April 2003 Archives

Everybody now knows about the new music store that Apple launched on Monday. What can I say, apart that I legally cannot usebuy from it outside the US, and that instead of hearing that it will come to Windows by the end of the year, I would have preferred to get some hint on when it will come to Europe?

I am a great fan of Japanese cuisine -- actually a great fan of everything cuisine, simply -- and seeing this description of Japanese Suppon Snapping Turtle from Joi Ito makes me wonder why all Japanese restaurants I know of in Paris are limited to the sushi/sashimi/maki/teriyaki quartet ? Love that too, but compared to the extent of Japanese food art, isn't that their equivalent of fast food? It would be like saying that american food is nothing more than what you get at McDonalds!

Does anyone know of a Japanese restaurant in Paris that would go beyond sushis etc.? Joi, I am sure you know one, please ;-)

I tried this, and it worked for me too.

It is not hard to understand what the problem is. By the description, the idea is to slightly push the antenna from the inside of the case towards the exterior of the case. You probably won't see the antenna inside the battery slot (as the instructions suggest) but you cannot miss it if you look outside the case. It is the small 4 cm long plastic strip that is near you on the left side when you are looking at your keyboard. This piece of plastic gets easily pushed inside the case when you carry the PowerBook, and that probably explains why it gets less efficient over time and why pushing it back in place increases the efficiency of the signal reception. There is another antenna, symmetrical, but that one cannot be reached so easily.

Portable metal cases are acting as Faraday cages, effectively shielding electro-magnetic waves, hence the necessity of designing holes for the antennas. I discovered Faraday cages when I was a child at the Palais de la découverte in Paris. I did something very close to this, and it was really impressive (OK, I admit it, scary is closer) to stand inside that cage, hands on the metal while the presenter was generating huge electrical sparks outside the cage where I had my hands.

My better half just picked up an iBook left for repair at the AppleCare desk in Paris. The box came back with an unexpected smoking surprise, right there in the Internet Explorer history. I saved a screenshot for your pleasure (and my records).

As you can see for yourself (and no, I am not going to link to that site, check it for yourself), repair technicians have broader interests than IT matters. Unless all recipes for planting, growing, harvesting and smoking pot is part of Apple's knowledge base.

The iBook had just one problem, a broken latch preventing it to remain firmly closed. Since it was not covered by an AppleCare contract (18 months old), the repair was billed 454 euros. I guess that leaves a comfortable amount of free time to get high at the expense of your customers.

Before you ask, I am not making this up. And to the repair person: you should consider Safari, it has a very convenient "Clear History" one click away from the application menu.

The Reg reports on today's launch of Windows Server 2003:

"It's tattooed on our brains," [Ballmer] said. "We have gotten the message from our customers loud and clear that security is a top issue."

Statements such as that should cause a few alarms to go off in any CIO's head. Microsoft, like any IT vendor, knows that customers place security high up on their list of concerns. Still, the company has taken ages to start shipping something resembling secure code.

In a similar vein, users have looked for Microsoft to make a real move in the data center for some time. The company takes repeated shots at Unix operating systems but has little to show for the claims.

I once heard a CTO say something like "Unix is an outdated OS, it is 20-year old! Windows, that is a serious OS". He is allegedly a big Microsoft shareholder, so much for the objectivity, let alone the seriousness of his knowledge about Unix. Considering how rock-solid the Unix systems I work with are, I think I am going to have a look at, say, Windows Server 2023.

All in all, Microsoft is improving its OS to the point where it has started to resemble something the Unix crowd had two or three years ago. This should be more than enough effort to keep Windows users happy and maybe tempt a few Linux/Unix users to convert.

Seriously? OK, I might consider Windows Server 2005 Service Pack 5 then. Meanwhile, because I need both reliability and cost effectiveness in the datacenter, the last two Windows-driven servers in my vicinity are going to RIP in about two months.

From Cory Doctorow's notes of "Journalism 3.1b2", Dan Gillmor's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference:

New corporate policies: who inside can keep a blog and what can go on it?
Groove has a formal policy detailing this. Lawyers will try to stop you, esp in public corps -- they'll be written by the same person who writes Barbie's blog

I guess that in the context of this particular presentation, he is referring to journalists' blogs. But it is hard not to imagine that sooner or later, the words weblog and blog may appear more broadly in work contracts or internal policies. This popped into my mind a few days ago while I was reading a friend's blog -- who shall remain anonymous, at least until his employer fires him because of his blog ;-) -- where he is as objective as possible and definitely honest about the market he works in, whatever the company gwana-gwana is at that particular moment.

One can object that weblogs have nothing to do in contracts, because it is a matter of what you can say or write about your work, not where you do it and that no one can forbid you to have a personal site and express personal opinions there. It is very much a matter of common sense, be careful under all circumstances, extra careful when off the record, do not fool on the record.

