My-Life

We are already on July 8th, 2007! :-0

I was looking for a simple info on the Belgian finance public service website: the address of their office in Liege. I know it’s rue Paradis but I also need opening hours and a general contact phone number. I can tell you this website is really crappy! First, when you arrive on the website, you are overwhelmed by links, info, text everywhere and, of course, the photo of the Finance minister. Now it will take you at least 30 seconds to know where to look. Then, it’s impossible to easily find an address ; I didn’t even find it at all! I tried their “search engine”: no result. Their site map takes ages to load (with no result, of course; it won’t be funny otherwise). When you try to click on most services on the left, you launch a new website, completely different from the main one (still no sign of the address). I guess they don’t want to be contacted … ...

Après ma présentation d’hier àla soirée du Liege Linux Team, j’ai placé ma présentation en ligne : " Introduction aux Logiciels Libres" (ou directement : fichier PDF, 1.8Mo). Tout commentaire ou amélioration possible est le(la) bienvenu(e) ! Edit (a little bit later): since I usually write in English here, I translated my presentation in English. It’s here: " Introduction to Free Software" (PDF, 1.9Mb).

Taking advantage of my laptop crash, I went back to some text-mode tools ( vim, mutt, …): they are fast, easy to use (once you read at least the introduction section in the manual) and reliable (text files are more easily recovered after corruption than binary blobs). I also tested and adopted Snownews. Snownews is a text-mode RSS newsreader. Installing it is very easy: download the archive, and type the usual “./configure; make; make install”. Since I’m following some blogs written in French, I configured Snownews with Unicode support: “./configure –charset=UTF-8”. ...

As every Belgian citizen, I voted today for our legislative bodies ( Chambre et Sénat). As always, I was confronted to the same problem: electronic voting. Technically, I’ve no problem to understand and use the system: it’s an ethical problem. I don’t know if my vote is correctly written on the card, even with all the given guarantees and technical details (you can test such a voting machine here or watch a demo of the Belgian system, both in French). Personally, I saw two problems: ...

There isn’t any television in our flat since a week. What a relief! No more stupid TV series, no more political soap operas ( federal elections this Sunday), … It also means more time for real work and real relaxation :-)

I’m back from an excellent trip to Baltimore and Washington. Now, I’m trying to cope with the jet lag and the huge amount of work left here. :-)

Nearly 2 months ago, I got a GPS tracker. I discovered its antenna is sufficiently sensitive to work in my pocket so I took it on my Saturday morning bike ride. Back home, I was able to retrieve data from the tracker in various formats. What can I do with this data? Find the total distance I rode, of course! I am lazy ;-) so I decided to use the Kompass track file since it’s only a CSV text file (I should have used the GPX file format but parsing XML is still more difficult for me than a plain text file). With a rather simple Python script, I was able to store all the latitudes and longitudes in a collection of objects. But, hey, how do I compute the distance from longitudes and latitudes? ...

Did you know that the last 3 transactions you made with a Proton card (the Belgian electronic purse) are stored in the chip? I simply used the card reader/challenge solver given by my bank to have access to the online banking system. Usually, you press on the “M1” button. If you press on the “Info” button, you’ll get the last 3 transactions you made with Proton, the reader EPCI number, battery level and embedded software version. ...

Small news to share my amazement for CSS: changing the design of my website took me around 15 minutes (based on a Ganesh Gunasegaran’s initial template). The content didn’t change. Only the way “semantic elements” are displayed was changed (+ some minor adaptations, of course). Et voilÃ! :-) Next step: adapt this blog design to my website design (I won’t do it right now).