koalie

Webizen became W3C Developers Avenue

Webizen is no more. Yay! We released W3C Developers Avenue instead, and it’s a good thing! It’s much simpler, streamlined and more scalable.

https://twitter.com/w3c/status/659265539135676416

Webizen kept a public task force busy for a year and went through two major iterations between W3C TPAC 2013 in Shenzhen and TPAC 2014 in Santa Clara, where the W3C Advisory Committee approved the proposal.

In the year leading to last week’s TPAC 2015 in Sapporo, we redid all again! An implementation of Webizen representation groups was going to be a forum. Meanwhile, the Team had been experimenting with a new forum, Discourse, to which anyone can bring ideas; and the Web Platform Working Group charter was being developed, a component of which was for the community to incubate new web platform features via Github and Discourse. So, we slowed down rolling out Webizen as we realised some Webizen participation benefits were going to be made available for free under the Discourse banner, and to rethink what would make sense to put together.

While Webizen was a modestly fee-based participation program, we abandoned the idea of benefits for a fee, and introducing instead a gratitude program, Friends. We focused on how W3C gives developers a greater voice, and which services the Web developers value in particular: our free validators and tools, to build Web content that works now and will work in the future; W3C Community Groups that more than six thousand people have embraced since 2011, to propose and incubate new work; our free and premium Training program, to learn from the creators of the Web technologies; and Discourse, to share ideas and feedback with the community on Web Standards.

Welcome to Web Developers avenue, your one-stop place for tools to learn, build, get involved, move the Web forward https://t.co/6hYJ7RlPEj

— W3C Developers (@w3cdevs@w3c.social) (@w3cdevs) November 4, 2015

It was important for us to release during TPAC 2015, and it was high time we did, really. After all, it was an anniversary date of the question from which it all stemmed. The first anniversary was the approval of a version, the second had to be the launch. And we did it, in the nick of time, but it was challenging.

I tested my abilities to manage a project and I learned a lot for the future, to say the least. Meanwhile, to make up for this, I worked over weekends, in the plane, and every night in Japan leading to the launch. Karen gave good feedback on content and Guillaume, as designer and integrator, scrumed with coding. The foundations of the work had been laid out months ago, but many of the building blocks still needed attention and polish, that we applied right up to the release on the W3C Technical Plenary Day, literally two minutes before the H hour.

I had aimed for much earlier in the day and for a fuller version, but a piece of code in the Friends component stopped working and when it was obvious it was not going to be fixed in time, we had to back-track a little. Donations to support the W3C mission and free developer tools are thus possible via Paypal only at this point, but soon we will accept contributions via credit card through MIT, a 501(c)(3) organization, which are tax-deductible for United States citizens.

Next steps for W3C Developers Avenue are more Developer meetups and outreach, and general (r)evolutions to further developer engagement at W3C and the value of W3C to the Web community. You have thoughts on those? I welcome your input!

I wrote on the topic before: Individuals influencer of the Web at W3C –utopia? (February 2014), Introducing #Webizen electoral college (April 2014).

Recette : roses aux pommes

Ingrédients pour 6 roses aux pommes :

2 pommes rouges
1 pâte feuilletée
1 citron (optionnel)
1 ou 2 cuillères à soupe de sucre en poudre
1 cuillère à soupe de confiture d’abricot
Cannelle en poudre (optionnel)
Sucre glace (optionnel)

Préparation :

Couper les pommes en deux dans le sens de la hauteur, retirer le centre, couper en lamelles fines.
Disposer les lamelles dans un saladier rempli d’eau, du sucre en poudre et du jus de citron; passer au four micro onde pendant 5 minutes. Égoutter.
Déposer la cuillère à soupe de confiture d’abricot dans un bol, délayer avec un peu d’eau.
Étaler la pâte et la segmenter en 6 bandes, dans le sens de la largeur.
Sur chaque bande, étaler du mélange de confiture.
Disposer les lamelles de pomme en les chevauchant (7 à 10 selon la longueur de la bande). Elles doivent dépasser de la pâte. Saupoudrer de cannelle.
Replier la bande de pâte et recouvrir la base des pommes.
Saisir une extrémité et enrouler le tout en formant une spirale; la rose.
Disposer chaque rose dans un moule à muffin.
Saupoudrer de sucre en poudre.
Enfourner 25 à 30 minutes à 180°C.
Décorer avec du sucre glace.

