Heri does Ruby on Rails + Web Design

Alors voici les choses que je fais ce mois-ci:
- Technologie à Montreal
- de la gestion de produits, et de l’évangelisation à iweb
- des évenements avec de l’alcool, et d’autres plus techniques
- des projets “stealth” avec des montréalais

Le mois prochain, sur la wish-list:
- bon, je cherche un appartement quelque part près du métro Laurier. Ne me demandez pas pourquoi,
- des concerts hip-hop sur le calendrier, avec les anciens du LDD 
- encore plus de choses à iweb
- la suite des projets “secrets”
- et puis j’ai trouvé un endroit pour refaire du kali. à suivre

Encore plus loin, sur la wish-list:
- j’ai une amie qui s’est corrigé les yeux au laser. c’est tentant mais je ne suis pas sûr si c’est sécuritaire
- l’idée de Montréal ou Québec sans voiture, c’est sympatique mais je pense que ca prend maintenant une voiture. à partir de là, reprendre alors le permis du kenya. ou repasser complètement le permis de conduire du Québec.
- faire de la vidéo. mais bon c’est aussi un terrain vague.
- apprendre un nouveau langage de programmation. Le C? le javascript?

Dans tout ça, je me rends compte que ce sera extrêmmement facile de continuer sur tout ce qui marche déjà, par contre, les nouvelles idées ca va pas être évident. C’est peut-être l’idée de cet article. Écrire publiquement pour avoir une pression supplémentaire.

I’m late on the news, but I’m now blogging at iWeb, with articles and posts about web development and web hosting issues. There is also a french version for each article.

It’s a new experience, although not totally different from Montreal Tech Watch. So far, there were articles on usability, CSS frameworks, accessibility, management of traffic peaks, even Halloween costumes etc.

A few comments on this:

• The folks at iWeb are young and awesome to work with
• In many regards, it’s like a technology startup
• They are based in Montreal, with 3 data centers and still expanding thanks to lower costs of electricity in Quebec.
• blogging about web development forces me to organize my thoughts. And of course, it’s an opportunity to do deep research about a topic.

Hopefully, at one point, I’ll do also Research & Development and get the blog off the ground, to make it a reference in web development. I’m not sure about marketing tactics used by other websites such as the infamous Smashing Magazine, but will also give it a try.

A journalist from the New York Times asks the question: “Inside Nairobi, the next Palo Alto?”

This is a provocative title — maybe as sensationalist as the alarmist news reports that were published at the beginning of the year. While I’d do anything to see a technology boom in Nairobi (or in Madagascar), Nairobi has still a long way to go before comparing it to Palo Alto, such as solid infrastructure and mass adoption of technology.

There is something true though to the article; as it tells how the technology landscape and usage is radically different in Africa, compared to North America. As the reporter writes, people don’t use computers but cell phones as their main technology tool, with the example of mobile web payements. This is true in East but also in West Africa, confirmed by friends in Senegal and in Ivory Coast. A friend told me the example of fishermen getting real-time information about fish prices, allowing them to ask for better prices. Other novelty examples is news and alerts crowdsourcing, by the Ushahidi team.

With those 2 simple examples, it doesn’t take long to envision mobile services made for Africans. I’m brainstorming for instance with a friend on a new mobile social networking app for Mali. The service is to be monetized by sms, by usage, (via routesms if you are curious). It won’t also be sticky, meaning that usage should be ocassional and not pushed to users.

I get my news nowdays mostly from blogs RSS subscriptions. These blogs are around my centers of interests, and prove in the past to provide valuable insights. I also visit some time to time news from Hacker News or general websites like lemonde.fr.
I found out that those were valuable websites that filter the digital noise on the Internet, and allows me to keep-up-to-date with what’s important and meaningful for me.

The thing though is that it does not take into account serendipity, and of course I find myself overlooking some piece of news that were not reported in these selected news feed. And I find myself looking for a tool that would get all important news, but would also feature from some time to time a page or a post which might not be a high-profile blogger, but who would bring up a new idea or something meaningful.

Techmeme is known to sort technology blog posts, especially the startups/web2.0 “stuff”, and does a good job in doing so. From what I know, it features on its homepage new items that gets lots of trackbacks or mentions in other blogs, a sort of social validation much alike Google’s Pagerank algorithm. I also noticed it also takes into account keywords used in the headline.

Techmeme is an interesting project, although in my opinion, it encourages “memes”, and I’ve seen many posts that were just paraphrasing a featured blog post. It’s also a firehose of information, and you will see yourself loose a lot of time if you decide to take your technology news from that website. And as I said, there is no serendipity or “small blogs” in techmeme.

I’ve been thinking about this, and there are some tools avalaible out there (AideRSS or Technorati’s API come to my mind), I’ve done a quick architecture of the whole thing, and it seems trivial to create a blog aggregator that would do what I describe. And I thought it would be great to do a Québec-theme blog aggregator, or one around Madagascar.

Of course, this is just an idea stage. I know it’s technically feasible, I only need to find the time. And yes, get a web server. But yes, finish those other ruby on rails projects. But in a time where everyone and their pet has a blog and is media, I think this would be a tool that many would use.

