After 2 weeks down (the server got hacked and closed without any notice by online.net ) and after looking at low-cost yet feature-full hosting options, ksso.net is finally back online ! I took the opportunity to also clean up the image links in the database (some very old links were bogus) but for some reason the recovery of the database from the hacked server induced some encoding issues :/ – which I’m not sure how to solve (and may not be worth the time).

This brings back to a big question: this blog started in 2005 – Feb 19th to be precise – and god it has changed a lot along those 7 years. Yet blogging has changed a lot too – becoming more professional, more organized. Some massive players have conquered a large audience on very vertical subjects and the place for personal blogging has gotten smaller and smaller. Commenting the news is futile, providing in-depth analysis is über time-consuming, talking about personal life is boring, bragging or complaining is useless… What’s left to the occasional blogger ? sharing passion and thoughts in a “lighter” form than what the verbose blog used to be.

Thus the evolution of this blog into something lighter – closer to a tumblr form factor – and closer to the daily concerns rather than a pompous why’s why analysis. At least that how I feel today !

2 generations later, I’m still in love with my iPad, love to read RSS on it or play chess… but I believe the iPad will never go beyond the media consumption paradigm. iOS which was one of its strength thanks to its ease-of-use is proving way too limiting to enable any actual work to be done on that device – which is a shame since this device is – at least in its latest revision – a computing monster.

In the meantime, Windows 8 is bridging the gap between tablets and computers at fast pace.

As you may know I can’t work with windows as it lacks a decent shell and I still don’t see why you need to use a mouse to do actions that require the precision of a command-line.

And yet – Windows 8 and the new generation of tablets it’s helping build are truly a leap forward from the standard set by Apple. One example is the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, rocking a i7 processor and 13″ 1600×900 IPS display, it’s both an ultrabook and a (big) tablet.

lenovo ideapad yoga

Featuring both a touch interface, with an elegant design (I kinda like the Metro UI/UX as I grew kinda tired of Apple’s skeuomorph thing) as well as en environment where productivity apps can work decently – I love being able to use Visual Studio 11 on a “tablet”, coming with or without a keyboard, it opens up this platform to the full class of usages that people may imagine for them – lifting away the media consumption-only limitation. 

windows 8 on samsung slate review 13

Moreover, it comes with an unusual openness (coming from Microsoft) to web standards as HTML5 apps are natively supported by the platform on an equal level as native c++/c# apps.

To me this evolution means only one thing : the time of Apple is coming to an end unless they manage to give a decent openness to their system and stop putting walls everywhere (Moutain Lion is a major step backward from that prospective).

• Open various communication channels for users to give feedback : mostly through our Facebook page or Uservoice ideabox and make sure to mark our presence there and interact actively with the users
• Process help tickets in less than 24hrs. Most of the time we answer them in less than an hour ensuring speedy issue solving
• Engage proactively with a customer upon signs that he may be experiencing troubles. This is currently done manually

Although Pascal had doubts over the last point, after a year of proactively engaging our users one thing is sure : they all LOVE it ! This has helped to solve number of issues before having to get the user through the additional hassle of opening a support ticket.

This kind of behavior has become somewhat the new standard for online services, and anything below that standard now feels unprofessional. That was my feeling for instance this week with hobbyking’s customer service. A poor zendesk interface, an average time of response of 3 days, the guy responding did not have access to my account !?!? thus requiring from me extra work to get support…. which made them basically loose me as a customer.

As with the building of your web service, the customer service is one of the most crucial side and must never be overlooked. It’s a big part of the soul of the entire system, and just as you focus on the customer when building your service you should keep him at the center throughout the whole flow… which does include customer service and keep on trying to make his life easier especially when he’s in trouble.

Initially I though it was about demonstrating that 3D design could be crowdsourced (instead of using farms of chinese people) but maybe it’s not about that after all..

This week at SXSW they’re announcing the beta release of an interactive screensaver based on the models they crowdsourced… and it’s beautiful. As a scuba diver I could probably spend the whole day switching from one view to another and following each and every fish as they smoothly swim in the Blu.

I still don’t get what they’re up to – but I totally love what I’m seeing! Grab your copy here

I’ve been an iPad user since day one, and I believe tablets are way superior to laptops when it comes to consuming media. Watching a movie, reading a magazine (and accessing all the foreign magazines in a few seconds thanks to the newsstand…), reading newsfeed (I’m a lover of the reeder app), browsing the web…

Yet every time I tried using it as a creation tool it failed painfully. Creating keynote presentations, pages documents, writing code… all the usual stuff are still no good on that platform.  Every time I try using keynote the simplest operation which would be granted on a regular computer becomes a massive pain. The only thing that get actually easier is the “drawing” or “sketching” on apps such as Adobe ideas.

