Cherry-picking Pearls in San Francisco

Bring Your Kids To Work Day

SAY Media has this tradition (I later learned that this was actually a national event of some sort) of welcoming employee's kids to work for a day, so of course I brought Maelys in, so that she understand a little bit better what daddy does when he is "going to work". Prior to that it was fuzzy in her head, for sure. Each time she wanted me to leave her alone she'd say: "Daddy, go to work. go now".

We had lot of fun activities (drawing on tshirts, touring the office) and then I rode her back to her daycare. She was Sooo proud when I dropped her in the park:

• in a BICYLE ("the blue one with the red one")

• in front of all her friends from the daycare

• after touring daddy's office

She was like a princess arriving late to a ball because she had so much fun at this other event first.

I'm glad to work for a company where we can have such events, thank you SAY Media, especially Moira, Nicki and everyone who helped to make it a great event for Maelys.  Here are a few pictures of the event:

I don't know what she was negotiating with Ben, hopefully something on my behalf. She wouldn't leave Ben's office, that was funny considering that she was so shy initially.

I see 4 babies on that picture. how many can you spot? Moira was nice enough to give us a private tour away from the crowd of other kids. We are in the studio, fixing their art.

Bean bags!

This was my shared-office for 3 months. It was a bit like that, only different (less colors, more laptops).

One of the best secret of San Francisco

You need a bike and enough will to wake up early. Reeeeallly early. But if you don't have a bike or you don't wake up early, it just doesn't work. Oh sure, you could come close, but you'd never reach the nirvana of climbing Conzelman Road (at your pace, no rush!) with a truly unique and stunning scenery.

I stole this picture from @alex_lod

via twitpic.com

And here is another one from Robert, taken this morning: 

 

The light and scenery changes very very fast - At least, when and it's not foggy :) So you don't get an idea of how it's like until you do it.

Totally. worth. it.

(wake up at 5:30, meeting point at ~6:30 on the top of Arguello)

In the US, you need a Master in Algebra to choose a Health plan

So this is decision time, aka open enrolment, aka big loss of time in the office.

This year, the insurance broker was pushing so hard on the new feature: HSA (Health Saving Account) that it was almost ridiculous. "FREE MONEY people!!!" (</blink>)

They brought a Geek in the meeting that demonstrated -- thanks to a spreadsheet -- that HSA is always better than other the other options. I've asked for the spreadsheet, but he responded, "I'm still working on it", which doesn't sound good. Too bad, because this is probably what would save me lot of time, and also could convince me that HSA is the new dope in Health-city.

But so far, I'm doubtful. I think spreadsheet-guy forgot to do the comparison with HMO in its demonstration. The total cost of Health this year for my entire family is around $2000 (*):  ($1200 employee cost + $600 copays&dentals + margin of error), and in all honnesty, I don't think it's beatable by HSA, even after free money and tax benefits, because when you start paying a baby visit something like:  

$115 for the visit + (3 shots = $90)

instead of 

$15 copay (except first year of life which is free)

then free money runs out very fast and you start tapping in the other type of money, aka the one I'd rather spend on vacations or this awesome Canon L lense.

I miss the french system, not to say it's cheap and awesome, because it is really not (Remember "sicko" the movie? Well... Moore was really inflating quite a few "facts") but at least I don't need to fire up a calculator, or a spreadsheet -- god forbid -- to make a simple decision.

 

(*) which is low by all figures given during the presentation. Even with pregnancy, the costs didn't go up that much. We paid $250 for the birth: the cost for one hospital admission (And I think we tricked them, because technically only Caroline was admitted, but then we had a bed for  Maelys too - $250 FREE MONEY)

Smoke testing: Continuous Integration Feature Matrix

CI Feature Matrix - CruiseControl - Confluence

I've found this HUUUUGE matrix of a lot of software doing similar things: Smoke testing/Continuous integration.

Fortunately Kevin (hinted by Miyagawa-san) installed Hudson and said it was awesome. And indeed awesome it looks! So no need to evaluate them all, looks like almost every aspect of hudson make it nice.

Git-svn hack to import original committers from an svk import of svn

I don't recall exactly what was the context but on one of your repo at Six Apart we had the beginning of the project imported into the public repostitory using an external tool (svk I think), I made a patch to git-svn (quick and dirty) to look into the subversion log message and correctly attach the commit to the original author.

