Francois Rouaix's Serendipitious

OCaml and Cocoa

2007-12-26T13:41:00.000-08:00

I have opened up an alpha-quality version of a bridge between Cocoa (Mac OS X API, Objective C version) and Objective Caml. Despite the common "Objective" prefix, this is not a perfect match, far from it.
In its current state, most of Foundation and AppKit is available from OCaml, but callbacks are not yet implemented (hence any GUI app would be pretty much impossible to write).
At this point I'm looking mostly for feedback; naming conventions are subject to change at any time, until I get to something that is palatable.
The next major step is the implementation of callbacks.

The license is new-BSD style, svn and wiki are at: http://code.google.com/p/objective-c-caml-bridge/

The dark business of commercial fundraisers

2007-12-23T14:19:00.000-08:00

This commercial fundraiser has been calling us for months, first with a caller id indicating "Courtesy Call", then with blocked caller ID (shows as "PRIVATE"). Since I typically ask them to put our number on their do-not-call-list (which they don't do because fundraisers are allegedly not subject to the direct marketer obligation), they ask for my wife.

The last call, from a certain Bill L, I asked gain "who's calling" after he demanded to talk to my wife. And then he called me a "f*ing idiot" and hung up. I kid you not. This is a fundraiser for charity. On December 23rd.

If anybody reads this while searching for their company name, please, please, do not ever give to their clients. Just peruse the WA site and look at how much money they return to their clients: 13%. This means that they eat 87% of the donations. Look at some of their charity customers. Some numbers are appalling. For comparison, the Red Cross uses 75% of donations to programs, NHF 92%.

Quartz Composer and Mac Dashboard Widget

2007-09-05T20:37:00.001-07:00

I've recently been playing with Quartz Composer, a cute (and limited) tool to make 2d/3d animations. My first application using Quartz Composer is a dashboard widget that performs simple searches on Amazon.com. I plan to use the same core of images rotating on a ring in 3D to implement other simple web APIs (e.g. Google Image Search, etc.) soon.

In the mean time, enjoy my widget at scrollring.com

John Doerr on going green

2007-06-28T07:34:00.001-07:00

If you liked Al Gore' Inconvenient truth, then you must watch this talk that John Doerr gave a TED in March 2007.

Photosynth and Seadragon

2007-06-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

Photosynth and Seadragon are two amazing pieces of technology for visual displays. Photosynth is a collaboration between UW and MSR, while Seadragon was acquired (see bio of the creator, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, here).

CBCS and TCPA

2007-05-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

There is a business somewhere called CBCS that is violating TCPA and getting away with it. This business, for which I can't get any contact information without disbursing research fees, has been calling my cellphone using automated dialers for weeks. The caller id number is 1-888-547-5354. When I answer the phone, I hear a message saying that someone (Tom, Catherine, or some other first name) wants to contact "John Doe" (name changed to protect that person) and that I need to call back 1-888-547-5354 today.

Note: it is illegal under TCPA to use automated dialing and to use prerecorded voice messages to contact a cellphone number.

I called back a couple of times, trying to get business information so I can attempt a Small Claim litigation. The only information ever given to me over the phone is "CBCS". If I ask more questions, they say "good day to you" and hang up.

Having grown tired of it, I asked them to remove my cellphone number from their system. Hope it will work, because this is annoying.

And, by the way, my cellphone bill records all the calls they made to me, and I have a couple recorded on my voicemail.

More quickshop pages

2006-11-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

Since I made a whopping $6.96 last month from my astore, I thought I might try more of the same. Since the astore features are still somewhat limited, I hacked a simple page for the most wanted product right now: the Zune Media Player.

Note: I'm fortunate enough to enjoy a high PageRank on rouaix.org, and this is why my astore shows up 3rd in this Google search. Why does PageRank give a 5/10 to rouaix.org? Because I've been around so long and there are links from old places. Is it worth 5/10? You decide.

Update: aStore now supports multiple store, here's the Zune Media Player aStore, the iPod aStore, the Apple computers aStore

Exalead finally launches

2006-10-10T07:23:00.000-07:00

Exalead has launched (as in: it's still in beta but the index has grown significantly). Finally someone (Francois Bourdoncle) is bringing something new (per-request clustering) to the arena. It's not totally new, as IIRC Francois had implemented this for Altavista back in the days (it was called Cow-9).

Make yourself a favor - switch away from the GOOG for a week, see what the world looks like elsewhere.

Buy diapers faster...

2006-09-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Since buying our favorite diaper brand on Amazon.com is a little bit more fastidious than it should, I ended up using the newly released aStore to build a simple frontend with all Pampers Diapers (Swaddlers and Cruiser)

Annoying idiom of the day: "provide color"

2006-06-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing this idiom in analyst questions on earnings conference calls. Now I read it in a CEO blog post. What does it mean? What is "color"? Why not "robe" while we're at it...

Customer experiences and international travel

2006-03-20T08:38:00.000-08:00

I recently flew from the US to EU on Northwest Airlines with a connection in Amsterdam. Happened to be the cheapest flight, and my favorite airline had cancelled my previous reservation for no discernible reason.

1- I have rarely seen a piece of software as broken as the VOD system that NWA runs in its Airbus. This thing is supposed to give you full VOD and Music-on-demand as well as advanced maps. In practice, there are major refresh bugs (some blocks of text stay on the screen; maps appear garbled; etc.) and major navigational problems (pressing a key seems to produce a random result). It wasn't only my unit. 4 other units that I was able to observe had the same symptoms. Honestly, I'd be ashamed to put something like that in front of people, even for testing within my own company. Unbelievable.

