Month: January 2007

Lancement du blog de Josef Zisyadis [fr]

[en] The site (blog, of course!) of my first political client, Josef Zisyadis is now live. Interested to see where it will go!

Il y a quelques mois, un ami commun a proposé à l’équipe de Josef Zisyadis de faire appel à mes services pour la mise en place d’un blog. En effet, Josef Zisyadis et son équipe désiraient utiliser efficacement internet dans le cadre de sa campagne pour les élections.

On s’est rencontrés, on a parlé, on m’a proposé un mandat (payé), je l’ai accepté. On a organisé quelques demi-journées de formation “De l’importance d’une formation blogs, en vidéo.”, de réflexion stratégique, de bataillage avec WordPress et divers serveurs. J’ai trouvé Josef Zisyadis et les membres de son équipe tout à fait réceptifs à ce nouveau média et je pense qu’ils sauront en tirer parti.

Donc, aujourd’hui — enfin, cette nuit — nous avons rendu le blog/nouveau site public. Comme vous pouvez le voir, cela fait déjà un petit moment qu’il est alimenté de billets et de contenus divers. Vous noterez également qu’il contient le contenu plus “classique” d’un site internet (question que me posent souvent mes clients: “mais si je fais un blog… je peux aussi avoir un vrai site?”): une page de contact, une biographie, une page Presse/Caricatures, etc. Aussi, pour les amateurs, une collection de textes divers, poésies et recettes de cuisine…

La navigation dans le site n’est malheureusement pas tout à fait aussi bonne qu’on l’aurait souhaité (et même, qu’on ne l’avait prévu): une incompabilité d’humeur de dernière minute entre le serveur hébergeant le site et K2, le thème WordPress (entendre “le look”) que nous avons utilisé comme base pour le design du blog. On va tenter d’y remédier, mais pour le moment, ce n’est malheureusement pas aussi bien que cela pourrait l’être, mais au moins on en est conscients 😉

Comme je ne pouvais pas être présente à la conférence de presse donnée aujourd’hui, j’ai préparé une petite séquence vidéo. J’ai demandé à Thierry aka James s’il pouvait me filmer — et il a fait même plus, vu qu’il m’a “fait parler” à coup de questions. Résultat: une interview d’environ sept minutes, où je parle de mon implication dans le projet Z-blogue et de l’utilité des blogs en politique, de façon générale. Donc, merci Thierry, et filez écouter (y’a pas grand-chose à voir) la vidéo si vous voulez en savoir un peu plus!

Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in wp-capabilities.php: Case Cracked! [en]

[fr] Le problème avec wp-capabilities.php qui fait qu'on peut se retrouver "exfermé" (enfermé dehors) de son blog WordPress (typiquement en cas de changement de serveur) semble avoir sa source dans le contenu du champ wp_user_roles dans la table wp_options. En particulier, pour la version française, "Abonné" est un rôle d'utilisateur, et en cas de problèmes d'encodage MySQL, le caractère accentué sera corrompu, causant ainsi l'erreur.

Il suffit de remplacer le caractère fautif dans PhpMyAdmin, et on retrouve l'accès à son blog. Bon, reste ensuite à régler les questions d'encodage... mais c'est déjà ça!

Finally. At last. Endlich. Enfin.

Once more, while trying to transfer a WordPress installation from one server to another, I found myself facing the dreaded problem which locks me out of my WordPress install with a rather cryptic message:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/user/wp/wp-includes/capabilities.php on line 31

(Your lineage may vary.)

What happens is that WordPress cannot read user roles, and therefore, even though your password is accepted, you get a message telling you that you’re not welcome in the wp-admin section:

Vous n’avez pas les droits suffisants pour accéder à cette page.

Or, in English:

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

A quick search on the WordPress forums told me that I was not alone in my fight with wp-capabilities.php, but that many problems had not been resolved, and more importantly, that suggested solutions often did not work for everyone.

I’ve bumped into this problem a couple of times before, and I knew that it was linked to encoding problems in the database. (I’ve had my share of encoding problems: once, twice, thrice — “once” being on of the most-visited posts on this blog, by the way, proof if needed that I’m not alone with mysql encoding issues either.)

I’ll leave the detailed resolution of how to avoid/cure the MySQL problems later (adding
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); to wp-db.php as detailed in this thread, and as zedrdave had already previously told me to do — should have listened! — should prevent them). So anyway, adding that line to my working WordPress install showed me that the problem was not so much in the database dumping process than in the way WordPress itself interacted with the database, because the dreaded wp-capabilities.php problem suddenly appeared on the original blog.

