Journals on Joannes Vermorel's blog

eCash is Bitcoin

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 18:00:00 +0200

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. Mark Twain Four years ago, I wrote that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin. Since that time, much has happened in the crypto circles. Fortunes were made. Fortunes were lost. A few bad actors have been jailed. More will follow them as lessons still haven’t been learned, yet. However, operationally, despite the plethora of cryptos available on the market, the field has made remarkably little progress over the last four years.

PeerTube to replace YouTube

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 22:10:00 +0200

PeerTube is an open source, self-hosted, alternative to YouTube. I have recently set up Lokad’s peertube instance, and I am impressed by the quality of this project. This achievement is somewhat stunning considering it’s basically a one-man project, the top code contributor of PeerTube is currently dwarfing all other contributors. More than a decade ago, I was already pointing out that letting a third-party platform control your audience was a terrible idea.

Remarkable software engineers write remarkable code

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 10:00:00 +0200

When hiring for my software company Lokad, my goal is to identify remarkable software engineers: those who will deliver outsized positive outcomes. The latest addition to my process is asking candidates to exhibit a personal and remarkable piece of software of their own choosing. Anything goes. I don’t mind if it’s COBOL or Rust, or even if it does not compile because it’s just a fragment of a personal project that you’re not willing to disclose1 in full.

以经验来谈BCHN

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 11:16:00 +0200

作者： Joannes Vermorel （Lokad创始人，Corps Des Mines工程师；业余时间兼职做技术审计；点击查看作者的更多资料）

发表于2020年8月24日

原文链接

比特币¹生态系统中再一次发生了匪夷所思的事：该系统似乎仍然无法判定在进行一个高技术含量的计划时，技术能力重要与否。几个月前，一个由多年来参与开发比特币软件的老前辈（他们各自的主要贡献是Bitcoin Unlimited和Electron Cash）组成的团队²，为一个名为Bitcoin Cash Node（BCHN）的项目走到了一起。这支团队似乎在一些社交媒体上越来越受欢迎；一些人信任这支团队，给予了他们不菲的资助³。

Empirical insights on BCHN

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 11:14:00 +0200

Once more, baffling events are unfolding in the Bitcoin1 ecosystem, which seems to remain undecided whether technical competency matters - at all - for the conduct of a highly technical software initiative. A few months ago, a team of old-timers who had been involved - for years - in developing Bitcoin software, mostly via their respective contributions to Bitcoin Unlimited and Electron Cash, came together with another project named Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN).

The wrong lessons of a supply chain crisis

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 16:00:00 +0200

Whenever humans are involved, complex systems are never amenable to “easy” models, if only due to second order effects 1. Supply chains are no exception, and yet these models are prevalent 2, leading to all sorts of inefficiencies such as inventory write-offs, waste, delays, unused capacity, poor customer service, etc. Yet, these inefficiencies are not the biggest problem associated with simplistic models, the biggest problem is that they prevent people in charge from even considering what could eventually become proper remedies.

Large scale reuse of FFP2 and N95 masks

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 11:18:00 +0200

The French version of this document. Synthesis: this document proposes the reuse of FFP2 masks on a large scale thanks to the pre-existing sterilization and decontamination infrastructure in France. This initiative aims to avoid the amplification of the Covid-19 health crisis due to a shortage of masks for medical personnel, which would lead to additional contamination from the medical personnel themselves. Within a week, this initiative would allow the reuse of 1 million masks per day for a cost of less than 4€ per mask from the first masks treated.

Réutilisation de masques FFP2 à grande échelle

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 11:12:00 +0200

The English version of this document. Synthèse : ce document propose la réutilisation des masques FFP2 à grande échelle grâce à l’infrastructure pré-existante en France de stérilisation et de décontamination. Cette initiative a pour but d’éviter l’amplification de la crise sanitaire Covid-19 due à une pénurie de masque des personnels médicaux eux-mêmes, qui aboutirait à des contaminations supplémentaires via les personnels médicaux. Cette initiative permet la réutilisation - sous une semaine - de 1 million de masques par jour pour un coût inférieur à 4€ par masque dès les premiers masques.

ABC is Bitcoin's biggest asset, a CEO's perspective

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 11:10:00 +0200

As a follow-up to the article Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin that I published 2.5 years ago, let’s revisit the Bitcoin community’s state of affairs. In particular, let’s have a closer look at the infrastructure players involved, as the future of BCH basically depends on the quality of the people steering this currency. Who am I to do this assessment and why? I am the CEO and main shareholder of a midsize software company (profitable, growing, non-crypto and no VC on board), I have been following Bitcoin since 2011, I have done various technical contributions such as proofreading the Avalanche code.

On choosing the right block size for Bitcoin

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 14:00:00 +0200

The Bitcoin community has been debating the right size of a block for almost its entire existence. Two years ago, these debates lead to the split between Bitcoin Cash - opting for larger blocks - and Bitcoin Core - opting for 1MB-forever blocks 1. Yet, while many members of both communities appear to have firm opinions on the matter of choosing the adequate block size, I have casually observed a lot of misconceptions concerning this topic.

Metadata subtree for Bitcoin

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 09:00:00 +0200

The block header of Bitcoin has a couple of flaws; some of them being in the way of highly desirable innovations such as UTXO commitments. Unfortunately, fixing those flaws isn’t an easy task because most “easy” solutions end up not only breaking backward compatibility with most of the software ecosystem, but also end up bricking most mining devices. Hence, those “easy” solutions aren’t exactly on the table. Yet, a simple solution is needed, because complexity is the enemy of both security and scalability in a project like Bitcoin.

Merklix tree for Bitcoin

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 08:50:00 +0200

Last summer, I had the opportunity to meet with the Bitcoin ABC folks, and we revisited the pain points which needlessly complicate on-chain scaling for Bitcoin. The Merkle tree flavor as originally implemented in the Satoshi’s codebase comes with its own complications, some of them clearly accidental - as they do introduce unintended vulnerabilities. The Merklix tree angle addresses the scalability challenge as well as fixing the unintended complications of the original design.

Salient bits of CashDB

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 11:10:00 +0200

Designing CashDB has been an interesting task, and beyond pure performance benchmarks, I would like to share some of the most salient aspects that went into its design. Choosing C#/.NET: CashDB is implemented in C#/.NET. This might appear as a surprising choice for a high performance project, however, .NET Core is performant, surprisingly so, even. High quality C# implementations (eg xxHash) basically exhibit performance aligned with C. Then, productivity-wise, C# - just like Java or Python - is plainly superior to C++.

Alpha release of CashDB, high-perf backend for UTXO storage

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 20:50:00 +0200

The alpha version of CashDB has been released. CashDB is a fork and the successor of Terab which has unfortunately been discontinued. CashDB is an effort (disclaimer: this is not a regular open source project, there is a BCH restriction, check the license) of Lokad to support the on-chain scaling of Bitcoin. It’s a blockchain-centric key-value store specifically tailored for the UTXO set of Bitcoin - the set of unspent transaction outputs.

The Sozu table, a blockchain-centric data structure for the UTXO dataset of Bitcoin

Thu, 16 Aug 2018 14:30:00 +0200

The UTXO dataset is the set of unspent transaction ouputs in Bitcoin. This dataset represents who own’s what, and it is the only part of the blockchain that actually need to be persisted to keep Bitcoin working (well, almost, block headers are needed too, but they are much smaller). Earlier this year, when I started to work on the UTXO challenge challenge, I realized that generic key-value stores were not exploiting all the angles that could be leveraged in the specific context of Bitcoin.

On compact proofs for token protocols

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 14:00:00 +0200

Bitcoin can operate a large variety of tokens1 through trust-but-verify schemes. Apps supporting such tokens are part of cashland2: those apps interact with the blockchain, but they are not required for Bitcoin to operate as cash. Trust-but-verify differs from the code-is-law approach where the validation of the correctness of the token transactions is the responsibility of the participants in charge of securing the blockchain itself. As far tokens are concerned, trust-but-verify is superior to code-is-law in terms of blockchain economics and also happens to be more practical3.

Canonical Transaction Ordering for Bitcoin

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 14:18:00 +0200

Bitcoin should and will scale. However, the scaling process can be made a lot easier if some hurdles are lifted. In particular, the path toward blocks as large as 1 terabyte requires every part - within Bitcoin - to be made as lean as possible. The canonical transaction ordering is a modest change, yet, I see this evolution as one of the most desirable changes in Bitcoin to clear the path to scalability.

Autonomics

Tue, 29 May 2018 11:00:00 +0200

It is the nature of radical discoveries to be wildly misunderstood by their contemporaries. It is inevitable to some degree. If most well-prepared minds were already expecting something similar to be discovered, chances are that those discoveries would have been made earlier, and would not have appeared as radical as they did. I believe Bitcoin to be a radical discovery. I argue that Bitcoin and its peers cannot be understood from the classical perspectives, thus, I am rolling my own.

4-byte prefix guideline for OP_RETURN on Bitcoin

Wed, 23 May 2018 09:18:00 +0200

Back from the CoinGeek conference in Hong Kong, I could feel that the extra capacity of OP_RETURN increased to 223 bytes on Bitcoin has tremendously energized the community. Tons of talented people are now back to work, building cool stuff on top on the Bitcoin infrastructure. Yet, the blockchain is a shared resource, and while scalability is a very solvable challenge, the community needs principles to avoid needless complications. In particular, as the OP_RETURN data space is shared among all participants, an opt-in mechanism to avoid “dumb” collisions is highly desirable.

A taxonomy of the Bitcoin applicative landscape

Mon, 07 May 2018 15:41:00 +0200

Nothing like a good initial confusion on dialog terms to trigger hours of sterile discussions; and possibly a few hundreds of tweets as well if attempts are made to have the dialog carried through Twitter. As Bitcoin was - still is to a large extent - a rather radical innovation, its early terminology wasn’t without flaws. Unfortunately, the confusion that followed turned out to be rather extreme, and was ultimately solved through a major fork: Bitcoin Cash vs Bitcoin Core.

