About social widgets, notice also that I have added the Sphere related content widget. This widget will show you external content related to the article you just read. Logically, you will find this widget in the “Read also” section below.
There are 2 reasons why I installed this widget. First is: some of you, dear readers, are coming here through Sphere. That is how I heard of it. Secondly, I like the name. It is related to ThinkoSphere, isn’t it ? However, I am only trying out the widget so do not hesitate to leave a comment to tell me what you think about this widget and the other ones. My impressions so far are that it slows down your blog but that is working correctly even if sometimes you really wonder why the hell this is meant to be related to your content !

As you can see below I have added the social bookmarks buttons at the bottom of each article. The buttons are for the following sites.

• Digg
• Delicious
• Reddit
• DZone
• Technorati
• Slashdot

The links will direct you to their widget page.

The code to add these buttons is:

I am only now upgrading my OFC plugin version in my Thinkosphere project. Last update was before all the refactoring made by dfl.
From this refactoring until now, you need to add the line ‘include OpenFlashChart’ in your model to properly use OFC. You do not need to do that in your controllers because OFC is already required for all controllers and views thanks to the following lines in init.rb:

In November, Open Flash Chart was updated with some new features and bugfixes. OFC rails plugin was also updated thanks to Charlie, Zuk and Otavio. I have just updated the OFC test app. The list of changes brought by OFC new version is given at the end of this post.

Moreover, some new examples of OFC use are available around:

• 2 from Giovanni: a radar chart with line and a chart with error margin.
• 1 from Anthony Navarre as a comment on Charlie’s blog on how to use a RESTful implementation with OFC.

For reference, here is the list of changes of the latest OFC version:

For one year, I have got plenty of troubles with the wifi under Ubuntu. I even got some troubles when I migrated to Intrepid Ibex. But I am pleased to say that finally the wifi management seems much better under Intrepid than under the previous versions.
To solve my troubles I just needed to clean the interfaces file, to reinstall the packages network-manager and network-manager-kde. Recently, I switched of wifi network and it worked smoothly. Amazing !
However, I still do not know how to freeze the IP address. If you have an idea please leave a comment !

After this first post about sex and marketing, let’s see my second point.
Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch tells us about the 2008 list of the most popular search terms for the year on Google. Something is bothering me. If you notice, the first thing in the article, as it is explained, is not the “most popular” list but the “fastest rising” list. As I wanted to see the “most popular list”, I went directly to google’s zeitgeist site. Weird thing, you cannot find the list for the US but you can for all the other countries that are presented. For all the lists, I am very surprised: where is the word “sex” ? I have always been told that the forever most popular search on the web is sex. So what happened ? Did Google censor the results ? Did they cheat ? Did they manipulate the results. Did they simply make some statistical tricks to hide it ? I think that they used that last option.

Let us talk about sex: it is good for business !
I have 2 reasons for talking about sex today. Surprisingly, both come from Techcrunch posts: one about the sexy video of the moment and one about the Google’s small study about the top requests on their engine. For the first one, why this post is about sex is pretty obvious. For the second one, it is less obvious and that is my problem: where is the word sex in Google’s top requests ?

As you can see this blog has a new design. This will also be the future design of the poll and survey website ThinkoSphere.com. In order to make this design, I worked closely with professional designers that I really congratulate for their awesome work (references available upon mail request).