Adrien’s old blog
=> moved permanently to blog.adrienjoly.com

This blog moved permanently to

blog.adrienjoly.com

Play’em is the name of my last week-end project.

The aim of play’em is to play the videos that your friends shared on facebook, without having to browse, just like TV.

In order to give it a try, open play’em, connect to your facebook account, watch, and relax! If a video is boring, you can skip to the next one.

Technically speaking, play’em is just a HTML page with some concise javascript logic. There is no server logic, so it’s very fast and simple!

In April 2010, we conducted a survey of 256 users of real–time microblogging platforms, mostly Twitter users, in order to analyze usage of those platforms and evaluate induced cognitive impact. In this article, after reporting and discussing the results of this survey, we identify opportunities to reduce information overload and frequent disruptions. We propose a novel approach for filtering status updates from real–time microblogging platforms based on contextual relevance between their authors.

Read/download the article on Google Docs: Between social awareness and productivity: Results of a survey about real-time microblogging (PDF copy from First Monday)

How to cite:
Joly, Adrien, Maret, Pierre, and Daigremont, Johann. “Between social awareness and productivity: Results of a survey about real-time microblogging” First Monday [Online], Volume 15 Number 11 (3 November 2010)

• EndNote - EndNote format (Macintosh & Windows)
• Reference Manager - RIS format (Windows only)
• ProCite - RIS format (Macintosh & Windows)

Title: A Context Management Framework based on Wisdom of Crowds for Social Awareness applications

At a time when social networking sites revolutionize the usages on the Web, it has become rich, easy, and fun to share private or professional content. Sharing personal information in real-time (such as news, moods, etc…), supports the maintenance of social ties at a high scale. However, the information overload which emerged from the growing quantity of signals exchanged on these services, often in real-time, motivates a regulation of these signals (called “mediated interactions”), in order to reduce the temporal cost for maintaining social networks, and implied interruptions, which have a negative impact on productivity on tasks that require long-lasting attention.

In the frame of this thesis, we have developed a filtering and recommendation system that relies on contextual similarity between users that produce and consume social signals, as relevance criteria. In our approach, contextual information is aggregated and interpreted on users’ terminal(s), before being submitted on-demand to a server in the form of a set of weighted tags. In this thesis, we present a broad state of the art on context- awareness, social networks and information retrieval, we propose a formalization of our filtering problem, and we implement and evaluate its application for enterprise social networking.

Keywords: information retrieval, context-awareness, recommender systems, social networks, information overload

Read my PhD thesis in English

Title: A Context Management Framework based on Wisdom of Crowds for Social Awareness applications

At a time when social networking sites revolutionize the usages on the Web, it has become rich, easy, and fun to share private or professional content. Sharing personal information in real-time (such as news, moods, etc…), supports the maintenance of social ties at a high scale. However, the information overload which emerged from the growing quantity of signals exchanged on these services, often in real-time, motivates a regulation of these signals (called “mediated interactions”), in order to reduce the temporal cost for maintaining social networks, and implied interruptions, which have a negative impact on productivity on tasks that require long-lasting attention.

In the frame of this thesis, we have developed a filtering and recommendation system that relies on contextual similarity between users that produce and consume social signals, as relevance criteria. In our approach, contextual information is aggregated and interpreted on users’ terminal(s), before being submitted on-demand to a server in the form of a set of weighted tags. In this thesis, we present a broad state of the art on context- awareness, social networks and information retrieval, we propose a formalization of our filtering problem, and we implement and evaluate its application for enterprise social networking.

Keywords: information retrieval, context-awareness, recommender systems, social networks, information overload

Read my PhD thesis in English

Titre: Un cadre de gestion de contextes fondé sur l’intelligence collective pour améliorer l’efficacité des applications de communication sociale

A l’heure où les sites de réseaux sociaux transforment les usages sur le Web, les échanges entre personnes deviennent de plus en plus faciles, ludiques et riches. Le partage en temps réel de nouvelles, d’humeurs, et autres contenus (personnels ou personnellement sélectionnés) permet de tisser, de maintenir et de renforcer des liens sociaux entre personnes à des échelles encore inédites. Cependant, la quantité sans cesse croissante d’information circulant sur ces réseaux, souvent en temps réel, motive une régulation des signaux (ici appelées “interactions médiatisées”), de manière à réduire le temps nécessaire pour suivre ses réseaux sociaux, et modérer les interruptions induites, non favorables à une bonne productivité sur le traitement de tâches demandant une attention continue.

Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous avons développé un système de filtrage et de recommandation de ces signaux qui repose sur la similarité contextuelle entre utilisateurs, producteurs et consommateurs de ces signaux, pour évaluer leur pertinence. Notre approche consiste à agréger et interpréter les données de contexte sur les terminaux des utilisateurs, sous forme de mots- clés pondérés (tags), avant qu’elles ne puissent être exploitées par le serveur de recommandation, à la demande de l’utilisateur. Dans ce mémoire, nous présenterons un état de l’art couvrant la gestion de données contextuelles, les réseaux sociaux et leurs pratiques actuelles sur internet, et des techniques de recherche d’information. Ensuite, nous proposerons une formalisation de notre problématique de filtrage contextuel, l’implémentation d’une application de réseautage social d’entreprise, et nous discuterons les résultats expérimentaux obtenus auprès d’utilisateurs.

Mots-Clés: recherche d’informations, modélisation de données de contexte, systèmes de recommandation, réseaux sociaux, surcharge informationelle

Lire la synthèse en Français, la thèse en Anglais

In April 2010, we conducted a survey towards 256 users of real-time microblogging platforms, mostly Twitter users, in order to analyze the usage and impact of those platforms. In this report, we present the results of this survey, and discuss their explanation and possible usage improvements towards reducing information overload and interruptions.

Links: the report page, or directly download the PDF file

Edit: an alternative link on scribd

This survey reveals that users of real-time microblogging platforms (such as Twitter):

• usually consume many updates (with or without being notified in real-time), mostly for professional use, news and networking;
• mostly receive updates that are interesting in regard to their longer-term goals, more than to their current activities;
• consult the content attached to many updates, but do not respond to them often;
• and that they would benefit from filtering mechanisms.

In my PhD thesis, I have addressed the need for filtering by relevance with users’ current interests and activities, by developing a system that can maintain a dynamic profile of users, based on physical, virtual and social sensors.

In the frame of my PhD thesis, I’m running a quick survey on the usage of Twitter and other real-time microblogging platforms. In order for this survey to be representative, I need a few hundreds of answers.

