Fabbo' CJs nörd-blogg

Get your Facebook network visualized (properly and without anyone stealing your data)

2011-12-30T01:56:00.005+02:00

Many of you who read this have had a blob like this created to "visualize" your network of facebook friends:

In my opinion, hideous and useless. When you could have something scalable, informative and beautiful like this:

I'd like to briefly tell you how to get your own graph like that. Because it is so much more flexible it has not been packaged as easily accessible as myFnetwork, but connect with me and I can guide you or show you how it's done through screen sharing.

Download the data necessary, through the netvizz app
Install the Gephi application (available for most platforms) to crunch and style the data
Export to PDF to explore and enjoy, or even print your own nerdy large-format poster. Done!

The details of how to use Gephi are in this tutorial (or this, the tutorial is more convoluted but it's a generally more interesting site).

From my friends network you can intuitively see a number of interesting things, it's a sort of picture of my social life. If tweaked and run according to different parameters (interests, gender, other groups) the sky is the limit for what you can discover using such statistical tools. They can tell things about your group, or people you want to learn about - I keep some of my experiments in this gallery.

Now, I can't tell for sure why apps like myFnetwork only give you such a hideous result, but I have been told that the prime motivation for providing any small facebook apps like that is to access and resell your information. Facebook in themselves are marginally better keepers of it, and in principle netvizz (the app I use to download the data) may be as bad too, but at least they don't give me bullshit trinkets which are supposed to keep me happy and attract attention from my connections.

LinkedIn also created a similar visualization they call inmaps - much nicer though and they don't run it off Gephi but borrowed everything from it's style. My professional graph you can see here. My idol Joi Ito has a great video having it demonstrated to him personally here:

What are you waiting for? Be the big brother and process the information you have access to, I for sure intend to further experiment with these things, so stay posted!

The love for meaningless things (GBC, Rube Goldberg machines and Transport Tycoon)

2011-04-23T16:04:00.006+03:00

Our work spam list (yeah, we have one of those) recently spat out this lovely Lego Great Ball Contraption video:

It doesn't do anything useful and as such is a Rube Goldberg machine, but there is something beautiful, I would say even relaxing about its futility and the effort gone into it. A bit like sorting stamps or burning money, turning your back on the constraints of Reality. The band OK Go, who have made many viral music videos before, made a machine of their own for "This too shall pass":

It's fascinating to notice how these things are being empowered by IT - it's easier to build when you're not constrained by atoms, and youtube and forums can at least potentially bring lots of eyballs to your obsession as well as gather the collective power for massive procrastination. People are doing the most insane meaningless things in Minecraft which hardly even can be described as a game, but still seems at least as addictive as WoW. Myself I play Transport Tycoon / OpenTTD to relax, maybe there's therapy for it?

People waste their time in all kinds of ways, watching TV, playing solitaire, reading poor books, how do you do it? As a final note and for good measure, let's play Michael B. Tretow's "Den makalösa manicken (Evighetsmaskin)".

(Update: This "The Birth of Low-Rise" of staples arranged over a period of 30 hours certainly gets an honorary mention for meaningless endeavors)

Finding a hearing-aid compatible (T3 telecoil) mobile phone in Europe

2011-04-22T23:36:00.014+03:00

(Det går att läsa den här bloggposten på smått trasig automat-översatt svenska)

The last couple of days, I've made my way through the jungle of options which is finding a cell phone setup which will work for my severely hearing disabled mother. It was strange and confusing, but a task I enjoyed doing, for with such a nerd son, my mother deserves only the best solution giving best value for money. I intend to describe my findings here, for the benefit of other hearing disabled and to criticize some who are not doing their job.

The final result first

We opted for getting my mother a cheap-o robust and very nice Nokia 2720. It has larger than average buttons, a decent screen, the option of at least GPRS and a basic camera, and the clamshell model my mother specifically requested. That way, there is no fidgety button to find when someone is calling - it displays the caller clearly on the external screen and you just open to pick up the call.

More importantly, Nokia is the only manufacturer we could find who display their US mandated M/T-ratings in a list online, and the 2720 is a fairly recent model which has the essential T-coil built in. This is at least supposed to enable her to switch the hearing aid to T-coil mode, sending the sound wirelessly between phone and hearing aid. For severely hearing disabled this is key, because the hearing aid would otherwise pick up too much noise and conversations would be difficult or impossible. Here is also the first point of criticism, AT&T provide lists for the american model phones they provide with M/T-rating, but similar compilations could not be found for European models either from manufacturers (except Nokia), operators or disability support groups. Other brands probably also have rated models, but we simply could not find them. It seems owning a decent cell phone is too much to ask for from a hearing disabled person.

