The Lab

Kids [...] The great moments of your life won’t necessarily be the things you do, they’ll also be the things that happen to you. Now, I’m not saying you can’t take action to affect the outcome of your life, you have to take action, and you will. But never forget that on any day, you can step out the front door and your whole life can change forever. You see, the universe has a plan kids, and that plan is always in motion.

(rewind) April 2008.

At that time, I was completing my second semester of 1st year in master STIC at Université de La Réunion. It was just before the exams. (After the exams would come 2 months of TER.) At that time, I was planning to come back to Mauritius after finishing that year, work and make some money, go back (or elsewhere) complete the master later (I know, bad idea, but the “socio-economical” climate was complicated…).

So we’re taking a break with the guys, sitting outside our computer room. Mamy-Haja (back then I knew him through being a TICE tutor, he actually is the director of the TICE service) comes up to me, and asks if I’m interested in a job right away, to do flash stuff in relation to e-learning Oò (minutes later, Sawa tells me Mamy-Haja had come up to him first, but he directed him back at me ^^ Hail to Sawa! ). I’m like, “Errr ben ouais!!!”.

FYI, finding a job can be rather arduous in Reunion Island, now one falling into your lap, totoche!!!

Christian (the coordinator of the Babelweb project) had come to Mamy-Haja, seeking a web hosting, as well as a part-time web-developer. I had a brief interview with Christian, rather in a relaxed manner, because I remember telling to Katty (my fiancée) I was wearing torn jeans that day lol

Since the job was part time, I would be able to pursue my master in parallel. And the 2nd semester of master2 was 6months of internship, which fitted in nicely. The project would last till end December 2009.

Before all this, I was rather laid back for my exams, I had a good average the 1st semester and didn’t have to kas paké the 2nd semester to have an average for the year (those who went through the french system know what it’s like lol). But acceptance in master2 was on the basis of a written application. It added some pressure ! Long story short, I made it through the selection.

The “immediately” part of starting to work for the project was put on a hold though, the University was in crisis, change of presidency, no budgets could be voted. But I needed money to pay bills for the coming academic year, and simply to be able to stay around. So, after my TER (on the management of the consistency of ubiquitous components in dynamic networks… yeah, a mouthful, but I like saying it ^^ ça en jette! lol ) Mamy-Haja got me a small job, through his friend and also one of my
lecturers, Fanilo, who needed a web-developer on a short project with SUFP.

Late at night working on the TER at IREMIA, and my macbook

Mamy-Haja also got a “summer job” for Sawa, setting up a uPortal portlet for the university, which I helped him with at the deployment phase ^^ (crazy times, worked till 4am at the worst, the day before the deadline/presentation to the president of the university… and had classes at the same time, oh even worse, had a presentation of our own Oò we were already in September 2008, in master2 ).

Another late night working with Sawa (left) and Med (who had joined along to revise), we were given the keys to an office in the physics department.

I officially joined the Babelweb project in August 2008. It made me learn a lot, meet interesting people, travel (I had the opportunity to go to Athens, Rome, Helsinki and Vichy!) for work meetings/sessions, have a different outlook on what and how we develop or put in place stuff in regards to the end users (Mamy-Haja’s obsession, along with “pérénité” lol)…

From Athens – Babelweb – Nov 2008

From Roma – Babelweb – Jan 2009

(fastfwd) End October 2009.

Life’s unpredictable. I have return to Mauritius, just before my residency card expires, as its renewal was refused by the prefecture -_-” One of the many problems I got there with administration (maybe I’ll blog about that later). I’m still working for Babelweb, from home ^^

In November, I went to a couple interviews (here in Mauritius) and got a job, where they accept that I start in January, really looking forward to it I’ll be doing sysadmin (on mostly mac servers!), task automatization (scripting), and R&D in web

Bane? boon? I think there is a Tao teaching in there, “the Universe already works harmoniously according to its own ways“, or something lol

yayann

To go forward, you must backup.

I learned that the hard way, when I was still a tender n00b (…now, I’m a tougher one lol). Hard disk crash or some corrupted partition, recovered just a few docs… Fortunately it was mostly mp3s/movies I lost back then, no biggy (in retrospect). I remember the shock it gave me :’D

Nowadays, I back up my system with Time Machine. My univ docs (which I no longer have use for) are backed up on 2 different hard disks (1mostly for archiving, the other was more up to date). My pictures are also backed up on external hard disk as well as online on Picasa (and facebook, I’m not very concerned of keeping things high res, I’m no photographer). Songs and movies scattered around on hard disks.