I am still looking forward into the day where our lawyers will come and ask me what the heck is a blog, and surely they will some day. I just wonder if they will have the URL for this one already.

There is nothing like testing the Matrix ;-).

According to this article on the Register, Verizon has lost its appeal against the Recording Industry Ass. (sic) of America (RIAA) which demanded the name of a Verizon customer that they alleged held illegal copies of copyrighted music works.

This decision is a clear win for the RIAA and other DMCA proponents, who can obtain privacy information from any company by shelling out $5 and filling a simple form (subpoena) on the basis that they suspect somebody of copyright infringement. The procedure seems as simple as that, and no judge (or anybody with a judicial competence) has to examine the request. This is a double edged sword, as innocent victims of those actions can fight back in court and obtain damages (but the procedure is more difficult and costly).

No later than last month, I have seen a case here in France (Old Europe) about a libel and passing off case. The victim needed to obtain the identity of someone from an ISP. It took a couple of days to obtain the authorization from a judge in order to get that information from the ISP. I find this method much better and at least more respectful of the principle that someone is presumed innocent until being convicted by a court.

For the likes of the music majors, we must surely be a true member of the axis of evil.

Yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman posted his thoughts about RSS:

we prefer that you see our words in the context of the page because, for us, text alone does not equal content (although text sans layout is fine in limited environments like Palm and Nokia). We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

All sound and illustrated with style, as always.

Today, surprise, Z blesses us with his own handcrafted RSS feed!

One day I discovered NetNewsWire, an RSS feeds aggregator for Mac OS. Needless to say, I became addicted to it very quickly, soon taking direct injections of tens of RSS feeds several times a day. Gradually, I indeed moved away from the browser bookmark collection to the aggregator subscription list, keeping bookmarks only to those very few sites I cannot miss but which do not have an RSS feed. It did not discourage me to seek, quite the contrary as the discovery of new sites and journeying was increased by a lot of weblogs and sites that I subscribed to. My return was favored, yet in an utilitarian, efficient way, not the sheer impulse of discovery, by the timely notification of fresh content. But it is only after a while that I became conscious of the fact that I was reading some content entirely within the aggregator and some through a web browser, on their original context.

Triggered to analyze this by Zeldman's post, I think I tend to switch to the browser for some posts because:

• the post is inconvenient to read on the small aggregator window. But it is only a matter of time before my aggregator displays HTML directly and (I think), browsers start offering an integrated RSS aggregation feature
• the links are not conveyed in the feed. Some sites do a good job to convey clickable URLs in their feed, some don't
• the feed only carries excerpts. For some, like Zeldman, this is a design decision which invites me to go to the site to continue my reading. For others, this is simply the default setting of their weblog software (my case, I admit it). This highlights one thing: an RSS feed has certain rules and effects that one needs to know and incorporate in the design. Did Jakob forbid us to smoke RSS in a certain way already? Apparently not, yet
• I know that readers of this site comment and participate to a positive discussion that adds to the content. Some sites convey comments in feeds, I found this actually highly annoying (tested with Joi Ito) because the aggregator keeps showing new content but does not help me to distinguish what's really new (see Mark's suggestion of colored diffs of a post when it changes)
• I love the site design

Thought provoking, really. Those who use an aggregator to passively consume what gets pushed there are missing something indeed.

What did Zeldman is provide me with a nicotine patch, to drive me to quit injections and puff instead. It's too late, I need both, and now -- thanks Jeffrey -- I can have both!

Black humor: "Hong Kong will take your breath away" was the slogan of a forthcoming ad campaign to drive tourists to the city. The campaign was cancelled before launch, for the SARS virus did effectively an excellent job to achieve that objective.

[source: LCI, le journal du web - This is a French TV site, so do not expect any relation between what they broadcast over the air and what they publish on their web site ;-)]

If only ;-)

The Guardian on Battle of the blog builders, or a little insight on the next production of Ben and Mena Trott, TypePad:

Like its rival, Blogger, the new system will be stored along with the user's writing on a central server. This means that, for the first time, budding webloggers who want to use Movable Type - regarded as the one of the most powerful weblog-building systems - will not have to hire server space from hosting companies. Nor will they need to go through the sometimes difficult processes required to install the Movable Type system on their server.

This article also reveals that Joi Ito has invested in Six Apart and helped bring Anil Dash as head of marketing and business development.

I was already excited by the prospect of an enterprise version of MT, but it sounds even better:

These changes to our company definitely mark a new chapter in our history, but our goal is to just get better at what we've been doing, not to alter the way that our company works. Our existing base of Movable Type users should see a lot to be excited about, from improvements to Movable Type due to the development work being done on TypePad and Movable Type Pro, to the larger base of plugins, extensions, and third-party programs that will be developed due to the bigger audience of people using Six Apart products.

