Something new on kernel.org. The latest stable version of the Linux kernel is no more a 2.4.X, but instead was changed to 2.6.0!

The Release Notes will show you the details of the last changes. If you don't know what is really new in 2.6, just read this article, or this french translation.

So what to do tonight? Install 2.6, or watching The Return of the King, which was also out today?

We found an apartment in Paris last week, after visiting more than ten. This one is well situated, in Rue Cambon (1st district), just in front of Chanel Headquarters.

Of course, this last detail could be somehow dangerous for my credit card ;-)

We should get this apartment from middle of next week, but won't be able to live there before we receive our shipping from Japan, probably during the first week of December.

We decided yesterday that it was not worth staying in Japan a few more days, as we initially planned. We took the plane yesterday night, and arrived in Paris this morning at 4:00.

Our hotel is near Les Halles, quite a good place (fucking AZERTY keyboqrd).

Here is the final schedule for our last days in Japan:

• Oct 8th: Sayonara party at the office
• Oct 14th-16th: Business trip to Sydney
• Oct 17th: Sayonara party at home. I will need to push everybody outside before 8:00 the next day because...
• Oct 18th: Moving company will empty our apartment (the travel will take 6-8 weeks to Paris)
• Oct 19th: We send some cases to Narita airport, and go for a few days to Kusatsu
• Oct 23rd: Flight to Paris
• Oct 27th: First apartments visits in Paris

I bought a new toy last week: The Zaurus SL-C760 is really a cool device... Launching a shell on such PDA is simply like a dream ;-)

I had first to localize it to English (everything is japanese by default). Then I started playing: Importing my Sony Clié NR70V data, installing a cross compiler on my PC, and compiling my first program for the Zaurus (Hello World! of course!).

I came back yesterday from a business trip to Hong-Kong. Not much to say about it... Next one will be Sydney next week...

In the meantime, Li's mother arrived in Tokyo for a few days visit... She should leave on 16th.

I just found in my email archives the following message. LOL!

In Japan, they've replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft Error messages with Haiku poetry messages.

For those who slept through Junior High English class, Haiku poetry has strict construction rules. Each poem has only 3 lines and a total of 17 syllables: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.

Haikus are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity -- the essence of Zen...

Your file was big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows has crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
So beautifully

With searching comes loss
And the presence of absence:
"My Novel" not found.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao-until
You bring fresh toner.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Hokkaido (Northern Japanese island) has been hit by the strongest earthquake worldwide since 2001, at 4:50 this morning. At least 243 people were injured, 16,000 homes were left backed out, and 41,000 people were evacuated. Fishing boats also capsized, a train derailled, a fire started in an industrial plant, etc... The city of Kushiro was hit by a 1 meter tsunami.

I could even feel it in Tokyo!

This earthquake was centered in Pacific Ocean, 100 kilometers east of Hokkaido's eastern coast and 800 kilometers north-northeast of Tokyo.
Its magnitude was 6 on Japan Scale (out of 7) and 8.0 on opened Richter's scale.

It was followed by some aftershocks, a few hours later. One of them was 6 on Japan Scale (7 on Richter's). These aftershocks could go on for up to 10 days.

Really a good time to leave Japan, isn't it?

Vous vous souvenez peut-être de nos tribulations sur les Femmes Chinoises (à lire absolument si vous voulez comprendre la suite)... En voici l'épisode n° II. Tout a commencé quand Xavier, de Hong-Kong, m'interpelle pour une affaire urgente, cet après-midi (désolé toujours pas d'accents):

Xavier: BRUNO!!!!!
Xavier: Y A UN PB
Xavier: T'ES LA?
Bruno: oui
Xavier: ca chie
Bruno: du genre?
Xavier: y a cedric qui part en couille la
Bruno: pq?
Xavier: ca chie
Bruno: pq?
Xavier: il repart en vacances a canton
Xavier: FAIS QQCHOSE!!!!!!!

Quelques secondes plus tard:

Bruno: Cedric?
Cédric: oui
Bruno: C'est quoi ce bordel?
Bruno: Tu petes un plomb, ou quoi?
Cédric: Ce dont Xavier t'a parle ?
Bruno: oui... Tu pars en couille apparemment
Cédric: non y'aura personne dans l'appart et on va faire du sport: on a booke 2 heures de badmington tous les matins, l'apres midi c'est piscine et le soir jogging
Bruno: ouais ouais... Y'a pas de badmington a HK?
Cédric: je pourrais le faire a HK mais c'est moin cher la bas et y'a plus de place. En plus faut booker 3 semaines avant
Cédric: la on va y aller tranquille et a 2 (pas a 25 ou 30)
Bruno: Et y'a que Canton, avec les mooncakes, lune a la tele, itou itou?
Cédric: ce sera des vraies vacances ce sera sans sa famille!!!
Cédric: c'est fini les mooncake et la pleine lune (sauf pour toi je t'en ai garde un)
Bruno: la derniere fois vous etiez 2 a y aller aussi, non?
Bruno: les 28 autres vous atendaient je suppose
Bruno: qu'est-ce qui te dit que c'est pas un piege?
Bruno: et que la plein lune t'y aura pas droit pendant 4 jours (ainsi qu'aux mooncakes specifiques de Canton - desole, j'ai reverifie, y'a vraiment que la que c'est pas bon)
Cédric: oui ils y etaient mais la sa grand mere va pas bien... donc ils sont partis a Shanghai, c'est pour ca que j'ai dit ok pour aller a canton
Bruno: ils sont partis a 30?
Cédric: ses parents, sa soeur et qq amis... dans les 30 beaucoup sont des amis
Cédric: tu connais les familles chinoises, l'oncle de la tante par alliance.... c'est des amis pour nous et pour eux c'est de la famille
Bruno: je sais: Li, fille unique, a au moins 30 freres et soeurs aussi ;-)
Bruno: ok ok... Et ils vont dire quoi qd ils vont savoir? Ca se trouve ils le savent deja d'ailleurs, et prevoient un retour discret. Ce serait drole
Cédric: et oui mais s'ils revienne je le verais bien... 30 personnes mais des chinois pas grands ca passe pas inapercu
Bruno: pq, ils sont petits?
Cédric: ils sont petit enfin compare a moi ils sont pas bien grands
Bruno: et compare aux autres de Canton?
Cédric: ils sont dans le moule... dans la chine du sud ils sont pas bien grands (HK, Canton,...) c'est un peu mieux a shanghai mais bon ca reste inferieur a 1m70
Cédric: donc c'est petit
Bruno: La prochaine fois, reflechis a tes choix de petite amie. Pense a une copine de Dalian. Je t'ai deja parle du couscous, de la sole meuniere, de l'absence de mooncakes et de pleine lune a la tele, je crois. Eh bien ils sont grands aussi... Donc on les repere mieux!
Bruno: tu pars quand?
Cédric: demain midi, tranquille pour eviter la cohuie a la frontiere
Bruno: attends. Lis ce que j'ai trouve sur http://www.wheeloftheyear.com/2003/solarlunar.htm:

October Lunar Cycle
10/2 Waxing Quarter Moon
10/10 (3:27 a.m. EDT) Full Moon
10/18 Waning Quarter Moon
10/25 (8:50 a.m. EDT) New Moon
10/31 Waxing Quarter Moon