Now, this is where I got lucky. Browsing quickly through the first dozen or so of forum threads about wp-capability.php problems, this response caught my eye. It indicated that the source of the problem was the content of the wp_user_roles field (your prefix may vary). In this case, it had been split on more than one line.

I headed for the database, looked at the field, and didn’t see anything abnormal about it at first. All on one line, no weird characters… just before giving up, I moved the horizontal scrollbar to the end of the line, and there — Eurêka! I saw it.

Abonné

“Contributor”, in French, is “abonné”, with an accent. Accent which got horribly mangled by the MySQL problems which I’ll strive to resolve shorty. Mangled character which caused the foreach() loop to break in wp-capabilities.php, which caused the capabilities to not be loaded, which caused me to be locked out of my blog.

So, in summary: if you’re locked out of your blog and get a warning/error about wp-capabilities and some invalid foreach() loop thingy, head for PhpMyAdmin, and look carefully through the wp_user_roles field in the wp_options table. If it’s split over two or more lines, or contains funky characters, you have probably found the source of your problem.

Good luck!

Back to San Francisco? [en]

[fr] Je tente de prévoir un peu mes voyages. Angleterre en principe début avril, puis pourquoi pas San Francisco en mai-juin? Par contre, je peine à trouver un vol au-dessous de $1000 -- si vous avez des tuyaux, c'est volontiers. Peut-être je devrais viser l'automne?

I’m thinking about my travel plans right now. Looks like UK (Leeds + London) beginning of April (awaiting confirmation from family and kind hosts). I started looking at flights to San Francisco, for example in May-June, but I can’t find anything under $1000 (GVA-SFO).

Is it because May-June is too close to now? Am I not looking at the right airlines? Should I aim for autumn instead?

Any advice/tips welcome.

Steph+Suw Podcast: First! [en]

[fr] Suw et moi avons enfin enregistré le fameux podcast-conversation dont nous parlons depuis notre première rencontre, en mai 2004. C'est en anglais et c'est assez long, mais on s'en est pas trop mal sorties pour une première!

Each time Suw and I meet, we talk about recording a podcast together. We met for the first time in June 2004, and if I believe the Podcasting and Beercasting Thoughts I wrote a little less than a year later, that was indeed when we first started talking about using audio to record conversations.

I’m definitely sure that we talked about it at BlogTalk 2. I don’t think Skype was in the air then, but we talked about hooking up our phones to some audio recording device, and left it at that. At that time, people were getting excited about “audioblogging” (did we already talk about “podcasting” back then? It seems a long, long time ago) and we agreed that were audio really became interesting was in rendering conversations. (See the Podcasting and Beercasting Thoughts post for more about that.)

Anyway, now we have Skype, and Call Recorder (which reminds me, I need to write up a post about the ethics of recording audio conversations), and we finally got round to doing it. It’s a bit long-ish (40 minutes — not surprising if you know us!) and has been slightly edited in that respect, but honestly, it’s not too bad for a start.

Here is roughly what we talked about.

  • San Francisco, web geek paradise
  • City sizes (see this London-SF superimposition map)
  • Segways
  • The cat/geek Venn diagram (Twitter error message)
  • I really want a Wii
  • IRC screen names
  • The difficulties of pronouncing S-u-w
  • When geeks name children: A unique identifier or anonymity?
  • Stalkers and geoinformation
  • Perceptions of security
  • Giving out your phone number and address, and personal boundaries
  • Airport security (background…)
  • Risk and expectations of risk
  • Death, religion, and the medical industry
  • Naming our podcast… something about blondes, apparently
  • Clueless marketeering from the Fabric nightclub in London
  • The repercussions of having a blog that people think is influential (even if
    you don’t think it is)

Let us know what you liked and didn’t like! View Suw’s post about this podcast.

Rédaction d'infos pour ciao.ch [en]

Mon travail de rédaction pour le thème internet de ciao.ch, un site d’information et de prévention destiné aux adolescents, avance plutôt bien.

L’association CIAO m’avait contactée il y a déjà bien longtemps, mais entre un job d’enseignante à quasi-plein temps à l’époque, des rechutes de TMS, et les débuts un peu sur les chapeaux de roue de ma vie de consultante indépendante, le rédaction a vraiment commencé au compte-gouttes. Mais là, depuis quelque temps, on a trouvé un rythme de croisière à coups d’après-midis dans leurs bureaux et de nombreux litres de thé de menthe assaisonnés de quelques gâteaux et chocolats.

