Firefox 3.0 + Flash on a protected Windows PC

June 22nd, 2008

Very often, your company doesn’t allow you to install a new software on your company computer. For this purpose, Portable Apps is a very interesting website: it contains a lot of free software ready to be used, without any installation process. Moreover, it releases latest version of software very quickly. For example, 1 or 2 days after the launch of Mozilla Firefox 3.0, it was already in Portable Apps.

Most Firefox plugins (”add-ons“) can be installed in the Portable apps version of Firefox, but not all of them. The Adobe Flash plugin is one of the few ones that you can’t install without administrator rights …

Unless your company installed Firefox 2.x on your computer with the Flash plug-in. If it’s the case, you have just to copy two files from the 2.x install to the 3.0 one :

Go to your “old” Firefox plugins directory, for example: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\. Then copy these 2 files: NPSWF32.dll and NPSWF32_FlashUtil.exe to your Portable Firefox directory, like: FirefoxPortable\App\firefox\plugins\. Now re-start Firefox 3.0 … Voilà!

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AEL-NG?

June 17th, 2008

A few days ago, I was sad to see that the Association Electronique Libre (AEL) website was down and only replaced by two measly <html> tags. For those who didn’t know it:

The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society.

The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information.
(from an old copy of the AEL website)

Although it was based in Belgium, the information it contained as well as the actions that were supported exceeded the small Belgian borders. The wiki was a very useful and valuable source of documents, links and comments about freedom in the electronic media. “Fortunately” we still have a 2007 version of the website on archive.org and some messages from the mailing-list were kepts on the mail-archive and open subscriber (and I will preciously keep my archives!).

Following a small exchange of e-mails with one of the main guy behind AEL, the machine hosting the AEL is simply dead (the fact the machine was dying was announced a long time ago, no one apparently reacted). I guess (or rather hope) that the data is still available on the hard disk(s).

Now what? Beside the fact we are all getting “older” with other priorities in life, how come we don’t feel more concerned about our freedom in the cyberspace? Internet liberties are still in danger [1], the Electronic Frontier Foundation website has more and more issues, a paper-media publishing house is printing comics to “educate teenage youth about an array of issues ranging from privacy, free software, security and the impact of politics on personal freedom as it relates to the use of technology”, … Are we too lazy to try to understand what’s behind Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning and other “social networking websites“? Maybe the technological gap between these polished websites and what indivuals can do “in their garage” radically increased since the advent of so-called Web2.0, inhibiting our will to actively participate in it [2], to make it ours? Did most of us “surrender” in front of the razzle-dazzle aspects of new communication media?

The idea behind this post title (AEL - New Generation?) is simply that something should be done to bring back to life a central, hopefully community-driven website to gather information about our freedom in cyberspace …

[1] Ironically, in this post, this reference is written by the main person behind the AEL
[2] About the “creativity” of people in Web2.0 applications, we could read with interest this article from C. Jonckheere and F. Schreuer (unfortunately in French only)

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Comment your code

June 9th, 2008

QR codeIt doesn’t matter if you write proprietary or open source code, comments in your code are very important (somehow even more important than readability and functional correspondence to the client’s needs). This is especially true if someone else is supposed or will, one day, look at your code, re-use your code and/or build upon your code.

For example, despite the fact that this source code header explained what the whole source is doing, you can’t tell what processing is done in this paragraph:

           MOVE SPACES TO IDTCLO-L1 OF ACXB01
                          IDTCLO-L2 OF ACXB01
                          IDTCLO-L3 OF ACXB01.
           @ZOBLIG, IDTCLO OF ACXB01, IDTCLO-V OF ACXB01-V.
           @CLR1, "01", "**", IDTCLO OF ACXB01, "3", "Y", "Y", "N",, \
                  IDTCLO-V OF ACXB01-V.
           MOVE IDTCLO    OF CLR1   TO IDTCLO    OF ACXB01.
           MOVE IDTCLO-L1 OF CLR1   TO IDTCLO-L1 OF ACXB01.
           MOVE IDTCLO-L2 OF CLR1   TO IDTCLO-L2 OF ACXB01.
           MOVE IDTCLO-L3 OF CLR1   TO IDTCLO-L3 OF ACXB01.
           MOVE NUMCLO OF CLD01-01  TO NUMCLO    OF TS-INTE.
           INITIALIZE ACD0B-01.
           MOVE NUMCLO OF TS-INTE TO NUMCLO OF ACD0B-01.
           MOVE REFACE OF ACXB01   TO REFACE OF ACD0B-01.
           @READ, "1", ACD0B-01, XX.
           IF ACCESS-OK
              @ERREUR, IDTCLI-V OF ACXB01-V, "ACXX0001"
           END-IF.

