Month: August 2006

Getting Rid of www [en]

[fr] Une recette pour faire disparaître magiquement ce satané "www" des noms de domaines que j'héberge...

I personally hate having “www” in front of a domain name. It’s redundant. If we’re visiting a website, we’re on the web anyway. It also brings no end of problems when people start writing for the web and creating links, because they think that what makes something a “website address” is the “www” in front if it, instead of “http://”. That’s how they end up with links like “http://example.com/www.yahoo.com” on their sites. But I digress.

On one of the sites I manage, we have a restricted members-only area. However, our users started reporting that when they used “www” in front of the domain name, they were being asked for the password twice. I tried myself, and I was simply asked for the password ad aeternam. Probably a server configuration glitch somewhere.

Anyway, I decided the simplest solution was to redirect all “www” requests to the non-www domain. I know I had that in place for CTTS at some point, but the setting must have got lost at some point. Instead of sticking rewrite rules in .htaccess as no-www.org suggests, I modified my vhost configuration slightly so that it looked like this:

ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /home/example/www/
ErrorLog logs/example-error
CustomLog logs/example-access combined



ServerName www.example.com
Redirect permanent / http://example.com/

Try it!

http://www.cafecafe.ch/

Many thanks to those who gave suggestions and nudged me along the way to this solution.

Culture Shock in Second Life [en]

[fr] Second Life est vraiment ressenti par ceux qui l'utilisent comme un espace physique. Preuve en est le sentiment de désorientation qui m'habite alors que je découvre cet espace -- sentiment très proche de celui qui a accompagné mes premiers jours un Inde: un choc culturel. On trouve également dans Second Life des problèmes de racisme. A mon avis, un terrain fertile pour mieux comprendre, par exemple, comment l'utilisation de jeux vidéos interactifs (comme WoW) peut agir sur nous.

After my first few hours inside Second Life, I realized that the confusion I was feeling was very similar to what I had experienced when I first arrived in India: I was suffering from a culture shock.

There were people all around me that looked like nothing I’d ever seen before. I had trouble communicating (I’d try to chat and I’d fly up in the air) and identifying what I saw in my surroundings. I didn’t know where to go. I read notes which mentioned places which ringed no bells. I just didn’t know what to do or where to start.

But what really rang the “culture shock” bells for me was that I was feeling anxious and afraid of the avatar-people around me. I feared somebody would pounce on me (well, my avatar, but by then the identification process had kicked in), or animate my avatar against my will, or start shouting obscene things at me. I felt pretty insecure and vulnerable amongst all these people with masks on their faces. I had no idea what to expect from them, just as I had no idea what to expect from people when I landed in India.

In India, I was afraid to go out by myself and explore. In Second Life, I get some of that feeling too. I’m afraid of ending up in “bad places”. Talk of griefers and guns makes me scared. So I tend to hang out in the New Citizens Plaza a lot. (Note: if you click on that URL, you’ll be shown where that place is on a map of Second Life. If you’re running Second Life, you can click on the “Teleport” button to go there. Doesn’t seem to work for me, though.) Then last night buridan showed me to Joi‘s island Kula (fun stuff there with merry-go-rounds and dancing floors).

The interesting point here is that I’m exploring Second Life space just as I do real physical geographical space. I find the same patterns in my behaviour. Same with activities that do not match anything in my life experience yet: flying, teleporting — I don’t tend to do these things much yet, just as it took me a while to start taking rickshaws on my own, queueing to get somebody else to photocopy (“Xerox”) documents for me, and fend off beggars efficiently.

Second Life is much more than “chat with graphics”. As I told my Grandma on the phone yesterday, when she asked me what on earth my last posts were about, it’s almost like an “internet inside the internet”. There are chatrooms in it, but they are informal and transient: put a few people in an open space, and if they gather and start talking, you have a chatroom-like atmosphere. But you can walk/fly/teleport away, do your hair or build/program stuff while the others talk. All that without leaving Second Life.

As a long-time IRC chatroom inhabitant, I see two major differences between what I’m used to and Second Life.

From the chatroom point of view, first of all, you cannot be in two places at once inside Second Life. On IRC, I sit in way more than one chatroom at a time, and it’s not uncommon for me to be conducting conversations in two or three chatrooms at once. In Second Life, you can send private messages in parallel to the “physical group conversation” you’re having, but you can’t have more than one group conversation.

