vendredi, décembre 18, 2009

Apache Directory WebSite statistics

Here are some stats we gathered yesterday on http://directory.apache.org site. I just checked the OS of our visitors (thanks to Google analytics), and the browsers.













































OS
2007 2008 2009 Last month
Windows 79,45% 76,10% 72,16% 68,92%
Linux 13,61% 15,11% 16,89% 18,74%
Mac OS 6,27% 8,13% 10,21% 11,61%
SunOS 0,23% 0,28% 0,35% 0,33%
iPhone 0,01% 0,07% 0,09% 0,10%


W$ is losing some ground every year. It's even more obvious on the Browser category. Last month, the stats are :

  • FF (all versions) : 59,19%

  • IE (all versions) : 21,31%

  • Chrome : 7,92%

  • Safari : 6,14%

  • Opera : 2,58%





















IE stats
2007 36,42%
2008 30,15%
2009 23.99%
Last month 21,31%



Of course, it's a bit biased, because we are addressing very technical people, who are most certainly on the bleeding hedge. My mom does not browse Directory.a.o, that's for sure ! However, this is relevant, considering that they are the ones who create tomorrow's IT !

mardi, décembre 08, 2009

Come on Eclipse, you can do it !!!

It's now years Eclipse has introduced the Working Set feature. It's really helpful, but sadly, it's still a damn bad hack : you can't have more than one project with the same name.

For instance, I want to work on MINA 2.0 *and* MINA 3.0. Both of them will have the same project names, as I see no reason to change them. I have a mina-core java project in both sets, and no way to have them both in their associated working set in eclipse.

This is not only useless, at some point, it's ridiculous. I can't imagine that in 8 years, no one in eclipse understood that it's a major problem. It seems to me a very basic concept...

It's just like, hmmm, I have a new born baby, and I want to name him/her John/Dorothy : WRONG ! Some one in another family has already used those names... Get it ?

How stupid ...

Hopefully, it might be possible in Eclipse 4.0 : http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_4.0/Wishlist (bullet #6)

jeudi, novembre 26, 2009

DELL D620, R.I.P...

Last week, I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.10 on my Dell laptop. I had to revert to 9.04, due to some huge instabilities (I was using Ubuntu 8.10 for more than a year before).

So far, Ub9.04 was just fine, I didn't had any problem, beside the problematic support for Flash on FF3.0, and a painfull process eating 45% of my CPU : something supposely helping disabled people to use the computer. Once this process has been killed, everything went fine.

Too bad. Yesterday evening, I had some issues with my power cord (it was said not to be recognized by the system), with the consequence of the battery not being on charge, and my processor crawling at half speed. It lasted until this morning, then it worked again. I already experimented this harsh in Oakland last month...

Tonite, I left the office after having suspended my laptop, and when I arrived at home, it was dead. Switch on, some leds were blinking, I heard the disk spinning a few seconds, and that was it. Nothing on the screen... Hopefully, I did a full backup last week before switching my system !

So I bought a Mac book pro, a 15", 2.8Ghz, 320Gb 7200rpms, 4Gb mem. 1400 €, refurbished. It is supposed to arrive either tomorrow or monday.

My Dell was 3 years old, I didn't paid for it (insurance paid for it, my previous one has been stolen), so it's the first time in 5 years I buy a new laptop. Not too bad ...

If some one is interested in spare pieces, I have 1 Gb of mem, a 160Gb 2.5" disk, a battery. Just tell me !

jeudi, novembre 19, 2009

A F**** disgrace !

So we did it. For the forth time in a raw, France will be present in South Africa. But what a shame this match was !

I must say that I never saw the french soccer "team" (at this point, I don't know if we can call it a team) played so bad. Ever. We have talented players, probably worth half a billion euros if you cumulate their value, and we can't make them play a decent game ?

Last, not least, this ends with an insult to fair play. Really, Irish players deserved a better end...

