We’re looking for different profiles:

• People with knowledge of Web services technologies and concepts: XML, JSON, HTTP, resources, etc.
• Developers coding in C/C++, who understand HTTP; knowing how to write PHP, Perl, Java extensions a plus
• Developers coding in C/C++, who understand HTTP and in particular authentication; knowledge of Apache internals a plus
• A product manager for those tools and working with the rest of the company

If you’d like to join the fun, drop me an email.

If you want to learn more about Yahoo! Open Strategy, here’s the presentation from our CTO at the Web 2.0 Expo:

And below is a deeper look provided by Neal Sample:

I received by mail an advertisment booklet a few days ago called Living Well. Feeling Great. Helping you make healthier choices:

However, the booklet doesn’t focus on fruits and vegetables. The first page of contents shows diet sodas and lists participating items such as M&M 100 Calorie and Twix Caramel Bar:

The second page talks about low calorie / low fat snacking and ice cream:

The rest of the booklet goes on to talk about skin care, low calorie canned dinner and deserts, one salad suggestion (with light dressing, of course), etc.

Essentially, eating healthy in the US means eating crap, but in fat free and low calorie form. This is particularly interesting in light of a recent study conducted Duke University showing that sweet taste and calorie consumption considered independently by the brain. Here’s a 60-second summary from Scientific American:

It looks like we’re on a slippery slope!

I spent a good chunk of my weekend figuring out what program to use to track personal finances, and was that a painful exercise! You would think that in 2008, with Money and Quicken around for about 20 years, you were going to be blown away by those programs. You could not be more wrong.

I decided to give Money a try, as we had a Money 2007 around. The problem is that I couldn’t find my Money 2007 CD, so I went online and downloaded a free 60-day Microsoft Money Plus 2008 Deluxe trial, until I locate our copy.

Since I’m a newbie, I was after something fairly basic: have Money download my statements from the banks’ Web sites, and have the transactions categorized to have a vision of what where our money is spent, projections for the future, etc. Nothing really fancy, but that was way too much for Money.

First, Money gives you the choice to store passwords locally, or in the Windows Live vault. I chose to do this locally, even though it promised me a pessimal experience. It quickly took a stronger tone while I was setting up one of my accounts by telling me that if I wanted to download transactions automatically, I had to use Windows Live. That was the first turn off for me.

But the next one was even stronger. Money can consolidate transactions based on variations of the name of the payee. However, it does not support any kind of wildcarding. Let’s take an example. I have auto bill pay at my bank. Those get reported as: Payee Date Time. So, I get:

JOHN SMITH FEB 28 21:03:02
JOHN SMITH MAR 28 21:06:43
…

I couldn’t figure out how to tell it that all of those ought to be in a specific category. Actually, it was not obvious how to assign default categories to transactions. The combination of all that made me reconsider using Quicken.

I read a few more bad Quicken reviews on Amazon (note that Money’s are actually worse), and decided to give it a try. The problem is that the only trial advertized on Intuit’s Web site is for their online version that I didn’t want to use. With a few Web searches, I discovered that there actually is an unadvertised Quicken Deluxe 2008 60-day trial.

I gave it a try, and Quicken looks much better than Money. First, all the account information is kept locally. It doesn’t seem to support as money banks as Money, but it’s pretty good at giving instructions when it fails. Second, it’s really easy to set up automatic categories for transactions. Not only that, but in my example above, Quicken automatically recognizes that all those transactions are for JOHN SMITH.

So, for now, I’m pretty happy with Quicken, and I’ll order the full version if things stay this way.

That being said, I’m enthusiastic about the basic functionality, when I was looking forward to being blown away. Reading the various reviews, all those new versions of Money and Quicken are barely fixing bugs, and that’s very disappointing. It seems that people who invested in one solution are stuck with it, and they seem to be very little incentive for Microsoft and Intuit to innovate; it’s sufficiently bad that You Need A Budget, a program written by one guy in his spare time, is seen as a viable alternative. Worst, Quicken seem to be deactivating copies of Quicken after 4 years, forcing people to upgrade to marginally better versions.

So Quicken is not the loser of the game, but there’s no winner.

I have actually been waiting for the next version of the iPhone to be released, and am happy to see all the recent rumors about it. However, I’m wondering how long I’ll be able to wait with my Treo making a pain of itself almost daily.

Thinking about changing phones, I realized that I’m taking more and more photos with it, despite the crappy quality of the Treo’s camera, and the fact that I need to reinstall a PRC regularly in order to be able to download them to my computer. In order to make my life easier, I have been looking into buying a small camera that I could carry with me all the time. The Casio Exilim EX-Z200 looks really cool, but it means carrying a camera in addition to my phone, and I’m not really imagining myself carrying two devices.

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced that the new iPhone will have a good camera. The current iPhone seems to be taking pretty nice photos, but it seems technologically pretty far from what its competitors can do in this domain: 2 megapixels, no auto-focus, no flash.