This code is definitely not readable. It first uses a standard nomenclature for variables, it uses macros with a good number of unknown variables, we don’t exactly know what can cause an error while accessing the table in the last lines, etc. This is only an example ; you can find this behaviour in many other programming languages.

That’s a reason why I really like tools to auto-generate comments and documentation (like Javadoc, pydoc, etc.). The documentation is in the code and it usually doesn’t block code reading while adequately describing what a section/paragraph/function does. And the tools can generate properly formatted documentation in a lightweight format (usually HTML+CSS, not heavy MS-Word documents). One nice thing: you don’t need to send the code and the documentation for review or upgrade: just send the code and your addressee will automatically get the documentation (s/he will be able to automatically generate it). And, in 2 years, people will still understand what you wrote and they won’t need a specialist to reverse-engineer your code.

By spending a little bit of your precious time to comment your code, others will get a better understanding of what you did and your project, as a whole, will save an impressive amount of time (time that you can spend on a terrace with a refreshing drinks).

Photo: “quote” by Bonnie Peirce (CC-by-nc)

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Posted in Computers | 5 Comments »

I can’t read my blog

June 3rd, 2008

At least from my office. Sadly true ;-) since one of the rules of my company proxy server bans all URLs with the letters “blog” inside (no blogger.com, blogspot, … websites either). Fortunately, there are a lot of web-based feed aggregators (which are not — not yet? — banned). It also blocks all URLs with the “exe” string so we are not able to visit the Belgian Post website (it uses an URL containing “outletlocator.exe”) ; I didn’t find any bypass yet.

Banned blog by ISA server

Btw, with their message, we know they use Microsoft ISA Server as a proxy …

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Alt+e, g, a

June 1st, 2008

This is the “shortcut” sequence of keys in order to get the list of changes in a text document in OpenOffice.org. It works very nicely with MS-Word documents, a useful feature when you are obliged to exchange work with colleagues, mentors, etc. who only use the proprietary word processor.

Part of screenshot of the track list in OOoIMHO, the only problem is the way the list of changes is shown to the end-user in OpenOffice.org: as in other word processor software, changes are underlined in a different color for each contributor and a small hint tells you what happened to the hovered block of text, who did it and when; unlike other word processors, you can’t accept/refuse any change by right-clicking on it (you have to do it from the separate window). I do not find this intuitive and, sometimes, annoying …

Although I really appreciate the list of all the changes (notably for bulk acceptance/refusal), I think the end-user should also have the opportunity to accept/reject a change, once at a time, with a right-click of the mouse or any other means (keyboard shortcut e.g.). This is, I think, especially important when you are not reviewing the last version of a document, when a reviewer ask questions in the text (you can’t neither accept neither reject, you have to manually edit the text) or when you still do some modifications to modified text.

Talking about modifications of modified text, OpenOffice.org doesn’t update the list of changes when you modify your text while this list is open. You have to close the list and then re-open it to see your new changes.

My “dream functionality” would be that, next to the actual list of changes, the end-user would be able to:

  • either right-click to obtain a pop-up menu showing the accept and reject options
  • either use two keyboard shortcuts: one for acceptance of the modification under the cursor

I already looked for such add-on on the web, without success. If anyone finds something interesting, let me know …

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A seventh scientific paper from the Poirrier-Falisse!

