Is Nokia "Tube" my next phone?

Ok, so the rumors are out: Nokia is about to release its first touch screen phone (in years) with an upgraded, modern S60 user interface. October the 2nd is around the corner so let's wait and see what it holds for us. I still have my SonyEricsson K610i as my main phone and I am looking to upgrade it. But none of the phones have really impressed me so far. I have had my opportunities to play with other Nokia phones, mostly S60 3.1 and 3.2 but I hate the old version of the S60 UI. If Nokia has managed to pull of a decent modern touch based UI, I think Tube has what it takes to replace my SonyEricsson.

Tube's specifications (again, according to rumors) are really impressive; 3.2" touch screen with 640 x 320 pixels, HSDPA connectivity, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, A-GPS, Wifi and, most importantly for me, a 3.5mm headphone jack. It should also be shipped with a 8 GB memory card and this makes the phone my perfect MP3 player as well. See, I am also looking to replace my current 1GB iPod Nano (1st gen) with something else and I really want to be able to use my phone as an MP3 player as well. But I don't want just an ok MP3 player in my phone - I want an MP3 player in my phone to replace my current one!

Looking at the specs, I really can't understand what the fansboys are whining about that this would "only" be a mid-range phone. Come on! What do you expect from a phone? How is some N96 or N85 any better than Tube, based on the rumors floating on the Internet? Nothing in the specs point to anything mediocre in this phone. True, it looks a bit plastic, but if the build quality overall is good I wont complain.

Overall, Tube is looking quite good, but I am really worried about the UI. I say again; S60 3.2 UI SUCKS big time. Nokia really has to pull this one off and I am sure Nokia feels the burdain. Tube is automatically compared to the iPhone and its slick UI. I really hope the UI in Tube is polished and works well, fast and logically. Then I think Tube will be my next phone.

Whenever it is available in Finland that it. Let's wait and see. Fingers crossed.

Pictures from Maemo Summit 2008 in Berlin

I took a few (could have taken a lot more...) pictures from the Maemo Summit 2008 held in Berlin 19.9.-20.9.2008. You can see them on my Flickr page: http://flickr.com/photos/kypeli/sets/72157607472568981/

Thanks again Maemo and Nokia for giving us a great summit!

Re: Engadget "A few more details confirmed on Nokia's next-gen Internet Tablet"

Engadget calls the photo of "leaked specs" of the upcoming Maemo 5 device from the Maemo Summit as a "spy shot". I can only think that Engadget had to add this make it seem more mysterious.

Engadget, That picture is not a spy shot! I attended the Maemo Summit in Berlin and the summit was open to anyone willing to walk in, without any NDA requirements. I have a photo of the same slide on my camera. Do you want that too? There is nothing in the powerpoint slide that you didn't hear from other sources during the summit or otherwise was already known from OSiM World.

Engadget, check your sources.

My Master's Thesis

Master's Thesis
Originally uploaded by Kypeli

One final time. This time with covers and all :)

P.S. get it here: http://www.johanpaul.com/thesis_johanpaul.pdf

Thesis: Quantitative Approach for Lightweight Agile Process Assessment

Yes, I have finally finished my Master's Thesis. And I must stress, finally. Some spell checking might still occur and I will print it next week. But I am quite pleased with what I current have. I am more than happy to receive any feedback and comments on my theses!

My thesis is about about our experiences at Plenware Oy on how to assess the agility of a process in a lightweight fashion, but still to be accurate and to support the Software Process Improvement (SPI) initiative. We came up with the idea that the assessment could be a set of predefined questions that could be easily answered by taking process metrics from a project management tool. The answers would be compared against reference answers and points would be given based on the assessment. Finally, a weighted sum gives the agility of the process.

The same approach could be implemented for other assessments, but our goal was to assess the agility of the process. The processes were in a transition phase to go towards agility and it was important to be able to measure the agility in a lightweight fashion.

I express my deepest sense of gratitude to my supervisor PhD Luka Milovanov at Plenware Oy for assisting in writing of this thesis.

Here's the abstract:

One focus in software development is to achieve high quality without loss of agility in the development process. In software engineering an agile development process is able to react to frequently changing customer requirements and also able to develop the software in small well tested increments. This is not an easy thing to do and will not emerge on its own, but requires well optimized and continuously improved software development processes. The quality of a process can be assessed by some external audits but they usually are heavyweight and costly processes. To measure the quality and follow the improvements in a process a lightweight assessment method is desired.

