T16:37:00.000+02:00

Interesting survey on blog readers at blogads. 30,079 readers filled the survey. if your business is targeting any kind of blog readers, here are some statistics for you to consider about your target market. Some highlights (rounded average numbers):

75% were over 30 years old. Only about 20% are from the 21-30 age group
I think this is pretty interesting. The computer savvy age group is surprisingly less present in these statistics.
43% receive over $90 000 in family incomes
20% of readers are bloggers
Hopefully this number is rising. The more conversations, the better. Yet, every fifth reader might write about you.
75% are males
I remember reading somewhere that most bloggers are females but how is it that there are more males as readers?
Distribution of job titles is very diverse. Not only computer enthusiasts. 10% where students and 8% were computer professionals
This is a good thing. What we need is more blogs about special subjects not related to technology and blogging at all. Like quality savile row suits.
Popular industries were education (15%), technology/computers (10%) and legal (7%)
Hopefully the education sector will grow through more utilization of blogs in education. Despite the fact that blogs were not originally designed for learning, blogs are very simple tools to help with personal learning.
Over 70% read more than 3 blogs a day
I rely on blogs almost entirely of the news I receive about my industry. There are several reasons but the most important one is:
75% read news they can't find elsewhere
Exactly. The mass media doesn't satisfy the general public. My forecast is that the readership of professional print media will drop as people will seek for the information they are interested in through grass-roots blogs.

Acqusition storms

2005-03-22T21:20:00.000+02:00

Crazy things are happening.. The social software industry is reforming.
Why everything at 2005/Q1?

2005/01/05: Six Apart acquires Live Journal, one of the largest weblog communities
2005/02/08: Ask Jeeves acquires Bloglines.com, most popular RSS aggregator
2005/03/20: Yahoo! acquires Flickr, the most popular photo sharing community
2005/03/21: IAC/InterActiveCorp acquires Ask Jeeves, 4# largest search engine (bloglines.com)

Is someone interested in what I'm doing? =)

The Long Tail of software

2005-03-14T04:51:00.000+02:00

Phew, lots of work went into our Open Source workshop. Check out the slides. Now it's done but the work continues.

I stumbled upon an article about the Long Tail of software. I've had my eye on JotSpot for quite some time already. It seems interesting but I wonder when the actual "application wiki" features are going to be easy to use for an average user.. or maybe it's targeted for advanced users only, who knows.

Joe Kraus's slides about the Long Tail of software are very nice. My first impression is that actually you could just change JotSpot in this case to "Open Source software", because that's what I agree with: the Long Tail of software is enabled and monetized by Open Source.

FLOSSE Posse, a new blog focused on Open Source in education

2005-02-23T21:39:00.000+02:00

I have created a new weblog which focuses on commentary on Free/Libre and Open Source Software in Education. It's called...

FLOSSE Posse

It's a group weblog consisting of some members of Free and Open Source in Education Association. We also accept guest bloggers.

Our first mission is to do digital audio recordings (podcasts) and analysis of various people in the field of Open Source in education. This is to systematically bring together ideas from people who work on various fields. Open Source in education is a fragmented field. There are certain online communities and mailing lists where people gather but so far not a single weblog has chosen to focus on these issues alone. If you know about one, let me know.

This also means that I'm talking more about Open Source in education over there and the business of Open Source right here.

The first interview is with Alan Levine. I think it came out fairly well. You can hear my compositions in the beginning and in the end of the interviews.

We are starting a conversation here, hop in.

Software should be stuff that gets you laid...

2005-02-20T15:34:00.000+02:00

I've been in the business of creating groupware applications and learning management software (LMS, which is the substitute of groupware in the educational world) long enough to understand what they are talking about in the Many-to-Many fame.

Groupware and LMS are both measured the same way: comparing feature lists, amount of features and other parameters useful when selling them to the management.

In the end, the users are not really willing to use these applications unless they are paid for doing so or there is some other benefit achieved through them. There is nothing sexy with a groupware application. Nothings that gets you laid.

Management is not (yet) interested in the social capital some of the software tools might be able to generate or how they are naturally able to network people together. They are interested in how these tools make certain mechanical business issues more efficient (save money and time) and how they are able to control it. They compare feature sheets where the features are listed like..

does it have a Todo application?
does it have a Project Management feature?
does it allow the teacher to track where students are spending their time?
etc.

It's all about increased structure. Control. Features. Cost savings.

Nothing bad about that. What is wrong here is that people stop using when the money stops flowing. That is the brokenated nature of groupware applications.

There is also a problem in over simplifying the process of selecting a tool. You simply just can't make a feature comparison chart and check if a groupware application has a feature or not. For example, if you have a LMS called Fronter in your comparison chart and there is a column called "Weblog", often you simply just check that "Ok, Fronter has a Weblog". *check*.

If you look more closely, the so called weblog you have in Fronter has nothing that makes weblog applications cool, sexy and social. In fact, there is nothing you could brag about: it lacks 90% of the characteristics of weblog applications in general that make them so sexy these days.

It's a poor substitute in the comparison chart simply to get the vendor ahead in feature checklist game as the management is able to say, "We have heard weblogs have benefits in education as our teachers are asking for them and students are already using them in their free time: Fronter also has a weblog". *check*.

The reality is that none of the users are willing to use the weblog tool in Fronter for blogging if they are not paid to do so. They use Blogger, Movable Type or Nucleus instead, software that is truly social software and is able to tap one into global conversations. These tools were built with a different mindset.

Building social capital through the daily use of collaborative software is underestimated these days. What managers are forgetting is that the markets are conversations and thanks to the internet, the markets are getting smarter all the time, requiring smarter conversations between companies and customers. A link between the conversation among the customers and the work that is done internally in a company has to be supported.

Ironical comment in the Many-to-Many blog by Will Davies:

"I gave a talk to a global consultancy firm a couple of years ago about what social software could do for them. I suggested that, given that they have several thousand over-worked employees in one building who never speak to each other, the best way to build social capital would be to create an internal dating site. They thought I was joking."

I have worked on an Open Source groupware/LMS.

Not anymore. Nowadays I'm working on social software.

I'm thinking about social capital and smarter conversations instead. I'm thinking about social added-value and smarter conversations instead of software feature checklists. I'm thinking about how my software could get you laid. I guess I wouldn't be able to think like this if I hadn't first learned everything about groupware and LMS.

Best sales pitch ever

2005-02-20T02:03:00.000+02:00

Tired of salesman pitches? How about a guitar and a familiar song with new lyrics that deliver the presentation? Very entertaining and fresh for sure.

I can play a guitar but I can't sing at the same time :) But I can juggle some balls, throw sticks around and play a fool. Anyone with good ideas about choreography for my next presentation?

Unlearning, wtf?

2005-02-18T05:34:00.000+02:00

There was a meme in the blog community about unlearning: unlearning the past in order to replace it with something new as the lifetime of what you know gets shorter and shorter all the time.

