Apprendre à faire des schémas

Dans cette optique donc, en ayant pour but de faire comprendre quelque chose à quelqu’un, maîtriser le crayon est primordial. C’est en vous entraînant régulièrement et souvent que vous parviendrez au fil du temps à représenter ce que vous imaginez par le biais d’une illustration.

Prenez par exemple une voiture. Vous l’imaginez et la concevez dans votre tête, vous pouvez même deviner les moindre petits détails comme la couleur des sièges en cuir ou la textures des jantes. Mais qu’en est-il de réussir à illustrer votre imagination grâce à un dessin ?

Maîtriser le crayon

Vous allez donc me dire « mais comment maîtriser mon crayon pour parvenir à illustrer parfaitement ce que j’imagine ? ». Je vous répondrais : fermez les yeux.

Oui ! Aussi absurde que cela puisse paraître, vous allez devoir dessiner les yeux fermés ! Essayez de vous focaliser en premier lieu sur votre imagination et non pas sur sa reproduction sur le papier avec votre crayon. Essayez de concevoir votre dessin comme un tout que vous allez dérouler étape par étape, gratuitement (oui, moi aussi j’ai ri en écrivant gratuitement).

Où apprendre ?

Vous pouvez passer par la méthode traditionnelle qui consiste à s’inscrire à des cours d’art plastique, d’art appliqué, et toutes ces choses coûteuses et contraignantes ! Je vous propose aujourd’hui d’apprendre à dessiner gratuitement grâce au site AlloDessin.com !

Vous trouverez sur ce site plusieurs dizaines de cours de dessins gratuits en ligne, de comment dessiner voiture aux dessins d’animaux en passant par les dessins de noël, vous trouverez toutes les leçons que souhaitez et pourrez même en demander de nouvelles !

N’hésitez pas à laisser vos impressions dans les commentaires ou directement sur le site :)

Just follow the steps:

1. follow @devquotescom on Twitter,
2. tweet: thanks @devquotescom for providing me a #Google+ invitation – [YOUR EMAIL HERE],
3. wait,
4. enjoy Google+’s features!
5. Expect some fresh new posts @devquotescom very soon.
6. Send bitcoin here as a reward : 1vjhAZza4iNKxvNfKfsHNoharRNcXrtZr

Examples

Just so you know what we are trying to do there, here is a list of Facebook pages using this functionnality:

• Coca-Cola
• Accor Hotels

Actually Coca-Cola seems to use another method than the one described here because changing the browser language or the Facebook language does not affect the fan page. I think they use IP geolocalisation.

Step 1 – Create your application

step 1 - create your application

Create a new application on the Facebook developper app.

I will assume that you already have the Facebook developper application installed on your Facebook account, if I assume wrong try to go on the Facebook developper application and enable it. You will also have to confirm your account with your phone or by adding a credit card to your Facebook account.

step 1 bis - create your application

Step 2 – Configure settings of you Facebook application

Since march 2011 Facebook does not allow anymore application to be hosted on his platform. You must now have a server to host you application.

step 2 - configure settings

Fill the form under the tab « Facebook integration » with the informations Facebook needs (leave the others empty):

• Canvas Page: it’s like a unique string for your application which will compose the URL to access to the canvas,
• Canvas URL: canvas is actually the « back-office » of your app and since we don’t really need it, just fill this field with a path to an almost empty index.html,
• Tab Name: the name of the tab which will be added to your fanpage,
• Tab URL: the path to the real content of the tab.

As you can see, you just need to have hosted 2 folders. Mine are here:

• the no canvas page: http://fwed.fr/devquotes/my-translated-app/,
• the tab page: http://fwed.fr/devquotes/my-translated-app/tab/ (the language detection is based on the Facebook language set by the visitor, so if you go directly to this URL you will see the default case which is in english).

Step 3 – Code the app

Now the app exists on Facebook, we have to make it real on your server (like the 2 URLs of mine).

The Facebook PHP SDK is needed to ensure our application to be translated in the language the visitor set on his Facebook (and not on his browser). You can get it on github: Facebook PHP SDK. All you need then is to include this SDK in your code (the code of the tab page, not the canvas) and initialize it this way:

$app_id = "your_app_id_here";
$app_secret = "you_app_secret_here";

require_once 'facebook.php';

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
        'appId' => $app_id,
        'secret' => $app_secret,
        'cookie' => true
));

Your app ID and app secret can be found at the top of the screenshot from the step 2. Once this step is done, we want now to find the language aimed. Facebook, through its API, allow us to access few informations about the visitor:

$signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
//var_dump($signed_request);

$locale = $signed_request['user']['locale'];
$country = $signed_request['user']['country'];
//var_dump($locale);

You can uncomment the var_dump to see what Facebook offers but so far we have in $locale what we need. Just a few more scripting and the automatic translation will be ready to work:

if(stristr($locale, 'fr')) {
// french content
}
else {
// english content
}

Step 4 – Add the application to your page

step 4 - add the application to your page

Now everything is set you have to go on the home of the developper application and click on « Application profile page ».

step 4 bis - add the application to your page

Go on your page and see the application working.

