D’un naturel plutôt ponctuel, je suis arrivé précisément à 21h, comme requis dans la charmante invitation de Mobistar. Il pleuvait une pluie fine qui vous glace les os, et avec la chaleur résiduelle du jour, une certaine moiteur régnait, ajoutant à l’ambiance tendue d’un petit groupe d’une centaine de personnes qui faisaient déjà la file le long de la Toison d’Or.

Parmis les plus de 5.000 personnes qui s’étaient enregistrées sur le site dédié à ce lancement, une centaine de personnes avaient eu la chance d’être sélectionnées comme V.I.P. Malheureusement je n’en était pas. Je me glissai donc dans la file des client non V.I.P., déjà un peu frustré - mais c’est tout le but de ce genre de lancement organisé.

Ayant compris du petit groupe la mécanique de la soirée (attendre sous la pluie), je reçu un ticket numéroté 085 d’une demoiselle qui pris la précaution de m’indiquer qu’avec ce numéro je ne passerais pas a la caisse avant 3 heures du matin, histoire de m’encourager.

J’étais bien résolu à me démerder pour trouver un raccourci mais je commencai par prendre mon mal en patience. Pourtant après une bonne heure d’attente humide, ponctué de jatte de café tiède, je commencais a en avoir franchement plein les couilles. J’ai alors usé de mes crédits de journaliste pour aller me mettre a l’abris et boire un verre de Coca tiède en attendant minuit.

Malheureusement mon badget Press ne me permis pas d’entrer avec les “VIP” et je repris ma place dans la file comme un bon citoyen. Finalement, c’est vers 1h30 du matin qu’un Emakinien (que je remercie au passage) me fit passer discrètement la barrière nadar, pour me permettre d’acquérir le “precious”. 4h30 d’attente pour pouvoir écrire ce putain de post et frimer pour quelques heures?

Non, en réalité je pars demain matin, rejoindre ce bon vieux Thierry Tinlot, pour 3 jours de délire au North Sea Jazz Festival à Rotterdam. Je vais pouvoir shooter, twitter, surfer, uploader, blogger, emailer, à la vitesse de la 3G. Good night!

As text editor I use Coda for its well designed interface, integrated FTP browser, grep integration, CSS editor, DOM inspector, integrated terminal and ability to share live code over Bonjour using the Subetha engine, with better developpers than me at Emakina.

Unfortunately Coda can’t grep through a bunch of files, so I still have to use BBedit for massive re-factoring.
I tested SubEthaEdit, the free TextWrangler and ForgEdit. All of them are great text editors too, but lack some polish in their interfaces.

I also use Transmit from Panic as my main FTP software. It’s strong at syncing a whole sites with my servers and just well integrated in MacOS X. It syncs FTP bookmarks over .Mac which is practical when you work nightshift from the office to home Forklift is cool too, especially it’s FTP to FTP feature and integration of Amazon S3.

I experiment a lot of Open Source PHPware, so I download the latest trunk version of my favorite projects from their subversion repository. After using svn X (free but ugly) for years I have recently switched to Version. The current beta 4 is very stable and it’s interface matches perfectly with Coda. I like the way it present the recents changes in a Timeline, that you can unfold to click every file for a quick diff. Juxtapose Folders is also useful and free. But the diff presentation of CornerStone are by far superior. CornerStone is another Mac OS X style Subversion client and I’m still wondering if I’ll buy Version at the end of the beta or go for CornerStone.

But to integrate update of Open Source software I have modified, I use Changes, a stronger diff tool which allow me to compare a whole project then integrate code changes bits by bits into my version. Previously I used DiffMerge (free but ugly), but I was tired of having false positive because of Mac OS X / Windows linebreak differences.

On my development servers, after using Mac OS X Server since the beta version to 10.3, I switched to Tenon iTools. They have great support, keep updating their Apache, PHP and MySQL packages and are a three clicks install on a brand new Mac mini. Its web based remote administration interface allow me to control my servers from anywhere, anytime, even on a Windows machine. When developing offline (during holidays in remote locations) I use MAMP on my MacBook Air.

To edit MySQL databases I currently use phpMyAdmin like everybody, but I just stumbled upon Navicat. If you know some better MacOS X native MySQL editor, let me know in the comments below.

Seen both of them at Google Zeitgeist 2008 in London. Couldn’t believe my ears!

It is 14.45 and you’re waiting for check in. Another flight delay is communicated. And you’re waitin, and waiting … Very boring and depressing. Lastminute.com knows everything about flying, including the malfunctions. Therefore… (source Maarten)

Source

It’s new beta version is an AJAX enhanced interface developed using Google Web Toolkit. ContactOffice developers have added numerous features to GWT (drag and drop, marquee selection, contextual menus, sortable columns, resizable panels, …) and are showcasing what is - according to Google engineers - the most advanced web application built using their java based revolutionary AJAX web application development framework.

The latest beta version of ContactOffice (release 1.2.002) contains numerous fix and is very close to being the best in his class of applications. It is finally fully compatible with Safari, in addition to its outstanding Internet Explorer and Firefox/Mozilla support. The new beta also features numerous new functionalities and enhancements :

- Wiki
- Info panels
- Threading for emails (only for paying subscriptions)
- Categories on docs, notes, contacts, bookmarks, …
- Right click or Ctrl click for Mac users to access contextual menus
- View document as PDF (.doc .ppt .xls .txt + openOffice extensions)
- Import Google contacts
- Account backup now includes the notes
- Details panel fro emails and contacts can now be collapsed or expanded as well email headers
- ‘Print contact’ is now available
- Some drop-down menus were not displayed for FireFox/Mac users
- Better interface color contrast
- Tons of UI enhancements and bug fixes

If you are in web development, you really have to test this web application to have an idea of what is the state-of-the-art today in a web interface!

