Blog

Michaëlle Jean, Governor General

The political storm around Michaëlle Jean appointment is beginning to take a ridiculous witch-hunt turn. The problem? She is accused of being sympathetic to Québec independentists, and this should deny her Governor General of Canada position. Let me say what I think of this.

It’s easy to flag people as separatist or federalist, but the truth is that people’s opinion usually isn’t totally black or white. Most Québeckers I know have at the same time reasons to say yes and no to independence. This is why referendums are not easy.

I think Michaëlle Jean is part of that group of the majority of Québeckers who haven’t taken (and don’t want to take) an absolute position on the question. I think that for this reason, and also because she is a pretty well known journalist here, many people in Québec identify themselves with her. To find here at an important federal position, even if it is only honorific, can only help Canada’s cause in Québec.

I think it is for this reason some independentists do all they can to force her resignation. And the tories are now falling in the trap.

If Michaëlle Jean appointment can help contain independence ideas in Québec, her forced resignation because of lack of total allegiance to a “United” Canada and the Queen of England may have the opposite effect by showing Québeckers they are not welcome in Canada government.

In conclusion, I hope she does not resign. I think this is a pretty good appointment from Paul Martin. And with all this mediatic pointless debate distracting us from the sponsorship scandal, this make it a even better good move on his part!

Vacation

I’m going on vacation to Loïs Lake in Abitibi. So, for a little more than a week, I won’t be able to respond to your emails. Be sure that I will read them all when I get back. Until then please be patient. Thanks!

PHP Markdown Extra

During the last eight months, I added features to PHP Markdown for my own use. Now that they seem to work right, I decided I would release my experiments as a regular markdown.php file usable by anyone. I called it PHP Markdown Extra, because, obviously, it adds extra features on the top of the Markdown syntax. What features exactly?

• Smarter inline HTML block parsing. You can nest block-level elements without much care about indenting the content.

• Markdown formatting inside HTML blocks. Markdown format will be processed inside block-level tags having the markdown="1" attribute.

• Simple tables that look like this:

  Header 1  | Header 2
  --------- | ---------
  Cell 1    | Cell 2
  Cell 3    | Cell 4
  

  It is possible to set text alignement for each column.

• Definition Lists that look like this:

  Term 1
  :   Definition 1
  
  Term 2
  :   Definition 2
  

• Underscore emphasis that only work for whole words.

  Emphasis with underscore will work _for whole words_ 
  but not in the _mid_dle of a word.
  

  This should help when you have to write file or URLs with underscore outside a code span or block. With standard Markdown syntax you would have to backslash-escape the underscores.

If you want to know more, you should read the detailed description of the PHP Markdown Extra.

My wish is that one day these features become part of standard Markdown syntax. Since most of these features appear on John Gruber’s toto list for Markdown 1.1 (see the bottom of this page), I belive my hope is realistic.

Until then, I will continue to update both PHP Markdown and PHP Markdown Extra separately. I may also add more extras to the Extra version eventually.

You can download PHP Markdown Extra form the PHP Markdown main page. It is also available on the dingus if you select the PHP Markdown Extra in the Format menu.

Update: A new version (1.0b4) is now available and solve some problems found in the previous one.

To encourage me to further developing PHP Markdown (and PHP Markdown Extra), you are invided to make a small donation. This is not required: PHP Markdown stays free. But know you can give what you want if you think I deserve it and if you have the means.

Graduated

I’m someone who loves to learn about everything, whatever it is computer, physics, sociology or anything else. I’m someone who loves projects of many kind — as long as it respect my values — and always full of good ideas. And I am someone who just received his Bachelor in Computer Engineering degree.

So, where I am now in my life? The next logical step would probably be to find a job, and I’m confident it won’t be too hard to find one in my region. But before that, I want to take some time to complete (or maybe I should say to start) a project I want very much to release: Reflex. I’m talking about the framework that empowers this web site.

Reflex is a framework built to manage a whole web site. The goal is to make easy creating a website hosting many web applications (forums, weblogs, wiki) but still leaves much room to the web site designer about the visual aspect and the URLs.

My planning say that I will release a first public version of Reflex at mid-august. Until then, I still have much work to do and a week of vacation in Abitibi.

Stay tuned to this weblog for more information on Reflex.