Significant speedup for Firefox

I noticed a tweak for Firefox that enables, what they call, HTTP Pipelining. Basically what this means is that instead of sending HTTP request sequentially, send them in parallel. This feature is disabled by default in Firefox (even in the most recent version, 2.0) probably because it is still (at least since 2004...) an experimental feature but it seems to work very well. I noticed a significant improvement in page loading times. I hope that the Firefox team would enable this feature by default since it shouldn't do any harm even for slower Internet connections and it would be yet another improvement over IE.

It feels like Opera has done this kind of page request from day one and that's why it "feels" different to browse the web with Opera, but in this case, the difference is a positive one.

Here are the instructions for enabling HTTP pipelining: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1299854/posts

A nostalgy trip - my BBS!

I noticed I had some old screenshots lying around of my old Bulletin Board System, BBS, RedZone! The system was operational from 1996 until 1999m which means I jumped on the BBS wave a bit too late since the big time for BBS' was in the early 90s. But I, as so many other, had a wonderful time running my own BBS and calling other's systems. It was a great way to learn to know other people and several of my good friends are ones I met online - in BBSs that is.

I believe I had about 800 users of which a few tens called regularly. My system attracted users mainly of the discussion forums. No, I wasn't one of the WaReZ boards ;) First I used my main computer as the board and tested it under DOS, but quite soon I got a dedicated PC running OS/2 Warp 3 and 4 with a SCSI disc :) Then later when OS/2 became a bit too old for doing anything else with, I moved over to Linux in 1998. I still have the bought version of RedHat Linux 5.2 lying around here somewhere!

The software I used is called BBBS (greets go to B!) of which I first used the OS/2 version and moved over to the Linux version. BBBS is still available as a shareware version with tons of features, including features supporting the Internet era and the author, B, still offers support for it.

Below are the four remaining screenshots of my board. I wish I took and saved more screenshots... :-/ Please, post your screenshots of your board if you have some!



Login screen
Note: My board offered free email to all users, which was a big thing in 1998.


My file section. About 1GB of files, carefully sorted by hand to include only quality (pictures, tracker music, demos and some shareware/freeware applications)


Bulletins - stats, my own scripts and other's and some door games.
(Greets go to Fopa for the color editor and login scroll!)


My last message to the board.

Special treatment because of a religion?

I dont think so.

The Guardian web site has an interesting point of view to religions: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2006/10/acgrayling.html. I totally agree with the article. Why should anyone consider themselves somehow special compared to others just because they say they chosen to belive in something? I could also say I belive in the Santa Claus or the Allmighty Spaghetti Monster behind my refridgerator but would I get special treatment because of that? No.

A great quote from the article I noticed:
"They [the belivers]claim, on no justifiable ground, a right to special status and special treatment on the sole ground that they have chosen to believe a set of propositions; and they demand that people who do not accept their beliefs and practices should treat these latter in ways that implicitly accept their holder's evaluation of them."

An example of this is the scandal over the Muhammed cartoons a Danish newspaper published in Denmark.

An other example are immigrants in a countries. I don't consider myself a racist person, but I do feel that people coming to live in a country must live according to the rules of the sociaty in that country. They just can't take a day off from work because their religion says so or take a break at work because they have to pray. I don't say they can't take a break at all - just that they have to take the break according to the same rules as everyone else does!

We have to respect each other, but that goes both ways. No-one can expect special treatment because of their faith.

"No one could dream of demanding that political parties be respected merely because they are political parties, or of protecting them from the pens of cartoonists; nor that their members should be. On the contrary. And so it should be for all interest groups and their members, without exception."

My first video editing test

Hah! I made my first attempts to play with video editing. It's actually quite fun :) Anyway, you can see the result of what I made at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZFHFT8XNs0

But that said, it's just for testing how editing is done :)

My trip to Helsinki

I was on a work related trip to Helsinki. I had a really nice time with my friends, Niklas and Mats. A start likeing this way of working ;)

EDIT: The above text was written directly from my SonyEricsson k610i mobile phone which has Blogger integrated. nice :)
Yep, that is Niklas goofing around. He just can't have a straight face when I take a picture of him. :) The picture was taken in the lounge of the hotel I was staying in, Scandic Simonkenttä in Helsinki. I liked the place a lot.

Flickr!

OMG! I just payed for a free web service!!

That's right. I subscribed to Flickr Pro. I know all the photos I shoot in the future are going to be digital so why not start using a good solution from the beginning. I get 2GB upload stream each month whcih I know is more than enough for my photos. And I can store unlimited number of pictures.

I also like to idea behind tagging and sets. I know not all are happy with them. But I didn't have such a good structure on my computer for my pictures. Maybe that's why I haven't been interested in taking or publishing photos. Maybe Flickr will make me want to shoot more pictures now...

