Lunchtime Semaphore

A while back, I mention one of the feature of Git I was missing in Mercurial. It was the nice way git display a summary of the changes when you update. But that’s it, no more regrets!

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know what make me buy this book a few years back: I was not using Ruby, had no planning to go for web development and never heard of Rails before. But flipping through the book in the bookshop made me realized that there had been some big changes in the way the web was working: sure, hacking some html and javascript everything is possible… in theory. In practice, a limit is quickly reached where it becomes prohibitive to make changes. That’s where framework such as Rails comes in the picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
(“It would seem that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.“) Read the rest of this entry »

That was in 2007, I was a bit frustrated with the Design Patterns book and was looking for more concrete examples. Design Patterns, from Gamma et al.,  is a great book, but required more experience than what I had at that time to get the proper understanding on when to use a given pattern.

Read the rest of this entry »

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” Benjamin Franklin

Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I gave in to the netbook trend and got a Lenovo S10-2. I couldn’t get a linux version, but sure enough Debian was running on it few hours after unpacking.

Read the rest of this entry »

During my last trip to Australia (the first trip for my Android phone), I have been using the ‘mytracks’ application from google to record all the places where I was going. Mostly for two reasons: sending the data to open street map and geotagging my photos.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually follow the latest gadgets and tend to skip a few generations of products before getting a new one. That’s what happened recently when I switched from my Pocket PC staring Windows Mobile 2003 to the HTC Dream (aka G1) with Android. That’s a 6 years gap between technologies and involved some workaround to migrate the contact data.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web server are not easy beast to handle: you want to make the stuff work but at the same time for security, you want to have as little stuff as possible to be opened.

Read the rest of this entry »

Few months ago, I moved from Toulouse to Singapore. As I continue to play with satellite images, I wanted to keep an access to the OTB repository and still participate to this open source project. It was also a good opportunity to move to a distributed source control system: sometimes, when you’re stranded in a plane/train/meeting, you really wish to have access to a full repository to do some clean work. Also, if the repository is behind a triple firewall with no possible outside access, this is not a really good way to encourage contributions…

Read the rest of this entry »