Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference! | Technology | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/10/startups-internet

Want to know how Britain should spend that billion pounds it has earmarked for internet startups? On a vodka-fuelled conference in a sauna in London. It would sure put LeWeb into the shade. Though almost anything would.

The Guardain rips into Loic Le Meur's recent tech conference.

So, LeWeb kindof sucked then, huh?

"Everyone has something interesting to say," Coelho said at one point, clearly showing that he's never had a conversation with one of his fans.

"And even more satisfying than all of that is the fact that the idea of a huge state-sponsored piss-up is such an anathema to Americans that there's no way they can outdo us. Instead Kara, Michael and all those other smug Valley dwellers will be forced to look on enviously as Europe drinks, sweats, networks and bonds its way to a new dot com boom."

Καυστικός Guardian για το LeWeb...

"So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow."

Centralization is not the future.

yeahhhhh

And even

Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics.

"By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand."

s written in C++, go play with Monotone. Really. They use a "real database". They use "nice object-oriented libraries". They use "nice C++ abstractions". And quite frankly, as a result of all these design decisions that sound so appealing to some CS people, the end result is a horrible an

c++ なくなってくれると，おれ楽なんだけどな．．.

Dynamic web fonts are coming. Actually they’re already here, but most of Our People haven’t noticed yet. But they will, and that’s going to be a huge boon to somebody.

The more I read about embedded web fonts, the more I crystalize my thinking. Take, for example, this latest “A List Apart” article where Jeffrey Zeldman interviews David Berlow: Zeldman: Let me put it another way. I want to use your ITC Franklin in a site I’m designing, but I’m not willing to violate my end user licensing agreement. How do we resolve this impasse, from your perspective? Berlow: The next step is for those who control the font format(s) to define and document a permissions table to be added with all due haste to the OpenType, CoolType, TrueType, and FreeType formats. … Zeldman: How can type designers and web designers work together to persuade the engineers who control the formats to modify the code to include a permissions table? Berlow: [W]eb designers flat-out refused to part with real type, which has filled the web with type as graphic files, scaring the bejesus out of a lot of engineering people. … How important dynamically rendered type is to de

Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one: WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM

Mr. Pilgrim at his best :)

"PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns."

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns. If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned...

We all can relate, bro.

// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch // them on a spaceship directly into the sun. //

At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format...

"After spending about a day and a half in testing I am forced to conclude that the HTML5 drag and drop module is not just a disaster, it’s a fucking disaster."

Holy H Christ... WHAT have we done!? We stood idly by and let this drag and drop disaster happen.

Gee, I wonder why that is.

Good read on Adobe FW, and why it works for interface design

Активный пользователь Fireworks рассказывает о хороших и плохих сторонах инструмента проектирования.

talks about the great and bad of Fireworks, and links to a few alternatives to Fireworks to check out

What if Google released a JavaScript library that sucked, and no one noticed? JavaScript expert Dmitry Baranovskiy has peeked under the hood of Google’s new Closure Library, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Follow along as he points out a few of the library’s many failings, and why the Web deserves better from Google.

The games industry is rushing headlong to Agile development methodologies just now; it’s a great source of excitement for some, with conference sessions and magazine articles left, right and centre, and “evangelists” spreading the word. I’m sick of it. I can’t wait for the day when everyone realises how much of a fad-diet, religious-cult-inspired, money-making exercise it is for a group of consultants.

Agile doesn't mean no planning or allowing to reject any kind of "older" approarches, which are actually necessary to do the things.

All methodologies imply a prescribed approach, a single-minded, fixed set of processes that removes flexibility and rationality.

Un article assez marrant sur à quel point Maven est mauvais... je peux confirmer :)

Erik Naggum on XML

"Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. "

I don't know python so I can't say whether these gripes are legitimate, but it's useful to remind yourself to look for such inconsistencies in how you do things, or in the tools you use every day

Ruby is in a very bad place right now. It’s no longer cutting edge, it’s technically stagnant, is in implementation limbo, and just isn’t… well… fun, anymore.

Dave Kirin on Ruby's growing pains - "Perhaps the most frustrating part about Ruby, to me, is the outrageously outdated state of the current Ruby interpreter. There is basically no way to avoid writing software that leaks memory. It will happen, you just have to make it leak as little as possible. I still remember the massive effort that Tom Preston-Werner went through to get a relatively simple program like God.rb to not leak memory… and it still leaks memory!": 2008-11-20: kd.to_tumblr

Let me start by saying that I’ve been a longtime fan of Ruby. I’ve been a member of the #caboose cabal forever, and I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of ruby over the course the last 6 years. I’ve drank the Ruby kool-aid, helped to start two Rails Startups and integrated a lot of code into Ruby. I fought tooth and nail to get Lockheed Martin to include Ruby deliverables in their RSA2 standardization project (didn’t you know? Ruby helps launch rockets!)

Why Ruby is dying

wow.

Pssst.... it is "sentence"