The options I had to understand

When mom first approached me for advice, she brought print-outs of the pretty new Doro phone selling very well here in Sweden. It's specially designed for the elderly, only has the basic functions and easily manageable large buttons. It advertises it's built-in T-coil to connect with the hearing aid so that was all looking like a nice option. However, it is priced like a mid-range multimedia phone, I have seen it reviewed as "plasticy" and to have mediocre battery time. Not something you want to pay that kind of money for, especially since my mom is not that vision impaired and maybe the T-coil wouldn't even be the final most convenient solution. I soon reviewed it as "Mom, that would be like getting you ready for the care home too early". There was some betting in the family whether she could be happy with another phone, and I'm satisfied to say that she pretty much loves the Nokia, so that's about the Doro. I'm sure it's great for the really elderly, but Nokia are experienced in making great low-range phones, so unless you badly need precisely those Doro features, Nokia gives you a better phone at less than half the price. Finally, like even basic standard phones nowadays, it has a camera which enables mom to shoot the occasional amusing picture with.

The bluetooth versus telecoil complexity

Mom has recently got a very nice and advanced Widex Inteo Power IN-19 hearing aid, one of the first capable of frequency conversion. Instead of amplifying more in the frequencies where she is pretty much deaf, it converts them down to lower frequencies which she can hear. It's a little bit like DanKam for the color blind, a neat piece of signal processing circumventing the disability.

Regardless how good the hearing aid is at getting sound to the brain of a hearing disabled, when it comes to any type of electronic systems (TV, the phone, speaker systems in seminars, church etc.) it is a lot more convenient to transfer the sound directly to the hearing aid instead of picking it up through the microphone. Now the issue I faced was precisely how to get the sound between phone and the hearing aid, there were three options.

Bluetooth between phone and hearing aid - pretty much all phones (and many other electronic devices, though not TVs) nowadays have bluetooth and support connecting to sound input- or output profile devices (microphone and headphones). However, only few hearing aid models have caught up with this and instead feature the older telecoil. Replacing a hearing aid is an expensive and cumbersome option, so we skipped that right away. Also the bluetooth hearing aid wouldn't have the microphone, so wouldn't necessarily give the nifty option to leave the phone in the purse and pick up with the press of a button and speak into a headset.

Telecoil in the phone - as mentioned above, many phones probably have the T3/T4 telecoil rating (M3/M4 is regarding how little noise the phone would incur in the hearing aid), but it is not simple to find and is rarely advertised in the regular specifications. Nokia excel by providing a list of their models which feature a telecoil. This is the setup we opted for at least initially and even though the Nokia 2720 is said to have a weaker telecoil than earlier models, it works satisfactory for mom.

Bluetooth telecoil loops and headsets - bluetooth has become a convenient and mature technology to connect in particular a mobile phone to a headset (it can also for example be used to transfer files between the phone and a laptop). Not only does it give a wireless audio connection to the phone which you can leave in your purse (hey, women usually have less pockets than men) or a few meters away, usually they can also provide a button to pick up and or make calls through voice control as well as signal and vibrator when someone is calling. It turned out even a regular cheap "jawbone" bluetooth headset on the ear in place of the hearing aid provided a great benefit when tried by mom, as you can crank up the volume straight into the ear it even worked without the hearing aid.

However, hearing disabled have their own solutions too, usually a telecoil loop hung around the neck with a pendant containing the bluetooth device, microphone, vibrator and the button (there also is the wired telecoil "hook" hung by the hearing aid, but on the whole it seems a silly option except it can get quite cheap). TecEar provide a good list of models you can buy in the US, but just to add to the consumer confusion, each supplier in Sweden sell only one or a few models (Hörselskadades riksförbund, Bo Edin AB, Headsetshoppen, Svensk hörsel leverantörernas förening och Lisas CI-blogg), according to their manufacturer contracts and quality preference. We have understood that the Joy Abe BH01 model is good enough, it is quite stylish and one of the best priced around and as the need arise, we may opt for this to supplement the Nokia 2720 built-in telecoil, as indeed it adds the wireless convenience as well. We have discussed simplicity a lot, this option would enable mom to leave her phone in the purse, feel the vibration from the pendant and pick up by switching her hearing aid to T-coil mode and press the button on the pendant. Compare this to switching the hearing aid mode, finding the phone in the purse, and fiddling with it some to pick up, or removing the hearing aid (which needs to be turned off as not to feedback shriek) and replacing it with a bluetooth headset, the telecoil loop is a very nifty option. Bear in mind that as niche devices, these things cost 100-200 EUR, which plus a basic phone still is a very appealing option competing with the Doro phone niched for the elderly.

Finally, I hope you have enjoyed and gotten use of this detailed description, I'm very happy to receive critique on it, and let's hope manufacturers and suppliers can improve and become clearer in their communication also to the disabled! A particular thanks to Lisas CI-blogg and Bo Edin AB for friendly and informative comments!

Update: I've found another list of M/T rated phones, but still very little communication from the manufacturers themselves. Also, we have realized that mom would very much want either of the bluetooth telecoils, but to complement it, a 3.5mm plug simple telecoil would also come in handy (not sure which would be the cheapest option though), for those times when you want to hear something off the computer, an iPod or someone else's equipment without doing the bluetooth pairing. A wired loop with 3.5mm plug would be ok, compared to one with a specific contact which you would have to replace when you change cell phones.

The power of version control - Video published

2011-02-10T12:23:00.005+02:00

Better late than never, Agile Estonia has published the talk I held there on the topic of "The power of version control". It definitely turned out into more of a seminar and discussion than a training, and I would have had to limit the scope a lot if I wanted to go deeper. However, in this setting we got to have som exciting discussion which I hope to elaborate on the conclusions of. Enjoy!

