David Madore's WebLog

2003-05-31 (samedi) · Nouvelle Lune (Éclipse annulaire de Soleil)

Santé

Ça doit faire la 4^e ou 5^e fois ce matin que je me réveille aux alentours de 9h–11h, soit dans les 3 à 5 heures après m'être couché, à cause d'un sentiment d'oppression du côté gauche de la poitrine, au niveau du sein gauche, en profondeur. Ce n'est pas très douloureux, mais c'est indiscutable ; la sensation est vaguement comparable à ce qu'on ressent quand on a un hématome sous la peau (vaguement, hein). Et ce n'est pas très localisé (c'est en gros dans toute la région pectorale) mais ça ne rayonne pas non plus dans le bras, par exemple, ni dans le cou. Et puis ça passe tout seul en quelques minutes (peut-être même pas autant) : la première fois j'ai dû juste me retourner dans mon lit et ça a disparu, les autres fois je me suis levé et ça s'est passé le temps que je me demande quoi faire. Avant-hier j'ai dû prendre une aspirine (parce que c'est efficace contre toute sorte de douleur, mais aussi que c'est notoirement bon pour certains problèmes cardio-vasculaires) ; ceci dit, je crois que ça a disparu largement avant qu'on puisse soupçonner qu'elle fasse effet (ou alors elle agit très vraiment vite, l'aspirine en question). À chaque fois en me couchant j'avais complètement oublié que j'avais fait ça les jours précédents, donc on ne peut pas vraiment soupçonner que parce que je me dis « je vais me réveiller bientôt avec mal à la poitrine » et que c'est une self-fulfilling prophecy. Je me promets de m'en occuper, je me recouche, et en me réveillant de nouveau plus tard (normalement, et sans trace de douleur) je me dis que j'ai peut-être exagéré, et j'oublie la chose jusqu'au matin suivant. Sauf que ce matin-ci (vers 9h, il y a une heure au moment où j'écris) j'ai paniqué (je ne crois pas que la douleur était plus forte que les jours précédents, juste elle est partie moins vite), je me suis dit « bordel, je suis en train de faire un infarctus, là », et forcément, en paniquant j'ai tachycardisé (j'ai dû monter à 180 pulsations), j'ai eu l'impression de manquer d'oxygène — mais était-ce un symptôme causée par la panique, par mon imagination du fait que je sais que c'est une sensation quand on fait un infarctus, ou bien encore un symptôme primaire, je n'en ai aucune idée. J'étais à deux doigts d'appeler le SAMU, mais c'est à nouveau passé. En ce moemnt ça revient et ça repart par intermittence toutes les trois-quatre minutes peut-être, de façon très très atténuée (à peine sensible, mais quand même) ; comme les autres jours je m'étais rendormi après, je ne sais pas si ça fait toujours ça. Ah, j'oubliais qu'avant-hier ou il y a trois jours j'ai dû mesurer ma tension avant de me recoucher, et elle était normale (genre, 125mmHg/90mmHg, avec un pouls autour de 80, enfin, je pipote peut-être pour la tension diastolique, mais disons que ce n'était pas mirobolant). Peut-être que ce n'est pas du tout un problème cardiaque, je n'en ai aucune idée en fait.

Mise à jour (13h) : j'ai consulté un médecin, qui n'a pas eu l'air affolé, mais qui m'a quand même prescrit une échographie cardiaque. Et qui m'a recommandé de me coucher plus tôt, aussi…

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2003-05-30 (Friday)

Quickies

This joke from the rec.humor.funny newsgroup has a moral which relates to the red tape problems I was recently recounting. Which leads me to mention the fact that Brad Templeton, the founder of rec.humor.funny is also chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, probably the most important defender of electronic freedom. One of the things the EFF fights, together with the League for Programming Freedom, is software patents. For a futuristic view of the dangers of software patents, I recommend reading The Right to Read by Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation (and original author of Emacs among other things). Basically the problem with patents is that some people have been patenting things that are so absurdly trivial that they have become simply a weapon to use against the competition rather than (as they were supposed to be) a way of avoiding that technology be lost in trade secret. We of the OCAPI oppose abusive use of patents to stifle creativity; and certainly I encourage Europeans to sign the No e-Patents Petition by the Eurolinux Alliance: it is not necessary for Europeans to follow the footsteps of every American stupidity we can find. When Jean-Loup Gailly invented the “deflate” compression method used by gzip (an Internet standard under the name of RFC 1951), he had to do an extensive amount of research to carefully avoid a great number of known compression algorithm patents. The very notion of avoiding a patent is an absurdity: a rightfully granted patent should describe something that one does not have the slightest chance of “stumbling upon” by accident. Anyway, talking about patents leads me to mention the Xiphophorus (now Xiph.Org) Foundation, a non-for-profit organization that has produced a parent- and royalty-free audio compression format called Ogg Vorbis that produces better quality (or higher compression rates, depending on what is kept constant) than the ubiquitous MP3. The Xiph.Org teams are now working on producing Ogg Theora, a free video compression format (not exactly patent-free, but the patents have been given to the Xiph.Org foundation by On2 Technologies in a way that will ensure that the codec is forever freely usable by all, even for commercial / for-profit purposes). An even longer term effort is Ogg Tarkin (currently dormant), a wavelet-based codec / format.

Enough of this. Another joke from rec.humor.funny (note, incidentally, that Pál Erdős is now deceased) gets me, in a complete non-sequitur, to the subject of mathematics. The Norwegian governement created, in 2002 to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of Niels Henrik Abel, the Abel prize in mathematics, clearly an attempt to create an equivalent of the Nobel prize for mathematics (the Fields medal is often considered as the Nobel prize for mathematics, but there are important differences between the Fields medal and the Nobel prize, not the least being that Fields medalists may not be over 40). The first and so far only recipient of the Abel prize is Jean-Pierre Serre (among many other titles member of the French Académie des Sciences). Jean-Pierre Serre was the youngest recipient of the Fields medal (at the age of 28), and now he is, as a friend of mine jokingly pointed out, at the age of 76, the youngest recipient of the Abel prize. Very impressive.

Enough, it is later than I thought. Having given Google some links for thought, I will now let it digest them and go to bed. If you want more information about (nearly) anything or (just about) everything, just follow the last two links. Isn't the Web wonderful?

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2003-05-29 (Thursday) · Ascension Day

e-commerce is great… when it works!

I'd just like to share my annoyance.

e-commerce is great when it works: one just (click click click) selects the items one wants to buy, then (tap tap tap) enters one's shipping address and credit card number, and finally (click) sends the order and relaxes. Wonderful. Except that when it doesn't work, it's just a cause of headaches and frustration. And it just happened to me now: your credit card has been declined, they tell me. Only, of course, they won't tell me why or how, and I have no way of knowing. How am I supposed to trace a problem that doesn't produce any kind of error message? I know my VISA card number by heart and am sure I didn't mistype it; and the expiry date is correct as well. And my bank account should clear the charges (note: in Europe, credit cards, although they're called credit cards, are actually debit cards, in that they'll automatically deduct the amount from the bearer's bank account, without him having to write a check). So I have no idea what the problem could be.

VISA is grotesquely opaque in its functioning. There doesn't seem to be any way you can access any kind of trace of all payments and attempted payments from one's VISA card except when they finally get through to one's bank account (and, of course, attempted and rejected payments are not indicated, and therefore no reason-of-failure can be read). Why, there isn't even a (globally unique) serial number for all VISA transactions, apparently! So the e-vendor cannot say something like: transaction number [some very large number] attempted on your VISA card was declined: please contact VISA for information as to why—that I should have some reference to recall to VISA or my bank in attempting to get some explanations.

Some more annoyances: my bank has this ingenious system to make e-commerce safer where, instead of giving one's real VISA card number on the e-vendor's Web site, one will connect to the bank's site, indicate the amount that one wishes to pay, receive a temporary VISA card number valid for just one transaction for this amount, and then return to the e-vendor's site to use this temporary number. I like the idea. But I suspect it may be what is getting in the way of my normal transaction (with my real VISA number, because I never used this secure transaction service). So I figured, I might as well try it (maybe if my real VISA number won't work, a temporary one will). I can subscribe to the service in question (click click click) directly from my bank's Web site… and of course I then discover that they will “send me an account and password” by snail mail within ten days. What a joke. There's nothing I hate worse than these electronic services which they claim you can subscribe to with just three clicks of a mouse, and when you do you discover that there actually needs to be some snail mail transfered and it takes days.

Oh, and of course the bank's secure transaction dedicated Web site requires goddamn Macromedia Flash, the technology that set the Web back ten years, and which is so broken that it hangs my browser every other day. I'll be writing to the bank's webmasters to point out that it would take perhaps ten minutes to write a trivial-but-usable HTML version of the site and that it would gain their clients considerable amounts of time not having to wait for Macromedia Flash to do its junk and hang every now and then. But somehow I know that my suggestion will be (politely) ignored. I just hate and despise Macromedia Flash, in case you hadn't noticed.

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2003-05-28 (Wednesday)

Concerns about religion entering the European constitution (draft)

Χρώμεθα γὰρ πολιτείᾳ… καὶ ὄνομα μὲν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐς ὀλίγους ἀλλ' ἐς πλείονας οἰκεῖν δημοκρατία κέκληται.

[Traduction française ci-dessous.]

