March 2003 Archives

I very much doubt he will win another Oscar with this, but I'm looking forward to seeing this Michael Moore movie, if it ever goes live:

Moore is working on a documentary about the "the murky relationship" between former President George Bush and the family of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The paper said the movie, "Fahrenheit 911," will suggest that the bin Laden family profited greatly from the association.

Boing Boing tells us about the title

"Fahrenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns," will trace the economic ties between Bush administration officials and bin Laden, and chronicle the erosion of Consitutional freedoms in America in the wake of the 9-11 attack.

Meanwhile, Michael tells us about that Oscar day, go check it while it's still on the front page.

The extended French week continues for its 6th day at Idle Words:

One of the main reasons Russia became a European power, instead of one of those humorless religious countries where all the men have beards, is because Catherine the Great developed a huge smoking crush on the Enlightenment philosophers in France. And so in this part of French Week, we celebrate Russia's massive contribution to European culture, courtesy of our cheese-eating friends.

I didn't think that France had been so influential in exporting socialism in Russia as it has for the habit of removing royal families out of their thrones (if not removing royal parts from their bodies). But contrary to some popular belief -- I specifically remember American titles labeling France as a communist country and the stock markets going down when François Mitterrand was elected President on May 10, 1981 -- Russia was not equally successful in exporting communism to France.

Let's dream about the future. All the countries forming the Russian Federation have cultural bounds that predates the 1917 revolution and, despite recent history glitches, these bounds will be instrumental in fostering their future growth. The next step being them and Europe comprehend the benefits of strengthening our mutual relationship. Europe has a tremendous potential in growing way outside its geographical limits (once it gets rid of some Christian-centric mono-cultural mental locks, it may discover new bounds in north Africa) and it has consistently and peacefully done so for decades. I doubt I will be alive to see it develop as far as I imagine it can go already, but that is a workable model.

According to Newsweek, Halliburton won't get a big Iraq contract. Would it be that the opaque (but not unnoticed) self-attribution to the Vice-President former firm was a bit too much, even for this administration? There is no explanation provided in this article, however it is suggested that Halliburton chose to play a subcontracting role. In which, without doubt, they can still largely cash out. I find it highly disturbing that the reconstruction of Iraq will be paid by Iraqis with their oil, which will provide a triple benefit for the US: reimbursement of the costs of war, an economical boost and an estimated ten more years of oil to continue burning it by the million barrels a day in SUVs to sustain the "American dream". All that at the expense of a people who never called for it, against an overwhelming majority of countries, with blatant lies for sole justification, sheer arrogance and total disrespect for legality. On the other side of the mirror, the entire world is watching, when not enduring, the American nightmare.

You will note the picture of Dick "Halliburton" Cheney which tells us two things: he's still alive and he likes coffee-to-go, something we don't have over here. Starbucks makes good Chai tea, may be it's time to bring mint-tea-to-go to Iraq, that would be a real civilization improvement.

I turned 37 today. My better half took me chez Thiou, an excellent Thaï restaurant. Délicieux. We walked half-way back home, three kilometers along the Seine. Beautiful city, nice weather, good food, que demande le peuple ?

[Update] OK, le peuple demande l'adresse: Thiou, 49 quai d'Orsay, PARIS 7ème. Thiou is the name of the Chef and she is allegedly one of the greatest Thaï Chefs in Paris. At least, since Oth Sombath is out of the picture now that the Bali Bar (Bastille) has closed (a real shame, one of the best Thaï restaurants in Paris, all fucked up in weeks by a new owner), we have a new place to go. You may also appreciate the Blue Elephant (near Bastille again).

Jon Udell on publishing a project weblog:

A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Weblogs have a good chance to enter corporations, but may be not in their current form. Jon points some little security issue (such as pinging external aggregators from an internal weblog if you misconfigure it!) but to me, at least in their present state, weblogs are still best at what they've been designed for: personal diaries. They lack a few things to become the powerful knowledge management and collaboration tools they promise to be:

• Discussion boards. Commenting on someone's post or using TrackBacks are very useful things, however they both require an author to start a new topic and not everyone is a storyteller. Look at the Movable Type site, Ben and Mena have had to integrate a third-party board to handle their support forum. Likewise with chat rooms.
• More website-oriented configurations. The chronological nature of weblog posts makes it difficult to handle more perennial content or big, structured articles. It is not impossible to handle a website via a weblog software, Boxes and Arrows is an example. However, doing this requires some serious tweaking to force the primary nature of the standard weblog (chronological posts, archives). Weblog software seem closer to portals, but portals are merely doors to the real beef: websites full of content and tools.
• Shared space, to upload and share documents. Again, with a weblog, that would require to be registered as an author, and start a new post. Microsoft has captured this need in its SharePoint offering, which is taking ground in the corporate space for that reason alone.
• Better email distribution and notification lists. Today, a weblog author can distribute an email to his/her entire reader base, but that is all. What is the value of that when they can subscribe to the RSS feed instead? I removed the email subscription form from my weblog because of that. I would like to be able to track a post or its comments to be notified when someone has trackbacked or commented on a specific post, or responded to my own comment. I would like to be able to subscribe to a category and be notified when new content (including a shared file) has been added to it. I would like to be able to subscribe to the community distribution list and reach this weblog audience directly. Really smart use of the omnipresent email is missing from existing weblog software, and companies typically have terrible tools regarding notification and distribution lists.
• Better category management. Categories are used within a weblog to organize the content in a non-chronological way and provide a simili navigation. Categories also play a role in a company taxonomy. Weblogs are not yet up to the task regarding both aspects.

