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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). ...

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. During the last months I spent some time writing a document on the TC65 development. It is primary aimed at TC65 project managers and developers. This document can be considered as a draft and I’m waiting for any of your comments to fix / improve / complete it. It’s currently 40 pages long. ...

Update 2011-06-25 A lot of people still contact me about this project. I received this mail today, just in case you’re getting interested by the project, you should know that it will die pretty soon: Dear PowerMeter User, We first launched Google PowerMeter as a Google.org project to raise awareness about the importance of giving people access to their energy information. Since our launch, there’s been more attention brought to this issue, and we’re excited that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of access to energy data. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would have liked, so we have decided to retire PowerMeter. ...

If you have a PHP configured with some open_basedir restriction (which is recommended), the WP-Codebox plugin will prevent you from exporting the posts of your blog. Go to your blog, go in the “wp-content/plugins/wp-codebox” dir and edit the “wp-codebox.php” file : On line 27, you should have : include_once "../../../wp-config.php"; include_once "../../../wp-settings.php"; Well, it fails because the plugin doesn’t use the good practices, so it’s pretty easy to fix : require_once( ABSPATH.'/wp-config.php' ); require_once( ABSPATH.'/wp-settings.php' ); I’d like to thank the developer of this plugin for doing such a great job. It brings the power of geshi (not the latest version by the way) into wordpress. ...

Blue Screen Of Death are the most annoying things that can happen on Windows. Most of the people just think “my stupid windows just crashed” and sometimes they even get reinstalling it (what a waste of time). But in fact the windows kernel itself never crashes, the drivers do. And from a general point of view, I think it’s better to understand the problems before solving them. It sometimes takes a little bit more time but it makes you save a lot of time in the long run (and everything in life is about time). ...

UPDATE (25 July 2013) I closed the project because it was consuming a lot of resources for not special result. It was merely a test of cassandra. BTW, Cassandra didn’t have any problem handling the load generated by this project. It went very smoothly. UPDATE (07 Nov 2011) I reworked the same project with a totally different architecture. I used Java/Servlet/Glassfish + Cassandra. It’s just a test project to see how I could apply this kind of NoSQL DB to other projects, so it’s really simple. ...

When I was a student, I worked on a little home automation project, it was part of a partnership between my school as the company. We were 5 five on the project and I was doing the core gateway. It was relying on the OSGi framework, I built some bundles (the OSGi way). AND… The most frustration thing we encountered is that we couldn’t find by that time any cheap and reliable home automation system. I did a lot of searches but the only cheap and reliable systems (and more specifically protocols) that we could find where Z-Wave and Insteon. But both of them where only available in the US and couldn’t be used in France because of the electrical system (110V 60Hz instead of 220V 50Hz here) and the unlicensed radio frequencies (443 Mhz instead of 800 Mhz here). ...