Websites

Browser hardware acceleration is meant to render websites faster by allowing the graphics card (its GPU) to directly display “things” (videos, animation, canvas, compositing, etc.) on the screen. By bypassing software rendering systems, lots of websites seem to render faster. All major browsers jumped on this: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera (post of 2008!). I understand that enhancing the user’s experience while surfing the web is something that can be interesting. Hardware acceleration opens the door to unseen compositions, to new types of animations, to new kind of applications. Directly in your favourite browser. ...

In one of his buzz, Cédric Bonhomme drew my attention on the Highcharts javascript library. This library can produce beautiful charts of various types with some Ajax interaction. The only negative point imho is that it is dual-licensed and all cases deprive you from your freedom: there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ; there is a commercial license for any other website. Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.

A small post to welcome the new website for the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL). The OCAL was created more than 6 years ago and now has more than 24.000 vector illustrations in the Public Domain (in the SVG format that can be read by most graphic software). For me, a major improvement is the direct visualisation of thumbnails. In the previous version of the website, it was indeed painfull to open each result of a search in order to see if the illustration was what one was looking for. I’m using the Library since a few years and I am always amazed at the quality of most illustrations in the science and biology sections (the two sections I use the most). ...

20040 views for my Gemvid presentation at FOSDEM 2009 100451 views for my random field presentation 200418 views for my OpenOffice.org Impress presentation It’s good to be considered as a presentation rockstar (even if it’s an April fools joke).

At least from my office. Sadly true ;-) since one of the rules of my company proxy server bans all URLs with the letters “blog” inside (no blogger.com, blogspot, … websites either). Fortunately, there are a lot of web-based feed aggregators (which are not – not yet? – banned). It also blocks all URLs with the “exe” string so we are not able to visit the Belgian Post website (it uses an URL containing “outletlocator.exe”) ; I didn’t find any bypass yet. ...

One of the two labs where I’m working, the Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, has updated its website. You can see it here and browse its growing content. And this time, I did nothing (a company built the website for us).

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …). Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to: ...

I was looking for a simple info on the Belgian finance public service website: the address of their office in Liege. I know it’s rue Paradis but I also need opening hours and a general contact phone number. I can tell you this website is really crappy! First, when you arrive on the website, you are overwhelmed by links, info, text everywhere and, of course, the photo of the Finance minister. Now it will take you at least 30 seconds to know where to look. Then, it’s impossible to easily find an address ; I didn’t even find it at all! I tried their “search engine”: no result. Their site map takes ages to load (with no result, of course; it won’t be funny otherwise). When you try to click on most services on the left, you launch a new website, completely different from the main one (still no sign of the address). I guess they don’t want to be contacted … ...

A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map. ...

Short message for spammers: you lose your time trying to add irrelevant comments on this blog since no comment is published before I agree so. Moreover, I activated Akismet spam filter since this morning … But I doubt spam robots read notices where they put spam comments. Although I disallowed comments (and even pings) on some posts, I felt something strange this morning: more and more comments had to be moderated on this blog. By default, no comment are directly published. If the comment is relevant (even if the author has a different opinion than mine), I publish the comment (1 click). Otherwise, I delete the comment (another click) and disallow comments and pings (human contributors can still send me their comments by e-mail and I’ll publish them). From 1.50pm to 2.50pm (some minutes ago), I received 153 spam comments. Sorry guys, unless you found a serious flaw in this blog engine, comments will still be moderated by a human who dislike spam.