Pixoria released a new version (1.8.3) of Konfabulator for Windows. I have already tested Konfabulator for a while.

What is Konfabulator?

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

What sets Konfabulator apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today’s advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Windows XP and Mac OS X.

The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task.

We are now confronted with a huge human tragedy in Asia. On day after my last post, the last information talked about more than 23’000 dead people with thousands more missings, specially in some Indian islands near Sumatra. Millions of people lost their homes……

The quake, the fourth largest recorded since 1900 and measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, occurred after a rupture on the Indian Ocean seabed caused by the violent grinding of two tectonic plates.

Sri Lanka and India were severely hit with respective death tolls of 10,897 and 6,597, while the number of dead in Indonesia rose to 4,725. A further 866 deaths were reported in Thailand, 51 in Malaysia, 43 in the Maldives, 30 in Myanmar and two in Bangladesh.

Huge waves swept some 7,000 kilometres (4,000 miles) as far as Africa, crashing on to the shores of Kenya and Somalia, affecting the islands of Mauritius, Reunion and the Seychelles on the way. More than 100 Somali fishermen were reported missing feared dead.

All the people dead, all these children dead….

Four weeks later and we would have been under the wave, too. God.

6,300 Dead as Quake, Tsunami Devastate Asia

The world’s biggest earthquake in 40 years hit south Asia Sunday, unleashing a tsunami that crashed into Sri Lanka and India and swamped tourist isles in Thailand and the Maldives, killing more than 6,300 people.

A wall of water up to 30 feet high triggered by the 8.9 magnitude underwater earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra caused death, chaos and devastation.

I wish you and your family a very happy and restful Christmas. Have a good time.

We also tried hard ;-)

A Christmas tree

A Christmas table

A Christmas fire

A Christmas capon (3.4kg)

Mumm Brut Rosé

Château Coutet (Sauternes)

1er cru classé 1999

Château Saint-Pierre (Saint-Julien)

Grand cru classé 2000

Château des Rocs

Bordeaux supérieur 1985

And…the whole family :-)

I published some pictures of a one-day family trip me made in the mountains last week-end. Have a look!

We had an apero this afternoon and I presented one idea of Seth Godin to the team. The main idea developped is that a small unit and big unit could benefit from each other, a kind of symbiosis.

RULE 9: OBSERVE THOSE LITTLE BIRDS THAT CLEAN THE TEETH OF VERY BIG HIPPOS

There’s a giant rhino, bigger than a Volvo, with its mouth open. And there, in the mouth of the beast, are a bunch of little birds.

The birds eat the bugs the rhino can’t get to. The birds are happy because they get an easy meal. And the rhino is happily bug-free.

There’s a lot a bootstrapper can learn from these little birds. By creating a mutually beneficial relationship with a hippo, you can make a lot of money, generate credibility, and avoid being eaten.

Find bigger, richer, more stable organizations. Partner with them. It gives you credibility and access and sometimes, cash flow.

Most big-company founders hate what their companies have become. They rail against the slowness, the bureaucracy, the inability to get anything done anymore.

Reminder: you can download the pdf version of the Seth Godin’s book – The Bootstrapper’s Bible.

As I am not using any “public” statistics tools like SiteMeter, I would like to give some information about my weblog/website statistics. Both sites (didierbeck.com and didierbeck.net) are hosted by OVH and I have a full-access to my raw-logs (apache logs). To analyse them, I am using the same utility as the one for my professional job, i.e. urchin, which is definitely very powerful and extremely efficient. With my laptop for example (hp nx7000 with 1GB RAM), I can generate full reports of websites with hundreds of thousands of pageviews monthly in….minutes!! For those you use WebTrends, have a look at urchin (the license is very cheap for this kind of powerful tool, $895 for 100 websites!).

OVH had some problems in September with the filers where the logs were copied, so that I put a forecast in the following statistics for this month, as for the December, to be able to close the year. The period of analyse is March to December 2004.

For the first two December’s weeks:

• 660 pageviews daily (min: 404, max: 890)
• 317 sessions daily (min: 166, max: 407)
• 79% of the traffic is generated by my blog, 11% by my website, 7% by the robots and 3% by the Seth Godin‘s book (!), the Bootstrappers Bible, about 300 downloads in 5 days!
• So, 79% of traffic is coming from the weblog, and 54% from the atom.xml, which is my Syndicated Newsfeed. This part is increasing quite rapidly.
• Interesting also to note that the browsers and feed readers structure accessing my blog and website is changing massively. In the last two weeks, 25% of the accesses are coming from IE, 22% from Firefox/Mozilla, 23% from Newsgator (!), the rest – 30% – from a *lot* of other feed readers (Bloglines, SauceReader, etc.)

To have a comparison, I took the liberty to have a look at two weblogs I am reading very regularly, the one of Rodrigo Sepulveda and the one of Loic le Meur, who are giving their statistics openly with SiteMeter here and here (Rodrigo, Loic, if you have a problem with my comparison, let me know ;-):

Loic (period=last week)

• Pageviews daily: 543
• Number of visits daily: 362

Rodrigo (period=last week)

• Pageviews daily: 243
• Number of visits daily: 183

As usual in this field, it is just an indication, specially for the number of visits which is always defined in different ways by the different tools. The number of pages should be representative on the other side. I am wondering if SiteMeter can integrate the traffic generated by the newsfeed (atom or RSS). I don’t think so, which is quite a problem, if you know that this part is generating more than 50% of my traffic…

As already mentionned in October, the Mozilla Foundation has called on its supporters to chip in on a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for the launch of its Firefox 1.0 browser.

It’s out!

MOZILLA FOUNDATION PLACES TWO-PAGE ADVOCACY AD IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15th, 2004 – The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today announced that it has placed a two-page ad in the December 16th edition of the New York Times. The ad, coordinated by Spread Firefox, features the names of the thousands of people worldwide who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation’s fundraising campaign to support last month’s highly successful launch of the open source Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser.

[pdf]

As I said, I participated to this program. Need an evidence?

Where are YOU??

[via Seth Godin]

Seth wants to add the following 10:

1. Basic understanding of electricity.
2. How to drive a nail, drive a screw, cut a board, build a box.
3. How to drive a car in the winter, how to pull a car out of a skid.
4. How to ask for help.
5. How to read a table and a chart
6. How to read the media for spin and for insight
7. The importance of doing things for other people (yes, this one among others is mostly a parenting job, but yes, it can be taught)
8. How to work really really hard, sometimes on things that aren’t fun.
9. What it’s like to be in jail.
10. How to create an internal dialogue that makes you happy.