Dans mon échange de courrier avec JM (en commentaires), la semaine dernière, j'exprimais mon inquiétude de voir advenir, en constatant, comme symptome, la disparition programmée d'Hypercard, un relation sociale rétrograde autour de l'ordinateur dans le travail (dans le loisir, c'est le consumérisme à tout crin, c'est pas mieux).
Le Nouvel Obs nous gratifie cette semaine d'un article sur ce sujet.
Il s'y trouve un encart sur "les différents comportements des gens face à l'informatique". L'informatique, chacun le devine ici immédiatement, dans cette simple description, est une donnée, comme les arbres, les fleurs, les montagnes, etc... Ce n'est pas un dispositif technique créé par des hommes pour d'autres hommes...non ! non ! votre comportement devant "l'informatique", c'est comme "çà vous fait quoi de vous trouver sur un rafiot pourri dans cette mer agitée", "quelle impression cela vous donne d'être au milieu du Sahara, sans gourde, sans carte et sans boussole". La question porte évidemment sur l'insondable mystère de la peur en mer et au Sahara et non sur les cons qui ont, vite fait, bien fait, largués les amarres et les parachutes.
Votre comportement face aux situations semblent être alors les seules variables modifiables qui puissent permettre une bonne adéquation entre ce que le nouvel obs appelle, selon leurs sondés, c'est déjà tout un programme, des "clients" (les utilisateurs, c'est-à-dire vous) et le système informatique. Pour qui se souvient de Fernand Raynaud dans un atelier de tailleur, c'est parlant.
Et là c'est un régal...l'article dit "à chacun de reconnaitre son profil"... je m'y suis mis, donc.
8 profils sont dessinés, dont un seul est positif... pour les sept autres, ce sont, où des demeurés profonds, ou des incapables prétentieux ou des bavards inconséquents...le mépris est la seule constante traversant les descriptions de profils (un mépris de "gauche", sans doute, si je considère le positionnement politique du Nouvel Obs)
Mais être le bon profil, au prix qu'il coute, je préfère m'abstenir: "il assimile...et deviendra une personne-ressource à l'étage, c'est-à-dire quelqu'un que tout le monde viendra consulter pour une petite difficulté, évitant de déranger le responsable informatique." J'espère qu'on lui donne des chocolats pour le remercier.
Evidemment, le "bidouilleur" est la racaille des racailles...avec profil psychologique à l'appui: "il jure, droit dans les yeux, qu'il n'a touché à rien. Et, pire, parfois, en nous prenant de haut". Le bidouilleur est un gosse et le "en nous prenant de haut" est évidemment à interpréter comme signifiant une volonté de renversement des positions de pouvoir, ou une mise en doute de ce pouvoir. Ce qui est franchement insupportable. Bref, le discours technique cache bien des choses... ici une relation paternaliste promue par ceux qui ne doivent sans doute pas douter qu'il sont les héros de la modernité (tiens, à ce propos, la modernité, dont on nous rabat les oreilles, ces temps-ci, j'ai bien aimé "le mythe du progrès" de Georg Henrik Von Wright-ed. L'Arche-15.09 euros)
Ceux qui ont connu les débuts de la micro-informatique, il y a maintenant plus de vingt ans peuvent reconnaitre dans cet encart les commentaires de ceux qui méprisaient Apple II, Mac et PC.
Je ne crois pas, du coup, avoir eu tort de ne jamais avoir avoué à mon travail que je pratiquais l'informatique, un peu plus que la normale l'exigeait. Profil bas, ces gens là sont dangereux.
Excellente introduction aux métadonnées (Métadonnées: une initiation) par Patrick Peccatte...et pendant que vous y êtes, ne ratez pas sa page d'acceuil, sobrement nommée Pim, qui nous donne une image de la philosophie autrement plus sérieuse et attractive que diverses foutaises à la mode.
Faut-il ajouter qu'il ne faut pas manquer de regarder les Logiciels du même auteur qui ont un grand intérêt pour qui travaille en milieu hétérogène Mac-PC.
Conclusion...la nature est mal faite...tout pour les uns, rien pour les autres...mais, bon, cela rend modeste...c'est toujours çà pour notre crédit.
11:18:29 AM commentairepisteur []Technorati Cosmos
Radio Userland tools including a dataFileCleaner and ExportWeblog tool
2005-06-06T15:04:00Z
www.romanvenable.net: Downstreamer Tool for Radio UserLand
Hmm...not sure what use this is yet, but review later
2005-06-06T14:59:00Z
MailEdit Documentation
An enhanced replacement to the Mail-to-Weblog feature
2005-06-06T14:56:00Z
Steve Hooker's Radio: Convert all Radio post into one RSS file
2005-06-06T14:52:00Z
Radio.Outliners.Com : How to create a Blogroll with Radio's outliner
2005-05-19T07:16:00Z
Radio UserLand: In a questioning mood: Book roll?
