Posts

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: ...

Thanks to the free software project lilURL and one of its implementation at ur1, the problem with TinyURL is solved. Thanks Alexandre for the info. :-) So now http://www.poirrier.be/~jean-etienne/ can be short ( http://ur1.ca/04d) and free at the same time: free to use, and free to look at source code. Since I’m never fully satisfied (hmm, never say never), the next step would be an implementation of some “intelligence” in these short URLs (see Udi’s post). And since I never have time (or less and less), I’m a bit sad not to have that time to code a solution (which should be quite easy).

The problem with TinyURL.com is that its source code is not free. And I can’t find any other open services/projects that offers the same features (1). I realized this when trying to add a long link in a Twitter update (2, 3). A maximum of 140 characters doesn’t allow you to add much text around. And it seems that a lot of Twitter users are using the TinyURL.com service which allows you to translate a small URL it gives you to the full, “regular” URL. For example, http://www.poirrier.be/~jean-etienne/ (37 characters) becomes http://tinyurl.com/6kq84z (25 characters). ...

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 … ...

A few days ago, I was sad to see that the Association Electronique Libre (AEL) website was down and only replaced by two measly tags. For those who didn’t know it: The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society. The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information. (from an old copy of the AEL website) ...

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. ...

This is the “shortcut” sequence of keys in order to get the list of changes in a text document in OpenOffice.org. It works very nicely with MS-Word documents, a useful feature when you are obliged to exchange work with colleagues, mentors, etc. who only use the proprietary word processor. IMHO, the only problem is the way the list of changes is shown to the end-user in OpenOffice.org: as in other word processor software, changes are underlined in a different color for each contributor and a small hint tells you what happened to the hovered block of text, who did it and when; unlike other word processors, you can’t accept/refuse any change by right-clicking on it (you have to do it from the separate window). I do not find this intuitive and, sometimes, annoying … ...

Finally, a seventh scientific paper is published by the Poirrier-Falisse. After a huge batch of articles from Nandini, here is my second paper: Poirrier J.E., Guillonneau F., Renaut J., Sergeant K., Luxen A., Maquet P. and Leprince P.: " Proteomic changes in rat hippocampus and adrenals following short-term sleep deprivation" Proteome Science, 2008, 6(1):14 doi: 10.1186/1477-5956-6-14 Very briefly, in this study we show the influence of 4 hours of prolonged wakefulness in rats hippocampus and adrenals proteome. As usual, this paper is published in an Open Access journal. Here is my updated BibTeX file (and I also updated Nandini’s BibTeX file). ...

When you are used to work on a computer with GNU/Linux and are obliged to process your files on a MS-Windows system for some time, the GnuWin32 project can come in handy. They provide a lot of command-line tools from the GNU collection (sed, iconv, tar, bzip2, … see the whole list of packages they provide). This evening, I needed to convert a lot of files from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 (because it seems no decent Windows text editor can correctly translate text between these two encodings). Apparently, the GnuWin32 project removed the recode tool. But it can be easily replaced by iconv. With iconv, it’s done with: ...