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June 29, 2028
7:57
Messenger Social: Email and Social News Feeds are the new Peanut Butter and Jelly
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpOne of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together. /p pOver on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/25/sharing-2-0.aspx"Sharing 2.0/a/p blockquote h5emOur data is everywhere/em/h5 pemPeople store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:/em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_1F184C46.png"emimg title="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" border="0" alt="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_thumb_5F00_6C4845D1.png" width="349" height="332" //em/a/p pemIt would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from /ema href="http://mobile.live.com"emmobile phones/em/aem and PCs that you may not own./em/p h5emWe're putting it all out there/em/h5 pemIt seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo amp; video dedicated sites, etc.)/em/p pemfont color="#ff0000"Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere./font They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news./em/p /blockquote pWith regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/29/email-in-a-world-of-social-networking.aspx"Email in a World of Social Networking/a where he wrote/p blockquote pemRecently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who useb AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/b, and bYahoo! Mail/b – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us./em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_012EE270.jpg"emimg title="Graphic comparing communication choices" border="0" alt="Graphic comparing communication choices" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_thumb_5F00_2EB00233.jpg" width="252" height="349" //em/a/p ul liembYou’re still very attached to your personal email accounts/b. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.#160;#160;#160;#160;#160; /em/li liembEmail is today’s tool of choice/b for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center /em/li liembEmail is your online photo album, too/b. font color="#ff0000"People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos./font/em /li /ul /blockquote pOne of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to a href="http://www.facebook.com"http://www.facebook.com/a and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ. /p pSo what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked. img style="border-bottom-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-left-style: none" class="wlEmoticon wlEmoticon-smile" alt="Smile" src="http://shared.live.com/5oeCPTazLAJxhccDO!c5Cg/emoticons/smile_regular.gif" /#160;/p h3Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social/h3 pOne of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed. /p pOn the web: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prQFlmXC5HmJCTD_E9XioEJakrUi5NtyydYVv4mSUbEyTIRLIHk4GFbXT_IpXyDmGaGE9olKI5JWg1c9ujptF0w/photo%20email.png" //p pOn the desktop: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1psiIm85CQm909os106w2i3PbPGiDpmS5Bib5IRdaWlsp-67-CEA_NacZuQSQL4jPbZnATo_xdsc1RnL4lblFbrA/despair.jpg" //p h3#160;/h3 h3Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social/h3 pThe goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pB7-_z8FHbEaz3076rs72sYMVIwqum-UxeWs-ZsGhsHze6d-5hUD6eaLqERqdSeXps09QHaLuzGSsv9iumZOIzg/comment%20email.png" //p pin the Messenger Social feed. /p h3/h3 h3What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?/h3 pSince Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live-messenger/id376196406?mt=8#"Windows Live Messenger iPhone app/a from the Apple App Store(comment #33). /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pvWcvyZY3kLa67LAzmTls0rFM8ZNh-I364lkxPZtwpuFHZySHhSwg3mHiOdStWjnAjCrjGOSQ0hUghrg4HWOY3w/1277313973_695268.jpeg" //p pimg title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Waka+Flocka+Flameamp;field-title=Oh+Lets+Do+itamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Waka Flocka Flame/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Waka+Flocka+Flame+Oh+Lets+Do+Itamp;x=0amp;y=0"Oh Lets Do It (remix) (feat. Gucci Mane, P. Diddy amp; Rick Ross)/a img title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

July 31, 2010
17:01
"Steam Punk backgrounds can be very generic. Very Breakfast oriented, etc."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Steam Punk backgrounds can be very generic. Very Breakfast oriented, etc.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/F87KB9iSxL8bU95kKGcgWD-g1lQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/F87KB9iSxL8bU95kKGcgWD-g1lQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/F87KB9iSxL8bU95kKGcgWD-g1lQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/F87KB9iSxL8bU95kKGcgWD-g1lQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:31
Sorties estivales
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Pendant que certains se prélassent sur des plages et d'autres épluchent les spécifications du futur mouchard Hadopi, le DebCamp a commencé et plusieurs projets de logiciels libres ont sorti des versions majeures de leurs applications.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://debian.usthb.dz/Dépôt Debian en Algérie/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://debconf10.debconf.org/DebConf 10/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://orgmode.org/Org-Mode/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.redmine.org/Redmine/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://couchdb.apache.org/CouchDB/abr / (...)
July 30, 2010
21:21
Sortie de Rakudo Star
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Rakudo, le compilateur Perl 6, annonce aujourd'hui sa première version publique après 10 ans de travail collectif. Baptisée Rakudo * (ou Rakudo Star), elle se base sur la machine virtuelle Parrot, conçue comme un projet indépendant pour interpréter des langages dynamiques. br / br / Ce compilateur est l'implémentation officielle du langage Perl 6, qui est plus ou moins le successeur de Perl 5, dont la première version remonte à 1994. De très nombreuses évolutions sont présentées, révélant les modifications importantes qu'ont subies Perl et sa communauté depuis leur création.br / br / Meme si Rakudo Star n'est pas encore considérée comme une implémentation stable ni même complète de Perl 6, les développeurs de Rakudo espèrent encourager la communauté à tester Perl 6, et à faire remonter des avis sur ce qui fonctionne déjà.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.perl6.org/Le site officiel de Perl 6/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://perlcabal.org/syn/Les Synopses/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://rakudo.org/Rakudo/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://linuxfr.org//2010/07/21/27151.htmlDepeche precedente annoncant Rakudo Star/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.mongueurs.net/Les mongueurs de Perl/abr / (...)

21:02
Client: “We want every single upper case letter removed from the site and replaced with all...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “We want every single upper case letter removed from the site and replaced with all lower case.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Okay, that’s a lot of work. There are dozens, probably hundreds of instances of upper case letters on the site. Unfortunately, we’ll have to bill you for this.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “That’s fine.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Can I ask why you only want lower case lettering?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Because it’s cooler. Oh, and we want to make it a policy for the site — users are not allowed to use upper case letters either.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3t0f07g_07-Xq03IsgGI1BsC1qU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3t0f07g_07-Xq03IsgGI1BsC1qU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3t0f07g_07-Xq03IsgGI1BsC1qU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3t0f07g_07-Xq03IsgGI1BsC1qU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

20:54
How do you unplay a Game?
» ‎ What To Fix
I have been thinking a lot about this tech addiction topic over the last week. Some problems just keep beating you about the head and shoulders until you try to do something about them.

And according to the data I'm looking at. It's a big problem.

Huge.

Billions of dollars have been spent by technology and internet companies to find out how to get you to play games. Every little detail is controlled and optimized, from the graphics to the music to the way the game is presented.

Fact is, however, that it really doesn't take much to get people to play games. Most of us seem somewhat natural at doing trivial and repetitive things. Somewhere right now there is still somebody wasting hours playing Tetris from the 1990s. A few little colored shapes dropping from the top of the screen. Millions of hours were spent on it.

From what I can tell, people have a natural desire to be in a state of flow. Professor Mihály Csikszentmihályi describes the flow state like this:
- clear and distinct objectives
- temporary loss of self-consciousness
- distorted sense of time
- actions merging with awareness
- immediate feedback
- high concentration on the task
- high level of control over this task
- balance (precise matching) between the available skills and the task challenges
- experiences bring full satisfaction and are worth doing for their own sake
The problem is, the last item -- experiences bring full satisfaction -- is a very relative thing. What you view as being worthwhile in itself this very minute could be completely different than how you would value it a year from now.

From my email stream yesterday
I figure that I work hard and effectively 8 or 10 hours a day, and as my world stands right now, that gives me the privilege to do what I please the rest of the time. So when I said 4-5 hours, I didn't mean that I want to get rid of those 4-5 hours, and spend them doing something else.

I have to admit that whether something is "productive" has almost zero influence on whether I am inclined to do it....

I don't know whether I'm striking the right balance between spending "unproductive" time online and spending time doing other things -- maybe I would be happier spending 2 hours a day average instead of 4; it feels like there's a little element of addiction influencing me. But I know that I would not be happier spending 0, or 1.

There are 3 great points here.
1. Technology is like food. It's not like we can turn it off. Like it or not, we're stuck in a world where to communicate with others and do our jobs we're going to be using technology. The same world-wide web that helps cancer researchers has tens of millions of folks playing Farmville. It's just the merest tiny change in an URL
2. People feel like they're owed something. Hey, I put in my time at work and I deserve a little happiness. If watching porn or lolcats makes me a little happier for a few hours, then it's a good thing.
3. But shit, did I really need to spend 4 hours on that? -- There's this underlying feeling that as entertained and happy as we are using technology, as much as it helps, we're missing out on something.
Old farts like me (45) are supposed to say things like "I remember back when we had to hitch the horses up to go into town. Younguns today are whiny little spoiled things"

So I'll say something like that.

I remember when I grew up what is was like to be bored. Summer would be in full swing, we'd get up and have breakfast - -then what? It was very common to complain to mom and dad about not having anything to do. There were 3 channels on TV and it was all soap operas during the day. We had no video games or taped movies.

Boredom was a real, physical, immediate, painful experience. But mom and dad would always say something like "you need to go and make yourself something fun to do, son"

The pain led to complaining, which led to self-direction and creative play. We'd build monsters from old blankets, make a play, create a new game. It was just you. If you wanted something fun, it took physical and mental work -- sometimes a lot of it. Boredom was nature's way of telling you that you had to create, invent. Act.

I'm sure my great, great grandfather probably had the exact same experience with hunger. Nothing to eat? Painful experience. Motivates you to go out and hunt and kill something. Pain drives adaptation. Now we all sit around eating junk food all the time, fat as pigs. My grandfather would be amazed.

Like bad food, bad technology just makes you want to do more of it. So how do you do just a little bit of something instead of so much? What's the low-carb, good sugar version of technology?

How do you unplay a game?

17:01
Client: “The website you designed looks great but my partner is here and she’s looking...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “The website you designed looks great but my partner is here and she’s looking at it from across the room and it’s a bit difficult to read.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“From across the room?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “It looks better from across the table, but go ahead and take a look at what you can do to fix the issue.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7OSC-Tmma124OzcWpT1z5QkG2dU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7OSC-Tmma124OzcWpT1z5QkG2dU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7OSC-Tmma124OzcWpT1z5QkG2dU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/7OSC-Tmma124OzcWpT1z5QkG2dU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:39
Les smartphones nous connaissent si bien, dixit une boîte noire de sécurité
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La conférence a href=https://www.blackhat.com/index.htmlBlack Hat/a, dédiée à la sécurité informatique, se finit aujourd'hui à Las Vegas. Les téléphones mobiles évolués dits ismartphones/i tels que iPhone ou Android et les problèmes de confidentialité inhérents y ont eu une place importante. La société Lookout a assisté à la conférence et a présenté un projet, App Genome, qui a révélé d'intéressantes informations à propos de la sécurité des applications mobiles... mais n'est-ce pas pour mieux faire de la pub à sa propre application (propriétaire jusqu'aux oreilles) Lookout, qui permet de garder les utilisateurs à l'abri d'applications malintentionnées... selon eux ?br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/29/une-application-espion-pour-android-telechargee-par-des-millions-d-utilisateurs_1393748_651865.htmlLe Monde : Une application-espion pour Android/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://blog.mylookout.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Lookout_App_Genome_Project_Infographic_072610_smaller.jpgLes principaux résultats du projet App Genome/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://www.mylookout.com/legal/termsLes conditions d'utilisation de Lookout/abr / (...)

0:07
FTC in Charge of Net Ads? -- and Opt-In vs. Opt Out
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Word is that the U.S. FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is seriously toying with the concept of establishing some sort of Internet do-not-track list to ostensibly control Web ads that involve behavioral targeting and/or user tracking. Outside of the fact...

July 29, 2010
21:03
"Can’t you just call Annie Leibovitz to shoot this portrait for, like, her portfolio?"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Can’t you just call Annie Leibovitz to shoot this portrait for, like, her portfolio?”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Qf0143UFc0dCEH09XqXigvDGxRk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Qf0143UFc0dCEH09XqXigvDGxRk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Qf0143UFc0dCEH09XqXigvDGxRk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Qf0143UFc0dCEH09XqXigvDGxRk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

19:53
Sortie de CImg 1.3.9 et G'MIC 1.3.9.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Deux mises à jour simultanées de bibliothèques/logiciels libres liés au traitement d'images sont à signaler, avec la sortie de a href=http://cimg.sourceforge.net/CImg/a (en version i1.3.9/i) et a href=http://gmic.sourceforge.net/G'MIC/a (en version i1.3.9.0/i).br / br / Ces deux projets, qui ont respectivement dix et deux ans d'âge, sont aujourd'hui développés et maintenus dans l'équipe a href=http://www.greyc.fr/?q=node/36IMAGE/a du laboratoire de recherche a href=http://www.greyc.fr/GREYC/a, unité de recherche a href=http://www.cnrs.fr/CNRS/a basée à Caen, et sont distribués sous licence a href=http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL_V2-en.htmlCeCiLL/a. Ils définissent un ensemble de fonctionnalités pour la manipulation de données images pixelliques génériques (images 2D, 3D, 3D+t, couleurs, multi-spectrales, à valeurs entières 8/16/32 bits ou flottantes), qui peuvent se mettre en place aussi bien dans un code C++ (avec CImg) que dans un shell/script (avec G'MIC), ou encore au travers de l'interface graphique proposé par le a href=http://gmic.sourceforge.net/gimp.shtmlgreffon G'MIC/a, dédié spécifiquement au logiciel de retouche d'images a href=http://www.gimp.org/GIMP/a.br / br / Le duo CImg / G'MIC couvre donc un large spectre de besoins et de profils d'utilisation, et peut intéresser potentiellement à la fois les programmeurs et les utilisateurs demandeurs d'algorithmes en traitement d'images. Ces réalisations sont disponibles pour de nombreuses plateformes, et les dernières versions en particulier pour Linux (paquets Debian / Ubuntu), Windows et Mac OS X accessibles sur les pages respectives des projets.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://cimg.sourceforge.net/CImg : C++ Template Image Processing Library/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://gmic.sourceforge.net/G'MIC : GREYC's Magic Image Converter/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://gmic.sourceforge.net/gimp.shtmlGreffon pour GIMP/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.greyc.fr/Laboratoire GREYC (UMR CNRS 6072)/abr / (...)

19:27
The Project
» ‎ What To Fix

In the Beginning was the Project
And then came the Assumptions
And the Assumptions were without form and void
And the customer conversation was completely without substance
and the darkness was upon the face of the workers
and they spoke among themselves, saying
"It is a crock of shit and it stinketh."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,
"It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odour thereof",
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them,
"It is a container of excrement and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,
"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,
"It promotes growth and is very powerful."
And the Vice Presents went unto the President and sayeth unto him,
"This new project will actively promote the growth and efficiency
of this Organization, and in these areas in particular."
And the President looked upon The Project,
And saw that it was good, and The Project continued many generations, and many were overpowered at the size, ineptness and illogic of it
And this is why you are here

17:02
"Round off all of the rectangles — this needs to be kid friendly."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Round off all of the rectangles — this needs to be kid friendly.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oNVNQN9-MPwFHsiuOB8gUEOHXeE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oNVNQN9-MPwFHsiuOB8gUEOHXeE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oNVNQN9-MPwFHsiuOB8gUEOHXeE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oNVNQN9-MPwFHsiuOB8gUEOHXeE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:34
Aide à la supervision informatique avec la suite gbRRDGraphix 1.7.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Sortie de la suite gbRRDGraphix en version 1.7.0, outil de surveillance et d’aide au diagnostique réseau. La suite se compose d'un front-end complet et souple pour la création de graphiques via RRDtool, d'un ordonnanceur, ainsi que d'un outil d’analyse des flux réseaux. La combinaison des outils RRDtool, SNMP et Flow-tools permet sur un grand parc de machines/équipements de réaliser des analyses et diagnostiques de manière fine et rapide.br / br / Contrairement aux outils existants comme Cacti, Nagios et d'autres, cette suite permet une analyse graphique simultanée des données SNMP et Netflow, mais aussi une étude plus pointue par l'analyse détaillée des trames Netflow elles-mêmes. La suite logicielle est développée depuis quatre ans et fonctionne en production sur un parc de plus d'un millier d'équipements. Elle a été développée pour tenter de combler un manque de logiciel open source d'aide au diagnostique réseau. Elle se place entre le logiciel de monitoring et celui d’analyse précise de flux réseaux et permet de faire de manière conjointe le travail de logiciel de monitoring, de tracing et d’analyse du réseau. Ceci dans le but d’accélérer la résolution d’incidents et cibler facilement les différentes sources d’anomalies.br / br / gbRRDGraphix n'est en rien un substitut de solutions comme Nagios ou Advanced Netflow Manager (logiciel commercial) mais bien un complément à celles-ci. De plus, gbRRDGraphix fait partie des rares interfaces graphiques les plus complètes pour apprendre et manipuler RRDtool. L'architecture du logiciel peut être éclatée sur plusieurs machines soit pour absorber la charge, soit pour permettre une administration déportée de chaque composant. Tous les composants de cette suite ainsi que l'interface graphique principale ont été développés en language Gambas v2.x, à l'exception de l’interface web.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://gbrrdgraphix.sourceforge.net/Site officiel de gbRRDgraphix/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/gbrrdgraphix/Projet gbRRDGraphix sur Sourceforge/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://gambas.sourceforge.net/fr/main.htmlSite officiel de Gambas Linux/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/Site officiel de RRDtool/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetflowDescription de Netflow/abr / (...)

13:10
Talking Digital Drugs Part 1
» ‎ What To Fix

I sat down with about a hundred of my friends yesterday and had a detailed conversation about digital drugs. I was wondering -- am I the only person who views this as a problem? Instead of chatting, I decided to use an online survey tool so that I could slice and dice the data. And here's what I found:

Who are you?

Most of these guys are friends from over on HackerNews, and the data skews accordingly.

All my tech friends are guys. Not much surprise there.

You're mostly all from English-speaking countries

Mostly you're in your mid-to-late twenties.
Just out of college and hitting the workforce

Incomes around 40K or so. Nice normal curve in there

What are your opinions on technology?

Not a lot of interesting data in the direct results of the likert responses (the "Strongly agree" questions), which is surprising. So no graphs. But you guys are tech mavens: you know a lot about the technology and the internet, and you keep learning more. You slightly disagree that playing electronic games was as much fun as it was five years ago, which makes sense, since you probably just got out of college. The statement people agreed most with? (Standard Deviation-wise) "I know a lot about technology". The types of statements you most often disagreed with each other on? (by 2 places on the scale) "i'm really excited about gadgets", "I wish I had better gadgets", and "I like playing electronic games" Seems like with gadgets and games, you're either for them or against them.

So what's the problem?

Note the wording here, because I think it is important: Number of hours a day you think you spend non-productively (Facebook gaming, WoW, randomly-surfing the web, chit-chatting, reading articles not directly-related to your goals for the day, arguing with people you will never meet and will never change their mind, looking at pictures or videos of things just to pass the time, creating and reading status updates and tweets that are silly, pointless, or trivial, etc)

This is not the hours you spend online. This is not the time you search for information that you find. This is the time that you self-report as being wasted. So please don't argue about how technology is great, you can find wonderful things on the net, etc. All of those things are true. This is simply what you think is unimportant. That can be different things for different folks, but the point is that, looking at your overall technology use, these are the parts you are not happy with.

Minimum hours lost per day

Minimum hours lost per week

Minimum lost income per month

Where's the money?

That last graph made me sit back and think -- what's up with this? Are there two (or three) segments of people? The income was such a nice curve, yet the lost money is not. Perhaps people are thinking that their time is worthless -- I might make 20K at the library, but the time I spent not at work has no value.

But you'd think that this opinion would hold evenly. Would it? This might explain the spike at the end of the graph -- at some point you realize that all of your time is equally valuable, while for a long time -- in your early-years, perhaps -- you think of "work" and "me" time.

So let's take the income numbers your provided and multiply by the hours you spend each month.

Calculated monthly loss based on income and hours

So there might be a bit of denial going on. Let's take the folks out who said the cost per month for their technology use is zero -- these are the guys who are saying "what problem?"

Average age: 28, give or take 6 years. Average income: 8!K give or take 55K -- so there is no average income. Average time reported lost per day: 3.4 hours give or take 3.4 hours -- so no average there either. Same with the weekly hours lost: 20 average with an STD of 21

Hours reported lost daily by the "what problem" people

Calculated monthly loss of income for the "no problem" guys

Denial -- it's not just a river in Egypt.

In part 2, I'll start looking at correlation between sets of data -- do people with more income report more time lost? Are they more sensitive to the time they spend? Are people who are more social less likely to report time lost with technology. There is some good stuff in there.

Also please keep telling folks about the poll -- the more numbers, the better.

Note: this is not a study or scientific survey. This is just people who feel like self-reporting. In addition, the sample size is very small -- less than 200 -- hence the reason I am asking you to help me keep pumping the link [bit.ly]

5:26
ICANN Touts DNSSEC As Tool to Fight Internet Criminals
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

ICANN said the DNSSEC would eventually allow Internet users to know with certainty that they have been directed to the Web site they sought. This upgrade will help disrupt the plans of criminals around the world who hope to exploit...

2:51
"Can you change the font to something kinda funky? It has to be funky."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Can you change the font to something kinda funky? It has to be funky.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/vlQFUPzP8egqYJ_uZaLsb4hhhSE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/vlQFUPzP8egqYJ_uZaLsb4hhhSE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/vlQFUPzP8egqYJ_uZaLsb4hhhSE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/vlQFUPzP8egqYJ_uZaLsb4hhhSE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

July 28, 2010
23:46
Mailman, Locomotive, Greenletters et re2
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Dans le cadre du a href=http://linuxfr.org//2010/03/28/26653.htmlRuby Summer of Code/a, un des étudiants a publié un micro-framework pour traiter des courriels entrants. Mailman est sous licence MIT et en est encore à ses balbutiements (et n'a rien à voir avec a href=http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.htmlGNU Mailman/a logiciel libre de gestion de listes de diffusion). Pour le moment, il permet d'aller chercher des courriels en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP3 title=Définition WikipédiaPOP3/a ou depuis un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir title=Définition WikipédiaMaildir/a et d’exécuter des actions pour chaque courriel en fonction de critères sur l'émetteur, le destinataire, le titre ou le contenu.br / br / Locomotive CMS est, comme son nom l'indique, un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_de_gestion_de_contenu title=Définition Wikipédiasystème de gestion de contenu/a et est sous licence MIT. Il est écrit en Ruby on Rails et fonctionne avec une base de données MongoDB. Il peut être déployé pour gérer un ou plusieurs sites ou être utilisé sous forme d'iengine/i au sein d'une application Rails plus large.br / br / Greenletters est un clone d'a href=http://expect.sourceforge.net/Expect/a écrit en Ruby. Il permet donc d'automatiser des interactions avec des outils en ligne de commande comme telnet, ftp, passwd, etc. Greenletters peut aussi être utilisé depuis des specs a href=http://cukes.info/Cucumber/a en utilisant les raccourcis fournis.br / br / a href=http://code.google.com/p/re2/RE2/a est une bibliothèque développée par Google pour manipuler des expressions rationnelles de manière efficace. Il existe désormais des ibindings/i pour profiter de cette bibliothèque en Ruby.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blog.titanous.com/post/867488976/mailman-releasedAnnonce de Mailman/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://github.com/titanous/mailmanMailman sur github/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.locomotiveapp.org/Locomotive CMS/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://github.com/locomotivecms/engineLocomotive CMS sur github/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://avdi.org/devblog/2010/07/19/greenletters-painless-automation-and-testing-for-command-line-applications/Greenletters/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://github.com/mudge/re2Bindings ruby pour RE2/abr /

21:17
"You can’t come over to help me with this website thing until the PC guy comes to fix the line..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“You can’t come over to help me with this website thing until the PC guy comes to fix the line running through the screen. He was supposed to come yesterday but I guess he’s part of the fire brigade and apparently there were two fires yesterday. I think it’s great that he’s civil-minded, but shouldn’t business come first? Aren’t his clients more important?” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zovkVHyZ3CiQcN6suy3OV2kCE3k/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zovkVHyZ3CiQcN6suy3OV2kCE3k/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zovkVHyZ3CiQcN6suy3OV2kCE3k/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zovkVHyZ3CiQcN6suy3OV2kCE3k/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

17:52
Bidouiller iPhone nuit gravement à la santé d'Apple
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La loi américaine gouvernant entre autres l'interdiction de contournement des DRM, le Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), prévoit que le bureau américain de la propriété intellectuelle, rattaché à la bibliothèque du Congrès, établit sur proposition tous les trois ans une liste d'exemptions, des cas précis et d'actualité dans lesquels les citoyens ne peuvent pas être poursuivis en cas de contournement de DRM.br / br / Cette liste vient d'être mise à jour, avec notamment la permission de hacker l'iOS (le système des technologies Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, et iPad), procédé plus connu sous le nom de ijailbreak/i, et bien entendu très peu apprécié d'Apple.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/articles/communiques/pr-20080730.htmlDADVSI/DRM : le Conseil d'État rétablit le contournement à des fins d'interopérabilité/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3743?viewlocale=fr_FRLes dangers encourus par les utilisateurs d'iPhones hackés (version Apple)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/feds-ok-iphone-jailbreaking/U.S. Declares iPhone Jailbreaking Legal, Over Apple’s Objections/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.eff.org/EFF - Defending freedom in the digital world/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2010/07/dmcaexemps.pdfDocument qui liste et justifie les exemptions/abr / (...)

17:16
My first phone conversation with a new client: Client: ”I love your rough concept! And your...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pMy first phone conversation with a new client:/p pstrongClient:/strong ”I love your rough concept! And your estimate’s very reasonable, too — oh, I’m so glad I found you. I’ll be the best client ever, I promise!”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Great! Glad you like it.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Do you want to have babies?”/p pstrongMe: “/strongPardon?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”A friend of mine’s single, she’s super cute and I think you’d get along great. She’s into art and stuff like you are. And she seriously wants kids. I can hook you guys up, seriously!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Z3FEEimaospNHQUto1N_2AHFOhA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Z3FEEimaospNHQUto1N_2AHFOhA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Z3FEEimaospNHQUto1N_2AHFOhA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Z3FEEimaospNHQUto1N_2AHFOhA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:52
Zoom sur... Sonar, pour automatiser la vérification de la qualité du code Java
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

La qualité du code est souvent le parent pauvre des projets en entreprise et, pourtant, celle-ci a un impact sur la productivité. Sonar est le tableau de bord permettant de suivre l'évolution de la qualité des sources au fur et à mesure de la vie d'un projet. Vous en avez marre de côtoyer des projets Java contenant du code dupliqué, des classes avec une seule méthode de 2500 lignes et sans aucun commentaire ? Sonar est la solution a tout vos soucis ! (je sais, c'est une accroche commerciale mais (...)

0:52
Looking for Stories
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pWe’re looking for your best and most memorable stories to add as exclusive content to our upcoming book. /p pspanIf you’ve been waiting to share a particularly horrific story, or if you have any tales relating to lewd and lascivious events, send ‘em in, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get published (anonymously, of course)!/span/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fsIA39iQV9_-BMPj1MUzN4h7DIM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fsIA39iQV9_-BMPj1MUzN4h7DIM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fsIA39iQV9_-BMPj1MUzN4h7DIM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fsIA39iQV9_-BMPj1MUzN4h7DIM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

July 27, 2010
21:46
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 29 de l'année 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La revue de presse de l'April est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire/strongbr / br / ullia href=http://www.mycoop.coop/sinformer/entreprendre-autrement/quand-leconomie-sociale-rencontre-le-logiciel-libre/[MyCoop] Quand l'économie sociale rencontre le logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.webdevonlinux.fr/2010/07/premier-succes-pour-meego-la-plateforme-in-vehicle-infotainment/[WebDevOnLinux] Premier succès pour Meego : La plateforme In-Vehicle Infotainment/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16301-le-dernier-decret-de-la-loi-hadopi-est-valide.html[Numerama] Le dernier décret de la loi Hadopi est validé/abr / /lilia href=http://www.fraifrai.net/index.php?2010/07/24/114-logiciel-libre-et-culture-libre-biens-communs-et-impact-sociaux[Fraifrai.net] Logiciel Libre et Culture libre : Biens communs et impact sociaux/abr / /lilia href=http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/actualite/monde/20100724.FAP5960/l-inde-devoile-l-ordinateur-a-35-dollars.html[nouvelObs.com] L'Inde dévoile l'ordinateur à 35 dollars/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16304-vulnerabilite-detectee-dans-la-protection-wpa2-et-la-securisation-de-l-acces-alors.html[Numerama] Vulnérabilité détectée dans la protection WPA2. Et la sécurisation de l'accès alors ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.itworld.com/open-source/115063/breaking-open-video-frontier-despite-mpeg-la[ITworld] Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359740/dell-drops-ubuntu-pcs-from-website-for-now[PCPRO] Dell drops Ubuntu PCs from website... for now/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2010/07/23/877885-Ramonville-Saint-Agne-Un-pedaleur-libre-en-route-pour-Ushuaia.html[LADEPECHE.fr] Ramonville-Saint-Agne. Un «pédaleur libre» en route pour Ushuaïa/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/media-tech/google-android-utilisations-militaires-39753391.htm[ZDNet.fr] Google Android: utilisations militaires/abr / /lilia href=http://www.webtimemedias.com/webtimemedias/wtm_article56262.fr.htm[WebTimesMedia] SophiaConf 2010 : le nombre de mille participants dépassé !/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58447-hadopi-eric-walter-125000-constats.htm[PC INpact] Hadopi : jusqu'à 125 000 constats par jour, non 50 000/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16291-ps3-sans-linux-sony-menace-par-un-recours-collectif-aux-eacutetats-unis.html[Numerama] PS3 sans Linux : Sony menacé par un recours collectif aux États-Unis/abr / /lilia href=http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/toolinux-information/communique/article/les-rencontres-mondiales-du-14785[toolinux] Les Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre à l'heure du bilan/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ecrans.fr/UltraViolet-verrouille-le-cinema,10456.html[Ecrans] « UltraViolet » verrouille le cinéma/abr / /lilia href=http://www.itrmanager.com/articles/108024/coeur-ouvert.html[ITRmanager.com] À coeur ouvert/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/l-esprit-libre/la-nasa-se-met-au-cloud-computing-open-source-avec-openstack-39753361.htm[ZDNet.fr] La Nasa se met au cloud computing open source avec OpenStack/abr / /lilia href=http://www.itchannel.info/index.php/articles/108009/cnll-demande-statut-fondation-consacree-logiciel-libre-open-source.html[ITCHANNEL.info] Le CNLL demande un statut de Fondation consacrée au Logiciel Libre et Open Source/abr / /lilia href=http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/toolinux-information/interviews-152/article/open-source-think-tank-2010-pour[toolinux] Open Source Think Tank 2010 : pour Colin Bodell, l'opensource est devenu un organe vital d'Amazon/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58425-geste-loppsi-blocage-identite-internet.htm[PC INpact] Les éditeurs de services en ligne souhaitent corriger la LOPPSI/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16279-acta-le-gouvernement-neerlandais-reclame-la-transparence.html[Numerama] ACTA : le gouvernement néerlandais réclame la transparence/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57509-senat-loppsi-juge-hadopi-blocage.htm[PC INpact] LOPPSI : le Sénat justifie le blocage des sites sans juge/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16273-impact-du-piratage-le-snep-s-appuie-sur-l-etude-tres-controversee-de-tera-consultants.html[Numerama] Impact du piratage : le SNEP s'appuie sur l'étude très controversée de Tera Consultants/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16266-bilan-2009-du-snep-satisfaction-pour-hadopi-lourdes-critiques-contre-le-piratage.html[Numerama] Bilan 2009 du SNEP : satisfaction pour Hadopi, lourdes critiques contre le piratage/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/le-parti-pirate-se-fait-fai-39753283.htm[ZDNet.fr] Le Parti Pirate se fait FAI/abr / /lilia href=http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/7/19/ec-provide-government-software-buying-guidelines/[ITProPortal] EC To Provide Government Software Buying Guidelines/abr / /lilia href=http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2010/07/19/a-la-une/wordpress-pourrait-trainer-en-justice-developpeur-du-thme-thesis/[ReadWriteWeb] Wordpress pourrait trainer en justice le developpeur du thème Thesis/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58332-hadopi-frederic-mitterrand-decrets-septembre.htm[PC INpact] Frédéric Mitterrand : « ça marche très bien Hadopi ! »/a/li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://april.orgApril/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presseRevue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://linuxfr.org/2010/07/21/27152.htmlRevue de presse de la semaine précédente/abr / (...)

21:01
"We really love your portfolio and have decided to add you to our shortlist for the project. Please..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“We really love your portfolio and have decided to add you to our shortlist for the project. Please provide us with three logo concepts for next year’s release and three complete designs for the new model. Each design is to come with three different colour combinations too. Once we get everyone’s ideas, we’ll decide who we want to hire for the job.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sTaYYBFAOpQS9VWjm19b8t-rLW4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sTaYYBFAOpQS9VWjm19b8t-rLW4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sTaYYBFAOpQS9VWjm19b8t-rLW4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sTaYYBFAOpQS9VWjm19b8t-rLW4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

17:51
Pack Logiciels libres pour TPE par Marc Leroy - Picardie
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Dans cette vidéo, Marc Leroy, qui était co-organisateur de la partie entreprise des RMLL, nous parle du Pack Logiciels Libres pour TPE, artisans et commerçants, lancé en Picardie dans le département de la Somme, au sein de la Chambre des Métiers. Il est interviewé par Jonathan Le Lous pour Intelli'N TV.br / br / Le Président du Conseil Régional de Picardie, Claude Gewerc, présente le projet de cette façon :br / br / « L’Europe (via le Feder), la Chambre de Métiers et de l’Artisanat de la Somme et le Conseil Régional de Picardie ont décidé de lancer un Pack de Logiciels Libres à destination des créateurs de petites entreprises. C’est une première en direction de ce public !br / br / Le Pack de Logiciels Libres compilé sur ce DVD est adapté et configuré pour une utilisation dans les très petites entreprises. Que contient ce pack, remis à chaque futur chef d’entreprise ? Il s’agit d’une boite à outils, immédiatement opérationnelle : bureautique, comptabilité, et gestion commerciale. Tout ce qui peut aider au démarrage de l’entreprise, et sans incidence aucune sur le plan de financement de démarrage de l’entreprise. Bien entendu, les futurs responsables de TPE seront formés, et cette nouveauté, bien utile, bénéficiera d’un large plan de diffusion.br / br / Un petit coup de pouce pour créer de l’activité et de l’emploi ! »br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.fcvnet.net/~cma80.fr/packCreateur/contenu.htmlPage d'accueil du pack/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://intelli-n.tv/LOGICIELS/Pack-Logiciels-libres-pour-TPE-par-Marc-Leroy-PicardieVidéo en FLV et OGV sur Intelli'N TV/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.youtube.com/user/Flo2sTVChaîne Intelli'N TV sur Youtube/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/video/xe5ohk_pack-logiciels-libres-pour-tpe-pica_techDiffusion Open Video sur Dailymotion/abr / (...)
17:10
Sortie de FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La deuxième version de FreeBSD issue de la branche 8-STABLE vient de sortir ! Il s'agit principalement d'une version corrective, avec quelques nouveautés inon-boulversifiantes/i, en attendant la sortie de FreeBSD-9.0 (actuellement -CURRENT).br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/announce.htmlAnnonce officielle/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/relnotes.htmlNotes de version/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/relnotes-detailed.htmlListe exhaustive des changements/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.freebsd.org/doc/fr/books/handbook/index.htmlLe manuel de FreeBSD/abr / (...)
15:13
Du non-respect des brevets par les plantes et les animaux
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Dans a href=http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/07/21/international-experts-see-backswing-in-pendulum-of-biological-patenting/?utm_source=feedburneramp;utm_medium=feedamp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ip-watch+(Intellectual+Property+Watch)un article du 21 juillet 2010 publié sur IPwatch/a, il est question de potentiel changement dans les lois relatives à la brevetabilité de plantes et graines faisant partie de la consommation alimentaire de base. J'ai décidé de faire ici un bref rappel sur les problèmes de brevetabilité de plantes et animaux (dont iHomo sapiens/i fait partie), avec un intérêt un peu plus particulier concernant l'agriculture.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.epo.org/topics/news/2010/20100713_fr.htmlAnnonce officielle de la discussion/abr / (...)

15:01
Client: “Look, we have to keep this simple. There should be a big red button for them to click...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pbClient/b: “Look, we have to keep this simple. There should be a big red button for them to click on and then a list of directions to follow. Make it simple.”/p pbMe/b: “Directions? Directions for what?”/p pbClient/b: “On how to use the big red button.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0QoRH9K6O8Jsy2SWJpD59mRRq8A/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0QoRH9K6O8Jsy2SWJpD59mRRq8A/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0QoRH9K6O8Jsy2SWJpD59mRRq8A/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0QoRH9K6O8Jsy2SWJpD59mRRq8A/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

0:15
Why Im Using Google Buzz More and Twitter Less
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Without any conscious effort to change my patterns of applications usage, Ive noticed of late that Im using Google Buzz much more and Twitter considerably less -- this despite the fact that Im (for now, anyway) following fewer people...

July 26, 2010
23:36
FreetuxTV 0.5.1 est disponible
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Près de 6 mois après sortie de la version 0.4.0, FreetuxTV sort en version 0.5.1.br / br / Pour rappel, FreetuxTV est un logiciel fonctionnant sous Linux, permettant de regarder et d'enregistrer la télévision sur son PC ainsi que d'écouter et enregistrer la radio en utilisant les fonctions de multiposte proposé par les FAI (Fournisseurs d'accès Internet) ou les WebTV et WebRadio gratuites disponibles sur internet. Il a pour objectif d'être l'équivalent d'ADSLTV pour Linux. Il est écrit en C avec GTK+ pour bien s'intégrer dans l'environnement Gnome et est basé sur LibVLC pour la gestion de la vidéo. Il est distribué désormais sous licence GPLv3 (au lieu de GLPv2 dans les versions antérieures).br / br / Ces dernières versions ont surtout connu une amélioration du code interne et l'ajout de quelques fonctionnalités attendues, notamment la gestion des favoris et le dé-entrelacement. De plus Yannick, qui s'occupe de la gestion des listes de chaînes et des logos, a ajouté de nombreux logos et WebTV et WebRadio dans diverses langues.br / br / Par ailleurs, le projet recherche toujours des contributeurs :ulliUn graphiste pour réaliser un logo et une page de garde/fenêtre d'attente (isplashscreen/i) ;br / /liliDes développeurs pour effectuer et maintenir le portage sous Mac OS X et MS Windows ou d'autres plate-formes ;br / /liliDes développeurs C/GTK+ pour améliorer FreetuxTV ;br / /liliDes testeurs pour remonter les bogues : a href=http://code.google.com/p/freetuxtv/issues/listhttp://code.google.com/p/freetuxtv/issues/list/a ;br / /liliDes empaqueteurs pour les distributions Linux dont les paquetages ne sont pas à jour ou disponibles ici : a href=http://freetuxtv.eric-beuque.com/packages/?mode=allhttp://freetuxtv.eric-beuque.com/packages/?mode=all/a/li/ul Si vous faites un tour sur le blog, n'oubliez pas de participer au sondage pour que l'on sache.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/freetuxtv/Site du projet FreetuxTV/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://freetuxtv.blogspot.com/Blog de FreetuxTV/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://launchpad.net/~freetuxtv/Launchpad de FreetuxTV/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.eric-beuque.com/Site de l'auteur/abr / (...)

21:02
Me: “Now, double-click on the little icon that says Internet Explorer.” Client: “I...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Now, double-click on the little icon that says emInternet Explorer/em.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I can’t do that. I’m Christian. I don’t believe in icons.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Fine then. Double-click on the little image that says emInternet Explorer/em.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Okay.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wL8kmoVUjTWVwfN_wdy6HI9Pndo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wL8kmoVUjTWVwfN_wdy6HI9Pndo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wL8kmoVUjTWVwfN_wdy6HI9Pndo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wL8kmoVUjTWVwfN_wdy6HI9Pndo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:02
Client: “I really need the site to be more immersive.” Me: “Okay. Have you played...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pbClient/b: “I really need the site to be more immersive.”/p pbMe/b: “Okay. Have you played around with the live chat function that I implemented?”/p pbClient/b: “Hmm… Yes, I played with that. It’s really great, but I really want the client to be sort of ‘sucked in’ to the site./p pb[Thoughtful Pause]br//b/p p..Kind of like the little girl in iPoltergeist/i.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2pO7zuXpeJoBjs-OrlDgSaDcpuU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2pO7zuXpeJoBjs-OrlDgSaDcpuU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2pO7zuXpeJoBjs-OrlDgSaDcpuU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2pO7zuXpeJoBjs-OrlDgSaDcpuU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

0:07
The Tragedy of the Commons in Cloud standards
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
I wasn’t at the OSCON Cloud Summit this past week, but I’ve spent some time over the weekend trying to collect the good bits. Via Twitter, I had heard echos of an interesting debate on Cloud standards between Sam Johnston and Benjamin Black. Today I got to see Benjamin’s slides and read reports from two audience members, Charles Engelke and Krishnan Subramanian. Sam argued that Cloud standards are needed, Benjamin that they would be premature.

Benjamin is right about what to think and Sam is right about what to do.

Let me put it differently: Benjamin is right in theory, but it doesn’t matter. Here is why.

Say I’m a vendor and Benjamin convinces me

Assume I truly believe the industry would be better served if we all waited. Does this mean I’ll stay away from Cloud standards efforts for now? Not necessarily, because nothing is stopping my competitors from doing it. In the IT standards world, your only choice is to participate or opt out. For the most part you can’t put your muscle towards stopping an effort. Case in point, Amazon has so far chosen to opt out; has that stopped VMWare and others from going to DMTF and elsewhere to ratify specifications as standards? Of course not. To the contrary, it has made the option even more attractive because when the leader stays home it is a lot easier for less popular candidates to win the prize. So as a vendor-who-was-convinced-by-Benjamin I now have the choice between letting my competitor get his specification rubberstamped (and then hit me with the competitive advantage of being “standard compliant” and even “the standard leader”) or getting involved in an effort that I know to be counterproductive for the industry. Guess what most will choose?

Even the initial sinner (who sets the wheels of premature standardization in motion) may himself be convinced that it’s too early for Cloud standards. But he has to assume that one of his competitors will make the move, and in that context why give them first mover advantage (and the choice of the battlefield). It’s the typical Tragedy of the Commons scenario. By acting in a rational and self-interested way, participants invariably end up creating a bad situation, one that they might all know is against everyone’s self interest.

And it’s not just vendors.

Say I’m an officer of a Standard-setting organization and Benjamin convinces me

If you expect that I would use my position in the organization to prevent companies from starting a Cloud standard effort there, you live in fantasy-land. Standard-setting organizations compete with one another just as fiercely as companies do. If I have achieved a position of leadership in a given standard organization, the last thing I want is to see another organization lay claims to a strategic and fast-growing area of the IT landscape. It takes a lot of time and money for a company to get elected on the right board and gets its employees (or other reliable allies) in the right leadership positions. Or to acquire people already in that place. You only get a return on that investment if the organization manages to be the one where the key standards get created. That’s what’s behind the landgrab reflex of many standards organizations.

And it goes beyond vendors and standards organizations

Say I’m an IT buyer and Benjamin convinces me

Assume I really believe Cloud standards are premature. Assume they get created anyway and I have to choose between a vendor who supports them and one who doesn’t. Do I, as a matter of principle, refuse consider the “standard-compliant” label in my purchasing decision? Even if I know that the standard shouldn’t have been created, I also know that, all other things being equal, the “standard-compliant” product will attract more tools and complementary solutions and will likely ease future integration problems.

And then there is the question of how I’ll explain this to my boss. Will Benjamin be by my side with his beautiful slides when I am called in an emergency meeting to explain to the CIO why we, unlike the competitors, didn’t pick “a standards-based solution”?

In the real world, the only way to solve problems caused by the Tragedy of the Commons is to have some overarching authority regulate the usage of the resource at risk of being ruined. This seems unlikely to be a workable solution when the resource is not a river to protect from sewer discharges but an IT domain to protect from premature standardization. If called, I’d be happy to serve as benevolent dictator for the IT industry (I could fix a few other things beyond the Cloud standards landgrab issue). But as long as neither I nor anyone else is in a dictatorial position, Benjamin’s excellent exposé has no audience for which his call to arms (or rather to lay down the arms) is actionable. I am not saying that everyone agrees with Benjamin, but that even if everyone did it still wouldn’t make a difference. Many of us in the industry share his views and rationally act as if we didn’t.

[UPDATED 2010/7/25: In a nice example of Blog/Twitter synergy, minutes after posting this I was having a conversation on Twitter with Benjamin Black about my interpretation of what he said. Based on this conversation, I realize that I should clarify that what I mean by "standards" in this post is "something that comes out of a standard-setting organization" (whether or not it gets adopted), in other words what Benjamin calls a "standard specification". He uses the word "standard" to mean "what most people use", which may or may not be a "standard specification". That's a big part of the disconnect that led to our Twitter chat. The other part is that what I presented as Benjamin's thesis in my post is actually only one of the propositions in his talk, and not even the main one. It's the proposition that it is damaging for the industry when a standard specification comes out of a standard organization too early. I wasn't at the conference where Benjamin presented but it's hard to understand anything else out of slide 61 ("standardize too soon, and you lock to the wrong thing") and 87 ("to discover the right standards, we must eschew standards"). So if I misrepresented him I believe it was in making it look like this was the focus of his talk while in fact it was only one of the points he made. As he himself clarified for me: "My _actual_ argument is that it doesn't matter what we think about cloud standards, if they are needed, they will emerge" (again, in this sentence he uses "standards" to mean "something that people have converged on").

More generally, my main point here has nothing to do with Benjamin, Sam and their OSCON debate, other than the fact that reading about it prompted me to type this blog entry. It's simply that there is a perversion in the IT standards landscape that makes it impossible for premature standardization *not* to happen. It's something I've written before, e.g. in this post:

Saying “it’s too early” in the standards world is the same as saying nothing. It puts you out of the game and has no other effect. Amazon, the clear leader in the space, has taken just this position. How has this been understood? Simply as “well I guess we’ll do it without them”. It’s sad, but all it takes is one significant (but not necessarily leader) company trying to capitalize on some market influence to force the standards train to leave the station. And it’s a hard decision for others to not engage the pursuit at that point. In the same way that it only takes one bellicose country among pacifists to start a war.

Benjamin is just a messenger; and I wasn't trying to shoot him.]

Related posts:

July 25, 2010
21:01
Me: “Here are the designs, and, with your approval, we’ll code them and put them up in a...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Here are the designs, and, with your approval, we’ll code them and put them up in a couple of days.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Why aren’t they up now?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “We require client approval before we put up the final product, in order to make any changes.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I wanted it up yesterday.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Well, this is the first time that we’ve had a chance to meet in person and go over the designs.”/p pstrongClient: /strong“But I wanted it put up yesterday.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I had emailed these to you for approval, but you never responded.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I thought you would just put it up.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Not without your approval, sir.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, put it up.”/p pemA week later./em/p pstrongClient:/strong “You know what, there are a few changes I need you to make… I can’t believe you put that up.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yJblCHlq6lCXJqLf2vcvQ5wtLkM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yJblCHlq6lCXJqLf2vcvQ5wtLkM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yJblCHlq6lCXJqLf2vcvQ5wtLkM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yJblCHlq6lCXJqLf2vcvQ5wtLkM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
"It’s a poo fetish website. But it needs to be classy."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““It’s a poo fetish website. But it needs to be classy.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/JvFHuDTayqXe93h8sDG_BW3U6CA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/JvFHuDTayqXe93h8sDG_BW3U6CA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/JvFHuDTayqXe93h8sDG_BW3U6CA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/JvFHuDTayqXe93h8sDG_BW3U6CA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:44
Videoporama disponible en version 0.8
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Videoporama, petit projet commencé il y a maintenant presque trois ans continue son petit bonhomme de chemin. C'est avec plaisir que je vous annonce la sortie de la version 0.8.br / br / Videoporama c'est quoi ? C'est un logiciel libre (GPLv2+) de création de diaporamas exportés en vidéo, dans la même veine que smile ou imagination. Videoporama se base sur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/QtQt/a et se différencie par sa capacité à exporter les diaporamas au format full HD. br / br / Quoi de neuf dans cette version ? (La suite dans le reste de la dépêche)br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://videoporama.tuxfamily.orgSite de Videoporama/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.videoporama.tuxfamily.org/doc/fr-main.htmlDocumentation/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://videoporama.tuxfamily.org/index.php?z=5Copies d'écran/abr / (...)

2:20
Me: “Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Is your computer’s power cable plugged...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Is your computer’s power cable plugged in?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “What is it plugged in to?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “The power strip.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Is the power strip on?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes. It is in the on position, but no lights are lit up.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “What is the power strip plugged in to?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “The power strip…”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iu_3awpwNooFWOj_0rosiQzO6ZY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iu_3awpwNooFWOj_0rosiQzO6ZY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iu_3awpwNooFWOj_0rosiQzO6ZY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iu_3awpwNooFWOj_0rosiQzO6ZY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
July 24, 2010
20:15
"What do I put in for the fields ‘Enter Your Name’ and ‘Enter Your Email’?"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““What do I put in for the fields ‘Enter Your Name’ and ‘Enter Your Email’?”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/70txYYMxApYcM9hu1w5QZO9ag0g/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/70txYYMxApYcM9hu1w5QZO9ag0g/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/70txYYMxApYcM9hu1w5QZO9ag0g/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/70txYYMxApYcM9hu1w5QZO9ag0g/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:53
Comment taxer les acteurs du e-commerce ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Une discussion intéressante a eu lieu mercredi 21 juillet lors de la commission parlementaire : impact sur les finances de l'État du développement du e-commerce.br / br / Pourquoi parler de ça ?br / Parce que c'est un sujet qui concerne sûrement pas mal de monde à différents niveaux : contribuable, client, ou fournisseur de services.br / br / La question est assez importante puisqu'il s'agit de savoir quelle peut être la position de l'état pour récupérer sa part dans les nouveaux modes de transaction apparus avec Internet. Le problème est que si tout le monde est d'accord sur le principe de base qu'il est normal d'avoir des taxes pour participer au fonctionnement des services publics, chacun a de bons arguments à faire valoir sur ce qu'il possible ou non de taxer.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~SQP/29974.htmlJournal à l'origine de la dépêche/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.publicsenat.fr/vod/seance/commission-impact-sur-les-finances-de-l-etat-du-developpement-du-e-commerce/65400La vidéo sur Public Séna/abr / (...)

July 23, 2010
21:02
"With Christmas right around the corner, I thought you should know that my last photographer gave me..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““With Christmas right around the corner, I thought you should know that my last photographer gave me this J. Peterman Duster and I’ve had my eye on their bomber jacket, in Medium. My wife likes Alessi stuff for the kitchen.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/V9UTbM65WaZRo0lJSoaYSEODQuw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/V9UTbM65WaZRo0lJSoaYSEODQuw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/V9UTbM65WaZRo0lJSoaYSEODQuw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/V9UTbM65WaZRo0lJSoaYSEODQuw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:01
Me: “The password is ‘123456’.” Client: “Upper or lower case?”
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “The password is ‘123456’.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Upper or lower case?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ltNODPiQA8djTQXzdmYWgnfEjL8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ltNODPiQA8djTQXzdmYWgnfEjL8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ltNODPiQA8djTQXzdmYWgnfEjL8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ltNODPiQA8djTQXzdmYWgnfEjL8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
0:41
Client: “I want to add these animated gif to the website, it will look great.” Me:...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient/strong: “I want you to add these animated gifs to the website. They will look great.”/p pstrongMe/strong: You do know that this is bad for your reputation?”/p pstrongClient/strong: “Add them, now. Our website must look ‘alive’.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8-baAGYmiVJPM92DNOceqPbORNA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8-baAGYmiVJPM92DNOceqPbORNA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8-baAGYmiVJPM92DNOceqPbORNA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8-baAGYmiVJPM92DNOceqPbORNA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

July 22, 2010
21:00
Sortie de la version 2.2 de Sonar
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Sonar est une plate-forme libre (LGPL v3) permettant de gérer la qualité du code source.br / br / La version 2.2 de Sonar vient de sortir. Parmi une soixantaine d'améliorations et corrections de bogues se trouvent également trois fonctionnalités majeures qui viennent enrichir l'outil ainsi que augmenter les possibilités de l'étendre par des greffons :br / ulli Filtres : les utilisateurs peuvent définir des filtres et créer des onglets afin d'obtenir une vue sur un sujet particulier. Par exemple : tous les projets, les tests unitaires dont l'exécution est la plus longue, les classes avec une couvertures par les tests unitaires lt; 50% et une complexité moyenne par méthode 10...br / /liliFavoris : il est maintenant possible de marquer une ressource (projet, module, package, fichier) comme étant une ressource favorite ce qui permet de la retrouver par la suite dans un onglet dédié aux favoris.br / /liliLe chargeur de classe des greffons : chaque greffon est maintenant exécuté dans son propre iclassloader/i. Le principal avantage en est que les greffons peuvent maintenant déclarer leurs propres dépendances au lieu d'être limités aux bibliothèques fournies par Sonar./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.sonarsource.orgSonar/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://nemo.sonarsource.orgDémonstration de l'application/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.sonarsource.org/sonar-2-2-in-screenshots/Les copies d'écran de Sonar 2.2/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.sonarsource.org/downloads/#2.2Notes de publication de la version 2.2/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/27/26900.htmlSortie de la version 2.1 de Sonar/abr /

15:00
Client: “Yes but it’s not moving when I move the mouse. I’m using a mousepad and...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “Yes but it’s not moving when I move the mouse. I’m using a mousepad and everything!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Look underneath the mouse. Does it have a ball or a light?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Underneath? The ball is on top!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Please turn the mouse right-side-up, so the ball is facing the ground.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yZl-WAeST48kmb7pi0tYCbkiUSE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yZl-WAeST48kmb7pi0tYCbkiUSE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yZl-WAeST48kmb7pi0tYCbkiUSE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/yZl-WAeST48kmb7pi0tYCbkiUSE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:17
H@ckWeeks - Ça démarre !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Les H@ckweeks sont un concept imaginé par le groupe picard d'utilisateurs de logiciels libres EPPLUG dans la lignée des devcamps (camp de développement) connus de la communauté, mais étendu à l'ensemble des productions de projets libres. EPPLUG lance donc un appel à projet pour trouver à qui faire profiter cette semaine « tout compris » !br / br / L'ensemble des frais (transport, hébergement, restauration, etc...) sont pris en charge par l'association grâce à ses partenaires financiers.br / br / Après une première édition déroulée au mois de juin, les candidatures sont ouvertes pour la deuxième édition, qui aura lieu du 22 au 28 novembre 2010 à a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens title=Définition WikipédiaAmiens/a, Picardie, France.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://hackweeks.epplug.org/frH@ckWeeks en français/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://hackweeks.epplug.org/enH@ckWeeks en anglais/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.epplug.orgSite de l'association EPPLUG/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://hackweeks.epplug.org/fr/hackweeks-2/Calendrier de l'évènement/abr / (...)
0:40
UltraViolet : et c'est reparti pour les DRM !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Alors qu'on pensait que les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestion_des_droits_num%C3%A9riquesDRM/a (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) étaient en voie de disparition, voilà qu'une nouvelle menace se profile à l'horizon pour les utilisateurs.br / br / La norme a href=http://www.uvvu.com/home.htmlUltraViolet/a qui vient d'être révélée est conçue pour permettre d'unir toutes les entreprises autour d'un seul système de gestion numérique des droits. Ce nouveau système se veut moins contraignant et plus facile à utiliser que les anciens verrous numériques.br / br / Plus de détails dans la suite de la dépêche.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : Sun avait déjà promis en 2005 un a href=http://linuxfr.org/2005/08/24/19458.htmlDRM universel interopérable libre/a, qui est resté un ivaporware/i ; ils avaient juste oublié de définir comment ils comptaient faire un client compatible libre... a href=http://www.april.org/drmRépétons le/a, un DRM est une solution qui techniquement ne peut pas marcher (d'où le besoin de passer des lois type DADVSI), un DRM interopérable est une fumisterie et un DRM libre est un oxymore.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.uvvu.com/home.htmlLe site web d'UltraViolet/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/les-industries-de-l-audiovisuel-et-technologies-pretes-a-experimenter-ultraviolet-leur-drm-global-39753318.htmArticle de ZDNet sur UltraViolet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/21/cinema-musique-jeux-bientot-des-verrous-numeriques-communs_1390785_651865.htmlLe Monde en parle/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/07/dece-moving-forward-with-beta-tests-but-still-sans-apple.arsL'article d'Ars Technica/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/retrospective-2009-informatique-deloyaleRétrospective April 2009 sur l'informatique déloyale, les DRM, etc./abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.defectivebydesign.org/Campagne DefectiveByDesign/abr / (...)

July 21, 2010
19:49
Inventions, Induction, Implications, Insinuations
» ‎ What To Fix

1903 -- Man first flies in heavier-than-air plane

Approximately 22 years later, early 1920s -- propeller aircraft become practical. 1923 First nonstop transcontinental flight. 1927 First Solo nonstop Transatlantic flight

Approximately 20 years later, mid 1940s -- The propeller gets replaced. 1944, German Messerschmitt Me 262 is first production jet fighter. 1947, Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in an X-1

Approximately 22 years later, mid 1960s. SCRAMJET practical application. The SR-71 Blackbird first flies 1966

Approximately 22 years later, invisible airplanes. the clunky F-117 stealth fighter in 1981 preceded the terribly dangerous B-2 in 1989

Approximately 22 years later, 2010. ????? -- What?

The last two advances were made under extreme secrecy. It took many years for the rest of us to catch up.

19:04
Our Responsibilities on the Web That Never Forgets
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. The New York Times has published an important article on the subject of the Nets long memory, and the impacts on reputations and other aspects of peoples lives when previously posted materials exist essentially forever online. Regular readers know...

15:00
"I want you to design me something that will make people horny when they look at it."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I want you to design me something that will make people horny when they look at it.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2fYdy8eNdMyOzE1FNwKDOOdEFe0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2fYdy8eNdMyOzE1FNwKDOOdEFe0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2fYdy8eNdMyOzE1FNwKDOOdEFe0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/2fYdy8eNdMyOzE1FNwKDOOdEFe0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:53
Looking for the Archons
» ‎ What To Fix

Sci-Fi can be deeply meaningful, or just all so much bullshit. It all depends on how you consume it.

During lunch for the last week I've been having a Trek-for-lunch workout session. Just old Star Trek shows (remastered) and the elliptical machine. Yesterday's show was "Return of the Archons" If you're not a trek fan, here's a synopsis of the show from wiki

Teaser
Lieutenants Sulu and O'Neil are dispatched to the surface of the planet Beta III to learn what became of the Archon, which disappeared there one hundred years earlier. Recognized as outsiders, they draw the attention of the lawgivers. Pursued, the officers call for beam-out, but only Sulu is retrieved, and he is in a strange mental state.

Act One
Captain Kirk beams down with a larger landing party to investigate. Spock, Dr. McCoy, sociologist Lindstrom, and two guards, Leslie and Galloway, form the balance of the landing party. Immediately, Spock notices a strangeness in the people they encounter; a kind of contented mindlessness. Then the Red hour strikes - the beginning of the Festival, a period of debauchery and lawlessness. Fleeing, the landing party bursts in on Reger, Hacom, and Tamar. They had been told by Bilar and Tula, two passersby, that Reger could rent them rooms for after Festival. Their questions seem to terrify Reger. They are given rooms and retreat from the mayhem outside, trying their best to get a few hours' sleep.

Festival ends the next morning. Reger, learning the landing party did not attend Festival, concludes they are not of the Body, and asks an astonishing question: "Are you Archons?" The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of lawgivers, the robed servants of the mysterious Landru. The lawgivers command the landing party to accompany them, to be absorbed.

Act Two
Kirk, acting on a hunch, defies them - and causes confusion. He'd correctly concluded this society is built around obedience, and might not be ready for disobedience. Taking advantage of their confusion, Reger guides the crew to a place he knows, where they will be safe. But on the way, Landru employs a form of mass telepathy to command an attack. Among the attackers is... Lieutenant O'Neil. Reger warns against bringing him along, but Kirk cannot abandon a crew member.

Spock discovers a source of immense power, radiating from a point near the landing party's location. Reger tells Kirk about the arrival of the first Archons: many were killed, many more were absorbed. And then he drops the bombshell, mentioning casually that Landru pulled the Archons from the sky... Kirk contacts the Enterprise, and learns that heat beams are focused on the ship. Her shields are able to deflect them, but nearly all ship's power is diverted to this purpose. Communications are poor, escape is impossible, and the orbit is decaying. If Kirk can't put a stop to the beams, the ship will be destroyed. Worse, contacting the ship enables Landru to discover and stun the landing party.

Act Three
They awaken in a cave-like cell, but McCoy, Galloway and O'Neil are missing. Then McCoy returns - and he has been absorbed. Evidently, this is the fate that awaits the entire landing party. Lawgivers appear, demanding Kirk accompany them, and this time, Kirk's refusal results in an immediate death threat. The orderly society has corrected a flaw.

Kirk is taken to a futuristic room: the absorption chamber. There, a priest named Marplon will oversee Kirk's forcible induction into the Body. Lawgivers summon Spock, who is taken to the same place, and there encounters Kirk, now mindlessly happy.

Act Four
Spock learns that Marplon is part of the same underground to which Reger belongs. Marplon intervened to prevent both Kirk and Spock from being absorbed, and returned their weapons. Spock, acting as instructed, makes his way back to the cell.

Discussing Landru and his society, Kirk and Spock reach the same conclusion: the society has no spirit, no spark; Landru's orders are being issued by a computer. Kirk decides the plug must be pulled. Spock is concerned this would violate the Prime Directive, but Kirk opines that the directive applies to living, growing cultures. When Reger and Marplon join them, Kirk demands more information: the location of Landru. Reger reveals that Beta III was at war, and was in danger of destroying itself. Landru, one of the leaders, took the people back to a simpler time. And, Marplon claims, Landru is still alive.

Marplon takes Kirk and Spock to a chamber, the Hall of Audiences, where Landru appears to his acolytes - or, at least, a projection of him does. There, Landru regretfully informs them that their interference is causing great harm, and that they, and all who knew of them, must be killed, to cleanse the memory of the Body. Blasting through the wall, Kirk reveals the truth: an ancient machine, built and programmed by the real Landru 6,000 years earlier. This machine, now calling itself Landru, was entrusted with the care of the Body, the society of Beta III. To that end, it has enslaved all members of that society, and those who visit, in a thralldom of happiness that is stagnant and without creativity.

Kirk and Spock discuss this with Landru, asking it difficult questions it has evidently never had to answer, questions about whether its approach to creating the good is really creating evil. Ultimately, they convince it that it is the evil, and that it must destroy the evil - and it does, exploding in a burst of pyrotechnics.

Kirk leaves a team of specialists, including Lindstrom, to help restore the planet's culture "to a Human form".

It's not a great episode, and I kept noticing that one of the red-shirt guys kept asking stupid questions. The plot would inch along towards us realizing that it's a computer controlling things, and the character would say something like "Don't these people have a soul!"

It seemed kind of stupid, but then I realized that the writers were using all the dumb comments as a way of continuing to explain the plot. Perhaps folks in the 1960s couldn't understand computer mind control. I don't know. it seemed heavy-handed to me. It had lots of problems. If I was going to start picking apart problems, I wasn't going to enjoy the story much. How about making up a game?

So with nothing better to do than exercise and think, I started asking myself the old editors and writer's question: "what could you take away from this show and it would still work?"

Obviously the "festival" -- the time when everybody went ape-shit -- was put in there so people would realize that things were not normal, not normal at all. People running around raping and burning and looting is a bad thing.

Would it work without all that silliness? I think so. I think just a bunch of people walking around with mindless looks on their faces would be pretty scary. People being afraid of these hooded characters, living in an ecstasy, no progress in six thousand years? Sounds like a pretty messed up place to me. Worthy of investigation, especially with the mystery of what happened to the Archons

What else could we take out? How about Landru? I think he's a nice prop thrown in there -- wise man from the ancient past who, through no malice of his own, created a system where people stay happy and fulfilled and society is stable. This is more of a critical plot element -- it gives the story it's human conflict. (After all, the main conflict is between Kirk and Landru's creation) But having a computer run things with mind control is still pretty scary. A story about computer controlling reality is basically a version of The Matrix, so it can work very well.

How far could I take this thing. How much could you remove and still have some degree or terror, conflict, and the opportunity for a good story?

How about taking the computer out? No, that wouldn't work. You have to have something that is bad. Wouldn't be much of a story about evil mind-control without the computer, would it?

Would it? I'm a good programmer. Could we take the computer from the central location and spread it around some? How about a network of computers all inside people's heads?

Yep, that still works. What we have here is The Borg. Lots of good story potential. The story has a centralized hive that controls all. I am still sticking to the idea that the trick is the mind control.

But is it? How about, instead of one hive mind controlling all, we have individual computers in each person's head doing whatever they want, providing them with anything they can imagine.

Ouch. Kind of hitting close to home, here.

But it works. This is a version of "Idiocracy" -- we advance technology so much we become immobile sensation-seeking tubs of lard. And I think it's still pretty scary. No progress in six thousand years, everybody with a blank stare, a constant state of rhapsody. No change. A stagnant society. You guys have heard me rant about this before, so I don't need to go on again. But it's a scary outcome.

Are we done? How about if we take away the computers completely? What if everybody was just extremely happy all the time, no crime or violence ever occurred, nothing changed, people had no new ideas, society actively punished any new thought.

Hmmmm. Yes, I think I could go that far. Perhaps not as a story about looking for lost Archons, but it could work. The story would begin with the crash-landing of the Archon's starship. You'd set it up as two societies living next to each other. One would be chaotic, messy, violent at times, dirty, and noisy. The other would be orderly, serene, peaceful, and idyllic. There would be immense tension. Those outside the body must be absorbed. Chaos and error cannot be tolerated. On the other side, those who are not progressing must be helped. Six Thousand years and folks still dying of things like smallpox? It hurts billions of future generations by not trying to make life better. We must help them, or at least talk to them and show them how things can be. Not the Borg, more like a version of the Stepford Wives. Or maybe one of those stories where the missionary doctor goes somewhere and doesn't fit in, but eventually makes a few converts and one of them goes to Harvard.

It'd work.

Which means, at it's heart this is a story about the conflict of cultures. We don't need Kirk and Spock and all that -- it's just the Landru guys and the Archons. One culture values peace, tranquility, non-violence, and stability -- above all else. The other culture? Well you can make a lot of arguments -- Landru says that he alone should be allowed to create. This seems to imply that the Star Trek folks are creative, therefore better, and the Landru guys are not creative, therefore worse. I don't buy that. It's true but incomplete. The Landru people are thinking independently and one assumes they create. Having a conversation, painting a building, getting a haircut -- even in stagnant civilizations there is creativity. I think this is just self-serving bullshit from the writers (sorry Gene!). If you have a job creating, creating must be the sole savior of the world. Everybody's job is always the key to civilization.

Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek and writer for this show, thought of creativity in extreme terms: the artist. But humans exhibit immense creativity in all kinds of ways, most of which are unpleasant. Everybody loves the painter, writer, or singer. Not many folks can find love for the torturer, human experimenter, or serial killer. Yet they are all forms of extreme creativity.

I think what the Star Trek guy's culture has that the other one doesn't is the empowering people as much as possible to be wrong, to make mistakes. You get mad and drive too fast. You have a fight with your spouse and they hit you. You come up with some half-brained idea for a search engine for the internet and it doesn't work. You decide to become a rock-painter for a living. Creative Chaos. Allowing folks to be as wrong as maximumly possible.

In controlled societies, there is a strong sense of what is wrong, either explicit or implicit. As our story fell apart, each of the above examples was about a world in which nobody deviated -- at all -- from a norm. The community did not allow anybody to be wrong.

Everybody is wrong -- until they are right. Every new idea and venture starts off as a crazy and bad idea. Until it works and changes the world. Every prophet, street philosopher, and malcontent preacher is a nutcase. Until one starts the Civil Rights Movement. Every crazy wacko in the world was wasting time and being a danger to themselves and others by trying to fly -- until the Wright Brothers flew. The guy down the street who gets angry all the time and looks like he might be dangerous is a menace to society -- until we need warriors.

99.99% of the time, these people are annoying, scary, chaotic, dangerous, not-serene, unhappy, pain in the asses. They're the exact opposite of the Landru folks. And they never accomplish anything except annoy folks

Except for that other .01% of the time. At those points society moves forward.

One final thought experiment.

Let's assume that the people have machines in each of their heads that can control their minds, but there is no external agent. They have complete control over the machine. Once a year, they all meet for a town meeting what the standards would be for programming. By debate and popular vote, they all set their machines to the same settings -- what they can do, what they can't do, what they can think about, what they can't think about. Technically there's still mind control, but it's being done by popular vote in a democracy.

Would you want to live there? Does it change your mind if there were only one reasonable rule, like not killing people. What if we started with one rule, and then each year added just one more rule, a rule that was guaranteed to prevent 99.99% of a bad thing and make people happier 99.99% of the time?

And the final kicker: are all peaceful cultures that shun change, have insanely blithely happy people, and are stagnant for thousands of years bad?

It's popular to picture aliens arriving as peaceful, wise, tranquil and kind souls. Any tendency towards violence or ugliness couldn't exist in an advanced species, we tell ourselves. Take a look at Kenau Reeves in The Day The Earth Stood Still as an example

But what if, a hundred years from now when the real aliens show up, they are a bunch of broken-down weirdos, violent and hateful, spiteful and petty? Smelly, get in fistfights all the time. Carry very dangerous weapons around as personal possessions. Keeping a strict military structure on their spaceships. Nice guys -- something like what a bunch of cowboys would be like from 1880. Not evil, but chaotically, unpredictably beautiful and truly diverse. What if we're the Landru guys, plugging ourselves into machines and then deciding what exactly what the machines can and can't do, valuing peace, stability, social harmony and happiness above all other things? Who's got the better culture?

Sci-Fi can be deeply meaningful, or just all so much bullshit. It all depends on how you consume it.

12:06
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 28 de l'année 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La revue de presse de l'April est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire/strongbr / ul lia href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/07/18/27142.html[linuxfr.org] Les résultats du LHC sous licence Creative Commons/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16246-hadopi-l-arret-du-pillage-d-abord-le-developpement-de-l-offre-legale-ensuite.html[numerama.com] Hadopi : l'arrêt du pillage d'abord, le développement de l'offre légale ensuite/abr / /lilia href=http://www.brest-ouvert.net/article8519.html[brest-ouvert.net] Quelle transformation écologique de l'économie ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58310-artistes-acta-rapport-gallo-sardou.htm[pcinpact.com] De drôles d'artistes français soutiennent un rapport pro ACTA/abr / /lilia href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/07/16/27129.html[linuxfr.org] Motorola : une nouvelle étape dans l'ignominie ?/abr / /lilia href=http://ledessousdescartes.blogspot.com/2010/07/les-secrets-de-skype-rendus-publics.html[ledessousdescartes.blogspot.com] Les secrets de Skype rendus publics ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16252-le-chili-vote-une-loi-sur-la-neutralite-du-net-une-premiere-mondiale.html[numerama.com] Le Chili vote une loi sur la neutralité du net, une première mondiale/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58286-acta-version-consolidee-contrefacon-hadopi.htm[pcinpact.com] Publication d'une nouvelle version consolidée de l'ACTA/abr / /lilia href=https://linuxfr.org/2010/07/15/27124.html[linuxfr.org] Fiction documentaire de 16 min « Libre à vous »/abr / /lilia href=http://www.nzcs.org.nz/news/blog.php?/archives/97-.html[nzcs.org] It's official: Software will be unpatentable in NZ/abr / /lilia href=http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/toolinux-information/communaute/article/signature-d-une-convention-aful[toolinux.com] Signature d'une convention AFUL - Master MBC de Paris-Dauphine/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16240-vimeo-introduit-les-licences-creative-commons-pour-ses-videos-et-youtube.html[numerama.com] Vimeo introduit les licences Creative Commons pour ses vidéos. Et YouTube ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/14/aux-etats-unis-la-lutte-contre-le-telechargement-illegal-coute-cher_1387758_651865.html[lemonde.fr] Aux États-Unis, la lutte contre le téléchargement illégal coûte cher/abr / /lilia href=http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/first-anniversary-bfrench-legislators-have-second-thoughts-on-three-strikes-lawrings-second-thoughts-on-french-3-strikes.ars?utm_source=rssamp;utm_medium=rssamp;utm_campaign=rss[arstechnica.com] French legislators have second thoughts on three strikes law/abr / /lilia href=http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100713173032257[groklaw.net] Sanity From the 1st Post-Bilski Decision from BPAI: In Re Proudler/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/acta-les-divisions-europeennes-ne-sont-toujours-pas-tranchees-39753145.htm[zdnet.fr] ACTA : les divisions européennes ne sont toujours pas tranchées/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16234-neutralite-du-net-l-arcep-ne-peut-pas-eluder-la-question-des-libertes-fondamentales.html[numerama.com] Neutralité du net : l'ARCEP ne peut pas éluder la question des libertés fondamentales/abr / /lilia href=http://www.toolinux.com/lininfo/toolinux-information/communaute/article/fsf-une-technologie-proprietaire[toolinux.com] FSF : Une technologie propriétaire est un gaspillage financier/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16231-agrave-l-abordage-une-bd-sur-la-propriete-intellectuelle-dans-le-cyberespace.html[numerama.com] À l'abordage ! Une BD sur la propriété intellectuelle dans le cyberespace/abr / /lilia href=http://www.dadall.eu/blog/index.php?post/2010/07/12/Economie-Larguer-Microsoft-et-utiliser-les-alterntives-libres[dadall.eu] Économie ? Larguer Microsoft et utiliser les alternatives libres/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58219-pole-emploi-migration-open-source-firefox-michel-brouant.htm[pcinpact.com] Pôle Emploi : le logiciel libre, un choix massif et pragmatique/abr / /lilia href=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/ascaps-attack-on-creative_b_641965.html[huffingtonpost.com] ASCAP's attack on Creative Commons/a/li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://april.orgApril/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presseRevue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org//2010/07/15/27125.htmlRevue de presse de la semaine précédente/abr / (...)

2:39
Next is Now
» ‎ Dan Siemon

Just stumbled on this video created by Rogers.

One of a few good quotes:

“10 years ago it took 72 hours to download Godfather… – Today it takes 10 minutes – It still takes 3 hours to watch”

1:04
Big Brother 2.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Cela fait plusieurs semaines que des quotidiens en ligne et papier publient des articles parlant de comment mettre une muselière à la bête qu'est Internet. Donc, plus ou moins directement, une volonté est affirmée de limiter autant que possible la liberté d'expression offerte par le réseau.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://libertes.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/06/07/letat-des-libertes-en-france-les-valeurs-de-1789-seloignent-selon-dominique-rousseau/#xtor=RSS-32280322#xtor=RSS-3208L’état des libertés en France/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/projets/pl1697.aspProjet de loi LOPPSI/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://owni.fr/2010/06/09/loppsi-le-senat-opte-pour-un-filtrage-sans-juge/Loppsi: le Sénat opte pour un filtrage sans juge (9/06/2010)/abr / (...)

July 20, 2010
22:37
Trusting Your Friends -- and Trusting the Cloud
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Internet cloud-based services, both for data storage and as computing resources, are expanding rapidly, and have become a flash point of controversy among some persons in the computer science and privacy fraternities. On various discussion lists and forums, dialogues...

17:03
Wine, JavaFX, OpenStak, Dell et les OS
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La torpeur de l'été dans l'hémisphère nord nous fait oublier qu'il y a des nouvelles dans les mondes du libre et des sujets voisins.br / br / bWine 1.2/bbr / br / Entre deux barbecues et son vin rosé, voici un autre « wine » tout frais, j'ai nommé a href=http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.2Wine 1.2./a C'est du cru été 2010. Après deux ans de développement, ayant résulté en pas moins de 23000 changements et 3000 bugs corrigés, l'accent a été mis sur les applications 64 bits et les graphiques Tango. De nombreux changements ont été introduits dans le cœur, l'interface utilisateur, l'intégration à l'environnement de bureau, les graphiques, l'audio, le réseau, Direct3D, les applications intégrées, les performances, l'environnement de build, etc.br / br / Wine, c'est bon, mangez-en sans modération.br / br / bPétition pour libérer JavaFX/bbr / br / Encore une pétition pour ouvrir et libérer du code source. Cette fois-ci, il s'agit de JavaFX, la fratrie de logiciels pour les applications Internet riches (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_ApplicationRIA/a). L'opportunité du changement de main de Sun à Oracle a été saisie au vol. À vous de décider a href=http://steveonjava.com/javafx-petition/de la signer/a, ou pas.br / br / bOpenStack : wannabe-standard ouvert pour le cloud/bbr / br / Le projet a href=http://openstack.org/blog/OpenStack/a a pour but de produire une infrastructure libre pour le Cloud Computing, que ce soit privé ou public, simple et scalable («i To produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable./i »). Le projet publie sont code sous licence Apache 2.0.br / ulliLe premier projet « OpenStack Object Storage », dont le code est disponible à ce jour, est un magasin d'objets (object store) complètement distribué, basé sur Cloud Files de Rackspace.br / /liliLe second projet « OpenStack Compute », dont le code devrait être disponible avant la fin de l'année, est un moteur scalable de provisionning, basé sur NASA Nebula cloud.br / br / /li/ulba href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEWH-gg3jQkC'est bon de rire parfois/a/bbr / br / Dans la catégorie « logique implacable », Dell a osé nous sortir un comparatif indiscutable entre Windows et Ubuntu. a href=http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/windows_or_ubuntu?c=ukcs=ukdhs1l=ens=dhsIl faut le voir pour le croire/a. Petite sélection de perles :ulli« UBUNTU is not a Microsoft Windows operating system »br / /liliChoose UBUNTU if: You do not plan to use Microsoft WINDOWS »./li/ulTout n'est pas copié-collé pour conserver le suspens (et accessoirement éviter la violation du droit d'auteur). Attention : le contenu est hautement trollifère.br / br / br /

15:02
"I bought some photos of my dog. I want him to ride across the website on a skateboard, because..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I bought some photos of my dog. I want him to ride across the website on a skateboard, because people will like that!”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bqLtmmOwoUZAOCltJwLTznoHGRs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bqLtmmOwoUZAOCltJwLTznoHGRs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bqLtmmOwoUZAOCltJwLTznoHGRs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bqLtmmOwoUZAOCltJwLTznoHGRs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:09
MBF : une boîte à outils pour la bioinformatique, par Microsoft
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 9 juillet 2010, a href=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msr_er/archive/2010/07/09/microsoft-biology-foundation-available-for-free-download.aspxMicrosoft a annoncé/a la sortie d'une boîte à outils informatiques pour la biologie et plus spécialement pour les analyses de génomes. Une présentation officielle semble également avoir été faite lors de la conférence de la Société Internationale de Bioinformatique (iInternational Society for Computational Biology/i, ISCB), qui s'est tenue du 9 au 13 juillet 2010 à Boston. Selon a href=http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bio/ la page officielle/a, la suite logicielle est sous licence dite libre.br / br / Dans la suite de la dépêche, les détails, le diable, toussa.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_PageBioPerl/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://biopython.org/wiki/BiopythonBioPython/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.bioruby.org/BioRuby/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.biojava.org/wiki/BioJava:CookBookBioJava/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.bioconductor.org/BioConductor/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/Debian-Med/abr / (...)

July 19, 2010
15:03
Me: “Okay, so here are some rough concepts I’ve worked up. Once you’ve...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Okay, so here are some rough concepts I’ve worked up. Once you’ve -“/p pstrongClient (interrupting):/strong “What the hell am I looking at? These look like scribbles my five-year-old could do.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Oh, they’re just roughs to get the concept figured out, once we have that done I’ll begin work on the finished piece.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “How am I supposed to decide which illustration I like if I can’t see them all finished. Finish them and then I’ll decide which one to use.”/p pstrong Me:/strong “Well, I can certainly do that, but just so you’re aware, I will have to raise my fees to cover the cost of bringing each of these concepts to a finish.”/p pstrong Client:/strong “Who do you think you are to make demands?! I’m the client, I get to make the demands! It’s not like this is a real job anyway, all you’re doing is drawing.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CHuf7JzZ7VY2LJ8wBh_jAgYOZFw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CHuf7JzZ7VY2LJ8wBh_jAgYOZFw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CHuf7JzZ7VY2LJ8wBh_jAgYOZFw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/CHuf7JzZ7VY2LJ8wBh_jAgYOZFw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

8:12
Introducing the Oracle Cloud API
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Oracle recently published a Cloud management API on OTN and also submitted a subset of the API to the new DMTF Cloud Management working group. The OTN specification, titled “Oracle Cloud Resource Model API”, is available here. In typical DMTF fashion, the DMTF-submitted specification is not publicly available (if you have a DMTF account and are a member of the right group you can find it here). It is titled the “Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model” and is essentially the same as the OTN version, minus sections 9.2, 9.4, 9.6, 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10 (I’ll explain below why these sections have been removed from the DMTF submission). Here is also a slideset that was recently used to present the submitted specification at a DMTF meeting.

So why two documents? Because they serve different purposes. The Elemental Resource Model, submitted to DMTF, represents the technical foundation for the IaaS layer. It’s not all of IaaS, just its core. You can think of its scope as that of the base EC2 service (boot a VM from an image, attach a volume, connect to a network). It’s the part that appears in all the various IaaS APIs out there, and that looks very similar, in its model, across all of them. It’s the part that’s ripe for a simple standard, hopefully free of much of the drama of a more open-ended and speculative effort. A standard that can come out quickly and provide interoperability right out of the gate (for the simple use cases it supports), not after years of plugfests and profiles. This is the narrow scope I described in an earlier rant about Cloud standards:

I understand the pain of customers today who just want to have a bit more flexibility and portability within the limited scope of the VM/Volume/IP offering. If we really want to do a standard today, fine. Let’s do a very small and pragmatic standard that addresses this. Just a subset of the EC2 API. Don’t attempt to standardize the virtual disk format. Don’t worry about application-level features inside the VM. Don’t sweat the REST or SOA purity aspects of the interface too much either. Don’t stress about scalability of the management API and batching of actions. Just make it simple and provide a reference implementation. A few HTTP messages to provision, attach, update and delete VMs, volumes and IPs. That would be fine. Anything else (and more is indeed needed) would be vendor extensions for now.

Of course IaaS goes beyond the scope of the Elemental Resource Model. We’ll need load balancing. We’ll need tunneling to the private datacenter. We’ll need low-latency sub-networks. We’ll need the ability to map multi-tier applications to different security zones. Etc. Some Cloud platforms support some of these (e.g. Amazon has an answer to all but the last one), but there is a lot more divergence (both in the “what” and the “how”) between the various Cloud APIs on this. That part of IaaS is not ready for standardization.

Then there are the extensions that attempt to make the IaaS APIs more application-aware. These too exist in some Cloud APIs (e.g. vCloud vApp) but not others. They haven’t naturally converged between implementations. They haven’t seen nearly as much usage in the industry as the base IaaS features. It would be a mistake to overreach in the initial phase of IaaS standardization and try to tackle these questions. It would not just delay the availability of a standard for the base IaaS use cases, it would put its emergence and adoption in jeopardy.

This is why Oracle withheld these application-aware aspects from the DMTF submission, though we are sharing them in the specification published on OTN. We want to expose them and get feedback. We’re open to collaborating on them, maybe even in the scope of a standard group if that’s the best way to ensure an open IP framework for the work. But it shouldn’t make the upcoming DMTF IaaS specification more complex and speculative than it needs to be, so we are keeping them as separate extensions. Not to mention that DMTF as an organization has a lot more infrastructure expertise than middleware and application expertise.

Again, the “Elemental Resource Model” specification submitted to DMTF is the same as the “Oracle Cloud Resource Model API” on OTN except that it has a different license (a license grant to DMTF instead of the usual OTN license) and is missing some resources in the list of resource types (section 9).

Both specifications share the exact same protocol aspects. It’s pretty cleanly RESTful and uses a JSON serialization. The credit for the nice RESTful protocol goes to the folks who created the original Sun Cloud API as this is pretty much what the Oracle Cloud API adopted in its entirety. Tim Bray described the genesis and design philosophy of the Sun Cloud API last year. He also described his role and explained that “most of the heavy lifting was done by Craig McClanahan with guidance from Lew Tucker“. It’s a shame that the Oracle specification fails to credit the Sun team and I kick myself for not noticing this in my reviews. This heritage was noted from the get go in the slides and is, in my mind, a selling point for the specification. When I reviewed the main Cloud APIs available last summer (the first part in a “REST in practice for IT and Cloud management” series), I liked Sun’s protocol design the best.

The resource model, while still based on the Sun Cloud API, has seen many more changes. That’s where our tireless editor, Jack Yu, with help from Mark Carlson, has spent most of the countless hours he devoted to the specification. I won’t do a point to point comparison of the Sun model and the Oracle model, but in general most of the changes and additions are motivated by use cases that are more heavily tilted towards private clouds and compatibility with existing application infrastructure. For example, the semantics of a Zone have been relaxed to allow a private Cloud administrator to choose how to partition the Cloud (by location is an obvious option, but it could also by security zone or by organizational ownership, as heretic as this may sound to Cloud purists).

The most important differences between the DMTF and OTN versions relate to the support for assemblies, which are groups of VMs that jointly participate in the delivery of a composite application. This goes hand-in-hand with the recently-released Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a framework for creating, packing, deploying and configuring multi-tier applications. To support this approach, the Cloud Resource Model (but not the Elemental Model, as explained above) adds resource types such as AssemblyTemplate, AssemblyInstance and ScalabilityGroup.

So what now? The DMTF working group has received a large number of IaaS APIs as submissions (though not the one that matters most or the one that may well soon matter a lot too). If all goes well it will succeed in delivering a simple and useful standard for the base IaaS use cases, and we’ll be down to a somewhat manageable triplet (EC2, RackSpace/OpenStack and DMTF) of IaaS specifications. If not (either because the DMTF group tries to bite too much or because it succumbs to infighting) then DMTF will be out of the game entirely and it will be between EC2, OpenStack and a bunch of private specifications. It will be the reign of toolkits/library/brokers and hell on earth for all those who think that such a bridging approach is as good as a standard. And for this reason it will have to coalesce at some point.

As far as the more application-centric approach to hypervisor-based Cloud, well, the interesting things are really just starting. Let’s experiment. And let’s talk.

Related posts:

0:03
The Google Search Secrets in Plain View
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. As Ive mentioned previously, I tend to receive several hundred e-mails daily that relate to Google one way or another, many of which contain requests for advice regarding perceived or real Google-related issues. I try to help when I...

July 18, 2010
16:40
Les résultats du LHC sous licence Creative Commons
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'accélérateur de particules LHC (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_ColliderLarge Hadron Collider/a) monte doucement en puissance et les chercheurs du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_europ%C3%A9enne_pour_la_recherche_nucl%C3%A9aireCERN/a commencent à produire des résultats scientifiques exploitables à partir des premières données.br / Sous quelles licences ces articles de recherche sont-ils publiés ? Quelle est la politique officielle du CERN à ce sujet ?br / br / Plus d'infos sur ces questions dans la suite de la dépêche.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22736L'annonce du soutien à Creative Commons/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre_acc%C3%A8s_%28informatique_documentaire%29Le mouvement de Libre Accès/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://scoap3.org/Le site de SCOAP3/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://wiki.april.org/w/Science#Journaux_libres_pour_la_scienceLe Wiki de l'April sur les journaux scientifiques libres/abr / (...)

15:00
Client: “So here’s the deal: my company has just given me $7,000 to spend on this...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “So here’s the deal: my company has just given me $7,000 to spend on this project, but since you only charged us $3500, why don’t you just write me a receipt for $7,000 and I’ll give you back the difference and manage the rest of the money myself.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I don’t know, that doesn’t seem right. Is there anyway I can deal with your employer personally?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Fuck you! Are you threatening me?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Fu7Ll3T0O_xN8zXvv6z2G-Kd1oQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Fu7Ll3T0O_xN8zXvv6z2G-Kd1oQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Fu7Ll3T0O_xN8zXvv6z2G-Kd1oQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Fu7Ll3T0O_xN8zXvv6z2G-Kd1oQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

July 17, 2010
22:20
« HADOPI, ça marche »
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce matin, l'invité de l'émission « Médiaboliques » de France Inter était le ministre de la Culture Frédéric Mitterrand. La question de la loi Création et Internet, dite HADOPI, été abordée. Quelques réflexions en vrac suite à cette émission...br / br / br / (...)

15:00
"You did such a great job that I am going to refer you some business. Contact my friend about some..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““You did such a great job that I am going to refer you some business. Contact my friend about some work. Oh, she is broke so don’t try to sell her a bunch of stuff.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cHPHx_zGJEVzkELDu8Nf59m1B8w/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cHPHx_zGJEVzkELDu8Nf59m1B8w/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cHPHx_zGJEVzkELDu8Nf59m1B8w/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cHPHx_zGJEVzkELDu8Nf59m1B8w/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

5:03
Les négociations d'ACTA se poursuivent dans une transparence irréprochable
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 14 juillet 2010, un ileak/i du texte consolidé d'ACTA produit suite aux négociations de Lucerne (Suisse) a été publié sur le site de La Quadrature du Net. Soyez rassuré(e)s : ce qui a fuité ne sortira pas d'Internet.br / br / Le Traité Commercial Anti-Contrefaçon (ACTA, iAnti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement/i) occupe beaucoup les négociateurs de quelques pays : régulièrement, ceux-ci se rassemblent à divers endroits pour écrire ce qui sera le nouvel ordre commercial mondial et asseoir une extension disproportionnée de la propriété intellectuelle. Ces réunions de travail sont célèbres pour leur transparence : le huis clos est permanent, empêchant ainsi toute discussion démocratique du document. Une publication d'un brouillon du texte avait eu lieu en avril ainsi que quelques ileaks/i. br / br / Quelques jours avant le dernier tour de négociations, des représentants de l'April et de La Quadrature du Net a href=http://www.april.org/fr/au-poker-de-lacta-exporte-la-repression ont rencontré/a les négociateurs français de cet accord. La rencontre n'a pas donné un résultat rassurant. Le neuvième tour de négociation a eu lieu à Lucerne (Suisse), entre le 28 juin et le 2 juillet 2010. Les gouvernements y ayant participé n'ont pas fait l'effort de rendre public le document qui en est sorti. Qui plus est, la Commission Européenne s'est entretenue avec des membres du Parlement Européen lors d'une rencontre tenue secrète le 12 juillet ; le lendemain, Karel de Gucht, le Commissaire européen en charge du commerce, a donné publiquement quelques explications de l'état d'avancement du document et des changements introduits (pour les détails, voir a href=http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/acta-briefing-by-de-gucht-in-the-european-parliament/le billet du blog de Christian Engström/a, député européen du Parti Pirate suédois). br / br / Apparemment, ces explications n'ont pas été jugées suffisantes : une copie du document consolidé issu des négociations a fuité. Le pdf peut être lu a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/files/ACTA_consolidatedtext_EUrestricted130710.pdfici/a et le 14 juillet au soir, nous avons été quelques bénévoles à faire a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_20100713_version_consolidated_textsa transcription/a.br / br / Enfin, le texte le plus récent pourra être lu et analysé : comme cela doit pouvoir se faire dans le cadre d'un processus démocratique. En attendant le prochain tour (fin juillet) prévu à Washington DC où le Parlement Européen compte discuter l'inclusion de ses marques géographiques (par exemple, Champagne) : selon de Gucht, sans la reconnaissance de ces marques par les États-Unis, l'Europe a peu à gagner d'ACTA.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_20100713_version_consolidated_textACTA : version consolidée et transcrite du traité au 13 juillet 2010/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/actaDossier ACTA de La Quadrature du Net/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.april.org/actaDossier ACTA de l'April/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/acta-urgence-a-repenser-brevets-et-droit-dauteurLettre ouverte jointe April et La Quadrature du Net/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58286-acta-version-consolidee-contrefacon-hadopi.htmArticle de PCInpact sur le sujet/abr /
4:56
Tatoeba.org, base de données de phrases d'exemple
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Toute personne apprenant une langue s'est retrouvée un jour face à la question « Mais comment diable utilise-t-on ce mot/cette expression ? ». Le projet Tatoeba a été fondé pour répondre au besoin de pouvoir rapidement trouver des phrases illustrant un mot ou une expression. Le tout s'articule autour d'un site web [a href=http://tatoeba.orghttp://tatoeba.org/a], où chacun peut venir piocher des phrases dans les langues qui l'intéressent et, une fois inscrit, ajouter ses propres phrases, mais aussi traduire, corriger celles déjà existantes.br / br / C'est d'ailleurs dans cet aspect collaboratif que réside tout l'intérêt de Tatoeba : l'ensemble des phrases a été créé/traduit par des êtres humains. Ainsi, on peut non seulement trouver des phrases « naturelles », mais aussi poser des questions sur les phrases déjà présentes, afin de savoir si telle ou telle variation est correcte, dans quel cas on utiliserait cette phrase plutôt qu'une autre, etc.br / br / Nous avons pour l'instant plus de 400 000 phrases réparties sur 53 langues et environ 4000 audios qui proviennent d'une collaboration avec le projet Shtooka. Pour ce qui est des licences, l'ensemble des phrases et audios sont sous CC-BY2.0/FR et le site en lui même est sous AGPL v3.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://tatoeba.orgSite du projet/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_CorpusCorpus Tanaka (d'où provient une majorité des phrases)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://shtooka.net/fr/Projet Shtooka (fournissant le matériel pour l'enregistrement)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://tatoeba.org/fre/homeDerniers ajouts/abr / (...)
4:54
PacketFence 1.9.0 - Un puissant contrôleur d'accès au réseau
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Inverse, société spécialisée en développement et déploiement de logiciels libres, annonce la sortie de la version 1.9.0 de PacketFence. Ce dernier est une solution de conformité réseau (NAC) entièrement libre, supportée et reconnue. Procurant une liste impressionnante de fonctionnalités telles un portail captif pour l'enregistrement ou la remédiation, une gestion centralisée des réseaux filaire et sans fil, le support pour le 802.1X, l'isolation niveau-2 des composantes problématiques, l'intégration au détecteur d'intrusions Snort et au détecteur de vulnérabilités Nessus - elle peut être utilisée pour sécuriser efficacement aussi bien des réseaux de petite taille que de très grands réseaux hétérogènes.br / br / PacketFence possède un grand nombre de fonctionnalités. Parmi celles-ci, on retrouve :ulliL'enregistrement des composantes réseau grâce à un puissant portail captif ;br / /liliLe blocage automatique, si souhaité, des appareils indésirables ;br / /liliL'enrayement de la propagation de vers et virus informatiques ;br / /liliLe freinage des attaques sur vos serveurs ou diverses composantes réseaux ;br / /liliLa vérification de la conformité des postes présents sur le réseau (logiciels installés, configurations particulières, etc.)./li/ul br / PacketFence est une solution non-intrusive qui fonctionne avec une multitude d'équipements réseaux (filaire ou sans fil) tels ceux de Cisco, Aruba, Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, Enterasys, Accton/Edge-corE/SMC, 3Com, D-Link, Intel, Dell et plus encore.br / br / PacketFence supporte dorénavant les contrôleurs sans fil WiSM, la série 1800 ISR, ainsi que les commutateurs 3750 et 4500 de Cisco. Le commutateur Foundry FastIron 4802 est dorénavant supporté avec téléphonie IP et les commutateurs HP ProCurve 3400cl, SMC8824M et SMC8848M sont maintenant supportés. De nouvelles fonctionnalités telles la catégorisation de composantes réseau pour l'assignation dynamique de VLAN ainsi que la prise en charge du matériel flottant ont été ajoutées. Des paquets pour Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ou CentOS) sont disponibles sur le site officiel du projet ainsi qu'une version pré-configurée dans une image de type VMWare.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.packetfence.orgSite officiel de PacketFence/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.inverse.ca/francais.htmlInverse/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Access_ControlNAC/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.packetfence.org/tour/screenshots.htmlCopies d'écrans/abr /

3:10
Quoteworthy: Chinese Proverb – Involve me and I’ll understand
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F16%2Fquoteworthy-chinese-proverb-involve-me-and-ill-understand%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F16%2Fquoteworthy-chinese-proverb-involve-me-and-ill-understand%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F16%2Fquoteworthy-chinese-proverb-involve-me-and-ill-understand%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pTell me and I#8217;ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I#8217;ll understand./p p- a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/tell_me_and_i-ll_forget-show_me_and_i_may/10546.html" target="_blank"Chinese Proverb/a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/07/16/quoteworthy-chinese-proverb-involve-me-and-ill-understand/"Quoteworthy: Chinese Proverb #8211; Involve me and I#8217;ll understand/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/04/27/quoteworthy-hunt-thomas-dont-repeat-yourself/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: Hunt #038; Thomas #8211; Don#8217;t Repeat Yourself'Quoteworthy: Hunt #038; Thomas #8211; Don#8217;t Repeat Yourself/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/09/quoteworthy-george-orwell-on-scrupulous-writing/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;'Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5g7h75bvuIGvpJFLYin62SirTh0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5g7h75bvuIGvpJFLYin62SirTh0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5g7h75bvuIGvpJFLYin62SirTh0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/5g7h75bvuIGvpJFLYin62SirTh0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8CAi10KUHCc:InUi_m-LP9o:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=8CAi10KUHCc:InUi_m-LP9o:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8CAi10KUHCc:InUi_m-LP9o:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=8CAi10KUHCc:InUi_m-LP9o:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8CAi10KUHCc:InUi_m-LP9o:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/8CAi10KUHCc" height="1" width="1"/

July 16, 2010
15:06
"I want the text to grab you by the face."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I want the text to grab you by the face.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/s9CTAILmxDeM4eSwNtiZMi5sh5Y/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/s9CTAILmxDeM4eSwNtiZMi5sh5Y/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/s9CTAILmxDeM4eSwNtiZMi5sh5Y/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/s9CTAILmxDeM4eSwNtiZMi5sh5Y/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:46
Motorola : une nouvelle étape dans l'ignominie ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Cette dépêche est tirée du a href=http://linuxfr.org/~patrick_g/29954.htmljournal de patrick_g/a. br / br / Le web commence à bouillonner au sujet des téléphones Motorola a href=http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/23/verizon-and-motorola-officially-announce-droid-x/Droid X/a (basés sur le noyau Linux) et qui sont supposés s'autodétruire si on tente de flasher le système. Tout est parti de a href=http://www.mydroidworld.com/forums/droid-x-discussion/3330-how-droid-x-locked-down-let-me-tell-you-what-i-know.htmlcet article/a sur le site Mydroidworld.com. L'info a ensuite a href=http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/14/droid-x-actually-self-destructs-if-you-try-to-mod-it/été reprise/a sur Mobilecrunch.com puis a href=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/15/1317205/Droid-X-Self-Destructs-If-You-Try-To-Modsur Slashdot/a et maintenant Harald Welte (spécialiste des smartphones s'il en est) a href=http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/07/16/#20100716-motorola_droid2_droidx_lockdownen parle/a sur son blog.br / br / De quoi est-ce qu'il s'agit ?br / Une puce (a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFUSEeFUSE/a) est chargée de vérifier le processus de boot du téléphone. Si tout est correct, c'est à dire si rien n'a changé par rapport au code d'origine Motorola, alors le boot continue normalement. En revanche si la puce détecte que le code du firmware a été modifié (à la suite d'un flashage par exemple) alors elle envoie une commande qui empêchera de façon permanente le démarrage du téléphone. Il ne pourra plus jamais s'allumer. Comme disent nos amis anglo-saxons : votre téléphone devient une brique ! iIf the eFuse failes to verify this information then the eFuse receives a command to blow the fuse or trip the fuse. This results in the booting process becoming corrupted and resulting in a permanent bricking of the Phone./ibr / br / Seul Motorola connait les spécifications de la puce eFUSE et peut éventuellement réactiver le téléphone. Donc pour l'utilisateur c'est mort, il peut jeter son téléphone à la poubelle ou le transformer en coûteux presse-papiers. On connaissait déjà les puces de contrôle qui empêchent simplement le boot mais c'est, à ma connaissance, la première fois qu'on découvre un mécanisme d'autodestruction placée sciemment au coeur du hardware par un constructeur pour interdire le flashage de ses téléphones.br / br / Bien entendu ça fait encore plus mal au coeur de savoir que ces téléphones sont basées sur Linux c'est à dire sur du logiciel libre devant posséder a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_publique_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9rale_GNU#L.27esprit_et_l.27objectifles 4 libertés classiques/a définies dans la licence GPL. C'est encore plus rageant quand on lit a href=http://community.developer.motorola.com/t5/MOTODEV-Blog/Custom-ROMs-and-Motorola-s-Android-Handsets/bc-p/4290#M432title=Customla prose de Lori Fraleigh/a sur le blog officiel des téléphones Motorola : iL'utilisation de logiciels open source, comme le noyau Linux ou la plateforme Android, dans une machine, n'oblige pas le téléphone faisant tourner ce code à permettre le flashing. Nous respectons les licences, y compris la GPLv2, pour chacun des packages open source de nos téléphones/i;.br / br / C'est évidemment un argument massue en faveur de a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gplv3#Version_3la licence GPLv3/a qui interdit explicitement cette a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoisationtivoisation/a. Et en attendant n'achetez pas un téléphone Motorola car, comme le dit un commentaire sur Slashdot, ivous pouvez légalement acheter un pistolet qui ne tire que dans la direction de la personne pressant la détente, mais ça ne veut pas dire que c'est une bonne idée/i.br / br / iNdM : Attention cette information émane d'une seule source donc prudence. Voir également a href=http://linuxfr.org/comments/1144810.html#1144810ce commentaire/a de SOULfly_B sur le journal d'origine./ibr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~patrick_g/29954.htmlJournal de patrick_g à l'origine de la dépêche/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.mydroidworld.com/forums/droid-x-discussion/3330-how-droid-x-locked-down-let-me-tell-you-what-i-know.htmlMyDroidWorld : How the Droid X is locked down? Let me tell you what I know. /abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/07/14/droid-x-actually-self-destructs-if-you-try-to-mod-it/MobileCrunch : Droid X actually self-destructs if you try to mod it/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/07/15/1317205/Droid-X-Self-Destructs-If-You-Try-To-Mod/. : Droid X Self-Destructs If You Try To Mod/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/07/16/#20100716-motorola_droid2_droidx_lockdownHarald Welte : Motorola locking down the DroidX and Droid2 in a nasty way /abr /

14:44
Retour sur la session Internet des Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre 2010
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Les Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre reviennent à Bordeaux, 10 ans après leur création dans cette même ville. Cette onzième édition s'est déroulée dans la joie et la bonne humeur, et en pleine chaleur estivale, du 6 au 11 juillet 2010. Petit retour sur la session Internet que j'ai co-organisée, à l'aide de Nicolas Perriault. Le programme des RMLL est un bon point de départ, exhaustif, si vous n'avez pu vous rendre sur place. Je me contenterai en effet d'aborder les conférences les plus (...)

14:04
Concours LinuxFr.org sur les séries : les gagnants
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ça y est, le concours permettant de gagner deux livres « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité » de Sébastien Rohaut est terminé depuis quelques jours et nous avons deux gagnants qui ont chacun réalisé une série de trois dépêches sur trois jours consécutifs :br / br / ulli a href=http://linuxfr.org/~gteissier/Guillaume Teissier/a avec les dépêches suivantesbr / ulli 16 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/16/26995.htmlØMQ, la messagerie inter-applications « nouvelle vague »/abr / /lili 17 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/17/27006.htmllatrace, le traceur qui instrumente le chargeur dynamique/abr / /lili 18 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/18/27022.htmlLe Sharkfest'10 vient de se terminer/abr / /li/ul /lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~_seb_/_seb_/a avec les dépêches suivantesbr / ulli 22 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/22/27032.htmlSuper-Crapule contre Super-Hadopi/abr / /lili 23 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/23/27049.htmlBonita : Une solution open source de gestion de processus métier simple et puissante/abr / /lili 24 juin : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/24/27050.htmlFirefox 3.6.4 intègre Electrolysis/abr / /li/ul /li/ul Bravo et merci à eux :-) Merci aussi aux a href=http://www.editions-eni.fréditions ENI/a d’avoir fourni les livres.br / br / Notons que sur la même période, Bruno, Florent et Nÿco ont respectivement réalisé une série de 5, 3 et 2 jours... mais ils étaient hors concours ! Maintenant que nous avons les moyens de repérer automatiquement les séries sur une période donnée, nous allons réserver au minimum un prix mensuel (livre ou abonnement) à la plus grande série de dépêches validées du mois (avec un minimum de 3 dépêches). C'est un minimum : si plusieurs séries se démarquent, rien ne nous interdit de récompenser plusieurs sérial-contributeurs sur le mois donné. N'oubliez pas qu'il y a entre 10 et 12 livres ou abonnements à gagner chaque mois en contribuant à LinuxFr.org !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26968.htmlL'annonce du concours/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/serie.htmlStatistiques sur les séries/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/maserie.htmlStatistiques sur VOS séries/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/top.htmlLes tops de LinuxFr.org/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26967.htmlLe livre « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité »/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlGagnez des livres et abonnements/abr / (...)

4:06
Business Analysts: What Do We Want to Create?
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F15%2Fbusiness-analysts-what-do-we-want-to-create%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F15%2Fbusiness-analysts-what-do-we-want-to-create%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F07%2F15%2Fbusiness-analysts-what-do-we-want-to-create%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div p style="text-align: center;"a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/1089869_empty_billboard.jpg"img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2550" title="1089869_empty_billboard" src="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/1089869_empty_billboard.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" //a/p pPeter Senge, in a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385260954?ie=UTF8amp;tag=jnotes-20amp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=390957amp;creativeASIN=0385260954"The Fifth Discipline: The Art amp; Practice of the Learning Organization/aimg style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=jnotes-20amp;l=as2amp;o=1amp;a=0385260954" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /, said that #8220;[a]t its simplest, a shared vision is the answer to the question, #8216;What do we want to create?#8217;#8221; I#8217;ve mentioned several times that I think a business analyst#8217;s primary responsibility is that of facilitating shared understanding (or shared vision) among project stakeholders. We help our organizations arrive at an agreement as to #8220;what we want to create#8221; within the parameters of the elicited needs and constraints./p pSome of my most important #8220;eureka#8221; moments as a business analyst have come when I realized that producing cookie-cutter documents conforming to all the stylistic rules of #8220;good requirements#8221; didn#8217;t necessarily constitute effective communication. And debating the relative merits of whether it#8217;s best to specify requirements with use cases or user stories or declarative statements is not nearly as important as the question, #8220;how can I express these requirements in a way that engages and makes sense to emthis/em audience for emthis/em project?#8221;/p pJames Shore, a href="http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Up-Front-Requirements.html" target="_blank"describing a situation where his team had specified requirements accurately, thoroughly and to the best ability of the team/a, said (emphasis mine):/p blockquotepWhat went wrong is that the customers didn#8217;t engage in the up-front requirements process. They looked engaged#8211;they were physically present and participating#8211;but they didn#8217;t know what they were getting and couldn#8217;t imagine it from the materials we were giving them.emstrong span style="font-style: normal;"span style="font-weight: normal;"I think what went wrong is that/span/span imagining software from a verbal or written description is a difficult skill, one that most customers don#8217;t have/strong/em./p/blockquote pI think Shore makes a significant point, here. It#8217;s easy to get wrapped up in the textbook process and deliverables and doing them the proverbial #8220;right way#8221; and then overlook the notion that our real value lies in, first, identifying the requirements, and then in modeling them in a way (whatever way that may be) that makes it as easy as possible for the audience to understand what success for the project looks like, and hopefully achieve that ever-elusive goal of #8220;shared vision.#8221;/p pLet me say this again in just a slightly different way, because I think this is so important, and because I think a lot of analysts miss the point: Your value as an analyst is not in asking a bunch of questions and cranking out documents, but in facilitating understanding; in optimizing the requirements models you create to maximize their communicative value. Our value is in creating a shared vision of what constitutes success in the minds of every project participant./p pI do have some ideas as to ways to maximize the communicative value of requirements, but we#8217;ll leave that as a topic for another day. But in closing I will ask - what are you doing to make it easy (or at least easier) for your audience of stakeholders to understand requirements? Or, for your project team to reach a #8220;shared vision#8221; of what you#8217;ll create?/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/07/15/business-analysts-what-do-we-want-to-create/"Business Analysts: What Do We Want to Create?/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/19/business-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Business Analysts: Don#8217;t Forget Your ROI!'Business Analysts: Don#8217;t Forget Your ROI!/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/02/23/leadership-through-communication/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Leadership Through Communication'Leadership Through Communication/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2009/07/21/four-key-knowledge-areas-for-business-analysts/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Four Key Knowledge Areas for Business Analysts'Four Key Knowledge Areas for Business Analysts/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AhwLlKLEoZyADaYhaLf6_Cse838/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AhwLlKLEoZyADaYhaLf6_Cse838/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AhwLlKLEoZyADaYhaLf6_Cse838/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/AhwLlKLEoZyADaYhaLf6_Cse838/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=xs1ei-TOAZY:ppCi_ADNOtI:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=xs1ei-TOAZY:ppCi_ADNOtI:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=xs1ei-TOAZY:ppCi_ADNOtI:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=xs1ei-TOAZY:ppCi_ADNOtI:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=xs1ei-TOAZY:ppCi_ADNOtI:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/xs1ei-TOAZY" height="1" width="1"/

July 15, 2010
23:08
Truth via Captions: Whats Under Their Kilts?
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. A few weeks ago in Why Web Video Captioning Is So Important, I mused on the importance of captioning to Web videos, and emphasized why YouTube users should take advantage of various YouTube captioning tools (automated and manual) to...