My apologize for all the irish, this was unfair. Shame on Henry, shame on the referees, shame on the FIFA presidents who keep thinking that video is just good for watching pr0n movies, probably... And shame on Domenech, who admitted to sometime pick players based on astrology studies... ("all parameters have to be considered and I have added one by saying there is astrology involved"...)

This is not soccer. Just a pathetic parody...

mercredi, novembre 18, 2009

Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10, updated

So after the ApacheCon event, I decided it was a good timing for an upgrade of my 8.10 Ubuntu driven laptop. I was quite pleased with the previous version, except that wifi support was crappy at best, and decided not to upgrade to 9.04,

After a full backup (took 4 hours), installation took only 20 minutes, most of the time was spent to carefully define the partitions so that I keep my /home and /opt safe. It seems that the installer is not happy with a 500 Mb partition for / (it asks for 2Gb), but I went through, without any problem.

I have 9 partitions defined, and even if it sounds a bit too much, I'm quite pleased with this setup. At least, /home and /opt are separate partitions, just because I don't want to update, but prefer to go through a complete re-installation instead (I have been burnt once with an update which ended with a full re-installation , so better spare this time by doing a direct re-installation). Another benefit is that I was able to move from ext3 to ext4 for the formatted partitions.

Then came the reboot, and bang, all was pretty much ok !

I just had to let Ubuntu to update many of its packages, and to add a few missing icons in my menu (xchat, thunderbird). My eclipse shortcut weren't working anymore, too, but that was easy to fix.

Now, the bad : suspend wasn't working anymore. I spent 3 hours on the net checking for a solution (it seems that almost everyone have experienced the very same problem), and at the end, I just found an interesting information. With an NVidia device, once the new driver (185) has been installed, adding this line in xorg.conf did the trick (in red) :


Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "NvAGP" "1"
EndSection


Don't ask me why, but it worked (Tm).

FYI, I'm using a Dell D620, a machine probably built and designed by former soviet union engineers : works well, looks ugly !

Update :
This version is probably the worst I ever used. CPU scaling does not work (I'm stuck at 1Ghz), Eclipse is crashing every now and then, many widgets remain stuck and can't be closed, sound does not work correctly, plus many little problems...

Release often, release fast, ok, but at least : release only when it's READY !!!

mardi, novembre 10, 2009

Seems that European commision is not happy with Oracle/Sun deal

Today, in a preliminary statement, the european commission has objected that "combining Sun's MySQL database product and Oracle's products could hurt competition in the database market"

That's not a good news for Oracle, but I don't really care. It should have been obvious to them that Oracle + MySQL would harm competition, and that they will face such an issue.

That's not a good news for Sun too, especially for all the fellow developers who are working there, and who have no clear idea about their future. I feel for them.

samedi, octobre 31, 2009

San Francisco !

So I arrived in SF last monday evening. As I have some family there, I'm enjoying the few days I'm spending with them, as we see each other every 5 years. On tuesday, we did some sight seeing (the weather was excellent !) and since then, I'm stuck in front of my computer most of the day, working on the DIrectory server.

Today though was excellent : we drove to Napa Valley, and did some wine testing. I have been there 20 years ago, and I remember having tested a very good Champagne (Tm), from Domaine Chandon. I was not that much impressed by the other wines we tested back then, but I wasn't the heavy wine drunker I'm now :)

I must admit that what we tested today was wonderful. There are two differences with the french wines I'm used to (actually, four) :
  1. when I test french wines, out of 10 bottles, only 2 please me, 3 are average, and 5 can be thrown in the sink. In Napa, They are more or less all pleasant, even if I won't put all of them on my table (it's a matter of taste here)
  2. I'm used with 12.5° wines, most of the Napa wines are above 14°C. Some of them are closer to Porto than normal wine. That also mean you have to be carefull not to swallow all the wines you test !
  3. There are some local 'cépages' (grapes) that we don't have in France, like the Zinfandel. Not my favorite...
  4. We have Chateaux, Grands Crus, 1er Crus, AOC. Napa has Cabernet, Syrah, Chardonnay. Of course, our Chateaux are made of those same Cabernet, Merlot, Viognier, Syrah, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Marsanne, ... but we don't name the wine from the cépages they are made of. Probably a mistake because it's really confusing for the vast majority of people who don't know anything about the Clos de la Roche, for instance (it's a very good burgundy Grand Cru, a Côte de Nuit, made of Pinot Noir)
Are those differences important to me ? Yes, and no.

