Microblogging - because who has time to pause to summarize life?

You know it's funny, but it's really when I am the busiest my blogs look the most inactive. While some give advice on how to succeed with your blog and manage to blog daily, I honestly think that my friends have better things to do than churning through the useless crap I have stressed out, and if it was my calling in life to produce quality articles continuously - I would rather work for a newspaper and get paid for it. I'm happy with typing up the occasional strike of insight, even if that means the blog is quiet for a week or two.

But still, it's nice to allow acquaintances to "keep up with you", and that's what I've started to use microblogging for. My friend Christian thinks of microblogging as "too much hot air" and even though I disagree with him, I'll do anything to return his link love. Microblogging has really become what blogging couldn't be for me. I use ping.fm to post out to facebook, jaiku, twitter and some (because I don't want to choose, and it's not practical to visit them all manually), and then plug those services into EventBox which gives me essentially a strange chat room with comments from the lives of many of my online friends popping up while I'm at the computer. When I'm not by the computer, there's not really any stress to catch up either. I also can turn it of should I want to.

I'm a huge fan of our old IRC channel #basvrak and of course the Young Scientist's #fuf.org, and now I have the diffuse channel of the social internet as well. Splendid! So if you're curious about how I've been spending my holidays, why don't you have a look at unclecj.jaiku.com, twitter.com/unclecj or unclecj.bloggy.se, and maybe even get yourself an account there while you're at it!




There are loads of suggestions about how to put microblogging to it's best use, myself I like the concept of putting URLs on your thoughts and use especially Jaiku as a computerized, online public notebook, but everyone are free to invent their own habits. If you still think microblogging sounds strange, maybe you can take your time to check out the excellent video "twitter in plain english", explaining how "life [and microblogging] happens between blog posts". Now the thing I need to figure out is how to shake life into myloki for location, is there anyone out there who's actually gotten it to work?

Also, always remember, when you see an RSS icon ( ), click it to subscribe! Yes, that goes for the one on this blog as well. And while you're at it, if you haven't heard of Google Reader for keeping track of your blogs, you're gonna love me for suggesting it to you.

Go ahead and read more of my posts about microblogging, facebook or chat.

LeWeb 08 - "Employees suck!" according to John Buckman

Even though I haven't declared it in the blog, I have obviously been back in Tallinn several weeks since I was in Sweden. Anyway, today I'm sitting in the office trying to follow the pretty cool LeWeb conference in Paris (also as #leweb on twitter). Not very easy, considering they are having bandwidth problems, and my Firefox is imploding on itself.

Chris Anderson from TED held a fine presentation about distraction as the new sugar of the masses which we will all stuff ourselves to death with. Reminds me a bit of the audience graph from Disruptive Media 3 - there are plenty of people who react by attempting to step off this carousel. I was emberassed to learn today there actually are two different Chris Anderson in technology journalism - this one who is the curator of TED, the other one is working for Wired and is the author of "The Long Tail". So now you could learn from my ignorance :-) .

The coolest thing today so far though (at least since the link died before Joi Ito came on stage) was John Buckman - declaring "Employees suck!", it was a presentation about how to create your own startup. Very sound advice, and I enjoyed the way he delivered his message. Check it out below. His slides are by the way on slideshare, the Youtube of Powerpoint, I'm there as well.

Employees Suck

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: bookmooch magnatune)

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream

Ge och ta emot sveriges bästa datorhjälp - ring CJ!

Är det dig vännerna och hela släkten ringer när deras datorer inte fungerar? Är du hjärtligt trött på att per telefon försöka lotsa farbror Stig att få igång skrivaren när han fortfarande inte lärt sig skillnaden på vänster- och högerklick? Kanske tycker du att det är ganska roligt att kunna hjälpa folk och vill få en bra erfarenhet och utvecklas själv? Fortsätt läsa om hur du kan fixa datorhjälp smidigare, bättre, lärorikare för alla inblandade och med mindre frustration!

... eller...

Tycker du att din dator går långsammare och långsammare, du är bekymrad över att alla dina semesterbilder skulle kunna försvinna vilken dag som helst och du tycker det vore roligt att lära dig göra såna där fina egna julkort? En halvtimmes översyn utav en datorkunnig person är oftast allt som behövs för att snabba upp datorn dramatiskt, installera de där välbehövliga uppdateringarna eller åtminstone ställa en diagnos. Nu finns chansen att effektivt, tryggt och gratis åstadkomma det här och äntligen ta steget in i ett smidigare datoranvändande!

Som jag skrivit om i min andra blogg har jag själv använt det här systemet för att kunna fjärrhjälpa mina egna familjemedlemmar (jag bor i Tallinn, de flesta av dem bor i Gnosjö) med slående resultat - deras datorer fungerar bättre, jag stressar mindre under julhelgen hos familjen eftersom jag vet att jag kan ordna saker även när jag kommit hem och föräldrarna och syskonbarnen har kunnat lära sig nya och spännande sätt att använda sina datorer på. Nu är det dags att på ett smidigt sätt möjliggöra för er andra att nå samma fantastiska resultat.

Om du vill hjälpa andra

Det krävs inga kontrakt, ingen betalning, bara ta kontakt med oss så får du tillgång till vårt system för smidig fjärrstyrning var du än befinner dig. Dina bekanta kan antingen få hjälp utav dig, eller använda dina "krediter" och få hjälp av någon annan. Vi tar inget betalt för krediter, utan håller bara koll på att ingen utnyttjar andra mycket mer än man själv bidrar med.

1. Om du inte redan använder Skype, installera det och kliv sedan in i vår gruppchat som du hittar på tinyurl.com/ringcjchat.


