FOSDEM is the annual Belgian meeting of free software developers. Like in 2005, I would only be able to go there on Saturday (Sunday, we are preparing experiments for Monday, in the lab). A car will thus do the journey from Liege to Bruxelles, on Saturday morning (8.00-8.30) and it will come back in the evening (at around 18.00-19.00, except if we stop in a nice Indian restaurant in Leuven). There are 2 or 3 seats left. If you are interested, please contact me.

I installed MS-Visual Studio 2005 this evening (I had to). The installation took around one hour. During this time, three persons are telling you the new tools and advantages integrated in their product. One is Indian and the two others are Asians. With a Vietnamese mother and an Indian wife, it’s a strange feeling when an occidental product takes Asians to advertise their product. (Well, even if you are not Indian nor Asian, you can still use VS2005 ; it’s just a post at 00:21)

Since a long time, I decided to provide a better stylesheet and organization for my website (the previous one was too simple but quite ugly). Now, you have a menu on the left and a RSS feed for the last changes. In fact, I use two stylesheets: a “big” one for displaying pages on your screen and a very small one that your browser will call if you decide to print a page (it removes the menu - useless when printing a page - and also removes most of the fancy styles). It is still simple but I hope it’s more beautiful.

Yesterday evening, I watch “Le Voyage des femmes de Zartalé” (Zartalé women’s journey), a film from Claude Mouriéras, on Arte TV ( description in French). We didn’t initially plan to watch it. But it was worth. In the Afghan village of Zartalé, half of the community suffers from tuberculosis. There is only one small hospital nearby (a journey of at least a couple of hours). Classes are given in the fields by the mullah. The film depicts the calm conflicts between traditional values and modern ones (medications -vs- prayers, illiteracy -vs- literacy, …) and the importance (or influence, if you like) of religion. ...

After the IR camera, I bought a dB meter and a light meter for the laboratory. They were the cheapest ones available (but they are still costly, around 150 euros, knowing money is coming from my own pocket). The dB meter measures noise level. In my office, it measured 62 dB (approximately). According to the Wikipedia article on Decibel, it’s between “Office or restaurant inside” and “Busy traffic at 5 meters”. The problem is that I am exposed to this continuous environmental noise everyday, at least 8 hours a day. Now I can put a number on the reason why I appreciate silence and calm. Fortunately, I only have a few months left, here. ...

Two weeks ago, I bought a small IR camera on eBay. I received it this morning and I managed to have some time to test it. The camera is quite small (approximatively 15cm long, 10cm in height without the mounting kit) and comes from a Chinese factory ( Shenzhen Lianyida Science Co. Ltd ; I have the LYD-806C CCD model). The box is in plastic. It is said to be “weather proof” but, anyway, this one will stay indoor. ...

I was looking if a XMLDTDs already exists for my field in biology (and, of course, I didn’t find any). It seems that bioxml.org is not available tonight (and wasn’t available before ; a WHOIS search told me that it is owned by someone from the bioperl project). I’ve found three collection of links to biologically-related DTDs: one by Paul Gordon, one by XML.com ( XML.com DTD repositories) and one by Andreas Matern. If you are interested, you can even try a seach in the XML.org registry. Most DTDs are focused on genes / genetics / genomics, proteins / proteomic, … but very few DTDs exist in other biological fields. And, of course, I am looking for a DTD in another field! All right, all right, I’ll try to write my own definition … ...

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? ...

I have quite a lot of work. Therefore, I don’t have much time to post here. However, some days ago, I found this cool “ad” in another lab: The first time I saw this one, I thought one can buy alkaloids, fatty acids, etc. for 0.3 - 0.65 euros from there. But, I quickly understood that it was not the case: these are parts of notes you can buy. ;-)

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. ...