Carl-Johan Sveningsson - The power of version control from Stan Vasilyev on Vimeo.

If you're interested in the topic of version control, DVCS and the necessary workflows, do check out my prezi below, the links in there, in particular my stackoverflow question, nvie's branching model with the support gitflow scripts. Also recently have been excited about Plastic SCM "branch per task" workflow.

"For the longest time first CVS, then Subversion, and recently Git or Mercurial tools have been used for version control and release management, often without knowing properly what benefits one is hoping to get from the tool, or how to achieve them. With the exception of those spending years figuring out how to manage these issues, many companies settle for the bare minimal solution, losing out on benefits of modern distributed version control systems (DVCS) which otherwise could enable critical efficiency improvements. This talk attempts to address the lack of discussion and resources available online when it comes to team version control workflows and release management and will discuss experiences with these issues and propose solutions.

The talk won't give any neatly packaged solutions, and may occasionally dive into complex details of DVCS, but the only pre-requisites are interest and attention, no earlier experience with DVCS is required."

The power of version control on Prezi

Garage48 and civil society in entrepreneurship

2011-02-03T21:25:00.006+02:00

Second blog post in a row now about the Garage48 HUB. Only - in between I have attended an awesome Garage48 event in Helsinki, where we created the letsmeethere.net service.
Actually what I wanted to write a note about this time was this:

That's the diploma that Garage48 association won the civil society pioneer of the year award, as handed out by the NGO round table foundation of Estonia. Really cool I think, that they're being rewarded for their efforts to push Estonia in a good direction in terms of innovation and collaboration. Anyway I've told my story about the spirit of my Gnosjö village to a couple people, how they have kept unemployment low through the decades and all. It seems that may turn into a proper public speaking engagement for me, trying to spread the word in Estonia, in which case you will hear more about it. Exciting stuff!

OpenCoffee Tallinn meeting in the Garage48 HUB / hackerspace

2011-01-06T14:38:00.006+02:00

I just came from the monthly OpenCoffee Club Tallinn, this time in the recently opened Garage48 HUB of Lutheri kvartal. I had to be quite brief (car logistics and that sort of stuff) but man what an energy there! Not only was it crowded with interesting people for the Open Coffee, but the G48 HUB seems to be attracting plenty of interest (hopefully paying members), my sincere congratulations to the team for going ahead and executing such an awesome idea!

Something which is refreshing for Estonia is certainly the sense of trust and community the hub brings. Many times involving the websmurfs or my home village of Gnosjö do I hear of smooth arrangements which in Estonia would be met with the rejection "A good deed never goes unpunished". But here is a good deed, with sufficient rules, smooth for everyone involved, which may make financial sense too!

See, where I come from we have an opposite culture of the expression "The best food for an Estonian is another Estonian". A Gnosjö factory owner knows that the wellbeing of his neighbour affects him too, and at least if it doesn't hurt him directly, rather than lose a customer from the area completely when they're over capacity, Gnosjö factories will send business to their local competitors, and sometime the competitor will send business back. Also incredible informal arrangements, like sharing of facilities or that the security guard sometimes will serve as night shift machine operator, are common and remarkably lacking covering of one's own ass. They may not be brilliant driven business men, but the almost naive problem solving ability and how low-friction business runs in the Gnosjö region really is a key factor to its sustained profitability and development.

My personal impression is that Estonia desperately need this sort of networking as well. It must be uncomplicated to do business and there must exist reasonable service providing companies. Surely this sort of web is not woven out of dreams and society alone, but trust, handshakes, forgiveness and a lot of good will is absolutely essential!

Speaking of the G48 HUB, it is somewhat modeled on the concept of hackerspaces. We were some people who wanted an Estonian hackerspace already before, but we emphasized the communication and local community rather than the physical space, and honestly were too cowardly and lazy to do something serious. So now to complement the physical G48 HUB, we have a hefty online community in Skype where nerdy people come to chat, meet and possibly collaborate any time of day. Just ping me if you would like to be invited there!

I had the pleasure to meet some new interesting people in OpenCoffee, but I still would like to discuss with someone my ideas regarding Flattr and pricing models for near zero marginal cost content...

If you appreciate my stuff, now you can flattr me!

2011-01-06T13:54:00.004+02:00

As faithful visitors of my blog may have noticed (do I even have any of those anymore - isn't it all driven by google reader, facebook and twitter?), I have added some colorful buttons in the sidebar and beneath each post.

The first of these are for a peculiar community called "Flattr". I hope to add some others as well, and tidy up the blog, but I feel a bit locked up in blogspot and of course as they say - the children of the shoemaker walks in the worst shoes. Anyway, Flattr is a voluntary community based on that people are willing to give away a constant pretty small amount of money every month, a "flat-rate", to things they appreciate online, which they want to "flatter". Get a better introduction to it here, in this excellent video:

Honestly, I'm participating in this experiment without a serious hope of breaking even, and I would suggest that so should you. I don't think I am the type of content producer to amass people's appreciation like that, but regardless, it is important to realize that the Internet is participatory, and every attempt to reward that should be encouraged. That's actually an interesting threshold - that mainly people who at least are producing some type of content online will be motivated to try to gain something and thus also contribute themselves.

