My name is Cédric Bozzi and this is my blog. Mostly, it’s an aggregate of my tweets and Instagram posts, but once in a while you may yet see an actual article here.
See also: my company; a contact form.
On Twitter: @garoo, @garootech et @garooplay — plus @garoodotnet that posts links to any update on this blog.
31 jul. 2009
Pourquoi la charge de mon serveur est passée du jour au lendemain de 0.1 à 0.99 ? Il n'y a pas eu tant d'inscriptions.
“The beautiful death of the Matrix Online”
This week is the last week of existence for The Matrix Online, and the gameworld - the Matrix! - is literally disintegrating in front of players’ eyes…
That’s a quite excellent way to close an MMO.
Un donut shop toujours désert, mais toujours ouvert, au milieu du mini-quartier chinois du 3e, c'est du blanchiment d'argent ? #weeds
30 jul.
Des travaux tous les matins entre 9h et 10h, et plus rien de la journée. Saleté de nouveau voisin.
29 jul.
Mais quel chieur a conçu ce micro-ondes qui refuse qu'on change la durée ou les options après avoir lancé la minuterie ?
28 jul.
That e-mail almost made me hopeful.
"Your cure for iTunes Connect." That's a slogan that resonates.
“Nicholson Baker on the Kindle”
“
This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?”Like Baker, I prefer reading Kindle books on my iPhone.
It’s interesting that engineers have been struggling with e-paper technology for a decade, and Apple might just be about to wipe out e-book readers with a good old backlit color screen.
“Iowa State University Creates Learning Robot”
Very nice face design.
26 jul.
It's funny that I watched My Dinner with André just before I started In Treatment.
Oups. C'est difficile de doser les coquillettes.
"Don't even try to break down the relationship between a woman and her gynecologist. That's a deep end."
25 jul.
So... I don't suppose you ought to use condoms that have been through the laundromat.
Wow. Clean sheets on my bed. Fancy.
Birthday parties at the Microsoft Store? Are you quite mad?
I've got one less "people you follow" on Google Reader each day even though I haven't removed anyone. Ahem.
24 jul.
“Dr Beaurieux’s report of a guillotine execution”
It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time.
Just… Ouch.
“Mass Effect save file transfers ’hundreds’ of decisions to sequel”
Not just the big decisions, either – Hudson says that the player made "hundreds" of choices in Mass Effect that have an impact on the sequel. For instance, Commander Shepard superfan Conrad Verner made a brief appearance in the first game. Players could respond to his fandom in a number of ways (ignoring him, threatening him, supporting him) – however you decided to treat Conrad will ultimately affect his subplot in the second game.
Oh, blah. I felt so much like no choice I made had any relevance whatsoever to the universe in Mass Effect, I just can’t wait to see all of my decisions ripple insignificantly throughout the entire trilogy.
“Flash security vulnerability exploited in PDFs”
When Adobe released Acrobat 9 last year, the company introduced support for embedding Flash media in PDF files. This feature is now being used by attackers who are exploiting a new vulnerability in Adobe’s Flash media plugin. The vulnerability allows remote code execution, making it a potential vector for malware deployment.
Urgh. Kill Acrobat dead already.
“How Palm Re-Enabled iTunes Sync”
my 1.1 Pre [is] identifying itself with an Apple USB Vendor ID:
Product ID: 0x8002
Vendor ID: 0x05ac (Apple Inc.)
Version: 0.16
Manufacturer: Palm Inc.
I find it very interesting — and clever — that they deliberately leave some identifying stuff out so that they can drag this back-and-forth as long as they can: the next iTunes update will recognize the “Manufacturer: Palm” part, and the next webOS update will change it. You can be sure that version of the webOS is even already developed, and locked away in a safe.
Don’t know how they intend to win in the long run, but they’re buying time quite efficiently.
As a rule, the universe abhors quality.
Oh, hell, I'm not opening those.
“Google Latitude Comes To The iPhone.”
After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.
Oh God, you’re kidding? Well, goes to show that being Apple’s biggest partner doesn’t buy you a reasonable review process from the App Store people. (What puzzles me is that Google ended up presenting the Latitude web app at an Apple keynote anyway. I guess profit trumps retaliation.)
As for Latitude itself, I’m disappointed by the interface. Other than the new Javascript Maps, which I already knew to be awesome (because I use it), the navigation is awkward and gets in its own way.
Ah, Google Reader reacted quickly enough, and made the "x people liked this" more subdued. Much better.
23 jul.
Need beta-testers with a 3GS for the Snap Filters update.
“Not Happy With Your Facebook Username? You Can Now Change It”
It now appears that Facebook has updated their policy, perhaps after being inundated with requests to change poor name choices, or maybe just because registrations have slowed to a more manageable pace and they intended to add the option all along.