2. Ladda själv ned och packa upp RingCJ.zip så att du kan få hjälp med att ordna vncviewer-lyssnaren och SSH-tunneln du behöver för att själv kunna ta emot "supportsamtal" (det är lite grovt beskrivet här, och vi kör tills vidare med tightvnc viewer, den enda servern som behövs följer med RingCJ).


3. Kontrollera med de andra i gruppchaten att det är ok att du tar kontroll över SSH-tunneln, vår för tillfället enda "supportlinje".


4. Lotsa den du vill hjälpa till att antingen själv ladda ned och starta "Ring CJ", eller hjälp dem in i gruppchaten så att de kan få hjälp av någon annan.
   

Om du vill ha hjälp

För tillfället föredrar vi om du har någon bekant som kan ställa upp som supportperson, men i mån av tid hjälper vi andra också. Tjänsten förutsätter att din dator fungerar åtminstone grundläggande (så att fjärrstyrningen går att använda) och det är smidigast om man har ett fungerande Skype installerat (vi kan ordna det åt er), annars går det också bra att ringa oss på 031-7995972 .

1. Kliv in i vår supportchat tinyurl.com/ringcjchat på Skype så att du kan kontrollera om din supportperson eller någon annan finns tillgänglig för att hjälpa dig.


2. Ladda ned det lilla programmet RingCJ.zip.


3. Öppna RingCJ.zip (oftast ska det fungera att dubbelklicka på den nedladdade filen), markera filerna som finns i zip-filen och dra-och-släpp dem på skrivbordet.


4. När du vet att en supportperson är redo att hjälpa dig, starta "RingCJ" (eller "OneClickVNC" som det i vissa fall heter) genom att dubbelklicka på ikonen som borde ligga på skrivbordet.


5. Ett svart fönster (ett kommandopromptsfönster) ska dyka upp med ett meddelande om att programmet för att fjärrstyra din dator har startats. Eventuellt dyker det upp ett meddelande om att programmet har blockerats, men antingen häv den blockeringen, eller så har din supportperson redan kontroll över din dator och du kan lugnt släppa musen och se på när du får hjälp.


6. När hjälpen är färdig bör du se till att stänga av fjärrstyrningen genom att klicka i det svarta fönstret och trycka på någon tangent, istället för att klicka i krysset som vanligt. På det sättet stängs fjärrstyrningstjänsten av på ett korrekt sätt och din dator är åter helt stängd för utomstående.


7. När du återkommer för support räcker det att kontakta en supportperson i supportchaten och sedan starta RingCJ.
   

Vi börjar smått, men det här kommer bli stort

För tillfället utförs all support idéellt och vi blandar ännu inte in någon ersättning från eller till någon. Du kan ta emot hjälp från eller ge hjälp till även andra än dina egna bekanta, och vi håller en grundläggande kontroll på att ingen överutnyttjar gruppen mer än de bidrar med.

Självklart är det oerhört viktigt för oss att du är trygg och nöjd med vår tjänst. För tillfället hänvisar vi dig till att lita på dina egna bekanta som hjälper dig och deras personliga kontakter, vi uppträder alla under eget namn vill förstås inte riskera vårt förhoppningsvis goda rykte. Vi har också planer på att spela in samtal och kunna kontrollera att våra supportpersoner inte ställer till med ofog, och få på plats utvärderings- och belöningssystem för att kunna garantera nöjda användare och sålla bort eventuella personer som inte passar i organisationen.

Tekniken vi använder mycket primitiv, en enkel modifiering av ett gratisprogram och lite klurigt krypterad nätverkstrafik. Det innebär till exempel att vi för tillfället får nöja oss med att dela på en "supportlinje", vilket dock borde vara tillräckligt för att konstatera om konceptet fungerar. Sedan är det en förhållandevis smal sak att skala upp systemet och lägga in förbättringar för att skapa en bättre och enklare tjänst. Support kan ges till datorer med Windows XP (Windows Vista fungerar också, om än lite hackigt) men från de flesta operativsystem som har VNC-klienter med "listen"-funktion. I tjänstens natur ligger att den fungerar bäst för vardagliga problem med programvara, men vi hoppas att kunna samarbeta med lokala IT-företag som kan göra hembesök för att ordna strulande internetanslutningar eller andra hårdvaruproblem.

Sist men inte minst är absolut ett mål med det här projektet att skapa ett företag och tjäna pengar, men samtidigt bibehålla ett gott samarbete med den idéella delen av verksamheten. Vårt mål är att skapa sveriges absolut bästa, trevligaste och mest utvecklande organisation och möjlighet att tjäna extrapengar för framförallt datorkunnig ungdom. Detta ska vi åstadkomma genom bland annat att skapa effektiva rutiner och möjligheter att lära internt, samt möjliggöra goda kontakter med andra inspirerande och växande människor. Väl mött på Internet!

(Uppdatering: Det föll sig så att andra projekt tar mer tid just nu, och dessutom är våra befintliga support-kunder så nöjda, att vi lägger det här projektet lite på is. Det finns här, tillgängligt och fungerande, men det återstår att se när eller om det blir business av det. På återseende)

In Sweden, at SIME

Hastily, as I got an invitation to the blogger's meet-up at SIME - Scandinavian Interactive Media Event, I decided last Saturday to go to Sweden over the week! I'm going to Gothenburg as well for more meetings late Thursday or early Friday, so catch me if you can!

This is awesome, seeing so many cool people and I'm very busy, very sweaty :-)

Non-exhaustive list of the people I've had great meetings while in Stockholm. Please comment if you met me I've left you out!:

• Henrik Ahlen, Alfabravo
  
• Fredrik Evertsson, cousin and business student
  
• Emil Fredriksson, cousin working at Spotify
  
• Anreas Ehn, Spotify
  
• Judith, blogger
  
• Peter Sandberg, MoYuMe
  
• Joi Ito, Creative Commons

Spotify - Love is in the air ...

