Laurent Kempé

Interesting French interview of Niklas Zennström from Skype

InternetActu.net » Niklas Zennström : “On ne peut plus faire payer pour des appels téléphonique”

I like his market vision.

Some rules...

Microsoft Notebook: Top exec shares business lessons

• It's often better to cannibalize your own business than to give someone else an opportunity to do it.
• In some situations, your biggest competition is yourself.
• One of the best ways to compete is to bet big on a "paradigm shift."
• When you dominate a market and you're looking for ways to grow, adjust your thinking to enlarge the potential market you're pursuing.
• Keep your mind open to unexpected opportunity.

I really like the last two.

Back to correct speed

Over the weekend I realized that my notebook became quite slow and was always reading something on the HD, even without any memory pressure. When I was to some music, starting an application was really corrupting the sound. So after some I realized that my Primary IDE controller went from DMA back to the old PIO mode. To solve this issue I reinstalled the the primary IDE port using the Device Manager, and after two reboots it went back to DMA and a acceptable speed.

You might find more information about that issue here: IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur.

Looking to the cause in the KnowledgeBase: "After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check (CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the transfer mode) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode)." makes me thing that I need to take care about my HD, so I made a backup.

Debugging VB6 in VS.NET 2003

Debugging VB6 binaries in Visual Studio .NET

CopySourceAsHtml - Visual Studio 2003 plugin

Ever wanted to copy paste some code from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to your blog tool (e.g. Sauce Reader) and keep the colorization ?
Here is the solution, CopySourceAsHtml, an awesome plugin from Colin Coller. The cool point is that if "VS.NET can highlight it, CSAH can copy it, and your code should look the same in your browser as it does in your editor". I was a bit disappointed not finding the context menu in the editor for other source then C# but you might add a keyboard shortcups as described on this page.

Even better, Colin provides the source. I guess I will soon integrate his colorization way to Tech Head Brothers Word 2003 publishing tool.

Here a sample output of a C# code:

XSLT:

I always thought that journalist must be impartial

Is that not true for sport journalist ? Canal+ showed this evening the football match Paris SG - Olympique de Marseille, and the journalists were really NOT impartial. That really piss me off, because I am paying an abo to get this private channel and when I see such attitude... It is even worse when you know that Canal+ invested money in Paris SG. A shame.

Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages Technology Preview (October 2004 Release)

"Today, you can download a tool that you can use to describe the concepts in a problem domain as the basis for a modeling tool or graphical designer. It is itself a graphical tool built on top of our designer platform and it is completely integrated into Visual Studio. For example, if you need a business process modeling tool, this editor allows you to describe the concepts specific to the way you like to model your business processes."

It is basically a graphical designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005 for designing and editing the concepts (or metamodel) of visual domain specific languages.

There is also an interesting : "Walkthrough of the Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages" showing the use of the object model for a user interaction process (UIP) chart language. UIP chart defines pages and transitions between them as part of the design of a Web site, a wizard, or a form-based application. Figure 1 is an example of a UIP chart for a fictitious online shopping Web site. You might find more information on this page about the User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block - Version 2.0.

Read more about it on MSDN, on the Domain Specific Language (DSL) Tools page.
Download the tool, on Microsoft® Tools for Domain Specific Languages Technology Preview October 2004 Release page.

Teaser trailer for Star Wars Episode III

Log4net nice idea :-)

If you are using log4net like me then I am sure you will like this idea. I combined it with ReSharper.

A log4net tip


private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(MyClass));


I'm writing more than once some days. Nothing difficult here, but I can save a reference to MyClass by using reflection (tip provided by Nicko Cadell) :

#region Logging Definition
private static readonly log4net.ILog log = log4net.LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);
#endregion


Comfortable when combined with quickcode or added to a "create new class" wizard.

Perfect timing