April 2004 Archives

In March 25, 1957, six founding countries signed the Rome Treaty: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. They were joined later on by others:

• 9 in 1973: United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark
• 10 in 1981: Greece
• 12 in 1986: Spain and Portugal
• 15 in 1995: Sweden, Austria, Finland

At midnight tonight the European Union will count 25 members, welcoming 10 new countries to this unique space of 450 M inhabitants:

• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• Hungary
• Lithuania
• Latvia
• Malta
• Poland
• Slovakia
• Slowenia

This represents 20 languages -- the EU portal is already displaying them! -- and the European parliament is looking towards employing up to 500 translators to handle the 380 possible combinations. Translation represents 300 M€, 30% of the EU parliament's budget, a mere 2.5€ per European and one of the unique traits of this multicultural space. However, a negative side effect of the multiplication of languages is to reinforce the supremacy of English. In 2002, among the documents produced by the parliament, 57% were in English and 29% in French (to be compared to 45% and 40% in 1997.)

Discussions are already popping about the next wave, whether to welcome Turkey, whether to stick to the geographical frontier (I'd frankly welcome Morocco before Turkey for example and I find most politicians quite narrow minded when they back down to frontiers and, for the extremists, a supposedly "original christian culture" of Europe.)

Welcome to the new comers. The adoption of our upcoming constitution promises to be a challenging but very interesting moment. Me, I'm really looking forward into seeing the EU go far beyond the initial goal of peace -- that was not and still is not a minor objective -- and become the first cultural, social, political and economical space.

[Via Libération]

Last December I wrote a short review of the Belkin Media Reader, qualifying it as an overpriced plastic gadget. Belkin is having a second shot at the concept of linking digital cameras with iPods, with its new Digital Camera Link (I'm not sure of the name, since their web site lists at least four different names for this product, marketing droids please take note).

This new device drops the card reader for the ability to connect to a camera with a USB cable and to a third generation iPod via the dock connector. At $90, it's marginally cheaper than its predecessor. This time Belkin is setting expectations straight about the transfer rate, reading from the FAQ:

The Camera Link, with most cameras, can reach transfer speeds of 750KBps on PC-formatted iPods and 650KBps on Mac-formatted iPods. This results in a transfer time of between 3 and 5 minutes for a full 128MB card. The transfer speed can vary based on the type of digital camera being used. The optional verification process, if used, is roughly 20-30% slower than the data transfer speed due to the data compare process addition.

At worst, this would translate into roughly 50 mn for a 1GB card with verification on. Its predecessor was reported by to be even slower than that (one commenter reported 22MB/mn which is 370KBps). Again from the FAQ I get the feeling that the batteries (in both devices) must be in good shape and that the transfer reliability may not be perfect, two issues reported with the BMR.

At the moment, the compatibility chart lists only 37 cameras and one PDA, Belkin will need to test its device with more products instead of listing most of the popular ones under "untested but believed to work" (mine is listed there.)

I'm looking forward to reading a review of the Digital Camera Link, notably to understand what's in it that is not already in the transfer protocol and the iPod software. The feeling I already had with the BMR and that this new device reinforces, is that the iPod software already contains what's required to talk to a camera, and that what's needed is a USB-to-dock cable. If that's true, $90 for a cable is way too expensive.

This is a little tutorial on how I built a links weblog using Movable Type.

Happy Tree Friends:

The Happy Tree Friends are cute, cuddly animals whose daily adventures always end up going horribly wrong. No matter how innocently their day begins, it always ends in mayhem.

The Simpsons meet South Park. Watch the episodes (but keep the kids away.)

[Via Embruns]

Let me tell you, Jeffrey, at this point I think your only option is exorcism.

I just realized why I sometimes miss a few comment spams: when I receive the email notification, Apple Mail flags and files some of them as junk, which is only logical considering their content. So I have to watch my weblog Junk mailbox or find a way to prevent Mail to touch those.

Now I still don't understand why spammers bother to comment on 6-month old posts that get absolutely zero traffic. Zero traffic, zero PageRank or value in search engines thanks to MT redirection, zip, nothing, nada, useless. Hello !?! Gratuitous nuisances.