 


Music is great for reaching the hearts of people, and Spotify is great for music, so let's connect the two in a very simple way - I want your all-time favourite love songs, and you will get the the love songs everyone else are crazy about.

If you have Spotify, simply open and add your best songs to this playlist: spotify:user:unclecj:playlist:5q9rhxy667Tu1qIbhPmpRr . If you don't, just leave your suggestion as a comment here. I have added my coziest songs already, so hope you enjoy them.

I have no idea why I haven't seen anyone do this before. Hope this may contribute to many romantic moments. And please be good too, I am sure Spotify deals harshly with vandalism.

(Update: It's curious, but kind of nice, how adding to the playlist is at least superficially anonymous. Like who added Pontiak Johanzon...)

(Update 2: The playlist is slowly growing, and I think it's pretty nice. The girlfriend just objected "Hold on, is this like your friends having a say in our love-life?", to which I answered "No, it's more like the world having a say in our love-life")

Remember, remember the fifth of November... when you were anonymous and free

"Remember, remember the Fifth of November
The Gunpowder Treason and plot
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot"

Once upon a time, when there still was an information void and not everyone could be kept under surveillance one man plotted to blow up the British Houses of Parliament. Since then, this "terrorist" has been demonized annually by protestant royalists.

However, in 2006 when the conservative protestants had finished celebrating their victory and total information awareness is finally within reach, the dust was shook of the Guy Fawkes mask and he was instead martyrized in a film by Alan Moore (seriously, download it here, "V for Vendetta" is awesome) as an icon of the true will and action of the man on the street - when he can be Anonymous, that is.

Ok, so as a symbolic action to celebrate this thought I have changed my profile pictures everywhere to the Guy Fawkes mask, and I suggest you do the same, but admittedly, the idea isn't particularly sticky. There are only a reasonably small and non-important things I currently don't feel I can say or do out loud without risking my name, but there are others who are less privileged and in my gut the principle still feels so urgently important. Anonymity is worth protecting, anonymity is for everyone and anonymity is essential for a safe society.


PS. I was reminded by a reader that I seem to misuse the word "integrity", because it in Swedish has a use stemming from "personal integrity" which simply doesn't work in English, instead it's "privacy". Thanks for the reminder, I stand corrected.

PPS. Share this with friends as the simpler address tinyurl.com/remember5november

Daemon by Zeraus - complimentary books and friendly marketing

 

I got a package today! The stamp collection on the envelope was truly impressive, death and misery to Posten, and many thanks and lunch or a couple of beers to my friend Henrik of Internet Video Advisory Group who sent me the book!

The deal was that Henrik had received some complimentary copies of Leinad Zeraus' "Daemon" (do read his story, it's an interesting one about friendly marketing). Since I had already several months ago put the book on my wishlist after reading a very positive review by my idol Joi Ito, I pretty much begged Henrik to send one of his copies to me.

Frankly, I don't know too much about the book yet, but if Joi considers it inspiring, it's usually something cool, considering his extraordinary understanding of social media.

In other news, my girlfriend recently returned from her too long trip to the US (yes, I was lonely), and in her handluggage was a bunch of books for me, and a Canon Speedlite 430EX flash, I'm so excited about that one, finally flash pictures which don't look like crap! The books she got me are:

• "The light of other days" by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• "Light - Science & Magic" as suggested by Erik Starck
  
• "Made to stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath as suggested also by Erik and Jonas Hombert

Filesharing by subscription

Since long, I've been a huge fan of podcasts, to the point that I don't listen to much music during the days, there's just too much interesting podcasts I want to hear. This is all fine and dandy, except for video. I still get the Swedish news through "podd-tv", but what's offered as pod-tv is pretty limited, both because it demands a lot more resources to distribute and it seems content owners are a lot less relaxed about releasing video for download than they are about audio.

So, what to do if you want to follow The Daily Show, your absolutely friendliest and most amusing newscomedy show ever, you have a computer connected to the TV, you're hopeless about watching shows as it airs but there is no-one willing to offer what you want for legal download? Well, you circumvent it. If you imagine a podcast, that's an "RSS feed" but except for only being able to download a file linked from each item, your software downloads a .torrent metafile which is then used to download the actual file using P2P Bittorrent. It's called broadcatching, it is a super-cheap way for anyone to distribute content without buying all the bandwidth which would be necessary to provide the content to each of the clients. It's still a little bit messy, not many programs provide the feature, but it's very flexible and useful.

To get this straight, this won't plug into iTunes or your podcast software, but currently into your Bittorrent client. Several articles online suggest using either of several RSS plugins for Azureus / Vuze but since that was crashing and has become super-bloated since I last touched it, I prefer µTorrent even if that means running it under Wine (which to my surprise works excellently!).

What you need to broadcatch is of course some RSS feeds, for example those of the Pirate Bay. Pick the one of the category you want to watch, and here's the little quirk from regular podcasting, create a filter to catch only the content you're interested in, and just relax as your favourite shows arrive while you're sleeping! (Some shows you want to activate the downloads manually for, when there are duplicate or bad releases)

In other news, again proving Bittorrent as a strong option for distribution of large content when you just can't afford (or want to spend your money on something better) to pay for all the bandwidth, check out how the newly released Wikipedia Schools Edition DVD shares the load as it is released on Bittorrent.

