Colas.Nahaboo.net - Blog

Numéros de telephone arnaques

2026-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Attention arnaque:

Le No de tel 0189628604 vous appelle en se faisant passer pour un conseiller bancaire (AXA), en ayant votre nom, adresse, en prétendant avoir remarqué des tentatives de paiement répétées depuis Amazon.

C'est une arnaque. J'ai raccroché de suite et appelé AXA pour vérifier.

La conseillère nous a d'ailleurs dit que elle-même avait failli se faire avoir récemment (un faux appel de sa mutuelle).

Je fais ce post simplement pour mettre 0189628604 (ou 33 189628604 ou 01 89 62 86 04) sur le web pour que une recherche de ce No tombe sur ce message.

A new version of the site for 2026, in Zola

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

I said</a> that I wanted to migrate this web site to a SSG</a> (Static Site Generator). And, after 5 years of procrastination, Ta-Da! here is the new site!
Initially, I was planning to use Hugo</a>, since I love coding in Go, and was not planning to learn Rust (Hugo is coded in Go and Zola in Rust), but I finally chose Zola</a> over Hugo for many reasons:

Zola has basically all the performance advantages of Hugo, and is also a single binary, with no need for databases, docker, snap, flatpak...</li>
Zola is opinionated. This is very important for me, I love more and more the systems were there is "only one way to do it". Needless to say, I hate perl, and I love Go.</li>
Zola is stable, and its creator ("Keats"</a>) very committed to not chasing the latest fad. This means less risk of an upgrade breaking things.</li>
Zola template engine, Tera, is both more powerful and more readable than the standard Go template engine used by Hugo.</li>
Zola comes with more useful built-in features, but no plugins that in my opinion brings complexity, especially in docs, and upgrade hell.</li> </ul>
As for the theme, I was looking for a clean responsive modern simple theme, with high scores in the various web performance benchmarks, with search and comments, and some support for multilingual (the site is in English with a few pages also translated in French). I tried the two leaders in the Zola theme ecosystem:

Tabi</a> I liked the looks but it felt a bit too complex for my needs: as a Zola novice I was afraid to end up relying too much on Tabi-specific feature instead of pure Zola and CSS ones.</li>
ABridge</a> I liked the architecture, not so much the design, but I struggled to make it work, it seems the doc still advise settings that break on recent Zola versions.</li> </ul>
I thus looked for a simpler theme, and chose:

Apollo</a> which was perfect for my needs, and simple enough to be easily modified for any of my future needs. I also enabled its support for the Giscus</a> commenting system.</li> </ul>
Porting my contents was made easy because I had anticipated this migration, and used Markdown for my posts in the Foswiki engine, instead of the native Foswiki syntax. So converting was basically adding a frontmatter to the pages, and fixing some links. I converted older posts with pandoc.
I have made a quick first migration. I will continue working on the CSS architecture and the looks in the following weeks.
Update on 2026-03-22: I now am satisfied of the result. I plan to work a bit more to add a search for only the French pages (now the search ignores them), autodetection of the browser light/dark preferences, sort the tags alphabetically in the page info line.

Mon compte Facebook a changé (piraté)

2024-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Attention : le 2024-10-24, mon compte Facebook a été piraté. Hélas, Facebook ne m'a pas permis de récupérer mon compte, ni même de le signaler, et j'ai donc dû en créer un nouveau.
Je vous prie donc de ne plus utiliser mon ancien compte ( https://www.facebook.com/colas.nahaboo ) et de le bloquer sur Facebook pour être sûr, car les pirates vont l'utiliser pour pirater et hameçonner d'autres personnes, et d'utiliser mon nouveau compte: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61567836084230.
J'ai changé ma photo de profil (sur Facebook uniquement pour l'instant) pour différencier les deux comptes :


My Facebook account has changed (hacked)

2024-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

Warning: on 2024-10-24, my Facebook account was hacked. Alas, Facebook did not allow me to get back my account, or even report it, so I had to create a new one.
So please never use my old account anymore ( https://www.facebook.com/colas.nahaboo ) and block it under Facebook to be safe, as hackers are going to use it to hack and phish others, and use my new account: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61567836084230
I changed my profile picture (on Facebook only for now) to differentiate the two accounts:


One year retired

2022-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

I have been retired for one year now, and what happened? Well...

