O mon dieu, est-ce vrai? ;-) _ France and UK discussed 'merger': " Secret documents reveal 1950s talks Be prepared to choke your beef and oyster pie of Olde England: previously-secret documents at the National Archive reveal how in 1956 the French Prime Minister travelled to London to propose a possible

The software industry is a battle field and somebody drew a map of it. (Source:Wired)

Now that Apple unveiled the real "thing", This website shows a photo gallery of some fake designs that appeared on the web when the "thing" was still a crazy recurring rumour.

It's fascinating to read the Google Zeitgeist (the list of the most frequent queries to Google search). the list for November 2006 in UK is very illustrative of the period (pre-Christmas shopping season). It was interesting to see "cricket" appearing in top 15 in India but not in

Buzztracker - World News - 2007-01-12 Almost a year ago, I discover a web site that track global news and represents them on a world map as circles. The larger the circle the more frequent are the news about the place. Buzz tracker also represents inter-references between places in the

According to Ars Technica, Ford and Microsoft are going to work together on the dashboard OS of some of Ford 2008 vehicles. I guess we will soon have plenty of illustrations for the old joke (If Microsoft made cars...) :-D

... and I lost the Sidebar Widgets plug-in. It's under investigation. Update, 08 Jan:  I moved the old sidebar.php and functions.php in the default theme directory and it's now fixed.

I found this blog article about the bandwidth consumption and thus storage growth for Flickr. There are graphs of frequency of photo uploads to Flickr and the size of the photos. The author doesn't say how did he get his information though. But the API calls are named in the

I use vi daily. I switched from Emacs 4 years ago. Sometimes I reflect with a smile on the fact that I'm still happy and productive with a software written before I was born. _ The Birth of vi: "lanc writes 'Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, tells the story of

Fancy becoming the input data for an algorithm? In other word, do you want to apply for a job at Google? :-) _ Google's Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm: "An anonymous reader tipped us to a New York Times article about Google's newest HR tool: an algorithm. Starting

Routemasters - Lower Regent St SW1 Originally uploaded by JJ Willow. I like very much this superb shot of 3 (not 1) Route Master buses. Symbol of London they have now been decommissioned. You can still see some of them on some tourist routes though (and also use as private

Lights Originally uploaded by Rija 2.0. I've tried Adobe Lightroom beta 2 on my iBook G4 last year and found the software interesting. A promising interface, but a bit rough feature-wise and it was darn slow (the 512MB of RAM and 4200RPM hard drive were really hurting) Recently I've

Happy New Year - Feliz Año Nuevo - Bonne Annee Originally uploaded by Rija 2.0.

Source: XKCD :-D

... this web comics suggests a possible use for it :-D

kew.jpg Originally uploaded by markwaddington. I would like to thank fellow flickr user MarkWaddington for sharing this beautiful picture of Kew during Christmas in my flickr group West London. The colours on the water are wonderful.

You may already know about this robot vacuum cleaner, the roomba. You may already know how hackable it is and that an entire community has appeared around it. You are not impressed anymore by all the hacks that involve Apple Sudden Motion Sensor. Now, a new step has been reached:

A few months ago, a colleague of mine showed me this brilliant visual story but later I couldn't access the page anymore when I wanted to, until somebody submitted it again on Digg. Enjoy! read more | digg story

Joy Of Tech once again delivers stories we can relate to ours :-) Updated: Don't forget to read the hilarious results of the poll underneath each comic.

... in the US. "The popular BitTorrent client, Azureus has just struck a deal with the BBC to offer TV shows on its recently launched content store/website, Zudeo." read more | digg story

Waiting Originally uploaded by Rija 2.0. I'm back to London™ after one week spent under sunny Spain. Just in time for the year end festivities :-) The week of work (wow!) in between is just a transition, the one you've got between two five-stars rated songs in iTunes.

I like maps. So here is a nice one representing the usage of Firefox in Europe: source: Boing Boing: Firefox ascendant in Europe

Few months ago, I posted an article about the misunderstandings and confusion that often occur when communicating by e-mail. Because a picture is worth thousands words, here is a pie chart resulting from research done in the sixties: The percentages describe the importance of the effect an attribute has on

_MG_5025 Originally uploaded by junku. What did you think was cats favourite couch? Sometimes they can get useful and clean the screen with their tail: the screen and the cat then nurture a symbiotic relationship :-D

Originally uploaded by come-undone. A photo from a flickr contact: it's simply wonderful. The colours are gorgeous. I like the composition and the great use of the depth of field help bring life into it. In the middle of that, the butterfly looks like a poser. :-)