With the first, agile, method you need to maintain strong discipline and actually make the effort of keeping things clean, even though it isn't fun. The second method, is a lot easier day-to-day, but the cleaning day is usually a source of agony to all participants. Neither method is inherently superior to the other, but they have different advantages and disadvantages.

For example, if you have surprise guests, or your spouse arrives a few hours early (ahem), the agile method of keeping the house clean all the time works well. The house is already in a good shape - just do some dusting and that's it. With the second method, you will find yourself apologizing for your messy apartment many, many times. Or out of laundry detergent just when you need it. On the other hand, the second method works really well if you don't spend a lot of time in the house, and/or if you have contractors, er, a hired cleaner coming in every week.

Agile methods can usually cope with changed plans, schedules and scope - but they require a lot of discipline to maintain, and they're not necessarily fun. The laissez-faire methods may be fun, but they're inherently brittle when it comes to change. Waterfall (=doing lots of planning what to clean before actually doing any cleaning) is usually brittle and NOT fun ;-).

Ok, so it's kind of fun to laugh at people who don't quite get the Internet. I'm personally kind of pissed at the Green party, who doesn't seem to be able to pull any coherent opinion on these internet things and tends to treat them as matters of conscience more than a party line. Not even individuals in that party seem to be able to form a defensible opinion.

Then again, this internet shit is actually really hard to grasp. Think about it: there is a growing mass of twentysomethings, who have been living on the internet their entire life. They are digital natives. They can build a world-changing service in a weekend (not all of them can pull it off, but some do). They live in two worlds at the same time - in fact, they're one and the same for them. They rewrite reality as they see fit and they LIKE to twiddle with it. They are used to rapid iteration - you build something, you toss it out to the public; if it doesn't work - you change it or abandon completely. Doing, not planning.

In contrast, the politicians talk endlessly, and then they vote, and that's it. No iteration - bugs may get fixed after a long process. The Finnish criminal code - which is still in use - dates from frigging 1889, though obviously it's been patched since. The entire legislation runs on waterfall, but the current generation is growing in complete agile mode. Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) doesn't care about what the legislation says about privacy - he does it, and if enough people complain, he changes it. That man is one of the most influential people on this planet when it comes to privacy, and whatever politicians talk about it does not matter.

And no, I'm not advocating using SCRUM for legislation - I wouldn't like to be tried under "law 2.0 beta" - but the clock speed difference is real and it's there. As Lawrence Lessig says: "Code is Law". I would even go as far as saying "Code is Reality", since many aspects of our life are now completely dependent on the Code: banks, jobs, communication, traffic... It's everywhere: we almost breathe it. But few people are really, truly aware of it.

And to me it seems that this is what is missing from this whole discussion around "digital property" and DRM and piracy - at least here in Finland: the realization that piracy is not a disease. It is a symptom of something more profound which is happening in the society as we speak, and henceforth any attempt at stopping piracy is about as useful as painting the walls when the house foundations are crumbling: might fool some people all of the time, and all people for some of the time, but the house will still collapse.

The interesting thing is that since it's unstoppable, watching people and corporations kick and scream while they're being dragged into the new age is kinda fun. In 20 years, the 20somethings of today will be in their fourties and start to have major power in corporations and governments. And in 40 years, everybody who gets to make decisions is a digital native, and they'll be fighting their own inability to grasp the changing world.

It just really bugs me that people just paint the walls and try to sell me the house as "fully renovated."

Yksi Rastimo kumoaa yhden Kasvin vaikutuksen, enkä koe enää sopivaksi antaa ääntäni puolueelle, jossa ollaan noinkin pihalla nykyisyydestä - saati sitten tulevaisuudesta.

One of the key ingredients in horror genre is stress. Usually this comes from powerful visual imagery or - in the case of gaming - the players own imagination as they visualize the horrors that their characters encounter. Or it can be more subtle and come from collapsing relationships or watching someone you love destroy themselves. However, it's a bit difficult to get yourself into the horror genre when one player is hunting for Cheetos and another one is reading a rulebook. Focus is very important.

