I’m glad Marc is supporting Senator Obama’s campaign…

Minor Surgery

Originally uploaded by orisha

Hard to type with just one hand. Everything went well with a surprisingly strict procedure in spite of the fact that it was a minor intervention. So now I know what the famous Clinique du Trocadero is like from the inside. Very professional friendly staff. I highly recommend it.  Should be more operational in a few days.

I was glad to have been able to talk to Maria Sarkis for a short while at lunch today.  She is an accomplished Lebanese artist who is looking to establish a presence in the Paris art scene.  I mentioned the Galerie Simonoff (which had been started a couple of years ago by my friend Jean-Baptiste Simon, now in Photography at Wanted Paris) and Envie d’Art.   Any suggestions ?  Get in touch with Maria on her website or through Facebook where she hosts her own group.

I installed boinc through the gutsy repositories and the boinc manager with synaptic and used it to add a new project. I was first thinking of SETI@Home but then I ran across the World Community Grid project and I thought I would be more confortable with supporting their objectives. The agent runs well and doesn’t make my machine slugish in the slightest way. Now it’s time to put this on all the computer at home.

We had been pretty shocked by the large number of obese americans we crossed in malls, restaurants or on the street during our visit to Maumee, OH in April.  I am glad to have learned through the Knowledge @ Wharton newsletter today that TGI Friday’s is giving consumers an option for smaller portions.   This is definitely a step in the right direction and should be supported by everyone concerned at TGI Friday’s but also in the US food industry in general.

Photo Credits :  Colin Gregory Palmer

It was great to meet some fellow Americans, a French lady interested in American politics and even a man from Birkina Faso, who were all either very supportive of Barack Obama’s campaign or interested in getting information to help them make a decision. It seems that it will be very difficult for American’s abroad to vote in the primaries because of the majority of them will take place between February and March, and it can take up to 6 weeks to receive an absentee ballot.  I’ll have to call the election board my daughter and I depend on to check this out.  Maybe there is a way to work something out.   It was also interesting to learn that the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy is an Obama supporter. If you are in Paris and interested in learning about Barack Obama’s position, it’s easy to sign up for the next meeting at the Barack Obama for America 2008 Meetup Group in Paris. or visit the Barack Obama website.

I have been working on learning the Hiragana alphabet for about a month. Progress was slow initially, but I was getting up to speed, when I realized my method would probably not scale further. I had installed Kanatest previously, but somehow had not figured out how it could help me and had dropped using it. But I went back to it, and I must say after experimenting with Bryn Dyment’s excellent Real Kana website, I realized that I could do something similar with Kanatest. I must say that I have become a real fan, and improved in both the Hiragana and the Katakana set which I was not learning before, since I basically drew the characters on a sheet of paper over and over. You can install and run Kanatest easily on the Ubuntu operating system.

The coolest thing is that when doing a search on wiki’s, I ran across a group on Facebook named in Japanese and I picked up WIKI spelled in Katakana characters (I hope this displays right) !

WIKI - ウイキ

I wonder how I would spell XWiki ?

Wow, it’s been such a long haul of continuous progress with all the successive beta releases that reaching RC1 now is really quite fulfulling so I hope there will be no show stoppers for the 1.0 release in the next few weeks.  I was also happy to have been able to take some time to contribute over the easter weekend and although it was mainly documentation and fixing some macros or skin problems, it is quite satisfying to knock down the issues in JIRA and seeing some of your work highlighted in the release notes.  If resolving some of the other issues was not so time consuming for me I would have loved to have been able to tackle a bit more.  Thank you Vincent and the rest of the XWiki contributors and R&D team for doing such a great job !

I’m in Maumee, Ohio visiting my father this week. We had a good trip to Detroit and actually got there an hour early. We should have rented a car to go down to Maumee, but we thought we would be better off taking the plane to Toledo, which meant we ended up waiting around for four hours that night to catch the 9:30 flight in a small turbo propeller driven aircraft. We’ll be enjoying my father’s company and hospitality here until Sunday. I hope to meet Keith Instone, who graciously accepted my invitation to chat about XWiki, before leaving. More on that later…

XWiki was selected again this year as a mentoring organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2007 program.  There are some really cool  challenging project ideas just waiting to meet a smart motivated student this summer.  Some of my favorites are:

• Google Web Toolkit WYKIWYG Editor
• Open Office Plugin
• AJAX Interface Improvements
• WebDAV API

The mentors are all top XWiki coders and the projects should be a real learning experience and a lot of fun !  If you are up to the XWiki challenge then please apply here on the Summer of Code website !