Hugh Gapingvoid mentions that he had to unlearn his career in advertising to come up with something as genious as
Hughtrain. Indeed, it's more than genious, go read it.

I think unlearning is a word from the old world where we used to think learning as acquisition of knowledge. I guess unlearning as a word is reversing that practice and putting something else back in. Yet I argue, you just can't unlearn, as the way how you have constructed new knowledge in the past has already shaped your point of view.

You have to change the way you view the world. My perception is that Hugh just got through the issues he just first mimiced to reveal a completely new level of understanding. The next stack in his understanding is partly based on the past learning experiences but the mindset is very much different, almost anarchic. I think this is the same for many who know their topic very well.

My friend Juhani Anttila has done a lifetime career in understanding Quality. My discussions with him have revealed (to me, at least) that quality is not in the specifications of how to manufacture quality products, services and goods. Quality is a mindset. He knows both sides of the coin better than anyone. He has been part of writing the ISO-9000 specifications and seeing people implement them.

Conceptual change is a better word to describe this. How the concepts through which you perceive the world change at an instant. It's like boiling water. Boiling doesn't happen gradually, the properties of the water change at once when the water reaches 100 degrees. We have to reach for the next conceptual boiling point in our understanding.

Oh yeah. My last major boiling point (atleast as much as I have realized) passed when I understood:

How on earth could a personal journal/weblog/website be social?

Suddenly you see the properties of the experience everywhere. I can't tell you how.

Funny animation for all you Data's out there

2005-02-17T06:11:00.000+02:00

When I was browsing some excellent demoscene demos and watching the Demo TV over at demoscene.tv I found this wild animation, presented at the Gathering 2004. It's hilarious, go see "Pat a Mat - Data" :)

Also found this überskillful demonstration of flash wizardry, $21 by Orion. Flash looks competent web technology these days ;)

Btw. sorry for not posting frequently lately, I've been busy working on various projects at work. I try to allocate more time for blogging about interesting stuff.

Exploring Flickr social relationships

2005-02-11T21:11:00.000+02:00

Web service APIs rock. These usually XML-RPC based interfaces enable so many creative uses of technology. Take a look at these third party applications made around the best photo sharing service, Flickr:

Technorati Tags
Flickr Squared Circle
Aerial Map of Vancouver
Flickr World Map
Mappr
Squared Circle Color Picker
and last but not least, Flickr graph which helps you to easily explore your friends of friends and their images in a network fashion. Addictive. Cogdogblog has more.

Free Software Magazine launched

2005-02-06T16:54:00.000+02:00

Free Software Magazine has launched, available on paper and in electronic format. Some pretty interesting articles. Hope this keeps up, visit the website.

Experiences on sound editing

2005-02-05T18:22:00.000+02:00

Recently I've been editing my soon to be released Skypecasts of various people in the field of Open Source in Education and also composed some tracks in the process with Skale Tracker.

Knowing how to mix and edit sound can make unbelievable difference in how a recording is experienced by the listener. Especially with podcasts and the increasing ammount of various offerings nowadays (thanks to IT Conversations and others), a listener might also choose the recording based on quality.

With quality I don't mean your MP3 bitrate but how pleasant it is to listen. If there is a lot of background noise, hard to hear words, lots of low-fidelity information (ummm, annndddaaa....) or distortion, it is easy to skip to next one despite the content.

As podcasting could prove to be a quite popular medium, I urge everyone creating recordings and releasing them to learn the basics of sound editing and mastering. Learning basics is easy and really make a difference in the end-product. There are also free tools available to begin with.

Doug Kaye (Via Stephen's Web) has gathered some links to tips on recording and editing. Good stuff to begin with.

I personally found this one very useful for beginners trying to do their work on Audacity.

Jon Udell pointed to Transom which is an awesome resource. If you are interested in movies or overall in how to edit music, talk and ambient sounds together in a way that people can still pick up the different themes without problems, see great article by Walter Murch where he describes audio through an analogy with visual spectrum and describes the unity of clarity and density through real examples from his movies.

Windows Media DRM10 Cracked?

2005-02-02T04:00:00.000+02:00

Afterdawn.com has an interesting article about
a rumor that Windows Media DRM has been cracked. Two programs are circulating, claiming to be able to unprotect
the protected media files. Here we go... There is always a way to circumvent a copy protection as long as the user
has access to the protected file and is able to play it on the same machine without a third party (network connection
to some verification server). It's only a matter of time.

BBS (bulletin board system): The Documentary

2005-02-01T02:10:00.000+02:00

ANSI art,
originally uploaded by inf.

I've been fiddling with computers long enough that I remember the glory nostalgic days of pre-internet era called Bulletin Board Systems. You hooked up your 9600 baud modem and dialed through your list of BBSs, hoping that one of them could answer. During that time a phone call at our area charged around 0,08€ a shot, no matter how long it was (!) As BBSs were mostly _the source_ of interesting files and discussions, you idled in BBSs just after midnight and consumed your precious daily download ratio till the morning, maybe playing some rounds of L.O.R.D at the same time or chatting with the SysOp in a split-screen chat.

The world's largest BBS was MBnet, located in Finland in my local area. It had 1000 nodes. MBnet was great for general-interest files, chat and door games, but the most interesting stuff was found in the topic-specific underground BBSs, often decorated with great looking character-based art.

I operated my single-line private BBS back in the day for a limited number of friends. I based it on the now notorious PcBoard software. First calls were most interesting.. "no one, in any circumstance, answer that phone when it rings, thank you!"

Trivia: Did you know, that the FILE_ID.DIZ files still around today were popularized by the PcBoard software? The reason was to include file descriptions inside the archives to let the users use the FILE_ID.DIZ contents as description of the uploaded file instead of writing their own.

ANSI and ASCII graphics also took off during those glorious days, which are still competed as an art form in the scene. I also got into drawing my own (see the inlined image). I also programmed in PPL, a Basic-like programming language for extending your PcBoard software.

The interesting thing about BBSs is that the glorious days were short lived. The unsung heroes who invented and prospered in the BBS community later affected how the internet formed out. These smart people are now scattered all around the world. That's why the BBS: The Documentary coming out in the following months is an important piece of work. Thank you! I'm so getting this.

This is important. A full-fledged documentary of BBSs does not exist. BBSs are often just a side note in stories like the Hacker Crackdown of a place where crackers meeted and discussed their attacks.

There is some entertaining media already available about the production.

Egology or not

2005-02-01T01:47:00.000+02:00

Egology, oh yes.

"In terms how we evaluate schooling, everything is about working by yourself. If you work with someone else, it's called cheating. Once you get out in the real world, everything you do involves working with other people".
-- The Talent Myth

Well said, indeed.

This is about how well the educational institutions prepare students for the business world.

The way students are engaged in groups is still a separate process in the school environment. It needs to be integrated so that when you get out of there, you feel like working your ass off for others, not working your ass off for yourself.

Future Virtual Learning Environment

2005-01-26T20:35:00.000+02:00

I totally agree with this one. The importance of RSS feeds, web service API's (XML-RPC) and other ways to loosely join pieces is not to be underestimated.