Another “quality” of Second Life that strikes me is that it’s less “partial-attention-friendly” than text-only chat or instant messaging — or even web surfing. I find it very hard to do “something else” at the same time as I’m in Second Life. I think it has something to do with the graphical nature of Second Life, and how rich an environment it is. There’s enough material inside Second Life for partial attention as it is 🙂 — but also, the fact there is a graphical representation of the people you’re chatting with helps capture one’s attention. (Maybe I feel things this way because I’m new to Second Life, I might think differently later on.)

So, even though Second Life is an entirely on-the-computer thing, it clearly activates the pathways in our brains that we use to deal with physical space and beings. I’ve already said many times that the internet is broadly perceived as “space without space”, but it’s much more obvious in Second Life. Another element that shows us how “real” this virtual environment is to our brains is the presence of racism in Second Life. The topic came up when I was talking to a few “Furries” (ie, people with an animal-like avatar) who mentioned there were “furry areas” because Furries were often subject to discrimination from others. Even though we know the aspect of a Second Life citizen is a mask, it seems to have an impact on the way we relate to him/her.

This, to me, is related in some way to the fact that the learning experiences you make in interactive virtual worlds (think “video games”) affect your “non-game” life as well (think “flight simulators”). Which can bring us to question, for example, what effect it can have on one’s brain to spend a long number of hours “killing virtual people”. But that’s another chapter!

ZoneAlarm with coComment: Here's the Fix [en]

A bit over a week ago, Lee Hopkins, an early coComment adopter, reported that coComment had stopped tracking his conversations.

The very next day, Christophe was at it to try and find what was going on. He quickly noticed that Lee wasn’t in fact logged into the coComment server (although Lee had been logging in as asked). Finally the problem was narrowed down to a cookie setting in ZoneAlarm, a popular Windows firewall that Lee was using. (The details of the one-on-one troubleshooting that went on behind the scenes have not been disclosed, so that part of the story will be left to your imagination.)

So, if coComment seems to have stopped tracking your comments, and you are using ZoneAlarm, click the Site List tab in ZoneAlarm and check the “3rd party” cookie control for cocomment.com:

ZoneAlarm Cookie Settings

That should do it! Let us know if this was useful for you.

Disclaimer: I don’t have ZoneAlarm, so if you have trouble finding the screen depicted here, ask in the comments and we’ll get more precise explanations for you. Thanks to Lee for the screenshot.

technorati tags:, , , , , ,

Initially posted on the coComment blog.

First Steps in Second Life [en]

[fr] Mes premiers pas dans l'environnement Second Life. En trois sessions (hier soir, ce matin, et ce soir) j'ai tout de même réussi à changer d'habits et de coupe de cheveux. Je trouve l'apprentissage difficile. Ce n'est pas habituel pour moi de me sentir maladroite et submergée d'informations devant un ordinateur!

A few months ago, I signed up for Second Life. I spent one evening going through the “training” island, and then didn’t go back until yesterday (Second Life won’t run on my windows box).

Well, people, I’m finding it really hard. I’m not used to finding myself in an environment I have trouble using and which is confusing to me. Here’s the story of what I’ve been through and understood (or not) — with pictures, so that you can get an idea what’s going on in there if you’re not familiar with Second Life. I’m Stephanie Spicoli in Second Life — do get in touch in-world if you have an account.

One thing I’ve pretty much figured out is how to use the arrows to walk around. Sounds silly, heh? At first, I kept running into things. Now I’m getting used to turn left/right, and backwards/forwards.

Yesterday evening, I spent some time in the welcome zone — lots of weirdos there. A kind person helped me out a bit by giving me things and showing me some place I could go to which were nice.

Put this way, it sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. What happened is I started having all sorts of little pop-ups appearing on my screen. I didn’t know for the life of me what to do with them. First I clicked “Discard” on all of them because I didn’t know what they were. Then I had to ask her to give them to me again, and vaguely understood I had to keep them in my Inventory (that’s where you store things in Second Life, kind of like a big handbag). But I couldn’t figure out how to put them in there. Actually, I just had to close the pop-up windows, they were already in my inventory. Gosh. Thank goodness chatting is pretty similar (albeit somewhat laggy when it comes to typing feedback) and I’m at least familiar with that part.

