Monthly Archives: May 2006

mes états d’âme – être assidus au travail!

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cela fait deux semaines que je rêve d’être dehors, de profiter des montagnes, de l’air frais. Je rêve gros, haut et fort; mais c’est pas réaliste.. j’ai du travail (beaucoup!) et je dois m’y remettre plus sérieusement.

Quand on a pas trop le goût de travailler on travaille à moitié, on regarde beaucoup l’heure, ses emails, l’internet. Tout en fait pour ne pas s’y mettre pour vrai. Et quand on s’y met, c’est pas fort, c’est butché, fait à moitié juste pour arriver au but; plus important que tout, j’en tire aucune satisfaction et ça me donne encore moins le goût de me mettre au travail.

Le projet sur lequel je travaille le plus activement c’est le ‘Tableau de Bord’ pour l’agence de santé et des services sociaux de montréal. Un BEAU projet, visuellement c’est extra et je suis fier de moi. Je suis à plus de 35,000 lignes de code en ActionScript 2.0 (le language de programmation de Flash). C’est tout de l’orienté objet, pour ceux qui s’y connaissent; je suis facilement au dessus des 100 objets; mon architecture est solide et facile à manipuler sauf le ‘reste’.

Le Reste

Le ‘reste’ c’est l’intégration de la fin. C’est là que tout se rencontre, tous les contrôles visuels, et ou les morceaux interagissent; c’est mon point faible, je planifie rarement le ‘reste’. Je le garde pour la fin et en fait c’est difficile de bien le planifier parce que je fais ce qu’on appelle de l’extreme programming. Ce qui veut dire que les specs changent en cours de route, le client veux des modifs, des fois assez fondamentales et moi j’adapte sans problème, mais ce qui reste à la fin, c’est un peu spaghetti. Ça représente moins de 5% du code, et plus tard je fais le ménage dedans. Mais là je suis en plein dedans, et il m’emmerde un peu. J’aimerais prendre le temps de le planifier, toutefois j’ai hâte d’en finir!!

Dans une journée normale (ce qui n’existe pas, vous allez voir!) je passe entre 3 et 16 heures à travailler. Je fais un peu de menuiserie, je passe des heures à faire la bouffe (j’adore!), parfois je fais du sport; moins souvent ces temps-ci. Je m’occupe, je lis, j’écris sur mon blogue depuis quelques temps; je passe beaucoup de temps à parler à mes amis à distance grâce à l’internet. Par téléphone, par email, ou par chat. Je déteste le chat.

Mes projets

Je désire fortement faire un rack à vélo pour ma moto. Je vais l’attacher derrière, j’espère que ça tiendra dans les airs. En bois; fort probablement. On a une scie et quelques outils en ce moment parce qu’on refait le salon. Dave et moi on s’est attaqué au super projet de poser un plancher flottant; moi qui a fait pas mal de menuiserie je trouve ça CHEAP! c’est de marque TrueClic, du 7mm. Le résultat finit est très beau, de couleur très riche (autumn oak je crois) et avec mes murs jaune acre c’est délicieux comme mélange… bref, le rack à vélo pour moto c’est pour me permettre de rejoindre les pistes qu’on appelle les ‘Moonraker Trails’ à Golden, qui sont à au moins 400m d’altitude de plus que le niveau de la ville. Ça me prend une heure m’y rendre, une heure plutôt désagréable et une fois rendu je fais 2 heures de cross-country sur des pistes hallucinantes! Et après 10-15 minutes de descente. Le problème c’est que ça me vide un peu trop; alors j’aimerais m’y rendre en moto plutôt qu’à vélo.

