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iPhone 6: Pay less with a little-known T-Mobile plan

2014-10-02T15:05:00.003-07:00

TL;DR: If you have the cash to buy an unlocked iPhone 6 upfront, don’t mind running on the T-Mobile network, and mostly care about data as opposed to voice, you can save well over $500 over a period of two years compared to mainstream plans by AT&T, Verizon or even T-Mobile’s flagship plans.

NOTE: The following post is specific to the US smartphone market.

Over the last 2 years I have been on an AT&T business plan [1] which was not a bad deal by US standards:

Upfront cost for the iPhone 5: $363.74 [2]
Monthly cost: $74 ($69.99 plus taxes, fees and phone subsidy)
Monthly data: 3 GB
Contract duration: 2 years

I usually stayed under the included 3 GB, but occasionally went over and had to pay an extra $10 for an additional 1 GB. I made very limited use of voice and text.

As I wanted to get a new iPhone 6 Plus, I considered my options. With that same AT&T business plan, here is what the cost would have been for the next 2 years:

Upfront cost for the iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB: $435.91 ($399 + tax) [2]
Monthly cost: $74
Monthly data: 3 GB
Contract duration: 2 years
Total cost of ownership: $2,211.90 ($92 / month)

The price of an unlocked iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB, bought directly from Apple, is $927.53 ($849.00 without sales tax). If we spread the total cost over 2 years, we get the following breakdown:

Monthly device payment: $927.53 / 24 = $38.65
Monthly service cost: $92 - $38.65 = $53.35

Looking at the monthly cost over the same period of time is useful as it allows us to do meaningful comparisons.

Now let’s look at the T-Mobile plans advertised for the iPhone 6. They give you quite a bit (unlimited talk, text and data with data throttling), but they are not cheap: they range from $50 to $80 per month, “plus taxes, fees and monthly device payment”, that is without phone subsidy. They mainly differ by the amount of 4G LTE data you get (from 1 GB to unlimited, and then “your data speed will automatically convert to up to 2G web speeds for the remainder of your billing cycle”). [3]

For my data usage I would probably need the $60 plan (which, remember, doesn’t include taxes and fees, so is probably at least $65 in practice) to have something equivalent to my AT&T plan. This is about $12 more per month ($288 more over 24 months) than my previous AT&T service.

In short, T-Mobile is not a particularly good deal if you care mostly about 4G data. [4] And, by the way, AT&T now has comparable prices as well.

But luckily there is more: T-Mobile also offers prepaid plans. And although the flagship prepaid plans that T-Mobile advertises are the same as their regular plans, you will find, hidden in plain sight, the following:

$30 per month - Unlimited web and text with 100 minutes talk

100 minutes talk | Unlimited text | First 5 GB at up to 4G speeds

Now get unlimited international texting from the U.S. to virtually anywhere included in your plan—at no extra charge.

This plan is only available for devices purchased from Wal-Mart or devices activated on T-Mobile.com

I had heard of this plan from friends who have been using it for quite a while with Android phones. T-Mobile clearly doesn’t want you to know too much about this: it is a little bit buried, and details of the plan are lacking. But it’s there! [5]

The question now is: does this work with the iPhone 6 Plus? The answer is yes, it does work! Here is what you have to do:

Buy your unlocked (“Contract-free for use on T-Mobile”) iPhone 6 (or 6 Plus) from Apple. [6]
Order the T-Mobile SIM Starter Kit with nano SIM. The kit is $10 but T-Mobile sometimes has promotions (I bought the kit for one cent).
Don’t activate the T-Mobile SIM which comes with your iPhone. [7]
Once you receive the SIM, place it in your iPhone.
Proceed with activation online [8] and choose the $30 plan. [9]
Profit!!!

So now let’s look at the total cost of ownership of this solution over two years:

iPhone 6 Plus 64 GB, unlocked, with sales tax: $927.53
Monthly cost of plan: $30 [10]
Monthly data: 5 GB
Total provider cost over 2 years: $30 × 24 = $720
Total cost per month including the iPhone: $68.65
Total cost of ownership: $1,647.53
Savings over my earlier AT&T plan over 2 years: $564.38

Of course, this is still not cheap overall, but it’s a bit better, and in addition I get:

2 GB more 4G data per month than with the AT&T business plan
tethering [11]
an unlocked phone which I can use on many networks around the world
no contract commitment whatsoever
the ability to upgrade the phone at any time (just sell it and buy a new one!)
the pleasure of giving money to a company a little bit less evil than AT&T and Verizon

There are drawbacks to this solution, in particular:

It is unclear whether I could have ported my phone number and still qualify for a “new activation”. I did not try it because I use Google Voice to forward my calls anyway.
You are on the T-Mobile network, and this means that you won’t have as much coverage as with AT&T or Verizon.
This can be seen as a benefit or a drawback: you have to pay upfront for the phone, and T-Mobile won’t help you pay for it when you get prepaid plans.
There are way less voice minutes (an option to call regular phones is using Skype, Google Hangouts, or other VoIP solutions).
It is unclear whether fancy features such as Wi-Fi calling [12] or VoLTE are or will be enabled. But since these are voice features and this solution is for people who care more about data than voice, it doesn’t matter much to me.

No matter what, I will see how this fares over the next few months, and in the meanwhile I hope this post will be useful to others!

Disclaimer: This has been working for friends with Android phones and appears to be working for me so far with the iPhone 6 Plus, but I cannot be held responsible if you go this route and have issues of any kind.

For another article comparing plans by major providers, see iPhone 6 Plans Compared: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Keep in mind that this looks at and iPhone 6, not 6 Plus (so about $100 of difference) and only 2 GB / month plans.

If you have a company, I recommend you ask AT&T about these plans. You have great customer support, and contrary to business cable, you get more for your money compared with consumer plans. ↩
This is of course not the full price of the phone. It is a downpayment you make on it, and you pay for your phone as part of your monthly plan, in ways which until recently were usually not detailed by providers. ↩
T-Mobile also has a “Simple Starter 2GB Plan” for $45/month, which includes 2 GB of 4G LTE data, but then cuts out your data. This is not really an option for me. ↩
T-Mobile also has business plans, but for one line the prices are the same. ↩
In fact, it is surprising that they even have this plan at all on their site. It makes sense at Wal-Mart, but online? Could it be that they legally have to list it on their site if they provide it at Wal-Mart? I would be curious to know. ↩
That’s what I did. It might be the same if you get it from T-Mobile, but I haven’t tried. ↩
I didn’t try to activate it, but I suspect that the activation instructions would lead you to the regular T-Mobile plans without including the $30 prepaid plan. Since the SIM kit was $ 0.01, I figured I would go the safer route. But even for $10 the price remains reasonable. ↩
Ignore the voice-based activation which starts when you turn on the phone. Also, I had some trouble with Chrome and then switched to Firefox. ↩
The plan is marked “for new activations only”, and I am not sure what it means, although by any definition of “new activation” I can think of, mine was a “new activation”. ↩
And by the way the plan is a round $30 per month: there is are no additional taxes or fees. ↩
With some devices, such as the Nexus 5, tethering is disabled by T-Mobile, while it works fine with the Nexus 4. It is entirely possible that T-Mobile will disable tethering on the iPhone 6 when they get to it. But for now it works. ↩
Although the T-Mobile site says “WiFi Calling for all T-Mobile customers with a capable device”. ↩

Reading plan: October checkin

2014-09-30T20:49:00.002-07:00

My goal for the month of September was making progress reading Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. I am now at page 60, so I consider that this was a success. It does help to have small, achievable goals!

Rationalizing the iPhone 6 Plus

2014-09-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Daniel Miessler asked himself which iPhone 6 to get and I did the same. Here are my thoughts.

First, whether considering the 6 or 6 Plus, there is definitely a decrease in pocketability. But I see the move to larger screens as necessary [1] as we use the devices we call phones more and more as computers-which-you-carry-in-your-pocket. [2]

After Apple’s keynote, I hesitated a little bit between the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus. Initially I was pretty sure that I wanted the larger size. Then I printed the templates and realized that the Plus was larger than I had expected. I started having doubts about whether I would like the larger device, in particular:

Will it fit in a pocket relatively comfortably, or will it be a constant annoyance? [3]
Will I be able to use it with a single hand at least part of the time? [4]

In the end I decided to get the 6 Plus and to consider it an experiment: a device so different from the ones I have had so far (iPhone 3G, [5] iPhone 4, iPhone 5) might change my habits in some interesting ways.

I am also experimenting in another way: I have had AT&T contracts since the iPhone 3G in 2008. This time around I ordered an unlocked iPhone 6 Plus for use on the T-Mobile network. [6] I like the idea of having an unlocked device, as well as having more options for plans. I will probably try to get one of the T-Mobile prepaid plans (which they don’t advertise much). [7]

Here are the features specific to the 6 Plus I am looking forward to:

Improved camera with optical stabilization. I have kids and I consider the camera which I carry with me at all times important. [8]
Bigger screen. Many activities should be more comfortable with a larger screen. Will I use my phone for reading more? Will I still be interested in getting the next Kindle?
Improved battery life. Depending on which feature you are looking at, the battery life is supposed to be better across the board. For example, Wi-Fi browsing is 10 % longer and standby 60 % longer.

I am also looking forward to the following features shared by the 6 and 6 Plus:

Improved speed. The CPU improvement announced is “only” 25% over the iPhone 5S, but the 5S was about twice faster than the 5, so that will be a nice improvement.
The new hardware design. I like the rounded body, which looks more like the original iPhone and should make the device pleasant to hold. The iPhone 3G, while plasticky, was also great to hold due to the curve of its back, and from this perspective the iPhone 4 to iPhone 5S design was a step back.
Apple Pay. I don’t need to pay in stores all day long, and this won’t revolutionize payments, [9] but I am intrigued by this combination of Touch ID and NFC. Will it work as reliably and fast? Will it work in stores I am likely to visit? The US is finally implementing “Chip and PIN” cards to help prevent fraud. This means that it might become a little slower to pay with cards than it has been so far, as you will have to enter your PIN. [10] Could Apple Pay be slightly more interesting due to this move?

I am looking forward to retire my beat up iPhone 5!

We can say it now that Apple is finally in the race! ↩
Not in all pockets in the case of the iPhone 6 Plus, Galaxy Note, or the 6" Nokia Lumia 1520. There is word that Google might come out with a large Nexus phone soon as well. ↩
If not, I can always consider 5.11 TacLite Pro Pant. I don’t think I can consider a European carryall. ↩
The iPhone 6 Plus has a feature called Reachability to help with this: a double-tap of the home button brings down the content to make it reachable by the thumb. ↩
Steve Jobs referred to the original iPhone’s screen as “giant”. Times have changed. ↩
I already knew the price of the device, but it was still a bit of a shock to see the final price in the shopping cart (almost $1,000 with sales tax!). It is a neat trick that the big US carriers have pulled to subsidize the price of devices over 18–24 months. I would bet that a large majority of smartphone users do not know the actual price of the device. ↩
I don’t have an absolute guarantee that this will work out. But the phone will be unlocked and T-Mobile has a “bring your own device” option so I am hoping things will be smooth. ↩
The camera of my iPhone 5 has gathered dust inside, and I find myself reaching for my wife’s iPhone 5S regularly. I also take my SLR on specific occasions. ↩
For two reasons: because the major credit card companies are still involved, and because the system is limited to the Apple ecosystem. ↩
This American Express FAQ says: “If you have a Chip and PIN enabled Card, you must use your PIN (Personal Identification Number) when prompted, to pay for goods and services”. ↩

Reading plan: September checkin

2014-09-15T11:20:00.001-07:00

My goal for the month of July was:

continue on the synthesis and try to have a closure on it, spending about 2 more hours

I didn't have any goals for August.

I only managed to spend another hour in July, and I don't have a closure. So I have decided to park this work for a while.

The good news is that I have just started reading Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking this month, one of the books on my reading plan for 2014.

I have decided to read this book not in digital format, but on good old paper. I have also decided to allow myself to trash this book with highlights and annotations as I see fit.

My goal for the rest of the month is simply to make progress reading this book.

Reading plan: July checkin

2014-07-16T15:20:00.001-07:00

My goals for the month of June were:

spend 3 quality hours
complete synthesis of the organ book

I spent 5 hours in June, which is good as that means I did more than planned! However that was not enough to complete that synthesis.

It's already mid-July and I have spent another hour on the synthesis. For the rest of the month, I will continue on the synthesis and try to have a closure on it, spending about 2 more hours.

For next month, I want to separate the tasks:

planned reading
writing about what I read

I do not plan to write about all the books I read, certainly not in depth. Still, if I want to read at least one other book this year, I better start doing the reading part regularly, and if writing is needed consider that a separately planned task.

Thoughts on the Swift language

2014-06-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

What it is

I am not a language designer but I love programming languages, so I can’t resist putting down a few rough thought on Swift, the new programming language announced on Monday by Apple. It is designed to make Objective-C, the main language used to build apps on iOS and OS X, a thing of the past. I think it’s fair to say that this was, for developers, the highlight of Monday’s WWDC keynote.

Objective-C is a dinosaur language, invented in the early 1980s. If you know any relatively more modern higher-level language (pick one, including C#, Scala, even Hack), it is clear that it has too much historical baggage and not enough of the features programmers expect.

John Siracusa captured the general idea in his 2005 Avoiding Copland 2010 article and its revision, Copland 2010 revisited: Apple’s language and API future, and has kept building a really good case since, in various podcasts, that Apple had to get their act together. Something, anything, had to be done. [1]

There was a possibility that Apple would keep patching Objective-C, moving toward a superset of a safe subset of it. But I don’t think that anybody not working at Apple saw Swift coming that, well, swiftly. [2]

Why this is good for programmers

Reactions to Swift so far seem mostly positive. (I don’t tend to take the negative reactions I have seen seriously as they are not argumented.) As Jeff Atwood tweeted: “TIL nobody actually liked Objective-C.”. I share the positive feeling for three reasons:

First, I believe that programming languages matter:

they can make developers more or less productive,
they can encourage or instead discourage entire classes of errors,
they can help or hinder reuse of code,
they can make developers more or less happy.

With brute force and billions of dollars, you can overcome many programming languages deficiencies. But it remains a waste of valuable resources to write code in an inferior language. Apple has now shown that it understands that and has acted on it, and they should be commended for it.

Second, concepts which many Objective-C developers might not have been familiar with, like closures, immutable variables, functional programming, generics, pattern matching, and probably more, will now be absorbed and understood. This will lead to better, more maintainable programs. This will also make these developers interested in other languages, like Scala, which push some of these concepts further. The bar will be generally raised.

Finally, arguments over the heavy, ugly syntax of Objective-C, and its lack of modern features can be put to rest: Apple has decided the future path for iOS and OS X developers. That ship has sailed.

Where it fits

What kind of language is Swift? I noticed on Twitter that many had a bit of trouble positioning the language. Did Apple reinvent JavaScript? Or Go? Is Swift functional first? Is it even like Scala? What about C#? Or Clojure or XQuery?

I haven’t seen anything in Swift that is not in other programming languages. In fact, Swift features can be found in dozens of other languages (in Lattner’s own words, “drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list”), and that’s why many have found similarities with their language of choice. So Swift is not “innovative”. Instead it is a reasonable mix and match of features which make sense for the Apple ecosystem.

Here are a few essential aspects of Swift which are not language features but which put it in context. These all appear to be essential to Apple:

Owned by Apple: Swift is fully owned by Apple. It does not depend on Oracle (Java/JVM), Microsoft (.NET), or Google.
Objective-C integration: Swift is designed to integrate really well with Objective-C. In fact, this is likely the second most important reason Apple felt they had to create their own language (in addition to ownership). There are precedents: Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon and others are designed to interoperate well with Java; CoffeeScript with JavaScript; Hack with PHP; Microsoft’s CLR was designed from the get go as a multi-language VM. This is important for initial adoption so that existing code can be reused and the new language progressively introduced. It would have been possible, but much harder, for Apple to pick an existing language.
Static typing: Swift is a statically-typed language. There is type inference, which means you don’t have to actually write down the types everywhere, in particular within functions. But types are there nonetheless. So it looks more like dynamic languages, but is not one. [3]
A dynamic feel: This is part of the “modern” aspect of Swift: a move toward concision which appeals to programmers used to dynamic languages, but with the presence of static typing under the hood. This combination of terseness and static typing is something Swift shares with Scala.

Swift has a REPL and Playgrounds (the interactive demo by Chris Lattner looked impressive), which includes what some other environments call “worksheets” and a bit more. Clearly that’s the direction development tools are taking. All of this is becoming mainstream, which again raises the bar.
Native compilation: Swift is compiled down to native code, like C, C++, Objective-C, Go, and Rust. There is no interpreter or VM, as in Java, JavaScript, C#, Ruby, PHP, or all dynamic languages, besides the small Objective-C runtime. Also, it doesn’t have a real garbage collector: it uses automatic reference counting (ARC).

Swift is a bit odd in that native compilation and lack of full garbage collection make it closer to systems language, yet it is clearly designed to build applications. I wish the balance had moved more toward the higher level rather than the lower level, but it’s an interesting middle ground.

What’s disappointing

Here are a few aspects of Swift which, at first glance, disappoint me a bit. Keeping in mind that this is a first version of Swift which has room to grow:

Openness: So far Apple has not announced that the Swift compiler would be open source, like the Objective-C compiler. This is a big question mark. It would be the right thing for them to do to open the compiler, and I am hopeful that they will.
Garbage collection: It’s likely that Apple considered that ARC was good enough in most situations, and it makes interoperability with Objective-C (compatibility in terms of memory management) much easier to handle. Still, this would give me trouble. Lack of proper garbage collection means more memory bugs to hunt down.
Concurrency support: Swift doesn’t have async/await, like C#, Scala, and soon JavaScript, or futures and promises. Async support is important in client apps as much as in server apps.
Type system: The type system appears very simple. This might be seen as good or bad. The reference book doesn’t even mention the word “variance”. (I suppose Swift picks a default, but doesn’t allow programmers to control that.)
Persistent data structures: There doesn’t seem to be persistent data structures (which are truly immutable yet can be updated efficiently thanks to structural sharing), as in Clojure and Scala. These are incredible tools which many programmers have now found to be essential. Immutability, in general, gives you much increased confidence about the correctness of your code. I would miss them in Swift.
Well, innovation: Dart, Go, Hack, and Swift show that it is very hard for big companies to come up with something really unique in their programming languages. Academia remains the place where new ideas are born and grow. Still, it would have been nice if there was one or two new things in Swift that would make it special, like for example Scala’s implicits which have turned out to have far-reaching consequences (several of which I really like).

Browser and server

I am curious to see if Swift will see adoption on the server, for services. It might make sense for Apple to use Swift internally for their services, although having a language is not enough: you need proper infrastructure for concurrent and distributed computing. Swift is not there yet. But it could be in the future. This is a bit less important to Apple than the client at this time.

What about the browser? Could one conceivably create a Swift-to-JavaScript compiler? I don’t see why not. JVM languages, from Java to Clojure to Scala, now compile to JavaScript. Swift currently uses ARC, but in a browser environment it could probably work with the JavaScript VM’s garbage collector.

So there might be room, in years to come, for Swift to conquer more environments.

Google!

Where does Google stand with regards to this? It’s curious, but I think now that it’s Google which might have a programming language problem! Android uses Java but, as famous programming languages guy Erik Meijer tweeted, “Swift makes Java look tired.” (To be fair, most languages make Java look tired.)

Google also has Dart, which so far hasn’t been positioned as a language to develop Android or server apps. But maybe that will come. Go is liked by some for certain types of server applications, but is even more of a “systems language” than Swift, and again Google hasn’t committed to bringing it as a language to write Android apps.

Will Google come up with yet another programming language, targeted at Android? The future will tell. If it was me, which of course it isn’t, Scala or a successor would be my choice as a great, forward-looking language for Android. And Google could point their Android developers to Scala and say “Look, it looks very much like Swift which you already know!” ;)

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

Back in 2009 I even tweeted: ↩

MS has Anders Hejlsberg (C#). The JVM world has Martin Odersky (Scala). Apple should work with Odersky on the next language for OS X.

Obviously it wasn’t Odersky, but Chris Lattner, who got to be the mastermind of Swift.
Good job by Apple, by the way, to have managed to keep it under covers so well since July 2010! ↩
There is a difference with with languages that have optional types, like Dart and Hack. Dynamic, optionally typed, and statically typed languages can, from a syntax perspective, look very similar. But under the hood some pretty different things take place. ↩

Reading plan: June 1 checkin

2014-06-02T21:18:00.002-07:00

My goals for the month of May were:

3 quality hours of reading
complete synthesis of the organ book
pick the next book to read and start

I did manage to do a bit more than 3 hours of planned reading, so that's a success! Now "reading" is a bit of a misnomer because all of this time was spent working on the synthesis. But that was not enough to complete it, so the success is only partial.

Surely, 3 more hours in June should allow me to complete the synthesis this time? Ok, that's the plan.

Reading plan: May 1 checkin

2014-04-30T22:43:00.003-07:00

My goals for the end of March were:

3 quality hours of reading
complete synthesis of the organ book
pick the next book to read and start in March

In March, I did spend 2 hours out of the 3 planned, but that wasn't quite enough to complete the synthesis, and I haven't picked the next book yet.

In April, I completely dropped the ball: I missed the April 1 checkin and didn't do anything related to my reading plan during the month.

I had scheduled 1/2 hour on the reading plan each Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. But I found myself "too busy" or too guilty to take that time off work. Yet it's too difficult to find quality time late in the evening.

So for May, let's try to get back on the wagon and to do 3 hours spread over the whole month. Otherwise, same goals: complete the synthesis, and pick the next book.

Why I am returning my Seiki 39" 4K "monitor"

2014-03-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

Notice the tiny 27" iMac behind the Seiki

After reading some recent blog posts (such as 4K is for programmers) about using the Seiki SE39UY04 39-Inch 4K TV as a computer monitor, I figured it might be an interesting experiment and I ordered last week a slightly used one. The price including taxes and free shipping was just under $500.

First, I do want more pixels [1] but it’s a bit unclear to me whether a 39“ monitor is workable or even desirable on a desk. I currently use an old 30” Dell monitor, so I am used to big screens, but 39" is gigantic! [2]

Second, that particular monitor is sold as a TV and not designed to be used as computer monitor in the first place. This means that it has important limitations, such as the absence of a direct input mode, and an abysmal 30 Hz input refresh rate at the native resolution. (This doesn’t mean that you see flickering, as on old CRT monitors. It just means that you only get at most 30 different frames every second.)

So I got the monitor on Friday and immediately set it up. It was easy:

connect the HDMI cable to the MacBook Pro’s built-in HDMI output
turn on the TV and wait for it to “boot”
turn down “sharpness” to 0 (important, otherwise you see artifacts)
play a bit with brightness (possibly too bright even at the minimum) and contrast

With the image adjustments, picture quality is pretty good. I don’t think it’s possible to get this monitor to have colors that are acceptable for photography or video, but for programming it seems decent.

However the issue that was an immediate turn off is the mouse lag. In practice, this translates to mouse or trackpad input which is very imprecise. Keyboard input is also visibly lagging.

It just take a while, it seems, for the output of the computer to actually make it to the screen. I suspect that part of the issue might not be so much the 30 Hz refresh rate (although you do notice that when moving stuff around and scrolling) as image processing done by the TV.

It is a known issue [3] that monitors and TVs do crazy (and unneeded) image processing which increases the time between receiving data from the computer and actually showing it on the screen. Some TVs have a “direct” or “game” mode which alleviates the problem, but the Seiki doesn’t.

I tried a couple of things to improve the lag:

I upgraded the firmware, and even tried the 50" firmware.
I tried SmoothMouse, which seemed to improve things a tiny bit.

In the end I don’t think I can get used to the lag, so the Seiki is going back. I will revisit getting a new monitor once the dust around 4K settles a little bit. There is upcoming 60 Hz output support in OS X for the MacBook Pro, and there should be many new 4K monitors of various sizes coming out this year. I am not sure yet if I would choose something as big as 39", but we’ll see!

The built-in 15“ Retina MacBook Pro display is 2880x1800, my external 30” Dell is 2560x1600 and the Seiki is 3840x2160. Having more pixels is good, whether to get closer to a “retina” resolution, or just to get more content on screen (like a debugger next to the app being debugged). ↩
Ideally, I would like the whole virtual space around me to be something like a monitor, where I could put virtual items, and use the brain’s spatial abilities to make the best use of it. But hardware and software are not there yet. ↩
See John Siracusa on various podcasts and John Carmack’s post on display latency. ↩

Reading plan: March 1 checkin

2014-03-09T17:21:00.001-07:00

At last month's checkin, I had the following goals:

complete my quick synthesis of the organ book
pick the next book to read and start in February
spend about 5 hours in total

I failed on all counts:

I did work on the synthesis but I did not complete it.
I didn't pick and start the next book.
I spent a total of about 1 1/2 hour,

So far this month I haven't done any progress at all, and 2/3 of the month are left. Let's plan to do only 3 quality hours of reading, with the same goals as last month otherwise. This time I am scheduling the reading time in advance.

