keskiviikkona, toukokuuta 30, 2007

Tiivi-Taavi uhkaa lapsiamme

Ajatella miten ajattelematon minä olen: En ollenkaan tajunnut, että Tiivi-Taavi on a) poika ja b) homo. Olin aina kuvitellut että teletapit ovat satuolentoja, jotka elävät jossain satumaassa ja tekevät jotain satuasioita. Hyvä että Puolan lapsiasiamies on avannut silmäni. Menenkin tästä etsimään terapeuttia jo vahingoittuneelle lapsellemme.

lauantaina, toukokuuta 26, 2007

DVD-levyn suojauksen purkaminen on nyt laillista

Helsingin käräjäoikeus päätti perjantaina, että DVD-levyn suojauksen purkamista ei voida pitää tekijänoikeuslaissa määriteltynä suojauksen purkamisena.

Oikeus perusteli päätöstään sillä, että suojauksen pitää olla tehokas ja koska purkamiseen tarvittavia ohjelmia on helposti saatavilla, joissakin käyttöjärjestelmissä jopa valmiiksi asennettuna, ei suojausta voida enää pitää tehokkaana.

Tarkoittaako tämä, että Suomessa olisi laillista tehdä DVD-levystä kopio omaan käyttöön?

torstaina, toukokuuta 17, 2007

Hyvin parkkeerattu


Hyvin parkkeerattu
Originally uploaded by sti.
Isolla bemarilla ei näköjään tarvitse ymmärtää liikennemerkkejä.

Tänään grillataan


Tänään grillataan
Originally uploaded by sti.

Suomalaisten hiilidioksidipäästöt

Mielenkiintoista: Suomalaisten hiilidioksidipäästöistä suurin osa tulee autoliikenteestä.

Ei siitä nyt niin kauan ole, kun kauppa-ja teollisuusministeri Mauri Pekkarinen sanoi, ettei Suomessa ole mitään järkeä pienentää liikenteen päästöjä, koska ne muodostavat niin pienen osan kokonaispäästöistä. Eli ei muutoksia autoverotukseen, auton käytön verotukseen tai tukia biopolttoaineiden valmistukseen. Suomelle on kannattavampaa vähentää päästöjä suurissa teollisuuslaitoksissa ja jos vanhat merkit paikkansa pitävät, se hoidetaan ostamalla teollisuudelle päästöoikeuksia verorahoilla.

Tämä oli ääni kellossa ennen vaaleja. Liekö ääni kellossa nyt muutunut, etenkin kun vihreät ovat hallituksessa?

Ja tietysti kyseinen HS:n linkki on vain mielipidekirjoitus. Pitäisi tietysti tarkistaa sen tiedot jostain, mutta se olisi ihan liian vaivalloista.

tiistaina, toukokuuta 15, 2007

Push vs. Pull

I have recently started using Twitter together with my collegues at work.
(For those who have spent last few months under a rock: Twitter is a social-web-2.0-service/miniblog where you can send max. 140 character messages and your Twitter-using-friends will see on their page your message. The stated purpose for these messages is for people to tell where they are and what are they doing so their friends don't have to call/email and ask what's up, when are you going to lunch. Sounds simple, eh? The real trick is that you can send messages to Twitter by IM and SMS and also receive updates from your friends the same way. It sure is better than hitting Reload on your Twitter home page. Being able to update and receive updates while on the road is cool.)
There are 4 ways to use Twitter:
  1. Keep the Twitter home page open in a web browser. The page reloads every few minutes. (Until it fails to reload once, after which the automatic reload stops completely. Most annoying.) The home page shows last few updates from you and your friends and has a text box for posting a new message (with a nice prompt: "What are you doing?")
  2. Subscribe the RSS feed of the home page to your feed reader app. This method is, of course, read-only. There is no way to post new messages.
  3. Configure Twitter to know your IM handle. Then add Twitter to your IM app buddy list. The Twitter buddy sends you new messages from your friends and you can post new messages to Twitter by chatting.
  4. SMS messages on your mobile phone.
The first 2 methods are Pull. The last 2 are Push.

With Pull, you have to poll Twitter to find out if anything new has happened. If you poll often, you cause unnecessary load on Twitter's servers (which seem to be struggling with the load as it is.) If you pull seldom, your friends may wonder what's the matter with you because you don't answer. Slow and heavy.

Push is better. There is no need to poll. Twitter sends the updates to you immediately when it has new messages. Fast and light.

On the other hand, Push method needs you to be connected in order to receive. With Pull, you can be behind firewalls or even offline and come online only to poll.

I wonder which is better for sending updates from server to clients? Would it be better for clients to poll the server or to be always connected to the server and server would push new data to clients when it wants?

Pull can be made lighter by e.g. using a single UDP packet and only use the more-demanding HTTP over TCP when the first UDP query returns information that something new is available. Another nice trick is used by the ClamAV virus scanner: it uses the DNS system to carry the version number of their latest database. A simple DNS query will reveal if the new database needs to be downloaded.

