Friday, May 20, 2005

Google Portal

Tonight (I believe) google will change the frontpage, so you can switch between the classical google page (as it is now) and the new portable-like customizable google page.

It integrates Gmail (should you use it) and Google News. You can also include stockquotes, quote-of-the-day, NYtimes headlines and BBC news headlines.

Check out the preview here.

A few cocktails before the weekend

So i've finally decided to post something, and what else could it be but a few cocktail recipes. Here we go

Jack and Sam

This is one of our favorite shots, when we get to the point of ordering these at the VD, it's basically the beginning of the end. I think this shot makes you blind, deaf, stupid and angry. This is a real man's shot, none of that "creme de mure" or manzana flavored sissy crap.

Very simple to make.
- In a shot glass, pour in half Sambuca (Greek aniseed liquor).
- Layer Jack Daniel's to fill the second half of the glass.
- Shoot that shit.
- note: if you don't have or can't find sambuca, some Uzo will do, or any Aniseed based liquor. The advantage of Sambuca is that it tasted just right, and has the liquory consistency which enables an easy layer, which is handy when you're canned.

Another great way to have sambuca in a shot is to fill a shotglass with sambuca, throw in a couple coffee beans, light the beverage on fire for a couple second, and shoot it (I hope you choke on the coffee beans mich).

Irish Car Bomb

This is a variant of the Flaming Dr. Pepper posted earlier. The principle is the same, half a glass of beer (except THIS time it's not lager, but Guinness or another stout) and a shotglass of alcohol (in this case it's half whisky, half Baileys). So it goes something like this:

- fill half a pint glass with Guinness, Beamish Stout, or any equivalent Stout. Let it settle.
- fill a shotglass with whisky and baileys. You don't have to layer it.
- drop the shotglass into the beer, and chug.

That's all for now, more to come.

Ciao!

Back to work

Back to work as of yesterday, and it is definitely harder than I thought.

The wedding of Thomas and Karine went perfect, and I believe everyone had a great time. We all met up in a small village about 10-15km outside of Toulouse. This is were Karine's family live. The couple were wed by the assisting mayor, whom also know Karine (and her family) since her childhood - which made for a very "cozy" ceremony. It was particularly fun, when he tried pronouncing Danish names ;)
After the official wedding, we were transported another 5-10km out on the country, where the church wedding were to be held. I am personally not much for going in church and whatnot, but I have to admit, it was a very pleasant ceremony, and the priest actually seemed very nice (especially when he cranked up the volume of the Ray Charles CD that was playing..)

Afterwards, everyone drove (while honking their horns like crazy) to the place the reception and dinner would take place. A very nice place, in a remote area - where the kids could play in the outside area while the adults could get loaded on the (excellent) punch.

Dinner was excellent.. fois gras and magret de canard among other things. I, as usual, got plenty of good wine, and finished off nicely with Armagnac.
Met a bunch of cool people, both Frenchmen and Danes - but also brits.
Looking forward going back to Toulouse, hopefully it will be a little bit less stressed for Thomas and Karine so we can chill out, and drink some pastis and play some petanque.

Stolen from another blog
Ripped off from http://ledanois.blogspot.com

Anyhow, congratulations to the newly wed.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Going to Toulouse

Leaving for Toulouse tomorrow morning. We are going to the wedding of Thomas and Karine, and I have a feeling we'll have a real good time. We have decided to stay a couple of extra days, to look at apartment prices in Toulouse, and of course, enjoy a pint or two.

As we've found a hotel in the center with a parking, I've decided to drive.

I'll give a short recap once back in Paris (and fully recovered from the festivities)

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Easier than expected

Just got off the phone with our salesmanager in Germany. Apparently, one of network adapters in our firewall got nuked due to power fluctuations last night.
I asked him to fetch a shiny new 10/100 network adapter, and guided him over the phone how to change it. Remarkably it went smooth, and now everything is working again..

I had been considering leaving *real fast* for Germany, but I guess, sometimes you just need to have a little faith in our sales staff ;)

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Merge !

It seems that Neuf Telecom & Cegetel are about the merge their IP divisions (for now). Cegetel actually does pretty well in terms of service, and if they can "bump" up the service of Neuf Telecom they might be "big enough" for AOL, Free and FT users to switch ISP.

I, for one, will follow this transaction closely. Free (my current ISP) have a lot of great services, but they do little release engineering when launching them so the quality and stability often suffers..

FreeBSD 5.4-REL is out !

Go get it before your neighbor..

What's new.

Monday, May 09, 2005


A little media player i stumbled upon. Open source, fast, free, i don't see why you wouldn't like it!
check it out here, or chose a mirror to download here.

First (serious) firefox exploit

Yup, you read it right.. a cross-site scripting exploit for firefox 1.x has been released today.. Obviously remote exploitable which can give the attacker system access. I guess it was just a matter of time, let's hope the folks at Mozilla will release a patch RSN.

Until then, you can use the following work-around:
1. Disable JavaScript (always a good thing)
2. Disable the "software installation" function

Read the full report here.

Update: Firefox-1.0.4 has been released, in which the above mentioned exploit has been fixed.

Text2Speech

Very nice little tool :

At&T text to speech engine

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Pro*C is shabby

We've got a couple of Pro*C programs, that needs updating. Jeez, Pro*C is a pain in the ass, especially when the original author of the code wrote it in a hurry.. I'm contemplating rewriting it..

What is Pro*C?
Is a oracle supplied preprocessor, that enables you to write you SQL code directly in your C code. Before compiling it, you run the proc(1) preprocessor that converts the SQL code to C.

Why not omit the preprocessor, and write the SQL directly in C?
Cause I suck.

Monday, May 02, 2005

Firefox hits the big 5-0

Today firefox downloads worldwide hit the 50 millions barrier. Holy crap, that's a lot. Hopefully, soon my web statistics will show a majority in Firefox users.

Congrats must be in order to the firefox team.