This simple site is an information site linking to my various activities
Why is it so basic, given that I know the ins and outs of web design? Because this is the way this page has been since the early days of the web in the 90's, when my internet provider since 1995 was PacWan and modems were reaching 33.6kbaud. It's just a placeholder to lead you to my other less archaic sites :-)
The only concession to modernity is that, despite the loo, the code here is valid HTML5
New items highlighted in yellow
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JumpGen Systems - I'm one of five founders of this startup in San Diego making rugged computers for telecommunications and network equipment manufacturers, mainly ATCA, AMC and custom blades based on multi-core processors, now also making network appliances. Specialty is multicore processing using Intel and Netlogic processors, and low latency switching from Fulcrum. JumpGen engineers are without a doubt the best computer hardware designers in the world. I am the international business developer for JumpGen, plus I made the CMS system for this site, and I take care of the site's content.
System Photonics - System Photonics is a brilliant company making solar photovoltaic tiles for roof and façade integration, based on a unique ceramic substrate that looks good, is recyclable and lasts forever, yet keeping the same level of efficiency as normal "ugly" solar panels, and keeping the price reasonable. I am the international business developer for System Photonics, mainly busy with the French, UK and USA markets right now.
I have 35 years' experience in engineering professional audio, power electronics, motor control, analog, digital, microprocessors as well as writing code in C. I hold a patent for an audio invention relating to sound effects. I script for web using PHP and MySQL, plus I have my own CMS tools.
TheWineBlog.net TheWineBlog.fr TheWineBlog.it - an international blog about wine and food in 3 languages, with Luca Risso, Martin Field and me. Actually I don't write as often any more, for lack of time...
Slow Food France - the official site of the french Slow Food association, which I co-founded 10 years ago - I did the entire CMS and design, back then there were no blogs...
Catherine Marcogliese - contemporary art (photography, installations) from Catherine, my wife
Cathy Marc- western landscape paintings by Cathy Marc
CoRivoRivo- my boat, a brightly painted Venetian fishing boat or Topo berthed right here in France at beautiful Sanary. Lots of info on Sanary and Venicetoo.
StateWorks - I am involved in a startup in Switzerland making software engineering systems based on virtual finite state machines: no more programming, no more bugs! Unfortunately, 20 years ahead of their time, but someday, someday...
ioBoard.net - I am also involved in a startup in Germany making intelligent IO modules for Ethernet: digital and analog IO with event management (no need for polling) and on-board PID loops...
Fureur des Vivres - a group blog of french food and wine writers. My articles are summarized here.
SyncBackSE - the most important program in my PCs. With a NAS in your network - I use a QNAP TN-219P with two 2 Terabyte discs in RAID 1 mirroring - SyncBack will backup your files incrementally, remembering what is on the disc and only backing up the files changed since last time. Brilliant. Why did I not think of that 10 years ago? For the first time, I now back up all my disk drives every week, painlessly, reliably.
Microsoft Office - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Visio I use all the time. Despite the incredible amount of useless clutter in these programs, you basically cannot live without Office. Word is ok if your document is under 300 pages and does not require fancy typesetting.
Chrome - it has replaced Firefox in my PCs. And I only use IE when I have to. I wish I could get Firefox's Web Developer plugin for Chrome.
Thunderbird - best email client. Buggy and getting fatter, but way better than Outlook, which will disable your PC better and more completely than any virus if you let the Inbox get beyond a certain size (1.7G I think, I prefer to forget...).
ABBYY FineReader 10 - incredibly good optical recognition, I once had to scan a year's worth of bank statements, it made zero errors!
Adobe Acrobat - the full version. Indispensable.
Adobe Creative Suite - mainly Photoshop, InDesign.
XnView - best way to view photos and do batch transformations.
Genuine Fractals - essential plugin for Photoshop, allows you to increase image size without the visible degradation that you get with Photoshop bicubic or other algorithms.
Silkypix - fabulous tool to work raw files from a camera. Does things that Photoshop cannot do. RAW files allow changing the camera settings after the picture is taken.
TurboCAD - poor man's Autocad, works beautifully and costs a little over $100.
WordPress - for blogs I used to use Movable Type, but WordPress is much cleaner and easier to use. Movable Type has too much code clutter that makes it a pain to really customize.
X-Plane - a flight simulator, the only game in my computer, except this is not a game, it is a REAL flight simulator, not an animation like Microsoft's FS; this one is FAA certifiable, but the home version is only $29 and it is BRILLIANT, so much so that I bought pedals and a yoke. You get hundreds of planes, from Cessna to F-22 to 747, and real charts plus just about every airport in the world. The automatic pilot works, as do the VORs.
EditPlus - a plain editor for coding in C or PHP or CSS or XHTML. Also a good place to cut and paste temporarily from Word or Excel, to get rid of all the Microsoft style clutter, for example when transferring an article from Word to a WordPress blog.
