Computers

(… at least for large documents) Two week-ends ago, I spend a whole day trying to apply a consistent style to a thesis. I spent hours trying to be obeyed by a word processor because it would systematically change the style of some element, somewhere in the 100-or-so pages. Including figures was also a nightmare: we had to keep an eye on the (limited) memory of the computer (otherwise we got unexpected screen freeze, a lot of noise from the hard disk (paging), etc). Generating a bibliography was also another daunting task, even with the use of a dedicated reference manager … ...

I was writing the next version of my badge counting the number of days without Belgian government when Laurent added his comment requesting for a vertical version. You can see it on the right. Since the original release, I also added translation of the sentence in Dutch and German (after all, Belgians are speaking 3 official languages). And I approximately centered the text on the vertical version (I personally prefer the text on the right for the horizontal version but you can easily modify this by yourself). ...

Now it’s not a secret anymore: more than 148 days passed since we, Belgians, went to vote (it was on the 10th of June 2007) and we still don’t have any government! If you want to count the numbers of days without Belgian government, it’s easy: just have a look at Belgian newspapers. Or … have a look at the counter below (in French, Vlaams or German) ;-) ...

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …). Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to: ...

Congratulations to Ananda for the creation of his company, Beaming Multimedia Solutions Ltd.! This guy is like an example to follow when you strongly believe in one idea and really do everything to achieve it … Congratulations again! Domain name is registered but website is not yet active.

Taking advantage of my laptop crash, I went back to some text-mode tools ( vim, mutt, …): they are fast, easy to use (once you read at least the introduction section in the manual) and reliable (text files are more easily recovered after corruption than binary blobs). I also tested and adopted Snownews. Snownews is a text-mode RSS newsreader. Installing it is very easy: download the archive, and type the usual “./configure; make; make install”. Since I’m following some blogs written in French, I configured Snownews with Unicode support: “./configure –charset=UTF-8”. ...

As every Belgian citizen, I voted today for our legislative bodies ( Chambre et Sénat). As always, I was confronted to the same problem: electronic voting. Technically, I’ve no problem to understand and use the system: it’s an ethical problem. I don’t know if my vote is correctly written on the card, even with all the given guarantees and technical details (you can test such a voting machine here or watch a demo of the Belgian system, both in French). Personally, I saw two problems: ...

This morning, I read Tim Anderson’s " Why Microsoft abandoned Visual Basic 6.0 in favour of Visual Basic .NET". While reading his article, I only had one idea in mind: this is another example of the importance of free and open source software. If you are not a programmer, you don’t need to read the remainder of this post; software users have many other reasons to prefer free software over closed-source software (but it’s not the subject of this post). ...

Short message for spammers: you lose your time trying to add irrelevant comments on this blog since no comment is published before I agree so. Moreover, I activated Akismet spam filter since this morning … But I doubt spam robots read notices where they put spam comments. Although I disallowed comments (and even pings) on some posts, I felt something strange this morning: more and more comments had to be moderated on this blog. By default, no comment are directly published. If the comment is relevant (even if the author has a different opinion than mine), I publish the comment (1 click). Otherwise, I delete the comment (another click) and disallow comments and pings (human contributors can still send me their comments by e-mail and I’ll publish them). From 1.50pm to 2.50pm (some minutes ago), I received 153 spam comments. Sorry guys, unless you found a serious flaw in this blog engine, comments will still be moderated by a human who dislike spam.

Although I liked Bill Burnham’s post about the " storage explosion" I think he forgot one thing in one of his last posts. In " YahooMail, Storage, and the Battle For Personal Data" he explains the announcement of unlimited e-mail storage for free by Yahoo! is the indication of two trends: for him, the obvious one is that storage is cheap and the less-obvious trend is that there will be a battle to control the user data in such “web applications”. ...