May 2003 Archives

Air France is definitely stopping the commercial exploitation of Concorde, which will land for the last time at Paris CDG today at 17h45.

[Note aux lecteurs francophones, je me suis très largement inspiré de l'article Concorde entre dans la légende de Netlex chez qui vous trouverez toutes ces infos et bien plus encore.]

The first study of a supersonic plane started in France and the UK in 1958. The 29th of November 1962, the French and British governments signed an agreement to jointly design and build a commercial supersonic plane. The first prototype will flight on March 2, 1969. Other key dates include:

• 25 May 1971, Concorde 01 flights from Toulouse to Dakar in 2h58mn, first intercontinal flight in 2h07 of supersonic flight.
• 20 September 1973, Concorde 02 lands at Dallas Fort-Worth, for its first visit in the USA.
• 26 September 1973, first journey with passengers between Washington and Paris Orly in 3h33mn.
• Air France launches the first regular service on Concorde on January 21, 1976, with two weekly flights between Paris-Dakar-Rio de Janeiro. On the same day, British Airways opens the London-Bahrein line.
• Christmas 1989, Concorde flights from New York to Paris CDG in 2 hours 59 mn 40 s. 20-21 May 1927, Charles Lindbergh on board of the Spirit of Saint Louis made the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris le Bourget in 33 hours and 30 mn for about 5,780 km.
• 12 October 1992, Concorde breaks a record with a tour du monde East to West in 33 hours and 1 minute with a commercial plane.
• 16 August 1995, Concorde breaks another record with 31 hours and 27 minutes for a tour du monde of 40,338 km, this time from West to East.
• 25 July 2000, Concorde F-BTSC crashes at takeoff, killing 113 persons. All Concordes are grounded.
• 24 January 2001, the first modified Concorde (F-BVFB) is tested at Istres.
• 7 November 2001, Concorde commercial flights start again between Paris and New York.

At Mach 2, Concorde will travel 100 km every 3 minutes, a speed of 555 m per second, and burn 1,000 kg of kerosene at an altitude of 18,000 m.

If you want to experience Concorde, your only chance is to book on British Airways, which last Concorde flight is scheduled for the 1st of November 2003. Or you may try to buy one but be ready for heavy travel expenses, as I reckon that one hour of flight will cost you more than 30,000€.

This time it's not about difference. If you want one example of a cultural similarity between New Yorkers and Parisians, take the subway.

Since digging into American vs. French cultural differences seems to please some of you, here is one funny take on French Etiquette from FrenchVillas.com. I'm quite happy to see that their comments on greetings and farewell back my owns up. Don't miss their other pages, notably dining and driving in France. Although I really appreciate the humor and style, their basic French phrases gave me a good laugh and will probably attract the same reaction on my fellow concitoyens. They're as funny and useful as this basic English lesson for French people: if you don't know what to say, say "ouate ze foq".

Phyl Giford on The everyone@ rite of passage:

Start-ups generally have a mailing list to which everyone in the company is subscribed, handy for news of website updates, mentions in the press and company announcements. Of course, in a laid-back company of, say, a dozen people, the list will also be home to plenty of amusing URLs, jokes and argument over the evening’s pub. Inevitably, there comes a point where management decides the list should host only official company business and all the incidental chatter should, as if by magic, disappear.

It reminds me of something that blew me at Netscape. I joined not so long after the pivotal term from startup to serious business, pointed to by many veterans complaining that this company was "not the fun startup it used to be" (and just when it was starting to be a seriously money-loosing business too). At that time, the 4000 or so employees enjoyed 7000 internal discussions/distribution lists, almost 2 for every person! You could find a list for people selling red SUVs and another for those seeking to buy green bicycles. And the senior management was "spamming" the whole company with regular email polls ("do you think the java browser would be a killer application?"), but that didn't last long.

[via Corante]

Two French consumers-defense organizations are legally fighting music majors over copy protected CDs. UFC-Que Choisir (the biggest independent, i.e. non governmental, French consumer organization) has filled a complaint against EMI, Virgin and BMG. CLCV has done the same against EMI, BMG and Sony.

They want the end of all technological measures abusively installed on CDs to prevent the right to private copy and use on whatever device consumers see fit (HiFi set, computer, radio-CD, car, etc.)

Sony has announced they would drop those systems on new CDs and is in talks with CLCV. EMI is waiting for the court hearings. The audience for BMG is scheduled late June.

CLCV has chosen to attack on the ground that the consumer is fooled by the lack of information regarding the measures taken and the list of systems on which the CDs will not play (that is a juridic tactic, since they condemn the protection per se). In other words, they argue that majors are deliberately introducing a flaw in the product, which may be a sensible argument to the court. The French civil code offers strong protection to the consumers, without time limit, over hidden flaws.

[source: Transfert]

Un long (et bon) article de Netlex à propos du projet de constitution européenne. J'en profite pour créer une catégorie Europe, un sujet qui me passionne depuis longtemps et dont l'absence totale lors de la campagne présidentielle n'a peut-être pas été, selon moi, étrangère à la défaite de Jospin. Mais il n'aura pas été le seul à nous assourdir par ce silence inquiétant des politiques sur un sujet des plus cruciaux.

Je m'efforce de passer sur cette facilité de douter que nos politiques puissent jamais faire avancer l'Europe, eux qui ne savent déjà pas montrer une réelle capacité à diriger le pays, qu'ils soient de tel ou tel parti d'ailleurs. Ce serait renier la politique, et la politique est bien plus que les hommes qui gouvernent à un instant donné. Mais que penser de ceux, qui n'osent ou, pire, ne savent rien nous expliquer à propos de l'Europe ? Vous me direz qu'ils ne savent déjà pas expliquer les retraites, alors l'Europe... Mais que dire des citoyens qui ne savent pas raisonner sans passion sur les sujets qui fâchent ? On tourne en rond. Continuons donc les uns les autres à jouer à "tout le monde il est con, tout le monde il est pas gentil" et quand la France sera définitivement classée dans la catégorie "nuisible, sans intérêt", l'Europe aura au moins réglé son problème de surcharge pondérale.