Good software propagates its own correctness

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 05:39:20 +0200

Writing good software code is an exercise in applied schizophrenia. You need to please two radically disctinct audiences. The first audience is the compiler and the runtime. A patient and diligent audience that takes your writing to the letter. The second audience is your peers, fellow software engineers. On the plus side, this audience tries to adhere to the spirit of your writing; on the minus side, they can misunderstand your writing entirely.

A weirder definition of Bitcoin

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 11:51:00 +0200

While attemps have been made in the past to come up with a [efinition of Bitcoin, I felt that those definitions were somehow failing at capturing the very esssence of Bitcoin, so I decided to roll my own. Enjoy! A weirder definition of Bitcoin Abstract: Bitcoin is best characterized as an exceedingly weird virtue-inducing artifact. Attempts at making Bitcoin less weird have only two outcomes: either the attempt fails and Bitcoin just becomes weirder; or the attempt succeeds and this is not Bitcoin anymore.

Addressing a few loose angles of Bitcoin

Fri, 06 Apr 2018 13:57:00 +0200

Two weeks ago, I had the unique privilege of meeting not one, but a whole series, of truly remarkable people at Satoshi’s Vision in Tokyo. This list includes Amaury Séchet, Shammah Chancellor, Tomas van der Wansem, and quite a few others. While Bitcoin had gained my interest back in 2011, I never had taken much time to think about the Nakamoto consensus itself. To my defense, running Lokad, my company, was simply capturing my day-to-day interests.

Satoshi's Vision, talk on Terabyte Blocks for Bitcoin

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:52:00 +0200

Last week, I was in Tokyo at the Satoshi’s Vision conference. I gave a talk about Terabyte Blocks for Bitcoin. Here are the slides. Check the video too, there are some good questions raised at the end of the talk. Overall, it was a incredible event, tremendously positive for Bitcoin. I am thrilled to see so many hard-working contributors doing their best to address all the challenges that Bitcoin is facing.

Fast 1D convolution with AVX

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 09:10:00 +0200

Convolutions are important in a variety of fields. For example, in deep learning, convolutional layers represent a critical building block for most signal processing: image, sound or both. My company Lokad is also extensively using convolutions as part of its own algebra of distribution. One technical problem associated to convolutions is that they are slow. The theory tells you that FFT can be used to obtain good asymptotic performance, but FFT isn’t typically an option when your signal has only a few dozen data points; but that you still need to process tens of millions of such signals.

Mankind needs fractional satoshis

Tue, 26 Dec 2017 17:18:00 +0200

Bitcoin Cash aims at becoming the world currency. As discussed previously, terabyte blocks are needed to achieve this goal. However, the Bitcoin Cash protocol also needs a few changes as well. In this post, I will demonstrate why fractional satoshis are needed for Bitcoin Cash. In the following, for the sake of concision, Bitcoin always refers to Bitcoin Cash. Overview of the issue A satoshi is, presently, the smallest unit of payment that can be sent across the Bitcoin network.

Terabyte blocks for Bitcoin Cash

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 16:37:00 +0200

Terabyte blocks are feasible both technically and economically, they will allow over 50 transactions per human on earth per day for a cost of less than 1/10th of a cent of USD. This analysis assumes no further decrease in hardware costs, and no further software breakthrough, only assembling existing, proven technologies. Introduction As pointed out in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, achieving very large blocks do require taking advantage of Moore’s Law rather than being stuck with fixed-capacity device.

Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin, a software CEO perspective

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 12:58:00 +0200

TLDR: my company, Lokad, is redirecting its attention to Bitcoin Cash, as the true Bitcoin Like Jeff Bezos, I also believe that being successful in business depends on being right rather than being smart. Smarter means that you will solve given problems faster and better. Righter means that you will identify better problems. As I had been writing in the past, smarter problems trump smarter solutions. Any single time. What’s Bitcoin about?

Details on the .NET first strategy for CNTK

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 20:47:00 +0200

An extensive discussion is taking place on the CNTK project. As I am partly responsible for this discussion, I am gather some more concrete proposals for CNTK. Correctness by design and BrainScript My company, Lokad, has built as complex data-driven analytical solution built on .NET. Because machine learning data pipelines are hellish to debug, we seek technologies to ensure as much design correctness as possible. For example, in many programming language, a certain degree of design correctness can be obtained through strong typing.

.NET-first strategy for CNTK

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 13:57:00 +0200

CNTK is an incredible deep learning toolkit from Microsoft. Despite being little known, under the hood, the technology rivals the capabilities of TensorFlow. While originating from Microsoft, it’s unfortunate that CNTK decided steer away from the Microsoft ecosystem, actually making CNTK a less viable option than TensorFlow as far .NET is concerned. My conclusions: as a contender for the Python ecosystem, CNTK is a lost cause. TensorFlow has already won by a large margin; just like x86-64 won over IA-64.

The sad state of .NET deployments on Azure

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 14:31:00 +0200

One of the core benefit of cloud computing should be ease of deployment. At Lokad, we have been using Azure in production since 2010. We love the platform, and we depend on it absolutely. Yet, it remains very frustrating that .NET deployments have not nearly made enough progress as it could have been expected 6 years ago. The situation of .NET deployements is reminiscent of the data access re-inventions which were driving Joel Spolsky nuts 14 years ago.

Cloud-first programming languages

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:46:00 +0200

The art of crafting of programming languages is probably one of the most mature fields of software, and yet it’s surprising to realize how much potential there is in rethinking programming from a cloud-first [0] perspective. At my company Lokad, we ended-up writing our own programming language - a narrow domain specific language geared toward commerce analytics – and, we keep stumbling on elements that would have been hard to achieve from a more traditional perspective.

Nearly all web APIs get paging wrong

Fri, 08 May 2015 16:04:00 +0200

Data paging, that is, the retrieval of a large amount of data through a series of smaller data retrievals, is a non-trivial problem. Through Lokad, we have implemented about a dozen of extensive API integrations, and reviewed a few dozens of other APIs as well. The conclusion is that as soon as paging is involved, nearly all web APIs get it wrong. Obviously, rock-solid APIs like the ones offered by Azure or AWS are getting it right, but those outstanding APIs are exceptions rather than the norm.

Buying software? Ignore references

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 11:48:00 +0200

As a (small) software entrepreneur, it is amazing to witness how hell is breaking loose when certain large software vendors start deploying their “solutions”. Even more fascinating, is that, after causing massive damage, the vendor just signs another massive deal with another large company and hell breaks loose again. Repeat this one hundred times, and you witness a world-wide verticalized software leader crippling an entire industry with half-backed technology. Any resemblance between the characters in this post and any real retail company is purely coincidental.

Super-fast flat file parsing in C# and Java with a perfect hash function

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 14:12:00 +0200

At Lokad, (almost) all we do is to crunch flat text files. It’s not that we haven’t tried anything else - we did - many times - and it went poorly. Flat files are ubiquitous, well understood, and they yield very good performance both of the write side and the read side when working under tight budgets. Keep in mind that the files we crunch are frequently generated by our clients, so while ProtoBuf or Cap’n Proto are very cool, asking our clients to deliver such formats would be roughly equivalent asking them to reimplement their in-house Java ERP in Haskell.

A few lessons about pricing B2B apps

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:49:00 +0200

My own SaaS company has always been struggling with its own pricing. For a company now selling its own pricing optimization technology for commerce, this was a bit ironic. Well, pricing of software is unfortunately very unlike pricing goods in store, and the experience we acquired working with our retail clients improving their own prices provided little insights about the pricing of Lokad. Since the creation of the company, Lokad has been offering a metered pricing, charging according to the amount of forecasts consumed.

How we ended up writing our own programming language

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 11:42:00 +0200

About one year ago, my company had the opportunity to expand into an area which was very new for us at the time : pricing optimization for commerce. Pricing optimization is quite different to demand forecasting; the latter being the original focus of Lokad at the beginning of the company’s existence. While demand forecasting fits rather nicely into quantitative frameworks that allow you to decide which forecasting methods are the most suitable for any given task pricing is a much more evasive problem.

Dismal IT usually starts with recruitment agencies

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 13:24:00 +0200

In most companies, especially non-tech companies, the IT landscape is dismal: the old ERP (vastly unmaintainable) coexists the new ERP (mostly unmaintainable). Sales figures from the ERP diverges from the ones of the Business Intelligence which also diverge from the ones of the CRM. Systems are slow and unreliable. Major evolutions take years, etc. Technical debt has not been paid for years, and interests are usurious. Root causes of dismal IT are many.

Bitcoin, more thoughts on an emerging currency

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:03:00 +0200

Two years ago, I was publishing some first thoughts on Bitcoin. Meantime, Bitcoin has grown tremendously, and I remain an enthusiast observer of those developments. I had originally proposed a vision in 5 stages for the development of Bitcoin with Mining stage Trading stage End-user stage Merchant stage Enterprise stage Back in 2011, I had written that mining was taken care of. Well, since that time, Bitcoin has witnessed an explosion of the hashing power through the development of ASICs, that is, hardware dedicated to the sole purpose of mining Bitcoins.

Thinking Big Data for commerce

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:43:00 +0200

As of October 2013, Google Trends indicates that the buzz around Big Data is still growing. Based on my observations of many services company (mostly retailers though), I believe that it’s not all hype, and that indeed Big Data is going to deeply transform those businesses. However, I also believe that Big Data is wildly misunderstood by most, and that most Big Data vendors should not be trusted. Search volume on the term “Big Data” as reported by Google Trends

A buyer’s guide for enterprise software

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 16:09:00 +0200

Through a series of Big Data consulting missions that were overlapping with the entire IT landscape, data being all over the place, I have observed software purchasing processes of many large companies. Being also an enterprise software vendor myself, I have been baffled countless times by broken buying processes that lead smart people routinely choose about the worst price-quality ratio that the market has to offer. In this post, I am trying to gather a survival kit for buying enterprise software.

