Christmas shopping

Yesterday I was out shopping for Christmas, specifically for my nephew. He's 2 years old. I thought I'll buy him some cloth - I guess it's more a gift for the parents than for him -. Connie and I went to Regent Street to get some cloth from Petit Bateau and Gap Kids. We bought some cute stuff :). But on the way we stopped by Hamleys. Man, that shop is just insane. There are so many people! We ended up in the Lego section and we came out with a nice Lego Mindstorm NXT kit. But no this is not for my nephew but for a much older kid...me :) It's actually really cool. I already started to build a robot, well a car but one that can go around and avoid obstacles. It's probably not the most original choice but I thought it would be a good one to start with. I'll post some picts when I'm done.

Skype conference

Last Monday I went to this month Mobile Monday conference. After Google, it was this time hosted by Skype. The theme was mobile social networking. It's a topic that interests me at the moment. A few of the speakers drew comparisons between the web and the mobile world. A few claims were maid that online communities should really suit the mobile world but that it is mainly due to the data charges that it doesn't really take off. There was a guy from 3Uk talking about SeeMe TV, an online video sharing service. The difference there is that once you publish a video you get paid every time somebody watches your clip. That also means that it will cost you money (10p) to watch a video. Probably not my type of community but I can see why people can be interested. There also was a demo by the people from Pitch, an ad-funded mobile networking service. Looks quite interested but again not so much my type of thing. And the last and most interesting demo was from SoonR (I'll talk about it in my next entry so watch this space).
It was an interesting evening, not to mention a good opportunity to meet up with the boys - and girl - from my previous company.

Travel to Asia - follow up

Well, things haven't changed much since my last post. I'm still waiting on a final confirmation from my company that I can take the 4 weeks I need off and then I'll buy my tickets. I've already started to buy the necessary equipment though. Still need to get a large bag pack and some good walking shoes and I'll be good to go. Feeling quite exited

Java 6 is out!

It's not going to make the world a better place but developing software in Java myself it's a welcome news!

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/features.jsp

Dzień dobry

Last weekend Connie and I went to Poland; Warsaw and Krakow to be more specific. To be honest, Poland has never been at the top of my travel list but we were invited by Connie's flatmate (Agnieszka) to her birthday party so we just took the opportunity and went. We flew Saturday morning to Warsaw. We spent the afternoon going round the old town. I found it to be an interesting place given that it was almost entirely destroyed during WWII. It is not a pretty city as such but I found it has some charm. And besides, we were accompanied by Mariusz, a very good friend of Agnieszka. He knows a lot about the city's history.
Later that day, it was time to celebrate Agnieszka's birthday. We went to a bar in the city center and after a few shot of the national drink - Vodka that is - we spent the evening dancing. I usually don't go out like this very often but once in a while it feels good...except the next morning. I had a very good time :)
Next day we went to the spa to relax. It was a really cool place. We tried sonas of different temperatures, steamed or not. One very strange thing was the ice room, you know the place where they usually stock dead meet. Well, the same but with still living meat :).
After this relaxing day, we took the train to Krakow. It feels somewhat a more modern city than Warsaw. The weather wasn't so great but I still enjoyed going around the city center.
At the end of the afternoon we started to make our way towards the airport to catch our flight back to London. We had a very good time there and met some nice people. I wouldn't mind going back there again.

Travel to Asia

Our travel plans to Asia next year are getting clearer. We settled for March. I managed to get the month off from work. That was the first step. Now, we're looking into which places to go to. The plan as it stands is to start with about 10 days in Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka) - since I watched Lost in Translation I really want to go to Tokyo -. We would then take the boat to Shanghai and stay around the city a few days. Followed by some trekking on the Yellow Mountain. Beijing would be next on the list with about 5 days there - I happen to have a friend from university living in Beijing -. To conclude the journey we would then spend a week in Hong Kong so I can meet my girlfriend's family and see where she grew up. This is all very exiting and I can't wait to go. I think it will an amazing trip. My first in Asia!

Christmas is all around

I can't believe Christmas is just around the corner. It makes me wonder what I've done with my time this year. Well, first I worked, and a lot - not sure that's a good thing: you see, I like my job most of the time but I find it quite demanding. That means I don't have much time for my own activities.
Otherwise I of course spent a lot of time with my girlfriend - no complains here :). We don't go out too much but we always try to go and see an expo or catch a movie.
We also traveled a bit: France - a few times -, Vancouver - meeting the in-laws -, Rome, Istanbul and in two weeks Poland. That will do for this year. Next will be China (more on that in a coming post).
I also met with my friends. Not as often as I would like but always nice.
I addition, it was my first year in London. So what do I think you might ask. Well, it's been great so far. I enjoy leaving and working here. Although from time to time I need to get out of the city, I'm quite happy to work in central London and leave quite close to it. It makes things very accessible.

All in all a pretty good year so far. Let's hope it will end the same way it started.

