Cyril Mazur»

So I was playing with GeoIP and the free MaxMind databases (the GeoLite version). From the IP address, this database can determine a country and a region. And from the country and the region you can determine the timezone. MaxMind gives away the CSV file and coding examples with the correspondance country/region and timezone, and they claim the timezones names are standard IANA, but it’s outdated… (hopefully one of my early users was in a conflictual timezone, so I could find out about this). If you have an up to date OLSON database, then you’d like to take into account my curated list.

For example, MaxMind will give you “America/Indianapolis” whereas the correct IANA name for that timezone nowadays is “America/Indiana/Indianapolis”. From my test, I found 18 timezones names that are not IANA compliant, here is the list.

Or you can download the curated CSV file here: curated time_zone.csv MaxMind.

If you follow me, you know that I am a nomad worker. Co-founder at Forexagone.com, my business is 100% online after all, so I made the decision in 2011 to keep on travelling and working from different places, different countries… In most of the places where I went, I was experiencing work at coffee shops. Some places have good Internet connection, comfy chairs and all. Some other don’t. In Manila (Philippines) I discovered the practicality of coworking, and experienced it for nearly 6 months at Co.Lab Makati. I am now in Ho Chi Minh City (economic capital city of Vietnam) where I found no coworking space so far, but after some days I found this pretty cool coffee shop in the heart of District 1.

Phuong Nam Corp. is a library, they sell books, DVDs, video games and some office accessories. And they have a café on the side of the store (called Book Café) where people can usually read their books while drinking a refreshing smoothie or a coffee. The chairs and tables are all in good condition and comfortable, most of the tables have a power outlet nearby. It’s never crowded and there are no kids around so it’s pretty quiet. The staff is friendly, drinks are not so expensive so I always give a tip between 5 000 and 10 000 dongs (up to 50 cents), because after all I’m using the wifi and power and I stay long. I like and follow this “coffee shop working etiquette” when I order a drink every two hours as a mean to pay for my rent.

Book Café is located in the Vincom Centre mall (which is the most recent and modern mall in the city, and also the most expensive, located in District 1) at basement 1. Check it out if you’re travelling over Ho Chi Minh City and need a space to work for a day or two, this place will do.

Also, if you have any tip on a coworking space in here, thanks for dropping a comment

I am a nomad, which means I change location a lot, and thus I need to travel light. The only thing I need for working is my laptop and an Internet connection, so virtually I can work from anywhere in the world, and that’s actually what I am doing. But there is a drawback when everything which is valuable to me (work files, personal pictures…) is in only one place: my laptop, which is in my backpack. If I lose my bag (or if it gets snatched, which is likely to happen here in the Philippines), I lose EVERYTHING and it’ll be very hard to recover from this.

Of course, one solution is that notorious “cloud”, where you store all of your data in a remote location, somewhere in the Internet. Yes but, you are giving your personal/work data to a third-party company (being accessible to third-party people you don’t know, and thus don’t trust). And even though they might be honest, you’re never sure this company is not going to close, or to get hacked. I am the cautious (paranoid?) type of guy, I like my data to be safely stored in a place where no people can access it but me, like “physically” can’t even access it.

read more… »

Some may call it destiny, but I don’t like it. Destiny means you can’t change what you’re intended to be, when in fact, you can! Here is the story of my life. I come from a small town in the North of France, where I spend my young years. There, most of the youth will study 2 or 3 years, start working as early as 22 and until they get 60-65 and get retired. The luckiest will study 5 years and end up they career as a manager or such. In the mean time, they get married, make kids, buy a house and have a savings account… In the mean time, it’s every day the same: a 9 to 5 job, 5 days a week, and they can spend the weekend watching football on TV. Luckily, they have 5 weeks a year of vacation leaves for possibly having the chance to spend some days on an over-crowded beach in the South of France.

read more… »

On Forexagone.com, we like to do everything ourselves, meaning we don’t like to use many third-party services to handle our work, so we are sure that everything is tailored to our needs, well integrated and working all together. For sending our emails, we decided to do it ourselves as well and not use a service like mailchimp or such. I learned much throughout my research and work on implementing the necessary technical stuff, so I thought it’s a good idea to write my learning on my blog, so it will be like a reminder for me, and it could help others who want to do the same.

Nota Bene: this post is not about the email marketing strategy itself, it is only about the technical setup for sending emails from your server and doing it right.

Like me, you have your own reasons for sending emails from your own server and not using a third-party service. If you decide to do so and go on reading this article, you would like to know the benefits of implementing the things I describe. There are many benefits.

• it lowers the chances that your emails land in the spambox of your subscribers (heck it is important!)
• it makes you comply with the legislation (can vary from the country but better too much than not enough)
• it makes your subscribers happy
• it shows a professional attitude

My list of good practices might not be complete and I excuse in advance, but they are already pretty important to carry out.

There are many aspects of my life that have changed since I decided to be a full time traveller, and I had to make many adjustments to the way I work in order to fit with my new lifestyle. The two new constraints I have to deal with are:

• I can’t carry much (one suitcase less than 20 kilos + one backpack)
• I must be able to manage my business with the same efficiency, like when I used to be sedentary

Therefore, there are a few items I had to buy, some others I had to throw away, and I started to make bigger use of the Cloud. I carry all of my office in my one backpack, which includes the following:

Whether you are a freelance worker, a young startup entrepreneur or simply belong to the category of people who don’t need to go to an office for working, then you should definitely give a try to coworking.

