After almost six months without abuse following the installation of the captcha module, a spammer found its way through it, to promote a ringtones site.

Not that it did him/her much good, since comments are premoderated anyway, but still...

Sheer luck, of astute pattern matching and module workaround ? Oh well, it's still six months of peace gained. Well worth the almost nonexistent hassle, it seems.

The block party is over, and the concert went reasonably well: rain on monday, rain on wednesday, and nice weather on tuesday, just when we played !

Some photos from the party are available on Flickr.

"Immeubles en fête" is a yearly block party held everywhere in France.

Come and hear us at the Villebon event, on 2007-05-29 19:00 to 22:00 !

It's 2007, people ! Rejecting Opera for its lack of standards compliance and advocating MSIE and Netscape Navigator instead is just ... well, you know what.

Can't but wonder whether they heard about the Acid test, or about that small, relatively unknown browser named Firefox.

The "heavy" modules OSInet contributes to Drupal (G2, Helpdesk, Zeitgeist) have now been placed under the new release system.

Branches and releases have been created where applicable:

Although technical problems (batteries !) prevented a full recording of the concert, the middle section is now available to group members.

Regrettably, until licensing terms are cleared up, these recordings cannot be made public.

In the meantime, here are a couple of shots from musicians playing in the other bands that night:

With OSInet having a large part of its business with suppliers and customers within the EU at large, I often find myself having to check the validity of the VAT information for third parties, and the EU VIES database comes in handy.

However, although I had been discussing remote access using XML-RPC or SOAP as early at 2004 with the database administrators, the UI had remained web 1.0-only until quite recently (apparently march 2007), when an AXIS SOAP service went online, just as I had suggested three years ago. So I figured I really couldn't let the occasion pass, and did a PHP-GTK client to VIES, which happens to be my first production SOAP application in PHP-GTK, previous ones having always been done in Pascal using Delphi or Kylix.

Let's see how this can be done... (code updated 2010-09-21)

For some reason, I had never bothered to pursue the relationship between string gauge and actual string diameter. However, when I sorted my stash of old strings after putting brand new Elixir medium strings in order to sound best at next week's concert, I found several strings for which I didn't know the gauge, meaning they would be next to useless in case of an emergency (which is typically the only situation under which I'd put on a used string). And I only had a metric vernier caliper available...

See the → driving directions.

As usual, there will be several bands playing. The concert is set up by french charity Portes Ouvertes. This nonprofit exists to help people with social difficulties by providing them with a way to meet others through art events, graphical or musical.