Winter strikes back!

It sure is springtime in Helsinki.

It looks like time to see housing and work opportunities in Spain.

Amazing pricing model for a record

For 75 000 dollars: http://www.joshfreese.com/buynow/#75000

“$75,000 (limited edition of 1)

* -Signed CD/DVD and digital download.
* -T-shirt**
* -Come out on tour with me for a few days.
* -I write, record and market a 5 song EP about you and your life story.
* -Take home any of my drumsets (only one but you can pick which one)
* -*Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL’s Lamborgini OR we play “quarters” and then hop on the Ouija board for a while.
* -If you have a band, I’ll join it for a month….play shows, record a CD together, have a swim party, etc…. or none of the above. We could also just sit in yer basement and jam old Van Halen.
* OR If you don’t have a band I’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4 day work weeks….10 am to 5 pm) and then we take a limo down to Tijuana and I’ll show you how it’s done (what that means I can’t legally get into here, right this minute). If you don’t live in LA but are in the USA I will come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks.
* -Take a Flying Trapeze lesson together in the San Fernando Valley and then Robin from NIN and his wife make us raw lasagna.
“

Amazing.

Though I don’t have spare 75 grand now.

Worst Movie Ever: The Ten

On the cover of this DVD was Jessica Alba and endorsement from The Onion. Surely that means the moview would not be totally sucky, right? I mean The Onion is known for having some class and Jessica Alba would not waste her time in utter crap.

But … I have to ask what people were smoking when they were doing this. From the outset the idea of the film and some of the stories is ok, but this movie fails in almost every possible way and also in some ways that I thought impossible. It is impossible to unerstand that with a cast like this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0811106/fullcredits#cast

You can end up with crap like this movie.

And how about the review in http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-ten,3357/”>The Onion? Don’t understand. Did someone from the cast blew the person who wrote it or was writing that review outsourced to someone totally retarded?

Does not compute.

Does not.

This could have been hilarious movie, but it is not. It is crap.

Saturday Night Fever in Helsinki

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to show great things in Helsinki to four amazingly beautftiful girls as well as discuss my experiences from the world of male underwear modeling. Our day started with shopping session at Itäkeskus for our dinner, before jumping into Jenni’s luxurious new Mercedes and heading over to city center, more precisely to Kamppi.

As an appetizer we had reserved one hour bowling session at Kamppi Bowling & Bar , which is conveniently located at the Kamppi shopping center allowing busy materialists to combine shopping, boozing and quasi-sports into one single session! Kamppi Bowling & Bar proved to be quite a fun place with fully equipped bar. We chose to drink a sangria pitcher to enhance serious sports event – and as a true gentleman I did let ladies to win.

After the game we returned back to Puotila to prepare the dinner and enjoy some refreshments. Even though three course dinner at Puotila is not the same as it would be in Mecca – since we all had to pitch in and do our part preparing the courses, we had a blast and enjoyed every bit of it. Good food, good wine and great friends – hours just flew by, and as we listened music from Spotify atmosphere transformed more and more towards partying in the heart of Helsinki. After few bottles of Veuve Cliquot we felt unity with the world and were ready to start preparing ourselves for our attack to the town.

These ladies were phenomenally fast in their preparations for the night, I kid you not. It did not take more than three or four hours, and we were ready to go. But can’t complain, as we were not in a hurry by no means. Good music, white wine and laughing our asses off with stupid jokes is just the proper way to get the mood up for clubbing. We also had time to take some photos and glamour shots of the girls as they finished their makeups – so can’t complain.

First stop in the city was restaurant Ateljee bar at the 14 th floor of hotel Torni. One does not get bored to look at the views over the roofs of Helsinki City center, especially when you can share the moment with dazzling ladies and a bottle of champagne.

After Torni we headed out to the new night club in the city center, Tiger. Tiger was actually nothing really new, as it was just Lux 2.0 – a renovated version of the night club that closed it’s doors few weeks before. Almost everything was same: beautiful girls, pumped up jocks and gigolos, long VIP-queque, people greasing doormen with money and lots of people willing to spend hundreds of euros to entry to the club, drinks and what else a good night out desires. Dance floors were larger than before and DJs did their best to keep dancing crowds happy – and we were… kicking it old school!

Though Lu…Tiger is not the type of place we will frequent, the night was success and we were happy to retire back to Puotila in the morning: tired, sweaty, happy – and thinking about where to get strawberries for breakfast to accompany the next bottle of Veuve Cliquot.

Kiinteät hinnat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0Hyh5UqVbw

And this ad was banned.

Porn

Back before the format war was decided for Blueray, I actually believed HD-DVD would win, as I read some analysis that porn industry had put it’s support to HD-DVD -format thanks to it’s more affordable cost structure in production side. Though the idea of porn driving adoption of new format was compelling meme, it did not hold water that well – and eventually it was the big movie studios who made the format decision and released the industry from the stalemate. So I was careless in repeating an idea that did not have solid analysis behind it. But it was an interesting meme in any case.

