I have a few pictures of Bruno taken with my cell phone, but I was always hesitating to put them up on the web, which would have been a shame if I hadn't because I just find them too funny!
Picture 1: Fashion show
Bruno is wearing an Etrali T-shirt, while he's been thrashing Equant/France
Telecom the whole day for the last 6 months (Etrali is a branch of France
Telecom).
Not too mention it's also very fashionable and very cool to
wear free T-shirts given by providers!
Picture 2: The Hair Odissey part I
Somehow, Bruno has decided to save some money from his hair dresser (since his
dog Boudicca's hair dresser is also more expensive than his!) and let Li cut
his hair... That's how the Hair Odissey started.
The first attempt was not too bad, I must say... a bit short but well, Bruno
was still recognizable!
Picture 3: The Hair Odissey part II
After last time's success, the next step was to try the electric shaver... As
you can see by yourself, Li was not as successful as before ;-)
What's next? Don't miss the amazing adventures of stupendous Bruno and his Fashion Odissey... all details told on this weblog!
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Note that Bruno still remains a charming person, even if Gaelle doesn't seem to be especially comfortable on this picture. Bah, babies just can't tell what Dandyism really is, when it's incarned in Bruno ;-)
I have made minor visual changes in the design of my homepage, however, I
believe this prepares the work for more important changes to come.
Indeed, after my last post, I looked at what you could do with css files again
and again and I am still impressed by the flexibility css files can provide to
a website.
As for the changes in themselves, I have removed the logo and the counter
from the banner, feeling that they were not really needed after all. Above
all, they were pure images inserted in the html code, which makes them
difficult to change, unless you go to every single page and modify the code
(this is what I actually had to do this time, with a perl script though).
I have also replaced the png file for the shiromi title by a jpg picture,
which is now properly displayed by Internet Explorer. More importantly,
instead of a picture in the html code, I've made it a non-repeating background
of a div placed in the banner :)
Practically, it means that the common layout of my homepage (the frame, the banner, the background pictures, etc.) is entirely managed by this single file.
I'm currently working on a new design which will be applied everywhere at
once. You can have a glimpse of it in Shiromi's diary,
selecting the alternate StyleSheet, if your browser allows you to do so.
If you don't have such browser, I've made a special flavour
to view it.
I've used the flower from the css zen garden that I find very cool, but I'll need to find my own background picture before I use this new template.
By the way, the Complex Spiral is another demonstration of what is possible with css designing. Note that this will be truly impressive only if you use a browser that respects the standards of W3C (obviously, not IE!).
For those of you who are lucky enough (or just non-Microsoft enough) to use
a browser (Mozilla
Firebird is one of them...) that is capable of switching css profiles, you
can view another version of this weblog by switching to another css file
instead of using the default one.
It is still very simple, as I am just playing around to see what I can do but
as soon as it starts looking good, I'll think about replacing the old
version.
This feature in mozilla is so useful, it helps me work on a new design of
my homepage without interfering with the "production" version!
The content won't change though, only the way things are organized and the
background pictures do...
There are just so many things you can do with CSS, it's just amazing... If you want
to need a better picture of what css can do, check the css Zen garden
page and try the different
designs.
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the html code is the same, the css
file is the only difference. You can even submit your own design!
The new version of blosxom came out a few days ago. For those
who don't know what blosxom is, you can refer to an earlier blog
entry of mine.
There are not really new features compared to the last release candidate
version, but it just seems to run faster, with a more compact perl code (even
more unreadable! ;-)).
The core of blosxom is actually so simple but at the same time so great
(because it can be widely customized) that this is what I think makes
blosxom's real strength.
On the other hand, the list of plugins is growing like crazy and
you have tons of new features for your weblog all the time.
That's what is so great about the GNU Public license, there are
so many people working on this that the product never stops growing in
stability and in functionalities...
I have requested netcraft to
monitor the server which is hosting my website.
They can do that for free and the information they provide is actually quite
useful, drawing a graph of uptime and giving information about the version of
the http server running, etc.
The only constraint is that you have to request the information on a regular basis, or else, they'll stop polling the server.
I will use it to check whether rcthost, my hosting server, is reliable
enough, although I already have my opinion on this...
There have just been too many problems recently such as wrong data on the
statistics, which can lead to exceeding your quota on bandwidth, compelling
you to upgrade your account, unless you want to leave your website inactive
for the rest of the month, frequent reboots, license of the cpanel expiring,
preventing you from managing your website, etc.
