Lately, I started to feel a growing interest for Design and that’s how I “discovered” Ambidextrous. I am considering getting a subscription to this magazine. So I decided to sample a few articles. This is how I came to read Keepon Dancing, a very interesting article on Keepon, a nice little robot with social interaction abilities.

Notice how simple its seems.This extremely simplistic design is engaging as shown by research conducted with children. According to the article, written by one of the two Keepon developers, Keepon is able to direct attention around a room and express simple emotions through bodily movement.

Beatbots.org, the “official” website, features a number of videos showing Keepon in action. I should admit that I have been flabbergasted by the demos. I’ve also learned from the article that Keepon starred in a Spoon Music video. See it dancing to Don’t You Evah. According to a post in BoingBoing:
the robot (...) extracts extract the pulse of rhythm from music and move its silicone body in time.

Before you reach out for your credit card, I’d like to inform you that Keepon is not commercially available. Otherwise, the compulsive buyer in me would have tried to get one and conduct some social interaction experiments in the workplace :-)

In the absence of some sound evidence, I always thought that Swiss hackers were a subgroup of hackers, which is a subgroup of human beings. My logical self led me then to believe that my friend Betabug and all his fellow Swiss hackers looked like your run-of-the-mill human beings! How mistaken I was!

Last week, I finally discovered some compelling evidence about how Swiss hackers really look like. I was in a supermarket when I stumbled upon a whole flock sitting silently (or so it seems). Look for yourself.



Oh and by the way, needless to say that I mean hacker as defined by the Jargon File.

One of my favorite activities consists of walking in Paris streets. I've been living in the area for almost ten years and Paris still amazes me. It's kind of a love'n'hate story between us. Far more love than hate though. And after all these years, Paris still have some Love cards up her sleeves that just make me happy.

I often wander in streets I've never been to before or just walked their pavement in a hurry, not really taking the time to see what beauty (or ugliness) they may have in store for me. Yesterday, I went to L'escale Pakito, a wonderful little pub to have a few drinks with close friends. I arrived quite early so I took the opportunity to wander around a bit. And there I found that kind of beauty I particularly enjoy. I took a picture to share it with you.



I was simply amazed by this street intersection, with that majestuous building in the background (the sunlit one) and more importantly by L'escalier (the staircase), an old looking bookstore that seems to support the whole building of which it occupies an angle; worn out by the cheer weight of the whole structure. It also made me wonder what's the story behind that shop? Who was its first owner? How did it evolve during all these years? How does it manage to survive in this time and age of cybergiants such as Amazon? What kind of books are sold there? Who chose the paint? Did a relative of mine ever visited or bought something from this shop in the seventies or eighties (one uncle, one brother-in-law, and the husband of one cousin dwelled in Paris for a few years at that time)? So many questions! All participating to the mistery of the bookstore from which sprung, I guess, the beauty I felt when looking at this scene.

I left them unanswered since all this very subjective beauty may simply evaporate with the answers. Of course, if you happen to know some of them please share them with us!

I was longing for a sunny, sweet day in the otherwise gloomy, grey-skeyed, coldish Paris. Heck, this is Spring or so they said on TV (and of course, you do believe whatever they say right?). Nuff' talk. See for yourself if you don't believe me. Picture shot this morning when going to work. This is Boulevard Haussmann if you care. The picture was taken by a cheap camera embodied in a far-from-cheap phone.

Oh, and as any other cheap wannabe open-minded, cool Parisian, I usually take the Velib' (an almost free bike service in Paris) for 10 minutes or so to go from Chatelet to work. My path takes me through Avenue de l'Opera where I can see the beautiful Opera in all its majesty shining when Sun is not slacking.

Just a small dose of this miraculous Sun makes me wanna grow wings and fly over to it like Icarus. The only thing that is preventing me from doing so is that very small, insignificant hurdle called Evolution. Damn ! Darwin, why did you have to provide such a theory? It would have been far easier if we were ruled by Creationism (or even its reduced-price version, Intelligent Design). I'd just pray the Flying Spaghetti Monster and I'd grow some hypish Pastafarian wings in no time. Damn Damn Damn.

In February, 12th, 2008, many DocIsland members got together for a dinner at Chez Max, a correct restaurant located in Les Halles in downtown Paris. LVDTime, a founding member of DocIsland, came over from Nice where he lives to Paris and we took this opportunity to organize a dinner. The restaurant was suggested by bana who got dinner there a few times before.



LVDTime made some nice shots that I have finally cleaned up a bit and published on the DocIsland Pictures section. Better late than never or so they say!

We got a few drinks at Le Sous Bock Tavern, a traditional geek beer venue located a few meters away from the restaurant.

My friend betabug posted a nice review of a camera he recently bought from a department store (yes! your eyes are just fine...). He used to be a photographer and I guess he knows what he is talking about as much as a Polish plumber knows what a waterpipe is.

