Category: personal diary

mostly personal, notes on the road

Vaio Z31

Ok, my new workhorse, Sony Vaio Z31WN has finally arrived. (Will post more about it after some test runs…)

Edit: here is a photo showing also the Z series dock:

22.05.2009

IT in the garden

Lying in our garden swing, I can currently see six wifi access points — that’s urban nature for you! 🙂 Comparing LCD screen and paper (Luontokuva magazine), it is clear that traditional paper is still far superior when reading anything outside. The screen in AA1 is very good, but still very pale in sunlight. Wonder if e-ink/ebook reader screen would make a real difference to the benefit of IT? At the moment — closing this webtop and app is the best way to relax, so: enjoy the summer, everyone!

Olli Sotamaa's PhD videos

I used my mobile phone to take some videos from Olli’s PhD defence yesterday, as well as from the karonkka party afterwards. A great event, many thanks for professor Aphra Kerr on probing questions and insightful discussions — and the evening party afterwards was also excellent: warm-hearted speeches, delicious food, drinks, music, colleagues and friends gathered together for a special day. Congratulations to Olli once again!

Installing WordPress on Windows 2008 Server

I am a GUI person by heart, and have had my fair share of frustrations on trying to configure Linux through the various config files. While I am currently pretty satisfied on how reliably Apache and WordPress run on this Ubuntu setup, I’d also see whether I will get over some printer driver and sharing issues by installing a Windows server. To test this, I ordered another HP Proliant ML110 server (this one was running Xeon, a G5 setup). Physically all seems very similar to the system I am currently having the Linux.

I will know from experience this will take its time, and I try not to hurry. I have a functioning production environment in Linux, after all. Quickly thinking it through, it seems I need to set up at least the following:

  • install an IIS web server role
  • configure some additional features, such as rewrite rules
  • make sure I have sendmail or similar mail capabilities running
  • install MySQL and phpMyAdmin or similar tool
  • configure MySQL database for WordPress
  • install WordPress
  • set up the themes, widgets and other plugins
  • import the WordPress database contents from the old Linux installation to the new Windows Server one
  • make sure that all firewall rules, NAT redirections and such are pointing to right internal IPs and ports correctly for the new server to start functioning.

A time estimate for all this? No idea. I guess it might go smoothly, but with the usual hassles etc. I’d guess something around 40-50 hours of installation work and processes. Should perhaps be one or two months, if I use plenty of my free time to implement this. This day’s saldo? I have now the Server 2008 Web edition running (a trial version download, lets see how this works out), and I also managed to input the new MAC address into my router’s fixed address table so that I now have a fixed internal server IP where I can start building upon. I managed to also find a couple of helpful web resources that I should read and apply to my case next:

Any tips and tricks that I should take into consideration are also very welcome!

Moblogging with a camera phone

I have been playing with some mobile tools in my kitchen and living room (the mobile weekend of a family man, I know). The camera phone that I am mostly using, Nokia N95 8GB, just got a new firmware, V 31.0.015, which brought along some nice additional or enhanced features. These include better integration to online photo sharing services. I am using Flickr, and now it is just one click away to share a photo through the default Internet service provider. Also, I noticed that the phone screen automatically tilts to vertical/horisontal (this sensor tech might have been in the previous firmware, too, I am not sure). In the background I am running Location Tagger, which captures the GPS coordinates into the photos’ metadata in a format Flickr can also read. You need to be close to a window for this to work indoors, of course. The app can cache the location data, though, which is handy. I have also Fring now running in the background, which is a mobile instant messenger program that is able to tap into Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and SIP Internet phone services, to start with. The downside now is that there is always something “interesting” going on in the damned device, so I might turn this off at some point. But the always-connected, automatically location tagging camera is something that I’d like to see in my SLR/main system, too, to look into the future.