As I discussed recently with a friend, the Flattr model has a number of weaknesses, for instance that it is so completely voluntary, the entry threshold is significant, you only have the option to give one Flattr click not more if you really like something, and finally the incentive to raise your commitment above the basic 2€ per month is way too weak. Overall thought, it would seem, as Chris Anderson would express it, that the routines for charging for close-to-zero-marginal-cost content are still completely under-developed in the economy. I will be very excited to see that development truly happen.

Finally, I think those offline flattr (also IRL-flattr) things seem adorably nerdy, would love to see some innovative use-cases of them!

I hope to have the opportunity to write a bit more about the dynamics of flattr later, stay tuned.

Chevron do agree, just not on everything (or a Yes Men hoax puncture a campaign)

2010-10-18T21:44:00.008+03:00

It's a common complaint that public opinion has poor ability of comprehending nuances or complex issues. Well, let's see if they can sort this out, and just how much of Chevron's marketing (a.k.a. greenwashing) budget has gone down the drain.

So, social media didn't know what to think, Chevron was saying some funky stuff and the first I saw of it (thanks to Chris) was assuming Yes Men (theyesmen.org). Well chevron-press.com and chevron-weagree.com think "Oil companies should... ":

... clean up their messes
... fix the problems they create
... put safety first

Wow, some pretty extreme statements there, coming from a huge oil company! Way to go corporate social responsibility!

Well, turns out the press contact "Giles Vechny" has no other google hits, basically declaring him an invented (at least as a professional) identity, and most likely the page a hoax. Haha, way to go Yes Men (or copycats), you almost managed to fool the world again, that's really funny. The world smiles and declares Chevron "We agree" CSR campaign a hoax.

Well, think again, because it only partly is! press.chevron-corp.com states (I'm sorry, I sincerely hope I didn't get those URLs mixed up now):

"While such a campaign does exist, its official URL is chevron.com/weagree. The advertisements released earlier today, at chevron-weagree.com, were an elaborate subterfuge and must not be mistaken as real"

So, what Chevron and chevron.com/weagree does agree on are that "Oil companies should... ":

... put their profits to good use
... need to get real
It's time... get behind the development of renewable energy
... support the communities they're a part of
... think more like technology companies
... should support small business

I'll leave it to the professionals to weed out exactly how accountable anyone can be held to such ideals and how watered down it is.

Now good.is writes that also the second press release is fake... well, I'm not sure anymore. Thanks to @blumenberg whom I bounced some messages early on with. Anyway it seems Chevron had a new fresh marketing campaign, trying to clear the slop off big oil, though the campaign was leaked to Yes Men (or copy cats, I haven't seen them verified yet), enabling them to perform this record-fast counter-campaign. If not heads will roll, at least it certainly was a powerful way of putting focus on big oil and their attempts at CSR.

The Yes Men have publicly described their methods, most recently in their documentary "THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD", supposedly due to a legal conflict available for free instead of for sale. So, you can at least with their approval just go to that site, download and enjoy their guerilla marketing.

Now, feel free to start the flaming.

The Yes Men posing as Exxon executives (from wikimedia commons, credit to Tavis )

Enjoy my other posts on marketing and identity.

(Update: Turns out the story is even more intricate than described above, and not all of my conclusions above were entirely correct. I hope to remedy it shortly)

The trinity of science - Feynman, Sagan and Dawkins (or, CJ tries magnet links)

2010-10-17T21:13:00.002+03:00

There are many good books out there, and generally prefer the non-fiction ones. When it comes to cool science books, many of you will have enjoyed Hawking, Bryson, Sacks and Hofstadter, but a while back I discovered these old heroes of science, like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and still alive, but relevant anyway, Richard Dawkins.

Amazing, amusing, fascinating, you mustn't miss these books, and they're all available as audio books for your lazy leisure!:

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (magnet) by Richard Feynman
"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" (magnet) by Carl Sagan
"The God Delusion" (magnet) by Richard Dawkins

This may be a realization only for me, but my heroes are actually mortal... and Oliver Sacks is dreadfully old...

(image via I love charts)

See my other nerdy posts or posts regarding Carl Sagan

50-year old Telefunken Gavotte tube radio still playing well

2010-07-19T19:35:00.009+03:00

This is my grandmother's and grandfather's old Telefunken Gavotte 6 Export tube radio. When my grandmother passed away earlier this year she did not leave a lot of worldly possessions, but I am very grateful I could inherit this beautiful old radio (manufactured in 1955) which I used to fiddle with as a kid when we visited grandma.

The radio is in a beautiful shape, always a cherished piece of furniture in a tidy home, just some light scratches and cracking of the wood finish. And to my great surprised as I replaced the ungrounded power plug with a modern one, it works, and plays FM beautifully!

