Tag: Software and Tools

Surprise Meet-Up Last Night [en]

[fr] Une rencontre totalement imprévue avec un pote d'IRC qui était à Lausanne pour la semaine. Je l'ai appris par hasard la veille de son départ -- du coup, on est allés faire un tour en ville!

So, last night, before the sad news hit me, I was just hanging out online while digging through the bottom of my GTD inbox when I was drawn into #swhack by a highlight. (If you don’t live on IRC, you probably don’t understand what I’m talking about — don’t fret.) Usually, highlights in #swhack mean the bots are getting chatty, but anyway, I peeked in. An irrelevant mention of Bugs Bunny (now you can guess what I highlight on) was all it was, but as the channel seemed alive for once, I stayed to exchange a few words with those who were there.

The conversation topic quickly drifted to Switzerland, and for some reason I didn’t quite grasp straight away, people were suddenly very interested in the fact that I was in Switzerland, and, more than that, in Lausanne.

A few lines later the penny dropped, and I realised that crschmidt was chatting with me through the free wifi provided by my hometown! He had been here all week for the FOSS4G conference. He works for MetaCarta, who were sending him there.

Half an hour and a park name confusion (my mistake) later, we were meeting up in Parc Montbenon. We went out for a drink, a stroll in the Roman ruins and a short photo session by the lake. We talked about History classes in Switzerland and the States, looked at satellite maps of Lausanne (blurry) and Geneva (I got to see the building the coComment offices are in!), and all sorts of other things that add up to enjoyable conversation without having to be blog material.

Before I knew it we had chatted away until past 1am and my tiredness reminded me that I had planned to go to bed early. But nevermind! It was worth it, nice to be able to meet Chris before he left this morning. Hope you had a safe trip home!

Chris and Steph in Vidy
Proof of meet-up!

VaudTax et mon MacBook [fr]

[en] Seems the official tax program around here doesn't work on Intel processors. *Firing up winbox...*

Dites, j’ai la très sale impression que VaudTax 2005 ne tourne pas sur processeur Intel. En tous cas, je l’ai installé sur mon MacBook et il plante en silence lorsque je le lance. J’ai installé la mise à jour, et VaudTax 2004, lui, semble accepter de démarrer.

(Oui, je suis au courant que c’est pas très tôt pour faire ses impôts, merci de ne pas trop remuer le couteau…)

Donc, a priori, j’abandonne et j’installe tout ça sur ma machine Windows (quitte à rentrer à nouveau toutes les informations qui auraient été normalement reportées des années précédentes). A moins que quelqu’un ait des informations contraires, en quel cas j’essaie encore un peu secouer la bête?

Flickr, ça se prononce comment? [fr]

[en] French-speakers have trouble pronouncing "Flickr". They tend to sound as if they had something stuck in their throat. This is my attempt to educate them. 🙂

La réponse à cette question cruciale pour tous les francophones dans le podcast de ce soir, en un peu moins de 3 minutes (enfin, les 30 premières secondes suffisent si vous êtes vraiment pressés).

To flick(e)r

Un indice: Flickr, c’est un jeu de mots sur “flicker”.

Annoying NeoOffice Error [en]

[fr] Un problème récurrent avec NeoOffice. Vous connaissez ce message d'erreur?

I’ve been getting this error ever since I moved from my iBook to my MacBook. I’ve erased NeoOffice from my Applications folder and reinstalled it. I know we had this error at school, too. It doesn’t seem to create any problems, but it’s just annoying that the first time in a session I save a file I need to click through this (and the next).

Screenshot of error message.

Welcome to Steph’s Troubleshooting Centre, and thanks for your help!

Slow SSH Login from MacBook [en]

[fr] La connection SSH vers mon serveur depuis mon MacBook est très lente (je dois attendre plusieurs minutes pour qu'il me demande mon mot de passe). Il me semble me souvenir que depuis ma machine Windows à la maison également, il n'y avait rien de cela. L'autre semaine, j'ai essayé de me connecter depuis un tout autre endroit et la réponse a été instantanée. Idées?

