Mac

A (not so) cold winter night

2008-11-03T18:39:00.002+01:00

Friday evening was indeed a cold winter night in Paris. So much so that I really thought over the idea to go the concert of I'm From Barcelona. Sure, I more than enjoyed last year's gig and I still expected some fun. But I had doubts.

First of all, I felt that a great part of the magic I had felt then came from a surprise effect that could not possibly occur again : I knew what to expect now. And that sounded like a good recipe for disappointment to me.

Furthermore, I had just listened to their last album a few times in the preceding week, and I had found it a bit more melancholic, darker than the first one (as the cover suggests correctly). I felt the touch was gone as all their communicative energy came through the joyfulness of their songs. How could they drive the audience nuts again with those songs ?

Then there was the 45 minutes queuing at the entrance of the concert hall in the freezing cold (I like to come early to get a good spot).

Then a nice french group (Revolver) played in the first part. Nice vocal harmonies, with two guitars and a cello, no drummer. Very nice, but not warming at all. Meanwhile, someone in the audience had brought his own balloons and started to inflate them.

Then the long awaited band began its show. Parts of the audience tried to jump, clap and scream on the first songs but there was something wrong about it. It was all fake, people desperately wanting to be happy but not being really. As feared, the new songs did not fit...

And then, Emanuel picked up a yellow balloon that had somehow landed on the stage :

I'm From Barcelona - Mingus

BOUM !!! Can you spot the moment when everybody starts being crazy ? My God, this concert was even better than the first one ! It went on like this for more than an hour, with more balloons, more confetti, more shouts and more joy. And it ended a cappella, in the streets of Paris, in a winter night that did not feel so cold after all.

Culture Mix

2008-10-09T14:43:00.001+01:00

As my friends know perhaps too well, I have the greatest difficulties to stand traditional music. No prejudice here : take any album of Raï, música de cobla, Kulning or Kan ha diskan and you can get me bored in no time. To death. That is only if I'm lucky, of course, because everyone is at the mercy of a sneaky pipe playing attack (I know I have been). Thus the rather famous English definition of a Scottish gentleman :

A man who knows how to play the pipes, and does not.

And I won't even link to Sardinian polyphonies. I am a true son of globalized music, one raised with The Beatles (don't thank me for this link) and now a humble worshiper of Róisín Murphy (but you already knew about this, didn't you ?).

But when I heard (the sweet sweet) Berry sing with Youss Banda last week, I was reminded of how great and hypnotic a simple mixture of traditional and pop music can be :

Berry - Demain

I think I have a photo somewhere where I can be seen playing the guitar in the Turkish country (it must have been near Istanbul), along with a local shepherd playing a flute. It was more than 15 years ago, but I remember vividly playing a theme based on We Got Married on which he had a great improvisation session. Music was our common language (his English was as good as my Turkish), even though our styles where so different. I had a similar experience in Bruxelles a couple of years ago with North-African immigrants playing the drums in the street. We had a great culture mix jam session that could have lasted for hours, had the police not interrupted us (it was 7am, and music seems to be considered as noise at this time of day).

So I gathered a playlist of my favorite mixed culture songs, and I realized they could easily fit in a playlist of my favorite songs :

Culture Mix

And if you listen carefully, I think you can even hear pipes in some of them.

Long time, no see...

2008-06-05T15:37:00.002+01:00

Like Jeff Atwood, I have have been carrying a USB memory stick for some time now, except that I started at only 32MB ! My current stick can hold 4GB now. Here is a small excerpt of my limited experience :

U3 was a very bad idea. No, I get this back : it was a very good idea, just very badly implemented. My current choice is the much more open PortableApps, which has the great advantage of making me think that I am the one in charge.
Hardware must be solid as a rock. For a key to last more than a few months in my pockets, this is an absolute must. I wasted too many too fragile memory sticks already.
Beware of performance. There are some real differences out there so get the facts before you buy.

But, speaking of performance, I found out the hard way that a single figure for read/write speed was not enough. I use my memory stick, among other things, to store my Mozilla (Firefox+Thunderbird) profiles, so that I can keep my history, my bookmarks and my passwords wherever I go. When my Intuix Smart Drive S300 U3 USB 2.0 - 2 Go decided to give up with life (the plastic case literally crumbled), I decided to buy another stick with the same chip inside, having been satisfied of the reliability and performance of the previous one.

