Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

AdaSockets 1.8.7 has been released

I just released AdaSockets 1.8.7. This is a maintenance release only, to adapt to the upcoming GCC 4.5.0 new Ada style warnings.

recoverjpeg 2.0 has been released

The new release of recoverjpeg is out! This new release can not only recover lost JPEG pictures from a memory card, but also MOV movies, thanks to the work of Jan Funke.

You can get recoverjpeg 2.0 and its cryptographic signature.

Handicaps, accessibilité et accès aux données

J’ai assisté aujourd’hui à une excellente présentation sur le thème « TIC et handicaps » par un groupe d’élèves de première année de Télécom ParisTech [1]. Lors de l’exposé est apparu un point qui a particulièrement retenu mon attention : alors que le site public de Télécom ParisTech a été conçu avec comme objectif l’accessibilité aux déficients visuels, [...]

Urbi is going open-source

Gostai just announced that its implementation of the Urbiscript programming language is going to be open-sourced in May 2010. Urbiscript is a prototype-based interpreted language inspired from a mix of Lua, Smalltalk, Ruby and Javascript amongst others with many features dedicated to parallel programming.

I spent the whole 2008 year working on Urbiscript at Gostai with [...]

ACM: who said old school?

Let us assume that you want to register for an expensive conference (e.g., SIGAda 2009). Let us say that you would like to get a discount, and decide to join the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) despite its retro name.

In this case, and in addition to dozens of emails, you will receive a wonderful full-page [...]

Small is beautiful

A friend of mine challenged me today to the number game. This is a classical one, where you have to guess a number between 0 and 999, and the computer will tell you whether you were right on or if you were above or below the chosen number.

Instead of doing dichotomy by hand or with [...]

The OVH-Google XMPP mess

Beware: trying to move your Jabber (XMPP) server from one host to another may result in your users not being able to reliably talk to users using Google Talk or Gmail chat. It looks like one way or the other Google caches the SRV records of your Jabber server and do not consult the DNS [...]

DADVSI : en arrière la musique

Il y a maintenant trois ans je prévenais, ainsi que beaucoup d’autres, du danger de la loi sur le droit d'auteur de droits voisins dans la société de l'information, plus connue sous le petit nom de DADVSI. Un amendement, surnommé par les bloggers et les journalistes « Amendement [...]

Silent death of a LG Flatron monitor

My LG Flatron L1915S monitor decided that it was tired of working so hard: the backlight now turns off after a fraction of second. Of course, it happened right after the warranty period expired, so it is unlikely that I can get it fixed. A fair number of users seem to have the same problem, [...]

20 years later, I’m proud of myself

Back in 9th grade. My science teacher was explaining to the class why carbon monoxide (CO) inhalation was dangerous: carbon monoxide molecules attach themselves to the hemoglobin, preventing dioxygen molecules (O2) to do so. The carbone monoxide doesn’t dissociate from hemoglobin under normal pressure, making it a long-term problem (ok, this was a simplification, but [...]