Madd0's Tech Blog

Those of you who know me personally, know that, as active as I might be during the week, on weekends I'm basically a vegetable. Well, I'm exaggerating a little, but I do like to take it slowly on weekends. For instance, I like to stay in bed late. I prepare for this on Friday night by leaving my laptop and all my remotes, as well as books or anything I might need in the morning, next to the bed. This way, I can stay under the covers as long as possible, which is usually until my body requires some energy input, or would like to output waste. Anyway, I'm starting to digress here...

Another thing I like to do on weekends is spending a while with TED. I should actually say on TED, but your mischievous little minds will probably wander where they shouldn't. At least until I explain what, and not who, TED is. From their website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Every year TED brings together "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers" who give 18-minute talks about what they do. Speakers include Chris Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Philippe Starck, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Frans Lanting; and I've only mentioned the "famous" ones here (by which I mean, the ones I know), but there's also "regular" people: mathematicians, anthropologists, musicians, physicists, computer scientists. People you've (or at least I've) never heard about before, such as Majora Carter (actually her talk is the one that made me discover TED), Kenichi Ebina (not everything is talk at TED, there also onstage performance), Ron Eglash, Robert Full and plenty of others.

Most of these talks are described as inspiring, fascinating, beautiful and even funny. I definitively don't mind spending my whole weekend watching these people talk 18 minutes at a time. That's why I've decided that every week I'll be sharing my favorite TED videos on the blog. Every Sunday, when technically possible, I will post here the videos I like the most in an attempt to get you inspired by these wonderful people.

So let's start with the one that got me started. Majora Carter's Greening the ghetto:

And so that you can see how diverse TED videos actually are, here is an extremely funny video from Ze Frank:

See you again with more TED next week ;)

In the good sense of course… Today was a great day! It was a day of discovery, of rediscovery, of new things in general.

So, what’s all the excitement about?, you might wonder. Well, let’s see, more or less in order:

I might be onto a gig in Malaysia, how cool is that?

I was one of the winners of the Trick-or-Treat category in MAKE’s Halloween contest! I get the latest issue of MAKE magazine. Check out all the other winners in all categories. Next year, the Hack-o-Lantern will be mine :)

I installed Simon’s newest release of My Exposé for Windows Vista. It’s a CTP (Community Technical Preview), but it’s pretty stable and bug-free. It features a new placement algorithm, way more organic than the original grid placement. An improved trigger interface, so that you can write your own triggers. As a matter of fact, it comes with a new trigger for Voice activation and control (of which I wrote a first version, but Simon pretty much rewrote it afterwards). Oh, and it also comes with extremely cool icons, made by yours truly ;)

Last week I was notified that I had won a book, two books actually, on Certifdotnet, by getting a top score last month. Both books arrived today: Ajax : le guide complet and XAML, which happens to be part of the same collection as my own book. (Yes, all in French, sorry)

I got the serial cable for my Lego Mindstorms yesterday. I can’t believe how hard it is to get the right serial cable these days. What’s worse, it’s also hard to connect it to a “modern” laptop computer, since they don’t have serial ports any more. But no worries, I borrowed a RS232-USB converter from a friend (who will remain anonymous, just in case ;) ) and, after recharging and buying batteries today, I got to use my RCX again after about 3 years (OK, I’ll admit I could’ve looked harder…).

So, I’m geek enough that playing with Legos (albeit very technological and not-necessarily-childish Legos) is already exciting, I went ahead and downloaded and installed Microsoft’s Robotics Studio November 2006 CTP. Yet another CTP, but this one, sorry Simon, is way cooler that My Exposé. I guess the “new technology” factor + the “moving creations” one makes it more exciting. The only feature I’ve tried for now is the Visual Programming Language (VPL), which allows you to program your robots using drag & drop, but that was enough. I can’t wait to play with simulator and the runtime. I think it’s safe to say that this weekend I’ll be playing with Legos quite a lot :)

Finally, just before starting this post, I learnt that Photosynth, from Live Labs, is now live! Well, a preview is live… If you don’t know what it is, I suggest to get my OPML file and subscribe to most of the feeds to stay informed and/or click here for their explanation. There’s also videos here.

Well, I guess that’s pretty much all. Sure it might not be everybody’s idea of an exciting day, but then again, it’s not everybody’s blog ;)

Oh yeah, and I won 25 cents at poker, which doesn’t seem much, but I actually doubled my stack :)