WE CAN LIVE on mars, remember everything's possible!

June 1st, 2012, “WE CAN LIVE on mars” is launching! I have finally took the decision to start my own business and to accelerate my own innovation path! Taking the opportunity to help others to become more innovative, by leveraging my 17 years of experiences within the digital space!

I am launching an innovation agency, specialized in Agile project management, process improvement and new technologies. No… not being an IT services company, but an innovation agency helping you to understand the value of new technologies and rather addressing your processes.

Helping you to become much more agile and fast. Coaching you to split your vision into achievable and valuable steps to deliver smaller components of your products, or services, on a much more regular basis. Making it possible to implement a continuous improvement based on the feedback of your customers. Overall, accelerating your innovation lifecycle and launching more and better new products or services!

At WE CAN LIVE on mars, I want our work being driven by a strong belief that any team with a vision, a plan, a willingness to deliver step by step and a lot of fun, can deliver merely the impossible. Therefore, we can live on mars… because we believe that everything’s possible!

Jérôme Perakis

Please find more information about us and more about our services in our web site: http://wecanliveonmars.com

Solving Gmail IMAP empty inbox in Apple Mail 5

Man! Took me a long evening and finally a portion of this morning to solve the following issue between my Google Apps Gmail Account synchronized with the Apple Mail 5 client over IMAP...

When creating the account, I had briefly seen my messages in my Google Apps account's inbox, but then the rest of the account folders were displaying the messages, I couldn't see the messages anymore neither in the account's inbox folder nor in the All accounts' combined inbox...

I had found several instructions how to setup the Gmail account and also others complaining about this issue, but nothing to solve it. Of course, start with the following instructions to setup Apple Mail 4, they are the same for the version 5. Nevertheless, if you cannot see the messages in the inbox, despite showing in your gmail account through your favorite browser, check this:

1. Check in Apple Mail whether you have sub-folders below the inbox (you will have a small little triangle on the left of the inbox icon).
2. If you have those sub-folders, go to gmail directly and check whether you have label's names which start with inbox/something.
3. If that's the case, in many cases, they have been created out of previous migration from another client e.g. Outlook migrated to Gmail... they are considered as sub-folders in IMAP and it seems that Apple Mail is lost and cannot retrieve the inbox content in the such case.
4. So from Gmail, select all related messages tagged with this label and move them to another folder.
5. Once done, get back to Apple Mail, and select the menu Mailbox - Rebuild
6. Your inbox should start displaying your messages and same for the combined inboxes
7. Enjoy!

Switching for Apple

Last Friday, I have took the decision to move to Apple... instead of buying my traditional PC laptop to run Windows and Ubuntu Linux, I have acquired a MacBook pro 17"! What a change...

Of course, it will better synchronize with my iPhone, might make me a bit nervous with my Asus tf201 tablet (yes, still on android), but overall, should be a good decision.

- powerful laptop and most likely longer life than my previous PCs...
- nice and big screen to work on many apps, such as spreadsheets and project plans.
- didn't need an ultrabook, given that I have my tablet when being on the road.
- should play nicely within my cloud services and devices
- nicer than all the other PCs design that I have seen ever, while asus might step by step come in the right direction.

So now, I need to get the software I need to run my business...
- a project management application
- a scrum project management application
- a visio-like application
- a small CRM
- an accounting and business management application suite (applicable to the Swiss legislation and best practices)

And of course, the CRM solution should sync with my contacts on Google apps. Best will be to have both PM and Scrum apps working on my Android tablet....

Stay tuned and of course if anyone has any feedback or recommendations, will be greatly appreciated!

Have you screw-up your display on Ubuntu after installing NVidia driver?

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 on a Lenovo T410, and tried to install the Nvidia driver without success! Worst, after the reboot, I was getting a blank screen... tried to fix the Nvidia driver through the console without success to date.

At least I have been able to recover the old config by renaming the xorg.conf file and rebooting.

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia

and removed the driver

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-settings nvidia-current

and rebooted

Fixed! :-)

Now that I know how to get my screen back in order, will try to install the Nvidia driver later on when I have some spare time.

A prosthetic eye to treat blindness: Sheila Nirenberg on TED.com

At TEDMED, Sheila Nirenberg shows a bold way to create sight in people with certain kinds of blindness: by hooking into the optic nerve and sending signals from a camera direct to the brain. (Recorded at TEDMED 2011, October 2011, in San Diego, California. Duration: 16:00)

Merry Christmas and happy New Year! How will you enjoy the holidays?

I wish you and your family all the best for this upcoming New Year. Just to make it a bit more fun and interactive this year, answer my poll and share how you will enjoy your holidays this year

Another and easier option to develop iPhone apps?

Did you know that you have another option to develop iPhone apps than Obj-C?

If you have previous experience with Adobe Flex, you should give a try to the ELIPS Studio from Openplug, which let you compile your apps for most mobile OS, such as iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows mobile

I am not, anymore..., a developer, so I am hoping someone could give me some feedback on how performant this dev platform is.

BTW, Alcatel-Lucent has just acquired OpenPlug, so must be worth the investment...