Funny:

1. Smart cat
2. Weird acrocat
3. Smart predators grow their preys

Simply impressive:

1. Nice puma

Thieves have a new way to steal cars. A method for clean thefts, served on a silver platter by car manufacturers who sell cars equipped with key fobs instead of traditional keys, without any protection against a simple attack. Even Toyota!

If I had had such a vulnerable car stolen from me, I would be happy to discover that flaw. I would just sue the manufacturer for selling such a product. When you create such a vulnerability, you are guilty of gross negligence. The onus isn't on the customer to prove that this flaw was exploited, but on you to prove the theft was made with different means.

When manufacturers will have lost tens of millions of euros in damages, perhaps they will consider paying for security responsibles who have a clue or two about security.

Computer maker Apple has found the recipe to avoid having to acknowledge any defect in its products: to instruct its technicians - I mean, its geniuses (of deception) - to avoid usage of the words "crash", "bug" or "problem".

Unfortunately, joining that cult is quite costly, given the sacrifices required by its gurus. Well, I guess that's just like any other sect, when it has managed to enslave enough fools.

As British Columbia is about to get a rare opportunity to get rid of FPTP, Fair Vote Canada shows just how relevant the topic is :

Could this finally be the start of the end? What better time than now to decide we can't afford such an obsolete system anymore?

Good luck BC. Good luck Canada

I took a week of vacation and on a friend's suggestion, decided to spend it at Club Med's village in Cancun, Mexico. I had never tried Club Med, but I needed to relax and thought that by paying for quality, I would take a break from bugs, as well as from problems in general.

Bugs

Short version

I saw surprisingly few biological bugs in the village. A lot less than I expected. Unfortunately, I stayed in familiar ground as for computer bugs. At least 2 major bugs before my stay, at least 2 issues during my stay, and 1 bug after. I wish I was looking for an IT Manager job.

Long version

Even before I confirmed my choice, I hit a major bug in Club Med's website - the booking calendar was showing me the wrong prices (I believe it ignored my departure city). I still found the booking procedure impressive and tried to create an account. I hit another major bug right there, unable to create an account for days! I had to call an agent to book.

WiFi

Before you book, Club Med advertises the following:

After you booked though, the formula gets more complicated:

Of course, there is no useful description of each access type. So since I wasn't travelling for business, I didn't purchase premium WiFi.

The reception staff told me to install the Club Med Villages app on my cellphone. Over 24 hours after my arrival, and despite multiple attempts, I still hadn't managed to download the ~ 70 MB application on my cellphone. Plus, network was really bad on my laptop. So I went back to the reception, asked if that was normal, and since I couldn't get a useful answer, I gave in despite the feeling of deception and paid for the damn Premium WiFi access. I then tried to setup the Premium access on the cellphone - and was greeted by a DNS error. 2 young employees at the reception failed to help. After rebooting and multiple attempts, I gave up.

Over 2 days after my arrival, after I had given up, I noticed the installation had finally ended. I then tried to access my village, but that turned out even harder. A scrollbar stayed stuck at 100%. I gave up on that too a day later. Only after I came back home did I realize that the application was finally usable.

Salvaging the Unsalvageable?

Nevertheless, I liked many aspects of Club Med and felt compelled to help them improve. I was disappointed that no one asked me how my stay went when I left (probably because I left early). So when I saw an email asking for feedback, I decided to set aside my reluctance to waste time with surveys and took at least 20 minutes to fill it. Here's what I wrote at the last step:

I was 98% into the survey then. I hit Next... and all I got was an image. No confirmation that my feedback was submitted. I tried to go back, but the document had expired.
Gah - apparently half an hour more wasted. All of that on my main desktop, with Mozilla Firefox 60 (ESR).

Other types of bugs, other life forms and Beyond

Other than technical issues, there is wildlife at Club Med, as my photos show.

This was my first time at Club Med, but I learned that it was bought by a Chinese company. Does Club Med still offer the best all inclusive resorts in the concept it created, or is there now a better option for those looking for real quality? I don't mind paying some more (my whole week was around 1800 CAD, direct flight from Quebec City included).

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.

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.

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.

Many forms of discrimination have already been tackled. And the war against discrimination continues, with high school students now calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety.

I now predict we will soon start getting rid of the ultimate form of discrimination: meta-discrimination.

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.