Deadlines tend to focus people very efficiently. They also generate loads of stress, as anyone who has to live by a calendar knows. So I figured that it's worth a shot: introducing artificial deadlines into gaming should introduce stress and focus into the game, even though it is not a horror element as such. As players are very good at suspending disbelief when it comes to imagining that dice can represent monsters, surely it would be easy to believe that one kind of stress is actually some other kind of stress?

Turns out this theory works wonderfully. So I'm running a Call of Cthulhu game, in which each game is limited by a chess clock to a period of maybe 35 minutes at its shortest to 1h 30min at its longest. I set the clock to a shorter time if the scenario is straight-forward and needs lots of action; if I want to get a darker, threatening but slower game, I give the clock a bit more time. There is an in-game device which does tell the characters the time as well, and it's fairly easy to explain as an "alien device which tells how much time there is left before the portal closes, but sometimes it runs faster and sometimes it runs slower and you don't really know when and how." If they players say "we fly to Paris", then the clock runs really slow; if they enter combat, the minutes drain very fast. But I am unsure whether you would really require that kind of an in-game device at all. Do try and tell me.

Of course, since the clock does not stop for anything it means that the GM needs to be very knowledgeable of the game as well. There just isn't time to go leafing through the sourcebooks: everything has to come out in a snap. I joke that in this game, writing a scenario takes longer than playing it. But the increased intensity of the situation is well worth it; it's very rewarding for the game master to get swept away by the emotion flowing from the players.

And buy, is there emotion. I am not sure as I was rather immersed in the game myself too, but I think I saw a player jump to his feet in excitement last time we played. And you can hear the creeping terror in their voices, as they try to figure out exactly how to keep a gigantic fluid creature in a barred cage (answer: there is no way) with 15 minutes left on the clock and the friendly receptionist they tied to a table so that she would be safe is going to be EATEN ALIVE by a thing that crawls on the floor and ululates in a terrible, forgotten language and they possibly don't have time to do everything they NEED to do and they simply have to choose who to save...

For a middle-aged guy with a family, gaming with a clock does bring in other benefits as well: games have a well-defined length, which means that they're easier to plan for. They're also easy to play as fillers or when all people can't make it - since the sceneario ends by clock, there's never a case where the scenario gets "adjourned in a suitable place so that we can continue later on". It does not preclude long campaigns, but it does require certain advance planning, since the players will not spend time digging up all the clues.

Obviously, this wouldn't work for everyone and for every campaign, but I was surprised to see how well it worked for us. Instead of a book, think of a TV series: 42 minutes, and that has to be the whole story. Think Pecha Kucha: you have time to tell maybe one or two things, and then it's over.

And hey, if it's boring, at least it's over fast. ;-)

• Whining. This is the lowest form of feedback, because it mostly just concentrates on why the complainers life is useless without such-and-such feature, and often also includes predictions of doom.
• HelloKitty. OMG LOL LOV UR SITE KTHXBYE. Probably positive, but one can never be too sure. Also known as "fly-by thanks."
• Complaints. People who have a genuine problem and have gone through the effort of actually filing a complaint. While they can be annoying, the concerns they do raise are genuine and can really make a positive impact on your product. After all, they care about your stuff. Can become good allies, even ambassadors.
• Reviews. These are an old-fashioned and not always very relevant form of feedback. Since they come conceptually from old media, they usually are not changed after publishing, and therefore work only for products which are changed rarely. For a modern web site which are updated sometimes several times a day, they are obsoleted quickly.
• Bonepicking. No matter what you do, some people have a bone to pick with you or your company, and will take everything that you do in negative light. Slips easily into whining, but can be a genuine complaint too.
• Awards. Awesome stuff, if given genuinely.
• Ambassadors. Folks that are so into your product that they go out and spread the word. Treat these people well, for their feedback carries extra weight.
• Faux criticism. This is usually just cloaked whining. It appears on the surface to be useful, but often turns out to be a complete failure to understand what the product is supposed to be doing and applying it to a focus group of one. ("My cell phone does not whip cream very well. I think there's a big portion of people in the world who would like to whip cream with their phones. If you cannot bring such a product to market, you will lose all those people.")
• Fair criticism. This is the kind of stuff that one should really grip when it comes in. It doesn't mean that you should do what it says, but at least you should understand where it comes from, and preferably respond kindly.
• Mehs. "Yeah, it's kinda okay." This is a good warning sign that your product isn't rocking the boat, but as for its informational value it's pretty much zero.
• Anons. Anonymous/pseudonymous commentary on web sites. This is almost like noise, and going through it is usually as useful as peeling your skin with sandpaper. Yeah, it does exfoliate, but it's painful and you could spend the time more wisely.
• Peekaboo. Comes in, gives you an incomplete bug report, and then completely disappears or is unable to give any more information. Often does not have very good language skills.
• Thanks. Just simple, heartfelt thanks. While they may not make your product better, they do make you feel better, and that's really why you do what you do, don't you?