I basically stopped coding and reading about anything computer-related for eight months. I didn't expect it, I was thinking I would start coding at once, going through my huge todo list of various projects.</li>
I enjoyed being able to go SUP surfing at will, but I ended up actually less on the water than before, simply because i didn't feel pressured into going on the water if the conditions were not enjoyable: I have now all the time in the world, I can wait for better conditions.</li>
I started what I should have done years ago: Stretching at least 30 minutes daily, and warming up a full 10 minutes before going surfing. Work and play for me were mainly sitting in front of a computer, and I had become awfully stiff. I will detail my routine in later posts, it is worth it.</li>
I dived deep in modern physics: astrophysics, cosmology and quantum mechanics. This also will warrant a full separate post.</li>
I started re-coding in the last four months:

The first month I began working on various bits of code (shell scripts), progressively getting back to speed, and also deciding to learn the language Go. I was looking for a very longtime for an efficient language to replace lisp or C as compliment to scripting (I never liked Java), and was hesitating between Rust and Go. A discussion with Olivier Arsac</a> convinced me to try Go.</li>
I switched to git (I was using mercurial) for version control, and moved</a> my publicly available source codes from my personal web site to my GitHub</a>. It may sound ridiculous, but at now 61, setting things up so they do not disappear when I do is becoming an important consideration. I will thus progressively stop using self-hosted sites to publish on places that will survive me, as nobody in my family is tech-savvy enough to maintain a web site.</li>
Then in December I stumbled upon the Advent of Code</a> challenge that I decided to do in bash for the challenge, and it was unexpectedly productive? I learned more in these 25 puzzles than in my last 10 years of professional bash scripting. You can see my solutions in my post Bash lessons learned with AoC 2021</a>.</li>
Thus, after finishing the Go tutorial, I decided to do the previous AoC years in Go. And I just finished the AoC 2015 in Go</a>. This definitively made me a Go enthusiast, I realized that the designers of Go had exactly the same opinion of what should be a general programming language: They worshiped readability, simplicity, performance and maintainability while hating inheritance and the feature creep of most modern languages.</li> </ul> </li> </ul>
That was my first year. And now, embarking for the next one!

Pinboard pricing model

2021-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

I am a knowledge addict, and always has been. I was reading as many books as possible, and the advent of the web has been a marvelous gift for me. But I soon realized that I needed some tools to manage this knowledge and supplement my memory. It started with pen and papers, then I used a lot the PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) such as the fabulous Psion Series 3</a> and Series 5</a>, the various smartphones, and finally the bookmarks-in-the-cloud service Delicious</a>
But as Delicious closed, I searched a replacement, and found Pinboard</a>, and was hooked. Not only it offered the same functionalities as Delicious (and more), but if was fast and sleek, with a minimal no-nonsense design that I favor.
It also had an original pricing system: you paid a one-time fee of $0.001 per the number of current users to get access for life. E.g $9.26 if there was already 9263 paying users and you wanted to become the 9264th. The goal was to entice people to register now rather than waiting, even though it may not have scaled. (see Pinboard.in Pricing Model: Fixing Their Math</a>).
Alas, it could not be sustained, so in 2015 it adopted a more mainstream yearly fee scheme: $11 / year. New Pricing Policy (Pinboard Blog)</a>
But we, old timers, kept our lifetime access we bought before the change. We were basically free-riding the new wave of customers...
Of course it could not go on, so last week, Maciej, the Pinboard author, suggested we voluntarily switch to the yearly fee scheme. And I did it gladly, Pinboard is for me a model of what web sites should be: sleek, fast, and efficient (and not re-selling your private data). At the opposite of the bloated monstrosities that a lot of sites tend to be nowadays.
Long live Pinboard!

Retired, at last!

2021-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

At last, I am now retired!
I ceased all activity on 2021-02-17, and my work account will be destroyed on 2021-02-28. A new era of full time surfing, coding and playing opens up. For now it is mostly playing with the new Valheim</a> game that is making a huge debut(*), as the waves are not good (winter storms) and I take a (small) coding break.
I will try to make a post per week on this site, starting now 2021-03-01. I know there is no way I will be able to keep the rhythm, but let's say it should be my long-term goal.
(*) I strongly recommend you read # Valheim: 7 marketing lessons from their amazing launch</a>, which tries to shed some light on its phenomenal success.

A New version of the site for 2021

2020-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

A big change is planned for this site in 2021: I am going to abandon the Foswiki engine for it, to pursue my recent goal of going back to the web roots. Basically, it a quest that relies more on:

