Blog like it's 2002

Nothing takes 5 minutes in software engineering. Nothing. Even the simplest things. But why do you still believe you could do it? And why does it consistently fail?

I always forget how to remove the Home folder icon on the Windows Desktop. It's not very intuitive in my memory. That's why I was a bit afraid to realize my office Ubuntu setup had this ugly icon representing my home directory on my otherwise virgin desktop. Turns out, it's …

A useful application to tackle short learning sessions

Let's say you started an application via the terminal and you used Ctrl-Z instead of Ctrl-C to continue working in your console. By doing so, your process was put in the background. How kill it easily then? On Windows WSL, sometimes you won't be able to kill it from the …

Yesterday I attended a Python user group meeting in Ghent. It was interesting and I'm glad I joined despite this week being my first in my new position. They were 3 talks: First talk was about Design Patterns in Python: after a brief presentation of the famous book from the …

Walking around and discovering new things the last 12 months made me want to share my (modest) pictures to the world. I've always looked down at Instagram as an influencer-boosted ad machine but I realized quite a few people my age and younger use it now as a less cringe …

How this project started (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) During my sabbatical time after my Agfa Healthcare career, I did a few things. Oh, nothing crazy. Repaired properly my arm, did yoga, went for many school activities with my kids, rented a van for a week with the family …

This is the third part of what I call the friends challenge: implement ideas my friends gave me 2 weeks ago (see Part 1 and Part 2). How it started This time my friend Natacha wanted something to quickly tell her the date of the next full moon. Why? Some …

My pet project arewebro as useless as it was, deserved a little bit of extra love in terms of UI. I noticed afterwards that the UI elements were annoyingly not centered in the frame I declared in Native mode. Thanks to a Reddit post, I discovered that you can use …

After working this weekend on my new blog theme and getting very satisfying results, I wanted to polish a bit more and add a favicon (and get rid of the error at startup saying that no favicon was found). I naively assumed that adding in the configuration file: FAVICON = "favicon …

How my journey started (Part 1) With my friends we play a game on WhatsApp called "Where am I?". Someone posts a picture taken during a business trip or a holiday and the others need to guess where he/she was on the surface of the Earth. It's usually in …

Preamble: I suck at programming. In my friends group I probably am the nerdiest guy but I have been working with so many brilliant developers minds in my career that I have a low (or acute) self-esteem with regards to my programming skills. But truth is: I do develop for …

Preamble: the mechanism described here is an alternative of the classic deployment steps described here and here. The Pelican documentation is awesome, if you read it carefully. The Tips section contains information about how to deploy with GitHub Actions. Sounds cool, but what is it exactly? GitHub introduced GitHub Actions …

Yesterday I discovered a modern-looking UI toolkit for Python called NiceGUI and I played around a bit. Installation: pip install nicegui Hello world application from nicegui import ui ui.label('Hello world!') ui.run() To go a bit further, I decided to use the 2024 Olympic Games open data to …

Unless you live under a rock, you've heard about the AI buzz the last 2 years. Since ChatGPT has entered the game, it has become more concrete for regular people how powerful the generative AI models are. Every week (if not everyday) there are announcements about a new model released …

Let's say, like me, you always forget to initialize/clone correctly the git repo with SSH and you did by mistake: git clone https://github.com/frica/.git Then when you want to push to main you will be blocked by GitHub: Username for 'https://github.com …

Here are some things I learned after a few days working with Pelican (read here an explanation about the initial setup). ghp-import The useful ghp-import tool is a non-standard git command mentioned in every article about Pelican setup. A quick look at the --help command reveals interesting options. I now …

I will explain here the steps to build your static website with Pelican and deploy it on GitHub Pages. But first, why use Pelican and not Wordpress or Dotclear, like back when I started my first blog? I was looking for: simplicity: Pelican uses markdown syntax in plain text files …

I compiled a list of the online trainings, followed or to follow, free or not. Impressive what the Internet has to offer! It's available here.

NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter won't fly on Mars anymore... The helicopter itself captured this color image showing the shadow of a rotor blade damaged during a rough landing. So one of the main exploration devices of the mission is broken, 225 million km away from Earth. There is of course no …