Posting with N900

Here I try posting with MaemoPy on Nokia N900!

Now that summer is over time for posting here seem to have vanished.. :(

Maemo 5 and N900 are here!

Maemo 5 and N900 got announced today. Hurray! I feel so proud to be part of the team behind them.

N900 builds on previous Internet Tablet models such as N800 and N810 but adds significant improvements to hardware department. Most notable OMAP2 has been replaced with Texas Instruments OMAP3 with ARM Cortex-A8 & PowerVR SGX accelerated 3D graphics. Another major, even more significant, is addition of cellular capabilities that bring phone functionality to N900. With powerful hardware the device brings computer-like multitasking performance to your hands.

Read more about Maemo 5 software goodies and N900 details at maemo.nokia.com! Soon you can have N900 in your pocket as well :-)

Scenes from Boston

Uploaded few shots from Cambridge and Boston that were taken during my trip to Gnome Boston Summit 2006. Check them here.

The Wait

The wait is killing me. Only two clues so far.

In Helsinki with Madonna

Madonna performed a concert from Sticky & Sweet tour in Helsinki 6.8.2009. And what a show it was. An amazing event overall and great performance from the artist and her team. Weather was great, too. Sun was still shining when Paul Oakenfield and Madonna's dancers warmed up the audience.

I'm not a fan but as said I enjoyed the concert very much. At the beginning people were bit calm but soon audience was jumping together with Madonna. Many of the songs were from her latest album Hard Candy and went unrecognized for me. Still they stuck in to my head and it was nice to dance in to them with rest of the crowd. Classics such as Into the Groove and Like a Prayer got the warmest welcome, as expected. In addition to those, my highlights were tender You Must Love Me and Give It 2 Me that ended the show. I could also mention Jump and Music and... The concert was also visually spectacular.

The biggest concert ever held in Finland was also well organized. Jätkänsaari had enough space for about 80 000 people. Getting there and away was not problem at all. I also bet the place was much easier to clean up afterwards compared to for example Kirjurinluoto in Pori, thanks to the flat concrete field.

I wasn't able to take our Ixus with me this time so I had to resort to my phone. Just took few shots, hoped for the best, and enjoyed the show! Below is a video shot by friend of mine next to me. You can also spot me on this video. We had pretty good place next to the stage :-) I love to be as front as possible as there you can see all the details and expressions of performers. In this concert it was obvious that Madonna and the dancers were really having good time as well.

Japan 2006 images

I uploaded some photos from my first trip to Japan (spring, 2006). You'll find them in Flickr. Enjoy!

Hancock

Rented Hancock today. Not due to the fact that I absolutely wanted to see it but selection was pretty poor this time at my local rental store. The movie was one of the kind I usually don't even think about going to see at a theater but I was in the mood for an easy action flick and took my chances..

So I didn't have too high hopes for this one. The beginning was poor. It tried to be funny but didn't work for me. Also the plot was quite straightforward and easy to expect. With one exception. There was a major twist in the middle that I didn't see coming. That changed the movie quite much and I even enjoyed it tonight. The movie ran only about 1,5 hours which was just enough.

The movie starred Will Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman. Theron was easily the best out of three lead roles while Bateman was a fresh face on the screen and suited well for the role. Will Smith... well, he was Will Smith.. I've never been a fan of him and won't be after this movie either.

I would give the movie rating 2,5 out of 5. A quite ok no brainer.

The other movie I watched today, Vicky Christina Barcelona, was from completely different genre. I'll write about that later.

Best of Japan 2007

I uploaded some of the good shots from Japan 2007 trip to Flickr. Enjoy!

More shots from Japan

Here's few more shots from Tokyo, Japan. The tall building is Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, 243 meters. It has an observation deck open for public where the other image was shot.

The two bugs that bother me

There's currently two bugs that bother me. Both are related to Last.fm.

I used to listen Last.fm sometimes at work while it was still free. Nowadays I mostly listen to music with my phone or Spotify but decided to keep Last.fm account for scrobbling. It's interesting to look afterwards what kind of music you've listened the most. But right when I got started scroblling habit there's two issue that very effectively stops me doing it.

1. Mobbler is very nice S60 application to listen to Last.fm or, as in my case, just scrobble the tracks played using S60 music player. However, after upgrading my Nokia E71 to 300.x.x firmware, Mobbler fails to connect Last.fm. I don't know if the bug is in Mobbler or E71 but it a showstopper for me.

