Furo’s World

“Micmacs à Glasgow”

19 March 2010 – 0:20

Thursday night, I went to see another film at the Glasgow Film Theatre, and not any film: a French one called “Micmacs à Tire-Larigot” from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) starring Dany Boon, André Dussolier and Julie Ferrier.

This film tells the story of Bazil, a man that got his life ruined by two big weapon manufacturer. Indeed, his dad died of a landing explosion when he was a wee boy and, 30 years later, because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time he got caught in the middle of a gang fight and got shot by accident. The bullet didn’t killed him but stayed in his head and have now a chance to kill him anytime. Having lost home and work, he starts a new life in the street and meets some unusual friends. With them he will seek revenge against these warmongers who built the weapons that ruined his life but will always be fair and smart!

With this movie, Jeunet offers us a modern version of David vs Goliath that mixes humor, intelligence, irony and, as usual from him, a subtitle sense of using the details of our everyday life. Short version: I really liked it!

Bazil surrounded by two of his new friends, “Petit-Pierre” and “La Môme Cahoutchou”

Another thing that made this film special was the environment: the GFT is an old fashioned cinema (very similar to the Utopia in Toulouse) where you can find more independent and foreign films than blockbusters.

Inside the “Cinema 2″ at the Glasgow Film Theatre

I really like the environment and especially the moment when the curtains where opened for the first time: it felt like being part of the past
Another thing that I expected was that lots of people in the theatre were French. Easy to notice before the film because of the comments and even more easy during the film since we were the firsts to laugh out loud at the jokes (Subtitles were good but it always takes a bit more time to read a joke than hear it!).
At the end of the film and with a lot of French words in my head, it was difficult to believe the Glasgow is in Scotland!

The GFT is really a good place for goods cinematographic experiences and I can only recommend it!

Posted in Cinema | No Comments »

Message from the cloud

16 March 2010 – 1:33

It has been ages that I wanted to write an article about my Nokia E71 and what is better to do it than from my E71 itself with Wordmobi ! Wordmobi is an open source Symbian 60 application written in Python and is compatible with all the S60 Nokia devices. It allows you to post articles, manage your comments, view your blog statistics and much more directly from your phone and without using a browser.

First of all, Wordmobi is capable of storing the connection data of many blogs via profiles. That means that if you are a blog freak that manages more than one blog, you will be able to log into them really rapidly from the start screen.

Wordmobi login Screen

Once you are in your favorite profile, you can easily access the posts and comments from your blog through the main menu. You can also list all the tags an categories or even add new ones! Note that these features are only available if your blog’s version is 2.6 or superior (if older, just the posts are visible).

Some of the different features of the main menu…

Creating a new post is also very easy and I had no problem adding links and photos from my phone (yes, I did all the screen shots and editing from my E71!!! The application I used is simply called Screenshot ). The result is not too bad and again, since the application is on the phone and not on a website, it is very comfy to create and edit an article. I really enjoyed my azerty keyboard and the copy/paste feature of the phone for this .

Me editing this article

The only time when the phone browser is required is when you want to preview you article (which is a very neat feature by the way). Once you are happy with the content of the article, you can easily select a category and some tags. Also, all the images added locally from the phone will be uploaded to the server of your website automatically. Once you’ve finished to deal with the setup of the article, you can publish your hard work either directly on your blog or keep it as a mock-up for further review.

Now I have no excuses at all to not keep my blog up-to-date

PS: for some reasons, the application is in French on my phone configured in English, sorry about this!

Posted in Phone | No Comments »

Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

22 February 2010 – 0:21

After years of success with Evangelion, Hideki Anno decided to resurrect the angels once again in a brand new tetralogy named Rebuild of Evangelion:

- Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, out in 2007;

- Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance, out in 2009;

- Evangelion: 3.0 Quickening, not out yet;

- Evangelion: Final, not out yet.

After having seen Evangelion 1.0 on DVD (that was just amazing!), I started to inquire on the Internet about the second film and discovered that even if it was not available on DVD yet, the UK premiere was to come… in Glasgow at the Glasgow Film Theatre for the sixth Glasgow Film Festival on the 15th of February! Hence, last Monday was for me the occasion to renew with one of my favorite anime serie ever and see Evangelion 2.0.

Although they have the same starting point, the new film are very different from the original TV series. The first film go through the 8 first episodes of the series with a lot of small variations at the beginning to tons of new details at the end. Also the graphical design has nothing to do with the original – of course now everything is computerized which makes the animations splendid!

