The picture on the right is from the downstairs bathroom at Vltava. Counting the handle, there are four potential ways to open or unlock the door.

(The text around the green button says “Open Door” in Finnish and Swedish.)

Vanity on uudistanut ulkoasuaan. Olen aina ollut Hemingway-teeman fani, mutta Vanityn uudistus palvelee blogin sisältöä paremmin. Ulkoasua voisi vielä vähän hioa, mutta päivän lyhyiden Notes-merkintöjen siirtäminen oikealle toimii erittäin hyvin. Hemingwayn ongelma blogiteemana on juuri sen epäblogimaisuus: pelkän viimeisimmän merkinnän “nosto” piilottaa liikaa aiempia merkintöjä. Teema sopiikin parhaiten harvoin päivitetylle, pitkien artikkelien blogille.

Hesarihan heittäytyy oikein Web 2.0:ksi!

Markosamuli mietti tänään mitä lehden pääkirjoitustoimittaja tekee. Kirjoittaako toimittaja yksinomaan pääkirjoituksia — ja jos ei, niin onko kyseessä jonkunlainen kunniatitteli? “Jos kirjoittaa pääkirjoituksia, niin eikö sitten ole pääkirjoittaja?”

Arvelin oikein, että Markosamuli tykkäisi tämän päivän Hesarin Tiede&Luonto -osion pääjutusta nisäkkäiden uudelleennimeämisestä suomenkielellä.

Pizzaa tötterössä, onko parempaa? Sinustako Suomen ensimmäisiä pizzatötteröyrittäjä?

Näin eilen Keskustassa vaateliikeen, jonka jokaisessa ikkunassa luki “turkisviikot” isoin tikkukirjaimin. On varmasti ainoastaan onnistuneen propagandan ansiota, että täysin vailla mitään erityistä tunnekuohuntaa mietin miltäköhän näyttäisi, jos ikkunoissa lukisi “murhaviikot”.

Markosamuli huomasi, että Veikkaus värittää hyvin saittinsa 10-vuotista taivalta kertomalla mitä muuta netissä on sinä vuonna tapahtunut. Loistava tapa antaa kontekstia kehitykselle.

Olemme käyttäneet Campfirea nyt kuukauden päivät, ja välillä meidän keskustelu muistuttaa pelottavasti 37signalsin porukan postauksia.

Köyttöliittymäblogi: push or pull?

Answer: push (paint to see answer)

Safari’s such a nice little browser. I just noticed today how it handles the titles of tabs: when you have several tabs open that begin with the same words, it drops them and starts from the distinct part.

If only Gmail and Bloglines worked in it. Oh, and if only it could remember my open tabs!

I’d like Bloglines to allow me to set up some default settings for new subscriptions. I don’t use Bloglines from my mobile phone, but it’s not infeasible to imagine that I might. For this reason, I try to keep my “mobile subscriptions” list short and clean. And that means every subscription I make, I have to uncheck the “add to my mobile” checkbox.

I’ve been talking a lot about settings and default values with Markosamuli recently. One way of enabling “pseudo-settings” for specific kinds of fields is to default to the value that was used last time (or used most often, or some other criteria). This allows the system to assign a probable default value for non-critical fields — without making the user decide or explicitly set (and have the system keep track of) a particular setting.

Remembered defaults, see?

37signals now offers three ways to read Getting Real: on the web, as a PDF, and as a printed-on-demand paperback. I like how the free version’s icon is blurry and flat, a subtle cue that this is the economy grade option.

M&M: Igglo sai pääomaruiskeen. Igglo myös tiedotti asiasta rekisteröityneille käyttäjilleen, tosin vähän omituisesti:

Hei.

