Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz

Yossi Vardi is remarkable

From Loic's blog.

And a final video of LeWeb3 on LeBlogdeBezier.com

Amusing, I had completely forgotten this part. Here you see me after about 10 min in the video for a very long while (15 min or so) with Jeff Clavier, interviewed live on Europe 1 radio, me podcasting the Europe1 journalist - Cathy Nivez -, and talking back to Thierry.

It's a large video on the backstage of LeWeb3 and very well done.

Quel coquin ce Versac !

 

A little French touch for my friend's Versac irony. He's talking about Alexandre, here.

Quoted in the International Herald Tribune today

Indeed, online video advertising is a real mess... I had a chat with the new president of IAB about it the other day.
Read it all here. There was a quote on vpod.tv a couple of days earlier by John Markoff.

Thanks for the article quote Thomas.

Some link love for a few favourite apps

I've been wanting to write about these apps / sites for a while, and my guess is I'll never do if I keep waiting. My only criteria for selecting them is how much I use each one of them every day. Hence my day is crappy without them (click on the logo for the sites)

My absolute favourite news site, it's actually my start page on my browser. I have here everything I need to know about my industry. I've stopped reading blogs as they take too much of my time and this page refreshes itself with all the relevant news I care about. Gabe, you rock.

I've tried many a site to share large files. They are clumsy, full of ads, require tons of stuff. Robert Levitan at Pando has done an AMAZING job at simplifying the UI for sharing large files. I'm in the video business, files can be big, I now use vpod.tv of course, but I still had a problem to share large presentations with my team or partners. Kudos !

i've used this service since it was called Keyhole: I used it for everything, love it, and think that their mobile version is also a piece of art with great UI and interactivity. I now read they are making this become a new second life ? whatever... have you checked out the way they've mapped the historical Cassini Maps into it ? amazing.

iSquint is the best compressor for video I've found on the Mac. select H.264 encoding, go nuts, and just wait for it to spit out a greatly compressed file. indispensable.

You probably know my other tools: Flock & Firefox, Thunderbird for mail, Cyberduck for ftp, Parallels for Mac  (indispensable), SMCFancooler...

Sl a few hours to go to submit your company to the RedHerring 100 Venture Market Europe

Basically, if you think you have what it takes to be a RedHerring 100, you should enter this competition. Deadline I believe is tomorrow, as it was extended due to CES. Check details here.

My problems with free.fr - episode 3

see episode 1

see episode 2

This is getting totally ridiculous. Remember from my previous posts that I've been having issues with my freebox (my ISP's modem / set top box) for a couple of weeks now. After their online help, their online chat, emailing in, posting on this blog, still no response to my problem. On the chat, one tech guy said I had to change my filter. why not, maybe my computer as well ?

free.fr are of course, known for their innovation, but also for the lousiest customer care around. Anyways, let's give it a try. On their page, I finally found a contact us section with a phone number. Costs 0,34eur/min, and my 2 calls today must have added up to 45 min ? Of course, I got the usual greeting message, select this option or that option, please hold the line, one moment please, etc.
Yep, there went about 15 euros today just in trying to solve my problem, AND IT'S STILL NOT SOLVED.

To be fair, they picked the line both times in about 1 min, so that's pretty neat. After extensive background checking (my phone number, my cell phone number, my email address, my  name), I got to explain twice the problem.

call 1: the guy was testing my modem from his side, and indeed after a while, he detects that my Ethernet is not hooked in, although it's in. He doesn't trust me on this, I swear that I haven't touched anything. Well if this box is replying to his probes, then it must be alright. I myself suspect that there's a component on the Ethernet interface that is not working too good. I've had this box for a couple of years, and they do wear down right ?