21:05
La pénurie d'adresse IPv4 sera-t-elle pour le 12/12 ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Tout le monde sait que la fin du monde est pour le a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9dictions_pour_d%C3%A9cembre_201212/12/2012,/a mais pour les adresses IPv4, le rythme actuel fait que la fin est bien plus proche. L'a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANA title=Définition WikipédiaIANA/a, l'organisme qui s'occupe de la gestion de l'espace d'adressage IP, estime qu'au rythme où vont les attributions, la pénurie d'adresse sera pour la fin de l'année, une a href=http://twitter.com/IPv4Countdownautre estimation/a annonce un peu moins d'une année. Une très forte demande en provenance de la zone Asie-Pacifique a fait que durant les six premiers mois de l'année 2010 plus d'adresses ont été attribuées que durant toute l'année 2009.br / br / bIl ne reste actuellement que 6 % des adresses disponibles./bbr / br / Il apparaît donc essentiel que la transition de l'IPv4 vers l'IPv6 se fasse rapidement, mais est-ce que tout le monde est prêt ? C'est le cas pour Google, dont tous les services sont accessibles en IPv6, YouTube a d'ailleurs été le dernier à avoir été adapté. Du côté de l'Europe, ça bouge, un plan d'action a été proposé et ce n'est pas le boulot qui manque : selon a href=http://labs.ripe.net/Members/becha/content-ipv6-ripenessRIPE NCC/a (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIPE_NCCRéseaux IP européens/a), 72 % des entreprises étudiées ne sont pas prêtes au passage à la version 6 de l'IP. Toute l'ampleur du problème est aussi au niveau des logiciels qui ne sont pas adaptés (stockage d'adresse en v4 seulement, traitement des requêtes depuis des adresses v4 uniquement, etc.).br / br / Au niveau des infrastructures, il existe des outils pour faciliter la transition : il s'agit des RFC a href=http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5569.txt5569/a (6rd) et a href=http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3056.txt3056/a (6to4). Stéphane Bortzmeyer a href=http://www.bortzmeyer.org/5569.htmlpropose une explication/a de la première qui a permis à Free de rendre les requêtes IPv6 possibles sur son réseau.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eacute;puisement_des_adresses_IPv4Également sur Wikipédia/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/infra-net/ipv6-il-y-a-urgence-a-migrer-selon-l-iana-et-la-commission-europeenne-mais-les-freins-sont-encore-nombreux-39752710.htmPierre Col sur ZDNet/abr /

15:20
Some Thoughts on Quora
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpI was reading a href="http://ifindkarma.posterous.com/pandas-and-lobsters-why-google-cannot-build-s"Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications.../a and came across the following statements /p blockquote pemNow, consider the Four Horsemen of Hotness in 2010: Facebook, Quora, Foursquare, and Twitter. Think deeply about why none of these four could have been developed inside Google. br /... br /Quora is restaurant that serves huge quantities of /ema href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn"embacn/em/aem and /ema href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(computing)"emtoast/em/aem.strong /strongQuora is a dozen people running dozens of experiments in how to optimally use bacn to get people to return to Quora, and how to use toast to keep them there. Bacn is email you want but not right now, and Quora has 40 flavors of it that you can /ema href="http://www.quora.com/settings"emorder/em/aem. Quora's main use of Bacn is to sizzle with something delicious (a new answer to a question you follow, a new Facebook friend has been caught in the Quora lobster trap, etc.) to entice you to come back to Quora. Then, once you're there, the toast starts popping. /ema href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/quoras-highly-praised-qa-service-launches-to-the-public-and-the-real-test-begins/"emQuora shifts the content to things you care about and hides things you don't care about/em/aem in real-time, and subtly pops up notifications while you're playing, to entice you to keep sticking around and clicking around./em/p /blockquote pAlthough I’m a regular user of a href="http://www.foursquare.com"Foursquare/a, a href="http://www.twitter.com"Twitter/a and a href="http://www.facebook.com"Facebook/a and consider myself to be fairly up on what’s going on in the social media space, I’d never used a href="http://www.quora.com"Quora/a when I read the article. Given that I’ve seen hype about it in various corners I decided to create an account and give the service a try. Below are some of my impressions/p h3What is Quora?/h3 pThe easiest way to think about Quora is that Quora is to a href="http://answers.yahoo.com/"Yahoo! Answers/a as Facebook is to MySpace. It is a Qamp;A site where users utilize their real names often linked to Facebook profiles as opposed to pseudonyms. It avoids game mechanics such as high score leaderboards and user badges that services like a href="http://stackoverflow.com/"Stackoverflow/a and a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_QnA#Levels.2C_Scoring_and_Reputation_System"Windows Live QnA/a instead relying on people getting kudos from their peers in the form of endorsements and votes on their answers to motivate users to answer questions. /p h3Why is Quora is so Hot/h3 pQuora seems to have started off as an invitation-only service which allowed them to cherry pick the original users to meet a particular demographic (i.e. Silicon Valley geek) and also carefully manage the initial culture of the site. What they’ve created is a place where members of the Silicon Valley technorati and wannabes can post questions and expect them to be answered by members of the tech elite including insiders at various tech companies. Quora is the kind of place where questions like a href="http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-scaling-issues-to-keep-in-mind-while-developing-a-social-network-feed"What are the scaling issues to keep in mind while developing a social network feed?/a is answered by one of the people who built the original Facebook news feed and a random opinion like a href="http://www.quora.com/Should-Mark-Zuckerberg-step-down-as-CEO-of-Facebook-and-find-a-more-seasoned-replacement"Should Mark Zuckerberg step down as CEO of Facebook and find a more seasoned replacement?/a gets a response from a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross"Blake Ross/a. There aren’t many places online where a question like a href="http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that-Larry-Page-and-Sergey-Brin-made-in-the-early-days-of-Google"What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google?/a can get a serious answer let alone a well researched history lesson as well as some actual insights. /p pThis site is pure gold for technology bloggers, journalists and Web startup geeks. It is unsurprising that these sorts of people would consider Quora to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. /p h3Quora is a Community Site not a Communications Tool/h3 pOne of the things I find weird about lumping Quora into the same grouping as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter is that unlike those sites it is unot/u a communication tool. Facebook created a new communication channel between friends, acquaintances and family members that sits somewhere between brings together the functionality of email and IM along with the feed. Twitter created a lighter weight way to consume and create content for brands and people you find interesting as compared to blogging. Foursquare is about broadcasting your location to interested parties. /p pQuora on the other hand seems to have more in common with mail lists and discussion forums. Specifically, it is more like a href="http://www.metafilter.com"Metafilter/a, a href="http://www.digg.com"Digg/a and a href="http://www.reddit.com"Reddit/a than it is like the aforementioned sites. This is a service that will live and die based on the culture of its community and is very dependent on quot;power users” who altruistically provide lots of value to the site in exchange for respect from their peers. The challenge for Quora is that it will be difficult to keep its current culture as it grows bigger. Will Facebook and Google insiders still be showing up in various question threads if the site grows to be as big as Yahoo! Answers with the same breadth of audience and volume of content? I can’t imagine that happening. /p pI also can’t imagine being able to segregate audiences like you can on communications services. Twitter has communities of mommy bloggers, tech bloggers, fans of various celebrities, sports fans, etc which operate independently of each other and really only are noticed by others every once in a while due to the trending topics feature. The same goes for Facebook and Foursquare. Quora will not be able isolate the various demographics from each other without changing the nature of the site. However they uwill/u have to figure that out once the current crop of users start logging in and seeing a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed"quot;how is babby formedquot;/a style questions because the site has taken off. /p pThen again, we might get lucky and the site never take off with the masses which may not be good for the VCs that have invested in it but would be for the community that has formed there. /p pimg title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Young+Buckamp;field-title=Welcome+To+The+Southamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Young Buck/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Young+Buck+Welcome+To+The+Southamp;x=0amp;y=0"Welcome to the South (featuring Lil Flip amp; David Banner)/a img title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

15:00
Client: ”The site is looking great! However, I’m a bit confused. I thought you said...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient/strong: ”The site is looking great! However, I’m a bit confused. I thought you said the design was done.”/p pstrongMe: /strong ”Yep, the ‘visual’ design is complete. Was there something bothering you about it?”br/br/strongClient:/strong ”Oh no! The design is great, everyone loves it! However, it doesn’t seem to be finished. There are a bunch of pages that look wrong.”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”How so? Could you show me?”br/br/[The client proceeds to click through his site and eventually comes to an external link that takes the user to Amazon.com]br/br/strongClient:/strong ”This page looks nothing like our site.”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”[somewhat confused] That’s because it’s not your site.”br/br/strongClient:/strong ”But we just got here from our site. Can’t you make it look like ours?”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”I’m afraid not. That would be like walking over to your neighbor’s home and re-landscaping their yard and painting their house to match your own.”br/br/strongClient:/strong ”Oh…well that sucks.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/o-uGBO5oMeGp4FSwnyeAez1T0gc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/o-uGBO5oMeGp4FSwnyeAez1T0gc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/o-uGBO5oMeGp4FSwnyeAez1T0gc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/o-uGBO5oMeGp4FSwnyeAez1T0gc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:59
Sortie d'openSUSE 11.3
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce jeudi 15 juillet, la communauté de la distribution au caméléon vous annonce la sortie de la toute nouvelle mouture d'openSUSE. Cette version 11.3 apporte son lot d'applications desktop mises à jour, ainsi qu’une suite complète de logiciels serveurs et une riche sélection d’outils de développement open source. Parmi les principaux paquets, on retrouve :ulliNoyau Linux 2.6.34.x ;br / /liliBureaux KDE 4.4.4 (par défaut) et GNOME 2.30.1 ;br / /liliServeur X.org 1.8 ;br / /liliGCC 4.5, GDB 7.1 ;br / /liliMozilla Firefox 3.6.6 et Thunderbird 3.0.5 ;br / /liliOpenOffice 3.2.1./li/ul Proposant les principaux bureaux et profitant de l'une des meilleures intégrations actuellement disponibles, openSUSE représente une très bonne alternative parmi les distributions qui ciblent l'utilisateur final, qu'il soit débutant ou averti.br / br / openSUSE 11.3 est disponible pour les architectures x86 et x86_64, en diverses versions DVD, Live-CD et Live-USB téléchargeables. Une version boîte contenant un DVD double couche, un manuel papier et un support à l’installation de 90 jours sera prochainement proposée à la vente (60 €). Elle inclura également un Live-DVD contenant une image spéciale iplasma-netbook/i qui donne un aperçu des dernières avancées en termes d'interfaces au format netbook. Les mises à jour de sécurité seront assurées pendant 18 mois.br / br / Notez que si vous êtes de passage à Nüremberg dans la soirée du 15, des saucisses et de la bière vous attendront à partir de 19h au quartier général de la distribution au caméléon, afin de fêter ce lancement avec les développeurs et la communauté comme il se doit.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.opensuse.org/openSUSE.org/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://opensuse-community.org/openSUSE-Community.org/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlightsProduct Highlights/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://en.opensuse.org/ScreenshotsCaptures d'écran/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://forums.opensuse.org/other-languages/francais-french/Forums openSUSE francophones/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=qamp;q=Suse+Linux+GmbH+Maxfeldstrasse+5,+90409+Nurembergamp;sll=49.46075,11.083912amp;sspn=0.001778,0.00478amp;hq=Suse+Linux+GmbHamp;hnear=Maxfeldstra%C3%9Fe+5,+N%C3%BCrnberg+90409+N%C3%BCrnberg,+Bayern,+Allemagneamp;ll=49.461611,11.083317amp;spn=Les saucisses et la bière/abr / (...)

13:53
Faut-il continuer à supporter Internet Explorer 6 ?
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

On ne va pas ergoter sans fin, tout le monde doit maintenant savoir que Internet Explorer 6 — IE6 pour les intimes — est un navigateur obsolète et dangereux. Et pourtant, certains continuent à l'utiliser. Faut-il les en dissuader, refuser de leur fournir son support, aller même jusqu'à leur empêcher l'accès, ou faut-il continuer à supporter (les faiblesses de) ce navigateur ? Petit aperçu du marché On le sait, les parts de marché de IE6 — et même de IE toutes versions confondues — diminuent largement, (...)

11:51
Meilleurs contributeurs LinuxFr : Les gagnants de juin 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

On continue sur notre lancée de récompenser ceux qui chaque mois contribuent positivement au site LinuxFr (dépêche, commentaire, logo, journaux, etc.). Vous n'êtes pas sans risquer de gagner un abonnement à Linux Magazine France, OpenSource Magazine ou encore un livre des éditions Eyrolles, ENI et InLibroVeritas. Voici les gagnants du mois de juin 2010 :br / br / bAbonnement d'un an à MISC ou OpenSource Magazine/bbr / ulli a href=http://linuxfr.org/~low/Laurent Wandrebeck/a pour sa présentation de a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/24/27053.htmlMooseFS, un système de fichier réparti à tolérance de panne/a/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~linuxpause/linuxpause/a a détaillé la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/12/26981.htmlsortie de Sabayon 5.3/a, montrant qu'il existe une vie en dehors des grosses distributions/li/ul bLivres des éditions Eyrolles, ENI et InLibroVeritas/bbr / ulli a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Malicia/Malicia/a a détaillé la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/05/26952.htmlrésolution des problèmes de licence de WebM./a Elle a d'ailleurs été particulièrement active en mai et juin./lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Tortoose/Cédric Brun /a a profité de la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/23/27041.htmlsortie d'Eclipse 3.6 - Helios/a pour en faire une présentation très complète/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~oliviosu/oliviosu/a suit pour nous la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/06/26955.htmlsortie d'OGD1/a, carte graphique libre/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~mackwic/mackwic/a s'adresse aux a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/20/27026.htmlAficionados de la console : Google pense à vous et sort Google CL tools/a/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~marahi/marahi/a nous explique sournoisement pourquoi a href=http://linuxfr.org/~marahi/29880.htmlPython « çaymal »/a/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~naparuba/Jean Gabes/a a présenté a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/01/26929.htmlShinken, la refonte de Nagios en Python/a/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~steckdenis/steckdenis/a s'est intéressé à la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/24/27055.htmlsortie d'ownCloud 1.0/a/lili Enfin a href=http://linuxfr.org/~antistress/antistress/a a fait le tour de a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/17/27005.htmlquelques outils pour générer des fichiers WebM/a/li/ul Certains gagnants n'ont pas pu être joints ou n'ont pas répondu. N'oubliez pas de mettre une adresse email valable dans votre compte ou lors de la proposition d'une dépêche. En effet, c'est notre seul moyen de vous contacter, que ce soit pour les lots ou des questions sur votre dépêche lors de sa modération. Tous nos remerciements aux contributeurs du site ainsi qu'à a href=http://www.miscmag.com/MISC/a (remplaçant ce mois-ci a href=http://www.gnulinuxmag.com/Linux Magazine France/a), a href=http://www.magazine-avosmac.com/opensource/OpenSource magazine/a et aux éditions a href=http://www.editions-eyrolles.com/Eyrolles/a, a href=http://www.inlibroveritas.net/InLibroVeritas/a et a href=http://www.editions-eni.fr/ENI/a. Les livres sélectionnés sont dans la seconde partie de la dépêche.br / br / Enfin, sachez que le concours pour gagner deux livres « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité » est terminé depuis samedi dernier. Nous vous communiquerons les résultats sous peu. Et n'oubliez pas de contribuer ; LinuxFr vit pour vous et par vous !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlContribuez/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/10/26971.htmlLes gagnants précédents/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26968.htmlLe concours/abr / (...)
11:11
Synthèse de la table ronde politique des RMLL
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La traditionnelle table ronde politique des RMLL s'est tenue le jeudi 8 juillet 2010, entre 14h40 et 18h. Elle était animée par Benjamin Bayart, l'élégance geek personnifiée avec sa cravate XKCD, et comprenait 2 parties.br / br / La première était un échange sur le rôle du Parlement dans le cadre de votes de lois ayant trait aux libertés numériques ; les intervenants étaient Tangui Morlier, membre actif de l'initiative a href=http://www.regardscitoyens.org/Regards citoyens/a, et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Dupont-AignanNicolas Dupont-Aignan/a, député et maire d'Yerres (Essonne).br / br / La seconde partie était une mise à jour des dossiers « qui nous intéressent » pour reprendre l'expression de Benjamin Bayart. Les intervenants étaient : Frédéric Couchet, délégué général de l'April, Jérémie Zimmermann, porte-parole et cofondateur de La Quadrature du Net, Jérôme Relinger, responsable national TIC auprès du Parti Communiste Français (PCF), Hervé Le Crosnier (maître de conférences, Université de Caen) et, par vidéo, Catherine Trautmann, député européenne PS et rapporteuse du Paquet Télécom. Voici un bref résumé de cette table ronde n'incluant pas les questions-réponses ayant suivi.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.regardscitoyens.org/Regards citoyens/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/April/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://blog.nicolasdupontaignan.fr/Blog N. Dupont-Aignan : A l'UMP : haro sur Internet !/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/La Quadrature du Net/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.pcf.fr/spip.php?article3537PCF : Projet de Loi « création et internet » : mort de la création, mort de l’internet, requiem des libertés/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://herve.cfeditions.org/rss/rsssmsi.rdfFlux RSS Société de l'information de H. Le Crosnier/abr / (...)
10:44
Fiction documentaire de 16 min « Libre à vous »
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le BTS audiovisuel du lycée Suger (Saint-Denis) a réalisé une fiction documentaire de 16 minutes sur le logiciel libre intitulée « Libre à vous ». Ce travail, encadré par Diane Vattolo, est disponible sous licence Creative Commons By-Sa 2.0.br / br / Il a été projeté lundi 5 juillet lors de la réunion April pendant les RMLL 2010 à Bordeaux. br / br / La version Flash chez Blip.tv semble avoir quelques soucis, mais la version OGV fonctionne très bien (conteneur Ogg, vidéo Theora 720x576 24bpp 25 fps, audio Vorbis, 239 Mo).br / br / La partie fiction raconte l'histoire d'un éditeur propriétaire se faisant prendre des parts de marché par le logiciel libre : une consultante vient présenter le logiciel libre, et proposer divers plans de réaction (l'ignorer, en faire, le combattre).br / br / La partie documentaire comporte des interviews de dirigeants d'entreprise du libre durant Solutions (GNU/)Linux 2010 (Fabien Potencier de Sensiolab, Boris Auché de Bull, Michaël Rémond de Process One, Gwenaël Saint-Genest, Open Pattern) et une interview d'Alix Cazenave, alors responsable des affaires publiques à l'April.br / br / Libre à vous... d'en assurer la promotion et la diffusion.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blip.tv/file/3837952?filename=Dvattolo-LibreVousVersion4Juillet2010135.ogvStreaming et téléchargement sur blip.tv (239Mo)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://dl.free.fr/moAJgSQPfTéléchargement sur free.fr (239Mo)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://media.april.org/video/201007-LibreVousV4/Téléchargement sur april.org (239Mo)/abr / (...)
9:56
Sortie de Scala 2.8 !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La version finale de Scala 2.8 est sortie !br / br / Scala est un langage de programmation très évolué. Il se compile en bytecode Java ou en .Net. La compatibilité avec Java est telle qu'il est possible d'utiliser des classes écrites en Java à partir de Scala et vice-versa.br / br / Ce langage intègre de façon naturelle des fonctionnalités issues des langages orientés-objets et des langages fonctionnels. Les apports de la programmation fonctionnelle aux langages objets, plus répandus, sont multiples et deviennent rapidement indispensables une fois qu'on y est habitué. br / br / En particulier, il est maintenant possible d'écrire des codes à la fois très concis, comme en Ruby ou Python, tout en ayant beaucoup plus de sûreté grâce à un typage statique fort. Cela est rendu possible grâce à un système très avancé de gestion et d'inférence des types.br / br / Plus d'infos sur cette nouvelle version dans la suite de la dépêche.br / br / iacronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym/i : Le code source de Scala est sous a href=http://www.scala-lang.org/node/146une licence propre au projet/a mais semblable à la licence BSD.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.scala-lang.org/node/7009Annonce officielle de la sortie/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.scala-lang.orgSite officiel/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.codecommit.com/blog/scala/roundup-scala-for-java-refugeesTutorial Scala pour programmeurs Java/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.scala-lang.org/node/146Licence Scala (type BSD)/abr / (...)
9:55
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 27 de l'année 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Cette revue de presse est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire/strongbr / ullia href=http://www.francophonie.org/11es-Rencontres-mondiales-du.html[francophonie.org] 11es Rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/10/brazils-copyright-la.html[boingboing.net] Brazil's copyright law forbids using DRM to block fair use/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16221-brevets-une-societe-menace-plusieurs-fabricants-de-mobiles.html[numerama.com] Brevets : une société menace plusieurs fabricants de mobiles/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58194-securisation-nonsecurisation-motif-legitime-.htm[pcinpact.com] Hadopi, moyen de sécurisation et motif de non-sécurisation/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58167-jeanfrancois-cope-hadopi-perception-faiblesse.htm[pcinpact.com] La perception des faiblesses d'Hadopi, la faiblesse de la perception de Copé/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16202-plus-que-16-signatures-a-reunir-pour-la-declaration-anti-acta.html[numerama.com] Plus que 16 signatures à réunir pour la déclaration anti-ACTA/abr / /lilia href=http://www.programmez.com/actualites.php?titre_actu=Alveole-une-nouvelle-plateforme-collaborative-de-production-de-logiciels-libres-solidaires-et-responsablesamp;id_actu=7861[programmez.com] Alveole, une nouvelle plateforme collaborative de production de logiciels libres solidaires et responsables/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/justice/292187/vive-le-logiciel-libre[ledevoir.com] Vive le logiciel libre!/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58129-lcen-mariefrancoise-marais-hadopi-cassation.htm[pcinpact.com] La présidente d'Hadopi a du mal à oublier la Cour de cassation/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16187-la-loi-dadvsi-toujours-incomplete-quatre-ans-apres-sa-promulgation.html[numerama.com] La loi DADVSI toujours incomplète quatre ans après sa promulgation/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58123-quadrature-net-gus-garage-fdn.htm[pcinpact.com] Le Traité de l'Art Juste de Fabriquer des Adresses Hypées/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16185-enquete-oxford-se-penche-sur-la-gouvernance-mondiale-et-la-propriete-intellectuelle.html[numerama.com] Enquête : Oxford se penche sur la gouvernance mondiale et la propriété intellectuelle/abr / /lilia href=http://www.infos-du-net.com/actualite/17202-Piratpartiet-Pirate-Bay.html[infos-du-net.com] Pirate Bay hébergé au parlement suédois/abr / /lilia href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/07/07/27097.html[linuxfr.org] La plainte des fournisseurs de logiciels libres contre le contrat de gré-à-gré avec Microsoft n'est pas recevable/abr / /lilia href=http://www.silicon.fr/fr/news/2010/07/07/jean_noel_de_galzain_reprend_mandriva_en_main[silicon.fr] Jean-Noël de Galzain reprend Mandriva en main/abr / /lilia href=http://www.sudouest.fr/2010/07/07/rencontres-du-logiciel-libre-a-bordeaux-le-logiciel-libre-a-la-cote-134316-2780.php[sudouest.fr] Rencontres du Logiciel Libre à Bordeaux : le logiciel libre a la cote/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16181-hadopi-il-n-est-plus-question-de-tribunaux-speciaux-en-region.html[numerama.com] Hadopi : il n'est plus question de tribunaux spéciaux en région/abr / /lilia href=http://fr.news.yahoo.com/68/20100706/tsc-tlchargement-illgal-les-mails-d-aver-04aaa9b.html[yahoo.com] Téléchargement illégal : les mails d'avertissements inefficaces ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16167-le-vote-du-rapport-gallo-sur-la-contrefacon-reporte-a-la-rentree.html[numerama.com] Le vote du rapport Gallo sur la contrefaçon reporté à la rentrée/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16165-un-etrange-processus-secret-prepare-a-la-riposte-graduee-en-norvege.html[numerama.com] Un étrange processus secret prépare à la riposte graduée en Norvège/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/berga-inaugure-une-rue-logiciel-libre-39752935.htm[zdnet.fr] Berga inaugure une rue quot;Logiciel Librequot;/abr / /lilia href=http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2010/07/05/a-l-ecole-du-piratage[courrierinternational.com] A l'école du piratage (Moldavie)/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16158-tres-petit-score-pour-le-parti-pirate-aux-legislatives-de-rambouillet.html[numerama.com] Très petit score pour le Parti Pirate aux législatives de Rambouillet/abr / /li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://april.orgbr / April/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-pressebr / Revue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org//2010/07/07/27100.htmlbr / Revue de presse de la semaine précédente/abr / (...)

July 14, 2010
20:14
Client: ”How much do you charge to install Windows on a computer?” Me:...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”How much do you charge to install Windows on a computer?”/p pstrongMe: “/strong$85”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Is it going to be legal?”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Yes.”/p pstrongClient: “/strongHow much do you charge for a pirated copy?”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”$10,000 or 10 years in prison.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p1Yki-TQ4e37j3hid1ukLQeTGIQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p1Yki-TQ4e37j3hid1ukLQeTGIQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p1Yki-TQ4e37j3hid1ukLQeTGIQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/p1Yki-TQ4e37j3hid1ukLQeTGIQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

17:34
TerraStore : le dépôt JSON distribué
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Plus besoin de les présenter, les Facebook, Twitter, etc. sont les applications qui font le web d'aujourd'hui ! Mais s'il est évident de voir les nouveaux usages qu'elles apportent, qu'en est-il côté technologie ? Cette nouvelle race d'applications se distingue des applications emweb/em plus traditionnelles par le format des données qu'elles manipulent. Fini les données fortement structurées ou les schémas fixes : les applications du emweb/em de demain veulent de la flexibilité, de l'évolutivité, de la mise à l'échelle et les outils qui vont avec. Et c'est exactement le créneau de a href=http://code.google.com/p/terrastore/TerraStore/a, un entrepôt de documents au format a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Object_NotationJSON/a.br / br / TerraStore se positionne dans la même catégorie que a href=http://couchdb.apache.org/CouchDB/a et a href=http://cassandra.apache.org/Cassandra/a de la fondation Apache, même si ces derniers endossent plus franchement le rôle de base de données. Les fonctionnalités que TerraStore propose sont celles d'un véritable entrepôt de données textuelles accessibles directement en HTTP ce qui justifie son intérêt pour des applications massivement en ligne. On plonge là au coeur du thème très en vogue du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQLNoSQL/a.br / br / De plus, l'application est conçue sur une architecture en emcluster/em afin d'assurer un service sous fortes charges. Deux types de composants sont présents : le emserveur/em qui stocke directement les données ou plutôt leurs fragments et le emmaster/em, responsable de la répartition des données et de la charge sur les emserveurs/em. Une installation de TerraStore suit donc l'habituel schéma des serveurs à l'écoute du ou des maître(s) qui gère(nt) l'application en grappe. L'accent est aussi mis sur les performances réseau : les traitements sur les données sont ainsi effectués sur le serveur même qui héberge les données. Encore un point essentiel pour des applications fortement orientées emweb/em.br / br / Le nom de TerraStore témoigne de l'utilisation sous-jacente de a href=http://www.terracotta.org/Terracotta/a, solution emOpen Source/em de emclustering/em de JVM. Malgré cet empilement de couches, TerraStore reste d'une simplicité d'installation et d'utilisation assez déconcertante comme en témoigne a href=http://code.google.com/p/terrastore/wiki/Getting_Startedce tutoriel de quelques lignes/a qui met en place un emmaster/em et deux emserveurs/em via a href=http://ant.apache.org/Apache Ant/a. Malgré sa jeunesse (version 0.4.2 en téléchargement), TerraStore présente des fonctionnalités visiblement très abouties : possibilité de monitoring via console JMX, fonctionnalités de sauvegarde des emserveurs/em et aussi capacité de gestion orientée évènements.br / br / Les ambitions de solutions telles que CouchDB et TerraStore ne sont peut-être pas de révolutionner le monde des bases de données, mais l'effort reste très intéressant et prometteur. Ces solutions sont donc à surveiller, car elles pourraient être une autre preuve de la théorie de l'évolution, mais cette fois-ci dans le domaine de l'informatique.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~galaux/29944.htmlJournal à l'origine de la dépêche/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/terrastore/TerraStore/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/terrastore/wiki/Getting_StartedTerraStore : Getting Started/abr /
17:07
Le prix de l'innovation des assises de la sécurité est attribué à un logiciel libre
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Depuis 2001, les Assises de la Sécurité et des Systèmes d’Information réunissent un millier de professionnels : 600 DI, DSI, RSSI, Risk managers et experts sont présents, soit la quasi-totalité des décisionnaires grands comptes stratégiques des secteurs publics et privés.br / br / Le Lauréat 2010 est le logiciel a href=http://www.digital-forensic.org/Digital Forensics Framework/a développé par la société a href=http://www.arxsys.fr/ArxSys/a spécialisée dans l'informatique légale.br / br / L'article bien documenté de l'AFUL insiste particulièrement sur le fait que c'est la première fois en près de dix ans qu'un logiciel libre est primé par cette institution. Cela montre non seulement que les logiciels libres sont performants (nous le savions déjà !) mais aussi que leur crédibilité a atteint les milieux d'affaires privés et publics.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : on peut traduire le nom du logiciel par « ensemble d'outils numériques pour la criminalistique », donc l'étude après-coup des fichiers après erreur ou plantage, la recherche et l'analyse d'éléments de preuves.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.les-assises-de-la-securite.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=unquC-qwrEU=amp;tabid=668Prix de l'Innovation des Assises 2010 - Communiqué de presse/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://aful.org/nouvelles/prix-innovation-assises-securite-prime-logiciel-librePour la première fois le Prix de l'Innovation des Assises de la Sécurité prime un logiciel libre ! (AFUL)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.les-assises-de-la-securite.com/Accueil/Presentation.aspxLes Assises de la Sécurité et des Systèmes d’Information/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.digital-forensic.org/Le logiciel primé : Digital Forensics Framework/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.arxsys.fr/solut-fr.htmlPrésentation de ArxSys/abr /
17:07
Sortie de Frogatto 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

David White, le génial initiateur et créateur de emThe Battle for Wesnoth/em, a encore frappé ! Cette fois-ci il s'agit d'un jeu de plate-forme dont le code source est sous licence GPL v2 : bFrogatto/b. br / br / Ce jeu, mêlant arcade et un peu d'aventure, d'exploration et de réflexion, est sorti dans sa version 1.0 le 13 juillet 2010. Il est basé sur les technologies a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL title=Définition WikipédiaOpenGL/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLEW title=Définition WikipédiaGLEW/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer title=Définition WikipédiaSDL/a et existe pour Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.frogatto.comSite internet de Frogatto/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.frogatto.com/screenshotsCopies d'écran/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.frogatto.com/sourceCode source/abr / (...)

16:16
What People are Saying about Social Networking in Windows Live (wave 4)
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpMany moons ago when we were planning the set of social features we would build into the next version of Windows Live, we were very mindful of the fact that our customers are inundated with lots of social networking sites and what people need are tools to manage their relationships across many services not yet another social networking site. As some of those features have now rolled out to the general public in the form of betas, I’ve been keeping an eye on social media sites like a href="http://www.facebook.com/"Facebook/a and a href="http://www.twitter.com"Twitter/a to see what regular people and techies think about what we’ve shipped. /p h3What the Techies are Saying/h3 pYesterday, Omar wrote a post on the Engineering Windows Live blog titled a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/07/13/all-your-contacts-in-one-place.aspx"All Your Contacts in One Place/a where he talked about the work we’ve done in creating a single place where users can view and communicate with not only their Windows Live friends but also their contacts across multiple services including Facebook, MySpace and soon LinkedIn. a href="http://factoryjoe.com/"Chris Messina/a posted the following in response to the story /p pa href="http://twitter.com/chrismessina/status/18474472505"img src="http://hpzfuw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1poZCHDS0tqmUlO_3YhLH4H-Iu393feRSyUqYl6Iw-V9-9LQFwEm_-IBPT3Ok9QRXPt9JMvveMDp7mU0FnKwbz0IJydwppuejP/chris.png" //a/p pI’ve a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/06/08/MessengerSocialBuildingTheUltimateSocialDashboardForStayingInTouchWhileEliminatingTheNoise.aspx"talked/a about the work we’ve done around bringing customer value with the news feed that is integrated into the new Hotmail experience including how we’ve a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/06/28/MessengerSocialEmailAndSocialNewsFeedsAreTheNewPeanutButterAndJelly.aspx"blended email into the news feed experience/a in recent posts. So I was pleased to see the following tweet from a href="http://staynalive.com/"Jesse Stay/a/p pa href="http://twitter.com/Jesse/status/18490113306"img src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pzJ_KhzrpRzn4DVwT81lQa3TDigEDQc6UtIOvYeIJ7szA2heeanrrvLs6A2F_UBSj8cZZhpYj_Oh3XIdrT7a5rg/jesse.png" //a/p pThanks Jesse/p h3Facebook Users on Windows Live/h3 pI regularly perform Facebook searches to see what people who are using the a href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta"Windows Live Essentials beta/a think about the investments we’ve made in bringing social networking to the desktop in a big way. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback I’ve found /p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pCGurk5SThFvWr152pPWsqe4HU2u36arvnf0DXQr4c1pqTYho_NsKuu2YrfrDcANx8JustVltaDXA6tNYtswbGQ/Jaime.png" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1prtjOW2xVEKYmKwOIwqSfbZC3vFNxSsz3cUKbYaIf9cstywgT-kGz7Su9jNklQPcssYA6UjeuKOcFHgA7gEF_Xg/Samant.png?psid=2" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pvBjoQkjec145UL-APFnNqKXfGeaO664jrpMWxaXW_suBCo7T86tLl9Wq_Sbbj9ic47OZ2Em2xejufSjqLMG7Jw/Adam.png" //p h3img src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pnclTDJ-wXMh0U7aeHhId2bQ9yXg6JBm1KV1FkGap1Kj266DmmgBogf5bX_pf5yRScYxyNGa0NjwWfL46OWMzUA/Buddha.png" //h3 pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pV9CyP9WaSn1dSi2nNeB8856oCRH2RvaLndnkrvqXUI2u9VLNiwZ4cC2lHBgyenNx8l79yDLT7KB9tm0BXUi-OQ/Tylar.png" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1prtjOW2xVEKZYMlbPdv1Dc9VdpIyAeAX5_7_ypNx--GYU_tY-KOLsYnIndSGstOiZMrHaMHFLxCesCuAB-ncjgA/Randy.png" //p pimg src="http://hpzfuw.blu.livefilestore.com/y1psOANmREYi6_v8ToaQ7zcdb2-2K9W8H9heqX5yQv6R-fDRlKT6VAywF6HMt7qDfbtisMvL8zYXIlRwmp92Wb5iYXed_Z8gvwL/Hector.png" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1prtjOW2xVEKYMS1OffPU0Re56EXIpJLQvtnq2AeTlp1uFU6ekmlxUUNGQf_9VOCp6fqxe5PgFwQzdssNpqh6Frw/Rory.png" //p pYou get the idea. img alt="Smile" src="http://shared.live.com/5oeCPTazLAJxhccDO!c5Cg/emoticons/smile_regular.gif" //p h3Twitter Users on Windows Live/h3 pI performed the same sorts of searches on Twitter and found similar feedback. Here are a few of my favorites /p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pzJ_KhzrpRzmWhBg98BxAbQEH4F13NmUqiJGzg_O-s2Ju_YMDyfnr-zdOACl_YUNNs0LtctJbLZsQbifazsr8kA/KSitjar.png" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1prtjOW2xVEKbo7TB_FhZcpVBvj35y-h6npBPyv2u7ahAXi60EL57OdOgW0HtKd290X2kWU811KDoFmz_3EhO6bw/peterbromberg.png" //p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pnclTDJ-wXMivtCiZ_WjEyUWEMVsCvtzpXy6Ut6PdbCxbfdO2O3gAcqvrxX5GeQiY3xmSakgaeymlPrvquzPwpA/adarsh.png" //p pIt’s really exciting to see so many people validating the design choices we made and enjoying the product that we’ve spent the last couple of months building. The outpouring of positive feedback has been really humbling and has me jazzed up to build even more things that make people happier as they connect with the people they care about using our products. /p pThank you to everyone who has tried out the various betas. /p pimg title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Eminemamp;field-title=Love+The+Way+You+Lieamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Eminem/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Eminem+Love+The+Way+You+Lieamp;x=0amp;y=0"Love The Way You Lie (featuring Rihanna)/a img title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

10:54
L'université Paris-Dauphine s'ouvre au logiciel libre
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'AFUL vient de passer une convention avec l'université Paris-Dauphine. Elle définit une collaboration concernant l'enseignement et les travaux de recherche pour le master MBC (Master Business Consulting). Grâce à ce partenariat, les étudiants connaîtront la gestion des systèmes d’information utilisant les logiciels libres, en particulier le logiciel de gestion ERP5. De leur côté, les chercheurs apporteront leur contribution à l'écosystème des logiciels libres.br / br / De manière similaire, depuis le 7 avril 2006, l'école d'ingénieurs ESIEA fait appel à la communauté. L'AFUL assure depuis 2007 cette présence dans l'école. Il s'agit dans ce cas d'un accord informel, aucune convention n'ayant été établie.br / br / Marc-Aurèle Darche est le principal artisan de ces accords. Sachons l'imiter, il y a encore beaucoup d'autres écoles à sensibiliser !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://aful.org/nouvelles/signature-convention-aful-master-mbc-paris-dauphineCommuniqué de l'AFUL/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://aful.org/gdt/educ/convention-aful-master-mbc-paris-dauphine/downloadFile/file/convention-aful-master-mbc.pdfLa convention entre l’AFUL et le Master MBC (PDF)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://aful.org/Association Francophone des Utilisateurs de Logiciels Libres (AFUL)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.dauphine.fr/Université Paris-Dauphine/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.esiea.fr/École Supérieure d’Informatique Electronique Automatique/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.erp5.com/ERP5/abr /

July 13, 2010
19:39
The Other End of the Telescope
» ‎ What To Fix
I'm a contrarian by heart -- if everybody goes one way, I start looking the other way. Must be something interesting going on over there. If everybody is selling stock, I'm looking to buy, if everybody is telling me how bad person X is, I'm automatically interested in their good qualities. I'm like the guy looking at the first telescope, and instead of using it traditionally, I swing it around the other way and exclaim "Hey! This thing makes stuff look _really_ far away!"
Why? First, I have always been a bit of an anti-social person, but more to the point, from many years of observation, I have concluded that most of the time people oversimplify and overreact. If there's some bad economic news, the market drops off -- but it almost always drops off farther than it should. If some executive or politician is caught doing something wrong, people shun him. But they almost always shun him more than is reasonable. If the economy takes a bad turn, it's the end of capitalism.

Especially when it comes to war and history, people think in the most crude and simplistic terms. It's either good or evil. People think of wars as always moving civilizations forward. Winners are the good guys. Losers are the bad ones.

I'm not about to defend Nazism, but even the Nazis weren't Nazis: there were some real and valid reasons for German outrage after the way WWI was settled. The allies didn't want total victory, and some of the major issues weren't settled, so the war continued many years later. In fact, many historians view both the first and second World Wars and being the same war. I digress. What I wanted to talk about was good and evil, history, and super heroes and ultimate villains.

Which brings me to Abraham Lincoln.

A few weeks back, my wife and I were spending a lazy Sunday afternoon reading when she stopped and stared off into space.

"I never knew that" she said

"What?"

"Abe Lincoln. Turns out he wasn't the great guy everybody makes him out to be."

Now I've had some doubts for some time about Lincoln, but my wife isn't much of a history buff, so it was interesting to hear her bring it up. I decided to poke around a little more.

I went to Amazon and found "The Real Lincoln" Wow! The reviews were either highly flattering or outright rants against the author and material. This much emotion can either be a sign of contrarian goodness, or wack-a-doodle pandering to the fringe element -- or both.

So I did a bit more research on the reviews, found nothing I considered substantially damning, and downloaded the book to my Kindle.

We all know the narrative around Abe Lincoln: In the early United States, the south had slavery. The north did not. Over time the differences between the two led to a fight. Lincoln, who campaigned his whole life to free slaves, finally was able to abolish slavery in the states and to save the Union -- at a horrible cost in lives. Lincoln freed the slaves with his famous Emancipation Proclamation. His Gettysburg Address laid the groundwork for why the north fought. After the war, the treasonous Southerners, who hated the slaves, did all they could to harass blacks, eventually forming the KKK.

In addition, as I've been hearing from various friends on the internet, to say anything good about the South is just about as good as wearing a KKK robe and burning a cross in your front yard -- we all know what you mean. It's code for racism. The South means slavery, hatred, and oppression. The only thing the South is good for now is a rallying point for poor, religious white trash. The day that every symbol of the South is removed from the country can't come too soon. Southerners were the Nazis of the late 19th century.

I overstate for effect, but only a bit.

To a contrarian like me, these types of statements are like a red cape to an angry bull. I just have to keep poking around. There's lots of smoke here (highly-charged emotions that things can only be told one way), but is there a fire? Is there some bit of interesting truth in here?

Trying to ditch the rhetorical baggage, there were several questions I have always had about Abe and the American Civil War:
- Why did most Southerners, who didn't own slaves, fight? Were they stupid? Manipulated by the rich upper class? Were they so afraid of slave freedom that they would have rather fought than let the slaves go?
- Lincoln abandoned all of the federal forts in the South except for two: one in Florida and Fort Sumter. Why not just abandon those as well? Was he planning on abandoning the last two? Did he announce this policy? What was the big deal about Fort Sumter, anyway? Why did the South Carolinians fire on it?
- Why did it take a war to get rid of slavery, anyway? Every other country on the planet got rid of slavery peacefully. Why we did need so much violence here?
- What was Lincoln's plan for the time after the war? I know he told Grant to "go easy" on Lee when he caught him, and he was not in favor of war trials and executions. Did he expect to use the military to occupy the south for more than a decade? What was the master plan?
- Did the southerners get to vote during the presidential election during the Civil War? Seems like a silly question, but if they were states in rebellion, and not another country, then the citizens of those states could vote, no?
- How did we end up with West Virginia, anyway? If the state of Virginia was split by war, shouldn't we reunite it after the war ended, like most places do?
- Why did we start building an intercontinental railroad in the middle of a Civil War? Seems like a weird time to undertake such a project, what with all those folks dying and all.
- All the states just didn't up and leave at once, right? So who left first, and why did some states stay in the union and others leave?
- For some reason, the U.S. only has two parties, and the last time we got a new political party was around the time of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. What's up with that? What did it take to start a new party, and how did Lincoln do it when others failed?
- I've heard the phrase "Sherman's March to the Sea", which I take to be very bad thing. Of the Southerners burning Chambersburg. Were there laws of war in effect in 1860? Did either side follow them? Where did Lincoln stand on burning homes and attacking civilians?
- What is the argument in the Gettyburg Address, anyway? I've read it, and it's a wonderful piece of poetry. But what the heck does it mean?
- (This one has bugged me for 20 years or more) As you go back in time towards the early 1900s, people were extremely sympathetic towards the South. Remember the Hollywood movie "The Undefeated" Rock Hudson plays a sympathetic Souther war hero. "Gone With the Wind"? I could go on, but the closer you get to the actual people who either fought in the war or had parents/grandparents who fought in it, the more kind the feelings towards the South. Why is that? Was it nostalgia? Or did they know something we've forgotten?
I got the book, and I had to force myself to read it. Not because it's poorly written: it was very interesting and readable. Not because it was a horrible vitriolic screed: I found it a bit of a rant, but solidly based on facts. Everything that I chased down was true. Not even because it was one-sided: you don't expect to pick up a book called "The Real Lincoln" without expecting a harsh, scathing criticism.

I found it hard to read because it went against the grain of so many things I had learned in school and society. I know nothing about the author, but he didn't seem like a crazy person. Emotional, perhaps. Many times he started with facts and narratives and then sort of evolved into a tirade. He overstated and exaggerated, as one would do in a heated argument. But he did not lie. You could almost see him, red-faced, waving his arms around.

People getting this emotional? About something that happened what? 150 years ago? it just gets better and better.

If you have ever wanted to sit down with an intellectual person from the South around 1870, have a couple of beers and talk about the Civil War, this is your chance. Even filtering out the author's biases, I found this to be one of the most eye-opening books I have read in years. I could feel his passion for the topic. I find that people who have passion, even if you do not believe in what they are saying, make you more passionate as well.

I'm not going to get into what I learned or why I have changed some opinions and deepened others. I can't do these topics justice, and it would only invite needless debate. Read the book yourself. Form your own opinions.

There was something very important that happened to me reading this book: the Civil War went from some kind of abstract concept -- perhaps about state's rights or slavery or something -- and became something that I really felt. Now I know why Lee, when asked at the beginning of the war, aren't you a patriot? Don't you want to stay with the Union? said "I wish to live under no other government, and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honour. If a disruption takes place, I shall go back in sorrow to my people and share the misery of my native state, and save in her defense there will be one soldier less in the world than now"

I love you guys but please don't show up in Virgina or I'll kill as many of you as I can? What kind of rebellious attitude is that?

Now that I've read the book, I know what the "American Bastille" was, why there were riots during the war, how the first Income Tax got passed, what the "American System" was, how the South viewed reconstruction -- all kinds of little things I must have missed in history class. I also know much more about the answers to my questions mentioned above.

More importantly, I am beginning to know the feelings of those who fought. They just aren't cardboard cutouts appearing in some comic book. The southerners weren't villains with funny hats -- they were just like us: same language, same history, same values (slavery excepted, of course), same culture, same literature and art. This was the first war that we Americans lost. Not quit, not negotiated a deal, but lost. This is what our civilization looks and feels like when it is totally defeated. Moving over to the North, this is what our civilization looks like under extreme duress. What rules of civilization do we keep? What do we let go? Why? This is how we got to our modern version of our country.

I never realized until recently how different the United States was prior to 1860. We teach kids about July 4th and 1776, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all of that, but all of that was really for a different country. For all practical intents and purposes, the country we have now was formed in 1861.

So many times we teach history as a linear process full of dates and events. This thing was wrong, so it led to this thing, which is naturally better. Logically then, the farther in history you go back, the more "wrong" people must be. This leads children to believe that progress is inevitable and that the people from the past were somehow stupid for thinking the things they did. But once you manage to emotionally connect to history, it suddenly blossoms into a beautiful tapestry of intelligent, honorable people doing the best they can under difficult circumstances. Lincoln wasn't Hitler, but the Southerners weren't Nazis, either. Now that I can see the southerner's viewpoint, it's a wonderfully complex story. I plan on learning more.

Are you living somewhere that people tell you a version of history that doesn't seem to make sense? Find people who can challenge your mind. Listen to their arguments. Feel their emotion, but even more importantly, double and triple-check their facts. You just might learn something. I know I did.

And that was worth being a little contrary and poking around.

Abraham Lincoln was a famous micro-manager. They said he spent as much time in the telegraph office as he did in the White House.

18:10
Excerpt of feedback regarding illustrations for a children’s alphabet book featuring...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pExcerpt of feedback regarding illustrations for a children’s alphabet book featuring animals./p p“How about making the sun a little bigger on the swans. What do you think about discreet genitals on the unicorn?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/h95l2fP614k-yjmceHIFkKkGuxY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/h95l2fP614k-yjmceHIFkKkGuxY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/h95l2fP614k-yjmceHIFkKkGuxY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/h95l2fP614k-yjmceHIFkKkGuxY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

6:30
Debian crée un Derivatives Front Desk
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Dans le monde des distributions Linux, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DebianDebian/a est presque la plus âgée encore en activité, de plus elle bénéficie d'une réputation de (trop) grande stabilité. Cela a créé un large éventail de distributions dérivées, citons pour les plus connues : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuntuUbuntu/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KnoppixKNOPPIX/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiduxSidux/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_LinuxDamn Small Linux/a..., malheureusement, certains se plaignent que les développeurs de ces distributions ne font pas remonter leurs améliorations au projet source, provoquant dans certains cas une certaine antipathie de la part de développeurs Debian à l'égard de certaines de ces distributions.br / br / Cette absence de communication étant, entre autres, due à une certaine difficulté à trouver des informations, cela pouvant donc passer pour une grosse perte de temps, Debian a créé un point de contact dédié à ces distributions dérivées, le iDerivatives Front Desk/i. Concrètement, une équipe de volontaires se chargera d'aiguiller ceux qui voudraient faire profiter de leur travail vers les bonnes personnes ou de leur expliquer la procédure afin que Debian et les autres distributions dérivées puissent profiter ce de travail. Pour faciliter ce travail, une page de wiki a été mise en place, ainsi qu'une mailing-list.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDeskLa page de wiki/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.technoaddict.fr/2010/07/04/debian-souhaite-que-les-distributions-derivees-contribuent/La nouvelle sur Technoaddict/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/debian-opens-front-desk-derivativesLa nouvelle sur LinuxJournal/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.fr.debian.org/News/2010/20100629Debian : More collaboration among Debian-based distributions: the Derivatives Front Desk/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/Liste de diffusion debian-derivatives/abr /

July 11, 2010
15:00
"It’s kinda the same idea as facebook, with functionality more like Twitter, but with the..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“It’s kinda the same idea as facebook, with functionality more like Twitter, but with the innovation of Microsoft.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZhujFHwyA-4sMeK1N8EKEb4sl5o/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZhujFHwyA-4sMeK1N8EKEb4sl5o/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZhujFHwyA-4sMeK1N8EKEb4sl5o/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZhujFHwyA-4sMeK1N8EKEb4sl5o/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
July 10, 2010
21:00
Client: “I want there to be a noise here so people know it’s funny, like a record...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I want there to be a noise here so people know it’s funny, like a record scratch!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Okay, but record scratches are kind of corny and totally 90’s. How about anything else that would have the same effect?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “No. It needs to be a record scratch. Record scratches are timeless.”strong /strong/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zxXyJK7Rc_s0W_GZpJ2fufLFsmM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zxXyJK7Rc_s0W_GZpJ2fufLFsmM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zxXyJK7Rc_s0W_GZpJ2fufLFsmM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zxXyJK7Rc_s0W_GZpJ2fufLFsmM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

15:09
F# Versus Microsofts Regex. A Lesson in Types
» ‎ What To Fix
The more I play with F# the more fun it gets. Take for instance this problem I was having last week.

I was doing some text processing. As part of that, I set up a few RegExes. As I continued coding, I realized that I was following a pattern: apply the regex, check the match count, and if there were a bunch of matches, either get the first or last item. So the code looked like this.

normal;mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none'> 9.5pt;font-family:Consolas;color:blue'>#light 9.5pt;font-family:Consolas'>

open System

open System.Text.RegularExpressions

let regFindNumbersInParens = new Regex(@"$[0-9]{1,4}$")

let doSomeStringStuff (s:string) =

    let parenNumMatches = regFindNumbersInParens.Matches(s)

    if parenNumMatches.Count > 0

        then parenNumMatches.[parenNumMatches.Count - 1].Value

        else ""

    // more stuff here

The more I got to thinking about it, the more I realized there were a lot of situations where I wanted the first or last item in a bag of stuff. Of course, this is already available for a bunch of stuff, but what about things that only had an IEnumerable, like Regex Matches? What I'd like is something like Matches.Last or Matches.First

The RegEx collection implements ICollection and IEnumerable, so we can get an enumerator and walk it. (This was actually the first thing I tried). But poking around, it gets easier still.

The generic case is very easy to do. If you want to get the first item, it looks like this:
```
let firstEnum (e:IEnumerable) = e |> Seq.cast |> Seq.nth 0
```
Note the use of "Seq.cast" -- this is because if all you have is an IEnumerable, you can have a bunch of anything. You really don't know. Hopefully every time you get a new item from the collection you get one of the same things, but it's not strictly required. So F# adds "Seq.cast" to take a bunch of IEnumerables and fake-out a strongly-typed collection. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for government work.

The last item gets a little trickier, since sequences aren't necessarily all "there" when you compute them. I mean heck, you could have a RegEx match that gives you a million results. Ideally you wouldn't walk the collection unless you had to. But, if you're going to the end, you're walking the list. So to find the last item, you have to convert to an array first:
```
let lastEnum (e:IEnumerable) = 
    e |> Seq.cast |> Seq.toArray |> (fun x->x.[x.Length - 1])
```
Note that I'm not checking to make sure the collection has anything in it. That's simple enough to do, but let's stick with the plot.

So I throw my Regex MatchCollection at this wonderful hunk of code -- and it barfs.

I throw a lot more collections that implement IEnumerable, and it works fine.

WTF?

After a LOT of googling around, I came across this thread about RegEx.Matches. In it, Tomas Petrice explains that the RegEx collection is one of the "old" ones -- it implements an IEnumerable, but not an IEnumerable

If all of this is sounding complex, the problem is that RegEx was coded a long time before generic collections, and nobody has updated the code. So while it looks like a collection, smells like a collection, and may even taste like a collection, it's not the same kind of collection as all the other ones.

Thanks Microsoft!

So let's fix this so it will stop annoying folks.

The first thing I tried to do was to write one function that would take either an IEnumerable OR an IEnumerable

I failed miserably.

I still believe this is possible, but hell if I can get it to work. Perhaps by wrapping the code in a type and using method overloads, but I digress. What I did find out with this adventure is that programmers have tremendous flexibility with types in F#. For instance, I can write a function that takes a type with certain conditions.
```
let inline getNameValue xItem = 
  let name =  (^a : (member get_Name  : unit -> XName ) xItem)
  let value = (^a : (member get_Value : unit -> string) xItem)
  name, value
```
There's a heckuva lot going on here, and I don't want to get into a detailed F# discussion. Suffice it to say that this method only takes an argument that has accessors for Name and Value, not that implement some kind of interface. So I could decide I would write a method that worked on any object that implemented a method called "Foo" and you could pass me any object that implemented such a method -- no matter where you got it. It's called "duck typing", and it's an entirely different thing from what most .NET developers are used to.

I also found that I could extend built-in types with new stuff. For instance, say I wanted a function that would give me "ForEach" capability on anything that implemented an IEnumerable. Sure, I could write a stand-alone function, but why not just make it part of anything that has an IEnumerable. Whiz-bang, easy enough to do:
```
    type System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<'a> with 
        member this.ForEach(f:'a -> unit) = 
            for item in this do 
               f item
```
Hell, a body could go ape-wild with all this power, adding on dozens of methods to each of the primary system types.

Maybe not a good thing to do!

Finally I found out I could write a function that took any number -- float, int, bigint, whatever -- and work with it.
```
module NumericLiteralG = begin
    let inline FromZero() = LanguagePrimitives.GenericZero
    let inline FromOne() = LanguagePrimitives.GenericOne
end
 
let inline factorize n = 
  let rec factorize n j flist =  
    if n = 1G then flist 
    elif n % j = 0G then factorize (n/j) j (j::flist) 
    else factorize n (j + 1G) (flist) 
  factorize n (1G + 1G) [] 
```
There's a whole nest of goodness in there. How can you write a strongly-typed function which takes any type of number? But that's a story for a later day

So what was my answer? Here's the dump:
```
#light
 
open System
open System.Text.RegularExpressions
open System.Collections
open System.Collections.Generic
 
type System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<'T> with
    member this.getLast = 
        this |> Seq.toArray |> (fun x->x.[x.Length - 1])
    member this.getFirst = 
        this |> Seq.nth 0
 
type System.Collections.IEnumerable with
    member this.getLast  = 
        this |> Seq.cast |> Seq.toArray |> (fun x->x.[x.Length - 1])
    member this.getFirst = 
        this |> Seq.cast |> Seq.nth 0
 
type System.Text.RegularExpressions.MatchCollection with
    member this.getLast =
        this.getLast :> Match
    member this.getFirst =
        this.getFirst :> Match
    member this.toSeq =
        seq {for i = 0 to this.Count - 1 do yield this.[i]}
    member this.toArray =
        [|for i = 0 to this.Count - 1 do yield this.[i] |]
    
 
let regFindNumbersInParens = new Regex(@"$[0-9]{1,4}$")
        
let doSomeStringStuff (s:string) = 
    let lastitem = regFindNumbersInParens.Matches(s).getLast
    // more stuff here
```
This code allows me to throw a "getFirst" or a "getLast" on any kind of collection I'm given -- whether it's a shiny new-fangled IEnumerable collection or just an old-hat .NET 1.0 RegEx Collection.

What I wanted initially was to be able to throw any untyped collection at the function and have it give me a strongly-typed last element, but my F# Kung-Fu has failed me. Clocking in at around 18 lines of code, this seems a little long to me, but it's always that way.

In either case, works good enough for now. And perhaps somebody else will run into this RegEx problem and be able to find some help here.

The cool thing here is the degree of freedom you have with playing around under the hood. This is not always a good thing, but like everything else, a little bit will go far.

UPDATE: Fred Leitz wrote in and pointed out that my function finding the last element in seqences is a bit whacked. No point in converting to an array just to go to the end. So it looks much better like this:
```
let lastSeq<'T> = Seq.reduce (fun a b -> b)
```
Couple interesting points here.

First, converting to the array and checking for "Length" walks the structure anyway -- which is what our new code does. So the old way copied it all over to a new structure, walked the array to get the length, then walked it again to get the last item. The new one just picks up 2 items from the sequence at a time, returning the second one. When you're done, the second item will be the last item in the sequence. No copying, no double-work.

Second, if you're going to be walking the sequence a bunch, finding the length, getting individual items, etc, you should go ahead and make it an array. But, as in this case, you make it, find the last element, then throw it away, there's no point in using up memory and CPU cycles.

One of the things about Functional Programming that strikes me as completely different from OOP-world is the degree to which you are always inspecting your variable structures and deciding which forms of structures, collections, and functions work best with the data you have. Many times in OOP we have abstracted away so much of the "guts" of the problem that the programmer is dealing in abstractions far removed from the physical implementation of the data and programming. This makes OOP easier to understand, design, code, and maintain, but it also makes it more prone to bone-headed mistakes.

Thanks Fred!

15:00
Client: A contact has a friend thats tight with Google so he’ll get us to the top...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong A contact has a friend thats tight with Google so he’ll get us to the top ranking./p pstrongMe:/strong I don’t think it works like that./p pstrongClient:/strong Don’t worry, we have it covered. My friend’s friend is tight with that Zakenburger kid from Myspace./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/BAa8FUsHexnA_4BzVMc8YoFuhrQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/BAa8FUsHexnA_4BzVMc8YoFuhrQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/BAa8FUsHexnA_4BzVMc8YoFuhrQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/BAa8FUsHexnA_4BzVMc8YoFuhrQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
July 09, 2010
21:01
"It’s not clear what the user should do with the check box."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““It’s not clear what the user should do with the check box.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EnZXyGrOPiujjvlrjSBfKp1zBNA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EnZXyGrOPiujjvlrjSBfKp1zBNA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EnZXyGrOPiujjvlrjSBfKp1zBNA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EnZXyGrOPiujjvlrjSBfKp1zBNA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

17:34
Big redesign at Google News
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

It has been a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1cf=allcf=allncl=dIzFkpJ0q7FY2aM6VYNtt3B85HKMM"widely reported/a that Google News has done a major redesign -- its first since 2002 apparently -- to more prominently feature personalization and customization.br /br /Before I comment on it, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am absurdly biased on this particular topic, having run a href="http://findory.com"Findory/a and talked at length over the years with Google, their partners, and their competitors about news personalization.br /br /That said, I don't like what they've done. And I'm not the only one. Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225702095cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News"catalogs the complaints/a he is seeing at InformationWeek and elsewhere, summarizing it all by comparing it to the "New Coke" flop.br /br /I think what the Google team has done is a lovely example of personalization done poorly, by people who really should know better. They change navigation links based on personalization even when confidence is low (one of my links in the left hand nav is for "Lindsay Lohan", which is hard to stomach). The article recommendations are often off, cannot be corrected, do not change in real time as you read articles, and there is no explanation of why something was recommended. There is no ability to see, edit, or rate your reading history. The ability to exclude or favor sources appears to be hacked on; the only way to do it is to manually type in the names of sources.br /br /Under the surface, there appears still to be a lot of implicit personalization based on past behavior, but, from what someone using it sees, the focus is entirely on customization. I can "edit personalization" and "add sections" to put categories on my page. And that is about the limit of my control and the limit of the explanations of why articles are appearing. People like to be in control. They like to understand why something happens, especially if they don't agree with it. And Google News offers very little control or explanations.br /br /Adding to the other problems, the design seems really busy and confused to me, like the Googlers can't decide what they are doing and -- in a fashion more typical of Microsoft -- just keep adding features. Hey, look, it's your fast flipping, clustered, personalized, customizable, widget-complete newspaper! Love it, it's Googly! C'mon, Google, what happened to keeping it clean, simple, and relevant?div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-3717544422266292916?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

15:00
While developing an affiliate website for one of our mobile network clients, my employer came over...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pWhile developing an affiliate website for one of our mobile network clients, my employer came over and reviewed the site we were building./p pstrongBoss:/strong “I think we need to have some sort of avatar on the home page, to welcome the users to the site.”br/br/strongMe: /strong“Okay, no problem. Was there anything you had in mind?”br/br/strongBoss: /strong“Well since sex sells, I would like to have a slim, sexy cartoon woman holding a mobile phone.”br/br/[I proceeded to create this sexy avatar.]/p pstrongMe:/strong “I’ve finished the avatar. Was this what you were after?”br/br/strongBoss:/strong “That’s nice but it’s not what I was after.”br/br/strongMe:/strong “Okay. What are you looking for then?”br/br/[My Boss then loaded up his internet browser and Google searched an image of a small, chubby, animated duck holding a mobile phone.]br/br/strongMe:/strong “I thought you wanted a sexy woman?”br/br/strongBoss:/strong “I do.”br/br/strongMe:/strong “So you want a cross between a sexy woman and a fat, yellow duck?”br/strongbr//strong/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iKXXU2WjIY756HAtLLBGrmu0png/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iKXXU2WjIY756HAtLLBGrmu0png/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iKXXU2WjIY756HAtLLBGrmu0png/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/iKXXU2WjIY756HAtLLBGrmu0png/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

8:44
Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Spring est sortie
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Aujourd'hui est sortie la distribution Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Spring, nom de code Farman, elle est disponible en 32 ou 64 bits, et comme d'habitude :ulliEn version Free - version installable gratuite n'incluant que du logiciel libre ;br / /liliEn version One - version a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live-CDLive-CD/a installable avec des pilotes propriétaires ;br / /liliEt la version PowerPack - version payante offrant du support et des applications propriétaires permettant notamment de lire les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3MP3/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WmaWMA/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMVWMV/a et les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DvdDVD/a (disponibles librement dans les pays ne validant pas les brevets logiciels via le a href=http://plf.zarb.org/about.phpPLF/a)./li/ul Depuis peu, Mandriva offre une option payante pour a href=http://linuxfr.org//2010/02/19/26492.htmlallonger la durée du support/a d'une partie des logiciels jusqu'à 3 ans.br / br / Les principales nouveautés sont un noyau a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinuxLinux/a 2.6.33, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XorgXorg/a 7.5, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOMEGNOME/a 2.30, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdeKDE/a 4.4, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Directory_ServerMandriva Directory Server/a 2.4.br / br / Cette dépêche est sous licence libre, Creative Commons a href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/Attribution, Partage à l'identique/a. Elle a été basée sur a href=http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2010.1_Notesles notes de version/a.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : merci également à a href=http://linuxfr.org/~kunta/kunta/a pour avoir également proposé une dépêche à ce sujet.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www2.mandriva.com/fr/Mandriva/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://wiki.mandriva.com/fr/2010.1_NotesNotes de version Mandriva Linux 2010.1 Spring/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www2.mandriva.com/fr/downloads/Télécharger Mandriva Linux/abr / (...)

July 08, 2010
21:01
Client: “Would you like to design a website for my daughter? She started her own company and...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “Would you like to design a website for my daughter? She started her own company and I’m very proud of her.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “That’s very nice of you, what kind of company is it?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “She mows lawns in our neighborhood.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eS35PSn1hPASYIwqhqvoTvTDAzg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eS35PSn1hPASYIwqhqvoTvTDAzg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eS35PSn1hPASYIwqhqvoTvTDAzg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eS35PSn1hPASYIwqhqvoTvTDAzg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

16:54
Les points clés de l'eZ Conference 2010
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Cette année, l'eZ Conférence a eu lieu à Berlin les 24 et 25 juin derniers. Les deux journées ont été divisées en 3 thèmes principaux : le « community track » (conférences animées par eZ Systems et des membres de la communauté), un thème de réflexion sur la gestion de contenu (notamment les tendances actuelles), et un thème spécialisé sur la gestion de médias en ligne. Voici un point sur les annonces importantes faites par eZ Systems. eZ Publish migre son dépôt public sur Git Après des années d'utilisation de (...)

15:00
Client: “Don’t use sky blue as a background color, we don’t like it. I assume you did...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “Don’t use sky blue as a background color, we don’t like it. I assume you did this is because of a ‘feel good factor’.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Don’t you want your customers to feel good?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “That’s not essential as long as they spend their money.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ayr3uuZgalNCSlr4mP02Lc9sSCY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ayr3uuZgalNCSlr4mP02Lc9sSCY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ayr3uuZgalNCSlr4mP02Lc9sSCY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ayr3uuZgalNCSlr4mP02Lc9sSCY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

11:38
The new Frontier: Synchronization
» ‎ CaptainDash

Well, you thought you knew the most key marketing trends of 2010 and forward? There is still one you may have missed, although it is likely to become central in the next quarters to come ; and that is synchronization. For most adverstisers so far, media spending was (and still is) a mater of advanced planification. [...]

7:27
Some Thoughts on Silverlight
» ‎ Andres Osinski's Blog

pSome time I ago I began a project for a customer in an all-Microsoft shop. Given that the project had highly restrictive time requirements and a RIA design, a decision was taken to develop the project with Silverlight./p pI have always expressed openly my preference for Free Software solutions above proprietary ones, and this preference still stands, however, throughout this article I'll judge the platform on technical merits alone, given that there's already many enlightened voices out there to warn us about the perils of working on proprietary platforms./p pMy initial impression came when installing the necessary development environment. Previous to this project I'd worked on several projects using Visual Studio 2008, by all means a very nice and capable IDE that ran well enough on a current, midrange machine./p pBut Visual Studio 2010 changed, and for the worse. I can't speak for the addition of new features, but there's one, single factor that makes it stand out from previous versions: iit is slow/i. And I mean slow like a Java-IDE-from-5-years-ago slow. Half a minute to load up, 15 seconds to connect to a Team Foundation Server (don't ask, it's what the customer has). Start piling up a few open Silverlight windows and we're talking a couple of seconds between switching windows, and at least a 10-second build time for a medium-sized application. I understand that things are a lot better when working with WinForms apps, but for a new platform that's supposed to be highly productive for getting things up and running, this is unacceptably slow. The astoundingly good autocompletion features do not make up for this./p p Let's go back to that last comment for a bit. If there's something which I think Visual Studio has above any other environment is the combination of the incredible autocompletion coupled with a very good language like C#. It competes very well in its niche as an application development language against similar alternatives. The problem, however, lies for the most part in the underlying applications framework used for the project; Silverlight itself. Yes, Siverlight is in many ways just a subset of the standard .NET library, which is not bad at all. The issues here have mostly to do with the presentation layer. /p h3XAML, Or A Failure In Declarative Programming/h3 p Many will probably disagree with me on this, but XAML is a piece of garbage. It is touted as a declarative DSL with support for some level of logic, where it's theoretically possible to write CRUD interfaces without touching a line of code. This, in practice, is about as feasable as writing a GUI in SQL. /p ul liThere are no good mechanisms for separating content from style. Yes, there's the Style attribute, but it's a poor excuse for a well-executed styling system. Even CSS, warts and all, is better for this./li liIt is complex. Very complex, to the point where there's a strict dependency on the IDE to get anything done. The number of elements and attributes, the slight irregularity on the naming schemes of different attributes, the verbosity of each element, all pile up to make even the slightest of edits require opening up the IDE./li liYou can't depend completely on either the GUI designer nor text editing. Due to the above factors it become prohibitively difficult to write an interface without the designer (we're talking literally thousands of lines of XAML code for rather simple stuff), yet it's very limited when it comes to describing fluid layouts properly. And it's slow. iSo slow./i/li liThe C# compiler is a marvelously effective and productive tool. Not so the one for XAML. Parsing XAML is sluggish, autocompletion is mediocre to downright bad, a surprisingly large number of errors are caught at runtime (difference with HTML being that in order to debug a Silverlight application you need at least 20 seconds to start up a debugging instance, and no runtime changes are allowed), and interaction with your C# namespaces is painfully difficult and bureaucratic./li liIn classic Microsoft tradition, the GUI toolkit contains items that just have no purpose being described on the interface. Specifically, Data Sources, a sort of dynamic connector to a database query that magically handles saving and updating data. I have a whole section dedicated to that, but let's just say it's not a good practice./li /ul /p p The worst offender of these is Microsoft selling XAML as an easy, expressive method for defining a UI without writing "real code". The reality is that not only does writing a new screen require copious amounts of C#, but that the standard controls are inadequate, to the point where they're the greatest factor in contributing to delays in my project./p pThe issue falls squarely in the fact that behavior for many actions is ill-defined and buggy. How does a SelectionChanged even know when it's being triggered by the user instead of by the loading of data? Why don't click events work properly on custom controls? Why do I have to explicitly unload and reload certain resources to register when they should work properly just by changing them once? Such distractions have cost me days, and apparently few people have straight answers for many of these problems (the standard response for the majority of these shortcomings is writing custom controls and intermediary Converter classes for things that would take two lines in jQuery)./p h3The DataSource and DataGrid: Convention Over Configuration, Failed/h3 pA big culprit of delayed projects is when things that are at first glance very simple are actually overly complicated. By and large, this is the main issue with using these very standardized components./p pMost CRUD applications can be written as a grid with data feeding off a set of entities, a few rows and columns, and a couple of buttons to manipulate things. For this workflow, you use a DataGrid that takes its data from a DataSource, binding it to a query, filtering by whatever criterion you want, and the control automatically handles the rest for you./p pThis should actually be a great boost to productivity, since you can take the hassle off saving and retrieving data and presenting it. And for the most part, it actually works very well: define your entities, create a providing Web Service, and you're good to go. For 70% of the use cases this works marvelously well. Unfortunately, it's disastrous for the remaining 30%./p pSo what problems does this entail?/p ul liThe Grid interface is slow. Clicks don't register properly when doing asynchronous operations in the background (and ieverything/i in Silverlight is asynchronous, to the point where forcing synced operations to enforce certain dependencies on interaction is very difficult), animations stutter, loading and reloading data is awkward when compared to equally featured HTML or (gasp) VB6 applications. The result is diminished user interaction./li liWorking within the Grid is annoying and difficult. There is no easy way to reference elements and controls within a grid (it's possible, but it'll take you 5 times longer than necessary and will be fraught with bugs). Binding of controls within the grid is buggy and your standard events don't cover the range of interactions you need. Many times things just don't work as expected and you need to spend hours coming up with a workaround, which can end up in adopting a different UI solution because your original idea is simply infeasable (something that's never happened to me before)./li liThe API is inflexible. It is difficult to customize a grid to override default behavior. Anything that's slightly complex requires yet more boilerplate code, and we're not talking about the sort of API that fits in your head, so expect to be looking over Stack Overflow and the Silverlight Forums very frequently for answers to simple questions (and not finding the answers to what you need way too often)./li liSilverlight's UI theming has nothing to do with the clients OS, unable to look like true desktop clients, yet harder to style than web applications./li /ul /p pAll of this comes down to the fact that getting the DataGrid and Datasource to do what you want it do is nowhere as simple as it should be./p h3Not a Polyglot/h3 pPart of the promise of .NET 4.0 was that the ecosystem would be getting more and more open to dynamic languages and newcomers like F#. This seems evident in the new documentation for the framework. The unfortunate reality is that, like I've said before, since a href="http://andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry/?id=2"languages are community and culture/a, it's very difficult to get a team up and running with a Silverlight project (which is already alien to most .NET developers) with IronPython or IronRuby. Almost no documentation is available, and nothing to speak of as far as code samples. Coupled with the fact that there is not much effort from the Microsoft evangelist to actually convert people away from C#, and we have an idea that's failed from the start./p pThis is truly a pity since Silverlight would be an excellent match for dynamic languages, given the tremendous amount of casting and anonymous functions that are necessary for manipulating so many data structures, and which currently presents my only objection to using C# in this context. The dynamism of the framework means that many errors will still not be caught by the compiler, and verbose blocks of code are needed where a simple Python one-liner would suffice./p h3Opinions Bottom-up/h3 pIt's interesting to note that despite my comments and what I consider to be some pretty egregious faults in Silverlight, you'll find people practically lining up to praise this framework. And to be honest, it's not the worst thing as far a RIA apps go by a long shot (I'm pretty certain it's much better than Eclipse RIA, and possibly comparable to Flex)./p pWhile it fares favorably against many technologies, it just doesn't hold its own against modern web technologies like Django, Rails, and similarly inspired web frameworks. There's more boilerplate, less flexibility, and many of the advantages of a RIA platform are lost against the sort of dynamic web applications that jQuery with extensiones can help you create. It's better than ASP.NET, probably, but I don't believe it's good enough when we lose so many things in the process, such as ul liDepending on a proprietary platform running on a single operating system. Silverlight for Mac OS and Mono just don't count. Trust me on that. It's very easy to write platform-dependent code on Silverlight./li liSpending thousands of dollars on your development platform, which will be outdated in a couple of years and requires a substantial investment in a vertically-integrated set of solutions that don't work well with anything else./li liLimiting the amount of community support. For a platform that counts with commercial support, the amount of extensions, tutorials, and tips just pales in comparison to the level of documentation and support you can get with jQuery, Django, or other FOSS solutions. IRC is still the best support line available for developers./li /ul In my experience, most of the praise comes from people already locked into other Microsoft platforms who have never had the pleasure of trying better alternatives, and given that a significant number of these people have no interest in looking outside this walled garden, it will effectively be one of their better tools for getting things done./p pIn conclusion, on purely technical grounds, it is a decent platform, albeit flawed in pretty important ways. If you work with .NET most things will not seem to alien. For everyone else, stay away. And when you factor in the matters of using a privative platform for in the days of the Open Web, everyone should probably disregard this platform, instead favoring web clients when possible and native clients when necessary./p br /

July 07, 2010
23:58
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 26
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Cette revue de presse est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire/strongbr / ullia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16158-tres-petit-score-pour-le-parti-pirate-aux-legislatives-de-rambouillet.html[numerama.com] Très petit score pour le Parti Pirate aux législatives de Rambouillet/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16142-le-parti-pirate-veut-heberger-the-pirate-bay-au-parlement-suedois.html[numerama.com] Le Parti pirate veut héberger The Pirate Bay au parlement suédois/abr / /lilia href=http://techrights.org/2010/06/30/ieee-for-swpats-monopoly/[techrights.org] IEEE Hates Software Freedom, Now Makes it More Official/abr / /lilia href=http://www.euractiv.com/en/enterprise-jobs/creative-economy-under-attack-time-act-acta-analysis-495689[euractiv.com] Creative economy is under attack: Time to act/abr / /lilia href=http://www.wimadame.com/informatique-des-femmes-qui-ne-manquent-pas-de-programmes[wimadame.com] Informatique: des femmes qui ne manquent pas de programmes/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16117-la-commission-europeenne-lance-une-consultation-sur-la-neutralite-du-net.html[numerama.com] La Commission européenne lance une consultation sur la neutralité du net/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57948-google-chrome-safari-firefox-opera-internet-explorer.htm[pcinpact.com] Chrome surpasse Safari aux USA, et progresse dans le monde/abr / /lilia href=http://facil.qc.ca/enbref/le-parti-qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois-mettra-le-libre-%C3%A0-son-programme-d%C3%A8s-lan-prochain[facil.qc.ca] Le Parti québécois mettra le libre à son programme dès l'an prochain./abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16156-acta-vous-pensez-que-la-france-est-une-dictature.html[numerama.com] ACTA : vous pensez que la France est une dictature ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58031-firefox-ibm-selection-officielle-salaries-publicite-image.htm[pcinpact.com] IBM choisit officiellement Firefox pour ses 400 000 employés/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16141-hadopi-il-faut-arreter-de-construire-la-ruineuse-ligne-maginot.html[numerama.com] Hadopi : Il faut arrêter de construire la ruineuse ligne Maginot !/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/01/michael-cross-les-donnees-publique-s-doivent-pouvoir-etre-reutilisees-librement_1381453_651865.html[LeMonde.fr] Michael Cross : Les données publiques doivent pouvoir être réutilisées librement/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/01/en-finlande-l-internet-haut-debit-devient-un-droit_1381867_651865.html[lemonde.fr] En Finlande, l'Internet haut débit devient un droit/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/58010-hadopi-identification-cout-adresse-fft.htm[pcinpact.com] Hadopi : identifier les IP se fera d'abord à la main, à 8,5 € l'unité/abr / /lilia href=http://blogs.lexpress.fr/tic-et-net/2010/06/lindustrie-du-jeu-video-echaud.php[lexpress.fr] L'industrie du jeu vidéo échaudée par l'Hadopi/abr / /lilia href=http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/societe/article/le-logiciel-libre-un-enjeu-de-77668[agoravox] Le logiciel libre, un enjeu de société/abr / /lilia href=http://blog.fdn.fr/post/2010/06/29/Egalite-devant-la-loi[blog.fdn.fr] Égalité devant la loi?/abr / /lilia href=http://padawan.info/fr/2010/06/comment-acceder-a-internet-un-guide-de-2025.html[padawan.info] Comment accéder à Internet (un guide de 2025)/abr / /li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://april.orgAssociation april/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presseRevue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/30/27076.htmlLa revue de presse de la semaine précédente/abr / (...)

21:00
[After sending a flash .swf file] Client: “I like it, but the filename is wrong. Can you...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

p[After sending a flash .swf file]/p pstrongClient:/strong “I like it, but the filename is wrong. Can you rename the file and send it again?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NAR62qsiAPRac6pWkS5XY_NwIaY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NAR62qsiAPRac6pWkS5XY_NwIaY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NAR62qsiAPRac6pWkS5XY_NwIaY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NAR62qsiAPRac6pWkS5XY_NwIaY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
"Maybe if you get bored, turn off the xbox this weekend and throw 20-40hrs our way."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Maybe if you get bored, turn off the xbox this weekend and throw 20-40 hours our way.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w1ZOJqNpI608ZPqWMWvOmTEjZHw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w1ZOJqNpI608ZPqWMWvOmTEjZHw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w1ZOJqNpI608ZPqWMWvOmTEjZHw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w1ZOJqNpI608ZPqWMWvOmTEjZHw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

7:16
La plainte des fournisseurs de logiciels libres contre le contrat de gré-à-gré avec Microsoft n'est pas recevable
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Les juges du Tribunal Fédéral Administratif (TAF) suisse ont statué sur la qualité pour agir des plaignants dans le cas de la plainte contre le contrat de 42 millions de francs suisse (30 millions d'euros). Celui-ci avait été passé sans appel d'offre public entre l'Office fédéral des constructions et de la logistique (OFCL) et Microsoft. Ce contrat comprenait de nouvelles licences logicielles, des mises-à-jour et des services de supports sur trois ans.br / br / Selon les juges, la plainte déposée contre ce contrat n'est pas recevable, puisque les plaignants – 18 fournisseurs de services sur des logiciels libres – ne font pas parties des soumissionnaires potentiels. Ils ont argumenté qu'aucun d'eux ne fournissait des produits ou des services dans le marché pertinent, en l'occurrence sur des produits Microsoft, tels que recherchés par l'OFCL. Les juges considèrent ainsi que d'acquérir des extensions, du support ou de nouveaux logiciels Microsoft équivaut à un choix de technologie.br / br / Cette décision risque d'être lourde de conséquences pour les fournisseurs de solutions alternatives, y compris pour les solutions propriétaires. En effet, elle octroie ainsi le droit aux organes publics suisses de réduire le marché à un seul fournisseur, balayant ainsi toute concurrence, et cela sans possibilité de recours pour les concurrents potentiels.br / br / La décision n'est pas encore prise, mais il reste toujours la possibilité pour les fournisseurs de logiciels libres d'attaquer la décision du TAF devant le Tribunal Fédéral.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/2010/07/legitimation-verneint/42-Millionen Vergabe an Microsoft: Legitimation wurde verneint,/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.inside-it.ch/frontend/insideit?_d=_articleamp;site=iiamp;news.id=21796Open-Source-Szene: Wir sind alle geschockt/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://news.google.ch/news/story?pz=1amp;cf=allamp;ned=fr_champ;hl=deamp;ncl=dT_XMMzwGjO0zrMWr7pmjCVI0-gfMamp;cf=allamp;scoring=dToutes les dépêches de presse/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://linuxfr.org//2009/05/28/25522.htmlLe monopole de Microsoft en Suisse remis en question/abr /

July 06, 2010
21:00
Photo
» ‎ Clients From Hell

img src="http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l53re1HCZH1qzwya5o1_500.jpg"/br/br/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w8F94aGIhYLYivfXsP44utR4Y6c/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w8F94aGIhYLYivfXsP44utR4Y6c/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w8F94aGIhYLYivfXsP44utR4Y6c/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/w8F94aGIhYLYivfXsP44utR4Y6c/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
Me: “Did you get the files I sent you?” Client: “Yes, but they were...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Did you get the files I sent you?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes, but they were huge!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “The files I sent you were well under the limit of something you could email.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “They were em122 mega bitmaps each/em.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”They were both a little over 1MB, which is a fairly small file.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I don’t care how many megaembytes/em they were. It’s all those embitmaps/em that are bringing my computerem to its knees/em!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/C3LUQvHwtTbbZ36CCWTIlXBxSEQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/C3LUQvHwtTbbZ36CCWTIlXBxSEQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/C3LUQvHwtTbbZ36CCWTIlXBxSEQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/C3LUQvHwtTbbZ36CCWTIlXBxSEQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

8:48
Python 2.7
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Un peu moins de deux ans après la version 2.6, la fondation a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(langage)Python/a est heureuse de vous annoncer la publication de la version 2.7. Cette version marque la fin d'une ère, car ça sera la dernière version majeure de la branche Python 2. Justement, Python 2.7 apporte beaucoup de nouveautés qui viennent de Python 3.1 (listées en seconde partie de la dépêche) dans le but de simplifier la migration de Python 2 vers Python 3. La branche 2.7 sera maintenue plus longtemps que les précédentes versions 2.x.br / br / Python est un langage de programmation interprété multi-paradigme. L'interprète standard (CPython) est distribué sous a href=http://www.python.org/psf/license/licence PSF/a (semblable à la a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_BSDlicence BSD/a). CPython est multiplateforme : Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, AIX, MS-DOS, OS/2, QNX, a href=http://www.python.org/download/other/etc./abr / CPython sert de référence pour le langage Python et les autres implémentations : a href=http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/PyPy/a (écrit en Python), a href=http://ironpython.net/IronPython/a (plateforme .NET) et a href=http://www.jython.org/Jython/a (JVM). Ces implémentations ne sont pas aussi à jour que CPython puisque IronPython est compatible avec Python 2.6 tandis que PyPy et Jython sont compatibles 2.5.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.7.htmlWhat’s New in Python 2.7/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/Télécharger Python 2.7/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://svn.python.org/projects/python/tags/r27/Misc/NEWSChangeLog Python 2.7/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://docs.python.org/Documentation de Python 2.7/abr / (...)

1:28
Donate Now
» ‎ Clients From Hell

a href="http://killspill.org"Donate Now/a: pOur friends at a href="http://killspill.org" target="_blank"Kill The Spill/a have raised over $16,000 to help animals affected by the gulf oil spill disaster. Fundraising is still going strong, but they need your help! Donate now and they’ll match your donation 100%, it takes less than a minute. a href="http://killspill.org" target="_blank"Make a Donation/a/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3U_HB1SwUSWC4Nm_XnXhGXcnKOE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3U_HB1SwUSWC4Nm_XnXhGXcnKOE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3U_HB1SwUSWC4Nm_XnXhGXcnKOE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3U_HB1SwUSWC4Nm_XnXhGXcnKOE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
July 05, 2010
21:01
Me: “Well sir, the total for your new logo, business cards and menu designs is...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Well sir, the total for your new logo, business cards and menu designs is $350.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Are you kidding me? The reason I chose a student designer was to get something cheap, plus help you out for your portfolio. I could have went to a professional and paid much less.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Um, that’s not true. I spent a lot of time dealing with your daughter who insisted on multiple revisions to the logo, and you ended up with a look that everyone is pleased with. This same project might have cost you 10 times the amount I’m charging you. I think it’s a great deal.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I highly doubt that. It’s just words and colors. Plus, our satisfaction has nothing to do with the amount we pay you. I’ll send you a check for what I think is fair.”/p pI got a check for 100 bucks. With “here you go asshole” written in the memo./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/D-0ypi7HTCaU2iJSknJidOROVpM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/D-0ypi7HTCaU2iJSknJidOROVpM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/D-0ypi7HTCaU2iJSknJidOROVpM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/D-0ypi7HTCaU2iJSknJidOROVpM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
Client: “This fax machine isn’t working properly.” Me: “How...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient: /strong“This fax machine isn’t working properly.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “How so?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Every time I put the paper in the one side and press ‘Send’ it comes right out the other side.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “How do you mean?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, it’s not sending.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Well, it doesn’t emactually/em send the physical page, just a digital representation of it, like a picture.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Isn’t that why it comes out all curled up?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “It’s magic.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Su7xPEhnHFb_FjvpQCfDk_echK4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Su7xPEhnHFb_FjvpQCfDk_echK4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Su7xPEhnHFb_FjvpQCfDk_echK4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Su7xPEhnHFb_FjvpQCfDk_echK4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

6:58
VÉRAC : Vers une Évaluation Réussie Avec les Compétences
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

acronym title=Vers une Évaluation Réussie Avec les CompétencesVÉRAC/acronym est un logiciel de gestion d'un établissement scolaire dans le cadre d'une évaluation par compétences.br / br / VÉRAC est composé de 3 parties :br / ulliune interface de gestion et saisie des évaluations par les professeurs ;br / /liliune interface d'administration ;br / /liliune interface de consultation en ligne pour les élèves et leurs parents./li/ul br / VÉRAC est libre (licence GNU GPL 3), développé en a href=http://www.python.orgPython/a, en a href=http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/introPyQt/a pour les parties administration et professeur et en a href=http://php.netPHP/a pour l'interface web. Il s'appuie sur des bases de données a href=http://www.sqlite.orgSQLite/a. D'autre part, VÉRAC utilise des formats ouverts (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocumentODF/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_valuesCSV/a,...) et des logiciels libres (a href=http://freemind.sourceforge.netFreeMind/a, a href=http://www.insilmaril.de/vymVym/a,...) pour les importations et exportations des données.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://verac.tuxfamily.orgSite du projet VÉRAC/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://verac.tuxfamily.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Help.VeracScreenShotsCopies d'écran/abr / (...)

July 04, 2010
21:02
Client: “What is going on with my website? It looks all wrong!” Me: “It was...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “What is going on with my website? It looks all wrong!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “It was working just fine yesterday, let’s take a look.”/p pstrongUs:/strong “Let’s take a look… em(We download a page, check out the code)/em. Well, it looks as if someone’s gone in and deleted some of the code that makes the site work.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yeah, that was me, I was getting rid of some of your unnecessary code… why isn’t the site working?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nble9Ti6ozvjszXrAJla9KDpT7w/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nble9Ti6ozvjszXrAJla9KDpT7w/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nble9Ti6ozvjszXrAJla9KDpT7w/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/nble9Ti6ozvjszXrAJla9KDpT7w/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

15:36
The Biggest Obstacle
» ‎ What To Fix

I've spent the last ten years working on creating my own startup. I've read dozens of books, hung out with other people who wanted a startup online, joined clubs and associations, met with "experts" , etc. More to the point, I've actually built 5 startup ideas and tried them out.

I'm finally reaching the point where I'm starting to get traction -- I'm not Ramen-profitable, but some things are starting to "click" and I'm making enough money each month to cover server and domain expenses plus beer money. That's not Bill Gates-rich, but it sure beats a stick in the eye.

Now that I'm beginning to get traction, I'm also beginning to feel like I may never make it.

Why? Because there's a huge obstacle that I am not sure I can overcome on my own.

Is it programming ability? Nope, got tons of that, and I love to code. Is it "stick-to-it-ness"? Nope, I used to have that problem, but now I realize that a year or two minimum is required to begin to get an idea of potential. Is it business smarts? To some degree yes, but not enough to matter. I understand that there are ways to quickly test a market and that market research must come before development. Find your customers and live with them. How about time? Nope, I make enough when I consult that I have time to work on my startups. Motivation? Not really, as I love building things and learning, and there is nothing in the world like getting a check for some service or product you have provided.

It's life.

I find this hard to explain, but I'll give it a shot.

In your teens and 20s, it is not unusual for you to have a kind of empty feeling. You might wander "What is the meaning of life?" or "What do I want to be doing?" or "What is the right choice for me now?" Life can appear empty and foreboding. Although you have things that you love doing, and it's great hanging out with friends, there is this feeling that you should be needed somewhere, that you should be fitting into the grand scheme in a big way, and that somehow you are supposed to make these decisions about how to make all of that happen.

Smart people take those feelings and turn them into ambition -- they go to school, self-educate, join the military -- do all sorts of things to maximize where they fit into the grand scheme of things. Some people join up with various causes and groups -- nothing wrong with these groups, but for many they serve an unacknowledged psychological need to be a part of something. Some folks get married.

Some folks just learn how to be permanently apathetic, through drugs, video games, TV, sports, whatever, they have learned to kill this feeling of wanting to make a difference and fit in.

But they are the rare ones. Everybody learns to dull this feeling to various degrees through these things, but most folks find some pieces of life where they are needed and where they make a difference. Many people find dozens.

So the day comes in your 30s or 40s when you want to do a startup.

And you have programmed your entire life to resist this.

Let's say you decide to start on a Monday.

You wake up on Monday. Time to kick it off, right? Well no, it's time to hit the treadmill. Can't take a day off from the workout. After that can you start? Well no, then it's taking the kids to the doctor this morning. Remember you promised? How about when you get back? Well, only an hour or so there, and you haven't blogged in over a week. Remember the goal to blog once a week?

After lunch? Sure thing! You sit down at the computer -- only to realize that ten of your Facebook friends have various things to say that you should respond to. Then you drift off reading HackerNews for an hour (very easy to do) and suddenly it's supper time.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on. There is a significant element of technology evolving to take all of your attention, which I've written about before. But there's also the fact that as you get older, things get more complicated.

When you write a program for a system, many times the code is in it's best shape the minute you stop coding. It does exactly what you want, and it is easy to read. Over time, however, if you (and others) continue to maintain this code, it gets a lot of "cruft" -- stuff that works, patches that make sense, but might not fit into the larger picture. It just works -- it's not pretty. Over months and months of patching and kludging, the code gets so much cruft it's hard to tell what does what.

Life is like that too. Each time you pick up a habit or make a commitment, it seems like a very logical thing to do at the time. But over many years, the habits and commitments build up, and they don't always interact with each other in optimum ways. Remember that habit you had of going out with the guys drinking beer and watching sports games on Monday night? Well that doesn't fit into your new habit of needing to exercise on Tuesday morning.

At first these are simple conflicts -- do I keep my running habit even if I'm traveling on vacation? But later they all start stacking up. For instance right now it is 10am Sunday morning and I have at least 4 commitments I have made, 3 of which I am ignoring. Sunday mornings is my designated TV time -- I love watching the political shows. It is also my time for exercising -- nothing like a good workout while the family is gone to church. It's the time I should be coding on my startup. And I should be writing on my blog. Today the blog wins.

The obvious answer is to prioritize your startup above everything else -- just do it. But when there are real people involved, it's not so easy. Let's take decisions involving family as an example. My oldest son Bruce is still upset me with because I did not attend his sporting events when he was a kid. My wife was talking to me last week to make sure I don't make the same mistake with the two children still at home. Startups have a 1-in-10 or 20 chance of succeeding. It might take another ten years to become self-sufficient. Even though I know now that it is doable, in ten years all my kids will be out of the house. Do you provide for your retirement or make memories with the people you love?

The easy answer is "family comes first", and of course, it does. But I don't think family shouldn't be some kind of god in your life. People in a family love each other no matter what and are all supposed to be encouraging each other to grow and do their best in life. This pattern of parents becoming martyrs -- spending every waking moment obsessing over their children and taking them from one event to another -- doesn't seem very healthy, either for the kids or the parents. I honestly hope that some activity I was involved in as a child didn't prevent my parents from enjoying their retirement. To think otherwise would be the epitome of selfishness.

These commitments and habits are complex, and inter-related. While I can dynamically choose each day which to prioritize, I find that over time it leaves insufficient time for working on my startup. This would not have been true when I was 20.

So now I'm in a spot where my existence itself conspires against my larger goals. Everything that I am -- the choices I have made, the habits I have formed, the promises I have made, the people that I love -- pulls me away from trying to create something that people want. And why shouldn't it? A startup is all about trying to find something people want. A rich life is about already having found it.

No answers from me this Sunday morning, but I've checked off the "blog" item for today, now on to 4th of July celebrations. The code can wait, right?

It can always wait.

15:00
Client: “I take it, since I haven’t heard from you, that you are not interested in...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I take it, since I haven’t heard from you, that you are not interested in building my website.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I told you I wasn’t interested when I left your office. I can’t imagine why you expected to hear from me.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, have you changed your mind about working on it?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Have you changed your mind about wanting me to do it for free?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “You would get stock.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “You don’t HAVE stock. It doesn’t work that way.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, I am faxing you a non-disclosure agreement.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Okay. Why?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “So you don’t steal my presentation materials and pass them off as your own.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I never received any presentation materials.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes, you did. I showed you the presentation in my office.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Are you under the impression that I memorized and re-created your powerpoint presentation?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, just don’t.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Tc-hvU7LBNHklqJ4xWglWyUphcw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Tc-hvU7LBNHklqJ4xWglWyUphcw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Tc-hvU7LBNHklqJ4xWglWyUphcw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Tc-hvU7LBNHklqJ4xWglWyUphcw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
July 03, 2010
21:01
Client: The draft looks great. However, since we are marketing this website to college age students,...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient: /strongThe draft looks great. However, since we are marketing this website to college age students, it is important that the background changes all the time. At least once a week, so that they don’t get bored. College students love the internet, y’know? They expect something new every time they visit a website. It should switch to things like a blackboard, laptop, desk.. things like that. I should also mention that we have no budget for this. Please find a way to do this for no money./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zgWXQehuJ9qJdsjonQ4FBOSRFiE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zgWXQehuJ9qJdsjonQ4FBOSRFiE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zgWXQehuJ9qJdsjonQ4FBOSRFiE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zgWXQehuJ9qJdsjonQ4FBOSRFiE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
"I don’t want to print my brochure in CMYK, because it is more expensive and has one color more..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“I don’t want to print my brochure in CMYK, because it is more expensive and has one color more than RGB, so print it in RGB and I will save some money.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/QPmTCmEpz2-UGH4OzhhZ-XhnsxU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/QPmTCmEpz2-UGH4OzhhZ-XhnsxU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/QPmTCmEpz2-UGH4OzhhZ-XhnsxU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/QPmTCmEpz2-UGH4OzhhZ-XhnsxU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

4:05
ICM Registry and Deceptive Dot-Ex-Ex-Ex Polls
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. One of the techniques that ICM Registry has been using to try demonstrate public demand for a dot-ex-ex-ex top level domain (TLD) has been touting various poll results. Right now theyre pushing a new CNN poll that seems to...

0:00
glFusion, un CMS qu'il est bien...
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le paysage des a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMS title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Content management systemCMS/acronym/a est tellement saturé qu'il est assez difficile pour un petit projet de se faire connaître. Bien entendu tout le monde à entendu parler des habituels a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal title=Définition WikipediaDrupal/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_de_publication_pour_l%27Internet title=Définition Wikipediaacronym title=Système de publication pour l'InternetSPIP/acronym/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla title=Définition WikipediaJoomla!/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/TYPO3 title=Définition WikipediaTYPO3/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/EzPublish title=Définition WikipediaeZ Publish/a et j'en passe.br / br / Aujourd'hui nous allons parler d'un autre CMS libre (GNU GPL v2) : glFusion. Il se veut simple à prendre en main et est utilisable dès l'installation. Il est en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php title=Définition WikipediaPHP/a et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql title=Définition WikipediaMySQL/a, dispose d'un système de greffon et d'un grand nombre de fonctions pré-implémentées, ce qui fera gagner beaucoup de temps pour une mise en place d'un site de base. Les développeurs principaux sont Mark Evans et Eric Warren.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.glfusion.org/glFusion (site officiel)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://demo.glfusion.org/Demo/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.glfusion.org/wiki/doku.php?id=startWiki du projet/abr / (...)
July 02, 2010
23:19
GNOME 2.30.2, dernières révérences de l'honorable
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Il y a quelques jours sortait a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME title=Définition WikipédiaGNOME/a 2.30.2. Au menu : correction de certains bugs gênants coté utilisateur, gros ajouts de documentation et de diverses traductions. Rien de bien folichon me direz-vous… Vraiment ?br / br / Et bien pourtant, c'est une version extrêmement importante et lourde de sens pour tous le Gnomistes, et plus encore pour les anti-Gnomistes : après huit ans de service, cette mise à jour est la dernière de GNOME 2 qui va laisser place à GNOME 3 dès septembre prochain.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.devel.announce/109Annonce de GNOME 2.30.2 sur la liste de diffusion/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.devel.announce/111Annonce de GNOME 2.31.4 (branche de développment)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/#rnlookingforwardPrésentation de GNOME 3 par l'équipe GNOME/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://live.gnome.org/RoadMapFeuille de route de GNOME 3/abr / (...)

21:15
Law Enforcement Controls Access to New Minneapolis Public Wi-Fi Network
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. With much fanfare in mid-June, Minneapolis announced the activation of a free public Wi-Fi network, with 117 outdoor hotspots, for use by residents and visitors alike. Just one problem. At the apparently explicit request of law enforcement, you cant...

21:00
More work, I promise.
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong It was my mum’s 60th at the weekend and I filmed two hours of party footage and vox pops of my family sending her best wishes. I want you to turn in into a 10-15 minute video, I’ll give you £30./p pstrongMe:/strong That’s nowhere near enough for my time. [I usually do 2-3 nightclub promos for £100]./p pstrongClient:/strong Yeah but it’s a present for my mum so I can’t afford to pay as much./p pstrongMe:/strong I’ve never met your mum and I’m not willing to give her £70 worth of my time, especially if you’re only putting up £30 of your own money for it./p pstrongClient:/strong I’m not asking you to give my mum £70, just do her video. I’m paying £30 of my own money. And I’m thinking of starting a business filming birthdays, this’ll definitely lead to more work, I promise./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KcVLbif7yXTajFNbnnX97KafFzc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KcVLbif7yXTajFNbnnX97KafFzc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KcVLbif7yXTajFNbnnX97KafFzc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KcVLbif7yXTajFNbnnX97KafFzc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

15:55
If you could go back in Time, What Would you tell Yourself in your 20s?
» ‎ What To Fix
- Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before, even if they have some value. So yes, that Kindle or iPad or whatever will have a real use, and you will be marginally happier with it than without, but not as much as you think
- You can talk yourself into (or out of) anything. The only difference between smart people and other people is that smart people do this with bigger words and more complex arguments. Be confident, but also assume that you are broken in ways you can never spot. Find some ways to get a checksum on life decisions every now and then.
- You don't need very much at all. Maybe a laptop computer and a couple changes of clothes. Pictures and videos of your life. That's about it.
- Nothing will ever replace experiences. No matter how big the car, nice the house, or professional-looking the suit, it's never going to be as much fun or mean as much later as the experiences you have in life. And it's not just having the experience, it's looking forward to them, and planning them, and making pictures, movies, and blogs out of them. The best part, oddly, may be the planning. So planning a 200-dollar trip to the beach in the Fall with people you love may give you many hours of happiness this summer -- along with the fun of the trip itself.
- Learn to keep picking topics and immersing yourself in them. Most everybody will say to drop out and become part of the system -- 9-5 job and TV/games/internet in the evening. If you want a life you could sleep through, that's fine. But if you want a life you can tell stories about, keep reinventing yourself. And that means constantly learning.
- Lots of shit in life that once looked dumb or stupid opens up into this huge panorama of beauty once you learn the rules. In so many things you are like the guy who never saw a baseball game going to the world series. You kind of get it, but it all seems silly. You don't know the rules. Decide to learn how to appreciate music, for instance. Get a few college lectures on tape, get some good music to listen to, hang out with folks who are music connoisseurs. The more you know about various art forms, the richer your life is.
- Forget philosophy and meaning-of-life shit. You're too young. For now, you are what you do. Go do something worthwhile. By this I do not mean spending a lot of time limiting yourself by placing labels on ourselves and limiting your perceptions by labeling others. I mean you make the decisions to do what you want to do, and those decisions -- what you do, your decisions -- is the essence of your existence.
  
  The things you may or may not have not done in the past have nothing at all to do with it. If you define yourself by your past actions then you are doing yourself a great harm.
  
  Every minute you make new choices, do new things, and those choices and actions are your life. The things you do, the decisions and actions you take, even if nothing more than decisions to be happy under miserable circumstances, constitute your life. You own them, and by continuing to take ownership and dancing above the chasm, you live fully.
  We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- Stick to a daily exercise routine at all costs
- If you are changing and getting better, that means you are changing friends too. This was very difficult for me, but you can't hang out with the same folks and expect to become a better person. There are exceptions, of course, but to a large degree your life is controlled by whom you choose to be friends and hang out with. Be aware that you don't want to be the same person at 30 as you were at 20. I'm not saying be an asshole -- keep being friendly by all means -- but be very careful who you hold yourself up against as "normal"
- Dating is a numbers game, like a lot of other things. Learn the skills of dating and don't sweat picking up chicks (or guys)
- Concentrate on your weaknesses. Make them stronger. When you get to your 30s you can work from your strengths, but there has to be some time in your life to work on shit you suck at, and for me it was when I had the most motivation, my 20s.
- Speaking of which, you have to learn management. No matter what you do, there will be a manager. Even if you don't want to be one, you have to understand what the job is like to help out your manager. Being a good leader means being a good servant. This concept sounded easy (or facile) to me in my 20s, but proved hard to apply in practice.
- You are never ready for kids. Have them early while you have energy. Read all the books about kids if you must, but realize that creating a replacement is about the most biologically easy thing you could do. After all, evolution has been working on making you a great gene transferral and primate-raising machine, so don't get paranoid and neurotic about all the latest parenting fashion. Use some sense.
- Everybody wants to be a rock star and win the lottery. Nobody ever does, and the ones that do end up destroying their life. Realize slow success is a million times better than overnight success.
- Much of the stuff in life that normal people do is geared around killing time by distracting you with shiny things of no value. You may never be able to fight this completely, but you should at least deeply understand it and how it affects your goals
- Create. With a passion. There are two major kinds of people in this world, consumers and creators. The herd will push you to consume, life will push you to consume, consumption is the easy and default path, but true joy and a full life come from creating. It does not matter one bit how many people like what you create, just create. Write. Blog. Make videos. Make a movie. Write a program. The longer the format and the more creativity involved, the more you are going to turn on and exercise key parts of your brain. Nobody wants to be 80 and only have stories of being at the office, but fuck, if you were at the office creating something at least you tried to make a difference. I'd rather be that guy than the one who watched Sumo wrestling everyday (or played 20,000 hours of WoW during his 20s) The only thing you're going to have at the end of your life are the decisions you made, the things you created, and memories. Learn to maximize these things.

15:00
Me: “If you could send me a check or use Paypal, that’d be great.” Client:...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe: /strong“If you could send me a check or use Paypal, that’d be great.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well, I don’t really trust Paypal or like mailing checks out. Can you come pick it up in person?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “We’re 4 states apart and it’s a 12 hour drive…”/p pstrongClient:/strong “It’s a nice drive though! You’ll like it, I promise. See you tomorrow!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cgdl7HoOdgN1r0wxgsnWI-0OPFw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cgdl7HoOdgN1r0wxgsnWI-0OPFw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cgdl7HoOdgN1r0wxgsnWI-0OPFw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/cgdl7HoOdgN1r0wxgsnWI-0OPFw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

12:00
L'accès à internet en Finlande devient un droit
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le ministre des transports et communications finlandais précise qu'à partir du 1er juillet 2010, l'accès à Internet haut débit (1 Mbit/s) dans son pays devient un droit. La Finlande devient ainsi le deuxième pays du monde (après l'Estonie) à garantir l'accès Internet à ses concitoyens par une loi et à l'inscrire comme droit fondamental.br / br / Depuis hier, les fournisseurs d'accès à Internet finlandais sont donc obligés de proposer une connexion internet à toute la population, même dans les lieux isolés. Le prix de cette connexion devra être raisonnable, mais prendre en compte le coût induit par la production de ce service. Le gouvernement finlandais prévoit par la suite de porter le débit à 100 Mbit/s grâce à la fibre optique d'ici fin 2015 pour 99% de la population.br / br / L'accès à internet se hisse donc en Finlande au même niveau que le téléphone, la télédiffusion et le courrier. Les deux tendances se dessinent aujourd'hui : dans certains pays tel que la France, le gouvernement souhaite couper l'accès Internet dès qu'il y a suspicion de téléchargement illégal, alors que dans d'autres pays prennent le chemin inverse en protégeant de plus en plus l'accès à internet comment étant fondamental.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://yle.fi/uutiset/news/2009/10/1mb_broadband_access_becomes_legal_right_1080940.html?origin=rssPresse Finlandaise/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/07/01/en-finlande-l-internet-haut-debit-devient-un-droit_1381867_651865.htmlPresse Française (Le Monde)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/14231-la-finlande-fait-de-l-acces-au-haut-debit-un-droit-fondamental-et-opposable.htmlPresse Française (Numerama)/abr /
10:02
K3b 2.0 est juillet
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

K3b 2.0, nom de code emKomeback/em, l'outil de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravure_de_disque_optiquegravure/a de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdeKDE/a, est enfin disponible officiellement même si les acronym title=Release CandidateRC/acronym étaient déjà disponibles dans la plupart des distributions. Le travail accompli est principalement le a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_informatiqueport/a de KDE3 à a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE4KDE4/a.br / br / Le port n'est pas encore parfait, d'anciennes a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_logiciellebibliothèques/a sont encore utilisées, mais le logiciel s'intègre mieux au bureau KDE que la version précédente. a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_%28KDE%29Solid/a est utilisé pour la détection matérielle et les icônes s'intègrent bien avec le thème a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_ProjectOxygen/a.br / br / Une autre grande nouveauté de cette version 2 est la gestion de la gravure de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-rayBlu-ray/a et plusieurs fenêtres de dialogue ont été fusionnées afin de faire abstraction du type de média.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://k3b.org/K3b/abr /

0:30
A Little Perspective
» ‎ What To Fix

I was downloading data from my PulseOx this morning and thinking about some problems i had yesterday with type coercion in F# when it occurred to me how good I am at whining and complaining. It's something of an art form. We live in a wondrous world, yet we complain all the time. Everything is awesome and everything sucks. Dude! Where is my jet-pack?

Then I remembered those cool pictures I found last week on the internet and changed my mind.

Take a look at these paintings. They look pretty good for an amateur or new painter. Perhaps something a person with a few years experience could do. I don't know anything about painting, but I thought they were beautiful. The artist shows a good use of color, an ability to put together a nice scene, and there's a warmth that comes through when looking at them.

Which makes it all the more amazing, because the man who painted this is blind. He cannot see -- not "I can see a little light and dark at times" but can't see anything at all. He was born without eyes. And he is a painter.

Eşref Armağan was born in 1953 to a poor family in rural Turkey. Growing up, he decided that he was going to be a painter. Not an unusual goal in life for some, but definitely an unusual one for a kid from a dirt-poor family who has no eyes. You might even say it was a ludicrous goal.

Fifty years later, and he's a well-known artist. He works with one color at a time, one color each day, and it has to be absolutely quiet for him to work. First he outlines his picture, then slowly adds color and texture. It's not just his painting that makes him amazing -- it would be possible to learn painting through rote. It's his ability to create 3-dimensional scenes in his mind and then keep that model in his head while he continues the painting over many days. Not only does he know where all the objects are in his painting, he even uses perspective and color correctly. Painters in the west didn't use perspective in their paintings until just a few hundred years ago.

So perhaps he is even smart enough to construct these 3-D scenes and keep track of them in his head, but how does he know how to use perspective in such a way that looks realistic to us? How does a blind man know what a good or bad picture would be like?

In the last decade or so researchers have studied the way he works on his paintings. They've even put him in an MRI and PET scanner to see what parts of his brain he is using when he paints. And they found something very interesting: when Eşref paints, all kinds of activity takes place in his visual cortex. This is astounding since people who are blind don't use their visual cortex -- it's for processing images. There is obviously much more to "seeing" than just eyes.

It's a fascinating topic, bringing together art, cognition, brain science, and the power of hard work and a positive attitude. There's even a book out, "Drawing and the Blind"

So next time you're pissed about something in life, think about Eşref -- who's making miracles happen simply because he decided he wanted to.

The most important thing we need in life is a little perspective.

EDIT: Here's a video about Eşref

July 01, 2010
23:17
Photo
» ‎ Clients From Hell

img src="http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4wdttZQyH1qzwya5o1_500.jpg"/br/br/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-Q5-ybwJTnvA3x9EOgQjEagvYhM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-Q5-ybwJTnvA3x9EOgQjEagvYhM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-Q5-ybwJTnvA3x9EOgQjEagvYhM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/-Q5-ybwJTnvA3x9EOgQjEagvYhM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
21:01
Client: “I need to know the exact amount of time it took you and that is what I will pay you...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I need to know the exact amount of time it took you and that is what I will pay you for.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I am sorry, but I told you that I work by the hour. I don’t work by the minute.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”I will pay you for the minutes it took you and not the hour. How long did it take you?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “60 minutes.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/9H8goXKeAGKUmgKNe_m2ZdMRXhg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/9H8goXKeAGKUmgKNe_m2ZdMRXhg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/9H8goXKeAGKUmgKNe_m2ZdMRXhg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/9H8goXKeAGKUmgKNe_m2ZdMRXhg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

18:45
YouTube et les technologies Flash et HTML5
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

John Harding, ingénieur chez YouTube, a publié sur le a href=http://apiblog.youtube.com/blog YouTube API Blog/a, une note dans laquelle il indique en six points en quoi la balise vidéo d'HTML5 ne peut encore remplacer la technologie Flash actuellement utilisée sur le site YouTube.br / br / Pour lui, bien que le support vidéo HTML5 permet de faire face à la plupart des besoins de YouTube, aujourd'hui, la technologie Adobe Flash reste à ce jour la plate-forme la plus adaptée pour les besoins de distribution vidéo de YouTube. Notons tout de même que John Harding rappelle qu'il est important d'avoir un standard ouvert afin qu'il puisse trouver place dans n'importe quel navigateur.br / br / Flash a pris une avance certaine dans la diffusion vidéo sur Internet et continue d'améliorer ce support en intégrant, par exemple, la lecture de a href=http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/gala/vidéo H.264 directement via la carte graphique/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html Article du blog/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.webmproject.org/ Le projet WebM/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash/ Laboratoire d'Adobe pour Flash/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://pro.clubic.com/creation-de-site-web/langage-programmation/html-5/actualite-350306-youtube-relance-debat-flash-vs-html5.html Article sur Cubic.com/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.html5rocks.com/ Information sur HTML5/abr / (...)

15:00
Client: “Now I know that I asked you for calm and relaxing and I think you did a great job but...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pbClient:/b “Now I know that I asked you for calm and relaxing and I think you did a great job but could you spice it up?”/p pbMe:/b “Uh.. Sure.”/p pbClient:/b You know, just add some white or something./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/10CL8uadBR9Ac6wOM-Y6Uoos914/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/10CL8uadBR9Ac6wOM-Y6Uoos914/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/10CL8uadBR9Ac6wOM-Y6Uoos914/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/10CL8uadBR9Ac6wOM-Y6Uoos914/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:41
Retour sur l'OpenREX « GWT2.0 »
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

GWT, framework Web Java developpé par Google permettant notamment de développer des interfaces riches, était à l'honneur pour sa version 2.0 lors de l'OpenRex. Ce billet constitue mon retour sur cette présentation. Un OpenQuoi ? Ippon Technologies organise depuis le début de l'année des retours d'expérience ouverts au public et animés par ses employés, sous le doux nom d'OpenRex. Bien que de taille modeste (35 places), ces présentations permettent d'avoir un retour direct sur l'emploi de technologies (...)

10:45
Comment accéder à Internet (un guide de 2025)
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Bienvenu sur Internet ! En suivant les règles de ce guide, vous vous assurez d'une expérience d'Internet sans problème et sans risque.br / br / strongVéritableIdentité/strongbr / br / Avant de vous connecter, veuillez vous assurer que vous avez reçu votre carte VéritableIdentité des autorités locales. S'enregistrer directement sur Internet a été rendu illégal par la loi Fin de l'anonymat (dite loi Masson) de 2012 et vous devez vous assurer de signer vos commentaires, courriels, billets etc. avec votre véritable nom. Utiliser votre carte VéritableIdentité est très facile, votre ordinateur (MacOS 15 ou ChromeOS7 et suivants) se connectera automatiquement à votre carte toute proche et la vérifiera avec vos données biométriques. Ne portez pas de maquillage, de voile, de lentilles de contact et rasez-vous s'il vous plaît avant que le scan biométrique ne démarre (il est conseillé de ne pas entamer une reconnaissance biométrique après une longue nuit de beuverie).br / br / iacronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : Cet article est une traduction de How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025) par Philipp Lenssen, sous licence CC by-nc./ibr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://padawan.info/fr/2010/06/comment-acceder-a-internet-un-guide-de-2025.htmlComment accéder à Internet (un guide de 2025)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-06-24-n15.htmlHow to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.frPaternité - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale 3.0 Unported/abr / (...)

