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raindropper

“pouring…”

Category Archives: Web

January 22, 2025 ‘My Two Lives – Cancer Story’: Now available online

In 2015, I was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer. As it’s pretty rare to stay alive this long, I decided to publish my survival story online.

My Two Lives – Cancer Story

It’s possible that the story and my methods benefit other people in prevention and identifying the symptoms. Though I have studied and researched the disease extensively – like my life depended on it – I can not even remotely suggest I know how to cure it. The content is for informational purposes only, as stated there on No Medical Advice Disclaimer. In other words, no quackery.

It’s not solely about the disease, there are elements regarding personal development too. Some cautionary tales also, to help you to avoid/learn from the mistakes I’ve made. Plus several original videos.

As an example, I recreated videos based on the hallucinations I experienced during my recovery. My phone could not record them, as there was no app for that 🙃.

The MRI scans interested me, so I requested them from hospitals and added them to the story as videos. The hole left by the alien is clearly visible in my head.

“Very touching story,” one reader commented.

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April 23, 2023 Website Monetization – The New Era Begins

ShowMoor Brings The New Era Of Website Monetization? Big words there.

First, some background.

Since I was a kid, technology has interested me. In those early days, I experimented with transistors, LEDs, capacitors, loudspeakers, built various gadgets, devices. My dad’s Yamaha Electone organ had a drum machine. I tried to built something similar. Something that generates sounds.

To my dismay, one of my oscillator circuits generated horizontal stripes on TV in my room. Worrying that it affects our neighbours’ TVs, I quickly turned it off. I wasn’t a Woz-like prankster.

Here in Finland, TM magazine had an article about Sinclair ZX-80 and BASIC tutorials. I was mesmerized. I had to get my own computer.

So, I jumped from Oric-1 to Commodore 128 to Amiga 500 to PC with Windows 95. Learned to code on each.

On the Amiga, I created a communication method for a severely disabled person. A pointer cycled slowly through the ABCs. By touching the joystick, she could select a letter and form words.

Then the WWW happened. The World Wide Wait, at the time.

Once again, I was mesmerized. By the possibilities the technology brings. I had to know all about it.

The best source of everything web related – tech, business, culture, hype – was Wired magazine. I have saved tens of those. It’s fun to check which of the various predictions have come to fruition.

Kiss your browser goodbye. Yeah, sure.

My plans to start a company to build web pages did not take off. It was too early. Not many knew what’s a web page.

I began studying software engineering in Lahti Polytechnic. It was cool to have an internet connection passable for browsing with Netscape Navigator.


My first website had GIF animations and a Java Applet that generated unique fractals. The website secured me a web developer intern job in 1998.

Java Servlets and Swing, XML parser, Kannel SMS gateway, JavaScript, testing on different browsers, JDBC, databases, CVS, Borland IDE filled my days. We used WebMacro template engine that had a clever Java introspection MVC concept.

Why am I telling you all this? What’s the point?

As evidenced above, the web has been my passion and playground since its early days. I’m a proud Browserland native.

All this time, there has been this lingering thought: “How could I improve the web? Is there an issue I could solve?”

During the years, I poured my creativity into different blog experiments. Here’s one example:

Book of W – Water from All Angles

Soon, I began to wonder, is there a way to get money, even some cents from the blog.

The harsh reality had muffled the mantra of “Information wants to be free”. We need money and deserve to get paid from the work we do. That’s common sense.

Banner ads were distracting, irrelevant, did not cut it.

I got a glimpse of the possible solution. Let it incubate. In the unconscious mind, you know.

After finalizing the Kara MIDI Controller, the perfect window for development opened.

Things started to click into place. Like the company name and the logo.

[ The end of Part I ]

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December 2, 2015 Underestimated

Underestimated

May 1, 2014 Thinking Aloud About New Programming Language

When we consider the world around us, with all its images, sounds and concepts, traditional programming languages seem terribly limited. Look around you, and see how far from reality manipulating information like this is:

a = a + 1;

if (a > 23) then a = 0;

Of course, the programming languages reflect the architecture of the machine they are executed on.

What I’m looking is for a way of programming which enables systems have characteristics like these:

– Creativity. Show the system a chair and a human being sitting on it. The system generates and presents thousands of alternative versions of a chair. All in 3D, of course. Real world is 3D so no reason to aim any lower than that.

– Curiosity. The system wants to learn more.

– Photographic memory. WYSIWYP, what you see is what you process. Visual information provided to the system stays in its memory and it can manipulate it at will.

– Shades of gray. Things are not only black or white, true or false, 1 or 0, they can be something in between.

Actually, this seems not to be so about programming languages. This is about artificial intelligence.

[ to be continued & revised ]

 

 

 

 

 

May 16, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha Test Drive

Ok, Wolfram|Alpha – the computational knowledge engine – is up and running. Granted, I’ve seen three different versions of “site is currently under heavy load”. Do remember that there’s a large amount of on the fly computation and algorithm crunching behind each result. 

These are the queries I tested it with:

Where are you? gives a good result.

Where am I? gives the correct answer.

Who am I? gives the same answer.

sin(n/10) * 100 draws a nice chart.

What are you doing? is the first computed tweet. 🙂

What time is it? surprisingly gives nothing.

green, red – minimum result.

BMW presents stock information.

Weather in Lahti Wow!

Weather in Lahti June 2003 Double-Wow!

Neuron is not that interesting for Wolfram to have knowledge about.

Are you OK? opens a “Human Discourse” functionality which is under development. What will it be?

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha provides an interesting approach and implementation. It’s certainly one to follow and use.

However, I do get “everything is a number or a taxonomy” feel from the data it contains. It mostly answers with numbers; even Madonna boils down to a straight line between two dates.

So, Wolfram|Alpha is the engine Douglas Adams wrote about. 