Sinä olit maailman ensimmäisiä Igglon käyttäjiä. Kiitos luottamuksesta.
Igglon mielestä sinun tulee olla ensimmäisten joukossa, jotka kuulevat Igglon lähdöstä maailmalle. Tänään kello 15 julkaistiin tämä lehdistötiedote http://www.igglo.fi/pressi/?pvm=181006

T. Igglo
www.igglo.fi

Oman vuokra-asunnonetsintäkokemuksen perusteella väitän, että asunnonvälityspalveuilla on vähintäänkin paljon mahdollisuuksia kehittyä. Igglon kaltainen rohkea konsepti saa minulta täyden tuen. Ja on jotenkin sopivaa, että Igglo pääomistajiin kuuluu mainostoimisto Taivas.

Nokia mainostaa 5500 “Sport” -puhelintaan väiteellä, että puhelimeen mahtuu 750 biisiä. Väite kvalifioidaan siten, että tämä määrä edellyttää 1 gigatavun muistikortin hankkimista. On kuitenkin vähintääkin harhaanjohtavaa, miten “biisien” tiedostokokoja on laskettu. Puhelimessa on 8 megatavua muistia, ja sen mukana tulee 64 megan muistikortti. Käytännössä siis esimerkin kaikki 750 biisiä ovat gigatavun muistikortilla. Samaa laskukaavaa käyttäen Nokian myymään 80 gigan ipodiin mahtuisi 60 000 biisiä, kolme kertaa enemmän kuin Applen myymään.

M&M: Raisio uskoi rasisteja. Älytöntä. Miinukset Raisiolle.

Pizzeria Dersimin (menu, pdf) pizzat ovat aika hyviä. Paikka myös kuljettaa, joskin se on aivan meidän vieressä, niin en ole kehdannut koskaan kotiin tilata. Harmi vaan, että paikka menee jo iltayhdeksältä kiinni.

Nokia’s flagship store seems to be a hit. Today in front of the store I saw two little boys trying to pull their family in. The mother told them they’d already been there, and that they were going to another store. The father was willing to compromise, though, and said he’d take the boys in and then follow her.

TechCrunch takes a look at SystemOne, a wiki with semantic analysis capabilities.

“Essentially, it’s a wiki that analyzes what you are writing in real time and offers up related search results from other pages in that wiki, the web in general, your uploaded OPML file of RSS feeds, your emails and any files the system is given access to.”

This is the kind of technology I’m thinking about when I’ve talked about using linguistic tools to assist in publishing systems. Learning, self-organizing helpers. Automatic category suggestion, autolinking via user-defined keywords, simple site-specific ontology builders, etc. What about author recognition via grammar analysis?

Shame about the name, though.

Alahup looks like an interesting web CMS. It has a Flash-based editor that’s keyed to let you mark-up what you mean (as opposed to “what you get”), supports versioning, has an interactive sitemap, non-destructive image scaling and syncs files via rsync (instead of FTP).

Shaun Inman works to eradicate lonely widows. This is like a league of design superheros. Working one plugin at a time to make weblogs typographically correct.

Banksy tampers with Paris Hilton’s latest CD. “Banksy has replaced Hilton’s CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?”

“He has also changed pictures of her on the CD sleeve to show the US socialite topless and with a dog’s head.” Via William Gibson.

Volcano music! Through the process of sonification, scientists can turn seismographic patterns into musical scores, which are playable using a cheap MIDI interpreter. I also like the mp3 based on web server activity. Via Mark Hurst’s newsletter.

There is something strangely fascinating how closely documented recent, Internet-related topics are on Wikipedia. We have exact dates and the context of terms being coined. Snowclone, disemvoweling, splog. It’ll be interesting to see if these neologisms survive, and if the way we “write history” will look more like this.

Creamaid connects advertisers with bloggers. They offer bounties to write-up stories on featured companies. Moderated, of course. They’re calling it a conversation widget. Okay, if you say so.

While I think that something like this could be used constructively, I expect that this’ll just lead to more whoring-guised-as-blogging. Surprisingly, Creamaid was featured (in Finnish) in today’s print edition of Taloussanomat. Based on a Technorati search, it doesn’t seem to have made a big splash in the blogosphere yet.

