In the ETCon aftermath, a discussion has been sparked about how ugly Wikis look. Joi Ito comments. And I agree - but only because most Wikis do look extremely plain. However, there is no reason whatsoever that Wikis should look bad. No reason! However, there is a certain zen-like quality of simplicity in the whole concept, and I think that the WikiEngine authors often consciously or subconsciously reflect that in their site designs.
Well, with this web site I can hardly claim that JSPWiki looks particularly nice, but some people have made some really nice templates for JSPWiki. Check out the mrg template, the Cocoon Wiki or the Roller Wiki. Perhaps it is time to include one of these in the JSPWiki main distribution.
Also, as a weblog using a Wiki is extremely nice, since I don't have to worry about posting in HTML - I can just type in WikiMarkup. It's quite a lot easier to type on a mobile phone than angled brackets...
There is also discussion on whether a finer layout control should be allowed, to give the writers the ability to define DIVs and SPANs on their wiki pages.
Satn.org points out a serious problem with the Creative Commons licenses. I'm withdrawing the license for now, until this gets resolved. The Creative Commons licenses really are not suitable for the casual weblogger. I cannot check each and every link I give for possible unlawfulness - how could I know how the laws work in different countries?
Darn, how could I've missed this one?
(Via Scripting News.)
Logical-Mathematical Thinker. Everyone, act surprised. Err... Anyone? Hm. No-one.
BTW, I just realized that I have created a meme. That thing has been posted all over; it is currently the most read page on this site. I have also already received the link via IRC at least once. ("Hey, check this out, some nutcake made this sick page!" "Yeah, that is my site." "Err...")
It will be interesting to watch the referrer logs to see how it spreads.
Put up a Creative Commons license for this site, so that nobody gets confused about what the rights are. Basically if you want to reuse this material from this web site (yeah, right, what are the odds of THAT happening), you have to give me credit, and ask me for permission for commercial usage. Click on the license logo at far right for more information.
I think Creative Commons is a good idea and should be supported. In this day and age, people need to understand where they stand legally. It's a basic survival tactic, much like learning the difference between the red and green lights.
Mobitopia reports that Symbian has released their OPL language under the Lesser General Public License. Woo-hoo! Does this mark the first time an industry heavyweight has actually released something under the GNU licenses? Probably not - but this is still very significant. The LGPL does make business sense, though - it effectively prevents others from grabbing the project and using it against you commercially, but allows a lighter development model than proprietary software: OPL is certainly cool enough to be a viable open source project, and thus is likely to gather plenty of support.
I remember writing some stuff in OPL for Psion Series 3. The language is a bit clunky (it's basically BASIC), but it is perfect for making macros and stuff.
Arrived back to Helsinki finally, and went straight to work, without passing home. Well, no reason, really - SAS lost my luggage, so I had nothing to take home, and I figured I could at least get something useful done until they find it and ship it to me. I even slept on the plane for a few hours, which is probably why I am so lucent right now. Though I seem to have trouble concentrating. And writing long sentences. Perhaps it is because I forgot my headphones on, and got six hours of subliminal blasting of the latest pop charts.
My humble travel kit: a shoulder bag with laptop and a bunch of go books, and a plastic bag with a bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig single malt whisky. What else could a man possibly need?
(The conference? It was good, very good. Check out the Wired coverage for a short blurb, suitable for bloggers currently suffering from B.A.S.S.)
Spent the yesterday evening with Mahlen and Paul in San Francisco and had a great time. As Mahlen said it, it is rare that you can talk all evening about wikis and nobody gets bored. :-) A few good ideas sprung up, though I can't really remember half of them.
Today to go and then I'll return back home. Perhaps I'll catch up with some interesting people today, too.
(On a separate note, the next time I'll come to the States I will try to get in a bit earlier. You always lose the first two days in a strange, jet-lagged haze, and at least for me, talking to people is much easier when you're at least half awake. Typing on the computer - that I can do while asleep. Which is probably evident in some of the JSPWiki source code.)
Man, everyone around here has a cool Mac Powerbook. I'm spending far too much time drooling at everyone else's machines... 12" Powerbooks, 15" Powerbooks, even a couple of absolutely stunningly gorgeous 17" Powerbooks. And on top of it all, Mac OS X.