So let's see how Flickr does! I loved it the period I tested it with 20 megs of upload a month and I feel it is like made for me.

SIC's Club Show 2006, Helsinki

We took a small trip to Helsinki today. We took Elvis to a dog show for the first time with us. It was SIC's (which stands for Italian Greyhound & Cirneco dell'Etna Club of Finland which we are members of) Club Show 2006.


The show started at 10a.m. and because we don't own a car and we had to take taxi, the train, taxi to get there - and the same back - we had to take a train departing at 6.30 a.m. *sigh*. It was a really beautiful morning and we had time to eat our breakfast at Töölönlahti, Helsinki which was nice.

The feeling at the show was family like. The same people seems to travel to different shows and they know each other. So it didn't feel the least a competition after all. We had the chance to meet all of the sisters to Elvis (the dog) and his parents as well. And he was excited about it, of course! The weather was hot and maybe a bit too hot for Riki, as you can see from the picture. Overall it was quite a nice experience!

Ok, so what was the outcome of the show and/or competition? Well, Elvis didn't qualify in his class. Although Elvis got some good comments from the judge, he felt Elvis was too unsure of himself. After all, he has a tendency to freak out of even the smallest thing, bicycles and trollies for example. So I felt he did ok after all. Here is what the judge said about Elvis (translated from Swedish to English):

"An elegant puppy. Beautiful skin, correct expression. Good eyes, thin fine lips. Excellent ears. Good angles (?) in front, ok breast depth. Good angles on the rear feet. Moves good from the side and back, although still a bit sloppy. Needs to be a bit more sure of himself."

So taken into account that Elvis is only soon 9 months old and this was his second or third apperance in a dog show, I think he did quite well! I couldn't see large differances between the dogs so I feel Elvis got quite nice reviews.

I set up a small collection of the photos we took at Flickr. Go see them by visiting this set.

Air conditioning

I never saw myself being one of those who buy air conditioning at home. But the weather has been so hot the couple of past days that I cracked. I think you cant put a price on a good nights sleep.

It is ugly as hell and has a quite loud noice. But the room is at nice temperature of 21C :) That's all that matters!

My bike is hot!

I was riding my motor cycle for fun because the weather was this time so great (approx 9 months of the year the temperature in Finland is below 15C...). The sun was shining from couldless sky and the temperature was at 30C (a bit too hot for riding a bike with all the gears on).


I ended up in Paimio. A really beautiful small town in the country side approx 30km from Turku. I stopped for some Coce and ice cream and suddenly these two nice looking girls come up to me. I was stunned because usually no attractive looking girls come suddenly and talk to me ;) They asked if they could photograph themselves on my bike! Of course!

I think they were from Russia and I have no clue what they were doing in the middle of nowhere, Paimio. But I hope they got some good pictures :)

My new mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson K610i review

Today I received my new mobile phone, Sony Ericsson K610i.

I had been waiting for "The Perfect Phone" for some while because my earlier phone, Sony Ericsson K700i, is having some construction problems with the joystick (that Sony Ericsosn won't of course confess. But it is a general known fact that earlier Sony Ericsson joystick's are crap, dust collectors).

To put a long story short, I just have to say that I really like the K610i! You can read other general reviews of the phone (for example at Mobile Review) so I wont write anything conclusive. Just give some of my opinions based on some hours of playing around with it.

Pros

• 3G - I don't know if 3G has delivered even half of the huge hype from the past, but I just have to love it! It's not like wireless broadband but a great improvement from GPRS. Maybe the speed difference feels like the one between a modem and a ISDN connection; nothing like ADSL but a great improvement! 3G was one of the reasons I chose this phone.
  
• size - it's small. I wanted a small phone over a full features Nokia 9300i communicator for example. Weighting at just 96g it lighter than my previous phone, K700i. It's a bit taller in size, but then again a but thinner.
• RSS - a perfect application for a mobile phone. I what I really love, is the integration between the RSS reader and the web browser. If a web site has a RSS feed, I can subscribe to it directly from the web pages. I can schedule the feeds to be updated automatically or manually.
• Blogging - Blogger is integrated! I can take a picture and publish it directly on my blog without needing to login first. When I first published a picture from the phone, I got a new blog. But when I logged in to this "temporary" blog, I got the chance to merge the mobile blog with my real blog and then in the future all the entries are automatically published on my blog. It's really well implemented! You can take a nice picture and publish an entry for it in literally seconds.
  
• Camera - ok, so the camera is not anything like the one in K800i. It doesn't have autofocus or a flashlight. But who cares? I am not intending to replace my digital camera with my phone. The camera is a really decent 2MP camera that I can take snapshots with. The image manipulation features integrated in the phone are really good which will compensate a bit from the lacking quality of the camera. I can for example take panorama pictures, adjust color levels, brightness, eliminate read-eyes and other basic stuff.

