Jul 30
“Open Business is still Business” - Jon Phillips
Jul 24
After a full day of work, most of the team around some drinks in Place de France, Luxembourg. Nice!
Jul 17
Seems like no week passes without a new concert appearing on my google calendar ;-)
- Maceo Parker with the WDR Big Band, in Dudelange (July 14th) : A really different performance from Maceo, with a tribute to Ray Charles. As always, it was a blast. Bassist Rodney ‘Skeet’ Curtis lays down basslines like nobody else and the Big Band was one of the best I’ve seen.
- Goldfrapp tonight at the Neumunster Abbey : We bought our tickets yesterday even if we don’t know Goldfrapp very well, mostly because the venue is nothing short of amazing! Check it out…
- The Mars Volta, 3 hours of show at the Atelier, next Sunday : will we survive more than one ? ;-)
Jun 17
Today I was stunned to see that Facebook has begun loading all their pages over AJAX, very much like what they were previously doing on their iPhone frontend.
Basically, the trick is to use URLs like :
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=665788844
and never move away from “home.php”, always change the signet part only.
I think Joe Hewitt has much to do in this update because he’s the creator of the Facebook iPhone frontend, which can be considered as a closed-source fork of iUI. For those who don’t know him, he was hired to Facebook when they bought his stealth startup Parakey, and he’s also the creator of the almighty Firebug. So he’s the kind of guy who gets it right when it comes to browser stuff ;-)
I think the main reason of that change is the Chat function which was added to Facebook a couple of weeks ago. I was amazed at how they managed to reload it at each pageview and still provide a “good enough” chat experience. Still, like many others, I noticed a few issues and my guess is that they decided to solve them once and for all by avoiding to reload the page constantly, just like Gmail.
Are we at the dawn of a standardization of this kind of navigation paradigm? It sure looks so. Its advantages compared to the “regular” way are worth the added complexity if you’re big enough.
Another detail worth mentioning here is that the Facebook implementation is quite neat, as all the links to “regular” pages like www.facebook.com/notifications.php are still valid but as they use progressive enhancement, they just can turn on the advanced navigation feature at any time on the client side, and take you to www.facebook.com/home.php#/notifications.php instead.
So congrats to the Facebook team for this update, they must have begun preparing it a long time ago… What’s next?
Jun 12
So that’s it, I’m leaving Brisbane and going back to the new Jamendo office for good.
We have some very exciting projects going on and I can’t wait to be there with the whole team again.
As I can’t really survive without a few concerts planned for the future, I’ve already booked several of them next month ;-)
- Fred Wesley + Pee Wee Ellis at Jazz à Vienne, June 27th. Tribute to James Brown!!!
- Rock Werchter Festival, with among many others: Radiohead, Justice, Sigur Ros, Lenny Kravitz, R.E.M., Ben Harper, Moby, Beck, ….
- The Mars Volta at the Atelier, Luxembourg, July 20th. I’ve read “3 hours of concert without an opening act”. Not sure we’ll be able to make it through that! :)
I’ll also go to a bunch of concerts of Jamendo bands: I have found a couple of really good bands lately that I’ll feature soon with our new widget. More on that later!
May 26
… of one of my favourite bands: Mig
Of course it had been a while since they had given any news but still… it really hurts :-(
All we’re left with now is Dhikrayat and Yamatna…
May 01
Adobe just announced they are to open source the Flash format and lifting licenses fees.
This is really big news for the web… a few thoughts on that:
- Will the search engines now be able to access Flash content more easily, and include it in their index?
- Will Gnash develop more quickly now, or will Adobe GPL its runtime making Gnash irrelevant?
- Against the Flash+AIR juggernaut, does Silverlight still have appeal for the developers?
- How long before Flash on the iPhone now? ;-)
Exciting times…
May 01
I’m going to the first WordCamp (WordPress meets BarCamp) in Paris this Saturday. I’m primarily interested in evaluating a wordpress-mu install for Jamendo and I hope to find some advice there ;-)
To become familiar with MU I’m currently trying the latest release candidate which is synced with the wordpress 2.5 tree.
I’m wondering what would be the best choice for the blog URLs :
- www.jamendo.com/blog/XXX ?
- blogs.jamendo.com/XXX ?
- XXX.jamendo.net ?
The real question behind this choice is: what’s the right tradeoff between security and integration into Jamendo?
May 01
We’ve just moved into our new office in Luxembourg City. Everyone (including myself!!) is thrilled with having our own place and it’s a great, great step in Jamendo’s history. Check out the pictures to see how awesome the office is!
We’ll be announcing an opening party soon :)
May 01
Once more, I’m trying to start blogging again ;-)
Oct 01
I got an iPhone 2 days ago and I couldn’t help starting to develop a Jamendo frontend right away. Here’s where I am after a few hours of hacking ;-)
Sep 05
Jamendo has been hiring for 2 months. It’s not yet over, we’re still looking for marketing & sales people. However the new development team is quite complete. In order of arrival, we hired Maxime (php/python), Gerald (flash/webdesign), Amandine (junior sysadmin), Pierre-Olivier (php) and just two days ago, Eric (senior sysadmin). The last piece of the puzzle will be Jonathan (php/ajax) mid-september.
That was a lot of people in a very short time but we’re already seeing a good team emerge. Okay, maybe not yet so good at fixing the 153 active issues on our bugtracker :) But the one thing we’re learning very fast is… Poker!
