Notification to speakers

The GUADEC 2012 programme committee took a bit more time than first anticipated to evaluate all talk submissions, but it's now all done: this morning, we finally sent the notification to speakers. Thanks to everyone who submitted a talk: it looks like we'll have a great GUADEC :-) Of course, we still need to create the schedule, but that should be trivial, right? (hmm...)

If you submitted a talk and didn't get a positive or negative answer by mail, please first check your spam folder: mail is from guadec-papers, and contains Your talk at GUADEC 2012 in the subject. If you don't find anything, feel free to ping me.

Help organize the lightning talks!

Next step is the call for lightning talks and for BoFs! I guess this will happen in the next few days. I don't think we have anyone in charge of this yet, so if that's something you'd like to help with, just drop us a quick mail on guadec-list and we'll happily give you a I'm fantastic: I'm helping organize GUADEC badge ;-)

Long time no post, I should really have had something up for 3.4.0, and that was of course the plan but on short notice I went to Vientiane, Laos, for $dayjob, the week of the release. Timezone difference, internet connection at the hostel, and a busy schedule made it quite impossible to participate in the release. I didn't stay long but I had a really good time there, thanks again Chanesakhone and Jean Christophe.

Then, back in Brussels I had to spend time on my new apartement, various administrative tasks, arranging things for gas, electricity and water, keeping an eye on the roof where workers had to knock a chimney down, discussing plans with an architect friend, and so on.

Things finally settled down and two releases have now consecutively been done; 3.4.1 brought some important fixes, and improvements in accessibility, translations and documentation; then last week 3.5 opened the path to 3.6. A new adventure begins…

SUSE is hiring people for the Boosters team! This is the team I've been involved in in the last few years, so I thought I'd share with you a few words on this...

The Boosters are working on enabling openSUSE contributors to reach their goals. This can involve technical diving, an artistic vision (not required, obviously, or I woulnd't be in the team ;-)), marketing fun, talking at events, discussing issues, etc.: all skills are welcome in our team, as all skills are welcome and needed in the community! It's really an amazing job where you're simply part of the community and your goal is to help the community move in the right direction. On top of that, I have to mention that the Boosters team is full of great minds, and we're enjoying every day working on something we love!

Dream job, some might say :-)

Are you interested? Check out the details and apply! You can also check the other open positions at SUSE, there might be the one you're looking for... ­Oh, and as we keep hiring, remember to check out the careers page every now and then to see the latest openings!

I’m joining Red Hat on May 2nd, where I’ll be working with the Open Source and Standards team. We’ll be working hard to help all of the projects that Red Hat contributes to kick ass at growing community. I have known several of the team from years gone past, and interviewing for the position was frankly a pleasure.

I’d like to thank Karsten Wade for thinking of me and making the connections back in February. When my future boss described the position and the team to me around then, and asked me whether I might be interested, I couldn’t help myself from saying “I think you just described my dream job”. I know you’re supposed to show restraint and play hard to get in these situations, but I got carried away.

Red Hat is one of the few companies out there that could tempt me away from independent consulting. They have a range of projects covering the server, desktop, middleware, cloud services and virtualisation. They are the top, or one of the top, corporate contributors to dozens of projects I use every day. I love the Red Hat philosophy of working with communities to make great Free and Open Source software.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everything is roses. There are projects within Red Hat (or that Red Hat contributes heavily to) which need to improve their community processes, that could do a better job of promoting themselves, or that have hung on to former business models post-acquisition, at the expense of community growth. And it’ll be our job to fix those issues. It’ll be challenging, it’ll be a slow, incremental process. But I have no doubt that it will be very rewarding. I’m looking forward to it!

GNOME 3.4 has been released since a short while and we didn't find the time to properly celebrate it here in Brussels. It's time to fix this critical mistake and so I'm glad to announce the GNOME Brussels Beer 3.4 party this Thursday. Feel free to join us if you're around and want to share some beers with us.

Most of the time, after an Unity release, I look like that:

Well, ok, not really, but in fact, this is after doing some exercice after an unity release, so it's exactly the same, isn't it?

