Seb's weblog

You’re welcome to smoke, and to play with your own poop. Just keep your smoke, and your poop, off of me. — jwz.

Brain damaged firefox developers! Now, I have pleasure using firefox2.

So, let’s say that I want to buy Adobe Lightroom. It seems to be a nifty software and I may like it better that the software bundled with my camera. So I go to Adobe’s website. Lightroom, right. $299. Well, seems fair.

But then, the troubles arrive. I’ll click on “buy online”. I’m in France, as it asks. And now the price is 297.80 EUR. What?! Can someone tell Adobe about the current euro/dollar rate? Currently, Google tells me that $299 is really 190 EUR. Even with the taxes, it wouldn’t reach more than 230 EUR.

Ok, there’s a “download” option, let’s use that. But now the price is 301.29 EUR. Uh? Can someone tell Adobe that usually, “download editions” are meant to have a lower price, since the editor doesn’t have to handle physical packages to send?

Duh, I’ll stick to my bundled software and eventually gimp/seashore, thanks.

I don’t like (or just don’t feel confident enough to use) bugzilla because:

• 3.2 is not etch-compatible (without breaking packaged modules anyway);

• 3.0 is still ugly as hell.

I don’t like (seriously) mantis because:

• php (hey…);
• I don’t want your stinky php-hard-configured colors to tell me the status of a bug. I don’t care. Give me the priority or the severity!

• Sending me to tinyurl to get “short view url”, from an internal installation, or just take my pants I won’t complain, really.

google earth download button not working, having to “reverse engineer” the javascript code to go to the real download page.

I have a pc which I use to run various test of software. A few months ago, I did install a Fedora Core 6 (or 5?) system to test Xen (since I already had a good feedback about this configuration) with 2-3 domU also running Fedora. But for some time now, I didn’t gave it the love it deserved, and now that the Sun is coming back, I’m trying to update it so that can I spend more time behind my screen instead of going in the Big Blue room.

So, I did a local mirror of the fedora repo and here I go. The update (first to fedora 7 and then 8) itself went almost ok. But the first already installed domU would boot ok but not have any network. Not good.

So, there may be things up with the libvirt thingie that (I guess, or just bad-mouthing again) redhat people try to force everybody else to use. The system fails to correctly configure the bridge and leaves a tmpbridge around (which sounds bad enough). Being a bit dumb those days, I try to force the bridge name or dev inside the xend-config.sxp but no joy.

new groovy nin single. And now a nice message to my friend Trent, wherever you are: the drones are ok, but DROP THE FRIGGIN’ CLEAR SOUNDING PIANO. it sux. Thanks for listening.

Hey, Trent, when I said that you should take him a guitar player, I didn’t mean that one!

In order to use bugzilla with mod_perl, it is recommended to have at least 1.5GB of RAM. That’s A-maz-ing, to me.

So, I was just fooling around with google’s geocoding API and doing tests with different target addresses. And suddenly, my test code barfed about malformed xml.

A quick look at the xml file that was printed on the console didn’t indicate anything obvious. One thing that could indicate the source of the problem was that the “missing” xml tag was preceded by an accented character.

Since when is my console UTF-8 aware? And the XML declaration says this is UTF-8. What would happen, if I put an accented character (not UTF-8 encoded) before a < ? The parser would try to expand the character with the following one, hence eating the < and breaking the tag, and this breaks client code.

Sure, as a quick search revealed, I can add oe=UTF-8 at the end of my query string (or I could convert the output on my side before parsing, but no, thanks!). BUT WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DECLARING UTF-8 IF YOU’RE NOT REALLY SENDING UTF-8?!@# Makes me wonder how their xml generator is written. A VB script using some kind of printf? Toh!

So currently, my dumbest geocode API bugs:

• the server lies when it says it is sending UTF-8

• the server can’t handle POSTs (Is it that hard to do both GET and POST? Don’t answer, please…)