Author Archives: Julien Lecomte

The YUI library source code is now hosted on GitHub

Posted on January 14 by Julien Lecomte

If you haven’t done so already, head over to the YUI Blog for the official announcement. I am proud to have made a (very modest) recent contribution to the library by porting the browser history utility to YUI3 (take a … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment

Meade Lightbridge 12″

Posted on December 20 by Julien Lecomte

Here are a couple of photos of the Meade Lightbridge 12″ telescope I received for my 30th birthday. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to take it to a dark site yet because of the bad weather we’ve experienced in northern … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy | 2 Comments

The Moon-Venus-Jupiter Conjunction of December 01

Posted on December 2 by Julien Lecomte

Venus is on the left, Jupiter on the right. Notice the Earthshine, barely visible on this shot. Cheers!

Posted in Astronomy | 3 Comments

Stop Using GMT!

Posted on October 26 by Julien Lecomte

GMT, the famous Greenwich Mean Time, is used everywhere. However, we should all consider not using it. Universal Time (UT) — or even better, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — should be used instead. Why? In a given location, the real … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy | 2 Comments

YUI Compressor and Java Class Loader

Posted on October 21 by Julien Lecomte

The YUI Compressor uses a slightly modified version of the parser used in the Rhino JavaScript engine. The reason for modifying the parser came from the need to support JScript conditional comments, unescaped forward slashes in regular expressions — which … Continue reading →

Posted in Web Development | 14 Comments

The Modern Moon: A Personal View

Posted on October 14 by Julien Lecomte

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

Posted on July 27 by Julien Lecomte

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

Posted on July 8 by Julien Lecomte

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

Posted on June 20 by Julien Lecomte

I will be speaking at the Velocity Conference 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

Posted on June 18 by Julien Lecomte

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