Hey, I feel juvenile today. Over at Alvin Woon's there's a post that made me smile and made me remember one or two pleasant things from my "youth". Ok, I'm not that old, but it's too late for me to write about "25 women I have to date in my lifetime". So how about the "25 women I would have liked to date in my lifetime" ? :)
Read More

Ever wondered how del.icio.us was named ? You thought that was heavy and creative brainstorming ? Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us' father, explains :

When .us became available, I wrote a quick script to figure out the shortest prefixes that would allow me to generate the most number of names:
$ grep us$ /usr/dict/words | sed 's/.*\(....\)\(us\)$/\1.\2/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
6 aceo.us
6 mino.us
7 ario.us
7 onio.us
7 urio.us
8 aneo.us
8 orio.us
10 itio.us
14 icio.us
18 acio.us


Heh. Those geeks are so funny :) (via)

There is a lot of noise today about what seems to be named GBuy for now, formerly known as Google Wallet, and which will be something like Google's competitor for Paypal.

I must say that this is a service I'm highly impatient for. Something that I would really appreciate would be my Adsense earnings going into some virtual wallet, where I could spend them, or transfer them to my bank account on an irregular basis, rather than this monthly payment, roughly equal from month to month, from the same company name, that obviously shows in my bank account and that I'll have to declare to the tax administration.

Oh well… Luxury problems, I guess, I'm happier to get this payment than not, but I admit something more "stealth", as what I'm collecting in my Paypal account, would be really neat.

La véritable caricature de Mahomet, la seule, l'unique, la première, elle n'a jamais fait de vagues, elle n'a jamais déclenché une hystérie collective dont j'avoue d'ailleurs ne pas comprendre ne serait-ce que la légalité, et elle a même fait rire tout le monde. Normal, elle est de notre maitre à  tous : Gotlib.

L'avis du maître sur la question peut désormais officiellement clore le débat (si quelqu'un pouvait passer le message outre méditerranée :)

I'm slightly updating my WordPress Theme Toolkit, which is now version 1.12. What's new is this version ?

• Separators
  Themes with dozens of options (/me looks at Tiga :) will love this : simply adding 'foo1' => 'This is a separator #1 {separator}' will split the option list, making the whole menu more readable.
• Bug fix
  A few users experienced a rather annoying bug : activating a theme when absolutely no plugin was activated would break everything. No more ! (eck, who would use a WordPress blog with less than 15 plugins running anyway ? :)
• Bug fix
  One user reported an issue with mod_security on TextDrive's servers. This issue should be fixed as well (you tell me, James !)
• Roles
  This update also brings better compliancy with roles, as now defined in WordPress 2.0.

I've updated the WordPress Theme Toolkit documentation accordingly, and also added on page 5 another tip : how to set default values with your theme so that when a user activates it, some options are already set. Enjoy !

Things I hate, #14 : get a flat tyre at night when it's freezing cold
Things I hate, #33 : when my kid Oscar enters my bedroom at 4:00 am, claiming that night is over and he's hungry
Thing I like, #8 : book an apartment in the Alpes for a week, next month

All in all, it's been a good day :)

I'm currently discovering GD in PHP, having fun with it in a small project (and having some great ambitions in another future great project, but time will tell :)
Here is a small function I wrote, designed to create gradient fills of any kind (vertical, horizontal, elliptic, rectangular or even diamond-shaped). Be it useful to one person and I'll be happy for the rest of the, errr… week. GD Gradient Fill.

Andy Beals asks : "what if Google made Cola ?"
Nathan Weinberg has a few really funny theories, and I feel like throwing mine as well.

If Google made Cola, …

• they would run Cola Sense, a program that would pay you for having others drink in your can, but drinking your own can would get you banned
• Microsoft would produce cans, most of them with tiny leaks. Hopefully, a few smaller manufacturers would produce cleaner cans, with less or no leaks. Google would soon start to officially endorse one of those small manufacturers (Firebox) and build an affiliate program with them rewarding people using their cans
• Every time they would release a new flavour on the market, Google's share value would go up through the roof again.
• Rumors would tell about lunch being free at their offices, also know as the Colaplex
• Google Cola would be available in China, but with no bubbles, as per Chinese laws that forbid bubbles in drinks. But well, that’s less evil than no Google Cola at all.

Maybe I'll add more as they come :)

For those who don't know, in France we have mainly two parties : on the left hand we have the PS (Parti Socialiste), and on the right hand is the UMP, currently governing (I don't even remember what "UMP" stands for). Apart from these two, there are of course dozens of more or less important parties. I won't describe any of them, this is not the point, and since politics bores me to death, no matter what side it's from.

The funny things is : the UMP has a very controversial, aggresive and somehow confusing strategy with Google's Adwords. In Google, search for any PS (their opponents) related terms : "Segolene Royal", "Lionel Jospin", "parti socialiste", "Dominique Strauss-Kahn", "laurent fabius" … and look what contextual ad comes first. You guessed it, all these searches serve ads for the UMP. A bit like if googling for "linux" would return ads for "Windows XP".

I'm not sure this is completely sane from a legal point of view. I know you cannot freely bid on competitors' trademarks and keywords, but what about their own persons' names ?

Anyway, as a complete moron who definitely wants to remain ignorant when it comes to politics, I find this very amusing :)