In addition, everyone who was an admin in the FB fan group, got their accounts disabled as well.

Will write more on this topic soon; at the moment my head is full of snot, I'm feeling feverish, the kid is tired and screaming, and a neighbour has decided to drill a gigantic hole in their apartment (the relationship between the last two is left as an exercise to the reader). My life these days is all about distractions.

One thing I'm fairly proud of still in that code are the RGB -> HAM/HAM8 conversion routines. HAM was this curious Hold-and-Modify mode in which you got to change only one of the RGB components, all the other ones were picked from the left neighbour pixel. Since that meant that in HAM you could only have 16 base colors (4 bit plans) and in HAM8 64, choosing the right palette was really hard. Many people just stuck to a preset palette, and tried to match it, but my routine built a histogram of the image and tried to choose the best possible palette. I still occasionally receive comments about how great the images look - though it's now been a couple of years since the last one - but for a program which hasn't seen active development since ~1995 that's pretty good.

Anyhoo, enough nostalgia. The code is GPL and available in this SVN repo if you want to see how badly I used to program. Lots of C code there... The HAM conversion routines are here and here.

Well, I've been thinking (which became my favourite phrase after @MikaelJungner said that every time he utters it in the Finnish Broadcasting Corporation's management team meetings, everybody starts screaming). Perhaps the real competition is the television.

I have a few arguments. First, the situation is analoguous to the early days of the mobile phone: everybody had a fixed landline, which was shared. It was in one place, and everybody had to take turns. Much like the current television set: it's in one place, we usually have one room which enshrines it in some way, and you only watch one channel at a time. Yes, now, if you find this a problem, quite a few households especially in the Western countries own more than one television these days, which makes them personal televisions. But they're still largely immobile and tied to one place.

The second argument is that media industry loves the iPad. Here they have an opportunity to keep going what they already have, outside of regulation, and have total control of who watches and what. No more worrying about the analog hole, because Apple doesn't care about interop. They will control, together with Apple, the entire production chain from source to screen. No need to change business models or worry about privacy.

Now, if pad computers become personal television sets, that means that the advertisers will get extremely accurate data on who saw what and who bought what. The knowledge that is accumulated in the Apple App Store and iTunes Music Store about consumer behaviour is simply the best data available anywhere on the planet, except perhaps for the data collected by Google. And people give this willingly and even pay for the privilege.

The fourth argument is the fact that internet distribution is way superior to broadcast. Get what you want, when you want.

The fifth argument is that people are getting very much used to now living in a virtual world. Smartphones and computers have given people the opportunity of changing few but intensive connections to a large number of less intensive connections - and people have chosen those en masse. Just look at how there is always someone who fiddles with their Apple/Blackberry/Nokia/Samsung wherever you are. So losing one of the bastions of togetherness in the living room doesn't sound that bad anymore. (Though this is a fairly controversial argument - I think that it might actually be good that living rooms become living rooms again as opposed to consumption rooms.)

The sixth argument is that TV set makers know this already. The new high-end TV sets have integration to Youtube and social media services - but I think it's not going to work. TV sets aren't personal to the degree that social media would work on them.

