Posts

In " Patenting the obvious?" ( pdf), you’ll read about people fighting against a patent on methods for making embryonic stem cells from primates. I won’t go into the details about the patent in itself (although I think that there shouldn’t be any patent based on or containing living “things” or part of it). I just want to share my surprise when I read this (emphasis is mine): In its 2 April statement, the patent office said that it accepted these arguments, and intended to revoke the patents. WARF has until June to respond to the decision, and if it is unhappy with the outcome, it can then initiate an appeal. The patents will be treated as valid until the re-examination process is complete — that is, until WARF’s response and the possible appeal have concluded. That could take years. ...

Nearly a month after the initial launch of my map of CCTV cameras in Liege, quite a number of people contributed to add cameras on this map (some people contributed heavily ; thanks to all of them). Currently, we have identified 79 cameras but it seems we are far from finishing this work since, according to some sources, there were more than 109 CCTV cameras in Liege at the end of 2006! Did this put you at rest: 40 cameras added in one go?

I’m very disappointed by this BSN meeting. This event is organised every 2 years so you might expect some quality standards. Well, don’t expect too much … (don’t expect anything, in fact). Morning talks were ok, nothing more: it was not better nor worse than any other congress. But the poster session was not organised at all and there was no support from senior scientists … Moreover, authors of about 1/3 of posters didn’t even deign to come and hang a poster! Most of senior scientists left before the afternoon poster sessions (usually, questions from seniors are more useful than other students’ questions); maybe 2-3 seniors were left (for the whole Belgium!!!). And the final touch, lunch was not free (not even sandwiches!) although we paid 45€ for registration (free for members - membership is 12€ per year for students). Instead we were redirected to the UAntwerp canteen … Are they not smart enough to find a sponsor? I think it would have been better to attend the Neuroinformatics Meeting only. ...

I’m wondering how people are using tags and how it differs from keywords usage in the scientific literature. Usually when I add tags on web services like del.icio.us or Flickr, I tend to add as many tags as possible. For example, even if a man is not the main subject of a photo, I’ll use the tag “man”. The rationale is we never know if, one day, I (or someone) would like to find a photo with a man and a tree (for example), the tree being the main subject. The problem is that I think I’m “diluting” the power of main tags. Another example … about a website helping find post-doc jobs, I’ll use the following tags: “jobs postdoc research science grants PhD job”. The problem is that “grants” is not really related (there are no list of available grants but only some jobs require grants and you never know what you’ll look for later). ...

(This post will be in French since it concerns French and French-speaking Belgians and gives links to websites written in French) Les élections françaises approchant (c’est demain !), un certain nombre de personnes ont émis de vifs doutes sur le vote électronique, doutes relayés par la presse ( exemple). Je voulais juste épingler le blog de Laurent Pieuchot, conseiller municipal d’ Issy-les-Moulineaux (près de Paris, en France). Il y décrit les cafouillages, gaffes, incertitudes et autres mensonges àpropos du vote électronique et des ordinateurs de vote dans plusieurs communes françaises. Et ils vont voter pour la plus haute fonction de l’État français … ...

In case someone will need it, here is a very small Python script that will convert your address book from SquirrelMail to a file you can import in a Yahoo!Mail address book: addressbookS2Y.py (2ko). To use it: save the “program” in the same directory as your address book you imported from SquirrelMail rename your address book from SquirrelMail as “addressbook1.csv” download and install Python (if not already installed) launch the “program” Voilà! You have now a file named “addressbook2.csv” that is suitable for Yahoo :-) ...

A lot of publicity is made around CCTV cameras in London (e.g. recently). But surveillance cameras are also invading other cities like Liege. You can be pro or against. The least thing is awareness: citizen should know where they are and how data is used. But nor the Liege city, nor the Liege police websites display a map of cameras. So I decided to create such a map here (in French). Of course, I cannot do everything by myself. If you know the location of some camera, just let me know and I will add them on the map. ...

Nearly 2 months ago, I got a GPS tracker. I discovered its antenna is sufficiently sensitive to work in my pocket so I took it on my Saturday morning bike ride. Back home, I was able to retrieve data from the tracker in various formats. What can I do with this data? Find the total distance I rode, of course! I am lazy ;-) so I decided to use the Kompass track file since it’s only a CSV text file (I should have used the GPX file format but parsing XML is still more difficult for me than a plain text file). With a rather simple Python script, I was able to store all the latitudes and longitudes in a collection of objects. But, hey, how do I compute the distance from longitudes and latitudes? ...

Short message for spammers: you lose your time trying to add irrelevant comments on this blog since no comment is published before I agree so. Moreover, I activated Akismet spam filter since this morning … But I doubt spam robots read notices where they put spam comments. Although I disallowed comments (and even pings) on some posts, I felt something strange this morning: more and more comments had to be moderated on this blog. By default, no comment are directly published. If the comment is relevant (even if the author has a different opinion than mine), I publish the comment (1 click). Otherwise, I delete the comment (another click) and disallow comments and pings (human contributors can still send me their comments by e-mail and I’ll publish them). From 1.50pm to 2.50pm (some minutes ago), I received 153 spam comments. Sorry guys, unless you found a serious flaw in this blog engine, comments will still be moderated by a human who dislike spam.

Did you know that the last 3 transactions you made with a Proton card (the Belgian electronic purse) are stored in the chip? I simply used the card reader/challenge solver given by my bank to have access to the online banking system. Usually, you press on the “M1” button. If you press on the “Info” button, you’ll get the last 3 transactions you made with Proton, the reader EPCI number, battery level and embedded software version. ...