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A few days ago, a friend of mine complained about the lack of speed of his products’ user interfaces. Like many of us, he chose to build his user interface using an abstraction software framework. One year later, his products’ web pages are too heavy and his customers complain. It would have been nice not to live in a world where the top Internet giants focus continuously on speed. Without these companies, one second to return the result of a web page would be the norm and browsing would be a peaceful activity. While today, web pages are displayed in less than the blink of an eye (0,2-0,3 second), many desktop applications still seem incredibly sluggish. When you look at the data presented by Stoyan Stefanov at Velocity, you would understand 2-3 seconds to load a view is still acceptable, if the user is working only with your application. But, today most users are browsing and searching while using applications at work. If you listen to Marissa Mayer at Velocity, you will...

Journalist Evgeny Morozov presents an alternative point of view about the Internet impact on politic. After, the Tunasian revolution , I'm sure that digital devices can help, but obviously these are only tools. Links: Wikipedia : Evgeny Morozov Wikipedia : Tunisian revolution RSA : The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?

Two months ago, Mix-IT took place in Lyon, and our team ( JUG Lyon + CARA ) will soon give some feedback about this event. For my part, I learned a lot. Below are a few points that I want to share with you. Context The idea of a conference in Lyon was initiated by JUG Lyon, and then they proposed that we (Lyon Club Agile Rhône-Alpes) co-organise it with them. For me, Agile Grenoble is the main Agile conference in this region and organising a similar event would be pointless. Therefore, a combination of Agile content with technical knowledge was a clever way to not tread on anyone’s toes. Self-organised team We talk a lot about self-organised teams in the Agile world, but most of the time someone defines the scope of the work. To be fair, Agnes’s ( JUG + Jduchess ) expertise in event organisation really, made the difference, because she really made sure everything was covered. For the first time in my life, I saw a group of people in which ideas were generated every day, ...

Communities dominate is one of my favorite blogs for improving my knowledge about mobility. I already referred to it , but they have posted one more amazing article that shows the astonishing penetration of mobile phones today: 50% in Africa, more than 200% in United Arab Emirates. There are more phone subscribers than those with permanent access to electricity or water. And again the main tool is SMS with 4.2 billion users compare to the 5.2 billion phone subscribers. As discussed in the article comments , the number of sold phones is composed of new users and replacements. The replacement rate is between 18 and 32 months, according to the sources available on the Internet. We could believed that we are in front of another planned obsolescence , but this is only a permanent race for new features in the phone industry. Three years ago, when I started to work in the mobile phone industry, I was trying to have an opinion about what would be the next step and where the enterprise ...

Last November, we, the Cara Lyon team , met the JUG guys to talk about organising a day of sharing.  After a two hour conversation, we decided to have a conference at the beginning of April, where speakers will discuss Agile, Java/EE new trends (Devops, NoSQL, HTML5). Mix-IT was born. I must admit that even though my current professional life is overwhelming, I find a real pleasure spending a few hours a week, working with the Mix-IT team.  Up to now, the CARA Lyon organisation was based on a "go it alone" strategy. The JUG guys, even though they are young, work more on an “invite a specialist and find sponsorship” strategy. I definitely can't decide between both strategies today, because I do not know the impact of the size of both communities and their attractiveness to companies. Here we go : Mix-IT will occur on the 5th of April 2011 in Lyon at the Epitech Computer School located 5 minutes walking distance from the Lapardieu train station. Mixity or mixité ...

 As an engineer, I do know that I have made many mistakes and many more will come. Sometimes, it's difficult for me to bear the weight of my country's history. However, it doesn't mean, we will not be smarter tomorrow. In Haiti's disaster of engine'ering, Peter Haas explains why all construction guys should know about earthquake best practices.

Enjoy ... New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products Adam, Thanks for the link ...

I'm a big fan of James Hamilton'blog (Perpective) , because his material has a high value. Before going through his posts, you may watch the following 20 minutes video from Velocity 2010 , where the most important technical trends of the Datacenter world are presented. His slides are available here and the last one provides links to all the important blog posts, he talks in his show. Enjoy. Sources: Perspectives : Perspectives - Velocity 2010

Update. I would like to congratulate Sir Brad Neuberg for the quality of the following HTML5 presentation. Due to the number of concepts presented in this video, I spent an hour gathering further details about these subjects. Please find here below, the links and summary, to plunge into the next dimension of the Internet content. Video timeline: - Technical History: 0 - Vector graphics: 6 -- SVG: 7:15 -- Canvas API: 10:15 - When Canvas or SVG : 17 - Video: 20:50 - Geolocation:27:25 - Application cache & database: 30:10 - Web Workers: 35:50 Update: Brad's slides are availabe here (PDF) . If you want to test the demos, help yourself. Humm, first of all, make sure you have a modern browser (e.g Firefox 3.5) : Vector graphic - 1st person gifter : walk in the game using your keyboard arrow keys, - SVG Web Toolkit : Animated Population Pyramid, - Bespin : web code editor. For further explanation watch the mozilla team at Qcon London 2009, uell : Ger...