Slashdot is banning my RSS aggregator and displays the ban through RSS:

My aggregator (NetNewsWire) is tuned to update feeds every hour (they say the limit is 30mn), only when the laptop is on off course, which leads to probably a dozen requests to their server a day. And NNW is nice enough to ask if the content has been modified since its last passage, before downloading the whole thing (a whopping 5KB of data, ranked close to a DoS attack for /. servers).

Given the past bans that I've seen even with a regular browser, I guess that they still have not got that some ISPs are using proxys to cache content, making all their customers appear behind the same IP address. Considering the tone and duration (much more than 72 hours) of their RSS ban though, it sounds to me that they do not like aggregators too much, and that they will be deft to any complaint.

Not that big of an issue, there are plenty of interesting and more user-friendly news sources out there.

Reading from AskTog how lawyers are destroying usability of products, I found my way to OXO Terms of use (the link on AskTog is broken). It starts with this:

Wow! You actually came to this page. Our lawyer made us include it and made us use a precious button to get you here. At first, we thought he was being a real pain as usual. But then we read the page. What a Netawakening! It's really important stuff. We took the legalese the lawyer wrote and translated it into readable English. After all, we are in the business of making things easy. So be a smart nethead and read the stuff on this page. It could prevent you from hearing from our lawyer (he's big and ugly).

and ends with this:

If this all sounds kind of mean and undiplomatic, you should have seen what our lawyer gave to us in the first place. We had to remind the big lug that human torture and sacrifice was outlawed in the United States. Boy, did he look disappointed!

I bet most of you never had to stretch their interpersonal skills to work out some terms of use that would both satisfy the lawyers and be readable by your target audience (usually not lawyers themselves), and you don't know how lucky you are. I tried to do just that once, without even trying to test the sense of humor of our lawyers. What Oxo did is really something and is not only fun but quite smart, since it conveys a bit of their brand -- "we are in the business of making things easy" -- in a place where most companies let their lawyers exercise state-of-the-art paranoia in public.

No wonder why webmasters try to plant some humor elsewhere, like on 404 error pages. More on 404 Research Lab.

The Web Standards Project has retired its famous Browser Upgrade Campaign. The BUC was initiated by the WaSP years ago in the double hope to accelerate the disappearance of old, non compliant browsers by enticing users to upgrade them, and to foster the adoption of a new school of web design among designers who were afraid to jump ship.

This is another positive signal that the adoption of web standards is progressing.

Il y a un an à 20h pile, comme tout le monde ou presque, je suis resté médusé devant le petit écran en découvrant les scores du premier tour des élections présidentielles.

J'ai tout de suite su que j'allais devoir, au nom de la sauvegarde de valeurs qu'une fraction alarmante de la population ne semblaient pas partager, trahir mes propres convictions et voter pour quelqu'un qui représente pour moi tout sauf ces mêmes valeurs.

Que celui qui n'a jamais voté Chirac me jette la première pierre.

Heard on France Info this morning (but can't link to it since like most French newspapers and radios they do a terrible job in promoting their content online) that just before the first launch of Ariane II (the second version of the European space launcher from Arianespace), some engineers were concerned about a possible helium leakage at the end of a small pipe. Unfortunately they did not have any means to figure this out. One of them then thought about using a condom. No one had one at hand on the launch pad, so one of them went out to the pharmacy and asked for a box of condoms. When he asked for a receipt, the pharmacist told him to stop pulling his leg. The engineer had to explain why he needed a condom and successfully got both the condoms and a receipt and went back to the launcher. Applied at the end of the pipe, the condom slowly inflated and thus proved that there was a leakage indeed. From this day and for many years after, condoms found their way into the toolbox of Arianespace engineers.

This brings me the opportunity for a new French lesson and a follow-up to my piece about bricolage. What this engineer did is known to all French as "le système D". D stands for débrouille or, in slang, démerde. Débrouille and its verbal form débrouiller mean literally "un-scramble" and "getting out of scramble", but in a context that is very close to the English DIY. When you hear "débrouillez-vous", it basically means that it is your own problem and that you should not expect any help but your own to figure out how to take care of it. And when you hear "démerdez-vous" it means that... well, débrouillez-vous to figure that one out for yourself (hint.)

Système D and bricolage are so tightly related that it is a chicken-and-egg situation in France. It is hard to understand if the French taste for bricolage comes from our sense of système D or the other way around. Confronted to such a problem, American engineers would have called for a meeting to move the situation up and down the hierarchy, German ones would have rushed to see if the procedure to the solution was in the manuals, while the French engineers did, in their natural système D way, put a condom on the stick! My dear American and German friends, do not get upset about this little caricature, since it actually only tells about how the French generally behave regarding hierarchy, procedures and manuals when confronted to a problem.

I have tried to reduce, and even stop, writing about the war but as everybody I continue to dig into news and information to try to understand why this has happened and -- something that concerns and even scares me more -- what is going to happen next, more wars, more diplomatic escalades, more anti-<place your contradictor here>, more resent between France and the USA... I have tried, but in the last 24 hours, two things made me mad to the point that I need to vent my colère in some foolish hope that it might help in a way.

