Xavier Defrang

That's it, it's now safe to say that the biggest product export from France to Belgium is its morons. The invasion started with a first wave of second grade artists and students but now my area is getting crowded by wealthy Parisians.
And I mean the kind of Parisian stupid enough to have a bas ass SUV with a 75 license plate. The kind that has enough cash to export his noisy, smokey, completely burned out lifestyle and actively take part in the steady decrease of the quality of life in Brussels. If you've ever been there, you know Parisians just behave like... Parisians! It started with Parisian guerilla parking techniques, quickly followed up with typical Parisian style whining in shops and restaurants but today we've reached a point of non return in terms of annoyance.

I was just walking down the street, when a young guy stops me :

French Guy - Excuse me, where are we?
Me - We're some-street-name-here
French Guy - Nooo, we're in 8th finals!

Considering the actual performance of their football team, this must be the absolute worst case of french assholeism I've ever encountered in my whole life! This is such a brilliant example of the Parisian rudeness...

I have to admit it's now a terrible time to live in France or even to be French. So they're probably doing whatever it takes to feel like they're still a significant nation in a globalized world. Pauvre France...

Last night, I crashed into the Wild Geese, your typical overseas « Irish Pub », located on the ground floor of an anonymous office building in the European district. I've been drawn there about four times but I always felt like half of the people in there were completely desperate. A perfect depiction of this feeling can be found in « Extension du domaine de la lutte », one of the most thought provoking book I've read and movie I've seen.

The most dramatic place in the pub is that small dancefloor packed with butt ugly girls wearing expensive clothes, peeped at by testosterone-sweating, obviously single males with more cash than actual sex-appeal. As no interaction occur, people occasionally pull their mobiles out of their pockets and frantically press some buttons just to pretend that they're so cool that their numerous friends spend their whole saturday night sending them messages.

Everytime I went to the Wild Geese, It has been an incredible social experience for me, this place is so full of would-be MILFs, nerdy expats, good looking gigolos of various mediteranean descent and Pat Bateman neverwases in eurocrat suits...

EFF's Cory Doctorow opened the day with an excellent keynote about DRM.

• Broadcast Flag is not capitalism, it's kleptocracy
• Remember the role of "View Source" in the early days of the web
• Studios exploiting the "Broadcast Flag Gap" between Europe and US to push new laws on both sides of the pond
• Eat your competitors lunch: don't bow before content industry and deliver the technology your users want.

Nokia's director of multimedia applications Christian Lindholm gave a great speech about the future of mobile applications:

• Mobile icons of today: laptop and monoblock phone
• If it's not in the pocket, it's not mobile: « Everyone who owns an iPod stand up? (almost everybody in the room stands up) Now, if you have it in your pocket show it (only a few iPods show up) »
• Think about the other 50% of the world population, females: they don't even have pockets!
• Dominant design: monoblock, sliders, clamshell
• New dominant design: the transformer? Is to the phone what the Lederman is to the Swiss Army knife.
• Picture and video capture in mobile phones are a memory augmenting feature
• Metadata enriched and timeline-based picture browsing
• Google taught us that when the amount of data tends toward infinity, the UI shrinks to the bare minimum
• Location metadata has to be democratized
• The architecture: data > metadata (timestamps, ...) > superdata (relations between objects, private metadata, external, not embedded in objects) > Access Methods / Browsing / Sharing / Search > Mobile Devices / Laptops / Internet Servers / Home

Malthe Sigurdsson told us about the Skype brand:

• Skype: application you use to talk through the internet for free and forever.
• A Small, Big Company: 160 people in 15 countries
• Free implies that you don't have to spend mental energy taking care of the communication costs
• The brand is the product is the brand is ...
• Release all the time, aggressive schedule, no PR stunts: the added value of meeting a deadline is nothing compared to the added value of getting things out fast
• Skype has plans to further open their IM platform

Jyri Engeström gave a pretty academic talk on object-centered sociality:

• Social network maps show how people connect but not why. What connects them? People don't connect to each other, they connect through a shared object.
• Tagging, crafting, tuning, hacking are key features of those objects to make the network sustainable.
• Bloggers invented a format of discussions which turned them into social objects.
• When you think about networks, think about objects and eventually you'll think about play

Doug Bowman gave a pleasant speech about standards-based design nothing excitingly new there but it was still entertaining stuff.

