Seb's weblog

I went to the Rennes Airshow yesterday, taking two cameras and lenses in order to grow my collection of aircraft pictures (and because I’m also an aircraft buff). The weather was a bit mixed, dark clouds with small patches of Sun (and a cold wind). As usual, the result with my Sigma 55-200 got ugly most of the time when the target was moving since this lens is slow (or I don’t know how to use it correctly, maybe), even though a few shots got ok (even if a bit soft). The 105mm was a bit short most of the time, and I wished I could reach a bit farther instead of having to crop most pictures, but it saved the day, as usual. My favorite would be the Spitfire Mk XIX, although the Red arrows offered me some timing exercises.

On the music side, I was recently pleasantly surprised by both Red Sparowes with their album The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies The Answer (which is not that heavy/loud), “Russian Circles” with Geneva (heavier/louder), Keelhaul with Keelhaul’s Triumphant Return to Obscurity and Animals as Leaders. It feels like there’s a trend here…

Even though I have been using it for years, I’m not an Emacs guru and only make use of the basic elements. However, it is still my IDE of choice most of the time. And there are a few reasons why it is so for Ruby on Rails development:

• I can use it in fullscreen (without menu or tool bar), even on a Mac where I don’t have a tiling window manager;
• I can split as much as I want my fullscreen frame in any number of sub-windows (imagine being able to see both model, controller, view and their corresponding specs/scenarios, plus a compilation buffer in a single glance);
• js2-mode is a really powerful Javascript mode with a lint-like behavior;
• Cucumber.el helps writing BDD scenarios, not only with its basic syntax and indentation but also with its nice table editing;

• Many other modes for the various tasks (YAML-mode, whitespace display, RHTML, HAML)

Sometimes, things are just a matter of not giving up. \o/

So, let’s arrive on time, jumping a bit for the fun of it, at Bercy to discover that for people with a ticket for the pit must go around the place to find the correct queue. Well, alright. But the weird thing is that the opener almost started on time! This year, Murderdolls were the only opening band at Bercy and they had a far better reception and effect than both bands 4 years ago. Punk-rock kind of music, make-up vs spit kind of stage presence. Effective rock n’ roll, not quite unforgettable anyway, but enjoyable anyhow (and I might even consider looking up their music sometime)

They played for about 70-75 mins, it took about 30 mins to setup the stage and then began the wait. Most people around me knew about it and didn’t really expect G&R to arrive early on stage. This is the interesting thing about G&R concerts: people will gladly alternate between booing and chanting and they even broke out the “hola” (lame as it was at first). The wait music included a bit of Soundgarden and a lot of Tool (but I can’t imagine MJK playing live in those conditions nowadays, given how many people smoked freely that night). (more…)

Since I often use to tinker with guitars, I wondered how I could publish “stuff” that I would record. I didn’t want to use flash (because flash ought to die, Die, DIE!) and I didn’t want to rely on a third-party (that would most likely try to use flash to do so).
But HTML5 has been out for some time now, most browsers I use support it nowadays, so maybe it’s time to try it in public:

The bad news here, if it works (not for safari?), is that I have to encode it twice for compatibility, but it’s not like it matters really much. And also, yeah, I think (or certainly hope somehow) that it won’t work with most (all) versions of Internet Explorer (die, Die, DIE!). Not that I care about this, in fact.