This particular release didn't follow this rule though. Even if last Friday and Monday were a little bit rushy, we kept merging latest patches on a regular basis to polish the Unity experience on 3D as well as on 2D for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Nothing scary emerged at the last minute. Also, thanks to the community testing (85 results for unity 3D and 7 for unity 2D, you rock guys!), we were able to analyze and fix the most important issues that were raised before releasing, taking our time to upload Unity before the Finale Freeze. The long stability trail we had in Unity for the whole precise development release clearly shows that the new processes in place and the maturity of Unity are paying off.

I'll even tell you a secret, since we started the Unity journey, I've never been so proud and positive about any unity release than I'm on this 5.10. Consequently, this finale version of Unity on this quality-based ubuntu 10.04 LTS sounds like a Perfect timing for a Precise release for the Pangolin.

In addition to that, this latest release will give you a nice extra cookie for configuring the HUD key in the launcher category of the shortcuts in gnome-control-center for both Unity 2D and 3D.

Of course, it's not the complete end of the unity story in precise, we will maybe be able to fix some crashes that a wider testing would potentially give us before the finale release (and we have two small issues in minds we want to fix also before precise is released or in a first SRU), but we are very confident that Unity in 12.04 LTS will be the greatest Unity experience ever! Good job team, thanks to everyone who contributed through bug reports, code, translations, testing… We won't be were we are now without you!

As I write Unity 5.8 is currently building on our official builders and will reach ubuntu precise soon. For this release, a big part of the stack was uploaded (14 components) including unity, unity-2d, nux of course, but also compiz 0.9.7.2 and the lenses (with some ABI breaks in the middle).

What's new on this unity release? Well, you can see the 3d milestone and 2d bug fixes (look also at this one for unity 2d which landed last monday). Keep in mind also that some 3d bug fixes benefits 2d as well! So, a lot of bug unitfixes, but that's not only it! We also got some UI refinements, some very visible, some more hidden, but it's all those little touch which makes the whole experience better!

Do not forget as well that the music lens is now taking back an important role as it supports rhythmbox in addition to banshee!

Also, we won some multimonitors new capabilities in both 2d and 3d. Basically, you can now decide if you want sticky edges between your monitors or not^[1], and decide if you want one launcher (which is then set on your primary monitor), or a launcher on each monitor. Gnome Control Center was patched to add those default options (which only appears on an unity session) back to the main experience. You will now notice as well a more "unityish" preview with a panel and a launcher displayed. Dragging the launcher also enables to change where you want to set it in addition to the combobox (think about clicking on apply to get the choice taken into account!).

We encountered some hiccups but we either fixed them or workarounded other issues for landing the new stack in beta2. We still have an annoying issue which seems to be appearing rarely (only on some configurations). This is logged as critical on this bug. If you encounter this latter, you should choose the unity-2d session for now on your logging screen. Well done to everyone involved on this release!

We are trying as well a new approach to avoid having the current development version of ubuntu uninstallable for a while (because of a long dependency chain in all the related unity components) while everything is building. Basically, we are using experimentally the -proposed pocket and once everything is built, it will be copied to the main archive. Thanks for the release team to push the right buttons to enable this, let's hope this experiment will be successful and that we can generalize it in Q for every unity release and other components (and not only when we are frozen)!

Hope you will enjoy this release and precise beta2, which is just around corner!

This Summer, on July 28th, I’ll be running a 60km mountain trail race in La Plagne in the Alps, the 6000D. And to provide myself with an added incentive, and to give back something to an organisation that has helped my family in the past, I will be raising money for Muscular Dystrophy Ireland in the process.

I’ve got a blog (in both English and French) specifically for the event to cover my training and fundraising activities, and to give people more information about muscular dystrophy and MDI. I’ve posted a first blog post detailing how I got involved in this as well as some information on muscular dystrophy, MDI and the 600D race up there. I have set an ambitious funding goal of €3000 – and you can follow along and donate on mycharity.ie right now!

In the coming months, I hope that all my friends and family will help me raise money and donate to this great cause. I’ll periodically post updates here, but primarily I’ll be keeping people up to date on the Run for MDI blog and the 6000dForMdi twitter feed. Yu can also subscribe to a newsletter if you don’t want to visit the site regularly – I’ll send out occasional email updates with what’s been going on.

Please help spread the word, and consider donating to help this great cause!