That said, weblogs have tremendous benefits that are widely unknown in so-called "enterprise-class" software:

• RSS feeds. Lessen the power of the central corporate portal to give more power to individuals to seek and get the content they want to get as soon as it is published. It somehow cuts the middle-man, but the idea that a central team can ever provide customized content that proves relevant to each individual is a control-freak fantasy.
• TrackBacks. Unleashing weblogs in a company would just add to the knowledge managers nightmare of link management. No more "could you please link to my page?", just ping the damn URL and cut the middle-man again.
• No "rocket-surgery" micro-content management that makes the journey to semantic content a breeze. Weblogs CMS with their simple web interface and desktop tools make editing a pleasure and are often doing the task better than awfully expensive "enterprise-class" CMS.
• Openness. Not all weblogs are open source, but those which are are leading the way. They foster an incredibly rich developer base which makes the most of communication standards, when they don't create them, at a pace that beats any company development cycle.
• Price. Need I say more?

I haven't said anything about Wikis yet. I have yet to apprehend why but I might be biased by their typical awful look & feel, wildly uncontrolled nature (weblogs look less frightening for corporations) and the feeling that they might not stand out compared to the future company-oriented weblogs. The padawan recognizes his ignorance in this matter and does not take his present opinion for granted.

Needless to say, I'm really looking forward into seeing this Movable Type Pro coming to life!

The Platonic essence of eggs: The perfect scramble eggs (oeufs brouillés) by Wells: "You really love someone very, very much when you make these eggs for them." Burke & Wells spent years in Paris, and if you likelove good food, dive into their weblog.

Also from an American in Pompignan, Something Soup by Dean Allen. Not for the faint hearted: "abandon the project and go away until you’re ready to take this seriously."

French lesson du jour: miam = yummie!

All my thoughts are wandering around culture tonight. Or, more exactly, cultures, their variety, their differences. For some reason, it's about France, the UK and the US, probably because we are close friends (don't analyze this please). Let's start with the bad thing so we can end on the good ones.

On the range of weapons of cultural destruction, I hear that Governor Bush -- as Michael Moore calls him -- will not eat French toasts anymore on Air Force One, for in another little step into ridicule, some primate has decided to rename them "freedom toasts". Does this have any effect on us French? None, zip, nothing, because "French toast" means nothing for us. Neither do French fries which most of the French people will attribute to our Belgians friends (check the secret history of French fries). Those expressions are true parts of the American culture, and renaming them is hurting nothing but the American culture. If it weren't that bad, it would be laughable. We shall see, between a culture and a government, which one is stronger.

A few days ago, I read a post from Gavin Bell about French vs. UK markets. Gavin describes the richness of the local markets, shops, press in St Omer compared to the dominance of supermarkets in the UK. Even in Paris (mais Paris n'est pas la France), the local shops and street markets are predominant, my explanation being that it is a part of our social life, like the pubs -- something we do not have in France -- are a part of the English social life. In a subsequent email chit-chat, Gavin pointed the difference between "pubs which traditionally serve men beer, whereas in France there are cafes that serve everything to anyone." To which I added another difference between our cultures, the one hour lunch break in France vs. the 5-to-7pm beer drink at the pub (which are, to me, equivalent socializing traditions at our respective workplaces).

Gavin further elaborated on the French cafe-bar, English pub or US coffee chain. I am impressed by his insight on something that has become less noticeable for me, living in a city where between two cafés, there is a café. Cafés rhythm our life as long as we are awake, from the morning café-croissant, through apéritif, lunch, afternoon drink, apéritif again, diner, digestif, to the last 3am decaf, including cigarettes, newspapers, stamps and tons of games. If you want to extend that experience 24 hours a day, enjoy the all-in-one hôtel-restaurant-brasserie.

What strikes me is Gavin's point about the US coffee chains. While they are spreading in the UK, somehow competing with the pubs, they are virtually non existent in France. It never crossed my mind until I read Gavin's post, but there is no Starbucks in Paris. Exactly like the local shops repel the supermarkets, our cafés repel the mono-function coffee chains, or at least maintain a very healthy competition against what looks like a cultural step-back. You are never far from a good coffee in France and if you want more diversity, there are plenty of brûleries which sell coffee from all over the world that you will prepare yourself at home.

This gives me a handy transition to another cultural difference. There is no English equivalent to the French word bricolage. The closest thing is "do it yourself", a whole expression which sounds rather unfriendly at first, to French ears at least. In 2000, the bricolage market represented €91bn in Europe, €300bn worldwide and €15bn in France, 5% of the total market! It is the first personal equipment market here, before furniture, electronics, telephony and computers. I know one English man who, when his better half tells him to do something he doesn't want to do, tells her "bricolage". It is not exactly acculturation, but it is a good start.

Bricolage has other meanings and related words in French, like bricole which is a triffle, a little thing. The verb bricoler can be translated as arranging, knocking up, tweaking, tinkering. The French lesson du jour will then be that renaming French toasts is both a bricole and a cultural bricolage. In a future lesson, I might tell you why W. is a bricoleur.

Adobe runs a Mac vs. PC comparison à la Steve Jobs but the results won't please Cupertino. Look at the URL, the stance is clear.

It's about time to boost those Macs, really.

[UPDATE] According to this OSCast audio broadcast, this page has been created by a longtime anti-Mac apologist, Charlie White, who has produced several biased benchmark reviews in the past.

Apple has rescheduled its Worldwide Developer Conference from May in San José to June in San Francisco (yeah!), officially to be on time to show Panther, the next version of Mac OS X (1.3).

The Register speculates different, suggesting that the real beef might be more about the announcement that Apple will adopts IBM'sPowerPC 970 processor.