As a business porn industry is not so different from any other industry – and is actually a really good laboratory to see and learn how different ideas and models can survive in the world. As human sexuality is very universal basic need porn industry does work also on very primal levels, which makes it an ideal target to study how different ideas, phenomenas and laws occur within that context.

Differentiation and the long tail – Porn industry has been pushing the boundaries of entertainment technology and adopted from time to time even radical ideas to make money and differentiate in extremely cut-throat-business.

Massive online services like videobox.com sell porn in bulk for as low as $9 per month, piracy is rampant – making sure that you can get more porn for free now than propably existed fifty years ago. But still people consume annually billions of dollars for erotic entertainment in different forms. Besides huge porn-publishing enterprises, the industry is filled with thousands of small entrepreneurs that run their operations from their houses or garages – having found their own succesful niches.

Innovate new formats and contexts for product consumption – It seems that whatever new mediums people invent ways to use it for porn. Through out the times smut peddlers have found ingenious ways to circumvent laws and societies’ norms by publishing and distributing porn in ways that punters have been able to consume it and fill their desires. Comics, animated movies, films, video, theaters, literature, computer games, porn for ipods, sculptures, jewelery, phonelines, paintings, t-shirts, playing cards, pens and what nots – if you can paint, print or carve something erotic into it someone has already tried it. Actually one interesting hypothesis has said that any sufficiently usable read/write system will attract porn and activists, and if there is not porn – the system doesn’t work. See more: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/

And the industry has come a long way: from seedy XXX-rated theaters, sexually oriented clubs, mom & pop videorentals with xxx-sections, sexshops in seedy parts of any town all the way to the supermarkets, main street and straight to the consumers through the post and the internet. Large porn enterprises are extremely capable of creating numerous different product revenue streams from their signed on super star actors, using them in the movies and photo shoots, live shows, streamed online shows, stars in industry fan events, models and spokespersons for other products like sex toys or similar.

Brand matters – In the world of cornucopia brands are more important than ever. Distributors like Vivid and Hustler are brand names of value like Coca Cola inside their own genres. With your trusted brands you don’t need to take risks with anything unfamiliar. Sure it might not be anything interesting or special that rocks your world, but it is a as safe bet as Budweiser for someone who wants to drink something beerlike.

Relationship between the product and the consumer matters – You can have products or Products. With Products consumers have an almost intimate relationship and will talk fondly about the qualities of the product. No matter how distant the relationship is, consumers want to feel and feel that they have a relationship with the brand, product – that they belong or are part of that story. Products and consumers live in symbiotic relationship where they both coevolve.

In some cases products and services – or people behind them – are so great that there is no additional work included as everything happens genuinely. Everyone else has to work for it. Asia Carrera – the nerdy superstar from the past had those qualities – and still has, otherwise she wouldn’t have been the sexiest geek of 2008.

And as it has been trend in the industry, almost every single adult movie star has to have a website to get money from consumers – the difference is in what kind of relationship performers get into with consumers.

Creativity hotspots – You need places where people of your industry will meet and work together. It is no wonder that most of the industries have their own creative hotspots where is lots of creative friction and possibilities to create and explore new ideas, it doesn’t matter if it is Hollywood, Silicone valley, New York or San Fernando Valley – also known as Porn valley.

An awards show – No questions asked. No matter what your business or industry is, you need an awards show where you can toot your own horn and build credibility, connections and visibility for the hard work in your industry.

Yep. Porn industry – even from a distance – is fascinating world that either innovates or replicates phenomenas that are or will be visible in one form or another also in other industries.

New Suunto comfort heartrate bealt

My faithfull Suunto T6 has worked well for years, but the old heartrate belt has shown signs of fatigue and weakness – amon others losing the signal and not picking up the heartrate properly anymore. After checking out the prices for new heartrate belts online I decided to go for the new Suunto Comfort heartrate belt that was made out of fabric and was supposed to be more comfortable and better than the old one. My problems with the old traditional belt was that it wasn’t really that flexible, which meant that when ever I packed it into gymbag I was afraid that it would bend and get fractures or something similar. Most likely something like that had happened already, as the belt’s performance gradually went sour.

I purchased the new belt from Stockmann departmenstore in Itäkeskus, as it was one of those places that had them available in the store immediately and the price was same as in the webshops I looked at. More importantly they also occasionally provide good service at Stockmann, which was also the case this time. As the sales clerk was not sure which one of the two different models would work with the old – original T-6 – he opened them up, his colleague fetched water so that belt’s sensor’s could be moistened and tested whether they work. And as it usually is, the first one didn’t – but the second one did.

Today was the first day for the belt in real use. From the start I could really feel that Suunto Comfort actually hit right on the target with comfort. Where the old belt was something that you could not forget when you were wearing it, the new Suunto comfort is barely noticeable and really comfortable. Besides comfortability, it is also more convenient – as the transmitter is separate from the belt, transmitter’s battery should last longer than before when you remove the transmitter from the belt after excersise.

So very well spent 69 euros.

