Ibrahim Maalouf is one of our modern era miracles!
Through the right abstractions, he succeeded in universalizing a very local middle-eastern musical phenomenon: Oum Kalthoum.
His Kalthoum album is a great illustration of his musical talent.
You can learn more about him at:
Cheers!
I read:
"Arianespace… announced […] that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency's Galileo constellation, had entered a "non-nominal injection orbit"—in other words, gone wrong"
You probably now know how to better say "I got a bug" (when it is just a "non-nominal behavior")!
BBC (bbc.co.uk) just published an article about "The worst CEOs of 2013". The article cites 5 of them.
The fifth?
«… So, while 2013 might not be Ballmer's worst year as CEO of Microsoft, it is a continuation of a long pattern. His ranking as No 5 on the Worst CEOs list is something of a lifetime achievement award. He is finally stepping down as CEO»
Happy New Year!
On the Windows Phone 8, the latest MSFT phone OS, you have a nice Theme selection option, which says:
"Change your phone's background and accent color to suit your mood today, this week or all month"
Quite attractive!
The feature proposes two settings:
On 'Background', you have two options: Light / Dark
On 'Accent color', you have a palette of 21 colors (which seems to be a pretty little choice on a device that, according to the manufacturer, can display 65000 colors or more!)
I should admit, that not having a choice is in a way less time consuming. May be this was the initial OS designer's intended objective.
Now let us leave WP and go back to the desktop machine to have a look at Microsoft Office 2013.
Here too, you have a nice feature to select your theme.
You have the choice between:
- White
- Light gray
- Dark grey
The difference between the three is really too subtle:
I tried them all, and ended up by selecting 'Dark': a little more readable!
On another point: after all the literature about the 'user interface design guidelines', it now seems that Microsoft Office apps are the only applications that can keep being outside of any graphical constraints. Those guys are really too spoiledJ
Conclusion
It seems that someone at MSFT has decided to re-form our education about colors. The 'monochrome' seems to be the new MSFT User Interface Strategy (you can check yourself: Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 2013…)
Some people may find this abusive… but, in a way, we are much less embarrassed with this new reduced theme strategy… we may gain more time to think about things more useful!
Let me first clarify:
Learning that the square root of 144 = 12 is a 'recipe'.
Learning how to retrieve the square root of a number is a 'method'.
Recipes represent one application of a method in a specific context.
They are efficient and straightforward, gratifying, easier to retain and easier to sell !
Still they most likely apply to a context and can hardly be useful if elements of the context change.
Methods are less easy to retain and assimilate. They also often need to be ascertained through applications in various contexts before being accepted.
The bad thing with recipes is that they are sealed, and tend sometimes to occult the openness of their originating method.
One good demonstrative example of this is the Agile principles (method) vs. the multitude of – more or less ridiculous – rituals (recipes) falsely attributed to the originating method.
Some of the rituals may have been correctly applied in specific contexts producing suitable results. But, no doubt, with different context, the same 'successful' rituals may be disastrous.
It is easier to retain rituals than to understand principles… even easier to retain those rituals that you may find attractive!
Jean-François Champollion who made the first translation of the ancient hieroglyph (in 1822-1824, before ever going to Egypt) made his first (and last) journey to Egypt in 1828-1829. He spent 20 months and 20 days in this journey (of which the last 60 days in quarantine in Toulon when he was back homeJ).
An amazing book "Lettres écrites d'Égypte et de Nubie en 1828 et 1829 by Jean-François Champollion" (there should be an English translation… don't really know) contains a collection of letters - written to his friends, family and some officials- that recount this journey in a very smooth and pedagogic way. In an annex, the book contains a very dense description of the History of ancient Egypt and neighboring civilizations.
Champollion was evidently passionate about ancient Egypt. During this journey, he seems to be revisiting places and events that he knew quite well. And he recounts all of this in a fascinating way.
One thing that may seem a little strange for us, is the time spent in travelling. For instance: it took him several months to travel from Paris to Luxor (in the south of Egypt)… which really seems too long now (probably unacceptable!).
