François Guillier's Blog

Blimey! With my last blog entry 10 months ago and a average of 3 entries a year, I'd be lucky if I still had some readers left!

Oh well, never mind... this is just a quick note to left my potential readers that the photos from our stay in Morzine are now online :

http://www.guillier.org/travels/201201-01/ & http://www.guillier.org/travels/201201-02/

Enjoy!

Our photos of New York are now on line :-)

Cette note aurait due être écrite depuis longtemps puisque notre semaine à Morzine date de fin Janvier. D'ailleurs, des photos ont été publiées il y a un petit bout de temps. Mais je m'étais dit que je devrais de publier quelques bonnes adresses...

Pour les leçons, l'ESF est sans conteste un gage de qualité et on est sûr d'avoir des moniteurs qui connaissent à fond et le ski et les montages alentour.

Cette année, nous avons découvert le magasin Intersport (Easy2Ride) situé au pied des pistes. Personnel très accueillant, service parfait et si on le veut, on y laisse le matériel quand on n'est pas sur les pistes. A priori tous les magasins des bas des pistes offrent ce service mais on l'a découvert un peu par hasard.

Pour le logement, cette année nous sommes restés au chalet l'Alzette et nous comptons bien y retourner !

Enfin, à 2 pas du chalet, le restaurant La Chaudanne (où il est quasi-indispensable de réserver). Les portions sont énormes mais vous aider à digérer, le patron vient vous offrir le "coup de fusil" (eau de vie) avec sa bouteille en forme de.... fusil.

Il y a un carrefour, pas très loin de chez nous où la circulation automobile est très fortement limitée !

Si un automobiliste - non riverain - parvient à ce carrefour... bonne chance pour le quitter sans enfreindre le code de la route :-)

Je viens juste de mettre les photos de la 3ème édition "Rando GDF-SUEZ" 2010 à travers Paris.

Mes photos ici et site officiel là.

ça y est ! Après pas loin de 3 ans (puisque nous avions ouvert "une caisse" pour les sports d'hiver), nous sommes allés skier.

N'y connaissant rien et ne sachant par où commencer, nous sommes partis en TGV jusqu'à Genève et avons utilisé les services de Ski Morzine. C'est très bien organisé, tout est prévu mais c'est malheureusement pas donné. En plus, ça a un côté assez marrant de se retrouver entouré d'anglais (managers, employés et vacanciers) alors qu'on est dans les Alpes.

Mention spéciale à notre moniteur de l'Ecole de Ski Français avec qui nous avons fait énormément de progrès en quelques heures de cours particuliers (OK moi partant de zéro, je ne pouvais que progresser ! ). On a même eu le droit à des démonstrations du ski à travers les âges (voir vidéos).

Je viens de mettre des photos et vidéos en ligne.

When I bought my flash last Christmas, I went for one of the cheapest options and decided to buy the EF 530 DG ST for my Samsung/Pentax SLR. It was a lot cheaper than Pentax models or Sigma's top end EF 530 DG Super and I thought I would not really need the wireless option anyway.

Since, I discovered that I was probably loosing some possibilities to have fun and that I could not even try the tricks from Strobist blog for example.

A simple cable is hard to find and amazingly expensive... something around 150€ !!!!

Then I spotted the Cactus flash triggers but they are indicated for "EF-530 DG ST (for Nikon only)". Browsing the web shows loads of problems with the EF-530 DG ST indeed.

While wondering what I could do, I noticed someone's comment (can't remember who/where but I thank you Mister!) saying that the best to do was to try the flash on a old "dumb" camera... if it fires, it is compatible!

I tried my flash Sigma Flash for Pentax on a quite ancient camera and it worked fine so hope was back.

While listening Déclencheur's chronicle, I decided to buy a cheap "Flash Remote Controller" from an Asian Ebay shop.

I went for the Seagull SYK-3 at cost of US $6.49 inc. postage and I am happy to report that it is perfectly compatible with the EF 530 DG ST for Pentax.

