Blog them all

Just released http://gemcutter.org/gems/penso-feedbag to discover feeds for specific website, with proper charset, a fork from muck-feedbag, which was a fork from feedbag.

Yes, I love Ruby, Git, Gem and GitHub.

>> require 'feedbag'
>> Feedbag.find("http://lemonde.fr")[3]
=> #<struct Feedbag::Feed url="http://www.lemonde.fr/rss/sequence/0,2-3224,1-0,0.xml", title="Le Monde.fr: Société">

Ça fait des années que j’entends dire qu’il faudrait que je passe aux disques SSD. C’est fait pour mon MacPro avec l’achat d’un SSD Intel X25-M v2. Le résultat ?

Le temps de boot passe de 76 secondes à 26 secondes. Le lancement de Firefox avec pleins d’onglets de 12 secondes à 3 ou 4 secondes, le lancement de Safari passe à moins de une seconde.

Rapide quoi…

Last week I met Eric Ries during a talk at la cantine. He talked about how he uses continuous integration for his company (his slides), too bad the Appstore process does not allow this for iPhone apps…

View another video on continuous deployment.

We need a SIP software for Mac so bad… Not something that looks like this (X-Lite) with awful design and which does not work anymore on Snow Leopard anyway, something more of a Mac user experience like FontCase (who won an Apple Design Award).

Pleeeeease developers, write one ! Get a SIP library and build a GUI on top of it. And yes, I’m willing to pay for such a nice software…

The application I’ve been working for the last months is now available on the appstore. Apple Push Notifications with a REST API for you, able to run any iphone applications, with Twitter plugin included, and GPush too.

All that for a very low amount. Let me know what you think.

Je vends mon Macbook Pro 15″, changement de machine.

C’est un 2.4Ghz acheté en novembre 2008 (l’année dernière), 2.4Ghz, 250Go de disque, 4Go de RAM et clavier QWERTY US. Un AppleCare est dessus, expiration en novembre 2011. La capacité de la batterie est toujours bonne, 4347mAh, 141 cycles effectués.

Son prix : 1850E TTC (prix original 2350E), avec une facture pour vous permettre de récupérer la TVA si vous en avez la possibilité.

Il est visible à mon bureau, Paris Bastille.

Après avoir passé quelques jours à har2009 (voir mes photos), quelle conclusion en tirer ? Je suis présent à ces conférences depuis la HIP97, et j’en ai donc vu passer quelques unes.

Celle de 2001 a vu l’arrivée du wifi, tout le monde s’est acheté une carte sur place et a profité d’Internet sans cable. La version 2005 a vu se démocratiser fortement les ordinateurs portables mais surtout des portables Apple. À ma grande surprise la version 2009 aura simplement amené un paquet de Netbooks, mais pas comme je l’aurais pensé d’iPhone, d’Android, et globalement moins de portables Apple. Juste des Netbooks sous Linux, rien de plus… La crise économique touche t-elle aussi les hackers ? J’ai été surpris aussi de voir que Twitter était très peu utilisé, et le réseau local assez moyen malgré une connexion en 10Gbits vers l’extérieur.

J’espérais rencontrer des développeurs iPhone, nous étions à priori 3, dont moi et Shane.

Cette édition était à mon goût moins bien organisée (il faut dire que c’est un sacré boulot à organiser…), les conférences à quelques exceptions assez peu intéressantes, la conférence sur le jailbreak iPhone annulée. Bref, c’était bien mais sans plus.

I will be at HAR2009 from Tuesday 11th to Monday 17th. I had few funny things in mind to do with iPhone development but I finally had no time to work on them. Therefore I’ll come empty hands, I’ve been too busy working on push notifications and other projects (36Pulp, and some iPhone apps).

If you happen to read this blog and be around, leave me a note here or on my twitter. I’ll publish pictures from HAR2009 on my flickr account.

Apparently the WWDC is not the only event that solds out before it even started… Har2009 is now sold out, no more tickets, plus de tickets, kaput!

What is HAR ? Probably the best Hacker oriented event that occurs only every 4 years. It usually holds at least 2,500 people or more, and I’ve personally attended HIP 97, HAL 2001, CCC 2003 (different organizers), WTH 2005, and will do so for HAR 2009.

See you there.

I had the chance to travel to California from last April to July. As any computer geek I had always dreamed about going to California, and mostly around Mountain View. Thanks for my friends, I had the chance to visit Google few times, Yahoo!, Six Apart, Google Android, Apple, some smaller private startups. I’ve got beers with the guys from GitHub (thanks Tom, it was nice meeting you), LightHouse, Twitter, LinkedIn, AfterShock (thanks James!). Orange Lab told me on Twitter I could call 1014 (A French phone number for customer support) to meet them (ahah). I’ve met many more people which I can’t list here, and I’ve also finally met Phil Jeudy (twitter).

I’ve attended the Rails Conf 2009 in Vegas, and the WWDC 09 in SF. The rails conference was very high level, Vegas had the cheapest hotels I could imagine for the room we got. On the other side the WWDC conferences were not as high level as I would imagine, but someone said 60% of the attendees never attended before. I would recommend going to both if it’s you work in those domains, meeting people in real is a big boost for your projects.

Something I did not have in mind, is the good general vibe you have in San Francisco. I had the chance to meet Shane Vitarana (blog), who published DrumKit on the Appstore (it’s featured in Apple ads, on Union Square on top of buildings, etc). He introduced me to many people, and we had a lot of fun together (I have to confess, I don’t go out much while I’m in Paris, but did almost every day in SF). Thanks Shane, you made my trip.

I’ve learned a lot being in San Francisco for that long, on iPhone projects as much as on Rails projects, and on web projects in general. If you work on ideas, make them happen in California. It won’t take longer than anywhere else, but the general impact might be much bigger for you. Raising funds is much easier too. I’ve met so many independent developers in San Francisco making lots of money (>$200K a year) without working much (but worked hard in the past, or had a good idea).

You have two kinds of people in San Francisco, the ones working 20 hours a day, or doing 2 hours commuting a day going from downtown to Mountain View and working for the big players. And you have the ones not working as much and enjoying life. I’d suggest going for the 2nd option if you plan to go to SF.

So would I go back to San Francisco ? Hell yeah ! But surprisingly I would go again not for work, but for the good vibe. Of course there are tons of IT companies there, and even the average level of software developers ain’t better than France (or other countries), you have way more people, way more companies. That operates like a magnet. At the end, you have way more projects happening there. San Francisco makes projects possible. My only concern is time does not run the same way in SF, and a one year stay would pass like a week in other cities.

See you soon San Francisco (my flickr California set).