Olivier's Blog

... I was waiting in line to get my blank DVD+R medias.

20 minutes it took to pay at Bureau en Gros (Staples). Why? Because their cash register system was down.

As I've been working in the computer industry my whole life, I certainly do know that a system can hang, or crash, or explode, or even catch on fire. It can be because of a power spike, a down spike, some voodoo magic, bit rotting, or even solar flares.

Computers are not reliable. It can let you down at any time. This is why we have redundant power supplies, or RAID-5 arrays. So what can we do about cash registers? Well, it is called keeping a receipt pad somewhere. I cannot believe they are unable to write or calculate taxes by hand. Maybe it is not as convenient, but it helps keeping your customers when you have a system outage.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 11:06 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

If you live in the Montréal area, you might have experienced the following: Bad taxi drivers doing as much as they can to make a dangerous and unnecessary move.

Just yesterday, I was waiting to turn right on corner Peel and René-Levesque. As some pedestrians were crossing the street, I was waiting in my lane not to block the cars in the opposite direction. Suddently, the car behind me, which was surprisingly a taxi, cut me from my left and almost hit some guy who was crossing the street.

I took his license plate number and called the taxi company. But sincerely, I don't think they gave a rat's ass. Too bad we live in a world where nobody cares unless someone gets hurt.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Personal at 08:08 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Absolutely not!

Since it is still hot and I have to wait 30 minutes before getting my haircut, I decided to waste some more time on playing with source code.

So I decided to make the blog XHTML 1.0 compliant. Well, I knew how to HTML 4.01 and I knew how to XML, so I guessed trying to put both of them together. And it just works. Some people try to convince you that standards are too complicated, this is wrong.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Computers at 11:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

32°C in my apartment and nothing else to do except moving my fingers and typing on my keyboard. It is actually so hot in here that I had to find something interesting to do without having to move any body parts.

Well.. So I decided to start a new blog. I must admit that I was kind of jealous. My girlfriend has been blogging for a month or so and many of my dear friends already have their daily weblogs.

So come'on in, and let's have fun together. I will try to post as much as I can and do not worry, I am being notified by email of everything you can comment here, so I will always stay in touch.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Personal at 22:19 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Since I had to compose some documentation for my job earlier today, I decided to finish my LaTeX installation on my Mac Mini.

Since I did start the installation process a while back, I had to see what was missing. I already had installed the LaTex Package (tetex) from fink so the only thing missing was a graphical frontend. I must admit that GNU nano is great, but it has its limitations. And since I am a big fan of syntax coloring, I had to leave my Terminal.app behind.

Posted by Olivier Hill in Mac at 20:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)