So, I decided for the EMTEC Flash Drive S520 ReadyBoost - 4 Go. But all of a sudden, my Internet experience slowed to a crawl. Performance for the usual transfer of files was excellent, but Thunderbird took an eternity to launch and retrieve my mail. I then download Flash Memory Toolkit, a benchmark utility, to see what was really happening. Are are the results :

Before :
After :

See ? The old stick was consistent in writing for all file sizes. The new one was much worse for small ones, and much better for large ones. No wonder that writing cookies took so long ! So when you get the facts for your prospective memory stick, try to get all of them and check if they fit your usage.

So I got the facts much more carefully, and I eventually opted for a OCZ Rally 2 Turbo - 4Go. Like Jeff (size does not matter. Or does it ?). And I browsed happily ever after.

Now :

Treat Me Like A Woman

2008-02-19T17:38:00.001+01:00

I learned today that Lesley Douglas, the head of popular music at the BBC, suggested that (full article here) :

men "tend to be more interested in the intellectual side of music", while their female counterparts' relationship with the art form is one rooted in emotion.

That may be just too stereotypical, a common gender prejudice. But as far as I know, there might as well be something relevant about this point of view. In which case I would have to admit that I am a woman, though I bet (and certainly hope) most of you would not find out at first sight (except perhaps for my long hair and my very occasional wearing of high heel shoes). And if so, you you would not guess as well that I am black, due to my strong preference for low frequencies (also known as "bass").

I can live with that. What I find amazing is that some people can be interested in the "intellectual side of music". Music is emotion. The "intellectual side of music" is not music ; it is something that can be of some help when joining a discussion between erudite scholars (no harm intended, I like to join those sometimes).

Close your eyes, open your heart : this is where music starts. You are invited to open your mouth, provided it is not to discuss anything but to produce some kind of harmonious sound...

Treat Me Like A Woman

Glory

2008-02-01T19:14:00.001+01:00

Read this :

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I find the very first point debatable. And so do others. We are animals, after all. I would rather say that our species is the only one who likes (needs ?) to express a consciousness of its (alleged) uniqueness. But this is not my point. The point is that the more I read it, the more I agree with the idea expressed in this paragraph.

My first reaction was one of skepticism, though : I thought about The Beatles. They seemed like the perfect counter example : no doubt that Ringo Starr had very little implication in the creative process, and that George Harrison was left to his own creation, but what about the Lennon-McCartney association ? So many great songs are bearing both their names that anyone can be startled at the realization of how many of them one knows. But having read a great deal about it, I then remembered how much of a front the partnership was. Even in the good, early times, as you can read here :

Most of the songs they wrote during this time were mainly started or conceived by one of the pair, with the other adding in a line or verse, completing the song, or helping out when inspiration was lost.

In other words, they used their collaboration as a means to achieve what their sparks of creativity had started. In their lonely minds. Afterwards, when their artistic relationship evolved from collaboration to competition, the loneliness of their creative process was even more (if possible) extreme. And this was the period considered as many (including me) as the climax of their creativity.

Teamwork is a great thing, the means of the greatest achievements. It is about development, building, construction. It just has nothing to do with creation.

And this I believe : that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for : the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against : any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Amen.

Near life experience

2007-11-16T20:46:00.001+01:00

Times have been tough in the last two months as I immersed myself into work, mainly for bad reasons. I had to effectively close my mind to the world as I focused on my only objective : deliver software. That is why I stopped, among other things, writing in this blog. Not because I took it as a distraction, but because of this giant black hole that sucked all my energy. And you can add a bit of seasonal depression to the mix to make a very inert cocktail.

To which I now know the antidote. The show laid down in front of me (and the rest of the audience) this week by Róisín Murphy was so intense visually as well as musically, so professional and yet so natural, so energetic and still so poetic at the same time that she got me out my cave. Perhaps not in the Primitive sense, but still.

As I am getting my life back, bit by bit, I forked this blog to create another one, destined as a place to express my views and relate my experience in the field of software development. This one will remain what it has evolved into. Think of it as a Pandora's box.

Pandora

Thank you so much, Róisín. Please keep on being.

I Want You

2007-09-11T12:57:00.001+01:00

As falls is approaching, so is "le vent d'Autan", this powerful wind that blows in the southern part of France and is also known as "le vent des fous" because of its alledged ability to drive people crazy. And I have this strange feeling that this year it will blow in a much larger area than usual. I can hear its whispers more discernably every day, through the voice of its goddess who is preparing the release of her new album with new singles, remixes and videos.

