Frankly speaking, I don’t really understand the passion for the new Apple iPad (an " iPhone on steroids"?). It’s a beautiful-looking machine but it also jails its user in the “Apple ecosystem”. It’s just consumerism. Apple has a record of launching beautiful-looking devices and shiny products. In the beginning of the years 1980s, they popularized the computer mouse and the graphical user interfaces as we know them today. In the beginning, one would love the simplicity of use of Apple computers and software, especially compared to the MS-Windows or GNU/Linux versions at that time (I’m speaking of the years 1990s). The end-user was then at the center of the “computer experience”. But now, it seems the end-user becomes a (paying) consumer, nothing else. ...

You may have seen in various places that “3-D Secure” (aka “Verified by Visa” or “Mastercard Securecode”) is not as secure as it says. The original paper is here (PDF). Unfortunately, having implemented the 3-D Secure system via a third-party somewhere in Europe, I have to agree with the authors. I will insist here on one aspect - the inline frame - but the authors are giving more aspects and some solutions worth considering in their paper. ...

I needed some data to test the pChart charting library so I decided to use WHO data about swine flu (in its weekly updates). The only issue I had was that the WHO started to collect data by country and changed to gather data by regional offices from July 27th, 2009 onwards. So graphs below are only by regional offices. For your information: ...

Do you know your local powerplant chimney can be a screensaver? (movie taken in October 2009 in the South of Brussels, Belgium) [youtube &hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]

Evince defines itself as “simply a document viewer” (for Linux/Gnome and now for Windows too). However it can already read a lot of formats: PDF, TIFF, PS, DVI, DJvu and plans to support a lot more in the future. But for me there is one important feature missing: the ability to read comments in PDF files. I sent PDF versions of draft documents to my PhD thesis promoters and they send them back with their comments. Open them in Evince: you’ll only get the balloons but no possibility to click on them (see Figure 1 below). Open them in Acrobat Reader and not only you can see that there are comments but you can also see their content (see Figure 2 below). ...

It’s the impact factor of the Open Access journal Proteome Science where I published my last article, last year. I didn’t see that before but came to know when I downloaded the 453 remaining e-mails from an old account (3 months without fetching them). The announcement of this new impact factor was in one of the three interesting e-mails.

I often wrote about Pubmed here. Briefly, it’s a search engine for publications in the biomedical domain. They recently redesigned their user interface and, although there are a lot of new things to save time that came with the new design, there is still a problem with their interface: the new search box takes too much space … Redesigned Pubmed homepage ( bigger image) Redesigned Pubmed result page: search box is hiding the logo, the display settings and the first result ( bigger image) ...

I really like gthumb to have a look at my photos, quickly perform some basic modifications or effects and display all the photos to people around me. But there is one thing that is annoying me: it seems impossible for my gthumb version (2.10.11) to upload to Flickr, where I put some of my pictures. There is an " issue 73" in the GNOME’s GHOP Contest page from 2007 and the development seems to be done ; it’s just not yet in the main branch. ...

In software development (as in many other fields, like paper or thesis writing ;-)), you often need a revision control software to effectively manage all the changes made to your source code (or sections and chapters). It’s even more important if you work with other people on the same files, on different versions of the same sources, with people in different locations and with different systems. The problem I currently try to solve (or, at least, try to bring a solution to) is the following … The system doesn’t initially use any revision control software. People are able to edit any file they want, one at a time (file locking which is very annoying). Basically, there is only one version of a file per project: the current one. If another project tries to merge the same file from another project, someone has to manually review all the lines in order to see what should remain and what should be left. In order to reach a previous version of a file, you have to manually remove lines marked with the patch reference at a specific location on some lines (it does work in some programming languages and not at all in all others). In fact, a rudimentary revision control system exists but it’s completely outside the development environment. When a file is modified, it’s name is entered in a “patch system” with the reason why it was modified (when you are lucky). If you forget to enter its name, the system can’t do anything for you (since it’s not aware of anything). ...