The Butt Ugly Weblog

It seems that spammers have quintupled (or more) their efforts over Christmas - this blog is getting overflown with spam, and it seemed to start three-four days ago. Sorry about that if you're following the full changes stream.

Maybe they're assuming that people don't check their blogs over the holidays, so they get a bit more exposure before it goes away. Whatever is happening, the spam volume is increasing fast - the spam filter over at jspwiki.org is catching over 200 spam edits/day! It's a far cry from being a solved situation.

Oh, the poor artists must be starving, because apparently ~AllofMP3 has caused 1.65 trillion (US) dollars worth of damage. To put things into perspective, this is about twice the size of the entire Russian GDP. Even according to RIAA's own estimate (which is known to be inflated), this is about 500 times the size of the entire worldwide piracy losses. It is not about recouping losses. It's about completely and utterly crushing your enemy so that you can keep your monopoly.

I know most artists are not greedy bastards, but frankly, the hate I feel when I see these kind of overblown figures flows over to them as well. There's just too much of it.

Yeah. Merry Christmas. Fuckers.

I like linen handkerchiefs, which tends to gross some people out. For them, human bodily fluids are things which you don't wrap up and put in your pocket after they've left the body. I, on the other hand, personally like the fact that linen handkerchiefs are washable and reusable. And they don't irritate the skin.

Of course, even reusable things exceed their maximum lifespan at some point. Here's one such case.

From the Valleyvag comes a very level-headed article by Clay Shirky:

My problem with virtual worlds is that the navigation sucks. Normally I have two hands, legs, and a myriad of cells to interact with the world. Online, I am already severely constrained by the fact that I have 100 keys, a display with a small field-of-view, and crappy resolution, and stereographic sound. In a virtual world, I get to use only WASD and the mouse.

Why simulate the real world when you need to constrain yourself when interacting with it? The world is about interaction, not ogling at beautiful graphics. Someone in the comments of the previous article said well:

Ewan is not happy. Not happy at all.

Tiedät bloganneesi kauan kun samat meemit alkavat kiertää. Tästä ja parista muusta päätellen kiertoaika on noin kolme vuotta. ;-)

Apropos, 15. päivä juhlitaan Esperanto-päivää. Eräs Esperanto-innokas ystäväni haluaa saada mahdollisimman monta esperantonkielistä blogipostausta, ja ilmoitti, että he haluaisivat kääntää suomalaisia blogimerkintöjä esperantoksi. Valitettavasti käännös pitää suorittaa englannin kautta, koska en tunne ketään suomalaista esperantistia. Mutta, jos haluat perjantaina julkaista merkintäsi esperantoksi, kirjoita se huomisiltaan (ke) mennessä englanniksi ja viskaa meilillä. Laitan ne eteenpäin ja palautan osallisille viimeistään perjantain aikana. Älkää kuitenkaan mitään romaaneja pyytäkö kääntämään...

There were reasons why I never bothered to look at SOAP: I hate standards which I cannot absorb in a single afternoon. I think this is an important thing about pickup of technology: If a techie does not understand what a technology is about in one day, he probably won't bother to recommend it to his CTO. You see, he's the one who's going to have to work with it, so he will naturally pick the one he understands, and not the one with "industry support and tons of four-letter acronyms".

I think this is something which is generally overlooked at the new technology introduction phase: Things should be easy to pick up, and not just by the end users - developers are users, too! It's just that the user interface they use is different from the interface which is exposed to the end user. And the easier it is for developers to get the basics, the faster they can work, and more reliable the end result is going to be. And, I dare say, also more usable. If the developers can spend more time worrying about the so-called presentation layer (aka the "User Interface") and less time worrying about the back end (aka "The Geeky Bits"), it's better for overall usability.

There is also the fact that (unfortunately) most programs tend to bring some of the underlying metaphors to the UI, too. If the underlying system is complicated, some of that complexity will creep towards the top of the stack as well. "We'll put it in user preferences" is a far too often heard phrase, when a developer does not quite know what he is doing.

Pete Lacey wrote a wonderful little piece called "S stands for Simple", an unique peek into what the SOAP standard is all about. It's rather funny if you've ever tried to wrap your brain around the whole SOAP/WSDL/UDDI "trinity of doom".

(Thanks to the link someone on IRC; updating client lost the logs... Sorry for incoherence, my brain is still full of snot. I hate it when I sneeze abruptly and a big chunk of goo from your throat lands right in the middle of the monitor. Don't you?)

Got back this morning - but guess what: my luggage did not. I've completely lost my belief in American Airlines' ability to transport bags from one plane to another.

I am also down with a cold. I somehow managed to muddle through Friday (thanks heaps to Paul and Mac, eh, Mark and Sun Microsystems!) but now my brain is oozing through my nose and taken any conscious thought with it.

Bah. At least it's good to be home.

