Mois : décembre 2006

Christine’s latino movie list

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Best movies on Week 52

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Quite a lot of great quality movies seen this last week of 2006:

The Business The Business: an english title looking like The Godfather with british spice from the 80’s. The off-voice naration might be annoying sometimes, and some plot are really easy, but the movie is still enjoyable.

Broken Flowers Broken Flowers: a great Bill Murray road trip across US, with a funny jamaican neighbor trying to help him in a quest for his old girlfriends. The end of the movie is really disappointing. Great soundtrack too, don’t forget to download it!

De battre mon coeur s'est arrete De battre mon coeur s’est arrété: Seen twice this year, enjoyed twice, great french movie to be seen again

Habana Blues Habana Blues: On the latino movie trip from Christine, here is the first catch. Some great mood to start with, but not really convincing after the middle of the movie as people are starting to be predictable (and so the end of the movie).

Travel tips for Freelancer

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During travel

By Train

Plan long battery charge on all your leectronic equipments.
Quiet environnement really work firendly. Avoid compartiment seats, not table on front seat provided (unless you prefer to work on your laptops).

By Plane

Not really work-friendly, and because most of flights are shorts (2-3 hours max. in Europe), the best is to enjoy the show by the ‘hublots’.

Visiting family and friends

Prepare yourself to have a double-day. Start working before everybody wake up, and have a few hours working session when others go to bed.
Visiting working people can be great to keep working following your friends working scheme (and sometimes try new kind of working hours).

Few steps to make it work

  • Be sure about internet connection, ask your friend to get information about how it’ll work;
  • Find a confortable place where to put your computer;
  • Make your home network available for SVN commiting, and check VPN access.

Budget Tips for Berlin

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Metro

Can be really expensive if not really well planned, as everything else.

  • single: 2.1€
  • daily: 5.8€
  • weekly: 25€

Credit Cards

They are not working everywhere (only shops), it’s better to have cash in the wallet all the time.

Life tips

Beers and eating-out are really cheap.
At disco, when you take a bottle drink, they’ll give you a token. Bring it back with the empty bottle to get your deposit back.

23rd Chaos Communication Congress

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23c3 LogoChaos Computer Club is organizing one of these great hacking congress just kilometers away from my holiday paradise. The temptation to spend a wandering day there has reached a peak last night, but I’ll have a better time staying with Chris and getting numeric feedbacks (blogs, podcasts, …) from the show.

Link to event info.

la suite…

Xmas: gifts for Web Developpers

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Always use protection

Danger! Really addictives 2006 web games

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A Christmas gift for Florent, a really addictive drug for real gamers: stupid, simple and time wasters web games.

  • Chaos Theory: A simple chain reaction game. 3 clicks to finish the game;
  • iSketch: Dessinez c’est gagné on the web, with french room to play with correct vocabulary;
  • Bendito machine: Not a game, just a super great animation;
  • zWok!: Excellent worms-like online with multiplayer gamplay and profile to upgrade. Days to waste here;
  • Nest of Moai: Just for fun. First level is a bit hard, but humour is present in the rest of the game;
  • Line Rider: Draw a line to make your slider ride his ludge. No goals, create your own, like « the biggest just ever » or « as many loops as possible« .

There is another game with a kind of spaceship drilling earth to get metal, going back to surface to buy fuel and vaious upgrade. If someone can find it for me, I’ll be grateful.

It’s a bit the opposite of ‘Humanity saves time‘ philosophy, but hey, we all love games.

Top 2006 ‘I like it’ Moments

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Here is a list to be completed until 31st of December 2006.

  • Meeting again Christine after not seeing her for 2 years
  • Trip to Tenerife for Hifi workgroup
  • Having a half-hour walk every morning to go to work
  • Lots of picnics in Toulouse parks
  • Dreaming about being late at work, and waking up as a new Freelancer
  • Making cakes every week
  • Learning that my brother and Sandra are married
  • Discovering the powerful color of flowers on a macro-photo
  • Learning how to make simple origami, and having some boxes full of them to offer
  • Buying 2 20Go Ipods for my birthday, one for Joan, one for me
  • Offering a Threadless 12 month club subscription to Joan
  • Building my own home network under a Linksys WRT54GL routeur, and a real server (SVN, Wiki, VNC, VMWare, …). Really geeky but wanted this for years!
  • Hosting Fred for a few days in Toulouse, with all the needed ‘kick your ass’ reflexions he came with
  • Learning Zen with Adam Watts, and feeling dizzy or really light sometimes discovering the power of life

Saving time

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I believe one of the purpose of any creation if saving Humanity time, just to have more time to create new tools.

Today, I’ve discovered a tool that will save few hours of my life, just to build HTML/CSS grid layouts. Simple, elegant:

http://blog.davglass.com/files/yui/grids/

YUI is a nice « 2007 tech » challenger. Enough of all these homemade hack to have a Javascript working on IE-Firefox-Safari. 2006 was the year of Web 2.0 JS packages like Script.aculo.us, moo.fx or Lightbox, let’s see what will happen in 2007.