Apple demos an advanced HD video codec, dubbed h.267 or MPEG-4 Part 10. I'm glad to see that the MPEG LA Group is showing some signs of progress on this front, because as far as I agree with the "everybody wants standards except Microsoft" all videos I have compressed for the web in the past year have shown the superiority of Windows Media 8 over MPEG-4. It's a moving target where everyone gets its 15 min fame every other year, but so far MPEG-4 has not because MPEG LA lost two years arguing with its members. The famous VHS story told us that inferior industry standards can win, but I wouldn't hold my breath when Microsoft is in the competition.

I've added a links weblog to this site. Until I release the RSS feed (I haven't finished the MT trickery behind the scenes), you'll find it in the side column under "Food For Thoughts". Enjoy!

Erik J. Barzeski describes PulpFiction, his upcoming newsreader for Mac OS X. A promising application, very similar to NetNewsWire despite his opinionated views about competition (the current beta version of NNW has pretty much everything PulpFiction will have except labels, plus a weblog editor, and Ranchero offers a free version with NetNewsWire Lite).

How to perform a mySQL search and replace.

update tablename set field = replace(field,'search_for_this','replace_with_this');

If only I had found that earlier :-P

My publication pace has dropped in the past week, as I was fully busy working on my company rebranding, not a single day off in the past 11 days and 2 hours of sleep last night. Yet another interesting challenge in my corporate life. So far I've refrained from writing too much about my employer, especially because this is my personal site and not a corporate weblog, but today is a bit special and I'm going to do a shameless plug.

I joined Cap Gemini in 1998. In May 2000, we acquired the consulting practice of Ernst & Young and became Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Today, we become Capgemini.

Involved in both events, I learned a great deal about mergers, reorganizations, transformations and branding. Being a change agent in the soul helped me a lot and I will gladly let my memory discard the hard moments in favor of the fun and the positive side of things.

What's special about our present rebranding is that it's not yet another bullet-thinking consultantese sugarcoated with a fancy name (ah! Monday is already taken, what about Friday?). It's a (re)discovery of our brand, i.e. what our clients, former clients and prospects think about us. The amount and depth of work that we've conduced to find out how we are perceived in their eyes, our strengths and weaknesses confronted without complaisance to their expectations, is impressive and has led to us to a reformulation of our brand with the Collaborative Business Experience (here's the shameless plug along with some free PageRank ;-). Check our TV ad featuring Daren Cahill, André Agassi's coach, who presents himself as a simple guy who likes to do things well and helps the champion get even better. I can't help but think that this is a great counter example of a certain company picturing itself and its clients elliptically with an eagle diving to catch a fish -- I let you guess who's the client.

Here is what I learned from this project:

- collaboration is good but requires strong team players

- you definitely cannot work as easily and quickly on a PC than with a Mac when dealing with creative materials, notably digital video. I've done tons of small videos with a DVCAM, iMovie and iDVD in no time. Plus it took me literally five minutes to train other colleagues to do the same. And no need to tell me you can do the same on a PC, I can watch my colleagues fail miserably all day long and the looks of envy they give to my Mac

- the bigger the agency, the heavier the HTML code. Project managers are clueless on web standards. Best question: "what XHTML DOCTYPE do you want with this 99-vintage-nested-tables-transparent-gif design?" More on this in due time

- the DNS is your enemy, as are caches and people who keep phoning you that "the site does not work" but are incapable of sending an email with a URL

- if you're only having two hours of sleep, you're probably better staying up (especially if it means being woken up by the same morons starting their daily phone spamming)

- intranet weblogs will make a hit

- pick your suppliers carefully. In difficult times, the best ones will shine and you will be wondering how you could have done it without them

- if your logo hasn't been designed for the web, live with it and enjoy it on other media...

Jeffrey Zeldman tells us about his Great Panther Disaster of 2004.

How can you tell that this must have been a real disaster?

Easy, he abandoned the Royal We.