The amazing hacks of an amazing researcher

Maybe you remember from way back sometime in 2005 this crazy nerd running around with his "poor man's steadycam", a concoction of some metal pipes, weight, bolt and nuts, as featured on Hak5? (Wow, I just realized I had accidentally unsubscribed to Hak5, now I've got some ten great episodes to watch, yay!)


You don't? Well, turns out this same nutty nerd has really made it big with his Wii remote hacks on TED.com among other places.

So, of course I spent all last night checking out his amazing projects, the projector-based tracking is not bad either. Johnny Chung Lee is now a researcher of interface design and stuff at Carnegie Mellon Universityfor Microsoft Applied Sciences, and a productive one to add. Much more productive than the researchers I remember from Chalmers University, maybe they could inherit some these people's urgency to create amazing prototypes? I dunno. Anyway, not all that many of the "small people" have the opportunity to turn up several times in the limelight and I will continue to be amazed by and admire this guy - go Johnny Lee!

(Update: I am so gonna make these whiteboards myself)

Just another gadget - now I want a Wii Fit

Ok, despite what people may think with all my gadgets, dance mat and stuff, I have actually stopped believing in gadgets for happiness. I don't have an iPhone, I don't have a Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360, I'm just happy with what I have - a couple of computers, dance mat and my old PS2 (cue sarcastic giggle...) .


Anyway, today I discovered the Wii Fit, and the balance plate (think bathroom scales) associated with it. Actually I did so somewhat reluctantly, I mean, stepping up and down on a pad, trying desperately to fight that overweight, how fun can it be? Well, I was wrong, Wii Fit is actually probably the most varied, fun and advanced Wii game I've seen so far. Maybe not so much something you bring out at the party, but combining the "Mii" account management with actual exercise activity tracking creates what would seem a great everyday challenge, and the different exercize tasks also seem pretty interesting and varied.

Considering how persistent I can be sitting on my ass playing just another level in Burnout Revenge, if I am challenged to gather exercize minutes (and Wii Points which can be cashed in for emulator games online?!) and unlock more silly games and tasks, I think I could struggle quite hard.

What turned out one of the most fun games in my opinion definitely was the slalom balance game. Silly, hard, fun, lean forward to speed up, lean left and right to turn, and fight the rest of the family for the positions in the highscore list. Man, I have to get myself one of these sometime... Can anyone who has one tell me if they remain fun? Read more about it here, and check out the video below for what cool undocumented things you can do with a wiimote:

Gimme Smurf Saturday!

Sort of like last time, but hopefully even more eventful, the websmurfs are having a blogging Saturday (facebook)!

I've said I'll participate some from a distance, not sure I will really create anything serious publicly, but I'm considering pre-loading for "Remember, remember, the fifth of November..." (on facebook here)

See you tomorrow on the Internet - eating pills!

Update: Seems people are a bit sleepy in Sweden as well, but there are some 6-7 people present in Jesper's conference room:

View Larger Map

• Christian - "Entreprenörskap och lågkonjunktur!"
  
• Peter - "De struntar i lågkonjunkturen och bygger en webbtjänst på 24 timmar"
  
• Jesper - "Lågkonjukturens inverkan på innovationen"
  
• Erik - "Lågkonjunktur - vad händer sen?"
  
• Henrik - "Recession: threat or opportunity?"
  
• Per - "Är Lågkonjunkturen här?"
  
• Simon - "Lågkonjunktur -- se fördelarna!
  
• Judith - "80-talisten och lågkonjunktur"

Update 2: We've produced quite a bit of material, I've updated the links above to the material, myself I wrote a piece "In Sweden we call it a "lågkonjunktur"" for my Emigrant Blog.

Build whatever you can imagine

I just stumbled over the Digital Fabrication Pool on flickr (or to be honest, I saw it in this old wired blog), and my what beautiful things they have!

This lamp is done through rapid prototyping, but I imagine that you could do pretty cool things with a regular printer, a carpet knife and a lot of creativity. Several of the things seems connected to the Processing language (the Processing.js demos are pretty amazing, but watch out so it doesn't crash weak browsers), which I'd want to learn as well.

Another favourite is of course Sketch Furniture by FRONT famous from Discovery Channel:

Me having worked at Lasercentrum and my brother being a former furniture carpenter and a professional CNC operator with access to a laser etcher... we have plenty of ideas but usually it's just too difficult to realize them. It's waking up and going back to the non-artistic reality :-) .

What do you want to build today?

PS. Wow, ok, I got totally stuck at the page of Bathsheba Sculpture - I want!!!

Slo-mo goodness, Discovery Time Warp

New digital cameras can really do wonders, as shown in this extremely smooth beautiful skate-video shot with the 120 fps RED camera:

Björn Falkevik alerted me to that there's a new program on Discovery Channel - Time Warp (download it here):

Also, Renee told me there's another cool show - Prototype This (download it here) which recently started airing. Enjoy!

Nerd party - StepMania dancemat, PS2 and Wii

Me and a couple of friends had a nice little gaming evening the other night. It was absolutely awesome and very cozy. Despite what people may think, I don't usually take the opportunity to play video games, so playing some in good company was great.

The games we played were mainly the StepMania dance mat as in the craptastic video above (I've got to buy a better phone...), on the PS2 FIFA 09, Soul Calibur 2, Katamari Damacy, Virtua Fighter 4, Burnout Revenge, Rez, and Marko brought his Wii, so people were going crazy boxing some as well.

PS. John was very excited about Mega Man 9 for Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, but not for PS2 so I'll pass for now...

Skyhook - I know where I am

I just went ahead and submitted my home AP to the Skyhook location database. Alt/Option (⌥)-click the Airport icon to see the MAC address. That's the hardware address of your wireless access point, not the address of your Mac :-)

The coverage, especially in Estonia, is very spotty, but this should enable me to use Loki for where I usually am located, so what the heck.

