Hello, and welcome
My name is Veeti Paananen. I live in Finland, and I write desktop and web applications using technologies such as Qt and Ruby on Rails. This is my personal website and blog. Close this...
Welcome to my new website
February 13th, 2010
It’s that time of the year when I get the feeling that I have to create a completely new template for my neglected personal website slash blog. So behold, here it is! I’ve also taken the liberty of rewriting some pages for maximum user enjoyment.
Oh, and Ruby IRC Statistics Generator has its own website now – check it out!
Maybe I can actually try to post more often from now on…
1 Comment » Ruby IRC Statistics Generator
October 10th, 2009
I’ve been working on something for around a week now. There’s not much to say yet (I write approx. 5 lines of code/day), but it’s called Ruby IRC Statistics Generator – or in short, risg.
As the name says, it’s supposed to generate statistics from IRC chatlogs. I’m writing it as a replacement for pisg: it’s going to do everything that pisg does, plus more.
For example, pisg is limited to HTML output only – risg supports all kinds of output formats (and at the time of writing, there’s support for plain text, XML & HTML).
pisg is also a bit odd to configure – the config file seems to follow some kind of “pseudo-XML” syntax which breaks very easily. Although risg doesn’t have any config system yet, it will soon!
Check out the github repository here. There’s a small example of the output here (note: still needs a lot of polish!).
Ubuntu One is missing the point
September 5th, 2009
(A new blog post in, what, half a year?)
Ubuntu One is Canonical’s new service that apparently allows you to sync files between your Ubuntu computers.
Great – now people with many computers can easily move data between them, no matter where they are! Save a document at home, it gets automatically downloaded at work on your laptop!
Wait, hold on a second…
Apparently you can only get it for Ubuntu.
Why? I’m sure many people use computers that run different operating systems. I use Windows on the desktop, Linux on the netbook (and it’s not even Ubuntu – Fedora). I guess One is a no go for me.
Incidentally, Dropbox is a similar service that gives away 2Gb of space for free, and works both on Windows, OS X and Linux!
PS. By using the above referral link, we both get extra space.
PS. I’ve changed the blog theme to something better than the awful one I made.
DealExtreme: Cheap junk
March 19th, 2009
DealExtreme is a webstore that provides insanely cheap junk from China. With free shipping!
In general, DX is a nice shop – I’ve made 5 orders so far, and received 3. The two I haven’t have been shipped in the past week (at the time of writing).
The items I’ve ordered have worked, and some were actually of surprising quality (especially when compared to the prices). These headphones worth 3 and a half dollars were pretty poor though.
Other stuff I’ve wasted money on bought: DS flash cart, laser pointer that feels much more expensive than it is, wall plug for USB chargers…
DX sometimes seems to take a very long time to get your stuff from their “supplier”, though – but I still highly recommend them. Reading product reviews can be very useful.
By the way, this post is full of referral links!
New theme
February 26th, 2009
I haven’t posted for a while.
I’ve been working on a new theme for the blog, built with the 960 Grid System, which is a really helpful utility for non-webdesigners like me. Hacked it into a WP theme by editing Kubrick (the default theme).
So, here it is. Yay.
Time lapse photography
February 1st, 2009
Ever since “taking up photography as a hobby”, I’ve been interested in time lapse photography. As you probably already know, the idea is to take a picture every few seconds and glue them together to make a video.
Today, I decided to try it out with my new DSLR, the Canon EOS 450D… nothing special:
Here’s more on how I made this video. My plan from the beginning was to recreate another “melting ice” video I made with a Canon Point and Shoot camera last year. More on that later.
In any case, I obviously needed something to remote control the camera. I initially planned to use the EOS Utility, but after it refused to run on the laptop I was using, I downloaded a trial version of DSLR Remote Pro.
(Why can’t intervalometer functionality be built in to the camera…?)
I set up the scene and set the program to take a picture every 15 seconds – I think I should have taken one at least every 10 seconds, but it did the job fairly well. The camera was set to take the lowest quality pictures (which still reached a resolution of 2256×1504).
I copied the pictures to my computer and used some program to crop the pictures to 1920×1080 (1080p, full HD). I don’t remember what, exactly. This is what the pictures looked like then:
A bit boring...