8 tips to turn your Big Data into Small Data

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:45:00 +0200

Hectic times. Looking at the last entry, I realize it has been half a year already since my last post. The Big Data projects I do, and the more I realize how usually scalability aspects for business projects are irrelevant to the point that the quasi-totality of the valuable data crunching processes could actually be run on a smartphone if the proper approaches are taken. Obviously there is no point in actually doing the analysis on a smartphone, this merely illustrating that really it does not take much computational power.

Big Data: choosing the problem before choosing the solution

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:17:00 +0200

My company has started several important big data missions, and I am taking here the opportunity publish some insights are are relevant to all those initiatives. A major (and frequent) pitfall of the Big Data projects consists of starting with a solution instead of starting with a problem. In particular, software vendors (Lokad’s included) are pushing their own Big Data recipe which will randomly involve: Hadoop SAP HANA HBase Amazon EC2 Cassandra Windows Azure Storm Node.

A few tips for Big Data projects

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:16:00 +0200

At Lokad, we are routinely working on[Big Data projects, primarily for retail, but with occasional missions in energy or biotech companies. Big Data is probably going to remain as one of the big buzzword of 2012, along with a big trail of failed projects. A while ago, I was offering tips for Web API design, today, let’s cover some Big Data lessons (learned the hard way, as always). 1. Small Data trump Big Data There is one area that captures most of the community interest: web data (pages, clicks, images).

Happy talk detector

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:02:00 +0200

Over the last couple of months, I have been pushing a lot of content on my company website (Lokad.com), and proofreading a lot of texts produced by colleagues too. The more I write, the more I realize that fighting our innate instinct to produce happy talk is a tough battle. Recently, I came up with a simple rule to detect most happy talk content: When by replacing a sentence by its negation, the resulting message seems totally out of place, then, odds are that the sentence was not carrying much of a message in the first place.

Bizarre pricing, does it matter? (B2B)

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:08:00 +0200

Update 2021: Yes, pricing does matter very much, and it’s not an area where one should be too imaginative. This post below was probably one of my worst idea ever for Lokad. Later on, we have moved toward flat monthly fees for our entire client base. Live and learn. My company has just released quantile forecasts upgrade. It’s no less than a small revolution for us, however, unless you’ve got some inventory to manage, it’s probably not too relevant to your business.

Cloud questions from Syracuse University, NY

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:45:00 +0200

A few days ago, I received a couple of questions from a student of Syracuse University, NY who is writing a paper about cloud computing and virtualization. Questions are relatively broad, so I am taking the opportunity to directly post here the answers. What was the actual technical and business impact of adopting cloud technology?. The technical impact was a complete rewrite of our codebase. It has been the large upgrade ever undertaken by Lokad, and it did span over 18 months, more or less mobilizing the entire dev workforce during the transition.

Goodbye Subversion, you served me well

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:43:00 +0200

I had been a long time Subversion user even before I started my company. Since 2006, the data analytics core of Lokad had been managed over SVN which proved to be a very robust piece of software (combined with TortoiseSVN). We had a few hiccups where the easiest way forward was to delete the local version and check-out again, but otherwise, our SVN host (hosted-projects.com) has been operating flawlessly over 5 years, which is a long time as far software technology goes.

MathJax, at last a decent way to post maths on the web

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:53:00 +0200

For a long time, posting something as simple as a square root on the web has been a major pain. Despite MathML having been around for years, Firefox is still the only browser (that I know of) to render MathML correctly. p=Φ(2ln(12π−−√MH)−−−−−−−−−−−−√)p=Φ(2ln⁡(12πMH)) p=\Phi\left(\sqrt{2\ln\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}}\frac{M}{H}\right)}\right) Recently, I did stumble upon MathJax, an outstanding JavaScript rendering engine for mathematics that works for all major recent browsers. The syntax is derived from the one of LaTeX, and the output is either MathML (if you have Firefox) or plain HTML/CSS otherwise.

Instant transfer with Bitcoin but without 3rd parties

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:01:00 +0200

Update 2012-05-17: Double spending can be made extremely difficult through quasi-instant double spending attempt detection. See TransactionRadar.com as an illustration. I now believe that the ideas posted below are moot, because early double spending detection is just the way to go. Bitcoin is a crypto-currency (check out my previous post for some more introductory thoughts) that provides many desirable properties such as decentralization, very low transaction fee, digital-native, … However enabling instant payment has not been a forte of Bitcoin so far.

Lokad.Cloud vs Lokad.CQRS, tiny insights about the future

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:11:00 +0200

Among the (small) community interested by the software practices of Lokad to develop entreprise software over Windows Azure, Lokad.Cloud vs Lokad.CQRS comes as a recurring question. It’s a good question, and to be entirely honest, the case is not 100% solved even at Lokad. One of the core difficulty to address this question is that Lokad.Cloud and Lokad.CQRS come: from different backgrounds: Lokad.Cloud orginates from the hard-core data analytics back-end.

Oddities of machine learning software code

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:24:00 +0200

Developping machine learning software is special. I did already describe a bit how it feels to be in a machine learning company, but let’s be a bit more specific concerning the code itself. One of most shocking aspect of machine learning code is that it tends to be full of super-short cryptic 1-letter or 2-letter variable names. This goes completely against the general naming conventions which emphasis readability over brievity. Yet, over the years, I have found that those compact names where best for mathematical / statistical / numerical algorithms.

Bitcoin, thoughts on a nascent currency system

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:41:00 +0200

Bitcoin is a fascinating concept, in short, it’s a crypto-currency backed by nothing other than raw processing power and geeky enthusiasm. This currency seems to trigger a much positive reactions than skeptical ones. My personal stance is very inclined in favor of Bitcoin, and I have invested a conservative amount of Euros in exchange of Bitcoins. Granted, nothing that would too troublesome even considering a 100% loss of value for those Bitcoins.

Why your company should have a single email address (guest post)

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:50:00 +0200

My second (ever) guest post has been published today by Jason Cohen, founder at WP Engine: Why your company should have a single email address. This discussion is mostly based on our experience at Lokad, I will address of concerns expressed in both the comments on the original post and on the Hacker News discussion. This is not an email problem, but a CRM problem. Very true. The secret ingredient to make single email work is, I believe, a CRM such as Relenta (or their next best alternative).

Squarespace and blog spam filtering: epic fail

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:27:00 +0200

Yesterday for the 10th time or so, I have been sending a ticket to Squarespace the company hosting this very blog - support to improve their abysmal spam filter (inexistent actually) for blog comments. This is rather frustrating esperience to delete about 10 spam comments on a daily basis just because Squarespace can’t manage to do things right in this area. Worse, people have been quitting Squarespace for years for this very reason - spam comment being the No1 reason quoted for the change.

3 features to make Azure developers say "wow"

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:53:00 +0200

Wheels that big aren’t technically required.The power of the “wow” effect seems frequently under-estimated by analytical minds. Nearly a decade ago, I remember a time when analysts where predicting that the adoption color screens on mobile phones would take a while to take off as color was serving no practical purposes. Indeed, color screens arrived several years before the widespread bundling of cameras within cell phones. Then, at present day, there are still close to zero mobile phone features that actually require a color screen to work in smooth condition.

3 Low-Competition Niches In Retail Software (guest post)

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:46:00 +0200

My first guest post (ever) 3 Low-Competition Niches In Retail Software has been published by Andy Brice on his blog Successful Software. Special thanks to Andy and his wife for the tremendous polish, they have brought to my initial draft.

Google App Engine becoming much more like Windows Azure?

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:57:00 +0200

The latest Google App Engine 1.5 release announcement has some puzzling edges. For once, it seems that Google is making its public cloud evolves to become much more alike another public cloud, namely Windows Azure. Google App Engine (GAE) was PAAS (Platform as a Service) right from the beginning, much like Windows Azure. Although, GAE had this very distinctive edge where apps were charged against strict CPU usage whereas most other public clouds charge per instance aka per allocated Virtual Machine.

A few design tips for your NoSQL app

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:13:00 +0200

Since the migration of Lokad toward Windows Azure about 18 months ago, we have been near exclusively relying on NoSQL - namely Blob Storage, Table Storage and Queue Storage. Similar cloud storage abstractions exist for all major cloud providers, you can think of them as NoSQL as a Service. It took us a significant effort to redesign our apps around NoSQL. Indeed, cloud storage isn’t a new flavor of SQL, it’s a radically different paradigm and it required in-depth adjustment of the core architecture of our apps.

Telling the difference between cloud and smoke

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:08:00 +0200

Returned a few days ago from NRF11. As expected, there were many companies advertising cloud computing, and yet, how disappointing when investigating the case a tiny bit further: it seems that about less than 10% of the companies advertising themselves as cloudy are actually leveraging the cloud. For 2011, I am predicting there will be a lot of companies disappointed by cloud computing - now apparently widely used a pure marketing buzzword without technological substance to support the claims.

A few tips for Web API design

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:51:00 +0200

During the iteration in spring 2010 that has lead Lokad to release its Forecasting API v3, I have been thinking a lot about how to design proper Web APIs in this age of cloud computing. Designing a good Web API is very surprisingly hard. Because Remote Procedure Call has been around forever, one might think that designing API is a well-known established practice, and yet, suffering the defects of Forecasting API v1 and v2, we learned the hard way it wasn’t really the case.

Big Wish List for Windows Azure - PDC10 update

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:38:00 +0200

At Lokad, we have been working with Windows Azure for more than 2 years, received the 1st Windows Azure Award and serving large and small companies through a 100% powered by Windows Azure technology since the commercial availability in Q1 2010. In my previous Big Wish List for Windows Azure, I was stating that Microsoft was a late entrant in the cloud computing arena. Considering the tremendous efforts that Microsoft has pushed around cloud technologies in 2010, I believe this aspect is no more relevant.