I found this out by the way from a person in the chat room connected to the livestream from the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium 2008. I found it's incredibly exciting how they have a symposium with extraordinary people like those speakers, and still allow "ordinary" people like myself participate and participate in the chatter of the virtual room connected to the event. Thanks to Joi Ito's twitter for alerting me of the whole thing.



(Update: This totally grabbed the attention of my entire evening, just because the symposium was overflowing with cool things. Anyway to my emberassment I realized that I had not initially realized that I was chatting away about our fascination with the revival of the neighbourhood with Liz Lawley, who seemed to be the one moderating the symposium (and had a very interesting talk as well)! Anyway, she suggested I'd take a look at the works of Keith N. Hampton (and of course, the rest of the channel shouted Putnam and Bourdieu as well), which I definitely will. Finally MoYuMe-Peter sent me a message that Joi will pe speaking at SIME nov 12th-13th and that there were free blogger press passes to apply for until tonight... Phew, what an evening, thanks everyone!)

(Update 2: Of course, Joi posted a set of his usual wonderful photos from the symposium. A lot of very cool people and ideas there)

(Update 3: Don't miss out on the ideary post keeping the info on the progress of this!)

Simple screenshots or screencasts with Preview and Jing

I get a lot of computer-related questions from friends and family, and it makes you innovative because few things are more tedious than trying to explain where a certain feature is hidden in the menus or explaining a configuration over the phone or typing in instant messaging. I've already written about how I provide remote support from wherever I am, but sometime what you need is just a little picture, some comments or maybe a tiny video.

The last couple of months I've been enjoying the very simple but functional free software Jing. It makes both screenshots and records screencasts (with or without commentary), can insert basic annotations into screenshots but most importantly it provides a simple connection to online storage service, it's only a matter of clicking "upload" and you'll have the link in clipboard. However, Jing is a bit too basic, and a friend showed me that the regular Mac OS X Preview application is already very capable to make annotated screenshots.

I decided to make a simple screencast (using Jing) of how you use Preview to grab a screenshot (in this case say that I want to bug report that I've got a strange file which shouldn't be there) and add the annotation tools to the toolbar (click here to go to the screencast):

Turning facebook and the internet into surveillance society?

As I was reading on Pusha's "what's hot" today, I noticed a youtube video highlighting the integrity issues associated with Facebook which I'd like to recommend to people:

Regardless of whether the somewhat far-fetched associations between facebook and the Central Intelligence Agency and the Information Awareness Office are accurate or not, it's a fact facebook is a data miner's or marketers wet dream. Also, I am becoming more and more convinced that authorities or illicit players won't be the major concern on the Internet of tomorrow - instead everyone will be so closely knit together on the Social Internet and through what's essentially Sousveillance (webcams, microblogs, whatever) that anything done outside this essentially volontary cage will be looked upon suspiciously... except if you manage to create yourself a double life, or build your unabomber hut.

The Internet will be this huge conservative village where everyone must strive to show only their most normal faces. And you can't move away from the Internet village with the pretense of going to college or anything. In that village, no-one dares to come out as gay, or maybe, just maybe... that can be a somewhat better and more humane village than the ones we have today. What do you think?

I want to hear your opinion!

Now I am attempting to improve my blogs a bit - first out is trying out the poll function, go ahead and answer it! (I also happened to make one for the emigrant blog) Poll closes next Monday.

Another thing I definitely want to do is provide links to the most popular posts, and possibly highlight browsing by label to find old posts on similar topics, but I got too many labels with maybe just one post tagged...

Two days on facebook - 128 connections

After only two days on facebook, I've made 128 connections. Mind you, I don't call them all friends, I've essentially contacted everyone I found and recognized, and it sorted added up. I still probably have a ton of contacts which are not approved. Also, considering social network theory such as Dunbar numbers, I'm not a fool, it's not feasible to search through all friend's lists just to recognize someone new. Except for people I've thought of, this has essentially grown by itself and anyone who recognize me should feel free to add me.


I am really curious about how facebook optimizes the network finding, if it makes clusters of people etc, but generally I think it should speed up all that connection making by for example providing clusters of some dozen people, asking you "do you recognize five or more of these people?" and then be accepted into clusters by some voting as well. One thing I fell for righ away is the application "Friend Wheel" which you see an example of above. It analyzes the connections between your friends and attempts to cluster them around the perimeter of a circle. As you can see, I have five clearly distinguishable clusters (or meta-clusters, since some are bigger than what would make sense for the computational model) and some random people. I went ahead and made an animation of the development of my friend wheel during my first two days at facebook, just watch the beauty grow! For obvious integrity reasons I've scaled it down to unreadable, but email me if you want the fancy version:


PS. Much of the time, facebook feels kind of like a noisy room of all the people you have ever known... it's quite exhausting!

PPS. I love it how more than a hundred people with connection to my home village Gnosjö have joined that group and are discussing online, this may be the first time since the dawn of telivision Gnosjö-people are actually communicating with each other!

PPPS. I spend more time than is justifiable on this... I consider it studying, mind you! :-)

The farse of BankID

The Swedish Administrative Development Agency (Verva) released has released a report suggesting to expand the concepts of electronic identification in Sweden. IDG writes how your cellphone will be used for e-identification, how e-identification will look in the future, everyone will have eID within two years and how the BankID company is optimistic about the future. What bull.

