About 106 million XP Sp2 downloads in two months… 90 million on the different Microsoft web sites and 16 million copies on CD. A list of SP2 incompatibilities updated on October 15.

New version of K-Lite Codec Pack available, have a try of the Mega Codec Pack, incredibly easy to install (v1.33)! I posted about this Codec Pack last month.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codec is short for Compressor-decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play 99% of all the movies that you download from the internet.

My friend and colleague Laurent is in Barcelona till the end of this week for the Microsoft Connect Event, which is a Microsoft’s event for Key Community Opinion Leaders across Europe . Laurent is responsible for the french community .NET website Tech Head Brothers (with his brother Mathieu).

An interesting operation from the Guardian in UK:

Last week G2 launched Operation Clark County to help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio. In the first three days, more than 11,000 people requested addresses.

Have a look at some responses from the US…

Have you not noticed that Americans don’t give two shits what Europeans think of us? Each email someone gets from some arrogant Brit telling us why to NOT vote for George Bush is going to backfire, you stupid, yellow-toothed pansies … I don’t give a rat’s ass if our election is going to have an effect on your worthless little life. I really don’t. If you want to have a meaningful election in your crappy little island full of shitty food and yellow teeth, then maybe you should try not to sell your sovereignty out to Brussels and Berlin, dipshit. Oh, yeah – and brush your goddamned teeth, you filthy animals.

Wading River, NY

As a US citizen, I want to advise you that you and anyone that participates in subverting the US presidential election can be criminally charged and perhaps even charged as spies.

California

Please be advised that I have forwarded this to the CIA and FBI.

United States

No comment

Be careful, this post could be dangerous for your spirits, specially if you are reading it on Monday morning, beginning of a new working week, and if the weather is as bad as by us :-)

As we cannot fight against the weather, we decided on last Friday to choose and to book our next “family winter holidays” at the beginning of February 2005. We hesitated between three sunny destinations: the Seychelles, the French west Indies and the Maldives. After some studies (thanx Internet :-), we chose the Maldives. The average precipitation is almost the same at home and in the Maldives in February (4 cm), not exactly the same for the temperature:

– at home (North-East of France): avg. low: – 1.7°C, avg. high: 6.1°C

– the Maldives: avg. low: 26°C (no, it’s not an error), avg. high: 30°C

Some interesting statistics about the Maldives from the Maldivian Ministry of Tourism:

– Situated southwest of Sri Lanka, on the equator

– 90’000 km2, 99% covered by the sea

– 1’190 coral islands, 820 km north-south, 120 km east-west

– Highest point: 8 feet (!)

– More than 200 islands are inhabited

– Capital: Malé, about 75’000 people

– February is the month with the highest occupancy rate: 97.7%!

– Average duration of stay: 8 days

– Tourism growth 2003-02: + 39.6%

– More than 560’000 people visited the Maldives in 2003, thereof 41’000 from France. Interesting to notice that the Italian market is from far the biggest market for the Maldives (about 25%)

Now, the Maldives are confronted with some instability, specially in Malé. People are pushing a process of democratic and institutional reforms. One unique party with the same leader since 1978 is ruling the country (President Gayoom)… News articles here and here.

Here we are, some pictures of the island we will visit ;-)

Umh, we are evaluating Typepad Pro for the next coming 30 days (free trial) in our professional environment. That means: no public access ;-)

My first impressions are very good. SixApart did a great job with the interface, it’s incredibly easy to set-up the blog and its different options. Let’s use it and stay tuned, I will give you some feedbacks!

PS: Loic, finally, I’m testing Typepad, I hope you appreciate :-)

[via vowe]

I was searching for a new Windows FTP client, vowe did the work for me, thanx ;-)

FileZilla is really great (actual version: v2.2.8d), a SourceForge project with a GNU General Public License. If you also want to change yours, have a look, it’s worth.

A printscreen:

[via MIT Technology Review]

Beurk, that remembers me some very bad souvenirs. I was “confronted” with all 20, unfortunately, during my schooling. And, since I’m working in the “real” life (already 9 years, wow), I haven’t use them…at all. On the other side, the *good* souvenirs are also coming back slowly :-)

Google released the first beta version of its Google Desktop Search tool. Little download (447KB), still indexing my local content :-) As usual, this tool is coming from the Google Labs.

A good functional description from BetaNews:

Google Desktop Search provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you’ve viewed. By making your computer searchable, it puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.

Google Desktop Search introduces new ways to access relevant and timely information. When you view a web page in Internet Explorer, it “caches” or stores its content so that you can later look at that same version of the page, even if its live content has changed or you’re offline. It organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result.

And a printscreen:

Synop released the new version 1.9 of its feed reader three weeks (!) after the last release. Great job! You can find a complete evaluation of this product here.

What are the new features in this version?

Improved memory management techniques.

Error reporting for feed refresh problems.

Weblog editor support for ISO Latin-1 Characters (e.g. accents, tildes, umlauts and symbols).

Improved UI behaviour, speed and stability; particularly the Items window.