I am writing about the deliciously insane (insanely delicious ?) Róisín Murphy, who releases her new single on october 8th. Have a good look (and hear) at this video and please Let Me Know if I am somewhat delirious :

Let Me Know

Still sensible ? Get out of your mind with Overpowered, the first single to precede the release of Overpowered, the album, due on october 15th

Overpowered

I can still remember vividly the night I saw her illuminate Paris. It was like

To dance around the fire
On the night of the dancing flame
To make the flame grow higher
In the light of the dancing flame

Róisín, the city of light needs you. And so do I.

My IDE is hot

2007-07-27T16:23:00.001+01:00

I know I am a bit late to join this debate, but :

I was new at my job at the time. After a few years spent in a few french companies, I was obviously not quite used to the internet as it had become since I left college, and I must admit I was as close as could be to miss the web 2.0 buzz. This blog was a longshot then.
July has only 3 full days left, and I realize it looks like my last oppurtunity to post something this month...
After I had this casual conversation with our new intern where I stated half jokingly that there was nothing wrong for a developer to keep the default Fisher-Price-like Windows XP theme (except that it looked rather unprofessional ;-), he set himself to tweak the colors, not only of his system, but also of his Visual Studio syntax coloring ! This reminded me of Jeff Atwood's old post.

So here it is :

Having been raised with a DOS Turbo Pascal environment, I got used to the theme. When I switched to Microsoft tools, I tried to create something close, but with a darker background, which I find more resting. You can download the settings here. I have also posted it on Ning (where you might want to rate it).

Love at second sound

2007-06-29T14:27:00.001+01:00

I hope you have already been stricken by sudden beauty : the grace of a movement, the fading colors of a sunset, the glimpse at a particularly gorgeous woman passing by... Part of the magic of these moments is that they just happen : they do not last. Their beauty can hence be (somewhat) eternal ; you will just have to cherish it in your heart (and in your dreams).

As for the beauty of (relatively) immutable "objects" (persons included), or easily repeatable moments (like listening to a particular song on your iPod), the opposite is true : perception of their beauty can evolve over time. And more often than not, I noticed that barely noticeable (at first) faces for instance could hold the most intense and addictive beauty, on the long term. And I found the opposite to be true as well : the most striking beauties could reveal to be boring after a while.

(...) ; but the face which, in silence, does not announce hidden mysteries is not beautiful, regardless of the symmetry of its features.
Khalil Gibran, Broken Wings

Blatant beauty does not stand the test of time , only beauty that has to be revealed can. Usually.

More than a year ago, I bought the last album of the french band Holden, Chevrotine. I had never heard about them before, and I had barely listened to a few seconds of the album in the store. I remember thinking it was alright (only), but I guess I compulsively had to buy something on that particular day...

When I happened to listen to it, I found nothing quite exciting about it. I gave it a try every few months, and was always somehow disappointed. But I knew there was this vague feeling of attraction growing. Even during the autumn, when its dense melancholy could have clashed with my own mood at the time. I then just fooled myself pretending to forget about it.

I rediscovered its existence a few weeks ago. It has since become one of my favorite albums, and I seem to enjoy it more every time I listen to it. I find the soft, sweet melancholy of the music, the melodies and the voices always more addictive. And the more I get into the lyrics, the more I discover moving meanings and hidden mysteries (and you know how I feel about lyrics). This is a great revelation.

The band seems to be on tour in Chile for now. They took this opportunity to have the chilean director Pablo Solís shoot a video clip for one of their songs :

Holden - Comme Une Fille

So, I must be a bit late for this, but I hope they will soon come back to France so that I can express my love to them. Live.

HowTo : Flickr from your Nokia N70 phone

2007-06-14T13:03:00.001+01:00

You have to know about Flickr by now : it is one of the most successful online photo management and sharing applications (others include shutterfly, snapfish, photobucket or Kodak EasyShare Gallery). They recently partnered with Nokia so that you can upload your photos to Flickr straight from your phone, provided it is a supported device and you have a web access. Check it out !

Thanks to a recent promotional offer from my network operator, I have been able to play a lot with my new N70 for the last few months : 39€ for this device was a good deal I think. And, as I already have a Flickr account, I was thrilled to try this new feature. Alas, only the N70 Music Edition is supported. End of the game.

But wait, are these two editions so different that this (seemingly) small application can run on one an not on the other ? I could not believe it, and I was right. So here is the (yet) undocumented way to set up your N70 :

Get the "Online share software". That is the piece of software that comes bundled with the Music Edition of the phone. As it is quite tricky to find, here are two links : Nokia Europe or Nokia Asia.
Install it on your phone.
Follow the instructions for the N70 Music Edition. The only difference here lies in step 1 : instead of "Options" → "Open Online Service", read "Options" → "Send" → "Web upload".