"BankID is an incompatible ugly hack the Swedish banks threw together to give Persson something to brag about during the EU-chairmanship"

... I quote from a renowned bank security specialist who must remain unnamed. The Swedish BankID really is terrible technology which attempts to fill the void the national ID-card should have, and could have filled long ago. Polisen writes (my emphasis): "På id-kortet finns ett kontaktchipp som i framtiden kan bli bärare av elektronisk information, så kallade eID-tjänster, som till exempel elektronisk legitimation". ("On the ID-card there is a contact-chip which in the future may be the carrier of electronic information, so called eID-services, for example electronic identification") Not only have they got backward what eID-services are and there is no such thing as a "contact-chip" if we are to be picky about device terms (which I think we should), they seem to not have any infrastructure, technical plan or even room to create a functioning hardware electronic identification.

The BankID-service is bad primarily because it is software carried ("BankID på fil") and because it requires service providers to chip in to the business model in a way which is just unfeasible. I have been told service providers avoid providing more services through BankID because the licensing is so expensive, whereas actually everyone could benefit and save money from using it more. Great success... I just realized that clunky BankID client which never works properly probably does embed standard PKCS#12 certificates (X.509) and keys (RSA) but I have not yet to peek into exactly what they are. The fact remains BankID chose to step beside existing infrastructure for hardware, software and protocols existing in browsers and other clients. Also, unless you're communicating with a BankID licensed organization, the BankID you have been issued is worthless. It may not matter much to most people, but principally it is strange not to be able to verify identity without going through a government.

Oh, and this story about Swedish bureucracy is just hilarious, according to
epractice.eu: March 2008 - "Due to the fact that the Swedish Administrative Development Agency (Verva) has no longer been assigned to manage the national eGovernment portal and that no other Government agency was handed this task over, the portal ‘sverige.se’ closes down." Yippie kay-yay...

In contrast, the Estonian ID card implements a regular PKI smart card much like the US DoD CAC. It ties into the OpenID project and anyone can implement services based on it using standard software and the government-provided LDAP directories. Oh and we already have Mobiil-ID using cellphone SIMs (using cellphone to pay for parking is a different but also very elementary thing done in all cities by most car owners for years).

To be fair though, the Estonian ID-card drivers are sometimes also messy to install, non-Estonian language support is failing in some points, the cards are pretty expensive to issue and since two cards have failed for me (I used to sit on my wallet) I've had to experience the failing support organization behind it. Probably Estonia can be said to have benefited from being a small country, not because there are few end-users (above a million is never a small number) but a limited number of market players which are able to cooperate and without too much involvement of Statskontoret framework agreements to stand in the way of pushing sensible technology.

All this is of course pretty complex things and it cannot be expected of the layman to distinguish what is good or bad technology. Myself I've gotten a proper eToken PRO through Danish it2trust on which my keys are stored, to be able to encrypt, sign and authenticate while knowing that the key can practically (as far as I know) never be stolen unless the physical token is stolen. That feels really good, and even if I don't have that sensitive information myself, at least I know how to do it, and what software is capable or not to do these things properly.

Actually I recently found myself in a war-of-blogs regarding inferior banking security where the pretty large Swedish blogger "TKJ" spreads some confusion on what is the real problem and the cause for credit card frauds persisting. I'd like to say that I don't mind TKJ contributing to the discussion, on the contrary, and he's generously complimented the expert critique he's received. In my opinion also security experts should dare to step up and discuss these things openly, or media and consumers surely won't know where to push the market. So my $0.02 are that the reason swedes are still getting skimmed is the emberassing fact that Swedish banks and payment systems still use primarily copiable magnetic strips instead of the more secure "for electronic use only" smartcards. In the competition between nations for using the greatest technology, this is one area where Sweden is definitely suffering from having to carry it's legacy and being stuck with old solutions.

Buy bye privacy - I have joined facebook

So finally I have given in, I have joined facebook. One friend too many mentioned collaborating through a facebook app, and considering my revised view of integrity I have finally decided to give in and join this borg. Because, on today's internet, everyone know's you're a dog and you might as well be somewhat in control of it:

My name is Carl-Johan Sveningsson, I was born in Gnosjö, Sweden on the 25th of January 1981, my email address currently is cj.sveningsson(a)gmail.com, my S/MIME fingerprint is D1:50:3A:C3:76:FD:37:95:58:4D:A4:F1:A9:1E:D4:F9:49:0C:8C:95 and my OpenID is http://cjsveningsson.myopenid.com . This is me

On the other hand, I have a fascination with sousveillance and neoism pseudonyms, have just tried out FiSH IRC encryption (bulky and works so-so), I discuss encryption with #basvrak @ EFnet and have just signed up to FRApedia.se. So I think I'll be fine anyway... I hope.

Sleepless with Spotify

Tonight I can't sleep, nose being stuffed and running at the same time, the cough has started, you sneeze and muscles you didn't know you had cramps and you lay asleep breathing slower and slower through one nostril until realizing you're not falling asleep, you're suffocating. So I got up and make myself some tea and share some creativity. Do you have any other good suggestions, what do you do when you have a cold? Don't tell me about the garlic or the vodka socks, I have realized that what I hate besides having a cold is having a cold with the aftertaste of garlic, and I know other uses of vodka which are much less superstitious.

Anyway, through friends of friends, I have just received an invitation to beta-test the much haussed music service Spotify (and this time I won't let it go to waste! :-P ). All friends who have tried it have gone Spotify-crazy, and maybe, just maybe I can understand why. Essentially it can rightfully be summarized as a crossbreed of Skype, last.fm, iTunes Store and Bittorrent (indeed they have hired the original creator of μTorrent who happens to be my old school-mate who surely won't remember me). And it's legal!