Google conference

I'm regularly going to these mobile monday conferences all over London. The basic idea of this community is to bring together anybody interested in the mobile industry. From developers to CEO of mobile startups, to marketing manager there is a good mix of people. Each month, on the first Monday - hence the Monday in the name -, a conference is organised around a different theme / facet of the industry - hence the Mobile in the name (it all makes sense!). And it is hosted by a different company each time. I quite like the idea because it makes you meet a very eclectic crowd and allow you to visit all the big companies around London. This month it was at Google. Their UK headquarter is in Victoria. Besides getting a free t-shirt and some nice drinks & food, the conference was quite interesting. The theme was mobile trends. There were a few presentations on what people use their phone for and where business opportunities are. I also met with people from my previous job so we could catch up on things. A nice evening indeed.

What's happening at work

Besides us getting a new fancy coffee machine that actually doesn't make good coffee, we finally released our new mobile dealing application last week. It is a complete UI redesign of the previous version. I've been working hard to get it out and although the release didn't go as smoothly as I hoped it's a good feeling to see our clients using it. We're also preping a marketing push to get more people to deal on their mobile phones so the coming months should be quite exiting, providing that my server does not blow up with the load. That's actually my next project. I've titled it : Project "server never dies...please!".

A great trip

We are back from our trip to Istanbul. That was something. First we had to wake up very early on Friday morning to catch a bus, then a coach to Luton airport to get our flight at 6.15 am - budget airlines are cheat but usual flying times are just stupid. We got a bit of sleep during the 4-hour flight to some small airport near Istanbul. Once landed and our visas sorted - actually being French I didn't need one :) - we had to take another coach - not again! - to reach the city center. It was in fact quite pleasant as we got a nice view of the city on the way.

Right, so here we are we thought. Job done! Well, not quite as we could not find a taxi driver who would understand the address of the hotel. Never mind, we decided to give the hotel a call to get directions. They told us to get this elusive 4T bus that we never found. So we ended up asking for help in another near-by hotel. The very nice person at the reception desk helped us finding a bus going to the area our hotel was located. After probably another 2 hours we finally made it to the hotel. WOOHOO!

We went to bed early that day so we could get up early the next. We started the next day with a visit of the Sultanahmet and the Haya Sofia (see picture above). These mosques are very pretty. We then decided to make our way towards to new city center (Taksim area) but stopped for a very nice meal on the way. Istanbul is really a huge city (more than twenty million people). We visited the Galata Tower and then went to the less historic and more lively areas near Taksim. There's a massive shopping street that leads to Taksim square with also lots of nice restaurants in the adjacent streets. We had a nice dinner there before deciding to go back to the hotel (now we knew which bus to take :).

Our last full day in Istanbul arrived so quickly with still so much to see and do. We started with a rather short visit to the Grand Bazaar. A very interesting place I would say. I like the atmosphere of all these people packed on these little streets. We then took a boat trip on the Bosphorus. It was OK but not as great as we expected it to be. With a few hours ahead of us we made our way back to the hotel area when we saw the entrance to this nargile / coffee shop. We went inside and had a smoke and a tea there while chatting with the brothers owning the place. A very relaxing experience. We then tried the Turkish bath. At first I wasn't too exited about the idea of having a big half-naked guy washing me but my girlfriend convinced me to try so we went. It was quite nice actually, I felt very clean afterwards :)

That concluded quite well our trip to Istanbul. Well, almost because we still had to go back to the airport and head back home. That proved a bit more challenging than expected. We actually didn't take the right coach and ended up at the wrong airport :( After panicking a little bit we found somebody who spoke English to help us and arranged a taxi for us. After some crazy driving from our taxi driver - or pilot I should say - we finally arrived at the correct airport and even on time for our plane. Phew!!
Now we're back in London with our memories and wishes to go back to this great city.

Just a few thoughts on online communities...

I am always amazed by the number or size of communities on the internet. Blogs are bursting to life at an unbelievable rate: I've read somewhere that a new blog is created every 2 seconds. Myspace.com with its millions of users is another fine example. This site allows you to create your own profile and share thoughts, photos, etc. I am personally using Linked-in to publish my professional profile, keep in touch with my old colleagues or find new opportunities.

It is interesting to notice this need for people to belong and to have an identity on the web. I was reading an article on Le Monde (in French only) about this phenomenon. The author was pointing out that a few decades ago people tended to stay close to the place they grew up in, thus living in their own community. However, nowadays it has become common for people to live in different cities and even different countries - just look at how many foreigners are living in London - that this close-range connection is lost. But the web is there to remove the physical boundaries and allow people to virtually connect and stay in touch with each other.

Given the cheer number if these online communities you can always find the right one for you but although one could ponder whether this new form of social interaction is really a progress, I am more concerned about the difficulty to keep up and the lack of centralized repository of information or lack of interoperability between these profiles. If your friend John is on myspace but your other friend Paul uses friendster then you need to create an account on both sites and maintain your profiles up-to-date. I guess - read hope - soon we'll see more cooperations between all these services.

In a next blog I will discuss a bit about web semantic as it could be solution to the problem I just mentioned.

Beautiful Istanbul

So it seems, and I'm about to find out. My girlfriend and I are going to Istanbul next weekend. I'm very exited about it. We wanted to go for a long weekend somewhere. We first thought about Barcelona or maybe somewhere in Italy but I somehow felt that I wanted to see something a bit different. Mind you I love Italy and Barcelona seems to be a great city but it's all a bit too...how to say...not exotic enough. Being French I can easily relate to Italian or Spanish culture but not to Turkish. So we opted for Istanbul.

