Hi, and welcome back on my blog. Following the progressive migration from epot.org to jepoirrier.net, you landed on the new address for my blog: http://www.jepoirrier.net/blog ( new RSS feed here). The migration process was easy, thanks to the WordPress eXtended RSS that contains posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. But there are two things left I wanted to keep: existing users and images which links are hard-coded in various posts. ...
This year, I only went for the Saturday afternoon session of FOSDEM 2009, the Free and Open Source software developers’ European Meeting. Two years ago, I mentioned the general trend that more women were interested in free/open source software/movement and this trend continues. But this time, I also noticed some really cute babies … and my son Neel-Alexandre was one of them of course! Although he’s only 7-month-old, he was really interested in the FreeBSD, Linux and Firefox mascots (respectively a red daemon, Tux the penguin and a fox). You are never too young to taste the truth ;-) ...
After a while, here is why I got a TV tuner for my Linux laptop, took screen captures and wrote a script to add a timestamp on pictures … I wanted to know how my (then 5-month-old) son was sleeping (his mom can be reassured: I was not planning to put electrodes on his scalp ;-) ). Get the Flash Player to see this player. var s1 = new SWFObject("../videos/player.swf",“ply”,“360”,“240”,“9”,"#FFFFFF"); s1.addParam(“allowfullscreen”,“false”); s1.addParam(“allowscriptaccess”,“sameDomain”); s1.addParam(“flashvars”,“file=../videos/081129-night.flv&image=../videos/081129-night.jpg”); s1.write(“container”); ...
Fosdem is “a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software”. I will be presenting Gemvid during a lightning talk on Saturday :-)
If you want to know the name of files containing a special string, grep -c is your friend. But you also get names of files not containing your string (with count = 0). If you only want the names of files containing “mystring”, awk can help you: grep -c "mystring" * | awk ' !/:0/ ' And if you don’t even want the number of times “mystring” appears (on 1 line): ...
It’s sad to see France Télévision chose a proprietary platform (MS Silverlight) to develop its web platform for video delivery … They developed this “thing” with public money; the content should at least be available to all the public eyes (even the “without Silverlight” link requires to have Windows Media Player 11 which even recent MS-Windows PCs do not have). Here are some general reasons why it’s a bad idea to develop something with Silverlight: ...
Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps. Most Firefox plugins (" add-ons") can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights … ...
It doesn’t matter if you write proprietary or open source code, comments in your code are very important (somehow even more important than readability and functional correspondence to the client’s needs). This is especially true if someone else is supposed or will, one day, look at your code, re-use your code and/or build upon your code. For example, despite the fact that this source code header explained what the whole source is doing, you can’t tell what processing is done in this paragraph: ...
At least from my office. Sadly true ;-) since one of the rules of my company proxy server bans all URLs with the letters “blog” inside (no blogger.com, blogspot, … websites either). Fortunately, there are a lot of web-based feed aggregators (which are not – not yet? – banned). It also blocks all URLs with the “exe” string so we are not able to visit the Belgian Post website (it uses an URL containing “outletlocator.exe”) ; I didn’t find any bypass yet. ...
I don’t know how I stumble upon this report of a conference ( English translation) from Avi Alkalay but I liked 2 schemes he showed. In this first scheme (left), I like the way it reminds you that “Open” is not only about software, source code. But now that more and more people are aware of the benefits of Open Source software, it’s interesting to also stress the other sides of openness: open standards (like OpenDocument), open hardware, open architecture. In the second scheme (below) is about the trend from private control / closed access to public control / open access (apparently from Rebecca Henderson; it could be interesting to find this whole presentation from 2004). ...