Jon Åslund

Mars 14, any normal day, if it wasn’t for the following holidays:

• Pi Day - Written in the USA date format, March 14 is an unofficial celebration for Pi Day derived from the common three-digit approximation for the number π: 3.14. Since I am more used to the international date format, I look forward to Pi Approximation Day 22/7.
• Steak and Blowjob Day - Say I love you with a steak and a blowjob.
• White Day - formerly known as Marshmallow Day, is unlike the above actually celebrated by millions of people, mostly in Japan, who in return for gifts received on Valentine’s day, give something back.

Don’t forget, in a month it is April 14, also known as Black Day - a day for single people, who celebrated neither Febraury 14 nor Mars 14, to eat noodles with black bean sauce.

Came home quite late from the blog meetup. We were eventually 5 people and almost all of us were level 60 geeks, who already knew each other from another realm.

At home, my Nikon pro magazine had arrived. Thanks Nikon and d70sverige. It said ASLUND on the front page. Neat, even though it is this guy, not me. Nice pictures, as if you could expect anything less from a photo magazine. It also had a simple overview of their latest products, like the very interesting DX VR 18-200mm lens.

More photography, when I read the latest entry from Jeff at Sushicam, where he tries to create a digital lomo, by dissecting a busted Lomo camera and mounting the lens on a digital body. He is not there yet, but I look forward to see the images.

Jon Stewart at the Oscars:

Piracy hurts! Just look at the people here. These are the people piracy effects. There are women here, who can only afford dresses that barely cover their breasts.

Larry Wall gets lost in a metaphor:

… Humans are not much into strong compile-time typing, and when they are, we call it stereotyping, or racism, or whatever.

Well, I’m just blathering now…

Larry

This is the point in history where the seed is planted for what will eventually lead to the birth of a hippie robot generation who are excellent judge of characters. Flowers and robots, the best of friends. You can hover into any bar and everyone will greet you with their own unique but perfectly calculated smile.

– Hey there friend! What will you have? We have metal filkshake, pattern and Larry Wall’s brain on tap.
– How can you have filkshake on tap? Are you not supposed to … Wha, wait, Larry Wall’s brain?
– Yes, it will probably overwhelm you at first, but it’s great if you are into heavy stuff.

Via Betsy Devine: When in doubt, press the “publish” button.

Linus Torvalds on crazy people:

You let developers be developers. Encourage a bit of crazyness, because the best developers are a bit crazy. It’s ok. Let them do things that you don’t think necessarily always make sense for the user, because that not only makes them happy, it’s also how sometimes you get the really great things that do make sense after all.

How true, how true… make sense, oh yeah, very true, makes them happy, it’s TRUUUUUUUUUUUUEE!

DLTQ.org: “MSN Spaces, please open your walled gardens”

I agree that there are quite a few people who would like to keep their privacy, so that is not the main issue. My question to MSN Spaces is rather: Why only MSN messenger?

Perhaps I was too fuzzy when I asked my question regarding authentication and authorization at Moz’ talk at Bloggforum, but I was basically wondering the same thing. It’s pretty obvious why they use the MSN messenger account and not something else, since this mean they control all components which makes it very easy to implement. The hard part is to distribute authentication. How can I verify that I am me, so that you can give only me access. And are they willing to do this? Perhaps Moz didn’t understand me or I didn’t understand his answer, but it seemed to me that they are not.

In the comments, Jessica Börjel, product manager for MSN Spaces in Sweden, answered that they indeed are working with others (aka the third parties), for instance Yahoo, which was news to me.

MSN and Yahoo users can now chat with eachother:

For instant messaging fans, this rates right up there with the Berlin Wall.

Yeah, I am actually happy, and others will be as well, but at the same time, something really stupid we built ourselves, we are now celebrating that we can tear down.

I am guessing this will apply to more than just instant messaging, like MSN Spaces privacy. It is perhaps a step in the right direction to let you authorize a Yahoo id to see your MSN Spaces blog, but then what? Another big company? Google id?

I want to see an open standard, something like OpenID. I know there is more to it than just identity, but this is definitely a step in the right direction. Since Microsoft surely have the resources to pull off something like this, if they do, then everyone will follow, but only if it is an open standard.

I regret not going to Loïc Le Meur’s talk and asking him the same question. SixApart has TypeKey, which is not totally different from Microsoft Passport (which I am guessing defines a MSN messenger user), but they also employ Brad Fitzpatrick, the main designer of OpenID, so maybe I would have already known the answer to my question.

If you are even slightly interested in anything related to these kinds of problems, you will love Dick Hardt’s talk on Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005.

Via Fröken J: Kommissarie Curiosa is spot on regarding the Swedish Mating and Dating Rituals.

Day Two:
A) Send a text message (assuming you were, in fact, sober enough to have completed step “D” of “Night One”) along the lines of “last night was nice. shall we have a coffee sometime?”
B) Spend hours analyzing the various ways in which aforementioned text message could be mis-interpreted. Get your friends to help you in this endeavor.

It’s becoming more obvious every day that I need something like flickr. It’s weird that nobody has built a gallery like it, or at least something even remotely similar. It’s even weirder that I haven’t done it myself even though I’ve had such great plans for world domination for a while. When thinking that out loud yesterday in the #perl channel, Simon Cozens pointed me to his Memories, which actually seems to do some of the basic things that I want. Memories is made in Maypole. My plan was to reinvent the flickr wheel in Catalyst.

Photos from day 1 and day 2. Some favorites:

You can also find the photos at flickr, under the tag npw2005, where other people also have uploaded their pictures.