There has been many speculations about a processor switch since it has been obvious that Motorola has given up on the megahertz war and that Apple is subsequently incapable of keeping up with the Intel world. Some have even expected a switch to Intel, after Steve Jobs said something about having "options" in the processor arena.

IBM's PowerPC remains the most obvious move for Apple, and would give the manufacturer a smoother upgrade path than a radical switch to the long-standing enemy. Apple's ISVs have just finished (or have they?) to swallow the upgrade path to Mac OS X, it is definitely not the time for Apple to impose a complete processor change, moreover in an economical downturn without a customer in sight.

The move to the PPC 970 would not only give some fresh air to Apple in terms of processor speed, but also allows it to move to 64 bits computing. And faster than the Wintel world, if you follow this Slashdot story.

I hope I'll be able to make it to the WWDC this year!

Michael Moore has sent a letter to "Governor" Bush, making six points about the war in his personal, flowery style. Here is one, which I picked at random (well, I might be a bit biased on this one):

Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can be pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn't even have this country known as America if it weren't for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. -- spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do -- tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can't get out of.

You can read the full letter on Moore's site.

Thanks to Doxa for the link.

Bowaaa! Tantek has done a roll reset and my 15 minutes fame window is now archived. Still, I remain en bonne companie.

Tantek coined a nice word with egorati, i.e. ego surfing on the bloggosphere. Mmmh, only ten links from five blogs, well... Hold on, I made it on Zeldman's Externals six days ago! And Technorati missed this link from Karl Dubost I got 12 days after my first post and a few others, coincidentally in French too.

Don't get me wrong.

The young padawan started with a thirst for learning, a good doze of curiosity and the presumptuous hope of sharing a few things he thinks he knows with an audience. Now the young padawan is standing respectfully in front of the A-List Masters, with stupeur et tremblements, carrying his burden of being an insignificant newborn to the bloggosphere, moreover a French one, and still trying to capture the reasons why he started blogging in the first place:

Living sites are only as good as today’s update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren’t there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.

Writing for the Living Web is a tremendous challenge.

Oh dear!

Suddenly the doubt that made me procrastinate for years before starting my own site seizes me again. Seeing my stats progressively increase is rewarding but isn't a growing audience a more demanding one? Getting links from web semi-gods comes at a price: the feeling that if I fail to deliver good content, I am not only alienating my own audience but somehow betraying people whose judgment is widely respected. Then I realize how arrogant this is.

I feel exactly like Douglas Bowman starting his weblog, and I wish I could express it as beautifully as he did. So, welcome again to the weblog of a webmaster who pretends to know something about the web and -- in the midst of an era where wars can be started at will and where allies turn into enemies overnight -- feels compelled to digress more than intended on wold issues and politics.

I'll refocus, soon, c'est promis.

Crazy Apple Rumors posts a funny parody claiming that "Bush Demands Recount In Gore's Board Election". Apple notices and quotes it in its Hot News section!

Come on Steve, it's not nice to pull the legs of your President with Democrat humor while he's at war trying to play the 800-pound gorilla.

France 2 is reporting frightening news that during a search performed on Monday by the Police, traces of ricin and other "highly toxic" chemicals were found in a locker at the Paris Gare de Lyon train station. Those searches are apparently a normal procedure under the Vigipirate plan, and this answers the silly question I was asking myself earlier today.

Ricin, the most toxic toxin from the vegetal world, is a violent poison against which there is no known treatment, preventive or antidotal. It is one of the lethal agents listed on Biotox, a public information plan from the French Ministère de la Santé about sanitary consequences of terrorism acts.

French and U.K. authorities are concerned about a terrorist use of this toxin. On January 5th, the British Police found ricin in a flat in Wood Green and subsequently arrested seven people after an impromptu raid at the mosque of Finsbury Park, north of London.

[Update] The Beeb is reporting on this news.

While reading an interesting article on how Google grows, I stopped on this:

A page that displays a search word in boldface or in the upper-right-hand corner, for example, will likely rank higher than a page with the same words displayed less prominently.

Having spent a good part of the day reviewing a CMS and talking about semantic and presentation, I was thinking that XHTML should make Google's life quite easy in that they would have a great deal of the relevance job already done by how the content is semantically organized, without the need to interpret the presentation. If you compare how much sense a <h1>...</h1> header or an <em> makes compared to "boldface or in the upper-right-hand corner", it's easy to infer that Google should return much more relevant results on sites which content adheres to the semantic spirit of web standards.

If this hypothesis holds true, the W3C should talk to Google and get them communicate on that. It's a true win-win situation. The more semantic content is published, the less ressources Google has to throw out to index it. And if Google starts telling the world that web standards compliant sites rank better than the "old school" ones, imagine the boost for the W3C standards!

The three nearest subway stations to the U.S. ambassy in Paris were locked down today, and the anti-terrorists plan (dubbed "Vigipirate") has been reactivated.

While I can understand why the governement wants to protect the U.S. ambassy, I'm wondering if the Vigipirate reactivation is appropriate. From whom are we trying to protect us? Anglosaxons terrorists?Ahem, actually from this.

[Update] Apparently, this plan allows for a broad surveillance of many sensitive places. About a hundred policemen have been deployed around the U.S. embassy as well as the Iraq and U.K. ones. Synagogues are being protected too. 500 militaries have joined the police forces.

The TV channel France 2 reports that a McDonalds fast-food has seen its windows broken by protesters. That is sad, stupid, totally counter-productive and the morons who did that are as worse as the francophobes out there. Les cons sont partout.

