Life notes on the way

N9 - we did it again

2011-09-27T18:40:00.000+03:00

In case you have not heard it yet - we did it again, so Nokia has begun shipping of N9.

Poppy patch in park

2011-06-13T11:55:00.004+03:00

There was little patch of poppies on my way along Writer's park in Helsinki...

From poppy patch in park

another Maemo lesson - limit your trust to corporations

2011-01-30T16:23:00.004+02:00

Open development/Licensing change requests has now interesting header which brings more light and relate to previous post:

Please note that this process is effectively dead. Please see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=784443 for details. Summary: Nokia doesn't have a Maemo distmaster anymore to process these requests, and does not plan to allocate further resources for Maemo to change this, rather than just trying to make the corresponding Meego components open.

by Josh

and further

Note: *Nothing* was ever opened via this process.

by Jebba

with written aside "a sequence that might help you understand more the current situation" by qgil .

and quote from document on why closed things stay closed (and as you see, never become open, even if someone trying to master "process to open").

Reasons for closed packages

Open source is the licensing model preferred by Nokia in the development of Maemo. There are some reasons to have exceptions, though.

Brand: Nokia wants to keep a strong brand and identity avoiding any risks of dilution.
Differentiation: Nokia wants to gain competitive advantage in certain areas by keeping the related software closed.
Legacy: Nokia keeps some components minimally maintained - the work of opening them has an unclear outcome.
IPR & licensing issues: Nokia avoids serious risks brought by patents, copyrights or complicated licensing situations.
Security: Nokia avoids safety risks and liabilities that could be caused by freeing access to certain hardware components.
Third party: Nokia does not own the code and therefore does not decide on the license.

corporations rarely or never give up on own or peer's interest.

one street corner in Helsinki - tiny etude

2011-01-27T19:37:00.000+02:00

there had been British legation in Helsinki in beautiful building (which LIFE had been not able to identify in recent photo digitalization)

which hasn't survived air raid

and had been eventually replaced by shoe-box building in 1961 with local registration office also known as Albertinkatu 25 - Bulevardi 21 corner in Haikara block .

2010 bottom line - Maemo left behind, Meego is another fruit

2011-01-08T19:33:00.011+02:00

after year 2010 wrapped up, one thing calmed down in my mind - for me Maemo has been left behind. Maemo team had released Maemo 5 for N900 along with N900 sales had started. After it had started sales, big heap of still-to-apply patches had been passed to maintenance team and majority had been switched to Harmattan. I had followed both Maemo 5 and Harmattan for several weeks but then I had no choice but switch too into Harmattan-only mode. And then Maemo+Moblin fusion into Meego had been pronounced as PR event. Real Meego deliveries had started several weeks later.

Lessons learned:

Maemo 5 had been released same way as previous releases, only now it took 9+ months for followup, and same story of leaving behind of
Harmattan aka "first mobile Meego" is totally different beast and openness there is limited compared to Maemo 5
Meego ~~Moblin~~ is certainly sell-off to Intel no matter how much PR / marketing people try to sell it positive. Since layman public doesn't care what's under hood, I decided to keep it impersonal - after all, kernel is same kernel, no matter what is packaging.
Luckily I am deep in kernel and don't have to bother much about userland apart from providing them with reliable high-quality kernel APIs. But what I see about Qt and rest of things UI... Well, it is probably Ok with average Joe but I don't like C++ and derivatives (read - Qt too). I just leave it up to "them" - not my business.
Nokia had put all eggs into Qt basket.
Overall feeling is like in movie "Toys" - ex-military invaded previously fun-making toy factory.

Meego is different fruit and hence it makes me thinking what do I do about my future and how tight my relationship with all these things is. I still continue to work in core team for Harmattan and further items, with all due diligence like squirrel in a wheel, but... future now is open more than before.

I feel it more like "wheel of life" has made another turn and I must think about change, whatever it is - is it "still Nokia" or something else, I don't know yet. One week of winter vacation hasn't brought any much clear about change - no real window for something else yet, new and exciting. Patience drills stones like water...