In this thesis I will look at Software Process Improvement (SPI) paradigm from the perspective of both Reference Process Models and the Experience Factory (EF) infrastructure. Then, I will present a quantitative lightweight process assessment method for agile projects. This method allows the assessment of a process in less than two hours. The method yields numeric results of the agility of a process in a lightweight fashion. I will conclude by stating that the work done in this thesis is only indicative of this kind of assessment for agile processes there is a need for further research. The results presented here result from the current need in Plenware Oy related to SPI evolvement.

Here's the PDF: Quantitative Approach for Lightweight Agile Process Assessment

So I bought the Apple Airport Extreme...

I needed a new WLAN base station because I will move in with my girlfriend to our own apartment. In the new apartment I want to extend my local network from my computer room to the living room and I also want to be able to play music in the living room - all this without cables. Apple Airport Extreme combined with Apple Airport Express is a suitable combination for achieving this - at least on paper.

We have not yet moved to our apartment so I haven't really connected the Airports to my network. However, I have played with the Airport Extreme just to to see what it's all about. I expected a great Apple out-of-the-box experience. Everything just working - or so I thought! I had spent almost double the amount of money than would on a normal WLAN+ethernet switch and the first time I launch the Airport Utility on my Windows XP box I am faced with an "unsuccessful network connection" error message. Bugger!

I reboot the Extreme and try again.
Bingo.

This time I see the Airport Extreme in the Airport Utility. Now I am faced with the question if I want to upgrade the firmware on my Airport Extreme. "Now that is nice", I thought. Why not upgrade to get a even more working box. However, I am, mildly said, disappointed when I see a dialog informing me that the firmware upgrade was unsuccessful. Bugger again!

Oh well, I just go on an configure my new cute white box. I again select the Airport Extreme from the Airport Utility. Failure again - the box shows the green status light indicating everything is fine, but the Airport Utility cannot connect to the damn box. DAMN! Reboot.

Now I am able to connect to the box, I tell the utility I do not want to upgrade the firmware and finally I have configured Airport Extreme to suit my needs. The configurations I made included port forwardings and specifying a MAC address into the DHCP server so that my server can always get the same IP address. I also changed the address space of the internal network. Nothing too fancy, for an expensive Apple box, right?

Wrong.

I am not sure what is going on, but Airport extreme will randomly disconnect all network connections. I can get an IP address to a client machine, but the machine cannot connect to the Internet. NAT problems? The only thing that helps me in this situation is to reboot the Apple extreme.

What is going on here?! I will tomorrow call Apple service desk and ask for a replacement unit. I don't know if that will improve anything, but I am very disappointed in Apple right now! Shouldn't Apple be all about easy setup and reliable hardware?

..and I haven't even tried to connect my Airport Express with WDS to the Extreme and stream music with AirTunes. What should I expect the outcome from that to be?

Edit: So. After two replaced Airport Extremes it seems that Apple has finally managed to find me a unit that actually works. The first replacement unit died the first evening and its MAC address for the WLAN card had disappeared and it failed to go into 802.11n mode. Now I have the latest revision on my replacement Airport Extreme and it, believeit or not, actually manages to do a reasonable good job - something I would have expected from Apple from the very beginning.

My experiences with Apple regarding Airport Extreme has raised some serious questions about Apples quality control. Why pay extra for Apple's products if you don't get anything extra? I am willing to pay for a good device, that "just works" and probably even looks good. But this was not a good Apple experience for me.

Many thanks to VAR Import in Turku and Mika who helped me with the service!

My Asus EEE and the bus to St. Petersburg, Russia

I often wonder about the modern marvels of IT and the Internet. I am on my way to St. Petersburg in Russia on a bus and here I am writing this blog post with my Asus EEE, SCM Bluetooth dongle and Sony Ericsson K610i with (almost) broadband 3G connection. And it works great! The battery lifetime on the EEE of course sucks but I cannot complain since a few years back I couldnt even imagine using the Internet on a laptop in a bus.

I took my EEE with me on my trip because I hope to fins open WLANs in the city and update my blog as a diary from St. Petersburg. It is my first trip to Russia so I imagine I have a lot to write about. I will also be intresting to see Sanna's hometown. She will be showing me around and I guess there cannot be a better guide than a local.

