Monthly Archives: May 2012

Named after a variable

A strange thought (among others) has crossed my mind today, it totally made my day. Let me come to it.

So, I have been learning code refactoring lately at work, one of the things that happened during my blogging coma. We have been peer programming and doing code reviews to share coding best practices. It’s a very worthy and interesting exercise, even if it’s still a bit difficult to not consider your code like a personal “creation” (d-d-d-don’t touch it!). There is always a little fear when another consciousness reads your code and rewrites it, but it’s a good way to improve your coding skills quickly.

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The Internet voting or the anti-democratic catastrophe

Yes this is my first 2012 post, I have a lot of catch up to do, not that I have been out of stories to tell but I just didn’t have the time to tell them right. I hope I’ll be able in another post to give an update on what I have been up to. But for now let’s throw this story out there before all the rest of my pile of untold stories, because this one is fresh and goldmine.

Intro

I’ve just finished a skype call with my mom. I have been helping her to vote online for the French legislative elections, for approximately two hours. I was helping her from France while she was in Madagascar, I was her personal hotline. She didn’t explicitly asked for help, but when we finished talking about life stuff she asked me how she could change her javascript version. It’s a red flag by itself when your mom asks you this kind of questions. Then when she elaborated, she explained that she was trying to vote online for the French legislative elections, and she couldn’t because her javascript version was wrong according to the voting website. Apparently the voting website detected her browser settings and made her install something to change the javascript version. Normally she had to install their software and then restart the browser and it should work. But she didn’t know how to install that software. So there she was, her javascript version was wrong, how could she replace it ?!  I don’t know much about Windows debugging and stuff, but javascript ?! THAT I know!

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