Soutenir la quadrature

Comme ce printemps 2011 débute sous les meilleurs auspices de paix, de properité et de bisounourserie, pouquoi ne pas en profiter pour soutenir la quadrature du net, une association en pointe pour défendre un internet libre.

D'après leur site:

La Quadrature du Net est une organisation de défense des droits et libertés des citoyens sur Internet. Elle promeut une adaptation de la législation française et européenne qui soit fidèle aux valeurs qui ont présidé au développement d'Internet, notamment la libre circulation de la connaissance.
Moi c'est fait :)

Libertés sur Internet, je soutiens La Quadrature du Net. Et vous ?

The futur of research

The College de France organized a wide series of debate in october, over the futur of research. The main points seem to be the necessity to cooperate among different universities and among several countries, to cope with the effects of competition and the limits of current methods of evaluations.

The debates are mostly in french, and so is the agenda.

Read more…

My code is awesome ! Or at least its users are...

I've just received a nice e-mail pointing at an even nicer blog post about one of my pet project: Yapsy and the author states it quite clearly: "Yapsy is awesome"!

Many thanks to Roberto Alsina for these kind words and for the very nice tutorial he wrote about yapsy.

To be honest, Yapsy is above all just an absurdly tiny piece of code, and , even with that, still has a long way to go before I dare qualify it as awesome, but one thing is sure the developpers who use it already are undoubtedly the awesome ones !

Yapsy is a project I started 3 years ago on my free time, and put on SourceForge "just in case" it could be helpful... It went dormant several times but was waken up by requests and suggestions sent by developpers like Peppy's Rob McMullen, MysteryMachine's Roger Gammans and now Aranduka's Roberto Alsina who all deserve a big thank you.

In its latest release (5 days ago) I corrected some bugs and tried to make the documentation as useful as possible. All in all, I wanted to highlight the ways in wich yapsy could be used to simplify the development of a plugin manager, but Roberto beat me to this. I'm especially proud of two of his comments:

  • "One of the great things about Yapsy is that it doesn't specify too much."
  • "it helps you write better code."

The first one was clearly indented but also known to be hard to get right (and IMHO yapsy's not quite there yet).

The second is way beyond yapsy's initial scope, but it's really sweet to read, especially from somebody who -- as it seems -- has already tasted Qt development ((Qt is well known among GUI toolkits for helping you write better code so that compliments from Qt developpers are worth twice as much :) ))

More info about Yapsy at ohloh