Ma caméra Canon EOS 10D

Je me suis acheté une caméra sur Ebay; je pense que c’est un bon deal. Elle est à Denver au Colorado. La date de l’achat c’est le 22 ou 24 avril et malheureusement j’ai pas pu payer avec PayPal parce que j’étais pas ‘verified’. Une frustration immonde je vous jure que de faire un achat, de se voir obliger de s’ouvrir un compte sur PayPal et finalement PAS POSSIBLE DE PAYER. Ma “limite d’envois” étant de 1 000$ CAN et le prix total de l’achat de 1 005$ CAN. Vous imaginez! Et pour être ‘verified’ il faut entrer son information de compte banquaire. J’ai jamais vu ça. C’était la première fois que j’achetais sur Ebay (quelle temps on peut y passer à magasiner! c’est débile) alors pas de compte paypal. La ‘vérification’ peut prendre une semaine ou deux, j’étais vraiment emmerdé. Après de nombreux essais, rien à faire. Et PayPal ils sont rendus aussi inflexibles qu’une banque, impossible de les raisonner :

  • Welcome to Paypal, can I help you?
  • Yes, i’d like to pay for the auction I won.
  • Sure, well you’ll need to create a PayPal account and then you can pay.
  • I already did that, but it won’t let me. It says it’s above me sending limit!
  • Well then you need to be verified.
  • Ok, VERIFY ME!
  • Sir, you have to go through our process of entering your bank account information so we can verify your identity.
  • Well I don’t want to I just want to PAY! Is there any other way to proceed? couldn’t you raise my sending limit by 10$?
  • No Sir, we have to stick to procedures…

Et ça a continué comme ça. J’en croyais pas mes oreilles. JE VEUX PAYER! JE VEUX METTRE MON NUMÉRO DE CARTE DE CRÉDIT ET PAYER MERDEEEEEE! Jamais on ne m’a dit que j’avais une limite d’envois! Au contraire, MR, dépensé plus, plus plus! Mais pas avec PayPal, quelle gang de con. Ils peuvent pas juste valider mon adresse d’envois comme les autres marchants sur internet, non. Ils sont différents, et surtout ne vous attendez pas à ce qu’ils puissent vous AIDER. AIDER QUELQU’UN ?? c’est quoi ça? On suit les procédures..

Bref, que de frustrations. Alors j’ai envoyé un mandat poste; qui a pris 14 jours à se rendre.. merci. Et là il vient de le recevoir et l’a déposé à sa banque pensant que c’était un chèque?!?! Et la banque elle dit: “it’ll take 2 weeks to clear the cheque sir”. Vraiment, je pense que c’était pas pour moi cette caméra.. j’aurais du aller au bordel dépenser mon argent; ça m’aurait fait du bien.. mais ahh c’est vrai, les bordels c’est pas légal; c’est stricte et vite fait. Moi j’aime prendre mon temps dans une environnement agréable et relaxe. Jamais je ne ‘consommerai’ du sexe.
Alors le travail, je m’y suis remis. Avec assiduement et ça va mieux. Je tire de la satisfaction de ce que je réalise; ça va être une des plus belles applications de tous les temps, je vous promets. C’est extra-ordinaire.

Et puis bientôt j’aurai terminé, et j’aurai mon permis de moto, et je partirai à Kelowna ou Kamloops ou Victoria passer une semaine et m’occuper de mon passe-temps favoris…. je vous laisse deviner!

QUE LA PAIX SOIT DANS VOS COEURS ET VOS ÂMES.

et si vous avez besoin d’aide avec l’âme j’ai découvert que j’ai des dons de guérisseurs. Je peux alléger les peines, réaligner les chakras, enlever les maux physiques; et je peux même le faire à distance! Je l’ai fait à 10 000km de distance il y a quelques semaines, et à près de 5 000 km cette semaine. Et ça vient tout seul… c’est merveilleux; mais je l’accepte pas tout à fait encore.. ça viendra.

Martin

creating Flash Videos the open-source way

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in a project coming up this summer, I am to create a video & audio mixing console in flash. This project will be for the ADN-X tv show on Télé-Québec; their current website can be found here : http://www.adnx.ca/. Last summer I produced the ‘photo-roman / bd’ which is essentially a tool to write stories on the web in a cartoon style; you can integrate your own images, create caracters, make them speak out.. fun stuff. I particularly liked working on this project because it is aimed at teenagers, at helping them express themselves. I had quite a hard time during my teenage years, and tools to express myself would have been great.