I experienced coworking for the first time as recently as last week, when moving in my first coworking space here in Manila, Philippines. It’s called Co.Lab, and they have two locations here in Legaspi Village (Makati) and in Barangay Kapitolyo (Pasig). Coworking is a style of work in which you share your working environment with other work-at-home professionals. Unlike incubators or standard offices, they include a social dimension that makes the whole thing almost non-formal and encourages collaboration, meetings and exchanges. It’s warm, it’s young and it’s full of creative energy!

People I could meet at Co.Lab so far have the following profiles: freelance web-developers/graphics designers, professional bloggers, subcontractors for foreign companies, web show directors, startups, internet entrepreneurs. I can see many advantages working near this kind of people: I meet people who have the same interests and maybe lifestyle, I meet potential business partners, I can share and exchange ideas of projects, I can listen and learn from a wide variety of profiles (which happen to be international profiles also), I can help and/or ask for help with high skilled people who work in the same field, and I can also possibly make friends!

I think I found something cool there, and wherever my life brings me in this world, I will definitely always look for a coworking space around me to spend my days in from now on. By the way, I happily heard that the first coworking space in Strasbourg, France (the city where I used to live, study and work for a couple of years) is going to open its doors soon in March 2012 at Rivétoile. Check it out if you’re an independent professional from Strasbourg, I know you’re many and it’s worth giving it a try.

One of the big things I undertook last January was to start a new lifestyle, like completely. I wanted to become a perpetual traveller, a nomad, I wanted to be free and have no strings attached in any ways. So what I did: I sold up everything I ever used to own, including my furnitures, most of my clothes, my computers, my car… I left my flat, and redirected my mails to my parents’ place. All what is left can now fit in a single suitcase of 20 kilos, ready to accompany me everywhere and anywhere. But I had to choose judiciously the items to keep with me at all time. Here is my conception of the perpetual traveller kit, the essential things that I cannot afford to leave behind. read more… »

I just arrived in Manila (Philippines) one week ago, with absolutely everything I own in my life which is: a 20kg suitcase and a backpack. I spent the last two months selling everything else I used to own: furnitures, PCs, car, clothes, and any other material thing that was just taking space in my flat and that I was never using. I actually realised that I didn’t need more for living than what I could make fit in my suitcase (well, I am compromising a little actually, as I can’t have an as diversified wardrobe as I would like to, but it’s a compromise I can accept).

So here I am, with only the strict needed belongings for my living, that give me the flexibility and freedom to move from a location to another if I like with just one flick of a finger. That’s my choice, I believe that owning nothing but being free to move everywhere is what’s good for me. As long as it doesn’t affect my work. Like I was doing last year during my trips in Asia and the USA, I can adjust my working habits to be sitting in a Starbucks with a 3G dongle and be as efficient and productive as if I was staying in my home town in France.

So here I am, in Manila, capital city of the Philippines, where I will stay for an undefined period of time during which I will take care of discovering and learning everything possible here. I spend my days in a coworking space called Co.Lab Manila, which gathers a couple of startups, internet workers, entrepreneurs and freelancers sharing the same working space and commodities for a small fee compared to renting a real big office. For lunch I try to go out and discover new local restaurants as much as possible (Filipinos are fond of fast food restaurants and street stalls, I am still looking for vegan or organic places here ahah). For dinner I also try to go out as much as possible and get around my neighbourhood. And of course last weekend I was hanging out in a nightlife district with my Filipino girlfriend and her friends. I had lots of fun there! read more… »

This is what happens, totally randomly when a client is accessing a file. Let’s say you try to access the following URL: mysite.com/blog. These are the consecutive HTTP requests that will occur:

1. GET mysite.com/blog
   302 redirect mysite.com/AbCdE/blog
2. GET mysite.com/AbCdE/blog
   302 redirect mysite.com/blog
3. GET mysite.com/blog
   200 OK

Where AbCdE is always a random string made of 5 characters. That’s right, randomly, requests happen to be redirected twice through a random directory that doesn’t exist before the server finally delivers the resource. What’s the matter, you will say? Well, this has absolutely no reason to happen, and even if a visitor wouldn’t notice it by loading the URL in his browser, this can have an impact in other fields.

First, Google tends to index the temporary URLs that doesn’t exist, and this leads to undesired pages to be indexed. Secondly, as this is an unexpected behaviour, this can fuck your scripts in some situations. It especially happened to me, when apps that are connected to my website couldn’t manage redirections that don’t output more than 255 characters for example. Because of this unwanted random 302 redirect, I couldn’t guarantee the availability of my app anymore.

I am sorry, but I am not responsible, as a developer, for this, and I don’t have to adjust my code to my web hosting in this situation. It seems to be a recurring problem at GoDaddy’s, you can check it out on Google, many people are talking about it, and GoDaddy doesn’t seem to be fixing the issue…

But I really wonder where this bug (or feature) comes from. I bet maybe for a feature, where by differing the actual delivery of the resource, it’s freeing some load on the server when too many connections are coming in at the same time.

Anyways, I am now hosting my site on Namecheap.