Weblogism

French Franc Symbol

They all looked at me as if I was mad. Or coming from the States. Et pourtant !

There is a French Franc symbol, even though it was not used: ₣. Just have a look at the symbol (code 20A3) in this Unicode chart. I may say/write lots of insipid things, but not this time…

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Designers and Developers: The Peace Process is on its Way

You may not have understood it, but I am a Java developer. More precisely, I deal with Web applications every day. Intranet portals, CMS, that’s my job. I am also interested in web design and typography. The thing is: I have a personal interest in Web standards and design, and as soon as I have pushed the door to go to work, I become the worst enemy ever of the Web designer.

Since the dawn of mankind and its irresistible craving for developing webapps, two tribes have been fighting each other without coming to a real understanding: the guys who do the stuff that makes the site dynamic and the guys who make nice designs to beautifully present contents. In short, the Web developers always yell when it comes to integrate HTML pages in their JSPs. The “magic” solution that the community came with to reconcile the crowds was the taglibs: they were supposed to provide tags for presenting things in a way that (even) Web designers would understand (they speak tag fluently, don’t they). But having been involved in many projects, it just doesn’t work: Web designers don’t care about programming, and that’s pretty normal. That’s none of their business. So the promised panacea just wasn’t there.

However, it seems to me that we have reached a point where at long last, we have come to a mutual understanding, solving the hellish puzzle of integrating web pages. We have indeed two things at hand:

• XHTML and CSS on one side, reducing the amount of tags to create a design and building the page in a sensible and semantic-oriented manner,
• JSR 168 on the other side.

Quick definition of Portlets, excerpted from the specification mentionned above:

A portlet is a Java technology based web component, managed by a portlet container, that
processes requests and generates dynamic content. Portlets are used by portals as
pluggable user interface components that provide a presentation layer to Information
Systems.

In plain words, the web page is now divided into components responsible for their own displaying. In an average portal, the menu would be one block, the list of articles, another one, the weather is Paris-Beauvais would be another. Translated into (proper, div-based) XHTML, it means that the layout of the portlet is based upon div; you just need to copy-paste the XHTML code, link the stylesheet, and you’re done. And believe you me, it really makes things much easier. It is not as painful as it used to be.

That being said, I still have to come accross the aforementioned “proper, div-based” HTML code. My latest experience in that matter shows two remaining problems:

• Tables are still used, even in so-called div-based designs: menus, for example, are not made with list items. Tables remain the persistant nightmare when integrating the design.
• The intensive use of badly-written JavaScript to do fancy animations still makes it painful. Big time. I am currently planning to rewrite the code which was delivered to me to make it suitable for a dynamic environment and gave up. Web designers definitely think static and write their code accordingly.

There is still a long way towards the Good Coding Agreement, but the tools and standards are there. Now, all is required is pedagogy.

The New Kid on the Block

Typographica, which has been sadly stripped off of its domain name a while ago because of new regulations (and replaced by some crap directory of low quality), mentionned yesterday the creation of UsableType. The first article is interesting, without being earth-shattering. It deals with font size on screen; well, ok, it is nicer down-sized, but as long as people use font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; in small sizes, I will be squinting at my screen, trying to decypher the mysterious tiny signs that my Linux kindly displays…

The rest of the content is quite good and helpful: the site basically summarizes the current schools of thoughts about how to display fonts on website. Excellent work.

Google Desktop Search

I am not so fond of the idea behind GDS (not that it really matters since I don’t meet the systems requirements): a thingy that crawls through personal files (“email, files, and web pages”) and indexes them, that is not quite my cup of tea. More generally speaking, any database built to index my files makes me feel itchy (such as WinFS), even if it is stored locally: who knows what happens if this database is compromised, if Google is taken over by evil aliens willing to snoop into our files to steal my grandmother’s recipes, if malicious data is inserted in the index, if, if… It is a matter of trust and I tend to think that there lots of naughty people out there – even though I still wonder what they would do with the junk that litters my hard drive. Sorry, grandma.

I am pretty sure that it does a better job than the dog (what wouldn’t? I look for files through Cygwin, at work. It does the job faster and doesn’t bark). Anyway, Bruce Schneier has written this very interesting eWeeks article about how the use of GDS uncovers security holes. But those vulnerabilities exist, with or without GDS; using GDS is just more likely to introduce more security risks. I am not saying GDS is not secure, though, since I don’t have a clue; however, there is always that (slight?) possibility that it might not…

The Spleen

I imagine this must happen to any blogger around the universe: at some point, you don’t post anymore because the pages you’ve designed just piss you off. The colours don’t suit anymore, you find them boring. Well, that’s what happens to me (it has also something to do with the fact that I am somewhat busy at work and cannot quite afford to take time to see what’s happening out there…) and Weblogism is now going under a serious redesign. More colourful, pictures are also going to make their way in.

But it is also time to celebrate the 100th post. Happy anniversary, Weblogism!

About Thunderbird

According to Le Journal du Net, in an article bearing tomorrow’s date, Thunderbird 1.0 has been released this morning. A bit confused with dates, this article quickly explains why there is such hype around Thunderbird… And is largely inspired by the announcement released by the Mozilla Foundation, linked above.

I am bit disappointed by this article; the title attracted me because I thought: “Yipee, someone has done a real job investigating the flaws in Thunderbird.” Because I’m sure there are some and I’d like to know before the next trendy virus starts to give a bad flue to the bird. Nope. Zilch. Nada. Just the usual lot. Snif.

