Ego related posts

Last days, I told you about my disappointment when I rushed at installing Mac OSX Lion only a few hours after it was released. Quickly, I decided to downgrade back to Snow Leopard. Hopefully, Time Machine is a very good piece of software that works pretty well for restoring your OS to the exact state of the desired date. Here is how to do it.

1. Check that yo have saved/backuped all of your work and data you carried out since you installed Lion (USB sticks, DVDs, whatever)
2. Insert your DVD of Snow Leopard and shut down your mac
3. When starting your mac again, press the OPTION key and wait until it offers a list of volumes to boot from. Select the Snow Leopard DVD
4. In the Installer, don’t go on the process of installation. Instead, click on the Utilities menu, then choose Restore System from Backup
5. Check that you are connected to your time capsule:
   - for networked time capsules, I recommend to link an ethernet wire instead of using wifi, it will be quicker. If you really can’t use a wire, then connect to your wifi access point via the Airport Utilities menu at the top left of the screen
   - for USB time capsules (or external HDD), you don’t have to do anything special
6. In the list, select your Time Machine volume
7. In the list, select the date at which you want to restore your system to. Dates and versions of the system are indicated, so just take the most recent backup you’ve made on Snow Leopard before you installed Lion

Now you’re good for waiting several hours, depending on the size of your backup and the speed of your connection. You have the time to go and make a coffee. Wait and relax, and forget about how Steve raped you with 24 euros.

Some hours later, your mac will reboot and your system is back like before. Lion is just now an old bad memory to you, until the day you have no choice but to upgrade because major softwares will not be supported on Snow Leopard anymore.

NB: if you don’t use Time Machine, I guess you’re going to have much more troubles while downgrading from Lion (if not possible at all?). Probabilities are that you’re to make a new clean install of Snow Leopard. And that you start to use Time Machine, at last (sorry dudes).

I’m a huge fan of Apple products, and especially their OS for Mac, to me there is no better OS for my personal and professional usage. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) was released just this afternoon, 20th of July 2011, and in the next hour I already bought and downloaded the new fresh OS. Upgrade from my Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) went well, I haven’t lost any of my data, and all of my applications are compatible with the new OS.

At first, I was especially excited about the security improvements, such as Filevault 2, Versions, and the ability to crypt Time Machine too. But now, I’m already very disappointed by Lion, on many points. I’ve been playing with Lion just for an evening, so the list of my disappointments might not be so exhaustive at the time I’m writing these lines, but here they are. read more… »

I don’t often talk about my personal life, but my new life plan looks so special to me that I needed to share it online. To set up my background, I am 24, I graduated a Master of Science (e-Business) in Oxford last year, and I founded right away the website Forexagone.com (french) with two other mates (french). I am now living in Strasbourg, France, and I pretty like my quality of life: I am a full time entrepreneur, I can adjust my working hours more or less the way I want (or not, because of course shit likes to happen during the weekend or in the middle of the night…), I am free to work anywhere as long as I’ve got my laptop and an access to the Internet, I earn enough to sustain myself, and I always have lots of fun with my friends here. But nevertheless…

I mentally gave myself 30 years old as a dead line for founding my family (or at least NOT BEFORE 30). I thus have 5 to 6 years to live an awesome life before I’m forced to have a stable life, get married and raise kids. 5 to 6 years that must be used the best way possible, because when the kids are born, I will be stuck for at least 20 years bringing them up.

Rice terraces in Baguio, Philippines

So here is the plan: travel the world, never stop to experience new countries and cultures until I reach 30. It’s not like holidays, since I’ll still be working my ass off every day from … from wherever I am staying. But since my work is flexible enough to do so, I feel I’d be so silly to spend my 6 remaining years of total freedom in the city I was born in…

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Today, I’m taking the time to talk about my new project, Forexagone.com. It’s a website (in french only so far) whose aim is to teach Forex to very beginners, in a way it has not been done before. We really make Forex easy to learn for beginners, who can really start from the very beginning and end by reaching a good level in Forex trading. Our core business is divided into 3 main sectors.

