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Archive for February, 2008

Links on this codeful thursday

February 28th, 2008

caff : how to make post-keysigning relatively painless and automated (i.e. automatically sign and send signed keys to other participants). Thank you Philip for the tip !

Interesting and slightly machiavellic video: Human Computation. Or how some plan to make you work for them without you even knowing – for an arguably good cause.

And good news, Peter Vanbroekhove put the FOSDEM talks from the Ruby/Rails Devroom up on the BRUG site.

And lastly, a pretty spectacular firefox add-on: lets you whoosh through pictures in 3D. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work on my favourite operating system. Booh.

1 comment »

Posted in RoR, Ruby, developer, semantic web

Independence day (remastered)

February 28th, 2008

I posted this about a month ago. Then i realised my boss probably wanted to keep it quiet, so that they could spin the news towards the customer. I removed the post, just in case. Well, he cat is out of the box now.
The dice are thrown, it’s done: i’ve handed in my resignation today (last month). I’m leaving the motherly breast of corporate employment. To spread my wings, but that might be one metaphor too many in this paragraph.
You’ll notice that i was a bit euphoric there – that has subsided somewhat.

I’ve felt for some months that this was the way to go. But being an adventurer of the cautious kind, i needed to read up on the subject, mull it over, consider it from all angles. And generally, to get used to the whole idea.

In a way it’s a promotion. I mean, i go from Senior I Consultant to Generalissimo of my own career.

In the long run the idea is to take some time out here and there to work out projects. I have a potential partner in crime, who for practical reasons couldn’t make the jump right now – but it might work out later.

So hrrrrrum <salespitch>
If you need a Ruby/Rails freelancer, i’m your woman. I’m also Java-enabled (and have done C and C++). I’ve worked on several OSes, flavours of Unix, Linux, and of course Windows. I’ve mostly worked on enterprise applications, but also some more arcane things, like porting C code between Unixes, or porting a framework from mainframe to Unix. I have a Master in AI, so i’m also familiar with machine learning techniques.
</salespitch> (cough)
I’ve got my first contract, and i’m lucky – a Rails project, and an interesting one.

Anyway, so a small step for mankind, but a big step for me. Exciting. Still exciting.

I had to go through 2 exit interviews in the meantime, which was less exciting. One of them was with the CEO. I realised during the interview that his briefing included 2 things:

my name

that CSC was sorry to see me go and that i could come back

but absolutely nothing else – the man had no idea who i was or what i was doing.
But i must say everyone’s been rather cool, overall.

4 comments »

Posted in developer, life

Post FOSDEM

February 25th, 2008

As expected, it was nice to be at FOSDEM. Saw a few familiar faces, which was nice. Missed a few, which was unavoidable.

Saturday, due to family occasion (and late out of bed), i only attended two talks.

One was the talk about software patents by Pieter Hintjens, where a new site was launched to killsoftwarepatents. Nothing really new (and a wee bit of advertisement for his company’s product wikidot).

The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl : the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime.

Sunday was a day with more subjects of interest. Actually, too many: the classic conference situation where you’d like to be able to clone yourself. I started off with Peter Vandenabeele en Koen Van Der Auwera’s talk about their newest Rails app, Time to production 63 days: pretty impressive.

OK, next time i’m tempted to participate to a keysigning party, i put the limit at 50 people. Yes, a signing party with 200 attendants will generate more trust. It’s also mind-numbingly dull, like a weird form of geek speed-dating. And when it’s at lunch-time, i need my calories. But it was an interesting experience. Still is, now i have to sign the keys of the 100 or so people i’ve exchanged ids with (sigh).

After that i went to, coincidentally, another talk about the Tux Droid. Or rather, its processor, and what his maker thinks about the hobby market for microcontrollers. Pretty interesting, but sometimes too in-depth and sometimes too superficial.

We whisked over to Koen’s talk about Shoes, which i’d seen before, though there were new elements. Talks here.

Last talk of the day for us was Mozilla Prism: it’s this project where they would make web apps into desktop apps. A sort of single-purpose browser. Your app would, like a desktop app, be able to run in the background and generate a foreground pop-up, or you could drag and drop files into it for upload. Lots of little ideas that are nothing new apart, but could give a worthwhile result when put together.

