Saturday night was really great. Nice weather, welcoming audience and great music…. We really enjoyed ourselves…

This is an impromptu we made while we were playing “The Day”:

The second part of “The Light Fantastic”:

Back to life, part 1, featuring a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” guitar solo:

Back to life, part 2 and our famous classic song ending:

We will be playing live in Schiltigheim next saturday. It will be outdoors, so we hope that the weather will be nice…

It will take place in Schiltigheim (France, 67), Rue des pompiers (Here is the map).

We will have almost three hours to play all our greatest hits ! In fact, since almost none of our songs last less than ten minutes, we won’t be able to play them all.

I hope to see many of you there. Until then, you can download these two recent pieces:

• The Light Fantastic (mp3 format, 9Mb)
• The Day (mp3 format, 11Mb)

Or view the video we made of “The Day”:

Today, my chess site chess.mkgi.net reached 300.000 moves played since it’s opening 3 years ago. I am very glad of this success !

Last month, I did rent a private Debian Linux server at my hosting company Gandi. The club was moved on this server a few weeks ago and this allows me to have much needed horsepower to fuel the site which is getting really important now.

I wish to thank all our most active players and all those of you who joined recently. I will begin work on a new release soon, so stay tuned for amazing updates soon.

I left my band when I came to Luxembourg last month. Since then I’m working on some new personal material.

Last week I had a drink in a local Irish Pub and thought that I could play a small acoustic set there. Since I was thinking about buying an acoustic guitar amplifier for a while now, this was the spark that made me go to a shop and buy this nice Marshall AS100D. This one sounds really great, features high-quality built-in effects and offers inputs for 2 instruments, a microphone and an auxiliary unit.

Now I’ll start to work on some pieces….

I spent more and more time doing Java development during the last months. I really like this language because I think its syntax is the right balance between advanced concept expression and readability. And I must also say that it’s nice being able to assert a 12 years Java programming experience when the technology itself is 12 years old ! I was introduced to it at the time by Stéphane Fritsch, a former university friend of mine who was ecstatic about the perspectives it was already offering at the time.

Today I faced a something that I didn’t see before: the use of final local variables and method parameters.

I was using the const keyword in method signatures a lot when developing C++ code, but I never thought about the use of final variables in Java, except for static constants. This modifier will forbid any change in the variable reference. Nice optimization in theory, but what’s really the point since this won’t affect the code execution much as we are only manipulating object references (as opposed to const objects in C++). Well, I discovered on the jGuru website that this was mandatory to share a variable value with a local inner class:

Another point that bugged me often is the way people fail to get the true meaning of the finally block in an try/catch/finally exception management code. When asked, most of the people will explain the finally block like “the code that will be executed after the try and any of the potential catch blocks”. Ok with this, but what’s the point in doing a specific block for this instead of simply writing code directly after the try/catch block ? It would also be executed after all the rest too…

The difference is that the finally block will be executed even if a catch block raises an exception.

This will output:

Thus asserting that the finally block was executed after the try/catch blocks and before the parent exception handling.

Last week, my chess website MKGI Chess Club went down for 4 days because of an internet issue at my french home… I was really sorry since there are so many people playing there (we have almost reached 300.000 moves played on the site) and it is really bad experience to stop for so long.

I finally decided to rent a virtual private server to host it and let my old servers go to the trash. It will cost me some bucks, but I hope that it will allow me better performance and a better bandwidth. I ran a Python pystone benchmark on the new server (running Debian Linux), and it did score 6 times better cpu than the computer I’m currently running the site on. I did rent this server at gandi.net since it always seemed to be one of the most serious registrar/host.

I will migrate all my web hostings (and I still have a few from the time I ran MKGI Esprit Marketing) to basic DNS-only hostings and put everything on this server in the next weeks.

I released the first official version of my Eternity II puzzle editor/solver. It is fully functional. It will help all the geeks like me who are thriving to solve this mind-blowing challenge and win the two million dollars prize that will be given to the first person who solves it.

Download it from SourceForge
Main Eternity II website
Eternity II group hosted on Yahoo

It’s been almost a week now since I started to work for Sogeti Luxembourg. I’m getting used to my new work environment and my new colleagues. Since I didn’t want to scare them too much at once, I waited until the second day to install a us keyboard and Ubuntu Linux on my main computer… I must remember to avoid the network administrator from now on !

I’m still working at the company’s main office, but will probably move to the European Court of Justice next week. There I will work as a software architect on all the projects that we are currently developing for them.

I also got a new car which is quite nice. I didn’t put an apple sticker on the rear yet, but I will soon ! I never did this on my previous cars since they were so lame that I thought this would be a bad advertising for Apple !

I organized a party last friday at my office to celebrate my departure for Luxemourg next week. It was really fun and we really had a good time. I put a whiteboard for everyone to leave a note on it.

I was offered a Wii by my former co-workers… I have a pain in my right shoulder since then ! Bloody tennis !

After the party we went to a restaurant where we spent some time in a less crowded environment.

Thanks again to all of you ! We’ll probably meet again !
Otherwise, Skyoe me !

This is it… I sold my car yesterday, and now I’m almost ready to leave. It was really a ripoff, but I wanted to have this done fast.

I don’t have a flat yet, I’m still searching, so I’ll start the first days or weeks in a hotel. I phoned my new company earlier to confirm that I will be in Luxembourg on Friday to start my new job.