The European Convention is working to produce a Constitution for the European Union. This is great and mighty step toward the construction of a united Europe, and a tremendously difficult task getting so many people and so many peoples to agree on a common text; and I fully support this effort. One thing greatly concerns me, however: under the insistence of some, the Convention has inserted in their draft preamble to the Treaty establishing the European Constitution, a reference to the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe (emphasis mine) and to the spiritual impulse always present it [Europe's] heritage. I don't intend to argue the matter at any length in this 'blog, but let me simply state that, as a citizen of a country which—probably most in the world—holds to the strict separation of Church and State (much more than, say, the United States which mention Nature's God in their Declaration of Independence), and as an atheist myself, I shall see this as a great step backward if this constitution is adopted as it stands in this matter, and I am deeply shocked that it should be demanded of me to accept the religious inheritance of Europe as having inspirational value in the perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights. This site will argue futher why the matter is important.

I find it approprite, however, that the frontispiece of the Constitution should be a quotation by Thucydides (which I reproduced above). For we must remember that the Greek city-states invented the very notion of a constitution, and the heritage we bear in this matter is first of all that of Solon and Cleisthenes (and, I suppose, Lucius Brutus as well).

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2003-05-27 (mardi)

Dodo

Enfin cette nuit je vais pouvoir dormir à peu près correctement. Ça faisait longtemps. Mais demain je n'ai pas de rendez-vous, pas de dossier urgent à porter à la poste, pas de séminaire auquel assisté, et personne ne m'attend nulle part.

Je reproduis donc de nouveau cette merveilleuse citation :

Il y a deux moments agréables dans la journée : le soir quand on se couche, et le matin quand on ne se lève pas.

Commentaires

2003-05-26 (Monday) · Memorial Day (US)

A note about XML and the DTD annoyance

XML is an interesting (but possibly heavily over-hyped) generic (or “meta”) description language, based on the markup concept (aka, “tags”), that allows a very wide variety of applications, from hypertext to mathematics, through graphics, abstract semantics, synchronized multimedia, user interface description, site syndication and much more. One of its ingenious (or, actually, completely trivial) ideas is the use of namespaces to separate tag vocabularies into semantic units.

One of the dubious features of XML, however, is the fact that it maintains compatibility with the older SGML (or ISO 8879). For this reason, an XML file typically contains, or includes by reference, a Document Type Declaration (DTD). The unfortunate thing is that (for legacy reasons) this DTD plays a double role: it serves both to define validity constraints on the document (such as to define which tags can contain which), which can be verified by a “validating parser”, and on the other hand to provide genuine semantic content / data information. For example, the fact that in HTML the entity é represents the character “é” (LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE) is determined by the DTD; whereas the fact that the tag <link> determines a link is governed by the namespace (in the case of XHTML, http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml). This is an unpleasant grouping of attributions, for one would sometimes want to be able to invent an XML application that has its own namespace and also its own set of entities but that does not care about validation (or for which validation is pretty much meaningless). Also, it is the DTD which determines the fact that such or such an attribute might have this or that default or fixed value, which means that the DTD has to be read not only to validate the document but also to determine entity replacements (part of the actual document content) and attribute values. And the DTD also determines which attribute (normally named id) is the fragment ID reference.

It has become much more obvious to me while working with XSLT (which cannot produce an internal DTD subset in the output document, unfortunately), and XUL or MathML (which, embedded in HTML, are very difficult to describe through a DTD), that DTDs are rather inadequate, but that they are tied up with XML in such a way that it is difficult to dispense with them entirely.

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2003-05-25 (Sunday) · Mother's day (France)

Isn't Mozilla great?

I've had some fun prodding the mighty Lizard today. Now I can play some of my favorite solitaire card games (though free cell is missing, unfortunately) within my browser just by clicking on this link (which probably won't work for you). Yeah, it's pretty useless of course (and rather slow, too, since it's all in JavaScript and XUL), but it's so cool. Actually, it's not completely useless, because it has the advantage of being cross-platform: I have all these card games from other sources on my home PC under GNU/Linux, but I might not have them everywhere. Anyway. Mozilla might not brew coffee yet, and looks very much like a kitchen sink, but it does some interesting things. Of course, the question is whether it can compete with Emacs.

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2003-05-24 (samedi)

Mes petits tracas

Je continue à être malade et à manquer énormément de sommeil (aujourd'hui j'ai dû faire une sieste de trois heures dans la journée, chose que je ne fais qu'exceptionnellement, parce que je ne tenais plus debout), et, pendant ce temps, les choses à faire (entre « urgentes » et « ultra-urgentes ») s'accumulent.

Dans la catégorie « ultra-urgente », il y a le dossier de candidature à un poste d'ATER auquel je postule pour l'an prochain, que je viens de finir de remplir, et que je dois renvoyer au plus tard lundi : des pages et des pages de dossier à remplir, des quantités impressionnantes de documents à fournir, etc. J'en ai assez des administrations qui utilisent les gens qui font appel à elles (ou qu'elles régissent à un titre ou un autre) comme secrétariat de liaison d'un organe à l'autre (notamment : pourquoi diable dois-je communiquer à l'Université des photocopies de diplômes qu'elle a elle-même émis ? des copies de contrat de travail dont elle est elle-même l'employeur ? c'est parfaitement absurde). Au moins ce dossier-ci ne demandait-il pas la signature de cinquante personnes pour m'autoriser à le transmettre, comme un certain nombre que j'ai dû remplir jusqu'à maintenant (comme pour m'inscrire en doctorat) — c'est d'ailleurs vraiment heureux, parce que je me suis réveillé si tard pour cette candidature que j'aurais eu bien du mal à obtenir une quelconque signature autre que la mienne (et peut-être celle de mon directeur de thèse). Dans la catégorie un tout petit peu moins urgent, j'ai un dossier à compléter pour valider mon agrégation.

Il est insupportable que pour obtenir n'importe quoi il faille franchir deux barrières : la barrière administrative de la paperasse et de la bureaucratie, et la barrière politique de la magouille et du copinage (parfois il n'y a qu'une des deux barrières, mais souvent il y a les deux). Je rêve d'un monde où on recruterait les candidats à leurs capacités importantes et non à leurs facultés à remplir sept fois leur nom dans les pointillés. Mais laissons cela.

Hormis le temps perdu en secrétariat, il y a aussi celui passé en tâches ménagères qui m'a toujours impressionné. Pour peu que je sois un peu pressé par d'autres choses, comme c'est mon cas actuellement, la vaisselle sale s'empile à une vitesse confondante, la propreté de mon appartement devient vite douteuse, c'est une catastrophe.

Pour parler de choses moins tracassantes, il y a eu un exposé très intéressant ce matin au séminaire Variétés Rationnelles (même s'il était un peu éloigné du sujet du séminaire), par Antoine Ducros, sur les analogues p-adiques de la géométrie semi-algébrique. Notamment, je crois avoir enfin compris ce qu'est un espace de Berkovich (ce n'est que la quatrième fois que je l'entends en donner la définition…).

J'ai dîné au restaurant indien (Les Délices du Punjab, rue Gay-Lussac), ce soir, avec une douzaine de copains de l'ENS. Le repas était bon et copieux (quoiqu'un peu cher), et l'ambiance à table était excellente. Après le dîner, certains du groupe organisaient une petite sortie (évidemment) dans les catacombes (autour du parc Montsouris), à laquelle j'aurais sans doute participé si je n'avais pas été malade.

Commentaires

2003-05-23 (Friday) · Last Quarter

Email stats

I just did a stat of my last two weeks of email. It's a bit frightening: I received

• 2313 emails total, of which
• 931 spams caught by SpamAssassin,
• 661 spams not caught by SpamAssassin but caught by SpamProbe (which runs after it),
• 13 spams not filtered, and
• 708 ham (non-spam) emails.

Omitting spam, I got:

• 708 ham (non-spam) emails, of which
• 552 coming from various mailing-lists, collective email aliases of various kinds, and similar sources,
• 29 viruses (effective only under Windows, of course, so not concerning me, but which I still get; actually, some may have been counted as spam above),
• 37 emails from various demons or automatic processes,
• 4 emails not belonging to any other category, and
• 86 “genuine” personal emails.

This means that I got an average of above 165 emails per day, or about one every 9 minutes, that 70% was spam (leaving around 51 hams a day, something around one every half-hour), and only 3.7% was “genuine” personal email (which makes around 6 a day).

The spam situation is pretty much under control, though at a high cost: having both SpamAssassin and SpamProbe filter my emails is computationally intensive (and also requires a lot of disk space for word databases). But 13 non-filtered spams in two weeks is bearable.

What worries me more is the 552 emails from various mailing-lists. Of course, most of them I only read the subject header of, and immediately sort them in the appropriate mailbox (I could do this automatically, but then I know I would never read them). But it still takes time, and this makes me think that I should try unsubscribing to some of these mailing-lists, insofar as I can. (I can't, of course, unsubscribe to my lab's collective email alias, because important information might come through that channel; unfortunately, most of these aliases are of the same kind.)

I'm afraid the invention of email has vastly increased the amount of information which any given individual has to triage. I'd need a private secretary to take care of doing that work, but I can't afford one.

(Incidentally, this rant is not an attempt to discourage anyone from emailing me: as long as you email me specifically, at david+wwwmadoreorg, you're counted among the “genuine” personal emails, and I don't really get too much of that. The reason I have this strong tendency not to reply is more complicated than just a question of quantity, maybe I'll try to explain it some other time.)

