If men wrote dating ads like women, found through reddit

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/den/588567246.html

Poignant.

Iltalehti Digi testasi vakoilukynää

http://www.iltalehti.fi/nettitv/?28042513

Sitä huomaa todellakin olevansa jo vanha, kun tuollaisesta journalismista huomaa närkästyvänsä. Videopätkä on täyttä urpoilua siitä, mitä ‘vakoilukynällä’ voisi tehdä – eli salakuunnella ja -katsella muita tai kuvata hississä naisten taktisia paikkoja. Mukahauskaa heh heh viihdettä, joka kuitenkin yllyttää ja kannustaa laittomuuksiin todella matalaotsaisella tavalla.

Se että salakuuntelu tai ihmisten vakoilu on teknisesti entistä helpompaa, ei tee siitä yhtään sen sallitumpaa tai sopivampaa. Toimittaja osoitti äärettömän hyvää pelisilmää tekemällä testit vieläpä pääosin työympäristössä.

“Joka oikeudettomasti teknisellä laitteella kuuntelee tai tallentaa

1) keskustelua, puhetta tai yksityiselämästä aiheutuvaa muuta ääntä, jota ei ole tarkoitettu hänen tietoonsa ja joka tapahtuu tai syntyy kotirauhan suojaamassa paikassa, taikka

2) muualla kuin kotirauhan suojaamassa paikassa salaa puhetta, jota ei ole tarkoitettu hänen eikä muunkaan ulkopuolisen tietoon, sellaisissa olosuhteissa, joissa puhujalla ei ole syytä olettaa ulkopuolisen kuulevan hänen puhettaan,

on tuomittava salakuuntelusta sakkoon tai vankeuteen enintään yhdeksi vuodeksi.

Yritys on rangaistava.”

Erinomaista toimintaa Iltalehti!

Creating your own SMS-services on linux

Back in the day it used to be hard to configure yor mobile phone to work with your mobile phone – either as a gsm modem to connect to the internet or to send SMS messages. You had to have some hair on your chest to either talk straight to your mobile phone through serial port or be skilled enough to configure Kannel or some other software to handle nitty-gritty details for you. Yesterday I returned to this topic as a friend of mine had noticed an article in Safari about SMS Messaging. As I hadn’t even thought about mobile services for a long time it seemed to be an interesting question to ask: how hard could it be these days?

And not surprisingly the answer not at all hard.

Depending on your needs there are two major routes to go about:

1) outsource SMS-traffic to an operator who does it professionally and program your services accordingly to use their API ( suitable for businesses and high load services )

2) use home grown versions with gammu-library or other tools

Option one is very simple, but usually not at all fun – as there is no tweaking around. Everything just works and you pay per sent and received message.

Option two includes atleast option to do something geeky, though gammu and other libraries make sending messages almost plug & play excersise. I plugges my phone ( N95 8Gb) with Usb cable to my linux box, ran wvdialconf to see that it recognized and found phone’s modem, which it did find from /dev/ttyACM0. Then I ran Gnome-phonemanager to quickly test sending messages, which actually worked without a hitch. As gammu has ready made bindings to Python, it would be trivial to write your own small application that sends SMS notifications for whatever purpose.

As long as the phone is found on supported models list, you should be set to go: http://cihar.com/gammu/

I added to my todo list to configure Hyperic Hq to send email notifications for downtime and problems on my servers, and to put a process to watch mailbox for downtime notifications – immediately forwarding such messages to SMS. All the bits and pieces are ready, just really need to configure them to work together. For this I already ordered text messaging phone account, that provides 1000 text messages per month for 8 euros, and new connection cable for my old phone – which will be used in this.

Qt versus Adobe Air

Yesterday I spent sime time reading and catching up with potential technologies for desktop software that links to a web 2.0 service that we are building – or for that matter any web service. Having desktop tools to complement usability of web service and/or to offer offline support for example for data input and/or manipulation is more that helpfull and beneficial, not to mention addition of applications on mobile platforms.

Two technologies that I spent some time studying were Trolltech’s Qt and Adobe’s Air – two very different kind of beasts that could be used to fulfill similar needs.

Adobe Air in combination with Adobe Flex, Flash, Actioscript, Javascript and HTML is an interesting option in cases where company has already made significant investments into web technologies and Adobe’s tools and workflow. However reading Flex 3 in Action and Adobe Air in Action I felt little uneasy as it was a constant stream of unfamiliar – though reasonable sounding – technologies. Without a prior investment to Flash and ActionScript learning and taking advantage of Flex and Air will be quite a feat eventhough Flex’s declarative programming model and ActionScript as a language seem a quite nice combination. On a positive side there is the possibility to use these acquired skills and components also on website’s online userinterfaces. A significant bonus in Adobe Air is also simple installation through webbrowser for applications as long as Adobe Air runtime environment has been already installed for the user.

Trolltech’s Qt on the other hand is already an old and well proven framework for multiple platforms, including also bindings for numerous languages – most importantly C++, Java and Python. Previously Qt was only usable for established commercial projects due to it’s high licencing costs or to open source projects that could use the library free with GPL licence. Due to Nokia’s announcements of changing Qt licence to LGPL there has been a huge interest lately for Qt and that is also the main reason for my interest to look at the framework. Based on examples delivered with the distribution QtJambi – Java bindings for Qt – seemed reasonably easy to use and well featured with components and features enough to build almost anything. Ability to use same code and libraries as in service code in backend, having very well tested and well known process and model for development — and most importantly well tested UI components is a huge plus. There is also no doubt that native components of QtJambi are blazingly fast and even have direct access to target machine’s graphics hardware.