Bruno: donc t'auras la nouvelle lune cette fois-ci. Ca te changeras... En fait c'est plutot cool, non?
Cédric: M'en fous... si y'a que moi et ma copine y'aura pas de tele (on la regarde jamais on a meme pas d'antenne a la maison, ca ne sert qu'au DVD)
Cédric: donc on verra peut-etre la lune dans un coffee shop ou dans un resto servant du couscous ou de la sole meuniere :-)
Bruno: tu veux pas plutot y aller semaine prochaine?
Bruno: comme ca ca t'eviterais de me refiler les mooncakes pourris que tu me gardes...
Bruno: Tiens, je viens de changer d'avis... Omar et moi on va a HK demain plutot... Bonne idee...
Bruno: A dans 2 ans a Paris... hehehe :-P
Cédric: je t'enverrais les mooncakes par la poste... de toutes facons ce sont des oeufs de 100 ans donc on est plus a une semaine pres de transport
Bruno: je reviens dans 5 min. Pause clope (ca, ce sera censure sur mon site web, ca, a cause papa et maman) :-#
Bruno: me revoilou
Bruno: Super, y'a un defile de mode aux Bacchanales...
Cédric: des photos!
Bruno: Y'en a une, on voit meme un bout de teton. Cool. On y est alle 2 fois pendant la pause clope avec Fred, et a chaque fois on est tombe sur le teton. Trop cool!
Cédric: vous ne vous etes pas battu tout de meme pour un bout de teton (tu n'oubliera pas de mettra ca aussi sur site... une fois que Li parlera francais ca deviendra marrant)
Bruno: En fait, je l'ai dit a Eddie... Lui il prefere les defiles... euh... comment dire. Regardes plutot ca, tu comprendras: http://www.shiromi.com/html/pictures/events/paulmarchand20030626/show1/index.html
Bruno: Je pense que c'est depuis qu'il connait Kamo-san... Il a plus le droit aux autres tetons ;-)
Bruno: Non seulement il y a plus droit, mais il doit se taper des defiles a la con
Cédric: il est bien au courant que c'est pas des filles ca mais de mecs... juste pour savoir... si un jour on fait un tennis ensemble et qu'on prenne la douche apres... que je sois prevenu :-)
Bruno: Il a pas de bol non plus. Un peu comme toi en fait...
Cédric: pourquoi, Li te laisse regarder les tetons des autres ?
Cédric: ca m'etonnerait
Cédric: je suspecte qu'elle ne connaisse pas tout
Bruno: Non, mais moi je ne prends pas de photos. Ou alors elles sont dans une section privee, sans liens, protegee par ssl, le tout crypte sur disque... Comme ca, les tetons ca peut passer...
Cédric: je comprends
Bruno: Mais lui, il peut pas s'en empecher, des qu'il prend une photo, c'est sur son site (NDbr: Desole, Eddie ;-)
Cédric: c'est pas de pot... moi je suis tranquille elle aime pas les ordinateurs et ne sait pas trop bien s'en servir (genre un hidden file suffit, pas besoin de cryptage) mais pour Eddie c'est plus embetant...
Bruno: Eh oui...
Bruno: Bon, c'est a nouveau dans la boite ;-)

All these worlds are yours - except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
-- Arthur C. Clarke (2010 - Odyssey Two)

Galileo, launched in 1989, passed away by hitting the dense atmosphere of Jupiter three days ago, on September 21.

The decision has been made quite a long time ago, to prevent any possible collision with Europa, which salted water could hide some form of life.

For more information, read the details of Galileo's last day, and watch the End of Mission webcast (very interesting!), from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Galileo page.

As I was in Singapore, Li told me that Earthquakes were a hot subject on Japanese TV.

But the Big One did not came as Yoshio Kushida predicted. But when I called Li the next day (on Saturday 21), she told me they just had a quite a good one (4 on Japan scale).

My immediate thinking was: Is Kushida right? In all case, his prevision impresses me a lot. This could be (we can hope!) the beginning of a fiable method...

Still in Singapore, I watched on BBC World channel a long report on the next Big One in Tokyo. It was not what we call an optimistic one :-(

According to this article, a Japanese scientist thinks that a big earthquake (magnitude of 7 or more) is likely to hit Tokyo today or tomorrow.

The last big one in Tokyo made 120,000 casualties in 1923. Even if building are surely stronger than 80 years ago, they would probably not resist a magnitude 8 earthquake.

This article has a sentence that I don't like very much: Officials and scientists agree that Tokyo is overdue for a huge earthquake.

The good news is that I go to Singapore tomorrow morning, for one week ;-)

Just in case you feel not ready, you better should read this survival guide and this one... This cannot hurt, at least (some kind of Pascal's Wager!).

I just got a new mp3 player... It is the size of a lighter, and it is also a FM radio, and voice recorder... The model is a SonicBlue Rio SU30.
Perfect, isn't it? Of course, my Linux box can manage it (this was my first criteria!).

My only small problem is to understand how to navigate all these japanese menus (I spent half an hour to find the volume switch!).

La petite amie de Cédric (Hong-Kong) est Chinoise, tout comme ma femme. Il a eu une expérience douloureuse l'année dernière lors d'un voyage à Canton dans sa belle-famille. Il nous a parlé pendant des mois de ce voyage!

Mais ne voila-t'il pas qu'il me demande hier de lui autoriser des congé pour... retourner a Canton... Voici le dialogue qui en a suivi lors d'une session de messagerie instantanée (désolé, pas d'accents; j'ai seulement corrigé quelques fautes d'orthographe):

Bruno: Canton??? La premiere fois c'etait une erreur, soit. Mais cette fois-ci c'est une faute, tu en es bien conscient?
Cédric: C'est ca ou c'est eux (les parents de ma copine qui viennent)
Cédric: Et eux qd ils viennent c'est pas pour 4 jours
Cédric: C'est mini 1 mois
Cédric: Je fais un arbitrage en ma faveur
Bruno: Ca va alors ;-)
Cédric: Et puis je suis sur que Canton doit etre sympa a cette periode l'annee
Cédric: On va deguster du super mooncake en regardant la pleine lune a la TV chinoise .. le pied
Cédric: toi aussi tu vas gouter a ca
Bruno: c'est quoi mooncake?
Cédric: ta femme t'a pas initie ?
Bruno: non...
Cédric: c'est des gros gateaux avec de la pate de cacahuette et des jaunes d'oeufs de 100 ans (ils ont pas 100 ans mais ils ont vieilli et clairement ne passeraient pas l'inspection sanitaire en France)
Cédric: et c'est a gerber total
Bruno: En effet... Ca et la pleine lune a la teloche, tu vas t'amuser... Je comprends pour l'arbitrage
Cédric: demande a ta femme de te faire essayer le mooncake ca vaut le detour
Bruno: euh...
Bruno: non, merci.
Cédric: si si
Bruno: non, non, sans facons.
Cédric: Bon je t'en enverrais un
Cédric: y'a pas de raison que je sois le seul
Bruno: si, si... Moi c'est pas Canton, c'est Dalian
Bruno: ya pas de mooncakes la bas.
Cédric: Ils mangent ca aussi la bas je suis sur
Bruno: non, non.
Cédric: meme a HK on en mange
Bruno: on mangeait des steak-frites, des soles meunieres, du couscous etc... Pas de mooncakes, et pas de pleine lune a la tele non plus
Cédric: j'y crois moyen a ton histoire
Cédric: http://www.mooncake.com/
Cédric: du monde entier tu pourras les commander
Bruno: ca a l'air sympa...
Bruno: http://www.web-holidays.com/moon/recipes/mooncake.asp
Bruno: je me renseigne d'abord...
Bruno: ils disent pas que les oeufs sont vieux...
Bruno: je pense que c'est juste a Canton... T'as juste pas de chance en fait...
Cédric: Ca a pas le gout du bon oeuf frais achete a carrefour en tout cas
Bruno: ;-)
Bruno: j'ai bien envie de recopier une partie de ce dialogue sur mon site web ;-)
Bruno: faudrait pas que ta copine apprenne le francais ;-)

e had some fun (I had at least!) during these long nights playing Diablo II, one of the best games I ever played.

I just closed our Games web site, and the associated mailing list. I will just keep the pages available for good memories...

But it does not mean the game is totally over: I still hope to play some games with this group members again! Timezone difference will be the only problem, and, as far as I know, this was not really a problem when whe finished very late ;-)

By the way, If anyone wishes to take over the Games page (and all the stuff around), and revive this group, please let me know, I would be happy to give you the whole data (with no copyrights!).

