New website

I finally took the time to redo my website properly :)

Obviously, I had to use Seaside, and as I did play with Pier some time ago, this looked like a good fit.

For those who do not know, Seaside is the best web application server I know of -- it really is something when you want to quickly write extremely complex sites or webapps. Pier is a CMS developped on top of Seaside, which provides a wiki system amongst other things.

The new theme is also frankly much better than my previous one -- it's actually nearly exactly the same as the default Pier theme, but hey, I really like it, and it _is_ cleaner :)

The site also automatically pull the last posts from this blog as well as my last commits and some recent twitter posts, and display all this as the main page.

Finally, one thing that wasn't great on the previous site was the pictures section; I resumed some earlier work I did on a Pier component (Pier Gallery) and cleaned it up to get what's shown now... more on that in a next post.

Mona Lisa video

Here is a small video demonstrating the polygons evolution:

(better results should be doable with more time and/or more parameters tweakings)
For this example, I used 50 polygons of at most 16 points, starting with 10 polygons.

Genetic Algorithms and Mona Lisa

Genetic Algorithms try to apply evolution mechanisms to find solutions to hard problems (typically, where no "proper" solution is known and where the search area is large).

Roger Alsing posted a couple of days ago an extremely cool article showing the convergence of 50 polygons to represent the Mona Lisa, using a random approach.

That was too cool to not try to implement it :)

The screenshot shows a rendering of the Mona Lisa using 50 polygons (16 points each), after 40818 total iterations, with 4577 elected states; the middle image is the original (i.e. the target) and the right image the difference between the current polygon-based image and the target (i.e. a representation of the fitness function).
Underneath was an earlier attempt using ovals instead of polygons.

Now, to be more exact, Roger Alsing's algo is more a hill climber algorithm or possibly a simulated annealing algorithm than a good example of a genetic algorithm; it should be interesting to actually implement a proper genetic algorithm approach (i.e. a population > 1) and see how the convergence rate compares... combining polygons and ovals might also result into interesting things.

Factor

I just watched this talk:

It's a very nice presentation of the Factor language, a mix of Forth / Lisp / Smalltalk -- a higher level Forth. Interestingly, they do have Cocoa bindings...

OpenSource Jam & Literate Programming

I gave a short talk yesterday about LP at the OpenSource Jam (bi-mensual open source meeting, at the Google London Office). So, here is the pdf of the presentation (just click on the above image to get it). People seemed to like the talk, and there was some interesting comments about the lack of good documentation tools (particularly, the need for multi-level documentations), the similarity with DSL, and some in-house LP tools used by some companies.

update: A blog post describing the event and pictures have been posted by the open source team...

iLiad iRex pictures

As there's some interest in the iliad and other ebook readers, and as a follow-up to my previous post describing my general impressions of the iliad, I thought that posting some pictures would be interesting... Clicking on the images shows the original image size (note that the grain is in fact due to the iso setting rather than the iliad !)

This first picture shows an A4 PDF, not resized, and perfectly readable. As you can see, no problems either with the viewing angle.

The 16 gray levels work well enough for reading some comics :)

Another comic, close up.

One of the great thing with a reasonable resolution and antialiasing: you CAN put A4 scans of partitions, and IT IS readable :) -- here the Turkish March, from a freely available document scanned by the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (thanks!).

As you can see, the poor quality of the pictures (and the not-so-great white balance) are due to the actual lightning conditions :) -- and you can also see how well an e-ink device reacts to a direct spot lamp...


Finally, as it's one of the main use of my iliad and one of the main reasons I actually bought one, an A4 research paper:

As you can see, it's readable (albeit a bit small), with the PDF reader I use simply set in fullscreen mode.

Zooming on the same document with the camera (ie without touching the iliad) -- you can see how such A4 PDF documents are actually readable, without any kind of resizing (apart the fullscreen mode). The PDF reader application can also zoom the document if it's really necessary (using a simple gesture with the stylus), but I rarely use this feature (usually only for some diagrams if they are too small, not for the text itself).