Si vous avez un moment — et surtout si vous connaissez les adolescents de près ou de loin — votre avis sur ce qui est déjà en ligne m’intéresse grandement. Est-ce que ça vous paraît adapté, pertinent, adéquat?

Le thème est loin d’être complet. Seront mis en ligne prochainement des chapitres tournant plus autour de la “sécurité informatique”: virus, phishing, spam. Le reste attend d’être rédigé…

Bloggy Friday 2 février (dans deux semaines!) [fr]

[en] Meeting of local bloggers in Lausanne, Friday 2nd February.

Eh oui, le temps file. Avant d’aller s’amuser à Lift, venez nous rejoindre pour le premier deuxième Bloggy Friday de l’année.

Au risque de me répéter (comme chaque mois) le Bloggy Friday est l’occasion de se manger une bonne fondue (ou autre chose) entre blogueurs de la région, le tout dans une ambiance informelle, détendue et sympathique.

C’est ouvert à tous. Il suffit d’annoncer sa venue (ici ou bien sur upcoming.org), je compte les participants et je réserve le bistrot (Café de l’Evêché), et le tour est joué!

Le Bloggy Friday de janvier février (arghl!!!) aura donc lieu vendredi 2 février à 20h00 au Café de L’Evêché, à Lausanne. Je me réjouis de vous y voir!

Why I Got Lost in LeWeb3 Videos [en]

[fr] Petit tour des problèmes d'ergonomie qui ont été la source de mon billet précédent concernant vpod.tv.

Right, I’ve somewhat figured out how I managed to get lost in the LeWeb3 videos and not find things like permalinks or slider bars.

When you’re on the fullscreen page, no controls are clearly visible. Where is the pause button? There is “launch your TV” (tried that, but never go the answer to what it does, too slow to load for me) but that’s about it. When you click on individual videos, the URL never varies from http://my.vpod.tv/channel.html. Well, I poked around as I could, and gave up.

One thing I had overlooked was the four little icons near the bottom of the video which is playing (you can click on all the photos I’m showing here to access notes and extra info):

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-navigation

Which one would you click on? Well, after I really started to suspect there must be a way out, I tried them all. The third one was the most interesting to me:

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-menu-buttons

To be fair, when you mouseover the buttons, some text is displayed. For example, text for the four buttons in the first photograph is “Sound”, “Video Greeting”, “Menu”, “ShowHide”. Unfortunately, you do have to mouseover to get to that information, as the icons themselves are not all self-explanatory. I definitely do not expect to find a menu listing of useful stuff I might want to do under the vpod.tv logo.

One shouldn’t expect a site user to drag his mouse over every portion of the screen which might be clickable to see what it is. Scanning available options is a job meant for the eye, not the hand. To make matters worse here, the mouseover text takes roughly twice the time a normal “title” tooltip would take to appear (on my system). A good two seconds. Who knows — I might even have mouseovered those icons and come to the conclusion there were no tooltips, when they didn’t appear after the expected delay.

The problem repeats itself. Look at the vertical bar of icons in the screenshot above. Have a guess. What do you expect them to do? Well, here is what the tooltips say, from top to bottom: “Share”, “Get link”, “RSS feed”, “Info”, “Flag it”, “Help”, and “About us…” — you’ll notice that the same vpod.tv logo is used for the “About us…” link as for the “Menu” one. It makes much more sense for “About us…”

In short, rather poor usability for essential navigation items and functionalities on a page like this.

Now, I’m still hunting for a permalink to the video I’m watching, remember? “Get link” sounds like a good one, though “Info” is tempting too (chances I’d click on that directly if I start mouseovering from the bottom, which would be logical as that is where my cursor was).

20070121-vpod-fullscreen-getlink-dialog

Bingo! There’s my permalink. Let’s click on it.

20070121-vpod-video-page-info

Well, that worked as expected. I get to see the video, I can display useful information about it, and I can even download it. Nice. The only sad part is that the URL in the address bar has changed from http://portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/69391 to http://portal.vpod.tv/#page:player. What a pity!

A slider bar appears when I put my mouse over the video, and there is a pause/play button. I’m still not sure if such features are available in the fullscreen version and I couldn’t find them, or simply not available. The slider works, but unfortunately doesn’t tell me which moment of the video I’m aiming for, so it’s a bit hit-and-miss if, say, you want to jump to minute 8 of my video to hear me try to talk (hint, hint).

