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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).

Work in Progress: Virtual Human Shape and Height Variety + Accessorized Animation

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:19:00 +0000

Here is some work in progress we're working on at the vrlab about real-time crowd variety. We're researching methods that allows to simulate varied crowd with a limited number of artists (in fact, currently one part-time artist !). The first part is about a simple and easy-to-use method for varying the shape and height of a few human templates. The second part is about creating variety at the animation level. Virtual humans are walking with accessorized locomotion cycles, carrying various stuff, like box (of beers!), pizzas, and ... mmmh ... flowers.

Install Subversion with Web Access on Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:59:00 +0000

For this post, I will just add my feedback on top of this very good tutorial. Here is my no-brainer feedback with Ubuntu Server 7.04 (you can also get this info by reading the comments of the tutorial).

In the config file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf, you also have to uncomment the #</location> which is located at the very of end of file.
The command htpasswd2 is not present but htpasswd seems to do the job also.
Your svn repositories that you want to access from the web should read/writable by apache, so don't forget to chown -R www-data:www-data /your_svn_rep.
If you don't want anonymous access add this:
AuthType Basic

AuthName "Subversion Repository"

AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd

Require valid-user

Which is my best Side ?

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:38:00 +0000

Moustache with hair crown vs. hype wig with trendy nerd-serious-sam-too-much-washed t-shirt ?

I know, the small kid with the balloon in the background seems suspicious ;-)

Windows C++ Compilation: error C2065: 'WM_MOUSEWHEEL' : undeclared identifier

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:33:00 +0000

// Hack to avoid these errors:
error C2065: 'WM_MOUSEWHEEL' : undeclared identifier
error C3861: 'GET_WHEEL_DELTA_WPARAM': identifier not found

Add this to your code ->

#define _WIN32_WINDOWS 0x501
#define _WIN32_WINNT 0x0501

Setting up the DNS of your Google Apps Domain Name

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:24:00 +0000

This post is for those who want to use a domain name bought before the google apps account creation. Indeed, if you buy a domain name with the google apps interface, everything will be working fine. The trick is to manually set up the correct DNS configuration. So either you use the DNS service provided by your registrar (you lucky guy !) or you can use a free DNS service such as xname.org. Here is the correct DNS stuff you need to add:

A Records

@ A 72.14.207.121
@ A 64.233.179.121
@ A 66.249.81.121

CNAME records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)

www      CNAME   ghs.google.com.
calendar CNAME   ghs.google.com.
start     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
mail     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
docs     CNAME   ghs.google.com.
sites     CNAME   ghs.google.com.

MX records (don't forget the trailing dot at the end)

MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
MX 40 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx4.googlemail.com.
MX 40 aspmx5.googlemail.com.

If you have a blog on blogger, e.g., yourblog.blogspot.com, you can also add a blog subdomain, just add this line in your CNAME records (of course, you also need to tell blogger about this by digging into the configuration interface) :

blog      CNAME   ghs.google.com.

Hope that helps !

Micro-Recipe: Setting up a static IP on your Ubuntu Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:47:00 +0000

Assuming your static IP is 192.168.0.100, your machine's name is computer, and you're on the mydomain.com domain.

nano /etc/network/interface

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.100
gateway 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0

nano /etc/hostname

computer

nano /etc/resolv.conf

mydomain.com

Google Sites aka Google Wikis are Finally Out !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:19:00 +0000

Google did acquired Jotspot long time ago for their wiki platform. Well, it took 16 months to relaunch it but it's finally out ! So go to sites.google.com to try them and in the case you have already a google apps account and you use the pages app, strangely enough, you have first to disable it, before being able to add the new sites app aka wikis !!

UPDATE: These wikis are here to integrate other google apps like documents and spreadsheets, but one thing that really sucks is that you cannot integrate a private spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has to be published on the whole internet ... I mean if I'm doing a private wiki, I want to share private spreadsheets !

Linux on a Dell XPS 1530 Laptop (Ubuntu 7.10)

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:21:00 +0000

This report is alive, when something new is working on the laptop, I'll post it here. See other reports there also:

It's the first time I decide to only put a linux distro on a new computer. I mean, no compromise this time, no Windows / Linux dual-boot as usual. Let's try to do everything inside the ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) distribution ! And maybe, later, install a virtualized XP to use photoshop or powerpoint (see the end of the post for an update).

Partitioning. I have never know if it's better to put the swap partition at the beginning or the end of the drive. But anyway, I have created a 4GB swap partition at the beginning of the drive. Followed by a 20 GB / (root) partition. Finally the remaining of the 250 GB hard drive has been allocated to the /home partition. This configuration is very useful when you want to redo a clean install of your linux. Indeed, you'll only need to format the root partition and you don't have to backup your /home directory.

Wifi. Nowadays, it's seems not a problem anymore, it's working out of the box.

Screen. As expected, the brightness controls are working pretty fine. But strangely, every 5 to 10 minutes, the sceen is going back at full contrast. You can tweak the brightness controls in the "System/Preferences/Power Management" menu bar under GNOME to stop it.

GPU, Sound, Touchpad. Working out of the box. Just a side note to get the sound working with the flash plugin in firefox, install the .deb located at this page.

Mic. Not working, neither skype ...

VGA output. By default, it's half working. When you press the "CRT/LCD" button, the screen is only showing on the second screen.

WebCam. Not Working, but is recognized as "OmniVision Technologies, Inc.". Well, now it's working with the cheese program (sudo apt-get install cheese).

Suspend. It suspends but never get back to life.

Hybernate. Working out of the box, even wireless works back !

Finger reader. Not working.

Bluetooth. Seems to work, but no in-depth testing though.

S-Video output, HDMI output. Not tested yet, stay tuned !

To conclude, don't forget to install automatix2 for a no-brainer setup of video codecs, skype, and so on. If you're into OpenGL programming, you have to do a "apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev" to install the proper headers and dependencies.

And if you miss a good'ol WinXP, you can easily virtualize it by installing VirtualBox. There is a good tutorial here. This is only 15 minutes to install XP from an iso image. For a confortable use of WinXP inside Ubuntu, you should load the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso cd-rom image on WinXP to gain seamless windows and mouse pointer (more on this in this post). Then, when you run applications it is surprisingly very fast, indeed, the reiserFS file system beneath should help where NTFS on native XP installation is slow as hell.

Video of the week: Shaolin Soccer in Mexico !

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:59:00 +0000

Micro-Recipe: Generate keys for passwordless SSH & SCP

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:51:00 +0000

Micro-recipe to avoid entering your password each time you do an ssh or an scp from a local machine to a remote one.

Local machine (enter passphrase each time) ->

ssh-keygen -t rsa1
ssh-keygen -t dsa
ssh-keygen -t rsa (if you do only one, do this one)

Remote machine ->

Append the content of each of the local ~/.ssh/identity.pub, ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub files to the remote ~/.ssh/authorized_keys one each time on a separate line.

Local machine ->

Execute this script every time you restart your linux box to start the ssh agent.

ssh_info_file=~/.ssh-agent-info-`hostname`
ssh-agent >$ssh_info_file
chmod 600 $ssh_info_file
. $ssh_info_file
for i in identity id_dsa id_rsa
do
ssh-add ~/.ssh/$i
done

Attach each shell to the ssh agent.

. ~/.ssh-agent-info-`hostname`

Complete recipe: http://www.cvrti.utah.edu/~dustman/no-more-pw-ssh/

Video of the week: Madlib - Beat Konducta in India

noreply@blogger.com (Jonathan Maïm) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:18:00 +0000