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Update 2012-03-25: It turns out, it’s just some object oriented C: Kaspersky Lab experts now say with a high degree of certainty that the Duqu framework was written using a custom object-oriented extension to C, generally called “OO C” and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 (MSVC 2008) with special options for optimizing code size and inline expansion. Source If you missed it in the news, you should definitely read this: The Mystery of the Duqu Framework. ...

I’m a huge fan of all the cloud technologies. I’ve been working on a M2M project on top of cassandra and I can really say I love this distributed database. I’d like to give my feedback on this great database. Easy management Cassandra doesn’t require any kind of manual management for complex operations like sharding data accross node restore a crashed server or put a new or a previous disconnected node back into the cluster. You just have to tell the nodes to join the cluster and watch him do all the work. ...

On my spare time, I manage a handful of servers. And even if it’s not really my job, I try to do it well and efficiently. All of them work on Debian because it’s simple to manage. I started using cron-apt a few years ago. I started by upgrading everything automatically, this was a big mistake. I switched to only sending mails on available upgrades and doing the upgrade manually. But this is also quite painful because 95% of the time, it consists in typing “apt-get dist-upgrade -y” and waiting and I have lots more interestings things to do. ...

I’ve been testing btrfs for some months now. One of the most interesting features of this file-system is its snapshoting capabilities. Before that I was using rsnapshot. The issue with rsnapshot is that its lowest atomic level for snapshotting is the files themselves using hard-links. So any database table where one row is changed is copied completely. Btrfs as you might guess will only copy the modified chunks (I don’t know the atomicity of them [but who cares?]). ...

I bought a Kindle. It might sound strange considering I already have an iPad, but I couldn’t help myself to buy a “e-ink” enabled device. The user experience around the Kindle is OK but not great, because it’s not a touch screen. The real amazing thing is the sync between amazon, the kindle and all the other possible devices. There’s the sync when you buy a book. It appears instantly on the device. This feeling is so great. You do the “one click buy” and plop, you can read it. I know you can download most of the ebooks for free. But it takes at least 10 times more time. And I think we should prefer to download things legally when it’s at a fair price and faster to download than illegally. And there’s the sync between your devices: I can read the same book on my iPad (better at night), my iPhone (I always have it) or the kindle. And every time I open any of these devices, it tells me “You were last reading on page X on this device, do you want to go there ?”. So thank you amazon for making a better world. ...

Same title. I wish I was more original. I’ve been missing writing on this blog. It’s very fulfilling to write stuff around subjects we love. Outdated This doc has been moved to the javacint website. What’s new in this document ? Netbeans 7.0 with the TC65i The use of pre-processor Small thougths around the EGS5. Personnal advices on project/product management This can be considered as a draft. I’m waiting for your comments, even (or especially) negative ones, to help me improve this document.

I’ve been working in a company for two years now (which is the longest time I have ever worked in the same company). I wasn’t supposed to do a lot of C++ but this is what I ended up doing and on a calculation intensive software. I ended up having to learn a thing or two about improving performances. I wrote these lines for new comers to the C++ performance optimizing problems. ...

Hi everyone, I updated the TC65Dev document. Mostly because there’s a good chance I will only have less free time. I modified few parts and added some new content. It is now 50 pages long, this is a lot more than I originally intended to do. Click here to get it

I just tested the sharing of the iPhone 3G internet connection that comes with iOS 4.3. And it works great. I think Apple figured out that sharing 3G over WiFi was the main reason for jailbreaking iPhones. Until now I was wondering if I would take the 3G or Wifi iPad 2. Now I’m pretty sure I will take the WiFi version. The good news here is also that Bouygues doesn’t seem to lock it (I accepted the mobile provider settings from the iTunes just after I updated the iPhone). ...

Debian released a new version of their system. I updated it on the server that powers this blog, it took me something like one hour to do the whole system upgrade. There was only a little glitch with mysql’s my.cnf file that had an unsupported “skip-bdb” line. Everything else went fine… The very good thing in this new release is the new kfreebsd version (available in i386 and x86_64). It brings the power of the FreeBSD kernel to the great Debian OS. If you don’t see the point, read this. To put in a nutshell: a more stable kernel with less legal issues, better vendors support and the same softwares.