Category: User Interface

Bad choice for France Télévision web platform

It’s sad to see France Télévision chose a proprietary platform (MS Silverlight) to develop its web platform for video delivery … They developed this “thing” with public money; the content should at least be available to all the public eyes (even the “without Silverlight” link requires to have Windows Media Player 11 which even recent MS-Windows PCs do not have).

No silverlight

Here are some general reasons why it’s a bad idea to develop something with Silverlight:

The Silverlight runtime is only available for MS-Windows and recent MacOS machines. This leaves out other operating systems (i.e. Linux, older Windows or MacOS versions, …). Even if these OSes market shares are minimal (compared to Windows XP and MacOS X), Curl and Adobe developed players for altervative platforms. For the end-user, it means (s)he will be able to keep her/his favourite computer to run your application.
Javascript-enabled browsers are already available since a long time, on nearly all operating systems (e.g. Firefox is available for Linux, Windows, MacOS and xBSD). For the end-user, it means (s)he will be able to keep her/his favourite browser to run your application if you use standard technologies like AJAX, DHTML, etc.
If you, as a developer, you really want to develop your web application with OpenLaszlo or Flex, the Flash player is already available on the computer of more than 95% of your potential clients. Although this is mainly due to historical reasons (Flash is available since the 1990s), I can’t see why Silverlight can win over Flash/Flex/Air since Silverlight is a competitor without added value. For the end-user, it means (s)he will most probably be able to run your Flash-based application out-of-the-box and it won’t be the case with Silverlight.
From a developer point of view, writing code for Silverlight requires to download and master 4 packages: Visual Studio, Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, Expression Blend and Deep Zoom Composer (although real web designers will probably prefer other tools than the two last ones). Compare with this: if you develop for AJAX, you might need to download and master 1 kit (your AJAX toolkit) ; developing for OpenLazslo or Flex: 1 SDK each. Moreover, all developer kits (except Silverlight) are open source, giving more durability to your developments and investments.
Finally, still from a developer point of view, your Silverlight application will not be seen in any of the major search engines. No SEO possible.

Firefox 3.0 + Flash on a protected Windows PC

Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps.

Most Firefox plugins (“add-ons“) can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights …

Unless your company installed Firefox 2.x on your computer with the Flash plug-in. If it’s the case, you have just to copy two files from the 2.x install to the 3.0 one :

Go to your “old” Firefox plugins directory, for example: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\. Then copy these 2 files: NPSWF32.dll and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe to your Portable Firefox directory, like: FirefoxPortable\App\firefox\plugins\. Now re-start Firefox 3.0 … Voilà!

Performance freeze in Windows Task Manager

I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature (*) but the Windows Task Manager doesn’t seem to refresh its graphs when we are moving its window. It’s barely noticeable when you usually move it (**) but you can spot this behaviour when one of your other windows is freezing.

Freezing performance graphs - Windows
(larger screenshot)

(*) I know this post is nearly useless but I’m tired of waiting for this freezing software …
(**) I guess it refreshes its graphs between window movements: a human being can barely notice if Windows stops moving the window for 1/100th of second to refresh

Buttons cluttering

Image seen on a post on the Hyper Dog Blog:

Fortunately, the content was still longer than the right pile and bottom line of buttons. Can’t someone create a “social network of social networks” (and call it “Web 3.0” of course) to help those poor recognition-hungry-bloggers? 😉

New website design

Small news to share my amazement for CSS: changing the design of my website took me around 15 minutes (based on a Ganesh Gunasegaran‘s initial template). The content didn’t change. Only the way “semantic elements” are displayed was changed (+ some minor adaptations, of course). Et voilÃ ! 🙂

Next step: adapt this blog design to my website design (I won’t do it right now).

A small journey in the world of LiveCDs

I have plenty of other things to do but, this evening, I decided to stop a little bit and try some LiveCDs I freely got at Fosdem. Since I did it very quickly and was tired, don’t take what I wrote for granted: LiveCDs are there to be tested. Download one and test it by yourself!

The first LiveCDs I tried were derived from Sun OpenSolaris (and on the OpenSolaris starter kit DVD). BeleniX was quite cute, directly launching XFCE. Quite a few applications were there. Some refresh problems were also present in the console. An old USB key was recognised without problem, as most parts of my low-end workstation.

The next LiveCD was NexentaOS, aka GNU/OpenSolaris. It took so long to finally display a rather empty Gnome desktop. In fact, it took a long time to load anything, any application without any warning, indication, nothing. So I was left wondering if my machine had to be restarted or not. Since I also got a DBUS error, I was unable to use the USB key to save a screenshot but, since the network was detected, I was able to transfer the image on another computer. Not many applications were present. Quite disappointing.

