Category: Me Myself&I

Google Android.

I have owned an HTC Hero for four months now. I’m looking around it as a user/customer but also as a developer/creator.

OHAI

The Good

As a phone experience, well it’s the best I’ve ever had with everything you like on smart phones these days: seeming less interaction with social media, useful apps and games. I’m kidding for the last, I don’t play on my phone. And I’ll talk about Android games in the bad I guess ^^ But the awesome good is: you are free. No motherfucking iTunes sync my ass ever. Never.

For the developer side, setting up the environment is easy and the SDK is well done in terms of readability. I for now didn’t see anything obscure or weird. I had never worked with Eclipse and Java before and well it’s not making me crazy yet, as I was expecting. Nice.

The Bad

Games usually suck on Android. Like really, thanks to Java The Big Butt. It might change though, with a JIT Compiler coming up. But more important is the fact that major apps like the Gmail one sucks hard. On a Google OS powered phone!  They really want us to launch a browser and go online where Gmail UI –on mobile web- is much better. Ha! Thanks but I’d rather have an app. Facebook does the same. Sorry but my browser on my phone is just to quickly check a link. On a 4” screen I don’t want 10 tabs.

Or the camera app, trackball to take a picture? Stupidest idea in the world (shaky pictures guaranteed). Also, there are some mysteries sometimes: I can’t find the Amazon app and install it on my phone, no matter where I go. Can’t find it on the Market on my phone, can’t have it with QR Code (no matches), tried in Paris, same here in LA, like this app doesn’t exist for my device. Frustrating even if hey, I was living without it last year just fine.

Also, but it applies to any app market, there’s some pretty bad written apps, would it be in terms of stability or UI. Hell, the Digg application is such a piece of shit. The Evernote one is weird and not intuitive at all etc

For the dev, I didn’t go deeply enough to say, except that I’m surprised how there’s not as much resource as I would think. Besides the traditional “Hello World” and a bunch of useful examples, well it seems like you have to try to do your stuff then. So it’s not really bad, just a little bit dry.

The Ugly

The Awful Market Fragmentation. This week an article went out about this subject.

The phone business is complicated: you have manufacturers, carriers and on top of that the Operating System, Android provided by Google. The OS is now reaching the 2.2 version next month. My phone is stuck at the 1.5 version because HTC the manufacturer, is too busy selling brand new phones updated with the 2.1 version. They said they would upgrade old phones –not phone carrier or Google job!- and they lie (update postponed two times) because they’ve never done/see that before: people were buying new phones. Now? With these little pocket computer sold at 300$ at least, people don’t want to change all the time anymore, not just for the price: we’re all setting stuff and don’t want to throw everything away and start over. But the hardware race is on, my phone is only available since 10 months and there are already some Android twice as fast with 4 times the memory embedded. They really want users to go crazy and buy the last “now seriously, it does everything super fast” device.

It’s getting worse in America Fuck Yeah, where there’s GSM and CDMA. GSM is the thing we all know with the SIM card and all, used by 3 billion people around the world. CDMA is mainly available in the US and they are of course totally incompatible (no sim card in it).

It is really annoying because it feels like a trap everywhere: even with an open source OS on a phone I bought without any contract from any carrier (which are giving full data access only on year contracts and not on prepaid cards), I am not free. Depressing.

[Dev side] The thing is my phone can totally run the last Android version as I tried with a custom ROM. There’s a parallel market where people would “cook” your phone OS bringing the last updates from Google (that’s why the Nexus One is nice: the only phone where you don’t have to wait for any manufacturers or phone carrier updates; direct from Google) and making people donate/pay for premium access and custom options. The 2.1 update brings a lot of little improvements for the user but a lot more for the dev. Therefore what version to target if you want to build an app?

For example my phone does multitouch. On Android 1.5 it’s not allowed to use it apparently, though some apps use it (Dolphin browser). On 1.5 I can’t pinch zoom Google Maps and on 2.1 I can. And it’s working perfectly.

