Merry Xmas!

Merry Xmas to everyone and happy holidays!

Lack of updates

I probably don't have any readers for this blog, as I haven't announced it anywhere (well, maybe the Facebook notes auto-import thingie counts as an announce?), so there is no-one waiting for my updates on this blog. Its been well over a month now, and I try to sum it up now.

Lets start with the Facebook. Since I joined it, I spent half a day finding my friends (more or less successfully) and configuring the glittery apps the place is full of. As anyone who uses Facebook knows, the apps seem to be "the salt" of Facebook, and they are true. I wouldn't be using Facebook nearly as much if there wasn't any.

However, there already is too many apps; the same functionalities exist in many similar apps and some users finding one apps before the other, they spread that one to their friends and they pass it to their friends and so on. Eventually you get invited to the "same app" hiding in different skin a gazillion time by different friends. And oh boy, is that annoying!

Well, in my book Facebook gets a B- for a good try. We'll see what other sites the future brings.

Another thing I've spent a bit of my time is the Netflix Prize competition. In short, they are offering one million dollars to first team to improve their movie recommendation system accuracy by 10%. It has been running for a year now and team closest to the prize has achieved about 8.5% improvement.

Realistically, I don't believe I can beat even that, but I'm using the competition as a framework for my Artificial Intelligence software project at the university. Getting study credits for something I have personal interest is a great thing! Another interesting thing about the competition is that you get an "authentic" dataset, with 18000 movie titles, 500000 users and 100 million ratings. That is hard to get by and registering to the competition only to download the dataset is worth it.

Thats all for now, more updates later!

Joined Facebook

I joined Facebook today. I've heard so much stories and things about it that I had to try it myself. We'll see if it turns out to be "too Web 2.0" for me or not :)

An essay about past ten years

I've been a student in the Helsinki University of Technology for nine years now. As you might already guess, my studies haven't advanced as they should've - I would've graduated a long time ago, if they had. However, having worked full- or part-time all of the that time has brought me such an experience a "normal", goody-two-shoe student will not gather for a long time, even after his/her graduation. I having seen and experienced the the dot-com bubble first hand is something you do not learn from the books or being in stable-and-boring job for ten, twenty or even thirty years.

Well, now I got well off-topic from what I planned to write at first. Earlier this month I decided to put more efforts to my studies to finally graduate some beautiful day. I had to write down a proper plan to complete my studies, and write an essay about my studies so far.

Writing down an essay about past nine years isn't exactly the most easy thing to do. You have to do some deep analysis of yourself and both your successes and mistakes. If something, that is something we all should do on a more regular basis. I found out many interesting things, both good and bad, by analysing the essay. When you see it all in a text that you write for someone else, explaining half of your life, you can no longer use those sad excuses anymore. You start to see the real picture.

I recommend everyone to do a little self-analysis. Write an essay about your life during the past five or ten years and see if you are happy what you see. If not, the problems are in front of you in clear writing and you can start improving yourself and your life quality right away.

My favourite feeds

Nothing out of ordinary lately. EU3 has been running a lot lately, so not so much free time left.

I'd like to share my favourite feeds, in case someone doesn't already read these:

The n00b comic: Excellent comic about the WoW generation gaming etc. Lots of fun about online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), lately it has gone down a notch, but mostly because the start is so HILARIOUS its hard to top later!

Ctrl-alt-del: Ctrl-alt-del is another excellent comic about gaming, life, IT. Featuring Ethan the umm, dork :) and Lucas the rational as main characters and best buddies & roomies, their views are constantly clashing and it creates interesting views into everything.. Just hilarious. Read from the beginning to not miss anything!

Slashdot: ./ is the number one site for following the Open source, Linux, IT, media industry etc stories. Very good moderation system, insightful discussion, a must for any IT person.

Worse than Failure: Former What-The-Fuck. Posts WTF cases from IT industries, potpourri of funny errors, WTF'd code and so on. Just hilarious if you are a coder or work in the IT industries. Lots of insider jokes referring to the older posts etc, just hilarious.

Doh!: Oh the humanity. Mostly posting mistakes and absurdies in news, such as BBC, CNN, webstores etc.

