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Paris Web 2010

(français) 19 July, by Fabien

This year’s a special year for Paris Web. It’s the 5th consecutive year the conference is held.

It’s growing bigger, but with affordable prices, it still aims to remain accessible to everyone who’s interested. The fact that speakers are not paid but defrayed also means that people that are present come for a real purpose, and definitively not for money or just for networking.

There is content, and content matters.

I’m insanely honored and happy to be giving a talk there in October, and that’s gonna be awesome to be on the other side of the event. For those who care about where we head to, and how, please attend Paris Web 2010: it will be full of incredibly talented speakers.

The whole team also deserves a big Ola — deal? Let’s do just that… — for all the sweat they put into the organization.

I got one big smile…

C’est si bon…

19 July, by Fabien

Depuis que superbobob a retrouvé un travail en agence, il est devenu beaucoup plus disponible sur Jabber. Outre le fait que cela me manquait, je savoure certains moments à leur juste valeur :

Fabien
15000RMB
superbobob
c’est bon, y a 15 dedans
Fabien
88888, c’est mieux.
superbobob
15000 right mouse buttons, ça fait beaucoup de souris
Fabien
quinzeu mille right mouse buttons, nanananana nanananana naaaa…
Fabien
C’est pas une chanson ?
Fabien
une allemande, je crois.
superbobob
sisi
superbobob
Nena Logitech
Fabien
:)

Urbanisme virtuel…

11 July, by Fabien

Tous les matins, je me réveille avec le 7/9 sur France Inter.

Le 03 septembre dernier, j’écoutais donc comme à mon habitude et ô joie Saint‑Denis — non c’était une spéciale Lille, en fait — et l’invité n’était autre que Christian de Portzamparc.

8:52
Stéphane Paoli
Est‑ce qu’on ne se repère pas plus par rapport aux villes et à leur identité propre que par rapport à une identité nationale ?

C’est ce que j’avais noté alors, je n’affirmerais pas que c’est ce qu’il a effectivement demandé mot pour mot.

Bon…

La question me paraissait intéressante, et je n’ai même pas écouté la réponse. Une belle réponse d’architecte pleine d’emphase et de périphrases. Mais quand même, c’est vrai que nos cultures actuelles ont de plus en plus tendance à se recentrer sur l’individu. Car si Paoli parle d’identité urbaine, qu’en est‑il lorsque l’on aborde Internet, qui justement, absout tout système de localisation, si ce n’est par la technique et les adresses IP (je ne me vois pas identifier quelqu’un par son adresse IP lors d’une conversation, ça fait trop mauvaise pub).

Identité nationale > identité urbaine > identité de quartier (Chinatown, Little Italy, etc...) > ... > individu.

Moi moi moi.

Quand je parle d’architecture virtuelle à quelqu’un qui ne s’intéresse pas forcément au sujet, la réponse pleine d’incompréhension et plutôt gênée se décline comme ça : «Mais on ne peut pas vivre dedans, c’est pas de l’architecture.»

Alors non, on ne peut pas vivre dans un écran, c’est sûr. Mais arrive‑t‑on mieux à vivre dans une feuille de papier calque ? J’ai essayé, je me suis fait engueulé parce que j’avais bousillé les plans.
Voilà, c’est malin ça.

Par contre, il est plus facile d’appréhender un espace virtuel dans la mesure où il se situe dans une représentation de notre environnement que nous avons l’habitude d’expérimenter, avec trois dimensions (essayez d’enlever vos lunettes ou de fermer les yeux pour voir s’il ne s’agit pas d’une représentation :) ).

Bon, ce n’est pas qu’une représentation, OK (ou alors il est temps de songer à nous suicider parce que cela voudrait dire que nous sommes au sein d’une matrice et que nous nourrissons des machines... erk).

Disons cependant que les datagloves et autres procédés permettent un début de sensation de l’espace virtuel qui nous entourerait, et ce de façon de plus en plus convaincante. Ne reste plus qu’à mêler biologie et informatique, et la matrice est prête.

