I met Hugh MacLeod at LeWeb ‘08 this week and he was kind enough (yeah, I know he was there for that, but thanks anyway) to draw something on my business card:
As Hugh predicted, I am twittering this, too ;)
I chose to remove my contact info to avoid spam, but it’s not like it’s hard to actually contact me. Follow me on Twitter or hit one of the links on the right.
Sitepoint is giving away its book The Art & Science of CSS during a two-week “Twitaway” (5 days left as of the writing of this post).
The book looks pretty interesting from what I browsed when I got it a few minutes ago, so I actually recommend it at least as a quick reference for some pretty useful CSS techniques.
What do you have to do to get it? This is where it gets interesting:
Follow @sitepointdotcom on Twitter*! You’ll get a DM with instructions on how to get it.
I’m quite a fan of Twitter (you can follow me if you want), so I really like the idea. If you’re worried about your “stats”, don’t: @sitepointdotcom will follow you back :P And if you’re worried about spam, you can always stop following the account with a single click ;)
* If you don’t have a Twitter account (although I really encourage you to create one, you might like it) you can also get the instructions by e-mail.
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.
At Google people don't make mistakes, they're just overeager to launch a new product. At least that's kind of what they imply at the Official Google Blog when they announce A fresh take on the browser.
This fresh take on the browser is nothing more than an open source project, called Google Chrome, that the Mountain View company will be making available for download sometime today (probably in the morning Pacific time). It hasn't even launched and it was announced with a comic book, but still, it has already been touted "Windows Killer" by some.
Open source browsers are not precisely something new. Changes in the interface are something we're starting to get used to even though it might hurt a little at the beginning. Sure, there are a few technical changes from what we're used to that might make Chrome feel different from other browsers and Google does have an advantage over others in the field since they don't have to fear antitrust suits with every line of code. But how is this supposed to kill the OS?
It's supposed to run JavaScript like a charm, OK. But will it run Flash? Will it run Silverlight (or Moonlight for that matter)? (Believe me, this will be important in the near future.) Oh, and it needs Windows (and only Windows for the moment) to run on. And how's it supposed to run the large number of applications that are open my computer right now? On JavaScript? Please! So really fail to see who's getting killed here...
Anyway, here's a screen shot of some Google results this morning:
Curiously enough, none of the links points to a real page. Funny how when your site does it, the search engine doesn't really place it in first position.
All this said, I will be testing Chrome by the end of the day as objectively as humanly possible. I'll let you know how it goes.
No, we won't be doing any necromancy; it's just a title...
But hasn't it happened to you that you want to visit a web site and it's down? It can be for any reason: the web site was recently taken down, the servers are overloaded, your hosting provider didn't backup your database like it should've ("personal experience" you say?)
Anyway, so what can you do?
You can always visit the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has been archiving web pages since 1996, but you'll probably not get the recent content you are looking for.
An alternative is the Coral Content Distribution Network. They keep a distributed cache that's easily accessible by appending .nyud.net or .nyud.net:8090 to the host you are trying to visit, for example:
If http://blog.madd0.com/default.aspx is down, you can always try http://blog.madd0.com.nyud.net/default.aspx or http://blog.madd0.com.nyud.net:8090/default.aspx (I find the latter to be faster most of the time). It's that simple!
Now, if you're anything like me, you'll probably forget what the text to append is, as short as it might be. So, you can do what I did: create a button for your browser's links toolbar that will do it for you! Need help? Just add the following links to your bookmarks:
You will have to right-click on the links (I use the second one, personally) and select "Add to Favorites..." on IE or "Bookmark This Link..." on Firefox (if you're using another browser, you're probably smart enough to figure this out on your own). Then select the "Links" folder on IE or the "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder on Firefox.
It's not always fast. It doesn't always work. But it has worked for me plenty of times. So I put this here in the hope that it might work for you too.
Photo valrico.runner
I was reading this Dr. Dobb's article about ASP.NET MVC by Dino Esposito and, when scrolling down to read the end of it, I got this window:
Now obviously, the big red X is my addition, and it's there to show what a waste of precious screen real estate is going on.
I was going to write post talking of what a shame it is that today's Web is mostly vertical. Indeed, I can safely say that, form a technical point of view, it's currently a PITA to format articles such as this one to fit in a browser window in a way I call (and I'm sure others do, too) newspaper-style, i.e. by using several columns spread horizontally. Especially if you take into account the fact that horizontal space varies from one computer to another, and all the other constraints that come from working in the heterogeneous environment that is the WWW.
Now, the above statement is true in the general case, no matter what, but before criticizing a site in particular, I decided to take a look at it on a different browser than the one that I use every day, since the latter is slightly tweaked for comfort:
As you can see, the screen real estate was not being completely wasted after all. Of course, "waste" is a relative term. I'm sure all those ads are very important to Dr. Dobb's.
I still look forward to a future Web where features like CSS3's multi-column layout are implemented correctly across browsers and platforms. But then again, we all know I'm an optimist.
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 ;)
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.
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 :)
