Websites on Jean-Etienne's blog

Trend in COVID-19 cases by Zip code in Maryland

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:43:35 +0000

Since the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) started to display number of COVID-19 cases for each Zip code in its dashboard, I was wondering how to display this information in a nice way. The MDH display the information as a map - very nice but it lacks from where each Zip code came from: is the number of cases increasing or decreasing?

Following on my busy chart with the evolution of all Zip codes (and highlighting just one of them - that may not be the one you are interested in, see previous post), I created a simple dashboard where you can select the Zip code you are interested in and see how cases are evolving. You can play with it here: https://jepoirrier.shinyapps.io/md-coronavirus-zip-app/ (screenshot below). Enjoy!

Jadoo and static website generators

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 19:03:10 +0000

Coming back from holidays, I fired my RSS reader and, among many interesting posts, I found this one from Smashing Magazine about static website generators being the Next Big Thing on the web (and a follow-up deep-diving into four of them).

The first paper describes how the web started as something static, became all dynamic and is progressively coming back to something more static, at least for some specific tasks. The interesting thing is that the author also describes pros and cons of each stage and why the web jumped to the next level.

Privacy -vs- information conservation time

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 11:27:42 +0000

In my opinion privacy issues are a by-product of information conservation times reaching infinite.

For centuries and more humans were used to their own type of memory. When information reaches the brain, it is stored in short-term memory. When relevant and/or repeated, it is gradually consolidated into long-term memory (this is roughly the process).

The invention of oral transmission of knowledge, written transmission (incl. Gutenberg) and, to a certain extend, internet, all these successively increased the duration of retention of information shared with others. The switch from oral to written transmission of knowledge also sped up the dissemination of information as well as its fixed, un-(or less-) interpreted nature.

Is it so difficult to maintain a free RSS reader?

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 12:04:10 +0000

A few months ago Google decided to retire its Google Reader (it stopped working on July 1st, 2013). As it was simple, effective and good-looking, a lot of people complained about this demise. A few days ago The Old Reader, one of the most successful replacement for Google Reader, also announced it will close its gates, only to keep early registered users. And today Feedly, another successful alternative, announced it is introducing a pro version at 5.00 USD per month.

Happy New Year 2012!

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:08:30 +0000

I wish you a very happy New Year 2012! Lots of things happened since 6 years (since I started this blog) and lots of things happened in this last year too. I’m sure it is the same in your life. I hope you will have lots of new discoveries in 2012 as well as a healthy and strong life, full of happiness!

If I look back, the top 5 posts this year were:

No more Read More!

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:52:55 +0000

Just a little post to write how I hate those “Read More” sentences in blog post!

[caption id=“attachment_1152” align=“aligncenter” width=“497” caption=“Grrr, again a disguised “Read More”! This post has a very low information content as presented.”] [/caption]

“Read More” is a way to cut your blog post in two: one part that will be shown in your blog RSS flux, on your front page and another part that will only be read by those who click on the “Read More”. A variant of this is the […] (as shown above).

An update on JoVE

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:34:55 +0000

Three years ago, I wrote about JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. JoVE was a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. I recently discovered that since 2009, JoVE is now just a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. You can debate at length on whether JoVE was Open Access (as I thought) or not. I just think it’s sad although I understand their motives: in a recent exchange with them, they wrote they “handle most production of our content [themselves] and it is a very very costly operation”.

Aaron Swartz versus JSTOR

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:18:22 +0000

Aaron Swartz, a 24-year old hacker, was recently indicted on data theft charges for downloading over 4 million documents from JSTOR, a US-based online system for archiving academic journals. Mainstream media ( Reuters, Guardian, NYT, Time, …) reported this with a mix of facts and fiction. I guess that the recent attacks of hacking groups on well-known websites and the release of data they stole on the internet gave to this story some spice.

Facebook -vs- Twitter short message usage?

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:56:55 +0000

The other evening, we started an interesting discussion with some colleagues about usage of Twitter and Facebook. Obviously most people in the room were (and are) using Facebook and knew about the feature (“status”) allowing you to share text messages with your friends (and the whole world). Less people were aware of Twitter, although is also offers the possibility to share text messages with your friends (and the whole world too). I was wondering why most (if not all) people in the room were registered on Facebook but almost none of them were registered (or even using) Twitter. Do not even mention Identi.ca, the open source alternative to Twitter.