As someone pointed out: people who're running Windows/Linux are missing out on quite a lot of the conference, since Mac users are very actively using Rendezvous and Hydra to do collaborative work, lecture notes, etc.
Ngh. Knife. Wound. Twist.
Darn. My attempt to discrete at the presence of Doc failed miserably. Doc, it was just a bad bagel. Honest. I didn't see it had onion in it.
(And I am not concerned. I am happy. It's just a bit disillusioning to realize you're just a hammer-maker :-).
Straight from the ETCon IRC net: Judge says file-swapping is legal.
- In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software.
- However, the ruling appeared to state clearly that decentralized peer-to-peer software such as Gnutella is legal, in much the same way that the Sony VCR is protected by law.
I am sure they're going to appeal this one out of existence...
If there is something that I really like about the U.S, it has to be bagels. These amazing little breads contain everything you need to start a day, fill your stomach, and taste good, too.
What I don't understand though is why anyone would want to spoil a perfectly good bagel by putting loads and loads of peanut butter on it...
It seems that quite a lot of people have really embraced Wiki in the same way they have embraced hammers. It is a tool - it creates no big emotions, and it's so simple you can just pick it up and hammer away with it. Weblogs, however, create the big buzz, and everyone and their dog is trying to wrap their brain around the concept and see where this big phenonmenon is taking us.
Of course, as a Wiki author, this saddens me :-). But perhaps they are right - a Wiki works by consensus of a small group, and as such is about as exciting as any committee work. A weblog on the other hand allows any crazed muthafucka to voice his/her opinions as loudly and brashly as if he was in the Hyde Park Speaker's Corner. Wikis are for work, blogging is for the time when you let your hair loose.
(Oo, Doc Searls is sitting next to me. Better not burp.)
You know, intelligent discussion and stimulation of your creative nerve do not go too well with sleep deprivation.
Anyway, here I am at the Emerging Technology Conference, who even have their own wiki. I think this is a good way to use a Wiki - it is a collaborative workspace. If anything, this conference has the problem of providing too many collaboration channels, Wiki, IRC, Confab... It is really difficult to follow them all, and they are not really that well profiled so that you could focus on one or two channels.
Cory Doctorow (who is BTW an excellent speaker) has been posting some photographs. I haven't bothered yet - I left my digital camera at home, and the only thing I currently have is the 3650 camera.
Well, here I am, 29 hours later, and it is still my birthday. I am of course in US Pacific time, so technically it's past the midnight back home, but for me the day just keeps going.
Brr. What a flight. I was searched twice, and on the both times they required me to take off my shoes as well. I sort of pity the security guys, having to examine people's shoes all day. On the other hand, getting through U.S. immigration was probably the easiest one yet - they just basically whisked me through, no questions asked.
What a strange day. Perhaps I should get a shower and go exploring. Or something.
Today, I turn 33 years old.
I don't look that old, say my friends, but I am not so sure. I can certainly see it - and feel it.
Mid-life crisis, welcome.
(And I'm going to spend the entire day in the airplane. Whee. The best birthday yet.)
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel...
No, I did not go mad, though it was close. However, if you've ever seen that text in an ad, or a newspaper and wondered what on Earth is going on, check out loremipsum.net. This phrase has 2000 years of history, and over 400 years of tradition with the typesetting industry.
Tradition is cool. I wonder how much of the things that we see in everyday life have roots dating back hundreds or thousands of years?
Hey, I did IPO on BlogShares! Wow! This fast! I was certainly expecting to take a bit longer.
I am currently valued at $1,118.47.
This warms my little geeky heart, for reasons that are probably unfathomable to most other kinds of intelligent life in this universe. But this is just so cool :-).
I just returned from the Go Nordic Championships. I was a bit too busy all weekend playing, talking, etc. For some reason I did not feel like blogging at all - though I think it is just a temporary overdose of blogging. It's gonna take more than that to stop me =).
Now I am rather drained. You know, normally you never realize how much energy your brain uses, but after the games today everyone was ready to eat a horse. Which we possibly did - the kebab place we went to afterwards did look a bit suspicious.
