Dreamer ant

In this era of high technology, of wireless information, GPS, satellites, multi-featured cell phones and user-friendly user interfaces, yes, I bought a compass And yes, it also has a thermometer (and if you wonder where in the world it’s 30 degrees in late November, answer is: an overheated room in Tokyo).

I can read a map but I do not own a GPS. And even if I did, it wouldn’t tell me towards which direction I should start walking when getting out of a metro station (unless I walk a little while, see where my new position is, and figure out the north from there). It just feels natural and comfortable to me, when I am in unknown places, to have a slight idea of my environment

Whoa, look at that, there is a Linux hater’s blog, and whoa, it has a new post about my whylinuxisbetter.net website. From the post: “[…] it reads like a talking point manual for your local neighborhood Linux zealot. I thought we might have a bit of fun with this one.” Hmm, let’s see… Yay, let’s fight

• Is your system unstable? “Who knew. When a system doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t crash.” All of Google runs Linux. So Google doesn’t do anything? Well that’s news. Nasa probably doesn’t do anything either? The French administration doesn’t do anything? Oh wait, that was a bad example.
• Choose what your desktop looks like… “To make yourself feel better about it not being to do anything. At least it is pretty.” Huh, were you just talking about Windows Vista?
• Too many windows? Use workspaces. “Yes. Spaces.” Oh, you mean that Mac OS X thing? So if I got two windows A and B on space 1, I put window B in front/focus, then I go to space 2, then back to 1, woops, now A is in front of B. And this is the newest version of the OS, released this year. Linux got this right 10 years ago.
• Why does your Windows get slower day after day? “Because you install a shit-ton of crap on it? If the same large selection of software could run on Linux, users would be having all the same problems“. Would they now? Fortunately for Linux, uninstalling software is done in a clean way and doesn’t leave a shit-ton of crap in your registry.
• Forget about viruses. “I think we went over that already” (with a link to another post). Oh, so the problem of viruses in Windows is completely fixed, solve, basta, finito? That’s news as well.
• Linux protects your computer. “What does that even mean? It sounds like the same as [the previous one]“. Does that mean the problems with spyware, adware, etc. is fixed as well? Well, great. Oh, but maybe you don’t know about them because you’re protected, right? How much did you pay for this protection? Are all users well protected? Is the average user well protected? I guess not because otherwise, all these crapware problems would have gone away by now, right?
• Don’t pay $300 for your operating system. “But spend 10 weekends setting it up“. Well, now I understand why you don’t like Linux that much, that’s because last time you tried to install it was 10 years ago! Got it. By the way, last time I installed Windows, it took me a whole day to go, fetch, and install all the device drivers for my hardware. And reboot after installing each one of them. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I spent 10mn in front of the screen, went away for 20mn, and everything was working and ready to be used when I came back.
• Does your digital life seem fragmented? “No? Does anyone care? Is it so hard to click three buttons to defragment?“. Well if it takes 5 hours and I can’t use my computer during that time, yes. Oh but didn’t you just wonder whether anyone cared? So why are you still doing it?

To be fair, let me say that whylinuxisbetter.net mentions several situations where you’re better off keeping Windows, including (among others) if you work for the book/printing industry or are a hardcore gamer. Linux isn’t perfect, but what this website says is that it’s better than Windows for most users.

Like most, I love to go out and talk with people. And like most, I often do that over a drink. But I just don’t understand when people go to places either so crowded or with music so loud that it’s really hard to hear what the other person is saying.

I see this fairly often: a group of people obviously came to some place only to talk — and not to dance, for example — but they have to shout into one another’s ear to be able to communicate. I just don’t get it, or maybe no one wants to be the first to suggest moving some place else.

… is usually the kind of place I first think of when going out to have a drink and talk with people.

Like many people, I now rely on web-based solutions for email (namely GMail) and I love it like this. However, I do want to be able to archive my email from time to time. So, lately, I just downloaded all my email from a veeery long time ago until now, got a huuuge mbox file, and converted it into multiple .eml files because I believe it’s a bit more easy to use/search/archive (but maybe that’s a mistake).