Here is the link to the survey, it should take you less than 10 minutes to complete:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dGRCTnVDTVlQYy1jUzlHQ01FZVF4NXc6MQ

It would be great of you could fill it and send it to relevant people, that would help me improve the quality of my PhD thesis! ^^

Je viens de découvrir l’article de Robert Scoble (mieux connu sous le pseudonyme Scobleizer): “World-brand-building mistakes France’s entrepreneurs make” sur ses rencontres avec des entrepreneurs français. Même sans être moi-même entrepreneur, j’en ai rencontré certains (et entendu parlé d’autres), et je reconnais certains défauts qu’il dénonce. Voici les critiques que j’ai retenues:

1. Trop peu visibles (voire pas présents du tout) sur Twitter, Facebook, et les autres réseaux sociaux.
2. Trop de présentations powerpoint envoyées par email, au lieu d’une bonne vidéo diffusée via Youtube, pourtant tellement plus efficace.
3. Trop peu de démos. Pas fous, les investisseurs (et les utilisateurs potentiels aussi d’ailleurs) ne croient que ce qu’ils peuvent voir, essayer, manipuler eux-mêmes. Présenter des slides, c’est endormir son audience.
4. Naïfs (ou du moins, évasifs) quant à la concurrence. C’est très rare d’être seul sur un marché ou d’avoir une technologie ou un service complètement nouveau. Il faut connaitre ses concurrents, les citer et savoir se démarquer.
5. Trop peu au courant de l’actualité des start-ups, des nouvelles applications et du web en général. Si vous ne connaissez pas la dernière appli iphone ou facebook, vous passez pour un rigolo qui vit sur une autre planète.
6. Trop de blabla non ciblé, non adapté. Quand on parle à une personne influente, c’est à soi de connaitre les intérêts de cette personne et son actualité (twitter et les blogs sont faits pour ça), afin de personnaliser le discours et gagner en impact.
7. Pas de carte de visite? Comment peut-on répondre aux dernières question d’un bloggeur qui compte parler de vous, si vous ne lui laissez aucun moyen de vous joindre? Vos comptes twitter et skype sont bienvenus sur votre carte.
8. Il faut savoir sortir de chez soi. Pour se rendre visible aux USA, il faut bien à un moment se décider à prendre un avion et rencontrer des gens influents de l’autre coté de l’atlantique.

Même si toutes ces critiques ne s’appliquent évidemment pas à tout le monde, elles sont à mon avis de bon conseil.

Bonjour chers lecteurs (pour peu que vous me suiviez toujours!)

Je viens de recevoir une invitation à participer à un sondage sur la précarité dans l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche publique (CDD, vacations, honoraires, allocations, bourses, travail gratuit). Ce questionnaire est en ligne jusqu’au 18 décembre à l’adresse suivante: http://www.precarite-esr.org/questionnaire.html.

Pour ma part — et cette opinion n’engage que moi — j’ai profité de ce questionnaire pour dire que je ne ressentais aucune précarité dans mon contrat de thèse CIFRE, et il m’a paru important d’exprimer mon gout pour une certaine flexibilité dans mon parcours professionnel, ce qui est malheureusement souvent assimilé à de la précarité. Personnellement je suis contre l’idée du contrat de travail à vie, et pour le mouvement, du moment que ce mouvement est possible et satisfaisant à l’échelle globale.

Je vous invite à vous aussi y faire entendre votre voix, y compris si vous ne vous sentez pas concerné, à partir du moment que vous travaillez dans/avec la recherche publique.

Le projet ECLORE vient de diffuser son comparatif de logiciels de gestion de références bibliographiques, parmi lesquels: zotero (mon préféré), endnote, bibtex, bibus, et nombreux autres! Il est possible de comparer plusieurs d’entre eux sur de nombreux aspects (description, installation, bibliothèques, références, vocabulaire, filtres d’importation, exportation, connexion, styles, ergonomie…) après avoir choisi des facteurs discriminants comme le système d’exploitation, le prix et le type de license (propriétaire/libre).

ECLORE : Evaluation et comparaison de logiciels de gestion de références bibliographiques
Cliquez sur le lien pour accéder à la page d’accueil puis sur base de données ECLORE.

Tim O’Reilly, during his talk for TED:

He gives a metaphoric example of people wearing name tags in the real world and semantic description of these people on the semantic web, assuming that they are identified by an RFID tag.

we don’t wear name tags all the time [to get identified]
[…]
if we meet again, i will not recognize you because you’re wearing a name tag, i will recognize you because “oh yeah, i’ve seen you before!”
[…]
=> our machines are becoming like that

He uses this metaphor to show that the actual “Semantic Web” is filled progressively by learning from the “wisdom of crowds”:

Semantic web /RFID is things wearing name tags, and web 2.0 is learning to recognize them. So many things are continuously getting better at recognizing things by accumulating context, bit by bit.

Adding cameras to our mobile phones made people want to capture every moments, mostly for sharing it with friends (e.g. with MMS and/or Social Networking Sites).

What if we could capture these moments with public cameras that are spread all around our cities?

I could buy a picture of me driving on the highway, thanks to speed cameras, without exceeding speed limits (and pay expensive fines).
I could watch and share the video of myself falling on the pavement, as I did this morning, thanks to CCTV.
I could make a low-cost (and low-burden) music video (like did The Get Out Clause band), thanks to underground and other urban cameras.
…

Your ideas could make cameras more “social” as you could use them for fun (and thus more sympathetic), and it could also generate some revenue.

I think that, in our transition from hierarchical structures to folksonomies (tags) for indexing our stuff (e.g. videos, bookmarks, songs…), we might have forgotten something important: the control of visibility of our stuff. Let me explain my thought.

Let’s say you have a photo which is very personal and that you only show to very close friends and family only. Will you put it in your main photo album? Maybe not… Instead you would probably hide it in some secret place which is hard (or at least not obvious) to find (e.g. in an enveloppe inside your drawer, under your bed…).

Let’s move to the digital world, before the flickr and the web 2.0, we used to store our photo files in hierarchical structures: folders and sub-folders which most file systems rely on. This structure was efficient to organize your photos with a personal indexing scheme. For example you could decide to make one folder per event. For each event you would make one sub-folder per person who took the photos. This is a two-degree hierarchical structure. One characteristic of hierarchical file structures is that it’s easy to lose files, by not remembering where we had put it. This characteristic also applies to your appartment (or your bedroom) because it contains several objects (pieces of furniture) that can contain objects and so on… This makes it easy to hide stuff, and to make some stuff more visible (by not hiding them).

Now, by using tags (like on flickr, delicious, and other “web 2.0″ sharing platforms), we’re flattening our indexing structure, we cannot hide stuff inside other stuff. Instead, we just put sticky notes on a big mess of objects that have the same level of visibility. It’s like if we put all our photos on the ground, there is no furniture nor photo album to hide them.

Some intuitive way must exist for us to make our shared stuff more or less visible… For me, manipulating “privacy settings” is a brutal function for end users. Any thoughts?

After the “Beacon” controversy, it seems that Facebook have recently added a new way for applications to leverage your personal data.

Now, when a (facebook-) friend of yours adds an application, some of YOUR personal information can also be accessed to the application. The default privacy settings are displayed on the screenshot above.

I’m not saying that Facebook is evil here, as I think that sharing some of this information can actually empower better social applications, but I think that Facebook should communicate clearly on this.

Keep on connecting, keep on sharing, but be aware of what the implications are

Today’s thought: How to keep the context of a URL shared by a contact when bookmarking this URL? By context, I mean: meta-information that describes why you might be interested by the shared URL, who sent it to you, when, and also gives you a way to reply/annotate/comment this sharing after consumption.

Confused? Okay, let me give an example use case (which happened to me this morning):

1. A friend sends you an email saying “you must watch this amazing documentary, it gives constructive criticism of your research approach i think: http://youtube/giheughe, what would you reply to the question at minute 16.22?“
2. You already have several emails in your inbox with links to lengthy videos to watch. You would like to make some space in your inbox, but you don’t have time to watch these videos right now.

