zattoo: legal online TV

Last week-end I was sick. And being sick is the only situation in which I would like to watch TV. As I haven't had TV for years, I was left in the sofa, waiting for the time to pass, and hoping I get better fast.

Well, next time I'm sick there's hope I won't have to sleep all day: Zattoo is available in Belgium and it seems really good. The good surprise is that they have a package for Debian and Ubuntu!!

Things are not perfect: the line-up is still limited (no VRT eg), and the channels available can have some problems (I don't have sound for la une, and I have a lot of frames skipped for la deux).

It seems this is all legal too: they get broadcast licenses in the countries they are available. I've read their business plan is to earn money by advertising displayed when you zap from one channel to another, during the time take to fill the buffer with the new channel's stream.

My first travel

Here it is.

I didn't even know the .travel TLD existed. I've somehow missed its creation, and it's very strange to see an URL of which you don't know the extension :-)

Google Reader already out of Beta!

After nearly 2 years of beta, Google Reader is now out of beta. That's fast compared to Google News, which stayed in Beta for more than 3 years......

Kevin P. Fleming interviewed on Profoss

Kevin P. Fleming is co-maintainer of Asterisk, and will speak at the "Asterisk and Voip" event on 9&10 october in Brussels. His interview is now available, along with the other speakers' interviews.

Management from the towers

Last year, InBev decided to move production of the beer Hoegaarden from ... Hoegaarden to Jupille. There were lots of protests, and I remember an interview on the radio where someone mentioned it would be impossible to produce the same beer, if only because the water used in Jupille had different characteristics. I immediately thought about this interview when I heard that production went back to Hoegaarden.

Although I have no insight on the way the initial decision was taken, I can imagine consultants looking at numbers, sure they know everything, although they don't even know how beer is brewed, and seeing clearly there is money spilled in inefficiencies. I can imagine managers following the consultants, not listening to people on the field or specialists in beer brewing.

In the end, the initial decision taken to limit cost, has cost lots of money: moving the production to the new site, but keeping some production on the old site powered by temporary workers (but with the impossibility to produce a lot because part of the installations where moved to the new site...), getting loads of production back due to bad quality, leading to a shortage, etc, etc

A good example of what happens when you loose touch with reality. Something that happens way too often with managers and consultants alike.....

Javascript on the server

Although there's not much news of Phobos recently, Helma is being developed further, with the 1.6 release available since on month ago.
If you're fluent in Javascript, it could be useful. Both are based on the Java platform. If you want to experiment with Javascript on the Java platform, you can do it with Rhino, included in Java 6.

Single Page Applications: something to watch?

I discovered Trimpath Junction today, a MVC javascript bringing RubyOnRails' convention over configuration to javascript. But what I really found interesting, is their Next Action demo available as a Single Page Application. The concept: with Firefox, you save the page on your disc, and you have the application on your disk. After you edited or added data, you save the page again and the application with the updated data is saved.

Of course, there are downsides. Isn't one of the advantages of web applications their centralisation and their remote availability? Anyway, I find it an interesting concept. Interesting enough to keep an eye on to see how it evolves.

First batch of speakers interview

Today we've published the first interviews of the Profoss Asterisk speakers. Get an idea of who you can meet on 9&10 october by reading the interviews of Raphaël Libois, Vincent Luba and Jordi Nelissen.

Each have a different profile (proprietary systems vendor, developer, company co-founder) and offer their view on Asterisk.

xmonad: a tiling window manager in Haskell

With the Ion 3 stable release around the corner, alpha geeks could be tempted to look for another alternative. Well, there is xmonad written in Haskell, and its development seems quite active, with lots of extensions available, even though it's only at its 0.3 release!

For those interested, xmonad's name comes from the concept of monads in functional programming languages, of which you can find a definition on wikipedia.

Although I'm an Ion 3 addict, I'll keep an eye on it. Along

with StumpWM, written in Common Lisp, even if its development doesn't seem as dynamic as xmonad's.