Blog

The Big Change in Colors

One year ago, day for day, I was changing the design of my website. And this year, I relapse. Admire the new website design with the colors of a cantaloupe.

In fact, this change goes really deeper than that. I decided to flush the Link section since I did not update it often anyway. The website menu is thus simpler.

The home page with my weblog now contains only the first paragraph of each entry, and only the two most recent ones are shown. My opinion on the old homepage was that it was too heavy. And the weblog archive is now on a single page instead of one for each month. This is a lot better now when you consider the old monthly archive where I published on average one entry per month in the last year.

The Software section changed it’s name, the new name is Projects. I like that better, that’s all. Projects are now using a separate web page design, which should give more importance to the project itself.

This is particularly useful for the updated PHP Markdown project, which now has it’s own menu. There is also a French translation of the Markdown syntax document written by John Gruber. Also new is the Concept page (that I wrote myself) which introduce Markdown to those who don’t know anything about HTML.

So it’s more than a color change, it’s a change in the way the whole website is organised. Note that I’ve put automatic redirects so that old RSS feeds and old page URLs still work.

But if you want the whole story, the change goes even deeper than that. My website now runs using a website framework based on MySQL I’ve built myself. I will discuss this in more details later.

Did you feel it?

Earthquakes are pretty rare here. From time to time we get shacked by one, but the magnitude is generally pretty low. Often, earthquakes would pass unnoticed if it wasn’t of seismographic measurements.

Here, last night around 1h20, the ground shacked: not very strongly but enough to notice. The epicenter was about 100 km down on the Saint-Laurence River, near Rivière du Loup. The recorded magnitude was 5.4 on the Rishter scale.

The report from the Geological Survey of Canada give more details and has a map. You can also see the seismic curves Finally, you can also see the live seismic curve from the Geology and Geological Engineering of Université Laval. (At the time I write these lines, you still have 5 hours before this night’s curve get replaced.)

Misconception

There is a common misconception about the Mac and application installation that I’ve heard countless times. Many people know that to install an app on a Mac, you drag it’s icon on your hard drive and that’s all. There are some exception (these apps use an installer), but for most of them it’s really that simple. Now, here is what I just read from somewhere on this page:

In each case all I had to do was download the installer from for website, and without any user intervention the file extracted itself and I was presented with a finder window containing the program icon. It told me to drag and drop the icon to the applications folder, and I did so. It copied all the files to the right places and that was that. UNIX has never been so easy!

He his technically correct, but somewhat misleading. All the files are copied to the right places ” but there is one place: the place he dragged the application to. There is nothing like an hidden installer going on under the hood placing files at obscure places in the system. This is a plain and simple file copy. This is because most applications on the Mac can work without any installation at all, the application file just have to be available on a storage media where you can double-click on on it’s icon: this can be a USB key, an iPod, a CD…

Without having any evidence, I believe this myth came from some Windows users who couldn’t even imagine that a complex application can be copied from one disk to the other and continue to work, and thus assumed that the install process was just hidden in order to make the Mac more user friendly. That’s simply not true. When I say that there is not hidden installer, there is really no installer.

Who said the G5 was so much powerful?

A graph on this page says that a Mac Mini can beat an iMac G5 when the later is in automatic energy saving mode. Interesting.