1) Installing applications to my phone was previously something I really hated. I remember how horrible it was trying to get oggplay installed to my phone, typing the url to the darn things browser. But hey, atleast my N95 already came with the solution (which I didn’t know how to use properly and in an actually useful way before): 2D barcode reader. I used 2D barcodes to my book catalogue (more about this later in this post) entries, but not on much else.

This is where The Most Excellent Mobile Barcoder comes into play… or would, if I’d use Firefox (*DOH*). But despair not, all you users of Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari or even Opera or IE! Since I happen to know the developer of the extension personally *cough*, I asked if he could do a nice little bookmarklet (to be dragged to the bookmark bar of the browser) for me :-) and so he did. It works on Firefox too ;-) I made a smart bookmark of it myself for my personal use; I’ll leave making of it as an excercise to the reader.

2) Fire Eagle and Twitterfeed are a nice way to inform your microblogging friends what is going on. Especially Twitterfeeds add some of the missing features in Twitter and Identi.ca that Jaiku (my absolute favourite microblogging service) already has. Fire Eagle allows me to update my location in multiple ways and to also publish it in many ways. My favourite updating tools are Plazes, dopplr and J2ME updater, and my favourite publishing tool is Eaglefeed.

3) Book/CD/DVD/perfume/shoe/jewelry database is what I’ve been thinking of lately. I’ve already catalogued my books and my CD’s, but I still haven’t entered my perfumes nor my DVD’s or the few games I have to any database. I desperately need a place to database them all, if for nothing else, for letting other people to know what not to buy for me. I was pointed to thinglink.org which might just be what I need. I’m planning to move my music/book collection to there, but what I’m thinking is that since thinglink is open source, it should be expanded and clusterized and clients for it should be made and and and… if only I knew how to code! I’ve not yet studied the whole thing throughly so I don’t know which of my ideas have already been implemented, but damn.

4) Hardware acquisitions are so difficult these days. About two months ago I purchased a hard drive for my laptop in the hope that it would solve my laptops sluggishness (as smartctl suggested my hard drive might be dying). I spent most of my still hangoverish Monday to go to Pirkkala verkkokauppa.com by bus from Hervanta to purchase a hard drive, they didn’t have the model I wanted on the shelf so I paid for a bigger model. I checked the hard drive and the laptop specs before I opened the package, and good thing I did. The laptop uses SATA, the drive I bought was IDE… >____< I just got the new correct hard drive a week ago, I still haven’t installed it, but will soon. BUT.

I need to buy more RAM, and this is where things start to get tricky: I have no idea what kind of RAM this thing eats and how much I should/could purchase. This document (PDF) tells me I could max to 4GB, but I’m still uncertain of the type of RAM.

5) Intrepid Ibex is out and since I’ve been running it on my laptop since August, I didn’t for once feel the odd jittery feeling and anxiety of a new Ubuntu version. I did attend the release day madhouse at #ubuntu and #ubuntu-release-party as a good IRC op should, but that was about it. I guess I’m a bit blind to the new and cool stuff in it, though I do appreciate seeing the fruits of the project I looked over during the summer by one of my Finnish Summercoders who I later recruited to work for Nomovok to be included in Intrepid.

I’ve had my share of problems with Intrepid though – and I’m sad to confess my tight schedule on both work and personal life stuff has prevented me from looking up most of them. My laptop has no wireless in Intrepid with the latest kernel of 2.6.27-7, for reasons I’ve not checked. Might be that I’ve blacklisted a module, though I doubt it as 2.6.27-6 works nice-ish (cuts the signal in a way that, for example, Skype calls hang up from time to time). My laptop has Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01), which works fine with ath5k.

6) Out of professional interest I’ve got a sudden urge to install Gentoo, LFS and/or *BSD on a virtualized system. Odd. Some may speculate I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps I have.

7) I want Nokia Internet Tablet n800 really bad. Not n810, I want especially n800. People have asked me *why*, but the answer is actually quite simple. I don’t need GPS, as my phone has GPS. I don’t want moving slided keyboard, as the hardware keyboard doesn’t have *the* Finnish keyboard layout I wish it had. I don’t want moving sliding keyboard, as it would be yet another moving part that would break when dropping the thing, or yet another moving thing collecting guinea pig hair or crisp bread crumbs in between the moving parts. The hardware specs are really better for me in the older model than in the newer one. Anyone care to sell me one cheap? I want to play Numpty Physics, do Ekiga calls, have Flash on my browser for watching youtube and Skype to work on a mobile device. These are the things my trustworthy 770 can’t do.

