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they call me naughta oughtnots

Yesterday, I got XMMS working on ubuntu. That was Cheerful - not too many things yesterday were. During the days I'm supposed to try to understand something about how MetaEdit+ actually works, but I'm beating my head against the wall a great portion of the time.

I started the day by modelling my life with FreeMind, a pretty mind map drawing utility which produces pretty, hierarchical XML files. I've put everything I would like to do in that map, the current <node> count of the XML tree is 190.

Weekend: meeting the family of my mother's side.

Thu 2005-07-28 17:32 in diary No comments #link

Usability and attitudes towards non-geeks

Computer Stupidities (or lack of usability?)

I wrote a longer bit about usability to my stumbleupon blog, and since I can't think of a (smart) way to include() the text here, I'll just link to it.

Wed 2005-07-27 11:30 in tech No comments #link

Inkscape SVG

Tried out Inkscape SVG, a vector drawing program, which came with Ubuntu Linux. It's nice and clear. I've never before seen a drawing tool, with which I, being someone who really can't draw, can create something that looks this good. In under a minute.

How egoist of me.

Note to Internet Explorer users: the PNG image above contains alpha transparency which your outdated browser doesn't support - the background colour of the image should not be light cyan or anyting else than transparent and should thus show through the rather white background color of the page.

Please upgrade to Firefox now.

Sun 2005-07-24 21:21 in tech No comments #link

My humble... flat

I've been living here since the beginning of June, but since I got my camera on Friday, I took some photos. They're of poor quality, but I guess you get the idea from them.

Inside: flat1, flat2

Outside: view, taken through the window.

Sun 2005-07-24 15:12 in visual No comments #link

Pretty morning

Yesterday was totally useless and frustrating. This morning I woke up with different feelings, excitement to start doing all those things I had wanted to. I hope it'll stick. Thank you Father.

Sun 2005-07-24 09:49 in diary No comments #link

Faststone

Faststone (for Windows =/), a beautiful photo browsing/organizing software with lossless JPEG rotating and lots more. The GUI has got quite a bit of innovation, and it's incredibly fast compared to most apps on my computer.

Sun 2005-07-24 09:48 in tech No comments #link

Haapsalu / Estonia

10 EEK (15 EEK is 1 EUR) and I'm on the net for 15 minutes in an internet "café" in Haapsalu. The computers have a stamp on which it says "Espoon kaupunki 7069". A pretty town, it is. Lots of old buildings. Saw The Kingdom of Heaven on Monday. Been playing with Emil and getting to know the place.

Gots to go now. Will post photos... at some point. Can't be sure since it's just dad's camera I'm using. Mine is still being repaired, in Sweden.

Wed 2005-07-20 15:18 in diary 2 comments #link

Estonia

In 2,5 hours we'll be on a boat to Tallinn with Emil, my dad, Leena and Hankku. We've been playing and trying to work with dad and Emil for the past couple of days and things seem complicated, there's never time for anything.

Fri 2005-07-15 14:05 in diary No comments #link

"It's a good day"

Another day not working all that hard but enjoying learning and listening to Sting. Look at these lyrics, man! Preferably while listening to the song, of course. Sorry, can't provide you the song here, though.

My current strategy seems to be keeping myself sane and healthy while working as much as I can - as a contrast to trying to work more than I could and losing any grasp of reality I might ever have had.

Mon 2005-07-11 11:15 in diary No comments #link

Ubuntu Linux

Just installed Ubuntu on my desktop machine. The installation was rather painless even in expert mode, didn't take long - changing the time zone gave a "failed" message with no explanation on the couple of first times.

The GUI itself is pleasant and simple - I used to prefer KDE to GNOME but I'm not sure anymore. I haven't tested anything as advanced as a package manager yet though ;). One thing that I've come to expect is missing: none of the FAT32 or NTFS partitions in my system have been mounted automatically. I guess I'll have to do that myself, then.

The Ubuntu community seems to be the first one to have the right attitude towards newbies. The general way to fix almost anything is to google for "ubuntu [app name]". This usually brings up several links to ubuntuforums.

Check again. Last night I thought I had lost my root password since after clicking the update notification icon (27 updates available) and entering my root password when prompted I was told that my password was wrong.

{ There's more! See full article }

Sun 2005-07-10 23:12 in tech No comments #link

The Concepts of the Mambo CMS + a wishlist

Topics:

• Plug-ins and terminology
• Content linking and menus
• Static content categories
• Complete web-based template access
• Community building
• Login form issues
• Mambo + AJAX

This document is my two pence worth about the future development of Mambo gathered into one place. Many of these topics have probably been discussed in other forums as well, and I would appreciate it if you told me about such places so I could extend my understanding of the entire Mambo phenomenon. I'm not trying to get smart on you (the developers) even though I feel I'm poking awful many of the design solutions that have already been done in Mambo. I just like the platform and would love to see it develop.

Introduction

Note: I'm not familiar with the software architecture of Mambo, except from the outside. During a bit over a year I've been learning to understand Mambo a bit by bit. My technical incompetence (in terms of inner workings of Mambo and/or Mambo developers :) will be a reason for possibly incorrect conceptions of the roles of modules, components and mambots. However, I see this more as a benefit than a problem: my goal in this document is to try to move towards a set of concepts which would be more understandable for the novice webmaster learning the Mambo administration panel (backend).