Looking at the competition, there are a few interesting 5-megapixel cameraphones:

Sony Ericsson K850i

Sony Ericsson’s K850i seems pretty nice, but it does not have WiFi capabilities.

Also, after I had two Sony Ericsson phones die days after their warranty expired and had similar problems with a Sony Clié, I swore not to buy crappy Sony products anymore.

Nokia N95 8GB

Thomas showed my his Nokia N95 8GB which is really neat. It has WiFi, GPS, and the Flickr gallery for the N95 looks promising, though the photos taken with an iPhone look better to me. Maybe iPhone users are more artistic than Nokia owners.

Nokia N96

The Nokia N96 is the successor of the beloved N95, and it looks very promising.

Sony Ericsson C902

Finally, the Sony Ericsson C902 seems to be closer to a camera than a phone, which might be what I’m really after.

Apple, Sony Ericsson, or Nokia?

The problem is that I’m picky: I also want an adequate music interface as I listen to podcasts daily, good PDA capability, good connectivity, and a decent Web browser. Maybe I’m asking too much.

I feel like the iPhone is falling short in terms of storage and camera quality, while the others have a much lower usability – the interface of the iPhone is really the killer feature – and not as good Web browsing capabilities. But then again, it’s really the camera that I’m after, and since all phones can play music these days, as long as I can sync my podcasts from iTunes and that it can synchronize my events, to-dos and contacts, I should be fine.

I feel that I’m going to ponder about this a little while longer, until the N96, C902 and the new iPhone come out.

<?php echo get_avatar($comment, '32'); ?>

So now I have little faces next to comments:

The new interface to write posts is also pretty nice:

In particular the media library functions:

Go and get it!

So this morning, I arrive at the train station as the train is stopping. I run on the platform, and see that nobody is going in nor out anymore. I quickly think: either I run to the ticket validating machine, and I’m pretty sure I’ll miss my train, or I just get on the train without validating my ticket. I go for the latter. It turns out that the train stays in the station for an extra 30 seconds, so I might have had time to validate my ticket.

Anyway, as the doors close, I go straight to the ticket controller and explain that I didn’t have time to validate my ticket, and ask him to validate him for me.

Ensued a 5-minute lecture about Caltrain rules; some highlights:

• Can you see the sign there? It says that you cannot board the train without a ticket.
• I should really be writing you a ticket.
• Do you know that it’s not my job to validate your ticket? My job is to get you to your work on time. Your job is to get to the train station on time, and validate your ticket.

I did have a time management lecture once as well, but this guy, behind his sunglasses, was just out of control.

When I mentioned that I could have just gone hiding into a corner and not pay for my ride, he just went on and on about how I was making him waste his time. At some point when he was talking about how his job was to bring me to my work on time and how he should fine me for being late to the station, I wanted to ask him what were the consequences of him bringing me late to my work, but the discussion was getting more and more absurd, so I decided to just smile and nod, and he finally validated my ticket.

Interestingly, years ago, I had a similar experience in Paris. I had bought a ticket, failed to find the validating machine, and boarded the train with my freshly bough – but not validated – ticket. When I got off the train, I tried to exit the station, and the machine wouldn’t let me out because it rejected my ticket. Instead of tailgating behind a passenger with a valid ticket, or jump over the doors, I thought: hey, there’s a controller back there, he’ll sort my problem in no time. The guy assessed that I had cheated on purpose (nevermind my proof of purchase from 1 hour beforehand, and the fact that I was the one that came to see him), and proceeded to fine me.

Something’s seriously wrong with ticket controllers!

There are many ways one can make money with a Web site: you can add ads around some content you produce (e.g. by publishing photos), point people to some products that they may be interested in buying as a result of visiting a site (e.g. by reviewing items), help people save money and take a cut (e.g. with Web hosting coupons).

However, all of this really works when people coming to your site are motivated enough that they’ll click on anything to get answers.

That’s what’s happening on my wife’s Web site right now. We had a bed bug issue in Paris a few years ago. That was an awful experience, and it was really tough to get rid of them (that required having a professional spray some very nasty chemicals twice, and we were not so far from throwing our bed and bedding away and moving apartments). You can see from the comments how desperate people can be when facing this problem, and they’re very happy to follow any link that could be helping them.

So the key is: write about problems. My dog pulled me off of my bike two weeks ago, and I hurt my hand and knee. I should have taken a photo…

I’m not sure why that was, but that was very weird.

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I love the If you do not agree to the new terms of use, do not continue to use our sites.

Fascinating.

I didn’t try to understand what exact rule was the culprit, but the following fixes the issue:

iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -F
iptables -X

Since the Slug is behind my NAT anyway, I don’t really need a firewall. I wish I could actually disable the iptables support from the kernel altogether, but it’s not compiled as a module.