One week ago, I went to a factory outlet to buy some trousers (mine were definitely out of usage).
For the same model and same size, I found three different jeans : I didn’t fit in the first, and I felt comfortable in the two others, even I felt differently in those.

I bought the two latters, and, asking the sales woman for what the codes I noticed were, she explained me one was the textile code and the other … well, I don’t remember what the other was.
I reminded me how tricky it is when you buy computer parts ; you always have to check which firmware there is in.

Trousers have firmware, too.
2008 is so incredible !

Last night I pulled a bit too much on the mouse wire, and disconnected it. I plugged it back on the PS/2 connector, but, as expected, I couldn’t move the cursor. So I tried removing the USB -> PS/2 adaptor and plugged it…. WOW it works. Who said OpenBSD wasn’t ready for the desktop ?

Funny, the mouse is way faster now. I can move from one screen to the opposite just in one wrist movement. My mouse is Speedy Gonzales !

P.S. : this post was to be longer, with a big part of ranting about standard and wireless keyboards and mice, but Firefox crashed. So I gave up re-writing all the text. The rant will be the topic of another post.

For the last two months, I’ve been more and more thinking about buying an Apple computer.

I first fell in love with the Mac Book Pro, the 17 inches one, of course. It featiures nearly everything someone would love to have. But at EUR 3.100 (USD 4,080) with an external TV card, I quicky admitted I couldn’t afford it. Sigh.
Then I considered getting either a Mac Book or a Mac mini. Both are way cheaper than the premium Mac Book Pro : about EUR 1.498 (USD 1,970) for the first and EUR 1.059 (USD 1,400) for the latter. They aren’t fully loaded like the Pro, but they’re still quite interesting.

If I choose a Mac Book, it’s also to have a small and light laptop when travelling, and to really feel at home, I would gladly add a 23 inches Apple Cinema Display (maybe inspired by the commercial featuring 37signals‘ Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson) And then it costs a lil’ more : EUR 2.650 (USD 3,490).

As I realized I’m not that often travelling, buying a laptop may not be the best idea. Moreover, it would cost me a big Apple screen, as it wouldn’t handle my current three screens display.
So I thought of affording a Mac mini, plugged to one of my screens, and using Synergy to switch from OpenBSD to Mac OS X just with one single keyboard/mouse set.

Anyway, I like my OpenBSD workstation, with fluxbox, and I’ll keep it for a long time before chaging for an Apple computer (even if they’re very attractive).
Okay, to fulfill my dreams, here is what I would order :

• A 17 inches Mac Book Pro
• A 30 inches Apple Cinema HD Display
• A USB TV card

For… about EUR 5.300 (USD 7,000). Insane hu ?

Ouch. A three days week-end. Eventful and restless.

I caught a train on Thursday evening, an hour and half after leaving the office, to arrived at 11pm in Paris. pouype was kind enough to host me for the week-end. He was waiting for me at the railroad station and drove me to his house, in a nice and quiet suburb.

On Friday morning, pouype and I got into the train, he to go to work, I to go to La Defense, to attend Paris on Rails conferences, in IBM’s Descartes Tower.
The conferences were very interesting, and it was the opportunity to meet many of those from Ruby France and Rails France I chat with on the Internet. I also met the team from the company I have job interviews with the week before, and the recruiter from Teamlog was here as well. I’ll write a complete page about these conferences in some days.

After the conferences, pouype (who joined after his day job) and I stayed next to the tower, so I could catch anyone I knew coming out, to introduce him to pouype. After discussing the interest of each conference with kristalino and bartocc , pouype, underflow, zencocoon and I walk around to finally have a drink and, after being cordially invited to leave, had pizza for dinner (where we were asked to leave too, a little after at 10pm O_o).

On Sunday, pouype, his wife and I went to a Greek restaurant, after what she stayed at home while we drove to La Cité des Sciences de La Villette, for APRIL’s 10th anniversary. We attended a conference and then leave to meet leeloo, the Mandriva Girl, and one of her friend, who lives in Montpellier, so we’ll plan to see each others sooner or later.
I didn’t watch my clock and I was four minutes late to get the train back to the South :-\

After considering waiting for 11 hours at the railroad station, as the following train to Avignon was at 7:54am on Sunday (!), I choosed to wander around and try to find a cheap room.

I did. But you can imagine the comfort of a EUR 50 (USD 64) room, less than a quarter of a mile far from the railroad station… I even blocked the door with chairs, in case someone tried to rob me during the night… (I took some pictures, I’ll upload them later)

Finally, I caught the earliest train this morning, and got back home at 11am.