You should have asked, Jeffrey, we knew about both ways to eject your CD, not only the mouse button, but also the hidden pinhole where to insert an unfolded paper clip to force ejection. ;-)

The iPod mini seems to have a design issue with its jack:

Any time I touched mini, she would scream with unbelievably and horribly distorted sound. Whether I touched her elegant click-wheal, beautifully curved anodized body, or her shiny white bottom, mini would curse and scream. If left alone, mini would occasionally come back to her senses and sing in her clean voice, but slightest touch would bring back the darkest side of her.

There is also a big thread going on at iPodlounge.

That's exactly what I experienced last month at the Apple Store in Soho -- and I wonder why Apple let those faulty mini exposed to their clients, it certainly did not make me want one. One can suspect that the current absence from the shelves of the mini is related to Apple being busy fixing this problem more than facing high demand.

Are we back to the bad old days where wisdom mandated that one avoid the first generation of Apple products? Is this a consequence of this permanent quest for the cheapest outsourcing deal in manufacturing?

[Via Slashdot]

I've been told that a few non French-speaking people are interested in reports on France's new law on the internet (Daniel denounced the both of you). For your reading pleasure, here is the latest round, in synch with my French post about it.

In January, I told you about the LEN, Loi sur la confiance dans l'économie numérique, which provoked a flurry of outraged reactions from the French internet actors, last but not least the francosphere (aka the French blogosphere). Your servitor, in a midst of analysis about this law project, launched the first French Google bomb in the middle of this mess. An anecdote in the history of the French internet, but an ironic one since its victim claims his law will be a cornerstone in said history.

Today I'm happy to report that all the civic rage this project has caused, has had a positive influence on our senators, who reviewed the text for the second time on April 8. They acknowledged the civil reaction and removed two of the most critiqued dispositions, which they even recognized as useless and infeasible (as we kept telling them), namely the obligation made to hosts to preemptively scan all published content for illegal information, and the ability granted to the judge to impose to any ISP the obligation to filter (i.e. prevent access) internet content that's deemed illegal with respect to the French law.

This project is not yet a law, it will have to pass at least three more steps in our legislative process before being granted this status. I don't expect any significant change to it. However, it will indeed mark the history of the French internet by creating a dedicated legal corpus, an almost blank page in which our political personnel will not miss any opportunity to inscribe their thoughts, whether they are motivated by vision, innovation, ambition, reaction, lobbies, moral, denial or fear. Is it the end of France's Internet hysteria, or is it merely the beginning, who knows?

The Padawan is looking forward to writing about other interesting divergence of views between the old Europe (which is proud of its age as the Queen says) and the U.S., notably with respect to privacy policies and spam. Or strange similarities, on the contrary, like on electronic voting. One thing at a time.

The Metrics Reloaded:

Since the web standards movement began, people have been saying W3C specs were irrelevant, everybody uses Netscape 4 Internet Explorer 4 5 6, the browsers won’t change, the browsers haven’t changed, okay the browsers have changed I stand corrected but do you realize how much money we make from knowing the 17 proprietary ways to code a web page, you people are fools, you people are bullies, you people are Nazis, validation doesn’t matter, there are no benefits, my client won’t let me, nobody cares, users don’t view source, everybody has high-bandwidth connections, everybody has Flash, blind people don’t buy my client’s product, if they didn’t want us using tables for layout they shouldn’t have uh, okay never mind that one, CSS doesn’t work, XHTML doesn’t work, IE handles XHTML the wrong way and therefore there’s no point in using XHTML, there’s no point in using CSS until all browsers support CSS3, there’s no point in using CSS if you have to compensate for potholes in IE’s support, and so on.

I love it.

There are few professional things that keep me awake at night, but CMS are a big insomnia trigger and it happens that I'll soon get into yet another CMS implementation project.

