koalie's contemplations in markup

"Lord, beer me strength" --Jim

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Monday, February 25, 2013 11:27:34 PM

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I moved my blog to coraliemercier.wordpress.com.

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I used to be thick in #semanticweb

Thursday, January 31, 2013 11:59:05 PM

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I used to be thick in #semanticweb. But that was before.

That was before Alexandre (@bertails) started to explain, and Amy (@amyvdh) translated.

What's a triple? Easy. It's three URLs: subject (sky), predicate (has color), object (blue).
Now, what's a quad? It's a 4th URL that names the context.

I was kidding; I'm still obtuse to Semantic Web. But I've learned something!

Thanks, wonderful colleagues.

4 comments

So, my dad has an iPhone

Saturday, January 26, 2013 9:43:30 AM

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I gave my former iPhone to my father. This morning, after watching for a while his 5 year-old grand-son play Angry Birds, he recounted his experience setting up the iPhone.

First, he didn't know how to insert the SIM card. The leaflet only said to look some page up on the Web. Eventually, he searched and found a good video on YouTube, and watched it 15 times to get the hang of it.

Then he wondered how to open the damn thing and where the heck was the tool he had seen in the video. Well, it was where it had to, nicely tucked on the side of the white cardboard. He found it eventually, which saved him from having to look for a paper clip. Then he cut his SIM card. No sweat, here.

His next step was to install iTunes on his PC. It took a while to download but the hard part was to install the program. It failed near the end with an obscure error. He tried ten times. He decided to discard what he had downloaded and start again. It took another while but this time he managed to install iTunes properly.

What next? Well he needed to activate the iPhone. It didn't work; he said the servers were probably loaded too much when he tried and that he'd try the next day.

So he took back the SIM card, reconstructed the card to its previous bigger shape, using tape and put it back in his previous cell phone. The next day, he was able to activate his phone.

Et voilà!

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Recette : Filets de poisson en papillote, au curry et lait de coco

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 11:04:57 PM

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Filets de poisson curry et coco en papillotes, pour 4.
Préparation : 15 minutes.
Cuisson : 20 minutes.



Ingrédients :
4 filets de poisson (merlu, cabillaud, etc.)
160 g de riz basmati
4 poignées de haricots verts extra-fins
2 carottes
200 ml de lait de coco
Curry, sel, ail moulu

Préparation :
1. Cuire 5 minutes le riz, et séparément les haricots et les carottes en lamelles.
2. Dans chaque papillote d'aluminium, déposer un fond de riz, disposer deux lamelles de carottes, une couche de haricots. Verser un fond de lait de coco. Saler, saupoudrer de curry.
3. Déposer les filets de poisson, saupoudrer de curry, de sel et d'ail. Disposer deux lamelles de carottes.
4. Garnir le riz restant autour des filets et recouvrir le riz du reste de haricots. Verser le reste du lait de coco sur les filets et autour.
5. Fermer les papillotes et enfourner 12 minutes à 180ºC, et 8 minutes à 210ºC.

Et voilà !

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Matin d'automne, le chaud et le froid

Tuesday, December 11, 2012 7:52:32 AM

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La cime des arbres, encore habillés de feuilles orange, semble s'embraser sous les rayons puissants du clair soleil de ce matin d'automne. Un beau contraste que cet orange cuivré sur le fond bleu du ciel. Alors que le jardin, dans l'ombre, est encore blanc et mat et que l'herbe est transie dans la rosée gelée. Quelques feuilles orange tombent, virevoltent dans l'air figé. Leur chute une tâche de lumière dansante et puis elles disparaissent tout à fait et se posent à l'ombre froide.

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Things for which I am grateful

Thursday, November 22, 2012 6:00:53 PM

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Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it! Happy regular day to the rest!

My laptop acted up last night and today and what a prank it was for it to assess the disk corrupt, claim it can't be fixed, and declare that reformatting and restoring from backup were in order. Turned out the disk got repaired and I tweeted I'm grateful for it:
This is the short-term gratefulness and there are other things I am deeply grateful for: I am healthy and literate in a country where life is good, I have a family of good people, I have a son whom I love from the bottom of my unfathomable heart, I live with his sweet father, I have a job I live for and colleagues who are kind, talented, dedicated, funny that I admire them. This is a fraction of the things I am grateful for. Today I thought about them, and I'm thankful.