The iPad form factor is excellent (though the bloody thing is still way too heavy, but that'll be corrected in a year or two) for snuggling in bed and watching telly. It doesn't heat up the same way a laptop does; it doesn't keep noise like a laptop does; and it doesn't bring in the cognitive complexity as a laptop does.

So I'm going to hazard a guess here: pads will be the personal media centres for home, killing off television sets the same way mobile phones killed landlines. They won't kill television as such, because moving to the iPad is the path of least resistance for the media companies, but it will punish them because now there will be a new distributor in the chain who will grab a bite out of every sale.

It's alien, it's frightening, it's beautiful, it's dangerous and we're completely and utterly dependent on it. If it burps in the wrong way, we're all dead.

(For larger images, click on the link.)

Joten vaikka äänestänkin Vihreitä, niin en ole kovin myrtynyt ydinvoimaluvista. Ydinvoima on kuitenkin riittävän saasteeton (poislukien ydinjäte, joka jälleen on vain lokaali ongelma) ja antaa meille tarpeeksi energiaa, jotta voidaan siirtyä pidemmällä tähtäimellä tyystin pois saastuttavista energiamuodoista. Ja kuvittelen, että uusiutuvien energiamuotojen tuki oli Vihreiltä työvoitto ja riittävä hinta periaatteista lipsumiselle.

But, as a software engineer, I cringe at techniques which haven't actually been tried out. It is scary to think that we wouldn't try any of those things before we really NEED it to work, or else all humanity dies.

So here's a question: why don't we test out one or two of those deflection techniques and bombard Venus? Take an engine and put something on collision course with an actual planet. We could also blow up one or two stray asteroids to see if theories about rock and nukes really hold up... Venus is quite similar to Earth in size, so we might get useful info on what to actually expect from a really large explosion. Or a bunch of small ones if we blow up an asteroid just close by.

Just saying... ;-)

Whenever it runs out of battery, it wails like a banshee. "EEEE-OOOO". "EEEE-OOOO". A horrible, piercing noise which cuts through silence like a high-powered laser through dissidents. Last night, it woke us both up, and we just laid there, panting, all ready to fight or flee, until I remembered that little feature and was able to calm my panicking wife.

Once, it went off in the overhead compartment during plane takeoff. I tried to look as nonchalant as possible as everyone else in the plane was gripping their armrests and peeing their pants. It's NOT the sound you want to hear at the possibly most dangerous phase of flying.

Luckily, the screeching doesn't last too long. It just rings a couple of times, before the machine runs out of battery and shuts down. And that's what's really curious - what on Earth did go through the designer's mind? I mean, I could understand it if it screamed five minutes before battery runs out, so that you could actually have time to find a charger and plug it in? But no, this really just informs about the "well, I'm out of battery and you can't do anything about it anymore" -condition. Why would I ever want to be signaled about something I can't really do nothing about, and what I will notice the next time I try to start the laptop anyway?

And why, in <deity>'s name, did it have to be designed to be so loud?

I am very grateful to all the people I have met during this journey, and who have taught me, both in good and bad. And it's been a long journey. Remember, I joined Nokia in 2002 when 7650, the first S60 phone, was still under wraps and was the thing which pretty much started all this smartphone brouhaha. Now, smartphones are everywhere, and there's a good, fresh and exciting competition on that promises to be every bit as interesting as the introduction of the internet to the whole world. Good luck to everyone, since no matter what happens, it's the people who win.

What's next then? Well, I'm taking up something more ambitious and challenging: I've accepted the offer to join Thinglink as their CTO. Yes, it's a startup. Yes, it's going to mean plenty of work. And yes, if stuff breaks down, it will be all my fault.

But Thinglink will also be a fertile ground to grow some seeds of fresh thought and opportunity. We'll be doing some really exciting stuff, and hopefully knock over a few established thoughts while doing so. As the "Godfather of NFC" (as I am sometimes jokingly referred as) at Nokia I've had my hand in making a part of the Internet of Things to go live, and I ain't done yet.

(Oh, and BTW, we'll be hiring. Watch this space.)