I don't get the Adobe Lightroom methodology

I like photographing, although I don't think I am not even on the par with amateur photographers, but it is a better way to waste time than laying on the couch watching The Simpsons or something (don't get me wrong, I love the Simpsons). I have a Nikon D40 to play with and I take a lot of picture of one subject just to experiment with different settings and compositions. I guess this is the way SLRs are supposed to be handled. Hence I looked into Adobe Lightroom as a way to import, organize, pick good shots and publish photos. Yes, I like Lightroom over Windows Live Photo Gallery - in the matter of fact, it's not even close!

But there are some things I don't get about Adobe Lightroom. First is the methodology that you never ever overwrite the original photos. I personally don't get this design decision. Lightroom offers me a great set of tools to manipulate and insert metadata in the pictures. But it is like I should only be allowed to use these great tools if I only use Adobe Lightroom. I have no easy way to immediately save my cropped picture over the original one. I probably have no reason why I would not like to overwrite the original picture. At least give me an easy way to save the modified picture into the same folder as the original one with a, for example, different name (picture1_mod.jpg). That is why I agree with the complaint made by for example KDern at Flickr forums.

The other thing I really don't get is why I am not able to out-of-the-box export my photos to Flickr. It is an other example of how Adobe wants me to only play with them in their sandbox. Come on, Adobe! Even its competitor, Aperture, has this feature built in. Yes yes, I know there are some extension that allow me to do this, but Flickr export integrated would probably give me better support.

Nevertheless, I will give Adobe Lightroom the 30 day trial period Adobe offers me. I like the overall feel of the user interface and of course, as you would expect from Adobe, Lightroom gives me more than enough tools to manipulate the photos.

Nokia swetting today? I guess so :)

Oh, and now that I mentioned WWDC in my previous post, lets see how it goes. Steve will probably launch the new 3G iPhone today. It has already, before its' launch, got widespread attention and worldwide delivery contracts announced. I think Nokia is starting to feel the pressure, since now Apple can start competing for real in the markets where Nokia has previously dominated with their E- and N-series smartphones.

But Nokia really needs to get their UI into this century! S60 3 feature pack 2 is horrible compared to iPhone's UI! If (and when) iPhone will have 3G, GPS, an application store with native 3rd party application and in the future even more enterprise specific features, Nokia really has to get its act together with that UI because it will eventually draw people to buy a iPhone, which is nice to use, instead of a old-fashioned S60 UI.

I will probably comment on WWDC afterwards.

Update:Yeah, so the 3G iPhone is here. Apple did a really impressive announcement to sell the new 3G iPhone (8GB) for only $199. "The price is a maximum of $199 all around the world". This is really impressive! But I won't hold my breath yet; Sonera will sell the new iPhone here in Finland and I just hope that there will not be a some kind of forced data plan for 24 month, like I would guess. If the new iPhone is 199e with no strings attached, I will buy it the day it becomes available. But unfortunately not Sonera nor Apple has said anything about data plan requirements.

And I guess Nokia will have a crysis meeting tomorrow morning ;)

Update: Well, I guess my first excitement is gone: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2008/06/09/iphone-3g-the-details-you-never-wanted-to-know/
Of course this doesn't mean that Sonera in Finland requires a similar data plan, but in this light I think it is a bit naive to think that Sonera wouldn't have a similar requirement for a data plan. After all, this is where Apple gets its' money!

Nothing to see here anymore, move along...

Nokia is doing great fanb...^Wcustomer service

I don't know about you, but usually when I think of Microsoft, HP or, say, Apple, I tend to think of large enterprises with very hush-hush relationship with their customers - and let's not forget about the "fanboys". We can read about the corporation and their products on their web pages and nice looking product ads and press releases will pop up once in a while. Oh yeah, and I am writing this on the eve of Apple's WWDC, before the event. I bet every single Apple fanboy is wetting their pants at the moment. I can understand them; Apple comes out and presents something new in Steve Job's great mass-like chanting on how everything is superb, wonderful and let's not forget great. "Boom".

But Nokia is doing things a bit different. Nokia has quitely openened Nokia Converstions. I haven't seen it mentioned in a lot of media, even IT centered. It is a Nokia web pages that aggregates and comments on things written about Nokia, and their products, in blogosphere. People get to interact with the giant corporation in a new way that I haven't seen before done by any other major company, let alone a IT company. I think it is Nokia's way of saying thet the company listens to the customers and fans and want to have a two way dialogue going on. Of course they will use the page to promote new things inside Nokia, but also show that Nokia follows trends; they talk about Twitter, social networking, blogging, Mac support and about a lot of other stuff that I don't normally see a "large stiff corporation" talk about. Also, they welcome criticue and try to improve things.

