Heri does Ruby on Rails + Web Design

This might be a good idea… or a very stupid one. 

I opened Adium yesterday evening, and 1 minute afterwards, I had a message from a friend who asked right away if I knew something about the habs

I don’t know anything about hockey, but I do know how to find information, and after searching a little bit, I had clues on what was going to happen. What was funny was that I saw how so many people were browsing the web or asking others (twitter or any other communication medium) what was going on. Many wanted to know, right away, before they’d go to bed. God knows why. 

Anyway, this brings Roberto Rocha’s poll on how one would pay for good journalism content. I’m not sure if content is the key. I do know though that if i had the right info yesterday, and if there was a way to “reveal” it to all those fans, I could have managed to have a couple of thousands dollars in bank. So here it is, people would pay for:

• personalized
• customized
• exclusive journalism

Je viens de lire un article intitulé Becoming a Renewable Engineer (comment devenir un ingénieur en énergies renouvelables).

L’article est vraiment terre-à-terre dans son approche, avec des astuces et une recette précise pour la personne qui veut devenir opérer dans ce domaine, comme par exemple concevoir une génératrice à la fin du programme.

Ça laisse songeur. Si j’avais su à la fin de mes classes prépa, je serais devenu un génie (sans jeu de mots) en télécom, ou en électronique, ou en informatique. Au lieu de quoi, on a passé notre temps à philosopher, à apprécier la vie parisienne, et à discuter… comme tout bon étudiant français fraîchement arrivé en école d’ingénieur sait le faire. Tenez par exemple, voici la liste des cours que j’ai suivi, dans l’ordre, à l’école Telecom SudParis:

• Mathématiques
• Électronique
• Unix (Introduction)
• Télécom
• Probabilités 
• Finances 
• Analyse des Données
• Radiation et propagation des ondes
• Architecture matérielle et logicielle
• File d’Attente
• Signaux
• Économie
• Statistiques et Optimisation
• Optique & Télécommunications + Circuits Haute-Fréquences
• Programmation objet
• Réseaux 
• Théorie de l’Information
• Mathematique Statistique
• Processus Stochastiques
• Signal et Modélisation de l’information
• Codage de l’information
• Traitement Statistiques des Images
• Communications Numériques

This is where you see that you need to be (a little) bit crazy to be a technology entrepreneurs.

Altough seriously, there are a few points:
- build on sales (as in traditional salesmanship), that’s how businesses are built, end of the story
- differentiate smart people vs smart asses (the guys from McKinsey)
- care about good people,

I’ve noticed it intuitively at Montreal Tech Watch or the other blogs I’m following on RSS, but here’s a post written by Nick Carr which sheds a new light on the audience shift on the web.

Admittedly, I am very late to the concept of blogging, having only started one about 18 months ago, but I did see the “power” and reach of blogging. You gather a few thoughts, and if there were a tad original and interesting, the “community” found it, commented on it, and re-blogged the post with other original thoughts. And once in a while, there would be conversations, where two or more bloggers discussing a hot topic.

It doesn’t happen nowdays, not anymore. I have the feeling nobody reads the entirety of a post anymore, and if they find something interesting, one of their first reactions is to put it on twitter or facebook or a bookmarking place like hacker news. A twitter/friendfeed discussion will then continue. The original post on the blog would then act only as a tinyurl reference, and not the central focus of discussion.

It’s easy to understand how we came up to this: It’s much easier to setup a twitter or an identi.ca account, than setting up a blog. It’s much easier to throw you current state of mind in 140 characters than writing carefully crafted paragraphs. And people do answer you immediately on microblogging platforms. Plus the fact that a user own their content on a tweet whereas it’s not the case on the blogger’s website.

For me, this means that the old dream of having a personal blog that would have a world reach, a presence on Google, and being able to reach out to the “community” and starting a discussion is dead. Yes, this old dream is a thing of the past. You will now just get heard on your immediate network (read: co-workers, immediate friends, family); unless it’s a professional blog, with a marketing plan and a sales team that would allow it to become the leader in a market. In a few years, we’ll probably just have a few huge web media companies, brand names such as Huffington Post, Revision3, Giga Omni Media which will have mass media influence, equivalent to the current omnipresence and power of Time or NYTimes.

