Ultimate tool for geek – Part II

For about 2 weeks and thanks to vowe, I tested Kapsules, a desktop widget engine for Microsoft Windows. A widget is like a miniature application which rests on your desktop. Kapsules is great but quite limited concerning the number of widgets.

The leader in this field is Konfabulator. This tool is coming from the MacOS world and the first Windows (XP, 2000) version was released last week. You can download the version 1.8 here, this standard version integrates some standard widgets. The stability is ok (no crash in 5 days of intensive usage), the memory foorprint is more or less ok – about 10 MB per widget. I installed it, tested it and….switched definitely to Konfabulator.

Konfabulator is doing about the same things as Kapsules. The main difference, as already mentionned, is the number of widgets. Kapsules is quite an “old” (first release in February 2003 ;-) program on the MacOS, and now, a lot of widgets are compatible for both platforms (MacOS and Windows).

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine 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 AirPort signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather. What sets it apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of Apple’s Quartz rendering. 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.

I am using four widgets: The Weather (standard package), What to do (standard package), Battery (standard package) and a mini Calendar. How does this look like?

A tool for geek, I told you :-)

PS: to be able to have two instances of a widget runnning at the same time (as for me with the weather in Male, Maldives and Mulhouse, France), just make a copy of the corresponding file (.widget) with another name!

Shame on AOL, shame on AOL, shame on AOL.

I had already almost no respect for this company, its services and products (I’m speaking about AOL, not Winamp ;-), but THIS…. BetaNews published yesterday an interesting article – Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp – about the catastrophic integration of Winamp in AOL. As a quite fanatic user of Winamp since years, this article sounds desperate concerning the future of this great tool. Again, a very bad example of an integration of a little structure (Winamp) with its own history, people and efficient way of working, in a big and fat monster (AOL), as usual with the same consequences: no values generated for the monster, no future for the people of the little structure, and a VERY BAD SERVICE for the customer!!

The last members of the original Winamp team have said goodbye to AOL and the door has all but shut on the Nullsoft era, BetaNews has learned.

Only a few employees remain to prop up the once-ubiquitous digital audio player with minor updates, but no further improvements to Winamp are expected.

Winamp’s abandonment comes as no surprise to those close to the company who say the software has been on life support since the resignation of Nullsoft founder and Winamp creator Justin Frankel last January.

The marriage of Nullsoft and AOL was always one of discontent. After AOL acquired the small company in 1999 for around $100 million, the young team of Winamp developers was assimilated into a strict corporate culture that begged for rebellion. Although Nullsoft was initially given a long leash by AOL, It wasn’t long until the two ideologies collided.

Frankel and his team were accustomed to simply brainstorming ideas over coffee and bringing them to the masses without approval. So when Frankel and fellow Nullsoft developer Tom Pepper devised a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing system, dubbed Gnutella, parent AOL was left in the dark.

Despite the somber farewell, Nullsoft’s former masterminds are proud of their accomplishments. Winamp helped start a digital audio revolution and boasts an incredible 60 million users per month.

After a disappointing Winamp3, Nullsoft developers returned to the drawing board and completed long-standing goals with the release of Winamp 5.0 in late 2003.

[…] Without those who poured their heart and soul into building the software, Winamp seems destined to meet a fate similar to fellow audio player Sonique, after Lycos saw the departure of its development team. Sonique has stagnated for years, and development ceased altogether last March.

So, Google declares to index more than 8 billion pages. Have a look at the Google’s homepage:

Bill Coughran, VP Engineering at Google, posted on this subject:

You probably never notice the large number that appears in tiny type at the bottom of the Google home page, but I do. It’s a measure of how many pages we have in our index and gives an indication of how broadly we search to find the information you’re looking for. Today that number nearly doubled to more than 8 billion pages. That made me smile.

Comprehensiveness is not the only important factor in evaluating a search engine, but it’s invaluable for queries that only return a few results.

Now, another interesting thing: you know that one of the best way to test the Google’s index is to search the word “the”. I did that yesterday and Google showed more than 9.5 billion pages:

I did the same search for about 10 minutes and it seems that Google corrected the number of pages returned by this well-known query…It’s now exactly 8 billion!!

I just de-activated AdSense on my blog. As I mentionned here, it was a test, nothing more. This online contextual ad program is very easy to activate, to integrate and to manage. It works really very smooth. On the other hand, I have (still) no need to “finance” my blog :-) It costs time, not really money!