Well, this one was easy, right ? Enjoy !

Beyond words

2007-05-21T14:09:00.001+01:00

I often reach a massive wall of incommunicability when I try to explain that I consider music to be more important to a good song than lyrics. I mean a perfect song is a perfect combination of both great music and great lyrics allright. But I can much more than reasonably enjoy a song based on great music and poor lyrics. « But don't you think lyrics are important as well ? » Well, yes of course. But in fact no. Poetry is a great, but different (though somewhat related) form of art.

I began to think about it after I first had to pick up my favorite Beatle. I do not think one can escape this kind of question sometime in one's life : « What is your favorite song ? » « What is your motto ? » « What is your favorite colour ? » I tend to think the only interesting answers are those where you try to explain that there is none really. But the fact is that my favorite ex-Beatle is also the musician that made me discover my passion for music. I love you Paul. And the fact that people laugh (arguably rightly so) at your lyrics is hardly relevant to me. And yes, I love Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, even though it might be the worst song ever.

All these thoughts (about me, I am not trying to convince anyone that feeling otherwise is wrong) were confirmed last friday, when I had this quite mystical experience (shared by many others around me). With just a microphone, only using his body, and without a single word for more than an hour, I saw Bobby McFerrin incarnate the very essence of music.

Everybody has to know Bobby McFerrin. He is the guy who sang Don't Worry, Be Happy. That is a great song, with great lyrics indeed. He released several albums at that time, with songs (mainly covers) recorded on the same pattern, which is overdubs of his own voice. Each one of these songs were great, but I have to admit that it was a real pain to go through an entire album at once : I always got bored at some time, never really knowing why. And then, in 1997 came Circlesongs. What a revelation ! Check it out : it is a set of really addictive songs. That is the first of his albums that I have been able to listen to, straight from the first to the last track. And as for the lyrics, there are none. And yes, these are actual songs.

When I learned that he was touring again, I knew I could not miss him when he came to Paris. And there I was, not knowing exactly what to expect apart from a great vocal performance, when the lights at last faded out and he appeared on the stage. Before sitting on one of the two chairs and picking up his microphone, he responded to the audience cheering with a silent namaste like salute. Two songs after that, not a single word had been uttered yet, not even a lyric. But this was too late for that already : everything was understood, nothing had to be said. The magic was there, we were all in a trip in another dimension.

At once (I almost completeley lost track of time, so it is hard to give a more precise temporal description), the audience applause was cut short when we heard him talk in his microphone. When we realized it was only gibberish, there was more applause, only more frantic. Then, apparently needing more instruments than his own body to express himself, he used us. Still without a word, let alone a warning or a rehearse, he made us sing patterns and sang above us. It was like there was no stage any more, or no audience for that matter : we were all in the show together. We were the show. A true communion.

There were two sets (the show lasted for about 2 hours). In the second set, there were two guests (one of them his son), who remained as silent as the guru. It was only in the middle of a song in the second set that we heard our first real proper sentence :

Hey, this is fun !

More words followed in the following minutes (no lyrics though), but we were already hooked. The experience was slowly but surely coming to an end, and we would not let him disappear just like that, in a snap. We were high, but sowewhat conscious that hitting the ground again would be hard. So we called him back when he went off the stage. We shouted him back actually. He performed another song with his son, and went off again. Shouts. Claps. The lights went on. Some people started leaving. More noise. He came back, this time alone. He then came across the audience and started improvising duets with people randomly picked up. Amazing ! We on balconies had to stand up to have a glimpse of what was going on. When he got on the stage again to wave us goodbye, I think he realized there was so much noise that he could not leave again yet. Some more people started leaving. Even more shouts. Even more claps. So he improvised something again : he invited 12 people on the stage with him. When he managed to have only perhaps 30 people, he set up a choir. And then... Well, see by yourself :

This was fun, indeed. And without lyrics.

Memory almost full

2007-05-18T17:02:00.001+01:00

I have to tell you that when I started this blog, I really wanted to write about software development. And you can bet I will eventually do that. But for now, the most prominent form of art that seems to drive my emotions (and thus my interests) is music.

I have been lucky enough to discover Rose, then Malia came back, and now Macy Gray is on tour, Bobby McFerrin's sabbatical is over... All these great events (and others), it appears now, are only foreshocks. They precede the Big Thing like average ghosts preceded the coming of "Gozer". Get ready for this :

Paul McCartney is about to release his new album around June 4th ! And I guess we could all dance tonight to celebrate :

I know I will...

Then I will get me some well deserved (?) vacation and get ready for my idol.

