I manage four email addresses, each for different purposes like signing up to websites, personal email and mailing lists. Since GMail included POP3 access as part of the service, I have been able to get all of them except Hotmail together in one slick web application.

GMail changes the way email is managed, abandoning traditional folders in favour of labels. This takes some getting used to but has some distinct advantages. If an email fits the criteria to be in more than one folder you’d have to copy it into all of them. With labels you just add as many as are relevant. Add to that the notion of coversations (Google keeps all emails in the same thread together as if they were one email) and your email is easy to keep track of. Especially when you have the power of Google keyword search for all your email.

The efficient SPAM filtering in GMail was the final nail in the coffin for my other webmail apps. Yahoo has a nice drag and drop interface but catches less junk mail for me. The rich interface also makes it slower, especially with all the advertising (which is text only in Gmail).

GMail Mobile is another advantage. You can download a free application for your PDA or phone to send and receive email while on the move or away from your PC. The application is easier to use than most phone email applications and works even if your carrier doesn’t provide email access because it uses WAP or HTTP. Put simply this means if you can surf on your phone, then you can GMail.

Now I can read all my mail in one place, accessible from anywhere. I spend less time deleting SPAM, and I can still download it to my PC to keep it backed up. Now I just have to get organised enough to send timely replies to all those people who are waiting to hear from me.

I got an unexpected present this Valentine’s day. Yasmina bought me a new alarm clock, and it’s unlike any I’ve had before. It works on the principle that simulating sunrise by gradually fading up a light until the alarm goes off helps to reduce production of melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone. So recently, I’ve been waking up less likely to get out of bed on the wrong side.

You set your alarm time, the light intensity and the sound to a comfortable level, and around about 30 minutes before you wake up the light will begin to fade up. At your regular alarm time, the sound of birdsong (you can select a sort of echo laden zen beeping too) fades up over 90 seconds, giving you a zen moment before you open your eyes and reach to switch it off.

It works very well, waking me up less violently than the previous sudden intrusion into my slumbers of some random snippet of morning radio inanity. It’s rare that I have to hit “snooze” as often as before. Perhaps some of the effect is psychological, since it’s quite a luxury item, but I certainly feel better in the mornings. Philips say that it is medically proven, which has a nice logic behind it… combining artificial sunrise with zen birdsong while working somatically to reduce levels of sleep-inducing hormones. Highly recommended.

On a technical note (I’d hardly like to bore you with a post uniquely about this) I’ve upgraded to FeedBurner for my RSS delivery. This will allow me to find out how many of you are reading me via RSS and should make it easier to subscribe especially if you’re new to RSS. The BBC describe RSS it in some detail - you can create your own page with news from various sources and your favourite blogs thanks to RSS. Email subscribers, if anything looks funny when you receive this post, please let me know.

I speak English to Nathan as much as possible, while his Mummy speaks French. Obviously, outside the house he’ll hear mostly French except for visits to anglophone friends. He’s now nearly 16 months old, and babbling away in a language which is comprehsible only to him. The more I think about it, the harder it gets to know what the best way might be to help him be bilingual.

French shouldn’t be an issue, living here. I’d love for him to hear more English though, as I don’t see enough of him to have him hear English a lot. I avoid the television, but when it’s on it’s generally in French - we only have Sky News as an English option anyway. There are a couple of children’s cartoons on old VHS tapes though, and a few baby books in English. Reading and writing (a long way off perhaps, but time does fly) will probably be best done in French in the first instance, so as not to confuse him with the English alphabet (which sounds different, though the letters are the same).

I haven’t taken the plunge and read any books on bilinguism yet, for fear of finding out just how wrong I am about things. Should I worry? Perhaps not, but it’s harder than you’d think to stick to your native tongue when your work day is mostly in French, at least when speaking. Writing email and reading English online all day is one thing, but coming home and forcing yourself to speak English when others around you don’t understand it can feel awfully rude. I lose touch with my fluency in English when speaking too… which can be very frustrating. It’s like when you’re lost for a word, and you can’t change the subject until you’ve found it. But it’s worse when you know you can express the same concept in a language which isn’t even your own!

I’ve heard stories of children rejecting the language that isn’t spoken everywhere around them, and of children who happily pick up three or more languages. In any case the effort will be worth it… the alternative would be terribly sad. One day Nathan could turn around to me and say “je ne veux pas parler anglais, papa”…

First of all, let’s be clear: a hacker is a computer enthusiast, and not a criminal. If you’re not already a computer lover, then you’re a web surfer (since you’re reading this via Internet transmission of some kind), so maybe you have some hacker traits.

Here’s a take on what a typical “hacker” might be like, quoted from part of a well fleshed out hacker psychological profile.

From: Personality Traits
Hackers are ‘control freaks’ in a way that has nothing to do with the usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back by moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like computers do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be their nifty stuff. They don’t like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring, ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence. Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.

Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest of work or other activities in terms of the challenges offered and the toys they get to play with.

I read through pretty much the whole site referenced above, and there are a number of things which found quite strong resonance with the way I am. There are negative points that are brought out in other pages like

As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, ‘cool’, and imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often contributes to weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be especially poor at confrontation and negotiation.

