Fame! (The illusion of)
Every blogger gets to do that once in a lifetime (ahem, I mean at least once...): I searched for my firstname in search engines...
Surprisingly or not (depending on how much you know about web indexing techniques), I am famous, very very famous!
- #1 François in the world out of about 6,450,000 on yahoo.com
- #2 François in the world out of about 3,310,000 on google.com
What more could I ask for?
Real fame? nah... I just hope those rankings last long enough for me not to look stupid when you read this :p (Those rankings can actually change on a daily basis, so... yeah maybe cyberfame just works like real fame, one day you're at the top, the next day you're gone...)
French cities at night
During this time of the year, when the sky is grey all over the country, French cities actually look best at night. And it's a good thing 'coz I wouldn't have gotten a chance to take those pictures at daytime anyway! ;)
It's funny how many cities I've been to lately... I just wish I had my camera handy more often... I really gotta get one of those camera phones... But they make crappy pictures anyway, so I'm not sure they'd really fit the purpose here... ahh whatever
XHTML/CSS heights (or depths) of geekdom :))
From htmldog.com:
(And I laughed a couple of times ;) )Q: Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
A: Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.
Q: Why was the font tag an orphan?
A: Because it didn't have a font-family.
Q: Why do CSS designers have too many children?
A: Because they employ lots of child selectors.
Q: Why was IE5's 3-metre wide cell in the insane asylum smaller than IE6's 3-metre wide cell?
A: Because the width of the cell included the padding.
Q: Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
A: Because it wasn't nested properly.
What is XML-RPC?
XML-RPC is a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.
It's remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.
Palm to XP synching via IR
I still carry around that vintage Palm V that I still haven't replaced by a smartphone to carry around things like my address book and some access codes (heavily encrypted).
Since I moved my email/outlook to my newer Presario X1005 laptop I was a little bit annoyed though... that laptop has no RS 232 serial port! Thus, I cannot connect my vintage Palm craddle and cannot hotsync my email address book no more the way I have been doing it for years... |-|
I thought it would be wise to buy an USB to RS232 adapter... but these aren't actually easy to find. I finally got one on ebay, but that peace of crap came with an unverified XP driver... and I think there's a reason for that: the device worked properly only twice over about 50 desperate attemps... >:XX
Then, I remembered that RS232 ports may have been heavily replaced by USB ports but IR ports have not been wiped out by Bluetooth yet... That sounded so easy I wondered why I hadn't thought about IR earlier! Morevover, I had done that kind of IR sync before on an NT 4 laptop... :crazy:
Well, it isn't quite as easy as it seems... that IR port just wouldn't act like a serial port, so there was no way to get the palm hotsync manager to listen to it. :!: Huh? What's that, it worked on NT 4 a few years ago!
A few days later I finally realized that I needed a missing brick over the IR port driver: a virtual COM port driver! :idea:
Luckily, the open source community has produced such a thing: http://www.ircomm2k.de/english/
Even better: it works like a charm! B)
Now I just wonder: did I install something like that on NT 4? Well, now that I'm thinking about it... I have a vague memory that I did... :oops:
