Tommi Asiala's blog

Got the following stacktrace from Samsung Galaxy S2 when trying to sync an Exchange account email for the first time. I’m puzzled because I know that with the same settings and the same model phone another guy has it working just fine.

Let’s see if this bug will go closed as vendor specific bug or if something actually happens.

W/System.err(12329): java.lang.NullPointerException
W/System.err(12329):    at com.android.email.activity.AccountManagerPremium$AccountManagerAdapter.bindAccountItem(AccountManagerPremium.java:3623)
W/System.err(12329):    at com.android.email.activity.AccountManagerPremium$AccountManagerAdapter.bindView(AccountManagerPremium.java:3269)
W/System.err(12329):    at com.android.email.activity.AccountManagerPremium$AccountManagerAdapter.getView(AccountManagerPremium.java:3951)

Update

The exchange account had mail and mail forwarding set at that time. When the mail forwarding was removed, then new received mail began showing on the phone.

Blogging here has been on hold as I’ve been writing posts to my new training blog. As it’s in Finnish and it started as an project, I’ve wanted to keep it as separate I will probably continue to do so.

Octopress had many dependencies so I changed the blogging platform to plane Jekyll. GitHub does the hosting and also gives a nice online editor with markdown preview if needed. I’ll do fancier template when I have the time.

I’m now working for Elisa.

As a side project I’m doing an Intellij IDEA plugin. Releasing next week. Hype, hype…

Very quick and dirty planning poker number displayer for WVGA Android phones (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S2) can be found on github. I’ll have to check the submitting to market another time.

While I admire the way Facebook is collecting information, the new tactics employed by the company and showcased in F8 event are bit creepy.

Spotify now integrates very tightly to Facebook. So tightly that there isn’t a direct way to cancel the integration, just a button to “Get started”. That dialog violates so many good design principles that it just sickens me.

After two months of using AeroFS my advice is stay away from it. At least for now, that is. It’s still in rather early phase and the immature can cause data corruption and other mysterious behaviour such as your account password starts to fail. Been there, done that.

The technology itself sounds good, but the implementation still needs maturisation. I hope the Air Computing guys will get there soon.

Funny how no matter how stuffy you are feeling, after a gym you feel so much more energetic and focused. This time with inverted legs, seated leg extensions and curls and standing calf raise. I got to increase weights on the extensions and curls, yay!

Recently I received a marketing message from Diaspora by email which can also be read from Diaspora blog entry. All the credit to the team for making their thing go as far as it has. However, I was disappointed by their message. You shouldn’t claim that others are imitating your core features when the idea is not originally yours. Dividing the content subscribers in to groups by the publisher is not a new idea at all. Making it as one of the main points of the message is not convincing. Diaspora team also listed the following points as ways they are pioneering the future of the social web:

• We’ll make the social web more fun than it is today.
• Our distributed design gives you the security of owning your own identity and data.
• This also gives you the freedom to do what you want online.
• Our ecosystem provides the commons, the connective tissue for an evolving social web.
• We’re not gatekeepers, so our ecosystem will always support the latest apps.

The list is marketing talk without anything to back it up and therefore sounds too vague to be engaging. Always back up your sweet talk by actual commitments. “We added this and that feature”, “we completed the second out of three phases of protocol definition”, anything. There has to be something concrete to stand out from the crowd. That is why I simply love the Play Framework’s visualization of their progress right on the upcoming version’s “marketing” page.

Last weekend I was on a trip to Riga, kudos to Sysart. Riga is a beautiful city with beautiful women, definitely worthwhile visiting. The old city, the parks and the more easy going feeling compared to Helsinki among other things made it a good experience. Of course you didn’t have to go far to see the new west meet old east and girls willing to take your money for favors but I guess it’s part of the authentic experience of visiting a former Eastern Bloc country.

I occasionally browse Pakkotoisto, a Finnish body building forum. From there I noticed Mika Nyyssölä’s blog post in which he advocated beef jerky as a snack. This time I saw more beef jerky stands in the local Citymarket than usual, in total three of them. I got curious. Should I buy beef jerky or not? Then I started browsing the back side of those packages. The first one was made in New Zealand, processed and packaged in U.S.A. The meat had travelled at least 20 000km if taking the shortest route. Most likely way more. The second one was made in Uruguay and processed in Estonia. The third one was also from Uruguay but processed in the UK. I decided not to buy. See the image below for details.

If you want to see and hear Venkat Subramaniam at Helsinki this November then take a look a the Sysart Hotspot.

A flyer from Sats strapped to the back of a bicycle got my attention. I hate spam emails and I loathe real life spam as well. However, I decided to take a closer look at their website and since I just installed skitch, you can see the outcome in Finnish below.