We'll have a small gettogether tonight, so if you're interested and are in the area, please join! Time is 18:00 (or 6 pm, whichever way you prefer), we'll meet at the lobby of Hotel Solamar, 453 6th Avenue, and probably head on to the Blue Point Coastal Cuisine in the Gaslight District (565 5th Avenue, a couple of blocks away).

New York Times has a story about how spam is increasingly being a problem, even if Bill Gates said three years ago that "by the end of 2006, spam will be gone".

Personally I've always thought HTML email was a bad idea in the first place. In fact, I've tuned my spamassassin so that HTML email almost automatically gets flagged as suspicious... Text is fine for text. It was good for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me :-)

Flow is a Flash-game of Snake with a serious Zen attitude. A perfect way to spend the morning when you wake up really early and it's still dark outside...

(Via Collision Detection.)

Edit: Game apparently hacked; don't go there. Removed link.

I’ve been playing Travian - an online, multiplayer game - for a while now. On the surface, it looks like a resource management game like Settlers of Catan, but once you play a bit more you realize that there is quite a lot going on beneath the surface. There are no bot players – everyone around you is a real person somewhere out there in the real world. And anyone can attack anyone else.

So, conflicts are inevitable, as are non-aggression treaties, alliances and wars. And bullying – stealing resources from other players because you can. You’re either bigger, or better armed, or you have strong friends, who will keep your village safe from retaliation.

I’ve noticed that it’s rather easy to slide into this bullying, just because it is easy to forget that the dots on the screen are controlled by a living being. I have a few “farms” to which I go regularly. Most of them are players who do not play anymore, so they’re just free resource banks, but some of them try to defend. And I go in and I wipe out all of their defenses and grab all their resources – because I am bigger, and I need them to protect myself against my own enemies: people who attack my village because they are bigger, and they need the resources to grow bigger so that nobody attacks them. I don’t know whether I should feel bad about this – Travian is a war game, after all, so you’re supposed to be fighting others. But on the other hand, it is unfair to just rob from the weak.

But the game has moved on to a different realm now. It is no longer single players fighting each other – there is a big, delicate balance of power between alliances, and they negotiate whom to destroy and whom to save. It’s stopped being personal and it’s now “just business”. Threats are eliminated, and attacks are revenged with as much overkill as possible to make sure they don’t try again. Friends are defended vehemently and enemies hated with passion. Near total anarchy.

It’s fascinating to look at the progression of the game. Most of these players are young and can barely speak English. Yet they can hold together large alliances, conduct complicated diplomatic negotiations and orchestrate deadly barrages of firepower to their enemy. You could draw lots of analogies to the real world here, but I am going to leave those to the game theoreticians.

Travian is a perfect example of how a game does not be overly complex to become engaging. It’s played on a regular web browser, and it’s free. If you like Civilization, and can handle the fact that you can’t save the game and restart once you get completely wiped out, you might like this game, too. The action is apparently now all on Server 7.

Collision Detection has an awesome story about Gordon Bell, a Microsoft researcher who is recording every single bit of his life, after which other Microsoft researchers analyze it.

A lot of people I know already store all the email and SMS messages they get, since it's less trouble that deleting it. It's becoming seriously feasible to store everything you see or hear, as well. Maybe in a few years everyone has their own personal cameras, and we start seeing court orders to confiscate eyewitness camera recordings... Transparent society, anyone?

Is the longest sunset in the world on the afternoon flight between Helsinki and New York? It starts when the plane rises above the ubiquitous cloud covers, and you can just see the red sphere about to disappear behind the western horizon. But once the plane starts heading for JFK, the time seems to nearly freeze, and it seems that it takes forever for the Sun to vanish. It just grows redder and redder and sinks deeper and deeper and colors the cloudtops to a nuclear volcano.

I listen to Finnish pop lyrics, and feel sad. Finnish pop lyrics has a tendency to do that. Not because they’re crap, but because us Finns have always expressed our melancholic view of life in our songs. We don’t sing about how great love is, but how great love was, and now it is gone. We sing about longing and loneliness, and how fleeting happiness is, if you happen to be so lucky to find it. We sing in flat rather than major.

The seat in front of me is broken, because it leans back way more than any other seat. And the guy in front of me is happy about it, and plans to spend the entire flight in as horizontal state as possible. If I bent forward, I could drool on his head. I can barely see the screen of the laptop due to the angle, and the position to type is rather awkward. Of course, I cannot ask him to sit upright, because that’s just something you don’t do in the Finnish culture, so I’ll just tolerate it. (If I was drunk, it would be okay to start a fight. But a small plastic bottle of Chilean white wine is not enough, I’m afraid.) The situation is absurd in a very Finnish way.

Yes, I’m traveling again. This time to sunny California and San Diego, to the NFC Forum standardization meeting. We’re planning a JSPWiki users meeting for Friday, so if you’re around, follow this space for more information.

Update. I arrived. My luggage did not. Wa-hey.

Apple is having a one-day special sale today only. Head over to the Apple store (or the Finnish store) to get your Christmas presents!

101€ off the Macbook price or 21€ off iPod Nano is not too bad...

(Via Macrumors.)