I am staying in Finland and will concentrate mostly on developing social training log Moozement, where I see a great potential. I will also be working as an independent consultant, so if you need help with your projects – get in touch.

I am hoping to get more time to formalize my thoughts, ideas and experiences with agile development methodologies, development of internet services and marrying them to mobile devices. So watch this space for more interesting blog posts.

The decision to leave was a tough one. Nokia clearly is an amazing company to work for, especially now, when it is aggressively establishing itself in the internet services domain. What makes Nokia unique is its ability to reinvent itself, and I believe that it will emerge ever-more powerful from this latest transformation.

I feel privileged to have worked with and learned from so many passionate, talented people. But after about six years at Nokia, working on products used by millions of people every day, I’ve decided that it is time to move on and explore the world beyond the corporate pond.

Let the future begin…

Now things are starting to get back to normal – and I’m hoping to be more visible in the blogosphere.

Having spent almost 8 years working with Symbian devices, I decided to shift the area of my professional interests. I moved from Nokia Devices to Services, where I’m working on creation of one of the common components for Ovi services.

Software development processes and complete cycle (from building to deploying) of rich web applications are in the center of my interest. Ruby on Rails, Facebook applications and social objects are occupying a serious part of my free time. In the mobile area I’m taking a broader view and looking into iPhone and Android applications in addition to traditional Series60 and Symbian.

2009 promises to be a very interesting year…

When Sampo launched the new system this Easter, they took into use Java-based authentication system. Of course it didn’t work in my Ubuntu 7.10, but after removing Open JDK and installing latest Sun JDK it started functioning again – at least log in worked. This Java solution raised a lot of concerns in internet community.

After upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 that has Firefox 3.0b5 as default browser, Sampo web-bank Java login stopped working again. This time installing latest JRE didn’t help. Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) contains JRE 1.6.0_06-b02 and it fails on the second security code request during login process. (Remarkably, Sun itself offers only 1.6.0_05 version for Linux). Solutions proposed in Finnish Ubuntu discussion forum (tweaking plugins) didn’t work for me either.

What worked was replacing JRE 1.6 with an older version 1.5:

$sudo apt-get remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib

$sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

Then I ran

$sudo update-alternatives --config java

command to make sure correct JRE was selected as default.

While struggling with this issue I tried to check Sampo’s technical support pages. There was a nice “Check your computer page” that kindly informed me that my operating system is Linux and “You may be able to run eBanking, but your operating system is not supported by Customer Support.”

This is really frustrating. 14% of the readers of this blog use Linux. On regular sites that I maintain this figure is from 7% to 10%. Sampo caused a lot of grief to its customers, me including, with this software system upgrade. Even after they promised to waive four months’ worth of service charges I’m still not sure it is going to be enough to keep all their customers.

I’ve experienced quite a lot of problems by far – non-\0-terminated strings in UI, transactions with no explanations that I don’t remember authorising, transactions in our web shop that were reported as failed, although money were withdrawn from customer’s accounts, simple web-bank downtimes with HTTP 503 and the latest one is my credit card – Sampo claims that I don’t owe them anything – probably it is one of the Monopoly’s famous “Bank error in your favour, collect $200″ cases.

Beta culture seems to be spreading from internet startups to bank systems (although in this case I would be more inclined to say that this was a huge screw up on Danske Bank IT department’s part). I’m not sure I like it. Gmail beta, Flickr beta, but Sampo Bank beta? It’s definitely fun to participate in debugging of the new web service, but not when it deals with your real money.

This case bring interesting thoughts on how much we trust online services and what is the pain level when we say “that’s enough, I’m leaving”. Is it the same for data banking as for traditional banking. Would you trust your bank to keep your family photo archive or your computer backups? Is it any safer than Flickr/Google Documents? And the other way around – if you trust your data to Google or Yahoo, would you trust them with your money?

Fri 23/06/2006 21:40 Drinking and grilling

Midsummer in Finland

Vappu on Senate square

Fazer is giving away tippaleipä

Tippaleipä

Fire brigade orchestra

Havis Amanda on Vappu day

Pictures from Vappu celebration in Helsinki taken with new Nokia N93 (posted using Lifeblog from mobile phone and optimised).

According to Mr. Vanjoki there’s no such sign just yet, because he suspects that there are not many users in the neighbourhood.

"In my opinion network connection should not be restricted in any case. Even now my WLAN-network is open, however the computers are
protected." Mr.Vanjoki said in the interview.

Open WLAN is great, but unfortunately not all people who have open wireless access points realise that they are sharing them with the neighbours. Some people don’t even bother to change default configuration password on their WLAN hubs.

My home WLAN is protected and I have to agree with Tero, I wouldn’t like to make it open to total strangers – in the end I am responsible for the traffic going through my WLAN hub.

This ship was unloading something near Kaapelitehdas. Never seen such big ships in Ruoholahden kanava before.