If you don't understand this picture, maybe you should see a simpler version instead, already constructed by my fellow comrade Alan at Maricopa.

Take good specialized components, collect, mix and combine the way you want. The open standards like content syndication with RSS and XML-RPC for web servces make it cheaper and even possible.

We enable this with Dicole to some degree. We call it easy (and cheap) web application integration. More of it later. The problem with a picture like this is that the integration of such services usually requires some programmer to construct the interfaces into the VLE, which is costly and time consuming. Also, interfaces do change. I want this process to be as simple as possible for a teacher to do it herself. Still some work to do on that field but I guess the future VLE is not that far away in the future... ;)

Are traditional VLE providers going to support a more open and more component oriented approach to VLE construction for customers? Absolutely not. it's against their lock-in plan. In this case they are not controlling the pieces, say webmail, photo album or ePortfolio. It's their business to provide uhm.. the best proprietary combination of such tools to their customers and lock competitors out. Unfortunately this is not the benefit of the customer.

I don't have a business problem like this because I'm not making money out of the components. I also have an Open Source platform for creating such loosely joined group or personal environments. I can sell my expertise of Open Source tools and social software as a service to help finding good components, mix good components and create the customized targeted solution. Cheaply and affordably.

Spaghetti con pollo citron peperoncino

2005-01-24T01:45:00.000+02:00

spaghetti con pollo-citron-peperoncino,
originally uploaded by inf.

Some of my latest experiments. Good for coding: some citron chicken spaghetti with chili fast-food (well, it's fast to prepare, anyway). I don't know if the italian name I made up is correct or not. Maybe someone could shred some light?

Here is the recipe.

Spaghetti con pollo citron peperoncino

Cooking time: 10 minutes
Yield: 2-3 servings

Ingredients:
300-400g spaghetti (I used tricolore)

3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
250g chopped chicken

2 tablespoons capers
2 teaspoons chili flakes
1 chopped tomato
2½ teaspoons grated lemon rind
3 tablespoons lemon juice

1 decilitre cream (optional)

1 decilitre shredded fresh basil, oregano and mint
1 decilitle shredded rucola leaves
2 decilitres grated parmesan
Lots of black pepper

Use half of the recipe when preparing for yourself (it's late night coding, after all).

Boil spaghetti with 1 teaspoon of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of salt until it's al dente (half-cooked). While it's boiling, prepare the chicken mix.
Heat olive oil on a pan until hot. Add minced garlic and chicken. Cook for a few minutes until the chicken is half-cooked.
Add capers, chopped tomato, fresh chili strips or dried chili flakes, lemon grind and lemon juice. Cook stirring for a few minutes until the chicken looks ready.
Add cream. This is optional, use it only if you want to make creamy pasta. Cook for a minute.
Drain the pasta and mix it with chicken mix, shredded herbs, rucola, black pepper and parmesan.
Serve with oven hot crispy bread and red wine. Start coding.

Cooperative categorization with folksonomies

2005-01-17T22:17:00.000+02:00

Flickr and del.icio.us have popularized the use of folksonomies. Now Technorati has adopted the use of tags to join content from Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati indexed blogs into one single location. Excellent job!

Folksonomies defined according to the original author Thomas Vander Wal:

Taxonomy is from "taxis" and "nomos" (from Greek). Taxis means classification. Nomos (or nomia) means management. Folk is people (from German). So folksonomy means people's classification management.

Simplest description of folksonomies are simply classification, categorization or defining keywords. The concept is not new: for a long time keywords have been assigned to web sites in meta descriptions and in controlled vocabularies.

Originally metadata has been in hands of professionals who use complicated vocabularies and tools for describing information assets. In some systems, the authors have had the opportunity to tag their content with a controlled vocabulary like IEEE LOM (learning object metadata).

The fundamental shift is the move towards an information system where the content is not tagged for personal use only but for a community to collaboratively describe information assets without any formal training in the subject. This enables wider adoption but the trade-off is that the taxonomy is not as accurate as it is in controlled vocabularies.

At first as you see Mac, Macintosh, Macs and Apple describing almost the same thing, the method seems more like chaos than control. The true benefit lies in the accidental browsing capabilities, as you find information you might never find otherwise. This enables a layer above the information to browse numerous information resources quickly and effectively, while still maintaining a level of cheer luck in finding new and interesting things.

Google is using masses to understand the content. They have abandoned the use of user provided metadata, according to their Director of Search Quality. This is because as long as there is a market to use the metadata to make money, people will abuse it (spam, fooling people to look after their commercial offerings etc). Instead, they are using the masses to find out relevant data.

When we look at folksonomies, the framework is using masses to help browsing in a similar way as Google does. Merholz notes that folksonomies could be used to create controlled vocabularies. Maybe this results in generally more useful vocabularities for personal use? This might also fix the problem with educational XML standards which have their problems according to many experts in the field.

For more information and a great analysis of folksonomies, see Grassroots Cooperative Categorization Of Digital Content Assets: Folksonomies, What They Are, Why They Work and Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.

It seems that in many things it's neither total control nor total chaos but the true capabilities lie somewhere in between.

Open Source beer from Denmark

2005-01-15T18:20:00.000+02:00

Finally freedom as in beer (not free as in beer)! Danish computer science students have started to brew their own 6% Vores Øl beer. It includes quorana and caffeine for added energy boost. Serious geeks only? Maybe.

The recipe and the brand are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution & ShareAlike license. I hope some local brewery takes this recipe so I could use it to aid myself with all night coding sessions...

Check it out.

Really simple tomato soup

2005-01-15T03:04:00.000+02:00

Image originally by McBeth.

Well I always thought that making tomato soup from real tomatoes is somehow time consuming and not worth the effort. Well, I tried with oven today and I can say, it leaves you plenty of time to browse your RSS feeds. 45 minutes in oven and max 10 minutes on cooker and that's it. Not much chopping and hanging around in the kitchen.

My girlfriend left to Scotland with the digital camera, so no picture of the soup until I get it back (I'm sure I'm repeating this very soon).

Inf's tomato soup
Yield: 4-6 servings
Cooking time: 45 min + 10 min

Ingredients:
½ - 1 litre vegetable broth

10 medium to large sized tomatoes
1 complete unpeeled garlic
2 unpeeled onions

3 tablespoons fresh minced basil
2 tablespoons fresh minced mint
2 tablespoons fresh minced oregano (optional)
1-2 teaspoons black pepper
sea salt

Heat oven around 150-160 degrees. Separate the unpeeled cloves of garlic from the complete garlic. Throw garlic cloves, tomatoes and onions in the oven for 45 minutes. Avoid playing World of Warcraft in the mean time. Play Tetris instead or you have burnt tomatoes.
Take vegetables from the oven and leave them chill while heating the vegetable broth in a pot (avoid boiling). Use less vegetable broth (½) to make your soup thicker.
Watch your fingers, they still might be hot. Remove the root part of the garlic cloves and squeeze out the contents in a bowl. Peel the onions, cut into pieces and throw in the bowl. Optionally, fry the onions on a pan for a couple of minutes. Add tomatoes in the bowl and you are set.
Shred the contents of the bowl with an electric blender into rough pieces. Don't get haywire with the blender unless you prefer purée.
Empty the shredded contents of the bowl into the vegetable broth pot. Mix well. Let your cooking simmer for a couple of minutes and add shredded basil, mint, oregano (optional), pepper and salt. Check taste.
Let boil for 3-5 minutes and stir occassionally.
Serve with French bread as a starter of your main dish (suggestion: creamy spaghetti with tomatoes, spinach and chevre) or as it is with good company and some red wine.