DabbleDB 8 minutes demo

DabbleDB is as impressive as ever. If you never heard about it, it's a fantastic database app, one of the few "webapp" that really manages to be as usable as it would be if it was a "normal" desktop app. It manages that by leveraging the power of Seaside, a web application server written in Smalltalk (hands down the best app server I ever seen, period. Beats even webobjects, and you code in Smalltalk. Can't be better, really!).

Discarding the impressive "webapp" aspect (which in a way is more of a sad commentary on the poor capacities of the "web" platform, although it is improving, as dabbledb can show, and as addons such as Gears improve the capacities), it's the only database I know that let you evolve your data model as smoothly as they do it, not even talking about the great tools to easily explore and enrich your data... This is a kind of flexibility that I think should be put back at the center of our computing experience and be adopted by more applications/domains.

Anyway, Avi Bryant released a new 8 minutes demo showing off DabbleDB, after their famous 7 minutes demo they did in 2006. If you never heard about DabbleDB, check it!

GNUstep Summer of Code 2008

For those who don't know yet... GNUstep is one of the organisation that Google has accepted for the Summer of Code program --- which means that if you are a student looking for something to do this summer, want to hack Objective-C code, help a cool free software project, learn a lot... and even be paid, well, you should apply ! sure beat your average summer job :)


...


Deadline for applications is next monday (31/03/2008), so hurry up !

update: the deadline has been pushed by a week, so if you thought you missed it, you still have a few days left to apply.

Mobile Gears T-Shirt

T-shirts are nearly an internal currency at work... so we of course had a mobile gears T-Shirt made ! Here is it:

Nice isn't it ?

Evolved Virtual Creatures

A pretty cool video showing evolved virtual creatures:

More infos here, with Karl Sims Siggraph's 1994 paper..

another video from Nicolas Lassabe

more on Lee Graham's page :

AlpenStep '07

I was at AlpenStep this weekend, you can check some pictures.

It was a very cool event, thanks in particular to gerold's organisation. The location, in a small swiss village, was really nice -- I can say that some fresh air after beeing in london is good !

It was also a small-scale event -- only 7 persons (though gurkan came but left saturday before lunch :-/), which made it a very intensive event as well: lots of discussion, lots of coding too. Fred Kiefer was probably the busiest person in the room, as everybody wanted to ask him questions/advices... ;-)

Riccardo Mottola gave a nice GAP demonstration, and during the weekend he and Nikolaus Schaller were busy working on SimpleWebKit:

Nikolaus also made a cool presentation of QuantumSTEP running on the OpenMoko platform :)

The OpenMoko device is actually fairly nice, very high-res screen, and some interesting hardware to tinker with.

Quentin was working on ContainerKit for Etoile, a very interesting way of specifying UI using a generic data model (so you can switch representations on the fly for instance), also allowing very nice introspection features with inspectors generated on the fly. I tried to convaince him to introduce some Magritte-like magic, i.e. adding metadatas to your model...

Quentin and I also made a presention of Etoile, describing the various components/frameworks/applications, and how everything is supposed to fit...

Finally, I can only be admirative of gerold organisation skills... to the point were he got us a GNUstep cake:

Which was delicious !

In short, looking forward for AlpenStep'08 ! (and Fosdem'08 before...)

Hard Disk Crash

...You know when people tell you to do backups ? Feeling guilty ? :-)

Well, most of my data is usually backed up, but... even so, there's still a lag usually, particularly for "not-so-important data", etc. Add to this usual mix some data put away "temporarily" from my main computer... and that's when my LaCie 250Gb external drive choose to die. Around 200Gb of data lost, among them some that I could get back with various difficulty somewhere else, eg on some dvd or other computers (the LaCie *was* the main/more used backup plan), and some truly lost (yes, this "temporarily moved" data, yes, it's you I'm talking about), or some data recently copied only on the LaCie... Of course this drive is around 3 years old, and I actually had some thoughts recently of doing a proper backup of everything there was on it, for convenience, and for fear of such an accident. Of course too, I ended up way too busy to actually do it...

