Just another WordPress site

Tag: personal

  • Google Street View Car, Downtown Montreal?

    Hum… I was on my way back from work on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street tonight when I spotted something in the oncoming traffic that most definitely looked like a multi-lens, 3D capture camera mounted on a standard black car.

    View Larger Map

    Difficult to miss it, perched 4 feet above the car’s roof and right at eye level for me in the bus.

    Knowing that Immersive Media, the company handling most (but not all) of Google’s Sreet View image capture, is from Calgary, I wasn’t exactly surprised. But it definitely got me curious.

    Well, it turns out that the bolts of controversy coming from the States have been duly noted by our government and its privacy watchdog. See also: Canada to Google Street View: “Car!”.

    Ms. Stoddart’s letters to Google and Immersive are available online.

    On my end, I’m equally interested in both parties’ perspectives.

    • As an individual and a Canadian, I do enjoy my privacy.
    • As a geek and having lived in many places, I do want the technology.

    Finding an appropriate compromise is the name of the game.

    Update: I guessed I had somehow missed the buzz on the always excellent Montreal Tech Watch. That’s definitely the car (see picture). I hadn’t seen the side logo from the bus. Oooooh. Aaaah.

  • Release: Moostick 1.0

    Moostick is my take on a Mootools-powered, unobtrusive, Javascript news ticker library.

    Moostick will take in any type of <li> container (<ul>, <ol>…) and turn it into an animated news ticker, fading between each entry at a set interval.

    This project is an experiment in mootoology. Quite arguably over-engineered for its core purpose, I use it to hone my MooTools skills while trying to still provide a fun and stable tool for others to use.

    The unobtrusiveness aspect of the project is key in keeping the content accessible when pages are loaded without Javascript and/or CSS, whether by users or machines, and is one of Moostick’s top goals.

    See the project page for more information.

  • CBC New Media sites upgrade and consolidation

    I just noticed that CBC Radio 3 has finally upgraded three massive sites for which I designed the backend software seven years ago, while living in Vancouver.

    Mind you, they did also run the innovative Zed site in the meantime, but the latter has now passed on after four TV seasons. On the other hand, 120seconds.com, newmusiccanada.com and justconcerts.com have all been consolidated as sections of their main site.

    My team and I built all the software used to run and manage the three sister sites, while the interface design was handled by a stream of super creative artists. Features included audio streaming, Flash-based UI (120seconds) and components, admin tools up the wazoo (for admins, DJs, artists, etc) and quite a bit more.

    I think six years worth of use isn’t a bad ROI. If nothing else, I can’t be blamed for not designing and writing long lasting software. And it did score them a Webby nomination (though heavy.com wan this one).

  • Release: wpDirAuth 1.0

    I have now released the first version of wpDirAuth, a WordPress LDAP connectivity plugin I have been working on for the last month, after an extensive community-based peer review period. The latter helped a lot with hammering desired functionalities as well as coping with the countless configuration permutations found in the directory server sphere.

    Fun stuff. 🙂

  • Feels good to be FOSS'ing again

    After a happy-daddy-induced hiatus from contributing to FOSS in the last few years, I have to say it feels great to be in that sphere once more. I quite recommend it (/smiles and points, infomercial style).

    The few projects I’m working on and have or am about to release are not only motivating from a software perspective, but at the human level as well. A request for a peer review has led me to meet more like-minded people, if only virtually, and the in and off thread intellectual stimulation that has ensued is in and of itself retribution enough to me. Bonus: The threads have so far been focused and I’m getting some really valuable contributions.

    Gotta love it. And sure, I will consider the outpour of VC funding that is sure to follow.
    Uh uh, will too. ;p

    Here’s an update on the recent days progress:

    • wpRedirect 1.0 was released last week, preceded by 1.1, which adds WordPress caching into the equation to be fair to those cute little cycles in server land. Bah, okay, ‘coz I was looking for an avenue to play around with WP_Cache. Busted!
    • wpDirAuth is nearing its first official release, after the forum thread and miscellaneous other review requests led (recurringly) to some helpful insight on the portability, as well as coincidentally, on the licensing aspects of the project. I still have to formalize the end-user documentation and wait for a few more reviews (/me liky tight security) and we should be on for the 1.0 release.
    • Moostick is a yet to be published Mootools-related project I’ve been toying with. It’s a bit on the over-engineered side for its current purpose (unobstrusive JS news ticker), but I’m planning on developing the library with a slew of features on the longer term. For now, there’s not much in the way of end-user documentation for it yet (always the last step), but the source, code docs and examples are all available publicly for pre-release reviews.

    On this, time to hit the sack, because I’m having as much fun at work and I do need my beauty slee… err, I need to lay down for a while, manly and all… 😉

  • Release: wpRedirect 1.1

    I just released wpRedirect 1.1, now with WordPress caching goodness. I am also now packaging the generated code documentation for download, per release.

    You can find more information on wpRedirect, a handy WordPress post and page redirection plugin, on the related project page.

  • Release: wpRedirect 1.0

    Since I’m getting wpDirAuth peer reviewed before releasing the first version, due to its security implications, I have released another project as my first official WordPress plugin instead.

    You can find more information on wpRedirect, a handy WordPress post and page redirection plugin I developed for my site, on the related project page.

  • Testers needed for new WordPress Directory Authentication plugin

    After getting in touch with and having gotten “approval” from its author, I’m attempting to fork off and revive wpLDAP and would like the upgraded code to be peer reviewed by other developers before I release anything into the wild.

    The current development version is in my SVN repo at:
    http://labs.tekartist.org/wordpress/svn/branches/dev/plugins/wpDirAuth/

    If you decide to try and/or review it, please add your constructive criticism and test reports to the related WordPress Forum entry.

    Thanks for any help I can get. 🙂

  • 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.

  • Amstrad CPC 464

    I was recently talking to someone about the first computer I owned: an Amstrad CPC 464 (@wikipedia). Attached is a nice flickr photo of the beast in all of its 64kb-RAM-and-tape-recorder glory.


    Good times; good times indeed. I was 12 (1987) and saved my money for around two years to get one. It was my first major purchase on my own. The first computer I used was a Thomson TO 7, and its lovable turtles, at school.