Every year at this period of time I make chocolate truffles. Pretty good ones am I told. I think it's as worth as a web advice, so here is the recipe:

Chocolate Truffles (the original, short version)

250 g of dark chocolate
100 g of fresh butter
1 tablespoon of whiskey or rhum
Cocoa powder (pure, preferably Van Houten)

Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie without stirring then add the butter and stir continuously until the mix is smooth. Remove from heat and add the alcohol.
Let rest in a cold place but not in a fridge during at least two hours or for a night.
With a teaspoon, take small pieces of chocolate and work them quickly with your hands to form a ball then roll it in cocoa powder. Let the truffles harden, in the fridge this time, before placing them in a box or in whatever wrapping of your choice.

The hacker's version, with tricks and 25 years of experience:

Prepare the butter first, cut it in small pieces with a knife and let it get soft (it must not be liquid). Break the chocolate in small pieces and place in the bain-marie with one tablespoon of water. The trickiest part is to get the chocolate to melt without stirring at all, otherwise you'll get pieces of hard chocolate in your truffles. You can push gently on top of the chocolate pieces to make them drip into the molten chocolate but you really need to trust me about not stirring until it's completely melted! The bain-marie needs to be just frémissant, the melting needs to be gentle, otherwise the chocolate will burn, but not too long, otherwise it'll burn too. You can replace the suggested alcohols with anything you feel with go with chocolate (I tested Kirsch, Grand Marnier and Cognac successfully). Stir well when adding the alcohol.

Forming the truffles and rolling them in cocoa can be a funny and messy experience and I'll leave that for your pleasure. If you're a productivity freak, you can pour the liquid chocolate into a square plate that you have previously recovered with an aluminum foil. Once the chocolate is solid, cut it into little cubes and roll them in the cocoa (you can place them in a deep bowl with cocoa powder and shake them). The only trick is to find a plate of the right size so that your truffles will be square.
Square truffles are geeky and one of my specialties.

If you keep your truffles in the fridge, you can keep them as long as you would keep the butter (that's why you want real fresh butter).

Enjoy!

is unusually warm those days. It's 12°C (54°F) with some sun spots in the clouds. The contrast is nice with the recent multiplication of news regarding a centenial flood of la Seine (the last one was in 1910, you can see the map, PDF 2.7MB).

and for the lawyers, here is what Santa says.

The Web elves at Aventis have removed the ban on Mozilla, so Mozilla and al. users can now enjoy what is probably one of the biggest pandemonium of drop-down menus in a top banner.

Now if Santa hasn't brought you a fancy game box here is an idea of a cheap game. Try to find the longest trail of sub-menus within that banner. Then try to follow the entire trail as fast as you can (really tricky, especially when it bounces on the right edge of the screen if you don't have a 21' monitor). Warning: abuse of this game may lead to severe repetitive injuries!

Jakob Nielsen has a new Top 10 Web-Design Mistakes of 2002. And for those who doubt that he has no sense of humour, check out mistake #3 (the missing part reads 3564-1663-4763-000071 exp. 12/04).

As usual, it's to be taken "avec des pincettes" as a raccourci such as

Style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser's "change font size" button and specify a fixed font size.

is an over-simplification. As any other technology it can do bad things if used improperly. CSS can allow the end user to control the font size, and even in much more user-friendly form than the aforementionned "change font size" button (which I don't have on my browser). Check out Wired as an example and A List Apart for the mechanic.

Zeldman is finally tasting Mac OS X after numerous unfortunate attempts. Zeldman's comments are those of a designer, Apple's core market.

Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

The above quote is the current boilerplate in Apple's press releases and it exhaustively lists which market segments the company is pursuing. The focus on the latter one -- consumers -- came out in the recent switch campaign. The trouble is that those segments are rather different, and thinking differently enough for some of the old guard (no pun intended) to feel uneasy with a one-size-fits-all OS X that is so obviously designed for a broad consumers base. This single focus is sometimes reaching kafkaesque dimensions when OS X Server -- not exactly fit for the average consumer base (again, no pun intended) -- demands that you update iTunes or displays broken links in users' dock for iMovie and iPhoto on an Xserve!

Apple is in a difficult transition that is taking too long and has slipped into a bad time. Mac OS X requires computer resources that most two year-old machines cannot deliver (an unusually short life span for Macs, which until now used to fade into obsolescence much slower than PCs). The current economical conditions simply prevent the high-end customers to throw premium price for top of the line computers that will increase their productivity, and Quark plays the last village gaulois that still resists to the invader. Add to that the recurrent "catch me up" fight with Intel about who's got the fastest processor (guess where the pendulum in the GHz war is now) and this turns the 68k-to-PowerPC transition into a piece of cake.

