• around 2000 events were created during the last 2 months
• between 500 and 1000 people visit the site each day.

This naturally lead to a mailing issue: I was previously using gmail to automatically send emails, I guess I reached the limit since it constantly required me to change the password.

I recently heard about MailJet, a French company that raised quite a lot of money last week. I knew Sendgrid but was willing to try something fresh.

Mailjet has a nice UI, clear instructions and allows you to setup your SMTP server in a few clicks. The real-time dashboard with analytics is a real plus to see if everything goes well.

I quickly reached the free plans limit (which is 200 mails per day), but thanks to a few donations from my users, I could upgrade a Bronze plan and since then, all is runnign smoothly. I guess I will downgrade when the holiday season is over.

On behalf of Joshfire, I worked on the main cordova Android source code by adding elements from the original Android browser. In the end, clicking on a video on a Phonegap application starts a fullscreen video player view. Hitting the “back” button goes back to the app. This is far from perfect, but better than nothing.

After submitting my pull request, I had warm and polite feedback from Simon Mc Donald of the Phonegap team, he helped to test my work and added the final touches before accepting the code into his branch.

Today the feature has been shipped into Phonegap 2.2.0. I had great feedback from both Phonegap creators and users. That’s something very motivating.

See the final commit in Phonegap’s source code.

Last year, I added an organizer dashboard, to track who opened the mail. This was a important feature in order to make sure that everything goes well. This year, following tens of user complaints, I added a way to change the email of a participant and resend him the drawing email.

The organizer dashboard, with the new edit and resend email feature

Happy holidays

However, if you still want to use voyages-sncf.com for whatever reason, you can install this little hack I made by removing everything not necessary to me:

voyages-sncf.com left before, right after

How to use it:
Install the Stylish add-on for Firefox or Chrome, then install my style from this page. Enjoy.

The simple “source code” is available on this gist, feel free to make it better.

This could be a message to SNCF: Keep It Simple Stupid, please.

His first trip is to the Maldives, where he will be filming Manta Rays. I worked using Blender on a shot that explains the travel and the location.

You can see on the following video, various iterations of this shot:

This week-end, I participated to the foursquare global hackathon. I worked with Jean and Olivier on

I’ve been having an idea for a long time: imagine a virtual virus that is spreading due to our social interactions. Wouldn’t it be great to see it spread and to see how people react? Foursquare was the ideal product to build upon. So I pitched a crazy idea about virus and zombies, saying that a game mechanism was still to be defined.

Inspired by zombie movies, we worked a long time to define a simple game pluggable on foursquare. After a couple of iterations, we came up with a simple system:

Square of the Dead, rules

Players can either be survivors or zombies.

• When you are a zombie, you contaminate every place you check into. Your goal is to spread the virus.
• When you are a survivor, you get contaminated if you check into a contaminated place. Your goal is to survive, for this you can find guns in non-contaminated places. These guns will allow you to de-contaminate places and transform zombies from these places into survivors.

The game do not require so much actions from the players, they just have to keep using foursquare to play. We minimized the problems by adopting a cross-platform notification system that everyone is already using: emails.

Technically, we used the Play! framework deployed on App Engine using Siena. I ran into a bug that made us lost some precious hours.

We will polish the game and maybe come up with some nice other features (like a map to see the virus spreading all over the world!).
Try “Square of the Dead” now.

Olivier, designer, also blogged about his experience.

Working on the project, picture by Le Camping

I really enjoyed the hackathon. Other projects were really great. here are my favorites:

• 4sqBox: receive files when you chek-in somewhere
• fstalk2her: check the boy/girl ratio before going into a bar and see what you have in common with these people
• Check Me In: Check-in just by facing your smartphone in front of the venue’s iPad (use case: you have no network)
• Gettogether: very slick mobile app to organize something with friends.

I’m using the accelerometers of the phone to record the movement of the players. Then I compare this to the reference movement of this video. If the movement match, the player earn points. The best dancer win at the end of the game.
Technically, the main challenges are the processing of the accelerometer data and communicating in real time.

Accelerometer data from the phone: I could use the native APIs and build a native app, but Phonegap is providing an accelerometer API, so I could build my app once and use it on many platforms.

Data comparison: I have to use well thinked descriptors to compare the recorded data to the reference. I will start by detecting the “bumps”, their direction and their amplitude.

Live communication: I’m using some real time technology to make all the device communicating with a server in real time: my choice is to use node.js and the socket.io library (and to ideally use web sockets).

Data store: the library of dances will be stored in a no-SQL database. My choice is to use mongoDB.

Record a dance: one last challenge is to record the reference dance for a given video. I will try to use some simple machine learning algorithms to extract the reference from a set of records.

You can follow the development on my github.

I took some time to create a logo, and here is the second iteration :

In the spirit of a hacking event, the logo is a remix of Le Camping‘s logo. Then the idea is that people will build things on top of the APIs from startups of Le Camping, this is why Le Camping’s symbol is the root of a growing tree of smaller other symbols. And of course, the Van Koch fractal is something geeks love

What do you think?

It’s done using Inkscape an Open Source vector graphics editor I contributed to. It uses Live Path Effects. Get the SVG here!

Now let’s do the t-shirts !

When using my smartphone and when I don’t want to explicitly check the time,  I don’t pay any attention to the clock. It can be similar to the “banner blindness” phenomenon.

What if the time could be printed into my mind without doing any effort?

I wanted to experiment around this idea. In a short time, I created a live wallpaper for Android which color changes over the hour.

The wallpaper color changes during the hour.

I’m sure that after having checked the smartphone, we are able to tell what color was the background. And because a given color corresponds to a given number of minutes, we can approximately guess the time. The tint of the background color depends on the minutes : 0 min is red (0°), 30 min is turquoise (180°)… I think that the hour is not important, most of the time, we are able to guess the hour.
Of course, it requires a learning time. A time for our brain to learn the bijection between colors and minutes. This experiment will test if it is easily possible.

The HSV color wheel is mapped on a clock. Every color has its minute.

Give it a try by downloading “Color Clock Wallpaper” from the Android market.

And it’s open-source, bitch! You can grab the code on my github and come up with your own additions.

I will start using it every day, and see if this experimentation works. It may require to be tweaked, we will see.
I also have ideas for additional features:

• Add a texture to the wallpaper, for it to be pretty.
• I notice I like to tap on the screen when I have the “Nexus” wallpaper, because I know it will do something entertaining. What if this something could make me know the time?
• Let the user choose the color gradient ?

How to do image processing using Javascript ?

The canvas API is good to manipulate pixels, however, a library with the most common operations would be great.
I spotted two libraries: PaintbrushJS and Pixastic.

• PaintbrushJS simply allows to apply filters to images on the page, that’s it.
• Pixastic is more flexible, offers more filters and features. And you can easily call a filter in your Javascript code.

But because of its simplicity when reading the code, I started some experimentations using PaintbrushJS.

After a few minutes, I noticed that the matrix convolution operation was not correct in this library. So I fixed it in my branch. Feel free to use it.