(How did I do? Lousy - I lost a game after which even my opponent said he has never been so pissed off at winning a game before. It was a classic case of complete situational blindness from both players, and we both made mistakes after mistakes after compound mistakes after cardinal mistakes after game-losing-mistakes. Then again, at least our games are always entertaining. Not perhaps to the players, but definitely to the viewers.)
Todays scientific experiment: How to mince a hamburger.
(Warning, the images you find on that page may be a bit ... disturbing.)
I'll very likely be in the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, CA next week. If any JSPWiki hackers or users happen to be there in the Silicon Valley area at the same time, drop me some email, and let's go have a beer or something.
Update: The conference is in Santa Clara, not Santa Barbara. Women. Who can keep track of them. :-)
I registered this blog on the BlogShares. I don't know whether that was a smart thing to do (it should at least cure me of the belief that this blog is of any significance), but hey - it's all about learning :-).
Since I don't have an automatic weblogs.com ping, I had to do that manually. I wonder if I have to ping it every time to get the ~BlogShares to fetch my blog?
 |
Finally, the makers of the personal hygiene products are targeting the crowd that needs them the most :-).
The Weblog Kitchen seems to have some interesting discussions starting up about Wikis, WebLogs and other groupware apps. It certainly seems a bit more research-oriented than other discussions I've seen, and most of the right people seem to be there. Looks good, here's your thumbs-up for search engines :-).
Contracting by USAID For Reconstruction of Iraq:
- ...for capital construction including bridge, road and port rehabilitation and repair; seaport administration; airport administration; public health; primary and secondary education; local governance; theater logistical support and personnel support.
- USAID chose to limit competition -- in full compliance with the FAR -- for these Iraq reconstruction contracts to certain U.S. companies...
So it wasn't a war after all - it was a hostile takeover by a rival corporation. The similarities are quite striking, don't you think?
(Apologies to anyone who lost a family member or friend in the war. Thanks to Syksy for the link.)
David Mattison writes about Wikis as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool. Good stuff, very thorough (it even mentions my own JSPWiki, yay!), and definitely worth a read if you need a crash course in Wikis, what options there are, and how to use them.
Link via Ross Mayfield, who also has some interesting pointers to a recent survey which says that weblogs are not even a blip in the radar for most Americans.
But unlike many attempts in the big internet hype a couple of years back, weblogging does not require significant capital investments to get huge, so it can afford to grow slow.
Ever wonder how the auroras look from space? The Astronomy Picture of the day will show you.
It's a good site - lots of beautiful pictures.
Yes, now who would you kill on the Teletubbies? What I am finding totally incomprehensible is that how do people tell them apart enough to decide that Po and Tinky Winky are the two most hated individuals? Even over the psychotic vacuum cleaner?
Hm. Perhaps it is because Po is the smallest one and Tinky Winky carries a hand bag... Maybe people have some sort of an repressed urge against small hand bag -carrying creatures?
(Check out the other WWYKs as well. Link via Dave Barry).
Janka has a point. A very sharp - if you excuse the pun - point. It just so happens that I am observing one such bad case of belittlement occurring at a closer range than I would like. To me it seems that things like jealousy, and frustration at one's own lack of success play a big part in it. Sometimes it's just sheer maliciousness - "nip the bud of innovation just because you like the crushed look on the little guy's face".
For some reason, these days it just makes people look so... transparent.
I think the Aussies call it the tall poppy syndrome.
I got tired of the bugginess of Newsmonster - for example, after a few iterations it still cannot decode RSS with non-ASCII correctly, and reading Finnish weblogs was always a guess - and switched to NNTP//RSS, the coolest thing since, well... I want to say sliced bread, but that's not really very cool anymore, is it?
Of course, I couldn't find any way to export my blogroll from Newsmonster (and even its storage format is some binary bubblebobble), so I had to copy my entries by hand. Damn.
NNTP//RSS seems to play very nicely - provides import/export, posting, history... All through your friendly newsreader app. Looks very nice, too.
 |
For those who are looking for the deep thoughts and radiant flashes of imagination instead of my "barber^Wcooking blog", sod off. The rest, consider this:
I am currently being quite intrigued by this opportunity to write a photojournal. I've usually hated taking pictures, and even when I bought a digital camera, I still don't lug it around as much as I probably should. I don't document anniversaries or weddings, but I do photograph scenery and some personal events, though I am not really a photographer.
