Computers

I don’t understand why people are buying and offering Apple iPods to their family members. In fact, offering an iPod is like telling you: “Here is a costly electronic device I’m giving you, it’s cool thanks to huge marketing efforts but hey, in 5 - 10 years (or immediately if you lose your player), you won’t be able to read any music files you bought anymore: it has DRM inside. Moreover, when this one will be old, you’ll be forced to buy an Apple player to keep listening to music you bought”. In short: “I am offering you a beautiful trap”. ...

I have plenty of other things to do but, this evening, I decided to stop a little bit and try some LiveCDs I freely got at Fosdem. Since I did it very quickly and was tired, don’t take what I wrote for granted: LiveCDs are there to be tested. Download one and test it by yourself! The first LiveCDs I tried were derived from Sun OpenSolaris (and on the OpenSolaris starter kit DVD). BeleniX was quite cute, directly launching XFCE. Quite a few applications were there. Some refresh problems were also present in the console. An old USB key was recognised without problem, as most parts of my low-end workstation. ...

Some interesting links for today (didn’t had time to read everything, that’s why I’m storing them here): Java boutique has a in-depth review of NetBeans 5.5 Java Practises has a small tip about implementing toString in Java A new (very important ;-) ) feature of Java 6: the splash-screen functionality. Another interesting thing is that Java DB (Derby) is integrated by default. About databases, David Coldrick’s Weblog hosts an interesting discussion about H2 -vs- Derby databases The Java Plug-in Framework Project Besides Design Patterns, OpenSubsystems released the Open Patterns, a repository of common application functionality patterns … Some links about companies: ...

I couldn’t find sleep tonight (*) so I did two small variations on the Ruby official logo for Ruby France, since they are looking for a new logo (**). Double-clic to enlarge, single-clic to reduce back to the small images (***) : I also like Greg’s proposal. (*) it happens very often these days (**) No, I don’t know Ruby (***) Doesn’t work if javascript isn’t enabled in your browser (usually it is) + Internet Explorer doesn’t correctly render the transparency ; please use a real browser instead

I really like this kind of application: a person used an old hard disk to bevel micropipettes for electrophysiology [1]. It’s fast, simple, easy and the author got an article published at an impact factor 1.784. [1] Canfield, J.G. " Dry beveling micropipettes using a computer hard drive" Journal of Neuroscience Methods 158 (1):19-21.

I was using Poseidon as a modelling editor for my UML2 diagrams. It was based on Java and I was able to run it from both GNU/Linux and MS-Windows. It was not free software but the Community Edition was free (as in “free beer”) and has all the tools I modestly needed. The only trick: all the diagrams had a string in the bottom, stating it was not meant to be used for commercial purpose (for educational purpose, I’ve written a small software that removes it). ...

This evening, I prepared a computer for the lab. Don’t blame me but it has to be under MS-Windows and with MS-Office. Knowing it’s only an Intel Pentium II MMX (“x86 Family 5 Model 4 Stepping 3”) with 64Mb of RAM and 2.4Gb of hard disk, I needed to find general software that has the smallest footprint in terms of both memory and hard disk consumption. Here is a small list of software I found interesting (mainly for me to remember): ...

As I previously wrote, I’ve discovered the Beamer class for LaTeX some months ago and I really like it! It’s very easy and straightforward to use (provided you know a little bit of LaTeX, of course). I’ve also noticed it forces me to actually prepare my slides and illustrations before beginning to create the slide show. This is a good point since 1) it forces me to stress the structure (rather than doing it as one goes along the slides) and 2) it allows me an easier and better re-use of illustrations and slides previously shown (in Powerpoint or Impress, you had to think of what objects you have to copy ; here, you have only text to copy). ...

I’ve recently learned that the Jabber.org server was an experimental one but I was too lazy to change my Jabber ID. Now that the Jabber.org server is down (apparently since 23.00, Belgian time), I am forced to change. My new Jabber ID is “jepoirrier at jabber.fr”. I will still use the old one (“jepoirrier at jabber.org”) but I will gradually switch all my contacts to this new ID. BTW, the Jabber.org status can be found here. The Jabber.fr server is hosted by APINC and its status are here. ...

The National Academies Press are putting some of their books on-line. I was particularly interested in the Guidelines for the Care and Use of Mammals in Neuroscience and Behavioral Research. The only “trick” is that they provide the book one page at a time (either in HTML or in PDF format). If you want entire chapters or the whole book in one file, you have to purchase it. I think it is a fair deal (how many publishers do that?). ...