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Attribution links to pasted content? - Something is wrong on the Internet!

Thursday, November 15, 2012 11:09:25 AM

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Some websites will transform, at the paste event, the content that you copy. This isn't recent, and it was a mild annoyance until it made its début in Opera, the browser I use the most (I installed 12.11 beta RC last last week).

What happens is that when you select text from some web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text that you paste.

What a terrible idea.

As John Gruber put it in a 2010 article on the subject:

It’s a bunch of user-hostile SEO bullshit.



I looked at the Tynt website, and soon found that users can opt out. \o/ http://www.tynt.com/opt_out.php


If you don't want Tynt tracking copy activity or adding attribution links, 
you can disable Tynt, by clicking the Opt Out button below. 
You will need to Opt Out for each browser you use, and have cookies enabled.


It appears that there aren't any other competitor. I hope it stays that way.

But what I wish even more, is that Websites would just NOT do this. It's not privacy that concerns me, it's the fact that in many cases, what I want to paste is lost.
In all cases, what I want to paste is what I select.

I don't want to need any work-around. Yes, I can view the source of a page and select from there. It's tedious. Yes, I can paste in a text editor, strip to what I need, copy again and paste what I want. It's also tedious.

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Last week's scribing performance

Wednesday, November 7, 2012 11:30:07 AM

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One of the things I did a lot last week was minuting meetings, that is capturing a record of what people talk about. At W3C we typically do that via IRC and then a handful of bots and scripts generate HTML minutes.

So I scribed. Friday was particularly intense, being the second day of the Advisory Boad face-to-face meeting, the agenda for the day still being pretty full, and people's heads being quite full of long talking points on what I consider complex topics.

I cleaned up the minutes the same evening, as I usually do, while things were still fresh in my memory. And what surprised my was the small amount of typos and spelling mistakes I had to fix.

Thanks to grep and wc, I found that of the 949 lines in the IRC log of the Friday meeting, 687 were my scribings (amounting to 8835 words). And the number of typos and spelling mistakes I find so low is: 32. That is all. I performed significantly better on that day than I usually do.

Of course, the worst part is now; I need to synthesize 2350 lines (15K words) of minutes into a summary. And "again, the Advisory Board saved the Consortium" isn't enough (nor is it true just yet!).

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Quick, a computer exorcist!

Tuesday, September 25, 2012 12:32:47 PM

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The fact that I find this irrationally funny is worrisome. Don't worry; I already do.
Someone's computer (Rigo's) goes berserk and gives darobin concerns. So, this made me laugh out loud:
[...]
2012-09-25T10:59:04Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:06Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:10Z <rigo>     
2012-09-25T10:59:11Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:15Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T10:59:17Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:19Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:21Z <rigo>          
2012-09-25T10:59:24Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:25Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:27Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:29Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:31Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:33Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:35Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:37Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:40Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:41Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:43Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:45Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:47Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T10:59:49Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T10:59:52Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:53Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T10:59:55Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T10:59:57Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T10:59:59Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:01Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:03Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:05Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:07Z <rigo>   
2012-09-25T11:00:08Z <darobin> mmmmm WTF?
2012-09-25T11:00:09Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:11Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:13Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:15Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:17Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:19Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:20Z <darobin> rigo?
2012-09-25T11:00:21Z <rigo>  
2012-09-25T11:00:23Z <rigo>
[...] 
2012-09-25T11:58:24Z -!- rigo [rigo@128.30.52.169] has quit [Excess Flood]

4 comments

The sound of things

Monday, September 24, 2012 10:17:16 AM

Sound that things make and their levels, as analysed on my smart phone with Decibel Ultra:

Light rain under the porch: 60 - 70 dB
Heavy rain under the porch: 90 dB
Thunder striking a couple kilometers away: 100 dB
Downpour under the porch: 100 dB

This is usually when I give up staying out under the porch, because it means ricocheting water will soak me soon. And my computer too. [User relocates] Here, let me wipe a few drops from my screen and trackpad. Done. You should see the cat --having migrated indoor against her will, she sits under the table in front of the French window and looks dismally at the curtains of rain.

I like to measure the sound of things. Not all things, only things which sound level I find notable. Here are a few additional examples:

Loud snoring: 86 dB (peak)
MIT machine room: 83 dB? I haven't committed that one to memory, I was too busy being impressed.
Meadhall nearby Stata Center: 103 dB! I lasted throughout dinner once, kept only by the fine company of two people I like.









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