Pretty good predictions

2005-01-11T01:01:00.000+02:00

New years promises must be the worst promises ever. How many of you have really stopped smoking? Predictions, in the other hand, are always interesting.

Sir Cringely comes once again with pretty interesting predictions for the new year in technology business.

Is this the year of online music stores, Long Tail and VoIP?

Is Microsoft finally taking over the gaming entertainment market from Sony? I think it's going to be a tough competition. Nintendo lost their markets to Sony because Squaresoft and Enix changed camps. Did you know, it's forbidden by law to release new sequels to popular game series in Japan expect weekends by those companies because teenagers are skipping school and workers get ill? Japan, as being the hardest gaming market to understand by Microsoft, will be the final frontier.

Is this the time when Sun Microsystems abandons their current strategy? Their current strategy might be a flawed one. Basic economics: smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. Hardware is a complement of software and vice-versa. By promoting free software they are commodizing software. By promoting Java they are commodizing hardware. Oobs:

"OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you're going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley".
-- Joel on Software

Nostalgic moments with console RPGs

2005-01-08T01:01:00.000+02:00

For many years I was not really that much into games. When I got my first PC I was mainly fiddling with software, networking, hacking and programming instead of playing games. This is the tradition up to these days. Yet there are two genres that I have played both for 24 hours straight and almost ruined my school projects. Yet I think all of that m4d gaming was worth of it for various reasons. The two genres I have played in long bursts during my life are console RPGs and 1st person shooters (got my skills playing Quake for several years, I'll tell something about that experience later).

My first console was the now notorious NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). My journey into RPGs started from Zelda and Willow, later followed by the long awaited Gameboy and Super Nintendo, which I remember as the golden age of Japanese RPGs. I also remember the disappointment of hearing of how many great titles went untranslated I had been waiting for. Heck, one of my friends even learned Japanese to play those games imported from Japan.

This guy called Ville really introduced me into the mystical world of Japanese RPGs. He and his family were really all about gaming from my point of view. They owned every single system from the time and I can still visualize the big game cartridge towers in their game room. Everyone was playing from father to son, only the mother was not really into 24/7 gaming. It was the "gaming pit" for me in both good and bad.

The first RPG games which really changed my gaming life and interest in buying games were the Final Fantasy II (FF IV in Japan) and Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan), both for Super Nintendo (and both from Squaresoft). I also played some of the PC RPGs like Ultima series and Diablo but never got the same kind of vibes as I got from the orchestrated music, epic battles and complex plots in medieval fantasy settings of the Japanese RPGs. These titles really got me into playing for just one more hour. I think I have so far played through all the great Japanese RPGs released for SNES in the west. I'm in dept to Enix and Squresoft for delivering me with so many great experiences. Still when I'm playing with my Xbox, I dream of experiencing the same again.

In my opinion, the greatest title on SNES was Chrono Trigger by Squaresoft followed by excellent Chrono Cross on Playstation. Breath of Fire series from Capcom was not bad either. Few know that I have hacked together a Finnish translation of Chrono Trigger in the past just for fun, now surpassed in quality by another team...

I totally skipped Gameboy Advance, Playstation and Playstation 2, all which had great Japanese RPG titles and I still regret that move (I was playing Quake at that time ;)). Now I own the Xbox, my one and only evil swing towards Microsoft. It doesn't have any Japanese RPGs but it sure is a PC if you open the cover. If you have the skills you could modify your Xbox to run Linux and alongside with it, all the great emulators to emulate almost every single console available in the past. It's potentially a 100 in one solution (video).

Gamespot is featuring a series of articles about the part of gaming world I really love. Take a look at the history of Square, history of console RPGs and history of Final Fantasy.

I think I'm going to fire my emulator and load some Japanese SNES goodness which never really got through the trans-pacific cracks. Now it's done, unofficially. Nostalgia awaits...

Inf's beef with oyster sauce

2005-01-07T21:04:00.000+02:00

Inf's beef with oyster sauce,
originally uploaded by Teemu Arina.

Very nice, pretty traditional chinese except the rice. If you are tired of feeling sleepy and full after eating Chinese food, try my rice vaporization technique. I got tired of traditional rice without any additions in the cooking process so I often try to experiment with different sauces, spices and vegetables while cooking rice. I haven't since returned to plain rice. Indian Pilau rice is so far my favorite. Here is my cooking for today, enjoy.

Inf's Beef with Oyster Sauce

Yield: 2-3 servings
Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:
3 decilitres Basmati rice
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon yellow thai curry

350-400 grams roast beef
1 cup peanut or vegetable oil
2 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 teaspoon sugar
3 teaspoons cornstarch

1 teaspoon cornstarch
½ scallion, green leaves trimmed
4 leaves Chinese cabbage
2 tablespoon shredded fresh ginger
1 red or green pepper
1 red hot Thai chili pepper
1 medium sized carrot

3 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon rice wine (sake), dry sherry or some other wine
2 tablespoons water

Peanuts and scallion rings for garnish (optional)

Preparations:

Take a kettle and a sieve bowl (you know, a bowl with a screen :) What's the correct name?). Place the sieve bowl above the kettle so that it fits inside it. Add water until it's about 2 centrimetres above the bottom of the sieve bowl. Flush rice under cold water and add in the sieve bowl. Place your construction on high heat and add the cover so that the vaporizing water is able to escape from a narrow opening. The rice takes about 20 minutes of vaporization to be ready. Every 3-5 minutes remove the cover and turn the rice over so that it cooks evenly and cover the rice again. Remember to do this while cooking the beef and vegetables. If your timing is correct the rice is ready just when you remove the main dish from the heat. This is my favorite method for cooking rice. The result is rice which is not too thick so you don't feel sleepy after eating it.
Cut the roast beef using a sharp knife into the thinnest possible long slices you can make. This is easier to do if the beef is partially frozen. Avoid already sliced beef, make your own.
Using a bowl, mix beef, 1 tablespoon of oil, dark soy sauce, sugar and 3 teaspoons of the cornstarch.
Shred carrot and scallion into round thin pieces. Cut red pepper into small square pieces. Mince ginger and Thai chili into small pieces. If you want more spicy food, add more chili. Remove the white root part of the Chinese cabbage leaves. Add everything into a separate bowl for later use.
Mix 1 teaspoon of cornstarch and 1 tablespoon of water in a cup and leave it aside.