The main problem is attachments: I do want to keep the text of all these messages, but have usually no interest in keeping the attachments in most cases, and I’m trying to make this as small as possible if want to keep it around for a long time. I searched for easy solutions to “trim” attachments out of .eml messages, but didn’t find a nice way to do it automatically so I just ended up opening the biggest ones with a text editor and removing the encoded attachment by hand…

So I was just wondering how you guys handled email archiving. Do you archive email at all? Do you have simple ways of removing attachments? Or do you just dump the whole thing onto a blank CD or DVD every once in a while and don’t care about size?

First of all, lots of very warm thanks for the support I got on my last blog post about cancer. And huge thanks to everyone at Google (more about this in my next post), they’ve also been extremely nice and supportive. Thanks to all of you, guys.

This post gives a few more details, but in short: although nothing is certain obviously, it looks like I’ve won the battle against cancer after about 6 months; there are less than two weeks of treatment to go. Soon back to normal life, woohoo!

So, all of this is nearly over. It is most likely that the cancer didn’t resist to 1) chemotherapy, 2) surgery and 3) radiotherapy. I still have 7 courses of radiotherapy to go (until the end of next week), but things are going pretty well and I can now see the end of the treatment and start planning a normal life again.

Of course, this is not a mere cold I got here, and one can never know if bad cells remain or not, but thanks to my young age (26) and overall good health, the treatment could be pretty aggressive and all signs until now seem to show that it has been really successful. After examining the bit of tongue that was removed, it appeared that there was no real one-piece tumor left, only sparse regions of cancerous cells; this means that I responded very well to chemotherapy (much more than 50% — good thing those 3 months were useful ’cause they weren’t easy!). The surgeon removed all the neck ganglions (around 90 of them, whoa — it turned out 3 of them were infected but there was no further appearant “leakage” of the cancer), along with about half of the mobile tongue and replaced the removed bit with muscle from inside the neck. All this (huh, relative) good news allowed the radiotherapist to not have to burn me with too much radiation (56 Gy = 28 courses of 2 Gy each, which means about 6 weeks of treatment, it could have been 8 or 9).

If I understood well, the doctors’ philosophy is to make the treatment quite a bit more aggressive than needed in theory to increase the chances of success (in other words, you can never know at which point the treatment is sufficient because very small amounts of cancerous cells are undetectable, so the only way is to “over-treat”). For example, in theory, neither the removal of the left neck ganglions (tumor was on the right side) nor even radiotherapy were really compulsory, but they maximize the chances of success. Of course there are side effects, but they’re nothing compared to the possibility of the cancer coming back (not a good thing for this type of tumor).

So, about long term side effects (short or middle term side effects are also a pain, but they’ll be gone in a few weeks/months now): 1) for the moment I have difficulties pronouncing certain sounds (’S’ especially), but this will get better over time and I have no problem making myself understood in French, English or Chinese (lots of people have these elocution troubles since birth and are fine with that), 2) saliva doesn’t have all the good properties (and is extremely thick for the moment — radiotherapy burns the salivatory glands) and maybe lacking a bit in the future, but it could have been much worse should radiotherapy have lasted longer. A few other minor side effects are some stiffness of the neck and shoulders (will get better), some difficulties to chew stuff (will also get better, although I’m not sure how much), and of course a neat, huuuuge scar on the neck

I’ll still need a few weeks in Paris to recover from all this, have some more exams to make sure there’s nothing bad left in my body, remove the implantable catheter system that was placed under my skin a few months ago (for chemo injections not to ruin my arm veins) and I’ll be going back to work! Once again, thanks to everyone for your support, and I’m especially thankful to my family, they’ve all been besides me in the past few months (my wife slept on a foldable bed in my room every single night when I stayed in hospital after surgery — that’s 3 weeks, and her job is on the other side of the city), as well as to everyone at Google for their support (more about my experience in this great company soon!).

The main reason why I have been mainly offline in the last few months (and, in particular, didn’t come to GUADEC), is that it has been diagnosed in late April that I had tongue cancer. This was quite unexpected since this kind of cancer usually concerns older people (I’m 26) who drink much alcohol (I don’t) and have been smoking for a long time (I never smoke). So having this at my age is bad luck. But on the other hand, I’m much better off to fight it with my young age and no other problem (whereas patients with tongue cancer usually present a bad overall health state: mouth/throat/lungs, etc.).

