This blog has moved…

Managing two or more blogs is much work for me, and I already have too little spare time.

So this blog has been merged into my main blog at http://leblogdejean.wordpress.com/, which has thus become bilingual (French and English). The categories merging is far from being finished, and it is a great bit of work, but I’m (slowly) progressing.

All articles have been copied into it, so nothing should be missing.

Feel free to post comments, I will be very happy to answer.

The latest english language post is a small though about “We” and “I”. Maybe I should translate it into french. Maybe I will, as I should translate my latest french article into english: Sur Internet comme ailleurs, « Tout est en son contraire… et inversement ». (On the net as everywhere else, “Everything relies into its opposite… and vice versa”).

NaNoWrimo 2010 is over

The 2010 nanowrimo edition is now over. My  page shows  62,457 words, which was unexpected.

A few thoughts about this experience:

First lesson is that you will succeed only if you try.

Synopsis: I do not thinl that a synopsis is a must. Many say it is mandatory. In my mind, if something is mandatory then it is much less fun. I didn’t have a syno, but only a few ideas of what I wanted to put into the novell, so I started as my main character did, from a blank page:  no idea of the past, but discover it while the story is being written. I got stucked a few times, but I overcame them with small flashbacks and lesser characters.

Lots of pleasure: Of course the main goal was to write 50000 words within 30 days, which gave a rythm to follow, but why not take pleasure and allow yourself some freedom? If you want to write an adult scene, weird dialogs, or surrealistic or psychedelic scenes, then why not? You always have to cut them off during the afterwork or before validating your wordcount.

Write-ins: I couldn’t go to a single one, but I will participate next year. Forums are Ok but in visu discussions are far better.

Music : no restrictive genre, but with a reasonable volume. I enjoyed Bjork, Band of Skulls, Ben Harper, Yodelice, Hendrix, the Beatles, Tété, Muse, Iron Butterfly, Carlos Santana, Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) and many more. I have even played with my good old guitar when stucked in the middle of nowhere. I’m not fluent regarding guitar and bass, but I really love them, and it helps relaxing oneself.

Writing: I have a lot of progress to do. I only wrote a quasi linear story (with a few flashbacks), because it allows to easily go from a more or less stable stituation to the next one within two or three writing sessions. I will see what I can do about it during the forthcoming proffreading/rewriting/correcting. If I could draw (I’m working on it) it could give a series of  scénarios for a comics or a manga, or synos for a novell series, but one thing at a time.

As a conclusion, I had a lot of fun and pleasure, and I will participate next year if I have the oportunity.

Resentment and forgiveness

When resentment and his twin anger appear against someone, things almost always calm down with time. Sometimes it takes more time.

You can decide to do your best not to let these feelings express themselves but you simply can’t decide to forgive.

At least the process of forgiving is not as straight as it seems, unless of course you are advanced enough on the middle way – most people including me are not – to follow the process within seconds of minutes.

Resentment is a feeling. Putting a name onto things helps solving troubles.

Feelings are not addictions but I will make the parallel to help explain the process.

Imagine you are addicted to something, say alcohol or cigarettes or chocolate or TV. You can restrain your consumption of these, but you can’t simply and definitively decide that you are not addicted to them.

This comes with time. When you decide that you should give up your addiction and start fighting against your addiction, at first you will experience very frequent craving episodes. Then this craving will happen less and less often, then only once or twice a year. One day your addiction has gone into a latent, sleeping state, or even completely gone.

With resentment and forgiveness the process is about the same: bursts of this very negative feeling appear but more and more rarely as you work on it and as time passes by.

One day you realize that you have forgiven.

Then you have gained one more reason to take life with a smile.

HP 50g calculator : cold boot

I just exhumed my HP 50g calculator again, which I had bought  years ago with the intention to use it for lots of things.

I must admit that time has lacked, as have motivation and energy. After all there is a real life out there.

My calculator was cluttered with libraries, code snippets and the like, and the SD card was a real mess of objects, text files, photos.

So I have decided to bring it back to its factory state, by erasing every file I could find on the device and on the SD card and performing a hard reset.

After a few settings, such as RPN, rigorous and silent mode I am ready for a simple program to make sure that all is not lost.

Quelques règlages de plus, comme les modes RPN, exact, et silencieux, et je suis prêt pour un petit programme, histoire d’être sur de n’avoir pas perdu la main.

I have put on the mini portal a link to a   small document about my progress. I will extend it with time.

Add a custom menu to MonkeyGtd/mGSD

In my monkeyGtd documents I want to keep a quick access to a few tiddlers, for example the tag cloud, the site map and the projects statistics.

