I was noticed today by a colleague that Google gives my site as no 1 when searching raoult. Cool!

This was a sad Christmas in my family in France this year. My mother was in hospital, my sister's mother-in-law passed away the day before, my father was alone at home, and of course I was not there, being on the other side of the Earth...
Could not be worse, I guess...

Jeff (Tokyo): C'est bien, quand ça veut bien marcher
Jeff (Tokyo): It is very good, when it is working

Bruno (Tokyo): Qui est-ce qui a appuyé sur le mauvais bouton, cette fois?
Bruno (Tokyo): Who pushed the wrong button this time?

Bruno (Tokyo): Y-en a un qui suit
(Sorry, if someone could provide me a good english translation for this one, please let me know!)

Still lazy...

We decided to receive a karaoke machine for Christmas. This will be funny (in fact we already have one, that we got for free, but it only reads VCD, and we can find only DVD in Japan).

I made a page for our Diablo II Gamers'Group. Feel free to join us! For timezone reasons, you should probably live in Asia if you want to have some games!
I will probably try to do something with Movable Type (or equivalent system) on this site. This permits to completely separate the design from the contents (with xml-based data). Looks cool...

Finally, and more sad, my mother just entered hospital a few days ago. I really hope she will be out for Christmas...

François (Hong-Kong): On est temps-réel. A 10 minutes près, quoi...
François (Hong-Kong): It's real time... Well, more or less 10 minutes...

Bruno (Tokyo): C'est trop bête de planter en même temps la prod et le backup
Bruno (Tokyo): It's too stupid to fuck up the main and the backup alltogether

Bruno (Tokyo): Je pense pas qu'ils vont nous emm... avec des questions
Bruno (Tokyo): I don't think they will bother us with questions

Cédric (Hong-Kong): J'ai trouvé une petite fonction, non documentée mais hyper pratique en fait
Cédric (Hong-Kong): I found a small function, non documented, but it's useful for sure

François (Hong-Kong): Pourquoi? Pourquoi c'est toujours moi?
François (Hong-Kong): Why? Why is it always me?

Bruno (Tokyo): Tant qu'on n'a pas dit "oui", c'est "non"
Bruno (Tokyo): As long as we don't say "yes", it's "no"

Fred (Tokyo): Y'avait un process qui trainait, pas réussi à le choper...
Fred (Tokyo): A process was hanging about, couldn't catch it...

Ooops... This page was not updated for so long! So, here is a quick reminder:

I went to France in June, for 1 month: 2 weeks for business purpose, and 2 weeks holidays.

Do you know Oze? This is a very scenic place, 200km from Tokyo, where I went for 2 days (we came back yesterday) with Li and Eddie - an office friend and Diablo II player :-)

By the way, trying to make some panorama pictures with my 6-months old (expensive) Olympus digital camera, I found that this option was disabled in the menu. Do you guess why? The camera simply checks if the memory card (SmartMedia) is an Olympus-branded one!!
Incredible. The only difference is a string in the header of the card. This is an unacceptable behavior from this company (of course this is not clearly explained when you buy the camera!!). More funny, SmartMedia is a trademark of Toshiba, and only 2 or 3 companies manufacture them.
This makes this attempt to sell their own (overpriced) cards simply pathetic and ridiculous (as well as disturbing for consumers, of course)...

Chirac was elected again as President in France yesterday, after the surprise two weeks ago (Le Pen, far-right candidate, being second after the first round). Although I was not really sure to be registered on the lists, I went to vote yesterday in Tokyo French Embassy. I had no problem.

I bought also a wireless network: The Apple AirMac Station (as it is called in Japan - I think the name is AirPort everywhere else), and a card for Li's iBook. I chose the Apple Station because I was not able to find the model I wanted in Japan (a Lucent Orinoco RG-1000). Only these two can be configured from Linux, AFAIK. I had a lot of trouble configuring the PCMCIA card, until I realized there was a new version of the AirMac software in the package. Shy on me :-)

We went with Boudicca on holidays in Okinawa. Weather was nice: We had rain nearly every day!! I understand now why we were the only customers in the hotel!! Next time, I will check the weather, and at least the good season :-)

One week later, I went to Sydney, for a business trip. As usually, there was rain. This is funny, as it happens every time I go. People there told me I bring the rain. My opinion is totally different: There is a conspiration in Australia, which tends to make the World believe the weather is nice there. This is obviously not true, as my experience shows ;-)

I bought a bi-processor PC this week... 2x1.4Gh. It rocks!! Then, adding some mirrors for some partitions, and it really goes fast...

More important, we decided to go on holidays to Okinawa soon... I never went there, but Boudicca will have her first plane trip ;-)

I am going tomorrow on business trip to Hong-Kong. As my wife is in China for 2 weeks (for the Chinese New Year), we had to send Boudicca again to a school. She will get there some education, but... in Japanese!!! I will also need to learn to say "sit down", "quiet", etc... in Japanese. It surely will surprise people when I go back to France :-)

My syster and her family came to Tokyo for Christmas. This is the first time in 4 years that we spend the end of year together!

Xpaire Malheureusement de trop nombreux webmasters se satisfont de la situation actuelle. On croise bien trop souvent des abrutis pour qui "si ça marche avec IE, c'est bon". C'est d'autant plus pathetique que ces meme personnes sont persuadees d'avoir affaire au meilleur browser web...
houplaboom Meme pas puique IE gere pas la transparence des png.
fifiz Et gnangnan gere pas les png et gnangnan Kro$oft et gnangnan ...
frenzy Pas le meilleur mais le plus utilise!
glandium Plusieurs milliards de mouches ne peuvent pas se tromper, mangeons de la merde.
YupYup Nivellement par le bas, ca a commence avec les emissions de Lagaff', et Microsoft continue le boulot sur Internet.

(forum.hardware.fr, Jan 2002)

Finally, our main motivation was the modern solution they proposed to us: Non-proprietary, since it was Microsoft.
Jean-Paul Bezie, CIO, explaining the restructuration of the French Red-Cross Intranet.

Enfin, ce qui nous a motive le plus etait la solution moderne qu'ils nous ont proposee: Non proprietaire, puisqu'il s'agissait de Microsoft.
Jean-Paul Bezie, directeur des systemes d'informations, expliquant la refonte de l'intranet de la Croix-Rouge Francaise.

(fr.news.yahoo.com, Jan 30, 2002)