May 22nd, 2008

Finally, a seventh scientific paper is published by the Poirrier-Falisse. After a huge batch of articles from Nandini, here is my second paper:

Poirrier J.E., Guillonneau F., Renaut J., Sergeant K., Luxen A., Maquet P. and Leprince P.: “Proteomic changes in rat hippocampus and adrenals following short-term sleep deprivation” Proteome Science, 2008, 6(1):14
doi: 10.1186/1477-5956-6-14

Very briefly, in this study we show the influence of 4 hours of prolonged wakefulness in rats hippocampus and adrenals proteome. As usual, this paper is published in an Open Access journal. Here is my updated BibTeX file (and I also updated Nandini’s BibTeX file).

Since the publication of two papers in peer-reviewed journals is a requirement, I will now be able to finish and defend my Ph.D. thesis …

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GNU tools on MS-Windows

April 27th, 2008

When you are used to work on a computer with GNU/Linux and are obliged to process your files on a MS-Windows system for some time, the GnuWin32 project can come in handy. They provide a lot of command-line tools from the GNU collection (sed, iconv, tar, bzip2, … see the whole list of packages they provide).

This evening, I needed to convert a lot of files from UTF-8 to iso-8859-1 (because it seems no decent Windows text editor can correctly translate text between these two encodings). Apparently, the GnuWin32 project removed the recode tool. But it can be easily replaced by iconv. With iconv, it’s done with:

iconv -c -f utf-8 -t iso-8859-1 utf8file.txt > iso8859file.txt

Photo credit: “In the beginning…it was the command line” by Dick Mooran on Flickr

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Two nice schemes about Open Source

April 14th, 2008

I don’t know how I stumble upon this report of a conference (English translation) from Avi Alkalay but I liked 2 schemes he showed.

In this first scheme (left), I like the way it reminds you that “Open” is not only about software, source code. But now that more and more people are aware of the benefits of Open Source software, it’s interesting to also stress the other sides of openness: open standards (like OpenDocument), open hardware, open architecture.
In the second scheme (below) is about the trend from private control / closed access to public control / open access (apparently from Rebecca Henderson; it could be interesting to find this whole presentation from 2004).

There is a third scheme in Avi’s post but there is something I don’t like in it, although it’s visually appealing. Although I understand that proprietary and open innovations should collaborate for the time being, I think that Open Innovation is the model to follow. Moreover, the “speed-to-market” criteria is, imho, better in the Open Innovation model (but maybe I should see Rebecca Henderson’s presentation).

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Published in the Wall Street Journal

April 13th, 2008

Scott Hensley used one of my pictures on Flickr to illustrate a recent article on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog.

The interesting thing is that they give a link to the original photo (at the end of the article) and wrote a nice note on Flickr :-)

Life seen by a micropipette resting on the bench

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“Word processors” are not meant to be usable

March 21st, 2008

(… at least for large documents)

Two week-ends ago, I spend a whole day trying to apply a consistent style to a thesis. I spent hours trying to be obeyed by a word processor because it would systematically change the style of some element, somewhere in the 100-or-so pages. Including figures was also a nightmare: we had to keep an eye on the (limited) memory of the computer (otherwise we got unexpected screen freeze, a lot of noise from the hard disk (paging), etc). Generating a bibliography was also another daunting task, even with the use of a dedicated reference manager …

Now I don’t know if I have to blame what we call “word processors” or human laziness …
First, these pieces of software are not really “processing words”. Grep, sed, vim, LaTeX, XSLT… actually are processing words, transforming them from a raw text format to something else, possibly transforming the whole text into something more readable on paper.
Second, word processors tend to let people write whatever they want, in whatever style (some word processors even retain the different style of things pasted into the text), in whatever order. In this aspect they resemble mind mapping software. But if a draft of experiment can be written like this, a good thesis needs a good planned underlying structure (imho). And current word processor software doesn’t push you to do this.

In this aspect, LaTeX may have a steep learning curve but it somehow force you to think about the structure before adding text and embroideries. Changing the style is only done in one place and is easy (once you know the command to type). I already used LaTeX for other reports, presentations and thesis and will certainly keep it for my Ph.D. thesis this year.

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