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Almost missed

Thoughts on "human intervention"

Some pre-nostalgic thought here.

In the last 24h, the same thing happened to me twice. This is a clear sign from the universe that I should tell the story.

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The Amazon ultimate Ad

The lost art of gift offering

Here’s an interesting personal story that I experienced recently, about gifts.

Ancient social wrapping for objects used in human relationships

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The Air Seychelles HTTPS Mayhem

The Chase of the magic flight ticket

This is November, temperature is 5° C, Christmas holidays are coming fast, terrorist attacks happened, spirit is down and broken, I need to get away. I want to go here:

Magic beach

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The Mega Shit Day

Today I had the most unbelievable shitiest day ever in my life. Really. I will not go through the details but in my history, this day will be known as “The Mega Shit Day”. Anyway the new profile of Stackoverflow kind of cheered me up a little bit with their new metrics called “impact”. Finally meaningful numbers ! Not numbers that are just big or low but actual numbers that make a difference, you know ! It’s very positive to see the “impact” your contribution makes. Good idea, thanks for motivating me.

You see, interfaces can make a BIG difference !

Posted in Organic, Notes, Life, Stories, U.I

The Infometer Concept : Making information measurable

Introducing the Infometer chrome extension

In this article I will show you what’s missing in the way we process digital content and what we could do to improve that with the concept of “Infometer”. It is the rationale behind the Infometer chrome extension that I also introduce here as an illustration of this concept. Continue reading

So I am a heavy reader. My best rate is one book per week. I read mostly practical books that make me learn something and sometimes novels. My reading is consequently very goal driven : I have to understand and learn. Being rather a practical reader, I have developed some reading techniques that make me read faster, with more focus, so that I learn more efficiently.

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Please collect your tickets on the floor

The modern and beautiful cinema Pathe Beaugrenelle

This morning I went to the movies right after my photography class. I love going to this new cinema that recently opened in my neighbourhood, it is so futuristic. It’s very modern, very classy, it has great contemporary design, in fact I think it’s the best movie theater I’ve ever been to, compared to the ones I know from London or the US.

Every time I go there I take the time to observe how they designed the rooms, the furniture, the decoration, it’s really beautiful, it’s like visiting some kind of modern art museum where you can also view movies and eat popcorn, how cool is that. And in the morning the place is empty which makes it even greater, we were just two in the room to watch the movie, perfect. For some reason the place makes me think of Ray Bradbury’s books, it would fit in the future he imagined. I also read it was designed after 2001 a space odyssey, so I really like going there to feel like I’m in the future. Warm feeling.

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jGridder : how to fit elements in a sized grid

A recursion pattern for UI

Today I want to share about jGridder : https://github.com/eloone/jgridder.

jGridder is a javascript UI component that I developed to fit a number of elements in a sized html grid.
It solves this problem :

Given a height and width and a number of items, how do I place those items as squares in a grid that fits those dimensions?

To see what I mean, peek at the demo : http://eloone.net/jgridder/demo/.

In this post I will share my approach to design the script and tackle the problem, it’s not a tutorial about the code itself. But hopefully it will enlighten and help you regarding similar problems you might have in UI. The focus will be on the method.

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Google hangout timeout message : are you still there?

So we migrated from skype to google hangout. It works better for a multiple videos conference. The other day we were quietly discussing with my mom. And suddenly, we both heard a loud alert. Google was interrupting our conversation with this popup.

And my mom and I had a crazy laugh at this. My mom said “Errr, why is it asking this ? Does it not hear us talk or what ?”

Then we observed, it seems it’s something that only happens after a certain amount of time. The message is friendly so it really amused us. But indeed it would make sense that they check the sound more than the time.

Posted in Notes, Observations, U.I

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Girls day out !

The skin care analyst robot

Roooarrr ! So I went crusading in women territory with my friend. We took an afternoon to explore the realms of facial beauty, a real event that happens every 5 years or so. Yes, really. We decided solemnly “It’s time we know. Let’s do it”. You would think women know this stuff naturally but it’s just like shell scripting, you need to learn it, it’s not loaded in your brain. And since I refuse to buy a book about facial beauty, I had to update from real world, it’s way more fun.

So we went to see the “professionals”. Apart from the cleansing lotion and some things we heard one day we really knew very little. So it was quite intimidating to go and ask the lady in the white coat, in front of the dozens of creams “So…what is all this stuff ?” We didn’t even know where to start. It’s indeed embarrassing. Fortunately, technology was around the corner, much to my delight.

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The toilets mishap

The lost dream of the automatic city

I spent Christmas eve at Notre Dame de Paris, the big cathedral of Paris that you might know of. There were so many people, I’d say around 50,000 people coming and going, queuing and praying inside. It was like “the big show”.

I came with my parents but since they had arrived earlier they could actually attend mass from inside while I had to view everything through a big screen outside sitting in the cold on arranged benches. It was nice to observe all those people – mostly tourists – sitting there and queuing in the cold. I was sitting with my brother, another professional geek, and we couldn’t help noticing how people around us would share their activity online. We spotted 3 sharing patterns : facebook, twitter and foursquare. (Un)strangely, I suspect all the people that we spotted sharing to be Americans (I heard them speak). I visualize well their post “Celebrating Xmas @NotreDame in Paris, OMG so beautiful!” 🙂 I never post my activity online on the fly, ne-ver, I never know what to write. I prefer the elaborated blog article that I can re-read later. Each to their own sharing habit 🙂 I will not say that it was “OMG so beautiful” though, but listening to the choirs was indeed quite pleasant in spite of the cold.

Notre Dame

The saint songs, the Christmas lights, the festive atmosphere, what on earth does it all have to do with toilets ?!

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