Here are some links to read when I’ll have time: How to write comments ( Slashdot discussion) A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age The nose cells that may help the paralysed walk again ( Slashdot discussion) What Makes a Good IM Client? Failing ocean current raises fears of mini ice age ( Slashdot discussion) The only thing worse than flying is open source code ( Slashdot discussion) Now, back to work …

Oxford University is building a new facility to replace and regroup all its laboratories working with animals. In July 2004, after a campaign of protest from animal rights group, works stopped. They are now resumed ( BBC story). I am working with animals in my laboratory and, if I can understand some arguments from the animal rights activists, I can’t understand why they are going that far. A big part of the “modern comfort” that Europeans and North American are used to comes from and needs animal experimentation. For example, if we take any drug, it has to be tested on animal first before coming to the market. Of course, you can use in vitro cells but the complex behaviour of an animal (including the human) won’t be there. Animals are a collection of cells; but these cells are not the same in the arm or in the brain: they are specialised. How can you be sure that a general in vitro cell will react in the same way as an animal (including the human)? If we completely abolish animal testing, will you still go in court if a drug have side effects (that would have been spotted if tested first on animals) on you? ...

(For once, this post will be in French since I am refering to a French newspaper) Dans son article intitulé " Firefox souffle 18 bougies et poursuit sa mue", Eric Nunès parle de la sortie de Firefox 1.5, de ses parts de marché (notamment face aux autres navigateurs), de la fondation Mozilla Europe et du projet de loi français interdisant tout système de diffusion de connaissance n’intégrant pas un procédé technique de traçage de l’utilisation privée (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc. ; certains diront que c’est la fin des logiciels libres, d’autres que c’est la fin d’internet …). ...

Since I had some time during lunch, I discovered the LaTeX Beamer class. I’ve put what I did here.

I’ve recently discovered that a grid computing service was available at the University of Liege (where I am working), inside the Alma-Grid structure. The “Alma-grid” name is quite confusing since, if I understand correctly, they offer lab solutions for genomics, proteomics, etc., and bioinformatics is only a part of it. A Grid is a network of many computers sharing their unused ressources (CPU and/or disk storage) to solve large-scale computation problems. We can see that like a distributed computational and/or storage system. Well-known “grid computing” projects are, a.o., SETI@Home or Folding@Home. The main advantage of a grid is that you reach the power of mainframe computers in terms of CPU power and/or storage, without the cost of buying one since a grid usually uses common desktop computers distributed around the world. ...

The Linux Distribution Chooser: after a kind of survey, they give you a Linux distribution that can suit you. In my case, they were right since they gave me the advice to use the Fedora Core (that I am currently using). Booh, a static Web-Album generator (a French news from the author) CImg, a C++ template image processing library Do-it-yourself LED lightning for the house The Warning label generator :-) During this week-end, I’ve met a lot of people but I didn’t worked a lot (and my boss is asking for some results asap …).

In an interesting article on Wired, Bruce Schneier is showing the collusion between computer-security companies and an entertainment corporation. Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on your computers. A rootkit is a software usually used by an intruder after gaining access to your computer and in order to steal information, track your habits, collect your preferences without your knowledge nor your consent. Moreover, you can’t remove it since it will damage your operating system (the main software of your computer). ...

I am looking for a widget toolkit (a software bag of things that allow you to create GUI). I have two desideratas: I want to use C++ and I want to use it on GNU/Linux. I’ve found two big lists of widget toolkits: one on Wikipedia and one on atai.org. For the moment, I think of using gtkmm or wxWidgets but I need more information … Now, some grumpy people will tell me they only use text-based applications ;-)

In What Workplace Coding Practices Do You Use? (Slashdot), there are some interesting notes about coding practices. The main one is, of course, the use of comments (and good ones: synchronised with code update, not too short, not too long, not explaining obvious lines like (if x == 456) except if it has a very special meaning, it may be interesting to write comments first in order to have clear ideas of what we want from the code, etc.). ...