Yann Kerhervé's blog

Fun with Google Street View

It's kind of impressive how comprehensive Google street view coverage has become.

Completely zoomed almost all of North America and Western Europe is covered in the distinctive blue halo. From there you can fly your little yellow traveler across tremendous distance and watch the street preview display yet another country side scenery. Or you can drop it and guess where you landed.

 

Pilot ejects an instant before fighterjet crashes

via photoblog.msnbc.msn.com

via www.badnima.com

wow. incredible picture. I hope the pilot is recovering.

My own iPhone 4 dropped calls statistics

Now, that it seems pretty much granted that the shinny new iPhone 4 has big antennas problems. I've decided to look into the details and real data.

I logged in on my AT&T and pulled the data from my wife calls log and extrapolated about the one that have potentially dropped. It was easy... I looked for communications with the same number around the same time. Then I went through the data with her to confirm. Here is the raw data:

 

So it looks like roughly 2/3 of the calls dropped. It's waaaay more than before we switched to the iPhone 4.

Now, I, and she, needs to decide if we're going to return the phones or not. The lack of clear acknowledgment for the problems from Apple is not really encouraging. I know, it's a tough issue, and I'm sure it's hell on earth at Cupertino. But we only have 30 days to return the phone, why should we take the risk to be stuck with a semi-working phone? My wife rely on that phone for business, she hates dropped calls. Why should we have faith on Apple to be fair and honest about resolving that problem, eventually (Remember Airport Express issues)?

What is your experience with this? Is 2/3 a wide spread number or is it high just because we were unlucky?

I wonder if this bike is still there

In this video about bike locking, a bike suddenly looked all familiar:

 

Here is a shot of it I took back then: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yann/2518716033/.

It's funny because it was a  while (several weeks) after the video was taken, and NYC is a pretty big city. I wonder if now, two years later, this nice red little bike is still there.

Just testing my new iPhone

...and the TypePad App, Of course!

installing a linode server using opscode chef and a stackscripts

I've published two linode stackscripts supposed to work together to speedup the installation of a server ultimately controlled by chef. You can find them here:

• http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=476
• http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=480

The first one sets basic networking up including the private ip that is asked upon image creation, the second one installs chef using gem.

once the linode is up you can track installation progress by 'tail'ing

/root/stackscript.log

You can automate further if you wish, like auto-validating the client but for obvious reason I wouldn't recommend to publish the stackscript publicly. Otherwise the next steps are to copy 'validation.pem' in /etc/chef/ and assign a role to the new machine. Then wait for chef-client to run or run it manually.

Adjustable Table

via www.youtube.com

it looks a bit dangerous if you ask me, but pretty cool otherwise.

i love the girls in the background realizing just what it is he's singing

via www.youtube.com

via mini.sippey.com

Ok I had to google the lyrics to find it was from Lady GAGA, But HEY at least I knew already who Lady Gaga was.

Yesterday I learned about Justin Bieber, I can't wait to discover what tomorrow is made of.

Spammers now use image distortion technics, too

I guess they plan on reusing the opensource technology to defeat this kind of spam to solve CAPTCHA, once it exists?

 
 

Getting started with Perl development on your new mac.

This is basically how I get started myself nowadays:

- I install Xcode (from the dvd or from ADC)
- I install MacPorts using the dmg http://www.macports.org/install.php
- I install perl5.10 (first thing after install MacPorts) This will nicely override System's Perl without altering it: (see also my other post)

 sudo port install perl5 +perl5_10

- I install local::lib (which keeps all my installed Perl modules local, in my home directory): Basically I run the bootstrapping steps provided by http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?local::lib
- I install git:

sudo port install git-core +bash_completion+doc+svn

- Then I install my dotfiles (I basically clone http://github.com/yannk/dotfiles-yann and run make) (which has settings for local::lib, git etc...). I mention it here because I find it convenient for me, but it's totally optional of course.
- Then I install CPAN Minus...

git clone git://github.com/miyagawa/cpanminus.git
cd cpanminus
perl Makefile.PL
make install

and voila!

Then each time I need a module from the cpan it resolves around a simple:

cpanm Module

in most cases, thanks to the elegance of CPAN minus. For a bit more complex cases (when there is an external dependency, like a C library), I first install the missing libs from macports).

Apple iMac User-Installable Touchscreen "SlipCOVER"

via www.youtube.com

that's the video I was writing about in my previous post. In line videos makes more compelling posts I've been told

Apple iMac TouchScreen

I paid a visit to The California Academy of Science yesterday, and I was mesmerized by the fact that they got Touch Sensitive iMacs.

The irony is that even though it's Apple hardware, which sure looks nice in the building, it appears to run Windows. At least some of them do: I was looking at their photo store booth, which was running DarkRoom software, maybe it is virtualized -- I'm not sure.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed this hardware announcement from Apple if it was truly an Apple product, I surely did notice the rumor saying that such product was coming out this year. My best guess so far is that it is in fact a Troll Touch addon maybe a slipcover?

How To enable perl5.10 by default with MacPorts

$ port uninstall perl5.8
--->  Unable to uninstall perl5.8 5.8.9_3, the following ports depend on it:
--->    perl5

So, you should type:

$ port -f uninstall perl5.8 
--->  Unable to uninstall perl5.8 5.8.9_3, the following ports depend on it:
--->    perl5
Warning: Uninstall forced.  Proceeding despite dependencies.
--->  Deactivating perl5.8 @5.8.9_3
--->  Uninstalling perl5.8 @5.8.9_3

and finally:

$ port install perl5 +perl5_10
...

which gives:

$ perl -v | grep built
This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for darwin-multi-2level

Triggering ScreenSaver (and lock) with a shortcut on Snow Leopard

I've been using this for a long time, but lately I've found that it wasn't working so well (The screen saver would launch and then stop right away).

Initially, I was using quicksilver and the guts of the ScreenSaverEngine to run something like that:

 open '/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app'

There is a better way to launch the ScreeSaver, it's to use the following applescript

tell application "System Events"
start current screen saver
end tell

Finally, the main problem was that I was previously using this trigger with the key combination ⇧⌘L 'on press', but it's much better to use 'on release', solving a race issue making the screensaver exit almost immediately.

So to sum up:

1. install Quicksilver (of course)
2. enable triggers (maybe it's only in Beta?)
3. make sure you have the "Run as Applescript" action (might be in a plugin?)
4. add a trigger
5. in the item section, hit '=' (to type a text, instead of triggering a search)
6. paste the apple script above
7. select the "Run as Applescript"  action
8. select a 'on hold' hotkey

My ideal Nexus One setup would be something like that apparently.

- get the phone from Google not subsidized
- switch to t-mobile
- Even More Plus for Families 750 Talk + Text and 2 unlimited smartphone data
- unlock my iPhone v1 to give to Caroline

it's $120/month pre-tax + $530 one time purchase.

But, I think I'd rather wait porting my phone number to Google directly...