I will have a booth at Fanabriques 2009, a local Lego enthusiasts meetup. I will present the vintage lego space projects that I rendered with Blender. I will also showcase Blender tutorials during the whole weekend.

It will take place on June 27th and 28th in Rosheim, France.

I learnt about this puzzle almost two years ago when it was launched. The principle si quite simple, a 16×16 pieces puzzle and a $2 Million prize for the first who can solve it.
Since that time I was thinking about algorithms and all the possible approaches to find a solution. It looks fairly simple but in fact it’s really tricky. Last december, the 1st results were published and nobody did actually find a complete solution yet.

The solver I am developing can now solve up to 12×12 similar puzzles so I thought I could get out and buy the actual puzzle to give it a try. Alas it is not available in shops anymore. I managed to find it on eBay and got it last week. I was really excited, but the same day, in a post sent on an eternity mailing list was a message stating that a group of hungarian students might have found a solution….. There’s no proof yet, and they’ll have to keep silent if they don’t want to be disqualified. I’ll try to persevere on finding a solution anyway, and we’ll know for sure at the end of the year.

Currently my macpro is running fulltime on its 8 processors, handling 150.000 positions/s…. I hope that using its power I’ll be able to get a close approach to a solution in the next months.

My Eternity editor/solver project at SourceForge

Eternity II Official Site

I went to the FOSDEM’09 this week end. It is the free and open source developers meeting and took place in Brussels. It was nice to attend a few lectures and meet some friendly people around the booths. I prepared some kind of “Open CV” which holded my contact informations along with descriptions of my SourceForge.net projects.

I used it an open souce business card hoping to find some volunteers to use these or help development. I’ll see if this brings more momentum in the future.

I must have been really nice during this year since Santa brought me this high-end Apple Macintosh setup. It’s a 2xQuad-core Xeon Mac Pro. I opened my most cpu-intensive audio compositions in Logic Studio. They took all the power of my iMac to play, and there, I can’t barely see the cpu bar moving….

On the picture, you can see it with its 30 inch cinema display, besides my current iMac and MacBook Pro.

With this setup, I hope to release more music soon !

I did not post a lot in the last weeks despite having been quite busy. Here are the latest news…

I’m working on having full Ajax behaviour in MKGI Chess Club board widgets which manage player notes and chats. It’s in progress in the current SVN release and there will be a 2.3 version coming soon.

My 3D modelling suite Sculpt is also going well. I did implement an independent rendering window with a settings panel and a bunch of fixes.

I installed https service on the apache server hosting my websites. I did also install mod-subversion to grant public access to my non-sourceforge hosted projects from the web.

I hope to have some more to show here soon… And a new musical piece is coming, so keep connected !

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”:

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.