Vincent Foley-Bourgon

All right, the Typo blog didn't work so well, check out http://gnuvince.net again, things should be working now. Hopefully...

All right, I'm sick of all the weird TextDrive problems, so I'm gonna move gnuvince.net to somewhere else. I'll update you

Head over to http://gnuvince.net to see my new blog! Right now, this is Typo on TextDrive.com, but since I've been having some issues getting up and running, I could end up on WordPress. We'll see what happens. Update your aggregators!

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, has been declared the best hacker of 2005 by O'Reilly and Google. I gotta say that I agree, Rails is a terrific framework, and the way it became one of the hottest technologies around in less than a year is pretty incredible. Good job, David!

I want talk about two topics in this post.

First, I think I will get myself a TextDrive account to host a new blog, a Typo blog. Their rates are pretty chea, and I hear their service is great, so Uncentered Mind could be changing servers. Stay tuned, I'll let you know what happens.

Second, I think I have good karma, listen to this story that happened to me today. I left for work this morning, and it was a little foggy. Not too bad, but enough that I decided to turn on my headlights, so that oncoming cars would see me from farther away. However, people who know me know that I'm the kind of guy to forget things quite quickly, and indeed, when I got to Merck, I got out of my car and forgot to turn off the headlights. I didn't notice it then. However, when I came to my car at 3:30PM, I realized I had no power. There was barely anyone in the parking lot, I didn't have my cell phone, so what could I do? Luckily for me, not 20 meters away, there was a two truck. That's right, the day that I let my battery die out, a two truck is in the parking lot, ready to help me :) I went to the guy, he pulled over, plugged my car to his battery, and bingo, I could be off home! I gave the guy $20 (is that enough?), thanked him for his help and went home. And now, here I am! Amazing!

I finished reading Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, author of best sellers Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. For those of you who read DVC and A&D know that they both start exactly the same way, in the first chapter, someone dies. The same happens in Digital Fortress. The story is so-so, the plot is a bit weak, but entertaining nonetheless. However, I found the book to be way too predictable, I solved the first of the two major riddles 150 pages before they do, and the second one as soon as I read it, I knew the answer. You know, for highly intelligent people -- that is emphasized often in the book -- they're not so quick.

If you like Dan Brown's style, you will probably enjoy the book.

Do you remember during the 2004 presidential campaign when FNC hosts kept calling John Kerry a flip flopper? If not, watch the trailer of the movie Outfoxed to refresh your memory. Now, I think somebody should call them and tell them we've found another flip flopper, George W. Bush:

While we're on the subject of Karl Rove and the potentially criminal leaking of classified national security information, let's do a quick update on where the case stands so far.

In October 2003, Scott McClellan said, "if anyone in this administration was responsible for the leaking of classified information, they would no longer work in this administration. This is a very serious matter. The President made it very clear just a short time ago in the East Room, and he has always said that leaking of classified information is a serious matter. And that's why he wants to get to the bottom of this. And the sooner we get to the bottom of it, the better."

In June 2004, George W. Bush affirmed that anyone who was involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity would be fired.

In July 2004, Time reporter Matt Cooper confirmed that the covert identity of Valerie Plame was given to him by the senior advisor to the president, Karl Rove.

And last week George W. Bush demonstrated his commitment to honesty and integrity by not only not firing Karl Rove, but giving him a $4,000 pay raise.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated, America?

Way to stand by what you say Georgie, way to "bring back honnor and decency back to the White House." For people who are interested in these sort of stories, the website Democratic Underground is definitly for you, especially the Top 10 section, which is updated every Monday. It's always fun to read about men who claim they have high moral values just to read that they slept with the baby sitter when they drove her home.

I just watched an amazing video: some dude finishes both Megaman X and Megaman X2 for SNES SIMULTANEOUSLY! He hacked his emulator so that the keys were sent to both game, and he finished them both faster than I can do half the game!

Check it out: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/movies.cgi?id=380

You Are an Espresso

At your best, you are: straight shooting, ambitious, and energetic At your worst, you are: anxious and high strung You drink coffee when: anytime you're not sleeping Your caffeine addiction level: high

I want to keep a couple of directories (namely, my gems and elisp directories) in sync on my iBook and my Linux machine. What would be the best way to do it? I could set up a Subversion repository, but is it the best solution?