Check out the video I made in my excitement, and the follow-up as I had learned slightly more of the specs. Apologies for poor quality and mistakes, they slip in:

My grandmother's antique radio is working! :

Antique radio, again :

What I tried to explain in the second video was that LW, MF (MW in German), HF (KW in German) has long been allocated for AM transmission, whereas VHF (UKW in German) is used for FM. That was what surprised me somewhat, that the Gavotte's superheterodyne receiver is able to demodulate both amplitude modulation and frequency modulation.

Another thing which is not clearly visible in the video is just how analogue the radio is. The radio tubes take a minute or so to warm up and begin functioning, and there's that beautiful little flourescent green signal strength indicator. Ah, turns out that's called a "magic eye tube" as illustrated by this excellent video.

I considered modifying the radio and using only its shell to build some variation of a home media computer, but there's no way I will do that now. I would however consider selling it, if the price is right, so collectors, get in touch and tell me what a gem like this may be worth!

(Update: I made some better pictures now available on flickr and in the little slideshow below. Also I learnt that pretty "magic eye" is indeed an EM80 tube with that fan shape)

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Social iPhone games with OpenFeint - just add friends!

2010-07-05T22:52:00.008+03:00

I am looking for friends to play with! Facebook apps are all good, but the real recent revolution in games is the iOS platform (iPhone / iPad / iPod touch). I love the way the iPhone has revived casual gaming with small, simple and fun games.

The thing which is surprisingly missing from most games still is the social factor. When we were kids, the only thing me and Lada had to amuse ourselves with was IR pong between our Palm Pilots during lectures, and while OnLive with social features like brag shots and spectators during tournaments is still to take off, I'm settling for OpenFeint on the iPhone.

As is usually the case with applications and IT habits, you need to reach out to people to learn of their preferences, which is why I'm writing this blog post. I really want to know if you're playing any OpenFeint games! Later I hope to write a post about iPhone apps in general. Leave your comments!

I'm asking for competition for example in:

And as you can see in the attached screenshots, these are some games my friends seem to play (but I can't really know if it's currently or just old stuff):

My book addiction got a fix

2010-06-22T12:52:00.005+03:00

I have visited the Helsinki academic bookstore again (and got a new shipment from Daniel Suarez), it's always equally rewarding. The book I wanted but they didn't have was "The Puzzle Palace" by James Bamford. Other books I got:

See also the rest of my bookshelf. I hope to write an update regarding the Suarez' books shortly.

The Maksu- ja Tolliamet perils of internationalization

2010-02-18T17:23:00.004+02:00

In these tax declaration times, as a foreigner in Estonia I have a particularly treacherous time to get with the usability of Estonian e-services.

This year the Estonian tax authority (Maksu- ja Tolliamet - emta.ee, twitter) proudly declared that they will accept tax declarations in English:

However, trying to take them up on that promise, disregarding the numerous times I'm thrown into an Estonian-only environment, the English environment doesn't have the 2009 tax declaration I see if I switch to the Estonian one:

Estonian version:

Furthermore, once successfully in the declaration environment, the English version seems completely broken as I for example can't save my changed postal address (which of course works in the Estonian one). I can only deem this complete usability fail.

For the fairness of things and to provoke a debate, I'll share the opinion of a Swedish friend of mine:

"Yeah.. they really should not do it [attempt translation] at all.. no need to, really. Either you learn the language or you get help with it. Your choice (not theirs).

Just as in Sweden where they translate everything into 27 different languages and the tax payers pay for it. Not the tax payers fault that people do not know Swedish.

I do not mind any kind of miniority population but if they are unable to learn Swedish then they should pay for their own translation. Just as I seem to be unable to learn Estonian hence it is my problem to translate what I need, not the Estonian tax payers problem"

On another note, I've finally got a functioning mobile-id, as I was tired of the ridiculous software issues I had with my ID card. There english translation is even more absent, the support because of the jungle of organizations involved is terrible - but I recently was lucky enough to get both competent and helpful feedback when my ID card wasn't working.

xkcd Tech Support Cheat Sheet - now in Swedish

2010-02-06T23:31:00.007+02:00

It's absolutely not that I mind visiting my parents, or that I don't love being helpful, but I felt that some attention should be given to this immortal comic strip / flow chart:

Here it is in Swedish, for you, friends and collegues to print and educate each other with:

Do translate it into your own language using the files available in github, then just tell me where to pull from and I can include them. Or just grab the text file and translate to your own language and then I can help with the picture.

I am allowed to do this derivative work off xkcd because "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details". This derivative work is thusly also provided under the same license.

( Update: Hah, that was both surprising and very nerdy - Claes Wallin has taken my files, and not made any more translations, but made an SVG (scalable vector graphics) original with scripts to generate PNGs! WTF?! Well, I pulled, and I look forward to where he intends to take that. More than anything, cooperation through github can be fascinating because you see ways other people do things. )

Symphony of Science: auto-tuned science awesomeness

2010-01-31T12:16:00.004+02:00

Recently a silly project called Symphony of Science (youtube playlist) opened my eyes to somewhat of a lost treature. I knew my hippie friends admired Carl Sagan, but it took until now to fall in love myself.