…and possible solutions to clear your inbox and keep a reference to URLs for later consumption:

1. Solution 1 (no context): you “bookmark” these videos in a personal “todo-playlist” in order to watch them later. But if you do that, you lose the context of these shared URLs (i.e. for the definition of context, read above). Thus you don’t know in which mindset to watch the video and where to put feedback responding to your friend’s email.
2. Solution 2 (webmail): if you use a good webmail (i.e. each email has its own URL, e.g. gmail.com), you can bookmark the email of your friend. This solution makes it possible to archive the email to make some space in your inbox, and to keep the context of shared URLs.
3. Solution 3 (social-networking style): you bookmark the videos’ URLs in your “todo-playlist” (which you could also call “TV” btw), and, when you watch them, the user interface shows you the context of this shared video. E.g. the web page that embeds the video displays a frame with the name and photo/avatar of the friend who sent you this video, along with his recommendation message (e.g. the content of his email), and a link (or even a textbox) to respond. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Just a thought I wanted to share: have you ever been frustrated of not being able to bookmark a file of your computer on delicious? …to find the URL of a file (e.g. an image) you downloaded, in order to share this URL instead of sending the file? … or event to be able to work seamlessly on any document from any computer, with or without installed software? and I won’t even talk about synchronization of files between people, computers and devices… (is that the actual last version of the document?)

If feel so, you’re just like me! Wouldn’t it be nice that we only work with URLs instead of OS-specific and computer-specific local file paths? That way we could leverage thousands of cutting-edge tools available on the internet, in order to better manage, annotate, visualize, share and thus better browse through information!

Of course putting everything on the internet is scary because we’re not always online, and because some stuff sometimes disappear from the web (e.g. older versions of software which are not free anymore)… But what if we “cache” our web-stored information on our computers instead, and assume that the web-hosted version is the reference of the resources (with an Unique Resource Identifier… URI!). This URI could lead to several hosting spaces, including private storage (e.g. computers, devices, portable hard drives), that would keep synchronized.

I promise that, if such a system exists (and works well of course), I would never have to keep downloaded research papers on my computer any longer!

Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of typical structured knowledge management and collaboration platforms (e.g. intranets):

For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.

The feeling of connectedness (and thus, the usefulness) of Social Networks and Ambient Awareness environnements is very hard to explain without actually experiencing it. David Allen did not find a way to actually explain this feeling, but he gives some inspirational clues:

There is inherently some sort of magic between the lines in much of it that seems to have struck a chord in so many of us. I attribute this to the transparency, connectedness, and immediacy that social media offer, which are key attributes of quality relationships—something humans crave at a basic level.

Time Management in the Age of Social Media

Hi all,
I just wanted to share with you one of my tricks for better organizing my bookmarks in delicious.
Today’s trick consist of using hashtags (e.g. #research) instead of regular tags when annotating/bookmarking web resources on delicious. Like twitter’s hashtags, they are not officially specifically handled/supported by delicious (yet?), but they are useful for me to make a difference between general/public tags and personal tags. Let me explain with a few examples:

• I use the “research” tag for resources that deal with research in general. I use “#research” for resources that I keep for MY research
• I use a “#todo” tag for stuff I need to read later. This shows that some tags can be irrelevant to other users but very practical for personal matters. Hashtags is a way to separate these two kind of tags.
• Finally, I use a “#profiles” tag to list my profiles on the internet. A regular “profiles” tag would just not make sense to the community of delicious users.

Last week, my PhD supervisor and 2 fellow PhD students (Julien Subercaze and Johann Stan, also under his supervision), participated to two seminars. The first seminar was in Universität Karlsruhe (Germany), and the second seminar was in Universiteit Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands).

In the frame of these seminars, I presented some slides on my current PhD work: Awareness Without Overload.

This presentation introduces existing approaches for improved enterprise communication and collaboration (including social web platforms and research works on Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments), which motivates a convergent framework of real-time contextual notifications based on employees’ work context. The framework is presented and current research issues (work in progress) are introduced.

As usual , I’m happy to welcome your comments

My homepage needs some freshing up but I have so many ideas (sometimes conflictual) that I don’t know where to start!

Firstly, I must define what I understand by “homepage”: it must be the web page that I will spread around to represent my identity on forum/email signatures, on wikis, etc… So, it must provide some personal introduction and links to several facets of my identity (e.g. the researcher, the musician, the technology enthusiast…) on the web.

I considered using one of my existing public social profiles (netvibes, friendfeed, my lab profile, my wiki, or even this blog) as homepage. But:

• those public profiles are either too specific (representing only one of the facets of my identity) or too messy when too general (e.g. netvibes);
• my homepage is very well referenced on Google, so I’d better leverage that;
• …and I would like to manipulate some code!

So, let’s share some thoughts on what I’d like to make:

• The homepage must be nice looking on a computer and adapted for easy navigation on a mobile device => should I make a WAP version or use some generic HTML instead?
• I would like my page to be machine-understandable, by adding some semantics (RDFa, FOAF…)
• I want to be able to edit quickly and precisely (no WYSIWYG please!) the content of my homepage directly on the web.
• The content must be backed up on every change, so that I can revert a change, either accidental or malicious.
• I want the page to be lightweight and respectful of W3C standards.

Err.. this sounds like a neat semantic wiki, doesn’t it?

And now, some more precise ideas I’ve had:

• In order to have a self-contained homepage for all the facets of my identify, I’m thinking of a unique HTML file with fragment anchors for each facet (e.g. http://joly.adrien.free.fr/#music would only display the “music” part of my homepage). It would be nice to display a menu/tabs to switch from a facet to another, without having to load another page. The nice thing about this solution is that legacy web browsers (including MS Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile “smartphones”) that do not support modern javascript will still be able to render the full page and leverage anchors.
• I want to include some lifestreaming on the page. For that I could deploy Noserub to federate my feeds, or simply embed a friendfeed gadget. The possibility for visitors to comment lifestream entries directly on my homepage (incl. through Facebook/Google friend connect) is a plus.
• EditArea seems like a great way to make my page editable online.
• Concerning the semantics, I see two possibilities: the simple one is to embed some RDFa and/or microformats directly in the HTML code and to have a separate FOAF file that I would have to maintain separately; the geeky solution is to store the content of my homepage (mostly links, anyway) in a FOAF file (in RDF) and to render it as HTML pages using stylesheet-based transformations (e.g. XSLT). As a geek I obviously prefer the second option! However it is also a quite heavy solution, and I’m not sure that its complexity is worth the result, and it might not comply with all the requirements I expressed above…

Do you have any thoughts to share on this?

Intending to share my current works on my PhD thesis, I’m regularly twitting my advances and issues using the #mythesis hashtag. Feel free to follow this feed, and to react to updates, if you’re interested!

On this blog post, Ori introduces current works of the MIT on augmented reality. Instead of having to wear goggles, the originality of their approach is to project the display directly on walls, hands or objects. Check out this video:

Dans un souci de transparence et de sollicitation d’idées, je viens de partager mon sujet de thèse sur mon wiki. Vous pouvez y accéder à l’adresse suivante: http://adrienjoly.pbwiki.com/ThesisSubject

Formulation fonctionnelle :
« Exploitation du contexte des utilisateurs pour faciliter leur interaction sur leurs sites de réseaux sociaux »

Formulation scientifique :
« Filtrage intelligent des interactions sociales basées sur le contexte »

Contribution principale : Moteur de filtrage en charge de :

• Sélectionner et diffuser des informations du contexte d’un utilisateur qui pourraient être valorisées sur son réseau social (en provocant de la communication)
• Filtrer et agréger les interactions du réseau social de cet utilisateur de manière à donner un ressenti de son état actuel, de manière plus ou moins pertinente par rapport au contexte actuel de cet utilisateur, en fonction de la granularité d’information souhaitée.

