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.

As I started to use hotplug with my Sony PDA, I decided to automate this copy process.

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!