Very confusing I then teleported to New Citizens Incorporated, a place which gives classes and has lots of free stuff for newcomers. You can see the shops on this photograph. I went into one of the shops, and the shelves were absolutely packed with all sorts of stuff which didn’t make much sense to me. Well, one type of item I understood was “clothes”. I wasn’t really interested in clothes at first, until I saw another person wearing exactly the same outfit as I was! I was still wearing the default outfit they give you in the training zone.

That set me off on my first mission: try to get some new clothes. Not as easy as it sounds. I managed to get a box or two of female clothes off a shelf (Cmd-click on the box, and choose buy). Of course, I tried to wear the clothes directly and ended up with a box on my head. Then I understood I had to go in my inventory, drag the box out of it so it was on the floor, Cmd-click on it, choose open, then go back into my inventory, look at what items of clothing were in there, Cmd-click the ones I wanted to wear and choose “wear” from the menu. Sounds like a lot of trouble just to change clothes, doesn’t it? Well, it was. It probably took me an hour. Needless to say that in the process I ended up in my underwear — though hopefully I managed to avoid being stark naked in the middle of NCI Plaza.

Classes you can take at New Citizens

At that point I was ready to try to do something with my hair. Somebody told me there were classes organized for new Second Life citizens, so I went to have a look at the program. Unfortunately there was no class named “dye your hair pink in less than 30 minutes”, so I postponed that piece of fun to the next session.

Instead, I played around a bit with the camera controls (I desperately wanted to see what my face looked like) and tried to take a snapshot or two. Managed to zoom out! Well, I still have a lot of learning to do. Zoom in and out works now that I’ve understood I can use the MacBook trackpad scrolling technique (go up or down the trackpad with two fingers, and it scrolls/zooms). As for detaching the camera from right behind my avatar and moving it around and up and down… well, sometimes I manage, sometimes I don’t. It’s a bit hit-and-miss — again, not something I’m used to on a computer. I’m aware that for many people, normal computer use is just as confusing as Second Life is for me now. It’s an interesting experience for me.

As I’m writing this, I’m trying to remember when I did what. I’ve been on Second Life three times (last night, this morning, tonight). I’m honestly not certain which part of the story I’m telling you was last night, and which part was this morning. My memories are a bit confused and jumbled up.

Right, I went to look at the time I took the various screenshots I have: this morning, I chatted quite a bit with a bunch of people who were trying to build a Griefball.

Meet the Griefball!

A Griefball? Well, as one put it, mainly a statement — but the idea was also that this ball would then be programmed to get rid of griefers. Griefers are the Second Life equivalent to trolls. We had one this morning, by the way: he was dancing all over the place and making noises and stuff. Pretty irritating. I “muted” him (the equivalent of “ignore”) and then I think somebody else filed an abuse report on him. How do you mute somebody? Not too hard: Cmd-click on that person’s avatar, and click “Mute” in the menu that appears.

This morning, I also decided to do something about my hair. After a few random clicks in my inventory (I saw I had different kinds of hair in there) I finally landed in the hair style editing menu. Holy cow! There are tons of settings. You can literally spend hours doing your hair in Second Life.

Spend hours doing your hair

I also managed to make it pink (my initial goal). The magic slider for that is “rainbow colour” (don’t ask).

Tonight, I:

  • grew a pink tiger-tail (not quite true, somebody gave it to me)
  • swapped my red shirt (arghl, not nice with pink hair) for a green one (which I modified myself!)
  • went for a stroll in the park by sunset
  • got stuck in a mountain (no photos of that, I was too busy trying to get out).

Want pictures? Clicky below:

Stephanie Spicoli New green shirt Sunset

Overall, for the moment, I’ve met quite a few nice helpful people. What makes Second Life exciting is also what makes it really difficult to get into: it’s complex. I’m spending a lot of time learning stuff which isn’t really that interesting in itself for me (I have no ambition to become a digital hairstylist) but which is needed for what’s coming next. Feeling comfortable with your inventory, moving the camera about, doing things with objects… there are all basic skills and I’m not comfortable with them yet. But if you want a world where people can be digital artists, build businesses, organise live music performances or conferences, you need that level of complexity to allow users to be creative.