I think Mac OS X is not fully baked, yet I am very positive about it. Baking continues. Big ISVs such as Microsoft, Adobe and Quark have credited Apple for listening to them and improving OS X to fit their needs. Apple knows that its customer base is not reduced to brand whores. I had the chance to test an Xserve for two weeks (thanks to Apple Europe) and I can testify how eager they are to get feedback from their customers. Finally, I've never felt so comfortable with a Mac than now. There is nothing I run on my Unix servers (both Solaris and Linux) I cannot build on my PowerBook with OS X. The mix of open-source versatility, Unix rock-solid stability (I never shut down my laptop), world-class UI, same office tools than Windows with which it integrates nicely (my colleagues cannot tell I'm on a Mac on the company network), and broad choice of browsers and email clients make it my platform of choice.

As the permanent challenger Apple has to be on top, otherwise it will disappear. It simply cannot be on top every day. Just often enough to make you aware that even though the grass looks always greener on the other side of the fence, it's not worth crossing.

I wish that the same designers who did the awesome redesign of the Mini would jump on the challenge of redesigning the mythic Citroën DS. In French, DS is pronounced "déesse", which means goddess. I don't fancy cars, but I have a crunch on those two and I miss the DS.

If you are a seasoned web designer, you have been creating sites that use web standards for nearly a decade (measured in dog-like web time). If you are a cutting edge web agency, you are showcasing your knowledge already. If you are a high profile web site, your brand new redesign has just placed you at the forefront of web design and peers and competitors are just following suit. If you are a newly born blogger, lucky you, most blogs out there will provide standard-compliant templates. If you are about to design your first web site without any preconceived knowledge of HTML, just make sure you don't pick the wrong book and start learning.

But what if you are in none of the above situations, like for example managing a corporate site with tons of content lovingly hand-crafted or FrontPaged over the years with every single proprietary goodies and hacks your webmasters or IT developers have found to work in the browser they happened to like? Chances are that, although you know the rationale and benefits of switching to standards, the journey looks far from appealing.

Story in progress, le prochain épisode is cooking...

is a catch phrase you can currently see on Macromedia's home page in a Flash teaser where a web producer shares with us his despise about some idiot at marketing. Other nice comments include "What's up with the web team?" and "Who's in charge?" from the aforementionned bozos, who apparently appreciate the web guy just equally.

Macromedia is building upon the real frustration that exists within companies over web content management to sell its solution, Contribute, aimed at ending "the hassle of updating web content". And they're not trying the politically correct way, which is refreshing -- don't tell me you've never seen similar team spirit before :-).

Being in the middle of a CMS project myself, I'm not as interested by the technology used as I am about the transformation it has on the teams involved in a web site life. I believe that if the shift is purely technological -- i.e. moving from content publication done by the web team to direct content management by content owners through a CMS but without any effort to make the different teams understand their real value in the new process -- will end up with equal frustration. The boundaries will simply shift, not disappear, and people will continue to jump on each others' toes. The web professionals will make fun of amateur mistakes from the "HTML impaired" marketing folks, content managers will complain about the lack of control they have on the site's look & feel, and none will make efforts to understand the new playground if it is forced upon them. At the extreme, your content contributors will look like monkeys with typewriters and your web experts will be gone to friendlier cyberspace.

A little too scary? Before running for a CMS solution, make sure that you understand what it takes to manage your web site. Content management is key, but not everything, and a CMS does only so much about it.

To be continued.

Excerpt from Information Architecture, Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke:

So you've got hard problems, no time, and no money. Sounds like a typical web project to me.

Sounds familiar :). Christina Wodtke promises to teach you IA -- which looks like rocket science -- in a day. If the style continues like this, I'm going to enjoy rocket science a lot. However, I think this book won't deliver on one promise: it's not one of these books that layer one idea in ten pages with equally huge typeface and blank margins, so it is unlikely that it can be digested in one day.

More great stuff on IA at Boxes and Arrows.

Wired News has published a piece on Apple, reducing it to its brand.

Marketer Marc Gobe, author of Emotional Branding and principal of d/g worldwide, said Apple's brand is the key to its survival. It's got nothing to do with innovative products like the iMac or the iPod.

"Without the brand, Apple would be dead," he said. "Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all they've got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It's got nothing to do with products."

Quelle connerie !

Apple's brand does not exist by itself, nor comes intuitu personae from Steve Jobs or ex machina out of the marketing machine. It derives from its products, hardware and software, and how well they fit customers' expectations. Apple has a strong brand in France, where it has failed to do any visible advertising until only recently. Apple has been kicked out of the enterprise when it has started to ignore its clients, and failed to deliver products that matched its brand and clients' expectations. A few years ago, the standard laptop in big consultancy companies was a PowerBook. In 1997-1998, Apple was so confused about its catalog that it basically had NO entry models. It consequently turned individual consumers away, and was at its lowest in 1998. Not long after Jobs returned in command and put the company back on tracks with a consistent product line, Apple got out of the red. The brand helps, of course, just like a lubricant. But it's a by-product. And you don't do much with just a lubricant, do you?

