Music Monday.

A while ago, when Pownce was still a thing (and when, of course, I was a superstar haha), there was this meme called “Music Monday”. Don’t ask why I thought about it this monday, I don’t know. But here are a few tracks to begin the week in a good mood.

Fallulah – I lay my head

Mark Ronson Ft. Amy Winehouse – Valerie (the song actually starts at 0:30 but it’s worth seeing the intro)

Metronomy – Everything goes my way

The XX – Crystalised

Also, I kinda miss this meme, so I was thinking that maybe I’d post some songs every mondays. And since I’m not sure I will do it, I highly suggest that you subscribe to my friend Maxime’s mailtape, which will be sent in your inbox every sunday for sure.

By Bastien, December 5th, 2011. No comments.

Recently on my iPod.

A few tracks from the latest albums pushed to my iPod (my iPhone, actually). If you have any musical suggestions, I’m open to pretty much every music style, as long as it’s not stupid French rap or hardcore death metal! Enjoy!

Nadeah – Odile (from the album Venus Gets Even)

Mina Tindle – To Carry Many Small Things (from the EP Mina Tindle, via Littlesa)

Yellow Ostrich – Whale (from the album The Mistress, via Maxime‘s Mail Tape)

Beirut – East Harlem (from the album The Rip Tide, via Jen)

By Bastien, October 11th, 2011. 1 comment.

Why PHP is (so much) better than Ruby?

I attended this weekend my first Ruby conference, Ruby Lugdunum in Lyon. Besides cool talks and the fun of meeting people like Nick, Blake, or Laetitia, my friend Camille & I did a surprise lightning talk about how PHP is better than Ruby. Here are the slides and a more detailed transcript:

  1. A lot of free hosts: it’s easy to find a PHP host, you just have to google “free php host” and you find a ton of free PHP/MySQL hosts
  2. Bigger community: The PHP community is really huge, and it’s really easy to find a PHP developer
  3. Easy to learn: Most people in the IT field have some notions of C. Adding a $ before every variable, forgetting about typed variables, and you’re good to go. It’s even simpler if you’ve done some Perl too.
  4. We know when the line ends thanks to semicolons
  5. Big websites use PHP: Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, and I should add Overblog because I used to work there. All these websites use PHP, and it scales pretty well.
  6. Mark Zuckerberg uses PHP: The richest programmer in the world (well, he’s not a real programmer anymore, but he used to be) is a PHP developer, so PHP can actually make you rich!
  7. Typing skills: due to a more “verbose” syntax, PHP improves your typing skills. This way, any PHP developer types faster than any Ruby one. And this is very important, because you chat faster so you spend more time actually working! ;)
  8. Real blog engines & CMS: While PHP has WordPress, Drupal and Joomla (to mention the most famous ones), Ruby/Rails’ most famous products are Mephisto, Radiant and Locomotive. I think we can objectively say is that there’s a clear lack of features/plugins on the Ruby based systems, probably due to the smaller community?
  9. Pear is better than Rubygem: OK, this was just a troll, to make the audience feel hurt and yell “BOOOO” very hard…
  10. … Which leads us to our last slide: PHP dev have sense of humor ;)

Of course, saying that PHP is so much better than Ruby is pure bullshit, and this talk is, as I hope you guessed, a big big sarcasm. Trolling apart, I think this talk is also quite interesting, since somehow it shows some of the weaknesses of Ruby and its ecosystem.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun preparing and doing the actual lightning talk, and I can’t wait to create another funny one with Camille, even if some people don’t seem to understand our offbeat humor ;)

Slides by Camille Roux & Bastien Labelle: Why PHP is (so much) better than Ruby?

By Bastien, June 27th, 2011. 14 comments.

Your problems are not problems.

You may know that Stéphane Taponier & Hervé Ghesquière, two French journalist, were taken hostage for a year. France Television made a videoclip to show them support.

Here’s the transcript:

- Céline will be home in 2 hours (broken lock)
- Olivier will be home in 4 hours (broken car)
- Lian-Xue will be home in 3 days (delayed flight)
- Hervé and Stéphane still don’t know when they’ll be back home.

And here’s the life lesson we can learn from this spot: No matter how pissed off we are, someone always has a worse problem. There’s always been this ambiant negativism and pessimism, especially in France with all the strikes and everything. But we don’t look at the big picture often enough.

The truth, my friends, is that we’re lucky. Lucky not to be taken hostage. Lucky to have a family. Lucky to have a job. Or simply lucky to be alive.

What pisses us off everyday? Our neighbors making too much noise? Someone bitching about us? Our problems are like a needle in a haystack. They are just unimportant. Totally insignificant. No matter how hard they piss us off. And for that, we should be grateful, and see things on a more positive side.

Now go live your life. And be happy. This is how I do everyday. And it works.

By Bastien, December 29th, 2010. 2 comments.

A beautiful journey with Anna Chalon.

My friend Thien is really good at finding new talents. She made me discover Anna Chalon a few monthes ago, and I really liked her songs on MySpace. So when Thien told me if I was in for a private concert at “Le 146″ with Anna, my answer couldn’t be no (actually, it was more kind of a “Hell YEAH!”).

Everything was set to have a perfect night: red wine, friendly people, among other things. And more importantly, an acoustic guitar coupled with a really gorgeous voice.

A while ago, I wrote on this blog that with only a guitar and your voice, if you’re talented enough, you can do something great!

It applies to Anna. We made a beautiful journey through Anna’s universe.

And it felt good. So good.

Thanks to Thien & Laurent for hosting the show, and a big thanks to Anna, I’ll be the first to buy your album when it’s released!

Photo credit goes to myself (more on Flickr) and Video credit goes to Thien (more on Vimeo)

By Bastien, October 4th, 2010. No comments.

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