Au final se développe une réelle identité virtuelle, dans le sens où des mécanismes de sociabilisation s’établissent, avec des notions de groupes et de hiérarchie parmi ceux‑ci, des castes ? Quand est‑il alors du quartier, de la ville, de la nation ?

On ne se groupe plus par position géographique mais par centre d’intérêt. Et «le centre d’intérêt, c’est moi».

Heureusement qu’il existe encore de vrais altruistes pour enrayer ce débat égocentrique.

Toutes ces phrases sont assez confuses, je pense, mais c’est un début de réflexion ; des mots balancés assez vite pour avoir une base. Et ce serait un plaisir d’en parler avec des gens ouverts. Je manque encore de référence dans ce domaine.

Kill the FM remixed

(français) 10 July, by Fabien

v2 of Kill the FM just hit production phase this week‑end. So yeah… exit green and welcome white.

I couldn’t help much with this version, but there’s some pieces of me inside, and I’m pretty happy I could give a hand somehow.

Congrats to Carine and all the team for the work! Keep on enchanting our ears, please!

New layout under testing…

6 July, by Fabien

I was mentioning this a few days ago: the actual layout definitively need to be updated or changed.

Let’s change, but let’s test it first.

As this area is a workshop, it’s hardly ever finished. My goal today is to prepare something I can tweak and enhance later on. That is, this is mainly a wire‑frame, even though I’d love to keep it “like this” somehow.

I played a bit with HTML5 and since I’m kind of going crazy with liquid layouts these days, it should be readable on multiple resolutions. You should then be able to zoom in or out from whatever screen resolution and still have no scrollbars. You can try to use it on a 200 pixels wide device, but you might be willing to switch off positioning — though it might work.

Forms are definitively part of the game since all the header is a big ol’ form. Good thing with having a navigation based on forms is that you finally can navigate the menus with Opera without having to use crazy shortcuts: Tab is enough, and I love this one.

So for example, if you want to reach articles about Paris‑Web, you can either click on the months and/or days when those events happened, or just click on “Paris‑Web” tag.

I need to make the colors or behaviors reflect the additive or substractive behaviors of the menu for sure. Any tip on this is welcomed. Other problem with these rules is that you might end on a dead end, which is not so nice.

Planned are nicer URL — that won’t be difficult to make it at least better, ahem —, better graphics, and possibly a resurrection of the myah the day canvas officially starts to support 3D via WebGL.

And there’s a bit more… but there’s things that should never be explained.

Any comments are welcomed and encouraged, of course! But most of all, play around and enjoy it, please!

restore lost icon after installing Thunderbird 3.1 from Ubuntuzilla package

26 June, by Fabien

I installed Thunderbird 3.1 from Ubuntuzilla packages a few minutes ago and lost the icon in Docky. I wasn’t so happy with that, so I checked around to find a solution.

The reason appears to be that the system is looking for /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop whereas Ubuntuzilla creates a file called /usr/share/applications/Mozilla Build of Thunderbird.desktop; this is not right.

Just rename the culprit file to thunderbird.desktop and you’ll be a happy bunny as me.

That might not be the best solution ever, but it seems to work pretty well so far.

Just a tip…

25 June, by Fabien

If you find yourself in a dead end with some code you don’t seem to be able to solve: get off your screen, sit on your toilets, and think about it with no help whatsoever (paper, pen…).

You might even end traveling in time.

:first-child pseudo‑class and the <caption> element

22 June, by Fabien

case solved, thanks for the answers!

So… I was answering a rant from one of our readers, and I came across something I can’t find any answer to, but “WTF?” (Excuse my French).

When using the following codes, the <caption> element looks like being ignored by browsers as the first child of <table>; I made a test case in the codeplay section:

CSS

table tr:first-child {
  color: #f00;
}

HTML

<table>
  <caption lang="it">è un'ingiustizia però</caption>
  <tr>
    <th>code</th>
    <th>comment</th>
  </tr>
</table>

Since I can’t find any reason why this would be the case, I’ll ask the Web: Dear lazy Web, do you have any answer to this question? Not “WTF?”, but “Why is <caption> ignored as the first child of <table>?

The DOM in Firefox says it’s children[0] of <table>, which is fine with me! But why would the rendering behave an other way?