It's easy to get blind to a system's faults from the outside if you're too deep looking just at the inside. Are we tempted justify the strangeness of an application to the user by explaining how the system works from the inside? A main idea behind this post is that the webmaster, as well as the visitor, is a user of Mambo, and should not have to see any more of the inner workings of the software than absolutely necessary in order to be capable of taking advantage of the full potential of the software.

Currently, at version 4.5.2.3, Mambo is showing great maturity in terms of technical possibilities. Though there are still problems, often having to do with showing too much of the mechanics of the underlying architecture to the user (hacking the core, anyone?), it all seems to work pretty well together.

However, the user experience still has a lot to wish for, and I'm thinking that the general consepts/terminology ought to be clarified. Since the current backend is very versatile in its capability to parametrize different parts of the system (core or plugins), it may be best to leave it alone and let it do what it can do best. So, in the spirit of the Google Summer of Code, it would be gooood to greate: "5. A rich administration application - Create a rich administration client application. Connect to Mambo using XML-RPC or SOAP.". This is called GUI in this document. Thus, the proposed concepts might be just for the GUI, not necessarily to replace the concepts that already have a foundation in the backend. Complete change (that is, on also the current backend) might be good, too, since two different vocabularies would be very confusing.

{ There's more! See full article }

Sun 2005-07-10 15:50 in tech 1 comment #link

like night and day

I'm mostly night. A dark shadow slowing down my thoughts and actions, leaving me in this strange water it's not cold or warm it's something in between or just too much. It's not easy to even imagine explaining it, the thing deep within me that the Bible would call sin. From what I know, there's most of the time nothing in what I am or what I do that could have anything to do with God at all.

How annoying that most of this entry sounds like religious "small talk" to me. I guess I've heard it all too many times and now it's starting to materialize in my own life and... it's annoying and, on the other hand, kinda safe.

Sometimes I can grasp something about how undeserved it is, the love God has for me. I just fail to live in any way that I could even imagine similar to being with Him. Still, just a simple prayer - facing the fact that I don't feel like praying, the situation doesn't seem right but I'd still like to go to Him - it just helps living my life.

I feel loved. Not especially by anyone. Or perhaps actually by many people, and by God; that safety after prayer described in the previous paragraph just happened again. I feel I'm in some kind of a peace with people. I could be with them more and it would be good if I was more direct and honest, but there's some kind of a peace. I'm not good enough, but it doesn't matter. It should matter though, something in me keeps crying out. People demand more by nature? The love that pours down to believers from Christ has altruism I guess.

I miss Iikku and Elina in a strange way, Iikku wrote in his journal that they're coming back soon and that was meaningful to me and quite frankly, I don't fully understand why... not in the end.

I was just browsing through the graphical designs I've planned for pilpi.net during the past few years (after the publication of the current design, that is). I was positively surprised that in fact, I liked most of them. I'm probably going to need to implement a style swither on this site, but too many designs would just be too many... hrmh.

Thu 2005-07-07 00:05 in diary 1 comment #link

taking apart

Language Is A virus: Cut Up Machine

The previous poem was inspired by that grey, empty box: "now create", someone seemed to whisper.

A "fun" idea: type something like "gre erg reg egr" (the same word many times with the letters in different order) and watch the letters travel as you keep clicking the button furiously.

Wed 2005-07-06 12:30 in links No comments #link

hotfall

I'm not scared mind you
thinking of a new life
with my own boundaries,
no I'd never let them go

I'd fall, never fly
fall endlessly,
a puppet on a string
nobody

on the other end, my Lord

Wed 2005-07-06 12:27 in poetry No comments #link

why, God is merciful!

Today, I've gotten a clue about what God's mercy Really is in practice. It's like I've heard this in the Lutheran Bible school I was in - but hadn't experienced and at the same time realized it in such a tangible way. Today I sinned so hard and consciously ran away from God. It did seem the only choice at that moment though - apart from really trusting God - from my limited point of view. I did, however, realize how limited my point of view was. After that I felt guilty and was afraid that I would "just die" under the burden of the consequences of all that sin. The opposite happened, however: the evening and the night was probably the best of, at least, all of the summer so far. There I also got a chance to understand something about what is praising God, for what He is (not for what I am) really like.

Anyway, I still acknowledge it all-too-painfully and sharply that all I'm experiencing and explaining with concepts of Faith can mostly also be explained (to some degree) using naturalistic reasoning. That's really not the point though and doesn't say anything about the trustworthiness of naturalistic reasoning.

Tue 2005-07-05 03:05 in diary No comments #link

del.icio.us usage idea

A suggestion about del.icio.us and other taggable bookmarking system usage: Say, you link something that's related to yourself. In addition to the tag(s) related to the content itself, use a tag which is equivalent to your del.icio.us user name so that people know that this tag is related to you and may be an explanation for why you're tagging the specific page. I just did that.

I'm not sure if someone else has already had that idea but I certainly can't remember seeing it anywhere (at least not in this exact form) before thinking of it.

Tue 2005-07-05 02:53 in tech No comments #link

visilallaa (käännä)

an old page with a broken link, dated Dec 29 2004. There's something about that "design" I would like to capture at pilpi.net. There's no use making this site look like a portal when it isn't one, so perhaps there'll be a revolution on this site at some point. Behold!

I was in the shower about 40 minutes ago. A magazine salesperson called me, selling Auto-Bild. I know nothing about cars. "You're marked as a special customer". I don't have a car or even a driver's licence! "But it's only 1,40 euros per issue!"

Going to Kansanlähetyspäivät (link in Finnish) tomorrow. Today: my aunt Marja's place.

Fri 2005-07-01 15:40 in diary No comments #link