Anyway, thanks to the organizers, it was very well done indeed ! Be back next year.

Update: i was dog tired when i wrote this last night. Added some links today

1 comment »

Posted in Linux, Open source

Sneaky Music

February 22nd, 2008

Sneaky is a friend of Ray’s. He’s part of Fingathing, a unique combination of turntablism and double base (albums available at FNAC and other well-stocked disc store).

Fingathing is successful, which led to touring around the world, where he met Rina, his entrepreneur of a wife (also a very nice person). Now they’re both living in Berlin, and Sneaky’s working on a solo project.

It’s good stuff, instrumental, full of unexpected samples. The EP is on sale here, at artists first, which take only 10% from the sales (as opposed to 30 to 40% for iTunes, shocking).

Sample:

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Posted in music

Bilingual

February 22nd, 2008

emich has a nice story about how he came to be a perfect bilingual. He asks how i learned both languages of our beautiful country.

The story begins when i am 2 years old. My parents have lived in Germany (Köln) so far. Both my parents are from the deepest of the deep south of Belgium, french is their native language.

My dad has a job at a hospital in Gent, and my mum has an interesting opportunity in Brussels. Where, o where to live ? The answer turned out to be a godforsaken village called Aalter (it has grown quite a bit since).

Of course, being the cosmopolitan place it was, Aalter had the fantastic number of 1 (one) school on offer, in flat east-dutch. So i started school there. Like emich i had a very disoriented time (which i still remember !) wondering what was going on – nobody spoke a word of french.

When i was six we moved to Brussels, and I continued going to school in dutch – although it was another variety of dutch than Aalter, obviously.

I’m obviously pretty grateful for having been given this opportunity. Another unexpected result is that i enjoy learning languages, whether it be for real or for holiday. And a natural empathy for lost foreigners.

emich, you stole all the geeky biliniguals i know, i don’t know who to pass this on to Anyone ?

2 comments »

Posted in Belgium, life

Berlin, Berlin

February 20th, 2008

Last four days were spent roaming the city of Wings of Desire. Good days: i like this city. I’ve been there twice before.

This visit was different, however: my previous visits were in summer. Huge difference: continental climate, so while the summers are nice and warm, the winters are really miserable – think at least 5°C below ours.

East Berlin is my favourite part. Streets are wide, buildings are massive, and there are a lot of trees. It’s a rather poor place – and it’s certainly rather cheap. Thrift shops and flea markets country. A lot of tags (of the graffiti kind) everywhere.

This is displayed in all its bare glory under the winter gloom. However, when you’re there in summer, it’s warm and sunny. The leafy trees hide the seedier aspects. Everyone sits outside.

The low-cost aspect has its own rewards: lots of artists, musicians, writers, creatives come to Berlin because they can afford to have a decent life there. The art and music scenes of Berlin are as cutting edge as you get them in Europe.

And this fauna can loiter in the very laid-back coffee shops. I miss this in Belgium: you have pubs, and tea rooms, but nothing in between. In Berlin you can get Latte Mochachino and cake on every street corner, in places that are actually pretty trendy.

Anyway, here’s a video of the gig we went to the first night, with local friends. Pretty cool (although not terribly german). Will ring a bell if you’ve seen Scratch.

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Posted in Uncategorized

DrongenGirlGeekDinner

February 14th, 2008

Last night’s very entertaining Brussels Girl Geek Dinner at One Agency’s swank offices in Drongen had a theme: smart companions. Everyone was invited to bring her favourite electronic toy – which resulted in a herd of Nabaztags, one very cute Pleo, and a few other unidentified moving objects.

There was even a presentation by Melanie Chamaah from Kysoh, who talked about smart companions in general and the Tux Droid in particular. There was a spectacular attack of demo syndrom, unfortunately, since the Tux Droid broke his wing right at the start of the presentation, resulting in a slightly sinister machine gun noise (I’d seen the Tux in action before, since Kris brought his to a Barcamp, if i remember correctly).

Imke’s and Edzimbi’s Nabaztags got married, and then we got a goodie bag containing, amongst other things, err, a vibrating battery-powered companion. A pink flowery one.

