Xavier Defrang

I have quite a decent bathroom collection of computer games and programming magazines (from 1986 to 2000) and that's an endless source of bogus predictions and phoney reviews.

We'll start with a quote coming straight from the dot-com era:

(...) studies have shown that, in Europe, by 2004, 200 millions mobile devices will be WAP enabled and 60% of all internet connections will be initiated with mobiles.

- Sophie Bocquillon (september 2000, in Programmez, p. 44) *

* I highly suspect the article featuring this quote to be an infomercial, although it was not advised as is and it seamlessly blend into the other very poor content of the magazine.

I incidentally noticed a very clever feature of the iPod Shuffle: when you unplug the headphones cord, the playback is automatically paused. This kind of detail tells you a lot about Apple engineers outstanding care for detail.

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

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". ;)

Birthday present time is slighlty approaching... hint.

The SACEM (the french RIAA) wants to racket Apple by reclaiming an estimated $20 fee on each iPod... just like somebody was still caring about such money sucking businesses that transfer bucks from everyone's pocket right to the bank account of a few hundred best selling crap-making artists.

Do you remember a revolutionary new kind of device called the Tablet PC? Wasn't that thing supposed to invade offices all over the world and replace laptops? How many months since MSFT stopped talking about this technology? Now what's happened to the Tabled PC?

This crap will probably be remembered as the virtual reality helmet of the early 2000. I suppose all the manufacturers who followed the cluefull MSFT on this one will thank them one day or another...

It's always a good reality-check to google for "technology-name-here sales" months after the hype faded...

This book looks like a fun read : In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters.

Cool gadget of the week : Commodore 64 Emulator for Nokia 3650!

John Gruber : The corporate IT field is in large parts comprised of men who are not smart enough to program, but yet wanted a career in computers. They are the fifth wheel of corporate America ó serving no practical purpose but their own employment. (...) The only difference between ìmost peopleî and ìmost corporate IT professionalsî is that the IT guys arenít intimidated. Theyíre not afraid to re-install everything from scratch, theyíre not afraid to double-click attachments, and theyíre not afraid to open the case to install some RAM. But how anything actually works? No clue.

That's a fantastic reality check for the whole IT industry, I wish this rant was printed in all major IT magazines... maybe some day, the industry will figure out that it could have lived without all those braindead, service pack addicted desktop PC techies.

Iraq is Big Brother's new playground and testbed : U.S. interrogators in Iraq are building a digital catalog of prisoners of war and loyalists of Baath Party, scanning and saving their fingerprints and other body characteristics in databases.