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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.). ...

Here are some evening news … While surfing on Slashdot and LinuxFr, I read two articles on yakforfree and openwengo. Yakforfree claims to bring the revolution to your voice communications by adding video. Of course, their main competitor - Skype - doesn’t offer it yet. But video conferencing software are already available since quite some time, and some of them are even free (as in free speech): gnomemeeting, e.g. OpenWengo is open source (GPL), backed by a French telecom company and offer voice, video and chat communications between PCs (MS-Windows and GNU/Linux). It is said to work on the open SIP protocol (I am wondering if one can contact a Wengo user with another Sip-based software). And, for the moment, they offer a 3 euros communication credit for every inscription (I suppose it’s for calling regular phone lines). Hmmm … seems interesting. If I have time, I’ll try it. ...

While looking at the User Interface guidelines from various well-known companies, I found this text stating The Importance Of Labels. In his blog, Jensen Harris (apparently working on Outlook at Microsoft) write about his experience with icons: icons only are not used by non-expert people although icons with label are extensively used. When reading the comments at the end, I saw an interesting thread … If we accept that people will preferably use labelled icons, why not try text-only buttons (instead of icons)? I probably won’t work since, when using the two (icon + label), you are simply making an association between the meaning that you can read in text and the symbol. Later on, you’ll simply look for the symbol, knowing that it has a certain meaning in a certain situation. ...

I am back to my blog. Since I am interested in many things, I would like to share them with you: neuroscience (mainly memory stuff), Open Access to scientific litterature, Open Source software and computer science. I see this blog like an on-line notepad, for small notes, thoughts, etc. And I am sometimes too lazy to publish them on my own website.

“Automate the creation of graphs with Graphviz” is my first article for the LinuxFocus magazine. You can read it in English and en français : “Automatiser la création de graphiques avec Graphviz”. Have a nice reading! :-) Now, I’ll continue to translate some articles from English to French. If I find another interesting software, I’ll write another article.

This morning, I got a fine from the police because, on Sunday, I drove at 70km/h instead of 50km/h on an empty road. :-( Well, maybe I was at 70km/h, I don’t remember and I didn’t pay attention at that moment. It’s just bad luck: I had to take care of my lab animals on Sunday. That’s why I was on this road. Oh, the beautiful shortcut: I am fined because I pay attention to the well-being of my lab animals. ;-) Anyway, since my wife got her temporary driving licence, I will have to pay attention to this kind of thing in order to give her good driving habits.

I had a problem with the default video player in the Fedora Core 3, Totem (it couldn’t initialize a Gstream object or something like that). Instead of fixing it, I decided to install MPlayer and I discovered two interesting websites: GnomeFiles, a GTK+ (Gnome) software repository Grey Sector, a RPM software repository that also has the RPMs for MPlayer with codecs, skins, etc. While we are talking about MPlayer, they need a new server: if you have some money to spend, please participate. And, about Gnome, the new issue of the Gnome Journal is out …

Open source software are more and more observed (if not used) in the biological sciences field. They provide all the advantages of Open Source software, plus they bring needs for consensus on file formats, data representation and manipulation methods. I’ve just read a short article from Greg Wilson ( in Nature) who is working with the Python Software Foundation “to develop a course that will teach scientists and engineers the 10% of software engineering they need to solve 90% of their problems”. Their goal is to “introduce them to some open-source tools and working practices that can reduce the amount of time they spend programming by up to 25%”. The course is already available here ( Software Carpentry) … for free, of course!

Soit je suis parano, soit j’ai raison de peu apprécier le raccourci suivant : Protocole non propriétaire = absence de contrôle = attention à l’extrême-droite … Résumé : le Vlaams Belang, parti politique d’extrême-droite flamand / belge, émet une émission sur les ondes AM, via le système DRM ( Digital Radio Mondiale, une sorte d’équivalent au DAB ou RSN), à partir de l’étranger. Cette émission de 2 heures est apparemment “captable” (“écoutable”) en Belgique, avec le récepteur ad hoc. Le problème est que cette émission / radio / parti n’a pas d’autorisation pour émettre en Belgique. ...

I am a statistics because I replied to this MIT weblog survey (I found the link on Alex Schroeder’s diary). Alex Schroeder put the “I made some Science” sticker on his weblog but, since I did some biological experiments today, this sticker wouldn’t mean anything on my website ;-)