Before getting this camera, betabug used to take pictures with his phone. wildweasel, a fellow OpenBSD developer and a friend of both of us, used to complain about the "sucky" nature of those pictures, as betabug clearly states in his review:

but since wildweasel has burned a hole in my ears whining about my lousy phone camera pix, I had a look at the digicams.


Well, truth is ... I prefer the "sucky" phone pictures or more exactly the Photoshopped ones!

Here is a picture shot by the new camera:

Well, it's ... normal.

And here is a picture shot by the phone: (and photoshopped)


And another one:


Feel the strange, hazy, verging on the eery atmosphere of these pictures? It's like they have been shot in another space-time continuum. Give betabug a crappy phone camera, he'll produce true art (I really like those pictures a lot), give him a digicam he'll turn into your normal guy taking normal pictures in a normal World.

Phone pictures produce real emotions to their viewer. wildweasel hates them, I love them. The new camera pictures produce almost none, save for a *yawn* ;-)

Do you want betabug's phone-shot pictures back? Then sign the online petition I set up. The more signatures, the better.

I've noticed this morning that Haloscan offers the possibility of rating blog posts. I don't know if it's really useful at this time, maybe it allow me to quickly spot the kind of posts that you like more. Anyway, I activated the feature and you can now rate my blog posts, past, present or future. To do that, simply select the number of stars (on a scale of 5) and that's it.



Note that you need Javascript activated on your browser if you want to use this functionality. Moreover, if you have a FireFox filtering extension such as NoScript, you may need to temporarily or permanently allow Haloscan.

I will let this functionality activated on my blog for a few weeks/months to assess its usefulness. If proven completely useless, I will turn it off.

In 1998, I went to work in Japan for a 6 months period. It was my first real job in the computer industry. A year earlier, I was fresh out of the Engineering School (Ecole Mohammedia d'Ingénieurs, Rabat, Morocco). I sent a truckload of resumes to the local companies and landed an interview at The Casablanca Stock Exchange's IT department. I arrived there pretty early and the receptionist made me sit in a corner. I can't remember exactly how long I waited. But I am sure it was more than 45 minutes. You can imagine my frustration and it only got worse after the manager I had the interview with came down and took me to his office. He asked questions that didn't really make sense while answering many phone calls and reading the newspaper! I felt humiliated. This was more than enough for me to start looking actively for a way to escape the Moroccan "professional" World.

Was it my ka or something else when my long-time friend Fayçal came back to Morocco that summer? He has just finished his Engineering studies in Lyon, France. And he told me about his plans to study business. He happened to have a spare subscription form set for I.A.E. Poitiers, France. The interesting thing about that school was their strong relationships with Asia and Japan specifically. My father was often talking about the Japanese intelligence, the Japanese innovations, the Japanese processes... He had great respect for these people while not meeting one in his whole life. It was the challenge I needed. I wanted to check for myself. Are they more intelligent than anybody else on this Planet? If so, are there any obvious factors to learn from?

Subscribe. Go to France. Pass exam. Come back to Morocco. Gather what's needed for the travel. Go back to France. Study. Land a traineeship at Towa Elex Co. LTD, Tokyo, Japan.

In April 1998, I took the plane to Tokyo. I won't delve into how much of a shock I had, mainly due to the cultural differences. It felt like landing in an Alien planet, full of borgs (joking here to illustrate the shock's force. Nothing to do with how I really do feel about the Japanese) with different customs, different public transportation system ... and different everything! Well, I'll stop short here before starting to write uncontrollably about how much of an experience it was.

But i'd like to tell you one thing. It's about Tea. The very first cup of Tea I was offered there, as a sign of hospitality (or so I guessed), was a green sort that tasted...terrible! I made myself drink it not to offend my host. While I was used to drink Tea on a regular basis, it was the Green Powder Chinese sort that you can find everywhere in Morocco, used as a basis for the sugar-heavy Mint Tea. The Japanese Tea I was offered had no sugar, felt salty and had that my-hair-stands-straight-on-my-head taste of Algae. My goodness! What did I do to deserve this?

Adapt. I strongly wanted to adapt to this weird environment. And if it takes drinking some badly tasting fluid they called tea, so be it! More cups of it when down my throat without causing nausea or sudden death. I adapted to it but without really enjoying it. My mind simply started ignoring its taste.

A few years later, back to France, I surprised myself when ordering some at Japanese restaurants in Paris. I surprised myself even more when I started really enjoying it (and yeah, I even stopped drinking Mint Tea with sugar, it's all natural sugar-free now). I adapted to it very well, as I did for a whole range of food and drinks. The algae taste is not a problem anymore, quite the contrary.

