Mathieu’s log

A few months ago, I set up a personal wiki on my server. By personal wiki, I mean a wiki that is for you and yourself only and that is not intended for anyone else to see. The advantage of the wiki is that you can read and edit it from anywhere and the wiki syntax is very convenient. Overall, I found the idea of a personal wiki to be very useful and I think it may help you organize your work/life as well.

TODO-list

I use my wiki to keep a list of things I want to do. This can be project ideas, books or publications I want to read, movies I want to watch. The only problem with a TODO-list is that you generally add more items to it than you remove so the list can grow quite fast!

Notes

Another thing I’ve been using my wiki for is taking notes. Every time I read a publication, I now write down the ideas I found interesting in the paper. For technical books, I try to make a quick summary after each chapter I read. Of course, this takes a little more time than just reading the book but I found out that 1) it helps me memorize the content better and 2) as I write down the summary, I sometimes realize that I didn’t fully grasp a concept and thus I have to clarify my understanding in order to write the notes. I also take notes of interesting companies, conferences, links, program commands I run across…

One important thing with taking notes is not getting too far in taking your notes - otherwise it’s like you’re rewriting the book that you’re reading or you’re recreating the internet…

Diary

I’ve also been using my wiki as a personal mini-diary. At the end of the day, I write down the meaningful things I did of my day and try to remember the interesting ideas I had. It didn’t become a habit yet so I forget to do it very often. Yet, one doesn’t necessarily have something interesting to say everyday so it can become a motivation to try to do something meaningful of your day.

Writing style

Another important thing to consider is that this kind of wiki is strictly personal — it should be protected with a password. Therefore you don’t have to worry about making typos or of what will people think. As a writing style, I make extensive use of bullet lists and I use a mix of English and French, depending on what comes out. Mostly for technical stuff, it often happens that words come in English rather than French so I write directly in English.

(English version below)

Voici une liste non-exhaustive et en vrac de difficultés que, d’après mon expérience, les Japonais apprenant le français rencontrent.

• Distinction entre les sons r et l, v et b, eu et ou.
  • Le français comporte 36 phonèmes (16 voyelles et 20 consonnes) tandis que le japonais n’en comporte que 19 (5 voyelles et 14 consonnes).
• Distinction entre les articles définis (le, la, les) et les articles indéfinis (un, une, des).
• Différences sémantiques entre les temps du passé: passés simple et composé, imparfait.
• Verbes pronominaux comme se souvenir.
• Distinction de son entre les pronoms il et elle.
• Le genre des noms - masculin ou féminin.
• La concordance des temps.
• Une tendance à thématiser.
  • En caricaturant, « la pomme, je l’ai mangée » au lieu de « j’ai mangé la pomme ».
• Les mots qui ne s’écrivent pas tels qu’il se prononcent comme monsieur ou oignon.

Cette liste n’inclue bien sûr pas toutes les difficultés que les Français eux-mêmes rencontrent… :-)

————————-

Below a non-exhaustive list of difficulties without particular order that, according to my experience, Japanese people learning French may encounter.

• Distinction between r and l, v and b, eu and ou.
  • French is composed of 36 phonemes (16 vowels and 20 consonants) while Japanese has only 19 (5 vowels and 14 consonants).
• Distinction between definite articles (le, la, les) and indefinites articles (un, une, des) .
• Semantical differences between past tenses.
• Reflexive verbs such as se souvenir.
• Sound distinction between pronouns il and elle.
• Noun genders - male and female.
• Tense harmony (agreement of tenses).
• Tendency to topicalization.
  • « the apple, I ate it » instead of « I ate the apple ». (exaggerated example)
• Words which are not pronounced the way they are written such as monsieur or oignon.

Something is really fascinating me on social networking websites like Facebook and since this is already the third time that it happens to me in only a few months, I had to write about it in this journal!

- Primary school friends and middle school friends know each other although I didn’t go to the middle school most of my primary school friends went to and my middle school is quite far away from my primary school.

- The friend of a friend I met in France is the friend of a friend I met in Japan (happened twice).

I’ve once been told that within a distance a 6 intermediate friends, everyone on Facebook is the friend of a friend. This is fascinating yet this sounds very plausible to me.

See also Six degrees of separation @ Wikipedia

I’m planning to use git, a popular new version control system, for all the developments that I don’t want to publish on a forge (like Sourceforge). Because it’s distributed, it’s possible to perform commits offline. This solves my nightmare of making modifications that break the project and spending hours to track down the problem. So far I like git very much. Here’s a memo of commands and useful information.
(more…)

Read on twitter.com

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Why? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely.

* Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know.
[...]

Haha. So true…

最近、このことを書く時間が見つからなかったが、明日もう日本に行きます。よろしく！取り合えず、何を日本にしに行くか少し話しましょう。今週、授業がやっと終って、試験を全部受けて、来週から研修が始まります。研修はいつも外国に行くいい機会で、ぼくは日本に行きたかったです。ぼくが行く会社は知らなかったけど、日本ではけっこう大きくて有名だそうです。旭化成です。もちろん、旭化成はとくに化学に関することをやっているけど、ぼくは厚木（神奈川）にある音声認識と音声合成チームに入ります。1年間です。今年勉強したこと（信号処理）と趣味（プログラミング)に関係があってよかったです。

二年前一ヶ月日本に行ったけど、あまり旅行しなかったから、今回は時間があったら、いろいろなところに行きたいです。他の予定の一つは一生懸命に日本語を学ぶことです。発音はきれいだし、漢字も文法もとても面白いし…日本語が上達するのに日本に行くのはぜったい嬉しい理由の一つです。

まぁー、とにかく、とっても楽しい経験になりそうです。

Bought a Nintendo DS yesterday mainly for playing Mario Kart online and just found out that it doesn’t support WPA encryption :-( ! I want to keep my network secure so downgrading to WEP is not an option, neither is WEP + MAC address filtering… The best solution I can currently think of is buying an USB dongle that I could plug and unplug on my laptop and that would act as a bridge between my network and the DS…

I saw people offering free hugs in Lille today. Amazing :-)

Un dossier intéressant sur le Monde diplomatique.

French people are sometimes said to be rude and arrogant… Some tourists may feel that because of the culture shock : our societies have simply different rules and different codes.

If you consider the French language itself, there are a few hints about the underlying French code of politeness. For example, you may talk to someone using “tu” (you) or “vous” (polite you). Incidentally, foreigners learning French usually have troubles to master the difference between “tu” and “vous” and it is difficult for them to choose the appropriate one regarding the situation.

When French people enter a shop, most of them say “Bonjour” (Hello) and when they leave, they say “Merci, au revoir” (Thanks, good bye). I am not sure it is the same everywhere in the world.

Likewise, in English, it would sound way too much if you said “Hello Sir” or “Hello Madam” to all the people you meet but it is very frequent in French (”Bonjour Monsieur, Bonjour Madame”).

I am writing about this because as I am getting older, adults now talk to me using “vous” (polite you) and kids call me “Monsieur” (Sir). Even though it happens quite often, I am always somewhat surprised about that… Hehe ;-)