If you can read this entry, it means that you are accessing my new website, which is hosted at hostitcheap.
In fact, the move will be quite painful, as their php setup is difficult to use: For instance, they use PHP-CGI instead of PHP apache module, and some functions, such as virtual() are not available. Of course, I was using virtual() everywhere!

I guess I will have some more surprises during the first days of the move...

Cédric (Hong-Kong): "And about the small bug in Sydney software, I would say..."
Guillaume (Sydney): "... This is NOT a bug, this is a feature."

Cédric (Hong-Kong): "Et a propos de ce bug a Sydney..."
Guillaume (Sydney): "... Ce n'est pas un bug, c'est une fonctionnalité"

Google has a new calculator. It even knows the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!

Just get the result here. Cool, isn'it?

More seriously, the calculator works well, and kuro5hin has an interesting article about it.

Kamo-san (Tokyo): Jeff, you should improve your communication skills.
Kamo-san (Tokyo): Jeff, côté communication, tu devrais faire des efforts.

Sébastien (Tokyo): "Jean-Paul, what are you doing all the day?
Sébastien (Tokyo): "Jean-Paul, tu fais quoi toute la journée?"

Kamo-san (Tokyo): "Are you guys awake?"
Kamo-san (Tokyo): "Vous dormez, les mecs?"

Jeff (Tokyo): "Is Bangalore doing all this?"
Sébastien (Tokyo): "Are you interested to join them, Jeff?"
Jeff (Tokyo): "C'est Bangalore qui fait tout ça?"
Sébastien (Tokyo): "Tu veux y aller, Jeff?"

I already discussed about SCO claims about Linux, but many events came since then, especially since the beginning of this week.

For instance, on Monday, RedHat filled a lawsuit against SCO.

This could be a non-event, as RedHat looks much smaller than SCO, and the SCO-IBM battle seems more important, but I was surprised to learn that SCO market capitalization is no more than 120 millions USD, ten times less than Redhat (and 1,000 times less than IBM). This probably means that RedHat has the power to fight.

Yesterday, SCO announced the Linux runtime licence prices. Are they smoking again? I have a personal server at home and I should pay 700 USD (1,400 after Oct 15th), just because they ask me to do so?

Imagine that someday this story happens in litterature domain: An SCO-like publisher would attack readers for buying a copy of an hidden book, and ask them a $10 licence to read.

But let's come back to SCO adventures... Then answered yesterday to RedHat with this letter:

Matthew J. Szulik
CEO
RED HAT, INC.
1801 Varsity Drive
Raleigh, NC 27606

Dear Matthew,

Attached is the letter I discussed with you during our July 31, 2003 telephone conversation. Instead of actually sending the letter, I thought it was best to telephone you and speak in person to see if we could resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation. We left the conversation with a preliminary agreement to meet and continue our discussions further.

To my surprise, I just discovered that your company filed legal action against The SCO Group earlier today. You, of course, mentioned nothing of this during our telephone conversation. I am disappointed that you were not more forthcoming about your intentions. I am also disappointed that you have chosen litigation rather than good faith discussions with SCO about the problems inherent in Linux.

Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy.

I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.

Yours truly

Darl C. McBride
President & CEO

Of course you noticed the last sentence. Ooops! I am really afraid!

Stupidity is the great constant in this universe.

I am sure that she was looking at me when I was leaving our home this morning.
And Li found her inside the closed toilets this evening, when she came back.

What happened?

Apparently, today, Boudicca managed to close the toilets from the inside while she was alone at home. We only hope it was late in the evening, as today was very hot in Tokyo, and this poor little girl was catched in a very dark place with no water :-(

I am going to Paris tomorrow.

The target is mainly be to meet people in office and to start finding an apartment (it looks very difficult apparently). I will stay there two weeks, while Li will join me this week-end, for one week. I will meet my family too, they will come to Paris for a few days next week.

Cédric (Hong-Kong): "Petite Question": If ever you receive a mail with such subject coming from Bruno, DO NOT OPEN IT!!! It's a deadly virus which will infect your next 2 working days ...
Cédric (Hong-Kong): "Small Question": Si vous recevez un jour de Bruno un mail avec ce sujet, NE L'OUVREZ PAS!!! C'est un virus mortel qui va gâcher vos 2 prochaines journées de travail...

After upgrading to blosxom 2.0, I made some changes in this weblog, by:

• Replacing my old crontab generated tree by blosxom's dynamic plugin.
• Adding the archive plugin (the calendar list in the right column). I had to patch this one to make it XHTML 1.1 compliant.
• Adding the paginate plugin, that gives links to next and previous pages, as well as to all available ones.
  This plugin is still buggy: The last entry in the last page is a ghost one, and it does not use the current category to compute the number of pages. This last problem is probably due to the structure of plugins itself.

I also switched my main page from Server Side Includes to a PHP one. In fact my SSI scripts were going really long, and difficult to maintain. With PHP I was able to rewrite the whole in a few lines, while still being able to fully control the page.
Eventually I added a lot of rewrite rules in my apache configuration, to be able to "hide" the most of the weblog structure (the php is hidden, old links are redirected, etc...).

This was eventually officially announced this friday in our company: Eddie and Eiko will marry!
Apparently the secret was well kept, as it was a surprise for many (we were really a few to know about it).

I wish them all the happyness!

I know, I am quite late, as I am living in Japan for some time now, but I just discovered Chitose Hajime this week-end. I usually do not write here about music, but I will make an exception ;-)

She is a singer, coming from a 50 people village in Amami Islands, not far from Okinawa.

So what?, will you ask.

The answer is: She has a once-a-century voice!

The kind of tremolo she can sing is simply unique. The music itself is generally soft-rock, with some reggae rythms.

If you don't live in Japan, you may order her music on www.cdjapan.co.jp web site. You will not regret it!

Bruno (Tokyo): Devinez qui est #1 sur google avec "prout poil"?
Bruno (Tokyo): Guess who is number #1 on google with "prout poil"?

You maybe don't know Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, even if she was really famous in her country, India. Here are a few words about her life:

Born in 1963, in a poor low-caste family, she was married at 11 to a man who was 3 times her age. After being abandoned by him, she was raped on a number of occasions, and eventually was kidnapped by bandits.

At the age of 20, she became quickly a legend when she became the "Bandit Queen", and the leader of a group of dacoits (robbers) in north and central India. On Feb 14th, 1981, as she was 18 years old, she attacked the Behmai village, and killed 22 people with the help of her band; One of the victims previously raped her and killed her own lover.

She became the number one police target, but, helped by the population, she always avoided to be captured.

She eventually managed a deal with the government, and, before a crowd of 10,000, she surrendered in 1983 (left picture) to the authorities. She spent the next 11 years in prison without any trial, three more than she negociated.

After being released, she became Member of Parliament in 1994, and tried to fight for the oppressed people. She was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997!

She was shot dead by three men on Wednesday, 25th July 2001, outside her residence in New Delhi... She was 37.

Here are some links:

BBC News article and biography
goodbyemag.com biography
Philip's Phoolan page (good starting point)
Articles about events following her death
Biography and interview (1996). Read only this one if you are lazy!

I removed the weather page: As it was written in JSP and used a postgresql database, I will not be able to transfer it to a hosting company (they mainly offer mysql & php).
I also removed the weblog subsection, and moved it as the main page.

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, n'oublie pas ton pre-meeting la prochaine fois.
Kamo-san (Tokyo): C'est quoi, un pre-meeting?

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, don't forget to fill out your pre-meeting, next week.
Kamo-san (Tokyo): Pre-meeting? What is that?

According to netcraft , some corporates switch from Linux to Windows Server 2003. Colt.com is one of them, and made this clever move in May. I will make no comment about the uptimes shown on the above graph...

...

