Rémi Plourde - Drupal Web Developer

Blog Now Open

remi — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:18:32 +0000

I’m the shoemaker without shoes. Since I have a lot of Web sites and applications to do for my clients, I don’t even have time to do my own.

Opening my blog is the least I can do, despite its lack of an original look. I’ve been writing on it, hoping to simply publish everything at one once I have a chance to finish making my own site. However, thanks to search engines, the content of my blog was already made public unbeknownst to me, despite the lack of links to it from the front page. In fact, not only other people are linking to entries in my blog already, but I’ve already received thank-you notes by e-mail for having saved their day. Impressive for a blog that hasn’t seen the light of day!

A lot happened in my personal life, which made me late at replying to messages I’ve received. I moved in Japan in last October to be with my girlfriend again and to finally experience the Japanese culture — something I’ve been hoping to do for so long since the day I’ve learned my first Japanese word.

Although I had to quit my stable full-time job back in Ottawa to pursue my dream of being where I live now, I am fortunately not without work. I’ve been working on Drupal projects for clients in Tokyo and back in Canada. In fact, last month has been the busiest since a long time, even more than last year, when I worked extra hard to save enough money to do the big leap over the largest ocean. My workload is more stable this month.

This is it for now. I have a lot to write about, especially about Drupal and other projects of mine. In the meantime, I invite you to read about my adventures in Japan at Edojin.

Goodbye from Saitama, Japan!

New and deprecated tags in HTML 5

remi — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:17:10 +0000

The lists below are compiled based on data at W3Schools, comparing HTML 5 with HTML 4, not XHTML 1.

New tags

Tags you should learn.

<article>     Defines an article
<aside>     Defines content aside from the page content
<audio>     Defines sound content
<canvas>     Define graphics
<command>     Defines a command button
<datagrid>     Defines data in a tree-list
<datalist>     Defines a dropdown list
<datatemplate>     Defines a data template
<details>     Defines details of an element
<dialog>     Defines a dialog (conversation)
<embed>     Defines external interactive content or plugin
<event-source>     Defines a target for events sent by a server
<figure>     Defines a group of media content, and their caption
<footer>     Defines a footer for a section or page
<header>     Defines a header for a section or page
<mark>     Defines marked text
<meter>     Defines measurement within a predefined range
<nav>     Defines navigation links
<nest>     Defines a nestingpoint in a datatemplate
<output>     Defines some types of output
<progress>     Defines progress of a task of any kind
<rule>     Defines the rules for updating a template
<section>     Defines a section
<source>     Defines media resources
<time>     Defines a date/time
<video>     Defines a video
<xmp>     Not supported. Defines preformatted text

Deprecated tags

Do not use them anymore!

<acronym>     Not supported. Defines an acronym
<applet>     Not supported. Defines an applet
<basefont>     Not supported. Use CSS instead
<big>     Not supported. Defines big text
<center>     Not supported. Defines centered text
<dir>     Not supported. Defines a directory list
<font>     Deprecated. Defines text font, size, and color
<frame>     Not supported. Defines a sub window (a frame)
<frameset>     Not supported. Defines a set of frames
<isindex>     Not supported. Defines a single-line input field
<noframes>     Not supported. Defines a noframe section
<s>     Not supported. Defines strikethrough text
<strike>     Not supported. Defines strikethrough text
<tt>     Not supported. Defines teletype text
<u>     Not supported. Defines underlined text

How to install Colibri and other new Vista fonts on a Mac

remi — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:11:57 +0000

Microsoft has licensed new fonts for Office 2007 and Vista. These fonts look great and are a nice change to the standard and over-used Tahoma and Verdana. (At least, you’re not using Comic Sans, right?)

However, you have a Mac, and you think it deserves to have those nice fonts too. Installing them is simple: buy a copy of Office 2008 for Mac and install it. Unfortunately, the simplest solution is the most expensive.

There’s another way to obtain those fonts. It may not be as simple as the method mentioned above, but don’t worry, there’s no technical tweeking needed.

Office 2004 for Mac has no support for documents saved in the new Open XML format. For this reason, Microsoft released the Open XML File Format Converter for Office 2004, available for free at Mactopia. This package contains the fonts you want which you can install manually, even if you don’t have any version of Office installed on your Mac.

I’m not certain if installing these fonts manually is allowed by their EULA, however, and I do ask you read the licence before carrying out the instructions below.