LinkedIn DirectAds, early thoughts

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:08:00 +0200

I just started my first LinkedIn DirectAds campaign a few days ago. I had significant previous experience with Google Adwords, and I was interested to see how DirectAds could perform compared to Adwords. From an outsider perspective, LinkedIn looks the perfect marketplace for a niche B2B software technology such as Lokad which specializes in demand forecasting. Indeed: I know exactly the profile of the people I am trying to reach: vertical, job description, company size, location, etc.

Why perfectly reliable storage is not enough

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:40:00 +0200

Cloud computing now offers near perfectly reliable storage. Amazon D3 is announcing a 99.999999999% durability and the Windows Azure storage is in the same league. Yet, perfectly reliable data storage does not prevent data loss - by a long range. It only prevents data loss caused by hardware failure, which nowadays are no more the most frequent cause for losing data. The primary danger threatening your data is just plain accidental deletion.

Wish list for Relenta CRM

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:25:00 +0200

At Lokad, we have using the Relenta CRM for nearly two years. It’s an excellent lean CRM that comes with a core focus on emails which happen to represent about 90% of our interactions with clients and prospects.If you happen to be an ISV, Relenta is worth having a closer look. Although, I have been missing a few key features in Relenta for a long time. Hence, I taking the time here to post my wish list for Relenta.

Top 10 cloud computing predictions

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:18:00 +0200

The Microsoft World Partner Conference 2010 is due to begin next Monday, and it’s clear that Windows Azure is going to be one of the product that will get the most attention this year. Over the last 2 years, I have attended and even took part to many cloud computing talks, and I am hearing tons of very confused opinions on cloud computing, and even more concerning the future of cloud computing.

BIG award for a TINY company (Lokad)

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:13:00 +0200

Lokad just won the Windows Azure Partner award of 2010. That’s an extremely big award for an exceptionally small company. The last French company to get such as an award was no less than Dassault Systèmes, the largest software company in France. I am proud of the work done by the Lokad team.

Strategies Logistique event in Paris

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 13:31:00 +0200

I have been giving a talk at the Strategies Logistique event in Paris last week about cloud computing, supply chain and Lokad. Beyond forecasting, I believe that supply chain will be one of the entreprise area that will benefit the most in the next decade of the migration toward the cloud. More pictures. Special thanks to Gilles Solard for the smooth organization of this great event.

Meeting Eric Rudder, Senior Vice-President, Microsoft

Wed, 26 May 2010 19:14:00 +0200

Yesterday, I had the chance to meet Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President at Microsoft for nearly 1h30, along with three of my students who actively contributed to the Sqwarea project, an open source C# game designed for Windows Azure. Eric proposed internships at MS Research after about 45min of discussion (really nice since CS students are expected to make a research internship in the US in their 2nd year at the ENS).

Really Simple Monitoring

Sat, 15 May 2010 12:12:00 +0200

Moving toward cloud computing relieves from (most) hardware downtime worries, yet, cloud computing is no magic pill that garanties that every single of our apps is ready to serve users as expected. You need a monitoring system to achieve this. In particular, OS uptime and simple HTTP responsiveness is only scratching the surface as far monitoring is concerned. In order to go beyond plain uptime monitoring, Lokad has started a new Windows Azure open source project named Lokad.

Sqwarea, open source game on Windows Azure

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:21:00 +0200

Beyond running a small software company, I am also responsible for the Sofware Engineering and Distributed Computing course at the ENS Paris. For the fourth year in a row, Microsoft offered gracious support for this course (include some Windows Azure resources). Every year, a small dozen of 1st year Computer Science students take over a sofware project. Last year, my students produced Clouster (cloudster.sourceforge.net), a scalable clustering algorithm on top of Windows Azure.

Stack Exchange 2.0: epic fail?

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:00:00 +0200

It’s a sad thing to see a pair (Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky) of brilliant entrepreneurs going for a probable epic fail with best intentions in mind. IMHO, the recently announced Stack Exchange 2.0 has a high probability of failure, and worse (as far I am concerned) it might marginally hurt my business due to the lack of ongoing commitment for the forum I did setup (ask.lokad.com) for my own company a few months ago.

.NET profiler for Windows Azure

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:01:00 +0200

Under modern managed runtimes, performance profiling comes in two flavors: CPU profiling memory profiling In last decade, the No1 breakthrough in the profiling arena was the introduction of sampling. Instead of intercepting every single method call, every single object allocation - introducing a 10x slowdown in the process - the profiler takes only sample at regular intervals. Sampling decreases the accuracy in favor of gain in performance. In practice, sampling is not just a tradeoff, it’s a game changer.

Thinking an academic package for Azure

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 17:41:00 +0200

This year, this is the 4th time that I am a teaching Software Engineering and Distributed Computing at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS). The classroom project of 2010 is based on Windows Azure, like the one of 2009. Today, I have been kindly asked by Microsoft folks to suggest an academic package for Windows Azure, to help those like me who wants to get their students started with cloud computing in general, and Windows Azure in particular.

You don't know how much you'd miss an O/C mapper till you get one

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:21:00 +0200

When we started moving our enterprise app toward Windows Azure, we quickly realized that scalable enterprise cloud apps were tough to develop, real tough. Windows Azure wasn’t at fault here, quite the opposite actually, but the cloud computing paradigm itself is tough to develop enterprise apps. Indeed, scalability in enterprise apps can’t be solved by just pilling up tons of memcached servers. Enterprise apps aren’t about scaling out some super-simplistic webap (like twitter.

MapReduce as burstable low-cost CPU

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:15:00 +0200

About two months ago, when Mike Wickstrand set up a UserVoice instance for Windows Azure, I immediately posted my own suggestion concerning MapReduce. MapReduce is a distributed computing concept initially published by Google late 2004. Against all odds, my suggestion, driven by the needs of Lokad, made it into the Top 10 most requested features for Windows Azure (well, 9th rank and about 20x times less voted than the No1 request for scaled down hosting).

Paging indices vs Continuation tokens

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:53:00 +0200

Developers coming from the world of relational databases are well familiar with indexed paging. Paging is rather straightforward: Each row gets assigned a unique integer, starting from 0, and going with +1 increment for each additional row. The query is said to be paged, because constraints specifies that only the row assigned an index greater or equal to N and lower than N+PageSize are retrieved. I call such as pattern a chunked enumeration: instead of trying to retrieve all the data at once, client app is retrieving chunks of data, potentially splitting a very large enumeration is into a very large number of much small chunks.

Ambient Cloud is bunk and irrelevant

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:10:00 +0200

Every couple of weeks, I hear about computing resource scavenging projects of some sort (think Folding@Home. Indeed, there is an astonishing amount of latent processing power out there, just think of those billions of idle personal computers. Latest news, the scavenging thingy has been renamed Ambient Cloud. Unfortunately, the Ambient Cloud is both bunk and irrelevant, as far raw processing power is concerned. Energy amount for more than 50% of the total amortized cost of a modern data center.

Big Wish List for Windows Azure

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:11:00 +0200

At Lokad, we have been working with Windows Azure for more than 1 year now. Although Microsoft is a late entrant in the cloud computing arena, So far, I am extremely satisfied with this choice as Microsoft is definitively moving forward in the right direction. Here is my Big Wish List for Windows Azure. It’s the features that would turn Azure into a killer product, deserving a lion-sized market share in the cloud computing marketplace.

Fat entities for Table Storage in Lokad.Cloud

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:29:00 +0200

After realizing the value of the Table Storage, giving a lot of thoughts about higher level abstractions, and stumbling upon a lot of gotcha, I have finally end-up with what I believe to be a decent abstraction for the Table Storage. The purpose of this post is to outline the strategy adopted for this abstraction which is now part of Lokad.Cloud. Table Storage (TS) comes with an ADO.NET provider part of the StorageClient library.

Table Storage gotcha in Azure

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 12:28:00 +0200

Table Storage is a powerful component of the Windows Azure Storage. Yet, I feel that there is quite a significant friction working directly against the Table Storage, and it really calls for more high level patterns. Recently, I have been toying more with the v1.0 of the Azure tools released in November'09, and I would like to share a couple of gotchas with the community hoping it will save you a couple of hours.

Scaling-down for Tactical Apps with Azure

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:41:00 +0200

Cloud computing is frequently quoted for unleashing the scalability potential of your apps, and the press goes wild quoting the story of XYZ a random Web 2.0 company that as gone from a few web servers to 1 zillion web servers in 3 days due to massive traffic surge. Yet, the horrid truth is: most web apps won’t ever need to scale, and an even smaller fraction will even need to scale out (as opposed of scaling up).

Lokad.Translate v1.0 released (and best wishes for 2010)

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 12:29:00 +0200

A few weeks ago, I have been discussing the idea of continuous localization. In summary, the whole point is to do for localization (either websites or webapps) what is done by the continuous integration server. Obviously, the translation itself should be done by professional translators, as automated translation tools are still light years away from the required quality. Beyond this aspect, nearly all the mundane steps involved in localization works can be automated.

Right level of interruption and productivity

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:19:00 +0200

Lokad was at LeWeb'09 along with other BizSpark One startups. It had been a great time for us. Our showcase client, Pierre-Noël Luiggi, CEO and founder of Oscaro, was there at our booth and did a tremendous job at explaining why inventory and back-office matters if you intend to build a great eCommerce business. Among various discussions that I had with Pierre-Noël during those two days of hectic trade-show, we have been discussing a lot about productivity in presence of interruptions (LeWeb'09 was focused on real-time web, hence real-time interruptions).

O/C mapper for TableStorage

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:46:00 +0200

The Table Service API is the most subtle service provided among the cloud storage services offered by Windows Azure (with also include Blob and Queue Series for now). I did struggle a while to eventually figure out what was the unique specificity of Table Storage from a scalability perspective or rather from a cost-to-scale perspective as the cloud charges you according to your consumption. Since the scope of the Table Storage remained a fuzzy element for me for a long time, the beta version of Lokad.

