Unless you were in deep winter hibernation in February, it’s difficult to have missed out on the 2010 Winter Olympics that were just concluded in Vancouver, Canada. Despite the 15 disciplines and their 76 events, and me being a Swede, ice hockey is arguably the main feature of each Winter Olympics with the top 12 teams in the world fighting it out for gold medal glory. Even more so if you ask a Canadian; whether you asked one before or after they won gold in a historical match against the USA.

Ice hockey is considered one the fastest and most physical sports in the world. It can be rough at times – more so in the NHL than in Europe – but always incredibly exhilarating, exciting, beautiful and skilful to watch. Almost like a figure skater in how they skate on the ice, but with a stick, puck, some padding and considerably cooler outfits. If you’re not big into sports, I highly recommend watching a live game at least once, even if just for the experience and atmosphere. I had the opportunity to go to Vancouver and experience ice hockey at its peak and was quite honestly overwhelmed at the level of hockey and passion there is for the sport in the country where hockey was practically invented.

Although not as well-known as its football equivalent, FIFA, the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) is the world governing body for ice hockey. Back in 2004, the IIHF went through a major facelift of its corporate identity and logo and had selected blue-infinity to undergo the surgery. The result was a much more modern, authoritative, dynamic, recognisable and adaptable identity that won the globally renowned Rebrand Award in 2007.

We have since done some great marketing and design work for the IIHF such as creating their 100th anniversary logo and several World Championships logos, various stationery items, merchandising etc. For the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics – where the lIIHF are responsible for organising the ice hockey event – we were given the task of designing elements for their official hospitality venue, named the ‘IIHF Lounge’. The Lounge allowed VIP’s to grab a bite to eat and drink whilst watching the hockey games on one of several HD TV’s, as well mingling with hockey legends (including Wayne Gretzky and the 22 members of the Triple Gold Club), IIHF representatives, business partners, etc.

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There has been lots of discussion in the UX community about the compatibility or not of  Agile development and the principles of user centered design. The fact that developers are aiming to produce something fast in small iterations can have a scary note to it – best captured in Alan Cooper’s book  The Inmates are running the Asylum.

In my experience, rapid development is not a bad thing at all – if it comes embedded in a well-managed project with well-defined strategy and scope.

I first came across “Agile” when I worked for a software company in California (Niku, now part of California Associates). After the burst of the bubble and a couple of rounds of lay-offs, the CEO went around distributing copies of Extreme Programming. This happened in an organisation that had had a PMO (gone), Product Managers (gone), Marketing (almost gone), and a full-blown web development team with producers, usability engineers, designers and front-end developers (only 3 remained).

The result was quite astonishing: development was streamlined with automated nightly builds (no more: “but it worked on my machine”), usability issues where addressed on the fly and tested with whoever happened to walk down the hallway, and most importantly, customer requests were prioritized and features added or dropped based on their needs. As a result, we were able to get a number of releases out in record time while working in very tight collaboration amongst ourselves and with our clients.

A couple of things played in favor of  such an agile development effort:

• Small teams
• Senior and experienced people
• A general roadmap and strategy in place
• UI patterns well defined and documented

However, in order to have a  roadmap and strategy in place as well as a well-defined concept, the mantra of “doing your homework first” is more valid than ever:

• Research user needs and context
• Evaluate competitive landscape
• Assess business goals and objectives and
• Create an overall concept in form of sitemap, process flows, wireframes, etc..

As with building a house, you want to get the foundations right – or any extension done later on will look like the picture above!

You can always count on Google for creating a buzz  on the internet with its innovative applications, such as Google Wave for example.   In November, Google  released its first preview of its new operating system: Google Chrome OS.

Google said that this new operating system targets  netbooks that use on-line applications only, without local storage support. The entire system is stored on SDD disks – and nothing else.

That said, I wanted to see for myself what could be this new Google concept. So I downloaded the Chrome OS VMWare image (also available for Sun’s VirtualBox) from engadget web site and ran it on my PC.

Actually, Chrome OS is built on a Linux kernel with an enhanced Chrome browser as the user interface. Only on-line and some off-line (based on HTML 5 off-line access features) applications can be used. Chrome OS does not handle local storage systems such as hard drives or USB keys. So, no way to use your netbook as a video or music player, except for on-line resources (YouTube, Deezer, …).