Oh! By the way while I am writing this post I am drinking a wonderful cup of Sencha Fukuyu, the Tea I used to hate ;-). Kanpai!

Well, it's this time again! I'd like to wish you an excellent year 2008 full of every good thing your heart may desire.



And it's about time I come up with new resolutions for this year. But first let us take a quick look at my last year's resolutions.

Well, if you've read my HNY entry from last year, you knew that I made three resolutions:

• Give more love to the people I cherish and care for.
  
• Practice sport seriously and lose (many) extra kilos I've been carrying for too long.
  
• Get a driver license.

As for the first resolution, there is no "scientific" method I can measure with if it's a success or a failure. But from what I see, I consider it done. Don't get me wrong. It doesn't mean I gave a certain "quantity" of love to my loved ones and I'll just stop there. No way! I am always looking forward to give as much love and care to them as I can. And I will make sure I stick with it. Basically, this is now kind of an implicit resolution on the very very long-term until my body hits its grave.

What about the second one? Glad you asked (*cough*), this is one of the areas where I obtained awesome results. I went down from about 89 Kg to barely 74. There is almost no diet involved, besides avoiding eating between meals. The real reason is sports! I have a damaged meniscus that required surgery and this gave me enough of a kick to start on the right path. I regularly practice Power Walking, Nordic Walking and Swimming. I will give you more details about this on a later post.

As for the third one, I didn't make any progress. It's a total failure. This makes me rather sad but now ... it's my top priority for 2008!

I know you can no longer wait ;-) ... So here are Saad's Resolutions 2008:

• Get a driver license. (déjà vu ?)
  
• Re-engineer my "career". The idea behind this is very simple but requires heavy thinking to correctly implement. I need to isolate my top skill weaknesses and make them strengths. The goal here is to seek a better overall equilibrium in my skills as an infosec consultant.
  
• Learn Spanish. I currently speak three langages.

As always, three resolutions are more than enough to keep me busy a full year, besides my other duties.

Les Promesses De L'Ombre est un de ces films rares et précieux en ces temps de productions portées sur la surenchère visuelle et les scénarios prémachés faciles à digérer pour nos cerveaux peu habitués à la réflexion.

En surface, David Cronenberg nous sert un polar du meilleur cru avec la belle sage-femme, l'ignoble parrain russe, le fils un rien détraqué et la brute de chauffeur. Mais il suffit de prêter un peu plus attention pour dépasser cette surface et plonger au coeur du film. La lentille hollywoodienne nous présente (trop) souvent la violence de cette chère humanité que nous représentons sous une forme surréaliste avec des combats agencés et habillés d'effets spéciaux à vous couper le souffle. On en perdrait le sens des réalités. C'est là où Les Promesses De L'Ombre intervient. Les combats, rares, sont crus et très brutaux. L'adversaire n'est pas prévisible et on n'anticipe pas façon kata. On ne fait pas dans le beau mais dans l'efficace. Mais la dimension psychologique du film est encore beaucoup plus importante que quelques combats filmés de la manière la plus réaliste qui soit, sans passage par le filtre polarisant des effets spéciaux. C'est la collision de plusieurs mondes qui se côtoient tous les jours; collision de plusieurs visions de la réalité, si réalité il y a.

Certains bien-pensants s'arrêteront peut-être à la violence, un des fils conducteurs de l'oeuvre, et joueront la carte de l'offuscation. "Apologie de la violence !". Vous avez raison mais est-ce qu'il faut pour autant hésiter à regarder ce monde à travers cette lentille ne serait-ce que le temps d'un film poignant, à couper le souffle, avec des acteurs magistraux, et qui invite à la réflexion sur la nature humaine et cette fameuse notion de civilisation dont nous nous targuons.

Chapeau bas sir Cronenberg!

We've been to Morocco from 27th May to 13th June 2007 inclusive. We spent about 15 days in Rabat with my family. We then went to Marrakesh for the last 5 days. We had a great time. The weather was awesome and I enjoyed spending two weeks with my family, which I don't see so often. Even my mother, who lives in the U.S. was there for holidays. And she has wonderful hands when it comes to cooking...Yummy. To compensate for the heavy food intake, I exercised almost daily. Either power walking, running or swimming. We stayed at one of my sisters' home which is located near a nice park (Nouzhate Ibn Sina) where I exercised, often with Gaelle my wife. In Marrakesh, we enjoyed (like always) the nice food of Chez Chegrouni, a restaurant located in Jemaa El Fna. Highly advised.



I have posted a few pictures of our trip.

Yesterday I went for a power walk in the Angers countryside, where my wife's parents live. There is a nice circuit that I usually take. It's about 4 kms long. The road crosses a few farms with real cows(tm), and features nice, big trees on its sides. There are also very nice country houses made of stone. You can also hear birds singing (I'm not speaking about Paris-invading pigeons).

