February 2014 Birthday ski tripWeek end ski Février 2014

You are invited to Marie Line and Martin double birthday party 2014 version the 15 to the 17 of February. For this special event we booked a large chalet in eastern Quebec to make the most out winter! Monday will be off in Ontario for familly day. The chalet can host up to 20 persons and we budget between $40 and $50 per night per person (the more we are the cheapeat it is).

Sutton resort
Sutton resort is well known for its glades, which is pretty exiting. You can check the following video to have an overview of what the station has to offer.

Cross country skiing and snowshoeing are also available at Sutton en haut and Sutton park

Where is it?
We will get more into logistic specifics in January once we have a good idea of who is coming but Sutton is located in eastern Quebec about 1h30 drive from Montreal and 6h30 from Toronto

Ready to go?
Please fill the form below so we can see who’s coming and for which nights!

Vous êtes invités au double anniversaires version 2014 de Marie-Line et Martin du 15 au 17 février. Pour cette occasion nous vous invitons a passer le week end dans un grand chalet dans l’est du Québec pour profiter des joies de l’hiver. Pour information le lundi est férié en Ontario pour la fête de la famille.

Nous avons réservé un chalet pouvant accueillir jusqu’à 20 personnes dans la station de Sutton (QC).  Voir plus de details sur le chalet et nous prevoyons un budget de $40 a $50 par nuit par personne (plus on sera nombreux moins cela sera cher).

La sation de ski de sutton 

La station est reputee pour ces sous bois (voir la video) et offre de belle perspective de glisse

Sur place il est aussi possible de faire de la raquette et du ski de fond a Sutton en haut ou dans le parc de Sutton

Comment y aller?

On rentrera dans le détails du transport plus tard en janvier, mais en gros Sutton est dans l’est du Québec, a 1h30 de Montreal et 6h30 de Toronto par la route. 


Agrandir le plan

Partant pour l’aventure?

Afin de s’organiser nous aimerions savoir qui vient et quelle jours en remplissant le formulaire ci dessous. Nous reviendrons vers vous en janvier pour la logistique.

Google I/O – Freebase and Knowledge Graph

I had the chance to attend two sessions on freebase and Google Knowledge Graph during Google I/O 2013.

The first session was a general introduction on the linked data concept and presentation of the work done around shema.org. A platform developed by Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex in partnership with W3C to develop standard around linked data and semantic web.

Schema.org is like a massive dictionary and mark up model to describe various entities through a huge collection of properties. You can browse the full list of entities describe from this page. This session also present webmaster tools to

  • use information from schema.org and
  • test how data will render on different search engine
  • see usage of your data
  • improve your data markup


The second session was more focused on freebase, and how anyone can leverage knowledge and data stored in it using its API. For example, the Freebase search widget is ready to integrate code to browse freebase entities given a specific category and a keyword (through the search function). The widget returns list of possible matches that the user can browse by hoovering the hits in the drop down list. If used in a production environment the API results should be constraint as it can return

  1. way too many matches
  2. information on a matches that are not useful in your use case.

For example playing a bit with API, the following query will provide 20 city part of Ontario:

https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/search?filter=(all%20type:/location/citytown%20part_of:Ontario)

I invite you to read the cookbook to master various constraint and query parameters as the API is flexible to query or display only certain fields. You can see more usage of freebase search API by checking the documentation.

Using the topic API, one can quickly retrieve all information available on freebase for a specific entity. This get interesting once you know that freebase also stored  links to other notorious web pages and social media (twitter, facebook, wikipedia …) for most topic (people, organization, location).

This session was also the opportunity to ask questions regarding methodology to maintain data quality on freebase (since information are pull out from wikipedia and any user can submit changes and new information), where we learned that freebase:

  • flag duplicate for merge process
  • wait two weeks to integrate wikipedia changes, so the wikipedia community has time to moderate it (freebase / google and wikipedia has developed formal relationship around this project)
  • keep track of all changes with user id and timestamp so can flag and / or revert submission that doesn’t meet freebase standards (the moderation system is similar to the wikipedia one)

See all other session on freebase and linked data

Euro Tour 2010Euro Tour 2010

Five weeks on the road, three time zone, 8 700 km by plane, car, boat, train and bus including 3000 North-South and 2 000 East – West ; 17 stops ; about 15 friends and tons of nice experience.


View Martin Euro Tour 2010 in a larger map5 semaines sur les routes, 3 fuseaux horaires, 8 700 km (avion, voiture, bateau, train, bus) dont 3000 Nord-Sud et 2 000 Est – Ouest ; 17 étapes ; une quizaines d’amis revu et pas mal de bonnes rencontres.


View Martin Euro Tour 2010 in a larger map

Travel Post CardCarte postal de voyage

After my visit of the Tate Modern in London, I had the idea of creating a serie of postcard to go along with my Europe trip. Each postcard will be sent to my previous host with a drawing from the next stage.

The idea is not to do nice drawing (I am not capable of this!) but to create a link between my different stops and friends. I will reuse the title of a painting from Miro (http://ow.ly/2b3BR): Message d’un ami (Message of a friend). This will be the only message at the back of the postcard (with a link to this post)Suite à ma visite au Tate Modern et en réactions à plusieurs oeuvres, il m’est venu l’idée de faire une série de carte postale de chaque villes que je visiterai cet été et de l’envoyer à la personne m’ayant hébergé lors de l’étape précédente. Ce travail débutera par Londres.
L’idée n’est pas de faire des jolis dessins (j’en suis aujourd’hui incapable), mais plutôt de créer un lien dans ce voyage entre les différents lieux et personnes. Je me base ainsi sur le titre de l’oeuvre de Miro, message d’un ami (http://ow.ly/2b3BR) et l’idée d’une série ou chaque entités peut être vu de manière individuelle ou dans son ensemble.

Chaque carte postale aura au dos le même message : message d’un ami et le lien vers cet article.