Les amoureux de la cuisine nipponne se réjouiront d'apprendre l'existence du site de cuisine-japonaise.com, qui, non content de vous proposer une liste de recettes suffisamment longue pour vous tenir occupé pendant de longs mois, dispose aussi d'un lexique des aliments, ustensiles avec photos à l'appui.
Vous y trouverez aussi un astucieux calendrier (voilà le lien pour le mois de février), qui marque les dates des diverses célébrations au Japon, ainsi qu'une description des coûtumes qui vous permettront de mieux comprendre l'esprit Japonais autour de la table. En bref, une excellente leçon de culture Japonaise, au travers de l'art culinaire.
Pour la petite histoire, c'est quand même un collègue de bureau en France qui m'a montré ce site, pour m'expliquer ce qu'était un makisu. J'avais l'air malin après 6 ans au Japon! Donc merci à Pierre B. de Paris, qui partage le même goût raffiné de la cuisine nipponne, même s'il semblerait qu'il soit tout de même plus impliqué et mieux documenté que moi!
Je viens de découvrir l'existence de deux blogs créés par deux amis rencontrés au lycée:
- Celui de Pipo et de ses amis, une jolie collection de liens intéressants, parfois insolites, pêchés sur le net
- Pixelle, une série de dessins magnifiques, qui me font honte à chaque fois que je les regarde, car je me dis sans cesse qu'il faut que je recontacte l'artiste et ami qui les a créés.
N'hésitez pas à jeter un œil, c'est une vrai bouffée d'oxygène numérique.
I've found this cool tutorial
about how to make the same light saber effect as in Star Wars. It only
requires a few steps of Photoshop or After Effects and I think the effect is quite
convincing.
The picture in the thumbnail is actually one of our wedding pictures, where I am actually holding a fan, but everyone told me it would look awesome if I was holding a katana instead. I found it even more funny to hold a lightsaber in a traditional Japanese shrine instead, although it may look a bit dorky :).
A satellite image
taken not too far from Spain's southern coast revealed some ancient ruins that
appear to match descriptions made by Plato of the lost city of Atlantis.
Two rectangular structures could be the silver temple and the golden temple devoted to the Greek Gods Cleito and Poseidon.
The article in Discovery Channel explains how the different elements in Plato's writings could match locations and events in history.
If this is really the city of Altantis, I'm wondering if there are still posters of Patrick Duffy (the Man of Atlantis) stuck on the walls somewhere...
I mean, this guy from Atlantis must be the only one of his kind to have made it to a TV show, so he must be a star in his hometown ;-).
It all started when someone posted a picture of a cat contemplating a flower in a forum. Then someone else posted another picture of his own cat looking at the first cat.
Say no more, it was enough to start a chain reaction of cats looking at the previous cats looking at the previous cats!
The whole series can be found on a website called Private Hand, featuring a bit less than 100 cats as of today.
Will Pitou ever make it on that page?
Finally! Following recommendations of
the W3C, I found an interesting website explaining
a fix for the problem of transparent PNG showing a grey background in IE or
Frontpage on Windows (IE on Mac supports PNG transparency!).
There are several options, this one uses conditional comments in IE to run a javascript, which will enable the alpha channel in IE
The solution is quite light and will allow me not to have different PNG files for IE and for other compliant browsers.
When Microsoft finally decides to patch their browser, hopefully they will also think about supporting CSS properly!
The picture above was found on the libPNG website and was created by Stefan Schneider.
Ever since I switched to Apple instead of my crappy PC
running Windows, I've never regretted my decision, except when I was feeling
like using a few applications that were only available on PC.
For most of them, I was able to find workarounds, replacements (sometimes better than what I was using on Windows), but one that was awfully missing to my library was VNC, which allows you to remotely control a machine's mouse and keyboard.
Looking at the VNC's website, where no binary file was available for Mac, I started to compile the source code for Mac, when I realized some X11 libraries were missing in my environment.
Laziness finally got me and I never actually tried to go any further since then.
That is until I found out about VNCThing, which is a native VNC viewer for Mac OS X, which seems to work quite well and is rather fast, compared to my Windows' version of the VNC viewer (or maybe my opinion on Windows related applications is biased...).
Unfortunately, the official site Webthings.net does not make the application available for download anymore (the domainname is actually for sale), but there are several other mirror sites on the Internet, which still provide the application for download.
The safest way to keep yourself updated and to be sure you get the latest
versions is to follow sites like MacUpdate or VersionTracker.
Both sites provide email notification for software updates, but MacUpdate
requires a one-year membership for $20
Of course, VNCThing is under the GNU General Public License, meaning that is free to download, to use and to distribute.
That being said, I can put the binary files of the version 2.2 on my website too :)
You've probably noticed that Google's logo changes on certain days, like anniversaries, national holidays, Christmas even, etc.
Did you know that Google also has some hidden pages, with different flavours like the Easter eggs, Microsoft, Mac, Linux, Uncle Sam, in latin, in klingon (the language in Star Trek), the hacker's version ?
Slashdot reports that Microsoft has acknowledged that portions of Windows 2000 and Windows NT source code were illegally made available on the Internet
The leak would allegedly come from some third party groups, which were participating to the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, a program launched by Microsoft to provide portions of the source code of its (hardly) operating system in the scope of some business partnerships.
I'm wondering what's really new in that, since we know the core of Windows
was already available a few years back.
I can't resist but to make it available again in this weblog, at the risk of
being tracked down by Microsoft...
