Caffeine Lab

Busy as I was, I realized I didn’t blog about my recent employment change. I left Yoono 2 months ago to join a company called Zenexity (site in French). It’s really cool because after Flock and Yoono that were very similar (consumer oriented/social mashup/Mozilla technologies), I get to work on really different stuff: more server-side, and more business oriented. But still with a strong R&D component, and it’s something that really motivated me to get on board with Zenexity: they’re independent because they earn their own money (e.g. don’t live on VC money) but still spend a lot of effort in R&D projects. Projects for customers also are really state-of-the-art of the web.

Specifically, they (I mean “we”) have an Open Source project called the Play! Framework. It’s an MVC framework similar to Django or Ruby on Rails, in Java. Within the Java world, I think it’s pretty disruptive. It contrasts from bloated stacks, and manages to provide simplicity and productivity to Java web development. Also, it speaks the language of the web by making it easy to create RESTful web apps, pretty URLs and web services.

Here is a screencast I did last month for the 1.0 release.

A web app in 10 minutes using Play! from zenexity on Vimeo.

Homies from California

All my homies were come from a vending machine in Fry’s, some in Palo Alto and others in Sunnyvale. If you really are into homies, you can also play one of the worst Nintendo DS game ever: Homies Rollerz.

I just saw that ad in the metro close to my office.

It’s a famous French TV show that’s been around for 20 years, and they just released a Best Of. The Best Of is called “Putain 20 ans !”, and that I would translate in English to “Fuck, 20 years!”. It’s actually a reference to a recurring joke they were making back in 1993; but I couldn’t help to imagine how that would be impossible in US, where there are some forbidden words that you just can’t say in public.

It’s good to be back home.

I’ve already written about reading and writing Japanese on a Western Nokia phone. Now that I am in France, I got to test sending SMS in Japanese from my E71 to my dear’s E65. And it works, in both ways! There is nothing to do other than setting both phones to display and input Japanese. I have no idea what encoding is used on the server, if it’s really Unicode or if the server think it’s Latin-1 while the data actually is Unicode, I just know it works.

For information, I’m using a MVNO on the SFR network, so I assume that it would work on SFR itself and any operator using their network.

I’ve been in France for a couple weeks already, but I don’t really have much time to relax and write blog posts yet. January has been pretty busy with the move from California, and now in France I’m busy finding an apartment, doing zillion administrative stuff, and working.

So, before I can find some time to write a nice big consistent post about what’s going on with me at Yoono (and as a “returned-expatriate” in Paris), here is the view from my window. Sorry for the reflection on the window, but as you can see it’s not the kind of view you can get in California

View From Yoono Office

After 7 years living outside of my home country, I decided to live back there… At least for a few years .

I’ve been living for about 4 years in Tokyo to do my Ph. D. After that, I moved to the Silicon Valley to join Flock, at the time a tiny startup operating from a garage in Palo Alto.

Termie, Rockstar Programmer at the Original Flock HQ (by foolswisdom)

Today it’s time for me to say goodbye to my friends at Flock, but I will never forget the 3 years spent working on the web browser. I’ve seen the company at various stages, growing from the days of the garage with the founders to a bigger team, split between two offices with a professional CEO.

I’ve also had the chance to enjoy Northern California: the blue sky, the geek-friendly environment, the numerous tech-related events, the Japanese supermarkets, the burritos… More importantly, I’ve met with some really smart engineers from whom I’ve learned a lot, and it has been a real pleasure to work with them. I’m convinced that I’ll stay in touch with these friends even living 9,000 km and 9 time zones away from the Valley. (And that’s true for non-engineers too )

***

So as I said, I am moving to France and while I have great memories with Flock, it is also time for me to look forward. The good news is that I found a very exciting project to join, and I will start in that new company as soon as I land in Paris early next year. It’s called Yoono, and the eponymous product is a browser extension with some similarities with Flock’s own features. It’s a great opportunity for me to keep one foot in the Mozilla community (the extension runs on Firefox) while still exploring new things such as extensibility on other browsers (Yoono runs on IE too) and server-side work (Yoono is coupled to a web service).

If you were following what I was doing at Flock, you probably want to check out Yoono. It’s really one of the most advanced browser extension out there.

Update: I finally found a solution that satisfies me! It involves +J and an alternative font. See details here.

My new toy is a Nokia E71 (yes, for various reasons I chose it over the new hot Android G1 and the old-but-still-hype Apple iPhone).

One of the first things I tried to do is install Japanese input for it. Nokia doesn’t offer that because they don’t seem to care much about the Japanese market and (as far as I know) don’t release high-end phones there. I understand them in a way, because the Japanese market is so different from Europe or US that they would need different products to appeal to the Japanese public.

So here we go: Japanese input on S60 phones in general, and the E71 in particular. So far I found three possibilities, I tried two, and there is no satisfying solution yet.

1. Psiloc Crystal Japanese

Commercial, €50, download the demo here.

The Good:

• Just one package to install; nothing scary
• The font looks really good

The Bad:

• the input itself is really, really weak. So weak I even wonder if they had anyone who can write Japanese in their team.
• It’s overpriced considering how bad the input is

The Ugly:

• Psiloc uses a nazi DRM that runs you-don’t-know-what on your phone and calls home to make sure you’re respectable family guy. Yeah, yeah, I know: it’s to fight piracy. Except that pirates can download a DRM-free cracked version on the web so only legit customers are exposed to the DRM.

More details about the input: when I say it’s bad, I mean it.

• It doesn’t remember which kanji you choose – so next time you write the same thing you have to go through the list again.
• The punctuation is messed up. Pressing “.” doesn’t output “。” and pressing “,” doesn’t output “、”. You can get around by typing “まる” and “てん ” but it’s a pain in the arse… And remember, it doesn’t save your choice so you have to go through the list each time!
• The “-” puts you back in English so it’s impossible to input basic words like マスター (master), スキー (ski) or パーティ (party). NOT POSSIBLE. They basically sell you a Japanese input software using which you cannot input some very common Japanese words.

2. +J

Commercial, ¥5,000, download the demo here (in Japanese)

The Good:

• An awesome input. Very complete, on-par with what you can find on a computer.

The Bad:

• No English doc, so it may be hard to install for beginners at Japanese. Additionally there are several packages (the font is separate) and you need to pick the right ones for your device.
• My real grip: you have to install a font that makes your whole phone OS look pretty ugly. Even when you’re just using an app in English, not typing Japanese, you will be using the ugly font.

The Ugly:

• Nothing ugly for +J. It’s a great input software, I really wish they would fix the font problem.

So here is where I stand. Psiloc’s software input method is insuffisant and their DRM bothers me. Additionally they don’t seem motivated to improve it, according to them they’re focusing on other products. Maybe they don’t work on Crystal Japanese because it doesn’t sell well… I wonder why?

+J is really nice but I can’t stand having a crappy font on my phone all the time. If more than half the email/text messages I was writting were in Japanese I would probably use it though.

The last one is M-FEP60, it’s as least freeware, and maybe Open Source; the source code is available but I’m not sure what the licence is. I didn’t try it because I’m unsure if it works on the E71 (the last version was released before the E71) and according to screenshots it suffers the same font problem as +J.

Taken from Pete’s plane, flying back from Lake Tahoe to San Carlos.