The quickest mean to achieve this is to add a custom drop down menu to the main menu.

You already know the ‘more’ menu. It is defined in the ‘MainMenu’ tiddler :

 {{tag{<<tag more|GTDComponent>>}}}

This single line simply tells that any tidller tagged as ‘GTDComponent’  will appear in the ‘more’ dropdown menu. Quick, easy, efficient.

So I have added this line to add a ‘tools’ menu:

 {{tag{<<tag tools|QuickAccess>>}}}

This menu will contain links to eacha and every tiddler tagged as  ‘QuickAccess‘, for example :

To feed this menu I have simply tagged as  ‘QuickAccess’  the GtdStats, RelatedUrls, SiteMap, and TagCloud tiddlers

This menu can be quickly modified by tagging/untagging tiddlers as ‘QuickAccess’.

My Modified ‘MainMenu’ tiddler:

[[Dashboard]]
 [[Project]]
/%
 <<tag Realm>>
 {{new{''<<newTiddler label:'+'  title:'New Action'  tag: Action Next GTD>>''}}}
 {{tag{<<tag Action>>}}}
 {{new{''<<newTiddler label:'+' title:'New Project' tag: Project GTD>>''}}}
 {{tag{<<tag Project>>}}}
 {{new{''<<newTiddler label:'+' title:'New Tickler' tag: Tickler GTD>>''}}}
 {{tag{<<tag Tickler>>}}}
 {{new{''<<newTiddler label:'+' title:'New Context' tag: Context GTD>>''}}}
 {{tag{<<tag Context>>}}}
 {{new{''<<newTiddler label:'+' title:'New Area' tag: Area GTD>>''}}}
 {{tag{<<tag Area>>}}}
%/
@@padding-left:1em;font-size:70%;
 [[starred|Starred]] &nbsp;&nbsp;
 {{tag{<<tag inbox|InboxTiddlers>>}}}
 {{tag{<<tag updt|UpgradeTools>>}}}
 {{tag{<<tag more|GTDComponent>>}}}
 {{tag{<<tag tools|QuickAccess>>}}}

@@
 @@padding-left:1em;color:[[ColorPalette::PrimaryLight]];<<tiddler MonkeyGTDVersion>>@@

A small portal for my websites

I actually have two blogs and three small web subsites, so maintaining a link between them, and making it easy for reader to discover them all is not easy.

So I needed a simple portal, allowing access to each of them from a central web page.

I have used Komposer for it ease of use and its ability to build small pages within minutes, without having to master the HTML markup language.

The portal is here :

Unclutter your smartphone

Several of my friends/colleagues and I have a smartphone, of different brands.
Most of us are very happy with it, but one of us  (no name please) is displeased with the way it handles its applications, and where they are stored. Hid phone is one of the latest (maybe the latest at this time) Android based smartphone.
After having installed many applications he found that his main memory was nearly filled with apps and files. Now he want to get rid of it and buy the ap<biip>e i<biiip>e model. He is great at buy new phone models and new apps and spending a whole lot of money onto it (just my opinion anyway).

I started working with computers in 1987. Those were the days of the 8086 based PC-XT with a for the time wonderful 512 kb of main memory. If you could not afford a 20 of 40 Mb hard disk then you had to cope with one or two 360 kb floppy drives. More “advanced” PC-AT were out of reach for a student. Later I got a 128k Mac, with its err… 128kb of memory and a single floppy drive. Later again, and for a few years my main machine has been a Psion Series 5 palmtop with 8 Mb of memory, which were used for running the multitasking system, the applications and store the application data.
All these machine had something in common: their quite terse memory and disk resources. Not many people could cope with this nowadays but mind you we worked very well with those machines. How come?
First, there was no internet, or it was just the beginning outside the university, and multimedia was for high end computers and workstations.
Second, applications were very expensive, and free software were not widespread.
Last, but not least, we applied some basic mecanisms to cope with sparse resources. Those are still applied nowadays – at least I still do apply them; the fifth one appeared with web applications.

• one and only one  application for a function
• any application not used at least twice a day is to be discarded
• any application where most functions are not used must be discarded
• no games, or at most one or two tiny games
• for web intensive applications prefer the browser based version to its native version (only apply sinc a few years)
• keep only small, but efficient apps
• one acronym : KISS ( for “Keep It Stupid Simple” )

My actual phone main memory and storage are not cluttered, even if I have tried many more applications than I should have. Simply applying the above principles keep my phone, my netbook and myself away from clutter.