I hope I score a little better than suggested there on communication skills. It’s important to understand yourself and how others perceive you, since studies have shown various things like “higher-level employees are more likely to have an inflated view of their emotional intelligence competencies and less congruence with the perceptions of others who work with them often and know them well than lower-level employees” and another study showed perhaps more generally that the incompetent overrate themselves and above average performers underrated themselves to a certain extent.

So while you twist your head around whether you’re under- or overrating yourself, or perhaps if you’re wondering if you’re right about your judgement of how others perceive you, you could do worse than read through the profile of J. Random Hacker and see if it fits your personality in some ways. Do let me know.

Happy New Year!

2006 has been a good year, it’s seen Nathan go from small baby with worrying tests for cystic fibrosis to toddler celebrating his first birthday and then running around happily with toys. We celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary, and took Nathan to England for the first time (more on that later).

The year in review last year was much grander, since there were more posts in 2005. I wish you all the best for 2007 and hope to make it a better year for blogging .

Nobody is going to buy a video recorder based on the VHS format this Christmas. Everything will be MiniDV (camcorders), DVD and hard drive based.

In the US, the VHS format was recently declared dead. That’s perhaps a bit premature, it’s rather more of a retirement. VHS tapes will still be active for some years to come as old tapes with treasured memories or cult films will still be rewound and played through every now and then.

From the article linked above:

After its youthful Betamax battles, the longer-playing VHS tapes eventually became the format of choice for millions of consumers. VHS enjoyed a lucrative career, transforming the way people watched movies and changing the economics of the film biz.

VHS is a media which has survived 30 years, and over the years I have owned (and lost) hundreds of tapes. In the early days, the quality wasn’t very good, but improvements in image processing circuitry (VHS HQ) drove a nail into the Betamax coffin and made VHS ubiquitous.

The same kind of tension is apparent in the market now - regarding downloading films - as there was when VHS became popular. The cinema industry was frightened that tapes you could view at home would have a negative impact on their revenues. In fact, VHS became a money-spinner in it’s own right. Film downloads could be just the same, if legal download sites get their acts together. People want to get hold of DVD quality content from the comfort of their home office chairs and living rooms. They also want all the accompanying bonuses and language options. You can download almost anything illegally, but this is less of a problem than the studios make out. Just like the risk of VHS copyright infringement didn’t stop massive studio sales of popular films, or people going to the cinema. The only difference is that it’s quicker to copy a DVD than a VHS tape. But it will always take 2 hours to watch the film, which rather limits the interest of mass copying to rogue market traders and their ilk .

Anyway… with no good download solution most new recordings I buy are on DVD. Those I make myself are recorded directly on a 1Gb memory card. You can get more storage on that square centimetre of media card than you used to be able to get in a very expensive hard drive. In fact that square centimetre at 1Gb can hold more information than a 3 hour VHS tape, and at superior quality, using XviD and MP3 compression.

Back when VHS was big, editing home movies together meant two VHS decks, and if you had the money, an editing console to automate the start/end points for you. With a digital source you can use VirtualDub or Windows Movie Maker and get it done for free, in much less time.

I invite you to embrace the digital age for it allows us all to do things more quickly and cheaply. It means we can be creative and share our creations with people who share our interests all around the world. It doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly a major copyright infringement case. Goodbye VHS, I have fond memories of bookcases full of tapes but I’ll stick to a 250Gb hard drive and my DVD shelves, where I have far more films at higher quality and in far less space.

Image credit: A. Carlos Herrera.

Comparatif haut debit

Over a year ago, I wrote about my desire to have a decent coffee machine. I finally got one for my birthday this year (that was back in August) and it broke down recently. I was pretty peeved about it, since the Nespresso system I have is really easy to use. You just put a capsule in the top, press a button, and a close-to-perfect coffee is served at the right dosage automatically.

I rang the site that I got the machine from, and they explained that I’d have to take the machine myself to an authorised repair centre a few miles away. While procrastinating about that, I decided to try the “Nespresso club” that I had joined to mail order new capsules of coffee. They immediately arranged for a courier to pick up my broken machine, supply a replacement for the interim, and then bring back my machine. All at no cost to me, being a Nespresso club member.

Now, detractors may indeed ask why I should spend so much on a coffee machine that effectively locks me to a single coffee supplier. If you’re a bit of a coffee perfectionist I’d like to know if you have viable alternatives that do not require keeping coffee in perfect condition, grinding when needed, and don’t get grains all over work surfaces when you prepare your coffee. Oh, and get excellent after-sales service that don’t even leave you a day without coffee (if of course you don’t procrastinate like I did and just call them as soon as your machine stops functioning).

After-sales service is the key to successful business strategy, and a lot of e-commerce sites could learn from these more traditional mail order clubs. I’m happy with the quality of my Nespresso coffee, and very happy to have my machine back. The icing on the cake was an automatically extended guarantee because it required fixing in the first six months after purchase.

It’s our “wooden” or “silverware” anniversary today. It feels like it was just yesterday.

Yasmina will get her flowers later in the morning (I hope she won’t read this first). Soon after the wedding I put up our wedding site which is still available. If you’re interested in what it takes for an Englishman resident in Morocco to get married in Morocco with a Moroccan, there’s all sorts of information there.

Today brings back all sorts of memories of my life in Rabat and everything that has happened since. I’ve lived in four different apartments since that date, in three towns in two countries with the one I love.

Here’s to another five years and more!