I'll post some pictures and a video (thanks to my new toy) there.

Cobertura 4 J2ME

A while back in my previous job I worked on a code coverage tool for J2ME. I used an existing J2SE/J2EE code coverage tool called Cobertura that I modified to work on J2ME. After I left the company I decided to set up this project as open source. This is how Cobertura for J2ME started. It now enjoys a bit a popularity because it seems to be the only tool of its kind for Java 2 MicroEdition. It's always a nice feeling to see something you do being used by others. So I'm keeping busy with the coming 1.1 release. I'm hoping to have out by mid-Novermber. Watch this space for more on that...

Children of Men

WOW, what a movie! It's one of the most gripping movie I've ever seen.

This is the story of Theo (Clive Owen), an ex-activist now bureaucrat who's fed up with his life. It's the year 2027 and the last baby born on earth was more than 18 years ago. The world has become a totalitarian, over-polluted place where people have no hopes of future, where refugees are treated like criminals. When Julian (Julianne Moore), Theo's ex-lover reappears in his life, a thread of events takes Theo on a journey to save Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), a refugee who also happen to be the first pregnant woman in almost 20 years. Some of the action scenes are anthology! Cuaron excels in putting you right in the middle of the scenes. You're on the edge of your seat for the most part of the movie. But where it gets very interesting is in the content that the movie deals with. It tries to explore a very plausible view of the future of our society and how we would react if women became infertile. It makes you wander about the world we leave in today and sends warnings of what it could become if we don't pay attention. It is also packed with some witty quotes and Owen gives a great performance. This is the perfect example that movies can be thought-provoking and yet entertaining.

It's one of the best movie I've seen in years. It gets a 10/10 on my filmographic scale!

My new toy

A few weeks ago I bought myself an expensive new toy:



It is a very nice camcorder that lets you take very good quality video. Then all you need is a proper video editing tool and off you go. I'm also looking into putting all my videos into a dvd with nice menus and all. All I need is to find the time to do it!

I'm back....not quite!

A few month ago I blogged about me being back at blogging more frequently. I even mentioned one entry a week. The result is ....suspense.... 2 entries in 4 months. I can see you say "WOW, that's a lot. Where does he find all this energy?!!!". Yes I know, not quite what I said. So this time no statement of that sort. I'll just try and add things more regurarly here. A little help from my fellow writers Aaron, Luci and Raffi wouldn't hurt ;). Am I the only engineer in the city?

The power of Ajax -> Netvibes

I've been using netvibes as my homepage for a month now and it really rocks! It is highly customisable and allow you to create your own modules. Plus it has a very nice feed reader.

If you don't know it I suggest you go and check it out. You can use the link below to subscribe to this feed on netvibes.

Long time, no see

A friend of mine from uni came to visite me this week. We both studied computer science at the same school. Last time I saw him was two and a half years ago when he came to visite me (again) for new year's eve with 4 other people from uni. It was good. We stayed at the twins place in Farnborough. Thanks again for that Ladies!

This time he came with his girlfriend. They arrived on Wednesday and visited central London Thursday and Friday while I was working :(. Saturday, the four of us - my girlfriend joined us too - went to Portobello market in the morning. Although the weather was quite bad, it was nice. I really like this area of London, very picturesque. Then, change of style with Camdem Town. It's always nice to go to Camdem. You know you'll meet original people. We spent an hour or two there browsing the shops. Then again another change of style with...Harrods. My friends wanted to go and have a look. While they were going around, Connie and I went to the 4th floor so she could play a bit piano.

Once all done with shopping we made our way to Tottenham Court Road where we were supposed to meet with Connie's friends for dinner in a Korean restaurant. It was good food and not too expensive. To complete the evening we went to Soho for a drink (see picture). All in all it was a very good day and I think my friends enjoyed their time here!

I'm back

It's been ages since I - or anyone else for that matter - wrote anything here and it's too bad! But I decided to make more efforts and try and write an entry every week so watch this space...

My first Chinese New Year

Being European, there's a lot of things I don't know and don't understand about Chinese culture. So when my girlfriend – born in Hong-Kong – ask me to join her and her friends for their New Year's celebration I was a bit anxious at first. To start with, it was the first time she introduced me to her friends (I think she was slightly worried that I wouldn't feel comfortable among Chinese people). Then, there was the food. I'm not usually too difficult when it comes to food but chicken feet does not sound very appealing to me. It's probably very good but I could not bring myself to trying – I guess I'm not that adventurous. Also, I wasn't too sure about how to behave. I had this idea that Chinese people are very respectful of traditions and thus they would get upset if I was doing or saying something inappropriate. Well, it either didn't happen or they didn't say anything.

Overall it was a very pleasant experience. Her friends seem to be interesting enough people. Nice too. And, event though I can't tell you what I ate, the food turned out to be quite good.

Being with a person of different origin can have its drawbacks, but it is very exiting to discover new horizons.