Happy birthday!

15 June, by Fabien

This website is now nine years old today. Well well well…

Still have around 1400 articles to put back online, once they’re cleaned up from the previous home made CMS tag’s and typos. Oh, and something new to come…

Dear blog, I hope you’ll make it to your 10th!

Just a thought.

12 June, by Fabien

This unfinished layout is really getting on my nerves. ’Will change it in the month to come; I’ve been sketching enough to make ten different layouts already, maybe this should be confronted to reality somehow.

Stay tuned.

China‑Europa Forum

(français) 28 May, by Fabien

For this project, ACS Horizons hired me to optimize the code of the existing website. Most of the work has then been done on the back‑end side, even if numerous improvements have been made on the front end, like a semi‑fluid layout instead of a fixed width of 1000px.

The challenge was interesting, especially considering the many exceptions to a number of website’s rules, added to that its availability in three different languages and the cultural clash in uses there is sometimes between Chinese and Western users.

Based on Spip because of it’s good multi‑lingual support, the skeletons have been upgraded and replaced by Zpip. A lot of work has been made to ease editor’s needs while still being flexible with what they want to show, when, and where.

flipmood

(français) 6 May, by Fabien

Graphic design was made by flipmood, and I integrated it with Spip.

This website acts as a showcase for their crazy ideas and whatever designs that might cross their thoughts. This involves still images, sounds and videos, and that was (“is”, since there’s still things to get done) absolutely great to work on this project.

As a disclaimer, this website is not IE‑proof at all. Considering time and resources we had, plus the target aimed at, decision was taken from the start to focus on recent browers that have a good support of Web Standards, ie: not IE. Don’t try it at home if you’re an absolute fan of Bill Gates and can’t imagine using anything else than IE. Of course, they’ll be at least some kind of support… “one day”.

raccourcis claviers typographiques sur Ubuntu

28 April, by Fabien

Suite à un article de Vincent sur l’utilisation de l’apostrophe, j’ai cherché un peu à savoir quel raccourci clavier générait quel caractère sur Ubuntu. Voici donc un tableau qui résume ces raccourcis, d’abord par lignes du clavier, puis dans un vrai tableau explicite que je complèterai au fur et à mesure. Désolé pour l’absence de bordures qui ne facilitent pas la compréhension, j’y travaille… :

Dans l’image suivante, les caractères en bleu sont obtenus en appuyant sur AltGr et ceux de couleur rouge en appuyant simultanément sur AltGr + Maj : combinaisons de touches et caractères correspondant sur Ubuntu Pour les personnes désirant modifier le fichier original, vous pouvez télécharger le fichier au format SVG.

AltGr :

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AltGr +Maj :

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≥“”®←↑→…⋅∕−
combinaison de touchestouche du clavierrésultatcommentaire
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"Contrefaçon" : The Cité des Sciences censors opensource at INPI’s request

(Español, français) 21 April, by Fabien

The following text belongs to an article describing how the INPI put pressure on the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie to censor it. This text about open-source licences was supposed to be part of the exhibition «Contrefaçon : la vraie expo qui parle du faux», which doesn’t seem to provide any informative website at the time.

Copyleft : Isabelle Vodjdani, 20th of april 2010, this text is "libre", you can copy it, broadcast it and modify it following the terms of the Free Art License 1.3.

Causes and consequences

26 March, by Fabien

Once upon a time, a company was providing a service to help people achieve what they couldn’t do by themselves, because of a lack of know how or knowledge, or because of the lack of tools. They were doing this because they studied this, practiced this, and were good at this, hence them being called for the job. In consequence, they were getting something as a retribution (food, whatever privilege, money).

Nowadays, do you think passion or skills are leading the industry? Sometimes... This is business, right? I feel more and more (at least around me in Shanghai) the cause starts with money (Hey! We could make money out of that!) instead of the willing to help or share.

Hopefully, there’s still some nice people all over the place. :) (making money first is definitively not putting someone at the top of my "nice people" list)

Hey! Did you know Paris-Web just started their call for speakers? Mmm... Maybe will I try to be in Paris in October 2010...

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