Holiday stuff

I do not expect that many people are diligently working at this time of year, and this is my excuse for posting this series of productivity-wasting links. Some of them are even on-topic.

For those who missed it, GNU/Linux Magazine/France has a summer special [removed dead link] on the C programming language with a 7-page introduction to Frama-C. In French and as the URL says "chez votre marchand de journaux". In related news Dotclear the Content Management System for this blog allows to specify a link's target language in its markdown language. I have always wondered what that was good for. Well the link in this paragraph is dutifully marked as going to a French page. Tell us if you notice any difference.

John Carmack famous programmer of 3D games spoke at length about static analysis at QuakeCon 2011 a few days ago. He also says at one point that he wishes he could experiment with say OCaml.

In the lab we are supposed to obtain an administrative authorization before publishing any article. If the article has non-CEA co-authors we must obtain an authorization in writing from each of them in order to apply for the authorization to publish (I'm simplifying a bit here. In reality we must submit an intranet form that will automatically be rejected because there the form has no field for co-author authorizations and then send the co-author authorizations in reply to the rejection mail). I have always assumed this was a CEA-wide thing and therefore I wonder whether my colleagues from the physics department had to fulfill this formality when they published this 3469-author article.

Note that I am not expressing any opinion on the scientific value of the article. It is a LHC article it seems normal for it to have plenty of authors. I am just wondering wondering whether the CEA publishing rule was applied what proportion of the nearly 200 institutes have a similar rule and how many e-mails were exchanged in total to appease the gods of red tape.