Reading plan: February 1 checkin

2014-02-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

This is my February 1 checkin following my Books I plan to read in 2014 post.

January was a short month as I posted my resolution on January 20 only.

The good news is that I have finished The Organ from its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the end of the Thirteenth Century by Jean Perrot. This has kept me busy (or in the back of my head) for about 4 months! I have pretty complete reading notes.

While technically “reading the book” is done, I would like to write a synthesis of what I have learned.

So my goals for February are:

write that synthesis
pick the next book to read and start in February

I am shooting for 10 serious reading days this month, for a total of 5 hours.

2013 year in review

2014-01-28T23:46:00.000-08:00

(The following is inspired by my brother's 2012 en chiffres and 2013 en chiffres "year in numbers" posts, with some twists!)

In 2013, we had 1 baby

The first defining moment of 2013 for our family was the birth of our second son in February. He is now 11-month-old and thriving.

Number 2 and his grandfather

In 2013, I lost 1 grandfather

The second defining moment of the year was the passing away of my grandfather. With this I have now lost all my grandparents. I should be grateful that he lived to the age of 92 with a good quality of life. Yet I agree with Ray Kurzweil, who views death in general as "a tragedy": it is the loss of a person, of a mind, of memories, for which there is no proper "backup".

Number 1 and his great-grandfather in 2012

In 2013, I took 2 trips to Switzerland

The first one was in June for the funeral. I am glad I took that short trip to share this with my family. The second one was in December/January for a family vacation. These are my only two trips by air this year. I don't miss the days where I travelled so much for business!

In 2013, we sold 1 car

We sold my wife's 1999 Miata, for which we didn't have much use anymore with 2 kids. It was pretty easy to sell it, as it was in pretty good condition and, I was told, a used Miata was the car to have this summer in the Bay Area!

In 2013, I voluntarily fasted 4 days

During the month of April, I decided to try to fast once per week as an experiment, to see what it would feel like. The rule: no solid food from the time I went to bed the day before until the morning the day after. It was a bit painful at times but it turned out to be doable, if a bit unpleasant. I did allow myself a fruit juice during the day. The day after fasting, however, I felt hungry a good part of the day even with regular-size meals.

In 2013, we had a lot of family visiting

After the birth, we had visits and help from family both from Taiwan and Switzerland. I am grateful for this, as that allowed us to deal with the work and tiredness that come with a new child.

In 2013, I posted 44 work blog posts

I posted 18 of those on my personal blog:

2 on Scala.
5 on personal topics.
11 short "link blog" style.

And I posted 26 of those on the Orbeon blog.

In 2013, my weight oscillated 10 lbs

That's too much to my taste. The minimum was in March and the maximum in October. I have been fed too well, and I have been too lazy! I think that lack of sleep and exercise, and stress due to the second child didn't help.

In 2013, I went to the gym 23 times and took at least 7 small hikes

In short: not enough.

In 2013, I posted 1,294 tweets and sent 2,201 emails

That's 209 more tweets than in 2012.

In 2013, I watched 8 movies, 2 documentaries, and watched 3 series

That's not a lot, but we've had other things to do. None were at the movie theater. The series are:

The Big Bang Theory
Doctor Who
Les Mystérieuses Cités d'or (1982-1983)

In 2013, I read or listened to 10 books or audiobooks

I even include my organ book in this count, which technically I finished in 2014. Of these:

5 were "serious" reads
5 were audiobooks
4 were rereads
2 were science fiction

In 2013, I had 7 colds

This looks like a lot, retrospectively:

February 3 (I wrote "mild", but this was followed by weeks of coughing)
April 6
April 23
August 11
October 15
November 11
December 17 (with coughing)

Firefox vs. Chrome

2014-01-28T10:44:00.000-08:00

Image from lifehacker

I use Firefox regularly for testing, but Chrome has been my default browser on OS X for a few years. Yesterday I used Firefox again the whole day as the latest Dev Channel Update of Chrome was horribly slow (UPDATE: This was due to a bug in Chrome.).

After a few hours of regular use (not web development), it's pretty clear that Chrome wins on usability. The following features in particular frustrated me a lot:

Search.

Google is just better at search:

Google Instant in the Chrome bar. I don't know if Firefox can do this easily.
Unified URL/search field. Firefox should do this. Even Safari does now.

The Firefox "awesome bar" remains great for history search and completion, but Chrome has mostly caught up lately.

Downloads.

The Firefox download window is better than in the past, but it's still an annoying, clunky window.
Chrome's placing of downloads at the bottom of the window is simply better and smarter, as it gives you instant access to what you want to do the most with your downloads: locate them, open them, or cancel them. Firefox should do something similar.

Keyboard shortcuts for editing text.

In OS X, you have two sets of keyboards shortcuts:

The Unix ctrl-a, ctrl-e, etc. These works in Firefox.
The Mac ⌘-←, ⌘-→, etc. These don't work in Firefox in rich text editors (which use an iframe). It used to be that ⌘-← would do a browser back even while you were editing fields, and on many web pages you could lose the content you were editing. I suspect that's why they disabled those shortcuts. But Chrome does it right.

⌘-Q quits immediately.

I closed Firefox 4 times by mistake, while trying to reach ⌘-W to close a tab. Chrome does this the smart way: you have to press and hold ⌘-Q to quit. This nicely filters out mistakes, and is way better than a clunky confirmation dialog.

So go Firefox, work on those, and make me want to use you!

[Link blog] Why I am disappointed by Google buying Nest

2014-01-22T11:57:00.002-08:00

Why is everyone disappointed by Google buying Nest?

« Instead, there's a chorus of concern — some sincere, some contrived, but all of it grounded in fear of an unchecked Google. »

I agree with much of the article, although that conclusion is in contradiction with this:

« the fear that a slower, less innovative giant will kill the spirit and pace of a beloved startup »

There is no doubt that this acquisition is good for Google, and good for Nest founders, investors and employees in the short term. But are acquisitions like this one generally good for society? I tend to think that it is not the case.

Personally, I don't worry much about Google's collection of thermostat data. Yes, that could go unchecked at some point in the future, but that's another fight - that of making sure that users are in control of their data, whether captured by Google or others.

Instead there is a bigger worry, which is that due to the relatively slow pace of developments in large companies, as well as the scarcity of engineering talent, promising companies like Nest are being taken away by the brute force of the billions of dollars they are offered the ability to grow and become successful companies on their own.

This not only slows down the overall pace of "innovation" (to use a tired term), but also yields to increased concentration of power.

Books I plan to read in 2014

2014-01-20T23:45:00.001-08:00

Photo by Matthias Buehler

As Randy Pausch said, "Yes, you are going to have to change the plan. But you can't change it, unless you have it".

I like what @buster says about sharing resolutions "so that the information is “out there” and can’t be easily brushed away", and doing his "rabbit rabbit" checkins in 2013 helped follow my resolutions over the year.

So here it is: in 2014, in addition to finishing the last 20 pages of The Organ from its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the end of the Thirteenth Century, I plan to read or finish reading one book in each of the following categories:

serious

history
science
philosophy
biography
music

less serious

French
fiction
science-fiction/fantasy

My concrete selection in the "serious" categories is:

History: John King Fairbank's The Great Chinese Revolution: this is a book which I started years ago but haven't finished. But I find the history of China starting around 1800 fascinating, and the West is almost fully ignorant of it.
Science: Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene: I purchased this book in 2007, read a few pages, and that was it.
Philosophy: Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking: I read the sample chapter, which was pretty good.
Biography: Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs: I even had this book on preorder when it came out and read one chapter. Time to finish it!
Music: Possibly my friend Cesare Orselli's Pietro Mascagni (in Italian, which makes it more of a challenge).

I plan to take notes for at least 3 of those books.

In the "less serious" category, I might decide to finish Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Terre des Hommes, of which I have read a few pages already. I don't have picks for fiction and science-fiction/fantasy yet, but that shouldn't be too challenging.

I am open to reading suggestions, and here are some additional candidates I have considered:

This program is very ambitious given my past record. It is possible based on my experience with one book to read about 150 pages/month of a serious book while taking notes. Since the serious books have over 300 pages each, they might require more than 2 months each. So the schedule might be tight, even though I might find that some books read faster than others, and that I might not take notes for all books.

Finally, I do plan to checkin every month (the "rabbit rabbit" trick) on Twitter, mentioning two friends, and I have setup a double reminder to do this.

GTD review buddies: an update

2013-11-05T22:44:00.001-08:00

About a month and a half ago, at the end of September, I wrote about setting up a "GTD review buddy system" with Alex. I can report that it went pretty well:

Alex and I did 7 GTD review sessions, always on Monday at approximately 10 pm.
In my case, each review session lasted at least 30 minutes, and sometimes close to an hour. Yes, I have really a big backlog to process!
Yesterday, for the first time in maybe years, I managed to get down to zero items in my OmniFocus inbox, and to only about 20 items in my e-mail inbox, consisting mainly of really old items that I still need to sort through. "Inbox zero" is near!
I have made good progress on reviewing and organizing my work-related projects. I am maybe about 3/4 through.

I still need to review all my personal projects, a task that I haven't started yet. I may or may not manage to be done reviewing all my project by the end of this year, but at this rate I should be pretty close. If everything goes well, I will be done catching up in early 2014, and then start doing regular GTD reviews, which should be much shorter.

Reading resolution: an update

2013-11-04T23:09:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of October, I blogged about my reading resolution for that month. So, how did I do?

First, the numbers:

I hit 16 reading days out of 31.
I read on average 10 pages each reading day.
I read 170 out of about 300 pages.
To read 10 pages well and take notes, I needed 30-40 minutes, rarely less.

The bad:

I didn't manage to read every day. I quickly figured out that it was almost impossible to read on the weekends, but even considering only weekdays, I still fell short with 16 out of 23 weekdays.
I didn't reach 10 pages per day on average, which would have allowed me to finish the book. This is not surprising, as I would have had to read about double the number of page per reading day, given the reduction in reading days.

The good:

I did make great progress.
I have reading notes on github.
I learned about my effective "slow reading" speed.

I plan to continue this in November, with the differences that I will plan to read only on weekdays. I still plan to average 10 pages per reading day and to take notes. The plan is to finish the book by the end of November. Let's see how that goes!

See also my Rabbit Rabbit Resolution Accountability Squad checkin for this month.

Update: It turns out I have to return the book to the library on November 7 as I can only extend it once. I ordered a used copy but that will arrive only in about a week if all goes well. So that will induce some delay.

October reading resolution

2013-09-30T22:22:00.000-07:00

There is a side project which I started last year but which I haven't had much time to work on so far. Suffice it to say that it involves researching the history of the organ, and I was recently recommended a must-read book about this by the curator of the Musée Suisse de l'Orgue in Switzerland.

Thanks to the magic of public libraries, I managed to find the English adaptation of the book (the original French edition seems to have disappeared from the San Francisco Public Library), and to borrow it (via LINK+):

The Organ from its Invention in the Hellenistic Period to the end of the Thirteenth Century

I just read the introduction and seems like it is well-written and very well-researched - a true scholarly work, in a good way. The only problem is that this brick is about 300 pages long! What are the chances that I will go through it?

So here's my plan: for the month of October, I will try to read on average 10 pages of the book per day. The idea is to try to read at least a few pages every day. It would be unsustainable to have to read a hundred pages on a Sunday evening.

The goal is not to finish the book, but to learn something useful for my project. This mean serious reading, including taking notes. I will allow for exceptions, for example if it turns out that parts of the book are not needed for my research, or if it turns out that, after all, the book turns out to be boring.

Finally, but optionally, I might tweet things I learn.

Update: My reading notes are here.

[Link blog] What if the humanity became infertile?

2013-09-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously

I get the point Samuel Scheffler makes about humanity losing purpose if "the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed 30 days after your death". But his other thought experiment is more puzzling:

« In Ms. James’s novel, humanity has become infertile, with no recorded birth having occurred in over 25 years. Imagine that you found yourself living in such circumstances. Nobody now alive is younger than 25, and the disappearance of the human race is imminent as an aging population inexorably fades away. How would you react?

As in the case of the asteroidal collision, many activities would begin to seem pointless under these conditions: cancer research, seismic safety efforts, social and political activism and so on. »

My wild guess would be that on the contrary a large number of humans would on start working tirelessly to ensure that they live longer (if possible "forever"), which would entail very quickly finding a cure for cancer and other ailments, and work even harder on safety. Knowing that you don't have offsprings means that your own life and that of your peers already born is even more important to preserve. This would also maybe work against the "after me, the deluge" attitude: if you know you will be around for a long time, you might make better decisions as those are more likely to affect you.

GTD review buddies

2013-09-23T23:47:00.002-07:00

I try to stay reasonably productive at work and at home with a variation on the GTD system. Several aspects of that system work quite well, but one thing I have been really terrible at doing is the regular review of my projects.

That is a problem, because reviewing projects is an essential part of any productivity system. Without a review, your list of projects becomes out of control, you lose grip on what is current and what is not, and that is likely to become a weight on your mind and to make you lose trust in your system.

Years ago, I figured that I would do my GTD review once a week, on the weekend. It's been years that it hasn't worked at all. Yet I keep getting an automatic reminder by email that I need to do my weekly review, and I am now fully numb to it.

Last week, talking about this with @avernet, who also has issues doing regular GTD reviews, we decided to try an experiment. We figured that if it easier to go to the gym with a buddy than alone, the same idea could apply here. So we have decided to try for a while to be "GTD review buddies".

The concrete implementation of the idea is as follows:

We both have a recurring alarm on our phones set to Monday at 10 PM (when our respective kids are supposed to be asleep!).
When that alarm rings, we send a message to each other with a reminder that it is GTD review time.
We then work on our own review separately, as we are in different locations and of course have completely different projects. But the idea is to do the review at the same time.
We are free to work on the review as long as we want.

Tonight was the first time that we tried this and it worked pretty well. At this rate it will take weeks if not months to get our projects in order, but it should become easier as time goes. We'll see if the habit sticks!

My iPhone Home Screen

2013-09-22T22:42:00.002-07:00

This weekend I reorganized my iPhone home screen like this:

I tried not to fill the entire screen, keeping one full row empty and one spot in the bottom row, to encourage me to go the extra mile when removing the non-essential apps, and to give new apps a chance to make it to the home screen. The organization is not perfect, but here we go:

Bottom row ("most important apps"):

OmniFocus: I use it extensively on the desktop, and the iOS version synchronizes with it (in the background with iOS 7!). On the iPhone I use it to enter new inbox items on the go and to deal with a few contexts (standup meeting at work, errands, and contexts for a few people I often interact with).
Mailbox: my email client of choice. I use it to do a first pass on my email, including archiving unimportant items.
Chrome: my web browser of choice.

First row ("voice and chat"):

Google Voice: I moved my number to Google Voice a while back. The app is not great and there is no native integration with iOS's dialer (Apple doesn't support it), but for better or for worse that's what I use now. This covers old-school calls and SMS.
Messages: iMessage (SMS is via Google Voice).
Skype: chat and the occasional call.
Photos: not "voice and chat", I know, but this had to go somewhere.

Second row ("social and reading"):

Tweetbot: my Twitter client of choice.
Facebook: yes I use it.
Instapaper: favorite reader.
Kindle: to remind me that I need to read books.

Third row ("audio"):

Maps: I know, it has nothing to do with audio (unless you count directions). This is the Apple Maps app, which works well in my location. I occasionally use Google Maps too.
Music: provides access to my music collection via iTunes Match.
Instacast: my podcast client of choice.
Podcasts: the Apple Podcasts app. Contains a few podcasts which I haven't yet consolidated with Instacast.

Fourth row ("health"):

Food: the Evernote Food app, to remind me to eat well and collect data about it.
Up: to remind me to exercise and sleep well.
Automatic: to remind me to drive economically and safely.

I use the camera often but didn't put the Camera app on the home screen as it is so easily accessible from the lock screen.

Finally, I chose a simple built-in wallpaper. My lock screen has a picture of my family.

[Link Blog] My "wonderworld" does not include business trips

2013-09-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

2030s Cognitive Machines: a glimpse of life in a future wonderworld

« Getting ready to fly to a conference, my auto-drive electric car rolls its top down on this warm day […] »

In this article, you have:

"microscopic sensors embedded throughout the house [which] constantly monitor" your health
"wall tiles [which] display the day's top headlines"
a "Mars mission [which] launches ahead of schedule"
"smart dust" able to destroy terrorist training camps
"auto-drive" cars
a headband which can figure out a person's identity and project it on your eyes

Yet, the person is flying a commercial flight to a conference? The same mistake is present in this 2009 Microsoft video (which is otherwise amazing):

If you have communication technology that is that advanced, the case for conferences and flying around the world for business is greatly reduced. After all, we are almost there already, with tools as poor (relatively to what we should have in 2030) as Skype, WebEx, or Google Hangouts.

There is a reason conferences and face to face business meetings still exist: they remain often the best way to exchange a lot of information quickly, to mix the formal with the informal, and to capture the out of band signals that humans constantly send. So they will probably be around as long as there are "humans 1.0". But my guess is that they will progressively be replaced by future communication technology. (Apply all this technology to leisure travel and that's another story.)

What will it take?

higher bandwidth, lower latency, and lower price for data (wired and wireless)
high-definition audio/video equipment cheap to the point where you can plaster walls with it
or, alternatively, smart glasses/headbands which remove the need for shared displays
the hardest part: software to glue it all that actually works, and that follows standard protocols

This trend could be slowed down or maybe even temporarily reversed if physical transportation sees fundamental improvements, maybe with ubiquitous hyperloops and cheap supersonic flights.

[Link Blog] Real mobile computing

2013-09-02T23:45:00.001-07:00

Revenge of the Nerds

This 2002 article by Paul Graham contains the following remark:

« as software shifts off the desktop and onto servers (a future even Microsoft seems resigned to), there will be less and less pressure to use middle-of-the-road technologies. »

The move from the desktop to the server indeed allowed the blooming of frameworks and languages. But more than 10 years later, there is a clear move back toward the client: with so-called native apps on one hand, and of course in the browser on the other hand.

Which makes me think about the question of where computing should take place. Cloud resources are getting cheaper and cheaper, which argues in favor of more computing in the cloud. But personal devices are also getting cheaper, more powerful and more networked, which argues in favor of more local computing!

I like to think of a future where computing is really mobile, and by that I don't mean "running on a mobile device", but able to move from one device to the other as needed. Depending on latency, connectivity, storage, CPU cycles, power requirements, and pricing, the physical location of computing would change.

Big services such as Google and Facebook try to reduce the amount of computing and storage that every user needs, for obvious cost reasons. But what if everybody had his own computing nodes (in the cloud or in your pocket - after all we have this thing called the Internet connecting things), usable by any service (given permission)?

Google today does not, for example, dedicate a thousand dollars of computing resources just for you (especially as you're not directly paying Google for that). But you might be willing to provide these resources. In fact you probably already have these resources, with your laptop, mobile phone, and other computers, and odds are that in the future you will have much more.

What would it take to get there? The biggest obstacle is designing the software. You need a standard way of describing software (i.e. bytecode, a VM, APIs, and metadata), securing it, and create virtual networks. You also need a way to figure out how to handle the location and mobility of data. You probably also need a way to suspend computation on a device, and resume it on another one. Finally, you need a lot of intelligence to make this actually work.

[Link Blog] About yourself

2013-08-30T23:01:00.003-07:00

Daniel Miessler's About page

I only discovered Daniel's websites recently, thanks to my brother. It looks like Daniel and I largely share a worldview. The difference, of course, is that his website is excellent, and that he is quite good at expressing himself, something I have yet to improve.

« I'll start by saying that if you've not tried to summarize yourself in this sort of way, i.e. via some sort of "about me" format, you should make an effort to do so. It's quite enlightening to explicitly identify who you are and what you value in life. »

I like that encouragement. I have focused so far on a single Worldview document. But that might not be the best format, or at least not the only format. So now I started updating the README to look a bit more like his About page.

« I see my site as nothing less than a means of augmenting and sharing my mind. I use it as a means of organizing everything I have learned and want to learn, and then as a means of sharing that same content with others.

This is very well said and it's exactly what I am trying to do, without having been able to express it that well. I feel encouraged, reading this, to put more content in that space I have created on github.

[Link Blog] Meat without the hurt

2013-08-08T22:18:00.002-07:00

The world's first cruelty-free hamburger

« My own view is that being a vegetarian or vegan is not an end in itself, but a means towards reducing both human and animal suffering, and leaving a habitable planet to future generations. »

I am not a vegetarian but I try not to eat too much meat - when I think about it. If tomorrow all meat consumption was prohibited, I would probably just shrug. Sure, I would miss a little bit dried meat from Valais and the occasional filet mignon. But given the positive impact on animal suffering and the environment, that would be well worth it.

But I agree with the author that it's not the meat itself, it's how we get to the meat. If there was a way to enjoy the taste without the pain, and no particular adverse health effects, I would see no reason not to eat meat at least occasionally. But of course that would be a personal choice.

Trip starting Sunday August 5, 2007 04:12:35 GMT

2007-08-05T14:56:12Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Sunday August 5, 2007 04:12:35 GMT
Duration: 10 hours, 43 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 1204

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Trip starting Saturday August 4, 2007 16:01:26 GMT

2007-08-04T19:01:51Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Saturday August 4, 2007 16:01:26 GMT
Duration: 3 hours
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 303

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Trip starting Friday August 3, 2007 17:42:34 GMT

2007-08-04T14:59:09Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Friday August 3, 2007 17:42:34 GMT
Duration: 21 hours, 16 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 2106

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Trip starting Saturday July 14, 2007 10:08:36 GMT

2007-07-14T14:34:23Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Saturday July 14, 2007 10:08:36 GMT
Duration: 4 hours, 25 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 531

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Trip starting Sunday July 8, 2007 08:34:22 GMT

2007-07-08T15:30:16Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Sunday July 8, 2007 08:34:22 GMT
Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 1843

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Trip starting Friday July 6, 2007 10:25:04 GMT

2007-07-06T12:49:32Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Friday July 6, 2007 10:25:04 GMT
Duration: 2 hours, 24 minutes
Number of segments: 2
Number of points: 497

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Google Maps Experiments

2007-07-05T02:22:04+02:00

Not long ago, I bought a DG-100 Data Logger. This is a small GPS device, without a display, which just records where you are going. You can then offload the data to a PC and use it to geotag pictures or whatever fun idea you may come up with.

Now one thing I had in mind was to create GPS traces with Google Maps. The idea is that you go for a trip, come back home, offload the data, and voilà, the result appears in your blog nicely displayed with Google Maps (this is against all rules of privacy but it's pretty cool).

So last weekend, I put together some of the elements needed to achieve this:

Exported all the data taken by the data logger to GPX format.
Wrote an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet to group points into segments (xsl:for-each-group does marvels). A segment is aa series of GPS points no further apart than one hour (one hour is very conservative, five minutes would probably do just as well).
Wrote an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet that produces an XHTML page calling the Google Maps API based on points in one or more segments. This is the fun part.
Wrote an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet to produce an Atom feed with one entry per group of segments within a day. Each entry displays some high-level information about the trip, and includes a map using an HTML iframe pointing to the XHTML page displaying the map, parametrized appropriately.

The Google Maps API is a nice object-oriented JavaScript API which is quite complete and powerful. (Although I did find some bugs or omissions in the documentation.) The trickiest part was to produce "encoded polylines" to draw the paths, and I wanted to do this server-side. Using encoded polylines is necessary if you have more than a few points in a line (GPS tracks can have thousands), or your browser will take forever to load the map or even crash.

Luckily, Mark McClure has done a fantastic job describing the algorithms, including Douglas-Peucker, to encode path data, and has made available JavaScript code. Recently Mark Rambow has written a Java version of this code, which I have integrated and modified a little bit. I started writing the algorithms in XLST 2.0 / XPath 2.0, and in fact got pretty far writing the encoding code, but then realized that some portions of the algorithms were just too hard to write this way. I may give this a try in XForms 1.0 / XPath 2.0 some day though!

The result is the series of blog entries that precede this post. For now, they are experimentally aggregated in this feed.