Caught this on Jeremy Allaire's weblog:

An SVP from Verizon commented in a Q&A in the Boston Globe (...) that he didn't believe there was a standalone market for Wi-Fi access:

Q. Any chance you would offer WiFi as a stand-alone service unconnected to Verizon Online DSL or dial-up Net service?

A. We don't view WiFi as a service per se. It is an access technology. It is something our customers want [in order] to be untethered from the network. We have yet to see a business model where WiFi could operate as a stand-alone business.

(...) this notable comment underscores the fact that Wi-Fi will be like the air we breath, and thus part of our commodity communications/utility bills.  Incidentally, this is exactly the model that more advanced markets (Japan) are using, where broadband+VOIP+WiFi are now common and affordable.

But with the possibility to setup a free access point for a few hundred bucks, providing WiFi access is not really an operator's privilege. Cafés and public places, which have to pay for an ISP account already for their business operations but are not using it during their opening hours since they are serving their customers, can and will provide that kind of facility either to differentiate themselves or simply because they are lagging behind competitors. I think I have seen that reasoning on Tantek Çelik's weblog, but just by observing how the AirPort-addict Tantek picks his favorite places, you bet that some customers are already asking for free WiFi along with the peanuts.

Let's take the opportunity to update you on how la ville lumière is going regarding WiFi. Taking the good side of yet another forthcoming strike here, I shall test next week the WiFi test access that is currently running at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris. Nothing has been announced yet other than the "free" phase will end next month. I am dubious that a pay-for WiFi service like this one (along buses and subway) can survive. Years after promises to cover the airports with WiFi, Air France is still incapable of giving you more than one (1!) ridiculously slow PC with some dummy webmail client to check your email in the business class lounge. You cannot even connect your own computer to an ethernet plug. I guess that AirPort means something only to Apple! Rumors say that the Mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, would like to cover the whole city with WiFi access. L'Assemblée Nationale (our parliament) is organizing a meeting on "the new frontiers of the Internet: what regulations, what territories, what content ?" on June 23. I hope to be there as well. May be, peut-être, will we see some inspiring things coming out from all these tests and thinking. Meanwhile, I am afraid that you fellow always-on tourists and busy travellers, will be paying good money for a few airborne packets sold by the minute at a few crowded lounges.

[Update] I don't know what's going on with wireless networks right now, but at this time, there are no less than 7 articles on today's stories on The Register, including one on Paris that will give you more insights on what's going on in the subway. The clever idea of the subway operator RATP (currently dubbed "Rentre Avec Tes Pieds", go back home with your feet, because of the frequent strikes that let parisians transport-less), is to use their gigantic underground network to deploy a pan-city Internet network without drilling a hole. They had plans to roll-out a phone network a decade ago when the phone monopoly was suppressed, but it never launched. Now they're back with a much better idea.

The semantic web, and web standards in general will not succeed if we do not have good interfaces between them and the users. BitFlux, a visual XML editor looks like a good step in that direction:

Bitflux Editor is a browser based Wysiwyg XML Editor – and that changes everything! You can edit now your content semantically and at the same time display it to your users and editors in its final form.

That's a big stone in the garden of old school text editors.

Note to Mac users: it does not work in Safari. Try Mozilla 1.3+ or Netscape 7.

I saw The Matrix Reloaded today. There was one truly hilarious moment in it, only one but the whole theater laughed out loud at the scene with Lambert Wilson, aka le Mérovingien. The best part is something like this (my memory isn't perfect):

I studied all languages and French is the one I prefer... French is the best language for cursing. Nom de Dieu de saloperie de putain de bordel de merde.^(*) C'est comme se torcher le cul avec de la soie.

The last sentence is in English in the movie but, that's the point, I give it to you in French for your reading pleasure.

Of course that little part of the movie is way funnier for the French speaking people. The French cursing is quite good and in addition of seeing Lambert Wilson in a blockbuster, it is funny to hear him speaking English with a French accent when one knows that he speaks perfect English. Matrix irony, the Merovingian program plays its role à la perfection, knowing virtually all languages but speaking French, and English with a French accent.

(*) Les rares spécimens qui, comme moi, ont la particularité d'être à la fois francophones et fans de Pierre Desproges auront peut-être le souvenir de cette phrase : "Putain de bordel de merde de cintre à la con chié". C'est dans le sketche (accrochez-vous) Ô vertige de la penderie béante sur l'alignement militaire des pelures incertaines aux senteurs naphtalines.... Evidemment, comme lien supposé entre Matrix et Desproges, ça ne vaut pas tripette, surtout face à cette analyse métaphysique du film. Mais comme 70% de mon audience ne doit pas comprendre le français, la face est presque sauve !

Anders Jacobsen has some trouble with the weird French tipping methods:

First of all, I really like a lot of things about France and the French; I really do. But if you're just a visitor, and especially if you know no French, be aware that the French restauranteurs/taxi-drivers/shop-owners/etc will all do their best to screw you. Sorry, but it's just a fact. At least here in the south.

Thanks to soften the generalization by limiting that to the south, because this is certainly not the case everywhere else. I lived and worked two years in that area (Nice - Cannes) and yes, it's how "commerce" is done there. Actually since anybody who's not from there since five generations is a tourist, they will try it on French too so it's not because you don't speak the language (but it makes things easier for them).

Tipping in France is such a complex business, almost taboo, without any written rules, that it is a mystery for the French in the first place. Unlike many other countries where tipping is part of some common rules, everybody in France has their own personal rules. There is only one occasion I know of, which you don't see much anyway, with small movie theaters where the ushers earn nothing but tips. Even public toilets, except a minority, have moved away from the "dame pipi" and her small change plate business.