Fast rendering by no rendering at all: pre-compiling the site pages into static HTML+CSS+JS pages: the JAMstack</a> approach.</li>
What I call a LAUW approach (Linux Apache Unix-utilities Web Standards) instead of the traditional LAMP</a>. Using the full strengths of Linux, Apache, the GNU Unix utilities, and the modern web standards (HTML5, CSS4, JS ES6) now that Internet Explorer is at last dead. This means not using software libraries (e.g: JQuery) and processors (e.g: Saas) that were designed to remedy to the poor state of some browsers.</li>
Using Markdown for text editing</li>
Using ultra stable and reliable technologies. I want to use things that will still work in 10 years, not the fad-of-the-day javascript framework that will be obsolete in 6 months, or that will break compatibility on each update.</li>
Technical: And that do not try to be friendly to non-technical authors and admins, as I will be the sole admin and editor.</li> </ul> Now 🔗</a></h2>
So now (December 2020), I am still using Foswiki</a>, but progressively prototyping on it the features I will try to implement later:

A simplified skin, with all the "wiki-ism" (everything editable) removed. As you can see I got rid of the left toolbar, to keep only the top banner with its sections (Code/Surf/Blog) menu on the logo and minimal tools on the right</li>
Editing contents in Markdown instead of the Foswiki syntax: I now do not use the Foswiki system to edit topics, but desktop-edit via marktext</a>.</li>
Having all the post sharing a common Form, so that the fields of this form can be easily converted to YAML as used as frontmatter (metadata) in modern Markdown-based systems.</li>
But still using all the Foswiki power for the site admin and non-content topics (indexes,...)</li> </ul>
The idea is to migrate progressively the contents into a form (Markdown + Frontmatter) usable in a modern static web generator like Hugo, while adapting Foswiki to use this content form, preparing a future migration.
I have developed the details of what this means in my post on the Foswiki site: Foswiki for non-wiki web sites</a>
Spring 2021 🔗</a></h2>
After I retire, at the end of February 2021, I will have more time to ditch Foswiki and implement the site on a new engine. It will probably be a static website generator, most probably Hugo</a>, but maybe also Zola</a> Eleventy</a>, or Gasby</a>, and incorporating ideas of the myriad of other ones</a>.
Summer 2021 🔗</a></h2>
I will then probably replace progressively various components of this system by ones that I will handcraft optimally to incorporate all the ideas I have been toying with during all these years: the HTML+CSS+JS layout, the tag/category system, the search engine, the comment engine, the editing process...
Later...🔗</a></h2>
And I may even at some time create a totally new web engine system, who knows?
Or code a wiki replacement: a collaborative editing site based on the concepts learned via this experiment.

A New Version of the site for 2020

2020-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

After 10 years of neglect, it is time for a new start of this site, because:

I am going to retire in early 2021 (in 6 months), and I will have now time to properly maintain a personal site</li>
I am feeling the need to archive in a central place all the contents I scatter in various different places, if only for the selfish reason to be able to retreive them more easily</li>
I was toying with the idea of going to a static web site, as it is now in vogue, and it has a kind of nostalgia for me as I started my web sites as static sites anyways. But by looking at the existing solutions, I was not convinced by them, as a lot seemed to naively solve the 80% easy part of the problem, and them struggle without any clear vision on how to solve the 20% hard part... a classic situation.</li> </ul>
I thus decided to keep on using Foswiki</a> (v2.1.6), as it is now quite mature, and thus stable: I like building on solid, time-tested fundations that will not change every month. And let's be honest, it is both extremely powerful and incredibly reliable. I am just tweaking it for using it as a public site (one author with all admin rights, and read-only viewers), rather than the standard wiki setup of many authors, all able to edit contents, with some able to also admin rights. My postulate is that a dynamic web site like a wiki, with proper caching, has all the advantages of a static web site, but is more practical to maintain (although more complex to implement).
I will detail my views on how to website-ize a wiki in future posts, but for now, on 2020-07-26 at noon French time, let go live!
Welcome to my (new) world!
Colas.

Migration to Foswiki

2015-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

At last, I found the motivation to work again on this site that I have left dormant since 2009. And I start with a long deserved migration of the engine from the old TWiki system to the superb Foswiki WIki engine.
Just installing a new Foswiki, and copying the data seem to provide a working base, I will then work on fixing the minor bugs and designing a new look in the following weeks.

Usability issues on a payment form

2009-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I know, I know, it is easy to nitpick on other people design, but this morning I tried to pay my phone bill online, and... failed. I had to retry many times, because I kept making mistakes on a simple, run-of-the-mill form to enter my credit card data. I was dumbfounded. How can, in 2009, people manage to make such a trivial and essential part of online business go so wrong? As I guess you are as curious as me, here is what I found out: (See the picture for the 3 main pain points)