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2003-05-22 (jeudi)

Nouvelles non matricielles

À part cette petite critique de Matrix II, je peux donner très rapidement quelques autres nouvelles de moi. Mon rhume passe, mais je suis actuellement aphone (heureusement, ça ne m'empêche pas d'écrire, comme on le constate). Je manque catastrophiquement de sommeil et je commence à ressembler à un zombie, d'une part ; demain, mon manque de sommeil ne se sera pas arrangé et je dois assister à un séminaire important tout l'après-midi. Mon court article Very free R-equivalence on toric models, soumis il y a un an au Journal of Algebra a été mi-accepté mi-refusé : le référé l'accepte à condition de faire des changements assez importants, qui sont un peu dommage (il y a une partie de l'article qui n'est pas originale mais que j'ai écrite faute de référence adéquate dans la littérature, et ça n'a pas plu). Les automorphismes pentaculaires des surfaces de Del Pezzo de degré 4, dont j'ai parlé précédemment, ne semblent exister que pour un pentagone régulier. J'ai obtenu un avis très favorable pour la validation de mon agrégation, ce qui est toujours une bonne nouvelle (même si ça n'a rien d'une surprise). Je me suis acheté un nouveau sweat avec capuche (puisque j'ai déjà mentionné que j'avais perdu le précédent), avec un graphisme un peu tribal sur le devant et le derrière, qui a certainement un sens bien précis pour les gens qui écoutent du KOЯN ou du Slipknot, mais je ne veux pas savoir, moi je trouve juste ça joli (et sexy ! ).

Tiens, puisque Denis Feldmann a mis un lien vers mon 'blog depuis son site, je peux lui rendre la politesse (et le saluer au passage) en mettant un lien vers le sien.

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2003-05-22 (Thursday)

Matrix II

Well, at last I saw Matrix Reloaded. As was to be expected, there were aspects of the film which I liked, and others that I did not. Here is a short critique (probably including some spoilers, although the spoily parts probably won't make much sense if you haven't seen the movie, so… at any rate, the next paragraph doesn't spoil much).

My major grievance is that I found the combat scenes exceedingly lengthy and boring. At this stage they have become really pointless: all possible forms of fighting skill have been exploited, and since every character (worth mentioning) is practically immortal and indestructible, what use is there in fighting yet more kung-fu? Yeah, the special effects are fun, but couldn't they have been saved for something more useful? Speaking of lengthy scenes, the one where Trinity and Neo make love while Zion dances seemed to last forever. (Oh, and while I'm mentioning that scene: it seemed to me that Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and the others, at the end of the first film, no longer had their plugs / sockets / holes / whatever you want to call them in the arms and back, only a single one in the back of the neck. It seems they have them again, and I find that pretty disgusting, I wonder why the screenwriters insisted on it.)

What I mostly liked is the remarkable and subtly depicted characters: they have—how can I phrase this?—glamour, panache of some kind. They're convincing, too, in their way. The Merovingian (with his funny French accent) is nice, and so is (ex-)agent Smith; but the Oracle is simply great, and so is Persephone (the Merovingian's wife), the Key Maker (in his own subtle way, like when he describes how to get into the building where the Source is), the Architect (somehow reminiscent of Christopher Lee, don't you find?), or in fact Morpheus himself. And councillor Hamann is also a rather interesting character; in fact, so are they all. The various confrontations we witness are a piece of anthology, and the insight into the zoology of the Matrix (peopled by such strange and ancient beings) is cool. A few dialogue lines are quite memorable, too!

Not all lines are good, though. There seems to have been a kind of truism attack at various points, although some of these are certainly meant to be funny. But “I believe what I believe” or “some things change, and others don't”, well… you don't have to be a genius to write stuff like that.

There are some nice private jokes meant for computer hackers that made me laugh. When Seraph (the Oracle's protector) leads Neo through a hallway filled with doors and refers to them as “back doors”, I was howling with laughter. So was I at the point where you can actually clearly see Trinity type “ssh 10.0.2.2 -l root” after having used the nmap program to hack her way into a computer. I think there were a couple more similar jokes, which I can't remember just now. The insistence on the “Source” in the way they do it might also be a wink at the famous Open Source motto, “Use the Source, Luke”.

As for the plot, it has its niceties. I thought the inspiration by Vernor Vinge's wonderful (and must-read) classic novella, True Names, was even more apparent (though I can't put my finger on the reason) in this sequel than in the first part. It's pretty effective, and one really wants to learn what's ahead.

But the plot also has its weaknesses. Unfortunately, nice as it may be in the way of acting, the central and final confrontation between Neo and the Architect seems to be the main fault. Because when you think of it, the Architect's intentions are quite absurd. For one thing, if he intended for Neo to come to him, why did he make it so hard for him to (it can't be to check that Neo is really the One, for that is quite clear already at this point)? Also, which choice was the Architect expecting Neo to make? If he wanted Neo to walk through the other door than the one he does walk through eventually, he must be disappointed by the choice that Neo makes: so why doesn't he offer Trinity's life as a kind of bribe to confince Neo to go through the other door (rather than go and save her)? If, on the other hand, he wanted Neo to walk through the door which Neo chooses, why does he bother speaking with him in the first place? Why not simply put up a sign saying oops, dead end: please exit this way? Actually, why does he bother giving Neo a choice in the first place? What point is there in all this? I'm afraid the script's writers have succumbed to the classical error of “the Bad Guys must hinder the Good Guys' progress, no matter what, even if it goes against their own goals”. Now I'm quite sure that the third film could salvage all that: it is quite possible to still make everything perfectly consistent down to the tiniest details, as far as everyone's intentions are concerned; but I'm also quite convinced it won't be done, and in the end there will still be some massively incoherent actions (“incoherent” in the point of view of the goals that various agents are trying to achieve). It's unfortunate, but many stories fail there anyway. And it's not catastrophic either.

I'm pretty convinced there will be some really nice things, and nice surprises, in the third (and hopefully final) part of Matrix. I expect a major surprise concerning the Matrix, its origin, its modus operandi, its role, or something of the kind. A wholly unexpected surprise, but one that isn't contrived, and that we'll be retrospectively able to find clues for in the second (and perhaps even first) film. But I can't guess what the surprise will be. Maybe the Matrix wasn't created by the machines but by humans, for an entirely different purpose, which Neo will discover. Or some such thing. But enough speculating.

Enough Matrix, in fact. Followup is in November, when Matrix Revolutions is released. Until then…

Comments

2003-05-21 (Wednesday)

Matrices and Monkeys

I watched Matrix again today, with a few friends, to refresh our memories before seeing the sequel tomorrow (I had only seen it once, shortly after its release, and that's a couple of years ago). I still liked it, and I find that the plot mostly holds water. One thing that disturbs me, however, is the extent of the agents' powers: at times they are nearly almighty (they are able, for instance, to seal Neo's mouth, or to create solid brick walls out of nowhere) in the Matrix, but at others they are much less powerful (why bother running after someone, for instance, when you can seal their limbs together, or create solid walls all around them?). I guess there are ways to argue around this coherently (as in: the physical modification trick will only work on weak minds who firmly believe that the Matrix is reality; and the brick walls require some preparatory work), but it would have deserved some kind of explanation. Also, I keep thinking that the “human battery” plot key is utterly ridiculous (oh, and the version I heard mentioned the energy production in “British thermal units” (BTU's), I wonder whether it's because it's a European version; but I'm certain that nobody ever uses British thermal units these days!; update 2003-05-22: I stand corrected on that point, apparently BTUs are indeed used by Americans); anyone with an incomplete ignorance of physics will immediately see that human beings would make terribly bad batteries—and even if such were not the case, one could always keep the humans in a coma of some kind rather than coming up with the ridiculous Matrix idea. Now it would have been so easy to come up with a genuine reason that could justify the Matrix: for example, human beings could be employed as parts of some kind of monstrous supercomputer to some sinister goal; then the humans' minds would be used, and the whole thing would make some kind of sense. But overall, I think that Matrix is a good movie.

In the course of conversation, I mentioned this 'blog, and someone surfed through it and noticed the previous note about the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite. Was I ever asked, he demanded, whether I'm not a real human being but, in fact, an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters? For no human being could write such vast amounts of text as I do, he said. Hmmm, that's a thought, and maybe the previous note is a clue. Would I know it, I wonder, if I were no real human but the product of millions of monkeys randomly typing? Maybe not. Maybe it's like the Matrix, and I live in a fake world of (simian) imagination. Well, enough monkey business.

Oh, by the way, I have a pretty bad cold, and I'm dead tired, these days. I should get some sleep, now.

Comments

2003-05-20 (Tuesday)

Link of the day

This time I'll just put a link to RFC 2795, the description of the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite, which I happened to reread today. I find it simply hilarious.

Comments

2003-05-19 (Monday)

Robots, and Pentacles

I'm currently reading Asimov's I, Robot collection of short stories: whereas I had already read most of Asimov's “non-robot” fiction, I have so far mostly avoided his robot stories (apart from a few that managed to find their way into other collections, and, of course into Foundation). And I proceed with mixed feelings: to be sure, Asimov is great, like he often is; but still, his principles of robotics and robotology, and in particular the famous (and oft-quoted) Three Laws of Robotics, always seem to me a little contrived. And I can't help but feel a little bothered by the fact that some of the premises conflict with my views on AI (such as the idea that making a talking robot would be considerably more difficult than making one with sufficient intelligence to understand human speech but not practice it itself). Anyway (…anyway, I tend to find the ideas of the Singularity Institute equally contrived). But of course the Three Laws of Robotics are a big step forward compared to pre-Asimov visions of robots as man-threatening machines that might take over the world. Still, I far prefer the Foundation cycle, which, in a way, has far less aged (even its earliest parts) than the robot stories.

In case there are some people around who haven't heard of the Three Laws of Robotics, here they are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

(Incidentally, I think there should logically be a Fourth Law, about not harming other robots as long as that does not conflict with the First, Second or Third Law.) Of course, Asimov, as one would expect of him, cleverly finds all imaginable ways to circumvent (or apparently circumvent) the Three Laws which he himself set out. Sometimes it is very ingenious.