This new Google operating system left me skeptical. This OS is based on a linux kernel but restricted by Google specifications. I do not think I would ever pay for a netbook that will only work if I can access the internet, on which I cannot store my music and video library, without any way to store my files on a local device or handle external devices (at the time being, Google has not announced any solution to handle printers for instance ). It reminds me of the  Sun’s Network PC concept,  a comeback of  the old passive terminal, applied to the Cloud. Google seems to target the iPad-like devices, but the restrictions are so drastic that I think that Apple can sleep on both ears

But we will see, as Google always surprises us …

Resources:

• Engadget Chrome OS image download: http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/20/google-chrome-os-available-as-free-vmware-download/
• PCWorld’s Chrome OS FAQ: http://www.pcworld.com/article/168080/faq_google_chrome_os.html?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a38:g26:r4:c0.002918:b26258934:z0

Storyboarding comes from movie making to describe the scenes of a film before the actual shots. It’s essential in describing the general framework of the production: casting, movement, people, transitionts etc.

On the web and for multi-media projects, this method also has many advantages. In certain cases, wireframes – used to illustrate the general page layout and navigation of a site – are not enough to illustrate special areas whith a high amount of animation or interaction.

The story board allows the client to visualize and “feel” how the future site or application will eventually turn out. It can easily be modified and different scenarios can be explored, without a line of code. This of course helps to save precious time and money, by avoiding rework later and also providing a precise scenario to the developers / animators who will implement the concept.

As an example, here is a part of a storyboard I did recently for a client.

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blue-infinity has increased its portfolio of open-source publishing solutions with Drupal. We are also now a Drupal Association Member.

Our Open Source Practice has already been serving clients namely with Joomla! and Typo 3. Through Drupal, our teams hope to bring even more functionality to clients who wish to implement a solid solution for digital media, as well as take advantage the very complete social media solutions, which include multi-user blogs, wikis and community networks.

The Drupal social publishing system has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception.  Assisted by a thriving ecosystem of consultants and developers, a diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including SonyBMG, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, Hachette Filipacchi Media, NYU Langone Medical Center, Columbia University, Allied Advertising, New York State Historical Association and Amnesty International. A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source technology, including nearly 2000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality.

Our teams have already had successes with Drupal both in the Consumer and Government sectors.

For more information on the right publishing system for you please contact Guillaume Arluison (guillaume.arluison at b-i.com).

You may have read interesting posts on Continuous Integration (CI), Test Driven Development (TDD) or source code and build management process (maybe even on this blog ). Most of them show solutions based on Apache Maven tool.

I am not going into details about what Maven is or is not, and how to use it, as Sonatype has released a very good on-line book on the subject “Maven the complete reference“, and on top of it it’s  free. I have read it and I think this book is THE reference to learn Maven or deepen your knowledge on the subject.

Also,  take a look Nicolas Frankel’s review,  a consultant I am working with on a project.  I definitely agree with his opinions.

Resources:

• Sonatype’s Maven the complete reference: http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnref-book/reference/public-book.html
• Nicolas Frankel’s book review: http://blog.frankel.ch/maven-the-complete-reference
• Apache Maven’s web site: http://maven.apache.org/
• Maven 3 should be released soon (currently in release 3.0-alpha-6): what’s new in Maven 3 (french)

The demand could sound easy : “We  manage more than 1200 desktops and would like to migrate them from Windows XP to Windows 7.”

But in reality, the effort involved in migrating a significant number of desktops while keeping wallpapers,  shortcuts and all the application custom settings can be quite significant and the process can be daunting. However, there is often no time and not an enormous budget for the migration.

This particular customer only had a few IT people, involved most of the time with technical support, and less with more complex tasks such as mass migrations. While I was doing the interviews to gather the various demands, the idea of a single centralized management system was coming : Altiris

Well….maybe you will think : it sounds too easy to be true.

We first used  “Deployment Solutions”  to create a list of jobs. It starts by capturing all desktops, users and application settings. Then, we applied  “Deploy a Windows 7 Image”, which creates a universal image (meaning the multi- hardware support).

The applications were deployed,  previous settings restored…and all computers integrated into the domain. The proof of concept was  done in 2 weeks. Migration operation was finished after 4 months. Today, they can regenerate any PC in minutes, without the IT staff  having to leave their desks.

Next step was: Automate all the processes in relation to Active Directory integration, goods acquisition and PC re-allocation.
(No, Altiris can do that too ? Unbelivable…)

We put in place Altiris Workflow Solution, with a front-end server, able to genearate some forms into a Web portal. This helps to fill in the information and automates the process, with already other products  installed.

