Logs
Ctrl-P-Print
Eddie Izzard's Encore on Computers - just for a 7' laugh… Orig: YouTube...
90 days
It's been almost 90 days since my last post. Whoosh. It's not like nothing happened, or that I haven't written anything, or felt, reflected, pondered or brainstormed. No. It's just that I haven't published anything. I have a number...
My 2 cents worth of iPhone tips for Switzerland
It's almost a month now that I've received my iPhone, and I thought it might be time to share a few tips related to its use in Switzerland where it still isn't officially available despite the rumours (Feb 29th,...
Serenity
Grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference. Come back later to read a tale of failing hardware and unwilling people. Currently playing...
Soulmate
A different reality. A state of mind. A new colour. A direct line. A stateless presence. A broader horizon. A free thinker. A cloudless sky. Now and here. soulmate (also soul•mate) noun a person ideally suited to another as...
23 Mar 2008 : self
frustration • life • mood
Just for you
These few lines are for a friend in need. This is one of thoses times when you feel something as been ripped out of you. Something so deep and vital, that you are left utterly stunned and empty. What...
Fractal raindrops
One story is told of how John W. Gates, John W. Drake, and John W. Lambert, another associate, were watching a heavy rainstorm come up. It was thundering and lightning terrifically. Gates stood in front of the window and...
21 Mar 2008 : daily
frustration • geneva • weather
Wet
I don't know about you, but here you are better off staying at home, snuggling up in front of a warm chimney (if you have one - wish I did), listening to the wind blowing and the rain falling...
Burned
It's a bright new day. I remember this day, nine years ago as if it were yesterday. Some events just burn into your memory cells forever. More than a turn in my life, it was an opening. An opening...
iPhoned 10 years after
Gee. I've just realised it will be 10 years this spring that I've owned a cellphone. Well, several would be more accurate. While my iPhone was being knocked about in a UPS van somewhere, I began to try and...
Snow today?
No snow here - yet but windy has hell. Felt like the tires of my bike were glued to the road. No iPhone either. Brr. Grr....
Thin line
Early rise again. Black coffee and code for breakfast. I should be use to these events by now, but there's always the dreaded hardware failure, or worse, software failure, that looms in the back of my mind as the...
Early ramblings
Up early today. Euphemism. Up in the middle of the night rather. 5:30am. Even the birds haven't started to sing yet. I hear the wind blowing. I feel can it. A warm sort of wind. Outside, I can only...
In sync
As March looms in once more with its load of festivities, rejoicing (and workload), Emma will turn 7 and Mathias 9 over the following couple of weeks. Birthday parties are being organised, birthday invitations designed and printed, wish-lists amended....
Feeling chirpy @16:43
Didn't get half of I wanted to do this week, but the spirits are high at the week-end's dawn. The sun is out, the air is almost warm. I'm working with the windows open. Everything has a warm goldy hue...
20 Feb 2008 : daily
frustration • geneva • mac • weather
10.5.2 freezes
When an update makes you feel sick. This is what the latest Mac OS 10.5.2 update makes me want to do. It is a sad world when you start to loose trust in what use to be a flawless...
18 Feb 2008 : thoughts
conference • geneva • lift • lift08
LIFT 2008 afterthoughts
Once again, here I am in a post-conference-blues mood after LIFT 2008 ended yesterday. As Laurent mentionned, in 2006 we had a conference, in 2007 an event, and in 2008 a community. It felt like that this time. At...
08 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • lift • lift08 • social
LIFT08 - Foresight and wrap up
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Friday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later and break it up ion separate posts. Some day. Maybe. - I slowed down on...
08 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • entreprise • lift08 • social • web
LIFT08 - Web and entreprises
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Friday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later and break it up ion separate posts. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. The purpose...
08 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • gaming • lift08 • social
LIFT08 - Gaming
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Friday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later and break it up ion separate posts. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. Robin Hunicke...
08 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • lift • lift08 • social
LIFT08 - New frontiers
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Friday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later and break it up ion separate posts. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. This track...
LIFT08 - A glimpse of Asia
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Thursday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. With LIFT going to Asia, we want to share...