Until now it wasn’t possible to test GNOME-shell in a kvm machine, because there was no 3D support, and you ended up using the fall-back mode, which to be honest is no more supported. And as more and more applications where using clutter to do tricky things like animations or advanced widgets like empathy, or totem to name a few, you were not able to use them, as they were crashing in a not 3D capable graphic environment.

Now these times are over, and with the upcoming Fedora 17, it is possible to have the real full gnome-shell experience thanks to the work of Adam Jackson to have all the rendering  done on the software (so the CPU).

On my 4 years old Lenovo T61 laptop (model 7660-RPG with Intel Core 2 Duo T8100), it is a little bit slow, albeit it is usable. This solution has the advantage to let you try the next version of GNOME, without upgrading your distribution (as I use Fedora). During the hackfest, it helped a lot our task to update the documentation, as we were able to spot differences between the latest stable and the next version.

How to test this

So you need to have a kvm capable CPU, and have kvm tools installed (package qemu-kvm) I won’t explain you to check, there are tons of pages explaining that.

Download the Fedora 17 Alpha release Live CD iso here.

Launch the iso instance in kvm:

• for Debian, the command is

kvm -m1024 -hda Fedora-17-Alpha-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso

• For Fedora host, the command is

qemu-kvm -m1024 -hda Fedora-17-Alpha-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso

After a while, depending of the power of your machine your should see the desktop running under the shell.

Today I have a tip to share, especially to the destination of Mike, to whom I praised the power of git-bz during the Documentation Hackfest in Brno last month.

When you work on GNOME, whether to code, translate or write documentation, you have to deal with two common components of the infrastructure, the GIT repository to commit your code and bugzilla, the bug tracking application.

git-bz is a git submodule developed by Owen Taylor that glues git and bugzilla together to lower the overhead of managing patches in bugzilla (open a bug → attach a patch → commit a patch → close a bug).

Set up & Configuration

For this article I assume you already configured git and you have commit access on the GNOME repository, I assume also you use Firefox as default web browser.

To get git-bz, you can put the version downloaded here into a directory defined in your PATH. you can also clone the git-bz repository.

git clone git://git.fishsoup.net/git-bz
ln -s ~/bin/ git-bz/git-bz

Type git-bz in a console and check the command returns the usage message, to make sure the sub-module is found.

Now we need configure to set the default bugzilla tracker and the browser you use

git config --global bz.browser firefox3
git config --global bz.default-tracker gnome
git config --global bz-tracker.gnome.host bugzilla.gnome.org

I use firefox as main browser and specially to access bugzilla.gnome.org so I defined the value bz-browser to firefox3 (which also matches all later ersions), so git-bz will be able to use my browser cookie to post on bugzilla.gnome.org with my credentials. You can also define other browsers like chrome.

The second line defines a tracker short name that will be named “gnome”, and the following line define the hostname of the bugzilla tracker which is bugzilla.gnome.org

Getting Started

We’ll use a really simple example, let’s suppose you want to want to correct a typo in the gedit documentation. So first I need to clone the gedit repository

git clone git.gnome.org/gedit
cd gedit

Now I do the fix in the documentation and I commit it.

git commit -a -m 'Fix a typo in the documentation'

Now to have your bugfix reviewed in bugzilla, normally you would:

• create the formatted patch from the commit, with git format-am
• go to your browser and open a bug in bugzilla against the empathy component
• locate the patch file in the file system
• attach the patch to the bug report.

That’s not a tough job, but it requires a lot of manual operations that can be avoided. With git-bz, you can do all theses operations in one command

git bz file gedit/docs HEAD

it means “file a new bug, against the product gedit and the component docs and attach a patch which is in my latest commit“. Before creating the bug, you’ll be asked to enter a title and a summary to explain what is the defect.

If you check the commit history of your latest commit, you’ll see that git-bz rewrote the message to include the number of the tracker you have opened.

Once your patch is reviewed, the maintainer will ask you to commit your patch. Instead of doing a git push, and then closing the bug in bugzilla, you just have to do

git bz push

which will do the job for you. Simple isn’t it ?

Going further

Testing a patch

Imagine you want to test someone’s patch which is published on bugzilla, git-bz can retrieve it for you

git bz apply gnome:454353

“gnome” is the shorthand for the tracker defined earlier and 454353 is the tracker number. So the patch is now in your branch, so you can test it.

