babebridou

Nice initiative! Do people on the waiting list usually get the chance to attend anyway, or is 100 participants a hard figure?

This is how my previous company (a great bunch) implemented SCRUM. My CEO came to me and asked me this:

"Thomas, we want to increase our revenue so we need to differenciate ourselves from other consulting firms. We need our services to be top-notch. Our customers don't know anything about Agility and processes such as SCRUM but I think I can sell them that. What can you guys do to help sell this?"

To which I suggested: "we can pretend we're doing a variant of SCRUM and label it '{{nameofcompany}}scrum'. I think a board in the middle of the openspace with neatly arranged coloured post-its will do the trick."

He said: "Great, thanks", then proceeded to increase our average daily rate by 20%.

Once a cowboy, always a cowboy... Oh and by the way, it worked.

Agility, as in the Agile Manifesto, simply works on its own. It might not define good practices, but at least it defines a set of good intentions and it's a working strategy that's simple to explain to team members. Everything around is nothing but ways to make more money, not ways to make projects work. My philosophy would be to sign the Manifesto (because it's good) and pretend to implement one of those methodologies (because it's cash), while you keep doing your job well in the way that best suits you (because that's what makes you happy).

Thanks for the link. It certainly looks like it.

Anyone else having issues with the delay in volume control? I'm used to the volume changing instantly whenever I change it with the mouse wheel, but in 2.00 there seems to be an annoying delay of about a second for each change, at least on my PC.

My current pet project is a Boilerplate OpenGL-ES 2.0 Android project in java. I don't want to go all the way and build an engine, I'm far from being experienced enough, but at least it's a great way to sort the good and the bad in all the things I've done already.

Loading of textures, creation and loading of materials, loading of shaders, linking of programs, creation and buffering of VBOs... there's a ton of things to be done before you can even see anything on your screen. I'd love to speed this up for the first launch, and then let the code be overhauled according to each and everyone's specific needs - OpenGL is too low-level to be wrapped in a full-fledged library (that would be an engine...), and I'm a bit fed up with copy-pasting my own bugs from previous projects, so a boilerplate with very few features (and errors!) will do.

I've often had people ask me how I could context switch all the time like I did and stay sane and a bit productive. I usually reply this: "I might be a bit rusty but I can still dual task". It's generally enough for them to realize that they are asking me to do something that they would never accept to do themselves. They might not know the first thing about computer science, project management or actual IT work, but at least they understand that they're doing something wrong when they see me multitask only because of the additional work they give me.

Call that passive-aggressivity, social engineering or mind games, I call it just a game. Multitasking at work is tons of fun when you've practiced enough to recognize and leave all error-prone activities out of the picture. And it's very good to make people double-check their problem before they come bother you, even though you're behaving like an open and helpful guy all the time.

Alternatively on Android, you can use FairyPreview to decode most minimized URLs for you before sending them to the browser.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.linkpr...

> Browsers have sub second back buttons, how much pre-rendered ram space do you think that takes up?

I'm sure the os & browser devs are all good and great. I'm sure the web devs are all fine and accurate; that the subject is a complex one and we're already all doing the best we can.

But that's not my point: I'm worried that one day we'll run out of RAM because we're designing our webapps as if client RAM was no longer a finite resource, we simply forgot it even existed in the first place.

I implied in another comment that my FUD about browser memory came from being wrong by an order of magnitude in the wrong direction when applying my notion of memory footprint to web browsing.

You and others just filled that gap, thank you, I feel less stupid now.

I'm wondering where the memory useage really comes from. I'm coming from an dev culture where if I do things right, i can trust the underlying system I built on to make it run fast enough and use up as little resources as it can, so most of the performance & optimization work comes from me.

Are the underlying systems running web applications (aka browsers) doing it wrong? Or are the webapp devs not doing what needs to be done in general? Or am I raising a false alarm and is everything alright?

As for my macbook, it has an unrelated problem, that's for sure, but all it does is magnify the memory issues for me.