Also, two app store? Why Google? Couldn’t it be easier if you had updated all phones to Android 1.6 and the new market for everybody? It’s not helping selling apps for sure and developers can’t live on free software all the time.

It was supposed to be simple guys, WTF? Contracts, patents and agreements between network and communication giants must be ridiculously insane behind the curtains. Add the never finished software development process on top of it, and you get a real mess.

It’s going to be very interesting with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 at the end of the year. The thing is Android has a really positive reputation amongst people, getting sick of Apple’s behavior. But the problem with open source always has been to support both users and developers (something MS is really good at; WordPress is a good example of a big scale successful open source business) and if Android’s support is basically “buy a new phone”, people will switch, even to walled garden. Remember the Vista mess when MS thought that every Windows user would upgrade their machines and vendors their drivers? Didn’t work out well. Windows 7 works from 2003 machines to now. More than 100 million licenses (which means at least 150 million computers running with it) sold in six months.

So dear Android Ecosystem, just a few words for you:

Don’t. Screw. The. Users. You. Already. Have. If you do, the’y’ll bury you into oblivion.

 
Yeah yeah yeah. Be my friend but don’t fuck with me buddy.

Food.

It seems to be in the top 3 discussion here in LA or maybe the entire US. Maybe top 2 actually.

Food is everywhere. On TV it’s purely insane, it’s a joke with my girlfriend: “get our Supreme Dunkin Deep Fried Chicken Burger PLUS two Beef Tacos and French Fries with unlimited dipping sauce only for nine ninety-nine!”. Sometimes it’s not far away from that and every 10 minutes. It creeps me out.

Calories is the unit. Everybody talks with calories and knows quite deeply about nutrients or how much calories you can have in the day.

I never knew or took care of that shit, ever. Just knew that sugar was not food, that eating vegetables can almost be unlimited and that water is all you need to drink.

I’m lucky of having grow up in France with healthy home cooking for all my early years, leading me to do the same. I’m lucky of being born in a country, Europe, where the food system is maybe a little less corrupted by financial expectations and more driven toward health of its people (seriously, the FDA is a sad joke).

I realize that chance by watching two absolutely must-see videos especially for you US people. First, why would we eat better? Well to feel better, for a longer time.

How to live to be 100+

What he’s saying about the heavy plant based diet and exercise, the Grandmother Effect or the father not wanting to pay to do pretty heavy stuff in the house and do it by himself like this old multimillionaire Californian man… Well this is almost exactly how I grew up. How my parents –for no particular reason except that they were not sure it would dramatically improve their lives- would not buy robots to do the cooking but use their arms to do all these kitchen tasks to make something to eat. 365 days a year. How they would work every weekend –and enroll me- in the garden, fixing things and never ever have a 8 hours couch/food/tv program. I would of course want to do that and eat more pies and more burgers but somehow, I would say to myself that if I’m never sick, always in good shape and feeling good then the family diet must probably have something to do with that.

But also I need to be active. I always want to do stuff, fix, create I really have a hard time sitting on a couch more than for the length of a movie. I felt that there’s a sweet spot of body activity where the food quality I absorb in reasonable quantity doesn’t really matter –it just needs to be diverse-, it can even be the worse fat ass burger ever. My body is working so well it detoxifies itself. The human body is an amazingly smart, self-cleaning machine, if used. Not for burning calories, which is a dumb version of saying that your body is a full system and needs in order to activate all its parts including protection against bad stuff, to run. When sitting on a chair, it’s idling.

The second video is talking about that and also, how sugar whatever it’s processed –HFCS– or not is a poison. And in large quantity in all the US food. I looked at a yogurt in the fridge. No HFCS, but 23 fucking grams of “sugars” in a 170g portion! It’s like 5 sugar cubes in half a mug of coffee man. It’s ridiculous.

Sugar: The Bitter Truth.

