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No Food for Thought

Food is something you should provide to your brain long before coming to this blog. You will find no food recipes here, only raw, serious, non-fake news for mature minds.

Julbo photochromatic cycling glasses

admin Saturday October 13, 2018

This summer I looked for cycling glasses which would not only protect my eyes from the Sun, but also minimize the airflow. After careful research, I chose Julbo's Aerospeed, even though I couldn't find a local retailer to buy them from. I bought online from trekkINN for 173 CAD and thankfully, the glasses fit well. Just a couple disappointments:

  1. It wasn't clear whether these came with a single glass or several. In the end, there is one glass (and it cannot be removed).
  2. At night, there is important reflection. You get used to it, but it requires some more attention.

EasyPHP review - not so easy to choose over XAMPP

admin Monday October 8, 2018

In recent years, I ranted about 2 of the main options for installing a development AMP (Apache, PHP) stack (including Xdebug) on Windows, namely XAMPP and WampServer. I was hoping that I could be kinder towards EasyPHP, but after trying EasyPHP Devserver on Windows 8 for several months, I'm not very satisfied.

Before anything, I should note that my first attempt to install Devserver 17.0 failed. Oddly enough, it worked after I installed the same version on the same Windows install several months later.

Cost/limitations

The first thing to say is that unlike the others, EasyPHP is semi-commercial. It offers modules from a "warehouse". It costs 10 USD per year to access that warehouse.

I don't have a problem with asking to pay for special packages, but I feel that EasyPHP developers are trying to get users to pay for the basics. The warehouse offers an Xdebug Manager module, which must be great. But when you don't have that, Xdebug isn't even enabled, and there is no easy way to enable it. I think it's just a matter of having the correct zend_extension line in php.ini, and it may just be a matter of uncommenting (removing a semi-colon from) a disabled line, but I feel that in order to make their module interesting, EasyPHP developers have intentionally made default EasyPHP worse.

The other area where I smell this practice is PHP itself. The current version of EasyPHP ships with PHP 7.1.3, which is 1½-year-old. Much newer versions are available in the warehouse, but 7.1.3 feels like an old version to ship as default. There may be good reasons to wait before going to PHP 7.2, since existing applications need changes to adapt to PHP's backwards-incompatible changes, but when PHP 7.1 has reached 7.1.22, shipping 7.1.3 seems quite negligent.

Issues

The other thing is that while EasyPHP does have an issue tracker, it has in fact 2, 1 for Devserver and another entirely different one for Webserver, which presumably causes lots of duplication or difficulty finding already reported issues.

I hit several important issues with EasyPHP:

  1. The dashboard being inaccessible
  2. Opening dashboard sometimes restarts Apache httpd on a different port
  3. EasyPHP needs to be started every time I open a session. Plus, the dashboard needs to be opened for servers to start.


None of the first 2 had already been reported. And several months later, they remain unsolved.

Conclusion

After trying the 3 main options, I'm sorry to say I don't see a clear winner. WampServer is definitely the worst, but between EasyPHP and XAMPP, there is no clear winner. If you're willing to pay, EasyPHP might be a little better. If not, XAMPP probably wins narrowly in general, but I recommend to choose according to your needs and the precise packages and versions offered by each option at the time you choose.

Selected Select2? Better go with option #2

admin Sunday October 7, 2018

I haven't contributed much to Select2, a JavaScript library to replace native HTML select fields. And considering what happened to my latest contribution, just one of numerous issues managed unacceptably, I'm afraid that won't change.

As nothing was done to address concerns 20 days after the problem was brought to light, that will remain my last contribution to Select2, and I will not choose Select2 for any project. Which should not be a problem, as despite what the homepage still says, there are other options for advanced select fields, including Chosen.

Green or Grey: Subsidies for Cryptocurrencies?

admin Monday August 27, 2018

For as long as I have been adult, I have been part of a kind which was not common, at least at the time: an ecologist opposed to subsidies for green technologies. I have always believed in the polluter pays principle, which says we must discourage polluting activities (and not encourage less polluting activities). On specific cases, such as grey cars (more commonly called "green cars"), I disagreed with people I esteem. My stance has always been that we should not subsidize by 1 Euro to encourage use of cars that pollute "less", but rather tax usage of cars which pollute - including grey cars, such as hybrid cars.

On a topic which used to be completely different, since Bitcoin was created, I have been explaining to people why "cryptocurrencies" are worthless. For me, the crypto hype's intensity has always been a sad sign of how widespread the lack of economical education is.

Today, I read a news story which proved how bad the crypto hype has become: "Cryptocurrency" mining now accounts for almost 1% of the World's energy consumption. On the face of it, this is bad news for the environment.