Cooking madness:

In a wokpan heat the remaining oil but avoid getting it too hot, otherwise it's hard to keep the beef separated from each other.
Add the beef mixture and stir-fry cook for about 30 seconds. Keep the food moving constantly. This is accomplished by quickly and repeatedly sliding a spatula down between the food and the pan and turning the food over in a constant motion. Make sure all parts of the beef get contact with the hottest part of the pan.
When the meat is half cooked (avoid overcooking, we heat that stuff again later), remove and drain the meat well in a sieve bowl. Catch the drippings! Do not let the valuable beef drippings away, we need that stuff for the vegetables. When removing, leave about 2 tablespoons of oil in the pan.
Turn the heat high and add the contents of your vegetable bowl in the wokpan. Cook for 10 seconds and add the oyster sauce and beef drippings. Mix.
Thinly pour the cup of cornstarch+water all over your vegetables. Add the beef, rice wine and the remaining tablespoon of water.
Stir-fry to thicken and remove from heat. Empty the wokpan into a serving plate but leave about 1 tablespoon of the juices in the pan. Garnish your dish with fresh scallion and peanuts.
Add butter and turn the heat low. Add salt and yellow Thai curry. Fry the spices for 15 seconds. Make sure the rice is ready and throw the rice in the wokpan. Stir for 1 minute, make sure all the spices and juices mix well with the rice. Remove from heat.
Serve hot with beer (preferably Chinese) or sparkling water. Enjoy.

Six Apart and LiveJournal: How to do a press release

2005-01-06T15:11:00.000+02:00

It has come to my attention that Six Apart and LiveJournal are merging. Read this "exclusive first post" and compare it to what the LiveJournal author himself wrote in a press-release-kind-of-thing.

The interesting part is that the first one could be slightly edited to fit in the good old press release structure. It's boring and written in third person, looking like a journalist rip-off of a company press release to complete the day. It could be the press release of either of the mergers. It sprung quite a lot of doubt and disbelief on many fronts.

But if you read the LiveJournal authors post, which one you find more interesting to read, more to trust and to believe in? It's written in a form of a conversation. It really has a personal sound in it. I especially loved the "above is all gibberish" part and some muttering about TCO and core competencies. It's great self-irony at best.

Now this is how companies should write their press releases to build trust in the markets of conversations. Sure it doesn't sound "professional" enough but it has more effect in the market and user base, me thinks... It's very hard to write something like this if you are used in the old way of doing things. Almost like sailing upstream without a sail. No problem, these guys have pretty good wings.

Kick ass LiveJournal and Six Apart, I have my trust in the management of both companies.

Inf's Storm Chicken Soup

2005-01-05T19:47:00.000+02:00

Inf's Storm Chicken Soup,
originally uploaded by Teemu Arina.

What is better on a frosty winter night other than some spicy chicken soup thai style? This is one kick ass chicken soup I made to wake myself up, I tell you. So if you feel a bit drowsy after the holidays, get your wokpan and prepare yourself for a delicious ride.

Inf's Storm Chicken Soup

Yield: 4-6 servings
Cooking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:
1 litre rich chicken broth
1 decilitre coconut milk

250 grams chicken

1 carrot
1 habanero or 3 thai chili
2 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 decilitre bamboo shoots
5 leaves of chinese cabbage

2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon yellow thai curry
1 teaspoon chili powder or red thai curry
1 teaspoon cayanne pepper
1 teaspoon crushed green or black pepper

½ teaspoon monosodium glutamate (optional)
½ cup minced parsley

Note:
If you can't afford to make your own rich chicken broth a canned one is also acceptable but remember, the soup base is the most important one.

Warning:
Handle your habanero chili with care. That evil stuff really has some potent. Use gloves or limit your bathroom trips (really, I know).

Mince carrot, habanero chili, garlic and ginger.
Chop your chicken into small pieces, not bigger than your finger tips.
Heat the oil in a wokpan and add garlic, habanero chili, ginger and chicken.
Cook, stirring, over high heat about 2 minutes. Add the bamboo shoots and carrot. Cook briefly, stirring while preparing the next step.
Heat the chicken broth, dark soy sauce and coconut milk separately. When it is simmering add to wokpan.
Add yellow thai curry, cayanne pepper, red thai curry (or chili powder) and crushed pepper.
Let your cooking simmer for 15 minutes. In the middle, add leaves of chinese cabbage.
Add monosodium glutamate or some other stuff to thicken your soup if you want. Bring down the heat and add minced parsley for garnish.
Serve with fresh bread and citron flavoured sparkling water on ice, preferably just after escaping the snow storm. Finish with sake.
Start being productive.

Open Source personal Tsunami Warning System

2005-01-02T01:56:00.000+02:00

The president of Finland announced, that the Asian disaster which also affected some finnish tourists is the biggest disaster in our country during the slightly over 50-year period of peace-time. In Sweden things are even worse, as they haven't had any major events (last war was fought in 1814) in mid-term memory other than the sinking of Estonia, resulting in major difficulties for people to handle the issue.

I tried hard not to write anything about the Tsunami. Everyone else is doing it already in their weblogs and the level of information I'm able to provide to the collective pile is fairly low. Once again Wikipedia is a great source for updated "facts" of all of the noise.

Well, I guess I have found an element which connects to my overall interest so here it goes.

Robert Cringely has written a very interesting article about how to build a Global Internet Tsunami Warning System (or more conveniently, GITWS). The basic idea is that letting the governments build the multi-government warning system involves many many years of politics, new technology and great piles of money to build. The alternative?

We, of course - In a similar manner as weblogs provide alternative coverage to main-stream news and individual Open Source developers building great software from scratch.

A multi-government system requires a great ammount of data to process. Seismic sensors are monitored and as activity is detected, the data is combined and simulated automatically. From the simulation we can see how the event could affect certain locations and we could warn those locations beforehand. I expect a simulation like this requires a lot of calculation power.

If we attack the problem from another angle, i.e. "is my beach going to be devastated by a tsunami?", the ammount of information and seismic sensors you require to figure that out are fairly low. I expect there are many things you could leave out of your calculation compared to a full simulation. It's possible that this information could be processed fairly quickly on a single computer or on a local p2p application of some sort as a full simulation is not required.

If seismographs are online, all the data could be gathered electronically and a formula to calculate a disaster from your viewpoint exists, the system could be online in months, not in 10 years. The software could be released under Open Source for public good, of course. Everyone interested in if a tsunami is going to hit your location could have a nice tsunami icon in their taskbar, sending a horde of IM's, SMS's, email and flashing your screen to notify you in event of a disaster and give you plenty of time to sail with your precious cruiser to sunset.

It could be done?

Google Suggest makes JavaScript acceptable

2004-12-18T18:43:00.000+02:00

Some time ago I checked out Google Suggest, a search engine that does suggestions for you as you type.

