Monthly Archives: August 2004

WEEK-END: Ecomusee of Alsace

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I’ve seen yesterday some very beautiful old half-timbered houses at the Ecomusee of Alsace (only in French) – Alsace is a region of the north-east of France, near the German and Swiss borders, where I live and come from. My region is often represented by storks, which can be found also in the Ecomusee.

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The Ecomusee of Alsace is the largest open-air museum in Europe, visited by nearly 400’000 visitors yearly.

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It contains about 70 traditional style buildings which were dismantled piece by piece in their village of origin and reassembled in this living museum. It features constructions dating from the 12th to the 19th century. Visitors can study the technical evolution of traditional building methods.

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A half-timbered house from a little village called “Artolsheim”, near the Rhine. I was built in 1561. This house was salvaged from destruction in 1987 at the last minute… Above: before the transport and renovation, below: how it looks like today.

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The one below comes from Gommersdorf and was built in 1682.

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All that made the daily life of this period (and specially the 19th and 20th centuries), the work and the celebrations of the past generations, is collected and demonstrated. You can also enjoy numerous activities and historical reenactments, as seeing (and hearing) this old tractor.

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Really a beautiful place I recommend if you visit our region!

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NEWS: some statistics about spam

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A recent study of MessageLabs concerning the evolution of spam was published here. It gives some interesting statistics about spam during the first semester 2004:

  • 5.0 billion emails scanned (anti-spam service), thereof 3.2 billion identified as spam, i.e. 63.5%. In comparison, during the same period in 2002, the quote represented 1.5%, in 2003 37.9%.
  • 5.6 billion emails scanned (anti-virus service), thereof 468 million containing virus, i.e. 8.3%. In comparison, during the same period in 2002, the quote represented 0.3%, in 2003 0.5%.
  • MessageLabs intercepted about 1.5 million phising emails (emails containing URLs to fraudulent websites) during the same period.

    • TOOLS: evaluation phase conclusion of SauceReader

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    Since Mai 14, 2004, I’m using intensively Sauce Reader from Synop as feed-reader and I would like to summarize my impression, as an "evaluation phase conclusion" (for my other posts, have a look here, here and here) :

    What’s Cool

  • Great user interface: clean, intuitive Outlook 2003 style user interface

  • Sauce Reader toolbar available in Internet Explorer

  • Very good usability

  • Since this version: performance, stability and a quite good memory foot-print

  • Customization of keyboard shortcuts

  • Great desktop alert when new feed items arrive

  • Feed discovery and one-click subscription to RSS and Atom feeds

  • Pop-up blocking, complete default browser support

  • Integrated weblogging environment with full posting functionality (including image uploading)

  • Great full-text search functionality (within archived items)

  • Support for content in any language or character encoding

  • Automatic application updates

  • Support of proxy, great feature to stay tuned at work

  • Free for personal use, reasonnable price for commercial use ($25US per license)

  • Last but not least, very active development team, professional alpha- and beta-phase

    • Room for improvement

  • I’m still not totally convinced by the “posting” module. The development team improved a lot the possibilities, stability and performance. But I still prefer to use the very simple Blogger web interface. Perhaps out of habit? Let’s see.

    • Conclusion

    All in all, I still think that Sauce Reader is the best aggregator at this moment (on Microsoft platform). The last developments of this tool (five releases now!) give me a very convincing impression of the Synop’s capability and user orientation.

    PS1: have a look at the reviews of Robert Scoble and of Laurent.

    PS2: my review was linked by Synop on their product homepage ;-)