Tipping is sometimes a marketing art, like in some US restaurants that print out a list of 10, 15, 18%... on the bill so you don't have to calculate it yourself, and even feel sorry if you don't leave that much. I have seen many times, in NYC restaurants, a 15 or 18% tip already included in the bill, following exactly the French model!

But at least we do have a common sense rule that I think is the same everywhere: there is no tip for bad service.

One little thing I wanted to blog yesterday but got trapped between politics and an obituary, the importance of the user interface and the contrast between its importance in the success of something and how people overlook it when creating things.

The technologue knows one thing: people do not interact with technology, never. They interact with interfaces. This explains why good technologies with bad interfaces have little chance to succeed, while bad technologies with good interfaces can take off.

In the people's web, Drew McLellan shows us his passion for making a better web ( like a web that uses standards) and how important it is to get people, as much as possible, put their content online without bearing the burden of technology barriers:

… the world needs badly made websites and the people who make them. Anyone who wants to publish their stuff on the web should be wholeheartedly encouraged. Sure, gently guide them to good practice if that’s possible but don’t let it get in the way. We’ll cope. We have technology. Let them get their stuff online and sod the rest.

Ultimately it’d be great if there was a low-cost general page building tool that got things right. Dreamweaver is close to getting this right (there’s still a way to go), but it’s reet expensive. FrontPage will never get there because it’s always meeting Microsoft’s agenda. I guess we need an easy-to-use open source visual web editor that understands the importance of web standards – but hey, we don’t need it that much.

I disagree on only one little point, we actually do need it that much! I strongly believe that until someone gets out with a real good and pervasive visual editor that completely hides the complexity of the tag soup, shows content to the user and outputs kocher tag soup, the semantic web will remain an elite playground.

Commenting on the first look at TypePad's screenshots, JF of 37 Signals questions:

Do you think Typepad’s apparent simplicity and approachability will help push blogs into the mainstream, or are “pay-to-blog” systems (like Typepad and Blogger Pro) forever relegated to the hard core crew?

I think that the success of weblogs is precisely and primarily due to the progress made by tools like MT and Blogger as being simple, usable interfaces between people and the web. If my mother-in-law can use a weblog to publish her site, while she has not been able to do so with pay-for tools and her ISP, no wonder why there has been a spike in micro-content publishing with weblogs and why we'll see even more growth with free or cheap weblogs in ASP mode lifting the monkey business of hosting their site away from people who couldn't care less.

It's the interface, stupid!

Jean Yanne est mort ce matin d'une crise cardiaque. Il avait 70 ans et une filmographie impressionnante. Maintenant il va pouvoir avoir des nouvelles du bon dieu et régler ses comptes avec Jésus-Christ.

Jacques Chirac on May 22th, in a speech during the 60th anniversary of the CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France) [retranscription from Netlexblog, translated in English by votre serviteur below]:

"La laïcité est une valeur d'une extraordinaire modernité tant elle exprime cet esprit de tolérance, de respect et de dialogue qui doit plus que jamais prévaloir. Elle est un principe sur lequel nous ne transigerons pas".(...)

"La France n'est pas, et ne sera jamais, une juxtaposition de communautés avec ses rivalités et ses antagonismes." Dans la "République une et indivisible"(...) "nul, au motif de ses racines ou de ses croyances, n'est fondé à se prévaloir, pour lui ou sa communauté, de droits particuliers".

"Secularism is a value of outstanding modernity in that it expresses this spirit of tolerance, respect and dialogue that must definitely prevail. It is a principle on which we will not compromise. (...) France is not, and will never be, a juxtaposition of communities with their rivalries and antagonisms. In the Republic, "one and indivisible" (...), no one, on the basis of their roots or beliefs, is founded to claim for themselves or for their community, any particular right."

Let alone any political feeling towards the French president, I find those words very useful to illustrate a value that has been a deep part of France's political (in a noble sense) and even intellectual genome for centuries: l'universalité (universality). This value is at the core of our constitution, has deep consequences on our laws and political system and is singular in that it is not shared by many other countries, when it is not the complete opposite of other models, found notably in religious countries and, you guessed, anglo-saxon countries.

That Chirac pointed secularity (la laïcité) in front of the most prominent Jewish organization in France, is not innocent -- and not targeted to one religion in particular but falling handy at a time where debates around Islam and the Chador are raging here. The separation between the State and the Church is considered as a key basis for a democracy since the French revolution, and it never hurts to be remembered that (I am anxious to see what kind of regime will take place in Irak and its exact relations towards any religion). This explains why the French will naturally react very negatively to religious claims and references publicly expressed by a representant of a democracy (I personally find Bush's ones particularly outrageous), while they will respect that as personal beliefs. Ironically, this should be enough to ridicule the pestilential views of former French president Giscard d'Estaing who recently pictured Europe as a Christian-club, in an effort to undermine its expansion to countries that are not orthodox enough for him (e.g. Turkey).

Expand the religion further to roots and beliefs, or culture and traditions, and here comes the true differentiator. This country has no particular attention to communities. It is not that they aren't any, they are plenty: immigrants, religions, gays, whatever. But our constitution does not have the notion of communities, civil and penal laws apply equally to every single citizen with the sole exception of "positive discrimination" based on objective differences (e.g. only women can get pregnant and give birth, so women deserve additional social care). All citizens being equal within the République, une et indivisible. Of course this sounds a bit of a 1789 "idéal révolutionnaire" caricature, and seems to be challenged everyday in front of our numerous corporations and plethora of different social regimes, and yet it is very real, built-in in the true democratic constituents of this country as a protection to ensure that freedom is not the privilege of a few, and that freedom goes along with equality to form strong pillars to build a democracy.

This why France has played an influential role among democracies, why it has been seen as both enlightening and arrogant for centuries, why, I think, it will continue to inspire and infuriate generations of people for the sake of democracy, and surely one of many reasons why I love this country.

Vive la France, universelle.