When I started, the weather was fine. Sunny, with a few clouds, and the temperature was excellent. As I strode across the road for about fifteen minutes, massive clouds arrived and it started to run very heavily. I was wearing sports shorts, a tshirt and a light sports sweatshirt. I looked for cover but only found a few trees around. There weren't efficient at protecting me from that rain because of the wind. So in about a minute or so, I was soaked to the bone. I had three options: wait under "cover" until the rain stops, run for it, walk for it. The first option was ruled out immediately by looking at the sky. There were big, grey clouds everywhere. The second option was not advised. I had walking shoes, not running ones. But more importantly, I didn't want to risk an injury in case I slipped on the wet tar. So I started walking again faster than ever. Five minutes later, I was "rescued" by Bibi, Caroline's boyfriend. She is my wife's sister. He took his car and came to pick me up.

After drying myself up, I took a book and relaxed. Five minutes later, the superb weather was here again. *sniff*. Not such a big surprise, given the 4SAD (4 Seasons A Day) we have currently in France. And they said Summer is only a week away... I just spent about eighteen days in Morocco and we had awesome weather almost all the time. I believe it's a Murphy conspiracy ;-)

It's been a long time that I didn't post anything on this weblog. It's been a pretty hectic time for me lately. Anyways, now you can see that I am back and the website has a new design! The third in about 18 months. I hope that you'll enjoy it. As always, feedback is more than welcome.

I am very happy to welcome Siegfried Noël (a.k.a. sieg) to DocIsland as the twelveth member of our not-so-small group. We had our traditional new member "welcome" dinner last Thursday in La Robe et Le Palais, an excellent Paris restaurant where you can have a wonderful meal and amazing wine.

sieg was kind enough to send me the necessary data to create his profile on our Website. Welcome on board mate!

I am extremely proud and happy to announce that Lily-Aya, my second child/daughter, was born today at 11:40 AM CET. We didn't know her gender until the very last second! And it was a very nice and thrilling experience. We did the same thing for Noée-Neyla, her elder sister.

At 3.640Kg and 51cm, she is a nice baby. Expect some pictures to be published on this website pretty soon (read: until I get some rest and finish selecting the nicest ones). In the meantime, here is one.

I'd like to wish you a happy new year 2007, full of every good thing your heart may desire. Did you make any good resolutions? I made three. Here they are in no particular order:

• Give more love to the people I cherish and care for.
  
• Practice sport seriously and lose (many) extra kilos I've been carrying for too long.
  
• Get a driver license.
  

I've been slacking too much on this but I finally devoted some time to publish some of the pictures we took during our trip to Barcelona in May 2006.

Barcelona is a gorgeous city. I think I fell in love with it and I am looking forward to visit it again. Next year hopefully...

I wish you a merry Christmas full of happiness, joy and every good thing your heart may desire! And please, remember... "He Who Relieves The Poor Makes Ahura King"

Finally, DocIsland counts now 11 members with the addition of Gabriel Merlet (a.k.a. gab) who joined our small group about one week ago. It is always interesting to have fresh blood added to the team. Moreover, gab looks really like an interesting guy (Hey! He enjoys Jazz and Funk music among many other genres). We took some pictures (pretty bad quality though since they were taken with a phone builtin camera) during the dinner we had with gab.

If you are curious about how would one join DocIsland, the first thing you need to know about is What Is DocIsland? A new member needs necessarily to know one or more existing members, and know them pretty well. Then one of those DocIsland members will make arrangements to suggest the addition of that person to the team. Then we set up a meeting to see if we get along with that person. The meeting is informal of course. It is held around a dining table in one of the many excellent Paris restaurants we know of such as Galopins Nation. Then we vote. And that's it.

What the advantages of joining DocIsland you might ask besides sharing pretty regularly nice drinks and food and having lots of geeky fun? Well you get free access to the DocIsland infrastructure which offers mail, Web hosting, DNS hosting, shell accounts, storage space, backup and other nice services, all backed with a pretty nice bandwidth. Moreover, you can also take part in our internal discussions and idea sharing about differing miscellaneous subjects such as Music (you would expect that if you are following this blog), I.T. (with a focus on Computer Security and Open Source software).

If you haven't noticed the new Friendly Links on the right navigation bar, it's a page that points to friends' websites as well as other links that are related to this website (in a very broad sense).

As you may have noticed, I have changed the theme and layout of the website. I got tired of the previous theme that I've been using since the creation of this website.

Mitch, a close friend of mine, brought my attention to other themes from the same vendor of my original one.

After reviewing them as best as I could, I bought the Phantom theme for RapidWeaver (the web creation software I use) from Blueball Design. This new theme is a 3 column one that takes advantage of some of the new features or RapidWeaver 3.5. I've tweaked the fonts in the CSS files to have a consistent font on all pages.

