Blog

I'm not dead yet

My website have been pretty inactive recently. I will try to explain why in two points:

1. It’s because I’m busy with many things currently (studies, projects, work) and I don’t get much time to post.

2. It’s also because I always want to write more than I have time to put on writing. This makes that I write something and does not finish it, or it makes that I postpone writing about this subject to later. In all cases, nothings get posted on the website.

It’s strange because I still have many things to say.

I will try in the next weeks to catch back what I didn’t wrote before. There is many interesting things I didn’t write anything yet. And a word is better than nothing.

This is a small list of the subjects I want to talk about before Christmas:

• Politics here, in the United States, and elsewhere;
• PHP Markdown and PHP SmartyPants
• Some other of my projects:
  • A small peice of PHP software called Cosmos;
  • A Mac OS X utility that may take the name Color Blind.

Draw me a diagram

When an idea becomes to complicated and when I’m confused just by thinking of it, the diagram becomes my friend.

Week off and iBook G4

After my summer work at INRS, I enjoyed a week off before returning to my courses at the university. One week, that’s enough to make repairs to my bike, shop some new clothes, and get a new iBook

A new iBook! Exactly. My old tangerine one still work very well even after 4 years and a half, but in the last year I always kept close to the saturation limit of my hard disk. I planned changing that for some time now — and voilà: it’s done.

The major point that sold the iBook to me instead of a PowerBook is battry life. On my old iBook, when it was new, I often got 6 hours on one charge with normal use. In the last four days I was pleased to discover that my new iBook G4 can acheive about the same results.

Why did Internet Explorer ceased evolving

This is an excerpt from How Microsoft lost the API War that give a really good explanation to the lack of any improvement to Internet Explorer in the last years:

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft’s API doesn’t matter so much. Web applications don’t require Windows.

It’s not that Microsoft didn’t notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There’s no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it’s just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client.

[“Rich client” here means a Windows application]

So Microsoft see in Internet Explorer a threat to it’s own interests and the project is put to rest. My opinion is that this is not sustainable for long term because the competition will eventually evolve beyond IE. Soon or later, a “killer app” will appear needing a better browser and then people won’t hesitate much to switch platform so that they can use it — the platform here is the browser. This is what always happens with gaming consoles. It’s not like if it was complicated, or costly, to switch browser today.