Of course I signed up, tried it out and looked for content to “flattr” right away. I think the idea is great, and I can’t really complain about the implementation either. The service feels really easy to use and understand, and there are many extensions and plugins to integrate with different tools, including the WordPress plugin I’m using.

How does Flattr work then? Basically, you pay a fixed amount of money per month (you choose how much of course!), and you click “Flattr” buttons of the content you find interesting on the internet. At the end of the month, the money you paid is divided between the number of buttons you clicked, and each of those “slices” will be given to each author. You can watch the video below for a better explanation:

The only downside is that the money Flattr gets for every transaction is a bit high (10%), but I really like the idea and the service and I feel it’s something I have to support. Because, as the Question Copyright folks say, “I am the content industry“.

So I sent a message to some internal company mailing list to see if there was anyone interested. And boy were they interested. Four people replied, and the best is that it was a singer, two guitar players and a piano player. So we decided to look for a place to rehearse, found the amazing Øvingshotellet and gave it a try. One of the guitar players was really put off by Jazz, so ended up being five: voice, guitar, piano, bass and drums.

It was funny because I was exceptionally bad at the time (October 2009; now I’m just very bad), and had never played Jazz before. And of course Jazz is the scariest style to start with, also when you play drums. But somehow we managed to stick together and play for another week, and another, and another, and after some months someone said “we should start looking for a gig, you know? So we have a goal to focus on and all that. Otherwise this will just be fooling around”. We were a bit scared of playing in front of people because we didn’t sound that great (not that we sound that great now, but it was definitely much worse back then). Somewhere in the middle of that we decided to choose “Not a Number” as a band name (the story is longer and more complicated… and boring, so I’ll skip it). I even made a funny logo resembling another band‘s logo.

And it happened: we got this opportunity to play in Opera’s 15th anniversary Summer Party last Friday, August 27th, and we went for it. Unfortunately the only recordings we have are of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what we got. And after the next-to-disaster situation we experienced right before the gig, exemplified by the comic below, it’s not such a tragedy that we didn’t end up with a proper recording.The gig was quite short, only 5 songs, but we felt really good while playing and had a lot of fun. Apparently some people liked it even! And we were lucky enough to even have a “guest star” playing sax in the last two songs. The set list was:

1. Maiden Voyage
2. Some Day My Prince Will Come
3. High & Dry
4. Autumn Leaves
5. Summertime

If someone had told me this “playing with Chris at my place so I don’t get bored of drums” was going to end up like this…

UPDATE: It seems some people have trouble downloading or listening to Ogg files, so I’ve uploaded the recordings to SoundCloud and I’ve embedded the concert recordings down here:
Summer Party Concert – Aug 2010 by Not a Number

UPDATE 2: And now also in HTML5 (you’ll only see it if you have a modern, decent browser):

Maiden Voyage:

Some Day My Prince Will Come:

High & Dry:

Autumn Leaves:

Summertime:

My basic requirement was that it must play Ogg Vorbis, and ideally also Flac, apart from MP3. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time comparing and looking for the ideal player, and of course I didn’t want it to be very expensive, but I didn’t really have more requirements that the music formats.

Long story short, I ended up buying an iRiver Spinn. One of the reasons was that it was relatively cheap, and another reason was that I thought it was nice supporting iRiver, to my knowledge the first company that really cared about Ogg Vorbis as a format for portable music players, many years ago.

