Petit Bourgeois

April 19, no end in sight, yet.

After working with Chris, Eiko and Paul on L'Institut (フランス語教室), I've been working on various improvements and site launches for the European mobile sites of Weathernews.

Recently, Weathernews Netherlands has re-launched its weather site. Probably a draft and test run for our upcoming European sites, which might take up the interface from our Japanese site.

Some more great reporting about Google from non-emergent Andrew Orlowski got me thinking about Google's business objectives. At first, I wondered how long Mozilla would keep distributing anti-advertisement add-ons to Firefox such as the Greasemonkey, Customize Google or Adblock extensions. On second thought, they probably will, because it's good for them.

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Once again installed PHP 5, MySQL 5 and Apache 2 on my laptop (running Windows XP), and once again I had problems, MySQL was not available in PHP. I'd solved the problem before, but could not remember how.

The problem should not happen at all, the issue is in fact quite trivial. But a series of small problems occur, and the various layers involved make it difficult to see where and why things go wrong. So I've put together this checklist.

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On Thursday, a renewed Weathernews site for KPN i-mode (Netherlands) was launched, featuring quite a bit of my code and even more of my overtime hours these recent weeks. If you have a KPN i-mode handset, you can access the site here: http://wap.weathernews.nl/

My colleague Jean also launched the Weathernews site on Bouygues i-mode (France), pretty exciting with a Mobile Flash interface and location-based services (not using GPS, but mast triangulation provided by the operator). Both sites make use of our MobileEngine data abstraction system.

I still consider myself a total beginner, but I'm afraid I will never grow to enjoy coding in Perl ;-)

This timestamp to date bookmarklet converts a Unix-style timestamp (seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970) into a human-readable date.

After a discussion with Paul last week, he forwarded me a great link about the fashion of traditional Japanese workclothes (I would like to get one of those wide blue pants, as the toed shoes 30cm long are beyond hope).

The manufacturers' pages (Kaseyama, Toraichi) are a good example of the typical use of text and images for textual representation in Japanese web design. What do you want Google's or Altavista's translation engines to make out of text written in images?

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Old news, of course, but I agree, the internet is shit.

Before I lose them again, here are photos of this wonderful campaign, where the city of Amsterdam spent the taxpayer's money promoting the use of video surveilance in the public space, making bold claims without any serious arguments, and lamely pretending to use irony.

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The 100% halal video productions web site has launched last week. I've done a PointComma implementation very quickly, just before we left for Japan.