Thanks a lot @gapingvoid !

I met Hugh MacLeod at LeWeb ‘08 this week and he was kind enough (yeah, I know he was there for that, but thanks anyway) to draw something on my business card:

As Hugh predicted, I am twittering this, too ;)

I chose to remove my contact info to avoid spam, but it’s not like it’s hard to actually contact me. Follow me on Twitter or hit one of the links on the right.

The Simpsons visit the Mapple Store

In the latest Simpsons episode, the family visits the new Mapple Store at the mall.

I don’t know how long the video will stay online, but it’s just great!

I had never visited an Apple Store before my trip to London at the beginning of the month, but I found it was really fun; it felt like visiting the HQ of the Church of Scientology for some reason :P

Anyway, enjoy the fist few minutes of perfect Simpsons sarcasm.

Virtual Studio Pro : FAIL

Et moi qui pensais connaître plus ou moins bien la gamme de produits de développement Microsoft quand même…

Je ne dirai pas où est-ce que j’ai trouvé la faute par contre ;)

Illustrating the use of the top ten most irritating phrases

Oxford compiled a list of the top ten most irritating phrases used in English texts: books, magazines, the Internet, etc. Before I stop using them, I thought that they deserved to be put together in what is probably, by extension, one of the most irritating paragraphs ever written:

With all due respect, I personally think that it's a nightmare that at the end of the day most people will continue using these irritating phrases 24/7. At this moment in time it is absolutely necessary to control this fairly unique phenomenon which shouldn't of taken off in the first place; after all, learning proper English is not rocket science, is it?

I think that the list is funny, but irritating language is something very subjective that I don't really core about. So, at the end of the day ;) I'll probably continue to use some of these.

As a side note, though, English altogether can be rather irritating to us non-native speakers. Try to read a little bit of poetry out loud, you’ll see what I mean.

One of the Best Translation Failures, Ever

This one comes straight from Wales, through the BBC.

It looks like an innocent street sign, and it is, in English. The problem is that in Wales all street signs must also be displayed in the local language and for that you need a translator. Unfortunately, when consulted for this sign, the translator was out of his office and his automatic reply was used as the actual translation. This is (more or less) what the sign actually says:

I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.

I find this even better than Parfaitment con :P

Perfectly dumb

Some typos are just beautiful!

The highlighted text would read “Perfectly dumb” or maybe even “Perfectly stupid” in English.

I’ll just say: Perfect!

I guess it's my turn...

You cannot be a blogger and not have to go through this at least once a year. Of course, it's up to you to decide how you react, whether it's worth your time or not, whether the person who tagged you deserves a response...

Yes. That's right. I've been tagged with one of the myriads of blog memes going around. So, without further ado, here's ten things everybody already know about me:

1. Who tagged me:
   Well, that would be my dearest friend Stéph. Few are the people who could've tagged me and actually elicited a response. But Stéph is one of them.
2. My greatest dream (or at least the one more likely to happen):
   This is a good one... Hard one too... I guess my greatest dream is to do something significant for the world before I die. I know I'm kind of neglecting the parentheses there, but who cares...
3. An important moment soon to come:
   Hmm... I'm graduating this year. I think that counts.
4. The song that describes my current frame of mind:
   "Current" is a very volatile state, but if we're talking about an average, it's probably No Rain, by Blind Melon.
5. Big moments in the past year:
   I've been lucky to have had plenty of big moments last year, but I guess meeting Great people at La Sorbonne, including Bill Gates, ranks amongst the top moments. There was Korea too... Yes, there have been plenty...
6. What makes me happy:
   Oh, whoever knows me, knows I'm easily amused, but I guess "amused" is not the same thing as "happy." I'm usually happy with a job well done, after riding my bike, but most often, I'm happy when I know I've made other people happy.
7. What I miss:
   I miss going back to my country and to its beaches and forests. I still don't consider Costa Rica my first choice for living, but I'd like to be able to go back there more often.
8. My favourite movie:
   I don't have a favourite movie. It's that simple. I like all movies that help me forget about real life for a while.
9. My greatest project:
   With graduation approaching, I suppose I have to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. That feels like a pretty big project to me.
10. What I hate:
    There's lots of things I hate, actually. If you want to know more about them, I suggest you come here regularly for my rants or follow me on Twitter, where you're likely to hear me talk about plenty of stuff I like and hate.

