The show is called Les aventures du comte de Malamanteau (French for Earl Malamanteau's Adventures), and is mostly music centered: during one hour, a selection of music from a given country (a different one for each issue) is aired. So far, we have visited South Africa, Kenya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Ukraine and Finland.

A website has been setup for listeners to have access to broadcasted shows and gathering more information about the music we chose and location we visited: malamanteau.fr.

The website is generated using Blogreen, a project I started bazillon years ago and that recently reached a form that makes it usable (after being re-thought from scratch a couple times). Basically, Blogreen is a tool for building websites from free-form XML data. If you consider your data to be some models, regarding the facts that the system expects you to provide views, Blogreen is basically the controller of an XSLT MVC data processing system.

The documentation is currently somewhat sparse, so if you are interested in the project, you'd better subscribe to the blogreen-announce mailing-list to be informed of major news (documentation availability, releases (maybe one day), …) or if you are interested in how it works, to the blogreen-devel mailing-list for commit messages.

In each Free/Libre software event I attended, Wim was the guy promoting OpenBSD.

Unfortunately, Wim and Theo recently clashed (full story on Wim's website) and Wim decided to stop promoting OpenBSD in such events. His main concerns are now:

1. make room because he has a lot of stuff in his house;
2. get money back, because these goods have already be paid.

If you are interested in helping this cool guy, go visit his website at http://kd85.com/ and buy some stuff.

I also would like to thanks publicly Mathieu Pasquini, founder of InLibroVeritas, for his gift so that I can give a few more euros to Wim before leaving from LSM.

Going there

As usual, the SNCF website was not of any help (worth website ever?) so I planned my train trip using the BAHN website.

Staying in Nantes

Once more, I really thanks Jean-Marie Favreau and his family for hosting me, picking me at the train, driving me to and from the event and the good time off the event (Best crêpes ever).

Conferences

There were a lot of conferences on no less than 19 tracks, but I have to admit that the targeted audience of each is so different I was interested in 3-4 tracks. According to me, 2 out of 3 conferences were too short in time for deeping enough to get exciting for hackers like me or too general. So there is a bit of deception when I recall what I have seen / learned in conferences. On the other hand, some conferences where f**king interesting!

People

The cool thing in such events is that you can speak in front of people you usually speak with on the Internet, you meet cool people, and often realize that the unknown-guy in front of you has developed a cutting-edge library you are using everyday (well, you have the idea of what I mean). I had some interesting contacts for further project (Yay, I know I am ENOTIME... I don't mind :-) )

Going back home

The return trip was horrible. I had to go to Paris, to go to one train-station to another, and then go back to Clermont-Ferrand. I really don't like Paris, and the return trip was more then 2 times more expensive than the initial trip.

@{Nicolas Dumoulin} where were you at 15:20? Were not we supposed to met and go back to Clermont-Ferrand together?

Okay, I admit it, it was quite a problem. Here is a picture of my cupboard as of today (I admit that I attended to Vinidôme in the meantime):

You see Baptiste? Including what's in my fridge and on the kitchen's table I can count 15 bottles of wine, 2 of Porto, and only 7 kinds of oils and 5 different vinegars (not mentioning other alcohols).

Would you be happy to come eating one day?

TypeMatrix skins are available!

While the keyboard I am working with has an interesting background, and I really love it in some way, I am quite hurried to change it because is has some electronics problems and from time to time, I have to twist the PS2 cable to be able to type-in again or stop the keyboard from sending endlessly the same characterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

According to the answer I got for an e-mail sent earlier this year to the guys at TypeMatrix, the TypeMatrix 2030 skins will be available this month:

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Romain Tartière wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> 2030 is available again ! Great! But I can't find the skins in the shop. I
> would be interested in a Dvorak keyboard with a black qwerty skin. How to
> proceed ? May I pre-order a dvorak keyboard now ?
> 
>  Thank you!

Romain --
  
Yes, we are back!  but the skins are not yet available.  We are working on
them now and hope to have some by February.  Check back with us then!
  
The Dvorak-labeled keyboards are due to arrive this week, so we will have
all three keyboards ready for shipping out: Qwerty, Dvorak, blank.

I'm impatient!

My first attempt was a total failure. I followed the instructions a friend of mine gave me (we can resume this as Oh! It's easy! It's the only thing I known cooking! You melt the yolk of an egg with the same quantity of mustard, then you add cooking oil slowly and it magically turns into mayonnaise).

Seeing people making mayonnaise instructed my I was doing it wrong.

I am a lot more proud of my second attempt:

The spoon is really standing alone!

Because of the geom(8)etry of my kitchen (and because it is unbelievably small), I relied on such a feature to make(1) fseek(3)ing my fridge easier. But since it is not a Microsoft Windows one, it does not features so called HANDLEs (it is POSIX compliant though and so provides descriptors).

So, my problem: I know that my fridge has to be opened from the right side, but most end users try to open it the wrong way. And since there is no handle to help them figure out it has to be opened from the other side, they pull hard.

I took a couple minutes hacking two patches that should fix the issue. The result is visible below:

The door of my fridge with patches applied (files at Deviant Art).

Nobody tried it yet, but if it proves to be helpful, I will certainly push these patches upstream :-P.