I certainly hope Facebook isn’t that stupid, and it’s the latter.
Facebook is still imposing some limitations, alerting you that “You can only change your username once”
Huh. So much for that.
Wow, I don't like the new layout on Get Satisfaction at all.
Fine, I give up. I'm removing my non-personal accounts from Tweetie and setting them up in a third client.
Freed 11GB on my Mini so I could buy the In Treatment DVDs. Can't wait to find out what essential apps I've broken.
Tiens, il y a une épidémie d'inscriptions à FriendFeed en France ?
22 jul.
You wouldn't think there are still stories to be told in a hospital, but I'm liking Nurse Jackie. (Yet still not sure where they're going.)
I feel cheated. Loud as it was, that thunderstorm didn't cool the atmosphere off so much.
21 jul.
If I could just develop my precog skills a bit.
Je reçois mes DVD de Top Gear dans le désordre, c'est intolérable. Comment je vais suivre l'histoire, moi ?
20 jul.
“DiggBar Commits Career Suicide, Starts Redirecting Users To Digg Homepage”
This is weird. They already had to change a couple things at launch because of the users’ reaction; a few months later, they’re doing much worse. What the hell did they expect?
Damn, I'm not sure which blog to link, Mashable or TechCrunch — which do I boycott more?
19 jul.
First time I go for a walk since the flu, and I know now how it feels to be a hundred years old.
“The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack”
Gmail informed him that an email had been sent to the user’s secondary email account. […] This is the point where the chain of trust broke down, as the attacker discovered that the account specified as a secondary for Gmail, and hosted at Hotmail was no longer active.
Damn Hotmail and its 1990s-style expiring addresses. Be careful where you’ve used them. (I never know whether they still expire nowadays, but do you remember what secondary address you’ve used, years ago, to sign up for Gmail?)
I'll go out with you for 5,000 euros. (I'm not saying I'll put out.)
18 jul.
Why on earth is there a Scooby-Doo DVD on my hard drive? It doesn't even seem to be mislabelled porn or something.
Dirt 2
I’m absolutely in love with the sound of the bumper cam — it probably gets old after a while, but it’s very nicely realistic. (For the rest, the visuals aren’t quite as impressive as the previous trailer from two days ago. There’s some aliasing, and it looks like they’re having a hard time balancing realistic hard sun and playability — especially with the cockpit view.)
17 jul.
Disabling Google Reader’s "Like" Feature With CSS
But I don’t want to disable “Like” (I like it on Facebook). I just want it to be a little more intelligent and only show up when it’s about my contacts, and not strangers.
I can't believe how suddenly and noticeably wrinkles happen. Always thought it was a joke that you'd notice them in the mirror one day.
So bored I'll drink a drink if you pay for the drink. Well, maybe. I mean, slightly more possibly than usual. Infinitesimally. Maybe not.
Il fait beau toute la journée quand ça ne me sert à rien, et il se met à pleuvoir à la tombée du jour. Je vais le prendre mal.
Bingo, il pleut.
Bon, et aujourd'hui, est-ce qu'il va à nouveau tomber des glaçons si je me mets en tête de sortir ?
Knowing — More watchable than I expected, but the plot only makes the tiniest bit of sense if the strangers are the biggest sociopaths ever.
Wonder is someone's pattern of "dskflmskdfmlskflmk" over a long-enough length could be used to identify them reliably.
There's no way there were so many steps in the stairs before I got the flu. (Suddenly empathizing with any smokers I've ever invited home.)
Comme un pincement au coeur en entendant une mère demander à sa fille "Tu veux quelque chose ?" devant la boulangerie. Et moi ?!
Watchmen — Anybody who read the comic then liked the movie doesn't deserve to breathe. The action; the entire cast; why, God, why?
The Reader — Nice and sad; not quite Oscar-sad, though. The criticism it got is almost more interesting than the movie.
The New Adventures of Old Christine S1 — Sad for Julia Louis-Dreyfus. And it's not like she needs to be in a sub-par sitcom to live!
Terminator: Salvation — Can you believe what a self-important dick Connor has become? That final nod to Marcus, I wanted to scream.
Waiting for Guffman — It saddens me that some people list it as one of the funniest movies ever. Bully humor is what it is.
“No promo codes for apps rated 17+”
As it stands, neither the 3.0 software nor iTunes display parental warnings when using a promo code to purchase apps with a mature (17+) rating, so Apple has made the promo code functionality unavailable for apps that fall into that category.
God, that’s ridiculous.
16 jul.
Irrational fear of ever catching a cold again.
Grah ! J'allais enfin sortir de chez moi !
“Official Google Reader Blog: Following, liking and people searching”
Instead of sharing your items with others and hoping they reciprocate, you can now find people with public shared items and subscribe to their shared items with one click.