2005-05-18T18:31:00Z
Converting Manila to Movable Type
will try that
2005-05-07T02:15:00Z
Radio UserLand: Tip of the Week - by Donovan Watts
Cool Radio UserLand tips
2005-05-02T19:39:00Z
Workbench: Workbench.root
Tool suite from Rogers Cadenhead for Radio UserLand
2005-05-02T18:15:00Z
Radio UserLand: How to backup and restore your weblog
2005-05-02T17:50:00Z
Radio Community Server: Home
2005-04-16T20:56:00Z
Radio Userland updated today
RSS Feed
2005-03-31T10:49:00Z
bniz: Tuning Time2Read
2005-03-27T22:49:00Z
RadioExpress! bookmarklet for Radio
2005-01-19T00:28:00Z
blogSearch, a weblog search interface for Radio UserLand
blogSearch, a weblog search interface for Radio UserLand weblogs by Mark Paschal
2005-01-08T01:45:00Z
How to redirect an RSS feed
Here's the scenario.
You've just moved your weblog or news site, and the RSS feed has moved too.
You want people who are subscribed to your RSS feed to automatically start reading the feed at its new location.
This document explains how to do that.
2005-01-04T20:43:00Z
Radio UserLand: FTP upstreaming Events Log page error messages
Possible causes of FTP related upstreaming error message using Radio to publish to a FTP server.
2005-01-02T02:28:00Z
Add a javascripted calendar to your Radio UserLand template
2004-12-29T00:26:00Z
Radio Meta-Documentation
LOTS of excellent Radio UserLand links
2004-12-28T00:54:00Z
Restart Radio threads in Radio UserLand
If you notice only one single thread running in the About Radio UserLand window.
You can restart the threads that manage upstreaming etc.
2004-12-23T06:04:00Z
New Radio UserLand macro: categoryLinks
What you get: an HTML unordered list of links to your categories.
2004-12-16T23:57:00Z
Firefox application overlay: extending the radio aggregator
As you can see from this screenshot I have a Javascript in place which adds a select and deselect option to the posts from each feed which controls the checkbox next to each post in the group.
This script is only invoked for the Radio aggregator page.
For
2004-12-14T06:14:00Z
Yet Another Radio UserLand FAQ
This document is a Frequently Asked Questions document about Radio UserLand, a weblogging application from UserLand Software.
2004-12-13T18:10:00Z
Pingbacks tool for Radio UserLand
Pingback provide for a more connected weblogging experience.
This tool is a pingback client tool for Radio, it will automatically send pingback's to those servers that support them when you post entries in your weblog.
2004-12-13T02:11:00Z
Radio UserLand: WebDAV client in Radio Userland?
Simone wrote a tool that helps coping with WebDAV
2004-12-12T23:46:00Z
Paolo Valdemarin Weblog: Uploading a Radio weblog on .Mac
2004-12-12T23:44:00Z
Change your default font preferences in Radio UserLand
2004-12-12T03:58:00Z
Community Radio UserLand Wish List
Join us by adding your Radio UserLand wish list.
2004-12-11T22:32:00Z
Tools in Radio UserLand
Tools bring together all of the major areas of Frontier and Radio UserLand functionality, in a single place.
This page documents the Tools functionality for Frontier and Radio UserLand.
2004-12-08T03:37:00Z
Radio UserLand nodeTypes Reference
This page lists all of the Radio UserLand nodeTypes, what's in their right-click menus and what happens when you expand a node.
A quick note: the new upstreaming scheme provided with Radio's Uptreaming Beta will break the normal automatic upstreaming of outlines saved in 'outlines' or 'opml' folders under Radio's root folder ('www') or any Radio category folder.
I have a fix ready in activeRenderer version 2.5.2, but other features of 2.5.2 are not quite ready for release yet.
I'll announce vs 2.5.2 soon on the ar-announce list.
In the meantime, any beta-tester who wants the fix right now can get a pre-release aR 2.5.2 update by dropping me a line directly.
While they are not using Radio Userland as their publication tool, they've made a great use of the public activeRenderer web service and its XML-RPC API to create outlined show notes for their podcasts.
[image] Thanks to the audio transcluding feature of activeRenderer 2.5 built into the web service, you can listen to their podcasts directly inside the show note page by clicking the small 'loudspeaker' wedge icon in the 'MP3 File' paragraph.
Starting with version 2.5, activeRenderer provides a way to include part of the outline's content into the URL specifying a transcluding link.
If you think this is gibberish...
You're probably right.
A small example will probably make things clearer, at least if you are reading this directly on the activeRenderer News site.
Click on the 'page' wedge icon to the left of the next paragraph to learn what MSDN can report about activeRenderer. activeRenderer The URL of the link attached to the previous node looks like this: http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=##self## ##self## is a link macro that references the current node's textual content.