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Until I looked at this Google wave podcast, I have to confess that, in my mind, Google was no more than a cool web application editor, adding innovation to existing concepts. But with regards to Google Wave technology, I definitely changed my mind and I now think Google is imagining the next generation of applications (and not only web applications).

Google Wave concept is to federate in a single application features of several domains such as email, chat, syndication, blog, collaboration and much more.

To describe Wave in a few words, I would say that Wave is a “real time” communication application, where collaboration is the core concept. You can use Wave like email, as the waves are persistent do not need on-line participants, but you can also use it like a chat, concurrently editing a wave with other participants. But that is only the tip of the iceberg, as Google tried to federate the best-of-breed of (Google) web applications.

But the reason why I think that Wave is the definite revolution in communication and collaboration is that it is more than just an application. Wave is built on an open protocol, really similar to the main concept of email protocols, allowing Wave servers to communicate with each other. Wave is open source, and you can have your own wave server, opened or not onto the internet, and I think this is a key feature for companies that want to host all of their IT resources or use Wave only in their Intranet with securtiy and confidentiality concerns.
And finally, like Google Maps, Google Waves provides a Wave API allowing you to embed Wave components in web applications  to implement, customize and extend Wave client and server. Actually Wave as been built as an integration platform around a collaboration platform.

The only drawback I see  is that as a user, you need to change your way of communicating and collaborating. This may take some time, but not always, if the concept is really good and matches with the ways users actually think and act (just think of Apple with the iPhone …) .

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blue-infiniy is now an official Attivio partner.

Our new partnership with Attivio enables us to offer clients the third major solution on the market today, adding to our offering of Autonomy and Fast.

Through our dedicated teams we have successfully ensured proper definition of user, technical and infrastructure requirements as well as configuration, deployment and knowledge transfer, with business continuity being a priority throughout the project life-cycle.

Our usability experts champion user requirements, leveraging them to design clear interface designs and task flows.

blue-infinity is now an official partner of Atlassian. This partnership supports the growing portfolio of collaboration solutions that blue-infinity provides to its clients.

Atlassian provides an alternative set of tools that blue-infinity can now share with their clients to  manage and run Agile Developments.  This includes a complete set of modules, namely JIRA, for project and development teams to manage Agile planning, with customizable workflow and a pluggable integration framework. In addition, Continuous integration brings faster feedback to your development process, preventing bugs from piling up and reducing the risk of project delays.

An integrated part of the tools is CONFLUENCE, a flexible wiki with over 200 plug-ins, that enables teams to share information rapidly without the bottleneck of publishing.  In addition, it is easily integrated with Sharepoint.

With more than 11’000 customers, Atlassian’s products are being used by companies from the technology sector, such as Agilent or even Adobe to the banking sector, with actors such as HSBC.

 blue-infinity’s team has successfully used Agile methodologies and tools for various large-scale clients and projects in across the banking and government sectors.

 For more information please contact Pierre-Alexandre Riera.

Having worked on various web projects, I often encounter a very well known problem : finding an effective regular expression (regexp) to check the validity of user submitted email addresses.

In his blog, Fighting for a lost cause, Ian Dunn has compiled various regular expressions which try to address this problem. The editor’s idea is great: using a set of valid/invalid emails and a simple unit test, he can provide a good comparison of some of the most used regexps.

His philosophy is simple : “It’s better to accept a few invalid addresses than reject any valid ones, so I’m looking for 0 false-positives and as few false-negatives as possible.”
But I’ve noticed 2 problems :

1. His “best” regexp doesn’t work in JavaScript (JS doesn’t support advanced features like negative lookbehind …)
2. The method used to validate IP addresses is not correct (doesn’t take care of 0-255 range)

So i’ve decided to improve another existing regex, created by Warren Gaebel and already enhanced by Guillaume Arluison, by adding another test criteria : also check the “real” validity of the IP address.

Here is my solution :
/^[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+(\.[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+)*@([a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9_]?[a-z0-9])*(\.[-a-z0-9_]+)*\.(aero|arpa|biz|com|coop|edu|gov|info|int|mil|museum|name|net|org|pro|travel|mobi|[a-z]{2})|([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})(\.([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})){3})(:[0-9]{1,5})?$/i

This one works very well (found 18/18 valid mails + deep IP address check, and found 19/20 invalid mails – there is a problem checking global length)

There’s just a small problem, each time a new TLD > 2 chars will be added, you’ll need to append it to the list in the regex, if you want a more generic solution, you can use this variant (note that this version will not check if the TLD really exists) :

/^[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+(\.[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+)*@([a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9_]?[a-z0-9])*(\.[-a-z0-9_]+)*\.([a-z]{2,6})|([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})(\.([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})){3})(:[0-9]{1,5})?$/i

Those 2 solutions should be usable in all languages providing PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), on server & client side (such as Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby etc…)

We live in an over-networked world where security becomes more and more important to protect us from information thefts, servers downtimes and other attacks.

