vincent bidaux  freelance web and application design

Ok this is not an extensive list, this is just my friends and I suggestions for nice and good restaurants in Paris. We think you can have great time in these. Call the restaurants and make reservations as much as possible.

1. Le Bistrot du Peintre – XIth district – typical parisian bistrot, moderate prices, not so far from Bastille.
2. Racine – not a lot of room, not so cheap but not that bad, a-ma-zing dishes, you HAVE TO try the porc lard, ask for it. Also the pork cheek is a revelation.
3. Polidor is a suggestion from Kevin W.
4. Le Train Bleu – amazing high ceiling old decoration classy restaurant of the Gare de Lyon train station. They serve their veal speciality for 30 years. don’t miss super chocolate generous Profiterolles au chocolat. Not so moderate price but not that mush though
5. Le timbre – Kevin W. suggestion, his favorite restaurant
6. Chartier – cheap, kind of – super experience of typical parisian brasserie where the rudeness of the waiters is part of the experience as they are some sort of shareholders of the restaurant. Don’t be afraid of queing up outside, you have to. Good and simple food. Never tried porc feet? It’s the place to give it a shot. On the Grands Boulevards not so far from Republique
7. Les Itinéraires – 34 euros menu, very nice
8. La biche au bois – Pretty not expensive very good game food
9. Les marcheurs de la planete – bastille (salade/cheese/coldcuts/wine), affordable depending on wine
10. Les Galopins – Bastille district
11. La fee verte – The green fairy, Bastille District
12. Café des anges - super afordable
13. Cyclo – Bastille district, vietnamese yummy
14. Nakagawa – great japanese restaurant, XXth district

I hope this is going to lead you to a great parisian culinary experience. Please tell me afterwards.

Follow me on twitter @vinchubang.

Only one game lost so far this season for the Giants. Now everyone dreams about a possible NY Giants vs NY Jets for the Superball final!

Stereographic images are usually pairs of photos taken at the same time with a slightly different horizontal point of view, let’s say slighlty as the distance between two human eyes. By modifying your vision, crossing or paralleling you eyes, you can superpose the two images in one and litteraly trick your brain and make it think it’s a single live 3D view. When we were kids, we had some stereographic goggles to watch 3D pictures or animation movies sceneries.

Stereovision on Flickr

Pictures like these can be taken with a single camera and two successive shots, but best results are obtained using this:

Stereo images can also be created from scratch, as I just did, playing with and early graphic design for my friend’s parisians band: Salarydog. It comes in two versions: one is set for parallel vision, the other for crossed-eyes vision. Here is the one for parallel vision:

How to see the 3D in it?

1. Hold the stereo pair at a comfortable, viewing distance, wearing your glasses if you normally wear them.
2. The stereo-pair should be approximately in the center of your visual field and evenly illuminated.
3. Looking “through” the paper, look to the distance.
4. A third image will appear between the left and right pictures.
5. Without converging the eyes, slowly focus on the third, center image.
6. A 3D picture will emerge.

And the one for crossed-eye:

Use the crossed-eye version like this:

1. Hold your finger 4-5 inches in front of your nose.
2. Focus on your finger – in the distance the two images become one stereo image, with the separate images still visible on either side.
3. Slowly focus on the center image without reconverging the eyes. The center image becomes sharp and in 3D.

It’s been ten days I did these images and still no one of my friends get to see it. It appears I am the only one in my friend group who can handle stereogram and stereo images.

So I came up with this classique red/blue version of it. Now if you still have somewhere one of these red/blue goggles you definitely can catch the 3D in the scenery.

But did you succeed getting the 3D in one of the stereographic images above? And in case of yes, what method does work best for you?

Filed under (bad) User Experience.
Myspace audio player, the most known audio player on the Internet, is fooling everybody with its fake graphic equalizer! It’s there forever, makes me laugh forever.

(Recently a new feature hit Myspace profiles: the ability to sort the friend list alphabetically.. Wow! Impressive…)

Today, this message from Facebook made me laugh:

I’ve already tried the new interface and it confused me a lot. And today I thought they should rephrase the message in a more honest way. I have some propositions:

• The new Facebook is there, and this time you won’t get anything in the Privacy panel so you’re going to be screwed even more than with the last version.
• The new Facebook is there, and we feel so guilty trying to mess up with your personal datas that we honestly can’t oblige anyone to use it.
• The new Facebook is there and you should not opt-in.
• The new Facebook is there, it’s awesome how many ways we invented to prevent you to access the real applications privacy setup panes.
• The new Facebook is there, we wonder how much time it will take you to think we’re maybe mentally sick.

You are using the new Facebook? How can you tell the way third party applications are dealing with your personal datas? Well… I think you can’t!