I lived for 7 straight years in Kenya, and this shaped most of my personality, my music tastes, my view of the world. I also learned how diversity can enrich a nation, but at the same time, each group keeping its own culture and characteristics.

In this sense, Nairobi with its diverse population coming from the Europe and North America, from South-East Asia, all over Africa, and of course the infinite diversity of Kenya ethnic group was a symbol, an oasis compared to the continent. When the Rwandeese genocide erupted, at the other side of the Great Lakes, people would thought that it would create instability in Kenya. Indeed, Kenya and its neighbors received its share of refugees, adding up to the contigent from Somalia, but stability and good life prevailed.

One of my “real” souvenir would be watching The Lion King with its “hakuna matata” motto; and I think it captures one part of the kenyan spirit.

The events that started in Kenya from 24th December are very sad, and the saddest thing here is that they were mostly started by a tiny group of politicians (I could count them on 2 hands). I know most kenyans don’t have any problems at all living with other ethnic groups. Politicians whose only sole envy (ego) is to be in power are ready to sacrifice the soul of their country just to get 4 more years.

This is is important because as history showed, they might just succeed (cf Zimbabwe)

Nevertheless I am confident in the turn of the events. This time, it will somehow get solved, as there is too much in stake. And more importantly, I believe in the Kenyan spirit. I saw just a few days ago about a documentary about a Canadian-Somalian-Kenya singer, named K’NAAN, who authenticity and generosity is inspiring.

Je vous souhaite beaucoup de santé, de succès et de prosperité

Pour 2008, j’ai beaucoup de projets, et j’espère trouver le temps pour en parler sur ce blog:

• Blitzmaker est un web app pour les gens qui travaillent sur le web,
• Montreal Tech Watch, encore et toujours,
• un projet sur des “social tasks”,
• un jeu persistant massif (MMO) - on verra si ce sera purement HTML+javascript, ou si je peux faire un client Flash,
• Blitzweekend, un camp pour créer des produits en 48 heures. Ce qui est intéressant, c’est le coté compétition entre équipes.

Avec d’autres montréalais, j’ai aussi 3 projets en cours:

• un gros projet pour créer un portail sur montréal, avec un annuaire, des cartes etc. rien d’extremmement innovatif, mais ca va prendre néanmoins beaucoup de travail
• j’ai aussi un projet sur les microformats. je ne sais pas si ca va marcher encore, mais on verra tres bientot (en mars) si ca “poigne”

Bien sûr, ce sont juste les projets web, ruby on rails, à Montréal… question de rester focusé sur un sujet.

Yesterday evening, someone broke my locker, while I had 1 hour of sports, and took my wallet. Apparently, the !@#…\ who did it also broke other people’s locks.

I called the bank, and they told me that they registered 5 transactions in the last 30 minutes, with a total of $700. They had the exact amount, the different shops the thief went to, and the time.

Needless to say I am really pissed off. There was also the Carte d’assurance maladie in the wallet, the debit card, $100 in cash, and other cards that will take me days and weeks again to renew. To make it even more painful, the police said they are closing the case, because there are no witness(es). I think this really got me angry because there was a way to get the place and time where the thief went. But they don’t want to make the effort, something that seems to be well-known by thieves.

Now, I am not going to blame anyone about it. It’s best to do something about it (I am an engineer at heart anyway) so I was wondering if there was any website out there that lists all the lost/stolen objects. Some sort of mix between google maps pins with a database, and asking people if they have seen something. People would register the valuable objects, pets, people they have lost or have been stolen, and visitors are then asked if they saw something at a particular hour. An idea, anyone?

Yesterday, I learnt that my neighbour was dying because of her cancer. This was a hard news to stomach. Even though I didn’t know everything about her and her past life, I knew from the beginning she was a good person, the one that would care and support you.

Today, I also learnt that my instructor in eskrima was also gone, without notice. Like yesterday’s news, I was just left dumbfounded. This was just the sort of thing I took for granted.

But then…well when you think about it, I really shouldn’t be sad about it. I knew my neighbor did everything she wanted to do in life. She was leaving in peace. For eskrima, I know we gave everything we got. 100%. 200%. It was short but intense, with memories of us running like wild in Montreal parks during the hot summer, doing figures in front of _surprised_ hassidic jews. We couldn’t have done more. And maybe that’s all it matters in the end.

Today, a friend then told me “an era is gone”. I agree with him. And like people who would shout “the king is dead, long live the king”, I wanted to tell him back “an era is gone. Long live the new era”

Time to move on then. And I will remember giving 100% of myself.

Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC, about the new YouTube rival:

“we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”

The current president of Madagascar, Marc Ravalomanana wants a new constitution which will erase the 6 autonomous provinces, make English the official language, and erase the word ‘laicity’ from the current constitution

In Canada, this would be equivalent to deleting provinces and uniting Canada under a single governement, make the country _religious_, and announcing French (or German) as the national language for Canada.

Media always talk about Hugo Chavez’s hatred for the US, but this is the case of one head of state who mimics George Bush.

This is arbitrary and completely crazy. It would made my day if it was a joke, but we are dealing with a new constitution that might actually gets voted.