Originally I have always thought that using Javascript or any other client-side scripting language is evil and the root of several problems (not just security, but compatibility as well).

Lately I have started to shift towards thinking that JavaScript is acceptable if it makes the experience richer or enables some shortcuts not otherwise possible. Especially I find Javascript useful for usability purposes. The key is that the application should work without JavaScript at the same time, so that client-side scripting is not required. Google Suggest takes things a step forward in usability and speed by involving server-side processing by using XMLHttp objects for transmission.. Awesome.

Google has restored my faith in client-side scripting, first with their great invite-only Gmail service and now this. Our usability guy Tony has also made some really nice tricks with JavaScript in our Dicole product and there is more to come..

For a technical description of how the Google Suggest works, check out this great analysis of the code.

Earning as in learning

2004-12-16T01:19:00.000+02:00

I couldn't get any sleep so I just had to write this down. eLearning is not ePublishing. If we think about the word eLearning, it's fundamentally wrong, because it makes people compare it to traditional learning as an alternative - that is understandable, because it's a new thing in a sense. This is also where the problem starts.

People tend to build on old paradigms. The old paradigm of learning is content. The business in learning is content. We now have this new transmission channel, the internet and we put e in Learning as in the old paradigm. We emulate the traditional class room. We end up mixing, replacing and burning content (where the money is) with electronic substitutes. This is all about making the old paradigm more efficient in a way - we can reach people with content without caring about physical presence. We are replacing schools with online libraries. We build online repositories of learning objects which are not visible in popular search engines. Thanks: we have now a lot of digital material, but I ask you, how the learning is improved, made richer and expanded as in methods of learning? We have to drop the e and go back to the basics, Learning.

There are many different learners. It's not a new thing that some methods of learning work better for some than others. We still mostly start a class room by buying a book - the content - and the teacher goes through it according to a preset plan. This works very well for some but not for others. Learning is situated. Building dynamic expertise which is able to adapt in new settings out of the class room context is difficult. Some learners end up learning how to pass an exam, not how to adapt the knowledge in settings they are supposed to. This is why we have to mix different methods to make learning fair for various types of learners.

If we drop the l from learning, we get Earning. The question is, what is earning as in learning in the technology we call the internet?

To unleash the full potential of internet we have to go back to the roots. What is internet build on? What stuff is it especially good at? What are the fundamental key issues it improves?

My educated guess is that the keyword is networks.

Internet builds on a web of information and social networks. It's a small world network, with several interesting hubs inside it. It's not totally random or totally organized, it's somewhere in between. Six degrees of separation.

Now if we look at some successful internet based businesses, we see that all those go back to the roots: LinkedIn, Friendster, Meetup, Google, Wikipedia, Blogger, Livejournal, Flickr, Technorati, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon.com, to name a few. All of them are based on exploiting the key enablers of the established strong network - the internet.

It's all about how the information and people are connected in a network, not the content itself.

Take for example weblogs - the first website ever was a weblog. Now there is a myriad of opportunities in the weblog business, as people have discovered it's in fact a social network where collective knowledge is not in small units of ready-made content, but as thoughts in people's minds, evolving all the time as conversations. It's a social platform for information to mutate. The markets are conversations. You can recognize the footsteps in the sand.

The new technology could improve learning by building above the already established strong network. A network above network, a second stack over the existing one. That's where the potential is as in learning.

We have to...

use the internet in learning for what it's good for

start sharing methods instead of content

fundamentally change the online learning environments to connect with each other, to build small world networks

tap into conversations and transform that into learning

facilitate the formation of new Pro-Am communities (like the Open Source community) out of learners, to support their life-long learning

use the technology of networks to build a framework with embedded social structure - enabling communities of practice in learning

A fellow who still can't get any sleep.

Educational weblogs

2004-12-12T19:43:00.000+02:00

The Edublog Weblog Awards is a great source to expand your source of educational and academic information.

Off-topic: I've tried to grow my own Shiitake mushrooms in chopped wood beds and so for I've been successful and have gathered a few caps. I'm now starting my second growth period, expect some pictures in a couple of weeks. They grow nicely in room temparature if you remember to spray some water several times a day.

EPIC 2014 - World of personalized media

2004-11-30T14:59:00.000+02:00

The Museum of Media History features a 8 min flash of
EPIC 2014. It's a story of the near history, predicting a mythical future scenario of Google merging with Amazon to form Googlezon, a collaboration which enables fully personalized media. In the year 2014, The New Your Times has gone offline. Worth to check it out.

Publishers, learning objects and the future of education

2004-11-29T16:02:00.000+02:00

During the past weeks I've been writing and speaking about a loosely joined network for online learning. It's a system build on emerging technologies that connects the isolated islands of creative workers, bound in their islands by the barriers and limits of their online groupware systems or learning environments.

Yet the publishers and designers of standards behind the online learning have taken a different route, missing the point of online learning and internet completely. It seems like a step backwards, reflecting on the existing world, not building the future but recreating the past.

Stephen Downes explanation of a brave new world of online learning and what went wrong is entertaining, sound and to the point by someone who has observed the field for a long time. Read his learning networks transcript, it's worth of every minute of your time. I've personally observed the online learning field for several years already and I honestly recommend this one as a quick mind boggling introduction to learning objects, content repositories and artifacts that describe the future of learning as well as past. Shall it be ground for the future scenarios of online learning you might be working on.

I feel the fresh wind in the air, the snow has finally arrived to my neighborhood. Along with it Stephen has shown me that what I'm doing is probably worth of it.

Exercise your creativity in boring business meetings

2004-11-09T13:09:00.000+02:00

Found these through IT conversations. Alphachimp studio facilitates groups using visual presentation and learning as seen here at Pop!Tech conference. Scroll down to see the visual mind maps of various presentations.

We all were given a box of crayons after all. I remember practicing the art of drawing shapes, illustrations and figures in my school books, despite the fact that the teacher didn't really like it. So now it's time to start doing it in work ;)

Make, Buy, Outsource, or Open Source?

2004-11-05T13:44:00.000+02:00

Mikko Puhakka has written a nice article about the fact that businesses should start to look after IT Survival Strategies. It is evident that Open Source is here to stay and companies have to ask from themselves, "what is our Open Source strategy?"

I agree with most of his points. Businesses should start to think about these issues before it hits their forehead. There is one thing I don't completely agree with:

"watch out, incumbents! I suggest that you accept that open source is here to stay, and that it's causing the value of your current offering to slowly approach zero. And you'll have to find new sources of revenues while you still can.
"

In my opinion, Open Source is not causing the value of all closed source software products to approach zero. There is a certain group of specialized products which market is very small: e.g. a product which is only useful for say, windmills. If your software has only a handful of customers around the world, I argue that such software is not going to be replaced by an Open Source product.

So far Open Source has been successful in applications which user base is potentially very large and brings benefits to almost any organization around the world. Open Source products directly threaten the position of products that have such a broad market. My analysis is that in the future Open Source starts to threaten more specialized products indirectly, because Open Source platforms enable companies to bring a new specialized product faster, cheaper and more conveniently to the market by building on open platforms.

