Just another WordPress site

Author: Stephane Daury

  • New MooTools-related section and repository

    Since we’ve committed to MooTools for our RIA and AJAX development needs in the McGill WPS, I’ve been using it on my recently released personal site as well, so I can experiment outside of work but still try to gain from it professionally.

    Therefore, I just opened a new section and repository under tekartist.org to feature little projects I plan to release publicly, as FOSS, for people to download, use, comment on and modify as they please.

    You can currently only find more information about my source repository, but I will release a little project I’ve been toying with shortly, after I document it properly.

  • Now, that is losing track of time!

    From the source article, via Digg:

    “One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”

    Isn’t it amazing how things you have absolutely nothing to contribute to can titillate your interest to no end? The above article, and countless related references, are perfect examples of a subject I’m going to get lost into for the next few hours, just clicking away until it all sinks in. Simply fascinating.

  • New tekArtist site launched

    Tada! I have decided to move away from Blogger and instead leverage features afforded to me by my new web host, DreamHost. I have now acquired the tekArtist.org domain name and set myself up with a WordPress instance to run the present site.

    newsite-banner1.jpg

    Besides having imported my previous Blogger posts to the new blog section, you can now also browse through two new main sections:

    • labs: the geeky side of things
    • more: the public disclosure area

    The base page is mostly there as a soft landing pad for visitors just stumbling upon my site, but also serves as an OpenID delegate through myOpenID.

    Please bare with me in regards to the domain-wide search, as I’m only using Google’s most basic site search feature. They have not yet picked up my pages in their index, since I just turned off the temporary password I had setup at the root level this morning.

    Technologically speaking, the new site features tools and options such as:

    You can read more about the WordPress theme I custom develop for this site in the related labs page. Since there is nothing really private in it (sensitive values are protected through more appropriate means), I have also decided to make the theme’s source available publicly, fact which might change at any time if I realize that this leads to abuse or security issues outside of what I originally planned for.

    I have been relatively quiet online in the past few years while primarily focusing my energies on my responsibilities as a dad and as a professional. I obviously never stopped playing, but limited my personal publishing activities to blogging and participating in online communities, rather than releasing products or experiments.

    Now that my beloved children are starting to require less of my attention (IE: less then 24-7), I now have the opportunity to revert closer to previous levels of contribution to the web and Open Source spheres. Don’t get me wrong though, I still have clear priorities. 🙂

    As a final note, I just wanted to mention that my moving away from Blogger had nothing to do with necessity, as they truly have an excellent blogging platform, but stemmed from a desire for the increased flexibility that only a full on web hosting account and a product like WordPress can provide.

  • parseMe v2.1 update

    I have released a new version of parseMe, my lightweight browser-based RSS/Atom feed reader utility, which main target remains mobile phones and accessibility devices (universal access).

    You can find the latest release in the download section, and more information about it in the release log. There is now also a public Subversion repository.

  • Sand, sun and RFID?

    From the source article, via Slashdot:

    Ocean City, New Jersey is a nice, family-oriented beach that will apparently soon be the high-tech model for seashore lovers and now perhaps geeks everywhere. The city has on its plate a $3 million variety of public services on tap featuring Internet access and radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) and Wi-Fi wireless technology.

    Usually, when I go to the beach, it’s not to be “in range”… Although, for those whose offices are in walking distance of the beach, it’s a dream come true! Nothing than a good old cantenna couldn’t achieve before, in the latter context, but even better.

    On a related note, here is the definition of self-control: seeing your neighbours discarding a portable satellite dish, picking it up to convert it in a wi-fi extender, then putting it back because you just know you don’t actually need it.

  • OpenMoko teaser video

    See embedded video below for a teaser of the FIC Neo 1973 running OpenMoko.

    I even like the soundtrack they chose, and they also have more OpenMoko related videos on their dedicated Youtube account. Must… Fight… Urge… And wait until October for the consumer version. Not enough time on my hands to involve myself as a developer unfortunately, but once again, it wouldn’t be the first time I say this and fall for it later on. 😉

  • Since I was addressing poor online busin…

    Since I was addressing poor online business ethics in my last post, I might as well touch the following, as it came up while I was browsing the upcoming security stories thread on Digg.

    I was googling my online trail recently, and was quite stirred that the nickname I use on a lot of online communities started showing up as a registered user of a number of social-networking-flavoured porn sites. Most of them pumping out (pardon the analogy) long lists of sites and videos one allegedly features on their profile as interesting, à la Digg et al.

    I thought someone else was simply using the same moniker, but the following article and its author might just have provided me with some valuable insight: Why are my picture and name showing up on porn sites without my permission?

    Thankfully, this seems limited to the user name for now, and my real name isn’t returning such search results. But it is definitely of interest to me professionally, since McGill does have, and is looking forward to further develop, people pages. We will definitely have to take this trend in consideration in the upcoming incarnation of the software and content.