I hope you will enjoy the new looks of my website. Feedback is welcome.

Il y a quelques temps, nous (ma femme et moi) sommes tombés sur Bébé au naturel, un site vendant des produits diverses et variés, orientés plutôt soin du bébé et de ses parents. C'est là que nous avons découvert la noix de lavage indienne.

Comme son l'indique, c'est une noix qui permet de laver (en douceur s'il vous plaît) vos vêtements aussi bien blancs que couleur. Ca se présente sous forme d'un sac d'1 Kg. Vous en mettez un peu dans un petit sac en toile fourni dans la machine à laver et le tour est joué. En théorie, le sac doit faire 150 machines.

Nous l'utilisons depuis quelque mois et nous en sommes satisfaits. Le sac ne fera certainement pas les 150 machines théoriques mais je ne pense qu'il en sera très loin. Cependant, si vous avez des vêtements tâchés, il faut ajouter un détachant (décidemment, les produits chimiques ...).

Le prix, à mon humble avis, est très correct. Et pour celles et ceux qui ont un magasin Naturalia à côté, vous pourrez même économiser encore un peu par rapport au prix auquel ce produit de lavage est proposé sur Bébé au naturel.

Betabug pointed out this morning that the links on the archived posts were missing. After investigation, I found out that when I copied them from my previous blog site, the links were not correctly pasted over and it seems that my current blogging software simply removed them without a warning.

As far I can tell, all those links are live and kicking now. Don't forget to force reloading the pages or purge your cache. And if you still notice anything wrong, please let me know.

Sorry for the inconvenience. And thanks to Betabug for reporting the issue.

A few days ago, I picked up the copy of Cryptonomicon which I ordered on March 2001 (*cough*, blame it on my backlog). Aside from being a very interesting and funny book, I laughed my bowels out when I read the following paragraph:

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

Some may wonder what made me laugh. My fellow developers who are members of the OpenBSD project would understand that Cryptonomicon's Randy sounds a lot like our own leader, Theo de Raadt.

Did Neal Stephenson, the author of this book, interact with Theo? Maybe he was an OpenBSD developer in disguise. Or maybe the World.com(tm) is full of Theos and I'm way too blind. Or do we learn this kind of attitude in Manage Hackers 101? Either way, it's an excellent technique for getting work done.

I just added another photo gallery to the website. This one is populated with shots taken during a trip we made to Corsica in 2004. I was a bit worried at first since some natives showed aggressivity towards immigrants from Maghreb and the French media made big headlines on the subject.

When our ferry arrived, the first thing I noticed was a big writing on the wall in front of the arrival zone in Ajaccio : "Arabes Dehors" which means "Arabs Out".

Save for a few other writings on postal boxes (as if La Poste could carry persons), I felt no animosity and the travel was really enjoyable. Corsica fully deserves its surname. It is really The Island of Beauty.

I have populated the Pictures section of the website. It contains 8 galleries containing shots taken between 2003 and now. Some of these shots appeared on past incarnations of my website.

I will add more as time permits.

I have ("Finally!", would say Betabug) enabled Comments and Trackbacks on my weblog. This service is offered by HaloScan.com.

You can follow the comments by clicking on the Comments feed at the bottom of the right-hand navigation bar. To avoid comment spamming and off-topic posts, the comments will be moderated.

Les nouvelles catastrophiques, qui vous donnent mal au ventre, qui vous font maudire votre modernité ou haïr le voisin pour ce qu'il vous fait subir, continuent de pleuvoir sur le H5N1, virus version KFC, qui saute du poulet voire du canard vers nos chétifs corps humains tellement fragiles. H5N1, virus au doux nom (et je ne parle même pas des souches), qui nous fait tellement peur car il aurait tué une soixantaine de personnes en Asie et des millions de volatiles. C'est vrai, il ne sait pas encore bien sauter d'une espèce à une autre mais bon il apprend. C'est qu'il est malin l'animal. Et si jamais il y arrive, alors là il faut s'attendre au pire ! En attendant continuez à acheter le journal ou à fournir du temps disponible de votre cerveau à la télé. Comme vous l'aviez fait à l'époque du HIV ou du prion de la maladie de la vache folle. Je dis bien époque car comme on ne les voit plus dans les médias - allez, un jour par an à l'occasion de la journée mondiale du Sida ou tous les jours au supermarché dans le logo qui vous rassure quant à l'origine de votre belle pièce de viande - on peut supposer qu'ils ne font peu ou plus de victimes.

