This is a video about Belgium which is probably not as funny as it was intended.
Or perhaps it was never intended to be funny.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ceg6NQKHd70&feature=player_embedded

A short animated film about the Belgian political structure.

The text was written by Marcel Sel, a Belgian writer, author of Walen Buiten, a best-seller on the

«Belgian Crisis».

The music was specifically composed by Laurent Aglat for the film, and Emma Dornan's beautiful
voice gave the commentary its magical tone.

The film was directed by Jerome de Gerlache.

blog.marcelsel.com
laurentaglat.com
jeromedegerlache.com

One of our favourite recipes!

Ingredients:

2 red onions
Cloves of garlic, as much as you can handle
Small can of tomato paste
Milk
Corn Flour
Can of Salmon
Smoked Salmon
Tagliatelle or Spaghetti

 

Doing it:

Fry onions until they are transparent, don't over cook them
Add your finely chopped garlic and your can of salmon mashed
with a fork. Add your tomato concentrate

Follow the pictures here with the recipe and you'll get a better idea:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jerry.rocteur/Salmon

Mix together and let cook for 3 or 4 minutesDon't overcook or burn or let anything stick
Add some milk and corn flour How much milk and corn flour depends on how much
onion and salmon 
You're trying to make a sauce which is not runny but not hard either, you'll get the feel for it.
You can add cayenne or red pepper or even black pepper if you want it a bit spicy

Don't over do it because it is not intended to be very spicy otherwise you'll lose the
taste of the rest.
Taste and add salt to your liking.
Cook your tagliatelle or spaghetti
Add sauce and spread smoked salmon.

NOTE: It's not saghetti sauce so you don't have to make a huge amount of sauce.

Nous pouvons bien en rire, merci Annie

 

Since I've been working with UNIX I have always used vi and later vim as my main editor until recently when I started programming in Python and Jython.

When I started working with Jython I discovered Eclipse through a colleague, I still use gvim for small scripts but when writing bigger scripts or scripts where I import Java packages I use Eclipse.

When I say Eclipse I actually use Aptana on Mac OS X and Spring on Windows at work. I'd like to try Aptana on Linux but so far have not found a way to install it that won't need fiddling around!

However, being a vim user I get quite frustrated having to use my mouse and arrow keys to move around so I looked around for something vim like to help me out and I discovered Vrapper.

http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/

Vrapper installs like all other Eclipse plugins from http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/update-site/stable once installed you have a litle gvim icon in your toolbar and when you click on this you have vim like editing.

From the Vrapper site: http://vrapper.sourceforge.net/

Instead of embedding Vim in Eclipse or creating a new text (Eclipse) editor with Vim functionality from scratch, Vrapper adds a layer on top of existing editors like the Java editor. The advantage of this approach is that all the features of the original editor are still available. For example it is still possible to use the refactoring capabilities of the Java editor.

While Vrapper is active, it adds a listener to every editor which is opened. Every keystroke send to the editor is then evaluated by Vrapper. In insert mode, keystrokes are simply passed to the underlying editor (unless they are remapped to something else). In other modes (e.g. visual or normal mode) most keystrokes will result in some action performed by Vrapper (e.g. delete, paste).

I didn't know this, cool.

:help quickref

Nice!!

I've just upgraded Debian etch to lenny and so far only had a few issues.

• There were two root users in mysql, one without password, I removed the one with no password
• updatedb and locate no longer exist on system even if findutils exists, you need to install package mlocate
• php can no longer access mysql - Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect(), you need to install php5-mysql which upgrades you to php5

OUTSTANDING ISSUES (I have not had time to fix)

• ejabber: pyMSNt no longer working
• Anything I've missed ?

Sorry the site has been dead for the last few months but I've spent ALL of my spare time learning Python !

I wanted to learn Python because of the positive things I was seeing on the web and then one of my colleagues encouraged me to do it and so I did!

I've read Learning Python, Fourth Edition by Mark Lutz which I found a bit long winded and repetitive, it will make a good reference book for the future but I'm not sure that it is the best style for me to learn a language. I like the style of Randal L Schwartz but of course he writes about Perl and not Python!

I have also bought Mark Lutz Python Pocket Reference, 4th Edition which I think is OK for the price, handy to have around but sometimes not the easiest to find things. Often it seems you need to know more about what you're looking for to get the information you really need. As I was learning I was sometimes confused about the difference in printing beween Python 3 and Python 2.6 and earlier, I ended up having to write the formats myself in the book to have all the information in one place.

If you're into UNIX I recommend Python for Unix and Linux System Administration By Noah Gift, Jeremy M. Jones which I have just finished reading. I like the book very much, I learned a lot from this book and I had a lot of fun reading it and trying things out. I learned about Ipython which I recommend highly if you work at the shell you may use Ipython more often than your favourite shell, the writing style is very different to what I've read before and sometimes feels like it is your mate sending you an email with a story but at the end it will whet your apetite and you'll spend hours trying things out. A lot of the examples and stories are not complete and so you have to get your fingers dirty to learn more about things but that is fine, otherwise the book would be 2000 pages and you'd get bored like I did with Learning Python's verbose style.

Next step is the Python Cookbook which I will start reading this week. 

When the new versions of Python in a Nutshell and Programming Python come out I will also buy those.

There is a lot of resource on the web but I like reading books when I'm learning a language or a new technology!

If you're buying an O'Reilly book in Europe, I found it is cheaper to buy the book from Amazon UK and then getting the PDF version from the O'Reilly site using the Ebook discount code. I find Safari way overpriced and prefer having the PDF on my memory stick. You can also download the ebook in other formats at no extra charge. One thing that is formidable is that if the book is updated due to errata, O'Reilly will send you an email offering you to download the updated version.

Proximus screws up again. It is Mother's day and their SMS service is down.

Avertissement :
Pour des raisons techniques indépendantes de notre volonté, ce service est momentanément inaccessible. Veuillez réessayer plus tard. Cliquez sur le bouton "OK".

These Mobile Service providers are so gloated with money from the exploitation of their customers and you can't send an SMS on Mother's Day.

Not proud to be a Proximus customer again.