Consumer Reports has published a new report about internet security among consumers. One of the gists of the account is that Macs are still safer than Windows PC’s:

Macs are safer than Windows PCs for some online hazards. Only 20 percent of Mac owners surveyed reported detecting a virus in the past two years, compared with 66 percent of Windows PC owners.

What’s interesting is that every fifth Mac user in the USA has detected a virus even though there is not a single Mac virus out in the wild at the moment. The jury is still out on what viruses these guys have detected but I’m pretty sure it’s not a Mac virus. Polyconsumption, perhaps.

(via)

Dave Thomas just reported that David Heinemeier Hansson has received the 2005 Open Source Best Hacker award. Congrats, as well as to the one-year-old Rails (sorry, late)!

[UPDATE] Here’s the list of all the awards and recipients

One of the major arguments of software patent proponents has been that the patents would only be a defensive shield for their owners. The latest patent war between Amazon.com and Cendant shows again how much the claim holds true (from El Reg):

In his defense, Bezos argues that patents are defensive and should never be used, and illustrated this when Amazon.com sued rival bookseller Barnes and Noble for infringing on its notorious One Click patent.
In fact Bezos hates patents so much he has applied for 15 in his own name of which eight have been granted; as patent-watcher TheoDP noticed recently, one Amazon patent was granted after five rejections over four years. And as patent ’399 shows, he was busy filing before Amazon.com had sold a single book.
Clearly, the world needs more crusaders against patent abuse like Jeff Bezos.

(The whole article)

After recent events Aaron Schwartz declares he’s no more writing a blog but an online magazine. In accordance, he writes up his new regime with ten theses. The first rule: “??”Like all major newspapers":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact_checker, there will be no factchecking.??" Read the whole hilarious article.

That said, I just got a notice about a bag full of books waiting for me in the local post office. Won’t complain. I can’t right now think of a better thing to do than to retreat to the summer cottage to peruse Cradle to Cradle and The Best Software Writing I (containing pieces by, among others, Aaron, why the lucky stiff, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, John Gruber and Paul Graham).

If you want to build a successful business, you need to get your customers to trust you.

There’s a fairly new recovery drink (for sportsmen, but you knew that), Bioremix, in the Finnish market. It’s made in Finland, they are sponsoring the Finnish national orienteering team and seem to have some scientific research backing up the effects of the drink. But I’m completely turned off every time I read “Fresh lemon taste” in the package. Fresh? Lemon? If I had to describe the taste with one word it would be ‘puke’.

My empirical, absolutely non-scientific, research tells that the people who’ve tasted the drink can be split in two categories: those who’ll never touch it again and those who can drink it but with a grimace. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’d like the taste.

If the manufacturer tells me lies that I can instantly detect, how can I trust their claims about the ‘scientifically proven’ effects. They might or might not be substantial but I will always be very doubtful about them. You might want consider that when fabricating more things in your packaging and marketing materials.

Joel Spolsky:

Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the Gretchen level. No matter how good a recruiter you are, you can’t compensate for working at a company that people don’t want to work for; you can’t compensate for being the target of eight years of fear and loathing from the slashdot community, which very closely overlaps the people you’re trying to recruit, and you can’t compensate for the fact that a company with a market cap of $272 billion just ain’t going to see their stock price go up.

Plus a follow-up.

When visiting Lars last week I got a glimpse of a Mac Mini turned into a PVR. We haven’t had a working video recorder since 1999 and although (and because) we almost never have time to watch TV it’d be great to be able to timeshift the few truly interesting broadcasts. I already have a Mac Mini with all the bells and whistles lying in my shelf so all I needed is a TV tuner for it.

The best known tv boxes for Mac are made by Elgato, a German company with close ties to Cupertino (they say). Their most popular model has been EyeTV 200, which powers both David’s and Lars’s living rooms.

Finland is already in the digital age, however, and about to pull the analog plug totally in 2007. Therefore EyeTV 200 would not be an ideal choice for my needs. Elgato is fortunately running in the front field even with digital PVR’s, providing a wide range of products for different DVB signals. We have cable-tv in our house so EyeTV 610 is the model I chose. It has an interface for a conax card reader and an updatable firmware so it shouldn’t become obsolete too soon. For those of you who know Finnish, here’s a raving review of the 610.