Trip starting Saturday June 30, 2007 09:20:06 GMT

2007-06-30T14:02:47Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Saturday June 30, 2007 09:20:06 GMT
Duration: 4 hours, 42 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 611

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Trip starting Thursday June 21, 2007 04:56:04 GMT

2007-06-22T11:27:59Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Thursday June 21, 2007 04:56:04 GMT
Duration: 1 day, 6 hours, 31 minutes
Number of segments: 3
Number of points: 2567

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Trip starting Sunday June 17, 2007 16:55:27 GMT

2007-06-17T23:06:12Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Sunday June 17, 2007 16:55:27 GMT
Duration: 6 hours, 10 minutes
Number of segments: 2
Number of points: 206

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Trip starting Friday June 15, 2007 06:24:34 GMT

2007-06-15T16:34:42Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Friday June 15, 2007 06:24:34 GMT
Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes
Number of segments: 4
Number of points: 259

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Trip starting Friday June 1, 2007 01:56:36 GMT

2007-06-01T03:32:27Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Friday June 1, 2007 01:56:36 GMT
Duration: 1 hour, 35 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 192

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Trip starting Thursday May 31, 2007 01:40:36 GMT

2007-05-31T07:45:43Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Thursday May 31, 2007 01:40:36 GMT
Duration: 6 hours, 5 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 650

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Trip starting Monday May 28, 2007 15:48:04 GMT

2007-05-30T01:14:50Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Monday May 28, 2007 15:48:04 GMT
Duration: 1 day, 9 hours, 26 minutes
Number of segments: 1
Number of points: 3985

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Trip starting Saturday May 26, 2007 12:16:28 GMT

2007-05-27T10:16:30Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Saturday May 26, 2007 12:16:28 GMT
Duration: 22 hours
Number of segments: 3
Number of points: 2229

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Trip starting Friday May 25, 2007 13:16:22 GMT

2007-05-26T03:14:02Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Friday May 25, 2007 13:16:22 GMT
Duration: 13 hours, 57 minutes
Number of segments: 4
Number of points: 785

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Trip starting Thursday May 24, 2007 13:15:28 GMT

2007-05-25T00:26:32Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Thursday May 24, 2007 13:15:28 GMT
Duration: 11 hours, 11 minutes
Number of segments: 3
Number of points: 1940

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Trip starting Wednesday May 23, 2007 15:58:00 GMT

2007-05-23T21:09:35Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Wednesday May 23, 2007 15:58:00 GMT
Duration: 5 hours, 11 minutes
Number of segments: 2
Number of points: 22

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Trip starting Sunday May 20, 2007 04:12:58 GMT

2007-05-20T22:47:23Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Sunday May 20, 2007 04:12:58 GMT
Duration: 18 hours, 34 minutes
Number of segments: 4
Number of points: 1035

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Trip starting Sunday May 13, 2007 10:05:10 GMT

2007-05-13T16:33:37Z

Trip information:

Starting time: Sunday May 13, 2007 10:05:10 GMT
Duration: 6 hours, 28 minutes
Number of segments: 2
Number of points: 630

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Personne Pour Défendre la Science?

2006-10-31T16:01:51Z

On ne sait par où commencer pour décrire ce qui a mal tourné dans l'émission Infrarouge de ce soir, qui proposait un "débat" entre Jacques Neirynck (physicien et écrivain) et Elizabeth Teissier (astrologue):

Parmi les 10 à 20 personnes présentes sur le plateau (qui en général dans Infrarouge prennent équitablement la parole pour défendre l'un ou l'autre parti), il ne s'est apparemment pas trouvé une seule personne pour prendre sérieusement la défense de la raison et de la science. On se pose des questions sur la façon dont les invitations à l'émission se sont effectuées.
M. Neirynck n'a quasiment pas eu la parole alors que Mme Teissier l'a monopolisée, d'ailleurs de façon constamment impolie. La modératrice a été faible et n'a pas joue son rôle et a en conséquence implicitement supporté le parti de Mme Teissier.
Il faut bien dire que M. Neirynck a fait preuve d'une mollesse décevante: interventions pauvres voire mal a propos, et acceptation de se voir son temps de parole monopolisé par la partie adverse.

L'astrologie est une insulte à la raison. Mme Teissier, en particulier de par la popularité qu'elle a donnée à l'astrologie, et donc de par son travail constant contre la science, à mon sens ne mérite que le mépris. Il est triste et choquant de voir que l'émission de débat phare de la Télévision Suisse Romande ait, sciemment ou par incompétence, clairement choisi le parti de la charlatanerie et de la superstition.

Finally, Apple Releases the Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro

2006-10-24T06:37:59Z

It certainly took Apple some time to upgrade its MacBook Pro, especially when you think that the CPU is a drop-in replacement for the original Core Duo. Dell and other manufacturers have been shipping Core 2 Duo machines for weeks. So what do we get for waiting besides the CPU? The answer seems to be "not that much, as expected, but it's not too bad":

Good. The Core 2 Duo CPU, of course. 2.33 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, and supposedly 34-39% faster than the previous Core Duo. I will take better performance any time.
Good. 3 GB of RAM is now officially supported. I've had 2 GB of RAM for 2 1/2 years now, and it's really starting to hurt. Funnily enough, the 2 GB modules cost USD 1,170 at Crucial, almost 4 times the price of two 1 GB modules (USD 334). However apple prices the 3 GB option at USD 575 more than the 2 GB option, so either they get their memory cheaper or they rip you off on the 2 GB option (maybe both). So either you get 2 GB today (there is no lower option) and upgrade later when the 2 GB modules are cheaper (you throw away one 1 GB module), or you pay a hefty USD 575 today.
Neutral. No enhancements (functional or looks) to the case. The current design is ok, and it's certainly one of the best-looking notebooks around, but it's starting to be a little old. Rumors say there won't be any such enhancements until summer 2007 with the next generation CPUs and chipsets.
Bad. Same old 1680x1050 display. Again, I've had this on my notebook for 2 1/2 years, and 1920x1200 displays have been available for at least over a year, so I don't see why Apple doesn't ship the latest display. Back in the days when operating systems had trouble scaling graphics, Apple had at least an excuse to standardize on ridiculous resolutions, but today, doesn't Apple have Display PDF?
Bad. No 7200 rpm 160 GB hard drive. To be fair, I don't think the 160 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 is out yet.

Price for a 17" / 2 GB / 160 GB configuration with 3-year warranty (a must): USD 3,148. Same with 3 GB: USD 3,723. This does not include sales tax. I think it's a go, but honestly, I am getting ready psychologically to run Vista on it.

Sad day for journalism and freedom

2006-10-08T07:43:43Z

Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered yesterday in Moscow.

I had read her first book about Chechnya, A Dirty War, and been impressed by her courage and by the depth of her stories about the horrors committed in Chechnya. She has made many enemies over the years by denouncing corrupt Russian and Chechen officials, including Putin and Kadyrov, especially about the war in Chechnya.

The world needs more people like her.

Getting More Ready to Switch

2006-08-15T15:45:38Z

Like many, I have been thinking about switching to MacOS X from Windows for a long time. Why? As much as I dislike Windows, it does the job and I have got used to most of its quirks. Most of all, it runs all the applications I need, for development and for fun. So really the major reason is a sort of disgust for the whole Windows user experience after all these years, and the fact that significant OS updates only occur every five years or so due to Microsoft's broken development methodologies and release strategies. Finally, I can't forgive Microsoft for what they did with IE, namely dropping the development of a broken browser for 5 years, causing headaches that we will still have to deal with for years. Switching to MacOS X would provide a novel user experience, more frequent software updates, and possibly a less evil company to deal with (something I have yet to be convinced of).

But so far, this desire has been mainly hampered by:

The abysmal CPU performance of the PowerBook G4
The mediocre screen resolution of Apple's notebooks
The fact that some software I use is not available on the Mac

But now Apple has done the right thing and is using decent CPUs; the display resolution is up to par with my current notebook; and you can dual-boot (an option which I actually don't like at all except as a last resort), with hopes that good emulators will see the light of day soon since you don't have to do CPU emulation anymore.

For fun I tried to look at similarities and differences between my current 17-inch notebook, a Sager bought two years ago, and the latest 17-inch MacBook Pro:

Feature	Sager NP8790	MacBook Pro
CPU	Pentium 4 3.4 GHz	Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz
Maximum RAM	2 GB	2 GB (some have suggested that it actually supports 4 GB, but this is not official - and 4 GB is currently way to expensive anyway)
Hard Drives	Up to 2 7200 rpm drives in RAID 0 or RAID 1. I am using two 60 GB drives in RAID 0 for a total of 120 GB.	Single 7200 rpm drive, with a current maximum size of 100 GB (more once larger 7200 rpm drives come out).
Display	17-inch, 1680 x 1050	17-inch, 1680 x 1050
Numeric Keypad	Yes	No
Card Reader	Yes	No
Integrated Camera	Yes	Yes
USB 2.0	3 ports	3 ports
FireWire	1 x 400	1 x 400 + 1 x 800
Wi-Fi	B/G	A/B/G
Bluetooth	1.0	2.0
Video	ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 256MB DDR Video Memory	ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor, dual link DVI support, 256MB of GDDR3.
Weight	10.5 lbs with battery	5.6 lbs
Dimensions	1.7"x15.4"x11"	1"x15.4"x10.4"
Battery Life	1/2 to 1 hour (effective)	5.5 hours (advertised)
Fan Noise	Bad	Unknown
Price	$3800 paid in May 2004	$3800 (price for 2 GB of RAM, 100 GB 7200 rpm HD, extended warranty, second power supply, and California taxes)

What's bad about the Sager. Clearly, the Sager has some clear disadvantages in comparison with the MacBook: it is much heavier, thicker, and because it uses a desktop P4 CPU and two hard drives, its battery life is terrible. Another big annoyance is the noise produced by the 3 fans on the main unit and the additional power supply fan.

What's bad about the MacBook Pro. On the other hand, the MacBook pro doesn't have that impressive features: the screen resolution is the same (17-inch PC notebooks have long come with 1920x1200 options, known as WUXGA), as is the maximum RAM (affordable 3 or 4 GB would be good). Hard drive capacity would be going down from what I have now (going under 7200 rpm is not an option), and hard drive speed would likely go down as well since I am running in RAID 0. There is no handy card reader, and no integrated numeric pad (a shame, since you clearly have room for one in a 17-inch notebook). There are only 3 USB ports, which are quickly used up (this issue will be solved once Wireless USB arrives). Of course there is the issue of software compatibility: I still use some software that doesn't seem to have a perfect MacOS X equivalent, and vendors tend to release for Windows first (for example, the latest beta of Skype is only available for Windows).

What's good about the MacBook Pro. FireWire 800, ExpressCard, possibly even better video (the Sager's is excellent), DVD drive, and Express Card. A the moment I don't care about any of those. But Bluetooth 2.0 sounds good: I have been using a bluetooth headset, mouse and cell phone for a long time, and look forward to a longer range and stereo bluetooth headphones. The sound card of the MacBook Pro is going to be better than that of the Sager (which is the worst sound card I ever had in a notebook, bar none).

The question is now whether it is worth spending $3800 mainly for a more portable notebook, MacOS X, and the cool factor. Unless, of course, the Core Duo chip really performs significantly better than the P4 3.4 GHz, which remains an unknown to me at the moment for the exact type of applications I have. In the meanwhile, I hope my Sager will hold until later this year so I can postpone this decision.

Gotta Love Hard Drives

2006-07-01T14:02:50Z

It's summer again, so hard drives start failing. This time, it's just a hard drive in my backup PC, which is part of a RAID 1 array, so that's not too serious. Restoring the array almost failed though. This is one of those built-in VIA RAID chips, and you just never know if things will happen the way they are supposed to.

Take this particular case: the "source" disk failed, and the "mirror" was ok. So I bought a new drive, plugged it in in place of the failed drive (be sure to correctly identify the right drive, or you may just end up with two drives with corrupted data!), and started my PC again. The result: the RAID software tells me there is now no drive in the array. Darn.

So I tried several things, from hot-plugging the new drive to putting back the old drive just to make sure things still work. Note that if I do that, the RAID software tells me the array is out of sync, but proposes right away to synchronize by copying from the failed "source" drive to the sound "mirror" drive. Don't say yes to that!

Finally, I figured out that my new drive was configured by default for the 3 Gb/s rate, while my PC only supports the old 1.5 GB/s. Change the jumper on the drive and voilà, the drive is recognized, appears in the user interface, and I can use it as a spare to copy from my "mirror" disk, which now acts as "source". One hour later, and the array is restored. Phew (you know that it's typically during restore that the only remaining drive with good data fails)!

Now I just need to find an external enclosure that supports two drives, a good fan and air flow, and that's it. Something like this, but isn't this a tad expensive?

As a side note, some predict that if trends continue (which they may or may not), the price of Flash will be competitive with hard drives around 2015. I for one can't wait for that to happen, and you can bet that in fact Flash as a mass-storage technology for PCs will occur well before that year.

Credit Cards: Don't Make the Same Mistake...

2006-06-29T09:51:52Z

Yesterday I used my credit card instead of my debit card to get cash at an ATM (incorrect brain processing). From my credit card's web site:

Are there fees associated with cash advances ?

The cash advance fee for ATM transactions, transfers and convenience checks is $5 per transaction for transactions of $100 or less or 4% of the cash advance, with a minimum of $15 for transactions greater than $100. The cash advance fee for all other transactions is 4% of the cash advance with a minimum fee of $15.

How are finance charges calculated ?

Finance charges for purchases will not accrue if you pay your balance in full each month. However, if you have an outstanding cash advance balance, finance charges for cash advances will accrue each day beginning on the date of the advance, until the full amount is paid. Therefore, you may incur additional finance charges on future statements when you use your card to take cash advances or use convenience checks.

Ouch!

Do you speak Swiss?

2006-05-23T00:44:52Z

Il y a deux semaines, Infrarouge discutait de la question de l'enseignement du français en Suisse allemande, a l'occasion des débats récents dans certains cantons de cette région sur le remplacement de l'enseignement du français par celui de l'anglais. La question inverse (enseignement de l'allemand ou de l'anglais en Suisse romande) était également à l'ordre du jour. Quelques points intéressants ont été soulevés dans la confrontation entre Beat Kappeler (l'anglais en premier, le français / l'allemand en second, et rapidement optionnels) et Isabelle Chassot (l'anglais oui, mais le français / l'allemand d'abord).

La plupart des Suisses font ce douloureux constat: l'enseignement réciproque des deux principales langues nationales est un échec et les suisses ne communiquent que difficilement au travers de la langue voisine. Après dix ans d'allemand à l'école (mon cas), les étudiants ne sont pas en mesure d'avoir une conversation, même si des bases écrites et de compréhension subsistent. Les résultats semblent donc disproportionnés par rapport aux efforts.

Voici en vrac quelques thèmes proposes dans le débat, et mon opinion:

De nouvelles méthodes d'enseignement. On constate que les méthodes anciennes et actuelles ne produisent pas les résultats escomptés. Un indice supplémentaire qui désigne les méthodes comme fautives est le fait que les Romands n'aiment pas l'allemand, et que les Allémaniques n'aiment pas le français ("la pire branche", dit un élève de Stanz). Les optimistes soutiennent que de nouvelles méthodes vont grandement améliorer la situation, ce à quoi les détracteurs répondent que cela fait 100 ans qu'on essaie et qu'on ne va tout simplement pas y arriver. Mon avis: il faut clairement de nouvelles méthodes, mais si celles-ci vont certainement améliorer quelque peu le niveau de maîtrise de la langue, je reste sceptique quant à la perspective de résultats spectaculaires. Seules les méthodes dites d'immersion pourraient vraiment fonctionner, mais la difficulté de mise en oeuvre de celles-ci (enseignants bilingues ou de langue maternelle allemande / française respectivement) les réserve à certaines écoles privées seulement.
Apprendre l'anglais à la place "Que les Suisses apprennent tous l'anglais comme seconde langue et tous les problèmes seront résolus". M. Kappeler pense même que ce serait une solution pour les commissions du gouvernement fédéral. Les détracteurs: la langue, c'est aussi la culture. En Suisse, c'est le fondement du pluralisme. Mon avis: la Suisse tient ensemble pour d'autres raisons: histoire commune, cohésion négative vis à vis des voisins, système politique, politique économique, etc. L'apprentissage réciproque des langues n'est pas essentiel a cette cohésion, même s'il peut la faciliter. Si les Suisses utilisent l'anglais pour communiquer entre eux et donc développent leur connaissance de cette langue, ce sera également un avantage pour eux sur leurs voisins plus grands (France, Allemagne, et Italie). On voit le résultat dans les pays Scandinaves, dont le niveau d'anglais dépasse de loin celui des pays cités. Donc finalement, pourquoi pas.
L'anglais plus difficile qu'on le croit. "L'anglais est facile au début, et le français plus difficile, puis la tendance s'inverse". Mon avis: de langue natale française et ayant vécu de nombreuses années dans un pays anglophone (et parlant l'anglais tous les jours), je ne vois pas d'indice allant dans ce sens. Toute langue est difficile, mais simplifiez la grammaire et l'orthographe et vous retirez déjà de grands obstacles à l'apprentissage. Le français et l'allemand sont des langues très difficiles dès le début, et le restent. L'anglais est plus facile grâce à son absence de genres et à sa conjugaison très simple. Même ses verbes irréguliers sont un jeu d'enfant compare a ceux du français. Ne parlons pas de l'allemand et de ses trois genres et multiples cas (nominatif, accusatif, datif, génitif). Quant a l'orthographe, chaque langue a ses difficultés: l'anglais qui n'a quasiment aucune règle claire de prononciation, le français qui en a mais compliquées, l'allemand egalement mais un peu moins compliquées, et l'italien et l'espagnol qui sont phonétiques. Les francophones doivent être les seuls de la planète à faire des concours d'orthographe. La difficulté principale de l'anglais pour les francophones? Sa prononciation.
Le problème du suisse allemand. Eh oui, les Suisse Allemands ne parlent pas le "bon" allemand (Hochdeutsch) mais des dialectes, et la tendance du repli sur ceux-ci a augmenté depuis les générations précédentes. La langue allemande n'est plus appréciée en Suisse allemande. Ceci est un obstacle de plus pour les Romands, qui, eux, parlent le "bon" français (enfin, c'est ce qu'on veut bien croire). Voici un argument de plus en faveur de l'anglais.
L'anglais est une langue pauvre. Shakespeare se retourne sûrement dans sa tombe en entendant ce lieu commun. Il est vrai que la tendance à la simplification est visible avec l'anglais, en particulier dans sa version américaine. Mais il n'en reste pas moins qu'on exprime tout et avec beaucoup de subtilité en anglais. La richesse d'une langue ne se mesure pas à la complexité de sa grammaire ou de son orthographe.
Si on apprend l'anglais, alors pourquoi pas le mandarin? Vous avez peut-être déjà entendu ce lieu commun. Evidemment on apprend aujourd'hui l'anglais non seulement parce que c'est la langue maternelle d'une grande partie de la planète (au premier, second ou troisième rang selon les études), mais parce que cette langue est utilisée pour les affaires, la science, la culture, les conférences, les voyage, et bien sûr Internet. Elle est donc énormément parlée comme seconde langue, ce que toutes les statistiques n'incluent pas (voir ces quelques chiffres intéressants). C'est donc aujourd'hui la langue de communication par excellence. Si l'anglais reste numéro un de ce point de vue, pourquoi effectivement ne pas se tourner vers le mandarin, de plus en plus utile avec les échanges croissants avec la Chine, ou vers l'espagnol, troisième langue mondiale?

Ma conclusion: donnons à l'anglais l'importance qu'il mérite et assurons-nous que chaque étudiant en connaisse au moins les bases au sortir de l'école obligatoire; améliorons les méthodes d'enseignement des langues en favorisant les méthodes pratiques et d'immersion lorsque c'est possible; donnons la possibilité aux élèves de choisir leur troisième langue parmi l'allemand, l'italien, l'espagnol, ou d'autres langues de leur choix. La Suisse aura tout à y gagner.

Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone

2006-05-22T14:48:49Z

I knew Carl Sagan from Pale Blue Dot, Billions and Billions, and especially his wonderful Cosmos (truly, if there is one book everybody should read, Cosmos is it). The man that transpires from these books appeared to me as an wonderful example of what human beings should strive for, and I naturally picked up Poundstone's biography out of curiosity.

Poundstone covers Sagan's life adequately. He does not limit himself to that however, dedicating ample space to explaining the scientific context behind much of Sagan's work. He defends Sagan's positions well, but also presents the positions of some of Sagan's adversaries with apparent honesty.

The low point of this reading is the revelation that Sagan's personal life was not always exemplary. Living with a man as busy and allegedly full of ego as Sagan was a challenge. He married three times, finally finding the ideal partner in his relationship with Ann Druyan, who in particular appears to have made him a better family man.

Sagan's life is fascinating and shows admirable continuity. From his involvement with the question of whether there is life on Mars to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), he has remained largely devoted to the question of extraterrestrial life, a new field initially called exobiology.

Sagan's influence in the scientific world has been huge, if not as a traditional scientist, then as a man who seeded ideas. But his role as a popularizer of science has probably been even more important. In particular, his hit TV show from the 80s, Cosmos, has made his name famous to the point probably of being at some point the second-best known scientist in the 20th century (after Einstein, of course), at least in the US. Many have become scientists later in life after watching the show as kids.

Sagan knew how to teach, as his Cornell students can testify. He was able to inspire awe from the contemplation of the physical world. His always perfect (if a little snobbish-sounding) elocution, and his sometimes poetic stances, touch the mind and the heart.

Poundstone's biography confirms that Sagan was an extremely smart man, and a constant defender of reason. He never tired and always loved what he was doing. Through his books and teaching, he has sent the message that humans should not let their brains at the door. What Voltaire and Swift did with satire, Sagan did with science.

Sagan's untimely end in 1996 at age 62 is tragic, first on a personal level because he was in the end fully aware that his illness could take him, and second for the world at large, as he could have easily provided his insight and wisdom for another twenty years.

The Singularity: Do People Want It?

2006-05-22T14:47:28Z

While still progressing in my reading of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, I found an article from The Futurist (get the PDF), where Kurzweil summarizes what the Singularity is about. The article is followed by reactions to his perspective, among them one by Richard Eckersley, fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Eckersley begins: "I have sometimes asked audiences if they are inspired or excited by the sort of techno-utopian vision represented by the Singularity; almost no one is." He follows with a fairly strong criticism of Kurzweil's vision of the future, arguing that not only does that future not bear much resemblance with what we today call "human", but also that we have not actually made a choice of that future yet.

Eckersley's position is understandable and also defendable in a way: the future that lays ahead of us may or may not globally be of our liking. I do not know if Kurzweil looks forward to everything the future he predicts will bring humanity. Certainly he wants a good part of that future, in particular he has made it clear that he does not look forward to disease and death. I tend to share this desire of living long and healthy.

And this is in my opinion the crux of the issue: we may not want that future, but it will be difficult not to get to it. To understand why, just answer this question for yourself: given the opportunity, provided by scientific research, to live longer and in good health, will you take it? The answer I expect from most people is a resounding yes. In fact, this has been most people's answer for as long as the world has known ways to treat damage done to our bodies. Listen to people who have had to deal, directly or indirectly, with heart attacks, cancer, Alzheimer, AIDS, etc. The search for cures to all these diseases is considered, at least in Western society, a laudable goal. In other words, the population at large wants to get rid of disease. To get there, it supports medical research and it agrees to spend a quite large portion of its money for medical care.

On the other hand science is progressing, arguably increasingly faster. Remember that the role of DNA was discovered only about 50 years ago, in 1953, and consider the progress accomplished since then in all the areas of medical science. We now understand in many ways why cells die, how the brain works, what genes intervene in certain diseases, etc. Almost every day a new discovery is made. In conclusion: you have on one hand demand (people do not want to suffer, get ill, and die) and on the other hand supply (medical science is finding more and more ways to repair the body). Guess what happens when there is supply and demand: consumption.

This cocktail is what will get us to a future probably not very different from that described by Kurzweil. If you believe that the human body is a (biological) machine, and that there is nothing to stop us, if we keep looking, understanding all the mechanisms of that machine, then we will get to a point where the known diseases will be treatable, and where we will be in a good position to treat new ones extremely rapidly. It does seem like eradicating disease (let's be reasonable and say "in 99 % of the cases") is at least a theoretical possibility.

Some will argue that yes, people want to live long and healthy, but that there is a limit. Surely, if you live up to something like 90, or maybe 100, years old, you should consider yourself happy and look forward to a nice, peaceful death? This is a fundamental misunderstanding, and here is why. The technology that will help get rid of cancer, Alzheimer, and many other dreaded diseases, requires understanding in depth the mechanisms of the human body, including aging. The very concept that aging is not a fatality and can be slowed down or even reverted is now broadly thought to be a reality. Medication or treatments that will slow down or revert aging will see the light of day. Looking at today's global trends toward staying young, at least in appearance, you can imagine the success those will have, whatever their cost.