This Year's Building Letters

“32 fonts, 1 magazine, 2 posters”. Building Letters is back this year with a new offer around the theme “India”. Like last year, good fonts for a low price… And all this for supporting charity projects in Africa and India. Excellent Christmas present which might help a wee bit to bring back some hope.

Time also to go and see Concern or Médecins sans Frontières.

Google News Blocked in China

Reporters Without Border reported yesterday that China was blocking the access to Google News in English. The article is not only harsh with China but also with Google, which is “partly to blame” since the Chinese version of Google News provides only an expurgated list of news, excluding for instance “such sites as the pro-Falungong Epoch Times (www.epochtimes.com) and Voice of America (www.voanews.com)”.

Live from Vancouver, B.C. (II)

Does it ever stop raining, here? The commercial on TV keeps saying it is the “best place on Earth”, but it certainly is one of the wettest place I have ever been to… Anyway, the Lions didn’t make it. And the parade was somewhat… disappointing; but apart from that really enjoying my time here. Next Wednesday, we’re heading off to Whistler: let’s hope I won’t come back with a broken leg…

Just started 1421 by Gavin Menzies or how the Chinese discovered, amongst other places, America some seven decades before Columbus. Excellent book.

Live From Vancouver, B.C.

It is about 5pm here in Vancouver where I am currently spending a fortnight on holidays. Holidays is always a good time to catch up with all the reading, and that is what I have been doing. It all started with A Little History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson which is an excellent book about science. It brings back all the memories of the early days in school: from astrophysics (Hubble law, red shift) to DNA, from relativity to Darwin… An excellent reading, that’s for sure.

Following the (crappy) Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, I wanted to look a little bit further into cryptography and bought Cryptographie: Théorie et Pratique by Douglas Stinson as well as The Code Book by Singh. Simply fascinating. Brings also lots of memories about algebra and probabilities. It certainly all give a quick overview about cryptography and maths, and that’s really what I wanted.

Anyway, Vancouver has been somewhat rainy since I arrived with Ellen last Saturday but I find the people here nice and amenable despite the unwelcoming weather; the bus drivers take their time to allow the challenged people on board, waiters and waitresses are always smiling and helpful. Something people in Paris should learn, I guess. Still a bit lagged and cannot quite get used to prices before tax, but apart from that, everything all right. As usual, I promise photographs and all, even though I think I will never take the time to put them online… Take care, eh.

Reading While Installing: Always Interesting

As I am installing Gimp 2 on Mandrake, I have also had to install FreeType2, a Open Source font engine (used, amongst other things, by Nautilus in the Gnome environnement). The documentation on the FreeType project website is definitely a must-read (funly enough, that is what they say themselves about FreeType Glyph Conventions): it is very interesting and you end up learning lots of things about digital typography.

Anyway, I thought that was worth sharing; now back to Gimp…

J2SE 5.0 Released

Here we are: the long-awaited J2SE 5.0 (codenamed “Tiger”, which reminds me of the first Java book I ever read, Java in a Nutshell) is out with a ton of new things, ranging from boxing/unboxing to generic types. I certainly didn’t have the time for anything those last few months, so I guess I should try to look into it soon. Anyway, it was an excellent event to start blogging again; it has certainly been a long time!

In the cardboard box (“I am living in a box”) are also changes to Weblogism – which happens to deeply irritate me at the moment: new design, an efficient way to fight spam through bBlog, etc. An interesting thing is that some pages in Weblogism make new versions of Firefox mysteriously crash. If I have time, I will also look into that…

“A bit too Bateman-like”

Whoever wrote that comment entitled “A bit too Bateman-like” is a plain genius. That’s just it. And he could have written exactly the same about the latest Bateman, Driving Big Davie, even though it is slightly better – probably because of the presence of Dan Starkey.

Oh. I remember. I wrote it… I guess that makes me a genius, then. :D

Odie has always been the Star...

I’ve always known it, Odie is the star. Not that machiavelic cat…

<em>Lorem Ipsum</em> Reloaded

Lorem Ipsum is one of my favourite sites when dealing with web designing or any typesetting work. It always comes handy when you need to fill a page with text without copying-pasting hundreds of times the same sentence (which gives an unnatural look to the page).

Here is a new one: lorem-ipsum.info. It gives the whole lot not only in pseudo-latin, but also in esperanto, volapük or other languages:

בהבנה העמוד פיסיקה אחר ב. אחד ב אינטרנט פוליטיקה שימושיים, בה לראות בידור מונחים ארץ. ארץ דת העיר ספינות ברוכים. קודמות מדויקים שמו את, רבה אל כדור בחירות תקשורת.

חפש את לציין מדינות תאולוגיה, שמות אגרונומיה עזה של, בקר או ערכים ובמתן מדינות. לוח מושגי משפטית דת. כדי על עמוד ופיתוחה, רבה לטיפול הקנאים דת, גם דפים הקהילה היסטוריה סדר. יוני סטטיסטיקה של ויש.

גם היא העזרה בקרבת התפתחות, תנך לערך אודות גם. את שתי הארץ למחיקה, ב מתן יידיש תאולוגיה אגרונומיה. זאת הרוח בהשחתה מבוקשים של. אם סדר אחרים הגרפים, צעד בה איטליה וכמקובל. בחירות האטמוספירה זאת אל. אספרנטו ופיתוחה את אנא.

בקר דת מוגש המדינה, אחרים שינויים גם לוח. בהבנה שימושי אם שכל. בה בדף מחליטה לטיפול, זאת מתוך בגרסה מיוחדים על. רבה ב אינו זכויות, לטיפול אירועים לוח בה, צעד העברית ואלקטרוניקה על. זכר משחקים סוציולוגיה בה.

I’ve found my new toy.