November 2005 Archives

Mozilla released a brand new version of Firefox yesterday (or actually this morning for us here, Californians used to get up earlier ;-)). Great update for a great browser, but my 4-month old rant to Firefox developers and Mozilla marketing luminaries still stands true! Off to manually discovering where to download the beast (which gets a new home at Mozilla.com, and yet another click to find it...). But there's hope in this news from Mozilla Europe: "New automatic update system makes Firefox an "install once and forget it" application."

P.S. It shuts off the Live HTTP Headers and Google Pagerank Status extensions. It updated the Web Developer Toolbar automatically, which is a must have for me.

Joyent buys TextDrive (and merges the two totgether, which makes for quite a nice bunch of interesting people and services) -- see official press release and a word from Dean Allen. I suspect this will generate a flurry of questions in the TxD Forum about the future of TextDrive and the rationale for such a combination, which I find very exciting. As I prepare my next professional decade on the internet, I've been spending some time thinking and digging past the web 2.0 buzz, and it's full of stars ideas that are nicely coalescing right now and will get past a potential Bubble 2.0. A few of those are:

• Less as a competitive advantage (small is beautiful -- also worth reading: the virtues of KISS)


• What happens when the time to develop a new application approaches zero? (This combined with the above items, and suddenly offshoring feels less of a panacea, doesn't it?)


• These and Intelligent Reaction leads to software as service (look here vs. here, here and here vs. here) and appliances done right


• Add Mr Moore in the datacenter combined with broadband adoption (it may be slowing in the US but Europe goes mad for it)

Europe's eGovernment Observatory boasts that Europe dominates global e-readiness. That's great news, however I'm missing the 37Signals, the Strongspaces and the Joyents of Europe. I want to see them here and now, in French, in German, in Dutch, in whatever language we enjoy in our diversity. I really do, seriously.

Allan Jenkins sez: don't mix your identity with your employer's and points to interesting readings.

The message: Guard your identity and don't mix it up with your company's identity. Otherwise, you risk being "disappeared" if you leave your job or get fired.

And in pure blogosphere style, Gunnar Langemark leaves the following comment:

How important this will become in the future, and how much it will be a fact of life for employers, I don't know. I believe that top talent will have more clout, and be able to set their own terms if hired. Also real top talent will become increasingly "non-employable" - meaning that employers will not be in a position to lure people into their companies. There'll be a whole new ecosystem around self-employed, small-bussiness, free agent types of business, and contract work will become much more attractive, as it should be. So being an employee will become more and more like having your own company. I sometimes bragg that I do as I please. I don't ask permission. The worst thing that they can do is fire me, and how bad would that be?

Reminds me of a former coworker who once stated about the company we both worked for at the time: "my brand is bigger than yours". He had a bigger footprint in the business than his employer had.

Can't tell you how much it resonates with this particular blogger.

[Source: Tidbits and more, the blog of Donna Tocci who's working in PR for Kryptonite (and who will obviously not blog about their blogosphere-powered lock fiasco as François notes)].

In the last 12h I've received a flurry of emails, sporting titles such as "Registration Confirmation", "You visit illegal websites" (from the FBI, nice ;-)), "Your IP was logged" (from the CIA, even nicer!), "Mail Delivery Failed", "Your Password", "hi, ive a new mail address", "Your password has been successfully updated" (from Mac.com), etc. They all include a ZIP file that itself contains a virus (infecting Windows).

It seems to be well spread and/or quite active, I've seen it on four addresses including a corporate one, and already received two reports from work, including the now traditional complaint that we're spamming people^*.

Don't open attachements in unknown emails. And switch to Mac OS X or Linux if you can ;-).

(*) To circumvent anti-spam initiatives from ISPs, spammers now use spambots in the form of virus that infect Windows PCs (I've yet to see that on other OSes) and using those PCs to send spam through their own internet connection. They also crawl the user's disk drive to find email addresses and send spam to those, faking the "From:" address also from the harvested information. This explain why you can receive spam and viruses from companies or people you know, without them being involved in those activities (or even infected by those viruses). So, don't blame them too quickly.

Compare this site: www.capgemini.com
with this one: www.advection.net

This is not the first time we get our corporate site ripped off by clueless or unscrupulous people (cf. Google cache is my friend) but this time, with a pure CSS design, it's never been easier to steal a design. Here they copied our XHTML structure and CSS stylesheets, and just changed a couple of colors.

They got a mention at Pirated Sites, so it's been going on for some time.

Unleashing the dogs now...

Macromedia is conducing yet another blog authoring survey, which starts with:

This survey is designed to help the Contribute development team better understand the requirements necessary to deliver a compelling blog authoring tool. The team is now forming an Advisory Council to help refine our feature set. By helping with this survey, you'll be considered to participate in the coming Advisory Council.

The survey looks much shorter than the previous one they did (no words on blogging systems or interfaces/APIs, it's more centered on media formats and external hosting facilities such as Flickr and alikes). They forgot MS Office 2004 in the list on one question, so their results are going to be false on that one.