Bonjour à tous,

Comme vous le savez, utiliser le même mot de passe sur plusieurs sites c’est pratique mais aussi extrêmement risqué dans des cas comme celui de monster.fr.

Pour éviter d’avoir à retenir un mot de passe par site, je vous propose deux solutions viables (j’utilise les deux couramment après y avoir murement réfléchi):

1) imaginez (et retenez) votre propre algorithme permettant de générer un mot de passe unique à partir d’un motif commun et d’éléments qui sont caractéristiques du site. Par exemple: 123[p]coco[n]! Où [p] est la première lettre du nom de domaine du site et [n] le nombre de lettres du nom de domaine. => une fois l’algo retenu, il est facile de retrouver le mot de passe de chaque site

2) utilisez un bookmarklet pour générer un mot de passe unique pour chaque site à partir d’une clé maitre (mot de passe principal, éventuellement commun à tous les sites). Le site supergenpass.com propose un tel bookmarklet en javascript qui fonctionne sous firefox et IE, ainsi que sur les mobiles, et vous pouvez même télécharger le code source. L’avantage d’un tel système est que vos mots de passes seront vraiment uniques (hash) et que leur saisie sur les sites est presque automatique grâce au principe du bookmarklet.

Dans tous les cas, libres à vous (et je vous le recommande) de stocker tous vos mots de passe dans une base cryptée, au cas où vous auriez oublié votre algo perso, où un nom de domaine aurait changé, ou si le bookmarklet ne fonctionne pas. Pour ça je vous recommande KeePass, un logiciel libre qui a été porté sous Windows, Linux, J2ME, Windows mobile et plein d’autres plateformes. Ce qui garantit que vous pourrez retrouver vos mots de passe en toutes circonstances (sur la machine d’un ami, sur le pc verrouillé d’un cybercafé…)

PS: un dernier conseil pour éviter qu’on recoupe vos comptes sur plusieurs sites: utilisez une adresse email différente sur chaque site. Non, ce n’est pas une blague. Sachez par exemple qu’avec gmail il est possible de suffixer son nom avec un complément (ex: ajoly+monster@gmail.com renverra le courrier sur ajoly@gmail.com). Sinon, certains sites (comme endjunk.com) permettent de créer des adresses email de redirection à la volée (ex: monster@ajoly.endjunk.com). De cette manière il est aussi très facile de voir quel site vous envoie du spam

Sortez couverts!

Some monday morning fun for programmers who are still note on holidays

If programming languages were religions…

A colleague has just informed me that googling “Bell Labs France” (which is a shortcut to our newly subsidiarized French research group “Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France”) gives my viadeo profile as first result!

Along with the funny fact that I’ve been working here for just 1 year, isn’t it weird that there has been no press coverage about this new subsidiary?

I’ve just watched an amazing video about the advances on brain signals analysis (Brain Power Video - CBSNews.com). Current research allow paralized people to communicate and control wheelchair movements by their thought! Monkeys can control a mechanical arm thanks to implants directly connected to the neurons of their brain! This looks like science fiction!

Watch CBS Videos Online

Sixteen Great Twitter Moments are shared on a Mashable blog post. These interesting communication scenarii would not have existed without twitter!

Nao is (apparently) the first French android to be sold for the mainstream market. It’s a cute little robot that can listen and talk to you, danse, tell stories and read your email from the internet using wifi. Is this the next nabaztag?

Présentation de Nao par newzy.fr

Alice is a free software to create simple programs in a 3D
virtual world, thanks to the assisted drag-and-drop-based programming language. You can drop 3D objects and avatars to the scene, visualize their methods in real-time and add parametered calls to these methods to your script. I think this is a good way to learn computing science.

A good (and concise) read for those who still think twitter is yet another chat protocol:

Twitter is like a blog except is it is only 140 characters
Twitter is a status update except it is viewable in lots of places
Twitter is like a giant chat room except you choose the people you follow
Twitter is like instant messaging except it’s public & archived online

(source: What is Twitter Like? « The Stratius Blog)

I just watched the teaser video of a new website called Paggr, and I must say that it looks exciting to me!

Paggr is a platform that allow users to create pages on which they add widgets, similarly to iGoogle or netvibes. The differences are that:

• the widgets can gather data from semantic web services using the SPARQL language, and these widgets can thus be created directly on the platform
• (semantic) data can be dragged & dropped from a widget to another, allowing a seemless mashup-enabled navigation between them.

I’m looking forward to get an invite for this platform in order to play with it!

Salut à tous,

Je voulais partager avec vous une trouvaille d’hier soir: PeopleJar.

Et oui, encore un réseau social! Sauf que celui-ci a retenu mon attention pour deux choses:
1) la vidéo de présentation est excellente
2) leur système de communautés est innovant: chaque communauté permet d’enrichir le profile utilisateur avec des champs spécifiques, et ces champs peuvent être ajoutés par leurs membres. par exemple, si je rentre dans la communauté des batteurs, on me demande mon nombre d’années de pratique, les styles que je joue… et seulement si je rentre dans la communauté dating, on me demande mes préférences sexuelles. ces champs permettent donc de faire des recherches de profiles assez précises, ce qui est pratique lorsque qu’un groupe cherche un batteur unijambiste sachant jouer la salsa sans baguettes par exemple!

http://peoplejar.com/welcome
Cliquez sur “watch our video” et enjoy!

Et si vous avez encore faim de réseau social, n’essayez pas idntiti.com qui est une vraie purge… (pour l’instant?)

A+

These portable wireless speakers seem great for playing your music on holidays!

Haut parleur de bureau bluetooth avec confcall

I add them to my wish-list!

Dropbox file sharing/synchronization service has just opened to public.

For those who don’t know it, Dropbox is an online file storage service that comes with multiplaform software to synchronize chosen local files with the remote service. Wondering about what’s so special about Dropbox? Have a look at these cool features:

• a file can be copied from your desktop to the remote storage service without going to their site.
• dropboxed local files are appended a small icon to show their status on the remote storage site: green if the versions are up to date, blue if modifications are to be downloaded/uploaded.
• modifications are tracked on the service, giving the possibility to revert to a previous version of a file, or to restore a deleted file.
• files and folders can be shared, so that they are synchronized at all places
• you can create “photo” folders that will be shown as a nice photo album from the web.

I’m going to give it a try right away! I invite you to have a look at the quick screencast on their homepage: http://www.getdropbox.com

Google is working on their own open source web browser called Chrome. In order to introduce their vision, they published a very well designed comic book that illustrates the architecture and features of Google Chrome. It is a bit long (30 pages), but entertaining and very interresting to developers (some technical terms and concepts are included). I recommend this reading and I’m looking forward to try this browser!

Have you ever head of freebase? It’s a semantic alternative to the well-known wikipedia.

What are the benefits of a “semantic alternative”? The possibilities of exploration and combination of information are just amazing! For example, this video of Freebase Parallax shows how to list the schools in which republican U.S. presidents have put their children in a few seconds!

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

When freebase will be as rich as wikipedia (in terms of content), we will never want to use google or wikipedia again!

I’ve just found on Twine a video of a very interresting presentation at Google TechTalks, May 30, 2006, by Dr. Douglas Lenat, the President and CEO of Cycorp.