Yesterday night, the France-Germany TV channel Arte broadcast a documentary by William Karel titled Guerres Secrètes (Secret Wars). 52 minutes of comments by former executives of the FBI and the CIA who served under the Bush (father), Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations. As wrote Laurent (sur Navire.net, j'invite les francophones à aller le lire), it came as a chock. If you have not seen it, you really have missed one of the rare moments where TV broadcasts mind-blowing content (Arte will rebroadcast it on Saturday 26, 1h55 am and on satellite on the 23rd). I hope this documentary will find its way to a broader audience than the French and the German ones. It has all the ingredients to be banned from American channels which is a shame since this is America looking without concessions into its demons. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 project might be their only chance to come close.

I just cannot summarize this documentary, but boiled down to its scariest bit it gives this: if you ever wondered what can happen when right-wing extremists take control of a democracy, look no further than the White House! I now measure the difference between a permanent democracy (where mandates can be withdrawn at any time) and a temporal democracy. I, with billions of people around the globe, am waiting for the next democratic window to happen in the US, i.e. the presidential election in 2004. Meanwhile I can only watch what has become the biggest threat on earth: an hyperpower controlled by extremists who do not give a damn about democracy, who despises their allies, who lie like they breeze, who shit on the UN and can unleash hell when and where it pleases them. If you think that the US are presently a democracy, please give me some hint.

Today, I stumbled on this post from Anil Dash:

Maybe someday America's great love for the world will even extend to the poor people of France, oppressed by their backwards government.

I read that post many times, trying to find some irony or double meaning to that particular sentence as well as the entire post, but gradually came to the same conclusion: WTF? Writing under anger and lost temper is a bad idea, I know, and I will probably regret that later(*). Still, WTF are you to impose your simplistic mono-culture to the rest of the world? Have you ever considered that like many other cultural aspects, there are more than one version of democracy and that none can be considered better than the others? Could you, for a second, envisage that there are other countries that are better places to live than yours? Can we disagree with you without the fear of being bombed some day?

Speaking of the poor people in France, I had to go to the emergencies at the hospital yesterday for a knee problem. I spent three hours there in something that is far away from the ER show but it reminded me that despite all the ranting you hear every now and then, social care in France means something. I had plenty of time to watch all the people there take good care of patients with the same professionalism, respect and humanity regardless of their social statute. They do not even ask for your social security number anymore.

And you know what Anil? I still have vivid memories of the homeless people of New York and San Francisco. I am sure that with only a ridiculous part of the hundreds of billions that your government is throwing into this military micro-theatralism (as Emmanuel Todd named it in Après l'Empire), the US could give a historical lesson to the entire world by getting rid of poverty in its homeland once and for all. That would be quite a contribution to humanity.

A force de chercher la paille dans l'oeil de son voisin, on ne voit pas la poutre qui est dans le sien. I may calm down now.

(*) I already do, after the comments Anil left on this post. Consider that the "you" in this post are for those "knee-jerk reactionary anti-French American people" as you wrote. And we'll take the offer for getting Lousiana back. I love the idea that Air France could do domestic flights up there and import massive amounts of stinky cheeses so close to Texas ;-). Napoleon did a stupid mistake selling it in the first place.

Oh oh, Joi Ito is going to be banned for this by lots of PG and other politically correctness bots!

Apple has released the second beta of their browser, Safari. I thought I would be switching now that it has both pop-ups blocking and tab-browsing -- two features that I now can't live without and that are both missing in any IE incarnations but present in Camino -- but it is still not baked enough. Notably, the tab-browsing only works from within Safari, i.e. there is no preference to have links triggered by external applications open in a new tab. A definitive no-no now that I am used to crawl through the news in one batch with NetNewsWire and let it open tabs after tabs in the background for later browsing.

[Update] I was wrong, it is possible to get external applications to open tabs in the same window. Brent Simmons unveils the trick.

John Gruber has published a brilliant piece where he demonstrates why Quark Xpress is still running the show in the DTP world despite a much better proposition from Adobe with InDesign, along with an analysis of the high volatility that has been observed recently in the browser market, where no one would have expected Microsoft's IE to be threatened in any way just a year ago.

Since we're on war time, osOpinion.com tells us about the next browser war, browsers for mobile phones.

In his latest Alertbox, usability guru Jakob Nielsen gives us a book review of "Paper Prototyping: Fast and Simple Techniques for Designing and Refining the User Interface". While the topic is interesting by itself -- i.e. it is always better to take care of usability as early as possible rather than as a medicine for a catastrophic project outcome -- I have all my marketing-crap alarms flashing red at his prose. I hope the following excerpts will show you why:

By following this book's advice, designers on any mid-sized project will likely see an ROI of several thousand percent.

