All good meetings are similar, but each bad meeting is shitty in its own way. I could also say that it's hard to formalize elements that make meetings ineffective, but that's not true: I have a neat list. All summarized to one point is: being lazy. Organizing a good meeting …

What is a Javascript Promise? When I was documenting the Neo4j Javascript driver, I did not know. So let's find out, and in so doing tear to pieces explanations I found online. My favorite past time.

W3Docs

In JavaScript, a promise is a unique object linking the "producing code" and …

Early in 2022, I started getting emails from Google, warning that starting from 2023 they would retire Universal Analytics (UA), which is what everybody uses to track views from Google Analytics in this decade. Closer inspection revealed that this was not a simple change: they were in fact retiring all …

I had a long summer and decided I would do something to improve the ergonomics of my tech life. Many years ago I bought a Kinesis Advantage, but I was young and naive, and gave up after a week. This time, with all the wisdom of my late twenties, I …

I sit on the metro. I see the lady on my side unlock her smartphone, scroll up to reveal the list of installed apps, open one at random, go back to the home screen, and finally lock the device again. All happens within 5 seconds. Still holding the phone in …

In the attempt of coupling my PhD's Finite Elements Framework for Fjord Ice-ocean Interactions (FEFFII) with an ice code, I stumbled upon the issue of deforming the ocean mesh. If a simulation stretches over a long span of time, the geometry of the ice is likely to change due to …

The following WP-CLI command will create a lot of test data into a WordPress site: 1000 new users, each with 50 posts. Each post gets a random date in the last year and a random post content of variable length filled using a lorem ipsum generator.

WP_CLI::add_command( 'test', 'create_test_data …

I took part to the first Summer of Math Exposition from 3blue1brown! Check out the video I made!

It is difficult to argue that the current, wide popular 8-hour workday in cognitive-demanding jobs is in any way efficient. It is bad both for employees and employers. Quoting the Harvard Business Review,

Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance …

I am definitely not an expert in networking, so take all of this with some salt. Still, I found it valuable to have my home internet powered by open source software as much as possible, rather than some shitty closed black-box provided by my ISP.

There are already lots of …

If you expose your bbPress forums to the public, it is likely you will be getting loads of spam every day. Most of it is actually caught either by WordPress itself, and set as pending, or by Akismet, and set as spam. Either way,

1. bulk purging pending content is not …

My old Android smartphone fell too many times and had its physical buttons (back, home, recent apps) not working, which was problematic to do anything. You can go back with in-app buttons most of the times, but there is no way to switch app or to go back to the …

A while ago I decided I did not want to be a product anymore, and start paying for services. I started by breaking free from all the free-but-commercial company services such as Dropbox and Gmail, and ultimately ended up ditching all non open source software on my phone, doing away …

First create a new sink:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=zoom_input sink_properties=device.description=zoom_input

then remap into a Zoom monitor source that Zoom will allow selection of:

pactl load-module module-remap-source master=zoom_input.monitor source_name=zoom_mic source_properties=device.description="zoom_mic"

Then create as many new virtual sources as microphones you need …

As a fellow table tennis player and piano player, I have noticed some interesting spiritual similarities between the two arts. I'm pretty sure they are also common to other sports anyway.

Always think ahead: the next stroke, the next note

In table tennis, one should not think about scoring a …

The FEniCS project allows for simple solution of partial differential equations. However, getting started from examples is so quick, it is easy to miss how the inner-workings of it behave. This should not happen (especially if it is a PhD project). There are three vital pieces of the puzzle that …

I have listened to so many talks in so many different fields and topics, that I feel confident enough to provide advice on how to give a proper talk. I have listened to talks ranging from public speaking contests to PhD level seminars. I draw mainly from science talks, but …

For a second, stop to think about how many languages you know. With languages, I do not mean verbal languages: rather, any means of expressing thoughts and feelings, or of expressing a dialogue. I am here do advocate for the learning and teaching of more than just one.

Our western …

As a mathematics PhD student, I have seen a lot of mathematics teaching. I have been lucky enough to witness some (very) good teaching, but I have also been inflicted with so much bad teaching. Sometimes, I just wondered whether the people do even realize that their teaching is horrible …

So, found myself installing IRAF on a friend's laptop running Ubuntu. There are some decent tutorials online about the general steps: for example, this one, and the official one. However, they all skip all possible issues that could come up (or at least, that popped up in my case). This …