In my quest to becoming a better scuba diver - and discovering more scuba fun stuff to do - I took the opportunity of an empty flat in Tignes to drive there with kid and take the “ice diver training course“ taught by Alban (and Monche + Vince).

The 3-dive training session both introduced me to dry-suit diving and to the do’s and don’ts of ice-diving.

First time I put the dry suit on, and sat on the icy entry hole was the oddest experience ever : it’s not cold ! So dry suits do work – that’s a relief. For the first dive I was allowed a full-face mask making me look like one of those professional underwater workers (classy).

During this dive we only used the dry suit as a dry insulation layer, the suit was in auto mode (which means the left shoulder valve lets automatically the air out as pressure raises) and basically I did not have to worry about the buoyancy issues. A little swim underwater, playing with the bubbles on the icy ceiling (making a bubble tornado) and first exercise: planting an ice screw… that one was harder than it looked. Getting the ice screw to enter the ice required heavy pushes on the fins followed by frantic screwing… this led to heavy breathing for a few minutes.

Fun facts I discovered pretty fast : there are 3 very different buoyancy zones under the ice.

• Under 1m depth, you feel sucked up towards the ice. It’s actually your breathing bubbles fault. As they can’t be released in the air, they create a water flow going up and you are being sucked up towards the icy ceiling.
• The 1-3m zone is the comfort zone … you are stable and everything works out great.
• Below the 3m zone you feel sucked down at high speed and need to inflate your BCD…. while being extra careful not to reach the 3m zone too fast or you’ll hit the ceiling in no time.

The ice screw is an essential security tool. Whenever you or someone in your group is lost, there’s is only one thing to do : plant the ice screw, connect a tether line and start making circles around the ice screw, increasing the radius at each circle. If you lost your exit hole, you’re bound to find it. If you lost your buddies just remain calm and motionless under the ice, using this technique they’ll find you or at least you’ll see the tether pass at some point.

This was the objective of the second dive : plant the ice screw, connect the tether, make a mark in the ice to identify the origin point and circle around .. and repeat operations with a larger radius. On this dive I got to connect the dry suit to the air supply, and thus to inflate a bit whenever the suit became too squeezed, but I had to trade in the full-face mask for a regular mask and octopus+protective mouthpiece. Against all expectations the loss of the full-face mask did not make me feel cold at all !

Day 3, last dive before graduation, was about free exploration tethered to a line connected outside. I had to drill holes in the ice, open a hole with an ice saw, prepare the dive site by compressing the light snow (heavy snow on the last 2 days). Nothing very complicated aside from the fact that you need to pay extra attention to hold the line far away from yourself to avoid becoming entangled in it.

I took the camera to try and take a few shots, but obviously took the wrong objective (60mm/F2.8 Macro…. ) and the old eos 300D sensor was really behaving badly in low light. I still managed to snap a few shots and a video with my Kodak Play which turned out unexpectedly allright.

Bottom line: ice diving is an amazing experience, and definitely up to any CMAS 2* diver with enough buoyancy control. Can’t wait to do this again !

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I got the opportunity to play with a WP7.5 phone a few days ago, and was pretty amazed by its progress.

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!

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Apparently Microsoft and “social networks” is a honest mistake

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Adobe has just posted on their official blog about their backing out of flash plugin on mobile. Here’s basically what they’re saying:

This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming andpremium video.

Adobe has been trying really hard with Flash for mobile since almost 10 years… unsuccessfully. Since the first version on Symbian to the latest plugin on Android phones it’s become clear that the market fragmentation, the cost to port and maintain the plugin on all those platforms and the fact that the adaptation of content is not really as good as it should lead to a really small market share… definitely not wort the investment apparently ! (Especially since the iPhone will remove out of reach for Adobe).

Recently they acquired  Nitobi the editors of Phonegap. Phonegap is in my opinion the absolute best solution for creating cross-platform mobile applications nowadays – and that’s what we are using for Diveboard. It provides deep device integration while relying on the power of html5/css (and the render engine of the built-in web browsers) to ensure and easy development and port of the applications. This is definitely good enough for many applications, although it will never be as good as native, the TCO of a Phonegap mobile app is way lower than that of a native cocoa app – plus it relies on skill that web developers already have.

Kudos to Adobe for their clear-sight analysis of the situation – must have been an complicated decision internally!

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This post has been on my mind for a long while, and even as I start writing it I know that this post won’t even allow me to dump a tenth of what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.

I’ve been doing or managing software projects for year now. Saw the rise of AGILE programming, saw people getting crazy about Test-Driven-Development… and yet I’ve rarely seen so much crappy software and such long development cycles in companies. Why ? Because Agile has become a method for hiding your responsibilities as a developer over a roadmap, a new way of crumpling  the whole development process where developers are empowered with everything while not given any responsibilities over the deliveries, a new way to fail project without consequencies.

AGILE is actually the less agile method I’ve ever experienced, where sprints are blind development tunnels where outside of the developers nobody can really evaluate how the project is progressing. With sprints lasting up to 2 months (I’ve seen it), and with no real ability o get anything delivered in-between, this is definitely the worst approach of all should you be a small-to-medium size company willing to deliver fast and iterate fast.

What are the real objectives for software ? In my opinion those points are a must and should always be granted

• The master branch has the current production code, and can be updated fast (after testing) should a bug be found. This is critical in my opinion : when a bug is found by a user in production : you must be able to correct it immediately ! And most of the time current methodologies just disable that from ever happening…
• No software goes to production before having been tested. An NO-UNITESTS ! Unitests are only good for testing complicated algorithms. You should focus on designing usage-based tests with scenarios following the most common user action suites. On the web, selenium is the way to go. And this is only going to enable you to limit regressions by highlighting potential side-effects of a latest code update that as a developer you may have missed.
• Deploy often. Why wait the end of a sprint to see a service update ? Some stories are fast to deliver and have limited impact on the codebase and can de done in a few hours… some require weeks of headaches… why choose your deployment speed to match the longest task development time ? Put each feature in a dedicated branch, merge them into testing when completed (for testing) and then into master for a final test run.

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rsync -vrP –append filename user@server:path

and with resume that works of course….

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https://gist.github.com/634750

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Sounds like a classic but it’s rare enough to make me happy when it happens

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Digi just announced a new line of WiFi/Xbee modules :“XBee modules offer developers tremendous flexibility and are extremely easy to use,” said Larry Kraft, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, Digi International. “By adding a low-power Wi-Fi module to the XBee product family we give customers the fastest and most flexible way to get Wi-Fi up and running on their systems.”
Xbee are the preferred choice for the DIY community since they are easy to set-up, fairly robust and easy to use with their simple COM interface. They will be priced around 149USD

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Check out my dives in Ko Samui/Ko Tao, Thailand here : http://www.diveboard.com/ksso and a more in-depth review on Diveboard’s blog.

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