Edit: Effff…

This morning at the post office, one lady asked me if I wanted some 5 euros silver coins with my change… I was not even aware that they’ve been doing such coins… Got one! Actually got two but already sold out one to Raf, former colleague at North Pole Studio.

The design could have been great and imaginative, in fact it’s just cold and ugly. A v ery bad shape has been chosen for “la semeuse”, the recurrent character on french currency.

I guess this last image is actually from the upcoming 15 euros coin. You can’t see the legs on the 5 euros one.

Every country is defending a different medal table in order to be as close as possible to the top. Americans only speak about the total of won medals, Chineses refers only to gold. But did you ask yourself if this was fair? They have huge countries, an incredible number of athletes comptetiting and giganormous sports infrastructures to prepare them for worldwide competitions. But how about the number of medals won by population? By GDP? By number of athletes in the competiton? This would make much more sense isn’t it?

BBC News did the maths for us here. And the results are interresting, because in these three alternative and more fair tables, there’s no China, USA, UK, France, Australia or Germany. Some of the countries at the top of thse tables may benefit from a statistic chance, but one of them place itself at the second row of each: Jamaica!

Jamaica’s Usain Bolt after winning the gold medal and setting a world record in the 200 meters in 19.30 seconds.

Back in the days, my friends and I were crazy about Carle Lewis!

For sure they deserve it, as they are winning with style, and rage. I feel something for Usain Bolt, he’s the first to win both 100 and 200m gold medals since Carl Lewis, and Carl Lewis was my hero when I was a kid. Since him, I am addicted to tracks and fields games.

They also have the best shoes ever, don’t they?

• BBC News Alternative Olympics Medal Table
• Official medals table for 2008 Olympics
• Another alterntive tble were there is a “human rights” option… has for effect removing only China from the table! Messed up!
• Usain Bolt
• Carl Lewis

This is a project coming from http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects . I really hope we will see that in action in our post production softwares very soon.

“The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene).”

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

Can you tell who I am regarding of these clouds ?
This one is my blog cloud:

The following is my del.icio.us cloud:

“So, about the tools, we’re all gonna use MS Office pack, of course?”

I have heard this sentence during the last three kickoff meetings I had in the last few months. And this is barely a question, more thn an affirmation, something no one is going to stand against. But we are. For different reasons.

For my partner company, OWS, the deal is pretty simple: they sell open sources solutions (OWS stands for Open Web Solutions) so there’s no way they’re going to purchase a single licence of MS Office or anything else not open source. So far, document exchange and revisions works well between Open office and MS Office.
For me, it’s more a money matter: as a freelance, I can’t afford owning several distributions of various products. I also can’t afford owning a solution I don’t have a very good and deep knowledge about. I have to chose something affordable, suitable to my small business needs. My documents represent me, also. They have to be nice and effective. I have the obligation to provide to my clients a good work as well as a good process supported by a perfect management of office documents.

So what choices do we have? For my partner company, this is an easy one. As free does not mean open source, they’re not gonna chose Google Documents, even if they find it very usefull and attractive (they’re using my online documents when they are invited to of course), they chose Open Office and they begin to have a very good knowledge of it.
For myself, I have tried to use Open Office, and Neo Office, the java version, on my mac, but this was not enough fancy and I couldn’t control the look of the document as I really wanted to. I found the mac versions of Office really really good, but still too much expensive for my needs. I finally chose iWorks, which is a perfect tool for text documents, tables and presentations. It’s easy and cheap, perfectly integrated in my environment. I use it along ot GoogleDocument of course. I can stick onGoogle Docs for long, and just switch to iWorks when I need a solid document design.

What are the deals?

Word perfect is still in the run, I know if was hyper popular some years ago in America, but it never had a real success in Europe. Only one offer and one price, quite affordable but a lack of users, really.

Open Office is free, of course, but you still can get a lot of support from books, Internet and users.

That was the very very good surprise. 78 euros for this kind of software makes it a must have. For years I thought that iWorks was MS Works, and a lot of people still make this mistake. Where MS Works is quite abrupt, ugly and not really user friendly, iWorks is the total opposite.

129 euros is not a bad price, but with this offer, I have to really be a family or a student (not kidding, read the EULA) and I won’t find all the tools needed in the package.

This is the version I am supposed to buy (I don’t even speak about the “Small Business” edition which is very much more expensive). So why the hell should I buy something close to 500 euros when I found something great for 79 ? I have pretty good skills in MS Office, enough to know that thios is probably the most complete of every other office softwares around the market. But all I want os to do text documents, tables and presentations. No scripting, no advance dialog boxes editing, no advanced label printing, no drawings or schemes, nothing else.

Mr Microsoft you should start doing a reasonable offer for you Office product. I am still interrested in your softwares, but not enough to pay that high.