zengun

Sorry for the lack of updates yesterday. I was standing next to the DSL modem waiting for it to show me a green light instead of the red light that it’s been sporting all day.
Turns out when I last paid my phone bill, they made a fumble and cut the DSL line. Of course it had to happen a friday, just before the weekend. So I’m stuck on a 56k on pay-by-the-minute access which means not much time for surfing/blogging. Everything should be ok on monday or tuesday.

Overheard in a distant future:

- What a wonderful diamond ring ! Oh James, you shouldn’t have…
- It’s only my ex wife.

Goodness, the power is back in my apartment’s wires !
It all took a little appointment at the EDF local office. I wish it could have been done yesterday, just after the power went out, but it went out minutes before the office closed.

I finally called a friend, who lent me the keys to a friend’s apartment, and spent the night there. I took my first bath in months, as always a delightful experience since I only got a shower cabin at home. This entry is typed at the cybercafé because it’s just halfway home and I needed a rest after all this walk (35°C, maybe 50°C under the sun).

I can’t help but think that in this office yesterday, an employee was about to get back home, and then remembered “oh yeah I got to cut that guy’s power supply” and probably lost 10 minutes on this. He may have been back home a wee later, to an angry wife who waited for him to drive at some place, and all may have gone downhill. All because of his dedication to the task of cutting my power supply. The EDF thanks you, faithful employee ! Michel doesn’t.
Egocentric scenario ? Why, of course.

It’s rather ironic that more than half the blogs linked on Matt Brown’s Dreamweaver Blog, are sporting default Blogger layouts or layouts that scream “hey I’m coming straight out of a layout reservoir !”.
Maybe Macromedia forbids they actually use the software they are blogging about…
Out of these linked blogs, a good note goes to Dan’s shorts for implementing alternate stylesheets that are a little bit more than mere color switching (colors/backgrounds switching gets old very fast), and Dreamweaver Fever for the funny background technique (though when I saw ‘Soap’ on the menu, I expected webservices instead of a soapbox area). Dru’s encoded email addresses harvester couldn’t get my email address from this site, try with your site to see if your email is safe from dumb spambots (smart spambots will find it anyway, I swear they must use Jedi mind tricks).
Talking about spam, Dru links to this article by Steve Champeon, about how to serve different pages to known spambots with Apache’s mod_rewrite.

No, they didn’t. They only cut my electricity supply.
I paid the bill this morning, and this afternoon just before the end of a cool tv movie, the power went down. Granted, I was a wee bit late.
Here’s hoping it’s only an error and that the power will be back tomorrow, else it will be candles and stuff for a few days. Or I will settle at a friend’s, which looks like a much better idea.
In the meanwhile, I’ll be posting from a cybercafé if in the short time spent there I find something worth blogging.

Tiny text tyrannizes users.

I am Designerzilla, hear me roar !
Actually, besides errors that Zeldman points at, Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox feels like an eternal re-run, or some rambling filler text; take your pick. And beware of Designerzilla !

I just found out about R&OS‘s PDF-PHP classes, and toyed around with it.
Before I learn more about to generate cool dynamic PDF documents with it, a PDF version of tidak ada is there ! It’s a bit blank, color-less, and it could use a better presentation, but it was done in 5 minutes by modifying the classes’ readme file and putting together a simple b2 template. It may look better later.

Also, check out the VoiceXML version of tidak ada, which you can actually hear if you call 1-800-555-TELL, and then at the menu dial 1-TIDAK (Tellme Studio provides this service), if you are in the US.
Since I’m not in the US, I can’t hear what my weblog sounds like: anyone send me a .wav record ?

Marcelo Cabral just told me about Blogger Brasil, one of the first non-Pyra-operated Blogger services. Globo, the biggest brazilian television network has launched it yesterday, seemingly in time for the brazilian version of COMDEX today.

I’ve started learning portuguese some months ago but never got really far. Now with Blogger Brasil I will start learning portuguese again and keep a weblog about my progresses. Tudo joia !
If only I could log in, first. Looks like BB is already struggling with many felizes Brazilian users trying to start blogging at once.

I was IMing Brett this morning, and proposed to fix the security holes in ShoutBox, that prompted him to remove it from his website and remove link to download it.
And I did it. If you’re a ShoutBox user, check the 2.32 release announcement.

To make my blog a little more accessible, the font sizes’ unit has been changed from pixels to ems. Now you can resize this text by 200% or more, and thus get 200% more Michel on your screen !

Also, if you wondered what I was meaning by many-to-many-to-many db design, you can stop wondering because it didn’t work. I could try all possible ways to do it today, and each time the db wasn’t using the indexes when it was queried.
It’s quite a delusion, for I thought it would be both innovative, which it was, and efficient, which it was not.

So what if it will spontaneously burn after 10 minutes of use, I still want a box like this !

Indi is smart, too, and very cute with Davey !

It amazes me that 6 months after the craze’s peak, there are still some google whacks for me to find.
It amazes me even more when the one result is Triptych Cryptic, an interesting blog which consequently makes it to my blogroll.
Proof enough that random googling can sometimes be profitable to the random googler.

Sam Buchanan’s Netscape Google anecdote reminds me of this british girl I met at university some years ago, who would tell me how her hotmail account worked but her student email account did not.
It turns out she had been typing her email address right in the URL bar for months. And while typing jane@hotmail.com as an URL brought her to hotmail.com where she would type her email address again, typing jane@edu.univ-montp3.fr brought naught.
I had to walk her through using the dumb email terminals that the university provided, some antediluvian Macs running an early 0.1 alpha version of Eudora. I sent her a test email for her to reply to, as an exercise, then I had to go back to the amphi for a lecture.
I was eagerly waiting for a reply, not only because I wanted her to make use of the help I provided, but also because I didn’t remember her hotmail address and I wanted to see her again. Alas, my ‘hello Jane’ test email remained unanswered.

In the purest Firda-style, I’m presenting the haiku of the day (not mine):

Buy wadded paper
from very famous artist
and then you like it

Culp said the flaw doesn’t lie within CAPI but in the code that performs validation of SSL certificate chains, which refers to the hierarchy of trust that cascades from certificate authorities such as VeriSign Inc.

Don’t you just love trustworthy computing ?
Looking back, it’s ironic that the above linked document’s first section is titled “Why trust ?”.

<Hendikins> make the guy eat his own genitalia :P
<BenB> lol
<michel_v> make him browse the web on IE 1.0
<michel_v> that’s enough of a torture
<sirLurxalot> No, too cruel and unusual.
<Hendikins> IE2 at least

Fresh from #mozillazine, plugindoc developer Hendikins writes:

Right now I’m writing this from a pub in Manly Australia, in the middle of a disco, without a beer in my hand. Is that dedication, lack of time, or just plain sad? :)

It is indeed plain sad. What’s more saddening is that I have only one beer left in this fridge. Oh the agony.

I was talking about URL footnotes in RSS feeds, so here they are now in my RSS feed.
I don’t have much to blog about today, I’m still battling with that new funky many-to-many-to-many db structure, and how to make it scale well.

It’s always annoying to see an RSS feed break because of an HTML entity, or a page failing XHTML compliance just because of some Â? sign.
So here’s an html2unicode conversion array, that you can use in your PHP script to convert any HTML entity and some special characters to Unicode references, which have the advantage of not breaking in XML.
It also converts &#128; to &#159;, which are MS-only references, to their standard equivalents.
If I missed some HTML entities, please warn me so I can update that list.