Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player in history. It takes a man with a healthy brain, lots of memory, and an incredible determination, to achieve such a mythical status.

Unfortunately for Putin’s government, Kasparov is their opponent. Here is what Kasparov suggests we do to understand Putin:

If you are in a real hurry to become an expert on the Russian government, you may prefer the DVD section, where you can find Mr. Puzo’s works on film. “The Godfather” trilogy is a good place to start, but do not leave out “The Last Don,” “Omerta” and “The Sicilian.”

Of all people, I think Kasparov is one of the few the Russian government will not touch. Or, at least, I hope this is true.

It is too late for the call for papers, but WikiSym 2007 will held in my home town. I like the slogan of the symposium: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century.

Source: Seb Paquet.

Eclipse is a great IDE. Up until I tried Eclipse, I thought that IDEs were for wannabes programmers. You know the type: why does programming have to be sooo hard, why can’t I just click and click? Well, programming is a design task and design is hard. So, just like there is no automated tool to generate the next iPod killer, there is no tool to generate great software.

Not so with Eclipse. That’s an IDE for real men.

There is one think that really annoys me with Eclipse, and that’s the Forward/Backward choice, see on the image:

Ok. What is the problem exactly? How often do I want to search for a string in a document, but only “Forward”. Never. I almost always want to know whether the string is present in the document. Period.

This is a case where the default option is a complex query while most people only needs something simple. Bad design. Bad. Bad.

Most of the time, I barely know where my cursor is. All this stupid dialog box does, most often, is lead me to conclude that the string I search for is not present. At the very least, the Eclipse people should have a warning when the string you are searching for was not found but could be found if you opted for the Backward option. This would take me exactly 15 minutes to implement this if I knew the Eclipse code base.

Disclaimer. This post is in no way sexist. Women can program as well as men. Or, at least, I have no evidence to the contrary.

Update. Thanks to Raghuram, I now know I am an idiot. Not that it takes me by surprise. Turn on the wrap search option.

These Web Development Bookmarklets are really great. I really enjoyed the JavaScript shell: you can actually “drop down to a shell” and write JavaScript code interactively. At last!

Here is a list of slides of various major Web projects where scalability had to be addressed. I am starting to think about a course project where this would be addressed specifically. Since I am not into software engineering, Web programming is nothing but a technical task for me, but if you throw in high scalability, the topic becomes very interesting and very database-related. In English, the course title is a given (Scalable Web Development), but I am unsure how to call it in French. I do not know exactly how to render the word scalable in French: vague terms are typically difficult to translate. Maybe a title like Programmation web et mise à l’échelle. It is a bit long, but it is the best I can do.

Scalability means three things, at least. First, you have to the number of hits that your server takes every second. That’s IO and CPU scalability. Then you have user-scalability (going from 3 users to 3,000,000) and everything it implies (abuse and spam). Finally, you have design scalability: how fast can you come up with the application, and how fast can you update it as things are crashing and burning.

Topics covered would include:

• Memcache
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• PHP
• MySQL
• Custom data structures (flat files)
• Partitions
• ECMAScript and AJAX

Am I missing anything? Yes, Java is absent.

Students would conclude the course with a project that would have to be design to take a lot of abuse, or at least, design in such a way that if it did get abused, people could come in and fix it easily. For example, students would have to explain how they would partition it and so on. Maybe they’d have to run tests on how it scales (but that’s not entirely satisfying). I’d certainly allow students to come up with sites that they can turn into a business.

It would probably be a course from hell. But then, I am convinced that challenging courses is not what kills students. Boredom and couldn’t-care-less instructors do.

Update. Maybe facebook applications and map reduce should be included.

Stephen Downes cites Tom Hoffman:

A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame based on little more than superstition.

You think this is false? Recently, Monday in fact, I asked a copy editor to install Open Office so that she could open the Open Document Format files I was sending her. The answer? The IT people say that Open Office is incompatible with Microsoft Office so it cannot be installed. Total nonsense, but the users buy this. Beautiful. IT people aren’t smart enough. The perfect way to become obsolete fast.

I started out a big project a couple of weeks ago. Using my MacBook, I decided to digitalize my stuff. I ordered from FrontierPC
(probably the best e-commerce site for techies in Canada) an ADS PYRO A/V Link Analog to DV Video Converter. Several years ago, I had bought an earlier USB-based ADS converter but it kept on crashing my PCs: the driver was poor and USB didn’t have the bandwidth. This last version is firewire-based which is much better suited for the task. You basically just have to plug it in and MacOS will recognize the video source, without any extra software. However, things are far from perfect: you can’t digitalize noisy video content since the ADS box will simply fail and skip video streams with too much noise. It is not clear either what constitutes “noise” since it failed on videos that looked nice enough to me.

However, if you have good quality VHS tapes lying around, this is a great time to digitalize them on the cheap. As an example, here is a TV interview I gave in 2001 for the TV show “C’est mathématique” (in French):

I consider that the quality is excellent, especially after all the compression Google Video does.

I have now officially moved from taskfreak to gtd-php. Taskfreak is prettier, it is faster (in part due to its use of AJAX), and supports multiusers.

However, gtd-php is far more GTD compliant. For one thing, with taskfreak, I continually felt overwhelmed since all of your tasks are visible all the time. gtd-php is much better at showing you just what you need, when you need it.

Now, if only it was faster!

To learn more about GTD, watch this:

I am a to-do list freak. Everything I have to do must be written down, tagged and prioritize. I find that this is key to getting stuff done. I have been a PDA users since the first days of Palm and I am one of the odd people who find PDAs useful.

My good old black-and-grey m505 is dying. The screen has a dark spot in it. I can still keep going a few months, but eventually, I’ll need to replace the device. That’s ok since I have used it many years.

Now, I am looking for my next PDA. Here are the factors:

• Within reason, money is no object: this is a critical device for me and I’d be happy to pay $500.
• I only use it to set appointments, manage a small address list, and setup todos. I do not need to play videos or browse the web on the device, since I have a laptop for this purpose.
• Losing my data is a big nono.
• I do not want a cell phone. I am against cell phones because I do not want to be easily reachable. I am a researcher and professor, not a salesperson or manager.
• A long battery life is a must.
• It must run PalmOS: I am not going to throw away or reenter all my data. I have been entering data for over 8 years in PalmOS devices!

It does look like a Palm Tungsten is the way to go. Palm seems to charge a bit over $200 for those which is amazingly cheap. It seems to have non volatile memory which is very nice: my m505 has volatile memory, I think, so, if I never let it run out of juice. What bugs me is that Palm Tungsten might be the only way to go. Are PalmOS users a dying breed?

There is the more expensive T|X which has builtin wifi. I am not sure what wifi and a browser buy you. I’d love to be able to surf the web anywhere at anytime, but, in practice, whenever I have access to a wifi network, I also have either my laptop or a desktop handy. I am also worry about depleting battery life needlessly.

Anyone knows of another mobile high-tech way to manage to-do lists and projects, that does not involve a cell phone?

I have been using taskfreak to manage my to-do lists. It works well. However, it fails to provide a good visualization of what I have to do. I love lists, but lists work better when they are short and my to-do lists are always very long. Mind maps are far better to visualize complex data.

Why won’t taskfreak and related tools automatically generate mind maps?