Archive for April, 2003

VoIP in the enterprise market

Wednesday, April 30th, 2003

Kevin Werbach reports on an interesting forecast:

According to InStat, “2003 will be the year when IP station shipments first exceed traditional PBX stations.” The enterprise VOIP marke grew 60% last year.

What they didn’t teach you in school

Wednesday, April 30th, 2003

Slightly less common latin phrases

Sona si Latine loqueris… Imaginative…

[via A Frog in the Valley]

Phénomia

Tuesday, April 29th, 2003

Je ne sais pas combien d’inscriptions Star Académie a reçu, mais j’aimerais souligner certaines statistiques assez incroyables pour la nouvelles série Phénomia. On parle ici de 104 319 téléchargements du formulaire et 2 380 inscriptions… croyez-moi, ça en fait des boîtes !

Le tout est à suivre sur Vrak.TV dès le 15 août 2003 !

Merci infopresse, qui en passant a aussi un petit vidéo d’un pub démontrant les effets néfastes du cellulaire !, mais d’une manière assez… comique.

Free cone day

Tuesday, April 29th, 2003

Tomorrow is Ben & Jerry’s free cone day

[via backup brain]

Scale

Sunday, April 27th, 2003

Ever wondered about the size of stuff? No, not the kind of size that supposedly does not matter. This is about the size of buildings and other works (including imaginary ones). One could argue about the phallic sybolism there too, but I don’t want to go there.

Well,
I knew about the SkyScraper page, which has beautiful drawings of, well, skyscrapers. Great to settle bets and they have a page for Montreal with 80 eligible buildings, which places us in 8th place in North America apparently. Quite a few buildings in there I never considered skscrapers though.

Boing Boing points to “1 pixel per meter” which build on the concept and add things such a Godzilla, the Hindenburg, the Jahre Viking and a bunch of scifi starships. If you like starships, there is a whole bunch here.

I think all these sites rip off content from each other though.

Blogger code

Sunday, April 27th, 2003

NSLog();Tits & WitsBlogger code
B2 d+ t+ k s+ u f i o- x– e- l- c

NSLog();BlogsharesBlog listed after much procrastination

Star Académie, un modèle éducatif?

Saturday, April 26th, 2003

Un billet passant de Star Académie (Bon, American Idol, mais c’est pareil) à Linux puis à l’éducation.

Intéressante progression, même si je ne suis pas certain de bien saisir la base de l’argumentation. Je crois que ca tourne autour du fait qu’un show de télé interactif permet à l’auditoire de se sentir responsable du produit. D’où le lien avec les logiciels libres. “It’s not hard to invest in something that you were a part of.” L’auteur postule ensuite qu’il faudrait appliquer la même dynamique à l’éducation.

Intéressant. Mais je me demande si ce modèle interactif est transposable de façon générale. Par exemple, ne somme nous pas les premiers à nous plaindre quand les politiciens naviguent aux sondages? La possibilité d’un glissement vers la démagogie n’est que trop facile. Enfin, l’idée de responsabiliser les étudiantss face à leur apprentissage est difficilement contestable en elle-même.

[via Remolino]

Moist towelette

Saturday, April 26th, 2003

I saw a posting the other day on Slashdot about a web page discussing the different kinds of moist towelettes. It’s slashdotted into oblivion now but I had seen the page before, thanks to Memepool.

Read below to see my modest contribution to cause.

(more…)

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit

Saturday, April 26th, 2003

Retrouvé cet ex libris dans un livre de mon grand-père.

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit faisait dire Virgile à Énée dans l’Énéide (I,203) : « Peut-être un jour ces souvenirs auront pour vous des charmes ».

Le contexte selon Ab Nihilo: «Chers compagnons, ce n’est pas d’aujourd’hui que nous connaissons les revers ; nous en avons éprouvé de plus grands. Vous avez vu de près la rage de Scylla et ses rochers retentissants. Vous avez connu les antres affreux des Cyclopes. Peut-être un jour ces souvenirs auront pour vous des charmes ! ».

J’aime bien l’application au contexte des études.

Enough extensions!

Saturday, April 26th, 2003

Computer book publisher O’Reilly & Associates has decided to limit some of their books’ copyrights, adopting the Founders’ Copyright program of the Creative Commons! This makes a lot of sense, especially for technical books in a field where the commercial lifespan of the technology is so short. Congrats! We are winning… slowly but surely :)

Illico : Swell!

Friday, April 25th, 2003

Vidéotron gagne du terrain dans mon palmarès des câblodistributeurs!

Le service est presque 100% fiable maintenant, la qualité de l’image s’améliore, de plus en plus de films sont accessibles en Dolby Digital…

…et on peut maintenant changer sa sélection de canaux sur le site web de Vidéotron instantanément! Les nouveaux canaux choisis sont accessibles en moins de 30 secondes suivant l’accès au compte sur le site. On dirait de la magie!

Belle façon d’éviter 15 minutes de taponnage au téléphone…

Losing momentum

Friday, April 25th, 2003

In a rather surprising decision, considering the previous history of such cases, Morpheus/Grokster and Streamcast won against the RIAA in the district court. Basically, the “substantial non-infringing uses” of the Betamax case were let out for the first time in many years. The control criterias used against Napster were not applicable to decentralized systems, hence no contributory infringement.

The DMCA already bypasses the Betamax decision, but this case did not involve circunvention devices. Note that the judge did not seem particulary sympathetic to the defendants in the decision:

The Court is not blind to the possibility that Defendants may have intentionally structured their businesses to avoid secondary
liability for copyright infringement, while benefitting financially from the illicit draw of their wares. [...], additional legislative guidance may be well-counseled.

I’d except the decision to stand but not the law…

Coverage at LawMeme, Copyfight, Cnet, Slashdot and the excellent Furdlog. Decision at EFF.

Note Taking 202

Thursday, April 24th, 2003

Can you imagine yourself in a classroom where students can collaboratively write notes on the same document? It seems like a great idea to me on the educative side of things, and it did work fine for the talk Jason Kottke attended.

I wrote about Hydra before, but that use didn’t occur to me at the time. I was more thinking of Extreme Programming or simultaneous editing of long documents.

I remember when, in secondaire IV, me and two other guys ended up typing our history notes. There was a bit more than 100 pages, single spaced in Times 12… It could have saved us a bunch of time, and give us a better result in the end.

4 jeudis

Thursday, April 24th, 2003

Il neige.

Nortel a enregistré un bénéfice.

Moi je change mes plans de week-end, c’est clair qu’on va avoir quatre jeudis cette semaine.

QOTD

Thursday, April 24th, 2003

Screw me once, shame on you.

Screw me twice, shame on me.