Have you ever tried not to eat any sugar at all? I did. It was the worst experience ever, but I learned something this day: I can’t live without it, even if my body doesn’t really process it.

I decided to stop any sugar a few years ago, from the morning cube in the coffee to yogurts to the chocolate at night just to see what it would be. It took me three days before feeling absolutely, terribly depressed like an old crap on the sidewalk. I wasn’t expecting that at all, I remember going back from the store, feeling sick looking at all these cookies and sugar things all around. I went back buying some Petit Ecolier half a hour later.

I couldn’t believe that it was MUCH harder to stop sugar than stop smoking. Like, it’s not even the same scale. You usually substitute smoking with eating candies. You have nothing to substitute for when you stop eating sugar and your brain goes crazy really fast for that. At least for me.

Anyway again in this video, Robert H. Lustig shows how no soft drinks is a must-have for any kid diet. Just water and milk. That’s how I lived and still do though I can add some wine now. But if people around the world were drinking as much soft drink than I do or my family does, there would be no soft drink companies at all. And that would be ok.

I think I’m even immune to it now. Every time I try some Coke my stomach doesn’t even want to speak to me. It just gets mad at me and it is right when I see the slides of the above conference.

*tractor beam*

Someone in my family grew up with daily Coke from 6 to 12. She had a belly. She stopped soft drinks for the same amount of time and moved much more. She lost it. It demanded a lot of efforts and it was hard.

So seeing how a Coke can
is the equivalent for your metabolism of a beer can –hence bellies-, I’m not surprised. But you can’t say that it shouldn’t be allowed for kids to parents giving their children soft drinks. I mean, if you want to stay friend with them.

And that’s sort of depressing. The importance of food and diet here in the US feels oppressing sometimes and more precisely, out of proportion because the answers are rather simple and your genes don’t really matter: there’s good and bad carbohydrates cholesterol fat whatever, you will never have the perfect diet recipe by suppressing something –except sugar, but it’s hard- and that calories count is a really, really poor measure. Just eat the less processed food possible –never would be a good start-, not too much but diversified food, no processed drinks either and be physically active. Incroyable. We know that since the 60s ffs! It doesn’t stop parents. Even in France and Europe, obesity is growing up: less bread (glucose, good sugar) more buns (sucrose and HFCS, bad sugar) is a signal of a wrong  trend for sure.

I don’t care about food (in terms of taste) as much as I care about balance between my everyday activity and the fuel I need for it, adjusting it. That’s the important part for me, and I don’t want to track that with an app or follow any diet on the internet. I want it embedded in my habits. I just have to teach my body, over and over again with the bad –but kind of good let’s face it- food spreading endlessly around me (I’ll miss my perfect, healthy baguette forever).

Be careful, don’t slip. That’s what I’m saying to myself. Especially since I saw Wall-E.

Twittersearch on fan noise.

I believe i will have to bring back my Macbook Air. the fan is making constant noise and runs at 6/7ks rpm…not good.

The fan on my Newertech MiniStack 2.5 is failing for the third time. I really can’t say enough lousy things about it.

Solved one problem with iMac now have loud fan noise which is driving me crazy – !!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhh can’t stand it!!!

The noise of my fat PS3’s fan drove me so mad that I got a slim.

XBOX360turn down the fan noise please.#xbox360

New northbridge fan ready to install. The old one was driving me nuts with noise.

I HATE MACBOOKS!!!!!!!!!!! Why does the fan freak out and make loads of noise every time I try to film something?!!!!!!!!!

I hope my laptop fan thingie isn’t dying….I hate when it makes the odd noise….

Hm. My mactop fan shouldn’t be making that rattling noise, should it?

My laptop fan is making a buzzing noise. I shook it, and it just got louder. Just like a baby.

Checking on obscenely loud computer fan noise I’m tired of listening to. Time to crack the case.

etc. Needless to say my Dell laptop is doing the same too. All computers and piece of hardware start being silent and after some use they all are getting damn noisy, thanks to this weak design that is a cheap fan blowing hot air on an expensive silicium chip to make the temperature drop. Isn’t it stupid?