I have to say I’m disappointed with it. While I don’t have such strong feelings about music players and it’s not like I’m not going to use it, there are a number of things that were (negatively) surprising or didn’t meet my expectations:

• It has trouble with UTF-8. I’m sorry, last time I checked it was 2010. iRiver guys, W T F ?
• I have had a bunch of problems (many of them unresolved) with the song order. I have set the track order in the tags, but it still gets the order wrong. Typically it orders alphabetically by title in the tag (not filename). How the fuck is that useful?
• It has a touchscreen, which most of the time you don’t really have to use… but it’s not exactly responsive, so when you have to use it it’s very annoying.
• When I turned it on for the first time, it seemingly had a lot of songs already loaded. When you tried to play any of them, it would do nothing so it was quite confusing. Navigating through the menus (inside a menu called “SET” -> “Advanced”) I found a “Rebuild library” option. Using that option “refreshes” the idea the player has of what your library looks like, and of course it turned out empty (ie. no sample tracks included by default). Also, every time you copy or delete new music you are apparently expected to use that option again. While I don’t mind having to do it as I don’t copy/remove music very often, it’s just dumb and bad design.
• The USB cable you need to charge/load songs is not a standard mini-USB. From what I can see it’s a proprietary USB cable, which is an amazingly moronic design decision to make. If I lose that cable I’ll probably not buy another one from them, I’ll just buy a new player and never again buy from iRiver.

In summary, I’m not going to throw it away or anything, but I’m disappointed with the iRiver Spinn. When I stop using it, I’m going to consider stop using those altogether and just start using my phone for listening to music. It might turn out to be cheaper, more practical and less disappointing.

Different stuff I’ve been reading or otherwise been exposed to in the last weeks has made me reach a sort of funny comparison: code is (or can be) like science. You come up with some “theory” (your code) that explains something (solves a problem)… and you make sure you can measure it and test it for people to believe your theory and build on top of it.

I mean, something claiming to be science that can’t be easily measured, compared or peer-reviewed would be ridiculous. Scientists wouldn’t believe in it and would certainly not build anything on top of it because the foundation is not reliable.

I claim that software should be the same way, and thus it’s ridiculous to trust software that doesn’t have a good test suite, or even worse, that may not even be particularly testable. Trusting software without a test suite is not that different from taking the word of the developer that it “works on my machine”. Scientists would call untested science pseudo-science, so I am tempted to call code without tests pseudo-code.

Don’t get me wrong: sure you can test by hand, and hand-made tests are useful and necessary, but that only proves that the exact code you tested, without any changes, works as expected. But you know what? Software changes all the time, so that’s not a great help. If you don’t have a way to quickly and reliably measure how your code behaves, every time you make a change you are taking a leap of faith. And the more leaps of faith you take, the less credible your code is.

So, the executive summary would be that the ideas in the book are quite interesting, but it’s way too long and it’s often, in my opinion, annoying to read due to the author’s arrogance (you can probably imagine what I mean by looking at his website “Fooled By Randomness“).

The rest of this post is my random notes that sort of serve as a summary. They’re meant mostly for myself (or at least someone who has actually read the book) and probably fairly bad, but hey, it’s the first book I read like this, so bear with me. If you haven’t read the book and want to read them anyway, at least you have to know what a “Black Swan” is: it’s an event that it’s basically unpredictable, and changes the world in a substantial way. Just go to Wikipedia and check it out.