... is sometimes frustrating. I have been looking for a digital camera for years now, unsuccessfully so far. Back in the previous millennium, I used to take pictures with a reflex (SLR) camera and do everything myself in the dark room (well, that was at the very beginning, on black-and-white negative films only, color was too complex to handle for the amateur). My first film camera was a Praktica (something like that) and my last a Nikon F801 (I found a pic here, but nothing on Nikon's sites!). That spoiled me, and since then I have never been satisfied with anything that is not a reflex, providing through-the-lens viewfinder, depth of field, and a wide range of quality lenses to name the features that matter the most to me. Replacing the film by a digital sensor does not change anything about the fact that a compact camera sucks compared to an SLR. After some experiments with a few digital compact cameras (notably a Nikon Coolpix 995), I even tend to think that compact cameras using film are still way better than their digital counterparts for sometimes 1/100th of the price.

But until very recently, the digital SLRs were out of reach, even for a techno geek like me, with prices ranging from 3000€ to more than 10000€ (body alone). For comparison, equivalent film SLRs are a good 4 to 5 times cheaper. So, when Canon announced the EOS 10D (official "gwana-gwana" site, DP review), a digital SLR camera with a never-seen-before price of $1500 for that kind of features and performance, I got seriously interested.

Problem: three months after its introduction, it is as if this camera does not exist. It is impossible to get one, or just see one somewhere in Paris. Shops have no information and trying to find anything on Canon's web sites reveals only a complex, confusing, misleading and mostly content-free galaxy of sites (but I don't read japanese, so I might have missed the beef). Let alone its availability, this camera was supposed to have a street price of $1500 (1288€, ex. VAT). But its list price in France is 2082€ ($2423, ex. VAT), a good 62% more than the US price! Canon being a Japanese company that manufactures everything in Asia, I quite don't get why the European market is penalized so outrageously. I have a built-in anti-robbery protection that suppresses all pleasure when I see an unreasonable price tag on something (e.g. seeing a 3 digits price tag on a bottle of average Bordeaux in NYC restaurants is enough to prevent me from enjoying the wine). I'm not ready to consider Canon positively after so many signs that Canon sees me at best as a clueless cash cow.

I could write an almost identical story, replacing "Canon EOS 10D" by "Sony Ericsson P800".

Add to that that products companies are starting to act more and more like software companies, i.e. pushing buggy prototypes on the market to cut on development costs and shorten life cycles (if they can license bug-ridden betas as software, why can't we ship prototypes as production products?). The techno geek already had a difficult time paying premium price for the sole privilege of being the first to play with the latest goodies, but now that he gets products that have more bugs than a copy of Windows Me, the shopping fun is no more. If this is the new model of capitalist production, there is no bright economical future in sight.

I guess I'll wait another six months for the next SLR wave...

Dave Shea concludes the CSS lovers vs. haters debate:

People who turn this into a silly all–or–nothing debate are missing the bigger picture here: the user doesn’t give a damn about how you built the site. They want it to load fast, they want it to navigate well, they want it to look good, and they want it to work. The rest of this is, ironically, just semantics.

Do not miss the links to Simon Willinson reloading Dave Winer and Jamie Zawinski in CSS.

The always thoughtful views of Maciej Ceglowski about Poland and France, growing Europe.

I don't understand what's going on at The Register, which has just published a story with an alarming title: .org registry vanishes into thin air. The Public Interest Registry seems to be working fine, accepting registrations and delivering whois requests at whois.pir.org. What's the fuzz? And after having bashed weblogs for as long as they discovered them, they are now picking up on a mistaken blogger to invent horror stories? What kind of journalism is that?

I'm diving into Flash MX, trying to understand how it works, notably to get my hands into RIAs. After two hours (mostly fighting to get the whole mysql, php and Apache to work again on my Mac OS X laptop after an upgrade to the latest versions) and a big headache, I can tell only two things: 1. I'm getting rusty at programming. I used to code in assembly language for the Z80, the 6809 and the 68k (that was a looong time ago :-), in Basic, Pascal, Fortran, C, PHP, Javascript, but I'm feeling less and less at ease learning yet another language (although it's more or less ECMAScript in this case). The dinosaur is on its way to fossilization. 2. I need a new laptop with a bigger screen (and I'm not sure it'll be enough to fit the plethora of palettes that Macromedia applications require, it's becoming frightening). Boss, can I get one of these please? :-).

Wired has a story on how search results are "clogged" by blogs. The title itself induces that blogs do harm to the search placement race that is so important for companies.

Commercial websites believe scoring high placements in search-engine results is so crucial for generating traffic that many are willing to pay top dollar to sponsor keywords or hire "positioning" consultants to secure a good ranking.

Then there are bloggers. With no deliberate effort, many dedicated weblog publishers are finding their blogs rank high on search results for topics that, oftentimes, they claim to know practically nothing about.

Bloggers attribute prominent placement to the frequency with which they publish new material and the fact that other sites often link to their blogs. These are two factors most search engines take into account when determining rankings.

I find this story delightfully ironic. Rephrased, it simply means that search engines are doing their job, i.e. finding out content that:

• is fresh (Google looks at the rate a page is modified and seems to module the rate at which it indexes a site accordingly)
• is reachable (stable URLs are important)
• gets attention (gets linked to)

and giving it prominence so that their users find content relevant to their queries.

Let's add that search engines would logically favor pages that written to the XHTML/CSS web standards, where the ratio semantic content/code is far higher than HTML pages designed with tables. Webloggers have another advantage over companies here, as the prominent weblogging software offer XHTML/CSS templates while the vast majority of companies are still using bloated web pages.

If you needed proof that your money is better spent on your website content rather than on search engine ranking services, here you are. But good content is like common sense, it's a valuable resource that you cannot just buy.