In the same time, he could compose (with his small team), in less than 2 months, more than 600 entire exact colorful drawing copies of all the monuments he visited (including endless hieroglyphic texts!). All in quite harsh travelling conditions between the Nile cataracts.
Near the end of his journey, he heard that Jerusalem's Archbishop decided to honor him with a distinguished prize (Croix de chevalier du saint-sépulcure). He recounts that getting hold of the prize was too expensive for him (200 Louis)!
The book is also available in an audio version (in French) on the great Free Litérature audio web site.
(Not sure you can write code while hearing such a bookJ)
Few days ago, many press articles exposed what was supposed to be spectacular action of the FBI against LulzSec.
The main ‘spectacular’ action this time was that the FBI succeeded in gaining the ‘cooperation’ of one young man who was, more or less, part of the young people's movement.
The ‘cooperation’ of this poor scared young person, lasted 10 months… from June 2010 to March 2011, where he sometimes worked ‘full nights’ for the FBI to deliver his colleagues and friends in the best (illegal) conditions!
According to the press news (relating FBI personnel declarations), the operation ended up by arresting 4 suspected persons (all over the worldJ).
Apparently not hoping for many more suspects through its new agent, the FBI decided to throw him away by revealing his identity to the press! (Not very much encouraging collaborating with those people… isn’t it?)
Well… by any simple arithmetic logic: 10 months of cooperation of such a great agent to simply have 4 suspects… that really seems pitiful.
Finally: The story seems in fact more about the recurrent failure of organizations like FBI to do their job (whatever this job may be!)
Communication is a vast and ancient field which ran through many evolution phases, experiments and research. Internet, as we know it today, is one of the outcomes of this human work.
In this story, no one technology proved eternal or ever-lasting. Cycles of evolution produced some usable and convenient forms of communication at a time. Internet seems to be just one of these.
But now, each time I look at a web page, I feel that just cannot last much longer (at least I hope so:)): these elastic regions, shapeless tables, unexpected fonts changes, images and colors… hazardous page reloads and other ‘partial updates’ (sometimes even more annoying)… the whole mess of plug-ins, add-ins and other artifacts…
That really doesn’t seem to be an ever-lasting model!
Searching for something on Internet is even worse. Just go search for the word ‘sequence’ and you will find yourself with a non-classified mess of subjects ranging from cinema to molecular biology!
Looking for a solution of a problem?... you may find many, often ten or fifteen years old… which rarely relates to you current question.
To keep some ‘Lasting Value’ for old archived articles, many publishers no more mention the articles’ publication date… and search engines don’t help much in finding out a time-classification of a search result. All these ‘partners’ (publishers / search engines) are happy with this. As long as the consumer (you and I) don’t complain, the business just continue to run with minimal costs!
The appropriateness between what is needed and what is offered seems to be near a break-point.
In parallel, the great rise of technologies like web services and the wide range of their implementations may just allow us to hope for something new to emerge: new stable and appealing content explorers / new relevant and coherent search engines.
With a little refactoring, this presentation can be quite good for SharePoint 2010:
“In this fully computer-animated fantasy from the creators of Antz, we follow the travails of Shrek […], a green ogre who enjoys a life of solitude. Living in a faraway swamp, he is suddenly invaded by a hoard of fairy tale characters, such as the Big Bad Wolf, the Three Little Pigs, and Three Blind Mice, all refugees of their homes who have been shunned by the evil Lord Farquaad […]. They want to save their homes from ruin, and enlist the help of Shrek, who is in the same situation…”
“While simultaneously embracing and subverting fairy tales, the irreverent Shrek also manages to tweak Disney's nose, provide a moral message to children, and offer viewers a funny, fast-paced ride.”
Egypt’s January 25 revolution is a great hope for humanity.
Against a regime of criminals with 1.8 million of “well-equipped” and “well-trained” anti-riot forces… and some more thugs, opportunists and other hypocrites… young peaceful people with human values could win.
We are living a new dawn for human values.