In addition, as Kurzweil is pointing out, life expectancy, even accounting infant mortality, was in the 30s about 200 years ago. It is now 85 for Japanese women (the current world record). In western countries, somebody who dies at age 65 is commonly considered to die "young". Clearly, people have now fully integrated the idea that life should last for around 80-90 years. Not so long ago, this was not the case. So the idea people have of life expectancy has changed, and it will probably change again in the future as life expectancy actually increases. There is no reason to place the bar at 90 or 100 year old, or even 150. The sky is the limit.

There are ways of curbing this seemingly inevitable trend. One is a global war that would destroy civilization. Another one would be oppressive laws blocking scientific research and/or blocking access to certain types of medication which also cure cancer and Alzheimer. It seems unlikely that the developed world will go in that direction, and the demand will be so strong that there will be a place on the planet where those developments will take place anyway.

Dramatic life extension is not all there is to Kurzweil's predictions, but it is one which appears ineluctable. We may not deliberately choose it, but humans' strong desire for life and the simple fact that medical science will be able to answer that desire will cause human life to change drastically. Now is the time for thinkers to ponder the consequence of those changes and outline solutions to the new problems that will arise from them: the concept of generation will be blurred; the way people generate wealth will have to adapt to the new pyramid of ages; pensions will have to be revisited; keeping the population stable or slightly decreasing will require revisiting family policies. On the other hand, as the earth population gets older and therefore requires less children, there will be no reason for every kid not to have access to the best education there is on the planet.

E-ink and e-paper at last?

2006-05-22T14:43:34Z

An article at BusinessWeek suggests that good electronic book readers are real close now^TM. Prototypes of e-ink and e-paper have shown that the technology is a reality. E-Ink's technology, for example, relies on small capsules containing black and white particles. By appropriately applying an electric field, you can make the particles move to the top or the bottom of the capsule, making the surface of it appear black or white. The promise: low-power, high-contrasts display that provide the experience of reading on paper. They may not even erase when you shut down the power, and be flexible, although I am not sure wether E-Ink's technology provides these features yet.

The recent Sony Reader that makes use of the E-Ink technology is a step in the right direction. Its main drawback, besides being made by Sony, is its price of around USD 400. I believe this kind of technology will really spread once it passes under the USD 100 bar. But there is no reason, with mass-production and competition between manufacturers, that this won't happen.

Another drawback is the lack of availability of recent books in formats free of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). As much as Apple has been successful with their iTunes Music Store (they are seeling their billionth song any day now), their format remains encumbered. I admit that I have "freed" the few songs I have bought from them. Recently, I even bought a few TV shows. To my horror, when starting to play one of those, I got the message: "This file has been authorized on 3 computers out of 5 already. Authorize to play on this computer?". But I can swear that I never played or even moved these files to a computer other than the one I am using now. What do I do when buggy software tells me that I can't play my files anymore? Sure, we are talking about USD 0.99 or USD 1.99 stuff here, but people will buy for thousands of dollars worth of music and videos. What if they lose it all because of DRM?

Luckily there are many good books that are out of copyright that will work on any decent ebook reader. You can download articles from the web as well. But for the market to take off, it will be necessary to provide ebooks that are cheap (it doesn't make any sense for an ebook to be more expensive than a paper book) and unencumbered. But we are of course talking here about an industry which is really scared of unauthorized copying, and which misunderstands technology and its future evolution. It may take time for consumers to finally get what they really want.

I personally very much believe in electronic books. I have a few books on my Nokia 7610 (I want a full copy of the latest English Wikipedia as well), which I read from time to time when I happen to be stuck somewhere and bored. This is possible since I pretty much always have my cell phone with me. However I would be unwilling to do serious reading on a display with such low contrast, small resolution and small size. Now imagine every single cell phone sold with such an e-ink display: you would get a killer device. In the same way that smart phones have been taking over the entry-level digital camera market, and will likely do the same for the good old PDA market and the mp3 player market as well, cell phones may be the key to a large adoption of e-ink technology.

BBC downloads

2006-03-06T09:43:15Z

BBC Radio 3 has recently put all of the Beethoven symphonies online for download in mp3 format. You can download them up to a week after broadcast (although of course this is the net, so people have been able to obtain all of them after that deadline).

I have to say that I have used the opportunity to download and play those symphonies over the last few days. While I know quite a bit about opera, I am fairly clueless when it comes to symphonic music.

It is about time that radio stations take that kind of courageous initiatives. After all, they have been broadcasting music for free for decades now.

Marcus Miller video

2006-02-15T07:52:22Z

A great interview of Marcus Miller (a fantastic musician and a great person as well) is up on Google Video. This is also an opportunity to try out the new "Put on site" functionality of Google Video:

The battle over books

2006-01-20T05:35:31Z

I just stumbled upon a video of a debate that took place on November 17, 2005 at the New York Public Library on the subject of Google Book Search (formerly known as Google Print) and the lawsuits the project has triggered from the Association of American Publishers. Google plans to scan 15 million books from various libraries, including works under copyright, of which only snippets will be displayed as the result of searches. The AAP contends that to get there, Google has to make digital copies of the books and alleges massive copyright infringement, while Google invokes fair use.

I am not going to summarize the substance of the debate here, but if you have interest in copyright issues, I highly recommend you spend the time (100 minutes, but you can probably skip the first 10-15 minutes of introduction) watching it as the quality of the exchanges was very good.

While the panel included four participants and a moderator, the debate turned into a confrontation between Allan Adler, from the Association of American Publishers, and Lawrence Lessig, from Stanford Law School. I have to say that the AAP has found a smart and articulate advocate in the person of Allan Adler, but what matters in the end is that Mr. Adler is defending the interest of American publishers and authors only, not necessarily the public interest at large, and from that perspective I find myself in total agreement with Mr. Lessig's broader and more consistent views.

As a side note, this debates takes place in the context of American copyright law, not all the aspects of which technically apply to Europe. But Mr. Lessig mentioned in passing that the EU has so far taken a much more extreme approach in granting rights to authors and publishers. I ask this question: shouldn't Europe learn a lesson from the US's experience with lobbies and special interests groups, instead of simply giving in?

Why digitization projects are necessary

2006-01-13T15:09:32Z

The Ernest Hemingway museum and bar on a Bahamas island has just been completely destroyed by fire, including "hundreds of photographs and artifacts of the author".

This event is just one more example that highlights the need for digitization projects. Even more tragic was 2004's fire in Weimar which destroyed an irreplaceable collection of Goethe's manuscripts and books (40,000 to 50,000 volumes were lost). Recognized artists, musicians and authors' manuscripts and photographs should be quickly digitized and photographed so as to ensure that future generations have at least access to reproductions in the unfortunate case of catastrophic events (fire, flood, war, etc.).

I am thinking about setting up such a project to preserve Mascagni's manuscript scores, letters and photographs that are owned by his family and by a small museum in Livorno, Italy. There is a lot you can do just with a good scanner, and it seems to me that the project could be realized for quite a low cost, assuming the number of documents to digitize remains, say, under ten thousand.

Holiday online shopping

2006-01-13T08:09:38Z

The world has progressed much in terms of shopping thanks to online resources, but there is still progress to make. A few recent cases in point:

Shopping for new home phones. The requirements: I wanted two decent-looking, latest-generation wireless phones with one additional handset each to replace the two 20 year-old two-line phones my parents are still renting from Swisscom (for about CHF 10 / month). The difficulties: I have not found a web site with comprehensive reviews of such phones. Some sites review a few models. Many sites have the keyword "review" while actually featuring no user review at all. Some manufacturers' web sites are abysmal. In particular, Switel's web site is a shame: they feature dozens of models categorized in an arbitrary way; their web site does not support the "back" button (and it is a basic HTML web site - I don't know how they achieved that!); they don't feature product comparison charts; and finally, their model numbers rarely match the model numbers of the phones actually sold in Swiss stores. My email to them remained without response. The bottom line: I did not buy from them, but from Siemens (the cheaper Gigaset C340 with C34 handset, and the more modern Gigaset S440 with S44 handset). I am by the way curious about their USB adapter, which allows the handsets to talk to Skype through your computer.
Booking hotels in Italy. Here, TripAdvisor is a great resource, although it seems to be largely used by americans, based on the style and expectations visible in the reviews. I have also had success with Bookings, which features unfortunately a limited number of hotels and reviews (but it does have SOME reviews), but except for the fact that it doesn't let you (I think) search by hotel name, beats all the other similar sites I have tried in terms of usability. The difficulties: you will spend literally hours browsing the web with these tools (Florence has over 400 hotels, Rome almost 1000); different booking sites show different availabilities, and some will show availabilities when in fact there is none, in which case your booking will be canceled after a few days and you will have to start over. In one case, Orbitz supposedly sent our booking information to the hotel only three days before our arrival. Had I not exchanged emails with the (kind) personel at the hotel right after booking online, our reservation might have gone down the drain.
Amazon.fr. I do like Amazon.com, in spite of their ridiculous "1-Click" patent, and I have shopped there for many years. My shopping cart is always full of "saved for later" items, even though I don't always end up buying from them. I always look forward to improvements in their shopping system. Lately, I found the "wiki products comments" cool, although it looks like those disappeared almost immediately (and I had taken the time to write something - damn! I hope they bring them back). In the US, their free shipping over $25 is quite good if you are not in a hurry to receive your items. However, Amazon.fr has not kept up with Amazon.com. It still features a much older version of the site, without the latest improvements. I have also found out that they are censoring reviews, and that it is difficult to figure out what is happening with that. Maybe French law puts more pressure on Amazon to review "every single line" (as I was told by their customer service) written by users? Or maybe my review, even after two revisions, was simply not politically correct enough? I suspect that this is one reason for Amazon.fr's quite poor user reviews. This makes the site that much less useful. I have still bought from them, since they have a quite reasonable flat EUR 5 shipping fee to Switzerland (unlike fnac.com).
Shopping for an electronic piano. The latest experience in date: looking for a decent electronic piano. By that I man an acoustic piano replacement, not just a keyboard. I own a P-80 (the predecessor to the more recent P-90), which has been doing its job, but that is really a portable electronic piano, without built-in speakers, and I find its sound a little tiring over time. Give me a Steinway Grand any time... Anyway, in the medium term future, I will be looking for a "real" electronic piano (which will arguably provide better sound than an acoustic piano of the same price, and will be easier on the neighbours). The catch: it looks like nobody really seriously reviews those, except some keyboard magasines, of which I found the (paying, at GBP 3.50 apiece) reviews to be fairly poor. Some good candidates at Yamaha: the top of the line CLP-280, and the interesting-looking Slimline CLP-F01. Now the real question: how do they sound?

By the way, Yamaha has a fairly good product comparison site (provided by a third-party company), complete with dynamic PDF generation. An example to follow, and improve upon (this is 2006 after all).

There is a clear need for a consolidation of online shopping guides: we need less sites with each more reviews. Who will really tackle the task? Google, who wants to organize the world's information? There is also a need for Europe to do better in that respect, even though its multilingualism will remain a real obstacle: how do you translate user reviews into Europe's main languages?

Pietro Mascagni not doing too bad in Italian streets

2005-11-03T18:38:09Z

A recent article of La Nazione looks at street names in the region of Florence, Italy. In the section "classical music composers", Verdi comes first with 30 streets, Puccini second with 22 streets, and Mascagni third with 18 streets, before Rossini with 17. This is not bad at all, especially considering that while Mascagni was from Tuscany, he was not from Florence but from Livorno.

Un juriste vendu au lobby des companies de tabac

2005-11-02T15:27:19Z

Après l'association GastroSuisse, c'est au tour d'un juriste, Andreas Auer, de se vendre sans scrupules aux compagnies de tabac. En effet, d'après un article du Temps d'aujourd'hui, M. Auer, payé par Camel, Mild Seven, et Winston, aboutit à la conclusion qu'interdire la fumée dans les établissements publics serait anticonstitutionnel en Suisse. Quelle surprise de découvrir que le lobby de la cigarette puisse acheter... n'importe qui, à ce qu'il parait. Malgré les protestations d'honnêteté de M. Auer, on a honte pour lui et pour sa profession d'avoir accepté ce mandat. C'est permettre aux lobbys d'acheter de tels rapports qui devrait être anticonstitutionnel !

On lit tous les clichés dans les propos de M. Auer reportés et commentés par le Temps : "dangers du politiquement correct" (une allusion d'un anti-américanisme latent); "atteinte disproportionnée au droit de chacun au respect de sa sphère privée"; "dangers [pour les] libertés fondamentales"; "'le doute est permis' quant à la nocivité réelle de la fumée passive." On croit décidément rêver en lisant tout ceci, alors que les premières études démontrant la nocivité du tabac sur la santé datent de 1953, et que depuis les stratégies de l'industrie du tabac (en particulier : déni pur et simple, lobbyisme, campagnes publicitaires, études mandatées, et même falsification de données scientifiques) ont été analysées et bien comprises.

Passé le premier choc de voir un juriste tomber dans le panneau aussi facilement, on en arrive au second choc : les propos tenus par M. Auer. Dans le doute, pense-t-il, il faut considérer que la fumée passive ne tue pas et ne puisse pas rendre malade. Et pourquoi pas le contraire, s'interroge-t-on ? Pourquoi, dans le doute, ne pas considérer le danger réel pour la santé du citoyen suisse ? Quels seraient les impacts négatifs de l'alternative ?

La réponse est double. Premièrement, on risque de mécontenter la puissante industrie du tabac. Deuxièmement, on risque d'atteindre au respect de la sphère privée. Or on ne considère pas avec cet argument le respect de la sphère privée du non-fumeur. Mais dans les lieux publics, le fumeur est une véritable torture pour beaucoup de non-fumeurs, qui je le rappelle sont majoritaires. J'en ai encore fait l'expérience il y a quelques jours dans un restaurant : autour de notre table de non-fumeurs, pas moins de cinq personnes fumaient à plein poumons et projetaient leurs fumées nocives dans notre direction. Est-ce que M. Auer se préoccupe de notre liberté dans pareil cas ? A une table voisine, plusieurs adultes enfumaient trois ou quatre de leurs enfants - bien sûr dans le plein respect de la sphère privée de ceux-ci, et, dans le doute, considérant le tabagisme passif sans danger pour leurs propres enfants ! On comprend bien que l'argument de la liberté individuelle ne tient pas la route.

On oublie curieusement ici que, sans même considérer le tabagisme passif, la fumée tue. Elle a causé plus de morts que la seconde guerre mondiale. Trois fumeurs dans ma famille sont décédés du tabac dans leur cinquantaine. Mis à part les drames crées par de tels décès prématurés, le coût sur le système de la santé est énorme. Or, on ne naît pas fumeur : on le devient sous l'influence d'une pression sociale favorisant cette pratique, entretenue savamment par l'industrie du tabac. Interdire la fumée dans les établissements publics réduit cette pression sociale sur le non-fumeur comme sur le fumeur. Le résultat en sera des non-fumeurs plus heureux et des ex-fumeurs reconnaissants.

M. Auer, GastroSuisse, et les compagnies de tabac préfèrent prendre le risque de tuer que celui de ne pas gagner un peu d'argent. Carl Sagan a très bien exprimé cette attitude : "On pourrait croire que, avant de dénoncer des résultats de recherche dérangeants, les grandes entreprises privées utiliseraient leurs ressources considérables pour vérifier que les produits qu'ils proposent sont sans danger. Et s'ils ne trouvent rien, si des scientifiques indépendants suggèrent qu'il puisse y avoir un danger, pourquoi ces entreprises protesteraient-elles ? Est-ce qu'elles préféreraient tuer plutôt que de ne pas réaliser un profit ? Si, dans un monde incertain, une erreur doit être faite, ne devrait-elle pas l'être dans la direction de la protection les clients et du public ? [...] Est-ce que nous ne sommes pas dans le cas où au moins une certaine intervention du gouvernement serait dans l'intérêt du public ?"

Suivons Carl Sagan et, dans le doute, protégeons les enfants, les adultes fumeurs comme les non-fumeurs, ainsi que le personnel des établissement publics ; dans le doute, rendons l'expérience du restaurant ou du bar plus agréable ; dans le doute, créons une pression sociale sur les fumeurs pour les aider a se débarrasser de leur habitude mortelle ; dans le doute, rendons à tous la liberté de respirer un air non vicié.

AAP, Google Print, and the new Luddites

2005-10-25T02:45:04Z

NOTE: Cet article est également disponible en français.

After the music industry and the movie industry, it is the turn of the publishing industry to be scared of the internet. The reason? Google's monumental scanning project announced last year, Google Print. The first two industries were, and still are, scared of illegal filesharers. So-called piracy is not really what the publishing industry is afraid of right now, but this industry shares with the others a fundamental trait: a complete, utter misunderstanding of technology, high-tech companies, and what those can actually bring to their own business - possibly at the price of a change in business model.

Case in point, music. For years now, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), previously better known for an equalization curve for long play records, has been quite unsuccessfully fighting music filesharing on the internet. The truth of course is that it is extremely easy to exchange music files over the internet, and therefore hard to stop the trend, even if a few lawsuits may temporarily slow down the rate of filesharing. In addition, many doubt that fighting your customers or potential customers is a good business proposition.

But is it that hard to curb illegal filesharing? Not if you tackle the problem from the right angle. In 2003 came Apple and its iTunes Music Store, the first online music store offering legal downloads of songs or albums by the unit. The result: half a billion songs sold for $0.99 each in the two years since the opening of the service, with most of the revenue going to the record companies. The trend is accelerating and Apple expects another half a billion songs to sell by December 2005, and an additional billion by May 2006. The morale of the story: if record companies had spent their energy figuring out and implementing a business model adapted to the internet, they would have curbed illegal filesharing, sold billions of songs by now, and made a huge profit. Instead, they have wasted the money legitimate buyers gave them by suing grandmothers and little girls.

A similar situation is in the works today with Google and the publishing industry. Google's project consists in scanning up to 15 million books over a few years. Among those, not only out of copyright works, but also works still covered by copyright. However, Google plans to follow fair use laws regarding use of the material. Beyond being a wonderfully exciting project that promises to bring much forgotten knowledge right to your browser, this project also promises publishers that people will buy more books because they are able to figure out quickly whether a book is interesting to them or not.

But instead, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is suing Google, our of sheer unreasoned fear. Never mind fair use. Never mind the incredible benefit of the service to students, researchers, and casual readers around the world. Never mind the potential for increased sales. Never mind that publishers can easily opt out of Google Print (a favor done to them by Google). Never mind, in the end, the point of Google Print. They are just suing.

Unreasoned critics of the Google scanning project abound. I mentioned earlier in this blog the blog-style ramblings of Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association. I also talked about Jean-Noël Jeanneney's book, "When Google Challenges Europe", a not-so-bad initial thesis followed by quite bad implementation ideas. More recently, I read in L'Hebdo, a Swiss weekly magazine, an article entitled "The Race for the Big Digital Library has Started" ("La course à la grande bibliothèque numérique a démarré"). The article contains good and bad, but unfortunately gives too much space for the comments of a few clueless people, in particular:

Alain Jacquesson, director of Geneva's Public University Library (BPU) of Geneva, thinks the project is in the end going to be a great tool, but then places a Gorman-esque, Jeanneney-esque comment: "Who will read hundreds of pages on screen?" Don't they have printers at BPU? Can't they see that in just a few years, electronic paper will be widespread and make reading electronic documents much more convenient? Doesn't all the knowledge those librarians should have by being specialists of their domain give them at least a minuscule hint as to what the future of electronic information may be?

Danielle Mincio, curator of the manuscripts at Lausanne's Cantonal University Library, says: "The documents will be drowned in the mass." She doesn't realize of course that this is exactly where Google's core business lies, and what has made them the most successful search engine on the web for years now: the fact that they have so far been the best at ranking search results. They also have some of the brightest minds on board who are, no doubt, working hard to improve search algorithms. Also, how is the current system of quite awful library catalogs better than a full-text content search?

Jean-Frederic Jauslin, director of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (and once director of the Swiss National Library), says: "It's not because a mass of information is available that it will be used and that it will make people smarter." This has got to make you think. Such a comment may have been taken terribly out of context by L'Hebdo, but for the moment I feel ashamed that my country's culture is in the hands of Mr. Jauslin. Who has ever claimed that the goal of Google Print was to make people smarter? Doesn't Mr. Jauslin think that a slightly subtler analyis of the possibilities Google Print, or large scanning projects in general, could be made?

The L'Hebdo article ends on an insightful note: that libraries, "not accustomed to competition, have however in their hands a formidable occasion to show their usefulness, in a time where relevant information is worth gold."

The morale of the AAP lawsuit and the L'Hebdo article is threefold:

Lack of imagination and lack of understanding of the prospects of technology are widespread among people who should be specialists of their domain (namely librarians) and always on the lookout for the latest possibilities.
Some people in charge of libraries in the US and Switzerland appear more eager to keep their jobs than to actually think about providing a service which will be useful to the next generation. Kudos on the other hand to the libraries at Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, New York and Harvard that have partnered with Google.
Europe is very late in this game. The reason is not so much a lack of political will to start such a project, as per Mr. Jeanneney's stance, than an climate which is unfriendly to the development of the computer industry, in particular the software industry. Among the reasons for this situation: the sad fact that Europe does not encourage its citizens to innovate by starting up their own companies. Instead of raising and subsequently wasting public funds to start a sort of European Google Print, Europe should seriously think about the reason why Google, the company, was born and is now thriving in the US and not in Europe.

Luckily many people are striving to be creative and to ease access to information. It is to be hoped that the AAP will just waste its dollars in its lawsuits, that Google will be able to continue its Print project, and that the Luddites will lose again.

AAP, Google Print, et les nouveaux Luddites

2005-10-25T02:42:59Z

NOTE: This blog entry is also available in English.

Apres les industries de la musique et du cinéma, c'est le tour de l'industrie du livre d'avoir peur d'Internet. La raison ? Le projet monumental de numérisation annoncé l'année passée par Google sous le nom de Google Print. Les deux premières industries avaient, et ont encore, peur du partage de fichiers sur internet. Ce piratage, comme on l'appelle à tort, n'est pas vraiment ce dont l'industrie du livre a peur en ce moment, mais elle partage avec les autres un trait fondamental: une complète et totale incompréhension de la technologie, des compagnies dans le domaine de la technologie, et de ce que celles-ci peuvent effectivement apporter à leur commerce - peut-être, il est vrai, au prix d'un changement de business model.

Un exemple, celui de la musique. Depuis des années, l'association américaine de l'industrie du disque (RIAA), auparavant surtout connue pour avoir standardisé une courbe d'égalisation pour disques 33 tours, a combattu sans véritable succès le partage illégal de musique en ligne. La réalité, bien sûr, est qu'il est extrêmement facile d'échanger des fichiers de musique sur Internet, et très difficile de stopper le phénomène, même si quelques poursuites en justice peuvent temporairement le ralentir. De plus, beaucoup doutent qu'attaquer ses clients, actuels ou potentiels, soit une très bonne façon de faire du commerce.

Mais est-il si difficile de ralentir l'échange illégal de fichiers ? Pas si l'on attaque le problème par le bon angle. En 2003, Apple fait son entrée avec son iTunes Music Store, le premier magasin de musique en ligne qui permet de télécharger légalement des chansons ou des albums achetés à l'unité. Le résultat: un demi milliard de chansons vendue pour $0.99 durant les deux premières années depuis l'ouverture du service, la plupart du revenu allant aux compagnies de disque. La tendance s'accélère et Apple prévoit qu'un autre demi milliard de chansons seront vendues d'ici à décembre 2005, et un milliard supplémentaire d'ici à mai 2006. La morale de l'histoire : si les compagnies de disque avaient dépensé leur énergie à inventer un business model adapté à Internet, elles auraient ralenti les échanges de fichiers, vendu des milliards de chansons, et réalisé un profit immense. En lieu de quoi, elles ont gaspillé l'argent obtenu par les achats d'acheteurs honnêtes, en le dépensant pour poursuivre en justice des grand-mères et des petites filles.

Une situation similaire est en développement aujourd'hui entre Google et l'industrie du livre. Le projet de numérisation de Google consiste à scanner jusqu'a 15 millions de livres sur une période de quelques années. Parmi ceux-ci ne figurent pas seulement des oeuvres libres de droit de copie, mais également des oeuvres encore couvertes par des droits. Cependant, Google prévoit de suivre la notion américaine de "fair use", autrement dit les règles qui régissent l'utilisation d'oeuvres soumises par le droit d'auteur. En plus d'être un projet extraordinairement enthousiasmant, qui promet d'apporter une quantité de connaissances oubliées directement dans votre navigateur web, le projet promet également aux maisons d'édition que plus de gens vont acheter leur livres, car il sera désormais possible de découvrir plus rapidement si un livre est d'intérêt ou non.