But seeing what some are trying to minimize this issue proves more interesting. Capitalism is based on agents doing everything economically viable to maximize their gains (or at least - particularly in this case - the gains they expect). Mining is a race; if we make mining "more efficient", miners will simply mine even more; there is no end to the appetite for "coins" when companies buy into the frenzy and people start trying to make a living from mining. In this case, it becomes obvious that our simplistic inciting measures are useless at best.

The only way to end this madness, besides economic education, will be to internalize the cost of pollution. That may mean resisting pressure from lobbyists, but the good news is that will finance States, rather than using State means to finance those who degrade the environment.

L'Actualité décoré

admin Sunday July 22, 2018

L'Actualité est le magazine que j'ai le plus lu. En partie parce que mes parents me l'ont mis à portée de main, mais bien sur surtout pour son contenu. C'est mon magazine préféré. Je suis heureux de voir qu'il a mérité le Prix 2018 du meilleur magazine d’intérêt général de la Fondation des Prix pour les médias canadiens, et un total de 7 médailles. Je félicite d'ailleurs la décision récente de diminuer à 12 publications par an, permettant une plus grande profondeur.

Je suis tout aussi heureux de voir que sa journaliste Noémi Mercier a remporté la médaille d'or dans la catégorie Chroniques, pour sa chronique « Des gars, des filles », déjà mentionnée 2 fois sur ce blogue. Des chroniques de féminisme scientifique courtes (1 page de texte), mais qui méritent amplement cette distinction par leur qualité hors paire - Non multa sed multum.

AV1: A Victory for Open Video

admin Saturday July 14, 2018

Rejoice. One major component of modernity - video - can now be compressed using a stable, specified and fully open royalty-free video codec, with AV1, which is also most efficient.
I did not play any role in this achievement, so I have to thank all contributors, notably Google, Cisco, Mozilla, VideoLAN, IBM, Intel, AMD, ARM, Microsoft, Netflix and NVIDIA, BBC, Amazon and Realtek.

Impatiently waiting for an AV1-ready environment

2023 Update: We're getting there...

Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections 2015

admin Thursday May 17, 2018

I voted in this year's Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections. I had only interacted with 1 candidate and since I was almost focusing entirely on governance, I was neutral for almost all candidates, except:

  • Supported Dariusz Jemielniak, who has spoken against bureaucracy (although I consider his specific proposition of setting a firm limit to the volume of policies as a bureaucratic proposition... despite its anti-bureaucratic purpose).
  • Supported James Heilman for his general impression
  • Confidently supported Tim Davenport for being reform minded and critical of bureaucracy, and his intention of oversighting WMF.
  • Opposed Samuel Klein, simply because he is proposing term limits (we need less rules, not more arbitrary rules!)


By the way, WMF, please make it easy for voters to fix or at least report problems (such as the large number of broken links (anchors) to candidate presentations). And allow us to modify our vote (or at least warn us we would need to start from scratch to do so).

And as for candidates, most of your presentations say a little too much about your past and too little about your intentions.

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Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections 2017

admin Sunday May 6, 2018

I voted in the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections 2017. I had interacted with no candidate and was neutral for most candidates, but I supported:

  • María Sefidari, for her work on transparency.
  • Dariusz Jemielniak, for his huge knowledge of Wikimedia, his work on transparency, and his past stance against bureaucracy
  • James Heilman (general impression)
  • Peter Gallert, for his goal of improving transparency


As in the 2015 elections, there is no way to modify our vote (submitting a new vote would require to fill a new vote form from scratch).

As in the 2015 elections, I hit an important issue voting. But I managed to report it this time.

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Le poids (ou la masse?) des mots

admin Monday April 30, 2018

Il y a quelques mois, ce blogue faisait pour une première fois référence à un article de la série "Des gars, des filles" du magazine L'Actualité. En lisant « Le poids des mots », que signe Noémi Mercier dans le numéro de mai 2018, force est de constater que cette série, qui n'est certainement pas à veille d'être à court de pertinence, n'est toujours pas non plus à court de contenu. J'ai trouvé cette courte lecture (1 page) très enrichissante.

Voici l'étude de Armand Chatard auquel le sixième paragraphe réfère, et selon lequel les garçons sont plus confiants de pouvoir exercer un métier traditionnellement féminin lorsqu'il est présenté en utilisant autant le masculin et le féminin que lorsqu'il est présenté en utilisant seulement le masculin.

La belle langue? Si ce fût autrefois le français, les critères de beauté et la société ont bien évolué depuis. Lorsque de simples mots amènent des maux aussi complexes, il faut plutôt catégoriser le français parmi les langues sexistes (et peut-être réattribuer cette épithète obsolète à son descendant sans sexisme linguistique, l'Ido).

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