I changed my mind, I will make one: Haa-Haa-Hoo-Hii-Hiiii... One reboot a day... Huummphrrrrr....

LOL!

Do you remember the famous Munich decision to switch 14,000 desktops from Windows to Linux, on May 28?

USA Today reported two days ago in this article what Microsoft tried to prevent this switch to the Open-Source OS. This deal was so important for M$ that were really able to give a lot! Here are some examples:

• They authorized Munich to have a new upgrade only after 6 years, instead of the usual 3 years contracts.
• They offered to install only Microsoft Word on some PCs, instead of their usual forced bundling of all Office applications.
• They were going to offer the City millions of dollars for training and support.
• Steve Balmer himself went to meet the mayor end of February, in order to explain why Microsoft had the best solution, and to make some special offers.
• They made a final offer of $21.7 million (from the original $36.6 million proposal).
• And much more!

But the City, mostly for strategic reasons, eventually decided to go for the more expensive Linux solution ($35.7 million against Microsoft's $21.7).

One interesting part is this quote from Christine Strobl (Munich council member): "And the more Microsoft discounted, the more it underscored the notion that as a sole supplier, Microsoft could - and has been - naming its own price".
I know very well some Corporates which did not get that point at all, and prefer to go the opposite way, wrongly thinking that an unique supplier means cheaper prices ;-)

This web site (except the statistics page which I won't change) is now XHTML 1.1 Strict compliant.

At the same moment I removed the javascript section (which was pre-downloading the top menu images, and changed their color when the mouse was over). The home page, for instance, is now 30% smaller (only html code), and less than half of the original size if we consider the images download.

Linus Torvalds announced today in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List that the test1 version of the 2.6.0 kernel is ready for testing!

He also asked people, especially the Linux vendors, to start testing it, to make the release of 2.6.0 quicker than the last one - "2.4.0 took about seven months from the pre1 to the final release" - and to have everybody ready when the 2.6.0 comes out.
You can download the test1 version on the kernel.org site. You will also find a small readme file there ;-)

When I was around 12, and scouting, I went to a summer camp somewhere in France, and we had, the last day, a cooking contest. My patrol won the dessert prize with the (soon famous, as I publish it today) Canouga ©. I strongly recommend you to try this recipe as soon as you can. Why not tonight?

You will only need a pan, a wood spoon, one liter of milk, and one kilogram of sugar.

Now, the difficult part: Pour the milk and sugar (yes, everything!) in the pan, then put on fire. I don't know if the fire should be strong or not, as we used a fire camp at the moment, but it was probably very hot.
As soon as it is on fire, never stop stirring it with the spoon... Ensure that the sugar mixes well with the milk, and that nothing is burning, that's the challenge...
Stop the fire when the whole becomes hard...

That's it! It is time to serve the canouga © to your guests, and to think about buying a new pan, as you will never be able to properly clean the one you used.
Maybe you will need to find new friends too ;-)

What puzzles me is that the canouga © won the contest! I don't want to imagine what the other patrols made ;-)

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, arrête de m'embrouiller la tête...
Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, stop bullshitting me...

Japan Government is going to switch its 800,000 employees payroll system to a Linux system, designed by Fujitsu Ltd, IBM Japan Ltd, and Oki Electric Industry Co.
The design contract is worth 188 million yens, and the development itself could cost between 2 and 3 billion yens. The new system is supposed to halve the operating costs of the network.

This weblog section will be reserved to the Linux switchs around the world.
As I started it only today, let's start with a June 6th The Register article, which explains the recent Linux moves in Europe.

According to news.com, the announced website defacement contest is currently taking place, but there are chances that "web site attacks was mainly a flop".

The zone-h.org website is not accessible anymore, after it received 500 defacements links. As h-zone is the "official" repository of the contest, it is unclear how many sites have really been defaced ;-)

Due to h-zone.org trouble, the person running the challenge extended the contest for another day.

Jean-Paul (Tokyo): D'un point de vue technique ça marche, mais, dans les faits, pas du tout.
Jean-Paul (Tokyo): From a technical point of view it works, but, in reality, it does not.

news.com reports that a website defacement contest will take place this Sunday. The winner will be the crackers group to get the more points with a maximum of 6,000 defaced sites. The points are given as following:

• Windows system defaced: 1 point
• Unix, Linux or BSD system: 2 points
• IBM's AIX: 3 points
• HP-UX or Apple's OS-X: 5 points

zone-h.org expects 20,000 to 30,000 defacements during this contest. They also noticed that the number of defacements decreased the recent days, while the scanning of web servers increased. They think that the crakers are currently looking for targets, and are waiting the contest time to launch the real attacks. This is not really surprising, for such a serious matter: It is really important to know who is the best :-)

If you want to have fun, just have a look on Zone-H defacements archives, and on their Hall of Shame!

It is interesting to compare the latest Netcraft web servers survey to the January ones.

In terms of active sites , Apache has now 67.54% market share (66.42% in January), and IIS has 23.98% (vs 24.79%).
Open source is going well in some areas!

Another interesting point of this survey is that Network Solutions is moving back a quarter of a million sites to Solaris after they moved them to IIS one year ago. Hum... I wonder why they come back ;-)

I just made public the statistics page for this web server. These statistics are collected since 2000, using the excellent awstats software.

One of the most interesting data is the queries on search engines which links to my site. For instance, this link show these queries for 2003.

Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 (which is based on Mozilla 1.4 too) have been released yesterday. Mozilla is available first for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Other versions (Solaris, OpenVMS, etc...) should follow soon, as usually.

Yes, I know, I did not update my pictures gallery for nearly one year. I made some updates this week-end (but most of the new pictures don't have comments yet):

• Old Family pictures (scanned)
• Holidays in France, June 02
• Holidays in Phuket, Oct 02
• Company Exco in Phuket, Oct 02
• Sailing in Phuket, March 03
• Sailing in Phuket, June 03
• Boudicca, 2 years old
• Other Japan pictures

François (Hong-Kong): Oh non, pas les minutes, pas encore moi! La, je crois que ça va vraiment pas être possible...
François (Hong-Kong): Oh no, not the minutes again! This time, I think it will really not be possible...

I received an email this morning from Sérgio F. Lima saying that he translated my Palm-Linux page into Portuguese.

Cool! I wonder if I should not switch to a real versioning system: With one translation it will not be very difficult to manage the changes, but as soon as one more comes, we will get trouble.
I am thinking about Sourceforge or a private CVS server (I have already one up and running for my own developments). But I think the private CVS repository is not a good idea, as I will move my site to another provider when I leave Japan, and CVS will probably not be available.

Unisys's US patent 4,558,302 expired today. This was the LZW compression algorithm, which is used (among others) by the GIF format, created by Compuserve in 1987.

Europe: June 18th, 2004
Canada: June 6th, 2004
Japan: June 20th, 2004

More information about this subject on kuro5hin.

The question is: What will happen to the PNG format now?

I started in office yesterday to feel some symptoms (cold, fever), and I came back home early... Eventually I was off today.

I guess I was right, as my temperature went from 38°2C yesterday night, to 38°5C this morning, and finally 39°5C this afternoon...

If I don't feel better tomorrow, I will have to see a doctor (it is easy, there is a clinic just down my building).

I today downloaded, compiled, and installed the latest 2.4.21 Linux kernel. No major problem, and compilation, as usual, was very quick with my bi-pro :-)

As usual, I had also to update my NVidia driver, and to recompile the alsa modules. And, as I did when I installed the previous kernel, I forgot to reconfigure alsa before compiling the modules.

Bruno, repeat 100 times:

I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...
I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...
I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...
I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...
I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...
I must reconfigure alsa for a new kernel...

Do you remember the January SQL slammer worm? One of the consequences of this worm was that Continental Airlines had to cancel flights, because their admins failed to protect their systems.

All the guys hacking Windows are Linux guys. Continental was hit hard by SQL Slammer and our CEO said we'd failed.

