Weblogism

Waffling in the Rain

All in all it’s been a pretty busy first month, trying to get new habits, trying to get used to my new company and to their product. The whole is rather complicated and rather big, but the technologies involved are quite challenging (so is the business!). I am doing better for the moment, since I have managed to solve the problems I was fcing on my own, which I consider to be quite an achievement.

Anyway, very little time, but I am going to try to catch up with all the craic!

Disconnected… Still

It’s been a while since we’ve decided to turn away from Eircom to embrace
the newcomer, Smart Telecom. In a perfect and ideal world, everything should have
sorted out in 4 or 5 working days. That’s called France for you, guys. But here,
in Ireland, it seems as if everything is done with half the speed. I don’t know
if that’s the drawback of having tried to escape Paris’ stress, but it sure is
a very frustrating pace. Anyway, the migration from Eircom to Smart Telecom forces
us to change our phone number, but also to wait for an undefinite time.

What really gets on my nerves is the lack of feedback. Our phone
line is not working anymore and our guess is the transfer to Smart is on its
way. But:

• Nobody told us the phone line was about to be cut: it took us a whole hour playing with the cords to realise what was happening;
• Eircom have this silly and anti-user-friendly automated phone system that makes you speak like a dumb person, when you really want to talk to someone about your problems. The automated response to our query was: “Your phone line is going to be checked”. When? By whom? Will we get any explanation for what went wrong?
• No sign from Smart Telecom.

Some readings

Even though I still have no connection at home for the moment since we are
patiently waiting for Smart Telecom to give us any sign of life, I managed
to spot one or two interesting articles whilst eating my dessert at work.

The ß-lovers (even the non-German ones) will love this
link:
two PDF documents present the history of the
ß ligature from the beginning of the 20th century on. Unfortunately, my German is not
what it used to be: I am afraid I won’t dare to attempt any translation. But those documents
are worth a reading.

About the EU constitution referendum in France: the debate that went on le sauna was very heated between the Non and the Oui supporters, but also quite interesting. I recommend anyone taking any interest in that matter to give it some reading.

About Frutch

I’ve been looking at Nutch
for the last 6 months because I think it’s a great project that deserves some time. I have followed the
list (proposed a fix, even)
and plan to be involved some more. Anyway, I hadn’t realised until this week that there was a French community
around Nutch, called Frutch. Fair
play to them.

Harmony

Following all the turmoil after the ASF announced they were starting the Harmony project, whose aim is to implement an Open-Source JVM, I subscribed to the list – and the discussions are very interesting, even though rather complicated for the newbie. But their idea is to analyse the pros and cons of existing VM to decide what’s to take… and what’s to leave aside.

One of the good places to follow the discussions is Nick Lothian’s Harmony blog.

Congrats, Liverpool!…

But Gerrard sooo dived.