Every now and then, we hear that Mac users don't matter because they account for (ridiculous number here)% of the PC market. Anyone with a slight notion of statistics and sociodemographics will know this reasoning is dangerous.

When Bang & Olufsen released their portable mp3 player, they didn't bother, as usual:

We had deliberately chosen not to develop BeoSound 2 to make it compatible with Macintosh computers because they account for such a small proportion of the total market, just 3.8%.

Guess what? Mac users tend to be rather vocal, especially when they are disappointed, so B&O ran its figures again:

the calculations we have done on the basis of all the inquiries we have received show that Macintosh users represent a larger customer segment for us than we first assumed.

And, according to B&O, Mac users are pleasing customers too:

All in all, this has been a very positive experience. We cannot say much more than that Macintosh users have good taste. So now we are hoping for a flood of communications from Mac users who are satisfied with us

Good boys, who said Apple fans are brand whores? Don't hold your breath, that Mac-friendly UFO thing will not hit the shelfs before December.

Macromedia has got some surprises along the same lines. Reporting on the progress of their public redesign and the feedback they received, MM found out that while Mac users represented 11% of all users during this first beta period, 41% of the survey respondents were Mac users. And users of Safari (accounting for an even more ridiculous number of browsers share) where quite vocal too:

Because of the beta status of Safari, we expected some issues but were surprised by the volume of comments we received.

Unless you are a company which targets world+dog, beware of any reasoning based on a dry broad base. This (ridiculous number) percentage may well account for a much bigger customer segment than you think, they also may cost less to retain and generate more revenues (loyalty). They may be vocal and biased, but isn't marketing about listening and building on feedback? And even if they still amount for a minority of your sales, they may be the leaders of opinion that influence the remaining 95+%.

[Update] I think that Microsoft has made a smart move in creating the MacBU and committing itself into a five-year plan to develop its applications for the Mac. They have regularly introduced new features on their products through the Mac platform first, benefiting from the vocal and pickier user base who in return helped them fine-tune things or redo their copy, before releasing them for the Windows masses. IE/Mac is a great outcome of this move and each time I have to use PowerPoint (a corporate necessary evil) I'm glad I can do that on Office X rather than on our buggy and ugly corporate version for Windows. The hair splitters may be a minority, but treating them as first-class citizen may bring surprisingly positive results.

On a side note, if you watch French political leaders on TV (they get a little exposure those days), they seem to use Macs for a vast majority of them. It looks like their U.S. counterparts fancy that too.

If you are a webmaster, this translates into: all browsers matter.

Wow, I lack all necessary background to form even the beginning of a thought on that move.

Clouds everywhere, nice happy little clouds chez Zeldman, sand clouds in the Gulf.

Bushblair, the new hyperpower chimera, who lost on both diplomatic and legal fronts of the U.N., are blaming Chirac -- a handy scape goat -- for their personal failures, and fueling an anti-France movement that is, basically, dumb xenophobia.

The technology field is in dead waters, so much if you work in IT. The Economy, depending on the mood, is still either crazy or depressed(*). Will our present era be retained as a step forward in the Human journey? Open creativity vs. corporate property? On the political side, the children are in charge. You're with me, or against me. Balance is out, extremism is in.

Our times are so depressing. Blame France on that too, le bouc émissaire doesn't bother anymore.

We can just hope that the grown-ups will eventually get their acts together, realize that the world without one of us can't be a better place, and move on. If I'm not mistaken, here are a few interesting elections to watch:

U.S. Predident: ~October 2004
U.K. Prime Minister: 2005 (next General Election?)
France President: ~May 2007

As we all have learned here on April 21, 2002, "ne pas voter peut provoquer un président grave".

(*) disclaimer: this is from one of my company's ad campaigns, personifying the economy into a nasty greedy man. The campaign is not running anymore, but those clips retain some cold irony. I did the compressions, in three formats, because I can and that giving choices is better than dictating. But I digress...

Why we need to re-claim the public domain, and whatAntoine Neron is doing about it. In the scope of the yet-to-be-named movement around commons, Antoine has created Meta Commons, a commons for the commons. A sort of commonization, that is.

The French have joined the food war: send a preztel to W!

According to Wired, foreign news websites are seeing large volumes of traffic from America. Critics point to the lack of objectivity, esprit critique, debate and depth of view regarding the Bush administration. Jon Dennis, a journalist from The Guardian sees a shift to weblogs:

The only debate in the U.S. media is on the Web, Dennis said. "Weblogs are doing all the work that the U.S. media did in the past," he said. "That's an interesting development."

Even prominent members of the U.S. media are quite critic:

[CBS's Dan] Rather recently complained to the BBC about the media's lack of access to government officials, and the growth of "Milatainment" reality shows on U.S. TV, including ABC's Profiles from the Front Line and VH1's Military Diaries.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "(U.S. TV news) seems to be reporting about a different planet than the one covered by foreign media."

Due to the language barrier, U.S. readers turn mainly to U.K. and Australian sites.

Today, Idle Works gives us a frightening comparison of French vs. US school menus:

You get the sense that a French school lunch is considered part of the child's education. Students learn that there are many kinds of foods and many kinds of main courses. They notice that meals have a structure, and consist of an appetizer, main dish, vegetable, cheese, and dessert.

[...]

Contrast this with the American school, where the kids are fed a monotonous diet of pizza, burgers, chicken parts and meat. [...] The message American kids get is that healthy food is second-rate and tastes bad, that they should eat lots of meat, cheese and potatoes, and that eating fast food every day is a normal diet.