The cool features I notice right away are dual - first, you have access to a ton of music legally, for free in a light client, and you can play any of it with the ease of a few clicks. I've seen several of those things done before, but not all at once, for obvious reasons :-). Secondly, you can share and attach music with friends and and on the web without transmitting any files, just make a link like such: "Right now I am listening to Johnny Cash - American V". The social internet will have to give way to the musical internet! More updates as soon as I discover anything cool.


(Update: Another very pleasant thing about Spotify is the very clean interface. No fuss, just a very simple and good interface, except it is unfashionably black, but what the heck. One thing I'm curious about is whether they expect to actually catch the long tail of music and not just the hits? They seem to have somewhat of such an ambition, but I notice they have only one of the three Kjell Höglund albums I have, that's weak!

Oh and that's so cool, since noticing this blog post my university mate mentioned above got in touch over Skype. An extremely cool dude and great fun to get in touch with! I also noticed in the invitation letter from Spotify that I was requested to not post screenshots, but since they're already here and there over Google, I'll just hope they don't complain at me if I keep my head down. Sorry, it was a mistake, honestly)

(Update 2: Don't miss my candid pictures from the Spotify office, or my other posts about Spotify)



(Update 3: it24 has a particularly interesting article (translated here) though they're claiming "Spotify is [primarily?] living off the hype")

(Update 4: It's quite funny how Buzz Out Loud (CNET article here) labels Spotify as "a service available to everyone else [than the USA]" now they finally notice it. Also, thanks go to Judith and Martin for linking to this post)

Young Scientists in the news - and I want to hear more about it!

Today, except for playing around some with a camera flash to see if I do want to buy one (do you have one to sell?!), I have been thinking some about locality and microblogging.

It just so happens that my good friends the Young Scientists were in the editorial debate page of NyTeknik (in Swedish). That's really cool, and I think they should be heard more in the education debate. But my point right now is that I didn't know about it, because as it happens, FUF's news feed is broken and I am not really in touch with any active members anymore (except now I've found one, but he's in the board like everyone else...). We've been trying to tempt people to join the IRC chat, with little success, and I'm just craving communication with the sort of cool kids which FUF members usually are.


Back in the day, we used to communicate with people through IRC - you chose one or a few rooms of like-minded, and that's where you'd stay, sometimes for years and it was tricky to find new places where you'd want to hang out. Lately, in microblogging platforms like Jaiku I've become excited by the "virtual rooms" continuously created as your friends participate in interesting discussions with their friends, and you may choose to follow the posts of a new acquaintance. No-one expects you to listen to all the conversations, but you end up shaping your "flow" of conversations towards what people and topics you are interested in.

Actually, currently this shaping of the flow is pretty blunt. You can select people (which by the way are few of my IRL friends so far) and channels (which are infrequently used), but not keywords, or most importantly, location. By combining keyword and location, my motorbike-riding brother could get all messages on the topic of "co-biking" in the Småland area if he'd feel like it, and myself, like a child playing with the walkie-talkie, I would just love to be able to watch the "buzz" of people in my own city. Somewhere dwells also the dream of resurrecting the concept of local communities and villages - if you could select to listen to the (public) messages of your neighbours, maybe they could start to matter to you again...

twitter, bloggy.se, FriendFeed and Voolife - except for Jaiku, Twinkle for iPhone is the only such service which currently truly excites me. Do you disagree? Tell me why!

I'll end this blog post with the thought that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", and the social internet version of it which now reads "If you as much as touch a keyboard, everybody kows you're a dog". It's extraordinary to compose an impression about someone from all the tracks he leaves online, somewhat like the guy who has gathered an amazing collection of material on Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett which I watched today...

International Talk Like a Pirate Day - September 19th

Arr! Today, nerds all over the world celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Myself I have a great interesting in issues of "piracy" and privacy and even though I'd like to be more level-headed than most prominent members of the Swedish Pirate Party, their achievements are really impressive. So, as the old expression goes:

"To err is human, but to arr is Pirate!"

Picture from the ingenious service faceyourmanga.com which seems temporarily down... See you on Towel Day (May 25th)!

Piracy Monday!

I got remarks on yesterday's creative commons post that I didn't include some also very significant films / clips, so to better myself here's another bunch of clips, this time focused more on actual piracy and filesharing, not so much enabling creativity. What I consider the so far most groundbreaking work in this category is probably Piratbyrån Walpurgis 2007: Four Shreddings and a Funeral (also available in Swedish). There's a video for it too, but it's not as good by far, the text is really thoughtworthy.

The videos can by their very nature be downloaded for free, but I chose to link to youtube below. Enjoy! :

Good Copy, Bad Copy:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6)

Steal this film I:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

Steal this film II:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

Creative Commons Sunday!

As friends of me may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Joichi Ito since I met him in Tallinn and lately also his Creative Commons friend and collegue Lawrence Lessig. So here goes, a dense series of videos related to CC. Thanks to Hax here and here. Note that I know CC-licensing is not the abolishing of copyright, nor necessarily requiring share-alike to produce a special family of components like the GPL-fanatics like Richard Stallman argue for.

PS. Does anyone know rules regarding performance royalties and amateur recording of a live concert like I encouraged in one of my recent blog posts from the R.E.M. concert? I would like to think that the artist can at least explicitly allow recording and redistribution of a concert, but in Estonia, that seems to be mandatory to go through also the royalty collecting agency and the idea of a song may anyway be tied to the original song writor and composer. I have no idea...

Selling using the Black Swan

I've been reading The Black Swan recently, an exciting book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In its essence, it reminds us how fooled we may be in the way we describe reality, history and future, and possibly it may assist us to make much better decisions and being ready for the unexpected.

