Seb's weblog

I have, at last, been able to mix favorably Textile and SyntaxHighlighting. In fact, another wordpress plugin would go over posts to add unneeded <br/> tags. Well, the highlighted code still can’t contain empty lines, but one thing at a time!

Things are getting closer to be in working order. I just can seem to get SyntaxHighlighter and Textile to be friendly with each other. Grmbl.

I’m almost satisfied with the layout now, and I have restored some colors (even though they are not that warm and fuzzy). IE rendering might be broken. Do I really care? In the meantime, I’ll try to correct the comments thing.

Changing a thing or two around here… A few (hey…) things may not work currently, but that’s not like it would be a real problem!

Nothing else to add, after all…

“Rudi was a sort of ‘golden youth’,” said Richard. “You know what I mean? His had been the world of sports-cars, tennis, country-house weekends, summers on the Riviera. He was a half-Jew; There really was no reason for him to be there. Except that in 1938, after the Austrian Anschluss, he had fallen in love with a girl from Vienna who was Jewish. He married her the day before the regulation came into effect that Jews had to wear Stars of David on their clothes. Of course, he didn’t had to wear it, but the day after his wedding he had the Star sewn on all his suits and coats. When she (though not he) was ordered to Theresienstadt, he went with her. And when she (not he) was ordered to Treblinka, he came with her there too. She was killed immediatly.

— Into that darkness, Gitta Sereny.

Recently purchased CDs:

• 10.000 days, Tool. Thunderous, powerful, and still those strange sounds (and we won’t forget the bon jovi influence).
• On down the road, Izzy Stradlin’. The complete opposite of the Tool album on the rock side. Just plain ol’ Rock n’ Roll, nuff’ said. I like it, but receiving it at the same time as 10,100 days was the greatest mistake.

• Yes, Virginia, The Dresden Dolls. I don’t feel it as powerful as their self-titled debut album was. A bit disappointed, but I may have to take a closer listen to it.

I felt a bit surprised by the date of my last post. I hadn’t seen the time pass that fast. A quick look at my (misc) TODO list:

• The Ruby/RRD DSL I started to think about is still just a sketch, although I also have the skeleton for the graphing part. But still, the RPN part is blocking me. I don’t feel there is a really nice way to express this kind of things, except as plain strings.
• I was a bit disappointed by the way things worked with Ikiwiki. Ok, it works as advertised (being able to generate a static wiki), but there things that I don’t like and I’m getting sick of seeing Perl code, these days.
• I have finished The Confusion and started The System of the World. Yay. My goal: finish it in less than a year, for a change.

• I have received my Guitar Rig and this is really a cool toy (and a time killer).

I had a small technical article recently, ready to publish (or almost) but the Gods of Safari and Flash ruined it.

I also have a gig review to write, but I’m just lazy.

In the meantime, I have smoothly upgraded this piece of software that is running this blog to its version 2.0.1 (or something). It went ok, even though the new administration interface is soooooo Web 2.0 lookalike, with those flashy “yellow fade” thingies and those toolbars that don’t seem to work.

But anyway, If you can nonetheless read this, it’s ok for me.

PS: In fact, I just hate this !@# visual editor. I want my Textile©, not this dumb visual thing!

Que la culture soit chère pour certains de nos concitoyens, en particulier les jeunes n’est pas une raison pour sacrifier la rémunération des auteurs, des interprètes et des autres acteurs de la chaîne de production et de diffusion. — Nicolas S.

Yeah, knowledge is power, but Money comes first.

So, I have been in my new apartment for a few months almost now, and as such, I am beginning to receive various invoices for living there: electricity, water…

As a side node, for EDF, I did not have any trouble, I did everything by phone when setting it up, with the nicest person I ever had the pleasure to speak to for this kind of things. Just perfect. If I could have this power, I would immediatly ask for a raise for her.

As for general des eaux. Well, I was a bit lazy and sent too late the paper for automatic payment, so I got another invoice. Looking at the paper, I see that I can (try to) pay online. So, being nowadays a Mac user at home, I open my ibook and fireup Safari with the URL of their site: Générale des Eaux and what do I see? A blank page. blink, blink. I go through google, just in case I mistyped the URL. Blank page. Ok, dumb web agency, part 1. Fire up firefox. Same result. Dumb web agency, part 2. Fire up Opera, identify as IE, same result. Dumb web agency, part 3.

I’m a software developer. I used to be a system administrator. I worked in the IT field for 7 years by now, and I wrote my share of web pages, static, dynamic. Perl, C++, Java, whatever. HTML 2, 3, 4, XHTML transitional, Strict, Javascript. After all of this, I thought we were in 2006.

How wrong was I! We’re still in 2000, and the Generale des Eaux (or whichever web agency is behind “this”) is still writing dumb web pages, startup-like, that can’t be read anywhere but on the desktop of the people who wrote these pages. I don’t want to try to look at what they wanted to produce. I have already seen frames, javascript writing (dumb) HTML and Flash; Enough for me in this case.

I tried to write a mail for webmaster@generale-des-eaux.com but only got an error reply. Only way to contact them is through their web site. Dumb. So, I’m a brave and nice guy, I find a lonely Windows XP pc at work, use it through rdesktop, fire up IE and try to use it to send them a mail. And at first, it won’t even work because there are using pop-up everywhere, and this IE was blocking them. Gargl!

Maybe the Generale des eaux ought to learn from what OpenWeb has to say, for example.