Food is an inherent part of the French culture, we use no less than three common words for food on a daily basis: aliment, nourriture, and the slang bouffe. Our lunch hour is sacred because a day without a good lunch is not a good day. We like to eat, and we love good food. Not that our American friends dislike good food, but eating there seems more like something you have to do rather than one of the plaisirs quotidiens.

One of the many, many things to love about that country is that they can publish an 1800 page, two-pound book and call it a pocket cookbook.

ROTFL, that is so true :-)

Today is the Day of the Crêpe at Idle Works,"fighting francophobia since wednesday."

Matthew Thomas shares a thoughtful analysis of the current Iraq state of affairs and the inefficiency of indirect action, such as petitioning, protesting, etc.:

it often seeks to vilify its targets, rather than providing them with an exit strategy. Thus, you have people making snide remarks about George W Bush's unelectedness, avenging his father, supporting oil companies, et cetera ad nauseum, but not providing him with any way he could now pull back from war without seeming like the Weakest President Ever.

Too occupied to bash Jacques Chirac to listen to what he said five days ago, many people may have missed this:

The US have deployed 200,000 men in the Gulf, and they have won already! It is probable that Iraq would not have complied without this pressure from the US. The US have therefore achieved their objective of disarming Iraq, in forcing its cooperation with the inspectors.

If this isn't an exit as big as a Babylon Gate, then what is it?

Today I had a new glimpse of web standards in action. I got my hands on a Sony Ericsson P800 for a few minutes and went to check both my company site and this weblog. As expected, the former was recognizable -- actually fairly identical to how it is supposed to look on a "regular" browser despite its "old school" design -- but difficult to browse on the tiny screen. This weblog, however, was surprisingly usable and looked fine too. Thanks to the out of the box web standards based templates of Movable Type.

Web standards veterans know that by heart. After months of digging in theory, Web standards padawans who aren't blasé yet appreciate to see all those Good Things™ produce visible, encouraging, even rewarding results. Simple but striking demos are worth a thousand business cases and web agencies should all have a portfolio of demos to convince their clients to adopt web standards.

Now, I'd like to see recent business cases about WAP or web clipping, just for a good laugh.

If they continue to scream that up it might indeed get noticed by a CIO, who's not trying to hide zillions in investments on inefficient proprietary portals or KM black boxes.

Note to self: install a weblog somewhere in la preuve du pudding mode to avoid using this to write a business case for that. Or torture Patrick to grab gory details about portals.

NCSA Mosaic is 10 years old today. I never met with that beast, but that doesn't prevent my colleagues to call me master while I feel like the padawan who's still a long way to go. Life is strange but web life is still funny.

Stefano Scalia thinks so. Let's see...

Apple is focusing every facet of the digital world onto the computer screen. But what do countless families in the US and around the world group around for hours on end every day? I'll tell you.

The television.

This is the key point of his opinion, and I think it's flawed.

According to LCI/Le Journal du Web, internauts in Europe are spending now more time surfing on the web than watching TV. I can only guess that they're doing this in front of a computer, and the development of broadband, wireless and slicker, faster, easier computers in addition to good online content will just increase that trend. Is TV showing any comparable development trend? Not likely in terms of content, and the current attempt at giant flat screens (or LCD/DLP projectors) are not yet going mainstream if you look at the price tags.

Even if people were spending slightly more time in front of the TV doesn't mean the TV is going to replace everything that needs to carry sounds or images. This is the sort of manichean reasoning that yields to conclusions such as the TV will kill the radios and theaters, the radio will kill the newspapers, etc.

Current statistics suggest that the average American household has the TV on for 7 hours and 40 minutes a day, and that 40% of Americans eat dinner while watching TV. Talk about an eye-catching medium.

No wonder how they're being so easily brainwashed (pardon the pun, it's the epoch, and black humor is not yet classified as a weapon of mass destruction). More seriously, this is the most important characteristic of TV and it's main difference with the PC: passivity. People watch TV in passive mode, even in groups (look at what happens when someone grabs the remote control and starts zapping). A PC is a mostly interactive and solitary experience (I hope this doesn't trigger any parental guidance filter).

[The TV], according to Sony, Microsoft, and numerous other companies makes it the future medium of choice. Sorry Apple, it's not the computer.The difference, especially with Sony, is the fact that they control so many different areas of consumer electronics. (...) Now Sony is poised to completely dominate all areas of your 'digital lifestyle' - and, if Sony's latest television, PDA, and Viao offerings are any sign, they are.

Viao, isn't that... a PC?

if you purchase a new Sony WEGA TV, you can use your Sony digital camera to view your photos, straight onto the television with it's built in Memory-Stick reader.

Great. I can do that with pretty much any camera, by just plugging it to the TV. No need for the memory stick (a proprietary and expensive trap of Sony's digital hub), or even a PC. By the way, this is another error in the reasoning: for what reason would you throw away everything to buy a 100% Sony digital life? Sony is certainly not going to change the digital world if consumers are being trapped into a single brand choice. Incidentally, HP is trying this path as well.

These photos, with the use of Sony's 'RoomLink network media system (which can also broadcast TV to your desktop, from your television, and play music)' can be sent to your computer, all with just a few clicks of the remote.

I'd like to see how this compares to my experience with Mac OS X: plug the camera, watch iPhoto launch automatically, zero click. In probably no more than the "few clicks" you need to send your photos to your Sony PC, your photos treated on the Mac are published on your website.

And with TV technology making leaps and bounds, such as Plasma and the adoption of High-Definition Television, or HDTV (which will be a broadcast standard in 2006) TV's will become a great way to display any type of media.

Here we have something: scrutinizing the back of flat screens and projectors for DVI connectors reveals where the junction will likely be between the home PC and the home cinema system. However, there is still a PC in the picture, using the TV as its screen. Hopefully, since I'm not looking forward into writing on my weblog with, er, a remote control.