Yes, because I just find it disapointing that french producers don't understand that quality is a must, and producing mediocre wine is just killing them.

And no, because navigating through all the small villages in Burgundy, a place where 50 different producers can share 125 acres of vineyard (4700 bottles per producer, average), is stunning. Old houses, beautiful landscapes, and of course great wines and good food is part of the pleasure.

However, I would say that there is no reason for any Napa owner to be ashamed from their production : they top most of french wines !

Time to go back to the Directory Server code after this day off !

dimanche, octobre 25, 2009

Boston...

So I'm in Boston, enjoying a short stay with good friends. Zhenya and Alexei are kind enough to welcome me in this beautiful city before I fly to San Francisco, I really appreciate !

Boston is really a nice place to be in October, when all the trees turn red and yellow. Very differnet from Paris !

On the other side, I still have a lot to do on the Directory server, but frankly, with a 6 hours jet lag, plus many places to visit (tomorrow : Newport), I don't have time nor energy to spend more than a couple of hours a day to work on the schema refactoring we are currently working on (but it's still making progress).

I will arrive in San Francisco next monday, with some more places to visit. Time is flying ...

jeudi, septembre 17, 2009

LdapCON 2009 : Portland !

I'm flying to Portland tomorrow where the 2009 LDAP conference will stand, just before LinuxCON. Stefan Seelmann will travel with me, we arranged a common flight (Stefan is one of the guy behind Apache Directory Studio)

This will be the second LDAP conference, the last one was organized in Köln back in 2007. I will present two talks, one about replication and another one with Ludovic Poitou about a new Java based LDAP API.

The most interesting part is that the LDAP community will be there, this is a promize of many interesting conversations (and probably a lot of beers to drink :)

It's a 17 hours flight, with a stop, quite a long journey...

For those of you interested in LDAP, feel free to join us !

vendredi, septembre 04, 2009

A question of style...

This morning, Pierre-Arnaud Marcelot, who designed the Apache Directory Server web site pointed me to the new Nexus site. And then back to Directory Studio.

Pretty similar L&F :) In fact, the CSS are the very same.

First, Pierre-Arnaud is quite proud to see that what he designed was used as a base for a commercial web site (granted that the people behind Nexus are Apachers too - Sonatype's founder is Jason Von Zyl, one of the well known Maven guy )

Second, I think that we should also add the ASL 2.0 header in CSS, and probably HTML pages (assuming that Confluence does it automatically when exporting pages : something to check)

Last, not least, I'm quite sure that Pierre-Arnaud, and the Directory project team, would have appreciated to be contacted before those CSS are used for a commercial web site. Just because Pierre-Arnaud has spent hours, and probably days, to polish those CSS and would have been pleased to have been thanked for that.

But it's probably always the same story : deadlines, rush hours, etc. Anyways, it's always a pleasure to see that your work is being reused, it's a proof that it's not that bad, all in all :)

So congrats for the great job, Pierre-Arnaud !

vendredi, août 28, 2009

Street Fighter

Today I played this game again. Well, even if everything is going virtual those days, the experience was very real... Long story short : an old lady was grabbing money on an ATM and a young mobster was assaulting her.

At first, I thought this was some young couple having fun (you know, with those hair coloration, you can't tell from 10 meters looking at her back if she was young or not... Say NO to artificial colors ! Gray is sexy ...). But when I saw the walking stick falling down, I switched to Berseck mode. That mean : you don't think about the consequences. Ok, would the guy looked like Mike Tyson, I probably would have thought a bit more, but, well, you know, there is something in your brain that short-circuits in such situations.

I grab the guy, choked him, and he started to suffocate. He released the money. The woman was safe. I was safe. I asked someone to call the police.