The R-word again followed with stellar percentage in a style that is close to a Nigerian 419 scam: read this book and you will become a millionaire. Not that ROI is a bad thing per se, but the language used and the lack of basis of such a bold claim are not likely to attract the kind of people who work on mid-sized projects and should benefit the most from those techniques.

It's a rough estimate, but I would say that the benefits from early usability data are at least ten times greater than those from late usability data. Late usability studies often add about 100% to the final design's desired metrics, but early usability can add 1,000% or more.

As usual with Nielsen's figures, everything comes by factors of 10, 100, 1000, etc. and the more zeros, the better, hence 100% in lieu of double. Note how Nielsen makes a comparison between usability timings (one bring you 10 times more benefits than the other) then backs it up with individual outcomes (one adds 100%, the other 1000% or more). The trouble is, adding 100% means doubling (1 + 100/100) the metrics while adding 1000% means getting 11 times (1 + 1000/100) the metrics, which means that the outcome from early usability data is more likely to be around 5 or 6 times the one of late usability data.

It makes me think of those soap ads with graphics showing that product X is 10 times better than product Y through some marketing-wizard convolution that beats any mathematics. Too bad I am an engineer, I always miss the poetry of marketing graphics.

Forty years of software engineering experience uniformly indicates that it's much cheaper to change a product early in the development process than it is to make changes later in the process. The most common estimate is that it's 100 times cheaper to make a change before any code has been written than it is to wait until after the implementation is complete.

Again some sensible assertion (better early than late) immediately followed by an absolute 10^n figure that falls from the sky (it is 100 times cheaper). In the scope of packaged products and shrink-wrapped software from an editor, it certainly makes sense. However in cases such as custom software development and web design, the real life is more about flexibly accommodating permanent changes on a budget and being fast too. Many clients need to see something more concrete than wireframe use cases and will start to grasp the reality at a much later stage of the process. In software development, new techniques such as Extreme Programming go further than ever before in multiplying iterations in order to accommodate changes as far as possible in the process (in the clients perspective, your flexibility is their right to change their mind). Forty years of software engineering experience is not likely to hold an absolute truth.

That said, usability is indeed important and can bring more benefits than eye-candy ROI figures. Many of those benefits you can find on Alertbox when the marketing machine is off and Jakob Nielsen feels like sharing some insight avec le peuple. I am not trying to make fun of him but as Zeldman says:

Why do you make fun of usability expert Jakob Nielsen?
We respect Jakob Nielsen. We just wish he hadn’t forbidden us to eat pork.

This rhetoric would be funny if it wasn't déjà vu.

My newsfeeds are bruising about rumors that Apple is trying to buy Universal Music. Apple is expected to ship new models of its iPod mp3 player and has been reported working on an online music service.

My initial reaction is twofold.

Firstly, I am always suspicious of any business model where the same company owns both the content catalog and the pipes. This the kind of lure many cable and media companies have been through, with the success we all know (déjà VU anyone?). Congrats to Apple for making sure that Mac users are not locked up from online music, however we should be worried if this ends up in access to only one catalog.

Secondly, despite my first point, I think this is just the sort of "shock and awe"™ news the music majors need to stop procrastinating and change their business model instead of throwing kids in courts. What better than a new entrant that has everything consumers want in terms of online music to shake up the incumbents?

J'en ai marre de recevoir des réflexions désagréables comme quoi je n'écris pas en français ("cette langue de loosers" me prête-t-on gracieusement). J'y viendrai bien un jour, en temps utile mais surtout lorsque l'inspiration pointera son nez.

En attendant, je lâche du lest, et du bon. Depuis navire.net je suis tombé sur la ColocK qu'a son avis sur tout, notamment sur son collègue PaCa Kolher (y-z-ont de ces noms !) lequel vend la mèche sur Madame R. qui a déjà assez de mésaventures comme ça.

Et quand vous aurez fini, j'aurais peut-être relu Molière ou je me serais mis au québéquois.

Enjoy (na !)

The NPD Group, Inc. reports 76 percent of consumers are "being careful" about spending on discretionary products and services.

Gosh, this is terrible and so irresponsible! This could be the ultimate weapon of capitalism destruction! Why are the marines digging in the sand while the U.S. are feeling the end of the (consumer) world as we know it and just when their homeland is being threatened by crypto-communists who want to abolish private property? Go home and get them buy stuff, anything, now!

Bon, c'est pour de rire. Prenez donc un cognac ;-).

Tristan sent me this example of RIA running on Mozilla (it is supposed to work on Mozilla 1.0 and Gecko-based browsers, but be warned, it doesn't work properly on Chimera).

The main interest of this, as heavily marketed by Macromedia with Flash 6, is the possibility to build applications that exchange data with servers over the network in a much more flexible and optimized way (just what is needed) than the good old HTTP request-response, refresh-the-whole-damn-page way we all know about.