The guy who made the UnCommon Web video released another very nice screencast (torrent) where he introduces SLIME. This is a very well done video, explains many things that I didn't know about SLIME and shows many things that so-called modern IDEs could learn from.

However, again, I couldn't shake the feeling that doing things in Ruby and Smalltalk is easier. Now, a SLIME-like mode for Ruby, THAT would be way sexy :)

Through Planet Lisp, I found an introduction video to UnCommon Web (torrent). UnCommon Web uses the same techniques as Seaside, however I thought that it looked way more complicated than Seaside. All these macros with different names made it seem quite harder to use than Seaside. I wonder if that's because Seaside has been in development for a longer time and Avi has put more thought in usage or if it's a cultural difference between Smalltalk and Common Lisp? In either case, I think that if I had to develop a web application that required continuations, I'd go with Seaside. It's nice however that UnCommon Web can use Apache as its backend.

I started playing the guitar quite regularly again a few weeks ago. I already had two guitars, a classical one and an electric one, however I always found myself taking my dad's acoustic guitar. So yesterday, I went to Musique A-440 in Valleyfield and I got myself a new guitar, a Blueridge BR-40, a damn fine guitar. From the picture, it looks pretty plain, however it's a very, very nice guitar and far more importantly, it sounds so great. According to the salesman, my old guitar teacher, this guitar ranked #1 in a review of 11 acoustic guitars in a high-profile magazine on guitars. Three reviewers out of four prefered it to guitars that cost three times as much. The guitar cost me $550 CAD, taxes included. When I got home, my dad took his guitar, and we compared the sounds of both instruments: now, my dad's guitar is like 30 years old, but it sounds quite well, however it had a very normal, plain sound in comparison to mine. Played so much last night that my fingers still hurt :)

So, if you wanna sing some songs, just come over to my place, we'll have to fun, drink some beers and pretend we can actually sing :)

This question is addressed to the techies who mistakenly read my blog: what disk wiping utilies do you use? I'm gonna be wiping a lot of hard disks in the next few days, so I'm considering my options. The number one quality is a very clean wiping; there may be sensitive data on these disks, but since we plan to donate them to public schools, we don't want some pimply teenager with a lot of time and technical knowledge browsing around.

Other qualities I am looking for are that the utility can wipe multiple disks at the same time, that the process of starting new disks be relatively simple (as few keystrokes as possible). Free tools are nice to have to. So far, I've got these choices:

• GDisk: That's not Google Disk, it's a utility that comes with Symantec Ghost. It seems to do the job, however I don't know whether you can wipe multiple drives simultaneously. It has the advantage that you just pop in the floppy, boot the computer and come back a few hours later.
  
  
• dban: I haven't tried it yet, but my friend Joel has recommended it to me. I don't know if starting the process is complicated and long, or it just starts automatically. The website claims that dban will wipe any hard disk it detects, so I'm guessing that it can work simultaneously.
  
  
• Disk Wipe: This is a utility that comes with ERP Commander, some sort of Windows XP Live CD to recover data. It works well, seems pretty fast, I know you can do more than one wipe at a time, however the process is rather long: Start Menu, System Utilities, Disk Wipe, select "Wipe Disk", select the disk, type the disk's label to confirm and then it starts.
  
  
• DSX: I've used that when I worked for the federal government, however I learned that its usage is restricted to governemental agencies only, so I guess this one's out. Anyway, I remember it was long to setup and did one disk at a time.
  

If you know of other utilites, please let me know.

Just a quick questions to the Mac guys, is there a way to specify that all links which should open in a new window in Safari, should be opened in a new tab? Kind of like Firefox?

I really hate the morons in the Slashdot comments. There's this story on Why I Hate The Apache Web Server, and instead of commenting on the issue at hand, all the morons at Slashdot can talk about is how the author is stupid for using a PDF and how the editors are twits for posting a PDF link without advertising it.