Sony Ericsson has promoted very stongly Sony's Walkman brand. This phone does not have the Walkman MP3 player, but the MP3 player is really decent anyway! I can find songs by artist, genre and playlist. And the MP3 player is playing in the background so I can continue to use my phone as before. Nothing fancy, but works better than in older Sony Ericsson phones.
The phone also includes a Memory Stick micro card reader. I am thinking of buying a 512 MB memory card to hold some music :) (The phone description says that the card is not included, but my phone had a 64MB card inside!)

And needless to say, the Sony Ericsson's GUI is supirior to the Series60 GUI! It's really fast and intuitive. All the settings are in correct places, I can make my old shortcuts and the general placement of menus and icons just feels right, in contrast to the S60 GUI.

Cons:

• The web browser is unable to render event slightly more difficult web pages. I haven't tried using it with "Smart-fit" turned off or without pictures. But I guess Opera Mini will have to do.
  

Sony Ericsson K610i is a great replacement for my K700i! It has all the features I looked for in a modern mobile phone. One can always ask for mobile TV or iPod-like MP3 players in mobile phones, but I already have an iPod and I don't think I currently need mobile TV - I don't really watch TV anyway. So I was looking for a mobile phone and got one that suits me really well.

My bike

This is a picture of my motorcycle. Its also a test to send a picture from my new Sony Ericsson K610i phone :)

allofmp3.com - too good to be true?

What would you be willing to pay for a music album in mp3 format if that same album would be available for free, if illigally pirated, from for example The Pirate Bay? Not much, I guess? I think this is the fact what makes allofmp3.com so successful. The site offers music albums in mp3 and ogg vorbis formats, among others, for a price of about $2. And this site is legal! At least under Russian law.

Now the US government has demanded that the site must be shut down. Why? When does the US government realize the small fact that the so called "world outside US borders" is not one of US states! The same thing happened with The Pirate Bay. The rumor has it that the US government forces Swedish authorities to seize the servers despite the fact the the Swedish police knew the server didn't contain anythin illegal!

From the site http://www.museekster.com/allofmp3faq.htm:
“MP3's, OGG's, etc are not illegal in the USA and therefore can be imported. There is also no law against importing music from other countries (including Russia). Because you are buying this legally in Russia and then importing to the USA, this should be 100% legit. For example, assuming that Russian Vodka is illegal to buy in the USA on Sunday, but you buy the Russian Vodka in Moscow on Sunday, then you import it into the USA, you have done nothing wrong. Again, this assumes that 1) it is illegal to buy Russian Vodka on Sunday in the USA 2) it is legal in Moscow and 3) it is legal to import Russian Vodka.�

The license agreement on allofmp3.com states that you may not use the service if it is in conflict with the legislation of your country. How should I know if this kind of international business between for example myself and a Russian company is legal or not if the product(s) itself is legal!?

I think the music industry, and the US government for that matter, has failed to realize that people will find music illegally and are not willing to pay if they can find the same content for free. They should realize that if they can get any money for downloaded mp3s they should be happy! I am willing to pay for the kind of service allofmp3.com provides, that is, provides fast download rates and latest albums even if I could the same for free and the artists wouldn't get anything at all. Now they get at least something...

Last but not least; I am not supporting piracy in general! I do buy CD albums from all the bands I really like (I have about 150 CD albums)! These CDs I would anyway rip to mp3s and put them into my MP3 jukebox.
But then there is music I might be interested in, but I wouldn't want to pay the full price for it - then the options are to pirate the content, or buy it cheap from allofmp3.com.

DogCam

I put up a webcam so I can follow from work what our two dogs are doing :) So can you at http://www.johanpaul.com/rikicam.html

Note: The webcam if probably offline in the evenings. And probably even more often :)

The next game console?

I started playing computer games on my friend's Commodore64. I've always loved computer gaming over console gaming but sooner or later I have to admit that console gaming is somewhat more enjoyable than playing a game on your PC.

First of all you can sit on the couch, sit back and relax. With HDTV resolution the console games look even better on your TV than on your monitor. And your monitor is probably not a 32" wide screen either.

XBox introduced the fact that online gaming can be done with consoles. The next generation consoles all have online support. So not even this supports PC gaming anymore.

But in some areas console gaming can't beat PC gaming - at least yet. I can't imagine playing Civilization 4 or The Sims on a console. Strategy and simulators will probably be the strong point for PC gaming even in the future. But the fact is that shooters (Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2...) and RPG games (The Elder's Scroll: Oblivion, ...) are enormously popular genres which both work very well on consoles.

So probably I have to upgrade my Playstation2 to a next generation gameing console anyway (of course I can stop playing console games, but maybe that's not an option in the short run...)


