Ongoing: SHiFT [en]

[fr] SHiFT a commencé. Plein de choses que je devrais bloguer, mais... Voilà.

SHiFT has started, and I’m feeling very guilty about not blogging and photographing everything. Oh well.

Of note for me this morning, two talks: Lilia on personal blogging meeting work blogging and Laurent on the lessons learned during his adventure with coComment.

Scattered Lisbon Travel Notes [en]

[fr] Quelques notes en vrac au sujet de Lisbonne. Résumé: ça se passe très bien.

This post will be updated on-the-go. Come back.

  • Big city. Really big. Jorge, my kind host, says 3 mio inhabitants. If my memory is correct, that’s roughly three times as big as Zürich, the largest Swiss city, and a half of Switzerland’s total population. I had no clue. IIRC Pune had 3 mio inhabitants when I lived there.
  • Praça do Principe Real: very nice and calm square. Lots of benches to sit down, and even tables!
  • Stairs. More stairs. Hills! Lausanne doesn’t even come close.
  • Red and green lampposts.
  • People queue for the bus, “UK-style”.
  • Beggars, some maimed. I’ve seen lots of beggars in India of course, but maybe they just came in as a bundle with the rest of the culture shock, which is why I never had the feeling I had been particularly stricken by the amount of people begging. Here, I am. People sleeping on doorsteps.
  • Hot. Summer-hot. “Where’s the shade” and “can’t we just live naked” kind of hot.
  • Colourful. Day and night.
  • Two classes of kindergarten kids. One with yellow hats, the other with blue hats.
  • Mad drivers. Not the Indian kind. You can’t just jump in the middle of the road and expect them to swerve around you or slow down. You can’t start walking on pedestrian crossings like in Switzerland, secure in the knowledge that you have right of way. I regularly find myself hoping that the driver headed right for me doesn’t consider me expendable.
  • Healthy helpings in restaurants for the moment.
  • Nice supper last night at the Granja Velha, Rua dos Douradores 200 (Baixa).
  • Nice “nouvelle cuisine” style lunch at Porco Preto, just off Praça das Flores. Complete with warm cheese and strawberry jam.
  • My next digital camera will have integrated GPS-based geotagging.
  • Mir. de S. Catarina has a nice view. Unfortunately it seems to be the haunt of a bunch of guys who try to strike up conversations with tourists. I realised that I’m pretty good at playing deaf, or at pretending that I don’t understand English (or French, for that matter). I just tell myself I only understand Hindi 🙂
  • Seriously thinking about not over-doing it, hence this little expedition back to my “couch” before I head out again at the end of the afternoon. It’s too hot outside, and I also need to take a break from new things, or I’ll overdose. I’m also here to relax, and I think I’ll enjoy it more if I don’t spend my whole time walking through the town and playing tourist.
  • More photos on Flickr.
  • The flight of stairs to my host’s appartment just keeps getting longer and longer each time I go up.
  • Weird magic locks (turn three times to the left, once to the right, jiggle the key, do a little dance and the door will open). Well, not quite, but it did take me 10 minutes and a phone call to get in.
  • Lots of francophone tourists.

In Lisbon! [en]

[fr] Bien arrivée à Lisbonne.

Safely arrived in Lisbon. CouchSurfing rules. Photos on Flickr.

Lisbon by Night 02 Lisbon by Night 04
Lisbon by Night 11
Lisbon by Night 20 Lisbon by Night 17
Lisbon by Night 41 Lisbon by Night 37

A l'étranger jusqu'au 4 [fr]

[en] Off for Shift and Blogtalk. Be back on the 4th. Catch me by e-mail or SMS if you need to communicate.

Comme prévu, je serai absente jusqu’au 4 (conférences Shift à Lisbonne puis BlogTalk à Vienne).

Pour me joindre durant ce temps, e-mail et SMS sont les moyens les plus appropriés.