Still speaking of fiction, I've barely begun writing my entry for the story writing circle (which I've already talked about in a previous entry). I won't say what it's about, though, because it is supposed to be kept a secret until the deadline (which is currently 2003-05-28, but may be delayed for various reasons).

I haven't seen Matrix Reloaded yet. I will see it on Thursday.

After a discussion with my thesis advisor today, I'll give a few more thoughts to a subject which I had pursued some time ago: technically, “automorphisms of Del Pezzo surfaces of degree four”, but concretely I can describe them as some very nice (birational) plane transformations determined by a set of five marked points (“blowup points”, technically). In particular, there is a set (an abelian group, actually) of sixteen what I call “pentacular transformations” of the plane with a beautiful geometric structure. Maybe I'll try to draw some pictures if I have the courage (since, for once, what I do is not so high-brow that it can't be represented graphically). What I wish to check is that these pentacular transformations always exist (and not just in the case where the five blowup points form—the projective transform of—a regular pentagon, in which case I know for sure that they do).

Comments

2003-05-18 (Sunday)

A mathematical amusement: bidecimal numbers

Here's a little mathematical fact that may amuse the reader. I thought about this some time ago, and was reminded of it while proving some statements about “weak approximation” today.

Start with a concrete case: on 2002-01-01, various European countries switched to a new currency, the euro. Exchange rates had been fixed several months earlier, by defining the euro's value as an exact number of the various earlier currencies (deutschemarks, liras, French francs and so on), these numbers being the then market exchange rate with six significant digits. For example, the euro was defined as (exactly) 6.55957 French francs. Naturally, this makes the French franc equal to approximately 0.152449 euro(s); however, in that direction, the ratio is not exact, because it is even more precisely 0.15244902 euro(s), and even that is not exact (though at that point, the further decimals become quite meaningless, but we are interested in mathematics, so we can't call it exact).

Call a number decimal iff it can be written with a finite (that is, ending) number of digits after the decimal point; in other words, it can be written as the quotient of an integer by some power of ten (as in: 6.55957 = 655957/100000). For example, 1/2 (one half) is a decimal number because it is 0.5 (or 5/10), and so is 1/5, but 1/3 and 1/7 are not decimal numbers (although they are, of course, rational numbers). So the value of the euro in all of the former European currencies was defined exactly as a decimal number (the euro's value in French francs, 6.55957, is decimal); on the other hand, the value of the currencies in euro(s) is not decimal (for example, 1/6.55957 is not decimal, because 0.152449 or 0.14244902 are only approximations, and no finite number of digits will give an exact value). This can be annoying (in practice it never is, or was, a problem, but assume for the sake of argument that it is).

Now call a number bidecimal iff it is decimal and its reciprocal (or “inverse”, that is, one divided by that number) also is a decimal number. There exist bidecimal numbers: for example, 4 is a bidecimal number, because 4 is decimal (as are all integers) and 1/4=0.25 is also decimal. Similarly, 1.25 is bidecimal (its reciprocal is 0.8). Now assume we had wanted the currency rates in both directions (the euro's value in the former currencies and the former currencies' value in euro(s)) to be decimal: in other words, for the currency rates to be bidecimal. Could we have done this? Of course, it is not the matter of picking an arbitrary bidecimal number: the fixed chosen currency rates need to be very close to the market rates at fixation time. The question, then, is: is it possible to find bidecimal numbers that are arbitrarily close to any given number? Or, in mathematical terminology: are the bidecimals dense in the real numbers? And the answer is yes. If it had been desirable to make the currency rates bidecimal, that could have been done while keeping adequation to an arbitrary precision with the market rates of the day. For instance, one can find a bidecimal number which is between 6.559565 and 6.559575, thus being close to 6.55957; or between 6.5595695 and 6.5596705; or to any desirable precision. I'm not claiming, though, that to fix the rate's approximation of market rates to six significant figures we need only six digits in the bidecimals! Actually, a bidecimal number between 6.559565 and 6.559575 needs quite an impressive number of digits to be written exactly (or its inverse); but it can be done.

As for why that wasn't done in practice, the last sentence above is the answer. But it is an amusing mathematical curiosity. I'll let the mathematically inclined reader figure out the proof.

Note that it doesn't work in binary, for instance: can you explain why that is?

Comments

2003-05-17 (samedi)

Encore une soirée festive

En ce samedi soir, c'est nuit Superficial (fédération d'associations étudiantes gaies et lesbiennes d'Île-de-France) qui m'a permis de faire la fête. (Ce faisant, j'ai malheureusement raté la première assemblée générale de l'OCAPI, voir une entrée passée au sujet de cette association ; mais je ne peux pas être partout à la fois et j'avais promis depuis un moment d'être à cette soirée.) Je vais peut-être donner l'impression de faire la fête sans arrêt, mais ce serait très exagéré…

Il y a cependant une chose que je regrette avec ce genre de soirées, même si j'ai du mal à la formuler ; disons que je m'y amuse bien moi-même, mais j'ai bien peur de donner l'impression, auprès des gens qui me connaissent peu ou mal, (sous prétexte que je ne bondis pas pour me trémousser dès que la musique retentit…) d'être un personnage terriblement ennuyeux, ou, encore plus pernicieusement, d'être entouré d'une sorte d'aura de respectabilité (ha, ha, ha, quelle blague — et quand je pense qu'un copain, que je ne dénoncerai pas, a parlé récemment de mes « oreilles chastes », ça devient assez grave, là). Le fait est qu'au-delà même de ma timidité naturelle, j'ai des difficultés particulières à lier contacts, et je crois que c'est en partie à cause de l'image que je projette inconsciemment. Pfiou, que c'est compliqué, tout ça.

En outre, ces soirées me laissent toujours des sentiments partagés, parce que d'un côté on voit beaucoup de monde, ce qui est fort sympathique (notamment j'y ai retrouvé des gens que j'apprécie et que je vois trop rarement), et de l'autre on en ressort avec un sentiment de solitude un peux doux-amer.

Indépendamment de ça, j'ai cassé mon parapluie à cause d'une bourrasque de vent ; et j'ai oublié mon sweat-shirt dans le bar.

Bah, je vais me coucher un peu moins tard que d'habitude !

Commentaires

2003-05-16 (vendredi) · Pleine Lune (Éclipse de Lune)

Je vis ma vie

Puisqu'il est question de raconter ma vie, je peux raconter ma journée d'aujourd'hui pour le plaisir des internautes qui ont du temps à perdre à lire n'importe quoi.

Le vendredi est le jour de permanence de >Dégel! dont j'ai déjà parlé : cela signifie qu'on se retrouve entre copains et copines, au local de l'Unef à Jussieu, pour goûter et échanger les derniers potins et ragots (ça c'est pour le bénéfice de ceux qui se demandent « mais que peuvent-ils bien faire dans une association de jeunes homos ? »). Ensuite, on va normalement dîner au Quick de la rue de Rivoli (en face de l'Hôtel de Ville) — ou, si on en a marre du fast food, dans un autre restaurant du coin. Sauf que cette fois j'ai fait bande à part (et pour ceux qui ont manifesté de la curiosité quant à savoir pourquoi, voici, ta da, la réponse).

La semaine dernière, j'étais à une soirée chez mon ami Sébastien Desreux ; cette fois c'est chez un autre ami, Daivy, qu'était la soirée. Daivy est en colocation avec quatre ou cinq autres personnes dans une grande maison (de quatre étages), du côté du Père-Lachaise, et assez régulièrement ils y organisent d'énormes fêtes, où chaque colocataire invite une vingtaine d'amis, lesquels, à leur tour, arrivent parfois avec des amis à eux, ce qui finit par faire beaucoup de monde et c'est très sympa (la dernière était une soirée costumée très réussie). Cette fois-ci était un peu spéciale, cependant, parce qu'elle servait de cadre à une émission de télé, Vis Ma Vie : en l'occurrence, un certain Christophe (venu de Lyon — avec son chien Coyote), qui partait d'un a priori négatif sur la colocation (car jaloux de son indépendance), allait essayer de vivre, pour le week-end, dans le groupe de colocataires. La fête servait donc de réception de Christophe, mais aussi d'exemple des choses à gérer en colocation (et si un des colocataires ne veut pas faire la fête ?). Nous avons donc été filmés lors de la soirée, et les colocataires présents et Christophe ont été interviewés ou enregistrés en conversation entre eux, pour exposer les points de vue sur les avantages et inconvénients de la colocation. J'avoue que j'étais venu entre autres par curiosité sur la façon dont se font de telles émissions (elle devrait passer à l'antenne dans environ quatre semaines, soit dit en passant). Mais évidemment, les soirées de ce genre sont aussi une occasion de rencontrer des gens intéressants, avec ou sans télé.

Je suis rentré vers 2h du matin, à pied : cela m'a pris un certain temps (plus d'une heure) pour faire le trajet depuis Gambetta jusqu'à Place d'Italie, mais ce n'est pas désagréable non plus (j'apprécie de marcher dans Paris, surtout la nuit).

Ce n'est pas la première fois que ça m'arrive : en chemin (plus précisément, en l'occurrence, rue de la Roquette, arrivant à la place Léon Blum), je croise un beau garçon, nous échangeons quelques regards, puis je me retourne pour le voir passer, et je vois qu'il se retourne aussi — sauf qu'au lieu d'avoir le courage de l'aborder, voyant que nous sommes intéressés l'un par l'autre, je n'ai évidemment pas trouvé mieux à faire que tourner de nouveau le dos et fuir presque en courant. Parfois ma wishy-washiness m'exaspère au plus haut point : certes, il n'est pas forcément recommandé de sauter sur le premier venu croisé dans la rue, mais d'un autre côté, si je m'enfuis en courant dès que j'ai une chance, je ne peux pas vraiment me plaindre d'avoir du mal à en trouver, des chances.

