Towards the year-end my computing interests have been a bit of tit-and-dat.

I’ve developed quite a keen interest to finally resolve how to make 3-D graphics (on Linux).

Though it does seem a little bit kinky project, I try to remain stubborn enough to get some kind of object rotating on my screen. The past 10 years have seen GPUs increase their performance and features almost like in a fairy tale. Graphics cards can draw up to about 2-3 billion polygons a second!

As a side-effect I might bump into GTK toolkit, which is a cross-platform graphics palette to do user interfaces in. Gnome (a Linux window manager) has the very elemental and original look of GTK.

I am reading the book about Facebook’s birth and short history. Facebook is a high-profile start-up, perhaps one of the highest profiles in the last 10 years.

(A good by-story, if you got time, is the 1:33hr video on Youtube, about The Facebook Effect)

Another project that I’ve been putting a little bit of time is recording using SoundCloud.com as a storage partner. The relatively new service offers a 1 gigabyte free space for anyone signing up. If you want to share your own experimental music, or just chat around, recording your speech, take a look at SoundCloud. I’ve found it very smooth and interesting. Oh, and by the way, for some reason ‘cheese’ (Linux webcam software) stopped seeing my in-built webcam hardware. I’m only getting a blank screen in the window frame where usually a live webcam picture appears. Digging into it..

Firefox 4 latest beta 8 is interesting. I downloaded the browser yesterday, and have been trying it out.

It’s been freezing in southern Finland. Today, -6F (-21 celsius). It felt baaaaaaad. I took a walk to the city, using – for some wicked reason, the aesthetic me – not the shortest path. At one point I understood my fingers were practically numb. I bought a pair of real fluffy and rugged gloves, specially for the winter times. They are really warm, love them. Seems every now and then a tight winter temperatures remind me of where I live. This is very north. Norway extends more north, but then there’s Finland as a second player (Greenland not accounted for!)

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on getting the “odaxi” host up and running. I love Linux, so of course it runs a flavor of Ubuntu. The particular operating system becomes a part of your brain and body, once it is used daily. There is always new things to discover, both within and online.

My network is now speedy 18 mbit/s practically. It gets a dynamic IP number from DHCP server. I run light host-based defense systems also to make sure that intrudes cannot penetrate from within the network.

On the left side you can see an external 19″ monitor. This was a bargain at 110 eur a year ago. Nowadays, of course, there are better prices and sharper equipment. The idea of having an extra monitor for work, status, chat, or whatever you keep there, is something that has to be experienced before one believes it.

Captain’s Log, year 2006: supplemental
establishing computer maintenance and administration business in Finland

keywords: T:mi, toiminimi, Jukka, Paulin

My email to a friend; I am living in Klaukkala, Finland, at
the time. And just about having established my own
sole proprietorship in the computer / security and software
maintenance (administration) business.


Those laptops sure are nice toys to have around, but one
big grime: the cables! In order to configure a working set
of hardware, you suddenly have at least 10-15 meters of
different kinds of cables! A webcam, broadband modem, mouse,
external keyboard, power cables, the printer… I already
noticed this when my sister was taking home her work laptop,
and setting it up took around 5-10 minutes per session.

The Etera mutual pension fund approached me based on my
action to establish a business. I have so far had about
three, four calls from different service providers regarding
various aspects of business. I am currently looking at a
map at home, and thinking about geographical positioning
in the markets. Cities around population 15,000 up to
metropolitan Helsinki (520,000) will be my prime targets.
In the east I will limit my reach to Porvoo, approximately
64 kilometers from here (Klaukkala).

I am looking for laptops in Gigantti and on the net. I want
the laptop to be equipped with as few wires as possible;
in normal use, only maximum the power cable, nothing else!

Competitors seem to be charging anything from 30 to 100
euros per hour. Fifty euros could be a fair start for
my own company. It makes no sense to dump prices down.
Dumping, in markets, means that one makes very cheap products
or services, and increases aggressively the market share,
but ultimately often ends up with a situation where it
is difficult to satisfy customer needs; and with diminishing
margins.

About Learning

During the fall 2001, when attending to Structure and Organization
of Brain -course taught at Helsinki University of Technology, I
decided to jot down some extra-curricular notes, or a learning
diary.

Learning is a fascinating yet still mysterious process. It can be
viewed from a high abstraction point, where the pupils are
tested in standardized tests against the information content
in the subject matter. This is a rather narrow view of learning,
yet often it is kind of the compulsory or most practical one.

Intuitively, I like to think of learning as something you
go through, which thus leaves a mark in your brain, and
after you have learnt something it is very hard, if not
impossible, to truly unlearn it.

You can for example modify your behaviour to supress or exhibit some aspects
to some degree (i.e. you can have a new kind of attitude towards
things by just deciding this, but you cannot easily
change something which is inherently a feature in your native
personality).

Unlearning “information” or
“data” from your brain would be quite impossible, unless
it happened by an accident; a hit in the brain is known
to cause very curious damage in several functional areas
of thought. Think about trauma or psychosis; unlearning certain habits
like being late, or excessively ruminating about matters is hard.