For a shorter, Macromedia Contribute is a slimmed down version of Dreamweaver that is much simpler to use and geared at content contributors (you can't design a site with it, only manage its content). I wrote on their Web Publishing System back in the past, and dreamed of a Contribute-MT integration once (on which a Macromedia Contribute Technologist asked for more info, which I gave but heard nothing back).

I still haven't managed (yet) to convince Daniel Glazman at Disruptive Innovations that Nvu (or rather a sister product) could (and should) venture alongside Contribute. Desktop applications for content management are still way ahead web-based ones, although with things like AJAX and XUL they're making a lot of progress in the UI -- i.e. feels like an application -- space.

It's a weird feeling to start your day by reading alarming emails from folks overseas worried about "the events in France" and asking if you're safe, before your brain slowly wakes up from "What the Hell?" mode to catching up from local news channels. Troubles up from one suburb to ten and 400 cars burnt during the night, France Inter (radio) saying that lots of foreign TVs are shooting and exaggerating things with bordering those events to civil war... the weirdness feeling goes up. This was a couple days ago, now ten days after it started we're at 1200+ cars burnt just for last night with some, but too few, hints at things calming down. Radio news this morning mentioned words like Paris and Molotov cocktails being thrown in buildings halls.

On the rare occasions when politicans break their current astounding silence, their words are mostly appalling in that they show their total lack of foresight and control over the situation. (And their incapacity at doing some root-cause analysis, that might show their lack of vision and the consequences of their past politics, or lack thereof.) A French reader sent me this quote from Nicolas Machiavel (my translation certainly will not match his style):

« C'est ce qui arrive dans toutes les affaires d'État : lorsqu'on prévoit le mal - de loin, ce qui n'est donné qu'aux hommes doués d'une grande sagacité, on le guérit bientôt ; mais lorsque, par défaut de lumière, on n'a su le voir que lorsqu'il frappe tous les yeux, la cure se trouve impossible. »

"It's what happens in all State affairs: when one foresees evil -- from far away, which is a gift made only to men of great sagacity -- one cures it promptly ; but when, by lack of light, one has seen it only when it's in front of all eyes, the cure is impossible."

France is one of the rare European countries where the police (which is under the authority of the governement and in particular the ministry of the interior, Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy) has no (zero, zilch) official prevention role, only a repressive one -- because, for mostly all political sides here, prevention is an exclusive part of the "social sphere". Previous attempts to build a "local proximity police" with this prevention role in mind have been nullified by Mr. Sarkozy. The same who never fails to catch any opportunity to attract media attention that can serve his presidential ambitions, never giving any vision but executing on populist subjects (e.g. immigration, his current favorite) like a pitbull on a log of salami¹. The same who spammed one million people a few weeks ago by email, illegally and even using one supplier convicted twice for fraud, brilliantly inaugurating political junk email.

The same who bought Google AdWords ads for the word "suburbs"³ (as well as insecurity, security, gauchism) just after throwing fuel at the fire with blunt statements such as "I'll clean the suburbs with a Kärcher" or the now infamous "I'll get rid of those scums"² that started it all ten days ago.

Political opportunism at its worst. This is pathetic.

Sorry for this political rant, but as I look behind at the results of the last presidential election, at today's events, at how we "negociate" in this country (lastly a union highjacked a boat in a power-play with the government), and at the choice of prospective candidates, I can only fear that 2007 won't be any better. I don't think this country is doomed, but its current political personnel certainly shows more signs at being part of the problem rather than of the solution.

Notes:
1. Paternity of this apt metaphor goes to Jason Hoffman, aka J. Xander Man.
2. He was responding, while in a mediatic trip in a troubled suburb, to a woman asking him "When one will get us rid of those scums?". The media, always keen to shoot for provocation first and report on the truth later, only aired his response to her, also forgetting to report that he met with local youngsters before. This was taken as pure provocation by the youngsters there (and lots of other people). Still, he's a media wore who perfectly knows to be prudent as well as blunt in front of a camera, and with the Kärcher statement the guy is really on a provocative mission, ready to set things on fire for his personal ambition. Which is totally irresponsible for the ministry in charge of security, and it's only logical that some people want him demoted.
3. Evidence here (in French but you'll recognize suburbs ("banlieues") and Riots in the suburbs ("Emeutes en banlieues") which is a commercial link on the right to a page boasting that Mr. Sarkozy is preparing his project for the presidential election in 2007.

Ross Mayfield (SocialText) doesn't trust Microsoft's approach to the web, that's what Robert Scobble acknowledges in listing 12 reasons Web 2.0 entrepreneurs aren’t using Microsoft’s stuff. He's forgetting at least one more reason: reliability. I dumped all the Microsoft "stuff" out of our web platform years ago because I got bored of having the OS, the web server, the search engine, the database and who knows -- or doesn't know, you'd be surprised at how little the IT people really know about Microsoft's products and how to diagnose issues with them -- would be the next stuff crashing at the worst possible moment. Not that LAMP is without faults, but in the very rare occasions where we've got a problem, it's always been diagnosed and fixed within hours. Simon Willison says it's taking charge of your own destiny, I couldn't agree more.