1 the expiration date example is ambiguous: does 0903</code> here means 2009-03 or 2003-09 ? Why didnt they disambiguate it by also adding a specification (like MMYY, or, as it is a french dialog, MMAA ?)</li>
2 but today, it was not only ambiguous but plainly misleading! As we were in March 2009, I assumed that the example was built from the current month and year. I said cool, so it is YYMM. Wrong! it was actually the reverse, MMYY, resulting in one failed attempt</li>
3 ok, I filled the fields, and hit the OK button... and it just reset the page to empty fields! Grumbling, I re-typed the fields, re-clic, and... another blank page! After these two more failures, I tried to think (which is what youdo not want your users to do</a>, trust me). I then read the button label and discovered that this big, prominent button alone at the bottom of the page was not the Submit button but the Cancel one. I should have hit the middle one "Valider", but this button was not in the correct place on the flow of the form.</li> </ul> So,after 3 failed attempts, I managed to pay my bill. All this on a simple form with no fancy verification code or Captcha. Well done Telefact, I wonder if you can find a worse example still in use today.
What is good code? 2008-10-22T00:00:00+00:00 I stumbled upon the blog post "Is it important to write good code?</a>" the other day, and became more and more ill at ease as I realized that I thought that I preferred the original code, that the author was trying to ridicule, over his new "improved" object-oriented version. At first I guessed this was another manifestation of the the "Worst is best" scenario - enhancements are often not worth the added complexity - but I realized that it was perhaps a more profound factor: The original code is very good because it ... is small. It fits on a teminal screen, so an human being can read it at once and have less items to maintain in his short term memory</a> and also understand it easily because it follows a natural way of thinking with sentences using IF. This becomes obvious by reading the body of the blog post surrounding the code samples, where you can see that the author is using phrases such as "if I need this I do that", showing that in plain english, the if statement is the best way to make people understand what you mean. And making code that people understand is the best way to make debuggable and maintainable code. At this moment I noticed the citation in the blog header: "Good programmers write code that humans can understand" Indeed :-) PS: I know I am a bit exaggerating the issues there, and that I unfairly nitpick on Fredrik Normé, but it is that it seems to me from my personal experience that the two changes I see most in my coding efficiency as I grow older is a decrease of my short term memory capacity, and that I make more and more typos where I realize I mix up totally words with totally different meanings but that sound the same, for instance writing "never" instead of "nether", making me suspect that our natural way of thinking may be much more language-based that I imagined... Mercurial web templating 2008-10-09T00:00:00+00:00 For some time now, I have seen the light and I switched to the new wave of the Distributed Source Control management systems. Linus famous video</a> of his Google talk decided me to try. I was a bit apprehensive at first, wary of engaging myself on a technology that would bring more problems than solutions, but after some days of use, the realisation dawned over me: Distributed Source Control may be one little step for a programmer, but it is a giant step for programming. Why? because, its mental model actually follows your first intuitions that most of us developed as young programmers before using any source control system. Suppose you want to try a feature? instead of just copying the directory, you clone it. You mess an operation? you just remove the directory, no embarrassing traces left to keep the burning scar of shame on you for the following decades of a central repository. You are used to think of your enhancements as patches, you can work with patches. I could go on and on, but many people have done it much better than me so I'll just say that you should definitely try it. By the way, between the 3 main contenders, git</a>, mercurial</a> (aka HG), and bazaar</a>, I chose mercurial because of its simplicity, its better support of windows (I work in Linux since 1995 but my coworkers currently use Windows), and because some people at ILOG started using git so I wanted to be able to try something else. I did not choose bazaar as I wanted to stay close enough of git, to be able to switch to it if ever my dream to work in a windows-free world materializes one day... So I started to set up a public web repository of my Open Source personal work with mercurial, which gave me a simple way to publish my work in full detail, but, although mercurial is quite easy to use, but I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to customize its look & feel. The rebirth of this site 2008-04-04T00:00:00+00:00 At last, I decided myself to redo my old website, which was a collection of static html and was based on many of the various tools I made in these past years. As I grew in love with wikis over these years, the natural tought was just to do it in a Wiki, and naturally in the Wiki I like the most, TWiki</a>. So bear with me and keep posted, as this site will slowly emerge in this first half of 2008.

Colas.Nahaboo.net - Blog

Numéros de telephone arnaques

A new version of the site for 2026, in Zola

Mon compte Facebook a changé (piraté)

My Facebook account has changed (hacked)

One year retired

Pinboard pricing model

Retired, at last!

A New version of the site for 2021

Later...🔗</a></h2> And I may even at some time create a totally new web engine system, who knows?</p> Or code a wiki replacement: a collaborative editing site based on the concepts learned via this experiment.</p>

A New Version of the site for 2020

Migration to Foswiki

Usability issues on a payment form

What is good code?

Mercurial web templating

The rebirth of this site

Later...🔗</a></h2>
And I may even at some time create a totally new web engine system, who knows?</p>
Or code a wiki replacement: a collaborative editing site based on the concepts learned via this experiment.</p>