So I had to undergo 4 courses of chemotherapy (about 3 months, from May to July), and went into surgery on August 22nd where they had to remove about half of my tongue and all the neck ganglions (that’s about a hundred of them, 3 of which were infected). The chemotherapy was quite hard (harder than I thought), and the first few days after surgery were really hard as well (tracheotomy, huge scar on the neck, probe going into the stomach to feed me, etc.).

There is still a phase of radiotherapy to go (5 to 8 weeks, I don’t know exactly yet) starting on September 24th, and I hear that’s pretty tough as well. So I should be able to go back to work (more about that in my next post) around December or January.

Overall, the side effects are not easy (half of the tongue: difficult for speech, and radiotherapy: lack of saliva for the rest of my life, which makes it difficult to speak without drinking water all the time and to eat dry food), but I have already accepted them and the morale is pretty good now Although radiotherapy is not easy, I think the hardest part is behind me. In theory, all cancer cells should now be out of my body, but the radiotherapy is still important to be really sure of that. I guess I’m ready to undergo hard stuff with tough side effects if it means that the disease is much less likely to come back.
I usually don’t feel like saying everything about my life and little private problems in public, but I thought it would be nice to let people know why I wasn’t online lately and why I didn’t go to GUADEC. I’ll definitely be there next year, though!!

This post will probably not interest many visitors, apart from the French people who went to China with me during this program, and maybe the Chinese people who took good care of us back there (and that’s why I don’t write this in French).

Intro

Last month (October 23-30) I took part in what was called an “exchange program” between young people from China and France. Last October was the first part of the program, with 400 French people going to visit China (actually 4 groups of 100 people — not all at the same time), and we should see the same number of Chinese coming to France in 2007. I was in the “100 young scientists” group, and we went to Beijing, Wuhan and Shanghai.

I hadn’t planned on writing or blogging about this, but it seems like another guy from this “exchange” program (I’ll explain the quotes in a moment) felt like expressing his point of view in a small booklet, and while I mostly agree with what he seems to be saying (I could only read bits and pieces from Pierre Haski’s blog post — in French), I thought it needed to be said in a more moderate and constructive way.

I had already been to China a few times, I speak Chinese and I’m fascinated by many aspects of Chinese culture, so the bottom line is basically that I love the real China, which in big cities sometimes looks a bit like this:

And I just think we really had too much of this:

and this:

Before flying to China

Let’s skip the part about how we get selected (I didn’t actually apply, I just sent an email asking how to apply — along with my resume — but they selected me nonetheless, maybe they were short of Chinese-speaking people, I’m not sure…). By the way, each of us only had to pay some 500 euros, which is a very small fraction of the actual trip, given the flights, hotels, etc. So, prior to the actual departure, we all received some sort of schedule telling us what we would be doing during this week in China (the schedule read, by the way: “This exchange with China is more important than the purchase of 150 Airbus” written by the Chinese Prime Minister!). This was the first surprise: although there was indeed mention of “Visit of the Forbidden City” and “Visit of the Great Wall”, the rest was just lots and lots of “Drink at the French Embassy”, “Meeting with the French and Chinese presidents”, “Arrival at the /insert name of the most expensive hotel in the city here/”, etc. Whoa, wait a minute, aren’t we mere students or did we just become a bunch of 100 diplomats!?

About a week from the departure, we were all invited to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where we could get some foreshadowing of what was waiting for us, both from the surrounding (small challenge: find a square inch that is not made either of gold, red velvet or marble) and from what we were told: “this is a very political visit”, “don’t forget to bring your tuxedo”, etc. We had been warned.

Hey wait, wasn’t this supposed to be an exchange program?

The first few days were just like what I had feared: we were running from gold-marble-velvet-5-stars hotels to gold-marble-velvet embassies, from gold-marble-velvet embassies to gold-marble-velvet restaurants, etc. Where did all the Chinese students go? I had had a faint hope when I had read “Dinner organized by the National Federation of Chinese Youth”: great, does that mean we’re going to sit, eat and talk with Chinese people? Huh, no. We were indeed able to meet new people: the previous group of 100 French people who had just finished their trip around China and were about to go home. And yes, that was really nice and I met some really interesting people… but, hey, why did we all need to go to China for that? We couldn’t see the shadow of a Chinese student during that dinner, and the food wasn’t even really Chinese (were they afraid we might not like it?…).

