Archive for the 'Lists' category

Some people seem to have wondered what plugins I am using to extend the basic functionality of WordPress. So here goes the list:

• AdSense Deluxe to help me handle Google AdSense advertising and some table inclusions in the posts.
• Akismet to protect Roumazeilles.net against comment SPAM.
• WP-email to allow users to email a copy of posts.
• WP-Polls to include polls on the site (may not be ready yet when this is published; Be patient).
• Keywords to ease the management of these meta tags in posts.
• WP-DB-Backup to allow easy backups of the web site database.

Plenty of others are available, but those one make the great WordPress much better on my web site.

This web site offers to compare two images. You click on the one that seems fairest to you. It allows to build a small top-10 list of the fairest images. Curiously, the majority of the fair images are colorful landscapes.

It’s your turn to judge which image is the fairest!

You can also propose images that you really believe should be in the list.

Surge protection is a technology which is obviously difficult to grasp and the sales people do not make it easier.

Wendell H. Laidley wrote a nice paper to explain it in an interesting way: He shows the 11 Myths of Surge Protection:

1. Any surge protection is better than no surge protection
2. A UPS will provide dependable surge protection
3. Transformers are the best surge protectors
4. Voltage-regulating transformers are helpful with computers
5. Common mode surges cause computer problems
6. Computer modem damage is caused by surge on the phone line
7. Signal ground is isolated from chassis ground
8. The only risk from the power line is hardware damage
9. Surge protectors are permanent devices
10. Nothing can stop lightning
11. You get what you pay for

All those myths! It makes a very interesting reading, indeed.

It is now the time to look back at the year 2006 and to check what you really liked in the Roumazeilles.net web site. So, here are the posts viewed the most in the past year. Is it a surprise?

• Canon 40D crushes 30D prices, at least, that was the rumour. But the prices went down anyway…
• Masai Mara - Lions
• No Canon 40D in view at the Photokina
• Internationale Zurich Gruppe, in defence of individual financial investors
• NikonCafe.com, a forum for the Nikon lovers
• Photo deer hunting during the rutting season
• Inkjet inks - Pigment or dye-based? A technical comparison

The same data for the posts in the French version of the web site.

Whatever the skills you use in your professional life, the pre-hiring interview is a needed step that the candidate engineer will have to go through. They prepare themselves as much as they ca. But the hiring people usually are relying more on their habits or experience and they do not prepare interviews too much (with the usual exception of Human Ressources personnel).

But Engineers also meet the candidates (the opinion of Human Ressources cannot be enough when hiring for a highly technical position). After a few years, you collect a few ideas and questions that could be asked to the candidates in order to build an impression about the adequation between the position and the various candidates. Here is the output of my own experience in hiring for technical engineering positions.

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Plenty of web sites try to attract you with free fonts (or other free items) and fail to deliver this. If you are lucky you will find a couple of ugly (but still free) fonts. Now, it is quite exceptional to find true top-quality fonts on the web. Vitaly Friedman just did this on his notebook with his 25 Best Free Quality Fonts.

According to my tastes, one of the best is Cardo. Have a look.

The Annals of Improbable Research (a magazine dedicated to the public celebration of the research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK) have organized the 2006 ig Nobel awards. The categories are less rigid than their equivalent in the more presentable cousin of the family (the Oh! so dull Nobel prizes) since there are established specially on the spot after the needs of the excellent research thus selected. For example, this year’s laureates:

• NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.
• ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
• MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed.
• PHYSIQUE (ou CUISINE ?) : Basile Audoly et Sebastien Neukirch de l’Université Pierre et Marie Curie, à Paris, pour leur étude des raisons pour lesquelles des spaghettis secs, se cassent préférentiellement en plus de deux morceaux quand on les plie.
• BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania; and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.
• PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant - a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults - and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

This nice list of reasearch culmination is certainly making the Nobel committee members faint at not having spotted the real scientific achievements of this year. In this context, it was important to notice that this year, Roy J. Glauber could return to his official position as Keeper of the Broom or Sweeper of paper airplanes after missed ceremony last year (He had to go to Stockholm to receive his 2005 Nobel prize of Physics).

You are thinking about moving from Microsoft Office (expensive commercial bloatware ;-)) to OpenOffice (free). A few questions you can ask to orgniaze your transition, before you jump ahead.

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If you want to publish a web site, you may be interested by the following series of articles I wrote about how to quickly create a full-fledged web site using WordPress.

1. Get a domain name
2. Rent web publishing space
3. Connect web space and domain name
4. Configure the Apache server
5. Install WordPress
6. Call the search engines

Now, you can fill the new web site of yours. Wasn’t it easy?