NB : I love a good bass player...

Practically perfect

2007-05-04T17:56:00.001+01:00

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Take the topic of transportation systems : I quoted recently an article of The Independent that can make believe that Londoners would be very happy to trade their Tube against our Métro.

Well, the Métro is quite allright. Except for the noise of course. In some sections, you cannot have a normal conversation, let alone a loud one. Oh, and who cares really about air-conditioning ? Certainly not Parisians who like to sweat bullets from spring to autumn. And to gather in large groups in small carriages to enjoy their overheated and deafening trips during peak hours. To be honest, I found my recent experience with the Tube quite exhilarating. And the new Oyster system is so easy to use ! I could never find the courage to go through all the paperwork required to get the rather equivalent (there is no such thing as "pay as you go") Navigo in my own city when it took me 2 minutes of queuing and 3£ to get one in London.

Or so I thought. I just checked out and was able to subscribe online almost instantly. I almost cannot believe it was so easy ! It sure does not help for the noise, but after all this annoyance seems to quite well shared, not only in "old Europe", but in the capital of the world as well (where their EasyPay program does not seem to be half as useful as ours). So I will try to rant a bit less from now on. Even if it can be quite enjoyable at times ;-)

But one thing for sure the Métro will always lack, and this is no ranting, is that it will never bring me to such marvellous, moving and dreamful places as this one :

I will not leave my brand new Oyster card unused for too long, you can count on this.

Software Factory vs Usine Logicielle

2007-04-20T15:07:00.001+01:00

Software Factory is a term that has been very closely related to Microsoft, ever since the company began promoting it. In this two pages advertisement (June 2004), you can read :

A software factory is a product line that configures extensible development tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) with packaged content and guidance, carefully designed for building specific kinds of applications.

The advertisement is a mashup of a 666 pages book named "Software Factories". The book is a complete tour of what a Software Factory is, written in a rather heavy and poor style, which is probably why a lot of people still argue about the term definition.

But even more controversial, I found, is its french translation : literally "Usine Logicielle". Read Keith Short (co-author of the above cited book) in this article :

"The key is not to think of a factory like a turn-of-the-century sweatshop," Short says. "The image we’d like people to have in mind when they see the word ‘factory’ is much more like a production line staffed by robots, where humans are doing the creative tasks in setting up the production line, but the rote or menial steps are done by robots."

So what am I supposed to think of when I read this article in 01 Informatique, a quite renowned french magazine, about Software Factory plants ? It describes how software developers are packed in production centers (I am to blame for the translation) :

Pour planifier, suivre et réagir au plus vite, le responsable de production s'appuie sur une multitude de tableaux de bord. D'ailleurs, à voir le PC de Benoît Mompon, on se croirait dans la cabine de pilotage d'un avion long courrier. Voyants, tableaux, et graphiques en tout genre lui fournissent en temps réel les indicateurs de productivité, d'avancement des projets, de niveau de satisfaction des clients. (...) Il s'agirait donc, à première vue, d'une simple transposition des pratiques de l'industrie. A une nuance près : « Ce sont des hommes, et non des machines que nous gérons », martèle Benoît Mompon.

In order to establish plans, follow them and still be highly reactive, the production manager relies on many indicators. Benoît Mompon's computer could easily make you think you were in a long-flight jet cockpit. Indicators, tables and graphs of many kinds provide him with real-time metrics for productivity, projects advancement, clients satisfaction level. (...) It would seem, at first sight, like a simple transposition of standard industry methods. With one nuance though : « We are dealing with men, not machines », hammers Benoît Mompon.

No April's fools, no joke, no false friends : some people here do think (and I suspect dream) that a Software Factory can be a sweatshop ! Let them do.

More common now are people who think a Software Factory is in fact a set of breaking edge and almost never heard of but allegedly highly efficient tools like Software Configuration Management, Unit Testing, Bug Tracking, Continuous Integration server... Yes, it seems actually that a vast majority of open source projects would be based on a Software Factory (without most of them being aware of it, I guess ;-) ! Take a look at NovaForge, which is exactly that : the english version reads "software forge" (subtle difference), while the french version reads "usine de développement logicielle" (no difference at all).

But the worst part is that even Microsoft France uses the term "Usine Logicielle" in this acception. In this success story description, they describe how, by automating their tests and their deployment (thanks to VSTS, of course), they could create "une véritable usine de développement logiciel". Well, excuse me, but I see it more like a way to get the 4 cheapest points (out of 12) in the the Joel Test. 4 is far better than 0 allright, but this is far from giving you a Software Factory !