Cluetrain's David Weinberger delivered an afternoon keynote entitled

The Natural Shape of Knownledge, it was pretty hairy and covered a lot of aspects but the things I remember the most were:

• Owner of the information is no longer the owner of its categorization (power to the user)
• Taxonomies: from trees to pile of leaves
• Unlike blogs, most commercial sites are just afraid to link to the outside world
• Topics get smaller (see Wikipedia articles on obscure subjects)

The talk about Social and Psychological Sides of Software Architecture was a complete catastrophe. Was anyone expecting an analogy between software and so-called brick-n-mortar architecture? I thought that this kind equivocal thinking was reserved to architects fed up building suburban homes! In addition, the speaker was actually not so good so I left the building to enjoy a bit of sun and fresh air...

Matt Webb's Fixing Broken Windows, Human perception and the user interface was smart and appealing:

• Fix the little things first to prevent big bad things to happen
• Things you perceive affect the way you behave on a global scale
• When screen resets (i.e. page reload), it resets the users visual buffer
• If something flies toward you, it pushes everything out of your mind, it grabs all your attention (bad examples includes Apple Keynote transitions and DashBoard)

But, as a coder at heart, the most thought provoking and mind blowing session was most certainly Matt's discussion about Physics and the Future of Computing.

His point was that types (and eventually schemas) must die. Use Duck Typing. It's all about aspects, capabilities, conventions, assertions, expectations, ...

One thing struck me: this whole conference was about forward thinkers and almost everyone in the room was a Python and/or Ruby developer, some more exotic languages such as IO or Haskell were mentioned as well. Oh boy, the future has never looked so bright, and Java is already out of the game. I'll certainly provided further development about these ideas within a few days as the they get digested and reprocessed...

If I had to extract 3 trends from these 2 days at Reboot, they would be:

• Metadata
• Simplicity
• Skype

Here we go for a little round-up of the sessions I attended today...

Doc Searls delivered a very entertaining keynote covering a very wide spectrum of issues ranging from the transformation of vocabulary to free speech. The bottom line was: get up now and stand up for your rights!

Robert Scobble made a terrific job at putting everyone back to sleep. After being introduced by the host with the famous "Microsoft has no taste" Jobs quote, he tried to play it cool with a live IRC feed running on the big screen. But this presentation was plain boring: did anyone in the audience really needed an explanation of what blogs and PageRank are all about? Please, this was no Visual Basic Developers conference...

Michael Heilemann's lessons from the Kubrick template was a talk on open source design. The session was actually a bit like the template itself: not really bad but nothing groundbreaking neither.

Dina Mehta gave an uplifting talk about the rise of social and collaborative software (the combined use of Blogs, Wikis, VoIP, mobile messaging, ...) in India in the perspective of the crisis management and business development.

Ben Cerveny's presentation about games as dynamic systems model was thought provoking but maybe a bit too fast-paced at some points. I don't if it's because he was anticipating the lunch break that much or if my brain was just too slow.
Citing Nintendo as an example, Ben said that as games are getting closer to reality, the subsequent player boredom will leave even more room for abstraction and surrealism just like when photography 'killed' painting. He also gave some interesting insight about the collision - which is bound to happen - between virtual and real economies.

Jimbo Wales told the audience about the wisdom of Wikipedia and other projects from the Wikimedia Foundation. Some pretty interesting figures were shown regarding the demographics of Wikipedia editors and Wales also provided some explanation about the associated quality insurance and community processes. A very good example of how a loose system managed with a flexible policy can end up producing quality.

I was a bit disapointed by the talk about Goal-oriented and Persona-based design as the resulting overall process seems very linear and doesn't leave a lot of space for client interaction. There were some interesting ideas which could be especially useful when designing task-oriented user interfaces but I think I'll stick to the wireframe and mock-up iterative design approach.