Just check out these profound quotes. They may not mean anything to you, but to some of us it is deeply touching:

Carl Sagan:

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

"My own musical tribute to two great men of science. Carl Sagan and his cosmologist companion Stephen Hawking present: A Glorious Dawn - Cosmos remixed. Almost all samples and footage taken from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's Universe series" :

"'We Are All Connected' was made from sampling Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The History Channel's Universe series, Richard Feynman's 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye's Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking's Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music" :

"'Our Place in the Cosmos', the third video from the Symphony of Science, was crafted using samples from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Richard Dawkins' Genius of Charles Darwin series, Dawkins' TED Talk, Stephen Hawking's Universe series, Michio Kaku's interview on Physics and aliens, plus added visuals from Baraka, Koyaanisqatsi, History Channel's Universe series, and IMAX Cosmic Voyage. The themes present in this song are intended to explore our understanding of our origins within the universe, and to challenge the commonplace notion that humans have a superior or privleged position, both on our home planet and in the universe itself" :

"'The Unbroken Thread' is the fourth video in the Symphony of Science series, and it features David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, and Carl Sagan. The clips used in this installment come from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, David Attenborough's Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, The Life of Mammals, The Living Planet, BBC Life, XVIVO Scientific Animations, IMAX Cosmic Voyage, Jane Goodall's TED Talk, and a clever Guiness Commercial. The themes present in The Unbroken Thread attempt to explore the wild diversity of life on our planet, the intricacy and origin of its mechanisms, and its close relation to all other life forms" :

Also, I've taken up a habit which I encourage to everyone - when you see something cool, google it a bit to follow up on it! Like I've found these awesome books and videos:

Must-see hilarious nerdy movie clips

2010-01-30T22:40:00.005+02:00

I'd like to share with you a few of those movie clips all nerds just should have seen. It's funny, because even though my entire class of course will have seen them, they may be entirely ignored by later or earlier nerd generations. Do you have any favorites I missed?

First out is Look around you, which you just have to see to believe. A hint - it was made in 2002 (youtube playlist and torrent downloads: series 1 and series 2) :

Their periodic table of elements is pretty amazing:

Next, "Sorting out sorting" is an excruciating review of all the basic sorting algorithms. Very educational, very old.

I'll finish off for this time with "Erlang: The Movie", documenting the ground-breaking features of this Ericsson functional programming language. It may not seem much to you, but in the nerd world, these things matter. For artistic reasons best enjoyed muted with Falco "Der Kommissar" playing over it:

See other of my nerdy posts.

Unboxing of Daniel Suarez' "FreedomTM" advance reading copy

2009-12-17T21:59:00.005+02:00

I was very excited to finally the ARC Daniel Suarez had the generosity to send me, so I just had to make my first unboxing video (definition of unboxing). Well, I opened the box before, so it's a bit faked, but my excitement is not! Check it out:

I guess receiving a galley implies some obligation to read and review it or something. I will do that as soon as possible, hopefully by when FreedomTM is released publicly in January. In the meantime, check out also my other blog posts about Daemon and my collection of great bookmarks on it.

Thanks by the way go to my friend Björn Falkevik who showed me the simplicity and charm of Bambuser. It's not like we all expect to get hundreds of live viewers of our opinion diarrea, but in situations like this it's nice that anyone can have it accessible and I'm particularly excited about the nice integration with twitter and recently to have live broadcasts directly to facebook. Not to mention the implications of having accessible live video streamed to the world when otherwise you could be forced to surrender your recording... ouch :-)

Pre-order Daniel Suarez' Daemon sequel Freedom™

2009-11-15T05:50:00.007+02:00

I was concerned there for a while, when I didn't find a single bleep from Daniel Suarez online after his Google talk - hopefully no-one decided him too dangerous and silenced him, right?

Anyway, I have written a whole bunch of things about Suarez' revolutionary book "Daemon". Someone asked me what to read after being riveted to that book, and sure enough once a paradigm has been changed once, it doesn't change again with the sequel, but Freedom™ is looking promising anyhow. Maybe, just maybe it will do to privacy what Daemon did to IT security, I especially like the tagline "Everything is under control - everything".

If you haven't already heard the story of how Daemon went from self-published to Barnes & Nobles, read about it. Essentially Daniel is still kicking it and recently sent me an email about my wish to pre-order FreedomTM (seems he is still treating me well...). You can also pre-order it before the release on January 7, 2010. Before ordering, don't miss reading the preview chapter Suarez recently published on his homepage.

Finally, don't take my word for it, but check out what people are saying online about Daniel Suarez' books. (Update: I tried to do both twingly and twitter search widgets here, but the javascript just won't work, could someone tell me what's wrong with blogspot?)

Do check out my other posts about Daemon, and also see the awesome collection of bookmarks I have gathered.

PS. Don't buy anything by Dan Brown. Preferably also don't read it, but seriously don't buy it. He is evil™.

Nerdy T-shirts

2009-11-08T22:19:00.003+02:00

Silly stuff found online, maybe something for the Young Scientists, I saw these and these tshirts.

Actually, since long I've wanted stuff from here, here or here, and there's just too much nice material gadgets in the world to afford or to even keep it all. So I don't really want to buy any of it. But I can giggle at them.

See also other nerdy stuff or about fuf.org I have written.

