I have plenty of other things to do but, this evening, I decided to stop a little bit and try some LiveCDs I freely got at Fosdem. Since I did it very quickly and was tired, don’t take what I wrote for granted: LiveCDs are there to be tested. Download one and test it by yourself! The first LiveCDs I tried were derived from Sun OpenSolaris (and on the OpenSolaris starter kit DVD). BeleniX was quite cute, directly launching XFCE. Quite a few applications were there. Some refresh problems were also present in the console. An old USB key was recognised without problem, as most parts of my low-end workstation. ...

This Sunday, I attended only two talks. These talks were in the embedded track since I was with my brother who is interested in this. The first talk, “SH-2A Linux kernel” by Yoshinori Sato, was very difficult to follow since Yoshinori did not tell us what is the SH-2A microprocessor (it is apparently used in cars, a.o.) and his English was very bad. In the second talk, Vitaly Wool introduced XIP, a way to directly run portions of software from where it’s stored in a type of Flash memory (instead of being copied to RAM first). With XIP, you can reduce boot time (or at least the “time to splashscreen”, especially interesting in handheld devices where you want to quickly be “productive”). But you can have other occasions where speed of execution is more important than price (because the type of Flash memory used is more expensive than standard RAM). Yesterday, Jim Gettys said the OLPC laptop can boot very quickly but it was thanks to the use of LinuxBIOS (and maybe XIP?). I also liked when he took a pen to show us something on a slide and said that it’s “because my wife is here and she said it’s bad manners when I point at things with my finger”. ;-) ...

OpenStreetMap is a “project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.” I thought it was worth participating and more documented than the UPCT project. So I got a Locosys NaviGPS GT-11 and used it for the first time on the way to FOSDEM (and back). I did a small mistake by taking an interval between points of 30s: on a highway, at 120km/h, 30s means 1km and the road direction can change a lot. When I’ll have more time, the next step will be to do some edition and mark roads, highways, interesting landmarks, etc. Stay tuned … ...

I spent this Saturday at FOSDEM, listening to some interesting talks. Pieter Hintjens spoke about the Status of Software Patents in Europe. As the FFII president, he should clearly be against software patents. But, although his speech went in this direction, the 3 new FFII initiatives are diluting his/its position as well as the threat (the 3 initiatives are European patent conferences, the creation of the European Software Market Association to lobby the EU and a Campaign for Ethical Patents). Let’s talk seriously: software patents are not a solution and shouldn’t be allowed ; no trade-off. ...

My python script pyP2B was command-line only. Tonight, I played for the first time with Tk, re-wrote pyP2B as a class and thus added a GUI. Its webpage is updated ; the archive containing both command-line and GUI versions is here: pyP2B.tar.gz (3kb).

The Belgian Justice confirmed its original judgement by condemning Google News service to remove all articles citations from some French-speaking newspapers. The Google cache is also considered illegal in Belgium (see beginning of the story here). In an interview with the " Echo" (Belgian) newspaper, Alain Strowel, lawyer specialised in authors’rights, said the judgement is correct but also raised several questions: What is exactly behind the word “cache”? If a cached document is still formatted as the original document, I understand it could be forbidden by the law. But I guess all the search engines are using indexes where they put all the words from any webpage (regular webpage or newspaper article: it’s just HTML). What about these indexes? If they are considered as a cache, then any webpages from these newspapers shouldn’t be indexed and they’ll then be unavailable. Since they also sued Yahoo! and MSN (with much less buzz), this will mean they won’t be visible on the internet, except if you directly type their URL. Is that what they want? Alain Strowel said this judgement can bring back the debate about the exceptions to authors’rights. Currently, the exceptions are those ones (in French). With all the so-called “laws against terrorism”, I fear this will mean a reduction of the number of exceptions. It’s difficult to obtain web statistics on these newspapers websites. A lot of people guessed the number of visits will go down but it’s the first time a journalist (the interviewer) said this number actually decreased (and the lawyer agreed). Finally, this whole thing won’t make me change my opinion: ...

When I began my Ph.D., I don’t know if Flickr existed but, at least, I didn’t know it existed. So I didn’t know about this PhD vs Girlfriend comparison nor these work/motivation/courbature vs time charts. I didn’t get a canned Ph.D. where all the techniques are already used since a long time in the lab but then it would have been too easy! Finally, after my defense, if I have the opportunity to go to the USA, I’ll get this smart car (or the plate, at least). ...

I was surprised being tagged by Chris. One day, it could be interesting to study how and why people are making (web) links to each other (see the blogroll on the left, for example), what are the motivations, etc. Here, I posted a comment about recyclable bags on his blog. Apparently, Jeff Pulver started this “blog-tag” game “in which bloggers are sharing five things about themselves that relatively few people know, and then tagging five other bloggers to be it”. I like the way he calls it a “Virtual Cocktail Party”. Is it useful? I don’t think so :-D ...

OK, I am giving up the Jadoo project. It could have been a very interesting project. But if I don’t give up now, it will stay in my mind and prevent me from starting new projects or continuing more important projects. But it’s a temporary giving up: who knows how much time I’ll have in 2 or 3 months. For those interested in Jadoo, here is the short story: everything started with a post on Alexandre Dulaunoy’s blog, then I tried a first version and finally I wrote a small update. Files are still here: jadwrite.py and jadpub.py. ...

I am still alive. I am very busy. And things will not calm down soon: I have to finish my thesis. Nearly all my other projects are paused. Although writing entries are not time consuming, I am not sure I’ll be able to update my blog with (imho) interesting news, projects and software.