Serialization in the cloud: SharedContract vs. SharedType

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:00:00 +0200

Every time developers decide not to go for relational databases in cloud apps, they end-up with custom storage formats. In my (limited) experience, that one of the inescapable law of cloud computing. Hence, serialization plays a very important role in cloud apps either for persistence or for transient computations where input data need to be distributed among several computing nodes. In the case of Lokad.Cloud, our O/C mapper (object to cloud), our blob storage abstraction relies on seamless serialization.

Continuous Localization or l10n 2.0

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:23:00 +0200

There is nothing is easier to sell globaly than software. Yet, it’s still surprising to me to see how few efforts are made on average by small software companies toward localization. Disclaimer: I am not saying that selling software anywhere is easy. Some places are really tough. I am just saying that selling about anything else worldwide level is just 10x harder. Translation is (relatively) cheap Localization (l10n in short) is easier and cheaper than you think.

PDC'09 and Lokad

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 03:45:00 +0200

PDC'09 has ended. It has been a great time for me, and probably an even greater time for my own small company considering the outrageous amount of exposure that we have received from Microsoft. This post is probably the least that I can do to thank all the Microsoft folks that have made PDC'09 such a great event for us. First of all, I would like to thank Doug Hauger (General Manager, Windows Azure) who actually made our venue possible under a very constrained time-line but also under a very constrained budget.

Live from PDC'09 - it's quite cloudy out there

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:49:00 +0200

The first keynote for the PDC'09 ended up minutes ago. Although it was not such a surprise, Azure was pervasive in virtually every talk being made this morning. Azure is definitively a top priority for Microsoft much like Windows or Office. For my small company, it’s very good news because we are banking a lot on this technology. Also, I really like the vision of Microsoft that includes tooling as a core of the cloud experience.

How to restart your Azure workers in less than a minute

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:57:00 +0200

Ever been waiting in front the Windows Azure Console for your apps to get deployed and restarted ? Well, although this behavior is rather annoying, the console only behaves as expected. Indeed, even if you’re only deploying a 1MB package, the Windows Azure fabric ends up redeploying a whole virtual machine, or rather of a whole set of virtual machines if your role happens to have multiple instances. Obviously, part of the problem comes from the super heavy stack that an OS represents.

No excuse for not disclosing your roadmap

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:43:00 +0200

Software is a fast-paced industry. New technologies soon become obsolete ones, and you need keep your mindset in Fire and Motion mode to move forward. Yet, when something really big emerges, say cloud computing, you end up in a crossroad and you need to make a choice about the future of your business. This future depends on the 3rd party technology you decide to rely on. This is true for software companies buying software components, but it’s also true for brick and mortar companies moving to the next generation ERP.

Windows Azure deserves a public roadmap

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:06:00 +0200

Last week, I had the chance to meet in person with Steve Marx and Doug Hauger, two key people part of the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. First of all, I have been really pleased, those folks are brilliant. My own little company is betting a lot on Windows Azure. When I tell people (partners, investors, customers) about the amount of work involved to migrate Lokad toward the cloud, the most frequent feedback is that I am expecting way too much from Microsoft, that Lokad is taking way too much risk too rely on unproved Microsoft products, that Microsoft failed many times before, …

Cloud 2.0, what future for cloud computing?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:01:00 +0200

Almost one year ago, I posted a a personal review about Azure, Amazon, Google Engine, VMWare and the others. One year later, the cloud computing market is definitively taking shape. Patterns are emerging along with early standardization attempts (ex: www.simplecloud.org). My own personal guess is that the cloud computing market (not the technology) will somehow be reaching a v1.0 status at the very end of 2009, when the latest big player - that is to say Microsoft - will have finally launched it’s own cloud.

Azure Management API concerns

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:21:00 +0200

Disclaimer: this post is based on my (limited) understanding of the Azure Management API, I did start reading the docs only a few hours ago. Microsoft has just released the first preview of their Management API for Windows Azure. As far I understand the content of the newly released API, this API just let you automates what was done manually through the Windows Azure Console so far. At this point, I have two concerns:

Table Storage or the 100x cost factor

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:33:00 +0200

Until very recently, I was a bit puzzled by the Table Storage. I couldn’t manage to get a clear understanding how the Table Storage could be a killer option against the Blob Storage. I get it now: Table Storage can cut your storage costs by 100x. At outlined by other folks already, I/O costs typically represents more than 10x the storage costs if your objects are weighting less than 6kb (the computation has been done for the Amazon S3 pricing, but the Windows Azure pricing happens to be nearly identical).

Thinking the Table Storage of Windows Azure

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:25:00 +0200

Disclaimer: I am not exactly a Table Storage expert. In this post, I am just trying to sort out my own thoughts about this service offered with Windows Azure. Check my follow-up post. Soon after the release announcement of the release of our new O/C mapper Lokad.Cloud (object to cloud) named Lokad.Cloud, folks on the Azure Forums raised the question of the Table Storage. Although it might be surprising, Lokad.Cloud does not provide - yet - any support for Table Storage.

O/C mapper - object to cloud

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:10:00 +0200

When we started to port our forecasting technology toward the cloud, we decided to create a new open source project called Lokad.Cloud that would isolate all the pieces of our cloud infrastructure that weren’t specific of Lokad. The project has been initially subtitled Lokad.Cloud - .NET execution framework for Windows Azure, as the primary goal of this project was to provide some cloud equivalent of the plain old Windows Services. We did quickly end-up with QueueServices which happens to be quite handy to design horizontally scalable apps.

Discovering Twitter

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:40:00 +0200

I have been hearing a lot about Twitter for a long time. I am still puzzled a bit by the concept, but apparently a significant percentage of the registrants at Lokad do have a Twitter account. So now, I can start wasting time on Twitter too while pretending it’s company work :-) More seriously, it appears that a couple of competitors, prospects, customers are actually discussing of sales forecasts out there, so it might be worth keeping on eye on that.

My first horse riding lesson

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 09:03:00 +0200

The trick is: Galaad (the horse) was much more trained than I was (cours-equitation.com).

Lokad.Cloud - alpha version released

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:36:00 +0200

One of the major little-known weakness of cloud computing is development productivity. Indeed, developing over the cloud ain’t easy, and as complexity goes, the management of a complex, fully-distributed app may become a nightmare. At Lokad, as we started migrating a fairly complex technology, we did get the feeling that we were needing strong patterns and practices - tailored for the cloud - so that we don’t get lost half-way in the migration process.

Thoughts about the Windows Azure pricing

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:29:00 +0200

Microsoft has recently unveiled its pricing for Windows Azure. In short, Microsoft did exactly align with the pricing offered by Amazon. CPU costs CPU costs 0.12/h,meaning that a single instance running 24/24 for a month costs 86.4 which is fairly expensive compared to classical hosting provider where you can get more for basically half the price. But well, this situation was expected as Microsoft probably does not want to start a price war with his business partners still selling dedicated Windows Server hosting.

Lokad mentioned on Microsoft Senior VP blog

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:26:00 +0200

My small company is getting visibility momentum. After managing to get copied by the Chinese Government itself, Lokad is now listed on the blog of S. Somagar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I am not exactly sure how S. Somagar ended-up on Lokad, but I don’t think that he personally spend time to carefully review each one of the 15.000 bizspark companies. Thus, I guess I have to thank Julien Codorniou for that :-) .

FIPFO - First In Probably First Out

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:31:00 +0200

The FIFO (First In First Out) is a very well known concept in computer science. In one of my previous post, I used the word FIPFO to refer to First In Probably First Out to refer to the cloud equivalent of the FIFO. Indeed, the basic idea behind that term is that you can’t scale much pure FIFOs due to synchronization constraints. Yet, if you just loosen a little bit the semantic, that is to say, FIPFO, then you have an infinitely scalable data structure.

Copied by the Chinese government

Mon, 04 May 2009 17:19:00 +0200

Apparently, my company website has been copied by an official branch of the Chinese government. Although, Ghandi has said that Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery, I am not sure how I should handle such a blatant ripoff of Lokad’s copyrights. Key interesting facts: plenty of “left-over” on the Chinese website from the original one. imaginative ways of recycling irrelevant illustrations. it’s a .gov.cn website, that is to say an official Department of the Government of China.

Startup Class '07 and '08 at Telecom ParisTech

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 14:59:00 +0200

In my previous post if been detailing 9 steps to make sure your startup exists. Inspired by an initial idea of Chris Exline, I decided to make a small survey of the startups admitted at the Incubator of Telecom ParisTech in 2007 and 2008 (startups are hosted 18 months by the incubator, and then kicked-out, that’s the rule). To figure out how well the startups of the incubator were doing, I came up with a simple score the startup websites.

9 steps to make sure your startup exists

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:18:00 +0200

My uISV isn’t even remotely an audience based business - we are on a narrow B2B segment - but since the very beginning, I have invested a lot of efforts to get a decent online presence. So far, every effort that I have pushed to strengthen the online presence was very significantly rewarded. Every week or so, excellent news just pop out of nowhere: A consulting group wants to add the product to its portfolio.

Cloud Computing vs. Hardware as a Service

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:55:00 +0200

In a previous post, I have discussed why I believed that cloud computing was going to be a big player arena, and not a friendly place for the little guys. Recently, many people told about such and such small company that was supposed to deliver cloud computing too, and that their service would match the ones offered by big players. Basically, the discussion goes like this: Hey, we too are able to instantiate virtual machines on-demand.

In praise of Voices.com

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:36:00 +0200

I have been a long time consumer of freelance marketplaces. Yet, all the freelance websites that I have experienced so far left me a feeling of half-backed design. Guru, oDesk, eLance, rentacoder, just to name a few of them. The heart of the problem lies in the doomed attempts at supporting any type of freelance jobs with a unique web application. In contrast, voices.com has a unique focus on voice talents.