I had had another faint hope when I had read “Visit of the Chinese Academy of Science”, “Visit of the Qinghua University”, “Visit of the Hubei University of Science and Technology”, etc. I thought “great, we’re gonna meet Chinese students, or at least Chinese searchers…”. But this was deceptive as well: each time, our buses (4 buses, about 25 people each) would bring us into the campus, directly in front of some building where the head of some department was (we couldn’t have walked through the campus, we might have actually met some Chinese students!), and we would watch a Powerpoint speech were the guy would explain what the college was, what research domains they had, how many millions of Yuan they were allowed, how many students they had, etc. And that was about it: bye bye, let’s hop onto the bus and let’s head for the next gold-marble-velvet place. Once or twice during these visits we were allowed to actually meet with Chinese students, and that was just great. But it was always much too short: after 15 or 20 minutes (30 at most), we were told that we had to hurry back into the buses or we would be late for our next appointment.

On the second day, I thought that was enough: after entering the gold-marble-velvet-home of the French ambassador and listening to his short speech, I escaped (the Chinese guard kindly opened the font door for me) and went to take a long walk in the streets of Beijing (I hadn’t been there since 1998), sat down in a café and spent an evening speaking with real Chinese people I hadn’t met before… that was the best part of the trip so far.

What I liked

Okay, there still were a lot of really good things about this “exchange” program:

• The whole idea of doing this is great, and I hope it doesn’t stop here. This was their first try, let’s give them some time to improve it. I really want to thank all the people involved in this program, on both the Chinese and French sides.
• Chinese people have dinner pretty early, so the “gold-marble-velvet” part of our schedule ended at 6 or 7 pm most of the time. This gave us plenty of time to go out and walk in the cities at night, eat real Chinese food in real Chinese restaurants and meet real Chinese people if we wanted to.
• A few Chinese “guides” were with us (mostly people from the National Federation of Chinese Youth), some of them were really nice, and they did a really good job at leading us through this busy schedule. A few people from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs were with us as well, and they shared some of our surprise towards this busy schedule but were really friendly the whole time as well.
• We had the chance to spend an evening with a Chinese family (two of us for each family) in Wuhan: we went to their home, had dinner with them, and walked in the streets of Wuhan with them). This was really great:

• We went to see the Forbidden City and the Great Wall (at 司马台).
• We could bring a big poster about our research (most of us were PhD students) and we had some time to discuss it with students from the Beijing University (although the time for this was a bit too short, like many other things).

• We were treated just like Princes from the West everywhere we went. The result is that we ended up not seeing a lot of the real China, but we shouldn’t forget that the Chinese side made a lot of efforts to show us that we were important guests and impress us (and we were, indeed, impressed!).
• We went to visit different cities: Beijing, Wuhan, Shanghai (I hear that other groups went to other places like Chengdu instead of Wuhan).
• Although many of our meals were in hotels or fancy restaurants, we were able to have two or three meals in real, nearly-normal Chinese restaurants, and actually eat what local people eat.
• Of course, seeing MM Chirac and Hu was interesting (although I wouldn’t say that their speech was mind-blowing…):

• I was thrilled when I saw the acrobats show in Wuhan.

What I disliked

• Apart from the evenings when we could do whatever we wanted (provided we were in the bus at 7:30 am or sometimes 5 am the next morning…), we were always moving in groups of 25 to 200 people. And since we couldn’t really walk in the streets of Beijing or Shanghai with groups of that size, it meant that we basically had to travel with our buses all the time (even when walking would have actually been shorter). When going to the Great Wall, we even had a police escort:

