Mobitrends

Hey dear fellow readers - I wanted to share this stupid beliefs that we have in old Europe (France?). WiFi gives headaches ! For real ! And in Europe we’re so stupid that when a bunch of lazy public workers in public libraries yell that putting a WiFi Hotspot in their library give them headaches - they got it removed. Honestly this is depressing to see those uneducated guys that manage to get global knowledge banned from their dusty places…
A few facts : in France, WiFi Hotspots can never emit more than 200mW. Emission is unidirectional, thus powers decreases in 1/r^3. The Librarian is usually sth like ten meters away from the access point - thus gets less than a couple of mW in their heads. If he forbids WiFi than I don’t want to see him use a cell phone or a microwave oven (several hundreds Watts - over one MILLION tmes more radiations).
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, there is Municipal WiFi and Community WiFi (Fon, Meraki…).

I have ben watching Unity3D game engine for quite some time - I always thought it was going to be worthy but not ready yet for production. I guess time has changed. Just after a conf’call I had this afternoon I got back for a test-drive of Unity3D game engine and really had that striking “wow!” effect : the unity 3d guys just made wonders.
Unity3D comes as a light plugin to your navigator (4.4Mb for Safari/OSX) and renders wonderful 3D scenes in a glimpse - the loading and the rendering was so fast that I firstly thought it was playing a movie… This can make awesome 3D scenes way above whatever you can see on SL, Lively or Virtools… Check it out !
The engine is multiplatform (including iPhone and Wii).
The software also includes an impressive physics engine - another awesome WOW effect … really can’t wait to see production applications based on this.

Holidays are booked - yay (we’re leaving on saturday) and I got a week of dive - at last (I bought the camera case almost 2 years ago and never got to use it - was starting to worry that the camera might break before I got a chance to take underwater pictures…).

Now the best you get with Adael (Café WISP) is 20mins free WiFi - that kind of behavior forced me to move to a 3g+ USB stick - it’s weird to see that telcos have won the battle of WiFi - it has become so hard, hectic and rare to find working WiFi that I got almost forced on paying some money to telcos to make sure that I can get network access whenever I need it.
I’m pretty sad about this - WiFi is in my opinion not a reliable technology - it doesn’t propagate well, you have no real way of knowing where antenna is and thus I always am reluctant to pay while I know that I might not get decent service and thus value for money. I really hope that FON could do something here but I feel it hard to be optimistic as there is still so much to do…

Yay, just receivd today my new VR-WEAR stickers from La Stickerie - they look awesome !

Starting fresh means i get the chance to do a bit of sysadmin - I just set up a working server for the dev team with a running subversion (source control) and samba shares (network file storgae) and installed a w00t backup system relying on : Raid 1 drives in the server, 72 GB DATs + mondo backup, dedicated NAS storage with RAID 1.
I was looking at the doc on Mondo’s website and now I feel even more secure :

Mondo is reliable. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R[W], DVD+R[W], NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA’s JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

Now I can feel safe about my data.

Testing out the latest wordpress app for iPhone - just released !
Taking a pict crashes the app but hey nobody’s perfect and app crashing seem natural on iPhone …

Update: adding pict from library works…

Got my iPhone 3G - white 16gb !

Kym brought us back from sweden a bunch of local cheese - and I must confess I’m impressed by swedish know-how in cheese making - I only tasted the first one and it was awesome (so awesome that only its packaging was left for the picture…). Blå-Ädel is very much alike our french “Bleu de Bresse” although a bit stronger. Pretty intriguing by its cinder coating, once you slice it you unveil plenty of dark-blue mushrooms dots and discover a tender almost melting body - yummy !

Still haven’t got my iPhone 3G (but, hey, contrary to others I did *not* loose 8h in a day to find one). It should arrive on monday through the mail thus now is a good time to start building up my app library. I was wondering, beforehand, if a US store and a EU store account could co-exist in the same account… US store is cool as there are more movie rentals available at a cheaper price while regarding the app choice pricing an portfolio is similar for both stores. I started building up my app catalogue (check on the pict), if you think I’m missing something, let me know!