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J’ai assisté aujourd’hui à une excellente présentation sur le thème « TIC et handicaps » par un groupe d’élèves de première année de Télécom ParisTech [1]. Lors de l’exposé est apparu un point qui a particulièrement retenu mon attention : alors que le site public de Télécom ParisTech a été conçu avec comme objectif l’accessibilité aux déficients visuels, l’intranet de l’École, pour sa part, méconnait totalement cette problématique.
Par exemple, l’emploi du temps des élèves (ainsi que celui du personnel enseignant) n’est disponible qu’à travers une page WWW dans laquelle toute information sémantique est absente. Les tableaux qui s’y trouvent servent autant à la mise en forme qu’à la mise à disposition des données elles-mêmes.
Cette situation serait beaucoup moins problématique si les données étaient accessibles sous forme structurée, apte à être intégrées dans un mashup adapté aux différents handicaps. Si, par exemple, l’interface de Twitter ne convient pas à certaines personnes, il est facile d’en extraire les données pour rendre cette interface plus conviviale comme le fait Hootsuite ou pour l’intégrer dans un système de lecture automatique. Pour cela, Twitter fournit, après authentification, les données brutes sous forme exploitable, permettant ainsi de créer de la valeur ajoutée tout en utilisant leur service. Chacun est libre de transformer et de présenter l’information sous la forme qui lui convient, sans avoir besoin de déconstruire du code HTML pour en extraire l’information qui y a été noyée de manière plus ou moins élégante.
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Gostai just announced that its implementation of the Urbiscript programming language is going to be open-sourced in May 2010. Urbiscript is a prototype-based interpreted language inspired from a mix of Lua, Smalltalk, Ruby and Javascript amongst others with many features dedicated to parallel programming.
I spent the whole 2008 year working on Urbiscript at Gostai with several very talented people, and I’m really happy to see the project we worked on released as open-source. I have some ideas of where I could use the Urbiscript language in place of compiled solutions. The licensing model will be a dual one: a free and GPL-compatible open-source license, or at your option a proprietary one for which you will have to pay. However, if you want to contribute to the code, there is a catch:
[...]
Let us assume that you want to register for an expensive conference (e.g., SIGAda 2009). Let us say that you would like to get a discount, and decide to join the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) despite its retro name.
In this case, and in addition to dozens of emails, you will receive a wonderful full-page color certificate and a congratulations letter for having satisfied the requirements to become a professional member of the ACM. What are those requirements? Having a credit card is apparently enough. I guess one is supposed to be proud to have joined such an elitist institution.
And by the way, do not dare put an accented character anywhere in your name or address. On postal mail, such as the issues of “Communications of the ACM“, “Télécom ParisTech” will be listed as “T L COM PARISTECH”. Hello ACM, this is 2009.
Edit 2010-11-01: I just received a mail with “We hope that you take pride in being a Professional Member of the world’s premier society whose mission is the advancement of computing as a science and profession”. Wow! I guess I should be proud because my institute payed my feeds.
A friend of mine challenged me today to the number game. This is a classical one, where you have to guess a number between 0 and 999, and the computer will tell you whether you were right on or if you were above or below the chosen number.
Instead of doing dichotomy by hand or with a calculator, I wrote the following Forth snippet using the gforth interpreter:
: guess 2dup + 2/ dup . ;
: init 0 999 guess ;
: big nip guess ;
: small -rot big ;
Here is the transcript of an interactive session (what I typed is in black, what was printed by gforth is in red):
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Beware: trying to move your Jabber (XMPP) server from one host to another may result in your users not being able to reliably talk to users using Google Talk or Gmail chat. It looks like one way or the other Google caches the SRV records of your Jabber server and do not consult the DNS anymore afterwards.