Took them long enough.
I’m not a fan of the way they implemented “like,” however — having one line saying “100+ people liked this” on all articles, with a bunch of white space above and below, is nothing but an annoying waste of real estate.
Oh, blow me. Nimbuzz has a Mac client, and it's Intel-only.
15 jul.
Me want some wasabi peas.
Oh, wow. The Google Maps JavaScript API v.3 works quite impressively on the iPhone.
14 jul.
Well, I tried.
13 jul.
Oh, Kim Cattrall's in Big Trouble in Little China? Damn, I have to watch that again now.
"Pour bénéficier du compte courant ING Direct, il vous suffit de domicilier vos revenus dessus." Ben ouais mais euh...
12 jul.
Kings 1.11 ★★★
Damn, those silly, manipulable, holier-than-thou kids are really unsufferable (Prince Zuko isn’t much better, but at least he’s stirring some shit once in a while).
RT To be or not to be, that is the question (via @shakespeare)
I can't believe the latest fashion is to have both "RT" and "via" in the same message.
Torchwood: Children of Earth ★★
That story was vaguely worth a two-parter, maybe a three- if you’re feeling indulgent; just because the last episode was gratuitously creepy and gross doesn’t make up for the uninteresting story — Torchwood has never, no-way, no-how, earned that kind of a resolution, not with this writing, directing, and acting. Torchwood is watchable when it’s campy and fun (though it’ll always trigger a migraine even then); but nobody on that show was ever hired to produce stuff that could take itself seriously. (Well, except for Barrowman, I guess, but then he went and tripped into a Barbie doll’s mold.)
The only interesting thing in there was the reveal of what the aliens really were about. So that’s all of ten good seconds, which could have been written better.
Contacted most iPhone or tech blogs. I feel dirty. But it's either that or more literal panhandling.
And why the fuck did I introduce it on a Sunday? Goddamn App Store reviewers working on weekends.
Unicode for iPhone
Remember Glyphboard? Unicode is the same, but as a native app: tap a symbol, from the several pages offered, and it’s immediately copied to the clipboard — in just one step. Or tap several symbols, then press the “Copy” button, if you want to copy and paste several at once.
A future update will let users paste symbols from outside the app into the favorites pane — mostly as a workaround for the Apple logo that I removed at the last minute because they’re no way the App Store would have accepted it (but then, the Apple logo isn’t a valid Unicode symbol anyway, so you shouldn’t really use it).
The app is very temporarily free, so you should just hurry and download and rate it with five stars.
You do know that when I promised I wouldn't bitch about the past week's weather, it didn't apply to ending up bedridden all week.
11 jul.
That phantom smell of coffee is gonna kill me. Whether it's phantom or not.
Forgot to eat my breakfast donuts at breakfast. It's not as fun in the middle of the day.
RT @GreatDismal: “Favorite Babelfish re-translation: "out of sight, out of mind" becoming "invisible and insane".”
ShowRSS isn't very reliable. Can anybody recommend a good RSS service for DVDs of TV shows?
Bloguer l'application #nopicnodial vous donne le droit d'utiliser #webispink ! #prosititwition
10 jul.
“Devspeak: iPhone 3G vs iPhone 3GS”
To take full advantage of the new capabilities of the 3GS, [EA Mobile’s] development teams will create an additional version specifically for it. […] Sega will offer products tailored specifically for each phone, although only on select titles.
According to the SDK, you’re not supposed to make “additional versions” for the 3GS, but simply use the processing and graphical power in your app if it’s available. Yet you can bet that you’ll have to buy all your games again when you switch from the 3G to the 3GS — and be prepared to pay a premium for those versions, too.
The developer had to use a more powerful OpenGL model and didn’t compress the textures as much? Geez, that’s worth at least 25% more money!
It's not. Going to stop.
8 jul.
(Oink.)
Yeah, it's my mouth that tastes bad (or I'm being poisoned). Funny, that never happened to me before. No, not funny.
Oh, blow me. 1Password has been updated, and I have to RE-hack it to enable the Camino plug-in.
Step 3: Profit!
Spent the night proving the quantum mechanics of How I Met Your Mother's infinite unreliable narrators. My heard hurts but the fever's gone.
7 jul.
Web is Pink on the iPhone App Store
I’ve waited so long for this moment, I’ve gotten so used to the idea that the app would never be approved for the App Store, that I now have no idea what to do next.
It’s unbelievable, but here it is: Apple has finally approved the Web is Pink app, which gives you direct access to, like, the best gay chat ever, right there on your iPhone.
It’s free, you don’t need an e-mail address to sign up from the app, it uses your phone’s geolocation capabilities to show who’s nearby, it’s connected with the awesome regular version of the site, it lets you upload photos and everything you need, and did I mention it’s the best gay chat in the world?
