Project: Study of the Game of Go

I've been working for some time on a study of the Game of Go and its relations to the oriental culture. Most of the material I used is not available anymore and, to my knowledge, it is the first time the oriental history has been overviewed from this point of view, so in a way, it is an original work.

Here is the link: thegameofgo.blogspot.com

creativeLIVE: Photoshop Week 2014

creativeLIVE: Photoshop Week 2014:


"PHOTOSHOP WEEK 2014 5 DAYS, 40 CLASSES, 60 HOURS"

Free streaming workshops!


Everything you wanted to know and never dared ask about PhotoShop and Lightroom!

Do you know the creativelive online workshops? Their real-time (free) broadcasts are in the evenings and nights here in France, and are rebroadcast (streamed for free) for a day or two after the workshop. (Their business model is to encourage you to buy them to watch whenever you want.)

Do you use PhotoShop or Adobe Lightroom? This week's workshop program might "enlighten" you to new features or workflows...  (On channel B he's showing advanced image retouching at right this minute...)

Hope all is going well for you! Looking forward to seeing you soon.

'via Blog this'

Some links: physicists popstars & old ads

Add the CERNettes and the Canettes to your favorite playlist! Who would have thought that physics researchers could be popstars as well?

When you're done with their playlists, have a little break with an old ad (related videos on the side pane are interesting as well). How well do you think AT&T guessed their future, our present?

And one extra website for oldies lovers (or merely curious amateurs)! Once more, the ads are really fun to see.

Have a nice week-end!

Fun facts about Internet

Dear fellow students,

Here are some fun facts I gathered about Internet, during my research:

- There was an Internet before Internet! From ARPANET to BITNET and NSFNET, in the 70s and 80s, the way was quite long before reaching the modern Internet we know at the end of the 80s.

- Did you know there are parallel worlds to the Web? I was shocked to discover the existence of Gopher, an alternative protocol (and associated browser) which could well have won the 21st century, if only things had turned out a little differently.

- Robert Cailliau, co-inventor of the World Wide Web and of HTML... hates HTML. He really dislikes its syntax, but he designed it as a quick way to prototype browsers for the Web. By the time he had some free time for dealing with the language issue, it was too late, people had already adopted HTML.

- Brendan Eich, who created JavaScript, is totally aware that JavaScript is mainly used for annoyance (like blinking texts or scrolling ads). He even welcomed the browser function to disable JavaScript!

- The Web has been popularized by physicists. Paul Kunz set up the first web server in 1991, and it was a database of 300,000 physics research papers. Success for the Web began when Paul Kunz did a demo of this server at a nuclear physics workshop in Southern France.

- The teacher of the MOOC I followed on Coursera, Dr Chuck, states that Microsoft saved the Web! As a petty vengeance against Netscape, whose $50 web browser was becoming far more successful than Internet Explorer, Microsoft started to give Internet Explorer away for free, which opened the way to free web browsers as the normal case. Would so many people have used web browsers so quickly, if they hadn't become free? In addition, Dr Chuck points out that Microsoft is a fierce supporter of standards and their development, and they worked hard at W3C to keep the Web open.

Project: Internet and Computer History

Why do developers still use black and white terminals, when operating systems provide them with such wonderful graphical interfaces?

Have you ever wondered how remarkable spreadsheets are and how many lives they changed?

Had you ever done this calculation, maybe just once: with Gigabit Ethernet, you may transfer in one second 200 times more data than the whole capacity of a $3499 hard disk drive in 1981?

My project aims at answering all these questions: I'm currently working on Internet history and, generally speaking, the history of computers, and their evolution since the very beginning.

Using Coursera's amazing 'Internet History, Technology and Security' course given by Charles 'Dr. Chuck' Severance as a guideline, I discovered the Internet success story through valuable documents and interviews. I actually discovered names, people and facts I had never heard of, but that are in the center of the whole Internet revolution. A new session of the class is opening right now, don't miss it!

Then James provided me with his copy of the 'Triumph of the Nerds', a 3-part and 18 year old TV show about who and what made modern computers, more or less the same facts indeed, but this time from the people point of view. Was Steve Jobs a good boss? Did Bill Gates have a shower when he was working under pressure before an important demo? Really, don't hesitate to ask James or myself for a copy of the show. You won't be able to see it in HD, of course, but I hope it doesn't stop you from watching it, as it provides really valuable points of view and quotes.

And now I am diving into the world of hackers, with Katie Hafner's book 'Cyberpunk' (thanks to James again!)... What will come out of this experience? Will you dare to lend me your computer again afterwards? Who knows...