[...]

Having one vendor throat to choke is helpful in crisis situations. An IT pro can't go to the CEO and say that a server is down, "and hopefully some guy in Amsterdam" will get to a fix when he gets back from the "dope house".

He also said that he was impressed with Microsoft's response to the problems.

These sayings brought of course a lot of reactions.

The guy who miserably failed to protect his systems, and caused Continental problems is a funny one: He defends his own technical choices by the fact that Linux developers are all dopesmokers!
What is sure, is that these dopesmokers could not do a lot for him, if he went to change his systems for Linux ones: Maybe he would need to wait a couple of hours for answers (when the dope effect is over!), but, as in that case he forgot to install a patch available 6 months before the worm, this delay would not matter anyway ;-)

Just for the fun, Continental problems maybe started the day Nathan Hanks asked people how to successfully install SQL Server. He eventually got a very responsive answer, two days later, by a Microsoft guy ;-)

SCO changed its mind and, instead of asking $1 billion to IBM, prefers now to get $3 billions (!!).
But that is not all! They also claim to have rights on most of operating systems (yours is probably there!).
And of course that IBM helps the terrorists and gives North Korea a way to build super computers.

And what will come next? Here is a a possible follow-up, found on slashdot:

SCO ups damages to 6 billion - citing IBM's illegal use of 'international business machines' acroynm which they thought up first.

Damages go up to 15 trillion when SCO discovers that gravity and other basic laws of the Universe which IBM has been using to build servers formed a basis for SCO's machines first.

Finally, SCO ups damages to (quoting here) "forty bazillion-kabillion" for "having a successful business," which is what SCO was planning to do but couldn't because of IBM.

It should be noted that this last figure was given just before the Executive board collectively passed out after coming down dangerously from a hallucenagic high caused by dry-erase markers, non-dairy creamer, pez, and possibly other office-related recreational drugs.

Maybe the IBM answer could simply be (another /. post):
I see your 3 billion and raise you two more. Show your cards...

Linus Torvalds leaves Transmeta after working 6 years there, to work fulltime on the development of the kernel. This should not change a lot for him, as he already spent most of his time working on the kernel at Transmeta.

He will now work for the non-profit Open Source Development Lab. This organization was created by a large group of sponsors (including Transmeta), and received from them a $20 millions investment.

He wrote about his move in a kernel mailing-list post announcing the 2.5.72 version of the development branch.

Have fun!

SCO decided to go on, and annonced yesterday that they "terminated IBM's right to use AIX in their business, development, distribution and sales"

What amazes me is that the offending portions of code contains JFS, RCU, and NUMA:

JFS (Journaled File System) was created by IBM for AIX.

RCU (Read-Copy Update) was created by Sequent for Dynix/ptx system. Sequent was acquired by IBM in 1999.

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) was also acquired from Sequent, although others implementations were previously created by SGI and others.

None of these technologies were part of the original System V code, but the real claim against IBM is not copyright related; tt is about a breach of contract:

SCO claims that "IBM's 1985 Unix license, originally signed with AT&T, but subsequently transferred to SCO, prevents IBM from distributing software derived from the Unix code base."

They have a very broad vision of the derived term, IMHO ;-)

The new 2.4.21 kernel was released two days ago. Have a look on the changelog. This is mainly a bugfixes version, but there are some enhancements too.
You can download it on one of the 129 mirrors sites.

In the meantime, the development branch version is currently 2.5.71 (you can always get the current versions -stable and beta- on the kernel.org site).

I just came back from Phuket, where I spent two weeks, including a 4 days sailing trip.

The main difference with my last trip is that there were only three customers in the hotel (the SARS effect). For the same reasons, the prices were really low.

SARS is really the problem, and the Thai government is launching a SARS-FREE guarantee for USD 100,000. This could be interesting, but you will only get this prize if you die (!!) from SARS within 90 days after a trip to Thailand. No thanks!

Another interesting point: During the boat trip, we stopped on a small island, and we decided to have a beer in a small restaurant near the beach.
Halas! The shop cannot sell alcohol any more: Even if the owner is Bhudist, the Muslim community around the area is putting a lot of pressure (I don't know which kind of) to force everybody to follow their own rules :-(
I guess that alcohol was previously the main source of revenues over there; this is probably the end for this shop, then for this nice island itself when tourists will avoid it. I am not sure the local population needed this with the current situation :-(

Jean-Paul (Tokyo): I think that's all.
Cyrille (Hong-Kong): No, that's not all.

Jean-Paul (Tokyo): Je pense que c'est tout...
Cyrille (Hong-Kong): Non, ce n'est pas tout.

Three hours ago, at 18:24, an earthquake measured six (on seven) on a Japanese scale, (and seven on the Richter scale) did hit Miyagi prefecture (near Sendai city). There were no victims apparently.

Tokyo, nearly 400 kilometers south, was hit too (I was in the office, on 15th floor, when it happened). It was not very strong, but quite long :-(

The full earthquake data is here, but I don't know how long this link will be valid...

François (Hong-Kong): Putain, ca va trop vite, c'est pas normal...
François (Hong-Kong): Shit, it is going too fast, there must be something wrong...

I am sailing, I am sailing,
home again 'cross the sea.
I am sailing, stormy waters,
to be near you, to be free.
-- Rod Stewart

I am going to sail again in two weeks! This will be in Phuket again, for the third time in less than one year time, but isn't it a nice place?
This time, I will probably sail on Fi-Tuen. It looks a nice boat!

Nothing is really 100% decided yet, but it is very likely this will happen, as I need to take a lot of holidays these coming months...

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 has been released a few days ago. Firebird is the new name for the phoenix project, but, as next versions of Mozilla will be based on this branch, it is likely that Firebird will soon be renamed again (probably -and simply!- Mozilla Browser).

Firebird is certainly the best browser available today!

The standalone equivalent mail application, thunderbird, can also be downloaded, but I will wait a little before using it (I need at least GnuPG support, which is not yet included). Thunderbird will be the official mail application for Mozilla too, and will probably be renamed too (Mozilla Mail?)

We have got one more week before the end of the world, according to the japanese men in white group . They previously announced that May 15th should be the end for all of us, but eventually decided that the apocalypse was postponed one week (next Thursday). Cool, isn't it?

What will you do during your last days?

Bruno (Tokyo): Il faudrait quelque-chose de plus compliqué... qu'un truc simple.
Bruno (Tokyo): We should do something more complex... than something simple.

XXX (Paris): On va faire un test en prod aujourd'hui.
XXX (Paris): We will make a test in production today.

Two months after suing IBM for $1,000,000 (saying that IBM included Unix technology into Linux source code) SCO sent a warning letter to the top 1,500 companies. More links are available here.

This letter explains that there is a risk in using Linux, because of Intellectual Property issues.

Some private comments:

They did not show any portion of the source code (when know, if any, it will be so easy to remove!).

SCO was anyway going to die, and their IBM suit did not have the expected results (many claim that they wanted IBM to buy them). Today, it is obviously too late! By the way, in the worst case, IBM could always buy SCO, and dismantle it!

SCO web site is itself running Linux. Did they receive the letter too? Will they sue themself?

This article , and this one (and so many others, hehehe!), explain how Microsoft could:

First, two weeks ago, announce that they will build Windows-powered public toilets, with broadband internet access, good audio system, etc...

Then, this monday (two days ago) announce that it was a hoax. A Fools Day Joke made one month too late (but calendars were never their strong point, anyway).

Eventually, yesterday, change their mind again, and decide that it was a real project that was killed by the management...

Whaooo... I already knew the W$ toilet paper, but this real story is even better. Where do you want to go today?

I was hosting, at home, a few web sites, for friends, colleagues, and family. At least until last month.
I asked them all to find another provider because of my coming departure from Japan in a few months...
Only one is still hosted today (Jeff, do it NOW!). When that one will be removed, I will feel comfortable when the time will come to shut down the server...