Like I said I'm in no way a browser or web expert. I only have a notion of what could potentially fit in a certain amount of memory, and when I look at webpages I'm at least an order of magnitude off, in the wrong direction. This is why I'm worried. I sure hope I'm completely wrong!

Figures are taken from the "private" column of chrome://memory-redirect/

Chrome says: "This is the best indicator of browser memory resource usage"

I guess Rogue is a term to describe both malicious or poorly coded sites. As a rule of thumb, if scrolling isn't perfectly instant, then a site is "rogue". I found a recent example of a unintentional rogue website: it was a tumblr blog using a preview service that would extract opengraph meta data and display images as a caption to the link. One of the link was an article on a news website where the og:image was incorrectly pointing on a 3MB jpg. The whole tumblr blog would be totally unresponsive to scrolling due to a 50x50 image with a 4096x2048 src.

This was absolutely unintentional and involves at least two intermediates over which the original blogger had no control whatsoever.

Link to the page in question: http://fh2012.tumblr.com/page/6 It so happens it's the tumblr blog of the current favorite to the French Presidential election, and it was the first post so I noticed it :P

Still I fail to see why this "live" data takes so much space.

Besides, I'll have to take your word on that, since my 4GB macbook pro has become completely unuseable due constant swapping, but it could be completely unrelated.

Fragmentation is definitely not that kind of issue. It has to do with Hardware Acceleration, Screen sizes, Memory capabilities, native I/O threading and the likes. The only fragmentation issue I've ever had that directly concerns the UI is the presence of default Android Icons and fonts. Some manufacturers remove them, others decide to not implement them or give them arbitrary layout constraints: Sense UI for instance refuses to let you draw a Generic android icon over less than 40pixels. Motorola Xoom's default OS on Honeycomb did not let you display a size 106 font. Stuff like that.

These are the kind of fragmentation issues you're going to have to bite.

Fragmentation over whether a phone has or doesn't have a menu button is of no relevance. This app(1) for instance works both with the Action Bar, the software menu button and the hardware menu button. I only had to point the onCreateOptionMenu method to a single XML, and the ICS SDK did all the defragmentation work for me. It works fine from Froyo to Ice Cream Sandwich, on tablet, on phone, on KindleFire.

(1) shameless plug: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fairyteller.icanre...

Pas forcément si misérable, on est 5, peut faire un tarot.

Personnellement je suis pour une rencontre (après à voir comment on peut faire ça, après tout nous sommes tous un poil occupés je pense).

> Don’t write your own memory manager, and stop if you find yourself doing something ugly with byte buffers.

What's wrong with byte buffers? Serious question, as I use them all the time whenever I do OpenGL-ES 2.0 surfaceviews for android apps.

I've used Flipboard when it came out. I found it excellent but didn't get much value from the kind of content that it would produce for me back then, so it didn't stick. Part of me wonders if their success comes specifically because they didn't feature any scrolling.

Aye, I'd be sorry to work against your fun :)

I see touch scrolling as a great implementation of the wrong solution.

1. of course, I completely forgot about the original scrolling for some reason.

2. I agree with you, but by itself a list is not any better for comparing rows. It's only better in the edge case where you can display the two rows on the same screen in the list but not on a pager, and even then it's visually hard to get the job done.

I've tried to reason my belief. It's hard. The only really earthly reason why I don't like scrolling is that (don't laugh) touch interfaces hurt my fingers. I actually feel pain whenever I touch the iPad or Xoom's screen, or my macbook pro's touchpad. I gave my magicmouse to my sister no more than a couple hours after I had purchased it, because I knew I couldn't sustain the mix of friction & electrical pain for more than a minute at a time.

I honestly don't know what came first, the pain or the repulsion for scrolling in general, but the association is fierce.

Then I started reasoning on why people would prefer a world without scrolling. The first thing that came to mind is that scrolling does not exist a lot in real life, apart from a few instances: using binoculars, using a magnifier, going forward/backward on some sort of static security camera looking at traffic or something like that. For everything else, we naturally use paging. Paging is strange: using two or three fingers, you can page by any amount you see fit, and every time, the entry you're looking for is on display at the exact same place on your eye. Items can be specified with their page number (324), then a 2D position (fifth line, seventh word). At some point you can even use muscle memory to reach the correct page while you position your eye for receiving the info.

