Le mercredi, mai 18 2011, 23:10 ::
advocacy,
bitcoin,
decentralisation,
opendiscussionday,
xmpp,
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Traduction française disponible
A boy that was just discovering Internet once asked me: “I'm wondering, where is located the content of Internet?”. I considered it as a silly question but, in fact, it is the most crucial question about the Internet.
And to answer it, why not celebrate the Open Discussion Day this Thursday like every May 19th since 2006?
Some people say that Internet was made to be able to sustain an atomic bombing. I find the solution incredibly beautiful: decentralization. Internet doesn't have a center or a major node. It is only a lot of interconnected computers. A bomb could destroy some of them, the network would still be there. Of course, some website would be offline but without major impact on the others.
One of the key aspect of a decentralized network is an open protocol. Indeed, you want to allow anyone to join the network without any prerequisite. We need a language that anyone is able to learn.
Today, we fear a bit less a nuclear attack. But should we care less about decentralization?
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Le mardi, mai 17 2011, 17:06 ::
übergeek,
:: Lien permanent
It always astonished me that pressing an apparently random combination of several keys, including a "Meta" one, is called a "shortcut".
Le mercredi, avril 27 2011, 23:05 ::
advocacy,
albedo,
bitcoin,
decentralisation,
:: Lien permanent
Currency is a way for people to exchange value. By itself, the currency does not have a real value. It only carries the symbolic value that people want to put in it. Try to pay with gold or euro in a Papuan tribe and you will understand what I mean.
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Le vendredi, avril 15 2011, 16:07 ::
humour,
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"Believe my investor experience Mr Young Visionary, nobody will ever be interested by a camera embedded into a phone!"
Le mercredi, avril 6 2011, 21:37 ::
gnome,
lanedo,
mon_nombril,
:: Lien permanent
How strange. I'm sitting in my apartment in Belgium, I don't hear any horn, my food tastes surprisingly unspicy and there's no cow in the streets.
It is impressive how quickly India can grow on you. Last week, I was kindly sponsored by Lanedo to attend the GNOME.Asia conference in Bangalore. It was my first trip to India and if I had only one word to describe this event, it would be *AWESOME* (look mam, I'm Jono Bacon!). Or absurd but in the good old Monty python way.
Awesome, absurd and extremely funny. I had a smile on my face for the whole week. I initially planned to give one talk and ended giving five of them (+ one bad lightning talk). I met a bunch of wonderful people and even more really motivated students. I've never seen so many friendly people at the same time. Or maybe are we really grumpy in Europe? Anyway their questions were really insightful, ranging from "What distribution do you recommend to develop GNOME 3" to the unexpected "I want to contribute to X.org and spotted this particular bug I want to solve, have you any advice?". And I don't talk about the incredible head-banging technique they use while you talk to them.
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Le mercredi, mars 16 2011, 13:07 ::
gnome,
gpager,
usability,
:: Lien permanent
So far, I've used GNOME-Shell for at least 10 minutes and Unity for at least 15. And it was six months ago. Just to tell you how much I'm competent on the subject. And I didn't like them. Not at all. I've my own ideas about the desktop.
So what? What is the point about liking or not liking? You don't like blue? Does it make blue a bad color? User interaction is an engineering science. You identify a problem, you design prototypes, you conduct experiments to choose which design has the best result (on a scale that you built as part of the experiment). The fact that you like a prototype more than another is not relevant.
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Le lundi, février 7 2011, 12:31 ::
belgiom,
best seller,
buzz,
humour,
politique,
world,
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Traduction française de ce billet disponible ici
European paradise:
You are invited to an official lunch. You are welcomed by an Englishman. Food is prepared by a Frenchman and an Italian puts you in the mood and everything is organised by a German.
European hell:
You are invited to an official lunch. You are welcomed by a Frenchman. Food is prepared by an Englishman, German puts you in the mood but, don't worry, everything is organised by an Italian.
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Le mercredi, février 2 2011, 15:57 ::
advocacy,
albedo,
bitcoin,
decentralisation,
xmpp,
:: Lien permanent
While strolling on that inter-network thingy, you quickly realize that there's one mandatory identity certificate required: your email address.
It is not possible anymore to be active on the web without an email address. Most services require that you provide a valid email address. And it's a good thing because email has the following properties: being decentralized (not tied to any provider), being standardized and freely implementable, being easy to share (just one human-readable string). It's also possible to have multiple addresses, meaning there's no enforcement to have a one-to-one connection between a real-life identity and a web identity.
But, now, there's a increasing need for a more complete web identity. People want to know your profile, want to talk to you, learn about you. That's why more and more services are allowing you to connect with your Facebook or Google account.
Is a Facebook account a good web identity? My French speaking readers know that I don't like Facebook. What's the biggest problem of Facebook in this context? It is centralized. It is tied to one and only one company. It is not standardized. It cannot work. It, hopefully, should not work.
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Le jeudi, décembre 2 2010, 00:00 ::
gnome,
lanedo,
mon_nombril,
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Today is a new step in my life : I'm starting to work for Lanedo, an European GNOME company.
Each change in a life is a somewhat sad. I'm leaving an innovative usability job with a bunch of very good colleagues that I nearly consider as friends. It will be strange to not have philosophical discussions between two running sessions anymore. Or to discover strip after strip that Scott Adams is spying my life.
Each change is a huge opportunity. Working for Lanedo will allow me to work with GNOME technologies, to learn a lot while contributing to them. In summary, a lot of stuffs I wanted to do if only I had more time or more lives.
It makes me very proud to join such a bunch of talented hackers. I hope to meet their expectations soon.
But this isn't just a job change. It's a whole life experience change.
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Le dimanche, octobre 24 2010, 14:08 ::
hacking,
server,
:: Lien permanent
I recently moved the Fritalk platform from a old server (Ubuntu 10.04, upgraded to every Ubuntu release since 7.10) to a new, fresh, powerful engine running on Ubuntu 10.10.
The hardest part of the migration was, without any doubt, the LDAP part. There's nearly no documentation so here's a little howto.
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