The Butt Ugly Weblog

The Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen
Internal Announcement, 30.1.2007.

Announcements in the Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen

The Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen is responsible for maintaining Janne’s work efficiency, and sanity, as well as providing high-quality meeting and negotiation facilities for up to two persons. The Entity is also the Chief Responsible for managing and housing Janne’s Personal Development Plans (PDP), as well as is the central repository of Multiple Important Documents. Janne’s Personal Office Entity is currently located in Helsinki.

To increase the efficiency of the Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen, the Personal Office Management has decided to make the following nominations:

The Table, previously responsible for housing Multiple Important Documents as well as The Computer, has been appointed as the Chief Executive for Piling Things On Top Of Other Things. This allows it to concentrate on its core competencies of piling things on top of other things, and leverage its multi-year experience as a permanent office fixture.

The Computer is nominated the Head of the Computing Division, consisting of a Senior Laptop and a number of cell phones. The Computer is joining us from IT support, where he was previously functioning as a Senior Thing In A Box.

The Coffee Mug is nominated as a Director of Entertainment Functions. He is the successor of the Teletubby Doll, who will be leaving the company to pursue new challenges in the demanding task of participating in the construction of the new E4 motorway as Senior Landfill.

The Filing Cabinet shall take the challenge of housing Multiple Important Documents from the Table, and also continue in its existing role of serving as a General Place To Dump Things. The Filing Cabinet reports to the Table.

The role of the personal masseuse of Janne Jalkanen is still open, and can be applied for in the Internal Job Market.

The Table, the Computer and the Coffee Mug all report to Janne Jalkanen.

All appointments are effective as of February 1st, 2007.

Please join me in welcoming the Table, the Computer, and the Coffee Mug in their new, challenging tasks in the Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen.

Janne Jalkanen
VP
Personal Office Entity of Janne Jalkanen

Shamelessly stolen from a megacorporation who shall remain nameless. Oh, it's always so much fun to watch a reorg.

The author of the Mac program "Display Eater" got tired of piracy, and said that he coded the program such that if it detects a pirated version of itself, it'll destroy files from your home directory. It was all a hoax to scare people into buying the real version.

This turned out to be a major mistake and a PR catastrophy. As the developer explains in this statement on his home page:

It is never a good idea to treat your customers as criminals (unless, of course, you are involved in arms smuggling or some other illegal activity - then your customers actually are criminals). This is no different than the whole Sony rootkit debacle a few months back - a huge PR disaster.

Piracy isn't just going to go away by fighting fire with fire. I'm not even sure whether fighting piracy is worth it - I'm almost certain that the only way to end piracy is to put more money in it than is possibly lost by piracy in the first place, and therefore it makes no economical sense. There's surely a sweet spot somewhere, and this sweet spot is different in different industries, but I think that after this sweet spot you gotta think of piracy like a progressive tax. It's just a price you have to pay for being popular.

Straight off the FON blog: There's now a FON client for your S60 3rd edition smart phone. It also does other hotspots than FON, so it's useful as a general application. You can leave it in the background and it'll connect to the nearest hotspot for you.

Works well for me at least on an E70 - YMMV.

Everybody seems very buzzed about the Apple iPhone. The fun thing is that nobody seems to have actually tried it out, yet people are already claiming that it's going to kill Nokia and Samsung and all the other phone manufacturers, much like OSX has killed Windows.

I certainly want to get my clammy hands on an iPhone as much as the next guy, but the following article got me chuckling. Since when did an unavailable product which has just been launched and nobody has tried become a benchmark for the smartphone industry so fast, that even before the product is in the shops, the media is already talking about iPhone killers? I mean - it's sort of okay to wish Zune to be an iPod killer, because iPod is the market king, and everybody of course wants to be the next iPod. But to call something an "iPhone killer" shows how distanced from the reality the writer is. I know the media loves conflict, but building an artificial conflict between unavailable products is, well, vaporjournalism for the lack of better word.

But then again, that's Steve Jobs's Reality Distortion Field for ya ;-)

As far as movie trailers go, this is gotta be one of the best I've seen for a while. Don't forget to turn on the sound.

(Thanks to Outi.)

Joel Johnson over at Gizmondo has good words of advice to all first adopters, electronics companies and the trade press:

...sitä heti Lahden jälkeen törmää hirveen.

Semmotti.

...joten päätin vihdoin tunnustaa väriä ja vaihdoin Google-mainokset tuossa oikealla linkkiin Jyrki Kasvin vaalisivustoon. Kukaan ei tosin taida yllättyä tästä, sen verran olen tässäkin blogissa vaahdonnut samoista asioista.

Liityin myös Kasvin tukiryhmään; katsotaan vaikka jos ehtisi jopa tehdä jotain. Tällä hetkellä elämä tuntuu kerrassaan erinomaisen kiireiseltä. Työ tuntuu siltä kuin joku olisi lyönyt koneen kolmoselle kun on ensin jyrryytetty ykkösellä motaria myöten Lahteen, ja vuorokauden tunnit eivät millään tunnu riittävän kaikkiin mielenkiintoisiin asioihin.