The Tools

If you do a quick search for ‘flv conversion’ you’ll notice there are quite a few offerings. Some of them are quite affordable:

The challenge with the video mixer is that I will need to do batch conversions of user submitted videos on the fly from PHP. What I need is either a commande line encoder (also known as a console encoder) or a PHP plug-in or module that offers this functionality. There is one commercial FLV encoder that works from the command line, it is the GeoVid Video To Flash Console encoder. Great, we found a solution! euhh, wait a second. What’s this price tag, 3999$ US? I must be mistaken!

But i’m not. It does cost a whopping 4000$ US. I know my client would freak out if I mentionned this as a solution; it’s simply not an alternative. In this era of free software it’s hard to get anybody to swallow that kind of price tag for a VIDEO CONVERTER. Hence, we had a problem.

Open-Source Alternative

It all starts with FFmpeg, which stands for (Fast-Forward Mpeg?). “FFmpeg is a complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec, the leading audio/video codec library. FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can compiled under most operating systems, including Windows”. Basically, it allows you to decode (for viewing and conversion) almost all known video formats and to encode in almost all known video formats. And it supports FLV and there is a PHP Module called ffmpeg-php for easy access to movie data. This means I can use it to do the conversion and free myself of the 4k$ price tag! Awesome.

For more details, please read this blog entry from Luar: http://luar.com.hk/blog/?p=669.


More to come

I will post a full article on how this has been achieved and I will include source code. Come back in august; in the meantime if you do get around to getting it to work, i’d love to hear more on the subject (it’ll save me a few headaches!).

Peace.

two excellent bands

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so I thought I’d share with you two incredible underground bands : Plaster (from Montreal) and My Diet Pill (from France somewhere). Both do english music, well I don’t think there are any lyrics in the Plaster songs; I recently ordered their CD but it takes forever for mail to reach the boonies of GOLDENcity-beach.

Plaster

I first heard them at the NuJazz festival in montreal. They had quite an interesting line-up of bands and clearly Plaster stood out; to me they won. They won my heart, they are great! They play live drum-and-bass with REAL instruments, you should see the drummer go, it’s incredible. Their vibe is one to dance on, it is powerful and well maintained, it keeps you going and going and going, like the energizer bunny.

When their show ended, there was one encore. But I didn’t have enough; while everybody was starting to spread out thinking it was over, I kept shouting, cheering, probably dancing too.. after a few minutes a few people came back towards the stage and joined me and THEY CAME BACK. ahh such good music, we had 2 more encores after that if I recall correctly. They enjoyed our energy, we enjoyed theirs. wow.

They do tour around Quebec, go see them. Wether you like drum and bass or not, they are good; if you like to dance.. this band stands several magnitudes above House music; house is crap in my opinion. It’s the music of tease, and we sure do live in a society of teases.. another subject, another time.

My Diet Pill

While I don’t have as much to say about My Diet Pill as I did with Plaster, i can tell you this: they produce what is called in french ‘tubes’ which means catchy songs; and their music isn’t redundant, all the songs are different from one another!! THAT just that, a band which plays such a large spectrum of emotions, is worth MILLIONS. Lets hope they can get known. They should come to Canada, I’d set up shows for them (well I’d try… ;) )!
Peace.

so I met Mike McPhee today..

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Mike is the Marketing Project Manager at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, my home mountain here in Golden. While Mike seems like a nice guy, I learned more information on the ‘total website revamp’ they are planning; release date is Sept 1st, 2006. The website budget makes this contract attractive. The part of the budget allowed to maintenance is almost half the contract, maybe the other comapny was afraid to charge too much up front.

I had estimated between 15k and 20k for the website. After answering his question: “So how much do you think it would cost to build the website as it is?” I always ask back: “Now that you know my estimate it would only be fair to know about your current budget!”. A few years ago I wouldn’t have had the guts to ask such a question, but today I do. And hell yeah, i’m entitled to!