Link macros come in several flavors besides ##self##.
They are useful as search requests arguments to specify richer outline links.
Learn more about link macros in activeRenderer's Tutorial 9.
I can prepare a post using a full featured browser based outliner, then press the 'post to weblog' icon to publish it into this weblog.
This is my first public posting experiment with the webOutliner, a companion Radio tool to activeRenderer.
The webOutliner is still under wraps, but its release date is getting closer :-) There is no official webOutliner site yet, but a demo site has been running for some time.
There is also a wo-support discussion group; and a support index.
With the current version of webOutliner, I can format my posts in static HTML (using HTML blockquote tags) or, in activeRenderer style dynamic HTML, such as in this post.
This is fun when linking to podcasts, such as these Morning Coffee Notes from Dave Winer.
There's still a little work to do: filtering DHTML in the RSS feed, providing for post links and enclosures, sending outlines over email.
Parallel development is on the way on non Radio, non Usertalk environments.
[image] After the customary delays (even worse than my worst estimates this time :-), the new version 2.5 of activeRenderer is now available for download.
Here is a quick summary of activeRenderer 2.5's new and upgraded features.
Plain text rendering: activeRenderer now renders regular text documents in addition to OPML outlines and RSS news feeds.
It even renders dot-head format files, for nostalgia's sake.
[image] Word documents rendering: in addition to plain text, activeRenderer now renders Microsoft Word documents - .doc files.
For this feature to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed on the system running the Radio/activeRenderer application.
Automatic importing feature: any text or Word document dropped, saved or modified in aR's new www/imports folders is automatically rendered as an OPML document in the matching www/outlines folder.
This triggers its upstreaming as DHTML on the public site.
Audio transclusion: the transclusion mechanism in activeRenderer now recognizes several audio file formats when processing OPML link attributes: ".mp3", "m4a" (Apple), ".wav" (Microsoft) and ".mid" (MIDI).
These audio links are rendered in the outline's DHTML version with a new 'speaker' wedge.
[image] Clicking the speaker wedge creates a small player object under the linking node, sized according to the linking node's width.
The audio content starts playing.
You can control the sound output through the player object.
[image] This should be helpful to poscasters who are publishing show notes in OPML format using Radio with activeRenderer, or are using the activeRenderer web service.
Importing feeds from mySubscriptions.opml: activeRenderer's outline browser now has a new import button at the bottom of its news feed list [screenshot].
Clicking import, you can locate a subScriptions.opml file on your local system or on the Web [screenshot], and ask activeRenderer to automatically add all the feeds of that file into Radio's aggregator: mass subscription! Registration is back: It's optional, works fast [screenshot], the server side processing is simple and hosted in NYC. Registration is a first step in getting to know activeRenderer users, something that is very important in any community driven project.
So please take a few seconds to register once aR 2.5 is installed.
Indeed, ar-announce and ar-support have been the places where most of the action took place these past months.
In an effort to take better advantage of RSS publishing, I will publish more detailed information about each aR 2.5 new feature on this channel in the coming days.
[image] Version 2.3.1, announced last June, is now officially reported Missing In Action, fallen to determined bug attacks - and pressing other engagements - during the testing phase.
RIP. At long last, activeRenderer 2.4 is now ready for download.
It has all the features of 2.3.1, and a whole bunch of others.
Here's a short list: The registration process at first time installation is now history: I couldn't afford the time to replace the aging (defunct?) registration service graciously offered by eVectors in Northen Italy.
New users: we'd still love hearing from you, drop us a note anyway.
Gwénaël's work in vs. 2.3 makes localization almost painless; we're still looking for Spanish, Dutch and Danish contributions.
To switch languages, use the popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.
The outline rendering of RSS feeds and of Radio's aggregator is vastly improved: no more risks of crashing Radio when feeds contain malformed HTML Tags.
I also added a clever (I hope) sentences processor to separate posts content into outline nodes in a clean way (this was a major endeavour, took way too long :-) The outline browser got a little face surgery.
You can check it out on the demo site.[image] Local lists in the 'news' and 'outlines' tabs are now selectable.
After selecting an entry, you can either delete it (unsubscribe for an RSS feed) or rename it.
Clicking twice on an entry puts you directly in text editing mode.
When browsing a news feed which is not in your subscription list already, you can subscribe to it directly.
Finally you can enlarge or reduce the font used to display outlines.
At Thomas Burg's request, you can open transcluded Flash or QT Movie objects full size in a different window when clicking on the new 'spyglass' button that appears at the right of the transcluded node.
At Gwénaël's suggestion, I added a new startup preference so that aR may republish in the background at a programmable interval all pages created using a template that includes the rssBox macro.
[image] If I can convince Gwénaël to lead the development of the next 2.5 version of activeRenderer, it will include wizards to easily format and style rssBox and activeRoll macros in weblog publishing templates.