To install the fonts, download the disk image via the link above. Once downloaded, mount the image, and right-click or option-click the Open XML File Format Converter for Mac package file and select “Show Package Contents.” In the package, browse in Contents, then Packages. Right-click the OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg package and select “Show Package Contents” again. In that package, open in Contents folder, and copy the Archive.pax.gz file to your Desktop. Double-click the file to decompress its folder. Once done, the new Archive.pax folder should open automatically, containing all the font files you want. Open the Font Book utility, create a new collection called “Vista” (if you wish), and drag all the fonts files in the window.

That’s it. The new Vista fonts should be installed, ready to be used in any of your applications!

Adobe CS3 installer on Vista disappears

remi — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:42:26 +0000

I had problems installing Adobe Creative Suite 3 on Windows Vista Home Premium. After reading a few pages, I found a solution. I had to reinstall Adobe Flash and Reader, but it worked for me.

From the bottom of the page at http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/88734-adobe-cs3-installation.html:

[1] Install Microsoft Windows Installer CleanUp Utility from
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301
[2] Run the CS3Clean script from
http://www.adobe.com/support/contact/cs3clean.html.
Select the [undocumented] level 4 cleanup. This removes ALL Adobe
applications.
[3] Turn on User Account Control - may not be necessary, but it is for Adobe
Reader!
[4] Copy the Adobe CS3 folder to your HD, right-click Setup and select Run
As Administrator

Ubuntu 8.04 on the Asus Eee PC 701

remi — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:55:25 +0000

A few months ago, I bought myself an Asus Eee PC 701 4G. (The new Eee PC 900 is out now.) The small laptop has a 4GB solid-state drive (SSD, no hard drive), 512MB of RAM, a small 800x480 LCD screen, a webcam, and a few other things. The operating system installed is Xandros Linux, although it’s possible to install any distribution of Linux and even Windows XP.

The drive has two partitions by default, one with the system files and the other with your personal files. They are both mounted as one file system using unionfs, with the changes of the later overwriting the former. The advantage is if you mess up your OS and want to reset it back to factory defaults, you only need to restart the laptop, hold F9 for the GRUB boot list, and select “Restore,” which will basically wipe your user partition. This will make your laptop good as new again.

However, I got a bit tired of Xandros. I’ve always been a fan of Ubuntu and Fedora and I wanted one of them to be on my laptop instead. Thankfully, installing Ubuntu 8.04 was really easy thanks to the Ubuntu Eee distro, available at ubuntu-eee.com.

I had a 1GB USB memory stick laying around, which was perfect for the installation of Ubuntu Eee. I couldn’t get the UNetbootin utility to work on my Xandros Linux as described, but using another computer, I was able to download the Ubuntu Eee ISO and transfer it to my memory stick, and make it bootable. All I had to do after was to restart my computer, hit Esc at the “Asus Eee” logo (before the OS loads), and select my memory stick at the boot menu. After starting with the live Ubuntu image on my memory stick, I was able to install it the complete version of Ubuntu Eee on my computer.

I wiped everything on the SSD, including the original system partition, but this is fine, since it can still be restored using a memory stick and the restore CD provided by Asus in the Eee PC box. Besides, with storage as small as 4GB, every byte counts!

Mostly everything is running smoothly with Ubuntu Eee PC. I like its functionality and the look. A few things have been adapted for the Eee PC, including the smaller font size. But, there are a few things not working perfectly after the installation, like some function keys. Fortunately, the Wiki of Ubuntu Eee provides useful documentation on how to fix some of those issues, including a problem which will not turn off your computer after you shut down from Ubuntu. There is also a Facebook page about Ubuntu Eee where you can share your experience with others, even the maintainer of the distribution. EeeUser.com also has a page about how to make Ubuntu 8.04 work perfectly on the Eee PC; it’s written for the original Ubuntu and not the slightly-modified version provided by Ubuntu Eee, but can still be useful.

A few more advantages Ubuntu Eee provides are features that were not supported by the default Xandros installation. I was able to use a VPN, set up a firewall, and upgrade my RAM to 2GB!

Generally, I love Ubuntu Eee and I should have installed it a long time ago. (Ubuntu Eee 8.04 has only been available since last month, however.)

JPEG CMYK images

remi — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:15:55 +0000

Done with most of the Japan Pavilion Web site, I’ve been told a few times the first two news article images in the “Media” section was not working. Firefox 2 was giving the following error message:

The image cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Those JPEG images have been provided by the staff of the newspaper and it turns out the two images that can’t be displayed were both in CMYK instead of the common RBG colour format. Firefox 3 can display JPEG CMYK images just fine, but Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 can’t.

I simply opened those CMYK images and re-saved them in RBG. This solved the problem.