OB

Crisis, what CriSegmentation Fault

2008-09-01T09:54:46Z

Debian is broken, DNS is broken, BGP is broken. People were seen in the streets today, protesting against technology and holding strawberry yogurts, the last thing they still have faith in. Stay tuned for the 6pm Flash Update at 6:30pm, wherein you'll watch nerds jumping off bridges with their laptops, shouting various bits of C code before they die making a splash-like noise.

Faces

2008-08-18T20:43:07Z

Today's happy face: we got our stuff from France, including my beloved PS2. When I tried to setup her (PS2s are girls in French) clock, thinking it would be completely reset after two years with no power, I was delighted to see it was simply 12 minutes behind. Well done, PS2. I love you, PS2.

Today's sad face: although it's way better than Firefox 2 (granted, being worse is a significant challenge only an evil mutant could achieve), Firefox 3 is starting to piss me off. He (Firefox is a boy in French) keeps lagging and freezing and dying. I should probably find a new job involving animals or something.

Pwner

2008-07-25T14:39:19Z

So we officially own a place for reals. We possess bits of Ireland! We got the keys last Friday and although the house looks like it's been decorated by an army of seventy-year-olds, it's pretty lovely according to our standards. The vendor left a fantastic letter for us:

To Olivier - Rhaphaelle

Welcome to your new home. This has been our family home for over 50 years. It has been a very happy and loving home. We wish you health, happiness and a loving home here.

Will you please put any mail addressed for [...] into next door [...]. They were very good and kind neighbours to us.

Should you need any information, you can contact me via [...].

Also, my son opened his eyes during his last scan. That's pretty nice too.

Herbert Park

2008-07-23T09:22:14Z

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

Today was probably the last time I commuted through Herbert Park. Incidentally, the summer was lovely. Good bye, Herbert Park, I'll miss you. Don't mind if I call you Herbert?

DoC feeds us all

2008-07-02T11:29:08Z

DoC feeds us all
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

This gerrowadat, he's a man of salad.

Le outrageous blog de la moustache du Ireland

2008-06-15T20:41:53Z

In case you can read French and are bored enough to have a look at my one and only French blog article, wherein I if course rant, here it is: http://tais-toi-ob.blogspot.com/. Please don't trust Google Translate, it just makes me say things I never wrote. I swear :)

EOC

2008-06-06T07:21:28Z

End of California. A lot of good stuff involving old awesome people as well as new awesome people. Heading back home in a few (ok, not so few) hours to see the two and a half people I do miss so much. Hopefully I won't get a shitty plane this time.

Break dance

2008-06-02T17:52:19Z

IMG_0253
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

Deathcon 3

2008-05-31T03:32:05Z

Just watched Wargames again. It's a movie where people do dangerous things such as smoking in the office. I'd forgotten how scary the Cold War was.

Yet another one

2008-05-29T15:52:58Z

Nappy days

2008-05-26T21:31:10Z

Originally uploaded by ob-v.

Something that typically annoys the hell out of me. I took this picture at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Thank God I went to Eurodisney previously so I could find some civilised toilets in France where I could change my daughter whilst being a man.

I'm in California now, where it's not unusual to have baby changing facilities in the men's rooms. Anyways, I didn't bring any baby with me to make sure I could still complain.

Airport love

2008-05-26T06:41:13Z

In this world of fear, where terrorists can take down a plane in no time with the cunning use of washing powder and toothpaste, I decided to announce publicly that I love DAA (which means but doesn't stand for "Dublin Airport Security"). I'm not being sarcastic. Repeat: not sarcastic. Security here is lovely. People are kind and do their job properly, they do pay attention to you, and they're neither grumpy nor slow on purpose. Dear American friends, don't think TSA makes you special: your people are not the worst ones either (although I would appreciate if US immigration would stop hitting on my wife but that's another topic I won't blog about until I'm in, you never know).

(Trouble)shooting

2008-05-22T08:02:19Z

kill -9
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

The proper way to debug Java applications.

Britney Spears doesn't exist and she's French

2008-05-20T18:43:15Z

While watching old French stuff on Youtube, I recently understood something absolutely incredible: Britney Spears was invented by the French in the late 40s!

Her real name is France Gall. Below is a picture of her sometime around the mid-60s and another one short before 2000. She was arguably called Britney Spears on the latter.