Attaching a patch to an existing bug tracker

Someone has reported a bug in bugzilla, and you want to fix it.
Work on a branch (master or a dedicated one)
Once you’ve made the bug fix, commit it with a message pointing to the bug number as follows (first line is the summary, the second line is the description)

Fix the bug that makes the program useless

Fix the bug 345543

Then do a

git bz attach HEAD

git-bz will pick automatically the bug reference in the commit log and will attach the patch to bugzilla.

More documentation

This post is just an introduction to git-bz and to have the full picture of the power of git-bz you can have a look to the page http://git.fishsoup.net/man/git-bz.html

Of course git-bz is not limited to GNOME bugzilla and should work with any bugzilla instance, with perhaps some tuning.

Have fun.

Since the last report, "mapping" has been the order of the day. We now have support for:


Not as pretty as mocked up, but it's functional. We hope to have the nicer version done for the next development cycle.



The button mapping will show you the actual keys, with translated names, for your device, instead of every possible combination of buttons which end up doing nothing.

We've also made a big number of layout changes and fixes, which means that the main window isn't as awkward as it used to be.

There are a number of features that unfortunately didn't make the cut, mostly due to the lack of support from the X.org drivers. Mode switching currently doesn't advertise the current mode by changing the LED, and the OLEDs that show the bindings for each key stand empty.

Top départ à 10h17, on se voit, dernières marches de l'escalator, on se dira bonjour plus tard, on sprinte ! 10h18, heure officielle de départ du train. 10h19, arrivée sur le quai, il est toujours là, on saute dedans. On souffle.

Lille. Puis Dunkerque. Retrouver et rencontrer des personnes, se perdre dans les habits, tenter mille combinaisons, se maquiller, sortir.

Carnaval.

Lignes. Chahuts. Harengs. Rigodon.

Le lendemain se balader, retraverser la frontière, La Panne, saluer tout le monde, rater un train, courir à Gand, arriver à Bruxelles, passer encore du temps ensemble, attraper le dernier métro.

Moments qui seront chéris. N.

If you expect 'Alt + d' wil only remove the first part 'foo_' of 'foo_bar' with the great python-mode, you can make this change to python-mode.el:

- (modify-syntax-entry ?\_ "w" py-mode-syntax-table)
+ (modify-syntax-entry ?\_ "_" py-mode-syntax-table)


Thank you Ivan.

Update with python-mode v6.0.4, add this line to python-mode-syntax-table (line 153):

(modify-syntax-entry ?\_ "_" table)


Santa Claus uploaded them during the night :-). Among the one of the previous years, you will find the videos of FOSDEM 2012. Many thanks to the GNOME and Mageia guys I met there, I really enjoyed that week-end in a snowy Brussels :-)

Bientôt 2 ans après avoir exprimé ma volonté de créer une extension pour Nautilus afin de pouvoir lancer un découpage ou un assemblage avec GNOME Split, cette extension est enfin arrivée.

Le but de l'extension est de proposer deux nouvelles entrées dans le menu contextuel de Nautilus. Lors d'un clic droit sur un fichier quelconque l'item "Découper le fichier..." apparaît, l'utiliser permet de lancer GNOME Split avec les arguments qui vont biens pour découper le fichier sélectionné. Lors d'un clic droit sur un fichier étant considéré comme la première partie d'un fichier qui a été découpé auparavant, l'entrée "Assembler les fichiers..." apparaît permettant de lancer GNOME Split pour assembler les parties.


Concrètement, cette extension de Nautilus est codée en C, publiée sous GPL version 3 et déjà présente dans le PPA pour la version 11.10 d'Ubuntu.

    ~$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome-split-team/ppa
    ~$ sudo aptitude update
    ~$ sudo aptitude install nautilus-gnome-split

N'étant pas expert en développement d'extensions pour Nautilus toute aide est la bienvenue.
En espérant que cette extension soit utile.

The reasons why I have been silent

I have been silent on my blog during the last two years. There are several reasons to this. I went through a serie of emotionally hard to live events during which I had no time left for Ekiga. I guess it happens to all Free Software authors who are developing during their spare time.