First snow picture feed pipe

2009-11-06T23:35:00.004+02:00

Because first snow fell today, and in honor of my friends over at MoYuMe, I was compelled to build a small Yahoo! Pipe continuously listing the pictures people show on twitter of their local first snow, all over the northern hemisphere! You can check it out here.

The point of making a Yahoo! Pipe (yeah, I know it would have been cooler with the other type of snow pipe) is usually to get an RSS feed. This you can plug into Google Reader, or as I've understood is popular among non-nerds, bloglovin'! The address for the first snow feed to copy and paste into your RSS reader is this.

The pipe looks like this, it is free for anyone to clone and then edit, and I would love if you let me know if you do something useful with it! I used some tricks to get it to work, if encouraged enough maybe I can dissect it in the blog sometime. In general I'm not super-happy about Yahoo! Pipes, it has stability problems and is a bit inflexible, but it's fun to play with. Also Amazon S3 seems to dislike me hotlinking the pictures like I do, so your mileage may vary. Enjoy!

You can also of course see yourself all the messages, not only pictures, of people loving the first snow on twitter, or read my other posts about microblogging, yahoo pipes, or other nerdy things.

Five ways to make your own live web tv!

2009-11-02T23:58:00.010+02:00

Back at the turn of the century things were so messy - some friends were playing around with Icecast and similar contraptions to do streaming live web radio but someone was always lagging in the streaming, there was never enough upstream bandwidth to host any large audiences (read: three is a crowd already) and since it was tricky to announce a show hosts were speaking to empty halls most of the time anyway. Oh, and usually the shows were not usually (certainly not automatically) archived and hosted for perusal by late-comers.

Probably it was in late 2005, I even recall the setting when I saw the first article about Youtube and thought it seemed like a stupid idea, how could they ever attempt to house, and even less broadcast all that video?! Video, even the shortest clip you had tried to play around with, VCD's, MPEG4's and DVD-R, storage of it all and crap, it was just impossible to imagine to do it for a large crowd - over the web?! Hah.

Seriously, I was so wrong. The culture and technology surrounding "Web 2.0" of the last couple years has changed all of these factors. Chris Anderson's principle of "rapidly diminishing marginal costs" enabled Youtube, there is always a service there to host and process your data as well as willingly expose it to other sites, the same sites in which you broadcast your message to rapidly gather your friends as an audience as well as to spread the word when you have just found something great looking for an audience. Somehow... it just happened, and for those who don't touch twitter, facebook, google reader, ping.fm etc., it must be very hard to grasp. But it has changed things, for sure.

Today, a large part of the radio or TV I enjoy is provided as podcasts or other live streaming online. Sometimes I measure widespread acceptance of technologies by how much my family are spontaneously using it - and judging from the appreciation when I send them a bambuser link to some debate they are interested in, or they go online for the replay of the show they missed, the gap between common mass media (sw. "gammelmedia") and user-generated content is closing. You can have a pretty successful radio or TV show nowadays without ever touching an ether wave except whatever is necessary for transmitting the IP protocol. My friend Björn Falkevik is using Bambuser (it is a common mistake to identify him with this Swedish/Finnish web startup) to prove this with their excellent reoccurring show "Sweet Sunday Web Crunch", and indeed it has become so easy, and so good, the sky and your imagination is the limit for what you can achieve with web video! Not with such high ambitions, but just to prove how easy it was to do it, I recorded a small clip:

The cool thing distinguishing Bambuser from Youtube is that it is live. When it's live, and you have an event with a reasonable audience, it opens up for the opportunity of a backchannel - a chat or similar way for the audience to comment and participate in the content. This can create extremely interesting dynamics - certainly one reason for why CNN chose to broadcast the Obama inauguration in collaboration with facebook.

Doing live streaming video well is a bit tricky to do well, but there are several options available for you to play around with, here are some:

Bambuser (Swedish / Finnish)
USTREAM (US)

Justin.tv (US)
Livestream (formerly Mogulus - US)
Qbrick (Swedish)

Using slightly different methods but the same principles, Christian Rudolf of disruptive.nu shows that with a whiteboard and a videocamera you can baffle the world:

Regardless if you choose to bite the bullet and contribute something of your own or stand in the audience, I think you will agree with me that this is exciting opportunities indeed.

Since quite some time I have been experimenting with transcoding and ripping online content (all with the justification of your liberty to enjoy content in the format you choose… and that post really ought to be updated) and recently I have been doing some transcoding actually using the Videolan VLM server for work. It's really cool! But it's also tricky - we're doing flash video to the web browser (to be played by a flash based video player like flowplayer) but VLC supports only HTTP pseudo-streaming it seems, and we're dreading moving to Red5 or similar for proper RTMP streaming. Not to mention if we want to start replaying and managing archived streams… Phew, seems I always end up at the bleeding edge of technologies!

( PS. Yes, five ways :-) )

Wolfram|Alpha use case: Calculating probability of hash collisions

2009-10-21T22:15:00.006+03:00

A collegue was discussing with me today whether seven hex digits (what Git commit names are usually abbreviated to) is sufficient to avoid collisions. Usually four-five just works, but the engineer answer is as usual "I can calculate that!". Wikipedia states regarding the birthday problem:

"Given n random integers drawn from a discrete uniform distribution with range [1,d], what is the probability p(n;d) that at least two numbers are the same?"