(English summary: I'm voting for Jyrki Kasvi of the Green party in the upcoming parliament elections. In addition to English, he also maintains Klingon-language web pages, which is always a big bonus. Qapla'!)

...I was bitten by the Idols bug this weekend. As is always fashionable in my peer group, I spent more time dissing the contest than I spent secretly listening to it, but on Sunday, Johanna Hämäläinen just blew me away. This song and her voice still send chills down my spine, and makes my eyes moist in a very non-gruff way. I would've probably even voted for her, if I wasn't using a company phone...

This season of Finnish Idols seems very strong.

Have to agree with Henri: Best press release ever!

But me think: maybe grammar overrated. Maybe we all talk this tomorrow. I feel my brain shrink already.

Sorry for the bland title. But this video is pretty awesome. Not complicated. Simple. Effective. And it explains Web 2.0 really nicely.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple just posted a long article on the future of music to apple.com. The man should really have a blog...

Anyhoo, he makes a few interesting points:

• If Apple's iTunes DRM is broken, they have to fix it in a small number of weeks or lose the entire music catalogue. A big risk, I would say.
• Under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. Therefore, Jobs argues, iTunes DRM does not cause lock-in to iPods. Yet.
• If Apple were to license their DRM to other players, it would be impossible to issue fixes once DRM gets broken. A fair point - any DRM which is widely spread is no DRM after a while.
• "The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system."
• Apple would like to get rid of DRM: "Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat."

All in all, a good article. It looks like Apple is the winner no matter what happens - if people keep insisting on DRM, then they will get the lock-in, and if DRM is abolished, Apple saves itself from loads of problems...

...a server several kilometres away crashing and burning at 3 am. So yeah, this day has mostly been used by ripping out the guts of an old machine and installing a new OS on a new computer. Well, used computer, donated by BaseN - thanks! On the other hand, it was good to work on something nice and concrete, and refresh my Linux skills again - on the other hand I could've really used the time better.

However, I have a LazyWeb request - I also got a second machine, with almost exact the same specifications. Now I'm pondering how I should distribute my services across these two computers. I am currently running

• Apache 2, with several web sites and wikis (some of them could be distributed so that Apache is a front-end and just forwards requests, and some of them could possibly be moved to completely to their own servers. Eventually I will want to have fully clustered JSPWikis, but that's still a bit off.)
• a CVS server
• Mail server (all my mails and mailing lists are hosted on the same computer)
• Backup server for my laptop and home computer
• User home directories
• DNS server

If any of my readers have any good suggestions how I should use this sudden doubling of computing power, I'd be glad to hear it!

I have a confession to make: I am one of those annoying people who like to sit through the end credits of movies. Annoying, because we sit while everyone else is moving; annoying, because other people in the company have to wait for us outside the movie theatre.

Then why do it? It's not like there's anything interesting during the end credits, is there?

Well... over the years I've heard (and used) different excuses for this. The most common one, I guess, is that people want to see if there's something extra during or after the end credits, and usually you can count on certain types of movies to have them. (Rowan Atkinson pops up at the end of "Mr Bean" and says "Yes, I normally stay to the end as well" - a nice nod to us weirdos, and the animated credits from almost any Pixar movie are definitely worth staying for). But I do it regardless of the movie, so that's not a good reason.

The other reason is that you can listen to the movie score at the end. True, but you can probably get it from the nearby record store or off the internet, if you really want to, and you can listen it as many times as you want.

Yesterday, we went to see Pan's Labyrinth, and during the end credits, I really realized why I want to stay through the credits: so that I wouldn't have to leave just yet. I really like movie theatres, and the kind of an immersion you can get in there. At home, there is always distraction - there are so many things in the room which can break the illusion: a car driving by, a phone call, mice scurrying, or maybe there is simply too much visual noise: the book shelf, the carpet, the table, a can of soda.

I'm a relative A/V luddite: my TV is pretty crappy by modern standards, and I don't own even a decent pair of stereos. But watching movies at home is just not... fun in the same way as in a movie theatre, so I have had no reason to upgrade. It works for the purpose of watching recorded TV shows, and that's pretty much it. (Now that I have a Wii, I may have to upgrade to get a better playing experience, though :)

But anyway: leaving right after the movie is over would be a too harsh blow, a jarring transition from the illusion to the real world. The end credits, and the music, and the near-empty theatre until the final blackness and the curtain give me a soft landing to whatever waits outside.

Oh, the movie? I really, really liked it. At first, I had trouble adjusting to it, but around half-way, at the Pale One, it lodged itself directly between my brain lobes and refused to let go. It's definitely a fantastic fantasy movie, and it works on so many levels - and somehow, I could directly relate to the little girl, Ophelia. Maybe because she would probably be one of those persons who stay until the end - the real end - of the movie as well.