Pouh, il est 9h du matin passées (le 17). Il est plus que temps d'aller dormir. Cela fait des jours que j'essaie désespérément de me remettre à des horaires plus normaux, et pour l'instant ça ne fait qu'empirer.

Commentaires

2003-05-16 (vendredi) · Pleine Lune (Éclipse de Lune)

Ma vie

J'ai converti mon autobiographie au nouveau style de pages. J'en ai profité pour faire quelques changements même si ceux-ci ne sont pas finis : notamment, j'ai rajouté des encarts pour présenter de façon plus claire certaines des personnes qui m'ont accompagné au cours de ces années.

J'ai cependant beaucoup de changements à y faire encore : si je suis globalement satisfait de ce que je raconte au début de cette autobiographie, jusqu'à la terminale environ, cela devient, ensuite, une énumération fastidieuse et sans intérêt de résultats et péripéties scolaires, omettant complètement les événements réellement importants (notamment, je ne dis rien de ma vie sentimentale — ou absence thereof). Je vais donc mettre dans mon agenda de réécrire largement tout cela, en coupant dans l'auto-satisfaction pompeuse sur mes réussites académiques et en livrant un peu plus de ma vie personnelle (m'enfin, rappelez-vous bien l'avertissement au frontispice de ce site).

Il faut aussi que je parle de ce qui m'est arrivé depuis 1998, le moment où cette histoire prend fin ; autrement dit : que je la continue. Notamment, je ne peux pas ne pas parler de la bande de geeks à laquelle je me suis intégré à l'École Normale Supérieure, les geeks (« glauques » dans le jargon normalien) de la Salle S, parce que cela a été l'origine de beaucoup de nouveaux amis, et de beaucoup de questionnement affectif, aussi. Et bien sûr, je devrais parler de mes relations aux ordinateurs, y compris en revenant aux début, lorsque je jouais avec le New Brain : c'est-à-dire intégrer cette petite histoire de l'informatique vue par moi que j'ai racontée à l'ENS. Bref, j'ai du pain sur la planche narrative.

Commentaires

2003-05-15 (Thursday)

Making my bookmarks public

My bookmarks page on this site had been stale for ages: I just rewrote it, from my Mozilla bookmarks folder (and through a script, so I can update it when I add new bookmarks). This is mainly for my own perusal, so I can quickly and from anywhere have access to the sites that interest me, but others are permitted to be indiscreet and have a look at it. Insert usual disclaimers, of course; I don't make any statement concerning the interest, content, or anything else, of the sites to which I link.

The page's format is a bit Spartan, and not very elegant, but that's the price for being automatically generated. Also, my bookmarks are a total mess (especially the “miscellaneous” section): I don't bother to order them properly, simply because I usually just search through them for a keyword or title word and Mozilla is good at that.

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2003-05-14 (Wednesday)

On metadata

I'm slowly beginning to grasp the concept of metadata, so I thought I'd say a few words about it. In truth, the difficulty is not with the concept itself (there's nothing so complicated about it: metadata are just ancillary data, that are not part of a document's content but describe the document itself), but the strange and fascinating architecture that various organizations, notably the World Wide Web Consortium, have built around it, and that bizarre language, RDF. RDF is a language of which one can easily (and that is what happened to me) read the specs and guide, and still not have the slightest idea of what it's all about: it seems at once completely abstract and devoid of utility. (As a mathematician, I really shouldn't have any problem with notions that are abstract and devoid of utility, yet…) Yet RDF is not a content-free language, and although claims that it is the universal “semantic” language (whatever that may mean) are pompous and not very meaningful, it is an interesting idea.

The most basic use of metadata would be, say, in an HTML document: to indicate a list of keywords associated with the document, one might write <meta name="Keywords" content="foo, bar, baz, qux" />, for example. Or to indicate who wrote the document, <meta name="Creator" content="Doe, John" /> might be used. But who decides what tags like “Keywords” and “Creator” are available? It could be, of course, a simple de facto list, with various tags understood by various kinds of potential users. But there is a more formal aspect: metadata vocabularies can be defined and collected in so-called “profiles”. In HTML, the profile attribute to the head element specifies the metadata vocabulary profile that is used.

One such profile is the Dublin core element set, which specifies a small list of basic (“core”) metadata properties. The formal description of the Dublin core namespace is an RDF file located at http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/, so one appropriate way to specify the keywords and creator for the document might be <head profile="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <meta name="Keywords" content="foo, bar, baz, qux" /> <meta name="Creator" content="Doe, John" /> </head>; another way, which is recommended by RFC 2731 consists of using the <link> element as follows: <head> <link rel="schema.DC" href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" /> <meta name="DC.Keywords" content="foo, bar, baz, qux" /> <meta name="DC.Creator" content="Doe, John" /> </head>.

To exploit metadata to their full power, and to describe them commodiously, however, the RDF language is necessary. For example, to write the same metainformation as above in RDF, one would write, if I am not mistaken, <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.somedomain.tld/some/uri/" dc:keywords="foo, bar, baz, qux" dc:creator="Doe, John" /> </rdf:RDF>: this formally states that John Doe is the creator of http://www.somedomain.tld/some/uri/ which has keywords foo, bar, baz and qux. But RDF goes much beyond that: it is capable, for example, of making metastatements about the metadata themselves (as in “Jane Smith says that John Doe is the author of http://www.somedomain.tld/some/uri/”), or of defining (to some extent, of course—at a point it becomes necessary to express things in a natural language) the vocabulary that it uses (thus, the Dublin Core RDF vocabulary is itself expressed in RDF).

A strange and fascinating architecture, but beautiful it its way! I guess I should slowly start attaching some correctly labeled metadata to these pages.

Comments

2003-05-13 (Tuesday)

Nothing!

“What?” roared the Web surfer, “no diary entry for today? Shame upon you, David!” And David could do nothing but look away meekly and mutter an inaudible excuse.

Well, I could tell of plenty of things, of today's strike and protest that paralysed France, or of my further successes with cubic surfaces, or of the encounter on IRC of a mad francophile Dutch priest with a boot fetish (I'm not making this up! I have logfiles to prove it! the question remains, of course, whether it was some kind of hoax), but I think I'll simply go to bed now.

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2003-05-12 (lundi)

Une grande décision capillaire

J'ai décidé que j'allais à nouveau me couper les cheveux courts. Longs, c'est rigolo pour jouer avec, mais ça a cette façon insupportable de me rentrer dans la bouche (berk !) ou me de tomber dans les yeux (surtout quand je me penche pour regarder quelque chose de près). Plus gênant : ça ne plaît à personne, apparemment (enfin, à moi, dans l'absolu — j'aime assez les cheveux longs, mais il faut admettre que les miens ne tombent pas très bien), et j'ai même eu des avis très marqués à ce sujet.

Bref. Ça fait depuis le 2001-10-09, soit plus de 19 mois maintenant, qu'ils poussent et je crois qu'ils ont, justement, fini de pousser et atteint leur longueur maximale. Pour autant, je voudrais, avant de les massacrer, prendre le maximum possible de photos pour immortaliser mon apparence avec leur longueur actuelle (qui est plus que sur ma photo standard, là à gauche), parce que je ne sais pas si j'aurai jamais à nouveau la patience d'attendre un an et demi pour avoir cette longueur : je regrette de n'avoir aucune photo du temps où j'avais le crane complètement rasé (ce qui n'est pas tout à fait le cas sur ma photo de zombie, là à droite), je ne voudrais pas regretter aussi de n'en avoir aucune de moi avec les cheveux longs. Ça risque de prendre encore un moment, donc, parce que faire des photos dont je suis satisfait, c'est très difficile.

L'autre chose est de décider comment les porter. Complètement rasés, à nouveau ? (Ma mère en ferait une crise.) Très courts, façon militaire ? Courts, en brosse ? Mi-courts ? Au bol ? Avec des mèches pleines de gel ? À l'iroquoise (ce serait rigolo, ça, mais je ne pense pas qu'ils puissent tenir) ? Teints en bleu ? Frisés ? Dur choix. En fait, mes cheveux sont rétifs (ré-tifs, ha, ha, ha) à toute sorte de traitement. Ils n'en font qu'à leur tête (enfin, la mienne, ha, ha, ha, ha, il est vraiment tard je devrais me coucher). Extrêmement fins, très souples, presque invisibles individuellement, se graissant très facilement : voilà quelques-unes des propriétés qui les rendent, disons, pénibles.

Bon, si vous avez des idées, écrivez-moi (david+wwwmadoreorg, comme d'habitude, quoi). (Si possible avec les bons termes techniques, parce que j'ai toujours du mal à me faire comprendre des coiffeurs.) De toute façon, je vais sans doute lancer une grande consultation parmi mes amis pour leur demander ce qu'ils me conseillent sur ce douloureux problème. Si vous voulez me demander une touffe de mes cheveux avant qu'ils partent à la poubelle, c'est le moment, aussi.

Ouhlà, il est vraiment tard, je crois que je touche le fond de la vacuité, là.

Commentaires

2003-05-11 (Sunday) · Mother's Day (US)

Quotes of the day

For no reason at all, I'd like to quote the following bit of wisdom by US Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardoso (1870–1938), a thought which I've always found very true and very beautiful, from his essay Law and Literature (1931):

The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. To yield to its blandishments is so easy. The wrong, it seems, is venial… Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth.

