My-Life

Today, internet was down from 8.30 to 15.40 (I don’t know the reason). We were able to work on the local network but not further. No mail, no web surfing, no chat, nothing. This gave us the opportunity to work hard :-) Soon after the “disaster”, I looked for incidents on verious support websites. I didn’t find anything. But I do find some interesting graphs about the internet connection. For example: Of course, this link is completely useless if the connection is down (since we wouldn’t be able to access it). And, anyway, it’s again a geek-only concern.

My webcam is finally working with Fedora Core 3. Thanks to Luc Saillard’s page on Philips USB Webcam Driver for Linux, I was able to download and put a new module for my webcam (a Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000). I first tested it with GnomeMeeting and it worked fine. Thanks to camE, I was able to take this snapshot (and get rid of any unnecessary GUI ; snapshot is a reduced version of what I get). ...

Following an urban audit from the European Commission, Liege (the city where I am living) is one of the top criminal city in Europe ( detailed results here)! In 2001, they counted 256 crimes for 1000 inhabitants. In Belgium, Bruxelles has 153 crimes and Charleroi, a city one often refers as a mafia city has only 144 crimes for 1000 inhabitants. Even big capital cities like London has a lower scores than Liege (146) … ...

I’ve recently discovered that a grid computing service was available at the University of Liege (where I am working), inside the Alma-Grid structure. The “Alma-grid” name is quite confusing since, if I understand correctly, they offer lab solutions for genomics, proteomics, etc., and bioinformatics is only a part of it. A Grid is a network of many computers sharing their unused ressources (CPU and/or disk storage) to solve large-scale computation problems. We can see that like a distributed computational and/or storage system. Well-known “grid computing” projects are, a.o., SETI@Home or Folding@Home. The main advantage of a grid is that you reach the power of mainframe computers in terms of CPU power and/or storage, without the cost of buying one since a grid usually uses common desktop computers distributed around the world. ...

This morning, I got a fine from the police because, on Sunday, I drove at 70km/h instead of 50km/h on an empty road. :-( Well, maybe I was at 70km/h, I don’t remember and I didn’t pay attention at that moment. It’s just bad luck: I had to take care of my lab animals on Sunday. That’s why I was on this road. Oh, the beautiful shortcut: I am fined because I pay attention to the well-being of my lab animals. ;-) Anyway, since my wife got her temporary driving licence, I will have to pay attention to this kind of thing in order to give her good driving habits.

I am a statistics because I replied to this MIT weblog survey (I found the link on Alex Schroeder’s diary). Alex Schroeder put the “I made some Science” sticker on his weblog but, since I did some biological experiments today, this sticker wouldn’t mean anything on my website ;-)

My parents-in-law just came for some holidays in Belgium and they choose a nice, old-style house near Liège (Belgium), in Trooz. It’s called " Biche les prés". It has plenty of rooms, a nice, well-kept garden, it’s clean and situated near a forest, away from the city (20 km from Liège) … and it has a computer with GNU/Linux (RedHat 9 in dual boot with MS-Windows) and an internet connection (modem). Of course, M. Spirlet won’t give you the root password ;-) but, at least, if you left your laptop at work (like I did), you can read your mail with your favorite operating system.

First post on my blog. Let’s see what I’ll be able to put here … Oh, by the way, thanks for visiting my blog :-)