The television will be the center of the digital hub, and Apple is not the innovator on this front.

They surely can't innovate on all fronts, but they still are one of the few real innovators in the PC arena. And as far as we need to pinpoint a center on the digital hub, I have a hard time locating it on... a screen!

The hub is a marketing construct which makes easy for marketers to make you focus on the particular product they sell (a PC for Apple, a TV for Sony, whatever can carry a Windows license for Microsoft). This is another trap Scalia is falling into. After all, if I want to quickly print a photo from my camera, why do I have to deal with a PC or a TV when I can transfer it directly to the printer? If I need extra storage space because the memory card in the camera is getting full, I can connect it to the MP3 player and use its tens of gigabytes of disk space. Think of all the possible connections where you to get two devices communicate together and where neither a PC nor a TV are part of the picture, because they're not any useful or -- frequently -- because they're not with you when you're mobile.

Communication, mobility and standards are the names of the game. USB and FireWire if you are stuck on cables, Bluetooth and WiFi if you dare to enjoy the delights of the real future of your digital life: the wireless personal network. A glue around your digital belongings where the center of gravity is whatever fits your needs at the right time and the right place. And Apple is not particularly late on this bandwagon. They bet on portable computers loaded with about every communication standards and best of breed softwares, it makes way more sense to me than centering my life around a 200 pounds HDTV broadcasting "reality TV" shows!

To paraphrase a Silicon Valley motto, The Network Is The Hub™.

It's French week at Idle Works and they have ten reasons to love France.

Macromedia warns users of Flash Player of a potential security issue and has released a "critical" update (version 66,0,79,0). This notice gives no information on which version(s) of the player is (are) concerned.

The Flash Player, being a third-party plug-in, is largely excluded from OS vendors security bulletins and systems updates. If you're concerned about security, you can subscribe to Macromedia Security Service to be warned of future security issues with Macromedia products.

Karl Dubost writes about web standards in a professional context:

The only way to gain standards acceptance is to place them in a professional context. Certain professions live by and create today's and tomorrow's Web. These persons who create sites are sometimes little aware, if at all, or lack of a real culture of the medium. Additionally, the standards bodies lack of creativity. The Web is not just a question between users and software developers, but also amongst all other professionals along the chain. It is very important to get these people involved.

A couple months ago, I posted a short complainte titled Lost in CSSpace, on which Karl wrote: "let's make it less dramatic and have fun! Standardizing one's web site is not so difficult, if one measures the effort and understands what has to be achieved."

I promised a follow-up on that post, and this sounds à propos now, because the (perceived) dramatic tone was not a little drag but a real intuition of the task at hand, from an actor in the chain of web sites production who has the chance to look after pretty much all stages, from company guidelines to datacenters. What Karl points out makes absolute sense, but this refreshing above the box thinking has still some way to go.

Web standards Jedi Knights (sorry, I have to justify the domain name) are brilliant people. They have relentlessly pushed the envelope, taught the Good Things, deployed fantastic pedagogic talents to help padawan learners decipher the standards bodies' jargon or eat with their hands off the tables, and whatnot. But who do they talk to? Who do they efficiently influence? It started amongst web designers who, fed up with a nasty browser war, got browsers makers pay a little attention to years-old standards. When this battle was well engaged, they turned to web tools makers (at least the dominant one) to make them embrace standards and stop adding more and more proprietary tricks while playing a "bloatware" war that started to look strangely similar to the browsers war (on that aspect, I still expect the WaSP to shed some balance between Macromedia and Adobe). And, while all this was starting to make sense, they kept evangelizing their peers, the web designers.

Thanks to this remarkable work, the web standards are now a no-brainer issue to browsers makers, web tools makers and virtually any web designer who is not too autistic.

But what about the corporate front? If we look at the full spectrum, who are we missing? Webmasters, developers, editors, content producers, brand/marketing/PR/communication/knowledge managers, CIOs, CKOs, CFOs and, soyons larges, end users.

Do we start to see a bigger picture here, making the journey slightly more complex than learning XHTML+CSS that will bring us the pure semantic content, reader-agnostic dream in its full glory? I hope that Karl will now pardon me of having expressed a slight anxiety while I grasped the full task I'm going to face. While I realistically don't expect it to be an easy ride in every aspects, I intend to keep it fun. Count me in to evangelize web standards to the full chain of actors, that's part of my role in a certain corporation.

La suite au prochain épisode, don't hold your breath though.

Tantek Çelik has published a short presentation on CSS he just gave at SXSW (*). Informative and short, with a few well spread examples that can drive "old school" designers to finally learn more about a modern way of styling their sites.

Our French readers will find more info chez Karl. There is a retranscription of the panel by Matthew Mullenweg linked from Tantek's post above.

(*) Tantek, the Microsoft Tasman lead has tested this on IE5/Mac. But Tantek, the W3C Diplomat, should polish this presentation to work on other browsers and further nail the point of designing with standards (not for browsers). Because it's good content. It looks artistic
on Safari (which is a beta software, so no charge nor pun intended here). And Tantek must have more than enough on his plate at the conference, so fire up IE and have a look.

So, our prez Jacques Chirac (this is official site not president.fr, you idiot!) talks to le peuple tonight. It's not something usual on this side of the Atlantic, so what's going on? Is he going to declare war on the US or what? Don't hold your breath, here is a transcription of the main bits for our international readers:

"The main question is: in what world do we want to live? One that is multipolar, democratic, where Europe and the UN play their role, with good crisis management, respect of each other, dialogue, without conflicts.

