Rainy, Rainy London !

The first two weeks I was in London, the weather was very pleasant and sunny most of the days, so giving a very good feeling. But now the real life starts: for third consecutive day it continues raining in the evening, and in some times it is really like a shower!

London has got a lot of green space and also a beautiful river passing inside, so it is a beautiful city, what a pity most of the time covered by gray clouds!

# posted by Mahdi on 24.5.06

Wireless world : isn’t it wonderful ?

In London you can find WiFi signal everywhere in the city. Yesterday, after having spent a lot of time trying to figure out how my ADSL connection work, finally I switched on my WiFi and I could have a signal of somebody in the neighborhood, without finally needing an ADSL !

Now, I came near the Thames River and there are several Wifi antennas, even though there is no building in nearby ! Well I should confess that the signal is not really powerful and it took us 30 minutes to configure it. But once connected, it is easy to take photo with my cellphone and send it via wireless infrared connection to post it via wifi to the internet !

Only missing something ! If we had also wireless power into the laptop, the world would be great !!

# posted by Mahdi on 11.5.06

My flat in London

I have got a new flat in the city center, around 15 minutes walk from my office. I share this flat with another colleague which is originally from India, and worked in UK in the two last years.

He cooked a nice Indian food, as you would expect well spicy ! I specially liked the way he fried bread slices and throwed them up with his frying pan !! (see photo : the camera was not fast enough to capture the bread in the air, you see only the pan movement !)

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# posted by Mahdi on 3.5.06

Towards London

Today was my first day in London, a very very long day. I have started my day by waking up at 4:15 UK time to go catch the EuroStar, the train that goes inside the Tunnel linking France to UK.

The EuroStar part in the Gare du Nord in Paris is completely separated from other trains with high-electricity fences around (see photo) ! Actually the passport check is done before boarding up to the train, and once you arrive in London there is no passport check.

The train goes very fast in France part, then you will have a 20 minutes of total dark when passing by the Tunnel. Once arriving to the otherside, you feel that it slows down completely.

Once in London you feel fast the impressive dynamism of this city. People running all around the streets, most of the time using the Tube (subway system) or walking, as nobody uses the car because of congestion charges.

# posted by Mahdi on 3.5.06

Mahdi's freeware toolbox

One of my favourite games is search and test freeware and shareware stuff. After having tryed hundreds of them, I have done a selection of them to create a toolbox , which convert a Windows install into a full-featured system, without spending a penny:

Crimson Editor : an excellent free tabbed editor
CygWin : ultimate unix shell and gcc in Windows
IrfanView : good image viewer with some editing capabilities
BSD : great movie player, much faster compared to WMP or RealPlayer
WinAmp : no need to introduce, it really whip the Llama's ass !!
JDiskReport : analyses disk usage to free disk space
LookAtLAN : to discover your local network (great for administrators)
MTail : a graphic interface for “tail –f” of unix
PDFCreator : create PDF from any application (word, powerpoint, …)
PrintScreen : to take screen captures with added functionalities
Putty and WinScp : great secure terminal and file transfer
Process Explorer : hack into the processes running on your PC
Unlocker : have got your files locked by a process ? unlock them easily
FireFox : I wonder why people still continue using IE ? :)
UnxUtils : some useful unix tools that come handy : where, grep, sed, …
HTTrack : useful to mirror a website to read offline
ZoneAlarm : a very good personal firewall
VirtualDub : convert your audio / video files from one codec to another
WorkRave : tells you to take a break if you work too hard !

(for example now which is the labour day, 1st of May, 1 o'clock in the morning and I am working on my PC!!! workrave reminds me to stop being so geek!)

# posted by Mahdi on 1.5.06

Madrid and the biggest hotel in Europe

Our group in the company has now the European community meeting, with more than 1000 people participating. It is not easy to find a hotel having that large capacity, so the organizers have searched all europe to find the biggest hotel (as claimed by the hotel itself) in a suburb near Madrid. In the entrance, it did not seem big, but once inside hotel, it was very easy to lose the direction !

Besides, we have done a hop in Madrid, a beautiful city which is relatively modern compared to other european cities. The wonderful thing was the the Real Madrid's stadium is inside the city (see photo), it shows the importance of soccer in the life of Spanish people.

# posted by Mahdi on 15.3.06

SCEA : "Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE" certification

These days most of my spare time is spent on studying for the SCEA. It is motivating but really time consuming, I have planned to read around 10 books.It is a good idea to have a goal, to create a self-motivation. Tomorrow, I will go to Sun Microsystems to have a J2EE training ...

# posted by Mahdi on 12.2.06

Speed Networking : a new concept to know people

I have been to a "Speed Networking" session recently. It is something similar to "speed dating", making many people meet others on a rotation-based scheme. There are 7 groups of 7 people, and in each group, each person present herself or himself during 1 minute. After that, the people rotate based on a mathematical formula, and at the end everybody has met all others.

To be able to do such a rotation, the number of the people should be equal to (p * p), where p is a prime number. So the constraint is to have either 25, 49, 121 or 169 persons. It seems that 49 is a good value, resulting in groups of 7 persons. (In reality, however, it is not so strict as that, the aims in to meet people and not to follow a number theory problem!)