Father's day gift

2010-11-14T10:59:00.005+02:00

my family made me little gift for Father's day - for some reason can't stop myself for little set of pictures

Maemo / meego team at Nokia hiring developer again

2010-05-08T11:46:00.007+03:00

colleague hires again - this time application developer with deadline 15 June 2010

Are you the next star application developer of MeeGo?
Be hired by 15th of June. Check out the details and apply now!

Simple rules:
MeeGo Devices at Nokia is looking for a Linux expert that knows how to write C++ or in Qt tool kit. Python and HTML 5 a plus.
If you have contributed to an open source project or you have a project of you own:
a) post your project in the event wall and b) apply with your CV

What we are offering?
- The best team to work in MeeGo in the areas of Email, Calendar, Synchronization
- Working on hot/cool/fun/extraordinary/awesome projects and technologies
- A competitive offer and relocation services from anywhere in the Globe to Finland
- Partying from time 2 time but for sure lots of chocolate and good humor

Are you ready for the challenge?

Impress the hiring manager by putting a cool post on Facebook event wall (your project, ideas, blog etc.) and send your CV

Don’t forget 15th of June, by then you might have a job at MeeGo Devices at Nokia.

And here are all job opportunities at MeeGo Devices at Nokia.

PS: If you know someone that matches the criteria, please forward this invitation.

Moblin and maemo are merging!

2010-02-15T13:11:00.003+02:00

I'm sure you've heard the news: Moblin and maemo are merging! http://meego.com/

via Ping.fm

Posted via web from silpol's posterous

the copyright bubble

2010-01-12T00:59:00.001+02:00

I've posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts -- it has details of why the ACTA is secret. by girlintraining

A Private War

I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.

An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn't matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that's exactly what they're doing.

What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.

Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don't really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.

Culture Connection

Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity's history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It's how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.

Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way -- by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It's not a comfortable or politically correct thing to admit, that for societies to function there must necessarily be inequality between people. It is nonetheless true.

This is not a reason to give up hope or be cynical! We are in the middle of a social revolution that has few outward signs. Unlike generations past, the revolution that is happening now exists in fragmentary communications by a collectivistic movement that lacks any real core. It has been created by an unspoken understanding between its participants. That is to say, the participants of the digital community to varying degrees develop the same coping mechanisms to frame their understanding of this environment. These coping mechanisms develop into ideas and beliefs that we then form the basis of our interactions with other members. Put another way, these coping strategies that we interpose between ourselves and our environment form the basis of culture. The interesting part is, this change occurred without any indoctrination or central leadership to accomplish. Mere exposure to the environment alone seems to predispose people to a certain kind of thinking that cuts across barriers of country, culture, sex, and race.

There are no real leaders for the digital culture, yet the culture is there. This is unprecidented. There are very, very few social movements that organize around principals instead of individuals who exemplify those ideals. Whether you live in Iran or America, Africa or Europe, the same values systems are spontaniously developing in reaction to exposure to the digital environment. And while the state of the art has advanced at an incredible rate, our methods of understanding and interacting within the new social spaces created by that aren't changing that much. It's a stable environment evolving at rate sufficiently slow to allow culture to form.

That, in and of itself, is amazing. Forget copyright for a moment and consider all the other social advances that are taking place because of our digital interconnectedness -- and then realize that there are only a very few friction points in this revolution! That is also unprecidented in modern history.

The Bubble

Copyright won't end anytime soon, but I'm suggesting we look at the fundamentals here: it is an artificial construct within the digital environment. It's something we built extraneous to it, and in fact is antagonistic to it. The exchange of information is fundamental to the existance of the internet. Copyright is not. Copyright is an institution, like marriage, the church, the government, etc. Like those things, it has a maintenance cost. It is a coping mechanism. That's not a judgement on its sustainability nor its justification for existance (or lack thereof).

Copyright is an institution and like all social institutions remain in existance only for as long as its members continue to support it. There is a substantial and growing number of digital identities (people, organizations, projects, etc.) that exist outside of that institution. Why? Because information is very, very cheap to replicate. Production of that information however can vary in cost. Everybody agrees that there must be some compensatory mechanism, however artificial, to reimburse people for the effort invested in the production of the goods and services that copyright protects. If there is no protection at all, many staples of modern life cease to exist. This is the loci of why copyright exists.