I hope the service was not too bad during these years ;-)

Bruno (Tokyo): Sylvain, tu es viré.
Bruno (Tokyo): Sylvain, you are fired.

Nicolas (Sydney): Il faut éviter les blagues grasses.
Nicolas (Sydney): We must avoid bad jokes.

Roppongi Hills opened its door this week. I saw this complex growing for more than two years!
This is just near our home, and we will be able to find there restaurants, shopping places, cinemas, etc... Nice!
We had a small walk there this friday, and maybe we could go to see Cube 2 tonight, if Li is not too afraid ;-)

I cannot say that I am happy: My company decided that I must go back to Paris (the usual mobility argument). This move should happen in September. I guess Li and Boudicca will join me one or two months later, when the apartment will be ready.
We will try to find one (apartment) inside Paris, not far from the Japanese (Rue Ste-Anne) or Chinese (13th district) communities...

The good point of it is that I must clear my remaining holidays ;-)

I just received my new silly geek stuff from thinkgeek.

Two tee-shirts, one saying "Scan my network and die", and one printed with "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't".

The other stuff is an incredible hand gyroscope than you can speed up to 15,000 rotations per minute by hand (but I was still not able to pass the 10,000 symbolic barrier!).

After several accidents and scandals linked to Japanese nuclear industry in the recent years, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) stopped the last of its 17 reactors yesterday for security checks.
Apparently they will need at least 10 reactors up and running this summer to cover Tokyo needs (when all air-conditioners will be up). Alternative power sources should not be enough.

A chronology of the most serious accident (Tokaimura, Sept 1999) can be found here, and here. The Open Directory Project has also a list of articles about this incident.

It is really scary...

The good point is that we could have a 2 months holidays this summer ;-)

Ten years ago, in April 1993, the first release of Mosaic was released. It was developed at the NCSA, at the University of Illinois.
All current browsers take their roots in Mosaic. Even IE has licensed code from this university!

If you consider that NCSA also created a web server (curiously called NCSA!), which was used as a starting point to create the Apache server, and that Netscape was created by some developers coming from the NCSA team, we can surely credit this university for the current development of the WWW.

Guillaume (Sydney): Tous les serveurs Tibco etaient par terre. Donc tout ce que je vous ai dit pendant la formation c'était du pipeau.
Guillaume (Sydney): All Tibco servers were down. It means that everything I said during the training was bullshit.

Guillaume (Sydney): Ce serait cool si je pouvais avoir un contact à Tokyo et un à Hong-Kong. [Gros silence...]
Guillaume (Sydney): It would be great if I could have a contact in Tokyo and another one in Hong-Kong. [Deep silence...]

Air France and British Airways announced simultaneously today that they would stop using the Concorde. The last flight will be during this Autumn.

Economic reasons (only 16 seats were reserved on Air France today, out of which 4 were no-show; there are nearly 100 seats available), and maintenance costs (this plane is being used for 27 years) are the reasons invoked.

Apparently, the Concorde did not survive the fatal July 2000 accident, the technical problems, Sept 11th, and the current issues (weak economy, Irak war, SARS virus).

People who wish to have a try still have 6 months: Less than 3 hours and a half from Europe to America is worth a try, no? AF & BA will surely offer some special prices for the last months of Concorde life!
British Airways is starting the promotions with a £ 1,999 London to New-York Concorde flight, and a regular return flight.

Anyway I feel sad, it is the best plane made ever. The only remaining choice will be those Boeing 747 turtles :-(

I have an Olympus C-4040 Zoom Camera, and I usually copied files manually to my computer by mounting, copying, and unmounting the SCSI device.

Step 1: Prerequisites (It should work manually first!)

Your kernel should support usb-storage, which is out of the scope of this blog. If you have an out-of-the-box kernel (2.4.X) from an usual distro ( SuSE, RedHat, etc...), it should be fine anyway.
This link could you give some hints if you need.

Step 2: Add the following line to /etc/hotplug/usb.usermap.

olympus 0x0003 0x07b4 0x0105 0x0100 0x0000 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x00000000

The hex values 7b4/105/100 are the product code of the camera (dmesg should give you the information).

Step 3: Create a /etc/hotplug/usb/olympus script.

Download it here. This script should be made executable (chmod +x). Don't forget to change some variables too ($DESTDIR, $USER, and $GROUP).
Also, your /etc/fstab should contain something like (change $MOUNTPOINT if the mount point is different):

/dev/sda1 /usb auto noauto,user,sync 0 0

Step 4: Plug your camera to the usb port, and turn it on.

The pictures will be copied to the destination directory, automatically.
When the camera led stops blinking, it means that the copy is finished, so you can turn it off.
You will just have to delete the pictures from the camera later. This could be done in the script itself, but it may be dangerous. Just uncomment the rm line if you really wish to take the risk.

I do it myself, but after all this is my script ;-)

I just updated my Palm-Linux page, adding specific Sony Clié hotplug script for PPP connections.
It is really useable now!

Next step: The doc is somehow messy, with Palm/Clié and Linux kernels 2.2.X/2.4.X mix. I will separate clearly the two cases, even if this implies some duplication of text.

Jean-Paul (Tokyo): Il n'y a pas de bug cette fois. C'est très bien.
Jean-Paul (Tokyo): There is no bug this time, it is very good.

Kamo-san (Tokyo): Ce n'est pas ma faute!
Kamo-san (Tokyo): That is not my fault!

I just returned from Phuket this morning.

But at the last moment, before the departure, Li decided to cancel her trip, and she really made a mistake:
She wanted to get a new job in a small company, which told her that she should cancel her holidays. So she did.
But later on the company cancelled the position, and Li started to work as planned in Tokio Marine insurance company.

We were surely not lucky with our 2 last holidays!

François (Hong-Kong): Je te laisse faire ton boulot, Bruno!
François (Hong-Kong): I let you do your job Bruno!

François (Hong-Kong): Jeff, c'est quoi le nom du projet pour Flowmatch?
Jeff (Tokyo): Flowmatch.
François (Hong-Kong): Jeff, for Flowmatch, what is the name of the project?
Jeff (Tokyo): Flowmatch.

I wrote in this weblog, on March 2nd, that my wife, Li, decided to try her new (and untested!) hairdresser talents on myself with quite poor success...
But yesterday evening, I had to take Boudicca, our dog, from hairdresser, before going back home. She was allowed (even if she does not like it at all!) to avoid a new test...

For your information, my hairdresser is half of the price of my dog's! We are all poor men, aren't we?? ;-)

I completely missed this information, one month ago.

On Feb 6, 2003, Heidi, an English Sheepdog, received from Oracle Corp Japan's chief executive Masaaki Shintaku, a certificate of thanks and a one-year supply of beef jerky as her retirement pay.

"I want to thank you for helping staff and customers relax," said Shintaku.

She worked at Oracle Japan for 11 years, as the official company pet. Her job was to come to the office twice a week, in order to help everybody to relax ;-)

She will be replaced by Wendy, a dog of the same breed.

Photo: Heidi kissing Masaaki Shintaku during the ceremony.

François (Hong-Kong): La formation sur le nouveau soft est pratiquement terminée à Sydney.
Nicolas (Sydney): Euh, pas tout a fait... On n'a pas commencé en fait.
François (Hong-Kong): The new software training in Sydney is almost completed.
Nicolas (Sydney): Well, hummm, not exactly.... We did not really start yet.

I got a new haidresser: Li herself!! But the first try, yesterday, showed some leaks in her processing.

I should maybe go back to my regular hairdresser in the future ;-)

Bruno (Tokyo): Guillaume, est-ce que Sylvain est la? (quelques secondes apres que Sylvain ait pris la parole).
Bruno (Tokyo): Guillaume, is Sylvain there? (a few seconds after Sylvain talked).

