First, I've 3 new web projects that I want to build and YABON, v3, will not fit in any of them. Unfortunatly time is not on my side.

Next, according to me, YABON has a main drawback. YABON is too generic, too common and not strong typed enough. When you arrive here, you never know what you'll find. This could be fun, but I feel I have not succeeded here. The low level of supporters and usual daily readers confort my mind. Even most of my friends do not read YABON because it has nothing personal (well almost nothing if you remember the pictures of Alice's birth). I'll consider this drawback when building my next projects.

Finally, I have less and less fun going on the web because of YABON's required discipline of finding interesting stuff to post all the time. This is part of the blogging audiance secret: bringing fresh stuff on a regular basis (along with value added and strong-typed contents). At the beginning, blogging was an easy game to play 'cause almost everything was a new thing. Fresh stuff was easy to find. Now this excitement is gone (little by little) and finding new "publishable" material is much more harder. I do not want to become some kind of slave of my blog due to the fact that feeding YABON is a time consuming activity.

YABON will come back as a simple collection of links and quotes (the famous quote of the day). Also you may find on this page some sporadic personal news addressed to my family and friends as well as information on my other online projects. Thank you for your reading. Happy surfing.
Grégoire.]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2004/01/index.html#1522 the real state of the Union. ]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2004/01/index.html#1515 Bush knew [via ->onepointzero.com].]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2004/01/index.html#1474 Leading companies and third-party analysts confirm it: Windows has a lower cost of ownership and outperforms Linux. Microsoft Corp. on Monday launched a new advertising campaign, referred to as ->"Get the Facts," which is designed to give customers information about the advantages of using its Windows operating system versus Linux, its open-source competitor. This latest move is yet another way the Redmond, Wash. software firm is trying to counter the effects of the Linux operating system, and is in keeping with the strategy embraced by Martin Taylor, who ->took over the role of Microsoft open-source and Linux strategist last July. Damned, they pay a guy to have linux counter strategies and that's all he have found... ]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2004/01/index.html#1472 We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use, Johansen told The Register via email. ]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2004/01/index.html#1471 Saddamania!!! (well, a lot of it anyway).]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2003/12/index.html#1456 The gift of blog. (it is powered by blogger, but could be easely adapted to your favorite web content manager).]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2003/12/index.html#1451 Jakob Nielsen (->the king of usability) is here for you:"Many of this year's top design mistakes actually indicate a happy phenomenon: we are making progress in Web usability. Now that sites are doing certain things correctly, we get hit by second-order phenomena that only cause problems because users have progressed past the first-order issues.". And here comes the ->Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003.

Between you and me, I still have to update Yabon design to conform to point 10 (Pages That Link to Themselves) because this page has a link to itself. I let you find it... ]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2003/12/index.html#1450 First Monday offers a great study which helps to understand how software license fees are an insuperable barrier to the technological development of the poor countries.

The study compares the licence fees with a country's GDP per capita and notes that: "even after software price discounts, the price tag for proprietary software is enormous in purchasing power terms. The price of a typical, basic proprietary toolset required for any ICT infrastructure, Windows XP together with Office XP, is US$560 in the U.S. [2]. This is over 2.5 months of GDP/capita in South Africa and over 16 months of GDP/capita in Vietnam. This is the equivalent of charging a single-user licence fee in the U.S. of US$7,541 and US$48,011 respectively, which is clearly unaffordable."This simple calculation is presented within a table for 176 countries, together with 10 geographical and political aggregates. The table also includes the piracy figures published by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), read more about ->The case for open source in developing countries.]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2003/12/index.html#1449 Belle de jour, a self-described diary of a london call girl. I want to congratulat belle for being elected as the guardian's best of British blogging, best written category.

"Archly transgressive, anonymous hooker is definitely manipulating the blog medium, word by word, sentence by sentence far more effectively than any of her competitors. It's not merely the titillating striptease aspects that are working for her, but her willingness to use this new form of vanity publishing to throw open a great big global window on activities previously considered unmentionable ... She is in a league by herself as a blogger."

I couldn't agree more with this. I found another sub-title for her blog: Belle-de-jour, a blogging phantasm...]]> http://www.welraeds.be/archives/2003/12/index.html#1448