Blog::new

For a while now I’ve been regularly recieving emails on my gmail address which are mistakenly sent to me. Not spam, actual email (and sometimes pretty important too), just sent to the wrong address. I generally make the effort to reply to the sender so that he would know about his mistake, because otherwise there’s no way he’d guess.

And it also seems that many people think ‘g.laurent@gmail.com’ belongs to them. Nope, gmail ignores any dots in the username.

The point of this post is trivial : beyond the obvious online/offline debate (I dislike webapps though I agree they have their use in some cases), here’s another thing you should consider about moving all your email to a gmail/hotmail/ address : it will make you lose an important distinctive part of your email address, that is its domain name. Within a large email host, you run a much greater chance to have a name clash than within your own ISP. There already are a few ‘glaurent’ on Orange or free.fr (two of the largest french ISP providers), but on gmail there’s a whole lot, and each is bound to get private email that doesn’t belong to him if he didn’t make his address distinctive enough (I’m pretty sure there’s a ‘glaurent.gmail@gmail.com’ – that one probably gets the cake).

That’s another reason to get your own domain name, too .

Almost a decade ago now, back in a time where vanity pages on geocities where hip and Facebook or flickr weren’t even a neuron firing in their designer’s minds, I put up a bunch of “silly” pictures on my homepage as a mockery of this trend to put useless personal stuff on homepages (some trend, uh ?). These pics are digitized X rays. The irony is that, what was meant as a joke ridiculing the uselessness of most homepages turned out to be actually useful to some. Over the years, I received quite a few usage request on these X rays, mostly on the skull one. Most were for educational uses, a couple where even for art. And judging by my site logs, many are referencing the images from their own pages.

And just today, I received an email from Michael Berkowitz, a retired teacher who had asked me for permission to use the skull image in his science transparencies back in May 2006. Today he’s asking me the same thing but for CD ROMs. For one thing, I really appreciate that he would make the effort to reach me again about it, even more given the use he makes of it. But also I’m very glad that this joke ended up being one of those cool things about the Net, that you have no idea how useful whatever you make available will really be.

Back in 2006 my friend Claude Chastagner and I wrote a short piece on file sharing, which was a short version of an article which we wrote for the Revue Française d’études américaines. In this short version we equated the music market to the water one, mp3 and downloading being the equivalent of tap water (i.e. essentially free) and CDs being bottled water (i.e. what you’re buying is less the product itself – music – than added service – a long lasting medium, immune to viruses and other computer-related mishaps).

I’ve been browsing around Gerd Leonhard’s previous writings (warning, the man’s a Net-junkie and has an account for every social site in existence), and I’m proud to see he had the same idea (though he developed it much more). His Water Like Music Manifesto is a must-read.
(edit: Gerd Leonhard came up with this back in 2005, Claude and me in 2006 – given I’ve been maintaining a close watch on the subject, I think it’s safe to say I came across it somehow )

On another note, this quote from Feargal Sharkey, who attended the debate “The Big issue – how can music and ISP work together” at the MIDEM seems to show that there’s still work to do : “It seems we are surrounded by an ever-growing chorus of pseudo-intellectual cyber professors who will have us believe that their vision of reality is nothing short of the high altar of intellectual thinking. And to challenge those viewpoints and assumptions is nothing short of heresy and treason.”

Then again I can see how hard it is for non-tech people to understand that their business has suddenly turned into a computer engineering problem.

I’ve just read this very well written post on all you need to know about concert photography by Alan Hess. Nothing much to add, except he says not to carry too much gear yet carries probably twice as much as I do  (though having two bodies is hardly unusual and makes a lot of sense). He’s got my respect for on-the-fly adjusting of parameters (ISO, aperture and shutter speed). I prefer to simply redo light metering (spot mode of course) while keeping the aperture at f2.8.

This morning I noticed that some comments from my blog had disappeared. Checking the DB table, they’re gone for good (my host currently has no automated DB backup facility for my kind of account). I only have a precious few to start with, so I made the effort to dig them up (thank you Google for your ‘cache:’ operator) and re-create them. I wish I knew what happened, I suspect akismet since I think it happened after a round of spam moderation. Anyway, that’s one more reason to look into an alternative hosting solution. DB backup through phpMyAdmin is no fun.

(Edit : turns out that my host does make automated, daily DB backups, lucky for me I came across them when looking for my website logs – so I was finally able to properly restore de comments table)

Looks like my intuition on how the iphone/ipod touch would become a perfect universal remote is becoming real.

So Canon has just announced the 50D (wish they had announced a 6D instead). Pretty interesting upgrade, in my case it’s mainly the Auto-ISO mode being able to go from 100 to 1600 (rather than 400-800 as in the 40D) which might be worth the upgrade (that, and the fact that upgrading to every other release makes it very hard to sell your old camera). One thing dpreview.com’s extensive preview  notes is that the ‘direct print’ button now has an actual useful usage as it gives access to the live view. They can’t understand the purpose of such a button on a ‘prosumer’ camera, and neither could I until I read this article. In short, it explains that Japan passed on the wave of 8-bits machines because they simply were not able to handle their alphabet. Therefore, instead of PCs, Japan mostly developed appliances. Machines which were pretty much stand-alone and could do one main thing and many other related things. Like taking photos, and printing them. Therefore I figure that the Canon’s “direct print” button could be a remnant of this “appliance culture”. At least that’s the only sane explanation I can think of.

Answer : Turn off 3G.

After the first few days of using my iphone 3G, I was rather disappointed to see that the battery would hardly last through a couple of days (with usage limited to a phone call or two, and listening to podcasts). This was a clear regression from my first iphone. Well, it seems that you can revert back to having the same battery life by turning off 3G in the settings (which is annoying but tolerable, given that I rarely access the Net from the outside, in which case I can turn it back on).

[EDIT: Firmware upgrade to 2.1 does indeed solve this problem ]

Two days ago, my office mate received his Openmoko-based mobile phone. First thing he told me about it was that is wasn’t quite ready for the general public : “yeah, you need to run the ‘date’ command from the console to set its internal clock”. At first, all you have is the ability to make and receive phone calls and… a console. And apparently that’s about it. After about an hour he said “ok, it’s finally connected to the guest WiFi, I can ssh to it now”. At the same time, by some strange coincidence, I came across this blog post linked from the Linux Hater’s Blog (which I wholeheartedly recommend – so far I’ve yet to find a single article which I couldn’t link to my own experience with Linux). I read the first few lines of the post to my office mate and he agreed : “yeah, I figure it will take me about a week to set it up completely”.