Iraq does have weapons of mass destruction, and its regime is undoubtedly dangerous. It was essential to disarm this country et destroy its arsenal of mass destruction. There are two options: war or control under constraint of the UN. The Security Council a voted unanimously for the peaceful option of inspections. The inspection plan which has last from 91 to 98 has detroyed more weapons than the entire Gulf war, and has permitted to eradicate Iraq's nuclear program. Hans Blix esimates that with better cooperation from Iraq, we can achieve a complete disarmament. Cooperation has improved and the inspectors are able to pursue their work efficiently. However, Iraq is not sufficiently cooperative, but this is up to the inspectors to tell the UN so, not to us (or any other country). If the inspections aren't efficient, then the inspectors have to inform the SC. Today, the inspection process is working, and we must continue this way.

[Along with an allusion that North Koeran regime is in no way better than Iraq's] Other objectives, like a change of regime, would have deserved a discussion between the SC members. The only objective we have discussed has been disarmament.

Considering the dramatic impact of a war on the world (death, destruction) I have proposed that the next SC meeting be held by countries or gouvernements leaders. I will go there if a majority of them agree with this proposition.

Some consider that we have to move fast with different methods. They are proposing a second resolution that will set an ultimatum. We move from an inspection system to a pre-declared war. France will oppose such resolution. My feeling is that this resolution, right now, does not have a majority (9 votes) behind it. In this hypothesis, there is no veto issue. If, on the contrary, there is a majority of 9 votes in favor of a resolution allowing a war, France will vote against it (which corresponds to a veto, since France is a permanent member of the SC). France will vote no either way, because it considers that it is not necessary to start a war to desarm Iraq.

France is not a pacifist country that would refuse war by principle (look at our involvement in the Balkans). But France considers that all options must be exercised before war. Since the inception of the SC, France has used its veto right 18 times before, the UK 32 times and the US 77 times! It is not exceptional. France is also not an anti-american country. We have two centuries of common history and we have always got together in difficult times. There is no risk that our respective people get angry.

If the international community does not agree (with war), it would set a unfortunate precedent. The US have deployed 200,000 men in the Gulf, and they have won already! It is probable that Iraq would not have complied without this pressure from the US. The US have therefore achieved their objective of disarming Iraq, in forcing its cooperation with the inspectors.

The American are our allies. We do not agree with an immediate war in Iraq, but we remain allies.

It is rare that results of a war are positive. Deaths, country chaos, difficult return to a calm state, a fragilized region that does not need another war. Reconstruction will be necessary, materially and politically. This reconstruction must be conduced by the UN. It's inconceivable that it could be done by a single country. But I'm focusing on the principal objective: disarmament, by peaceful means, which transparency will eventually lead to a change of regime.

I don't want to polemicize with the Americans. We are not in conflict, but there is a problem of principles, a moral problem. France, according to it traditions, will avoid war as long as it's avoidable.

Europe [construction] has always been a difficult journey, but we have progressed whatever the difficulties. We have always grown stronger after facing challenges. We clearly have difficulties over diplomatic issues, as this Iraqi affair has demonstrated. The crisis that Europe is facing because of its divergences over Iraq, will not divide Europe, which will grow even stronger after this crisis has ended.

It is certain that the first winners of this war will be those who want a frontal choc bewteen cultures and religions. This war will fuel terrorism. France has been badly hurt by terrorism, and by experience it is more cautious than others. The international cooperation against terrorism must be reinforced. France is not isolated on this point.

The current economical doom is somehow linked to the present political climate.

Even if there was only one chance out of a thousand, or even a million, this would not undermine a bit my determination to avoid a war."

[ Disclaimer: that's Jacques Chirac words, not mine, don't shoot the messenger please. Using my best coined sentence of last year: "qui n'a jamais voté Chirac me jette la première pierre" ;-) ]

My second impression of the macromedia.com public redesign is much less favorable than my first. I'm trying to download the latest updater to Dreamweaver MX and the downloads page remains stuck on "Assembling Interface Components". Asking people to give you feedback on cosmetic design may be fine, but throwing a widely untested, unusable site that just gets in the way when you're trying to achieve something as simple as a download, is unacceptable for a company which claims leadership in web space.

No, this is not about the Google Dance, but the conscious decision of Google to play with its logo at each potential occasion. They even got as far as publishing fan contributed logos. IMHO of brand padawan, this is a very bold decision, a declaration of self-confidence that makes the Google brand even more powerful. I wish we could have that power with a certain ace of spade, but brands are fragile, living things.

But will they give David his privates back?

Geoff Barral, CTO of Blue Arc, discovers the Mac and adopts it. While he depicts his frustration with Windows with irony ("I have spent years building data centers and have some degree of technical competence but simply cannot seem to keep my desktop PC in good order"), his candid testimony that, basically, he can do with a Mac everything he's used to do with a PC, comes at no surprise to the rest of us but leaves a bitter taste on how long people can remain blind in front of anything that questions their beliefs. But he puts his acts together and confesses: "if like me, you have assumed for years that you could not do your job with a Mac, maybe it is time to look again. Sometimes it is important not just to Think Different™ but also to Be Different."

Welcome to the crowd Geoff.

I am myself a happy Mac user in a "big 5" IT company where we represent less than half a percent of the "official" computer base. I cost zip to the company in terms of IT support, and not simply because they offer no support for Macs. My colleagues spend several days a year calling the helpdesk, collecting tickets, waiting helplessly for repairs, incapable of using the printer sitting on their desk when the server down in the basement fries (once a year, twice on a good year), and looking like they've just met with Death when their screen goes blue. Nobody but those who cross my desk or see my portable (it's hard to keep Apple gear out of sight) can tell that I'm working with a Mac.