Most of all, it was nice to have a chat with Karen, Nadia, Caroline, Paul, Pascal, Brit, Bart, Bart, the lama, Baudouin, Yves, and I may forget others. Good edition.

3 comments »

Posted in geek, so sue me

Links on this crystal clear tuesday

February 12th, 2008

If you like to classify your books: Goodreads. It’s LibraryThing, version social network, and with a nicer design (via Michel). Like it.

odesk: for freelancers to find contracts worldwide. I think I’ve seen other versions of this, but this application seems quite mature. I’d like to hear some customer opinions.

enlightening post about how to use someone’s browser history to customize his/her experience. Smart, but my instinctive response to this is Preferences -> Privacy -> always clear my private data when I close Firefox.

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Posted in books, privacy

The art of cooking

February 9th, 2008

Cooking is probably one of my longest-lasting and favourite hobbies. It’s a great mix of different skills and dimensions.

sensuality: taste, smell and feel are obviously an integral part of the process. Smelling of the spices, taste the preparation at several stages of cooking, poking and prodding the ingredients, try to reach the ideal consistency for cakes or meats.
meditation: i usually don’t need music or tv to accompany me while i’m cooking. It takes its own amount of concentration, and i feel usually more relaxed after cooking then before.
physics and chemistry: ever since i read a book about this, i’ve realized that much of what i learned in my materials engineering courses could be applied in the kitchen. Boiling points, molecules binding, polar-apolar, porosity, osmosis, you name it. Professional chefs wield thermometers. It’s a precise art.
design: for some reason a preparation will taste better if it also looks good. Some ingredients, like a sprig of dill or a cherry tomato are added purely for decoration. I think some restaurants build reputation solely on that aspect of their dishes.
the social side: it’s a pleasure to serve good food to friends and family. It’s a kind of gift, material love – and usually much appreciated.

I’ve known an alarming amount of guys who announced smugly that they couldn’t cook an egg, or that they burned pasta.
They looked, expectantly, for you to chuckle at this display of virility. Or maybe they expected you to find it cute, and feel like making them Boeuf Bourguignon or carrot cake on the spot.

Well, the effect on me was befuddlement. Not being able to cook an egg is a sign of mental retardation, and certainly not something to brag about. And you better find a willing girlfriend quick, or you’ll have a balanced diet of varied fast foods.

Update : On second thought – i admit: I don”t get football. So i can conceive that there are those that don’t get cooking. Agreed.

Anyway, i’ll go and make a speculoos tiramisu now, for tonight’s meal. Hehe.

2 comments »

Posted in life, trivia

FOSDEM

February 6th, 2008

FOSDEM is near, and i’m looking forward to it. I’ve only been 4 times, as opposed to real pure-blood open-sourcers who helped organized the first event 8 years ago. But then i only discovered Linux in 2000, much to my everlasting shame.

As a side note, wee article about Linus Torvalds commenting on Mac OS X. I agree with a lot of his remarks

Moreover, the marketing around OS releases such as Vista or Mac OS X Leopard is really mostly about the visual shell around the OS, rather than the core functions themselves, Torvalds said.

And he’s not exactly praising Mac OS X. I was considering buying a MacBook Pro, now i’m hesitating again. Truth be said, i feel quite comfy with my Linux desktop.

Although, i think i might give FreeBSD a shot. I mean, everyone knows Linux now, so it’s time to move on to a new edge. I’ll have to check out what’s on the OS horizon.

Anyway, back to FOSDEM. I’m looking forward to it because this year i’ll know some more people. Last few years i was a lone voice in the wilderness, trying to roust my apathetic colleagues to go and enjoy the variety of open source. No such luck. So i wandered around by my self, chatting at stands, enjoying myself, but in a quite solitary way.

This year, thanks to the geekdinners, i know some of participants (and even organizers !). I’ll go check out the beer event at that utter tourist joint, the Delirium Tremens.

I’ll sign my gpg key at the keysigning party. And I’ll be sure to stop by the Ruby and Rails devroom, where there’ll be some more familiar faces. Sounds like a good week-end to me.