My work stuff is what I’m the most paranoid about. I use Dropbox to autosync files online, I have a script which periodically rsync’s my work folders to an external hard disk, another script to rsync to a server on univ, and I also make use of Google’s project hosting service and svn co my stuff up. Not counting my time machine system backup lol

About svn with googlecode, maybe you remember from the article where I talk about free hosts and other free geek stuff, I mentioned univ’s proxy being a pissant. Well I had worked around that by svn committing rendered xml files and company to googlecode, and the server at univ would periodically pull the latest version and put it in its www folder. Is that bad practice? Anyway, I stopped that after a while, when I got the vpn tunnel lol .

I also like to keep my stuff neatly ordered (on my computer, not always IRL). That greatly helps for backing up, I find. If files are scattered around, you’ll find it difficult to get out of your way, look for them and back them up. If things are classified – important docs / code / pictures etc, things go smoothly for backing up! I’m talking of what I saw here

Also for work, I regularly back up the www folders, as well as the mysql databases.

One thing I didn’t see coming was that my host, Byethost, for my “junkyard” website might go down, or more rightly the mysql servers, because I could still access my files via ftp.  I never backed up the mysql database for it Oò. Dans l’cul. Fortunately, my mac is also a test server, and all the xsl, js, css and xml data files were still on my mac (as well as on the ftp).  I re-uploaded everything to Alwaysdata (turns out I simply have to turn on libxslt in my php configuration on the server ^^ – Symphony is heavily based on xslt ) and finally only lost an article (the intro one) and time to set things straight. My junkyard is now here.

Have any backup tricks you care to share?

admin

Indian people, we are proud of our cheapness. You are never gonna insult us by calling us cheap. That’s the best part, you know. You walk up to an Indian guy:
- You guys are cheap.
- Thank you for noticing, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
- That guy just called you cheap.
- No, no, no. He pronounced it cheap. But what he was saying was – smart. Very smart he was.
[Russell Peters]

This blog is hosted freely ^^. Alwaysdata offers a free plan pf 10mb (duh). I think its French… anyway, I found it while looking for a host with python environment, and on Django’s site they were listing such sites, both free and paying. The fun part is the shell through ssh access it’s very nice to test out some stuff ^^

My other website, Yann’s junkyard is hosted at Byethost, with free domain name provided by co.cc (I had learned of the domain name through sachindb’s article). The CMS I’m using over there is Symphony, which makes use of XSLT. Byethost is one of the (few) free hosts providing php’s libxslt. No candy ssh though, plain ol’ftp, and it’s rather slow

If you are interested in having a shell online, head over to sdf lonestar : ssh access, apache server, irc. To “unlock” more privileges (e.g mysql db raaaah)  you have to make donations though -_-”. Still, nice… I’ve put my resume and some images over there.

How about a free VPN? try s6n ! I had started using that back in Reunion Island, not just because of Hadopi, but also because the proxy on the cité universitaire was being a real pissant, blocking port 22, and I needed to access servers for work. Bref ! You’ll need a VPN client, like TunnelBlick for Mac. Linux users, google is your friend ^^.  An interesting “side effect” is the possibility to join and use Spotify (stream music, huuuuuge catalogue, top quality) for free (restricted to Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France or Spain) as the OpenVPN server you’ll be given access to upon registration is in France ^^.  Sign up to spotify here.

Kudos to lynx who found s6n, and introduced me to Spotify!

admin

As I explained in my previous (and first) post, this blog was initially installed for test purposes, then I thought, what the heck, I’ll use it for myself.

I should have got a blog a long while ago, for the sake of keeping a log of the wpmu hacks I did for Babelweb blogs at least, or javascript tricks I came up with… coding stuff in general, which I even forgot I did sometimes Oò.

The tone could get rather geeky and even technical. I intend to talk a bit about myself also, what I did/am doing, where I’ve been, stuff like that.

Laid back. Pa fer aigreur lor lestoma. Contemplation des cerisiers en fleurs, tout ça tout ça. That should be the tone. (Though I can be impulsive, so you never know.)

Opinions ? Probably on tech stuff, political = no no, society = definite maybe.

I’m favoring English to write right now, but I could as well write in French, and throw in some créole.

We’ll see where all this leads ^^

admin

So I needed a wordpress mu on a test server to try out some stuff for work. I previously had a wpmu installation on my mac for test purposes, but after installing snow leopard my mysql database got screwed up, and I lazily (or let’s say due to lack of time) reinstalled mysql without checking if there was a way to recover stuff.

I also previously got a free account with alwaysdata.net, it supports python and the django framework, I wanted to try out some tricks with xmpp and python, but have not yet got around to it…

Well I ended up installing wmpu here yesterday morning. Its real fun to use when not behind a proxy (squid proxy at univ, a real nightmare) and fetched plugins here and there to set this up.

And hence, here I am with my first post!

admin