Scrolling also has an interesting attribute: it's entirely a computer concept. You have a buffer of information and you increment the offset. But as an end user, using only scrolling, you can't easily perform things such as dichotomy - everyone knows dichotomy even if they don't know the name of it. Go forward a bunch, go backwards half a bunch, go forward half of a half of a bunch, find the entry.

Another thing that I don't like with scrolling is how it messes up with the "5-7 modulo 2" rule of thumb for decision making (1). It's not that there are more elements than needed, it's that they get pushed up & down when you scroll, so they never appear to be a fixed point in space where you can go in a subset of 3-9 destinations. As a result, you can't select a subset from 3-9 subsets, and you can't select an item from 3-9 items, you actually have to scroll all the way and parse all elements in order to make an informed decision from, say, 15 or 150 possible ones.

All these questions (and more (2)) itched me since the day I realized that there could be a computer world without scrolling and maybe we could start dreaming/having nightmares about it... Anyway this is a belief and I'm generally a man of reason - it's tough to put it into words what you know you definitely can't prove :)

(1) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

(2) : mouse wheel fatigue when browsing websites or expanding trees, why isn't a newsfeed or a time related search result on a logarithmic scale so I can see it all, always, since the start of the century, why did we mix UI and content on webpages when we could simply remove the navigation panes...

I agree. I'm not defending my decision to do it that way, it comes down to a habit from my Swing days, a good one then, and probably a bad one now that I'm working to correct. I'm just stating the plain fact that I have my way of doing it, Apple have their way of doing it, and Android has no way of doing it.

I believe the right way to be something else, though: Never display a list that mixes data and actions. Even better: never display a list at all. Lists are bad for the user. Scrolling is bad. That's my honest belief.

I use the following rule of thumb: "if you're going to display a new screen from touching an item with a label, append '...' to the label".

My motivation for debating the two uses of the back button is whether I prefer a smooth OS integration (back as in back in time) or whether I prefer displaying more ads and am willing to capture the user inside (back as in up within my app).

It has unfortunately little to do with UX, since both end up being confusing on edge cases (Astro's horribly enraging "press back twice to 'exit'", the conversation or gmail app issues people mentioned in this thread).

I personally tend to prefer back as in back in time but I know for sure opinions vary.

That's what alt+tab and ctrl+tab are for. The confusion comes from the use of only one back button instead of one per hierarchy.

On android we have only one system-wide consistent timeline to work with, and that's the timeline of fired intents. It works across the whole system. Back works on that level by default and is defined by default as "go back in time".

I've had the issue using maps with primitive keys. I solved it by isolating the performance critical functionality and not using the Collections framework there, instead writing my own data structure for it (with heavy influence from the hashmap one).

This tends to be my general philosophy, by the way. Reuse code to get something working fast, isolate what really causes bad performances, then solve only those problems by going under the hood. If the performance issues remain, cheat by pretending it doesn't exist, by making sure we're never in a worst case scenario and handling the worst case scenario differently.

In my "IntHashMap" case, the worst case scenario was gathering the keySet. I made sure that I'd only call it when I really really needed it. The rest was "fast enough" once I had removed the underlying Integer Object on the key.

The thing is, you need to remember that in France, you can't talk about personal fortune/money without raising public outrage. We have an extremely special relationship with money, it is absolutely taboo to talk about how much money you make or have, and not only in public, in private too, one has to make amends when they reveal that they earn more than the minimal or (god forbids!) average wage.

Likewise, comparative advertising is illegal in France. You can't be the French Coca-Cola and feature the French Pepsi in your ads.

Anyway, let's drop the troll word. I have more quotes to provide though, maybe these will better carry the reputation of "Troublemaker".

Couple recent quotes from Niel (taken from LeWeb 2011) http://www.techrevolutions.fr/free-mobile-le-troll-de-xavier...

