Small is beautiful

April 26th, 2009 by Samuel Tardieu

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

November 20th, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

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 [...]

Silent death of a LG Flatron monitor

September 21st, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

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

August 6th, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

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 [...]

Battle Programme Shirase

August 4th, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

Am I the only one who would have loved to see a second season of Battle Programmer Shirase coming?

The crazyness of DRM

December 7th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

First I hoped I had misread the web page. Then I realized I had not.
Networked disks are very useful. At home, they allow you to access your data from any computer on your local network without needing to keep a machine acting as a file server turned on all the time. But wait! You could [...]

Using IPv6 by default with wget

October 31st, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

I was surprised to see that wget chose to use IPv4 over IPv6 when downloading a file. It looks like it is on purpose (I would call it a bad design choice). You can tell wget to prefer IPv6 over IPv4 by putting the following line
prefer-family = IPv6

in either /etc/wgetrc (system wide) or $HOME/.wgetrc (user [...]

Strange keyboard problem

October 19th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

Since about a week, I started to notice that I had been making a lot of typos in some commands I use frequently. For example, I became unable to type correctly

cd /usr/src/linux

which always resulted in

cd /usr/src:linux

(incidentally, when typing the above strings, I had to fix the first one and the second one came naturally buggy)
On [...]

Recursion and while loops in Factor

October 11th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

Tonight, I was willing to create a while construct in Factor taking two items on the stack:

a quotation to execute when the test is true
a test quotation

For example, I wanted to be able to find the smallest power of two greater than or equal to an arbitrary number (here 34098) by doing:

1 [ 2 * [...]

A Japanese student in Paris

October 5th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

Are you Japanese? Do you have a bachelor degree? Do you speak some French? Do you want to come study for one year in Paris for free in the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications? We teach computer science, electronics, embedded systems, robotics, optical communications and many other things.
If you answered yes to all those [...]


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