Jim McGee has compiled views and links on weblogs and knowledge management. Are "klogs" the next big thing for the corporate KM community? (via Timing)

What gives an attorney with a weblog and a PayPal account? An e-commerce. Some companies have paid billions to build fantastic money-loosing e-businesses when a bunch of free- and self-service toys are just good enough :-).

Damelon has documented his journey to improve comments on his MT-driven weblog.

On the path to the ideal comment system, weblogs are missing one basic feature of classical discussions/forums systems: be notified when someone has replied to one of your comments, or simply added a new comment to a post. That would facilitate everybody's life and encourage discussions, otherwise you are required to check posts on a regular basis to find out if there is (or not) a discussion going up.

So I'm going to invoke the lazyweb for a "MTNotify" plug-in that would:

• allow me to subscribe to a particular post and be notified by email when a comment or a TrackBack has been added to it
• on weblogs that allows for threaded comments, allow me to be notified when someone replies to a comment of mine

Perl and MT gurus, please! ;-)

P.S. the first action could be done through RSS but I find it very impractical. Just subscribe to Joi Ito RSS+comments feed to see what I mean. You get notified by your aggregator when Joi's posts change but have no quick way to decipher what's new (a post update, a new comment, a TB? You have to re-read the entire post and comments to find that out). I'd much prefer an email that reads "someone has replied to your comment at..." with all the beef and a quick link inside.

Ready to talk to your lawyer?

Inside the IBM PowerPC 970 (part I and part II) by Jon Stokes on ArsTechnica. Warning, this is deeply geeky, pedal to the silicon information about IBM's new 64 bits micro-processor that everybody expect to get its way through Apple computers. The rest of us just want this to translate into insanely fast machines. Six more weeks to go, it's about time.

Peter-Paul Koch, on Digital Web Magazine, has the recipe for the ideal web team (part 1 and 2).

This article is targeted at web agencies which want to create web sites, and that is pretty much about it. This is not clear from the title and notably this recipe would prove less than ideal if applied as is to create a corporate web team.

Let's see what the main differences are. To do that, I need to highlight the three main steps in the life of a web site:

1. Design. Going from a simple idea to a complete design.
2. Build. Going from a design to a fully functional web site.
3. Run. Managing the ongoing operations: hosting, content management, interaction with the audience, metrics, evolutions, etc.

A typical agency will focus on the design and build aspects and stay as far away as possible from the run side. A company may handle all or part of them but needs to focus in particular on the run aspect. If I need only one reason to explain why an agency web team is not ideal for a company, I will focus on this one.

The suggested team leader, for an agency, is a project manager. While a web site manager definitely needs project management skills, thinking of a web site as a "project" -- therefore giving it on the hands of a project manager, a project team, etc. -- is completely missing the point. A web site is a customer touch-point, and running your customer touch-points as projects can be a pretty bad idea. If you are serious about your web site, it is managed on an ongoing basis by someone who has your audience in mind at all times (this implies customer-facing skills and a good grasp of your communication and marketing objectives), the knowledge of the numerous aspects of this particular media (the techniques as opposed to the technologies), and more importantly the capability and power to decide what makes through the home page, the scarcest resource of a site, its most valuable real estate. This is my personal definition of a webmaster, but since I am an old-fashioned one(*), do not take my word for it and name your web site manager as you see fit.

You should see now why the "run" side of things takes precedence, for a company, over an agency (or a project team) "design/build" roles. There is a dichotomy here that, if underestimated, may create real problems for the company web team. This DW article, in an involuntary way but that is what makes it interesting, demonstrates the thinking gap of agencies regarding the run aspect:

Occasionally a Web site project will employ other supporting specialists, like system or server administrators. Their job is not to create the Web site but to make sure it can run on the system(s) meant for it.

Note how the hosting aspects are optional and disconnected from the design/build (creation) roles. But the real problem is here (emphasis is mine, where it hurts):

First of all, the team will have to select a server-side language. Will the applications be written in ASP, Perl, PHP, Java, ColdFusion, or another language? Although proponents of one language or another are quick to point out the advantages of their favorite and the disadvantages of other languages, in practice a server-side language is seldom selected because of these arguments.

Instead, the availability of competent programmers is the most important requirement. For instance, Java could be the best language for a certain job, but if your company only employs ASP programmers, choosing Java is not a good idea. Usually ASP can do the job, too, though it might be less efficient.

Without extending this judgment to the entire article, I think this is a very ill-conceived suggestion. While it may make sense for some agencies (if you have ASP-only competencies, do not sign for a Java project), it is one of the greatest mistakes of web development. Or, as a matter of fact, of IT development in general. Most developers do not have a clue of the "run" side of life, in the present case the hosting aspects. They will, as DW advises, pick back-end technologies according to their own agenda which can be far remote from the client's operational environment, leading to discrepancies such as an ASP/MS SQL site landing on a Linux/PHP/MySQL back-end. Here you can take my words for granted, I have seen this happening too many times for it to be a coincidence. "Good afternoon! I understand you are the webmaster, I have this brand new ASP site for you that needs to go live tomorrow morning, where do we FTP it?"

Agencies that are following this model, i.e. ignoring the run environment of their clients, are not serious. And a company that is not careful enough may be happy to get a brand new site for a cheap fee, only to discover that its hosting costs have increased and their site reliability decreased, on an ongoing basis.

I will not pretend I have the recipe for the ideal web team, a title that is making a promise difficult to match, and that some may find rather pretentious. Your mileage may vary but mine tells me that there is no such thing as a universal web team model, as each enterprise is different. There is a simple acid test every one can run: define what is a webmaster (or a web manager). You will get a lot of different answers, potentially one per enterprise.

But I hope that you will find this little advice valuable: your ideal web site manager needs to be strong on how to run a website to be better equipped on how to handle the design/build aspects. And if you help him/her to build a team that fits your and your clients' needs, here comes your ideal web team.