Various solutions exist. I have recently given an  internal presentation to present  Prelude SIM (Security Information Management) System, a project I have contributed to. It’s an  OpenSource solution which allows you to monitor in real-time your infrastructure by correlating events from deployed sensors such as Snort (IDS), Samhain (FileSystem Integrity Checker) or Prelude-LML (Log analyzer) and  helps you react quickly to a potential attack.

Here are my slides : Prelude SIM Talk

One of the the favorite question of a project sponsor during a steering meeting is “So, what is the status of my project?” If things are looking good, a frequent answer from the project manager often sounds like this: “Well, we seem to be within the budget and it looks like we will meet the target go live date…”. If things are a bit dicey, he or she might say “Well, there have been some roadblocks and bottlenecks, so it looks like the timeline might slip by a few weeks and we will also need an additional budget…” Now if I were a project sponsor, this is definitively not what I would want to hear. I will share in this post a good way to report on project status, using a simple methodology: the Earned Value Management.

The goal of Earned Value Management (EVM) is to objectively understand what was accomplished, and compare it to work planned, in other words what was spent and how. By using EVM, the project manager wants to manage cost (and schedule) rather than just monitoring and reporting it.

Let’s take an example of a project status. The project, 10000 CHF budget, 10 days effort, will produce 10 deliverables. The status report gives the following elements: Time elapsed 5 days, spent to date 6000 CHF, deliverables produced: 5 complete and 1 half done. What is the status of this project? How far along are we? What about the performance of the team? If we spend 60% of the budget, does that imply that we have 60% of the project completed?

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Since 2002, social networks are spreading worldwide thanks to the growth of the Internet. More and more people are using social applications like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia… seeking, sharing and discussing information has become a way of life to them.

By adding a new social layer to Sharepoint 2010, Microsoft is embracing this new trend in user behavior. These new collaboration and communication tools are  the missing pieces in the Sharepoint puzzle and will help many companies to increased information sharing to make communication easier.

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Annecy 2010 as the world’s largest event dedicated to animation, Annecy is a fun and friendly way to discover the latest in animation masterpieces, meet major players and young talents, check out new trends, and find ideal business partners, all in one place. Editorial from www.annecy.org

First founded in 1960, the International Animation Film Festival will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2010.

Every year, there is a competition around  the concept and the visual realisation of this event. The visuals and the logo “Annecy 2010″ are used for a multitude of promotional material: signs, posters, books, catalogues, kakemonos, web site, video animation, bags, t-shirts, ….

Well, my proposition was selected this year.

For the 50 years of the film festival, I decided to unite all the award-wining films of the past as well as the old posters of the festival to form the number 50: they display in a paper ribbon  trail covered with animation drawings. The curves also suggest film reels and garlands.

The CITIA,  organisers of the festival, appreciated these double meanings in the image, as well as the mix of complexity and the sobriety: complex because of  the visual amount  and sober because of its black background and use of photography.

Copyright © 2009 – installation, photography, design: Nathalie Pattier consultant at blue-infinity – Website: www.nathaliepattier.fr

Have you ever  subscribed to receive thematic news  on topics such as stock exchange, technology or updates of a friend’s blog? These feeds are what we call Syndication, and their format is standardized by the W3C and called RSS or more recently Atom.

But beyond this feature of propagating news through the Internet, syndication can be a really good feature within your applications, leveraging the user experience by proposing to interact  with the application in a non intrusive, lightweight “push”-like way.

This sounds good, no? I use Syndication for in my application. At first glance I can see two main feed audience.

First you can provide feeds for application monitoring. This aims mainly at technical users such as administrators or project leaders. The objective is not to replace reports from products such as Nagios, but rather to provide a higher level view on the application behaviour. For instance you can provide a feed giving an aggregate view on the application logs and alerts in order to follow its health over time.

But personally, I feel that the real added value  is the business feed. Imagine the impact on you client when you will tell him that he will be able to access targeted business data from his brand new smartPhone, using his usual RSS reader, getting only the valuable pieces of information without bothering with the application. Your boss may need the application to provide feeds such as statistics digged from the database or audit trails. The marketing guy may want to have feeds back on final users navigation habits while the infrastructure manager would need performance and volume data. The head of finance would want to know the quantities sold of each product during the last week.