Netcraft announced in January that they found a Windows 2000 server up and running for more than two years on the internet.
First, this information was funny itself: One unique server worldwide with a good uptime seems worth a notice when it is Windows :-)

The hilarous part of this story is that this nice uptime went to a tragic end just a few days after this announce. As a coincidence, this was exactly when the SQL Slammer worm came to life, end of January.

See you again in two years? LOL ;-)

We went to see it today (it was released in Japan yesterday). Great film!!! It is a pity to need to wait one more year for the last part :-(

Guillaume (Sydney): Avec les outils que l'équipe infrastructure nous fournit... Ok, je vais utiliser les miens dans ces conditions...
Bruno (Tokyo): N'écris pas ça, Fred.
Guillaume (Sydney): With the tools infrastructure team provides us... Ok, I will use my own tools, then...
Bruno (Tokyo): Don't record this one, Fred.

We bought brand new speakers today. We went to Akihabara, and spent the day there, trying to find the best ones.
Strangely, we agreed on Yamaha NS-8HX model; I did not know that Yamaha was a good speaker maker. I knew Cabasse, JBL, and Bose, but Yamaha was really the best, especially on vocals (we made our decision on Mozart's Requiem).
These speakers are really good!

We also bought a new CD player, the Sony SA30ES model. Very good, too!

According to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), 2.4 bil. Yen (EUR 18,500,000) of cash was found in Tokyo in 2002, down 1.2% from previous year.

Also, the lost-and-found center got (in 2002) some 330,000 umbrellas, and 90,000 mobile phones (250 per day!!).

Maybe you never heard about Tama-chan, especially if you don't live in Japan.
This is a seal who was spotted recently along the Katabiragawa river, near Yokohama.
Its nickname, Tama-chan, was given when it was first seen on Tama River, about 6 months ago.

Tama-chan will be registered as Yokohama resident next week, by Nishi Ward in Yokohama. On its resident card, the following information will appear:
Tamao Nishi (aka Tama-chan)
Banks of the Katabiragawa river
Nishi-hiranumacho, Nishi Ward
Yokohama

Sugoi, ne!

She was 42, her name was Kalpana Chawla, she was beautiful.

She died yesterday, in Columbia shuttle, with six other people...

She was the symbol of one fifth of the mankind, and her name was not even prononced on Radio France Internationale.

Instead we had a 5-10 minutes about one of the other seven casualties, coming from a small country, apparently more important than India...

I would like to know about her instead...

I am sad for all of them, and their families...

For those who don't know yet, have a look on Bellaminettes!!. They are sexy, and I guess you will have the same pleasure as me looking at them.

My visa was wrong, and I could not take the plane yesterday: The Chinese Embassy made a mistake 2 weeks ago when we asked for it.
They said: "look at the date, you can go to China until beginning of February".
Of course, the visa was fine until that date, but it was for one entry only! And I already used that entry in November :-(
The airport staff tried to join both Embassy in Tokyo, and Dalian airport, but they could do nothing.
So I went back home, I got Boudicca back, and I am waiting for my wife to come back end of next week...

We go to Dalian tomorrow morning, for one week. We will have fresh air, as the temperature will be somewhere between -2 and -10°C.

The other funny part of this trip is that I will need to try my first Chinese dentist, as I broke a tooth a few minutes ago...
In fact, it is not really funny, as Chinese dentists are known (according to Li) to take no care at all about people's pain :-(

Update on evening: I was too afraid of the dentist, and I managed to find one in Tokyo this afternoon. He made a temporary quick & dirty fix on my broken tooth, which "should be ok for 1-2 weeks", he said. I am safe!!

The IT news information site, News.com, wrote in this article today:
Microsoft's policy of relying on software patches to fix major security flaws was questioned Monday after a series of internal e-mails revealed that the software giant's own network wasn't immune from a worm that struck the Internet last weekend.

Eehh!!! So do you still believe the "users not installing patches are the main problem" statement? Does it look serious to you?

If even M$ does not [install patches], who should? Maybe there could be a deeper problem?

By the way, even if they will never announce it clearly, their internal network got infected.

It appears to me that this news.com article could say the truth:
"Seems like every time I install a system patch, something else goes wrong with my system," said Frank Beier, president of Web design firm Dynamic Webs. The designer said many system administrators won't patch for many months, because they don't trust Microsoft to fix the problem without breaking some other function of the software. "In most cases, I'm better off just playing Russian roulette with the hackers until our servers are broken into."

On Jan 23, 2003, Bill Gates promised better security:
"Microsoft has a responsibility to help its customers address these concerns, so they no longer have to choose between security and usability."

On Jan 25, 2003, two days later, a massive DDOS attack was launched on the Internet, using Microsoft SQL Server flaw, by the SQL Slammer worm.

Up to 20% of the internet traffic was lost in transit, South Korea whole internet services were off, Bank of America teller machines stopped working, etc...

My network received 1200 attacks so far.

Whose fault?

Of course, M$ is not responsible for damages coming from a flaw for which a patch exists for 6 months. Not directly at least. The mistake comes from lazy & ignorant people who manage these systems.
As said in another page of this site, putting a Windows CD into a PC does not make anybody an administrator. Nor getting these funny 5 days MSCE certifications ;-)
This is where M$ is wrong and has responsability, as they go on arguing that "Windows administration is easy, anybody could do it!"

Waooo... At least this was a funny week-end ;-)

François (Hong-Kong): Alors... ben... euh...

Netcraft Survey gives monthly statistics on web servers in the world.
This January, the number of active sites running apache server has 66.42% market share, with a total of 11,178,715 sites (my server counts for one!!).
The second one, Microsoft IIS, has 4,172,101 sites (24.79%).

Li and me will go on holidays in Dalian (North China) from Jan 31st, for Chinese New Year (which is Feb 1st). Dalian is my wife's hometown.

One month and a half later (week of March 23rd), we also will have one week off and will sail for one week in Phuket (Thailand) with Philippe and Nam (a colleague and his Thai wife).

According to slashdot, the english edition of wikipedia, a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, has now more than 100,000 articles online, after just two years of work!

Wikipedia is a website where anyone can edit any article at any time, and where anyone could use the content as they wish, if they follow the GNU Free Documentation License. Generally speaking, to re-use the content, you only need to give the same rights to your own copy, and you must credit wikipedia as the original source. That's it!

No change compared to 0+5i version. It ran Out Of the Box, after I made the same changes.

I added a small script, as I really want some files to keep the same date. This script looks for files (in blog directories) which names look like a date, then it changes the date of these files with the name itself.
It runs every hour, and could be used with other versions of blosxom as well.
Here is the source of this file:

#! /bin/sh

for i in `find ./blog -name '*.txt' -print`
do
    DATE=`expr match $i '.*\([0-9]\{12\}\).txt'`
    if [ -z ${DATE} ]
    then
        DATE=`expr match $i '.*\([0-9]\{8\}\).txt'`
        [ ${DATE} ] && "DATE=${DATE}1200"
    fi
    [ ${DATE} ] && touch -t ${DATE} "$i"
done

This script accepts files like "*DATE.txt", where DATE can be in both YYYYMMDDhhmm.txt or YYYYMMDD.txt formats. In the latter case, a default of 12:00 is used for the time.

A colleague bought a brand new Vespa scooter a few weeks ago... Funny, as we are in Japan, and the best scooters are probably made here.
He discussed a lot (one month?) to get the best one, he got it, he talked a lot about it, and eventually was able to ride 106 km.

The facts:

1. When he got it, he had to replace one wheel, which was not straight (!!).
2. When he rode, some bolts wanted to leave the scooter (!!).
3. When he rode, the retrovisors prefered to change their positions randomly, probably in order to make riding in Tokyo a more challenging experience.
4. After 106 km, the scooter would'nt start anymore, and the repairman came to his place to pick it up. Game over.