• A consequence is that, most of the time, the bits and pieces of “real China” we saw, we were seeing them through the bus window.
• If you followed the “official” schedule, you ended up being with 90% of French people 90% of the time.
• We spent too much time in gold-marble-velvet rooms/hotels/restaurants and we finally didn’t see much of what China is really like (fortunately, I had been to China several times before, but that was not the case of most students, and I wonder whether this trip gave them a loyal image of China).
• Nearly all “official” visits were mandatory. Only the last visit, the Shanghai Urbanism Museum, was optional (I escaped right away — although it must have been pretty interesting, but I just had to go and actually see the city! — and went to walk in the streets of Shanghai and visit some friends there). But the rest of the time, our “guides” were checking lists of names each time we went on the bus to see if nobody was missing. I understand that they didn’t want a poor non-Chinese speaking French student to be lost in Beijin or Shanghai, but come on, most of us were 25 years old or so, not 10, and we could figure out what to do in case we lost the group. One morning we waited about an hour in the bus because one of the students was still sleeping in his room and they were trying to find him.
• “Visiting university X” basically meant “sitting in a room and listen a Powerpoint speech — in English — about University X”. No real campus tour, no visit in the classrooms (I don’t think we saw a single classroom), no visit in the research labs.
• Given all the official stuff we had to undergo, and given the fact that we seldom had time to go back to the hotel, we were wearing tuxedos pretty much all the time (which strengthened the idea that we were diplomats, not students, and probably didn’t make casual meeting with Chinese people easier…).

Suggestions for next time

Let’s try to be constructive now, here’s a list of what I thought could be interesting ideas, should they do this again.

• Select 400 people from both sides at the same time (the 400 Chinese who will visit us next year obviously hadn’t been selected yet).
• Match each of the 400 French people with one or two of the 400 Chinese, depending on the languages they can speak (Chinese? French? English?) so that they can communicate easily and improve their Chinese/French/etc., and maybe depending on their field of interest (research, etc.).
• Make schedule for the morning, but leave the afternoon free.
• Make up groups of, say, 4 people (2 French, 2 Chinese) who will meet at lunch time, go and eat together, and visit the city in the afternoon (Chinese students acting as “guides” in China, and vice versa, they can bring us to places they like — not necessarily where most tourists go). Maybe change groups every 2 or 3 days, or depending on cities.
• Let us wear our usual, casual clothes most of the time. I understand that wearing a tux in front of Chinese officials is a mark of respect, but then it means we need to walk in the streets like this all the time… Students don’t usually dress that way and don’t feel very comfortable with it, especially if they want to meet with plain, normally-dressed Chinese people.
• Having lunches and dinners at the hotel is a bad idea: they’re both really expensive (given the hotels we were in) and really not Chinese at all (they have food to please international travelers). Eating in “normal” restaurants all the time would be cheaper, better, and much more interesting. Do this for breakfast as well if possible (scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages and pastries… is that really Chinese now?).
• If we have a meeting somewhere, why not let us go there by ourselves instead of using 4 large buses? It’s a pity that we didn’t use public transportation — either bus or subway — one single time during this trip (except in the evenings, if we wanted).

All right, that’s about it. I’m looking forward to meeting the Chinese students in Paris next year, I’ll be glad to show them around, and I hope this whole thing happens again in 2008 or later. Although lots of things can be improved, the idea itself is really great. Thanks again to everyone involved in this program!

After last year’s Summer of Code, someone at Google (Zaheda Bhorat) suggested that students make a short video (5 minutes) where they would present their project. I actually didn’t see any video coming since that time, probably because it would have required quite a bit of work.

However, after letting Zaheda’s email stay in my “To do” mail folder for about a year (!), and after taking part in Summer of Code 2006, I decided to get to work.

So here’s a video report of my work in Summer of Code 2005 & 2006. It is about 10 minutes long, has subtitles explaning what I’d m doing, and some music to make the whole thing more watchable. I’m no video editor expert, but I do hope it is watchable The first part is about Ubuntu:

And the second part is about OLPC:

I posted a few “howtos” about how I made this, so I hope other Summer of Code students will soon make videos about their own project:

• Make a screencast with Linux
• Convert an AVI video to DV
• Change the audio track of a video

I also did upload it on Google Video, but it seems that it’s been downsized a bit too much. Comments welcome!

Some time ago, I made this website called gameminutes.net featuring lots of videos (a few minutes) of videogames: reasonably recent ones, older ones, and very old ones (and by the way, if you would like to see a particular game there, just tell me and I’ll see what I can do! Feedback on the content appreciated). I thought it would be nice to have this kind of “photo album” for games, many people have had some great time with them.