Now, the availability of a cheap digital camera that is continuously with me all the time, and an easy way to blog it all makes suddenly the threshold of blogging far, far less than what it used to be. Consider normal blogs: 90% of them are crap, as suggested by Sturgeon's Law. Which is fine and as it should be - I couldn't be bothered to read most weblogs and most people really don't want to read mine. But still, they have created some enormous successes, and brought a whole new kind of authorship in existence.
I think photoblogging is going to go the same way: 90% of them are going to be incredible crap. But really, some of them will become something new and grand, and enable new kinds of journalism, or community creation, or hate groups, or ways of voicing out your political views, or something else totally. Hard to say. We just need to find those individuals or groups who have the urge to do something cool and creative and give them the tools.
It's bloody addictive, anyway.
Well, inevitably I managed to catch the flu that has been running around, and have spent the last two days indoors. It has been good for JSPWiki development, though, and I've been playing plenty of go, but still two days is quite enough, thankyouverymuch.
JSPWiki authorization is now at such a stage that I get constantly a message saying
No default policy has been defined!
which is really a good thing. Shows that almost everything is running okay under the hood. The trouble is, I've got this nice access control system, but no way of adding users yet :-).
 |
(The image is staged, in case you are wondering: I do not use Windows CE... :-)
 |
(Update: What makes this image so special? Because I just blogged the whole entry directly from my cell phone using the MetaWeblogAPI and some procmail+~JavaMail magic. Well, I am adding this comment manually because I don't want to type very much on the cell phone keyboard, T9 or no T9. Now, what else we can do with this? :-)
Just dropped in the first incarnation of the JSPWiki metaWeblog API in CVS. Hm. Guess where I'm posting this entry from :-).
- The third item was a dual quarter pound cellophane wrapped cardboard package of loose leaf Chinese tea. Unfortunately, it was of a well known variety known as Gunpowder Tea, and had this printed on the packaging.
- Obviously this was of such importance, that, despite already forcing the passenger to check his hand bag as hold luggage, it was decided that the tea was allowed, but that the evil word "Gunpowder" was not. Consequently the security staff then rummaged around (thereby delaying me and the rest of the queue) and found a plastic bag into which they decanted the fragrant tea leaves, and confiscated the cardboard packaging!
This, and other completely stupid security measures, along with some extraordinary invasions of privacy can be found at Privacy International's Stupid Security Competition.
Worried about the new Helsinki travel cards? In Bornholm, Denmark, you have to prove your identity via a fingerprint each time you use the ferry.
Tuesday late afternoons are good for personal reflection, which is why I updated my personal page with the (un)usual 20 questions as well as putting my thoughts on paper on why am I writing in English instead of Finnish.
Why Tuesdays? Because I've started to play badminton on Tuesdays, and at this point of the evening I am far too tired to do anything really coherent. :-/
Yesterday, I spent most of the evening watching Eyes Wide Shut, which frankly was a disappointment. I was somehow expecting a tighter drama, thanks to the hype a few years back.
Simultaneously, I was coding something cool for JSPWiki [1]: We now have a partly functional MetaWeblogAPI. It's not in the CVS yet, but should probably arrive later this week when I clean it up a bit and add some safety checks. Why am I doing that instead of importing the JSPWiki:JSPWikiAccessControl? Because a) it's cool to work on this code, and I sometimes need to work on cool stuff, and b) I have something else that is cool up my sleeve, which I am not yet telling you about :-).
Of course, the MetaWeblogAPI does require functional user authentication to work in a satisfying manner... So this is a good time to bring that in and see how we can tie those together nicely.
[#1] I tend to do this occasionally. When you have the image of the program you're after clear in your mind, coding it becomes nearly an automated process. Other people can knit while watching TV... I write code :-).
 |
Hm. My head seems to be bleeding a little bit. Perhaps a hit too many?
(For those that are following JSPWiki development: Notice the new Image plugin in action. It allows you to have a much finer control over the layout of the image than what used to be possible.)
What a strange feeling. Dulljoysatisfactionhappinesspininglonelytiredamuseddrunkwoozythirstycoldheadachy-ish.
A new version of the classic song: this time in Flash. Enjoy.
(Via Aula).