Jaiku now opensource

http://jaikido.blogspot.com/

http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine-mobile-client/source/checkout

http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/

Did checkout the code from the repository, but did not yet have time to really go through it. Have to look at it as a sideproject.

Linux using most of the memory for cache

I had a very strange WTF-moment yesterday, when I noticed that one of our servers had hogged most of the momery – almost 3 gigs – to linux kernel cache, which meant that the appserver had only a tiny fraction of memory to start on with, and ran quite fast into problems with starting new threads etc. Happy times to no-one.

As I hadn’t ever before had similar experience of seeing almost all the memory taken by no process, but the kernel itself, I was little worried. Luckily Google helped me to find info on how to drop linux caches:

http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/04/free-up-cache-memory-in-linux.html

So effectively running as root:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

.. dropped caches and appserver was free to start again.

Live and learn.

-huima

Testing, testing – Testing webapplications with WebDriver

In the project that I am currently working in, we made some non conventional choises for testing and making sure that we build quality software. First of all we decided against unit testing as none of us was real practioner of TDD. Rather some of us even believed that TDD actually creates waste as in some cases tests can become a rigidity and liability for the project’s development forward. Instead we decided to put the efforts into functional testing – to test the actual user stories and features that end users use, rather than individual components that make up the software. As we are building a web application, natural tool to be used would be Selenium or something alike – in this case we used the ‘alike’, namely Webdriver.

After using previously Selenium RemoteControl, Webdriver felt like a breeze of fresh air – no longer cumbersome configurations or setups, just launching webdriver based tests with FirefoxDriver and voila – Firefox pops up and your testcase drives firefox through your application like demons posessed it. It can be quite soothing and hypnotizing to look at computer surfing your web application – but it can be quite unproductive unless you have popcorn to eat or a book to read. If you are developing web applications, then WebDriver is something you should definitely take a look at!

Below is a small clip from a sample test of ours, it’s a JUnit 4 test.

// Setup function run before the test method is run
@Before
public void setupFriendsForTest() {
setupTestUsersForPrimaryTestUser(); // Sets up test environment and creates dummy testusers to be tested
}

@After
public void cleanupTestUserFriends() {
cleanUpOldTestUsers(); // Cleans up the test environment
}

@Test
public void testFriendsListOnHomePage() throws InterruptedException {
loginPrimaryTestUser(); // Common utility method that logs our testuser in
driver.get(testBaseUrl + "/home/friends"); // Goes to the url we want to test

Thread.sleep(500); // Wait for ajax-operations to finish. This is silly way to handle the situation, but works for this sample

// Check that there are 6 friend elements on page
List friends = driver.findElements(By
.className("vcard friend")); // Get a list of elements from the page
assertEquals(6, friends.size());

int friendsListSize = 6;

// Loop through friend list and remove friends one by one
while (friendsListSize > 0) {
final WebElement friend = friends.get(0);
removeFriend(friend); // Call the method that is defined below
friendsListSize--;
friends = driver.findElements(By.className("vcard friend")); // Get elements again
assertEquals(friendsListSize, friends.size()); // Check that one user was removed
}
}

private void removeFriend(final WebElement friend)
throws InterruptedException {

final WebElement removeButton = friend.findElement(By
.className("remove")); // Get remove button
removeButton.click();

Thread.sleep(500); // Wait for ajax operation to finish and open a dialog

final WebElement removeFriendBlock = driver.findElement(By
.id("removefriend")); // Get the dialog element

final WebElement removeFriendButton = removeFriendBlock.findElement(By
.id("removefriend-remove")); // Find a remove button inside the dialog
removeFriendButton.click();

Thread.sleep(1000); // Wait for the dialog to fade away and close
}

Simple test above shows most of the most used features of WebDriver: commanding driver to load a page, finding elements from the page by classname or id – and clicking an element on the page. Method missing above is how to enter text into elements on webpage, which is described as an example below:




webElement.sendKeys("datasend to the element");

Looks simple and is quite easy to understand. But what do these tests mean for webapplications?

Well they give you a safetybelt and reassurance that the feature or features that you have built actually do work as they were supposed to work. The code above – as simple as it is – actually spotted a simple bug in frontend javascript code that manifested itself after some ui fixes and javascript refactoring. No unit test would have spotted this, as the backend worked flawlessly.

Functional tests also help webapplication creators to communicate and plan with customers how features work and are accepted. If functional tests are written first – atleast the first version, it can help programmers and designers to see flaws in their plans or thinking before they implement themselves into the corner. Walking through userstories and creating tests first actually forces you to think things through your end users point of view.

Sure it takes some time to get into the culture and practice of writing functional tests based on your user stories, but sooner or later you have done all the basework and have enough utility functions in your baseclasses that writing new tests for your application is a snap and comes as a routine. In our project my ultimate goal is to get to the point that ui-designers and concept planners are capable of writing and reading functional tests as well as programmers are – and have these functional tests as the most important tool to define confirmation ( acceptance criteria ) for our user stories and aid in our conversation.