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.
Sex, fornication and a beautiful body…
Yamaha seems to have put the AEX500 back into their catalog. Hum, well, after checking, this is at least for the UK. I may have to talk to my local dealer…
Christmas isn’t that far away, anyway…
Things are beginning to settle a bit; I have an internet access at home again, I can almost do things that are interesting rather than things that really need to be done.
I have a list of books that I have read or I am currently reading or I intend to read in the (more or less) near future. One short thing I would like to do (“short”, here means that I could almost do it in less than a month and really do it) is a best-books list (mostly in the computer field). I don’t really want to do a full review of all my books, just pull a few titles.
I also would like again to do some translations. Maybe a book (but that would be a tremendous effort and I would probably not be able to publish it anywhere), or maybe just articles (that may be easier to get arrangments for publication).
I would also like to build some kind of framework/tools association to allow me to build my web site from a simpler syntax (compared to docbook, anyway, that’s easy). (Currently, this is a mix of Docbook/website and rcs — no, I’m not oldschool!).
And another nice thing would be to have a tool to sync between different feed readers, but that’s another story.
Again, “No time, no time, no time!”.
Or I could just do something with my fingers…
I don’t know if this one is comestible, but I needed to test if the html code provided by flickr was ok with wordpress. And it seems to do the trick (not that I ever had any doubt about it, mind you).
(note that this yet again another point for/against having multiple software (or service providers) vs one True CMS. Again, to integrate pictures in my blog, on my website, I use a third-party service with a differente interface and different user account. Yes it works, but it is also cumbersome to use at first).
I don’t publish much, but I like the idea of being able to publish whatever I feel like publishing, being my thoughts of the moment (this blog, for example), something more technical with a need of a certain semantic (which I usually do with DocBook), a few thousands pictures of my cat, or a linked-self-confined space (aka, a wiki).
Currently, that means using wordpress (online), Docbook and its website extension (offline) and rubyphoto (offline) (or flickr because it is so web-2.0 that I couldn’t do withouh — do you feel the painful irony?). If I choose to setup a public (or at least external), I may choose between Instiki or dokuwiki (or phpwiki, or…).
But in my quest of limiting the administration tasks at home, this means yet again another tool or interface to learn. I know that if I really wanted to stop being a sysadmin and just use the tools, I could use external services, like I do for pictures, with flickr. But there is still the problem of having n tools and interfaces which can’t always be integrated in my own webspace (and that also means n accounts, which is enough of an headache).
What I really want is a CMS, with existing extensions for my needs, with generation of static pages (because I am the only editor of my webspace and that would be a waste of ressources). Doing everything with Docbook/Website was fun for a moment, but I can’t edit the pages if my main computer is offline and I wouldn’t try to import the xsl files on my hosting server (and I’m not even talking about generating a blog or a wiki with such tools).
I’d like to use a simple formating syntax (textile would be good enough), have easy linking, being able to link more complex documents (external documents or files), and have some specific content (pictures and chronological content). I want the look to be easy to define, I want to be able to edit almost anything from anywhere, possibly allowing comments. But I also want it to be a static display.
On one side, you have:
With a huge 250MB inbox*
(and I love how the little note specify that this is only available to US users).
And on this other side, you have:
You are currently using 8 MB (0%) of your 2564 MB.
Yeah, size does not matter…
Some people can only work in a fully silent environment, others use classical music and I had colleagues which fan of things like Amon Tobin when real work was needed. In my case, I need things that would mostly be considered as violent, mostly metal or industrial bands. My most recent entries on my real-work-needed playlist would be:
The oldest would be a list of classics of Mötörhead… I just need fast-paced angry sound to fight against those bugs! (well, in fact, it simply the best way for me to accelerate the way I think —- Sometimes, if I only feel the need to take a rest and take some distance to think, I will probably fire up some Rachmaninov).