Mais au lieu de supporter le projet, l'association américaine des éditeurs (AAP) poursuit Google en justice, par pure peur irraisonnée. En oubliant la question du "fair use". En oubliant l'intérêt incroyable du projet pour les étudiants, chercheurs, et autres lecteurs partout dans le monde. En oubliant le potentiel d'augmentation des ventes. En oubliant que les éditeurs peuvent désinscrire leurs ouvrages de Google Print (une faveur qui leur est faite par Google). En oubliant, enfin, la raison d'être de Google Print. L'association, tout simplement, poursuit en justice.

Les critiques irraisonnées du projet de numérisation de Google font légion. J'avais déjà mentionné les divagations tout à fait dans le genre blog de Michael Gorman, président de l'Association des Bibliothécaires Américains. J'avais aussi critiqué le livre de Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, "Quand Google défie l'Europe : Plaidoyer pour un sursaut", qui propose une thèse initiale valable, suivie d'idées horribles pour lancer une solution. Plus récemment, j'ai lu dans L'Hebdo, un hebdomadaire suisse, un article ayant pour titre "La course à la grande bibliothèque numérique a démarré". L'article contient de bonnes et de mauvaises choses, mais malheureusement laisse par trop la parole à quelques personnes apparemment incompétentes, en particulier :

Alain Jacquesson, directeur de la Bibliothèque publique et universitaire (BPU) de Genève, pense que le projet sera en définitive un excellent outil , mais place ensuite un commentaire Gorman-esque, Jeanneney-esque: "Qui va lire des centaines de pages a l'écran?" N'ont-ils donc pas d'imprimantes à la BPU ? Ne peuvent-ils pas voir que dans quelques années seulement, le papier électronique sera répandu et rendra la lecture de documents électroniques pratique ? Est-ce que toute la connaissance que ces bibliothécaires devraient avoir en tant que spécialistes de leur domaine ne leur permet pas d'avoir au moins une toute petite idée de ce que le futur de l'information électronique peut réserver ?

Danielle Mincio, conservateur des manuscrits a la Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Lausanne, promet: "Les documents seront noyés dans la masse." Elle ne réalise pas que ceci est exactement au centre du business de Google, et c'est exactement ce qui a fait de cette compagnie le moteur de recherche ayant le plus de succès sur le web depuis des années : le fait que Google a jusqu'a présent été le meilleur à ordonner les résultats de recherche. Google possède à son bord également parmi les cerveaux les plus brillants dans le domaine, qui sont sans aucun doute en train de travailler dur pour améliorer les algorithmes de recherche. De plus, comment peut-on considérer que l'horrible système actuel des catalogues de bibliothèques serait de quelque façon que ce soit meilleur qu'une recherche complète sur le contenu des ouvrages?

Jean-Frédéric Jauslin, directeur de L'Office fédéral de la culture (et ex-directeur de la Bibliothèque nationale suisse), annonce quant à lui: "Ce n'est pas parce qu'une masse d'informations est disponible qu'elle sera utilisée et qu'elle rendra plus intelligent." Voila qui laisse à penser. Un tel commentaire pourrait avoir été tiré horriblement hors de son contexte par L'Hebdo, mais en ce moment j'ai honte que la culture de mon pays soit aux mains de M. Jauslin. Qui a jamais prétendu que le but de Google Print était de rendre plus intelligent ? Est-ce qu'il ne viendrait pas à l'idée de M. Jauslin que l'on puisse faire une analyse un tout petit peu plus subtile des possibilités de Google Print ou des grands projets de numérisation en général ?

Pour rendre les choses un peu plus positives, l'article de L'Hebdo termine sur une note intelligente: "Les bibliothèques [...] peu habituées à la concurrence [...] tiennent pourtant là une occasion formidable de montrer leur utilité, à une époque ou l'information pertinente vaut de l'or."

La morale de la poursuite de l'AAP et de l'article de L'Hebdo est triple:

On assiste à un manque d'imagination et de compréhension de ce que la technologie peut apporter, même parmi des gens qui devraient être spécialistes de leur domaine (dans ce cas précis, les bibliothécaires), et en permanence a l'affût des dernières possibilités.
Certaines personnes à la tête de bibliothèques aux Etats-Unis et en Suisse semblent plus préoccupées par garder leur position qu'à penser à fournir un service utile aux prochaines générations. Félicitations, par contre, aux bibliothèques de Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, New York et Harvard qui travaillent avec Google.
L'Europe est très en retard. La raison n'en est pas tant qu'il manque une volonté politique pour démarrer un tel projet, selon la stance de M. Jeanneney, qu'un climat hostile au développement de l'industrie informatique, en particulier celle du logiciel. Parmi les raisons de cette situation : la triste réalité qui est que l'Europe n'encourage pas ses citoyens à innover en démarrant leur propre entreprise. Au lieu de lever et finalement gaspiller des fonds publics pour lancer une sorte de Google Print européen, l'Europe devrait sérieusement se poser la question suivante : pourquoi est-ce que Google, la compagnie, est née et se développe aujourd'hui aux Etats-Unis, et non en Europe ?

Heureusement, beaucoup s'efforcent aujourd'hui d'être créatifs et de faciliter l'accès à l'information. Il faut espérer que l'AAP va simplement finir par gaspiller son argent dans les tribunaux, que Google puisse continuer son projet Google Print, et qu'une fois de plus les Luddites perdent.

Green Tea

2005-10-22T13:39:27Z

A couple of weeks ago Swiss television consumer show A Bon Entendeur covered the topic of green tea. Some interesting bits:

Green tea has started being a hit in Switzerland around 1996.
440 tons of green tea imported in Switzerland in 2004, almost 10% more than in 2003.
Some people manage to grow green tea in Ticino (the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland).

The show tested 17 green teas available in Switzerland, looking at the content in anti-oxidants (EGCG) and caffeine. 6 teas were rejected because they contained pesticides. This was followed by a degustation by three "specialists" (supposedly). They only found one decent tea among the 11 remaining teas. I would be very interested to know how the teas I drink would have been rated!

I was not impressed at all by Nicolas Schaad, the pharmacist asked about the benefits of green tea. It is true that all sorts of benefits are attributed to green tea without serious proof. However it would have made sense to actually ask somebody knowledgeable in the subject. The host asked Mr. Schaad whether green tea could help lose weight. He answered that the audience would be disappointed. The reason? It has been shown that only green tea in combination with caffeine can help burn an additional 300 calories a day. Mr. Schaad didn't know that there is caffeine in green tea. He then mentioned that this was the equivalent of two squares of chocolate a day, to which the host commented that it was a pretty good result. Mr. Schaad's would-be ironic answer: "Yes, but how much sugar do you add to green tea?" Again, the pharmacist didn't know that... you don't add sugar to green tea!

Be sure to check the web site, where you can play the video of the whole show or read the consumer report.

Some references at Wikipedia:

The article about Green Tea
The article about Health benefits of tea

Note that the Wikipedia article about health benefits mentions that the weight loss study was made by the University of Geneva.

GastroSuisse: le mauvais combat

2005-10-22T13:31:16Z

Un récent article de 24 heures , un quotidien Suisse, fait mention de la campagne anti-tabac de GastroSuisse, la "fédération nationale leader de l'hôtellerie et de la restauration" en Suisse. En résumé, voici la situation: par crainte de voir les cantons passer des lois interdisant entièrement la fumée dans les établissements publics (Genève en particulier discute d'une telle loi), qui supposément entraîneraient une baisse de la fréquentation de ceux-ci, GastroSuisse s'est lancée dans une campagne antitabac ayant pour but de maximiser le nombre d'établissements proposant aux visiteurs des espaces non-fumeur, tout en conservant des espaces fumeur.

GastroSuisse fait le choix du mauvais combat. L'association a certainement une bonne décennie de retard. En effet, le monde n'en est plus a débattre de la véracité des études ayant établi la nocivité de la fumée pour les fumeurs, mais aussi pour les non-fumeurs (tabagisme passif), ainsi que la dépendance physique occasionnée par la nicotine. Ce combat-là a été déjà mené aux Etats-Unis, en particulier en Californie (dont les lieux de travail sont devenus sans fumée en 1995, suivi des bars en 1998, une première) ainsi que plusieurs autres Etats américains; en Irlande, où il est interdit de fumer dans les lieux de travail clos (y compris bars et restaurants) depuis mars 2004; puis en Norvège, Nouvelle-Zélande, Suède, Ecosse, et Italie. Qu'attend la Suisse ?

Interdire la fumée dans les lieux publics tels que bars et restaurants ne peut qu'avoir des résultats positifs. Ceux-ci sont évidents pour la santé des non-fumeurs d'abord, désormais plus nombreux que les fumeurs, mais également bien sûr pour celle des fumeurs, contraints de fumer moins voire en fin de compte d'arrêter de fumer. Une baisse de fréquentation temporaire des établissements publics n'est pas impossible, mais les études réalisées aux Etats-Unis ont montré que les seuls effets économiques négatifs concernaient l'industrie du tabac elle-même, résultats bien sûr corrélés avec une diminution globale de la consommation de tabac. Qui peut s'en plaindre ? Suivez ce lien pour plus d'information. En Californie, on a même montré un impact positif sur l'économie (j'ai personnellement tendance à éviter ou a rester moins longtemps dans les établissement avec fumée).

Pour des ressources supplémentaires, visitez également le site de l'Organisation mondiale de la Santé (World Health Organization), qui mentionne que le tabac "est la seconde cause de décès dans le monde. Il est actuellement responsable de la mort d'un adulte sur dix (environ 5 millions de décès par année). [...] La moitié des fumeurs qui fument aujourd'hui - c'est-à-dire environ 650 millions - va mourir du tabac." On parle bien d'un véritable fléau qu'il s'agit d'éradiquer.

Il est désolant de considérer que GastroSuisse se bat bec et ongles pour une initiative qui en fin de compte ignore non seulement la santé de sa clientèle, mais aussi les nombreuses études publiées sur le sujet ainsi que l'exemple déjà donné par plusieurs pays. Il serait intéressant de connaître l'influence des compagnies de cigarettes sur les origines de cette campagne.

Update: Le canton du Tessin vient de passer une loi interdisant la fumée dans les établissement publics. Ce canton devient ainsi un précurseur en Suisse, et il faut espérer que les autres cantons suivent cet excellent exemple, à défaut d'une loi fédérale qui serait la solution idéale.

GastroSuisse has picked the wrong fight

2005-10-16T10:33:12Z

NOTE: This is an English translation of an article in French posted in this blog on October 10, 2005.

A recent article published in 24 heures, a daily Swiss newspaper, mentions the non-smoking campaign recently started by GastroSuisse, the main Swiss federation of restaurants and hotels. This is what the situation is about: for fear of seeing Swiss cantons (Swiss states) pass legislation that would ban smoking entirely in public places such as bars and restaurants (Geneva in particular is discussing such a legislation), which would supposedly lead to a negative impact on their attendance, GastroSuisse has started a non-smoking campaign with the goal of maximizing the number of non-smoking seats in bars and restaurants, while still allowing smoking seats.

GastroSuisse has picked the wrong fight. At the very least, the association is now a good decade late. The world is no longer debating the validity of the studies that have shown that smoking is not only harmful to smokers, but also to non-smokers (passive smoking), and that nicotine causes a physical addiction. This fight has already been fought in the United States, in particular in California (where workplaces have become smoke-free in 1995, followed by bars in 1998, a first) as well as several other American states; in Ireland, where it is prohibited to smoke in closed workplaces (included bars and restaurants) since March 2004; and then in Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Scotland, and Italy. What is Switzerland waiting for?

Prohibiting smoking in public places such as bars and restaurants can only have an overall positive impact. This is obvious for the health of non-smokers, who now outnumber smokers, but also of course for that of smokers, forced to smoke less or even to stop smoking. A temporary negative impact on the attendance of bars and restaurants is not impossible, but studies done in the United States have shown that the only negative economic impact has been on the tobacco industry itself, a result which is of course correlated with a diminution of the consumption of tabacco. And who will complain about that? Follow this link for more information. In California, a positive impact on the economy has even been demonstrated (I personally tend to avoid or stay less time in smoking places).

For more information, it is a good idea to visit the site of the World Health Organization, which mentions that tobacco "is the second major cause of death in the world. It is currently responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide (about 5 million deaths each year). [...] Half the people that smoke today -that is about 650 million people- will eventually be killed by tobacco." We are indeed talking about a plague that must be eradicated.

It is saddening to consider that GastroSuisse fiercely fights for an initiative which, in final analysis, completely ignores not only the health of its customers, but also the numerous studies published on this subject, as well as the path already shown by several other countries. It would be interesting to know what influence tobacco companies have had on the origins of this campaign.

Update: The canton of Ticino as just passed a law prohibiting smoking in public places. This canton therefore becomes a precursor in Switzerland, and we can only hope that other cantons will follow this excellent example, even though a federal law would be the ideal solution.

The Hammer of God, by Arthur C. Clarke

2005-10-10T02:29:44Z

This is a good execution of a theme which has by now become a classic: that of an asteroid menacing the existence of planet Earth. Clarke is as usual a precursor and treats the subject with his typical style and insight, but the book is not without weaknesses. The character of captain Singh, for example, while developed at length during the first part of the book, seems to lose its definition at the end of the story.

More importantly, the treatment of the social impact of the menace and its consequences is somewhat naive. For example, one would imagine that on Earth, the news of the sabotage would have caused the Reborn to be chased down. The handling of social aspects has never been Clarke's strength, but this is maybe what gives his novels this color so familiar to science fiction enthusiasts around the planet.

Overall, this remains a good read, all the more because it touches on a subject which actually concerns all of mankind and deserves awareness. It certainly fares much better than the movies on a similar subject that appeared in theaters in 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact.

Wikipedia on cell phones - not quite there

2005-09-22T18:33:53Z

There is no doubt that Wikipedia is one of the great projects of the moment. Many articles are still lacking, but there is regular progress made with regards to the quantity and the quality of the information. If the next four years of Wikipedia are as productive as the last four years, the results will be astonishing.

During my recent vacation I have found myself rediscovering my cell phone, a Nokia 7610, bought last year. My prepaid Swiss SIM card did not work for sending SMS in China (shame on Orange), but I ended up using the phone for writing down a few notes and ideas using the built-in Notes application. While visiting different monuments and cities, it also occured to my friend Alex and I that having access to Wikipedia on the device would be invaluable.

Here we are not talking about accessing the online Wikipedia through a wireless connection, but about having a Wikipedia dump stored on the cell phone itself. The drawback is that the information accessed is likely to be at least slightly out of date, since Wikipedia articles are constantly updated online. On the other hand this is the only reasonable solution when data coverage is lacking and/or expensive. It is in fact a very convenient option which promises fast access times and ubiquitous access.

We are not the first to think about this idea, of course. Some versions of Wikipedia have been built for eBook readers. I found a version of the German Wikipedia for the Mobipocket eBook reader. There is also an English version for the TomeRaider eBook reader. However the former is lacking an English alternative, and the latter does not appear to work on Symbian S60 platforms.

The Nokia 7610 is said to support 1GB RS-MMC cards, which is probably still sufficient to hold the current English Wikipedia (without images) based on the fact that back in November 2004 the TomeRaider version took 450 MB. At about the same time, the version with images took 1.5 GB, which would require a 2GB card (which I believe are not yet available), or excluding some images. I believe that images would be nice, but not exactly necessary. At any rate this means that it is realistic to store Wikipedia on such a cell phone from a hardware perspective.

But according to this preliminary research it looks that there is as of yet no satisfying software solution for S60 (you are better served if you have a Palm or Pocket PC device). I may have missed the obvious though, and I would be very happy to hear about existing solutions!

Update: I have sucessfully been able to run the Mobipocket reader and an old dump of the German version of Wikipedia which fits in the 64 MB card of my phone. The reader is fine and the results encouraging, but I don't have much interest in the German version of Wikipedia! Please please please, can somebody work on the English version?

Immigration story

2005-08-18T11:26:07Z

I have been in the US since late 1997 (over 7 years now), with five H1-B visas in my passport (probably more than the average), and some extended stays as "visitor" that amount to almost an entire year. My last H1-B expired in May. I left the US for a five-week stay in Switzerland during the summer, and I re-entered the US as a visitor in August without any problem, going through immigration at SFO. All this may have triggered some red flag at the immigration of the Atlanta airport last weekend, when I came back from a two-week trip in Peru. My conversation with the immigration officer, who was very dry, went about as follows:

Me: Hi.

Him: What's the purpose of your visit in the US?

Me: I am just visiting for two weeks.

Him: [Going through my five expired H1-B in my passport] Do you plan to work during your stay?

Me: No. I quit my last job back in May when my H1-B expired. I have a receipt for a plane ticket that shows that I am going back to Switzerland in two weeks.

Him: Did you work last for Company X?

Me: No, the last company I worked for was Company Y.

Him: Does Company Y have offices in Switzerland?

Me: No, it doesn't.

Him: [Puts all my documents in a bright orange folder] Ok, take this folder and go to this office over there.

During all that time he was going back and forth between his computer and my passport.

I follow the order, and find myself in a special room (quite nice actually, like the rest of the Atlanta airport) with about five Peruvians, and one or two immigration officers sitting behind a counter. I witnessed the questioning of a Peruvian couple, where the man, wearing a traditional hat, did not speak a word of English or even Spanish (only Quechua, I understood). The woman kind of spoke a Spanish dialect. An interpreter was relaying questions back and forth, such as the "purpose of visit" question, but also "do you have money with you", "who are you visiting" (the daughter), "is your daughter allowed to work in the US" (she's a citizen), "what is your job back home" (selling fruits), etc.

When my turn came, I was questioned by an officer even dryer and more unpleasant than the first one. At that point I had already missed my connecting flight to SFO, I did not know if my friends had boarded the plane, I had had only a few hours of sleep in the plane during the night, and those immigration officers were a little intimidating, so I was a little stressed:

Him: What's the purpose of your visit to the US?

Me: I am visiting friends and taking care of some personal belongings.

Him: Do you have a job in the US?

Me: No, I don't.

Him: Do you have a job in Switzerland?

Me: No, I don't.

Him: So how are you going to sustain yourself while in the US?

Me: I worked in the US for almost seven years, I have money in a bank account.

Him: You last came to the US in August.

Me: Yes. [I thought it was time to explain the whole story.] I was advised to go back to Switzerland for a while after my last visa expired, and to come back as visitor to take care of my belongings. As a matter of fact, they are on their way to Switzerland as we speak.

Him: Do you have a receipt or document showing that this is the case?

Me: No, not with me. But I have a receipt for a plane ticket showing that I am going back to Switzerland in two weeks.

Him: [Looks at the passport and points to a certain H1-B]. This H1-B expired. What was your status in the US at that point?

I explain that I asked for an extension, which was documented by my last H1-B in the passport, and that everything was done by the rules.

Him: Do you own a house in the US?

Me: No.

Him: Do you own a house in Switzerland?

Me: No. But my parents do. [I am thinking that he wants to know if I have ties in Switzerland.]

Him: Do they have a phone number in Switzerland?

Me: Yes. [I write it down]

Him: Who lives there?

I give him my father's name, and tell him that my father is currently on a plane.

Him: So how can I speak to him if he's on a plane? Who else can I find there?

I write down the name of my mother. He leaves with the phone number, then comes back angry because I wrote down a "+" in front of it.

He actually called my parents' home in Switzerland, without even asking beforehand what time it would be there, or whether anybody there spoke English. He luckily found my brother and asked him when they were expecting me back. My brother answered correctly, the immigration officer told me that he was able to confirm by return, and I was released from further questioning.

I now understand how documents such as employment contracts, leases, or other receipts, can be useful in such circumstances. I don't know what would have happened if he hadn't found anybody home. Most likely nothing too serious, but I would probably have spent more unpleasant time in the company of immigration officers.

Luckily, Delta had a flight almost every hour to San Francisco, and immigration had notified the airline that I would be delayed. My friends were informed of this and had already taken care of making sure that we would get seats on one of the following flights. So the whole episode ended up being mainly an inconvenience, but it was also instructive.

Une bonne et attendue biographie - La Damnation d'Edgar P. Jacobs, par Benoît Mouchart and François Rivière

2005-07-18T03:52:37Z

Jusqu'à La Damnation d'Edgar P. Jacobs, le célèbre auteur de bandes dessinées était resté mystérieux pour ses lecteurs pourtant nombreux et enthousiastes. Jacobs avait publié de son vivant ses mémoires, Un Opéra de Papier, mais ceux-ci ne présentaient que la perspective du maître lui-même. La disponibilité d'une véritable biographie est donc un événement à saluer.

Les auteurs couvrent en détails ce qui est connu de la jeunesse de Jacobs, son amitié avec Jacques Van Melkebeke, puis sa première et courte carrière de baryton, qui le hantera pour le restant de ses jours. Le travail aux côtés d'Hergé, dès la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale, la douloureuse séparation d'avec sa première femme, Ninie, ainsi que la naissance de Blake et Mortimer, font des années 40 une période charnière de la vie d'Edgar.

Les productions majeures, du Rayon U aux Trois Formules du Professeur Sato, constituent le fil conducteur du reste de l'ouvrage. Si les commentaires autour des œuvres abondent, on regrette le peu d'informations liées a la vie personnelle de Jacobs dans cette seconde partie, qui laisse l'impression que celle-ci fut somme toute banale, jusqu'a la réclusion paranoïaque des dernières années. En fin de compte, et c'est la faiblesse majeure de l'ouvrage, on peine à saisir véritablement le caractère de Jacobs.

L'ouvrage est pourtant riche en anecdotes. On apprend ainsi qui a inspire l'apparence de Blake et de Mortimer, le rôle de Jacques, l'ami d'enfance et scénariste "fantôme" à qui Jacobs dut beaucoup. On apprend également les méthodes de travail d'Edgar, de sa phobie de l'encrage à son habitude de se faire photographier dans diverses poses servant ensuite d'inspiration pour le dessin de ses personnages. On notera que l'ouvrage est agrémenté de photographies couvrant toutes les périodes de la vie de Jacobs.

Au-delà de la passion pour l'opéra et des frustrations liées à sa seconde mais véritable carrière, on découvre un homme qui aura pu jouir, ne serait-ce que tardivement, du respect et de l'admiration non seulement de ses lecteurs mais des critiques. La Damnation d'Edgar P. Jacobs, c'est aussi une porte ouverte sur l'histoire de la bande dessinée Belge, qui donne envie d'en savoir plus. Voici un ouvrage que le fan de Blake et Mortimer ne peut manquer de lire.

Décevant - La religion dans la démocratie, par Marcel Gauchet

2005-07-18T03:52:06Z

Le lecteur qui anticipait une couverture universelle du sujet sera déçu. En effet, le point de vue et le sujet de l'ouvrage sont à peu près strictement français. On est presque tenté de rappeler à Monsieur Gauchet et à son éditeur que le fait de publier un ouvrage en français n'implique pas que le sujet en soit limité aux frontières de la France, ou même de la francophonie. Un titre plus approprié, pour ne pas dire moins trompeur, aurait été "La religion dans la démocratie en France".

Passé ce regret initial, j'ai trouvé le style de l'ouvrage déconcertant dès la première page. Le texte tend trop souvent à la digression, à l'explication et à la réexplication de formules, aux double-sens, aux jeu de mots, ou à l'utilisation de mots communs dans des acceptions imagées peu communes. Il semble tenir plus de l'exercice intellectuel que d'un effort entendu de communiquer des idées claires au lecteur. Je vois derrière ce problème de style une difficulté de l'auteur a communiquer l'abstraction. Une ébauche de solution consisterait à commencer par définir sur quelques pages un langage, un vocabulaire précis, puis à l'utiliser de façon systématique dans le reste de l'ouvrage.

Mais plus encore que le style, est-ce la méthode même utilisée pour aborder le sujet qui pose problème. Une large partie de la question relève du domaine historique et donc scientifique, mais l'auteur s'en tient à ne mentionner que quelques faits épars, agrémentés de commentaires qui ne restent que de simples impressions ou sentiments. De plus cet argument peu étayé reste sans véritable aspect synthétique. Selon son sous-titre, l'essai est censé être un "parcours". L'approche de l'auteur est donc en partie consciente, mais elle n'excuse pas la carence d'un découpage clair et de points de repères.

Je ne suis pas en mesure de valider ou d'invalider toutes les analyses de Monsieur Gauchet, qui établit sans doute quelques idées pertinentes. En première approche je ne partage pas nombre d'impressions de l'auteur, en particulier sa thèse principale, qui voit un changement fondamental récent (quelques décennies) du rapport entre l'État et la religion (toujours en France), conséquent à un phénomène de "sortie de la religion" (qui parait lui indiscutable, en tout cas en Europe).

Au final on ne peut que regretter la portée limitée d'un ouvrage qui se borne à ne présenter qu'une série d'impressions personnelles. Mes conseils à l'auteur: des faits, de la logique, et plus de simplicité.

