Open-Source

The sixth Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting ( FOSDEM) is a 2 days event, organized by volunteers, to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. It will take place in Bruxelles (Belgium) on the 25th and 26th of February 2006. On their promotional material page, they give some links to website that already display their banners. One of them refers to a “belgian LaTeX reference site”. Instead of the correct URL, they did a small mistake (at least at this time ; I’ve sent an e-mail for the correction) and they wrote http://http//www.latex.be.tf/ (don’t use this yet). I didn’t noticed the difference because the wrong URL is “hidden” by the text “LaTeX” (as any other regular link on the internet). Now, click on the wrong link and you’ll be redirected to the Microsoft website if you are using Mozilla Firefox. Why? ...

Today at 11:00, I’ll be doing my first real presentation with the LaTeX Beamer class. It will be about Random Field Theory in functional imaging (fMRI), a topic I’ve never done, ever, in my life (I am working on other techniques in the same lab). But, anyway, preparing this presentation was a good challenge (to understand a new technique from scratch and to do it with Beamer). I am quite impressed with Beamer ease of use. ...

(For once, this post will be in French since I am refering to a French newspaper) Dans son article intitulé " Firefox souffle 18 bougies et poursuit sa mue", Eric Nunès parle de la sortie de Firefox 1.5, de ses parts de marché (notamment face aux autres navigateurs), de la fondation Mozilla Europe et du projet de loi français interdisant tout système de diffusion de connaissance n’intégrant pas un procédé technique de traçage de l’utilisation privée (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc. ; certains diront que c’est la fin des logiciels libres, d’autres que c’est la fin d’internet …). ...

Since I had some time during lunch, I discovered the LaTeX Beamer class. I’ve put what I did here.

In an interesting article on Wired, Bruce Schneier is showing the collusion between computer-security companies and an entertainment corporation. Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on your computers. A rootkit is a software usually used by an intruder after gaining access to your computer and in order to steal information, track your habits, collect your preferences without your knowledge nor your consent. Moreover, you can’t remove it since it will damage your operating system (the main software of your computer). ...

“Automate the creation of graphs with Graphviz” is my first article for the LinuxFocus magazine. You can read it in English and en français : “Automatiser la création de graphiques avec Graphviz”. Have a nice reading! :-) Now, I’ll continue to translate some articles from English to French. If I find another interesting software, I’ll write another article.

I had a problem with the default video player in the Fedora Core 3, Totem (it couldn’t initialize a Gstream object or something like that). Instead of fixing it, I decided to install MPlayer and I discovered two interesting websites: GnomeFiles, a GTK+ (Gnome) software repository Grey Sector, a RPM software repository that also has the RPMs for MPlayer with codecs, skins, etc. While we are talking about MPlayer, they need a new server: if you have some money to spend, please participate. And, about Gnome, the new issue of the Gnome Journal is out …

Open source software are more and more observed (if not used) in the biological sciences field. They provide all the advantages of Open Source software, plus they bring needs for consensus on file formats, data representation and manipulation methods. I’ve just read a short article from Greg Wilson ( in Nature) who is working with the Python Software Foundation “to develop a course that will teach scientists and engineers the 10% of software engineering they need to solve 90% of their problems”. Their goal is to “introduce them to some open-source tools and working practices that can reduce the amount of time they spend programming by up to 25%”. The course is already available here ( Software Carpentry) … for free, of course!