Doesn’t look too fancy, does it? That’s when I realized I could use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to adjust their colors & much more.
In short, Lightroom is designed for post-production work. Color adjustment and much more for photographers. I use it to manage my photography and for post-production work.
I loaded every photo into Lightroom and applied this preset to every single photo (not by hand, obviously!)
This was perfect. The preset is designed to highlight the red colour:
Much better, isn't it?
In fact, the photos got a complete makeover.
After this, I used VirtualDub to make an AVI video off the photos. I loaded it to Premiere, added some titles and fancy Creative Commons music.
And we’re done. Oh, and here’s that old video:
(snorrrt)
Why can JavaScript & alert lock up a browser?
January 26th, 2009
JavaScript often provides “Web 2.0″ functionality to websites. But one of the simplest commands that is still being used to date is the alert box:
Hello World!
Simple, right? Useful? Yes. But what about websites with malicious intents (we’re using this word in a “light way”; what can JS do?): what if we want to lock up the browser?
Create an infinite loop of alert boxes. The only way out seems to be killing the browser process (or with Chrome, the tab process). This brings us to an question – why?
A good example of this is how in Firefox 2, the Password Manager dialog was intrusive, like this (it also blocked any user input until a button was pushed):
(What happened to the Vista theme?)
While in Firefox 3, it shows up a prompt like this at the top of the page, that does not block any user interaction (like an alert prompt):
Much better
You can see where I’m aiming at. Why can’t we have something like this for the alert box too? Why does the alert box block the browser? The user should still be able to interact with the browser even with an infinite loop of them. A similar solution is used for some security alerts in Internet Explorer, but not any user JavaScript.
There’s actually a Mozilla bug tracker issue about it. From 2000.
GoDaddy
January 18th, 2009
First post of my new personal website/blog! Yay!
This domain (tuntis.net) was registered at GoDaddy in 2005. I also used their shared hosting for a year. This post is about my bad experiences with them and a generic complaint at their aggressive marketing.
To date, I remember all the extra products and ads they pushed at me while registering my domain. No, I don’t want e-mail hosting; I don’t want hosting… I just want to register a domain! After the registration, I used a free host for a while to host a very early personal website of mine. After that, I decided to buy GoDaddy’s Linux Shared Web Hosting.
That was a huge mistake. I’m sure you can find a lot of hateful writing about them already in the internet, but one blog post more can’t hurt.
Incidentally, I had trouble with my first blog I tried to install on their hosting package. That’s one of the reasons why I later moved to another host. I think that was WordPress version 2.1 or something.
Anyway… back to GoDaddy’s hosting. Here’s a small disclaimer, first: I haven’t used it in about 2 years. Things might have changed, but a friend of mine doesn’t seem to think so.
GoDaddy’s hosting control panel sucks. A really huge problem with it was that whatever you wanted to do, would get added to a queue. Any action usually took hours to execute (like creating a simple MySQL database).
Speaking of the MySQL databases, they were all hosted on remote servers (“secureserver.net”). I kept trying to install WordPress with the DB address as “localhost” before I even realized what I was doing wrong.
I recall having a lot of speed issues with these databases. And anything you did in the control panel seriously took an hour to complete. Sometimes even more, as I mentioned above.
I’m not going to get into much technicalities here, but GoDaddy kept dropping MySQL connections. I kept getting 500 Internal Server Errors.
So I moved hosts. But now, back to present day.
In December, Dreamhost (referrer link) ran a “get 1 year of hosting for 9$” promotion. I fell for it – and bought it for my small photography site that I had just finished. It’s been really great so far.
Anyway, I then decided to move my personal website (tuntis.net) to DH too (which you are now reading). When I went to change my nameservers at GoDaddy, I saw the following:
GoDaddy likes to advertise a lot.
This for some reason ticked me off. Sure, it’s just a small ad – but think about it. Do other domain registrars show you this? No, they don’t. Namecheap doesn’t.
I’ve decided to transfer tuntis.net to Namecheap once it’s about to expire and never use GoDaddy again. It’s not just the ads – but GoDaddy’s domain management interface is very bulky, too. And why would I keep maintaining 1 domain on another registrar instead of transferring?
But the ads are a major contribution in why I’ll transfer.