Bonne intention de départ, faible argumentation - L'obsession anti-américaine, par Jean-François Revel

2005-07-18T03:51:23Z

L'obsession anti-américaine part de bonnes intentions: dénoncer une tendance fort répandue de dénigrement gratuit des Etats Unis, en particulier de la part des Européens et des Français, tout en tentant une explication du phénomène.

Malheureusement, Revel déçoit sur plusieurs points : le style manque de structure, les références détaillées sont quasiment inexistantes, et de multiples répétitions, souvent d'ailleurs même annoncées ("encore une fois", "j'insiste"), contribuent à rallonger l'ouvrage sans raison valable. J'aurais préféré un texte plus court mais plus rigoureux, organisant les faits de façon systematique, et les démarquant clairement des passages d'opinion.

Il n'en reste pas moins qu'une partie des assertions de Revel sont certainement valides, mais un lecteur sceptique ne sera pas convaincu par une argumentation aussi légère.

Un plaisant voyage - Mystérieux Mozart, par Philippe Sollers

2005-07-18T03:50:43Z

Plutôt qu'une œuvre de référence, Mystérieux Mozart est un plaisant voyage, sur les lieux Mozartiens d'abord, puis dans le temps, plus précisement dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Sollers traverse la vie du compositeur librement au gré de son enthousiasme tout en commentant les œuvres les plus marquantes, levant ici ou là quelques arguments pertinents, pointant du doigt l'anecdote révélatrice. L'éclairage des relations avec le père, la cousine ainsi que Constance sont particulièrement intéressant.

On trouvera curieux cependant la thèse de Sollers qu'"après Mozart tout s'est brusquement ralenti dans le bruit, la fureur, la lourdeur ou le tintamarre.", comme le résume la seconde page de couverture. Les pages 215 a 217 où cette thèse est présentée sont pour le moins déconcertantes. Après Mozart, la "catastrophe", selon Sollers. Des "livrets imbéciles", une "dissociation des mots et de la musique", une "militarisation de la musique" qui "a pu ouvrir la porte à de nouveaux massacres". On a rarement vu des assertions moins étayées, et les quelques citations de Nikolaus Harnoncourt et Cecilia Bartoli ne contribuent pas à réparer tant de maladresses dans le raisonnement et l'écriture. On aura compris que Sollers aime Mozart passionément (on aura même compris qu'il aime le Jazz), mais on aura également compris qu'il méconnait l'opéra du XIXe siècle (que dire en effet de Donizetti, Rossini ou du Verdi de Falstaff, pour ne parler que d'opéra ?). Bref, trois pages que l'on aurait souhaité voir échapper à la publication.

Quand Google défie l'Europe, par Jean-Noël Jeanneney

2005-07-18T03:13:01Z

J'avais récemment commenté les faibles articles de Michael Gorman, président de l'Association des Bibliothécaires Américains, et à cette l'occasion fait une courte mention de Jean-Noël Jeanneney qui s'exprimait sur le projet de numérisation de Google. Pour en savoir plus sur l'opinion de M. Jeanneney, j'ai acquis son petit opuscule d'environ 110 pages, Quand Google défie l'Europe.

La thèse centrale de M. Jeanneney est relativement simple et tient en quelques phrases: le projet de Google en soi n'est pas foncièrement mauvais, mais il s'agit du projet d'une entreprise américaine réalisé en collaboration avec des universités américaines, ce qui laisse à penser que la majorité des ouvrages numérisés seront en anglais et présenteront donc une vision anglo-saxonne de la culture et de l'histoire mondiale. L'Europe se doit de réagir en lançant un projet de numérisation et de moteur de recherche qui assurera une place de choix à la culture européenne sur la toile, et qui soit libre des risques liés au contrôle total d'un tel projet par le secteur privé.

Pour s'assurer une audience maximale, soit tout simplement pour maximiser l'utilité de l'information partagée en ligne, l'anglais est une langue incontournable car la proportion d'internautes comprenant l'anglais dépasse de loin celle de ceux comprenant, par exemple, le français. A moyen terme, il est certainement utopique de voir le français, ou une quelconque langue autre que l'anglais, gagner sa "juste" place sur Internet : tout au plus peut on espérer ne pas voir les autres langues simplement péricliter. En principe, on ne peut donc qu'être d'accord avec la thèse de M. Jeanneney. Les millions d'ouvrages scannés par Google risquent de faire pencher la balance encore davantage du côte de l'anglais.

Pourtant, M. Jeanneney mélange deux aspects fondamentaux dans son projet pharaonique de numérisation et de recherche au niveau européen. Il faut en effet effectuer une distinction fondamentale : premièrement, la question de la numérisation elle-même. Deuxièmement, celle de l'indexation (voire du catalogage) et du moteur de recherche donnant accès à ces ouvrages.

En ce qui concerne la numérisation, il va de soi qu'elle doit être suivie d'OCR (reconnaissance optique de caractères), même approximative, sinon aucun résultat probant ne peut être espéré d'un moteur de recherche. Il s'agit là probablement d'un point qui n'a pas été bien étudié par M. Jeanneney, car sinon comment expliquer son obsession des catalogues ? En effet, il ne cesse de revenir à la charge, en faisant d'abord la critique des moteurs de recherche, en particulier de Google, qui selon lui ne sont pas satisfaisants. L'alternative ? M. Jeanneney a en tête des armées de bibliothécaires européens en charge de créer ces catalogues. Apres tout, pense-t-il, ces bibliothécaires sont indispensables à la société. Ce sont eux, ceux qui savent, qui organisent la connaissance, pour ceux qui ne savent pas. Ceux-ci seraient chargés non seulement des catalogues, mais également de sélectionner les ouvrages a numériser.

Une telle idée est pourtant absurde. On parle de 100 millions d'ouvrages publiés depuis le début de l'imprimerie, et probablement bien moins qui sont actuellement dans le domaine public. Sachant que Google planifie de numériser environ 10 millions d'ouvrages, et que l'effort européen se devrait d'être concurrentiel, il n'y a plus de choix à faire : on parle bien de scanner tous les ouvrages que l'on peut trouver, million par million ! Le problème de la sélection ne passe donc pas par un choix méthodique, ouvrage par ouvrage. Tout au plus va-t-on choisir quelles collections d'une bibliothèque vont être numérisées.

Alors qu'il serait intéressant de s'interroger sur les méthodes qui vont permettre de numériser des millions d'ouvrages en quelques années seulement (une petite révolution en soi), la question du "catalogage" et de la recherche est elle-même passionnante.

Mais à nouveau, il semble que M. Jeanneney ait en tête un classement manuel de ces millions d'ouvrages, toujours par son armée de bibliothécaires, et sous la houlette des grands "esprits" nationaux européens. Nouvelle idée absurde, pour la raison citée plus haut : comment imaginer qu'on puisse classer manuellement des millions d'ouvrages ?

M. Jeanneney entend par exemple s'assurer que les "têtes de listes", c'est-à-dire, on imagine, les premiers résultats de recherche pour certains mots-clés, soient protéges d'un biais anglo-saxon grâce à un mécanisme de catalogage manuel. Pourtant, il suffirait de fournir à l'utilisateur le choix d'effectuer une recherche sur la base de la langue de l'ouvrage, voire de la langue originale s'il s'agit d'une traduction, pour régler ce problème.

M. Jeanneney fait ensuite une profession de foi politique explicitement gaulliste (c'est a dire très à gauche, avec une reconnaissance en surface de l'utilité du marché pour éviter une "léthargie"). Jeanneney prône des acteurs "financièrement désintéressés" et le recrutement de l'élite européenne pour le classement des ouvrages selon des "blocs de savoir". Sa vision du monde l'encourage à proposer une solution coûteuse et élitiste à l'excès, mais qui apporterait en passant des montagnes d'argent a la BNF. Or bien souvent les projets des "désintéressés" traînent et coûtent. Une telle entreprise ne serait en fin de compte qu'une énorme perte d'argent, j'en fais le pari.

C'est que M. Jeanneney manque cruellement d'imagination. Il a bien saisi les bases algorithmiques qui régissent des moteurs de recherches comme Google. Mais, et c'est pour le moins curieux de la part du président d'une des grandes bibliothèques mondiales, il ne comprend pas que l'indexage et le catalogage de grandes quantités d'information requièrent des méthodes nouvelles.

L'une de ces méthodes, bien sûr, c'est le moteur de recherche de l'avenir, c'est-à-dire le Google du futur, européen ou non, qui sur la base du contenu des documents et des relations entre ceux-ci (explicites ou implicites), des références qui y sont faites par les internautes, des requêtes de recherche elles-mêmes, ainsi que d'autres facteurs, sera capable d'extraire l'information la plus pertinente automatiquement. Que l'on ne s'arrête pas aux résultats actuels de Google ou de ses concurrents : il est certain que bien du progrès peut encore être fait dans le domaine des moteurs de recherche. Après tout, ceux-ci, sur une telle échelle, ne datent que de quelques années (AltaVista, le premier d'entre eux, a été proposé au public en décembre 1995). Que l'on considère en guise d'entrée de petites innovations telles les Phrases Statistiquement Improbables et les Mots en Majuscules d'Amazon.

Les autres méthodes, ce sont bien sûr les méthodes collaboratives, entérinées par le succès de Wikipedia. Or, M. Jeanneney connaît l'existence de Wikipedia, mais en diminue immédiatement la valeur par la mention du manque d'une "instance sûre de validation". En fait, la pensée de M. Jeanneney est résumée tout entière par cette attitude. Pour lui une telle absence discrédite immédiatement un projet tel que Wikipedia. Pour lui, seul fonctionnera l'armée de bibliothécaires, pourtant irréalisable. Or, que l'on regarde les chiffres : en juillet 2005, Wikipedia a déjà 634,091 articles en anglais et 132,382 en français (en troisième position mondiale avec 257,592 articles pour l'allemand, 128,384 pour le japonais, et pour référence, 87,778 pour le suédois, 79,277 pour le hollandais, 75,986 pour le polonais, 57,705 pour le portugais, 55,756 pour l'espagnol, et 51,332 pour l'italien).

Et pourtant, pour ajouter des méta-données, pour lier entre eux ces millions d'ouvrages et les commenter, comment imaginer système plus efficace qu'un système collaboratif à la Wikipedia ? Ceci ne veut pas dire que des bibliothécaires avertis "officiels" ne puissent participer à la tâche, bien au contraire : maints articles de Wikipedia sont écrits ou mis à jour par des professeurs, des enseignants, ou tout simplement par les spécialistes d'un domaine particulier. Il y a fort à parier que Wikipedia, grâce également à de nouvelles solutions techniques (critiques et validation d'articles, que sais-je), puisse dans un futur proche converger vers un véritable ouvrage de référence très "sûr", selon la terminologie de M. Jeanneney. Bien sûr, on peut croire ou pas au succès final de Wikipedia, mais jusqu'à présent ses résultats sont extraordinaires, et il est à parier que ses faiblesses puissent être corrigées.

M. Jeanneney commet donc ici une erreur qui est de ne pas considérer les systèmes émergents qui fonctionnent, mais au contraire de considérer les possibilités a priori pour qu'ils ne fonctionnent pas (recherche automatique avec moteur de recherche élaboré, édition collective avec Wikipedia). Il ne considère également pas que l'implication du citoyen, de l'étudiant ou même de l'écolier puisse être un facteur d'encouragement décisif pour la culture et la langue sur la toile.

Voici les grandes lignes d'une solution alternative a celle de M. Jeanneney :

Utiliser l'argent du citoyen seulement pour organiser l'aspect de numérisation (et de reconnaissance de caractères) en collaboration avec les grandes bibliothèques nationales européennes, et celui des frais d'hébergement des données, qui peut s'avérer massif.
La partie recherche et indexation sera développée entièrement en parallèle et gérée comme un projet indépendant, qui ne mettrait en cause à aucun moment la partie liée à la numérisation et stockage des données.
Le développement des solutions techniques liées à ces activités se fera par l'encouragement à l'entreprise et au déploiement de capital-risque au niveau européen dans le domaine du logiciel informatique, et non pas par l'injection d'argent public dans des institutions d'état.
Les solutions collaboratives seront favorisées.

En conclusion, je suis d'accord en principe avec la thèse initiale de l'ouvrage : l'Europe doit travailler à une présence culturelle sur le web, et ceci passe par des efforts de numérisation conséquents. Là ou mon opinion diverge très fortement avec celle de M. Jeannenet, c'est sur sa méthode élitiste et gaulliste, qui promet en deux mots d'être chère et de manquer ses objectifs.

En post-scriptum, voici une liste d'erreurs commises par M. Jeanneney dans son court ouvrage:

Il rejoint M. Gorman dans sa défense de la "lecture séquentielle d'ouvrages", et j'ai beau me creuser la tête, je ne vois toujours pas ni ce dont ces messieurs veulent parler, ni pourquoi cet aspect les préoccupe tant ! Cet épisode est d'autant plus navrant qu'il semble suggérer que ces grands bibliothécaires se lisent entre eux sans exercer de fonction critique. Pour sa défense, M. Jeanneney est "pro-numérisation", au contraire de M. Gorman.
Il se méprend sur les monopoles aux Etats-Unis: ceux-ci n'y sont pas interdits, mais bien les abus de ceux-ci, comme l'obtention de nouveaux monopoles par le biais d'un monopole existant.
Il pense que Google ne se préoccupe pas de la pérennité de l'information. Cette assertion est pourtant sans fondements. Google possède un vaste système de stockage distribué et redondant, et on peut imaginer que personne ne fasse mieux aujourd'hui. Peut-être que M. Jeanneney pense encore au CD-ROM?
Il ne se pose pas la question du pourquoi du succès de Google, Yahoo, et des autres, et du pourquoi de leur émergence aux USA. Au lieu de penser, en conséquence, à encourager l'entreprise européenne, il propose encore plus de fonds publics. Pour sa défense, il est opposé au brevetage des algorithmes, un point de vue compatible avec l'encouragement du secteur privé européen.
Il cite l'ABU comme projet français faisant le pendant au projet Gutenberg, mais l'ABU n'a plus publié depuis Janvier 2002.

Surprising, but not as good as it could have been - The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick

2005-07-17T16:33:54Z

This is a surprising opus. The action takes place in San Francisco in the 1960s. Japan and Germany won World War II twenty years earlier, and split the world between them. The two countries occupy each half of the United States. Germany has brought the final solution to an extreme in Africa. The few remaining Jews are prosecuted and have to hide even in the Japan-controlled Pacific States of America, where the I Ching (or Book of Changes) is used daily and referred to as the oracle. The Germans have the technological advantage: Lufthansa rockets connect the continents, and the conquest of space is well underway. This is the only aspect of The Man in the High Castle that could place it in the category of science-fiction.

Philip K. Dick uses fascinating characters to progressively immerse the reader in his utopia, rather than going for a completely descriptive approach. Three loosely connected sets of characters share the book: first, Robert Childan, Frank Frink and Ed McCarthy; then, Mr. Nobusuke Tagomi and Mr. Baynes, AKA Captain Rudolf Wegener; and finally, Juliana Frink and Joe. Juliana and Frank are married but separated, and never meet in the story. Mr. Tagomi is an occasional customer of Childan. The three sets of characters could as well have been completely disconnected.

The variations on the English language are quite interesting. The Japanese characters speak what could be called Japanese-English, quite consistently throughout the book. In addition, the German culture is never far away, and the occurrences of German words are numerous, without being an obstacle to understanding the story.

An interesting twist is the presence in the story itself of a book, The Grasshoper Lies Heavy, which is about a world where Japan and Germany lost the war. This mise en abyme of the utopia is actually at the center of the story of Juliana, but in the end the plot falls short being really interesting. The last few pages in particular are quite anticlimactic.

Boukreev's Explanation - The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt

2005-07-17T16:32:46Z

Many have read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, the true story of a disastrous day on Mount Everest in May 1996, when several expeditions were caught in a storm that killed eleven people, including team leaders Scott Fisher and Rob Hall.

Krakauer's best-seller is a fantastic read that has inspired many. At the same time, while Krakauer acknowledges Russian mountain guide Anatoli Boukreev's heroic efforts to rescue fellow climbers, he criticizes many of his actions prior to the rescue. This situation motivated Boukreev and DeWalt's attempt to rectify the facts in The Climb.

Krakauer was climbing with the expedition of Hall's Adventure Consultants, and his account reflects in great part that point of view. Most casualties occurred in Hall's expedition, and Krakauer was on the front line to describe them. The Climb on the other hand tells the story from the point of view of Boukreev, who guided with the expedition of Fisher's Mountain Madness. Consequently, Boukreev spends less time on Hall's expedition, and more on his own, including an interesting account of his involvement with the preparation of the expedition.

Boukreev's point of view is that above 8,000 meters, you cannot be a guide anymore, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. You cannot constantly hold the clients by the hand. This is the basis of Boukreev's defense of his actions in the 1996 expedition. While he rarely shows any willingness to admit being wrong, he does recognize that his poor command of English at the time of the expedition became an obstacle on the mountain, a situation he had not anticipated.

What will convince the reader of Boukreev's professionalism is the long description of his expedition to Everest in 1997. In that expedition, as a "consultant" for an Indonesian team of climbers, he shows by example how the mistakes made by Fischer and Hall could be avoided with good planning. For example, he made sure that a Camp V would be installed and provided with enough oxygen on summit day (it turned out that Camp V was actually used by the descending team). He also insisted that he should have total control of the clients on the summit day.

Bad luck played a role in the 1996 expedition and appears to have led to Fisher's unexpected exhaustion, or even, as suggested in The Climb, HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Edema). However the book also points to the fact that the planning of Fisher and Halls's expeditions was sub-par (case in point, the fact that clients were still climbing after 2 PM on summit day, without a clearly communicated turnaround time, without radios, and without spare oxygen supply).

Fisher and Hall's deaths are utterly tragic. Both were good men and respected mountaineers, and Boukreev's admiration for them did not falter after the tragedy. But The Climb shows that as team leaders on the Everest in 1996, they probably deserve more criticism than Boukreev does as a guide. It is sad that Boukreev himself died in an avalanche in December 1997.

While most of the book is written by DeWalt, I was impressed by the amount of material narrated by Boukreev himself. These sections are edited from conversations between DeWalt and the guide. In addition, the crucial moments of the rescue on the South Col are presented as an unedited conversation between DeWalt and Boukreev. Content from the "debriefing tapes", recorded by nine expedition members a few days after the tragic events, is also directly quoted. There should be little doubt that DeWalt respects Boukreev's ideas.

The Climb is by no means as well written as Into Thin Air. It is also less dramatic, provides less historical and technical background on Mount Everest, and does not picture the general situation on the mountain in May 1996 as well as Krakauer does. For these reasons, it is probably a good idea to read Into Thin Air first, but The Climb remains an excellent and easy read that nicely complements Krakauer's opus.

iTunes store lacking

2005-07-17T05:32:51Z

Credit is clearly due to Apple for being the first popular and legal music download site. They are now nearing 500 million downloaded songs. Maybe against all odds, they managed to convince backward-thinking music labels executives that downloading music was the future of music distribution and that there was money to make, not to lose, on the internet.

But everytime I give a try to the iTunes music store, I end up frustrated.

The choice is extremly poor. Arguably, it is not as poor as last century music stores' (you know, the brick-and-mortar stores that are disappearing), but I just expect a huge choice for an online music store, as the cost of storage is cheap and getting cheaper with time (500 GB hard drives are available today at your neighborhood computer store). In the realm of classical and jazz music in particular, the choice is disastrous. Granted, these music styles account for probably 10% of music sales combined at most (I read somewhere the number of 3.5% of music sales for jazz in the US), and unfortunately young people are not the most likely to buy classical or jazz.
You can't download sounds in a lossless format. Apple has its own lossless format that they could provide as an option, adding DRM if they wish so, as they do now for AAC. Savvy users can get rid of DRM anyway, and legally with that, by just burning a CD with iTunes.
Prices are fairly expensive given that you don't get a physical media, a booklet, or a lossless file format. There is still an unfortunate belief in the music business that music should be expensive. Make it cheaper: you will sell more of it and people will be happier and less likely to get music through illegitimate channels.
There is a confusion with national stores. I just got a certificate for three free songs at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Pretty cool, uh? Except that, because I already have US account, I wasn't able to redeem them easily. I had to create a new account in the Swiss store, with a new email address, to manage to get my coupon accepted. In addition, I can't even use my US credit card in the Swiss store: it has to be a Swiss credit card. The French saying "l'argent n'a pas d'odeur" ("money doesn't smell") should apply here: why does anybody care what credit card I use to buy music online? I may be a minority here, but given the international appeal of the Montreux Jazz Festival, more than one attendee may have hit these problems.
I get the Swiss site in German language, with a German national flag, and without a way to change language settings. In addition, I keep receiving messages (in German) that a particular album is not available in my location, and that only at the time of redeeming the song.

All in all, there is huge room for improvement. In particular, Apple and recording labels should really get their story together at the European level, as their national stores provide nothing less than a disastrous user experience at the moment. Let's hope that a little bit of serious competition for Apple gets things moving again.

Web browsers still suck

2005-07-16T04:23:18Z

It is no news that web browsers suck. For example, Netscape 4 sucked big time (it was rushed out), which was one of the causes of its demise. Nowadays, it's the turn of Internet Explorer to suck, having stalled for over five years due to a lack of competition allowed by Microsoft's monopoly abuse. But with all the hype around Firefox, Opera, and Safari, you would think that at last, we are in good shape. Well, yes and no.

First, I have to say that I have been using Firefox forever, and before that the Mozilla suite (even before it reached version 1.0). The current success of Firefox is one of the greatest events on the web since the end of the browsers war, because it ends over half a decade of stagnation on the web. Thanks to Firefox, Opera and Safari, competition is back, developers must care, and end users will benefit. In other words, the web has just restarted.

I am usually fairly happy as a user of Firefox. It is fairly fast and comfortable. In contrast, I would no longer touch IE with a 10-foot pole. Just yesterday, playing with Deer Park Alpha 2 (the latest Firefox alpha), I have been happily surprised by the "fast back" feature (long provided by Opera), which in addition to providing way faster back / next navigation, is a boost for Ajax applications. The issues arise when you start writing web pages and web applications. That's when you just wonder why, in spite of all the recent developments, browsers still suck.

For example, Firefox does not support CSS 2 completely (CSS 2.1 is still in the works), a specification which came out in 1998. Isn't that a shame? And I am not talking only about features of CSS 2 supposedly impossible to understand. I am talking about things like paged media, partially supported by Opera. In fact, with Opera itself, in spite of numerous recomendations found on the web, I still haven't been able to generate repeating table headers and footers when printing. Maybe it's just me. At least, basic page breaks work with Opera.

My guess is that printing is not consider very sexy by browsers developers. Not a single browser prints decently, although Opera is ahead of the others by a long shot. Norm Walsh has blogged about this not long ago, and he is of course right. I for one would be inclined, with some CSS specialists, to think that we should be able to print documents with HTML and CSS directly from the web browser. While XSL-FO is good and has different goals than HTML, the reality is that you often have HTML to print, and that you don't want to go through the pain of converting your HTML to XSL-FO. Furthermore, open source XSL-FO libraries are far from being complete.

So here we are, in 2005, unable to decently print an HTML document. I will maybe give a shot later to Norm's XHTML to XSL-FO transformation, and run the output through the free personal edition of XEP.

The Immortal Cell, by Michael D. West

2005-07-08T05:03:31Z

In The Immortal Cell, Michael D. West tells about his lifelong search for solutions to aging and age-related illnesses.

West's quest starts with an ideal of compassion: if we can help it, why should we keep suffering from Alzheimer, Parkinson, macular degeneration, atherosclerosis, and so many illnesses associated with aging?

West first thought religion and the bible would provide him with answers to his questions about life and death. One is surprised that a bright young man with a scientific mind would have fallen for creationism for as long a period of time as ten years, but West finally recognized that creationism does not resist serious analysis and that at the end of the 20th century, it is just nonsense. Because of this however West has kept a certain understanding for the point of view of the more conservative religious parties.

West then tells of the scientific quest, amidst fierce competition between scientists and even corporations, to understand the mechanics of cellular aging: the discovery of the importance of telomeres, those chromosome ends that turn out to be associated with the cellular clock; the discovery of telomerase, the enzyme able to repair telomeres; the discovery of the tight relationship of such research with cancer research; the first experiments to rewind the cellular clock by implanting somatic cells DNA into egg cells; the cloning of the first mammals; and the experiments to produce embryonic stem sells in vitro, from somatic DNA and egg cells.