Still, a bit of luck: there was no scratching noise, in fact, there wasn't any noise at all: the disk just didn't start, which meant that it was more likely an electronic fault than a mechanical one. Removing the hdd from the LaCie enclosure and plugging it directly on a computer didn't do anything either (so it sadly wasn't the LaCie controller board). So that left us with the actual hdd electronic board... I then looked on the web for an hdd from the same brand and the same model -- and found a cheap one from an online reseller. After receiving it, I checked it -- yes, it was the same model, yes, the same year, yes the same firmware... ah. No. not the same firmware ! well, still, only two months separated those drives, so I crossed my fingers and started removing the controlling board of the "new" drive to swap it with the one on my crashed drive. Never having done that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect :-) but it's in fact really straightforward (you just need the right kind of screwdrivers -- Torx). The only difficulty is in finding a control board that is compatible with your hdd!

To cut the story short, the "patched" drive started happily and worked fine, so I passed the day swapping and burning dvd of the drive's content ;-)

One thing for sure is that I will seriously think of building a proper backup solution (ie, automated/redundant) for hosting "home" data (photos, videos, music...) asap... I was lucky to save this drive ! these kind of content is annoying as they quickly take so much space, yet (for at least some of them) they are invaluable...

NeXT videos & WebObjects

I found these two videos, the first one showing Steve Jobs demo NeXTstep 2.0, the NeXTCube 040 + Dimension, the slab, DBKit, in 1990.. it's always surprising to see how far ahead NeXT was, or reversely, how slowly did we progress on the software side, while the hardware we have now is insanely more powerful...

The second one shows again Steve Jobs, five years later. NeXT stations didn't sell, their state-of-the-art factory closed, they stopped producing hardware, and reconverted as a software only company. The tone of the talk seems to reflect those disappointment, with Steve trying to be excited about Distributed OLE and Portable Distributed Object (PDO), but you can feel it's not really anymore about changing the world... and yet, when analysing the state of the WWW and its future, Steve is absolutely dead on, and he then goes on to demo a beta version of WebObjects, which in the end will save the company (until it took over Apple). WebObjects was an absolutely amazing tech, and still is. The move to a J2EE implementation instead of the ObjC implementation, the availability of other solutions, and its curious downplay by Apple (while they use it for their store, they aren't exactly pushing it on the market, although they dramatically cut the price from hundred thousands of dollars to $500, to finally make it free). WebObjects had a huge impact on current "web application servers", many of them openly inspired by it. My preferred one is Seaside, a fantastic Smalltalk framework... for a great example of what you can do with Seaside, try dabbledb :-)

Note that there's two free software implementations of WebObjects in Objective-C, GNUstepWeb and NGObjWeb (part of SOPE, the web application framework used by Opengroupware.org).

Pink Floyd

Today I was in london for a job interview, and had a few hours to kill after it before going back to wales.. so I walked around a bit, and ended up reaching the Thames (duh! not surprising in london, is it ?). But I just ended up in front of the Battersea Power Station :

Of course, this power station is world famous because of Animals, the 1977 Pink Floyd album... ;-)

Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me, so the shots are from my mobile... here's some more:

ps: in the "cool for a geek dpt", I'm actually posting that from my laptop.. but through my 3G mobile cnx. With a cheap unlimited data plan, you basically get internet access everywhere -- as like here, in the train :D

Subtext

Found on Martin Fowler's bliki, an interesting short summary of the OOPSLA'05 conference, along with interesting links. One of them is Subtext, a really cool language / programming environment (you perhaps already encounteered it, it was featured on slashdot some time ago...). Definitely something interesting -- check the demo (flash video) and the researcher's blog. Lots of good points / ideas about what should be a programming environment ;-)

I wonder if we could extend some ideas about ide to really dump the text editing, or at least relay a lot more on metamodels of the code.. Dynamic Aspects seems to head into that direction ;-)

Nokia 770

I received today my new shiny toy, the Nokia 770:



I put online some pictures of it..

First impressions:

• it's light ! yet it doesn't feel "crap" :-)


• the form factor is surprisingly nice (even if coming from a newton I wouldn't mind a (physically) bigger screen)


• applications are a bit slow to start. Hopefully things will improve -- even if as it is it's ok, I wouldn't mind instantaneous starts ;-)


• redrawing is a bit slow too :-/ is it because of X or gnome.. ?


• the screen is absolutely gorgeous !! really beautiful and luminous :-) (the pictures I took don't completely do it justice)


• playing movie is ok (there's a trailer for ice age 2 on the machine), but could be improved..


