Last month I made myself a long awaited present and bought a new digital camera.

At last, I’ve returned to the good old SLR cameras, leaving with great pleasure the compact digital cameras’ world.

So I bought the new Sony α200 DSLR camera accompanied with two lenses: a DT 18-70 mm F3,5-5,6 and a 75-300 mm F4,5-5,6.

I went on vacation with it for a week in the Basque country and took some interesting first pictures.

Unfortunately, I also discovered an issue with the sensor, which gave me a fucked up one picture every 4 to 5 photos…

Depending on lightning conditions, a blue, red, pink, green or yellow layer was covering the pictures… Very annoying… So, I had to double, and sometimes, triple shoot to get the right picture.

The camera has gone for repair last week and should come back in two weeks… Free of these kind of artifacts I hope…

Except this issue, I’ve been thrilled by the quality of this camera. The sharpness of the pictures is far better than my old camera and the image stabilizer does an amazing job.

Here’s a little gallery:

On tuesday I returned to my old university (Université Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris VI - Jussieu) to give a course about Eclipse Plugin to first grade Computer Science Master students.

I was very pleased by this proposal and happy to contribute to improve the synergy between the university and “the industry” (like my teacher used to say…).

Here are the slides (in french obviously) and demos I presented during this course.

Seven months after the release of the first version, and after two Release Candidate version, we’ve finally managed to finish our Apache Directory Studio 1.1.0 release.

This release fixes 100 Jira issues, adds a lot of improvements and has been released last week when we were at ApacheCon Europe.

See Apache Directory Studio’s website for more information and download links.

Last week I was at ApacheCon Europe ‘08 in Amsterdam and it’s been a very good.

Six people from our Apache Directory project were there: Emmanuel Lécharny, Alex Karasulu, Christine Koppelt, Stefan Seelmann, Stefan Zoerner and I.
We’ve talked a lot about the architecture of Apache Directory Server and what new features we’d like to introduce in the future version of Apache Directory Server and Studio.

ApacheCon is also very good socializing event and I’ve met very interesting guys like Bruce Snyder and Guillaume Nodet from Apache Service Mix, Gerolf Seitz and Martijn Dashorst from Apache Wicket, or Richard Hall from Apache Felix.

I really look forward to next year’s ApacheCon Europe which location and date have not been decided yet.

For the first contest of the new 2008 Fosters ASP World Tour, the Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast, Jérémy Flores came to Australia with its best surf.

He has finished third, beaten in the semi-finals by the winner of the event, King Kelly Slater, in a very thight heat (15.47 to 15.17) in which Jeremy was in lead until the last 5 minutes.

That’s a really good start for the young frenchman, who confirms by this results the hopes established last season.

Unfortunately, the rest of the Euroforce Contingent was not in such a form. Aritz Aranburu twisted his knee during the MSF expression session and will not be present in the next contest. Tiago Pires was eliminated in round 2 and Miky Picon in round 3.

We’ll see what all the European guys will do in the next event, the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach.

I’m very pleased to announce that Apache Directory Studio is finalist at the Eclipse Community Awards in the “Best Open Source RCP Application” category of the “Technology Awards”, competing with MyTourBook.

Sometimes the smallest detail counts…

Here’s the screen you get after registering Awaken.

Very nice guys!

This year’s Fosters ASP World Tour is going to be very exciting for European fans. For the time in the history of the competition, four European surfers have managed to qualify to the top 45 best pro surfers in the world.

The “Euroforce contingent” is composed of:

• Jérémy Flores (France)
• Miky Picon (France)
• Tiago Pires (Portugal)
• Aritz Aramburu (Euskadi - Basque Country)

I really look forward to seeing the results of this four guys, especially the french men Miky Picon and Jérémy Flores.

Apache Directory Studio has been nominated for the Eclipse Community Awards in the “Best Open Source RCP Application” category of the “Technology Awards“.

The Technology Awards are determined by a panel of judges. The judges were selected from Eclipse-oriented editors and Eclipse project leaders. The panel of judges determines winners based on a majority vote.

The criteria for judging the commercial and open source product awards are:

1. Usability and intuitiveness of the user interface - is the product user interface easy to understand?
2. Innovation and uniqueness - how cleverly does the product solve the problem?
3. Completeness - how well does the product solve the problem, including technology, documentation, tutorials, web site and community support?

Nominations open December 14, 2007 and close January 25, 2008. Winners will be announced at EclipseCon 2008.

Three others applications have been nominated:

• EscapeK
• MyTourbook
• Relations

May the best win…

I have updated the website of Apache Directory Studio with a new homepage design. I think this look way better, more professional looking and appealing.

Check it out: http://directory.apache.org/studio