Category Archives: divagations
Some components for the “other” information infrastructure on the internet (rss feed etc)
Disclaimer: this started essentially as note-to-self listing a few interesting projects to spare me another internet search session.
RSS feeds (and their twin brothers Atom) are ubiquitous over the internet making it possible to easily get a summary of the latest publications of a given website.
Interestingly a huge amount of websites produce this kind of feeds (most blogs obviously but also sites like twitter[en]) and from this point of view the RSS format is quite lively.
But on the consumer side, I’m pretty disappointed with the “offer” in terms of RSS readers. Over the time I’ve tested several well-known desktop readers (liferea, rssowl, thunderbird…) and most of then ended up synchronizing with Google Reader. This one has consequently come to be my main newsreader and it appears to me as clearly dominating the world of internet based newsreader. However such a predominance is not that much a good sign1.
- a quick glimpse at HackerNews shows that people are regularly trying to reinvent the newsreader service so there is hope I guess [↩]
Bright side of an exploit ?
So, my website (tibonihoo.net) has been recently hacked… No apparent effect but a bunch of undercover redirections and a load of php one-liners to “do stuff” with cookies.
Apparently I’m not the only one to have suffered from this and everyting comes from a security hole in zenphoto (that I use to manage my photo gallery).
The bright side of things:
- it’s a good incentive to think a bit more about the security of my website and its data
- it’s a good reminder to suscribe to the right rss feed for zenphoto (the former has suddently changed, without me paying attention)
- it’s a good criteria to clean-up useless plugins (goodbye wp-security-scan that brillantly failed to detect anything)
- it’s a good time to thank Dreamhost‘s team that answered my question pretty quickly
- it’s the perfect occasion for you, dear visitors, to clean up your browser’s cookies (because the aim of the exploit is not clear, but visitor’s cookies clearly seemed to be involved).
Academic Genealogy
Since genealogy is trendy and the weather on Paris is a bit gloomy I played a little with the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
The aim of this project is to trace back the scientific lineage of “all” mathematicians throughout history. The main link considered is the “student – advisor” relationship, though sometimes looser relations are taken into account like “student – professor” (for mere lectures or mail correspondence, even when a PhD or a specific degree is not at stake) or even brotherhood (as for the Bernoulli brothers — Jacob and Johann - who actually worked hand in hand during their studies)
Here, I tried to follow my scientific legacy starting with my PhD advisor Dominque Jeulin, his own advisor Jean Serra, himself having had Georges Matheron as advisor, and so on…
Mathematical lineage (click on image to get the full version)
Joys of coffee
No matter how much we are aware of this…
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim. — Honoré de Balzac, Traité des excitants modernes (1838), translated by Robert Onopa)
Via “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” but the original version is here[fr obviously].
So I guess that’s a “thanks” to my family for offering me this wonderful expresso machine…