News.com has a funny story about Apple selling silent songs (for 99 cents, as other songs)!

They have many versions of silence, by various authors. The most funny is the last part of the article:

John Cage created a 4'33" silent song in 1952 (it was even played by the BBC Symphony orchestra this year!), and won a copyright in 2002, as Mike Batt created also a silent song.

Batt's defence ("Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds.") did not work apparently!

Less than one year later, the free wikipedia encyclopedia doubled its number of articles, to reach 200,000 entries!

This number is for the English version. The next languages in terms of number of entries are German (around 49,000 entries), Japanese (~29,000), and French (~26,000).

All latest statistics are available here. They decided

N'oubliez pas une chose: Vos connaissances groupées valent beaucoup que celles d'un Larousse! Qu'attendez-vous pour publier?

FYI, on their 200,000 celebration page , the last message is currently: Well, we're getting slashdotted now. Of course, this should happen!

I am lucky: Somebody called me on friday, asking for Monsieur Grant.

It appears that my mobile number was previously that guy's. I got Monsieur Grant number, and called him. I got his father after a few tries, and explained him the situation. His answer was quite funny (imagine a strong contryside speaking):

"Ah oui... Quand il y a un problème, je me fais appeler chez moi, mais si je ne réponds pas, c'est renvoyé vers le portable. Je vais essayer de supprimer ça, mais c'est très compliqué, alors je ne sais pas si je pourrai le faire rapidement. Peut-être fin de semaine prochaine?"

"Hum... I see... When there is a problem, there is a phone call to my home, but if I don't answer, the call is forwarded to the mobile phone. I will try to change this, but it is very complicated, it will take time. Maybe end of next week?"

Apparently he still did not do it, as I was called this week-end during the night ;-)

Come on, Monsieur Grant! Read the f... phone documentation, or call France Telecom, or ask a friend to help you, but do it!

Eventually internet is up today: The problem was linked to the freebox ethernet port (it does not work at all).

Following free support advice (and after five phone calls costing me at least 50 €!), I decided to try the USB port - on an XP machine, as they don't have other drivers :-(

I first spent more than half an hour to reactivate the only dual-boot machine I have, and to remember my password ;-)
Then I installed the driver, and tried to connect: It worked! Hummm... Only two minutes in fact: I got quickly a message telling me that Windows was rebooting, what I did with no choice at all! The same message (and result) came again soon. I understood later that I was infected by the Blaster Worm. That one took only a few minutes to infect this Exccceeelllent operating system (I really like the word operating when this is Microsoft related).

It was a chance in fact: I just tried to reboot Linux, with the same USB connection. Surprise: No problem, no driver needed (the CDCEther module loaded without help and managed the connection), and of course no more virus/worm!

I am just waiting for a new freebox, so I can use the ethernet port, and my wireless airport station (Currently, the laptop linux box acts as firewall/NAT box, and the airport, which links my dual-processor as well as my wife's iBook is just a bridge).

By the way, it is a good occasion (and reason!) to erase my last end-of-century-system partition isn't it?

My provider, free is still not able to setup my ADSL connection, after one week of trouble.

Well, one week does not change a lot, after a two months delay, but it is surprising to see these so-called broadband links (only 2 Mbps in France, and more often 512 Kbps!) being so difficult to setup: Everything here is paper based, hot-line is inexistant, and, AFAIK, it does not work (at least for me!) :-(

I would not like to joke about french customers, who are really happy with their 2 Mbps Super Broadband service, but they should have a look around, to understand that other countries offer 13 times this speed for the same price!

But, more than the speed, my concern is on the setup procedure. Have a look on the Japan one, as explained in the previous link:

Another factor worth noting concerns the set-up procedure.
There is no taking an afternoon off work and waiting around for an engineer to do something mysterious with your phone socket.
[...]
Connect the ADSL modem to your computer, run the supplied software (Windows, Mac or Linux) and that is it.

To finish, have a look on this ADSL study in the world. You will be surprised.

Hum... No comment.

I am not lucky with my phone lines. In Tokyo, my home line was subject to many FAX calls, especially in middle of the night, and it just happened a few days ago that my french mobile phone is the target of a farmer who has some kind of automatic alerts.

Here is the message I received, every five minutes for more than two hours:

Ici l'élevage de Monsieur Grant. Le bâtiment est en panne. Intervenir d'urgence. Acquitter après le bip sonore. Merci.

Here the breeding of Mr Grant. The building is out of service. Intervene urgently. Discharge after the beep. Thank you.

I tried to find who is this Monsieur Grant, without any success :-(
I hope he will notice that the number is wrong, before all his animals die!

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