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.

For some others countries, the LZW patent will expire later:

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.

But, on Tech Web, Nathan Hanks, managing director at Continental Airlines, said:

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 :-(