Today was our second Poker evening and it was a blast, we’re slowly all becoming addicted (Try this free ajax poker website…) to the calls, raises and all-ins ! No luck (or skill?) for me tonight though, Eric showed us he knows how to bluff and won after 2 hours of fun ;-)
I can’t think of a cooler sysadmin ;-)
A few links : Jamendo Poker Tour on picasa / Jonathan’s post & photos
Aug 08
I just got back from Wikimania 07 in Taipei. I had the chance to present Jamendo twice, both at a Creative Commons Taiwan conference and at Wikimania itself.
This week in Taipei was a real eye-opener, I met a lot of people and discovered some new interests… more on that later.
In the meantime, here is my presentation:
Jun 03
This is one of my favourite albums from Jamendo.
It has a sweet groove I really like. The pianist has some good spots all over the album.
Please send more music to jamendo! ;-)
Jan 10
jamendo was featured a few days ago on barrapunto.com (thanks to our new spanish translator levhita!). Barrapunto is the spanish Slashdot so the word began to spread : we appeared on many spanish blogs. (see on technorati)
What’s really funny about this is that the “Open your ears” motto still hasn’t an official spanish translation, so the bloggers have been coming up with their own translations like “¡Abrete de orejas!” or “Abre tus oÃdos” :-)
A few trackbacks to some of the great blogs that featured jamendo :
http://www.blogdejacinto.com/jamendo-abrete-de-orejas
http://www.informediario.com/2006/01/jamendo-p2p-musica-creative-commons.html
http://edulix.blogspot.com/2006/01/jamendo-todo-un-descubrimiento-musical.html
http://alquemont.zoomblog.com/archivo/2006/01/08/agradable-sorpresa.html
http://tecnomovidas.bitacoras.com/archivos/2006/01/07/jamendo-busqueda-de-nuevos-artistas
http://www.kt.cl/blog/2006/01/08/jamendo-abre-tus-oidos/
http://trusmis.blogspot.com/2006/01/msica.html
http://spaces.msn.com/members/mmontesp/Blog/cns!1pLcXQONCFgwdSrY5Ly0H3IA!214.entry
http://spaces.msn.com/members/matrixkx/Blog/cns!1p-5CHMXE4cde64qyPl2s2wQ!423.entry
http://locolive.net/archivo/2006/01/musica-libre
Thank you all, now we need some more spanish artists before the official jamendo spanish opening (next week maybe)!
Jan 07
Everything at jamendo is crazy these days. Albums are coming in faster and faster, we got a link on Creative Commons, the word is spreading about us in French press, translators are knocking to the door every day … The future has never looked so bright.
I still manage to release a new feature each week on the website, but it’s getting harder to stay in sync with the overall status of the project. I released the new backoffice for artists a week ago after a few days of testing and everything went fine ;-) The next big thing we are going to work on is the new member area (improved registration, profile, recommendations, “blog this album” feature, …)
In the meantime, I spoke with Mike Linksvayer from CC who recommended me for an internship in San Francisco this summer. Simply amazing! Entering the CC sphere was one of my main motivations when I created jamendo. Maybe I could have done it simplier but anyway… it’s not done yet. The only problem if I go there is… will I come back to France ? ;-)
Dec 30
I spent the last two weeks in Metz, both partying with family+friends and commuting to Luxembourg to work on jamendo with the rest of the team.
Right there is a picture I took yesterday : Laurent and Amélie had a little fight in the snow. Guess who lost !! ;-)
Amélie has been doing some great work for jamendo lately, I think more international artists will join us soon thanks to her ! It is also extremely important to have someone who doesn’t have a technical background in the team.
Aug 22
We’re now more than 400 torrents to seed on jamendo. That’s about 100Go. We currently use btlaunchmany.py but I don’t think that’s sustainable. So before it’s too late, I think I have to reconsider a new solution to this problem.
As we also operate the tracker, I think there’s really some cooperation needed between both sides, the tracker and our permaseeds. Here are a few of my ideas :
- We don’t need to seed files that are already seeded by many users. Let’s find a lower limit, like 5 seeds.
- But we have to make sure they really seed ! So we need to make some control on the uploaded/downloaded statistics of the client. Are they reliable ?
- Maybe some clients will send the IPs of our servers to the other bittorrent clients, or even use Azureus’ DHT. So we have to really stop seeding these files.
- As the seeds are permanent, it should be easy to store their IPs in the tracker, and turn off announce on the seeds.
- Use that ultraseeding feature ?
- Would it help to turn off the seeds when there’s no client downloading ?
Just some thoughts… TBC
Aug 18
YouTube just launched, it’s the flickr of video. All this “web 2.0″ stuff really got my attention last week, and we’re clearly heading to that now with jamendo. Maybe we’ll become the flickr of audio. Or something like that. Here is our todo-list to add web 2.0 “compliance” to jamendo :
- more Javascript/podcast/RSS syndication tools
- rework URLs. they are way too obscure right now
- folksonomies
- more CC integration
- test the XSPF flash player in order to be really “web only”. for P2P we’ll have to wait I guess.
- we already have a public XMLRPC API, but try to extend it a bit more.
- more social features in the website
If you think of more web 2.0 features just tell me ! We’ll see in a month what I’ll have implemented :)
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