I encoded the videos in XviD (it seems that Theora wasn’t able to give me such a good quality with the same file size) and until recently, visitors just had to download those AVI files, which gave a fairly good quality/size ratio. The problem was, of course, that they needed to download the whole file before beginning playback. So I switched to a Flash-based video format (flv): this makes playback much easier, embedded in the webpage (provided that you have the Flash plugin…). However, there is a big drawback: I need to use the Flash 7 compression method so that everybody can watch those videos (we’re still waiting for Flash 9 for Linux, and for 64 bits versions by the way…), and this produces much larger files (it is still good for real-time, in most cases) while decreasing the quality a lot. Schplunks.

So, dear lazyweb, I have a question Do you know a way to stream (or progressive-download) XviD videos (or similar formats) without requiring visitors to download some rare plugin first, and so that people can view those videos on any OS? I also thought of QuickTime, but that’s even worse (no Linux version AFAIK). Can Fluendo do something like that? I can always wait for a Linux version of Flash 9 but, well… Oh, needless to say, Open source solutions are best!

Whether you get your email from usual POP/IMAP servers, or have a webmail (e.g. GMail), you can always find countless small pieces of software that will notify you the very second you get a new email, with various gizmos blinking or beeping on your computer.

Reading email takes time; answering email takes even more time. Of course, you’re always free to just look at the notifications and postpone the actual reading; you’re also free to read your email as it flows into your inbox and answer them all at once, later in the day. But come on, let’s face it:

• When you’re concentrated on your current work and there’s a blinking gizmo telling you that you have 30 new messages (which your brain interprets as “Hey, stop! Danger! New stuff arriving!”), can you just ignore it, not go check your email (at least the subject lines), and keep working, undisturbed? Well, I couldn’t.
• You’re reading your new email and you find out that you’re going to want/need to write an anwser. Can you just go back to what you were doing and stop thinking about it until your chosen “email answering” time comes? Well, I couldn’t. I’d just start thinking about what I’m going to answer (and this can be a lot of thinking if there are numerous emails I want to answer), even if I’m trying to concentrate on something else.

I’m sure lots and lots of “optimize your time” books talk about this already, but since I haven’t read them, pardon me if I’m saying blindingly obvious things.

I don’t think the brain’s conscious concentration capabilities are very multitask. It needs a few minutes, while switching from one task to another, to get running at “full speed” again, especially if the two tasks are very different from each other. If you’re concentrating very well on task A and, for some reason, need to switch to task B for half an hour, and then come back to A, your brain needs time to adapt, both ways. On the other hand, if you make sure that nothing else will disturb you for a potentially unlimited amount of time in order to concentrate on a given task until it’s finished, you’re likely to be very, very efficient (at least this is true for me). By “nothing else”, I mean really nothing: no phone, no email, no co-worker entering your office to ask you something, no family member entering your room asking you where the hell you put her small statue of the purple bald bear washing its toes with sour cream, etc.

If you’ve set an automatic email notification every half an hour (which is already quite optimistic, I reckon?), and you actually go and check and/or answer your new emails each time, you’re spending extra time (maybe like one minute and a half, twice) to let your mind concentrate on the new task (reading email), and then concentrate again on what you were doing. So, if this is 6 minutes every hour, and if you’re spending 10 hours at work everyday (rough approximation :-p), you’ve wasted an hour just for switching between things, and that’s only for one day.

Okay, maybe those numbers aren’t accurate, and I don’t mean to be so anal about wasting a little time (hey, who’s that prick who doesn’t even allow his co-workers to enter his office to have a little chat?). But still, I think it is a good idea to prevent yourself from checking and answering your email more than, say, three times per day. If you run into anxious people who expect you to answer their email within half an hour and can’t wait until your next batch of answers, just tell them to give you a call! It’s really nice to be able to be so open and available for communication, but real concentration is not essentially a collective state of mind, and I find that when I can manage to set up a three or four-hour “Do NOT disturb” zone in my schedule sometimes, my productivity increases *a lot*.

How are you guys managing this?

PS : sorry for people who tried to access my website (or the whylinuxisbetter.net site) yesterday, my server had a few minor problems just after my post, bad luck. It’s all fixed now.