Playstation 3
Sony's PS2 is the second most sold game console after the PS1. So Sony has an enourmous influence on the whole console gaming phenomenon. It is thanks to the PS2, the gaming industri is a larger business than the Hollywood movie industry!

But I don't know what to expect from the upcoming PS3.

• It's late. Microsoft's XBox 360 will have an 1 year upfront before Sony even gets the hardware to stores. During this time, the 360's games have also evolved to a second or third generation. SOny will have some catch-up to do.
• The price. I can buy a XBox 360 with all the goodies for 400 euros. Why would I want to spend 600 euros on some other hardware with probably the same (or even less) processing power?
• Blu-ray. Why?! What's with the new technology? Why invent the wheel once again? We already have DVD and HD-DVD which both are already working technologies and would be enough for next generation gaming. *sigh*
• Online gaming. If you belive the myths, Sonys online gaming platform is still vapourware when Microsoft already has a working online community.

And that's not even all. It seems that Sony's engineers screwed up big time. Just read this article from Ihe Inquirer: PS3 Hardware slow and broken. I think we have to be optimistic if we think Sony will get the hardware to stores this year.

The only thing that can save PS3 is the games. People buy the hardware to play games. Killer exclusive games like the GTA series could save it. But unfortunately for example GTA4 will be available for the 360. And the next big hype thing from Remedy, Alan Wake, will be exlusivly available for the 360 and Windows Vista. Great marketing campaign there from Microsoft!

Maybe I just wait and see. And then buy the XBox 360...

Sony-Ericsson or Nokia - that is the question.

I've been looking for a new phone for about six months now. I know the features I look in a phone but it just seems that there isn't a phone with everything I want. That is a typical dilemma in life of course, but at least I want to try to find the perfect phone for me.

(Sony-)Ericsson has been my phone for the past 5 years now. I never really liked the Series60 user interface and at the time I change my Nokia 6110 for a Ericsson T39, I haven't looked back. I still think Sony-Ericsson makes the best phones out there. But don't get me wrong; Nokia has phones with loads of features that no one else has, but I don't see myself in the market spot using those kinds of phones (e.g. I don't want to open an Excell spreadsheet in my phone... gee!).

I didn't see any reason to buy a Nokia before Nokia E60 came out. It has loads of features other phones a waiting for. But Sony-Ericsson seems almost too perfect for me.

I got this opportunity to buy the Nokia E60 really cheap. But now I really don't know which one to buy. Here's my thoughts of the both phones:

• Really small, like my current phone, K700i. Fits the hand really nice.
• 3G communication
• HTML4 complian www-browser.
• 2MP camera + integrated VGA kamera => video calls possibly.
• I love the S-E user interface. It's logical and fast.

• Brilliant display (16M colors).
• Great communication (3G + WLAN)
• Great WWW-browser (Opera)
• Better email client than S-E.
• I don't like the Series60 user interface.
• Earlier Symbian OS versions have been really buggy, slow and both!
• The phone is really big in my hand (not compared to a 9300i, but compared to the K610i)
• I get it really cheap (which is not anything close to free though...).

So I don't really know what to do. In any case, both are great phones. Now I guess it is a matter of prioritizing. If I had lots of money, I would probably buy them both ;)

We got a new dog

Today we got our second dog! It's an 7 month old Italian Greyhound called Elvis.

We wanted a second dog as a friend for our first dog, Riki. Of course Elvis will not replace Riki in any way and thus Elvis is on a trial period for a while. If we have any kinds of problems, we have to give Elvis back. But that's ok because Riki is of course number one :)

But an Italian Greyhound is an interesting breed. They have been used a lot in painting and have been a popular dog by the royalties. It is an active dog that is popular in for example agility courses. Lure coursing is another activity well-fitted to the Italian Greyhound, and they seem to enjoy it tremendously. Although the Italian Greyhound is a very fast dog, it is not as well suited to racing as its larger cousin. In a matter of fact, our interest for the Italian Greyhound waked some weeks ago when we tried lure cursing with our Riki dog.

An other interesting aspect of the breed is that it is not that common. During our first walks out, Elvis cought a lot of attention. It looks anything but a typical dog like a Golden retriever for example. It look maybe more of a overgrown rat :) ...just kidding. Elvis is quite addorable.

Lordi won Eurovision song contest - YES!!!

Lordi did something to the Finnish music industry no-one thought possible some weeks ago. Lordi won the Eurovision song contest with an all-time score record!

I am totally speechless! I have loved heavy metal music all my life and I didn't see a day coming where heavy will win the most ridiculous pop music contest. But here it is. Now metal music can been seen as an accepted trend of music.

I think a part of it is just because of what the Eurovision song contest has become - a ridiculous song contenst and Lordi was the right type of anarcy it needed. But the song was good!

HARD ROCK HALLELUJAH!!