Posted in : Watch

Articles part of my technology watch.

The toilets mishap

The lost dream of the automatic city

I spent Christmas eve at Notre Dame de Paris, the big cathedral of Paris that you might know of. There were so many people, I’d say around 50,000 people coming and going, queuing and praying inside. It was like “the big show”.

I came with my parents but since they had arrived earlier they could actually attend mass from inside while I had to view everything through a big screen outside sitting in the cold on arranged benches. It was nice to observe all those people – mostly tourists – sitting there and queuing in the cold. I was sitting with my brother, another professional geek, and we couldn’t help noticing how people around us would share their activity online. We spotted 3 sharing patterns : facebook, twitter and foursquare. (Un)strangely, I suspect all the people that we spotted sharing to be Americans (I heard them speak). I visualize well their post “Celebrating Xmas @NotreDame in Paris, OMG so beautiful!” 🙂 I never post my activity online on the fly, ne-ver, I never know what to write. I prefer the elaborated blog article that I can re-read later. Each to their own sharing habit 🙂 I will not say that it was “OMG so beautiful” though, but listening to the choirs was indeed quite pleasant in spite of the cold.

Notre Dame

The saint songs, the Christmas lights, the festive atmosphere, what on earth does it all have to do with toilets ?!

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Books vs Internet: Why I choose a book instead of a blog

So I now have the habit of looking for the things I need on the web. Whether I need a recipe or a tutorial, the Internet is my friend and helps me well to find what I need. However, recently I wanted to get some more information about the painter René Magritte whose paintings really attracted my attention but strangely the Internet didn’t help as I hoped.

Background Story

Le fils de l’homme, Magritte

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What kind of machines should not freeze

Today I went to the gym for a change because I have to use my 5 coupons before next week. But I don’t like staying there too long, usually I stay for maximum 30mn. Beyond 30mn I go existential and I think oh man I’m walking towards nowhere, on a machine that doesn’t move, what am I doing ???. So as usual I wanted to make it quick. Usual program : fast walk, and very high slope.

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How to play a video when there is no play button

Is ui tested on rats and monkeys first, or just on geeks?

I come back from a lipdub session where we wanted to make a fun video in front of the Eiffel Tower for my friend, the bride to be. I was filming the movie so I got to interact with the camera, it was my friend’s camera. First take : the actors played their part. It seemed great. Then we wanted to view the video to confirm, that’s when our real mission started : play the video. Impossible.

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Nursing machines : engineers really have it easy

Saturday I made an interesting encounter, I met a nurse. We met at a bachelor party I organized for a very good friend. It was an adventurous race through Paris where I had designed some cool and fun actions to complete for my friend (nothing to do with dirty bachelor parties, it was in the afternoon !!!). So that’s in between actions that I got to talk with the nurse.

But where are the engineers ?!!

While we were racing in the street, she told me she was glad because for once she didn’t have to work on Saturday. “Really ?!!”, I naively said. Then she went on and introduced her job. She explained it and described all the stress she had to go through. I was kind of shocked by what she shared with me. She said that the patients were plugged to a pumping machine that was used to pump their blood, and often this machine would break down and SHE had to fix it as quickly as possible. Her words were “when that happens I need to fix it and nobody knows how to fix it, I mean I’m not an engineer, but I do have to fix the machine, so sometimes I just fix it by intuition thanks to previous experiences, sometimes I just know what I should do, sometimes I don’t and the engineers are not there”. My immediate reaction was “but where are the engineers???!”, “No idea”, she said. Incredible.

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My first coding dojo

This morning our coding best practice guru made us do our first coding dojo. I had no idea what that was, for me “dojo” vaguely referred to a javascript library. But actually, “dojo” is the Japanese word for the place where students practice their martial art. So by extent a coding dojo is a coding exercise where devs practice their code. Aha!

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Posted in Discoveries, Devsworld

Tagged , ,

Taxed in 3 clicks or the universal money extraction

3 clicks. That’s all it took me to declare my income to the French government so I can be taxed later. Sweet. Regarding the taxes, it seems the government deployed the technical swat team to extract the money out of the citizens. Every year they get better and better. This year, you could even declare your income from your smartphone by flashing a QR code both on Android and iPhone. Also you have the option to get their mail delivered only electronically, no paper anymore. The webapp is as fast as a high level app. Really, I give them 20/20.

Remember though, the Internet voting or the anti-democratic catastrophe ? Now I see where exactly the priorities are. They don’t ask me to install a JVM before they can tax me. Poor voting team, they must be really jealous when they see the tax team working with iMacs and iPhones when they only get to work on Windows 2000.

Well, well, still very good, high five to the tax team.

A relic from the past that makes you gasp and marvel at the present

Evolution of the role of software engineer

Guess !

Quiz question : do you know what that is ?

If you were not a software geek during the 70’s, you probably have no idea. As a tip though, you should know that this represents in fact a one line machine instruction. So, have you guessed? No idea? Well, in that case, I’m very happy to introduce you to the punched card ! Ok, as a highly cultured reader you probably knew, but in my case I had no idea until I discovered it during my blogging coma. It’s a big discovery ! When you know what I discovered you’ll gasp and marvel.

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Movie review : 127 hours

Technology as a life recorder

127 hours

127 hours

Waouh, I love that movie. Super intense. The movie is excellent on so many levels. For me the morale I retained is that true independence is tough. You can try to live as independently as you want but in the end you will always need and miss the help of others. We are humans living among humans.

Social media?

The story is a true story about Aron Ralston who got stuck in an accident in the middle of a canyon. He knew no one was looking for him because he didn’t notify anyone of where he was going. The story is set in 2003. In other words, when the “social media” were not as popular as today. Do you think it would be different today? I mean, if this would happen today, would he notify people of where he was going on his facebook for example or, maybe check into Places or something like that?

Smartphones?

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Posted in Inspiration, Movies

Tagged

Please format me

Facebook is building a library of people

I’ve read about the new Facebook Timeline feature today. It’s a feature that lets you see your data organized in a timeline in your profile. It looks like this:

Facebook new Timeline feature

Like anything they do, it left a bitter taste on my mind. I already understood why people use this, but I still get rather sad thinking that humanity is willingly formatting itself into that stuff.

The web is a recording device

The web is a recording device, it means that whatever you put there, it’s going to be recorded and be a trail of you. Right now, thanks to the diversity of the sharing platforms available online (unfortunately still not diverse enough), you can have several trails, you can move your trails from there to there, you can delete your entire trail, you can decide of what is left of you online. With tools as popular as Facebook, that just offer you the interface, people tend to forget the innate freedom they have to broadcast from their own “antenna”, and they start formatting themselves into that single possibility of the Facebook profile, because it’s easy. They leave to Facebook the power to format, present and keep their data in a way that they can remember their life, but not in a way they chose to remember it. The format is fixed, inflexible, not customizable, you can just get stuck there without you even noticing. After allowing to list unborn children as family members, it’s clearer and clearer where Facebook is taking its crowd.

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