LIFT08 - Stories
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Thursday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. This track is aimed at hearing the stories of...
07 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • lift • lift08 • social
LIFT08 - User experience
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Thursday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. Younghee Jung Anthropologist at Nokia Tokyo. Telecommunications have been...
07 Feb 2008 : notes
conference • lift • lift08 • social
LIFT08 - Online Environments
Warning: the following notes were live blogged on Thursday by session, so please forgive the typos and semantic errors, I'll brush it up later. Some day. Maybe. Watch the videos. Bruce Sterling The first I heard of Bruce Sterling...
LIFT 2008
Back to the LIFT conference for the first day of conferences. As last year, I dodn't manage to attend the workshops, or at least not in a serious fashion, but I'm here for the full two days of conferences...
Rainy Monday iMix
A whipped iMix of the tunes & vibes which kept me going on this cold and rainy February Monday morning. Just like that. ADD? Naahh…...
Earth Hour 2008
A couple a days ago, a tweet from my friend Madhava attracted my attention: I followed it and discovered the Earth Hour project. Last year, Australian WWF organized the original Earth Hour during which over 2.2 million residents of Sydney...
Days like this
Days when things just go wrong, haywire, off target, awry, out of order. Murphy is never far, add a pinch of procrastination and the day has come and gone. The Todos remain, the sun sets and it's time to...
.Mac calendar synchronisation problem in Leopard
I've been having synchronisation issues with .Mac services recently related to my iCal calendars. Usually, resetting the .Mac copy with a local copy from one of my computers solved the problem. But not this time. The SyncServer was generating...
Mon•day
This week will see my To Do list shrink down to 1 digit numbers…...
27 Jan 2008 : music
electronic • jazz • soul
Belleruche | Turnable Soul Music
Another smooth discovery I made while browsing Asa' "Listeners also bought" section of iTS. Belleruche is a well-crafted mix of bass & drums with a sensual, smoky, sexy female vocalist, together with funky guitar moments. Pure soulful jazz under...
Asa | Asa
Here's music to start your week with: Asa's (pronounce Asha which means eagle in Nigerian) self named debut album. An album full bright colours, heights and perspective. Rythms that callback long gone memories of Jamaican evenings, rythm & blues,...
Raspberry sky
Woke up to the most beautiful sky this morning. Shades of pink, orange, magenta all harmoniously gathered and delicately intermingled to wish us a raspberry week. Wish I had my Ricoh GRD. And apparently, I wasn't the only one to...
15 Oct 2007 : thoughts
backup • duplication • mac • notification • raid
Backup revisited
I've recently fine tuned my overall backup strategy and finally found a balance between efficiency, security and ease of use that suits me. As you may or may not know, I'm a paranoid sucker when it comes down to...
Wrapped up in Hamed Bouzzine's Moroccan tales
We spend an enchanting moment Saturday afternoon listening to Hamed Bouzzine wrap us up in his Moroccan tales. It was part of «Les Nuits du Maroc» festival (Oct 4-13th) organised by the Ateliers d'ethnomusicologie, and took place at the...
Trusting a Certificate with Keychain Access
This is by no means mission critical, but I have been plagued with a keychain certificate glitch ever since I migrated to my Mac Pro in August. Each time I opened Mail.app it warned me that the certificate for one...
04 Oct 2007 : thoughts
future • localisation • microformat • semantic • social • web
Thoughts on Web Strategy
Regularly, I get asked about the future of the web, or what is the next big thing?, what is all this Web 2.0 buzz? or I get called in to talk about web strategy in general or in particular. My...
KT Tunstall | Drastic Fantastic
Like many I suppose, I discovered KT Tunstall during her live session at the Apple Special Event on September 5th (Tip: scroll to 01:14:30 of the webcast to view her performance). I thought she gave a stunning performance in...
iPod Touch first impressions
My iPod Touch was delivered yesterday around 3pm, and I've been playing with it since. The iPhone hasn't reached Europe yet, and isn't announced in Switzerland at al for the moment, so it was my first contact with the...
28 Sep 2007 : daily
accessibility • apple • css • xhtml
Apple Store web standards savvy
This might be old news to some, but I was pleasantly surprised this morning to discover that the Apple Store had been redesigned to become a big step closer to web standard compliance and has improved its accessibility. Apple's...