Finally, Schillix was quite strange because there were no X windowing system (apparently, they are currently trying to build a version of X). I don’t mind text-only operating system. But here, I had a sendmail error popping all the time. It was quite annoying. Finally, I didn’t get a good impression of OpenSolaris with all these LiveCDs. Anyway, OpenSolaris is not free (but only open source).

The next LiveCD was FreeSBIE and I really liked it. The desktop took a little long time to load (but at least I was able to see what’s happening on the screen). It also uses XFCE but it was very well designed, with what a geek wants on the top right corner 😉 I was also impressed by all the multimedia applications included (even Ekiga but I didn’t tested them since that computer is used for serious work and has no sound card). Maybe, one day, I’ll try to install a full BSD system …

Finally, the last LiveCD I tested was Novell OpenSuSE. As usual with SuSE, you can count on a great design. I asked for a Live Gnome version. I just disliked the start menu “a la Vista”: you need 2 mouse-clics to have all the applications you can launch (see screenshot below). Moreover, when you get that screen, it starts with the A for Applications, a category that doesn’t contain the most useful applications (so you have to scroll down and/or click one more time to reach the app you want!).

One final word: I didn’t talk about the common applications on these systems since you nearly get the same pieces of software on each of them (Firefox, OOo or AbiWord/Gnumeric/…, Thunderbird, etc.).

Search for images by sketching

On his blog, Laurent wanted to know who is this guy. I though it was an interesting starting point to see how good is Retrievr, “an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch”.

Although my drawing skills really needs to be improved (and their drawing tools more refined – always blame the others for your weaknesses 😉 ), a first sketch gives some interesting results (see screenshot below): 7 retrieved photos (44%) show a b/w human face in “frontal view” (if you count the dog, it’s even 8 correct images).

If I just give the photo URL, results are not so good (see screenshot below). I am nearly 100% sure that it’s because it’s a greyscale photo scanned as a color image.

When I upload the image on my harddisk, convert it to a greyscale image and upload it on Retrievr, now it gives more expected results: 10 images show a person with his/her hair (63%), either from the front or from the back.

So this photo is not among the “most interesting” ones on Flickr (it is even probably not on Flickr). I suppose that if one applies Retrievr on a larger subset of photos, we’ll have a higher probability to find it (but it will also increase noise, i.e. the number similar photos). If you like playing with Flickr, other intersting Flickr mashups can be found here.

Interesting interaction between videotracking and computer games

In his blog, Jonas Hielscher wrote about an animal controlled computer game), where a player can play Pacman against real crickets! It is so cool, I shamelessly copy and paste his screenshot here :

Bugs playing pacman with you

I find it cool to see nice application of tracking, like I did (tracking) with my rodents:

Tracking of a rat in the Morris water maze
rat = big, red spot on top
its trail from bottom is also in red

Next time, rats will solve crosswords …

rat solving crosswords

Identity 2.0

This week-end, I attended a scientific meeting and, although the content of the presentations were often interesting, they also often lacked attractiveness. This reminded me two videos I stored, some time ago, on my hard disk. SÃ©bastien Lorion called them “refreshing”. And, for me, not only these presentations look beautiful, they also talk about an interesting topic: who are you on the internet ?

In the first presentation (a keynote at OSCON 2005), Dick Hardt talk about what is identity and how do we prove who we are, in the online world.

Identity is what I say about me and it’s what other say about me. In the real world, technical advances had enabled the separation between acquisition and presentation of credentials as well as the separation between the identification process and the authorisation process.

Now, in the online world, we are still at the “Identity 1.0” level, where one has to register at a website in order to get a service. User IDs and passwords are just authentication, they only proves that you are a directory entry! At this level, it’s impossible to prove who you are because this so-called “verified identity” is not what you apparently give to the website but what this website knows about you. Dick Hardt calls those websites “walled gardens”, closed and complex identity silos, lacking transparent policies, simplicity, scalability and flexibility.

So, with his company, Sxip, he proposes a Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol (it’s the acronym for SXIP), based on buzzwords like “Web 2.0” or “webservices” (ok, I’m exagerating a little bit). He described some of the technological details in another presentation (given at ETech 2006). And, although I didn’t tested the websites he gave as examples, I think that, perhaps like other companies (MS Infocard, IBM Higgins, …), they succeeded in separating acquisition from presentation of credentials as well as the identification process from the authorisation process.

Use of a credential provider to many resources needing this credential
Use of many credential providers to only one resource, a bit like showing ID, SSID and driver license to the policeman
Claim acquisition
Claim presentation

In his talk, Dick Hardt gave two links : his blog and Microsoft Kim Cameronâ€™s (where you can find the laws of identity but I didn’t had time to read them yet).

Finally, to come back to the presentation aspects, I think Dick Hardt presentations are quite surprising for me, sometimes slides go too fast (that’s because I’m becoming old 😉 ). But I am wondering how can I apply some of his tricks to my presentations (next one is on June, 29th). Let’s see ..