Evolution of the Social Networking Map

In February 2008, in my What is Web 2.0 blog post I showed the following map about Social Networks, which came from xkcd.

Today, I saw on Le Journal du Geek the 2010 version and it speaks by itself. Notice the rise of FaceBook, YouTube, and Google for example but also the decline of MySpace and some others.


Only two years and an half between the two pictures. Changes are fast on the internet.

Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers

I just finished reading this article about performance comparison of major web browser by Jacob Gube and wondered if everything was said. Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer is presented as the worst and slowest browser. By the way, I often consider that people tend to appreciate criticizing when talking about Microsoft products in general.

But in the case were the tests complete ? It talked about speed, CPU, and read access time. But nothing about memory consumption. I jumped on the gun, took a look at my dozen tabs opened on Firefox and opened them as well under Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Chrome.

As you can see, Firefox momory consumption is bundled inside a single process while IE8 and Chrome creates several processes with different memory consumption.

But after summing all results, I was astonished to see that Internet Explorer 8 is the best browser concerning memory consumption. The fancy Excel graphic below perfectly illustrate that fact.

There is no doubt that IE 8 requires less memory than Chrome or Firefox.

For the sake of fairness, here are the types of websites I used for the test. All of them are common sites I use on a day-to-day basis:

• iGoogle
• Two bugtrackers: Mantis and Jira
• Two tabs concerned games on Kongregate.com
• A PHPMyAdmin and a MediaWiki pages
• A page on my online game (MMOG): Star Wars Combine
• A web page from the MySQL site, one from an online banking, one from a newspaper with forums, and that blog on sixrevisions.com

In my next post, I will maybe make performance and statistics reports about the number of crashes of each browser. ;)

Ten ways to sink an IT project

During the recent Project Management Institute (PMI) congress from last May, Andre Chrome made an interesting show about ten ways to sink your project. And of course it applies perfectly to any IT project and I modified them sightly for this purpose.

1. Be vague: Do not define any detailed scope that would force you to implement what you promised.


2. Begin the execution ASAP. Why make a planning when you already know lots of changes will happen.


3. Focus solely on your team. Clients will only interfere with your work.


4. Forgot about code documentation and instead prefer mutual trust with your client.


5. Go beyond your client expectations. As clients expect always more and fancy features, you will sign new contracts that will compensate for your losses and bugs.


6. Risk management ? By definition, risk is uncertain. Why bother planning for risk.


7. Quality is only important at the end of the project. The client will only look at the GUI anyway.


8. Avoid bureaucracy. Paperwork is a waste of (your) time.


9. Make sure your team works overtime. As IT project are overdue anyway, put pressure on your team from the start.


10. Throw away paper documents when the project is over. Paper files takes place in your office and none ever read them.

Here is the video of this presentation:

Twenty years of World Wild Web

Happy birthday, Tim. ;)

The Web is indeed wide today ... but no less wild.

Stress at Work

First day at Work

You listen to Stevie Wonder. It is your first day, the sky is blue, girls are nice, and everything goes well.

After three months

You listen to HOUSE music because you are already overloaded.

After six months

You listen to Heavy Metal and start seeing everything double because you work from 8.00am till well over midnight.

After nine months

You listen to Hip Hop. You became fat because of stress and suffer from constipation !

After one year

You listen to Gansta Rap. You blink, all the time and for no reason. You are deeply addicted to caffeine.

After two years

You listen to Techno and your life is a perpetual rave party. Beat after beat you become crazy.

And ultimately...


In a pure and sincere desire to reduce mailbox sizes and help poor IT administrators, I decided to put online this joke instead of forwarding the mail. Credits go to its respective authors.

Something has changed ...

Eight years ago, in a not so far away country ...



Today, something has changed.



Reality strikes back.
Wazaaa !!!