2. Spotify fails to scrobble thru a proxy. I mostly listen to Spotify at work and this problem kills the attempt to scrobble..

Annoying.

Sonisphere 25.7.2009

I attended Sonisphere festival together with other 60 000 people in Pori, Finland. The festival was headlined by Metallica. Before Metallica started the show around 9 PM the Stage 1 was occupied by Mastodon, Lamb of God, Machine Head and Linkin Park. I didn't care too much about the others but Linkin Park was a postive surprise. The show was energetic and music was good. I'll have to check them out with Spotify..

I waited patiently and was able to get a good place in the second row between the bands and rest of the 60 000 people. It was a bit crowded but the view was good. Metallica gave a solid performance, quite typical one I would say. Four out of eighteen songs were played from the latest Death Magnetic album. The highlight for me was Blackened which was superb.

The rest of my photos are available in Flickr.

Metallica setlist
1. Battery
2. Creeping Death
3. Fuel
4. Harvester of Sorrow
5. Fade to Black
6. Broken, Beat, Scarred
7. Cyanide
8. Sad But True
9. One
10. All Nightmare Long
11. Day That Never Comes
12. Master of Puppets
13. Blackened
14. Nothing Else Matters
15. Enter Sandman
--
16. Stone Cold Crazy
17. Motorbreath
18. Seek & Destroy

www.huippu.net

Changed this blog from blogspot domain to my old domain, huippu.net. Should be working soonish...

Lightbox, Slimbox

While I posted the image in post I started to wonder if there's any better way to present images on blogger. There must be. After few searches I found out about Lightbox and then Slimbox which I set up using help from here. Go click the soda can again to see the effect.

Edit: make it slimbox-2 :-)

Sample from Japan

One sample image from my trip to Japan in 2007. Learning Lightroom 2 workflows after migration from RawShooter.

Run DVD Profiler on a Mac

I use DVD Profiler, a nice software from Invelos, to catalog my movies. It just has one flaw, it's Windows only software. As I wrote earlier I'm now using Macbook Pro at home. I had to make up my mind about this problem.

After few minutes of thinking I had these options.

• Give up on DVD Profiler and start using something else
• Keep using older PC laptop for DVD Profiler
• Install BootCamp and dual boot to Windows
• Try to run DVD Profiler in OS X using Wine
• Install Windows in a virtual machine

The first option is obviously not a real option. I have bought DVD Profiler licence and I find it very good for my use. I want to keep using it. The second option was quite ok, as my wife uses Windows. Still, this would not satisfy my inner geek :-)

So I had to pursue one of three remaining options. After another five minutes I made up my mind. Earlier, before getting my Mac I had an idea to setup BootCamp for dual (or triple) boot. Now I don't want it. As I bought Mac, I'm going to use it and OS X as much as possible. And besides, I find dual booting very clumsy. Wine has come a long way as sometimes even work pretty nicely (I use it sometimes to run Spotify on Debian). However, after quick googling I found out that getting DVD Profiler to run in Wine on Mac may not be hassle-free.

The last option in my list, running Windows in a virtual machine was good for me.

1. Install Virtual Box on OS X and run it
2. Create a profile and configuration for virtual machine
3. Get a Windows CD or image (I had Windows 7 RC image from Microsoft)
4. Install Windows in to the virtual machine (remember Virtual Box guest addons!)
5. Install DVD Profiler to fresh Windows installation
6. Restore DVD Profiler database backup

And there you go! In about 30min I had DVD Profiler running on my Mac. This option is the best as it allows me to run DVD Profiler in "native" Windows which starts up in around 10 seconds (resuming the saved state of virtual machine) and can be run inside OS X without dual booting. Me. Happy :-)

And my movie catalog is here, in case you would like to take a look..

Where in the world is... a pipe sign?

So, I am a Mac newbie. While I have used computers over 20 years I just bought my first Mac couple of weeks ago. It's a shiny new 13-inch MacBook Pro with, ofcourse, finnish keyboard layout. So far transition from PC to Mac has been quite smooth and positive ride. Learning the basics like installing applications, the dock and application lifecycle were straightforward. But then I ran in to a problem while working on command line.

Where is the | (pipe)? It's not next to your left shift on Mac. I had to resort to google to find out it's behind option + 7, obviously... :-)

Revive the blog!

Hmm.. just as I thought. I did not blog for long. Or maybe I didn't have anything to blog about. Let's see if I can find something interesting to write about in the future.