Yeah, another birthday happened, and it helped me reminding some very old stuff.
Back in 2004, a Friend, Kiddo, sent me a nice image for birthday. The image was posted on 2004-05-31 at 23:54, and I’ve kept it all this time 
Now it’s time for me to share it with you.
Recently I wrote about PHP lessons.
You have until June 1st to register and take part as one of the 10 chosen ones.
All levels of PHP are accepted, however you’ll need basic knowledge of HTML (CSS and JS are a plus).
Lessons will contain many aspects of real-life php programming, ranging from simple charset problems to things like XML generation using DOM.
Each lesson will be available as an exercice, and you’ll be able to unlock parts of the required documentation to get some help. Scoring will be based on amount of documentation you had to unlock, code quality, security aspect, etc…
Everyone will be able to access exercices, however documentation and notation will be reserved to the 10 selected students.
The first exercice will be a pretty simple application. This simple application will have more and more things added as time passes by, and will end as a pretty complete website. This reflects some aspects of PHP programming.
The exercices are made to force you to search for what you’ll need, just giving you basic tips. Searching for documentation helps learning way more than receiving documentation.
Out of the 10 students, the 3 best overall students will win some prizes. Those prizes will change as I get sponsors. It may range from a domain name with webhosting to having the final project bought by a company for cash. Each winner will be free to choose from what’s available at this point. Webhosting isn’t a problem, however I don’t know yet for the code buying thing.
If you wish to participate, you can contact me directly on this contact form.
Ever wanted to become a terrorist, you can achieve that easily by going to Guantanamo. You can choose your employer, and a nice high-salary job.
Ranging from suicide bomber to suicide plane pilot, staying there will make sure you have something to do once you get out.
No wonder so many people who get out from Guantanamo fall back to terrorism, even if you didn’t belong to this world in the first place.
USA want to stop Guantanamo (at least form what the BBC says).
Anyway you can probably still enter there by pretending being a bad guy. You won’t have to pretend anymore after that.
While browsing the web, I found someone who posted about the service I created, SiteShot.
Well, they didn’t know what to say as the service’s page is really light. At least they saw that the screenshot are also saved in PDF.
Anyway I added a forum link on the website to allow people to access the forum, and ask questions. Dunno if it’ll help much, but well, who knows?
By the way a new design for the page is on its way, and will be available soon.
You remember, I left Eurocenter in june ‘05. Things weren’t good, and I left because I felt it was my best option.
Today, we’re soon in june ‘08, and I feel it was the right choice. It caused a whole lot of problems (and trust me, a lot means a lot), things are better, I earn a real salary (when you live near Paris, a salary under 2000€/month is far from being enough) and I don’t get any news anymore.
However today, while searching « MagicalTux » on google as I usually do (I like to see where people talk about me), I found this page.
Yeah, in ‘07, two years after I left, people still wish me an happy birthday. I’ll wait a bit to see what happens in ‘08, they may forget me this time, but it feels warm inside to see people who still care about those who are not around anymore.
I’ll be starting PHP lessons for free in a few weeks.
It’ll be limited to 10 people, and the 3 best will get some special prize, I’ll see with them what they want and what I can give them. They will get a SVN repository and a webhosting connected to this repository in order to be able to answer to the subjects.
If you want to participate, I’ll have to talk to you and evaluate your level in order to adjust to everyone’s level and avoid making subjects too boring for you.
As subjects will be made public on this blog, you are also free to participate on your own.
Subjects will be issued in English and in French.
June 1st is the deadline for people who wish to participate directly. First subject will be issued a few days later, once all participants are ready.
After a while on our new server Mu, Shigoto has finally been setup as we initially expected.
…
So we’re going back to Shigoto (Shigoto means « work » in Japanese).
Right now all the websites, mails, ftp, and other subsystems were moved from Mu to Shigoto. Success rate is 100%. The only problem which has occured is the new MySQL server which didn’t support InnoDB (and yeah, there are people using InnoDB on the websites I host).
Anyway the only remaining thing is the most troublesome one : the DNS. It’s troublesome, but it’s also not that urgent as the system will do well even with only two dns servers.
Finally, I didn’t write a new blog engine as I initially intended (no time in this world for that), however I switched from DotClear to Wordpress.
This choice was made after I used Wordpress for a while on Porchoman. Anyway stay tuned for more soon !
TuxTelecom, a French VoIP service, is opening back after a few months being down.
The service currently only allows to call between registered users, but we’re currently under negociations to allow people to make calls to external lines. Also, calling from external lines via a common PSTN number (09xxxxxxxx) will be possible too.
Last bit of special info : the service initially existed in French and English, the new one will also have Japanese voices, we found a seiyū company in Japan specialized in PABX voices, and negociation are in progress.
Schlock Mercenary, it’s … well, read it from the start before you make any assumption. I did. It took an insane amount of time to read everything from the first strip, but it’s fun, intelligent and well written.
Oh, and don’t forget about the plasma gun and the *ominous hummmmmmmm*, and all this totally free massive destruction. Did I forget to mention I love free destruction?
And don’t forget Rule 1 in mercenary business : Pillage, THEN burn.