It's the product, stupid!

"Calling bullshit "bullshit" is not bias" writes John Gruber who describes this article as anything but journalism.

Zeldman offers an insightful story about how bad delivery can impact Apple, and proves that Apple customers can think different than brand whores.

I switched to Chimera some time ago, notably because of its ability to block those annoying unsollicited popups that are the visual equivalent to browsing as spam is to email. Netscape has just released version 7.01 of its browser which includes the same feature. Netscape's DevEdge has more information on how this works and how you can control it for your own site. Needless to say, this ability will prove to be very popular (if only it was that simple to get rid of spam), until marketers find a workaround.

Although it was obvious to me that this popup barrage would easily make its way through any browser that is not tied to a revenue model, I thought Netscape wouldn't add it to its flagship browser because it would kill its main cash cow (the browser side lives mainly on ad revenues from its portal and affiliates) and would infuriate its own paying customers (the ones who want you to click on those popups). But they found a trick...

Netscape 7.01 gives you two options to control popups: you can either allow them and add domains to an exception list (which are then blocked) OR suppress them all except for a list of domains from which they are allowed. Chimera does the same. The trick is that Netscape 7.01 comes with a predefined list of domains that are, unsurprinsingly, carefully selected (screen capture). So if you don't modify this predefined list, you'll be safe from annoying popups on MSN, but ironically not on netscape.com.

Now that's a smart trick, make advertisers pay twice: once for the ad, once for the right of not being blocked upfront. And thanks to Netscape for making our life better outside the AOL web space!

this is not another fanzine about the movie, the Force or some Jedi cult. It is a simple, personal weblog. Why this name, then?

I am a webmaster. It's not a hobby, I make a living managing web sites for Capgemini. They gave me the somewhat impressive title of "Corporate Webmaster" and sometimes I tell them to simply call me Master.

This is a joke, I feel very much like an apprentice. One of the key drivers of my life, especially in the professional arena, is a taste for learning new things.

When I saw Episode II of Star Wars and heard dozens of «You still have a lot to learn, my young padawan. — Yes Master» lines between Jedi knights and their apprentices I knew this would make an interesting name for an apprentice blog. By chance, padawan.info was still available for registration (quite a surprise, honnestly, since this word was cast more than three years ago in Episode I and all the other TLDs were taken).

And here I am, the young webmaster a lot to learn has...

François Nonnenmacher

Last update: October 28, 2006

Internet expert, consultant, writer, speaker

With more than a decade of passion and hands-on professional experience, I developped a broad expertise about the internet as a whole: media, technology, standards, uses, trends, etc. I have the ability, and the business track record to prove it, to see the bigger picture, understand and address the business needs through creative and pragmatic uses of IT services, tools and technologies. Figuring and explaining how to use the internet for improving our lives, anticipating and assisting change, is what I love doing, writing on, speaking about. For more information about my services, please email me at .

Recent and most significant achievements

• May 2006: launched the Capgemini CTO Blog, the first external official blog of the company, which I created after planting blogs on the intranet
• Jan 2006: release of Blogueur d'entreprise, my book on business blogging, considered as a key reference (Edition d'Organisation, first editor of management books in France)
• Sep 2005: completed "International Business Solutions", a select business training program of Capgemini University for future leaders of the company (our assignment was to deliver practical solutions to increase add-on sales)
• May 2005: led the biggest redesign of the Capgemini web sites, moving the company to web standards

Past Employment

June 1998 - October 2006

Corporate Webmaster -- Capgemini Group, Paris

Capgemini is a company specialized in consulting, technology, outsourcing and professional services (61,000 people as on Dec 31, 2005 and 2005 revenues of 6,954 Million euros).

Within the Corporate Communications department, I led the Group's web presence, managed a few of its biggest web sites, created its web guidelines, designed and operated a global platform of web services, animated an international community of actors who design and run more than 30 public web sites worldwide.

The uniqueness of this position was in the interactions it provided: I dealt with all levels, cultures and profiles in the company, with its external audiences, with peers and the ever expanding web out there. My biggest challenge was, literally, to herd cats. They say I'm good at it.

Jan-June 1998

Independent Consultant

Various web and IT projects, the main one being program director on a 6 months project on real-time scoring and web publishing of rugby matches.

1997

Senior Consultant -- Netscape Communications, Paris

World Wide Professional Services. Expertise on Internet/extranet/intranet markets, Netscape server products and enterprise solutions.