Eventful, restless.

Ouch. 00:53 am.

I’ve just finished writing our last French speaking Ruby users, Ruby France, e-gathering, during which we dealt with… administrativia.
It wasn’t long, but I’m not very productive when I spend the evening watching Prison Break and chatting on IRC.
Anyway, we’re on our way to building a strong Ruby community in France (by the way, we need a logo, so, if you’re a graphist, feel free to contact me (zifro@ this site) to show me something ; in my idea, and hexagonal Ruby will be perfect, as France is also called the Hexagon).

I wrote I was at the JDLL last week-end.
It’s time to point at a stand I particularly liked : LinuxChixFrance (who claimed to be also grep|grrl too).
It’s a group of women, willing to see more girls involved in the open source community (like Debian Woman, Gnome Women). They were explaining to every each guy coming to their stand what goals they target, and were selling very, very nice A3 (European size, more than twice the US Letter size) posters, which you can see there.

As most of this blog readers are not French reading ones, here is the translation of the texts of the posters, from left to right :

1. I code, You code, She codes, We code, You code, They (women) code

2. One can love to take care of animals without even dreaming of becoming a vet.
3. This woman uses Free Software. It makes her : [ ] sexy [ ] independant

4. This womand hates mouses. She prefers command line interfaces.

I was well-dressed (I wore a suit and a clean shirt) so I suppose the girl (zopeuse ?) thought I wasn’t a techie (but I may be absolutely wrong…) and explained me more precisely what LinuxChixFrance wanted.

To support them, I bought five of each posters they were selling, plus a small Tux pendant (I bought a pink one, I think I’ll offer it to my sister). The girl didn’t believed it at once, then she was truly happy to see someone would spread their message by pasting and/or distributing posters.

The fact is there aren’t enough girls in FLOSS (Anne Ostergaard made a neat conference about “Women in Free Software - Findings from the FLOSSPOLS report on gender 2006″ while she was at the 2006 RMLL). All that those girls say are sadly the truth : from kindergarten (toys play an important role in mind development, and girls are given dolls while boys are playing with construction games, tools and stuff) to university, girls are more or less forced to other ways than computing.
So whatever we could do will be a first step to welcoming more girls in our community.

I’m waiting for the first girl to join Ruby France

It was a very good three days week-end.
I left home early (around 7 am) on Friday morning, and drove to Lyon.

The job interview went fine ; I think I was quite good, and I’ll soon have a phone call from their recruitment service, to be interviewed by another person. Wait and see.

The JDLL were very interesting, especially the Mozilla security conference made by Tristan NITOT and Paul ROUGET’s presentation about XUL & XPCOM. Yes, I like Mozilla stuff.
Lucas NUSSBAUM gave a lighting talk to present Ruby, but it was too troll-focused ; at least he did it.

I have a great time of fun with fredix, alexis, pouype, Fraifrai and jsh. They are people I knew on IRC only before this day (except for Fraifrai). We had lunch and dinner together, talked about all and nothing, Ruby France, Linux, OpenBSD, and so on…

fredix asked me if I would present something about Ruby next year… why not ?

One of the bosses of the main company I work for came in the office this morning to greet us ; he noticed my Slackware tee-shirt.

him : oh, you’ve got a pingoo !
me : no, it’s a Tux…
him : a Tux ?
me : a Tux !
him : ???
me : Tux is the name of the pingouin that symbolizes the Linux operating system
it’s a free, both as in free of charge and freedom, operating system
When it smokes Bob’s pipe, it’s the Slackware Tux. They all have a different way to
draw it
him : I know what Linux is, do you use Linux at home ?
me : I used to, but I’ve switched to OpenBSD… it’s for people with a bigger beard !

(he publicly made fun of me the first time I had let my hair and beard grow)

Next time I’ll bring chunky bacon or a gorilla at the office…

It appears that you, Mac users, haven’t fullfilled your true destiny just having bought
the latest, hypest, Mac Book Pro.

You need something more to gain the next level.

A DeviantArt member has the solution : the Steve Jobs desktop.
Get it there : http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/36733419/

Source (as pasted by sng on IRC) :
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/08/17/his-steveness-in-desktop-format/

More icing on the cake, do you know how many Steves it takes to change a light-bulb?

None. Darkness is the next big thing.

I received the bill for the screens… it’s time to pay now

EDIT on 2006/08/07 : it’s paid.

I upgraded my desktop environment Not my computer, but my physical desktop. Take a look :