I know, we can’t really get rid of them for now, and the smaller fans are, the more they make noise and are unreliable. Hence the problem with laptops.

On the other side by making less powerful chip we can be fanless, like smartphones and netbooks are showing it. But of course we lose a lot of comfort (forget about the 24” screen and forget about the fast as “immediately” when loading a heavy web page).

Good old silent days, please come back thank you.

TDP

To understand how much we are close –and yet far away- to solve this problem and have both silent and powerful computer there’s a measure unit: TDP Thermal Design Power (in Watt). It represents the maximum amount of power the cooling system in a computer is require to dissipate. The number is usually 20 to 30% lower than what the chip is able to output when really stressed out (video encoding, games). So you always need to have more than what your processor can dissipate. Of course the faster the cpu is, the bigger is the TDP.

Full List of CPU power dissipation (long loading is long). Wikipedia, I love you.

First there’s a huge dynamic: from the single core Atom running at 1.6 GHz you can find in netbooks at less than 3W to the quad core Core 2 Extreme QX9775 at 3.2 GHz rated at 150W.

To dissipate a cpu passively with a simple chip-sized radiator it needs a TDP inferior to 10W. In a really compact environment like a phone it needs less than 3W.

If you want to passively without any need of fans to dissipate a typical 2010 desktop computer at around 65W/90W with a midrange graphic card, you need like 25 Kg of steel attached to a radiator on the CPU. Temperatures at full charge are as high as 90°C (194°F) or more on a finger nail-sized surface. Don’t forget that we need to dissipate three literally burning chips in a computer: the CPU, the GPU and the Chipset which is responsible of all the interaction with components.

25 Kg of thick black anodized aluminum does the job. But man! 

Yeah it’s kind of insane.

For the rest of a configuration though, the problem is already solved even for the high end market: sound card? No need of fans. HDDs? Not really. SSDs? Not at all.

Because progress of making cooler chip is always matched by the progress of making them more powerful, we always end up on the last trend because manufacturers (basically five companies: AMD Intel Nvidia Motorola IBM) would say that “the market decides and people want more”. Hopefully they now know. They stopped pushing the thermal envelope and the clock rate to focus on resource management, adding more core for the same energy output after facing some problems of..

Reliability

A really important parameter in being satisfied with a computer or any digital device is to have the less maintenance possible to do on it. With the extreme temperature of today’s chips and the fact that they need fans, these weak points getting clogged and making noises or simply killing machines by dying, reliability is not better but worse than 10 years ago (is the fan 3 not working well or is my watercooling pump dying?). And it requires more management than ever before.

Before the Pentium and the 100 Mhz barrier, computers were not requiring any special care. Since circa 1997, fans are obligatory and IT help desks became Dissipation Garage.

In a fanless world, machines are maintenance free. They are virtually more stable than a rock in a field. They can be covered of dust like your media center under the couch, no problem. All year long, you don’t hear anything and you don’t have to bother at all. You know there is not going to have any problem unless something heavy fall on it or if there’s some water damage. Otherwise you can forget about it and that’s the beauty of the fanless design. You know it. Your TV. Your fridge (almost). Your Hi-Fi. I want that in the computer world. All around me. But there’s more reasons for going this way.

Sustainable development and human rights

First, we need to make these hundreds of millions of machines to be useful as long as possible to avoid stupid waste. Having fanless design all around would make it easy because computers usually come out useless because of the weak fan design. If they could work without any problem and any noise I still would have my old machines, computing for a cause 24/7.

Too much electronic waste. Way too much. Discarded electronics represented 5 to 6 times as much weight as recycled electronics, polluting entire region of the world.

Think about it next time you use your phone or your gamepad.

