<Glazblog/>

I just filed this bug, that is VERY annoying if you happen to have, like I do, a group of URLs as Home Page. I filed it under Browser General because I did not know where to file it.

I gave a try to Ubuntu Live CD. I have to say I like it but strongly dislikes two things:

1. gcc/g++ is not installed by default; that just sucks.
2. Ubuntu Live CD has just destroyed the MBR of my hard disk, even if I have no idea why, and rebooting after trying the CD was more than a pain...

Gerv: Everyone either has a certain hope in Christ, or is certain to go to Hell
Daniel: Oh, well, I just hope Hell has air conditioning...

Only ?-))))

One of the most annoying things in Nvu 0.50 is certainly the resizing of the vertical ruler when the selection changes, triggering a document reflow because the document's viewport changes. This is about to be fixed.

• More work on Site Manager 2
• Integrated R.J.Keller's and KSS's help for Nvu Guys, you rock!!! I just had to update nvu-toc.rdf, the links were almost all broken.

  

• Update: Nvu 0.50 was added to Mandrake contrib rpms last saturday (source: Fabrice Bonny)

Ah, en fait, il y avait quand même un truc qui m'a chiffonné aux journées de Lyon: une assoce nommée Bloukblouk (à vos souhaits) avait laissé traîner des papiers sur une table de démo. Daniel Veillard et moi-même avons été assez effaré par le contenu des dits-papiesr. Faut vraiment être très très con pour écrire des trucs comme ceux qu'on a lu:

"Le logiciel propriétaire, c'est du VOL!"

Ben voyons. Parce qu'il est vendu ? Alors qu'il est peut-être le résultat du travail acharné d'une équipe de R&D soutenue par un investissement important ? Ou parce que la notion même de "propriétaire" donne des boutons à ces adeptes du kolkhoze ? Il ne faut quand même pas tout confondre... PDF par exemple est propriétaire mais est ouvert puisqu'il a été même normé. En quoi est-il mauvais qu'Adobe récupère ses billes sur son investissement de R&D ? Le format natif de MS Word, .doc, est propriétaire. Bon. Et cela gêne-t-il vraiment un milliard et demi de personnes pour écrire et lire du .doc ? Bloublouk fait une confusion majeure entre les technologies, leur accouchement et leur devenir d'une part, et les politiques commerciales de l'autre.

"Bloukblouk c'est (...) un espace convivial où trouver (...) de quoi remettre en état de marche les ordinateurs déclarés obsolètes par la société de consommation"

Non. C'est de la vraie propagande de caniveau, ça. On peut parfaitement, si on n'a pas besoin de plus, travailler aujourd'hui sur un 80486 sous Windows 3.1. Il y a d'ailleurs pas mal de grandes entreprises dans le monde qui ont des applis tournant sur des vieux matos parce qu'il n'y a pas besoin de les upgrader: ça marche!

"Bloublouk c'est (...) un lieu de résistance et de réflexion sur une éthique informatique et politique"

Ah, des hacktivistes quoi...

"Bloublouk c'est (...) une initiation à la cryptographie"

Exactement. Des hacktivistes.

"Bloublouk libère les ordis utiles aux kombats"

Faudrait libérer les neurones aussi...

"Parce que les idées d'un programme informatique comme toutes les idées appartiennent à toutes et tous et qu'elles ne doivent pas être cachées dans un code compilé par exemple, ou accessibles seulement à une élite, et que celles-ci ne soient pas soumises à des lois restrictives"

Oulala, fumage de moquette sévère apparemment.

Ce genre d'extrêmisme fait un mal fou au logiciel libre. Je ne sais pas si Bloublouk, vers qui je me refuse à établir un lien, se rend compte du repoussoir qu'ils représentent pour ceux qui pourraient envisager de passer aux systèmes et/ou logiciels libres. Un discours pareil, c'est mille clients de plus POUR Microsoft. Encore bravo.

• the format toolbar was listed twice under View > Show/Hide > Customize toolbars. This is now fixed.
• I'm now in Lyon and am hardly waiting for Tristan to dance in pink tutu tomorrow morning during my talk.