So, I started watching my panel. The sound is good, and that’s pretty cool (as I heard that it was almost unintelligable during the conference for people who were listening in on the stream). Unfortunately, somebody must have been a little overenthusiastic about compression and the small amount of key frames, because LeWeb3 speakers seem to all have contracted a really horrible skin disease which makes unsightly blemishes appear on their skin at regular intervals:

20070121-vpod-compression-illness 20070121-vpod-compression-illness-scott

Seems like Scott Rafer and I should both go and see a dermatologist pretty quickly, doesn’t it?

Vidéos LeWeb3 [fr]

[en] LeWeb3 videos are online. Can't use them. Gah.

Ah oui! j’oubliais. Parlant LeWeb3, les vidéos sont a disposition — mais arghl! je proteste:

  • pas possible de télécharger les vidéos pour les voir offline Si, on peut.
  • pas possible de faire un lien vers une vidéo particulière Sisi, on peut.
  • pas possible d’avancer ou de sauter à un point défini dans une vidéo Sisi.
  • je ne trouve pas la vidéo de la conférence de danah
  • le plein écran, franchement, si ça veut dire “pixellisé et plein d’artefacts”, je m’en passe — je préfère petit et net à grand et flou (voir ce que fait PodTech en comparaison)

Je suis peut-être bicle, hein…

(Ma table ronde est la… 18ème vidéo environ, si j’ai bien compté: “Have communities replaced the Media”.)

Edit 21.01: bon, donc, merci de m’avoir répondu. Je vais faire une petite enquête interne pour tenter de saisir pourquoi j’ai raté tout ça!

Interview "LeWeb3" en ligne [fr]

[en] Interview (in French) I gave at the end of LeWeb3 last month in Paris.

Pour mes lecteurs francophones qui s’inquiéteraient (comme Isa) de la récente anglicisation dramatique de mon blog, je tiens à vous rassurer: je change de langue comme de chaussette, et des fois je porte la même paire pendant un peu trop longtemps. OK, mauvais exemple, mais vous voyez l’idée. En l’occurence, entre voyages en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis, ma vie a été très anglophone ces derniers temps.

Tiens, ce serait intéressant d’analyser (pas trop d’idée comment pour le moment) la répartition du français et de l’anglais dans mes billets au fil du temps.

Mais bon, pour le moment, je voulais simplement vous signaler la mise en ligne de l’interview que j’ai donnée à Thierry Weber à la fin de la conférence LeWeb3 à Paris le mois dernier.

J’ai des tas de choses à bloguer, et je vous promets que certaines en tous cas seront en français!

Edit: Oups, j’ai commencé par publier me plaintes concernant les vidéos LeWeb3 dans ce billet avant d’en faire un séparé. C’est mal! Désolée.

Five Things You Probably Didn't Know About Me [en]

[fr] Cinq choses que vous ne saviez probablement pas à mon sujet. Un petit jeu qui tourne dans la blogosphère.

This is way overdue, but I have a guilty conscience after having been tagged by Jonas, Ric, and Dannie. I think the main reason I haven’t yet published this post (well, I have now, but look at the dates I was tagged upon and you’ll understand) is the difficulty in figuring out how I can tell a very varied audience (which includes family, strangers, IRC buddies, close friends online and off, googlers, passing acquaintances, work relations and all the others) things that “they” probably don’t know about me.

So. I’ve had to conjure up a target audience. Let’s say the target audience are people, online or off, who know me somewhat but not that well and have maybe not known me for many many years. My close friends and family will probably know the five things I’m bringing up here, and none of them are “secrets”. Some of these facts are even already “out there” if you care to look for them.

That said, here goes.

  1. I have a 21cm-long scar. I got it for my sixth birthday, and it beats all the other birthday presents I ever got. (Came with a price, though.)

  2. My middle name is Jane. I like having a middle name, and I quite like the one that was chosen for me. This hasn’t always been the case.

  3. My mother died of cancer when I was 10. It was only about fifteen years later that I managed to ask my dad which type of cancer she had, and details about her illness.

  4. I usually start writing my posts at the beginning, work straight down, tag and categorize, and hit publish. I rarely proof-read or re-read.

  5. My “pre-bunny” nickname was Gummywabbit. People kept thinking I was a guy, and I got sick of it.

What I chose to list here obviously says a sixth thing about me: I have a tendancy to get caught up in extremes. Too dramatic or too futile, too much or nothing at all. I work hard towards exploring the middle ground, but as you can see, I’m not always successful. Lucky you anyway, you got sixth things for the price of five!

I’m not tagging anyone myself (peer-pressure etc), but I’ll be happy to tag the first five people who ask me in the comments. And anyway, anybody is free to take up the meme and post their one — aren’t they?