Looking at the wide spectrum of learning

Learning probably happens at an extraordinarily wide scope
of levels. Some learning is mere imitation, like learning
the first steps in a sports. Or learning the multiplication
tables by rote. But what about learning general concepts of
life? How to behave well, how to cope with people, and how
to cope with yourself?

What are the factors leading to true insights? Why might
something suddenly seem so clear and easy, when it was
the most difficult thing to overcome just a moment before?

Real-world example: my first maths part-exam

I was studying in Helsinki University of Technology
for the fourth year. I was taking a maths basic course in
the fall of 2001. Had skipped about 1/2 of the lectures,
and attended no calculation practise sessions. I started
studying on the weekend, 2 days prior to exam.
I had a maximum of around 20 hours time to learn the
required things. I started reading at 5:50PM on Saturday.

o I checked the area of study from WWW pages. Our maths teacher
  has a tradition of always putting the very first words of 
  each assignment in the exam public before the exam takes place.
o Condition preparation: opening the window in my room to have
  CO2 out and O2 in (do not underestimate this), took couple
  of Kisandra food supplements (works with me), and some coffee.
  The dosage of coffee should be continous and incremental, 
  not a single 'bomb' into your stomach after which you are
  just doing the caffeine shakes, multiplexing from task to task
  and not much else. Do not use any stronger and illegal substances
  like amphetamine or the likes. They are no good to you in the
  long run. 
o during the first hour I was both amused and fascinated by 
  mathematics; by its quite abstract and declarative nature. 
The subjects included:
- basic mathematical logic, proving. Predicates, propositions,
  binding, logic theorems.
- matrices (operations: adding, subtracting, taking an inverse, transposing)
- basic algebra

Crinus’ Mobile Dreams

From work to centre of Helsinki to Airport

I am blasting near Helsinki with my parents’ car,
en route to the airport to deliver them this necessary
piece of transportation. Frustrated with the sluggish pace
of the traffic and the always-out-of-date information signs
(yes, I’ve taken the hint from Helsinki: cars not welcome)
I get an inspiration to write this text. I don’t know
the impact this has on anything, but it doesn’t (never has 😉
prevent me from writing it. If nothing else, it helps me to let out
some pressure.

Situation: I’m at work 3:30PM, going to deliver the car to my
parents, but before this a couple of friends and me decide to
go to the centre to get some more juggling props (clubs).

First stop: gasoline from the Esso station

Why can’t I pay using my cellular? They always have
queues at the desk, and I’m just too fed up with waiting.
It’s not that my (leisure) time would be that precious, it’s immeasurable
=)

I’m used to having a lot of leisure time, and after a good
work day in the IT-sector I wish to have zero unnecessary
burdens. Another service which I would certainly pay a small fee
would be querying for the cheapest gas station along my planned
route, say, I would be pinpointed using GSM technology and I would
provide a parameter (radius in kilometers) and the service would give
me the name and driving instructions of the cheapest station (or
one that would meet other criteria, such as level of service).

Second need: which traveling method in the city?

I arrive at the end of the motorway, just about to enter
the city. Traffic slows significantly down, and we begin
a chatter about which way we could get to the juggling store
fastest. Should we continue driving the car, or
should we take the subway, or a combination of public transportation
methods? Guessing, guessing. I want answers, which are
very likely true. The information system I have in mind
would be updateable, knowing of traffic jams, average
traffic densities (where real-time information wouldn’t be
available), road blocks, and the timetables of public transportation.
I could make queries like "I’m at point A, wishing to go
to point B, tell me how to do it". The computations and
databases are quite massive and complex, but the whole idea
of this kind of service would be that the end-user would get
a simple, natural language answer to the question.
The service might answer something like:

Take bus number NNN (in 3 min.) to CENTRE,
followed by SUBWAY to EAST at 10:11AM.
You will arrive in place XXX estimated
10:16AM.

At the airport: parking fee, info snippets

I park the car in
a 30-minute parking lot.
The fee has to be paid using coins (which of course
you don’t have at hand, an evidence of this
is the woman coming right after me and talking to her
husband about the machine not accepting notes).
And still, I’ve more than once spent half an eternity
trying to make a machine believe my notes are valid.
They often keep ejecting the notes several times
before accepting.

I pay the sum of 20 FIM and I get 30 minutes of parking
time. The machine slips me two paper notes:
one which I shall place inside the car for parking
area personnel to see, and the other which reminds me
when my time is up. If this had been done using a
cellular, it would be very handy to get a countdown
meter of some kind running in the display.

Knowing the totally chaotic situation of air traffic
in Europe, it would be nice to receive little informative SMS-style
messages about current situation, eg. in my case it would have
been that all incoming international flights are coming through
the second arrival hall (actually the people are coming, not
the planes, I hope). An extension might be that before you arrive
at the airport, you would tell the service which flight you are
waiting for, and you would get information concerning that
particular flight.

Conclusions

All of these services are just waiting to get implemented.
Anyone?

(a sidenote: the text was written in year 2000, in Espoo Finland)