I am working on an actual Software Factory at NourY Solutions right now. And we are going all the way through our product line definition, our Software Factory Schema definition, our Domain Specific Languages definition. We are creating our own set of tools as well as configuring existing ones, developing our own set of libraries as well as integrating existing ones. Our work is still incomplete, but one thing is for sure : there is far more to a Software Factory than to use Subversion and CruiseControl. I even took it for granted that nobody could seriously develop software without these tools anyway ;-)

Flash Player update

2007-04-19T16:08:00.001+01:00

I have had a few problems lately with my blog : YouTube videos would not appear any more. I have tried to fix it in many ways (like embedding with javascript instead of HTML), but to no avail. Then I noticed that they would play correctly in Internet Explorer 7 (I am using Firefox 2.0). Filled with despair, I updated my Flash Player plugin from version 9.0.28.0 to version 9.0.45.0, and eureka !

You can check here what your current version is. So my advice is : stay up to date !

Imagine (there is no countries)

2007-04-18T17:08:00.001+01:00

According to the BBC, which uncovered recently declassified documents, France's Head of Council Guy Mollet proposed in 1956 to United Kingdom's Prime Minister Anthony Eden that the two countries be merged. The latter wisely discarded the proposal, but The Independent had a little fun imagining what the hypothetical nation could have achieved :

Fifty years on, we might have blended the best of France and the best of Britain. On the other hand, we might have shared our faults. France might have had our public transport and health systems. We might have had the ramshackle, French university system. We might have had French rates of unemployment. They might have had the London Tube, instead of the Metro.

We both might have ended up with French TV, British hospital waiting lists, the French police, British estate agents, French trades unions, British school dinners, French plumbers and Scottish joie de vivre.

Well, I guess the thought of it is equally scary from this side of the Channel (try to imagine a nation that shared French humour, British food, French musicals...). And we certainly would not have accepted too much mockery at our auld friends the Scots.

Furthermore, I do think that the world is a better place having both views on the world, both attitudes. Admit at least that it would be far more dull than it is today. Take for instance the United Nations Security Council Meeting on the 14th february 2003 : in this moment of history, I think that the very spirit of both nations is summed up. Let me refresh your memory :

So let me be glad that history has let us retain our identities, though it could have easily been the other way at times :

Blackadder - Back and Forth (Part 2 of 2)

Malia is back (or is she ?)

2007-04-11T11:58:00.000+01:00

I was so thrilled last month when I learned that Malia was to release her new album on the 16th april : less than a week from now !

Alas, her website still has to be filled with actual ... content, and it seems now, according to her MySpace site as well as to Amazon, that it will in fact be released on the 14th may :-( Meanwhile, here is a teaser made up from a showcase at the Pershing Hall Hotel in Paris :

I just cannot wait to listen to the whole thing ! Anyway I will have to... But she promised she would be there on the ~~9th~~ 12th september. This summer will sure be a long one.

Update : (04/11/2007) her concert is now scheduled on the 12th september...

Jag är från Barcelona

2007-03-27T10:23:00.001+01:00

Well, I am not really. But from now on, I mean from the moment the swedish band called "I'm from Barcelona" was born, this has become the "Civis romanus sum" of all party goers. And boy, do they know how to party ! They heated up Paris yesterday, and here is the only song we (the audience) could have a bit of a rest on :

Take easy lyrics, easy melodies, a lot of energy, a bunch of balloons, large amounts of confetti, a bit of water for the outside and a lot of beer for the inside. Shake it a lot. I mean a helluva lot ! And there you have a recipe for a long lasting joy ! A must have experience if they happen to come to your area.

Heja Tre Kronor ! Visca el Barça ! (Och tack till Henke).

Rat-ification

2007-03-26T15:29:00.001+01:00

I really had a good laugh at the movies the other day when they showed a teaser for Ratatouille, the next Disney/Pixar movie.

Art de vivre, humour : just (part of) what I love about Paris.

What ? Mmmh. OK, maybe not humour... But still :

It's so easy to find good food in Paris !

And then I smelled a rat : what kind of publicity is this ? Do they try to suggest that there are rodents in our kitchens ? So let me get this straight : we do NOT have rats in our restaurants.

What we have instead are cute little mice. We of course have bigger ones too, but they are actually located outside Paris. And if you are looking for the big thing, then check a big city out. Give the capital of the world a try :

This was the only place in the world this could take place. I am not talking about the rats, but about the fuss around them : breaking news, live reports, international coverage... Just (part of) what I love about New York City.

Malia is back !