• From page 8: History is opaque. Reasons:
  • Illusion of understanding: the world is more complex and random that everyone thinks.
  • Retrospective distortion: we assess matters after the fact and look for tidy, regular explanations.
  • Overvaluation of factual information and experts: we “Platonify” the world.
• Page 12 (about the second point above): history makes jumps, not small increments of change. Yet we believe in nice, tidy, incremental changes.
• Page 30: About scalable vs. non-scalable jobs (writer vs. nurse; getting paid for your time or not), “talent” comes from success, not the other way around.
• Page 49: the book is not about avoiding risks, but about knowing which ones to take and know what we don’t know.
• Page 50: Black Swan blindness, related themes:
  • We focus on preselected segments and generalise from them: confirmation error.
  • We believe in tidy explanations: the narrative fallacy.
  • We behave as if Black Swans don’t exist.
  • We don’t see all it’s there: we hide Black Swans under other explanations.
  • We “tunnel”: we focus on well-defined sources of information.
• Page 58, about the “confirmation error” above. Experiment: given 2, 4 and 6, people are asked to guess the rule they follow. Each person can give any number of three-number series and the experimenters will say if the series follows the rule. In that experiment, people tend to first build a theory and then try to confirm it. So, most people never guess that it’s simply “ascending numbers”.
• Page 71, about people behaving as if Black Swans didn’t exist: When you remember something, you change the story at each remembrance. We renarrate the past to make it “more logical”.
• Page 114, about hiding Black Swans under other explanations: We don’t hear the stories of the non-successful, so the information we have comes mostly from the lucky ones.
• Page 120, still about the same topic: When survival is in play, we look for cause and effect. We believe in the “because” and not in randomness. It may have been just luck, but we always try to find a cause.
• Page 138 has a summary about chapter 10 (all notes up to and including page 158 belong to this chapter). There are two main topics in this chapter: (a) we are arrogant about what we think we know, and (b) that has implications when predicting. Why do we predict so much, even if we know we make so many mistakes?
• Page 144. Ideas are sticky: once we have a theory, it’s hard to change our minds. We have trouble interpreting information that contradicts our opinions. Experiment with horse race prediction: knowing the 10 most useful variables, people predicted.  Then, when given extra variables, the accuracy of predictions didn’t increase, but the confidence in the predictions did.
• Page 151: When you predict wrong, you tend to think you couldn’t know because it was an aspect you don’t know that well (e.g. about predicting the fall of the Soviet Union when having an excellent knowledge of the political workings, one would think that it turned out to be economic reasons, so you couldn’t predict it).
• Page 158: We anchor: when we see a number before a prediction, even if it’s random and we know it, we make predictions “close” to that number. This, by the way, I had read before, I think in “Predictably irrational“.
• Page 203: Advice: be human, admit your arrogance and ignorance. Avoid large scale, harmful predictions.
• Page 205: Advice: put 85-90% of your resources in something very low risk, and 10-15% in something very high risk. Avoid “medium risks”.
• Page 207: Closing tricks:
  • Make a difference between positive and negative contingencies. When you have a limited loss, you have to be as aggressive, speculative and “unreasonable” as you can.
  • Don’t look for the precise and local. Don’t be narrow-minded. Do not try to predict precise Black Swans. Invest in preparedness, not prediction. Infinite vigilance is not possible.
  • Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like one. They’re much rarer than people think.
  • Beware of precise plans by governments.
  • Do not waste time trying to fight forecasters.

In summary, I liked the ideas in the book, even if sometimes I wasn’t very convinced by the arguments or the evidence provided… and it was sort of boring to read at times.

So anyway, recently Opera released 10.60, which is awesome news because finally Linux has a modern stable release, because of the amount of new eye candy in the UI, the new supported web standards (like Geolocation or WebM video, yay!) and… because of the amazing speed (“much faster than a potato“).

On Saturday, DailyTech published an article comparing the speed of several browsers, Opera 10.60 included. Obviously the conclusion was that Opera is the fastest (I wouldn’t link to that article from this post if it wasn’t the case, would I? :-P), and shortly after reading that, I came across this hilarious video that sort of follows up on that:

I mean, the video even mentions Opera Link, I have to like it :-P (although yeah, the claim is not correct, Chrome does have something similar). My favourite quotes are:

• “You promised innovation, but look at Opera!”
• “Maybe Opera is hiring”

And the second reminded me that yes, we are hiring!

But I hate not trying to be constructive, and just saying that it was disappointing for me won’t tell you much about the possibility of it being disappointing for you, so here we go:

• The choice of articles seemed “random”: clearly some of the authors had very good things to share, but many others didn’t sound that experienced or having so much interesting to say. I could imagine myself writing some of those articles.
• Many articles read like they want to give “general” advice, but extrapolating from circumstances that I may never have (like making a rule out of a “this happened to me once” kind of experience).
• I didn’t find it “inspiring” at all, if I wasn’t a project manager already I would not want to become one. The idea of working as a project manager felt dry, boring, and too focused on processes.
• Many articles feel written for someone that doesn’t have any project management experience whatsoever. That’s cool, but it’s useless for me and should have been clearer in the book I think.
• Many other articles seem written for project managers from other industries (or even simply “managers”) that are going to start managing a software project. That is not only plain useless to me, it also bores me to death. Seriously, WTF is with the definitions of super basic concepts? If you don’t know what an “iteration” or a “hack” is and you won’t check yourself out of curiosity you shouldn’t be allowed to manage a software project. Period.
• Many articles felt too “corporate” to me, there was too much jargon and too many references to job titles, methodologies and contractors instead of really essential stuff based on experience.
• Reading some of the more or less interesting stuff, I couldn’t help thinking that those things would be obvious for someone who has been working as a software developer for years and wants to become a project manager because she finds it interesting.
• Other articles were interesting, but lacked depth to make them really useful.

Don’t get me wrong, there are useful articles, but the book as a whole doesn’t feel that useful. Certainly not worth the time reading the whole thing.

And finally, something that kept popping in my head, even if the comparison is unfair (it’s a different kind of book), is that this book is in many respects the opposite of the things I loved about Making Things Happen (an excellent book that you should read if you have any interest in project management). Oh well.

But that meant I had to edit video. Which I had never done before. And I figured it wouldn’t be trivial if I only wanted to use Free Software tools under Linux. I was partly wrong, because after looking around a bit I found OpenShot, which I found pleasant enough to use (at least for my very basic, very limited needs). However, the final footage I used made OpenShot export corrupted videos. I know it was something specific to that source video (a MOV format, H.264 codec, EPICly HD resolution (1920×1080) video) because I had tried to do exactly the same things with earlier, lower-resolution, MPEG-format takes, and it had worked like a charm.

In any case, I was sort of fucked because I couldn’t get the final edited video out, so I had to resize it and change the format somehow. I won’t list here everything I tried (that includes trying to download and use several programs on Windows, as well as using mencoder on Linux), but after a very long and frustrating process, only ffmpeg did the trick for me. My first attempt with ffmpeg did export the video, but with awful quality. After looking around a bit, I found what worked for me:

ffmpeg -i original.mov -s hd720 -b 3200k resized.mpeg

The trick to get a decent result was forcing the bitrate (“-b” option), which will hopefully help someone in need. Meanwhile, I’m going to stop typing so I can go back to crossing my fingers to get picked for GTAC ;-)

They are going to play it again tomorrow (Sunday, 30th May) so don’t miss this opportunity if you are in Oslo! One word of warning though: the actors speak pretty fast and for me it was fairly hard to follow the story by the dialogue. Luckily I knew the story so it wasn’t a problem. Thus, by all means go see them tomorrow if you can, but read a summary of the story if you don’t know it already, it will make sure you can follow everything ;-)

Edit: forgot the time, it’s at 19:30.

My first impression is fairly good: even though it’s the first decent Android phone and quite old now, I find it very nice to use and quite customisable (which is great, considering all the applications and widgets available for the platform). And even when using an old version of Android (1.5) I don’t find it slow. At least not enough to be irritating.

However, there are several annoyances and things I found out that I figured I’d share:

• It doesn’t automatically import SMS from the SIM card, let alone use the SIM card as the SMS storage. I find that really silly, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me that much. You can of course import your backed-up SMS using some utilities (I haven’t bothered).
• It took me a good deal of effort to import my contacts from the old phone. I tried some app called vCardIO, which sounded awesome but it didn’t work for me. The final solution was using a utility called “Import Contacts” that doesn’t seem to be in the Android Market (?). I had exported my contacts using gammu/wammu, but I had just in case removed the X-GAMMU-* lines from it. I don’t know if it had anything to do.
• I found the default mail application to be kind of sucky, so I looked around and found K-9 Mail. I’m quite happy with it.
• The default browser is some sort of bad joke, but luckily there’s Opera Mini. Opera Mini 5 totally rocks, especially with Opera Link.