If you are a java / ajax developer, you should try working for this company.

If you are looking for a solution to manage your group online collaboration needs, you have just found the best on the web.

Thanks Crusty for finding this gem!

• Donnez d’abord (temps, conseil, visibilité, …) pour recevoir ensuite.
• Choisissez bien vos associés afin d’éviter les conflits, surtout ceux d’ego.
• Partagez-vous les rôles et les pouvoirs en fonction des compétences de chacun et pas de l’historique.
• Surtout créez votre réseau de contacts avant d’en avoir besoin.

Innovation

• Soyez curieux, remetez-vous souvent en question, étudiez éternellement.
• N’hésitez pas, même si vous êtes le seul, à lutter contre une opinion populaire.
• Copiez, assemblez des idées existantes, ou détournez-les sans complexes.
• Lisez beaucoup (offline et online), et ne perdez pas de temps en foire et salons.
• Partagez vos idées avec un maximum de monde, et écoutez beaucoup, n’ayez pas peur d’être copié. Ce ne sont pas les idées qui valent mais l’énergie et le talent qu’on met a les réaliser.

Business Model

• Les grandes idées sans business model sont les idées les plus dangereuses.
• Eviter comme la peste les business models ne reposant que sur la publicité.
• Privilegiez les business models scalables techniquement sans devoir recruter du personnel proportionellement à votre croissance.
• Commencez par travailler le volet revenu de votre business plan avant les dépenses et le plan marketing et communication.

Communication

• Pour le lancement ne faites aucune publicité, mais communiquez beaucoup avec vos utilisateurs, la presse, vos partenaires.
• Pensez à exploiter les canaux gratuits de l’internet (buzz, viral, web2.0, relais, …)
• Une fois votre part de marché acquise, pour occuper le terrain et empêcher de nouveaux entrants, faites beaucoup de publicité.
• Si vous avez les moyens, plutôt qu’avec un bon généraliste, travaillez avec les meilleurs spécialistes, Emakina

Technologie

• Ne surestimez pas les compétences internet des utilisateurs ou le temps qu’ils peuvent consacrer à votre service.
• Faites tous vos choix en fonction des besoins de vos utilisateurs, et non pas en fonction de la paresse de vos developpeurs.
• Sauf pour les prototypes, ne misez pas sur des languages ou technologies exotiques, car en cas de succès il vous sera difficile de recruter.
• Débutez avec des solution légères, des produits open source ou gratuits, prototypez avec des technologies souples avant d’investir dans l’architecture state-of-the-art.
• Découper votre projet en unités, testables individuellement et assignez-les a des équipes différentes. Developpez unité par unité.

Factor is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language whose design and implementation is led by Slava Pestov. Factor’s main influences are Joy, Forth, Lisp and Self. As of December 2007, the current version of Factor is 0.91. A 1.0 release is planned in 2008.

Factor is a general purpose, dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. The Factor implementation includes a VM together with an extensive library. The VM is written in C and provides basic runtime support and memory management. The library provides building blocks for applications. Factor is compiled to machine code, and on Mac OS X, can be used to build stand-alone native applications.

Factor began as a scripting language in a Java game project and quickly grew into a general-purpose language. While this was happening, the limitations of the Java virtual machine were making themselves apparent, and an effort to write a native Factor implementation with a minimal core in C was kicked off. The native implementation was bootstrapped from Java Factor, and soon thereafter native Factor became the de facto implementation, work on the Java implementation stopped.

Factor development is led by Slava Pestov, with extensive help from a community of contributors and testers.

My first real computer was probably a calculator, a Texas instrument 58c I played with it for a few monthes, learning its logic, primitive algorythms made of sequences of maximum 5000 instructions… but I really started programming in a little known language, Forth. It was the only programming language available on my white Jupiter ACE. I immediately loved the beauty of it’s simplicity. With the included manual I could learn the language in a day. Only a LIFO stack to push and pop data and a few instruction to solve about any problem. I could not do any floating point calculations but it was a great exercise for the mind to try reducing complex problem to the shortest suite of simple instructions. It was 1985 and about the same time I bought myself a book which was a general overview of programming languages. It featured quick review of BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, ADA, LISP, and more. I still own a copy somewhere and this book opened my mind to a form of human creation that since then fascinate me : the art of designing programming languages which in the hand of programmers can theoretically solve any computing problem.

I am always looking for those new languages and it’s my main subject of conversation whenever I meet one of those contemporary geniuses that do real programming. So I decided it was about time I share my discoveries in this modest geek blog.

I’m reading a lot lately about it. A lot of scientific research try to demonstrate empirically that this theory of physics could explain the whole universe in one complex formula. I think it does, and for a practical demonstration of the String Theory just go to any Brazil beach. After this little joke, I should reveal that this post is my first experiment with Yahoo Shortcuts, a Wordpress plugin that allow you to enrich you blog posts with Yahoo content, maps, photos from flickr and many more Yahoo content…