8) OMG OMG I want zebra to Ubuntu, too! VOTE FOR IT! (and if you can contribute in the development, please add support for QR/DataMatrix, plz?)

9) YES!

10) I’m still an emacs fangirl

even if someone has tried to bribe me in multiple ways ;-)

After opening ceremonies, the first speaker Mikko Puhakka of SoberIT, a venture capitalist with experience of IT investing for over 10 years(?), told us about the current trends of the ICT sector and especially what intrests VC’s about OSS. The OSS, according to him, is a strange thing in the current investment climate, since it has made it possible to start new Internet service companies (web hotels, news portals, search engines, you name it) with almost no capital. That means that the people who’d really like to invest great sums of money don’t actually have that many companies to invest in, because they don’t need that much money to start the company.
Most of the innovative OSS projects have been started before the bubble broke back in 2001. Referring to that, in his last slide Puhakka made a suggestion for the community to form a national software bank, a repository for open source software, to keep software projects in safekeeping for future ICT companies, to help them build on what’s already been done instead of trying to invent the wheel all over again. Software bank would preserve innovations of dead projects.

Bob Sutor, the vice president of Standards and Open Source at IBM told us of IBM’s strategy of Open Source. IBM has given quite a few of its patents available for the OS community and I personally think it’s a great thing. His way of speech was truly American, and he was funny. I hope his attitude spreads around big proprietary software coding firms. He spoke quite a lot why IBM thinks “standards” (quotes because very few things in the ‘Net are actually real standards) are important and what action IBM is doing to get these standards more adopted in those areas that really need them most, education and health care.

Before lunch Nokias Valtteri Halla spoke about Maemo.org, the open source project that Nokia launched in May. It’s about OSS community creating software for Nokia 770, Linux / GTK based handheld Internet device. He commented Sutors notion that big companies are always surprised by the power of OSS communities, their speed and multiple points of views; When maemo was published and the codes released, people started programming software for Nokia 770 “emulating” it with their computers, creating software months before the actual hardware was released.

Lunch was great. For having only 95 cents in cash and being hungry as a wolf, green salad with herb croutons, baked veggies and ox breast were the most excellent lunch, especially since they were free. I sat next to marvelous people, with whom I had excellent conversation about communities and there seems to be a shift going on from doing things individually to doing things in a community, using software/Internet not only to do something but also to communicate, how social aspects of software are getting more and more important. I have noticed the trend but didn’t know that it already had a name, “Web2.0″. The persons I had the invigorating talk were Gerrit Visser and Teemu Arina. Gerrit even took a picture of me with my Tux WIP and put it on his Flickr page: here.

Being an Ubuntu user myself I felt really curious when Andreas Schuldei of Debian project held his presentation about “Sustainability and Revitalization of Global Developer Community”. I won’t comment it more than I’m not surprised that they are focusing on the community or that it’s on their agenda big time.

Unfortunately I had to leave the event for some pressing school work as Victor van Reijswoud of Uganda Martyrs University and East African COSS was just getting started, so I caught only the beginning of his presentation… and returned when Ashwin Navin of Bittorrent was already answering the questions… So I missed essentially two presentations that would’ve been very interesting. After that the director of Star Wreck, Timo Vuorensola spoke about the new concept of Internet movie, and how that’s going to change things around. Before, when returning from school I noticed Samuli Torssonen and after the OpenMind event had ended, changed a few words with him about pink ladyfit Star Wreck t-shirts with black print, those would be nice. Before leaving I talked with Petri Räsänen a bit, asked him for an interview and took a few photos (which I suspect are very bad ones).

After that I’ve been mostly reconstructing my web pages, yes, these, the one you’re reading now. For many years my pages have been in Finnish only, and since Gerrit seemed so disappointed when I told him I have practically nothing in English in the web and I’m increasingly active in the international Ubuntu community, now was the perfect time. I actually upgraded the whole thing to use PHP, which really is a very helpful way of keeping web pages in order. I reconstructed the file system so that updating the pages is easy with nano.

Links

Mikko Puhakka
Bob Sutor
maemo (Valtteri Halla)
Dicole (Teemu Arina)
Coworking.com (Gerrit Visser)
Andreas Schuldei
EACOSS (Victor van Reijswoud)
Bittorrent (Ashwin Navin)
Star Wreck