In this presentation, Dr. Lenat shows to googlers how the OpenCyc ontology make computers able to compute answers to simple questions that Google cannot answer because it does not understand their meaning. It is a very good presentation of semantics, common sense AI with many clear examples and a very good speech. I recommend it to people who are curious about the semantic web, ontologies and stuff.

Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

I like the second video which shows how future mobile devices could leverage the semantic social web and context-awareness to find activities in a city. Check it out, it’s in HD!

Aurora (Part 2) on Vimeo

Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

I have just found a conference that seems interesting. Unfortunately, I cannot go there to discuss how to discuss science in the 21st century… (should we call that “meta-science”?!)

Science in the 21st Century

I want a smart watch like this one:

This concept was one of the finalists of the NextGen PC design competition endorsed by Microsoft.

Hopefully it vibrates instead of my phone when I’m receiving a call or a message, it tells me if one of my friends is around and it shows me walking directions on the move!

This 2-minute video from Moblin propose a vision of how we could communicate in the future with new generations of mobile devices and applications. Proposed by Moblin to advertise their open-source linux-based platform for mobile devices, it is an inspirational video that shows some use cases currently being researched in the domain of Ambient Intelligence.

Après idTGV, la SNCF va plus loin dans l’innovation en proposant “idNiGHT“, un concept de soirée dans les trains de nuit avec DJ, scène ouverte, jeux et magazines gratuits, café offert…

Voici une petite séléction perso de photos récupérée sur leur site, et prises par tilllate, un site qui diffuse des photos de soirées parisiennes.

Les 10 commandements:

A bord, magazines et jeux gratuits:

Petite partie de cartes arrosée en début de soirée:

Puis le DJ pose son son:

Certains préfèrent les soirées musicales plus intimistes:

On a du mal à croire que ça a lieu dans un train:

Ben pourtant si:

Tiens, le chaud lapin à choppé:

Beware the wild animals:

Forcément, quand les gens font la fête dans les wagons, seuls les bagages peuvent se reposer!

On vit une époque formidable ! Qui a encore envie de prendre l’avion ?

I’ve just found this quote while reviewing FOAF’s website, I love it !

“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”
Robert Benchley, Benchley’s Law of Distinction

Tout d’abord, bonne année à ceux qui liront ce billet!

J’entame donc cette nouvelle année avec un billet en français pour faire la promotion du JDE 2008, la Journée Entreprises-Doctorants qui aura lieu à l’ENS de Lyon le 7 février prochain. J’ai découvert cet évènement par hasard, mais j’en parle car c’est le genre d’évènement que j’attendais quand j’étais encore un étudiant à l’avenir incertain…

Bref, j’invite tout ceux qui — comme moi à l’époque — se demandent quels opportunités de recherche proposent les entreprises à se renseigner sur cet évènement ainsi que sur les bourses CIFRE (dont je bénéficie actuellement).

http://www.jed2008.fr/index.php

This question excites business people, researchers and web enthusiasts… What will Web3.0 be? Gurus say it’s gonna be a set of technologies allowing to get rid of the browser, to work semi-connectedly (sometimes off-line) or it’s gonna be the so-called Semantic Web that W3C have been dreaming about for years, or maybe it’s about moving from the keyboard/mouse/screen paradigm to new human-machine interfaces… I think everyone is being too specific, in my opinion.

Here is my vision of the Web evolution:

• Web1.0: sites that broadcast information to people
• Web2.0: services that allow people to contribute and exchange information
• Web3.0: platform that brings relevant and contextual information to every individual

If you read between the lines, you see different dimensions:

• the information flow: broadcasting -> exchange -> relevant delivery
• the platform: web sites -> services -> platform
• the social aspect: people look for information -> people exchange (blogs, social networks, tagging…) -> every person is informed (personalized and contextual aggregation)
• the relevance: company or service-based sites (brands, forums, chats…) -> convergence to topic-based sites that allow manipulation of information (widget, mashups, RSS feeds…) -> feed of personalized information based on the context of the user
• the technologies: HTML (server-based pages) -> AJAX (rich client interfaces) and RSS feeds (extracting information from websites) -> ??? (A.I., semantic technologies…)
• the interfaces: keyboard/mouse/screen -> support for more interfaces (webcams for video conferencing…) -> multimodal access (adapting to the context)
• the community spaces: forums/irc/chat/im -> social networks, metaverses (second life…) -> augmented reality?

Sorry for posting such a draft, that’s just a bunch of random thoughts I just felt I had to write down!

As you may know, I believe that the future of computing is through the use of Semantic Technologies in order to link knowledge (note the contrast with the words “data” or even “content”) in a way that is more natural for humans but also understandable for machines. Although many enthousiasts (including the W3C) try to push semantic standards to the public to follow the vision of Tim Berners-Lee (well know for having written the foundings of the Semantic Web in Weaving the Web), many detractors think that this vision is naive/idealistic and that it will thus never work. I believe that we are ready to Semanticize the Web, but it will take time and we should not expect the masses to do the hard work.

Concerning the Semantic Web, Mor dared to declare publicly that the “The Semantic Web is Dead“. On his article The Emerging-Semantics Web (”The Semantic Web is Dead”), he claims that, even with Web2.0 in which users annotate data and the use of microformats, we cannot expect the masses to generate Semantic data (or should I say knowledge). As I commented on his article, it’s true that nobody but geeks can write pure Semantic data (using RDF for example, and it would not be perfect anyway). But wouldn’t it be the responsability of the platforms (i.e. websites/webservices that allow users to feed their databases with user data) to enrich the user data with semantics? I explain this idea on Mor’s article, check it out.

On his article “Moving Towards the Semantic Web: Grassroots vs. Ivory Towers“, James Simmons shares a similar belief that Semantizing the Web must be done by developers on their publishing platforms, not by the masses using these platforms. In his explaination, he smartly introduces two categories of Semantic Web believers: “Grassroots” and “Ivory Towers”. The Ivory Towers (we’re mainly thinking of the W3C) make the Semantic Web by building its foundations in a top-down approach. They define standards to store, link, query and represent semantic data on the web but their vision of how the web should be is too idealistic for now, as they are on Tim Berners-Lee’s side. Whereas the Grassroots make the Web more Semantic, following a bottom-up approach. For example, they enrich state-of-art websites using smart tricks like microformats to embed metadata within XHTML pages.

Like James, I believe that the Semantic Web is starting to grow as developers build bridges between the current Web and semantic standards. According to the fact that most content of the web is stored using platforms like WordPress (for blogs), Joomla (for websites) or even Facebook (for social networking), this evolution could become exponential soon if the developers of these popular platforms integrate some semantics in them. It’s a long way to Tim Berners-Lee’s (and other Ivory Towers’) vision for sure, but we’ll get there progressively!

Bloc-notes électronique Asteco DigiMemo A402

Let me inaugurate my brand new “wish-list” blog tag with an interesting device that I found on another blog.

This cool thing is an electronic sheet that you can use to take notes digitally. It works exactly like a sheet of paper with a pen, but on this one you don’t waste paper nor ink, pages are saved on memory cards and can be copied to your computer!

L’association Avenir Climatique propose aux diplomés de l’enseignement supérieur de faire entendre leur opinion et leurs attentes de l’enseignement supérieur français en matière de sensibilisation aux enjeux énergétiques et climatiques.

Le rapport de cette enquête sera présenté à Jean-Louis Borloo, ministre de l’écologie, du développement et de l’aménagement durables.