The conclusion of the meeting was that i am the ‘most qualified guy in Golden’. Thanks Mike! Mike wants to hire somebody to do the work in-house while his boss prefers outsourcing: it is cleaner. Less complications, less obligations, less engagement. An employee of a ski resort has quite a lot of benefits like staff prices everywhere, free seasons pass. I already bought my season pass for a meager 480$ CAN tax included. Anybody who knows me knows I’m not a good employee; I work at irregular hours, i am not always happy to come into work and I prefer to stand out for myself than for the company I work for. Still staff prices at the cafeteria and the bars WOULD be an awesome perk.

So i’ll know in a few weeks. They currently hire Driven. I had researched them out before coming out here, them being the closest there is to a company I could work together with; but they are not up to par. They still have a lot to learn; quite a lot in fact.

I had heard that Sunshine Village paid 100k for their website. It isn’t all that great, don’t you think? For 100k I would make them an INCREDIBLE website. It was developed by Critical Mass of Calgary; I guess prices in calgary are inflated in all domains. Well, I don’t like that ski area, it reminds me of out east except with snow and more storms. In fact there is very rarely any sun at Sunshine Village.

Oh, so I now bear a cleanly shaved face. I wore nice clothes, prepared quite a demonstration (took 2 hours!) for this meeting. Well 2 hours ain’t that much really; but…

Martin Legris - Le 9 mai 2006 - PUS DE BARBE!

J’ai l’impression que c’est têteux de se raser pour un meeting du genre, mais je sais bien que c’est indispensable. La dernière fois que je me suis rasé ça a été pour la conférence PHP Québec 2006. Bref les gens ne me voient jamais la ‘face’ à nu, quand je suis allé à l’épicerie Paige la jolie caissière est resté surprise un bon 5 secondes! mmm Paige, si seulement tu avais quelques années de plus…

So let’s hope for the best. I’m not sure I WANT this contract on top of all the work I have planned over the summer. It would be a lucrative summer. I think i’ll need help!! ;)
Peace.

my painting..

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since mr. camera seller hasn’t received the money order yet, well, I will have to wait quite a while for my camera. Hence I think it’ll take another two weeks atleast, so here’s a preview of my first painting. I’m thinking of doing another one tonight ;)

first painting

i painted last night!!

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it’s been years since i touched a paintbrush; an artist’s paintbrush that is. I recently painted the house I rent in Golden, BC a nice bright yellow and while trying out colors I decided to paint shapes on the walls. They were nice shapes, big yin/yan shaped teardrops, a hot hair baloon whose basket was a hand reaching down, nice butt shapes too. It was an extraordinary experience to paint on such a big canvas; so liberating. I was completely submerged in the experience, I cried for a while, thought of the many girls i’ve been with; the ones I loved most (KARINE!!) and those that hurt me most. Or did I hurt myself using them? Hard to say really.

That night I had a dream, where I kept going down stairs, down and down and down the basement of a basement of another basement. There I found Marie-Eve waiting for me. She was my first real love and boy did I love her! My first reflex was to want to have sex with her, you know, for the old times. She didn’t want to! That was very reminescent of the old times thank you. So we walked around hand in hand and talked to people, and once in a while I’d try to make love to her and NO.

In a way it’s so weird that down so far in myself Marie-Eve is still there and she still won’t have sex with me. I’m rather impulsive on the matter and rather… always wanting. I can have sex 5-6-7 times a day.. up to twelve i’m sure. I did have sex for twelve hours in a row once; oh I was on ecstacy but still. Must have had 30 orgasms; crazy stuff.

So far down there she was, my first love with what hurt me the most, or the point that I won’t let go off of is she won’t have sex with me. Weird eh? I wonder if she’s gone now that I acknowledged that.

Now back to the painting.. so last night I painted on a 6″ x 8″ canvas; rather small compared to wall-sized canvases. But I did, and it felt great. Bright colors, abstract yet a mix of elements we can recognize, lots of opposites, fire, water, earth, greens and a soul. (I’ll post a picture when I get my camera!). Again I was completely captured, immersed in the experience. I didn’t really know where I was going; didn’t really think. What I was doing was projecting emotions on the canvas and my hand, the paintbrush and the beautiful colors were the medium.