You probably played a role in this, by having a twitter or a facebook account, and spending time adding links and notes here and there. The question left unanswered is: Is there a way to still keep the influence and the discussion? Probably not. Microblogging, social portals like Facebook are going to stay, and they’re the fastest-growing destinations on the Internet. Instead of fighting the change, you’ll have to embrace it. I’m looking forward to tools that would gather discussions, and highlight at the same the tinyurl’d web page. I’m looking forward for tools that would disseminate content on these platforms, but still keeping a trace (with a token for instance in the url) and show where it is going and landing. This is the kind of tool we’re heading towards to at TechEntreprise, but I won’t be surprised if there are new websites already working on this.

Original illustration: Atomization by Didier Bonaventure, a Montréal artist.

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.

_Note: this post was originally for MontrealTechWatch but I thought this blog was better for personal opinions_

I am seeing a lot of facebook-related posts accross the web, and it doesn’t seem to stop. In the screenshot above, I have 273 blog posts mentionning facebook in Google Reader (see above), which I use for tracking blogs in Montreal.

To put things in context: yes, I have a profile at facebook, and find myself logged in the service every two days, because of the occassional invite or the random be-friending. Second, yes, I admit they have done a very good job. The graphical design is one of the best you can get on the web; the flow between pages and the user interface are so well crafted that every other website seems broken compared to facebook.

This is all great, but if you ask me, I am not betting on it. It isn’t because of the data-mining advertising, where they now advertise lavalife, because I haven’t put anything in my relationship status. It isn’t either because they will soon make your profile avalaible to Google. Or because they force you to login to update your status, as opposed to other websites that have open interfaces. I understood that Mark Zuckerberg is determined to monetize facebook, and it’s his rights to do so, in any way he wants. And every other entrepreneur on earth would agree with him.

I registered to facebook one year ago, when they opened the platform to universities outside the US. It was very cool at the beginning and I spent a lot of time filling out pages and adding people. Seeing what your friends are up to was magic. But eventually my interest faded. And even though apps have revived the interest, I am pretty sure facebook’s design is fundamentally flawed. I follow what Joshua Porter is doing, and I think he nailed it, personal value must preced network value. In this case, Facebook has 0 value if you don’t added friends yet. zero. nada. You can’t make it do something useful for you.

Apple has released Safari for XP and Vista today

Some randoms screenshots from the web:

i.never.nu lots of random white spaces

Montreal Tech Watch : titles and dates are not displayed.

Le monde : random typography. Titles are disappearing too.

I have tried to see if the texts were changed to the background color or indented, but no, they are just hidden.

Bravo Apple.

Update: it seems that other users cannot reproduce the errors. I think it’s a problem with how it handles utf-8. (meaning users from the US don’t have the problems, but if XP is set to french, it f**cks up)

I am saying this because other french-speaking users have noticed the bugs too

I got 2 years ago a Toshiba laptop from Best Buy, a P35 with a P4 3.6Ghz processor - with other “great specs”. I had a deal back then and thought it would make a good desktop replacement.

It soon had overheating problems. It would shut down without any warnings (or if count full speed fans as warning). I sent the laptop to Best Buy because I had the full guarantee. They took the laptop for almost 3 months, just to tell me that they monitored the CPU’s processor temperature and found it to be “ok”. I know they didn’t open the laptop. I know also they just switched on the machine and see if it shuts down. Of course it won’t. You have to run photoshop and other processor-intensive apps to see the problems. Doh!

What I learned from that is: Never buy again from Best Buy and never get a guarantee from those kind of electronic shops (ie Futureshop for instance). Their tech guys are completely incompetent. And never get again a Toshiba laptop.

Now, because I was stuck with the overheating problem, I needed to find a solution. And I decided to go for the radical way, which is open the laptop, get the dust out and put a new and more efficient thermal grease. Irisvista has a guide so I did it.

After removing the LCD screen, the keyboard and all other removable elements

The motherboard with cleaned heatsinks

Still some dust left

Applying new thermal grease

I woud say that it was straightforward. The most difficult part was getting the keyboard latches out. You have to be very good with your hands.

Now the laptop runs Ubuntu and I haven’t heard the fans starting. The laptop seems like new.

I also have to say that even though Apple laptops seem perfect on the outside, the Toshiba engineers have done a better job with their laptops. Of course, it’s just an opinion seeing the build quality of the P35 vs an iBook’s motherboard but, still, it’s a great suprise.