2:27
MetaLab, Campaign Monitor, Squarespace, and WooThemes have come...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

img src="http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4uryhw5sh1qzwya5o1_500.png"/br/br/pa href="http://metalabdesign.com" target="_blank"MetaLab/a, a href="http://campaignmonitor.com" target="_blank"Campaign Monitor/a, a href="http://squarespace.com" target="_blank"Squarespace/a, and a href="http://woothemes.com" target="_blank"WooThemes/a have come together to match donations for animals affected by the oil spill in the gulf. Donate $10, and they’ll donate $10. /p pThese animals need our help. a href="http://killspill.org" target="_blank"Donate now, it takes less than a minute/a/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0O0SNyJaWLnhcx_vdYRmkF5vg7M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0O0SNyJaWLnhcx_vdYRmkF5vg7M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0O0SNyJaWLnhcx_vdYRmkF5vg7M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/0O0SNyJaWLnhcx_vdYRmkF5vg7M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

June 30, 2010
23:58
Major Published Article on Microsoft vs. Google Privacy Issues
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Fairly recently, I was interviewed for an article to appear in Redmond magazine (The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community). The topic of the article was presented to me essentially as Who has bigger and scarier privacy problems,...

22:05
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 25
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 25/strongbr / br / ul li a href=http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/societe/article/le-logiciel-libre-un-enjeu-de-77668[agoravox] Le logiciel libre, un enjeu de société/abr / /li li a href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16092-acta-des-sanctions-penales-pouvant-aller-au-dela-de-l-acquis-europeen.html[Numerama] ACTA : des sanctions pénales pouvant aller au-delà de l'acquis européen?/abr / /li lia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16082-la-collecte-de-dons-de-l-ascap-critiquee-par-le-creative-commons.html[Numerama] La collecte de dons de l'ASCAP critiquée par le Creative Commons/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ecrans.fr/La-Sacem-americaine-veut-se-faire,10236.html[écrans] L’épouvantable menace de la culture libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/intranet-extranet/levee-de-fonds-nuxeo.shtml[Journal du Net] Nuxeo part à l'assaut du marché ECM en levant 2,7 millions d'euros/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/ubuntu-co/ubuntu-est-plus-sur-que-windows-dixit-dell-39752355.htm[ZDNet] Ubuntu est plus sur que Windows dixit Dell/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16065-la-sacem-americaine-sollicite-des-dons-pour-combattre-le-copyleft.html[Numerama] La Sacem américaine sollicite des dons pour combattre le copyleft/abr / /lilia href=http://www.artesi.artesi-idf.com/public/article/nouveau-site-internet-du-senat.html?id=21371[Artesi] Nouveau site Internet du Sénat/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/loppsi-2-la-cnil-emet-toujours-des-reserves-39752653.htm[ZDNet] Loppsi 2 : la CNIL émet toujours des réservesbr / lia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16029-aol-force-videolan-a-amputer-vlc-d-une-fonctionnalite-tres-appreciee.html[Numerama] AOL force VideoLan à amputer VLC d'une fonctionnalité très appréciée/abr / /lilia href=http://www.01net.com/editorial/518517/loppsi-les-critiques-de-la-cnil/[01net] Loppsi : les critiques de la Cnil/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/16032-dessin-anime-hadopi-france-5-reconnait-des-erreurs-factuelles-et-annonce-une-suite.html[Numerama] Dessin animé Hadopi : France 5 reconnaît des erreurs factuelles et annonce une suite/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/super-hadopi-defend-les-artistes-contre-super-crapule-39752578.htm[ZDNet] Super Hadopi défend les artistes contre Super Crapule/abr / /li/a/li/ul br / br / (...)

21:05
"The shaded areas reflect areas we don’t have service and the light areas where we do have..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“The shaded areas reflect areas we don’t have service and the light areas where we do have service. Currently the Great Lakes are light, and implies that we deliver into the lake. Please shade all of the lakes.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oC8pk96xh-0txsteliuoH_H_NNA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oC8pk96xh-0txsteliuoH_H_NNA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oC8pk96xh-0txsteliuoH_H_NNA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oC8pk96xh-0txsteliuoH_H_NNA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

20:41
Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop 2.5 disponible en téléchargement
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'Open Virtual Desktop est un logiciel de type Bureau Virtuel permettant de fournir des applications ou des bureaux complets avec applications, qu'elles soient Linux et/ou Windows, dans le navigateur des utilisateurs. Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop délivre des applications tournant sur des serveurs Linux ou Windows Terminal Services, à distance dans le navigateur web (avec greffon Java). Le résultat est donc multi-plateforme (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, thinclient).br / br / À noter qu'il faut évidemment des serveurs Windows (2003 ou 2008) pour permettre l'utilisation de logiciels développés pour cette plateforme. Les applications disponibles par défaut incluent la suite office OpenOffice.org, le navigateur web Firefox, le client email Thunderbird, les logiciels de messagerie instantanée Kopete et Pidgin... Des milliers d'autres peuvent être installés et déployés par l'administrateur système. br / br / La version 2.5 de cette solution Open Source (GPL v2) est disponible depuis aujourd'hui en téléchargement. Cette nouvelle version se concentre principalement sur des améliorations permettant des déploiements à large échelle au niveau des serveurs d'applications et des annuaires. Jusqu'à 50 000 utilisateurs semblent pouvoir être supportés.br / br / Il reste néanmoins un point à améliorer concernant la gestion audio/vidéo. En effet, à l'heure actuelle, le mode portail OVD v2.5 permet déjà de jouer des MP3 et des vidéos FLV présents dans le répertoire de l'utilisateur. Une prise en charge complète du son sera disponible dès la prochaine version d'Ulteo OVD. br / br / L'OVD peut s'installer sur les versions récentes de Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu et SuSE, et potentiellement sur toute distribution Linux récente. Un DVD embarquant tout le système, avec un système hôte, est également proposébr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.ulteo.com/home/fr/news/2010/06/30La nouvelle initiale/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.ulteo.com/home/ovdi/openvirtualdesktop/featuresLa page des fonctionnalités et copies d'écran/abr /

15:02
Client: “The designer will make no decisions regarding this site’s design! Where was the...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pbClient:/b “The designer will make no decisions regarding this site’s design! Where was the designer while I raising money for this venture?!”/p pbMe:/b “Art school?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ds529WPXyY5biOdWcBEGk_fw_SQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ds529WPXyY5biOdWcBEGk_fw_SQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ds529WPXyY5biOdWcBEGk_fw_SQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ds529WPXyY5biOdWcBEGk_fw_SQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:21
RedNotebook 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

RedNotebook est un logiciel sous licence GPLv2 qui vous permet de tenir un journal. Il vous aide ainsi à garder trace de vos notes et pensées et de naviguer à travers celles-ci via un calendrier, un nuage de tags, une hiérarchie de catégories ou un moteur de recherche.br / br / RedNotebook est écrit en Python et GTK. Il est donc possible de le faire fonctionner sur de nombreuses plateformes dont GNU/Linux, Mac OS X et Windows. Il est traduit en 16 langues, dont le français.br / br / Ses principales fonctionnalités sont :br / ulliL'export d'un journal en PDF, HTML ou texte brut ;br / /liliPossibilité de formater le texte et d'inclure des images ou fichiers ;br / /liliReconnaissance automatique des URL et adresses de courriel ;br / /liliLa prise en charge du glisser-déposer ;br / /liliLa correction orthographique ;br / /liliEnregistrement automatique dans des fichiers plats, en local ou à distance (ssh, ftp ou webdav) ;br / /liliDes gabarits par jour de la semaine ou nommés ;br / /liliPossibilités avancées comme gérer plusieurs journaux ou chiffrer un journal./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://digitaldump.wordpress.com/projects/rednotebook/RedNotebook/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/rednotebook/Télécharger RedNotebook/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://freshmeat.net/projects/rednotebookLes dernières versions/abr /

5:39
Blaming Google and Android for Calling ID Spoofing
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. An article on Slashdot today seems to blame Google and Android for the ease with which two Caller ID spoofing programs can manipulate Caller ID and gain illicit access to ATT (and other) voicemail systems. It even attempts to...

June 29, 2010
21:02
"We’re not Jewish but we’re Jews, if you know what I mean."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“We’re not Jewish but we’re Jews, if you know what I mean.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fGcsTzu2TlT8l_ZO5SHnwMFnzRs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fGcsTzu2TlT8l_ZO5SHnwMFnzRs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fGcsTzu2TlT8l_ZO5SHnwMFnzRs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/fGcsTzu2TlT8l_ZO5SHnwMFnzRs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:01
Boss charges into my office furiously, two days after the company site goes live. Boss: “Carl...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pBoss charges into my office furiously, two days after the company site goes live./p pstrongBoss:/strong “Carl just showed me that people can right-click our site and emview all our code/em.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Well, yes, that’s how web browsers work.”/p pstrongBoss:/strong “Take the whole thing down, emnow/em! I’ll be damned if I’m going to give our competitors all our god-damn code!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hwRErBVZYQWAccvfXFPm-Rtnhqk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hwRErBVZYQWAccvfXFPm-Rtnhqk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hwRErBVZYQWAccvfXFPm-Rtnhqk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hwRErBVZYQWAccvfXFPm-Rtnhqk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:26
If We Told You That, We Would Have to Shoot You
» ‎ What To Fix

What product can you buy that is expensive, works with your PC, does things that could be critical to your health, but the salesman can't tell you how to use it?

Sounds stupid, huh?

A lot of medical products, that's what.

I found this out during a long and painful experience with Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

I can't breathe at night -- it's not being fat, although I am, it's that for some reason the muscle tone in my neck sucks. So as soon as I drop off to sleep, my throat closes up and I stop breathing. As my blood oxygen levels drop, adrenalin kicks in, I wake up a little bit, my throat opens up, and then I immediately pass out again.

Most people have some form of obstruction when sleeping. However when it reaches over 120 times per hour, you're basically waking up twice a minute. That means no REM, tossing and turning all night, your adrenalin and stress hormones are in high gear, your heart rate is surging all night long, your blood pressure is out of whack -- as you can imagine, not a good thing. If left untreated, OSA at that level can lead to heart attack and stroke. Early in life.

So I went to the doc and told him my problem. Told him I needed a CPAP. (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure -- a device that does not breathe for you, but keeps your airway open so that you can breathe) My wife and I have been observing the symptoms for years, we're done the research, and now it is time for action. He said I needed to go to a pulmonary specialists first -- a guy who specializes in lungs and hearts. Why? Because it had to do with breathing. Could I have just went to the pulmonary guy first? No, they won't take you without a referral.

I go to the pulmonary guy. Tell him I have this problem, have had it for years, it's gotten bad enough that I am unable to get enough sleep at night and my health is going down the toilet. I need a CPAP. Pronto.

Do I get a CPAP? Nope. I get a "sleep study"

Sleep studies cost $2000 and they are very important to make sure that you really have the problem that you say you do. Or at least that's what they told me. They measure your breathing, pulse, movements, and blood oxygen through the night. They also can fit you for a mask to use with your CPAP and show you how to use one. You'd think sticking a mask on your face would be fairly simple to learn, but it's good to have support.

I show up, tell them my problem, and say "So, once you measure this, do you start fitting me for a mask?"

Nope. We send you back to the pulmonary guy. We just take measurements. Another guy comes in during the day and reviews the data. Then we send the data to your pulmonary guy and he makes a decision.

Gee, I thought I had already made the decision.

Did the sleep study. Went back to the pulmonary guy.

Can I get my CPAP now?

Nope. He tells me yes, it looks like you have Obstructive Sleep Apnea (which was very much a "no shit?" kind of moment for me) Now you must have a CPAP.

Yay! Cool! Got one here? It's been 4 weeks since I started this and I'm feeling the worst I ever have in my entire life. I will go to another hundred tests and doctors, just please give me a CPAP so I can breathe tonight.

Nope. Dude, you got to go back for another sleep study. We just make the diagnosis here, the sleep study guys are responsible for fitting and making sure it's working okay. They make sure the diagnosis is correct. Maybe it was my imagination, but somewhere far away I could hear cash registers ringing.

Back to the sleep study, where another $2K later I have a temporary mask and my first real night's sleep in months or years. But no CPAP. Where's the CPAP? Hell, you got to go to the medical supply place for that. We don't sell CPAPs. What do you think we are, a home medical device provider?

Off I trot to the medical supply place.

By this point I'm starting to get a little concerned. Even though I am currently under insurance, for most of my life I have been self-pay. And I need this CPAP thing. It's not like a new hat. It's not even like a car, or a house. I need this CPAP thing like I need air. So what happens if I have no insurance and the one I have breaks? What if the power goes out? What if it stops working well? What if my condition changes? It's not like I can play pin-the-tail-on-the-billing-chain every time something needs tweaking. After all, this is my breathing we're talking about. I am very fond of breathing.

So I call the doc and make sure that it's an APAP -- Automatic Positive Airway Pressure device. Through my research I found out that the automatic ones will adjust themselves during the night. That means less fooling around with doctors.

At the medical supply place, I finally get an APAP. But it was programmed to be a CPAP. The doc wrote the prescription for an automatic machine, but that it would be set on a fixed setting.

So the automatic machine was set to run in non-automatic mode. Why? As best as I can tell, for safety. We can't have folks running these machines just any way they want. If it needs adjusting, I was told, just call us up, bring in the chip, and we'll turn it up or down a notch or two.

But how will you know if what you are doing is correct? How will I know when to bring it in? Hey if you start having a lot of problems, let us know and we can reschedule a sleep study. Find out what's going on.

!@#$%$@#

I have reached the end of my patience. The medical system is a system between providers -- doctors, test takers, diagnosticians, pharmacies, and such -- and payers -- insurance companies and government programs and such. Nowhere in that equation was the patient, although everybody was supposed to be in it for him. Nobody had any malice, everybody was acting as carefully and precisely as they could and they all had my best interests at heart. But somewhere along the way I stopped being helped and started being herded.

That's not happening.

Programmer Versus The System

So I go home and find a pulse oximeter -- a little device that measures my pulse and heart rate over night and then reports to me what is happening. It's not a $2000 sleep study, but if my oxygen is fine and my heart rate isn't spiking? For all I care things are working fine.

I have decided to go off the doc treadmill and start taking control of this thing.

The pulse oximeter shows up. Cool little gadget, a PulseOx 7500 Wrist Oximeter, plugs right into a USB port, and after some screwing around I got it to work.

But the program to access the data is proprietary. The data is proprietary. Hell, the USB drivers are proprietary. The company that makes the device doesn't support the software and the guys who made the software are long gone (both of these thing probably happened for liability reasons). So could I have the spec? I'll write my own program to pull the data? Nope. The spec does not exist on the net. Aside from using the software they provide to read and display the data, I have no options. Can I correlate it into larger groups? Perform my own statistical analysis? Export to a standard format? Nope, nope, nope,

Ok, how about re-programming the CPAP to go into full auto mode? After hours of googling, I can't find a way to do that either. For a machine with a data card, a processor, and all these smarts it doesn't seem to want to talk to other machines.

I even found out that my machine was monitoring my breathing habits during the night -- it could tell me of obstructions. Between that and the PulseOx I had a pretty damned good set of instrumentation, but the machine couldn't tell me what it knew. That was for the doctors. Not the user.

"If you have any problems or would like us to look at the data, just bring in the card and we'll take a look" the nurse helpfully told me on the phone.

So I started calling people who sold CPAPs on the net. Spoke to one guy last week. If I bought a new machine, paid for it with my own money, do I get the technical guide along with the user's guide? Maybe a link to a SDK somewhere?

"I can't tell you how to configure your machine or how to get data from it," the guy told me, "the FDA strictly forbids me from telling you the details of how to operate the machine except as a user"

How about not setting the machine, but just getting the diagnostic information it contains? Nope.

I can be a user, but I can't be an informed user. If I want information, I must go to the magic people who charge me (or somebody else) money. After all, what would silly old me know about reading such complex information? It would do nothing but confuse me.

Now I'm not shooting up morphine -- I'm basically using a machine that maintains pressure in my throat while I sleep. Best I can tell, there is nothing addictive or harmful about this situation -- especially compared with strangling myself while I sleep each night. But the machine vendors have a deal with the docs and the techs and the specialists and the rest of the system where everything is a walled garden and I'm not invited in. I'm just the owner, the user, the human being.

If this situation existed anywhere else where we paid tens of thousands of dollars, people would be outraged. But it's all hidden here, except for those who are stuck on their own. Worse, the system is rigged so that open and shared information is harmful to those who provide it, so the incentives are all for controlling more and more information and charging for access (usually in the name of safety or risk or whatever). And so it will simply get more complex and difficult to access.

Meanwhile I've got a cool machine that could help me understand my condition, and I can't do anything but plug it up and turn it on.

"I could tell you how to program it, " the salesman said last week, "but then I'd have to shoot you"

He laughed.

10:25
PyPy 1.3 et newthreading
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy title=Définition WikipédiaPyPy/a 1.3 est sorti ce 26 juin. Pour mémoire, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy title=Définition WikipédiaPyPy/a est une implémentation de Python, réalisée elle-même en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python%20(langage) title=Définition WikipédiaPython/a. br / Il y a deux grandes nouveautés pour cette version :ulliUne amélioration du compilateur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIT title=Définition WikipédiaJIT/a, beaucoup de bogues ont été corrigés et la vitesse d'exécution a été augmentée ;br / /liliGestion des extensions écrites en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langage_cC/a pour l'interpréteur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython title=Définition WikipédiaCPython/a introduite en version alpha. Pour l'utiliser, il suffit d'activer ce support via emimport cpyext/em et de recompiler, PyPy n'étant pas binairement compatible avec CPython, avec empypy setup.py build/em.br / /li/ul br / Une autre actualité récente est la sortie de emnewthreading/em en tant que iproof of concept/i. CPython utilise un verrou global (acronym title=Global Interpreter Locka href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPython#Le_Global_Interpreter_LockGIL/a/acronym) qui limite fortement l'utilisation de plusieurs thread avec Python à cause du partage de ressource. emnewthreading/em permet de contourner le GIL pour qu'un objet soit bloqué seulement quand une classe s'exécute à l'intérieur. De plus, les objets synchronisés sont accessibles par plusieurs thread séquentiellement.br / br / Les auteurs se sont notamment inspirés du monde Java et espèrent permettre ainsi des restrictions moins fortes pour pouvoir se débarrasser du GIL.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2010/06/pypy-13-released.htmlPyPy 1.3/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/2010-June/008407.htmlL'annonce de newthreading/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/newthreading/newthreading/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/newthreadingintro.htmlLa documentation de newthreading/abr /
10:16
Résultats d'un sondage aux utilisateurs de Debian
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 10 juin, un sondage a été lancé auprès des utilisateurs de Debian. Ce sondage portait sur divers sujets comme l'utilisation faite du système, les contributions apportées, les composants non libres et la politique de publication des versions.br / br / Ce sondage correspondait bien au point numéro 4 du a href=http://www.debian.org/social_contractContrat social Debian/a : les priorités de Debian sont ses utilisateurs et les logiciels libres.br / br / Ce sondage est maintenant clos et dépouillé. Avec 3258 répondants dont moins de 20% de contributeurs directs à Debian, c'est le plus gros sondage d'utilisateurs de Debian réalisé.br / br / Une synthèse des résultats les plus marqués montre que les utilisateurs apprécient largement les caractéristiques qui font la spécificité de Debian :br / ulliDebian est surtout utilisé sur les machines de bureau, puis sur les portables et les serveurs.br / /liliLes utilisateurs apprécient les a href=http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelinesPrincipes du logiciel libre selon Debian./abr / /liliDebian ne doit pas retirer sa section emnon-free/em.br / /liliLes utilisateurs préfèrent que Debian soit « publiée quand elle est prête » plutôt qu'à dates fixes.br / /liliSi Debian devait être publiée à date fixe, les utilisateurs préféreraient un intervalle d'un à deux ans entre chaque version./li/ul br / iacronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym/i : Ce sondage n'a pas été réalisé de façon officielle par l'organisation Debian mais par un développeur Debian.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dDBMcWwtUmZBMXo1RFFHdG5jUEREb0E6MALe sondage/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://twerner.blogspot.com/2010/06/results-from-debian-community-poll.htmlRésultats — 1re partie/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://twerner.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-results-from-debian-community-poll.htmlRésultats — 2e partie/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://twerner.blogspot.com/2010/06/debian-community-poll.htmlAnnonce du sondage/abr / (...)
June 28, 2010
22:33
Parution du numéro 3 de l'International Free and Open Source Software Law Review
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'iInternational Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.)/i (revue juridique internationale sur le FLOSS) est une publication collaborative sur le droit/le juridique, autour des questions liées au logiciel libre (droit d'auteur, utilisation des licences, interprétation des licences, standards ouverts, jurisprudence, etc.). Les articles sont en anglais. Certaines sections sont revues par les pairs. La publication est bisannuelle.br / br / L'objectif est de fournir en « open access »/libre accès du contenu pour permettre les échanges de connaissance. Les licences acceptées sont certaines Creative Commons (de préférence avec permission d'oeuvres dérivées, obligatoirement avec permission d'utilisation commerciale), la GNU FDL et le domaine public.br / br / La troisième édition a été publiée le 17 juin 2010. Voir les sommaires des trois premières éditions dans la suite de l'article.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/indexInternational Free and Open Source Software Law Review/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/issue/view/1Édition 2009 volume 1/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/issue/view/2Édition 2009 volume 2/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/issue/view/3Édition 2010/abr / (...)

21:01
Client: “I want a way to track all the people that come to my site. Names, addresses,...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I want a way to track all the people that come to my site. Names, addresses, telephone numbers and cell phone.”/p pstrongUs:/strong “Well, there are some tools to capture visitor information but not to that level unless the viewer supplies that to you. They would have to register at the site and that kills page views.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I don’t know why this is so fucking hard! You are the 5th firm to tell us that! Its fucking 2009, can’t anyone make the internet work right?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bT7Q5qNaAAYeb44BsjUvoeZRTNg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bT7Q5qNaAAYeb44BsjUvoeZRTNg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bT7Q5qNaAAYeb44BsjUvoeZRTNg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/bT7Q5qNaAAYeb44BsjUvoeZRTNg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

16:36
Messenger Social: Email and Social News Feeds are the new Peanut Butter and Jelly
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpOne of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together. /p pOver on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/25/sharing-2-0.aspx"Sharing 2.0/a/p blockquote h5emOur data is everywhere/em/h5 pemPeople store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:/em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_1F184C46.png"emimg title="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" border="0" alt="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_thumb_5F00_6C4845D1.png" width="349" height="332" //em/a/p pemIt would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from /ema href="http://mobile.live.com"emmobile phones/em/aem and PCs that you may not own./em/p h5emWe're putting it all out there/em/h5 pemIt seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo amp; video dedicated sites, etc.)/em/p pemfont color="#ff0000"Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere./font They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news./em/p /blockquote pWith regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/29/email-in-a-world-of-social-networking.aspx"Email in a World of Social Networking/a where he wrote/p blockquote pemRecently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who useb AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/b, and bYahoo! Mail/b – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us./em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_012EE270.jpg"emimg title="Graphic comparing communication choices" border="0" alt="Graphic comparing communication choices" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_thumb_5F00_2EB00233.jpg" width="252" height="349" //em/a/p ul liembYou’re still very attached to your personal email accounts/b. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.#160;#160;#160;#160;#160; /em/li liembEmail is today’s tool of choice/b for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center /em/li liembEmail is your online photo album, too/b. font color="#ff0000"People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos./font/em /li /ul /blockquote pOne of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to a href="http://www.facebook.com"http://www.facebook.com/a and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ. /p pSo what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked. img style="border-bottom-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-left-style: none" class="wlEmoticon wlEmoticon-smile" alt="Smile" src="http://shared.live.com/5oeCPTazLAJxhccDO!c5Cg/emoticons/smile_regular.gif" /#160;/p h3Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social/h3 pOne of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed. /p pOn the web: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prQFlmXC5HmJCTD_E9XioEJakrUi5NtyydYVv4mSUbEyTIRLIHk4GFbXT_IpXyDmGaGE9olKI5JWg1c9ujptF0w/photo%20email.png" //p pOn the desktop: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1psiIm85CQm909os106w2i3PbPGiDpmS5Bib5IRdaWlsp-67-CEA_NacZuQSQL4jPbZnATo_xdsc1RnL4lblFbrA/despair.jpg" //p h3#160;/h3 h3Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social/h3 pThe goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pB7-_z8FHbEaz3076rs72sYMVIwqum-UxeWs-ZsGhsHze6d-5hUD6eaLqERqdSeXps09QHaLuzGSsv9iumZOIzg/comment%20email.png" //p pin the Messenger Social feed. /p h3/h3 h3What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?/h3 pSince Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live-messenger/id376196406?mt=8#"Windows Live Messenger iPhone app/a from the Apple App Store(comment #33). /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pvWcvyZY3kLa67LAzmTls0rFM8ZNh-I364lkxPZtwpuFHZySHhSwg3mHiOdStWjnAjCrjGOSQ0hUghrg4HWOY3w/1277313973_695268.jpeg" //p pimg title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Waka+Flocka+Flameamp;field-title=Oh+Lets+Do+itamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Waka Flocka Flame/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Waka+Flocka+Flame+Oh+Lets+Do+Itamp;x=0amp;y=0"Oh Lets Do It (remix) (feat. Gucci Mane, P. Diddy amp; Rick Ross)/a img title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

16:09
Our First Hiring post…
» ‎ CaptainDash

CaptainDash is now on a recruiting phase… We are creating several hiring opportunities, as follow. Oviously we would rather have people who have some interest for the data field, meaning dashboards and datavisualization. Motivation and start-up state-of-mind are obviously key to us. Graphic Designer: In the short term, we are offering a trainee position for [...]

15:00
The Coupon Puzzle
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I have patented an exciting new marketing technique, the [Coupon Puzzle]. Consumers will receive envelopes with puzzle pieces that they will have to assemble to find out what the coupon is. Have you ever designed a puzzle before?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I can’t say that I have, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Can you give me specifics on the file set-up from your printing company?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Actually, I’d like for you to design the [coupon puzzle] first, then you can market your design to businesses in your area. I was thinking [coupon puzzles] would work great on pizza boxes, in local newspaper racks, gas stations etc. Once you make some sales, we can determine the quantity to print. These [coupon puzzles] are really going to be the next big thing in the coupon industry, even the executives at Valpak thought it was a great idea. And you are going to have a monopoly in your area. You will keep 5% of all sales you make.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “So.. you want me to design the piece, sell the product, and handle the printing? And my pay would be based on sales?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/E6MTkkYZ7AY9FsurpHxG8BklUNg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/E6MTkkYZ7AY9FsurpHxG8BklUNg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/E6MTkkYZ7AY9FsurpHxG8BklUNg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/E6MTkkYZ7AY9FsurpHxG8BklUNg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:40
12 ans de LinuxFr.org
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

LinuxFr.org fête aujourd'hui ses 12 ans.br / br / Bon anniversaire LinuxFr.org ! Merci à tous ceux qui ont contribué et contribuent au succès du site (administration système, développement, modération, dons, écriture de contenus, etc.). Le meilleur moyen de nous dire merci est de a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlproposer une dépêche/a pour faire vivre le site.br / br / Côté a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/chiffres/a, le site comporte plus de 26000 dépêches et autant d'entrées de forum, 29000 journaux, 190 sondages, et plus de 1,1 million de commentaires.br / br / Une dépêche début juin sur l'a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/02/26937.htmlactivité du site/a ayant déjà fait un retour sur l'activité de l'équipe de modération et les évolutions techniques en cours, je ne reviens pas dessus.br / br / Le concours pour gagner deux livres « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité » (de Sébastien Rohaut, aux Éditions ENI) se poursuit jusqu'au 9 juillet. Actuellement les deux plus longues séries éligibles ont une longueur de trois jours, il est donc facile de faire mieux. À vous de jouer.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26968.htmlDLFP : Concours LinuxFr.org en cours/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/01/02/26304.htmlDLFP : Statistiques 2009/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/06/28/25650.htmlDLFP : Grand quizz des 11 ans/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/20/26762.htmlDLFP : Dernière réunion des admodérolecteurs/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2008/07/02/24291.htmlDLFP : RMLL 2008 - Dix ans/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/07/09/25714.htmlDLFP : RMLL 2009 - Retour d'expérience sécurité sur 11 ans/abr /

3:59
Messenger Social: Email and Social News Feeds are the new Peanut Butter and Jelly
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpOne of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together. /p pOver on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/25/sharing-2-0.aspx"Sharing 2.0/a/p blockquote h5emOur data is everywhere/em/h5 pemPeople store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:/em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_1F184C46.png"emimg title="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" border="0" alt="Graph illustrating where we store our photos" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/Where_5F00_we_5F00_store_5F00_our_5F00_photos_5F00_thumb_5F00_6C4845D1.png" width="349" height="332" //em/a/p pemIt would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from /ema href="http://mobile.live.com"emmobile phones/em/aem and PCs that you may not own./em/p h5emWe're putting it all out there/em/h5 pemIt seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo video dedicated sites, etc.)/em/p pemfont color="#ff0000"Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere./font They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news./em/p /blockquote pWith regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/29/email-in-a-world-of-social-networking.aspx"Email in a World of Social Networking/a where he wrote/p blockquote pemRecently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who useb AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/b, and bYahoo! Mail/b – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us./em/p pa href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_012EE270.jpg"emimg title="Graphic comparing communication choices" border="0" alt="Graphic comparing communication choices" src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Blogs.Components.WeblogFiles/windowslive/CommunicationChoice_5F00_thumb_5F00_2EB00233.jpg" width="252" height="349" //em/a/p ul liembYou’re still very attached to your personal email accounts/b. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools. /em/li liembEmail is today’s tool of choice/b for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center /em/li liembEmail is your online photo album, too/b. font color="#ff0000"People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos./font/em /li /ul /blockquote pOne of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to a href="http://www.facebook.com"http://www.facebook.com/a and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ. /p pSo what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked. img style="border-bottom-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-left-style: none" class="wlEmoticon wlEmoticon-smile" alt="Smile" src="http://shared.live.com/5oeCPTazLAJxhccDO!c5Cg/emoticons/smile_regular.gif" / /p h3Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social/h3 pOne of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed. /p pOn the web: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1prQFlmXC5HmJCTD_E9XioEJakrUi5NtyydYVv4mSUbEyTIRLIHk4GFbXT_IpXyDmGaGE9olKI5JWg1c9ujptF0w/photo%20email.png" //p pOn the desktop: /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1psiIm85CQm909os106w2i3PbPGiDpmS5Bib5IRdaWlsp-67-CEA_NacZuQSQL4jPbZnATo_xdsc1RnL4lblFbrA/despair.jpg" //p h3 /h3 h3Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social/h3 pThe goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pB7-_z8FHbEaz3076rs72sYMVIwqum-UxeWs-ZsGhsHze6d-5hUD6eaLqERqdSeXps09QHaLuzGSsv9iumZOIzg/comment%20email.png" //p pin the Messenger Social feed. /p h3/h3 h3What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?/h3 pSince Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/windows-live-messenger/id376196406?mt=8#"Windows Live Messenger iPhone app/a from the Apple App Store(comment #33). /p pimg src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pvWcvyZY3kLa67LAzmTls0rFM8ZNh-I364lkxPZtwpuFHZySHhSwg3mHiOdStWjnAjCrjGOSQ0hUghrg4HWOY3w/1277313973_695268.jpeg" //p pimg title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularunfiltered=1field-keywords=field-artist=Waka+Flocka+Flamefield-title=Oh+Lets+Do+itfield-label=field-binding=sort=relevancerankAdv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Waka Flocka Flame/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicfield-keywords=Waka+Flocka+Flame+Oh+Lets+Do+Itx=0y=0"Oh Lets Do It (remix) (feat. Gucci Mane, P. Diddy Rick Ross)/a img title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

0:48
Why the New Federal Trusted Internet Identity Proposal is Such a Very Bad Idea
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Last Friday, in White House Proposes Vast Federal Internet Identity Scheme, I posted a brief thumbnail expressing my major concerns regarding the expansive federal Internet Trusted Identity proposal. Here are a few details explaining why Im taking such a...

June 27, 2010
21:00
Me: “Could you please provide us with details of what elements you would like to be included...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Could you please provide us with details of what elements you would like to be included on the homepage so our designers know what they need to include.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Sure, the site needs to be Professional, Clean/Crisp, Global, Proactive, Eco-Friendly and Dynamic. Hope that helps!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P671LgL2PA8tafrmGzsY7yU6m7o/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P671LgL2PA8tafrmGzsY7yU6m7o/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P671LgL2PA8tafrmGzsY7yU6m7o/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P671LgL2PA8tafrmGzsY7yU6m7o/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
Client: “How about we pay you in free alcohol?” Me: “Only if I can make your...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “How about we pay you in free alcohol?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Only if I can make your poster out of macaroni noodles.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rHjTcrvxyhwBnEc4wM2D_rQn0Is/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rHjTcrvxyhwBnEc4wM2D_rQn0Is/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rHjTcrvxyhwBnEc4wM2D_rQn0Is/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rHjTcrvxyhwBnEc4wM2D_rQn0Is/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
June 26, 2010
21:02
"I had an absolutely horrible thought this evening while I was working on the various pages! Since..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I had an absolutely horrible thought this evening while I was working on the various pages! Since the text is white lettering will the search engines be able to ‘read’ it?”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rakgM4b-w2K83xyd82RaXzSnXnY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rakgM4b-w2K83xyd82RaXzSnXnY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rakgM4b-w2K83xyd82RaXzSnXnY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/rakgM4b-w2K83xyd82RaXzSnXnY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:00
"Left click? But the mouse is in my right hand…."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Left click? But the mouse is in my right hand….”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hhnFcRHAUKRwNZCHZF6RZFa7HGw/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hhnFcRHAUKRwNZCHZF6RZFa7HGw/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hhnFcRHAUKRwNZCHZF6RZFa7HGw/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hhnFcRHAUKRwNZCHZF6RZFa7HGw/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

5:11
White House Proposes Vast Federal Internet Identity Scheme
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. The White House has just released the draft of a rather chilling document -- tellingly hosted on Department of Homeland Security servers -- that proposes the creation of a vast, federally-led Trusted identities in Cyberspace infrastructure that would potentially...

June 25, 2010
22:18
Clients From Hell for the iPhone, available now! →
» ‎ Clients From Hell

img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4k8h6M1CO1qzwya5o1_500.png"/br/br/pa href="http://clientsfromhell.net/app" target="_blank"Clients From Hell for the iPhone, available now! →/a/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/spsPXsHDcDd5ZvrE80IYMDdIU5M/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/spsPXsHDcDd5ZvrE80IYMDdIU5M/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/spsPXsHDcDd5ZvrE80IYMDdIU5M/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/spsPXsHDcDd5ZvrE80IYMDdIU5M/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

21:39
Qt Creator 2.0 est sorti
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 22 juin 2010, Nokia a sorti Qt Creator 2.0. Cette version succède à la version 1.3.1. Qt Creator est un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environnement_de_d%C3%A9veloppement_int%C3%A9gr%C3%A9EDI/a (environnement de développement intégré) multiplateforme qui permet de développer facilement en C++ en utilisant Qt. S'initier à la programmation en C++ avec Qt est maintenant plus simple que jamais ! Il suffit d'installer Qt SDK : ce dernier contient Qt Creator 2.0 et Qt 4.6.3.br / br / Pour ne pas paraphraser le ichangelog/i, nous tenterons de résumer les améliorations ainsi : rien n'est révolutionné, mais les fonctionnalités sont affinées et les bogues résiduels disparaissent. Pas mal d'améliorations concernent les plate-formes a href=http://www.symbian.orgSymbian/a et a href=http://maemo.org/Maemo/a.br / br / La prise en charge de Qt Quick (voir plus bas pour la définition) était une des fonctionnalités les plus attendues de cette nouvelle version. Il a malheureusement été désactivé par défaut. La raison est que Qt SDK embarque Qt Creator 2.0 et Qt 4.6.3 ; QML (une des technologies nécessaires à Qt Quick) quant à lui arrive avec Qt 4.7, qui n'est pas encore stabilisé. Quand Qt 4.7 sera stabilisé, Qt Creator 2.1 sortira afin de pouvoir exploiter Qt Quick.br / br / Qu'est-ce que Qt Quick ? C'est l'union des 3 technologies suivantes :ulliQML : un langage déclaratif qui permet la création de GUI (Graphical User Interface) ;br / /liliQt Declarative : la glue entre les fichiers QML et l'application ;br / /lili Qt Creator : cet IDE va embarquer la gestion de QML afin de pouvoir créer des interfaces facilement et rapidement./li/ul À bientôt pour la sortie de Qt Creator 2.1 et Qt 4.7 !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://qt.nokia.com/downloadsTélécharger Qt SDK/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://qt.nokia.com/developer/changes/changes-qtcreator-2.0Le changelog de Qt Creator 2.0/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.developpez.net/forums/d811427/c-cpp/bibliotheques/qt/qt-quick-futur-developpement-dihm-anciennement-declarative-ui/Présentation de Qt Quick/abr /

18:54
ICANN Moves Forward with Dot-Ex-Ex-Ex, while ICM CEO Plans for Big Bucks and Censorship
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. As predicted in ICANN Likely to Approve Dot-Ex-Ex-Ex Domain for Chumps!, it is now reported by AP that ICANN is moving ahead towards final approval of the dot-ex-ex-ex TLD (Top Level Domain). Note in the AP piece how the...

12:43
Thunderbird 3.1 est sorti
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après le renouveau de la version 3.0 en fin d'année dernière, Thunderbird continue son chemin et sort en version 3.1, basé sur Gecko 1.9.2. Cette version corrige des défauts de jeunesse et apporte quelques fonctionnalités.br / br / Au rayon des nouveautés :ulliUne nouvelle barre de filtre rapide, associée à une indexation plus rapide ;/li liUn nouvel assistant de migration et des corrections pour la mise à jour depuis la version 2 ;/li liUn gestionnaire pour les fichiers enregistrés ;/li liAmélioration de la gestion des mots de passe ;/li liAmélioration de l'outil d'ajout de compte mail, en prenant en compte plus de fournisseurs ;/li liAméliorations du design et autres corrections diverses./li/ulUne version compatible de Lightning — extension intégrant le calendrier Sunbird — est également de la partie (version 1.0bêta2).br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/06/24/thunderbird-3-1-is-now-available-for-free-download/Annonce de la sortie/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/3.1/releasenotes/Notes de la version 3.1/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.mozillamessaging.com/fr/thunderbird/features/Fonctionnalités en détail/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/Calendrier Lightning/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/12/09/26247.htmlDépêche LinuxFR sur Thunderbird 3.0/abr /

0:50
Client: “We want out home page to be very minimalistic. We like lots of white space, and only...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “We want out home page to be very minimalistic. We like lots of white space, and only the most important elements. It should look like Google - basically, a logo and one or two other important things.”br/br/strongMe:/strong “Great! In that case, what would you consider to be the one or two most important things?”br/br/strongClient:/strong “Rotating article carousel, dropdown menus, power search, forum list, latest forum posts, member sign-up, news ticker, event countdown, testimonials, featured VIP member, RSS news feed, and four blocks of advertising.”strongbr//strong/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oyg7JprfcDmPVPqIpdMkc4ZGDs8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oyg7JprfcDmPVPqIpdMkc4ZGDs8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oyg7JprfcDmPVPqIpdMkc4ZGDs8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oyg7JprfcDmPVPqIpdMkc4ZGDs8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

0:22
ICANN Likely to Approve Dot-Ex-Ex-Ex Domain for Chumps!
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Word is that tomorrow ICANN is likely to reverse itself yet again, and (under continuing lawsuit threats from the would-be TLD-operator who desperately wants to cash-in on this fiasco) unwisely approve a dot-ex-ex-ex top-level domain. Every word that I...

June 24, 2010
23:53
Sortie d'ownCloud 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 24 juin 2010 est sortie la première version d'ownCloud, un projet de la grande famille KDE visant à offrir aux utilisateurs la possibilité de stocker leurs données chez eux, avec les avantages du stockage sur serveur distant (accessible aussi bien depuis un ordinateur que depuis un PDA, chez soi ou depuis l'extérieur), mais avec tout le contrôle et le respect de la vie privée nécessaires.br / br / Cette version est la première version stable et apporte les fonctionnalités de base du projet.br / br / ownCloud permet de stocker sur un serveur local ou distant des fichiers, puis d'y accéder depuis un point de montage WebDAV ou directement depuis l'interface web. Les transferts sont sécurisés au moyen de SSL si le serveur accueillant ownCloud (qui n'est qu'une simple application PHP) le prend en charge. Les futures versions permettront de stocker encore plus de choses (métadonnées Nepomuk, courriels et contacts Akonadi ainsi que les paramètres de configuration de KDE).br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://owncloud.orgSite web du projet/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://blog.karlitschek.de/2010/06/owncloud-10-is-here.htmlAnnonce «officielle» sur le blog d'un des développeurs/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://socialdesktop.org/L'initiative Social Desktop/abr / (...)

23:23
VidMe Announces Private Video Sharing -- But Fails Big Time
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Ive said it often -- once data is on the Internet, never assume that it can ever really be completely controlled or removed. The latest example of this axiom in action is a new video service announced with much...

22:52
ITWS v1.0 pour réaliser vos sites web et plus...
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Itaapy vient de sortir sa première version importante de itws : un logiciel permettant de réaliser simplement un site web ou un extranet.br / br / Itws est le fruit des projets clients réalisés par Itaapy aussi bien pour des sites vitrines que des sites marchands, des sites dédiés à des projets particuliers ou des sites avec des fonctionnalités spécifiques.br / br / L'idée est d'avoir une prise en main facile avec les fonctionnalités permettant de faire un site vivant : flux RSS, boîtes latérales, nuage de tags, actualité, bannières, sections composites, etc... le tout avec un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/référencement title=Définition Wikipédiaréférencement/a naturel fort.br / br / Itws est basé sur iKaaro, un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Système de gestion de contenu title=Définition WikipédiaSystème de gestion de contenu/a complet avec gestion de fichiers, recherche plein texte (fichiers binaires compris), agenda, gestion des pages multilingues, tracker, etc...br / br / Les principales caractéristiques techniques du CMS sont : ulli Essentiellement dans le langage a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python title=Définition WikipédiaPython/a ;br / /lili Une architecture a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST title=Définition WikipédiaREST/a ;br / /lili Une base de données objet qui stocke les contenus dans leur format d'origine sur le système de fichier ;br / /lili L'utilisation de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/git title=Définition Wikipédiagit/a comme gestionnaire de versions./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.itaapy.com/news/sortie-officielle-d-itws-1.0L'annonce sur le site d'itaapy/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.hforge.org/itwsLa page du projet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.itaapy.com/nos-solutions/itws-gestion-de-contenu-open-source/Page de description d'itws/abr / (...)
21:27
MooseFS, système de fichier réparti à tolérance de panne
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

MooseFS est un système de fichiers distribué méconnu regorgeant de qualités.br / br / En vrac :ulliLe code est distribué sous GPLv3 ;br / /liliIl utilise a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_UserspaceFUSE/a et fonctionne en espace utilisateur ;br / /liliIl dispose d'une poubelle automatique à durée de rétention modifiable à souhait ;br / /liliIl est très simple à déployer et administrer : comptez une heure, lecture de la documentation comprise pour avoir un serveur maître et quatre serveurs de données fonctionnels ;br / /liliCompatible a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIXPOSIX/a, il ne requiert aucune modification des programmes pour pouvoir y accéder ;br / /liliL'ajout de machines pour agrandir l'espace disponible est d'une simplicité enfantine ;br / /liliVous choisissez le nombre de réplicas que vous désirez, par fichier ou par répertoire, pour la tolérance de panne, avec une seule commande, le tout à chaud…/li/ul Le développement de MooseFS a débuté en 2005, et il a été libéré le 30 mai 2008.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.moosefs.org/Site officiel de MooseFS/abr / lien 2 : a href=https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/moosefs-usersListe de diffusion/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://centos.kodros.fr/Dépôt CentOS/abr / (...)
21:20
Sortie de MailNG 0.8
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après quelques mois de développement, la nouvelle version de MailNG (outil prévu pour faciliter la gestion et l'utilisation d'une plate-forme d'hébergement de courriel) est disponible avec son lot de nouvelles fonctionnalités.br / br / Au programme :ulliUn composant webmail, simple pour le moment ;br / /liliUne gestion de préférences par utilisateur ;br / /liliUne gestion des paramètres intégrée dans le composant d'administration ;br / /liliUne nouvelle organisation graphique avec un style revisité ;br / /liliL'utilisation de a href=http://south.aeracode.org/south/a pour le support des migrations du schéma SQL ;br / /liliUne amélioration du composant de gestion de quarantaine amavis ;br / /liliBeaucoup de modifications au niveau du code./li/ul br / Cet outil est toujours écrit en Python, sous licence a href=http://projects.koalabs.org/trac/mailng/browser/COPYINGMIT/a, utilise le framework Django et intègre un peu de Javascript évolué grâce au framework a href=http://mootools.net/Mootools/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://projects.koalabs.org/trac/mailng/ MailNG/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.djangoproject.comDjango/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.mootools.netMootools/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.python.orgPython/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://south.aeracode.org South/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://koalabs.org/~tonio/mailng/MailNG tarballs/abr /

17:41
Tom Tom car kit doesn't work with iPhone 4: here's the fix
» ‎ Mark Trapp. Blog.

p img src="http://marktrapp.com/sites/marktrapp.com/files/imagecache/article_image/blog/Tom-Tom Car Kit.png" alt="" title="" width="425" height="150" / /p pstrongBottom Line:/strong Sticking something 1.78mm/0.07in thick behind the base of the iPhone 4 when sticking it into the iPhone car kit gets the kit to recognize the 30 pin dock connector./p pnbsp;Never underestimate the the internet's ability to solve problems./p pYesterday, I received my new iPhone 4, and quickly found out that the TomTom iPhone car kit does not recognize the phone at all: no GPS fix, no quot;Dockedquot; recognition, nothing. So, I Googled around, and found a few people having the same issue: a href="http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11736729#11736729"the iPhone 4 simply doesn't work with the car kit/a. The consensus when I went to bed last night was that TomTom would have to release a software fix./p pBut when I woke up, I checked again: someone had figured out a href="http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11744346#11744346"the problem and a workaround/a: stick something behind the base of the iPhone so the connector hits the port at the right angle. So, I tried it, and it totally worked.nbsp;/p pI did some testing, and was able to find a pretty good minimum thickness: 0.07 inches, 1.778 mm, or seven 10pt/80lb business cards./p pBehold:/p pa title="iPhone 4 with Tom Tom car kit by itafroma, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/itafroma/4729942929/"img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1160/4729942929_a5b4bbe92c.jpg" width="425" height="318" alt="iPhone 4 with Tom Tom car kit" //a/p pa title="iPhone 4 with Tom Tom car kit by itafroma, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/itafroma/4729943291/"img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1319/4729943291_d0e98a2360.jpg" width="425" height="318" alt="iPhone 4 with Tom Tom car kit" //a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=nvnK2j1zCNA:5y21MaZhU7I:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=nvnK2j1zCNA:5y21MaZhU7I:YwkR-u9nhCs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=YwkR-u9nhCs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marktrapp/blog/~4/nvnK2j1zCNA" height="1" width="1"/

15:08
Clever Age accueille le premier atelier « Git Attitude »
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Clever Age a le plaisir d'accueillir le premier atelier « Git Attitude » dans ses locaux, le samedi 10 juillet 2010 à 9h30. Christophe Porteneuve proposera au cours de cet atelier un tour complet de l'outil de gestion de code source Git. Au programme de la journée, entre autres, on trouvera : Installer un Git récent (Linux / Unix / OS X) Configuration globale, locale, aliases de commande et astuces de prompt Philosophie et architecture ; comparaison avec les SCM centralisés type Subversion / CVS (...)

7:36
Firefox 3.6.4 intègre Electrolysis
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La nouvelle version 3.6.4 du navigateur Firefox vient d'être publiée. Bien que cela soit une version mineure, elle incorpore la fonctionnalité très attendue des utilisateurs : la séparation en processus des greffons.br / br / Firefox 3.6.4 fournit ainsi une navigation sans interruption pour les utilisateurs Windows et Linux après un plantage des greffons Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime ou Microsoft Silverlight. Si un greffon cesse brutalement de fonctionner, cela n'affectera pas les autres onglets et fenêtres de Firefox. Vous aurez alors la possibilité d'actualiser la page pour redémarrer le greffon et ré-essayer (icrash protection/i). Rappelons que Chrome, le navigateur de Google, utilise déjà ce système.br / br / La séparation en différents processus de l'interface utilisateur du navigateur, l'affichage du contenu web et l'exécution des greffons repose sur la plate-forme Electrolysis, un sous-projet de la fondation Mozilla. Electrolysis devrait profiter également à Thunderbird, le client de messagerie électronique de Mozilla.br / br / En outre cette version corrige de nombreuses anomalies ou problèmes de stabilité et quelques problèmes de sécurité.br / br / Cette mouture du logiciel symbolise aussi la nouvelle politique de développement de la fondation Mozilla dévoilée en début d'année et qui consiste à intégrer de nouvelles fonctions à des mises à jour dites « mineures ».br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : la dépêche a été modifiée. Elle indiquait que chaque onglet utilisait un processus séparé, ce qui n'est pas encore le cas. Pour le moment, seuls les greffons tournent dans un processus séparé. Il faudra attendre la prochaine version de Firefox pour la mise en application complète d'Electrolysis.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.mozilla-europe.org/fr/firefox/3.6.4/releasenotes/Notes de cette version/abr / lien 2 : a href=https://wiki.mozilla.org/ElectrolysisElectrolysis/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.mozilla-europe.org/fr/firefox/Page de téléchargement/abr /
7:35
Vrac de brèves du logiciel libre
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Il n'y a pas que les versions majeures qui font l'actualité, le logiciel libre se construisant pas à pas...br / br / a href=http://www.system-linux.eu/index.php?post/2010/06/09/Zonecheck-v3Zonecheck devrait sortir sous peu en v3/a : c'est un logiciel de vérification de configuration DNS. Très utile pour détecter les problèmes les plus courants.br / br / a href=http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/06/09/2140215/Canonical-Developing-Ubuntu-OS-For-TabletsCanonical se lance dans le développement de Ubuntu pour tablettes/a : c'est une version simplifiée et amoindrie, avec la capacité écran tactile. Cette version devrait voir le jour fin 2011.br / br / L'a href=http://www.regardscitoyens.org/lopendata-cest-bien-plus-que-de-la-communication-politique/OpenData/a, ou la disponibilité sous forme libre des données publiques, déjà en place au moins en partie dans plusieurs pays, a bien du mal à trouver son chemin en France.br / br / Le a href=http://lldb.llvm.org/déboggueur LLDB/a du projet LLVM est censé être haute performance et nouvelle génération. Encore en version alpha, il est toutefois utilisable basiquement, et serait a href=http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/06/10/1850205/New-LLVM-Debugger-Subproject-Already-Faster-Than-GDBplus rapide que le vénérable GDB/a.br / br / Microsoft – une fois n'est pas coutume – a href=http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/microsoft-slips-ie-firefox-add-on-into-toolbar-update.arstriche une nouvelle fois/a en cachant une extension Firefox dans une mise à jour de barre d'outil (Search enhancement).br / br / Nokia a clarifié a href=http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/nokia-clarifies-qt-release-roadmap-launches-qt-sdk-10rc.arsla feuille de route de Qt et lance le Qt SDK 1.0RC/a. Ce SDK contient Qt Creator 2.0 et Qt 4.6.3. Ainsi une application pourra être développée à la fois pour Symbian et MeeGo. Qt 4.7 est actuellement en beta, pour une publication à la fin de l'été.br / br / a href=http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2010/06/webgl-on-n900.htmlWebGL fonctionne sur N900/a depuis la PR1.2 du micrologiciel.br / br / Facebook est un des sites les plus visités au monde, et pas seulement parce qu'il est paramétré par défaut comme page d'accueil d'un navigateur par défaut. Cet article survole a href=http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebookl'utilisation massive de logiciels libres/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlÉcrivez vos propres brèves (et gagnez des prix)/abr /
June 23, 2010
20:59
Bonita : Une solution open source de gestion de processus métier simple et puissante
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Bonita est une solution Open Source (GPL) dédiée à l'automatisation de processus métier. Le projet de Bonita Software (BonitaSoft) a été co-fondé par Miguel Valdés Faura, un ancien ingénieur en informatique de l'Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) afin de proposer une alternative Open Source aux solutions existantes commerciales dans le domaine a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A9lisation_de_proc%C3%A9dure_d%27entrepriseBPM/a (Business Process Managment).br / br / Très rapidement remarqué, Bonita s'est vu décerner un prix Open Innovation Awards en 2009 (voir la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/22/27035.htmldépêche linuxfr d'Open World Forum/a parue cette semaine) et rejoint le a href=http://www.ow2.org/consortium OW2/a où il est l'un des logiciels les plus téléchargés.br / br / Cette solution logicielle s'articule autour de trois composants :ulliUn studio de modélisation de processus Bonita Studio, qui tente de relever le défi du standard Business Process Management Notation (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Modeling_NotationBPMN/a) avec une solution graphique simple et intuitive, reprenant les concepts d'un tableau blanc.br / Cet éditeur de processus s'accompagne également de nombreux connecteurs vers des bases de données (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase...), des annuaires LDAP, des services web (SugarCRM, Twitter, Facebook, Google...) ainsi que vers d'autres solutions logicielles (Jboss Drools, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Alfresco...).br / /liliUn moteur d'exécution des processus. Celui-ci est assez flexible pour s'adapter à diverses architectures de systèmes d'information et suffisamment extensible pour intégrer de nouveaux services ou standards qui peuvent émerger dans le BPM.br / /lili Une interface utilisateur de contrôle permettant de lancer l'exécution de processus et de vérifier sous forme de boîte aux lettres de réception le résultat des processus./li/ulAprès un an d'existence, BonitaSoft est devenu l'un des principaux éditeurs de solutions BPM open source et connaît une ascension internationale (France, Espagne, États-Unis, Brésil, Canada, Suisse, Belgique et Malaisie). Pour fêter cet anniversaire, la version 5.2.1 de Bonita vient de sortir et la version 5.3 est déjà en route. Seul bémol, la documentation nécessite une inscription (gratuite) et la solution est packagée uniquement pour la plate-forme Win32.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.bonitasoft.org/Site officiel de Bonita/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.bonitasoft.org/websvn/Source du projet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.bonitasoft.org/blog/Blog du projet/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.bonitasoft.org/Site de la communauté/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.bonitasoft.org/bugs/changelog_page.phpChangeLog/abr /

19:13
Markhams Scale of Ignorance
» ‎ What To Fix
Yesterday a couple of readers gave me grief for all the "knowns", "unknown knowns", "unknown unknowns", etc.. On top of that , the definitions got a little loose in the essay.

So instead of fixing the essay (Gad no! This is the internet! 2-hours work constitutes long-term commitment) I thought I would enumerate the scale of what you can know and what you can't. I'm probably reinventing something from somewhere, but I think these distinctions are important enough to restate. One of the authors from the articles I quote came to the conclusion that you can deal with any amount of unknowns simply by knowing the questions. Hell no. That's totally whacked.

Ten years ago I sat in the office of a high-ranking procurement officer in the military. He was a fast-riser, had a masters in mathematics and was a very sharp guy. I was explaining to him that the way the software development was going on a certain project was troublesome. The people, technology, process, environment, and bureaucracy were not working together. Instead various misunderstandings, agendas, confusion, and ignorance was causing chaos and poor performance.

It was a complicated discussion, made more so because each of the varying factors - people, technology, process, bureaucracy, environment - were pretty dang complicated in their own right. The way they all worked together -- or were supposed to work together -- was even more complex. Remember, this guy was probably a genius. Literally responsible for tens of billions of dollars. But he had no concept of what he didn't know. It was like trying to explain String Theory to Julius Caesar. We just had no place to meet. Sure, given a few weeks of gaining some common understanding, this guy would be teaching me something. There was no stupidity at work -- he was a brilliant man. He wasn't even classically ignorant -- it wasn't like I could give him a class and a couple of tests and somehow that would fix things. We simply couldn't communicate.

I'll never forget what he said.

"I'm not sure I'm following you completely, but you see, I'm on top of the whole thing. I can ask any questions I like and get an answer"

My thoughts were: yes! But you neither know the correct questions, what the answers might imply, or how the answers to one question might lead to other questions!

Simply asking and answering questions is not enough. This guy had the magic power -- whatever he asked, you can be sure that somebody was going to work as hard as they could to come up with an answer. And the project was still hosed up.

So in the interest of simplifying the discussion of how ignorant we all are in various ways, I propose the following scale:
- Level 1: Mastery of Principles and Operations - You understand the deeper principles involved with creating the symbols and relationships. You understand and can use all of the operations in the domain. You can mix and match operations freeform, including changing fluidly changing operations, to reach a larger goal. Because of this knowledge, you also create and modify what the symbols and names mean
  This one is a little complicated, so let's unpack it a bit. Picture a professional card player. He knows what all the cards in the deck are. He knows how to play all of the games involving cards. He knows all the jargon involved with card games. In addition, he knows why some card games are better than others, and he can create his own games on the fly. In fact, given some paper and a pencil, he could create a new card game complete with new kinds of cards, new terms , new rules, new strategies, and new goals. And people would like it. This guy has not only mastered the terms and symbols of cards, he's mastered how those symbols go together -- flush, straight, 3-of-a-kind. He's even mastered how all of the various operations work on cards: drawing a card, using a discard pile, laying down, etc. But it goes beyond that: he knows the principles that all card games are built on: competition, turn-taking, combinatorial logic, etc. He knows why certain combination of rules and cards make a good game and why certain combination don't. Based on this knowledge, he can modify existing games, add new card types, come up with new jargon, heck, create his own game. He is operating at the lowest level of ignorance
- Level 2: Mastery of Operations - You know all the terms and how they all fit together. You are fluently able to perform any of the operations inside this domain. You have mastery of how the operations fit together. In our card game analogy, you can play any game of cards. You know all the card names and all the moves. You know when you do one thing and get one result, other things are now implicated. If you were playing chess, not only would you know the moves and the pieces, but you would know which moves imply other moves. This is the level that our officer did not reach.
- Level 3: Knowledge of Operations - You know what all the things are, and you know how to do things with them. But you're not sure exactly how the strategy works. You're following a cookbook. You've got the immediate things to do, but how they fit together and what they all mean is beyond you. This is probably my current knowledge of chess.
- Level 4: Mastery of Symbols and Terms - Through study and application of some of the operations, you have learned all the terms in the domain. As an example, I grew up in a house where my father was a diesel mechanic. Every night at supper I got to hear him talking about working on trucks. Over a period of years, I became very good at talking about how to work on trucks -- so much that I could even fool people who were professional mechanics. (Not that I tried) But I actually was completely incapable of even changing a flat tire. I knew the words, and could put the words all together in meaningful ways, but that's about it.
- Level 5: Knowledge of Symbols and Terms - This is what you'd get if you spent an hour or so googling some random topic. You'd know a bit, perhaps a lot of words and how some of them fit together. In a pinch you might even sound like you knew what you were talking about. This is the skill level of the average internet commenter when asked to put forth on some topic. Nothing wrong with that! I'm the same way. But it's just the barest minimum to be able to communicate
- Level 6: Knowledge of Adjacent or Similar Domains - At this level of ignorance you know something about a field that is somewhat related. Perhaps you've learned a bit about card-playing by watching TV, and so you've picked up some terms and operations. Perhaps you are an expert in some other game of chance. In this situation you might not know the terms and operations of the domain in question, but you know enough about a similar domain to quickly work in one of the other levels of ignorance. This is typically how people are taught: you give them an analogy to some similar thing they know and tell them "it's mostly like that"
  
  Of course, it's never "exactly" like that, but the generalization works for a while, sometimes for a long while, and it helps people start working in the new domain. This is the expert on frogs that is called upon to work in the field of iguanas. The various analogies may work so well that no problem is ever discovered -- or there may be subtle differences between the domain he knows and the one he is working in. This is the "unknown unknowns" from yesterday's post. The various abstractions and analogies being used seem fine. It's impossible for the practitioner to know if some new terms or procedures completely outside his experience will show up because he has no idea what is in the actual world he is operating in. All abstractions are leaky. Things might come along that he has no terminology for, things could happen that he's never seen before. If you're creating a new business, or learning a new skill, you're going to spend a lot of time here. A lot of breaking-ground science happens here as well.
- Level 7: Lack of all reference - This is the caveman and String Theory. As much as you might like, no amount of communication and practice is going to get a person who has no language or understanding of math to understand, work, and master String Theory. Just ain't happening. Now you might work on a lot of easier domains, like spoken language, or written language, or counting. And at some point you may have raised his ignorance level enough in various areas to begin communicating by analogy and abstraction, but it's completely impossible right now. The caveman has ignorance level 7 when it comes to string theory. Even if he spoke some kind of crude language -- perhaps using grunts to describe various hunting patterns -- you couldn't say anything about String Theory that would make any sense at all to him. If it makes you feel any better, he'd probably judge your hunting ignorance level as 7.
  
  Ignorance Level 7 is where deities are used. We're a couple of cave people on the beach. Never been there before. There is this big body of water. "Auugwheychat!" I say, using a word that has no meaning at all to us. We leave. From now on, "Auugwheychat!" is our word for the ocean. It's ways are mysterious. Who knows what it is made of, or what is in it? Who knows what it does, or how it does it? It is the unknown. It is "Auugwheychat!"
  
  Of course, the human mind can't stand a void, so we immediately start anthropomorphizing it. Level 7 is very uncomfortable, and people will not remain here. "Auugwheychat!" is a woman. It is a jealous lover. It has many legs like the centipede, etc. Welcome to a plausible explanation of the origin of all those Greek and Roman gods. It got so in ancient times that the stories were plethora and many times conflicted with each other -- after all, you got to make up your own as you went along. The gods were so numerous that single rivers or woods would have their own god, which makes sense too. After all ,who in ancient times really understood much about a river? Aside from being made of water, it had all sorts of terms and did all sorts of actions that were completely baffling.
Note that you may physically be unable to move from one level to another. No matter how hard I try, I'm never going to get a slug to understand arithmetic; there's simply no cognitive ability. Perhaps humans are slugs to most of the rest of intelligent life in the cosmos, in which case not only would it be silly to talk to us, it might actually interfere with our evolving into some sort of creature that could understand things. In other cases the cognitive ability is there, it's simply a matter of vastly different life experiences, as in our caveman. Sometimes we have a wide array of life experiences, but we don't have enough in common, or we don't have the time to start creating common models that we can both use, as in our procurement discussion.

The worst case, of course, is when we understand many models that mostly work, but we have no idea where they do not work. We may not even know that there are gaps. We're just humming along using our broad generalizations, working metaphors, and patterns of other models, and things seem to be fine. This is the scientist who speaks out of his subject area, or the historian who tries to explain Bayes Theorem but misses hugely important parts. A vast, vast majority of the time we are at Level 6, which is how it should be. It's probably all we can cognitively manage. Our brains are able to fake higher levels to an amazing degree -- to such a degree that we are not even aware of it.

Some domains are easier for us than others to reach Level 7, Card-playing, for instance, or some forms of math. Some are probably impossible for us. The vast majority of domains we are able to use Level 6 techniques to fake our way up to Level 3 enough that nobody is really the wiser. Most of the time things work the way the way most things work most of the time. But as things get more interconnected, as all the pieces get smaller and hooked together in more complicated ways, the "gotchas" multiply. And are largely invisible. Not a good thing.

15:04
Sortie de Eclipse 3.6 - Helios
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Eclipse Helios arrive enfin après un an d'attente, ce 23 juin. Cette version numérotée 3.6 marque la consolidation des technologies historiquement prises en charge par Eclipse (le monde a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_EEJava JEE/a), l'ouverture vers d'autres technologies et la confirmation en tant que projet libre d'environnement de développement intégré (IDE) le plus dynamique et le plus utilisé dans le monde.br / br / Le travail effectué autour de cette version majeure a été important tant du point de vue de l'implémentation que du point de vue de la vie communautaire du projet, les contributeurs comme la fondation sont moteurs pour qu'Eclipse s'adapte aux nouveaux besoins et incitent à plus de contributions.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.eclipse.org/helios/Eclipse Helios/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://marketplace.eclipse.org/MarketPlace/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/hosting/Eclipse Labs/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://dev.eclipse.org/git/index.htmlMiroir GIT des projets/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/development_process.phpEclipse Development Proces/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://wiki.eclipse.org/EEF_Sample_World_Cup_ForecastsEEF World Cup forecast/abr / (...)
15:00
lxBDPlayer, un lecteur libre de disques Blu-Ray sous Linux
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Alors que VLC vient tout juste de sortir en version 1.1, sachez qu'il existe sous Linux un lecteur libre (GPLv3) dédié pour la lecture des disques optiques au format blu-ray : blxBDPlayer/b. Comme d'habitude, la communauté arrive avec brio à compenser les manques des industriels sous Linux. Dans ce cas, il s'agit d'élèves ingénieurs de l'acronym title=École Supérieure en Informatique, Électronique, AutomatiqueESIEA/acronym.br / br / Développé en Java et basé sur dumpHD et mplayer pour la lecture, il permet de lire relativement simplement les disques Blu-ray. Cependant, il ne prend pas en charge les disques du commerce ayant une protection anticopie (AACS/BD+). Pour pouvoir les lire, il est nécessaire d'utiliser le mécanisme de greffon du lecteur pour installer makemkv afin de contourner la nouvelle protection a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Key_Block title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Media Key BlockMKB/acronym/a. Rappelons qu'en France, la loi DADVSI précise que « iles mesures techniques ne doivent pas avoir pour effet d'empêcher la mise en œuvre effective de l'interopérabilité/i ».br / br / Actuellement en version 0.2.1, l'équipe fournit par défaut un binaire Java, un tarball des sources et des fichiers .deb pour Ubuntu, mais vous trouverez sans souci sur le web un tas de tutoriels pour installer facilement lxBDPlayer d'une part et les greffons d'accès au contenu chiffré d'autre part.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://lxbdplayer.sourceforge.net/lxBDPlayer/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123111dumpHD/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=155110AACS for lxBDPlayer/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/lxbdplayerTutoriel sur Ubuntu-fr/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.hackurx.info/2010/06/lxbdplayer-lecteur-de-film-blu-ray-sous.htmlTutoriel sur le blog Hackurx/abr /

14:00
When Should Management Push Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

After the Boston edition of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, IBM’s Rawn Shah wrote a great follow-up post outlining ten observations from the event. A couple points that I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly were: Adoption is about transforming human behaviors at work – More folks are starting to recognize that it is not trivial to [...]

12:56
Programme du thème transversal « Accessibilité et handicap » des RMLL 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Cette année, le thème « Accessibilité et handicap » des RMLLs est un thème transversal, pour favoriser le contact entre les différents acteurs du Libre et les sensibiliser aux questions d’accessibilité et de handicap. Il y aura ainsi des interventions dans tous les autres thèmes, depuis les mécanismes de l'accessibilité aux jeux audios en passant par la gestion de bibliothèques numériques !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/+-Accessibilite,2-+.htmlProgramme détaillé/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Site des RMLL 2010/abr / (...)
11:28
Nouvelles des logiciels de navigation web
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

bTest Pilot 1.0 bêta/bbr / br / a href=http://mozillalabs.com/testpilotTest Pilot/a est une campagne des Mozilla Labs pour collecter des remontées d'informations de manière structurée. Elle fonctionne par le volontariat grâce à l'utilisation d'une extension Firefox. La version a href=http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/06/07/test-pilot-1-0-beta-released/Test Pilot 1.0 beta/a a été récemment publiée.br / br / Une fois l'extension installée, l'utilisateur peut prendre part aux différentes études proposées, inspecter les données collectées, et choisir de les envoyer. Si une nouvelle fonctionnalité est proposée, il est demandé la permission de l'installer. Les résultats de ces études sont - après anonymisation - publiées sous licences libres, et c'est relativement intéressant : l'utilisation des onglets, le stockage des mots de passes, les entrées de menu les plus utilisées...br / br / bJetpack SDK 0.4/bbr / br / a href=http://mozillalabs.com/jetpackJetpack/a, également issu des Mozilla Labs, a pour but de faciliter la création d'extensions, par l'utilisation des technologies web standards ouverts. Google Chrome et Apple Safari ont également proposé leur système d'extension plus récemment, également basé sur les standards ouverts du web.br / br / Le SDK (Software Development Kit) de Jetpack a href=http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/05/27/announcing-jetpack-sdk-0-4/est disponible en version 0.4/a, et nécessite Python 2.5 ou plus. Il devrait faciliter le développement d'extensions Jetpack.br / br / bFirefox for Maemo 1.1 RC 1/bbr / br / Bien que Maemo soit abandonné au profit de MeeGo, Mozilla continue le développement de Firefox pour Maemo : la a href=http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2010/06/firefox-for-maemo-1-1-rc-1/version 1.1 RC 1 est disponible/a. Elle apporte l'auto-complétion dans l'assistant de formulaire, une refonte de la page d'accueil, la mise à jour automatique des extensions, un meilleur système de tapping (clic du doigt), le mode portrait sur N900, un menu contextuel, une mise à jour du thème de contenu web, un menu site amélioré, l'utilisation des boutons de volumes pour zoomer, la capacité de sauver la page au format PDF, et un rapporteur de crash.br / br / bWebSocket Protocol Updated/bbr / br / WebSocket, le protocole et API du futur, mieux que HTTP couplé à AJAX, évolue rapidement car en cours de standardisation. Google Chrome suit en effet de près les changements dans les spécifications. Ainsi, les développeurs peuvent apporter de vrais commentaires, basés sur des expérimentations. Il faut toutefois bien garder à l'esprit que les changements peuvent induire des cassures et autres incompatibilités.br / br / bGoogle Chrome Frame/bbr / br / a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/google-chrome-frame-now-in-beta.htmlGoogle Chrome Frame/a est disponible en version Bêta, depuis le 8 juin 2010. Google Chrome Frame est un greffon gratuit pour Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 sous Windows 7 / Vista / XP SP2). Des applications comme Google Wave, utilisent déjà Google Chrome Frame pour vous permettre d'utiliser certaines fonctionnalités dans de meilleures conditions.br / br / Plutôt que d'ajouter de clinquantes nouvelles fonctionnalités, l'équipe de développement s'est contentée de corriger plus de 200 erreurs afin de rendre l'intégration à Internet Explorer transparente, tout en améliorant la sécurité, la stabilité et la performance. Ainsi, Google Chrome Frame gère maintenant la fonctionnalité de navigation privée, le nettoyage du cache et le blocage de cookie. De même, toutes les améliorations présentes dans Google Chrome 5.0 sont dans Google Chrome Frame. On pense évidemment HTML5 avec l'audio et la vidéo, canvas, la géolocalisation, les (workers) et les bases de données.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/google-chrome-frame-now-in-beta.htmlGoogle Chrome Frame Beta/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://mozillalabs.com/jetpack/2010/05/27/announcing-jetpack-sdk-0-4/Jetpack SDK 0.4/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2010/06/firefox-for-maemo-1-1-rc-1/Firefox for Maemo 1.1 RC 1 /abr / lien 4 : a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/websocket-protocol-updated.htmlWebSocket Protocol Updated/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://mozillalabs.com/testpilot/2010/06/07/test-pilot-1-0-beta-released/Test Pilot 1.0 bêta/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/websocket-protocol-updated.htmlWebSocket Protocol Updated/abr /
June 22, 2010
21:53
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 24
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 24/strongbr / br / ullia href=http://www.sudouest.fr/2010/06/18/logiciels-libres-et-viables-120065-2780.php[sudouest.fr] L'économie du logiciel libre est rentable/abr / /lilia href=http://www.agoravox.fr/tribune-libre/article/open-data-des-licences-libres-pour-76452[Agoravox] Open Data : des licences libres pour concilier innovation sociale et économique/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ecrans.fr/L-Allemagne-n-aura-pas-son-Hadopi,10167.html[ecrans.fr] L'Allemagne n'aura pas son Hadopibr / /a/lilia href=http://www.directioninformatique.com/DI/client/fr/DirectionInformatique/Nouvelles.asp?id=58044cid=79[directioninformatique.com] Le CHUQ confie à Bell la diffusion d'un logiciel service/abr / /lilia href=http://www.cio-online.com/actualites/lire-quatre-mois-pour-tenter-d-eclaircir-le-contrat-microsoft-defense-nationale-3004.html[cio-online.com] Quatre mois pour tenter d'éclaircir le contrat Microsoft / Défense Nationale/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15986-une-nouvelle-generation-de-drm-proposee-par-l-leee.html[numerama.com] Une nouvelle génération de DRM proposée par l'lEEE/abr / /lilia href=http://www.actualitte.com/actualite/19598-copyleft-creative-commons-droits-auteurs.htm[actualitte.com] Copyleft et licence Creative Commons, gérer ses droits d'auteur sur le web/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/pour-dell-ubuntu-est-plus-securise-que-windows-39752417.htm[zdnet.fr] Pour Dell, Ubuntu est plus sécurisé que Windows/abr / /lilia href=http://www.clubic.com/antivirus-securite-informatique/virus-hacker-piratage/malware-logiciel-malveillant/actualite-346286-decouverte-cheval-troie-ciblant-linux.html[clubic.com] Découverte d'un cheval de Troie ciblant Linux/abr / /lilia href=http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/science-et-technologie/201006/13/01-4289614-acces-public-a-internet-des-merveilles-avec-le-logiciel-libre.php[cyberpresse.ca] Accès public à Internet : des merveilles avec le logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/propriete-d-unix-victoire-definitive-de-novell-sur-sco-39752387.htm[zdnet.fr] Propriété d’Unix : victoire définitive de Novell sur SCO ?/abr / /li/ul br / br / (...)

21:50
We are currently looking to add some great stories to our upcoming book! If you would like to...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pWe are currently looking to add some great stories to our upcoming book! If you would like to potentially get a story published, please send in you terrifying/hilarious stories about clients:/p ul liMaking innapropriate or awkward advances/li liThrowing temper tantrums /li liWho have lashed out at you in public/li liWho have offended you with racist/homophobic/sexist remarks/li /ul pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Dcf5KtaoZK-HmzS6h2yUPU8qHFc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Dcf5KtaoZK-HmzS6h2yUPU8qHFc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Dcf5KtaoZK-HmzS6h2yUPU8qHFc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Dcf5KtaoZK-HmzS6h2yUPU8qHFc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:05
Photo
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img src="http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l46id9zdPm1qzwya5o1_500.png"/br/br/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eEHYFSVcIiOcBoTU1IXhPBMQfas/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eEHYFSVcIiOcBoTU1IXhPBMQfas/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eEHYFSVcIiOcBoTU1IXhPBMQfas/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eEHYFSVcIiOcBoTU1IXhPBMQfas/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

13:30
L'Europe se pose la question des logiciels propriétaires dans les États de l'Union
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après le jugement rendu le 3 juin 2010 par la justice québécoise qui déclarait illégal l'achat de logiciels Microsoft sans lancer une procédure d'appel d'offre alors qu'il existait des logiciels concurrents libres et gratuits, c'est au tour de l'Europe de se poser la question, par intermédiaire de Neelie Kroes.br / br / Neelie Kroes, qui était précédemment commissaire européenne à la concurrence, avait lancé, à l'époque, plusieurs enquêtes contre Microsoft, qui avaient abouti à la condamnation du géant du logiciel à des amendes record pour son refus de partager certaines informations avec ses rivaux et pour l'installation par défaut d'Internet Explorer comme navigateur Web dans Windows.br / br / Aujourd'hui, cette même commissaire européenne est en charge du numérique et elle met en garde les gouvernements européens contre le risque de se voir « ienfermés accidentellement dans une technologie propriétaire/i », visant sans le nommer Microsoft. Elle annonce la mise en place d'un programme de conseils aux États pour qu'ils développent leur utilisation de logiciels libres.br / br / Dans son discours à l'Open Forum Europe, une association de promotion du logiciel libre, la commissaire européenne a souligné que les technologies propriétaires pouvaient à terme devenir tellement prévalentes « ique les alternatives sont systématiquement ignorées/i », alors même qu'il peut exister des solutions équivalentes libres et gratuites. (cf le jugement québécois). Madame Kroes ajoute également que « iC'est (aussi) un gaspillage d'argent public que la plupart des administrations ne peuvent plus se permettre/i ».br / br / Et pendant ce temps, en France, alors que la Gendarmerie a prouvé qu'une migration et une utilisation des logiciels libres étaient possible dans l'administration, d'énormes contrats cadre sont passés avec Microsoft, sans mise en concurrence. Le dernier exemple en date est celui concernant le ministère de la Défense qui équipe tous ses postes de travail avec les logiciels bureautique de la firme de Redmond pour 100 € par poste.br / Les réponses aux députés se font sans publicité et avec toujours les mêmes arguments fallacieux : il ne s'agit que d'une mise à jour du parc et ils veulent pouvoir faire des mises à jour rapides...br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/06/10/l-europe-pousse-les-gouvernements-vers-le-logiciel-libre_1370844_651865.htmlSource de l'info/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/06/04/victoire-judiciaire-pour-le-logiciel-libre-au-quebec_1368034_651865.html#ens_id=1368047Jugement québécois/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/04/26951.htmlDLFP : Victoire pour le Libre au Québec !/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/imprimer-contrat-microsoft-defense-les-reponses-du-ministere-30947-page-2.htmlContrat Microsoft/Défense : les réponses du ministère/abr / lien 5 : a href=https://linuxfr.org//2005/01/14/18082.htmlDLFP : Migration de la gendarmerie sous OpenOffice (en 2005)/abr /
13:23
Sortie du jeu libre Newton Adventure 1.0
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Newton Adventure est un jeu de plate-forme où le personnage principal n'est pas très rapide et ne saute pas très haut. Pour compenser sa faible forme physique, il possède un pouvoir particulier : il peut modifier la gravité et ainsi atteindre des plates-formes éloignées, faire tomber ses ennemis ou déplacer des objets. Sortie en version de démonstration il y a quelques mois, Newton Adventure est désormais un jeu complet.br / br / bLe jeu/bbr / Cette version 1.0 comprend un certain nombre de nouveautés. Newton, le héros du jeu, devra être prudent pour parcourir les six niveaux. Il lui faudra éviter des pièges cruels tels que des haches ou des canons et repousser les attaques de chauve-souris ou de zombies. Il se pourrait bien aussi que son voyage se termine par un affrontement avec un pharaon en colère.br / br / bLe développement/bbr / Newton Adventure est toujours écrit en Java avec les bibliothèques lwjgl pour l'affichage et phys2d pour la physique. L'éditeur de niveau (tiled) est désormais fourni, car l'auteur de tiled a décidé de passer son logiciel de Java à C++ rendant ainsi mon plugin incompatible avec la nouvelle version. Les sources de Newton Adventure sont sous licence BSD tandis que les graphismes et les données du niveau relèvent de la Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 ou de simple autorisation d'utilisation de leur auteur.br / br / bLe futur/bbr / Si le jeu fonctionne bien, je vais essayer de le diffuser un peu plus largement sur internet et essayer de recruter un graphiste afin de donner au jeu une véritable identité.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://newtonadv.tuxfamily.org/?article4/version-1-0Le jeu et ses copies d'écran/abr / lien 2 : a href=https://linuxfr.org//2010/01/02/26305.htmlDLFP : Un nouveau jeu libre : Newton Adventure (dépêche précédente)/abr /

13:01
Back to the Darkness
» ‎ What To Fix

In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

I haven't been blogging much lately, and it all has to do with flying. Fifteen years ago a 22-year-old kid at the airport told me something that's been resonating with me ever since.

In my mid 30s, I had decided to learn to fly. So I went to the airport, where I met a young flight instructor. He seemed like a nice enough fellow. He asked me about my desire to fly. Immediately I went through a list of things I'd like to do -- first I'd like to learn how to navigate, and then I'd like to try out landing on grass strip, and then....

"Hold on a second there, hoss," he said, "Right now you don't even know what you don't know."

As I learned to fly, first as a private pilot, then getting my instrument, commercial, tailwheel, high-performance, and complex ratings (including trying out twins, seaplanes, and stunt planes, among other things) I thought a lot about what he said: I didn't even know what I didn't know.

He was right.

His point was that while I was very aware of what I'd like to do in terms an outsider would understand, I had no domain experience at all in aviation, aside from watching a few movies and being a passenger. It's not just that I didn't know the questions, I wouldn't understand the questions, wouldn't understand what they meant, what the answers might mean, or how the questions fit together. There was no basis for us to have an intelligent conversation.

So we spent a lot of time doing things not on my list: flying slow, approaching a stall, reading METARs, talking about maps, talking about priorities in an emergency (aviate, navigate, communicate), talking about all sorts of domain concepts, talking and learning. We created a common model understood overtly, tacitly, and functionally from which we could start to have a conversation.

You see, I thought I knew what I wanted, and I was right in a way, but in a more important way I was worse than ignorant -- an ignorant person can be taught, he simply needs to be exposed to information -- I was a stranger in a strange land. I was just some guy with a boatload of terms and stories that all kind of fit together in my world-view but had little credence in his -- even though the terms were the same. First I had to learn and be able to physically and symbolically manipulate concepts about what I didn't know, aviation, and then we could start talking about what I'd like to know.

The reason I haven't blogged much lately because I am beginning to feel that the vast majority of what we say and do in the world is horribly incomplete. We're all like kindergarteners to somebody else. We don't know what we don't know. This has very mportant consequences

This may have been meant as a political sidestep,
but is there something very profound here as well?

First I'm not talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people are incompetent believe they have great competence beyond their ken, although this is certainly a subset. I am also not talking about Anosognosia, where people believe they can do things, function in some way, that they cannot, and are unable to realize this, although this too is a subset. I'm talking about the space between being an outsider to a world and being ignorant of it's questions and issues. Cavemen are not ignorant of particle physics: it is outside their world so completely that there's no common ground to discuss knowledge. No amount of questions and answers that is going to get a caveman to start working with bosons.

I started programming in the mid 70s. Back then there were 2 or 3 kinds of personal computers. I learned BASIC on a Commodore PET, but it could have just as easily been on an Altair 8800 (some acquaintances had one) The cognitive leap between turning the thing on -- just like a light-switch -- and programming was minuscule. I could have had my sister (yuck!) programming with just a small amount of help. When I started programming, nobody had PCs, nobody wanted PCs, and PCs were simple to own and use. You could know everything about PCs by taking a week and hanging out with the right bunch of nerds.

Over the next 30 years, I became a computer consultant, a generalist, specializing in not being a specialist. I lived in a rural area and the way I started my business was to meet people with computer problems, walk into their workplace, and fix the problem. Whatever that problem might be. I did hardware, software, the first Mac network in town, manufacturing, printing, you name it. I have tried to have a general overall knowledge of computers and a general overall knowledge of business. My professional goal for the next few decades was to stay on top of a field of study that started out very simple, and got immensely more complex. I've had the unique opportunity of being in the passenger's seat while an entire new world-wide industry took off and changed things forever. Very cool.

Of course, in the last ten years or so it's gotten too much: there are too many major variations on personal computer software and major variations on deployed hardware platform. Over this time I kept seeing the same pattern. Let's take,databases. Initially there were very basic DOS databases (Dbase anyone?) Pretty soon multiple players come into the market, the level of expertise rises dramatically, things get super complex, and suddenly you get people who are expert in one software aspect of one database platform. Repeat and rinse.

Today if you asked me if I knew how to program a database, I'd explain that I can and have worked in many different platforms: Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Access, flat-files, etc, but my work has consisted of designing and deploying project-based work. There's a whole other world of database programming involving shards, clustered indexed, column-based datastores, replication, etc that I think I know enough about to have a conversation, but not immediately use. These are the known unknowns for me.

I believe I am seeing the end of when a technologist can walk into a company and start having a reasonable conversation about any of the random hardware/software combinations that might be running there. We're still at the point where sharp people can learn quickly, so consulting is not dead! But the days of having a vast functional cross-cutting domain knowledge are coming to a close. Consultants, even the sharpest ones, that work with random clients are moving into unknown unknown territory.

I'll never forget when I joined Microsoft Developer Network. The first month I got all these discs in the mail. Woo hoo! I had a copy of everything Microsoft made! I could take my time and learn product X, or take a look at system Y.

Then the next month came, and there were more discs. Then the next, and the next. Discs started to pile up around the house. I bought boxes for them. Products had multiple releases and patches. Microsoft set up tests for each category, then each product, and finally each product version. Pretty soon I had hundreds of DVDs but the hits just kept coming. Microsoft had forty-thousand people in Redmond making new Microsoft products, making the existing Microsoft products more complex, and all I had was one guy at the other end of the disc mother lode -- me -- at first trying to master but later just to stay on top of the language of the technology. I have a closet full of MSDN discs.

Used to be Microsoft was the big game in town, but now Microsoft is just one player in a large ecosystem of technology creation. I never stood a chance.

Over the years I am coming to believe this same thing is happening in most all of modern life, to all of us, only it's happening at a slow enough rate and we give it such little attention that we are unaware of it.

Recently I had a friend recommend a good book, "The Science of Fear". In it, the author goes over his reasons why we are afraid of things we shouldn't be, and how external agents use that to their advantage. Next I read "Predictably Irrational" in which that author went over how people made economic decisions based on many other things besides a mathematical understanding of value, and how that changes economics. Finally I am reading "Against the Gods:The Remarkable Story of Risk" in which THAT author goes over how people have learned to deal with very complex systems of risk, using logic and math to make intricate and detailed plans and decisions about things. About how we don't reason in superstitious ways like we used to.

Now each of these books is good, and each has a point. But each is missing something from the others: context. The fear guy has simple theme -- people have a primal brain and a logical brain -- and he takes that to the conclusion that we are all manipulated by [insert evil actor here]. Seems like he is missing the fact that it is not just fear, it's perception, it's understanding, it's expected impact -- but you can use the word "fear" to cover a lot of ground, and that's what he does. He has a semantic hammer, and everything in the world is a nail. The others have similar flaws. You get one piece, you miss others. You tell a great story, but big pieces of it are incomplete.

Each of these books was written by people who had important things to say and were somewhat experts in their field, yet each author drifts subtly from an area of strength to one of weakness while continuing to expound as an expert. The psychologist begins talking about economics, or the economics professor begins discussing history. Most people will never spot the holes -- unless the book has some great political impact, there's simply not the attention given to the overly-broad statements, misstatements of fact, or important omissions. It's not false. There is no deception going on. In fact, mostly kinda sorta it's all true. The models are incomplete or lacking in subtle yet perhaps important ways. It's "truthy"

I remember after I learned to fly I took some "practical aerobatics" classes from one of the better flight instructors in the nation. The guy was amazing. You could ask him any question "What would happen if we turned the plane upside down, killed the engine, and got into an inverted spin while in IMC?" and he would sit down, walk you through the issues, then take you up in the plane to practice it.

One day a very unusual plane flew into the airport. As the pilot (one of his friends) came into the FBO, he asked "Jim, how long do you think I would last if I tried to fly that without any training?"

Jim chuckled, "You might make take-off, but you'd never land it"

There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. Aviation is all about having a damn good grasp on the knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

While we all may find it easy to believe that most other people are stupid (to use Russell's term), it's much harder to accept that we all suffer equally from this. Intelligent and educated people, in fact, more than others. Let's take a look at science, because that's where the gap between what we'd like to be and what we are is the most painful.

Initially a person could be a fair master of everything scientific: people up until the 17th or 18th centuries could learn enough to make a passable attempt at basically whatever field they wanted to play around in. Science was like a field of dirt with a few plants placed every so often. If you knew something about one plant, you could work with most any of them. Scientists were supermen.

In the late 19th century, though, and definitely as the 20h century progressed, the plants grew roots, multiplied, and started forming in unique ways. In addition, all the plants wrapped around each other both above and below ground -- visibly and invisibly. it was no longer clear what was connected to what or by pulling on one thing what other things would be affected. Folks reassured themselves by saying that their little plant was where all the action was, and that we could trust the experts on the other little plants when we needed help, but nobody really understood all the interconnections. It either wasn't important, or it was impossible, so why worry about it?

As I learn more and more, I realize more and more what I don't know. I also begin to see what others do not know -- and believe you me, we do not know a lot of stuff. 99% of internet commentary, including mine, is missing key pieces of information that would make a huge difference. It's enough to make you give up writing altogether. I had some inkling of this, but I don't think it really sunk in until recently.

Sadly, education level does not help. To take a recent example, economist Daniel Klein surveyed about five thousand adults to ask them a few simple questions about economics that had clear wrong or right answers. Now economics isn't the most sexy science in the world (sorry Dan) but having a basic knowledge of it would be important, say, for talking about starting a business, or immigration, or minimum wage, or any of a thousand other topics that tangentially involve economics. Surprisingly he found no correlation between education level and understanding of basic economic theory. But there are a lot of professors, scientists, pundits, and otherwise highly educated people who are more than willing to blog, write, comment, and pontificate where this basic rudimentary knowledge is required. Dan's discovery is like finding out that most PhDs are unable to add or subtract. It should be a scandal, except that it isn't. Nobody knows what they don't know.

it's all becoming like computer science was in the last decade. To have a discussion about just about anything in life makes us a generalists in some sense, and just like me and those Microsoft discs, we don't stand a chance either. The details and new sciences are piling up faster than we can not only grasp, but faster than we can roughly manage a working domain knowledge.

So we have climatologists making statistical errors, physicists making historical errors, biologists failing to understand political science, English majors failing to understand logic. It's not that these people are defective or somehow missed out on some needed piece of education; it's that, at certain times that they are totally unaware, the depth of all the required peripheral fields to their work have increased beyond their ability to function. Somewhere Rumsfeld has to be laughing.

Some scientists, unaware of what they don't know, or uncaring, have decided to become activists. Or historians. Or TV commentators. Or political pundits. Or authors. Or politicians. The great general public still attaches a certain face with "expertise" -- the old lizard brain is not about to go around saving some matrix of skills with each face -- so our brains basically only have two modes: trust him and don't trust him. Lizard brain meeting the cognitively blind pundit is not a good match-up.

Not only do we (the public) do this, much more importantly highly educated people do it to each other. In fact, highly educated people are much more likely to trust another highly educated person than a mentally-challenged person would.

So a scientist in one field, say agriculture, can write a book on better farming and begin talking about meteorology and cross the line between solid science and guesswork without having any idea he's done so. Meanwhile we, and other scientists, take him on the same authority in one area as the other. Then he reaches conclusions that seem imminently rational and germane to modern life: conclusions that are little more than educated speculation -- although neither he nor we know this. The plants are all connected to each other in non-intuitive ways. Not good.

It gets worse when we add activism to the mix. An activist scientist, like all others, can easily rely on nearby sciences that he thinks he knows enough about to reach conclusions. After all, while he might not be an expert, these are sciences in his general field, so he feels qualified to work with them in the same manner as his own science. Maybe he is correct in this assumption, maybe he is not. To an outsider we can never be sure. We know the dentist who starts giving us stock picks may be speaking outside his expertise area, but the expert on frogs telling us about dinosaurs? Not as sure. Are dinosaurs still considered reptiles? What we can say from historical observation is that the distance between sciences where you step out of your depth keeps getting smaller and smaller. 150 years ago your dentist could also be your doctor and veterinarian. Does the frog expert know enough to give advice about iguanas? Who knows?

Like the rest of us, the activist scientist doesn't know what he doesn't know either. but he knows what we should be doing. He has made an emotional commitment to a course of action based on provisional facts strewn together with speculation covering areas that the speculator has no expert knowledge of, but he doesn't know and we don't either. Nobody knows what we don't know.

Science, logic, and reason will carry on no matter what, of course, but once the guy who is the expert in the arcane starts worrying about messages and planning how to wield political power, a line is crossed. In an important way this takes us back to where we started five thousand years ago. There's some big thing we can never understand, actions must be taken to make things right. The magic man will tell us what to do and whether or not we have done enough. He is sure he knows. He can show us other tricks that assure us of his power.

The rest of us are sure of our ignorance. He is not. He cannot petition for political change unless he is sure that he has mastered the subject to such a degree as to know what to do. It means there can be no Anosognosia, no major doubts, no Dunning-Kruger, no unknown unknowns.

In my opinion, an activist scientist is not a scientist at all.

Maybe you are thinking global warming, but I have no particular topic in mind here, you can substitute economics or whatever else you like and still reach the same conclusion.

We're back to the witch doctors preaching to the cocksure.

There is hope, all is not lost, when there's an actual product or reproducible result and not just an opinion or theory the universe has a tendency to cut through the bullshit, but that's a topic for another day.

EDIT: But what do I know? I've finally written an article where if you tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, you're agreeing with me!

I know there will be criticism that while there are common errors amongst regular folk, when it comes to science none of them are important enough to note. Leaving aside the discussion of popular scientific literature versus scientific papers, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how one would know whether an error was important or not without knowing what it was, how it connects with other topics, and what impact it has on people working in other areas. This is not a matter of criticizing certain occupations, authors, or political positions. These examples are mostly random. I am simply observing the side-effects of humans with minds that evolved for the savanna interacting with the incredibly rich, deep, and interconnected system of knowledge that we've created.

11:38
Nouvelle version majeure de VLC media player : 1.1.0 « The luggage »
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le projet VideoLAN vient de sortir une nouvelle version 1.1.0 de son logiciel phare : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player title=Définition WikipédiaVLC media player/a, nom de code « The luggage » en référence à la célèbre série de Terry Pratchett, « Le Disque Monde ». C'est un lecteur multimédia jouissant d'une très grande popularité car il est multi-plates-formes, libre (licence GPL) et accepte nativement en entrée/sortie et en diffusion (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/unicast title=Définition Wikipédiaunicast/a ou a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/multicast title=Définition Wikipédiamulticast/a en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4 title=Définition WikipédiaIPv4/a ou a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 title=Définition WikipédiaIPv6/a) un très grand nombre de formats vidéos, audios et sous-titres.br / br / bQuoi de neuf ?/bbr / Cette version est considérée comme une évolution majeure par l'équipe. Elle est le fruit d'un gros travail de réécriture du cœur du logiciel (la sortie vidéo). Ceci devrait faciliter les évolutions futures et améliorer la qualité des sous-titres. On notera aussi une grande cure d'amaigrissement avec un grand nettoyage dans le code (suppression de dizaines de modules obsolètes, non maintenus ou encore liés à des interfaces obsolètes, etc.), une réduction du nombre de threads et de la consommation mémoire. Un autre point notable est l'utilisation du GPU (sous Linux via a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAAPI title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Video Acceleration APIVAAPI/acronym/a, et sous Windows Vista et 7 via a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX_Video_Acceleration title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=DirectX Video AccelerationDxVA/acronym/a 2.0) pour le décodage des vidéos en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 title=Définition WikipédiaH.264/a. Tout le monde ne sera pas logé à la même enseigne, mais globalement, cela devrait améliorer significativement les performances de VLC pour le décodage de ce format HD qui monopolisait auparavant beaucoup de ressources mémoire et CPU.br / br / bEt du côté des formats pris en charge ?/bbr / Chaque nouvelle version apporte aussi son lot de nouveaux formats, codecs, protocoles supportés, et celle-ci ne fait pas exception. En tête de gondole, on trouvera le récent a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8 title=Définition WikipédiaVP8/a / a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM title=Définition WikipédiaWebM/a et les sous-titres PGS du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-Ray title=Définition WikipédiaBlu-Ray/a et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Video_Broadcasting title=Définition WikipédiaHD-DVB/a, mais aussi l'amélioration des sous-titres plus classiques (srt et ssa) et les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrac title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Adaptive Transform Acoustic CodingAtrac/acronym1/a, l'a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Multi_Rate title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Adaptive Multi Rate narrow-bandAMR-NB/acronym/a, Windows Media Speech (Voice), a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Lossless_Coding title=Définition Wikipédiaacronym title=Audio_Lossless_CodingMPEG-4 ALS/acronym/a, les playlists au format .wpl et .zpl, l'accès en SFTP, etc. Consultez le changelog complet pour tous les détails.br / br / bExtensions de VLC/bbr / VLC media player 1.1 est livré désormais avec sa propre plate-forme d'extensions (comme Firefox, OOo, etc.) basée sur le framework a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua title=Définition WikipédiaLua/a. Il sera donc possible de scripter facilement VLC en Lua pour, par exemple, accéder à des informations contextuelles (IMDb, Wikipédia, paroles, sous-titres etc.) sur le média joué directement depuis le lecteur ou encore contrôler VLC, récupérer des contenus sur des plates-formes type Jamendo, etc. Un script IMDb est fourni par défaut et la plate-forme est encore en rodage, mais cela augure plein de bonnes choses pour la suite.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : merci à a href=http://linuxfr.org/~ivoire/ivoire/a pour avoir également proposé une dépêche sur le sujet.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/1.1.0.htmlL'annonce de VLC 1.1.0/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/files/vlc-1.1.0/vlc-1.1.0.tar.bz2/downloadTéléchargement de VLC media player 1.1.0 (sources)/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWSChangelog complet/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.videolan.org/vlc/Site de VLC media player/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://icecast.org/Icecast/abr / (...)

10:44
Google to personalize metashopping
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

In an a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20007972-265.html"interview/a with CNet, Googler Sameer Samat talks about Google's future plans for shopping search, including personalization and recommendations.br /br /An excerpt:blockquoteiOne thing Google doesn't do very well is provide the shopping-as-adventure experience ... You might go to the mall with a specific product in mind, but a well-designed mall ... forces you to discover -- and hopefully purchase -- other products that you might not have even known you wanted: the marketing types like to call this "serendipity." Google wants to be known as a destination for that kind of experience, said Sameer Samat, director of product management.br /br /After years of trying and failing to reach that goal, Google plans to give it another go over the coming months. Don't expect Google to turn into a full-blown online retailer among the likes of Amazon.com or Buy.com just yet. But the combination of personalized features for product search pages and what Samat thinks is "the largest database of products that has been created" could entice people to actually shop on Google.br /br /Google's current approach works best for those who are on a mission when they shop, shoppers who already know what they want and are just looking for additional information before sealing the deal ... [But] there are millions of other people who treat shopping as leisure, rather than a simple transaction. These are people who ... prefer browsing to targeted shopping, knowing that every now and then they'll discover something totally unique or completely unexpected.br /br /Google wants to serve more of those people ... [by making] recommendations based on that list of products and lists submitted by others to help you discover new products: sort of like Amazon's recommendations page meets Pandora's radio stations meets Google.br /br /"Shopping is not just about search, it's not just about intent, it's about discovery," Samat said. "If we can do it, and do it well, we will have built something that's really amazing; it should be the most comprehensive experience for shopping you could ever find."/i/blockquoteOn a related note, Google a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/17/googles-commerce-search-for-retailers-now-better-and-cheaper/"is pushing/a aggressively to get retailers to use Google's commerce search engine to run their search experience. Each deal Google signs gives them more detailed information about another retailing vertical. It's all about the data.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8151878464007473362?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

10:04
Sortie de Perroquet 1.1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Perroquet est logiciel éducatif dont le but est d'aider à améliorer sa compréhension orale des langues. L'originalité de Perroquet réside dans son utilisation de n'importe quel film accompagné de sous-titres comme support d'exercice. Les exercices prennent alors la forme de texte à trous.br / br / La première version de Perroquet, sortie début janvier, a été l'objet d'une a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/01/05/26316.htmldépêche/a qui a généré un afflux massif de commentaires, rapports d'erreurs, suggestions et contributeurs. Par conséquent, le développement a été poursuivi avec l'aide de quelques contributeurs (à la base, il s'agit d'un projet personnel mais en parlant un peu trop fort et on se fait piéger bêtement...).br / br / La version 1.1.0 vient donc de sortir. Malgré ce que laisse penser le numéro de version, il s'agit d'une version majeure. Le nombre de lignes de code a doublé et grâce à Matthieu Bizen le code est maintenant beaucoup plus propre et commenté.br / br / Archlinux n'a pas volé sa réputation puisque qu'un paquet pour cette distribution était disponible deux heures après la publication de cette version. Un paquet pour Ubuntu est aussi disponible. Pour ceux des autres distributions, il est possible de lancer Perroquet sans compilation ni installation depuis le tarball.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://perroquet.b219.orgSite web de Perroquet/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://perroquet.b219.org/fr/screenshots/Capture d'écran/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://perroquet.b219.org/fr/download/Page de téléchargement/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://launchpad.net/perroquetPage du projet Launchpad/abr / (...)

6:34
A Retina display-equipped iPad? Don't hold your breath
» ‎ Mark Trapp. Blog.

p img src="http://marktrapp.com/sites/marktrapp.com/files/imagecache/article_image/blog/retina_0.png" alt="" title="" width="425" height="150" / /p pstrongBottom Line:/strong You'll be waiting a long time for a Retina display-equipped iPad. A long, long time./p pstrongUpdated at the end./strong/p pEvery minute, some technology analyst is predicting the future. 99 times out of 100, they're wrong. And it's not really worth writing about. But every once in a while, there's a prognostication that's so crazy but written as though it's an inevitability is pains the mind./p pToday, MG Siegler a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/ios-4-iphone-4-ipad/"wrote an article/a about how the iPad looks like old news compared to the forthcoming iPhone 4. In it, he opines that, among the main problems the just-released iPad has, its display simply doesn't measure up to the new iPhone 4's display. I take him at his word: I haven't seen it yet, and nearly everyone who has says it's an amazing display./p pBut then this gem comes up:/p blockquoteHerersquo;s why this really matters for Apple: the iPhone 4 likely points to the updates coming to the iPad in the not-too-distant future. Are there any doubts that the Retina Display and twice the RAM will make its way to that device? So why would you buy the iPad now if the device might get these updates in say, January? The proof will be right in front of your eyes on Thursday./blockquote pHot damn, don't buy an iPad! Or if you already have, you poor bastard you, sell it on eBay! In January, we're going to have a new iPad (I'm calling it the strongiPad Unicorn/strong) with a sick Retina display!/p pIf you believe that, or if you can follow that logic, I'm going to save you some trouble now and tell you it's not going to happen./p h3The facts/h3 pLet's start with the knowns: the iPhone 4 has a 3.5quot; display with a resolution of 960x640 pixels. This gives it a pixel density of 326 ppi. The current iPad has a 9.7quot; display with a resolution of 1024x768. This gives it a pixel density of 132 ppi./p pIn order for Apple to equip the next-generation iPad Unicorn with a comparably dense display as the new iPhone 4, they'd have to up the pixel density by a factor of around 2.47. Given the same form factor, we're looking at a truly amazing 9.7quot; screen with a resolution of a staggering strong2530x1897 pixels/strong. emImagine/em the pornography you could watch with a screen like that!/p pNot so fast. Let's put aside pure flights of whimsy and magic that such a large display could be manufactured at all at this time (much less for an affordable price), consider a few comparative figures:/p ul liThe new MacBook Pro I own currently sports a resolution of 1440x900./li liThe 24quot; LED monitor Apple sells has a href="http://www.apple.com/displays/specs.html"a max resolution of 1920x1200/a./li liEven 1080p video, currently the upper threshold of video quality, clocks in at a relatively crummy 1920x1080./li liFinally, we find something that has a comparable (but still inferior) resolution at 2560x1440 pixels: a href="http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html"the 27quot; iMac/a./li /ul h3The reality/h3 pI list devices that are far larger for absurdity's sake, but the important figure is the resolution of 1080p video. Even under ideal conditions where battery, storage space, bandwidth, and processing power are non-factors the best video available to most consumers would look gross on the mythical iPad Unicorn./p pBut we don't live in an idealized world. There are too many factors, at this point in consumer technology, for such a feat of human largesse to be feasible. Firstly, Apple needs to have an infrastructure in place to deliver 1080p video on the iTunes store (and it can't be super compressed like the current 720p it calls HD; such crummy video would look emawful/em on such a device)/p pGetting past that, the iPad Unicorn needs the processing power to decode a 1080p stream. While I have no doubt there will be advancements in decoding, consider a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/recommendations.html"the requirements to get 1080p video to decode in QuickTime/a. There are no chips in anyone's roadmap that come close./p pThirdly, the iPad Unicorn needs the battery life we have all come to expect from the current version. With its current battery, it's rated to get a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/"up to 10 hours watching video/a. That's with the battery taking up a href="http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad-Wi-Fi-Teardown/2183/1"almost the entire chassis/a. Let's be generous and say the iPad Unicorn only takes an additional 25% more processing power. Again, there are no chips in anyone's roadmap that will perform 25% better but take the same amount of power. So we need a bigger battery. Where's it going to go in a product that has to fit within Apple's mantra of quot;thinner is betterquot;?/p pFinally, we need to talk about bandwidth and storage. Currently, a feature-length heavily-compressed 720p video on iTunes takes strong3.95 GB of space/strong (if you're wondering which, it's a href="http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMovie?id=317909453amp;s=143441"Star Trek/a). Forget about 3G downloads. Forget about 4G downloads. Heck, forget about most WiFi connections. The iPad Unicorn is prohibitively unable to consume Apple's media offerings on the go./p h3The future/h3 pAll the problems I listed here are not insurmountable, even in the short term. But releasing a device with such a display would either be half baked, prohibitively expensive, or likely both. And Apple's philosophy isn't to make products embecause they can/em, but to make products because emthey make sense/em. The iPad Unicorn simply doesn't make sense. Not now, not six months from now, not a year from now, not 18 months from now./p pBut let's talk about it for the third revision of the iPad in 2012. For now, that iPad you just bought will do just fine for a long time to come./p pstrongUpdate:/strong a href="http://friendfeed.com/itafroma/e2abecd0/retina-display-equipped-ipad-don-t-hold-your"Kevin Fox/a correctly notes that the optimal viewing distance of an iPad is likely larger than for an iPhone, so it would not necessarily need to have the same pixel density to achieve the same end result (no discernible pixels). Even at his suggested 260 ppi, it's still over the amount needed for 1080p. While 1080p video would likely look fine on such a device, the other problems still remain./p pLet's take this further, though. Based on a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving-the-iphone-resolution/"Phil Plait's measurements/a, if we assume a 24quot; viewing distance (not a bad distance if it's sitting in your lap), you'd only need a 144 ppi display in order to qualify as a quot;retina displayquot; in the sense that the pixels are no longer discernible. At 131 ppi right now, the current iPad is not that far off./ppBased on this, I'd still say talk of a game-changing iPad by January is still overblown (if less ludicrously so). If you look at the product development of the iPhone, Apple stayed with the same display, even while other comparable phones were getting better ones, until it could release the retina display. It's highly unlikely they'd change the display within a year (or two) for a minor upgrade that would cause even more display fragmentation./ppAs I said above, Apple doesn't release products embecause they can/em, they release products that emmake sense/em./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=PlPDXcIm3kw:Ua6Rs2-IdEU:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=PlPDXcIm3kw:Ua6Rs2-IdEU:YwkR-u9nhCs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=YwkR-u9nhCs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marktrapp/blog/~4/PlPDXcIm3kw" height="1" width="1"/

5:57
OpenID Comments Working
» ‎ Aaron Toponce

After much sweat, pain and tears, I have finally nailed down the source to my troubles with OpenID on my blog, specifically when commenting on posts. It turns out that Filosofo Comments Preview plugin is the culprit, causing a “You must submit a comment using the comment form” error. The plugin hasn’t been updated in about 18 months, so I wonder if the developer has abandoned the project? Anyway, disabling the plugin brings OpenID full swing to my blog. It works, and it works well. I know there have been other blog installations where OpenID commenting has probably ruined your experience to OpenID, my blog included, but hopefully, now that it’s fixed, I can help provide a positive experience.
1:13
Breakfast, Anyone?
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
I’m constantly amazed to read, over and over again, about people who don’t “tweet”, because they don’t care what you had for breakfast. When I first heard about Twitter in early 2007, I had the same feeling. What am I supposed to do? Tell people when and what I’m eating, how often I’m using the restroom, and what time I went to bed? It seemed so pointless to broadcast my life in such a way. Why in the world would anyone care what’s going on in my personal life?
Then, while working for Guru Labs, I was on the road with Christer, another guru, and he was using it rather intensively. After dinner one day, and heading back to the hotel, he called me over to his room to hack on some stuff for our classes. In the meanwhile, he was go, go, go on Twitter (back then, they rocked it hard with a Jabber bot. They’ve since ditched the bot, and as a result, my interest in using it).
Him: “Dude, you need to get on Twitter. It’s a lot like an IRC room. Just post something, and people following you will likely reply if it’s interesting enough.”
Me: “So, I just tell people I’m having a burger for dinner, or that I’m about to take a shower, and people are supposed to care?”
Him: “Would you post that in an IRC channel?”
Me: “I guess not.”
Him: “Here’s the thing: start following others that you would be interested in keeping up-to-date with, like those in an IRC channel. They’ll likely start following you in return, especially if they know you. Eventually, you’ll have enough people to start a conversation with. Then, post something, and see if replies come back in. You know, stuff like what you would read on Techdirt, why the latest random distro sucks, etc. You know, stuff you care about that others can relate with. The conversation will just follow.”
He was right. I started following people first that I already knew personally. Mostly, those in the Ubuntu community. Then I started finding others that I didn’t know too well, but knew that their nerd level was on par with mine. As I started following others, people started following me. Then, the test- posting something. I don’t recall what I posted, as I ended up deleting my account in favor of Identi.ca (which I re-opned later, but lost my nick, my posts, and those I followed), but I’m sure they were awkward.
Then it hit me. When I found cool posts online, I usually shared the URL with an IRC channel I was in. Instead, I started sharing that link on Twitter. Sure enough, it would usually garner a reply. Then, a conversation would ensue. Before long, I “got it”. Twitter was nothing more than a platform for casual, off-the-cuff conversation. It wasn’t about what I was eating for breakfast, as much as it was discussing current topics, trends, fads, and such that I and my followers were interested in. As Christer mentioned, it was just like IRC, except rather that starting a conversation with a very limited set of people, it was being broadcast to anyone who could see my public profile, and people could subscribe to that feed if they liked what they read. Further, it was nothing about what I was eating for breakfast. Instead, it was all about having conversations with people I wouldn’t normally converse with.
Of course, if you know your Twitter history, you know it finally found its fame when celebrities started using it. People wanted to get closer to celebs. Celebs want to get closer to their fans. Then TV stations, news, weather, and just about anything and everything hit the Twitter trend. And rarely, since I’ve been on it, do I see people broadcasting what they had for breakfast. I see hurricane updates, earthquake news, when and where my favorite music artists will be, discussions, arguments and flames over some certain technology and on and on. Twitter has been the biggest platform for discussing the World Cup. Follow your favorite sports team, player and stats. Check out [hashtags.org], and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s really quite remarkable.
So, it never ceases to amaze me those who don’t understand the technology, or the Luddites fighting against it, keep saying “I don’t care what you had for breakfast”. Is it really hard to understand how to use a microblogging service? Let me guess. You probably don’t have a Facebook account either, right? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying everyone should jump on the social bandwagon, but if you aren’t using the service, because you think it’s nothing but vain, self-proclamations and promotions, then it’s clear you don’t “get it”, just as I didn’t back in 2007.
There are a number of reasons why Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, and other microblogging platforms will be successful over and over:
- Keeping in touch with those you care about
- Getting caught up on the latest news
- Looking for a social outlet beyond your current lifestyle
- Using it when other methods of conversation would fail (maybe you’re a mute)
Sure, as with any service, there are those that abuse it, and people who have used a microblogging platform knows that there is some noise to come along with it. But, when you learn how to use the tool effectively, it’s rather trivial to filter out the noise, and get a high degree of signal.
I use it entirely for conversation and news. I am an IRC junkie, and hang out in far more channels than I would care to admit. I do it for the social conversations, as well as support and providing support. Identi.ca and Twitter are that for me. A place to converse when I want to converse. It’s a place for news, when I’m in the mood to keep up-to-date (along with RSS and email. No, I don’t watch TV). I’ve even used it to get deals when travelling and scheduling appointments with friends. Heck, I recently became a ham radio operator for similar reasons.
So, to each their own, but if your problem with Twitter is not caring what people have for breakfast, then it’s clear that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you haven’t used the service. But then again, unless I ask, I’m likely not interested in your opinion anyway. I definitely won’t try to “convert” you.