Things are getting better now. I have moved into a new house 2 years ago. I also met Claire a few months after I separated from Jonita and I am finally getting prepared to become a father!

I decided to dedicate some spare time to the Ekiga project again. During the time I was not coding, a few people like Eugen Dedu, Julien Puydt, Yannick Defais, and a few others have made their best to keep the project alive.

A few interviews

Two interviews have been published a while ago.

The first interview has been published by Josette on her Josetteorama blog.
The second interview has been published by Billy Toulas on OSArena. It is available both in English and in Greek.

Ekiga 4.00

Work has started on Ekiga 4.00 a few weeks ago. The release should be ready around March when we have done enough testing.

Stay tuned for more information about this exciting new release!

I arrived in Belgium yesterday.

I'm glad to see people that were at DebConf in Bosnia and Herzgovina. I'll try to assistat many conferences about Java, Debian, GNOME and more if I can. I will also participate to the LibreDinner tomorrow.

Well, see you at FOSDEM 2012!

After seeing, this article about "How secure is Paypal for eBay sellers" in this morning's Guardian, I'll share my personal experience with you.

In October, I sold my first generation MacBook Air on eBay, and got a buyer within a day for the £500 "Buy It Now" price. "Buy It Now" requires using Paypal, and the £500 (minus commission) appeared in my Paypal account¹. After a bit of to and fro, the buyer got in contact, and suggested that he come and pick it up. Saving about £30 of shipping, and sorting out the sale faster, strike me as good ideas.

The "buyer" said he couldn't come, sent one of his "employees". A very courteous man came to pick the laptop. In hindsight, he seemed slightly uncomfortable, and looked like he was very happy to see how easy it was going to be.

The spooky thing is that within 40 minutes -- note, not 3 hours, not a day after, not the day before) -- within 40 minutes of the laptop getting picked up, the holder of the eBay and Paypal accounts submitted an "unauthorised account activity claim", leading to "payment reversal" (me owing £500 to Paypal²).

During my call to eBay's customer support, I was told that "I had nothing to worry about" (I'm guessing that would be the case as long as I repaid the £500). Paypal promptly sent a mail mentioning they needed my help, but with very little possibilities from my side ("no courier tracking number? Give us the money now").

Surrey Police failed to find the culprits, with the 2 mobile numbers associated with the con only being pay-as-you-go phones (topped up in a little convenience store in North London that only keeps a day's worth of CCTV).

So my advices:

• If you sell anything via eBay using Paypal, send it recorded, and keep the receipt.
• If you bought a MacBook Air first generation with the serial W88500DJ12G, it's stolen, send me an e-mail.

And as opposed to Mssrs Lodge and Reakes, Paypal didn't reimburse me anything, and I'm £500 out of pocket.

¹: I'll pass you the details on eBay referring to a closed Paypal account that meant I got conned two days later than the "buyers" anticipated.
²: On an account that was already closed, see ¹.

Update: Added mention of eBay's ludicrously bad customer service.

FOSDEM 2012

My last FOSDEM participation was in 2004, and I always keep in mind many good moments with my French and Belgian GNOME's Friends !

Archives

So I'm totally excited to meet them again in 2012 ... :)

Cela fait un peu plus de deux ans que je me suis mis au jeu de rôle Star Wars, un peu par hasard. En cherchant des idées de sorties sur le net, je me suis rendu compte qu'un maître de jeu (celui qui anime les parties de jeu de rôle) habitait à une rue de chez moi. Et bon, il fallait bien que je complète la panoplie du Geek :-p. Depuis le virus m'a contaminé...

Dans un jeu de rôle, pour représenter les différentes caractéristiques de son personnage, on utilise une feuille de personnage. Sur cette fiche sont regroupés ses attributs (dans Star Wars: dextérité, savoir, mécanique, perception, vigueur, technique) et les compétences qui découlent de ces attributs. Par exemple, la compétence "Sabre Laser" qui permet de manier un sabre laser est une compétence de dextérité.

J'ai utilisé plusieurs fiches en 2 ans. J'ai commencé avec une photocopie du modèle de personnage que j'avais choisi, un "Jedi Raté". Ce modèle est fourni avec le livre de règles. J'ai ensuite évolué vers celui de Robin Defives (merci à lui) que vous pouvez trouver sur scenariotheque.org. Il a mis deux fiches à disposition : une fiche de personnage, une pour un vaisseau (utile pour incarner un pilote).