(*) Disclaimer: I wrote that article for my company e-zine about 2 1/2 years ago. It was edited to fit a different audience and the e-bubble had not yet bursted at the time of writing. Since then, about 17 web years have passed (the webmaster's life is a dog life, so I get 7 years for one) and more lessons have been taught. The apprentice hidden in the webmaster would like to rewrite this, but will relegate that task on maintenance mode unless there is significant interest out there.

There are strikes (grèves) all over the country today and more than a hundred protests are currently going on. Public transportation is reduced to nothing in Paris (which is enough to paralyze the whole city, since public transports are everything here). Me and the better half are taking a holiday and going to do our favorite sport: walking across the city for hours, hoping that the car traffic will also be minimal.

France needs to reform its retirement system, and as always with big, touchy political subjects, nothing can happen here without protests and strikes, as if they are prerequisites for any serious discussion. I'm all for the droit de grève but there is something odd in this perpetual movement and the fault lies in between the politicians and the unions with a share to both. Dialogues de sourds (dialogs between deft people).

Ce qu'il nous faut, c'est une bonne révolution ;-).

The French version of the W3C page "Buy web standards compliant web sites" consistently crashes Apple's Safari browser. Do not try this with lots of tabs open, you have been warned :).

OK, Safari is a beta, yet way less crash prone than other non beta browsers, but it's ironic to this on this particular page. If it's not the standards then... pardon our French!

I can picture a few people at Macromedia laughing out loud after reading Dave Hyatt's views on CSS (and rolling on the floor after reading the comments).

There has been a heated debate around CSS lately with numerous thoughtful comments and a few rants that are, well, rants. As Phil Ringnalda writes it, it is last week news and no one detains the absolute truth that would make contenders evil. And we'll always have the CSS Zen Garden.

But Dave's remarks reminded me of something I've heard repeatedly from usability people: the experience you can get from a web browser, in terms of user interface, moved us a decade backward. I believe I heard live from Jakob Nielsen himself -- yes I've attended a Nielsen/Tognazzini show once, flame me if you want -- that browsers "wasted ten years of UI usability knowledge". Don't tell me that he earns a living thanks to that, the point is: web standards are still, in the UI realm, way behind what can be achieved for desktop applications.

You may object that the web is not about applications but content and there are lots of work to do regarding the semantic aspects of it. I disagree with that because it is not an either/or proposition, the semantic web does not exclude web applications. Take a look at the Apple music store. It is all about selling content (music) to an audience. What is the key success factor Apple did work on to achieve this, that convinced the music majors to jump ship and got noticed by everybody? The user experience: how simple and straightforward the service is compared to existing online stores, and how much you can do beyond just browsing and buying. Do you see a web browser somewhere? None, it all happens in a desktop application: iTunes. iTunes is a remarkable example of a web application (it has notions of URLs, uses Internet standards for communication), and one that, if it proves successful enough, will mark a cornerstone in web development.

I am not trying to undermine anything or anyone's work. The web browser is, and will remain IMO a very important piece in the web user arsenal. The web standards are perennial and getting ubiquitous. Whatever I think about XHTML/CSS, I know this is the way to go and most of the debate out there is more due to the friction consecutive to real or imaginary pressure felt by those who are called names (old schoolers) by some CSS evangelists, than due to any real show-stopper (there is no Y2K bug for HTML4). But the limits of web browsers, consequences of both the standards' own limits and the quality of their implementation by software developers, are more palpable as the average user gets more demanding.

The definition of the upcoming XHTML2 standard raised fears that the normative body had lost track with its user base (the content producers). It seems this is not the case and the W3C HTML group is listening to feedback. Are we seeing a similar problem with CSS and designers, UI experts, browsers and applications developers?

The padawan would like to be enlightened, meanwhile he thinks that Macromedia and its RIA concept in Flash has a few good years ahead and wonders where Microsoft want to go today.

They surely do not want to let it go.

Pierre Carion and Damelon Kimbrough are two expatriated guys, a French in the US and an American in France, respectively. They have published their list of five behaviors they have adopted from their country of residence and five that they have imported and maintained even so they look odd to the locals. For your reading pleasure, Pierre's and Damelon's lists are published in both English and French.

The figure 1 on their respective post title let me expect that more lists are coming, but these first primers already give a list of the usual suspects that give a few helpful keys to understand our cultural differences. Since they did not compare their lists before publishing them, I tried to get the similarities that would highlight the main differences (that sentence sounds really weird, but you should get the idea). For the sake of comprehension, when I write here or we, I mean France and the French.

La poignée de mains (shaking hands) is a very basic sign of politeness in France. This habit comes from a very old trick: showing your good intentions by approaching someone with your right hand in clear sight and open, carrying no weapon, the handshake sealing a reciprocal acknowledgment (think of that, you geeks, when you use the concept of handshake in your software). It is a natural part of the body language, in such a way that it is very easy (for a French) to find out if a handshake is not spontaneous. It also carries a symbolic, yet strong visual meaning for others (e.g. when Chirac and Blair met after the Iraq crisis wreaked havoc, everybody here noted that Chirac did not shake Blair's hand and that absence of handshaking carried way more sense for the French than has probably been noted on the other side of the atlantic, or the Channel for that matter). It then falls onto one's cultural knowledge to (be able to) take it as a simple behavioral difference or a meaningful sign of (im)politeness.

Faire la bise (kissing cheeks) is not to be confused with the French kiss. In family and close friends circles, you kiss hello and goodbye when and where the handshake would be taken as too formal. It carries no sexual connotation so that two guys kissing each other on the cheek does not mean anything much beyond that they are related or close friends. But it is easy to understand how that can be even more disturbing for a foreigner than the handshake.