The second film however is radically different from the storyline you would expect if you know the series: a new character, new evas, different angels,… Although the differences are major and highlight a complete new plot, I really liked the work that has been done: this new version is simpler to understand (yes, the original Evangelion episodes could have been written by Freud) and since the story variates, it is a delight to re-discover the Evangelion world.

I have always been used to watch Evangelion alone at the TV or on the computer so for me, watching it at the cinema was really amazing! It was just fabulous to discover the new story with a few hundred people and be able to laugh at Misato’s behavior, be scared by the Angels and encourage Shinji through his journey! Add to that the good environment of the GFT and a very friendly staff and you get the perfect recipe for enjoying your film!

The only thing that I hope is that they will do the same again for Eva 3.0 and 4.0

In summary, buy the first DVD and jump on the second one as soon as it is out!

Posted in Cinema | No Comments »

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

4 January 2010 – 23:27

Everything is in the title: I hope that this new year will bring you happiness, success and health! Also, I hope you have loads of good resolutions! For me, one of my resolutions will be to post more often on that blog. Seriously, I am a disgrace to have let this space empty! My technological discoveries have been numerous over the past year and I really indent to drop a word or two about them!

Stay tuned and have a great year

Posted in Non classé | 1 Comment »

Merry Christmas

25 December 2008 – 19:01

I wish an happy and fabulous Christmas to all of you and to your family!

Posted in Non classé | 1 Comment »

An IBM application

13 October 2008 – 16:52

One of the company that attracted me since I’m jobhunting is clearly IBM. Indeed, everyone knows “Big blue” and their supercomputers, from the PS/1 to the Blue Gene! But since they have an office in Glasgow, I’ve decided to give it a try and apply to the Graduate Recruitment Program.

For me, the graduate recruitment process in IBM is composed by 4 steps.

Step 1, the online form.

This step is basically the writing of the CV online.

-A funny thing occured for me, I noticed that the “CV web engine” is powered by the same company than the one that does JPMorgan forms: since I’ve applied for their graduate program first, my IBM form was 60% already filled thanks to the Firefox cache :p -

The only “hard” work to do there was to write a small cover letter and to explain why did I choose IBM.

After completed that and having wait half a week, I was invited to complete step 2.

Step 2, the online aptitude test.

Unlike a lot of companies that use aptitude tests designed by SHL, IBM have designed their own: the Information Processing Aptitude Test On-line or IPATO.

This test is composed by 3 parts, timed, 3 web pages of questions each and the difficulty increasing on each page:

- Data matrices(13mins): Lots of reasonning about caracters in matrices. I found this part difficult because, since english is not my mother tongue, I lost lots of time to read carefully the questions.

- Number series(4mins): Or find the next number. Clearly the easiest test, I did it first, it is motivating

- Mathematical problems(15mins): Not really hard but a calculator, a pencil and a sheet of paper are required. This part was fun to me, espcially the first time I passed it. Why the first time? Well, the day I did the test, I completed part 1 and 2 then I started part 3. I managed to have 2 pages in 10minutes (which is not bad at all when you have 15 minutes to do 3 pages of questions) but when I clicked on the “Next page” button, an error occured and I was disconnected!!!!! Stunned, I tried to connect again, and again: same error. Of course at the third time, the system was blocked and my account was frozen!!! Of course!!! So I had to call IBM, make the thing un locked to be able to continue 3 days later. Unfortunately, they reinitialized the part and I had to do the 3 pages again, with differents questions and… different difficulty So in the end I completed 2 pages in 15 minutes. Morality: there were compatibility issues with Firefox, so if you have to take that test use IE (at least it will be useful for one more thing than downloading Firefox )!

Anyway, everything is detailed before each part: IBM give you examples and some advices. Just remember that you are not meant to do all the questions, but if you manage to do everything, good for you:) I did almost 75-85% of the total test.

Eventually, after a couple of days, I received an eMail saying that I succeded to the test, and that I was invited in Hursley (England) for the First Round Selection day.

Step 3, First Round Selection day.

This was the occasion for me to have a point of view of England more representative than Gatwick Airport!

It was indeed interesting: I had a night in a nice little hotel called Kings Head in Hursley. By the way, Hursley is a little village between Winchester and Southampton. However it is pretty isolated…

Anyway, the FRSD is globally, like you can read on IBM website, a presentation and confirmation day. Basically, I was in the IBM castle (really beautifull place) and I attended to different activities:

- Presentation of the company: of its needs and of the campus. Just to be sure that you are on the right place.