Hope this tut was useful. If informations are missing just ask for it in the comments, we are really reactive during the week :)

A concrete example is the one my brother has experienced. Last year he wanted to go to London for a few days so he spoke by emails with someone who lives there and who promised him some hosting solutions in exchange of only one thing: make a transfer through Western Union to himself (from my brother to my brother), just in order to verify if he has a credited account. At this point my brother had never heard about Western Union Scam, but that did not last long.

I have no idea how (I’m not aware of Western Union processes) but this guy managed to steal the money transfered from my brother. Then you surely have already guessed, he did not answer anymore, neither from his email neither on the web forum where my brother found him (craigslist.com).

Actually he had two solutions:

• ignorance (just can pray to hope the bank will restore the stolen money),
• strike back by finding his real identity.

The hack that I’m going to describe you has permit to my brother finding the real identity of the scammer only with his email and to engage legal pursuits against him. At the moment, they are still in tribunal procedures.

How to find real identity behind an email

Maybe you already know services like Spokeo or Pipl in order to reverse an e-mail but, be honest, it is as relevant as 123People. There are two simple ways to parse huge databases of people’s email to see if one is corresponding.

Web 2.0 services with dynamic « lost password ? » page

As described by Karim, Facebook had this kind of password recovery page. It seems that it’s not the case anymore. The only other website that I know and which has the same kind of page is Quora, directly on the home page. Just try by pasting in the form the Robert Scoble‘s email: [email protected]. You will see the famous blogger’s face appears :)

Web 2.0 services with dynamic address book import

A lot of social networks or web aggregators offer you to find your friends by connecting directly to your address book through your email address. This feature retrieves emails of your contacts and looks if they match with someone’s subscription address.

You only have to import the email into your address book (you can create a hotmail/gmail account just for this purpose) and import your address book into twitter + Facebook. This way, you will parse around 600 millions emails. Here is a non-exhaustive list of services which have the feature (the links lead you directly on the feature’s page):

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Quora

There are a lot of chances the person you are looking for has signed up on one of these websites.

Let us know if you the tip worked for you, or if you know other tips like this. We are trying to make the reverse email lookup the more relevant as possible.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions through comments below.

Great articles about Quora.com:

• http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchmark-invests-at-86-million-valuation/
• http://scobleizer.com/2010/12/26/is-quora-the-biggest-blogging-innovation-in-10-years/
• http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/44618/what-can-we-learn-from-quora
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quora

Comments are now closed, new invitation process described on post quora’s invitation v2.

]]> http://www.devquotes.com/2011/01/06/providing-quora-com-invitations/feed/ 679 http://www.devquotes.com/2010/11/10/how-to-enable-url-rewriting-on-prestashop/ http://www.devquotes.com/2010/11/10/how-to-enable-url-rewriting-on-prestashop/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 14:51:42 +0000 fwed http://www.devquotes.com/?p=124 [link to french version below]

PrestaShop is an e-commerce solution known by his many uses through the world. By using PHP and object oriented programmation, it allows to be easily customizable by the common run of programmers, hackers or integrators.

Install mod_rewrite

Before everything, you will have to check if the mod_rewrite module is installed on your Apache. You can see that in a simple phpinfo().

If it is not installed, type (while being root):
a2enmod rewrite

Allow .htaccess files

You will have then to tell Apache to enable the use of .htaccess files, either in the main conf file or in the conf (it is the AllowOverride property which is important):
<Directory />
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Options All
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Generate the .htaccess

Once .htaccess are allowed, you can use the tool brought by the Prestashop back office to generate automatically a .htaccess which will indicate to Apache which rewriting rules apply. You will have to previously create the file empty and give it the 666 rights (in the root of you PrestaShop file):
touch .htaccess
chmod 666 .htaccess

Apply modifications and check the logs

Don’t forget to restart apache2 to enable thoses operations:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you still get some errors or weirds behaviors (like no 404 page loaded, error 500, etc), don’t forget to check the Apache logs before trying anything else, they will tell you a lot about the problem (this path is the default one, yours may be different):
cat /var/log/apache2/error.log

[French version of this post can be found on my blog: Comment activer l'URL rewriting sous PrestaShop]