Think of it as the good old client-server mode with the ease of web delivery and the look and feel of desktop applications.

On the Trademark Blog this trade dispute:

FT.Com article on a trade dispute between the U.S. and the EEC over reciprocal treatment of appellations of origin. The U.S. charges that the EEC does not grant protection to terms such as IDAHO POTATOES equivalent to that granted by the U.S. to terms such as FRENCH COGNAC.

Too bad, because potatoes and cognac go well together :).

I like this PowerPoint tip from Victor Lombardi, his observations on PPT-based presentations obviously come from field experience:

1. During a presentation people are either listening to me speak or reading my slide, not both simultaneously, and
2. a deck doesn't contain enough information to be meaningful on its own after the presentation.

In my former consultant life or my current corporate life I found that you basically cannot live without PowerPoint in way too many situations, even when it's the worst format to work with. Not that it is an absolutely bad application or format by itself, but too many people just expect that any presentation (and presenter) comes with a PPT that they can watch live and get as a printed hand-over or by email. Give them a well-written, comprehensive document organized by audience (exec summary plus the real beef) and they will look exhausted in advance. Those people suffer from the "bullet-thinking" syndrome.

They cannot think and elaborate about something that is not summarized in a few bullet-points on a slide. The thinking of both the presenter and the audience are constrained by the format and subsequent elaborations are in turn formalized in more bullet-points. Bullet-point thinking is a vicious circle, so widespread within corporations that one should not wonder why they tend to lack vision nowadays. And I will spare you a few best practices, such as how to fit 50 bullet points on the same slide (table-based layouts are not a web design exclusive faute de goût).

If PPT is a necessary evil in your own business life, do not miss Understanding PowerPoint from Dan Brown and if you ever lack inspiration be sure to check Click To Add Title.

Now could just someone explain to the clueless padawan why this fuzz about viewing PPT documents on a mobile phone? Bullet-thinking whores, try SMS.

Chief evangelist Tristan et al. have setup a section on DevEdge named Strategy Central where you will find case studies, examples, presentations and articles to help make a business case for standards-based web sites and applications. You will even find a reusable PowerPoint presentation (surprising format for Netscape, but quite suitable in corporations) that will "give you nice soundbites for pitching execs in the elevator (or in more appropriate settings)".

The elevator will be just fine, thank you ;-)

Netscape DevEdge sports a news about Midas, a rich-text editing feature that works with with Mozilla 1.3:

Mozilla 1.3 introduces Midas, an implementation of Microsoft Internet Explorer's designMode feature. The version of Midas in Mozilla 1.3 supports the designMode feature which turns HTML documents into rich-text editors.

I am always happy to see anything that helps content managers get a little comfort to edit texts that are supposed to go on web standards-compliant pages, especially when it works on Macs. But in this case, Midas falls short of doing the job and curiously tarnish the otherwise excellent job that DevEdge evangelists are doing to promote web standards:

• It is an old-school rich text editor, i.e. it again gives the content managers the impression that they can modify font types, size and half a dozen more presentational elements that should be driven by a CSS file.
• It re-introduces the content+presentation mix that web standards were supposed to suppress. For example, where the IE equivalent (and pretty much any other rich-text editors do) will use the correct semantic markup <em> and <strong>, Midas will bloat your code with this: <span style="font-style: italic;">emphasis</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">strong</span>. How cute!

Sure, technically speaking it will produce code that validates. But can someone explain to me how I am supposed to control the presentation of an entire web site with this powerful idea of site-wise styles sheets and semantic markup, when the web is full of rich-text editors that maintain content managers in the idea that they can control both the text and the presentation and that actually produce a code mix that is anything but a validable tag soup? By getting my content managers learn XHTML? Dream on!

My plea to the DevEdge evangelists: give a crash-course on web standards with a hint on semantic markup to Midas' developers, please!

CNet has a rather long story on the challenges that the IT services firms are facing. Worth reading only if you care about that particular industry, which is indeed facing a profound overhaul. This article has a rather deep coverage of the issues at hand of both clients and suppliers.

Before I go on with a little comment, I have to introduce two French words:

• Informatique (n. f.), which covers both concepts of Information Science and Information Technology. It is rare to see a word or concept being much shorter in French than in English, and I see more and more appearances of the word Informatics (although I am not sure it has gained significant adoption yet). For a little history (en français ici et ici), this word was crafted by Philippe Dreyfus in 1962 (I had the chance to meet him at Cap Gemini, of which he is a retired veteran).
• Artisanat (n. m.), which translates into craft industry. The translation is actually unfaithful of the French concept, the art of the craftsman, craftswoman, l'artisan(e). In that sense, l'artisanat is often seen as the antithesis of l'industrie, and something artisanal (produced by an artisan) is opposed to something industriel (an industrial product).