Avenir Climatique - Enquête

It’s now become a common practice for blogs and web sites in general to provide RSS feeds that notify subscribers when new information is published (or any other update). That way, visitors don’t have to visit their favorites websites regularly (”PULL” fashion), instead they are notified (”PUSH” fashion) by their RSS feed aggregator as long as they subscribed to the corresponding feeds. That way, the aggregator watch for updates of visitor’s favorite websites, and the visitor only has to read the updates using the aggregator.

The problem is that some websites don’t have RSS feeds. Fortunately, there are a few services that will create that missing RSS feed for you by watching a web page regularly, thus notify you when updates occured.

On this page, I propose a quick review of the services I tried.

i’ve just decided to start using twitter, i couldn’t stand ignoring the buzz anymore! but now i’m facing a critical problem: i need friends to twit with!

“what the hell is twitter?”, i can hear you say… well, it’s between a very concise blog (with very short posts) and the status message of your msn/aim/gtalk (or any instant messaging). it’s a bit like myspace bulletins, actually. the idea is to write occasionally what you are up to, in order to let your friends know; and thus read what your friends are up to. it’s a good way to share instantly a particular state of mind, good/bad news, or updates about your life that may be important to your friends.

some examples? “got 2 invites for a concert tomorrow, anyone interrested?” ; “i’m leaving to paris in september” ; “i broke up with my gf” ; or even “damn, i just stepped on a dog shit”!

the cool thing is that you can receive your friends’ updates, and send your own updates on your cell phone by SMS, wherever your are. therefore you don’t need a computer nor an internet connection to keep in touch!

so, if you’re curious, if you care about keeping in touch with me, or if you’re a geek who already has a twitter but lacks friends (well, sounds like me!) => please join, i can invite you!

see you on twitter, or go to hell!

Don’t you realize that people don’t socialize much in the train anymore? Most people have their own personal entertainment means: they watch movies on their laptop, listen to their ipod, read books… But in the same time, many of them have a profile on myspace or any other social networking website in order to meet new people. Isn’t that a paradox?

In France, I’ve found two initiatives that extend the idea of social networking to train journeys. Idtgv&co is proposed by SNCF (the French railroad company), and Train d’Union is a free and independant alternative. In both of them, passengers are expected to create a personal and/or a professional profile, register the references of the trains they will be travelling on and meet other people sharing the same journeys online before they can eventually meet on the train.

While some people may think that it’s ridiculous to use a website for meeting people whereas you can talk sponteanously with the person next to you, I think the idea is great because you can make new interresting contacts instead of doing stuff on your own during long journeys.

Now, the next step is to be able to browse people’s profiles and exchange messages on line, during the train journey, like you would do on myspace, in order to meet them right away and make your journey much enjoyable.

I won’t teach you that spam is a major problem these days. As soon as your email address is found on a web page, it is potentially exposed to spammers that can extract it automatically from HTML pages using robots. For that reason, many people cloak their email address:

• by writing something like "john dot doe at gmail dot com" or even "john.doe(removethis)@gmail.com" in order to trick robots whereas humans can still understand the actual address.
• by replacing its textual form with an image. That way, unless the robots use OCR, the email address can’t be extracted automatically from web pages.

Both methods have a downside: visitors can’t click the email address to send an email immediately if the email address is not textually included in the HTML page (as a "mailto" anchor link). Here, I propose a workaround that allows visitors to see and click your email address without exposing it in textual form on your HTML page.

The trick is to cloak your clickable email address in a flash object. If you even too paranoid to leave your email address in textual form in the flash file (which is binary and compressed), you can even put an image instead (this won’t be explained here, though). We will use SWF Tools to create the flash a file from an image containing your email address.

Step 1: Create an image representing your email address

Use your favorite "paint" program (I use "paint.net") to write your email address, crop the canvas (mine is 164x18), then save the image to a file (use png if you want optimal quality). Note that you may want to make the background of your image transparent, this will be supported in the resulting flash file.

Step 2: Create a script to generate the flash file

This time, you’ll need to create a file with your favorite plain text editing program (like notepad). Write (or copy-paste if you’re lazy) the following source code in the file:

# Generate a flash file cloaking an email link
# Run using Swftools http://www.quiss.org/swftools/
.flash bbox=164x18 version=5  name="emaillink.swf" compress
  .png button_img "emailmini.png"
  .button email_button
    .show button_img as=idle
    .show button_img as=area
    .show button_img as=hover
    .show button_img as=pressed
    # ActionScript
    .on_press:
    getURL("mailto:myemail@address.com", "");
    .end
  .end
  .put email_button pin=center x=82 y=9
.end

Now we’re going to do some replacements for the parts written in red. 164x18 are the dimensions of the image you created on step 1, and emailmini.png is its filename. Write your email address in the getUrl function. Then replace x=82 y=9 with the central coordinates of your image (in my case x=(164/2)=82 and y=(18/2)=9).

Save your file as "emaillink.sc", in the same directory as the image you created in step 1. 

Step 3: Run the script using SWFTools

First, you may need to download SWFTools freely from http://www.SWFTools.org then install it. Then run "swfc.exe" with "emaillink.sc" as an argument. Whatever the way you do (command line or drag&drop), make sure that the image file you’re referencing in your script can be found in the current directory.

This will result in a "emaillink.swf" flash file in the current directory. You can test it by drag&dropping it to a web browser.

Step 4: Embed the flash file in your html page

Embedding your cloaked email link into your html page consists in writing the following code: 

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="emaillink.swf" width="164" height="18">
  <param name="movie" value="emaillink.swf" />
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
  <!–alternate content –>
  <img src="emaillink.png" alt="my e-mail address: myemail at address dot com"/>
</object> 

As for the script, you may need to replace some values here. emaillink.swf (appearing twice) is the name of your flash file, 164 and 18 are its dimensions. The img element defines an alternative, if the user’s environment is not able to display Flash content. If you want to keep it, you may need to put in the name of the image file you created on step 1 and a human-understandable textual representation of your email address (don’t write its normal form if you don’t want robots to extract it automatically by parsing your page).

Enjoy the result

This is how my cloaked email link looks:

If it doesn’t show as a Flash object, check it out on my homepage instead.

Back from the "forum CIFRE" that was happening in Paris on March, the 20th, I released the last version of my CV/résumé in three flavours:

• a short "french-fashioned" CV to introduce myself as a "Software Architect" (in French only)
• a complete CV including my research works in French
• and the same complete CV including my research works in English

I also updated my business networking profiles on Viadeo (formerly "Viaduc", now both in French and English), LinkedIn and Ryze.

Updates are indicated by a "post-it" icon followed by the update date written in red font. 

Check this out on my home page: http://joly.adrien.free.fr/ 

Hi,

Today I decided to keep track of the programs that I use. In order to make this list versionnable and shared, I’ve made that list as a publicly-visible Wiki page.

Feel free to consult it there:

adrienjoly.schtuff.com - FavoriteSoftware

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I made some changes to my homepage:

• added a presentation
• added little flags for english and french documents
• added link to RSS feed of this blog
• added a nice & clean background image

I have not had any feedback at all about my homepage so far, and your opinion does matter to me! So, please, feel free to tell me what you think about it by posting comments here or sending me an email!

Cheers! 

Facts: With the increasing popularity of the "web 2.0", internet users are invited to get involved with the content proposed on web sites by annotating, commenting, tagging… This way, information is reviewed and linked to other resources, helping people to learn and navigate in a more intuitious way - because these annotations are human.