Ah vous ne savez-pas ce qu'est le H5N1 ? Vous aussi, vous vivez dans une cave et sélectionnez soigneusement vos lectures histoire de vous convaincre que le monde n'est pas si pourri que ça ? Ah mais attendez, en lecteur avisé qui n'a pas de temps disponible de cerveau à donner à qui que ce soit, vous devez certainement lire National Geographic, cette superbe revue qui vous fait découvrir des endroits merveilleux et des paysages hallucinants de beauté (oui, oui c'est sur Terre. On ne croirait pas en lisant les quotidiens). Dommage, le numéro d'octobre est plein d'espoir lui aussi : la fin du pétrole, un petit clin d'oeil aux Français avec la bataille de Trafalgar histoire d'enfoncer le clou après Paris qui perd les Jeux Olympiques (pensez temps disponible) face à Londres, les éléphants thaïlandais maltraités dont l'avenir est fort incertain, et bien sûr un superbe dossier avec de belles photos à l'appui de H5N1, Monsieur Grippe Aviaire.

Pas d'inquiétude pour les Français. L'institut Pasteur est là et le gouvernement veille au grain. Il paraît que la France a acheté des vaccins pour un quart de la population (l'Histoire nous dira peut-être pour quel quart). Sauf que le vaccin en question a donné des résultats satisfaisants (le communiquant aguerri aura compris "mouais ... ça peut aller") ... mais H5N1 change souvement de déguisement et le vaccin n'est pas capable de repérer tous les déguisements. Hahaha, je vous sentais partir d'un pas rassuré mais non mais non ! Restez encore un peu.

Vous allez voir, au bout d'un moment vous allez vous y faire. Comme pour tout d'ailleurs. Loin derrière sont vos craintes concernant le H7N7 (si si, ça existe vraiment), Ebola, le HIV (on a réussi à bien l'exporter celui-là comme nos déchets nucléaires et autres monstruosités vers la poubelle du Monde), notre prion préféré, etc. etc. etc. Mais bon, il faut pas vous sentir en sécurité et, Business is Business : il faut continuer à vendre du média et du temps disponible du cerveau.

S'il fait comme le Sida, le H5N1 fera la une un temps après avoir tué peut-être quelques millions de personnes (une broutille parmi les 5 ou 6 milliards que nous sommes) et bien plus de volailles (Si on faisait ça avec les virus informatiques ... J'ose même pas imaginer les conséquences) et pouf ! Plus de nouvelles, bonnes nouvelles comme on dit. Les végétariens vont encore crier au meutre quand ils verront toutes ces bêtes se faire massacrer. Qui prend les paris sur le super-entrepreneur qui va s'occuper de ces volailles et résoudre en même temps les problèmes de famine en Afrique (ah, vous saviez pas pour le Darfour ? C'est vrai que le Tsunami est plus touchant) quitte à refiler un petit extra à ces pauvres gens ?

En tant que virus numéro 1, il faut mériter sa place n'est-ce pas ? On ne va quand même pas laisser le H5N1 nous la prendre si facilement.

Pour finir sur une note d'espoir, il paraît que le H5N1 a pris des billets pour la Roumanie et la Turquie histoire de tâter le terrain. D'aucuns croient que c'est en fait un agent du fisc de Dame Nature. Selon les rumeurs qui courent, l'espèce humaine n'aurait pas payé ses impôts même après moultes lettres de semonce. Il faut donc faire des prélèvements à la source histoire d'équilibrer un peu la dette. Dame Nature n'est pas aussi gentille que le FMI.

je suis sorti trop longtemps de ma cave. J'y retourne de suite. Je compte sur vous pour me tenir au courant.

As a follow-up to my Mediating Poverty, How So? post, Nick Holland, a very good friend whom I met through our common work on the OpenBSD Project, tells us this:

I wasn't sure if I should hit "reply" or "reply all" on this one. I am
rather proud of this one, so I hit "reply all", maybe someone else can
make something useful of my comments.

I did what Saad is suggesting...

Before I shut down my consulting business, I worked with a small charter
school, about 200 students in the 9th through 12th grades. Charter
schools are an experiment in the US in areas with failing public schools
-- they are publicly funded, but operate very differently from a public
school, typically managed by a for-profit company, typically non-union.
To say they are controversial is a horrible understatement. They have
been a mixed success -- some fail miserably, some succeed brilliantly.
However, they give alternatives to some of our students who would
otherwise have to go to hell-holes we sometimes call schools.

I build them a lab...