Étant gêné par quelques limitations, j'ai il y a quelques temps commencé à faire évoluer ma fiche de personnage. J'ai par exemple modifié la fiche pour en faciliter la lecture, notamment en optant pour un meilleur alignement des différentes zones. J'ai aussi regroupé les zones qui avaient un lien, comme celles utilisée lorsque l'on est touché lors d'un combat: "vigueur" et "protection" (pour vérifier si le coup/tir reçu blesse notre personnage), et "santé", à modifier lorsque l'on est blessé.

Feuille de personnage Star Wars D6 (pdf)

Incarnant un "Jedi raté", je trouvais aussi les zones permettant d'indiquer les pouvoirs de la Force du personnage vraiment trop limitées. J'ai donc opté pour une page à part (ce qui m'a permis de me perfectionner dans l'utilisation d' Inkscape par une nuit d'insomnie). La présentation en diagramme plutôt qu'en texte permet de repérer plus facilement les dépendances entre chaque pouvoir, et de quelle capacité de la Force elles dépendent (Contrôle, Sens, Altération). Les pouvoirs représentés sont ceux de la seconde édition:

Diagramme des pouvoirs de la Force (pdf)

Il y a également la fiche des caractéristiques du vaisseau que vous pilotez. N'ayant pas orienté (pour l'instant) mon personnage vers le pilotage, je n'ai pas modifié celle de Robin:

Feuille de vaisseau Star Wars D6 (pdf)

Selon le personnage que vous incarnez (sensible ou non à la Force, pilote ou non) vous pourrez vous faire une fiche recto-verso sur mesure avec un site de fusion de PDF comme PDF Merger. Bonnes aventures ;-) !

Despite what some stats may say, my biggest contribution to GNOME is not in bugs or code but in the organization of beer related events!

So I'm pleased to announce that, like each year, we'll have a GNOME Beer party on the Saturday night of FOSDEM (4th Feb). People seemed happy of the location of last year, so we decided to stay at "La Bécasse" in the city center. Feel free to add yourself to the wiki if you are planning to attend.

See you at FOSDEM!

From December 19 to December 28 zarb.org main server was down. This server host(s|ed) many things including this blog, Mageia website, PLF, ... The reason why it took so long is that the server is in the south of France, kindly hosted by Lost Oasis and we have no one nearby to physically access it, and in this case we had lost our main raid array.

This server (kindly donated by HP almost 10 years ago) has a remote administration card (P1218A) but it is not really usable for anything except rebooting the machine. The remote console more or less works with some of the java versions from sun, but most of the time it only displays the top third of the screen, until next refresh when it goes black, and misses many keystrokes. This made it unsuitable for accessing the RAID BIOS and finding the problem.

After about a week, for some unknown reason (I could have done it many times over the last 10 years), I thought of looking at the communications between the applet and the management card. Everything was clear text and very simple. The next days I wrote a ruby-gtk client for the card, accessed the BIOS, found that the 4 disks had been marked has failed without errors and were correctly syncronized, and put them back online.

Login
The first (and longest) part was to find how to login and get the session cookie. The exchange looks like:
GET /cgi/challenge HTTP/1.1
<?xml version='1.0'?><?RMCXML version='1.0'?><RMCLOGIN><CHALLENGE>DJRhNVfOWfuB8fS/6PFazg==</CHALLENGE><RC>0x0</RC></RMCLOGIN>
GET /cgi/login?user=FOO&hash=UtPRDzFS36s0jJBgTmtS4JDR HTTP/1.1

Challenge was obviously 16 bytes of data base64 encoded. Response was called hash and was 18 bytes whatever the password is. Given that it was written more than 10 years ago, I supposed it would be md5, even if it only gives 16 bytes.

I then wrote a small ruby application trying various combinations (md5(challenge + password), md5(xor(callenge,password)), xor(challenge,md5(password)), ...) and found that md5(xor(challenge,md5(password))) was giving me the correct first 16 bytes.

I then used an online CRC calculator to find that the remaining 2 bytes are "CRC-CCITT (XModem)".

Console
The other big part was the remote console.