I’m dumping a bunch of duly noted items that I never got around to posting. Oh, and I finally fixed my title so that it links to the main page.

In February, Om Malik spun off The Daily Om, a link blog. Malik wanted to devote GigaOm to longer, meatier pieces, and not drown them in the chatter of “asides.”

I don’t know how Malik is publishing The Daily Om, but publishing separate “blogs” (or feeds, or types of posts) should be possible with standard blogging tools; it shouldn’t be necessary to set up a new blog — at least not on the admin side. Unfortunately this “one site, one admin” problem is much worse in the traditional CMS world.

Understand, a novelette by Ted Chiang, explores superintelligence, as in “at which [point do] quantitative improvements — better memory, faster pattern recognition — turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally different mode of cognition”.

Colors on the Web is one of many resources on color theory for web designers. I’ve felt these might be useful tools, but when I recently tried using a few of them, it didn’t really do too much for me. I like my own (possibly offensive, I admit) color schemes too much.

Vaihtoehtoisen arjen toinen lähetys oli videomuotoinen podcast Mark Pilgrimin tapaan. Nautin lähetyksestä suuresti, parjatusta kuvanlaadusta huolimatta. Onnittelut Villelle, lisää tällaista!

The Mac culture of tiny little apps is taking a little getting used to. I notice I’m a wary of installing anything I’m not sure I’ll be using a lot of — a throwback to my years of avoiding Windows-rot. I don’t listen to podcasts, but Neat Little Mac Apps looks good.

So, this comes a little late, but Alice and the Rabbit opened last Friday. The address is Fredrikinkatu 55, Helsinki.

Internet Explorer 6 has the most annoying bug with transparent PNGs: some (or most, it seems like) dimensions cause IE6 to break a bunch of links within the container of the transparent background image. The links are still visible, but they can’t be clicked, and they don’t react to the cursor hovering over them.

The fix is to change the dimensions of the offending PNG (though it’s not really the PNG that’s being offensive, it’s IE). Your mileage may vary, and unfortunately, tests seem to indicate that no single dimension combination seems to work reliably.

Note that the alpha transparency in IE is created via a proprietary filter CSS attribute. Note also that the source image must be located in the same directory as the web page calling it. I have no idea why.

One fix as demonstrated by Satzansatz.

A guide to CSS support in email. A useful breakdown of how various desktop and web email clients handle CSS. I’ve had to design and troubleshoot a few newsletters in my time, and unfortunately it’s not only the markup that causes problems.

The winners of Textplates’s Textpattern template competition have been announced. There’s some nice ones in there. My favorites are Serene and White and Wild.

I’ve never seen a juggling performance that’s been so tightly and well synchronized to music. (Generally, I avoid blogging video clips, but this one made me think of Elexa and all her juggling nerd friends, so I couldn’t resist.) Via Reddit.

Wikis tend to fall into the same layout/design pit as many open source CMS systems: they all look drab and alike. Usability-wise this could, of course, be considered somewhat beneficial. However, the feature-driven functionality of these prototypical designs aren’t actually all that easy or obvious in the first place, so this doesn’t come near compensating their drawbacks. This is why I was quite impressed with what Wetpaint has done with their wiki templates.

What Roosa wants for her birthday. That’s a radiator. Only 3950,00 euros.

How to Digitize a Million Books:

“Ultimately, Clancy says, Google would like Book Search to give the same result as someone going to a library, looking in its stacks, and serendipitously finding a book that’s interesting or useful. One way to do this would be to link books to each other by categories and themes, he suggests. The task becomes more complicated, though, when linking works by Virginia Woolf, for instance, to criticisms of her work, works that inspired her, or authors who wrote during the same era. Designing algorithms that can effectively organize all of this new information, Clancy says, is ‘one of the grand challenges and will take many years.’”

