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Migrating to Tumblr

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:00:00 +0000

I'm migrating from blogger to tumblr (jonmaim.tumblr.com). Here is a very useful online tool to help you do duplicate your posts. What I'm trying to do now is to go to tumblr with the comments !

I want a better, simpler blog system

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:07:00 +0000

So I haven't been blogging so much these last months ... As I'm spending my blogging time on Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed and others this should be reflected here in a more proeminent way than blog badges. The perfect blog system for me thus would be something that mix my activities on social sites and the sporadic blog posts I'm writing and all of this on the same page. I haven't seen any cool and simple system for this yet. So, a page with only javascript that connect to all my social networks, so that it's very easy to set up.

What you would see on this page:

Twitter updates (including preview pictures sent from iphone)
All other public updates coming from Friendfeed (videos would be playable directly on the page)
Blog posts should should stay at the top of the page longer than anything else.

Hacking this friendfeed api sample page would be a good start.

Cloud Database: MySQL vs Amazon SimpleDB

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:48:00 +0000

A database in the cloud for your webapp. I see 2 choices:

Using Amazon SimpleDB,
Using MySQL on an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

MySQL on EBS
Pros: Cheaper + full RDBMS
Cons: Not scalable at first

SimpleDB
Pros: Instant scalability
Cons: Not open source (have to stick with amazon web services) + more coding for advanced queries (simpleDB = key-value store) + possible inconsistency ?

After this simple analysis sticking with MySQL as the main DB seems a better choice, and maybe later use SimpleDB for certain tasks. Any thoughts ?

Video I need to watch again ...

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:58:00 +0000

... when i need motivation !

Spore Creature

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:53:00 +0000

EA Maxis has released Spore Creature Trial before launching the complete Spore game. I have finally tried it out and I can tell you that's really fun !

In the first phase you edit your first creature, you begin with a random spinal column and add piece by piece leg, arm, hands, mouth, etc. There is so many choices to build you creature that the rendering is unpredictable so that usual pre-designed skinning techniques are not possible. If you look closely in the edit mode, you can see that they use a metaball technique to get nice smooth connection between body parts.

Then you can customize the texture of your creature. In the trial you have a limited choice of texture with some nice shader effects, just enough to personalize your creature.

Finally you can test your creature in a small arena, see how it behaves when walking and playing some fun animation clips, you can even add some baby creature of yours. The skeleton of your creature is also unpredictable, so they created an in-house tool called spasm to create animation clips that can fit morphologically different creatures.

On the marketing side, this product is really advanced and really tailored for smooth word of mouth. You can very easily take pictures and shot videos that you can upload directly to youtube. Of course you can instantly email pictures to your friends and share publicly your creatures on sporepedia. Last but not least a small avatar picture of your creature is automatically created, so that it's really no hassle to embed it as profile picture on social networks if you want to. And if you prefer an animated gif, that's also possible !

Enjoy my creature and its family:

Dogs don't know it's not bacon

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:01:00 +0000

What else ?
(retweeting @davewiner)

Flex 3 Canvas Chain of Command

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Here the abstract class hierarchy in actionscript3 for a Canvas ui component :

Container -> UIComponent -> FlexSprite -> Sprite -> DisplayObjectContainer -> InteractiveObject -> DisplayObject -> EventDispatcher -> Object

That's pretty scary when you know that it's the main branch without all the other implements, isn't it ? Let's try to know what's the features of each of this inherited classes.

Container -> scrolling, clipping, borders of child components.
UIComponent -> visual components and low-level events like keyboard and mouse input.
FlexSprite -> dumb.
Sprite -> basic display list building block.
DisplayObjectContainer -> if you want to have children and z-order (front-to-back) between them.
InteractiveObject -> interaction from mouse and keyboard.
DisplayObject -> x and y position and transformation matrix of an object.
EventDispatcher -> dispatch events and can be an event target.
Object -> root.

Papervision3D for OpenGL Coders

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:40:00 +0000

Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for Adobe Flash technology. It's not using the GPU yet, so it's still a bit slow. But the incredible advantage is that you get a multi-platform 3D scene running on 99% of the computers of the world without any setup of any kind. For that I'm ok to drop some frame rates ! When coming from the OpenGL coding world, you need to be aware of some low-level concepts to tackle pv3d faster :

Pv3d uses a left-hand coordinate system (OpenGL uses a right-hand one).

