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 :)

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 !

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"

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.

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 ?

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.

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 ?