21 Sep 2007 : daily
No tags
Bear with me
Please bear with me while I fool around with the markup and the css of this website. A revamp is on the way. Things might look weird, things might break, things might simply not show up. I know. It's...
Watch that trailing slash
The trailing slash on URLs referencing directories has always bugged me because it doesn't look good. I am a bit of a URL fetishist, I like URLs to be simple and clear and without a trailing slash. But that...
Embracing iTunes Plus, or from LPs to MP4a, or some 32 years of music
Apple launched their DRM free music (256kbps AAC) last Tuesday by creating a new entity of the iTunes Store called iTunes Plus. All of EMI's catalog was to be offered in DRM free form sometime in May, and user...
Spaces matter in IE 7's conditional statements
This might not be news for you, but it came as a surprise to me when I recently tested a website under Internet Explorer 7 and discovered that nothing showed up, although it displayed normally under IE 6. The...
Hot in Geneva
I love it and not thinking about Monday....
A bird's eye view
There are times when I get a glipmse of my broader me in the big picture. Not the big picture of course, but a wider perspective from a few steps back, something a little bit more global. In time and...
11 May 2007 : daily
microformat • social • twitter
Twitter cleanup
Spent the last 10 minutes cleaning up my Twitter follower's list. Twitter has just introduced a new feature called "block": We've introduced a new feature lots of folks requested called "block." Blocking someone means that you (and your pic) will...
Sunny at seven
The sun is shining at seven o'clock. Temperatures are rising again. Public outdoor swimming pools open after tomorrow. At lunchtime I'll only have another three lectures to give before the summer break. It's going to be a full day....
The clouds are back
Back blogging at the Mouton Noir. It was blue in the west and grey in the east when I left home this morning. Seasonal weather seems to have caught up with us this last week. Temperatures have dropped, it...
01 May 2007 : self
carouge • flood • frustration • geneva • raid • self • water • weather
Damp and powerless
1st of May 8:00a. The sun is still shy, but shines through a blue water washed sky with the last yesterday's scattered clouds running away. I'm writing this post from the Mouton Noir with 12 wireless access points around...
09 Apr 2007 : thoughts
apache • design • howto • mod_rewrite • movabletype
Use Apache's mod_rewrite for beautiful MovableType URLs
If you are an URL fetishist like me, you certainly have been bugged by the fact that MovableType's installation URL kicks in when you need to use MovableType's search function. Eventhough MovableType can host multiple weblogs each with their...
Airport Disk hangs logout if not unmounted
I've setup my brand new Airport Extreme base station with success about ten days ago, and was excited to test out the new Airport Disk feature. I intended to transfer my iTunes library onto an external disk, and share...
Winter hits back with a revenge
With Spring less than two days away, Winter hits back with a revenge (• • • • •)...
Safari UTF-8 rendering glitch fixed in WebKit nightly build
Safari v2.0.4 (419.3) and previous versions have this annoying habit of not displaying utf-8 encoded characters properly under certain conditions: If you use the css 'content' property to display an utf-8 encoded string, it won't be properly rendered in...
MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo WEP problems fixed?
Apple released an Airport Update 2007-002 that fixes connection problems that were nagging MacBook and MacBook Pro users ever since the release of the MacBook Pro C2D. Contrary to the previous one released earlier this year. This update also...
On hardware failures
There are days when the hardware lets you down. I've noticed a significant increase in the frequency of hardware failures these last years, part of them related to quality control (see below). More personally, I've been experiencing a hardware...
05 Mar 2007 : daily
french • l10n • language • localisation • social • switzerland
Swiss french speak French
Why can't web app developers embrace the idea that language should be assigned as an array and not a single variable to a country? Switzerland has 4 official languages plus English. Defaulting to German is plain shortsighted. I learned...
Turned six
Emma turned 6 on Saturday. The events and their build up, that took place almost 2'200 days ago are still cristal clear. It was a Saturday when we shifted from a couple with a child to a family of...