He later answered that I'm most likely correct:

"I was talking about theoretical possibility. Open source is a challenge to look at academically as e.g. existing economical theories pretty much say that it's emergence should not have taken place...."

So all of you who have so far ignored the existence of Open Source: think about your strategy and the possibility that your wonderful product may sooner or later get replaced with an Open Source offering.

The fall of the capitalist dream of Iraq

2004-11-03T01:39:00.000+02:00

While I have been interested in the latest economical impact in the infrastructure of Iraq caused by the Bush administration, I have read a great article by Naomi Klein, "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia" released some time ago.

It describes how the idealistic believers in Shock theory didn't succeed in their attempts to turn Iraq into a capitalist dream of free market, low taxes and possibility to 100% privatize country's businesses and sell them to foreign companies.

It turned out the idealistic plan was just way too idealistic to work and it back-fired. The operations didn't paralyze the Iraqi people, instead the new approach gave them two decisions: either fight the privatization or starve and loose your job. Bremer gave no options, while his vision was blurred by the myriad of investment opportunities.

The greediness that drives the economical growth in capitalistic countries does not mean that the system works in it's most idealistic and purest form, as the religious crusade of the neo-con regime fueled by the Bush administration shows.

I guess you should value a more pragmatic approach these days.

Hughtrain hitting in the forehead

2004-10-30T23:24:00.000+03:00

I was wandering around the net after I saw the unbelievable act of picking a Kryptonite lock with a mere pen. The markets are conversations... and the markets did just that. Now Kryptonite is exchanging their defected products to new and better designed ones. Another good example of Cluetrain manifesto. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Keep the bike in your bedroom and spread the word.

While I was looking for more information I suddenly stumbled upon the Gapingvoid site. I was almost leaving but as an artist by heart, the drawings got my attention. Each post has a creative sketch attached to it. This guy draws pictures on back of business cards. I wonder what Japanese would say about "ruining" their business cards like this.

I dug deeper and spotted the cleverness of the Hughtrain. It seems to be affected by the background in the advertisement industry by the writer but it was like reading my own notes, as one commenter puts it. I found many things I have subconsciously noticed in my job, now being just well-written. I think many other creative persons will feel the same who have been looking after something meaningful to do instead of some brainless jobs-for-money.

Products are conversations and it's not all about products but the process of using them. One have to love using the product not the product itself.
When creating a product, there must be something interesting, insightful and new in it. When you yourself have visions and belief in it, then it's time to explain it to others. Re-inventing existing markets is stupid and often more difficult than creating completely new markets.

I have noticed this lately when I have been going around talking about my vision of the Dicole Network. I'm turning things upside down, making old things interesting by introducing new ways of thinking. When people share my vision and see it in their own way, suddenly the product also becomes meaningful and something fun to play with. So it's not about the product characteristics, it's about what is it like to use it, is it a new and interesting way and how it's going to change the culture one is living in.

Unlock car via SMS, download MP3s, kick some ass

2004-10-27T22:42:00.000+03:00

Now this is a cool car. Especially for geeks and alike. These guys are creative, they built a car which allows you to download MP3s from specially enabled petrol pumps, unlock it via SMS text message and transform it's windows into PC screens (although I wouldn't trust my car to run Windows on Windows, imagine what a blue screen would do in the middle of a traffic...).

Well, "one gallon of hardcore techno, please".

The article also features a Ninja TV-Fight suit, which reminds me of Kick Ass Kung-Fu, a system developed in the UIAH Medialab. It allows you to kick some serious ass if you want to and stay in shape at the same time. Check out the presentation video.

Bush tells us about the state of the union

2004-10-24T22:53:00.000+03:00

This video is just way too hilarious. Best edit of a G. W. Bush speech I have seen so far.
I guess you have to edit footage of Bush to get the truth out of him.

My notes of the presentation by Joichi Ito at Aula

2004-10-18T22:10:00.000+03:00

I was last Thursday listening at Joichi Ito at Aula (Finland) who gave a great presentation about the future of music business. I always appreciate people who are able to give a brilliant and interesting presentation without using any slides. Very skilled.

I recorded some notes of the presentation in my notebook. There were several good points I think I should share with you. My notes in cursive:

Joi was in Italy:
- CreativeCommons copylefters accused as pirates
- Tone changed once understanding grew.
It costs $300, 000 to produce one hit iTunes sells one for 99c
If price is low enough, maybe there will be no piracy:
- When people are doing file sharing, they are working.
- If the price is low enough (e.g. 20 cents), people would actually pay instead of working (waiting for download to complete, search for quality sources etc).
Music is all about social interaction:
- Friends recommend, people go file sharing.
- File sharing increases people's interest in music.
- This probably results in more record sales as interest in music increases.
Social navigation like Amazon's collaborative filtering allows you to discover music and books you have never heard of.
95% of physical CD's are pirated:
- Most artists lose money on CD's.
- They make CD's anyway.
- Cheapest way to market.
- Let people steal your music to become famous.
Music brings people together. Fills the gap between people.
Mass media made folk music not cool.
Head market is shrinking. We have to focus on tail.
Joi's example: LastFM:
- Creates a profile of your musical taste.
- Similar to Amazon recommendation of books.
- Stream music from your personal playlist to others.
- Chat included.
- You can add music from playlists of others to your own.
- Creates playlists similar to your taste.
- lastfm/user/joi
- Allows people to share their own music even for money.
- Allows customers to vote for price of music.
Marketing music is difficult:
- Joi explains a case where Yahoo marketed wrongly and the market was found elsewhere.
- You never know where your fans are.
- Collaborative filtering as a solution.
- You can now theoretically charge 20c per song and still make money long tail.
You can't make Michael Jackson in the long tail:
- Joi suggests there will be no Jacksons in the future because people are no more paying attention to mass media (Whoa, you should have seen the faces of some music bosses in the room).
Musicians are ready to pay to do music if they had no other option. Musicians are ready to make music for no-profit, as long as no one exploits them in a bad way.
Pro-Am revolution:
- Amateurs sharing music, doing music and learning about music.
- There are a lot of professional musicians, who are not as talented as some amateurs.
- To become professional, you would have to go to school and buy and learn a lot of things before you can become mainstream.
Joi explains Karaoke success in Japan:
- You want to participate in the creative process.
- Real market is in the long tail amateur music.
- Digital tribes. Digital tribes may now have their own music.
Identify your community and provide what they need.
Figure out what to sell them.
Band becomes a community platform. Allows two-way communication between fans and bands.
Flash community as a sharing amateur community some make music, some make storyboards, some make animation, some make coding etc. They share and put things together.
Company is required to clear all copyrights in music business lawyers create a part of the record expenses.
CreativeCommons is good because it decreases the parasitic cost. Allows content to be more fluently shared.
Delivery and discovery business. Delivery is free (P2P). It's all about how these communities develop.
Moving to world where everyone has their own voice. Internet is like a radio they promise all kinds of crap.
In Google individual weblogs come up in searches.
Joi quotes someone I don't remember by name: Democracy is not about giving everyone a vote real democracy is giving everyone a voice.

