Hugo’s blog

In order to make it easier to provide HTTP caching information in my PHP scripts, I wrote a tiny PHP 5 class: HttpCaching.

It’s very basic and I had more fun playing with Doxygen than with PHP while writing it, but people might find it useful.

A few weeks ago, I was raving (well, maybe not raving, but at least expressing satisfaction) about my Windows Mobile 5.0 device.

As I was asked today if I was still happy with it, I was reminded of what I’ve been meaning to do for the past week: warn people about Windows Mobile! I haven’t done too many weird things to my device, and yet it turns out that it crashes on average once a day. My Treo would crash regularly too, though this would always happen while I was doing something.

This is where Microsoft is better than Palm: my WM5 device crashes while I’m not doing anything. A couple of examples:

1. I set an alarm to wake up in the morning, and then I turn off my device and go to sleep. A few hours later, I open my eyes thinking that it’s a little too bright out for 7 in the morning; indeed, my watch says it’s 8.30am. My phone/PDA cannot be turned on: it crashed during the night
2. I’m waiting for a phone call. The phone’s not ringing. After a while, I take it out and turn it on to call and check why I’m note hearing from anybody. Oh, look at that: the phone cannot be turned on. It crashed again.

So this happens about once or twice a day. On the bright side, the reset button on the Qtek S200 is much more accessible than on the Treo. Maybe the HTC engineers were expecting users to need it on a regular basis.

It’s too bad, as I really quite like this device, but it’s really not realiable. I haven’t done yet what somebody ought to do with a Microsoft OS: do a hard reset and reinstall my third party apps. Maybe that’s the solution.

Update (2006-10-06): it turned out to be caused by a third-party app (Batti). The device is now extremely stable, though I now have issues with the Missing Sync… Sigh.

Fans de l’Agence Tout Risque, réjouissez-vous. Neopulsar a une excellente parodie appelée l’Agence Tous Rix.

Tous les détails de la série originale y sont présents : les personnages (nos 4 héros, des gentils agressés par de méchants méchants), un scénario “digne” des épisodes d’en temps, des cascades, des explosions, aucun mort, les musiques originales, des plans de scènes très fidèles (zoom sur les bâtiments, caméra au niveau de la roue avant dans les poursuites de voitures). Bref, on a vraiment l’impression de voir un épisode original.

Une critique cependant : Hannibal ni dit jamais J’adore quand un plan se déroule sans accroc trois fois dans un même épisode.

Je recommande chaudement cette parodie. Ce groupe en a en fait plein d’autres que je n’ai pas encore eu le temps de regarder, mais ça ne saurait tarder.

After reading about Norm’s move to math CAPTCHAs, I decided to try it myself. I actually did not have to implement it myself, as there was already a WordPress plugin for this: Did You Pass Math?.

The result is that I have not gotten a single spam comment since I installed it. This goes to show that visual CAPTCHAs and all their accessibility problems are not the only solution to stopping spammers.