Bloc Party | A Weekend in the City
I discovered Bloc Party's first album Silent Alarm back in April 2005 while spending a weekend in Berne at Laurent's house. I still remember my surprise and amazement at hearing that spiky guitar rock and Kele's voice that recalled...
26 Feb 2007 : daily
heathrowexpress • london • wardriving • wifi
Wardriving in the Heathrow Express
On our way home from FoWA London 2007, I connected to the internet at Paddington waiting for the train to leave. I kept iStumbler open as we left the station expecting to see the number of access points fade as...
22 Feb 2007 : thoughts
conference • design • fowalondon07 • london • social • wifi
After FoWA London 2007
Heathrow Airport, gate 19, waiting to board the plane back to Geneva with Mathias and Enrique. The Future of Web Apps 2007 conference wrapped up yesterday for us as we didn't attend today's workshops. I'm flying back with mixed...
Ayo | Joyful
I discovered Ayo (Joy in Yoruba) quite by chance just before leaving for Leysin last week. I was following a trail of "you bought this - see what others bought" on the iTS when I fell on Ayo's first...
Sunny melting hot in Leysin
Waow. The snow will definitively melt today.....
Unplugged in Leysin
Leysin. Just past 10pm, we're back from a lovely diner in the Fromagerie and we're all in bed, the kids having finally surrendered to a long day worth of excitement. I'm still fiddeling with my wifi connection, attempting to...
Carla Bruni | No Promises
We waited two years for Carla Bruni's second album, and here it is at last. First impression is that it is short - 35" minutes max. - and entirely in English this time. The texts are old American and...
Multiple iTunes librairies
I've been playing around with iTunes 7 multiple librairies function, and I must admit it works as advertised. I've been looking for a solution that enables me to share a library among multiple Macs, along with its copy protected...
My short Lift 2007
The Lift Conference 2007 is wrapping up while I write these lines. I didn't manage to attend it as I initially planned to. I was going to spend Thursday and Friday following the conferences and socialising. The reality turned...
Your latest t-shirt
Do you buy t-shirts on internet?. I do. Essentially geeky and crypted branded one (gibberish for some). My latest acquisitions are from A List Apart and Insanely Great Tees. Good quality cotton, nice colours and nice prints. As a...
WWDC07
Whoosh, I received a Time Machine Leopard teaser styled invitation in my mail today. Now, what does that tell us on 10.5 UI? Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference will be help on June 11-15th, 2007 in San Francisco....
04 Feb 2007 : daily
hosting • howto • movabletype • software
Movable Type in the fast lane
One of Pronet's latest weblog posts entitled "Make Movable Type 15 times faster!" attracted my attention a few days ago, and I decided to give it a try over the weekend. It turns out that the latest version of...
Apple UK ads
The Get a Mac adverts are available on Apple's UK website with new actors. I find them funnier than the original ones. It must be that English dry humour touch.....
What is your notepad bag?
If you own a notepad (aka laptop) computer you care for, you probably own a well designed, strong and sturdy laptop bag, with all the appropriate protection your investment requires. I get the impression people aren't that worried about...
02 Feb 2007 : music
electronic • jazz
Nina Simone | Remixed and Reimagined
I've been listening to this album for the last couple of days, and I must admit that it was just what I needed. It's energy and soulful vibrations fill the space up. Remixing can be a daunting experience and...
Interarchy, old friend
I received Peter N. Lewis' last "Total Interarchy" issue today. He announces that Interarchy's lead developer Matthew Drayton has formed a new company, Nolobe Pty Ltd, and acquired Interarchy and that he is retiring from its development. As of...
Mint v2.0
Shaun Inman has just released Mint v2.0. A major update to what has become an invaluable website usage stats tool. UI aside, I noticed the following enhancements, full support for IE6+ including admin (lots of clients asked for this);...
Dingalingaling
I've just been given one of the funniest ringtone I've happen to hear since I own a mobile phone. Thanks Sergio. MP3 Flash Player courtesy of dewplayer. It come as an MP3 file (a little over 2Mb): 07_Radjiv_07.mp3. I have...
28 Jan 2007 : daily
dalai lama • mac • photography
Enlightened
His Holiness the Dalai Lama using a Mac. A happy picture picked this up on Digg....