Very often, applications will  offers such pieces of data, but you usually need to connect to the application, navigate to the proper statistics or dashboard page. This is not always easy and efficient, especially from a mobile device, and worse if you cannot connect to the application! One of the benefits of such a solution is that most of the feed readers provide you a way to access feeds off-line, keeping the information available at any time.

My point of view is that this approach can be really valuable. Syndication can be a way to provide a multi-channel access to these data: the feeds can be integrated within the application using web technologies such as Ajax (jQuery, JFeed) but can also be accessed directly using feed readers.

Behind the scene, implementing such a functionality is easier and easier, as frameworks such as CXF, Abdera and others provide solutions to implement syndication services.

Resources:
RSS News feed: http://www.w3.org/2001/10/glance/doc/howto
Atom syndication format: http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom
RFC 4287 – IETF Atom Syndication Format: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
RFC 5023 – IETF Atom Publishing Protocol: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt
Jquery Jfeed plugin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfeed/
Apache CXF – JAX-RS: http://cwiki.apache.org/CXF20DOC/jax-rs.html
Apache Abdera project: http://abdera.apache.org/

As in its previous release, Sun seems to focus on including de facto standards in the Java EE new release. In Java EE 1.5, one of the major improvements was to add a persistence API (aka JPA – part of JSR-220), based on Hibernate and other ORM api.

In Java EE 6, Sun has included an implementation of the JSR-330 to provide the best-of-breed dependency injection features from standard libraries such as Jboss seam, Spring or Juice, and to extend those by adding some innovations.

In JavaEE 5, dependency injection was only possible within the Enterprise container, restricted to resources such as JMS connection factories, datasources, JPA entity managers and factories and EJB. JavaEE 6 extends this to any bean, still in an annotation-driven programming. This new feature is based on the existing JSR-330 (Dependency injection for Java), adding new annotations such as @Injection, @Qualifier or @ScopeType.

The Context and Dependency Injection allows defining the bean’s scope. Several scopes are available, such as Dependent, ApplicationScoped, RequestScoped, SessionScoped and, Seams users would recognize this one, ConversationScoped.

As we can see, enhanced IOC and context management becomes part of JavaEE core, and I think all Spring or other IOC framework users would agree this new Java EE feature is going in the way of facilitating JavaEE programming.

Resources:

Java EE 6 specification: http://java.sun.com/javaee/technologies/index.jsp
JSR-220: Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=220
JSR-330: Dependency injection for Java, http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=330
TheserverSide.com article, http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=DependencyInjectioninJavaEE6

Drupal is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP. It allows to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

Drupal is highly popular

Drupal is currently used by more than 500 000 users over the world. Dozens of well-known blue chip companies use it as well as NGOs & not-for-profit organizations. One of the latest famous addition to the long list is the official “whitehouse.gov” website adopted in October 2009 by the US administration.

Core modules

Drupal comes out of the box with default modules called core modules which can be easily enabled or disabled by the administrator. Here are some features provided by the Drupal core:

• Access statistics and logging
• Advanced search functionalities
• Blogs, books, comments, forums, and polls
• Caching and feature throttling for improved performance under load
• Search Engine Friendly URLs (for example, “www.example.com/products” rather than “www.example.com/?q=node/432″)
• Multi-level menu system
• Multi-site support
• Multi-user content creation and editing
• OpenID support
• RSS Feed and Feed Aggregator
• Security/new release update notification
• User profiles
• Various access control restrictions (user roles, IP addresses, email)
• Workflow tools (Triggers and Actions)

More modules

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By Scott Campbell

This is the question  a lot of marketing directors are asking themselves these days. Twitter allows to “blog” short messages (less than 140 characters), to let people know what you are doing, at the moment you are doing it. There are loads of reasons to love Twitter, but a company should carefully evaluate its objectives before facing this brave new world.

Here are 4 cases when you should NOT use Twitter to promote your company:

1. If you want to use Twitter like an RSS feed. The tweet itself has to say something. It cannot just be a teaser.
2. If you are not able to answer to incoming tweets. If you want to start a monologue without any dialogue, your clients interest will shorten as fast as the credit crunch.
3. If you need your legal department to validate every tweet. Twitter is the kingdom of the snap, of the ephemeral…
4. If you think that having thousands of “followers” is the goal. What is really important is the quality of the relationship you can create with your clients. If the noise you generate is not manageable, it will not be usable, and it will just result in a loss of time.

Read the whole article on Social Media appeared in “market” (french)