The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble. Large corporations and governments alike have bought into it and driven up its cost. Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble, and the housing bubble, but that's nothing compared to what's going on right now -- we lost billions when that one burst. We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now -- labor capital in the third world.

Which is exactly why, right now, governments around the world are drafting a copyright treaty between themselves in secret. They know that as soon as the lesser-developed countries have come forward a bit more infrastructurally, they'll be at a point where they can leverage a free flow of history, ideas, and information to dramatically improve their economies. Just as plans for the machinery that powered the industrial revolution was witheld from countries that didn't have it, so too have the tools to begin the information revolution been witheld.

Let's face it -- less developed countries are not going to pay licensing costs and fork over the money circulating in their economy back to us: They're going to pour it back into modernization of their own economies. The only way they can do that is by asserting sovereignty and independence from the global copyright framework being developed. That's why there's such a push right now to lock them out if they don't join in the global copyright racket. If this effort fails, the bubble will burst and trillions of dollars will drain out of the economies of the western world like someone pulled the plug out of the bathtub, because the marketplace will be much, much bigger. That's why if you ask for copies of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, the government will tell you it's unavailable for reasons of national security. But you don't need to have the text to know what it intends to do.

The chinese are already producing very cheap material goods. What do you think's going to happen when they start producing very cheap services as well? Nobody's going to pay $400 for an operating system; Not when the Chinese have their own that sells for $5 each on a DVD. They have more honor students than we have students -- and each will work for dollars a day.

Posted via web from silpol's posterous

Streets of Helsinki - very personal calendar for next year

2009-12-20T15:24:00.003+02:00

one summer walk with camera down streets of Helsinki, capital of Finland

N81 8GB vs N900 in evening light nano-competition

2009-12-06T14:43:00.005+02:00

these photos were not exactly public some time ago - but now you too can compare. while number of pixels on matrices is not exactly comparable, but you can see progress - evening shooting is slightly more tough on phone-camera than one might think...

N81 8GB

N900

N900 gone sales!

2009-11-10T11:58:00.002+02:00

Yay we are shipping #N900 http://bit.ly/2XSI2F !!!

via Ping.fm

Posted via web from silpol's posterous

maemo jobs - new position again

2009-10-22T21:44:00.005+03:00

our colleague Kristiina Saaristo has posted again new position - "Maemo Developer Advocate @ Nokia" As it stated there,

The Maemo marketing team, which has created quite a buzz in recent weeks, is looking for a Maemo Developer Advocate to assist in promoting the business opportunities for apps built on top of Maemo globally.

you can apply straight on Taleo

also some other positions advertised on Google Adsense once page or search contains word maemo ;)

books and digital e-ink revolution coming

2009-10-22T20:50:00.009+03:00

reading article "The Google Book Store, Coming Soon To A Browser Near You" @ TC , I had some thoughts, which most probably other people share too.

somehow I feel vary about "paper -> digital" books transition presumably-closer-in-time - on one hand, emotionally and sub-consciously paper has more traits than digital: digital e-ink has no smell, feeling of age in book, you can't do handmade notes with distinctive personal touch, etc-etc-etc, leave alone difference in human perception between light screen vs reflecting paper

on the other hand - digital books have full text index, you can search in them, have wild amount of meta possible, etc-etc-etc

so this is not exactly win-loose game - it should take some more time, no matter what would-be digital printing suppliers and Co would like us to believe ...

on the other hand, our children (probably) and grand-...-children (most probably) will have perception of paper as something _ancient_

and the other aspect - somehow digital _printing_ I perceive as unsustainable i.e. one have to rely on rather complex infrastructure, which is not necessarily reproducible with simple tools

here and there I see examples of calculations "how ebooks are more green and mean and lean" while it is common knowledge (or is it?) that electronic waste is one of worst forms of pollution, both during production and rest of life cycle, and ethical producers are not that cheap.

and there is no guarantee that digital _books_ will survive in long term, as paper one do sometimes - usually they are made as short-term cheap-o-device... so are we going to put our future to be bet for e-ink pushers?

Maemo jobs on offer!

