Jeff Mesnil

Pierre Chappaz reported today that Kelkoo has been sold to a private-equity firm by Yahoo! (Yahoo! bought it for 475M€ in 2004 and apparently sold it for less than 100M€)

I worked at Kelkoo for a short time in 2004-2005 after the acquisition. I made good friends and there is a bunch of smart people in this company.
I’m sure they will rebound and innovate again now that they can focus on their own core business.

Good luck to my ex-colleagues!

I can’t say it better than Pat Helland:

Being at a conference like HPTS was very entertaining as I could look from across the room and see Jim march methodically through all the attendees, many he’d known for years and some he was just meeting. I would smile because it was obvious they were getting the same kindness and curiosity that I so enjoyed. I knew they would benefit from that attention.

That is exactly what I felt when I met Jim Gray at HPTS’03. He made a strong and lasting impression on me with his amazing ability to explain complex things in simple terms.

I met a lot of so-called architects or experts who seem to take pride in being hard to understand (after all, if they could be understood by mere mortals, they wouldn’t be experts…)

Jim Gray is the exact opposite:

When strangers approached Jim, he had an uncanny ability to assess what they could understand and the level at which to explain the problem. I’ve seen him take the most complex issues and dissect them into a framing that allowed a lay person to understand the gist of the problem and then, separately, dig int the deepest and subtlest nuances with another more versed in the topic.

I really feel priviledged to have met Jim Gray.

~$ uname -a
Darwin macbook.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar  4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386 i386
~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   132  git
    63  cd
    55  jruby
    54  ant
    42  ls
    30  rake
    14  rm
    13  ./bin/runtest
    12  vim
    11  ps

I guess I’m having fun learning Git with jmx4r.

[Meme via Stefan]

Finally, after almost 3 years running the same version of Wordpress for this weblog, I finally upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. The upgrade went smoothly except for a permission problem at the end which is documented in Wordpress forum.

Kudos to Wordpress team for releasing a web application which can upgrade a 3-year old version without any user intervention (almost…) while preserving all my content.

Update (Oct., 1st): A huge thank you to everyone that has mailed, phoned, or linked to me over the past several weeks. I was contacted by great people at companies with very interesting and cool things and it was a tough decision to choose among all these great offers.

But I finally took the decision and starting today I’m working for Red Hat in the JBoss division.

It is now official: I’ve been notified by my employer of my layoff (French R&D office closing down, cost reduction and all).

My resume is available in PDF or Word.

Thank you.