Well, it seems that writing about my technical problems here is more efficient than bugging people repeatedly on IRC about them, so let’s continue. Welcome to Bunny’s Troublshooting Centre.

I have trouble SSH’ing into my server from my MacBook. Trouble, here, means I have to wait a couple of minutes (no exaggeration) for the password prompt. If I’m quick enough and type my password in before it times out, I’m in.

I logged in from somewhere else the other week and it responded almost immediately. I don’t recall that logging in from home (same wifi/DSL connection) from my winbox was sluggish.

Any ideas? I’ve run SSH with the verbose option on, and it does throw up a few warnings an errors. I don’t really want to paste it all here, but if you tell me what bits are useful I can put them in a pastebin. Thanks for any ideas/help/assistance.

Nokia 6280 compatible Mac :-) [fr]

[en] Nokia 6280 seems nicely compatible with OSX.

Faut que je passe annoncer la bonne nouvelle à MobileZone: mon nouveau téléphone (Nokia 6280) paraît joliment compatible Apple. Je découvre les joies de la synchronisation sous OSX avec mon MacBook: il faut brancher le câble (j’ai aussi relié les deux par Bluetooth, pas certaine que ce soit nécessaire), et sur le téléphone, choisir mode de connection par défaut pour le câble USB.

On peut ensuite synchroniser contacts (depuis Address Book) et calendrier (iCal).

Concernant le calendrier, j’utilise Google Calendar depuis un moment. C’est joli et on peut y accéder de partout à condition qu’il y ait un ordinateur connecté à internet à disposition. L’idéal serait de pouvoir synchroniser mon téléphone avec gCal, mais ce n’est pas encore vraiment possible (quoique… quelqu’un a le courage de tester GCalSync?). Voici comment je m’en sors:

  • je m’abonne dans iCal à mes calendriers Google (en read-only)
  • j’ai un troisième calendrier dans iCal que j’appelle “Phone”
  • dans les réglages de synchronisation, j’importe les événements créés avec le téléphone dans ce calendrier
  • de temps en temps, je l’exporte d’iCal, l’importe dans gCal, et transfère les événements sur les bons calendriers gCal (avant de vider le calendrier “Phone” dans iCal. A la synchronisation suivante, tout rentre dans l’ordre.

En choisissant le mode “Stockage de données”, on peut voir dans Finder le contenu de la carte Mini-SD. Du coup, voici la première photo publiée avec cet appareil:

Desktop

Si vous allez voir la version originale de la photo, vous verrez que les bords sont un peu imprécis. Trop de compression ou bien (gasp!) zoom numérique à l’insu de mon plein gré?

PS: si vous n’avez pas encore de compte Flickr, c’est le moment de vous en faire un. C’est gratuit.

Flock, extensions, and coComment [en]

[fr] Une adresse de site pour convertir des extensions Firefox pour utilisation avec Flock, qui est un excellent navigateur. J'étais déçue de ne pas pouvoir utiliser l'extension Firefox pour coComment avec Flock -- maintenant je peux!

My ex-collegue and now friend Gabriel introduced me to the Flock browser quite some time back. I mentioned it quite a bit on my other blog but I don’t think I talked about here much.

Anyway, it’s great. It’s Firefox, but with all sorts of nice bloggy, flickr-y, del.icio.us-y stuff tied in. I’d like to get coComment integrated in there too.
(Disclaimer: I work for coCo.)

One thing that makes coComment really nice to use is the Firefox extension. Once you’ve installed it, you don’t need to do anything, and it automatically records all the comments you make (as long as the blog platform is more or less compatible to show them on your user page. Here’s mine.

The thing that bothered me when I started using Flock again sometime back was that I had to revert to using the bookmarklet (which, let’s be honest, is a real pain — who remembers to click on a bookmarklet before posting each comment? not I!) Today, as I was starting on my tour of the blogosphere to see what people are saying about coComment I came upon another Flock user who regretted the extension wasn’t compatible.