It has been several weeks since I moved the ejabberd XMPP server for rfc1149.net on a new host which kept the same name as the old one. However, connections with gmail.com users are randomly working, while all the other domains my users interact with seem to have no problems at all. I have found several server administrators who experienced the same issue, and even read a suggestion to send an e-mail to the address xmpp@google.com which could supposedly solve the problem. The result? No answer, no working connection with gmail.com users.
What is needed to get Google to reread the new DNS information?
Edit: I received an answer from Jonas, a software engineer at Google. It looks like they are having troubles linking with Jabber servers located on the OVH network (as is mine, and as Ploum also wrote in comments), and they have contacted OVH. In the meantime, I may try to add another port to my Jabber server, update the SRV record, and see if it brings me more luck.
Il y a maintenant trois ans je prévenais, ainsi que beaucoup d’autres, du danger de la loi sur le droit d'auteur de droits voisins dans la société de l'information, plus connue sous le petit nom de DADVSI. Un amendement, surnommé par les bloggers et les journalistes « Amendement Vivendi Universal », proposait d’interdire la simple mise à disposition du public de logiciels qui pourraient être utilisés pour contrefaire du contenu protégé par le droit d’auteur.
Et voila, on y est. La société civile des producteurs de phonogrammes en France (SPPF) poursuit quatre sociétés américaines au prétexte que leurs logiciels de peer-to-peer permettent de partager du contenu contrefait. Peu importe que ces logiciels servent à partager des logiciels libres ou de la musique légalement partageable, le fait qu’ils puissent être utilisés pour partager des œuvres dont la redistribution est interdite par leurs ayants-droits suffit à donner une chance à la SPPF de gagner une telle action en justice. Le texte de l'article L335-2-1 du code de la propriété intellectuelle est formulé en ces termes :
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My LG Flatron L1915S monitor decided that it was tired of working so hard: the backlight now turns off after a fraction of second. Of course, it happened right after the warranty period expired, so it is unlikely that I can get it fixed. A fair number of users seem to have the same problem, so I guess I will have to find another brand.
Back in 9th grade. My science teacher was explaining to the class why carbon monoxide (CO) inhalation was dangerous: carbon monoxide molecules attach themselves to the hemoglobin, preventing dioxygen molecules (O2) to do so. The carbone monoxide doesn’t dissociate from hemoglobin under normal pressure, making it a long-term problem (ok, this was a simplification, but it was ninth grade, don’t forget).
I remember myself asking the teacher: “Would it be ok to run a person’s blood through a machine that temporarily increases its pressure in the presence of oxygen?” She looked surprised and told me she didn’t know.
Two days ago, I watched an episode of House M.D in which Dr. House puts a patient into an hyperbaric oxygen chamber to cure a patient from carbon monoxide poisoning. Not quite the same thing as the derivation I was thinking about, but the same principle, increase the blood pressure in an oxygen-saturated environment. This reminded me of the question I asked when I was a child. Twenty years later, I’m proud to know that my idea was not that stupid.
Am I the only one who would have loved to see a second season of Battle Programmer Shirase coming?
First I hoped I had misread the web page. Then I realized I had not.
Networked disks are very useful. At home, they allow you to access your data from any computer on your local network without needing to keep a machine acting as a file server turned on all the time. But wait! You could use a networked disk to store songs and movies that you have illegally downloaded, couldn’t you?
Don’t worry, your networked disk will make sure you comply with the law and much more . Did you intend to store music that you legally downloaded from Jamendo and let your spouse and children access it? Too bad, since it may infringe someone else copyrights, Western Digital seems to think that it is best that you do not share it at all, just in case:
Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the following file types cannot be shared by different users using WD Anywhere Access.
If these file types are on a share on the WD My Book World Edition system and another user accesses the share, these file will not be displayed for sharing. Any other file types can be shared using WD Anywhere Access.
As a friend send to me, “sure, sharing 1 tera bytes of text files looks very appealing”. This post could have been titled “how DRM (Digital Rights Management) can hurt the world even when they are not used” or “we assume that you are a criminal”.
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