Category Archives: General

What is cloud computing?

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Original author: AJ Ashton | License: CC Public Domain

What is?

For a short and quick answer, cloud computing is moving your computer experience from your desktop to the internet (the cloud!).

From the consumer of computing services perspective, it means having those services accessible from the internet:

  • Online application (e.g. Google Mail, Google Docs, etc.) ;
  • Online storage (e.g. S3Fox + Amazon S3, Flickr, Apple MobileMe, etc.) ;
  • Online services (e.g. Google Maps, Airline reservation, etc.).

From an IT person or software developer perspective, it means that you deploy your application on a (potential virtual) infrastructure or platform on the internet:

  • Virtual infrastructure or grid (e.g. Sun Grid, Amazon EC2, though both have their own specificities) ;
  • Platform (e.g. Google Apps Engine) ;
  • Identity verification, storage, payments, etc.

Re: Why I love Windows 7, hate Linux, and think the Mac is lame

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Source: ZDNet.com | IT Project Failures

The article on ZDNet is about why Michael Krigsman (CEO of a IT consulting company) loves Windows 7, hates Linux and thinks the Mac is lame. The article is pretty short and gives 3 reasons to be satisfied by Windows 7, by presenting an old screenshot of Linux to present it in a miserable way and displaying a fake version of Apple Mac vs. PC advertisement. All a good laugh if it was not serious.

After reading Michael’s post, I cannot help but remember this: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

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On the road again

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Happy travelling in Christchurch, NZ

Happy travelling in Christchurch, NZ

One month ago, we were back from our trip around the world. That was an amasing experience, it is so much a different way of travelling and getting to know other cultures! You may have read all about our experience along our way or seen our photographs from so many countries: Russia, Mongolia, China, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar (Burma), Sydney, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Easter Island, and the northern Chile and Argentina.

And we did not get it enough from it! There are still so many places that we want to see, so many things to experience. So we decided to go again on the road.

Not too long, not too many countries this time, and changing of means of transport. Our next adventure will be in Patagonia (southern tip of South America, a region that encompass Chile and Argentina) on our own bicycle.

We will be touring Patagonia for a little less than 3 months with the up and down of the road, weather and our physical and mental strengths. But we anticipate it as a great and rewarding journey.

As with our world trip, we will try along the road to write some of our feelings and experiences on our blog, a dedicated section will open soon. And if the internet connections are not too bad, we will even add new photographs!

There is a whole magical world there, and we are going to explore it!

A thousand miles journey starts with a single step (Lao Tseu)

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Hello World, we are coming…That’s it! In a few days my partner and I will do the first step of a long journey around the World. We are going to travel for a whole year, spend time together, enjoy life, people, cultures, landscapes and food together. This World seems so beautiful and magical, that it feels natural to just let’s go exploring it!

As we are going to enjoy the real life, my virtual me is going to hibernate. This blog will no longer be updated for the coming year and maybe even more. As a temporary measure, I will close commenting just before our departure, which is scheduled on the 1st of August 2007. Closing commenting is just momentarily to avoid this blog being flooded by unsolicited commercial message during the coming 365 days.

I never yet talk much about my interest in bande dessinée (a special form of comics) or comics. Though, I definitely prefer the first ones, I am fond of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip by Bill Watterson. I find this strip so refreshing and funny, if you do not know it, give it a try at your local library or bookshop! Fans of Watterson’s work may have noticed a small plagiarism I used earlier. To give credits to whom it deserves, here is the small strip that inspired us our travel blog name (magical-world.eu) and my previous sentence:

“It’s a Magical World (…) let’s go exploring!”

Credits: Bill Watterson

Re: The Indulgences of Open Source

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In reply from The Indulgences of Open Source (by Jonathan Cogley).

Jonathan, the author of the above linked post, is talking about free software projects and their relation with the understanding of “customers“. To illustrate his writing, he provides two examples of free projects: DokuWiki and AWStats.

Before I go in deeper analysis, let’s talk semantic. I am not an English native speaker, but I figure that English might be close enough to French so I do not make a misunderstanding. A customer is the person that buys or receives a product, it might not be the “end-user”, the one who is actually using the product. Knowing the philosophy behind free software, I also feel uneasy to call an end-user a customer when they go and download the project. Free software give the end-user the same rights and freedom as the producer, he can therefore be an actor and/or contributor of the project. Something not possible in the traditional producer and customer view.

Products and customers are bound to the commercial world, whilst projects and users belong to the free world.

Now, Let’s analyse Jonathan’s train of thought on each subject separately.

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A typical day – Une journée type

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If you want to know what is a typical work days for a hobbyist software developer, there is a nice comic strip about a Cartoonist’s day (French only). Simply replace cartoonist by developer ;-)

Envie de connaître la vie d’un développeur de logiciel amateur ? Boulet nous a concocté une planche de BD sur une journée type d’un dessinateur. Il faut avouer que la ressemblance avec celle d’un développeur est frappante.

Count out! Simple game can provide fun too

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I stumble yesterday upon a funny, not complex little game that resemble pretty much mine sweeper. :-)

It is a flash animation, so this has nothing to do with free software. But it is just fun to play. It is much like mine sweeper but with numbers. A number indicates how much golden tile there are adjacent to it. This make it pretty simple when the number is 0 or 4, or even 3 next to a border or 2 at a corner.

Easy but fun . :(|) Ideal to relax 2 minutes.

The Wow had already started

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It is not my intention to transform this blog into a video one. But I will from time to time add one that I found of interest.

Today is an alternative wow that I want to say. I have installed a 3D desktop on my computer last autumn and found it fun, I also found out how crap was my built-in laptop video card… sigh!

Anyway, today I was watching a recent video of such 3D desktop, and wow! They have evolved really fast. The video is a bit long at the beginning, but it is worth it. I like the dock at the bottom of the screen (kiba dock). Of course, the operating system is Linux.

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Linux distributions trends

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Google trends - Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat based, Debian, SUSE based) and Windows Vista

I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.

You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.

At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.

So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.

To conclude, you could check this other trend comparison between various version of Ubuntu, interesting…

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Definitively two different styles

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Video MIME Type by TangoRecently San Francisco was the location of the Macworld 2007 event. Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO, performed a remarkable keynote and presented the iPhone, which is buzzing all around the internet now.

Even though, that’s only a few month that we got our first Macintosh computer, I fell in love with the look and the use of those devices long before when once – around 15 years ago – there was one of those machines for a few days at home (my father brought it to work on it a couple of days). Since then, I long for having one.

Fifteen years ago PC (DOS+Windows) based computers were clearly ugly. From the hardware design to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), PCs were no comparison to Apple Macintosh and their Operating System (OS). Nowadays, the look of PC (Windows XP or Vista) is clearly improved, both hardware and software. But oddly enough and for my own taste, I consider Apple design still more recherché (sought-after).

The funny part of all this, and which is what triggered this post, is the difference in keynotes from both Microsoft and Apple. Get the full article to know more…

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