A scene graph is included no need to build one. So every DisplayObject3D object (for example a plane primitive) need to be attached to a parent DisplayObject3D object (addChild and removeChild methods become handy to do this).

No z-buffer yet, it's using the painter's algorithm (the depth precision is per triangle).

Texture mipmapping are handled automatically thanks to the underlying flash player, but you still have to take care that your texture width and height are a power of 2.

On SmallWorlds I'm the Afro Samurai !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:14:00 +0000

Just been trying the beta of SmallWorlds. My first impression is that it's very nice and really smoothly polished. The first thing you have to do in the world is to cutomize your avatar and optionally your pet, here is my avatar and my pet.

Then, you can chat with connected people and also play some games. I didn't really try all the games, but one game I really enjoyed is the samurai game ! You click on another guy and you can challenge him with an ancient sword. The game play is similar to RagDollKungFu, you control your character with the mouse, it's a very uncommon game play, so most players suck, but it's still very fun. I'm really the Afro Samurai as you can see in this picture :-)

A cool feature to grow the community and feed the word of mouth effect is that you can customize an avatar for a friend. Here is the avatar I customized for Barbarba ! As you can see, the UI is very slick.

Firefox 3: Time to try Mozilla Weave

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:37:00 +0000

The folks at google are not willing to upgrade their browser sync firefox 3 extension. That's too bad for them, I'm switching to Mozilla Weave. You should do the same if you're using firefox 3 and wants to share your bookmarks accross different computers. Moreover Weave seems more transparent !

Japan Pictures on Flickr

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:27:00 +0000

Here some pictures of my last year trip to Japan (May 2007). We have been mainly visiting Tokyo and Kyoto. Awesome memories !

Wanna do some micro-blogging with google reader ?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:46:00 +0000

It's possible now to do some micro-blogging with google reader ! I didn't see this new addition in my previous post, or it was not out yet. Anyway webware has been blogging about it, so just check this how it's so cool with one example item of mine.

Basically, now you can add whatever you want in your shared items, i.e., not only rss items, but images, html, etc. To insert stuff, drag the bookmarklet in your browser's toolbar, and whenever you stumble upon something nice to share, clik it, simple ! And yeah, I think the "item" in google "shared items" is really making meaning now.

New Features in Google Reader !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:50:00 +0000

I love Google Reader, there is not a single day without using it. You can keep up-to-date with hundreds of feeds, categorize them, read them all at the same time when you're procrastinating too much (press shift+A), and much more. Definitively, one one my favourite web app !

I forgot to say that you can easily share blog posts with friends, and the new feature is that you can now also annotate these shared items !

The second feature, though less useful, is the nice picture that you can choose to add on top of your shared items page. These days I'm really into fishes so this picture really suit me presently (more on the fishes very soon).

Twitter's getting decentralized by the crowd ?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:58:00 +0000

Heavy twitter users like Michael Arrington and Dave Winer are pushing towards a decentralized twitter network. Just imagine one second, that could mean a twitter service out of control from the original twitter company !

If you think about it, twitter is all about micro-blogging, and thus, like usual blogging, no bottleneck should be present, i.e., everything should be decentralized.

Anyway, I'm looking forward seeing how the original twitter guys are going to handle that ! People love so much the twitter service they want to take care of their baby themselves, interesting crisis for the parents !

Testing Amazon Web Services Bandwidth

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:25:00 +0000

I've been quickly testing the Amazon EC2 bandwidth capabilities. Here are the results:

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to New York:

download speed: 7255 KB/s
upload speed: 2167 KB/s
ping: 7 ms

From amazon availability zone us-east-1c to San Fransisco:

download speed: 1899 KB/s
upload speed: 759 KB/s
ping: 138 ms

To compare these results, here are some tests done at my swiss university:

From EPFL to New York:

download speed: 1130 KB/s
upload speed: 479 KB/s
ping: 109 ms

From EPFL to San Fransisco:

download speed: 682 KB/s
upload speed: 201 KB/s
ping: 377 ms

Installing the Wireless Card Netgear WG311 v3 on Ubuntu 8.04

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 01 May 2008 08:36:00 +0000

To install this card, you can find a lot of step-by-step information on this page. However, there is some more tricks to do:

The drivers of the card have disappeared. Fortunately, you can still find the needed files at this place.
On Ubuntu 8.04, to get the wireless network each time you reboot your box, you need to append the ndiswrapper module to the /etc/modules file (need to be root).

