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Very nice video created by Melih Bilgil as part of his diploma project PICOL illustrating the history of the Internet from 1957 to 1990.

He uses the icons of his design to represent every element of the story. That and a well written voice over, make for a very interesting, easy to understand video. I’m actually considering asking my teachers to play this as an introduction to our web development classes.

Noticed the music by Matthias Grübel? I liked it a lot. Click on his name to visit his very weird web site, filled with photos and poetry, or go visit his myspace profile for more music.

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 ;)

My post from two days ago was only a title and a photo. The title was a question in French: À quand 100% de métros automatiques ?, which can basically be translated "When will we ever have 100% automatic metros?".

For those of you who don't follow world news, I'm alluding to the public transportation strikes that have been affecting us (i.e. people in France) for the last 10 days. Forcing most of us to miss work, school, squeeze ourselves into the few running trains or find some sort of alternative means of transportation. All this because most of the 16 lines of one of the "best underground transit systems in the world" have pretty much stopped working. All but line 14, Paris's most recent and fully automated line, which has worked as usual during the strike.

Since it's obvious we have the technology (all new subway lines in France are automatic) I guess there are pretty much only two reasons why all traditional lines are not yet automatic:

1. Money.
2. Unemployment.

Indeed, I learnt yesterday in the 8 o'clock news that a regular subway line employs about 300 people and that automating a regular line costs about 480 million Euros!

Then again, I read an article today in which the government estimates that "the strikes have cost the economy up to 400 million euros ($593 million) a day."

I'll let policy makers make decisions, but apparently we're already on the right track (pun intended) since Parisian subway line number 1 should be going fully automated by 2010. This is one of the lines with the most traffic, due to its strategic (touristy?) stops: Arc du Triomphe, Champs Elysées, Place de la Concorde, Musée du Louvre, Bastille, ..., and making it automatic should improve its reliability.

According to the RATP (the Paris transportation authority), if this conversion's ROI is good enough, other high-traffic lines such as numbers 4 and 13 could go automatic too.

This is the first in an irregular series of posts where I bring you nice surprises I've found while browsing the Internet.

I found today's surprises in my RSS aggregator just waiting to be shared with the rest of the world*.

Both of today's surprises come from totally different sources, but they do have one thing in common: innovation. Both concern technology that is not yet available, but that's totally awesome. They actually have a second thing in common which I discovered just before writing this post, but I'll let you watch the videos first to see how keen your eye is.

So, today's first surprise comes from the O'Reilly Radar post entitled Context Aware Image Re-Sizing. How cool does that sound? If you're not convinced, I'll let you see the video then:

Now what do you think? One of the things I'd really like to do with my blog is enable a FlowDocument-like experience for reading my posts. Unfortunately, you can resize and reflow text as much as you like, images will always be a problem; well, until technology like the above is widely available, of course.

The second surprise is called LucidTouch and I found it through Engadget. The name by itself is not very compelling to me, but take a look at this demo:

I've always wanted an "Origami" PC because I feel that in the future we'll probably all have one of those in our bags most of the time. If technology like LucidTouch actually gets into devices like UMPCs, I'm sure my feeling will become a prediction.

So, did you figure out what else these two technologies have in common?

Well, even though the second one is said to come from Microsoft Research on Engadget, really only one of five researchers works there**. The other four work at MERL, where the two researchers of the image resizing application also work.

MERL?

Yes, MERL: Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, the American branch of Mitsubishi's R&D. If you've never heard about them, you might want to take a look at their impressive project list.

Well, that's all for today, but the Web is host to plenty of secrets, so expect more Surprise bags in the future.

* Yes, I know that if I found them in my aggregator and if they're already on the Internet, they have already been shared with the rest of the world. That unfortunately is not true when I'm talking about "the world," because when I say it I'm obviously talking about the only world that matters: the one that revolves around me.

** I am not at all implying that because only one researcher comes from MSR they've had lesser impact or influence on the development of the technology, I just want to bring more attention to Mitsubishi to make the link between both videos.

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.

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 :)