June 21, 2010
22:52
Why Web Video Captioning Is So Important
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. The New York Times has published a good article about Web video captioning, which provides me with a convenient hook to briefly discuss this very important topic. I cant emphasize enough why captioning is so vital for the entire...

22:45
Client: “Whats your fees to do this template?” Me: “$40 per hour.” Client:...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “Whats your fees to do this template?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “$40 per hour.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Thats steep. How do I know you won’t bill me for extra hours.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “If you want to be sure you can come and watch.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “No wiseguy, give me a call whenever you start working on it and whenever you take breaks. I will keep count of the hours.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DAPZtxIy5qg43fkwCZJlohhj4wQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DAPZtxIy5qg43fkwCZJlohhj4wQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DAPZtxIy5qg43fkwCZJlohhj4wQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/DAPZtxIy5qg43fkwCZJlohhj4wQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

17:59
Postgres, NetBeans, mod_python/mod_wsgi et HTTPS Everywhere
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

ullibPostgreSQL 9.0 en approche/bbr / La a href=http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.1210bêta 2 de PostgreSQL 9.0/a vient de sortir et la finale devrait sortir dans les prochaines semaines ou prochains mois. Robert Treat a publié a href=http://www.slideshare.net/xzilla/intro-to-postgres-9-tutorialune présentation des nouveautés/a.br / Depuis la version 8.4, le célèbre logiciel libre de type SGBDR a vu 204 correctifs, 84 contributeurs, 1860 fichiers impactés sur divers aspects tels que les performances, l'administration, le développement, les procédures et la réplication.br / br / /lilibNetBeans IDE 6.9/bbr / NetBeans, l'IDE (Integrated Development Environment) poussé par Oracle, est disponible en version 6.9 pour Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris et l'autre OS. Rappelons que NetBeans n'est pas dédié exclusivement à la plate-forme Java, mais est utile aussi pour JavaFX, PHP, JavaScript et AJAX, Ruby et Ruby on Rails, Groovy et Grails, sans oublier les vénérables C/C++.br / Un a href=http://netbeans.org/community/releases/69/résumé des changements/a ou des a href=http://netbeans.org/community/releases/69/relnotes.htmlnotes de version complètes/a sont disponibles.br / br / /lilibmod_python est mort, vive mod_wsgi/bbr / L'Apache Software Foundation a prononcé la mort officielle de mod_python, ou plus précisément du projet Apache Quetzalcoatl, qui chapeautait le développement du défunt module. En effet, le module a vu sa dernière publication en février 2007.br / br / C'est a href=http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/mod_wsgi/a son remplaçant officiel. Il est publié sous licence Apache 2.0 bien évidemment. WSGI signifie Web Server Gateway Interface : c'est une spécification pour les serveurs web et serveurs d'applications pour communiquer avec les applications web, bien que ce soit bien plus que cela. C'est un standard Python, décrit dans la a href=http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/PEP 333/a.br / Parmi ceux qui le gèrent d'ors et déjà, citons Django, Zope 3, MoinMoin, Roundup, Trac, etc. liste bien évidemment non-exhaustive.br / br / /lilibHTTPS Everywhere/bbr / L'a href=https://www.eff.org/EFF/a (aka Electronic Frontier Foundation) en collaboration avec le a href=https://www.torproject.org/projet Tor/a a publié a href=https://www.eff.org/https-everywhereHTTPS Everywhere/a, une extension Firefox qui va basculer votre navigateur sur la version HTTPS du site que vous souhaitez consulter, et ainsi utiliser une connexion chiffrée entre votre navigateur et les sites majeurs.br / br / Cela repose sur un ensemble de règles que l'on peut affiner soit même. Le code est basé sur a href=https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Strict_Transport_SecuritySTS/a (Strict Transport Security) et a href=http://noscript.net/NoScript/a./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.postgresql.orgPostgreSQL/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://netbeans.org/NetBeans/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/mod_wsgi/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://www.eff.org/https-everywhereHTTPS Everywhere/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/redacteurs/LinuxFr.org : Tribune des rédacteurs/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlProposez des dépêches et gagnez des livres !/abr /

16:25
Client: “We’d like you to make the About Us and Why Buy From Us pages password protected...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “We’d like you to make the emAbout Us/em and emWhy Buy From Us/em pages password protected and only viewable by people who have signed up.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “But how will people know if they want to sign up if they don’t know anything about you or your service?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Look, we don’t want any tire kickers.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ir3gukFGqzPFnYUSj__QsBP1vYo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ir3gukFGqzPFnYUSj__QsBP1vYo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ir3gukFGqzPFnYUSj__QsBP1vYo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ir3gukFGqzPFnYUSj__QsBP1vYo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

15:31
Enregistrements des conférences des RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre)
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Une liste de diffusion a été ouverte pour préparer les enregistrements de l'édition 2010 des Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre alias RMLL. Elle regroupe actuellement environ 45 inscrits et on espère qu'ils se montreront tous actifs. :-). Le français et anglais sont acceptés. Sont les bienvenus :br / ulli Les vidéastes et preneurs de son amateurs ou pros ;br / /lili Les sysadmin et spécialistes du scripting, pour préparer la gestion des flux de données ;br / /lili Les transcripteurs ou traducteurs ;br / /lili Les gus qui savent comment cliquer ou appuyer sur un bouton comme l'auteur de cet article.br / /li/ulN'oubliez pas que les RMLL ont besoin de bénévoles dans beaucoup d'autres domaines. Ce sont eux qui rendent possible cette manifestation chaque année.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://listes2010.rmll.info/listes/info/audiovideoListe audiovideo@/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://rmll.infoSite des RMLL/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Contribuer-a-l-organisation-2010.htmlAppel à bénévoles/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://free-electrons.com/fr/communaute/videos/conferences/Un modèle pour l'enregistrement des RMLL/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/mini-howto/Mini howto de free-electrons/abr / lien 6 : a href=https://linuxfr.org/2006/07/05/21065.htmlRMLL 2006 : table ronde politique Bayrou/Billard/Cazenave/Rocard/abr / (...)

June 20, 2010
22:45
"I think that since I already paid you a 50% deposit, I’m going to test run my new website for 2..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I think that since I already paid you a 50% deposit, I’m going to test run my new website for 2 months before settling the balance. If my business plan isn’t working, I won’t pay you the rest.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/gYHlU7S4y7-O1OymTO8b5YMYC2w/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/gYHlU7S4y7-O1OymTO8b5YMYC2w/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/gYHlU7S4y7-O1OymTO8b5YMYC2w/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/gYHlU7S4y7-O1OymTO8b5YMYC2w/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

21:03
Aficionados de la console, Google pense à vous et sort Google CL tools
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Nombreux sont ceux qui pensent que les services de Google tels Docs, Picasa ou Calendar sont ce qu'il se fait de mieux dans leur domaine. Leur principal inconvénient i(acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : côté Minitel 2.0 mis à part)/i étant d'être obligé de passer par l'interface Google adéquate pour en profiter. Certes, il existe bien différentes APIs Google, une ou deux par service, mais il faut bien avouer que cette solution n'avait rien de pratique…br / br / Et comme Google vous aime et pense à vous, il a réalisé vos souhaits les plus fous. Grâce à une petite bibliothèque répondant au doux nom de a href=http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-clientgdata-python-client/a, GoogleCL a pu voir le jour. Il ne s'agit rien de moins qu'un utilitaire en ligne de commande pour manipuler les données dispersées à travers vos comptes Google, le tout sous licence Apache 2.0br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-google-command-line-tool.htmlIntroduction à GoogleCL sur le GoogleBlog/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/HomePage du projet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/ManualManuel de GoogleCL/abr / (...)

20:51
ChangeCamp London
» ‎ Dan Siemon

Thanks to the organizers and participants involved with ChangeCamp London yesterday. It was amazing to see such a strong turnout of people interested in making London better. I hope everyone got as much out of it as I did.

For anyone who couldn’t attend, you can get a feel for the event by looking at the #ccldn tweets and following up with the actions which will be posted on the website.

15:25
Me: “Good afternoon, we’ve noticed that you haven’t paid the entire amount due on...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Good afternoon, we’ve noticed that you haven’t paid the entire amount due on your bill.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”We haven’t received an invoice.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Then how did a check show up with the invoice number on it in the memo field? We appreciate the timely payment, but it’s about 75 dollars short of the payment due.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”You know this is a church group right? We don’t have to pay taxes, and you realize you go to hell for lying, right?”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Well if you check the invoice, there is no sales tax applied, but you realize you go to hell for theft too, correct?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/c4nZZObCRn_e2UBOPFOh8XFNRqk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/c4nZZObCRn_e2UBOPFOh8XFNRqk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/c4nZZObCRn_e2UBOPFOh8XFNRqk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/c4nZZObCRn_e2UBOPFOh8XFNRqk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

12:16
RabbitMQ 1.8.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

RabbitMQ est une solution de messagerie d'entreprise complète et fiable, qui implémente le standard AMQP (iAdvanced Message Queuing Protocol/i). Elle est écrite en Erlang, publiée sous a href=http://www.rabbitmq.com/mpl.htmllicence MPL/a et en concurrence avec a href=http://qpid.apache.org/Apache Qpid/a et a href=http://www.zeromq.org/ØMQ/a.br / br / Le projet RabbitMQ comporte plusieurs composants :ulliLe serveur, pièce maîtresse, en charge du routage des messages, des files d'attentes, de la gestion des droits, etc. ;br / /liliDes passerelles pour les protocoles a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP title=Définition WikipédiaHTTP/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP title=Définition WikipédiaXMPP/a et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOMP title=Définition WikipédiaSTOMP/a ;br / /liliDes bibliothèques client AMQP pour Java et .Net (il existe de nombreuses bibliothèques pour les autres langages développées ailleurs) ;br / /liliDes greffons comme a href=http://hg.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-shovel/Shovel/a (pour déplacer un message d'une instance de RabbitMQ vers une autre) ou a href=http://www.rabbitmq.com/rabbitmq-bql.htmlrabbitmq-bql/a (un langage qui ressemble à du SQL pour interroger et configurer une instance de RabbitMQ)./li/ul La version 1.8.0, sortie récemment, est la première depuis le rachat de Rabbit Technologies Ltd. par SpringSource, une filiale de VMWare. Elle apporte de nouvelles API pour étendre le fonctionnement de RabbitMQ par des greffons, ainsi que diverses optimisations.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.rabbitmq.com/RabbitMQ/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://lists.rabbitmq.com/pipermail/rabbitmq-announce/2010-June/000025.htmlSortie de RabbitMQ 1.8.0/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.htmlCommencer avec RabbitMQ/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.rabbitmq.com/specification.htmlSpécification d'AMQP/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/16/26995.htmlØMQ, la messagerie inter-applications « nouvelle vague »/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/14/26732.htmlRachat de RabbitMQ par SpringSource/abr /

0:42
If Adobe wants to fight, it should leverage FOSS
» ‎ Andres Osinski's Blog

pAs we have seen in the blogosphere, devs are up in arms about Apple's attempt to close down their mobile ecosystem even further. Suffice to say people are not glad about the fact that their choices for programming in one of their favorite platforms have been reduced substantially./p pThis does not come as a surprise for myself or anyone with a little bit of common sense on the Free Software camp: you live by the sword coding for a proprietary (or, as Spanish-speaking FOSS supporters like to say, iprivative/i) platform, you die by the sword. In the choice of submitting to a master, you must accept that the rules are arbitrary and "enlightened self-interest" is merely a way to say imost/i of the times you'll come out fine, and accept the lack of control a another risk to take into account (or not, considering how many people were not capable of seeing a lockdown of this magnitude)./p pBut let's get away from the rhetoric for a minute and concentrate on the emerging warfare between Adobe and Apple. Evidently the Adobe folks were taken off-guard by these events as well. Now, Adobe-Apple animosity has existed for as long as Photoshop's been running on Apple computers; Adobe has consistently been late to adopt platform guidelines, has suffered blowback from a subpar Flash implementation, and receives constant criticism for its CS flagship applications crashing during the middle of work sessions./p pDespite that, the interested parties have all much to lose from altering the status quo: Adobe moves a massive amount of Photoshop licenses on Mac, Apple gets a substantial market share of designers and application developers from having Adobe products as first-class citizens, everyone in the Mac camp from consumers to pros to developers is happy (except for the occasional Flash crash). If the Adobe experience were to worsen on Macs, several things might happen:br / ul liLarge design and graphic houses whose lifeblood depends on Adobe CS products would migrate to Windows, living with whatever gripes and lack of expertise they might have on the platform in favor of staying on the move./li liIndependent Mac devs (and possibly Apple itself) would fill up the niche and take opportunity of Adobe's weakness to develop first-class alternatives. A barely "good enough" product would not move the large players away from their software dependencies, but it could shake up freelancers and independents, having a sufficient market share to eventually face Adobe head-on. Anyone who can stay on the market for 2-3 years to live a software upgrade cycle can afford to compete./li /ul Neither Apple nor Adobe would benefit from this move, and it is very clear that it's a dark path for everyone, including consumers who would have to readjust. /p pAdobe, however, as a software vendor with a cross-platform product, need not actually have to back down from the Mac platform to cause substantial damage to Apple; it need only port its existing solution to an operating system that has clear advantages of its own and provide legitimate competition. That OS, right now, is Linux./p pLet's take the facts at hand:br / ul liThere's been a gradual push in the last two years for Linux vendors to create ties with proprietary software devs to improve the user experience, doing things such as giving a uniform UI experience and stable, predictable API release cycles. Yes, an important number of FOSS advocates want nothing to do with this, but as Linux market share increases and it becomes a more mainstream product (surprisingly so, when looking at the market share in many countries, corporations and governments), a substantial number of users want the software they need to work. And as long as these improvements don't worsen current FOSS options, no one's in a position to complain./li liLinux already sees much use in large FX houses, both in the back end and the front end. Most 3D rendering packages already have Linux ports of very high quality, and a number of companies and users are not afraid of embracing a new product if it offers clear, visible advantages as far as cost and vendor lock-in go. Since most places already have specific Windows and OSX machines just for Photoshop work, moving over this part of the workflow to where the rest of things happen would not be a difficult choice, and would help to homogenize software configurations./li liPlatform mindshare for Linux is already there. The knowledge for porting large projects from UNIX to Linux and from Windows to Linux exists, and commercial Linux vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical and Novell would be more than happy to provide assistance if it means exponential growth and a new market opportunity in light of most UNIX installs having already converted to Linux where necessary./li liBelieve me: Apple is scared to death of Linux. It is the antithesis of their revenue model and lock-in strategies, and while they have very good ways to make the public aware of Linux's liabilities, they have nothing to counter the obvious weaknesses of a closed, proprietary model in both mobile and desktop offerings (Mark Pilgrim has a a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks"very good writeup/a on the reasons for switching to a Free platform). Apple's marketing is oriented towards shooting down Microsoft's software, but the fact that Linux is not even mentioned on their keynotes, even on graphs where it is highly relevant, shows they have no intention of making the average consumer aware of a third alternative./li /ul /p pWould this be ideal? Not really. I'd be the first to say Adobe would have a huge task at hand that might not even work out correctly:br / ul liAdobe already has a massive number of employees working to maintain two ports of their software; adding a third would imply more than a 50% increase in workload (a port from scratch would need a ilot/i of research ) to make the Linux experience an equal with current offerings. The codebase is old and very likely littered with little things that might not have even contemplated anything not Win32 or Carbon (see the troubles Adobe has with the Cocoa API)./li liNobody can say for sure whether Adobe is actually affected enough to warrant and effort of this level./li liA port would likely take years, during which Apple would obviously realize what's coming and find ways of its own to remediate the situation, and I trust they would have an adequate alternative with such motivation./li liFree Software developers ilove/i creating alternatives to proprietary solutions; you can be sure GIMP development would double in speed, and a dozen projects would spring to life trying to offer new choices. Most would fail, but a couple of success stories would be sufficient to hinder the initiative./li /ul Nontheless, I belive that success in Adobe getting CS to run on a third platform would be the largest single blow in mindshare for Mac, and might increase Linux usage to levels never before seen, surpassing even Canonical's efforts to bring Linux to the masses./p

June 19, 2010
22:05
Designed a simple web banner for their etsy shop and a few days later… Client: “The...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pDesigned a simple web banner for their etsy shop and a few days later…/p pstrongClient:/strong “The banner looks terrible its all fuzzy and you cant read it.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Thats odd because Im looking at your etsy shop now and it looks great.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”No not that one, I also had it printed into a 1.5 meter long banner to hang over my stall at the market. Looks horrible!”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tr_cI1YFS_j0Sr4nQnecalaZYnE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tr_cI1YFS_j0Sr4nQnecalaZYnE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tr_cI1YFS_j0Sr4nQnecalaZYnE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/tr_cI1YFS_j0Sr4nQnecalaZYnE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

21:55
Les pouvoirs magiques d'Unicorn 1.0.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Unicorn est un serveur applicatif HTTP en a href=http://www.ruby-lang.org/fr/Ruby/a comparable à a href=http://github.com/fauna/mongrelMongrel/a ou à a href=http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/Thin/a, sous a href=http://unicorn.bogomips.org/COPYINGlicence GPLv2/a. Il est utilisé notamment par a href=http://twitter.com/Twitter/a et a href=http://github.com/Github/a et vient d'atteindre la version 1.0.br / br / Unicorn est compatible avec a href=http://rack.rubyforge.org/Rack/a, une interface entre les serveurs applicatifs et les frameworks. Il peut ainsi être utilisé pour servir des applications Ruby, dont celles écrites en a href=http://rubyonrails.org/Ruby on Rails/a. Il tourne avec Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9 et bientôt a href=http://rubini.us/Rubinius/a. Rappelons que Rubinius est une implémentation alternative de Ruby dont a href=http://linuxfr.org//2010/05/15/26854.htmlla version 1.0 est sortie/a récemment.br / br / Unicorn s'appuie au maximum sur les noyaux Unix pour éviter de réinventer la roue. Par exemple, la répartition des requêtes entre les différents processus se fait grâce à une socket partagée. Il est également possible de mettre à jour Unicorn, l'application ou l'interpréteur Ruby sans perdre la moindre connexion.br / br / De même, Unicorn est optimisé pour servir des clients rapides. Il est donc très souvent utilisé derrière un reverse-proxy, qui pourra bufferiser les requêtes des clients lents. br / br / A l'inverse, utiliser Unicorn pour des connexions longues comme du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28informatique%29Comet/a (Comet désigne un ensemble de techniques où un serveur maintient des connexions HTTP ouvertes pour pouvoir pousser des contenus vers les clients) ou des a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocketswebsockets/a serait très inefficace, je vous conseille pour cela de regarder Rainbows : c'est un projet inspiré d'Unicorn qui vise justement à répondre à cette problématique particulère.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://unicorn.bogomips.org/Unicorn/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://unicorn.bogomips.org/NEWS.htmlAnnonce de la version 1.0.0/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/03/unicorn-power.htmlLa puissance d'Unicorn chez twitter/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://github.com/blog/517-unicornL'utilisation d'Unicorn par Github/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unixI like Unicorn because it's Unix/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://rainbows.rubyforge.org/Rainbows/abr /

15:45
Client: I know you creative guys sometimes need “inspiration.” I really want my project...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient: /strongI know you creative guys sometimes need “inspiration.” I really want my project to go well so I will get you the kind of inspiration you need, OK? Free of charge./p pstrong[It was revealed later in the meeting that he was suggesting that he would supply our designers with marijuana.] /strong/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KnqBUOJ4oGoyMWvOeIUoWs5v090/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KnqBUOJ4oGoyMWvOeIUoWs5v090/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KnqBUOJ4oGoyMWvOeIUoWs5v090/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KnqBUOJ4oGoyMWvOeIUoWs5v090/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
June 18, 2010
23:05
Client: “How come all the photos I took have the heads cut off?” Me: “Hmm, Did you...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “How come all the photos I took have the heads cut off?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Hmm, Did you look though the view finder when you took them?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I don’t know what that is. Can’t you just move the picture up so I can see their heads? I mean they’re digital pictures?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KQqGK4DJFAK0BRU1XTPNcnfjk0U/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KQqGK4DJFAK0BRU1XTPNcnfjk0U/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KQqGK4DJFAK0BRU1XTPNcnfjk0U/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/KQqGK4DJFAK0BRU1XTPNcnfjk0U/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

21:54
Googles Wi-Fi Crucifixion, an Open Mike, and Public Is As Public Does
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. As I noted recently in Highly Illogical: The Hysteria Over Googles Wi-Fi Scanning, the unseemly and opportunistic attacks, lawsuits, and now perhaps even criminal prosecutions of Google over their accidental recording of unencrypted Wi-Fi payload data seem to call...

18:33
Le Sharkfest'10 vient de se terminer
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le Sharkfest est un événement annuel qui se déroule aux États-Unis, centré sur l'incontournable a href=http://www.wireshark.org/Wireshark/a. Anciennement connu sous le nom d'Ethereal, c'est un « packet sniffer » libre (GPLv2) multi-plates-formes (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X). Véritable couteau suisse de l'analyse de protocole (il en reconnait pas loin de 800), ses utilisations sont multiples : des plus légitimes dépannage, analyse réseau, développement et rétro-ingénierie de protocoles , au plus controversées comme le piratage (au même titre que tout autre logiciel - P2P - ou couteau de cuisine)br / br / Le dernier en date Sharkfest - troisième du nom - s'est déroulé du 14 au 17 Juin 2010 sur le campus de l'université de Stanford à Palo Alto, CA. Les quelques sessions ci-dessous, tirées des programmes officiels, donnent la teneur des échanges :br / ulliScripting and Extending Nmap and Wireshark with Lua ;br / /liliVisibility into the DMZ Network with Wireshark ;br / /liliAdvanced Threat Intelligence and Session Analysis.br / /li/ulGageons que les présentations seront bientôt disponibles. En attendant, les impatients pourront se plonger dans la lecture des présentations - pas toujours dans un format ouvert d'ailleurs - des deux années précédentes.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.cacetech.com/sharkfest.10/Page du Sharkfest'10/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.cacetech.com/sharkfest.09/Page du Sharkfest'09/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.cacetech.com/SHARKFEST.08/Page du Sharkfest'08/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.wireshark.org/WireShark/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/16/26740.htmlDLFP : Ostinato, un complément idéal à Wireshark/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~jgoffaux/29317.htmlDLFP : Introduction/tutoriel Wireshark/abr /
18:13
WordPress 3.0 Thelonious”
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

WordPress est un moteur de blog, écrit en PHP et publié sous licence GPLv2. Matt Mullenweg a annoncé la sortie immédiate de WordPress 3.0 au nom de code Thelonious. Citons quelques chiffres : WordPress existe depuis 2003, la version 2.0 a été téléchargée plus de 10 millions de fois, le développement de la version 3.0 a pris six mois, 218 contributeurs ont été impliqués, 1217 améliorations apportées et bogues corrigés, et il s'agit de la 13ème version majeure.br / br / Le changement majeur est la fusion de WordPress vanilla et MU (Multi-User) : ceci permet avec une seule installation de faire autant de blogs que la machine peut en supporter. Autre changement de taille, les nouvelles API pour développeurs de thèmes apportent la possibilité de gérer les fonds, entêtes, liens courts, menus, types de publications, et taxinomies. Le nouveau thème par défaut « Twenty Ten » exploite pleinement ces nouveautés. L'interface a été également revue et est plus légère, de l'aide contextuelle a été ajoutée sur tous les écrans, et il est possible de mettre à jour des plugins par lots.br / br / D'autres améliorations ont été apportées sur le tableau de bord, l'édition de posts, le multimédia, les liens, les commentaires, l'apparence, les plugins, les outils, l'installation, le multi-site… Sont remis à plus tard la refonte des rôles et le téléversement de médias. Les développeurs principaux souhaitent désormais se concentrer sur l'écosystème, tout ce qui touche de près ou de loin à WordPress : showcase, Codex, forums, profils, API de mise à jour et de compatibilité, annuaires de thèmes et de plugins, mailing lists, wordcamp.org, etc.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/WordPress 3.0 Thelonious”/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://wordpress.org/WordPress.org/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://wordpress.org/download/Téléchargement/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0Changements de la version 3.0/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunkCode source/abr /

17:23
Maquettage et prototypage : le tour des notions et des outils
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Zoning, wireframe, maquette, prototype, voici des termes qui ne vous sont pas anodins, puisque nous les rencontrons de plus en plus dans le monde du Web, notamment dans les phases d'initialisation des projets. Mais savez-vous réellement ce qui se cache derrière chacun de ces termes, qui désignent l'ensemble des techniques et des outils qui permettent de maquetter graphiquement, fonctionnellement, ergonomiquement un site Web ? Tout d'abord utilisée dans la création de logiciels lourds avant la (...)
17:23
Zoning, wireframe, maquettage, prototype ... : les meilleures pratiques
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Zoning, wireframe, maquette, prototype, voici des termes qui ne vous sont pas anodins, puisque nous les rencontrons de plus en plus dans le monde du Web, notamment dans les phases d'initialisation des projets. Mais savez-vous réellement ce qui se cache derrière chacun de ces termes, qui désignent l'ensemble des techniques et des outils qui permettent de maquetter graphiquement, fonctionnellement, ergonomiquement un site Web ? Tout d'abord utilisée dans la création de logiciels lourds avant la (...)

15:45
[From an unsolicited e-mail looking for a free illustrator] “Take this letter very seriously....
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrong[From an unsolicited e-mail looking for a free illustrator]/strong/p blockquote“Take this letter very seriously. Imagine that George Lucas or Todd McFarlain just emailed you and you now have the chance to  collaborate with one of the most gifted artists of all time. Seriously . Think about that. You could be responsible for helping to create the next great american novel.”/blockquote pThe enclosed script synopsis was about a proud young Aryan boy in search of a mummy in order to use its ancient magic to restore the “nazies” to their former glory./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3_UEwtltgqK8tPSnZZA-RRRVJb0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3_UEwtltgqK8tPSnZZA-RRRVJb0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3_UEwtltgqK8tPSnZZA-RRRVJb0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/3_UEwtltgqK8tPSnZZA-RRRVJb0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:45
Sortie de LyX 1.6.6 et LyX 2.0-α4
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX title=Définition WikipédiaLyX/a est un logiciel permettant la saisie de texte structuré utilisant LaTeX pour faire le rendu et est disponible sur les trois principales plate-formes. L'interface utilisateur, en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt title=Définition WikipédiaQt/a, permet de se faire une idée de l'aspect de la sortie définitive. Plus commercialement parlant, il s'agit d'avoir la qualité du rendu de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX title=Définition WikipédiaLaTeX/a sans avoir à en connaître le langage (toutefois la connaissance de la syntaxe ainsi que les mécanismes de placement des flottants est un plus). L'autre point fort du logiciel est qu'il est auto-documenté dans de a href=http://www.lyx.org/I18nnombreuses langues/a, un nouvel utilisateur peut donc facilement commencer son premier document.br / Dernièrement, LyX a atteint le numéro a href=http://www.lyx.org/announce/1_6_6.txt1.6.6/a suivi d'une première a href=http://www.lyx.org/announce/1_6_6_1.txtrévision/a pour corriger un bogue bloquant,br / br / Le développement de LyX 2.0 se poursuit, une pré-version a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg81561.htmlalpha4/a a été publiée. Bien entendu, elle est réservée aux développeurs et il ne faut pas l'utiliser en production. La feuille de route prévoit une sortie définitive en septembre de cette année.br / br / La suite de la dépêche abordera quelques points de l'utilisation de LyX, les nouveautés de cette version et de la version à venir.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.lyx.org/WebFr.HomeSite officiel/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.lyx.org/announce/1_6_6.txtL'annonce LyX 1.6.6/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-users@lists.lyx.org/msg81561.htmlAnnonce alpha 4/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://wiki.lyx.org/Devel/ReleaseScheduleFeuille de route/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX20Nouveautés de LyX 2.0/abr / (...)
10:35
Petites brèves, spécial Javascript
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

bHTTP-console/b est un outil en ligne de commande qui vous permet de faire des requêtes HTTP et d'examiner la réponse. C'est donc une sorte de a href=http://curl.haxx.se/Curl/a, mais son mode interactif en fait un outil très pratique si vous avez à débugger une API a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest title=Définition WikipédiaRest/a. Pour ceux qui préfèrent les interfaces web à la ligne de commande, vous pouvez regarder a href=http://hurl.it/Hurl/a (a href=http://github.com/defunkt/hurlcode source/a).br / br / bPDF.js/b est une bibliothèque javascript qui permet de générer des fichiers a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF title=Définition WikipédiaPDF/a simplement. Elle peut être utilisée dans un navigateur web ou coté serveur avec Node.js.br / br / À propos de bNode.js/b, Ryan Dahl, son créateur, viendra en parler lors du Web Workers Camp le 3 juillet à la Cantine, Paris. Node.js est une implémentation Javascript côté serveur qui utilise le moteur V8 de Google Chrome. Il est publié sous licence MIT et est très performant. Par exemple, il est possible de faire tourner des composants serveur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP title=Définition WikipédiaXMPP/a avec a href=http://xmppjs.prosody.im/xmpp.js/a.br / br / Enfin, pour ceux qui préfèrent utiliser a href=http://jquery.com/jQuery/a (une bibliothèque Javascript facilitant le développement d'un site web), a href=http://www.rebeccamurphey.com/Rebecca Murphey/a a mis en ligne un livre intitulé « jQuery fundamentals », sous licence CC by-sa. Celui se compose de trois parties : une introduction au Javascript, les concepts de base de jQuery et jQuery avancé (la troisième partie n'est pas encore là).br / br / ba href=http://bitbucket.org/primalmotion/strophecappuccino/wiki/HomeStropheCappuccino/a/b est un ensemble de classes Javascript qui - comme le nom l'indique - lient a href=http://cappuccino.org/Capuccino/a (framework pour applications desktop-like) à a href=http://code.stanziq.com/strophe/Strophe/a (bibliothèque XMPP). Il permet donc d'écrire de vraies applications desktop en Javascript se reposant sur XMPP.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://github.com/cloudhead/http-consolehttp-console/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://nodejs.orgNode.js/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://barcamp.org/WebWorkersCampWeb Workers Camp/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://github.com/Marak/pdf.jsPDF.js/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2010/06/17/open-source-jquery-training/Annonce du livre jQuery fundamentals/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.rebeccamurphey.com/jqfundamentals/jQuery fundamentals/abr /

2:02
WordPress 3.0
» ‎ Dan Siemon

Upgraded to WordPress 3.0. There’s been so many changes to the themes in recent versions that I think I’ll be running the new default theme at least until I get some time to update my own.

The new theme looks really nice but it still doesn’t add horizontal scrolling to pre-formatted text blocks. This kinda breaks posts with long configuration examples.

June 17, 2010
23:31
XMP PHP Toolkit v2.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'extension PHP5 XMP PHP Toolkit vient de sortir en version 2.0. Cette nouvelle version développée par Mathias Vitalis est basée sur le dernier Adobe XMP Toolkit. Cette extension permet de lire, écrire, modifier, parser, parcourir les métadonnées d'un fichier multimédia, et est proposée en licence GPLv3.br / br / Cette extension permet, au sein de PHP5, de disposer des classes XMP d'Adobe et de leurs méthodes, afin de lire, modifier, extraire les métadonnées XMP d'une multitude de fichiers multimédia (jpg, eps, pdf, psd, mp3, avi, mpeg, flv, wav... et dans cette nouvelle version, les .mov). Écrite en C++, cette extension permet d'ouvrir et manipuler ces données avec une grande rapidité. Vous pourrez donc au sein de votre application PHP5, ouvrir ce genre de fichier, en extraire les métadonnées et les indexer comme vous le voulez. Cette version 2.0 a été testée sous système Debian, Debian 64bits, FreeBSD et Mac OS X.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://xmpphptoolkit.sourceforge.net/XMP PHP Toolkit Extension Homepage/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.silverhand.fr/index.php/programmation-rd/xmp-php-toolkit-version-2-0Blog du développeur/abr /

23:05
"Also, I will pay you when my website becomes popular like Facebook. For now, you can just work on..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Also, I will pay you when my website becomes popular like Facebook. For now, you can just work on it.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zyYtZqoCF-4pgxPqPBzRT-cYYvI/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zyYtZqoCF-4pgxPqPBzRT-cYYvI/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zyYtZqoCF-4pgxPqPBzRT-cYYvI/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/zyYtZqoCF-4pgxPqPBzRT-cYYvI/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

20:06
Gérez vos projets avec Trac
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Trac est un outil de gestion de projets écrit en Python et distribué sous a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracLicenselicence BSD/a. Il combine un wiki, un outil de suivi de demandes et un explorateur a href=http://subversion.apache.org/SVN/a (ou a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/PluginList#VersionControlSystemsd'autres SCM/a).br / br / C'est donc un projet similaire à a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/10/20/26048.htmlInDefero/a, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/02/09/26457.htmlRetrospectiva/a ou a href=http://www.redmine.org/Redmine/a. Trac est moins avancé que ces outils pour l'aspect multi-projets, mais ses a href=http://trac-hacks.org/nombreux greffons/a lui permettent de rester en tête en nombre de fonctionnalités.br / br / La version 0.12 est sortie récemment et apporte de nombreuses améliorations. Parmi celles-ci, citons les plus importantes :ulliPrise en charge de l'internationalisation avec a href=http://babel.edgewall.org/Babel/a ;br / /liliGestion de a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracRepositoryAdminplusieurs dépôts/a par instance ;br / /liliSyntaxe wiki plus souple, plus intuitive, et plus proche de a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/WikiCreoleWiki Creole/a ;br / /liliAmélioration de l'interface de gestion des tickets et commentaires ;br / /liliAjouts de fonctionnalités au wiki : renommer de pages, a href=http://www.universaleditbutton.org/Universal_Edit_ButtonUniversal Edit Button/a, prévisualisation automatique, etc./li/ulVous pouvez essayer cette nouvelle version sur le a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/demo-0.12site de la démo/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/Site officiel de trac/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDev/ReleaseNotes/0.12Release notes de la version 0.12/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://trac-hacks.org/Trac hacks/abr /
19:30
Actualités du monde XMPP
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Voici une petite compilation d'actualités du monde a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP title=Définition WikipédiaXMPP/a. Au menu, une pincée de nouveaux clients, des bonnes nouvelles version de serveurs, quelques soupçons d'interviews et en guise de dessert, des curiosités à ne pas louper.br / br / Commençons par une petite série de nouveaux clients de messagerie instantanée XMPP, avec respectivement leur environnement/langage de développement, licence, plate-forme d'exécution, ainsi que leur particularité.br / ullia href=http://swift.im/releases/swift-1.0beta3/Swift/a : développé en C++ et Qt sous GPLv3. Fonctionne sous Linux, Mac OS X et l'autre OS. Concentration sur les tâches les plus courantes et peu d'interruptions non-nécessaires de l'utilisateur.br / /lilia href=http://www.jappix.com/Jappix/a : développé en PHP sous aGPLv3 pour le Web. Réseaux sociaux et respect de la vie privée.br / /lilia href=http://poezio.eu/Poezio/a : développé en Python sous GPLv3 pour un fonctionnement en mode console. IRC-like.br / /lilia href=https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/mobile/addon/53630/Papaya/a : développé en XUL sous MPL 1.1 pour Firefox mobile. Expérimentation d'extension mobile.br / /lilia href=http://www.cleartext.com/esm/Cleartext ESM/a : Développé avec Adobe Air sous une licence propriétaire. Fusion du chat et du microblogging.br / /li/ulAu niveau des serveurs XMPP, on a vu des mises à jours ces derniers temps :ullia href=http://www.tigase.org/content/tigase-xmpp-server-500-b2135-finalTigase 5.0/a ;br / /lilia href=http://blog.prosody.im/prosody-0-7-0-released/Prosody 0.7.0/a ;br / /lilia href=http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd/release_notes/release_note_ejabberd_2.1.4ejabberd 2.1.4/a.br / /li/ulQuelques podcasts d'interviews ont été réalisés avec les moyens du bord au FOSDEM, par votre serviteur :br / ullia href=http://blog.xmpp.org/index.php/2010/06/fosdem-podcast-fabio-forno/Fabio Forno/a : développeur Lampiro ;br / /lilia href=http://blog.xmpp.org/index.php/2010/06/fosdem-podcast-dave-cridland/Dave Cridland/a : XSF Council ;br / /lilia href=http://blog.xmpp.org/index.php/2010/06/fosdem-podcast-florian-jensen/Florian Jensen/a : XSF Board ;br / /lilia href=http://blog.xmpp.org/index.php/2010/06/fosdem-podcast-simon-tennant/Simon Tennant/a : développeur BuddyCloud.br / /li/ulAutre curiosités du monde XMPP :ullia href=http://antoinemercadal.fr/archipelblog/Archipel/a : l'orchestrateur de machines virtuelles, basé sur libvirt et Capuccino ;br / /lilia href=http://blog.thetofu.com/hacking-s5-to-be-remote-controlled-and-sharedS5 over XMPP/a : la présentation XHTML+CSS+Javascript contrôlée à distance./li/ul br / br /

19:26
Using Symantec NetBackp With A Fedora 12 Live CD
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
At work, we use Symantec NetBackup for all our full and incremental backups to tape. With currently about 100 servers in operation, and roughly 300+ virtual development environments on the horizon using RHEV, NetBackup and Bare Metal Restore, also from Symantec, will be crucial in our operations.
Recently, we had some virtual servers take a dive, because the disk array they were on took a dive, and with it, all the storage that these VMs were relying on for their OS and other needs. So, we’ve been building these machines back up from backup on a new NetApp SAN. Everything has been working well with Bare Metal Restore for Windows VMs, but we were struggling getting it to work with RHEL. So, I got the idea to boot up a Fedora 12 Live CD, install the NetBackup client in the live environment, and do a restore from there, then reboot into the newly built machine.
Works like a charm! So, I documented the steps necessary to make it work. Realize, that this was documented for my place of employment. Of course, I’ve completely changed the hostnames, IP addresses, and other details that would be specific to work. However, if you deploy this in your environment, then you’ll need to make the necessary architectural changes that fit your needs. Also, this should work with Fedora 13, the latest release at the time of this writing, but Fedora 12 works well for us, and because it’s used just for this purpose, we see no pressing need to use the latest. Also, Debian or Ubuntu, or some other GNU/Linux based operating system might work as well, but NetBackup doesn’t support these operating system necessarily, and it is expecting the filesystem layout that is common with Red Hat based operating systems. Regardless, Fedora 12 is being used as a tool here, not because of any loyalty or fanboyism.
So, here’s the tutorial:
Fedora can be used as a temporary live environment for NetBackup when doing restores to RHEL machines. Just boot from the Fedora ISO or CD, and make sure you have configured networking appropriately, and that you can get out to the Internet. After that, follow the instructions below. This does assume that you have a base, bare-bones, RHEL install that matches the partitioning or volume layout of the previous install that you’re restoring. This must be completed first, because at the end of the tutorial, you will be mounting these devices, and restoring only the files, to these mount points.
First, the liveuser can get root access without any password. However, for this tutorial, you will need to set a password for root, so go ahead and do that:
```
[liveuser@localhost ~]$ su -
[root@localhost ~]# passwd
Changing password for user root.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@localhost ~]# 
```
At this point, we need to setup the hostname and networking correctly. We have set aside the ‘netbackup.example.com’ domain name for the Linux restore system in our DNS environment, and the IP address that has been set aside is ’10.19.84.254′. In the terminal as root, set the hostname:
```
[root@localhost ~]# hostname netbackup.example.com
[root@localhost ~]# export HOSTNAME="netbackup.example.com"
```
Now get networking configured with NetworkManager. In the status bar of the desktop, there is an icon that looks like two computers. Right click this, and click “Edit Connections…”. Click “Auto eth0”, click the “Edit…” button, click the “IPv4 Settings” tab, and set the parameters as necessary:
```
Method: Manual
Address: 10.19.84.254
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 10.19.1.254
DNS servers: 10.19.2.192, 10.19.3.192, 10.19.4.192
Search domains: example.com
```
Click “Apply…”, and enter the password for root, then close the “Network Connections” widget. The icon looking like two computers should have a red “X” next to it now. This means it’s not online. Left-click the icon, and click “Auto eth0” to get it back online. Back in your terminal, you should be able to verify that the networking has been set correctly:
```
[root@localhost ~]# ip a show eth0
2: eth0:  mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:1a:4a:06:14:24 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 10.19.84.254/24 brd 10.5.31.255 scope global eth0
    inet6 fe80::21a:4aff:fe06:1424/64 scope link
        valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
[root@localhost ~]# ping -c 4 mediaserver.example.com
PING mediaserver.example.com (10.19.84.60) 56(84) bytes of data
64 bytes from mediaserver.example.com: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.942 ms
64 bytes from mediaserver.example.com: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.230 ms
64 bytes from mediaserver.example.com: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.193 ms
64 bytes from mediaserver.example.com: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.212 ms

--- mediaserver.example.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3002ms
rrt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.193/0.394/0.942/0.316 ms
```
In order for the NetBackup client to communicate with the media server (mediaserver.example.com – 10.19.84.60), we need to make a modification to our /etc/hosts file, and add it’s IP address and hostname:
```
[root@localhost ~]# echo "10.19.84.60      mediaserver.example.com mediaserver" >> /etc/hosts
```
With networking correctly set, we need to start up the SSH server:
```
[root@localhost ~]# service sshd start
Generating SSH1 RSA host key:                              [  OK  ]
Generating SSH2 RSA host key:                              [  OK  ]
Generating SSH2 DSA host key:                              [  OK  ]
Starting sshd:                                             [  OK  ]
```
Because this is a temporary live environment, we’re not interested in SELinux nor any firewall. So, let’s get those disabled first:
```
[root@localhost ~]# getenforce
Enforcing
[root@localhost ~]# setenforce 0
[root@localhost ~]# getenforce
Permissive
[root@localhost ~]# service iptables stop
iptables: Flushing firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter          [  OK  ]
iptables: Unloading modules                                [  OK  ]
```
At this point, you should verify that you can SSH to the Fedora live environment from another host. It should work. However, we still have more work to do. Before we can get the NetBackup client installed, we need to install a few packages. So, in your terminal, type the following:
```
[root@localhost ~]# yum install glibc-2.11-2.i686 libacl-2.2.47-5.fc12.i686 libstdc++-4.4.2-7.fc12.i686
```
This will download about 30MB of packages and metadata necessary for installation. Depending on your Internet connection, this might take a while. If you don’t want to wait, you could change the repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d/, and use a faster mirror. Or, you can wait. After the packages are installed, and everything configured, we should be able to install the NetBackup client. To do this, we need to SSH to mediaserver.example.com, and send the client over. You can do this from the terminal you’ve already been working in:
```
[root@localhost ~]# ssh mediaserver
The authenticity of host 'mediaserver (10.19.84.60)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 14:d3:50:f1:27:d5:14:ab:c2:ca:51:fa:7e:5a:98:4c.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'mediaserver,10.19.84.60' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
root@mediaserver's password:
[root@mediaserver ~]# 
```
Now transfer over the client. First, mediaserver.example.com will likely have the wrong SSH key for this box on file, as you might have done this more than once, and every time you boot into the Fedora 12 Live CD, and start up the SSH server, a different key will be generated. You will need to delete it:
```
[root@mediaserver ~]# cd /usr/openv/netbackup/client/Linux/RedHat2.6/
[root@mediaserver RedHat2.6]# ./sftp_to_client netbackup.example.com root
Connecting to 10.19.84.18...
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
89:db:1f:12:f9:8f:76:38:63:6e:54:75:7a:43:ed:9e.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:4
RSA host key for netbackup.example.com has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
Couldn't read packet: Connection reset by peer

sftp connection to netbackup.example.com failed.
```
Notice, that it says the offending key is on line 4 of /root/.ssh/known_hosts. So, I’ll delete line 4 from that file:
```
[root@mediaserver RedHat2.6]# sed -i 4d /root/.ssh/known_hosts
```
Now, try again:
```
[root@mediaserver RedHat2.6]# ./sftp_to_client netbackup.example.com root
Connecting to netbackup.example.com...
The authenticity of host 'netbackup.example.com (10.19.84.254)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 4d:74:e6:66:ed:d9:bc:dc:3a:71:41:51:18:58:da:e9.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added '10.19.84.254' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
root@netbackup.example.com's password: 

sftp completed successfully.

The root user on netbackup.example.com must now execute the command
"sh /tmp/bp.22802/client_config [-L]".  The optional argument, "-L",
is used to avoid modification of the client's current bp.conf file.
[root@mediaserver RedHat2.6]# exit
[root@localhost ~]#
```
Now that we are back in the live environment, we can execute the command as given us from mediaserver.example.com. Of course, the name of the file transferred over might be different. First, let’s get xinetd running:
```
[root@localhost ~]# service xinetd start
Starting xinetd:                                           [  OK  ]
[root@localhost ~]# sh /tmp/bp.22802/client_config
```
It will spit out a bunch of files and directories that it’s installing for the client, and will reload the xinetd server. All that is left, is to start the NetBackup client, and we’re finished!
```
[root@localhost ~]# service nbclient start
NetBackup SAN Client Fibre Transport daemon started.
```
Verify that the default NetBackup ports 13722, 13724, 13782 and 13783 are bound to the system:
```
[root@localhost ~]# lsof -Pan -i tcp | grep 137
xinetd   3261 root    5u  IPv6  22914      0t0  TCP *:13782 (LISTEN)
xinetd   3261 root    6u  IPv6  22915      0t0  TCP *:13722 (LISTEN)
xinetd   3261 root    8u  IPv6  22916      0t0  TCP *:13724 (LISTEN)
xinetd   3261 root    9u  IPv6  22917      0t0  TCP *:13783 (LISTEN)
```
At this point, you should be able to login to the NetBackup Administrator Console, find the netbackup.example.com client, and verify that they can talk. The only thing that you should be aware of, is that you need to mount all logical volumes and partitions to their respective mount points BEFORE the restore! This is important! When in the NetBackup Administrator Console, and doing the restore, you restore the files to a specific mount point. In our case, it’s going to be ‘/’. This means, that if the host has separate /var, /u01, /, /home and other mount points, they all need to be mounted to their respective mount points BEFORE doing the restore!
```
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/work/root /mnt
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/work/var /mnt/var
[root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/work/u01 /mnt/u01
etc
```
CONGRATULATIONS! At this point, you’re ready to start restoring the data using NetBackup in the Fedora 12 live environment. Just remember, that when you’re in the NetBackup Admin Console, you need to restore the data to netbackup.example.com, and the directory path you need to use should be /mnt, not /, obviously.
I hope someone on the remote corners of the Internet finds this tutorial helpful. If so, let me know if the comments. If there are any spelling errors or I’ve missed something giving away detail of my works, also let me know so I can make the corrections. Thanks!

15:45
Setting up the final, complex shot of a broadcast music video where the camera moves almost 50 feet...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pSetting up the final, complex shot of a broadcast music video where the camera moves almost 50 feet side to side on a crane./p pstrongMe:/strong ”Alright, let’s move the crane in, calibrate the remote head and focus unit, and get the rest of the lighting set up for this last shot.”/p pstrongProducers/strong: “We figured you wouldn’t need the crane, but we have a ladder.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Rpgb14hkgoSGyFa5RWRvVoQZVKA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Rpgb14hkgoSGyFa5RWRvVoQZVKA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Rpgb14hkgoSGyFa5RWRvVoQZVKA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Rpgb14hkgoSGyFa5RWRvVoQZVKA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

15:41
Revue de presse - Juin 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Si vous ne vous êtes pas encore rendus chez votre marchand de journaux, voici les magazines sortis en début de mois et qui viennent compléter les bimestriels du mois dernier toujours en vente :br / ullia href=#1GNU/Linux Magazine France/a n°128 sur la détection d'intrusionbr / /lilia href=#2Le hors série Linux Pratique/a n°18 spécial ligne de commandebr / /lilia href=#3Linux Pratique Essentiel/a n°14 dédié à Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx sous l'angle de l'optimisationbr / /lilia href=#4Hors série Planète Linux/a n°22 consacré lui aussi à Ubuntu 10.04/li/ul iBonnes lectures/ibr / br / span style=text-decoration: underlineAddendum (18 juin)/span : La déferlante Ubuntu 10.04 continue avecbr / ullila sortie du premier numéro de bMaximum Linux/b consacré à cette distribution et qui la fournie sur un DVD (avec coffret. Serait-ce une renaissance de ce magazine décédé au début de ce millénaire ?br / /lilibLinux Identity Set/b qui propose un DVD multi-boot contenant différentes variantes d'Ubuntu en 32 et 64 bits : Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mythbuntu, Xubuntu et la version Ubuntu Netbook Editionbr / /li/ulParmi les autres distribution, Fedora 13 est aussi disponible chez votre marchand de journaux chez bLinux Identity Kit/bbr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.unixgarden.com/index.php/news/gnulinux-magazine-n%C2%B0128-juin-2010-chez-votre-marchand-de-journauxGNU/Linux Magazine France n°128/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.unixgarden.com/index.php/news/linux-pratique-hors-serie-n%C2%B018-juinjuillet-2010-chez-votre-marchand-de-journauxHors série Linux Pratique n°18/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.unixgarden.com/index.php/news/linux-pratique-essentiel-n%C2%B014-juin-juillet-2010-chez-votre-marchand-de-journauxLinux Pratique Essentiel n°14/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.dppresse.com/Planète Linux (DPPresse)/abr / (...)
11:08
Quelques outils pour générer des fichiers WebM
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Bien que WebM, le nouveau format libre et ouvert de référence pour la diffusion audio et vidéo sur le Web, basé notamment sur le codec vidéo VP8 libéré par Google, ait à peine a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/19/26874.htmlun mois d'existence/a, de nombreux logiciels permettent d'ores et déjà de convertir des séquences dans ce format. Plus précisément, c'est le cas de :br / ul li la bibliothèque multimédia GStreamer, à partir des versions GStreamer Good Plugins 0.10.23, Ugly Plugins 0.10.15 et Bad Plugins 0.10.19 sorties le 31 mai dernier et donc des nombreux logiciels basés dessus (PiTiVi, Transmageddon, Arista...) ;/li li la collection de logiciels FFmpeg (à partir de la version 0.6 qui vient de sortir le 15 juin) et des logiciels basés dessus tels Miro Video Converter (pour Windows et Mac OS X seulement). /li /ul br / À côté de ces outils, permettant d'encoder la vidéo au format VP8, le son au format Vorbis, et de placer le tout dans un conteneur WebM conformément à la spécification, d'autres outils permettent d'effectuer des manipulations sur le conteneur sans intervenir sur l'encodage des pistes audio/vidéo.br / C'est le cas de la collection d'outils MKVToolNix (à partir de la version 4.0.0 sortie le 5 juin dernier) parmi lesquels imkvmerge/i permet de générer des fichiers WebM à partir de sources pré-encodées en VP8 et/ou Vorbis (utile par exemple pour convertir un son Ogg Vorbis en WebM).br / br / Deux autres outils très récents (lancés en mai dernier) sont à signaler :ulliimkclean/i qui permet d'optimiser un fichier WebM. Suite à son utilisation, la taille de votre fichier sera éventuellement réduite, les non-conformités seront le cas échéant corrigées et l'index sera placé en tête du fichier pour optimiser la lecture sur Internet./liliimkvalidator/i permet de s'assurer de la conformité d'un fichier WebM. /li/ul br / MiroVideoConverter, disponible sous Windows et MacOSX, est pour sa part une interface graphique aux outils precedemment cités, simplifiant ainsi la conversion de video par simple selection de profil de sortie.br / br / Tous les logiciels cités sont des logiciels libres (selon les cas sous licence GNU LGPL, GNU GPL ou BSD).br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/news/#2010-05-31T03:00:00ZGStreamer/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-0.6.releaseFFmpeg/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/MKVToolnix/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.matroska.org/downloads/mkclean.htmlmkclean/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.matroska.org/downloads/mkvalidator.htmlmkvalidator/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/Miro Video Converter/abr /
10:36
Le pare-feu d'OpenOffice.org existe !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Vous pensiez madame Albanel, l'ancienne ministre de la culture, à côté de ses pompes lorsqu'elle a parlé du pare-feu d'OpenOffice.org en pleine Assemblée Nationale lors des débats hadopiens ? Détrompez-vous, elle était juste un peu en avance sur son temps. Mis au défi, Pollux, bien connu dans le domaine de la sécurité informatique et du libre, vient d'implémenter la fonction dans la célèbre suite bureautique. Le tout n'est pas un simple petit bidouillage ou une blague potache à l'aide d'une macro, mais une véritable petite architecture basée sur :ulliOpenOffice.org (forcément !) ;br / /lilinfqueue et python pour amener les paquets en espace utilisateur (l'auteur ne se voyait pas porter OOo en espace noyau) ;br / /lilipython-uno pour manipuler OOo ;br / /li/ulLa communication entre la partie filtrante et la console d'admin se fait en XML-RPC avec pyUNOserver.br / br / D'une simplicité déconcertante, il suffit juste de lister les ports à autoriser et OOo va les filtrer, Pollux en a de plus fait un outil daycidors-compliant en remontant graphiquement le nombre de paquets rejetés et acceptés, le tout mis à jour en temps réel ! Tous les détails sur son blog ! À proposer d'urgence à Orange pour remplacer leur console de téléchargement, car au vu des performances (~10 paquets par seconde), cela vous fera passer l'envie de faire du P2P !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.wzdftpd.net/blog/index.php?2010/06/16/46-le-pare-feu-openofficeLE pare-feu OpenOffice.org par Pollux/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.wzdftpd.net/downloads/oowall/Récupérer le pare-feu OOo/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.wzdftpd.net/downloads/oowall/video_oowall.aviLe pare-feu en fonctionnement (vidéo)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.wzdftpd.net/blog/images/oowall_02.pngCapture d'écran du pare-feu/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F011hLZHZrMamp;NR=1L'origine du pare-feu OOo/abr /
9:50
latrace, le traceur qui instrumente le chargeur dynamique
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le chargeur dynamique ld.so projette en mémoire les bibliothèques partagées référencées par un binaire. Pour ceux qui ont déjà décroché, lancez un terminal, et preldd /bin/bash/pre listera les bibliothèques dont bash dépend.br / br / Quel est l'intérêt de pouvoir instrumenter les opérations du chargeur dynamique me direz-vous ? Cela permet - entre autres - de tracer l'appel et le retour de fonctions appartenant aux bibliothèques partagées. La signature des fonctions permet de détailler le nombre et le type des arguments ainsi que le type de la valeur de retour. Les amateurs de ltrace apprécieront la similitude.br / br / La différence entre les deux outils provient du fait que latrace utilise une interface inexploitée du chargeur dynamique nommée rtld-audit, disponible sur les libc dont la version est supérieure ou égale à 2.4. Cette dernière est inspirée par l'interface d'audit de Solaris. Là où ltrace échoue à tracer des applications multithreadées, latrace s'en sort haut la main.br / br / La dernière version de latrace, la 0.5.9, date de mai 2010. Latrace est sous licence GPLv3. Si vous vous retrouvez un jour bloqué par ltrace, pensez à latrace !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://people.redhat.com/jolsa/latrace/doc.shtmlSite de latrace/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man7/rtld-audit.7.htmlPage de manuel de rtld-audit/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://people.redhat.com/jolsa/latrace/dl/latrace-0.5.9.tar.bz2Code source de latrace-0.5.9/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://people.redhat.com/jolsa/latrace/latrace.htmlPage de manuel de latrace/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.linuxsymposium.org/archives/OLS/Reprints-2007/branco-Reprint.pdfLtrace vu de l'intérieur/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/ltrace-devel/2006-April/000036.htmlLtrace ne permet pas de tracer des applications multithreadées/abr /
9:49
Programme de la session technique « Systèmes d'exploitation » des RMLL 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Lors des Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre à Bordeaux du 6 au 11 juillet, la session technique Systèmes d'exploitation regroupera 13 conférences le jeudi et le vendredi.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Site des RMLL 2010/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/-Systemes-d-Exploitation-.htmlSession Systèmes d'exploitation des RMLL/abr / (...)
6:26
Présentation de nginx
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Nginx est un reverse proxy et serveur web, ainsi qu'un proxy mail (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP title=Définition WikipédiaIMAP/a et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP3 title=Définition WikipédiaPOP3/a), sous a href=http://nginx.org/LICENSElicence BSD/a. Igor Sysoev a commencé à le développer en 2002 pour un site russe à fort trafic, et depuis la popularité de nginx n'a cessé de croître. Selon netcraft, 6,5% des sites web dans le monde seraient servis par nginx.br / br / Nginx est réputé pour ses performances et sa faible consommation mémoire. Cela vient de son architecture : au lieu de dédier un processus ou un thread pour traiter chaque requête, il utilise un modèle événementiel. Cela lui permet notamment de tenir un grand nombre de connexions simultanées sans voir sa consommation mémoire s'envoler. Des sites connus comme a href=http://wordpress.com/Wordpress/a, a href=https://github.com/github/a et a href=http://sourceforge.net/SourceForge/a l'ont choisi pour cette raison.br / br / Nginx est également développé selon une approche modulaire : il est composé d'un cœur réduit et d'un grand nombre de modules que l'on peut choisir d'inclure à la compilation. Comme il est facile de développer un module, il en existe de nombreux et qui couvrent une large palette de fonctionnalités, des plus essentielles (SSL, fastcgi, gzip, rewrite, log) aux plus exotiques (servir des fichiers GIF vides, afficher des pages d'index aléatoires).br / br / Si vous souhaitez télécharger nginx, 3 versions vous seront proposées : la branche 0.8 offre les dernières avancées, la branche 0.7 est la branche stable, et la branche 0.6 (ilegacy/i) est encore maintenue. La dernière version, sortie le 15 juin, est la 0.8.41. Vous pourrez l'installer sur Linux, BSD, Solaris, OSX ou encore Windows.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://nginx.org/en/Nginx/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://wiki.nginx.org/MainLe wiki de Nginx/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NginxNginx sur wikipedia/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/05/14/may_2010_web_server_survey.htmlL'étude netcraft sur les parts de marchés des serveurs web/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxModulesLes modules officiels/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://wiki.nginx.org/Nginx3rdPartyModulesLes modules tiers/abr /
0:13
Publication de CodingTeam 0.9.3
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La cinquième version de la forge logicielle libre CodingTeam a été publiée récemment. Cette forge développée en PHP apporte avec cette 0.9.3 de nombreuses nouvelles fonctionnalités ainsi que des corrections de bugs la rendant à la fois plus agréable et plus stable.br / br / CodingTeam est une solution multilingue (actuellement disponible en français et en anglais), légère et agréable, offrant de nombreuses fonctionnalités pour les projets :ulliLa gestion des sources (Subversion ou Mercurial) ;br / /liliTimeline et roadmap ;br / /liliLa gestion des rapports de bugs et de demandes de fonctionnalité ;br / /liliLa traduction en ligne (via gettext) ;br / /liliSuivi de l'activité du projet par flux (RSS ou Atom) ;br / /liliLa gestion des téléchargements ;br / /liliPages de documentations (sur le modèle du wiki) ;br / /liliForums de discussion ;br / /liliIntégration des salons de discussion Jabber ;br / /liliStatistiques SVG./li/ul et bien plus encore !br / br / N'hésitez pas à installer et à tester la forge ! Vous pouvez aussi la voir en situation réelle et l'utiliser pour vos projets de logiciel libre sur le site CodingTeam.net. En outre, la communauté dispose de salons Jabber, vous pouvez donc rencontrer des utilisateurs et des administrateurs de la forge sur le salon a href=xmpp:codingteam@conference.codingteam.net?joincodingteam@conference.codingteam.net/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://codingteam.netCodingTeam.net/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://codingteam.net/project/codingteam/news/show/421-codingteam_093_releasedAnnonce officielle/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://codingteam.orgSite du projet/abr / (...)

June 16, 2010
22:05
"We have a really tight budget on this project so whatever you can do to cut costs would be really..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“We have a really tight budget on this project so whatever you can do to cut costs would be really great - like just do it in your spare time.” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/6yJWkSfgMmrFX8VqZINQOfm6Mw0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/6yJWkSfgMmrFX8VqZINQOfm6Mw0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/6yJWkSfgMmrFX8VqZINQOfm6Mw0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/6yJWkSfgMmrFX8VqZINQOfm6Mw0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:05
Client: I showed this logo to my daughter and she didn’t like it. Me: How old is your...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient: /strongI showed this logo to my daughter and she didn’t like it./p pstrongMe:/strong How old is your daughter?/p pstrongClient:/strong Five./p pstrongMe:/strong But your target audience is recovering drug addicts./p pstrongClient:/strong Right./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TfC_1L1hJVGQ3wxGkDi_qgeApmM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TfC_1L1hJVGQ3wxGkDi_qgeApmM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TfC_1L1hJVGQ3wxGkDi_qgeApmM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/TfC_1L1hJVGQ3wxGkDi_qgeApmM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

14:15
Transmission 2.00
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Transmission est un client a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_%28protocole%29BitTorrent/a multi-plateforme a href=https://trac.transmissionbt.com/browser/trunk/COPYINGlibre/a. Il propose cinq interfaces utilisateur : a href=http://github.com/fagga/transmission-remote-cliligne de commande/a, a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Clutch-Large.jpgWeb/a, a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/GTK-Large.jpgGTK+/a, a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Qt-Large.jpgQt/a et a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/images/screenshots/Mac-Large.jpgMac OS X/a.br / br / La version 2.00 vient de sortir et offre principalement des optimisations pour le téléchargement, mais également un démarrage plus rapide, une vue compacte, et les classiques corrections de bugs. Cette nouvelle version n'est donc pas une révolution, mais vient plutôt marquer l'accomplissement des changements apportés depuis la version 1.00 pour en faire un client BitTorrent agréable et pratique à utiliser.br / br / Ainsi, itransmission/i est un client facile à utiliser, léger, avec une bonne intégration aux différents environnements, mais qui n'en reste pas moins puissant (a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryptionchiffrement/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_exchangeéchange de peers/a, a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_schemeliens magnet/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_de_hachage_distribu%C3%A9eDHT/a, etc.).br / br / Ce qui est moins connu, c'est son extensibilité via les a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/resources.phpadd-ons/a. On trouve parmis celles-ci le contrôle à distance (dont téléphones mobiles), des interfaces, ou d'autres encore, malgré un écosystème encore assez peu étendu.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.transmissionbt.com/Transmission/abr / lien 2 : a href=https://trac.transmissionbt.com/wiki/ChangesRelease notes/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://trac.transmissionbt.com/La forge de TransmissionBT/abr /

12:59
ldquo;Failure is Wonderfulrdquo;
» ‎ Management Blog

I just read an article on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History website called “Failure is Wonderful”. The article talks about a Creativity Round Table, held at Washington's Cosmos Club in late April.

There are several important points were made that is:

Laurie Kahn stated “Much of creativity depends on listening, asking the right questions, and being able to see things differently.”

Greg Mortenson replied "Listen with your heart and trust your intuition, not solely your logic.”

"When people ask you a question or ask how to solve a problem," Mortenson advised, "be hands-off so that they can figure it out using resources and thinking creatively."

Laurie Kahn asked, "How do you sustain creativity?" Mortenson's experience taught him you need to "take care of yourself" and "be in touch with yourself".

"Don't just think outside of the box," Mortenson added, "live outside of the box. Take risks. Don't be afraid to fail. Failure is wonderful."
12:59
“Failure is Wonderful”
» ‎ Management Blog

I just read an article on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History website called “Failure is Wonderful”. The article talks about a Creativity Round Table, held at Washington's Cosmos Club in late April.

There are several important points were made that is:

Laurie Kahn stated “Much of creativity depends on listening, asking the right questions, and being able to see things differently.”

Greg Mortenson replied "Listen with your heart and trust your intuition, not solely your logic.”

"When people ask you a question or ask how to solve a problem," Mortenson advised, "be hands-off so that they can figure it out using resources and thinking creatively."

Laurie Kahn asked, "How do you sustain creativity?" Mortenson's experience taught him you need to "take care of yourself" and "be in touch with yourself".

"Don't just think outside of the box," Mortenson added, "live outside of the box. Take risks. Don't be afraid to fail. Failure is wonderful."

11:03
CMDB in the Cloud: not your father’s CMDB
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Bernd Harzog recently wrote a blog entry to examine whether “the CMDB [is] irrelevant in a Virtual and Cloud based world“. If I can paraphrase, his conclusion is that there will be something that looks like a CMDB but the current CMDB products are ill-equipped to fulfill that function. Here are the main reasons he gives for this prognostic:
1. A whole new class of data gets created by the virtualization platform – specifically how the virtualization platform itself is configured in support of the guests and the applications that run on the guest.
2. A whole new set of relationships between the elements in this data get created – specifically new relationships between hosts, hypervisors, guests, virtual networks and virtual storage get created that existing CMDB’s were not built to handle.
3. New information gets created at a very rapid rate. Hundreds of new guests can get provisioned in time periods much too short to allow for the traditional Extract, Transform and Load processes that feed CMDB’s to be able to keep up.
4. The environment can change at a rate that existing CMDB’s cannot keep up with. Something as simple as vMotion events can create thousands of configuration changes in a few minutes, something that the entire CMDB architecture is simply not designed to keep up with.
5. Having portions of IT assets running in a public cloud introduces significant data collection challenges. Leading edge APM vendors like New Relic and AppDynamics have produced APM products that allow these products to collect the data that they need in a cloud friendly way. However, we are still a long way away from having a generic ability to collect the configuration data underlying a cloud based IT infrastructure – notwithstanding the fact that many current cloud vendors would not make this data available to their customers in the first place.
6. The scope of the CMDB needs to expand beyond just asset and configuration data and incorporate Infrastructure Performance, Applications Performance and Service assurance information in order to be relevant in the virtualization and cloud based worlds.
I wanted to expand on some of these points.

New model elements for Cloud (bullets #1 and #2)

These first bullets are not the killers. Sure, the current CMDBs were designed before the rise of virtualized environment, but they are usually built on a solid modeling foundation that can easily be extend with new resources classes. I don’t think that extending the model to describe VM, VNets, Volumes, hypervisors and their relationships to the physical infrastructure is the real challenge.

New approach to “discovery” (bullets #3 and #4)

This, on the other hand is much more of a “dinosaurs meet meteorite” kind of historical event. A large part of the value provided by current CMDBs is their ability to automate resource discovery. This is often achieved via polling/scanning (at the hardware level) and heuristics/templates (directory names, port numbers, packet inspection, bird entrails…) for application discovery. It’s imprecise but often good enough in static environments (and when it fails, the CMDB complements the automatic discovery with a reconciliation process to let the admin clean things up). And it used to be all you could get anyway so there wasn’t much point complaining about the limitations. The crown jewel of many of today’s big CMDBs can often be traced back to smart start-ups specialized in application discovery/mapping, like Appilog (now HP, by way of Mercury) and nLayers (now EMC). And more recently the purchase of Tideway by BMC (ironically – but unsurprisingly – often cast in Cloud terms).

But this is not going to cut it in “the Cloud” (by which I really mean in a highly automated IT environment). As Bernd Harzog explains, the rate of change can completely overwhelm such discovery heuristics (plus, some of the network scans they sometimes use will get you in trouble in public clouds). And more importantly, there now is a better way. Why discover when you can ask? If resources are created via API calls, there are also API calls to find out which resources exist and how they are configured. This goes beyond the resources accessible via IaaS APIs, like what VMWare, EC2 and OVM let you retrieve. This “don’t guess, ask” approach to discovery needs to also apply at the application level. Rather than guessing what software is installed via packet inspection or filesystem spelunking, we need application-aware discovery that retrieves the application and configuration and dependencies from the application itself (or its underlying framework). And builds a model in which the connections between application entities are expressed in terms of the configuration settings that drive them rather than the side effects by which they can be noticed.

If I can borrow the words of Lew Cirne:

“All solutions built in the pre-cloud era are modeled on jvms (or their equivalent), hosts and ports, rather than the logical application running in a more fluid environment. If the solution identifies a web application by host/port or some other infrastructural id, then you cannot effectively manage it in a cloud environment, since the app will move and grow, and your management system (that is, everything offered by the Big 4, as well as all infrastructure management companies that pay lip service to the application) will provide nearly-useless visibility and extraordinarily high TCO.”

I don’t agree with everything in Lew Cirne’s post, but this diagnostic is correct and well worded. He later adds:

“So application management becomes the strategic center or gravity for the client of a public or private cloud, and infrastructure-centric tools (even ones that claim to be cloudy) take on a lesser role.”

Which is also very true even if counter-intuitive for those who think that

cloud = virtualization (in the “fake machine” interpretation of virtualization)

Embracing such a VM-centric view naturally raises the profile of infrastructure management compared to application management, which is a fallacy in Cloud computing.

Drawing the line between Cloud infrastructure management and application management (bullet #5)

This is another key change that traditional CMDBs are going to have a hard time with. In a Big-4 CMDB, you’re after the mythical “single source of truth”. Even in a federated CMDB (which doesn’t really exist anyway), you’re trying to have a unified logical (if not physical) repository of information. There is an assumption that you want to manage everything from one place, so you can see all the inter-dependencies, across all layers of the stack (even if individual users may have a scope that is limited by permissions). Not so with public Clouds and even, I would argue, any private Cloud that is more than just a “cloud” sticker slapped on an old infrastructure. The fact that there is a clean line between the infrastructure model and the application model is not a limitation. It is empowering. Even if your Cloud provider was willing to expose a detailed view of the underlying infrastructure you should resist the temptation to accept. Despite the fact that it might be handy in the short term and provide an interesting perspective, it is self-defeating in the long term from the perspective of realizing the productivity improvements promised by the Cloud. These improvements require that the infrastructure administrator be freed from application-specific issues and focus on meeting the contract of the platform. And that the application administrator be freed from infrastructure-level concerns (while at the same time being empowered to diagnose application-level concerns). This doesn’t mean that the application and infrastructure models should be disconnected. There is a contract and both models (infrastructure and consumption) should represent it in the same way. It draws a line, albeit one with some width.

Blurring the line between configuration and monitoring (bullet #6)

This is another shortcoming of current CMDBs, but one that I think is more easily addressed. The “contract” between the Cloud infrastructure and the consuming application materializes itself in a mix of configuration settings, administrative capabilities and monitoring data. This contract is not just represented by the configuration-centric Cloud API that immediately comes to mind. It also includes the management capabilities and monitoring points of the resulting instances/runtimes.

Wither CMDB?

Whether all these considerations mean that traditional CMDBs are doomed in the Cloud as Bernd Harzog posits, I don’t know. In this post, BMC’s Kia Behnia acknowledges the importance of application management, though it’s not clear that he agrees with their primacy. I am also waiting to see whether the application management portfolio he has assembled can really maps to the new methods of application discovery and management.

But these are resourceful organization, with plenty of smart people (as I can testify: in the end of my HP tenure I worked with the very sharp CMDB team that came from the Mercury acquisition). And let’s keep in mind that customers also value the continuity of support of their environment. Most of them will be dealing with a mix of old-style and Cloud applications and they’ll be looking for a unified management approach. This helps CMDB incumbents. If you doubt the power to continuity, take a minute to realize that the entire value proposition of hypervisor-style virtualization is centered around it. It’s the value of backward-compatibility versus forward-compatibility. in addition, CMDBs are evolving into CMS and are a lot more than configuration repositories. They are an important supporting tool for IT management processes. Whether, and how, these processes apply to “the Cloud” is a topic for another post. In the meantime, read what the IT Skeptic and Rodrigo Flores have to say.

I wouldn’t be so quick to count the Big-4 out, even though I work every day towards that goal, building Oracle’s application and middleware management capabilities in conjunction with my colleagues focused on infrastructure management.

If the topic of application-centric management in the age of Cloud is of interest to you (and it must be if you’ve read this long entry all the way to the end), You might also find this previous entry relevant: “Generalizing the Cloud vs. SOA Governance debate“.

Related posts:

10:18
Petites nouvelles pour rubyistes
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Les bRuby Hero Awards/b sont remis une fois par an, lors de la a href=http://www.railsconf.comRailsConf/a, et mettent en avant des personnes ayant fait avancer la communauté Ruby. Cette année, six trophées ont été remis :ullia href=http://twitter.com/josevalimJosé Valim/a, membre de la icore team/i de Ruby on Rails, auteur de greffons très utilisés comme par exemple a href=http://github.com/plataformatec/devise/devise/a ;br / /lilia href=http://twitter.com/qrushNick Quaranto/a pour son travail sur a href=http://github.com/qrush/gemcuttergemcutter/a, qui a débouché sur la nouvelle version du site a href=http://rubygems.org/rubygems.org/a ;br / /lilia href=http://twitter.com/tenderloveAaron Patterson/a pour ses bibliothèques Ruby, dont a href=http://github.com/tenderlove/psychPsych/a, a href=http://github.com/tenderlove/sqlite3-rubysqlite3-ruby/a et a href=http://nokogiri.org/Nokogiri/a ;br / /lilia href=http://twitter.com/wayneeseguinWayne Seguin/a pour a href=http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/RVM/a (Ruby Version Manager) ;br / /lilia href=http://twitter.com/seacreatureGregory Brown/a pour le blog a href=http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/Ruby Best Practices/a et la bibliothèque de génération de PDF a href=http://github.com/sandal/prawnPrawn/a ;br / /lilia href=http://twitter.com/fxnXavier Noria/a, membre de la icore team/i Ruby on Rails, pour son important travail sur la documentation de Ruby on Rails./li/ul br / Un bsondage Ruby/b est organisé pour mieux cerner les préférences des développeurs Ruby : Rails ou Sinatra ? Textmate ou Vim ? Espaces ou tabulations ? Si vous êtes un développeur Ruby, je vous encourage à y participer (ça ne prend que deux minutes).br / br / Pour ceux qui ont la malchance d'être sous bWindows/b, sachez qu'il existe un moyen simple d'installer Ruby sur votre plateforme : l'installeur. Les versions de Ruby disponibles ont été mises à jour la semaine dernière et le site vient d'être refait.br / br / Enfin, le 19 août sera l'occasion de célébrer le bWhy Day/b, en l'honneur de a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiffWhy the lucky stiff/a. Ce hacker a très fortement influencé la communauté Ruby, par ses écrits et notamment le a href=http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/guide poignant de why/a, ses projets Ruby (a href=http://github.com/camping/campingCamping/a, a href=http://github.com/shoes/shoesShoes/a, a href=http://github.com/jgarber/redclothRedCloth/a, a href=http://github.com/Sophrinix/TryRubyTry Ruby/a, etc.), et plus généralement par a href=http://viewsourcecode.org/why/sa présence en ligne/a. Le 19 août de l'année dernière, il a décidé de supprimer toute son activité en ligne, probablement pour préserver son anonymat. Le Why Day sera l'occasion de lui rendre hommage et de se lancer dans des projets fous.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/06/ruby-hero-awards-2010/Ruby Hero Awards 2010/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://survey.hamptoncatlin.com/Sondage Ruby 2010/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://rubyinstaller.org/Ruby Installer (Windows)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://whyday.org/Why day/abr /
7:18
ØMQ, la messagerie inter-applications « nouvelle vague »
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

AMQP, ou iAdvanced Message Queuing Protocol/i, est un protocole standard ouvert pour les MOM, ou iMessage Oriented Middleware/i. Pour résumer, c'est un protocole de message entre serveurs offrant des mécanismes de files d'attente, de routage (point à point et par diffusion/abonnement), de fiabilité, et de sécurité. Citons les implémentations OpenAMQ (en C, sous GPLv3) ou RabbitMQ (en erlang, sous MPL).br / br / Le sujet n'est pas nouveau, mais iMatix considère ce standard comme dépassé et en propose un nouveau, ØMQ ou ZeroMQ, avec une implémentation de qualité : légèreté, facilité d'intégration et performances. iMatix a pendant un temps développé OpenAMQ, mais soutient et développe désormais le projet ØMQ.br / br / Que vous utilisiez Ruby, Python ou C n'est pas un problème, les ibindings/i existent déjà. Vous pouvez vous en rendre compte en consultant le a href=http://www.zeromq.org/docs:cookbooklivre de recettes/a. La bibliothèque est elle-même développée en C++, sous licence LGPL.br / br / Le transport des messages entre les nœuds est assuré par différents biais selon la disponibilité des moyens : TCP/IP, a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_General_MulticastPGM/a, InfiniBand ou encore isocket/i Unix dans le cas de communications internes. L'interface proposée permet d'implémenter de façon concise les principaux usages de messagerie inter-applications : requête/réponse, abonnement/notification, éventuellement avec restriction à un sujet particulier. L'utilisation de fonctions avancées comme le a href=http://www.zeromq.org/blog:zero-copyzero-copy/a ou le scatter-gather est rendue possible dans les dernières versions de la bibliothèque.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.zeromq.org/Site de ØMQ/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.zeromq.org/docs:cookbookLivre de recettes de ØMQ/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://github.com/zeromq/zeromq2Code source de ØMQ/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/iMatix-to-drop-OpenAMQ-support-by-2011-968262.htmliMatix pousse ØMQ/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://code.google.com/p/openpgm/OpenPGM, une implémentation de PGM/abr /
0:45
Publication de NagVis 1.5
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Lars Michelsen, l'un des deux principaux auteurs du projet NagVis vient de publier officiellement la version majeure 1.5. NagVis, sous licence a href=http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html title=lien FSFGPLv2/a, est une célèbre extension de Nagios, qui permet l'affichage de cartes géographiques, fonctionnelles ou réelles, disposées en fond d'écrans, sur lesquelles viennent se superposer les statuts des différents services ou hôtes gérés par Nagios. Tout cela étant au libre choix de l'utilisateur.br / br / Comme toujours, le projet NagVis reste à l'écoute des dernières avancées technologiques autour de Nagios et, après avoir été l'un des premiers projets à utiliser acronym title=Nagios Data OutNDO/acronym, il est l'un des premiers à utiliser MKLiveStatus voire le premier si l'on exclut Thruk, l'interface CGI alternative écrite en Perl par Matthias Kettner lui-même.br / br / Cette nouvelle version apporte plusieurs nouveautés majeures :ulliLa nouvelle source par défaut est MKLiveStatus, le fameux module de courtage d'évènements écrit par Matthias Kettner ;br / /liliLa fonction WeatherMap qui permet l'affichage dynamique du trafic sur les liens réseaux./li/ul Les méthodes d'identification et d'autorisations ont été ré-écrites et s'appuient à présent sur la base de données de NagVis :ulliDe multiples automap sont dorénavant possibles ; br / /liliLe design de l'interface de configuration WUI a été re-travaillé, avec une nouvelle navigation et propose désormais une grille pour faciliter la position des objets./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://nagios.larsmichelsen.com/nagvis-1-5-released/Blog de Lars Michelsen/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.nagvis.org/Projet NagVis/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_livestatus.htmlProjet MkLiveStatus/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.thruk.orgProjet Thruk/abr /
June 15, 2010
23:52
CAMP 0.7.0 : bibliothèque de réflexion en C++ sous LGPL
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9flexion_%28informatique%29réflexion/a (ou introspection) est un mécanisme qui permet à un programme d'examiner, voire de modifier ses structures internes. En d'autres termes, c'est la capacité d'un programme à examiner son propre état. Cela permet par exemple d'effectuer des mesures de performance, d'inspecter des modules, de déboguer un programme, ou encore de le faire d'évoluer automatiquement en fonction des besoins et de l'environnement.br / br / Certains langages de programmation offrent ce type de fonctionnalité, notamment Smalltalk, Java et C#, qui fournissent des outils pour connaître et utiliser la classe d'un objet, ses propriétés et ses méthodes (on parle en général de méta-classe, de méta-propriété et de méta-fonction).br / br / L'introspection peut être utilisée pour fournir des ia href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindingbindings/a/i vers des langages de script, pour écrire des éditeurs de propriétés, ou faire de la a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9rialisationsérialisation/a. L'intérêt étant que le code de ces outils est écrit une fois pour fonctionner sur la structure abstraite (méta-classe, méta-propriété, méta-fonction), et peut ensuite être utilisé dans n'importe quel programme.br / br / Malheureusement, le langage C++ ne fournit aucun moyen de faire de la réflexion. Il existe cependant un certain nombre de bibliothèques fournissant ce type de fonctionnalité, la plus connue étant probablement a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/QtQt/a avec ses a href=http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/qobject.htmlQObjects/a.br / br / Cependant, pour générer toutes les « méta-informations » nécessaires à la réflexion, la majeure partie de ces bibliothèques requiert soit d'utiliser un pré-compilateur (imoc/i pour Qt), soit de déclarer ses informations en ajoutant tout un tas de macros dans l'en-tête de chaque classe ; a href=http://kifri.fri.uniza.sk/~chochlik/mirror-lib/html/C++ Mirror/a faisant exception. De plus, il est souvent nécessaire d'hériter d'une classe de base (QObject pour Qt).br / br / Ceci a amené a href=http://www.tegesoft.com/Tegesoft/a à développer a href=http://dev.tegesoft.com/projects/campCAMP/a, une bibliothèque de réflexion généraliste pour C++. CAMP utilise intensivement les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B#D.C3.A9claration_de_templatestemplates/a C++, ainsi que a href=http://www.boost.org/boost/a (ensemble de bibliothèques C++ permettant d'étendre les fonctionnalités du langage). Il est non-intrusif, à l'exception de la gestion du polymorphisme pour les méta-classes ; une alternative basée sur le a href=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C++_Programming/RTTIacronym title=Run-Time Type InformationRTTI/acronym/a (Run-Time Type Information : fait de déterminer, à l'exécution du programme, le type d'une variable, dans les langages orienté-objet) du langage devrait être ajoutée dans la prochaine version.br / br / CAMP ressemble à a href=http://www.rasterbar.com/products/luabind.htmlLuabind/a ou à a href=http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/libs/python/doc/index.htmlboost::python/a, mais est généraliste. De ce fait, il est possible d'écrire un module pour CAMP permettant d'embarquer un interpréteur Python, un autre pour embarquer un interpréteur Lua, ou encore un pour faire de la sérialisation XML, l'intérêt étant que le binding des classes n'est fait ici qu'une seule fois. Lorsqu'un nouveau module pour CAMP est disponible, vous n'avez aucun binding supplémentaire à écrire.br / br / Le mieux dans tout ça ? C'est sous LGPL ! La version 0.6.0 de CAMP était déjà distribuée sous GPL, mais une licence plus permissive a été choisie afin de favoriser l'utilisation de la bibliothèque.br / br / De plus, un a href=http://dev.tegesoft.com/nouveau site internet/a (basé sur a href=http://www.redmine.org/Redmine/a) est disponible, avec bug tracker, wiki, et documentation de l'API. Le code est quant à lui hébergé sur a href=http://github.com/tegesoft/campGitHub/a. Un a href=http://dev.tegesoft.com/projects/camp/forum/forum/a est également disponible.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://dev.tegesoft.com/projects/campSite du projet/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://dev.tegesoft.com/projects/camp/forum/Forum du projet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://github.com/tegesoft/campCode source sur GitHub/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.tegesoft.com/Site de Tegesoft/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~viridis/29832.htmlJournal à l'origine de la dépêche/abr /

21:45
Client: “That’s way too much money to charge for an email campaign. It’s not hard...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “That’s way too much money to charge for an email campaign. It’s not hard to put a few graphics in an email.”br/br/strongMe:/strong “I charge based off of my regular hourly rate and that’s how long it will take to complete the project.”br/br/strongClient:/strong “Forget it. We’ll just do it in house. We have a copy of Dreamweaver.”br/br/strong[Phone call 2 weeks later]/strongbr/br/strongClient:/strong “Can you talk for a second?”br/br/strongMe:/strong “Sure.”br/br/strongClient:/strong “OK. We made that email campaign, but I can’t figure out why all of the links take me to the unsubscribe page.”br/br/strongMe:/strong “I’m not sure. Is this a test email you’re talking about? I can finish the project for you based on my hourly rate.”br/br/strongClient:/strong “Well…no. We already sent it.”br/br/strongThe client sent an email campaign to a list of 74,000 customers with every link in the email being a one-click unsubscribe./strong/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/H7qdH71WICnRJ2lQPqpYqLcZvsU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/H7qdH71WICnRJ2lQPqpYqLcZvsU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/H7qdH71WICnRJ2lQPqpYqLcZvsU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/H7qdH71WICnRJ2lQPqpYqLcZvsU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:25
A Cautionary Tale
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pI’m sure none of you are strangers to being asked to do favours for friends and family. I’m here to tell you that while there’s nothing wrong with doing a favour for someone you love now and then, always draw up a contract and terms of service, no matter how small or minimal the project. I don’t care if you’re doing it for free - make them sign a contract. In this case, I assume complete responsibility for the following situation because I mistakenly worked from trust. I should also warn you that this reads more like a bad romance than anything else, but hey, I wouldn’t wish the following on anyone./p pBackground: I’m a 22-year-old university student with aspirations of practicing rural medicine. I’m also a freelance web/print designer. It’s my sole source of income, and it’s what I do to put myself through school. I don’t have much of a social life because I balance a full-time university schedule with twenty to thirty hours a week of volunteer and paid design work. I wouldn’t change a thing here. I’m happiest a-codin’ and designin’, and I count myself as pretty lucky to be able to make a living from my hobby while I’m working towards my doc dreams.br/br/I’ve always been a nerdy and creative kid, so I got into computers and art at a fairly young age. I knew I liked designing and I spent a lot of time playing with Python to pick up on basic programming in middle school. In high school, I designed posters and crappy Geocities websites for nearly every extra-curricular club around. So when I was fifteen, I was really excited when my dad asked me if I’d be interested in doing some design work for a good business acquaintance of his, whom I’ll refer to from now on as CFH (for Client From Hell - what else?). The job involved developing some simple layouts and promotional materials for an industry-specific print career guide. Armed with Publisher and Photoshop, I got to work./p blockquote pstrongThe pay seemed pretty damn great for someone my age, and the idea of getting paid to do something I loved from home seemed pretty attractive compared to the notion of finding a summer retail job, an experience that had bored me out of my mind the previous year./strong/p /blockquote pI did the job, CFH was happy with my work, and I continued working on small projects for him every now and then, past graduating high school and entering university.br/br/In early 2009, I received a scholarship to study abroad for a semester. When CFH heard, he gave me his heartfelt congratulations, attended a goodbye party my parents had for me, and even gave me a generous monetary gift for my travel expenses. He’d become a very supportive family friend at this time, and was often the only non-South Asian face at family gatherings. I was really grateful for his support and thought the world of him. When I returned six months later, CFH let me know that the website I had designed for him had been voted into the global top ten of its field and that he would be branching out to cover a greater range of clientele. I knew that it was making him boatloads of money and I was happy to have been involved in a project that had achieved such status. He asked me if I’d be interested in taking a lead role in helping out with the company’s growth. I agreed enthusiastically, and got to work. br/br/Fast forward to September, when I started as CFH’s primary web designer. The work was substantial, and took up much more of my time than previous projects had, but it was completed on time and he was thrilled with it. Prior to starting, I had let CFH know that I’d be changing our previously casual business relationship, and that I’d be invoicing him all Official-Like from now on since I was going to be using my work as my primary source of employment, and needed to keep good records for tax purposes. At this stage, CFH had started outsourcing all his back-end development work to India because it was cheaper than hiring Canadian-based developers, so I think my invoice took him by surprise as he had thought that web work would be ‘cheaper’ and ‘easier to do’ than print, for whatever reason. Keep in mind that I was asking for what was essentially cents above minimum wage per hour of work not including the many hours I spent on development, consultation, edits, etc. because I was a little insecure in my legitimacy as a designer due to my lack of formal education in the subject. I now know this to be BS, as my current clients continue to hire me, citing the diversity of skills I offer and the highly creative and efficient nature of my print and web work. Nevertheless, I decided to give CFH a very steep discount because we hadn’t pre-negotiated the terms (even though he was aware of how much time each project was taking me). He took his sweet time with my invoice but finally, and begrudgingly, decided to pay up. br/br/Things get a little ridiculous here./p blockquote pstrongCFH became increasingly imposing. His phone calls to me became increasingly longer and unrelated, bordering on uncomfortable./strong/p /blockquote pHe started demanding additional amounts of work to be done ‘immediately’, and when I’d ask about payment, he’d get irritable and tell me that it was ‘all about the money’ with me, and that he’d pay me as soon as I sent him an invoice via snail mail. Everytime I would mail out an invoice, he’d complain about some charge, and insist that I send him an updated invoice with this or that detail changed. This continued. I didn’t see a cent. I was even paying for stock photos and fonts out of pocket and not being reimbursed like I had earlier been promised. Keep in mind that I was in a particularly delicate position given that this person was my father’s good friend, and regretfully, my pride got in the way of actually saying anything to my father at the time. At the time, I didn’t think things would (could?) get worse.br/br/They did, so in January, I put my foot down. I told CFH I’d no longer be working for him as he had become unbearably imposing, and had unreasonable expectations of me. Primarily, I was concerned because I hadn’t seen a cent from any of this work I’d done since September. He countered this by telling me that I was a rip-off and that he’d found a “professional design agency” that was better equipped to meet his needs. I wished him the best despite the fact that I was disappointed at having let go of my biggest client. I tried not to think about the many hours of work I wouldn’t be seeing a cent for anymore. At the same time, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to put up with his borderline psychotic behaviour, or compromise the quality of my work anymore to meet his increasingly ass-backwards demands (white text on beige?). br/br/Two days later, I received a phone call from CFH. He apologized profusely right off the bat, said that he’d pay his complete owing sum, and that he needed me to come back. He told me that he was extremely unhappy with the quality of, and the speed at which his new designers were completing his work. He begged me to come back, saying that this time he’d be more considerate of my time and reasonable in his expectations of me. I hesitated, but agreed to come back on the terms that he had to agree to the estimate I gave him prior to starting each job. Since my prices were ‘too steep’ for him and he didn’t want to contend with the fact that I could only work in the evenings due to my class schedule, we worked out a system where I would design the main graphical elements and primary pages, and his “professional design agency” would use these elements to develop subsidiary pages for the back-end. He agreed, and I got to work. As a sidenote, I should mention that his “professional design agency” pulled out when they realized the extent of work that needed to be done and his unreasonably demanding nature, but I digress. /p blockquote pstrongSo I hadn’t realized that my new agreement with CFH would otherwise translate into a one-way ticket to hell, with him reigning as chief Satanic commander./strong/p /blockquote pHis behaviour become fairly unbelievable at this point: he’d call me at 11:30pm and asking to have something by 7am the next morning. He’d whine when I’d decline. He’d have me sit on the phone for hours while directing me to this stock photo or that website to “get inspired by” (i.e. steal). At the time, I was under a lot of stress because I was experiencing a flare-up in an existing neurological condition that was putting me in the emergency room almost every week. I mentioned at one point to CFR that I was scheduled for an MRI in a couple of months, and he suggested that I pay out-of-pocket to get it done privately to avoid the wait. A private MRI has to be done out-of-province, and runs upwards of $1500. I explained that this was not an option for me given that a recent astronomical increase in tuition costs, and my student aid being cut substantially due to the increasing conservatization of my post-secondary institution. br/br/Unsurprisingly, he didn’t ‘get’ it, telling me to bug my parents for the money or ‘something’. For the record, I’m completely financially independent, and have no intentions of harassing my parents for money I’m perfectly capable of making myself. My lifestyle ain’t so lavish that it requires a lot of dough either: I’m a herbivore, don’t go out much, share an apartment with two other people, and ride a bicycle or take public transit everywhere. I use open-source software and recycle hardware whenever possible. Textbooks (which I generally buy secondhand) and tuition are my major expense, so while my living costs might be minimal, they’re still there. I wasn’t sure what part of this CFH couldn’t comprehend. Surely, he’d understand, having himself been a student forty years ago?br/br/April was the final straw. I hadn’t seen a cent since September despite many false exclamations of “the cheque is in the mail!” and what I now knew to be CFH’s lavish income from MY work./p blockquote pstrongHe even had the nerve to call me to share his excitement about his new ‘keyless’ car, which he eagerly explained cost about as much as a house./strong/p /blockquote pA myriad of other reasons followed, and you should tell me if I’m being a bit too sensitive here: Rape jokes? check. Racist remarks about his Indian developers DESPITE the fact that I’m South Asian too - but ‘not like one of them’, according to him? Check. Pictures of, and forwarded emails from women he was sleeping with? Check. Pervasive questions about my sexuality and personal life? Double-check.br/br/I quit. I fucking quit. I sent a politely-worded e-mail explaining that I would not be working for him anymore. I don’t believe in leaving people in the dark about their behaviour, so I explained very clearly exactly how his behaviour had influenced my decision to leave. CFH responded by saying that he hadn’t “bothered to read my e-mail” but that “as a professional, [he] anticipated that [I] would provide [my] assistance in bringing the new resources up to speed..”. Regarding my invoice, his exact words were: “It shall, of course, be paid, in full, upon receipt” (all those commas, must be, compensating, for, something) seeing as how he was continuing to use my work. I had no problem with this, and made the remaining incomplete files available in their raw form on my server, alongside a detailed explanation of what the new designer/s would need to know. I’m not a vengeful person, so when the new designer got in touch with me, I was quick to direct him to where he needed to be. I just wanted to get paid and get CFH out of my life already.br/br/Things seemed like they were ending on a slightly more positive note. A few days later I got a call from my father. CFH had taken him out for drinks and then gotten him call me to “tell me” to come back to work for him. CFH had explained to him that I was upset about my pay (I didn’t realize zero dollars was pay?) but that he had ‘forgotten’ that I was now a grown-up with financial responsibilities, and not that same fifteen-year-old who was estatic about getting some spending money from his hobby./p blockquote pstrongHe told my dad that I had left him hanging despite having given me a pretty decent deal; apparently my ‘mental health issues’ and ‘greed’ were getting in the way./strong/p /blockquote pClearly, this wasn’t just about the money for me anymore, and I realized that CFH’s new designer had probably bailed on him as well as a result of his.. loopiness. Naturally, I declined. This upset my father initially, though he changed his mind later when I gave him a (heavily censored) account of what had actually happened.br/br/Besides, hadn’t CFH mentioned that he’d be paying me for the work I’d already completed? The invoice was in the mail for the fourth time. Of course, I didn’t set my expectations too high because on May 11, I received the following message: “Let me be quite clear about things. Unless you immediately finish the projects you started for [Company Name], we shall not pay your invoice. Enough is enough!”/p blockquote pstrongSo now I know better than to expect any pay at all. Over 300 hours logged since September, and not a cent./strong/p /blockquote pCFH continues to use my work and profit from it. I have no legal backing because (1) CFH happens to be a retired lawyer, and (2) I never drew up a physical contract because of the sporadic nature of the work and our long-standing business relationship. My own fault. The best part? I have to defer my next semester at university to work more, because I couldn’t come up with my minimum tuition payment in time this year - seeing as how my job didn’t pay me, and I had to use my existing funds for things like rent, medication, and food. CFH is well aware of this. Sucks, but I’m not one to dwell in the past recognizing my own mistakes. I’m also far too grateful for things like a roof over my head to feel sorry for myself. /p pI learnt my lesson and since then, I have had no problem putting what I’ve learnt into practice with my current clients. Keep in mind that these are primarily charitable organizations and student groups with very limited funding - yet they have no problem respecting my time, signing contracts without complaint, agreeing to my terms and putting down a 50% deposit before I do any work. These clients believe in my right to make a living wage from my work, and that’s exactly how all clients should treat their freelancer. /p blockquote pstrongIn closing, please don’t make the same mistakes I did with CFH. I don’t care if you’re making invites for your neighbor’s son’s friend’s girlfriend’s baby shower: always draw up a physical contract, regardless of whether the work is for-pay or not./strong/p /blockquote pIt’s a sad fact, but there is no guarantee of sanctity in a long-standing relationship regardless of how long you have had your client. There are people out there whose only motivation is to make as much money as possible while taking credit for your work and screwing you over in the process. A contract gives you some legal backing, and at the very least ensures that both parties understand the terms of service. Deposits are great too, because they ensure that both parties are invested in the project to some extent. Lessons are better learnt earlier rather than later./p pAnd finally, to CFH? I trust Karma./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8Yq6NyJP7PmM5XqVla-yX6-ycDk/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8Yq6NyJP7PmM5XqVla-yX6-ycDk/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8Yq6NyJP7PmM5XqVla-yX6-ycDk/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/8Yq6NyJP7PmM5XqVla-yX6-ycDk/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

5:05
My Upcoming Internet Issues Interview on China Radio International (CRI)
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Ive been booked as part of panel to discuss Internet issues on China Radio Internationals Today show airing live this Wednesday, 16 June, from 1000-1100 Beijing Time (thats 1900-2000 Tuesday, 15 June, Pacific Daylight Time). China Radio International (CRI)...

June 14, 2010
22:05
Make Them Disappear
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrong[Phone conversation with a client concerning a corporate animation.]/strong/p pstrongClient:/strong “We don’t want people to think that everyone using our service is black. Can you make most of the people white?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “They are stick figures, I don’t think there’s going to be any racial profiling.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Well you’re using black lines for all of them. We want to see most of them as white.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Don’t you think that would look even more racist? Besides, it’s a white background, the white stick figures would disappear.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Then change it to a black background and make the black people disappear. I don’t know, just figure it out.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_Y1W5Oc_8Eqdal-9jBdDS6z4Nyo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_Y1W5Oc_8Eqdal-9jBdDS6z4Nyo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_Y1W5Oc_8Eqdal-9jBdDS6z4Nyo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/_Y1W5Oc_8Eqdal-9jBdDS6z4Nyo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

19:15
Quoteworthy: Cicero – Be Brief
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F14%2Fquoteworthy-cicero-be-brief%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F14%2Fquoteworthy-cicero-be-brief%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F14%2Fquoteworthy-cicero-be-brief%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pWhen you wish to instruct, be brief; that men#8217;s minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind./p p- a href="http://thinkexist.com/quotation/when_you_wish_to_instruct-be_brief-that_men-s/148606.html" target="_blank"Marcus Tullius Cicero/a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/14/quoteworthy-cicero-be-brief/"Quoteworthy: Cicero #8211; Be Brief/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/20/quoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: William Strunk #8211; Vigorous Writing is Concise'Quoteworthy: William Strunk #8211; Vigorous Writing is Concise/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/09/quoteworthy-george-orwell-on-scrupulous-writing/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;'Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NJ38LrVrZDeGSDEgrX8eE1-nXOg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NJ38LrVrZDeGSDEgrX8eE1-nXOg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NJ38LrVrZDeGSDEgrX8eE1-nXOg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NJ38LrVrZDeGSDEgrX8eE1-nXOg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=-awCVvPTIrQ:pVHnGNRc8fc:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=-awCVvPTIrQ:pVHnGNRc8fc:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=-awCVvPTIrQ:pVHnGNRc8fc:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=-awCVvPTIrQ:pVHnGNRc8fc:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=-awCVvPTIrQ:pVHnGNRc8fc:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/-awCVvPTIrQ" height="1" width="1"/

17:48
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 23
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 23/strongbr / br / ullia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57601-canada-loi-anti-piratage-copie-privee.htm[pcinpact.com] Tensions autour de la loi sur le droit d'auteur au Canada/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15948-hadopi-des-logiciels-de-securisation-seront-bien-labellises.html[numerama.com] Hadopi : des logiciels de sécurisation seront bien labellisés/abr / /lilia href=http://hightech.nouvelobs.com/actualites/depeche/20100612.ZDN2299/orange-lance-son-outil-de-protection-contre-le-telechargement-illegal-sans-garantie-face-a-hadopi.html[nouvelobs.com] Orange lance son outil de protection contre le téléchargement illégal sans garantie face à Hadopi/a/lilia href=http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/science-et-technologie/201006/10/01-4288529-semaine-cle-pour-le-logiciel-libre.php?[Le Soleil - cyberpresse.ca] (Québec) Semaine-clé pour le logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15934-linux-doit-rendre-l-open-source-34fabuleux34-pour-rester-dans-la-course-des-mobiles.html[numerama.com] Linux doit rendre l'open-source fabuleux pour rester dans la course des mobiles/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2010/06/10/l-europe-pousse-les-gouvernements-vers-le-logiciel-libre_1370844_651865.html[lemonde.fr] L'Europe pousse les gouvernements vers le logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15912-une-amende-d-un-milliard-de-dollars-pour-tuer-limewire.html[Numerama] Une amende d'un milliard de dollars pour tuer LimeWire ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-nkm-financer-et-non-pas-subventionner-le-numerique-innovant-30847.html[lemondeinformatique.fr] NKM : financer et non pas subventionner le numérique innovant/abr / /lilia href=http://owni.fr/2010/06/08/paris-un-pas-vers-l%E2%80%99opendata/[owni.fr] Paris: un pas vers l'opendata/abr / /lilia href=http://www.cio-online.com/actualites/lire-jim-whitehurst-red-hat-condamne-les-nuages-proprietaires-2971.html[cio-online.com] Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat, condamne les nuages propriétaires/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemondeinformatique.fr/actualites/lire-des-appels-d-offres-publics-plus-ouverts-au-quebec-30837.html[lemondeinformatique.fr] Des appels d'offres publics plus ouverts au Quebec/abr / /lilia href=http://www.slate.fr/story/22611/open-source-hackers[slate.fr] L'open source trop ouvert aux hackers?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemagit.fr/article/microsoft-windows-licences-office-assemblee-nationale-contrat-defense-sharepoint-opensource-exchange-nuxeo-open-source-outlook/6499/1/le-ministere-defense-dit-pas-rouler-que-pour-microsoft-sans-reellement-convaincre[lemagit.fr] Le ministère de la Défense dit ne pas rouler que pour Microsoft... sans réellement convaincre/abr / /lilia href=http://trends.rnews.be/fr/economie/actualite/high-tech/les-4-grands-partis-francophones-signent-un-triple-pacte-internet/article-1194747967008.htm#[Trends.rnews.be] Les 4 grands partis francophones signent un triple pacte Internet/abr / /li/ul br / br / (...)

15:59
Me: “Lets talk about color first, do you have any colors in mind?” Client: ”Well...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “Lets talk about color first, do you have any colors in mind?”/p pstrongClient: /strong “Well I like corvettes and the movie emSomethings Got to Give/em”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NEyeA0NQxBahFjb8FRn-EdLMGEc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NEyeA0NQxBahFjb8FRn-EdLMGEc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NEyeA0NQxBahFjb8FRn-EdLMGEc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/NEyeA0NQxBahFjb8FRn-EdLMGEc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

11:17
Google on presentation bias in search
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

A few Googlers at WWW 2010 had a paper, "Beyond Position Bias: Examining Result Attractiveness as a Source of Presentation Bias in Clickthrough Data" (a href="http://www.yisongyue.com/publications/www2010_bias.pdf"PDF/a), that explores how much people tend to click on eye-catching search results rather than seeking the most relevant search results.br /br /The work itself was pretty simple -- just looking at how bolding title and abstract terms changes clickthough rates in A/B tests -- but I think the paper is worth a peek for two reasons. First, it is a decent survey of some of the current work on position and presentation bias. Second, it exposes some of Google's struggles with the difficulty of deriving searcher satisfaction from the noisy proxies that we have available like click data.br /br /By the way, I love the fact, noted in the paper, that people tend to click on the last result much more than you would expect. The reason is that people don't linearly scan down a page, but often jump to the bottom and focus attention there. A decade ago at Amazon, the personalization team exploited this effect and seized the space at the bottom of most pages on the site for our features. You see, when we saw no one had built tools to track click and conversion data, we built them, and then we used them. No one else realized the value of the space at the bottom of the page, but we did.br /br /For more on the struggle to evaluate search results from noisy click data, please see some of my older posts, "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/08/modeling-how-searchers-look-at-search.html"Modeling how searchers look at search results /a", "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/11/finding-task-boundaries-in-search-logs.html"Finding task boundaries in search logs/a", and "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/11/testing-rankers-by-interleaving-search.html"Testing rankers by interleaving search results/a".div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-5481138236992668429?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

0:47
Bank websites
» ‎ Dan Siemon
It boggles my mind that the banks haven’t figured out how to make their websites more useful than they are. Why are these sites limited to online versions of bank tellers?

Here’s what I want my bank’s site to provide:
- Allow me to categorize or tag every transaction. I want to mark that Subway is “Eating out”.
- Learn from previous transactions and automatically suggest classifications for me. If I marked “89328374 Ontario Inc.” as car repairs two months ago there is a good chance it goes into the same category this month.
- Summarize the totals for each category and show trends. Am I spending more on eating out every month?
- Allow me to set targets or thresholds for each category and send me notifications if I cross them. If my budget is $300/month for eating out I want to know when I’m beyond that.
The banks already have access to all of my account activity and I don’t want to provide a third party, especially one outside of Canada, with my online banking credentials to get this functionality.

Why would a bank build this?
1. It provides an incentive to move all of your accounts to one bank.
2. I’d switch banks to get these features so I’m sure others would too.
June 13, 2010
21:32
Books
» ‎ Dan Siemon

I recently finished reading a couple books that are worth mentioning.

The first is Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Don’t let the teen categorization discourage you, this is a book any technology geek will love. The best one line summary I can think of is that this book is a modern version of Nineteen eighty-four with the addition of a little teen rebellion. The story and characters are very well written and interwoven are decent introductions to important security techniques such as public key encryption and onion routing. Targetting this book at teen readers was a brilliant idea. I can’t think of a better way to help them understand what a security state would feel like.

The second book is Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. No, this isn’t some kind of conspiracy theory book. The answer put forward by the authors is basically that territorial governments control the Internet despite the Utopian non-governmental ideal that many technologists associate with the Internet. The source of this control comes from the fact that governments are alone (mostly) in their ability to use physical coersion. While this in of itself isn’t that earth shattering I found the suggestion that online businesses such as eBay are reliant on the excercise of this coersive power very interesting. Even if the Internet isn’t that interesting to you this book is worth reading for the discussion of the role of government in commerce.

I’ve also recently read Switch and Linchpin which both deserve short reviews but that will have to be some other time.

21:25
Client: “I need you to redesign the shirts you made for me to attract only $100,000 +...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I need you to redesign the shirts you made for me to attract only $100,000 + clients.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “In the original meeting you said these were to be shirts for your employees to wear at work. Are we still talking about the same thing?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes, well… I only do business with those corporate types.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “What type of shirts do $100,000+ corporate types wear?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I don’t like your tone.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/S1ANgUrrYV23Lh2qgzfAlM3l4rs/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/S1ANgUrrYV23Lh2qgzfAlM3l4rs/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/S1ANgUrrYV23Lh2qgzfAlM3l4rs/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/S1ANgUrrYV23Lh2qgzfAlM3l4rs/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

19:59
Django/mod_wsgi on Fedora 12
» ‎ Dan Siemon
I recently deployed a Django application with mod_wsgi on my server which runs Fedora 12. Since this required a bit more configuration than a standard Apache virtual host I thought it might be useful to document the configuration for others.
SELinux
While SELinux can be a little annoying if you don’t understand how it works it is a very powerful security layer that should not be disabled. In order to get the Django/mod_wsgi application working I had to modify a couple of SELinux booleans which give Apache extra permissions.
```
setsebool httpd_tmp_exec on
setsebool httpd_can_network_connect on
```
mod_wsgi configuration
The default configuration tries to create the mod_wsgi sockets in a directory that SELinux does not allow Apache access to. You can change this by adding the following line to /etc/httpd/conf.d/wsgi.conf.
```
WSGISocketPrefix run/mod_wsgi
```
Apache virtual host configuration
Below is the Apache virtual host configuration. Note that I have chosen to use mod_wsgi’s daemon mode and processes instead of threads because some of the libraries I’m using are not thread safe.
```
<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin dan@example.com
 DocumentRoot /home/vhosts/example.com/
 ServerName www.example.com

 Alias /robots.txt /home/vhosts/example.com/example/web/static/robots.txt
 Alias /favicon.ico /home/vhosts/example.com/example/web/static/favicon.ico

 # Static files.
 Alias /static /home/vhosts/example.com/example/web/static

 # Admin static files.
 Alias /media /home/vhosts/example.com/dependencies/Django-1.2.1/django/contrib/admin/media

 WSGIScriptAlias / /home/vhosts/example.com/example/web/example/django.wsgi
 WSGIDaemonProcess example.com processes=15 threads=1 display-name=%{GROUP}
 WSGIProcessGroup example.com

 ErrorLog logs/example.com-error_log
 LogFormat "%a %l \"%u\" %t %m \"%U\" \"%q\" %p %>s %b %D \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" custom_log
 CustomLog logs/example.com-access_log combinedio
</VirtualHost>
```
19:41
New OpenPGP key
» ‎ Dan Siemon

For the two people that care I’m migrating to a new OpenPGP key. I created the old key way back in 2001 so it is time to move to a longer RSA key instead of DSA. The new key also uses the stronger SHA-256 hash.

You can find the signed (with both the old and new key) transition note at:

[www.coverfire.com]

Here are a few useful links for anyone else making this transition.

[www.debian-administration.org]

[keyring.debian.org]

16:53
Quoi de neuf sur Apple chez Framablog ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

En complément d'une récente a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/11/26980.htmldépêche/a évoquant l'actualité d'Apple, le Framablog propose quelques traductions circonstanciées à l'occasion notamment de la sortie de l'iPad en France. L'iPad cristallise en effet de nombreuses critiques en soi mais c'est toute la « chaîne » Apple qui est pointée du doigt.br / br / em« C’est un énorme pas en arrière dans l’histoire de l'informatique »/em nous disait déjà la FSF lors de la sortie de l'iPad aux USA. em« Je n'en achèterai pas et vous invite à en faire de autant »/em, surenchérit l'écrivain a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_DoctorowCory Doctorow/a qui déplore la fermeture à tous les étages du système Apple. Nous sommes à des années-lumière d'un projet em« hackable »/em comme Arduino. br / br / Au même moment une journaliste du New York Times n'hésite pas, quant à elle, à anticiper em« la mort du Web ouvert »/em à l'aide d'une analogie urbanistique : Apple est à l'Internet ce que les banlieues riches et sécurisées sont à l'aménagement du territoire.br / br / On pourra également lire ce coup de gueule d'un évangéliste de Mozilla qui s'interroge sur l'honnêteté intellectuelle d'Apple (mais aussi de Google) vis-à-vis du HTML5. Manipulation marketing ou vrai souci de rendre service à l'utilisateur ?br / br / Et pour finir un dessin humoristique du Geektionnerd qui n'a pas peur de qualifier GNU/Linux de em« Mac OS X du pauvre »/em !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/02/12/ipad-is-bad-apple-1984iPad is iBad for freedom - John Sullivan (FSF)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/05/29/ipad-pourquoi-je-ne-l-acheterai-pasPourquoi je n'achèterai pas un iPad - Cory Doctorow/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/06/02/arduino-materiel-libreDis-moi si tu préfères bidouiller Arduino ou consommer iPad et je te dirai qui tu es/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/06/04/apple-ipad-carre-vip-webLa fin du Web ouvert - Virginia Heffernan (The New York Times)/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/06/13/html5-christopher-blizzard-mozillaDe l'honnêteté intellectuelle et du HTML5 - Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla)/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.framablog.org/index.php/post/2010/02/12/geektionnerd-ipadL'iPad'quoi fouetter un chat - Geektionnerd/abr /

15:25
Client: ”So I’m thinking that for the navigation we should have a guy with a dog head,...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “So I’m thinking that for the navigation we should have a guy with a dog head, kind of like one of those dog butlers, come dancing out and start tossing letters around. These letters can then form the site navigation buttons!”/p pstrongMe:/strong “To sell real estate?”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EMTROu0NtAKfmHr4B7kyhoGRPt4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EMTROu0NtAKfmHr4B7kyhoGRPt4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EMTROu0NtAKfmHr4B7kyhoGRPt4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/EMTROu0NtAKfmHr4B7kyhoGRPt4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

0:35
Sortie de Pardus 2009.2 (Geronticus eremita)
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Pardus Linux, la distribution produite et financée par la Turquie, est parue en version 2009.2 sous le nom de Geronticus eremita (ibis chauve), une espèce en voie de disparition.br / Au menu : des mises à jour, des améliorations et des corrections de bugs.br / br / Pardus 2009.2 se base sur KDE 4.4.4, Python 2.6.5 et Qt 4.6.2, incluant tous les codecs multimédias, Flash, Java, DVD ainsi que les pilotes propriétaires Nvidia et ATI de manière à être immédiatement opérationnelle pour l'utilisateur de base, qui représente sa cible privilégiée.br / Tous les développements du projet Pardus sont placés sous licence GPL.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.pardus.org.trSite officiel/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.pardus-fr.orgSite francophone/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.pardus-fr.org/?article2Présentation détaillée/abr / (...)