Where it gets really interesting is how it changes me. For the last four or five years I always fall asleep in the same position: on my left side. Unless i’m with a girl or in an akward situation. But basically i cannot fall asleep in any other position. If I lay on my back I feel the energy of the universe too much, I get so high and my soul wants to leave my body. When I’m on my right side something doesn’t feel right, and when I’m on my left side, you can count to one, two, zZzZzZ.. Now last night I went to bed and i feel asleep on my right side! And I slept in that position all night, no matter how much I moved around. It’s weird eh? Painting liberates me.

I shall do more!

Peace.

hosting-unlimited… not!

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one of my clients is hosted at hosting-unlimited.net. They offer a great bang for the buck, 29 UK pounds for one year of hosting; I mean that’s a great deal. Their system offers CPanel for complete self-administration, a little restrictive on some aspects like 5 email accounts only, 500mb of storing, 5 mysql databases and you are not allowed to host multiple domains.

They use a system for billing called premium billing; basically everything is automated and they offer no phone support. It takes them 1 day or two to answer questions.

Recently she got her account suspended; she hadn’t paid her yearly fee. It was due on April 30th, and they suspended her on may 2nd. It took 4 DAYS to fix this issue, all of it happened because the email address she had used to create her account wasn’t active anymore. Hence she didn’t receive the notices. But couldn’t they try calling her? Or using the email account on the hosting account? No. Couldn’t they be understanding and put the website up right away when she got in touch with them; while she got around to paying? No. They were complete idiots when it comes to understanding their clients needs. They don’t care. They follow procedures and that’s it.

So I give them a two star rating out of five. If everything goes well and is in order, excellent. If anything goes wrong, man you’re in trouble!!

Peace.

road biking vs mountain biking!

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here we go again! why can’t they get along? I don’t know. In fact for me road biking doesn’t even EXIST. I love mountain biking, i love going cross-country mountainbiking to be more exact. I love going uphill for 10 seconds, around a corner, downhill for 5, another corner. I love the thight trails, the thighter the better. I love spending time inside of nature, not on the border of an infinite road; being alone and submerged in trees, insects, dirt, mud, creeks. The closer to the earth the better.. the windier the trail the better, the more roots the better.

What do I come to understand out of it? Well everything I like is opposite from road biking. But this guy, Jerome of Summit Cycle here (he’s a goldenite like me) who runs a mountain bike shop and has mountain biked for years and years and years well he says that road biking is excellent; in fact he does it more than he does mountain biking. Well Jerome, maybe your right, but I will never know cause road biking doesn’t exist!

Peace.

what do you do when two hot chicks

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who are kissing each other in front of you, then come talk to you briefly to say: “Are you having fun yet?”, not waiting for your answer whatsoever, and head 2 feet behind you on a bed to make out?

You read your own t-shirt which says: “I ride twins” in nice pink letters.

Well they weren’t smart ‘bitches’ (pardon my expression, I think I am influenced by the hiphop culture!! oh no!!). It doesn’t mean I ride two girls at once, it means I ride twintip skis!!

click to activate and use this control

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Frank Scuccimarri, good friend of mine, complained about a weird behaviour on the site http://www.flirtmontreal.com which we put online a little while ago. Basically to change languages you need to click on a link which is inside the header animation; in flash. In firefox this works no problem, but in Internet Explorer you need to click twice; once to activate the control, a second time to click on the link itself. As I found out by searching on google this is due to the fact Microsoft lost a legal battle over a software patent: they aren’t allowed to automatically load and install activex controls (or something like that).

As it turns out the fix is 4 lines of javascript and uses an apparent bug in IE, because a line of javascript that reads:
[code]
theObjects[i].outerHTML = theObjects[i].outerHTML
[/code]
can’t do all that much, except force IE to reparse the html? dunno.

For a more detailed explanation, click here.

Oh and this bug doesn’t appear unless you upgrade to the latest Windows XP patches. I think it dates from a little while ago, but.. you know.. i use IE once every blue moon.. so..

Peace.