Kristian Tapaninaho's Blog

It’s been a pretty fantastic year. Hasn’t it?

As I’m heading to Lapland for Christmas and I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to post anything, I thought I’d do quick re-cap of the year gone.

Full-time to freelance to full-time

As many of you know, I used to work at the UCCA (University College for the Creative Arts at Rochester) and enjoyed it a lot. I was given a good job there already when doing my final year enjoyed a great deal of respect and trust from the ones deciding. I never intended to do that job for more than two years after graduating and decided to go part-time from beginning of 2007. That only made me hungrier and not long after that decided to – lets put it this way – try being more available for freelance work; leave the day job.

All though there are many many plus sides to having a steady job, I haven’t regretted that decision. There’s a lot more admin to do, and it’s taken a long time to get a hang of it but I’m getting there. Being free to do what ever you like, brings a lot more responsibility as well, after all you’ll still always work for someone.

Shortly after going freelance, my girlfriend, who’s also freelance, and I, decided to start our own company, Suklaa Ltd. Even though our day to day work hasn’t changed a lot yet, it does provide us a great platform to start thinking bigger and getting noticed as an entity rather than individuals. For this reason I’m really excited about what 2008 has to bring.

The un-avoidable tech notes

Two great things that happened in the world of tech: Windows Vista and Zune 2.0. Need I say more? I must say I’ve only dabbled with Vista; installed few drivers and connected it to the Internet but I must say that it’s some experience. And Zune, from pictures I’ve seen, I can’t wait until it hits Europe. Good stuff Microsoft. Here’s one to you.

Ok, just kidding.

Leopard, a bit late but worth the wait. I did have the same problem as many others with the ape thingy but I can’t imagine going back to Tiger. (unlike so many Vista users dream of going back to XP…)

iPhone. I still think it’s the greatest phone ever. I know my first writing about it was quite negative and as it’s still important to make sure Apple knows what people think of it, here’s few more negatives. Or things I’d like to see them fix in software.

- No multiple recipients for SMS’s.
- SMS app doesn’t take contacts sent as SMS from other phones i.e. Nokias. But it shows up on senders phone as recieved.
- No reports in SMS app.
- Battery life is bad in the UK which is probably due to shitty network coverage. Just now when in Finland, I’ve noticed that battery life is much much better with five bars network at all times.
- No Bcc. field in the Mail app.
- it’s very hard to place the playhead when listening to podcasts. Increments of about 1/30th of the duration? WTF.
That’s about it for now. I’ll add later, I’m sure there’s few more.

Birthdays

My middle-brother turned eighteen. I’m really happy that he’s finally a bit older; he’s been about 12 cm taller then me for the last 2-3 years and it’s not fun realising that you’re shorter than your fifteen-year-old brother.

On top of that, there was a flush of big, zero ending, birthdays this autumn. Started of with the birth of my god-daughter Sohvi Ester Tikkanen. I’ve just met her for the first time few days ago and she is the cutest and happiest looking creature I’ve ever met. I’ll post few photos on to my Flickr later.

One of my best friends, Olle, and his girlfriend, Jennifer, both turned thirty. Congratulation to both of them again.

Finland turned ninety. Ninety years of independence. Celebrated it by having few beers with Olle and Jennifer. Tried to watch the Linnan Juhlat* on Yle’s** website but it didn’t seem to be possible. If someone know anyone at Yle let them know that I want to watch it next year. Online.

And finally, my dad turned fifty. He celebrated his actual birthday away in Hawaii where he ran the Honolulu Marathon. When he, mom and my youngest brother came back we had a surprise party for him. One of the best parties of the year; stayed up until 6:30 in the morning, had an almost three hour sauna in the small hours and swam in the Avanto*** eight times. I’m really happy and proud to have a such a healthy, fit and young dad.

We spent the last days of the year in Lapland skiing and I finally cracked the secrets of snowboarding. Or at least I don’t fall every time I get up.. Nice ending to the year.

Annyhow, happy new year to all of you dear readers!

–kristian

*The President of Finland hosts the biggest ball of the year in her palace every independence day.

** Yle is similar to BBC in Britain.

*** Avanto is a hole in the ice on a frozen lake.

Fourteen days before my five years in the U.K. anniversary, we, Darina and I, are moving to London. Finally. Really can’t wait. I’m gonna miss the people who are still here, all though most of our friends have moved away before us so there’s not that many left. I’m also going to miss Man of Kent and Grandma Thai. For obvious reason if you’ve ever been to them and if not, I’m not going to explain in case you might get upset for missing out.

–kristian

About two years ago, when starting my previous job running the computer resource at the University College for the Creative Arts I heard about Folding at Home (F@H). It’s a Stanford University project, in a nut shell, researching folding of proteins and how, when miss folding, they cause diseases such as different cancers and alzheimer’s. There’s couple of different ways to run F@H; in a stand alone app, screen saver or from command line. I chose to use the screen saver as it needed least effort from my part in terms of keeping it running. Just leave it to start as the machine is not in use. I’t's a brilliant way of participating in research, using those empty processor cycles for something useful.

Of course, I’ve since left college and moved on to the other side. But I did leave the screen saver on all the machines I was administering, 55 G5′s. It wasn’t running 24/7 for two years, sometimes the machines were shutdown for nights and weekends, sometimes students might have changed the screen saver etc. But now finally it has reached 1.000.000 points. Thanks for this belongs, obviously, to UCCA and that they’ve allowed it to keep running.

If you want to know more about Folding at Home, read this article about the science behind it. If you want learn more about distributed computing here’s the wikipedia article and another one on Xgrid, which is a build in technology in Mac OS for distributed computing.

–kristian