The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2011
  Are Cheap Androids An Electric Dream
Mon 16th May 2011   
Last Christmas was tough on my netbook. The travelling around, the trains and planes being cancelled or delayed, the packing and unpacking, the plugging and unplugging, and the occasional knocks finally killed my good old and trusty Asus eeePC 901.

More exactly, the screen decided to die.

  I'm in love with Kira
Sun 27th March 2011   
No, Kira is not the name of my girlfriend, it is not the name of my cat either, and I'm not in love with any particular film celebrity bearing a similar name.

Kira is only a small device you connect to your network, which in turn allows you to control anything that uses infra-red, kind of like an universal remote control.

  Home-automation experiments
Fri 25th March 2011   

Inspiration

For about two weeks now I've been working on a small home-automation project.

The inspiration came from few cool YouTube video, and in particular that one:



I'm not particularly fan of Star Trek, but the idea of controlling all the audio and video system from a touch screen using some fancy interface kind of resonated with my inner-geek.

  Communication protocol exploits
Sun 27th February 2011   
If you found this page using a search engine with the hope of finding any relevant information about exploiting things on the Internet, you are going to be disappointed. What I'm going to write about now was relevant only in a now semi-distant past.

I have to start first with a disclaimer: What you will read is related to events that happened a long time ago, when we were young, stupid and lucky. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

  Simple C++ threading
Sun 20th February 2011   
For some reason, people tend to think that creating multi-threaded applications in C++ is a very difficult thing to do.

It is in fact not that difficult, but there are basically two main issues to consider: How to make the code correct (it should not crash, deadlock, corrupt data, etc...) and how to make it efficiently use as many cores as possible.

  How fragile is this Internet thing
Sun 30th January 2011   
Quite a lot of people these days take for granted the ability to communicate with their computers and mobile phones at any time of the day .