Thank you very much.

As some of you may know, a new law (“Hadopi”) has been voted in France that allows private companies to monitor illegal downloads of their copyrighted content, log the IP addresses, ask the Internet access providers for actual names, and then start doing stuff like sending email and disabling your Internet connection for up to a year (while you still continue to pay for it).

As an effort to try and show how absurd this law is in today’s world I put up a fake page (in French) selling the “Hadopi router” that automatically cracks passwords of the nearby Wifi networks and connects to them to download torrents.

It’s a dumb joke, but I think it does point out a little bit of the absurdity of the law Comments and suggestions welcome!

After having gone to GUADEC in 2006 and having missed the two following conferences, I am glad to be back and to attend the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria! I’ll be attending events on the 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8th of July. Long time no see!

Programming tools like Eclipse assist your geeky typing by automatically adding closing brackets and ending quotes for you when you type the opening ones. This gives you extremely bad habits and you end up leaving all kinds of doors open.

Now I am not saying it is always that bad, but frankly, I could have taken this photo in many (if not most) car interiors in any Chinese large city:

Note the lucky charm (top right), but no belt (also note that this is a fancy car that belongs to a very wealthy family).

… would probably require some way of preventing your head to move at all, but wouldn’t that be neat, and a great way to keep you relaxed?

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.