Let’s scratch those itches!

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Julien Lengrand-Lambert

It’s been a long time since I have written stuff regularly on this blog. But it doesn’t mean nothing happened; far from that in fact!

For some strange reason, blogging is just like sport : the less you practice the less you want to get back in.
Put some holidays in the middle and you quickly end up in a situation where your blog lies dead for weeks even though you have plenty of ideas of articles.
And after some time, you don’t even have ideas any more; which makes it even more difficult to get back on rails.

I don’t know about you, but thinking about it I can often see a relation between the number of blog posts I write and the progress I make in my pet projects. Just like if blogging was some kind of motivator to work harder, or somehow linked to my productivity as a developer.

Blog posts are difficult for me to write. As a (bad) developer, I love to directly jump into the technical stuff. And I really have to force myself to take a step back and spend an hour or two writing about something I have already done. In the end, most of the blog post ideas I got end up in the trash bin and never get published.

But thinking about this, I realized that I actually write a lot. Only of all this is never actually goes on the internet.
For years, there are two things I always have on me :

My glasses, just because otherwise I couldn’t see anything (don’t try to make a link with the post, there’s none)
And a notebook with a pen, in which I write everyday.

This habit has been here as long as I can remember.
I know I have a really bad memory. I always had. So noting down stuff is the best way for me to cope with this brain full of holes.
Those last years, I started also writing down everything that could piss me off. Things that would take me a long time to do while I could avoid it. Or things that I would see people do that I sound could be done better (at least in my opinion).
Those are just dummy statements on my notebook, but I usually put them somewhere else afterwards and sometimes give more thoughts about it.
And when I started reading Hacker News and LifeHacker a few months ago, I actually realized that some of these dummy ideas have actually been transformed into sustainable businesses by clever people.

So instead of writing them to myself, I think I will start putting them out on this blog. Let’s not call them business ideas (most are likely not to be) but simply itch scratchers, or life facilitators .

In the end, I think I should have done this long in the past :

If anyone has the same ideas than me and read them here, Fine! That can be seen as some kinf of validation for him
It will force me to develop those ideas a bit more, to make them understandable by everyone.
It will allow me to post on this blog without more work than usual, as I already write those for myself usually.
And who knows, maybe will someone fall in love with one these ideas and contact me to make it happen!.

So now, let’s make this happen!

About Time to market

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Julien Lengrand-Lambert

As a lot of people, I have pages full of cool ideas I’d like to implement.

I start to work on some of them, write about a few of those, and to this day am happy about none. The huge majority about what I do doesn’t even have a README. I know I am not the only one. I know lots of developers are like me.

I stop working about most of my ideas because no one uses them. Because most of the ideas I got in the end come from me. And I don’t find much motivation solving my own problems.

Last week, for the very first time, a friend of mine came with a request. For the very first time, someone asked me to implement something to make their life easier.
The real-time schedule of the bus network of the city they live in is only available on a WINDOWS WIDGET.
Think about it: you can know when your bus will arrive at your stop using your computer.
Well, pretty useful when you sit next to the bus stop itself, waiting RIGHT NOW for the bus to come.

So they asked me to make and android app out of the widget, so that they could use it with their mobile. And then I realized how big of a market it could be. A whole city of 150k people, taking the public transports, with no app to warn them about the next bus coming.
I worked my arse off, and within 2 days had reverse engineered the widget and developed a really simple android MVP.

The whole thing was simply based on POST request, so it was just a matter of getting the right parameters to make it work. I have rarely been so productive, driven by the idea that I was sitting on a potential 10k downloads.

And as I was working, I looked at the public transportation website once again, searching for some information.

Their index page had changed, proudly showing that they were releasing their mobile app the coming week! A really cool app, where you could. . . see the bus schedule in real-time on your phone. Not only that, but they also started sticking QR-codes in all bus stops. By simply taking a picture of the bus stop, their phone would redirect them to the app, giving them the next coming bus arrival time.

Well, what to say to conclude this.
Most of the time, the barriers come from you. You fail at workring hard enough, or finding enough motivation to conclude that project. But if you don’t fail, well, you still haven’t won yet. And it’s not because you don’t see any potential threat today that it won’t suddenly appear tomorrow morning.

I’ll take this as a lesson to myself. Stop putting stuff to the following day. Because in the end, you only have control on part of the game.

XBMC: Share your external drive to your other computers

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Julien Lengrand-Lambert

As already said in my last post, I gave my first try to xbmc last week. The basic setup was almost fully automatic.

There was one thing I had to do manually though, and I want to share it here because I didn’t find the solution anywhere on XBMC forums.
My idea is simple : attached to my xbmc laptop is a 2To external hard drive that will contain all my movies, pictures, . . .
Those things used to be on my other computers, and I don’t want to duplicate content so I wanted this drive to be accessible to all the other computers on my network.

The way to do it is quite simple in the end, if you know where to search :
By default, xbmc already shares its libraries on the network (Movies, Music, …). All of this is defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf.

So the solution is to add another section to this file. That will share it on the network too.
By default, your external hard drives should be mounted in /media.

So if I want to share my external hard drive (called Elements) on the network, I’d do something like that:

[Elements]
path = /media/Elements
comment = data drive
writable = yes
browsable = yes
guest ok = yes

The guest ok option will allow anyone on your local network to access the drive without having to authenticate, so be careful.
Now check that the other users will be able to read/write on the device

$ ll /media/Elements

and if not, run


$ chmod -R 755 /media/Elements

and restart samba (or the whole computer if you have a doubt )


$ /etc/init.d/sbmd restart

Now check on your other computers, you should be able to access your new folder without troubles .

On my Win7, that simply means going to my file explorer and double clicking on the Xbmcbuntu icon that appears.

Hope this can help someone!

Look up to the future !

Linux User, Blogger, Engineer, Climber, Human . . .

Let’s scratch those itches!

About Time to market