Pokernews: PokerNews has improved a lot over the last year, and it has the best coverage of the WSOP this year. Kicked Bluff magazine hands down in accuracy, speed, quality... despite that Bluff was the official WSOP reporting mag.

In addition to those, I have many "private" boards I follow and discuss on. If you have any other good webcomics, post them, I could occasionally use something new :)

Napolens Ambition

If you like turn based strategy, you must try out Paradox Interactives Europa Universalis. It has evolved to version III already over the years. Couple of days ago, they published an extension for it called Napoleons Ambition.

As you can guess, Im going to praise the extension. Adding a lot of things to a already superior game isn't easy thing to do, but they've done it. The game offers even more balanced game play, advanced AI, extended timeline and so on. The computer isn't the same walkover opponent it was back in EU3 v1.0 a year ago (well, the v1.3 actually managed to fix it properly already...)

Anyways, now shoo, if you are a bit into this type of game, go buy the game and the extension ASAP. Paradox is a rarity in todays gaming world, their games do not include any DRM or stuff that hinders you playing experience. The game does not span multiple DVDs and hog you HD on install. Its just the game, a HUGE set of historical accurate data and lovely gameplay.

Do you need more reason than that? I don't. Now I'm having hard time deciding which one to use my spare time to: Civ4 with Beyond the Sword, or EU3 with Napoleons Ambition :)

Got my hands on N800

I got a pair of N800's related to my next assignment. Quite a toy! I was part of N770 development team, and we cussed about a lot of things in it, the lack fo memory and flash capacity as our prime targets. 64mb for memory and another 64mb for storage was way too little for a embedded Debian.

N800 does it different: double the memory and quaruple the storage, and another flash card slot for even more storage: one internal and one removable. Stereo speakers instead of mono, yummy. Faster OMAP processor, about twice the speed; oh the luxury!

Anyways, if you have any interest for this kind of device, I can recommend it warmly. New software versions are coming out frequently enough and community has ported and developed hundrers of applications for it. Just google for Maemo Mapper (and purchase GPS with Bluetooth) and you have a navigator! The list goes on...

Shoo, go get one! :D

HD explosion - the reinstallation hell

Hoo-fucking-ray, all I can say about this incident. Just a less than a month ago, I went thru the pain of re-installing both my OSs, Ubuntu (upgraded it to Feisty Fawn from scratch) and Windows (from XP to Vista). Now, the HD that hosts both of those OSs chose to stop working!

It was my oldest drive, which I mainly used for OSs simply because earlier Ubuntus and XP didn't know their way into installing themselves onto SATA disk (I got two of them, newer and bigger than the IDE disk) without feeding them special drivers prior the installation. I was simply lazy and went the most convenient way. The re-installation was then a simply "habit" of just doing the same I did before.

Now, one and a half days later, things are getting running again. The tricky part was finding the space required for not just one, but two OSs in the previously full SATA disks. And I also had to find and install those drivers for XP so it could install. Then I could backup any data I could from those disks, defrag those, use Partition Magic to cut those two Linux partitions some space and then install Ubuntu as well.

Well, most of the programs are still missing, but OSs are up and running. And no, I didn't re-install Vista, I backed down to XP. My mere 2800+ single-core CPU and 1G of memory wasn't simply enought for smooth use... Basic system ate 700M of memory, even after I shut down about bazillion services, turned off most of the candy and so on. Pathetic.

Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword

Oh dear, Sid Meier has done it again! The original Civ4 was a total success, which revamped the whole system to a totally new level. The Warlords expansion to Civ4 was a failure in my eyes, but the Beyond the Sword expansion adds worthy content. Corporations, colonies, new civilizations and leaders, new techs etcetc, check the massive list here. The most addictive game is a tad more addictive now.

Thanks Sid, once again you made me lose my good night's sleep :)

First post

This is the first post to my new blog, which I chose to call 'The Tuminoid Affairs'. It doesn't mean anything special, I just suck at making up titles :)

So bear with me, I will be rambling here now and then, don't expect anything and you will not be disappointed either.