- Confirmatory IPATO test: to be sure that it was you that did the online one. I found it particularly difficult but I did obviously quite well.

- Group exercice: They check how you work with other persons This wasn’t a problem for me and I quite liked it: It reminded me meetings in my internships

- Written test: A one hour test to check you really are who you pretend to be! A software developer in my case.

Finally, for the software developper role, there weren’t interview so I suppose it depends on the role chosen.

Again, obvisouly I did well because I was invited to the next stage the Assessment center!

Step 4, Assessment Center.

I don’t know that much about that since I’ve just been invited. The only thing is that I’m really proud to have been invited because, according to what IBM said, less than the half of people that were present in the FRSD were selected, and I’m in

The only problem to all of this is that I don’t really know if there are jobs for Glasgow or not… And from what the people said in Hursley, I don’t think so… So I’ll try to get the information and we will see… But one thing is sure, I’m staying in Scotland

Posted in Software Engineering | 10 Comments »

A new beginning!

13 October 2008 – 15:11

It has been a while since my last post. Indeed, I’ve been in vacation at the ocean, showed Ariège, attended to a Scottish wedding, moving from Toulouse to Foix but my biggest news is that I just moved from Foix (France) to East Kilbride (UK).

East Kilbride is a nice little town in the south of Glasgow that combine nice views and, in my opinion, nice weather (you can really find snow in the winter there!!).

And this is here that my new carreer begins with my darling!

So welcome myself in Scotland

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

The end of the good days…

24 June 2008 – 1:57

I haven’t been able to post for a while maily because of an incredible schedule due to the end of my year at uni.

And now that’s it: I’m finished with classes and lessons!!!!! HURRAAA!!! All the projects, exams and difficult days are over.

To celebrate our last 3 hours of class (on the 06.23.08 from 2pm to 5pm French hour), we organized a cool dinner with the major part of my classmates and then we went to a pool club. It was a brilliant evening!

The only things left is the oral exam for my internship on thursday and as soon I receive my final grades, I will be officially graduated!

But… now I do realize what it means to end the studies. That’s why I’d like to say : thanks guys, those 4 years (or 3 years for some of you) were really great! Without you, I would have never become what I’ve became and learn what I’ve learnt. Thanks for thoses great and painful moment that we shared and faced together. And finally just thanks for this social adventure. With a special attention to: Fred, PP and Zenithar that were just here

The end of the studies is something that every students wish when they are into it but also something that every new graduate regret when they leave it…

Posted in IUP ISI | 3 Comments »

“Cannot obtain value of local or argument” “as it is not available at this instruction pointer, possibly because it has been optimized away.”

8 May 2008 – 18:27

Welcome in the weird world of C#! Sometimes you say: “Programming is simply, if you know how things work then you can debug or fix every problems!”. But when something not understandable happens, well… you just have your eyes to cry!

In my case I was doing a small part of code, following a tutorial. Everything was crystal clear. But at the execution, this error happened:

Cannot obtain value of local or argument XXXXX as it is not available at this instruction pointer, possibly because it has been optimized away.

So I began to search, and it was honestly the first time that the Microsoft search engine gave me more answer than Google! And what a surprise when I discovered that all the occurrence found were people that had this problem and that the problem was completely different from mine. Going further, I discovered that in the most cases, having this exception is a known problem of the framework: I couldn’t do nothing about it.

So basicaly, it is a weakness in the .NET 2.0 framework. Don’t ask me more, people from who i got the intell didn’t knew much more. but since my speciality is to be stubborn I tried a few things and found something that could interest you if you are in the same case.

In fact, when you execute the line of code that returns this exception, it is like it is executed 2 times so a solution is to surround your code by this:

Try{ Your_expression; } catch{Exception}

Your expression will be evaluated and will return the exception but with no effect. Ok, it is quick and dirty but it works, and can help you if like me, you don’t have a choice.

If you have any feedback about that issue, please leave a comment!!!

Posted in .NET | 2 Comments »

Sunshine!

22 April 2008 – 21:08

This long week end was for me the occasion to visit my precious Sunshine in Scotland, in the city of East Kilbride. With her, I discovered some places in the West ends of Glasgow, made some shopping in Buchanan Street and enjoyed the fabulous landscape of the Isle of Arran.