So after you buy a train ticket online through voyages-sncf.com, you are forced to receive a weekly newsletter. This is illegal since in France, users have to give their permission before being subscribed.
To put it further, in order to unsubscribe, you have to enter the starting date and the ending date of your “unsubscription”, that is to say you have to enter when you will start receiving this letter again. Funny…
This is the number of visitors we have every day at FFWorld.com since the release of Final Fantasy XII last week in Europe. This is not less than twice the traffic of a few weeks ago… Wow ! Big thanks to KujaFFman and Kain, the two main editors of FFWorld these days, who are doing a terrific job!
I attended to the first day of the FOSDEM conference on last saturday. This was the first time I attended such a conference so it was great to see all this crowd, the overall atmosphere and all the bearded geeks ;-) The talks I followed were quite interesting even if the impression I have is that it is generally difficult for great developers to be good speakers.
The first two talks, that probably everyone attended to, were about software patents in Europe and the OLPC (one laptop per child) project. While this is an interesting and challenging project technically speaking, one can wonder if a laptop is really the thing that children from Africa need most at present…
On the afternoon, I attended to Keith Packard’s talk on X.org, Linux BIOS talk and Andrew Morton’s talk on the Linux Kernel. I found the talk on Linux BIOS very technical and difficult to catch. On the contrary, the Linux Kernel talk was more qualitative, in the sense that the technical parts have not been very detailed.
Andrew Morton said something interesting about the kernel contributors. He said that a vast majority of them are professionals that are paid to work full time on the kernel. And the few contributors that are individuals do not remain private very long anyway. This quite cuts the idea that many people have that free software is made by passionates in their garage… He also explained why some companies care about paying kernel developers. It was quite interesting.
The French magazine Le Point establishes a ranking of the best engineering schools in France every year. There is one ranking for the post-preparatory classes schools and another one for the post-high school schools. This year, my school Telecom Lille 1 (formerly ENIC) is ranked 3rd in the latter ranking.
Several criteria have been taken into account such as the number of students per teacher, the budget of research, the time required to find one’s first job, the first salary, the order of magnitude of management classes, to name just a few.
The tuition fee is also taken into account. Telecom Lille 1’s is 880 € a year which compared to American or Japanese universities is nothing but compared to some other French public engineering schools is too much in my opinion. Students with a scholarship from the government only have to pay 440 € though.
All in all this is very good news for Telecom Lille 1!
Many LucasArts games ran thanks to a game interpreter called Scumm. A team reverse-engineered it and developed a multi-platform and open-source version of it called ScummVM. Provided you own the game data, you can thus play Monkey Island and other LucasArts adventure games on Linux..
So I tried Monkey Island 3 with it and it worked outstandingly well…
I am quite fascinated by reverse-engineering in general because things like disassemble a program and convert it from ASM to C or study a closed file format require a somewhat scientific method : change one thing at a time and analyze the results.
Anyway, ScummVM is a great achievement and a great program.
Being in China, I lately had to customize my keyboard layout so I can input french accents on my qwerty keyboard. I am using the standard X input method to do it and I found out it was really powerful.
The plugin “Did you pass Maths?” that I am using to prevent spam had an annoying bug: rejected posts still incremented the comment count. So I have made a little program to update my database with correct number of comments.
Here it is.
最近（Nihongo Benkyoのせいかな？）、たくさんの日本語のスパムを受け取った。Bogofilterが日本語だと、あまり強くなくなる。時々、面白いのある。たとえば、これが今日もらったメール：
<女と言う生き物>
うん。＝いや。
いや。＝うん。
たぶん。＝だめ。
私たちに必要よ。＝私が欲しいの。
あなたが決めて。＝答えはもう分かってるでしょ？
話し合いましょう。＝文句があるのよ。
それでいいわよ。＝私は不服よ。
この台所使いずらいわ。＝新しい家が欲しいの。
私のこと愛してる？＝買いたいものがあるの。
もうちょっとで準備できるんだけど。＝言っとくけど，ずいぶん時間かかるわよ。<男という生き物>
ハラ減った。＝ハラ減った。
眠い。＝眠い。
疲れた。＝疲れた。
うん。その髪型いいね。＝前の方がよかったかな。
その試着した服良く似合うよ。＝なんでもいいから早く選んで，家に帰ろうよ。
映画でも見に行かない？＝終わったらエッチしたい。
バンゴハンでもどう？＝終わったらエッチしたい。
退屈だね。＝エッチする？
愛してる。＝エッチしよう。
俺も愛してるよ。＝よし。言ったよ。さあエッチしよう
スパムが面白くて参考になるときあるんだね。
In the process of making my daily internet activities (reading emails through IMAP and a webmail, accessing to my bookmarks with del.icio.us…) accessible from any computer connected to internet, I have installed Gregarius, a web-based feed aggregator.
Feeds can be organized by folders, categories and tags. It seems to use a lot of AJAX. What I liked too is that anyone can read feeds (unless you protect your installation with a .htaccess) but only the administrator can mark news items as read. It does not require access to CRON.
Prior to Gregarius, I had tried out Planet Planet which was clearly too limited for my use as there’s no way of classifying feeds.
The result can be found here.