Of course, they will not talk about some things which is fully understandable. But I think this is a great way to interact with real users that in the end use the devices, services and software. Hope other companies would follow Nokia's example.

Japan: Highlights

So my trip to Tokyo is over. What a wonderful place to visit. The cultural difference is huge, of course, and coming home is always the best thing.

Besides working, we visited Shibuya and Akihabara. Below is a video I took with my camera from Shibuya:


Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me when we visited Akihabara, but it was a great experience for tech-guy like me. A lot of small shops packed with electronics. As a contrast, we also visited Japan's largest electronic store, Yodobashi Camera. With 8 stores of only electronics, I was quite impressed. Wow!

Of course, you might not be able to leave Akihabara without exploiting the possibility to buy cheap electronics. So I just had to buy myself a proper DSLR camera; Nikon D40 with extra lens (55-200mm). It was almost exaclty 50% chepaer there than in Finland so I couldn't resist! I was also able to haggle 25000 yens off the price, so I was satisfied :) Btw, I bought it at Yamada which I can recommend since we went to a lot of other electronic retailers and this was the cheapest :)

We then flew from Henada airport to Osaka where we connected to Finnair's flight to Helsinki. 10h on an MD-11 without entertainment system is not a way to spend the day.

Japan: Day 2 - 26.2.2008

Second day and first morning in Tokyo. We walked today to the office which takes about 20 minutes. This was really the first time I had a chance to feel the Japanese culture around me. The street are amazingly clean and even the truck shine. I was also quite amazed how little traffic there is on the streets compared to for example Paris. I heard that local people use the metro and the train just because there is not parking space downtown Tokyo.

The breakfast was quite amazing. I was escorted to my table and my coffee was served to the table. The selection of breakfast items ranges from fresh fruit juices to blueberries and strawberries. Of course there was also a lot of fresh fruits and local Japanese breakfast cuisine with more western items, like corn flakes. Quite yummy!

Japan is a wonderful place, part 2:

3) Smoke or get fined - You are not allowed to smoke on the streets in Tokyo. There are designated smoking areas on the street that you can smoke in, otherwise you might face a fee of 40 euros!

4) High-tech restaurants - I've worked in the restaurant business so I noticed that the waitresses have wireless PDA-like devices that they take the orders with. The order goes directly to the kitchen, and the food comes out really fast. All waitresses (including breakfast waiters!) have ear-peaces and radio, so they can communicate with each other all the time. This is really cool :)

Japan: Day 1 - 25.2.2008

So here I am, on the other side of the globe. The world feels really small when you can quite easily fly here and use the Internet as from home. But nevertheless I am 8000km away from home.

The first day has been quite tough. Almost no sleep in the plane, via the hotel directly to the workplace. We started working at 11am local time and it is not 12pm and I am back at the hotel finally, hopefully, getting some sleep.

First of all, I want to say how I miss my Sanna. It is really hard to be for the first time away from the one you love. But I guess I have to do my job...

Japan is a wonderful place, part 1:

1) Canned coffee - Hot coffee, in a vending machine, from a metal can. Yes, it's all in Japan! This is how the local employees have their coffee break. They take something from the vending machine (costing about 100 yens) and having a cigar. And yes, even the coffee (with and without milk and/or sugar!) is from a vending machine. Fascinating, yet frightening.

2) Electronic toilets - I arrived into my hotel room and I could not figure out how to use the toilet. Wow! That's a new one! In the toilet, there was a large remote control with some rather frightening looking symbols and maybe luckily none of them worked when I pressed them. Ok, I then realized that the toilet is flushed beside the bowl itself... I was so reliefed that it actually worked.


I will continue to list odd things from this wonderful culture :) But I love the people, they are so friendly! The city is a large metropol but it is so clean that Paris should be ashamed of itself.

But now some sleep - after 30 hours or so.

Tokyo, Here I come!

I never thought that I would visit Tokyo, at least yet in my life. Nevertheless, on my winter holiday to Paris, I got a telephone call. It was my boss that asked if I wanted to go to Tokyo the week after I get back from my holiday. After a brief moment of thinking, it was a no-brainer - of course I will go to Tokyo when flight and hotel is payed!

Going to Tokyo is not like hopping on the train and visit Helsinki. Or even Paris, which is only a 3 hour flight away. I leave tomorrow, Sunday 24.2., and will be there all week. I will try to post something every day to this blog about my journey! :)