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The last day, I was given a brand new MacBook Pro at my new job. First thing to do: open Safari … in order to download Chrome! But I don’t know why (some traces of French settings?), the default search engine for Chrome was google.fr (french language), and not google.com (english language). Impossible to change it in the list of search engines, and there was this google:baseurl setting (set to google.fr) that I couldn’t overwrite. No way until I found the solution below.

Stop Chrome.

Open the following file (on Mac OS X, files is located elsewhere for Linux and Windows users):

vim ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Local\ State

And look for the three following lines:

"StartupDNSPrefetchList": [ 1, "http://www.google.fr/" ]
"last_known_google_url": "http://www.google.fr/"
"last_prompted_google_url": "http://www.google.fr/"

There, change the URL by the one you want (in my case I turned google.fr in google.com).

Restart Chrome.

The default language for google should be english now. At least, it worked for me

I’ve just discovered this feature in Snow Leopard and it’s changing my life. It allows me to reduce a window into the application icon (in my dock), instead of going to the right of the dock next to the trash bin. I’m really happy of that feature especially because I’m keeping the MAMP window up every time, and I didn’t like to waste space in my dock for that!

To activate this feature, go to System Preferences, then to Dock, and check the box called Minimize windows into application icon. From now on, your windows will reduce and not take more space into the dock.

Not something to be proud of, but I ended 83rd on 95 competitors at the Cascading Style Summer Refresh 2010 contest organised by Alsacreations (french). Unless I gave a lot of efforts to make it HTML5 and W3C compliant, accessible, usable and optimised for slow connections, my lack of skills in Photoshop was fatal.

I’m not disappointed, in the sense that I don’t pretend to be a computer graphics expert. I’m just a hard core developer after all Nevertheless, congratulations to the competitors, and be ready for the next contest, because I am ready and my Photoshop skills won’t stick to the current level!

My motivation in writing this proposal comes from years of PHP practice, when I had to use other people’s code and their code looks like garbage so much that I wanted to throw it to the their face rather than using it. I can’t expect everybody to write clear code, but if I could turn the actual world in a world of beauty and smartness, I’d like people to follow the guidelines in this paper. Note that I didn’t pretend to write complete PHP good practices, as I’m just covering the writing aspect of PHP coding, with concerns such as readability and logic in the flow of code.

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With hindsight, there are things that are definitively not obvious to me when I started to design my first WordPress theme, things which are not very well explained in the official documentation. To begin, be aware that WordPress theming is everything but beautiful coding: no OOP, no MVC, no respect of coding good practices, nor even of common sense sometimes… I’ve learnt these things at my expense, so I’m now going to warn you from the beginning so that you don’t get the cooling effect that I got.

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It was on my todo list for a while: “code a URL shortener“. And yesterday, I don’t know why, I decided it was the day to definitively check this line off. Here is the story of a guy who wanted to code a service in one small afternoon.

tldr: it took around 3 hours to code it all (it took a little more afterwards actually when mates pointed out CSS bugs in IE) and you can see it at http://yop.la.

What to do today?

I woke up at around 1pm this wednesday (I know I know, my rythme of life is a disaster). I went to the kitchen to serve myself the usual bowl of cereals, and switched on TV. What to do today – did i ask to myself? Hmm, I did all the urgent work for the current projects, I redesigned my blog … now what? Ah, there is this line at the bottom of my todo list that hangs for months. Pff, how much would it take, I’m not kind on loosing too much time on a project that won’t get me a penny? Oh, I’m sure it won’t take too much, let’s see if I can do it in one afternoon hehe.

Deal? Deal! Let’s play Below, the table of contents:

1. Phase 1: thoughts and analysis
2. Phase 2: design the database
3. Phase 3: build an architecture
4. Phase 4: finally write the pages
5. Phase 5: have a coffee
6. Phase6: put it online and show to mates

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