With a MDBF (Mean Distance Between Failures) of 26.5 km, this Vespa was surely a good bargain (maybe oil accounted for half of its price?).
Also, as my colleague lives 4 kilometers from the office, he could (reasonably) be able to use the scooter 3 days per week (24 kilometers), and use a taxi the 2 other days. The week-end would of course be needed to repair the "scooter".

As a matter of taxi cost-cutting, he could prefer to use the Vespa like a Celerifere or a Draisienne the 2 usual failure days. This will be possible when the engine is down, but only if the wheels are still fine (and of course if enough bolts are still in place!).

Bruno (Tokyo): C'est qui qui prend les notes aujourd'hui?
Tout le monde: C'est toi
Bruno (Tokyo): Who is the guy taking the minutes today?
All: It's you

8 years ago, on Jan 17, 1995, at 5:46 am, a 20 seconds earthquake seriously damaged Kobe city, making 4,500 casualties and hundreds of thousands of homeless people.

As a side effect, Barings famous british bank collapsed after Nick Leeson's operations on the Singapore Futures Exchanges .

My version of gmplayer (0.90pre9-3.2) was sometimes very slow on playing mpeg movies (and only mpegs), while mplayer was running fine. The error message was:

         ************************************************
         **** Your system is too SLOW to play this!  ****
         ************************************************
!!! Possible reasons, problems, workarounds: 
[etc...]

The solution was to find the "cache = 4" line in ${HOME}/.mplayer/gui.conf, and change the value from 4 to 512. Everything is perfect now!
Maybe you could experiment with different values of cache, like 1024, or 2048.

Guillaume (Sydney): La doc est pas mal: On a au moins un numéro de téléphone
Guillaume (Sydney): Documentation is pretty good: We have a phone number at least

Bruno (Tokyo): N'écris pas ça
Bruno (Tokyo): Don't record this

Two new big changes, in the path to migrate this site to a fully XHTML/CSS web site: The "Webcam" page will disappear (being replaced by a more useful "GPG" page - already done in all new pages), and the "Palm" page has been rewritten in XHTML.

1. Change the new links (Webcam vs GPG everywhere). Easy. Done on Jan 7.
2. Rewrite the "Weather" page in XHTML. Easy. Done on Jan 11th. But it was not easy at all! I was not able to include a jsp in middle of a SSI file, so I run a hourly job to prepare an html file instead (with an ugly wget getting the data from the jsp). Any better idea on this?
3. Do something about the "Forum" page. I will probably remove it (I don't like their licence sytem - after all, even if it was small help, I crontributed to this software!). Done on Jan 11. Just by removing links, and redirecting the forum page to the main page.
4. Rewrite the "Linux" page. This will be longer: I have 2 ways here. I could just make it XHTML compliant, or make it more accurate. I will probably choose the first solution. Done on Jan 12th.
5. Rewrite the "Gallery" page. Again, I will probably change the engine. Not easy, and I prefered to "patch" the old system to be compliant with XHTML standard. There are problems with images overriding he right column - I'm not going to solve them soon! Done on Feb 9th.

Horizon pas net, reste à la buvette.

Mouette en haut du mât fiente bientôt sur toi.

Quand les mouettes ont pied, il est temps de virer.

Pingouin dans les champs, hiver méchant.

Mauvaise météo, journée au bistrot.

Quand le capitaine est bourré, le bateau reste à quai.

Qui pisse contre le vent, se rince les dents.

Goéland bec en avant, marée de 110 dans pas longtemps.

Caca de mouette, tempête. Caca de goéland, ouragan!

Quand le goéland se gratte le gland, c'est qu'il va faire mauvais temps; Quand il se gratte le cul, c'est qu'il ne fera pas beau non-plus.

Quand un cachalot vient de tribord, il est prioritaire. Quand il vient de bâbord aussi. (Olivier de Kersauson)

As I just rewrote my "Links" page in xhtml, I wondered if I should include it in the weblog or not.

More generally, my question is: Where should a Weblog stop? Should technical data (such as Blosxom installation) be there?
As I don't have an answer yet, I will leave the Links page as it is, as well as the Forum one (but I think that one will disappear as soon as Blosxom can handle postings :-)

I am using Blosxom (version 0+5i). As I needed a special setup (more than one weblog per page, SSI includes for header/footer, etc...), I could not use Blosxom as a "page generator", but only as an "article manager" inside an outside page.

I made the following to make it work:

• First, in my html index file (server parsed), I included the following:

     <!-- I call blosxom.cgi with the parameters.
          If none, the default "/blog/diary" is used -->
     <!--#set var="BLOSXOM_CATEGORY" value="/blog/diary" -->
     <!--#if expr="$DOCUMENT_PATH_INFO" -->
       <!-- #set  var="BLOSXOM_CATEGORY" value="${DOCUMENT_PATH_INFO}" -->
     <!--#endif -->
     <!--#set var="PROGRAM" value="/cgi/blosxom.cgi${BLOSXOM_CATEGORY}" -->
     <!--#set var="RSS_PROGRAM" value="${PROGRAM}/?flav=rss" -->
  

  Then I use the PROGRAM and RSS_PROGRAM variables as following:

     [...]
     <a href="<!-- #echo var="RSS_PROGRAM" -->">
        <img src="/images/xml.gif" alt="Syndicate this site!" />
     </a>
     [...]
     <!--#include virtual="$PROGRAM" -->
     [...]
  

  The target is to generate the correct Blosxom path, and to have a default "/blog/diary" one if none is specified.
• I also needed to create a .htaccess file in the directory where the index.html resides, to force an http redirection to the index.html if only the directory is specified in the URL. This is necessary, as only URL like http://www.raoult.com/diary/index.html/path/to/weblog will work (and not http://www.raoult.com/diary//path/to/weblog).

     DirectoryIndex redirect.html index.html index.shtml
     Redirect /diary/redirect.html http://www.raoult.com/diary/index.html
  

• Then, I added the following line in blosxom.cgi, to handle possible "//" (slash slash) between the $url & $path macros:

     $url =~ s/^included:/http:/; # Fix for Server Side Includes (SSI)
     my @pi = split m{/}, path_info();
     shift @pi;
  
     ########## br, to skip initial // (SSI pb)
     $pi[0] eq '' and shift @pi;
  
     my $pi_bl = '';
     while ($pi[0] =~ /^[a-zA-Z]\w*$/) { $pi_bl .= '/' . shift @pi; }
  

• As I don't want to use the <span> tag as a date separator, I commented out the corresponding lines:

     # $content_type eq 'text/html' && $curdate ne "$dw, $da $mo $yr" && 
     # print span({-class=>'blosxomDate'}, $curdate = "$dw, $da $mo $yr"); 
  

• Finally, I run a hourly cronjob to generate the weblog index file:

     #/bin/sh
     # find the directory tree and build a list...
     #
     find blog -type d -print | awk '
     BEGIN {
          URL = "http://www.raoult.com/diary/index.html/"
          print "<div class=\"list\">";
          print "<div class=\"listtitle\">";
          print "Weblog tree...";
          print "</div>";
          print "<ul>";
     }
     {
          printf("<li><a href=\"%s%s\">%s</a></li>\n", URL, $0, $0);
     }
     END {
          print "</ul>";
          print "</div>";
     }' > tree.dat
  

  This file is included in the index.html file as:

     <!--#include virtual="/blosxom/tree.dat" -->
  

That's all folks!!

I lost my first place on Google (for a member of French Parliament), and being between this one (Eric Raoult) and a French Senator (Paul Raoult, #3 on Google) makes me somehow uncomfortable ;-)

But I worked a little, and I have got a new home page!
The changes are:

* XHTML 1.0 instead of HTML 4.01
* No more frames!! (using frames is Bad [tm]).
* Only CSS for presentation. Using HTML tables is Very Bad [tm]
* blosxom is the engine for this page (and for RSS syndication)
* blagg is the RSS aggregator (the right column with news)

What I need to do now is to make the change for all the site (this should not be very difficult).