BUT such annotations are found on specific websites, e.g. YouTube for videos, del.icio.us for bookmarks, Last.fm for music, and so on…

Challenge: What about bringing human annotations to another level by generalizing it to any kind of information and pushing it to the user when relevant, without expecting him to look for it on specialized websites?

Uses cases:

1. Reviewing resources and sharing opinions
2. Warning about resources: "content is not up-to-date" etc…
3. Linking to other human-relevant resources
4. Creating communities: meeting other visitors

• Yakalike, Chatsum and many other services intergrate your favorite browser to chat with other people visiting the same page as you. This is an interresting solution for all of the 4 proposed use cases, but there are some drawbacks:

• the lack of popularity (too few users installed the software) prevents the idea from taking off
• the identification of a "page" is based on its URL, which can be irrelevant (especially with web 2.0 apps?)
• this chat program, as a browser extension, may be too intrusive for permanent use: too much space is wasted, sometimes for nothing

• Blogger Web Comments is another browser extension which notifies the user (by a small icon) when the visited page is commented in blogs, allowing her/him to consult the relevant posts. This approach is less intrusive and relying on blogs, which are commonly used nowadays, but also has its drawbacks:

• this add-on only relies on blogs hosted by Blogger.com, limitation that is not acceptable since it would chunk the information for each blog host
• commenting on a page consists in posting in your blog, and this blog must be hosted by Blogger.com. is a small note worth a post on your blog?

• Del.icio.us and other bookmark sharing communities are services that invite users to submit their bookmarks on their account by tagging them. By sharing them with the community, we can evaluate the popularity of a website, discover new websites related with certain tags and read user reviews. We can also consult the people who tagged a bookmark to interact with them. This approach is very popular and interresting but:

• you have to go on the del.icio.us website in order to browse this information
• tags are not necessarly efficient: their are sometimes subjective (synonyms and interpretations) and culture-dependant (translations), this may result in improving ranking bookmarks which are trivial to tag and forgetting content which is not easily categorizable but valuable.
• like a few people, I like to keep my bookmarks stored locally too, and I don’t know about any possible synchronization between del.icio.us and Firefox. It would be hard anyway since browsers use hierarchical categorization while del.icio.us use tags.

I like the idea of chatting with people concerned with certain websites, when they could represent an interresting community, but I think that this concept should not be integrated in all cases. In the blog approach, I like the fact that the user can be notified if some annotations were identified about the website which is currently visited, this is less intrusive. Unfortunately, it also too specific because most interresting annotations are not worth a post on your personal blog. Nevertheless, del.icio.us, as a bookmark sharing service, is the perfect place to store these annotations. But the current service is sticking to its website too much, forcing users to look for information instead of the information being brought to her/him.

A perfect approach?

I think that annotations should be proposed to the user when browsing websites or consulting results of a search engine. In the case of the search engine, these annotations should have an influence on the ranking of the results, by the way. In the browsing side, an extension should connect to a service like del.icio.us to propose sticky notes, a link to an irc channel (chat), human-entered links to related resources and other ranked annotations about this page. The sticky notes and the proposed chat channel must be elected democratically by user vote, favorizing commonly agreed and concise information. The sticky notes would consist in objective information, like the current status of the the content: telling if it’s not up-to-date for example. Any other annotation would remain in a list in which users can rank them (like in Digg). Adding a bookmark would propose to the user to rank the annotation which best describes the content. Ideally, we’ll find a more efficient way than tags or hierarchies to classify bookmarks both locally in your browser and remotely on the bookmark sharing service on the internet.

This article explains how to synchonize your calendar between google calendar and pocket outlook on your pocketpc, using a free program called remotecalendars. This program is actually a plugin for MS Outlook 2003, and that’s too bad for me because I’m using MS Outlook 2000 which was offered with my pocketpc. I’m not gonna buy MS Outlook 2003, no way!!!

I hope some day it will become easier to synchronize our personal data between heterogeneous systems, but today it sucks!

If you know any technology that allows that, I’m interrested! 

How to Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and Smartphones Automatically

Here we go! Proximate is now distributed on the PocketPCFreeware preview website. If successful, it could be published on the main site which is much more popular!

PocketPCFreeware : Proximate 1.0 beta

An interresting post about two evolvements of taggings: hierarchichal and clustered tagging.

Hello World: Hierarchical Tags

Here we go! One of the most interresting study project I’ve done in Australia is now online! It’s a chat program on top of a peer-to-peer framework for Pocket PC. Check it out and tell me how you like it! BE CAREFULL though, it’s quite unstable!

Proximate, proximity peer-to-peer framework

Proximate is a framework/middleware that empowers proximity communication applications using peer-to-peer technology. Designed for mobile devices with wireless connectivity, this platform can host pluggable applications sharing the same network and user identification layers. It can be compared to MSN/Windows Live Messenger in the way it integrates diverse modules in a common environment, allowing people to communicate and interact.

The current (UNSTABLE) version allows to chat with online users around you, using your stylus either to type or scribble.

• Homepage
• Screenshots

(only french people are concerned)

Pétition pour exprimer son ras-le-bol concernant la qualité de connexion en zone non dégroupée chez Free.

freepetition

In France, up to now, we were very in advance with domestic Internet connections: many ISPs were providing very fast connection (up to 20 Mbps) with plenty of free services (phone-over-IP allowing unlimited free calls, TV access, wireless "boxes" with routing capabilities…) for a cheap price (30€/month in average). Unfortunately, the quality and usefulness of the actual internet connection is getting worse and worse now…

Many users complained about big problems with their ISP: Free. The new fashion for some French ISPs is to restrain the bandwidth for some internet services including newsgroups, bittorrent and other P2P sharing networks. Ok, let’s face it: most of these services are used in a illegal way, for the sake of sharing copyrighted content for free. Hence, we have to admit it’s a huge highway for domestic piracy. But unfortunately, these networks are also used for legal activities. Some websites (including Jamendo and ratiatum) use Bittorrent or eDonkey to distribute files, in order to avoid investing in expensive file servers. Free’s limitations prevent us from using these services now.

Last but not least, not only the peer-to-peer transit is restrained but also instant messaging services like MSN/Live Messenger, Google Talk and others!!! Sometimes it becomes unusable: some messages "disappear", making the conversation very awkward and misunderstandable, this is very very frustrating!!! And for this case, I see no reason at all!

The ironic thing is that, while they save bandwidth with such restrictions, they’re installing fiber cable in order to allow bandwidth up to 60Mbps! What’s the point if we can’t download anymore??

Interresting readings (in French): 

• Les FAI en guerre contre le cryptage de BitTorrent - PC INpact

• Forums FreeNews / déconnexion intempéstive de Widows Live Messenger

I just read that Microsoft is launching a new product: "SoapBox", a service that allows users to exchange videos. Yeah, like YouTube, Google Video and many others. Of course it’s "in beta", to follow the web2.0 hype invented by Google with its Google Mail. It’s a shame that everyone does the same thing, especially Microsoft.

You could think that it’s too late, Google Video and YouTube are having too much success already, but you would be wrong: even if Microsoft’s service is limited (only 100 MB of space for personnal videos while the others are unlimited) and private (you need to be invited, just for the hype "à la Gmail" I guess), they will take profit from its links with their so-called "MSN/Live Spaces" that are already integrated with the very popular Live Messenger!