Is there a life after delicious?

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:12:21 +0000

Delicious is " a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet". I extensively use(d) it and I think it’s one of the very good tools Yahoo! (its parent company) has to offer on the web for the moment (along with Flickr and the currency converter). I was thus very disappointed to read persisting rumours that Yahoo! will shut down Delicious. And I’m not totally reassured by the official comment from the Delicious blog: " No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive".

Browser hardware acceleration issue?

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:57:44 +0000

Browser hardware acceleration is meant to render websites faster by allowing the graphics card (its GPU) to directly display “things” (videos, animation, canvas, compositing, etc.) on the screen. By bypassing software rendering systems, lots of websites seem to render faster. All major browsers jumped on this: Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera (post of 2008!).

I understand that enhancing the user’s experience while surfing the web is something that can be interesting. Hardware acceleration opens the door to unseen compositions, to new types of animations, to new kind of applications. Directly in your favourite browser.

Software license and use of end-product

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 23:37:29 +0000

In one of his buzz, Cédric Bonhomme drew my attention on the Highcharts javascript library. This library can produce beautiful charts of various types with some Ajax interaction. The only negative point imho is that it is dual-licensed and all cases deprive you from your freedom:

there is a first Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License: you can use the library for your non-profit website (see details on the licensing page) ;
there is a commercial license for any other website.

Now what if we only need the end-product, i.e. the resulting chart, in a commercial environment? What is covered by the license is just the re-use of the javascript library in a website, not the resulting chart. If a company choose to use Highcharts internally to render some beautiful charts and just publish (*) the resulting image, I guess they can just download the library and use it (* by “publishing”, I mean: publish a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal, not publishing on its website). On the other hand, no one ever questioned the fact commercial companies have licenses for all the proprietary software they use to produce anything else, from charts to statistical data, just because they publish results with these software as tools. So the “trick” here would be that, by changing the medium on which you display end-results (from website to paper, even if it’s in PDF on the journal website), you can use the free-to-download license, even in a commercial environment, for an article from a commercial company. I’m not sure this was the original intention of Highslide Software.

A new website for Open Clip Art Library

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:56:48 +0000

A small post to welcome the new website for the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL). The OCAL was created more than 6 years ago and now has more than 24.000 vector illustrations in the Public Domain (in the SVG format that can be read by most graphic software). For me, a major improvement is the direct visualisation of thumbnails. In the previous version of the website, it was indeed painfull to open each result of a search in order to see if the illustration was what one was looking for. I’m using the Library since a few years and I am always amazed at the quality of most illustrations in the science and biology sections (the two sections I use the most).

Presentation rockstar!

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:56:25 +0000

20040 views for my Gemvid presentation at FOSDEM 2009
100451 views for my random field presentation
200418 views for my OpenOffice.org Impress presentation

It’s good to be considered as a presentation rockstar (even if it’s an April fools joke).

I can't read my blog

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:47:36 +0000

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.

New website for the CNCM

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:07:29 +0000

One of the two labs where I’m working, the Center for Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology, has updated its website. You can see it here and browse its growing content. And this time, I did nothing (a company built the website for us).

OpenSocial, a step further towards a "society of social networks"

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:24:27 +0000

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …).

Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to:

Belgian finance public service website :-(

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:08:50 +0000

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 …

Mapping cameras in Liege

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:26:42 +0000

A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map.

Under attack

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 14:07:22 +0000

Short message for spammers: you lose your time trying to add irrelevant comments on this blog since no comment is published before I agree so. Moreover, I activated Akismet spam filter since this morning

… But I doubt spam robots read notices where they put spam comments.

Although I disallowed comments (and even pings) on some posts, I felt something strange this morning: more and more comments had to be moderated on this blog. By default, no comment are directly published. If the comment is relevant (even if the author has a different opinion than mine), I publish the comment (1 click). Otherwise, I delete the comment (another click) and disallow comments and pings (human contributors can still send me their comments by e-mail and I’ll publish them). From 1.50pm to 2.50pm (some minutes ago), I received 153 spam comments. Sorry guys, unless you found a serious flaw in this blog engine, comments will still be moderated by a human who dislike spam.

New website design

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:40:45 +0000

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).