I ready to bet this is also the case for Cactus's models (and its clones) so basically it seems that there are 2 categories of "EF 530 DG ST" : The Canon (and Sony) version on one side needing very specifics signals on their pins, and the other side, the Nikon & Pentax version happy to fire when triggered crudely.

I ordered something through Amazon but sold by another company located in Germany. This morning I received an email about it and since I don't speak German (I only know the 3 words used in the title of this entry), I fired Google Translator:

Hum, OK I my German might be non-existent but I am not sure that translating "Amazon Markerplace" by "FNAC" (which would be the equivalent of translating by WHSmith for example) is correct! :-)

I tried with German -> English but it doesn't work (or rather it does give the right result).

Into Spanish is quite funny too actually: "...a través de la Amazonía"! I hope my package won't travel from German via Brazil!

This year again, the website "Ship of Fools" has selected the "best" Christmas present (or as they put it the ones Jesus would buy).

For example, this Military Santa...

Selection visible on the Ship of Fools' 12 days of Kitchmas.

Last year page is still available.

see more pictures on failblog.org.

We obviously knew about the famous Velib' scheme (for the ones who don't know, it is a Self Service bike hire system available 24/7 with a pick up/drop off location every 300 metres or so) but haven't had a chance to try it.

Since the weather was very nice and we wanted to visit the tower of "John-Without-Fear" [Tour Jean sans Peur] not too far from where we live, it was a very good opportunity to test the Velib'.

In theory, this is an excellent idea... in practice, all is not perfect...

Our biggest grudge is certainly the fact it is very, very hard to find a bike in working order... Almost all the ones not in use have a (usually small but impeding) problem. If there are two (or more) of you, by the time everybody has found a good bike, you have probably lost 5 minutes of your 30-minute allowance.
Problems are usually flat tyres, saddle clamps, chains/pedals. In short the usual problems with a bike but I can't believe there are so many broken bikes!

We figured out that the best way to have a good bike, is to use the one just dropped off by someone else. If a bike is in its rack, it is probably because it doesn't work (well) :-(

One thing: Why don't the hooks have 2 additional buttons: one green to say the bike is fine, one red to notify a problem. When you bring your bike back, you could have 10-15 seconds to "vote". Then if a bike receives more than a couple of red votes, it is locked and the problem is notified automatically to the HQ! (apparently in Lyon there is a notification system but I don't know how it works).

The second problem is that the streets of Paris can be very complicated. This applies to drivers as well I suppose (but I try to avoid this kind of exercise if I can!). There are countless streets/junctions where you ride on the left hand side of the road! This should not be complicated when you have spent years in the UK but actually it is; you end-up not knowing what to do to stay safe. Also most of bus lanes are open for bicycles but these lanes can be in the middle of the road or on the left and not always on the right hand side. And taxi drivers are allowed in them so you hardly have less traffic than on the main road! I think it is just a question of getting used to it. Cycling routes are signposted and have loads of markings on the ground so at least someone made the effort to provide an infrastructure.

Conclusion for this first attempt: Good but quite hair-raising!

Some info about my new job... not that I intend to make it a regular feature (and I certainly don't intend to get ''dooced''!!!) but just in case some of my most faithful readers are interested...

Well... after receiving several offers, I went for the one with... the lowest pay! (not quite... but not far). Basically, it also was the one I preferred and also one of the safest for my CV. In France (at least in Paris), it seems that you have to be very careful with this :-( (Sad but true... I'll write another time about this subject).

After spending years being basically my own boss when it came to pure technical matters, I am now starting a new life as a cog in the machine. This not entirely involuntary... I was a bit curious of working with bigger teams and having to reach a bit of uniformity across the board.