Packaging and distributing applications made with QtJambi however is little bit more complicated compared to Adobe Air. You have to package the software for each platform and create installers with separate tools, most likely an commercial installer creator that hopefully also includes an ability to include also JRE into the installation. Open source IzPack ( http://izpack.org/ ) seems otherwise good, but does not include the possibility to install java runtime if that does already exist in the target system. With a quick google search I did find some installers that do that also, and from a small selection of potential and expensive tools I found one that seems not too expensive and also seems to have required features ( http://www.advancedinstaller.com/feats-list.html ).

So without writing any code, what is the verdict and with which technology will I do my first tests?

Should I say both?

Adobe Air is clear winner when the application will be a simple addition to a web 2.0 style service, providing possibly drag and drop features and access to local filesystem. Use existing javascript or actionscript skills – and don’t worry so much about producing top notch desktop software as it is just an extension to a website. It is a new technology that is poised to have it’s own share of funky bugs, features and idiocies – but there is a good chance that ease of use and already existing features make you more productive than you spend time debugging weird problems and learning Adobe Air in the first place. In similar fashion same skills with javascipt could be used then again in mobile development for example with Nokia WRT ( http://www.forum.nokia.com/Resources_and_Information/Explore/Web_Technologies/Web_Runtime/ ) or iPhone. Naturally you can’t use or access all the features of platforms that you are working on, but atleast you are quick to market with something.

Qt on the other hand is the real thing – library used in Google Earth and in numerous other ‘true’ applications. And as Qt has also WebKit integrated into it, there is a good chance to be able to use both the cool and wicked javascript / ajax skills as well as mad java or c++ programming with great access to resources on target system. As I read about the examples of WebKit integration from trolltech blogs ( http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/category/labs/internet/webkit/ ) I almost wet my pants, it was so cool! Rendering webpages to thumbnails, running javascript code on the page to extract data from DOM and doing the shenaningans! You dream it and you can build it – or atleast most of it.

From business perspective Adobe Air can be a really good choise as in the best case you might get a some web developer to do the application for a beer and a burger – though I doubt it. But for those of use who have invested greatly in Adobe technologies and feel at home with Flex and Javascript Adobe Air should be a breeze to work with. But if – for any reason – you are aiming to do anything more complicated and want to have a foundation that you can count on, I would really suggest to give QT a try. I know I will.

Nina Mikkonen FTW!

Joskus tulee eteen hetkiä, että on pakko ihmetellä mitä toisen ihmisen päässä liikkuu ja kuinka itsekäs sekä käytöstaidoton ihminen voikaan olla. Pelottavaa tässä on, että kyseisellä meuhkaamisella on jopa oikeita kannattajia – ihmisiä joiden mielestä on hienoa kun ‘joku laittaa toiselle jauhot suuhun’ vain jyräämällä toisen yli. Samalla tosin menee lapsi pesuveden mukana ulos, eikä asiallista ja oikeaa keskustelua argumentointeineen koskaan synny.

http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/?s=s&g=5&ag=36&t=&a=6598

Jyrki Lehtola kommentoi asiaa aika hauskasti: http://www.iltalehti.fi/kolumnistit/200901208937951_k5.shtml

Building XML databases!

I just read a nice article about game development and phare “it’s a black triangle” that meant to them the moment when they had a significant parts of the infrastructure ready and where able to finally see first simple things on the screen drawn and shown through that complex infrastructure.

That reminded me of another expression that we use with a friend of mine – building xml databases – that reminds us from an event in the past where a certain team of very intelligent programmers where building a CMS-type of product and invested a lot of money and effort to effectively build their own XML-database. Naturally there must have been some good ideas and reason why they did that or thought that it was a good idea at the time, but as the company and the product tanked – only thing that was left alive was the expression building xml databases to describe situations where something interesting and elegant is being built just for the sake of it with a promise of potential business benefit later on.. maybe.

Lately I’ve been remembering a lot about that story and thought to myself whether I have committed similar crime in our current project, though the ‘xml database’ in our case is actually a pretty solid and good piece of infrasructure software on top of which we can build on. On the good side we have made an investment early on to build a solid foundation and on the downside we have made an investment possibly too early on, when we do not yet need it. If everything goes well, the investment pays itself back as we can increase our development speed and build on top of well designed and thought foundation – and if everything goes to muck, we still need to do redesigns and refactorings. But we shall see.

Hooked on watching poker

I was a bit unfortunate and hurt my back little at the gym and have had to now spend few days at home, resting in my bed. Being in small pain and being able to only lay down in couple of positions, only thing that I could do was to watch recordings from World Series of Poker – 2008.

I haven’t yet played any poker online – or any homegames or cash games anywhere – but been amazed about the entertainment value and adrenaline rushes that even just watching great game produces. Especially 2008 main event was amazing competition to watch with it’s ups and downs – never to mention huge field of players that originally started in the event eyes set on to the top prize of 9.1 million dollars.

On my todo-list is a section for reading couple of poker books that I already ordered from online bookstore, but I’m still hesitating to actually to start to play any real games online as I don’t want to commit too much time nor money to gambling — no matter how much fun playing and watching games could be. Those who really play the game seem to commit themselves really to the game and spend insane amounts of time and energy with it and schmucks like me would be just small fish to them online.

Could be that later on I might play a bit with a very limited stack, just for the fun of it and to enjoy more also following the game.