• I'll give a talk about NVU in Lyon during the 6th Journées du Logiciel Libre. Arriving there tomorrow, I'll have dinner with the whole team. See you there.
• the Site Manager v2 is 70% done.

• I have decided to rewrite entirely the Site Manager, to clean it up, enhance it, solve bugs related to symlinks, etc.
• fixed major bugs, including one slowing down the source view so much when it deals with very large files it becomes unusable
• more work done on DW templates

Update: multi-site manager, first screenshot

I saw today a big american car here in Saint-Germain en Laye (not surprising, with the International High School located in town) with two interesting bumper stickers. On the left hand side "American in with France". On the right hand side "American Idiot in 4 letters: Bush"...

As a side note, a lot of Americans living in Paris were demonstrating against Bush a few days ago under the Eiffel Tower.

If your geekiness includes some interest about linguistics and the history of Europe, then make a break and read this. (Source: Léon Brenig)

editable areas

Basically, there are three simple ways of "marking" a given area as editable in an HTML document instance. Such an area is similar in spirit to a selection.

1. use an element and specify that this element is editable through an HTML attribute or a CSS property
2. use two paired elements, one inserted before the area and the second one after the area, the second one carrying an idref to the id of the first one
3. use two paired comments, one inserted before the area and the second one after the area

Unfortunately, the authoring tool may need to style an editable area with an outline, or a background, or a specific font. So, at least internally, we need an element here because we need to apply CSS styles. Immediate side-effect of that choice: if the start or end of an element has to be contained in an editable area and if that element start or end is not the area's start or end, the whole element has to be contained in the editable area... Example:

<p>blah blah blah <em>foo bar</em> bola bola</p>

The area in bold chars over yellow background cannot become editable because the selection ends inside an element. Making it editable would require cutting the em element in two pieces and that's not acceptable from an author's point of view.

DW

Dreamweaver has chosen the third option above. All the features contained in a DW template are "coded" through SGML/XML comments added to the HTML/XHTML markup of the document. I will only discuss the last version of the DW Templates format that is implemented in DW MX, the former versions of DW uses a slightly different and simpler format.

An editable area is tagged using <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="foo" --> and ends with <!-- TemplateEndEditable -->.  If you launch DW and place the caret in such an editable area, you'll see that the structure toolbar at the bottom of the window shows an invisible element called mmtemplate:editable.

Repeatable areas are tagged with <!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="RepeatRegion1" --> and <!-- TemplateEndRepeat --> and create an internal element named mmtemplate:repeat.

Conditional areas (the area is present if and only if a condition is true) are tagged with <!-- TemplateBeginIf cond="facultative" --> and <!-- TemplateEndIf --> and create and internal element named mmtemplate:if.

Template parameters are contained inside the head element of the document and are defined using a comment too. The comment specifies the name, the type and the value of the parameter: for instance <!-- TemplateParam name="fooo" type="text" value="bar" -->. Parameters don't really need to generate an internal element but we're going to discuss that later.

The ugliest thing in DW templates is parameter instanciation in the markup and attributes values. Let's suppose you have a parameter called foo. To copy its value into the markup or into an attribute's value, you have to insert @@(foo)@@ there. I find it absolutely ugly. I understand DW folks made that choice on purpose because an SGML/XML comment cannot be contained into an attribute's value, but still, it's really really ugly, and implies the post-parser has to implement a full-doc text search.. Oh by the way, what's between the parenthesis can be an expression. Think JavaScript... Instead of that ugly @@(foo)@@, they could have used an entity reference. In my mind &MMfoo; is certainly much better and more conformant to the HTML/XML spirit. I understand the HTML parser they used could make it problematic if it drops entity refs to replace them with the entity values...

And so on...Clearly, DW uses internally elements for templates even if those elements are always serialized into comments. It implies that the application has to run a post-parser on the document's tree after load, and a pre-serializer or a hacked serializer.

