François Nonnenmacher, aka padawan

Matt Haughey has a very interesting post about how commenting on blogs has (badly) evolved in the past years. And the ensuing comments are worth the read too (is this a counter-argument to his point?).

Methink, reading Andrew Anker's comment about Vox, that I should try something about anonymous comments: register with a valid email address or pay 1€ for commenting anonymously ;-).

Dell loses bid for 'cloud computing' trademark.

If everything goes well, next week I shall be the happy founder and owner of a shiny brand new company, under which I'll incorporate my professional consulting and services activities. It's being registered in Noumea, New Caledonia, where I'm about to relocate in November. Within the next three months I'm already booked on about 100 hours and 36,000 km of flights round the globe, not forgetting the boat for the furniture. (If you know where Paris is, Noumea is more or less exactly on the other side of the planet. So, no, I'm not going to let your children have the oil that I need to burn right now ;-p.)

This may, or may not, have an impact on this blog. I've discussed the subject of separating my professional writings from my personal ones over the years, but I've done that more on my french blog than here. Although I started this blog in english about 6 years ago, my french blog has taken precedence and has grown quite differently. I've become used to write more freely and in a more eclectic way in french, and to reduce my writings here to more technical, less personal subjects. Also, and that adds a bit to my frustration, my French audience is significantly more vocal and contributing than the anglophone one, making me less and less motivated to continue a standalone professional blog in english (under my personal "brand" that is).

That is not to say that I will stop writing in english. But this 6-year old adventure of mixing pro and personal blogging in two languages under the same roof is likely to end soon. Unless you tell me otherwise, or unless I suddenly find the right way to design such a site properly for once.

Movable Type 4.2 is here with a lot of good news and new features. The new set of licences, if I get things correctly, is as follows:

• Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) -- The core engine without any extensions/packs, minimal base for blogs et sites (more or less equivalent to MT 4.1 without Custom Fields). Free for all uses.
• Movable Type (MTOS?) -- Developer edition, same as MT open source above. Free for development purposes.
• Movable Type Pro (MT) -- The main and most interesting edition, contains MT plus the Professional Pack (Custom Fields, Universal Templates) and the Community Pack (formerly known as MTCE, Community Edition). A really powerful pack allowing one to create blogs, sites and communities. Exists in two flavors/licences: the free Blogger edition for "power bloggers" (i.e. individuals even if the usage is commercial, with a $99 support option), and the Business edition (for commercial entities) with support and more affordable licences than the previous MTCE (at the strange "psychological" prices of $395.95 for 5 authors and $1,499.95 for 20 authors, including support).
• Movable Type Enterprise (MTE) -- For those companies who want to pay a big premium for the privilege to hook up the same product as above to their LDAP directory and proprietary databases.

My two cents in terms of marketing:

• I don't get the MT Open Source / Developer difference. As a developer, I would use both MTOS and MT Pro for different development purposes.
• I wish Six Apart would stop renaming/reshuffling those names and packs at every release! (P.S. But heck, to be fair, I love the MT Pro combo, MTCE was overpriced and not promised to a brilliant future as a standalone product)

For MT Open Source, go to www.movabletype.org. For all the other options, go to www.movabletype.com.

I'm putting the last touches on a CMS to generate custom NewsML feeds for internet portals. It's based on Movable Type 4.2 and allows for custom multimedia content and feeds for each portal. NewsML is a very versatile norm that allows for many, many things (its 200-page definition is frankly frightening! Thanks to L. Le Meur^(*) from AFP for publishing his NewsML for Dummies [PDF, 128KB]).

MT is still lacking certain features to make it a full-blown CMS platform above its blog engine origins, but its design, template system and tags make it flexible, powerful and affordable (low learning curve and low cost) at the same time. That's its charm in my opinion for projects like this one.

(And it's always nice to see some content flow from a "tiny" MT to a "big" public portal, one can easily forget how complicated it used to be to syndicate content on the internet last century ;-).

Note :
(*) No, that's not the same LLM. ;-)

This expired certificate alert just showed up for my GMail account. Apparently Google let the SSL certificate expire for the smtp.gmail.com domain.

In the midst of the current DNS insecurity storm, it's not exactly a good idea.

Has anyone else seen this?

We wanted to strip away all the nonsense. Do we really need a sommelier? Do we really need all the other accoutrements that you see at a 3 star or 4 star restaurant. Our goal was not to be a three stars. Our goal was to serve the best food we can. Our goal was to try and make the best food in New York City regardless of anything else, regardless of the environment.

Chef David Chang on failure, Thoreau, and vegetarians.

Good to see there are still chefs in NYC who care about the right thing, food, and not decorum. Usually it's the contrary, and NYC is where I've had the worst food in my life (before London!), i.e. a place where people go out in insanely expensive restaurants to show off and be seen rather than to enjoy food, and where the politically correct answer when asked about that shit in your plate is to say "great food" with a smile.

I use to say that New Yorkers (as the British) eat only because it's a necessity (otherwise they would die), while San Franciscans (as the French) eat because it's a pleasure. A cliché yes, but one that I've consistently seen, verified and had approved of by locals on my dozen times on both coasts.

(Note to my friends in NYC: I've also had great food in NYC, but that's because I was well accompanied, and shown a few rare good places. :-)

Dr. Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon CS professor, Dead at 47.

I didn't know him before I saw the following video, which is one of the most beautiful, inspirational and thought-provoking presentations I've seen in my life.

P.S. Here's a more recent presentation he gave last May to Carnegie Mellon students:

Passion and love.

I'm playing with iPhoto and Flickr (which I've been avoiding for months, cause I'm a content-centralizing-control-freak). I must admit it's an impressive web application. I'm less satisfied with the couple iPhoto/MobileMe despite a much better integration (the lack of any compelling feature, comments, social network doesn't make MobileMe an interesting choice vs. keeping everything under control on my own web server).

Anyway, here's my first photoset from New Caledonia, where I just spent three months, and where I'm going to settle anytime soon because life's too short not to live where your heart is.

The new flying whale Airbus A380 seems an airborne treat for gadget fans.

Methinks airlines should consider actually reducing the electronics on some seats. I'd be more than happy to get only power and internet connectivity to hook my own laptop or smartphone, plus a couple of widgets for displaying movies, the flight map and information in my web browser. I wonder how much that would decrease the production and maintenance cost of a seat. I know there are some security issues (you wouldn't be able to use your portable during landing and takeoff) but providing a computer and a screen on each seat seems a bit overkill to me.