So, quickly plugging this into Wolfram|Alpha, assuming seven hex digits gives d=16^7, and a reasonable set of git objects, say n=10000 :

{ n = 10000, d = 16^7,
p = 1-exp(-(n (n-1))/(2 d)),
q = 1-((d-1)/d)^n }

Which indeed gives that p = 17% probability that there for this setup would exist at least one collision in the whole set, but on the other hand you only use the abbreviation manually and the probability to actually use one of these is only q = 0.0037% . Q.E.D.

See also my first and second tweet about this. I have other entries about git, wolframalpha or just plain nerdy.

Why Git will revolutionize the world of open source

2009-10-20T21:05:00.006+03:00

Today, looking at the Pro Git book homepage, I was reminded of how sure I am that Git will revolutionize open source. It is just so simple to fork and start contributing to a project. When you've done something, there's even a button to ask the owner of the project to pull back your contribution.

The graph above is a section of the network graph of the progit book, I.e. the mesh of contributions to the project. The book is being translated into German, Chinese etc., as can be seen in the Github inline rendering a chapter of the book. Absolutely smooth.

To add insult to insanely cool flexibility injury (eh, sorry about that figure of speech) Github allows you to host project homepages also through git containing markdown or anything Jekyll will swallow. Maybe also check out the Github hosted homepage of sitaramc, the creator of the gitolite alternative to the gitosis server.

To be honest, git development so far has been pretty minimalistic, it has reached it's current usability very fast. It is not as well integrated in different platforms and systems as subversion is, partly because the usage model is so different, partly because Git hasn't been failing for as many years as subversion has. However, don't let yourself be fooled, Git is absolutely usable and there is simply no substitute to what it's reliability and streamlining can do for your coding process. I hope to elaborate on that topic any of these days.

What I'm next keeping my eyes open for is SCRUM and agile development in open source, but I suspect I'll have to wait for that...

I have my own Github profile with only some stuff in it, other posts about open source as well as a good collection of git links.

Update: My collegue Lauri went ahead to try out Github, and after naming the repository correctly to username.github.com and realizing you should use the master branch there, "gh-pages" is only for username.github.com/repo-name pages (which are cool themselves!) his pages are working, and he can play around with this smoothly web-connected storage as much as he wants!

Secondly, Git absolutely has benefits to other than open source projects! Our company does essentially no open source, and still check out my presentation about the cool benefits we've experienced, in particular how it streamlined the workflow an helps us capture and keep information at the right time.

Spotify patents available to the world!

2009-10-11T18:24:00.007+03:00

It is a common misconception that patenting has something to do with keeping secrets, while it is actually just the opposite - it is a way of gaining protection for your innovation, on the condition that you publicly disclose it for the world to see.

Even if you don't get the patent, your information will remain publicly available (as far as I know), and if you get the patent, you're still gonna have to pay the yearly fees to maintain the protection. In this sense, patent databases are hardly just lists of licensing obstacles to avoid or purchase, but vast repositories of knowledge on methods and solutions. Repositories which are largely ignored.

My friend Martin who this weekend visited Tallinn notified me that there would be a Spotify patent out there in the names of the people we know there, Ehn, Strigeus et al. Said and done, break out ep.espacenet.com and go search, and anyone can find the either 11-page US or 14-page European patent applications for Spotify. Go to the "Original document" tab, ignore the one page preview and instead choose the "Save Full Document" link, fill in the CAPTCHA and you can download the full PDF.

Other organisations which may have exciting patents to read:

(PS. Look at that, IDG.se Computer Sweden picked up this blog post, so I will take the opportunity to suggest my other posts on Spotify, my candid pictures from the Spotify office or other stuff I find cool. I'm @unclecj on twitter)

(PPS. Browsing around for how the Computer Sweden guy picked up on this blog post, he thinks it may have been through @jocke, I find that my other friend @erikstarck had RT'd the patent before me and a fine article about the costs for running Spotify. My insider info - the licensing costs are very relevant, someone has spent a lot of work to be able to keep a music service which is both free and legal alive. And they are doing their best to manage the network costs, while paying attention to that as you grow, your role in the network affects how much you have to pay someone for what)

The possibility of physical and mental collapse...

2009-10-01T23:14:00.004+03:00

"The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride." (quote)

Tonight it hit home with me how messy my online footprint has become. Sure you can just google "unclecj", but each of its pieces, including this blog, is very neglected. I barely even open my Google Reader anymore, EventBox sort of passed away with my old harddisk, Jaiku and bloggy are all but forgotten and my ambitions to write on several exciting topics are simply moving nowhere. Indeed my "workflow" is very streamlined, microblogging through ping.fm and stuff, which also means I take time for almost nothing outside of the everyday flow.

It took me a long while to figure out I used my OpenId to connect with twitterfeed, and what happened to feeding my blogs to twitter before I simply don't know. I would love to clean up my blogs and post some new things, but it's not gonna happen, I'm simply too busy with more important commitments.

So, enjoy some fear and loathing while I'm being confused. I got some cool books while overseas, good stuff.