l'étranger

1. Massively Collaborative Mathematics (Nature)
2. Take A Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway (Time): How we envisioned the future of the Internet in April 1993.
3. CSS Differences in IE 6, 7 and 8 (Smashing Magazine): Thorough reference for CSS writers.
4. The Elements of Statistical Learning: The 2nd edition of the book in pdf for free!
5. UrbanSpoon: Augmented-reality iPhone app. Just wow.

The “mystery song” that drove me close to insanity for almost 20 years is no longer a mystery! For some background, you can read a post from March about it.

In any case, there apparently was another person on the planet who was looking for that song. The first thing she did is google the lyrics, like I had done. Except this time, she found something: My post. She contacted me and I was puzzled that someone from the US had also heard that song, which to my knowledge had only been used in this French version of a late 80s skateboarding video.

She said she’d heard that song in the Barbie Fashion Show video game. She quickly looked up the credits and found out the song had been licensed by DeWolfe Music. I contacted them, and eventually found a person kind enough to send me a link to the song.

Thanks to all of my friends (and their friends, and their friends’ friends…) who helped me in this quest. And many thanks to the person who heard that song in the video game, without her, I would still be looking for it for a long time I’m sure.

Sometimes (most?) it feels good to be French and Christine Lagarde’s performance on last night’s Daily Show should make us all feel proud:

And even if it’s a bit old now, I can’t get tired of Bill Maher’s New Rules on French:

Comme j’écoute souvent Skyrock (eh oui…), je cherchais un moyen plus pratique pour ne pas avoir à aller sur le site de la radio à chaque fois, mais plutôt pouvoir écouter les programmes directement depuis iTunes.

Après quelques recherches sur Google, apparemment plusieurs personnes étaient tentées de faire la même chose, mais point de solution.

Voici donc ma méthode, soit un peu sale, mais qui marche.

En examinant le source du player de la radio, on observe que le flux radio provient de cache.yacast.fr/V4/skyrock/skyrock.asx. En analysant le contenu de cet objet ASX, on peut récuperer le lien vers l’objet player lui-même:

L’objet est donc à la première URL, la deuxième n’étant là qu’en cas de problème avec la première. Ouvrir l’URL mms://vipmms9.yacast.net/encoderskyrock directement avec iTunes ne marche pas. Le mieux est de télécharger VideoLan pour ouvrir cette adresse :

Le flux prend un peu de temps à se bufferiser, mais la radio devrait marcher. Maintenant, sauvez le fichier avec File > Save Playlist en format Extended M3u. Ensuite, ouvrez ce fichier avec le Quicktime player et sauvez-le en skyrock.mov. Finalement, copiez skyrock.mov dans la bibliothèque de iTunes et voilà !

In 1990 or 1991, I was still big into skateboarding and I taped a documentary on French TV about it.  I had forgotten about it but recently I remembered I had loved the song from one of the sequences.  I got the VHS tape, hooked up my Samsung SV-5000W VCR to an ADVC-110 video converter, itself connected to my MacBook Pro with iMovie and imported that sequence.  I figured googling the lyrics would return the title for that song in no time.  Well, tough luck!  Googling any combination of the chorus below didn’t return anything…

“Turn it up loud, radio radio
Out in the crowd, on my radio
Say it out loud, the music is my friend
On my radio”

I’ve asked almost all of my friends about it, no one has ever heard it.  I’ve even tried Yahoo, Lycos, Ask.  No luck.

So I’m now hoping the wisdom of the crowds can help.  I’ve become a bit obsessed about this quest I must admit, so I will send $100 via Paypal to the first person who sends me the details of the song in the video sequence below.  I will of course post a follow-up if this approach is successful, so feel free to forward to your friends, the deal is on!

It’s so rare to find a good new French singer that it deserved a post!

About six months ago, as I was getting ready for work, a then-unknown singer’s latest song was playing on TV5. The tune was catchy, fairly different from the usual crap, and the rhetoric caught my attention too. The song was “J’écris faux, je chante de la main gauche“.

I went about my day and forgot about it. Yet, a couple of weeks ago I googled it to find out who the singer was. His name turned out to be Benoît Dorémus, someone I had never heard of–which is not surprising in itself by the way as I usually don’t listen to any French music that was created after 1993, except for a couple of exceptions.

I ended up on Benoît’s website where you can actually listen to his entire album. The comparison with Renaud is obvious and makes sense since Benoît was produced by “l’homme au foulard“. Ten minutes into the album, I had to buy it (the iTunes store is quite handy for such compulsive buying cases). It was everything I was hoping for and more. His lyrics are witty, his music simple and popular. Whoever loved Renaud in the 80s will undoubtedly enjoy Benoît’s album. I particularly recommend “Un arracheur de sacs”!

This was rare enough to be blogged about. It gives me hope for France’s art scene renewal.

On that topic, a friend of mine, Cyrielle, was visiting last week and she’s toying with the idea of acting in the US so as promised, here’s her short bio in case anyone is interested.

I never get tired of those, never seems to get old for me

I am about to rewrite a scuba-diving center’s website for a friend of mine and it’s about time I Web2.0-ize it. I’m not sure whether to go with script.aculo.us or jQuery. Once I find a bit of time to explore both, I’ll share my findings here but if you’ve already done so, please let me know!

I’m in San Francisco for the next 3 days for our National Sales Conference. Lots of fun and work to come…

As a note, I spoke about Google Gadgets and AdWords API on Witamine, a French webradio. I hope the talk was interesting, I pretty much condensed in 10 minutes what I said at the GDD for those who unfortunately could not attend that event.

I also received an invitation to Wallop from Régis Gaidot (thanks Régis!). That is pretty cool, I didn’t even know about this. I played a little bit with it but plan on spending more time on it once I get back to NYC. This is a very rich community site with all of the features one could expect, but presented in a very high-tech, Flash-required fashion.

On May 31, I attended the Google Developer Day in Paris where I introduced Google Gadgets and the AdWords API to a technical and passionate crowd.

Technorati Tags: gdd07, gdd07fr

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