Anybody has a good suggestion for a hosting server, please let me know... I'm looking for a Unix/Linux server allowing ssh and all the usual stuff (php, MySql, Advanced Guestbook, etc.).
A friend of mine sent me a link to the site of a Japanese TV channel, where
they have some best videos
of TV shows.
Since I opened this link, I just can't help but watch the last video called Ping Pong over and
over again! It's just so hilarious!
To me, it is so typical of Japanese humour, as you can see it on TV, where the
comedians are just experts of making fools of themselves and really not take
themselves seriously (you can see that a lot in commercials on TV, where they
always make fun of the Japanese Salaryman and the oyaji, the average 40-50
year old Japanese man).
I think this video is especially brilliant because not only it's treated with a lot of humour, but it's also great visually speaking: it's almost a parody of the bullet time of the Matrix but still very well done, with low budget solutions, live on stage!
Just enjoy watching it again and again as much as I do! the other links are quite interesting too, but Ping Pong remains my favorite one!
I read in Le Monde
today (sorry the article is in French) the story of a guy like anybody else,
who was receiving spam like anybody else.
The only difference is that one day when that Scottish guy named Craig
received 6 junk mails at once, he decided it was enough and started chasing
down the senders of that kind of emails.
A famous one is the one where you receive a mail from the wife of an
African dictator who inherited a huge sum of money but she cannot get hold of
the money without your help. So if you agree to pay a few thousand dollars for
the account setup fee or whatever, she agrees to give you a certain percentage
of the money (I can't believe how much money I could have made if only I
hadn't trashed those emails!).
Craig started to "play" with one of those emails, using a fake identity and
some photoshop tricks to make the guy believe he had all the money required in
cash.
The whole story was told in a weblog and every new step forward (mail exchange, comments from Craig, etc.) was a new entry in the blog, the whole thing with a certain humour, until the end when Craig finally met the guy reponsible for that scam at the airport of Dubai.
As far as I am concerned, I use Mozilla which filters junk mail, so I don't
get too bothered.
However, I never miss a chance to have some fun and to record the email
address of such junk mail (a unique oppportunity!) and to follow Scott Adams' advice (the author of Dilbert):
whenever I receive some other junk mail where I am requested to input my email
address, I look in at records to use the email address I had carefully kept
away from deletion!
Shouldn't we help spammers to know each other better? ;-)
Note that the article in Le Monde also mentions that "Le journal du Net", which started talking about Craig in France, reported that some less happy people than Craig believed the story and were robbed, kidnapped or sometimes killed after their arrival at the meeting point.
The 419 Fraud as it is called is also referenced on the website of the FBI, as well as other types of scam.
It seems my homepage has been quite popular lately. At least, the amount of
bandwidth used has increased like crazy.
In the first 10 days of July, I had already used more than 1Gb of bandwidth.
As a result, my site was unavailable for a little more than a day.
Looking at the stats, it seems that my Fashion show pages were the most visited pages recently. However, I can also see more and more requests from search engines such as Google, Goo (a Japanese search engine) or All the web, which also shows that the rank of my homepage is growing in Google :).
I have upgraded my bandwidth from 1Gb to 3Gb, I hope that's going to be enough for now to handle the number of requests but I may be moving my website to another server soon...
I've just bumped into this cool weblog called "Title n." and found out about this System Administrator Appreciation day, celebrated every last Friday of July.
Aren't you tired of your users saying "What did you do *again* ? It used to
work fine until IT messed up with something..."
Wouldn't that be great if - for a change - your users came to you to thank
you, to give you some chocolates or a small gift from ThinkGeek, like a Valentine Day for
Sysadmin (since it's common knowledge that Sysadmins don't have girlfriends or
boyfriends anyway ;-))?
The sysadminday website not only makes a lot of sense ;-) but it's also a great collection of links to funny stories like "Advice to employees on the proper use of the System Administrator's valuable time" or the famous "Techtales"!
Well, maybe you have to be a sysadmin or a complete geek to appreciate that kind of humour but I just love them, which puts me in one of the 2 categories, or maybe both ;-) !
I
have mentioned the tenki.jp site before,
when there was the last major earthquake in Japan a few months ago.
However, at that time, I hadn't had a look at the other pages, such as the one
that gives the weather forecast for
Tokyo for example.