Petite anecdote dans le genre “j’y crois pas”: train Lausanne-Genève, 9h du matin. J’ai enlevé mes tongs et je me suis roulée en boule sur le fauteuil pour vaguement faire la sieste. Le contrôleur vient gentiment m’expliquer que je ne peux pas mettre mes pieds (même tout roses et fraîchement douchés) sur la banquette sans utiliser un papier de protection. Il est sympa, il a amené une serviette en papier et la dispose sur le siège au bon endroit.

Par contre, mon sac de voyage qui a traîné sur des sols plus que douteurs, il n’a pas besoin de papier de protection, lui. J’ai fini le voyage les pieds de retour dans mes tongs.

Integration Page Updated [en]

Here we are! The page explaining how to integrate coComment into your blog has just been updated. You’ll see some changes in the javascript integration code — but not to worry, the old code still works.

Let me take this occasion to clarify again what this whole “integration” thing is about. When coComment captures comments left on blogs, it needs to catch all sorts of information: blog name and URL, comment author’s name, comment content, etc. Clicking on the bookmarklet or using the extension tells coComment to do that.

When coComment is integrated into a blog, two things happen:

  • the different variables coComment needs are given to it directly
  • coComment is given the power to catch the comments.

Consequence: if you integrate coComment into your blog, coComment will have the correct data (blog and post names, etc.) and will know to capture the comments made on it, be they by coComment users or other people.

If you don’t integrate coComment into your blog, then we still try and catch the comments (if a coComment user requests it by posting in the thread or simply choosing to track it) with the coCo-crawler. This is, however, a less precise way of capturing comments for the moment.

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Initially posted on the coComment blog.

Two Updated Plugins For WordPress [en]

WordPress users, this is for you! Two useful plugins for coComment have been updated:

  • coComment Enhancer by David has gone up to version 1.2.3b, with bug fixes as well as French and German translations.
    This plugin will integrate coComment into your blog. This means that it will ensure that coComment gets accurate data (post name, blog name, post url, etc.) independantly of the way you set up your template.

    It is definitely the easiest way to make your blog friendly for coComment if you’re using WordPress, and it ensures that coComment gets the right data even if you change your template.
  • Show coComments by Pablo has now been bumped up to 0.2 stable release after some bugfixes.
    This sidebar widget allows you to easily display your comments or conversations on your WordPress blog. It also works as a normal plugin if you don’t have a widget-enabled theme.

Thanks a bunch to David and Pablo for taking our feedback into account and updating their plugins. If you don’t use WordPress, all is not lost: check out our Integration page for instructions about integrating coComment into your blog (the little imps tell me it might very well be updated soon, so keep an eye on it). To display your latest comments on your blog, use a blog box which you can customize to your liking.

technorati tags:, , , , , , , ,

Initially posted on the coComment blog.

Difficultés à comprendre le fisc vaudois? [fr]

[en] This is part of a printout from my tax declaration, or whatever you call that in English.

Déclaration d'impôts

Maintenant, vous savez pourquoi!

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?

Rob Levin (lilo) of Freenode Just Died [en]

[fr] Rob Levin, fondateur du réseau IRC freenode (plus connu sous son pseudo lilo) est mort des suites d'un accident de la route.

I’ve just received news of Rob Levin’s death (lilo on freenode) when logging on after coming back home from a surprise evening I’ll tell you about later, given the circumstances. Needless to say I’m pretty shaken.

I’d never actually met Rob, of course. But I remember many conversations with him on freenode — about nickname issues, about freenode and the underlying concept of community it was built on, about leaving New Orleans before Katrina arrived. He was somebody I always enjoyed chatting with, and I was always amazed at how he would take time for small issues like my nickname problems. He struck me as nice, patient and understanding for the little I knew him.

As founder of freenode, he was of course an important person to me. Freenode is a place which lies at the center of my online social life. But more than that to me, he was also simply a person I chatted with every now and again and really appreciated. I’m going to miss him.

I’m doing something I usually tell people not to do: publish stuff when emotions are fresh. My excuses therefore, if I sound a bit rambling or whatever — but there’s just no way I can just head for bed right now as I was planning to do when I got home. Hopefully writing this here will help me accept what has happened and feel a little less sick.

Bye, lilo. My thoughts are with your family and friends. You will be very much missed.

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