After 23 years of heavy exposure to computers and all sorts of IT things, the apprentice has learned two fundamental things about informatics:

1. it is not an exact science
2. it is an artisanat before being an industry

The first one will strike people who think that computers are one of the most predictable things around. They may well be (although I still doubt that), but informatics is not just about computers. It is very much about humans, their needs, their requirements and expectations interpreted, written and rewritten into requirements, specifications, which get re-interpreted then transcripted into code which enjoys a cycle life full of debugging, patching, updating in minor and major versions before dying in obsolescence. Informatics is a world of uncertainty where the conservative metrics are: whatever the scope of a project, the timescale and budget will be twice as much as initially predicted.

The second one is what, in my eyes, makes the whole informatics world really interesting. A significant part of the IT services business is done by individuals doing haute couture work as free-lancers, or in small firms or in small expert teams in bigger companies. The innovation and top-notch expertise mainly comes from individuals (whatever their work status is), and the whole open-source movement is the quintessence of artisan IT work (one could argue that it is the only place where you see innovation en marche nowadays). The current IT services industry is basically split into four areas: consulting, technology, outsourcing and professional services. There are artisans working in all those areas and in all sorts of companies but -- because consulting is essentially an individual, client-facing job and professional services are very local -- the pressure to industrialize IT services is only sensible in technology and outsourcing. Besides, industrialization makes sense only where economies of scale are beneficial but may come at the price of lesser flexibility, adaptability, customization and -- mother of all business fears - competitive differentiation.

Informatics is somehow like cuisine. The art of the Chefs Information Officers consists of knowing all the grades in between the artisanal sublime and the industrial extreme, the ingredients and recipes, and how to pick venues and menus relevant for one situation.

Following the argument around Andrew Orlowski's article about googlewashing (here then here then here) I ended up on this parody of Joi Ito's web site:

Had brunch with the Pope this morning at St. Peter's in Rome. I set him up with a Movable Type blog and started to explain how blogging could possibly replace the sacrament of confession, if we could somehow just arrange a trackback ping to God.

Lots of other fun things there, have a good laugh.

Naxos, Cisco and my employer have setup a WiFi access in Paris, along a bus line (38, Porte d'Orléans- Gare du Nord) that crosses Paris from north to south. Access is free during the test period, which ends on the 30th of June.

Naxos, Cisco et mon employeur ont mis en place un accès WiFi à Paris, le long de la ligne de bus 38 (Porte d'Orléans- Gare du Nord). L'accès est gratuit pendant la phase de test, qui dure jusqu'au 30 juin.

Can we look at Nations as Persons?

Signal vs. Noise thinks so and has a pretty humorous way of describing the noisy children out there:

The USA is the spoiled rich kid who always gets his way (“No Mommy, I will not give up my SUV!”).
France is the touchy, feely type who always wants to communicate about her feelings (“I think it’s time we had a talk about where this relationship is going.”).
Germany is the recovering addict who can’t even stand to look at booze anymore [...]
The Arab world seems like a group of abused children who now view the world through a prism where everyone is always out to humiliate and exploit them [...]
And of course, everyone assumes it’s the other guy who has a problem.

George Lakoff, who authored Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf in 1991, gives us a sequel with Metaphor and War, Again:

One of the most central metaphors in our foreign policy is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be stopped." What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we are not going to war against.

All good readings. Now, the sanity check: how many of the following statements are true?

• George W. Bush is a spoiled rich kid
• Jacques Chirac is a touchy, feely type guy
• Gerhard Schröder is a recovering booze addict
• Saddam was abused when he was a child

Note: combinations are not allowed (e.g. "George W. Bush is a recovering booze addict" doesn't count).

Karl calls for comments on the W3C XHTML 2.0 working draft:

It's a bit unusual coming from me, but I think that if all developers and users of the web want a language that fits their needs, it is absolutely necessary to participate in the re-reading of the working draft document. Everyone can participate.

Everyone? Including Mark?

Pour les francophones qui peuvent lire l'anglais mais ne se sentent pas formuler leurs commentaires en langue de Shakespeare, Karl suggère de contacter OpenWeb, une ressource bien utile pour qui veut comprendre les standards web en langue de Molière.

This isn't exactly moblogging for the masses ;-)

By the way, since I'm having some fun at Google today, searching for moblogging makes Google ask if you meant mudlogging, even though it returns more than 4,200 results.

Google has again changed its way of serving its foreign visitors.

A long time ago, if I wanted to get to the French version of Google, I just had to go to google.fr.

Then Google started to fool around, forcing me to google.fr even when I specifically asked for google.com. I suspect it did that by guessing my location based on my IP address, because it was not honoring my browser language preference which was set at U.S. English. For a short period of time it was just impossible to get to google.com, until they added a link to google.com on the footer of all their localized versions for people who really wanted to go there. Later on, probably based on some cookie cuisine, google stopped to redirect me to the French version when I wanted the American one. That was good enough for me.

