Category: General

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Photon – A WordPress plug-in for PhpWebGallery 1.7

Photon 4.2.1 (non official release) by @jcberthon

You can find an updated (and non official version) of Jillij Photon plug-in for WordPress. It now works with PhpWebGallery 1.7.0.
This plug-in is licensed under the same condition as the original one: GPL
Instructions are included in a readme.txt file in the package.

If you are on Windows (XP or Vista), you might want to try 7-zip to open the previous archives. 7-zip is free of charge and is free (as in freedom). It has many advantages compare to the built in archiving facility of recent Windows release.

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A thousand miles journey starts with a single step (Lao Tseu)

Hello World, we are coming…That’s it! In a few days my partner and I will do the first step of a long journey around the World. We are going to travel for a whole year, spend time together, enjoy life, people, cultures, landscapes and food together. This World seems so beautiful and magical, that it feels natural to just let’s go exploring it!

As we are going to enjoy the real life, my virtual me is going to hibernate. This blog will no longer be updated for the coming year and maybe even more. As a temporary measure, I will close commenting just before our departure, which is scheduled on the 1st of August 2007. Closing commenting is just momentarily to avoid this blog being flooded by unsolicited commercial message during the coming 365 days.

I never yet talk much about my interest in bande dessinée (a special form of comics) or comics. Though, I definitely prefer the first ones, I am fond of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip by Bill Watterson. I find this strip so refreshing and funny, if you do not know it, give it a try at your local library or bookshop! Fans of Watterson’s work may have noticed a small plagiarism I used earlier. To give credits to whom it deserves, here is the small strip that inspired us our travel blog name (magical-world.eu) and my previous sentence:

“It’s a Magical World (…) let’s go exploring!”

Credits: Bill Watterson

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Re: The Indulgences of Open Source

In reply from The Indulgences of Open Source (by Jonathan Cogley).

Jonathan, the author of the above linked post, is talking about free software projects and their relation with the understanding of “customers“. To illustrate his writing, he provides two examples of free projects: DokuWiki and AWStats.

Before I go in deeper analysis, let’s talk semantic. I am not an English native speaker, but I figure that English might be close enough to French so I do not make a misunderstanding. A customer is the person that buys or receives a product, it might not be the “end-user”, the one who is actually using the product. Knowing the philosophy behind free software, I also feel uneasy to call an end-user a customer when they go and download the project. Free software give the end-user the same rights and freedom as the producer, he can therefore be an actor and/or contributor of the project. Something not possible in the traditional producer and customer view.

Products and customers are bound to the commercial world, whilst projects and users belong to the free world.

Now, Let’s analyse Jonathan’s train of thought on each subject separately.

Continue reading “Re: The Indulgences of Open Source”

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Count out! Simple game can provide fun too

I stumble yesterday upon a funny, not complex little game that resemble pretty much mine sweeper. :-)

It is a flash animation, so this has nothing to do with free software. But it is just fun to play. It is much like mine sweeper but with numbers. A number indicates how much golden tile there are adjacent to it. This make it pretty simple when the number is 0 or 4, or even 3 next to a border or 2 at a corner.

Easy but fun . :(|) Ideal to relax 2 minutes.

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The Wow had already started

It is not my intention to transform this blog into a video one. But I will from time to time add one that I found of interest.

Today is an alternative wow that I want to say. I have installed a 3D desktop on my computer last autumn and found it fun, I also found out how crap was my built-in laptop video card… sigh!

Anyway, today I was watching a recent video of such 3D desktop, and wow! They have evolved really fast. The video is a bit long at the beginning, but it is worth it. I like the dock at the bottom of the screen (kiba dock). Of course, the operating system is Linux.

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Linux distributions trends

Google trends - Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat based, Debian, SUSE based) and Windows Vista

I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.

You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.

At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.

So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.

To conclude, you could check this other trend comparison between various version of Ubuntu, interesting…

Continue reading “Linux distributions trends”

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Definitively two different styles

Video MIME Type by TangoRecently San Francisco was the location of the Macworld 2007 event. Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. CEO, performed a remarkable keynote and presented the iPhone, which is buzzing all around the internet now.

Even though, that’s only a few month that we got our first Macintosh computer, I fell in love with the look and the use of those devices long before when once – around 15 years ago – there was one of those machines for a few days at home (my father brought it to work on it a couple of days). Since then, I long for having one.

Fifteen years ago PC (DOS+Windows) based computers were clearly ugly. From the hardware design to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), PCs were no comparison to Apple Macintosh and their Operating System (OS). Nowadays, the look of PC (Windows XP or Vista) is clearly improved, both hardware and software. But oddly enough and for my own taste, I consider Apple design still more recherché (sought-after).

The funny part of all this, and which is what triggered this post, is the difference in keynotes from both Microsoft and Apple. Get the full article to know more…

Continue reading “Definitively two different styles”

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Drivel, a Blog Editor

I am discovering Drivel, a small but neat application that allow me to edit my Blog off-line. Actually, this article is being written with Drivel.
Drivel is compatible with MovableType, Typepad, LiveJournal and Blogger. So as I am using WordPress, it is using the MovableType compatible XML-RPC. However, it is a bit disappointing because not all possibilities provided by WordPress are offered by Drivel. Besides writing rich text within Drivel, the only other option is to assign a single category to an article. This is yet a bit limiting, especially when compared to what drivel can offer when connecting to a LiveJournal Blog.
In addition and even though there is a way to split the article in two, in the “read more” manner (accessible via the menu Format->Insert link…), it is not compatible with WordPress and the article is displayed as one single block. Another concern is that once you have updated an article with Drivel, and if you want to re-modify it, Drivel has still in memory the original version of the article.
Still, Drivel is a neat application to have when you’re working off-line, but has room for improvement to better support existing possibilities in other Blog system than LiveJournal.

Update: The new version of Drivel (2.0.3) shipped with Ubuntu 6.10 does not bring visible changes when using WordPress apart that now after updating an article, Drivel will re-download the list of recent entries. Thus correcting the annoying bug that Drivel would still show the content of the original article before it was modified. The Drivel 2.0.3 complete change log is accessible on SourceForge. However, Drivel is still not capable to retrieve the currently assigned category of an existing post.

One can find another interesting review of Drivel on Linux.com.

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Moved to Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5

I was stupidly playing with hdparm features, and after experimenting a few non recommended parameters, I nearly destroyed my / partition (the system one). So my Kubuntu was unusable on my laptop.

Seeing the few problems (bugs) I have encountered using Kubuntu, I decided to switch to Ubuntu and install the KDE desktop (not yet done, I am still under Gnome). I will have more or less the same as Kubuntu. However, the administration tools will be the one from Ubuntu, which, in my opinion, are a bit better and especially more stable.

Speaking of stability, I decided to move right away to Ubuntu Dapper Flight 5, so still a release which is under development. So, I do not expect it to be pretty stable. But I am planning to play around a bit with my laptop, so this release was suiting my idea then.

Nevertheless, as Kubuntu and Ubuntu are pretty similar, I will keep to the category Kubuntu for both distributions.

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