Watching Steve Levin's talk on Infoq about multiple mobile platform development, I asked myself the average time I concentrate on each product management skill. Refering to the 280group manifesto ,I understand this talk will help me to improve my market and the technology knowledge. About platforms, I recorded the following remarks. Each platform has something annoying: The Iphone's black-boxed application validation process, Android UI which needs to improved, Windows mobile and its API, badly implemented by manufacturers, Blackberry's OS which is based on an old one. If you want to know more about one subject, go to the video and click on the question that is stir your interest. The video will be set to the question to which you need an answer. From the distribution point of view, I really agree with his remarks about the Apple Store, that I would summarize thus: Apple has a built-in store system and nothing more has to be done by the end user (e.g. adding a...

Probably due to the predominant position of a few actors (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.), I often feel that all I used to learn about small size systems will soon be obsolete. The current fashionable IT word is noSQL. If you don't have a minimum of IT culture and only read the buzzy articles you could think the SQL thing is dead. After a short analysis, I collected a few answers and mainly understood, both old and new technologies will have a long life, but their opposition really makes us step back and reconsider. First, there is ACID for atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability, the properties implemented by the Database management system (DBMS) to make sure the transactions proceed reliably. Most of the time we use databases of this type in our indoor computing system. But when it comes to distributed ones (many nodes) you've got to understand that a choice has to be made. In 2000, Eric Brewer made a keynote speech at the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distr...

2010, the browser is a platform. Step by step, HTML5 arrives. Three Googlers present their 20% project: a port of the Quake II engine to HTML5 using the Google Web Toolkit. For more information, please visit Quake2-gwt-port . In the projet page, you read: In the port, we use WebGL, the Canvas API, HTML 5 elements, the local storage API, and WebSockets to demonstrate the possibilities of pure web applications in modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome. The port is based on the Jake2 project, compiled to Javascript using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Jake 2 is a Java port of the original Quake II source code, which was open sourced by id software. To make the Jake 2 code work with GWT, we have Created a new WebGL based renderer Ported the network layer for multiplayer games from UDP to the WebSocket API Made all resource loading calls asynchronous Created a GWT implementation of Java nio buffers based on WebGL arrays (to be ported to ECMAScript Typed Arrays ) Implemen...

We are now living in the second decade of the 21st century and having data/services online is not an advantage anymore, but not having it is a disavantage. We used to deploy servers in data centers to make sure our customers have permanent access to our services or to give the sensation that we were always online. Our internal IT infrastructure was changing step by step and the recurrent question used to be: should we based everything around Microsoft to minimise the products' compatibility or should we take the best of every product and support their interaction ourselves? We were living with the philosophy of IT perimeters delimited by security devices even if users were spending their time collaborating with others, sharing their documents by emails located somewhere. Somewhere connected. Today, everything looks different due to our understanding of news trends and the near future: the soon to be soaring energy price, the unavoidable trend of collaboration pushed by social ne...

Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop."

Today, the computer world has two big trends: mobility and cloud computing. If you want to have a feedback about the second one, have a look at the Jeff Dean presentation : Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems I found the google protocol buffers "a language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications protocols, data storage", pretty interesting.

Google Reader is probably the best free online RSS reader available today. Due to its simplicity and its minimalist interface, sometime you wish you could have colorized at least its background. Matt Cutts tell us here below how to display a hidden function: In your Google Reader press keys: Up arrow, Up arrow, Down arrow, Down arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, Left arrow, Right arrow, B key, and lastly A key. And .... This is my nerd's consern of the week. Sources: Commoncraft : RSS in Plain English - Common Craft - Our Product is Explanation Matt Cutts : Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Statistics have been published about Wikipedia and Wikimedia ( PDF Here) . The first lines are: According to comScore, Wikipedia is the fourth most popular web property, world-wide. In June, it served 327 million unique visitors. Wikipedia is available in 266 languages. It is continually expanded by approximately 100,000 active volunteer editors world-wide. The English version alone contains more than 2.9 million articles. All language editions combined contain more than 13.1 million articles. Next to English, the largest Wikipedia editions are German (911,000 articles), French (798,000 articles), Polish (600,000 articles), and Japanese (587,000 articles). For more see the original document . Sources : Resource Shelf : Updated: Key Statistics About Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation (September, 2009) « ResourceShelf

I went through Zoho writer and Google doc , and I'm still really impressed by Zoho features. Microsoft is not yet online, but sure enough, they will recover and be on track with online office applications. Have a look at Paul Thurrott , Office 2010 review to understand their progress and see also his explanation about Office versions .

In Mike West's presentation a t the GLUE conference : " Harnessing the Cloud " (available on InfoQ ), you will find all the trends and keywords about the cloud businesses. Below is a slideshow from him, close to the one used above.

We spent hours speaking about Internet as a technical thing. Today its reality is a real time tool that is changing all the previous media, communications and social concepts. Enjoy here below the Clay Shirky video at Ted. To confirm his talk, please have a look to the iran dissidents' story on twitter here .