Web Apps API

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:47:00 +0000

Just quoting a very interesting part of a post from webware about web apps API:

"Since we're moving towards a Web world in which services and social networks are far more important than their interfaces -- and where the best interface builders are often not employed by the companies that make the services they are writing apps for -- getting APIs right is critical."

Pitching - the american way

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:37:00 +0000

Explained by @Scobleizer:

@aruni I would get to the demo fast, then explain what we just saw, cover the market need/pain/size, cover competitors, then cover team.

My european education would tell me more to do it like that: cover the market need/pain/size, cover competitors, cover team, demoing while explaining.
But it's much more boring.

I'll try the american way ;-)

Some Virtual World Market Numbers

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:19:00 +0000

There is a growing number of teens visiting virtual worlds. What is possible to deduce from this figure is that a teenager who is 16 in 2006 will be 21 in 2011. So maybe penguins will not be fun anymore. We can assume that grown-up virtual worlds will thus become increasingly more visited.

From this second figure we can see that search engines are really the way to display influential ads. That's true, sometimes we query google not to get search results, but to get very relevant ads. For example, when you are searching for a specific hotel in a specific city, you want to see who is willing to pay to advertise their product on the top (or right) of the page. Interactive ads are the second winner for the most influential ads. I consider advergames and adverworld as being cutting-edge interactive ads, and there is still a lot to be made in that field, that's encouraging ! Advergames and adverworlds are not just ad billboards in an online environment, they are really created from scratch around a brand to advertise.

To finish this post, here is an interesting figure about the number of hours spent on second life, which as you can read is provided by linden labs. This seems to go towards the opposite of rumours spreading over the internet and local newspapers. But let's be careful because the source of information is not so neutral.

(eMarketer figures grabbed from this post)

Two videos I need to watch

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:37:00 +0000

The first one is about the "Getting Things Done" method, i.e., the GTD method. How to stop procrastination and get things done !

The second one is a Scoble interview of MySpace CTO.

KinderGarten Physics Lecture !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:06:00 +0000

Clifford Stoll gives a really entertaining and energetic TED spitch !

Let the Dollar Circulate

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:08:00 +0000

Here are some new "long tail" content for your smooth ears. This first video is a funk, soul tune by Billy Paul from 1976.

And the second video is the hip hop remix by 9th wonder, which is great also.

Virtual Crowd Research Papers on the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:22:00 +0000

This post is the kind of ambitious post. The purpose is to list every research paper about virtual crowds that are available on the web.

Work in progress, trying to add 3 papers per ~~day~~ week. I'm already publishing this post even if it's uncomplete to keep motivation to finish it !

Kavan, L.; Dobbyn, S.; Collins, S.; Zara, J.; O'Sullivan, C.
Polypostors: 2D Polygonal Impostors for 3D Crowds
I3D '08

Reynolds, C. W.
Big Fast Crowds on PS3
Sandbox Symposium '06

Dobbyn, S.; McDonnell, R.; Kavan, L.; Collins, S.; O'Sullivan, C.
Clothing the Masses:Real-Time Clothed Crowds with Variation
EG Short Papers '06

Dobbyn, S.; Hamill, J.; O'Conor, K.; O'Sullivan, C.
Geopostors: A Real-Time Geometry/Impostor Crowd Rendering System
I3D '05

Reynolds, C. W.
Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters
Game Developers Conference '99

Reynolds, C. W.
Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model
SIGGRAPH '87

Our Lab as Seen on TV !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:49:00 +0000

Ok, you'll say the TV is dead, it is so not "long tail" ! But, hey, it's always nice to see your workplace on it, and this channel is kind of "long tail" because it's the official local TV channel of Valais.

Let's see if you can spot Helena, Barbara, Mireille or Jonathan in this video ?

An External Graphics Card for your Notebook

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:36:00 +0000

That would be neat ! Seen on this interesting interview of Tim Sweeney (founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal engines).