The original commit messages have this format:

        # r123@host (orig r1234):  author | 2006-05-17 17:07:42 -0700

documenting the bugs I'm finding [updated x3]

I've started to work on semi work-related projects - i.e. it uses Six Apart technology stack, and I code mostly during the night but also I use my hackathon time to do stuff.

I thought I'd document all the quircks I've found in my way. First it will allow me to remember all this stuff, and second I think it's me being a good internet citizen (someone will find this page someday using google, and might get helped this way).

It might not be that interesting other than for this documentation purpose though.

I intstalled virtual box and ubuntu on my mac, and found two issues with vboxsf (shared folders for ubuntu):

• http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2921
• http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2951

the first one is a problem with linux's sendfile and the second is auto-completion (probably related to vboxsf)

I'm adding pure Perl support for servers in Authen::SASL module, and then hooking that into DJabberd. Doing so, I noticed (thanks hachi for the long debugging session, not related to Danga::Socket/DJabberd at all!), than Psi is not sending the xml (stream start after a successful SASL negotiation) that is shown in its own xml-console!

That last thing made me switched to Adium. And there I noticed a weird issue in the challenge parsing of DIGEST_MD5. I noticed extra quote (") in the realm and digest_uri. I temporarily fixed by changing the order of my tokens inside of the challenge and it fixed the issue... but I have to investigate more, it looks like a libpurple bug.

Lots of TODO and TOFIX!

update:

I've tried with iChat, and it comes with its own set of issues:

Jan  7 17:27:54 yann iChatAgent[56325]: [SASL] Level 5: DIGEST-MD5 unrecognized pair cipher-opts/rc4, 3des, des, rc4-56, rc4-40: ignoring
Jan  7 17:27:54 yann iChatAgent[56325]: [SASL] Level 5: DIGEST-MD5 unrecognized pair qop-options/auth, auth-inf, auth-conf: ignoring

multiple pair doesn't work either:

Jan  7 21:09:56 yann iChatAgent[56325]: [SASL] Level 5: DIGEST-MD5 unrecognized pair qop-options/auth-conf: ignoring
Jan  7 21:09:56 yann iChatAgent[56325]: [SASL] Level 5: DIGEST-MD5 unrecognized pair qop-options/auth-inf: ignoring
Jan  7 21:09:56 yann iChatAgent[56325]: [SASL] Level 5: DIGEST-MD5 unrecognized pair qop-options/auth: ignoring

damnit! I know that DIGEST-MD5 is not the most useful mechanism for me, but still...

I'm going to check if this is me that doesn't interpret the RFC 2831 correctly though.

update

Alright, rechecking the RFC/my code it looks like it's not "qop-options" but "qop" and "cipher" and not "cipher-opts". iChat is fine, psi for some reason is behaving weirdly (not sending data to the socket, this is mysterious), Adium has probably issues with challenge parsing (when the challenge includes unsupported token?)

VOX VOX VOX \/O><

Hurrah! It's finally public world wide! vox has been set free today. I'm really, really excited and happy, as I wrote on my other blog. Indeed, I've another blog since a while but I didn't have right to speak about it until now :)

It's really fucking[1] cool.

This year working on this project has been awesome, mainly because of the great people in this company (founders, managers, colleagues and dogs).

[1] Dedicated to the guy capable of posting this word in every post [2]
[2] yeah he loves to make footnotes too.

six apart, comet, ajax, vox, sixapart, 6a, notcomet

Microsoft Word, blog edition

Wow, seriously I think this [fr] is a huge step forward for getting my mother on blogs.

I know a few people (and People) not innocents in getting Microsoft team interested in the subject.

So yes, Microsoft Office will post on blogs. Microsoft Word is speaking Atom.

atom, blog, microsoft, msword, office, typepad, word

Duty accomplished

I've delivered the gift from Beau to Samuel!

gift, paris, san francisco, six apart, wine

Jemplate Hackathon

Yesterday, Ingy came at Six Apart offices in San Francisco to hack (with the help of (Xantus, Miyagawa-san and myself) on Jemplate. Jemplate is a full Template-Toolkit port in Javascript (Template-Toolkit compiles your template into Perl code, Jemplate reuses the same engine to compile it to Javascript code). It was really fun :

Checkout the pictures on flickr

What's pretty amazing is the quality of Template-Toolkit module, everything remains the same except for Directive.pm and Grammar.pm (and the later didn't change a lot for now -- wich also means than weirdly Perl and Javascript are quite the same), two modules that you don't have to worry about in your day to day life with Template::Toolkit. Kudos to Andy !

jemplate, Perl, six apart, template