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

Google left, Wolfram|Alpha right.

I do not know why, but the system creates an impression of an autistic Rain Man recalling phone book numbers and curated minutia with precision. Whereas Google is the outgoing guy with all the fun; its bots gathering data from the web carelessly, and giving noisy, vague answers at times.

January 27, 2009 Blog Book Hybrid – Navigation Changes

Those who follow have noticed daily changes on The Book of W. I took the final step and overhauled the navigation on that tumblr based site.

The site is now a good mixture of a blog and a book. The starting page displays recent updates like in a blog, and navigation at the top opens pages like in a book.

Main thing was to add page tags to each post. Now I can control which blog post belongs to which book page. In a way, this is a misuse of tags but…

With tags, users can link and refer to a certain page easily and intuitively, like in a book. As you probably know, blog pages are something one can not link to because they change dynamically.

I removed timestamp of the posts: books don’t have dates under their chapter titles. I like to think the contents are not glued to a certain time period, they are valid also in years to come.

Some things to prepare for are:

  • Sooner or later, as the page count increases, I will notice that the page numbering at the top will need some changes.
  • The cover page contains a water related photo from Flickr;  for some reason it doesn’t load 100% of the time and displays only some white space. Then it doesn’t look that good. Anyway, it’s great to have a dynamic cover page. Although, sometimes, the photo is not that close to the subject matter.
  • One of the worries is that users find themselves lost caused by the duplicate page concept: there are book page numbers and blog page numbers. This is something that needs to be addressed.

I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Next task is to fill the blog book with top content.

September 15, 2008 My Second Photosynth Experiment

At our Deomo booth on OLO.MUOTO trade fair here in Finland – I took several pictures with the Canon Ixus 950 camera, and photosynthed them:

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=29a44f5f-e48b-488a-8cf0-c87aee0491b6&i=0:2:0&z=467.0787043003208&g=2&p=-2.50427e-014:6.92928e-014&m=false&c=-0.664613:-0.656377:-0.145462&d=-1.56066:1.1653:0.877044

Deomo, modern furniture

Do remember to set the Photosynth viewer to full-screen mode (icon on the bottom right), it’s much better that way.

Regarding the Photosynth tech, I learned the lesson that one needs to change the camera angle and position only a slight amount between pictures. Otherwise, the end result is too jumpy as the Photosynth algorithm leaves too many images without context.

And yes, I’m bloody proud of the booth we did with my wife, Nina. 🙂

August 26, 2008 The Book of W: A Book or a Blog or a Blog Book?

As you have probably noticed, I’ve partially moved my act to thebookofw.tumblr.com.

On that site, I’ll create an experience which takes all the good parts of books and blogging. Furthermore, the site should be readable with mobile devices also.

One of the simple, minor, mundane things that bug me is how the pages are numbered. In blogs, the most recent page is the page number 1, by default. In books, page number 1 is the beginning. In my view, the best solution would be to number the oldest (i.e. first) blog post with the page number 1, and increase from there on. I haven’t yet found a way to accomplish this feature with Tumblr technology without relatively heavy scripting, or manual tagging (using tags like “page1”, “page2”). Yeah, I could code it using Tumblr API, but we’ll see.

Anyway, The Book of W is an interesting experiment. You wouldn’t believe how much, how long, how dearly I kept the contents and the subject hidden. Only my wife knew something about the unpublished, unprinted, unagented book. My face blushed and hands started to shake on those rare moments when the discussion reared it. And now, I’m on the other extreme as I publish the chapters to the web for you all to read.

When I was younger, I hided all my creative works (music, writings, …) from others. The rationale – if you can call it that – was that the works felt too personal, they gave out too much of me and made me vulnerable. Now I’ve learned that life’s too short for that. So, if you have something to present, just pour it out. Thanks for the web, it’s easy, fast, inexpensive and leads to an uncharted territory…

June 4, 2008 Something Wet Is Out! Really Wet…

It’s quite natural for a guy nicknamed raindropper to create a book covering all aspects of water, don’t you think?

So, point your browser to The Book of W and start exploring. There will chapters and postings about science, business, arts, cultures and religions – all of course water-related.

The Book of W

It looks like a mish-mash of blog postings and book chapters. But there’s a simple, common theme underlining all of those – and it’s clear as water. 😉

April 5, 2008 Ponzi Scam in Finland

The pyramid scheme named Wincapita made a few happy people and thousands of angry ones. According to some news, the happy ones are in Thailand. Angry ones are reporting to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, or silently cursing their losses. 

Here’s a good wrap-up of the issue. The scheme started in 2005 with the prop of Forex trading; the high interests for investments (400%) would come from currency exchanges. The Wincapita website went offline in March, company vanished and damage assessment began. Details are scarce as usually, but in essence top 50 or so got huge gains, 10000 or so lost packs of money. Estimated 50 million euros were invested to the company.

Interestingly, the brochure of Wincapita clearly stated that “Invest only the amount of money you are capable of losing.”

Internet has made the spreading of Nigerian letters and building of Ponzi companies easy. Nowadays, one can easily hire a person who under different fake names hoax the Ponzi company in newsgroups and message boards etc.

Why do people fall in to these traps, time and again? I’d see that at least some of the persons who give their money to these kinds of games know the odds, know the risks, and have a thought: what if I’m one of the inner circle winners, let’s try this, I might make a huge profit! 

As the pyramid scheme mechanism works, latecomers’ money goes to the top members’ – early adopters’ – pockets. Could the same happen in stock markets – in real estate business? Is the role of a latecomer always to make a loss?

[Update 12.12.2008] Yes, it can happen on stock markets also. WSJ article: Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud – His Investment-Advisory Business for the Wealthy Was ‘Giant Ponzi Scheme’