Author Archives: Julien Lecomte

The Modern Moon: A Personal View

I just finished reading The Modern Moon: A Personal View by planetary geologist Charles A. Wood, and felt compelled to write a few lines about this genuinely brilliant book. I have been practicing amateur astronomy for the past 17 years, … Continue reading

Posted in Astronomy | 1 Comment

Observing the Heavens at Lick Observatory

The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory, owned and operated by the University of California. It is situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, USA. The observatory is managed from … Continue reading

Posted in Astronomy | 1 Comment

An IDE Device Driver for Simplix

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on an IDE hard disk driver for my hobby operating system Simplix. This driver probes for existing IDE controllers, identifies the IDE devices connected to these controllers, and allows for … Continue reading

Posted in System Programming | 5 Comments

Velocity Conference 2008

I will be speaking at the Velocity Conference 2008 alongside my buddies and former co-workers Steve Souders and Bill Scott. The conference takes place on Monday, June 23 in Burlingame, CA. The topic of my presentation is High Performance Ajax … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | 4 Comments

Simplix Running on Real Hardware

This morning, as I was just finishing up the code responsible for detecting IDE devices (hard disks, CD-ROM drives, etc.) in Simplix, I felt like trying my operating system on real hardware. I have a 4 year old PC with … Continue reading

Posted in System Programming | 4 Comments

New Version of Simplix, My Hobby Operating System

Some of you may remember this post about Simplix, my hobby operating system. The first version, published in Sept. 2007, was not able to do much and was really buggy. Over the next 9 months, as I was studying the … Continue reading

Posted in System Programming | Comments Off

gedit, An Awesome Text Editor

TextMate has gained a lot of traction in the past few years, especially among web developers. Ruby developers swear by it for some reason. I don’t have MacOS X at home so I don’t use TextMate. Instead, my favorite text … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) First Impressions

Last night, I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Release Candidate on my laptop (a HP dv2000 with a dual core AMD64 2.8GHz CPU and 2GB RAM) I had used Ubuntu in the past (versions 7.04 and 7.10) on … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Douglas Crockford just published his first book titled JavaScript: The Good Parts. After reading this book, some of you may be left with the impression that Douglas is always complaining about some aspect of this very popular programming language. However, … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment

YUI Compressor Version 2.3 Now Available

This new version of the compressor fixes a few bugs and implements a few additional micro optimizations. Please refer to the CHANGELOG file for a complete list of changes, and don’t hesitate to report any issue you may experience with … Continue reading

Posted in Web Development | 19 Comments