First trace for OpenStreetMap

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 22:41:26 +0000

OpenStreetMap is a “project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I thought it was worth participating and more documented than the UPCT project. So I got a Locosys NaviGPS GT-11 and used it for the first time on the way to FOSDEM (and back). I did a small mistake by taking an interval between points of 30s: on a highway, at 120km/h, 30s means 1km and the road direction can change a lot. When I’ll have more time, the next step will be to do some edition and mark roads, highways, interesting landmarks, etc. Stay tuned …

Ruby France logo proposals

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:40:41 +0000

I couldn’t find sleep tonight (*) so I did two small variations on the Ruby official logo for Ruby France, since they are looking for a new logo (**). Double-clic to enlarge, single-clic to reduce back to the small images (***) :

I also like Greg’s proposal.

(*) it happens very often these days
(**) No, I don’t know Ruby
(***) Doesn’t work if javascript isn’t enabled in your browser (usually it is) + Internet Explorer doesn’t correctly render the transparency ; please use a real browser instead

How to fix Error 500 (or 302) in WordPress

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:03:55 +0000

After having updated WordPress to version 2.0.5, you can find some Error 500 (or 302) when writing new posts (you’ll fortunately not lose any content). Mark Jaquith wrote a simple plug-in to fix this little annoyance. Upload it, activate it and you’re free from this small bug.

Simple Sitemap.xml builder

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 23:40:45 +0000

In a recent post, Alexandre wrote about web indexing and pointed to a nice tool for webmaster: the sitemap. The Sitemap Protocol “allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling” (since it’s a Google creation, it seems that only Google is using it, according to Alexandre).

If you have a shell access to your webserver and Python on it, Google has a nice Python script to automatically create your sitemap.

Search for images by sketching

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:30:28 +0000

On his blog, Laurent wanted to know who is this guy. I though it was an interesting starting point to see how good is Retrievr, “an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch”.

Although my drawing skills really needs to be improved (and their drawing tools more refined - always blame the others for your weaknesses ;-) ), a first sketch gives some interesting results (see screenshot below): 7 retrieved photos (44%) show a b/w human face in “frontal view” (if you count the dog, it’s even 8 correct images).

The Belgian press is fighting for its rights (really?)

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:20:50 +0000

A lot of blogs, Belgian or not, are talking about the fact that the Belgian French-speaking press (lead by CopiePress, a Belgian rights management company) successfully sued Google in Belgium over indexing, author rights, content copying, etc. The full order is available on the Belgian Google homepage (in French).

I am not a lawyer. So I read the order:

CopiePress wanted the Belgian court to look at the lawfullness of Google News and Googgle Cache services, according to the Belgian law
CopiePress wanted Google to remove all links to any data from CopiePress clients
CopiePress wanted Google to publish the order in its first page on their Belgian website

So, CopiePress won the first case (the case will be heard again in appeal). I assume that the Belgian justice department is doing its job. So, let us consider that Google broke the Belgian law with their services. If you want to know more about the legal stuff, P. Van den Bulck, E. Wery and M. de Bellefroid wrote an article about which Belgian laws Google seems to have broken (in French).

Digital access to the ULg libraries

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 11:36:35 +0000

Although the University of Liege ( ULg) network of libraries webpage is very old and ugly, the network is starting to use new, technologically advanced tools to allow digital access to its content (articles, books, thesis and other media). Three tools are available since a short time:

Source gives access to all media currently available in libraries (it replaces the Telnet-based Liber, for those who used it before). Source is based on Aleph from ExLibris, a proprietary software.
PoPuPS is a publication platform for scientific journals from the ULg and the FSAGx. PoPuPS is based on Lodel CMS, a free (GPL) web publishing software. Articles in this database seem to be Open Access although no precise licence is defined (and some articles look strange : see the second picture in this geological article).
BICTEL/e is an institutional repository of Ph.D. thesis. It seems to be developed internally by the UCL

With these tools, the ULg try to catch the Open Access movement. Source is already connected to other types of databases but it seems that PoPuPS and BICTEL are not (yet) connected to cross-references systems like DOI nor using standardised metadata like in Eprints.

How to fight spam in a wiki?

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:35:50 +0000

On Friday, having to wait for a librarian to fetch the old articles I wanted to read, I spent a few minutes removing spam from the AEL wiki. This form of spam is very easy to spot because it’s always the same : HTML tags enclosing 30 links and the text linking to these sites have well-known spam, adult-oriented words in it (see the end of MsSecurity page where I didn’t had time to remove spam).