Apple launched yesterday its new iPad, featuring a retina display – and yet although I’m an Apple fanboy I’m left wondering why I should upgrade from my iPad. Will I be able to do more stuff ? Probably not. A few tech bumps (retina display, A5x) do sound appealing to a tech geek, and yet if those 10 last years have thought us something it’s that processin power or screen resolution do not create any new usage or experience.

I liked discovering yesterday the Android AIDE toolkit which enables to develop and compile android apps straight from an android device:

From my prospective that kind of tools are symptomatic of a healthy ecosystem where both creation and consumption can happen. Of course the experience is still very rough but that kind of trials will undoubtedly lead to some significant UX breakthrough in computing that will evolve touch-based devices from mere interactive screens to fully-functional computing platforms..

The 3-dive training session both introduced me to dry-suit diving and to the do’s and don’ts of ice-diving.

First time I put the dry suit on, and sat on the icy entry hole was the oddest experience ever : it’s not cold ! So dry suits do work ‘ that’s a relief. For the first dive I was allowed a full-face mask making me look like one of those professional underwater workers (classy).

During this dive we only used the dry suit as a dry insulation layer, the suit was in auto mode (which means the left shoulder valve lets automatically the air out as pressure raises) and basically I did not have to worry about the buoyancy issues. A little swim underwater, playing with the bubbles on the icy ceiling (making a bubble tornado) and first exercise: planting an ice screw – that one was harder than it looked. Getting the ice screw to enter the ice required heavy pushes on the fins followed by frantic screwing – this led to heavy breathing for a few minutes.

Fun facts I discovered pretty fast : there are 3 very different buoyancy zones under the ice.

• Under 1m depth, you feel sucked up towards the ice. It’s actually your breathing bubbles fault. As they can’t be released in the air, they create a water flow going up and you are being sucked up towards the icy ceiling.
• The 1-3m zone is the comfort zone: you are stable and everything works out great.
• Below the 3m zone you feel sucked down at high speed and need to inflate your BCD while being extra careful not to reach the 3m zone too fast or you’ll hit the ceiling in no time.

The ice screw is an essential security tool. Whenever you or someone in your group is lost, there’s is only one thing to do : plant the ice screw, connect a tether line and start making circles around the ice screw, increasing the radius at each circle. If you lost your exit hole, you’re bound to find it. If you lost your buddies just remain calm and motionless under the ice, using this technique they’ll find you or at least you’ll see the tether pass at some point.

This was the objective of the second dive : plant the ice screw, connect the tether, make a mark in the ice to identify the origin point and circle around .. and repeat operations with a larger radius. On this dive I got to connect the dry suit to the air supply, and thus to inflate a bit whenever the suit became too squeezed, but I had to trade in the full-face mask for a regular mask and octopus+protective mouthpiece. Against all expectations the loss of the full-face mask did not make me feel cold at all !

Day 3, last dive before graduation, was about free exploration tethered to a line connected outside. I had to drill holes in the ice, open a hole with an ice saw, prepare the dive site by compressing the light snow (heavy snow on the last 2 days). Nothing very complicated aside from the fact that you need to pay extra attention to hold the line far away from yourself to avoid becoming entangled in it.

I took the camera to try and take a few shots, but obviously took the wrong objective (60mm/F2.8 Macro ) and the old eos 300D sensor was really behaving badly in low light. I still managed to snap a few shots and a video with my Kodak Play which turned out unexpectedly allright.

Bottom line: ice diving is an amazing experience, and definitely up to any CMAS 2* diver with enough buoyancy control. Can’t wait to do this again !

‘ve been a believer since day one, and against all odds. I really think Microsoft is a real and serious player in the mobile OS war (as opposed to Palm, which despite the fact that they made a nice OS did not have the money to support it).

After playing with the latest 7.5 release, and notably with the Spotify app, I think it’s safe to say that WP7.5 is finally ready for prime time. Backgrounding works, the UI is smooth and responsive… Although the slide UI is a bit of a pain from a developer point of view (you have to rebuild/rethink your apps to match that experience) and the app store is still a bit empty because of that, I’m sure frameworks such as jquery mobile will soon support those kind of transitions.
Moreover I was surprised to see that finally the mobile IE is up to the task displaying html5/css3/js websites properly as their webkit couterparts already do.

I guess I’m going to give a close look at the Nokia Lumia tonight a the launch party!