Now, many lessons learned :
- First, people around you in such situation don't know what to do. There were 3 guys, quite young (30 years old), they were just watching; I had to yell at one of them so that he called the police. Lesson one : John Doe is not used to violence, whatever movie he is watching.

- Second, I remember that I had to release his neck, so that he can breeze. My "idea" was that it could kill him, and I didn't want that to happen. So I put him on the ground, trying to lock him, as I learned when I was doing Judo, 30 years ago. Lesson two : it's not because you did one year of Judo training that you are still good at it, 30 years later...

- Third, of course, this guy wasn't waiting the police calmly... he was trying his best to escape, well, using a mix of whining, and desesperate move to get away. He wasn't violent though : no pinches, no teeth, no punch, just like a snake, trying to escape. At some point, he turned me down, and I was under. Not good. He escaped. Lesson three : Secure your hold, don't try to change your position, when it's safe. He might have suffocated, but probably won't have passed out.

- Forth, when he started to run away, the other peeps just did very little to stop him. So he was away. Good for him. Anyway, he was under 18, and would have probably spent a day or to in jail, and would have been released. He was not french either, that mean there is very few the police can do. My bet is that he was a kind of refugee, and needed the money badly. I can understand that. Life is a battle. Lesson four : Don't expect any help. the fight lasted for something like 2 minutes, and *nobody* tried to give me a hand. Probably plain normal.

- Last, not least, the ground is dirty and tough. Even if he didn't fought back, I got some scratches. Also, my physical condition was not perfect : I was injured as I fall down from my bicycle 3 days ago, and at some point, I didn't want to increase the injury. Lesson five : it's *exhausting*. I never thought that a 2 minutes action was so demanding. It took me 5 minutes to recover after this effort. Ok, I'm 44, but I do ride my bicycle every day (around 20km a day). It does help a little.

At the end, I wish I don't have to do that again. Nobody was injured, the woman did get her money back, the young mobster had a new chance to behave better (hmmm, ok, I'm not that optimist). So all is good !

PS: Calling the police in Paris in August is simply not possible. They never showed up, they didn't even replied the call ;)

jeudi, août 27, 2009

Social Sites OD !

There is not a single day I'm not receiving an alarm from someone moving from one place to another, tripping from one country to another one, anything...

Trippit, Dopplr, wtf ?

Soon, there will be a new Social Site like named GirlIFckd.com...

This is utterly useless and annoying. I bet that their business model is doomed from day one, but there are still some VC wanting to waste their money on such companies. We probably have to wait one couple of years to see those parasites dying.

mardi, août 25, 2009

French sucks in English

This is obvious, you just have to read my posts ;)

But now, it's confirmed by the french students scores on TOEFL. With an average of 88/120, France ranks at the 69th place, far behing the norwest european countries, on the same seat than Bulgaria, Belarus and Latvia.

That explains a lot ... Désolé :)

mardi, août 18, 2009

Eclipse Column mode selection

Bernd Fondermann mentioned that he likes some cool feature in IDEA : the column mode selection.

It's also available in Eclipse 3.5. You have a small icon you can click on (or you can activate it with Shift-Alt-A) :


I never used it though. To me, such a feature lies in the hidden little gems you may use, but that you don't need, except once a year.

All the IDE have such gems, the difference between two IDEs, to me, is just about how used you are with the one you work with on a daily basis.

I have tried to switch to IDEA last year, and I felt in such a foreign space that I swallowed my rants about Eclipse, and switched to a new version.

I perfectly understand that someone else can prefer IDEA (or NetBeans), but I don't really think that any IDE has a competitive advantage above any other (except if you are using them in specific areas). I even now people who are still using Emacs and code in Java.

It's good though to have more than one IDE available ! We all saw what IE has done to the web as soon it killed all its competitors !

vendredi, août 14, 2009

Are investors worse than animals ?

It seems so :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5988799/Parrot-beats-investors-in-South-Korean-stock-market-contest.html

What strucks me is the last sentence :
"Our experiment proved that making long-term investments in blue chips is safe and effective," Mr Chung said.

