Lex Nokia, the controversial snooping law is about to pass in the Finnish Parliament pretty soon, the latest of a series of clueless, unconstitutional laws passed because our MPs are just hopelessly out of touch with the modern world (well, except one). This means that soon in addition to the Swedish, any organization providing you an internet connection can listen...
Today's N97 launch reminded me of a big mental difference between using Nokia or Apple phones: with Apple, you're merely a consumer, where Nokia's devices allow you to participate in the information flow, to be a producer. Back in 1932, Bertrand Russel wrote: The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the...
Prompted by a recent COSS news release, I thought to write about two Summer of Code success stories: In addition to Google's Summer of Code, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) runs a localized version called Kesäkoodi. One of this year's projects was adding 3G configuration support for the GNOME Network Manager. This feature made it to Ubuntu...
Maemo.org, the community site for Nokia's mobile Linux environment has this week been upgraded to 8.09.2 Ragnaroek, the much faster and long-term supported version of the Midgard framework. Thanks to Niels and Piotras for working with me on this! in October, I spent quite a bit of time optimizing this release, shaving off an estimated 60-70% of queries through some...
JP Rangaswami is writing about how innovation should happen as a dialogue between the developers and the users of the product. As an example of how innovation used to happen, he dug up Henry Ford's early automobiles and assembly lines. With these early Fords, the customer choice was limited to having your car "in any color as long as it...
At Nemein we do maintenance for quite a few servers of our customers. While some customers have their own Linux distribution preference - usually RHEL - in most cases we have a say what distribution runs their servers. So far this has been debian, but now we're going for Ubuntu Server. The reasons for this are quite simple: Ubuntu follows...
Ten years ago, 1998 Started my first "real job" as a site building in an ad agency Moved out of the commune We were running already the first production Midgard site Was in process of handing Harmaasudet over. By spring 1999 I would be out Five years ago, 2003 Did my first motorcycle trip to Russia Co-organized a very nice...
The second Midgard Gathering of 2008 is this weekend in Otaniemi, Espoo. Happened so far: Thursday Sebastian Bergmann gave us a training session on PHP software testing, as as result we now have over 1000 unit tests for the MgdSchema API for PHP. We also looked at Selenium for acceptance testing and deployed a continuous integration server for MidCOM 3...
Damn. As Slate put it:
Distance also magnifies the impact of negative feelings like longing and suspicion; according to one study, intercity lovers are more likely to be depressed
What next? I don't know, maybe focus on some core competencies...
According to recent Helsingin Sanomat poll, 73% percent of Finns aged 55-64 years wanted to "control" the Internet, removing freedom of speech as necessary, in the light of the recent school shootings. I've got very little to say to them, except: "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither" - Benjamin Franklin Every knee-jerk reaction like this only fights...