Madd0's Tech Blog

Times change and smart people adapt in consequence. That’s pretty much the definition of evolution, right? And it’s those who adapt, the fittest, who will survive. Well, today the one place where change is taking place is on the Internet and I honestly believe that only those who can adapt will survive.

A few months ago we learnt that the Queen of England (it’s actually the British Monarchy, but the Queen sounds better) had a Royal Channel on YouTube. We know that the Prime Minister has a Twitter account. Yesterday, President Elect Barack Obama addressed the Nation on YouTube:

Sure, the New York Times reported today that once he takes office President Obama will probably lose his e-mailing rights, but in the meantime, I think that using the Internet is a positive sign of someone who understands the world today.

A few weeks ago I posted the pictures of the Imagine Cup conference that took place in Paris and during which I had the opportunity to interview Bill Gates.

An event like that was of course filmed and now the videos are also available for online viewing and for download from the web site of Microsoft France.

There are six videos:

• French (well, French and Costa Rican :P) finalists from 2007 (French)
• Bernard Charlès, CEO Dassault Systèmes (French)
• Ora Ito, Designer (French)
• Andrew Herbert, Microsoft Research Cambridge (English)
• Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman (English)
• Q&A with Bill Gates (you can see me here again) (English)

Click on "Voir ..." to view the video online or "Télécharger" to download.

Have fun!

I'm currently reading a pretty good book by Lawrence Lessig called Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. It's a very interesting analysis of the state of copyright law in the United States that takes a look at the past, the present and the future. I'm only half-way through, but I still heartily recommend it.

If, like me, you don't live in the US, you're probably wondering why you should care about US copyright law and US lobbies, etc. Well, simply put, because bad ideas have a tendency to escape the United States and spread throughout the world, like a tumor spreads its deadly tentacles throughout a healthy body (and there you go, I'm now probably banned for life from entry to the United States for exercising one of the rights Americans appreciate the most.)

Anyway, if you do not have the time to read the actual book (freely available from the book's web site, by the way) or you do not like reading in English, you might want to take a look at this presentation that, even though it does not really summarize the book, does cover some of its main points:

OK, maybe the title doesn't mean much, but I couldn't think of anything better. So how about you just watch the videos?

I was barely finished with last week's TED post when I stumbled upon the first of this week's recommendations. I know I said that TED videos were only 18 minutes long, but I guess when you're Jane Goodall you're inherently expected to need a little more:

As inspiring as Mrs. Goodall might be, I would have preferred a longer talk from Alan Russell, the speaker on this video called Why can't we grow new body parts?:

For a long time I've followed the same routing on Christmas day:

Wake up, unwrap presents, have breakfast, watch a movie, visit relatives.

Of course, over time, things have changed slightly. Most notably, the time I wake up, that fact most presents are actually opened the night before, breakfast became brunch and most of my relatives now live a 14-hour flight away.

Movie time didn't change, though, and today's was The Devil Wears Prada. I actually enjoyed it, But I'm not going to discuss movies tonight. After all, the blog's supposed to be "mostly tech" ;)

It just so happens that sometime later I was catching up with some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to (well, I did have extra time with the relatives living far away and all) and stumbled upon an entry from Eileen Brown with a couple of parodies of the movie I'd just seen. They're made by Microsoft to promote the Unified Communications suite. They're funny by themselves, even funnier if you've watched the movie. Here they are:

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 ;)

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.