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I just posted my second and latest short story: Salon de nuit. And yes, it is in french again.

I wrote this story for a short story contest in the Flash Informatique, a local magazine published at the Polytechnical School of Lausanne where I study. I was honored to win the contest with Salon de nuit.

Just dropping a note to mention a few updates. First, a review of Guero, Beck's excellent latest work. Second, the last entry of my blog about Sweden, thus closing this fantastic adventure for good. Third, a "Manifesto for a Better Music Player" which will serve as a conceptual basis and design rationale for my XMMS2 client projects.

Oh and kudos to the European Parliament for rejecting the controversial directive for software patents!

My apologies for the recent lack of updates, including music album I wish I had time to write and real song of the week. Studies, sauna and other social activities keep me busy, but the main excuse I will hold is a 10-day-long trip to Russia. So as a compensation, I wrote a detailed diary entry of that fantastic trip in the Sweden Blog section. For now it is only available in french but I plan to translate it soon. Also, make sure you have a look at the gallery of photos from Russia!

Apart from that, a few late exciting discoveries. The excellent Hugin/Enblend duo for creating blended panoramas from pictures, as shown on some pictures from Russia. Autopano-sift can theorically be used to find the blend points automatically, but it takes ages with big images so it's faster by hand (it is a Mono application, my first experience with Mono, rather satisfying). nmzmail is another small but useful piece of software that allows indexed (i.e. fast and powerful) search in maildirs, and it is easily started from mutt! Last enjoyable discovery, Fischerspooner's Odyssey, an excellent synth-pop album, "electro with balls" as a friend described it.

Well maybe you don't. And I don't think I want it, either. But there is a guy, Lion Kimbro, who wants to and actually did it. And he wrote a book about how to do it: "How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think". Scary? Yes, definitely, but nonetheless interesting, especially to all the people who are used to having around 50 post-its of notes on their desks (yes, I am one of them).

The book is written as a thought dump, which makes it both slightly unstructured and more dynamic. However, it is clear and detailed enough to give a really good idea of the concept invented by the author, the "notebook system" (although it's more about binders than notebooks). The main idea is to define a methodology to capture any meaningful thought, save it quickly and then categorize it where it belongs. Then, arrange the thoughts in lists, studies and maps (with indexes, references, etc), in order to finally generate the Grand Subject Map of Contents, an abstract graph representing all your thoughts in a tree!

I read the whole book, although I do not plan to try the system myself, both because I don't feel like going to the cinema with a thought binder in my backpack, and because I don't think I need to keep every single meaningful idea that might pop into my head. But it is still an interesting read, that could be of some use when I will restart the development of Minder, a mind-mapping software.

Many thanks to Flammifer for this link!

Those of you who live in GNU Emacs might be interested by these two tips. Those who don't understand what I'm talking about can happily skip this news, as it will hardly make any sense to them. What I describe here is not advanced or special, it is simply very convenient.

First, have you ever wanted to quickly insert a date, in a custom format? Well that's what format-time-string is for, and coupled with a custom format string (see function reference for the syntax) and a shortcut, it lets you print the current date the way you want it:

(defvar tl_std-format-string "%Y-%m-%-dT%H:%M:%S%z") ; 2005-03-21T00:36:29+0100 (defun insert-standard-date () "Insert the date and time into the current buffer at the current location. See the documentation for tl_dts-format-string to change the format of the date-time stamp." (interactive) (insert (format-time-string tl_std-format-string (current-time)))) (global-set-key "\C-c\C-s" 'insert-standard-date)

Second, what is your favorite way to switch between buffers? C-x b ENTER to switch to the previous buffer maybe? And C-x C-b to list the buffer? Well although it did the job for me for the past few years, I have found very convenient to map two emacs functions (electric-buffer-list and bury-buffer) to two easily accessible shortcuts (C-$ and C-ENTER). The first displays a focused version of the buffer list, that you can hide by pressing ENTER or which you can use to choose the buffer you want to switch to. The second simply lets you loop between your buffers. Try them (append to your ~/.emacs, or C-x C-e them in a GNU Emacs buffer to evaluate their code):

(global-set-key [(control $)] 'electric-buffer-list) (global-set-key [(control return)] 'bury-buffer)

That's all for now. More elisp fun when I will get round to actually diving in the documentation more deeply.