General Electric is a USA based multi-national company, where I worked as an intern over this summer. This 100+ years old corporation operates in more than 180 countries with more than 300,000 employees. GE's broad range of products are from jet engines to power generation equipments, financial services to media content. The unit I have been working for was GE Energy....

I spend a good deal of my time trying to understand what is unusual about successful start-ups founders and product creators, that is, what is special about their way of doing things. Hence we can infer some attitudes and "design patterns" that are often found among these people. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of traits that I have noticed in these people....

Ceci est juste un résumé des leçons les plus importantes que j'ai apprises de la construction et l'édition de Bavardica. J'espère sincèrement que tu en tires quelques informations utiles (ou des rappels si tu sais déjà tout ceci). (PS: une version de Bavardica est disponible à http://bavardica.com) 1. Personne ne va utiliser une application sauf si elle fournit une certaine valeur, quelque chose d'intéressant qu'ils ne trouvent pas déjà dans ce qu'ils utilisent habituellement. Cela est vrai même pour des applications gratuites. Ils pourraient l'essayer mais ils l'abandonnent assez rapidement, s'il n'y a aucune incitation réelle. 2. Le fait même qu'ils sont priés de s'inscrire va décourager beaucoup de gens de tenter une application web. Les causes les plus évidentes pourraient être qu'ils ne veulent pas perdre de temps à le faire, ou qu'ils ne veulent pas donner leurs coordonnées& pour des raisons de confidentialité. Donc, au moins une version d'essai devrait être offerte aux visiteurs sans inscription afin qu'ils puissent voir de quoi il s'agitavant de prendre une décision....

Enough talk. This one will be my last post on Bavardica (for this version at least). I now need to get back to work. Anyway, this is just a summary of the most important lessons I learned from building and publishing Bavardica. I sincerely hope you get some useful information (or reminder if you already knew all of this) from that. ( PS: a working version of bavardica is available at www.bavardica.com ) 1. Nobody will use an application unless it provides some value, something interesting they don’t already find in what they normally use. This is so true, even for free applications. They might try it but they would give it up quite soon if there is no actual incentive. 2. The very fact that they are asked to register will discourage many people from trying a web application. The most obvious causes might be that they don’t want to waste time doing it, or they don’t want to give away their details for privacy purpose. So at least a trial version should be offered to visitors without registration so that they can see what it’s all about before they make any decision....

A few years ago, I could easily spend hours sitting in front of the computer, watching photos on Facebook or on Hi5. That's right, if people publish their photos, the whole point is that we can watch those indeed. Sometimes I went on profiles of people I didn't even know! When I was asked what I was doing, I used to answer: I look at people's prosperity! Actually, I was a little envious! I have so many projects running through my mind, so many dreams still unrealised, that sometimes I have these "down" periods, when I feel that everyone is happier than me and that I am running late! Not specifically late with regard to others, but mostly late on the vision that I have for myself! I envied those who were able to reach some of my dreams and who don't always realise that they are privileged! I also envied these people who enjoyed their youth in the fast lane because, stuck in my perpetual "school-house-sleep" routine, I might not have had any interesting story to share with my children! But at least, it's fortunate that I happen to be the prime confidant among my connexions. Therefore, for lack of better insight, I would still have the experience of others as a reference point! And then one day I realised that no one ever photographs their bad times!...

Ceci est la dernière partie de la série sur Bavardica. Outre une interface utilisateur conviviale et colorée, les autres caractéristiques comprennent la modification de personnages en temps réel (pendant qu'ils sont sur la scène). Là encore, le style de cheveux, la peau, les vêtements et les chaussures peuvent être modifiés. En outre, les couleurs de tous ces vêtements peuvent également être modifiés. La façon dont cela fonctionne est assez similaire à la façon dont un personnage est créé. Entre temps, quelques autres fonctions ont été ajoutées:...

This is the last part of the series on Bavardica. Apart from a user friendly and colourful user interface, the other features include the edition of the character outlook in real time (while on the scene). Here again, hair style, skin, clothes and shoes can be changed. Additionally, colours of all those garments can also be changed. The way it works is pretty similar to the way a character is created. In the meanwhile, some other functions had been added:...

How I draw the 2D characters Due to the nature of the drawing art, which is not really computer science related, I thought it was best to describe this process in another part right after the progress description. This work had been a full part of the project and even though it does not directly concern programming (before we get into animation), it is also a computer work involving a pen tablet and some image processing software (Adobe Photoshop). The following screenshots describe the steps in the drawing of one character (out of four)...

En raison de la nature artistique du dessin, qui n'est pas forcément liée à l'informatique, j'ai pensé qu'il valait mieux décrire ce processus dans une autre partie juste après la description de l'évolution technique. Ce travail a été une partie intégrale du projet et même si elle n'implique pas directement de programmation (en tout cas, pas avant d'entrer dans l'animation), il est aussi un travail sur ordinateur impliquant une tablette à stylet et un logiciel de traitement d'images (Adobe Photoshop). Les images suivantes décrivent les étapes dans la conception graphique d'un personnage (un personnage sur les quatre qui ont été créés)...

As we discussed the subjects areas related to Bavardica, we can now go through the steps in the actual achievement of the project. i. Sending a public message over the TCP network from a Silverlight client The model selected for this project is the prototyping model. Starting first with a throwaway prototype, I could first send simple TCP packets using Silverlight and a console application as a server. It was a very basic chat that let a user, say A send a message to a user B so that no one else with receive the message apart from A and B. The server is a .Net console application and the client is a Silverlight application hosted in a......