Fourniture scolaire

Trouvé dans la liste de fourniture scolaire demandée par l'école de mon fils pour l'année prochaine: 
"double décimètre qui tienne dans la trousse"(sic) 
Ma question est: combien mesure le double décimètre qui doit tenir dans ma trousse? 
Corollaire: combien de double décimètre puis-je mettre dans ma trousse de 15 cm de long? Réponse probable: 0,75... 

Pas toujours facile de bien penser...

L'écriture selon Pennac

On écrit pour en finir avec soi-même mais dans le désir d'être lu, pas moyen d'échapper à cette contradiction.[...] Quant à prétendre écrire sans vouloir qu'on vous lise (tenir un journal intime, par exemple), c'est pousser jusqu'au ridicule le rêve d'être à la fois l'auteur et le lecteur.

Daniel Pennac - Le dictateur et le hamac - 2003

Il a certainement raison, mais maintenant, il y a le Web et encore mieux les Blogs! 
Mais y a-t-il seulement des lecteurs? 
Si oui, qui sont-ils? De futurs auteurs pour la plupart (s'ils sont tombés sur cette partie du Net, c'est que la curiosité qui les a porté là sera certainement assez forte pour les pousser à passer de l'autre côté de la page Web!), les proches des auteurs (orgueil, orgueil, ...), qui d'autres? 
Cette écriture est donc assez solitaire (du moins au début): on parle à d'autres, imaginaires et nombreux, pour mieux se parler à soi-même (en finir avec soi-même dit Pennac); une sorte de thérapie en somme.

OpenSource Software Plea (in French ;-)

I've written a long time ago a plea on OSS. 
I do not include it verbatim here, but prefer to point it: it has been written in 2001 (and I kept it jealously [shyly?] for a while) and it has been first published by the excelent DNG (DotNetGuru: an open-minded and highly "architechnical" site on .Net and its relationship with Java world, webmastered avec maestria). 
Then, if you feel like reading french writting, give it a try!

EAI products in OSS

I've been roaming over EAI/B2B products delivered on an OSS basis. Here is a simple list I can share now (I did not test all!!!): 
 - BabelDoc (@sf.net): based on a pipeline of transformations/actions 
 - BIE (@sf.net): more elaborated than BabelDoc (needs a DB!) and provide a visual Web-based tool to design exchange steps 
 - OpenAdaptor: another pipelining environnement which helps connecting an application to a (set of) middleware/apps (amongst them: MQ, JMS, JDBC,...) 
 - others which I've heard of: Submarine (cocorico!), OpenEAI, Joram (cocorico bis!), ... 

Modify an XML file with ANT

Recently, while using the wonderful Glue for building WebServices (WS), I came up with the following problem: how to modify an XML file with Ant? 
(The rationale of this is: when creating a new WS, you have to use a special deployment tool [a shell script] and manually patch one of the many generated XML files; and of course, I want to automate the "manually" part of the cycle! But I guess such a problem is more general and when using EJB, one could encounter same wondering). 
First, I rejected the idea of using an Ant task that deals with TEXTUAL modifications of regular text files: I simply could not see an XML file as a regular file! Let me tell you that I didn't even think about creating a dedicated task in Java for solving that particular problem: that would have been crazy! 

Then, I ended up with 2 ideas: 
 - using an XML Ant task (such as the xmltaskone) 
 - using a templating engine (Velocity or FreeMarker) 

I preferred the first option which fits nicely to my needs (design-to-cost approach ;-) and allow me to write XPaths expression to patch the original XML file. Great! 
Templating engine was ... tempting, but too far from both my real need and time-frame to achieve it! 

So as to conclude, one of my best friends and colleagues (best applies to both nouns!) would probably have envisioned the possibility to write an XSLT file to perform that stuff with variables passing and modification of the XML file: let's forgive him!

One I like most these days

This is a very pleasant software that tries to reach perfection: near bug-free! 
Try it for free (even if it is not [yet] OpenSource!]:

A (Saint-)eXuPéry quote

Sorry for mispelling that french author's name (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) for the sake of a play on words related to XP.
He used to say (free translation by myself): "Perfection is reached not when there's nothing more to add but when there's no more to take out"
I guess it applies very well to programming in general and especially when refactoring (XP-minded ;-).