I will be later this week in Toronto, Canada in the Future Play conference: http://www.futureplay.org/
There is also a conference blog, where abstract of my keynote is now available: http://futureplayconference.blogspot.com/2007/10/frans-myr-keynote.html
See you all there!
One of the problematic issues is how to allow file access to a Vista system in a secure manner. One nice distribution is copSSH which includes OpenSSH, CygWin and some utilities. Installation is a breeze, you just need to activate the user and realise that the home directory is provided as a symbolic link within the SSH daemon home directory. See: copSSH – OpenSSH for Windows. From within Linux/Ubuntu the best client to file share/transfer into a MS Vista system appears to be Nautilus, the standard file Ubuntu browser (use File > Connect to Server, then bookmark the ‘myhome’ location that copSSH has provided you).
Joensuu, Tuusula massacre
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
I am today and tomorrow visiting Joensuu university on the Chancing Views in Technology seminar; pictured is the early morning in Joensuu market square. – Yesterday the news of Tuusula school shootings caught me in the airport. The entire day was spent in deepening feelings of sadness and shock. Today there are already news being published how the Internet is responsible for the massacre, or the shooter games (the school shooter was a fan of shooter games as well as real guns, and übermench style of extreme philosophies). I cannot but just repeat what I have said many times: please care of people in the real life, and they are also better capable of making positive use of the virtual worlds. If the society and people near to a mentally sick person abandon him, there is not much a virtual reality can do to him.
Something very strange is going on in WordPress.com right now: people report entire blogs of messages gone missing, stats pages broken, categories messed up, all sorts of weird behaviour that could perhaps best be captured by the expression: “this service is broken”. Several of my blogs (some of them related to my teaching) are hosted in WordPress.com, so lets keep our fingers crossed. One of the discussion threads runs here (hopefully, if the forum area does not broke down, too): http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=17723&page&replies=6
Night ride
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
All Saints’ Day is Pyhäinpäivä in Finnish, but I like to look how the pre-Christian times resonate in this kind of celebrations. Samhain, and Day of the Dead (Vainajainpäivä) are some associations to this direction. It seems that there is some controversy around Samhain as the ‘Celtic New Year’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain ). The first day of November is nevertheless when Marraskuu starts in Finland — ‘marras’ an ancient word for death. Thus: drink well, eat well, remember the dead and be glad while you are alive!
More pics in: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2007-11-03-pyhainpaiva/ and in my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/
Skellefteå teaching visit
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
Air travel in practice has relatively poor effectivity ratio: for one hour of flight you might spend one hour to get to the airport, one hour in queues, suffering security check humiliations, and then perhaps spend three more hours waiting in another airport for your connecting flight. And then back through all those steps again, in reverse.
Today I have been in Sweden, as a visiting lecturer in Skellefteå, at their Luleå Tekniska Universitet’s Game Design degree programme. An interesting blend of technical university and art school, they are now moving in to provide game design education, and many researchers from our team are providing their expertise on various subjects as visiting lecturers. My offering was focused on some conceptual and theoretical fundamentals of Game Studies, and largely based on my forthcoming textbook on this subject. Now — just to be home already. Weather forecast promises snowfall to Finland tomorrow. That would be a welcome change in this darkness.
Tomorrow I will start a new lecture course series, ‘Theories and Interpretation of Interactive Media (P2)’ in WordPress.com: http://newmediatheory.wordpress.com/ . I will be making use of Slideshare service in publishing my PPT lecture notes, further media still under consideration.
One of the key issues in today’s home with multiple ip-networked devices is sharing data. All those photos, songs and video clips need to be flying from room-to-room in addition to those work related files that seem to follow us home, too, in these days. A Linux file and printer sharing server is nice basic element for that kind of work; the software is free and even rather old and cheap hardware can run it (hidden into some distant cupboard, well-air-conditioned of course, preferably). But unfortunately I’d still need to recommend for a casual home user to keep within Windows home networking, rather than venturing into setting up one’s own Linux server box. I have now installed several versions of Linux (all of them from Ubuntu family, supposedly the most user-friendly distribution out there), and yet even getting the basic file sharing smoothly running between Windows and Linux machines, in a typical mixed environment with ADSL-modem, home router and a couple of Wifi boxes is still a complex and frustrating task. I finally today got the Gutsy Gibbon workstation installation running Samba in a way that is compatible with our WinXP Pro and Home machines (oh yes, forgot about the new Mac…). This piece of instruction appeared to be the most useful one: HOWTO: Setup Samba peer-to-peer with Windows – Ubuntu Forums.
I spend some of last night setting up the new Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) version into my new workstation. After setting up a separate hard disk (so that I could maintain Windows on its own disk), the initial impressions were positive; with the new nVidia card the Compiz-enhanced desktop really shines. Eventually I also got sounds out (Ubuntu did not get anything out through the digital audio, I found out). But then the system freezes started; mouse cursor still moves around, but you cannot click anything. Keyboard is completely dead, too. There appears to be multiple people reporting similar bugs:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=568023
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=412125
I suspect something in the combination of Dual Core processor, Asus motherboard and nVidia display card make this happen, but apparently there is no solution. Thus: no working Linux desktop yet, back to Windows we go…
Edit: Uninstalling the restricted nVidia accelerated graphics driver seems to bring back the stability, so that must be the main culprit. Thus, I can use Gutsy Gibbon without the Compiz extras, but without crashes, or see the flashy version of UI for about 30 seconds, until it freezes. Oh, dear… It would be nice to get some automatic notification when nvidia-glx-new gets updated (today it apparently equals to Nvidia’s current release 100.14.19).
Name-giving party
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
Our little boy finally got his name yesterday. Or two of them: in ‘Luka Ilmari’ the first part is rooted in the Mediterranean civilization, whereas Ilmari comes from the deep roots of Kalevala and Finnish history. “Ei nimi miestä pahenna, jos ei mies nimeä.” Nuff said.
frans goes blog 
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