I went Saturday morning at 9:30 AM to the Apple Store at Opéra and got my iPad 2 an hour later. What surprised me the most was the attitude of the salespeople - they sell you the cool/Mac attitude along with the iPad. I got a WiFi version, so no GPS geolocation. The iPad wasn’t geolocating me at all, which is quite annoying for apps like Allociné that offer “nearby” showings, or Google Maps for “nearby” businesses. After an update from 4.3 to 4.3.1, no more issues - I was located within 50 meters. The coolest part is that the geolocation changes when I move around the apartment. So WiFi-based geolocation, although not very precise, is quite usable. ...

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.

I just read an article by an entrepreneur who tells things as they are, not “the speech to give to sell my success story and create my buzz”: Interview with Patrick Merel, Founder of Portable Genomics in San Diego (in French). The most amazing part is this: “[…]I quickly understood that the mandatory step, unfortunately, for an emerging innovative project was the ‘OSEO’ competition. […] Obviously, OSEO said no to me.[…]What really screwed me over, though, was that afterwards, all the French institutions for business creation support that I met all asked me, before providing any help, ‘Have you been a laureate of the OSEO competition?’, the killer question.” ...

I have the Freebox V6… I just moved into my new apartment and discovered that the Freeplugs won’t pair. I’m entitled to a replacement via UPS, but I’m apparently not the only one. I might have to wait quite a while. So I’m going to buy powerline adapters elsewhere.

The cloud Just in case, you still haven’t understood, the future is in the clouds. The more I use online product, the more I feel it. I’m now typing all my documents into google docs. Ok, I copy/paste them to Word for my retarded friends that live bellow the clouds, but soon I won’t. Even the important things that I have to do on actual files are synced by Dropbox (still on the cloud). ...

WARNING: All the Cinterion related content from this blog will be removed to go to the javacint wiki soon. Hi the Cinterion community, Cinterion France asked me to remove all the Cinterion TC65 / TC65i development materials I published on my blog. The good news is you can contact the Cinterion office of your country and sign a NDA to get the latest version of their manuals and SDK.

Hi the TC65 community, There’s a new software in town, after JOBexFTP from Ricardo Schmidt, Christoph Vilsmeier decided to create the TC65SH tool which apparently does the same thing but faster. Best regards, Here is the mail that brought the good news: Hello Florent, I’ve done some TC65 development recently and found your site very helpful, especially your articles about TC65 development. Thank you for that! I ran into some problems with the Cinterion SDK, especially the Module Exchange Suite (MES). Basically, it didn’t work for me. Cinterion support told us that MES doesn’t work on Windows 7 and they are working on a solution, well… (I tried it on WindowsXP too. There, it worked better but was still very unreliable.) ...

XRDP is a very interesting project. It allows to create a terminal server on Linux hosts using the RDP protocol. I think the RDP protocol is a great protocol (better than VNC) but that’s not why I’m writing this. The important thing about this tool is: It’s freaking simple to use. On Debian, just type: apt-get install xrdp -y On Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just type: yum install xrdp Then, you have to start it: ...

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 light of day each year. I think there are three main reasons for that: It’s not that hard to create a (scripted or compiled) language. Development languages 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 ideas 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. ...