Blog - Guillaume Déflache

amendable and free online dictionary

Guillaume — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:59:00 +0200

Since I moved to German-speaking Switzerland, I sometimes need to get Standard German translations of French words, or the opposite. After some tinkering I settled on using...

Since I moved to German-speaking Switzerland, I sometimes need to get Standard German translations of French words, or the opposite.

After some tinkering I settled on using Wiktionary, because:

it does not need you to state which language the word you want to translate is in: you only have to choose the target language
if you use Firefox's Smart Keywords, you may only have to type "de clock" or "en Urlaub" in the address bar to know what the German word for "clock" or the meaning of "Urlaub" respectively are
as a bonus, when translating to a foreign language, you are bound to use pages written in that language, which helps you to learn the foreign vocabulary for all things language!

The only drawback I can see as of now is that sometimes no translation will be available, but:

you can add the missing words yourself, wiki-style
all dictionaries lack some words anyway, and a community-based one probably stands the best chance to stay current

Retour à la surface... du lac de Zurich !

Guillaume — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:56:00 +0200

Ca y est, après quelques semaines mouvementées (démission d'Anyware Technologies, déménagement à Zurich), Magali et moi sommes enfin à peu près installés, il me reste juste des monceaux de formalités à finir... et à trouver un nouveau travail !

Pour me joindre (et récupérer toutes mes autres coordonnées), mon adresse Anyware n'est plus valide, mon adresse SF/SourceForge.net par contre l'est toujours, ainsi que mes profils Xing et LinkedIn. Je devrai aussi être encore assez régulièrement sur Skype, avec un micro et une caméra pour les plus curieux ! ;)

quit Javascript "alert debugging"

Guillaume — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:59:00 +0100

Avoiding the alert function for debug traces in Javascript is so simple, I never figured it out until now:

function debug(s) {
    if (! window.info_guillaume_d_console) {
        window.info_guillaume_d_console =
         window.open("about:blank","info.guillaume-d.console");
    }
    info_guillaume_d_console.document.write("<p>"+s+"</p>");
}

There are probably many issues with this but... anyway, for now it serves me well as Firebug's console.debug("foo") does not work for me in Firefox 3 Beta 3 (it prints OK but disappear once the whole page is loaded...), and this method beats "alert debugging" any time!

Update: Fortunately the above bug does not show up in Firefox 3 Beta 4 anymore (with unchanged Firebug 1.1.0beta10)!

Tip: FTP-upload hidden dotfiles on OSX

Guillaume — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:20:00 +0100

As you probably know showing normally-hidden dotfiles in the Finder is painful, as (as far as I know) it still requires a Finder restart.

While doing some programming on my website recently I had to change Apache's .htaccess files quite often and upload them to a FTP site (which is my only access route to my website).

For this instead of reverting to using a text-mode FTP program I found the following method more practical:

open your favorite, drag-and-drop capable FTP application and connect to the FTP site you want to upload dotfiles to
open Terminal, type open /path/to/your/.file, this will open a window for your dotfile
each time you want to reupload your dotfile, drag the icon in the title bar of the dotfile window to the window listing the remote FTP directory contents... and drop it! You're done! :)

Finally airing!

Guillaume — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:11:00 +0000

After much internal struggle, trying to begin to roll my own blogging software (but life is short...), and some gentle pushes from colleagues(*) and other friends, I finally got around starting my blog! :)

Although I am French, I will probably write mostly in English here, as I guess much of my prose will be about programming and other computer-related subjects, which might be of interest to a larger audience.

That said, some French may occasionally appear here for more personal writings, so don't be surprised! ;)

For the technically inclined, this uses a shared DotClear 2 (a blog engine that for now seems to mostly fit my picky requirements, and that says something!) and is hosted by Gandi (a nice registrar which so far seems to really care about its customers).

(*): Here I must really thank Thibault who, by writing down "my" first blogging idea, finally decided me to do it myself! ;)

Also thanks to Benjamin, a true social networks early adopter, which has for some time now been listening to my musings, rants and belated findings about these topics with amazing patience! :)