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Hot in the city: Dubai

The past July was the warmest month ever in Finland. What “warm” means to us Finns is usually over +25C, also known as “helle”, an exceptional heat wave by the local standards. In 2010 there was a staggering new record temperature of +37.2C measured in Joensuu. Boy that’s hot!

There are other definitions to “hot”, which is something I learned during my trip to the United Arab Emirates. July is not among the most favourite months for tourists to visit the area and I don’t blame them. We landed in Dubai on a Sunday morning and tried our best to perform a tour of the city’s main sights before spending the next few days in the office. With the weather forecasts setting the temperature at +45C every day (there weren’t too many live thermometers visible in Dubai), the tour ended up consisting of short hops outside of the air conditioned malls, shops and busses. The summer weather in Dubai can be best described as walking into a hot sauna with your clothes on to check if it’s ready for bathing, with the difference being that you can’t step outside after your done. Anyway, I managed to grab a set of photos where the lens is not all steamed up, so here you go:

My next stop will surely provide a much cooler experience, as we’re going to spend a week in Scotland, driving around the Highlands area. Better remember to pack my umbrella and rain coat, I suppose.

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By Jukka – August 7, 2010

Lessons from Google Wave

It was announced yesterday (on August 4th) that Google would no longer develop Google Wave. In other words, R.I.P. Google Wave. Let’s have a look at some of the reasons why Wave suffered this fate and what Google might have learned from it.

Google Wave was an island

There was no easy nor logical way to incorporate Wave into your ordinary workflow. If you weren’t opening wave.google.com on your browser, you were not “on the wave”. The most critical thing was that even though it looked almost exactly like a webmail client, and your user account had the form of username@googlewave.com, there was no email integration whatsoever. It’s bad enough that you couldn’t subscribe to any Wave updates to your inbox (later this feature was added without much fanfare), but the fact that a company hosting one of the largest email services in the world goes and assigns users pseudo email addresses you can’t send messages to is something that still boggles my mind. Ok, I understand that Google Wave was supposed to be something beyond email, but even emails could be printed on paper. How about some backward compatibility, eh?

Google Wave did not solve a specific problem

Most people just couldn’t quite figure out what exactly they were supposed to use Wave for. Pretty much everybody saw the potential of it for something useful, but were they able to picture themselves as a user in a specific use case where Wave was a natural fit? Let’s face it: there’s no point in releasing a technology demo and expect people to start using it straight away. What in fact was missing was the real product. Wave gave us the tools, but it would have probably taken an ecosystem around it to turn these tools into products that people could utilise for solving a specific problem (which Google did try to encourage through it’s API and federation protocol offering). Yes, collaboration challenges tend to be universal, but that doesn’t mean you could simply throw technology at them and expect people to take it from there.
Continued…

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By Jukka – August 5, 2010

WordPress maintenance day: improve sharing, caching and mobility

I’m running two self-hosted instances of WordPress: on my personal (jukka.niiranen.eu) and professional (Surviving CRM) blogs. There’s actually also a third one running on WordPress.com (Microsoft Dynamics CRM Links), which is just a no-frills link site, not a blog. There’s been a few more blogs in the past, and every now and then I get ideas about new sites/applications that could run just great on WordPress. It really is the Swiss army knife of CMS’s and I absolutely love it, even with its faults and frustrations. The beauty is not in the amount of features (which there are plenty) but the simplicity and usability, which allows you to focus on getting things done i.e. pushing content out there.

Having said that, hosting your own WordPress site does require you to perform regular maintenance. For many of us this is not exactly the most rewarding part of runnign a website, but if you want to go beyond what hosted services offer you, then it’s just the price to be paid. I had been skipping payments for a while, so now when I finally had some well deserved time off in my hands, I knew the time had come for a summer cleaning effort.

WordPress 3.0 upgrade

With any application’s major version release, you may not want to be the very first user to install it. I certainly took a while to jump on version three and actually waited until 3.0.1 was out. The main reason was not the fear of native WP bugs as such but rather the plugin compatibility.

Before working on any plugin upgrades and installation, the natural first step is of course to patch up the core WordPress installation to the latest version. Before the upgrades, we are always instructed to take full backups of our precious data and other files, but let’s face it: how many of us really go through the trouble? Well, this time I thought I’d download a new full snapshot of my domain (0.5 GB of data), just to be on the safe side. I do have scheduled backup jobs running on the server, but there’s nothing quite like having the bits sitting on a local drive right next to you.

Continued…

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By Jukka – August 4, 2010

Tune of the week: Tinie Tempah Vs. Bomfunk MC’s – Pass Out Vs. Freestyler

Sometimes 1 +1 > 2. Any bootlegger would like to reach this result, but typically the score can actually be <1. In this particular case I think the DJ’s from Mars team have done an excellent job in mashing up two big tracks into something at least worth >1. It’s been ten years since Freestyler hit the international charts, so while we are waiting for JS16 to create an official anniversary version (why not? Everybody’s doing it), I’ll keep on banging this bootleg.

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By Jukka – August 4, 2010