and I mean it
Just in case you forgot: less than a dozen days to go before the smoking ban in Belgian restaurants. What was only possible in places like the AB resto or Bar Bik, will then be the norm: no one spoiling your food with cigarette smoke!
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At the awesome LeWeb3 party at Paris Bodega, I took some pictures of Tom while he was dancing (not that hard, as he practically didn’t stand still the whole night). At some point he was showing off some steps with a lovely girl, I put a picture of them on Flickr and now she tagged me with a meme. Ouch!
So Andrea, (via Susan, Mary and so on), here I go: Five things you probably don’t know about me.
Continue reading ‘Five Things You Probably Don’t Know About Me’
I went to see the movie “Babel” recently, and I liked it a lot. At some point I was asked “what is it about?” The best I could come up with is “bad judgement”. If you still plan on seeing the movie, skip the next paragraph (spoiler).
It was bad judgement to expect someone to not attend the wedding of her son, and bad judgement of her to drive back with a drunken nephew. Bad judgement of the Japanese guy to donate a gun to his Moroccon guide, of that man to sell it, of the buyer to give it to his teenager sons, of the boys to test the gun by shooting at a bus of tourists. Shit happens, yes, but sometimes people make an even bigger mess out of it by taking bad decisions for the wrong reasons.
So what happened at LeWeb3?
I’m not hoping more dramatic things will happen in this saga. I can’t help but feel bad for Loic too, he has been working on this event for months and now it’s turned ugly in his face. I just don’t think I will be attending any LeWeb4 (or LeWeek4, as Tom calls it). Conferences like Reboot (Denmark), SHIFT (Portugal) and LIFT (Switzerland) look like a much better platform for the topics that interest me. Also, I will probably organize new “Barcamp Brussels” editions in 2007.
And to end with a positive note: we’ve had tasty food, we’ve met with some awesome people from all over the world, we’ve learned how to knot a bow tie, we had an hilarious dinner on Monday followed by a party we won’t be forgetting for a long time.
Never say “we have a Flash website”; there is no such thing. You might say: we have a website and it features, amongst a lot of relevant information in HTML pages, a Flash movie and/or application. You might say: we did buy a domain and we decided that a real website would be too accessible for our customers, so it only has a Flash blob on the ‘homepage’.
Flash is to websites what airconditioning is to a car: you might call it luxury, you might call it indispensable, but you cannot call it a car. It’s just airco.
For some reason, people that have experience with creating Flash applications also think they can make websites. “Just throw some Javascript on the homepage and it plays beautifully”, right? Wrong! If you have never heard of proper markup, SEO, the limitations of Javascript and Flash, you should leave making websites to professionals. If you insist that your branding cannot be properly expressed with just HTML/CSS/Ajax, you can add a Flash object to your site. But on its own, it’s a sorry excuse for a website.
Case: Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles is a new brand of singlets (’wifebeaters‘ in English, or ‘marcellekes’ in Bruxellois). The idea is good, the branding is beautiful, the advertising is top-notch (not surprisingly, since the founder is also one of the founders of the ad agency LG&F).
Continue reading ‘There are no Flash websites’
For some reason this “web” conference has been transformed into a political rally.
This bothers me a lot:
I’m leaving for Paris with Clo and Fre to attend the LeWeb3 conference. We will be joined by a whole bunch of Belgians: Bart, Kris, Maarten, Luc, Robin …
2 days of networking, schmoozing and lots of good food (at least, that’s what we hope!)
What’s the value of more megapixels? Is 10 megapixels better than 5? Here are some articles stating the opposite:
On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.
(…)
I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.
The Truth About Digital Cameras (NYT)
Megapixel apples and oranges
A 5-megapixel image that was created by down-sampling a 13 megapixel original is not the same as a 5-megapixel original. Why?
Well, let’s take a look at how a digital camera CCD sensor works. Natively the sensor is color-agnostic: pixels only measure light, not color. So the chip can only do greyscale images. A smart guy from Eastman-Kodak, Dr. Bryce E. Bayer, has however found a way to add color-sensitivity, by adding an RGB color filter array (the Bayer filter). Each pixel has a filter in front of it that lets through either the Red, Green of Blue light. Since the human eye is most sensitive to green, 50% of all pixels measure green, 25% do red and another 25% blue. A 5-megapixel image from the sensor is really a 2.5 MP green image, a 1.25 MP red and a 1.25 MP blue image, the three of them almost overlapping (1 pixel off). This is how the image is stored in RAW format. Each such pixel has a value between 0 and 4096 (12 bits). To convert it to a full-color image (8-bit value for each color R-G-B, so 24 bits for each pixel), the missing colors for each pixel are derived from the neighbouring pixels (aka demosaicing). E.g. a Red pixel has the exact value for the colour red, gets the green component from 4 neighbouring green pixels and the blue one from 2 neighbouring pixels. (More advanced algorithms exist) This gives some false colors (’artefacts’) at sharp edges. Let’s simulate this with a pure black/white border:
A pixel in a native 5-megapixel JPG image is based on 5 to 7 pixels of RAW color info. A pixel in a 5-megapixel camera that was downsampled from a 13MP image, gets its color info from roughly 20 pixels of original info. So the colors are more correct (provided the original picture was good quality, of course). Also, the color artefacts around sharp edges are much thinner so that they may almost disappear after the resizing.
My point being: printing out a resized 5MP picture is not an honest comparison.
Continue reading ‘Megapixel myth nuances’
Miel just announced that he will be working for Microsoft as a enthusiast envangelist. ‘Technology evangelist’ I’d heard about but how does one evangelize enthusiasm? I did a simple Google search on the term and up came Benjamin Gauthey, his French counterpart.
OK, they’re both talented guys, I have no doubt about that, but it’s obvious that Microsoft also took some esthetic criteria into account. I think Steve Ballmer thought: let’s steal back some of that female marketshare from Apple. So expect in the future:
In any case: I wish Miel fascinating times at Microsoft!
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