Archive for May, 2009

Summer: m.noun /ˈsʌmə(Éč)/ (plural summers) Long period of time that millions of English-seaking people choose to replace watching silly TV reality shows by reading silly thick paper printed words selected first for their total lack of requirement of brain participation during the operation known as reading.

Let’s contribute to the improvement of knowledge and culture in the Human race: This year, let’s read English novels of the highest quality. They may come from the old United Kingdom or from the newly liberated colonies of North America. Quality is always here.

The 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

Here is the beginning of the list. Which ones did you actually read?

1. (1922) Ulysses James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5. (1932) Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22 Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
11. (1947) Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
12. (1903) The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler
13. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
14. (1934) I, Claudius Robert Graves
15. (1927) To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
16. (1925) An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
17. (1940) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
18. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
19. (1952) Invisible Man Ralph Ellison

The Roomba autonomous and (nearly) intelligent vacuum cleaner runs around to clean the floor. Example of its convoluted path:

La danse du Roomba

Not bad for a vacuum cleaner which has a very limited and very artificial intelligence!

Say you are parent to a kid who is more than willing to play those games that he/she discovered with his/her friends and you don’t know much about them. It’s time to learn some before you make a decision about letting fun happen or not.

From IGN vault.

You choose your passwords as the most sophisticated and the strongest as you understand the importance to protect your computer. But did you know that this is nearly useless? A few commands and here is your safe password replaced or removed by a mere user, by your youngest nephew.

• On Windows, it’s enough to use the bootable CD-ROM of Ophcrack which is available as Open Source. Reboot and watch the software program find the Windows Administrator password…
• Ophcrack also works on Mac (and Linux) but with OSX10.4, it’s enough to use the Apple installation CD and to choose “Utilities” to run “Reset the password”. On OSX10.5, you’ll have to reboot, press Command+S, then type the following at the prompt:

fsck -fy
mount -uw /
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist
dscl . -passwd /Users/UserName newpassword

• If on Linux, if boot is controled by GRUB, it’s enough to press ESC during the boot sequence to choose ‘Recovery Mode’ which will will start you as root without even knowing the password. Just change it now…
• But even better (or worse), on Linux again, here is a list of 10 ways of resetting a lost linux root password

Plus ou moins inspiré de JoeTech.

I learned (in karting) that you should not break and that you must choose the best trajectory. These French and Italian drivers are decidedly learning. And they crash so many cars that they are helping reduce the impact of recession on car manufacturers.

Be ready for more than 90 minutes of broken WRC cars, or crash compilation videos.

Final note: Even if most of these crashes happened about 20 years ago (there are plenty of Golf GTI, R5 GT Turbo, 205 GTI, Fiat Uno, Autobianchi Abarth and others 1980’s cars), some of them have killed or maimed people. So, drive safely and use the highway.

You could fully appreciate this video only if you have some experience of Role Playing, but I couldn’t help posting it here.

Stan, this video is partly dedicated to you, the Dungeon Master.

Some of you may know that I work in the electronics industry (for automotive applications) with Johnson Controls. This is the reason why I am in daily contact with industrial means of manufacturing of complex electronic boards. For a long time now, I wanted to share some of the knowledge I acquired, some of the continuously renewed amazement I share in front of these industrial tools. But I could not really go and shoot photos in the manufacturing plants of my company.

Everything changes as I found some freely available information available on the Internet. For example, AMD-ATI (designer and manufacturer or graphics cards for personal computers) published a small presentation video.

(more…)

Duke Nukem

You have certinaly heard about Duke Nukem Forever, if only because you are interested in PC video games. As a matter of fact, this is (was) a game frist-announced in 1997 as the sequel to Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem II and Duke Nukem 3D (the Duke Nukem trilogy), the last of them being a First Person Shooter (FPS like Doom, FarCry or Crysis) whose success was partly based on its very high level of violence (blood, dismembered corpses, etc.) Whatever! Many old/mature video gamers were awaiting the real availability o this game which well earned its title of best vaporware for many years.

Rumor was running for weeks that, 3DRealms, the developer, had finally closed doors. Take-Two still has the exploitation license, but the horizon is really dark. Some hope to see Duke Nukem ressurect, but… Apogee software, LLC confirmed its willingness to keep developping the trilogy (for the Playstation Portable & Nintendo DS), but… Take-Two attacks 3DRealms and Apogee dragging them to the Judge, but…

Finally, the end is so true that developpers started to leave 3DRealms and are actively looking for new jobs. Even worse, the game assets are dispersed widely: The Web sees the distribution of many good pieces of work, 3D models, script/plot contents (only 60% finshed), many objects and backgrounds, etc.

You can also find

• 28 screen copies for Duke Nukem Forever
• monsters
• videos like the following to see were it really went

At last, you can read the Wired eulogy.

The most fanatical readers/gamers will want to check the only real review of this (unfinshed) video game.

Visit the infinitely small as we zoom right into steel.

Cooking recipes were the excuse for millions of Internet users (Ed: maybe not millions) to write down the advice of their grand-mothers, quite often with a desperating lack of inspiration. But I just found a couple of nice web sites that could be checked as much for their recipes as for the pictures [1] or the videos going along with them.

• Habeas BrulĂ©e is superbly written with elegant recipes and generally great photos.
• Rouxbe proposes recipes also very generous but presented in video.

Rhubarb Soup with Olive Cookie

I am a great fan of miniature model railways. But this one is all railways, locomotive, trains geeks want. It’s ok for kids as well as adults.

Free ad for friends in concert in Paris in a few weeks.

Gabriela Ungureanu / Anne-Elisabeth Halpern - Schubert

Schubert Concert on Sunday 24 May 2009 @ 12h30.

From GraphJam.