  • First Facebook worm[-ish behaviour]?

    A friend of mine supposedly sent me a Facebook-based invite for an FB app called Advanced Wall. It came as a notification in FB and prompted me to retrieve a message from my contact by adding the app to my profile.

    ‘k, I bite, since I’m in Facebook-API-craze mode for work and fun anyway and get the following, as allegedly written by my friend:

    Check this out!

    It’s an Advanced Wall!

    You can change colors, sizes, fonts, add smilies, pictures, videos and a lot more…

    :)

    Odd.. Especially from the supposed author…

    First, I was just curious to know if they are using tinyMCE for the advanced editor, like WordPress and co. Evidently, I dig a bit deeper, and fire up Firebug, which as a complete aside is the most amazing piece of software. I use it everyday, and am still baffled by how efficient and powerful it all is.

    So, the Javascript doesn’t look familiar and the editor’s iframe goes to http://ai.idlestudios.com/write.php, a domain which strangely enough doesn’t respond under http://www.idlestudios.com/ or http://idlestudios.com/, and just redirects http://ai.idlestudios.com/ to the app’s description inside FB (as of 2007-07-22, ~1 AM).

    Odder…

    Head off the the terminal: whois idlestudios.com tells me the domain is registered to a more than likely fine fellow from the Russian Federation, which in and of itself doesn’t really imply anything.

    But that’s when I start noticing the ads in multiple locations around the Advanced Wall’s WYSIWYG editor. Text ads, subtly placed in the telling Facebook colour scheme. Blockbuster, icon sets, the usual.

    So on to my friend’s profile I go, and what do you know? What do I see on his wall, with no other message than:

    Check this out!

    It’s an Advanced Wall!

    You can change colors, sizes, fonts, add smilies, pictures, videos and a lot more…

    :)

    Really? And it’s coming from someone else in my contact’s own friend list…

    Next: Facebook » Profile » Applications » Edit » Remove

    🙂

    This all said, I haven’t gotten a reply from my friend yet on if he actually sent the invite in the first place (it’s late, and the invite was sent at 11:59pm), so maybe I’m just seeing things and outta get to bed. I’ll post an update here when I know more. Call me traumatized by another friend’s experience. ;P See update below.

    Personally, I’m not sure I’m willing to go for this one anyway. Best case scenario, it’s gonna be MySpace all over again…

    And if by any chance you receive an invite for Advanced Wall from me, you’ll at least know how it did not get there: Not-by-my-click.

    Update (20:45): Well, it seems that my friend is as surprised as I was. Although he did see an option to invite his friends, he is fairly sure he canceled. Yet, the app seems to have propagated itself to his contact list. He also had the same reaction as I with the dubious first message template, and brought to light an error message he received from the app stating “there are still glitches we’re working on with the facebook team“. So worm[-ish]? Questionable interaction design? Buggy app? Plain old bad taste? I’m not a security expert by any stretch, so I’ll hold off on the labeling, but as a software developer, I say: none for me, thanks.

  • We Should Not Bite the Hand that Diggs

    I’ve been noticing that Digg has been getting a substantial amount of cr*p about things they’ve done on and with the site recently. Nothing new or exceptional, as every popular Web outfit gets the community treatment once in a while, but now that the dust settled a bit, I just wanted to express the following thoughts.

    I had the pleasure to meet with some of the Digg crew in San Francisco last month, coincidentally hours before they released their new commenting system. What I saw was a group of people who, on top of being passionate about their respective vocations, actually believe in the product they bring us. This is a relatively rare and precious thing, and I think that as a community, we should nurture it as much as we can.

    I’m definitely not saying we should just fall into blind fanboy-ism and idolize their every actions, but I do think that there’s a [not so] fine line between constructive criticism, which is usually welcomed by any self-respecting professional, and plain old bashing, which can be the most depressing aspect of public releases. And it’s not like they’re not listening (1, 2).

    Yes, I do think that a balance between surprise releases and usability testing could gain to be developed. And yes, I do understand that sudden changes to something you enjoy can be offsetting for users. But I also know that they’re cultivating a tight-group/almost-family-like atmosphere amongst their ranks, and that the last thing I want is for the people behind the code to be nudged anywhere close to just being yet another bunch of salary makers, in yet another faceless corporation.

    So I say, keep on guys, and thanks for your efforts. I’ll happily keep on digging and watching the site evolve.

    And no, I’m not going to submit my own post to Digg. 😉

  • A Swarm of Angels: Remixing Cinema

    I found out about this open source movie project last winter, and am happy to see that they are so far reaching their set targets.

    A groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million people using the Internet and a global community of members.

    • P2P-friendly: free to download and share
    • No DRM: watch on anything
    • Creative-Commons licensed: remixable

    A fantastic initiative, in my humble opinion.

    See also: Elephants Dream, by the Orange Open Movie Project.