Yesterday we were at öölaulupidu, the night song festival, which was held at the song festival arena in Tallinn to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the singing revolution events. Song festivals are hold every 4-5 years, next one is next year, so this event was different and I expected less people. Oh was I wrong, […]

Not much blogging lately. Since joining the Core team 3 months ago, I’ve been getting more and more busy, working hard on the next version of Skype (there is cool stuff coming…). So my thoughts are all on Skype internal stuff, which is unfortunately not blogging material.
In Skype news, one important thing that happened lately […]

2.5 years ago, I was the first engineer of the embedded team at Skype. Since then, we built a team and did great things: Released many devices, worked with many partners, fixed lots of bugs, ported Skype to many platforms… But as with any job, there comes a time where you know it well enough […]

In my childhood, I always wanted LEGO for toys, so it’s no big surprise that Henri is getting some too. Of course he’s too young for standard LEGO so he’s getting Duplo. And with Ingrid we got quickly convinced it’s the best way to use the toy money.
Duplo have great build quality. They are safe, […]

I have blogged before about how using the Skype4Py library makes it very easy to script Skype and add little features to it, in a portable way. I have written two such little scripts recently. Their code is short and simple, and while I only tested them under Linux they should also work under Windows […]

In the recent weeks, Skype launched High Quality Video on Windows: 640×480 (4 times more pixels) and 30 fps (double as standard Skype video). I got last week one of the camera that can support it and I tried it with my mother. Her feedback was excellent (others agree). It’s much nicer to use in […]

I’ve been using Python as my main scripting language for a while now. The Skype Linux tools I wrote a little while ago were already in Python. They used a custom wrapper for the API that Skype exposes for 3rd party applications. There is however a much better Python wrapper available now, Skype4Py, which […]

Since a couple of months, I have been using an iPhone. In one of the first posts of this blog, in mid 2004, I wondered why we didn’t have an iPod phone yet. It took a long time, but it was worth the wait. The iPhone is an amazing device.
There have been lots of critics […]

2007 is ending, time for a little personal update. No changes actually, still in Estonia, still at Skype. And still having a great time with our son.
Beginning of October, Henri started walking. That was pretty amazing to see him so happy to discover that he can walk alone. Since then, he has been using this […]

While we have been traveling a lot in the last years with Ingrid, we haven’t been really in holidays in the classical sense of the terms, where you go for a week or two to a nice place, in a hotel, and relax or do sightseeing. So this year’s trip to Paris was a first […]