Universal Rule

Goodbye to Universal Rule - closing shop

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:32:27 GMT

As the Radio Userland software is at the end of its life, I'm closing down this blog and will not move it elsewhere. Some parts of it (book reviews etc.) may appear elsewhere at some point, but no promises. The blog will disappear from the net at the end of 2009, perhaps even earlier.

Climate change - need for action

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:49:33 GMT

Read Climate Futures and start acting NOW.

Security can be interesting?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:47:35 GMT

Just a note: a free PDF download of a chapter of the book "Beautiful Security" is available - the chapter title is Tomorrows Security Cogs and Levers and the writer is Mark Curphey. Excellent writing, excellent book.

Pondering Enterprise Architecture

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:35:08 GMT

I have been reading some material on Enterprise Architecture, for example the documents A Practical Guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture and Agile Enterprise Architecture. Not a new thing by any means, but now becoming a must in the public IT sector in Finland, thanks to national EA initiatives. If things work out well, we might even get interoperable IT solutions on the national level, opening up the markets and access to information.

Long time no see

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 08:11:40 GMT

Heavens, how long since the last update. I have been busy with other things, for example for writing columns on IT, especially the "dark" (or at least gray) side. Here are four recent ones, all in Finnish:

These all discuss the drawbacks of using IT: loss of concentration, multiprocessing, losing touch with reality.

A digital camera provides a lot of value

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:39:06 GMT

I have now taken well over 32,000 photographs with the Panasonic LX3 which I bought last September. The price per image is at about 0.01 euro - one cent per image. That is quite cheap, much cheaper that I thought possible. And the camera works still without major problems, so there may be another 32,000 photographs to be taken with the camera.

Changing to another topic - fellow photography blogger Paul Lester posted a deeply personal and insightful piece about Shadows, about how keeping a personal journal helps to run a "mental health program". I posted a comment at Paul's blog, here are some further thoughts on the topic.

I used to keep a journal, written by hand, but that habit disappeared when I started to use the computer for writing. At some point I was no longer drafting texts first by hand and only then typing them. Something was lost in the change, a feeling a spontaneity. Writing by hand with a fountain pen felt as if there wouldn't have been anything between the thought and the text.

I think writing on a computer is not the same, it is much more impersonal. (Isn't there even a religious sect which says that there is a devil inside each computer?)

I retrospect I feel that there was a lot of benefit in that kind of introspection. A little bit of journal-type writing each day helped to keep things in perspective. But somehow I can't find the stamina to keep on doing it any more. However, if the (metaphorical) demons keep on pressing too much, I may have to pick up the pen once more.

On writing and photography

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 09:19:25 GMT

I haven't been updating this blog lately, only once a month or so. But meanwhile I have written 596 postings at Light Scrape, my photography blog.

Some of the postings over there touch on the same topics I used to write here at Universal Rule, but mostly it is about photography - and the images do a lot of the talking, not so much the writing. And I have been active in writing comments of fellow photography bloggers' sites, on a variety of topics.

Also, I have cutting down on some other writing. For example, I'm no longer a regular columnist at the MikroPC magazine, although I may occasionally write net columns there (on photography perhaps).

I had quite a long term as a columnist, regularly since the year 2000, and the first column was published in the magazine in 1998. But lately this hasn't been so rewarding as it used to be. Perhaps information technology is working too well nowadays, so that I don't have any reason to complain. And my interest have been shifting also, I'm no longer so eager to try out new IT products and services. But if you are interested in what I'm up to, by all means visit Light Scrape.

Photography is the thing

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:58:04 GMT

I haven't been blogging much here at Universal Rule for some time, but those who are interested in what I'm currently doing, please check out the Light Scrape blog, which is about photography. I'm nowadays mostly using the Panasonic LX3 for taking photos, over 23,000 photos taken so far with the camera. There has been much less time for other topics since I got a major interest in photography, but that can of course change at some point. But currently it seems that photography poses an interesting long-term project, defined in my own terms. So, other topics such as DRM, Macs, and such will have to wait.

Some happy things

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:06:30 GMT

Some computer-related things make me happy, or at least don't increase my non-happiness. Firefox 3 is one such thing - switching to it from Safari was a good decision. I has been great, especially with the add-ons I have been using for synchronizing bookmarks, blocking ads and tweaking the interface. Safari was quite fast and mostly robust, but it crashed every so often. Firefox has been more stable, although even it does freeze sometimes, perhaps once a week.

The only remaining problem is a specific web site, which for some strange reason does not work right in Firefox, but works in Safari. But that is also all right, as this system is not needed every day, and because I'm using it for financial things it is actually good to quit the browser after each time I go there (I have set it up as the home page in Safari).

What are other happy things. My iMac and Macbook Pro are nice things, especially as they mostly stay out of the way of using them. And the software I need works great on both systems, no bottlenecks and no hiccups. The iMac has become the media center of out family, used for all kinds of things - kids playing, the family watching movies and tv, I organizing photos, everyone using the web (the kids with access restrictions).

The MBP is really a workhorse machine, performing those things I need to do. And both the iMac and the MPB have excellent displays and keyboards, allowing the work efficiently. The one remaining thing about the MBP is the buttonless trackpad, which still causes some learning problems - mainly because at desk at work I'm using it with an external display, keyboard and mouse, the same way I did with my old Titanium Powerbook G4. But slowly I'm also learning to use the trackpad, especially the single-finger click and drag, which used to require two fingers with the old trackpad.

Macbook Pro hiccups

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:00:34 GMT

After using the new Macbook Pro for two weeks of so, I have mostly good experiences, but also some problems have turned up.

What is interesting about the MBP is that when you are using it, it seems quite large, even big - plenty of room for typing, using the trackpad and working on the screen - but when you look at the machine, especially closed, on a table, it seems small, almost diminutive. It is probably the rounded edges and the aluminium color which produce this effect.

The problems which I have had are twofold. I'm using the machine lid closed on my desk, connected to an external display and through a USB 1.0 hub to a keyboard and a mouse. (The MBP needs to be connected to the power supply to use the machine like this - this is the same as with the TiBook.)

I had a single instance when the machine was not waking up when pressing the mouse button or keys on the external keyboard. Fortunately, this problem never appeared again.

But there is another problem which appears once in a while. When woken from the sleep, the external display starts to switch on, goes off, wakes again, goes off, etc. The display does not function properly until disconnected and reconnected, or until the display (not the MBP) is put to sleep and then waken up. You can use define the "sleep display" command to one of the corners of the screen to do this easily.

Perhaps connected to this "waking display" problem is the occasionally slow startup when connected to a video projector - my old TiBook can do it faster. But this doesn't happen always, and may be due to some software settings (PowerPoint of the new MS Office etc.).

I would imagine these problems will soon be fixed in a software update. At least they are quite minor, and don't much diminish the joy of using the MBP.