I haven't been up to much these days. Maybe tomorrow. Not that it matters. Not much on my mind worth mentioning, but what can I say? That's how it is. Pfft.
The previous entry courtesy of The Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator. No longer you have to generate your own blog entries - this software will do it for you! (Via Jeremy Zawodny)
I finally managed to put month changing buttons to the top right calendar. Thanks to RoyW for the help.
I know, I know... It's sad when you comment on the different searches people run on Google, but I would just like to point out that I am #10 for "strange and ugly people", as well as being the #35 authority on butts. It is my earnest desire to become the worlds leading expert on butts, and especially those that are of the ugly kind (#16!).
Man. I need a life. Quick.
Finally saw Star Trek - Nemesis yesterday.
What a depressingly bad movie. Don't get me wrong - I am a huge fan of Trek, mostly Next Generation and Deep Space 9, and some of the movies, but the new Trek is simply bad.
There are so many places to complain about (mediocre special effects for one), but I guess that the biggest gripe about the whole movie is the fact that it underestimates the viewers so badly. In many places it just seemed like "well, we need to put a stupid fight here because the audience expects it" or something, but they were entirely irrelevant to the plot. Come on, most of the people who grew up with the Next Generation are now in their thirties - HEL-LO! We need a bit more than cool guns, big spaceships and a naked Deanna Troi (who seems to have aged not-so-gracefully) to be interested in a movie. Seriously. We grew up, why didn't the producers?
This movie finally breaks the even-odd -cycle of ST movies: Traditionally, all of the even ones were okay, and the odd ones were bad. This is number ten, and it is, frankly, hard to think of anything positive about it (aside from the strong performances of Patrick Stewart and Tom Hardy).
I didn't expect much, but... I didn't, frankly, get much either.
Yes, it's true. I have been informed that someone else than me has now seen dreams about JSPWiki. This is truly one of the milestones in the life of every programmer.
I am impressed, surprised, amused, and scared.
:-)
(On a separate note, it's snowing here again. Grrh.)
Russell Beattie is being haunted by one of his old rants. He has some very good points about weblogs and the problems they're facing as they "grow up", so to say:
- I wonder if weblogs are at this weird turning point that television was in the 50s when people took everything that was said on television as fact? Seriously - before just recently, to have a popular web site that was highly ranked on Google, you needed to be a major news corporation or some hot-shot funded dot-com startup. But now any shmoe like me can rant and it has this big effect. Look. Imagine this: I'm this guy. Greying and getting fat. Sitting in a small one bedroom apartment in not-particularly-special corner of Madrid. Typing on my 3 year old laptop. In my shorts. I work in a non-particularly-special job doing not-particuarly-special work. There is nothing about my words that should carry any real weight... are you getting the picture?
But Russell - the problem is, you are saying something special. And you say it well. If you weren't, people weren't linking to you... And really, we are all just shmoes - even the tiniest difference will lift you above the crowd. Accept it, you are on your way to being a real influencer of the mobile world.
Good luck :-).
How come...
- I can't seem to be able to type my password correctly these days?
- I am still at work at 19:30?
- Playing badminton for the first time in nearly three years made my thighs hurt, but not my ass?
- When someone wants to loan a DVD from you "in a couple of days", they never come to get the DVD, until the very next day after you've loaned it to someone else?
- I can read legalese these days as well as I read comic books or technical manuals?
- Some people still insist that any version of Netscape still has the same bugs as Netscape 4?
- My email folders keep growing, and growing, and growing?
- I can send 200 emails per hour, but it takes me weeks to get a simple item mailed through the post office?
- Some people are so incredibly transparent, but they never realize it?
- Some people simply cannot be understood, no matter how hard you try?
These questions, and more, will not be resolved in the next week's edition of ButtUgly!
The first European conference on weblogs, blogtalk has announced their lineup of speakers. It does look quite interesting, as most of the driving forces behind weblogs come from the US. This could be a good opportunity for the budding European weblog community. Too bad they do not yet have the program available, just the speakers.
I'll comfort myself by saying that the sieve must've been tight - only one third of the proposals did not get through. Mine included. :-/
Private comments? Drop me an email. Or complain in a nearby pub - that'll help.
|
More info...
|
| "Main" last changed on 10-Aug-2015 21:44:03 EEST by JanneJalkanen. |
