The stage 13 of the Tour de France went by under my windows, today, and I didn't even know it passed by Montpellier! For some reason I'm only interested in motor sports, but since I know that my friend Seth is a fan of le Tour and would love to see it live, here's my report (also it will wake up my weblog which took advantage that I'm quite busy at work to fall asleep behind my back!).

The first thing I noticed was the calm (I'm in front of a rather important road, and when it's closed you can hear the difference!). I also noticed some people and cops hanging around, but since I was working I ignored them. One hour later, the first ad cars went by, and then I couldn't ignore any longer that something was going on. They make lots of noise, playing ads and honking. They were going quite fast, though (at least 60 or 70 km/h), and didn't throw any junk to the crowd as I thought they were supposed to. They were grouped by advertiser, thankfully for our ears, and a few hundred of meters separated each group (maybe 7 or 8 of them).

Nothing else happened for maybe one hour, except an occasional car or a bike passing fast but silently.

Then the runners arrived, announced by the sound of the choppers. Since this must have been a flat stage, there were two groups of them separated by only 30 seconds or so. They were going as fast as the ad cars, and they were all gone in less than two minutes. They were followed by team cars and ambulances which were all gone in less than five minutes.

Five or ten minutes later a few (five or six) late runners passed by, with the "voiture balais" and the last cars. And it was done. The crowd and cops started to leave, and that was it. Better watch it on TV, if you ask me, Seth! :)

Here's a link about that stage.

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My TiBook's disk died on me this weekend. :(

OK, things aren't eternal and it had to happen at some point. But this disk was replaced only height months ago!

The problems started very suddenly: one minute everything was fine and the next one I was getting the Spinning Cursor Of Death all around. But the applications weren't completely unresponsive like when they're hung and I could still switch between most of them. But I couldn't launch any app or do anything that involves disc accesses. I couldn't even log out or restart. I forced the machine to shut down and rebooted in verbose mode. And then, I saw the following being reported repeatedly: IOATAController device blocking bus.

My first reaction was "Uh-oh! That's not good!". The second was to Google that sentence from my other machine, and everything I read confirmed my first impression. I kept the TiBook shut down for the night, rebooted it from an external drive, and checked the internal one. DiskUtility detected and fixed some minor errors on my system partition, but the S.M.A.R.T. status was still "verified", at this point (the fact that the disk had got all its time to cool down definitely helped). I immediately ran a full backup of my users partition to a disk image on the external drive, thanks to SuperDuper!, and it succeeded. But it wasn't too smooth: I kept checking the disk activity from ActivityMonitor and noticed that it frequently stopped for some time. So I did something I figured out the last time its disk failed: instead of keeping it flat, I put the TiBook down on its left side. And again that helped a lot for some time. But I couldn't clone my system partition as well (which would have saved me a complete reinstall). The disk stopped responding completely (when the copy was about 98% done, of course) and the last time I checked, its S.M.A.R.T. status read "failing". By now, AppleCare has confirmed that it must be replaced.

Thankfully nothing is lost except time (I had a fairly recent backup anyway), but I hate when that happens. Since it's my main machine, it always breaks completely my workflow. For example I planned to release DesktopSweeper 1.2b2 to beta testers this weekend, and because of that I couldn't. :(

Enfin, c'est la vie...

Update: Somehow I've been lucky that the disk died when it did: the TiBook's AppleCare protection plan ends in three days. Being lucky from time to time doesn't hurt, does it? ;)

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In the last month I've been trying to file my (french) tax declaration online. It's not the first time I do it, and even though I've been successful before, it's always been a pain in the ass. But this time I kept running into problems that made me feel just like I was using a Windows app (and not a good one!).

First you have to download and install several Java applets and libraries. Then you have to authenticate via one of these applets if you already have their certificate, or download another applet to request a certificate. But you don't get all these applets and libraries at once, oh no. You have to start over the procedure again after each one, going through several web pages and forms between each. Be prepared for at least half an hour of that!

Anyway, when I tried to authenticate using the certificate I already had, I was told that authentication was not possible and that I should check my Internet connection and my proxy settings. I don't use any proxy, and my connection is working fine, thank you! What do you do when you've tried several times from two different machines, two different OS versions, and four different browsers (including MSIE)? Clicking on Help seems a good idea, right? Well, I tried, and got a very long FAQ where of course my problem wasn't mentioned at all (it was all about taxes stuff).

Since the government announced publicly a couple of times that their service had problems due to an unexpected number of users, I kept trying once or twice a week at various times of the night. Always with the same result. And the deadline for online declarations was coming faster and faster. So I finally decided to start over from scratch, that is to cancel my current certificate and get a new one.

One of the last steps in getting a certificate from them is to fill out a html form that's also submitted via a Java applet. And of course, each time I tried I got a page that told me basically "Your request failed. Please check the information you entered". Still not a clue on what is wrong! And of course you can't use the back function of your browser to find the form already filled, that would be too easy. No, you have to type it all again (including the darn 25 digits of identification numbers).

After I tried several times (still from several different browsers), I finally clicked on Help again, because this time it said "if you have problems, click on Help and select a contact method (phone, email...) to get the answer to your question." Sounds encouraging, doesn't it? Well, the help button took me to the same fucking FAQ I previously got, where of course I could find nothing related with contact methods. Argh!

I finally found the contacts page I was looking for, from a completely different part of their site. I emailed them with a bug report, asking what I was supposed to try next (as the deadline to send the declaration by the postal service was far behind, by then). I never got any reply. Bastards! Of course, they want me to call. Their number is like €0.8 per minute, and I'm sure they can easily keep me on the line for at least 20 minutes. No, thanks!

Obviously the whole stuff has been put together by windows developers, and they were very careful to not disorient Windows users! It's really a shame when Windows defines the standard of online applications in terms of quality and user friendliness, and unfortunately, most of French official online services are obviously developed on Windows for Windows users.

I was finally successful, BTW. Guess how? I did it from XP running in VirtualPC! :(

Sorry about the rather long rant, but I had to let it out.

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