Click here to download (iTunes link, requires OS 3.0), or here for more information.
La "nouvelle recette" du riz cantonais micro-ondables Uncle Bens est dégueulasse.
RT @jonathancoulton: “Uh oh: "no unread items." Now what am I supposed to do?”
OMG.
6 jul.
“iPhone 3GS oleophobic coating wearing off prematurely?”
While we have yet to see a second report of such extreme wear in such a short time, iLounge editors have found previous products with oleophobic coating—such as sunglasses—to be problematic, with the coating coming off with as little as contact with certain types of water.
I half-expected that. An oleophobic coating sounds like something that ought to be hard to make stick to a pane of glass.
Wikipedia: CompuServe
The original CompuServe user IDs consisted of seven octal digits in the form 7xxxx,xx - a legacy of PDP-10 architecture
Ooh. You know what? If you’re going to give your users a numeric ID, octal makes great sense — you only lose two numbers, and it’s computationally much cheaper to convert from the ID string to octal than to a binary representation of decimal.
(Also, I’m frustrated I can’t remember what my CompuServe ID was.)
Peine de mort pour les gens qui utilisent leur klaxon dans Paris avant 13h.
5 jul.
Kings 1.10 ★★★
Damn, what a stupid little boy — some future king he is.
Only the mother’s scene made this episode worth watching. (And what’s with getting rid of xxxx so quickly? They scrambled to speed the story up before the end of the season, didn’t they?)
“The Wild Russian Pet”
Want! Who could still want a dog when you could have that?
(See also: Wikipedia - Fishing Cat.)
Oh, what do you know, there is indeed such a thing.
What the hell is that? Delayed hangover?
Quantum mechanics strike me as heaps of bullshit piled upon a probability geek's thought experiment. Wavefunction collapse shmollapse.
4 jul.
Get off my lawn.
“Kinetic Road Plates - Green power from the parking lot”
Kinetic road plates will soon power checkouts at a Sainsbury supermarket in Gloucester in the UK. Each time a vehicle drives over the plates in the parking lot, kinetic energy is converted into electricity and transferred back into the store.
Not new, but I just realized: you can’t call “green” something that produces energy by increasing the gas consumption of each car that goes through the parking lot, however infinitesimally.
Does iTunes ignore qtz visualizers on a Mac mini with integrated GPU, or am I doing something wrong?
Am I really the only one who hates how the copy and paste interface has made the iPhone's magnifying glass horribly fidgety?
“Email Full-Resolution Photos From the iPhone”
If you use copy-and-paste instead of the “Email Photo” button in the Camera app, you can email the full-resolution version of the photo.
That’s… just weird.
3 jul.
Dante’s Inferno
Uh, yeah. It looks pretty but rather empty; it’s certainly not as impressive as God of War 3, but at least it’ll run on my 360. (If I keep it off all summer so it doesn’t fry.)
The last Murcielago and Stephen Fry promoting Grindr — what a Top Gear episode.
“Apple patching critical SMS vulnerability in iPhone OS”
Security researcher Charlie Miller has revealed that Apple is working on a patch for a security flaw he identified in the iPhone’s SMS implementation. The flaw can actually lead to arbitrary code execution, as he explained to Ars last month. […]
The iPhone can be instructed to execute SMS data as code instead of text, and when it executes the code it does so with root privileges and without any interaction from the user.
Wow. That’s completely unacceptable — unlike a browser vulnerability (where you can switch browsers or at least avoid shady websites), or even a port that’s open to probing on Windows (where you can hide behind a router), there is absolutely no workaround for that kind of thing, short of removing the SIM card and turning your iPhone into an iPod touch. How in hell does an iPhone end up running SMS data as root-level code?
(I’d rather the article had an official Apple quote, but I’ll assume a security researcher wouldn’t burn themselves by bragging about such a thing without grounds.)
I think my iPhone's battery status indicator has become completely unreliable since 3.0.
Ah, the Watchmen DVD is out.
2 jul.
“The Freewheelin’ Bob Simoleon”
That’s the iPhone app EA needs to make: one that overlays Sims-like widgets onto photos.
Conundrum: If I back up more often because heat makes me worried about my hard drives, it's gonna make some of them fail that much sooner.
According to thermodynamics an open bottle should stay cooler than a closed one. But would the difference be noticeable by a human mouth?
I swear not to complain if it does start raining for a whole week. Psych.
(Can't bring myself to end on an exclamation point.)
1 jul.
Kings 1.09 ★★★★★
Damn, why does it have to be so good and start falling into place now that the show’s been cancelled? That’s so rude.
Oh, shit, I used to have sunglasses. Wonder wherever they've ended up.
I think I need a second giant fan.
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