This experiment just confirms that "Economists/Inverstors are people who explain you today why they have failed yesterday"

mercredi, août 12, 2009

Using a bicycle in Paris...

Paris has 6 003 streets, for a total length of 1700 km. Out of that, 400km dedicated cycling tracks have been created since 2002, 200 more km will be created by 2013.

People using a bicycle in Paris represent now close to 2% of the global traffic. That means you have something like 40 000 person riding a bicycle every day. This is probably due to the Velib system (http://www.en.velib.paris.fr/) : you can pick a bike in one of the 1200 stations, there are more than 16 000 bicycles available.

How much does it cost ? 1 euro, and you can use the bicycle of half an hour. The ticket is still valid for 24 more hours, but you have to pick a new bicycle every 30 minutes. Considering that most of the trip will take you less than half an hour in Paris, that's enough (Paris is 13km x 7km wide, but don't expect to cross all Paris on those bikes in less than half an hour !)

Last year, those bicycles have been used 26 000 000 times !

I'm using a bicycle in Paris since 1991, and I must say that things have changed a lot since then. I never felt in danger, but I'm used to ride my bike now, even if I'm going fast (probably more than 30 Km/h, when I'm not stopped by a red light).

The rules are simple, if you want to have a safe ride :
  • Stop at every red light. Car drivers can see you, as you are on the first line.
  • Keep your right
  • Never stay close to the parked cars : someone can open a door, you'll be surprised how bad can be the contact... So riding with one meter marhin on the right is just finewear an helmet. Your skull is not that solid...
  • Wear some gloves. If you fell down, your hands will probably hit the ground first. That will save you bad injuries.
  • Have a horn, pedestrians are crossing the streets without watching out for bicycle, they rely on the absence of noise as a signal that they can cross the street safely...
  • Before changing of direction, check behind to see if a car, truck, motorcycle or another bicycle is not in your way.
  • Try as much as you can to stay on the dedicated tracks.

  • I may cumulate something like 2000 kms a year in Paris, day and night, and I must say it's quite a pleasant way to move from one place to another, assuming you have a safe place to store your bicycle.

    lundi, août 10, 2009

    Virtualizing IoC ...

    I was wondering which company could be interested in buying SpringSource :

    http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2009/08/vmware-acquires-springsource.html

    What next ?

    lundi, mai 11, 2009

    Eclipse annoyance, take 2...

    Two weeks ago, I complained about some issues I had with Eclipse. No, I don't want to use any kind of additional plugin to manage my Maven build : it's far too complex for Eclipse...

    Now, Eclipse is making me loose my precious time again. Something that worked pretty fine on older versions (3.2... oh dear...) simply does not work anymore. Namely, I have run mvn eclipse:eclipse on some project, and get it working just fine. Except that Eclipse still claims that "Project 'mina-core' is missing required library: '/home/elecharny/.m2/repository/cglib/cglib-nodep/2.1_2/cglib-nodep-2.1_2.jar'". WTF ??? I have done a 'clean all', without any success...

    Boring... So boring ... Any Idea around there ?

    Side note : I don't know what's going on with Eclipse, but it's now two years that the platform is piling features on top of features, while the core is less and less stable. May be it's time to go back to basic : focusing on what users *really* need. A stable IDE.

    lundi, mai 04, 2009

    Goatgle !

    They fired H/R, and hired some goats :





    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/mowing-with-goats.html



    Will they produce goat cheese soon ?

    mercredi, avril 29, 2009

    Eclipse, you are so boring sometime ...

    So we have had a long convo lately with some french OSS peeps. It started about Sun^H^H^HOracle, and ended with a discussion about NetBeans vs IntelliJ Vs Eclipse Vs JDeveloper, well, forget about JDeveloper :)

    I'm using Eclipse since its infancy, back in 2001, version 1.0-RC1 (time is flying !). Since then two things has prodigiously annoyed me :
    - there is no way to work with two versions of the same project without having to switch the workspace (painful, to say the least !)
    - importing a project into a working set (a recent addition) is still impossible : you have to import the project, and then move it to the working set.What a waste of time !