In Nvu

Well, I guess we'll do the same and implement a post-parser and a pre-serializer, and hack the structure toolbar in Nvu to hide some elements. I am thinking of a _moz_no_serialize attribute. The only difficult things here are the template parameters. I think an easy way to implement them is to attach an xbl binding to the document with a object field that will carry all those parameters and their definitions. I call it the parameters holder. Copies of parameters in the markup will be done through XBL; that XBL will populate an anonymous text node and will refresh it when a given event is received. The parameters holder  mentioned above will implement a watcher, and that watcher will let all parameter copies and conditions know when a parameter is modified. It'll be a bit harder for attribute values but it will also be done through XBL; an attribute making reference to a template parameter will probably trigger the application of a binding to the element, and that binding will refresh the attribute when it receives an event for that from the parameters holder. Could be hard if HTML element already carry a binding...

Given the way I am proposing to implement parameters, the eval JavaScript function will be the only thing needed to evaluate a condition or a parameter. I am pretty sure DW is implemented in a similar way too, the design seems to be made on purpose to rely on JavaScript.

Conclusion

It's feasible. It's not trivial and it'll take some time, but it's feasible. Can be done entirely in JS and XBL. When I read again this conclusion and what I wrote above, I have only one question coming to my mind : why the hell isn't Dreamweaver built on the top of Gecko and XBL ? It seems to me really weird that Macromedia did not push further the talks it had with Netscape at the end of 2000 and beginning of 2001.

Private message : no, it's not "so 1996". It's "so -4000".

• Many thanks to Yves Combe for a contributed LinuxPPC build of Nvu 0.50
• I just found how I can implement DW template parameters in Nvu Ehehe I may even make Nvu become natively conformant to DW templates and totally drop the current template format.

Yes there is one... You found it ?-)

DevEdge is no more. It is now confirmed that the server was brutally removed from network yesterday w/o prior notice. AOL has no plan to set it back despite it's VERY useful for Standards-related matters and for the JavaScript reference. Congrats again AOHell.

I guess the title says it all... Sorry it took so long. You can get Nvu 0.50 from its official site or from my personal mirror. If you want to build Nvu 0.50, this is the document you are looking for.

Reminder: when you start Nvu 0.50 for the first time, you're asked to issue a "ping" to our stats server. Please accept it. We store nothing but the time of your ping, the stats are available to anyone, and it helps us counting how people have really downloaded and launched the application. Thanks a lot.

Tristan Nitot, MacNN, linuxfr.org Robert Accettura

Last friday around 6pm, the Apache server running the Glazblog died. Despite of many customer calls to the hotline, the server was down all the week-end. It came back just a few minutes ago. The Hotline has frequently told the people calling "oh, you're the first one to notify us...". Easyconnect has a page to list their network problems, but it's never updated. They suck, I mean for the expensive price I pay, they really suck. So glazman.org is going to move to dreamhost. Expect a few down times in the near future to allow that move.

Gro Kounar

Il y a des mois comme ça... Le 28 septembre dernier, une Pitite Kounasse en scooter manquait d'empapapouter ma voiture avant de toréer avec un autobus, me donnant suffisamment de frissons pour une vie entière. Ce matin, précisément au même endroit, dans la même manoeuvre exactement, alors que je suis de nouveau en train de ramener mon fils à son école, c'est une grosse Honda ST1100 verte qui me double en accélérant alors que je suis en train de tourner, clignotant mis, vérification des rétro faites. Le gars a du mettre les gaz sur la file de gauche pour doubler tout le monde et arriver si vite que je ne l'ai même pas vu. Et tout ça en ville, bien entendu. Je sais pas si vous voyez bien la taille de la ST1100, mais comparé au scooter précité, c'est OBESE et un peu moins maniable qu'un vélo Décathlon !!! J'ai de nouveau pilé net, les ongles plantés dans le klaxon, mon fils mort de trouille à l'arrière. Le gars a évité l'avant de ma voiture à exactement un centimètre près et a du, comme la gamine, effectuer un superbe renversement parce que la voie de droite était bloquée par un camion en livraison et qu'une Kangoo arrivait en face. Il doit y avoir un mauvais karma à cet endroit, un truc qui fait qu'à ce lieu précis, les connasses et connards dangereux sur route ne peuvent que se manifester. Malheureusement pour moi, je ne peux en aucun cas éviter cet endroit. Suite donc au prochain épisode

