Pourquoi reprendre des études?

Voici une mini-présentation que j'ai donnée aux étudiantx de BAC à l'UCL sur les raisons de mon retour à l'univ et l'utilité d'étudier l'informatique.

You must like the song before you hear it!

How can I like a song even before I heard it? That's what I was asked to do on this facebook page:

Installing Mozart/Oz on a 64 bits Ubuntu

It's not that hard, and is based on information gathered on the net ( here and on the mailing list).

First, install emacs and libc6-i386

sudo apt-get install emacs libc6-i386

Then download the binary tarball from the mozart website, and decompress it in /usr/local:

<br />wget -O /tmp/mozart-1.4.0.tar.gz http://www.mozart-oz.org/download/mozart-ftp/store/1.4.0-2008-07-02-tar/mozart-1.4.0.20080704-linux-i486.tar.gz<br />(cd /usr/local && sudo tar zxvf /tmp/mozart-1.4.0.tar.gz && rm /tmp/mozart-1.4.0.tar.gz)<br />

You can now setup you PATH so that the oz executable is found immediately:

echo 'PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mozart/bin' >> ~/.profile
. ~/.profile

And here comes something I didn't find on the net: you should call the oz exectuable by telling it it's running on another architecture (see man setarch). That is done here by prepending the oz command by linux32:

linux32 oz

You can of course ease this by creating an alias:

echo 'alias oz="linux32 oz"' >> ~/.bash_aliases
. ~/.bash_aliases

Now you show be able to start oz and Browse some data.

There's also a directory /usr/local/mozart/lib and you might need to add it to /etc/ld.so.conf , but that was not needed for me, but I'm still a beginner in Mozart :-)

Overclocking with liquid Nitrogen

Some pics from crazy the overclockers using Nitrogen to overclock their system. They nearly double the speed of a high end cpu!
Check the thermometer on the last pic, I saw it go down to -100°C.

Bande annonce de l'Éveil

Voici la bande annonce de L'Éveil, un chouette livre fantasy écrit par une jeune auteure. Encouragez-la et partagez cette video autour de vous! De plus, le livre est écrit avec Lyx ;)

fault tolerant loading of js with yui

Just when I decided to use geoplugin for myowndb it's already down..... Luckily it's easy to correct with YUI, which is a library I like more and more. Check it out here.

Parking in Brussels

Here's how they do it:




This was taken in Sint-Agatha-Berchem on monday 22 feb 2010 at about 21:35. If someone know what happened, please explain in the comments. I cant figure out an explanation, as these cars are on the parking lane!

IE the time sucker

Just lost time with IE again. I hate when things work fine in FF and not in IE, even when using a cross-browser library as YUI3. For those interested, here was the problem and its solution.

Lyx pour auteurs: un premier post

J'ai aidé récemment une auteure à utiliser Lyx pour la rédaction de son roman, et son expérience a été si positive qu'elle a commencé une série de post à ce sujet à destination d'auteurs (non informaticiens). Le premier post vient d'être publié, mais d'autres suivront!

Juegos Suramericanos using MyOwnDB!

The 2010 edition of South America’s Games (Juegos Suramericanos) will take place in Medellin from 19 to 30 march.
They are using MyOwnDB to collect volunteers applications and I have of course posted it on the MyOwnDB blog :-)

Create and deploy a Jekyll site to Github page in 5 minutes

As I was looking for a simple way to publish documentation but still ensuring a long term availability and full control of the content, I went for a self-developed solution based on Jekyll and YUI Grids.

If you're looking for a solution to rapidly be able to deploy content on Github pages with Google Analytics and Google Search integrated, Jekyll Base might be for you.

All reasoning and information on Nsa.be, and code available on Github.

About Virtualbox, S3, time drift, 403 reponses

I was working on the FileAttachment code of myowndb.com in a virtualbox debian guest, when all request sent to S3 got the 403 Access Forbidden reponse, even code that was working fine in production. The good thing was that the production server still worked flawlessly, but I really asked myself what I had changed to break my code.

After checking my credentials, the code, trying with S3cmd and getting the same problem, I found a forum thread where having the wrong time could cause that problem.

And that was indeed the problem! My time had drifted 15 minutes, so I was sending out request with a timestamp in the future.... An ntpdate later, everything was working fine. Phew!....

From OO to List style: my notes

I've continued development with Clojure and Jwt, and I got stuck: how do I implement my app without class definition and instance variables? It's not hard, but I had to get used to it. You'll find my notes here. Feedback welcome!

Nokia N900: I'm not sure I want it

Today Nokia unveiled specs of their next internet tablet: the N900.

No, I still haven't found my PDA-phone, or do they cal that a smart phone nowadays? But I've bought the N810 in the meantime, and that was a big disappointing experience: the addressbook application was horrible. Of course, Nokia calls it an internet tablet, and for a good reason. But sadly Nokia seems to think that an internet tablet is not made to help contact managment.

When you see the N900 page, there's a lot of talk about internet and network technologies, but not a word about contact management or calendar. That a bad sign, and I fear the situation has not improved a lot.

I'll wait a bit more to see how Android phones evolve. They seem to have very interesting stuff going on....

Jwt and Clojure

I've experimented with Jwt and Clojure, and put my findings on the web at
http://www.nsa.be/index.php/eng/Blog/Using-Jwt-yes-it-s-a-J-with-Clojure. If you're into web development you might be interested!

Interested in a 100$ gift card at Amazon?

Check here for details. Winner should be know soon. If you wanted to order a book one of these days, it could be a way to get it for free!

Tmdtc Interview from this morning

Here is the radio interview (in french) I did this morning:

The Million Dollar TagCloud on the radio

Tomorrow, monday 3 august, I'll give a short interview about TheMillionDollarTagCloud.com on PureFM, a national french-speaking radio. It will be a short interview of about 3 minutes. Even though it is the holyday period, this should give a boost to the project.

If you want to have your tag online before the interview, book it now and I'll put it online in time.

Facebook App for TheMillionDollarTagCloud

I have finally finished the TMDTC Facebook App for TheMillionDollarTagCloud.

For those who don't know, TheMillionDollarTagCloud ( aka TMDTC) is my attempt at selling for $1 million worth of tags, and I'll distribute $100.000 if this works out.

To make a chance to win these $100.000, you just need to register and then click on tag, or publish a tagcloud on your own page (like I did on this blog, see right column) and encourage people to click on your tag cloud.

Each click recorded gives one chance to the clicker and to the publisher of the tagcloud on which the click occured to win the 100.000$.

And now, there's one more way to augment your chances at winning these 100.000$: the TMDTC Facebook app, which lets you publish a tagcloud on your Profile, and share it with your friends.

I hope you join and spread the word around. I really want to distribute these 100.000$! :-)

Screencast recording script

I have published a script I use to record screencasts here (my website about my professional activities). It is simple, efficient, written in ruby and using ffmpeg.