So, I headed to our internal bug-tracker to find out what the status of my request for a Flock extension was, and saw that Nicolas (coComment’s Daddy!) was asking for more information on converting extensions. I googled a little and here’s what I came up with:

Well, I installed the extension in Flock, restarted my browser, and after a painful start (wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was because of the extension or just good ol’ Windows acting up) it was up and running. I now have Flock running the coComment Firefox extension!

Let me know how it goes for you if you try it, particularly on other platforms. And if you haven’t tried Flock yet, you should. It’s really neat!

Gandi fait peau neuve [fr]

[en] If you haven't yet checked it out, go and see Gandi.net's new design.

Je ne le vois que maintenant, mais au cas où vous seriez encore plus à  la traîne que moi, allez regarder la nouvelle interface de Gandi.net. Gandi (sans h!), c’est l’endroit où aller pour enregistrer vos noms de domaines. Souvent, votre hébergeur vous proposera des formules hébergement+nom de domaine: très joli, jusqu’au jour où vous voulez changer d’hébergeur et où ça devient compliqué.

Tous chez Gandi!

Video Complaints [en]

[fr] Souvent pas facile de voir les jolies choses vidéo qu'on nous met à  disposition sur le web. Je me plains un peu.

Stupid user or balkanisation?

I’m listening to a video from LIFT’06. First of all I got a pop-up window which looked like a “go no further, you don’t have what it takes to view this” message. Actually, there’s a RealPlayer link in there. OK, cool. They have a partial podcast of the event, but I can’t open it in iTunes. What a shame!

At LIFT’06, I learnt that part of Robert Scoble‘s job is barging into people’s offices with a camcorder and saying “hi there, what do you do at Microsoft?” So I headed off to Channel9 to try and listen to some. My first impression upon landing on the site, I have to say, was “ew, what a mess! Where do I find Robert’s stuff in there?” OK, I found one: Jenny Lam – Designing Experiences at Microsoft. Click, click. Launches VLC. Doesn’t work 🙁 Quicktime usually works. Ah, damn, Quicktime is an Apple thing, isn’t it?

Yep, I’m running OSX, Firefox, and I’m not exactly a Microsoft fan. I’ve been very positively impressed, though, from what I learnt that Microsoft was doing in the transparency department. Aren’t I precisely the kind of audience Channel9 could be interested in catering to? Make it easy for me, please 🙂

DailyMotion Problems [en]

[fr] Un problème avec DailyMotion, heureusement réglé. Si vous n'avez pas pu voir la vidéo où je fais la bobette derrière Robert Scoble, c'est le moment d'y aller!

You probably know I like DailyMotion. I posted some feedback about DailyMotion yesterday, and bumped into some naughty problems today.

The problem with DailyMotion is that it doesn’t have a nice forum or a real devblog like coComment where we can leave feedback. So I’m posting it to my blog and tagging it in hope it will be found. By the way, I’ve been wondering what the best place is for this kind of feedback: here or on the Cheese Sandwich Blog? What’s your take?

After LIFT’06, I put this video of Robert being interviewed online and wrote a post about it here. Unfortunately, it seems at least one of my readers is not able to view it . (I guess there are at least 20 of you out there who just didn’t tell me about it.) The message says something about a key not being valid for this blog.

DailyMotion allows you to blog your videos directly from the site. That’s neat, but as I’m a control freak, I like dealing with the code myself. Back in November I had posted a video to my other blog, so I grabbed the code from over there, adapted it (video id), and it seemed to work. Actually, that was because I was still logged in to my DailyMotion account.

I first tried adding CTTS to my DailyMotion account, as a second blog. That failed (error message, just doesn’t work). As I was writing this post, I tried logging out of DailyMotion, and actually saw the message all my poor readers have been seeing these last days! In a click of my trackpad I was able to fix everything.

So, if you haven’t seen me goofing off behind Robert Scoble as David and Marc-O try to podcast him (red wine and Apple hardware involved), now’s the time to do it! Sorry for the buggy post, and thanks a lot to Raphael for pointing out the problem to me.