Jason Fried of the 37signals & Basecamp fame delivered a really brilliant speech about building successful projects with small teams. Here are some random notes I took:

• Small teams is about less for more.
• Get rid middle/muddle managers to avoid distortion and put everyone on the frontline
• Go for the simplest solution to lower the cost of change
• Say no by default and let features remind themselves
• Don't add, think about improving first
• Every decision is temporary
• Get your software out of the way of the user
• Functional specs are political documents aimed at blaming people
• No problem till it's a problem
• Big design upfront Vs Making decisions when you have real information

Too bad, I still can't see how that kind of attitude can work with small teams embedded in larger structures ridden with system dependencies, politics, ass-guarding, job protection and fear.

David Heinemeier Hansson's Ruby on Rails talk was a nice explanation of the origins and design philosophy behind the best web development framework to date. Some of the highlights:

• Being quick without getting dirty
• Be it PHP or Java, it's not fun to keep fighting a language or an environment. Most programmers are not happy because they have to deal with harassing technology
• Investment to get started is key to success
• No academic aspirations, Rails is no revolution: patterns deja-vu (MVC, ORM, ...), shared-nothing architecture (PHP-like), familiar open-source foundations (Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL).
• Old ideas, new context: Taking a good idea in Java to make it a great idea with Ruby.
• Convention over Configuration: optimize the common case. It's a trade-off, flexibility doesn't mean that everything should be equally hard.
• Choice is overrated especially in programming stack, flexibility is not free. Apple gets this. Trade some flexibility to earn a lot of productivity in return.
• Languages of love, platforms of passion. Unlike Java, assume competence; Attract programmers caring for the craft; Motivation determines productivity. Programmers who shoot themselves in the foot with the gun the (dynamic) language offer them would be bad programmers in any language anyway.
• Ruby on Rails is the sum of all its parts and the philosophy around it
• Culture clash with 'Enterprise Developers' (That won't scale! But is it mature! Nobody ever got fired for...). Java people just say what C++ folks said when Java came out.
• Ruby on Rails just steal the ideas from the 'smart guys' and give them to all those 'green programers' to play with
• Bottomline: no single, big innovation

This conclude my report of the first day of Reboot!

I'm taking off tomorrow morning to spend a few days in Copenhagen and attend Reboot. The talks I anticipate the most are:

• The Social and Psychological Sides of Software Architecture by Peter Lindberg
• Doing Big Things with Small Teams by Jason Fried of the 37signals fame
• Ruby on Rails: Tech, Necessity, and Passion... or why Developers with a cause are more productive

You can expect some almost live feedback but no MacWorld-like fanatic coverage... So, no "18:29:43CET - David takes the stage wearing a 'Java Sucks' sweater and a denim". ;)

corrupt bureaucratic scumbags!

Way to go! Ireland bans smoking in pubs and restaurants. Yes! It's high time people have the right to choose not to be exposed to the cancer of irresponsible others. Am I really supposed to have my throat on fire for 3 days after attending a smoker-bloated party? Too bad it will be practically impossible to ban smoking in such places...

Now that's a backlash : Prime Minister Tony Blair has been voted the most unpopular person in Britain -- followed by a topless model and the nation's first female premier Margaret Thatcher...

Labour suspended the controversial anti-war MP George Galloway. Don't mess with warmongers. Never.

On an ordinary day in a country during peacetime...

Impaled birds are roasting behind shop windows. Dismembered bodies are decorating market stalls. On the bridges of boats twitching fish are slowly asphyxiating. Dismal lives are spent in foul-smelling hangars. Live animals have their beaks, teeth and testicles forcibly removed. Specially designed feeding funnels are forced into throats. Everywhere there are lorries stuffed with the condemned. Those that will have their throats cut, bleed and be carved up.

On this ordinary day, there are millions filled with fear and suffering. In this country at peace; torture and murder are a part of daily life.

On may 17, there will be a Veggie Pride in Paris

UK keep on following the trends set by US : One in every 100 black British adults is now in prison.