The most important result is the proof that cellular aging is not a fatality, as one could have thought initially: it is caused by a mechanism that we are now able to somewhat tweak. From there, there are two main therapeutic perspectives. First, the idea of fixing the aging cells of the body. A lot of research remains to be done in this area. So far, nobody has managed to find a mechanism to reliably deliver a fix to a significant number of cells, and the fix itself has yet to be developed. Second, the idea that any somatic cell can be used to produce embryonic stem cells. This opens the door to building tissues and even entire organs in vitro. Such tissues and organs could be then grafted to the donor without risk of rejection. The perspectives go from implanting skin and bone marrow cells to finding a cure for diabetes and atheroscleriosis. Ultimately, it may allow for entire organ replacement.

West is probably a better scientist than philosopher, but in the last chapter of the book, he makes a good case for therapeutic cloning, including addressing some religious questions regarding "life" with very sound arguments.

The Immortal Cell is a good and easy read. I had fairly high expectations about it because it was very well rated online, and I was a little disappointed by several aspects of the book. West could have communicated even better the excitement this research should generate. He neglects related developments such as the impact nanotechnology research could have.

He also fails to address exciting but disruptive perspectives. If in fact cellular therapy becomes one day mainstream, there is a clear possibility that humans could see their life expectancy increase dramatically, from about 80 years today in developed countries to... 100? 120? 150? 200? 1000? The social impact of such a change would be enormous. It is quite possible that West does not wish to speculate about such subjects so as not to disrupt current research. After all, his own work has put him in the middle of the controversy about research on human embryonic stem cells and human cloning.

Speaker For the Dead, by Orson Scott Card

2005-07-08T04:44:33Z

Speaker For the Dead is an excellent sequel to Ender's Game. The importance of the religious theme may appear scary at first, but whatever his personal beliefs are, Card doesn't get carried away.

The book relies on a strong development of the characters, as Card explains in his introduction. While I think the story start in an excellent way, it becomes weaker after the arrival of Ender on Lisutania. For example, given his powerful friend Jane, his famous sister Valentine, and his overall knowledge of the universe, one would expect him to act more like a hero. He does have a gift for understanding people and discovering the truth, but beyond that he often appears empty. Also, one would have expected that a single fact had led to the demise of Pipo and Livo, but the final explanation is disappointing. And I keep wondering why Ender did not try to get in touch with his sister right upon his arrival on Lusitania? After all, he had a free long distance plan thanks to Jane.

All in all though, the story remains captivating and quite consistent.

Homage to the PJB-100

2005-07-02T11:55:04Z

The PJB-100 was the first ever hard disk mp3 player. I bought my 6 GB version back in July 2000, for a price of USD 783.71, shipping included. At the time, this was simply incredible: you could store the equivalent of about 100 CDs in your pocket. Besides the sheer capacity of the device, it also had a rechargeable battery with a life of over 10 hours, and a simple but very slick user interface.

For a very long time, looking at all the flash-based mp3 players out there, and then at the first (and terrible) Creative Nomad Jukebox hard disk mp3 player in late 2000, I have considered the PJB-100 to be simply the best player out there. Only with the release of the iPod in late 2001 did at last something as good or better arrive on the market.

I am forced to realize that today, the PJB-100 has a few shortcomings:

It is a fairly large unit compared to an iPod
It is based on USB 1.1, which means that transferring files is quite slow
My version doesn't have a backlight
The software is not as good as iTunes

But to this day I use the PJB-100 in my car, and you can tell by the Wikipedia article about the PJB that I am not the only one to like (love?) this unit! Since I have been using my PJB for exactly five years now, I thought it was time to render homage to a wonderful piece of technology.

Amateur audio restoration

2005-06-28T02:51:59Z

78 rpm records can be quite fun, and I have now acquired a few dozens of them over time. The big question is: what do you do with them? The answer appears simple: transfer them to some digital audio format, and just keep the originals safe in a closet. But how do you get from a hundred years old record to an mp3 file?

First, you need to play the record. For this purpose, I have a Thorens turntable which supports a rotating speed of 78 rpm, and a stylus appropriate for 78 rpm records (those are bigger than the needles used for LP records). Ideally, you should have a collection of styli and choose the one best adapted to the record you are playing, depending on type of record and condition, but I have not yet experimented with different styli.

The speed of the turntable is 78 rpm and not adjustable. Many web sites out there advise about using a fully adjustable turntable, because records may actually have to be played at 80 rpm, or 77, or other speeds: there was no actual 78 rpm standard at the time. If you play at 78 rpm and the record was intended to play at 80 rpm, the music will last a little longer, and the pitch will be a little lower. But my assessment is that nowadays an adjustable turntable is not required: with the appropriate software, you can resample your audio and adjust it to the correct speed and pitch. You could even record at 45 rpm, a speed supported by pretty much all the turntables out there. The pitch would be about half what it should be, but the frequency response of the cartridge and preamp will be good enough that you won't lose sound definition in the bass, which are usually weak on 78 rpm records in the first place.

All mainstream phono preamps have a built-in RIAA equalization curve. More modern microgroove LPs are recorded with reduced bass and increased treble, for technical reasons not worth discussing here. So the preamp pumps up the bass and attenuates the treble. 78 rpm records were not recorded with the RIAA curve in mind, so you should not use that curve during playback. Again, you are often advised to use a special phono preamp which doesn't apply that curve or can apply a bunch of different equalizations. My solution instead: digitally apply a reverse RIAA curve after the sound is recorded!

To actually go from the analog world to the digital world, I use my notebook computer. The internal sound card is absolutely awful by any standard you can imagine, so using it is not an option. I use an Audigy 2 NX instead, an external USB 2 sound "card", which so far has worked very well. So here you go: with a fixed-speed turntable, a stock phono preamp, and a computer with a sound card, you can record a 78 rpm at the correct speed and with a flat response curve.

When you get to that point and listen to the result, chances are it will be fairly bad! In fact, 78 rpm records have usually had a long life before reaching you: they have been stored, manipulated, shipped, and may have been played a lot. This means that usually they have some wear and scratches. In addition, not all 78 rpm are equal: records from the early 1900 will not only typically have more scratches due to age, but the original sound quality, measured by the frequency range and the dynamic range, is also usually inferior to, say, a recording from the 1920s.

In order to reduce the noise due to scratches on the disc's surface, you should of course try to obtain a record in as good a condition as possible. But it also appears important to have records as clean as possible. I have not done much to clean records so far, because I lack the cleaning equipment. Some records I have bought are very clean, but some do appear to have dust within the grooves which should be removed.

Even a clean record will likely produce many audible clicks and pops. One first processing step which may reduce them is converting the audio from stereo to mono by mixing the left and right channels. 78 rpm records are obviously monophonic, but most turntables will provide a stereo signal, corresponding to measuring movements of the stylus at 45 degrees within the inner and outer part of the groove respectively. This means that the left and right signal you obtain by using a stereo cartridge on a monophonic record may pick up more or less dust or scratches.

Another technique consists in using "declicking" software. I have tried Cool Edit Pro's built-in declicker as well as Dart XP Pro. As is the case with noise reduction tools, it is a question of balance: you can quickly get to a point where the clicks or the noise are gone, but where the signal is also noticeably modified. For example, the music can sound boxy, or have "holes" instead of clicks. Removing clicks also doesn't make the sound perfectly clean: the sound may be almost "click"-free, yet remain very noisy due to other factors. Beyond automatic tools, it is useful to try to manually fill-in larger clicks. You do this by selecting an audible click or "dirty" area of the recording, which is then replaced with audio content coming from just before or after that area. The results are often surprisingly good.

Finally, some equalization of the resulting audio file may be needed. This is an art which I have not mastered yet. In fact, most of the time I have not done any equalization at all. But even though there was no standard equalization curve at the time of 78 rpm records, record companies did apply some type of equalization before recording. Eventually, what matters is how good the music sounds, and a strategy for equalization can consist in just listening and trying to obtain a natural sound.

The results I have obtained so far are clearly amateur and it is very frustrating to listen in comparison to recordings restored by somebody like Ward Marston. Of course, Marston has access to the best source material, the best equipment, and he is the Mozart of antique records restoration! But still, I believe it is possible to enjoy those home-made transfers.

One of my goals was to provide music for free on Mascagni.org. My first experiments can therefore be downloaded from Mascagni.org's upgraded Audio Files section. The wonderful duet from Il piccolo Marat, a gem recorded by Hipolito Lázaro and Mafalda de Voltri, should not be missed. The music comes from four 78 rpm sides, for a total of almost 15 minutes of dream music. Another beautiful track is the version of Stornelli Marini, one of Mascagni's best songs, sung by Beniamino Gigli, one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century. There is much more - just explore for yourself!

Antidigitalism

2005-06-25T14:55:37Z

A Slashdot news (ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers) directed me to two recent articles written by Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association. They relate to the question of the digitization of printed content, which is a favorite subject of mine. I am not familiar with ALA, but I am sure it is valuable and means good. I also would have assumed that Mr. Gorman, given his position, is an insightful person. It turns out not to be the case.

The first article, Google and God's Mind, was published in the LA Times on December 17, 2004. It is a diatribe against one of Google's latest projects, which consists of digitizing millions of books from a few select libraries, putting online the content of the books that are out of copyright, and providing search access to all of them. Mr. Gorman asserts that the project is a total waste of money. Curiously his main argument revolves around the idea that Google will provide a useless contextual result. "The books in great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts. They are designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively, so that the reader gains knowledge in the reading.".

First, one fails to see why such books have to be in "great" libraries. Then it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there are numerous useful scenarios where a contextual search is useful. There are reference books and dictionaries, of course. But consider a book about a music composer: the author of the book will likely dedicate pages to a biography of the musician, and then discuss each of his works. If you are looking for particular information about a particular work of this composer, sequential reading may be better, but not necessarily, and very likely you will obtain great insight about the particular work just by reading a few pages. You may also be searching for a particular excerpt of a novel that you remembered or that somebody indicated to you. In fact give me any book, and I am likely to find a little scenario showing how a contextual search can be useful. And I am not even talking about the obvious research scenarios ("Who said that first?"; "Am I plagiarizing now?"; "What book contained this piece about a computer searching for the answer to 'Life, the universe, and everything'?").

Mr. Gorman also attacks the question of online book reading. "So, you abandon that line of inquiry or resolve to read the book. Are you going to do that online, assuming it's out of copyright?". This question is asked as if the obvious answer was a resounding "No!". But my answer is: read it online if you feel like it. If you don't want to, you can go borrow or buy the book, but at least now you have determined that you want to do so. You can also print a few pages or even an entire chapter on your home or office printer. Give the reader the freedom he or she deserves. I personally don't like reading entire books on screen. As a matter of fact I have never managed to do it and even long articles quickly tire me. But a few pages? Certainly, I will read them on screen. It is also important to be a little optimistic about the future of technologies such as so-called electronic paper. While long overdue, some incredible prototypes of electronic paper technology have been shown recently by E Ink, and once mature there is almost no doubt that a fantastic market will emerge around such technology.

Mr. Gorman concludes his first article with this line: "This latest version of Google hype will no doubt join taking personal commuter helicopters to work and carrying the Library of Congress in a briefcase on microfilm as "back to the future" failures, for the simple reason that they were solutions in search of a problem." There is no doubt that the technologies Mr. Gorman mentions were failures, but searching millions of books digitally will likely prove that it is not.

There are many reasons for this. First, existing library catalogs are poor. Some collections are not even catalogued. When they are, you don't have a unified catalog for all the libraries of the world. Most libraries even have internally multiple catalogs! When you find a catalog entry, you have no idea of the subjects treated in the book other than by looking at the book title and subtitle, sometimes (rarely) with a brief summary of the contents of the book. How are you going to make a selection of books relevant to your research? You will have to leave your comfortable home or office to go spend hours, days, and maybe months as a library rat all over the world to find the information you are looking for.

There is also the question of rare books. How do you access them? There is a good chance that you will have to travel half around the world, ask for special permission, and maybe fail to obtain it. After that, you may not be allowed to make copies of the book. Making a digital copy of it would allow spreading the contents of such rare books, after a single but careful phase of digitization.

There is something exciting about the idea of searching dusty books and finally finding the gem you were looking for. But if there is a better way, nobody should be nostalgic of this.

Now it should be said that unfortunately the current state of affairs with libraries won't change any time soon. It is not because Google is scanning a few million books that all the printed content in the world will be instantly available digitally. Google, or any other company or government for that matter, does not have infinite resources. But what will be available digitally will be invaluable. It will also be a world premiere experiment on such a scale, and if it works, it may spawn similar projects all over the world. In fact, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the French National Library, believes that Google's project is so awesome that he wrote a book (Quand Google défie l'Europe : Plaidoyer pour un sursaut) about the threat it creates to the French language. Mr. Jeannenet believes that Europe should unite and launch a similar project to try to counter the hegemony of English online (which reminds me that I should write more blog posts in French).

Mr. Gorman apparently received a lot of negative feedback on his first article, which is understandable. He reports on this in a second short article in LibraryJournal, where he directly insults every blogger in existence (and there are about 40,000 more every day) with this introduction: "A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.' Yes, most blogs out there are of poor quality. They speak nonsense, have poor grammar, have very unstructured content, when there is any content at all. You have to realize that a lot of them are written by kids and teenagers, and for fun. There are however excellent blogs out there, and there will be more and more. Search engines will also eventually put some order in this: blogs with the best content are linked and read more, their success is measurable, and they will show up first in search engines. The online world just needs a little more time to adjust to the blog phenomenon.

On the other hand, there is a lot of terrible edited content, online or not. Grammar doesn't do everything. Ironically, Mr. Gorman's texts in particular are not very bright or researched. They are quick-and-dirty opinion pieces, where ignorance, arrogance and short-sightedness take place of clear thought. As a Slashdot poster puts it: "I find myself struck by nothing so much as how very much like a blog entry this alleged "article" reads..."

But in the end what is Mr. Gorman's concern? He "believe[s], however, that massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms."I for one could not disagree more. Mr. Gorman simply appears to be irrationally enamored of dusty libraries and books. Not that there anything wrong with that, except that it clouds his appreciation of some technologies that he does not fully understand. Worst of all, Mr. Gorman does not propose any alternative to digitization and online search software to facilitate the dissemination of information.

The Swiss military tax

2005-06-25T10:17:36Z

The Swiss army is a funny thing. Well, that's a way of speaking, of course. Switzerland, in spite of being a small country (about 7.5 million people at the time of writing), and neutral since the 17th century, has a long military tradition. Swiss children learn in school of the legendary William Tell, and of how young kids were trained to fight since an early age. The Swiss kicked the Habsburg out in 1315 and became an independent country, fought off the French and the Italians as well, until they got our own ass kicked by the French in Marignan in 1515. They have a long tradition of working as mercenaries as well. And finally, everybody knows about the Swiss Guards of the Vatican, who have been in this role from 1506 to the current days.

Nowadays one fairly well-known particularity of the Swiss army is that it is mostly a militia army. Every Swiss male is supposed to serve in the army for a total of about 300 days, split between an initial recruits school of about 120 days, then doing some further training typically every other year (details may vary). You can postpone training if you have good reasons, like university exams and the like. But every Swiss male who is required to serve in the army but doesn't must pay a tax, which amounts to 2% of his income (3% since 2004).

Now when you move abroad, as I did back in 1997, you notify the army of this fact and you obtain a military permission. Here is the catch though: you have to pay the military tax for the first three full years of your stay abroad (you don't pay the tax for the following years).

When you leave your country, this is the last thing on your mind. When I moved back to Switzerland in late 2004, I first got in the mail a letter asking me if I was volunteering to join back the army (after six years abroad, you no longer need to serve in the army, unless you explicitly volunteer for it). Of course I denied this kind offer. But then a few months ago I got in the mail some forms related to paying my tax for the years 1998 and 2000.

This caused a little shock, since I didn't even remember that I was supposed to be paying that tax. It is also hard to comprehend why this tax has to be paid, since as a Swiss working in the US, you pay your taxes in the country where you earn your money, based on a treaty between both countries. The military tax is an exception to this rule.

After receiving those tax forms I quickly added up numbers and the worst-case scenario amounted to quite a lot of money. A good citizen, I declared my actual income, providing copies of my W-2 forms. The good news, it turned out, is that I have to pay only for the years 1998 and 2000 (because I was not required to serve in 1999); that the 2% rate applies to me, not the 3% rate; that you get a discount depending on the number of days of service you have done in the past (the recruits school, for example); and finally, that after all I did not make that much money in 1998, as I was working in my first job in the US, and less in 2000, when we were working on starting up Orbeon.

In the end I owe about CHF 2000. It could have been much worse. But as a resident of the United States for seven years, quite a lot of my money went into financing the US military, and I wish my tax money could go help people who need it rather than the Swiss army.

The joys of hard drives

2005-06-14T02:44:11Z

I don't know if it's just me (well, in fact, I have evidence that it's not the case), but I seem to collect problems with hard drives. While I have been lucky not to have had a serious problem with laptop hard drives (crossing my fingers), my desktop machines and servers keep causing me trouble.

Take my main server, which hosts my personal data archive (music, etc.) as well as a few public web sites.This machine is equipped with a RAIDCore BC4852 configured in RAID 5. During last summer, one drive failed. I did not have a hot spare, and did not notice the issue because the notification email from the RAID software was caught by my spam filter. When I realized the problem, a second drive was already failing. I managed by miracle to rescue most of the data and to rebuild an array.

Now in this case, I always suspected a heat problem. I promptly upgraded to a new drive enclosure with a good fan, and bought an additional drive which now acts as a hot spare. Since then, I haven't had any problem. It may just be luck.

I have been thinking for a while about my "personal information architecture", that is, where do I store my data, and how do I maximize the chances that I won't lose it. From a hardware perspective, this has since last summer consisted of having two machines: one in California, one in Switzerland. One acts as a main data archive, and the other as a backup.

The Swiss backup machine is a Shuttle FX83, a pretty nice-looking PC, with the big benefit that it can be transported. Because that machine had one of those built-in VIA RAID chips, I figured I would configure RAID 1.

Last week, one drive in the RAID 1 array failed. I promptly bought a replacement drive, removed the failed drive, put the new one in, and then used the VIA software to synchronize the array. Alas! The synchronization failed midway. After much moving around of drives, I ended up with one dead drive, and two healthy drives with a thoroughly corrupted filesystem. There went my backup.

What exactly happened remains a mystery . Did I have in fact two bad drives? Did the filesystem get corrupted after the first drive failed? Did I make a mistake and attempted to synchronize the bad drive to the new drive? I don't know. I do know that next time, I will take more steps before just switching in the new drive.

Here again I believe heat was the initial problem. Three drives in a poorly cooled XPC? I don't think so. I have now configured the fan to seriously blow on the remaining drive. My Shuttle is no longer silent, but oh well.

I will have to figure out how to get a new backup from the other machine which is across the atlantic. Unfortunately I can't simply copy over about 120 GB of data: it would take months.

Oh and yes, I do regular backups of my notebook's 120 GB RAID 0!

Remember, the Earth is round!

2005-04-12T13:16:55Z

And the Earth also happens to rotate on itself.

Engineers writing software for the web should be kindly reminded of this fact when they start putting dates and times on their web pages. Case in point, while posting a comment to Blogger today: no Sir, it's not "7:21" or even "7:21 AM" right now. I posted this comment at 4:21 PM Central European Summer Time (CEST), or, if you wish, 14:21 Universal Time (UTC), or 7:21 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). Time zone information is not an optional, cool feature when you display time, it is an indispensable source of information!

So by the way are dates. Just yesterday, I visited a web site where news items didn't have any date information. One news entry went something like: "Back in February..." February of what year, please? Luckily, I contacted the web site's owner, who was kind enough to tell when the news item was posted, and that this would be fixed in the future. Other fun items include:

Web sites dead for ten years saying: "The new version of the software will be released this coming June."
The JavaScript clock that gives you the current time but in California or Italy or the UK. In fact, you have no idea unless you check your own watch.

Please, developers: use times and dates that make sense for the visitors of your web sites and users of your web applications. Yes, the world has become a village thanks to the Internet, but don't take that too literally.

Marcus Miller in Cully

2005-04-11T01:48:25Z

I just attended on Thursday Marcus Miller's concert in Cully, Switzerland. This must have been my fourth of fifth Marcus Miller concert: I have seen him in Montreux, Switzerland at least once, and at least a couple of times in California, in particular a double concert at Kimballs East. I have always returned enthusiastic.

This time we were the first in line to get in, and so we managed to be right in the center in front of the stage, a great spot if you want to become deaf, but also of course being about 30 centimeters from the musicians, it's quite an experience. My brother was wearing a Miles Davis t-shirt, which attracted Stewart's attention during a solo. Oh, and beware, you might get Dean Brown's guitar in your face if you're not careful.

We were told that the band was stuck for seven hours on their way from Paris, and they didn't have time to do a sound check. So the concert kind of started sound check style with the tune Bruce Lee, Poogie Bell on the drums, progressively joined by the other musicians. Finally, Marcus arrived on the stage, dancing to the music, looking cool as usual! It may sound cliché to say this, but he has music in his blood.

The band consisted of the usual Poogie Bell on drums, Michael "Patches" Stewart on trumpet, Dean Brown on guitar, with Keith Anderson on sax, and Bobby Sparks on keyboards. Another guy also played the keyboard and a second bass from time to time. For the second encore, the band was joined by Nino G, the "human beatbox" as they say. Nino played with the band of Reto Webber just before Marcus, and he was a real kick!

You have to admire those touring musicians. This is how music should be done: put together an album, and then go on tour. I can only imagine that this must be at the same time fun and exhausting for musicians: if you look at Marcus's tour dates, you will see that he is touring from February 26 to June 5 for a total of 43 concerts. From April 6 to May 7, that's 26 concerts over 32 days in Europe!

I look forward to seeing him on May 14 in Fairfield, California.

Check out the pictures I took with my cell phone on the occasion.

ObjectWebCon05

2005-04-09T08:47:44Z

I am just back from ObjectWebCon05, the Fourth Annual ObjectWeb Conference. For the non-initiated, ObjectWeb is "an international consortium fostering the development of open-source middleware". The consortium has picked a lot of steam over the last year or so, and my company is currently in the process of joining. I did a presentation in the context of the ESBi initiative, and of course I attended a few of the talks there.

Of particular interest to me, from a technical standpoint, were C-JDBC, a transparent clustered JDBC solution, a couple of talks about OSGi, and meeting a few very interesting people including Sylvain Wallez from the Cocoon community, Cliff Schmidt from BEA, Richard Hall from the Oscar OSGi project, and many others from the ObjectWeb community that I had for the most part already met before.

As others have mentioned, the French accents in English have reached some interesting levels during that conference, and my ears, used to the good old American accent, were sometimes hurting. On the flip side, I have my own accent so I guess it's only fair ;-)

The picture shows the Passerelle du Palais de Justice (Palace of Justice Footbridge) by night, a picture taken with my Nokia 7610.

In the snow

2005-04-09T08:47:35Z

It's not only the US North East which is under the snow. Switzerland has just seen some pretty good snowfalls as well, without storms really, but to the point where the the Geneva airport had to be closed for nine hours on Sunday.

This kind of weather of course comes with the usual skiers and snowboarders caught in avalanches, usually because they go off-piste. I am by the way surprised that the web site of a company like Téléverbier, which operates the lifts of the nearby Verbier ski resort, does not prominently advise against off-piste skiing, particularly days like today. It is true that when you are actually taking the gondola and other lifts, there are large yellow warning signs. Maybe they figured out that those are more effective than warnings on a web site.

The picture shows what you can see of my car at the moment. I guess I won't be using it anytime soon.

Lost in the mail

2005-04-09T08:47:08Z

I had ordered a set of 78 rpm records from a seller in Urugay last year. I had ordered from that person once or twice before, and the packages arrived to the US safe and sound. This time since I was in the process of moving, I gave my Swiss address as shipping address.

Only recently did I start wondering about what had happened to that order. I promptly checked the DHL tracking number and got a confirmation that the package had indeed been shipped and delivered in early October 2004. But there was no way I could remember whether I had actually received it.

I started looking all over the place: in old cardboard boxes, on the top of bookcases, behind and under furniture. I went through the rest of my records, etc. But I did all this to no avail. And I figured, since DHL said they had delivered the package, they must be right, right?

Because I was in the middle of moving, with a couple of rooms full of boxes and papers, I figured that I must have been dreaming, and that I must have thrown away the precious Mascagni records still within their cardboard packaging.

Tonight I had a nice little surprise, when a person who identified himself as Eric Bruchez called me and asked whether, by any chance, I was not expecting a package from Uruguay. Mr. Bruchez is a cook who works nearby. Five minutes after the call ended, I was on my way, in the snow, to get my records.

