Synop finally released a new major release (v2.0) of its free feed reader, called SauceReader. The last version 1.9 was launched in October 2004 (cf. my post here).

So, why did the Synop’s guys need so much time? It seems they had some issues with .NET.

Sauce Reader 2.0 is a complete rewrite and no longer requires the .NET framework. Using .NET for Sauce Reader v1 we were never able to achieve the level of performance we considered appropriate for a heavily used productivity application. .NET is a compelling and powerful platform, but currently unsuitable for widely adopted client side applications.

Oups.

What are the new features?
– Office 2003 style user interface.
– Integrated weblog posting with drafts and offline authoring.
– Comment feed subscriptions, archiving, posting and search.
– One-click subscription to RSS and Atom feeds using IE toolbar.
– Search archived items using Sauce Reader or desktop search tools.
– Feeds tree and newspaper style views.
– Fast, small and scalable to your reading requirements.
– Automatic migration from oldder versions.
This version is clearly *MUCH* faster than the v1.9. Also the memory requested by SauceReader is now reasonable (about 14MB). I like the new interface. Great job!

I know, I am a bit late, but anyway, I forgot to talk about a study (pdf, 261KB) from the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored and published by Dimension Data. This study includes the findings of a global survey of 500 Senior Executives, which identifies the most important management challenges facing the world’s leaders.

CEO briefing at a glance

Conclusions about the future

1. Companies strive for growth in an uncertain environment.
2. Competition for offshoring intensifies.
3. China as opportunity, risk and competitive threat.
4. Technology: disrupting industries, organising business: for the first time since the dotcom crash, advances in technology are seen as the single most important driver of change.
5. Managing scarcity: specially oil and talents.
6. Governance goes global: Companies will continue to march towards their compliance deadlines, but there is also a greater emphasis on the broader aspects of governance.
7. Corporate agility as pre-requisite for survival: shifting from fixed cost-structures to the variable cost-structures associated with outsourcing

Strategic importance of technologies

Strategies for growth

Outsourcing strategies

Expected benefits from technology

Critical forces for change

After having studied a bit the concerts programme 2005 of the Montreux Jazz Festival, we decided ourselves for the evening of the July 11 2005 at the Casino Barrière with:

• Dianne Reeves Trio
• George Duke & Band

Sexy, jazzy and groovy evening in perspective!

Wow, again, a great increase in my traffic. More and more readers, thanx a lot! I think I have to be a little more careful with what I am posting. Nooo, I am kidding, no pressure :-)

Technical statistics April 2005

• number of hits: 298’115 (daily average: 9’937)
• number of pageviews: 62’986 (daily average: 2’100)
• number of sessions: 36’424 (daily average: 1’214)
• bytes transferred: 8.22 GB (daily average: 0.27GB)

Traffic development – April 2005

Some highlights – April 2005

• Increase April / March 2005:

• Hits: +63%
• Pageviews: +42%
• Sessions: +55%
• bytes transferred: +43%

• 13’206 hits
• 2’827 pageviews
• 1’482 sessions
• 385 MB transferred

Requested pages April 2005

• weblog: 87% (thereof atom.xml: 23%)
• website: 11%
• robots.txt: 2%

Browsers April 2005

Top 15 – Identified countries – April 2005

(excepted .com, .net, .edu, .org)

73 different countries accessed my blog during the last month (Andorra to Yugoslavia).

Last months

February 2005
March 2005

Our ten best things about St.Barths

1. The views and colors around every turn
2. The beautiful stay at La Banane
3. The great shopping time
4. The great dinners   (K’Fé Massai, Pipiri, Hideaway, Wall House)
5. The beaches, specially Le Gouverneur and Saline, specially in the morning
6. The feeling of being "out-of-the-world" for a while (no news, no crime)
7. Drinking Ti Punch and Planteurs every time that is possible :-)
8. The people of St.Barths
9. Leaving St.Maarten behind (if you like St.Maarten, you won’t like St.Barths)
10. Smoking some great cigars 3 times a week after the dinner (eg.: Davidoff Grand Cru No.4)

Do you know Silktide (strange name) and its SiteScore?

SiteScore is a free tool which rates how well designed, popular and accessible your website is.

The entire testing process is handled by advanced computer software, which means a test is free and only takes a few seconds. SiteScore also gathers user feedback on all the websites we rate, to help judge how appealing a design is.[…]

SiteScore rates all websites on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the highest).

Some interesting inputs. For example, I realized that all my pages were found in violation of the the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This means that my blog/website is unlawful in Britain for example… I must say I haven’t know these ones and I will have a look at these guidelines. Sorry for that, I hope I haven’t blocked somebody….

Sooo, what are the results for didierbeck.com?

Not bad, specially if I could correct the part “Accessibility” ;-)

PS: I think I tested this tool based on a post of Dragos I didn’t found anymore, sorry…

[via vowe]

You had a tough day because of one of your client? Have a look here, it is excellent and good for your spirits. Some abstracts:

Hey – in the screenshot of the HTML layout you’ve sent me none of the links is working. Can you fix this?

I’d like a gradient from blue to red — but get rid of that purple in the middle.

The invoice says the software is supplied on a 200 foot tape, so we’ve reserved a hangar to store it.

I need this section of the site to be completely locked down with passwords on a per-user basis. Don’t make it so that people can’t get in if they can’t remember the password though.

We couldn’t make a screenshot from your website, would you please fix that…

We want a Flash website…but we don’t want a lot of animation or sound because it’s too destracting…and it needs to be easy to update so that our secretaries can make changes.

[via Thomas & Sylvain, directly from Toulouse]

A great picture of Sylvain from the Airbus A380, taken from his … garten during the first flight of this incredible machine. The engineers surely used Catia, you know, this “piece of software which is changing the industry”.

The plane seems to be very quiet, also in comparison to other smaller planes.

No link to the Airbus’ website. Each time, I tried to load the A380’s page, it crashed Firefox…

[via PointBlog, in French]

NYTimes.com published some information about its website traffic. Impressive, wow!

[via padawan]

Funny, extensive, (partly) true, and informative :-)

Preamble

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

[source: Sam’s archive]