One of my 2010 resolutions was to write at least one blog post each month. As you can see, we're not exactly there, but anyway I managed tonight to take the time to write stuff! So let's for some update about my life and stuff.

New place

Maybe you know it already, maybe you don't but I recently moved to a new place. I'm not sharing a house with other people anymore, I had to rent one of those flat for young grown-ups. I am now living in Louvain-la-Neuve, not far from my previous place in Ottignies. It has the great advantage of being very close to my workplace, and yet being calm and cosy (for those who don't know LLN: can be quite a noisy town at night). I don't how long I will stay here, at least until I finished my PhD thesis.

About my life

The last 6 months have been horribly busy for me. We've working like mad at work to finish some experiments in time, and that kept me from doing mostly anything else. It also sucked most of my energy and generated quite a lot of stress. I won't come into details about this work since it is quite technical, but suffice to say we had to benchmark some CPU architecture we're working on at the lab. We're supposed to publish something in the coming month, I guess I'll take about that then.

Now that this work is over, another is taking its place: my thesis. I'd like to finish it up by the end of this year. September/october would actually be the ideal. I still need to get started, and I'm planning to do that in the coming days. This is a tricky work, since everything not clear already, but this the kind of work that can only get better as you're doing it, so I'd better get started I guess.

Getting Things GNOME and FOSDEM2010

Lionel and I started Getting Things GNOME in october 2008 or so. About 1 year and a half later, it is getting more and more popular. I guess I cannot express how cool it is. We now have more than ten regular contributors, and we're 6 developers. There's almost not a day that passes without some commit to our code repository. I am really glad it went so well and I hope it's going to get even better in the future.

Unfortunately my busy agenda those last months prevented to contribute major work to GTG. But hope I'm going to find time now to reincrease my contributions. We have some important features to include it the next version that should allow for a more general and better synchronization support. I'm really eager to see it work since it is clearly the feature that I miss the most.

Lionel and I gave a presentation at the FOSDEM about GTG. We were obviously not well prepared but it was our choice to give a rather fresh and dynamic presentation rather than something too defined and overthought. I think all in all it went pretty well, at least I had a good time while doing it.

Ju-jutsu

I commited to pass my ju-jutsu black belt exam this year. This represents quite a lot of work. Most weeks I'm practicing about 4 hours to get sufficiently prepared for the exam in may. Right now things are progressing well, I had some of my work already revised an accepted very recently. But still, this work will have to be reviewed again by the sensei of our method, so it's not done yet, but at least I'm happy we're progressing.