Ca va ? et autres artificialités (how are ya doin' today? and other artificialities) are a bit trickier. Pierre notes, on his changes, that he now has to start a conversation by some generality (how are you? how was your holiday?) before going to the point. Damelon notes that the French start with "ça va ?" but do not expect anything else than a positive answer. This hits a more subtle and more disturbing (at least to me) difference in interpersonal relationships. While the French may seem to have a strange sense of contact in the light of their handshaking/kissing habits, they have codes regarding interpersonal frontiers that will lead them to find any personal or general question asked by a stranger as either an invasion of their private sphere or an artificial behavior. I am no sociologist but cannot count the numerous situations where my acquired "multicultural grep code" had to intercept a "this is none of your (f*cking) business" and replace it by a "very well, thank you" and not take those general questions as artificialities coming from shallow or obsequious persons. My point is not to determine who is right, but to articulate something that seems to be a good source of clichés, the French seeing the Americans as superficial and everybody seeing the French as impolite or worse, rude.

Bonjour et au revoir (hello and goodbye) go in pair in France. I cannot say if there is a clear difference, just a regional one, but I often noted in California that you always get greeted when entering a shop and almost never when leaving. Each time we did say goodbye when leaving a public place, people looked at us oddly. Is that specific to California or was it because French people are expected to be impolite at all time and we did not fit in the cliché, I am clueless. In private circles, the goodbye ceremony may even be longer than the initial greetings. If not, it might be a signal that the food was bad.

Which brings me to the food, my favorite. What Damelon says about meal rituals being an art-form here is true. How are you supposed to fit a traditional festive family meal, that is (in order) apéritif, amuses-gueule, entrée, premier plat, entremets, second plat, salade, fromage, dessert, digestif in less than four or five hours? Plus, that is only lunch. And yes, seriously, blue and green are definitely not acceptable colors for a cake you little tasteless barbarians. Here, I must admit I have some issues with our American friends peculiarities regarding food. It's nothing big, but the waiters flying around with giant pepper mills asking you if you want pepper (not on my strawberries, thank you!) or the cooking of beef (rare, I mean it, and if you don't know what that means just bring me the cow. My recipe on how to cook beef: think of a big fire for 15 seconds, and it's cooked enough) are a bit hard for me. My best anecdote remains a business contact from New Hampshire who, while in Paris for about a week and walking with me near Place d'Italie, stopped suddenly and, looking like George W. Bush catching a glimpse of Saddam in the crowd, cried without an ounce of malice "a real restaurant, at last!". It was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

So you see, working out our cultural differences can be challenging, but it is definitely worth it. By the way, the fact that the French Chef Alain Ducasse has been named the best Chef in America is a positive sign that our friends are making progress. We hold you by your stomach, resistance is futile.

Just a few days after Wired uncovered a security issue on the Apple Store, the Register titles on a big security snafu at Microsoft's Passport service, that "could compromise the information stored on all 200 million users."

In pure and totally assumed bad faith, I would say that it is a regular habit of Microsoft to copy Apple but always make it bigger.

The FTC, which demanded security improvements on the service last year, is investigating and could fine Microsoft heavily if they find that the Redmond company did not follow suit to their previous order.

Microsoft has set up a page on this issue. You should check it if you are a Passport user.

I still persist in my opinion that leaving sensitive information on a third party servers remains a bad idea so far, and the level of trust you can have in a company or its developers' security skills is the big show stopper of any centralized service that handles personal data.

And some call it the land of freedom (via sale bête).

[Update: the lapidaire style of this post gives it a wrong meaning. Things like that seem to happen in many democracies, including France which makes liberté its first motto. I wanted to react to the fact that even in prominent democracies, some people with too much power have succeeded to convince others that they had to give up their civil liberties to get more security. This is a real lie, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Lapidaire translates too softly in English: concise, succinct, whereas in French it kept its latin root: lapis, lapidis, stone. Literally, thrown like a stone.]

If you really need any more proof that greed and stupidity are limitless, you need to read this MSNBC article about the patent that the US PTO has granted to Brian Shuster over pop-up ads (I couldn't find it on the PTO online database):

If you hate pop-up ads, you might blame Brian Shuster. A long-time figure in the Internet pornography world, Shuster recently received a patent for the ad format and is now looking to make some money off the sites that use it. And that’s just the beginning — Shuster has a long list of pending patents, including one for pop-up audio ads that cannot be turned off.

This article is full of other pearls, and it feels like reading an interview of Saddam Hussein explaining all the cutting-edge techniques of torture he has invented and are so much more efficient than what has been done so far.

How cute! I am indeed looking forward for those uncontrollable pop-up audio advertisements. I don't know if someone has patented the "audio-off" key, but thanks to Apple for providing one handy on its keyboards.

If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend the sci-fi novel The Space Merchants (Planète à gogos en français) from Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth. Well, it was fiction when it was printed, in 1970.

This weblog is indeed fulfilling my ongoing quest of learning and discovery of this wild web out there. I've just got my first one-way TrackBack from Houssein on this entry about weblogues.com. If you are not familiar with TrackBacks, check this tutorial first.

About a week ago, Joi Ito commented on his first one-way TrackBack:

I got a trackback on my iTunes entry (the first trackback there...) from a Japanese MT blog. Anyway, I went over to the site and it was indeed an entry about iTunes, but no mention of me or my blog. Also, no link back.

So, maybe I feel a bit hurt, but nothing illegal going on here. Obviously it makes sense to try to direct people to more information about a topic and sending a trackback to an entry about the same topic makes sense. It just felt weird. I had been looking at trackback more as a two-way thing, but I guess they are technically one way.

Timothy Appnel has added more thoughts to the discussion.

Re-reading the words from the TrackBack tutorial:

In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, "This is something you may be interested in."

This is exactly what Houssein did, and my weblog is configured to accept and publish incoming TrackBacks. Nobody did anything wrong, no need to send the troops to wipe the evil out. So why do I feel exactly like Joi?

The assumption that TrackBacks are a two-way thing, in the sense that a TrackBack is legitimate only if the TrackBack sender displays a link back to the recipient's site, is only due to the high degree of integration and automation achieved (I am referring to MovableType in that matter). To enable the publication of Trackbacks, or automatically send Trackbacks to other sites requires exactly one click on their respective check box in the weblog preferences. To trackback another site then requires nothing more than linking to a post from one's post, hence the two-way linking that is visible, expected, implied.