* Netware server, pulled out of my basement.
* Netware license, donated by a client of mine who was upgrading in such
a way that the old licenses were "available" (this was verifed with
Novell at the time). Netware 3.2, btw, runs great on 486 and low-end
Pentium systems.
* Tape drive: pulled out of my basement.
* 30 desktop computers, $40 each for PII-333MHz, 128M RAM, 6G HD.
* We got new keyboards and mice because the kids seemed to go nuts over
the idea that they were getting SOMETHING "new" -- even if it was a six
dollar mouse and a four dollar keyboard...which was vastly inferior to
the old IBM keyboards they already had, but we had some money left over,
we went for the grins.
* Windows 98 licenses are available without charge for donated computers
for schools. We may have played a little fast and lose here, as it
wasn't exactly "donated", but close...goodness knows I donated a lot of
time to make it all work.
* OpenOffice
* OpenBSD firewall (used one of their old computers for the FW, misc.
upgrades from my basement).
* Old 10/100 hubs donated by a client
* HP LaserJet 4si saved from dumpster from a client
* donated labor on the part of me, my dad, and a couple teachers

The result was a system which was incredibly cheap to install, very easy
to maintain, very stable, enough spare computers on the shelf to replace
ones in the lab that broke. The teacher I built this with had formerly
worked at a very afluent district in the area, she told me "her" lab was
vastly superior to the labs at her former employer, which were just put
in a year or two earlier with all brand new, very expensive HW and
software, in terms of ease of use, uptime, managability, recoverability
when something broke, and overall satisfaction.

This works. It works really well. I can't tell you how proud I was of
that system. It was the achieving of some goals I've had for over 25
years, and it worked very much as I expected.

There are problems, however.
A number of the students were upset over the fact that their "new"
computers weren't brand new. They wanted new, and didn't care about the
rest. They didn't care about the fact that none of them could type well
or write well, and few of them were even proficient readers.

A shocking number of the students couldn't care less about the age of
the machines, as long as they were Dells. Apparently, Dell has a very
effective marketing campaign, these high-grade IBM machines didn't do it
for them because they were not Dells.

In the US, this "experiment" would never happen at any normal public
school. I've watched the process in my local district, the purpose
there was to spend money and to have pictures of kids in front of Brand
New Computers, not actually getting anything done with them. It takes a
special teacher (which we had), it takes a special school management
(which we had), and it takes parents willing to look for results, not
name tags. That's all stuff that is harder to come by than money here.


All that being said...
At least in the US, computers in classrooms are so poorly used normally,
I have no particular desire to see more of them. The students aren't
learning Internet safety. They aren't learning how to do proper
research. They don't understand what is happening when they punch
something into google and it comes up with "the answer". At "My"
school, we took a stab at a lot of that...but no one else even tries.

Computers or teacher's saleries? I'd rather pay the teachers.
Computers or food for hungry school kids? I'd rather feed them.
Computers or books? I'd rather they learn the idea of good research in
books over typing stuff into google and seeing what comes out.

When I was in school, we were prevented from using encyclopedias,
because of the lack of diversity. Now, we let kids do all their
research "on line", and they have no tools to understand the stuff they
come across..what is good research? What is an authoritative source?
What is an expert opinion? What is a non-expert opinion? What is
someone just bad-mouthing or building up a product/person/idea? These
kids have no clue on this stuff. We did something to help a little by
teaching them web page creation (using Notepad, btw, not an HTML layout
program!), then published it, so they had some idea how little effort
was required, and how anyone could say ANYTHING on the 'net, but I'm not
sure how much of that sunk in. I had suggested that they do a
"wrong-research" project -- "prove" the holocaust didn't happen, "prove"
we didn't go to the moon, "prove" there was no slavery in the US, etc.,
not sure that ever happened, however.

Oddly, for a skeptic of computers in the classroom, I owe my later
schooling to a computer. I'm dyslexic and ADD, without a computer, I'm
functionally illiterate, I can not write by hand. The first time I
turned a paper in I wrote on a computer word processor (in 1983), I was
the first student to do so in my class -- and I nearly got expelled from
school for it, as it was so much better than anything I had ever written
before, it couldn't have been mine. Fortunately, my teacher had enough
faith in my intelegence that she didn't believe I'd ever cheat in a way
that she would catch, and believed me when I told her it was all my
work. However, I look at things now, over 20 years later...and I'd
still probably have the exact same problems in school I had then...the
answer would be sitting all around me, but it wouldn't be available to
help me in the ways I needed help. Twenty and twenty-five years ago,
everyone "knew" computers belonged in a classroom, but no one knew what
to do with them. Today...people still don't know what to do with
them...and they are sucking up huge amounts of education funding.

Anyway..much more I could write on this topic...it is very dear to me,
but I'm way overdue for bed. |-)

oh, btw: well written article, Saad. :)


Nick.

In his From the Editor's column in the August 2005 issue of MIT's Technology Review, Jason Pontin covers Mr. Negroponte's Hundred-Dollar Laptop or HDL. Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, told U.S. IT industry leaders his hope to build many HDLs starting from 2006 in order to get an HDL in every child's hand since he believes that education is paramount to solve many problems.

