IE the time sucker

Just lost time with IE again. I hate when things work fine in FF and not in IE, even when using a cross-browser library as YUI3. For those interested, here was the problem and its solution.

Lyx pour auteurs: un premier post

J'ai aidé récemment une auteure à utiliser Lyx pour la rédaction de son roman, et son expérience a été si positive qu'elle a commencé une série de post à ce sujet à destination d'auteurs (non informaticiens). Le premier post vient d'être publié, mais d'autres suivront!

Juegos Suramericanos using MyOwnDB!

The 2010 edition of South America’s Games (Juegos Suramericanos) will take place in Medellin from 19 to 30 march.
They are using MyOwnDB to collect volunteers applications and I have of course posted it on the MyOwnDB blog :-)

Create and deploy a Jekyll site to Github page in 5 minutes

As I was looking for a simple way to publish documentation but still ensuring a long term availability and full control of the content, I went for a self-developed solution based on Jekyll and YUI Grids.

If you're looking for a solution to rapidly be able to deploy content on Github pages with Google Analytics and Google Search integrated, Jekyll Base might be for you.

All reasoning and information on Nsa.be, and code available on Github.

About Virtualbox, S3, time drift, 403 reponses

I was working on the FileAttachment code of myowndb.com in a virtualbox debian guest, when all request sent to S3 got the 403 Access Forbidden reponse, even code that was working fine in production. The good thing was that the production server still worked flawlessly, but I really asked myself what I had changed to break my code.

After checking my credentials, the code, trying with S3cmd and getting the same problem, I found a forum thread where having the wrong time could cause that problem.

And that was indeed the problem! My time had drifted 15 minutes, so I was sending out request with a timestamp in the future.... An ntpdate later, everything was working fine. Phew!....

From OO to List style: my notes

I've continued development with Clojure and Jwt, and I got stuck: how do I implement my app without class definition and instance variables? It's not hard, but I had to get used to it. You'll find my notes here. Feedback welcome!

Nokia N900: I'm not sure I want it

Today Nokia unveiled specs of their next internet tablet: the N900.

No, I still haven't found my PDA-phone, or do they cal that a smart phone nowadays? But I've bought the N810 in the meantime, and that was a big disappointing experience: the addressbook application was horrible. Of course, Nokia calls it an internet tablet, and for a good reason. But sadly Nokia seems to think that an internet tablet is not made to help contact managment.

When you see the N900 page, there's a lot of talk about internet and network technologies, but not a word about contact management or calendar. That a bad sign, and I fear the situation has not improved a lot.

I'll wait a bit more to see how Android phones evolve. They seem to have very interesting stuff going on....