Second, we all know and don’t want to admit it that all the digital devices and computers are made by hands by 16-18 years old Chinese women working 90 hours a week (more at Kotaku). It’s called slavery and it makes me sick just to think about it. Especially whe
n as you gadget lovers, my eyes sparkle when they see a nice and new piece of hardware.

It has an awful human cost. And I want that to slow down and even stop some day. I want these girls to use what they actually make. I want them to connect and learn as much as I did and do, thanks to the magic world of computers.

So to resume in two lines it’s either:

more power=>more power consumption=>more heat=>more noise=>less reliability=>more waste=>more slavery

or

more efficiency=>less power consumption=>less heat=>less noise=>more reliability=>less waste=>less slavery

After decades of the first, I want the second for a while. Please?

So when I’m said that as a music producer I’m legitimately anal about the noise that machines make, it’s not just that. Really.

U.S. mom’s rejection of 7-year-old outrages Russia. Me too.

Like I said in a direct French-to-english-translation on Twitter, I was adopted at 6 in France and it was already hard. It still is, in some weird ways. So I’m not surprised. I just can’t believe that the US mom did that this way, fucking up the kid some more. She may not be a mother at all and that may be totally a good thing.

I read a take on a similar adoption working out well. Yeah, with people around for years, paying extra attention to a child growing up, it works. It’s just a gigantic energy investment and this mother was obviously not prepared.

Matching Lacoste shirts 10 years before they were hype in the Paris suburbs, sense of unity bla bla.

I said horrible things to my parents too. Like yelling I don’t love you and I want to go home (foster family) or secretly wanting really bad things happening to them. But things like that happen all the time with children, adopted or not. You’re just more eager to really express it when you don’t have any connection with your parents but a legal piece of paper.

And then you grow up. You feel that as adoptive parents they do a lot. Just by looking at how friends parents behaved could tell me that my parents with all the differences we had, were taking care of me and being attentive. Even if I didn’t like it. I was looking at it as a boring process before hitting 18 years old, the age where I could do whatever I want.

But it takes time. Patience. For both children and parents.

So in this respect, I think international adoption should only exists when there’s no more kids ready for adoption in the country. In the US each year there’s around 100 000 children available for adoption. Almost every year, half of them are not adopted. Searching for the poor kid at the opposite of the world always seemed weird for me. Weird in the way “you are just thinking that you are somewhat a god spreading happiness and it’s more about how you feel than actually helping a child” way. It’s even worse in France: 4 000 children adopted each year, 3 000 coming from foreign countries says Wikipedia.

Anyway, I guess the good thing is that adoption is happening less and less even if we’re talking much more about it now (adoption was huge in the 70s but taboo).

So you may ask: would you adopt a child? I wanted to when I was in my 20s. Now I’m 30 and man, I don’t feel I ever could. I don’t feel I could ever have a child actually. Trying to think about it is like googling google at Google HQs, a wormhole appears in my head and makes me feel like antimatter. Or something like that.

There’s not a day without thinking about building a passive house. The number of benefits from having a passive house (PH) is just the key and the answer to a shitload of problems, like global warming. It’s available right now.

The principle is simple: best insulation possible so that you don’t need classic heating system because machines and humans are enough to heat a superinsulated room. Also, trying to get the maximum out of the sun with big and wide exposure to the south.

Get the point?

Numbers? Well Wikipedia says it all:

• This is between 75 and 95% less energy for space heating and cooling than current new buildings that meet today’s US energy efficiency codes. The Passivhaus in the German-language camp of Waldsee, Minnesota uses 85% less energy than a house built to Minnesota building codes.^[25]
• In the United Kingdom, an average new house built to the Passive House standard would use 77% less energy for space heating, compared to the Building Regulations.^[26]
• In Ireland, it is calculated that a typical house built to the Passive House standard instead of the 2002 Building Regulations would consume 85% less energy for space heating and cut space-heating related carbon emissions by 94%.

When you think that the majority of carbon emissions come from housing more than anything else, you understand how much this PH is important to the world.

We just need to be effing efficient and Planet Earth will be fine.

