Exclusive: first photos of the iPhone !

Woohoo ! The CTO of Google Earth was on stage a few minutes ago and demoed a real Apple iPhone !!!! He is now sitting 5 meters away from me …. with an iPhone.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/francois/tags/iphone

Where 2.0 - Day 0

Where 2.0 notes

So I left my apartment a little before 5am, took a cab to YUL and boarded an American Airline flight at 7am. One hour layover in Dalla / Fort Worth, which is by the way probably the largest airport I’ve seen so far. I was surprised to see all sort of pretty high tech gizmos around this airport; especially fancy vending machines through which you can rent laptops, buy digital cameras, recharge your cellphone or ipod (locked using your fingerprint !). Then came the second leg of the flight: going over deserts, deserts, more plane fields, then Las Vegas, mountains, canyons… Wow ! But I gotta say I was amazed to see how large the desertic area around the bay area is.

We arrived in SJC (San Jose airport) a little in advance then I took the light rail heading towards downtown San Jose. En route I reached Sonya over the phone (yikes, my Boston T-Mobile SIM card still works and has plenty of pay-as-you-go minutes left). We met in front of the convention center. After a quick stop at Starbucks to get some refreshing orange frappucino we headed to the hotel (a short walk from where the conf. is taking place). After dropping my luggage, I decided to go on my own for a few hours to fullfil a dream of a lifetime … seeing the Apple Campus in Cupertino. Following a 30 minutes bus ride (stopping many times, many times along the way, while in fact it’s pretty close distance-wise) and a short walk I was standing in front of the entrance of the One Infinite Loop. Unfortunately, I then realized that it was Memorial Day, a federal holiday in the US, so pretty everything was shut down. I took a couple pictures.

Came back to the hotel to upload some pictures to Flickr, then we left for the Ignite 2.0 session. I gotta say that I was pretty impressed by the quality of the location and the installations. The stage and the equipments were stellar. Ignite 2.0 included 12 short 5 minutes presentations of applications and/or projects. Some of them were pretty amazing. SAIC presented a demo of Urban Reality where they combine LIDAR, high-res imagery with highly accurate (5 cm error !) GPS coordinates to generate 3D models of buildings and surroundings. Needless to say that their primary client is the US army… Brady Forrest, the O’Reilly Mapping pundit and conference organizer, presented the speakers. At the end I met the Poly9 guys from Quebec City. They will also be presenting some of their new projects tomorrow at the Where Fair.

Pffew pretty exhausting day + some jet lab. I have to go to bed soon, wake up early, because tomorrow is THE big day.

Stay tuned for more… probably some live coverage also.

First trip to California !

Hooray ! Monday at 7am I’m taking the plane to go to the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in San Jose California. This is going to be my first trip to California… I’m so excited. I am going to blog live from the event + post photos to Flickr. I am presenting iFIND, with Sonya Huang from the SENSEable City Lab, tuesday night at the Where Fair 2.0. The guys from Poly9 will also be there. Then I’m staying one more day to attend the Google Developer Day on May 31st.

In prep for the event, I just got my moo minicards today in the mail I love them.

Post-CUWIN, Pre-California.

So I’m back from the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks, CUWIN 2007 that was held in Columbia, Maryland. It was a fun, fun road trip with Michael, Alexis and Richard. Over there we joined Benoit and Alison, also from Ile Sans Fil. Lots of cool geeks from around the world and very interesting discussions.

Flickr photo set for the trip.

Early next monday morning I’m taking the plane to go to O’Reilly Where 2.0 in San Jose, California where I’ll presenting iFIND, the project I’ve been working on at MIT. I’m staying til May 31st to attend Google Developer Day. This is a dream come true

“Road trippin with my two favorite allies …”

Comme dans la chanson de Red Hot, je pars ce soir en road trip avec mes amis d’Île Sans Fil: Alexis, Alison, Benoît, Michael et Richard à la conférence annuelle mondiale des groupes communautaires sans fil: CUWIN 2007 Community Wireless Summit. La conférence se tiendra à Columbia, Maryland (à moins de 10 miles de Fort Meade… centre d’opération de la NSA). Qui sait, peut-être aurais-je un moment pour aller visiter le musée de la cryptologie.

Je suis vraiment excité et honorré d’avoir été invité par Michael sur 3 panels ! Ça va être une belle expérience pour moi, après l’avoir fait une première fois lors de WSFII 2005 à Londres.

Je prendrai part aux panels suivants:

• Social Networks and Wireless: An Update on the Progress and Development of Social Networking Applications.
• Citizen Hackers: Their Disappearing Role in the Community Wireless Movement.
• WiFiDog Workshop: How to Build Your Own Multimedia Community Wireless Infrastructure.

Alors souhaitez moi bonne chance pour samedi prochain

Hacks in Java source code

Sun finally released the rest of the Java source code in GPL this past tuesday at Java One. First thing I did after downloading the bundle was of course to check how many occurences of the word “hack” there are in the code.

grep -r -i "hack" ./openjdk/ | wc -l
452 occurences
grep -r -i "ugly" ./openjdk/ | wc -l
101 occurences
grep -r -i "horrible" ./openjdk | wc -l/
6 occurences

Prenez garde aux chiens !

Hier au YULblog j’ai rencontré Marie-Josée Belley qui s’occupe du site “Prenez garde aux chiens”, un site d’humour qui produit ses petits sketchs videos. C’est vraiment très bien (ça me rappelle vaguement le style de RBO) et la qualité de la production est impressionnante. Est-ce le nouveau site qui va détroner “Les tête a claques” (tant qu’à moi oui, car l’humour des TAC me tombent cr*ssement sur les nerds) ?

Where 2.0, here I come !

I am so excited, I have been invited to present iFIND at the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference (May 29 to 30 2007). This is going be really really crazy Plus, on the 31st all attendees are invited to join the Google Maps team at the Googleplex for the Google Dev. Day I can’t believe it ! I have never been to California. I have always dreamed of going to the valley. Be sure that will take a picture of me in front of the Apple building (Infinite Loop), which is like 10 minutes train ride from where the conf. will be.

Freedom of speech

[Post edited]. I am auto-censoring myself before Google Cache remembers too much.

Hear it for yourself.

As a final thought:
“Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.” - Lawrence Lessig.