Seb's weblog

This is the error that pops up when editing the (obviously) floating point value of the character or line spacing in the Mac OS Terminal.app preferences.

Le vélo Star is a public bicycle rental service provided by Keolis for the city of Rennes and it opened last year. At first, data were not provided officially, although one could look at the source of their google maps use to see that a list of station was available as a XML file and detailed informations were in HTML fragments. However, Rennes Métropole has decided to open up its data and the first step in this direction was done early this week by Keolis Rennes providing an API for Le Vélo Star.

So, I wanted to do something with it. Building a google maps stye application would have been easy but I tried for something different. I first started by building a script that would collect and store the data (number of bikes and slots available for each station) using RRD. Graphs are nice, but it wasn’t helping much seeing the whole picture. So instead, using a background image generated from OpenStreetMap I built a time-lapse animation of the stations’ usage.

All the code I wrote is available on my Github repository, except for the animation bit, were I currently used iMovie.

So, Apple showed the world its new world domination toy, the iPad. What do I think about it? First, the name is silly and boring. The device seems interesting with limited capabilities, but most probably due to physical and technical constraints. Sure, it can’t do multitasking and it is just an oversized iPhone, but one has to take into account that the thing is thin and that the battery is good even though the display and the faster processor would be more power-hungry than those on the iPhone/Touch.

Would I buy one? Not yet. Although I’m a good target, I think that this is still a bit expensive (not even speaking of the cash cow represented by the various storage capacities, and what about the OS updates?) for what it can do and my pocket are not that deep. I would rather keep a laptop instead, at the time being, for home usage. Hopefully, in one or two years, it will get better feature-wise. Would it get more “open” to other apps? Not sure Apple would let go.

However, I think this represents a kick in the nuts for the eReader market. Many of those compete on the features and in the end are expensive old-fashioned (b&w) devices. If I had to choose between an Apple iPad and any 10” eReader, at the same price, I think the LCD screen would win this time. I don’t know if they could compete directly with the iPad. Build a cross-over device with ePaper and touch capabilities at the same time? Not likely to win. My guess is that they would better try to go against the touch/iphone, with simple/cheap 6” devices, where they can’t be reached by glossy and battery-hungry gadgets.

So, this is a XML list of vélo star stations and this is the state of a particular station (as an HTML fragment)

I preferred when Safari was chewing up tons of memory. At least then it didn’t crash every 10 minutes on random web sites. (more…)

So, the following is legal:

$foo = array(
  "bar" => 2*2
);
var_dump($foo);

But this is not:

class Foo {
  public static $foo = array(
    "bar" => 2*2
  );
}
var_dump(Foo::$foo);

I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation for this behavior, but I’m not sure I really want to hear about it.

A few months (well, almost years…) ago, I had this project of mine which only led me to write a small google maps rails based application. And since I was having some spare time recently and some good weather, I was also playing a bit with my GPS. So, one thing leading to another, and the rewrite starts to look good. But I still have quite a few features to add. And with some luck and inspiratio, I may even be able to finish the original application.

Dear Lazyweb, why does Safari 4 takes up to 500 threads after a few days running? Not that I mind much the 5.6GB of virtual memory it takes or the almost 700 MB of real memory, but I’m just curious.

I’m 2 months late on this one, but one can now merge gmail contacts!

It would be nice if you could work together so that I can directly open PPT/PDF/DOC/whatever files directly from the search interface with the docs viewer (which is far friendlier than the HTML output). kthxbye. (more…)