What the heck is wrong with PDF's anyways? Acrobat Reader (on Windows and Linux) and Preview.app on OS X all start rpetty quickly, they all show the exact same contents, not something you can say with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, and PDf is so ubiquious, you shouldn't really have any problem dealing with PDF's. So, what's the problems? Slashdot community are a bunch of dorks. You know, I keep going there because it has become a habit and I go see the comments because sometimes I wanna know what other people think of some issue. But I think I should try and find new places to get my news from. Any suggestions?

I'm at work, and I am bored. I am supposed to take an online training
cours, however I can't log in yet because the databases haven't
synced, so I'm stuck waiting and not doing anything really productive.

If you've followed the IT scene in the past few years, you probably
know about a product called VMWare, a very nice product that
allows you to run multiple OSes on a single machine. A couple of
friends of mine were talking about VMWare the other day, and they
especially liked the fact that the whole virtual OS was just a single
image file.

"That way, if you need to move the virtual OS to another machine, you
just have to copy the image file, start VMWare and you're off!" they
said. I don't know if it's that simple, I have no experience with
VMWare, but it sounds reasonable enough to me to believe.

This made me wonder if VMWare that is quickly becoming a life saver,
even a necessity for some system administrators can enlighten
programmers about what is so hot about Smalltalk (and Lisp) images.

Smalltalk images are like that, they contain all your source code, but
also the source code of the Smalltalk distrubution you have, the tools
you use (debugger, refactoring browser, unit test browser, etc.) to
develop. If you use Squeak for instance, you can easily put your
image file on a USB drive, go to another computer, plug in your USB
stick and just open the image file with Squeak and you have the exact
same thing than the last time you saved.

Since everything, including your configurations, is inside that image,
if you need to change computers, your work environment will be exactly
the same. So if for any reason you have to change computers (maybe
you're going home, maybe you want to use the laptop outside, maybe you
bought a new computer), as long as you have your image file, your work
environment will be the same.

That sounds pretty attractive to me, doesn't it? One file with all
your code, the system's code, the development tools and your
configurations. Consider if you were using Java with Eclipse, to have
the same work environment, you'd need to either copy all the config
files from another PC, you'd need to install all the third-party
libraries you need and get your source code from either a RCS
depository or just by scp'ing the files from another system. In
either case, it seems like a lot more work than in Smalltalk's case,
doesn't it?

Another advantage of images and Smalltalk has been explained by Cincom Smalltalk's product
manager, James
Robertson where he said that some clients had problems with their
programs, so they saved the image and sent it to Cincom, where some
programmers could look at the code, see what conditions triggered the
exception, etc. Replicating a bug in Java is much harder, because the
code is dead. It's like Frankeisten, you code it when it's dead, you
try it, when it tries to kill you, you unplug it, see what's wrong and
try to fix it. Smalltalk code is alive.

If sysadmins begin to see just how nice it is to have VMWare imges, is
it possible that programmers could begin to see that source code in
files is quaint (to quote Kent Beck) and that images are the way to
go? You get the added bonus of much more powerful tools than grep,
sed and awk.

Here's my rant about incomplete RSS/Atom feeds: @HNE
CH(UIWHOIFD231231SOIDFNOINAWODN.

Wow, I feel better already. Anybody reading me who has a partial feed
for his blog and/or news site, also put up a feed with full contents:
I will read it. I don't like going back and forth from NewsNetWire
and Safari. I'm subscribed to The Superficial's feed and I
deplore the fact that I always need to open Safari to read the
complete stories.

lolkthxbye

Well, in less than twelve hours, I will start my new job as Desktop
Computer Specialist at Merck Frosst. I can't say that I'm not
apprehensive about this, because I am. I have friends who don't seem
to have this problem, they keep their usual cool about new jobs. I
can't understand how they do it; to me, a new job is a new building
that you need to learn, new people you need to meet, new bosses whose
expectations you have to meet, new ways to do your job (at least, in
my case it will be), new work politics, new schedule, new habits to
take, new road to travel every morning and every evening, etc.

I'm sure I'll be all right, but I think I'll feel better when the week
is over, when I know what this job is all about. Until then, I'll
continue feeling apprehensive. I don't expect I'll be able to sleep
much tonight.