Incidentally, I came across several interesting articles and posts about this subject. Here they are, tabs dump style:

• Content management: web publishing needs real discipline -- "Too many organizations take an unprofessional approach to the content they publish on the Web. Many web managers still seem to believe that if they get the technology right the publishing will look after itself. Quality publishing requires skill and discipline. Unfortunately, discipline is something many web teams are lacking." Well, sometimes the lack of discipline lies not with the web team but with the content managers!
• Content Management - A Process, Not a Technology -- "I feel like, most of the time, when the goals for a site are laid out the first thing on the docket it the design and look and feel. This has been going on for years and it seems like after all we’ve learned about the Web and how people use it we should know by now that without content there is no point to having a Web site."
• Enterprise Content Management is a Process, Not A Technology -- "CMS vendors have spent years trying to convince customers that content management is a technology, and with the right solution, the problems go away. But in talking to people at organizations big and small, we hear again and again that CMS projects fail." Ah, content management, ce douloureux problème !
• Why Content Management Fails -- "So many of the companies I’ve spoken to lately have complained about the content on their Web sites. They say it’s woefully out of date, growing out of control, and generally a complete mess. Almost unanimously, these companies have chosen to solve the problem by handing it to their IT departments." I guess I'm lucky I've managed to keep IT out of my arena for the past 6 years.
• People critical for managing content -- "Jeff Veen has captured a painful bit of experience that too many enthusiastic managers, captivated by technology, often fail to see: 'Turns out, after all the budget and time we spent, we really didn't need a content management system at all. We just needed some editors.'"
• Managing the Complexity of Content Management -- "Content management systems suck. Or so you would think from the strife heard from analysts and practitioners alike. And yet, many websites regularly publish vast amounts of information with superior control and ease compared to manually editing pages. So where’s the disconnect between what’s possible and the too-often failure of CMS?"

Oh, and although I know this won't please some zealots, Java is another thing that keeps me awake at night, so there is little chance I'm going to do the CMS + Java nightmarish combination again... [P.S.: yes Java sucks, I found an independent scientific study that proves it ;-)]

Lance Arthur may be a latebloomer, but he's a courageous one:

Oysters are amazing. Have you tried them yet? I recommend that you do.

The thing about oysters is that they look like huge boogers bathing in mucus. They are not an attractive food. Plus, I have an aversion to mussels, such that if I eat only the tiniest piece of one, everything inside of me will start rushing to get outside of me using the most convenient bodily orifice available, meaning all of them, at the same time, for hours. So I wasn't excited about hopping on board the oyster boat and sucking back a few big gobs of snot.

I tend to think that the most courageous human being in history was (and still is) the first one who ate an oyster. Frankly, look at an oyster. Not the one that is served to you, already opened, on a nice plate in a restaurant. Imagine yourself on the coast, seeing this ugly, malformed rock with razor-like edges for the first time in your life. Would you grab it? Would you go as far as to associate that with food? (Those who associate McDonalds with food may dismiss now, thanks.) You may think that the first one to eat an oyster may have done it by accident, discovered a broken one and saw there was something that, for their pre-historic standards looked eatable, was desperately hungry, or deeply stupid. I have the weakness to think it was brave, may be because it took me a lot of courage to eat my first oyster not that long ago.

You see, besides alcohol, there are a few social skills that are imposed on you as a French person. Oysters are a big one. Every year, at Christmas and New Eve, or at formal classy diners in the proper season, escaping oysters in France is Mission Impossible. I can't remember how I did it (although thoughts of "everything inside of me will start rushing to get outside of me using the most convenient bodily orifice available" associated with angry mom and ruined diner start to emerge from ancient memory), but I managed to convince my parents that I was perfectly happy with snails while the rest of the family would gob those alien things, alive, with disturbing noises. Though, my father kept threatening me that one day, I would be invited to an important diner and presented with oysters and that, no, it wouldn't be a good idea to... you know what.

I can't remember when I ate my first oyster, but I do remember that it was not easy to contain myself while doing so, less take any pleasure from it. The main reason is that there was no way I could swallow it without chewing it. Just the idea was, for a long time, unbearable. And folks around would maintain me in the belief that you should just swallow them directly. I've come a long way since, firstly realizing that there are lots of people around who pretend that they like oysters but would never chew one, secondly that the proper way of tasting them is actually to chew them a little, otherwise you'd better just order a glass of oyster juice (or sea water, with lemon, shallots and ketchup, if you're that disturbed).