Lothringer über alles

Après ce grand moment routier, je suis aller déjeuner tranquillement au centre-ville. A ma gauche, les deux beaufs de baaaaze, qui ont eu pour seule discussion pendant le repas l'interrogation suivante : l'incontinence sexuelle de David Beckham est-elle ou non proportionnelle au nombre de défaîtes du PSG ? J'allais presque oublier un détail revenant assez régulièrement dans la conversation : la femme de Beckham, elle est booooooonne, si cht'assure elle est booooonne. Passionnant. Je veux dire, d'un point de vue socio-culturel, c'est passionnant de voir à quel point et comment certains êtres humains utilisent ce qui leur tient de cerveau. A ma droite par contre, pas pareil, mais alors pas pareil du tout. Le monsieur est très digne, on dirait qu'il avalé un grand balai par le rectum dans sa tendre enfance. Son foulard autour du cou lui évite les courants d'air et fait plus Klassieux (mais si, Klassieux, de chez Klassieux et Klassieux, place Vendôme...) qu'une cravate en soie. En face, c'est son fils de 18/20 ans, ils ont la même tête, mais le gamin est habillé comme tous les gamins de cet âge en ce moment, c'est-à-dire qu'on hésite à lui demander à quel clodo il a confié son relooking. Et suit un discours proprement stupéfiant, qui me laisse encore baba une heure plus tard :

• Vois-tu Hubert, tu viens d'avoir 18 ans il y a un mois et il y a une tradition dans notre famille pour cet évènement..
• Ah (l'ado à l'air de s'en contretaper comme du premier string en cuir de Britney Spheres) ?
• Oui (le Klassieux enlève sa chevalière, absolument superbe je dois reconnaître, prend la main de son fils, et la pose sur sa paume)
• La tradition est de la remettre à l'aîné mâle à ses dix-huit ans. Voila, c'est maintenant fait, elle est à toi. Tu sais ce qu'elle représente, n'est-ce pas ?
• (là, le gamin est scié, vraiment souflé par la surprise) Oui. Cette partie-là, c'est pour rappeler que notre ancêtre Machin s'est illustré pendant les croisades, celle-là, c'est l'alliance avec la Maison des Trucmuche, et ça je ne sais plus.
• Cette partie-là, c'est la plus importante, et je veux que tu écoutes bien ce que je vais te dire. Cette partie est là pour rappeler les origine Franques de notre famille. Tu ne dois jamais oublier cela. De tout temps, nous n'avons jamais fait alliance - et mariage - qu'avec des familles d'origine Franque. Tu dois garder cela en tête. Il y a la vraie noblesse, la nôtre, celle qui a fait ce pays, et il y a la piétaille, celle qui vient des Gallo-Romains. Ce n'est pas pour rien qu'autour de nous, il y a tellement de blonds et de nez retroussés comme en Allemagne du Nord. Les ennuis viennent des autres.
• Papa, qu'est-ce que tu racontes (là, j'ai été surpris que ce gars tutoie son père...) ?
• Tout cela est vrai. Tu es encore un peu jeune pour l'admettre, mais avec le temps tu comprendras. N'oublie jamais : ne compte que sur les Francs, ne favorise jamais que les Francs. Ton faux-filet est bon ?

J'en oubliais de manger tellement j'étais estomaqué par ce que je venais d'entendre. J'avais du mal à regarder le père dans les yeux vu qu'il était assis à côté de moi, mais j'avais envie de lui rappeler que les Tsiganes appellent la Reine d'Angleterre la Reine des Paysans; parce que pour s'attacher à la terre et aux biens matériels comme ça, on ne peut être que paysan. Décidément, la noblesse française est chiante, et a bien mérité 1789.