Taleb sums this down as being due to two primary ways of assessing things in the human mind:

• System 1 - the experiential. Rapid decisions according to experience and habit, the "gut feeling" and prejudice (in the true sense of the word)


• System 2 - the cogitative. Thinking rationally and logically about things, involving experience but also assessing the influence of abstracts such as statistics
  

The problem is of course that the experiental system can frequently be wildly inaccurate but you don't notice it unless you knowingly bring in the cogitative system to actually assess things. Using the cogitative system is both energy consuming and tricky as you don't always know when it would make a difference. I myself experience that I everyday think a certain way about things, but when you stop to think about how you actually should act, sometimes it seems that your direction has drifted way off target.

Anyway, the book also recently taught me a little clever thing about sales, especially if you're selling something obscure. Essentially if consider the probability of a generic situation A, compared to a more specific situation B whichas a consequence will result in A happening. Even if mathematically the likelyhood of A must be greater than that of B (and thus A) since other situations than B may also cause A, if B feels rational and A more complicated, people will generally think experientally and inaccurately think that B feels much more probable than the complex situation A.

So how to use this in sales? Well, describing the situations you want your customers to use your product for will make them seem more likely. Maybe this is very basic to anyone in sales, but for me it was a realization. I'll make an example below, and as a hint, A as described above is someone stealing and your email password and abusing it because you don't use SSL and B is computer wiz-kid stealing your password while you're working in the same café:

Rather than just talking about the importance of using encrypted POP and SMTP email (that's just a matter of ticking a box in the email program) tell the story of the university computer security student who has a hobby to run a network sniffer and log anything interesting when he's working from cafés. Your email program is checking the email every few minutes and the young student captures your username and password every time. Every now and then he takes a look in the logs and checks out the people of which he's got the accounts of, emptying his nets so to say.

In a couple of months, he's soon gathered some thousand accounts and realizes that besides playing pranks on his clueless victims (they had really given him their passwords!), he can make a little bit of extra money from monitoring the gossip or business pages and matching them to his secret lists. It is easy for the guy to be very safe from getting caught, every now and then he will get his hands on some very valuable information, and the people he sells it to can create a world of trouble for the victims. And all this because they didn't use secure email connections. Please use secure email connections and don't become a victim yourself. Tick that one box, check it now.

Young Scientists in the Physics Olympiad, prepare to beat them this year!

Already back in June this year (section down, here in google cache instead or the page at fysikersamfundet), two members of the Swedish Federation of Young Scientists, Gunnar Peng (1st place) and Karl Larsson (4th place), qualified for the Swedish team for the International Physics Olympiad. Yay guys, congratulations! (Actually, the finals were 20-29th of July... so how did they do? - Well, Carl Andersson got an honoruable mention whereas Estonia got one silver and two bronze medals!)

The funny thing though, Gunnar (who's from the same school as Karl, Katedralskolan in Linköping) was already qualified also to the finals of the International Mathematical Olympiad just like last year so was replaced for the physics team, supposedly by the runner up, Petter Säterskog who replies to the question whether he will go to the physics finals in Hanoi: "I'm not sure since I am already qualified for the biology olympiad in India. Not sure if they run at the same time. I am better at physics than biology". He did participate in India, and together with Emelie Sandberg and Martin Van from Sweden and Rudolf Bichele, Marit Puusepp and Kärt Must from Estonia got bronze medals! Tomas Kesek from Sweden and Kai Tiitsaar from Estonia got silver medals!

But... just say WHAT?! Not to say that Gunnar and Petter are not probably brilliant guys, but that just makes me think the whole Swedish participant community of the international science olympiades must be really tiny and inbred. In his Sommar i P1 program, Stavros Louca (mathematics teacher in celebrated "Klass 9A", download his Sommar i P1 program here or here) told of how he stimulated his students by challenging them to these olympiades, and they were successful! So, my contributon to remedy this situation, and for the benefit of everyone involved, is to help all everyone who can to compete in the olympiade.

So, generally the olympiades are for students in last year in high school (Swedish gymnasium third year) i.e. roughly 17-19 years old. The competitions seem to start qualifications during winter-spring (so you've got a couple of months to decide that you want to participate), national qualification finals early summar and international finals during the summer. The topics you can compete in are according to wikipedia:

• The International Mathematical Olympiad (Matematikolympiaden and Skolornas Matematiktävling - which starts already in November, and Gunnar Peng got a silver in Madrid this year! - "för [alla] gymnasister ... grundskoleelev i årskurs 9 kan beviljas dispens att deltaga")
  
• The International Physics Olympiad (Fysiktävlingen - "för tredje årets gymnasister som har avslutat A-kursen i fysik och läst större delen av B-kursen i fysik")
  
• The International Chemistry Olympiad (Kemiolympiaden)
  
• The International Biology Olympiad (Biologiolympiaden has no info since 2005)
  
• The International Olympiad in Informatics (Programmeringsolympiaden are clever, they help you participate if your school doesn't make sure. Though I don't believe this, Gunnar Peng also won a finals silver in the Informatics Olympiad finals in Egypt!)
  
• The International Philosophy Olympiad (Sweden is not represented yet)
  
• The International Astronomy Olympiad (Rymdstyrelsen should arrange Astronomiolympiaden but haven't update the page since 2005)
  
• The International Geography Olympiad
  
• The International Linguistic Olympiad (Lingolympiaden)
  
• The International Junior Science Olympiad
  
• The International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics
  
• The International Earth Science Olympiad

As a final note, I would like to share with everyone that the Federation of Young Scientists' chairman blog (in Swedish) is up and running again, and that LinkedIn now has discussions for groups, including for the funnny group of O-Unga Forskare (sw. "Non-young Scientists").