I don’t know how it’s by you: about 50% of my overall traffic is coming directly from accesses on my feed (atom.xml), about 20% from accesses on my webiste (www.didierbeck.net). So, all in all, about 3/4 of my traffic is not relevant for this AdSense program. Not really adapted!

Great summary from Jeff Clavier concerning two interviews (Endgadget and silicon.com) of Niklas Zennström, CEO of Skype.

New feature – SkypeIn

Amongst other things (voicemail, video-conference, etc.), Zennström mentions that Skype is going to roll-out a SkypeIn capability (at some point during the winter) allowing regular telephone users to reach a Skype user. This supposedly means that Skype users will be assigned a telephone number, and that Skype will become a full blown VOIP service.

Some little issues

[…]I have noticed recently that the quality of international calls tended to degrade compared to a few months ago (“ransom of success”).
More problematic seems to be the chronic issue that Skype is having with SkypeOut and its credit card processing function.

I have also heard a lot of complaints about their their online support: always very nice and polite, but of very limited usefulness (which is kinda problematic).

Nice conclusion from Jeff

Unlike so many other startups, their problem is that they can’t take the money people want to pay for their service ;-)

Now some facts & figures

• Skype was founded on August 29, 2003
• 70 employees (locations: London, Estonia, Luxembourg)
• 13 million users worldwide in 200 countries (!)
• 80’000 new users daily (!)
• 500’000 simultaneous users connected, peak > 1 million simultaneous users
• average call time: 6 minutes
• 295’000 SkypeOut customers
• 2.4 billion minutes with SkypeOut (Vonage has 170’000 customers, passed the biliion minutes served in 2004)
• VC financing of Skype: $19M

We are using Sype professionally very intensively since months with a lot of good experience. For example: last week, some of us had to coordinate a very complexe “move-to-production” process (2 guys in France, 1 in Switzerland) during about 5 hours. Thanks to the exclusive usage of Skype for the telephone conversations, I saved about 650 euros in one time (cell phones costs, including the roaming costs). GREAT :-)

Firefox v1.0 is out :-) As usual, some of the themes and extensions are not compatible anymore with this new version…

[via @rgumente]

1. Take action. Don’t put it off till tomorrow. Too many good ideas are lost because no one implements, no one takes action

2. Ignore “that’s a bad idea.” When you start a company, lots of people will tell you it’s a bad idea. Ignore them!

3. Never give up. Failure is good — it’s a great teacher. Better to try 10 times and only to succeed once than not to try at all.

My corollary to this, somehow #2 rephrased, is know yourself and your limitations very well, always believe stubornly in yourself and your ideas while being open to adapt to whatever makes a positive impact in your belief system.

[via MIT Technology Review]

IBM Corp.’s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

The world’s current official leader, Japan’s Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software.

Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics Inc. had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.

Blue Gene […] is just a quarter of its final planned size. When finished, it will exceed Earth Simulator’s performance by a factor of nine but require just a fraction of the electricity used by the Japanese machine.

I haven’t listenned to this CD for a while, wow! And not just because of the name ;-) This album, as a very few others, is a milestone in the music history. It was interesting for me to read the different reviews you can find online: on one side, very disapointed people, on the other side, very exciting ones… The latters are usually musicians, surely also a lot of guitarists. All this to mention that this album is not a easy one.

It was released in 1989 and won the Grammy of the “Best Instrumental Rock” album the same year. Terry Bozzio as a drummer and Tony Hymas as keyboard player joined Jeff Beck on this album. Each of them is a part of Music with a big “M”: Beck was, among others, the guitarist of the Yardbirds in the 60’s. Terry was the drummer of Frank Zappa and he is one the best technician and one the more innovative drummer since years. A kind of extraterrestrial, specially in the field of coordination. Have a look at his set:

So, a very uncommon set of musicians – trio guitar, keyboard and drums – who play quite a complicated music. BUT, to my mind, it definitely rocks. Have a try.

New version 1.16 of the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack released here. And it is free!

Mega Codec Pack includes everything needed to play online and offline computer media. This pack is from the makers of the K-lite codec pack. This version includes the Full K-lite codec pack as well as Quicktime and Realplayer codecs, and BS Player. This Pack includes codecs for the most popular compressions like Divx and Xvid as well as some of the less popular but still necesary codecs. This is your one stop codec resource.