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). ...

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) ;-) ...

Since Thursday, Google Code is hosting the OpenSocial project, a group of APIs allowing the development of common software for a certain number of “social networking” websites (e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, …). Before Thursday, every programmer wanting to develop a software for social networks had to learn an API, how to write code and sometimes a new language for each of these networks (when these ones exposed a public API!). Now, OpenSocial gives access to the most common functions of all the participating networks. Currently, the API gives access to: ...

Diwali in a major Indian festival known as the “Festival of Lights”. As usual, ISAL is inviting you to its annual Diwali celebration party. It will take place on November 10th, 2007 in Leuven and everyone is welcome. More details here.

In the Free Software Movement, we believe computer users should have the freedom to change and redistribute the software that they use. The “free” in free software refers to freedom: it means users have the freedom to run, modify and redistribute the software. Free software contributes to human knowledge, while non-free software does not. Universities should therefore encourage free software for the sake of advancing human knowledge, just as they should encourage scientists and other scholars to publish their work. ...

… And what about both wars against Irak? Title from F.C. Thompson’s correspondence to Nature in Nature 449, 139

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). ...

One of my photos on Flickr is now on Schmap, a website providing travel guides for some destinations in the world (only Europe, North America and Australasia for now). See here how it looks. What was interesting for me was the way they did it. I came to know it via an e-mail from Emma Williams (from Schmap) telling me my photo was included. And, at first sight (*), they correctly understand the conditions of the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0](Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0): attribution is on their website, as well as the “cc” logo next to the image. And they link to the the image on Flickr :-) ...

Following a comment from Alexandre on a previous post, I included SQLite in my performance test of database engines running under Java. What prevented me from using SQLite in the previous test is that it’s not a pure Java database and one have to use third-party JDBC driver and implementation classes in order to manage this database engine. IMHO, I also dislike another fact: SQLite does not enforce data type constraints ( and it’s a feature, not a bug) so everything is stored as ASCII string, even if you have very few other “artificial” data types. ...

In a somewhat strange move, Microsoft Research is going to sponsor BioMed Central 2007 Research Awards. Lee Dirks, director, scholarly communications, Microsoft Research: “We are very supportive of the open science movement and recognize that open access publication is an important component of overall scholarly communications.” I hope the other Microsoft divisions are going to follow this move and sponsor (or release their products as) Open Source and free software projects … More details on the announcement here.