Most of the time, it's very useful and accurate, as long as you can read
some Japanese. I especially like the small icon which tells you whether you
can leave your laundry outside for drying or not and how long that would
take!
That extra bit of information is just so funny to me, yet I find it also very
handy!
This morning however, I was wondering whether I should take my laundry out: it was amazingly hot and sunny but when I checked the website, it was saying that it wasn't a good day to do the laundry. I thought "Ha! They can be wrong sometimes too!" but left without taking my laundry out because I was already running late for the office and something inside me was telling me to always trust the Japanese weather forecast...
Well, a few hours later, just out of nowhere, it started to rain... I have
to admit that somehow, Japanese have developed a high sense of wheather
forecast (there's even a TV channel dedicated to that) and they are just so
accurate!
The same thing happened to me last week when I was looking at the predictions
on Yahoo for
Yakushima (actually Kagoshima, the closest main city), just because I thought
it'd be easier to read a page in English.
While Yahoo was announcing thunderstorms for the whole week, tenki.jp showed a
nice and sunny day. Again, they were quite right and I had a wonderful weather
for my trip.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I'll just forget about my own pride and so-called ability to foresee the weather changes and rely more on some Japanese who spend their days doing the same thing :)
In case you still don't want to believe, just ask my friend Jean-Paul whether his shoes have dried today ;-)
I've just read in the news
today that Singapore lifted the gum ban.
First of all, I didn't even know there was a gum ban in Singapore!
I'm wondering how people who like gum were doing before...
Were there gum dealers selling gums in the street to teenagers after school?
What was the penalty for being caught chewing gum? When you go to Singapore
with some gum in your backpack, would you be sent to jail as if you were
carrying drugs ;-) ?
It's only half a step forward though, since the article mentions that only pharmacies will be allowed to sell gum (and only the one that aids "dental and oral hygiene")...
Still better than Singapore's original proposal to sell gum only with a
doctor's prescription!
How much is a doctor's consultation, compared to the price of a pack of
gum?...
If you have seen the masterpiece
from Miyazaki-san called "Princess
Mononoke" (Mononoke hime in Japanese), you may have been charmed by the
wonderful nature described in the movie.
For the last 3 days, I was in Yakushima, an island in Kyushu also Unesco World
Heritage (the first one in Japan), almost entirely covered with the mountains
and the forest that inspired Miyazaki-san and to which the movie gives justice
so well.
The trip was fun, flying from Haneda (instead of the boring Narita) to
Kagushima to take a propeller plane until Yakushima.
I have to admit that it had been a while since the last time I took such a
plane and I was a little worried (I have a certain phobia of propellers,
always fearing the moment when it becomes loose and hits someone...),
especially since I was the seat at row 3, just next to the propeller, enjoying
the vibrations in my back for the whole flight.
Of course, everything went fine after all and using a small rented car (absolutely required in Yakushima, since buses don't run very often especially the ones taking you to the forest), I started my 2 day-trip with a nice trecking course in Shiratani Unsuikyo then went on with Yakusugi Land.
When you enter the
forest, you immediately feel the atmosphere of this wonderful nature and you
can totally picture people some centuries ago worshiping some of the cedar
trees (yakusugi) there, as they are quite amazingly huge: some of the trees
there are about 3,000 years old and reminded me about the way the trees are
drawn in the pictures of the old Chinese tales.
The trees just seem to be immortal: regeneration on stump is a process in which growing moss on a stump hosts dispersed seeds of cedar and those seeds germinate on the stumps then eventually trees mature on them.
Of course, I had taken my camera, as well as my tripod without which not a
lot of pictures could have made it.
It is however a difficult exercise to take pictures of a forest, when you're
balanced between the will to use a wide-angle lens to capture the whole
scenary and using a shallow depth of field to isolate the right element in the
picture (both are not theoretically incompatible, but by experience, it's
difficult to combine both in a nice manner).
Also, you should be careful not to overexpose the picture, because of the high
contrast between the shade of the forest and the brightness of the sky, nor
should you underexpose it, otherwise you'll lose plenty of details of the
trees.
As a matter of fact, I have to say I am not completely satisfied with the
pictures I took but I hope to improve for the next time.
Anyway, please have a look at my Yakushima gallery, the
memories of this trip will remain for long in my mind.
I just wish I could share the magic of this forest a better way than with the
pictures I took there.
