Tag Archives: en

Places feel different…

We are at the University of Oslo today for a meeting. The building does not look anything special, the entrance is very utilitarian but then… We get in and the building makes us all slow down. I relax very quickly, in the space of a minute or two, and feel completely at ease, like at home. Frank tells me he feels the same. He says it would be great to work in a place like this.

I agree. It would be great to work at a place without a trace of stress. It would be great if my home felt like that too. This place feels more home-like than my home. It is very, very comforting. I feel simply like staying.

How do they do that?… -->

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The Origins of German

I had a long chat with my German teacher the other day about language history and evolution. She mentioned something astounding: the first book, on which the German language is based, that actually created the grammar of the language, was the work of Martin Luther. But if I am not mistaken, that was in the 16th century. So the German language is only about 500 years old. I wonder if the situation is the same then with all European languages…… -->

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MBTI is dead? Long live Socionics!

I accidentally stumbled on an article about the death of MBTI yesterday. Strangely, it never occurred to me that there would be a wide audience interest in things like typologies in general and MBTI in particular. I always thought these were fairly specialized subjects only interesting for a minority of people. Since you seem to be interested, I present to you Socionics.

It all originated some time in the previous century with the works of Karl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist. His work was later built upon to create MBTI and later corrected and extended by people like Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, Gregory Reinin and Igor Kalinauskas to become Socionics. Nowadays Socionics is a young but fairly popular in narrow circles direction of social psychology. Actually, there are still raging debates on the subject of “where it all belongs”.

Socionics works with dichotomies of information processing functions and therefore describes how the given person filters and processes the information coming from outside, bases the decisions and outputs the information into the outside world. So Socionics is really a study in information metabolism of the psyche.

Given that, we can roughly say that a human being has some basic instincts at the base of its decision making, then there is the distinction between male and female, on top of that sits the information metabolism and that is all wrapped into a personality. The type of information metabolism determines those deep motivations inside the psyche that cause us to take many of our decisions. One has to note, of course, that different motives deep inside may cause nearly the same actions in different individuals. Different personalities may cause differentiation in actions based on the same motives.

Determining the type of information metabolism, or the socionic type, of a person is a task of uncovering those deep seated motivations that demonstrate how the given person processes the information. Tests for MBTI fail here because they try to correlate the behavior directly to the type but we see that the behavior is controlled by the personality. The type of information metabolism can be seen clearly when the practitioner concentrates on the motivations underlying the behavior. Unfortunately, the development of tests in this direction is far from mature yet and best results are based on the expert opinion… -->

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On Minimalism

Reading about minimalism and especially minimalist homes makes me think about typical Japanese traditional homes, Buddhist temples and such. I think what I learned from being in Japan about traditional culture is directly applicable to minimalism. So I know and like most of it, actually. This is a funny feeling of something new being actually quite old and well-known.… -->

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Nokia. End of story.

Nokia is gone for good. Microsoft has got what it wanted so badly for so many years. Could you imagine in your wildest dreams five years ago that Microsoft would buy Nokia, the undisputed market leader? I don’t like Microsoft but I have to admit they take their long-term business planning seriously, as opposed to so many other companies. Unfortunately, them being good means we are out of mobile phone manufacturing companies. And even though Microsoft got it now, I seriously doubt they will be able to run it properly to deliver the same brilliant products Nokia had.

But Nokia? How could you be so stupid not to see what’s coming? It was so painfully obvious. Although, come to think of it, nobody except the Nokia mobile phone customers was interested. The management got paid large sums of money to go along with the plan. The shareholders that matter probably know what they are doing in terms of their own win. So, who cares? Some people got reach on it and why would it matter that there will be no next brilliant Nokia E52 for the rest of us? We get what we deserve – a world where it does not matter anymore how good or bad the products are, how good or bad people feel about something initially. Everything can be manipulated, sold and bought, even the unthinkable happens if you have money to pay for it. Technical brilliance and the quality of the thing that does something perfectly do not matter anymore.

And just come to think of it, they paid such peanuts, 5 billion, for Nokia! That’s like getting it for free, basically. Can you imagine? Market leader is sold for 5 billion? That’s nuts! This is simply criminal and if I had shares of Nokia I would definitely sue. Making a market leader lose between 5% and 10% of the market a year – that is an attention grabbing achievement. Again, I would certainly prefer if a court looked into it very, very carefully. And if I was the government of Finland, this purchase would not go through, ever. Even in the face of threats of military strikes in the name of democracy.

Damn, after all these years, where am I going to get my next mobile phone?

… -->

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Quality of teaching

How would one go about determining a quality of teaching? Or, rather, the quality of a teacher? Say, you have a teacher in your school, you want to know if he is good or not, so you can replace him or keep him. What do you do?

It seems a difficult question and it seems that judging the quality of work the teacher does is really hard, especially if harmonious personality development is much higher on your agenda than getting end-year tests passed. Some thoughts on the matter include:

  • Participating in a class (what if you do not understand the subject completely and cannot judge?)
  • Reading through class plans, trying to figure how much effort the teacher puts into preparation
  • Interviewing pupils or students for both their feeling and their understanding of the subject
  • Setting independent tests (problems with tests are huge and numerous, so this may not quite work)

But there must be already some methods that work… Aren’t there?… -->

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Jack Barnaby … died? or made die?

Jack Barnaby was a hacker specializing in ATMs and medical equipment. He was working on the medical implant and hospital equipment security. He was scheduled to give a talk titled “Implantable medical devices: hacking humans” at the BlackHat USA 2013 tomorrow. The talk would focus on the security of wireless implantable medical devices, of which there are millions in the world. Jack planned to reveal software that uses a common transmitter to scan for and “interrogate” individual medical implants and discuss how they may be abused. And he is dead.

“The San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office said Jack died in the city on Thursday. It gave no details. He was believed to be in his mid-30s.”

Interesting. We are 4 days after now and still there is no information whatsoever. Some reporters say he was 35, some – 36. Nobody has any details on why he has died, of what causes. Not even a statement like “from natural causes”. Simply no information. Weird accidents happen. But being in security we are entitled to an unhealthy bit of paranoia.

At the time when medical equipment is riddled with viruses and malware, disclosing more problems with the medical equipment, demonstrating how people could die from a remote network attack on their implants, all that is a serious crime against good business. I would not be surprised if his death was “nothing personal, just good business.”… -->

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BOFH vs. Inkjet Printer

Ah, an excellent piece at the Reg where the Bastard Operator from Hell and his assistant neatly summarize all of the frustration I have for the inkjet printers of today. And then they deal with that inkjet printer, too! Head over and read it:

BOFH: Don’t be afraid – we won’t hurt your delicate, flimsy inkjet printer

I just wish I had access to one of those good old drums to feed it my inkjet…… -->

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