“Reddy says CMU researchers are trying to tackle this challenge by using a ‘statistical approach’ to organizing the information. In this approach, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness sentences, for example, would be analyzed by an algorithm that would find patterns based on sentence length, structure, and punctuation. This technique might find a work by James Joyce, one of Woolf’s influences — or that of an obscure author whose writings might otherwise never have been found.”

Passclicks is an interesting alternative to traditional passwords. Passclicks are made up of a set number spots (“clicks”) in an image. The rationale is that people are better at remembering visual cues than random strings of letters and numbers.

I do wonder though, how “strong” passclicks can be considered? Taking into account the fact that most pictures will have certain focal points that most people will click, it might, statistically speaking, be quite weak.

This typing game is fun. It reminds me of a ten finger typing trainer program — but unlike those, this one doesn’t care if you hit the wrong characters (and you never have to use the backspace to correct anything). Actually, the game could actually do harm to my typing skills.

I wonder how quickly one would have to hit random keys for it to be a viable strategy in the game.

I’ve had Edd Dumbill’s article on WHATWG open in my (saved by the grace Firefox’s Sessionsaver add-on) browser for a long time, but today I finally got around to reading it (as trivial as this may sound, the primary reason has probably been how intimidating and ugly IBM’s developerWorks is, followed by the repellentness of the WHATWG acronym).

I’m glad I finally did take a closer look at the article.

First of all:

“WHATWG’s figurehead specification is code-named HTML5, but is known more properly as Web Applications 1.0. HTML5 is intended to preserve backward compatibility with the current HTML standard, HTML 4.01, and also with XHTML 1.0, the XML version of HTML.”

And then:

So what’s inside HTML5? In short, a lot. The Web Applications 1.0 specification is an evolving beast, and some of the features mentioned are more fully developed than others. Here’s a 30,000-foot flyover of the new features:

• New layout elements, including a calendar control, an address card, a flexible datagrid, gauges and progress meters, drag and drop, and menus
• Programming extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM), including server-sent DOM events
• A formalization of the de-facto standard XMLHttpRequest object, the centerpiece of Ajax communication
• Dynamic bitmap graphics through the canvas element

Tom uses his scientological powers for evil.

Lis�isin t�h�n listaan viel� v�rikoodatut v�lilehti-ikonit ja Web Developerin kaveriksi Firebugin.

Open Tuesday will have its inaugural event February 7. Open Tuesday, similar, if not modeled directly after MobileMonday, is a free event for the open source community. The founders reportedly include people not only from software development but also financing. Digitoday’s article (in Finnish).

As it was not my fortune to miss the Chuck Norris fact-craze currently on the rounds, I was able to understand, and, yes, smile at, this list of Chuck Norris Web 2.0 facts.

Among the entries for Colly Logic’s Simplified Standards logo competition, one designer stands out. Not only the most prolific of the entrants, this designer is able to capture the essence of so many logos out there in the world today. This designer’s name is Mahesh Babu, entries 35–42.

En juuri lue Hesaria verkosta, joten ulkoasu-uudistus j�i huomaamatta. Onneksi MS noteerasi sen. Uusi ilme on mukava, joskin h�mm�stytt�v�n New York Timesin n�k�inen. Vanha oli hirvitt�v�.

Kummallinen, tuo tyhj� aukko HS.fi-logon ja asiakaspalvelulaatikon v�lill�.

Ja MS, viittasinpa hyvinkin Herkon Westwood Deadwood-merkint��n. Odotan innolla sarjan alkamista t�n��n.

Hmm. Procom j�rjest�� maksullisen Asiaa blogeista -brunssin, jossa selvitet��n mik� blogi on ja miten sit� voidaan hy�dynt��. Puhujina mm. Sami K�ykk�, Matti Lintulahti ja Alex Nieminen (tietysti).

Well, Christmas already went, but my birthday’s coming up. How about giving me the Freight family? It’s beautiful, has 100 fonts, and it costs only $895! Designed by Joshua Darden, Freight was one of Typographica’s favorite fonts of 2005.