Britney Gall
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

Since she looks young on both pictures, even though she's supposed to be 40 years older on the second one, the only reasonable explanation is that she's a robot. Probably an experiment of some kind, most likely run by Google. If you don't believe me, I recommend you watch the first minute of this video, on which she looks almost exactly as in "Oops I did it again" (this song is about how much she dislikes being a virgin. It's French art).

Next week, I'll tell you more about the kind of cheeses Barack Obama likes and eats.

OBoy

2008-05-09T20:21:18Z

So, looks like our second heir is going to be a boy. Technology told me today he looks good.

10 years

2008-04-27T20:45:28Z

Today is the day when I switched my gateway^W"UUCP-to-SMTP thingie" back from FreeBSD to Linux, approximately 10 years after the opposite switch.

Wisdom

2008-04-20T18:18:18Z

Life is like a box of chocolates. You start with a prototype written in Python, recode it in C++, clean it up a little bit, try the whole thing out and it goes all PPPFFFFFFFFRT -- Anonymous

Safety first

2008-04-14T16:08:17Z

I just tried Need for Speed Carbon on PS3. A game in which you have to do speeding in a city, drive in the wrong direction on the highway, evade cops and participate to some sort of gang wars (just by speeding, no guns here, it seems. Go wonder). It seems to be an OK game, although not quite as good as the GTA series or Need for Speed 3 "Hot Pursuit". But I really liked the disclaimer which was approximately "life is not a game, don't be a fool, safety first: fasten your seat belt." Wow. I can imagine the guy from the legal department saying "the law wants us to put a disclaimer for the seat belt, so we put a disclaimer for the seat belt."

Right.

Today's easy episode: disagreement

2008-04-12T16:23:52Z

Not sure I mentioned it here but I really appreciate working in a multicultural environment. It's very interesting and I particularly like the way disagreement is expressed depending on people's cultural background. For example, when I don't agree with something, I tend to be like "No offence... but I DISAGREE, you are WRONG, WRONG, and I'm going to murder your father, burn your mother, marry your sister and force her to eat raw monkeys for breakfast" whereas American colleagues, for example, would say something like "sounds good to me, but not sure it's what you want to do".

Good fun, overall.

command-not-found

2008-04-06T21:28:52Z

I just installed the latest Ubuntu beta and I'm impressed. There's this command-not-found package that's as simple as fantastic. If you type a non-existent command, it tells you where to find it and how to install the relevant package:

$ emacs
The program 'emacs' can be found in the following packages:
 * emacs21-nox (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * emacs22
 * emacs-snapshot (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * e3 (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * emacs-snapshot-nox (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * emacs22-gtk (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * emacs21 (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
 * emacs22-nox
 * jove (You will have to enable component called 'universe')
Try: sudo apt-get install 
-su: emacs: command not found

I think it's just brilliant. This thing works with some versions of bash (using the command_not_found_handle() extension from Debian) and zsh (by fiddling with preexec() and precmd()). I don't know if it'll annoy me after a while but, right now, I love it.

Bankocracy

2008-03-12T08:38:56Z

Studies have proven that the amount of paperwork to apply for 35-year mortgage in Ireland is slightly smaller than the one required to rent an apartment in Paris.

Think about it. Really thing about it. Mull it over. Mull it the fuck over.

Self

2008-03-08T20:43:59Z

"Happy birthday to you, me! Happy birthday to you, me! Happy birthday to yoooooou, me! Happy birthday to you, me!" -- my daughter

This one is for dbrane

2008-02-23T19:02:25Z

DSC00363
Originally uploaded by ob-v.

Quote

2008-02-13T18:29:12Z

This reminds me of an Internet Explorer for Solaris CD I got in the mail
in ... 1999? It said "bringing the Internet to UNIX".

-- an anonymous friend

It has to stop but won't

2008-02-08T02:15:00Z

Exactly one year ago, gerrowadat introduced me to Charlie the Unicorn. Since then, almost nothing has changed: gerrowadat is still about to be my boss and we all worship Charlie in rather insane ways.

This Charlie anniversary is an excellent opportunity to blog about Powerthirst, a pretty impressive drink. If you ever survive this one, you might want to watch UNCOMFORTABLY ENERGETIC too, just in case you still don't believe the end of the world is going to happen some time soon.

Oh, and you can blame gerrowadat for these links too. Just saying.