Jason Pontin tells us this:

The HDL has a number of other, intriguing features. Since many villages in the poor world do not have electricity, the machines may be powered by either a crank or "parasitic power"--that is, typing. Once turned on, HDLs will automatically connect to one another using a "mesh network" initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. In the mesh network each laptop serves as an information-relaying node. Households that have HDLs will be able to communicate with each other by e-mail or voice calls [...]

Jason Pontin ends up his column by asking if the readers think the HDL (which has its own website now) could be built. I answered him by stating the obvious: the HDL has already been built. Here is my answer:

Hi there Jason,

I've read with great interest your "From the editor" column on the Aug. 05 issue of Technology Review. As such, I would like to answer your question about whether the HDL could be built or not. The answer is pretty obvious: The HDL has already been built and for much less than a hundred dollars. I'd rather call it the LTHDM (Less-Than-Hundred-Dollar-Machine).

There are millions of LTHDM units waiting for people to use them but very few actually think of doing so. Instead they are sent to China and other countries to be dismantled and to contribute to more pollution of the environment. Yes, I'm speaking about your 3/4 years old desktop machine. And the machines of your coworkers, neighbours, friends, family etc etc etc. Just get a look at eBay. There are thousands if not millions of PCs that cannot satisfy the dominant desktop operating system and some of its bloated applications due to lack of RAM, hard drive, processor speed or some other hardware feature. And given the proper structure (local associations, negotating shipment contracts, volunteers to set up the machines and so on), we can really get LTHDM units for a very interesting price.

So instead of offering poor children machines that have not been field-tested, let's ship them our old machines loaded with a *BSD or GNU/Linux free operating system that will run like a charm on them. Instead of concentrating on new technology, let's focus on the real needs of those peoples and in the process, we may spare the environment some troubles.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Mr. Negroponte should start thinking about how to get the proper infrastructure to buy LTHDM units, test and prepare them (by stripping too-demanding components for his "parasitic power" technology for example) then ship them to the peoples in need. I just don't get it why we have to built new machines while we already have millions of them that will handle the task at hand very well. We can also mesh them in a way that will allow us to have one or two "big iron" LTHDM units in a meshed network while the other are pretty much "dumb" terminals. And we have almost (all?) the technology today to do so and more.

As a final note, we should drop once and for all this "western" view of the World and go ask these peoples whether should we spend a hundred dollars in a computer
and Internet access or in healthcare and nutrition.

What do you think? Let me know at saad@docisland.org.

A normal day
During summer '04, I was going back home as on any normal day after work. I live in Fresnes, in the southern suburbs of Paris and I work at Val De Fontenay, southeast of Paris. For commuting back and forth, I take public transportation (see below). It's an average 1h10min oneway ride taking the bus and two RERs.

Paris Paris
If you already visited Paris and took public transportation (the legendary Metro for example), you have certainly been surprised at the closed, smileless, gloomy faces of Paris inhabitants. People do not talk that much to each other (I call that the Big City Syndrom, but I haven't patented that word yet). And when they talk each other, they don't speak loud and keep their voice volume set to low.

A Spanish Attack, French hide!
Enter our Spanish trio. two women and a little girl. I'd say one of the women is the mother and the other one is the grandmother of the little girl. But since I only understand very few Spanish words, I can't say for sure. They took the bus shortly after I took it myself. Before they got in, it was your usual bus ride in Paris and suburbs. Almost complete silence of the humans. Closed, smileless faces. I was lost in some random thoughts about work and family feeling tired and thinking about how good the shower will be.

The Spanish Strategy
At the moment they entered the bus, even though I didn't see them immediately, I felt something is different. Someone was talking and talking loud! At first I thought they were arguing about something but looking at them, they seemed to have a normal chat about some normal situation. Oh my! I felt different. Like if they brought in some good energy with them. They were acting like they were in their house. I felt excited and joyful. Now that I think about it, it's like they took me with them back to my roots. Morrocco. Where strangers talk to each other (well at least 8 years ago) naturally and the voice volume is set to medium to high (ever heard a Morroccan speaking on the phone? They actually yell at the phone!).

Disruption
The Spanish trio changed the normal flow of life for a few minutes and you could sense it. Some people looked angry at those people speaking loud. They might be thinking something like :

Who are they? Who do they believe themselves are? Why they don't follow the local conventions? Please , why they don't stop that?


Personally, I found this experience enlightening. Imagine Paris without the Big City Syndrom (BCS) or full of Spanish (by the way, is Madrid victim to BCS?). It could make our days better. It could help us encounter amazing people, share ideas and so on. We won't need stupid stuff like Orkut and the likes of so-called online social networks.

Just three of these disruptive agents made me laugh and cheerful.

A note or two about public transportation

I take public transportation for two reasons. First, I don't have a driver license. I'm 30 years old and I feel uncomfortable driving cars. Second, it's better for the environment. Imagine how Paris will look without all those traffic jams? yes, better landscape, better air quality, less pollution related illnesses.