I already noticed that scaling operations is certainly not good for speed: And the reason is simple enough: If you are alone, once you decided what to do you just have to [find the time to ] do it. When you involve 3,4,5 people or more, by the time the idea is understood by all (which can be hard with non-technical managers), validated and dispatched to the person in charge... it will take age and you'll have to wait! But there is a bright side with this system... you are not responsible for everything and this can be far less stressful (ore far more is someone is blocking your urgent task). You just have to be Zen and see! ;-)

On the technical side, well... I have to say... I am still to see at least one server room (I know there are 4 of them across the country). I know how a server room looks like and I am not sure I would be thrilled like I would have been a couple of years ago but currently, the hundreds of servers I can log on seem a tad virtual! (Yes a good part of them are virtual indeed but this is another story). Some of my former colleagues might laugh, if they read me, as the majority of Linux servers are Debian based (grin). Actually version 4.0 seems OK (so far). For hosting (and since it's the core business of the company), it's a split between PHP and Apache Tomcat. Databases are MySQL. They have very heavy weight configuration (with replication, firewalls, VLANs, etc...), loads of scripts and automatic systems for almost everything (installing images, set-up application, all the monitoring) so in theory all the job could done in one click... Obviously, we are talking about computing and I already had to do some DIYs by issuing some UPDATE/INSERT/SELECT on a mysql database. Job would be boring if everything was working! ;-)

My office is at the 14th floor of the Tour Montparnasse although we will move away soon (thank goodness I'm not the person in charge this year! :-) ) to the centre of Paris because the tower is being stripped of its asbestos. In métro, it takes just 30 minutes door to door from our (temporary) accommodation so nothing to complain about. When I think that some recruiters wanted to send me miles outside Paris!

Wasn't surprised! :-)

10%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Note that I don't dislike my Mac mini... It does what I want (so do my linux boxes) but I have never ever been really excited by an Apple product so far...

There are other fun tests on http://www.oneplusyou.com/q including how does your keyboard compare to an average toilet seat (in term of germs) etc...

Back in October last year, we "had-a-go" at archery during Burwash manor apple-day. But 3 arrows and a couple of minutes is obviously quite short so I took and kept the business card.

We recently went for 4 hours of practice of Archery. Grand National Archery Society requires a 8 hours course before you can join a club but since it was not our objective, we booked only 4 hours thinking we would have had enough.

It turned out that it was clearly a mistake as first time goes very quickly and this activity seems highly addictive!

We really enjoyed it. Even the weather was OK (big shower just while having lunch but clear before and after so perfect timing).

Now we can't wait to go back to complete the 8 hours initial course (after all... why not? ;-) )

---

Contact: Robins Reach Archery - Beginners Courses - Private Tuition

Edit 11/06/2008: Second session was as good as first one (even the weather was perfect). Still highly recommended!

...but I still haven't decided on the exact shade of grey! ;-)

Utterly irritated by Windows Vista and its expensive, paranoiac, annoying and complicated way of doing things but still in need for a faster/better solution to deal with photos, I ended-up with a Malus domestica.

For a long time, people have been telling me, "I love my mac because everything just works..." And until very recently, I hated macs because "everything just broke": I spent (cumulated!) hours having the colourful spinning wheel turning round and round in front of my nose.... obviously, the Mac way, i.e. without any clue about what/why/for how long/etc...

Brand New Features!

Leopard (10.5) seems to have improve the things as (except on a old G4 laptop after the upgrade), I had to deal with very few crashes so far... Moreover, Apple made a lot of marketing about "Brand New Features" I have been using on my good old trusty linux boxes:

• Spaces. I can't remember when I started using such a thing with icewm, but it's not recent!
• 64 bits support. Helllllllo! 5 years ago you could use Linux in 64bits (but agreed: 64 bits doesn't make much different with 2GB of RAM indeed).
• Loads of UNIX programs which were really missing (svn, rsync, etc...). At last, the OS comes with a decent bunch of programmes...

With a bit of luck, Apple might one day discover the existence of a very handy thing called LED, so I can't wait until I see the press release to say they put one LED for hard drive activity and one for network activity! Maybe is too hip... You never know, they might be copied...

MenuMeters

So, waiting for useful LEDs, the best is to use emulation. Found a nice software called MenuMeters ( http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ ) There are loads around but this one is great... free (but I "paypaled" some bucks), open-source & non-obtrusive, it does perfectly the job!