Samlog

I am almost sure what happened yesterday night in Egypt at walking distance from the israeli border and in two other sites was not triggered by the Palestinians. It's been decades since the last serious threat on that touristic area, probably because of the jordanian and egyptian influence. In this area of the world, you can easily walk from Egypt to Jordan crossing Israel. And Saudi Arabian border is just a few kilometers away, it's possible to see from Israel and Egypt the cohorts of trucks going from Aqaba to Jiddah and Riyadh.

Israel has Eilat, Jordan has Aqaba, and Aqaba was already a town of local importance two thousand years ago, Egypt has Taba. Tourism is vital to Eilat and Taba, tourism is tremendously important to Aqaba. Nobody there has any interest in threatening the sole local industry. The King of Jordan and the President of Egypt have enough influence and power to send Palestinians a no-go message about that area.

The Taba Hilton is the place where took place israeli-palestinian negociations some time ago. It is a symbol, and it's so close to the israeli border that all tourists are going to flee, from Taba for sure, and from Eilat most certainly. I am pretty sure Aqaba is also going to be impacted. That was a very well chosen target, and a target Palestinians never touched.

Mr Mubarak, you have a problem in Egypt and that problem's name is certainly Al Quaeda and/or the armed branch of the local Muslim Brothers.

I need Dreamweaver templates. I want to implement an import for those templates and I need to work on real DW templates used in production, and not templates I am myself making in 5 seconds. So if you use such templates on a professionnal basis, and if you are willing to help Nvu, please send me a copy of your .dwt files. Of course, these files will never leave my disk, and will be trashed as soon as I am done with them. Thanks!

I got a silly idea and tried it. And it worked. So the last bug I had switching from Normal to Source View is now fixed : the source view was not automatically scrolling to ensure the selection is in the viewport. It works now very well. Unfortunately, it's too late to make 0.50. I'll probably release jars next week for those who really really need/want to have this fixed in 0.50.

• Found two big bugs in nvu 0.50, not blockers but too big to be released like that. Fixes in hand, making new builds now.
• 7-Zip LZMA compression used for the windows installer, down to an amazing 6.6 megabytes only
• Update: Nvu is officially included in SUSE LINUX Professional 9.2, see the announcement page !

Slashdot

Un mur est tombé ce matin...

excerpt from a Silicon.com article:

The Microsoft boss also claimed some domestic familiarity with the issue.

"My 12-year-old at home doesn’t want to hear that he can’t put all the music that he wants in all of the places that he would like it," he joked.

Steve, your son is perfectly right, and that's why all systems trying to strictly protect music will fail.

As if Europeans needed another proof that patents on software are dangerous and counter-productive...

If you plan to buy an iMac G5, you should know that the internal power adapter's fan is known to be weak, and could start doing weird noises only a few hours after the first use of the computer. I said "known" because I am right now on the phone with Apple and the store where I bought the iMac told me Apple knows well about the problem and already has a free exchange program...

Update: Apple France just lost a customer... So they knew VERY well about the problem, they have dozens of iMac G5 power adaptors that are ready to burn if the fan dies. My mac was probably assembled last week, delivered this week. So they intentionally left the bad quality's power adapter and left the customer - and the resellers - in front of the following dilemma : you bring your iMac to Apple's customer care center in the far south of Paris or you do-it-yourself, Apple sending you a replacement part. You can't get a technician's visit to do it. For a new machine, just acquired, facing a construction problem, that's a real shame. BUT to receive that replacement part, you need to provide Apple with a credit card number, they refuse to ship w/o that "because a lot of people abused"!!! Hey, so that's Apple that delivers a bad quality product, but *I* have to give them a proof I am an honest customer who'll sent back the bad part... Very cool, Apple, you're so polite with your customers. So I gave a credit card number, and I will send a letter Recommandé avec Accusé de Réception requesting the removal of my credit card data from their files as soon as I have sent back the bad power adapter; that's legal in France and they must remove my entry. If they don't, I will call the regulatory authority on privacy issues and I'll sue Apple. And of course Apple France just lost a customer today.