(it is already among my favorite Fortune quotes).

And while I'm at it, I'll also gratuitously quote the following verses from Sophocles's Antigone (verses 453–457):

οὐδὲ σθένειν τοσοῦτον ᾠόμην τὰ σὰ
κηρύγμαθ', ὥστ' ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν
νόμιμα δύνασθαι θνητὸν ὄνθ' ὑπερδραμεῖν.
οὐ γάρ τι νῦν γε κἀχθές, ἀλλ' ἀεί ποτε
ζῇ ταῦτα, κοὐδεὶς οἶδεν ἐξ ὅτου 'φάνη.

(Antigone is speaking to her uncle Creon; she says, Nor did I imagine that your decrees had such force, that a mortal could escape the unwritten and unfailing laws given us by the gods. For they live not today or yesterday, but for all time, and no man knows whence they appeared.).

(Of course, quoting verses in ancient Greek is also just another way of showing off the use of Unicode on this site.)

Comments

2003-05-11 (Sunday) · Mother's Day (US)

Browser woes

Yesterday I reworked the way spam-free email adresses are written on this site (as in: my email address is david+wwwmadoreorg; if you don't see anything remarkable about that link, it's proof that the system works as it should! the whole point is to make it as transparent as possible to bona fide users, as much as JavaScript and CSS permit it, while making it very difficult for crawlers to harvest such email addresses for spamming purposes). It should now function more or less on any browser: for once I did allow myself to go through a certain amount of bugware, although of course you should remember to read this warning. Only Mozilla and Opera version 7 give me full satisfaction (and even then, not really: Opera, for example, does not recognize data: URIs, such as this, which I intended to use as an indirect link to email addreses when JavaScript is not available). Konqueror has catastrophic reflow bugs when the DOM is used to modify the document's content; and it also has the weirdest bugs in interpreting the CSS content property. IE simply does not understand the latter property, and has other irritating limitations in the DOM (such as not understanding Node.TEXT_NODE); by the way, did I mention that IE ignores the HTML <q> element, which means that half of the quotation marks on this site will be mysteriously gone? Even the Amaya Web browser, the testbed of the W3 Consortium, has a limitation which causes it to ignore the CSS content property. And of course, text browsers are inherently limited. What a mess! How many hours wasted in pursuit of the combination that will work around every browser bug I can find. Well, I'm not doing this a second time: so from now on I'll stick to the policy of referring browser non-conformance to my general disclaimer on the subject.

Comments

2003-05-10 (Saturday)

Me!

The “all about David Madore” page has now switched to the new site style, and been slightly updated, both in English and in French. Just for fun, I've played the stupid game of “if I were”.

If you have important, stupid, useless, personal or indiscreet questions to ask of me, please don't hesitate to ask them (david+wwwmadoreorg). I'm not saying I'll answer, though.

Comments

2003-05-10 (Saturday)

Images

I've finished voting on the IRTC entries (see my previous note below). I won't say which image is my favorite, though, because it wouldn't be right, the competition being still under way.

The reason I mention raytracing again, however, is because my friend Antoine has pointed to me the following site, which I wish to link to: Oyonale; now as far as raytracing artists go, this one is a genius. There is this famous fable about Zeuxis having painted some grapes which looked so realistic that real pigeons flew to the canvas and tried to eat them (the story goes on to tell that Zeuxis was unhappy, because art should not just copy nature). Well, Oyonale's raytracing is so good that sometimes you don't see anything remarkable about them: you just think the pictures are photographs; but they're not, they're computer generated! Of course, he won the IRTC several times. Anyway, his artwork is not only highly photo-realistic, but it is artistically very interesting, also: he has much the talent of René Magritte in many ways; see, for example, his In Vitro image, or the (rather frightening) Dark Side of the Trees, or again Winter, or Persistence: these images definitely have a Magritte-like quality. Plus, he writes little stories (or story fragments) to accompany each image. His artwork is for sale as posters, too.

Since I'm talking about images, I'd also like to put a link to Art Magick, which is a virtual gallery displaying paintings from certain art movements of the 19th and early 20th century (Symbolists and Pre-Raphaelites, for example; with such painters as Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Arnold Böcklin or John Martin) that I happen to have a fondness for. In case you wonder what the connection with raytracing is, I was impressed once in an exhibit to see how much certain of John Martin's paintings, say, The Seventh Plague of Egypt were reminiscent of various raytraced images. And some would certainly have been interesting candidates for this round of the IRTC (“architecture”).

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2003-05-09 (vendredi) · Premier Quartier

Nouvelles diverses

Une fin de semaine un peu chargée ! Je dois terminer de rédiger un raisonnement pour le présenter à mon directeur de thèse mardi. Malheureusement, mardi il y aura une grève générale (à laquelle je participerai seulement moralement) donc, pas de transports en commun : j'irai habiter à Orsay sans doute de lundi à mercredi ; mais ça tombe très mal car l'assemblée générale de ma copropriété à Paris tombe précisément le même jour. Il faut encore que je trouve une solution à ça. Par ailleurs, il y a quantité de choses que je dois encore faire à Paris et que je n'ai pas pu traiter parce que j'ai actuellement des horaires de vie insupportablement décalés (je me couche vers 6h pour me lever vers 15h, ce qui me laisse peu de temps dans la journée). Je dois m'occuper de l'ordinateur de mon ami Laurent, qui a beaucoup de malchance avec sa carte graphique. Je dois rattraper avant mercredi un cours auquel je n'ai pas assisté mercredi dernier parce que, justement, mes horaires étaient trop décalés et je n'ai pas réussi à me lever.

Par ailleurs, mercredi prochain vient l'Assemblée générale de l'association HBO : j'ai accepté de me représenter à un poste d'administrateur (plutôt qu'arrêter mon mandat maintenant) et de prendre en charge le site Web de l'association ; cela va représenter un certain travail. Vendredi sort Matrix Reloaded : initialement je comptais le voir le jour même de sa sortie, mais tout compte fait, comme j'irai avec un groupe d'amis normaliens, et que l'un du groupe est en Suisse, on attendra une semaine pour qu'il soit là.

J'ai fini de lire The Hours de Michael Cunningham (le livre sur lequel est basé le film du même nom), que j'ai bien aimé, peut-être en parlerai-je dans une prochaine entrée de ce 'blog. J'ai maintenant commencé la lecture d'un roman de politique-fiction intitulé Mais où est donc passé Lionel ?, publié sous un nom de plume (« Tacite »), une description un peu satirique de la vie politique française partant de l'hypothèse du décès accidentel soudain du président de la République (le livre est très ancré dans le temps et commence précisément avant-hier, le mercredi 7 mai 2003) : ce n'est pas très bien écrit (le style est maladroit), mais c'est néanmoins rigolo.

Je continue à évaluer les entrées de l'IRTC (voir ma note précédente, ci-dessous), j'en ai maintenant vu les deux tiers, et je n'arrête pas de me lamenter d'en voir de meilleures et meilleures, et d'être bloqué par l'échelle qui s'arrête à 20 pour les noter ! Indépendamment, les gagnants en animations viennent d'être désignés : je ne les ai pas encore visionnés, mais il peut y avoir d'heureuses surprises.

J'ai commencé à refaire ma page d'informations personnelles sur ce site, mais comme je ne l'ai pas encore traduite en français, je ne l'uploade pas sur le serveur, mieux vaut encore garder la vieille version, qui existe en français comme en anglais.

Et ne parlons pas du fait que la date limite pour le cercle d'écriture de nouvelles (voir l'entrée de vendredi dernier dans ce 'blog à ce sujet) approche dangereusement, et, même si j'ai une idée de ce que je vais raconter, je n'ai pas encore vraiment commencé.

Ce soir j'étais à une soirée chez mon ami Sébastien Desreux (le fondateur des éditions H&K, et qui par ailleurs s'apprête à soutenir une thèse en combinatoire), qui, comme c'est habituel de sa part, était fort réussie et agréable. J'ai revu des gens fort sympathiques que je croise lors des soirées chez Seb et pas autrement. Entre autres discussions, il nous a dit que, las de ne pas avoir la mémoire des dates d'anniversaires, il a réservé le nom de domaine anniversaires.org (pour l'instant, il pointe vers le site des éditions H&K), où il compte faire un service de rappel par mail des anniversaires (pour son propre usage, mais pourquoi ne pas en faire profiter les autres): c'est une idée sympathique. Nous avons aussi revu avec plaisir le film George Lucas in Love, dont je ne peux que dire et redire que c'est sans doute le plus génial court-métrage de tous les temps, et peut-être bien film tout court ; en tout cas, ce film (d'abord diffusé par Internet) a eu un tel succès qu'il est sorti en DVD, alors qu'il ne fait que… 8 minutes !

Bon, assez raconté. Je devrais encore parler de mon nouveau plan pour implémenter des adresses mail sur les pages Web qui soient non collectables par les spammeurs, mais c'est un peu long à expliquer. Suffit pour aujourd'hui, il est déjà près de 6h30.

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2003-05-08 (Thursday) · WW2 Allied Victory Day

Voting on IRTC stills

For those who don't know it, the IRTC is the Internet RayTracing Competition. Every two months, a topic is chosen and raytracing artists throughout the world produce some amazing still images (there is also animation rounds, but I don't follow those nearly as precisely), of which the best will be selected by a panel of judges (including the artists themselves). The winners are usually very good: if you like this kind of artwork, the IRTC is definitely a site to see.

