Older blog entries for mattam (starting at number 3)

Lots to say tonight! Two weeks have passed and I did lot of things:

University Got my exams right! There was a 'Unix practicing' test, whose first answer was 'man ls', get it?

Gaming Forced to install Zin2k on my box for a research job (real-time video processing, more on this later) I finally play games again. I finished Hitman 2, Silent Assassin in about 1 week. I recommend it to anybody willing to become a professional criminal, it is very though sometimes to not get caught by all these bad guys out there ;)

Mathematics I wrote a logical propositions validator in OCaml, as my teacher suggested us (he works on Coq). That was nice to brainstorm a little for school as I didn't do that for almost 2 years. For those interested, here's the first version.

Genea Advancing... I just got the french translation right, but wasted a lot of time because of a boost::shared_ptr misuse. Now I keep my eyes wide opened.

A gift I offered a Wacom Intuos2 A5 tablet to my brother, so he's very happy. I did not have much time to test it as he's drawing with it all the time now, but it works nicely with The Gimp (I'll publish his productions someday).

Movies Monthy Python's Meaning of Life is still a lot of fun, especially the Catholism/Protestantism scene (All sperm deserves attention...). Out Cold was funny too although i do not think it could have been more caricatural.

Got an active week-end with a "festive" manifestation in Paris against repressive laws (no more street artists or free/rave parties in France, which is sad).

Also questioning myself about *BSD and GPL philosophy from time to time. What makes me wonder is that *BSD is a liberal license although GPL's restrict possibilities. You've got to hope the others will employ their liberty in some moral way (BSD) or enforce it (GPL). I think GPL gives me the right to be a dictator of some kind, although in practice there's little you cannot do with GPL'd software. OTOH BSD licenses allow evil uses, one of which is making some insecure,monopoly-backed OS becoming better, with no reward at all. It seems *BSD fans like their OS being in the background of every OS, standing at key points of networks infrastructure, encouraging standards (a nice property they have), and also being quite unknown from the mass. From a student's point of view I'll say it's great but as a 'software developer' I just could'nt afford the risk a user don't get the sources I worked on or cannot get/distribute it at no cost because some corp. decided that. Again it may well never be the case in practice.

Hacking

My GUI advances nicely, but I'm stuck with some (unavoidable?) problem with gtkmm. You can't make Combo boxes with C++ items in it. That's just a technical problem as the drop down list relies on a C implementation. I just hope I will not encounter other limitations like this one in the future. If anyone knows of a workaround, please let me know :)

Reading

Someone pointed me to the TUNES project and it seems they have great hackers over there. I got hooked by this text (Why a new OS?, still a draft) and suppose some others will or have been too.

Also interested in philosophy, I just begun reading Spinoza's "De Dieu" and I find it awesome that one man wrote such a proof of his philosophical thoughts. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just open the book at any page and read. It's a rigourous (although not as rigourous as modern maths) succession of theorems and lemmas and... about 300 pages long, all about humans and god. I'm searching for his first error :)

Last cigarette in mouth, a good, longer (1 hour more) night waits for me to sleep

Last cigarette of the day reminds me to write a little diary entry to keep things clear. I learned a lot today about logical propositions calculus with my teacher (the man who started active DVI! he was happy I knew about it).

Also talked to some *BSD Zealots for a comparison of features with Linux but they seemed to not know much about the kernel I didn't know (e.g. does it has preemption, how is the latency, what filesystems it supports and so on). They only said that was THE admin's OS, but that the desktop side was nice too. If someone could point me to a detailed comparison i'd like it much (googling didn't help, just flame wars appeared).

Oh and latest(in France) Ally McBeal was one of the funiest I ever seen. One (intermitenly lesbian) woman doing "polyandrism" and another attacking her husband for sexual harassment. Where do americans get those ideas while being supposed to be the most puritans in the world (and the least funny country these times of war) ? I'm pretty happy to see that there is still a big difference between politics and real life having seen that and Bowling for Columbine.

Wow, Advogato has a huge database ! I find it interesting to have such review although there is a size problem (what's the count ?) for newcommers.

Comming to my diary... Well, this is my first diary entry ever so I'm a bit uncertain about how to write it. Anyway, here it goes:

I'm just begining writting an interface for a Genealogy library I developed this summer. I'm really happy with gtkmm & libglademm and hope it will speed up development so my mother can finally switch to an all-free environment and I have a moderately big project ongoing (i'm still a young student, just wanting to make free software ;-). Once this "goal" acomplished i'll probably give my help to other persons in my town wanting to experiment free software too. I don't mean install-parties but going right to a user's home and help him learning a new environment. I wonder if it was already done.