Geekoblog - A geek's life

A few weeks ago, I had a revelation, something that will change the face of the (my) world.

Translating the biography of Richard Stallman into french on wikisource, I came across the Emacs phenomenon, which Stallman started. Curious, I installed the mighty software on my Debian.

Spending 3-4 days learning the key combinations, I eventually managed to use it. Then I discovered the power of it. Automatic indentation following different styles (I am a GNU style aficionado, because of a great readability), the syntax highlighting, the possibility to use it in terminal or in graphic mode, the multiple windows/buffers, the integrated shell...

But it was only the beginning. Now my .emacs.el file is as long as my arm, I use C# code highlighting, css, php, I installed emacs-wiki, which I love to use, emacs SVN...

All that to say that it is really really great to use such a nice program, and I am not close to stop using it.

As most people know, Microsoft has never been good at respecting standards.

However, the most amusing is when Microsoft doesn’t even respect its own standards. I just had a demonstration of this today. When saving a file in csv format from a German system and then opening it on a British system, the system is unable to recognize immediately the encoding and the separators.

In fact, when looking at the csv files with gedit for instance, one notices that the German csv is encoded in iso8xxx-15, and that the separators used are semicolons “;”. However, the English version uses commas “,” as separators and is encoded in windows something.

Now, when I look at this and have a big laugh, the thing I wonder about is why using commas on the English version while semicolons are not being used in the English value system, and why not using this good old UTF-8 as encoding, which would make the job infinitely simpler.

I recognize that csv is far from being a young format, but it can still be very useful, provided you use a standard encoding, separator and decimal separator.

Now on OOo’s side, things are a bit brighter.

First of all, when saving your csv, OOo leaves you the choice of the encoding and the separators, and the default encoding is the magic UTF-8. Even though the default separator is the comma on my Linux box, changing it is 2 clicks away.

OOo does not open the csv straight away but prompts you for the options regarding the csv file. The good thing is that OOo guesses the format, and even better, that OOo mostly guesses right, allowing you to click on next directly.

PS: this has been noticed from a 2003 version of MS Office, so this might be outdated.

It's been a long time I have been thinking about it, and I have now made the decision to switch my keyboards to dvorak layout.

image from wikipedia License: GNU FDL

For the moment. typing is painfully slow and I am not familiar with the position of the keys.

There is a useful program that allows me to learn faster: dvorak7min.

I will keep you informed of my progress.

Here we are, I am now a complete GNU geek, and depressed as well...

What should I do when trying my best to introduce the best (free of course) software to people, and find out that they just keep on using their rubbish proprietary stuff that, in top of not being free, also has a lower quality?

What should I do when this people answer to me "Oh, I'm used to this one". In this case we are talking of OOo and MS word. Don't you tell me that a basic user of MS word is unable to use OOo even without training! Even advanced functions such as inputting equations (OOo is much better at that than MS word by the way).

Anyway, my general feeling is to be depressed and disappointed by this world and the people who live in it. That they believe in money and think a software you pay shall be better than one you do not pay, I understand, but that they keep on using a blunt tool knowing they can have a sharp one for free, and that it is the same usage as the old one, this I cannot understand.

I leave you to these thoughts and go prepare my rope and chair...

People use to complain when it comes to the video games for the GNU/Linux operating system.

Are they right?

Well, not quite. It is true that the number of video games available is far behind those for MS Windows, but there are still enough to kill your several hours.

First of all, you can buy computer games ported to GNU/Linux, such as Neverwinter Nights, and some more recent games like Doom3. You can also play a good number of windows video games in GNU/Linux thanks to wine, Cedega if you are richer than me, or Dosbox if you like the oldies like Brakbabord.

Last but far from being least, there are a great deal of free games (like freedom, not free beer). Those are generally filled with good ideas and motivation from their developers. However, they usually lack of nice graphics and development, they are often buggy for instance. Fortunately, there are some of them that manage to achieve a quality good enough to be used and liked a lot.

In this series of reviews, I will begin by a video game that surprised me a lot : Globulation 2.

Lire la suite

As a programmer, I know very well how boring documenting can be. Nonetheless, I always made the effort to write at least a report after developing any application. Now, some people do not seem to agree about this consideration.

On a business point of view (yes, I am working), information is essential, that is what makes money. What if the guy who's got the information died tomorrow? Then the business would be lost, and it would take months for someone to catch up.

From a quality point of view now (which I studied 3 years), using a spoken tradition is very bad for business and generates errors. The traceability is vital for a modern company, hence when taking a project, we need to know who made it, what is its goal, what are the specifications in an eye-blink. Tracking errors is also very important, we cannot let a machine produce with a too important drift, therefore, the first thing is that we need to know what machines are being used for what project.

Well, in the end, the programmer's opinion, which is that when taking a project, I do not want to spend one month on trying to understand before implementing.

In conclusion, Documentation is not only important for companies and individuals, it is also essential to make sure nothing goes wrong, and if something does, then it allows us to find out what is going wrong in a very short time.

Now, please guys, write your documentations!!!