FileZilla - used to use WinSCP and WS_FTP, but Filezilla is less quirky and more reliable.
Putty - simple Telnet and SSH client.
WinRAR - essential compression software.
Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL - the best environment for custom web development.
TMPGEnc DVD Author - the best way to get stuff onto CD or DVD
Google - Gmail, Documents, Calendar, Contacts, Maps, Translate, Chat, Voice, I use them all.
Norton Internet Security - Well, actually I DID SWITCH from McAfee, the new updates became annoying and took up huge CPU resources. McAfee is yet another example of good software turning REALLY BAD in a short time, I had been using it since the early days of viruses. NORTON Seems to work unobtrusively, so far so good.
Skype - despite annoying ads, a great service. Works as well as a phone most of the time. I was an early adopter. Recently it has started to act up, especially in conference calls you get a loud hiss after a few minutes and you need to start again. It has just been bought by Microsoft, now it is impossible to change your mood message without opening a pop-up window, and once you change it you no longer see what it says, so you forget to change it. Google Voice is a lot better and I am moving to it.
PowWowNow - great telephone conference service with local access in most countries, no monthly fee.
Mailchimp - mailings can no longer be managed on your own server unless you spend months doiing the things you need to do to avoid getting tagged as spam. Mailchimp is easy to use and gives me 100% delivery both for commercial and not-for-profit use.
Apple iPhone 4S - yes I did it, I swtched. Blackberry has definitely become the Palm of a decade ago, finished and not realizing it, management deadbrained, too fat on its own success. Does this mean that I am extatic about iPhone? Almost. The thing I missed the most was the BB clock, which stays on and remains very visible all night without having to touch anything, allows you to pick any tune for an alarm, and automatically turn off all radios so you don't get email and calls in the night. The solution on iPhone is iHandy clock, bright, large, plays any tune, stay on all night, but will not automaticaly put phone in Airplane mode (apparently Apple does not allow any app that much control). Not too bad, it takes a second to go into Airplane mode before turing on the clock. Keyboard is not as easy to use as my daughter made me think it was, but then again BB keyboard with buttons was much worse, specially the one I had with supposedly ergonomically shaped keys - they made you press one key over. The other down side of iPhone is having to use iTunes and App Store, and the fact that these are regionalized, so that I get French apps and many US apps are out of reach. I now must resort to getting an iTunes card from the US and giving a fake US address. This iTunes thing is really one of those idiotic control things that Jobs probably insisted on, typical of the guy's not much discussed dark side and which is probably the reason why Macs are still a small percentage of the world personal computer market, even despite having as competitor something as terrificallly badly crafted as Windows.
Blackberry Bold 9700 - just as crappy. When you turn it on, the screen goes black at the moment of entering your password, you need to press a button to see the screen. GPS is pitiful. Upgraded recenly to version 6 firmware, now it will no longer conect to desktop application, nor will it get email. I can only phone and browse on a minuscule illegible screen. If you lock the keyboard and stick the thing in your trouser pocket, sooner or later the keyboard unlocks itself and it dials the first name in your contacts list - if he lives 9 time zones away from you he gets called up at all hours of the night (sorry Adrian). Next phone is an iPhone, sorry RIM, you suck big time
Recently RIM introduced version 6 of the phone's firmware. Thinking that it could only IMPROVE the disastrous product, I went for it, ignoring my scepticism (every time a piece of software goes from N.xxx to (N+1).0, it becomes fat, ugly and useless. Think of formerly really good software like Word Perfect... overnight it became unusable: corporate seppuku!). For a week my email stopped working and the phone crashed often, requiring removing the battery and restarting. At every key press, it went into wait mode, the little clock showing that it was busy. After 2 weeks it somehow improved a bit, but it is still slow, slower than before. The calculator has disappeared, it's GONE. The camera puts pictures somewhere different than where they were before. GPS has become useless, it was bad enough before taking 10 minutes to fins satellites, now it does not work. The camera is hard to operate, after the first picture you need to go back to the main menu and start again. The Options menu has been simplified and no longer allows controlling what I could control before.
Blackberry Storm - my previous phone, true crap, I wish I had bought an Iphone. The Storm has only 4 very fragile buttons, if you put Storm in the pouch provided, you will break all four buttons, like I did within 1 minute of purchase. GPS does not work most of the time. Does not have WiFi. Good for getting email (not writing). Keyboard is not usable, in fact it is useless. Cannot do Skype. Camera is not bad.
My first Apple buy since the Apple 2e a century ago. Incredibly, this nice looking thing has a video output that only works with a few apps that support it, it is not a video signal corersponding to the iPad screen. So if you want to use it to make presentations on a projector, you need to find a suitable app. Nice toy, but just a toy.