    I thought that with this working set addition, it would be easy to associate a project to a specific working set, and then allow you to have two versions of this project at the same time. No way. It's a pure cosmetic addition.

    Boring. Very boring... Com'on, Eclipse, instead of including useless plugins like this plague named mylyn, you could simply make developers life easier fixing the working set concept !

    samedi, avril 04, 2009

    How many new projects in Incubator this year ?

    So IBM is discussing with Sun, as they are interested in buying them. Many articles and blogs has mentioned it those past few weeks. One interesting recent post on TheRegister is trying to guess what will happen if IBM finally absorbs Sun. At this point, this is probably a mix of blind guess, rumors, backtalks, and hypothesis. One sentence though is interesting :
    "...It's likely the remainder of Sun's software would be quietly punted out to the Apache Software Foundation or released under an Apache license. IBM is an experienced backer of both."

    That's an issue when people start to think The ASF is a place you can trash all what you don't want to support. Hopefully, we have an Incubator, and it's a damn good filter : a project without a community won't get out the incubator. This is one of the reasons why it takes time to exit from incubation...

    We probably will need more mentors though in the next few months :)

    jeudi, mars 12, 2009

    Books

    Recently, I read great books : the Millenium trilogy (for english natives : "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire", the third book is not out yet, I guess). It's a very special thriller, totally different from anything I ever read. It's 1800 pages long, but you almost cannot put it down once you started it. Steig Larson, the author, died soon after he finished the third book, just before they all were supposed to be published. If you have to flight for more than 6 hours, definitively a must have !

    The second book is a bit different : "Jesus sans Jesus" (ie, Jesus without Jesus ). Basically, it's the history of the christian church first days. It could have been named "Building a religion for dummies". Religion put aside, it just demonstrates how the roman empire adopted the christian religion in 3 centuries, and how it transformed the empire from inside out. Way better than "God Delusion" from Richard Dawkins (I find this book a bit too messy.)

    mercredi, mars 11, 2009

    Oracle JRockit, WTF ?

    Today, I wanted to check with the latest JRockit version that we can run Apache Directory Studio with.

    No way ! You simply can't anymore get the latest version of this VM, unless you are ready to download one of the charged product : Oracle JRockit Mission Control 3.0.3 or Oracle JRockit Real Time 3.0.

    This is an incredibly stupid idea ! I don't care using either of those two products. What I want is to be sure that my clients who have invested a huge amount of money in WebLogic and decided that the VM of choice for their infrastructure will be JRockit, won't have any problem whatsoever with JRockit running Apache Directory Studio.

    Now, Oracle is wasting my time, as I have to register, give them some email address they can spam and get rid of the product I don't want to use just to be able to play with the JVM.

    Not to mention that their Login system is massively FU...

    Oracle, you are WASTING MY PRECIOUS TIME !

    Linkedin is not totally useless !

    At least, today I was able to find a real interest in LinkedIn.

    A fellow committer is working for a french company who submitted a proposal to a big state-owned french company (one of those gigantic mammoth which is supposed to spend our taxes wisely. Hmmm. _Supposed_ ...)

    They lost the deal, as it was attributed to another company. Were they more expensive, or with less technical merit ? Not at all. Another company got the deal, because the guy who selected them was previously working for this company before being hired by the State owned company. How strange ...

    How did they discovered this fact ? The poor guy had is CV on LinkedIn !

    lundi, mars 09, 2009

    Spam surge...

    I have no idea why suddenly the number of spams I receive has increased so drastically those last months ...

    Back in december, I received around 3000 spams a month (a good ratio of 100 spam a day). It has almost doubled since then !

    Don't worry, I'm not annoyed a single minute, as all the spams are quietly stored and destroyed every 30 days by Google. I decided to adopt this strategy 2 years ago, as I realized that running my own spam killer on my various computers was a lost of time : all my mails are now redirected to Gmail, and back into Thunderbird on my current computer. It has two advantages : I barely receive 2 spams a day, and I can still get my mails when I'm not in front of my computer. Not to mention the nice addition Google did last mont with Gmail Offline mode. I'm just a little bit concern about my privacy, but anyway, if it's confidential, I use snail...