June 12, 2010
21:45
Does God have a phone number?
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “The database is messed up. What’s the server log on?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “What do you mean?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I mean I need access to the server.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I don’t know how to do that.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Who set it up?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “I’m not sure.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Who owns the server?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “God.”/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZPi7-mVUkldej8Bid30f_1SNvAo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZPi7-mVUkldej8Bid30f_1SNvAo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZPi7-mVUkldej8Bid30f_1SNvAo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZPi7-mVUkldej8Bid30f_1SNvAo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p
15:05
"Let’s get together and figure out a way for you to work more hours for less money."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Let’s get together and figure out a way for you to work more hours for less money.”” pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hLs3BH6eu6uVsoehOpH0-5nLp2E/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hLs3BH6eu6uVsoehOpH0-5nLp2E/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hLs3BH6eu6uVsoehOpH0-5nLp2E/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/hLs3BH6eu6uVsoehOpH0-5nLp2E/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

10:44
State Of The Map 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

« State Of The Map » est le rendez-vous annuel des contributeurs au projet de cartographie libre OpenStreetMap que je ne vais pas vous faire l'affront de présenter ici. La quatrième édition du « SOTM » se tiendra du 9 au 11 juillet 2010 à Gérone (en Espagne, à mi-chemin entre Perpignan et Barcelone).br / br / Comme tout événement de ce type qui se respecte, outre l'opportunité de mettre des visages sur des noms et de sympathiser avec moults inconnus qui partagent la même passion que vous, « State Of The Map » est l'occasion d'assister à un large panel de conférences plus ou moins techniques, classées par thèmes. Cette année, après la mobilisation de la communauté « OSM » lors du tremblement de terre à Haïti et la démonstration de son efficacité dans la cartographie de crise, le thème humanitaire devrait être particulièrement suivi.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://stateofthemap.org/State Of The Map/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.openstreetmap.org/OpenStreetMap/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=41.98665amp;lon=2.81273amp;zoom=9amp;layers=B000FTFamp;mlat=41.98523amp;mlon=2.81161Géolocalisation de l'événement (Girona)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://osm-haiti.blog.lemonde.fr/2010/04/02/openstreetmap-a-contribue-a-sauver-des-vies/OpenStreetMap a aidé à sauver des vies/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMapOpenStreetMap sur Wikipédia/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.dmoz.org/Reference/Maps/OpenStreetMap/OpenStreetMap sur DMOZ/abr / (...)
10:34
Sortie de Sabayon 5.3
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce samedi 5 Juin 2010 a vu la sortie de SabayonLinux dans sa version 5.3, avec son lot de nouveautés.br / Mais avant tout, une petite présentation s'impose...br / br / Basée sur Gentoo, une distribution Linux hautement personnalisable, SabayonLinux a été créée par Fabio Erculiani, avec la philosophie suivante :br / olliLa distribution ne doit pas contenir de problèmes ;br / /liliN'importe qui doit pouvoir l'utiliser ;br / /liliEt garder le dessert italien aussi simple que possible, sans fioriture./li/ol br / C'est ainsi que le choix s'est basé sur la distribution Gentoo (avec une volonté de compatibilité à 100%) qui est réputée pour sa rigueur technique et sa stabilité.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.sabayon.org/Site officiel/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.sabayonlinux.org/mod/screenshots/Screenshots/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.sabayonlinux.org/mod/mirrors/Téléchargements/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://tracker.sabayon.org/Bittorents/abr / (...)

June 11, 2010
22:44
At our initial meeting with the client… Client: ”When can you have the website...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrong[At our initial meeting with the client]/strong/p pstrongClient:/strong “When can you have the website live?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Well, looking at our calendar and available dates, I think we should have it completed no later than the 8th of June.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Okay, well that’s too late - we definitely need the website live by the end of May.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Well, today is Friday and the last working day of May…”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Look, if you can’t stick to simple deadlines, then this isn’t going to work.”/p

22:18
Quoi de neuf chez Apple ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

L'actualité de la firme en passe de devenir la plus controversée chez les libristes est riche en annonces ces derniers jours, tant du côté matériel que du côté logiciel. L'Apple WWDC 2010 (WorldWide Developers Conference) a été l'occasion pour Steve Jobs de présenter le nouvel iPhone, de 4ème génération, ainsi que son système d'exploitation qui a été renommé iOS 4 pour l'occasion.br / br / Des avancées ont été annoncées également du coté des logiciels de chez Apple ainsi que sur les projets libres auxquels la société participe. N'en déplaise à certains libristes obtus, Apple participe à tirer l'industrie IT vers l'avant et il est toujours intéressant de savoir ce qu'il se passe chez la société aux 1000 innovations i(acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : Où peut-on trouver la liste détaillée ?)./ibr / br / Il n'y en aura eu que pour l'iPhone lors de cette conférence, de là à dire qu'Apple délaisse son système phare et ses applications, il n'y a qu'un pas. Toutefois, il y a des nouveautés intéressantes à annoncer du côté de Safari, le navigateur web non libre basé sur Webkit (libre lui), ainsi que sur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Level_Virtual_MachineLLVM/a en libre aussi, l'infrastructure de compilateur.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/07/steve-jobs-live-from-wwdc-2010/Retranscription de la keynote sur le site Engadget.com/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/safari_reader_based_on_open_source_project/Readability et Safari 5/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.htmlSafari 5/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.html5test.com/Test HTML 5/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/Readability, le projet/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://libcxx.llvm.org/Libc++/abr / (...)

16:36
Me: And what version of Windows are you using? He: Look, pal. I know two things about this fucking...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong “And what version of Windows are you using?”/p pstrongHe/strong: “Look, pal. I know two things about this fucking computer. I paid a lot of fucking money for it, and it doesn’t fucking work.”/p

12:53
PdfMod : outil de manipulation de PDF
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Un petit logiciel qui se veut simple et fort pratique commence à faire parler de lui : PdfMod. Il s'agit d'un outil de manipulation graphique de fichiers au format PDF. Actuellement sous GNU/Linux l'incontournable est pdftk, très puissant mais uniquement en ligne de commande (l'a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagemagick title=Définition Wikipediaimagemagik/a du PDF). PdfMod propose un sous-ensemble de ses fonctionnalités très facilement accessibles à la souris et sans crouler sous une foule d'options. L'auteur de PdfMod est aussi strikecelui/strikecontributeur de a href=http://banshee-project.org/Banshee/a (lecteur multimédia) et a href=http://f-spot.org/Main_PageF-Spot/a (gestionnaire de photos).br / br / Actuellement en version 0.8.3, PdfMod présente les pages du fichier PDF sous forme de grille et il est ensuite possible de ré-ordonner par glisser-déposer, supprimer, pivoter une ou plusieurs pages à la fois. Vous pouvez aussi fusionner des documents, extraire toutes les images dans un répertoire, éditer les méta-données (titre, sujet, auteur, mots-clefs, etc.). Toutes vos modifications sont ensuite enregistrées dans le nouveau fichier PDF.br / br / PdfMod est écrit en Mono/C#(a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gtk_Sharp title=Définition WikipediaGtk#/a) et se base sur les bibliothèques Hyena, Cairo, Poppler pour le rendu et PDFSharp pour la manipulation et l'enregistrement des fichiers. Il est disponible sous licence GPLv2 en 21 langues différentes et propose des packages pour SLED 11, openSUSE 11.1, Gentoo overlay, Ubuntu et Fedora. Cependant, si vous ne trouvez pas votre bonheur dans les paquets précédents, les sources sont disponibles via Git et facilement compilables à partir du moment où Mono est installé (ce qui est un point rédhibitoire pour certains, mais là n'est pas le débat).br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://live.gnome.org/PdfModSite de PdfMod avec capture d'écran et procédures d'installation/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://gburt.blogspot.com/blog de l'auteur/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/Site de pdftk/abr /

0:23
[When dealing with a rehabilitation charity] Client: We love the design. And we know that you said...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pemstrong[When dealing with a rehabilitation charity]/strong/em/p pstrongClient: /strong“We love the design. And we know that you said that using a butterfly was a bit obvious but we think what you’ve done perfectly represents the process that our clients go through.”/p pstrongMe/strong: “Thank you, that’s really good. We’re pleased you like it.”/p pstrongClient/strong: “..but, some of our clients find the butterfly a bit of a threat. So, we were wondering, could you maybe replace it with a non-threatening seabird?”/p

June 10, 2010
18:50
Journée du Logiciel Libre et de l'Interopérabilité
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Les Universités Numériques en Région Nord - Pas de Calais avaient organisé, le 3 juin 2010, une journée sur le thème des logiciels libres et de l'interopérabilité.br / br / La thématique de cette journée couvre l'ensemble des besoins de nos universités, allant de l'enseignement à l'administration ou la sécurité. Cette journée a permis de faire un état des lieux des logiciels libres : leur histoire, l'existant et leur futur. La problématique de l'interopérabilité et de la pérennité des données a été au cœur des débats.br / br / Les interventions comprennent notamment:br / ulli« Histoire du logiciel libre », par Roberto Di Cosmo (Paris 7/INRIA)br / /lili« Passé et futur d'openoffice.org », par Sophie Gautier (OpenOffice.org)br / /lili« Participation et Innovation », par Tristant Nitot (Mozilla.org)br / /lili« Droits d'auteurs et propriété intellectuelle », par Bernard Lang (INRIA/AFUL)/li/ul br / L'ensemble des vidéos sont disponibles au format ouvert.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://jll2010.univ-lille1.fr/Programme de la journée/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://lille1tv.univ-lille1.fr/collections/collection.aspx?id=e50794a4-d25c-49ee-a973-c345b2e823a5Collection de vidéos/abr /
18:39
Programme de la session technique « Développement » des RMLL 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Au programme des prochaines Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre qui se tiendront à Bordeaux du 6 au 11 juillet, la session technique « Développement » accueillera 27 conférences intéressantes qui couvriront de nombreux aspects du développement avec et/ou pour le logiciel libre.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Site des RMLL 2010/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/-Developpement-.htmlSession développement des RMLL/abr / (...)

15:22
Client: ”I decided I want one of the illustrations you already did for my logo and I am going...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong “I decided I want one of the illustrations you already did for my logo and I am going to use it for the background on my checks.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“A logo is usually a simple graphic used to represent your business, in your case, the book series and characters. The illustrations are a bit too detailed for that purpose. How about I simplify the characters and series title and create a logo?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Why can’t you just shrink the picture down to the size of the check?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “The artwork is 12” square and proportionally will not work in a rectangle.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Wait, hold on… you know I don’t understand you when you use those technical terms.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “By proportionally I mean…”/p pstrongClient:/strong “No not that word, the other one you said. It won’t work in a what?”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Rectangle?”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Yes.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Um, a rectangle is the shape of your checkbook.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “Oh ok.”/p

13:52
Meilleurs contributeurs LinuxFr : Les gagnants de mai 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

On continue sur notre lancée de récompenser ceux qui chaque mois contribuent positivement au site LinuxFr (dépêche, commentaire, logo, journaux etc.). Vous n'êtes pas sans risquer de gagner un abonnement à Linux Magazine France, OpenSource Magazine ou encore un livre des éditions Eyrolles, ENI et InLibroVeritas. Voici les gagnants du mois de mai 2010 :br / br / bAbonnement d'un an à Linux Magazine France ou OpenSource Magazine/bbr / ulli a href=http://linuxfr.org/~sytoka/Sytoka Modon/a a pas mal contribué ces derniers temps et a notamment abordé a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/03/15/26585.htmlOpenSSH v5.4 : Certificat et Révocation/a/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~galaux/Guillaume Alaux/a a fait a href=http://linuxfr.org/~galaux/29619.htmlle point sur Java 7/a/lili Pour a href=http://linuxfr.org/~GeneralZod/GeneralZod/a, mai est aussi le mois de la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/25/26889.htmlsortie de Fedora 13/a/li/ul bLivres des éditions Eyrolles, ENI et InLibroVeritas/bbr / ulli a href=http://linuxfr.org/~darkhad/gabriel/a, lui, n'a pas oublié qu'en mai c'était aussi le mois de la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/25/26892.htmlSlackware 13.1/a !/lili On en oublierait presque qu'Ubuntu est sortie à la toute fin d'avril. Heureusement que a href=http://linuxfr.org/~yellowiscool/yellowiscool/a nous a fourni la a href=http://linuxfr.org/css/contrib/lucidlynx.cssCSS lucidlynx.css/a pour le rappeler./lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~axel/Axel/a a regardé ce qu'il se passait a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/03/06/26553.htmldu côté de chez Xorg/abr / /lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~cyplp/Cyprien Le Pannérer/a nous a fourni un a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/23/26769.htmlrapide état des lieux de la photo numérique sous linux/a plutôt bien renseigné.br / /lilia href=http://linuxfr.org/~NoNo/NoNo/a a pas mal contribué en mai. Citons notamment les « vrac » sur a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/31/26917.htmlPython/a et sur les a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/30/26912.htmlnavigateurs/abr / /lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Aissen/Aissen/a s'intéresse au a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/03/17/26602.htmlBen NanoNote de Qi Hardware/a, machine atypique, en vente en Europe depuis peu/lili a href=http://linuxfr.org/~boa13/Boa Treize/a nous a conté a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/12/26840.htmlla belle soirée de l'Humble Indie Bundle/a au cours de laquelle des studios indépendants ont libéré le code source de leurs jeux./lili Et mai est décidément le mois de la libération des jeux, car a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Samaelh/Samaelh/a a signalé que a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/06/26816.htmlRyzom devient entièrement libre/a lui aussi./lili Quant à a href=http://linuxfr.org/~rewind/rewind/a et a href=http://linuxfr.org/~zarikotaba/zarikotaba/a, il nous ont proposé deux dépêches concernant la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/27/26774.htmlsortie de LLVM 2.7/a. Le travail de modération n'a pas été facile, surtout pour déterminer laquelle des news serait publiée. Cela n'empêche cependant pas de récompenser les deux. /li/ul bLivre O'Reilly/bbr / Enfin, un prix spécial pour a href=http://linuxfr.org/~erlen/Loïc d'Anterroches/a qui a sorti a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/19/26753.htmlIndefero 1.0 après 21 mois de travail/a en nous informant régulièrement de l'avancée de ce dernier.br / br / Certains gagnants n'ont pas pu être joints ou n'ont pas répondu. N'oubliez pas de mettre une adresse email valable dans votre compte ou lors de la proposition d'une dépêche. En effet, c'est notre seul moyen de vous contacter, que ce soit pour les lots ou des questions sur votre dépêche lors de sa modération. Tous nos remerciements aux contributeurs du site ainsi qu'à a href=http://www.gnulinuxmag.com/Linux Magazine France/a, a href=http://www.magazine-avosmac.com/opensource/OpenSource magazine/a et aux éditions a href=http://www.editions-eyrolles.com/Eyrolles/a, a href=http://www.inlibroveritas.net/InLibroVeritas/a, a href=http://www.editions-eni.fr/ENI/a et à la société a href=http://www.acipia.fr/Acipia/a pour avoir fourni le livre O'Reilly.br / br / N'oubliez pas de contribuer ; LinuxFr vit pour vous et par vous !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlContribuez et gagnez des livres/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/29/26790.htmlLes gagnants précédents/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26968.htmlGagnez deux livres en faisant la plus longue série de dépêche/abr / (...)
1:32
DataMapper 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

DataMapper est une bibliothèque en Ruby qui vous permet de manipuler des données dans des bases de données sous forme d'objets Ruby (c.-à-d., c'est un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapping_objet-relationnelORM/a). Sous a href=http://github.com/datamapper/dm-core/blob/master/LICENSElicence MIT/a, il vient de sortir en version 1.0, grâce au travail de a href=http://github.com/datamapper/dm-core/contributors66 contributeurs/a.br / br / Dans le monde Ruby, l'utilisation d'ORM est devenue une pratique courante sous l'influence de Ruby on Rails. ActiveRecord, l'ORM de Ruby on Rails, est ainsi très utilisé mais il ne convient pas à tout le monde. Les développeurs de Ruby on Rails ont des avis très tranchés sur certains points et, notamment, cherchent toujours à répondre aux 20% de cas d'utilisation qui couvrent 80% des besoins. Mais certaines personnes ont des besoins plus particuliers : c'est ce qui est arrivé aux développeurs de DataMapper.br / br / L'équipe de DataMapper a ainsi voulu fournir une bibliothèque plus complète qu'ActiveRecord. On peut ainsi citer les points forts suivants :br / ulliSupport de nombreuses bases de données, aussi bien relationnelles que NoSQL, mais également de fichiers a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML title=Définition WikipédiaYAML/a et d'interfaces a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_TransferREST/a ;br / /liliMigrations automatiques : on écrit les classes Ruby, puis on demande à DataMapper de créer les tables correspondantes dans la base de données ;br / /liliUnicité des objets : une ligne dans la base de données correspond à un objet ;br / /liliApproche modulaire : on choisit a href=http://datamapper.org/docs/dm_more/les fonctionnalités/a dont on a vraiment besoin ;br / /liliRéduction du nombre de requêtes : DataMapper ne fait les requêtes qu'au moment où vous avez vraiment besoin d'y accéder (ia href=http://datamapper.org/why#laziness_can_be_a_virtueLazyness can be a virtue/a/i) et précharge les objets quand vous itérez sur des collections (ia href=http://datamapper.org/why#strategic_eager_loadingStrategic eager loading/a/i) ;br / /liliIntégration plus souple à des projets Ruby existants.br / /li/ul br / La version 3 de Ruby on Rails devrait sortir d'ici quelques semaines et va notamment permettre de remplacer facilement ActiveRecord par un ORM dans les projets Rails. br / Saluons donc l'arrivée de DataMapper 1.0 qui va permettre de couvrir des scénarios complexes pour des projets Rails ou autres.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://datamapper.org/DataMapper/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://groups.google.com/group/datamapper/browse_thread/thread/6e3d51520cb63d9cAnnonce de la version 1.0/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://en.oreilly.com/rails2010/public/schedule/detail/14198Présentation de DataMapper 1.0 lors de la RailsConf/abr /

June 09, 2010
23:22
Why I love Craigslist
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pHi. I own some websites. I have ads on these websites. I need some quality clickers to click the links on these websites (ads). I am looking for people to click 1 hour, 3 times, for one week. Then I will determine if I want to repeat what I just said. br/br/For doing this gig the compensation will be a coffee or tea or soda at Starbucks or Pete’s coffee and $10 dollars. I will be with you because I am looking for a standard. br/br/ Thanks,/p

19:47
Gagnez deux livres sur la haute disponibilité !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

À l'occasion de la sortie du livre « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité », LinuxFr.org, son auteur, a href=http://linuxfr.org/~slyce/Sébastien Rohaut/a et les Éditions ENI vous proposent d'en gagner deux exemplaires. br / br / Pour ce faire, il suffit de générer l'une des deux plus longues séries (en jours) de dépêches validées sur le site LinuxFr.org dans le mois à venir ! On entend par série une succession ininterrompue de dépêches validées ; ivalidée/i correspondant au moment où la dépêche est publiée sur le site par un modérateur du site. Exemple : Une série de 7 jours signifie qu'il y a eu au moins une dépêche validée par jour pendant 7 jours consécutifs. Voici un exemple de NoNo (record actuel) : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/28/26905.html[1]/a le 28 mai, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/29/26910.html[2]/a le 29 mai, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/30/26912.html[3]/a le 30 mai, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/31/26917.html[4]/a le 31 mai, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/01/26924.html[5]/a le 1er juin, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/02/26937.html[6]/a le 2 juin, et enfin a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/03/26946.html[7]/a le 3 juin !br / br / Si vous voulez plus d'information sur les séries, n'hésitez pas à consulter les récentes pages sur cette statistique et à faire monter les compteurs. Bien sûr, toutes les dépêches qui seront proposées dans ce concours sont aussi éligibles pour les gagnants mensuels des meilleurs contributeurs ! Pour vos sources d'inspiration, vous pouvez regarder du côté de la a href=https://linuxfr.org/redacteurs/tribune des rédacteurs/a. br / br / iFaites péter les scores :)/ibr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/serie.htmlStatistiques sur les séries/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/maserie.htmlStatistiques sur VOS séries/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/top.htmlLes tops de LinuxFr.org/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26967.htmlDLFP : Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.editions-eni.frLes Éditions ENI/abr / (...)
18:50
Linux : Solutions de Haute Disponibilité
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

img src=http://www.editions-eni.fr/imgloader.aspx?idarticle=24de9bbf-ebc9-4f26-906b-ee88a9a8393bimg=imgminiditf=0 alt=Couverture du livre hspace=10 vspace=10 align=rightbr / a href=http://linuxfr.org/~slyce/Sébastien Rohaut/a, auteur de livres sur Linux et/ou la programmation sévissant aussi sur LinuxFr.org, a sorti récemment un livre consacré à la haute dispo sous Linux : « Linux, Solutions Haute Disponibilité ». Éminemment technique et destiné principalement aux ingénieurs et techniciens qui connaissent déjà bien Linux, vous ne trouverez rien dans ce livre concernant spécifiquement les politiques d'entreprises et les normes sur le sujet (ISO, ITIL PRA etc.). Le livre aborde les sujets suivants :br / ulli Les bdonnées/b avec leurs problématiquesulli de stockage et de garantie de l'accès à ces dernières (perte d'une connexion, performance etc.). Vous découvrirez les SAN, le multipathing et les possibilités d'iSCSI sous Linux./lili l'organisation et la souplesse que procure LVM (et plus particulièrement les possibilités de mirroring, striping et de snapshot)/li/ul /lili Le bréseau/b en allant plus loin dans la configuration avec iproute2, en mettant en place du regroupement d'interfaces (bonding) et en créant des tunnels entre hôtes et réseaux /lili L'béquilibrage de charges/b avec ulli LVS (Linux Virtual Server) et les différents moyens de le mettre en œuvre. Son compagnon, keepalived fait lui aussi l'objet d'un chapitre à part entière./liliPiranha, solution alternative disponible plus spécifiquement sur RHEL et dérivées (CentOS, Fedora, etc.), s'appuyant aussi sur LVS.br / /li/ul /lili La bvirtualisation/b des serveurs basée sur KVM.br / /lili Le bclustering/b (ou grappes de serveurs) pour la gestion de la bascule des services avec le couple OpenAIS/Pacemaker./li/ul Est-il besoin de préciser que toutes les solutions proposées et préconisées dans le livre sont à base de logiciels libres ? D'ailleurs, à ce sujet, l'auteur vient de dévoiler l'outil MakeAlive, diffusé librement sous licence GPLv2. Il s'agit d'un logiciel de gestion de LVS et de haute dispo avec Keepalived. Il permet de gérer des groupes de répartiteurs de charge, d’en modifier la configuration et de surveiller leur fonctionnement. Une dépêche devrait le présenter sous peu.br / br / Le livre est agrémenté de nombreux exemples pratiques, d'exemples de scripts, de configuration etc. Attention, ce n'est pas non plus un cookbook avec des recettes toutes prêtes, mais plutôt une sérieuse introduction à toutes ces technologies car chaque sujet abordé pourrait mériter certainement son propre livre. Cependant, il vous donnera un bon aperçu d'ensemble et de solides points de départ sur la manière de tout combiner pour arriver à mettre en œuvre une architecture haute dispo sous Linux. Au chapitre de la mise en forme, on pourra regretter que les espaces pour les indentations sur les bouts de code présentés prennent 8 espaces, ce qui rend le source parfois peu lisible sur un livre de ce format. Il aurait été judicieux de les réduire à 4 voire à 3 espaces.br / br / À l'occasion de la sortie du livre, son auteur et l'éditeur vous proposent d'en gagner deux exemplaires. Tous les détails dans une dépêche à venir.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.editions-eni.fr/Livres/Linux-Solutions-de-Haute-Disponibilite/.6_3a6222cf-b921-41f5-886c-c989f77ba994_9f7ed5d9-eb1e-4575-901a-b04fbee83e82_24de9bbf-ebc9-4f26-906b-ee88a9a8393b_1_0_d9bd8b5e-f324-473f-b1fc-b41b421c950f.htmlLe livre « Linux, Solutions de Haute Disponibilité »/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~slyce/Page DLFP de Sébastien Rohaut/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.makealive.org/Site web de MakeAlive/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/06/09/26968.htmlGagner deux exemplaires du livre/abr / (...)

15:52
Logic
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient: /strong“Web designer seems like a sweet job.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Yeah, it’s great.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “You probably love it so much that you would do it even you didn’t get payed!”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Uhm…”/p pstrongClient: /strong“Great! So I don’t have to pay you?”/p

15:05
MzMgWWVhcnMgT2xkIGFuZCBDb3VudGluZwo=
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
Believe it or not, you can figure this out on any Unix-like operating system. Should keep you guessing for at least a few minutes.
```
by9+IFlvdSd2ZSBoYWQgYSBiaXJ0aGRheSwgc2hvdXQgaHVycmF5ISBXZSB3YW50IHRvIHNpbmcg
dG8geW91IHRvZGF5LiBPbmUgeWVhciBvbGRlciBhbmQgd2lzZXIgdG9vLiBIYXBweSBCaXJ0aGFk
eSwgdG8geW91ISBvL34K
```

14:03
Application mobile native avec Titanium
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Titanium est un logiciel open-source qui permet de construire des applications mobile, avec les éléments d'interface natifs, le stockage de données, la géolocalisation etc. fonctionnant simultanément sur iPhone et Android, et avec des technologies web ! Les développeurs web peuvent ainsi s'éviter la peine d'apprendre Objective-C ou Java et utiliser à la place leurs compétences en Javascript, HTML et CSS pour construire des applications qui, cerise sur le gâteau, fonctionneront à la fois sur iPhone (...)

10:01
Twitter changes the rules for URLs in tweets: the end of privacy or the end of the 140 character limit?
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Twitter has decided that for our good and their own it would be better if any time you click a link in a tweet the request first went to Twitter before being redirected to the intended destination. This blog entry announces the decision, but a lot of the interesting details are hidden in the more technical description of the change sent to the Twitter developers mailing list.

Here is a quick analysis of the announcement and its ramifications.

The advertised benefits

For users:
- Twitter scans the links for malware, offering a layer of protection
- It becomes easy to shorten links directly from the Tweet box on twitter.com (or from any client that doesn’t have a built-in link shortening feature)
For Twitter:
- they collect a lot of profiling data on user behavior, which can be used to improve the “Promoted Tweets” system (and possibly plenty of other uses)
You don’t have to be much of a cynic to notice that the user benefits are already available today for those who care about them (get a link scanner on your computer, get a Twitter client with built-in link shortening) while the benefit to Twitter is a brand new and major addition…

One interesting side-effect: the erosion of the 140 character limitation

Without going into the technical details of the new system, one change is that each URL will now “cost” 20 characters (out of the 140 allowed per tweet), no matter how long it really is. But in most cases the user will still see the complete URL in the tweet (clients may choose to display something else but I doubt they will, at least by default, except for SMS). So you could now see tweets like (line breaks added):
```
In the town where I was born / Lived a man who sailed to sea /
And he told us of his life / In the land of submarines, http://more.com/
So.we.sailed.on.to.the.sun/Till.we.found.the.sea.green/
And.we.lived.beneath.the.waves/In.our.yellow.submarine/
We.all.live.in.yellow.submarine/Yellow.submarine,yellow.submarine/
We.all.live in.yellow.submarine/Yellow.submarine,yellow.submarine.
```
Based on the Twitter proposal, clicking on this link would send you to a Twitter-operated link shortener (e.g. http://t.co/J7erFi3) which would then redirect you to the full URL above. The site (e.g. more.com in this example) could be trivially set up so that such URLs are all valid and they return a clean version of the encoded text (for the benefit of users of Twitter clients that may not show the full URL).

This long URL example may seem a bit overkill (just post 3 tweets), but if you are only short by 20 or 30 characters and just can’t find another way to shorten the tweet the temptation will be big to take this easy escape.

A cool new URL shortening domain

You may have noticed the t.co domain in the previous paragraph. Yes, it’s a real one. That’s the hard-to-beat domain that Twitter was able to score for this. Cute. But frankly I am tired of the whole URL shortening deal and these short domain names have stopped to amuse me. You?

Enforcement

How, you may wonder, can Twitter ensure that the clicks go through its gateway if the full URL is available as part of the Tweet? Simple: they change the terms of service to forbid doing otherwise. It’s interesting how the paragraph in the email to developers which announces that aspect starts by asking nicely “we really do hope that…”, “please send the user through the t.co link”, “please still send him or her through t.co” and ends with a more constraining “we will be updating the TOS to require you to check t.co and register the click”. Speak softly and carry a big stick.

It will be obviously easy to avoid this, and you won’t have to resort top copy/pasting URLs. Even if the client developers play ball, open source clients can be recompiled. Proxies can be put in front of clients to remember the mapping and do the substitution without ever hitting t.co. Plug-ins and Greasemonkey scripts can be developed. Etc. Twitter knows that for sure and probably doesn’t care. As long as by default most users go through t.co the company will get the metrics it needs. It’s actually to Twitter’s benefit to make it easy enough (but not too easy) to circumvent this, as it ensure that those who care will find a solution and therefore keep using the service without too much of a fuss. We can’t tell you to cheat but we’ll hint that we don’t mind if you do.

The privacy angle

This is a big deal, and disappointing to me. Obviously the hopes I had for Twitter to become the backbone of an open, user-controlled, social data bus are not shared by its management. Until now, Twitter was a good citizen in a world of privacy-violating social networks because the data it shared (your tweets and your basic profile data) had always and unambiguously been expected to be public. Not true with your click stream. An average user will have no idea that when he clicks on http://cnn.com/some.story the request first goes to Twitter. Twitter now has access to identified personal data (the click stream) that its users do not mean to share. I realize that this is old news in a world of syndicated web advertising and centralized analytics, but this is new for Twitter and now puts them in position to mishandle this data, purposely or not, in the way they store it, use it and share it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up forced to offer an option to not go through t.co and they had additional metadata in the user profile to inform the Twitter client that it is OK for this user not to go through the gateway when they click on a link. We’ll see.

The impact on the Twitter application ecosystem

The assault on URL shorteners was expected since the Chirp conference (and even before). Most Twitter application developers had already swallowed the “if you just fill a hole in the platform we’ll eventually crush you” message. What’s new in this announcement is that it also shows that Twitter is willing to use its Terms of Service document as a competitive tool, just like Steve Jobs does with Flash. Not unexpected, but it wasn’t quite as clear before.

It’s not a pretty implementation

Here is what it looks like at the API level: the actual tweet text contains the t.co shortened URL. And for each such URL there is a piece of metadata that gives you the t.co URL, the corresponding full-length URL (which you should display instead of the t.co one) and the begin/end character position of the t.co URL in the original tweet so you can easily pull it out (not sure why you need the end position since it’s always beginning+20 but serialized Twitter message are already happily duplicative).

As a modeling and serialization geek, I am not impressed by the technical approach taken here. But before I flame Twitter I should acknowledge the obvious: that the Twitter API has seen a rate of adoption several orders of magnitude larger than any protocol I had anything to do with. Still, it would take more than this detail of history to prevent me from pontificating.

For such a young company, the payload of a Twitter message is already quite a mess, mixing duplications, backward-compatible band-aids, real technical constraints and self-imposed constraints. Why, pray tell, do we even need to shorten URLs? If you’re an outsider forced to live within the constraints of the Twitter rules (chiefly, the 140 character limit), they make sense. But if you’re Twitter itself? With the amount of cruft and repetition in a serialized Twitter message, don’t tell me these characters actually matter on the wire. I know they do for SMS, but then just shorten the links in tweets sent over SMS. In the other cases, it reminds me of the frustrating experience of being told by the owner of a Mom-and-Pop store that they can’t accede to your demand because of “company policy”.

Isn’t it time for the text of tweets to contain real markup so that rather than staring at a URL we see highlighted words that point somewhere? Just like… any web page. Isn’t it the easiest for an application to process and doesn’t it offer the reader a more fluid text (Gillmor and Carr notwithstanding)? By now, isn’t this how people are used to consuming hypertext?

Couldn’t the backward compatibility issue of such an approach be solved simply by allowing client applications to specify in their Twitter registration settings that yes, they are able to handle such earth-shattering concept as a <a href=”"></a> element. This doesn’t prevent a URL to “cost” you some fixed number of characters, it doesn’t prevent the use of a tracker/filter gateway if that’s your business decision.

We’ll see how users (and application developers) react to this change. As fans of Douglas Adams know, the risk of claiming that “all your click are belong to us” is that you expose yourself to hearing “so long, and thanks for all the whale” as an answer…

Related posts:

4:48
Linaro : la réponse à la fragmentation du monde ARM ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Quelques entreprises spécialisées dans le matériel (ARM, IBM, Freescale, TI, Ericsson, Samsung et Canonical) ont lancé une organisation à but non lucratif : Linaro. Son objectif est le financement du développement collaboratif de Linux mobile. Un ensemble de technologies mobiles est en train d'être créé ce qui aurait pour effet de réduire la complexité de systèmes mobiles basés sur ARM et utilisant un OS libre.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.linaro.org/Site officiel/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.linaro.org/arm-freescale-ibm-samsung-st-ericsson-and-texas-instruments-form-new-company-to-speed-the-rollout-of-linux-based-devices/Communiqué de presse/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.linaro.org/faqsFAQ/abr / (...)

June 08, 2010
23:52
We got a call at home at 11 pm from a client whose website had been crippled by malware. He was...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pWe got a call at home at 11 pm from a client whose website had been crippled by malware. He was extremely upset that the website needed to be rebuilt from scratch, and refused to understand why it was necessary. Then he suddenly stopped ranting and said:/p p“You know what, I don’t have time for this. I have to go fuck this prostitute. I’ll call you later.” /p
17:22
Client: ”Good God! Is this website going to be made of gold or something?”...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”Good God! Is this website going to be made of gold or something?” /p pstrongMe:/strong ”Ahh, no. Is there something wrong with the design?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”No, its the price! We are a charity! You can’t make charities pay for things. You’re suppose to give them to us for free!”/p

16:39
Travel itineraries from Flickr photo trails
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Every once in a while, you hit a paper that seems like a startup waiting to happen. A paper that will be presented next week at HT 2010 by Yahoo Research is one of these.br /br /The paper, "Automatic Construction of Travel Itineraries using Social Breadcrumbs" (a href="http://www.public.asu.edu/~mdechoud/pubs/ht_10_long.pdf"PDF/a), cleverly uses the data often embedded in Flickr photos (e.g. timestamp, tags, sometimes GPS) to produce trails of where people have been in their travels. Then, they combine all those past trails to generate high quality itineraries for future tourists that tell them what to see, where to go, how long to expect to spend at each sight, and how long to allow for travel times between the sights.br /br /Some excerpts from the paper:blockquoteiShared photos can be seen as billions of geo-temporal breadcrumbs that can promisingly serve as a latent source reflecting the trips of millions of users ... [We] automatically construct travel itineraries at large scale from those breadcrumbs.br /br /By analyzing these breadcrumbs associated with a person's photo stream, one can deduce the cities visited by a person, which Points of Interest (POI) that the person took photos at, how long that person spent at each POI, and what the transit time was between POIs visited in succession.br /br /By aggregating such timed paths of many users, one can construct itineraries that reflect the "wisdom" of touring crowds. Each such itinerary is composed of a sequence of POIs, with recommended visit times and approximate transit times between them.br /br /[In surveys] users perceive our automatically generated itineraries to be as good as (or even slightly better than) itineraries provided by professional tour companies./i/blockquoteThis reminds me quite a bit of the work on using GPS trails from mobile devices like phones (e.g. [a href="http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=119088"1/a] or [a href="http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70201"2/a]) or search histories on maps (e.g. [a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/09/hotmap-and-map-attention-data.html"3/a]). But, the use of Flickr photos as the data source is clever, especially for this application where the photos are also useful in the final output and the gaps in the data stream are not important.br /br /Fun idea, nicely implemented, and very convincing results. Definitely worth a read. Don't miss the thoughts at the end on expansions to the idea, such as changing how the trails are filtered and aggregated based on individual preferences to generate personalized itineraries.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-1279929330899140827?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

15:39
Messenger Social: Building the Ultimate Social Dashboard for Staying in Touch while Eliminating the Noise
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpOver the past year or so, I’ve been part of the team working on building the next version of the social news feed on Windows Live. Yesterday, the next iteration of this feature was made broadly available on a href="http://home.live.com"http://home.live.com/a and a href="http://profile.live.com"http://profile.live.com/a. As I look back at the work we’ve done there are a number of things I love about the philosophy behind what we’ve built and the actual features we’ve implemented. /p pimg src="http://hpxgma.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pwXSv8PVEQE4_svx3ZPXeSm1RX_ZGgYBjpXBkNkgnI_volPcysSyYip9ga-zJs1HdgdEB65qUIdneMJ-2OZ40WbYfSHZZBeZH/social.png" //p pThe above screenshot shows the header for Messenger Social feed on the Windows Live home page and captures a number of it’s key concepts. /p h3Highlights from your Favorite People /h3 pOne of the key problems we want to address with this release is the conflicting feelings of information overload from getting a flood of minutiae on a daily basis from people you’d barely consider acquaintances and the feeling of not seeing enough stuff from the people you actually care about because they are being drowned out by other less important people. The way we’ve approached this problem is a title="http://windowslivepreview.com/messenger/new/#benefit_2" href="http://windowslivepreview.com/messenger/new/#benefit_2"described on the Messenger Preview site/a and excerpted below /p blockquote pemBecause most people today use a variety of social networks and content sharing sites, with different sets of friends and acquaintances dispersed throughout these disparate networks, it can be challenging — and exhausting — to visit different websites and create different accounts just to keep abreast of your friends’ updates. But it isn’t just about bringing all that data together. What’s really valuable is helping you filter through the clutter and get to those updates you really care about — the ones from those people who you communicate with most frequently. There are a lot of intelligent algorithms and machine learning that can help in this, but we’ve found one of the best ways is to simply ask people. So, Windows Live Messenger will come right to the source — YOU — and ask you to specify your favorites:/em/p /blockquote pThe emHighlights/em filter shows the most interesting recent content from your social network and strives to ensure you are kept up to date with updates from your favorites even if they aren’t posting a mile a minute like some of your more active social networking friends. /p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1ptEiWympkUaTAqUHN4sS4To_tSykE1iKyb_H8TDNbkQKjJL9LcZtJvJEPhWb8QR_a6oODLRd6ulGzJx3Q4Uzm7g/people-centric.png" width="388" height="526" /#160;/p pThe screenshot above captures what this means in practice. Since a href="http://cid-95a54a46c806b80e.profile-df.live.com/"Omar/a is one of my favorites, his updates show up ahead of updates from a href="http://www.mint.com"Mint.com/a even though his are several hours older than those from the Mint fan page. We learned from experience that although a number of people find the Highlights filter to be a valuable way to cut through the clutter and view the most interesting updates from their social network, there are also times when we have time to kill and don’t mind swimming in the full stream. For those times, we also have a emRecent/em filter which provides the classic reverse chronological view of a stream of updates from your social network. /p h3People-centric not Service-centric/h3 pThe fundamental idea behind social software is that it enables people to connect with other people. When we first shipped the feed in Wave 3, it was a key part of our design philosophy that we would bring together updates from multiple services into a single experience that emphasized your friends not the services where the data was coming from. One consequence of this is that updates from multiple services are shown in a single stream as shown in the screenshot from the previous section. We don’t provide tabs for multiple services because at the end of the day, what’s important to me is seeing what my friends said today not what my Windows Live friends said versus what my Facebook friends said. Instead our filters enable users to decide how they want to see updates from all of their friends as opposed to making service-centric distinctions. /p pAnother nice touch is that once I’ve connected a service such as Facebook to Windows Live (more on that below) when I see an update from a friend in my feed, not only do I have the options of communicating with him or viewing his data on Windows Live but also communicating with him via that service as well.#160; /p pimg src="http://hpxgma.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pk0EXVU5hCkvZgj5WBLR3qPQHl7jLJWkfGa1RHHb41AhjTwgM5pKLCqMf_Z6wb9g_gSpwsqCw6dfXJYWQJ7gKQxWk87zmDXOC/IC.png" //p pand when I click “Send a message (Facebook)” above, it actually takes me to Facebook to send Omar a message via their messaging feature. /p pimg src="http://hpxgma.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pmn8f1tCOnnCd0yRvkmb02592OH58t5-jmkLTuVYOIjgLM8rZhMF05TCcjKsSaY0LTiCHE5oPlQDobeh1kf4EV_WGRFoZoKPC/omar%20message.png" width="600" height="267" //p h3Bi-Directional Connections to Where your Friends are/h3 pIn our previous release, we had a feature called a href="http://windowslivewire.spaces-df.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!30283.entry"Web Activities/a which enabled users to share the activities they performed on other sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and others with their friends on Windows Live. A consistent bit of feedback we got was that people wanted our integration with other sites to be much deeper. They wanted to be able see what their friends where doing regardless of what network they were on and interact with their content. They also wanted to be able to share content with their friends regardless of what network they were on as well. In short, our customers wanted a href="http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com/2010/04/open-is-not-enough-time-to-raise-the-bar-interoperable/"interoperability, not just data portability/a. With our current release we have obliged in spades…/p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pwAiP0nkO_2og9ZGcYGYrmAmlea3KuuJxZCWySoPLq6KhgfM5KNH9X3I88eTmN9Xvxt3ZRJgzTDgXE_v8-KO9EA/upsell.png" //p pWhen you first interact with the Messenger Social experience we ask you to connect your favorite services to Windows Live so you can see what your friends are up to all over the Web and share what you’re doing on other sites with your friends on Windows Live. If you got the prompt above when visiting a href="http://home.live.com"http://home.live.com/a and clicked through to Facebook, you’d see the following options to create bidirectional data flows between Facebook and Windows Live. /p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1p43D8-wDUKNEcgFzoji87gVxTGwJqfkYxzm-OWQ6CWU2UaovZ8Vf5GoRhBHGzZQ85CuugBHq-XhYpDtkS9NZJDA/Connect%20FB.png" width="582" height="359" //p pAs I mentioned before, this isn’t about “portability” and asking your friends to leave Facebook for Windows Live. Instead it is about allowing both sites to interoperate in a way that enables Windows Live users to stay in touch with their friends without either set of users having to switch services. Of course, Facebook isn’t the only social networking service we interoperate with in this manner as you can tell from the following screen shot/p p#160;img src="http://hpxgma.blu.livefilestore.com/y1plG9yjNYOlKvSVxu_XENeJhH4TZP4hiUjeowCovhTaYObEWp8vDzqIS5yskvt6-T2uWkGX_vRXr7hEAQTNdYE_z-27Aj9xTN4/MySpace%20Connect.png" width="589" height="326" //p pWith these connections made, I not only get to see what my friends are doing across MySpace and Facebook from within Windows Live but can also broadcast my thoughts to them from within Windows Live as well. /p pShortly after our features were made available yesterday I created the following status update/p pimg src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pa-h2MdGPU9exY7T8pPwrK1w4CPhoP30zxVI3RMUyuwAqwZMJK_7MyPHV3CJrH4qENDtKGhbuah95NNp9PBQCQA/sharing.png" //p pwhich caused that update to be shared to both my Messenger friends and my Facebook friends (see the handy iconography in the bottom right). You can see the results from both sites below /p table border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" width="400"tbody tr td valign="top" width="200"font size="4"On Facebook/font/td td valign="top" width="200"font size="4"On Windows Live/font/td /tr tr td valign="top" width="200"img src="http://hpxgma.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pnGQrOGjvs8lv4y5LLHHZRJCB1YdDbKd_XYlk3niyjptldNOFBs5gf4Y95a1evgd1wy5Uig40MC8zzVRxI2tXvMuwYT31tdwM/shared%20fb.png" //td td valign="top" width="200"img src="http://public.blu.livefilestore.com/y1pOzRywpaXZ7DDaLg5CCmdIwCkbC-tcooEg8_Fi6_S2fx0NIMaoD3Xo3eLbor-bUcPAj7QNUw4G91pEUA1r3vHEA/shared%20wl.png" //td /tr /tbody/table pThere’s more good stuff in the release as stuff rolls out across Windows Live and I’ll be writing more about what we’ve built in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading. /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Usheramp;field-title=OMGamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Usher/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Usher+OMGamp;x=0amp;y=0"OMG (featuring Will.I.Am)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

10:22
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 22
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 22/strongbr / br / ullia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15888-google-modifie-un-peu-la-licence-webm-pour-eviter-un-conflit-avec-le-libre.html[numerama.com] Google modifie (un peu) la licence WebM pour éviter un conflit avec le Libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lemagit.fr/article/mobilite-linux-opensource-embarque/6492/1/embarque-route-vers-une-unification-linux/[lemagit.fr] Embarqué : en route vers une unification de Linux /abr / /lilia href=http://blogs.lemagit.fr/2010/06/04/tristan-nitot[lemagit.fr] Tristan Nitot : « il y a danger dès lors que quelqu’un décide pour vous de ce que vous pouvez installer »/abr / /lilia href=http://www.cio-online.com/actualites/lire-france-televisions-choisit-un-cms-libre-unique-pour-ses-sites-web-2970.html[cio-online.com] France Télévisions choisit un CMS libre unique pour ses sites web/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15869-eric-walter-hadopi-trouve-34un-peu-hypocrite34-le-debat-sur-les-logiciels-de-securisation.html[numerama.com] Eric Walter (Hadopi) trouve un peu hypocrite le débat sur les logiciels de sécurisation/abr / /lilia href=http://www.generation-nt.com/android-smartphones-croissance-abi-research-actualite-1026651.html[generation-nt.com] ABI Research : les smartphones à base Linux en plein essor/abr / /lilia href=http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/science-et-technologie/201006/03/01-4286630-le-logiciel-libre-remporte-une-victoire-en-cour.php?utm_categorieinterne=trafficdriversutm_contenuinterne=cyberpresse_B4_en-manchette_2238_section_POS3[cyberpresse.ca] Le logiciel libre remporte une victoire en cour/abr / /lilia href=http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/actualite-343960-jean-noel-saunier-google-gagnera-argent-codec-ouvert.html[clubic.com] Jean-Noël Saunier : Google gagnera plus d'argent en maintenant son codec ouvert/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/media-tech/super-ordinateurs-91-du-top500-mondial-sous-linux-39752098.htm[zdnet.fr] Super-ordinateurs : 91% du top500 mondial sous Linux !/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/geoportail-veut-prendre-du-poids-en-seduisant-les-developpeurs-39752110.htm[zdnet.fr] Géoportail veut prendre du poids en séduisant les développeurs/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lexpansion.com/economie/actualite-high-tech/les-valeurs-du-logiciel-libre-sont-elles-en-danger_233431.html[lexpansion.com] Les valeurs du logiciel libre sont-elles en danger ?/abr / /lilia href=http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/high-tech/ubuntu-l-electron-libre-qui-defie-windows_896618.html[lexpress.fr] Ubuntu, l'électron libre qui défie Windows/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/l-esprit-libre/ma-petite-entreprise-du-logiciel-libre-ne-connait-pas-la-crise-39752108.htm[zdnet.fr] Ma petite entreprise du logiciel libre ne connaît pas la crise/abr / /lilia href=http://www.actu-cci.com/article/3390/[actu-cci.com] À l’assaut des applications/abr / /lilia href=http://www.actu-cci.com/dossier/Dossier_86/3391/[actu-cci.com] La révolution est en marche/abr / /lilia href=http://www.actu-cci.com/article/3389/[actu-cci.com] Le logiciel libre sort de l’ombre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57313-google-windows-arret-choix-mac-osx-linux.htm[pcinpact.com] Google se débarrasse de toutes ses machines sous Windows/abr / /li/ul br / br / (...)
June 07, 2010
23:53
L'unicité des adresses IP : la fin du rêve HADOPIen ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Les 5 gus dans un garage avaient réussi à casser le pare-feu OpenOffice.org. Les voilà qui fabriquent véritablement des adresses IP au détour de leur bagnole défoncée...br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/56419-adresse-ip-torrent-poising-seedfuck.htmSeedFuck se présente, par Marc Rees sur PC INPACT/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57449-seedfuck-ipfuck-http-poisoning-hadopi.htmIPFuck sur PCINPACT/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://blog.p4ul.info/2010/06/ipfuck-alors-comme-ca-ladresse-ip-est-une-donnee-sure/IPFuck : alors comme ça l’adresse IP est une donnée sure ?/abr / (...)
23:01
Programme de la session « Systèmes embarqués et matériel libre » des RMLL
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Dans le cadre des Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, qui auront lieu du 6 au 11 juillet à Bordeaux,br / La session a href=http://2010.rmll.info/-Systemes-Embarques-et-Materiel-Libre-.html?lang=fr« Systèmes embarqués et matériel libre »/a proposera du mardi 6 au jeudi 8 un ensemble de conférences sur différents aspects du Libre dans l'embarqué :br / br / ullibLe mardi 6/bbr / ullia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Developpement-pour-Apple-iPod-sous-GNU-Linux.html?lang=frDéveloppement pour Apple iPod sous GNU/Linux/a (Gwenhael Goavec-Merou, Jean-Michel Friedt) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Noyau-Linux-architecture-des-drivers-et-device-model.html?lang=frNoyau Linux : architecture des pilotes et device model/a (Thomas Petazzoni) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Developpement-de-bibliotheques-d-instruments-radiofrequences-sur-FPGA.html?lang=frDéveloppement de bibliothèques d’instruments radiofréquences sur FPGA/a (Marc Lamothe, Nicolas Chrétien, Gwenhael Goavec-Merou, Jean-Michel Friedt) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Robotique-et-logiciels-libres-le-robot-humanoide-NAO.html?lang=frRobotique et logiciels libres : le robot humanoïde NAO/a (Bothari Ganhir) :br / /lili a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Milkymist-un-System-on-Chip-libre-et-oriente-video-temps-reel.html?lang=frMilkymist : un System-on-Chip libre et orienté vidéo temps réel/a (Sébastien Bourdeauducq)./li/ul/li libLe mercredi 7/bbr / ullia href=http://2010.rmll.info/En-quoi-les-logiciels-libres-peuvent-rendre-du-materiel-portable-encore-plus-utilisable-par-les-personnes-deficientes-visuelles.html?lang=frEn quoi les logiciels libres peuvent rendre du matériel portable (encore plus) utilisable par les personnes déficientes visuelles/a (Sébastien Hinderer, conférence croisée avec le thème accessibilité) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/ConnMan-un-gestionnaire-de-connexion-pour-systemes-embarques.html?lang=frConnMan, un gestionnaire de connexion pour systèmes embarqués/a (Samuel Ortiz) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Vers-une-plage-braille-libre.html?lang=frVers une plage braille ’libre’ ?/a (Mario Lang, conférence croisée avec le thème accessibilité) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Enlightenment-Foundation-Library.html?lang=frEnlightenment Foundation Library/a (Carsten Haitzler, Cédric Bail) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Ebook-hacking.html?lang=frEbook hacking/a (Jesse Vincent) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Archos-mobile-platform,391.html?lang=frArchos mobile platform/a (Chidambar Zinnoury)./li/ul/li libLe jeudi 8/bbr / ullia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Enna-Geekbox-un-logiciel-pour-mediacenter.html?lang=frEnna/Geekbox : un logiciel pour mediacenter/a (Nicolas Aguirre) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Ajout-de-support-materiel-a-Buildroot.html?lang=frAjout de support matériel à Buildroot/a (Pierre Ficheux) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Detection-de-pollution-maritime-avec-GNU-Linux.html?lang=frDétection de pollution maritime avec GNU/Linux/a (Eric Bénard) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Integration-d-OpenWrt-sur-la-Neufbox-4.html?lang=frIntégration d'OpenWrt sur la Neufbox 4/a (Arnaud André, Raphaël Huck, Miguel Gaio) ;br / /lilia href=http://2010.rmll.info/Nouvelle-traduction-USB3-Linux-introduction-Sarah-Sharp.html?lang=frUSB3/Linux introduction/a (Sarah Sharp) et a href=http://2010.rmll.info/USB3-Linux-advanced.html?lang=frUSB3/Linux advanced/a (Sarah Sharp)/li /ul/li/ul br / Pour résumer, un total de dix-sept conférences sur des sujets variés, du matériel au logiciel, du bas-niveau au haut-niveau, pour tous les goûts.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.rmll.infoRencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/-Systemes-Embarques-et-Materiel-Libre-.html?lang=frSession « Systèmes embarqués et matériel libre »/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://2010.rmll.info/spip.php?page=rmll_progallamp;lang=framp;t=30Programme de la session « Systèmes embarqués et matériel libre »/abr /

22:22
CEO: ”Hi Michael, we wanted to talk to you in person (over the phone) to resolve the question...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongCEO:/strong ”Hi Michael, we wanted to talk to you in person (over the phone) to resolve the question of payment.”/p pstrongMe/strong: “OK.”/p pstrongCEO:/strong ”Let’s forget all of the stuff that has gone on in the past with this project. Let me put {Accountant) on the phone.”/p pstrongAccountant:/strong ”What we’d like to do is offer to pay $XXX for the project. Based on what you billed us we think $XXX is a fair amount, minus what we’ve already paid you, minus the recruiter fee.”/p pstrongMe: “/strongSo you’re ‘offering’ to pay me half of what is still owed on the bill for the work you hired me to do.”/p pstrongAccountant:/strong ”Well, based on the total cost we’re willing to pay, minus the recruiter fee…”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”A simple yes or no, will suffice. If you owe me $XXXX and are ‘willing’ to pay $XXX, if my math is correct, and I believe it is, I can redo it on my calculator if you’d like, you’re ‘willing’ to pay me half. Even though I rushed the work and everyone was thrilled with it.”/p pstrongCEO:/strong ”Well… yes, I guess, you could say that is half…”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”I do.”/p pstrongCEO:/strong ”Look, I’m sure you just want to put this behind you…”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Actually, no. I want to be paid in full.”/p pstrongCEO:/strong ”Well, this is all we’re willing to pay.”/p pstrongMe: “/strongYou know you signed a contract right?”/p pstrongAccountant: “/strongWell, we had several conversations via email and in person about this…”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Yes, in each you tried to weasel you’re way out of paying me…”/p pstrongCEO:/strong ”I think this is a fair compromise.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”I think you’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”/p

18:02
L'Agenda du Libre a 5 ans !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Il y a presque cinq ans jour pour jour, le 6 juin 2005, l'a href=http://www.agendadulibre.orgAgenda du Libre/a était officiellement lancé au travers d'une dépêche sur ce a href=https://linuxfr.org/2005/06/06/19066.htmlmême site LinuxFr.org/a, et il a passé il y a quelques jours le cap des 4000 évènements enregistrés. Reprenant l'idée de Rodolphe Quiedeville qui avait créé iagenda.lolix.org/i, l'Agenda du Libre a pour objectif de recenser l'ensemble des évènements français concernant le Logiciel Libre, pour leur donner une plus grande visibilité, donner des moyens simples et pratiques pour le public de se tenir au courant des évènements de leur région, et pour donner un indicateur de la dynamique communautaire autour du Logiciel Libre.br / br / En février 2006, l'Agenda du Libre a href=https://linuxfr.org/2006/02/20/20383.htmlpassait le cap des 300 évènements/a et ajoutait aux a href=http://www.agendadulibre.org/rsslist.phpflux RSS proposés/a depuis le lancement, le support des a href=http://www.agendadulibre.org/icallist.phpcalendriers iCal/a et une a href=http://www.agendadulibre.org/map.phpcarte des évènements et des GULLs/a.br / br / Le cap des a href=https://linuxfr.org/2007/04/10/22352.html1000 évènements recensés/a est franchi en avril 2007 et c'est cette fois-ci les étiquettes (itags/i) qui sont annoncées, permettant entre autres à un GULL de proposer à son public un calendrier iCal ou un flux RSS de ses évènenements uniquement.br / br / Le cap des a href=https://linuxfr.org//2009/02/20/25057.html2500 évènements/a est franchi en février 2009, avec de nouvelles fonctionnalités, et notamment la possibilité pour les soumetteurs d'évènements d'éditer ou d'annuler leur évènement après modération.br / br / En décembre 2009, un a href=https://linuxfr.org//2009/12/11/26253.htmlAgenda du Libre/a pour le Québec est annoncé, et en février 2010, a href=https://linuxfr.org//2010/02/12/26470.htmlc'est au tour de la Belgique de proposer un Agenda du Libre/a.br / br / Parti d'une moyenne d'une trentaine-quarantaine d'évènements par mois au départ, l'Agenda du Libre enregistre désormais environ 80 à 100 évènements par mois, avec des pointes à plus de 200 évènements pour le mois de mars, par l'organisation du a href=http://www.libre-en-fete.netLibre en Fête/a. Dans le classement des villes, c'est évidemment Paris qui rafle la première place avec 470 évènements enregistrés, mais c'est ensuite Rennes (onzième ville française en population, mais extrêmement active en termes de Logiciel Libre) qui occupe la seconde place avec 394 évènements, puis Lille avec 253 évènements et Toulouse avec 222 évènements. Marseille, deuxième ville française en population, est à la 10ème place avec 79 évènements, et Lyon, troisième ville française en population, est à la 6ème place avec 116 évènements, derrière Rouen.br / br / Nous profitons de cette dépêche pour remercier tous les GULLs, associations, cyber-bases ou médiathèques pour l'organisation de ces 4000 évènements et pour leur contribution à l'Agenda du Libre, ainsi que les développeurs et modérateurs du site. Si pour les cinq années à venir, vous avez des idées d'amélioration à apporter à l'Agenda du Libre, nous vous invitons à a href=http://www.toulibre.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/develrejoindre le projet/a !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.agendadulibre.orgAgenda du Libre/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2005/06/06/19066.htmlLancement de l'Agenda du Libre/abr /

15:03
"I need you to get me a picture of a black guys mouth and add gold to all his teeth. It should be on..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“I need you to get me a picture of a black guys mouth and add gold to all his teeth. It should be on every page of my site.”

11:38
A Findory buyout offer from Yahoo?
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

I just received this check from Yahoo payable to Findory.com:br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JQ7fxW3ASg4/TA0hHkkkRoI/AAAAAAAAWC0/5KFkB1YupOs/s1600/Findory+check+from+Yahoo.jpg"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 135px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JQ7fxW3ASg4/TA0g3PLJhZI/AAAAAAAAWCs/A3nG6wNzVVc/s400/Findory+check+from+Yahoo+small.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5480072454917948818" //abr /I've never seen a check for $0.00 before. Is that a buyout bid, Yahoo? Your offer for a href="http://findory.com"Findory/a?br /br /In all seriousness, I'm sure this is just an mistake over in Yahoo-land, perhaps leftovers from the experiments Findory did with layering its personalized advertising engine over ads pulled from the Yahoo Publisher Network.br /br /Still, years after Findory a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/12/findory-turns-off-lights.html"ended/a, years after Findory a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/09/starting-findory-acqusition-talks.html"talked/a to Yahoo, and seeing how Yahoo a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/06/yahoo-ceo-carol-bartz-on.html"now struggles/a to personalize content, I can't help but laugh at this check for $0.00 from Yahoo to Findory.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-5882487037545262689?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

June 06, 2010
21:22
This conversation occurred after receiving a retainer check that was short $1000 from the agreed...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pemstrongThis conversation occurred after receiving a retainer check that was short $1000 from the agreed upon amount, and had a post-it stuck to it informing me that they had decided to pay me in cash./strong/em/p pstrongClient:/strong We decided to pay you in cash, which means that we can have a 20% - 30% discount on your services./p pstrongMe:/strong How so?/p pstrongClient:/strong Well, since you won’t report the income, that will save you money. We figure that you’re in a 30% tax bracket, so we can certainly reduce your fee by that amount as you would be making more money./p pstrongMe: /strong That’s not how it works./p pstrongClient: /strong Oh yes it is./p pstrongMe:/strong Um, I am not in the practice of giving cash discounts, plus, you just sent me a check./p pstrongClient:/strong You mean you won’t do this?/p pstrongMe: /strong No./p pstrongClient:/strong So you’re trying to rip me off?/p pstrongMe:/strong You were the one who decided to pay cash and decided that you were getting the discount./p pstrongClient: [Yelling]/strong Okay, fine. Forget we every had this conversation. strong[Hangs up on me]/strong/p

21:20
Les oubliés du traité anti-contrefaçon ACTA
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 23 octobre 2007, les États-Unis, l'Union européenne, le Japon, la Corée du Sud, le Mexique, la Nouvelle-Zélande, la Suisse et le Canada annoncent leur intention de négocier l'ACTA. Le but : durcir les sanctions contre les infractions au droit d'auteur. Les négociations se poursuivent en douce depuis. Aujourd'hui, l'Inde et la Chine ne semblent pas être contentes de s'en trouver exclues. L'Inde a annoncé la formation prochaine d'une coalition des pays du Sud visée à s'opposer à ACTA.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.april.org/actaPage ACTA de l'April/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/en/ACTAPage ACTA de La Quadrature du net/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accord_commercial_anti-contrefa%C3%A7onPage Wikipédia sur ACTA/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15874-la-chine-rejoint-l-inde-pour-s-opposer-a-l-acta.htmlNumérama : « La Chine rejoint l'Inde pour s'opposer à l'ACTA »/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15880-le-secret-de-l-acta-etait-illegal-a-l-egard-du-parlement-europeen.htmlNumérama : « Le secret de l'ACTA était illégal à l'égard du Parlement européen »/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57319-rapport-marielle-gallo-parlement-juri.htm?vc=1PCInpact : « ACTA : Le rapport Gallo adopté en commission JURI »/abr / (...)
19:20
Sortie d'OGD1
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La première série de cartes a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project#OGD1OGD1/a vient d'être produite. OGD1 est une carte de développement matériel dont le but est de servir de base de travail pour la fabrication d'une carte vidéo 3D aux spécifications ouvertes et aux pilotes libres. Après les premiers prototypes de 2007, 25 exemplaires de la carte ont été produits :br / ulli13 iront aux développeurs ;br / /lili4 serviront pour les démonstrations (salons, conférences...) ;br / /lilile reste sera vendu aux personnes ayant précommandé la carte (8 cartes).br / /li/ul Cette série de cartes a pu être réalisée grâce aux fonds levés par Linux Fund pour le projet a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGraphicsOpenGraphics/a.br / br / bLa production d'OGD1 :/bbr / Les circuits imprimés ont été produits au Canada par « Myro Electronic Control Devices Inc. (MyroPCB) ». Ensuite, la société « Conelec » a réalisé l'assemblage de deux cartes à la main pour que Howard de Traversal Technology puisse les tester. Celles-ci validées, « Conelec » a assemblé le reste des cartes effectuant en même temps les tests de base, puis Howard a fait des tests supplémentaires pour la validation des cartes.br / br / La carte OGD1 est destinée aux développeurs, mais les images des micro-logiciels prêtes à être utilisées seront publiées à chaque mise à jour importante du code source de ceux-ci.br / Pour la carte OGD1, il y a trois micro-logiciels :br / ulliLe BIOS de la carte, programmable par le bus PCI ;br / /liliLe programme du Spartan-3, programmable par le bus PCI ;br / /liliLe programme du Lattice XP10, qui doit être transféré par un câble (C'est cette puce qui gère le bus PCI) ;br / /li/ul Les développeurs du projet OpenGraphics ayant maintenant leurs cartes, sa progression sera plus rapide.br / br / Avec la sortie de sa carte de développement, le projet OpenGraphics franchit une étape dans la réalisation de la carte utilisateur du projet OGC (carte graphique « normale ») à un prix raisonnable. Les 8 cartes vendues aux personnes ayant précommandé ont servi à faire la jonction financière et produire la série de 25 cartes. Une série plus petite aurait été plus chère et heureusement plus de 8 personnes ont précommandé la carte.br / br / bRecherche de développeurs/bbr / Les personnes intéressées par le développement de pilotes pour la carte ou bien par la programmation de la carte elle-même, peuvent demander à recevoir une carte en envoyant un résumé de leurs compétences et du projet (nécessité de la carte), ici ogd1@linuxfund.org br / Les cartes restant la propriété de Linux Fund, dont le but est que les cartes soient utilisées au maximum. (retour des cartes en fin de projet, en cas de non-utilisation...)br / br / acronym title=Note de l'auteurNdA/acronym : Un grand merci à Timothy Miller pour avoir répondu à mes questions.br / Cette série de cartes est produite par Linux Fund, Traversal Technology fournit « seulement » l'assistance technique gracieusement.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.traversaltech.com/Le site de Traversal Tech créé pour produire les cartes:/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfund.org/projects/ogd1/Linux Fund page OGD1/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics%2CfrWiki du projet/abr /

15:22
The client sent me a 30+MB file that my mail server could not support. I suggested he send the file...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pspan pThe client sent me a 30+MB file that my mail server could not support. I suggested he send the file via You Send It./p p class="MsoNormal"strongClient/strong: I have not had time to do that. /p p class="MsoNormal"I must say, I find it very strange that you don’t have the equipment to open a simple picture. How can I be trusting you with my website, when you don’t have the ability to even open and post a picture? I’m very confused by this. Also, I do pay you to build and maintain the site, and so you should have the equipment necessary to do so. It is implied that you SHOULD have and understand the equipment and programs needed to develop, support and protect the sites you are responsible for. Then you tell me you can’t open a picture? That does not sit well with me./p p class="MsoNormal"Do you understand my growing concern?/p /span/p
June 05, 2010
21:29
"I’d like to see more earth-tones, but not browns. Perhaps a shade of caramel?"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“I’d like to see more earth-tones, but not browns. Perhaps a shade of caramel?”
15:22
After a long and exhaustive feedback session where little was said and much was contradicted, the...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pemstrongAfter a long and exhaustive feedback session where little was said and much was contradicted, the client closed with this:/strong/em/p p“Just be an artist.”/p

14:49
Les problèmes de licence de WebM résolus
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Il y a quelques semaines, a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/19/26874.htmlGoogle annonçait le projet WebM/a (Matroska + VP8 + Vorbis). Ce dernier était publié sous une licence combinant droits d'auteur et brevets que l'entreprise possède sur la techno. Le problème était que cette licence, de par ses spécificités, rendait WebM incompatible avec la GPL.br / Le 4 juin 2010, Google a annoncé la modification de la licence et la résolution de ce problème.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/changes-to-webm-open-source-license.htmlL'annonce originale/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/#licensingLa FAQ de WebM mise à jour/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/04/1953232/WebM-Licensing-Problems-ResolvedReprise de l'annonce par Slashdot/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/googles-updated-webm-licenseLes remerciements de la FSF/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-statement-on-webm-and-vp8L'annonce de WebM faite par la FSF/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/19/26874.htmlDLFP : WebM : un format libre et ouvert pour HTML5/abr / (...)
June 04, 2010
21:55
Victoire pour le Libre au Québec !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après deux ans de procès, un jugement déclaratoire étoffé d'une quarantaine de pages vient d'être rendu par la Cour supérieure du Québec : la Régie des rentes n'a pas respecté la loi lors de la rénovation de son parc informatique en 2008.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blogs.savoirfairelinux.net/cyrilleberaud/KMBT35020100602152155.pdfLe jugement (PDF, 2.7Mo)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://blogs.savoirfairelinux.net/cyrilleberaud/Le blog de Cyrille Béraud/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/Economie/2010/06/03/007-proces-logiciel-libre.shtmlUn article qui en parle/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~fleny68/29795.htmlJournal sur DLFP évoquant le sujet/abr / (...)

21:27
"I want this logo to be really elegant and IN YOUR FACE, you know what I mean?"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I want this logo to be really elegant and IN YOUR FACE, you know what I mean?””

16:03
Update to Governance Guidance for Portals, SharePoint, and Intranets
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

I’m happy to announce that my “Website Governance: Guidance for Portals, SharePoint, and Intranets” has just been published. It’s an update to my Methodologies and Best Practices document on governance which is the most popular document that I’ve written for Burton Group (out of 17), even though only came out in March of 2009 and [...]

15:22
"This is everything we asked for but not what we wanted."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“This is everything we asked for but not what we wanted.”

14:44
Why Agile Teams Win in the Marketplace
» ‎ What To Fix
This post is about true Agile/Lean thinking. If parts of it disagree with your particular opinion of doing things, no criticism is intended.
- Agile is Applied Science. As opposed to most all other systems of developing technology, Agile makes no assumptions about what will work or won't work in a particular team or situation. Yes, there are tons of best practices out there, but at the end of the day it's just a team looking at data, forming hypotheses, creating business value, then validating or disproving the hypotheses. New teams "get this" and will immediately ask me "How about we just skip stand-ups? We're all in the same building anyway." To which I usually tell them something about trying the best practice for a while until they understand and know it, then change it up however they like in order to optimize.
  As an outsider, you note some interesting things about teams while watching them optimize that's not immediately apparent to the people inside the team. There is a huge aspect of psychology and sociology at work in technology teams that the teams themselves do not see. Kind of like how a fish is unaware it is swimming in water. Many times they will try something they don't like, say pair programming, and see an immediate improvement in productivity. In addition, the developers are more happy. But -- and this is really strange -- if you ask these same guys if they like pair programming some of them will tell you no. Their preconceived notions get in the way of observing reality. When I first saw this I thought it was just individuals acting irrationally, but after watching dozens of teams (and seeing it in myself) I've concluded this is just part of the human condition.
  
  This has some interesting implications in how teams make decisions. The ultimate arbiter, of course, is whether or not you consistently meet your sprint goals. But "meeting goals" and "continuing to improve" are two different things, and if you're not improving, in my book, you're not agile. Some folks will want to only use data-based decision-making processes. Some folks are much more loosey-goosey. Whatever you do, have an objective baseline, try something for long enough to really grok it, then take a hard look at whether it works or not. Remember the beauty of small teams is that you cognitively cover for each other, so you might think something sucked or had no impact while somebody else has the complete opposite opinion. Learn to be open-minded.
  
  At the end of the day, however, it's all Popper and Peirce. Look at data, form possible hypotheses, test, adapt. Good agile has a lot of the same attributes as good paradigm-breaking science and bad agile has a lot of the same attributes as bad science. If you've got the easy-going MythBusters attitude about seeing where things lead you, you'll go far. If you're rigid and inflexible -- even if you are a huge agile fan -- you won't.
- In Agile the People go to the Work, not the Work to the People. In traditional management, work is broken down from really big pieces into smaller and smaller pieces until each person has a tiny bit of work to work on each hour. People who are not working are failures in this breakdown system, and "management" is the process of keeping everybody busy.
  
  In agile, I get to the User Story or Backlog Item level and I have reached the quantum of business value. As a management outsider, I should only be concerned with how fast the stories move across the task wall -- it is the ultimate indicator of team productivity. I have to have the faith -- or at least the common sense -- to know that how it all happens inside the team is not something that I'm really qualified to act on. Could be they have trained monkeys doing the work. Could be they all take Fridays off. However it's happening, if my team is delivering business value in a manner that's tremendously effective, leave them the heck alone. If they're not, give them some time to make sure they are not improving, then fire them. But whatever you do, don't micromanage. It's a funny thing: people usually know how to do their job, but if you start telling them, they are more than happy to let you tell them exactly what to do. You've just removed all accountability from the system.
- Agile has no Standards Organization. I can buy a book on Agile Pizza-Making, and that's a good thing. Readers of agile literature are expected to compare notes and reconcile it with the things they already know. There is no magic person or group of experts deciding what's agile or what's not agile (although many of them would like to!)
  
  Ten years from now I would expect agile best practices for many items to look much different than they do today. In my opinion, the word "agile" is a marketing term for best practices around iterative and incremental development, and I'm okay with that. The other guys can keep the certifications and the One True Way. I just want a buzzword to identify ideas I might find useful.
- Agile is all About the Team and the Iteration. I've got a chunk of work and a chunk of time. Somebody thought this work was useful to somebody, and the team thought we could make it all happen in the time provided. Let's go make that happen. it's such a simple concept, yet it has profound implications on how things in a team work.
  
  In big organizations we might have a PM or a PO who helps us decide what has business value, but the idea is, really, to use the person who actually has money: the customer. Here's a guy who needs something, here's some people that can make it happen. Everybody wins.
  
  Note that there are not a lot of levels or processes between the guys who can make something happen and the guys wanting something done. In fact, the simpler the better. This tracks very, very closely with the golden rule of startups "stay close to the customer" In agile, the closer you are the better it works.
As I understand it, there is a whole effort to create a fusion between startup methodologies and agile/lean ones. But I'm not sure "fusion" is the right word. In my mind, startup systems are really all about a superset of agile -- finding iterative incremental projects that have value in the marketplace and how to construct them. I think if anything all of this work is simply underlining to people who either don't know agile or don't know startups that the two have always been in sync.

Agile teams will always win in the marketplace because agile teams always focus on the marketplace and delivering value to it. Other systems focus on other things -- including the system itself. Agile is fuzzy enough to not lead to doctrine wars yet specific enough to give teams useful help in making things happen faster.

13:11
Industrialisation de projets multi-sites
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Dans le cadre de plusieurs projets ayant des problématiques multi-sites (déclinaisons par pays ou par client), nous avons été amenés à concevoir et mettre en place une organisation technique permettant d'industrialiser les développements. Objectifs et contexte technique Pour ces différents projets, les objectifs à atteindre étaient les suivants : Permettre une capitalisation maximum du code développé Assurer la cohérence entre les différentes versions du code capitalisé et spécifique Sécuriser les (...)

June 03, 2010
23:24
Sortie de la version 0.6 de Grisbi, logiciel de comptabilité
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Grisbi est un logiciel de comptabilité personnelle sous licence a href=http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.htmlGPL/a. C'est un programme écrit par des Français qui respecte parfaitement l'esprit de la comptabilité à la française.br / br / Développé dans un esprit de simplicité, il n'en supporte pas moins des fonctionnalités avancées. Grisbi est multi-comptes, multi-devises, et multi-utilisateurs. Il gère les tiers, les catégories de recettes et de dépenses, mais aussi les imputations budgétaires et les exercices.br / br / La version 0.6 est sortie récemment et apporte les nouveautés suivantes :ulliChiffrement des fichiersbr / /liliNouveau système d'impressionbr / /liliInterface utilisateur amélioréebr / /liliImport des fichiers au format a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_valuesCSV/a et a href=http://www.gnucash.org/GnuCash/abr / /liliAstuce du jourbr / /liliTravail conséquent pour améliorer l'internationalisationbr / /liliSystème de pluginsbr / /liliEt bien d'autres encore !br / /li/ulacronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : merci à a href=http://linuxfr.org/~MrBidon/MrBidon/a pour avoir proposé a href=http://linuxfr.org/~MrBidon/29790.htmlun journal/a sur le même sujet.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://grisbi.org/Grisbi/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.grisbi.org/changelog.en.htmlChangelog complet de la version 0.6/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/grisbi/files/grisbi%200.6.0/0.6.0/Téléchargement/abr /
22:25
Sortie de Longene 0.3.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce 31 mai est sortie la nouvelle version de Longene. Le projet a href=http://www.longene.org/en/index.phpLongene/a, ou plus communément appelé, Linux Unified Kernel (LUK), est un projet chinois dont le but est d'intégrer les mécanismes du noyau Windows dans le noyau Linux afin d'obtenir un système compatible avec les binaires et les pilotes Linux et Windows.br / Longene est écrit en C et est publié sous les termes de la GPL v2.br / br / Bien que le numéro de version soit peu élevé, le projet fêtera ses 5 ans en septembre de cette année et 9 versions sont déjà sorties. Longene utilise a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WineWine/a comme base : les modules de Wine sont intégrés dans le noyau Linux. Une nouvelle version de Longene sort lorsque plusieurs modules ont été pu être portés. La nouvelle version stable est ensuite utilisée comme base pour la mise en œuvre des modules à venir. Les API Windows qui n'existent pas dans wine sont, eux, développés de zéro.br / br / Pour les pilotes de périphériques, Longene utilise indiswrapper/i. Des modifications sont apportées à ce dernier pour les fonctionnalités manquantes à a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Driver_ModelWindows Driver Model/a en utilisant a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOSReactOS/a comme référence.br / br / L'équipe a publié des tests comparatifs entre Longene et Wine. Il s'agit de réaliser des actions basiques : utilisation d'un sémaphore, d'un a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_exclusionmutex/a, lecture/écriture d'un fichier etc. Les résultats sembleraient démontrer un gain significatif en performance. Ceci s'expliquerait par la suppression de wineserver et l'optimisation réalisée au niveau de l'implémentation.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.longene.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19amp;t=4215Les notes de version/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.longene.org/en/test_analyze.phpLes tests/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.reactos.org/fr/index.htmlReactOS/abr /

21:22
"I already paid for the googles, I just want my website on there!"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“I already paid for the googles, I just want my website on there!”
15:03
"Instead of increasing your pay rate, what if we rent out our basement to you?"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“Instead of increasing your pay rate, what if we rent out our basement to you?”

12:44
CaptainDash: the product revealed
» ‎ CaptainDash

On this past May 25th, CaptainDash has for the first time released its product as it is in Beta version. The outcome was made during the Microsoft’s Bizspark summit, (sorry in French, we we haven’t yet retrieved the English version) taking place in Paris. We were surprised to see how much the product was expected [...]

6:06
Kid Tossing
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F02%2Fkid-tossing%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F02%2Fkid-tossing%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F06%2F02%2Fkid-tossing%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div div class='posterous_autopost' div style='padding: 5px 5px 10px 5px; margin-top: 5px; border: 1px solid #ddd; background-color: #fff;line-height: 16px;' div style="float: left; margin-right: 5px; overflow: visible;"a href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jbabcock/CJelcpvAeJCsBxpjsiGzkmjjstvulublpDkeAoGhtpcqipGqDpiGtJlbdnos/IMG_0000.mov' style='color: #bc7134;'img src='http://posterous.com/images/filetypes/mov.png' style='border: none;'//a/div div style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;line-height: 16px;"Download now or a href="http://jbabcock.posterous.com/kid-tossing" style="color: #bc7134"watch on posterous/a/div p ba href='http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/jbabcock/CJelcpvAeJCsBxpjsiGzkmjjstvulublpDkeAoGhtpcqipGqDpiGtJlbdnos/IMG_0000.mov' style='color: #bc7134;'IMG_0000.mov/a/b span style="font-size: 10px; color: #424037;"(8777 KB)/span br style="clear: both;"//div /p p style="font-size: 10px;" a href="http://posterous.com"Posted via web/a from a href="http://jbabcock.posterous.com/kid-tossing"Jonathan#8217;s Scrapbook/a /p /p/div pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/"Kid Tossing/a/p div class="shr-bookmarks shr-bookmarks-expand shr-bookmarks-center" ul class="socials" li class="shr-delicious" a href="http://delicious.com/post?url=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;title=Kid+Tossing" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Share this on del.icio.us"Share this on del.icio.us/a /li li class="shr-digg" a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;title=Kid+Tossing" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Digg this!"Digg this!/a /li li class="shr-facebook" a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?v=4amp;src=bmamp;u=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;t=Kid+Tossing" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Share this on Facebook"Share this on Facebook/a /li li class="shr-googlebuzz" a href="http://www.google.com/buzz/post?url=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;imageurl=" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Post on Google Buzz"Post on Google Buzz/a /li li class="shr-linkedin" a href="http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=trueamp;url=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;title=Kid+Tossingamp;summary=%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Download%20now%20or%20watch%20on%20posterous%20%20%20%20%20%20%20IMG_0000.mov%20%288777%20KB%29%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Posted%20via%20web%20%20%20from%20Jonathan%27s%20Scrapbook%20%20%20%20amp;source=Practical Analyst" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Share this on LinkedIn"Share this on LinkedIn/a /li li class="shr-posterous" a href="http://posterous.com/share?linkto=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;title=Kid+Tossingamp;selection=%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Download%20now%20or%20watch%20on%20posterous%20%20%20%20%20%20%20IMG_0000.mov%20%288777%20KB%29%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Posted%20via%20web%20%20%20from%20Jonathan%27s%20Scrapbook%20%20%20%20" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Post this to Posterous"Post this to Posterous/a /li li class="shr-stumbleupon" a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/02/kid-tossing/amp;title=Kid+Tossing" rel="nofollow" class="external" title="Stumble upon something good? 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5:53
Untitled
» ‎ Practical Analyst

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0:19
Fork de OCS Inventory : ça bouge du côté de l'inventaire de parc libre
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Il y a quelques, mois une partie des développeurs d' a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCS_InventoryOCS Inventory/a a décidé de quitter l'équipe pour lancer un nouveau projet nommé FusionInventory.br / FusionInventory est - au départ - la fusion de deux projets :ulliLe greffon GLPI Tracker (interrogation et découverte SNMP) renommé en iFusionInventory for GLPI ;br / /i/liliL' agent UNIX unifié OCS Inventory forké renommé en iFusionInventory Agent/i/li/ul L'objectif de l'équipe est de :ulliRéaliser un projet dynamique aux processus de décision ouverts ;br / /liliS'interfacer au mieux avec les différents acteurs existant dans le monde de la gestion de parc ;br / /liliPermettre à des projets tiers d'utiliser FusionInventory pour une ou plusieurs de ses capacités ;br / /liliGarder sur le long terme la compatibilité avec le serveur OCS pour la remontée d'inventaire./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.fusioninventory.orgLe site/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://forge.fusioninventory.orgLa forge/abr / (...)

0:07
Steve Jobs on the new ATT data plans
» ‎ Mark Trapp. Blog.

p img src="http://marktrapp.com/sites/marktrapp.com/files/imagecache/article_image/blog/Steve_Jobs.jpg" alt="" title="" width="425" height="150" / /p pstrongBottom Line:/strong Steve Jobs says, "I think its going to work out just fine for almost all customers. Try it."/p pThis morning, I checked a href="http://techmeme.com"TechMeme/a and saw the big news: ATamp;T decided to restructure its data plans to remove the option for unlimited data. This disappoints me greatly: I, like I'm sure thousands of other customers, bought the iPad WiFi + 3G based on the deal Apple struck with ATamp;T to offer a no-contract, $30/month, cancel-and-activate any time you need it plan. Like a href="http://gizmodo.com"Gizmodo/a said, a href="http://gizmodo.com/5491994/how-ipad-3g-service-works-or-why-you-should-buy-the-3g-ipad"the purchase was insurance/a in case I ever needed to be on 3G exclusively for a while./p pThe new plans, I believe, are a total bait-and-switch. I don't begrudge ATamp;T's right to change their prices, but I do find it disappointing that they did it no more than a month after the iPad WiFi + 3G launched, and a couple weeks after the return window ended. So, I decided to write to Steve Jobs in what I thought would be a vain release of my frustration:/p blockquote pHi Mr. Jobs,/p pUnder any other circumstance, I would never e-mail you: your time is much more valuable than to answer silly questions about rumor and speculation./p pBut today's announcement by ATamp;T, to discontinue their unlimited plan for even the iPad is too insane./p pLike hundreds of thousands of your loyal customers, I bought an iPad 3G sight unseen. You've never steered me wrong, and every time you sell a new product, you deliver 110%. When you announced the iPad 3G, you also announced a truly awesome deal with ATamp;T to provide no-contract, sign up any time you need it, truly unlimited 3G data for $30/month./p pI paid the extra $130 and waited an additional month to get the iPad 3G because of that. Now, a little over a month later, that primary motivating factor has been removed and I either have the option to pay $30/month starting today and never cancel that if I want unlimited data any time in the future, or be stuck with a lame 2GB/month plan. If those were my options at the time of sale, I would've reconsidered./p pI'm disappointed: not because a service changed its price points; that happens. I'm disappointed because, for the first time in my entire life of buying Apple products, I feel like I got sold a bill of goods. It's like buying a car because of its warranty and being notified a few weeks after the return date that the warranty's changed unilaterally./p pYou've always seemed like a reasonable man; I'm sure you personally didn't know about this switch, and feel just as annoyed as many of your customers feel today./p pBut it'd go a long way to maintaining trust in Apple to extend the return window for the iPad 3G so customers can make an informed choice about which model is right for them./p Thanks and all the best, pMark Trappbr / 503-985-MARK/p pSent from my iPad/p /blockquote pMuch to my surprise, 15 minutes later, I received an e-mail back from Jobs himself:/p blockquoteI think its going to work out just fine for almost all customers. Try it./blockquote pHe didn't really address my concern, but it's still pretty cool to get an e-mail from a guy I still respect./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=-XLFkIY-fVo:pO7swQ9zFms:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?a=-XLFkIY-fVo:pO7swQ9zFms:YwkR-u9nhCs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/marktrapp/blog?d=YwkR-u9nhCs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marktrapp/blog/~4/-XLFkIY-fVo" height="1" width="1"/

June 02, 2010
23:58
What Makes Collaborative Authoring So Difficult?
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

I’d like to draw your attention to two attention management-related posts I put up on the Gartner Blogging Network: First is Please Stop Blaming Everything on Information Overload. It describes how I’m getting tired of the word “overload” being applied to everything in IT, such as this example from Thomas Claburn in the InformationWeek Google [...]

21:24
"I know what will make this easier… Holograms!"
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I know what will make this easier… Holograms!””

19:16
Activité du site LinuxFr.org
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le site LinuxFr.org vit grâce aux contributions de ses lecteurs. Merci à vous tous, on ne le répétera jamais assez. La communauté LinuxFr.org est active et instructive.br / br / L'équipe de modération essaye de faire en sorte que LinuxFr.org reste cet espace vivant avec a href=http://linuxfr.org/news/des dépêches sur Linux et les Logiciels Libres/a, un a href=http://linuxfr.org/forums/espace d'entre-aide/a, des a href=http://linuxfr.org/journal/discussions sur des sujets divers et variés/a, et tout cela sans avoir a href=http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=130736postcount=18les chevilles qui enflent/a. Voici une petite sélection de nos faits d'armes :br / br / bActivité de l'équipe de modération/bbr / ulliIl y a quelques semaines, l'équipe de modération s'est un peu renouvelée. a href=http://linuxfr.org/~thomas_p/Thomas Petazzoni/a, a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Scara/Scara/a et a href=http://linuxfr.org/~xals/xals/a, pas mal occupés par ailleurs, nous ont quitté. Merci à eux pour le temps qu'ils ont consacré à LinuxFr. Nous pouvons saluer l'arrivée de a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Malicia/Malicia/a, a href=http://linuxfr.org/~claudex/claudex/a et a href=http://linuxfr.org/~boa13/boa13/a, déjà très actifs !br / /liliÀ l'occasion du salon Solutions Linux 2010, a href=http://linuxfr.org/~TheNastyBoy/Nils Ratusznik/a a donné un entretien à Intelli'N TV. C'est l'occasion de faire une séance de rattrapage pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas le site sur le bout des doigts.br / /lilia href=http://linuxfr.org/~neox/NeoX/a va atteindre les strong5000 réponses/strong sur le forum. Chapeau !br / /lilia href=http://linuxfr.org/~Nyco/Nÿco/a a atteint les 250 dépêches, a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Floxy/Floxy/a et a href=http://linuxfr.org/~poltuiu/poltuiu/a font la course à leur 200ème dépêche, et a href=http://linuxfr.org/~NoNo/moi/a, je me concentre sur a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/maserie.htmlma série/a de 6 dépêches en 6 jours.br / /li/ulbCôté technique/bbr / Dans un autre registre, le site tourne actuellement avec a href=http://www.templeet.org/Templeet/a et très rares sont les personnes à y toucher. J'ai commencé au début de l'année 2009 une strongréécriture du site/strong en a href=http://rubyonrails.org/Ruby on Rails/a. Les chances que ce projet aboutisse m'apparaissaient comme assez faibles quand j'ai commencé, mais bon gré, mal gré, cela avance.br / br / Aujourd'hui, une nouvelle étape a été franchie : j'ai taggé a href=http://github.com/nono/linuxfr.org/tree/alpha1la version alpha1/a sur le dépôt git. Je considère que le code contient les fonctionnalités essentielles pour pouvoir remplacer la version actuelle basée sur Templeet. Je vais maintenant m'attacher à corriger les bugs et optimiser le code. J'espère que cette version pourra être mise en ligne bientôt.br / br / Dernière chose, nous utilisons strongwebalizer/strong pour nos a href=http://linuxfr.org/stats/web.htmlstatistiques web/a, et plus précisément le package debian. Celui-ci a href=http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=491200n'est plus très jour/a, et si un développeur Debian a un peu trop de temps libre, nous lui serions reconnaissants s'il pouvait regarder ça.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blog.itnservice.net/post/Qu-est-ce-que-Linuxfr.org-par-Nils-RatusnikEntretien: LinuxFr.org par Nils Ratusznik/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/top.htmlTop ou flop du site/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlProposer une dépêche/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/redacteurs/Espace rédacteurs/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://github.com/nono/linuxfr.orgDépôt github de la version RoR/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.webalizer.org/Webalizer/abr /

15:22
Me: ”When you click on the button it takes you to the Paypal donation page that you set...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong ”When you click on the button it takes you to the Paypal donation page that you set up.”/p pstrongClient: “/strongWhat do you mean? I don’t want the donate button to do this, I want it to automatically charge their card. These are seniors they won’t understand this if I don’t. You can’t have them type stuff in.”/p pstrongMe: “/strongBut you wanted to go with Paypal because you couldn’t afford a secured shopping cart website. Either way, at some point they will have to type in their information.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Can’t you just take their credit card information without them knowing? That way they won’t get confused.”/p

10:59
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 21
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 21/strongullia href=http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/mfcr-bsa-open-source?page=1[abclinuxu.cz] BSA: Hardware Without Software Not Tax Deductible/abr / /lilia href=http://www.rue89.com/passage-a-lacte/2010/05/26/et-si-les-collectivites-locales-passaient-au-logiciel-libre-152403[rue89.com] Et si les collectivités locales passaient au logiciel libre ? /abr / /lilia href=http://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/intranet-extranet/sacem-et-gestion-documentaire-open-source.shtml?f_id_newsletter=3034utm_source=benchmailutm_medium=ML5utm_campaign=E10172280f_u=2831942[journaldunet.com] La Sacem met en musique son éditique grâce à l'Open Source/abr / /lilia href=http://www.progilibre.com/Le-Conseil-National-du-Logiciel-Libre-soutient-activement-les-Rencontres-Mondiales-du-Logiciel-Libre_a1124.html[progilibre.com] Le conseil national du logiciel libre soutient activement les rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre/abr / /lilia href=http://www.zataz.com/news/20262/rssil--Rencontres-des-Solutions-de-Securite-et-Informatique-Libre.html[zataz.com] Maubeuge reçoit la 5e édition du RSSIL/abr / /lilia href=http://www.agoravox.fr/actualites/technologies/article/l-ubuntu-party-revient-les-29-et-75407[agoravox.fr] L’Ubuntu Party revient les 29 et 30 mai à La Villette/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ledauphine.com/index.jspz?chaine=21article=306130[ledauphine.com] Une clé USB pour réduire la fracture numérique/abr / /lilia href=http://www.macgeneration.com/news/voir/155871/webm-pas-encore-vraiment-ouvert[macgeneration.com] WebM, pas encore vraiment ouvert/abr / /lilia href=http://www.clubic.com/systemes-exploitation-os/actualite-342162-bataille-os-tient-position.html[clubic.com] Bataille des OS : Microsoft, Apple et Linux tiennent position/a/li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/revue-de-presseLa revue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/revue-de-presse/feedLe flux RSS des articles de la revue de presse de l'April/abr / (...)

June 01, 2010
21:09
Client: ”I would like to commission you to draw a cover for my bands first album, and it goes...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”I would like to commission you to draw a cover for my bands first album, and it goes on sale in September.”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”Congratulations, so what would you like for the cover?”br/br/strongClient/strong: “Something midevily, like a dragon and a woman wizard fighting, but in the night sky, and there like fighting a dwarf in a mech suit, like a Gundam. And make the moon in the sky on fire. That would be cool.”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”That seems like it would be an eye sore to me…”br/br/strongClient:/strong ”No, this idea would reflect our music perfectly, we agreed, and it’ll deffinitely get people to buy our stuff.”br/br/strongMe:/strong ”So what kind of music do you guys do?”br/br/strongClient:/strong ”Country.”/p

19:39
Shinken, la refonte de Nagios en Python, sort en version 0.1
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le petit monde de la supervision open source est très animé ces derniers temps. Nagios reste la référence dans le domaine, mais de nombreux autres projets cherchent à le détrôner. br / br / Un de ses concurrents est d'un type un peu particulier : c'est une réécriture complète du champion en Python ! Il se nomme a href=http://www.shinken-monitoring.orgShinken/a et sa première version vient tout juste de sortir.br / br / Pour ceux qui s'interrogent sur l'architecture du programme, elle est présentée sur le site de la a href=http://www.monitoring-fr.org/2010/06/shinken-sort-du-bois-la-version-0-1-est-prete/communauté francophone de la supervision open source /a, ainsi que bien sûr sur a href=http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/the-global-architecture/le site du projet officiel/a. Elle fera également partie d'une a href=http://2010.rmll.info/Nagios-et-la-supervision-des-grands-environnements.htmlconférence aux RMLL/a, raison de plus de venir sur Bordeaux début juillet.br / br / Les auteurs attendent avec impatience les retours des tests de cette première vraie version et invitent tous ceux qui le souhaitent à participer à ce projet.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : Jean Gabes avait commencé par présenter a href=http://linuxfr.org/~naparuba/29782.htmlla version 0.1 de Shinken dans un journal/a avant cette dépêche.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/news/the-0-1-version-is-out-with-its-demo-virtual-machine/Annonce de la nouvelle version/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.shinken-monitoring.org/download/Téléchargement de la VM de test/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.monitoring-fr.org/2010/06/shinken-sort-du-bois-la-version-0-1-est-prete/Présentation détaillée/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.shinken-monitoring.orgSite officiel de Shinken/abr / (...)

16:28
How Bing predicts the CTR of ads
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

An upcoming ICML 2010 paper, "a href="http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=122779#"Web-Scale Bayesian Click-Through Rate Prediction for Sponsored Search Advertising in Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine/a", describes the algorithm actually used in the Bing search engine to predict the clickthrough rates of ads.br /br /From the paper:blockquoteiRecognising the importance of CTR estimation for online advertising ... Bing/adCenter decided to run a competition to entice people across the company to develop the most accurate and scalable CTR predictor. br /br /The algorithm described in this publication tied for first place in the first competition and won the subsequent competition based on prediction accuracy. As a consequence, it was chosen to replace Bing's previous CTR prediction algorithm, a transition that was completed in the summer of 2009./i/blockquoteThe paper goes on to describe why the problem is important, the algorithm used, and some of the nastiness of getting something that works in the lab to run on the live site.br /br /Don't miss the tidbit at the end where they say that they are "investigating the use of more powerful models, such as the feature-based collaborative filtering method Matchbox (Stern, Herbrich, Graepel, 2009) for latent feature discovery and personalisation."div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-3513208577247374155?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

15:04
"Client: I talked to God for a couple hours last night, and he agreed that I shouldn’t have to pay..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Client: I talked to God for a couple hours last night, and he agreed that I shouldn’t have to pay you.””

14:43
Le logiciel libre : comment ça marche ?
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Pour aider à sensibiliser de nouveaux publics aux enjeux du logiciel libre, le groupe de travail a href=http://www.april.org/groupes/sensibilisationSensibilisation de l'April/a a créé le dépliant « Le logiciel libre : comment ça marche ? ». Ce document de vulgarisation clair introduit le logiciel libre et donne quelques clés pour approfondir sa compréhension. Le document est sous licence libre et sa diffusion au plus grand nombre est fortement encouragée !br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.april.org/L'April/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/documents-de-sensibilisationDocuments de sensibilisation/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://artlibre.org/licence/lalLicence Art Libre/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/Creative Commons by SA/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.htmlGFDL/abr / (...)
9:46
e-venement 1.9.0 Cognac taste, le libre dans la billetterie est toujours là
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Alors que l'été arrive, et donc l'inter-saison pour les structures du spectacle vivant en particulier, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/e-venemente-venement/a sort sa version 1.9.0 pour mieux préparer la rentrée. Depuis 2006, e-venement continue sa progression et ses améliorations dans le domaine de la a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billetterie_informatis%C3%A9ebilletterie informatisée/a, où le libre fait franchement office d'exception.br / br / Ses recettes ? Une structure professionnelle souple (Libre Informatique), un mode de développement « en fonction des besoins » et « en fonction des contributions », des réponses à des besoins concrets des utilisateurs, une souplesse de déploiement... et des licences libres (GNU GPL et GNU LGPL) bien sûr !br / br / Alors si vous êtes une structure professionnelle du spectacle vivant, n'hésitez pas à franchir le pas, que ce soit seul ou bien accompagné.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.libre-informatique.fr/sw/01-Billetterie/e-venemente-venement/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.libre-informatique.fr/sw/01-Billetterie/e-venement/ManuelsLes manuels des utilisateurs/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://gna.org/projects/e-venementLe projet sur gna.org/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.libre-informatique.fr/Libre Informatique/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.libre-informatique.fr/sw/hidden/Actualit%C3%A9s/2010-06-01%20e-venement%201.9.0%20%22Cognac%20taste%22,%20le%20libre%20dans%20la%20billetterie%20est%20toujours%20l%C3%A0La dépêche officielle/abr / (...)
7:39
Sortie de Phusion Passenger 2.2.12
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Phusion Passenger est un module pour Apache 2 ou Nginx qui permet de déployer simplement des applications Ruby. En particulier, il est très bien adapté aux applications Rails, d'où son surnom de emmod_rails/em. Bien que développé et supporté commercialement par a href=http://www.modrails.com/commercial_support.htmlPhusion/a, l'intégralité du code source est placé sous a href=http://github.com/FooBarWidget/passenger/blob/master/LICENSElicence MIT/a.br / br / La version 2.2.12 est toute fraîche. Elle apporte des corrections de bogues et améliore le support de a href=http://gembundler.com/Bundler/a, vous permettant ainsi de gérer les dépendances de vos applications et charger les bonnes versions des gems utilisés sur vos projets.br / br / L'installation et la mise à jour peuvent se faire en utilisant le gem ttpassenger/tt, puis en lançant ttpassenger-install-apache2-module/tt ou ttpassenger-install-nginx-module/tt. Brightbox fournit également a href=http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:phusion-passengerdes paquets pour Ubuntu/a.br / br / Les développeurs de Passenger recommandent d'utiliser leur version de Ruby. Cette dernière se nomme de façon un peu pompeuse emRuby Entreprise Edition/em. C'est un Ruby 1.8.7 agrémenté de quelques patches pour améliorer la gestion de la mémoire et le comportement du ramasse-miettes (igarbage collector/i). Ces patches ont été proposés à Matz, mais il les a refusés car ils peuvent dégrader incroyablement les performances dans certains cas en dehors du web.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/05/31/phusion-passenger-2-2-12-released/Annonce de la sortie de la version 2.2.12/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.modrails.com/Phusion Passenger/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/Ruby Entreprise Edition/abr /

May 31, 2010
21:22
"Can we change the font on Saturated Fat and Sodium to something more exciting? We need people to..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Can we change the font on Saturated Fat and Sodium to something more exciting? We need people to have a positive feeling about them. And while you are at it, lets put the percentages in little stars so they think it’s a good thing that they are so high.””

15:34
Scalable federated security with Kerberos
» ‎ BigDataMatters.com
In my last post, I outlined considerations that need to be taken into account when choosing between a centralized and federated security model. So, how do we implement the chosen model? Based on a real-world case study, I will outline a Kerberos architecture that enables cutting-edge collaborative research through federated sharing of resources. This is an extract from the full article which can be downloaded here.

ContextThe IT infrastructures of two Institutions are heterogeneous to one another and contain different assets that are shared to facilitate ground-breaking research:
- Storage Institution - hosts a 5PB storage array that serves as a shared storage resource for users from both institutions. Additionally, Storage Institution hosts a petabyte digital library of research papers and technical books.
- Compute Institution hosts a large compute cluster that serves as a shared computing resource for both institutions.
Each institution has its own user management system. This means that for a user to access a resource requires them to use its specific access credentials. Whenever one institution wants to share a resource with a user at the other institution, a new user account at the owning institution has to be created. This cumbersome resource sharing model is not effective, requires a lot of paper work and users suffer from the extensive number of account details (non-uniform resource access) that they must remember. Moreover, with the lack of a common user access management tool, administrators have difficulty in keeping tabs on resource access lists and conforming to security requirements.
ChallengeThe institutions have decided that a new approach is required that provides secure, simple and rapid sharing of resources. Users who own the resources should be free to decide who can access them to enable intuitive collaboration removed from administrative hurdles.
The differing levels of IT skills at the two institutions means that the management tool for resource sharing should be simple and intuitive. GridwiseTech's AdHoc encapsulates these core values and is one of the presented solutions.
The challenge is to create an IT Infrastructure that securely shares distributed resources. Access granting and revoking must be intuitive and quick. The system should provide the following functionality:
- No single-point of failure - If the IT infrastructure of one Institute goes down, the other should remain unaffected.
- SSO – users should be able to access resources from both Institutions using their single access credentials.
- Access management – resource owners should be able able to grant access to their resources quickly and intuitively.
Rationale: Federated securityThe federated paradigm can be conceptualized as: passports – one country issues a passports and others accept it as valid identification. You are only issued one passport, but it works everywhere because there is trust between countries. Without this trust, then a country cannot participate.

Such a model enables multiple institutions to grant external user access to their sensitive resources, whilst maintaining full access control over them. No user accounts need to be created at the resource side and users benefit from single sign-on (SSO) to resources.
Designing a federated security system which connects multiple institutions is common. However, there is no single solution for such a challenge. A number of technologies exist that can be used to implement federated security, Shibboleth, Oracle IdM, OpenSSO, among others. Important aspects that require validation are:
- Security system concept and implementation - the system has to be verified that the security protocol is secure
- Number of applications to be supported by the system and their license models - integration of applications with security frameworks can be non-trivial and require custom development
- System management utilities – should provide ease of use, ideally through the use of graphical tools that can visualize who has access to which resources
- Cost and support – weigh up the costs associated with open source solutions, which are free but offer minimal support compared to the proprietary solutions
Architecture: Keberos, LDAP and AdHocIt is recommended to implement federated security using the Internet standards based LDAP and Kerberos. Both solutions provide free use licenses and have a proud heritage of implementing secure IT infrastructures. The strong point of LDAP and Kerberos integration is their extensive support for pre-existing software. Many network related applications are fully supported to use Kerberos authentication, web applications, network file systems (such as NFS, OpenAFS) and other remote and local services. Kerberos and LDAP have some pre-existing management tools but they are not intuitive for non-skilled users. AdHoc can provide intuitive resource access management. The responsibilities of each are outlined below:
- LDAP – manage user authorization to resources. Each institution will have its own LDAP server. To maintain federation, the stored information will be synchronized between the Institutions. Each institution will only be able to modify its own entities.
- Kerberos – manage user authentication using SSO. The federated security provided by Kerberos means user passwords are stored at their own institution.
- AdHoc – responsible for managing access policies to resources. It will allow resource owners to manage access to their assets in a simple and secure way using a graphical web interface. Users will be granted access to resources using the simple dragdrop functionality of the web interface.
The two institutions are connected using Kerberos and LDAP. Green indicates services related to the security system and blue AdHoc management services. The key assumption is the existence of mutual trust between the Kerberos servers installed at both institutions. This is important because whenever a user logs into Kerberos at their institution they will be able to access those resources at the second institution to which they have access.

AdHoc is divided into two distinct modules. (1) AdHoc web application provides a graphical web interface where users and administrators manage access to their resources. Kerberos provides authentication to the AdHoc web application. (2) AdHoc policy manager is responsible for modifying the user access policies of the underlying resources. Four example services are shown; NFS or OpenAFS can be used for shared file storage between the institutions. Access to the compute cluster can be provided using SSH or Web portal.
SummaryThe presented architecture implements a federated security model to allow the secure and intuitive sharing of resources. It provides the following benefits:
- Single point of access policy management,
- Easy to use graphical interface for managing access policies,
- Single-Sign On, users provide their password only once
- Standards based with many services able to work out-of-the-box

15:22
Client: ”Your rates are too high! I’ll do the design myself, and then you can do the...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”Your rates are too high! I’ll do the design myself, and then you can do the implementation.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Okay, that’s fine, just send me the files when you’re finished.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Just one question- how many centimeters is a pixel?”/p

13:24
Le classement Top 500 de juin 2010 est disponible
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le trente-cinquième Top 500 des supercalculateurs mondiaux est sorti aujourd'hui à l'occasion de l'International Supercomputing Conference (a href=http://www.supercomp.de/isc10/ISC'10/a) qui a lieu à Hambourg en Allemagne.br / br / La machine Jaguar du a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge_National_Laboratorylaboratoire d'Oak Ridge/a aux Etats-Unis garde la première place avec 1.75 a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flopspétaflops/a mais la très grosse surprise est l'arrivée inattendue du supercalculateur chinois Nebulae à la seconde place du classement avec 1.271 pétaflops.br / Comme Nebulae possède une architecture particulière incluant des cartes NVidia sa performance absolue est encore bien plus haute que le résultat LINPACK puisqu'il est capable d'atteindre, en théorie, le chiffre faramineux de 2.98 pétaflops (soit 2 980 000 000 000 000 opérations à virgule flottante par seconde).br / br / iacronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym: Merci à Thomas Baron pour son a href=https://linuxfr.org/~Troye/29766.htmljournal/a sur l'ordinateur TERA-100./ibr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06Le classement Top 500 de juin 2010/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/highlightsLes grandes nouveautés/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/performance_developmentLe graphique des performances/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.top500.org/stats/list/35/osfamLe classement par système d'exploitation/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.cea.fr/le_cea/actualites/mise_sous_tension_tera_100-34598Communiqué de presse du CEA sur le TERA-100/abr / lien 6 : a href=https://linuxfr.org//2009/11/16/26162.htmlDépêche LinuxFr sur le classement précédent/abr / (...)
7:35
En vrac, spécial Python
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

strongPylons/strong est un framework de développement web en Python, dont a href=http://pylonshq.com/articles/archives/2010/5/pylons_10_releasedla version 1.0/a vient de sortir (sous a href=http://pylonshq.com/project/pylonshq/browser/LICENSElicence BSD/a). Là où a href=http://www.djangoproject.com/Django/a se positionne comme un framework avec des composants fortement intégrés entre eux, Pylons privilégie un couplage lâche et la réutilisation des bibliothèques Python existantes. Par exemple, pour le templating, Pylons vous laisse le choix entre a href=http://www.makotemplates.org/Mako/a, a href=http://genshi.edgewall.org/Genshi/a, a href=http://jinja.pocoo.org/Jinja2/a ou ce que vous voulez. Pylons est utilisé par des sites à fort trafic comme a href=http://reddit.com/Reddit/a ou a href=http://www.bittorrent.com/Bittorent/a.br / br / strongSQL Alchemy/strong est à la fois une boîte à outils pour manipuler du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_Query_LanguageSQL/a en Python et un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapping_objet-relationnelORM/a (sous a href=http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.phplicence MIT/a). Vous pouvez par exemple l'utiliser pour la partie Modèles d'une application Pylons. La a href=http://www.sqlalchemy.org/trac/wiki/06Migrationversion 0.6/a est compatible avec Python 2.4+, Python 3 et Jython.br / br / strongFabric/strong est un outil de déploiement et d'administration à distance (sous licence BSD) que l'on pourrait comparer à a href=http://www.capify.org/Capistrano/a dans le monde Ruby. Son utilisation se fait en deux temps : on commence par écrire un ttfabfile/tt qui décrit des tâches en utilisant les modules Python fournis par Fabric, puis on peut exécuter ses tâches sur une ou plusieurs machines distantes via l'outil en ligne de commande ttfab/tt.br / br / strongGreen Unicorn/strong, ou gunicorn, est un serveur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP title=Définition WikipédiaHTTP/a qui respecte l'interface a href=http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/WSGI/a (a href=http://github.com/benoitc/gunicorn/blob/master/LICENSEsous licence MIT/a). Son modèle pre-fork s'inspire du projet Ruby a href=http://unicorn.bogomips.org/Unicorn/a et permet de faire tourner des applications dans les principaux frameworks Python (Pylons, a href=http://turbogears.org/2.0/Turbogears 2/a, Django). Le développement de gunicorn a commencé à la fin de l'année dernière, mais il avance vite : il en est déjà à la a href=http://gunicorn.org/news.htmlversion 0.9.1/a.br / br / strongPlone/strong va participer pour la 5supème/sup fois au Google Summer of Code. a href=http://plone.org/events/summer-of-code/2010/coding-startedQuatre projets/a ont commencé :br / ullil'ajaxification des formulaires d'édition de PloneFormGen ;br / /lilile développement de Core Tiles, qui pourrait servir de base à Plone5 ;br / /lilila simplification du parcours de création d'un thème Plone à travers l'interface web ;br / /lilile respect de a href=http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Content_Management_Interoperability_ServicesCMIS/a, un standard favorisant l'interopérabilité entre les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syst%C3%A8me_de_gestion_de_contenuCMS/a.br / /li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://pylonshq.com/Pylons/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.sqlalchemy.org/SQL Alchemy/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://fabfile.org/Fabric/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://gunicorn.org/Green Unicorn/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://plone.org/Plone/abr /

May 30, 2010
21:14
Really good medicine
» ‎ Clients From Hell

p“I need someone who can build me a really kick ass looking website in exchange for some really good medicine. Email for more details.”/p p[Verbatim Ad from Craigslist]/p
15:02
The Forbidden Fruit
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong Hey, just one final question before I send the deposit. Do you use a PC or a MAC?/p pstrongMe:/strong I use a MAC./p pstrongClient:/strong That is a problem. Do you have access to a PC? I am not a supporter of Apple products./p pstrongMe:/strong No, I don’t have access to a PC, but this will have little to no effect on the work itself./p pstrongClient:/strong I am a Christian and Apple products are sinful, I do not want our website to be created by a product made by this corrupt group. You need only look at their logo, an apple with a bite taken from it. Do you not know the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? If I allowed you to create my website on a MAC I would be just like Adam, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit./p pstrong[Silence]/strong/p p“Take my advise, destroy your mac and repent for when judgement day comes. It shall be you who is cast to hell for your sins.”/p pbMe/b: [Block Contact]/p

12:38
Cloonix : soyez administrateur réseau sans mot de passe root
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Vous êtes en froid avec l'administrateur de votre machine (Linux) et vous avez des manipulations réseau à valider ? La solution est Cloonix, qui sort en version 6.7 !br / br / Cloonix est un ensemble de logiciels en C (sous licence GPL v3) qui prennent en charge la gestion de vos machines virtuelles ainsi que d'un réseau virtuel sous-jacent totalement configurable à chaud.br / br / Les atouts de Cloonix sont les suivants :br / ulliInteraction graphique avec représentation « a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_you_see_is_what_you_getWYSIWYG/a » de la topologie ;/li liIsolation complète de votre réseau du réel (on n'a pas le mot de passe) ;/li liAccès Internet pour toutes les machines virtuelles sur un hôte connecté ;/li liConnexion inter-Cloonix pour étendre votre réseau sur plusieurs machines ;/li liEnsemble fourni avec les dernières OpenWrt, Debian et Ubuntu ;/li liAuthentification de toutes les commandes passées au réseau virtuel ;/li liAuthentification et chiffrement des flux de trafic sortant et entrant dans le réseau virtuel./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://cloonix.net/Le site de Cloonix/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://cloonix.net/siteweb/index_download.htmlTéléchargements Cloonix/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/11/12/26149.htmlAnnonce de Cloonix 3.0/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/05/18/25472.htmlAnnonce de Cloonix 2.0/abr /
9:15
En vrac, les autres navigateurs
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le navigateur web de Google, strongChrome/strong, est sorti dans sa version 5. C'est la première version à être officiellement supportée sur les plates-formes a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/google-chrome-for-linux-goes-stable.htmlLinux/a et Mac. D'un intérêt plus discutable, cette version vient également avec a href=http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/bringing-improved-support-for-adobe.htmlun player Flash intégré/a. On notera également une prise en charge d'HTML5 améliorée, avec notamment a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SocketsWebSocket/a, a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3C_Geolocation_APIAPI de géolocalisation/a, a href=http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#appcacheApplication Cache/a pour le mode déconnecté, ou encore le a href=http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#dndglisser-déposer/a de fichiers.br / br / strongChromium/strong, la version libre de Chrome, a été choisi pour devenir le navigateur par défaut de la prochaine Ubuntu Netbook Edition. a href=http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/05/just-how-popular-is-chrome-on-linux.htmlSes parts de marché/a laissent à penser que d'autres distributions pourraient suivre.br / br / strongMidori/strong est un navigateur web léger utilisant le moteur de rendu a href=http://webkit.org/WebKit/a et pleinement intégré à a href=http://www.gtk.org/GTK+2/a (licence LGPL). a href=http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/archives/30-Validation,-vending-and-Vala.htmlLa version 0.2.5/a est sortie le 16 mai avec des nouveautés importantes : validation visible des certificats SSL, mode kiosque amélioré, version Windows de nouveau pleinement fonctionnelle, prise en charge des extensions Vala, etc. Elle a été suivie peu de temps après par a href=http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/archives/31-Frames,-finity-and-fraction.htmlla version 0.2.6/a pour corriger des bugs bloquants.br / br / strongUzbl/strong est un navigateur web qui se veut respectueux de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophie_d%27Unixla philosophie UNIX/a : « Écrivez des programmes qui effectuent une seule chose et qui le font bien. Écrivez des programmes qui collaborent. Écrivez des programmes pour gérer des flux de texte, car c'est une interface universelle. » Ainsi, uzbl se décline en trois saveurs :br / ulliuzbl-core, un composant qui utilise WebKit pour afficher des pages web et qui est facile à intégrer dans des scripts et outils ;br / /liliuzbl-browser, un navigateur proprement dit qui repose sur uzbl-core et lui ajoute un moyen de changer de pages, un historique, une gestion des téléchargements, des raccourcis claviers personnalisables, etc.br / /liliuzbl-tabbed, qui enrobe uzbl-browser et lui ajoute une gestion multi-onglets.br / /li/ul br / Et sinon :br / ulliLa première a href=http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/April%202010%20Meetingréunion des contributeurs de Webkit/a s'est tenue les 12 et 13 avril dans les locaux d'Apple ;br / /liliKDE 4.5 va permettre aux utilisateurs de Konqueror a href=http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.5-beta1.phpde choisir Webkit/a à la place de KHTML comme moteur de rendu ;br / /liliUn développeur d'Epiphany a fait a href=http://blogs.gnome.org/xan/2010/05/22/quo-vadis-epiphany/le point sur la version 2.30/a et annoncé que le travail pour la version 3 avait bien commencé ;br / /liliApple a fait une demande pour a href=http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serialentry=85041789enregistrer la marque WebKit/a ;br / /lilia href=http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20006243-264.htmlOpera parodie/a la pub de Google sur la vitesse de Chrome a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0plus rapide qu'une patate/a.br / /li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/05/28/26904.htmlMozilla continue d'avancer/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/evolving-from-beta-to-stable-with.htmlChrome 5/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/pages/midori_summary.htmlMidori/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.uzbl.org/Uzbl/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.uzbl.org/wiki/shotsCaptures d'écran d'uzbl/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~Enixos/28263.htmlJournal présentant uzbl/abr /
May 29, 2010
23:20
Nouvelle base de données clés-valeurs : Kyoto Cabinet 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Mikio Hirabayashi est un ingénieur qui travaille pour un réseau social japonais, a href=http://mixi.jp/mixi.jp/a. Pour faire face à la montée en charge, il a écrit une base de données très rapide de type clés-valeurs : Tokyo Cabinet. C'est une bibliothèque écrite en C, avec des bindings Ruby, Perl, Java et Lua, et distribuée sous licence LGPL.br / br / Tokyo Cabinet est très rapide, mais son auteur n'était pas satisfait des performances en concurrence sur des machines avec de nombreux cores. Il a donc écrit son successeur : Kyoto Cabinet. Kyoto Cabinet est écrit en C++, et publié sous licence GPL. Des bindings Ruby, Perl, Python (2.x et 3.x) et Java sont disponibles.br / br / Kyoto Cabinet est rapide (l'ordre de grandeur est un million de requêtes par seconde), a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propri%C3%A9t%C3%A9s_ACID#Les_caract.C3.A9ristiques_ACIDACID/a et capable de gérer un haut niveau de concurrence. Ses bases de données peuvent enregistrer jusqu'à 8 exabytes et peuvent être de différents types en fonction des caractéristiques recherchées (persistence, verrouillage par enregistrement, par page ou global, ordre de tri, algorithme de stockage).br / br / Tokyo Cabinet bénéficie d'un service réseau, Tokyo Tyrant, et d'un moteur de recherche full-text, Tokyo Distopia. Les équivalents pour Kyoto Cabinet n'existent pas encore, mais sont prévus et devraient sortir d'ici la fin de l'année.br / br / emNote :/em Pour ceux qui s'intéressent aux bases de données, le a href=http://nosqlsummer.org/NoSQL Summer/a est l'occasion d'en apprendre plus. Le principe est simple : se réunir régulièrement pour discuter d'un papier scientifique autour des bases de données. Le lancement se fera le 21 juin à a href=http://lacantine.org/la Cantine/a pour Paris, mais vous pouvez n'assister qu'à une seule rencontre si vous le souhaitez. L'entrée est libre, la seule chose que l'on vous demande est d'avoir lu le papier sélectionné avant de venir. Si vous êtes dans une ville qui n'est pas encore couverte, rien ne vous empêche de trouver 2 ou 3 volontaires et de a href=http://nosqlsummer.org/#/propose-citycontacter les organisateurs/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://1978th.net/tech-en/promenade.cgi?id=7Annonce de Kyoto Cabinet 1.0/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://1978th.net/kyotocabinet/Kyoto Cabinet/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/Tokyo Cabinet/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/Tokyo Tyrant/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://1978th.net/tokyodystopia/Tokyo Distopia/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://nosqlsummer.org/city/parisNoSQL Summer Paris/abr /

21:07
When designing a website for a client, the client initially expressed that he wanted to use...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pemstrongWhen designing a website for a client, the client initially expressed that he wanted to use Burgundy./strong/em/p pstrongClient/strong: This isn’t right. You know the color blood red?/p pstrongMe/strong: Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about./p pstrongClient/strong: Yeah, I love blood red. I want the logo to look like that. Do you know what it would look like if you took a paintbrush and dipped it in blood, and smeared it downwards? How the blood would be darkest in the center, and there would be splatters of blood and lighter shades of blood around it?/p pstrongMe/strong: You want a gradient?/p pstrongClient/strong: No, I want it to look like the blood of all our victims./p pstrongMe/strong: I’m sorry, what?/p pstrongClient/strong: You know, from all the bugs we’ve terminated./p pstrongMe/strong: Oh./p
15:02
"So I have this table here in the document, I was hoping you could graphisize it for me."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““So I have this table here in the document, I was hoping you could graphisize it for me.””
May 28, 2010
21:06
"You design our marketing campaign, we give you 5 kilo bag of Basmati rice."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“You design our marketing campaign, we give you 5 kilo bag of Basmati rice.”

