Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, December 29, 2003

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Distributing free music: "Music giveaways are believed to foster customer loyalty. Expect Apple to sign many contracts allowing companies such as MacDonald's and Pepsi to give away millions upon millions of songs. Doing the same with CDs would be prohibitively expensive (and a logistic nightmare). A gift code to be redeemed by downloading one song at Apple's iTunes Music Store is easy to print and track. Plus it works on both MacOS and Windows platforms." [Jinn of Quality and Risk]

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The End of the Microsoft Era: "Nevertheless, the inability of the Microsoft culture to adapt to or even understand what is happening is going to inevitably doom them, and it's probably too big for anybody to change now. [...] I've been concerned about my career choices to this point; I started on Microsoft technologies but for the last few years I've been in the Linux world. I'm really not that concerned anymore, and now I'm glad I missed that mess." [iRi]

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Apple describes the G5 supercomputer at Virginia Tech in detail: cost-conscious supercomputing. [via Macsanomat]

What have I done? -- Comment()
It was time to update my CV. I added a couple of articles, and polished some details. So, here is my CV: pdf (recommended for best readability), html, txt. A longer version of the CV includes a list of popular articles and columns: pdf.

In all, I have now written (and published) about 380 articles, essays, and other short writings. Also, I have written, co-written and edited 32 books. Some of these have appeared in several editions (up to four editions). Also, I have been involved in organizing dozens of courses, and have given several dozen lectures during the years.

It is nice to note these things every once in a while. However, the most important thing for me right now is my family. All these other things are little in comparison.

Why people visit this weblog? -- Comment()
Every once in a while I look at the referrer logs of this weblog. Typically most visits are due to Google, but every so often someone somewhere points to this weblog, and sends readers this way.

During the Christmas vacation it seems that readers of a discussion group were searching for a person having the same name as I, and visited this weblog quite a few times.

However, although my name is not as common as John Smith, it is not unique. The name Juha is one of the most common names in Finland, related to the English name John. Also, there are a few thousand Haatajas in Finland, and of these a few dozen are named Juha Haataja. I personally know two Juha Haatajas, and have heard of a couple more.

It is interesting to see people get confused about my name. Some even have speculated that perhaps Juha Haataja is a real-life version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Thanks to Google, these writings are still available on the net.) Sorry to disappoint you, folks.

Back to work -- Comment()
Today I'm back at work. The week away was nice, although perhaps I should have been away longer. I started to read some essays by Harlan Ellison, but did not have the time to finish the collection.

I have a long way to go to reach the writing level of Ellison, even in my native Finnish. However, a couple of times I have been able to write texts which have been of satisfactory quality, even in hindsight.