High-perf SelectInParallel in 120 lines of C#

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:13:00 +0200

A few months ago at Lokad, we started working on 8-core machines. Multi-core machines need adequate algorithmic design to leverage their processing power; and such a design can be more or less complicated depending of the algorithm that you are trying to parallelize. In our case, there were many situations where the parallelization was quite straightforward: large loops, all iterations being independents. At that time, PLinq, the parallelization library from Microsoft wasn’t still available as a final product (it will be shipped with Visual Studio 2010).

Cloud computing: a personal review about Azure, Amazon, Google Engine, VMWare and the others

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:51:00 +0200

My own personal definition of cloud computing is a hosting provider that delivers automated and near real time arbitrary large allocation of computing resources such as CPU, memory, storage and bandwidth. For companies such as Lokad, I believe that cloud computing will shape many aspects of the software business in the next decade. Obviously, all cloud computing providers have limits on the amount of resources that one can get allocated, but I want to emphasize that, for the end-user, the cloud is expected to be so large that the limitation is rather the cost of resource allocation, as opposed to hitting technical obstacles such as the need to perform a two-weeks upgrade from one hosting solution to another.

Installing VMWare Server 2.0 on a OVH RPS

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 15:21:00 +0200

A French hosting company called OVH provides an interesting offer named Real Private Server (RPS) as a intermediate solution between cloud computing and classical dedicated hosting. In a nutshell, RPS is a true dedicated server that comes with a virtual storage starting at 10 GB and going up to 1 TB. OVH is pricing RPS very aggressively - 20EUR/month for a dual-core AMD64 and 2EUR /month/10GB - makes the RPS a very interesting offer for backup servers that essentially need a lot of reliable storage.

Creating an auto-update framework with WiX

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:34:00 +0200

The WiX utility does it job at letting you create Microsoft Installer packages (known as_.msi_ files), but it involves it own set of weird peculiarities. For my uISV, I have designed a minimal auto-update framework for WinForm applications. The spec was the following: the user can click on Check for update, and will optionally be notified if a new version is available. In such event, the user is proposed to upgrade toward the new version.

Migrating from OnTime to Trac, a short review

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:19:00 +0200

I have been a long time user of the project tracker OnTime provided by Axosoft. Yet, at Lokad, we have just migrated to Trac, a open source project tracker. Although OnTime is a good product, there are quite a few elements definitively in favor a Trac low ceremony: Trac has no advanced workflow, no 10 fields bug entry forms, no team reporting dashboard - but it just works. When it comes to web app, more is less.

Custom error page in ASP.NET when database connectivity is lost.

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:08:00 +0200

A particularly annoying, yet frequent, issue for your ASP.NET is the loss of database connectivity. Indeed, if your database is hosted on a separate machine (as it is generally advised for performance), then your web application is subject to database downtime. Database downtimes have several particularities It generates internal server errors. It’s not the type of error that can be fixed by be the developer. The problem tends to get solved by itself (think: reboot of the database server) Errors don’t get logged (well, assuming that you are logging errors in the database).

My startup at the Incubator of Telecom Paris

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:27:00 +0200

For over a year, I have been working on Lokad.com. The project has been growing nicely, and last week, Lokad has been accepted at the Incubator of Telecom Paris. The incubator of Telecom Paris is the largest incubator in France with some nice success stories (such as Netvibes). Thus, for the next 18 months, Lokad will have nice offices in Paris (in the 14th arrondissement). For a young company, an incubator is probably the nicest way to smooth all the mundane details (yet critical) that become unavoidable as soon your company grows beyond the stage of the 1-man company.

Hard times ahead for shopping cart providers

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:14:00 +0200

Since my μIVS is providing sales forecasting services for eCommerce, I have been spending a considerable amount of time reviewing the market of eCommerce frameworks and providers. I did come up with a few conclusions that may be of interest for people considering developing business in this area. The first shocking element when I did start to review the online shopping cart market is the insane amount of competing software solutions.

Delete-proof data paging

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:02:00 +0200

In order to retrieve a large amount of data from a SQL table, you need to resort to a data paging scheme. Conceptually, a typical paged SQL query looks like (the syntax is approximate and vaguely inspired from MS SQL Server 2005) SELECT Foo.Bar FROM Foo WHERE RowNumber() BETWEEN @Index AND @Index + @PageSize ORDER BY Foo.Id; The queries are made iteratively until no rows get returned any more. Yet, this approach fails both if rows are added or deleted in the table Foo during the iteration.

Tracking file downloads in Google Analytics AND Google Adwords

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:33:00 +0200

Google has not one web analytics system, but two of them, namely Google Analytics and Google Adwords. For the average webmaster, this situation is quite a pain, because most of the tracking code must be duplicated. To make the situation worse, Google Adwords does not support any straightforward solution to track file downloads. For the sake of my own μISV, I have designed the following script that enables both Analytics and Adwords tracking in a single function.

Crypt your config files with PowerShell

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:27:00 +0200

ASP.Net 2.0 comes with a convenient native support for configuration file encryption. Yet, things are still not that easy for WinForms, Console applications or Windows Services since the aspnet_regiis.exe utility only supports Web Configuration files. My own μISV has its share of distributed applications which involve securing a few connection strings over several machines. Securing the connection strings through encryption is not an ultimate defense (if the attacker gains executions rights on the local machine, connection strings will get disclosed anyway), but it can still save you a lot of trouble such as involuntary disclosure.

Velib's from a software engineer viewpoint

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:52:00 +0200

The Velib’s are becoming insanely popular in Paris because of the strikes (strikes in public transportations is a national sport in France, a bit like baseball is in the US). Thus, I have been taking my first Velib ride yesterday, a few months after their initial launch. The Velib both the name of a public bike renting system in Paris but also the name of the bike itself. There are now 10.

Securing CruiseControl.Net integration server

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:01:00 +0200

CruiseControl.NET is a great open source tool for continuous integration (CI). Yet, the default settings are quite permissive, and unless you’re working on an open source project as well, you might prefer restrict the accesses to your sole team. I have found that securing CruiseControl.Net while keeping a developer-friendly environment is not such an easy task. This post is a summary of the various steps needed to secure your CI server.

RESX utilities open-sourced

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 12:25:00 +0200

Due to popular demand, I have finally open-sourced my RESX utilities. All the content (source code as well as binaries) is now available at resx.sourceforge.net, released under the GPL open-source license. The release includes RESX Editor a simple yet efficient RESX file editor. It can be very handy if the translator is not too much familiar either with XML or with Visual Studio. The release also includes Resx2word a RESX to Microsoft Word converter.

Migrating to a DNS hosting provider

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:51:00 +0200

I have recently migrated all the DNS data of Lokad.com toward DnsMadeEasy.com, a provider specialized with DNS hosting. For a long time, it did not even crossed my mind that such low cost independent service would actually exists. DNS stands for Domain Name System. In simply words, the DNS converts the domain name address into a IP address. Why do I need to know anything about DNS? As a webmaster, DNS are most usually completely handled by your hosting provider.

Selling your mISV (the PeopleWords.com case)

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 19:54:00 +0200

Anthea has just acquired PeopleWords.com. PeopleWords was my first mISV project. My efforts being invested in a more ambitious project (namely lokad.com), I was not able to push PeopleWords any further. Thus, selling was a natural option. This post is a modest attempt to gather the few noticeable elements about this experience. Auction websites do not work There are places (ex: eBay, SitePoint) where you can sell websites through auctions. I tried, and in the end, it was pure waste of time.

Screwturn powered front-end for your mISV

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 23:26:00 +0200

I have just finished to migrate all the web content of Lokad.com into a brand new skinned Screwturn wiki instance. Thanks to the design skills of Sergey Pozhilov, the result does not look bad :-) . I have been writing about wiki misuses in the past. One of my recommendation of at the time was do not use wikis for public diffusion. I still believe that this recommendation is a good one (even highly popular forums have hard time to get anybody contributing to a wiki).

Few traps for former C++ developers coding in C#

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 11:29:00 +0200

I have been proofreading a couple of time C# source code written by former C++ developers. Also C# and C++ have a lot in common at the syntax level, the conceptual framework underlying the two languages is really different. This post is a negligible attempt to point out the most common issues. C# is garbage collected. You should not need any destructor. If you are using destructors, then it’s probably wrong 99% of the time.

Buyer's guide to development outsourcing

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:25:00 +0200

Outsourcing parts of your IT developments can be highly cost effective. While running Lokad.com, I have outsourced most of the work for 3rd party connectors (23 of them at the time) and I am considering the outcome as more than satisfying since I would never have achieved the same amount of work without outsourcing, considering comparable delays and financial investments. This document is a small guide for mISV or ISV that might be willing to go freelance too.

Spam 2.0 or the spammers reloaded

Thu, 24 May 2007 15:32:00 +0200

Spammers are legions, and unfortunately, most recent systems are just very weak against adversarial behavior. In the last few months, I have just noticed no less than 4 new kinds of spammers. Spam 2.0 released, buy now! P2P spam targeting file-sharing applications such as Emule. The basic idea is the following: spread, through the P2P application, a virus that breaks into the P2P application itself. Once the P2P application is infested, all the incoming requests will return the virus wrapped under the name of the incoming query.

Get your TCO assessments right - fight the urge for home-cooking

Wed, 23 May 2007 11:14:00 +0200

TCO stands for “Total Cost of Ownership”. The concept has been known for decades, yet when it comes to software, even IT professionals have real difficulties to make correct TCO estimations. It’s true that software TCO is a difficult task: first, it’s really hard to compare products especially if the products involve hundred of features as it is usually the case, second, TCO heavily depends on the way you are actually using the product, MS Excel has an excellent TCO if you want to make some personal budgeting operations, but the TCO would be abysmal if you would try to use MS Excel as an accounting system for your mid-size company.

Continous migration in software development

Sat, 12 May 2007 18:15:00 +0200

New (and soon to be deprecated) technologies are just flowing in the Software industry. Some people pointed out that you can’t stop improving your product just to keep the pace with the release flow (that’s the fire and motion theory. Yet, being an ISV, your options are quite limited. You have to rely on the latest (yet stable) technologies in order to maintain a highly competitive productivity. Rewriting from scratch your application to support the latest Foo.