More at ArchDaily. (photos by Paul Ott)

Anyway, the important thing in PH is insulation. Insulation is complex and you must think “wait, it costs a lot and it’s full of chemical stuff so PH being 100% clean, my ass”

You are wrong. Introducing to you the best insulation product ever. It’s 100% natural. It grows anywhere with no need of pesticides or fertilizers. After a natural treatment (mixed with lime), it doesn’t burn, nor can be eat by animals or bugs. Oh, and it’s water-resistant of course. Did I say that it was also an excellent acoustic protection?

It’s call HEMP. Which is illegal in the US of course, it would destroy so many businesses. Also, Monsanto doesn’t have the patent on that shit and never will so they’d rather ban it. US people, time to wake up.

That being said, what are the benefits of the PH in terms of Quality of Life? They are numerous:

• Inside temperature is homogeneous; it is impossible to have single rooms (e.g. the sleeping rooms) at a different temperature from the rest of the house.
• Since there are no radiators, there is more space on the rooms’ walls.
• The air is fresh, and very clean.
• A 100€/year of heating bill, even with bad ass winter is totally achievable.
• You need a third of the time you need to build a classic house. It’s 66% faster to live in the house you are building if you want: a PH for 4 people can be build in 4 months.
• Construction cost used to be around 14% more expensive upfront than conventional buildings but in Germany the cost is already equivalent. And if you’re aiming for a lot of wood instead of cement and choose hemp insulation over the conventional polyurethane and chemical ones, it gets dirt cheap (Paris price is around 7 000€/m² when you can build a PH for less than 2 000/m²).

The bad things:

• It doesn’t work well in a tropical climate.
• The house becomes a system. Therefore you need to tweak it from time to time (having plants so the air doesn’t get too dry, verifying ventilation systems and make them efficient all along the year, etc).
• Because you need to minimize the number of surface exposed to the outside, PH are by design meant to be as square and tight as possible. The more the house is spread out, the harder it gets to regulate heat/cool.

Do. Want.

I didn’t know what to aim for if I was thinking building a home. Now I do.

26°c. ‘Nuff said.

Time to get ready to drive to San Francisco and have a wedding weekend before getting back to LA all the way along the coast, looking at the ocean.

Sounds good to me!

I found something interesting on my SoundCloud statistics with this track:

Replay  by  Harold

Last month it was played more than 200 times when the average on my few tracks is more around 30 plays.

I designed and composed this track for a game, Soul Bubbles. It was at first less sophisticated and the sound was really –on a Nintendo DS- reminding me good tracks on the Sega Genesis. The track didn’t make it in the game but I thought it was a good one so that I should rework it and ship it as a normal track (meaning getting rid of low quality samples and enhance the composition).

I did, pretty fast like in two days. Conclusion? Well iterating and shipping fast is good. If I look at the numbers, it’s the track where I spend the less time that is played the most!

I find that it’s cool because it pushes me to iterate faster, minimizing the edit stage. Keeping the feeling. Not over working it. It’s hard sometimes because you don’t want to mess your work, you want it perfect.

And you know that Perfect is the worst enemy of Getting Things Done, especially in creative tasks.

I love to see something that you can apply anywhere in your life. The Cult of Done is a big one of them.

WORD.

And so that’s why I’m kind of obsessed about “getting better” in the way that of course procrastination and laziness are not going to disappear in a world full of micro-entertainment. Getting better is just a way to stay afloat on the done part more than anything else..

Also I find it funny because the Manifesto seems obvious and yet we all struggle with it in some way, whatever the lifestyle we have, whatever the values we believe in. I love to see we share that, it should make us more able to work together, making things easier.

Because man, I’m lazy.

There’s a lot of discussion about privacy these days: Facebook/Google takes on that subject, Foursquare geo-loc, Buzz, PleaseRobMe…

I believe it’s better to control your own digital life and share or not share what you want than trying not to be on the internet and end up on it anyway, thanks to a friend’s picture of you on FB or worse. I prefer to post a picture of my ass and let’s say that someone wants to put one to embarass me, well it’s going to be hard. I’m in control.