Recipe: Mojito

Follow my recipe for yummy mojitos (for 2 big glasses of ~33 cl each):

Ingredients:

Fresh mint (the more, the better)
Sugarcane juice
1 lime
White rum
Crushed ice
Iced soda water
2 sprigs of mint

Preparation:

Use scissors to shred 20 to 40 rinsed leaves of fresh mint in a bowl.
Transfer equally in each glass.
Pour 30 ml sugarcane juice in each glass.
Muddle mint and sugarcane juice. If you add a spoonful of powdered sugar in each glass, it may help extracting further oil from the mint.
Pour 30 ml white rum in each glass.
Squeeze one lime, pour equally in each glass. That’s about 30 ml per glass. Add pulp (unless you’d rather not bother or don’t care for pulp.)
Add 6 ice cube per glass, or crushed ice.
Fill up with iced soda water.
Cheers!

I’ll need a name for my next machine

Update 2015-07-29: It has arrived! Naming it was tough; although there were good suggestions that friends made. I considered calling it “theven” given the previous one was called “sith”, but I’m going to go with “Gillie”. I like the ring of it principally, but there are other meanings. It’s the name of a character in GoT, and in French it means “tickle”, which was in the list I considered.

“Gailuron”, “Melina”, “Abraxas”, “Eloah”, “Precious”, “Phoenix”, “Sith”. I have not followed any particular convention in naming my computers, thus far. Here are the stories.

“Gailuron” (namely “cheerful chap”) was a sturdy Sun workstation which I had not named myself. It was there when I was sworn into office at W3C in 1999.

“Melina” was a sturdier desktop computer, I don’t recall which make. I named it after a most excellent Greek singer, Melina Mercouri. At the time, I was dating a guy who was half-greek, I danced the sirtaki (or rather the hasapiko -the butcher’s dance-, which inspired the sirtaki), cooked greek food, vacationed in Crete every summer, listened to orthodox liturgical music and other Greek music, particularly Melina Mercouri. You know, Zorba? She sang to the famous Zorba movie music.

“Abraxas” was a heavy Dell Latitude laptop which the previous owner had named. I looked up “Abraxas”, and it’s related to ancient religions. If you look it up, you’ll find that Abraxas is both an Egyptian god and a demon, and you’ll see that he has legs like pretzels, carries a whip and a shield, and has the head of a chicken. I can’t fathom why anyone would name their machine like this.

“Eloah” was a Dell OptiPlex, a desktop computer that I named after Éléa, the main character of a wonderful novel by René Barjavel, The Ice People (“La Nuit Des Temps”). I don’t recall how I went from Éléa to Eloah, which is a Hebrew word for God.
In this photo, it’s hidden under the humongous monitor and behind a screen of paper in the office also known for its “1-million dollar decoration” (that would warrant a post of its own):

“Precious“, ah, The Precious… My first Macintosh laptop, a 15-inch PowerBook G4. It took me so many months of relentless persuasion and negotiation before it was finally ordered for me, that it was only natural that it should be named the Precious. I loved it. I could sleep with it.
Incidentally, in this photo, it’s in bed with me:

“Phoenix” -how could I forget Phoenix?- was the new Precious since on an unfortunate day in late 2006, Precious didn’t wake from sleep. Fortunately, I was in Boston, a short distance from the Cambridgeside Galleria Apple Store where I got a 15-inch MacBook Pro. It was entirely grey. And it was as pretty as the Precious. So I named it “Phoenix” after Jean Grey from the Marvel comics. Because it was grey and because it was sort of arising from the ashes of Precious.

“Sith” is the computer I’m typing this on, a MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009). I named it Sith because it had a dark keyboard. I hated it; it looked and sounded ugly. I had been able to get a glossy screen (versus glass), but there was no way to replace the loud black keyboard.

I can’t wait to replace the venerable Sith, and wonder what I’ll name its replacement, another MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015).