Minimal back-office for your eBusiness

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:19:00 +0200

I have been running two eBusinesses (namely PeopleWords.com and Lokad.com) and back-office systems play an important role in your business. Basically, there are 3 unavoidable elements for any eBusiness back-office Account & User deletion Error logs reporting Business oriented dashboard Account & User deletion: IT’S THE LAW, well, at least in Europe, but I suspect that many other countries provide similar laws, rules or guidelines. Intuitively, if a user who has just created an account asks for a deletion of his account (including all the user-related data), complying is a legal requirement.

Improved "Run external program" through environment variables

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:25:00 +0200

Dynacom is a Canadian accounting software that provides an add-on development framework named Synergy. We have started to work on an integration of the Lokad Desktop Sales Forecasting with Dynacom. This post might interest developers who want to integrate together several windows applications (we are considering Dynacom here, but the process would be quite similar for another application). Basically, Dynacom provides build-in custom action Run external program; yet, this action has a huge drawback: it requires either your application to be part of the PATH on the client machine or it requires to provide an absolute file location (which is likely to vary from one machine to another).

Homeworks going freelance

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:01:00 +0200

I am a regular customer of freelance services. It’s especially useful when you need to translate your website or when you need open source developments because confidentiality becomes irrelevant. Usually, I am browsing the freelance websites on the buyer side; yet I only recently gave a try to the provider side. Most freelance websites include tons of job like Simple sort in Java, NEED HELP JOIN, INNER-JOIN, LEFT-JOIN in SQL Solving a puzzle in C … Those jobs are clearly student homeworks, and I have been stunned by the fact that those jobs may represent one job out of two on most freelance websites (yet those jobs are tiny on average; thus the business impact is probably much smaller than 50%).

The quest of the fail-proof hosted service

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:52:00 +0200

There isn’t many 100% reliable hosting providers; yet when I buy an hosted subscription plan, I expect no less than a 100% uptime services. So far, I have discovered only two fail-proof hosting services Squarespace.com: blog hosting, not a single issue for more than 3 months of service. Hosted-projects.com: Subversion hosting, not a single issue for almost 1 year of service. Such a quality of services is truly worth to be mentioned and praised.

VPS for continuous integration

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:50:00 +0200

Continuous integration is a cornerstone of our development processes at Lokad. We are currently relying on CruiseControl.Net to support continuous integration. Several months ago, I did ask on various web forums if any company would sell hosting packages that would natively include CruiseControl.Net. The only answer that I did get was Get yourself a 300 USD PC and use it as your continuous integration server. I was totally unsatisfied with such answers because the maintenance costs associated with the management of an additional machine are terrible.

Iridium r8 released and new website fo Math.NET

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 21:18:00 +0200

Math.NET is open-source project delivering mathematics / statistics libraries written in C# (and mostly targeting .Net, although Mono compatibility should not be an issue). I have been personally contributing on the numerics package of Math.NET code-named Iridium. Several years ago, I did setup a [ediawiki-based website for Math.NET, but it’s now completely obsolete. Yet, I would like to mention Christoph Ruegg has released a brand new website for Math.NET. Update your (social) bookmarks with mathdotnet.

Submit-Everywhere.com review: reducing the PAD pain

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:45:00 +0200

There are a lot of things that are simply wrong in PAD files. My previous experiences of PAD file submission for Resx Editor and Lokad ASP.Net Sales Forecasting were just terrible. I did end up submitting my PAD URLs at random for hours to hundreds of crappy directories (because most online directories do not even work) without knowing whether this work would actually lead anywhere. Three weeks ago, it did bargain 80 euros or so and gave a shot to submit-everywhere.

What's wrong with PAD files

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:49:00 +0200

There are quite a lot of things that are just simply wrong in the IT industry nowadays, I have already discussed the case of the Google Adwords, let’s move to the subject of PAD files. PAD stands for Portable Application Description, it’s an XML format designed by the shareware industry to facilitate the submission of software products to software directories. The idea is pretty simple and pretty nice. As a software manufacturer, you create a PAD file for each one of your products; then you publish this PAD file directly on your website.

FTP upload to Sourceforge with PowerShell

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:45:00 +0200

The release system of Sourceforge.net requires to upload your files by FTP to upload.sourceforge.net. The process is basically a pure pain, especially for small files: sourceforge.net is slow, upload.sourceforge.net is slow too. you need to process your files by FTP whereas it could have been done much more easily through a simple web upload (at least for file that are less then 5MB which must account for 99% of the file released on sourceforge anyway).

WetPaint is far too expensive, migrate or die

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 21:52:00 +0200

WetPaint is a hosted wiki solution. Although Wetpaint still lacks from “professional” wiki features like being able to insert custom HTML or scripts, it’s a nice, simple wiki application with a great look&feel. I have triedWetPaint, I did even use it for while for Lokad.com; but looking back, it turned out to be a really BAD move. I have finally manually removed all the content from my wetpaint wiki (because there is no “Remove my wiki” feature available); and I have migrated all the content to community.

Two Lokad-related products shipped

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:00:00 +0200

The last few days have been intense, with not one be two releases. We have first shipped Lokad Sales Forecasting v1.0 for ASP.Net, a stand-alone reporting library to be integrated in your favorite ASP.Net eCommerce application. Then we have shipped Lokad OpenShell v1.0, a PowerShell snap-in that features CmdLets related to time-series forecasting. Lokad OpenShell aims to facilitate RAD (Rapid Application Development) approaches while integrating the Lokad technology. Both products have been released under a BSD license.

Weird consequences of full transaction logs

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 12:23:31 +0200

Let say that you have an ASP.Net 2.0 web application running on top of MSSQL Server 2005. Guess what happen if you database transaction log get full? Well, you will get a large amount of weird side effects, most of them seeming totally unrelated to the saturation of the transaction log. Among the problems that I have encountered The web services of your website start to send totally misleading error messages like authentication failed.

What's wrong with Google AdWords

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 16:02:00 +0200

I have been using AdWords for quite a time, having setup ad campaign both for PeopleWords.com (freelance translation marketplace) and for Lokad.com (business time-series forecasting). And, being both a AdWords consumer (yes I do click on ads) and an AdWords publisher, I must say it’s quite surprising to see a company weighting hundred billions of dollars, with a business so crippled with long-lasting intrinsic issues. Please note that this post is not a complaint against Google, they are quite good at what they are doing; my point is that the AdWords business model is really weak against adversarial behaviors.

Missing time-series vs. Empty time-series

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 15:20:00 +0200

Lokad is about time-series forecasting, but as simple as the time-series model may seem to be (after all a time-series is nothing more than a list of time-value pairs), there are several subtleties in the way to manage time-series. In this post, we will see how the Lokad time-series model distinguishes missing time-value pairs from empty time-value pairs. Since the topic is slightly complex, I would suggest, if you’re not familiar the Lokad technology, to have a look at our User Guide (in particular, the Forecasting tasks section).

More on WS directories - BindingPoint.com is over

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:26:00 +0200

In my previous post, I was reporting that BindingPoint.com was badly dysfunctional. Well, the problem has been solved, BindingPoint.com is no more. On their home page, they blame the market for being too slow to adopt Web Services. Well, I do agree that surprisingly the adoption of web services has been fairly slow; yet, you can’t blame the market for obvious bugs in your web application. Also, Lokad.com (my company, which provides time-series forecasting web services) has been listed in eSigma.

What do most WS directories have in common?

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:48:00 +0200

Most Web Services directories have one thing in common: they are totally bugged at the point of being totally unusable. Indeed I have tried to submit the Lokad Forecasting Web Services to several directories. Namely: BindingPoint.com: registration process crashes and the ASP.Net default exception page. WSIndex.org: can’t even login, gets a fatal cgi-bin error while trying. XMethod.com: website painfully designed, registration succeeds but submission crashes. Dmoz.org: “Submit URL” gets me to a page Service Temporarily Unavailable (it has been that way for the last 2 weeks) It’s almost unbelievable that so many top-ranked web sites (try web services directory on Google) are not even able to achieve something as simple as a registration process.

Do not make a sum with your forecasts - a coconuts study

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 11:27:00 +0200

Although we have tried to make Lokad as simple and intuitive as possible, statistical forecasting is a counter-intuitive science with many traps. In this post, I am going to describe one of the most frequent mistakes that I have encountered within many companies. In a nutshell, it is wrong to make a sum of forecasted values. Since the problem is quite hard to grasp, let’s start with an example. Let’s say that you have 3 shops; and that those 3 shops are selling coconuts.

Lokad.com, data mining and grid computing

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:05:00 +0200

I have finally released my latest project named Lokad.com. Lokad is about time-series forecasting, I believe that our approach is quite radically different from what the market was offering until now. Since Lokad has its own blog, my two posts about the Lokad release can be found here and here.

A few tips for source code versioning (do not drive your co-workers mad)

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 11:40:00 +0200

Source control management (SCM) is a technical matter as well as a good practice matter. Here is a small list of tips that I have found quite useful in practice. A good commit is like a good paper: It starts with an evocative title. Ok, there is no title in SCM but there are comments provided while committing. If your SCM comment is not clear, then how do you expect your co-workers to keep track of what you are doing?

A small developer-oriented PowerShell wish list

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 09:32:00 +0200

I have just started to use the PowerShell a few days ago; and I am more and more impressed by the work that have been done by the MS folks. Yet, being a developer, I have the feeling that many aspects of PowerShell still need to be polished. Too bad that there is no Visual Studio project templates for CmdLets. Providing an hello-world CmdLet with its associated SnapIn would really make the life of the developers easier, smoothing the learning curve.

Let's get cosmetic on C# documentation

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:08:00 +0200

I am gathering here just a few C# documentation cosmetic tips that I apply in my own projects. I do not pretend to have achieved any absolute truth or any optimal practice with those tips. I just find them convenient when applied with consistency. #region #endregion directives can be great, but caution not to overuse them by putting a dozen of directives within a 200-lines long code file. Indeed, if region makes the code structure more apparent, region also makes the code less proofreadable because you have to open the regions to actually start reading.