19:42
KOffice 2.2 est sorti
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après 6 mois de développement, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_bureautiquela suite bureautique/a du projet a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDEKDE/a vient de sortir une nouvelle version. La liste des modifications depuis la version 2.1 est tout simplement ahurissante (4500 ont été répertoriées). Les plus téméraires pourront les parcourir sur a href=http://www.koffice.org/changelogs/koffice-22-changelog/le changelog/a. On retiendra surtout l'ajout des filtres d'importations des nouveaux formats a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XMLOOXML/a.br / br / Le code source de KOffice 2.2.0 peut être téléchargé sous forme d'un tarball (cf. lien). Les paquets binaires de KOffice 2.2.0 seront disponibles et annoncés séparément par chacune des distributions qui les fournissent.br / br / Les faits les plus notables de cette version de KOffice sont dans la suite de la dépêche.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.koffice.org/news/koffice-2-2-released/L'annonce sur koffice.org/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.koffice.org/changelogs/koffice-22-changelog/Le changelog/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://linuxfr.org/~goom/29769.htmlDLFP: Journal: Koffice 2.2 est sorti/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://download.kde.orgTéléchargement des sources/abr / (...)
19:13
Sortie de MeeGo 1.0
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

MeeGo, la distribution GNU/Linux pour les terminaux mobiles conçue conjointement par Nokia et Intel, et basée sur Moblin et Maemo, est sortie en version 1.0. MeeGo est un projet hébergé par la Linux Foundation qui a pour ambition de devenir un sérieux concurrent d'Android et d'iPhone OS. Cette version 1.0, malgré sa numérotation, est plutôt destinée aux développeurs qui voudraient tester et développer sur cet environnement.br / br / Les caractéristiques de cette version sont les suivantes :ulliNoyau Linux 2.6.33 ;br / /liliDeviceKit et udev pour la gestion des périphériques ;br / /liliQt 4.6 comme bibliothèque graphique (à la différence de Maemo et de Moblin) ;br / /liliBtrfs comme système de fichiers par défaut./li/ul Deux images de MeeGo v1.0 sont disponibles au téléchargement :ulliMeeGo v1.0 pour les netbooks basés sur Intel Atom ;br / /liliMeeGo v1.0 core software platform pour le Nokia N900 basé sur ARM./li/ul On sait déjà que la prochaine version 1.1 sortira en octobre 2010. La disponibilité d'une version stable de MeeGo recommandée officiellement pour les plateformes de type Nokia N900 n'est pas encore annoncée.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2010/meego-v1.0-core-software-platform-netbook-user-experience-project-releaseAnnonce de la sortie/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://meego.com/Site officiel de Meego/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/02/16/26479.htmlIntel et Nokia annoncent la création de MeeGo/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2010/04/02/26680.htmlMeeGo s'ouvre à la communauté/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.lea-linux.org/documentations/index.php/La_distribution_Maemo_du_Nokia_N900Maemo sur Léa-Linux/abr /
19:12
Qimo 2.0 est sorti
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce mercredi 26 mai est sortie la version 2.0 de la distribution Qimo. Qimo est a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environnement_de_bureauun environnement de bureau/a construit sur une base de Xubuntu (Lucid Lynx) et entièrement dédié aux enfants. Il est l'œuvre de Michael et Michelle Hall au travers de leur association a href=http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/QuinnCo/a.br / br / Qimo contient des jeux éducatifs pour les enfants à partir de 3 ans. L'interface a été faite pour être intuitive et simple d'utilisation, les plus jeunes utilisateurs ne doivent pas avoir de difficulté pour choisir l'activité qu'ils veulent faire. Étant basé sur Xubuntu, il est possible de l'installer par-dessus en choisissant le paquet iqimo-session/i dans son gestionnaire de paquets préféré. Qimmo comprend :ulliDes jeux : Childsplay, gCompris, Tux Paint, Tux Math, Tux Type et Laby ;br / /liliDes fond d'écrans ;br / /liliLe calendrier orage ;br / /liliDes réglages par défaut pour Xfce.br / /li/ulLe projet possède son propre a href=https://launchpad.net/qimolaunchpad/a pour le suivi des erreurs.br / br / L' a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_imageimage ISO/a du CD d'installation est disponible sur quelques miroirs, mais il est fortement conseillé d'utiliser a href=http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/qimo-2.0-desktop.iso.torrentle fichier torrent/a pour la télécharger. Pour ceux qui préfèrent utiliser une machine virtuelle, a href=http://virtualboximages.com/Qimo4Kids-1.0des images aux format VDI/a existent également.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.qimo4kids.com/default.aspxQimo/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.qimo4kids.com/post/Qimo-20-is-now-available!.aspxAnnonce de Qimo 2.0/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.quinncoincorporated.org/qimo-2.0-desktop.iso.torrentTéléchargement du fichier torrent/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.kidsoncomputers.org/interview-with-michelle-and-michael-hall-from-qimo-for-kidsEntrevue avec les auteurs lors de la sortie de la 1.0/abr /
19:09
Le Conseil National du Logiciel Libre dénonce l'abandon des standards ouverts par la Commission Européenne
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Des fuites a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/56922-agenda-numerique-europeen-open-standard.htmpubliées par le site PC INpact/a ont révélé une version finale du Cadre Européen d’Interopérabilité en version 2, qui fait apparaître un abandon total des standards ouverts.br / br / Alors que la version de 2004 de ce document faisait reposer l'interopérabilité sur des notions comme « l’accessibilité, le multilinguisme, la sécurité, la vie privée, la subsidiarité, l’usage de standards ouverts, l’évaluation des bénéfices du logiciel open source, l’usage de solutions multilatérales, » la version 2010 de ces recommandations affirme que l’interopérabilité n’a pas besoin de standards ouverts, ni même de standards tout court, et finalement pas non plus de spécifications ouvertes, ni même de la moindre ouverture.br / br / Le a href=http://www.cnll.fr/CNLL/a, qui représente déjà plus de 200 entreprises françaises du Logiciel Libre, dénonce vivement ce revirement de la Commission, qui ne servira ni les entreprises, ni les citoyens, ni les administrations publiques, et qui témoigne de la perméabilité grandissante des institutions européennes aux lobbies.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : voir aussi les réactions du 19 mai :br / ullide l'April (5500 adhérents dont ~470 entreprises) a href=http://www.april.org/fr/agenda-numerique-pour-leurope-linteroperabilite-dans-les-principes-pour-mieux-loublier-dans-la-pratiqueAgenda numérique pour l'Europe: l'interopérabilité dans les principes pour mieux l'oublier dans la pratique ?/a « iles standards ouverts, garants d'une réelle interopérabilité, ont été exclus du paysage numérique et politique de l'Europe/i »br / /lilide La Quadrature du Net a href=http://www.laquadrature.net/fr/agenda-numerique-prudence-quant-aux-net-politiques-de-lueAgenda Numérique: Prudence quant aux Net-politiques de l'UE/a « ila disparition, dans le document final, de toute référence aux standards ouverts est une vraie défaite pour l'innovation et la concurrence sur Internet/i »./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.cnll.fr/Le CNLL/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/56922-agenda-numerique-europeen-open-standard.htmL'article sur PC INpact/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.gt-logiciel-libre.org/2009/11/lettre-ouverte-eif-v2/Le problème n'est pas nouveau (réaction il y a 6 mois du GT LL)/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/documents/digital-agenda-communication-en.pdfCommunication sur l'agenda numérique pour l'Europe/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/documents/digital-agenda-communication-fr.pdfCommunication sur l'agenda numérique pour l'Europe/abr / (...)
17:06
Big Brother Awards 2010
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 12 mai, s'est déroulée à a href=http://lacantine.org/la Cantine/a la 10ème remise des Big Brother Awards (BBA pour les intimes). Différents Prix Orwell ont été remis aux gagnants qui se sont illustrés par leur mépris de la vie privée et des libertés :br / ullibOrwell États/Élus :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1131.htmlEric Besson, ministre de l'Immigration/a pour avoir durci les quotas d’expulsions, refusé de mettre à l’abri des poursuites les personnes qui aident les migrants, et pour vouloir contourner le juge des libertés afin de bafouer les droits des migrants lors de procédures d’expulsion expéditives ;br / /lilibOrwell Localités :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1117.htmlle maire de Nice Christian Estrosi/a pour sa volonté de faire de sa ville un laboratoire de la vidéosurveillance ;br / /lilibOrwell Entreprise :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1171.htmlBNP Paribas, la Banque Postale, LCL et la Société générale/a pour avoir accepté de couvrir leurs employés qui dénoncent aux services de la Préfecture des clients sans papiers venus à leur guichet ;br / /lilibOrwell Novlang :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1183.htmlBrice Hortefeux/a pour le terme de « emvidéoprotection/em », venant remplacer « vidéosurveillance » ;br / /lilibMention spéciale Internet :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1112.htmlTrident Media Guard et Thierry Lhermitte/a pour chercher à profiter de la surveillance des internautes autorisée par les mesures de la loi Hadopi ;br / /lilibExécuteurs des basses œuvres :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1181.htmlEric Ciotti, député et président du Conseil général des Alpes-Maritimes/a, rapporteur de la LOPPSI, porte-flingue du gouvernement pour toutes les questions liées à la sécurité intérieure et président zélé d’un département qui veut être le premier à supprimer les allocations à une famille en difficulté sociale ;br / /lilibMention spéciale médias :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1162.htmlles Infiltrés de France 2 et le journal télévisé de TF1/a pour leur excès de zèle à souffler sur la braise sécuritaire, amplifier les faits divers pour servir le politique, emprunter des méthodes policières ou même collaborer ouvertement avec les services officiels ;br / /lilibPrix Spécial du Jury — 10 ans des BBA :/b a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1166.htmlAlex Türk, président de la CNIL/a pour tromperie et dissimulation (Alex Türk endosse les habits du défenseur tout terrain de la vie privée et des libertés alors qu’il en est parfois le fossoyeur et souvent le facilitateur).br / /li/ul br / Un bprix Voltaire de la Vigilance/b a également été remis au groupe a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C3%A8ces_et_Main_d%27%C5%92uvrePièces et main d’oeuvre (PMO)a pour son minutieux travail d’information et de réflexion sur les relents totalitaires des techno-sciences.br / br / Mais l'édition 2010 ne s'arrête pas là ! Il est possible de a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1216.htmlvoter/a pour le bPrix du Public/b. De plus, demain, samedi 29 mai, un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp title=Définition WikipédiaBarCamp/a se tiendra de 14h à 18h à La Belle Étoile, théâtre de la Compagnie Jolie Môme, 14 allée Saint-Just, 93210 Saint-Denis. Cet après-midi de rencontres, d’échanges et d’ateliers informels aura pour thème la contre-surveillance et les modes d’action visant à reconquérir et préserver nos identités numériques et nos droits d'individus libres.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/Big Brother Awards France/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1210.htmlLes résultats des BBA 2010/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article1216.htmlVoter pour le prix du public/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/Les-surveilles-se-rebiffent.htmlParticiper au BarCamp du 29 mai/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://bigbrotherawards.eu.org/IMG/jpg/AFFBBAA3bdweb.jpgLe flyer des 10 ans/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://linuxfr.org//2009/04/11/25297.htmlPrécédente édition des BBA/abr /

15:03
Client: “On that map of Maryland graphic… can you get rid of that jaggy thing? My client...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient/strong: “On that map of Maryland graphic… can you get rid of that jaggy thing? My client doesn’t like that.”/p pstrongMe/strong: “Uhh, that’s the Chesapeake Bay.”/p pstrongClient/strong: “I don’t think it’s part of Maryland, plus it’s annoying so delete it.”/p pstrongMe/strong: “Yeah, it’s definitely part of Maryland.”/p pstrongClient/strong: “I still don’t think so… I’m googling it right now, hold on.”/p pstrong [silence] /strong/p p“OK, just show the state boundary.”/p pstrongMe: /strong“Uhh, the Chesapeake Bay DEFINES part of the state’s boundary. I can’t delete a body of water.”/p pstrongClient/strong: “Just fill it in then.”/p

14:32
Mozilla continue d'avancer !
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Quand Mozilla regarde toujours plus loin devant, Microsoft tente tant bien que mal de se débarrasser d'un boulet fortement accroché à sa cheville...br / br / bUn de perdu, .../bbr / Ça bouge chez Mozilla. John Lilly, le P.-D.G., a annoncé son départ dans les mois à venir pour rejoindre a href=http://www.greylock.com/Greylock Partners/a ; en attendant un remplaçant, il continue d'occuper ses fonctions et responsabilités au sein de Mozilla. Côté embauches, Tantek Çelik, bien connu dans la communauté des développeurs web en tant que gourou des standards ouverts du web, arrive pour s'occuper a priori de l'interface utilisateur et des réseaux sociaux. Pour rappel, ou pas, il a travaillé sur le moteur Tasman qui équipait feu « IE for Mac », bien meilleur en terme de respect des standards que son cousin éloigné « IE pour Windows ».br / br / bFirefox 3.6.4 bêta 2 / WebSocket/bbr / Le travail continue avec une nouvelle bêta de la prochaine version 3.6.4 de Firefox, corrigeant un certain nombre de bogues. Rappelons que la nouveauté de cette version est l'isolement des greffons (Flash, Quicktime, Silverlight, etc.) dans un processus à part, pour éviter le plantage de tout le navigateur si l'un des greffons devenait instable. Il n'y aura pas de version 3.7.br / br / Pour un avenir plus lointain (Firefox 4 ?), l'équipe de développement est en train d'implémenter au sein de Firefox les a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Socket title=Définition WikipédiaWebSocket/a, un ensemble API/protocole de communication sur TCP en cours de standardisation respectivement par le couple W3C/IETF. br / br / bFirefox Home/bbr / Mozilla toujours, bien que chassé arbitrairement de la plate-forme iPhone par Apple, tente d'occuper le terrain avec bFirefox Home/b : ce n'est pas un navigateur, mais une application basée sur Firefox Sync (anciennement Weave, le greffon de synchronisation des données de Mozilla). Cela permettra aux utilisateurs d'iPhone et Firefox de retrouver leurs onglets, marques-pages, historique, etc. sur le navigateur du smartphone verrouillé d'Apple. Firefox Home devrait se présenter sous la forme d'une « Awesome Bar ».br / br / bMeurs IE6, meurs !/bbr / Quant à Microsoft, il trouve que IE6 occupe encore trop de terrain. Le responsable du produit chez Microsoft, Ryan Gavin, avoue qu'une partie de son travail est de l'éradiquer. Mais ils ne semblent pas prêt d'arrêter son support pour pousser les entreprises à migrer. :-( Bref, les entreprises continueront encore quelque temps de a href=http://www.microsoft.com/australia/technet/ie8milk/Default.aspxboire du lait dont la date de péremption a plus de 9 ans !/abr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2010/05/04/updated-firefox-3-6-4-beta-available-for-download-and-testing/Nouvelle bêta de Firefox 3.6.4/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/04/websockets-in-firefox/Les WebSockets chez Firefox/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://john.jubjubs.net/2010/05/11/whats-next-for-me-but-not-yet/Départ du P.-D.G. de Mozilla/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20005987-36.htmlEmbauche de Tantek Çelik/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-coming-soon-to-the-iphone/Firefox Home sur le blog de Mozilla/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/358276/microsoft-man-my-job-is-to-destroy-ie6Meurs IE6, meurs !/abr /

10:20
Highly Illogical: The Hysteria Over Googles Wi-Fi Scanning
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. I dont find many opportunities (nor do I have much inclination) to channel characters from Star Trek, but I can only imagine Mr. Spocks likely bemusement related to the shrill and illogical brouhaha over Googles Street View Wi-Fi scanning....

May 27, 2010
21:04
"I said that to be confusing to show you that clarity is crucial."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“I said that to be confusing to show you that clarity is crucial.”

18:51
Quoi de neuf dans Doctrine 2 ?
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Il y a environ 1 mois de cela, la première version bêta de Doctrine 2 a été rendue publique, une petite prise en main rapide s'imposait ! Je ne vais pas parler ici de l'intégration de Doctrine dans le framework MVC symfony, le plugin sfDoctrine2Plugin n'étant à l'heure actuelle pas testable en profondeur. Cet article porte donc sur Doctrine 2, l'ORM, uniquement. http://www.doctrine-project.org Le schéma de description du modèle Le classique schema.yml pour commencer, apporte son lot de nouveautés (...)

14:59
Cat Lover Wanted
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pspan class="Apple-style-span"I need a php programmer to make a website for my cat. My cat has win many awards, it is very nice cat. I can send you some pictures of it. This will be for your portfolio. There is no pay but if you like cats you will love to do this project for my cat. My cat was on a tv show for cats who like to use toilet and he flush. People will always like to come and see this website, you can get a lot of xposures!span class="Apple-converted-space" /spanbr/br//span/p

12:33
De l'utilisation des batteries rechargeables
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Utiliser des batteries rechargeables n'est pas forcément une affaire simple. Il y a différentes technologies, différents types de chargeurs, etc. Je n'ai jamais été convaincu par les batteries rechargeables et je continuais d'utiliser régulièrement des piles alcalines classiques jusqu'au jour où je suis tombé sur un article du blog de Jeff Atwood abordant les problématiques de capacité, d'auto-décharge et de chargeur. J'ai trouvé intéressant d'en fournir une version française pour LinuxFr (acronym title=Note du traducteurNdT/acronym : traduction réalisée avec l'accord de l'auteur), population qui ne doit pas être dépourvue de gadgets grands consommateurs de piles.br / br / Personnellement, j'ai acheté le chargeur LaCrosse conseillé dans l'article, malgré les petits défauts que certains utilisateurs pouvaient remonter sur les différents forums et que finalement, je n'ai pas rencontré depuis deux ans d'utilisation régulière. Il y a d'autres références dans la même marque ou ailleurs si ce modèle ne vous convient pas. un coup de votre moteur de recherche préféré devrait vous orienter pour les trouver. Concernant les accumulateurs en eux-mêmes, ceux fournis avec le chargeur ne sont pas forcément les meilleurs. Après quelques tests, je me suis rabattu sur les Uniross Hybrid qui ont une bonne capacité et un taux d'auto-décharge très bon. Depuis, à de rares exceptions, j'ai banni les piles alcalines LR03 et LR06 de chez moi. En espérant que cela incite ceux qui n'ont pas encore franchi le pas à faire de même.br / br / Place à la traduction dans la seconde partie de cette dépêche.br / br / acronym title=Note du traducteurNdT/acronym : Pour la traduction de « rechargeables batteries », j'aurais pu utiliser « accumulateur électrique », certainement le a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accumulateur_%C3%A9lectriqueterme le plus correct/a mais pas forcément le plus courant, ou encore « pile rechargeable » qui est un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pile_%C3%A9lectriqueabus de langage/a. J'ai donc fait le choix (forcément discutable) de le traduire par « batteries rechargeables » (quoique potentiellement redondant) ou tout simplement « batteries », terme relativement répandu et a priori correct.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/adventures-in-rechargeable-batteries.htmlAdventures in Rechargeable Batteries (texte original)/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.codinghorror.com/Coding Horror/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.lacrossetechnology.fr/fr/P-16-229--0-D1--rs900-nos-produits-appareils-specialises.htmlPage produit du RS900 de LaCrosse/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://perso.numericable.fr/mpl/Doc/AccusFAD.pdfListe d'accumulateurs à faible auto-décharge/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_des_piles_et_accumulateurs_%C3%A9lectriquesFormat des piles et batteries électriques/abr / (...)

2:09
Coming This Summer: Clients From Hell, the Book!
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pimg width="520" height="784" src="http://www.likeadesertprophet.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/CFH-cover.png" alt="Clients From Hell Book Cover"//p pIn December of 2009, Clients From Hell exploded as a cult phenomena of the design industry. Compiled in book form for the first time, this collection brings together the original and hilarious posts that made the blog a hit. strongOn sale this summer via a title="ChannelV Books" href="http://www.channelvbooks.com/titles/clients-from-hell.php" target="_blank"ChannelV Books/a More details to come./strongbr/br//p
May 26, 2010
21:05
Etsy Poetry
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pI want a very uniqe bussniess card madebr/im thinking all blackbr/with a unicorn on her hind legsbr/and purple writeingbr/showing my business namebr/and my easy linkbr/with wordsbr/sayingbr/“hand made crafts”br/br/I want to see samples of what u made so i cAn decide if your good enough. If u like u can put ur name on the business card to. But in small print. I do not want to pay a lot of money for this. So please start small.br/br/Ideal price: $0.01/p p[from an Etsy Alchemy request]/p

15:44
Should BP crowdsource solutions to solve the Gulf oil spill?
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

Clifford Krauss of the New York Times reports on BP’s latest effort to cap the oil leak, called “top kill”. He notes the following: The consequences for BP are profound: A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company’s brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the [...]

15:04
Me: So, including [multiple project specifics], this project will run about...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe: /strongSo, including [multiple project specifics], this project will run about $XXX./p pstrongClient:/strong That’s way too much! I can find someone on Craigslist to do it for 1/10th that./p pstrongClient: /strongThis is a really easy job. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two if you know what you’re doing. There’s no reason to try to rip me off. I’ll pay you $X./p pstrongMe:/strong I’m sorry, that’s really not possible. However, thank you for considering me for the project, and I’m sure that you’ll find someone more compatible with your budget./p pstrongClient:/strong So, what? You’re saying you won’t do it for $X? Do you want to stay in your house? /p

9:50
Squale 6.0 est disponible
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Début avril est sortie la nouvelle version 6.0 de Squale. Squale est une solution (libre, licence LGPLv3) qui permet de gérer la qualité des développements logiciels. Il a pour objectifs de couvrir plusieurs langages et d'offrir une vision de la qualité logicielle adaptée à plusieurs profils, avec ireportings/i détaillés et agrégés, génération de plan d'action, etc. Squale se focalise sur deux aspects principaux (voir la a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/09/17/25909.htmlprécédente dépêche de septembre 2009/a pour plus de détails) :br / ulli L'élaboration de modèles évolués d'évaluation, de visualisation et d'interprétation des résultats issus des outils de mesure ;br / /lili Le développement d'une plate-forme logicielle mettant en œuvre les modèles ci-dessus et permettant ainsi de contrôler la qualité de son code./li/ul Cette plate-forme logicielle que certains appelleront de « gouvernance de la qualité » ne ré-invente pas les outils de production de métrique mais se base sur ceux existants, par exemple Checkstyle, PMD, JDepend, etc. pour le monde Java, très fourni en outils libres. Pour l'analyse de code C/C++ et Cobol, Squale propose des connecteurs (plugins) libres, vers des outils du marché, pour le moment essentiellement propriétaires (ex : McCabe, RSM, etc.). Il est cependant tout à fait possible d'écrire son propre connecteur vers un autre outil de son choix.br / br / La version 6.0 sortie récemment, outre son lot de corrections et d'améliorations variées, apporte principalement les fonctionnalités suivantes :br / ulli Ajout de commentaires sur les notes insérées manuellement ;br / /lili Nouveau profil auditeur pour la saisie de ces notes manuelles ;br / /lili Portage et test complet sur environnement Windows ;br / /lili Finalisation du support de l'analyse Cobol via l'outil McCabe ;br / /lili Meilleure caractérisation des applications dans Squale ;br / /lili Implémentation de la visualisation Distribution Map ;br / /lili Export de données anonymisées vers un référentiel mutualisé (permettant de comparer ses résultats à l'extérieur de son entreprise par exemple) et import des références générées pour comparaison des applications dans Squale./li/ul Pour la suite, la feuille de route de Squale comprend pour l'instant :br / ulli L'amélioration du plan d'action généré par Squale ;br / /lili L'ajout d'autres visualisations résultant des recherches de l'INRIA ;br / /lili Une gestion plus fine des rôles utilisateur et de la sécurité ;br / /lili Une interface REST pour la consultation des résultats ;br / /lili Le support d'autres langages en plus de Java/C/C++/Cobol (PHP pour commencer)./li/ul N'hésitez pas à l'essayer : Squale propose à cet effet une version autonome (configurée par défaut pour Java) contenant une base de données embarquée.br / br / Dans la suite de la dépêche, vous trouverez un entretien avec Fabrice Bellingard, le chef de projet de Squale.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.squale.org/index.html Site du projet Squale/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/2009/09/17/25909.html DLFP : Présentation de Squale, Software QUALity Enhancement project/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.squale.org/squale-user-site/release-notes/6.0-release-notes.html Release Notes de la version 6.0/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://project.squale.org/downloads?order=versionamp;desc=1 Page de téléchargement/abr / lien 5 : a href=https://project.squale.org/downloads/9 Installeur Squale standalone pour test/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.squale.org/screenshots.html Captures d'écran/abr / (...)
7:43
Revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 20
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

La a href=http://www.april.org/revue-de-presserevue de presse de l'April/a est régulièrement éditée par les membres de l'association. Elle couvre l'actualité de la presse en ligne, liée au logiciel libre. Il s'agit donc d'une sélection d'articles de presse et non de prises de position de l'association de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre.br / br / strongSommaire de la revue de presse de l'April pour la semaine 20/strongbr / ullia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57129-edito-linux-dominer-le-monde.htm[pcinpact.com] UNIX (et Linux) va-t-il un jour dominer le monde ?/abr / /lilia href=http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/new-uk-govt-to-curb-cctv-scrap-id-cards-help-open-source.ars[arstechnica.com] New UK govt to curb CCTV, scrap ID cards, help open source/abr / /lilia href=http://www.usinenouvelle.com/article/ossif-les-grands-utilisateurs-de-logiciels-open-source-unissent-leurs-forces.N132227[usinenouvelle.com] Ossif : les grands utilisateurs de logiciels open source unissent leurs forces/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57100-negligence-caracterisee-securisation-hadopi-hadopi.htm[pcinpact.com] HADOPI : le ministère de la culture explique comment sécuriser/abr / /lilia href=http://www.gnet.tn/net-informatique/un-bunker-pour-proteger-les-formats-de-donnees/id-menu-473.html[gnet.tn] Un bunker pour protéger les formats de données/abr / /lilia href=http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/57092-google-web-font-directory-polices-libres.htm[pcinpact.com] Google propose un ensemble de polices libres pour les sites/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ecrans.fr/Google-libere-le-codec-VP8,9942.html[ecrans.fr] Google libère le codec VP8/abr / /lilia href=http://www.numerama.com/magazine/15749-jean-luc-godard-je-suis-contre-hadopi-il-n-y-a-pas-de-propriete-intellectuelle.html[numerama.com] Jean-Luc Godard : Je suis contre Hadopi. Il n'y a pas de propriété intellectuelle/abr / /lilia href=http://www.journaldunet.com/solutions/acteurs/hugo-roy-fsf-et-violation-de-brevet-apple.shtml?f_id_newsletter=2979utm_source=benchmailutm_medium=ML5utm_campaign=E10171622[journaldunet.com] Le W3C n'a pas voulu se mettre Apple à dos/abr / /lilia href=http://owni.fr/2010/05/17/espaces-de-hackers/[owni.fr] Espaces de hackers/abr / /lilia href=http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/05/17/nouveau-projet-de-l%E2%80%99equateur-le-logiciel-libre-pour-lutter-contre-le-piratage/[ip-watch.org] Nouveau projet de l'Équateur : le logiciel libre pour lutter contre le piratage/abr / /lilia href=http://pro.clubic.com/legislation-loi-internet/propriete-intellectuelle/logiciel-libre-open-source/actualite-340784-union-europeenne-definit-future-politique-numerique.html[clubic.com] L'Union européenne définit sa future politique numérique/abr / /li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/revue-de-presseLa revue de presse de l'April/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.april.org/fr/revue-de-presse/feedLe flux RSS des articles de la revue de presse de l'April/abr / (...)

6:10
Dear Cloud API, your fault line is showing
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Most APIs are like hospital gowns. They seem to provide good coverage, until you turn around.

I am talking about the dreadful state of fault reporting in remote APIs, from Twitter to Cloud interfaces. They are badly described in the interface documentation and the implementations often don’t even conform to what little is documented.

If, when reading a specification, you get the impression that the “normal” part of the specification is the result of hours of whiteboard debate but that the section that describes the faults is a stream-of-consciousness late-night dump that no-one reviewed, well… you’re most likely right. And this is not only the case for standard-by-committee kind of specifications. Even when the specification is written to match the behavior of an existing implementation, error handling is often incorrectly and incompletely described. In part because developers may not even know what their application returns in all error conditions.

After learning the lessons of SOAP-RPC, programmers are now more willing to acknowledge and understand the on-the-wire messages received and produced. But when it comes to faults, there is still a tendency to throw their hands in the air, write to the application log and then let the stack do whatever it does when an unhandled exception occurs, on-the-wire compliance be damned. If that means sending an HTML error message in response to a request for a JSON payload, so be it. After all, it’s just a fault.

But even if fault messages may only represent 0.001% of the messages your application sends, they still represent 85% of those that the client-side developers will look at.

Client developers can’t even reverse-engineer the fault behavior by hitting a reference implementation (whether official or de-facto) the way they do with regular messages. That’s because while you can generate response messages for any successful request, you don’t know what error conditions to simulate. You can’t tell your Cloud provider “please bring down your user account database for five minutes so I can see what faults you really send me when that happens”. Also, when testing against a live application you may get a different fault behavior depending on the time of day. A late-night coder (or a daytime coder in another time zone) might never see the various faults emitted when the application (like Twitter) is over capacity. And yet these will be quite common at peak time (when the coder is busy with his day job… or sleeping).

All these reasons make it even more important to carefully (and accurately) document fault behavior.

The move to REST makes matters even worse, in part because it removes SOAP faults. There’s nothing magical about SOAP faults, but at least they force you to think about providing an information payload inside your fault message. Many REST APIs replace that with HTTP error codes, often accompanied by a one-line description with a sometimes unclear relationship with the semantics of the application. Either it’s a standard error code, which by definition is very generic or it’s an application-defined code at which point it most likely overlaps with one or more standard codes and you don’t know when you should expect one or the other. Either way, there is too much faith put in the HTTP code versus the payload of the error. Let’s be realistic. There are very few things most applications can do automatically in response to a fault. Mainly:
- Ask the user to re-enter credentials (if it’s an authentication/permission issue)
- Retry (immediately or after some time)
- Report a problem and fail
So make sure that your HTTP errors support this simple decision tree. Beyond that point, listing a panoply of application-specific error codes looks like an attempt to look “RESTful” by overdoing it. In most cases, application-specific error codes are too detailed for most automated processing and not detailed enough to help the developer understand and correct the issue. I am not against using them but what matters most is the payload data that comes along.

On that aspect, implementations generally fail in one of two extremes. Some of them tell you nothing. For example the payload is a string that just repeats what the documentation says about the error code. Others dump the kitchen sink on you and you get a full stack trace of where the error occurred in the server implementation. The former is justified as a security precaution. The latter as a way to help you debug. More likely, they both just reflect laziness.

In the ideal world, you’d get a detailed error payload telling you exactly which of the input parameters the application choked on and why. Not just vague words like “invalid”. Is parameter “foo” invalid for syntactical reasons? Is it invalid because inconsistent with another parameter value in the request? Is it invalid because it doesn’t match the state on the server side? Realistically, implementations often can’t spend too many CPU cycles analyzing errors and generating such detailed reports. That’s fine, but then they can include a link to a wiki a knowledge base where more details are available about the error, its common causes and the workarounds.

Your API should document all messages accurately and comprehensively. Faults are messages too.

Related posts:

May 25, 2010
21:25
"We don’t need you to do our promotional campaigns anymore. We’ve just bought InDesign..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

“We don’t need you to do our promotional campaigns anymore. We’ve just bought InDesign and someone’s coming in to do a two-hour workshop on how to use it. We’ll be able to handle all the design ourselves from now on. We might give you the odd phone call for a bit of advice here and there — you won’t mind will you?”

16:44
Sortie de Slackware 13.1
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Après neuf mois de gestation, la version 13.1 de Slackware est enfin de sortie. Lancée en juillet 1993, Slackware est la plus ancienne distribution Linux encore en activité, talonnée de près par Debian GNU/Linux, sortie en août 1993. Longtemps maintenue par Patrick Volkerding seul, Slackware est maintenant faite par un petit groupe de contributeurs bénévoles. Cette version n'introduit pas de changements suffisamment majeurs pour la numéroter 14.0. Cependant, outre les habituelles mises à jour de logiciels, quelques changements méritent d'être mentionnés ; ils sont détaillés dans la seconde partie de la dépêche.br / br / Des fichiers ISO pour architectures x86 et x86_64 sont disponibles par FTP et BitTorrent. Il est aussi recommandé d'acheter les médias d'installation afin de soutenir le projet.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://slackware.com/Site officiel/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.slackware.com/announce/13.1.phpAnnonce officielle/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://slackware.com/getslack/Obtenir Slackware/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.slackware-fr.org/Communauté Slackware francophone/abr / (...)
16:14
Fedora 13 « Goddard », parée au décollage
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le projet Fedora et l'association des contributeurs et utilisateurs francophones de Fedora ont la joie de vous annoncer la sortie de la 13supe/sup édition de la distribution GNU/Linux Fedora.br / br / Fedora est un système d'exploitation libre et pionnier qui apporte des fonctionnalités innovantes à de nombreux utilisateurs, avec un rythme de sortie d'environ six mois. Nous vous annonçons la dernière et la meilleure version de Fedora qui soit : Fedora 13 ! Rejoignez-nous et partagez les joies des logiciels libres et de la communauté avec vos amis et proches. Fedora 13 amène de nouvelles fonctionnalités majeures avec une attention spéciale portée sur le bureau, les inetbooks/i, la virtualisation et l'administration système.br / br / acronym title=Note des modérateursNdM/acronym : iMerci à a href=https://linuxfr.org/~mathgl/Mathgl/a d'avoir aussi proposé une dépêche en ce sens./ibr / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://get.fedoraproject.org/Obtenir Fedora/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://docs.fedoraproject.org/fr-FR/Fedora/13/html/Release_Notes/index.htmlNotes de version/abr / lien 3 : a href=https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fr_FR/Marketing/Decouvrez_Fedora_13Découvrez Fedora 13/abr / lien 4 : a href=https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fr_FR/Marketing/Eclairage_sur_Fedora_13Éclairages sur Fedora 13 (entretiens)/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.fedora-fr.org/Communauté Fedora francophone/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/Distributions/Fedora/Répertoire Fedora sur DMOZ/abr / (...)

15:22
Client: ”I was thinking that I could pay you in Groceries.” Me: (Laughter)...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pspan pstrongClient:/strong ”I was thinking that I could pay you in Groceries.”/p pstrongMe:/strong em(Laughter)/em “You’re joking right?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”I don’t see what is so hilarious here sir.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”I apologize, honestly sir, that is one of the most ridiculous methods of payment I have ever heard.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Really? I think it is quite sane.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Well, are you talking about like a grocery store gift card?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”No, I just came into the wealth of $300 of carrots and $450 of potatoes.”/p /span/p

13:56
Passage de Phraseanet en Open Source
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Phraseanet est une solution ifull web/i pour la gestion des photothèques et des médiathèques. C'est un système dédié à ceux qui ont besoin d'assurer la gestion et la diffusion de leurs contenus multimédia (photos, vidéos, sons, PDF, etc.) en ligne. La version 3.0 est sortie au mois de mars 2010 à l'occasion du salon Solutions Linux. Phraseanet est depuis peu disponible en libre téléchargement sous licence GPL 3 sur le nouveau site a href=http://www.phraseanet.com/www.phraseanet.com/a.br / br / Événement à venir : des séminaires en ligne sont organisés toutes les deux semaines, pour découvrir la solution et s'y former. Le prochain aura lieu le mardi 1er juin à 14 heures.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.alchemy.frSite de présentation/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.alchemy.fr/spip.php?page=articleamp;id_article=111amp;id_rubrique=7Accès à la démo en ligne/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.phraseanet.com/download/Site téléchargement Phraseanet/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.alchemy.fr/IMG/jpg/Phraseanet-Classic.jpgCopie d'écran/abr / (...)
1:10
3 frameworks de développement : Ruby on Rails, Snap et Lamson
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Ce week-end, la version 2.3.6 de bRuby on Rails/b est sorti, suivi de peu par la version 2.3.7. Ces versions apportent un bon nombre de correctifs pour divers problèmes, mais surtout préparent le terrain pour Rails 3. Certaines API vont être supprimées dans Rails 3, et la version 2.3.6 permet d'être averti si votre application Rails utilise une de ces API.br / br / La version 3 va également apporter un grand plus au niveau de la sécurité en échappant par défaut toutes les chaînes de caractères pouvant être sujettes à une attaque a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scriptingXSS/a. La version 2.3.6 devait permettre de tester ce comportement en installant le greffon a href=http://github.com/rails/rails_xssRails XSS/a. Mais, certains commits n'ont pas été backportés depuis Rails3, rendant ainsi cette protection non seulement inefficace mais aussi source de plantages. Heureusement, la version 2.3.7 est sortie juste après pour réparer ça. Au final, si vous êtes un utilisateur de Rails, vous êtes encouragés à sauter la version 2.3.6 et à passer directement à la version 2.3.7.br / br / emMise à jour/em : a href=http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/5/25/ruby-on-rails-2-3-8-releasedRails 2.3.8/a vient de sortir pour corriger un problème lorsque l'on n'utilise pas le greffon Rails XSS. C'est donc vers cette version qu'il faut migrer.br / br / Et si vous préférez la programmation fonctionnelle, sachez que le développement web vous est aussi ouvert. Par exemple, bSnap/b est un framework web en a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell title=Définition WikipédiaHaskell/a sous a href=http://github.com/snapframework/snap-core/blob/master/LICENSElicence MIT/a. Snap se décompose en trois parties :br / ulliUne bibliothèque serveur a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP title=Définition WikipédiaHTTP/a très rapide, qui s'appuie sur la boucle événementielle de la a href=http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libev.htmllibev/a ;br / /liliUne a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monade_%28informatique%29monade/a particulièrement bien adaptée au développement web ;br / /liliUn moteur de templating XML qui permet de générer entre autres du HTML.br / /li/ulSnap est encore très jeune, mais a href=http://snapframework.com/benchmarksses performances/a sont déjà impressionnantes : plus rapide qu'apache !br / br / Enfin, bLamson/b est un framework de développement en Python sous la double licence BSD et GPL. Sa particularité est d'être un framework pour les mails. Il propose une approche similaire à celle de Django ou Ruby on Rails, mais pour développer des applications qui gèrent des mails. Vous avez ainsi la possibilité de router des mails entrants, d'utiliser le modèle a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le-Vue-Contr%C3%B4leurMVC/a, d'utiliser des données en provenance de différentes bases de données (relationnelles ou non), d'utiliser un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapping_objet-relationnelORM/a si vous le souhaitez, ou encore d'écrire des tests unitaires. Bref, Lamson permet enfin d'écrire facilement des applications qui gèrent des mails, que ce soient des filtres anti-spams, des mailing-listes, ou des applications très spécifiques.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/5/23/ruby-on-rails-2-3-6-releasedRuby on Rails 2.3.6/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/5/24/ruby-on-rails-2-3-7-releasedRuby on Rails 2.3.7/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://github.com/rails/rails_xssPlugin Rails XSS/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://snapframework.com/Snap framework/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://lamsonproject.org/Lamson Project/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1274557940.htmlLamson 1.0/abr /

May 24, 2010
21:22
"Yes, but those are red energy days, Mars is in retrograde and there is a full Moon. how about the..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““Yes, but those are red energy days, Mars is in retrograde and there is a full Moon. how about the following Tuesday or actually May 12th, its green days through the rest of the month. Maybe I’ll wait three more weeks for a guaranteed good outcome?””

18:01
Passage d'Urbi en Open source
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Urbi est un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frameworkframework/a de développement pour la robotique visant à standardiser et simplifier l'écriture de modules et comportements pour les robots, en les rendant réutilisables et en facilitant l'interaction entre robots hétérogènes.br / br / Il comprend:ulliUn modèle de composants C++ avec gestion de dataflow : UObject ;br / /liliUn middleware permettant aux composants d'interagir localement ou en réseau ;br / /liliUn langage de script parallèle et événementiel, urbiscript, pour orchestrer les interactions entre composants ;br / /liliUn environnement d'exécution faisant le lien entre les composants et urbiscript./li/ul br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.urbiforge.comLe site communautaire urbiforge/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.urbiforge.com/index.php/Main/DownloadsLa page de téléchargement/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.urbiforge.com/index.php/Main/TutorialVidéos d'illustration, dont le google tech talk sur Urbi/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.gostai.comLe site web de Gostai/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.urbiforge.com/index.php/Main/DocsLa documentation/abr / (...)

17:29
Rebuttal to “Filter Failure” Argument
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

I posted previously on Clay Shirkey’s assertion that there is no information overload, just filter failure. I pointed out that filtering is only half of the attention management picture (pulling information forward is the other part). But Nathan Zeldes did a much more detailed rebuttal – and more insightful I’d say. It’s called Yes it [...]

15:03
"I hate blogs. Blogs are for angry people who are sitting at their computer with a glass of wine at..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I hate blogs. Blogs are for angry people who are sitting at their computer with a glass of wine at midnight with nothing better to do. No companies use blogs anymore.””

9:17
Sortie de Metasploit 3.4
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Metasploit est une boîte à outils servant à faciliter les tests d'intrusion. À l'origine c'était un jeu réseau, mais il a évolué pour devenir en 2003 un outil facilitant l'exploitation de failles. Il propose une base de données d'iexploit/i (permettant d'exploiter les vulnérabilités des logiciels pour entrer sur une machine et en prendre le contrôle) à utiliser en conjonction avec une base de données de ipayload/i (ishellcodes/i, permettant d'effectuer diverses actions sur la machine attaquée).br / br / Cette nouvelle version corrige de nombreux bugs, apporte cent nouveaux iexploits/i, mais également de nouvelles cibles pour les outils de découverte de mots de passe par force brute, et de nombreuses améliorations pour imeterpreter/i : capture d'écran de la machine attaquée, compression et obfuscation des échanges réseau, etc.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://www.metasploit.com/Metasploit/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.metasploit.com/redmine/projects/framework/wiki/Release_Notes_34Notes de version/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://metasm.cr0.org/Metasm/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://www.metasploit.com/redmine/projects/framework/wiki/KarmetasploitKarmetasploit/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Un tutorial/abr / (...)
8:19
Panne du week-end
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le site LinuxFr.org et les services associés étaient en panne ce week-end. Le serveur qui les héberge a fait un a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_panickernel panic/a samedi matin (il semblerait que ce soit un problème lié au a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID_%28informatique%29RAID/a).br / br / Le serveur a pu être redémarré grâce à une intervention du a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_operations_centeracronym title=Network Operations CenterNOC/acronym/a de la fondation Free. Nous les remercions pour s'être déplacé un week-end et plus généralement, pour l'hébergement que la a href=http://fondation.free.org/fondation Free/a nous fournit depuis plusieurs années.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/submit.htmlProposer une dépêche/abr / lien 2 : a href=https://linuxfr.org/redacteurs/La tribune des rédacteurs/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://fondation.free.org/La Fondation d'entreprise Free/abr /

2:56
“Collective Intelligence”, by Pierre Levy
» ‎ Michael Nielsen

More from Pierre Levy’s book Collective Intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace, translated by Robert Bononno.

One reason the book is notable is that, so far as I know, it was the first to really develop the term “collective intelligence”. Levy was writing in the mid-1990s, and others had, of course, both used the term before, and also developed related notions. But Levy seems to be the first to have really riffed on the term collective intelligence. Here’s Levy’s definition, and some additional commentary:

What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… My initial premise is based on the notion of a universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity… New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. This is not simply a matter of modeling the conventional physical environment, but of of enabling members of delocalized communities to interact within a mobile landscape of signification… Before we can mobilize skills, we have to identify them. And to do so, we have to recognize them in all their diversity… The ideal of collective intelligence implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization.

Here’s Levy on the future of the economy:

What remains after we have mechanized agriculture, industry and messaging technologies? The economy will center, as it does already, on that which can never be fully automated, on that which is irreducible: the production of the social bond, the relational… Those who manufacture things will become scarcer and scarcer, and their labour will become mechanized, augmented, automated to a greater and greater extent…. The final frontier will be the human itself, that which can’t be automated: the creation of sensible worlds, invention, relation, the continuous recreation of the community… What kind of engineering will best meet the needs of a growing economy of human qualities?

It’s a provocative thought, although I don’t find it convincing. It’s true that the social bond is increasing in importance, as some other things become less scarce, but other scarcities remain as well.

I liked the following comment of Levy on democracy – it’s incidental to his main point, but nicely distilled an idea for me:

[Democracy] is favored not because it establishes the domination of a majority over a minority, but because it limits the power of government and provides remedies against the arbitrary use of power.

A final quote:

The greater the number of collective intellects with which an individual is involved, the more opportunities he has to diversify his knowledge and desire.

The downside of this may be a kind of glorified dilettantism. But the upside – as so often, the more interesting aspect of events – is the possibility of becoming deeply familiar with many more communities of practice.

May 23, 2010
21:26
"I need some changes to the magazine ad you designed last year. Can I just buy your hard drive that..."
» ‎ Clients From Hell

““I need some changes to the magazine ad you designed last year. Can I just buy your hard drive that the ad is on so that I can make my own changes?””
15:22
Client: ”Can you make the ‘About Us’ link say ‘About Us - Everyone...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”Can you make the ‘About Us’ link say ‘About Us - Everyone welcome’?”/p pstrongMe: “/strongSure, but…why?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”I’m afraid people might not know they’re allowed to click that link. They might think it’s private. We need them to know it’s okay for them to go there.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”But none of the links on your site are private. Why are you concerned with that specific one?”/p pstrongClient: “/strongGood point. You’d better add ‘Everyone welcome’ to all the links on the site.”/p
May 22, 2010
21:22
Phone call at 8 in the morning. Client: ”I’m very disappointed in you not responding to...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pemPhone call at 8 in the morning./em/p pstrongClient:/strong ”I’m very disappointed in you not responding to my urgent emails! I flagged them emURGENT!/em”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Uh, we’re technically not open for another half hour, what time did you send the emails?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Around 3am! I’ve been waiting FIVE HOURS for you to respond! You’re hardly treating it as urgent!”/p

16:27
My New Hobby – CW
» ‎ Aaron Toponce

The day before Mother’s Day, my family went up to the Golden Spike National Monument. We went through the museum, checked out the exhibits, and they even had a reenactment of the ceremony there on Promentory Summit. It was a fun day. On the way back to the car, I head some radio operators:
CQ CQ CQ. This is KB7MRL. Over. CQ CQ CQ. This is KB7MRL. Over.
Contact was made, a short conversation ensued, and they went on to the next band. I knew immediately they were hams, and I wanted to check out their rig, where they were from, and how long they had been doing amateur radio. They were handing out Golden Spike QSL cards to anyone they could make contact with. So, I headed over to their pavilion, chatted with them for a bit, then went back to my family for lunch.
During my meeting, they gave me a couple ARRL magazines, their personal QSL cards, and a Morse Code CD (bundled with Windows software). I’ve always been interested in learning Morse (commonly called “CW” for “continuous wave”), ever since I was a scout. So, recently, I decided to set to the task of learning it. Why, you ask? What’s the point, when we have the Internet, cell phones, satellites, and other forms of communication? My answer: I like a good challenge, and I just want to see if I can learn it. I can still get involved with satellite radio, and packet radio.
So, I fired up the software, and set to task. I’m learning CW using the Koch method, which means learning the number of characters I want, at the target speed I feel comfortable with. So, I set with 10 WPM, and I’m up to 7 characters: ABHJMTW, with about 90% accuracy. I’m hoping by the end of the month, I’ll have the entire alphabet down at 10WPM, where June I can focus on doubling the speed, as well as reaching the assigned 40 characters of CW. Maybe that’s a bit optimistic. We’ll see.
Eventually, I’ll set the goal for getting my Amateur Extra license here in the States. I understand that CW is no longer a requirement for obtaining that license, and as already mentioned, that isn’t the reason for me learning CW. However, when I do get my license, and eventually a rig setup, I would like to chat on the CW-only bands from the outset. So, becoming proficient with CW before then is important to me.
I’m not sure how my wife will enjoy me picking up a new hobby, especially seeing as though I have so very little time in my life for anything, let alone a hobby. She probably won’t be excited about me setting up my ham shack when we move. But, on the flip side, she’s always complaining that I spend too much time on IRC/IM, so maybe this can take that place. After all, hams step up for public service when they can, win awards, and just enjoy good company. It’s a bit more involved than IRC, with actual purposes, so we’ll see. Maybe she’ll get her license as well. I know I would like to see my daughter licensed. That would be cool.
So, anyway, there you go. Learning CW for fun. I’ll keep progress on this blog as I go along. No promises, or threats, on the frequency of the posts.

15:00
After developing a short animation piece for a client, I send them an invoice for $800. I originally...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pAfter developing a short animation piece for a client, I send them an invoice for $800. I originally gave the client an estimate of $750./p pstrongClient:/strong “I have a problem with this invoice. I agreed to $750; this is for $800.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “Perhaps, but I gave you an estimate, not a quote.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “We’ll have to talk about this.”/p pstrongMe:/strong “I told you the cost would be “around $750”, and it’s just $50 off based on the hours required after a few of your revisions. I’d say that’s a pretty good estimate.”/p pstrongClient:/strong “We’ll have to talk about this.”/p

0:07
Google Docs Unleashes New Features and Version Release Methodology
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

Did you notice that Google added twitch-level sync co-authoring, a drawing tool, rulers, and other features to Google Docs? Along with new functionality, they also unleashed a strange new process for rolling out versions. For more, see my blog entry at: Google Docs Introduces Parallel Computing (Not What You Think) Filed under: Google

May 21, 2010
21:23
Me: ”Your employees are saying they can’t get on the internet.” Client: ”Did...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongMe:/strong ”Your employees are saying they can’t get on the internet.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Did they restart?”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Yes, but the problem is the wireless is not connected to the internet. Did you change something?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Oh, yeah you have to plug them in to ethernets. I turned the wireless off because someone could hack into our wireless.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”We use 256-bit encryption, that’s not possible. Anyway, you didn’t pay the guy that wired the place, so he never terminated most of the cables.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Just go terminate it and connect it to the server.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”I’m a programmer, not a networker, and I don’t have the equipment to tone and terminate. Besides, we couldn’t find those cables, which is the reason we put them on the wireless anyway. And you don’t connect the ethernet to the server.”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Whatever, just figure it out. We can’t have people hacking our wireless.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”So really, you want to block someone from sitting in the parking lot and using the internet, blocking your employees from working in the process?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Someone hacked my wireless at home.”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Now we’re getting to the root of the problem.”/p
15:22
Client: ”Why does the eblast print in black-and-white?” Me: ”Are you using a...
» ‎ Clients From Hell

pstrongClient:/strong ”Why does the eblast print in black-and-white?”/p pstrongMe:/strong ”Are you using a black-and-white printer?”/p pstrongClient:/strong ”Yes.”/p

12:33
Nerdy Cute Girls. In T-Shirts
» ‎ What To Fix

What can I say. It's Friday, and I'm tired of doing serious stuff. I was telling my wife last week that I miss doing the "cute girl" posts. They bring a lot of bogus and useless traffic which costs me money and I hate, but they're also mindless and fun. And sometimes mindless and fun is a good thing.

If you can handle a wet t-shirt and some PG-13 language, this entry is safe for work. If you like girls, the whole article will probably be much more entertaining! I went through a lot of girly-nerdy-booby t-shirts on the web trying to find tasteful and cute nerdy examples. What can I say -- this is the type of sacrifice I am prepared to make for you, the reader. Which is another way of saying this post has nothing to do with you the reader, it was just the product of a waste of time on a Thursday evening that turned into a blog post.

(Honorable mention, since I know that's what many of you are thinking anyway)

12:23
OpenBSD 4.7 est sorti
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

OpenBSD est un système d'exploitation issu de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution4.4BSD/a. a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_RaadtTheo de Raadt/a, l'un des fondateurs a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSDde NetBSD/a, a choisi en 1994 de créer cette nouvelle variante dans la famille des BSD en mettant l'accent sur la sécurité du système.br / br / OpenBSD est multi-plates-formes, il prend en charge, entre autres, les architectures a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/I386i386/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD64AMD64/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_AlphaALPHA/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_MIPSMIPS/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC title=Définition WikipédiaSPARC/a... et très sécurisé.br / br / Le 19 mai est sortie la version 4.7, qui inclut la gestion d'un plus grand nombre de périphériques et de processeurs, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME title=Définition WikipédiaGNOME/a 2.28, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE title=Définition WikipédiaKDE/a 3.5.10, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFCE title=Définition WikipédiaXFCE/a 4.6, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostregreSQL title=Définition WikipédiaPostregreSQL/a 8.4, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL title=Définition WikipédiaMySQL/a 5.1, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice title=Définition WikipédiaOpenOffice/a 3.1, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox title=Définition WikipédiaFirefox/a 3.5 et une nouvelle version d'a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSH title=Définition WikipédiaOpenSSH/a. Évidemment, comme à chaque fois, une nouvelle chanson l'accompagne.br / br / N'hésitez pas à commander les a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM title=Définition WikipédiaCD-ROM/a d'installation, qui sont, avec les dons, les seules sources de revenus du projet.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://openbsd.org/fr/index.htmlPage d'OpenBSD/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://www.openbsd.org/47.htmlRelease notes/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#47Chanson I'm still there/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://linuxfr.org/~lapinflemard/29739.htmlDLFP : Un journal qui annonce la sortie/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://www.openbsd.org/orders.htmlMagasin en ligne/abr / lien 6 : a href=http://www.dmoz.org/World/Fran%C3%A7ais/Informatique/Logiciels/Syst%C3%A8mes_d%27exploitation/Unix/BSD/BSD sur DMOZ/abr / (...)
9:20
Open vSwitch, le commutateur virtuel bientôt sur votre serveur
» ‎ DLFP - Dépêches de page principale

Le 17 mai, la version 1.0.0 d'a href=http://openvswitch.org/Open vSwitch/a a été rendue publique. Comme son nom l'indique, ce logiciel permet de créer des a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutateurs_r%C3%A9seaucommutateurs/a (switches) virtuels.br / br / Avec les services qui se virtualisent de plus en plus, la gestion des interconnexions entre les machines virtuelles (et les machines réelles) nécessite une solution performante pour manipuler ce transit de paquet IP, d'où l'idée de faire des commutateurs virtuels. Actuellement, on utilise le plus souvent le mode a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_(informatique)pont/a (bridge) intégré dans Linux, via la commande a href=http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/bridgebrctl/a, ou le projet a href=http://vde.sourceforge.net/vde/a. Mais on en voit les limites lorsque l'architecture réseau devient complexe.br / br / L'objectif d'a href=http://openvswitch.org/Open vSwitch/a est d'obtenir un commutateur ayant les mêmes fonctionnalités qu'un vrai switch administrable (a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetflowNetFlow/a, RSPAN, ERSPAN, interface en ligne de commande à la a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOSIOS/a, etc.) et pouvant s'étendre sur plusieurs serveurs physiques dans le cadre de la virtualisation ! C'est le pendant libre des produits comme le a href=http://www.vmware.com/products/vnetwork-distributed-switch/Distributed vSwitch/a de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMWARE title=Définition WikipediaVMware/a ou le Nexus 1000V de a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco title=Définition WikipediaCisco/a.br / br / Le code source d'a href=http://openvswitch.org/Open vSwitch/a est distribué sous licence a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_ApacheApache 2/a, sauf la partie spécifique au noyau Linux qui est sous GPL. Il est écrit en langage C, avec le soucis d'être le plus indépendant possible de la plate-forme sous-jacente. Pour le moment, il supporte par défaut l'environnement de virtualisation a href=http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.htmlXen Cloud Platform/a, mais fonctionne aussi avec a href=http://www.xen.org/Xen/a, a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_MachineKVM/a, et a href=http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBoxVirtualBox/a.br / br / br / lien 1 : a href=http://openvswitch.org/Open vSwitch/abr / lien 2 : a href=http://openvswitch.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=openvswitch;a=blob_plain;f=COPYING;hb=HEADLicence/abr / lien 3 : a href=http://openvswitch.org/?page_id=120Photos d'écrans/abr / lien 4 : a href=http://openvswitch.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=openvswitch;a=blob_plain;f=INSTALL.bridge;hb=HEADRemplacer le pont de Linux par Open vSwitch/abr / lien 5 : a href=http://openvswitch.org/pipermail/announce_openvswitch.org/2010-May/000007.htmlLe courriel d'annonce de la version 1.0.0/abr / (...)

5:48
When visualization fail…
» ‎ CaptainDash

Datavisualizaton is usually to get things simplier and, most of the time, it does. As a example, to compare the GPB of countries, there are few thing that can match -in efficiency – the interface of Google public data or other interactive dashboards. But sometimes graphical visualization just screws-up. The best example in our view [...]

3:17
Quoteworthy: William Strunk – Vigorous Writing is Concise
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F20%2Fquoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F20%2Fquoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F20%2Fquoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pVigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell./p p- a href="http://www.bartleby.com/141/strunk5.html" target="_blank"William Strunk Jr./a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/20/quoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise/"Quoteworthy: William Strunk #8211; Vigorous Writing is Concise/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/09/quoteworthy-george-orwell-on-scrupulous-writing/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;'Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/06/14/quoteworthy-cicero-be-brief/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: Cicero #8211; Be Brief'Quoteworthy: Cicero #8211; Be Brief/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ug_v6rg77b-S2tfWGnwhOWJoDSU/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ug_v6rg77b-S2tfWGnwhOWJoDSU/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ug_v6rg77b-S2tfWGnwhOWJoDSU/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ug_v6rg77b-S2tfWGnwhOWJoDSU/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8sckt43U9tM:r6bkCmJKYuc:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=8sckt43U9tM:r6bkCmJKYuc:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8sckt43U9tM:r6bkCmJKYuc:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=8sckt43U9tM:r6bkCmJKYuc:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=8sckt43U9tM:r6bkCmJKYuc:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/8sckt43U9tM" height="1" width="1"/

May 20, 2010
15:31
Wanted: Cars that Use Collective Intelligence to Improve Driving
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

Every week, I drive in my car from Pleasanton, CA to San Francisco. You get some time to think when you make that drive. An idea that has occurred to me is… We ought to be making better use of the data our cars generate. It could make a difference in term of driver awareness, [...]

14:48
Hey! You! Get Off Of My Cloud!
» ‎ What To Fix

Somebody shared a link with me today about the role of dopamine in creativity. So I click the link.

And I am taken to the sign-on page to some place that keeps documents for people. I can view the document online, but if I want to download it, I need to sign-up.

I really wish there wasn't such a mad scramble on the internet to lay claim to data that I might be interested in.

Facebook is taking my friends -- who they are, what we say to each other, the pictures and videos we share -- and saying they own that data. Google recently got in trouble for accidentally picking up wi-fi -- as they drove around collecting hotspot information.

Google wants all the data in the universe. They're not going to charge me for it, but when I go looking for it, they want to "help" me out.

There are three types of businesses you can have any more. You can make pipes -- bring the internet to the house. You can hold data that goes through the pipes -- search data, map data, library data, whatever. Or you can write an application that transforms data, like QuickBooks, which transforms receipts, bills, and invoices into accounting data.

Transformative apps are becoming a sucker's game: the economics are driving most all software prices to zero, and creating the data is generally not as important as moving it or sharing it with the right people.

The pipe business is going like gangbusters, although most providers are looking at greed instead of Quality of Service, and they're going to pay the piper for that choice. But at the end of the day, the pipe business is mechanical and limited. Once you have 100 Gigs to the house, you're probably going to be okay for a while.

The data business, on the other hand, is the great internet land rush of the 21st century. Everybody wants to take parts of your life, your thoughts, your conversations, your email, your videos, your pictures, and "keep" them for you.

It's causing a lot of problems because the key issue here is this: is the computer a device like a record player that I store things on to play back at some future point? Or is it an extension of my mind?

The mp3 file-sharers have understood this problem for some time. If I hear a song, can I whistle it on the way to work? Can I record it on my mp3 player and listen to it any time I want? Can I share it with others? Their mantra, for quite a few years, is "data has to be free" The idea is that once an artist does a performance the information becomes bits and freely travels everywhere, whether we like it or not. Whether we try to outlaw it or not.

The computer is an information freedom device, moving all human knowledge and art around freely to everybody, enabling the world to know and act on the same data.

But then kids started taking pictures of themselves naked and sending them to each other on the phone. Or taking drunken pictures at college and posting them on FB. People have arguments via chat and words are said that live on forever.

Data never forgets, but people do (or used to)

Let's say I am 17u and living a wild life. I take lots of pictures and videos and write lots of blog posts that are radical, weird, or whatever. Perhaps due to some chemical imbalance I go insane and spend time posting totally incoherent thoughts for a year.

Later on I get that fixed -- it was something both natural and outside my control that caused me to act in an extremely anti-social manner.

Years pass. I go to college. I get a job as a lawyer. One day they ask me to be a judge. People Google me and blam! There's my life.

Now people will tell you that in this wondrous mysterious future, everybody will have skeletons in the closet and being able to find bad things on Google won't be such a big deal. This is akin to saying that since photography was invented, it wasn't a problem for folks to have slanderous pictures floating around, since there were a lot more slanderous pictures once photography had been invented. It's stretching the truth quite a bit. There will be folks with little to poke fingers at, and there will be folks with lots to poke fingers at. Who do you think is going to do better at being a judge?

The internet never forgets.

Worse still, the great data land rush is causing all sorts of little data islands to pop up. Each island has various rules and various standards of what to share with whom.

At the heart of this is a simple question: once the great singularity comes, are we going to evolve into a thinking machines that will live forever? Or are we evolving into some kind of hive mind where everything is shared and processed in parallel?

So here is my proposal.

Each person owns a file that describes everything they have put on the internet. Perhaps it's XML, don't care. Every time I tweet, or email, or post on FB, or record a video, or write a blog -- every tiny piece of data that I produce that is shared with anybody at all goes into this XML file.

Then I get to go in and annotate what I want to share with others. I may change this at any time. This is a passive standard -- people like FB and Google check this file from time to time and honor my wishes as to how my data is being presented or shared. Perhaps I keep this data on a key dongle, or on a PC, or in the cloud. Doesn't matter. But I separate the data from the ownership. Sure, I might choose to share any number of pieces of data with anybody on the web. Perhaps I blog, tweet about it, then post it on FB. But I get to say what my wishes are. If ten years later I am embarrassed by that post, I get to withdraw it.

The internet needs to be able to forget.

I'm not proposing a law, but I am saying that it is vitally important that each of us control our concept of self, of who we are. It used to be that if you made mistakes people would forget who you were and you could move on. It is absolutely critical that we provide this same functionality into whatever we're changing into.

It used to be that there was only one or two places that could index or hold all of the internet. As storage prices drop, the price of data storage is dropping through the floor and the number of organizations able to store all the data we generate in our lives is increasing geometrically. It is already impracticable for me to find all the places some picture might appear and annotate it with "but I was just a kid then". In the future instead of making me chase my data, my data should point back to me. We need a robots.txt file for people.

Bits still gotta be free, but there is a difference between a book, song, or movie and my life. As bits start adding up to cover more and more of my life, you're not just sharing some tune anymore: you're taking away my soul.

I don't want to be the Borg.

For those of you who don't get the pun in the title, obligatory link (and yes, this was before my time)

11:17
Geeking with Greg administrivia
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

This blog passed some fun milestones recently. It just had its six year anniversary, logging over 1500 posts in its lifetime.br /br /When I started this blog in 2004, I wanted to bring personalization to information. Just as personalization and recommendations help people discover what they want in a massive product catalog, I thought personalization and recommendations could help tame the information streams that flood over us. Over the next five years, I wrote on this blog as I worked on personalized news, personalized search, and personalized advertising.br /br /Regular readers may have noticed that posts on this blog have slowed down a fair bit over the last year. In large part, this is because I am no longer working on personalized search or personalized advertising, nor does my work still benefit from tracking what is going on in the information retrieval research community.br /br /I try hard to keep this blog on topic. My plan is to have posts here continue to focus on personalized information, perhaps a bit on research papers, but mostly tracking the increasingly aggressive moves of the internet giants toward personalized search and advertising. But, that means posts will continue to be fairly infrequent.br /br /If for some reason you can't get enough of geeking with me, if you really must have more, you might consider tracking what I am reading more broadly by following me in Google Reader. I use the shared items there as a link blog and comment broadly there on many topics.br /br /Also, on this sixth anniversary, I welcome feedback on what you might enjoy seeing more of on this blog, especially from long-time readers. Do you mostly like the reviews of research papers (which, many have told me, are a great time-saver)? Comments on events in the industry (which might be snark, but perhaps useful snark)? Do you find the posts to be too long or too infrequent? Do you care if this blog stays on the topic of personalized information? If there is anything you want more of, please let me know in the comments!div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-1893456377303822260?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

3:12
Business Analysts: Don’t Forget Your ROI!
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F19%2Fbusiness-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F19%2Fbusiness-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F05%2F19%2Fbusiness-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pa href="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/investment.jpg"img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2479" title="investment" src="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/investment.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="216" //abr / As business analysts, we#8217;re trained to help business stakeholders prioritize projects and requirements within projects to help ensure that the right things are done in the right order to optimize the return on their investment. I think it#8217;s important that we take our own advice when it comes to our analysis efforts and keep ROI (Return on Investment) at front of mind./p pAssuming our emraison d#8217;être/em as BA#8217;s is to help stakeholders reach a shared understanding of what is required for a successful product, what are the things we can do to create that understanding at the lowest cost in time and effort?/p pAnd I#8217;m not suggesting we skimp or not take proper time to do the analysis, only that we be smart about it. One of the reasons traditional delivery methodologies get a bad rap is that they are so regimented and template/checklist-bound. Or, maybe it#8217;s that analysts (and other project team members) interpret them as requiring the regimentation and checklists #8211; but I digress./p pIn any case, you do have to do the analysis. You just have to be expert enough to understand what models and methods #8211; among those available to you #8211; give you the best return on your investment for a particular project and its accompanying set of circumstances./p pA few examples:/p ul liIf we are producing a document that no one reads, the return is probably not worth the investment of time and effort./li liFurther, if we are producing a document that everyone reads and approves, but that doesn#8217;t contribute directly to helping get product out the door, not only is our time and effort wasted, but so is that of everyone who takes the time to review it./li liIf we are spending extra time on paperwork just to make sure that every section of a document has at least #8220;something#8221; in it, the return is probably not worth the investment of time and effort./li /ul pThere are just so many types of requirements, so many types of models, so many tools at an analyst#8217;s disposal that one can easily get caught up in doing things to be doing them #8211; as part of a process/template, because they worked well enough another time, or because #8220;that#8217;s what we#8217;ve always done.#8221;/p pWhen focusing on #8220;the process#8221; or #8220;the checklist#8221;, one can easily forget that the value we provide is not in producing documents, but in clearing the path that leads to stakeholder alignment through shared understanding./p pThere are lots of #8220;good things#8221; that we could do, that may be helpful to someone, somewhere, sometime. The trick is to learn to identify and focus on the #8220;best things#8221; #8211; the things that will move this particular effort furthest forward with an acceptable level of risk for the time and effort invested./p pI say #8220;at an acceptable level of risk,#8221; because analysis paralysis almost always results from well-intentioned project teams doing #8220;good things#8221; well past the point of diminishing returns in a futile attempt to entirely remove risk of the unknown from the equation./p pBefore diving right in and #8220;doing,#8221; I find that it#8217;s a good idea to assess the available tools in my BA toolbox #8211; by that, I mean the collection of documents, models, methods, tips and tricks #8211; basically the things that I can contribute that could help sharpen that shared vision of product/project success for my stakeholders./p pIt isn#8217;t practical to use them all for every project, so I have to decide which tools will get me the farthest toward that shared understanding at the smallest cost. Once I have a pretty good idea on how I think I can add value, I work with my project team members to make sure they understand and are comfortable with those tools/models/etc. Once the team is on board, off we go #8211; readjusting as needed when circumstances change./p pSo, here are a few questions for your consideration. An answer of #8220;yes#8221; MAY indicate an opportunity for you to modify your activities to improve your allocation of time and effort to improve ROI./p ul liAre you doing tasks/work just to fill out a template, or a generic project plan?/li liDo you use the very same modeling techniques, with no variance, for every project?/li liDo you get the sense that your documents aren#8217;t being fully read or used to drive downstream activity?/li liDo your analysis efforts seem to take longer than you think they should?/li liDoes what you#8217;re working on contribute directly to creating a shared vision among stakeholders of what is required for success on the given project/product?/li /ul pSo, when is the last time you considered the ROI for your analysis efforts? And what are you doing to improve it?/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/19/business-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi/"Business Analysts: Don#8217;t Forget Your ROI!/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/07/15/business-analysts-what-do-we-want-to-create/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Business Analysts: What Do We Want to Create?'Business Analysts: What Do We Want to Create?/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2009/07/21/four-key-knowledge-areas-for-business-analysts/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Four Key Knowledge Areas for Business Analysts'Four Key Knowledge Areas for Business Analysts/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/02/23/leadership-through-communication/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Leadership Through Communication'Leadership Through Communication/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/biHH7VFtntaqFtIXrQovtkHp2lA/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/biHH7VFtntaqFtIXrQovtkHp2lA/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/biHH7VFtntaqFtIXrQovtkHp2lA/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/biHH7VFtntaqFtIXrQovtkHp2lA/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=MOu8-gIx9cE:SukIj_wizog:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=MOu8-gIx9cE:SukIj_wizog:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=MOu8-gIx9cE:SukIj_wizog:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=MOu8-gIx9cE:SukIj_wizog:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=MOu8-gIx9cE:SukIj_wizog:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/MOu8-gIx9cE" height="1" width="1"/

2:10
From VMWare + SalesForce.com (VMForce) to VMWare + Google: VMWare’s PaaS milestones
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Three weeks ago, VMWare and Salesforce.com launched VMForce, a Salesforce-hosted PaaS solution based on VMWare runtime technology and force.com application services. In my analysis of the announcement, I wrote:

VMWare wants us to know they are under the covers because of course they have much larger aspirations than to be a provider to SalesForce. They want to use this as a proof point to sell their SpringSource+VMWare stack in other settings, such as private clouds and other public cloud providers (modulo whatever exclusivity period may be in their contract with SalesForce)

Well, looks like there wasn’t much of an exclusivity period after all as today VMWare is going an another date, with Google App Engine (GAE) this time. But a comparison of the two partnerships reveals that there is a lot more in the VMForce announcement than in today’s collaboration.

The difference in features

Before VMForce, we could not deploy Java applications on force.com. After VMForce we can (with the restriction that they have to be Spring-based). That’s a big difference. On the GAE side, the announcement today that we can now more easily run Spring Roo applications on GAE is nothing drastic. We could do it before, it was just harder. There was an ongoing effort to simplify it and there was no secret about this. Looks like it has delivered some improvements as part of the 1.1.0.M1 release. This only becomes major news via the magic of being announced as Google I/O rather than as an email on a developer mailing list.

Now, I don’t want to belittle the benefit of making things simpler. Simplicity is a feature. Especially for Roo where it is key to the value proposition. This looks very nice (and will probably push me over the edge to actually give Roo a spin now that I have an easy way to host whatever toy app I produce). It just doesn’t represent a major technology announcement.

The difference in collaboration

Salesforce is using VMWare infrastructure to run VMForce.com. They present a unified customer support service across the companies. They also presumably have some kind of revenue-sharing agreement. That makes for a close integration as far as business partnership go. No such thing that I can see on the Google side. No VMWare hypervisor is getting inside the Google infrastructure. No share of revenues from Google App Engine for Business goes to VMWare (any SpringSource infrastructure used is brought by the customer, not provided by Google, unlike with VMForce). And while Rod Johnson asserts that “today’s announcement makes Spring the preferred programming model for Google App Engine” (a sentence repeated on the vCloud blog), I don’t see any corresponding declaration on the Google side that would echo the implicit deprioritization of Python and non-Spring Java support. Though I am sure they had nice things to say on stage at Google I/O. From Google’s perspective this sounds more like “we’re happy that they’ve made their tools work well with OUR infrastructure” than an architectural inflection. I think Google has too much pride in their infrastructure to see VMWare/SpringSource as an infrastructure provider rather than just a tool/library. But maybe I’m just jealous… And tools are important anyway.

What we’re not seeing

These VMWare+Salesforce and VMWare+Google announcements are also interesting for what is NOT there. Isn’t it interesting that the companies that VMWare enables with a PaaS platform are those which… already have a PaaS platform? What we haven’t seen is VMWare enabling a mid-tier telco to become a PaaS provider. Someone who has power, servers and wires and wants to become a Cloud provider. VMWare is just starting to sell them an IaaS platform (vCloud) and cannot provide them with a turnkey PaaS platform yet by lack of application services (IDM, storage…) and of a comprehensive (i.e. not just virtualization) management platform. Make a list of what application services you think a PaaS platform requires and you probably have a good idea of the VMWare shopping list. But with Salesforce and Google this is not a problem, as they already have these services and all they need from VMWare is an application runtime (or just a runtime interface for Google) and some development tools.

The application services are also where the real PaaS portability issues appear. Which is also probably why Salesforce.com and Google are not too worried about being commoditized as interchangeable Spring runtime infrastructures. They know that the differentiation is with the application services. Their respective values in this domain are their business focus (processes, analytics, SaaS integration) for Salesforce and their scalability and low cost for Google (and more and more also the SaaS part). Not to mention Amazon who is not resting on its IaaS laurels and also keeps innovating in Cloud application services (e.g. RRS just yesterday). On their side, the value proposition seems to be centered on practicality and scale.

This is good news overall. As Steve Herrod writes, SpringSource has indeed been very busy and displays an impressive amount of energy in figuring this PaaS thing out. We’re still in the very early days of the battle of the Cloud Frameworks and at this point the armies are establishing beachheads and not yet running into one another. There is plenty of space for experimentation. 2010 is the year of PaaS.

Related posts:

May 19, 2010
20:08
Happy Open Discussion Day, 2010
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
I almost let today go by without blogging about Open Discussion Day. Of course, lately, I haven’t been doing much blogging at all, which is entirely out of my person, but anyway, let’s get onto the festivities.
First, so you understand, Open Discussion Day started back 4 years ago when Ploum first blogged about showing support for open protocols, such as Jabber/XMPP (using Google Talk, jabber.org, and others). I’ve blogged about it in the past, even though I missed blogging about it last year.
You can start with by checking out the page [www.opendiscussionday.org]. There, you’ll find a wiki that has some information on how to get started with open communication platforms, protocols and software. Given the ways we communicate with each other on the Internet and elsewhere, it makes sense to advocate supporting these open platforms. Here’s a brief, non-exhaustive list of various open protocols worth checking out:
- Jabber/XMPP- Jabber/XMPP is probably the most successful open communication platform to date. According to Wikipedia, it has more than 50 million active users, mostly on the Google Talk/Gmail service. It’s supported on Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s a federated protocol, which means Jabber/XMPP can communicate across different domains. It uses SSL encryption by default, which means your communication is secure, and most of the clients are free, and solid applications.
- OMB- The Open MicroBlogging protocol was started in response to Twitter. Rather than being tied to a particular vendor for your status updates, Laconi.ca, now Status.net, launched and announced they would provide an open, federated, protocol for broadcasting your “tweets”, following others, and others following you. Identi.ca was their product, and it has proven to be very successful, and the open platform has sparked a number of other microblogging servers, all in tight communication. [army.twit.tv], [brainbird.net], and others are based on this code, and can all communicate together. Lastly, there are a number of microblogging applications that support Identi.ca, and the others. You can follow me at [identi.ca].
- IRC- Internet Relay Chat is one of the older forms of open communication in this list, except for email. It uses TCP for the transport protocol, and optionally SSL/TLS for encrypting your communication. As with everything else is this list, IRC is federated, meaning connecting multiple IRC servers together, and communicating transparently. Freenode is probably one of the more common IRC servers for open source projects. OFTC, EFNet and UnderNet are popular as well. There are many IRC clients out there that can get you chatting on any number of different IRC networks at the same time. My personal favorite is Irssi, a text-based client.
- Email- The last, but definitely not least, however the oldest, and probably most ubiquitous. Everyone is familiar with email, and it’s rare to find people these days that don’t have an email address. It too is federated, meaning you can send an email from gmail.com to hotmail.com, without thinking about it. Many open protocols have been built around email, including SMTP, IMAP and POP, as well as their secure, encrypted versions. As much as the Internet would like to see email die, I personally think it will be around for quite some time. The only thing I would ask, is that people stop sending proprietary attachments to their message, bottom post, trim unnecessary cruft from the mail, and write in plain text (I think I might be reversing my stance on HTML email- we’ll see).
Of course, there are many closed discussion platforms and protocols, such as Twitter, Facebook, Skype and MSN/AIM/ICQ/Yahoo. It’s important to note that you don’t own your data on these services, unlike the ones I’ve mentioned above. You are subject to vendor lockin, and everyone else must use those services too, as they don’t communicate with each other. But, we’re about the open discussion protocols, not the closed ones, so let’s continue.
I’m sure there are many other open communication platforms that would be worthy discussing in this post. I chose what I feel to be the biggest and most successful of the open protocols. The future will tell what else we see in this arena, but right now all I can say, is we have a great deal of options for supporting an open protocol, many of which are doing very, very well. If you have other open communication protocols that you use, make sure you specify them in the comments, or add them to the Open Discussion Day wiki. For the record, I fully support all the open protocols/communication platforms, and you can find me on any of the protocols listed above.
Happy Open Discussion Day, 2010!

14:20
Nerd Zoo
» ‎ What To Fix

I was discussing with PlinkPlonk from HackerNews the nature of Agile the other day and it struck me what a wonderful zoo of human experience I've had the pleasure to observe.

I was talking to a team member yesterday who was telling me that he had a fifth-degree black belt in Taekwondo. I worked with a guy years ago who was a nuclear particle physicist. One guy was a rocket scientist from the former Soviet Union.

I remember saying one day "Geesh! This isn't rocket science!" and everybody in the room laughed. (I loved that East-German Rocket-Scientist guy, because he always sounded like a mad scientist from cheesey sci-fi movies when describing programming problems)

Part of my job over the past few years has been to work in a tightly-integrated fashion with a few teams at a time for a month or two, and then move on. It's not just been one industry, either -- I've had the privilege to travel all over the country and see teams tackling all sorts of technology problems.

It hasn't always been fun, but it's been very varied.

I worked at one place and was talking about requirements. "You have to have a list of things that people understand in case one of you gets run over by a bus the team can carry on."

There was dead silence.

Later that day I saw a plaque next to the cafeteria. Somebody on the team had gotten ran over by a bus.

Mostly, though, it's been very fascinating. When I first started working in software teams in my 20s, I expected programmers and technology people to be sort of supermen -- they were working on the hardest problems in the world, they were using logic and reason as their tools -- you'd expect these guys to be highly-functional, rational, erudite paragons of rationality.

I remember my first contract job. I had been doing a lot of programming and hardware set up in the local area, but I was self-taught, and I was sure that I was out of my league. Here I had flown across the country to Sacramento, dressed in suit, and was waiting outside the door of the VP of an insurance company.

He came to greet me in a "Go Buckeyes!" T-shirt and sandals.

Technology people did not turn out as I had expected.

Instead of a laboratory, it's been much more like a zoo: I get to go to various exhibits, er companies, and watch how people play and work there. What are the customs? What are the unwritten rules? Are they happy? How does change occur?

Some technology folks become teachers. I find that the really good ones are eventually leaned on to start sharing some of their knowledge. (This can have a very bad effect on the teacher if they lose their technical chops over time, but that's a story for another day). A lot of technology people are attracted to aviation, as I was. Somebody told me once that there is a certain kind of brain that likes to master intricate technical skills as a way of relaxing. We get a lot of those folks in technology.

I've found that people are a lot less rational than they think they are. No, this isn't meant as some sort of "Most people are stupid" kind of remark. Rather it's a trait of all humans: we have an amazing ability to self-deceive. People can understand this if you show them some kind of optical illusion or some cognitive parlor trick, but most folks have a very difficult time understanding what a deep role it plays in everybody's psyche.

One of the reasons that small teams are so much more powerful than individual or pair programmers is the ability of a team to cover all the cognitive blind spots. This has led me to believe that true diversity -- diversity of personality styles and life experiences -- is critical for any team to succeed. It's also been interesting to observe that any decision made by a team of more than 7-9 players is based almost completely on group dynamics, no matter how much the participants believe it may be based on logic or reason. in fact, the larger the group the more a clan or political group mentality sets in, at least among some members. If you had told me that 20 years ago I wouldn't have believed you. At some team size greater than 9 members, we begin to start forming small versions of political parties. Fascinating.

I've noticed that people who think they know things are very useful -- except for the times they're not, in which case it's crazy hard to get them to understand they are mistaken. As part of that, I've gone back to Socrates -- humble ignorant questioning is probably the most rational way for humans to interact. It also can be uncomfortable, especially if you have the pride of being an expert or feel like you have spent your time earning your rank and shouldn't be questioned.

Some folks hack their bodies off-work. A few people ran marathons. A lot had gym memberships -- which they used to varying degrees. Be careful starting a conversation about nutrition! If there are any takers it could go for a long time, and you'd better have boned up on organic chemistry.

There are the mensa members and the Trekkers, of course. All the stereotypical "nerd" traits are still around. The old joke that goes "How do you tell an extroverted engineer? He stares at your shoes while he's talking to you" still holds true with some. There are still guys with the nerdy glasses and dorky look, but this is really not as common as before. Any more there are a huge number of immigrants. I have met people in IT from just about every country in the world.

I think one of the huge untold stories of the past decade is the burgeoning friendship between Americans and Indians, and to some extent the Chinese. No matter where our governments are at, hundreds of thousands of folks at the "grunt" level are meeting each other and making lasting friendships.

Computers and technology in general have grown so quickly that they have "sucked up" vast numbers of people from all over the planet who trained or planned their life to turn out very differently. And work in industry is vastly different than academia, the other place where you'll see so many cultures mixing. Directors don't get teunre, and I seriously doubt you'll run into a coworker just passing through living on a trust fund or attend a demonstration in the cafeteria for a some political cause.

This makes technology workers probably the best place to see the largest number of integrated diverse people actually living their lives while mingling with each other. Which is pretty cool, actually.

10:13
Tour d'horizon de Windows Phone 7
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Windows Phone est un système d'exploitation pour téléphones mobiles présenté par Microsoft lors du MIX 2010 sous le nom Windows Phone 7 Series. S'inspirant des modèles à succès que sont l'iPhoneOS d'Apple et l'Android de Google, Microsoft a fait table rase de son précédent système mobile et souhaite désormais s'imposer comme un acteur majeur du mobile grand public. Matériel : un cahier des charges très strict Les constructeurs de terminaux Windows Phone, tels que Samsung ou LG qui ont participé à la (...)

May 18, 2010
15:57
Interesting sentences
» ‎ Michael Nielsen

From Pierre Levy’s book Collective Intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace:

Groups learn even more slowly than individuals.

The flipside to this is that sometimes groups learn things that individuals can’t or won’t.

14:31
The Iron Triangle: God, Suffering, and Death
» ‎ What To Fix

I enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy, and over the years I have reached a strange conclusion.

There are really only three important metaphysical concepts: God, Suffering, and Death. How each of us deal with these concepts form the basis of our value system.

God is a placeholder name for the Great Unknown. Ancient peoples understood that they didn't understand most of life, so they created placeholders for things they didn't know. There was the god of the sun, the god of the moon, the god of rain, etc. Almost immediately after creating gods, they started giving them human characteristics. But I would encourage you to separate the two things. A belief in God is a deeply held belief that there is much in the universe we do not know. There is a kind of humbleness that goes with this that feels awkward to modern man. But our relationship to the unknown forms a critical part of life. We create explanations for those things, either using science or just making stuff up. We share these stories and beliefs. Man's relationship to the unknown begins at birth and is probably his most powerful driving force.

Immediately after birth, our tiny brains realizing there is a vast amount of unknown, we experience suffering. Indeed, suffering remains with us throughout life. Buddhists tell us that suffering is a response to being too attached to things in life. Some people become atheists because they can't understand how a God would allow so much suffering in the world. Some sects view suffering as a part of purification. Some religions tell us that our relationship with God determines in some way our experience of suffering.

Suffering, like God, is an irreconcilable part of life, of existing. (All of these concepts are meta-concepts) So we're stuck with it. Like the Great Unknown, there are folks who try to completely ignore or run away from suffering using things like drugs. Usually these efforts end very badly.

Finally there's death, or the end of our life. Every living being will end at some point. Existentialists tell us that how we deal in the present with our impending death is a critical part of the value of our life, and I agree. Many religions have sprang up to connect God with Death in various fashions.

I believe these three universal concepts, God, Death, and Suffering, will continue to exist long after I am gone. In fact, I believe they exist for all beings, human or not. If 2 billion years in the future aliens in some hive mind finally harness the power of a galaxy, they will still deal with God, Suffering, and Death.

That makes these concepts very cool. We can make several observations. For instance, for most of mankind's history we have been struggling with these concepts. Science attempts to make the unknown less and less. Religion gives us answers about Suffering and Death. Medicine address Suffering and Death. People die for God. People suffer to make other people's deaths easier.

Some folks have tried to completely deny these concepts. Some believe there is no such thing as the unknown in a deep sense: either we know most everything now and/or we will at some point in the future. This is the religion of science. Some folks say we can beat death -- machine intelligence will make our lives effectively last forever. Some think life can exist without any suffering at all.

I don't know, but my guess is that there are deep flaws with these positions. For instance, even a machine intelligence living for a million years could cease to exist as a result of an accident. The idea that death can come for us will never disappear, even if we radically change the 80-year life span. There's a yin and yang part of suffering in life that makes the happy parts mean more because of the sad parts.

But I don't know, I'm not sure.

And I'm happy with that.

May 17, 2010
22:41
Follow Me to Gartner Blog Network
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

Yeah, this blog has looked a bit empty lately. I know you’re thinking “Doesn’t Craig still have thoughts on attention management, collaboration, content management, information work, SharePoint, and portals?” (yes, I just read that from my category cloud). Of course I do! But I’m posting those thoughts elsewhere. As you may know, Burton Group was [...]

May 15, 2010
14:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 051410
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office in outer space, where I’m blogging from the space shuttle Atlantis’s final mission… #1: RT @georgedearing Pilot advertisers happy with initial results from Twitter’s new ad program // http://bit.ly/twittermarketers // #fb [ADWEEK] #2: The debate about pilot projects in social business http://bit.ly/c3EViV by @leebryant #e20 #3: RT @amyjokim How to build [...]

May 14, 2010
11:28
Yahoo as an internet information filter
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is talking up personalization again, this time in an amusingly titled a href="http://www.esquire.com/women/women-issue/carol-bartz-bio-0510"Esquire article/a:blockquoteiWhen you talk about the Internet growing to 225 million sites, you've got to ask: Who's parsing all that? How do you make sense of all that stuff?br /br /I mean, who has time to wander all over the Internet?br /br /Tomorrow's Yahoo! is going to be really tailored. I'm not talking about organization — organizing means that you already know what you want and somebody's just putting it in shape for you. I'm talking about both smart science and people culling through masses of information on the fly and figuring out what people want to know.br /br /We will be delivering your interests to you. For instance, if you're a sports fan but have no interest in tennis, we won't show you tennis. We would know that you do things in a certain sequence, so we'd say, "Here's your portfolio. Here's some news you might like. Oh, you went to this movie last week, here's some other movies you might want to check out."br /br /I call it the Internet of One. I want it to be mine, and I don't want to work too hard to get what I need. In a way, I want it to be HAL. I want it to learn about me, to be me, and cull through the massive amount of information that's out there to find exactly what I want./i/blockquotePlease see also my June 2009 post, "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/06/yahoo-ceo-carol-bartz-on.html"Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on personalization/a", for more on Yahoo's vision of recommending information.br /br /[Esquire article found a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/my_own_private_1.php"Nick Carr/a]div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-5426702685786097846?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

May 13, 2010
2:12
ACTA Discussion Show Audio from Coast to Coast AM Radio Now Online
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. A number of persons have requested the show audio from my extensive discussion of the many risks inherent in the process and particulars of ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) from Coast to Coast AM radio last Sunday night. I...

May 12, 2010
17:47
Intégration pas à pas de tests Selenium dans Hudson
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Pour n'importe quel projet informatique, il est capital de satisfaire les spécifications fonctionnelles. Pour un projet web, ces spécifications peuvent bien souvent être traduites en cas d'utilisation et plus particulièrement en tests Selenium. Pour parfaire la qualité d'un projet il devient tout de suite intéressant d'inclure ces tests fonctionnels dans un processus d'intégration continue, dans notre cas, avec Hudson. Nous allons voir dans cet article comment mettre en place, pas à pas, ce (...)

14:00
Foursquare Check-in Etiquette
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

Anyone remember the early complaints about Twitter? That people were posting updates about what they’re eating for lunch? Robert Scoble noted this phenomenon in a blog post from last September about Twitter’s rise: It tells me that Twitter isn’t lame anymore. Remember those days when Twitter was for telling all your friends you were having [...]

May 11, 2010
22:31
Strangling the Net: Stripping DMCA Protections from YouTube
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. An amicus curiae brief was filed a few days ago by the Washington Legal Foundation in the ongoing Viacom vs. YouTube/Google lawsuit. Even by the normal standards of our adversarial legal system, this brief is startling not only in...

21:20
Google tries to save the news
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

James Fallows at The Atlantic has a new article out, "a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/05/how-to-save-the-news/8095/"How to Save the News/a", on what Googlers think about the future of the news industry.br /br /Some key excerpts:blockquotei"If you were starting from scratch, you could never possibly justify [the current] business model," [Google Chief Economist] Hal Varian said ... "Grow trees -- then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?" The old-tech wastefulness of the process is obvious, but Varian added a less familiar point. Burdened as they are with these "legacy" print costs, newspapers typically spend about 15 percent of their revenue on what, to the Internet world, are their only valuable assets: the people who report, analyze, and edit the news.br /br /"Nothing that I see suggests the 'death of newspapers,'" [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt told me. The problem was the high cost and plummeting popularity of their print versions. "Today you have a subscription to a print newspaper," he said. "In the future model, you'll have subscriptions to information sources that will have advertisements embedded in them, like a newspaper. You'll just leave out the print part. I am quite sure that this will happen ... As print circulation falls, the growth of the online audience is dramatic ... Newspapers don't have a demand problem; they have a business-model problem." Many of his company’s efforts are attempts to solve this, so that newspaper companies can survive, as printed circulation withers away. br /br /The three pillars of the new online business model, as I heard them invariably described, are distribution, engagement, and monetization. That is: getting news to more people, and more people to news-oriented sites; making the presentation of news more interesting, varied, and involving; and converting these larger and more strongly committed audiences into revenue, through both subscription fees and ads. br /br /The best monetizing schemes are of course ones that people like -- ads they enjoy seeing, products for which they willingly pay. Online display ads should be better on these counts too, [Google VP Neal] Mohan said. "here are things we can do online that we simply can't do in print," he said. An ad is "intrusive" mainly if it is not related to what you care about at that time ... "The online world will be a lot more attuned to who you are and what you care about" ... Advertising has been around forever, Mohan said, "but until now it has always been a one-way conversation."/i/blockquoteThe a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/05/how-to-save-the-news/8095/"entire article/a is well worth reading. It gives a great feel for how Googlers are thinking about the future of news (and is mostly in line with my own thoughts).br /br /Please see also my Oct 2009 post, "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-ceo-on-personalized-news.html"Google CEO on personalized news/a".div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-2383439018929232597?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

0:57
data… data… and data in 2010
» ‎ CaptainDash

It is difficult to imagine how much data we represent… but crunching the internet helps to figure out. According to IBM, Forrester and a few others, here are the Data that humans create, while paying their taxes, giving calls, listening to music, shooping, working, travelling, etc. I suspect that these numbers are just approximate expectations, [...]

May 10, 2010
21:52
Summary of ACTA Discussion from Coast to Coast AM Last Night
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Coast to Coast AM has already posted their summary of my ACTA discussion from last nights show (which turned out to be a 2.5 hour segment including listener questions). [Update (May 12, 2010): Complete show audio is online here....
May 09, 2010
11:25
ACTA Treaty Abominations on Coast to Coast AM Radio Tonight (Sunday)
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. This is just a quick heads-up that Ive been booked tonight (Sunday, 9 May) onto Coast to Coast AM -- the nationwide/global late night radio program -- for what will probably be a rather extensive discussion of the international...
May 08, 2010
21:38
New York Times Joins the Obnoxious Autoplay Audio Ad Club
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Last November in How to Sink a Major Web Site with a Single Ad, I noted how ABC News had begun using an autoplay ad format that starts blasting audio from an accompanying video advertisement as soon as an...

14:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 050710
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office at the New York Stock Exchange, where I said “Sell Google shares, not a googol shares!” #1: Li: CEOs have five things they focus on every day. Your “open leadership” and social strategies need to relate to one of them. #socialc20 #2: Surowiecki: The presence of a single dissenter makes a [...]

May 07, 2010
16:55
Coming to a Computer Near You: The Multi-factor Quiz Show
» ‎ What To Fix

Many companies are (rightfully) getting very concerned about security on the net. So to make sure you are who you say you are, they use something called "multi-factor authentication" It's not enough to have a password any more: now they'd like a smartcard, or perhaps you could store the answers to some questions only you would know the answers to. For those of us perhaps a bit on the forgetful side, this is not fun.

So now when I surf the net, it's like a quiz show. I go to log in to my brokerage account. After the password, they ask "What was the name of your elementary school?"

I don't know. They changed the name about halfway through my first year. Did I use the original one or the later one?

Visit another site: "What was the name of your favorite pet?"

I had a lot of pets. I really liked my cat WhiteFoot, but FriskyFoot was pretty cool too, and then was that dog Sad Eyes that Joy had...

"Where is your favorite vacation spot?"

The kids like Myrtle Beach, but I've always been fond of Maine, but then there was that trip I took about the time I set the account up....

"Who was your best friend growing up?"

Now wait a minute. I had LOTS of friends, thank you very much, and for me to pick one out....

"Where did you meet your wife?" "When is your wedding anniversary?" "Who is your favorite aunt?"

Stupid computer.
May 06, 2010
16:59
Collaborative Blogging -- Bad Agile User Stories
» ‎ What To Fix

This is my first shot at collaborative blogging -- where you, the user, have just as much control over the blog as I do.

I'll ask the question and you guys respond, both by voting, giving options, and commenting. As things progress, you can send links to other people to join the conversation, add in text, images, video, video conferencing, IM, mindmaps, embed the results in your own blog, or whatever. Whatever you think is appropriate for the topic.

Then you can monitor the changes as other people add their thoughts effortlessly -- using the web.

We're using Google Wave, so if you don't have it and would like it visit the site or ask for an invite. It's all web-based (works best in Chrome) and it's probably the future of something-or-another. That's kind of what we're trying to figure out. Not sure, but I think you're going to need a high-speed connection for this.

google.load("wave", "1"); google.setOnLoadCallback(initialize); function initialize() { var waveframe = document.getElementById("waveframe"); var embedOptions = { target: waveframe, header: false, toolbar: false, footer: false }; var wavePanel = new google.wave.WavePanel(embedOptions); wavePanel.loadWave("googlewave.com!w+eW1CgukjA");}

10:30
Integration patterns for social data: the Open Social Data Bus
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
The previous entry, “Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter“, used Twitter and Facebook as examples to illustrate a general point about the integration of social profile data. Unfortunately, the examples may have overshadowed the larger point. In the post, I didn’t consider Twitter as a social network but as a message conduit. Most people on the other hand think of Twitter as a social network (after all, which Twitterer is not watching his/her follower count?) and could come out with the impression that I was just saying that Twitter is a better social network than Facebook. It wasn’t my point.

The main point is about defining the right integration pattern for social data: is it a “message bus” pattern or a “shared database” pattern. For readers who haven’t had the joy of dealing with integration architecture and enterprise integration patterns, here is a one-paragraph primer:

The expense report application in a company needs to be in sync with the data in the HR system, so that an expense report can be sent to the right manager for review/approval. Implementing such application integration in an efficient, resilient and flexible way is hard. Battle-tested approaches (high-level “patterns”) have emerged that have been successful, in the right context. Architects have learned that 99% of the time they are better off asking themselves which of these enterprise integration patterns is right for their problem, rather than trying to invent a new approach. Two of the most common basic patterns are the “shared database” pattern and the “message bus” pattern. In the “shared database” pattern, all the applications read and write to the same repository. In the “message bus” pattern, applications post messages on a shared channel (the “bus”) and also listen on the channel for messages from other applications that they are interested in. It’s similar to a radio channel of the kind used by police and ham radio operators.

(diagrams by Hohpe/Woolf, under cc license)

Facebook wants your social data to be shared across sites and applications using the “shared database” pattern, in which Facebook is the central database (and also the primary application). What I described in the previous post was the use of a “message bus” pattern (in which Twitter was used as the bus).

A bus has the following advantages when applied to the problem of sharing social data:
- All applications have equal access
- The applications are loosely-coupled, meaning that changing one doesn’t break the others
- If applications only communicate via the bus, you get to observe the data shared about you
- It can scale well
There are lots of interesting considerations about how to build and operate such a bus: security, scalability, access protocols, payload format, etc. But they are secondary to the choice of the integration pattern. For the sake of illustration, Twitter’s approach to security is OAuth, their scalable architecture is described here, the access protocols here and the payload format here. Reasonable alternatives exist for all these functions.

It’s hard for me to imagine the content of the messages on this bus not resembling RDF-like subject/verb/object triplets, in which the subject is implicit (the user attached to the message). The verbs could be simple strings or represented by URIs and have an associated taxonomy. And as in RDF, the objects should be either URIs or simple values (mostly strings, of a limited size, be it 140 characters or something else). Possible examples (the subject is implicit, the verb is in square brackets):
```
[say] I just had coffeecake for breakfast
[like] http://www.hobees.com/
[location] http://www.hobees.com/redwood.html
```
I still think Twitter is the most practical implementation of the Open Social Data Bus, for reasons I listed before:
- It’s here today
- It’s open and makes no pretense of (often violated) “privacy settings”
- It can scale (give or take some growing pains and some still-drastic quota restrictions)
- It has a delegated authorization model (though not quite as fine-grained as I’d like)
- It already has a large ecosystem of provider/consumer applications
- Humans look at the messages, ensuring that any integration of personal data will remain at a human scale and therefore controllable
- It has proven to be a very successful environment for semantic tags to emerge spontaneously
- It is persisted by many actors, including Google, Bing and the Library of Congress
- Did I mention that it’s here today?
I remember discussions, in the early-to-mid-nineties, about whether the Internet, this quirky but fast-growing network, would turn into the expected global “information superhighway” or whether a superior one would have to emerge. This might seem like a silly discussion today but it wasn’t so obvious at the time. Wondering whether Twitter will turn out to be the Open Social Data Bus will seem just as silly in 15 years, though I don’t know if it will be deemed silly because the answer was obviously “no” or obviously “yes”…

The tension between Twitter as an infrastructure provider and Twitter as a competitor in the Twitter app marketplace is well-known. The company understands that what makes them different from other social networks is the ecosystem of applications that was enabled by this “message bus” pattern. Which is why, even as they announced that they were going to create their own applications to tap into the stream, they took pains to explain that they would be calling the same interfaces as everybody else.

On the other hand, Twitter obviously also needs to worry about making money. If their service becomes a low-level service, invisible to users (almost like DNS), then who is going to pay for the operations? Especially since the expectations on Twitter are currently so high that a “normal” rate of profit on operating such an infrastructure would be a huge letdown for investors. But this is not a post about the business prospects and strategic challenges of Twitter. It’s about allowing integration of social profile data in a way that benefits users.

I’d be fine with some other Open Social Data Bus implementation taking over and serving this need, as long as it fulfills the key requirements of being equally open to all applications and allowing individuals to control what gets posted about them. There are other avenues if Twitter cannot (or doesn’t want to) play this role. As the DNS example shows, it doesn’t necessarily have to be operated by a single operator. And there are a variety of funding models for such essential infrastructure (see “who funds root name server operations?” in the DNS root name servers FAQ). Alternatively, applications might be charged based on how much data they get from the bus.

Corporate support can take different forms. From wireless frequencies to wi-fi networks to DNS to supporting Firefox Google has shown a willingness to support the development and operation of the internet infrastructure, confident that they’ll be in the best position to benefit from it. Especially if the alternative is what Pete Cashmore describes as “Google’s nightmare“.

You could even think of this service eventually falling under the “common carrier” model, with the corresponding legal constraints. Especially in societies that are more privacy-aware.

I don’t know what the right business/operating model is for the Open Social Data Bus. What I know is that it’s how I want my social profile data to flow between applications.

[UPDATED 2010/5/20: Some supporting evidence for my recollection of "discussions, in the early-to-mid-nineties, about whether the Internet, this quirky but fast-growing network, would turn into the expected global 'information superhighway' or whether a superior one would have to emerge":

Gates's 286-page book [The Road Ahead, 1995] mentions the World Wide Web on only four of its pages, and portrays the Internet as a subset of a much a larger “Information Superhighway.” The Internet, wrote Gates, is one of “the important precursors of the information highway,” along with PCs, CD-ROMs, phone networks, and cable systems, but “none represents the actual information highway. … today’s Internet is not the information highway I imagine, although you can think of it as the beginning of the highway.”]

Related posts:

May 04, 2010
23:06
The Best datagov countries
» ‎ CaptainDash

We all know that the Countries that compose the OECD are usually some tough ones when it regards Data. Apart the fact that they are the richest places on earth, a measurable difference with other is that they proudly consider that they generally deliver data and financial reporting that are clearly serious stuff (ok, I can [...]

15:08
Sprint -- can you hear me now?
» ‎ What To Fix

I am working on-site in North Carolina for a while. The client is large, so they have Wi-Fi available for visiting consultants but it is monitored by the network Nazis. They also have video surveillance of the entire place.

So using the WiFi is an non-starter. I don't surf porn at work, but I do like to do whatever the hell I feel like on the internet without having people watch and log my actions.

So I plugged up my Sprint modem, got 4 bars on an EVDO connection, and went to town.

Then weird things started happening.

First the connection would go up and down seemingly at random. I know a bit about multipath propagation, so no big deal. But random cars driving by outside and what I was seeing was two different things.

First, after putting a heavy load on the card, such as a big download, the signal would drop in strength -- consistently. Sometimes it would drop into dial-up speed world, and the using the internet would be painful.

After a while, and on some days, all I could get was dial-up speeds.

Second, as my mother passed away recently, I have another almost identical card in my pocket. For the past couple of days, I've been playing a game: when one card has problems I switch the cards.

Every time so far the signal has gotten better and the transfer speed improved. Now these are two identical cards in the same place getting different results.

Is Sprint promising me one kind of bandwidth and delivering on another -- sort of high-speed for all the folks that don't really need high-speed? I'm beginning to think so, although I am not completely sure.

What I am sure about is if the larger story of ISPs playing games with speed figures continues, we're going to end up not only having net neutrality, but some QoS regulations as well. As a libertarian, I am against government intervention, but everybody deserves to have a very clear idea about what they are buying or the marketplace doesn't work efficiently. The impedance mismatch between what people think they are purchasing and what they are getting grows larger.

So Sprint! Can you hear me now? Or do I have to get a bigger stick?

