joker.iki.fi

I am doing some changes during this week to my home network. This probably means that joker.iki.fi will be not answering all the time. I try to keep the downtime minimal, but since I really don’t want to plan everything beforehand (come on, joker.iki.fi is probably not that business-critical!) you may get poor service.

Updated at 2/28/2007 14:25

I managed to do most of the updates which require downtime, so fear no more.

And by downtime, I mean disconnection from the Internet. The server uptime is still 346 days and the last reboot was a kernel upgrade. So joker.iki.fi has been running smoothly (as far as operating system goes) almost a year now. I think 365 is always a cause for celebration.

Today my wife forced me to tidy up my study. I have managed to delay this activity for years now but today I kind of had to give up as she gave me no options. I threw out two large bags of old printouts and a LOT of old papers and binders. Most of the stuff dated back to years 97-99 when I did most of my lab courses at the univerity. Lots of good memories there and a lot of information and work that went into producing those papers. I felt kind of sad throwing them away.

I had a lot of old Linux HOWTOs and magazines and whatnot, stuff that’s so deprecated nowadays and they are just a click away in the internet that makes no sense to keep those, but still I felt bad of discarding the stuff. The most memorable items were some of the old computer games and burned CD’s with faded out texts like “Red Hat 5.2″ or something like. It made me feel very nostalgic but at the same time the practical side of me was telling me that it just makes no sense in storing stuff that I’m never going to need again.
Well, now it’s done and I also did some housekeeping to my server. The old copy of joker.iki.fi has been running in the background for a few months now but the Drupal that it was running was so full of holes that I needed to archive the old version of joker.iki.fi. So, a lot of changes today here in my world. A spring cleaning even before spring.

During the time sun was setting I took a little cycling trip, a bit more than one hour and I have to admit that even though I don’t really like winter, it was actually very pretty outside.

A nice day in general.

Normally whenever something’s on in TV that sucks big time it does not bother me, as I just don’t watch it. But Idols, the very very original brain-eating format show, is something different. As I don’t like it I don’t watch it, but still I can’t escape it. Every magazine, person on the street and news website I visit has some reference to it.

Every time I see or hear about these asshats I feel mentally sick. Ok, I don’t know these people personally, but let’s gather the facts:

• This is a TV-Show where people go to perform for free. If you suck at singing people think you plain suck. If you actually can sing, people are not going to recognize you for that. You’ll always be “the idols wannabe” - no chance for real respect in the music scene.
• You may get some idiots to look up to you by performing there, but most of the population of the planet are going to feel sorry for you or downright hate you.
• The TV show is there - not because it’s somehow great or entertaining - but because companies want people to watch advertisement of diapers and toothbrushes and the latest “scientifically proven healthy”, frozen microwave dinners.
• If you are “famous” in Finland, that means nothing. There’s something like 6 million Finns. There’s 6 billion people on the planet. Do the math. People are just not going to give a shit about you in the big picture. Even if toilet papers like 7 päivää are calling you a “star”, that does not make it real.
• You are not going to get any money from this stuff in the long run. The “record deals” are very shitty and only make fat cats in “record companies” another piece of bacon.

Real musicians (and I don’t mean Britney Spears and other products like her) actually write their own music, get people’s respect by touching their inner feelings with their art and actually contribute something to the human race. Idols on the other hand, is mostly just a waste of perfectly good oxygen. Go to school and try to learn some useful skills for your life.

Now I’ve been using the new blog for a while and I have to say that I really, really like WordPress.

With the old joker.iki.fi I had to constantly worry about comment spam and all sort of mishaps. It might be that the new system has been online for such a short period of time that I havent been spotted by as many spambots, but still WordPress does what it promises very well.

I am going to remove that last drupal binaries from the server quite soon and as a blogging software, I don’t think I’m going to be looking back. Not that Drupal is bad. It’s a full CMS and does a ton of tricks that WordPress does not do, but as a blogging platform, I think I have found my own.

My next projects will include setting up a easy-to-maintain photo gallery. Let’s see how WordPress can help…

Just watched Prison Break. For those from abroad, one of the commericial broadcasters, MTV3 is airing it here on tuesday night prime time. I have to say, todays episode was just about the most exciting episode of any TV series I have ever seen. Today they got outside the wall for the first time. The way they have created the atmosphere is just amazing.

Ok, there are always those who will say that this is just another American stereotype-ridden cliché series, but I have to admit that I really admire the writers, actors and others who make the show happen. It’s not very easy to make entertainment like this.

I wish we get even close someday.

This post I think I need to start with a disclaimer: The following that is said is in no way related to my employer or any other company for that matter. It’s just an interesting thing that happened to me during my free time and is in no way related to any person I have business affiliance with.

Just the other day I was discussing with one guy who has been involved with Symbian S60 platform development. I didn’t actually know that he had been involved with this stuff until this discussion took place. Basically, I complained to him about Symbian S60 as a development platform. The platform is just very hard to learn even if you know C++ and getting from initial concept to a working and installable product is very time-consuming and frustrating.
I have written quite a lot of software in many languages and platforms during the 20 years I have been coding. This includes also some very low-level things with C and assembler. I took to Symbian development a few years back and was first very excited about the platform. Now that I finally have S60 devices and have some time to actually do more complex development, the difficulty and pain of developing working software has really surprised me.

Then just as a proof to the points I made, I found a link to this article from Slashdot. I would not like to call it a piece-of-shit OS as the article does, but I think it’s in serious need of redesign. I do realize it’s just not very easy nor cheap to make an easy, fast and customizable mobile smartphone OS, but the things that the article mentions just don’t seem to be today (or future) anymore.

I also would like to see some statistics on how much resources the worst problems of Symbian, like the VERY frustrating “leaving” exception handling and the descriptor paradigm does really save. If just these few things could be fixed and I could actually write my apps using a language closer to C++, I would not complain anymore.

Well, that and starting to add support for Linux on the development tools side.
I just needed to write this as the coincidence of stumbling to that article was quite eerie.