Mobitrends

While I had almost forgot I had music on my computer – I have been switching progressively to Last.FM enjoying its automatic playlist features and discovering new music, the arrival of iTunes 8 brought much rejoice to my 20Gigs of music thanks to the Genius smart playlist feature. This generates playlist that match the song you’re playing.
Next to that I’m having lots of fun with the new visualization plugins in iTunes 8, really nice effects !
I’m a bit disappointed by the itunes-only news of yesterday but I guess you can’t launch a new cool device every few months…

This is my holiday’s book – that I received home the day after I left (Ok, it costed me only 4€ but shipping from the US is so slow…) – and it’s developing a really interesting vision about the use of wearable computing in 2020s which is giving me a whole bunch of new ideas for VR-WEAR.

In the near future, the European Center for Defense against Disease discovers a diabolical pseudomimivirus. Rather than set off a panic, secret agents of the EU, Japan, and India work clandestinely to uncover a conspiracy seemingly based in a San Diego lab. Former poet Robert Gu, a recovering Alzheimer’s patient (one of the lucky few who took to all the treatments), returns to school just as agents Braun, Vaz, and Mitsuri put their wheels in motion. Immensely frustrated by simultaneously living with his son’s family and completely reeducating himself, Gu becomes a perfect dupe for the hacker hired by the gang of spooks. Under cover of a library protest, Gu and some old friends get into the lab, trailed by one of Gu’s adolescent classmates and his granddaughter. The conspiracy runs deep and has some terrifying implications on account of YGBM (you gotta believe me) technology, regardless of the conspirators’ intentions. The near future is less alien here than in some of Vinge’s other work, but no less fascinating and well constructed. Regina Schroeder

When there is lizards there is holidays; see u in 2 weeks!

Holidays are booked – yay (we’re leaving on saturday) and I got a week of dive – at last (I bought the camera case almost 2 years ago and never got to use it – was starting to worry that the camera might break before I got a chance to take underwater pictures…).

Yay, just receivd today my new VR-WEAR stickers from La Stickerie – they look awesome !

Starting fresh means i get the chance to do a bit of sysadmin – I just set up a working server for the dev team with a running subversion (source control) and samba shares (network file storgae) and installed a w00t backup system relying on : Raid 1 drives in the server, 72 GB DATs + mondo backup, dedicated NAS storage with RAID 1.
I was looking at the doc on Mondo’s website and now I feel even more secure :

Mondo is reliable. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R[W], DVD+R[W], NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA’s JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

Now I can feel safe about my data.

Kym brought us back from sweden a bunch of local cheese – and I must confess I’m impressed by swedish know-how in cheese making – I only tasted the first one and it was awesome (so awesome that only its packaging was left for the picture…). Blå-Ädel is very much alike our french “Bleu de Bresse” although a bit stronger. Pretty intriguing by its cinder coating, once you slice it you unveil plenty of dark-blue mushrooms dots and discover a tender almost melting body – yummy !