I am always welcoming feedback by all means, so I see a legitimate use of one-way TrackBacks. Despite being the developer of a plugin dedicated to weblogues.com, Houssein adds more thoughts to the picture, so it's worth reading (for the francophone audience that is, ironically the underlying subject of the initial post regarding language information).

However, it is easy to infer how this can be abused (think this as spamming a web site very much like spamming one's mailbox apart that you are spamming the site's audience, not just the owner). I have currently a simple door beel, I hope I won't need a dog or a doorman or, worse, weapons of mass TrackBack destruction.

Joi Ito announces the launch of LinkedIn, a site made to improve people networks efficiency. For the site's home page you can read:

LinkedIn is about finding people for projects or collaboration, and helping your connections do the same. LinkedIn makes your network more efficient, letting you keep in touch with the people you know and find the people you don't, but who are only a step away.

The comments on Joi's post, including my own, uncover a certain level of confusion people are having with the site that, I think, lies in the site's trademark: "Your network is bigger than you think™".

LinkedIn works around those lines (and the padawan draws this from his own fresh experience of self registration at the site, which does not allow him to do much at this point):

• You describe your professional self (what you do, your expertise, your goals and interests). The important point seems that this will categorize you to, I'm only guessing here, facilitate searches among the networks.
• You invite people you know to your network. The people you have invited are your connections.
• Once your network is not empty (and only then) you can perform searches and queries through your close connections.

The key point here is clearly not to help you discover new people directly (someone calls that trolling). A member can send you a request but (from the FAQ) "that request must pass through a chain of linked members, any of whom can decline to forward that request if they think it is not a good one. The last person to forward that request will be a friend or colleague (your connection)."

While I certainly see how this can help existing networks of professionals in some way, this approach suspiciously looks like an online and geeky version of the traditional, invitation only, private English club. I am no one to criticize that, nor is my intention to, but I still have to see how this translates to the promise that my network is bigger than I think through a process that is (again at a first glance) simply unnatural to me.

A key aspect of networking, to me, is the discovery. I am a public person in my company in the sense that I get contacted by all sorts of people who know me while I don't know them, with no entry barrier (no one or nothing will prevent you to email or phone me directly). The LinkedIn service is certainly useful but not meant to help you get discovered by an established network.

Adam Greenfield makes a point about "semantic-Web standard for friendship, affinity, reputation" and a constructive build on how a different approach could better "catalyze huge changes in the way we socialize, connect, associate and construct our lives."

That said, I would love to be invited to the party, so if you're within an established LinkedIn network that needs an Internet guru, webmonkey or chaos manager, please feel free to invite the padawan!

Doonesbury, a funny comic-strip by Gary Trudeau on France Bashing (source: sale bête).

[English below]

Marc-Olivier Peyer a lancé weblogues.com hier, un référenceur de weblogues francophones. La FAQ est silencieuse sur les weblogues bilingues, et je n'ose pas inscrire le mien vu la proportion écrasante de l'anglais sur le français. Encore une raison pour créer un joueb séparé et ne pas mélanger les genres, ce que je trouve tout de même dommage (pour moi, pas pour Marc-O, à qui je souhaite un franc succès).

Marc-Olivier Peyer has launched weblogues.com, a service similar to weblogs.com, and somewhow Technorati, for francophone weblogs. This raises again (for me at least) the question of bilingual weblogs, since those various services assume that weblogs are written in only one language. XHTML has a way to indicate the language used behind a link (only one yet, which is still better than nothing, you can see that in action on this weblog where all links pointing to French content are followed by [fr]). Weblog software, as far as I know, do not provide a convenient way to set the language for a post, which would give the webloggers, but most importantly their readers, the ability to customize the view as they wish (e.g. show only one language, or pass the language information for each post through RSS or communication protocols to allow for aggregators and online tools to use that information as well).

Weblog software and service developers, please mind your language!

I somehow missed this, so you probably have seen it already, but that Google search application in Flash is putting more bones* around Macromedia's RIA concept.

(*) pardon my English, it should read flesh instead of bones. But let's say that since this comes from Macromedia, their job is to provide the bones for the developers to provide the flesh. That will be my excuse for posting without re-reading while being in a hurry ;-)

According to Wired News, "Apple Computer said it fixed a security flaw at its online store late last week that could have enabled attackers to hijack customers' accounts and place fraudulent orders. "

Apple has licensed 1-Click™ from Amazon, which consists simply of storing the client's credit card information on file and allowing for buying online without having to re-enter this information during checkouts. Apple said that an attacker would not have been able to retrieve the full credit card number, however it would have been possible to place order on the Apple Store as well as the new music store.

Call me paranoid, but that is exactly why I resent storing sensitive information on foreign systems.

The flaw was discovered by an anonymous Canadian security researcher, nicknamed "Null", who simply looked at the source of the page that helps users reset their password:

After submitting his e-mail address, as requested by the system, Null said he noticed that Apple was hiding a string of letters and numbers in the source code to one of the pages designed to confirm users' identities.

By cutting and pasting that "hash" into a separate page for specifying the new password, Null was able to change his password without answering the secret question used to authenticate him.

Last year, Null identified a similar password security problem at the eBay website.

This kind of flaw is obviously due to bad coding practices, i.e. passing sensitive information from page to page where malicious users can view and compromise them during their journey through the browser. There are other well known examples -- I think specifically of the ability to compromise scripts variables in old versions of PHP which led to similar bad coding and flaws. Despite this, Wired throws Apple's own technology in the mud:

Apple had no immediate information about whether the vulnerability lies in the company's WebObjects software used at the store, or whether it would affect third-party sites running the software.

Wired would have been better serving its audience in hinting on the coding practices and remind programmers that this can happen with any technology.