Eric Lefevre-Ardant on Java & Agile

I had a most peculiar problem with my Palm Tungsten T3 (to which I’m happily commited). A few days ago, it started to turn automatically on after just a few seconds, and would not turn off by itself, obviously draining the battery in a couple of hours.
After numerous unsuccessful searches on Google, I eventually was lucky enough to figure out the problem in just a couple of days (and after 3 or 4 hard resets wiping out the memory — but I had a backup anyway). The issue is related to birthdays occuring at the beginning of the year, and birthday reminders set to (presumably) more days than the number of days from the beginning of the year. I just had to uncheck the reminder for birthdays and everything went back to normal.
Some of you will be glad to know that this has been acknowledged by PalmOne. Hopefully, they’ll figure out a patch before next year.

The Parisian public libraries are making more steps towards computerization. It is now possible to search for books and check the status of a user account. See here.
It is apparently not possible to search in a selected number of libraries; also, there is no way to navigate through a Yahoo-style tree of topics (even though the topics are definitely hierarchical), but still, it is a good start.
There were also rumors that it would be possible to put an option on a book currently checked out but I couldn’t find a way to do that.

The results are in: the best way to use webcams between a Windows and a MacOS X machine is Yahoo Messenger.
MSN Messenger does not support video on MacOS, ICQ does not seem support video at all (easily at least) and the open-source solutions are not stable enough yet. Too bad, as I was quite happy with Gaim.
Audio didn’t work so well, though (didn’t investigate too much why). Using Skype for this.