There is no such thing as too much transparency I guess. The world is going toward open, not close. If we open things, transparency has to be here. It’s embedded in the openness.

That’s where the two data giants of the internet are not fair and somehow scaring people: they know an awful lot about us (just think about it every time you use this search box, brr) but we don’t about them. Well if we want to know more about Google’s CEO private life, we can but I heard his house is not on Google Earth. Oh, and his lawyers put his mistress’ blog down last week-end.

When Microsoft is providing Hotmail to 270 million users, it’s not as big as a problem. MS business is selling software, operating systems and development tools. Google and Facebook business is to know you better to sell more ads to sell you more stuff. I know, we can’t really say to them to stop it. Actually they know that selling ads is a really poor income model in the digital age: Google is heading to become a network provider while starting selling electricity and Facebook is all about being a ubiquitous dev platform (for games of course).

We shouldn’t forget about what’s great about being connected: you meet people, crazy interesting people. You filter so much faster than in real life. Like was saying someone, for stuff posted on Facebook that got some people fired, how many of them have found work, friends, relationship with social networks? The balance is in favor of the positive I guess.

True.

Also it’s worth to point out that we benefit this amazing and exhaustive source of knowledge everyday. When we find on an obscure personal web page some really interesting information, or the exact answer we were searching for, we’re generally not really concerned about privacy in these moments.

Of course it’s a bit scary. But you don’t have to be active on the internet to have serious problems with people. Remember the cartoons making fun of Islam published in a local newspaper in Denmark in 2005? Well after years of death treats, assassination plots, one of the author faced someone wanting to kill him January 1st, 2010 with an axe and a knife in his own house. I’m pretty sure the cartoonist is not on Facebook doing RSVPs. He was under police protection since two years though. And he’s only a cartoonist using Freedom of Speech, you know. In a national newspaper, not on a blog.

The world is wild, online or offline doesn’t matter: privacy is pretty much dead since internet, GPS and mobile phones exist (you can know where the cartoonist lives just in a few seconds on Wikipedia). What you do, think does matter. And I’d rather know what you do, think than knowing nothing about your intentions. Online or offline.

That’s the cool part about staying closed: you don’t have to argue with anybody. It’s easier and as humanity, that’s what we did for now. It brought us WWI and WWII amongst other awful things like slavery. It’s harder to actively spread the positive mental attitude and keep an eye on everyone at the same time. The benefit of real freedom should overcome fear and laziness.

This is where the world collides. I know which way to go to avoid disasters in the future. Openness. Right now.

That being said, if someone wants to provide an email service as good as Google (keyword: spam filter) or a rss service providing privacy and sync with as many clients as I want, please go ahead. I would probably sign up immediately and even pay for it. (ala Flickr, no monthly fees kthxbye)

It’s not because I have nothing to hide that I want everybody to know it all almost by default.

Well I just deployed an e-learning solution, setting up the server, database, lms, creating and transferring content for the platform, creating accounts and being ready for clients.

I released a short video too:

I’m finishing another beat and audio fxs for a client and some classic music for composing training. I’m working on a funny flash game audio design and a prototype of my own for multitouch devices (which audio-wise is working perfectly, I can’t wait to put some input in it!).

I said I would update more my blog this year, I guess I was lying. Well it’s more like I’m under heavy stress and pressure right now but later you’ll have some palm trees pictures in your face and then you will hate me.

ffffffuuuuu 

I missed the Global Game Jam and still feel mad about it. I wrote a rant about the why, how France bla bla and all but who cares.

Things are moving.

 
Via The Daily What via Fark of course

On the keyboard

It’s the first thing I thought about: the angle for your wrist reading your iPad on your thighs is the worst ever to type something. The only way to type easily on a flat surface is to have it laying.. Flat on a desk. In this situation, having the screen on a flat position is awful for reading. I don’t see a lot of that comment on the web (actually beside Lâm I didn’t see this comment often).