13:10
Business continuity with real-time data integration
» ‎ BigDataMatters.com

div xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtmlp style=text-align: justify; /pp style=margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;span lang=en-USEnterprises want to protect their data. /spanspan lang=en-USAs the appetite for data volumes grows, storage technology becomes a critical business asset on which business continuity relies./span My recent survey in the medium-size enterprise segment shows the five dominant investment directions at the level of data management architecture: disaster recovery (DR), high availability (HA), backup, data processing performance and migration to more advanced databases. /pp style=margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify;This suggests that corporations generally have sufficiently structured data collections but are concerned with business continuity and continuous availability of data. What infrastructures can provide these assurances?/pp style=margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: justify; /p p style=text-align: justify; /pp style=text-align: justify;The most basic approach to provide data safety is hardware or software replication that automatically maintains a secondary copy of critical data. Home-made backup methods, based on open source software are also not unheard of. /pp style=text-align: justify;Oracle customers have more options: Oracle Active Data Guard can be used if the source and copies are based on identical Oracle versions and data models, while Oracle RAC promises transparent application failover if the copies are in close proximity. Finally, as the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model wins the market for its price and elasticity, one can take advantage of a remote Cloud to host a secondary copy of the business-critical data. /pp style=text-align: justify;In this post I want to focus on yet another option, and that is the Real-Time Data Integration model. As an example I am going to discuss Oracle GoldenGate, a solution that permits you to manage the data critical to your business in safety, ensuring business continuity without disruption even if the data is distributed among multiple, heterogeneous business applications and architectures./ph3strongKey facts about GoldenGate/strong/h3p style=text-align: justify;By 2009, GoldenGate, a San Francisco-based vendor of real-time data integration software was still a modest size (by Silicon Valley standards), but already had a considerable market presence: 500 global customers including top commercial banks, telcos and retail companies. /pp style=text-align: justify;What led Oracle to the acquisition? With its product portfolio, Oracle could already build advanced HA architectures for its customers, based on their own products.#0160; spanHowever, Oracle could not directly compete compete in the domain of real time data replication. o:p/o:p/span span lang=en-US/span /pp style=text-align: justify;How does it work? The secret is simple: GoldenGate can synchronize two heterogeneous databases, by reading the real-time history of all transactional changes at the source database. The delta is then#0160; piped to the other database(s), again in real-time. In technical language, this is called Change Data Capture (CDC). /pp style=text-align: justify;Simplicity is the feature of killer apps; GoldenGate guarantees transactional integrity when copying between source and target databases. With the simple deployment of#0160; GoldenGate between databases, one can build a highly available architecture with each database holding accurate copies of each other#39;s data./pp style=text-align: justify;Most importantly, GoldenGate permits active-active database replication. Imagine two separate branches of a corporation with separate IT systems (typical internal legacy of an acquisition process and a nightmare for sysadmins). With active-active, even though the two offices are not fully integrated, users can write to both locations at the same time, and the data will remain consistent. /pp style=text-align: justify;Here we touch one of the core problems of distributed data storage systems, which is the issue of consistency between geographically separated data replicas. Oracle GoldenGate guarantees that even in an unstable environment where networks and host servers occasionally drop out, transactions will never be missed or skipped. Active-active is not without it’s challenges – collision detection must be developed, but Oracle GoldenGate provides a foundation upon which business logic can be easily built./ph3strongWhen to use real-time data integration/strong/h3p style=text-align: justify;In the real-world, corporations use mixed IT architectures from multiple vendors (often a legacy of corporate history). When selecting a technology for a real-time data integration platform, the ease of integration across the spectrum of database and application platforms from multiple vendors is key. GoldenGate is no exception here; its Oracle license permits use with OracleDB and competitive products alike, knowing that this is the only way to maintain the competitive edge. Here are a few scenarios when real-time data integration can be considered:/pspan style=font-size: 13px; font-family: quot;Arialquot;,quot;sans-serifquot;;span style=font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;/span/spanol style=text-align: justify;listrongHigh-availability/strong: Oracle GoldenGate will automatically maintain a live remote copy of your application’s interim data, so your business application can fail over#0160; to the secondary storage during a disaster recovery scenario, with minimal down-time./li listrongLive migration/strong: upgrade, migration or maintenance of a production system typically involves downtime. Oracle GoldenGate enables zero-downtime migration, as the new system can be populated with old system data without operational interruption of the former./li listrongIntegration of heterogeneous systems/strong: your applications rely on Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, DB2 and what-not? A real-time data integration platform#0160; can make them all operate on the same, shared data with minimal integration effort./li listrongMergers, acquisitions and IT consolidation in a growing enterprise/strong: before your final, uniform architecture will be devised, a CDC technique can quickly consolidate data from branches and departments. (By the way, we both know that there is no such thing as “final architecture”!)/li listrongQuery offloading/strong: an interesting side-effect of sharing replicated data among multiple data marts is the improvement of OLTP performance and availability. Queries processed simultaneously by multiple servers execute faster and your reports are ready sooner./li /ol div style=text-align: justify; /divp style=text-align: justify;/ph3 style=text-align: justify;strongWhen to use something else?/strong/h3p style=text-align: justify;Savvy managers will carefully consider their options when building a real-time data integration architecture. For instance, care needs to be taken when planning for real-time data consolidation of multiple production systems, when at the same time thinking of it as a HA architecture. Can your business survive if one of them fails? span lang=en-USThis often depends on short and long-term investment management strategies. br //span/pp style=text-align: justify;span lang=en-USAnother issue addressed specifically to existing Oracle customers is how does GoldenGate coexist with other technologies, be it Oracle or non-Oracle that partially fulfill the same or similar functionality? You obviously don’t want to duplicate your investment. It is wise to learn and correctly differentiate between scenarios whereGoldenGate can complement RAC , Active Data Guard or other high-availability paradigms, and those where it is easier to use one of these products standalone. With Oracle licensing, these are not trivial questions and substantial cost savings can be made through informed decisions.br //span/pp style=margin-bottom: 0in; /p p style=text-align: justify;We will cover these subjects at the forthcoming a href=http://gridwisetech.com/momentum/goldengate_eventseminar/a in Krakow, Poland, May 27th 2010./pp style=text-align: justify;/pp style=text-align: justify;/p/div

5:47
Don’t tell Facebook what you like, tell Twitter
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
There seems to be a lot to like technically about the announcements at Facebook’s f8 conference, especially for a Semantic Web aficionado. But I won’t have anything to do with it as a user. Along with the usual “your privacy is our toy” subtext, I really don’t like the lack of data portability. “Web 2.0″ is starting to look a lot like “AOL 2.0″. Here is a better way to do it.

Taking the new “like” button as a simple example, I’d much rather tell Twitter what I like than Facebook. A simple #like hashtag in a tweet can be used to express positive feelings for what the tweet describes. Here is a quick list of the many advantages of this approach over the newly-introduced Facebook “like” feature.

It’s public

Your tweets are available to all. Your Facebook profile can still consume them, so if you think Facebook does the best job at organizing this information about you and your friends you can still go there to view the results. But other applications and networks can tap into the same data, so you can also benefits from innovation coming out of companies which do not want to be Facebook sharecroppers.

It’s publicly public

By which I mean that there is no pretense of privacy and no nasty surprise when trust is violated. Which is going to happen again and again. Especially when it’s not just a matter of displaying data but also of inferring new information based on the raw data collected. At which point it’s almost impossible to segregate access to the derived information based on the privacy settings of the individual data pieces. On Twitter, it’s all public, we all know it from the start, and as such we’re not fooled into sharing more than we should. See the fallacy of privacy settings.

It works on all things

Rather than only being on a web page, you can use a #like hashtag to describe any URI (dereferenceable or not) or even plain text. Just like RDF allows the value of an attribute to be either a URI or a scalar value (string, number…). For example, you can express that you like a quote or a verse of a poem by including them directly in the tweet. It’s not as identifiable as something that has a URI, but it can still be part of your profile. And smart consumers of this data might still be able to do some processing on it (e.g. recognizing it as a line from a song).

It can still be 1-click

You don’t necessarily have to copy/paste a URL (or text) into twitter. A web site can still do this for you, as long as it has your permission to post on your behalf. With that approach, it looks exactly like the Twitter “like” button to the user. You don’t have to be a Twitter user, just to have a Twitter account. No need for a Twitter client or to visit the Twitter web site if you don’t want to. It’s also OK if you have zero followers, Twitter is just a technical conduit in this approach.

It can evolve

The success of Twitter is also the success of self-organization as illustrated by the emergence of @replies, #hashtags and RT, directly form the users. Rather than having Facebook decide what verbs make sense to allow users to express their thoughts on the Web, let people decide and see what verbs emerge (e.g. to describe what you like, dislike, are curious about, are considering buying, etc). The only thing we need is an understanding that the hashtag qualifies the user’s attitude towards what’s described by the rest of the tweet. Or maybe hashtags should not be reused for this, maybe we need a new breed, “semtags” (semantic tags), with a different syntax, e.g. “^like”. This way you can semtag a hashtag, e.g. “^like #nyc” might replace “I ♥ NY” on twitter feeds (and tee shirts). It can be as simple or as complex as needed, based on what sticks in the real world. Nerds like me will try to qualify it (e.g. “^!like” for “I don’t like”) and might even come up with ontologies (^love subClassOf ^like). These experiences will probably fail and that’s fine. Evolution strives on failures.

It is transparent

Even if you let a site write these messages on your twitter feed, you can see exactly what goes on. There is no secret channel as with Facebook. The fact that it goes on your Twitter timeline acts as a validation, ensuring that only relevant, human-readable messages get added to your profile. Which is the only way in which we can maintain control of our profile information. If sites start to send too much information or opaque information you’ll see it. And so will your followers. This will put pressure on sites to make the posted data sparse and meaningful, because they know that their users won’t want to scare away their followers with social spam. See, for example, how the outcries over foursquare spam seem to have forced a clean-up (or at least so it looks to me, but maybe it’s just because I’ve unfollowed the spammers). Keeping social profiling on a human scale is a bug, not a feature.

It is persisted in many places

Who do you think is more likely to be around in 20 years, Facebook or the Library of Congress? Tweets are archived in many places, including Twitter itself, of course, but also Google, Bing and the Library of Congress. Plus, it’s very easy for you to set up a system to save all your tweets. Even if Twitter disappears, all the data in your profile that was built from your tweets will still be around. And if Google, Bing and the Library of Congress all go dark before Facebook, well that’s fine because the profile data from your tweets can be there too.

In effect, you should think of Facebook as a repository and Twitter as a stream. Don’t publish directly to one repository. Publish to a stream and benefit from all the repositories and other consumers that tap into it. It’s a well-known enterprise integration pattern (message bus), but it’s not just good for enterprise applications.

In fact, more than Twitter itself it’s this pattern that I want to encourage. Twitter is just the most obvious implementation, at this time, of a profile data bus. It already has almost everything we need (though a more fine-grained authorization model, or a delegated authorization model, would make me more likely to allow sites to tweet on my behalf). What matters is the switch from social networks owning data to you owning your data and social networks competing on how much value they can deliver to you based on the data. For example, LinkedIn might be the best for work connections, Facebook for personal connections, Google for brute search/retrieval of information, etc. I don’t want to maintain different profile data and privacy settings for each of them. I have one global privacy settings, which controls what I share with the world. Based on this, I want these sites to compete on the value they provide to me. It may not be what Facebook wants, but if what works best for us.

If you like this proposal, you know what you have to do. Go ahead and tweet:
```
^like http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/1464
```
Or just retweet it.

[UPDATED 2010/5/6: See the next post for some clarifications.]

Related posts:

May 02, 2010
14:13
Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam
» ‎ What To Fix

(Note use of Wave for comments at bottom. Feedback appreciated)

I do not believe in evolution.

When I was in fourth grade, my entire class took a break for an hour while I had a debate with my friend David Hillon about evolution. He argued for evolution and science, and I argued for skepticism and faith.

The world, you see, was only a few thousand years old. The Great Flood made the Grand Canyon. There were too many gaps in the fossil record to demonstrate evolution. Great flood stories are part of every culture. After all, we already knew how things came about -- the King James Bible -- and as long as we understood that was true we could speculate freely about the rest of it.

As long as it supported long-established religious dogma, it was worthy of study.

I have been thinking about my fourth-grade experience and Cato The Elder quite a bit over the last several years.

Cato the Elder came from a humble background. Born around 230 B.C.E., his ancestors had made names for themselves in military service but nobody in his family had a reputation for public service. Cato was the one who, after attracting the notice of powerful people, was brought to Rome where he stayed in politics the rest of his life. He was a man on the move, a novus homo. He was a strict Roman, he was old school and he accomplished a lot in his long life.

In his 70s, Cato was sent to Carthage to arbitrate a regional conflict. Cato was so taken back by the wealth he saw in Carthage that he became convinced that Carthage was a grave and imminent threat to the safety of Rome and must be attacked at once. From that point forward, whenever he gave a public speech he ended by saying "Carthago delenda est" -- Carthage must be destroyed.

It didn't matter what the topic of the speech was. The farmers this year have brought in record harvests and we should write a letter of praise, "Ceterum autem censeo, Carthaginem esse delendam" (and furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed). I am sure this new public building will contribute to the health of the state, and furthermore Carthage must be destroyed. I would like to thank my hosts for this gracious dinner, and furthermore Carthage must be destroyed.

Cato was so convinced that Carthage was a threat that whatever he was doing, he felt it somehow logically tied back to Carthage.

Nothing else really mattered if Carthage destroyed Rome.

Cato is best known for "Carthago delenda est", but he did a lot more than that. He also was the first person to write a history of Italy in Latin. He wrote a book on how to farm that you can still buy on Amazon, explaining everything from the soil to the market to dealing with the weather.

Back then, the climate was basically the same back then in Rome as it is today. Perhaps wetter. As the climate changed over the centuries, farmers produced more or less food, eventually leading to all sorts of problems for the Romans in the late empire period. The role of changing weather patterns and climate on ancient civilizations and how they evolve, or fail to, is fascinating.

Which brings us to what's driving me nuts.

Several years ago, I'm reading a science article about some esoteric topic, say tree frogs. (Most mainstream science reporting is total crap. [Insert long explanation here] This tree frog example is allegorical, not factual). At the end, the researchers noted that Global Warming is changing the frog's habitat and this could cause the species to be lost.

This seemed like a reasonable thing -- if things get warmer certainly organisms that depend on temperature will be affected.

Later that month, I read another such article -- also biology-related. Then there was another, and another. Then there was a deluge of articles. From reading these articles, the subtext was clear: global warming was a real and imminent threat in some fashion or another to the entire planet's ecosystem.

At this point my bullshit alarm went off. Sometimes I have trouble tuning it, but this was a pretty clear signal. My interest was piqued.

So I started researching Anthropocentric Global Warming. I found that the more I researched the science and the public debate, the more skeptical I became about the quality of the discussion. Not the truthfulness of the claims or counter-claims. I became convinced that there was little honest skepticism within the clique of scientists doing climate research. I was perfectly happy saying I didn't know what was going on with the climate. Climate scientists did not seem to be able to be this open-minded. It seemed that by the time you took a role in the climate research community, you already knew what was happening. Your job was just to continue to gather data to support it.

Later on, as we all know, the hacked emails showed some small number of scientists trying to rig editorial boards, shunning critics, fuming at criticism, withholding data, and all the other little petty things that people do when they're thinking politically instead of scientifically.

I became convinced that the debate was terribly flawed.

I am not trying to beat the dead horse of arguing about global warming. Really I'm not. This article has a deeper purpose, so bear with me even if you are the most avid supporter of AGW.

Things got even weirder.

Scientists started using the term "Climate Change" instead of "Global Warming"

Now every article I read ends in something like "and scientists feel that Climate Change is one of the responsible factors" or "Smith noted that Climate Change will continue to threaten the turtles habitat" or whatever. People even note how many research articles include links to Climate Change research, mentioned Climate Change, or implicitly accept Anthropocentric Climate Change. This is supposed to be a sign of the seriousness of Climate Change.

Climate change is everywhere.

Carthago delenda est.

Which brings me back to evolution.

What IS evolution, anyway? Wiki defines it as "Evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations."

I'm okay with that. It's not provable science in the strict prepositional "if A, then B" sense, but it represents a state of affairs that I believe to be true. I have grown up a lot since I was ten years old.

Just to repeat, evolution is not a theory like you see in physics that can be proven true or false. It's a general category of theories, all which deal with various pieces of how life changes over time. Some of these theories may be able to be proven one way or another. Some will be proven wrong. Some will be tweaked. We do not know everything about evolution because we've only been studying it around 150 years.

But generally, yes, makes sense to me. I agree that the title "Evolution" covers all of these theories. I also believe that most of these theories have been or will be proven true. I think evolution is an awesome thing to study. What I object to is the liberal use of the title "evolution" to describe and obscure anything you feel like saying.

Richard Dawkins is a popular writer. As i understand his works, he uses "evolution" to describe how religion may have evolved in human culture. Some writers use evolution to show us how human mating has become what it is. Some writers explain how corporations have "evolved" from the early days of barter. It seems that anything that changes over time is considered to be "evolving".

Worst still, it also seems that scientists can take a word like "evolution", pull apart various aspects and sub-theories, mix in a little imagination, and then expand at length on how "evolution" might explain everything from God to the Income Tax.

Poppycock.

Take a really smart person, give them an intractable problem, and ask them to take a stab at an answer. What do you get? A lot of scientific speculation, that's what. Creative answers based on shared beliefs about things that are still unknown.

As it turns out, we already have a great word for shared creative beliefs about things that are still unknown. It's called "religion"

I'm not saying Dawkins is wrong -- hell if I know how people became convinced about gods. I can certainly talk about God in the philosophical sense, and i think it's an important metaphysical topic, but I don't think anybody knows what humans thought of deities 400 thousand years ago. If they do, it's the first I've heard of it.

Dawkins is creatively speculating, pulling little anecdotal pieces of evidence here and there that supports his speculation.

I really, really love reading articles like this. It is fascinating to see what really smart people think about such difficult problems. If they're good writers, all the better -- I get to be one of the "in crowd", sitting in a bar having a beer with the best minds in the world while we talk about space-time, evolution, sociology, or any of a hundred other fascinating topics. It's like, for a little bit, I'm at the forefront of science, hearing about what the new stuff coming out is going to be before it comes out.

Very cool.

But we must remember what it is we consume. It's shared creative speculation by some of the smartest people we have using all the information in their field. It may have a lot of big words and contain all sorts of fascinating stories and observations, but it also may be very wrong. We don't know. After all, that's one of the reasons it's so much fun to read.

And let's be honest here, there is quite a bit of money and notoriety in it for the scientists as well. That's not saying they are crooked. Not at all. Just that it's not always clear whether you are helping them become wealthy and famous or helping their noble cause. Or both. Or neither. Motivations are unclear, and there can be subtle and powerful conflicts of interest that are not apparent to the consumer.

To be blunt, at the end of the day, epistemologically there's little difference between reading this kind of writing and listening to the local shaman explain why the river god has caused the floods due to a lack of sufficient sacrifices and offerings. The shaman was wrong, but he also lived ten thousand years ago. Somebody sometime is going to be looking back on us from ten thousand years in the future. I can guarantee you we're going to look the same way.

When I realized I only had a week to finish my research to debate Evolution with David, I tried to find the best sources I could. An older person at my church gave me a copy of The Genesis Flood, a detailed apology for the Biblical notion of how the world came to be. And there it was, in black and white! Pictures of human footprints next to dinosaurs, the reason we don't have dinosaurs (They couldn't fit on the Ark? Been a long time ago). Heck, this thing was written by real scientists. With footnotes and everything!

I am no longer ten years old, and I am embarrassed by this entire story. But at the time, there were really smart people with all sorts of credentials using big words telling me something I already knew was true. It wasn't like I was asking a bunch of questions or double-checking the details.

As I got older, I learned to ask questions -- especially of the things I felt strongly to be true. Those were the things I usually ended up being the most wrong about. It appears my BS detector has a tendency to automatically adjust itself downward without my noticing it.

I read a story today, "Arctic explorers get nasty surprise: rain"
In what looks to be another sign the Arctic is heating up quickly, British explorers in Canada's Far North reported on Tuesday that they had been hit by a three-minute rain shower over the weekend ... The rain fell on the team's ice base off Ellef Rignes island, about 3,900 km (2,420 miles) north of the Canadian capital, Ottawa ... "It's definitely a shocker ... the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event," said Pen Hadow, the team's expedition director ... "Scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms..."

Now I'm not an arctic explorer, or even a world-renowned scientist, but I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can show me detailed records from the last couple thousand years concerning 3-minute rain showers in the arctic. And no, a century or two isn't going to work, nor will measuring the temperature 3000 miles away and guessing rainfall. The statement was about rainfall, and I'd like to see the data, please.

Homeboy is not falling for this again.

Just like the problem with the word "evolution", when we moved from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" we've broadened the terminology so much that it can freaking apply to anything.

Epistemologically (epistemology is about what you can know and what you can't know), we either agree with the idea that the climate is changing or not. I know of nobody in their right mind that thinks the climate is not changing, so we all agree with climate change. The only question is, what does "climate change" mean? It changes. We all agree. Now it's one thing. Later on it will be something else.

I can use "climate change" to apply to just about anything that involves temperature, humidity, rainfall, snowfall, wind, barometric pressure, sunlight, diurnal rate, adiabatic lapse rate, tornadoes, thunderstorms, hurricanes, beach erosion, tides, salinity of the ocean, migration patterns of swallows (African or European)...

I can go on. "climate change" is the ultimate wild-card.

It's also a hot-button political issue, by the way, and people feel very strongly about it, including many of the scientists studying it.

Whenever you have the same people that feel passionately about something who are also supposed to be dispassionately and intellectually evaluating it -- better pay close attention. Bias can sneak in a million different ways, and it happens to everybody. This isn't a situation where you can somehow train yourself to the point where the bias is not there. Oddly, the more educated and elite you are, the less likely you are to be able to see your own bias. Lawyers and doctors already know this -- never have yourself as a client.

So now whenever I read anything involving research and walking outside, I get to "climate change" at some point in the article. I'm willing to bet a huge number of news stories, papers and research reports will continue mention "climate change". After all, it's so poorly defined it works for anything. Simply drop it in there towards the end with the rest of the factors. Makes you feel good to be bringing it up, puts a little bit extra out there for the good cause, and after all, it is a really important thing to be reminding people about.

Nothing else really matters if climate change destroys the ecosystem.

So, for me, "climate change" makes for a nice marker to look for where scientists or reporters are slipping up, perhaps being a little lazy. Taking shortcuts. Pitching softballs to each other to hit out of the park. If the tree frog is dying off because of poor rainfall, then let's see the rainfall stats -- as much as you can -- and track those against tree frog populations over time. Or let's capture some frogs and raise them in various rainfall conditions. Let's take one variable -- rainfall -- and change it while we hold the other variables the same. Multivariate analysis is cool, but there are a lot of alligators in there which we'll save for another day.

I hope some of this is sounding familiar to anybody who's been in a high school science class.

So while I believe in natural selection, and in genetic drift, I do not believe in "evolution" -- it is a fun word but has so many meanings as to make it useless. Likewise while I believe in the absorption spectrum of CO2 and the other greenhouse gases, and I believe in humans changing the environment around them, I do not believe in "Climate Change". It is a silly phrase that cannot be discussed at all with any sort of meaning. It gets in the way of discussion and research instead of assisting it. And while I love listening and reading really smart people tackle the problems of our age, I do not confuse that with "science" -- the application of abduction, deduction, and induction in a linked fashion to allow us to understand and manipulate the universe.

This article is not about evolution, climate change, God, or religion, even though I use them as examples. It's about the standards we critically need to apply when conducting science and making public policy that involves science. If you got emotional about one of these topics and stopped reading or posted some snarky commment then you missed the point -- and you are demonstrating mine. There is a deep systemic problem here. It's mostly hidden, and we only see it when the stakes are high, such as happens in these topics. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Ask questions, look for bias, and challenge assumptions. Always.

Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.

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May 01, 2010
18:43
Introduction to the Polymath Project and “Density Hales-Jewett and Moser Numbers”
» ‎ Michael Nielsen

In January of 2009, Tim Gowers initiated an experiment in massively collaborative mathematics, the Polymath Project. The initial stage of this project was extremely successful, and led to two scientific papers: “A new proof of the density Hales-Jewett theorem” and “Density Hales-Jewett and Moser numbers”. The second of these papers will soon appear in a birthday volume in honour of Endre Szemeredi. The editor of the Szemeredi birthday volume, Jozsef Solymosi, invited me to submit an introduction to that paper, and to the Polymath Project more generally. The following is a draft of my introductory piece. I’d be very interested in hearing feedback. Note that the early parts of the article briefly discuss some mathematics, but if you’re not mathematically inclined the remainder of the article should be comprehensible. Many of the themes of the article will be discussed at much greater length in my book about open science, “Reinventing Discovery”, to be published early in 2011.

At first appearance, the paper which follows this essay appears to be a typical mathematical paper. It poses and partially answers several combinatorial questions, and follows the standard forms of mathematical discourse, with theorems, proofs, conjectures, and so on. Appearances are deceiving, however, for the paper has an unusual origin, a clue to which is in the name of the author, one D. H. J. Polymath. Behind this unusual name is a bold experiment in how mathematics is done. This experiment was initiated in January of 2009 by W. Timothy Gowers, and was an experiment in what Gowers termed “massively collaborative mathematics”. The idea, in brief, was to attempt to solve a mathematical research problem working entirely in the open, using Gowers’s blog as a medium for mathematical collaboration. The hope was that a large number of mathematicians would contribute, and that their collective intelligence would make easy work of what would ordinarily be a difficult problem. Gowers dubbed the project the “Polymath Project”. In this essay I describe how the Polymath Project proceeded, and reflect on similarities to online collaborations in the open source and open science communities. Although I followed the Polymath Project closely, my background is in theoretical physics, not combinatorics, and so I did not participate directly in the mathematical discussions. The perspective is that of an interested outsider, one whose main creative interests are in open science and collective intelligence.

Gowers began the Polymath Project with a description of the problem to be attacked (see below), a list of rules of collaboration, and a list of 38 brief observations he’d made about the problem, intended to serve as starting inspiration for discussion. At that point, on February 1, 2009, other people were invited to contribute their thoughts on the problem. Anyone with an interest and an internet connection could follow along and, if they wished, contribute their ideas in the comment section of Gowers’s blog. In just the first 24 hours after Gowers opened his blog up for discussion, six people offered 24 comments. In a sign of things to come, those contributors came from four countries on three continents, and included a high-school teacher, a graduate student, and four professors of mathematics. A collaboration was underway, a collaboration which expanded in the weeks that followed to involve more than twenty people.

The problem originally posed by Gowers was to investigate a new approach to a special case of the density Hales-Jewett theorem (DHJ). Let me briefly describe the statement of the theorem, before describing the special case Gowers proposed to attack. Let be the set of all length strings over the alphabet $1,2,\ldots,k$ . A combinatorial line is a set of points in , formed by taking a string with one or more wildcards (““) in it, e.g., 14×1xx3, and replacing those wildcards by $1, 2,\ldots,k$ , respectively. In the example I’ve given, the resulting combinatorial line is: $\{ 1411113, 1421223, \ldots, 14k1kk3 \}$ . The density Hales-Jewett theorem says that as becomes large, even very low density subsets of must contain a combinatorial line. More precisely, let us define the density Hales-Jewett number $c_{n,k}$ to be the size of the largest subset of which does not contain a combinatorial line. Then the density Hales-Jewett theorem may be stated as:

Theorem (DHJ): $\lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} c_{n,k}/k^n = 0$ .

DHJ was originally proved in 1991 by Furstenberg and Katznelson, using techniques from ergodic theory. Gowers proposed to find a combinatorial proof of the case of the theorem, using a strategy that he outlined on his blog. As the Polymath Project progressed, that goal gradually evolved. Four days after Gowers opened his blog up for discussion, Terence Tao used his blog to start a discussion aimed at understanding the behaviour of $c_{n,3}$ for small . This discussion rapidly gained momentum, and the Polymath Project split into two subprojects, largely carried out, respectively, on Gowers’s blog and Tao’s blog. The first subproject pursued and eventually found an elementary combinatorial proof of the full DHJ theorem. The results of second subproject are described in the paper which follows, “Density Hales-Jewett and Moser Numbers”. As mentioned, this second subproject began with the goal of understanding the behaviour of $c_{n,3}$ for small . It gradually broadened to consider several related questions, including the behaviour of $c_{n,k}$ for small and , as well as the behaviour of the Moser numbers, $c_{n,k}'$ , defined to be the size of the largest subset of which contains no geometric line. As for a combinatorial line, a geometric line is defined by taking a strinq in with one or more wildcard characters present. But unlike a combinatorial line, there are two distinct types of wildcards allowed (“” and “ $\overline x$ “), with taken to vary over the range $1,\ldots,k$ , and $\overline x = k+1-x$ . So, for example, $13x\overline x2$ generates the geometric line $\{131k2,132(k-1)2,\ldots,13k12\}$ .

Both subprojects of the Polymath Project progressed quickly. On March 10, Gowers announced that he was confident that the polymaths had found a new combinatorial proof of DHJ. Just 37 days had passed since the collaboration began, and 27 people had contributed approximately 800 mathematical comments, containing 170,000 words. Much work remained to be done, but the original goal had already been surpassed, and this was a major milestone for the first subproject. By contrast, the goals of the second subproject were more open-ended, and no similarly decisive announcement was possible. Work on both continued for months thereafter, gradually shifting to focus on the writeup of results for publication.

Although the Polymath Project is unusual from the perspective of current practice in mathematics, there is another perspective from which it does not appear so unusual. That is the tradition of open source software development in the computer programming community. Perhaps the best known example of open source software is the Linux operating system. Begun by Linus Torvalds in 1991 as a hobby project, Linux has since grown to become one of the world’s most popular operating systems. Although not as widely used in the consumer market as Microsoft Windows, Linux is the primary operating system used on the giant computer clusters at companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Amazon, and also dominates in markets such as the movie industry, where it plays a major role at companies such as Dreamworks and Pixar.

A key feature of Linux is that, unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, the original source code for the operating system is freely available to be downloaded and modified. In his original message announcing Linux, Torvalds commented that “I’ve enjouyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I’m looking forward to any comments you might have.” Because he had made the code publicly available, other people could add features if they desired. People began emailing code to Torvalds, who incorporated the changes he liked best into the main Linux code base. A Linux kernel discussion group was set up to co-ordinate work, and the number of people contributing code to Linux gradually increased. By 1994, 80 people were named in the Linux credits file as contributors.

Today, nearly twenty years later, Linux has grown enormously. The kernel of Linux contains 13 million lines of code. On an average day in 2007 and 2008, Linux developers added 4,300 lines of code, deleted 1,800 lines, and modified 1,500 lines. The social processes and tools used to create Linux have also changed enormously. In its early days, Linux used off-the-shelf tools and ad hoc social processes to manage development. But as Linux and the broader open source community have grown, that community has developed increasingly powerful tools to share and integrate code, and to manage discussion of development. They have also evolved increasingly sophisticated social structures to govern the process of large-scale open source development. None of this was anticipated at the outset by Torvalds – in 2003 he said “If someone had told me 12 years ago what would happen, I’d have been flabbergasted” – but instead happened organically.

Linux is just one project in a much broader ecosystem of open source projects. Deshpande and Riehle have conservatively estimated that more than a billion lines of open source software have been written, and more than 300 million lines are being added each year. Many of these are single-person projects, often abandoned soon after being initiated. But there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of projects with many active developers.

Although it began in the programming community, the open source collaboration process can in principle be applied to any digital artifact. It’s possible, for example, for a synthetic biologist to do open source biology, by freely sharing their DNA designs for living things, and then allowing others to contribute back changes that improve upon those designs. It’s possible for an architect to do open source architecture, by sharing design files, and then accepting contributions back from others. And, it’s possible to write an open source encyclopedia, by freely sharing the text of articles, and making it possible for others to contribute back changes. That’s how Wikipedia was written: Wikipedia is an open source project.

The Polymath Project is a natural extension of open source collaboration to mathematics. At first glance it appears to differ in one major way, for in programming the open source process aims to produce an artifact, the source code for the desired software. Similarly, in synthetic biology, architecture and the writing of an encyclopedia the desired end is an artifact of some sort. At least in the early stages of the Polymath Project, there was no obviously analogous artifact. It’s tempting to conclude that the two papers produced by the polymaths play this role, but I don’t think that’s quite right. In mathematics, the desired end isn’t an artifact, it’s mathematical understanding. And the Polymath process was a way of sharing that understanding openly, and gradually improving it through the contributions of many people.

The Polymath Project’s open approach to collaboration is part of a broader movement toward open science. Other prominent examples include the human genome project and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which use the internet to openly share data with the entire scientific community. This enables other scientists to find ingenius ways of reusing that data, often posing and answering questions radically different to those that motivated the people who originally took the data.

An example which gives the flavour of this reuse is the recent work by Boroson and Lauer, who used a computer algorithm to search through the spectra of 17,000 quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, looking for a subtle signature that they believed would indicate a pair of orbiting black holes. The result was the discovery of a candidate quasar containing a pair of supermassive black holes, 20 million and 800 million times the mass of the sun, respectively, and a third of a light year apart, orbiting one another roughly once every 100 years. This is just one of more than 3,000 papers to have cited the Sloan data, most of those papers coming from outside the Sloan collaboration.

People practicing open notebook science have carried this open data approach to its logical conclusion, sharing their entire laboratory record in real time. The Polymath Project and the open data and open notebook projects are all examples of scientists sharing information which, historically, has not been openly available, whether it be raw experimental data, observations made in a laboratory notebook, or ideas for the solution of a mathematical problem.

There is, however, a historical parallel to the early days of modern science. For example, when Galileo first observed what would later be recognized as Saturn’s rings, he sent an anagram to the astronomer Kepler so that if Kepler (or anyone else) later made the same discovery, Galileo could disclose the anagram and claim the credit. Such secretive behaviour was common at the time, and other scientists such as Huygens and Hooke also used devices such as anagrams to “publish” their discoveries. Many scientists waited decades before genuine publication, if they published at all. What changed this situation – the first open science revolution – was the gradual establishment of a link between the act of publishing a scientific discovery and the scientist’s prospects for employment. This establishment of scientific papers as a reputational currency gave scientists an incentive to share their knowledge. Today, we take this reputational currency for granted, yet it was painstakingly developed over a period of many decades in the 17th and 18th centuries. During that time community norms around authorship, citation, and attribution were slowly worked out by the scientific community.

A similar process is beginning today. Will pseudonyms such as D. H. J. Polymath become a commonplace? How should young scientists report their role in such collaborations, for purposes of job and grant applications? How should new types of scientific contribution – contributions such as data or blog comments or lab notebook entries – be valued by other scientists? All these questions and many more will need answers, if we are to take full advantage of the potential of new ways of working together to generate knowledge.

14:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 043010
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office on the Gulf Coast, where I just have to note that you never hear about “sunshine spills” or “wind slicks”. #1: RT @mattgaston If foursquare gets it right, they could go big. Very big! NYTimes: Linking Customer Loyalty With Social Networking http://nyti.ms/cfzclt #2: RT @TechCrunch The Huffington Post Starts To Give [...]

April 30, 2010
16:07
Facebook's moves and personalized advertising
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

It has been a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?hl=enq=facebook+open+graphum=1ie=UTF-8ncl=dUVwU0S_tH8F1oMLQZ6OA8aMvZq0Mei=-T3bS9zJHYyuswOptYxssa=Xoi=news_resultct=more-resultscd=1resnum=2ved=0CDsQqgIoADAB"widely reported/a that Facebook has launched a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph"Open Graph/a and a href="http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=17099"Implicit Personalization/a, which, among other things, give Facebook information about people's movements and what they like on the web. The service was launched opt-out and, even if you do want to opt-out, requires diving into a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/how-opt-out-facebook-s-instant-personalization"confusing privacy settings/a to opt-out.br /br /The prolific discussion of this elsewhere has thoroughly exhausted most of what there is to say, but I wanted to emphasize two things about this launch.br /br /First, the fact that Facebook is so aggressively seeking this "a href="http://codingplayground.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-like-it-lot.html"treasure trove/a" of browsing behavior data may signal a major shift in its revenue model. Prior a href="http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9176"claims/a aside, the company now may be realizing that a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/11/targeted-advertising-and-facebook.html"it is hard/a to target advertising to profile information and status updates because there is a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/07/what-to-advertise-when-there-is-no.html"no commercial intent/a. This new source of data -- the websites people are visiting and what they like -- contains the purchase intent that Facebook so desperately needs.br /br /Second, as Steve Lohr at the NYT a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/privacy-concerns-limit-online-ads-study-says/"reported today/a, other companies considering heavy use of personalized advertising have been waiting for someone else to take the first step and bear the brunt of any privacy-related backlash. It will be interesting to see if Facebook's latest move -- which probably is aggressive enough to count as the first step everyone was waiting for -- will result in a backlash or will open the floodgates.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8330764526033712720?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

11:17
Exclusive! Mark Hurd pulls a Steve Jobs on Microsoft
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
When Mark Hurd read Steve Job’s rant against Flash (saying, in effect, “we have to tolerate Flash on our desktops/laptops for now but this piece of crap is not going to soil our iPhones, iPads and iPods”) he must have thought “hey, if I can pull one of these stunts maybe I too will have groupies screaming my name when I unveil our tablet”. Sources tell me he is planning to work on this over the weekend and publish it on hp.com on Monday. I was able to get hold of an early draft, which an HP staffer (or Mark himself?) left in a beer garden. Here is what Mark Hurd has to say to about Windows for mobile devices:

Thoughts on Windows

HP has a long relationship with Microsoft… [Note from Mark: someone inserts some hypocritical blah blah about how we used to love each other - sure hasn't been the case since I've been here]. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint customers – HP customers buy a big chunk of Windows licenses – but beyond that there are few joint interests.

I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows products so that customers and critics may better understand why we will not use Windows in our phones and tablets. Microsoft will characterize our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to taste decent margins for once – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Microsoft will claim that we are a closed system, and that Windows is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

First, there’s “Open”.

Microsoft Windows products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Microsoft, and Microsoft has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Microsoft Windows products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Microsoft and available only from Microsoft. By almost any definition, Windows is a closed system.

HP has many proprietary products too. Though the WebOS operating system we’ll use in our phones and tablets is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Windows, HP has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. HP’s mobile devices will all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by HP, Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced applications without relying on proprietary APIs (like Windows). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee.

Second, there’s the “full application ecosystem”.

Microsoft has repeatedly said that HP mobile devices will not be able to access “the full application ecosystem” because 75% of applications are Windows applications. What they don’t say is that almost all these applications are also available in a more modern form, using Web standards and implemented as a service, and usable on HP’s upcoming phones and tablets. Microsoft Office, Outlook, financial software etc all have excellent Web-based alternatives. Users of HP’s phones and tablets won’t be missing many applications.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Windows has had an awful security records for twenty years. We also know first hand that Windows is the number one reason PCs crash. We have been working with Microsoft to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our phones and tablets by using Windows.

In addition, Windows has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Microsoft to show us Windows performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Microsoft publicly said that Windows would work well on a device starting with the first Windows CE in 1996. Then came Pocket PC 2000, then Pocket PC 2002, then Windows Mobile 2003, then Windows Mobile 5, 6, 6.1 and 6.5, none of which was any good. And now they say it will be with Windows Phone 7. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life, mobile devices must use thin and efficient software and Windows is anything but that. It only runs on power-hungry Intel processors while the same features can be delivered by much smaller and more efficient processors when using WebOS. Not only does the battery last longer, the devices are lighter and don’t leave burn marks on your clothes.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Windows was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Windows applications have such crappy UI that users depend on tooltips to figure out what a button does. They pop up when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. WebOS revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a tooltip. Most Windows applications will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Windows applications, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if HP phones and tablets used Windows, it would not solve the problem that most Windows applications need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Windows is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we will not use Windows on our phones and tablets. Windows is an abstraction layer that covers very different underlying hardware.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the hardware and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of hardware enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying an operating system that runs on hardware from many vendors. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Windows is a multi-hardware abstraction. It is not Microsoft’s goal to help developers write the best application for HP’s phones and tablets. It is their goal to help developers write applications that will run on Windows devices from all hardware manufacturers. [Note from Mark: should I describe how Microsoft has been getting in the way of how our PCs talk to our printers and making a mess of desktop printing for the last 20 years or is this off-topic?]

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Windows was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Windows is a successful business for Microsoft, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Windows falls short.

The avalanche of Web-based applications accessible from Web-enabled mobile devices demonstrates that Windows is no longer necessary to access application functionalities of any kind.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too [Note from Mark: maybe I should remove that parenthesis or we'll give Ballmer a heart attack]). Perhaps Microsoft should focus more on creating a great Web-centric platform for the future, and less on criticizing HP for leaving the past behind.

Mark Hurd
April, 2010

[UPDATED 2010/5/18: I hear echos of "should I describe how Microsoft has been getting in the way of how our PCs talk to our printers and making a mess of desktop printing for the last 20 years or is this off-topic?" in the statements Mark Hurd made during his post-earning analyst call today: "when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices and we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of web connected printers and as they connect to the web, [they] need an OS.” Though I am really puzzled by the next line: “Hurd adds that HP prefers to own the OS to “control the customer experience” as it always has in printing.” HP doesn’t control the customer experience at all in printing, because of Windows. It’s only because we are so used to it that we don’t realize how awful the printing experience is, whether using a connected printer or over the network. Glad to see that they intend to apply the Palm acquisition to this problem too.]

[UPDATED 2010/5/26: According to some, this breakup letter from HP caused a breakup inside Microsoft: The reason Robbie Bach was fired]

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8:43
My ZSH, Irssi and Screen Themes On White And Black Backgrounds
» ‎ Aaron Toponce

Now that school is out for the summer, I have a bit of time to work on some of the themes I’ve created for my ZSH prompt, Irssi and GNU Screen. The first focus of mine was to get all themes working well with both white text on black backgrounds, and black text on white backgrounds. I’ve been leaning more and more to black text on white background colors for my default terminals, so I wanted to make sure that everything I was using day-to-day looked good with that setup.
First, my ZSH prompt was already developed from the outset with that in mind. So, no additional hacking has been needed on that. There are some elements that I’m not too terribly excited about. I don’t care for the dark blue directories on a black background, and I don’t care for the yellow character devices on a white background. Using the Tango scheme for gnome-terminal makes both of those scenarios much more tolerable. However, I do have additional items that I want to put in my prompt, but that will be for a later post. Also, my GNU Screen hardstatus line also needed to be compatible. This wasn’t that big of a deal, as I only needed to apply some colors to a few elements. Hhere’s a couple screenshots showing both black and white backgrounds, and how the ZSH prompt inside looks in each. Note the GNU Screen hardstatus line is at the bottom of the terminal.
From Desktop Screenshots
From Desktop Screenshots
Second, my Irssi theme also needed to work well with both. As I’ve already blogged before, I was really, really impressed with the madcows theme. However, I didn’t care for a few elements, so I started hacking it, making my own changes. I’ve tried keeping the true nature of the theme, while still adding my own style. The theme was already largely compatible with my ZSH prompt colors, it just needed some adjustments here and there, before I was totally satisfied. Further, it looked like crap using a white background, so this needed some hacking as well. I think I’m overall happy with the result, although I’m sure I’ve missed many things (like DCC, or CTCP), so there’s likely much more hacking to go before it’s perfect. However, for the general day-to-day chat, it’s 95% there. Screenshots for both backgrounds below:
From Desktop Screenshots
From Desktop Screenshots
In a nutshell, the themes are compatible with xterm-color support on most terminals. Mainly, I’m using bold and normal weights on red, green, yellow, black, white and blue. Anything else takes the default color of the terminal itself, whether it be the foreground text or the background. So, as long as your TERM variable is set to “xterm-color” or something better, you should be okay.
This post wouldn’t be complete without the source for you to try it out. Here’s a compressed tarball for giving it a shot, and reporting anything you find in the comments, if you like.
Cheers!

6:24
Flavors of PaaS
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
How many flavors of PaaS do we need?
- PaaS for business apps
- PaaS for toy apps (simple form-based CRUD) and simple business front ends (e.g. restaurant web sites)
- PaaS for games, mash-ups and social apps
- PaaS for multimedia delivery and live streams
- PaaS for high performance and scientific computing
- PaaS for spamming, hacking and other illegal activities (Zombies as a Service)
- Other?
BTW, doesn’t “flavors of PaaS” sound like the name of a perfume? At least when I say it with my French accent it does.

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April 29, 2010
19:44
Steve Jobs Posts Unconvincing Manifesto Against Adobe Flash
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Steve Jobs has posted a rather detailed condemnation of Adobes Flash, and has attempted to explain why he hasnt permitted Flash into the iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem. While I would happily see Flash being supplanted over time by HTML5/H.264, HTML5/Ogg Theora,...

14:50
Agile Does Not Mean Doing the Impossible
» ‎ What To Fix

One of the questions I commonly face as an agile smart-ass/wonk/nerd goes something like this: "We have a year's worth of work to do and 3 months to do it in. Agile is going to make it happen, right?"

Well yes, and no.

First yes. Yes, over time Agile principles will allow your teams to dramatically increase the amount of work they can do -- enough to be non-believable if I told you about it. After all, "Agile" is really just a marketing term around best practices for iterative and incremental teams and, well, best practices have a tendency to be really good.

But no, it will not fix your problems.

Here's the deal -- you don't make the work horse run faster by electrocuting him. Sure, it scares the hell out of him, and you're bound to get some initial improvement, but it's non-sustainable. Brute force does not make a team better.

What Agile principles do is bring the pain quicker. If you have unreasonable expectations for the next 3 months and week-long sprints, then an agile team is going to bring up that it's not working right from the very first sprint. You may not like this -- after all, traditional projects with long GANTT bars usually don't get feedback until many weeks into the process. Everybody here knows about the segment that makes steady increase until it reaches 80% -- only to remain at 80% for a long time! That's because it's easy to guestimate that you're making more progress than you actually are.

Agile projects aren't like that. You have a complete list of testable chunks of work that, when completed, represent the entire project. As each piece of work gets done, there is automated testing that goes with it. You're either done or you're not. We don't do partial credit.

So if you plan to have 10 iterations and the first three iterations only average about 5% of the total backlog, 10 times 5 percent means, on average, you're currently looking at only finishing about half the work. That's a lot of pain to get early in the project.

How organizations handle this pain depends on the project and the organization. If you want to allow the team to learn in order to reach the next level of performance, you will continue to stress them and give them maximum flexibility to innovate. I can promise you over time they'll figure it out.

This is called giving people time to learn. It's also called "sharpening the saw"

If, on the other hand, you want the product delivered, regardless of the consequences, then insist on sprint goals being completed each sprint even if it means working nights and weekends. I don't like this -- you're doing nothing more than electrocuting the horse -- but I understand that sometimes it has to be done. If your business model is such that it never has time for strategic items like increasing performance 10-30% and instead only has time for quarterly deliverables, then you're on a downward spiral. Have fun with that.

In either case, by having small periods of time in which the team is expected to make something of value in return for their salaries is good for everybody. The team gets better at providing value in small increments. The organization gets better at listening to the teams and learning from them.

Over time, teams getting in the pattern of providing value and providing feedback on organizational issues is good for everybody, no matter how the current project turns out. That's why if I'm put into an impossible situation the best thing I can do is stick to agile principles: promise stuff, deliver what I promise, and predict when I will be done and what's holding me up. If I stick to those principles and work as hard and as best as I can, there's nothing more for me to worry about -- I'm doing what I can. The rest is up to somebody else.

And over time, yes, you'll get that performance boost. But that's after you optimize your team and organization. It doesn't come that way out of the box. Agile does not mean doing the impossible.

8:19
PaaS portability challenges and the VMforce example
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
The VMforce announcement is a great step for SalesForce, in large part because it lets them address a recurring concern about the force.com PaaS offering: the lack of portability of Apex applications. Now they can be written using Java and Spring instead. A great illustration of how painful this issue was for SalesForce is to see the contortions that Peter Coffee goes through just to acknowledge it: “On the downside, a project might be delayed by debates—some in good faith, others driven by vendor FUD—over the perception of platform lock-in. Political barriers, far more than technical barriers, have likely delayed many organizations’ return on the advantages of the cloud”. The issue is not lock-in it’s the potential delays that may come from the perception of lock-in. Poetic.

Similarly, portability between clouds is also a big theme in Steve Herrod’s blog covering VMforce as illustrated by the figure below. The message is that “write once run anywhere” is coming to the Cloud.

Because this is such a big part of the VMforce value proposition, both from the SalesForce and the VMWare/SpringSource side (as well as for PaaS in general), it’s worth looking at the portability aspect in more details. At least to the extent that we can do so based on this pre-announcement (VMforce is not open for developers yet). And while I am taking VMforce as an example, all the considerations below apply to any enterprise PaaS offering. VMforce just happens to be one of the brave pioneers, willing to take a first step into the jungle.

Beyond the use of Java as a programming language and Spring as a framework, the portability also comes from the supporting tools. This is something I did not cover in my initial analysis of VMforce but that Michael Cote covers well on his blog and Carl Brooks in his comment. Unlike the more general considerations in my previous post, these matters of tooling are hard to discuss until the tools are actually out. We can describe what they “could”, “should” and “would” do all day long, but in the end we need to look at the application in practice and see what, if anything, needs to change when I redirect my deployment target from one cloud to the other. As SalesForce’s Umit Yalcinalp commented, “the details are going to be forthcoming in the coming months and it is too early to speculate”.

So rather than speculating on what VMforce tooling will do, I’ll describe what portability questions any PaaS platform would have to address (or explicitly decline to address).

Code portability

That’s the easiest to address. Thanks to Java, the runtime portability problem for the core language is pretty much solved. Still, moving applications around require changes to way the application communicates with its infrastructure. Can your libraries and frameworks for data access and identity, for example, successfully encapsulate and hide the different kinds of data/identity stores behind them? Even when the stores are functionally equivalent (e.g. SQL, LDAP), they may have operational differences that matter for an enterprise application. Especially if the database is delivered (and paid for) as a service. I may well design my application differently depending on whether I am charged by the amount of data in the DB, by the number of requests to the DB, by the quantity of app-to-DB traffic or by the total processing time of my requests in the DB. Apparently force.com considers the number of “database objects” in its pricing plans and going over 200 pushes you from the “Enterprise” version to the more expensive “Unlimited” version. If I run against my local relational database I don’t think twice about having 201 “database objects”. But if I run in force.com and I otherwise can live within the limits of the “Enterprise” version I’d probably be tempted to slightly alter my data model to fit under 200 objects. The example is borderline silly, but the underlying truth is that not all differences in application infrastructure can be automatically encapsulated by libraries.

While code portability is a solvable problem for a reasonably large set of use cases, things get hairier for the more demanding applications. A large part of the PaaS value proposition is contingent on the willingness to give up some low-level optimizations. This, and harder portability in some cases, may just have to be part of the cost of running demanding applications in a PaaS environment. Or just keep these off PaaS for now. This is part of the backward-compatible versus forward compatible Cloud dilemma.

Data portability

I have covered data portability in the previous entry, in response to Steve Herrod’s comment that “you should be able to extract the code from the cloud it currently runs in and move it, along with its data, to another cloud choice”. Your data in the force.com database can already be moved somewhere else… as long as you’re willing to write code to get it and perform any needed transformation. In theory, any data that you can read is data that you can move (thus fulfilling Steve’s promise). The question is at what cost. Presumably Steve is referring to data migration tools that VMWare will build (or acquire) and make part of its cloud enablement platform. Another way in which VMWare is trying to assemble a more complete middleware portfolio (see Oracle ODI for an example of a complete data integration offering, which goes far beyond ETL).

There is a subtle difference between the intrinsic portability of Java (which will run in any JRE, modulo JDK version) and the extrinsic portability of data which can in theory be moved anywhere but each place you move it to may require a different process. A car and an oak armoire are both “portable”, but one is designed for moving while the other will only move if you bring a truck and two strong guys.

Application service portability

I covered this in my previous entry and Bob Warfield summarized it as “take advantage of all those juicy services and it will be hard to back out of that platform, Java or no Java”. He is referring to all the platform services (search, reporting, mobile, integration, BPM, IdM, administration) that make a large part of the force.com value proposition. They won’t be waiting for you in your private cloud (though some may be remotely invocable, depending on how SalesForce wants to play its cards). Applications that depend on them will have to be changed, at least until we have standards interfaces for all these services (don’t hold your breath).

Management portability

Even if you can seamlessly migrate your application and your data from your internal servers to force.com, what do you think is going to happen to your management console, especially if it uses operating system agents? These agents are not coming along for the ride, that’s for sure. Are you going to tell your administrators that rather than having a centralized configuration/monitoring/event console they are going to have to look at cute “monitoring” web pages for each application? And all the transaction tracing, event correlation, configuration policy and end-user monitoring features they were relying on are unfortunate victims of the relentless march of progress? Good luck with that sale.

VMWare’s answer will probably be that they will eventually provide you with all the management capabilities that you need. And it’s a fair one, along the lines of the “Application-to-Disk Management” message at the recent launch of Oracle Enterprise Manager 11G. With the difference that EM is not the only way to manage a top-to-bottom Oracle stack, just the one that we think is the best. BMC and HP aren’t locked out.

VMWare and SpringSource (+Hyperic) could indeed theoretically assemble a full-fledged management solution. But this doesn’t happen overnight, even with acquisitions as I know from experience both at HP Software and currently at Oracle. Integration (of management domains across the stack, of acquired application management products, of support data/services from oracle.com) is one of the main advances in Enterprise Manager 11G and it took work.

And even then, this leads to the next logical question. If you can move from cloud to cloud but you are forced to use VMWare development, deployment and management tools, haven’t you traded one lock-in problem for another?

Not to mention that your portability between clouds, if it depends on VMWare tools, is limited to VMWare-powered clouds (private or public). In effect, there are now three levels of portability:
- not portable (only runs on VMforce)
- portable to any cloud (public or private) built using VMWare infrastructure
- portable to any Java/Spring Cloud platform
Is your application portable the way cash is portable, or the way a gift card is portable (across stores of a retail chain)?

If this reminds you of the java portability debates of the early days of Enterprise Java that’s no surprise. Remember, we’re replaying the tape.

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April 28, 2010
22:47
A preview of the next version of Windows Live Messenger
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpOver on the Inside Windows Live blog there’s a new post titled a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowslive/archive/2010/04/28/preview-of-the-new-windows-live-messenger.aspx"Preview of the new Windows Live Messenger/a which talks about a key part of what I’ve been working on over the past year or so. Interesting tidbits from the blog post include /p blockquote pemToday in a speech at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, /ema href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/"emSteve Ballmer/em/aem is sharing a /ema href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowslive/default.mspx"empreview of the new Windows Live Messenger/em/aem. In this post we want to talk more about our philosophy and approach for this new version./em br /... br //p h5emStaying in touch with close friends /em/h5 pemMost people today visit at least one social network and dozens of content sharing sites, get email with photos and social notifications, and of course, maintain accounts in numerous places with different sets of friends and content. So we focused on connecting Messenger to the social networks you already use, and prioritizing the most important updates so you can quickly see what your favorite people are doing, wherever they’re doing it./em/p pemWe know your close friends share using email, IM, and social networks. So we brought all of those together into a single view. The status from your Facebook friends who don’t use Messenger? Check. The photos your mom sent you as plain old e-mail attachments? Check. The Office docs you’re collaborating on with friends in SkyDrive? Check. And the stuff your favorite Messenger friends are doing on hundreds of sites they choose to share from? Check. /em/p pemAnd since simple “aggregation” can make things worse instead of better, font style="background-color: #ffff00"we focused on prioritizing the people that matter most to you, so you don’t miss the handful of important updates from your closest friends and family just because your college and work “friends” are broadcasting their whole life every minute of the day. Just tag your favorite people, and we optimize your feed for the stuff those people are doing./font Of course, it’s not 100% exclusive to your favorites – the most interesting things from your other friends like photos, videos, and links (especially the ones being commented on a lot) are there too. This makes us a great companion to the services you already love like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn and more – and when you have time to go beyond those most important updates, diving deeper into those sites is just a click away. /em/p pemLastly, we recognized that we could connect your social updates to the power of the Windows PC and really bring it to life. So we took advantage of the latest advances in hardware and graphics to give you a modern social experience. This means that Messenger brings beautiful high-resolution views of the photos, videos, and links that your friends are sharing, right to your desktop. View their Facebook albums, gorgeously presented so that they're fun to browse through and easy to comment on. Messenger is also the simplest way to update your status and instantly post it to other sharing sites you use. You can even bring your photo albums right into high-definition video chats with your friends. /em/p pemHere’s a picture of the new social view for Messenger:/em/p pa href="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p8-3NXZ5cmIMOkWe2cej88un_XE5zP4vNs6KOiKDb-PUnaupAT1IYI1CZ62FdpGtqE0LbPbzpCHy9-4aIFRiSPw/MainMessengerWindow.png"emimg title="Picture of the new social view of the main Messenger window" alt="Picture of the new social view of the main Messenger window" src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p7DZhUlQtB85bDIDMhHJhOsZlCiM0UmdI-BfI7b5pv6EpViluB2Reb8zCmFHshFjPVr_PPB5UPMz2irSpJhbpWA/MainMessengerWindow_small.png" //em/a/p /blockquote pThis is a pretty exciting day for the team and I’ll be scouring the web looking to read what people think about what we’re building. If you want to learn more about the new version of Messenger, you can visit a href="http://www.messengerpreview.com"messengerpreview.com/a#160;/p pLater in the year, I’ll see what I can do about writing a post on the Inside Windows Live blog about the philosophy and technology that underlies this experience. Let me know in the comments what you would like to learn more about in such a post.#160; /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=DJ+Khalidamp;field-title=Stolenamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"DJ Khalid/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=DJ+Khalid+All+I+Do+Is+Winamp;x=0amp;y=0"All I Do Is Win (featuring Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and T-Pain)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

16:18
Google launches web search similarities
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

In another aggressive move toward personalized search, Google has added similarities to some web search results to the bottom of the page, as Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_adds_similar_page_suggestions_to_search_res.php"reports/a. br /br /For example, if I search for [a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=engadget"engadget/a], at the bottom of the page, I see:blockquoteiPages similar to: www.engadget.combr /Gizmodo ... gizmodo.combr /Ubergizmo ... ubergizmo.combr /Wired ... wired.combr /Lifehacker ... lifehacker.com/i/blockquoteThe similarity algorithm also appears to have changed, with noticeably better quality in the spot checks I did.br /br /This is a fairly big deal. Similarities based aggregate behavior and targeted to the immediate context is a big step toward personalization. The next step is to tie the data to individual history and target similarities and recommendations both to the context and each person's past history.br /br /Google has done a version of personalized search a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/06/more-on-google-personalized-search.html"for some time/a, but the technique used mostly was based on biasing search results toward people's long-term interests. More recently, they also started a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195"boosting previously clicked search results/a to help support re-finding.br /br /Google's latest move should let Google add fine-grained personalization based on current missions and short-term trends, which, in combination with their current search personalization, a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/08/effectiveness-of-personalized-search.html"is likely/a to improve Google's ability to help people find what they need.br /br /bUpdate/b: Here is the a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/discovering-pages-similar-to-ones-that.html"announcement/a of the new feature on the Official Google Blog.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-3253891497015408152?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

14:46
Spit-balling the Startup Racket
» ‎ What To Fix

Yesterday I wrote an article about how the startup culture and business can reach a point of diminishing returns -- about how in many businesses gatekeepers adopt policies best suited to them and not the market, about how people honestly trying to help may not know their own selection bias, and about how there is a subtle motivator in the startup world to be "about" startups, without actually doing anything.

Today I thought I would quantify that a bit, using you guys as guinea pigs.

The goal? To find how how much money there could be in simply talking about startups, ie, what is one of the things in the industry causing dysfunction.

I posted my article on HackerNews, my virtual watercooler. It went pretty high. I've been trying to stay off HN, but checking a few times yesterday I'm guessing that it stayed on the front page for 12 hours or so.

What kind of money could that generate?

Looking at other sites I have, I've found that a tightly-focused site can generate between 1 and 2 bucks per hundred viewers using AdSense. My blog is about 1/100th of that, but if you are careful about how you control the topics and provide value, I believe you can at least make a buck per hundred viewers.

Yesterday there were 6,873 viewers of the article as of midnight. Extrapolating a bit, and just using the back-of-the-napkin, let's go for 10K viewers in all. That means if you write a startup article (as a successful writer with a tightly-couple audience) you should be able to get about ten thousand people to read it. Once again, from looking at other sites this is not an unusual number. Of course Joe Schmoe is not going to get this kind of traffic, but lots do.

Running the numbers, looks like yesterday's article could have generated about $100. Not bad for 15 minutes work.

But it gets better. AdSense is notorious for giving the blog owner just a small portion of the total amount being paid for an ad -- anywhere from 1/5th to 1/10th of the total price of the ad actually gets paid to the writer. Google keeps the rest. Assuming 1/5th, that means you could have sold that same ad to a set of dedicated advertisers for around $500.

But it gets better still.

Good sites -- sites that stay on-topic and provide new, fresh content, should easily be able to drive that kind of volume everyday, either through using rotating authors, more popular articles, or providing a social-ranking system portal, like Digg or HN.

But you can still take it up another level.

If, instead of selling ad space, you sell a service or product, like access to online repositories, a make-your-startup-hum book, or one of the many hangers-on to the startup world (lawyers, accountants, staff augmentation people, you know who you are) the value increases by another order of magnitude.

It's not hard to envision a situation where a person made it big in a startup one or two times, wrote a book (largely ignoring or minimizing their own selection bias) and is picking up several thousand dollars a month or more simply bullshitting about startups online. This can be a powerful incentive, even to people who don't need the money.

To them, they're bringing in an audience and generating revenue -- they must be providing value to somebody. But to the user, a simple case of hero worship or the insecurity or just trying to wring every little piece of information possible from this source could be causing them to visit even though they've long reached the point of diminishing returns.

That's not saying that these folks are con artists or that somehow the industry is crooked. It's just an example of how we can easily get at cross-purposes without realizing it. I personally think everybody I know in the "helping people create startups" business is good and honorable -- I haven't met any crooks. But that doesn't mean that the system isn't whacked, that lots of people aren't wasting their time and money, or that there are incentives that are not aligned with the greater common good.

Lots of noise-to-signal here, and it's not readily apparent that this is the case.

I am going to stop blogging about startups for a couple of weeks now, lest I become the very thing I am criticizing. I blog in order to clarify things in my own mind. This is something that has been festering for many months. Glad to have finally gotten it out in written form. Hope it helps you to realize if you are in the same boat as I am.

7:02
Analyzing the VMforce announcement
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Let’s start with the disclosures: by most interpretations I work for a competitor to what Salesforce.com and VMWare are trying to do with VMforce. And all I know about VMforce is what I read in a few authoritative blogs by VMWare’s Steve Herrod, VMWare/SpringSource’s Rod Johnson and Salesforce’s Anshu Sharma. So no hard feeling if you jump off right now.

Overall, I like what I see. Let me put it this way. I am now a lot more likely to write an application on force.com than I was last week. How could this not be a good thing for SalesForce, me and others like me?

On the other hand, this is also not the major announcement that the “VMforce is coming” drum-roll had tried to make us expect. If you fell for it, then I guess you can be disappointed. I didn’t and I’m not (Phil Wainewright fell for it and yet isn’t disappointed, asserting that “VMforce.com redefines the PaaS landscape” for reasons not entirely clear to me even after reading his article).

The new thing is that force.com now supports an additional runtime, in addition to Apex. That new runtime uses the Java language, with the constraint that it is used via the Spring framework. Which is familiar territory to many developers. That’s it. That’s the VMforce announcement for all practical purposes from a user’s perspective. It’s a great step forward for force.com which was hampered by the non-standard nature of Apex, but it’s just a new runtime. All the other benefits that Anshu Sharma lists in his blog (search, reporting, mobile, integration, BPM, IdM, administration) are not new. They are the platform services that force.com offers to application writers, whether they use Apex or the new Java/Spring runtime.

It’s important to realize that there are two main parts to a full PaaS platform like force.com or Google App Engine. First there are application runtimes (Apex and now Java for force.com, Python and Java for GAE). They are language-dependent and you can have several of them to support different programming languages. Second are the platform services (reports, mobile, BPM, IdM etc for force.com as we saw above, mostly IdM for Google at this point) which are mostly language agnostic (beyond a library used to access them). I think of data storage (e.g. mySQL, force.com database, Google DataStore) as part of the runtime, but it’s on the edge of the grey zone. A third category is made of actual application services (e.g. the CRM web services out of SalesForce.com or the application services out of Google Apps) which I tend not to consider part of PaaS but again there are gray zones between application support services and application services. E.g. how domain-specific does your rule engine have to be before it moves from one category to the other?

As Umit Yalcinalp (who works for SalesForce) told me on Twitter “regardless of the runtime the devs using the Force.com db will get the same platform benefits, chatter, workflow, analytics”. What I called the platform services above. Which, really, is where most of the PaaS value lies anyway. A language runtime is just a starting point.

So where are VMWare and SpringSource in this picture? Well, from the point of view of the user nowhere, really. SalesForce could have built this platform themselves, using the Spring framework on top of Tomcat, WebLogic, JBoss… Itself running on any OS they want. With or without a hypervisor. These are all implementation details and are SalesForce’s problem, not ours as application developers.

It so happens that they have chosen to run this as a partnership with VMWare/SpringSource which makes a lot of sense from a portfolio/expertise perspective, of course. But this choice is not visible to the application developer making use of this platform. And it shouldn’t be. That’s the whole point of PaaS after all, that we don’t have to care.

But VMWare and SpringSource really want us to know that they are there, so Rod Johnson leads by lifting the curtain and explaining that:

“VMforce uses the Force.com physical infrastructure to run vSphere with a special customized vCloud layer that allows for seamless scaling and management. Above this layer VMforce runs SpringSource tc Server instances that provide the execution environment for the enterprise applications that run on VMforce.”

[Side note: notice what's missing? The operating system. It's there of course, most likely some Linux distribution but Rod glances over it, maybe because it's a missing link in VMWare's "we have all the pieces" story; unlike Oracle who can provide one or, even better, do without. Just saying...]

VMWare wants us to know they are under the covers because of course they have much larger aspirations than to be a provider to SalesForce. They want to use this as a proof point to sell their SpringSource+VMWare stack in other settings, such as private clouds and other public cloud providers (modulo whatever exclusivity period may be in their contract with SalesForce). And VMforce, if it works well when it launches, is a great validation for this strategy. It’s natural that they want people to know that they are behind the curtain and can be called on to replicate this elsewhere.

But let’s be clear about what part they can replicate. It’s the Java/Spring language runtime and its underlying infrastructure. Not the platform services that are part of the SalesForce platform. Not an IdM solution, not a rules engine, not a business process engine, etc. We can expect that they are hard at work trying to fill these gaps, as the RabbitMQ acquisition illustrates, but for now all this comes from force.com and isn’t directly replicable. Which means that applications that use them aren’t quite so portable.

In his post, Steve Herrod quickly moves past the VMforce announcement to focus on the SpringSource+VMWare infrastructure part, the one he hopes to see multiplied everywhere. The key promise, from the developers’ perspective, is application portability. And while the use of Java+Spring definitely helps a lot in terms of code portability I see some promises in terms of data portability that will warrant scrutiny when VMforce actually rolls out: “you should be able to extract the code from the cloud it currently runs in and move it, along with its data, to another cloud choice”.

It sounds very nice, but the underlying issues are:
- Does the code change depending on whether I am talking to a local relational DB in my private cloud or whether I am on VMforce and using the force.com database?
- If it doesn’t then the application is portable, but an extra service i still needed to actually move the data from one cloud to the other (can this be done in-flight? what downtime is needed?)
- What about the other VMforce.com services (chatter, workflow, analytics…)? If I use them in my code can I keep using them once I migrate out of VMforce to a private cloud? Are they remotely invocable? Does the code change? And if I want to completely sever my links with SalesForce, can I find alternative implementations of these application platform services in my private cloud? Or from another public cloud provider? The answer to these is probably no, which means that you are only portable out of VMforce if you restrain yourself from using much of the value of the platform. It’s not even clear whether you can completely restrain yourself from using it, e.g. can you run on force.com without using their IdM system?
All these are hard questions. I am not blaming anyone for not answering them today since no-one does. But we shouldn’t sweep them under the rug. I am sure VMWare is working on finding workable compromises but I doubt it will be as simple, clean and portable as Steve Herrod implies. It’s funny how Steve and Anshu’s posts seem to reinforce and congratulate one another, until you realize that they are in large part talking about very different things. Anshu’s is almost entirely about the force.com application platform services (sprinkled with some weird Facebook envy), Steve’s is entirely about the application runtime and its infrastructure.

One thing that I am surprised not to see mentioned is the management aspect of the platform, especially considering the investment that SpringSource made in Hyperic. I can only assume that work is under way on this and that we’ll hear about it soon. One aspect of the management story that concerns me a bit is the lack of acknowledgment of the challenges of configuration management in a PaaS setting. Especially when I read Steve Herrod asserting that the VMWare/SpringSource PaaS platform is going to free us from the burden of “handling code modifications that may be required as the middleware versions change”. There seems to be a misconception that because the application administrators are not the ones doing the infrastructure updates they don’t need to worry about the impact of these updates on their application. Is Steve implying that the first release of the VMWare/SpringSource PaaS stack is going to be so perfect that the hypervisor, guest OS and app server will never have to be patched and versioned? If that’s not the case, then why are those patches suddenly less likely impact the application code? In fact the situation is even worse as the application administrator does not know which hypervisor/OS/middleware patches are being applied and when. They can’t test against the new version ahead of time for validation and they can’t make sure the change is scheduled during a non-critical period for their business. I wrote an entire blog post on this issue six months ago and it’s a little bit disheartening to see the issue flatly denied and ignored. Management is not just monitoring.

Here is another intriguing comment in Steve’s entry: “one of the key differentiators with EC2 based PaaS will be the efficiencies for the many-app model. Customers are frustrated with the need to buy a whole VM as the minimum service unit for their applications. Our PaaS will provide fine-grained resource separation”. I had to read it twice when I realized that the VMWare CTO was telling us that splitting a physical machine into VMs is not a good enough way to share its resources and that you really need middleware-level multi-tenancy. But who can disagree that a GAE-like architecture can support more low-traffic applications on the same server than anything based on VM-based sharing? Which (along with deep pockets) puts Google in position to offer free hosting for low-traffic applications, a great way to build adoption.

These are very early days in the history of PaaS. VMWare, like the rest of us, will need to tackle all these issues one by one. In the meantime, this is an interesting announcement and a noticeable milestone. Let’s just keep our eyes open on the incremental nature of progress and the long list of remaining issues.

[UPDATED 2010/4/29: See the follow-up post, PaaS portability challenges and the VMforce example.]

[UPDATED 2010/6/9: This entry points out how the OS level is a gap in VMWare's portfolio. They took a step in addressing this today, by partnering with Novell to offer SUSE support.]
yalcinalp
Related posts:

5:32
Quoteworthy: Hunt Thomas – Don’t Repeat Yourself
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F27%2Fquoteworthy-hunt-thomas-dont-repeat-yourself%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F27%2Fquoteworthy-hunt-thomas-dont-repeat-yourself%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F27%2Fquoteworthy-hunt-thomas-dont-repeat-yourself%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pEvery piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system. The alternative is to have the same thing expressed in two or more places. If you change one, you have to remember to change the others#8230; It isn#8217;t a question of whether you#8217;ll remember: it#8217;s a question of when you will forget./p p- A. Hunt and D. Thomas on the #8220;DRY principle#8221; (don#8217;t repeat yourself) from a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/020161622X?ie=UTF8amp;tag=jnotes-20amp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=390957amp;creativeASIN=020161622X"The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master/aimg style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=jnotes-20amp;l=as2amp;o=1amp;a=020161622X" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" //p pI might add that the same applies for documentation! #8211; JB/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/04/27/quoteworthy-hunt-thomas-dont-repeat-yourself/"Quoteworthy: Hunt #038; Thomas #8211; Don#8217;t Repeat Yourself/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2009/08/19/quoteworthy-thomas-edison/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: Thomas Edison'Quoteworthy: Thomas Edison/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2007/03/26/the-real-development-lifecycle/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: The REAL Development Lifecycle?'The REAL Development Lifecycle?/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/07/16/quoteworthy-chinese-proverb-involve-me-and-ill-understand/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: Chinese Proverb #8211; Involve me and I#8217;ll understand'Quoteworthy: Chinese Proverb #8211; Involve me and I#8217;ll understand/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/XUMqtFNfEJ4VlkgIsAXm4-lYOvg/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/XUMqtFNfEJ4VlkgIsAXm4-lYOvg/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/XUMqtFNfEJ4VlkgIsAXm4-lYOvg/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/XUMqtFNfEJ4VlkgIsAXm4-lYOvg/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=ESVYjUX9JPs:SB1HyyKp1O0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=ESVYjUX9JPs:SB1HyyKp1O0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=ESVYjUX9JPs:SB1HyyKp1O0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=ESVYjUX9JPs:SB1HyyKp1O0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=ESVYjUX9JPs:SB1HyyKp1O0:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/ESVYjUX9JPs" height="1" width="1"/

4:42
Python tutorial and advice
» ‎ Dan Siemon

A friend at work recently pointed me to a Python tutorial called Learn Python the Hard Way. It’s very basic but the later part has a little opinion chapter titled Advice from an old programmer which is worth taking the time to read. Below is one quote from this chapter.

Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art. You can create projects that other people can play with and you can talk to them indirectly. No other art form is quite this interactive. Movies go out to the audience. Paintings don’t move. Code goes both ways.

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but if you want to make about the same money and be happier you could actually just go run a fast food joint. You are much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

April 27, 2010
14:41
The Startup Racket
» ‎ What To Fix

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket" - attributed to Eric Hoffer.

I'm a startup junkie -- I love everything about how people can form together into small teams and change the world. To me it's the great untold story of the 20th and 21st century.

I also love writing. I have been a writer in some fashion or another for over 20 years, and loving every minute of it.

When I first started being serious about writing, I bought a copy of "Writer's Market", which would tell you where you could sell your writing. I subscribed to magazines like "The Writer" which educated me on all things a professional writer does and is. I attended conferences about being a writer. I sought out advice on how to submit, how to query, what to do or say and what not to do or say.

And a funny thing happened.

First, I became slightly successful. I wrote for local newspapers, regional magazines. Heck, I even did an interview of Clive Barker for High Society magazine. I realized that as much as I loved writing, it was a long haul and being rich probably wasn't in the cards.

Second I realized that I was consuming a vast amount of total crap in all the literature about writing. Take stories about what editors want. Some editor would write 500 words about what he wanted -- short cover letters, strong hook, yadda yadda. But what did he really want? He wanted a story to sell magazines. The story he was writing all kind of boiled down to "Don't pester me kid. I get a hundred like you every day, so write short letters, don't call, use an agent, do any freaking thing except for pestering me. I don't have time to sort through all of this junk I get"

Then there were the people who tried to sell me on making a living writing children's books. Or how-to books. But only if you paid them $99.95 for the full course. The deal here was that gee, there's no way all these folks are successful children's writers -- so where is the real action? The real action is selling courses on how to be a writer, not actually being one.

Lately, however, as much as I love startups, I've been seeing the same thing in the startup culture. As well-meaning as most people are, it's more of a racket than a help.

I read a recent post about "traction" -- the idea that your business is gaining more and more customers as time progresses. It was titled something like "How much traction is enough to talk to a VC? If you have to ask, you don't have enough"

Now this is like the bank saying in order to get credit you should already have plenty of money, or the editor saying that in order to pitch him you should already have an agent. It boils down to "Go do it on your own, kid. Then maybe we'll talk"

Nothing wrong with that advice. In fact I agree with it. But a VC's job (and an editor's) is to go through the slush pile and find gems that are going to help them grow. Only nobody wants to do that. It's too hard. Instead, everybody wants to find folks already succeeding and then pile on. Might make for a great bandwagon experience, but it's not being a VC (or angel)

Another article was about how to find and introduce yourself to an Angel. The gist? Already have a business making some amount of money, then use a personal connection to find an Angel. Once again, great advice -- lord knows if you are already making money and have a personal "in" with an Angel that's going to make the introduction go much better, but haven't we forgotten something?

If I'm making money, I'm not looking for cash to start a business. I may be looking for cash to grow a business, but I'm not looking for cash to start one.

Everybody wants the deal all wrapped up with a bow -- personal recommendation, cash flow, traction. Perhaps the founders have a lot of "moxie" or do a good interview. But the job description of venture investing is all about risk, not social engineering. If everybody goes for low-risk, highly social-engineered deals, what's the point? There's only so much room out there on that end of the spectrum guys, and it's already overcrowded enough as it is.

I spoke with a group a few months ago that was doing "early stage investing, covering the gap between FFF money (Friends, Family, Fools) and traditional angels"

First thing they told me? They wanted a business to already exist, have income and traction. By the way, they were really looking towards more high-end investing, say in the millions of dollars.

I'm seeing more and more websites -- some that require payment -- dedicated to showing you how to run a startup. More and more books about the magic forumla. More and more conferences and get togethers. More and more places where startups pay to be able to show their product.

There's lots of good people out there, even involved in all of these activities. But from the customer's standpoint, from the standpoint of whether it makes sense to invest time and money in all of this, there are a lot of rackets too -- places where you'll spend much more time and money than it's worth. After about the 100th founder's story you've read, at some point you should be doing some serious thinking.

At the end of the day, writing is about writing. You write because it is part of who you are. Startups are about startups. You create value from nothing (or attempt to) because it pleases you.

The goal here is to fail fast and learn, not to get a PhD in startups. PhDs in writing don't make any money, and PhDs in startups probably don't either. While the industry around startups will tell you they have useful information, most of them don't have a clue. It's like the guys writing "how to be a great writer" books. Totally worthless. Worse than worthless, because you waste valuable time consuming them. People get into this author and hero worship mentality and forget what startups are about.

I'm not down on the industry, and I apologize if this was a bit of a hurried rant. Most everybody I know in the how-to startup business means well. It's just that the industry has a lot of hidden flaws. Perhaps it's time to get them out into the open.

9:06
Atrocious Ethics Galore in the Lost iPhone Case
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. An extremely interesting analysis of the ongoing lost next-generation iPhone case has appeared over on Daring Fireball -- its very much worth reading. I agree very much with the thrust of that article. And now lets bring some ethical...

April 26, 2010
14:59
L'admin generator de Django vu par un développeur symfony
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Ce billet décrit ce qui différencie l'admin generator de Django de celui de symfony d'un point de vue fonctionnel

April 25, 2010
17:45
Google News hybrid recommendations
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Three Googlers published a paper, "Personalized News Recommendation Based on Click Behavior" (a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1719970.1719976"ACM/a), at the recent IUI 2010 conference that describes a hybrid recommender system combining user-based and content-based recommendations. This new hybrid recommender now appears to be deployed on Google News.br /br /Some excerpts from the paper:blockquotei[The] previous Google News recommendation system was developed using a collaborative filtering method. It recommends news stories that were read by users with similar click history. This method has two major drawbacks ... First, the system cannot recommend stories that have not yet been read by other users ... Second ... news stories [that] are generally very popular ... are constantly recommended to most of the users, even for those users who never [are interested because] ... there are always enough clicks ... to make the recommendation.br /br /A solution to these two problems would be to build profiles of user's genuine interests and use them to make news recommendations. The profiles ... filter out the stories that are not of interest ... [and recommend stories] even if [they have] not been clicked on by other users ... Based on a user's news reading history, the recommender predicts the topic categories of interest ... News articles in those categories are ranked higher in the candidate list.br /br /On average, the hybrid method ... improves the CTR [of] the existing collaborative method by 30.9% ... [and increased] the frequency of website visits in the test group [by] 14.1%./i/blockquoteHybrid recommenders are not that new. In the past, as in this paper, they usually were motivated by trying to deal with the sparsity and cold start problems that challenge collaborative filtering recommenders. Hybrid systems also have been used to deal with the so-called Harry Potter problem -- recommendations that focus too much on popular items -- by constraining the collaborative recommendations to the interests expressed in the profile, though that often can be better dealt with by tuning a collaborative recommender to discourage correlations between unpopular and popular items.br /br /One thing that is surprising in this paper is the use of high-level topics rather than fine-grained topics. I would think that you would be better off getting as specific as possible on the profile, then branching out to related topics. The paper briefly addresses this, arguing that "specializing the user profile may limit the recommendations to news that the user already knew", but that seems like it would only happen if you rather foolishly only used read topics rather than including topics that appear to be related to read topics.br /br /By the way, when you have as much data as Google should have, it is not at all clear you want to fall back on a content approach like they did in this paper here. Yehuda Koren, for example, has a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-front-lines-of-netflix-prize.html"convincingly argued/a that, when you have big data, latent factor models extract these content-based relationships automatically in much more detail and much more accurately than you could hope to do with a manually constructed model.br /br /Finally, I cannot quite let this one go by without mentioning that a href="http://findory.com"Findory/a was a hybrid news recommender, launched in January 2004, that dealt with the cold start and sparsity problems of a collaborative recommender, the same problems the Google News team apparently is still struggling with six years later. Findory is not mentioned in this paper in the related work, but I know the Google team is quite aware of Findory.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8975047489882872561?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

April 24, 2010
17:22
Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpDavid Recordon of Facebook has an interesting post titled a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/why-f8-was-good-for-the-open-w.html"Why f8 was good for the open web/a where he talks about how some of Facebook’s announcements at their recent F8 conference increase the openness of the Web. He calls out the following four items as the key benefits to the web as a whole from the F8 announcements /p ol liNo 24-hour caching limit /li liAn API that is realtime and isn’t just about content /li liThe Open Graph protocol /li liOAuth 2.0 /li /ol pOf these, the third seems to me to be the most beneficial to the Web as a whole. The first, second and fourth items are really about benefits to Facebook developers. Although I guess you could argue that such a significant service adopting OAuth 2.0 is great for increasing adoption across the Web. However this pales in comparison to the fundamental shifts in thinking introduced by the Open Graph Protocol. /p h1Evolving the Social Graph/h1 pThe first question is what problem does the Open Graph Protocol solve for Facebook and why are they releasing it? /p pimg style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://4vwitg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p_kvoPePtspyDS-QeKkABY3kkV2Y08ss_FwTMhkR8ZRKx8OoFfglcAA6T1QTynsE17ZHGVsquK2ZvGYDgWwJdVcU2NWHpqGtm/socgraph07.gif" //p puFigure 1:/u The Facebook Social Graph in 2006/p pThe original Facebook social graph had a one type of node and edge. The nodes were users and the edges were friend relationships. The operations you could perform on the nodes are also straightforward. How many friends does Jane have? Is Kim a friend of Mary? And so on. As more features were added to the site, new nodes and edges were added to the social graph/p pimg style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p4vrdeyWrn-9hXOCP17Qsogt4Iz7lZuIsrRsEgJBoPzSvSVrL98DANyYBF3Y3QzrSXxAXfKca0fQ_5qlE8HYx5g/socgraph09.gif" //p puFigure 2:/u The Facebook Social Graph in 2009/p pEach of these nodes supports similar operations. By counting the number of incoming connections you can tell how many fan's Justin Bieber has, how many people want to show the world their love for the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramblin%27_Wreck"Ramblin’ Wreck/a or how many people have added Mary as a friend. However as Facebook tries to model more of our offline world, it is clear that these aren’t the only types of relationships that users can have nor are these nodes the only entities users can have a relationship with. Which brings us to…/p pimg style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pjKckArZTnXwjvct7Zj5q1pzvE-eb8pQSJX_sHpJTCdKz-YHsiGR1iNRDgzgKSkjaZLFDPI8bogMrygUr1cBxuA/socgraph11.gif" //p puFigure 3:/u The Facebook Social Graph in 2011/p pThe Open Graph Protocol is the first step in allowing Facebook users express relationships with arbitrary emsocial objects/em. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of social objects, Hugh McLeod wrote a great introductory post on this concept entitled a href="http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/"social objects for beginners/a which is excerpted below/p blockquote pemThe Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object. /em/p pemstrongExample A./strong You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object. /em/p pemstrongExample B./strong You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object. /em/p pemstrongExample C./strong You’ve popped into your local bar for a drink after work. At the bar there’s some random dude, sending a text on this neat-looking cellphone you’ve never seen before. So you go up to him and ask him about the phone. The random dude just LOVES his new phone, so has no trouble with telling a stranger about his new phone for hours on end. Next thing you know, you two are hitting it off and you offer to buy him a beer. You spend the rest of the next hour geeking out about the new phone, till it’s time for you to leave and go dine with your wife. The cellphone was the social object. /em/p pemstrongExample D./strong You’re a horny young guy at a party, in search of a mate. You see a hot young woman across the room. You go up and introduce yourself. You do not start the conversation by saying, “Here’s a list of all the girls I’ve gone to bed with, and some recent bank statements showing you how much money I make. Would you like to go to bed with me?” No, something more subtle happens. Basically, like all single men with an agenda, you ramble on like a yutz for ten minutes, making small talk. Until she mentions the name of her favorite author, /ema href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-bio.html"emSaul Bellow/em/aem. Halleluiah! As it turns out, Saul Bellow happens to be YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR as well [No, seriously. He really is. You’re not making it up just to look good.]. Next thing you know, you two are totally enveloped in this deep and meaningful conversation about Saul Bellow. “Seize The Day”, “Herzog”, “Him With His Foot In His Mouth” and “Humbolt’s Gift”, eat your heart out. And as you two share a late-night cab back to her place, you’re thinking about how Saul Bellow is the Social Object here. /em/p /blockquote pThere are more examples in Hugh’s post but you get the idea. Social objects had been represented by “fan pages” in the Facebook world but with the Open Graph Protocol, it is now possible for any random website to become a part of Facebook’s social graph. This is a very powerful and liberating concept both from the perspective of what it enables Facebook’s platform to do but also because it gets rid of some ugly forms of lock-in. For example, Robert Scoble would no longer need to maintain a brand presence on Facebook at a title="http://www.facebook.com/scobleizer" href="http://www.facebook.com/scobleizer"http://www.facebook.com/scobleizer/a that is different from his website at a title="http://www.facebook.com/scobleizer" href="http://www.scobleizer.com"http://www.scobleizer.com/a to stay connected with fans of his blog who are Facebook users.#160; /p h1Turning Web Pages into Social Objects/h1 pThe process of turning a web page into a social object that Facebook can add to their social graph is very straightforward. From the a href="http://opengraphprotocol.org/"Open Graph Protocol documentation/a we learn /p blockquote pemTo turn your web pages into graph objects, you need to add basic metadata to your page. We've based the initial version of the protocol on /ema href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa"emRDFa/em/aem which means that you'll place additional codelt;metagt;/code tags in the codelt;headgt;/code of your web page. The four required properties for every page are:/em/p ul liemcodeog:title/code - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., quot;The Rockquot;. /em/li liemcodeog:type/code - The /ema href="http://opengraphprotocol.org/#types"emtype/em/aem of your object, e.g., quot;moviequot;. Depending on the type you specify, other properties may also be required. /em/li liemcodeog:image/code - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. /em/li liemcodeog:url/code - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/quot;./em /li /ul pemAs an example, the following is the Open Graph protocol markup for /ema href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500"emThe Rock on IMDB/em/aem:/em/p precodeemlt;html xmlns:og=quot;http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/quot;gt; lt;headgt; lt;titlegt;The Rock (1996)lt;/titlegt; lt;meta property=quot;og:titlequot; content=quot;The Rockquot; /gt; lt;meta property=quot;og:typequot; content=quot;moviequot; /gt; lt;meta property=quot;og:urlquot; content=quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/quot; /gt; lt;meta property=quot;og:imagequot; content=quot;http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpgquot; /gt; ... lt;/headgt; ... lt;/htmlgt; /em/code/pre pemThe following properties are optional for any object and are generally recommended:/em/p ul liemcodeog:description/code - A one to two sentence description of your object. /em/li liemcodeog:site_name/code - If your object is part of a larger web site, the name which should be displayed for the overall site. e.g., quot;IMDbquot;./em /li /ul /blockquote pFor now Facebook supports a a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph#types"limited set of object types/a from the following categories; activities, businesses, groups, organizations, people, places, products amp; entertainment amp; websites. Once your page is marked up and categorized, the next step is to provide a way for users to add it to their social graph on Facebook. This is done by using adding the Facebook a href="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like"Like button/a to the page. From then onward, when a user clicks the Like button they become a fan of that page. /p pNot only is your page added to their profile but you can also send news feed updates to all the people who have liked your page (just like “Fan Pages” can) if you associate the Like button with your Facebook ID. Doing that provides you with an admin page where you can post news feed entries from. /p h1The Return of the Semantic Web/h1 pOne of the things I find most exciting about this development is that sites now have significant motivation to be marked up with extremely structured data which can then be consumed by other applications. Having such rich descriptive metadata will be a boon to search engines especially those from startups since some of the big guys consider their ability to extract semantics out of HTML tag soup a competitive advantage and have thus a href="http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-6095705.html"fought the semantic web for years/a. /p pIn the social media space, a few people have focused on the fact that this data is put in place to enable sites to be added to Facebook’s social graph. However there is little reason why other social networking services couldn’t also read the same markup as a way to add those web sites to their social graph. For example, a href="http://www.yelp.com/"Yelp/a is one of the sites that now supports the Open Graph Protocol so when I click like the a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/pro-sports-club-bellevue"Pro Sports Club/a it is added to the list of “pages” I’m a fan of on Facebook. However I could just as easily see that being a [Twitter – Like] button which would add the Twitter account for the gym to my following list along with tweeting to my followers that I liked the gym. It would only take adding a markup element to what Yelp is outputting to indicate the Twitter account of the page being liked. With my Windows Live hat on, I can imagine going to Amazon or IMDB and clicking a [Windows Live – Like] button which would add the movie to a href="http://cid-616444ee7a34f417.profile.live.com/FavoriteThings/"my list of favorite things/a. There are a ton of possibilities this opens up in a totally decentralized way without forcing services or users to be locked into a particular social network. /p pThis has been the dream Tim Berners-Lee has been pushing for years and I’m quite surprised to see Facebook being the service to take a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa"RDFa/a mainstream. One of the things I’m happiest about is that Facebook chose RDFa for their implementation instead of the much hyped yet weaker solution, microformats. As Evan Prodromou wrote a few years ago in his post a href="http://evan.prodromou.name/RDFa_vs_microformats"RDFa vs. Microformats/a, RDFa encourages interoperable implementations between organizations and avoids naming collisions via namespacing as opposed to the microformats approach which requires a centralized committee process to add/remove elements from data formats. From my example above, adding support for indicating the Twitter account of a page that implemented the Open Graph Protocol would be as simple as adding an element namespaced to some Twitter URI. That is a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/08/02/HTML5-and-Distributed-Extensibility"distributed extensibility/a in action. /p h1Final Thoughts/h1 pThis is a very exciting time for the Web. I suspect that this will be another Facebook platform hit that exceeds expectations. The same way no one could have predicted Zynga and Farmville when the Facebook platform first launched is the way I feel we’ll all be surprised at the sorts of things that will be powered by the Open Graph Protocol in the next year or two. /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Timbalandamp;field-title=Say+Somethingamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Timbaland/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Timbaland+Say+Somethingamp;x=0amp;y=0"Say Something (featuring Drake)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

14:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 042310
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office in some Redwood City bar, where I’m using my pick-up line on all the single ladies, “Did you happen to find my Congressional Medal of Honor around here? Or my iPhone 4G?” #1: RT @TechCrunch Foursquare Becomes More Business-Friendly http://tcrn.ch/b45AJY > Biz owners can claim their businesses #2: RT @jowyang Heard [...]

0:21
Video: Solving Your Facebook Privacy Problems in 2.5 Minutes (with a Bit Of Style)
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Privacy-related concerns surrounding Facebook continue to escalate. Now anxiety levels are boosting even more rapidly with the unveiling of Facebooks new Instant Personalization system and its potential for massive expansion of personal information gathering from -- and sharing with...

April 23, 2010
5:23
The fallacy of privacy settings
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Another round of “update your Facebook privacy settings right now” messages recently swept through Twitter and blogs. As also happened a few months ago, when Facebook last modified some privacy settings to better accommodate their business goals. This is borderline silly. So, once and for all, here is the rule:

Don’t put anything on any social network that you don’t want to be made public.

Don’t count on your privacy settings on the site to keep your “private” data out of the public eye. Here are the many ways in which they can fail (using Facebook as a stand-in for all the other social networks, this is not specific to Facebook):
- You make a mistake when configuring the privacy settings
- Facebook changes the privacy mechanisms on you during one of their privacy policy updates
- Facebook has a security flaw that bypasses access control
- One of you friends who has access to your private data accidentally/stupidly/maliciously shares it more widely
- A Facebook application to which you grant access betrays your trust in accessing the data and exposing it
- A Facebook application gets hacked
- A Facebook application retains your data in its cache
- Your account (or one of your friends’ account) gets hacked
- Anonymized data that Facebook shares with researchers gets correlated back to real users
- Some legal action (not necessarily related to you personally) results in a large amount of Facebook data (including yours) seized and exported for legal review
- Facebook looses some backup media
- Facebook gets acquired (or it goes out of business and its assets are sold to the highest bidder)
- Facebook (or whoever runs their hardware) disposes of hardware without properly wiping it
- Etc…
All in all, you should not think of these privacy settings as locks protecting your data. Think of them as simply a “do not disturb” sign (or a necktie…) hanging on the knob of an unlocked door. I am not advising against using privacy settings, just against counting on them to work reliably. If you’d rather your work colleagues don’t see your holiday pictures, then set your privacy settings so they can’t see them. But if it would really bother you if they saw them, then don’t post the pictures on Facebook at all. Think of it like keeping a photo in your wallet. You get to choose who you show it to, until the day you forget your wallet in the office bathroom, or at a party, and someone opens it to find the owner. You already know this instinctively, which is why you probably wouldn’t carry photos in your wallet that shouldn’t be shown publicly. It’s the same on Facebook.

This is what was so disturbing about the Buzz/GMail privacy fiasco. It took data (your list of GMail contacts) that was not created for the purpose of sharing it with anyone, and turned this into profile data in a social network. People who signed up for GMail didn’t sign up for a social network, they signed up for a Web-based email. What Google wants, on the other hand, is a large social network like Facebook, so it tried to make GMail into one by auto-following GMail contacts in your Buzz profile. It’s as if your insurance company suddenly decided it wanted to enter the social networking business and announced one day that you were now “friends” with all their customers who share the same medical condition. And will you please log in and update your privacy settings if you have a problem with that, you backward-looking, privacy-hugging, profit-dissipating idiot.

On the other hand, that’s one thing I like about Twitter. By and large (except for the few people who lock their accounts) almost all the information you put in Twitter is expected to be public. There is no misrepresentation, confusion or surprise. I don’t consider this lack of configurable privacy as a sign that Twitter doesn’t respect the privacy of its users. To the contrary, I almost see this as the most privacy-friendly approach: make it clear that everything is public. Because it is anyway.

One could almost make a counter-intuitive case that providing privacy settings is anti-privacy because it gives an unwarranted sense of security and nudges users towards providing more private data than they otherwise would. At least if the policy settings are not contractual (can you sue Facebook for changing its privacy terms on you?). At least it’s been working that way so far for Facebook, intentionally of not, as illustrated by all the articles that stress the importance of setting our privacy settings right (implicit message: it’s ok to put private information as long as you set privacy settings).

Yes you should have clear privacy settings. But the place to store them is in your brain and the place to enforce them is by controlling what your fingers do before data gets on Facebook. Facebook and similar networks can only leak data that they posses. A lot of that data comes from you directly uploading it. And that’s the point where you have control. After this, you really don’t. Other data comes from tracking and analyzing your activities and connections, without explicit data upload from you. That’s a lot harder for you to control (you rarely even get asked for your privacy preferences on this data), but that’s out of scope for this blog entry.

Just like banks that are too big to fail are too big to exist, data that is too sensitive to leak from Facebook is too sensitive to be on Facebook.

[Note: this post is somewhat off-topic for this blog. But here is a variation that brings it back to one of the usual topics of discussion: can’t the exact same thing be said for Cloud Computing in general? Isn’t data too sensitive to leak from the Cloud also to sensitive to be in the Cloud? Which of the points above, which apply to personal data in social networks, don’t also apply to enterprise data in Cloud platforms? What additional safety

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April 22, 2010
18:44
Retour sur le Paris JUG Scala
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Cette session m'a permis d'éclaircir un peu ce qui se cache derrière le langage Scala lors des deux conférences données au cours du Paris JUG du 14 à l'ISEP. Pas besoin de faire un compte-rendu détaillé des conférences puisque c'est déja fait : http://thecodersbreakfast.net/index.... Tout d'abord, il faut signaler que pour ma première participation au Paris JUG, j'ai été enchanté par l'ambiance bon enfant et par les organisateurs. Scala est une salle d'opéra à Milan mais aussi un langage mêlant (...)
18:20
Points clés pour la réalisation d'une application mobile
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

La progression rapide du marché lié à l'Internet mobile ainsi qu'à l'effervescence qui en résulte — visible notamment chez nous avec les succès de nos petits déjeuners, l'interview de Xavier Rivoire begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting par TV4IT ou le lancement de plusieurs sites mobiles pour InfoTBC — incite les entreprises à investir sur ce segment porteur. Cet article présente l'état du marché des smartphones, les différences entre applications mobiles de type web et (...)

14:25
Will White Flight Strike the U.S.?
» ‎ What To Fix

I've noticed several trends in recent years, and I wonder if they won't all come together

The United States is on an unsustainable trajectory of spending. Politicians get elected making promises to spend money for stuff, and as long as they can find money, they're going to continue using it to get votes. No real news here.

Many third-world countries are becoming attractive places to live. Cost-of-living is low, the governments are getting more stable, and the land is not as over-developed as it is in the states.

The tax situation in the U.S. is getting crazy. Already people are beginning to renounce their citizenship because of the legal morass they get into when living overseas. While still at a small number, this is projected to increase.

Given these trends, which i believe to be true, I wonder if large numbers of U.S. citizens aren't going to start leaving the country to live in another country? Just like we saw with poorly-ran cities, I wonder if the country as a whole will suffer a kind of "White Flight", where the better off people move out of the city because the burden it is placing on them does not match the value of the services they are receiving? Meanwhile poorer people move in, further decreasing the tax base.

There is already a number, probably around 10K per month, where a person could take the same money they are paying in taxes and live in Central or South America and do quite nicely. They could pay for their own security, medical, electric, and communication services -- for much less than they are doing now. In addition the local labor rates are extremely low. A startup I was speaking with a few years ago was working with a growing market of ex-pats living in beautiful countries for a bargain. But for most people, the hassle of living far away from friends and family isn't worth it. As the tax burden increases, the difference between the pain of moving and the benefits of moving will become less and less.

5:58
The battle of the Cloud Frameworks: Application Servers redux?
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
The battle of the Cloud Frameworks has started, and it will look a lot like the battle of the Application Servers which played out over the last decade and a half. Cloud Frameworks (which manage IT automation and runtime outsourcing) are to the Programmable Datacenter what Application Servers are to the individual IT server. In the longer term, these battlefronts may merge, but for now we’ve been transported back in time, to the early days of Web programming. The underlying dynamic is the same. It starts with a disruptive IT event (part new technology, part new mindset). 15 years ago the disruptive event was the Web. Today it’s Cloud Computing.

Stage 1

It always starts with very simple use cases. For the Web, in the mid-nineties, the basic use case was “how do I return HTML that is generated by a script as opposed to a static file”. For Cloud Computing today, it is “how do I programmatically create, launch and stop servers as opposed to having to physically install them”.

In that sense, the IaaS APIs of today are the equivalent of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) circa 1993/1994. Like the EC2 API and its brethren, CGI was not optimized, not polished, but it met the basic use cases and allowed many developers to write their first Web apps (which we just called “CGI scripts” at the time).

Stage 2

But the limitations became soon apparent. In the CGI case, it had to do with performance (the cost of the “one process per request” approach). Plus, the business potential was becoming clearer and attracted a different breed of contenders than just academic and research institutions. So we got NSAPI, ISAPI, FastCGI, Apache Modules, JServ, ZDAC…

We haven’t reached that stage for Cloud yet. That will be when the IaaS APIs start to support events, enumerations, queries, federated identity etc…

Stage 3

Stage 2 looked like the real deal, when we were in it, but little did we know that we were still just nibbling on the hors d’oeuvres. And it was short-lived. People quickly decided that they wanted more than a way to handle HTTP requests. If the Web was going to be central to most programs, then all aspects of programming had to fit well in the context of the Web. We didn’t want Web servers anymore, we wanted application servers (re-purposing a term that had been used for client-server). It needed more features, covering data access, encapsulation, UI frameworks, integration, sessions. It also needed to meet non-functional requirements: availability, scalability (hello clustering), management, identity…

That turned into the battle between the various Java application servers as well as between Java and Microsoft (with .Net coming along), along with other technology stacks. That’s where things got really interesting too, because we explored different ways to attack the problem. People could still program at the HTTP request level. They could use MVC framework, ColdFusion/ASP/JSP/PHP-style markup-driven applications, or portals and other higher-level modular authoring frameworks. They got access to adapters, message buses, process flows and other asynchronous mechanisms. It became clear that there was not just one way to write Web applications. And the discovery is still going on, as illustrated by the later emergence of Ruby on Rails and similar frameworks.

Stage 4

Stage 3 is not over for Web applications, but stage 4 is already there, as illustrated by the fact that some of the gurus of stage 3 have jumped to stage 4. It’s when the Web is everywhere. Clients are everywhere and so are servers for that matter. The distinction blurs. We’re just starting to figure out the applications that will define this stage, and the frameworks that will best support them. The game is far from over.

So what does it mean for Cloud Frameworks?

If, like me, you think that the development of Cloud Frameworks will follow a path similar to that of Application Servers, then the quick retrospective above can be used as a (imperfect) crystal ball. I don’t pretend to be a Middleware historian or that these four stages are the most accurate representation, but I think they are a reasonable perspective. And they hold some lessons for Cloud Frameworks.

It’s early

We are at stage 1. I’ll admit that my decision to separate stages 1 and 2 is debatable and mainly serves to illustrate how early in the process we are with Cloud frameworks. Current IaaS APIs (and the toolkits that support them) are the equivalent of CGI (and the early httpd), something that’s still around (Google App Engine emulates CGI in its Python incarnation) but almost no-one programs to directly anymore. It’s raw, it’s clunky, it’s primitive. But it was a needed starting point that launched the whole field of Web development. Just like IaaS APIs like EC2 have launched the field Cloud Computing.

Cloud Frameworks will need to go through the equivalent of all the other stages. First, the IaaS APIs will get more optimized and capable (stage 2). Then, at stage 3, we will focus on higher-level, more productive abstraction layers (generally referred to as PaaS) at which point we should expect a thousand different approaches to bloom, and several of them to survive. I will not hazard a guess as to what stage 4 will look like (here is my guess for stage 3, in two parts).

No need to rush standards

One benefit of this retrospective is to highlight the tragedy of Cloud standards compared to Web development standards. Wouldn’t we be better off today if the development leads of AWS and a couple of other Cloud providers had been openly cooperating in a Cloud equivalent of the www-talk mailing list of yore? Out of it came a rough agreement on HTML and CGI that allowed developers to write basic Web applications in a reasonably portable way. If the same informal collaboration had taken place for IaaS APIs, we’d have a simple de-facto consensus that would support the low-hanging fruits of basic IaaS. It would allow Cloud developers to support the simplest use cases, and relieve the self-defeating pressure to standardize too early. Standards played a huge role in the development of Application Servers (especially of the Java kind), but that really took place as part of stage 3. In the absence of an equivalent to CGI in the Cloud world, we are at risk of rushing the standardization without the benefit of the experimentation and lessons that come in stage 3.

I am not trying to sugar-coat the history of Web standards. The HTML saga is nothing to be inspired by. But there was an original effort to build consensus that wasn’t even attempted with Cloud APIs. I like the staged process of a rough consensus that covers the basic use cases, followed by experimentation and proprietary specifications and later a more formal standardization effort. If we skip the rough consensus stage, as we did with Cloud, we end up rushing to do final step (to the tune of “customers demand Cloud standards”) even though all we need for now is an interoperable way to meet the basic use cases.

Winners and losers

Whoever you think of as the current leaders of the Application Server battle (hint: I work for one), they were not the obvious leaders of stages 1 and 2. So don’t be in too much of a hurry to crown the Cloud Framework kings. Those you think of today may turn out to be the Netscapes of that battle.

New roles

It’s not just new technology. The development of Cloud Frameworks will shape the roles of the people involved. We used to have designers who thought their job was done when they produced a picture or at best a FrameMaker or QuarkXPress document, which is what they were used to. We had “webmasters” who thought they were set for life with their new Apache skills, then quickly had to evolve or make way, a lesson for IaaS gurus of today. Under terms like “DevOps” new roles are created and existing roles are transformed. Nobody yet knows what will stick. But if I was an EC2 guru today I’d make sure to not get stuck providing just that. Don’t wait for other domains of Cloud expertise to be in higher demand than your current IaaS area, as by then you’ll be too late.

It’s the stack

There aren’t many companies out there making a living selling a stand-alone Web server. Even Zeus, who has a nice one, seems to be downplaying it on its site compared to its application delivery products. The combined pressure of commoditization (hello Apache) and of the demand for a full stack has made it pretty hard to sell just a Web server.

Similarly, it’s going to be hard to stay in business selling just portions of a Cloud Framework. For example, just provisioning, just monitoring, just IaaS-level features, etc. That’s well-understood and it’s fueling a lot of the acquisitions (e.g. VMWare’s purchase of SpringSource which in turn recently purchased RabbitMQ) and partnerships (e.g. recently between Eucalyptus and GroundWork though rarely do such “partnerships” rise to the level of integration of a real framework).

It’s not even clear what the right scope for a Cloud Framework is. What makes a full stack and what is beyond it? Is it just software to manage a private Cloud environment and/or deployments into public Clouds? Does the framework also include the actual public Cloud service? Does it include hardware in some sort of “private Cloud in a box”, of the kind that this recent Dell/Ubuntu announcement seems to be inching towards?

Integration

If indeed we can go by the history of Application Server to predict the future of Cloud Frameworks, then we’ll have a few stacks (with different levels of completeness, standardized or proprietary). This is what happened for Web development (the JEE stack, the .Net stack, a more loosely-defined alternative stack which is mostly open-source, niche stacks like the backend offered by Adobe for Flash apps, etc) and at some point the effort moved from focusing on standardizing the different application environment technology alternatives (e.g. J2EE) towards standardizing how the different platforms can interoperate (e.g. WS-*). I expect the same thing for Cloud Frameworks, especially as they grow out of stages 1 and 2 and embrace what we call today PaaS. At which point the two battlefields (Application Servers and Cloud Frameworks) will merge. And when this happens, I just can’t picture how one stack/framework will suffice for all. So we’ll have to define meaningful integration between them and make them work.

If you’re a spectator, grab plenty of popcorn. If you’re a soldier in this battle, get ready for a long campaign.

Related posts:

April 21, 2010
14:00
Six Factors in Emergent Innovation
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

In discussing employee-driven innovation, having a technology platform to deliver on objectives is a key part of a company’s strategy. Hard to get everyone tuned in when you rely only on email and conversations with your cubicle mates. But that’s just one factor. There are many other considerations for companies seeking to vault to the [...]

April 20, 2010
19:30
Learning by Trolling
» ‎ Jeslog

I've been following the development of the Go programming language for a few months now and learning more and more about it.divI've actually found that I learn more about it by helping other people than I would on my own. People on IRC and the mailing list tend to get themselves in to messy situtations and wanting to do insane things and encounter problems I never would. In the process of helping those people with their insanity I actually learn a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html"alot/a./divdivbr //divdivI tend to have a shortage of problems because I'm very good at planning to avoid them. Which I really think is a disadvantage, especially in any kind of learning or research stages./divdivbr //divdivThe whole reason human beings have advanced technologically has been due to the great number of problems we've had and created for ourselves. /divdivDroughts resulted in the need for farming, farming caused over population, over population caused packed cities of people spreading disease resulting in the need for medical treatments. etc./divdivbr //divdivIf it wasn't for all the stupid problems we wouldn't have the solutions./divdivbr //divdiv class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7931585-4878947928706680185?l=blog.jessta.id.au' alt='' //div

7:39
A week of Oracle Middleware, Management and Cloud
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Oracle has a busy week in store for people who are interested in application management. Today, the company announced:
- Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, to package and easily deploy virtualized composite applications. It’s an application-aware (via metadata) set of VM disk images. It comes with a graphical builder tool.
- Oracle WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option (not the most Twitter-friendly name, so if you see me tweet about “WebLogic Virtual” or “WLV” that’s what I mean), an optimized version of WebLogic Server which runs on JRockit Virtual Edition, itself on top of OVM. Notice what’s missing? The OS. If you think you’ll miss it, you may be suffering from learned helplessness. Seek help.
Later this week, Oracle will announce Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. I am not going to steal the thunder a couple of days before the announcement, but I can safely say that a large chunk of the new features relate to application management.

[UPDATED 2010/4/21: Adam and Blake's blogs on the Virtual Assembly Builder and WebLogic Suite Virtualization Option announcements. And Chung on the upcoming EM release.]

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3:00
Beware the Google Voice Phishing Attack!
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Earlier today a reader sent me an example of a phishing attack that they (and I) had not seen before. Before I could do much with it, someone else sent me another example of the same attack. Neither of...

April 19, 2010
16:38
Some Thoughts on XAuth
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpThere's an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb about a burgeoning technology effort supported by a number of web companies titled a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xauth_is_this_everyone_else_against_facebook_conne.php"XAuth: The Open Web Fires a Shot Against Facebook Connect/a which states/p blockquote pemA consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called /ema href="http://xauth.org"emXAuth/em/aem and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses. /em/p pemFacebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating br /... br //em/p h4emWhat XAuth Delivers/em/h4 pemIt's like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network./em/p pemThe gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It's like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too. /em/p h4emWhat About OAuth?/em/h4 emIf you're familiar with /ema href="http://oauth.net"emOAuth/em/aem, you might be wondering what the difference is between that system of secure authentication and XAuth. Here's one way to explain it: XAuth tells a webpage quot;this is where the site visitor does social networking.quot; Then, OAuth is the way the user logs in there, granting the site permission to access their info without seeing their password. In other words, XAuth tells you where to ask for OAuth from. /em pemGoogle's Joseph Smarr, recently hired because of his high-profile work on distributed identity systems across the web, says that XAuth is a provisional solution to the limitations of the cookie system. If you visit ReadWriteWeb, for example, our servers aren't allowed to check the cookies left on your browser by the social networks you use because they are tied to URL domains other than ours./em /p /blockquote pThe first thing that is worth pointing out is that XAuth is unot/u like a href="http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php"Facebook Connect/a. Facebook Connect enables a website to associate a user’s Facebook identity, social graph and activity stream with the site. XAuth enables a website to discover which services an end user is a member of that emsupport/em associating a user’s identity, social graph and/or activity stream with third party websites. /p pA practical example of this is the various sharing options at the bottom of this blog post (if you’re viewing it in the browser on your desktop PC)/p pimg style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://4vwitg.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pT9a1BfAKiqxe3FOwgtl6B6IxLfjM-P9X26llmXuFo4Xlh4WP_OY6eln0VWNB0hwjdPZqUD5MX__LZJboStQq92eXL37uU7ld/sharing%20nascar%202.png" //p pThis is a fixed list of options that where I had to write special Javascript code to handle each service. There are a few issues with this approach. The first is that people end up seeing exhortations to share on services they don’t use which is just visual noise in that case. Another is that, each of those widgets involves a Javascript call to the domain of the service which impacts page load times. In fact, I used to have a a href="http://www.reddit.com"Reddit/a widget but took it out because their server was too slow and noticeably impacted rendering of my blog. Finally, I tend to keep the list small because I don’t want my blog posts to suffer from the a href="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/04/06/does-openid-need-to-be-hard/"NASCAR problem/a so some services that may be popular with my audience audience are left out (e.g. I have no widgets for sharing on a href="http://buzz.google.com"Google Buzz/a, a href="http://www.slashdot.org"Slashdot/a or a href="http://www.digg.com"Digg/a). /p pHow the a href="http://xauth.org/spec/"XAuth specification/a attempts to solve this problem is fairly straightforward. Services that want to participate include some Javascript from a href="http://xauth.org"http://xauth.org/a which writes some data to the local storage (not cookie) for that domain when the user visits the social network. At that point there is now an indication on the user’s machine that they are a member of the aforementioned social network. Then when the user visits a site such as my blog, I also include the same Javascript from but this time I ask it if the user is a member of the social networks I’m interested in. Once the list of sites is returned, I then only have to render sharing widgets from the sites I support which the user is a member of. /p pIn general, I think XAuth is a legitimate attempt to solve a valid problem. However it should be made clear what problems XAuth doesn’t solve. For one, people like me who have an account on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Google, Windows Live, Reddit,#160; Delicious, etc will actually have a more cluttered experience than we do today. I know I’m always a little confused when I visit a site that uses a href="http://clickpass.com/"Clickpass/a since I can never remember if I’ve associated that site with my Facebook, Windows Live, Yahoo! or Google account. Similarly XAuth will potentially exacerbate the problem for the subset of people who are members of lots of social media sites. Another thing to be made clear is that this isn’t a replacement for delegated authentication and authorization technologies like a href="http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php"Facebook Connect/a, a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html"Twitter’s @Anywhere/a or a href="http://groups.google.com/group/oauth-wrap-wg?pli=1"OAuth WRAP/a. Sites will still need to support all of these technologies if they want to reach the widest audience. This is just about hiding options from users that do not matter to them. /p pThe one thing I’d keep an eye on is that XAuth provides a token that uniquely identifies the user as part of the results returned to the requesting site instead of a simply stating the user is a member of a specified social media site. This enables the requesting site (e.g. my blog) to potentially make some API calls to the social network site for information specific to the user without asking for permission first. For example, pre-populating the user’s name and display picture in a comment box. Since a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/26/facebooks-plan-to-automatically-share-your-data-with-sites-you-never-signed-up-for/"Facebook has already announced such functionality/a I guess people don’t think it is overstepping the bounds of the user relationship to enable this feature on any website the user visits without the user explicitly granting the sites permission to their profile information. It will be interesting to see if implementations of this feature steer clear of some of the creepiness factor of Facebook’s Beacon program which led to massive outcry in its day. /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=Jamie+Foxxamp;field-title=amp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"Jamie Foxx/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=Jamie+Foxx+Winneramp;x=0amp;y=0"Winner (featuring Justin Timberlake amp; T.I.)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

14:21
The cost of High Availability (HA) with Oracle
» ‎ BigDataMatters.com
What's the cost of downtime to your business? $100,000 per hour, $1,000,000 or more? The recent volcanic ash that has grounded European flights is estimated to be costing the airlines $200M a day. In the IT world, High Availability (HA) architectures allow for disaster recovery as well as uninterrupted business continuity during system failure.