Consultant -- Apple Europe, Les Ulis

I designed, developed and rolled-out a sales business tool for the CEMEA market team. The challenge being to design and develop alone an entire middleware between the sales channels and SAP using 100% Apple technologies. They managed $85M of sales with it on the first year and it successfully passed Y2K and the euro (simple forward-thinking, but no one, client included, was stressing those issues at that time). In this role I gained an intimate knowledge of Apple's catalog, markets and business processes.

1996-1997

Euromaster Telecom -- France Telecom, Paris

Business Management Degree in Information Technology and Telecommunications.
I decided to take a professional degree from a Telco leader and reorient my career towards the IT business and the internet.

1993-1996

Production Director -- L3D, Paris/Nancy

L3D was a small but cutting-edge French innovator in the Rapid Prototyping/Stereolithography market. There I did technical and operational management: customers' needs evaluation, specifications, production, costs and profits, new projects studies and management, market watch and business choices. I moved them from their R&D focus to actually selling services to clients.

1991-1993

Sales Engineer -- C.M.A, Mandelieu (Cannes)

Production and team management responsibilities. Sales, projects management, customers follow-up, hands-on from quotations to delivery. CMA hired me to create their new Rapid Prototyping activity from scratch. When I left, it was the first activity in terms of revenue.

1989-1991

Research & Development Engineer. -- C.N.R.S, Nancy

At the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique I pursued an extension of my research program on Rapid Prototyping started on my last engineer school year. Heavy R&D stuff, I have my name on a few papers and a couple of patents. I worked on the team which registered the first patent on Rapid Prototyping, two weeks before the American competition.

Skills

Seasoned internet expert. First experience with the web in 1993 but online as early as 1984 (thanks to the Minitel).
Deep knowledge and experience in the IT industry, starting in 1980 (I was 14 when I touched my first computer).
Ability to work at all levels in the organization, and equally at ease speaking and working with business and technology people.
Articulate, analytical and methodic yet creative, autonomous, adaptable, open-minded, committed, team player, leadership, global vision, business oriented.
Bilingual English and French. Managed multicultural networking teams in about 30 countries.

Education

1996-1997: Euromaster Telecom, a European Management Degree in IT and Telecom business. France Telecom, Paris.
1989: Advanced Degree in Process Engineering, INPL, Nancy.
1986-1989: Engineer, ENSIC-INPL, Nancy.

Other past and present experiences

Writings: I publish two blogs: one in English, one in French. I wrote a book on business blogging (Blogueur d'entreprise), two on stereolithography (referenced here, one co-authored for Dunod), and a few articles (like Web Standards for Business, or this one).
Consultant and conference speaker.
Board member of several non-profit and professional organizations.
Teacher in computer science, engineers school.

This site, dubbed as an apprentice blog for the sake of a tortuous web/master joke, is the personal log of an incurable learner.

I used to turn I think, therefore I am into I learn, therefore I can, a thinker and doer approach which proved to be problematic in the corporate world where the powers-that-be are convinced that one cannot be both.

A friend from Québec recently gave me the secret recipe of balance that I instantly adopted to justify my apprentice condition:

C'est la règle des trois 'C': Connaissance, Culture, Curiosité.

I love that. The day I stop learning I may still be thinking, but I am not sure I will be alive.

For those who are looking for fine prints and disclaimers, please note that:

• the opinions expressed on this site are mine and are not those of my current or former employers
• I am a French citizen and this site is produced and published in France under which laws I therefore am protected and obligated. France still maintains -- although not necessarily forever -- provisions for fair use and strong intellectual property protection for authors (oeuvres de l'esprit)

My name is François Nonnenmacher. I am currently shifting gears and working on my next internet adventure.

I am available as a freelance consultant. I am also a regular speaker at conferences. For more information about my services, please email me at .

In January 2006, my book on business blogging went out and received excellent reviews (Blogueur d'entreprise, in French, Editions d'Organisation - Eyrolles).

Previously, I worked for Capgemini, a global IT company, where I led the group internet presence and served various functions such as webmonkey, chaos manager and corporate emergency hologram (but they prefered to call me their corporate webmaster). I also worked for Apple, Netscape and as an independent consultant.

My background is mostly technical, though I got my best grades in french rather than in mathematics. I touched my first computer in 1980, discovered the "online" world in 1984 (The Minitel introduced e-commerce in France at that time, we're not always late comers!), turned into a Mac addict in 1986, graduated as an engineer in 1989 and worked in high-tech areas ever since. I got my first glance at the Internet in 1993 and my first personal ISP account in 1995.

French engineers learn basic but very important things: how to learn new things and how to manage alcohol (a key social skill in France). I guess I did not chose the technical way by accident, I have a taste for technology, skills to decipher it and appreciate aesthetics where there is some. But what I look into technology is what one can do with it, never technology by itself.

I have the chance to work and live in Paris, a city I truly love and where I was born.

You can read the long story in my curriculum vitae.