Offline for a month ! I'm going on holidays (again ??) and this time on a more "local" trip : South of France for a week, there to have a few sun and sea baths with my 2 years old son Oscar, then 2 weeks in Malta with as much windsurf and scuba diving as possible.
Enjoy your holidays, too :)
J'utilise depuis maintenant une semaine Gmail, le webmail l33togeek de Google en phase de beta-test dont au sujet duquel je me suis prostitué pour l'essayer. Voici une petite riviou de l'outil, mon opinion, ce qui est jaignale, ce qui craint du boudin, ce qu'il faudrait changer, ce qu'il faudrait ajouter. Une review, quoi :)
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Gmail is giving its members a lot of invitation so users can send them to anyone would like one. Being myself a Gmail user since last week, I have a few spare invitations to give.
Still haven't got a Gmail account ? Want one ? The two first posts in the comments win one ! (if you don't ommit your first name, last name (or nickname) and your current email address, of course)
Thanks to Randy, a fellow WordPress user, I've been invited to Orkut, another Google invitation-only community. I just wanted to get one invitation because I was curious about it.
So, from what I can tell now after 5 minutes, Orkut is just a dating machine for people looking for sexual dates :P People can add you as a friend, write reviews about you, you can seek for partners and stuff like this. Besides this, I admit I'm not sure it's not pointless, but I'm not convinced at all :) Here is my Orkut profile if you are logged in.
Update : and one of the slowest site on earth I think.
GMail will probably launch its service soon, and this private testing period will have been a very efficient marketing event, to say the least. Read on /. an interesting item about Gmail, compiling some interesting links : lotto give away, software like pop to Gmail or Gmail to pop, a few funny links and other usefull as well.
On the opposite side of this cult status, Gmail already has its opponnents. Having one's mail saved and scanned by a search engine might not be the best privacy guarantee, obviously. Gmail is too creepy lists a few interesting reasons that will probably be heard by the most paranoid of you :)
Let's face it : I badly want a Gmail account. Not that I really need it, to be honest : I dislike web-based emails, 1 Gb limited or not. But… But I am curious, and I want to try it. But I love Google as already proven. But this is just too cool geek must-have l33t. Plus, if I happen to really use it once it's launched for everyone, I'd rather have an early account when "ozh" is still available than get a "the_real_ozh" because my nick is already taken :)
So, in my desperate need for a Gmail account, I've looked a bit at GMail Swap, a list where Gmail invitation owners can trade something with a wannabe like me. Actually, trade something… or anything, and most of the time quite nothing. A bunch of offers there are just fun, but there are also plenty of nice offers : help to install a linux distro, postcards from a foreign country, and other things more valuable by their kindness than the money they'd actually cost.
I've myself concluded a nice deal with a nice Gmail user who has been kind enough to invite me. My part of the deal is my sending a few postcards from France this summer, which will be a nice occasion to make this virtual pal discover some beautiful places :)
Update: it worked, start the spamming at ozhozh@gmail.com ! (Jesus, login must be 6 letters at least…) Thanks a lot Tori ! :)
Wow. I'm always amazed at my rankings in Google for the pages written here.
For example, I rank amongst the top 3 or 4 results with my page about Apache and the trailing slash problem when you google about something like "apache trailing slash problem". Same thing with "quick reference cards" or "bash telnet script", other Google queries that bring me quite a few daily hits for such an errr.. empty site :)
So ? So, checking at my referrers, I just found out that my post about Continental Airlines is the first result in French pages according to Google. Guess I have my "revenge" :) (see previous post for more infos)
I will probably post more than just a useless rant about an airline company after such a beautiful trip I've made (see previous post), but now the customs are away, yes, I have somethings to declare : Continental Airlines suck. I've travelled a bit around the world, and made this trip to the USA with my parents who travel a lot, so we can compare our 4 consecutive flights on Continental Airlines with quite a few other competitors, including truely cheap Middle East Low Cost Charters. None has been as unpleasant as them.
Unwelcoming crew who probably wasn't told to be smiling nor listening to customers requests. Food so bad I'd be honestly ashamed if I had to give this to anyone (yellowish salad, dry bred, raw carrots with no dressing, so charming) Oh, wait, maybe they were actually ashamed, so that's why we had so little food ? Well, when we had some at least (two 4 hours flights around noon, expecting something to eat ? you wish !) Seat reservations not being respected (always fun when a 5 person group is splitted everywhere in the plane). Commercials broadcasted so loud on the TV's you can't escape them, but when it's movie time … you have to *buy* $5 headphones if you want to listen !
You may think : "well, dude, their goal is to bring you safe to some place, not entertain nor feed you during 11 hours". I'd reply : "Sure, but their competitors do, for the same rates." Continental Airlines suck. Now, if Google would rank me high on the words "Continental Airlines", that would be a nice revenge :>
Two weeks offline ! I'll be cruising through the South West of the US, somewhere around Las Vegas, in a few famous parks : Arch Valley, Death Valley … I hope to take a bunch of beautiful pictures !
We do have a slight fear of being sort of unwelcomed by the customs, I've read a few things here and there very opposite about the American feeling towards the French these days. Well, keeping fingers crossed and smiling :)
Update : Back ! Awesome ! Images soon ! :)
The ability to maintain a weblog in two (or more) languages is an often requested feature, especially by people like me who just can't make up their mind between French and English :)
I've come up with a very easy way to implement this in an existing website, as you can see by yourself if you click on the tiny flags. I've also added cookie support, so you just need to chose a language once. This may not be *the* perfect solution, it's just one way, and a very simple one to add in an existing site.
