Comments subscription

I just realized that I wasn't notified when people were posting comments on my own blog...My apologies to all those that left a comment on this blog if I didn't reply to you :-). Of course I enjoy everybodys comments so keep posting!

I'll go fix that right away.

The Neo FreeRunner is out!

It seems that the cellphone I was waiting for is finally out. The Neo Freerunner is the first phone that runs entirely with open source software and on open hardware. Its has about the same features as an iphone and its price is $399. It runs the openmoko platform, which is nothing else than a linux distribution for cell phone.


I will wait a few weeks to read some reviews and see what people think about it. And if it's positive, the freerunner will be next on my shopping list :-)

Woodstock or Icefaces?

I recently ran into a tutorial on the icefaces JSF components and it seems to be an interesting technology. I like the fact that they use ajax push for some of there functionalities. Drag n drop and other visual effects seem to be really attractive too, but I'm concern about the overall stability and usability of the toolkit. As I'm developing and maintaining a project that uses the woodstock JSF components, I need stability.

While signing up on IceSoft website to be allowed to download icefaces, I noticed a few usability errors. IceSoft website makes use of Icefaces. Basically, the form where you enter your name and all that uses ajax to autovalidate its content. That sounds like a good idea. The problem is that it drops the content of the form when it receives an ajax update. That means that what you type between the moment when the form decides to run an ajax validation and the moment where it receives the result of this validation magically disappears while you are typing.

That's the kind of usability bugs I cannot afford in my application so I think I will wait before I give a try to icefaces.

OOXML's vote at the ISO, the results should be published tomorrow

Yesterday was the last day of the vote for OOXML's approval as an ISO standard. The different organizations had until Saturday night, to submit the result of their vote to the ISO committee. This is a big deal as numerous governmental organization rely on the ISO to choose the standards they should use. Of course, considering the poor quality of OOXML, it wouldn't make sense to me to have it recognized as a standard. OOXML is microsoft's format and nothing else. It hasn't been designed by an open consortium with the goal of creating an open file format that will suit the needs of people. It has been designed by Microsoft's employees with the goal in mind that Microsoft needed to have their file format listed as a standard so that they can keep selling Microsoft Office to as many people as they can.
The results of the vote should be published in the news tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm back online!

So I guess I spent a total of 2.5 hours on the phone with verizon. I wanted them to send a technician to my place so that he can fix the phone plug in my wall. I thought that was the reason why internet wasn't working in my new appartment. Yesterday while I was passing by the modem I realized that the light was green and that my internet connection was actually working....I'm curious to see if verizon will ever send me the techician :-)
Anyway, long story short, I'm back online! <:o)

MonoDevelop 1.0 released

Congratulation to lluis and his team at Novel for the long awaited release of MonoDevelop 1.0. The release notes are available here. I don't have much time to test it right now but that's definitely something that gnome lovers will want to check out.

Game Developper Conference

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for San Francisco, where I will attend the Game Developper Conference on Friday. I'll spend the week-end there, and I will meet with some people I'm working with at the Emergency Operation Center of SF. I should be back on Wednesday with maybe some interesting things to blog about :-)