/* Source Code Windows 2000 */
#include "win31.h"
#include "win95.h"
#include "win98.h"
#include "workst~1.h"
#include "evenmore.h"
#include "oldstuff.h"
#include "billrulz.h"
#include "monopoly.h"
#include "backdoor.h"
#define INSTALL = HARD
char make_prog_look_big(16000000);
void main()
{
while(!CRASHED)
{
display_copyright_message();
display_bill_rules_message();
do_nothing_loop();
if (first_time_installation)
{
make_100_megabyte_swapfile();
do_nothing_loop();
totally_screw_up_HPFS_file_system();
search_and_destroy_the_rest_of-OS2();
make_futile_attempt_to_damage_Linux();
disable_Netscape();
disable_RealPlayer();
disable_Lotus_Products();
hang_system();
} //if
write_something(anything);
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
do_some_stuff();
if (still_not_crashed)
{
display_copyright_message();
do_nothing_loop();
basically_run_windows_31();
do_nothing_loop();
} // if
} //while
if (detect_cache())
disable_cache();
if (fast_cpu())
{
set_wait_states(lots);
set_mouse(speed,very_slow);
set_mouse(action,jumpy);
set_mouse(reaction,sometimes);
} //if
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.1"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 3.11"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 95"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 3.0"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows 98"); */
/* printf("Welcome to Windows NT 4.0"); */
printf("Welcome to Windows 2000");
if (system_ok())
crash(to_dos_prompt)
else
system_memory = open("a:\swp0001.swp",O_CREATE);
while(something)
{
sleep(5);
get_user_input();
sleep(5);
act_on_user_input();
sleep(5);
} // while
create_general_protection_fault();
} // main
If you're looking for a DVD player, whatever OS you are running, have a look at VLC.
Not only this piece of software will read any DVD, regardless of the region
code, but it also runs on all sorts of OS like Windows, Mac, Linux, BeOS,
Solaris, Zaurus, etc..
Even better: it's not only a player, it can also be used as a source to
broadcast video over the LAN (or at least a network with large bandwidth
capabilities) via multicast!
Oh, and did I tell you that everything is free?...
Check out the video
gallery on Discovery Channel's site, about the Xtreme Martial Arts.
The moves are quite impressive and the digital effects are especially nice, as always with Discovery Channel.
After HP announced that it was going to license Apple's iPod technology for its own MP3 player, Microsoft's answer was:
General manager of Microsoft's Windows digital media division David Fester has suggested that iTunes' emerging dominance would be bad for consumers, because it would limit them to the iPod.
He told journalists at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: "Windows is about choice - you can mix and match software and music player stuff. We believe you should have the same choice when it comes to music services."
Yeaahh, riiiight ...
Check the original article on Macworld UK for more details or the reaction of slashdot's readers.
Last time Microsoft killed me with that kind of stupid declarations was last month, when they decided that manufacturers of flash memory card using the FAT filesystem should pay Microsoft $0.25 for each unit, because Microsoft introduced the FAT filesystem back in 1976 (seen on dpreview.com)
I've recently
enabled SpamAssassin on my mail server
and it's incredible how efficient it is.
The filter will run on the mail server itself and not the mail client on
your machine and it basically gives 'points' to mails depending on the
criteria they match.
If the threshold you set is reached, the mail is classified as spam and you
can either delete it on the server and you won't even see it in your mailbox,
redirect it to another mail account or receive it but with a tag (***SPAM***
is added to the subject).
I personally find dangerous to delete the mail directly if you are worried about false positive (mail being detected as spam while it's not), although it never happened to me.
Instead, I use my mail client to move the mails tagged as ***SPAM*** directly into a folder, so that I can delete everything at once.
Actually, before deleting them, I also like to read the mails themselves. Not really because I'm worried about false positive ones, but more because SpamAssassin adds the details of the points given to the mail and it's actually kind of fun to see what tricks the spammers use.
The highest score a mail got so far is 46.4, while only 7 are required to be classified as spam in my configuration!
As you can see in the list of tests performed on incoming mails, there is not much chance for spam to get through!
And if SpamAssassin is not able to detect the mail as spam, the junk filter on Thunderbird usually takes care of that :)
The new version of blosxom came out a few days ago. For those
who don't know what blosxom is, you can refer to an earlier blog
entry of mine.
There are not really new features compared to the last release candidate
version, but it just seems to run faster, with a more compact perl code (even
more unreadable! ;-)).
The core of blosxom is actually so simple but at the same time so great
(because it can be widely customized) that this is what I think makes
blosxom's real strength.
On the other hand, the list of plugins is growing like crazy and
you have tons of new features for your weblog all the time.
That's what is so great about the GNU Public license, there are
so many people working on this that the product never stops growing in
stability and in functionalities...
A friend of mine sent me a link to the site of a Japanese TV channel, where
they have some best videos
of TV shows.
Since I opened this link, I just can't help but watch the last video called Ping Pong over and
over again! It's just so hilarious!
To me, it is so typical of Japanese humour, as you can see it on TV, where the
comedians are just experts of making fools of themselves and really not take
themselves seriously (you can see that a lot in commercials on TV, where they
always make fun of the Japanese Salaryman and the oyaji, the average 40-50
year old Japanese man).
I think this video is especially brilliant because not only it's treated with a lot of humour, but it's also great visually speaking: it's almost a parody of the bullet time of the Matrix but still very well done, with low budget solutions, live on stage!
Just enjoy watching it again and again as much as I do! the other links are quite interesting too, but Ping Pong remains my favorite one!