2007-03-21T18:43:00.001+01:00

And so is André Manoukian. He composed her first album five years ago, which is really a must have : a wonderful blend of jazz and soul served by a amazing voice. I had the chance to see her in concert in Paris at the time, and was blown away (it seems I was not the only one).

But then her second opus, barely two years later, was a failure, both artistically and commercially. The voice was still there, but the magic had gone. According to her official website (I am to blame for the translation) :

« Au moment de l’enregistrer, nous étions encore dans l’énergie rock des concerts et moi et André avions envie de la même chose sur ce disque. » se souvient l’intéressée. « Je crois avoir joué " petit bras " » reconnaît André pour sa part. « Nous aurions dû partir en Louisiane et enregistrer avec des musiciens du cru pour donner une vraie touche bluesy. Au lieu de quoi j’ai voulu faire un compromis, et on s’est planté. »
« When the time came to record it, we were still feeling the rock energy of the concerts and I and André wanted it on the album. » she remembers. « I think I saw it too small » admits André. « We should have left for Louisiana and record with local musicians to get a real bluesy touch. Instead of what I have compromised, and we failed. »

That must not be an easy admission for an artist. But they say they have learned from their mistakes.

Now the pair is back, and you can have a taste of their next album, "Young Bones", on MySpace. And God, is this promising ! It is to be released on the 16th april, and I can't wait listen to it. And maybe I will be lucky enough to hear her sing live again. Maybe a cover of "Moon River" ?

HowTo : Scrobble from your Creative device on Windows XP

2007-03-20T14:01:00.001+01:00

I started to scrobble yesterday. There are some interesting feelings attached to it ;-)

Allright. For those who are as ignorant as I was two days ago, let Last.fm explain :

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile.

So I thought I would really enjoy scrobbling. The bad news is : my MP3 player is a Creative. And as far as I am concerned, there is a general rule about Creative devices : the hardware is usually quite alright, the firmware is somewhat average and the software environment (OS integration, standard media players integration) is poor at the best. And who needs yet another custom media player like the Creative Media Source, with its poor user interface and its only remarkable feature, being that it natively supports Creative devices ?

I don't. But then, I really wanted to be able to listen to FM radio on my MP3 player, so an iPod was not an option (or that is what I thought at the time). So here I am today, stuck with my unscrobbable Creative device. Only Winamp today is able to read my songs directly from the device thanks to a plugin. But thanks to Jurel, I was able to cook up a recipe that will allow the most willing of you to achive your dreams.

Ok, so here are the required piece of software :

You need a Winamp.
If your device is a playsforsure (my Zen Micro Photo is), you should be alright with the default plugins. If not, try the plugin attached to this post. The thing is : make sure to be able to access your portable device from Winamp.
Now you need iTunes.
Then install the Last.fm software with (at least) the bundled iTunes plugin.

That is all (!). Now you can start scrobbling :

Start the Last.fm software, and enable scrobbling.
Start Winamp, and create a playlist for the songs you want to listen to. Save this playlist as a file (*.m3u) somewhere on your hard drive.
Open the playlist file with iTunes (do NOT close Winamp !). There you can listen to your files : iTunes will read them through the Winamp plugin, and the scrobbler will detect the songs played by iTunes ! There are a few annoying things to note though. First of all, it seems that iTunes loses the natural order of the playlist, and some of the information on the tracks are lost (like the artist name) until you play them once. And the playlist files do not seem to handle Unicode characters very well (I happen to listen to some non-english music...).

And no, I do not speak spanish ;-)

(Belief in) God exists !

2007-03-16T18:46:00.001+01:00

It seems that the trend in modern science is no longer to try to prove whether God exists or not, but to try to explain why belief in God exists. At least this last quest should lead us somewhere...

I have had the chance to come across this rather long and instructive article about this debate (also available here). Not only did I learn a new word (though "spandrel" might be quite difficult to use in an every day conversation, I must admit...), but it gave me matter for a lot of thoughts on the subject that had been initiated by my recent reading of "The Selfish Gene" (Richard Dawkins), which I strongly recommend by the way.

So, to have it brief, evolutionists have taken this matter with high interest, and now

the debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and adaptationists.

Nothing like a good controversy to spice up things ! I am enjoining you to read the rest of it, as I could not easily summarize the subject. And if you think that science is not compatible with belief, especially on the matters of God, you might be surprised :

At first blush, Barrett's faith might seem confusing. How does his view of God as a byproduct of our mental architecture coexist with his Christianity? Why doesn't the byproduct theory turn him into a skeptic?

"Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people," Barrett wrote in his e-mail message. "Why wouldn't God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?" Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote. "Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me - should I then stop believing that she does?"

I just love this last sentence. It reminds me of the proclaimed life long quest of Hubert Reeves

While meditating on the glory of a sunset over the ocean it came to him that its astonishing beauty could be explained in “excellent mathematical representation of light’s behaviour.” (...) The equations themselves were “superb, mathematically elegant, and functional,“ but Reeves feared that his ability to reduce the play of light and colour to a result “perfectly predictable and calculable” from the right set of numbers might forever limit his instinctive response to the natural world. From that time onwards he set out “to reclaim the right to enjoy in peace the sight of pink waves”

And as for me, if you ever wondered, I am more versed into Fictionology, the only religion that cannot possibly starve my need for poetry ;-)

VS2005 SP1 is suckin' up your drive

2007-02-13T11:29:00.001+01:00

Remember this old song about Windows 95 ? Softwares on Windows have always been demanding on hard disks, and it seems that disk capacity will never be enough. As mine is quite fixed, I am doing my best to optimize disk usage.

First thing I do is to regularly clean my temporary folders. Here are sample command-lines for this :
DEL /f /s /q %SystemRoot%\Temp DEL /f /s /q %TEMP% DEL /f /s /q %TMP%

Second thing is to use the Cleanup Tool. Either use it manually (launch %SystemRoot%\system32\cleanmgr.exe and follow the instructions) or automate it.

But all this is not enough, and I recently checked my drive for wasted space. And I happened to find that my %SystemRoot%\Installer folder was taking up more than 2.6Gb ! I tried to google this folder to find more about it, but I found that documentation is rather scarce. I could only find that what lies in there is very application dependent, and more research showed me that in fact a single application was responsible for about a 2.2Gb bloat : Visual Studio 2005. Or, to be more precise, VS2005 Service Pack 1 alone was responsible for this. So for those interested, here are two links about this matter and possible fixes by Heath Stewart : about VS2005 SP1 and about the patch cache.

IMHO, there must be something wrong in design about this cache feature...

Venceréis pero no convenceréis

2007-01-17T16:44:00.001+01:00

Hatred and violence are bad. I am almost ashamed to write such a naive self-evidence, but recent events in Second Life show that evidence is not the same for everybody. Thanksfully this is only virtual, which must be why such levels can be reached, but still I cannot help thinking about "The Battle For Spain", the excellent book by Anthony Beevor about the spanish civil war : it has already been for real. And it was ugly.

An interesting part, among many, is the description of a speech by Miguel de Inamuno in Salamanca. He adresses the fascists, but maybe we all can learn something :

Venceréis, porque tenéis sobrada fuerza bruta. Pero no convenceréis. Para convencer hay que persuadir. Y para persuadir necesitaríais algo que os falta : razón y derecho en la lucha.
Miguel de Unamuno, october 12, 1936

You will succeed, because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. In order to convince it is necessary to persuade, and to persuade you will need something that you lack : reason and right in the struggle.

The whole speech, replaced in its original context, is extremely interesting and can be found in this Wikipedia article. It is also a lesson of courage in troubled times.

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition released

2007-01-17T11:54:00.001+01:00

I have been playing around with SQLite, which is quite effective and impressive. There is even an ADO .NET Provider that embeds in the same assembly the native SQLite API, so that your single dependency is a 538Ko assembly for a fully functional self-contained database. For all this, you will not get support for distributed transactions though. That seems fair, but no exception is raised when you try to enlist a SQLite connection into such a transaction (unlike the MS Access OLE DB ADO .NET Provider for instance).

Microsoft have just released their own version of an embeddable database. It could have been called SQL Server Everywhere Edition, but eventually we have SQL Server Compact Edition. Obviously, its main benefit is the compatibility with other SQL Server versions (especially the SQL syntax). There are even tools to "easily" synchronize your data with plain server hosted databases.

Beware though : if you install the SDK, you will also have to install the desktop client (or else you are very likely to get an error stating that the sqlceme30.dll file is missing...). And deployment does not come free : a private file-based deployment means to copy 8 files (including the ADO .NET provider), amounting to 1.6Mo.

The ADO .NET Provider documentation itself is rather scarce (mainly a redirection to the standard SQL Server Provider documentation). So the main thing is that distributed transactions are not supported, which is OK. Another thing is that the SqlCeCommandBuilder class does not support named parameters (the protected GetParameterName(string) method throws an exception). That is usually not a problem unless you use this hack. Oh yeah, and the SqlCeConnection.GetSchema methods are not supported (throw an exception) as well...