I’m sorry to understand that we live in a world in which success is based on vertical expansion of services instead of basing on innovation. Damn, Microsoft could afford to create innovative services instead of simply copying other’s ideas, and being so late!!! Moreover, they dare to call them "Live Ideas", they’re not even theirs!! But you know, it’s so easy for them to package all their dumb shit with the so successful messenger so that everybody will use their services for the sake of integration, and hence simplicity…

Again, we can observe a "trust" problem: Microsoft do all they can to turn us into sheeps who use MS "Live" services with MS "Internet Explorer" browser on MS "Windows" operating system. You know, it’s so easy for users that way; why should they switch to something else?

As long as all these services are not fully interoperable, Microsoft will always win.

Thomas, I’m afraid you were not the first one who had the idea… of testing and reviewing toilets all around the world! It’s amazing how much we can learn with the Internet everyday!

Let me introduce three websites: 

1) Toilets of the world

This personal website is quite cultural. It shows pictures of toilets from all around the world: many different kinds of toilets! Some sample categories proposed on the site:

• Loos with views
• Benjamin Franklin’s Privy Pits
• High-tech toilets
• and many more!

This website is more informative: for many countries, it shows photos of many local toilets with a description, and the way to ask where to find them in the corresponding language!

3) National Public Toilet Map

More than a map, this Australian website features:

• the whole list of public toilets for each state of Australia
• find toilets by address, point of interest and even longitude-latitude!!! don’t forget your GPS device!
• toilet trip planner, to find your way to the toilets!

Scribbling on a PDA is slow and the tiny on-screen keyboard is not handy… TenGO found an innovative way of typing! Check it out!

http://free.tengo.net/ 

Ah! I’m not the only one thinking that our alarm clocks should take our sleep cycles in consideration! 

ShouldExist || Alarm clock which wakes you based on how long you’ve actually been asleep

Now that so many people have digital cameras, it’s sometimes frustrating not to be able to share pictures easily. One of the issues is the size of the pictures…

I’ve found a small program on the Internet that can resize your pictures automatically in one right-click! Then the quality is still good enough, but the size is drastically reduced! I’ve seen some pictures reduced from 2 MB to 200 KB without important quality loss!

Just go on this page and find the link to download "Image Resizer". Then you’ll just have to select your pictures, right-click, activate "image resizer", choose the final size (small, medium or large), click "OK" and the resized pictures are copied to the same folder!

I developed 2 python scripts to consult my gmail inbox off-line in my favorite email client (thunderbird):

• gmailretr.py downloads your inbox (or threads having the label of your choice) from your gmail account, using the libgmail API into a mbox file
• gmailboxpopd.py runs a POP3 server locally on which your favorite email client will connect to download your retrieved inbox (mbox file)

Use cases:

• you don’t have access to the internet, but someone else can bring your email back on a usb stick while keeping your privacy (emails are invisible, you don’t need to give your password)
• you have access to the internet for a short amount of time => you can download your emails online now and read them later while you’re offline.

In order to make it work, you need to be familiar with Python. You’ll also need to download and install the last version (tested from 0.1.3.3) of libgmail API.

 Download gmailbox version 0.9 (GPL)

I quite obsessed about organizing my files in a precise and clear directory structure. This also applies for my tunes. But the directory structure is a tree, and a file is physically contained by one directory at a time (unless you use links, this is a feature of NTFS that is hidden in Windows, btw).  For that reason, if you have a directory for each music genre, every song can only have ONE genre… Wouldn’t it be good to classify by "moods" instead of "genres", allowing a tune to be suitable for multiple moods?

After spending some time thinking about crazy ingenious solutions to make that possible (e.g. programming yet another music management program) , I finally realized that what I actually wanted to do was playlists! The only problem is that I want to "label my tunes with moods", like I do in Gmail; and editing a text file (i.e. the playlist) is not very convenient…

And guess what? The solution is both simple and elegant: use a music manager that allows playlist management by drag&drop!  I chose musikCube because it’s lightweight, efficient and free. I created a few "mood" playlists in the sidebar: fresh, sad, sunday morning, hardcore, and so on… Then I just drag&drop my tunes in the corresponding playlists. Finally, I can play any playlist after randomizing its order ("shuffle" can repeat some songs), according to my mood. Easy!  Moreover, a great feature of musikCube is to move or copy the files contained in a playlist to another directory, making it possible to go back to a good old directory tree structure, usefull if a friend of yours like your "sad" tunes collection for example.

Here is my first program contribution advertised on this blog.

One day I decided that I wouldn’t use MS Outlook any longer to manage my contacts. While it’s still convenient to have them always with you on your PocketPC, I also wanted to import my contacts into my Gmail account. But I couldn’t find a way to transfer them from my PPC to my PC…

I made that small c#.net program in order to export all the contacts stored on the PocketPC (using the native but invisible Pocket Outlook) into a CSV file, basing on a template (to define the fields to export).

Its usage is fairly simple: you install it on your PPC, copy the template.csv file in the root directory (after editing it if you like), then your run the program and wait for it to finish. There’s no UI at all, it’s script-like. The contacts will be exported in the contacts.csv file, in the root directory of your PPC. If you used the default template, you can directly import this resulting csv file into your Gmail account!

So far, the project is hosted by berlios under the Microsoft Shared Source license (since I’m using their POOM wrapper…).

Check that out: Pocket Outlook Export

Now it’s time to introduce myself a bit.

My name is Adrien Joly, I’m a French Masters student in Information Technology (or should I say Computer Science). Computing has been my passion since the age of 8, when my family bought a computer. I also like everything that is about technology. Because sometimes I love useless but techie stuff, I call my self a geek. But don’t worry too much though, I do have a (real) life besides, I see normal people, and can survive a few days (but not too many!) without touching a keyboard!

Ok, back to serious! I’m very into software design and mobile technologies (PocketPC, Wireless networks etc…). I’m currently doing a Masters research project at QUT, Brisbane, Australia. I’ve been doing an exchange program for my last year of studies at INSA de Lyon, France. My big concern at the moment is: What am I gonna do next?

I enjoy doing research because it’s a creative and cutting-edge job, so I’m considering doing a PhD. I can either stay in Brisbane with my current supervisor or go back to France for that, where all my family and friends are… On the other hand, I can easily find a job as a Software Architect and get well paid for that, but will that be interresting enough for me? Well, I’ll have to figure that out!

Besides I’ve been a drummer since the age of 8, and playing in bands since the age of 15. I love music (and especially performing it with a band) but that’s not the point of that blog (should it?).

Ok, that’s enough! If you want more details, check out my web page.

Hey there!

Yes, I guess what you could think at the moment: "Oh no, yet another blog"…  That’s fair enough, I would actually think the same in the first place, as many people create their "website", "space", "blog", or whatever just for the hype, without having anything interresting to share. Sharing interresting stuff is actually the point of this blog. Yeah, seriously!

Here is a list of the things I’d like to share with you on this blog:

• my experiences (tips & tricks) as a regular user, a developper, and a geek too
• my creations (programs & scripts), as they could be useful for other people
• and a bit of my life (personal), to share my experiences and opinions about things that matter for me, hoping that it could lead to some interresting discussions/debates

Ok, I’m finished with the traditionnal welcome post. I hope you’ll enjoy reading my blog sometimes and find some stuff interresting. I’d be more than happy to receive comments and any other kind of feedback in general, either negative or positive!

Have a good one!