I can’t wait for getting to play with the system after holidays. EyeTV uses a system called tvtv, which is similar to TiVo’s program guide and can be used to time recordings over the internet. The guide is already working in the biggest countries in Europe and should be available in Finland in late summer.

Ha! There’ll soon be one thing less in my 43things list.

This is too funny: Martin Fowler just pointed to a PDF article about Agile Development written by Dave Thomas. The article has a picture of the writer (Thomas) but to me it looked something totally else than the picture of Dave Thomas I’ve had in my head.

I wondered this in #rubyonrails irc channel and some bright lad noticed that the Dave Thomas who’d written the article was not the same Dave Thomas we knew at all. In fact he is an Australian Computer Science professor.

This is a funny coincidence, even more because PragDave is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto and the other Dave is the founding director of AgileAlliance.com. Or at least that’s what the article says. Hope they haven’t mixed up the two, I certainly would.

Wednesday

Had a nice (and expensive) dinner in Cafe Ketchup in Copenhagen Tivoli with lots of Danish bloggers and Scoble. The night turned adventurous when I tried to get out of the already closed Tivoli. After banging the gates for a while with some locals a nice bartender let us out through the emergency exit of his bar. Now that’s a good idea for maximizing your daily income: close the area before the restaurants inside it shut down.

Thursday

Building of Basecamp day. The workshop turned out to be as great as rumoured. I can’t say I heard that much completely new stuff (ok, I’ve probably followed 37signals, Basecamp and Rails a bit closer than average) but hearing all that in a single workshop, in such a coherent manner was probably worth the juicy price.

In the evening we joined the pre-reboot party at someone’s own (!) pub. Saw for the first time a lot of online friends and enjoyed the generous free beverages. The evening ended with a dinner in supposedly the oldest restaurant in Copenhagen, Lille Apoteket. Get one of the steaks if you ever stumble upon the place, at least the pepper steak was excellent.

Friday

Keynotes

Doc Searls was really great, you should definitely see him speaking some time. Scoble was, well, a bit unorganized compared to Searls and I didn’t get much more out of his speech than that I should blog. OK, I will.

Calacanis

I have to admit, I wasn’t that familiar with Jason Calacanis before, but he turned out to be a great speaker, too, articulating the power of blogging a lot better than Scbole. Here’s his own post about the talk.

After Calacanis, David Axmark of MySQL fame talked about how to make money with Open Source software. The topic was really up my alley, maybe a bit too much, since I didn’t find anything really new from his speech. Maybe his quite monotonic presentation had something to do with that, too.

The lunch was predated by a talk by Ben Cerveny, an interface designer behind e.g. Flickr and Quake. The presentation on Game theory was a disappointment for me as I had waited quite a bit more. It all just went flying high past me, don’t really know why. Lars offers one explanation with comments from Ben.

It’s always an illuminating event to find a name for a phenomenon you’ve known existed but didn’t really find a way to communicate it to others. One famous example of it is AJAX. It’s been around for years, got more exposure upon Google Maps, but didn’t really hit the mainstream until Jesse James Garrett labeled the technique AJAX and wrote an article about it.

I have an (annoying, some people say) habit to not only strive for but also buy the best. I don’t really understand people who when seeing me carrying a Powerbook come and wonder: “isn’t it terribly expensive?” Well, yeah, if you compare it to a €799 wholesale store laptop. But come on, it’s my workplace, a hobby and a communication vehicle in one. Why should I settle for anything short of the best?

Lars Pind, my kind host here in Copenhagen, recently posted an entry that really resonated with me:

When you’re a maximizer, second best is not good enough. Good enough isn’t good enough.
It’s not a materialistic thing at all. And it’s not snobbish. It’s a question of aesthetics and value. Why waste this precious life surrounding us with anything less? It’s greatly motivating and uplifting to surround yourself with the best there is, and help make it even better.

That’s me. A maximizer. It’s heartening to find out I’m not that freaky after all.

Me, I find that same kind of satisfaction in a really well thought out business model, in well performed music, in a slick software user interface, in a superbly written article about Ketchup in the New Yorker, in a perfect piece of Parmigiano, a well-executed business move, in an outstanding show by Eddie Izzard, in a beautiful piece of clothing, in a uber-functional perambulator, or in the Californian coast line (yeah, this isn’t man-made like the others, but whoever did it did a pretty impressive job. Kudos!)

Amen. Thank you, Lars, for (among many other things) helping me to take another step towards finding out who I really am.