Links: Original and GEGL

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:36:12 +0000

While looking for something totally different (what exactly is the Mascot score? Partial answer here), I found the Original photo gallery, a two-parts tool to get digital photos on the web. This tool could be interesting for the family website I plan to build. Since my hosting company enabled PHP Safe Mode, I cannot use most on-line gallery tools. Original seems to be an ideal solution because all the treatments are done off-line, on my own PC. Then everything is loaded on the website. Still, it’s not a static gallery like the one Picasa does (for example).

Some thoughts about a family website

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:44:42 +0000

I am currently building a family website. Here are some requirements:

services will be based on existing free software (I don’t have time to develop a complete solution)
first service provided: a news service (I don’t know if it will be a forum or a shared blog)
second service provided: a photo gallery
all this should be on a shared host server (so it should work with PHP safe mode enabled ; I don’t have time to maintain a dedicated server)
all this will allow everyone in the family to add elements, it will need very little maintenance and it should also be fast
an e-mail address will be provided to everyone (all serious providers give e-mail addresses)

Although I am running WordPress for this blog, although a friend of mine is running DotClear, I am tempted to try b2evolution (blog), TextPattern (blog and more) or even Vanilla (forum) for the first service (blog). What is interesting is that these tools are localized in French, they allow multiple author to write and, finally, they have an anti-spam service “out-of-the-box”.

KEGG can help you ...

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:32:50 +0000

… at least if you are a biologist interested in genes, genomes and pathways. KEGG is the acronym for “Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes”. I’ve found it while looking for genes involved in the circadian rhythm and in the long-term potentiation and depression. Of course, for a biologist strongly interested in computerised treatment of biological data, it’s a bit disappointing that these pathways in the KEGG PATHWAY Database are manually drawn but, well, it remains a very usefull tool to continue and digg further in the comprehension of these mechanisms.

Changing the hosting company for poirrier.be

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:22:59 +0000

I am changing the hosting company for my main website ( poirrier.be). I am leaving Amen because they became very costly (more than 80 € per year for only 50Mb). After considering B-one (problem: they forbid videos on your website, even if you are the producer), I finally chose Online (a little bit more than 30 € per year for 500Mb, they are not the cheapest but I know they are reliable). In less than an afternoon, DNS from Online to the university were already up-to-date. I hope that the transition will be as transparent as possible for everyone.

New stylesheets for my website

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 01:00:18 +0000

Since a long time, I decided to provide a better stylesheet and organization for my website (the previous one was too simple but quite ugly). Now, you have a menu on the left and a RSS feed for the last changes. In fact, I use two stylesheets: a “big” one for displaying pages on your screen and a very small one that your browser will call if you decide to print a page (it removes the menu - useless when printing a page - and also removes most of the fancy styles). It is still simple but I hope it’s more beautiful.

Some links, after the week-end

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 22:40:30 +0000

The Linux Distribution Chooser: after a kind of survey, they give you a Linux distribution that can suit you. In my case, they were right since they gave me the advice to use the Fedora Core (that I am currently using).
Booh, a static Web-Album generator (a French news from the author)
CImg, a C++ template image processing library
Do-it-yourself LED lightning for the house
The Warning label generator :-)

During this week-end, I’ve met a lot of people but I didn’t worked a lot (and my boss is asking for some results asap …).

Welcome back!

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 09:19:55 +0000

I am back to my blog. Since I am interested in many things, I would like to share them with you: neuroscience (mainly memory stuff), Open Access to scientific litterature, Open Source software and computer science. I see this blog like an on-line notepad, for small notes, thoughts, etc. And I am sometimes too lazy to publish them on my own website.

Mplayer install for FC3

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 10:00:42 +0000

I had a problem with the default video player in the Fedora Core 3, Totem (it couldn’t initialize a Gstream object or something like that). Instead of fixing it, I decided to install MPlayer and I discovered two interesting websites:

GnomeFiles, a GTK+ (Gnome) software repository
Grey Sector, a RPM software repository that also has the RPMs for MPlayer with codecs, skins, etc.

While we are talking about MPlayer, they need a new server: if you have some money to spend, please participate. And, about Gnome, the new issue of the Gnome Journal is out …