    From time to time, I check the number of spams I have in my spam box, and this is where I took those numbers from. I don't even check for false negative, I simply don't have time for that.

    So either this crisis didn't hit the spammers, or they are so desesperate they have doubled the number of spams they sent. Otherwise, it's still about pills, loan, lottery, and of course nigerian scam... Nothing new under the sun !

    mardi, février 24, 2009

    Wasted 40 € today...

    I went to see a "doctor" this afternoon. In France, you have to spend many years in university in order to become a doctor. Fine.

    So my throat hurts, since last week. I thought it was time to stop aspirin and check if I needed some more powerfull medecine (basically, check it was viral or bacterian). So I picked a doctor close to my current client. Bad move...

    I should have quit his office as soon as I discovered he was an adept of those sugar pills: an homeopath ! What a joke... When introduced into his office, he first asked me if there was nothing wrong with him using a pendulum. What the hell ??? Then came the investigation (around 2 minutes) : "this is viral" (how the fuck does he know ? ).

    And now, the best part : he picked a random number of 'medecines' on his board, and used his pendulum to select the ones I have to take.

    40 €. No kidding. Back to ancient age, hands over your body, fuming parfumes, split on your right, and you are cured, and he is a bit richer.

    And we PAY for such a piece of doctor ???

    "It's a flue. Take your medicine, you'll be cured in one week. Do nothing, it will last 7 days".

    samedi, février 07, 2009

    How to waste 2 hours...

    One of the biggest problem when you are using the Apache project you have participated to is that you have hard time trusting yourself.

    Last thursday, I spent 2 hours debugging Apache Directory Server just because the program I'm working on (which is based on ADS) was failing. Obviously, it was an ADS bug ! What a damn idiot I was... Instead of blindly trust ADS, I should have focused on my current code ! (thanksfully, it only took me 2 hours to realize that).

    What kind of lessons did I learnt from this bad experience ?
    - first, just realize you are a client of your Apache project. How many times you replied to a user on the mailing list : "hey, you'd better have a real reason to think that there is a bug in the project instead of a bug in _your_ code...". Generally speaking, you are more likely to FU in your new code than in the project's code !
    - second, resist to the idea to go knees deep into the project code just because you have a deep knowledge of the code base. Step back, ask your co-workers, and try to check the code you have just wrote.
    - last, not least, improve the Apache project's error messages ! Really, it helps :)

    Otherwise, it's a really good thing to use teh Apache project you are working on for some client : you have a better perception of what is good, what is bad and what is ugly. And you can improve the project in the process :)

    samedi, janvier 31, 2009

    Over-protection...

    Today, Google is trying to protect me against malevolent sites when I do a search. All of them. Including my favorite sites :
    - Apache
    - playB^H^H^H^H^HNational Geographic,
    ...

    In fact, any search on google gives me a warning (sorry, it's in french) :

    Avertissement- Attention, l'accès à ce site risque d'endommager votre ordinateur.

    Suggestions :Vous pouvez également accéder à http://www.apache.org/ à vos propres risques. Pour obtenir des informations détaillées sur les problèmes que nous avons rencontrés, consultez la page de diagnostic de la Navigation sécurisée de Google concernant ce site.

    Pour plus d'informations sur la façon de vous protéger contre les logiciels nuisibles lorsque vous surfez, consultez le site StopBadware.org.

    Si vous êtes le propriétaire de ce site, vous pouvez en demander l'examen à l'aide des Outils pour les webmasters. Pour plus d'informations sur le processus de révision, consultez le Centre d'aide des webmasters de Google.
    Avertissement fourni parGoogle

    It seems that Google is having some kind of issue. I'm not alone having this problem, as many of other peeps are having the same problem...

    Goggle, wake up, I know it's 7 am at Montain View, but it's a mess out there ...