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A lot is changing in my life. I’m getting older, I’m getting wiser, I’m getting “stupider” (like it was even possible :-P ). New Job Last Friday (3rd of Sep 2010) I left Orange Labs UK. After 2 years and 2 months, my work at this the UK branch of France Telecom R&D is over. I have been involved in a number of projects with various degrees of commitment: some full time, some to land a hand, some to just criticise and make fun of colleagues (just kidding: it was more like trying to shutdown wasteful project branching and focusing on the good targets :-P ). ...

Just one advice: watch this thing in HD and prepare to lose you jaw.

1 $ echo "Hello World!" This is my first post from a whole new backend. Yes, I’m leaving the underperforming and unreliable Bluehost Hosting for a scalable, distributed, load-balanced, reliable, powerful platform. I’m going Google. I’m moving to App Engine. To make App Engine serve my purpose, I picked a small, cute, interesting project to do the job: Bloggart, made by brilliant Arachnid (Nick Johnson). The old posts you ask? Yes, I’m working on a strategy for that. Most probably will work a bit on Bloggart to welcome my Wordpress’s data, and use the App Engine Bulk Loader. Of course, there will be quite few bumps on the way: Bloggart is not Wordpress. I’m sure there will be tons of features that will be left out. But Bloggart and App Engine suite my primary purpose: Speeeeeed. In fact, I recommend you take a good look at this series of article on Nick’s blog where he goes step-by-step through the development of his project: really cool stuff. ...

This is a really amazing version of the Daniel H. Pink speech about Motivation. It all into it’s second book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. And, best of all, it’s all explained on a white board ;)

I can’t put it any simpler: buy and read those 2 books ASAP. Getting Real Rework This is proper stuff. This is stuff that translates into words what you, THE DEVELOPER, would like to have in your daily work life. And probably the reason for which having a pet project, something where you set the rules, helps remaining sane, and sometimes to dream that, one day, you will be on your own.

This is a set of commets to some of the asserts made by Steve Jobs in his Thoughts on Flash. Safari has just ~5.5% of web users share […] Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers. […] Ehm, what about Netscape Gecko? It’s not just Firefox and it’s share of web users, much larger than the one of Safari, but also the fact that the Mozilla Foundation is very much involved in building (W3C) standards like HTML5 et similia. I can see that you used the word “Almost”, but that’s not a good start: Steve, let’s try to be more fair here. ...

This took some patience. Not to take the pictures themselves, but to bear with a group of trip-mates that were either freezing or bored to wait for me to take this 12 pictures -_- Roald Dahl Plass Do you like it? If so, I have a larger (way larger) version.

Show this to as much peoples as possible. It probably something some informed/smart people already know, but I admit that having someone making a video of it, makes it more “rememberable”, so more effective on (my) future behaviour. I’m cheese? I’m controllable through videos? Possibly, but in this case I’m OK with that. More at: The Story of Stuff.

I was writing some code to react at a textarea.onKeyUp. I take the size of the current textarea.val().length, update an element and do some other stuff. yawn The first version of the code looked like: 1 2 3 4 $('#message').keyup(function(e){ $('#chars_num').html( new_len ); $('#sms_num').html( Math.floor($('#message').val().length / 161) +1) ); }); Working good, but was clearly slow: every keystroke was “giving back the cursor” too slowly for a fast typer like me. I went to take a look at twitter, and their text box was WAY FASTER. ...

I’m going to make a simple point. And because people that know me think I’m a “unfair-Google-aficionado-that-doesn’t-see-how-evil-Google-is”, I’m going to use Android as victim here. iPhone ruleZ Other OS? I’m not even taking into consideration old stuff like Symbian: is just too easy to trash it now-days (Qt is a whole different story though). ...