2- If you can avoid it, do not connect in AMS (Schipol). I had a comfortable time to connect (1h30). For some reason the airline wasn't able to print the boarding pass for my EU flight ahead of time. In itself, this is weird. After all, all these companies (NWA, KLM, AF) belong to the same "team". Expedia was able to make the reservations. What's so hard about printing a boarding pass? So, in AMS I'm heading to a "transfer desk" as instructed by the flight attendants from the US flight. The first desk is unmanned, and there's a huge check-in line of maybe 1hr worth of people at the check-in desks next to it. I don't even know whether this check-in line will work for me, so I head on to information. And I'm right. I should be going somewhere else. When I reach the correct transfer desk, I have to take a ticket, somewhat like at the DMV in California or random administrations in France. I get #278 and the current called number is #135, with three desks opens and about one hour to my flight. Excuse me? Determined not to miss my flight, I head on to the gate and inquire at the desk there. Oh, of course I can get my boarding pass printed in about 10 seconds there. What the, as they say, F?

3- Getting my AVIS car, I'm told to initial the drawings indicating that the car is in mint condition. The rep tells me that the car is practically new, really. Come on. This is Paris. There's no such thing as an unbanged car. Sure enough, broken light, scratch paint, and to top it off the tank isn't even full. Again, WTF?

Is everybody so blase with international travel that they expect a bad experience over and over again? Doesn't anybody care anymore?

How about Google Stars?

2006-03-13T11:33:00.000-08:00

~~Keyhole~~ Google Earth is pretty cool. Google Moon was an April 1st joke. Google Mars is a novelty item. What I'd like to see is Google Stars. Take the best NASA and ESA pictures, and make them available in a map-type GUI, infinitely zoomable (say logarithmically?). More, hack some glue between the upcoming Celestron SkyScout and your browser, and there you go.

Reason #238 why I hate Windows

2006-01-18T10:10:00.000-08:00

I'm typing away something important I'm thinking about. Suddenly my laptop grinds to a halt, apps are unresponsive, I can't switch in less than 20 seconds, the disk whirs like crazy. What's going on? It's MCSHIELD.EXE time! Woohoo. What is it, why does it run and when? I don't know the details, except I'm suspecting that it has to do with virus "protection". The freaking thing has me stopping doing work for 10 minutes. Sometimes it's when I boot or login: the first 10 to 15mn the laptop is unusable. Sometimes it's in the middle of the day (10:05 am today).

Why is this happening? Because of an inherently unsafe operating system and so-called productivity suite, that nobody has ever gotten fired for forcing unto unsuspecting office drones.

Well, it looks like it's done, so back to work...

Software I want: stream MP3 from mt-daapd to Airport Express

2006-01-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

We don't have a central Linux server at home anymore, both our desktops died of old age (as well as two transatlantic moves and long stays in storage). Instead we have laptops (iBook and PowerBook) and a couple of NSLU2. One of the NSLU2 is simply a Samba file server. The second NSLU2 has been reflashed to use Unslung, and it runs mt-daapd and a few other things. This is good because it frees space on our laptops drives. Most the music lives on the NSLU2 instead on the laptops.
But when we play music with iTunes streaming to an Airport Express, we're using twice the wireless network bandwith. Also, we can't start music and then close the laptop's lid. This is silly.

Instead, I'd like to stream music (mostly MP3) directly from mt-daapd to an Airport Express. I looked around, but couldn't find anything obvious.

Reason #237 why I hate Windows

2006-01-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

Every time, every single time I reboot Windows XP, my frigging Start Bar shrinks in width (it's on the left side of the screen) so instead of display the icons like I intended (2 rows of 2), it shows 2 half rows and the "extend me" arrow.

Why, oh why? What's hard in remembering the size of the Start Bar?

Changed web hosting

2005-12-28T13:48:00.000-08:00

rouaix.org used to be hosted by ipowerweb.com, mostly because I knew someone who worked there in the early days (hi Philip). However, the customer service there is abysmal, and the ipowerweb mail servers are setup so that you, the customer, are pretty much considered as a spammer by default. Say you want to send a few Christmas cards... After 30 or so (maybe 50), the ipowerweb mail servers bounces all your outgoing email (unrouteable domain example.com).

And, of course, their customer service is a joke. Really.

So I switched today, and I'm now hosted by lunarpages.com... Let's see how that goes.

Sweet TB

2005-10-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

If only this device had been network enabled... Either I'm out of touch with what people want for their home, or the manufacturers don't get it.

Maxtor.com - Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo

Greed

2005-08-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

Says AP. More fuel for platform flamewars: they were iBooks.

Search engine size and pseudo-science

2005-08-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

This short "article" from some people at NCSA is pathetic. Let's pass on the fact that they can't spell the word "comparison". About half way down in the "Methodology" (sic) section, you will read this:

In order to create a large number of queries that returned less than 1,000 results, we took the commonly available English Ispell Wordlist (a total of 135,069 words) [3] and wrote a PERL script to randomly select two words at a time from that list.

English? So, we're back in 1994 then?

(Update: they fixed the typo).

Ringtones rip-off

2004-05-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

There is supposedly a multi-billion industry for Mobile phone ringtones and other vanity "improvements" to cell phones. It looks like information is not flowing freely. If you own a certain generation of phones (e.g. SE T610), you already have all you need:
- Bluetooth for file transfer
- MIDI files as tones
That's right. Download pretty much any .mid file that's out there (and they've been out there for 10 years already), and you get a new ringtone. I bet you *will* find one that you like...

French historic pictures on-line

2003-09-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

This collection of pictures is just one of many made available by the French Ministry of Culture, among others in their amazing collection of databases

Bye bye Grey Matter, Hello Blogger

2003-09-11T01:51:00.000-07:00

So, Blogger Pro is now free, thanks to Google. I guess it's time to abandon my old Grey matter setup.