Well the year isn’t over yet but I wanted to write down what inspired me in the past 12 months. Like you, I’m always looking around for interesting work to nourish my mind. Sign of times, I haven’t read many books. It’s been mostly an audio/video year. I watched a hell lot of TV though. Netflix doesn’t help in that matter… I’ve had a huge interest in comedy. I discovered the american alt-comedy scene and have been struck by their creativity and blunt thoughts.

The last time I wrote something here was in 2012. What happened since then?

It’s been quite a ride actually. I lived in 3 different cities on two continents and had some realizations on the way I want to work and the importance it had on my life.

If you (still) follow me on twitter, you might have seen some changes. I’m tweeting more and more in French and less and less about technologies. It didn’t went unnoticed to @clochix and he asked me what I was doing and if there was a chance that I could wrote about that somewhere.

A year ago, I started an experiment. I wanted to quit gmail and gtalk services and prove me that I could host my emails and my IM myself. It went quite well but I decided to stop and subscribed to fastmail.fm and to hosted.im.

Installation

A year ago, I spent some days installing a fully functionnal mail/web/jabber server. Hopefully, I had some good tutorials about setting up a mail server. On the jabber side, it was quite easy even if sometime, my WTF-o-meter level was really high. I blame my totally absent knowledge of erlang and mnesia here.

Yesterday, I lost a significant amount of time dealing with cross-domain AJAX requests and I thought I might share a bit of what I learned.

1. jQuery 1.5.0 is BROKEN when it comes to cross-domain AJAX requests. Upgrade to at least jQuery 1.5.1.
2. Access-Control-Allow-Origin WON’T accept a wildcard value if your XHR’s withCredentials option is set to true. Also, it won’t accept a list of origin. If you want to accept requests from a lot of domains, you can match the Origin request header against a set of domains and set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin accordingly.
3. Access-Control-Allow-Headers and Access-Control-Allow-Methods CORS header does not support * as a value. You have to be specific, even during your prototyping phase.

Yesterday during the SOPA Blackout, this website was on strike. The billions of readers of this blog had a static page explaining why this website was offline instead of the normal content. As a good nerd, I turned this operation into a technological one and instead of serving a static html with nginx, I decided to use varnish.

Yes, varnish.

I never wrote anything about the absolutely amazing architecture of this blog but basically, static files are generated from RestructuredText, served by nginx and cached by varnish.