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This post is postdated and not really organized. This is about me talking about things that I find amazing but don’t even have the time to get into. If you take a look around, you’ll see that there are lots of languages seeing the day of light each year. I think they are three main reasons for that: It’s not that hard to create a (scripted or compiled) language. Development langages are made to reduce as much as possible the gap between computers and humans. And everyone has a special opinion about this. And a lot of people have special idea on how we could do that. Languages requirements and possibilities evolve and are backed by previous languages. I’d like to point out few of them. The best language I’ve seen so far is C#. It’s a almost complete rip-off from Java, and most of the other ideas go back to C++ (where the Java guys made some stupid choices). But it also tries to get the ease to get into of languages like VisualBasic. But there are also tons of great news ideas and syntaxes that makes this language very comfortable for a developer to use. ...

OVH has a mail redirection service that fails quite badly. It’s a little bit slower, or at least it’s always the slowest point of the mail transmission chain. But sometimes it’s REALLY slow. Like 10 hours slow. An other interesting point is that their redirection server time is totally out of sync. This is a little problem for me as I use mails intensively. I had setup some postfix/mysql redirection before and I think I will have to come back to that. ...

When you do a fresh install of prestashop, just after it finishes you need to rename the “admin” directory. The problem is that with the last two installs we did (as part of WebIngenia), we ended up with a blank/empty/white webpage. The only way to solve it was to clear the opcode cache from APC. So, if you encounter the same problem, you know what to do, you just need to clear the APC opcode cache and continue the install. ...

WARNING: All the Cinterion related content from this blog will be removed to go to the javacint wiki soon. Please get used to going there. I did this program because I had to reprogram some chips without a working MES deployment environment. I could deploy the TC65 program on a server but not upload it on the chip. And then I thought it could do a nice application for all the people deploying TC65 programs in a production environment. ...

Dear Google Analytics, or dear blog readers (if any). I just read the google analytics stats of a site and noticed a totally new source of traffic: “Other”. What do you think it could be ? Somehow it reminded me this blog post of a graphic designer (who seems quite talented and very creative) :

I thought about this service as soon as Google released the Google Latitude service : “It would be great if they could save data so that we could see where we were at a specific time.” And I very quickly published some code to get my position (you could be tracking me right now with it). I thought they would never release the history saving feature as people would have feared for their privacy and things like that. But they did it. ...

I often hear people talking about which technology is better between C / C++ / C# .Net / java. Most of the time, it’s more a political/brotherhood/community thing (like football, even thought frenchies like me aren’t so proud of their team now) than a technical talk. I find it absurd. Computer science is about efficiency and making more money. You can take into account the pleasure you have to work on a technology (as you will be more likely to be more efficient with it), but it should still remain about efficiency. ...

I’ve got a highschool friend whose father started a robot company. And this isn’t any robot company, they built the finest consumer product robot. And she’s now representing the company and leading the communication around the robot in Shanghaï. She and her 9 people team, spent 5 full-time working months to do this quite amazing show : Edit : I just remembered my friend Alice already has a blog where she speaks about this great robot. My excuse for not remembering it is that she doesn’t update it very often. ...

I’ve “always” used IM clients. I started with ICQ, switched to AIM, then MSN, then Jabber, then Gtalk and more recently Skype. I have all of them open, mostly because I like to be able to talk to everyone without forcing them to switch to something to talk to me but the main client I use, is currently Skype. Skype is the only one client that isn’t open in any way (application and every protocols). Well I must say, they’ve released their SDK (SkypeKit) very recently (the 22/06/10). People can now build softwares around Skype. But this is not what I want to talk about. ...

C# .Net allocation and freeing system is quite efficient but when you need to create a huge number of objects, it’s just not fast enough. So what you can do is try to recycle each object to avoid to recreate them. You will then just need to set their property. In my tests, this class reduced the allocation time from 12 to 15 times: public sealed class Heap<T> where T:class, new() { private readonly Stack<T> _stack = new Stack<T>(); private int _count; public T Allocate() { if ( _count == ) { return new T(); } else { --_count; return _stack.Pop(); } } public void Free( T obj ) { ++_count; _stack.Push( obj ); } } You might think that this process is really painful as you have to manually free every single objects you use. But in fact you just have to recycle most of the objects. If you forget some, that’s not really important (they will just get garbage collected). ...