Although I don't produce any raytracing images myself (or the very few I have done are really miserable attempts), I very much enjoy viewing them. So I volunteered to be an IRTC panel judge. This means having to view a lot of pictures: this month's round has new fewer than 104 entries. But it's a rather pleasant task, really, and instructive; some entries definitely draw some “aaaaw!”'s and “ooooh”'s from me. This time's round's topic, viz. “architecture”, proved quite inspiring for the participants (of course, it is a canonical raytracing topic!) and there is much variety in the renderings.

If you wish to see the entries, follow this link to the IRTC March-April 2003 submissions. So far I have ranked 35 of them, so I still have some work ahead of me!

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2003-05-07 (Wednesday)

Now switching site root to the new style

This site's root (or entry page) has now been switched to the new style. Unfortunately, the French translation is not complete, as I really did not have the time—and it's already 8AM! (I mean tomorrow. I mean, it's 2003-05-08T07:45+0200 as I write this. Damn.)

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2003-05-06 (Tuesday)

How many countries are there in the world?

I started this as a 'blog entry, and it got so long that I'm making a separate Web page of it. The answer is somewhere between 194 and 239: read to find out more.

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2003-05-06 (Tuesday)

Browser sub-pixel rendering and roundoff problems

Time for a little technical note…

Web page authors, in describing their layout (as per the CSS specification) expect to be able to use various units of length: in particular, millimeters, inches, points (a PostScript point being 1/72 inch), and, of course, pixels (the pixels per inch ratio being specified by the screen resolution, and is normally an integer, such as the conventional value of 96). Naturally, one would want ten boxes of five millimeters each to align exactly with one box of fifty millimeters. This sounds simple enough, but it really isn't: for if the browser computes sizes and positions at the pixel level, five millimeters might round off to 19 pixels, say, so ten boxes of five millimeters each would add up to 190 pixels, which is not the same as one box of fifty millimeters, giving 189 pixels. Doing all calculations with a pixel precision multiplies these irritating “off-by-one-pixel” at all levels. The problem is even worse with modern antialiased font rendering algorithms, which typically operate on subpixel scales; when words need to be broken in boxes by the renderer, it is unacceptable to round their position off to integer pixel positions.

Unfortunately, this problem has no solution: it is a basic fact of life that computers cannot handle real numbers efficiently without roundoff errors. Probably the best behavior is to subdivide the pixel in a fixed smaller unit, say in 1440 “pixies”. In this case, five millimeters might round off to, say, 18 pixels and 1293 pixies, and ten times that make 188 pixels and 1410 pixies, whereas fifty millimeters round off to 188 pixels and 1406 pixies, so the error is only 4 pixies, well below a pixel: thus, even after pixy positions are rounded to the closest pixel, there will be no overall roundoff error; certainly it is not impossible to produce roundoff errors still, but it is much more difficult. Donald Knuth's famous TeX typesetting system does this, using a basic unit, the “scaled point”, of roughly 5.362851 nanometers (the exact value being, 2368143360 scaled points in 127 meters). Essentially, the smaller the unit and the more divisible by common units, the better the precision; but if it is made too small, typical lengths and positions will be large: TeX cannot handle lengths of 1073741824 scaled points or more, that is, roughly 5.76 meters. Web pages may reach quite frightening lengths, however, since they are typically viewed by scrolling. I believe a pixy of 1/1440 screen pixel is a reasonable value: it is larger than TeX's basic unit, but more nicely multipliable by 3's and 5's. Of course, floating point types could be used, but that is simply a way of pushing ashes under the rug, since the roundoff errors will continue to exist, and will be more difficult to control.

In theory, it would be possible to compute with, say exact rational numbers (by remembering their numerator and denominator). That is, after all, what I have done above in stating that there are 2368143360 of Knuth's scaled points in 127 meters (5000 inches). Exact rational arithmetic, however, is costly in terms of memory storage (think of Web pages containing many thousand boxes) and CPU time, since the size of numerator and denominator tends to explode rapidly. Besides, there is no reason to stop at rational arithmetic: exact real algebraic numbers can be handled in principle, so why shouldn't a user be allowed to specify, say, a length equal to the diagonal of a square of side 1 inch, so sqrt(2) inches, and put 408 such lenghts end-to-end to compare them with 577 inches ? There is no limit to the madness one can allow except the limits one decides to set.

In practice, I have been rather annoyed with Mozilla's bug 63336 these days: the text of very long pages tended to be slightly corrupted by off-by-one-pixel errors, and some words jumped around by one pixel when the mouse was moved over them because the CSS “hover” quasi-element was used. I applied the workaround described in comment 12 of that bug discussion, however, fixing the screen resolution at 96dpi, and it seems to have solved the problem for me, while in fact improving the overall layout quality (I'm not sure I understand why). This is not very satisfactory, intellectually, perhaps, but at least it works.

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2003-05-05 (lundi)

Quelques nouvelles en bref

L'OCAPI (voir mon entrée d'avant-hier) est en bonne voie : David Monniaux me signale qu'il a déposé les papiers à la préfecture aujourd'hui. Il faudra encore attendre le récépissé, puis paraître au Journal Officiel.

Encore dans la rubrique associations, pour HBO cette fois (voir mon entrée de vendredi), j'ai écrit une petite présentation de la modifications des statuts qui va être proposée à l'Assemblée générale mercredi prochain.

La refonte de ce site Web avance à petits pas, et le plan du site mis à jour est maintenant assez complet ; la longueur de cette page me fascine assez, en vérité. J'ai aussi fait quelques petits changements dans le choix des polices de caractères : si la police Optima est très belle, malheureusement elle n'est pas disponible partout (ceci dit, elles vient avec Mac OS X), et j'ai donc fourni différents seconds choix, comme Palatino, une autre police du génial Hermann Zapf, qui devrait être disponible sous Windows. Je n'ai pas le temps d'en dire plus juste maintenant.

Je me demande si je devrais enregistrer ce 'blog auprès de différents « annuaires » à cet effet. Je me demande aussi si je devrais utiliser des outils spécifiques comme Nucleus.

Tiens, pour finir, un petit lien rigolo que m'a signalé McM (merci à lui) : GeoURL, ou comment visualiser l'emplacement géographique des sites Web (qui s'enregistrent, du moins). Bien sûr, ça ne vaut pas la RFC 1712.

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2003-05-04 (Sunday)

Redoing site map

I have started rewriting the site map for this site. Sounds like a simple job, doesn't it? Just take every file, create a link to it, give it a title (in French and in English), and possibly add a comment to indicate that it is obsolete, not quite up to date, or something of the sort. Well, believe it or not, this simple-sounding job is actually a herculean task. I'm not even sure I understand why, but it takes minutes to add a single link; the fact that I need to translate everything into French probably accounts for part of the difficulty.

But I really need to get this done rapidly, because I currently have two site maps: the one I'm building and the former one which is at the site's root. Plus, some pages such as my main math page or my literature page might locally act as a third site map! What a mess… I know I never finish what I start, but I hope I can get at least this bit done, otherwise this entire site is basically a labyrinth. (Well, I guess it has always been.)

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2003-05-03 (samedi)

Fondation de l'OCAPI

Nous sommes en train de fonder une nouvelle association (loi de 1901) : l'OCAPI, ou Organisation Contre les Abus de la Propriété Intellectuelle. Le but de cette association est de s'opposer, spécifiquement dans le cadre de la France et de l'Europe, aux abus hallucinants observés dans les domaines de la propriété intellectuelle (copyright, droit d'auteur, brevets) dans le sens de leur renforcement outrancier et paranoïaque opéré notamment par des législateurs peu scrupuleux qui s'alignent systématiquement sur la position de certains groupes d'intérêt (éditeurs puissants). Il s'agit notamment de tenter, par des actions de communication (contre-lobbying) d'alerter l'opinion publique et les gouvernants sur les dangers d'aller trop loin.

Le point de départ de cette association était un manifeste que j'avais écrit dans ce sens, et qui pourrait servir de profession de foi de l'OCAPI. Même si certains points de ce manifeste seraient à remanier (j'ai reçu différentes critiques constructives à son sujet), je ne peux qu'en encourager la lecture.

Les papiers relatifs à l'association ont été signés aujourd'hui, et ils seront déposés à la préfecture dans quelques jours. Le Bureau initial est constitué de : David Monniaux président, Nicolas George vice-président, moi-même trésorier, et Joël Riou secrétaire. Différentes personnes viennent compléter le Conseil d'administration.

Nous n'avons pas encore de site Web, mais avons loué le domaine ocapi.eu.org, et c'est là que le site sera prochainement mis en place. En attendant, il y a un micro-site Web temporaire sur lequel les statuts et le règlement intérieur de l'association sont disponibles.

L'adresse mail temporaire pour tout ce qui concerne la fondation de l'Ocapi est ocapiquatramaranensfr : n'hésitez-pas à nous contacter si vous avez des questions. Pour adhérer à l'association, il faudra encore attendre un peu pour que les formalités soient toutes réglées (comme l'ouverture d'un compte en banque).

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2003-05-02 (Friday)

Past news

[Traduction française ci-dessous.]

So, basically, what have I been up to, these days, while my Web site was bit rotting, until I started this 'blog?