Spring lectures and visits

Looking at my calendar, I will again be talking in various contexts:

  • in 13/2 talking about games literacy and education in disciplinary didactics symposium (Ainedidaktiikan symposium) in Tampere;
  • in 6/3 talking about the profile of online gamer in drug medics day (Päihdelääketieteen päivät) in Turku;
  • in 16/3 acting as the examiner of Elina Ollila’s PhD thesis (about mobile game prototyping and evaluation) in Technical University of Tampere;
  • in 27/3 presenting a keynote about “good and bad in games” in the media education seminar, Tampere;
  • in 2-3/4 acting as the chair in the Playful Experiences seminar, Tampere;
  • in 23/4 presenting a lecture on ethics and good life in gaming in ITK conference in Hämeenlinna;
  • in 24/4 talking in a thematic seminar of games and education in ITK conference in Hämeenlinna.

See you in some of those — or elsewhere!

Planet Earth in HD

There are only few Full HD television series or movies I have got so far, and the king of them all currently is the four-disc Blu-Ray box of Planet Earth series by BBC. To a friend of nature documentaries, the selection of ‘spectacular’ animal species and situations (starting with the amazing Emperor Penguins guarding their single egg through the Antarctic winter), but the use of moving, flying cameras and HD video makes the planet really come to you in a way I have not experienced in any other visual media before. It is pity though that the localised version on sale here in Finland does not include the great Finnish language narrations that were prepared when the series was broadcast on the air by YLE, the national broadcast corporation. I really like and respect David Attenborough, but while we watch these with our family, it would be nicer to have Finnish audio, rather than the subtitles over the HD image. Particularly as the subtitles these disks carry have much inferior translations than what YLE used in their broadcast versions. I have wondered even before why BBC/2 entertain does not use the expertise of YLE when putting DVD versions of their series on sale here in Finland, and in this HD version the use of subtitles only is even a worse choice. I also truly miss the making-of documentary and the extra three “Planet Earth: The Future” episodes (those were included in the DVD release but omitted from the Blu-Ray box.) The series itself, nevertheless, is mind-blowing, and will truly fullfil its promise to show us our planet as we have never seen it before.bbc_planet_earth_blu-ray-box

Reading Excession

There has been a curious gap in my reading of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks so far, but this Christmas I did put some of my free time (night times, actually) aside to finally read Excession (1996). This is a highly entertaining and thought-provoking science fiction novel, written about a process where the different factions inside the Special Circumstances (the shadowy super-organisation dealing with external and internal security in the anarchist utopia called the Culture) need to deal with both the potential confrontation of a highly more evolved culture, coming outside of this universe, and at the same time deal with the ethical and moral issues embodied in the Affront, a race whose identity is based on inequality, slavery and systematic sadism. Is it allowed to go to war agaist the Affront to stop their evil, or is evil in the eye of the beholder? There is much good old fashioned interstellar intrigue, space fighting and megamachines marching to the stage, but also an attempt to deal with issues like gender, identity and free will. The novel is perhaps not at its strongest on the human characters, but the real protagonists are the Minds, godly powerful Articifial Intelligences, and the heady entertainment Excession is capable of offering is dealing with the interesting problems very highly powered beings and societies will possibly have to face at some point of their evolution. Allegorical readings of the Culture novels are also possible (interpreting the scienti-fictional framework as a dramatisation of certain ideologies), but not particularly inviting. These books are just so good head-trips.

Iain M. Banks: Excession
Iain M. Banks: Excession

Experiment with a lambskin, a swing and a kid

An example what you might come up with, when you have the Holiday season and you need to invent something (anything) to keep the toddler (and yourself) entertained:

(sorry, Luka…)

diNovo Mini with Mac Mini

Bluetooth technology is still flaky and connections tend to break up, pairings get lost, etc. I decided to move the Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard to the downstairs ‘media cellar’, primarily due to size issues. The replacement is another diNovo, but the Mini version this time. Both of these keyboards actually run pretty well with Mac Mini, even if they are not formally supported. diNovo Mini did provoke a “keyboard not recognized” dialog, and Mac wanted me to press the key next to right from the left shift (which did nothing). But canceling that, you get a very nice, super-small bluetooth keyboard for the living-room use. The ‘ClickPad’ mouse replacement doubles as a four-directional cursor key, but the most important feature is that the entire pad is a button, so that you can pretty much use the system with one hand, guiding the mouse with your thumb and pressing it achieves mouse clicks with the same finger. Very nice! On the other hand, downstairs, I had much more trouble to get diNovo Edge to keep up its connection with the Vista OS over the bluetooth link.