As one of the people who helped me out this morning said: “there’s not a lot of hand-holding”. Inside Second Life, of course, there are classes and coaching, but in my opinion the interface is complicated enough that it’ll get in the way from getting help in-world for many people.

I’m certain there is (will soon be) a market for introduction classes to Second Life… in First Life.

Second Life: c'est quoi? [fr]

[en] A brief explanation of what Second Life is. It's a graphical world you access to by signing up on the website and downloading a programme to your computer. In that world, you are represented by an "avatar" (you can see mine from the back at the bottom of the picture, in the middle).

You can interact with other people there by chatting, and you can also interact with objects in the world, or even create things. Everything you see in the photograph was created by people like me (only they have a bit more experience, obviously!)

There is money in Second Life you can use to buy and sell things. If you make things people want, like clothes, you can actually make money inside Second Life and convert it into real (First Life) currency. Second Life is free to use, though you'll need a paying account if you want to do fancy things like own land.

The difference between Second Life and online multiplayer games is that there is no goal or meaning to it other than what we put into it. You can go into Second Life because you like chatting in a graphical environment, or because you enjoy being a digital hairdresser/stylist/architect/whatever. You can organise conferences or even musical events. Basically, anything is possible.

03.12.2006: Lecteurs du Matin Dimanche, par ici!

Second Life est un monde virtuel. On y accède en ouvrant un compte (comme pour la plupart des services en ligne) et en installant un programme sur son ordinateur. Un monde virtuel, ça peut ressembler à ça:

Very confusing

Là, vous me voyez en bas au milieu de l’image, de dos. Il y a deux ou trois autres personnages dans l’image, et au fond, une série de magasins. On est représenté dans le monde virtuel par son avatar — un personnage du monde virtuel que l’on peut contrôler et façonner à sa guise.

A l’intérieur de Second Life, on peut se déplacer, chatter avec les gens que l’on rencontre, agir sur les objets du monde que l’on rencontre, et même fabriquer toutes sortes de choses. Tout ce que vous voyez dans la photo du haut a été construit par les “résidents” de Second Life (des gens comme moi, mais qui maîtrisent un peu mieux). Quand on se déplace, le champ visuel (la “caméra”) se déplace aussi automatiquement.

Si on veut, Second Life est comme un grand chatroom, mais avec un environnement graphique. Du coup, on ne va pas se contenter d’intéragir avec les personnes présentes, mais aussi avec le monde lui-même.

L’interface graphique fait penser aux jeux de rôle en réseau multi-utilisateurs comme World of Warcraft. La grande différence entre un tel jeu et Second Life est que dans Second Life, il n’y a pas de “but du jeu”: comme dans la vie réelle (First Life), c’est nous qui produisons les buts et le sens.

Second Life est gratuit. Si on veut posséder du terrain, par contre, il faut un compte payant. A l’intérieur de Second Life, il y a de l’argent. On en reçoit un peu au départ, et on peut l’utiliser pour acheter des choses. Comme dans Second Life n’importe qui peut créer des objets, on peut aussi s’improviser artisan ou artiste digital et vendre ses productions à d’autres. On peut même y gagner sa vie — en fait, toute une économie parallèle est en marche dans ce monde, et comme il y a un taux de change entre la monnaie “virtuelle” de Second Life et de vrais dollars, elle peut avoir une incidence sur la nôtre.

Incroyable mais vrai! [fr]

[en] It has finally
arrived!

Il est enfin arrivé!

Finally!

Pour suivre l'actu [fr]

[en] Keep updated on the foiled terrorist attack news on WikiNews.

Gardez un oeil sur la page wikinews consacrée aux attentats déjoués pour avoir des nouvelles fraîches. La version française est nettement moins complète.

Quant au blogueur Doc Searls, il a été pris dedans.

Chasse aux fautes [fr]

[en] Hunting for spelling horrors in my daily life. Not very interesting if you don't speak French.

Allez, j’inaugure une nouvelle série de billets un peu ludiques: la chasse aux fautes d’orthographe dans les affiches, vitrines, menus, bref, toutes les publications qui estropient allègrement notre belle langue française.

