Madd0's Tech Blog

So, the "Fox" (I know it's not a fox) is coming out for the third time today, but someone decided that "today" starts sometime when the sun hits the American continent...

I personally didn't want to wait until 7pm to get software that must definitively be ready right now (I sincerely doubt that Mozilla would put "finishing touches" a couple of hours before release) so I went to spreadfirefox.com to see what could be done.

It turns out all you have to do is play around with their download URLs a little and you can the fresh bits before their links are up. Since I'm nice, I'll share a couple of them and then let you figure out the rest:

• Firefox 3 for OS X in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for OS X in French: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=fr
• Firefox 3 for Windows in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for Linux in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=linux&lang=en-GB

That wasn't hard, was it? ;)

Have fun!

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

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 ;)

...with tafiti!

Tafiti, from Swahili "do research," is a new Silverlight application by Microsoft that approaches searching the Web in a rather original way.

Of course, egomania dictates that I must demo by tafiti-ing (?) my name, so here's the video (captured with CamStudio):

As you can see, you get to preview, filter and save results in categories such as Web, Blogs and Images.

There's also the tree view, which presents results in a, albeit, useless, but interesting way.

To test tafiti by yourselves all you need is a couple of things:

1. A browser. It can be any of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari on Windows or Mac.
2. Silverlight. Which you can get from silverlight.net, or better yet, just follow directions when you visit tafiti.com for the first time.

My only regret is that tafiti obviously uses search results from Microsoft Live Search, and I've already commented on what I think about those. As a matter of fact, look at search results from Google and tafiti, respectively, for the keyword "tafiti":

Sure, one of them looks nicer than the other, but who do you think I'll visit more often to get up-to-date results?

I don't know when this went online because I've been mostly disconnected lately, with the moving and all, so I haven't been able to keep up with the blogosphere, but still I would like to present you a new Microsoft site.

First, do you know about Channel 9 and Channel 10?

Channel 9 was one of Microsoft's first initiatives to open up to the general public. Today it's a website where developers, IT pros and other geeks can learn everything about past, present and future Microsoft technologies via videos, forums, blogs, etc.

Given Channel 9's success, another website of the same kind was created: Channel 10. Channel 10 follows the same principles, but it isn't necessarily as technical. It's branded for "technology enthusiasts."

And now, after 9 and 10, Microsoft has created a new website: I'm talking about Channel 8.

Channel 8 is for students.

The site will obviously concern technology, as do the other two channels (this is Microsoft after all), but all content will be created with students in mind: what students need, what students want, etc. Given the community-oriented nature of the site, it should be easy to stay on target.

You can take a look at the video presentation by Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives at Microsoft, and then start talking about it to your friends. Hopefully, content will be flowing soon and this site will be as much a success as its two predecessors.

So enjoy the site's cool looks for now and go back often to see how it gets better and better.

I’ve got plenty of invites for Joost and, this will sound weird, I don’t have enough friends to give them to. So, since Joost is encouraging me to give them away however I want, the first 999 people to request one, will get it. Use the comments.

Here you have their promotion video:

Joost is a way to watch TV on the Internet. Their software is pretty good, unfortunately their content is not. But I hope it will get better as service matures.

I know I have a tendency to abuse exclamation marks, but this time it is really important.

On Sunday, January 28th, 2007, Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist was reported missing at sea. As of Thursday, Feb. 1st, the US Coast Guard has called off the search, having found no trace of the boat or any of its emergency equipment.

Follow the story here.

Through the generous efforts of his friends, family, various communities and agencies, detailed satellite imagery has been made available for his last known whereabouts.

The satellite images have been put on the Amazon Mechanical Turk and you can help with the search efforts by dedicating some of your time to looking for Jim’s boat.

So put whatever you intended to do on the Web today aside for a couple of minutes. I am sure Jim’s family will appreciate it very much.

Click here to go to the Mechanical Turk.

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 :)

Que vous utilisiez Internet Explorer en tant que navigateur principal ou simplement comme un dernier recours, si vous avez déjà utilisé Firefox, sa fonctionnalité de recherche vous manque probablement lorsque vous “travaillez” sous IE.

Plus maintenant ! La IE team a publié sur leur blog une liste de Must Have Add-Ons for IE7 (add-ons indispensables pour IE7, mais ils marchent aussi avec les versions précédentes ) et parmi eux se trouve Inline Search, un add-on qui remplace Ctrl+F (mais pas Edit > Find on this Page) avec une barre à outils avec la même fonctionnalité de Firefox.

Voici une courte vidéo démontrant l’add-on. Je suis désolé pour la qualité. J’ai fait un version AVI de très bonne qualité mais qui faisait 1,19 Go, donc j’ai dû garder la version WMV de 965 Ko. Pour économiser ma bande passante et pour tester Soapbox, j’ai décidé de uploader la vidéo sur ce nouveau site de Microsoft :

Cliquez ici si vous ne voyez pas la vidéo ci-dessus.

L'autre jour Patrice nous dirigeait vers FeedIcons.com où on peut trouver le fameux logo RSS utilisé par Firefox et Internet Explorer 7 "sous toutes ses formes".

Or, sur ce site je n'ai trouvé que des images au format bitmap ou au format vectoriel mais que je ne peux pas ouvrir avec les logiciels gratuits que j'utilise (j'insiste, sur les logiciels que j'utilise !).

Je me suis donc amusé à recréer le logo avec mon éditeur d'images gratuit (pour l'instant) préféré: Expression Graphic Designer.

Voici le résultat :

Cliquez sur l'image pour télécharger le fichier XPR.

J'ai testé Google Blog Search aujourd'hui avec "mauricio diaz" comme mots clés et, à ma grande surprise toute la première page m'est dédiée ! Même les posts de test y sont...

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