Then I wrote down my question to Joi, which he didn't quite answer but the answer was great anyway:

You talk about the fact that Internet enables part of the distribution and lawyer profits to decrease, leaving us collaborative filtering which is helping people to find stuff in the long tail. Sounds like local distribution is about to disappear. That actually the long tail becomes more profitable and the market size of the long tail is bigger than the head (mainstream stuff). When is this going to happen? When are these communities going to take off on a wide scale? 5 years? 10 years? What are the obstacles that could break this idealistic approach? How DRM (digital rights management) relates to it: is it harming or supporting the future you describe?

My point was that this is no way mainstream, yet. Generally speaking people are not yet discovering the long tail online but probably some day will. Sure there are examples already that lead the way but general public is not yet aware of what they are missing at the moment.

Also, I think the big media empires might react very aggressively in this change and try to lock-in people in the old world (with DRM etc.) until they figure out it's impossible and change their business plan. It will hit their forehead pretty soon.

This is where I closed my notebook and just listened other people asking questions. There were some interesting points about blogging and how record companies are suing their music loving customers. The add by Pepsi was displayed with a parody version of it. Does anybody know where to get these?

Great stuff.

Btw., I asked about how Technorati is going to make money in the future (I checked their website and saw no $$$ signs anywhere). Mr. Ito told me that they are revealing some value-added services for power users and advertisers. It seems they follow the < 5% rule of making money from communities. See Livejournal as an example of the 5% rule. LinkedIn is doing the same. Ebayization of everything.

Where is the music industry money made in the future?

2004-10-07T16:53:00.000+03:00

Great article about the future of the music industry in the Wired magazine entitled The Long Tail. When you move your music business to the internet and take away packaging, distribution and retail sales, you have a business where the less popular misses of the music industry (the Long Tail) generate more money than all the hits together.

This requires that you are able to construct a business model which allows your readers to navigate from familiar entrant points (hits) to less familiar artists with help of social navigation or something else as easy to use. The reader will notice that his/her taste is actually much different from the mainstream if easy tools for finding more interesting artists are made available.

This is the story backed up with well constructed evidence in various illustrative charts. Way to go. Everyone interested in the music business and everyone who uses P2P networks to download music, should definitely check this out.

Now I just have to find a way to apply this logic to Open Source collaborative software. If the demand is actually in the niche groups, and if it's possible to support all the niche groups, the market of various niche groups is actually bigger than the general mainstream of almost any application. Isn't this what tailoring and customization is all about? Making customization and tailoring affordable so that the niche groups also get served. This is interesting, for example: build value-added services customized and targeted to certain niche groups in the educational world on top of open platforms and open standards.

Mushroom radar as a social software

2004-10-07T01:41:00.000+03:00

Let's start dumping some ideas..

In a couple of years I've become a regular mushroom hunter. I go to local forests to look for new findings; some interesting new fungi, preferably edible (this cultivation has nothing to do with magic mushrooms or our local favorites, Kärpässieni). It is said that several tons of quality food rot in the forests - and I mean quality: have you ever tasted Black Trumpets, for example? I found hundreds of them a month ago (although I got eaten by mosquito's while picking them up).

Most are unfamiliar or different specimen or know only a few edible ones. At worst, hunting mushrooms is seen as weird activity, conducted only by older generation of weird shamans. Those of you who do not know, the "mushroom" part as we know is only part of the fungi, that mostly lives under the surface, decomposing and rotting living things.

Of course, I always look at technological possibilities. I grew tired of carrying that heavy book of 5000 different specimen with me, merely utilizing it only partly, lacking the time and interest to search deeper into it in the forest. I thought about mobile capabilities.

Simplest would be the same in electronic format. But even better would be a social application of the above. Imagine a Mushroom Radar ( in finnish "Sienitutka"), which asks you a set of questions using intelligent heuristics and fuzzy logic to sort out what specimen the certain unknown mushroom is a part of: does it have a cap? How about gills? Small, medium or large in size? Dark or light in color? Etc.

The set of questions could aim to limit the possible alternatives to certain specimens. Once the set of questions have been asked and you could easily select from answers ranging from 1 to 4 selectable different alternatives (possibly including images), the system could poll a central database with the answers and return a list of possible alternatives with a calculated certainty.

If you have successfully identified the mushroom, you could take an image of it and attach some description of it (surroundings etc) and send it to the central database. Your phone will send the location information, weather and time of year for the system to conduct more analysis on its own.

So what I'm describing is a raw idea of a social software for mushroom hunters, which allows them to gather collaborative data and attach collaborative filtering of the results powered with simple, fast and accurate heuristics. This could in fact applied with anything else from flower lovers to bird watchers.

A system like this could leverage the participation in understanding a very complex topic like identifying a certain mushroom accurately (there are several thousand different specimen here in Finland alone, of which only a couple of packs are toxic). It might draw people who previously were not interested in mushroom hunting to actually try it. Hopefully not more magic mushroom hunters, looking for ways to get their heads filled with liberty caps they don't know much about anyway ;)

All in all I enjoy walking in the forest and now after I have introduced myself in the wonderful world of living things working their way under the surface I have viewed the forest as having more life than ever before. A real experience to look after. It really helps you to forget surrounding world and business while you are desperately trying to find that rare Cauliflower mushroom.

Let's get going...

2004-10-04T20:00:00.000+03:00

Alright, I'm starting a blog. I've been talking about blogs and their strengths for quite some time. I even think weblogs should be something like email for members of any organization: it is provided as a service and you are teached how to use it. Part of the common software infrastructure.

I've been delaying my own blog until I have enabled Dicole to actually allow personalized blogs to be published to the general public. As some of you might know, Dicole already has the capabilities with feeds and all, but the publishing part still requires some work. I'm almost there, but not yet. Meanwhile I thought I'll try another service. This allows me to build a taste of where we should be heading.

So, why am I starting a blog in the first place? First, I'm emailing daily updates to people I work closely together. Those emails typically contain a link and my opinions about it (You got it, this is the basic idea of the term "weblog"). So now they (and anyone else interested in my spam) may read (and pull) that pile of Infedelic Ideas whenever they wish.

Second, I believe in communities and participation. Weblogs highly support the idea networking and building communities and by nature lower the participation aspect. I want to get feedback of my ideas, before I go ahead and do anything about them. I have to try this myself and see if it really works as I have explained ;)

Third, I believe in the personal voice, in spirit of the Cluetrain manifesto. I wish my colleagues and friends in the industry also start their own blogs... I was quite easy with Blogger, after all.

I also need a place where I can dump my random ideas and come back to them later. Inf is my nickname and Infedelic Ideas is a good topic for a weblog where I bring up my twisted psychedelic out-of-this-world ideas. This is Hello World.