On the other hand, could you keep TCP connections open to the clients to implement Push? How much memory does an idle TCP connection consume? Are there limits to how many clients can be connected to a single port?

Then there is the wacky idea of doing Push by making the server connect to the clients. I used to work on a system that worked like that. It has its benefits, but it needs lots of smarts in the clients, who have to be able to be able to deal with firewalls and set up NAT traversal/port forwarding by some automatic way (SOCKS, UPnP, Bonjour).

I have no answers at this time. The world in general seems to be very much Pull-oriented these days with the Web and RSS feeds and its related protocol, HTTP. On the other hand, Push is also widely used, but mainly in instant messaging systems like IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Skype, and others.

maanantaina, toukokuuta 14, 2007

Tiedotustoimintaa Vantaan kaupungin tapaan

Lapsen mukana tuli kotiin tiedote koulun johtokunnan kokouksesta. Puuttumatta kokouksen sisältöön, haluan jakaa kanssanne lauseen tiedotteen lopusta:
Kokouspöytäkirjat ovat nykykäytännön mukaisesti nähtävillä koulujen kansliassa kuukauden ensimmäisenä arkipäivänä klo 9.00-12.00.
Vilkaisin sivun yläreunaan. Päiväys oli 11.5.2007. Hetken jo tuntui kuin aikakone olisi pudottanut minut vuoteen 1897. Tsaarinaikainen tiedotus ja virkamiesten avoimuusperiaate näyttävät olevan voimissaan ainakin Vantaan kaupungin opetustoimessa.

Pitäisiköhän yrittää samaa töissä? Kun pomo tulee kyselemään projektien statuksesta, pitäisikö vastata, että "nykykäytännön mukaisesti voimme vastata kirjallisiin kyselyihin kuukauden ensimmäisenä arkipäivänä klo 9-12"

Virkamieskoulussa pitäisi järjestää vähän koulutusta tästä nykyaikaisesta uutuudesta nimeltä Internet ja World Wide Web ja siitä mitä mahdollisuuksia se avaa erityisesti tiedon jakamiseen.

Tietysti... vain siinä tapauksessa että virkamiehet oikeasti haluaisivat jakaa tietoa tekemisistään.

maanantaina, toukokuuta 07, 2007

Quoting text in email

Today's Dilbert seems to make fun of people who reply to emails and do not include the original email in the reply. Why is this?

I am a dinosaur and I can still remember there was a time when email programs did not have graphical user interfaces and buttons. Instead you pressed keys on the keyboard to make things happen. Most of the email programs had assigned the R key to reply and the Shift+R to reply with quote. (To those who are coming late to the game, "quote", refers to including the original email.)

This assignment of key commands tells me that in the past it used to be more common to reply to emails and NOT quote the original email.

However, I never witnessed such time myself. When I was new to email, it was common practice to quote a small part of the original email, just to show what part of the original your reply was about. It was considered rude to the extreme to quote the original email in full and then reply with only a couple of words.

Seldom could you quote the full original email and that was reserved for the occasions when you wanted to disprove everything in the original email. You would do this by adding your witty commentary after every sentence or paragraph of the quoted message, puncturing the other's arguments step-by-step like they were a string of balloons.

Then something changed.

I'm not exactly sure what it was. Was it the AOL users who flooded the Internet? Or was it the redmondian software giant that created the abomination called Microsoft Mail and it's spawn, Outlook.

Whatever it was, it changed the existing culture of Internet email. Suddenly, it became the norm to always include the original email in full. And because it would be inconvenient for the person reading the reply to scroll all the way to the end of the message to see what, if anything, worth reading would be there, it also became the norm to write the reply to the top of the message, above the quoted text. "Top-posting", as it was called, used to be considered bad behaviour.

I too must plead guilty to both of these crimes. I am no better than others. I see everyone else do it, and I somehow think it makes it less of a crime to do likewise.

My only defense is that Outlook makes it darned difficult to behave properly:
  • Outlook does not have a button to reply without quoting (well, none of the modern email programs do.)
  • Outlook places the cursor to the top of the reply.
  • Outlook's insane way of wrapping text makes it hard to edit the quoted text. It is such a mess that one takes a quick look at it and turns one's eyes in disgust, deciding only to write the reply and hoping the receiver won't pay attention to the eyesore the quote has become.
Many people actually like that the thread of the conversation is recorded and accumulated in the end of the message. It makes it possible to easily review what was said earlier and it allows those who get invited in the thread later to easily catch up.

As an engineer and a professional programmer, this insults my intelligence. Can we really not come up with anything better than sending the same bits back and forth? Would all of this even be necessary if email programs could group messages relating to the discussion, making it easy to refer to earlier emails? We used to have email clients capable of performing this magnificent feat but Outlook most certainly fails, badly.

However, there is some hope: The best web-based email, Google's Gmail, threads email discussions elegantly and reliably. Gmail even hides the quoted text, because the engineers at Google understand that it is only wasted space. If you need to see the original, they make it available only one keystroke away.

If only I could use Gmail for my work email. And don't even get me started on the fiasco that is Outlook's Search feature.