#FF00AA

My name is Cédric Bozzi, I make apps and websites, and this is my tech blog — you’ll find news commentary here, from a very opinionated Mac-head.

Il y a une version française ici, but most of this blog’s contents are extracted from my Twitter feed, and hence only available in one language (which varies randomly).

A label for unread emails in Gmail.

# 2004-07-29 22:43:42

Upcoming features in Thunderbird 0.8 (via Paul Thurrot): RSS aggregation and global POP inbox, it’s really beginning to interest me.

# 2004-07-24 23:13:17

Thoughts on displaying times in blogs. Two very good ideas I’ll be sure to copy when my mind is into tweaking my templates.

# 2004-07-23 23:06:42

Expire (one of those Exposé clones) beta 2 (via Aqua-Soft). It’s certainly good, but it doesn’t work here.

# 2004-07-23 18:23:37

Your iPod mini has a sticky residue on it after removing the protective shipping materials. Where in this do they apologize for not changing their packaging even though they know it’s defective?

# 2004-07-23 18:20:24

The Kodak Camera~~phone~~ starts a craze. Damn that devilish technology thingy!

# 2004-07-20 22:59:10

V-Animator (direct download, osx-e doesn’t do permalinks), to make your buttons pulse, as in OS X. So useless it’s vital. (But not very spectacular with the graphite color scheme.)

# 2004-07-20 20:44:12

What’s wrong with registration-only news sites.

# 2004-07-20 17:15:15

The shape of a song.

# 2004-07-17 14:48:28

Wow: Google has just bought Picasa, it becomes free. “Picasa will not delete or move the location of pictures saved on your PC”: maybe I’ll try it then.

# 2004-07-16 17:55:17

Win a RoboSapien.

# 2004-07-16 11:29:50

The million monkeys at a million typewriters plugin.

# 2004-07-16 11:27:39

Blinkx. Let’s see.

# 2004-07-15 21:59:01

Digital Scrolling Name Tag Badge. Excellent.

# 2004-07-15 18:08:00

Nokia Lifeblog beta. Testing will be quick: it’s perfectly usable without a phone, but it only works in full-screen mode. It’s not only slightly annoying when you have a triple-head display, but also prevents from drag-and-dropping pictures onto the timeline, which would obviously be the most natural way of using it. I sent a bug report, but I don’t know whether they’ll get it: their form doesn’t work.

Conclusion: I’ll add a Lifeblog clone to the list of software I want to make. Timeline, drag-and-drop support for pictures (or any other file) à la Hello, one-click HTML page publishing, and you’re done.

# 2004-07-14 18:51:38

Google acquires Picasa. Logical yet surprising evolution of the Hello/Blogger partnership. Now what? Could Hello become Google’s full-fledged IM solution?

# 2004-07-14 00:24:55

GarooSync 0.1

And now is the time to release the first useful program since I got into the .NET SDK: GarooSync 0.1.

I have been wanting an FTP utility like this one for a long time, and it was becoming an emergency now that I’m working on a eZ publish project, involving lots of subdirectories everywhere.

Here’s the idea: I have on my hard drive local copies of my websites, corresponding to FTP-accessible distant directories — I’d expect any serious webmaster to have this setup, as I don’t see any other reasonable way to work. With a normal FTP client, when I edit a file I have to launch the FTP client, browse the local view to the directory my file is in, browse the distant view to the corresponding directory, and launch the upload. And that’s completely stupid, because any given file on my local setup will systematically go to the same distant spot, so it’s a huge waste of time and energy to have to wander around filesystems every time.

Hence GarooSync: once you’ve configured the correspondence between local and distant directories (for now you have to manually edit XML files, but there’ll be a configuration interface someday), all you have to do is launch “syncupload index.php” and the file is uploaded (caution: there’s no confirmation request; a future version will check last modification times).

I haven’t looked into adding options to the Windows explorer context menu yet, so you’ll have to manage this on your own: first you can add SyncUpload and/or SyncDownload to your “Send to” menu by creating shortcuts in the SendTo subdirectory in Documents and Settings; second, you can add them to your text editor’s tools menu. In Code-Genie (which I won’t link to because the latest version isn’t free anymore), after adding a line to the configuration file, I can now upload a file I just modified simply by pressing Ctrl+1. Editing code, pressing a shortcut, the file is up. I hope that, if you’re a webmaster, you realize how handy this is.

Thanks to Jaimon Mathew for the FTP library (this one seems to work: I updated everything on garoo.net/software with it).

# 2004-07-13 21:29:17

Firefox RSS.

# 2004-07-13 12:57:03

Google recruiting campaign.

# 2004-07-13 11:19:46

Dashboard widget development has begun.

# 2004-07-11 21:47:42

Carte des blogueurs parisiens.

# 2004-07-10 16:08:23

Oddpost acquired by Yahoo.

# 2004-07-10 12:52:57

Bluetooth luggage tag concept.

# 2004-07-09 20:05:27

Record promotion by P2P.

# 2004-07-09 19:14:17

LaCie DataBank. Sexy.

# 2004-07-09 19:13:39

Firefox 0.9.2 / Thunderbird 0.7.2 security updates.

# 2004-07-09 11:18:04

Participer gratuitement à la loterie iTunes.

# 2004-07-09 06:13:54

Perl for the XXXimum Century.

# 2004-07-09 00:50:19

Tiger Visual Style. Too bad the taskbar is broken when vertical.

# 2004-07-07 04:42:24

Watch out for the technical point. It’s not even about the web, but Windows programming, so you can just skip it. Besides, considering my current sleeping cycles, I’m dead now, so this post will be particularly bad. And what I’m writing about isn’t even new anymore. That’s how interesting it is.

So, if you’re nosy, you can still click the icon and download the program, which isn’t of much use — it’s just a technical demo — but, well, I like to brag with my software. (Hoping it’ll work on other computers than mine. And, of course, since that’s the post’s topic, you need the .NET runtime.)

# 2004-07-06 15:46:41

Viewpoint Toolbar. I don’t test Internet Explorer plugins, but this thing looks quite cool.

# 2004-07-05 15:54:57

So it would appear that Dashboard relies on a modified WebCore that allows HTML+JS widgets to access the computer’s data and programs, so that for instance they can control iTunes or display the calendar and address book contents.

I know that Apple’s programmers aren’t too stupid, but, still… isn’t that precisely the kind of added functionality that caused Microsoft to make Internet Explorer the worst collection of security holes ever released?

P.S. I don’t know whether there’ll be security holes at the implementation level, but at any rate they did consider security seriously.

# 2004-07-02 01:50:21

Preview the Dashboard widgets in your browser. (Probably won’t stay online for long.) Doesn’t seem to work without Safari. You can still download the PNGs.

# 2004-07-02 01:27:37

iTunes Giveaway. ~~Probably not applicable to iTunes Europe.~~

# 2004-07-01 21:11:12

Legacy Sony Walkman iPod case.

# 2004-07-01 21:08:15

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