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.)

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 !

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 !