Shame on Microtek

2005-04-09T08:46:53Z

It is known that hardware manufacturers have always sucked at providing decent software on the Windows platform (my impression is that Mac users have been in a better position, that is for the hardware supported on Mac). For as long as I can remember, sound card and scanner utilities in particular have looked like they came from a galaxy far, far away. And I am not saying that in a good way.

Microtek ScanWizard Pro is no exception to this rule. It looks like a mix between a Windows 3.1 and an old Macintosh program ported to the PC. It is certainly not remotely up to any of recent (or even old) user interface standards. This is the first reason Microtek should be ashamed. This software would look bad if it came with a $50 scanner, but in fact it came with the ScanMaker 9800XL, a $1,000+ A3 scanner bought a couple of years ago. People at Microtek, can't you hire one decent software engineer? I hear they are a dime a dozen nowadays.

But what if the software kind of worked, I shouldn't complain too much, right? In fact I made the mistake of trying to upgrade ScanWizard Pro to a new version, in the hope that it will allow me to determine whether a visual glitch I am seeing could be due to a bug in the current driver. So I went to Microtek's web site. Like any hardware manufacturer web site worthy of this name, it has a support section where you can download the latest version of drivers and scanner software. Not bad.

There is a major problem though. When you click "download", you are redirected to the web site of a company that I won't name, and through which you must pay EUR 2.90 to be able to download the Microtek software. This is the second reason Microtek should be ashamed. As a hardware manufacturer, you don't make your customers pay for minor software upgrades, however small the amount. Especially since the payment system they are using has about the worst registration process I have seen in a long time. I probably spent half an hour getting to the point where I could download the software.

Now I could have been just inconvenienced and my wrath would have cooled down by now. But the best of all is that I haven't managed to make the upgrade work. My scans are always black with the "upgraded" version. And don't get me started on the Microteck installers I had to go through to get to that point, which are unable to install or uninstall anything correctly, and provide error messages probably written by a monkey.

So far, my email requests for support at Microtek have remained unanswered. They probably want you to call their paying hotlines (over EUR 1 / minute). Why should you pay to get support on non-functioning hardware or software? Shame, a third time.

There are a couple of positive things to report though. Switching back to the older application, things luckily work (or don't work) as they did before. And as a workaround to my issue, I have noticed that those glitches have not yet reappeared if I scan in 48-bit mode. They also do not always appear on the same physical vertical lines, even in a single image. This would appear to point to a software issue. Who knows, it may be fixed in a recent version of ScanWizard "Pro", but I will never know for sure if I cannot install the update.

Update 20050201: I have just received an email from the Microtek support in Germany. They provided me with a series of download links, and I managed to upgrade to the latest version of the ScanWizard software after installing the missing bits. This is a good news. The bad news is that the stripes still occur if I don't use the 48-bit mode. I am told that to fix it, I would have to send the scanner to Germany.

Google gets real competition

2005-04-09T08:46:43Z

In internet time, Google has been the best search engine out there for ages now. I can remember when it was just a promising hack. At the time I was using AltaVista, the first really cool search engine. After AltaVista got out of DEC's hands, it became unfortunately bloated, slow, out of date, and simply didn't produce that good a set of results anymore. So when Google became mature enough, like many, I switched and never looked back.

Yesterday, Google just got the first real competition it has had in a long time, with Microsoft's launch (for real) of their new MSN Search. MSN Search looks like a Google clone. Its home page is lean and mean. It allows you to search the web and images. It lays out results in a way similar to Google's. It returns many results, with good relevance, and sometimes even pretends that it finds more hits than Google.

It is hard to claim that MSN Search is better than Google at this point. It doesn't search newsgroups, it doesn't suggest alternative words as well as Google does, and it lacks many of those cool Google toys like the calculator. It also still has a few glitches, like the fact that if I access it from Switzerland, I am stuck with an interface in French or German.

But the new MSN Search remains surprisingly good. Give Microsoft some time, and if they play the game well they may well be able to keep up. After all, they have the money to do it. And if there are two search engines out there that are equivalent for all intents and purposes, why would you use one rather than the other? People who don't like Microsoft will stick with Google, as I know I will. But with the monopoly that Microsoft enjoys on the computer desktop, many people will simply use the default if it is good enough.

Google, you better watch out if you want to stay in business. Keep improving your search engine. There are ways to do it: the current Google search is far from perfect.

You buy 78 rpm records?

2005-04-09T08:46:31Z

Friends of mine have had a good laugh more than once watching me listen to vintage audio recordings on my computer headphones. None of them of course would listen to muffled, crackling and popping, monophonic audio records. After all, this is the century of digital audio, where a $50 piece of equipment records at 24-bit / 96 kHz, and where your look dumb if your audio system does not have six or height speakers.

But I digress. The question is to understand why you would listen to one century-old music, when you can listen to last year's brand new opera CD. The answer requires a little bit more context information.

A century ago or so, opera was flourishing. Verdi had just passed away. Composers like Puccini, Mascagni, and Strauss, enjoyed huge popularity. Opera singers were the stars of the time, and going to the opera was one of the greatest entertainment you could have. In that context, the first audio recordings appeared, and the result was simply that countless musical treasures were kept for posterity on 78 rpm records.

But what the heck is a 78 rpm record, you might say? It is a type of vintage gramophone record that thrived during the first half of the 20th century. Those records had to be played at about 78 rotations per minute (or rpm), hence the name "78 rpm" ("78 tours" in French) under which they are known today - even though they did not always necessarily play at exactly 78 rpm.

My interest in vintage recordings is accentuated by the fact that opera singing is not quite what it used to be. Face it, opera music has had some competition lately, from jazz to hip-hop, but also from other types of entertainment like movies and television. The new generations have difficulty producing great singers. Many will tell you that you can't find a decent tenor nowadays. So what if you want to listen to the best tenors? You turn to audio recordings, and you get to hear the Carusos and Giglis of this world.

This doesn't explain why you would actually buy some 78 rpm records. Here are a few answers:

Many vintage recordings have been transfered to CD, but not all of them.
CDs can be out of print and/or difficult to find.
In most cases you can't put the music of a CD online on your web site. Even if the performance is old and often (but not always yet) in the public domain, the restoration and transfer work falls under a new copyright.

For Mascagni.org, I figured it would be nice to have music as free as possible, and transfering original 78 rpm records is is a good way of doing just that.

Plus, 78 rpm records can be fun: they come in different sizes, with different labels, and even in different colors, like the brown-red Vocalion record shown here. Don't think about listening to them on the move though: they remain cumbersome and crack or even break like crystal. Better use an iPod Shuffle for that: a 1 GB model would fit over 500 monophonic sides.

Flying with a cat

2005-04-09T08:46:18Z

Last October, I brought my cat, Bubbles, from California to Switzerland.

How to proceeed was initially not clear, as I had never seen anybody fly with a pet on an international flight. So I assumed at first, looking for information on the internet, that you had to put the pet in a kennel in the cargo area. Opinions on how bad this is for the pet differ, some people saying that it is the worst way to travel, some the best (after all, they have room because they can be in a bigger kennel, and the absence of light calms them down - and yes, pets are put of course in a pressurized area). But, since fairly recently, you can't just ship your pet yourself, and you have to go through an authorized company. The bottom line: it costs quite a lot of money, I was told, about $500 or more.

I then found out that some companies do accept pets in the cabin on international flights, in particular the company I had my ticket with, KLM. I managed to get some information online about the kennel size and pricing, and then simply confirmed over the phone. I was told I should reconfirm about one month in advance that the pet would be on board, and that they would ok it. The price: $100 (but funnily enough, I cannot remember anybody asking me to pay this fee in the end).

The pet must travel in a kennel that fits under the seat in front of you. You will find such airline-approved kennels at pet stores. The size is about 43 x 31 x 20 cm. Prefer the more expensive, but better designed semi-rigid ones, as opposed to the plastic ones. You can of course use such a kennel to transport your pet on other occasions. Most small to medium-sized cats will be all right, but dogs better be small. Your pet is not allowed to be taken out of the kennel, so it has to be prepared to stay in there for a long time. You may optionally pad the bottom with some baby underpads. The pet will remains very discreet down there, which also explains why you won't notice people with pets much anyway (as opposed to, say, babies). This said, there are indeed very few pets traveling in the cabin on international flights.

You may also want to carry a leash, which will be useful if you have to take the pet out of the kennel, for example to pass the security checks, where you have to carry it with you through the metal detector. You probably don't want to go look for your cat all over a crowded airport.

As for the administrative aspects, you need a health certificate for your pet made within 10 days. They ask for it when you checkin at the airport, and you may also need it when you pass customs in the destination country. The pet needs to be vaccinated against rabies, which is not one of the vaccines done automatically. So make sure you check what vaccines your pet had, and what you need. Also, be sure to check whether your destination country has special rules. The UK, for example, used to have very drastic quarantine rules (i.e., six-month quarantine), that have since been somewhat relaxed.

I did not use tranquilizers on Bubbles. I was told by the vet that if she behaved in a car, there was probably no need for it. A plane is fairly noisy, but otherwise more stable than a car. Also, tranquilizers can do more harm than good, as they weaken the animal and make it less able to react to stressful conditions. If you do use any, it is recommended to try them before the flight anyway, to see how your pet reacts.

In the end Bubbles spent an uncomfortable 20 hours in its kennel, between travel to and from airports, actual flights, connections, and a final trip by train in Switzerland. I feared that she may keep mewing, or do all sorts of stuff inside the kennel. But she behaved great (the underpads ended up not being necessary) and just arrived very thirsty (I did not give her anything during the flight, but a little bit of water would probably have been welcome).

Bubbles has been quite a happy cat in Switzerland for about four months now.

Needless to say, if you plan to travel yourself with a pet, be sure to double-check this information with your airline company, veterinarian, and destination country.

Living forever

2005-04-09T08:46:09Z

I just finished reading The Immortal Cell by Michael D. West and wrote a short review (also at Amazon) of it. Coincidentally, I came today across an article about Ray Kurzweil, famous inventor, and author of a book I read last year, The Age of Spiritual Machines.

The two men clearly have different outlooks and goals. One of the reproaches I make about West's book regards his fairly reserved enthusiasm, as if he doesn't dare getting really excited by the discoveries made. Kurzweil on the other hand is a visionary and knows no limits. To sum things up he believes that soon humans will be able to live virtually forever, thanks to progresses made in medicine, nanotechnology, and computers.

We are so used to associating great age with illness that many people's first reaction upon hearing about the perspective of extended human life consists in pointing out how so many old people suffer from infirmities. But the reality is that it is simply no fun living when you are ill or disabled, whether you are 20 or 90, and this only has something to do with age in that getting older often brings infirmities with it, from arthritis to atherosclerosis to Parkinson's Disease to blindness and many more. But if you can reverse cellular aging, as West describes it, and treat more age-related illnesses, then getting old is no longer necessarily synonymous with getting debilitated.

Even today, you will see many octogenarians (like my grandfather who, at 84, drives, goes out with friends and family, and can't seem to be able to rest), nonagenarians or even centenarians who are happy to live and not looking forward to dying at all, sometimes in spite of many ailments.

Another reaction is the "ethical" reaction: do we have the "right" to do this; "should" we do this. And the "ethical" people to try to wonder what "we" should do. I do think that deeply reflecting on this subject should be done. After all, you don't want to do this kind of research at any cost. But once the research itself is deemed acceptable, I do not think that a group of people should dictate to another whether extended life is a good thing or not: if you don't want to benefit from life-extending treatments, don't get them, but don't prevent other people to try to stay alive.

Do we have a choice in this matter anyway? Can we stop research in this area? The technologies that will allow fighting against cancer, diabetes, and many other illnesses are likely to be the same that will allow fighting aging. If conservatives in the US have castrated research about embryonic stem cells, in Europe on the other hand it is going forward. In Switzerland, the legislation was even submitted to popular vote and accepted with a large majority. So my guess is that this research will go forward no matter what.

And I think that such developments are wonderful. There is so much to do and learn in the world that assuming I can remain healthy and lucid, I would look forward to living for as long as science permits. There is a lot you can contribute when you are older and in good health, to your family and friends, maybe to the world. Travel, read, write, and communicate the experience and, hopefully, the wisdom that you have acquired over the years.

There is little doubt based on recent research that future drugs and treatments will allow for prolonged human life expectancy by countering cellular aging. Whether improvements will be measured in decades or centuries remains to be seen. But the best thing to do consists in looking forward to it and starting getting ready for the challenges posed by the possibility of extended human life. The pyramid of ages could be drastically modified (not unlike the modifications it has already seen over the last hundred years, thanks to the progress of medicine). This will have deep implications on social security, the age of retirement, birth control, etc. The question of just access to anti-ageing drugs and treatments and minimizing the divide between the rich and the poor will be crucial.

N'allez pas à l'Hotel Alpenblick à Leukerbad

2005-04-09T08:45:57Z

Ceci est une lettre que j'ai envoyée a l'hôtel Alpenblick à Loèche-les-Bains, en Suisse:

Monsieur / Madame,

J'apprends aujourdhui avec consternation que vous avez facturé à mon ami ... une nuit additionnelle sans son consentement, et ce pour des chambres inutilisées. Monsieur ... avait en effet eu l'amabilité de réserver pour moi-même, lui-même, ainsi que des amis, trois chambres pour deux nuits, en tout six personnes, vers Nouvel An (nuits du 30 et 31 Décembre 2004).

Un tel comportement de la part d'un établissement dans le domaine de l'hospitalité est absolument inqualifiable et relève quasiment de l'extorsion. J'avais déjà argumenté avec l'employée présente au guichet de votre hôtel le jour de mon départ qu'il n'avait jamais été question de passer trois nuits dans votre hôtel. J'ai trouvé cette personne extrêmement désagréable dans la façon de me traiter en dépit de ses sourires manifestement hypocrites. Elle a même voulu me faire signer un papier mentionnant que nous avions passé trois nuits chez vous. J'ai promptement refusé, et signé un papier mentionnant que nous avions passé deux nuits chez vous.

Notre projet avait toujours été de réserver deux nuits et non trois. Si votre hôtel a considéré que la réservation était pour trois nuits au téléphone (car il n'y a aucun accord écrit de cette réservation), qu'il en assume les conséquences et laisse au client le bénéfice du doute. Même si monsieur ... s'était trompé et avait effectivement réservé trois nuits au lieu de deux, votre hôtel était dans l'obligation morale de satisfaire le client.

J'espère encore que vous pourrez résoudre cette affaire correctement, en remboursant à monsieur ... les deux nuitées qui n'ont pas été utilisées et facturée à tort par votre établissement. En attendant, il est bien clair que :

Je ne mettrai plus les pieds dans votre hôtel. Je dois mentionner que c'est moi qui ai initialement recommandé à monsieur ... de faire des réservations chez vous.
Je ferai la publicité qui s'impose, c'est-à-dire que lorsque des amis me demanderont une recommandation pour un hôtel à Loèche, je ferai en sorte qu'ils ne mettent pas les pieds chez vous ou dans un hôtel qui pourrait vous appartenir. Une copie de cette lettre est d'ailleurs désormais présente sur Internet, car il est juste que des clients potentiels soient avertis des pratiques de votre établissement.

Salutations,

-Erik Bruchez

Rapsodia Satanica in Rome

2005-04-09T08:45:31Z

I attended on Sunday a performance at the Rome opera of Mascagni's Rapsodia Satanica, followed by Cavalleria Rusticana.

I enjoyed Rapsodia Satanica very much. I had already heard different audio records of the music, and watched a black and white version of the movie on video, so I was not entirely new to the work. Following is a mini-review of the work and performance. The bottom line is that Rapsodia Satanica should be done more often!

The Story

The story of Rapsodia Satanica is similar that of Faust. Here is a brief synopsis:

Prelude: Alba d'Oltrevita (I guess that "Dawn of the Beyond" could be a valid translation) is old and frail in her castle of Illusions. She regrets her youth. Arrives Mefisto (the devil), who proposes a pact: if she renounces love forever, he will make her young again.

First part: Alba has accepted the deal. She has opened the gates of the castle and the guests flow. She parties like crazy. Two brothers, Sergio and Tristano, fall in love with her. She seems to like Tristano but not so much Sergio, who in turn is madly in love with Alba and jealous of his brother. When Tristano learns about this, he backs off, and hopes that Alba will indeed accept his brother's love. Sergio tells Alba he will kill himself if she doesn't appear at her window at midnight. Tristano tries to convince her, fails to (Alba could maybe love him, but she cannot fall in love because of the pact), and Sergio dies. She regrets her act, starts loving him, and a wrinkle appears on her forehead.

Second part: Alba lives secluded in her castle. Nobody can visit anymore. Suddenly, she opens up to life and love again: she places flowers everywhere, goes out in the garden, marvels at butterflies, etc. Mefisto arrives, engulfs her in his cape. When he frees her, she is old and frail again. She looks at herself in a pond, and dies.

Rapsodia Satanica was intended to be a very synesthetic piece of art: colored movie, music, and yes, a poem, available here.

The poem is akin to the script of the movie. Whether audiences were supposed to read it before watching the movie or afterwards is not clear. The poem is by Fausto Maria Martini. A co-author, "Alfa", pseudonym of baron Alberto Fassini, is also credited. See this page for more information.

The poem was published in a booklet in 1915.

The Movie

The projection was on the big screen. I really did not know exactly what to expect regarding the coloring of the movie, and it was good to finally see what this was really about.

First, entire sections of the movie are colored. That is, instead of appearing black and white, the tones are uniformly yellow, green, sepia, etc., depending on the sequence. Some scenes are entirely in regular black and white. Then some sequences are colored differently, with different areas of each frame colored separately. For example, parts of Alba's dress will be in various colors (green, blue, red, etc.), the rest of the frame remaining black and white; trees will be greenish, etc. This is clearly the most interesting aspect of the coloring, and the one that must have required the most work.

It is difficult to judge a 90 year old movie without being an expert in the matter, but I found it pretty good. The action makes sense, it is well organized and edited, the scenes are not too long (and because of the music you don't get bored anyway, after all you could do just with the music and no movie), and the acting is fairly good. There is of course a style of acting that warrants exaggerations that we wouldn't do today, but that were the custom in 1915.

Mefisto turns out to be quite scary and ugly! He once appears out of a picture frame, then from within a bunch of flowers (the scariest apparition in my opinion), or from behind curtains.

There is a beautiful mirror scene, where alba plays with her veil, and her reflection in the mirror is played by a second actress. Quite well done!

There are a few short missing parts in the movie which were replaced with black frames. I am not sure exactly why: you would expect that the other black and white copies of the movie would be complete and could have provided the missing parts.

Also, the "slides" providing indications about the action, typical of silent movies were not all in the same format: most were red on black, with a big "Cines" logo in the background, yet a few were just black and white text.

Somehow, I expected the film to be "fully" restored, and by that I meant cleaned of dust and scratches, the image stabilized, etc. None of this appears to have been done here. This would probably require digital treatment, and I understand that this would be very expensive. It would be a good thing to do however, because the pleasure of watching could only be increased. Then a DVD release would be absolutely fantastic.

The Music

Seeing the movie performed with live music allows you to better understand how the music fits with the action. I hadn't realized that fully until Sunday.

For example, when Tristano tries to convince Alba to accept the love of his brother Sergio who threatens to kill himself, you see the clock (with colors) getting closer from midnight, while Tristano pleads for his brother. The music is intense in its slowness, pathetic and tragic, reaching progressively those lyrical apexes typical of Mascagni's style. Then midnight arrives, the music becomes suddenly dark and mysterious, and you hear a bass drum "bang". Sergio has just killed himself.

When Alba realizes what she has done and bends over Sergio's body, the music becomes extremely sad, almost to make you cry. This is the end of the first part of the movie.

The beginning of the second part really captures Alba's sad life in her castle. The music is romantic and full of melancholy but incredibly beautiful.

The scene where Alba opens again to a sort of spring of love is again supported by magnificent music.

The last notes are extremely dramatic, in the fashion of Mascagni's opera endings, reminiscing of Parisina (Mascagni's most recently completed opera at the time he wrote Rapsodia). I noticed that Rapsodia, while not at the level of Parisina, frequently uses chromatisms that echo that of that opera as well.

Mascagni said he was very meticulous during the composition to be exactly in synchronization with the movie to the second. The conductor, Marcello Panni, did a good job at remaining in sync with the movie overall, but not perfectly. For example in the end, the orchestra's last notes happened well after the word "Fine" appeared on screen. It is probably quite a difficult job.

The booklet features an interview with the conductor, who says that he has a stopwatch and a monitor showing him the movie. He also says that there are scene changes that are announced and that the score helps the conductor by providing before such changes "rallentandi" allowing him to adjust.

The interview also mentions that Panni revised the orchestral score, which allegedly was only available from a May 1961 version rebuilt by a copist from individual score parts. The score was apparently full of mistakes or omissions, like that of a bass clarinet part.

An interesting trick is that Alba sits at the piano twice in the movie (one of them at least is a Chopin piece). In both cases the music is played by an actual piano in the orchestra, solo first, then joined by other instruments.

Cavalleria Rusticana

Cavalleria Rusticana was just all right. The settings were very simple. No church! I did not care much for the tenor's voice, nor did I care for the soprano, but she was better. The tenor missed his first "Bada, Santuzza" and got completely out of sync with the orchestra, which was a little scary. He got a good round of applause in the end, as did the soprano. The Intermezzo had a particular sound this time, and I found myself enjoying it very much! It got a lot of applause as well. This matinee audience was full of Americans and Asians visiting Rome on tours. Few of them probably realized that they won't have an opportunity to see Rapsodia Satanica ever again!

Finally, you may want to check some personal pictures taken during my day trip to Rome.

Poor Blog APIs

2005-04-09T08:45:19Z

When it came to choosing blog software for my personal web site, I first considered writing my own. After all, it can't be difficult, can it? And I have written my own software for my web site including the photo albums, all based on the Orbeon PresentationServer (OPS) platform. But I let laziness prevail and figured that existing software must be good enough, and I settled for Roller. I preferred a Java-based solution since my OPS-based software already runs on Java and Tomcat.

But finally a few days ago, I launched a mini-project to create a new "Blog" sample application for OPS. So this weekend, I spent a few hours getting started with this. My approach was that the best thing to do first would be to look at blog APIs, such as the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API. The MetaWeblog API extends upon the Blogger API, offering some added functionality, and refining some existing functionality (by replacing calls). A few things struck me:

Both those specifications are poorly written. I have nothing against Dave Winer, mind you. But consider something like this: "In getPost, the returned value is a struct, as with the Blogger API, but it contains extra elements corresponding to the struct passed to newPost and editPost." This is it. This is how getPost is "specified". There is not even an example showing what the result looks like. No XML Schema or Relax NG schema normalizing what the structure must adhere to. The good news is that you can figure it out, after all, but the bad news is that there is room for misunderstanding. A little more formalism would help.
The APIs are extremely basic. This would not be bad per se, on the contrary. But here simplicity almost equates indigence. There is no access to post comments, for example. There is a call to create a new "media object", but then nothing to list existing objects, retrieve them, or update them. There is no way to manage blogrolls.
The APIs are based on XML-RPC. It would be so much easier to just send and receive structured documents! The calls would be so much shorter and so easier to understand. Well yes, XML-RPC is relatively appropriate for mapping to function or method calls. But that comes at the cost of creating XML documents that are overly complex. I for one much prefer document-based services. See my other blog entry for an example. I am not the only one to have realized that, obviously: see Why We Need Echo, What's Wrong with the MetaWeblog API, and the Atom Project.
The APIs don't leverage HTTP. Authentication is not built into XML-RPC. Simple HTTP authentication would work in theory, but there, the authors of the two APIs in question have resolved to embed username and password information into every request. Therefore, your application has to handle authentication itself, rather than, say, using the existing mechanisms set in place by your web or application server. This is extra burden for the implementor of the APIs.

As of today, I have been mainly been using w.bloggar to edit and post blog entries. It supports the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API. So for now, in spite of their limitations, I have stuck to implementing those APIs. In fact, in just a few hours, I have implemented a good part of them without great difficulty (thanks OPS - I know, this is so self-serving), but with no way of knowing that I am actually implementing them correctly, other than by observing w.bloggar's behavior.

Bluetooth Fun

2005-01-20T14:09:41Z

Bluetooth always sounded like a good idea to me. Just imagine: your mouse, keyboard, headset, PDA, mp3 player, cell phone, and whatnot, all interconnected without the hassle of cables all over the place.

Getting the Bluetooth option on my IBM A31p back in back in 2002 had been a waste of money. Bluetooth devices just weren't ready. And when a friend got a bluetooth headset and I wanted to try connecting it to the laptop, it turned out the profile wasn't even supported. Go figure. Last year, I chose the Bluetooth option on my new laptop nonetheless, and soon after tried a few peripherals with it:

The Logitech MX900 mouse
The Logitech Bluetooth headset
The Nokia 7610 cell phone