Je sais que mon niveau d’orthographe a joliment chuté depuis la fin du gymnase, mais cela n’empêche pas que j’ai l’oeil qui frise quand il se pose sur certaines horreurs. Fini de souffrir en silence, dénonçons publiquement les coupables, suivant les traces de Fautes de français! Voici celui d’aujourd’hui:

Chasse aux fautes

Cliquez sur la photo, et si vous avez un compte Flickr, vous pourrez annoter la photo pour indiquer vos trouvailles.

Et oui, très certainement, vu que je parle d’orthographe, vous trouverez au moins une coquille dans ce billet. Certains le savent, j’écris généralement mes textes d’une traite et je ne relis même pas avant de publier. Vilaine.

Laissez un commentaire audio! [en]

C’est grâce à Odeo (se prononce comme “audio”, si jamais). Vous pouvez enregistrer ici-même un message vocal pour moi. Je ne sais pas encore si d’autres personnes pourront l’écouter, tentons l’expérience!

Send Me A Message

20 minutes plus tard: Du coup, je viens d’ajouter ce petit badge au-dessus du formulaire de commentaires disponible pour chaque billet. Seul hic: c’est vraiment une boîte vocale, c’est-à-dire que le contexte d’enregistrement (par exemple, sur quel billet le badge était posé) ne me parvient pas. Si vous utilisez ceci pour laisser des commentaires oraux, n’oubliez donc pas de spécifier quel billet vous commentez!

Lush in Lausanne [en]

[fr] Le magasin Lush de Lausanne est ouvert, à la place de la Palud. Rendez-vous-y sans plus attendre si vous habitez dans le coin!

Lush Shop Lausanne Lush finally made it to Lausanne! In case you didn’t know already, Lush makes me happy and I’m glad I don’t have to go all the way to Geneva anymore to get my fix of ethical-fun-organic cosmetics.

The new shop opened on Saturday, and the nice Scottish guy I spoke to in the shop today told me it was absolute madness, with customers queuing all through the shop to get to the cash desk. I was (un)fortunately away this week-end, so I had to wait until today to set foot in my new favourite shop. The place they found for the shop is just right, in my opinion. Place de la Palud is pretty much dead central (well, Lausanne city centre is pretty spread out, so many places are “centre”, which is quite nice, actually).

The shop is much less cramped than the Geneva one. They have good air conditioning, which means the typical “Lush shop smell” (all the fragrances blended together, yum!) which some find overwhelming isn’t very strong. They have the fresh face masks which to my knowledge are not available in Geneva, so I bought one to try — it’s in the fridge now. The Scottish guy (I didn’t ask his name; he’s in charge (?) of the Bern shop but is going to be over here every now and again to help the new shop get started) told me they were discontinuing the Ginger fragrance, which I like a lot, so I bought a vaporiser (oh my). I also found a few ballistics which I hadn’t tried: Dream On, Still Life and Romance in a Stone. Ballistics are usually tennis-ball sized bath fizzies. They’re much better than any others you can find at Body Shop or perfume stores.

The thing I really like about Lush, as a brand, is how refreshing the article descriptions and the Lush Times are. The style is direct, no-jargon, witty (and sometimes even a bit naughty). For each product, they’ll tell you what’s in it and why, how to use it and when. In the Lush Times (a good place to start if you feel lost in all those smells and colours, just go to your nearest Lush store and grab a copy), you’ll see photographs of real people using the products. Customer letters and quotes are sprinkled throughout the publication. Lush employees also appear as human beings, cited by name here and there when anecdotes are mentioned. All this makes it feel very “bloggy” to me (see what I mean?), even though their websites (ahem) could really use some help (and not just technical).

Never been to Lush? If you are unfortunate enough not to live in beautiful Lausanne, go to the site and click on your country’s flag if you see it (otherwise, click on the flag of the country closest to yours — it’s worth the trip). You can order online (the shipping fees in Switzerland are very reasonable, 8.- CHF per shipment) too if you wish. Lush products are great to use on yourself, but they make really nice gifts too (though some of the guys might not appreciate glittery stuff like the Fairy Jasmine ballistic), and they have vouchers if you’re not certain what to choose. Be sure to read through the product descriptions and allow yourself to be tempted.

Note: I’ve linked to the UK site even if it hangs and you’re not going to use it to order stuff for Switzerland because (a) this post is in English (b) the descriptions are so much better in English than on the French version of the Swiss site. I find Lush loses a lot of its charm during translation, sadly.