Trophées du Libre 2006

The “Trophées du Libre” is an international Free Software contest rewarding the best free software projects among 6 categories. The awards ceremony will take place in Soissons, France, on November 30th, 2006.

The categories are : Security ; Multimedia and Games ; Company management ; Educational ; Applications for Public infrastructures and for communities ; PHP.

The deadline to submit a project is October 1st, 2006.

XWiki was a runner up and received a prize in the Educational category in 2005 and we have benefitted by participating in various trade shows with the organizers CETRIL.

QuickFile Thunderbird Extension – Thanks Mark !

Wow, I immediately installed the Thunderbird QuickFile extension and it is very quickly becoming indispensable !  I have a somewhat detailed folder structure with different folders for accounts, suppliers, events, r&d, etc…  and until QuickFile I spent some time doing fairly repetitive mouse actions to file messages in the right place.  Thanks to Mark Shuttle’s blog entry, I was incited to try it out and I am quite happy with it, even though it takes a while to get used to the Alt-Q shortcut.

Great job QuickFile developpers !

Belgian Old School Gripes

I had been wanting to comment on the Belgian editors court win against Google and Google Operating System’s coverage of Google’s compliance with the court order promted me do it. I can’t stand all the legacy shops playing hardball just to get a piece of the action. When did they ever create as much value to the consumer ? Whether its books or newspapers, all I want is to be able to search content, maybe read a snippet, maybe read the whole copy or buy access to do this. But I don’t see any reason why Google should pay for sending traffic or business to their sites. It should probably be the opposite. So too bad for the Belgian publications, we just wont be on the same page anymore.

Abanico Is No More, Long Live ISAAC

I am saddened to find out this morning that Laurent Erdos, the founder of Abanico, a Paris based school of Africo-Carribean Music, has decided to pursue personal projects in Spain, and so Abanico is no more. In his goodbye letter that is currently online at the Abanico web site, Laurent mentions the difficulties of identifying a sustainable business model for a private music school in France. This is a real shame. I had met briefly with Laurent in 2005 when I had attended a series of conferences by Isabelle Leymarie on the roots and history of Cuban music. Isabelle wrote a very interesting and exhaustive book called Cuban Fire on this topic.

Abanico will find a new life through a new initiative called ISAAC. I wish the ISAAC founders good luck and I hope they will continue the Abanico tradition with much success.

I wish you well Laurent !

Xavier Niel Wins Entrepreneur of the Year Prize

Nice video clip (French) of Xavier Niel, founder and Director of Strategy at Iliad, on the lentreprise.com web site taken at the prize ceremony. I really liked his description of successful business development. He mentions that it all starts with a bit of luck, finding something that starts to grow and the with the right people leads to something else, etc.. that assures sustained development. A real entrepreneurial strategy. Good job Niel !

Via FreeNews.

Radio Macondo

Radio Macondo has an excellent podcast featuring classic salsa. Salsa lessons with Antoine and Anne-Laure should be starting again real soon this year. Can’t wait !

Back from Toulouse

I had a wonderful trip to Toulouse where I spread the word about XWiki to various interested parties. I made a point of visiting my friend Marc Bureau who was a founding member of our Rueil Atelier Jazz group. He is now living on the top floor of a high-rise in the center of Toulouse with a great view of the city. I’m looking forward to visiting again !

My ISP is Fantastic !

Free is such an innovative player in the internet access market here in France !  Yesterday, they announced a 1 billion € 5 year plan to deploy FTTH to most parts of France. Their infrastructure will be open to competition and a new Free Foundation will offer low bandwith access, free telephone service, and digital TV to anyone in a building with FTTH access against a deposit for the set top box.  This is great news for Free subscribers and broadband entrepreneurs in France.

SparkingPoint – Ludovic Speaking on Virtual Architectures on October 12

Ludovic Dubost will be speaking on Virtual Architectures at an event organized by the SparklingPoint network in Paris on October 12, 2006. If you are in Paris, don’t miss this talk by XWiki founder and CEO.

SparklingPoint accueillera jeudi 12 _*octobre *_Ludovic Dubost,
XPertNet, XWiki.org, sur le thème “LES ARCHITECTURES VIRTUELLES : LE WEB
COMME PUISSANCE DE CALCUL, ESPACE DE STOCKAGE ET RÉSERVOIR
D’APPLICATIONS À LA DEMANDE — EXEMPLES, ENJEUX, CONSÉQUENCES”.

En 1984, John Gage de Sun Microsystems lançait l’idée que “the network
is the computer”.

Jusqu’ici le manque de maturité des technologies, couplé au trop faible
taux d’équipement en PC et connexions à haut débit, n’avaient pas permis
la mise en oeuvre à grande échelle d’un tel principe, ni l’éclosion de
logiciels adaptés.

Aujourd’hui, l’augmentation rapide des équipements, de leur puissance,
des capacités de stockage et des liaisons à haut débit à connexion
permanente crée une taille suffisante pour l’émergence d’un marché de
masse intéressant au premier chef les entreprises. L’évolution des
technologies accompagne le mouvement en accroissant la souplesse des
montées en charge (Web-scale computing, architectures GRID…) et la
continuité de service (technologies RAID, architectures redondantes…)

L’offre se dessine progressivement sur le marché. D’un côté les
hébergeurs proposent de plus en plus souvent des offres banalisés à très
bas coûts (OVH ou Debibox). D’autre part, les spécialistes des Web
Services se mettent en place. Amazon s’est d’ores et déjà positionné
très fortement en annonçant successivement Amazon S3 (Web Services
Store) et Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud). On pressent également
depuis un moment l’engagement plus que probable de Google sur cette voie
dont GoogleApps et le projet supposé “GoogleDrive” seraient les embryons.

Ce nouveau paysage conduit à de nouvelles architectures et de nouveaux
enjeux :

- comment gérer au mieux la demande fluctuante de puissance
- quelles applications et données garder en interne ou placer en réseau
- quels problèmes de sécurité pour ses données et applications :
disponibilité, confidentialité…
- quel type d’applications on-demand
- quelles contraintes d’organisation, de déploiement…

Inscription dès que possible par retour d’e-mail en indiquant {prénom,
nom, société, email} à cette adresse uniquement :
inscription@sparklingpoint.com

Merci de DIFFUSER largement cette annonce autour de vous. Le nombre de
place étant limité et le RV étant en octobre, nous ne saurions trop vous
conseiller de vous inscrire au plus tôt.

Bought Boston Remastered

While on vacation this summer, I taught my son Benjamin some riffs from my high school days including Boston’s “More than a Feeling” which he liked in spite of the generation gap. I saw Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides yesterday on FREE TV On Demand Video and really enjoyed the film and the music, which made me do some research this morning on Boston and I ended up buying their début album which has been recently been remastered by Tom Scholz. I had to order it on Amazon.com because I couldn’t find it on the .fr or .co.uk sites. I hadn’t heard the songs in a *long* time and I will be looking forward to receiving the CD !