Now, tradition has it that I must not break the chain. The thing is, I'm not very good at this, so I will not tag 7 people as expected... If you feel inclined to reveal personal information about yourself, though, consider yourself tagged, and don't hesitate to link back here.

Photo tonbut

Typewriter soon to be USB

A while ago I bought a typewriter (the one in the picture) with the intention of one day being able to connect it to the computer using a USB cable. Sure, a typewriter will make for a noisy keyboard, but who cares? :P

I'm obviously not the first one to do it, but again, who cares?

So, the first step was buying the typewriter. Thanks to eBay that's done. And, if you look carefully, you'll notice that the keyboard's layout is almost like my Swiss French layout that I like so much.

The second step was buying an actual keyboard and gutting it to keep only the part that interests me: the circuit board. You see, a keyboard is a pretty simple thing. Basically, every time you press a key you close a circuit. Every key you press closes a different circuit, resulting in different key codes being sent to the computer. If you open up a keyboard, you will see that pressing a key actually makes printed lines on two plastic layers touch. Each layer has printed conducting lines that end up connecting to one of the contacts in the circuit below:

The conductors of one layer will connect to the contacts labeled A though J (I skip "I" because it's to easy to confuse) and the ones on the other layer will connect to the contacts labeled 1 though 18, bringing the number of possible closed circuits up to 9 x 18 = 144. All that's left now is to figure out what keystrokes correspond to each circuit.

There's pretty much two ways of figuring this out:

• You can follow the conductor lines from each of the plastic layers from the place where the key strikes back to the corresponding contacts, but this is long and complicated because they're thin and there's plenty of them.
• You can use something like a multi-meter (or a piece of wire) to close the circuits yourself while the keyboard is plugged to the computer.

I chose the latter. So I wrote a quick .NET application that listens to keystrokes and displays their name while I closed each of the 144 possible circuits. It was actually less, because if you look carefully, contact A isn't really connected to anything. This is what I came up with:

I will recheck this matrix before soldering anything, but it's pretty accurate as it is. Most of the key names are self explanatory, others need a little bit of knowledge of the .NET Keys enumeration. The most annoying keys to find where those labeled "Hibernate" and "Sleep" (B8, B9, F3 and H3) which of course slowed things down a little bit while I waited for the computer to "wake up."

All that's left to do now is to figure out a way to make each key of the typewriter close the appropriate circuit and I'll have a USB typewriter, but that is work for another day.

Lost in translation

Call me a nitpicker or make fun of me because I speak several languages, but I cannot help to notice when people are not careful about translations. In the last few days I've come across a couple of examples.

The first one comes from a famous coffee-shop which I will not name (maybe the patent number will help you figure it out):

I guess you have to speak French to understand in that in the first paragraph they're actually talking about "This insolent sleeve (...)".

The second one was spotted at the Musée du Quai Branly. I put the three versions of one of their interactive screen together, in order from top to bottom there's Spanish, French and English:

Having translated for a living, I know that literal translation is not always the best solution and that sometimes interpretation is better, that's why I have nothing to say when "Interview" in English becomes "Récit" in French (or most probably, the other way around), but I do have an issue with making up useless words and "Intervista" really does fall into that category, because the perfectly good word "Entrevista" already exists in Spanish.

What makes these errors so remarkable, in my opinion, is that anybody with access to an online translator (Live Translator is currently my favorite) could have avoided these mistakes. Why not a professional?

Does this thing have a manual?

Well, I didn't think an escalator needed one, but the numbers seem to say different:

For those who can't read the poor quality text, it says "Last year: 1,024 injuries".

The number drew my attention for two reasons:

1. What are the probabilities of the number of injuries on escalators being a power of 2?
2. How can there be almost 3 injuries per day on something as trivial as an escalator‽ (that's an interrobang, in case you're wondering)

Sure, the escalators on the London tube can be impressive:

(CC) Flickr swh

But still...