This post focuses on a customer’s backend, comprised of a business application stack supported by a dozen Oracle databases. They wish to equip this infrastructure with HA features and ensure that outages do not cost business. How do we address the challenge of pricing the complete solution, with hardware, software, services and annual support?

The options

Active Data Guard can be used if the locations are far apart, while Oracle RAC promises transparent application failover if they are in close proximity. For Enterprise-class users with database heterogeneity, then GoldenGate software, the 2009 addition to Oracle’s portfolio, is an attractive solution.
And for those with no stringent real-time I/O requirements, backup might be enough, so it’s worth considering Oracle Secure Backup or the external cloud variants that allow us to save on CapEx. With this option, there’s no need for extra hardware if the data is on the cloud. Home-made solutions based on Streams are also not unheard of.
Others will prefer hardware replication with intelligent disk arrays from EMC, Fujitsu, Sun (Oracle) and any other vendor in conjunction with clustering software such as Red Hat Cluster Suite. Those with cost as the number one priority might consider open-source disk array software replication methods such as DRBD.
Two architectures, Three competing solutions
Using our Momentum(tm) methodology (technical and economic analysis) we narrow the field down to two alternative HA offerings. These two solutions are based on introducing a HA management layer through either database clustering or disk array replication.

1) Database clustering DB v1 Oracle RAC allows databases to be run on the server farm for failover and efficiency purposes. When one server instance fails, the other transparently takes over. For storage redundancy, ASM is used to manage data replication between the storage units. HA is achieved through RAC managing redundancy at all levels. (Note: This design assumes geographical proximity of the redundant nodes due to synchronisation issues).

2) Disk array replication Disk array OracleDB is still used, but in this scenario the database is unaware that the underlying architecture provides for business continuity. Instead, intelligent disk arrays transparently perform data replication to the remote location. High Availability is invisible to the upper layers of the software stack (Note: also here, there is a limit on physical distance between sites connected, due to latency and bandwidth characteristics)
3) And the third solution? DB v2 Based on exactly the same architecture defined for DB v1 and knowing that some associated licensing restrictions would not affect the customer’s operations, we can recalculate the costs using a different licensing model (in this case restrictions were limiting the number of system users).
In short, the finance director will see three solutions to choose from, while the IT architect will only see two.
More on licenses

Oracle currently has a sophisticated licensing scheme and working out the optimum involves exercising the patience of our Oracle sales team. Beyond the alternative licensing models, the usual headache is to calculate the license migration from legacy architecture paradigms. Most vendors defend their business interest so that if you haven’t purchased support in the past, they will make you purchase it backwards, otherwise migration won’t be possible. Such aggressive loyalty schemes can annoy and put customers off who have little choice and so negotiations follow. This is where consultants are used to find an agreeable compromise between both parties.
Pricing

To forecast total project direct capital expenditure, we break it down into the four major CapEx: (1) software licenses (2) hardware (3) services (4) year 1 support package which is normally paid up front.

The original “DB v1” option was priced at $611K. After the license tuning exercise, the total for “DB v2 option came in at $518K - a saving of 93K.

For this type of project, the major cost considerations are hardware and software, while services and support are marginal. For DB v1, cost breakdown is: 36% hardware, 40% software, 13% services, 11% support.

So, if the hardware only solution removes additional investment in software, can we see significant savings? No. Surprisingly Disk array comes in at $561K. Enterprise-grade storage arrays with replication features are not cheap.

Still open to interpretation

The cost of achieving business continuity using software is slightly less, although still comparable, to the hardware-only solution. So hardware or software?

Frustrated strategist: Hardware is not the only answer

This is just another example of how wrong it is to “kill the problem with hardware”. How often do we see people instinctively decide to purchase extra hardware to overcome scalability challenges? To me, this knee-jerk reaction is based on short-termism thinking and is extremely frustrating. Just look. Here, the distributed middleware provides you with the same results, but slightly cheaper. This cost saving will grow dramatically the more you scale out. Why?
Simple - software vendors have greater freedom for volume discounts than the hardware vendors. Once you’ve purchased one license, the vendor’s cost of granting another for free is zero. It’s worth remembering that the larger your installation, the greater the cost gap between hardware-centered and software-centered solutions becomes. For scalability there is no choice, software-centered solutions win every time.
Conservative Tactician: Step back and figure out the context

At the moment this is a small project and we’re not scaling out just yet. It’s surprising how similar the costs of both the hardware and software approaches are. A 7% cost difference isn’t considerable, especially as before the license restrictions work around, the hardware variant was actually cheaper! The price difference itself is not significant enough to help us decide which approach is best. The factors affecting our decision will not be financial, but contextual:
- What’s the envisioned technical context of this environment? Is this a dedicated system, or will it be sharing resources with other applications? It’s worth noting that hardware-based replication will equally protect all the data of the software running on top of it. Here you can fix all your HA needs at once, at the risk of volumes of unnecessary replicated data slowing the network. Instead, RAC will only provide business continuity to the data inside Oracle DB; lesser the risk, lesser the reward.
- What’s the Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective in your Disaster Recovery Plan? At failure, Oracle RAC will “guarantee” to seamlessly and transparently switch over the cluster control with no data loss, while other solutions require a few seconds or minutes to switch over (so not being completely transparent). Can you really afford this delay without harming your business?
- How does this fit the generic site policies, such as data center virtualization, disaster recovery plan or power consumption targets? Now the picture can become complicated and various arguments lean towards certain solutions. Imagine your environment is virtualized. In case of an incident, the “Disk array” hardware replication will allow all VMs to be automatically restarted on a secondary site. The downside? Service interruption is around 1 minute, while “DB v1” software solution is seamless. On the other hand with virtualization covering two replicated sites you are approaching licensing hell; you’ll pay up to twice the price for all your programs unless you are able to consolidate. The costing analysis here is quite complex but definitely worth investigating. In the long run you’ll easily save six or seven digits by picking a HA strategy that matches the site policy.
Of course these are just the fundamentals and there are many more factors to consider. Any HA project that’s undertaken must take into account the indirect, hidden, and long-term cost implications.

Summary
- With small installations, achieving HA and business continuity of your database-oriented software stack can be implemented with various strategies, including hardware or software solutions at an almost identical cost.
- Don’t immediately resort to a hardware-only based solution, at least not before proper consultation. Think strategically and ask yourself whether your architecture will need to scale. Cost implications here will be significant.
- Don’t rely solely on software until your HA solution covers the complete context. You chose software for agility. You don’t want to close your budget with the business continuity architecture that covers only a fraction of your critical systems.
- Apply methodical analysis during the decision process.

5:29
Chromium Removing http://
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
A recent build of Chromium removes “http://” from the Omnibar in the browser, and replaces it with a globe icon. As a result, typing “http://www.google.com” will result in “www.google.com/” being displayed, rather than the full URI. There’s been a lot of heat and discussion about this, and near and far as I can tell, people just plain don’t like it. At least the vocal minority doesn’t. From what I’ve pieced together, here are the reasons the developers have removed “http://” from the display:
1. The browser uses HTTP as its default protocol. Any other protocol, such as HTTPS, FTP, etc is not default.
2. It’s already understood that HTTP is the default protocol of the browser by users.
3. Displaying “http://’ is redundant information, as the user is already aware of #2.
4. If the user is not familiar with #2, then why does it need to be presented at all? Why clutter the interface or display “geek code” to the average user?
5. Removing “http://” from the OmniBar removes the redundancy, while keeping the browser behavior and user interface entirely in tact.
6. The browser will display other protocols that isn’t default to the browser, such as “https://” and “ftp://”.
Fact of the matter is, the Chromium developers aren’t going to revert the change. I’ve read all the comments I can find on this matter, and here’s an overall summary:
It’s UGLY!
After seeing “http://” in every browser on the market since browsers have been used, as soon as it’s removed, it seems there’s a big gaping hole in the address bar. For some reason, it keeps their eyes floating back to the address bar, wondering what had happened and why it was changed, when it wasn’t hurting anything to begin with. In other words, displaying “http://” is sexy, and removing it is not. Either that, or they feel that there’s a big void in their life with it missing.
It breaks other applications with copy and paste
By removing “http://” from the Omnibar, when copying a URL to the clipboard, and pasting it into other applications, these applications may or may not be able to recognize the URI, and as a result, not make it “clickable”. However, there have been no use cases submitted of such breakage. No one has come forth saying “Application X won’t linkify a URL pasted without http:// in front”. Plenty of speculation about it, however. Plenty. But, what appears to be the problem, isn’t Chromium, but either your operating system, or the application you’re pasting your URL to. You see, Chromium will present a web object to the operating systems clipboard. If the operating system is worth its weight in gold, it will preserve the web object, and present the object to the pasting application.
So, at this point, it’s up to the application how it wants to handle it. Every email and IM client that I can test, including office document creators, treat the web object as it should, and linkifies the paste, even though “http://” isn’t part of the paste. If an application exists that doesn’t linkify the paste, it should be brought to that developer’s attention. After all, it’s the problem of their application, not Chromium. Think about it. Do you type “http://www.google.com” when chatting with your buddy, or just “google.com”. So, not only should the client recognize clipboard web objects, but it should also recognize partial URI schemes.
It doesn’t adhere to specification
This is semi-valid. At least people are concerned about Chromium adhering to spec. The specification is the URI scheme includes a scheme name, such as “http”, “ftp”, “smb”, etc, as well as an authority, path, query and fragment. So, by not displaying the scheme name in the Omnibar, Chromium is not adhering to specification. The problem with this argument, however, is that the specification is really only dealing with applications referencing a URI, through another program, source code, etc. What is displayed visually to the user shouldn’t matter if it’s “breaking spec” or not. I tell you right now, your mom isn’t going to care if her URI is valid specification.
Observations
Frankly put, I’ve been all over the mailing list and on the bug report trying to explain to people soundly and logically why the move was made, and why the Chromium developers aren’t going to revert the change. As I outlined above, no one, other that developers and Internet geeks, are going to notice, if they haven’t caught wind already. If the change is indeed breaking applications, then the developers need to know what is breaking and how. What they don’t want is a bunch of whining, moaning and threats that you’re going back to Firefox. That doesn’t help. If copying and pasting is broken in other applications, let them know what application is broken, and how it broke. You know, bug reports. Actual, solid, bug reports.
Currently, there is a regression. When removing “http://” from the Omnibox, copying the URL didn’t include “http://” in the clipboard web object. So, a paste wouldn’t show it either. So, they added “http://” to the clipboard on copy. However, something else broke this behavior, and as it sits, a copy and paste will not give “http://” in the pasted result. However, this has been marked as release critical, so the next stable push likely won’t go out until this is fixed.
Conclusion
Personally, I welcome the change. Knowing the default protocol of your software may or may not be important, but I don’t think the software really needs to communicate that to you. Think of your email client. It communicates over SMTP, IMAP and POP3, sometimes simultaneously. Yet, you don’t think twice about it, and it certainly doesn’t tell you “Okay, now I’m using the SMTP protocol to send your message.”. IRC clients don’t tell you they’re using “irc://”. Chat clients don’t tell you their protocol, whatever it may be. FTP clients, SSH clients, Samba clients. On, and on, and on. The browser is the only exception to this rule. Why? Why does the browser need to tell you that it’s using HTTP when it’s already generally understood? Isn’t the important thing interacting with the sites you want to visit? Not the protocol? Frankly, I say good riddance!
Now, if only we can get system administrators to register “domain.tld” as well as “www.domail.tld”. I would like to go to vim.org without forcing me to type the www.

April 18, 2010
16:43
Whew! What a month
» ‎ What To Fix

Haven't been blogging much lately, due to two things. Twitter and Facebook seem to be sucking up anything creative I have to say each day, and I've had a hell of a time this past month or two.

You wouldn't think that writing in simple sentence format would relieve you of the desire to write in a longer format, but it does. I don't think this is a good thing at all, as there is something very good about organizing your thoughts in small essays. Not only does it teach you essay structuring, it also helps you reach some kind of conclusion. And if it continues this way, what are we going to do? End up sending smiley faces back and forth instead of having healthy conversations?

While that's slightly interesting, it's part of the larger story of technology dumbing us down and taking away all of our time. From a personal standpoint, the last month has been exciting -- and I mean exciting in a bad way.

My mother died a couple of weeks ago. She had been sick for a while, but we thought we had a few more months with her. Since she had spent most of her time in Florida, this involved flying back and forth, multiple services, and all sorts of stress.

I'm trying to write up an eulogy for her, but taking somebody you knew for 44 years and putting them into blog article is nearly impossible. I'm going to do it, though, no matter how poor it ends up.

Death is part of life. As my mother kept telling me that her dad would always say, "Nobody lives forever"

The second thing was that I found out that I had a major health problem.

You know how when you're watching videos you can turn the volume up or down? Over the last several years, somehow my volume was turning down. I thought it was just getting older -- perhaps even an indication of early heart disease or something. I didn't think there was much that could be done about it.

I found out what was wrong by chasing another problem, my snoring.

For at least 15 years Melissa has told me I am a bad snorer. In addition, she told me that I would stop breathing at night -- gasping and struggling to breathe. Since I was unconscious at the time, I didn't know one way or another how much I snored or struggled to breathe. Seemed just like I was everybody else.

About a year or two ago, I realized that I couldn't breathe when I was sleeping -- as I fell asleep, when my airway relaxed, it would effectively strangle me. I would wake back up enough to flex my airway muscles and breathe. But eventually I would drift off to sleep anyway. When I realized what was going on, I figured it was time to see a doctor about it.

I finally got to see the doctor last month. He sent me for a sleep study, and the results were not so good. This is called sleep apnea. It's perfectly normal. Obstructive Sleep Apnea happens when you physically cannot breathe -- because of the way your head is constructed when you are unconscious your airway completely closes up.

If you have apnea that happens more than 5 times an hour, it's considered mild. Anything over 30 times an hour is considered severe.

On average, during the sleep study, I stopped breathing about 116 times per hour, which is four times the severe rating, or about twice a minute. At this rate, I was not sleeping at all, just passing in and out of light states of unconciousness as I woke up enough to breathe and then passed out again. I could "sleep" for 12 hours like this and wake up just as sleepy as when I went to bed -- or feeling even worse. My blood oxygen levels dropped down to below 70%, which is also really bad.

So I am now the owner of a Continuous Positive Airway system, or CPAP. If I'm unconscious, I need to be on the machine. The doc said i had a risk of "coding" because of the severity of my condition. I take it "coding" is not a good thing.

But with the box it's all fine now. I am going to look into surgery,. Being overweight doesn't help with this, but I have it to a degree that is completely out of proportion to my weight. I really don't want the surgery, but I think it's probably the best thing to do. I'm also going to buy a pulse-oximeter with recording functions and start tracking my blood oxygenation levels overnight. The tricky thing about this problem is that since you are sleeping, you don't really know you have it.

i sold my Jeep a couple of weeks ago. Really loved that Jeep, but it was time. I was never driving it, and it was time to move on.

Finally I picked up a new larger client, Alcatel-Lucent, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Other than that it's been mostly uneventful.

14:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 041610
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office in Iceland, where I’m stuffing rags down that volcano to get planes flying again… #1: You know those ads where Domino’s admits their pizza sucked? Guess who saw profits double. http://bit.ly/bayH3b #2: RT @drewmaniac Ignore Foursquare at Your Peril – An Analysis of Potential by @JayBaer http://bit.ly/dqzxtz /via @unmarketing #3: RT [...]

0:47
Open Architecture Democracy
» ‎ Michael Nielsen

The singer Avril Lavigne’s third hit was a ballad titled “I’m With You”. Let me pose what might seem a peculiar question: should the second word in her song title – “With” – be capitalized or uncapitalized? This seems a matter of small moment, but to some people it matters a great deal. In 2005 an edit war broke out on Wikipedia over whether “With” should be capitalized or not. The discussion drew in a dozen people, took more than a year to play out, and involved 4,000 words of discussion. During that time the page oscillated madly back and forth between capitalizing and not capitalizing “With”.

This type of conflict is not uncommon on Wikipedia. Other matters discussed at great length in similar edit wars include the true diameter of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi – is it 120, 160 or 900 kilometers in diameter? When one says that U2 “are a band” should that really be “U2 is a band”? Should the page for “Iron Maiden” point by default to the band or to the instrument of torture? Is Pluto really a planet? And so on.

Don’t get me wrong. Wikipedia works remarkably well, but the cost in resolving these minor issues can be very high. Let me describe for you an open source collaboration where problems like this don’t occur. It’s a programming competition run by a company called Mathworks. Twice a year every year since 1999 Mathworks has run a week-long competition involving more than one hundred programmers from all over the world. At the start of the week a programming problem is posed. A typical problem might be something like the travelling salesman problem – given a list of cities, find the shortest tour that lets you visit all of those cities. The competitors don’t just submit programs at the end of the week, they can (and do) submit programs all through the week. The reason they do this is because when they submit their program it’s immediately and automatically scored. This is done by running the program on some secret test inputs that are known only to the competition organizers. So, for example, the organizers might run the program on all the capital cities of the countries in Europe. The score reflects both how quickly the program runs, and how short a tour of the cities it finds. The score is then posted to a leaderboard. Entries come in over the whole week because kudos and occasional prizes go to people at the top of the leaderboard.

What makes this a collaboration is that programs submitted to the competition are open. Once you submit your program anyone else can come along and simply download the code you’ve just submitted, tweak a single line, and resumbit it as their own. The result is a spectacular free-for-all. Contestants are constantly “stealing” one another’s code, making small tweaks that let them leapfrog to the top of the leaderboard. Some of the contestants get hooked by the instant feedback, and work all week long. The result is that the winning entry is often fantastically good. After the first contest, in 1999, the contest co-ordinator, Ned Gulley, said: “no single person on the planet could have written such an optimized algorithm. Yet it appeared at the end of the contest, sculpted out of thin air by people from around the world, most of whom had never met before.”

Both Wikipedia and the Mathworks competition use open source patterns of development, but the difference is striking. In the Mathworks competition there is an absolute, objective measure of success that’s immediately available – the score. The score acts as a signal telling every competitor where the best ideas are. This helps the community aggregate all the best ideas into a fantastic final product.

In Wikipedia, no such objective signal of quality is available. What allows Wikipedia to function is that on most issues of contention – like whether “With” should be capitalized – there’s only a small community of interest. A treaty can be beaten out by members of that community that allows them to reach consensus and move forward. Constructing such treaties takes tremendous time and energy, and sometimes devolves into neverending flame wars, but most of the time it works okay. But while this kind of treaty-making might scale to tens or even hundreds of people, we don’t yet know how to make it scale to thousands. Agreement doesn’t scale.

Many of the crucial problems of governance have large communities of interest, and it can be very difficult to get even two people to agree on tiny points of fact, much less values. As a result, we can’t simply open source policy documents in a location where they can be edited by millions of people. But, purely as a thought experiment, imagine you had a way of automatically scoring policy proposals for their social utility. You really could set up a Policyworks where millions of people could help rewrite policy, integrating the best ideas from an extraordinarily cognitively diverse group of people.

The question I have is how we can develop tools that let us scale such a process to thousands or even millions of people? How can we get the full benefit of cognitive diversity in problem-solving, without reaching deadlock? Are there clever new ways we can devise for signalling quality in the face of incomplete or uncertain information? We know some things about how to do this in small groups: it’s the art of good facilitation and good counselling. Is it possible to develop scalable mechanisms of agreement so we can open source key problems of governance?

Let me conclude by floating a brief, speculative idea for a Policyworks. In the one minute I have left there’s not time to even begin discussing the problems with the idea, let alone potential solutions. But hopefully it contains the kernel of something interesting. The idea is to allow open editing of policy documents, in much the same way the Mathworks competition allows open editing of computer programs. But each time you make an edit, it’s sent to a randomly selected jury of your peers – say 50 of them. They’re invited to score your contribution, and perhaps offer feedback. They don’t all need to score it – just a few (say 3) is enough to start getting useful information about whether your contribution is an improvement or not. And, perhaps with some tweaking to prevent abuse, and to help ensure fair scoring, such a score might be used as a reliable way of signalling quality in the face of incomplete or uncertain information. My suspicion is that – as others have said of Wikipedia – this may be one of those ideas that works better in practice than it does in theory.

You can subscribe to my blog here.

This post is based on some brief remarks I made about open architecture democracy at the beginning of a panel on the subject, moderated by Tad Homer-Dixon, and with co-panelists Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey. One day, I hope to expand this into a much more thorough treatment.

April 17, 2010
18:39
Datajournalism: Wazaaaa ??
» ‎ CaptainDash

In itself, the term Datajournalist isn’t very old. It has been largely popularized during the last American Presidential Election but, more accurately, it is fair to say that it more probably got its first moment of fame with the the initial ‘Gapminder’ shows of Hans Rosling, whom became almost a Data-visualization rock-Star, at the very [...]

7:23
Saving Internet Anonymity -- The Struggle is Joined
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Whats the fundamental problem with cyberspace -- that is, the Internet? There are various issues to choose from, but if you didnt put anonymity near the top of your list, youre not alone. Yet the drumbeat from the self-appointed...
April 16, 2010
23:24
Privacy Questions About the New Google Cloud Print Service
» ‎ Lauren Weinstein's Blog

Greetings. Google Labs has just published preliminary specifications (and an associated call for comments and feedback) for a print anywhere service that they are implementing, called Google Cloud Print. The project has the very laudable goal of reducing OS print...

April 13, 2010
8:11
Steve Ballmer gets Cloud
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
Devops? What’s devops? See these articles:
- Infrastructure Renaissance (doesn’t mention the word “devops”, but describes the phenomenon)
- What is DevOps?
- The Rise of DevOps
- DevOps mixing dev, ops, agile, cloud, open source and business
- Understanding the cloud and ‘devops’ (part 1, part 2, part 3)
- Myopic View of DevOps Misses the Mark (read the comments too)
- Why so many DevOps conversations focus on Deployment
Related posts:

4:16
Canada 3.0 Twitter graph
» ‎ Dan Siemon

The other day I found Gephi which was used to create these amazing graphs based on GitHub data. So I thought it might be fun to pull some data into Gephi and play with it. I decided on using the Twitter API to obtain all of the Tweets related to the upcoming Canada 3.0 conference in Stratford, ON, CA. I used the ‘can30′ hash tag as the search term but since the Twitter search only returns Tweets less than seven days old the history is limited.

I used Python and igraph to create the graph and exported it to GraphML which Gephi can import. Here’s the resulting GraphML file if you are interested.

I also used igraph to export PNG and SVG versions.

The nodes in the graph are Twitter users. The size of the node is relative to the number of new Tweets with the #can30 hashtag. By ‘new’ tweets I mean not re-Tweets. The edges represent re-Tweets and the width of the edges are relative to how many times the source user re-Tweeted the destination.

Based on the graph, Canada3Forum is the largest source of new Tweets followed by tobidh and there are lots of users re-Tweeting Canada3Forum’s messages.

Canada 3.0 on Twitter

April 11, 2010
19:07
Datavisualizing the Music Industry options
» ‎ CaptainDash

If we were all smart and PhD gifted, we would probably not need anything like visual representations. Most would directly read data-sheets and avoid anything that is about analogical. But sadely we are human beings, mostly sensitive as we need colors, shapes, 3D simulations to get to understand tricky things. But the good news is [...]

April 08, 2010
5:44
Quoteworthy: Aristotle – Rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F07%2Fquoteworthy-aristotle-rest-satisfied-with-the-degree-of-precision-which-the-nature-of-the-subject-admits%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F07%2Fquoteworthy-aristotle-rest-satisfied-with-the-degree-of-precision-which-the-nature-of-the-subject-admits%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F07%2Fquoteworthy-aristotle-rest-satisfied-with-the-degree-of-precision-which-the-nature-of-the-subject-admits%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pIt is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible./p p- a href="http://quotationsbook.com/quote/12998/" target="_blank"Aristotle/a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/04/07/quoteworthy-aristotle-rest-satisfied-with-the-degree-of-precision-which-the-nature-of-the-subject-admits/"Quoteworthy: Aristotle #8211; Rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2007/12/26/precision-tools-requirement-structure/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Precision Tools: Requirement Structure'Precision Tools: Requirement Structure/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2009/08/18/quoteworthy-gustavus-f-swift/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: Gustavus F. Swift'Quoteworthy: Gustavus F. Swift/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sbM8hOMQnD5IgnHPrERu0zU0_L8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sbM8hOMQnD5IgnHPrERu0zU0_L8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sbM8hOMQnD5IgnHPrERu0zU0_L8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/sbM8hOMQnD5IgnHPrERu0zU0_L8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=n6yNGd2Izl8:G4KzgPfogf0:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=n6yNGd2Izl8:G4KzgPfogf0:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=n6yNGd2Izl8:G4KzgPfogf0:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=n6yNGd2Izl8:G4KzgPfogf0:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=n6yNGd2Izl8:G4KzgPfogf0:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/n6yNGd2Izl8" height="1" width="1"/

April 07, 2010
20:31
L'émergence de @font-face
» ‎ Clever Age - Blog

Pour tout professionnel du web, l'utilisation de polices autres que celles disponibles sur le système des internautes a toujours été jusqu'à présent un exercice délicat et complexe. Nous avons déjà évoqué il y a quelques mois les différentes solutions pour personnaliser les polices de caractères. Avec l'évolution des navigateurs la propriété @font-face refait surface. Cet article dresse un état des lieux et donne les perspectives d'évolution d'une technique qui change déjà notre façon d'appréhender la (...)

April 06, 2010
12:43
Is That a Data Subscription in Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?
» ‎ The 4th Screen

It's the dawning of the era of tablets. It's about 9:30 am for 3G, and daybreak for 4G mobile data connectivity. It's the evening of the era of overpriced WiFi franchises at airports. It's the mid morning of WiFi devices of all kinds, mobile and stationary. And, monthly, it's the arrival of the subscription bill for multiple family members' data subscriptions for multiple mobile data plans on multiple devices.br / br / br / Multiple data plans are great for the network operators. Users have only one pair of hands, eyes, and ears, so users with multiple data plans are paying a multiple for one person's consumption of data. But, it can't last. Data, in general, is going to get cheaper, or it will stifle the spread of smartphones.br / br / The well equipped mobile worker may have some combination of laptop, tablet, smartphone, game console, and e-book reader in his kit. A traveling family might be using one of each, rolling down the highway. Paying for a mobile data subscription for each device is unsustainable.br / br / Currently, some carriers offer “tethering” plans enabling a smartphone to be used as a mobile data modem for a laptop. It costs extra (or it's a kludge that violates one's terms of servcie), and it does not solve the problem of consolidating one person's mobile data costs and uses across all devices, and under one price.br / br / Mobile hotspots, like MiFi take one right up to the threshold of having this consolidation, with the very large exception of one's smartphone, which still requires its own mobile data subscription.br / br / The ideal solution would put the mobile hotspot inside the smartphone, charging for one mobile data plan. It will be interesting to see just how willing carriers are to forego the revenue from two, or more, data plans a power user can bring.br / br / 4G carriers, like Clearwire, may see this problem from the opposite starting point: 4G networks will start out as purely mobile data networks, though there are both standardized and “over the top” (OTT) voice options for 4G carriers and third parties. 4G subscribers will either get “modem” devices for their laptops, or they will get mobile hotspot devices that can support multiple WiFi connected devices.br / br / Voice and text message revenues are an incremental opportunity to these carriers. So, instead of putting the mobile hotspot into the smartphone, 4G carriers may, conceptually, put the phone into the mobile hotspot, creating handset-like smartphone devices that enable an OTT voice service. I say “handset-like” because these phones can do without the ability to make circuit switched calls. Telephony, on these devices, is just an application, not a radio (though they might throw in 2.5G mobile as a fall-back).br / br / Instead of losing revenue through consolidation, 4G carriers pick up a bit of incremental revenue form marketing voice services, that can have advanced features like HD voice and video calls, on their network. The user gains both the true consolidation of data costs, and the convenience of having that packaged in a smartphone form factor that behaves just like a mobile phone for voice calls.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/9008820-516836168622085576?l=4thscreen.blogspot.com' alt='' //div pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/l6wv_qyldrAGQtXbcHcso2JQqsE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/l6wv_qyldrAGQtXbcHcso2JQqsE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/l6wv_qyldrAGQtXbcHcso2JQqsE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/l6wv_qyldrAGQtXbcHcso2JQqsE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/The4thScreen/~4/hE4WWguBkSQ" height="1" width="1"/

6:24
Quoteworthy: Mike Krzyzewski – Five fundamental qualities that make a team great
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F05%2Fquoteworthy-mike-krzyzewski-five-fundamental-qualities-that-make-a-team-great%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F05%2Fquoteworthy-mike-krzyzewski-five-fundamental-qualities-that-make-a-team-great%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F04%2F05%2Fquoteworthy-mike-krzyzewski-five-fundamental-qualities-that-make-a-team-great%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pThere are five fundamental qualities that make every team great: communication, trust, collective responsibility, caring and pride. I like to think of each as a separate finger on the fist. Any one individually is important. But all of them together are unbeatable./p p- a href="http://coachk.com/coach-k-media/quotes/" target="_blank"Mike Krzyzewski/a (Coach K.)/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/04/05/quoteworthy-mike-krzyzewski-five-fundamental-qualities-that-make-a-team-great/"Quoteworthy: Mike Krzyzewski #8211; Five fundamental qualities that make a team great/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/09/quoteworthy-george-orwell-on-scrupulous-writing/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;'Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LK4l3t0M7g_88s_Bx5axfvYAFGM/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LK4l3t0M7g_88s_Bx5axfvYAFGM/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LK4l3t0M7g_88s_Bx5axfvYAFGM/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/LK4l3t0M7g_88s_Bx5axfvYAFGM/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fqyVe4Kp9l0:h3MPU5OstYM:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=fqyVe4Kp9l0:h3MPU5OstYM:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fqyVe4Kp9l0:h3MPU5OstYM:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=fqyVe4Kp9l0:h3MPU5OstYM:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fqyVe4Kp9l0:h3MPU5OstYM:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/fqyVe4Kp9l0" height="1" width="1"/

April 04, 2010
4:42
Hair Poem
» ‎ Aaron Toponce

Yesterday, while at school, studying for a quiz, I saw that there was an open mic poetry reading. While passing the sign, I recalled a poem that I wrote about my wife’s hair while bored in church. So, I told my wife about it, asked if she and my daughter wanted to come, and we were on our way with my whimsical poem.
At first, I thought it was just a local university thing, with a few of the local college kids. However, I learned that this is only one night of a few that involved some major published poets, and had been held elsewhere across the city. This poetry event has been running for something like 20 years, and I was told that this is one of the biggest poetry reading events in the United States! Last night, was just a small part of the much larger event.
Anyway, I got up to the mic, and read my poem. I’ve never done this before, so I was actually quite nervous. To me, everyone in front of me was poetry and prose professionals, English majors, writers and the like. I’m sure my poem was child’s play to the profound poetry they had. But, I wanted to share my little poem, even if I was an amateur.
Just a little background on the poem: My wife and I were preparing for church one Sunday morning. When I got out of the shower, while drying myself off, one of my wife’s hair got caught around my leg, and a bit later, my arm. Further, she was worried about losing her hair, and at every brush stroke, felt she was becoming bald by the day. Well, while sitting in church, listening to the sermon, I was quite bored, so I pulled out my notebook, and started penning a poem about her hair.
I had been reading Dr. Seuss a bit before that day, so his quirky meter and rhyming style was on my mind. As a result, the poem doesn’t really have a specific meter or rhythm. It’s pretty carefree. It was meant entirely to be light and playful, and a bit overboard. My wife enjoys it, and it gathered quite the roar of laughter during and after I had read it last night. I initially wrote it in 2005.
Anyway, here it is, in full.
My Wife’s Hair
by Aaron Toponce
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Some rights reserved.
I just got married and inherited a wife.
Oh my, what a life!
It’s just not right
that I have to fight.
No not with her, but what’s on her head
and that she happens to shed.
It isn’t fair that she loses her hair.
The problem? It’s everywhere!
It’s on the pillow and on the sheets.
The stuffed armadillo, even my pant pleats.
I get out of the shower and grab a towel.
I dry myself off- wait. What’s that? (scowl)
It’s more hair! Where’s the Nair?
My arms, legs, hands and feet
are all caught ensnare.
And there I sit in despair on the chair bare.
I swear all I wear is her long hair.
I need to get dressed, but it’s such a mess
to grab my pants, my shirt and underdress
and find her long folicle.
It’s just diabolical.
Now I’m ready to go out for the day
and play.
I go to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
What am I met with? But the silk
of that thin dark hair on a freshly sliced pear.
Maybe I’ll have some cereal,
but there it is just as real
in my Froot Loops! Oops!
I better be careful wherever I go.
For every minute passed allows her hair to grow.
On the couch? Of course.
Guess the source.
The car? It’s on the seat.
Even the shoes for my feet.
The TV? Look at the screen. Is it clean?
What about the sink?
Or the local skating rink?
The computer desk or the curtains pink?
Yes, Yes, Yes! I must confess.
The tub, the floor
the poor dog and the door knob.
It’s a mob of hair.
At work, I shirk at the very thought
that my whole day was wrought
with fighting my wife’s hair.
“There. Right there,”
my coworker announced.
“It’s on your shirt.” And there he pounced
towards me to get the present that my wife renounced.
“That’s awfully long for a fellow like you.
Have you some confessing to do?”
He asked with a sarcastic grin.
“The joys of marriage,” I responded.
“With your wife’s hair, you’ll never win.”
Back at home, the count had increased
to millions. Maybe even billions! Please, oh please!
It’s an army out to get you, so fight!
Yeah, right.
It won’t to any good.
Just get a jacket and pull up the hood.
“Protect yourself!” my dad used to say.
“Protect yourself in every way!”
Never had hair crossed my mind
that would come across as the aggressive kind.
So here I stay in a marriage exposed
to a contract that was never proposed.
Every night, when I kneel at my bed,
I pray about my wife’s evil head:
“Please Lord have mercy on my soul.
Hair isn’t meant for my soup bowl.
It doesn’t belong in closet
or the bathroom faucet.
And I think that I should sleep
without a peep deep.
Is this your idea of Armageddon
to begin war with her hair?
After my weddin’?
Look at my house Lord.
Look at the place.
I can hardly kneel at my bed
without getting hair in my face.
Give me this day a long needed break
from the hair that her evil head will make.
Please, for goodness sake.
But, thy will be done, Lord. I must confess
Even if I must endure this hairy mess.
If I must endure, then one blessing that is high
on my ‘To-Do List’, (sigh)
is to give me the strength that I must bear
to shave my wife’s head of all of her hair.”

April 03, 2010
11:20
Paris: the city of Love… and Datavisualization
» ‎ CaptainDash

Talking recently to a Deputy Mayor of Paris -Jean-Louis Messica- we had the positive surprise to discover that Paris has a plan regarding Data. In a initial step, it would be just to progressively give access to a set of raw data and let the community of data-geeks play with it. Just doing that is [...]

April 02, 2010
10:11
Enterprise application integration patterns for IT management: a blast from the past or from the future?
» ‎ William Vambenepe's blog
In a recent blog post, Don Ferguson (CTO at CA) describes CA Catalyst, a major architectural overhaul which “applies enterprise application integration patterns to the problem of integrating IT management systems”. Reading this was fascinating to me. Not because the content was some kind of revelation, but exactly for the opposite reason. Because it is so familiar.

For the better part of the last decade, I tried to build just this at HP. In the process, I worked with (and sometimes against) Don’s colleague at IBM, who were on the same mission. Both companies wanted a flexible and reliable integration platform for all aspects of IT management. We had decided to use Web services and SOA to achieve it. The Web services management protocols that I worked on (WSMF, WSDM, WS-Management and the “reconciliation stack”) were meant for this. We were after management integration more than manageability. Then came CMDBf, another piece of the puzzle. From what I could tell, the focus on SOA and Web services had made Don (who was then Mr. WebSphere) the spiritual father of this effort at IBM, even though he wasn’t at the time focused on IT management.

As far as I know, neither IBM nor HP got there. I covered some of the reasons in this post-mortem. The standards bickering. The focus on protocols rather than models. The confusion between the CMDB as a tool for process/service management versus a tool for software integration. Within HP, the turmoil from the many software acquisitions didn’t help, and there were other reasons. I am not sure at this point whether either company is still aiming for this vision or if they are taking a different approach.

But apparently CA is still on this path, and got somewhere. At least according to Don’s post. I have no insight into what was built beyond what’s in the post. I am not endorsing CA Catalyst, just agreeing with the design goals listed by Don. If indeed they have built it, and the integration framework resists the test of time, that’s impressive. And exciting. It apparently even uses some the same pieces we were planning to use, namely WS-Management and CMDBf (I am reluctantly associated with the first and proudly with the second).

While most readers might not share my historical connection with this work, this is still relevant and important to anyone who cares about IT management in the enterprise. If you’re planning to be at CA World, go listen to Don. Web services may have a bad name, but the technical problems of IT management integration remain. There are only a few routes to IT management automation (I count seven, the one taken by CA is #2). You can throw away SOAP if you want, you still need to deal with protocol compatibility, model alignment and instance reconciliation. You need to centralize or orchestrate the management operations performed. You need to be able to integrate with complementary products or at the very least to effectively incorporate your acquisitions. It’s hard stuff.

Bonus point to Don for not forcing a “Cloud” angle for extra sparkle. This is core IT management.

Related posts:

April 01, 2010
7:40
The Correct Recycling Symbol
» ‎ Aaron Toponce

I was just going through my Google Reader feeds, and stumbled upon a new concept for the Coca-Cola company in redesigning their soda bottles. The idea is rather ingenious. The bottles are reshaped to save on packing space, thus reducing the carbon footprint needed to ship the same amount of containers. They also feature a collapsible design, encouraging recycling, or at least minimizing land fill should they be thrown away. Overall, it’s a total win, and if I was a soda drinker, I would become a Coca-Cola fan. If they implemented the concept, that is.
However, the designer of the concept missed the boat on a crucial icon that represents recycling on an international scale. Take a look at this picture:
See the recycling symbol in the lower right-hand corner? Yeah. It’s wrong. I’ll explain.
Gary Anderson, in 1970, designed a symbol for a contest held by Container Corporation of America, to raise awareness for recycling consumable products for Earth Day. His design won, and has since been an international symbol representing recycling. However, here’s something that many people don’t know: the symbol was deliberately designed to be a Möbius band.
I’ll chop out the symbol that the designer created and we can compare it to the one Gary Anderson created, so you can see what I’m talking about. The Coca-Cola symbol is on the left, with Gary Anderson’s creation on the right:

Notice, that with the symbol the designer created, it’s just the same arrow three times, only rotated. However, this means that the strip is not a Möbius band that Gary Anderson initially intended. As you can see, comparing the two symbols side by side, the upper arrows and lower right arrows are the same. The difference lies in the lower left arrow. The “half-twist”, as it would be called, in Gary Anderson’s creation creates the Möbius band.
If a Möbius band is new to you, take a strip of paper where its length is substantially longer than it’s width, maybe 10-times as long. If you were to bring the two ends together, without putting any twists in the paper, you would create a loop with two sides. Now, instead, put a half-twist in one end, and bring the ends together again. You have now just created a one-sided surface, called a Möbius strip. If you were to color with a red crayon on one “side” of the strip, and color with a blue crayon on the other, and follow the strip, you’ll find that the red crayon will meet the blue line, and the blue crayon will meet the red line. This surface only has one side and one edge.
If you’re having trouble visualizing this, consider the following video to help you see the one-sided nature of the strip (flash ahead):
Gary Anderson chose the Möbius band for his symbol, due to the nature of recycling. Take a “side” of the strip. Call that side “creation” of the consumable product. Take the other side to be the “recycling” of the product. Due to the nature of the Möbius strip, as you move along the strip (call that “time”) starting with the creation, you will eventually reach the opposite side, when you labeled recycling. In other words, a Möbius strip was chosen, as with recycling, everything goes back into itself.
Now, consider the logo the designer made. That band is ambiguous on whether or not has two distinct sides. If it indeed has one side, then it has 1.5 twists in the loop, which does not have the same topological properties as the Möbius band. If it has two sides, by adding an odd third dimension, then the “creation” of their product never gets recycled, according to their symbol. It just stays as it is. It will never reach the “recycling” side of the strip. As a result, the product won’t get recycled and reused.
The designer isn’t the only person to produce this failure. After all, it’s subtle enough that I doubt many people are aware of it. However, it drives me nuts. Being a topologist (a mathematician studying topology (topology is NOT topography)), I notice these things. Take a look at this Google Image Search results, to see how many other people the world-round make the same mistake.
There’s a rule in design that every designer should be familiar with. The rule is that the designer should deeply study what they are about to create before they create. For example, if you were creating a logo for a company, and wanted that logo to represent a rubber stamp, you should better spend a great deal of time studying stamps in person, learning everything about them, before creating your logo. If your logo involves a tire, take a lot of time to study tires. Et cetera. The reason being, when your logo goes public, if you haven’t deeply scrutinized it, to make the logo accurately convey what it’s trying to convey, the public will scrutinize it, and guess who will be wishing they spent a little more time in the research area?
Now, this designer may, or may not have taken design classes, or not have any professional experience in design. I know not. However, the images produced are quite professional looking, so I’m guessing there is some experience to be expected. Regardless, if the concept is run with Coca-Cola, I would hope that the marketing or advertising department picks up on the symbol error, and corrects it before release.
</rant>

March 31, 2010
1:20
Quoteworthy: Paul Martin Lester – Words and Images Work Together
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F30%2Fquoteworthy-paul-martin-lester-words-and-images-work-together%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F30%2Fquoteworthy-paul-martin-lester-words-and-images-work-together%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F30%2Fquoteworthy-paul-martin-lester-words-and-images-work-together%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pWords and pictures are intricately linked in journalism, advertising and educational contexts. Words printed under a photograph, the caption, signal the importance of the common sense representations portrayed in the image. Words beside a picture in an advertisement explain a product and its attributes clearly to a potential customer. Words spoken by an instructor give explanations and life to slides projected from the back of a darkened classroom. Words and images work together for most successful communications./p p- a href="http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/writings/viscomtheory.html" target="_blank"Dr. Paul Martin Lester/a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/30/quoteworthy-paul-martin-lester-words-and-images-work-together/"Quoteworthy: Paul Martin Lester #8211; Words and Images Work Together/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/15/quoteworthy-c-s-lewis-dont-use-words-too-big-for-the-subject/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject'Quoteworthy: C.S. Lewis #8211; Don#8217;t use words too big for the subject/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/09/quoteworthy-george-orwell-on-scrupulous-writing/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;'Quoteworthy: George Orwell on #8220;Scrupulous Writing#8221;/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/20/quoteworthy-william-strunk-vigorous-writing-is-concise/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Quoteworthy: William Strunk #8211; Vigorous Writing is Concise'Quoteworthy: William Strunk #8211; Vigorous Writing is Concise/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wFmACO-J5BmTx-qtckWFS5iLTT0/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wFmACO-J5BmTx-qtckWFS5iLTT0/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wFmACO-J5BmTx-qtckWFS5iLTT0/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/wFmACO-J5BmTx-qtckWFS5iLTT0/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=hfN8PFstkog:4g2jx2I6kfo:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=hfN8PFstkog:4g2jx2I6kfo:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=hfN8PFstkog:4g2jx2I6kfo:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=hfN8PFstkog:4g2jx2I6kfo:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=hfN8PFstkog:4g2jx2I6kfo:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/hfN8PFstkog" height="1" width="1"/

March 30, 2010
4:45
Linux x86_64 and Javascript
» ‎ Dan Siemon

The competition between browsers in the area of Javascript performance has led to some pretty dramatic performance increases in the last couple of years. A lot of this has been accomplished through Javascript just in time (JIT) compilers. What JITs do is convert the Javascript into native instructions which execute a lot faster than more abstract forms. The one downside to this approach is that each native architecture must be supported to get the speed boost.

If you follow Javascript performance you know that recent versions of Firefox have a JIT. What you may not know is that there is no JIT in Firefox for x86_64. This isn’t that big of a problem for Windows since there are so few 64-bit windows users but Linux distributions have been native 64-bit for quite some time. So if you’ve installed a 64-bit version of your faviourite Linux distribution you are getting far slower Javascript performance in Firefox than if you had installed the i686 version. How much slower?

The following benchmarks were executed on an i7-930 running Fedora 12, Firefox 3.5.8 and Epiphany 2.28.2. The benchmarks I used are the SunSpider and V8 Javascript benchmarks.

Browser/arch V8 (higher is better) SunSpider (lower is better)

Firefox i686 PAE 402 1002.6ms

Firefox x86_64 277 2131.2ms

Epiphany x86_64 887 1261.0ms

These results show that the Javascript performance of i686 Firefox is a lot better than x86_64. The Epiphany web browser is based on Webkit which, based on these results, I’m guessing does have a x86_64 JIT.

March 29, 2010
3:01
Quoteworthy: Kipling – Six Honest Serving Men
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F28%2Fquoteworthy-kipling-six-honest-serving-men%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F28%2Fquoteworthy-kipling-six-honest-serving-men%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F28%2Fquoteworthy-kipling-six-honest-serving-men%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pI keep six honest serving menbr / (They taught me all I knew);br / Their names are What and Why and Whenbr / And How and Where and Who./p p- a href="http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_serving.htm" target="_blank"Rudyard Kipling/a/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/28/quoteworthy-kipling-six-honest-serving-men/"Quoteworthy: Kipling #8211; Six Honest Serving Men/a/p pNo related posts./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eQb8_qJSeLq0sZeSlH0BXfCW_Uo/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eQb8_qJSeLq0sZeSlH0BXfCW_Uo/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eQb8_qJSeLq0sZeSlH0BXfCW_Uo/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/eQb8_qJSeLq0sZeSlH0BXfCW_Uo/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=YKBCcspR0FE:iOTbiMQv8os:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=YKBCcspR0FE:iOTbiMQv8os:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=YKBCcspR0FE:iOTbiMQv8os:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=YKBCcspR0FE:iOTbiMQv8os:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=YKBCcspR0FE:iOTbiMQv8os:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/YKBCcspR0FE" height="1" width="1"/

March 27, 2010
13:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 032610
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office in CTU, where I’m taking control of ’24′, not going to let it be canceled… #1: RT @scobleizer http://bestc.am/T90 This is Paul Pluschkell CEO of @spigit which is cool ideation software used by tons of companies. Now onto @pipioinc #2: Wow – my moment in @dahowlett‘s spotlight: Enterprise 2.0: let’s be [...]

March 25, 2010
20:44
Is Datavolution within reach… or not?
» ‎ CaptainDash

We noticed recently that there are lots of people who argue with the fact that data are widdely accessible to the masses. They believe that most consistant data are hiden in very well protected stronghold datacenters. In addition, the common belief is that if the data were accessible, it wouldn’t mean that they are of any [...]

March 24, 2010
23:02
SharePoint Management at Tech 2010
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

Planning to be in L.A. in April? I’ll be speaking at the TEC 2010 conference in Los Angeles on April 26, 2010. Originally I was going to speak on SharePoint governance, as I’ve been doing since 2003. It’s still a topic that audiences want and need to hear about. But lots of organizations have made [...]

14:52
Three Models for Applying Customer Feedback to Innovation
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

Customers have always been core to companies’ existence. An obvious statement for sure. Customers are the source of cash flow, and have historically been thought of in marketing and transactional contexts. But in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of a new way to consider customers. As vital influencers of company activities and strategies. Two [...]

8:23
Asking questions of your social network
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Google recently acquired the startup Aardvark a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/11/google-acquires-aardvark-for-50-million/"for $50 million/a. The idea behind Aardvark is to provide a way to ask complicated or subjective questions of your friends and colleagues.br /br /There are two papers that will be published at upcoming conferences that provide useful details on this idea. The first is actually by two members of the Aardvark team -- co-founder and Aardvark CTO Damon Horowitz and ex-Googler and Aardvark advisor Sep Kamvar -- and will be published at the upcoming WWW 2010 conference. The paper is called, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine" (a href="http://vark.com/aardvarkFinalWWW2010.pdf"PDF/a). An excerpt:blockquoteiWith Aardvark, users ask a question, either by instant message, email, web input, text message, or voice. Aardvark then routes the question to the person in the user's extended social network most likely to be able to answer that question.br /br /Aardvark queries tend to be long, highly contextualized, and subjective -- in short, they tend to be the types of queries that are not well-serviced by traditional search engines. We also find that the vast majority of questions get answered promptly and satisfactorily, and that users are surprisingly active, both in asking and answering./i/blockquoteThe paper is well written and convincing, establishing that this idea works reasonably well for a small (50k) group of enthusiastic early adopters. The paper does not answer whether this will work at large scale on a less motivated, lower quality mainstream audience. It also does not provide data to be able to evaluate the common criticism of asking questions of social networks, which is that, at large scale, the burden from a flood of often irrelevant incoming questions creates too much pain for too little benefit.br /br /To get a bit more illumination on that question, turn to another upcoming paper, this one out of Microsoft Research and to be published at CHI 2010. The paper is "What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why? A Survey Study of Status Message QA Behavior" (a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/papers/chi10-social.pdf"PDF/a). Some excerpts:blockquotei50.6% ... used their status messages to ask a question .... [on] sites like Facebook and Twitter .... 24.3% received a response in 30 minutes or less, 42.8% in one hour or less, and 90.1% within one day .... 69.3% ... who received responses reported they found the responses helpful.br /br /The most common reason to search socially, rather than through a search engine, was that participants had more trust in the responses provided by their friends [24.8%]. A belief that social networks were better than search engines for subjective questions, such as seeking opinions or recommendations, was also a common explanation [21.5%].br /br /The most common motivation given for responding to a question was altruism [37.0%]. Expertise was the next biggest factor [31.9%], with respondents being motivated because they felt they had special knowledge of the topic ... Nature of the relationship with the asker was an important motivator [13.7%], with closer friends more likely to get answers ... [as well as] the desire to connect socially [13.5%] ... free time [12.3%] ... [and] earning social capital [10.5%].br /br /Many indicated they would prefer a face-to-face or personal request, and ignored questions directed broadly to the network-at-large .... [But] participants enjoyed the fun and social aspects of posing questions to their networks./i/blockquoteThe key insight in the CHI paper is that people view asking questions of their social network as fun, entertaining, part of building relationships, and as a form of a gift exchange. The Aardvark paper focuses on a topical relevance rank of your social network, but maintaining relevance is going to be difficult at large scale when you have an unmotivated, lower quality, mainstream audience. The CHI paper might offer a path forward, suggesting we instead focus on game playing, entertainment, and the social rewards people enjoy when answering questions from their network.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8503152751087931436?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

1:59
Seven Steps and a Nice Little Process Template
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F23%2Fseven-steps-and-a-nice-little-process-template%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F23%2Fseven-steps-and-a-nice-little-process-template%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F23%2Fseven-steps-and-a-nice-little-process-template%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div p style="text-align: center;"img class="aligncenter" title="steps" src="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/steps.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" //p pI recently read and highly recommend Barbara Carkenord#8217;s book, a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604270071?ie=UTF8amp;tag=jnotes-20amp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=390957amp;creativeASIN=1604270071" target="_blank"Seven Steps to Mastering Business Analysis/a, and must admit it has quickly approached the top of my list of favorite business analysis resources. It covers the basics needed to help get new analysts off to a productive start, but is also a nice handbook for the seasoned analyst looking to review the fundamentals or improve upon his/her skills./p pIn chapter 4, she covers processes (business activities that turn inputs into outputs) and some of the subtle differences between use cases and processes. As supporting material, she provides a helpful sample process template, which I recently modified and used to catalog some processes that were being considered for movement to a different technical platform as part of a recent project. a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/steps.jpg"/a/p div id="attachment_2430" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 451px"a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/processtemplate1.jpg"img class="size-full wp-image-2430 " title="processtemplate" src="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/processtemplate1.jpg" alt="" width="441" height="566" //ap class="wp-caption-text"Low-fi screen cap to give a general idea of the template#39;s look and contents/p/div pI chose to use the template to catalog the processes because I wanted to capture the most important details about the processes, but I wanted to do it in way that was modular #8211; by that I mean that I wanted to be able to hand someone a single document for a process and be able to tell them, #8220;here#8217;s what you need to know about this one#8221; and have it be sufficient to stand alone. I also wanted the brief document to be thorough, but not lengthy. Using this template for each process worked nicely for capturing the level of completeness and modularity I was looking for./p pHaving found the template so useful, I asked Barb#8217;s permission to share a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/downloadsProcess-Template.docx" target="_self"my adaptation/a of it here for you folks to look at and a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/downloadsProcess-Template.docx" target="_self"download/a if you like, which she graciously granted./p pI#8217;d encourage you to take a look at it to see if it might be of use. Tweak it as needed to suit your situation. See if it might be as useful to you as it was for me. I won#8217;t use the template for every project, but it serves as a nice, new addition to my figurative #8220;toolbox#8221; of business analysis tools and techniques I can pull from as needed./p pAgain, I highly recommend #8220;a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1604270071?ie=UTF8amp;tag=jnotes-20amp;linkCode=as2amp;camp=1789amp;creative=390957amp;creativeASIN=1604270071" target="_blank"Seven Steps/a#8221; for business analysts of any experience level, and if your interested in seeing more from Barb, she#8217;s not hard to find. She a href="http://www.b2ttraining.com/author/barbara/" target="_blank"blogs occasionally at B2T#8217;s Business Analyst blog/a. She was also a recent guest on the a href="http://www.requirements.net/2010/03/12/requirements-unplugged-podcast-season-3-episode-3/" target="_blank"Requirements.net podcast/a, and a href="http://www.theiiba.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Learning/Webinars/PublicArchive/default.htm#BarbaraCarkenord" target="_blank"hosted a recent IIBA webinar/a./p pHopefully you#8217;ll find the template useful. If you do, remember to thank Barb!/p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/23/seven-steps-and-a-nice-little-process-template/"Seven Steps and a Nice Little Process Template/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2008/01/22/a-couple-tips-on-keeping-use-cases-simple/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: A Couple Tips on Keeping Use Cases Simple'A Couple Tips on Keeping Use Cases Simple/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ouasf-4DWLWbynxPfpV77HvFH4A/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ouasf-4DWLWbynxPfpV77HvFH4A/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ouasf-4DWLWbynxPfpV77HvFH4A/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/Ouasf-4DWLWbynxPfpV77HvFH4A/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fYHMZpbCVwo:2HY08vAQxmw:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=fYHMZpbCVwo:2HY08vAQxmw:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fYHMZpbCVwo:2HY08vAQxmw:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=fYHMZpbCVwo:2HY08vAQxmw:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=fYHMZpbCVwo:2HY08vAQxmw:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/fYHMZpbCVwo" height="1" width="1"/

1:32
Connecting To Serial Null Modems With GNU Screen
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
The motivation for this post, actually, is that I had heard of the BSD-licensed tmux. I’ve heard it’s far more configurable than GNU screen and lighter on resources. So, I thought I’d install it on my Debian machine, and give it a quick test drive. The first thing I wanted to test, was not attaching and detaching sessions, but using tmux to connect to serial ports as a null modem. I use this feature with GNU screen all the time, as I’m constantly in the back of Cisco switches, HPUX ports, and other serial connections in our datacenter at work. However, I found out very quickly that tmux doesn’t support this feature. In fact, the developers call it “bloat” (emphasis mine):
There are still a few features screen includes that tmux omits:
- builtin serial and telnet support; this is bloat and is unlikely to be added to tmux;
- wider platform support, for example IRIX and HP-UX, and for odd terminals.
That’s unfortunate. I’ve found that when developers call a requested feature “bloat”, it’s usually because they don’t use it themselves. That may be the case here. I don’t know. However, I do know that GNU screen supports both serial and telnet connections, and it’s a valued feature for our team.
So, here’s how you can use GNU screen to act as a terminal emulator to a serial null modem connection. Just start a screen session on the correct serial device:
```
$ screen /dev/ttyS0
```
If the connection is too slow, and your serial port can handle faster baud rates, then you can set that instead:
```
$ screen /dev/ttyS0 115200
```
As is common with null modem connections, if you need to send a break, just send C-a B.
That’s it. Rather straight forward. I know that using minicom or HyperTerminal can sometimes be a pain, so using a more modern terminal, complete with telnet, multiuser, locking and splitting support can make all the difference in the world. So, why tmux won’t support this is beyond me, but it sure makes life behind the serial connection just a bit more enjoyable, and a valuable system administration tool.

March 23, 2010
8:33
Security advice is wrong
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

An insightful, funny, and thought-provoking paper by Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research, "So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users" (a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cormac/papers/2009/solongandnothanks.pdf"PDF/a), looks at why people ignore security advice.br /br /The surprising conclusion is that some security advice we give to people -- such as inspect URLs carefully, pay attention to https certificate warnings, and use complicated passwords that change frequently -- does more harm than good. It actually costs someone far more to follow the advice than the benefit that person should expect to get.br /br /Extended excerpts from the paper:blockquoteiIt is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security ... [This] is entirely rational from an economic perspective ... Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit tradeoff to users and is rejected.br /br /[Security] advice offers to shield [people] from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with increased indirect costs ... Since victimization is rare, and imposes a one-time cost, while security advice applies to everyone and is an ongoing cost, the burden ends up being larger than that caused by the ill it addresses.br /br /To make this concrete, consider an exploit that affects 1% of users annually, and they waste 10 hours clearing up when they become victims. Any security advice should place a daily burden of no more than 10/(365 * 100) hours or 0.98 seconds per user in order to reduce rather than increase the amount of user time consumed. This generated the profound irony that much security advice ... does more harm than good.br /br /We estimate US annual phishing losses at $60 million ... Even for minimum wage any advice that consumes more than ... 2.6 minutes per year to follow is unprofitable [for users] from a cost benefit point of view ... Banks [also] have more to fear from ... indirect losses such as support costs ... than direct losses. For example ... an agent-assisted password reset by 10% of their users would cost $48 million, easily dwarfing Wells Fargo's share of the overall $60 million in phishing losses.br /br /Users are effectively trained to ignore certificate warnings by seeing them repeatedly when there is no real security threat .... As far as we can determine, there is no evidence of a single user being saved from harm by a certificate error, anywhere, ever ... The idea that certificate errors are a useful tool in protecting [users] from harm ... is entirely abstract and not evidence-based. The effort we ask of [users] is real, while the harm we warn them of is theoretical.br /br /Advice almost always ignores the cost of user effort ... The main reason security advice is ignored is that it makes an enormous miscalculation: it treats as free a resource that is actually worth $2.6 billion an hour ... Advice-givers and policy-mandaters demand far more effort than any user can give .... User education is a cost borne by the whole population, while offering benefit only to the fraction that fall victim ... The cost of any security advice should be in proportion to the victimization rate .... [lest] in trying to defend against everything we end up defending nothing.br /br /It is not users who need to be better educated on the risks of various attacks, but the security community. Security advice simply offers a bad cost-benefit tradeoff to users .... We must respect users' time and effort. Viewing the user's time as worth $2.6 billion an hour is a better starting point than valuing it at zero ... When we exaggerate all dangers we simply train users to ignore us./i/blockquoteThe paper also has a great discussion of password policies and how they appear to be counter-productive. When system administrators require passwords with weird special characters than need to be changed regularly, they make passwords difficult to remember and impose a substantial burden on users, but the benefit from this policy appears to be minimal.br /br /[Paper found via a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/users_rationall.html"Bruce Schneier/a]div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8322449369193841782?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

4:41
Don’t Forget the Constraints!
» ‎ Practical Analyst

iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F22%2Fdont-forget-the-constraints%2Famp;layout=button_countamp;amp;width=400amp;action=likeamp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:400px;height:30px;margin-top:5px;"/iframe div class="tweetmeme_button" style="float: right; margin-right: 10px;" a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F22%2Fdont-forget-the-constraints%2F"br / img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpracticalanalyst.com%2F2010%2F03%2F22%2Fdont-forget-the-constraints%2Famp;source=jonbab1amp;style=normal" height="61" width="50" /br / /a /div pa href="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/351760_old_ball_and_chain_series_1.jpg"img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2419" title="Ball and Chain" src="http://practicalanalyst.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/351760_old_ball_and_chain_series_1.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" //a/p pI found this ia href="http://www.futilitycloset.com/2010/01/13/bootstraps-everlasting/"nteresting little quote/a a few weeks ago./p blockquotepI recently visited an Eastern sage and asked him, ‘Is it possible to live for ever?’ ‘Certainly,’ he replied, ‘You must undertake to do two things.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Firstly, you must never again make any false statements.’ ‘That’s simple enough. What is the second thing I must do?’ ‘Every day you must utter the statement ‘I will repeat this statement tomorrow.’ If you follow these instructions faithfully you are certain to live forever.’/p p– Jacqueline Harman, letter to the Daily Telegraph, Oct. 8, 1985/p/blockquote pSo, why do I post that on my business analysis blog, if not only to share a cute little witticism? Here#8217;s my take #8211; and think on this for a sec.: If not for the constraint of.. well, mortality, the requirements for living forever sound pretty darn simple, don#8217;t they?/p pIn addition to eliciting and specifying the requirements, an important part of the analyst#8217;s value-add lies in helping business stakeholders and delivery teams identify and understand the business, technical, legal/regulatory or other constraints that will apply for the solution./p pA clear understanding of these restrictions and limitations helps solution designers/architects narrow the potential solution set to those that are most realistic (or at least to those within the realm of possibility!) and helps the business stakeholder arrive at realistic expectations./p pView the original post or comment on a href="http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/03/22/dont-forget-the-constraints/"Don#8217;t Forget the Constraints!/a/p pRelated posts:ollia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2010/05/19/business-analysts-dont-forget-your-roi/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Business Analysts: Don#8217;t Forget Your ROI!'Business Analysts: Don#8217;t Forget Your ROI!/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2007/03/14/curing-analysis-paralysis/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Curing Analysis Paralysis'Curing Analysis Paralysis/a/li lia href='http://practicalanalyst.com/2007/02/12/avoiding-the-how-trap-in-requirements-authoring/' rel='bookmark' title='Permanent Link: Avoiding the #8220;How#8221; Trap in Requirements Authoring'Avoiding the #8220;How#8221; Trap in Requirements Authoring/a/li /ol/p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZHoqQW6Y_EPo_kEVkZuDNBHR1-8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZHoqQW6Y_EPo_kEVkZuDNBHR1-8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZHoqQW6Y_EPo_kEVkZuDNBHR1-8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/ZHoqQW6Y_EPo_kEVkZuDNBHR1-8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=5WvguZgY2v8:cq9S0Bzrx7Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=5WvguZgY2v8:cq9S0Bzrx7Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=5WvguZgY2v8:cq9S0Bzrx7Y:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?i=5WvguZgY2v8:cq9S0Bzrx7Y:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?a=5WvguZgY2v8:cq9S0Bzrx7Y:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/PracticalAnalyst?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/PracticalAnalyst/~4/5WvguZgY2v8" height="1" width="1"/

March 22, 2010
23:17
Richard Stallman on SaaS
» ‎ autonomo.us

At Saturday on Libre Planet, Richard Stallman announced the publication of an essay on software as a service (SaaS). By my count, it is his first published piece on the subject since Stallman’s controversial comments on GMail a year and a half ago. Readers of this blog will all be interested in reading the new essay if they haven’t already already done so.

In his article, Stallman defines SaaS as, “a network server that does certain computing tasks … then invites users to do their computing on that server.” His basic message is simple: users should reject SaaS network services because SaaS users are inherently disempowered and out of control. Indeed, users should reject SaaS even if a service is implemented using free software!

Although some people have used the term SaaS quite broadly, Stallman means something very particular and focuses on the term “their computing.” When Stallman uses the term SaaS, he’s talking about computing that is highly individualistic and that looks like the type of computing that otherwise happens on a user’s own computer. Stallman explains SaaS does not refer to search, collaborative editing (e.g., Wikipedia), social networking, publication, or e-commerce. For each of these tasks, the computing involved can’t clearly be said to “belong” to one user or another; these examples all refer to computing that “belongs” to a dyad or a group. As a result, it follows that the computing involved need not obviously reside with any one individual. Stallman is careful to explain this doesn’t mean that network services doing these sorts of things are unproblematic. Often they are very problematic — but for reasons that have nothing to do with SaaS.

The piece is an interesting read but, judging by the questions and discussions after Stallman’s talk, the argument seems to be confusing for a number of people. Here’s my early thinking on the piece:

Part of the reason people are confused is because they are looking for a bright-line statement to evaluate particular applications and declare them free and non-free. SaaS can do that, but falls for short for many — and I think perhaps even the vast majority of — network services.

It seems to me that most network services I’ve used involve some SaaS features and some non-SaaS features. Some of the computing being done really belongs to a single user and some doesn’t. Some functionality boils down to collaborative or group-based computation and other things really are just tasks being done for one user using that user’s data; only the second class of features is SaaS. While particular features are easy to classify, most services end up being a bit muddy.

Much more problematically, and this is not something RMS addresses, it seems to me that the way that an application is used can really change the degree to which a program is SaaS. For example, Google certainly seems to be interested in having all of us replace OpenOffice.org and our other desktop applications with Google Docs and other Google services. Using Google as an OpenOffice replacement is clearly SaaS and should clearly be rejected for the reasons Stallman explains. That said, every time I’ve seen Google Docs used, it was as a real-time collaborative document editing system for a large group of people. Used in this way, it seems that even Google Docs might not be SaaS! SaaS or not, of course, we might still want to use federated free software alternatives like Gobby.

There are services that I have less trouble calling SaaS. Meebo, which apparently just uses the Pidgin code and creates a web-based front-end to it so that the all the computing involved happens in some data center instead of your desktop, seems like a clear example. But it’s hard to come up with tons of these pure-SaaS examples. My sense is that there are very few bright-line examples of network services that are clearly and completely SaaS. Indeed, my sense is that collaborative functionality is becoming an increasingly important part of most popular network services. SaaS seems to be a small and decreasingly important class of services.

Stallman made it clear in his talk and in the Q&A that he understands that SaaS is not a complete answer to the network services problem and, with the help of myself and the FSF staff, is working on a draft of a document influenced heavily by the Franklin Street Statement to be published by the FSF in the near future.

Stallman is right. We should reject SaaS. But even if rejecting SaaS alone leaves the most prominent, popular, and problematic network services unscathed — as I fear it might — SaaS provides a good way to think about them and keeps us focused on the key issues — control and (ahem!) autonomy. Thinking about the SaaS and non-SaaS features of applications helps us evaluate whether applications are worth their cost in freedom.

March 21, 2010
17:36
World of Goo on Google
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

This is too funny not to post. The clever and tremendously fun puzzle game a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo"World of Goo/a, in one of its last levels, has a hilarious jab at the search engines, personalized search, and personalized advertising. br /br /An excerpt from the dialogue with "MOM ... [the] Automated Search Engine Companion":blockquoteiWhat would you like to ask MOM today?br /br /bDo I smell cookies?/b ... Yes! I am baking your personal information into each one.br /br /bWhat personal information is in your cookies?/b ... Cookies may contain:blockquote style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"your locationbr /complete search historybr /whipped soy productbr /online purchasesbr /medical recordsbr /telephone logsbr /web logsbr /email logsbr /streaming video from your current locationbr /and more!br //blockquoteThat's MOM's special recipe for offering free, convenient, relevant information to valued users like you.br /br /bIs my personal information safe with you?/b ... Your personal information is stored in a secure database and will never be shared with anyone*br /* Unless they ask.br /** Or if someone says they are you and takes your cookiesbr /*** Or if the venture firm finds out it's profitable.br /**** Or if unhappy employees release copies of your cookies to other online databases.br /***** Or if outsourced data centers sell illegal copies of your cookies to other sites.br /****** Or if my parent corporation is acquired and my data including your cookies becomes part of a larger aggregate system without your knowledge or consent.br /br /bDelete my cookies/b ... Are you sure? ... bYes/b ... Your cookies have been deleted*.br /* Cookies may not actually be deleted.br /** Cookies may be stored indefinitely for evaluation and training purposes to better serve you.br /*** MOM knows best.br /br /Everyone loves receiving special offers from MOM and the MOM's affiliate network of adver-bots./i/blockquoteVideo a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDWhaVtyZBU#t=01m40s"is available/a as well as a a href="http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/945832/54528"full transcript/a (search for [Conversation with MOM transcript]).div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-3244426010511770669?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

March 20, 2010
13:00
My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 031910
» ‎ I'm Not Actually a Geek

From the home office on Capitol Hill, where I’m pushing hard this weekend to get the historic Potty Parity Act passed for this great nation of ours… #1: RT @louisgray louisgray.com: The SXSW Keynote With Ev Williams You Really Wanted to See http://bit.ly/c0xdpx #2: Enterprise 2.0: efficiency, effectiveness, blame and responsibility http://bit.ly/a6YgWX by @dahowlett > [...]

March 19, 2010
14:48
Technical Difficulties
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

I haven’t posted here in a while, although it’s not for lack of desire or something to say. For some reason, Windows Live Writer has decided to crash out immediately on launch and I can’t get it to come up. I hope to get some time to reinstall it soon. Filed under: Fun

March 17, 2010
22:44
Comparing A and B data : the real challenge
» ‎ CaptainDash

Internet has really changed so many aspects of our day-to-day life that it is sometimes hard to remember how we made things some years ago. Searching, buying, writing, creating are some of the few things that we can do better, faster and smarter today on the web. Surprisingly, there is a a space where there [...]

March 16, 2010
10:13
Designing search for re-finding
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

A WSDM 2010 paper out of Microsoft Research, "Large Scale Query Log Analysis of Re-finding" (a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/teevan/work/publications/papers/wsdm10.pdf"PDF/a), is notable not so much for the statistics on how much people search again for what they have searched for before, but for its fascinating list of suggestions (in Section 6, "Design Implications") of what search engines should do to support re-finding.br /br /An extended excerpt from that section:blockquoteiThe most obvious way that a search tool can improve the user experience given the prevalence of re-finding is for the tool to explicitly remember and expose that user's search history.br /br /Certain aspects of a person's history may be more useful to expose ... For example, results that are re-found often may be worth highlighting ... The result that is clicked first ... is more likely to be useful later, and thus should be emphasized, while results that are clicked in the middle may be worth forgetting ... to reduce clutter. Results found at the end of a query session are more likely to be re-found.br /br /The query used to re-find a URL is often better than the query used initially to find it ... [because of] how the person has come to understand this result. [Emphasize] re-finding queries ... in the history ... The previous query may even be worth forgetting to reduce clutter.br /br /When exposing previously found results, it is sometimes useful to label or name those results, particularly when those results are exposed as a set. Re-finding queries may make useful labels. A Web browser could even take these bookmark queries and make them into real bookmarks.br /br /A previously found result ... may be what the person is looking for ... even when the result [normally] is not going to be returned ... For example, [if] the user's current query is a substring of a previous query, the search engine may want to suggest the results from the history that were clicked from the longer query. In contrast, queries that overlap with but are longer than previous queries may be intended to find new results.br /br /[An] identical search [is] highly predictive of a repeat click ... [We] can treat the result specially and, for example, [take] additional screen real estate to try to meet the user's information need with that result ... [with] deep functionality like common paths and uses in [an expanded] snippet. For results that are re-found across sessions, it may make sense instead to provide the user with deep links to [some] new avenues within the result to explore.br /br /At the beginning of a session, when people are more likely to be picking up a previous task, a search engine should provide access into history. In the middle of the session ... focus on providing access to new information or new ways to explore previously viewed results. At the end of a session ... suggest storing any valuable information that has been found for future use./i/blockquoteGreat advice from Jaime Teevan at Microsoft Research. For more on this, please see my earlier post, "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/07/people-often-repeat-web-searches.html"People often repeat web searches/a", which summarizes a 2007 paper by Teevan and others on the prevalence of re-finding.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-1436269490113427565?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

March 15, 2010
23:16
AMQP and Twisted
» ‎ Dan Siemon

In one of my pet projects I’ve been using Twisted and txamqp. I use Twisted’s twistd to launch the service but unfortunately txamqp doesn’t come with any examples of how to use it with twistd. So I wrote a factory and protocol which makes it trivial to use txamqp with twistd. I haven’t tested it extensively but it appears to survive losing the connection to the AMQP server and reconnecting. I’m far from a Twisted expert though so please let me know if this isn’t the way it supposed to be done.

You can find the code in my Git repository.

17:05
Some Thoughts on Location Based Services Like Gowalla and FourSquare
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpI was recently on a href="http://my.sxsw.com/events/event/435"a panel at the South by South West interactive conference (SXSW)/a where we discussed multiple applications of the real-time Web and the things that might prevent us from seeing its true potential. I’ve found it interesting that the key take away from the panel is that privacy issues will be one of the biggest problems we will face as we move forward. You can see this perspective in CNN’s coverage of the panel in the story a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/13/sxswi.real.time.web/index.html?hpt=C2"Privacy concerns hinder 'real-time Web' creation, developers say/a and GigaOm’s write-up a href="http://gigaom.com/2010/03/13/sxsw-is-privacy-on-the-social-web-a-technical-problem/"SXSW: Is Privacy on the Social Web a Technical Problem?/a#160;/p pThis overlap of privacy and real-time web features is brought into sharp relief when you look at services such as a href="http://www.foursquare.com/"Foursquare/a and a href="http://www.gowalla.com/"Gowalla/a which provide a mechanism for people to broadcast their physical location to a group of friends in real-time. I started using a href="http://www.foursquare.com/"Foursquare/a last week and I’ve noticed I’m even more careful about who I accept friend requests from than on Facebook or Windows Live Messenger. The fact is that I may share status updates and photos with people but it doesn’t mean I want them to be aware of where I am on an up to the minute basis especially if I’m out spending time with my family and friends. This difference in how we view location data from other sorts of real-time data we share is captured by the co-founder of Foursquare in the article a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare-founder-on-facebook-2010-3"Facebook Isn't For Real Life Friends Anymore, Says Foursquare's Dennis Crowley/a where it states /p blockquote pemFacebook plans to clone Foursquare's central service -- the ability for site members to use their phones to quot;check-inquot; from restaurants and bars -- and make it a mere Facebook feature./em/p pemBut Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley says there's something Facebook can't clone: the real-life friendships between Foursquare users./em/p pemquot;Facebook used to be who your friends are, now it's everyone,quot; Dennis told us in an interview. /em/p pemquot;[Foursquare] is more tightly curated to who you want to have as your check-in friends. Facebook is good place for status updates and sharing photos, not to keep tabs on where people are going.quot;/em/p /blockquote pI think Crowley is on to something when he says Facebook can’t clone the Foursquare relationship model. I suspect that like Twitter, Foursquare has created a social network whose value proposition is differentiated enough from Facebook’s that it can grow into a relatively popular albeit smaller service that will not be “killed” by Facebook*. Secondly, there is a lot of synergy between Foursquare and Facebook as evidenced by the fact that a href="http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/12/facebook-foursquare-2/"Facebook is the largest referrer of traffic to Foursquare/a thanks to their implementation of Facebook Connect. So I think the claims that one will kill the other is just the usual tech press creating conflict to generate page views. /p pOne thing I have noticed is that location can’t just be a field you bolt on to a status update. It has to be a key part of the information you are sharing with others otherwise it adds little value to the user experience and in fact may detract from it by adding clutter. For example, compare what a location-based update from Foursquare looks like on Facebook versus what the exact same update looks like on Twitter /p pimg style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pv4gzBN2ODWtGM7TZ6Qv4pynjXV28Vwwlc0B0QViHZqlD9NBSVEAqjV8OJpNLFR-zHbW1I2Uy23x9zwq75xhQgg/foursquare.png" //p blockquote h2 align="left"VS/h2 /blockquote p#160;img style="margin: 0px 20px" src="http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p1Llaq8AfsU6iKyvatERjkYL0X4EV3Zxds9BdMZy31qDD_HJcaOaoCHZWhqlQtSeLSF2NygVT_leoceGICscTFA/twitter%20location.png" //p pThe difference between both updates is almost night and day even though the actual status text I shared is the same. The way Twitter has approached location is to treat it as a bunch of “poorly translated” GPS coordinates that are bolted on to the end of my status update. The Facebook update not only gives you that but also a human readable location for where I am down to the room number and includes some social context such as the fact that I was attending the talk with two coworkers from Windows Live. /p pAs real-time location data starts to permeate social experiences, there’s a lot to learn from the above screenshots. In the example above, people who are interested in the topic based on my status knew which room to find danah’s talk from the Facebook update whereas they were told “downtown austin” in the Twitter update.#160; As designers of social software applications, we should be mindful that location data enhances the experience and the information being shared. Adding location simply for buzzword compliance or to add metadata to the status update without enhancing the experience actually ends up crufting it up. /p p* Twitter’s value proposition is that it is the place to interact with celebrities and microcelebrities that you care about. It is useful to note that the much maligned a href="http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/suggested-users.html"Suggested Users List/a was key in establishing this value proposition in the minds of users. This is different from Facebook’s position as the social network for your real world friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances. /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=B.O.B.amp;field-title=Stolenamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"B.O.B./a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=B.O.B.+Nothin+On+Youamp;x=0amp;y=0"Nothin' On You (featuring Bruno Mars)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

March 14, 2010
22:51
Election Days in France. A prowess… But the French deserves better
» ‎ CaptainDash

Election Day on this Sunday. French are voting for their region’s head. It is just past 8PM and the result are already partialy announced. A prowess managed by the Interior Minister, which gather the votings from 21 millions voters (aproximately) and datacrunch it. A serious job for what is at stake. And given the level of transparency, [...]

16:31
GFS and its evolution
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

A fascinating article, "a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/3/76283-gfs-evolution-on-fast-forward/fulltext"GFS: Evolution on Fast-Forward/a", in the latest CACM magazine interviews Googler Sean Quinlan and exposes the problems Google has had with the legendary Google File System as the company has grown.br /br /Some key excerpts:blockquoteiThe decision to build the original GFS around [a] single master really helped get something out the door ... more rapidly .... [But] problems started to occur ... going from a few hundred terabytes up to petabytes, and then up to tens of petabytes ... [because of] the amount of metadata the master had to maintain.br /br /[Also] when you have thousands of clients all talking to the same master at the same time ... the average client isn't able to command all that many operations per second. There are applications such as MapReduce, where you might suddenly have a thousand tasks, each wanting to open a number of files. Obviously, it would take a long time to handle all those requests and the master would be under a fair amount of duress.br /br /64MB [was] the standard chunk size ... As the application mix changed over time, however, ways had to be found to let the system deal efficiently with large numbers of files [of] far less than 64MB (think in terms of Gmail, for example). The problem was not so much with the number of files itself, but rather with the memory demands all those [small] files made on the centralized master .... There are only a finite number of files you can accommodate before the master runs out of memory.br /br /Many times, the most natural design for some application just wouldn't fit into GFS -- even though at first glance you would think the file count would be perfectly acceptable, it would turn out to be a problem .... BigTable ... [is] one potential remedy ... [but] I'd say that the people who have been using BigTable purely to deal with the file-count problem probably haven't been terribly happy.br /br /The GFS design model from the get-go was all about achieving throughput, not about the latency at which it might be achieved .... Generally speaking, a hiccup on the order of a minute over the course of an hour-long batch job doesn't really show up. If you are working on Gmail, however, and you're trying to write a mutation that represents some user action, then getting stuck for a minute is really going to mess you up. We had similar issues with our master failover. Initially, GFS had no provision for automatic master failure. It was a manual process ... Our initial [automated] master-failover implementation required on the order of minutes .... Trying to build an interactive database on top of a file system designed from the start to support more batch-oriented operations has certainly proved to be a pain point.br /br /They basically try to hide that latency since they know the system underneath isn't really all that great. The guys who built Gmail went to a multihomed model, so if one instance of your GMail account got stuck, you would basically just get moved to another data center ... That capability was needed ... [both] to ensure availability ... [and] to hide the GFS [latency] problems.br /br /The model in GFS is that the client just continues to push the write until it succeeds. If the client ends up crashing in the middle of an operation, things are left in a bit of an indeterminate state ... RecordAppend does not offer any replay protection either. You could end up getting the data multiple times in a file. There were even situations where you could get the data in a different order ... [and then] discover the records in different orders depending on which chunks you happened to be reading ... At the time, it must have seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect I think the consensus is that it proved to be more painful than it was worth. It just doesn't meet the expectations people have of a file system, so they end up getting surprised. Then they had to figure out work-arounds./i/blockquoteInteresting to see exposed the warts of Google File System and Bigtable. I remember when reading the a href="http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html"Bigtable paper/a being surprised that it was layered on top of GFS. Those early decisions to use a file system designed for logs and batch processing of logs as the foundation for Google's interactive databases appear to have caused a lot of pain and workarounds over the years.br /br /On a related topic, a recent paper out of Google, "Using a Market Economy to Provision Compute Resources Across Planet-wide Clusters" (a href="http://www.stokely.org/papers/google-cluster-auctions.pdf"PDF/a), looks at another problem Google is having, prioritizing all the MapReduce batch jobs at Google and trying to maximize utilization of their cluster. The paper only describes a test of one promising solution, auctioning off the cluster time to incent developers to move their jobs to non-peak times and idle compute resources, but still an interesting read.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8570629564403569119?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

March 13, 2010
5:46
Irssi Handling JOINS/PARTS/QUITS
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
Irssi, as blogged extensively throughout this site, is one solid client. The flexibility never ceases to amaze me, and tonight was one of those times.
Hanging out in the amount of channels I do, I see a lot of activity in my statusbar for all of my joined channels. This can be overwhelming for some, but I don’t mind it. What I do mind, however, is when I check in on a specific channel, and see pages and pages of scrollback that is nothing more than people joining and leaving the channel. I’ve tried blatantly ignoring JOINS, PARTS and QUITS, as they’re called, but I always disable it, because I usually want to be kept abreast of when someone leaves a channel that I’m having a conversation with. I don’t want to look silly continuing to chat to someone, long after they’ve left. So, I need a way to keep on top of when people are joining and leaving the channel, but not have that information in the channel itself. Thankfully, Irssi meets this need.
The concept is simple. A JOIN, PART or QUIT is what is referred to as a “level”. There are a number of different levels that Irssi supports, all of which can be found with “/help levels” in Irssi. With Irssi, it is possible to ignore, or even redirect, levels. In my case, I want to redirect these three levels to another window, if possible. So, digging through the settings in Irssi, I found “window_check_level_first”. By default, this setting is “OFF”, which means that Irssi has a global setting for levels, and how they’re handled. Enabling this setting, means to follow the levels that have been assigned to their respective channels. However, if you turn this on first, without doing some initial setup before hand, you’ll notice everything going to your status window by default, including chat. This isn’t what we want, so let’s get setup.
The first thing we need to do is set our levels for all of our currently open windows, as well as any future windows that we open. We can accomplish this with two commands in Irssi:
```
/foreach window /window level ALL -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS
/set window_default ALL -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS
```
Now, the next thing to do is to create a new hidden window that will be the new home for all your JOINS, PARTS and QUITS. So, from Irssi:
```
/window new HIDDEN
```
Navigate to that window, wherever it is placed, and give it a name. For me, I called it “junk”. Of course, this isn’t necessary, just optional, but I prefer that each of my windows have a name:
```
/window name junk
```
It will have picked up the -JOINS -PARTS -QUITS from our default setting we just applied, so we’ll need to reverse that. Easiest way is to just apply the converse of what you did earlier:
```
/window level -ALL JOINS PARTS QUITS
```
Sweet. Our window is finished. Now, we can turn on the setting that will tell Irssi to look for each individual window level setting:
```
/set window_check_level_first ON
```
Wait a bit, and you should see all the JOINS, PARTS and QUITS going to your new hidden window, rather than each respective channel. You’ll also notice that it doesn’t print the channel where these are originating. I don’t know of an easy way to set that without a script, so if you know of such a script that exists, or want to write one yourself, sharing that would be appreciated. In the meantime, this is better than nothing.
Don’t forget to save:
```
/save
```
Also, you may not want to make your “junk” window hidden, but rather make it sticky, and split Irssi, putting the junk window on the top. I’ve done this with my highlight window, so it would make sense here. In that case, just:
```
/window stick on
/window show (number|name)
```
You can then size the window as needed if you decide you split your Irssi.
And, there you have it. Now, when people are joining and quitting, rather than filling your scrollback where precious chat exists, it’s all being forwarded to a window of your choice. If eventually, you like this setup, and you find that you’re not checking your junk window for joins and quits, then you may be able to get away with just ignoring JOINS, PARTS and QUITS altogether Irssi-wide. Which means, if for any reason you want to reverse this setup, it’s rather trivial:
```
/set window_check_level_first OFF
/foreach window /window level ALL
/set window_default_level ALL
/window close
/save
```
And that would back you out of this configuration, and get you back to default.
I should mention that I’ve heard that WeeChat has a feature that only people you’ve recently chatted with will show when they quit, or there is a setting for setting this. I personally think WeeChat is a solid client. However, in this case, I don’t want to see any quits, even with those I’m chatting with, in that buffer. However, I would like to see it in another buffer, and Irssi makes this painless. So, while I’m sure WeeChat can also meet similar needs, Irssi meets my needs best.
As with my other Irssi tutorials, I hope this one was helpful. I find that I personally benefit from my own writing, and that’s the major reason why I blog. I have searched for doing solving problems in the past, only to stumble upon my own blog post, outlining the very issue I’m faced with again. So, if it won’t benefit you, at least it will benefit myself.

March 11, 2010
19:04
The Onion on Google's data
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

The Onion has a hilarious article, "a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/news/google_responds_to_privacy"Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology/a", that should be enjoyable for this crowd. An excerpt as a teaster:blockquoteiAcknowledging that Google hasn't always been open about how it mines the roughly 800 terabytes of personal data it has gathered since 1998, [CEO Eric] Schmidt apologized to users -- particularly the 1,237,948 who take daily medication to combat anxiety --for causing any unnecessary distress, and he expressed regret -- especially to Patricia Fort, a single mother taking care of Jordan, Sam, and Rebecca, ages 3, 7, and 9 -- for not doing more to ensure that private information remains private.br /br /Monday's apology comes after the controversial launch of Google Buzz, a social networking platform that publicly linked Gmail users to their most e-mailed contacts by default.br /br /"I'd like nothing more than to apologize in person to everyone we've let down, but as you can see, many of our users are rarely home at this hour," said Google cofounder and president Sergey Brin, pointing to several Google Map street-view shots of empty bedroom and living room windows on a projection screen behind him. "And, if last night's searches are any indication, Boston's Robert Hornick is probably out shopping right now for the spaghetti and clam sauce he'll be cooking tonight ... Either that, or hunting down that blond coworker of his, Samantha, whose Picasa photos he stares at every night."/i/blockquote[Article found via a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/google_in_the_o.html"Bruce Schneier/a]div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-5270586313506781857?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

March 05, 2010
23:58
Google Buys DocVerse: Maybe This Collaborative Authoring Thing Finally Has Legs?
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

This morning, Google announced it is buying a little company in San Francisco that enables real-time and asynchronous (offline) collaborative authoring of Microsoft Office docs called DocVerse. The founders of DocVerse are actually ex-Microsoft product folks. As I wrote back in September 2008, I believe collaborative authoring is one of the top five trends for [...]
15:25
The Onion Peels Back Google Privacy
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

Leave it to the Onion to nail down an issue – in this case the amount of trust so many people are putting in a megacorporation that promises not to be evil. Personally, I don’t put that much out on Google, but if they buy Yahoo, Zoho, Netflix, and my health insurance company I’d be [...]
March 04, 2010
2:47
Catalyst Prague Discount Code
» ‎ KnowledgeForward

Our European Catalyst conference is coming up in April. It’s a beautiful time to be in Prague. The “Collaborate or Perish” track (on Wednesday, April 21st) should be especially interesting. We’ll be casting a critical eye on the Microsoft’s 2010 releases while also discussing non-Microsoft alternatives. I have a discount code to use while registering [...]

February 28, 2010
18:19
Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software
» ‎ Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Social Software

divpEarlier this morning I saw a href="http://twitter.com/al3x/status/9769762230"the following tweet/a by Alex Payne, one of the developers who works on Twitter/p blockquote pemGame mechanics aren't going to fix your product and they aren't making people's lives better. Great essay: /ema href="http://j.mp/aN66i8"emhttp://j.mp/aN66i8/em/aem#160;/em/p /blockquote pAlex’s description piqued my interest so I checked out the article by Peter Michaud titled a href="http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/achievement-porn/"Achievement Porn/a and not only agreed that it is a great essay but walked away from it with a fairly different conclusion from Alex. Below are two key excerpts from the article /p blockquote pema title="Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement" href="http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html"The game article/a, and the meta discussion surrounding it is actually part of an even larger discussion that affects more than just video gamers. Games are just a minor symptom of a systematic disease:/em/p ol liemOur society is set up to make us feel as though we must always achieve and grow. That’s true because individuals growing tend to bolster the power and creature comforts of the groups they belong to with inventions, innovations, and impressive grandstanding (Go Team!). /em/li liemBecause of this pressure to grow, there’s another incentive to make growth easier. More perversely, to make growth seem easier. /em/li /ol pemWhy work hard for achievements, when you could relax and achieve the same? That’s not pathological, that’s how exponential progress works./em/p pemBut why achieve at all when you can plug into any number of “achievement games” and get the same personal satisfaction?/em br /… br /emThe good news is that these little “achievement games” are fairly easy to recognize once you realize what’s going on. The bad news is that more are cropping up at an alarming rate, sped largely by the intertubes. /em/p pemGames fast becoming standard are the “followers” and “friends” games for example. Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, et al, all have their own ostensible raison d’etre, but the psychological underpinning they all share is this treadmill of achievement. This accumulation of points that’s correlated with whatever the intended benefit of the service is./em/p /blockquote pI find this discussion interesting because it matches the theme of my most recent posts the difference between adding features that are good for users versus good for the product. The physiological underpinnings that make achievement games work have been covered quite well in the Slate article a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/"Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous./a The article argues that our brains are wired to derive more pleasure from chasing after something than actually getting it. However although we are hard wired to constantly chase after achievement it is our individual choice which achievements spur us. Thus it is the same underlying biology that explains the addictions of Tiger Woods and those of the World of Warcraft junkie. /p pOur lives are full of lots of little “achievement treadmills” it’s just that video games are the most obvious. A few months ago I started playing a href="http://modernwarfare2.infinityward.com/"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2/a. I play it for about 1-2 hours every day and according to the game have clocked in almost two weeks of playing time. The game has lots of mini-achievements and ways to keep you grinding from a href="http://www.360maniac.com/2009/11/24/mw2-callsign-titles-and-requirements-for-unlocking/"unlocking titles/a when you complete challenges like score 500 headshots with a particular weapon to encouraging you to de-power your character after you hit level 70 and start the grind all over again (I’m on my 3rd or 4th circuit). The interesting question is what have I lost by spending all this time playing MW2? /p pIt turns out that the two activities that have suffered the most are my blogging and writing code for a href="http://www.rssbandit.org"RSS Bandit/a. An insight from Peter Michaud’s post is that these were also achievement treadmills in their own way. On my blog all of my posts literally have a score which is the number of times other people have retweeted links to them, bookmarked them on delicious or shared them on Facebook. I also use a href="http://www.feedburner.com"FeedBurner/a and for a while used to obsess about my number of subscribers but eventually got over it since I don’t have the time or willingness to create the kind of content that generates a large following. As for RSS Bandit, the number of people who use it and the number of bugs I fixed have always been motivating factors. I can still remember the feeling I’d get when I’d see stats like a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=96589amp;ugn=rssbanditamp;type=amp;mode=alltime"100,000 downloads a month/a or when I realized the application had been downloaded over a million times since it had started. Since I consider the glory days of Outlook-inspired desktop RSS readers to be in the past, I’m not as motivated as I once was to work on the project. /p pWhat it really boils down to is that I traded one set of “achievement treadmills” (i.e. blogging and contributing to an Open Source project) for another more explicit set (i.e. playing Modern Warfare 2). Now we can go back to Alex Payne’s tweet and find out where I disagree. From the perspective of Infinity Ward (creators of MW2) is it a bad thing for their business that they’ve created a game that has sucked me into almost 300 hours of play time? On the other hand, is it a good thing for me as a fully functioning member of society to have cut down my contributions to an Open Source project and the blogosphere to play a video game? Finally, is it better for me as a person to have traded achievement treadmills where I have little control over the achievements (i.e. number of blog subscribers, number of people who download a desktop RSS reader, etc) for one where I have complete control of the achievements as long as I dedicate the time? /p pI’ll leave the answers to those questions up to the reader. I will say game mechanics can more than “fix” a social software product, they can make it a massive success that it’s users are obsessed with. Just look at a href="http://www.farmville.com/"Farmville/a or a href="http://foursquare.com/"FourSquare/a for explicit examples or sites like Twitter which have inspired hundreds of a href="http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+to+increase+twitter+followersamp;form=OSDSRC"guides to increasing your number of Twitter followers/a for a more subtle example. Does it mean that these products aren’t making their users lives “better”? Well, it depends on how you define better. /p pimg style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" / Now Playing: a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_m_pop/?search-alias=popularamp;unfiltered=1amp;field-keywords=amp;field-artist=DJ+Khalidamp;field-title=Stolenamp;field-label=amp;field-binding=amp;sort=relevancerankamp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.x=19amp;Adv-Srch-Music-Album-Submit.y=6"DJ Khalid/a - a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_dmusic?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-musicamp;field-keywords=DJ+Khalid+All+I+Do+Is+Winamp;x=0amp;y=0"All I Do Is Win (featuring Ludacris, Rick Ross, T-Pain amp; Snoop Doggy Doog)/a img style="vertical-align: middle" title="Note" alt="Note" src="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/images/music_note.gif" //p/div

February 27, 2010
8:55
Personalization and differential pricing
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian has a new paper out, "Computer Mediated Transactions" (a href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2010/cmt.pdf"PDF/a). An excerpt of his predictions on personalization:blockquoteiInstead of a "one size fits all" model, the web offers a "market of one" ... [powered by] suggestions of things to buy based on your previous purchases, or on purchases of customers like you.br /br /Not only content, but prices may also be personalized, leading to various forms of differential pricing ... [But] the ability of firms to extract surplus [may be] quite limited when consumers are sophisticated ... [And] perfect price description and free entry ... pushes profits to zero, conferring all benefits to the customers.br /br /The same sort of personalization can occur in advertising ... Google and Yahoo ... [already] allow users to specify their areas of interest and then see ads related to those interests. It is also relatively common for advertisers ... to show ads based on previous responses of users to related ads./i/blockquoteBack in 2000, Amazon got slammed (e.g. a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/09/25/daily21.html"[1]/a) for an experiment with differential pricing, but Hal appears to be predicting differential pricing will rise again.br /br /The paper also talks briefly about how experimentation changes how companies make decisions ("when experiments are cheap, they are likely provide more reliable answers than opinions"), data mining, online advertising, legal contracts that use computer monitoring to enforce their terms, and cloud computing. The paper is from the 2010 Ely Lecture at the American Economics Association and video of the talk a href="http://videolectures.net/ijcai09_varian_cmt/"is available/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-1734233320456810734?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div
February 23, 2010
15:23
How we all teach Google to Google
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

Steven Levy at Wired just posted an article, "a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_google_algorithm/all/1"How Google's Algorithm Rules the Web/a", with some fun details on how Google uses constant experimentation, logs of searches and clicks, and many small tweaks to keep improving their search results.br /br /Well worth reading. Some excerpts as a teaser:blockquotei[Google Fellow Amit] Singhal notes that the engineers in Building 43 are exploiting ... the hundreds of millions who search on Google. The data people generate when they search -- what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they're unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations -- turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results.br /br /"On most Google queries, you're actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously," says search quality engineer Patrick Riley. Then he corrects himself. "Essentially," he says, "all the queries are involved in some test." In other words, just about every time you search on Google, you're a lab rat.br /br /This flexibility -- the ability to add signals, tweak the underlying code, and instantly test the results -- is why Googlers say they can withstand any competition from Bing or Twitter or Facebook. Indeed, in the last six months, Google has [found and] made more than 200 improvements./i/blockquoteEven so, this raises the question of where the point of diminishing returns is with more data and more users. While startups lack Google's heft, Yahoo and Bing are big enough that -- if they continuously experiment, tweak, and learn from their data as much as Google does -- search quality differences likely would be in an imperceptibly small chunk of long tail queries.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-891294976347166885?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

11:57
When to migrate your database?
» ‎ BigDataMatters.com
Why migrate your database? Efficiency and availability problems are harming your business - reports are out of date, your batch processing window is nearing its limits, outages (unplanned/planned) frequently halt work. Database consolidation removes the costs that result from a heterogeneous database environment (DBAs time, database vendor pricing, database versions, hardware, OSs, patches, upgrades etc.). OK, so the driving forces for migration are clear, what now?

What's the cost of my database?
Costs cannot be simply measured in terms of licenses, hardware, DBAs etc. It is more complex and requires thorough analysis on both a business and technical level.
1) A utilities company used Oracle. During the downturn a cost cutting strategy was undertaken to benefit from free database licensees and they migrated to the open source MySQL. The migration process took a couple of months and was initially a success. Problems surfaced with a sudden growth in customer demand – frequent outages occurred and because there was no clear plan for migration they could not address the underlying cause. The cost to business was so great that it was decided to migrate back to Oracle.
Main cost to business? During outages, the resulting backlogs had to be manually processed. Production standards could not be met in the desired time frame. Short-sighted planning had cost the company dearly.
2) In the early 90s, a manufacturing company buys the latest hardware and databases to support their production processes. As the years advance and production increases, efficiency problems appear as a result of the greater load. Managers are progressively viewing older and older data. Eventually they reach the point where they can only view today's data, tomorrow.
Main cost to business? Malfunctioning devices or defective materials, if not spotted immediately, can result in erroneous assembly of an entire batch, causing a loss of thousands in one shot. Ideally the system would operate in real-time, ensuing production quality with proactive decision making.
How to proceed?
The first step is analysis. Determine where the needs of your business lie and evaluate whether your existing IT is meeting them. It is paramount to clearly define where you start and where you want to go.
Example starting points:
- Efficiency problems delaying decision making – product batch is failing the same test, why?
- HA unsupported leading to frequent outages (unplanned/planned)
- Heterogeneous database infrastructure costing time and money in licenses, DBAs maintenance etc.
- 15 year old code base – unmanageable due to developer comings and goings with no formalized documentation
Example end goals:
- Real-time data decision making – we know why products are failing the same test. We can act.
- HA supported, users are no longer prevented from working
- Homogeneous database infrastructure – license cost reduction reduced, DBAs freed from maintaining an incoherent infrastructure.
- Standardized code base adhering to modern best practices (versioned, documented, tested etc.)
After you have identified where you want to go, the next step is to prioritize the goals based on their ROI.
Types of migration
Based on the goals, we need to evaluate the migration type that will fulfill them:
1. Migrate to your vendors latest database version - offers the least rewards, but with minimum effort. Enables you to benefit from increased functionality, better performance, availability and security. Even if the vendor says that migration will be flawless, experience shows that manual tweaking will always be required to achieve the same functionality of your database schema (tables, procedures, functions, views etc.)
2. Migrate to a different vendors database (e.g. SQL Server to Oracle) - I will explore this in depth below
3. Migrate to a non-relational storage store - allows for Web 2.0 Petabyte scalability. We blog about the pros and cons here.
Example: Migrate from vendor A to vendor B's database

Business logic - Most vendors provide tools that enable DBAs to translate from one vendors schema (tables, procedures, triggers etc.) to another. Of course, the functionality varies and specialist knowledge and manual tweaking will always be required. In essence, the more functionality you use that is specific to your database, the greater the amount of manual refactoring.
Data - Again, vendor tools can be used to migrate data from one vendors database to another. In the worst case scenario a DBA can simply create their own script to import.
Interfacing applications - The final step is to configure the applications that interface with the database inserting, updating and reading the data. A simple task, but one that requires careful analysis to identify and reconfigure the applications without causing costly downtime.

Testing - As with any project, a substantial amount of testing is required ensure the maintenance of existing functionality. This must be performed incrementally to identify problems before they become blurred by others. Best practice is to run the existing production database with the migrated database in parallel over a bedding in period (1-3 months depending on complexity). Data differences of the production data are recorded, reported as bugs, prioritized and fixed accordingly.
What can be achieved?

A financial services firm continued to use the same database over a number of years without upgrading. Batch report generation times were getting longer due to the ever increasing data. IT management took the decision to act and migrated to a different vendors database in addition to investing in more horsepower.
The initial results were disappointing with only 2X speedup. After a thorough audit of the migrated database, it was realized that the SQL logic (indexes, triggers, jobs etc.) needed to be optimized for the new database. After this was performed, report generation was 20X faster. The reduction in report generation time opened the door to new revenue channels.
To migrate or not?There is no straight forward answer, because it strongly depends on a case by case basis. My message is this – spend time and money during analysis to clearly define where the benefits and challenges lie. Ultimately, ROI determines if and what migration is required to realize the goals.

6:26
Google Reader recommends articles
» ‎ Geeking with Greg

In a post on the official Google Reader blog, "a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/02/may-we-recommend.html"May we recommend.../a", Laurence Gonsalves describes a new recommendation feature for Google Reader that recommends articles based on what you have read in the past. An excerpt:blockquoteiMany of you wanted to see even more personalized recommendations ... [Now], we've started inserting items selected just for you inside the Recommended items section. This is great if you've got interests that are less mainstream. If you love Lego robots, for example, then you should start to notice more of them in your Recommended items./i/blockquoteSadly, no additional details appear to be available. In my usage, there were rare gems in the recommendations, but a lot of randomness, and a strong bias toward very popular items. The lack of explanation -- why was this item recommended? -- and lack of a way to correct the recommendations likely will make people less forgiving of these problems. I also saw recommendations for items I had already read; items you have already seen always should be filtered from recommendations.br /br /For more on that, you might enjoy some of my previous posts on this topic, such as the Mar 2009 "a href="http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/22925-what-is-a-good-recommendation-algorithm/fulltext"What is a good recommendation algorithm?/a" and the much older Dec 2006 "a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/rss-beast.html"The RSS beast/a".br /br /bUpdate/b: A couple weeks later, Google a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/03/and-now-for-something-completely.html"launches/a Google Reader Play, a StumbleUpon knock-off that recommends web content based on what you say you like. Googler Garrett Wu writes that "it uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader." In my usage, it had the same problems too.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/6569681-8504378441530030266?l=glinden.blogspot.com' alt='' //div

February 21, 2010
16:50
Installing Debian via USB
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
Last night, I wanted to see if I could get Debian Squeeze loaded on my HP Mini 110, so I set out to accomplish the task, and accomplish it I did. As with most netboks, this HP doesn’t ship with a CDROM. So, the only way to get an operating system on this guy is either with PXE, or USB (actually, I don’t even know if PXE-booting works). So, I grabbed an unused USB thumb drive, and set to work.
Before beginning any installation, you should be very familiar with your hardware, so you know what sort of drivers you’ll need for the installation, and if there will be any compatibility issues. Attempting to put Debian on this machine in the past has failed, due to the network driver not shipping with the Lenny kernel. If you have this netbook, the NIC is an Attansic Technology Atheros AR8132/L1c gigabit ethernet adapter. The driver is open source, however, the hardware is so new, that at the time I had purchased the Mini, the driver hadn’t been included in the mainline kernel. The wireless is a Broadcom BCM4132, which means the firmware is not open source, and as a result, not included with the Debian installer. So, at the time, there was no way to get this netbook online with Debian. However, with the release of the 2.6.29 kernel, the Aetheros driver needed was included, and the development snapshot of the installer now ships that kernel, so we’re good to go with a network installation, and getting the computer online.
All the other hardware that I’ve tested, I have tested before with different hardware other than the Mini, and worked out of the box. So, the installation should be rather straightforward, and booting in the new system should be on par with a working system.
So, in order to perform a Debian GNU/Linux installation via USB, you need only a few things. First, you must grab a boot.img.gz file from the development snapshot of the installer for your hardware. Because the HP Mini is x86 32-bit, I grabbed mine here. Now, you also need a CD image file (ISO format) which will contain the necessary software and installation procedures for the install. I prefer to do network installs, so I grabbed a netinst ISO here.
The boot.img.gz file will contain a bootable syslinux kernel and initial ramdisk, which means it will have the drivers necessary for your hardware. Of course, I got mine from a development snapshot, so I could get the Atheros NIC driver from the latest kernel, but if you have older hardware, maybe the stable version of the boot.img.gz would work better for you. You just need to get it from any hd-media directory appropriate for your architecture. The ISO on the other hand contains the base software for installing to disk, the partitioner and other parts of the installer necessary for performing the installation. The boot.img.gz just gets you started.
Now that you have both files, you’ll need a USB thumb drive that is at least 256MB in size, which shouldn’t be a problem these days. Insert the USB drive into a computer with a working Linux operating system, and determine the appropriate device assigned to your newly inserted drive. You can get this information a number of ways. Probably the best way, is to run the following command before you insert the USB drive:
```
# tail -f -n 0 /var/log/messages
```
Then, insert the drive. You’ll see output from the kernel as it discovers the hardware and assigns a device to the drive. For me, my output was this:
```
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.644130] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789569] usb 1-7: New USB device found, idVendor=13fe, idProduct=1e00
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789586] usb 1-7: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789599] usb 1-7: Product: USB DISK 2.0
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789609] usb 1-7: Manufacturer:
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789618] usb 1-7: SerialNumber: 077904015F40
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.789974] usb 1-7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Feb 21 08:22:28 hermes kernel: [46103.790939] scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Feb 21 08:22:33 hermes kernel: [46108.838495] scsi 5:0:0:0: Direct-Access              USB DISK 2.0     PMAP PQ: 0 ANSI: 0 CCS
Feb 21 08:22:33 hermes kernel: [46109.101380] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 4030464 512-byte logical blocks: (2.06 GB/1.92 GiB)
Feb 21 08:22:33 hermes kernel: [46109.101984] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Feb 21 08:22:33 hermes kernel: [46109.107382]  sdb:
Feb 21 08:22:33 hermes kernel: [46109.174851] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
```
So, in my case, the newly inserted drive is /dev/sdb. So, armed with this information, I can now prepare the USB drive. This next step should be handled with caution. If you type in, whether intentionally or accidentally the wrong device, disasterous consequences may abound. As a friend once told me: “read twice, type once”. Think what you’re doing before you do it. So, at this point, I just need to send the contents of the boot.img.gz file to the new disk. I would not recommend doing it to a partition, but instead doing it to the whole drive. If you inserted your thumb drive, and you noticed in the output that you have a /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1, then this means you have a partition table outlining a single partition on the drive /dev/sdb. Ignore the partition, work with the drive itself.
Make sure your USB drive is NOT mounted, then type in the following (this next step will remove any existing partitions and data on the drive):
```
# umount /dev/sdb*
# zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/sdb
```
This should only take a couple of seconds to finish. At this point, you’ll have a FAT16 formatted USB drive with a syslinux install on the drive. You will now need to mount the drive and copy the ISO image to the mount point.
```
# mount /dev/sdb /mnt
# cp debian-504-i386-netinst.iso /mnt
# sync
# umount /dev/sdb
```
At this point, you have a fully prepared USB thumb drive with all the necessary bits in place to perform a USB installation on your netbook, or other hardware. When you boot from the USB stick, you’ll have the familiar Debian installer interface- automated installation, beginner and expert modes and a rescue environment. Because of this, I would recommend keeping the USB stick close at hand, should you need to troubleshoot your installation any time soon.
When you initialize the installation, the installer will look for an ISO file that contains the Debian software. It will start with /dev/sda, and work it’s way device-by-device and partition-by-partition in order, until it finds the ISO file. Because my drive is also recognized as /dev/sdb on my netbook, it only take a couple seconds. After it has found the ISO image, you’re ready to install, just like you would if you had booted off a CD.
That’s it! Rather straightforward, I think. You only need four times really to complete the job:
- You computer
- A USB disk
- A boot.img.gz file
- An ISO containing the Debian software
Good luck on your USB installs!

February 14, 2010
23:56
From Waterloo to Seattle
» ‎ Michael Nielsen

I’m deeply engrossed in finishing my book at the moment, but wanted to mention two events which readers of this blog might enjoy hearing about, and perhaps attending.

The first event is a panel on open source democracy that’s being run at the University of Waterloo (just outside Toronto) on February 22. It’s about how and whether ideas like collective intelligence and mass collaboration will have any impact on governance in the 21st century. The panel is being run by Tad Homer-Dixon, and the panelists are Mark Tovey, Hassan Masum, and myself. After some short initial presentations it’s going to be (we hope) very interactive, with people there from a wide variety of backgrounds. I’m looking forward to it!

If you’re interested in open science, Science Commons is organizing a Science Commons Symposium on February 20, in Seattle, at the Microsoft Campus. They’ve organized a great group of speakers, and if I wasn’t chained to my desk writing I’d be on a plane to Seattle!

Update: The open source democracy panel is on Feb 22, not Feb 20, as I originally wrote.

February 13, 2010
9:22
Facebook Chat In Bitlbee
» ‎ Aaron Toponce
It’s no surprise that Bitlbee is my chat client of choice. After all, I’ve blogged about it before. So, when I heard rumors that Facebook would be releasing their chat to outside clients over XMPP, I was excited to see the day when I could add it to my running Bitlbee instance. Lo and behold, that day has come.
Adding your Facebook account to Bitlbee is rather painless, as it is with any other account. The only catch, is you have to have a Facebook username set before you can continue. Once that is set, in Bitlbee, from your “&btilbee” status window, you can add the account:
```
account add jabber <
```

Browser/arch	V8 (higher is better)	SunSpider (lower is better)
Firefox i686 PAE	402	1002.6ms
Firefox x86_64	277	2131.2ms
Epiphany x86_64	887	1261.0ms