Eventually, as a good social citizen, partly to please the inviting powers, partly in curiosity to educate myself on this food ritual that looks like a religious experience, I came to appreciate oysters. It took me years and more attempts than how many oysters the average French gobbler can eat in a single meal. I'm still picky about the kind of oysters I can eat. I still cannot bear the big ones, full with laitance. And you'll never, ever, make me eat one that I didn't see closed in the previous hour and that's not alive when it reaches my plate. Hopefully I live in a country where that comes for granted, so is the standard.

Lance puts up la morale de l'histoire so nicely:

My point is probably obvious to everyone but the former me I keep tattooed to my ass. Try everything once. Abandon fear of the unknown and the new. Strike out and do. Take chances, taste things, try on that jacket you could never wear in public, buy those shoes, go to India, talk to that guy you see every day and wish you could talk to, take off your shirt and pants and visit the nude beach, sing on the street, arrive late to work, dance your heart out, be foolish and brave and foolhardy and amazing.

Now, Lance, do what you say and come visit us in Paris. Please. We have great oysters ;-).

OK, I missed her, but she passed (almost) by my window ;-).

French lesson du jour -- Entente (nf) harmony, understanding. Cordial, e (adj.) hearty, warm, cordial. L'Entente Cordiale, The Entente Cordiale (easy!). See, not only we've been able to stand for a century without spilling blood between us, but we even attached that island to the continent. And I even know Brits who like steak tartare and snails.

Tea time.

If you liked the privacy policy and fine prints of Orkut, you will love those of GMail, the new email service from Google that once looked like an April Fools joke. Google Watch warns us:

This page is not meant to be an analysis of Gmail, but while you are at it, please read the privacy page and the terms-of-use page for Gmail. Note that if you delete an email, Google may mark it so that it is invisible to you, but might not really delete it. And if you terminate your account, Google does not guarantee that they will erase your emails. Google decides what to delete and when, not you. It's none of your business.

While Google brags that no humans will read your emails, the entire Gmail program will involve extensive automated profiling of you as an individual. Google will be sharing the non-identifiable portions of your profile with anyone they choose. If the ownership of Google changes, or there is a merger, the entire personally-identifiable profile will be available to the new owners or partners.

The Register highlights another problem, the ability for Google to link your emails to your search queries, which Larry Page explicitly didn't rule out:

"Once users register for Gmail, Google would be able to make that connection, if it chose to," Pam Dixon, head of the World Privacy Forum told the Los Angeles Times. "And if Google ever compared the two sets of data there are some people who would be chilled and embarrassed." Richard Smith, formerly at the Privacy Foundation pointed out that "Google kind of makes it easy to connect all the dots together."

Rather than allay these fears, Google's accident-prone co-founder Larry Page refused to rule out a future policy of 'joining the dots'. A simple "No, Never" would have prevented much of the damage. But asked if Google planned to link Gmail users to their Web search queries, Page replied:

"It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."

I don't know for you, but the idea that one can crawl my private correspondence to profit from it makes me sick. Even if they're using machines to do so. Google has definitely a strange idea of privacy.

I've been hit yesterday by a comment-spammer who used a new tactic, at least new to me. 14 comment-spams were posted in 8 minutes using 12 different IP addresses assigned in 6 countries (US, Spain, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, China.) Clearly this defeats the comment throttling feature of Movable Type, since it relies only on the spammer using the same IP for subsequent comments. It also further confirms that screening spammers via IP addresses is not a viable method.

While I cannot and don't want to elaborate on that, there is one glimpse of hope that the upcoming MT 3 will reduce the annoyance from those villains (and, no, I'm not talking about TypeKey since it seems potentially useless as an anti-spam tool.)

I still don't understand why spammers continue to pollute weblogs that use the latest version of MT, since their links will have zero influence on their position in search engines and that people are unlikely to click on links from comments as stupid as "cool article!!!". Either they're stupid, or there is still something they can benefit from in doing that, which I'm missing. Any idea?

Guess who's who?

Bravo!