Automatix on Ubuntu

I am not sure I understand some of the controversy surrounding Automatix. I think it is an excellent tool myself. It makes the installation of essential stuff like Flash and Acrobat Reader so much easier than having to follow complex terminal-based to-dos. I still haven’t been able to find a convincing explanation of why I should stay away from it beyond a few terse words on the French Ubuntu forums…

Another fantastic tool is Alberto Milone’s Envy, which is really an excellent script for managing non-free drivers for Nvidia and ATI-based graphic cards.

Switching to Ubuntu in… How about right now?

I read somewhere just how easy it will be to upgrade from Edgy to Feisty.  So I decided not to wait and start switching from Windows to Ubuntu straight away and not wait for Feisty.

The process was smooth even for my laptop, once I installed wifi-radar that is.  I now have three dual boot PCs and two single boot machines dedicated to Ubuntu.  Not a single hardware issue, even with my laptop which is an unknown Chinese brand.

I will try to put all of my thoughts in a post when I have a second later this week.

BTW, desktop effects do work with the Feisty LiveCD.   Can someone tell me what use they find to that stuff?

A fun mash-up of Google Earth with our local reviews

The start-up I founded a few months ago has been live for about 3 weeks now and we keep adding new features to the site.

The latest “feature” we’ve added is fun to look at, even if you don’t read French: we have mashed up our database with Google Earth so you can start searching for places and businesses both with the satellite photos and user-generated reviews.  If you have Google Earth installed, you can download the file here.

 (click for a full screen view)
As you can see, we try to cover all of France but Paris is really where most of the action is!

Failure and the fear thereof

Well, for a guy with no formal writing experience, I think Dick Costolo, the founder of FeedBurner, pretty much hit the nail on the head…

http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/too_many_companies.html

A quote in particular hit me:

“Of course there are entrepreneurs and CEO’s who pitch their supreme confidence in themselves and point to some ability to work out all the angles that guaranteed their success. Most of them do this in retrospect after they’ve been successful, and maybe this leads other would be founders to think “I don’t have the faith in my idea this guy/woman does. I’m passionate about my idea, but i don’t have that supreme confidence in it”. The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.”

It feels pretty close to how you actually go about creating a business: the fear is definitely there (boy, get ready for some restless nights), but you do it nonetheless.  This quote also ties pretty strongly with Nassim Taleb’s point in Fooled by Randomness, actually: being able to construct a story to explain events after the fact does not mean we can predict the future (what NT called the induction problem).

Initial link to Dick’s post through Andy Sack’s A Sack Of Seattle. 

NX with Feisty

NoMachine’s NX needs a little tweak before it will work on Feisty.  Here’s the solution that worked for me:

* Install OPenSsh Server using Synaptic;

* Follow jkbrowne’s instructions on this page;

* Use joske’s little tweak at the bottom of this page.

It worked fine for me…  Just take a moment to savour the power of the Ubuntu community and how quickly solutions bubble to the surface…

Feisty Fawn Herd 5

About a week ago, I installed Feisty Herd 5 on my test machine just out of curiosity.  It is still a bit rough (CUPS did not work and the patches seem to have come out only in the past few hours) but absolutely usable if a terminal window doesn’t scare you.  As usual, the amazing Ubuntu community has started rallying around the latest version and the forums are busy figuring out workarounds and solutions to all sorts of problems thata even semi-moronic n00bs like me can use.  I love these guys.

Beryl does not work on my machine, I guess because of the low-end graphic set-up I hjave (this is a sub-€500 we are talking about, bought late last year).  I will go out and buy a new card just to see windows wobble (pun intended).

All right, that’s my new game plan: laptop and main computer are going to dual boot when the final Feisty comes out.  If I can use Ubuntu on a daily basis for *all of* my tasks (we are mostly talking about average desktop use anyway, with lots of emailing and web browsing, typical web 2.0 exec that I am), I am phasing out Windows in this house and will keep a Vista machine at work for widget testing.

No widgets on WordPress.com

I have tried quite a few web-based blogging platforms before settling on WordPress.com: Typepad, Blogger.  I have found WP.com to be really quite good: it works, they offer quite a few nice designs, it is free…  But their decision to allow widgets only on a piecemeal basis (and, I would suspect, against retribution from the companies who want to see their widgets allowed into WP.com, even if WP.com continues to claim they ban widgets for security reasons) is a deal breaker for me and I think I will have to move soon to an install of WordPress (the product) I will manage myself.

Widgets are just an integral part of the blogging phenomenon now, both for the writer as well as for the readers: my company has developped a very nice widget and I want to show the good stuff we do as a company, and all of the good content we have for our users.  If I can’t do it here, I will do it somewhere else.

Un vieil espoir

Que donnerai-je pour pouvoir appartenir dignement à cette fédération!  Le fait d’écrire ce blog suffit-il pour avoir une carte de membre honoraire?

Tracker included in Ubuntu

http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/03/06/new-features-in-ubuntu-feisty-fawn-release/

Allelujah.  This is the difference between open source and traditional software products: the big guy does not win if he delivers a product that just does not work.  Also, the upgrade cycle is just insane: how esle could Canonical manage a major release every 6 months?

Voozici.com: la life

Pour les lecteurs francophones de ce blog, un petit mot d’explication sur ce qu’est Voozici.com, la start-up dont je parle de manière elliptique depuis maintenant 4 mois.

L’idée consiste à créer le premier site communautaire en France où les internautes peuvent échanger leurs bonnes adresses et leurs bons plans.  L’accent est bien entendu mis sur les avis concernant les commerçants, artisans… car après tout, ils nous concernent tous dans notre vie de tous les jours, mais cela n’exclut pas la critique de parcs, de stations de sports d’hiver, de stades, etc…

Notre philosophie est de tenter de placer la communauté au centre de toutes nos décisions et de laisser cette communauté décider pour elle-même où elle souhaite aller, plutôt que l’inverse.  Pour cela, nous avons choisi la plateforme logicielle la plus légère possible (LAMP, bien que nous soyons tous assez Microsoftiens dans la société!), afin de pouvoir itérer très rapidement sur de nouveaux concepts, de nouvelles fonctionnalités…  sans avoir des cycles de 6 mois de spécification/développement à chaque fois qu’une de nos membres nous envoie une nouvelle idée…

Je suis PDG pour la première fois de ma carrière.  Il fallait bien que ce m’arrive un jour.  Après être passé de l’autre côté de la barrière (j’étais VC avant, je vois que certians ne suivent pas au fond de la classe), je comprends mieux certaines négotiations et discussions que j’ai pu avoir par le passé avec des entrepreneurs et la différence fondamentale d’approche entre les deux groupes.

Tentant d’expliquer à mon épouse l’autre jour à quel point ma perspective a changé, voici la métaphore qui m’est venue en tête: être VC avant d’être entrepreneur, c’est comme tenter d’être sexologue tout en étant vierge.  On doit pourvoir y arriver, mais l’essentiel nous échappe!