Liege

After the promotion of Open Access (see Bernard Rentier’s blog) and a history of publications in Open Access journals (see this last article from the Cyclotron Research Center in PLoS), the University of Liege is slowly slowly publishing Open Source software too. The last free software published is exams, an assessment management system (for on-line exams, …). They chose the GNU GPL 2, apparently without the possibility to upgrade to version 3 (I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not). And you can download the source code here. ...

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. ...

My parents-in-law just came for some holidays in Belgium and they choose a nice, old-style house near Liège (Belgium), in Trooz. It’s called " Biche les prés". It has plenty of rooms, a nice, well-kept garden, it’s clean and situated near a forest, away from the city (20 km from Liège) … and it has a computer with GNU/Linux (RedHat 9 in dual boot with MS-Windows) and an internet connection (modem). Of course, M. Spirlet won’t give you the root password ;-) but, at least, if you left your laptop at work (like I did), you can read your mail with your favorite operating system.