2009-10-17T11:57:00.002+03:00

Jobs on offer!
Originally uploaded by Loek van der Helm

we are (still) hiring at Maemo Nokia - Finland (Helsinki, Tampere and Oulu), USA (Mt. View) and India (Bangalore)

Maemo 5 UI showcases

2009-10-14T15:20:00.003+03:00

Maemo 5 UI team has created their own channel on YouTube where they present/showcase their design and give hints how you can use it in your own projects

Following are their personal top 5 shortcuts to start with:

tap on the Avatar opens the related contact card e.g. to call a friend from an ongoing Conversation

Ctrl+ Enter to send an e-mail

double press the Power key to lock the device

long tap on the Dashboard icon moves you directly to the Desktop

start typing on the Desktop to search a contact

Yay, we launched it!

2009-08-27T14:16:00.002+03:00

Fremantle aka Maemo 5 is public!!! http://maemo.nokia.com/ this was VERY long run :D

more jobs at Nokia - this time in Ovi.com

2009-08-11T19:00:00.005+03:00

my colleague Jason Madhosingh hints on new job opportunities at Nokia, this time at Ovi.com - feel free to try join Ovi team - there are three New York City-based positions on their team, a Digital Marketing Manager, Localisation Manager, and CRM Manager (links are there in the post linked above ;)

more walk to Munkkiniemi with camera - Easter'09

2009-06-27T18:31:00.001+03:00

it looks like Munkkiniemi shots are popular - here is more pleasure for searchers from past walks with camera

family too...

2009-04-04T20:52:00.001+03:00

04/04/2009
Originally uploaded by silpol

life consist not only from work - today we played with Geomag, and it is not only fun for kids

gift of alternative energy

2009-02-21T18:28:00.002+02:00

Going to office supply yesterday through underground garage, I stopped my sight on moving crates - they had "to dumpster" sign, yet another unpleasant reminder of cutbacks, cost savings, people leaving and other redundancies (I don't like term "downsizing" for all its Catbertish cynical meaning). Among those was a pile of old unstrapped folders, and since I was about to take any folder, I took one from top. It was moment of wow! Folder was full of copies (no, unfortunately not originals) of Home Power. The pile had almost all subscription self-printed or copied (tough to say) and accurately packed into folders, apparently by someone who had left work for company.

I knew about Home Power since mid-of-90's when I got to Internet. Time to time my mind had been returning to them, either bumping into old archive or just thinking on alternative power. But recent few months I was thinking more and more about alternative energy sources, and voila -- here it is, in your hands. I've rescued all folders, and took few home, so I will have a pleasant reading for next few weekends, or may be longer.

Sunday railway photo fun with abandoned steam engine at Pasila railway yard

2009-02-18T00:06:00.005+02:00

it all started with my wife noticing from commuter train's window the old steam engine, left at Pasila railway yard...

one winter Sunday - railway fun at Pasila
Originally uploaded by silpol

more Linux / Maemo job - open positions at Nokia

2009-01-14T17:08:00.004+02:00

I had been posting about open job postions within Maemo few times by now - [1] [2] [3] . Now my colleagues in HR has decided to invite even MORE people -- several vacant positions open in ~~USA, Finland and India~~ please read at the bottom.

The Linux-based Maemo platform is the software that powers mobile devices such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. To make the Maemo platform even more powerful, we at the Maemo SW entity in Devices R&D are now looking for people to take it to the next level as part of the applications and platform development teams.

Nokia is hiring skilled and motivated professionals to develop the Linux based Maemo platform.

~~www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo~~ - this link is not valid anymore.

instead you have to go www.nokia.com/careers, click into Careers link/picture and then use keyword... yes, maemo

old photosets from 2008

2009-01-05T00:41:00.004+02:00

I have (finally) uploaded recently few photo-sets made in summer 2008 around Helsinki downtown. Enjoy ;)

Harbours, ships, markets and streets of Helsinki

another photowalk into Munkkiniemi Helsinki

P.S. there are still photos which didn't make yet they travel from hard-drive to Flickr, so check it up time to time ;)

Maemo community Fremantle support - September 2008

2008-09-19T13:06:00.001+03:00

Maemo Community Fremantle Support September 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: community open-source)