The clock is ticking at 10:00 Sunday morning and what am I doing? I’m getting my ears full of water in a swimming pool. I can’t believe it’s been two years since my previous swimming lessons in Oulu. I haven’t been swimming much after those times, only couple of times in water parks and lakes. It was purely basics back then and now I’m taking swimming lessons on a next skill level and enjoying it.

The RSS feed of Edustajamme.fi is nice way to follow our MPs. The members of Perussuomalaiset party are very active in writing so many times their words are caught in my radar. Maria Tolppanen published this morning her speech at the parliament. She promotes herself on the blog page by writing ”I’m putting all my talents from thirty years of investigating journalism in to this. For you!”. Let’s see what the the thirty years of investigative journalism has brought us. Tolppanen seems to have found the buzzword inequality. She says that the time has changed since the war and there are now inequality among families and children. For some reason I find it hard to believe that inequality is something which has surfaced just recently. From what I’ve understood from the history lessons is that in the old days, we really used to have classes in our society. Sounds like rallying up on nothing to me. One of the things Tolppanen is complaining about is the increased candy tax, it being a flat tax and it not hitting the rich folks kids. Taxation can be used as a shortcut taken instead of educating and cultivating people. That shortcut, due to it’s easiness, is taken so many times and the Finnish tax laws reflect that. However, value added taxes on specific items is the most effective form of taxation when wanting to drive certain agendas on consumption of goods. I fail to see how Tolppanen can think that increasing capital gains would lead to the same outcome on candy. Can somebody honestly explain why increased progressive taxation and taxation on capital gains (currently 28%) is a good and the right thing to do in a society? Or is it just a trick to get the support of poor voters using a basic human emotion, envy?

While I do watch many TV series, I find that there are only handful which are good. Falling Skies is one of those. It doesn’t offer anything particularly new, we’ve seen survival stories, we’ve seen scifi, but the Falling Skies is good mix of the key elements of a good show. There’s some resemblance to Battlestar Galactica) and The Walking Dead).

I haven’t found particularly good place where to record my gym exercises, Heiaheia has no support other than “gym” exercise, so I might as well use the blog for it. I was about to create a website geared towards mobile devices but I don’t have the time to implement it and using mobile on the gym is impractical. Google docs spreadsheet is one option for saving the exercise, but it takes some tweaking with the formulas before it’s really useful. Today’s training included small set of feet exercises.

Inverted leg press

• 1 x 10 125kg
• 2 x 10 135kg

Seated leg extensions

• 3 x 10 50kg

Seated leg curls

• 3 x 10 50kg

Standing calf raise

• 2 x 10 50kg

Trivia: Did you know that George Gaynes, the guy who portrayed Eric Lassard in the Police Academy movies), was born in Helsinki, Finland?

Reijo Hongisto, a Finnish MP, wrote about hate talk and inequality in his blog. His conclusion was that banning hate talk does not help and that inequality leads to hate talk. Now I’m realizing more and more what kind of people are representing us in the parliament. While I agree on Reijo’s thought that banning hate talk does not do much good, I can’t share his view on inequality, especially economical inequality, being the root cause of hate talk. That is just way too simplified view of the world. I believe the root cause of hate talk has more to do with envy than anything else. I dislike when inequality is used as a synonym for poverty and the vagueness of the term. At the same time it also smells socialism. I believe that Reijo confused those two terms either intentionally to gain more support or by accident. But like he said, shortening the lines of food aid support (by other means of helping people) is of course a good thing. It also annoys when our representatives write this kind populistic bitching and moaning. Reijo offered no insight nor ideas on how to improve the current situation, something which we’ve employed him to do.

I was on a much needed vacation for July. The first week went completely slacking off and doing nothing, just laying back and unwinding. The next couple of weeks were active, 3 times at the gym and one aerobic exercise per week. Last week I went to play in water for two hours at Flamingo, something which I had not done for year. But the pace is going to change since a swimming school starting in a week. Also there was the Pirkan soudut last week. This week I’ve been twice at the gym and did a 8km run with a friend. The GPS didn’t start working right away and we went bit slow, but it was definitely worth while the effort. I don’t know which way the causality between training more and feeling better goes, but I don’t care - I’m loving it. Now some hot chicken wings for recovery food.

A friend of mine asked me to participate on a 35km race with a kirkkovene, a sort of viking boat. Without hesitating (actually without looking what I was signing up to) I answered yes. It was the 33rd annual Pirkan soutu rowing competition in a easy going group called the second wave. The first wave was the Finnish national competition. We, the team Kölinallet with the Nalle Puh balloon, started late behind others but managed to catch many holding the fourth place for a while and being near third. I have never really rowed before and neither had most of my teammates. Somewhat unfortunately the actual race was shortened to some 29,5km in the middle of the race but it was still long enough trip taking 2 hours 49 minutes. Fun race especially in a challenge yourself -way. And I think it actually did good to my shoulders. We finished 5/12.

See detailed results here: http://www.pirkankierros.fi/Tulokset_2011SO054_1.htm