A new home for IPGphor2reader

IPGphor2reader is a software meant to parse log (text) files resulting from an experiment with the IPGPhor and to plot graphs. I previously hosted it on my personal website and just moved it to Sourceforge, here. Amongst the various reasons for this move, I wanted the possibility for anyone to participate in the project and no hassle to manage this. Slowly, slowly, most software on my website will be hosted on Sourceforge or Bioinformatics.net. ...

July 2, 2009 · 1 min · jepoirrier

FOSDEM 2009, Gemvid video

Along with all the videos of all FOSDEM editions, the FOSDEM team put the 2009 videos on YouTube. So here is the video about Gemvid: [youtube &hl=en&fs=1] The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).

March 29, 2009 · 1 min · jepoirrier

FOSDEM 2009 and Gemvid 0.6c

This year, I only went for the Saturday afternoon session of FOSDEM 2009, the Free and Open Source software developers’ European Meeting. Two years ago, I mentioned the general trend that more women were interested in free/open source software/movement and this trend continues. But this time, I also noticed some really cute babies … and my son Neel-Alexandre was one of them of course! Although he’s only 7-month-old, he was really interested in the FreeBSD, Linux and Firefox mascots (respectively a red daemon, Tux the penguin and a fox). You are never too young to taste the truth ;-) ...

February 8, 2009 · 1 min · jepoirrier

Baby movements during sleep

After a while, here is why I got a TV tuner for my Linux laptop, took screen captures and wrote a script to add a timestamp on pictures … I wanted to know how my (then 5-month-old) son was sleeping (his mom can be reassured: I was not planning to put electrodes on his scalp ;-) ). Get the Flash Player to see this player. var s1 = new SWFObject("../videos/player.swf",“ply”,“360”,“240”,“9”,"#FFFFFF"); s1.addParam(“allowfullscreen”,“false”); s1.addParam(“allowscriptaccess”,“sameDomain”); s1.addParam(“flashvars”,“file=../videos/081129-night.flv&image=../videos/081129-night.jpg”); s1.write(“container”); ...

January 27, 2009 · 1 min · jepoirrier

Short script to add a timestamp on pictures

Here is a short script (1.6kb) to add a timestamp on all PNG pictures in a directory. It requires Python and the Python Image Library ( PIL). In order to use it, modify some parameters in the beginning to suit your needs (images directory, font file and size, etc.) and launch ./timestampFiles.py. Here is a before/after example (size of pictures is reduced to fit in this blog): ...

November 23, 2008 · 1 min · jepoirrier

Pixel lapse under Linux

Finally, I got a working pixel lapse software under Linux :-) It’s a bit late (and I have to work tomorrow), code is rather dirty but I’ll publish it as soon as possible (btw that’s why I needed a webcam and a library to read it yesterday). Originally, “pixel lapse” photography is the process of creating an image one pixel at a time. Beginning in the upper left corner, pixels are captured sequentially at a set rate until the entire image is formed. ...

September 21, 2008 · 1 min · jepoirrier

AEL-NG?

A few days ago, I was sad to see that the Association Electronique Libre (AEL) website was down and only replaced by two measly tags. For those who didn’t know it: The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society. The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information. (from an old copy of the AEL website) ...

June 16, 2008 · 3 min · jepoirrier

Vertical badge

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). ...

November 7, 2007 · 1 min · jepoirrier

How many days without governement?

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) ;-) ...

November 6, 2007 · 1 min · jepoirrier

More on Java DBs comparison

Following a comment from Alexandre on a previous post, I went a little bit further with my performance test of database engines running under Java. This evening, I tested a profiling tool and a variable number of insertions/retrievals (I didn’t tested transaction). Taking the code from the previous time, I simply changed the number of elements to be inserted/retrieved. As expected, the durations of object initialization (except for 2 points for Derby and H2) and database creation did not change with the number of elements to be inserted, Derby being still the slowest engine to create a simple database (1 table only). The durations of the insertion step increased slowly with all the database engine, except for SQLite+JDBC: you can see a much steeper initial angle in the increase of the duration in the graph below (be careful: x-axis shows logarithmic values). ...

September 17, 2007 · 2 min · jepoirrier