On the multitasking, relation with the processor

Yeah I don’t think it’s a big deal either. I prefer being able to multitask for sure but in a casual setting, when I’m not working I don’t use three or four applications, I usually use only one: media player, game, etc. I don’t close everything because I can on a laptop but in all fairness, I’m monotasking in these cases.

What I find crazy is reading an article on Engadget saying

“There’s no multitasking at all. It’s a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once.”

If it’s blazing fast with just one application, be sure that it’s not the same experience on multitask. It’s linked that it’s fast and not flexible. Android does more vs the iphone therefore is not providing the exact same seemingless UI flowing because with widgets and 7 screens refreshing together while downloading an app and tweeting yeah, it’s not perfect on the old smartphones based on it (though the 2.1 update makes it much better).

I mean a tech blog this size not understanding how Apple thinks, how they always put the user experience joy bells and whistles first, doing the teenager geek who wants everything is not what I expect from a professional article on a new device hands-on.

If you want to multitask, buy another tablet computer. It exists since 2001.

Same

On the noiseless experience

People focus on the mobility of this “new” device but I like to point out that it’s also about the noise: smartphones, tablets are totally noiseless computer. If they were doing a little spinning annoying noise while on use, I’m pretty sure everybody would rather be on a desk with a big screen to read emails. With noise too but at least your sight thanks you.

It’s awesome to be in the silence of a bedroom and reading without being disturbed by the “computer noise”. It’s not just about the portability (because of course, you lose a lot going from 24/17/15” to 4,5 or 9,7” for reading). It’s also about ears freedom.

On games

The iPad seems to be a perfect game machine we were I think, a lot dreaming about. And yet Apple doesn’t care more than just bringing a fucking car race and a fps on stage. They have the same pattern all the time: do a device focused on experience delivery, contact publishers. Of course they go for EA and Gameloft, making so much money on iPhone.

But the iPhone is pretty popular in the game industry and in the geek/tech culture not because it’s cool to develop for (it’s not), but because the device is awesome and made super weird and unique games some major hits. The day these indie devs quit for another platform providing more support and more openness, the Apple touch device serie is going to be much less trendy.

I still can’t believe how Apple reacts about games. Steve must have a problem with them. Computer games made Microsoft in the 90s (DirectX). Computer games made Apple since 2007 (iPhone). Computer games made Commodore in the 80s (Amiga). Computers get popular in the mass market with games since always. They don’t with iWorks or Excel.

Pushing about how it’s cool to read books on a multitouch device in 2010 is more than meh. It’s kind of dumb.

On Apple politics

No camera, closed system.. I have no problem with people getting crazy and wanting to buy it like they want to pee so bad even if they know the 2G is going to have a camera. It’s business. But I’d rather have Apple be sure that I would not buy a 1G without camera because I know that every fucking netbook has one since day one. I’d rather have Apple be sure that I have some brain you know. The same with accessories sold at insane prices.

For Flash, I don’t care as a user. I hate Flash as a user. On the other as a developer I know how Adobe’s product is pretty neat, allowing fast prototyping and stuff like that. And I know that HTML5 is totally not ready yet, so the web without proprietary plug-ins is still a dream.

Some people think that it’s sad that the iPad is a closed platform (I guess they beefed up the protection against jailbreaking?) and that if they were starting their career today, they may not because they could not code and hack their computer like they want.

Well, I guess a teenager today who wants to code would buy two netbooks for the price of the iPad, install Linux/7/OS X and would play with them and learn to code. I’m not worried about how future generations are going to produce software because the world is full of computers.

It’s amazing how in a week like this you almost end up thinking that no, there’s only one computer company in the world.

And they are launching a product with which “you can browse the web with it”.

Saying that without laughing out loud in 2010, only Steve Jobs can.