Well, working, for one thing. I'm sorry to say, my thesis is still not written, and it will be a couple of months yet before I can think of presenting it. However, my thesis advisor and I have been writing a paper together, in which we prove that smooth Del Pezzo surfaces of degree 3 (cubic surfaces) and 4 (complete intersections of two quadrics in projective space of dimension 4) might have no rational points over fields of cohomological dimension 1: this is an exciting new counterexample, and although it dashes some hopes of understanding the arithmetic of cubic surfaces in a “naïve” way, it gives an interesting application of Rost's degree formula toward proving arithmetic results on inexistence of rational points (or zero-cycles). I'd also like to say that my paper Équivalence rationnelle sur les hypersurfaces cubiques sur les corps p-adiques has at last appeared in volume 110 issue 2 of manuscripta mathematica: essentially, this is my first published math paper! (Its DOI is 10.1007/s00229-002-0327-3, and you can grab a local copy of it if you wish.) Currently, I'm working on cubing surfaces over C(t), and I also spare a thought from time to time to trying to find an elementary proof (which I'm sure is possible) of the fact that smooth projective rationally connected varieties over C((t)) always have a rational fact (over C(t) this is a very impressive result by T. Graber, J. Harris & J. Starr).

On the more personal side, for those who have asked (I know, I never reply to email, it's maddening): I haven't found myself a boyfriend. I have firmly resolved, however, not to let that fact ruin my happiness: while I'm a definite believer in Love with a capital ‘L’ (and some of my writing proves it), I don't intend, to put it simply, to let that aspiration shadow other interesting and positive human relations, such as friendship, tenderness or plenty of others. An obvious point, really, but some people seem to simply—miss it. Anyway. In an effort toward socializing with other gay people (not necessarily in hope of finding my Brother soul, nor to hunt for sex), I have been going to >Dégel!, the gay & lesbian students alliance of the Jussieu campus: this has been a profitable occasion to meet many interesting people and make new friends. Of course, I am also member of HBO, the similar organization for the Orsay campus: actually, I am a trustee (and sometime treasurer) of HBO, and one thing that has occupied me for the last months is the collaborative process of rewriting the organization's bylaws. On that subject, I might also mention that I've been found lurking (and not just lurking, in fact) around IRCnet, notably on the #gayfr channel under the nick “Ruxor” (these irc:// URIs should work within Mozilla, provided, of course, irc.ircnet.net is willing to accept you; the name “Ruxor” is a reference to an old novel of mine). While I'm ranting, I could add that I now have an ICQ number (UIN), namely 168950339.

I haven't written much literature recently (my most recent work is still my favorite: Histoire de la Propédeutique à la Reine des Elfes; actually, I wrote this erotic short story and these four very short stories since then, but I think they don't really count). Actually, I did write something: together with some friends of mine (from the ENS), I organized a little “short story writing circle”: we voted on a common theme or subject and then, each on our own, wrote a story on that theme, and compared them. You can read the stories that were written (and one of them is mine): overall, I thought they were very good. The chosen subject was The story must start with the death of a character. And it must end with the death of a character. The same one. Now we've started a second iteration of the story-writing circle, and the subject is to write a story that parallels a famous historical or literary event (such as the death of Julius Cæsar). I hope the results will be likewise interesting.

Incidentally, in developing a procedure to vote for the common subject of the aforementioned short stories, I had to implement what I call the “Condorcet-Nash” electoral system. This is definitely something I'll have to write about, some time. But I don't have the time now. In just one sentence, it consists of taking the optimal (von Neumann-Nash) strategy in the two-player fair zero-sum game where each player chooses one of the candidates and receives a score equal to the number of electors who prefer his candidate over his opponent's (or minus the number of electors who prefer his opponent's candidate). In a definite sense, this is the best possible electoral system. I developped an implementation for it using the GNU Linear Programming Kit, because finding an optimal strategy in a zero-sum game is done by linear programming. This is all quite fascinating.

On the computer side of my life, I haven't programmed much these days. I did a major rewrite of my MIDI writing library, but I didn't even bother to package it! The stuff is still completely undocumented, anyway, so essentially it's usable only by me. I also “discovered” and documented a gratuitous annoyance in Unix, concerning the behavior of the connect() system call when interrupted.

What else? I had a renewal of interest in the Rubik's Cube (I spent something like six hours one night remembering how to solve it, something I knew seven or eight years ago and had completely forgotten since); but that probably won't last. Still, I plan on buying a 4×4×4 Rubik's Cube and try to figure it out, now that I have the 3×3×3 well in hand (it takes me ages to solve it, but I manage it).

I also went to see a couple of movies in the last few months. I saw The Two Towers on the day it was released (worldwide), 2002-12-18, and I wasn't disappointed, although I thought maybe it lacked unity. Long Island Expressway, which I saw on 2003-02-04, nothing like a box office buster, is a deeply moving story, and I recommend seeing it. Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, which I went to see on 2003-02-19, was nice (although it gives a, uh, backward image of France). I rather liked Ma Vraie Vie à Rouen (no English title that I know of), which I saw on 2003-03-07, but I did find it lengthy. On 2003-03-10, I was deeply enthusiastic about 8 Mile: I don't have any particular fondness for hip-hop music, but I really loved that film anyway. Next I saw The Rules of Attraction on 2003-03-19, and I found it funny, but that's about all. On the next day I went to see Stupeur et Tremblement (possibly still not released in the US), and I loved it: it is at once hilarious, beautiful and somehow terrifying. Snowboarder, which I went to see on 2003-04-09, is pretty much devoid of interest, although some of the snowboard figures were spectacular. Next I saw The Hours on 2003-04-20, and I very much liked it: it is elegantly built, nicely filmed, and rather moving; plus, Nicole Kidman's award for her performance as Virgnia Woolf was well-deserved. The Life of David Gale, which I saw on 2003-04-23, was a bit disappointing: I had guessed the ins and outs of the plot not even halfway through the movie, so the end was sort of spoilt for me. Lastly, I saw X-Men 2 on the day before yesterday, and I found it rather entertaining. And I plan on seeing Matrix Reloaded on the day of its release (which is 2003-05-16 in Europe: contrary to Lord of the Rings which played the time zone difference by releasing a few hours earlier in Europe, Matrix decided to release a few hours later than in North America).

I've done some reading, too. In particular, I discovered that I really liked Borges, and I think by now I've read just about all that he's written (disappointingly little, I might add), in French translation. I tried to read David Copperfield, but I just couldn't get the hang of it: much as Balzac annoys me to no end, I find Dickens' habit of constantly straying off the subject a source of frustration; I expect to try again with A Tale of Two Cities. Right now I'm reading The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

I think that more or less sums it up.

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2003-05-01 (Thursday) · Labor's Day · New Moon

Starting this 'blog

[Traduction française ci-dessous.]

Well, here I am, having, apparently, finally succumbed to the “WebLog” fad.

Actually, this is an attempt to resuscitate my Web site, which has lain dormant for far too long: I no longer had the energy to motivate myself to make changes in it, and the more I waited, the more changes needed to be done, so the more discouraging it became, until I essentially dropped it (or “froze” it) altogether.

Now I will try to revive it piece by piece, migrating it to a different style. This WebLog (or “'blog”, as they say) should be the new nexus of it. The point being that this “Web log” style of writing should be more appropriate to the way I work: I get into sudden passions about this or that, and then I lose interest in it just as suddenly, so making a log entry is more appropriate than starting a whole Web page that will never be finished (of course, nothing I do is ever finished); and if my interest lasts long enough, I can try to copy the entry into a new page and develop it from there. Or something. Well, I'm not sure I'm making myself clear, but that's the idea. Naturally, I will never completely rewrite my old Web site in the new style (I don't even intend to try), so it will look yet more heterogeneous, but who cares? On the other hand, I will make a definite effort to avoid breaking existing links.

So what's different? Well, for one thing I'm now using XSLT to process what I write: this makes it easier to write Web pages which follow well-defined templates (and that is precisely my intention). I have also tried to make a better use of CSS in the hope of producing something a little less ugly than usual—I know not with what success. The font used here, by the way, is Zapf Optima (at least if available on your system), which is in my opinion simply the best type font in existence. I also hope XSLT will help me make this site more easily transportable, in preparation with the time when I'll have to relinquish my beloved http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/ address (I already had to fight to keep the :8080 when every other page on the server lost it). Of course, XSLT has its price, too, because it's such a strange and perverse language, but I hope the benefits outweigh the cost.

Another thing is that I now entirely cease to care about non-standards-compliant Web browsers. It is simply too much of a pain to write the mass of bugware necessary to get the site working on antique and outdated browsers such as Netscape's Navigator / Communicator version 4.x, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 4 or 5, especially as I am moving to an XML-based architecture. I strongly recommend anyone using such browsers to switch to Mozilla, Konqueror, Apple's Safari browser, Netscape version 7.x, IE version 6.x, or a similar modern Web browser. For those who browse in text mode, Links should be a safe choice, although you evidently won't get all the bells and whistles of truly graphical browsers (though even Links now has a graphical interface, it is a mere extension of its text-based interface).

But enough of technicalities! Another major question I had to solve was, which language should I use: either English or French (there is no other language that I know even remotely well enough to write such a log in it). I am daily reminded that my English is nowhere as good as I wish it were: although some people have tried to persuade me of the contrary, I know better (and let me just insert a little wink at Pierre at this point: hi, Pierre!). On the other hand, English has, shall we say, a rather larger audience than French. And when I think about it, there are certain things which I'm more comfortable saying in English, and others in French: so I'll just do the obvious things, write some entries in English and others in French. I'll rarely translate from one to the other, however, because it takes so much work and I'm terribly bad at it either way; this entry is an exception because it's the first one and in a way the introduction.

Anyway, for better or for worse, this 'blog is started (maybe it will simply peter out after three entries, that wouldn't really surprise me, knowing myself for the lazy sloth I am). May first seemed like an appropriate time to do it; in French we have this proverb, en mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît (in May, do as you please), and it did please me. Did you notice that one third of the decade (I mean the 2000's, the years from 2000 through 2009) is by us already? And a third of 2003 also. Somehow, I think this is depressing. I'll say more about this some other day.

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