"The thing that surprises me is that our concurrents have done nothing yet. They micro-reduced their prices by a few percents, this isn't reasonable! They have to get at it for real, they have to lower the prices for real! Start to cut right now, before we arrive! (...) Ready your communication, build some aggressive marketing plans, then maybe you have a chance to keep on existing! Right now it's a joke, you didn't lower your prices! This isn't serious!"

"I invite you to go and visit their work places, their desks, their lifestyle, look at the leaders of these companies all with their car with driver. As for me I have my cab waiting for me outside! When they no longer have all that, management in these companies will begin to improve!"

2010, from http://frenchweb.fr/xavier-niel-il-etait-une-fois-la-revolut... "We're so far ahead of the rest that they should be ashamed."

Around 7:12-7:45 in the linked video: "This struck me as a lack of courage, I had hoped they would, at last, offer unlimited phone calls from their box. [smiles ironically] But you see, we have to deal with copycats who don't go all the way with their copying philosophy. And that's it... actors who are bad, and who even when they copy become bad because they stop copying as soon as there's something good, I personally find it very disappointing. I believe that we're in a market that has always copied us, so companies need to be brave and copy us all the way."

About Orange: "We have a relationship of tenderness with Orange." (I'm not sure it translates the right way: he implies a relationship that's akin to a kid and his grandmother)

Illustration of his audacity & engineering background, and, well, ethics: in 1996, he launches a minitel service that would become extremely profitable (while not being related to porn): a Reverse Phone Number Lookup directory. At that time France Telecom provided a phone directory to everyone, with the first 3 minutes of connection being free. He simply wired a hundred minitels and browsed the service 3minutes at a time until he had every single person in France on his own database. There was a public outrage. There was a trial, which ended in 1998. Iliad lost and had to pay 100,000,000 Francs in fines (roughly 15 million euros, which was a lot those days) to France Telecom.

link to the legal report for that case: http://www.legalis.net/spip.php?page=breves-article&id_a...

The rest of my knowledge about Xavier Niel's character comes second-hand and is private, so I won't have much more to add here.

Don't take all this the wrong way though, I like this entrepreneur a lot. He is one of my role models.

As requested:

Biography in English

http://www.economist.com/node/14402214?story_id=14402214

There's more available on French-speaking web - here are a couple links about his porn debuts and his jail time for misuse of company asset.

http://www.liberation.fr/societe/010160359-le-x-versant-obsc... http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/politique/prison-avec-sursi...

The part about him doing it "for the lulz" was never officially acknowledged. With that said, French media have nicknamed him "le Trublion" which means roughly "the troublemaker", and he clearly likes it.

An example of pure trolling from Niel: as a justification for why he invested money in a newspaper in financial trouble, he said "You're asking me if I have 35 million euros? Don't take this the wrong way, but this amount is roughly equal to the daily variation of my fortune on the stock market" - "Si je dispose de 35 millions d’euros ? Je ne voudrais vexer personne, mais cette somme correspond à la variation quotidienne de mon patrimoine en Bourse."

http://www.capital.fr/enquetes/hommes-et-affaires/xavier-nie...

Now I agree that businessmen should be judged on their actions. He is smart, he is good, and I like his way of dealing with things. But he was always and will always be a Troll at heart, a well-intentioned one maybe, but "very decent ethics" clearly does not accurately describe him.

- sorry for the mix-up I messed up my reply earlier.

Official press releases from competitor Orange says (paraphrasing): "Dear customers, we will let Free celebrate their D-Day, but stay assured we will make sure to come back to you later."

All online & phone services for ending or transferring mobile contracts are of course overloaded and currently unavailable in France. FreeMobile's registration webpage (http://mobile.free.fr) has been unavailable for the past 5 hours. Figures fly on twitter, as apparently about 1.5 million people tried to access it this morning.

Streaming figures for the live keynote amount to 80Gb/seconds over 300 servers, Online.net representative @Online_fr said on twitter. Apparently 600,000 people watched the keynote live, Online.net even claimed it's a world record. (Online.net = Iliad/Free subsidiary dedicated to hosting services)

You are indeed witnessing Market Disruption - that or a highly successful launch, maybe a bit too successful :)