The guy convinces me that now, the problem is INDEED either with the freebox, or WITH THE CABLE ? as if a cable that works perfectly well can go loose. He asks me to hook up another cable (lucky me, I have plenty of them) and ANOTHER computer (which of course every one has...), and test again. Since I'm paying big time here, I tell him I'll call back if the problem arises again, which I was sure of, and of course did. And I test with another computer, and another cable.
Connection, web surfing, connection dead.

call 2: another guy, another security check, more blah blah to explain the whole thing again. Yep at least 5 minutes have gone by. Oh he says by the way, are you using a cable that came with the box ? duh... no. I don't even know what it looks like. I have a whole mess of cables on my desk, but it was working for about 3 years, and up until a couple of weeks ago. My cable, and another cable are used regularly for data transfers. And again, there are no active elements in a cable...
so how can that go wrong ?
"sorry sir, we can't decide whether the cable is faulty or the box, so we want you to test with a free.fr cable. We'll send you one as soon as it's processed". Right. The guy thinks I'm an idiot: I ask for a supervisor, no way. I tell him I'm a network engineer, 5 years of study, 10 years in the Internet business: I know when a cable is faulty and that mine is not, and that it won't make a difference. The guy laughs, seems to agree with me, and goes back to the standard script:
not a corporate cable, we'll send you one, call us back if it doesn't work. More laughs on his side. Right.

I have a free.fr cable in the office, will bring it tomorrow, and give them hell over the phone again.

The bad news is I don't have a proper internet connection anymore, I know the box is faulty, and that free.fr takes forever to ship a new box. I ordered an upgraded version 3 weeks ago, it still hasn't shipped. Expect me to connect with my 3G phone for a while still...

Technology is great when it works. The rest of the time it sucks.

And for the record, my line quality is beautiful, 20dB, almost a perfect line...

Rather incredible features coming up in new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac

I read some of it in this month's edition of SVMMAC. Florent has just pinged me to the upcomign released of Parallels, the app that allows you to run windows inside Mac OSX, simply a must-have program.

Read all the changes here, and download it ASAP.

Climate Crisis and global warming

I had not seen this movie (An Unconvenient Truth) until very recently. Although there's a little bit of self-procrastination in not being elected President of the USA in this movie, Al Gore does a wonderful job at showing examples of what's happening with our planet earth, and that each one of us can start contributing to solving the problem.

I encourage you to watch the movie, and read more, debate about it, and start doing something about it.

I also recommend watching The Climate Challenge session about global warming at the recent DLD conference (my review coming up soon).

Global warming is happening, and the impact for our kids' world is a concern of us TODAY.

reflashing your E61 nokia phone

I've just spent a long hour resinstalling my Nokia E61 phone. Indeed, I've had it for a while now, and it never seemed to work for me. I had reflashed / updated its firmware a couple of times already, and the phone was still very buggy: I always got a "memory full" error.

Well, it seems it's working this time:
* make sure you backup all of your data before updating your phone to the latest firmware. The software from Nokia to update the phone will however only run from a PC (I tried with a Windows Vista emulation on a Mac: it wouldn't recognize the phone :(
* set up all of your parameters the way you like them (I like English on my phone, 24 hour format)... For instance, since I use a SIM card for computers in my phone, I have to change the APN from "orange" to "orange.fr"
* resync all of your contacts, agenda, etc. on your phone. On a Mac with iSync / Novamedia.de plugins, it takes only a moment
* make sure you tell your phone what memory to use (extension card) before setting up your email settings (otherwise it won't read it. Weird. In previous versions it just copied the data).
* setup your mobile email; one thing I haven't tried yet are the SSL certificates that were not working in previous versions.
* install your usual lot of apps. Among my favourites: Google earth mobile, Opera Mini, and a couple of bookmarks for useful sites on the road: vpod.tv mobile, pagesjaunes.fr, Flickr mobile...

And I'm all set now to be always connected again.

Remember, the E61 is also a Wifi phone. So as soon as my freebox starts working again, I'll reconfigure my SIP calls, so that I can call for free from many places around the world.

All in all, using these smartphones is really a complicated task, and a lot has to be done to make them work properly in a productive way.

Really not for the masses yet.