But it is not good enough for Google, so they have invented some other way to frame the foreigners. Going to Google.com right now from my Paris den brings me to this:

At first I didn't notice the change, because this page looks like expected to me, i.e. the American English version. Then I caught up the title: "Google Français"! My instinct fear was that, although the interface is showing up in English (as expected), the search results would be limited to the French or francophone sites. To find this out I searched for "apple" and, seing some French coming up first (screenshot), thought this was the case. It is not, Google is simply sending me the French ads along with the results I would otherwise be getting from the American version of Google. Clever. Through the various preferences settings Google provides, I can change the language for both the interface and the scope of my searches, but I will always get ads coming from the country where I am physically located.

Immaturity, seen positively, is a great innovation fertilizer. The blogosphere, still in its infancy, sees innovations coming on a daily basis.

The serious business area seems to be -- as on the web in general -- the search engine: e.g. Google plus Blogger or Daypop.

Next to it, busy trying to get in the hot business model as well, are all kinds of services based on whatever metrics you can crunch out there: rating, linking, tracking and whatnot.

There are also the just-for-fun experiments, like Blog Shares, which is a quite funny game if you want to forget the nonsense at the real stock markets for a while. This very site is valued $ 1052.73 today and I was surprised to discover that Gavin Bell had already bought 50 shares of it before I even entered the play! It's good to know there are people who want to buy your stuff before you even think about selling something :-).

I also ended up on Blog Street, which might not fall on the just-for-fun category. It dubs itself as:

It is a tool for discovering other blogs which are similar to a blog.
For Blog Authors, their Neighborhood is a pool of blogs to track. Treat it as a list of blogs you *should* be knowing about.
For Readers, it helps them to find more blogs similar to a blog they have liked.
The Blog Neighbourhood groups together blogs of a similar nature, allowing you to find other bloggers writing about the same kind of things.

Interesting ideas, let's look at my neighborhood:

1. http://tantek.com/log/
2. anil dash - New York Is Just Getting Int ...
3. Helpmeblog
4. Gene Smith's weblog (atomiq.org)
5. paranoidfish.org/notes/
6. Kevin Lynch
7. v-2 Organisation | beauty. utility. ...
8. web-graphics
9. waferbaby: we eat bandwidth for breakfas ...
10. Kaliber10000 { The Designers Lunchbox &# ...

Wow! The webmaster's egorati takes a boost if those are considered "of similar nature". But the padawan takes this just as blogs he should know about and notes he didn't know about four of them.

The list above is far from being even close to the richness of the blogosphere innovations. If anyone knows a good source that keeps track of those, I'd love to hear from you.

Mozilla has a new roadmap and CNet breaks the story:

Three months after Apple Computer bypassed it for a smaller, faster Web browser, Mozilla.org has refocused its coding efforts on a smaller, faster version of its own product.

Who said we don't need new competition in the browser space?

The way Dear Leader normally imposes his Will is to declare victory in advance, thus acquiring an "Aura of Inevitability" about his person. The holy radience of this Aura causes all opposition to melt away. That his how Dear Leader seized power in 2000, how he looted the entire U.S. Treasury in only two years, and how he gets things done generally.

Get the entire story at The Temple of George W. Bush.

We want to get rid of tables to layout our pages and use web standards, but my company lacks the money to train people on brand new, unproven technologies. Therefore, we have decided to get back to HTML 2.0 which is a W3C standard without the table element. It hasn't got frames either, less evil temptation is always better.

Oh, and we'll be Safari compatible then.

From NSLog();:

"One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy" - Jean-Louis Gassée

Looking at the recent evolution of Apple's logo, it means that the anarchy is gone.

Two months ago I expressed my concern about the lack of a cross-platform, browser-independent rich text editor, possibly written in Flash. Marcel uncovered the Flash editor praised by Jeremy Allaire which had been removed by its author (not a good sign) and Doug from Ektron pitched their commercial product ewebWP.

None of them satisfy my quest for two reasons.

Firstly, the minor problem: none are open-source. I'm not against commercial products, but their current price schemes are unrealistic and expensive, with fees and limits at every corner: namely number of domains and named users which can become quite large within corporations. And we're stuck within software road maps with products that do not necessarily do what we want.

Secondly, the major problem: all are old-school rich text editors. While the web design world is all excited about web standards and the separation of content and presentation, the developers of rich text editors blindly continue to stuff their widgets with presentational blasphemy such as font types, sizes, colors and superbly ignore the basic concepts of style sheets and semantic elements. At best, they have replaced <b> with <strong> and <i> with <em> but that's about all you can get.

What's wrong with the idea of an open-source, cross platform, browser-independent "semantic-rich" text editor? When will developers catch up on web standards? Is that simple idea too hard to implement? It's stupor and chock here.

Boing Boing on French's Mustard: Eat me! I'm not French!

Is this funny, ironic, pathetic, all of the above? J'hésite...