As my main computer is (still) my Linux machine and I didn't want to buy a new screen, I went for the Aten CS62U : It's cheap (< £25), tiny, has very good performances and even switch the speakers. A double-click on "Scroll Lock" to switch between the 2 machines. Moreover, the image is almost as good as with a direct connection... Not like with a model, from a different brand I prefer not to name, which is slow, clumsy and give an image so bad, I had headache after 5 minutes (obviously this would not happen if I was using DVI... ...next monitor maybe! ;-) )

Keyboard mapping

Since I share my keyboard and I'm not a great fan of the Apple's version, my is a basic PC UK model with "|\" near the "z" , "~#" by the CR, etc... Since Apple doesn't seem to provide a decent keyboard support, I made one using Ukelele. Here is the file Genius.keylayout to put in ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/ Then by ticking and selecting "Genius" in Preferences / International, log-in out and in again, you have your keyboard correctly configured.

UTF-8

Twenty years after the byte-order & end-of-line character war between Macs and PCs, a new one has started: MAC OS X uses a canonically decomposed Unicode for its filesystems. Worse, it can't cope (well) with the use of precomposed characters. Obviously W3C recommendations as well as all other operating systems (AFAIK) around use the precomposed version.

I was wondering why the mac could see my directories with characters contening accents but unable to see the content. After wasting a lot of time and googling around I had the (annoying) answer.

Since I'm alone using these directories and Linux seems to cope OK with decomposed Unicode, I decided to convert the shared directory thanks to convmv. Under Linux, I simply ran:

convmv -f utf8 -t utf8 -r --nfd --notest /photos

That said, this mean that it is possible to create 2 different directories with exactly the same name :-( Oh well, this will do for me but I really wonder how they cope in companies sharing windows, linux & macs

Automount & NFS

Well, Leopard can do NFS automount (the UNIX way) but the mounted directories won't appear in the Finder... This would not bother me if some programmes (with graphical interfaces) can't cope with "invisible" directories. If it's not visible in the finder, it doesn't exist. Of course, one could use the "Connect to Server" option but it's annoying having to do it by hand each time you start the computer. Since Bonjour and "shared computer" stuff works only with AFP or SMB/CIFS but not NFS.... I had a problem! :-(

I finally found a 3rd party software (once again): Automount Maker http://jm.marino.free.fr/?switch=sw_&title=automountmaker You can create as many "mounting operation" as you wish and load them when you log on. Simple and efficient.

Network card

It is supposed to be Gigabit on the Mac mini but, it's 100Mb/s 90% of the time and Gigabit only 10%. Log indicate "2 Pair Downshift detected" and switch to 100Mb/s. It seems that this is a known problem with Yukon chipsets. It's usually when the cable is bad but I tried 3 different switches and 6 different cables, so I suspect the problem being somewhere else. I'll have to contact Apple support. Which actually is annoying because they seem to do everything over the phone only. What's wrong with a web/email based technical support? Not sexy enough??

Printing

Printing quality on my old HP 930c was awful. Rastering problem I presumed. When the same printer is used from Linux or Windows the quality is good. I might have found the explanation on the Gutenprint release notes:

Version 5.1.3 is the one shipped with Leopard.

"5.1.4 -> Fixed an issue in Mac OSX 10.5.x (Leopard) where the printing system was not obtaining the proper resolution from the Print Quality setting and was defaulting to the lowest printer resolution found."

Easy fix? No because this new release also has another entry: "removed support for most HP Business Inkjet, DeskJet, Photosmart, OfficeJet, and Color LaserJet printers"

In short, once again a proof of the "Mac? It's just doesn't work" motto ! :-(

The fix is to create a postscript printer pointing to the Linux Gutenprint (not buggy this one) which in turns send it to the print server!

Temporary conclusion

Mac OS works well as long as you don't expect more than a fancy GUI and you use latest Apple hardware. Still a bit too much "It's the way WE decided and YOU the user have to take it or leave it" for my liking. It has improved a lot but there is still a long road to enlightenment.

That's said, the photographic workflow (using both Mac and Linux) is taking shape... The pipeline is just a bit dry due to too much time spent doing IT! Oops! :-(