Just another WordPress site

Author: Stephane Daury

  • Mail Bug from Hell…

    I was wondering why my home connection seemed to be crawling since yesterday. I didn’t worry too much at first, thinking that with my wife working from home yesterday as well, we were just downloading a lot of stuff between the both of us.

    But the slowness persisted this morning. I took a peek at our bandwidth consumption and something became immediately obvious: there was something wrong on the upload end of things. We had somehow uploaded 2GB+ in one day, which is rather peculiar for us.

    Turned out the issue at hand was an arcane bug involving Apple’s Mail.app “self-recovery”, MobileMe, Gmail, an oversized message and some kind of infinite loop.

    1. Tried to send a 36MB video via email to a friend a couple of days ago.
    2. Gmail prompted me that the message was too large, as they have a 34MB upload limit.
    3. Mail.app kept trying to save it to my draft folder but likely kept getting the same Gmail error, silently.
    4. Mail.app kept on “rescuing” copies of the said message in a “recovered messages” folder.
    5. Mobile Me kept trying to sync my mail accounts.
    6. Repeat ad nauseam.

    I ended up solving the issue by simply trashing my entire ~/Library/Mail folder on my iMac, replacing it with a quasi-identical copy from my MacBook Pro and resyncing my mail accounts.

    Problem now seems to be gone. Won’t get bitten by this one again…

  • Smack Nightclub – LED Room

    [vimeo http://vimeo.com/13883156 w=640&h=360]

    How awesome is this setup? Very!

    Courtesy of the Smack Nightclub in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, UK.

  • Shell is King and ServerMattic Rules

    While working on the systems team at Automattic, I became closely acquainted with our  server deployment toolkit, an in-house yet GPL’d software named ServerMattic.

    I find it to be not only elegant in its simplicity, but also brilliant when it come to learning curve and flexibility. Why? Simple: all in all, it’s just a set of clever shell scripts, backed by SVN, running more shell scripts. This means that anyone familiar with even the basics of Linux/Unix systems administration can wrap their brain around it in no time. On the other hand, it’s also powerful enough to maintain over a thousand servers with ease and sanity.

    See http://code.trac.wordpress.org for more non-WordPress open source software by Automattic.

  • Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly …

    Now only Blogger remains, and is firmly in our sights

    Matt Mullenweg in Windows Live migration announcement

  • Photography: Animals in the News

    A beautiful photo essay, courtesy of Boston.com.

  • WordCamp Montreal 2010 Debriefing

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpppUrjJMlo&w=640&h=360]

    Jeremy and Brendan tell us about their experience as WordCamp Montreal organizers and why your city should have one.

  • Montreal's Vanilla Skies

    Photo taken and post-processed using Camera+ on my iPhone, then posted using WordPress for iOS. All while walking to my friends’ BBQ.

    How’s that for mobility? It really puts this comparison in perspective.

  • Star Walk: Awesome iPhone Astronomy Application

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhhPi7i32Uo&w=640&h=360]

    I’ll admit to have been jealous of my good friend Xopher‘s Nexus One phone and its nifty Android-based, augmented reality Google Sky Map. But I knew I’d find a similar one for the iPhone.

    Lo and behold, while in Seaside, a friend showed me Star Walk running on his iPad.

    One thing the video doesn’t showcase is that the application makes use of the built-in compass, GPS and gyroscope. This lets you simply point your device anywhere and get a picture-perfect representation of what astronomical objects are in your field of vision as well as get all the details you could want about them.

    At $2.99 for such a complete app, I think it’s a very good deal and entirely worth the expense.

    Copernicus would be stoked. 🙂

  • Personality Analysis through One's Download Folder

    So let’s see:

    • Astrophysics @ NASA: what can I say, I like stars. Does show I’m not afraid to tackle subjects I most often have no understanding of. At least I’m trying! 🙂
    • Bonobo, Days to Come: One artist can’t begin to define the gamut of my music interests, but it’s a hint. See my previous post for a tip on buying music online (yes, I did pay for that).
    • Chase Hawk Edit: B… M… X… Oh yeah, baby! I do download video files when the original publisher lets us rather than view them in the browser. Quality is generally much higher, and I can archive copies when I want to.
    • Debian 5.03 Net Install ISO: Nerd alert! I always keep a GNU/Linux ISO around. You never know when it’ll come in handy.
    • elockd: Nerd alert #2, thanks to Demitrious: “…an erlang port of my php locking daemon…”.
    • Kids Photos for family: Yup, I’m a proud and happy dad, and loving every minute of it. But most of the rest of my family is spread across two continents, so sharing picts of the kids growing up is an inherent part of my responsibilities.
    • Recipes: I absolutely suck at cooking, but I’m trying to fix that. In that respect, I’ve started accumulating recipes to try and cook better, healthier meals for my hungry gang.
    • WordPress Trunk: I do enjoy some quality time with my favorite codebase. That’s not even nerdy any more. With WordPress powering around 8.5% of the web, it’s a fair bet you and those you know have dealt with WordPress at some point or another, be it for themselves or while browsing.

    Does this make me a well rounded person? Not sure. But it does show how diverse my interests are. Balance is the key to a well lived life. 🙂

  • When it Comes to "Imported" Music, Buy Direct

    Bonobo's "Days to Come" album: iTunes Canada: CDN $17.82. Direct from Ninja Tune: £4. D'uh!

    I know, I know, buying from the iTunes Music Store is easy, convenient and so on… But it can be quite a rip off at times too.

    Take Bonobo’s Days to Come album for example. I was about to buy it on the Canadian iTMS when I saw the price: CDN $17.82. I thought to myself: betcha Ninja Tune will have this for sale. And wouldn’t you know, they sure do.

    Not only was the album much cheaper (£4 ☛ CDN $6.50) but it also came as 320kbps MP3s instead of 128kbps AACs and included 7 instrumental tracks to boot.

    There you have it. Sometimes, it pays to run a Google search before one-click-buying music off of iTunes.