Mathieu Blondel

Until recently, as an internet gateway/router/firewall/access point, I was using LEAF Bering (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall) on a small fan-less appliance that uses a compact flash as a hard disk. It worked quite correctly but I was not happy with the fact that LEAF cannot evolve easily. It requires very specific knowledge and I felt like I was not really controlling it.

During last week-end, I felt somewhat courageous and started building a mini system based upon Debian which is a much more standard distribution and which I know much better. A requirement was that it had to be pack on a 128MB flashcard. I took some notes so I’ll describe below the steps I followed. Hope that it will help someone.

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While the controversial DADVSI law is seriously being discussed in France, I found myself rediscovering internet radios which are a good way to listen to music for free, legally. That’s also a good way to discover music which we would just not be able to listen to in our own country. There are hundreds and hundreds of streams listed on Shoutcast.

こんにちは。マティウと言います。ぼくの始めのメッセージで言ったように、時々日本語で書くつもりだよ。じゃ、今日書いてみるよ(^_^)\　ずっと前から日本に興味がある。ぼくが小さいとき、柔道をやってた。面白いのは昔分からなかった言葉が今は分かる（始めと待てっていった言葉）。他の子どものようにゲームが好きだった。任天堂のファミコンを持ってた（懐かしいなぁ）。で、十五歳ぐらいのとき、サイトを作って見たかったから、ファイナルファンタジーのサイトを始めた。エフエフ・ワールドというそのサイトはだんだん有名になった。三年ぐらい前から、日本語についての興味が生まれた。その前は日本語がなんか難しそうな外国語だと思ってた。何やらそれでも日本語を勉強してみようと決めた。今は、たくさんの語彙と漢字を覚えるようにしてる。難しいけどね。

今日はCourrier Internationalっていう新聞の面白い記事を偶然見付けた。日本の中小企業についての日本経済新聞の翻訳だった。その記事によると、日本の会社の携帯のシェアは10パーセントだけだ。だけど、日本の中小企業は中国と韓国より高い技術があるので、外国の会社がその中小企業に下請けを頼む。たとえば、Motorolaの携帯の中で70パーセントの日本のチップセットとICがあるって書いてあった。Ipodも同じだって。それは、やっぱり客が知らないね。ぼくはICがとくに台湾と中国から来ると考えてた。びっくりした。

Hello. My name is Mathieu. As I said in my first message, I intend to sometimes write in Japanese. That’s what I’m doing today. I have always been interested in Japan. When I was younger, I was doing judo. What is fun is that I now understand words I used to not understand at that time, such as “Hajime!” (Start!) or “Mate!” (Wait!). I also liked video games like the other children. I had a Nintendo Famicom (ah… feeling nostalgic…). Then, when I was 15, as I wanted to create my own site, I started one about Final Fantasy. This site, called FFWorld, has little by little become popular. About three years ago, I got interested in the japanese language as well. Before that, I was thinking Japanese was way too hard. For some reasons, I decided I would　give it a try all the same. As for now, I’m trying to study the numerous words and chinese characters. But that’s difficult.

Today, I came across an article from the Courrier International’s newspaper. That was a translation from Nihon Keizai Shinbun about small japanese companies. According to it, the market share of the mobile phones japanese companies is not greater than 10%. However, a lot of japanese subcontractors are hired by foreign companies because they are bleeding edge, much more than chinese and korean similar companies. For example, inside Motorola mobiles, 70% of the integrated circuits and other chipsets are coming from Japan. The same goes for Apple’s Ipod. Of course, consummers don’t know that! I naively believed that those IC were coming from China or Taiwan. So it was kind of a surprise for me.

I came across some interesting statistics about the frequency of apparition of chinese and japanese characters in the chinese and japanese wikipedia.

The first 100 characters for Japanese:
の に る ン と は た い し を で て が な 年 ス れ ル 日 ト イリ か あ ア
す ら ラ う っ り こ も さ ク月 ッ ま 大 タ ド 本 シ く ジ よ ロ レ き 学
フ ん カ 国 テ 道 一 人 ム マ 中 市 駅 つ ィ め バ プ そ コ お け ウ オ 線
用 行 者 グ 県 メ え 部 ど デ ビ 地 サ や ニ 東 キ わ 名 チ ナ 合 上 作 出

The first 100 characters for Chinese:
的 年 一 中 人 是 有 在 大 之 不 日 以 国 月 和 行 為 上 为 了 國 其 生 用
学 地 法 文 公 子 出 第 家 成 斯 世 主 作 而 他 者 十 民 三 可 名 部 自 本
分 前 二 代 也 於 西 下 政 所 方 个 理 于 到 王 多 事 南 定 利 物 使 天 德
同 要 得 特 小 及 北 道 或 立 会 高 能 后 由 外 新 等 如 教 科 山 台 時 克

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After a few weeks of evaluation, Fantasdic has finally been accepted by the GNOME accounts team and is now in the GNOME CVS.

To retrieve the source code from the anonymous mirror repository:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co -P fantasdic

I hope it will help Fantasdic attract more contributors, translators and above all package maintainers. As far as I know, this is the first Ruby program to be hosted on the GNOME CVS. Maybe a first step toward more adoption of that fabulous language in the GNOME community?

Spammers are everywhere. After mail spam, comment spam, wiki spam, in case you didn’t know, now there’s also referer spam.

The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url pointing to a spam-advertised site. Sites that publicize their access logs, including referer statistics, will then also link to the spammer’s site. This benefits the spammer because of the free link, and also gives the spammer’s site improved search engine link placement due to link-counting algorithms (e.g. Google’s PageRank) that search engines use.

So what can we do ? Of course the first thing to do is not to publish the site’s statistics. So for my site FFWorld, I made the access to statistics private but gave the login and pass on the site so real people can see them and Google won’t index them. Thanks to that first recommendation, you rob spammers of the only benefit they have. This is quite enjoyable.

But the fact is referer spam is a so simple technique, which only requires one little HTTP request (without the need to wait for the server response) , that it seems that even sites which don’t publish their statistics are blindly spammed. The nuisance is real for the site’s owner because it gives a bad image of the site’s traffic and referers. Currently techniques to fight referer spam involve URL blacklists, which as this link details, is an unwinnable race. So I’m left with the joy that spammers won’t benefit from spamming my site…

Today, a japanese friend and me have started the french wikipedia page for Péter Frankl, based upon the japanese page and some informations we found on his personal website. That was very efficient! What was more time consuming though was finding the proper name of each article we wanted to make a link to.

Péter Frankl is one of those fascinating people that can be called a “genius”. He not only has won the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1971 and speaks hungarian, german, russian, swedish, french, spanish, polish, english, chinese and japanese fluently but also is an accomplished juggler. He’s quite famous in Japan, where he lives, in fact more as a juggler than as a mathematician…