Blogosphere quatitative elements, a few slides

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:30:34 +0200

Being part of the Corps des Telecoms1, I have been assigned for a modest blog study within the scope of a communication course. I have found the subject highly interesting because blogs open whole new directions of research and whole new methodologies. Indeed, contrary to most usual communication events (ex: person-to-person talks), it’s potentially possible to retrieve most of the blogosphere content through web crawling intensive methods. The slides of the talk have been uploaded.

ResxEditor reloaded - version 1.2 released

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:26:00 +0200

They were a couple of long standing issues with ResxEditor. Most of them were actually reported as comments on the blog post of the initial ResxEditor release. All of those issues are now fixed. Bug fixes and new features are detailed on the ResxEditor page. Special thanks to Nick Pasko for carrying most of the work and finding a solution to get rid of the previous cell saving behavior that was driving translators nuts.

Finally, I am going to be a theology teacher

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:10:00 +0200

According to Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), software development is a religion. Wow, frankly I hope not, because I am quite ignorant when it comes to theological matters. A major issue with human/social studies and practices is that it is so hard to get close to anything that would be considered as scientific knowledge and not pure erratic opinions. Yet, it’s not because it’s hard to produce science that it isn’t worth trying.

Wiki misuses (collaborative tools, part 1)

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:18:00 +0200

Great software development requires great tools; but tools do very little in themselves if the craftsman lacks the proper skills. In my (limited) experience, I have noticed that collaborative tools are often extremely useful (i.e. provide strong productivity boosts) while also being quite hard to master. There are far too many collaborative tools to discuss for a single blog post; I will start with the wikis. Why do you need a wiki?

Typo hunting: get some weapons first!

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:41:00 +0200

It’s just too hard to spell check your text by hand (or it requires an unreasonable amount of time). Before you actually get a spell checker, you might not even realize how many typos you produce. I have just downloaded today the FireFox RC1 that includes a web form spell checker. My first target for typo hunting was an intranet wiki I am working on. I feel that I won’t ever go back to a browser that does not provide such a feature natively.

The unteachable parts of software engineering

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:34:00 +0200

Having the responsibility to handle the software engineering course at the ENS in spring 2007, I have started to think about the desirable qualities that make the difference between an average developer and a brilliant one. Indeed, I can’t think of a better goal for this course but to actually try to develop such qualities. What makes a “good” software developer? It’s an obvious fact that many qualities and skills are required to make a good developer.

Your e-mail is your username

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 14:49:00 +0200

The 30-years-old unix pattern for user management involves a UserName, Password pair associated to a unicity constraint on the usernames. On most web applications, this pattern has been enriched as a triplet UserName, Password, Email with, usually, a two-fold unicity constraint both on usernames and on emails. But is there any good reason to distinguish e-mail from username? By looking at the major web players (Google, PayPal, Amazon …), the answer is negative without any doubt.

Antipatterns of Software engineering courses

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 21:31:00 +0200

I am very honored to be in charge of the Sofware engineering and distributed applications course at the Ecole normale superieure (ENS). This will be my first official teaching assignment, and I will be affected to brilliant Licence 3 students (it’s pretty tough to get through the entrance exam of the ENS). Software engineering is a difficult topic to teach. I have been browsing the web just to have an outlook at what people are usually doing in a software engineering course, and I must confess that I haven’t found anything very satisfying so far (although the MIT experience is definitively worth reading).

From RAD to test driven ASP.NET website

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 17:13:00 +0200

Both unit testing and R.A.D. (Rapid Application Development) impacted quite deeply my insights over software development. Yet, I have found that combining those two approaches within a single ASP.NET project is not that easy especially if you want to keep the best of both worlds. There are at least א (alef zero) methods to get the problem solved. Since my blog host does not provide yet that much disk storage, I will only describe here 2.

Over the Internet, your name is your personal trademark

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:22:00 +0200

I have been dealing with freelancers for various tasks (translations, graphists, development), and it’s still unbelievable that most freelancers do not pay any attention to maintain a consistant name in their communications. Let me clarify this point: I do not care to know of the exact legal name of any freelancer I am dealing with. But how can I even recognize the person if messages never get signed twice with same name?

Don't booby trap your ASP.Net Session state

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 14:04:00 +0200

The ASP.Net Session state is a pretty nice way to store (limited) amount of data on the server-side. I am not going to introduce the ASP.Net session itself in this post; you can refer to the previous link if you have no idea what I am talking about. Although many articles can be found over the web arguing that the major issue with the session state is scalability, don’t believe them!

Resx2Word, when simplistic is not enough

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 17:23:00 +0200

RESX files are great (and simple) containers of textual resources for your .Net/Asp.Net applications. It’s especially useful if you’re planning to translate your application into multiple languages (PeopleWords.com has been translated into 13 languages all textual content being put into RESX files). Yet, using Microsoft Visual Studio as a RESX file editor is quite an overkill solution for translators (whoses programming often equate zero since it’s not their job anyway). In a previous post, I was discussing ResxEditor, a simplistic and stand-alone RESX file editor.

Motivations behind the "PeopleWords free invitations"

Wed, 17 May 2006 15:26:00 +0200

I have just recently upgraded PeopleWords.com (online platform for the translation business). Among various small fixes and improvements, PeopleWords now provides free invitations for the translators. If you’re not familiar with the “invitation feature” of PeopleWords (it happens that some people are not), then just have a look at our white paper ). In this post, I will explain the (commercial) motivations underlying this feature. I have already explained (see my previous post that there is a strong imbalance of risks in freelance translation jobs.

Additional goodies from the blog spammers

Mon, 01 May 2006 12:31:00 +0200

An interesting thing about running a web application, it’s that people never cease to surprise you. I have already discussed the behavior of the scammers within PeopleWords.com. Now, I am encountering a new kind of annoying people: the blog spammers. Given that PeopleWords.com has no blog, there is no reason for blog spammers to get interested in Peoplewords, right? Wrong, PeopleWords has no blog, but blog spammers don’t care.

Scammers going global leveraging freelance services

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:29:00 +0200

In my previous post, I was discussing the various trust issues that are encountered when dealing with an online community. I was discussing some issues related to translation jobs sabotage by scammers. My point was the risks in freelance translation jobs are much higher on the customer side than on the translator side. The main argument was it’s hard to turn a small translation job into cash. Well, scammers have more imagination that I have, and it seems that this argument is partially wrong.

Building a safe community for online translation works

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:34:00 +0200

This article focuses on the various issues related to online trust for freelance translation jobs and the various solutions adopted by freelance websites in this domain. As for all online activities, trust is a difficult yet critical element to obtain. My personal experience in this domain comes from the management of the PeopleWords.com website. The naive approach: the rating system Most freelance websites provide a rating system for all users (PeopleWords is no exception, see [1]).

A few marketing tips for online freelance translators from a customer view point

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:19:00 +0200

Let me get the point clear: I am not a translator, I have never step a foot into a translation agency and I know nothing about the translation business. But as a simple customer, I have had a large amount of interactions with many freelance translators (most of this experience is related to the setup of the PeopleWords.com website). Good online marketing is about sending positive signals to the customers.

A translator-friendly RESX file editor

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:26:00 +0200

In a previous post, I was giving some details on the RESX format from a translator-friendly viewpoint. Actually, after proof-testing the XML concept with a few translators, I came up with the conclusion The most brilliant Uzbek-Azeri translators do not speak XML. Do not seek any explanation, it’s just a fact. XML has a logic which is totally alien to the average translator. The answer to the question Why can’t I freely insert < and > characters?

Best practice for website design, sandboxing with ASP.Net

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 21:41:00 +0200

Why should I care? The web makes application deployment easier, but there is no magic web-effect that would prevent web designers of commiting the very same mistakes that regular developers commit while designing classical applications. In order to minimize the risks, I have found the notion of website sandboxing as a must-have for web designers. What is sandboxing? A sandbox is a place full of sand where children cannot cause any harm even if they intend to.

A translator guide to website translation

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:34:00 +0200

Since the publication of this post, I have released Resx Editor a free visual resource editor dedicated to translation works. In this post, I give a short introduction about website translation. The targeted audience is non-technical translators. I will focus on the particular case of website translation when relying on Microsoft XML Resource files. The big picture Dynamic websites include many things beside pure textual content (programming source code, images, stylesheets, …).

When numerical precision can hurt you

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:07:00 +0200

The objective was to cure a very deadly disease and the drug was tested on mice. The results were impressive since 33% of the mice survived while only 33% died (the last mouse escaped and its outcome was unknown). Numerical precision depends on the underlying number type. In .Net, there are 3 choices float (32bits), double (64bits) and decimal (128bits). Performance left aside, more precision cannot hurt, right? My answer is It depends.

Refactoring and logistics ("L'intendance suivra!")

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:23:00 +0200

With Eclipse and VS2005, refactoring is now a standard feature of modern IDEs. No more than few minutes are now sufficient to drastically change the internal structure of a software library. Yet, if software logistics cannot keep the pace then productivity bottlenecks of software evolution remain unchanged. Charles De Gaulle said L’intendance suivra! (which could be poorly translated by “Logistics always keep up!"). Yet many european wars have been lost due to poor logistics, and, back to the discussion, I believe that logistics is no less important in software matters than it is in wars.

Hungarian notation and thread safety

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:35:00 +0200

Joel Spolsky had a very good Making Wrong Code Look Wrong article where he rehabilitates the hungarian notation for certain dedicated purposes (tips: no, hungarian is not about junking your code with variable prefix such as string, int and array). Joel Spolsky presents the idea of prefixing unsafe (i.e. user provided) strings in the context of web-based application with us, standing for unsafe string. Such practice makes a lot of sense in situations where things have to be right by design (security is a typical example because no security holes are going to pop-up against typical non-hostile users).