• lack of pppoe configuration for wifi VPN (or if there is, it's not obvious, but well, I just got it, so I perhaps overlooked something)


• installing a package is easy :-)


• The UI is quite good, as a PDA UI -- definitely better than PocketPC (well, duh..), obviously less good than the newton, but hey, it's not too bad..

So well, overall, I'm quite pleased -- the device is indeed very, very cool. Things can be improved, but it's already quite nice. The UI is ok, even if what I would like to do is (obviously ?) install GNUstep on it, and then modify GNUstep to blend on the Maemo platform (with a possible replacing of maemo in an improbable future). Anyway, as it is running linux, it seems an ideal platform for me -- both for experimenting with etoile/gnustep on a PDA (see a previous post about that, and see what I posted about the newton for what I think is good on a PDA...) and as a good client for the system I'm working on at uni...

I'm not sure if there's a market for a "web tablet" device, but I don't think that the Nokia 770 will only be a "web tablet" anyway :-) -- there's already ports of doom, abiword, the GPE pim stuff, etc.

Nokia has a winner in the linux community I think :-) -- which means that you can expect lots of software for the Nokia, and it already started... It also look like an excellent device for ebooks, administrators (as an X/VNC/ssh terminal), etc.

VERY interesting videos

Following a link from the Squeak-dev mailing list... I watched theses two videos (a presentation in two parts) by Alan Kay, circa 87 ... They are brilliant, and extremely interesting. Definitely something to view !

Part 1

Part 2

(ps: Squeak is an incredible environment, and Seaside is a fantastic web app framework running in Squeak... worth your time..)

addendum: Interesting PDF about PARC's work ...

addendum 2: another interesting video, an interview of alan kay.

Newton...

Received the wifi card and memory card, so I was able to connect the newton to my local network :-)

After some tweaking, I have NTK (the newton dev environment) running under Classic and connected to the newton using the wifi card :-)



Just started to play with NTK and NewtonScript, but it's quite cool. By far not as cool as IB/Gorm ;-) but NewtonScript is a rather nice language, and NTK seems ok, though not fantastic... got a very basic app running here, where what you write on the newton is displayed on the above textfield when you click on the button (very dull, but it's just to test things ;-)

Not sure what I'll do on it... perhaps a simple calc application where you'd write the numbers / operations and have a "paper trail" ? or perhaps simply a battleship game (there are two already, but they don't use the whole screen, and anyway it's just to play a bit more with NTK/NewtonScript ...). I should also try the xmlrpc lib, it could be cool to use the newton to connect to my visualization system at uni ;-)

I tried VNC on the newton too, both as client and server, and it's extremely cool.. even if it's very slow :-)

How to make a flash video recording on linux ?

It's rather easy -- first, you need vnc2swf, and a vnc server.
Start the vnc server on a second X port:

vncserver -geometry 1024x768 :1

Then you can launch vnc2swf:

vnc2swf out.swf :1

That will connect it to the vncserver running on localhost:1, and will output the swf file to out.swf. Start the recording by hitting F9; hitting it again will pause, etc.

Now, to add sound, there isn't a nice way of doing it... but what you can do (and that's what I did) is to launch a sound recorder application in parallel, and start the recording at the same time as the video. At the end of your video recording, you should have the video (out.swf) and a sound file from your recorder app, say "voice.aif". You then need to convert the sound file in mp3 (use the mp3 encoder lame for example).

After that, you just need to add the mp3 to the swf file, and you can do that using edit_vnc2swf :

edit_vnc2swf.py -o final.swf -a voice.mp3 out.swf

The last step is to create a html file containing the following section:

<object width="1024" height="768"
CODEBASE="http://active.macromedia.com/flash5/cabs/swflash.cab#version=5,0,0,0">
<param name="MOVIE" value="final.swf">
<param name="PLAY" value="true">
<param name="LOOP" value="false">
<param name="QUALITY" value="high">
<embed src="final.swf" width="1024" height="768"
 play="true" align="" loop="true" quality="high"
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</embed>
</object>

Note that you need to set the same dimension as the video, else you'll have artifacts.

And... that's it :-)