Just a few thoughts on online communities...

I am always amazed by the number or size of communities on the internet. Blogs are bursting to life at an unbelievable rate: I've read somewhere that a new blog is created every 2 seconds. Myspace.com with its millions of users is another fine example. This site allows you to create your own profile and share thoughts, photos, etc. I am personally using Linked-in to publish my professional profile, keep in touch with my old colleagues or find new opportunities.

It is interesting to notice this need for people to belong and to have an identity on the web. I was reading an article on Le Monde (in French only) about this phenomenon. The author was pointing out that a few decades ago people tended to stay close to the place they grew up in, thus living in their own community. However, nowadays it has become common for people to live in different cities and even different countries - just look at how many foreigners are living in London - that this close-range connection is lost. But the web is there to remove the physical boundaries and allow people to virtually connect and stay in touch with each other.

Given the cheer number if these online communities you can always find the right one for you but although one could ponder whether this new form of social interaction is really a progress, I am more concerned about the difficulty to keep up and the lack of centralized repository of information or lack of interoperability between these profiles. If your friend John is on myspace but your other friend Paul uses friendster then you need to create an account on both sites and maintain your profiles up-to-date. I guess - read hope - soon we'll see more cooperations between all these services.

In a next blog I will discuss a bit about web semantic as it could be solution to the problem I just mentioned.

Beautiful Istanbul

So it seems, and I'm about to find out. My girlfriend and I are going to Istanbul next weekend. I'm very exited about it. We wanted to go for a long weekend somewhere. We first thought about Barcelona or maybe somewhere in Italy but I somehow felt that I wanted to see something a bit different. Mind you I love Italy and Barcelona seems to be a great city but it's all a bit too...how to say...not exotic enough. Being French I can easily relate to Italian or Spanish culture but not to Turkish. So we opted for Istanbul.

I'll post some pictures and a video (thanks to my new toy) there.

Cobertura 4 J2ME

A while back in my previous job I worked on a code coverage tool for J2ME. I used an existing J2SE/J2EE code coverage tool called Cobertura that I modified to work on J2ME. After I left the company I decided to set up this project as open source. This is how Cobertura for J2ME started. It now enjoys a bit a popularity because it seems to be the only tool of its kind for Java 2 MicroEdition. It's always a nice feeling to see something you do being used by others. So I'm keeping busy with the coming 1.1 release. I'm hoping to have out by mid-Novermber. Watch this space for more on that...

Children of Men

WOW, what a movie! It's one of the most gripping movie I've ever seen.

This is the story of Theo (Clive Owen), an ex-activist now bureaucrat who's fed up with his life. It's the year 2027 and the last baby born on earth was more than 18 years ago. The world has become a totalitarian, over-polluted place where people have no hopes of future, where refugees are treated like criminals. When Julian (Julianne Moore), Theo's ex-lover reappears in his life, a thread of events takes Theo on a journey to save Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a refugee who also happen to be the first pregnant woman in almost 20 years. Some of the action scenes are anthology! Cuaron excels in putting you right in the middle of the scenes. You're on the edge of your seat for the most part of the movie. But where it gets very interesting is in the content that the movie deals with. It tries to explore a very plausible view of the future of our society and how we would react if women became infertile. It makes you wander about the world we leave in today and sends warnings of what it could become if we don't pay attention. It is also packed with some witty quotes and Owen gives a great performance. This is the perfect example that movies can be thought-provoking and yet entertaining.

It's one of the best movie I've seen in years. It gets a 10/10 on my filmographic scale!

My new toy

A few weeks ago I bought myself an expensive new toy:



It is a very nice camcorder that lets you take very good quality video. Then all you need is a proper video editing tool and off you go. I'm also looking into putting all my videos into a dvd with nice menus and all. All I need is to find the time to do it!

I'm back....not quite!

A few month ago I blogged about me being back at blogging more frequently. I even mentioned one entry a week. The result is ....suspense.... 2 entries in 4 months. I can see you say "WOW, that's a lot. Where does he find all this energy?!!!". Yes I know, not quite what I said. So this time no statement of that sort. I'll just try and add things more regurarly here. A little help from my fellow writers Aaron, Luci and Raffi wouldn't hurt ;). Am I the only engineer in the city?