I don't know if Zeldman started it, but redesigning in public has become a trend that even corporations fancy now. Macromedia has just launched its "beta site".

First impressions, starting with the good things:

• The design is sleek and aesthetic, rather cold but giving prominence to the content rather than the envelope, building on the previous company identity guidelines with bits of the semi-3D interfaces popularized by Mac OS X and Windows XP. The top banner is however closer to the blue metal bevel typical of XP than the candy-like widgets of Mac OS X.
• The top banner features some sort of site map (dubbed "Tray" navigation), borrowing to the NeXT's file browser that is now part of Mac OS X. I tend to prefer that kind of navigation to overly complex drop-down menus.
• It's overall a Flash site disguised in a "normal" site. This means that the average visitor (but are Macromedia visitors average anyway?) will recognize a web site by traditional good old web conventions, like bookmarkable pages and a back button that works. Jakob Nielsen will not be too angry.

On the less good things:

• The site has a doctype of XHTML 1.0 Transitional but does not validate.
• The home page starts throwing insults at you such as "Initiating Application Manager", "Loading Navigation", "Assembling Interface Components" or "Processing Content" that I'll rank as a pure faute de goût.
• There are a few interface widgets, all wearing an arrow pointing either down, right or up, which provide absolutely no clue on their meaning.
• The Products and Solutions "Modules" (as Macromedia calls them) provide, IMHO, no added value compared to a more classical treatment as drop-down menus with their eponym items in the top banner. They are treated as popup lists (so, like drop-downs anyway) and they eat lots of home page real estate.
• The lead teaser features a drawer with multiple links at the bottom, carrying the function of the previous Flash teasers that have been running for some time now on the home page. Unfortunately, once it slides down, it won't slide up properly after. May be a performance issue...
• Which brings me to my biggest grief with this Flash site: it is awfully slow (I'm browsing it on a PowerBook G4/500 with Camino). Jason Kottke reports that it crashed his browser (Camino again). The site map is so slow that I had trouble finding out that you have to click on each item and wait, wait, wait until you may get something.

Also worth notice:

• A long time Atomz client, Macromedia switched to Google for its site-search (with a "powered by Google" logo at the bottom of pages).
• Macromedia eats its own dog food with Rich Interface Applications and promises more RIAs on its site in the future. Actually, it promises world+dog that "RIAs are the future for next-generation websites." While I dig the concept for online applications, we have yet to see that the mix Flash 6 + cookies + javascript is the replacement to web standards for building the semantic web.

Macromedia wants to know how it compares to its previous site along three questions:

1. The new site is better representation of Macromedia. In that they put their technology and ideas at work, yes.
2. The new site is a better user experience. It could, if it worked properly on a decent computer. But I guess they will fix that. I'm neutral right now.
3. The new site makes it easier to find what I'm looking for. The previous site was already quite good at that, and the new one is equally up to the task. Again, I'm neutral on that one.

Have a look, and tell them what you think.

"Is newsprint obsolete?" asks Tantek Çelik who explains why he has given up on the Wall Street Journal print edition:

For the longest time it provided an excellent, unsensationalized, filtered daily news feed. Even when they provided the option of viewing articles online, I still preferred the print edition.

But this was before blogs. And blog indexers and popularity engines.

It has gotten to the point that by the time I see a story or a news snippet in the WSJ, I have already seen it on a blog somewhere, or linked from one of the blog/popularity indexes: Technorati, Daypop Top 40, Popdex, and heck even the most emailed news on Yahoo!.

Tantek builds on the facts that "electrons move faster than atoms" and that webloggers have reached a critical size where they are able to generate a bottom-up flow of information that challenges the top-down filter of edited newspapers. You can get an uninterrupted, almost instant flow of valuable, in-depth information much sooner than the traditional batch delivery of printed editions.

He notes, however, that very few people have switched to reading weblogs. I note on my side that more and more journalists have started to read weblogs and to report on the same trends, sometimes in an astonishingly similar manner, without much added value if any, and embarrasingly much later. This adds to my own frustration with the technical press, which is now no match compared to my weblogs and online news sources. We had some pretty boring IT newspapers in France, now we have boring and useless IT newspapers. Simon Willison shares a similar frustration.

Media sux tells us Daniel Glazman who -- for reasons that every French person should now be aware of -- has given up on Le Monde. Daniel has not given up newsprint, though, and pays tribute to the profession of journalist:

Blogs are not well enough written or have no journalistic background guaranteeing the quality and fairness of the contents.

Fair enough, the ethical and professional dimensions of journalism deserves recognition. But ethics and style are media agnostic. In a traditional conservative reaction when it has been confronted with the web for the first time, the newsprint industry has fought against it in refusing to recognize online journalists. Now, among millions of webloggers, more and more journalists are starting to use weblogs and raise the bar, positively, on independance and professionalism.

The "new economy" burst has bought some time to the incumbents in many industries, but they are using it now to hibernate. The newsprint industry is one of them, the music majors another. Meanwhile, unaffected by the economical downturn and multiplying like bacteria in the open-source soup, numerous solutions are popping up and growing which will, in no time, create a new form of competition where companies will cease to compete with their peers alone, in quiet oligopolies. Those who think that the new economy innovation frenzy was just a bad dream, and that things are now back to normal, will be suffering a lot tomorrow morning.

Longue vie aux bloggeurs !

As reported by CNET, "Steve Sakoman, a former Palm and Be executive, has rejoined Apple Computer as a vice president."

Will we finally see something concrete built by Apple around this?