Deleting large amount of emails from gmail make your account unaccessible for several minutes.

My Gmail account has been too slow lately. As it approached 90% size, I tried to reduce its size, by deleting old mailing list emails.

I deleted 3 times more than ~50 k emails, and each time, my account became unavailable for several minutes (about 30), including through IMAP! Got several errors on the web page (16 or 17 and 67 if I recall properly).

You've been warned. Plan ahead if you try to do the same thing :)

Final words: I am now down to 57% gmail usage. Need to find or write a tool to be able to identify the culprits. Maybe some kind of FUSE IMAP file system to reuse something like baobab (aka http://windirstat.info/ for Gnome) ?

"To tag" en francais

Searching for how to write taguer/tagger/tagguer in French. I won't use etiqueter neither. Nobody will understand...

So I found this. Not sure that's conclusive either...

Fun read anyway. In particular the longest sentence written using the 4 ADN 'letters' A, C, G and T.

Here's my version:

"Cata, ta tata gaga gâta, tagga 'caca! tacatac !', ça t'agaça !

Kung-fu coding

Derived from KUNG FU FIGHTING (Douglas, 1974)

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

They were funky Geeky men from funky Geekytown
They were coding things up and they were hacking them down
It's an ancient Geeky art and everybody knew their part
From a fix into a script, and coding from the heart

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

There was funky Billy Joy and little Sam Ruby
He said here comes the big job, lets get it on
We took a bow and made a stand, started writing with the hand
The sudden action made me flip now we're into a brand knew trip

Everybody was kung-fu coding
Those devs were fast as lightning
In fact it was a little bit frightning
But they coded with expert timing

(repeat)..make sure you have expert timing
Kung-fu coding, had to be fast as lightning

Licensed under fair-use/parody/whatever you have to do to not get sued for copyright infrigement these days.

(first one to upload a video on youtube with him singing that song, dressed as a kungfu coder gets some drinks from me)

Flash least green desktop application ?

After a while, Flash consistently takes 80-100% CPU on my desktop. Whether it is youtube, grooveshark or any other media player, I end up having to kill the browser and restart it. This with chrome and firefox (on Linux). I keep reading similar comments on the web, apparently also for people not using Linux.

I wonder what impact does this have on the world. How many trees per day would we save by not using a broken media player ?

Is the market getting better ?

I compiled jobserve UK stats out of my gmail IMAP box, thanks to mathplotlib. Note the graph depicts j2ee related jobs in Europe between July 2007 and now. These are not new jobs, but the amount of jobs advertised by Jobserve UK per day.

Here are the scripts.

Bank terminal GPRS failure

be.banksys.smash.UnexpectedErrorSmashException: Timeout occured.

I don't think this was expected to be printed out as is on the credit card receipt !

Happened to me yesterday while paying for a lunch in town. Someone from BBS might want to look at that ;) Feel free to contact me for more info, if needed.

Synchronize firefox and chrome profiles passwords

I have been using chromium more and more on Linux. But all my passwords are saved in Firefox profile. So I wrote 2 tools to help me deal with my use of both chromium and firefox. One to dump firefox passwords, one to merge the dump into chromium's profile. Seems to work in my very limited test...