Getting the current screen content is quite easy, it's a GET on /cgi/scrtxtdump (with an optional force=1 parameter).

In my initial tests there was 0x10 between each character so I just filtered them out. I found later that it actually gives attributes for the character (bold, color, ...) and now support the ones I have seen so far.

Sending a keypress is quite easy too, it's a POST to /cgi/bin with data being <RMCSEQ><REQ CMD="keybsend"><KEYS>space separated scancodes</KEYS></REQ></RMCSEQ>.

The result

The code is now online, still very ugly, but hopeful helpful :)

Whoops: water resilient Linux

I forgot my motorola android phone in my pocket while sitting in the hot spring pool yesterday, I quickly realized
though, rushed it out of the water, disassembled, removed the battery in a hurry. Funilly the display did stay on as "normal" but the system didn't like this. Dried it and kept the pieces overnight on the UPS to dry out thoroughly, and replugged SIM and battery this morning ... working :-) . Except for that incident the hot spring trip was great, and Cheng definitely loves playing in the water !

libxml2

In the category of stable software, libxml2 is relatively quiet though I need to do a release incorporating various XPath bugs. I'm quite slow at the maintenance those days (which I think is fine considering the project is really in maintenance mode), but I should get that release out ! Someone kick me :-)

libvirt

In contrast libvirt development is *not* slowing down as I was expected. We still roll a release a month, each incorporating 300+ patches, and the trend is that the patch number is still increasing, leading to more volume on-list. I was naively thinking that since most APIs were done, the volume would start to decrease around one year ago, but nope, people still want more features, better hypervisors support, etc... and that's just fine :-)

libstoragemngt

One of the new library project I am looking at now is libStorageMgmt the goal is to provide management APIs for those external storages arrays like SANs. Right know they each have their own specific ways to manage partitionning, provisionning, etc... and we hope to be able to improve that, but it will take a while. The project is starting and currently looking at design options, if that field interrest you, get on the list and provide some feedback, it may be more useful to you when it gets usable :-)

The GNOME Montréal Summit was held a month ago now, and not only was it lots of fun, but also a very productive time. Marina held a session about the outreach in GNOME, and we spent time discussing different ways to improve welcoming and attracting people in GNOME. Let me share some of the points we raised, supplemented by my own personnal opinions, that do not reflect those of my employer, when I’ll have a job.

A warm welcome

There has been a lot of nice work done structuring and cleaning up GNOME Love page. We now have a list of people newcomers can contact if they are interested in a particular project. Feel free to add your name and project to the list, the more entry points we get, the better for them!

I tend to think there is still a bit too much content on the GNOME Love page, maybe we could use more pretty diagrams (platform overview, ways to get involved) to keep the excitement growing and to reduce the amount of text we have right now (GUI tutorials, books about GNOME,  tips & tricks). Feedback appreciated!

Start small

We tend to think of contributions as patches and a certain amount of code added in a project. Howeverit’s not easy at all for newcomers to just pop in and work on a patch, especially in GNOME where most software follows strict rules (as in coding style, GObject API style, etc.). And since GNOME maintains (again, for the most part) a very high quality in its code backed by many hackers, whether they’re part of a company or independent contributors, it makes the landing of a patch even tougher.

Which is why we should encourage everyone who wants to get involved to work on small tasks, would it be fixing a string typo, rewording or marking plural forms for translation. Working on manageable changes ensures that the patches are completed and landing these patches builds confidence to work on bigger patches. Having your name in the commit log is a great reward, that encourages sticking around and digging for more.

Advertise early, advertise often

If we want to get loads of people coming toward GNOME, we should definitely talk more and spread the word about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (GOPW) and the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) earlier.

Google doesn’t announce the program very far in advance and approved organizations are only published three weeks before the application deadline, but we should encourage students to get involved in GNOME early and keep an eye out for such announcements. Having a list of mentors who can help newcomers anytime throughout the year and having that list included on the Google Summer of Code wiki page of organizations that provide year-round informal mentorship should help attract students to GNOME.

On our side, we could definitely gather ideas and promote the programs earlier. Don’t have exact dates in head, but our KDE fellows promote the Summer of Code early March if not before. Not only will that help better spreading the word, but students might get involved earlier, and get to know the tools/community before the actual program.

Communication is key to success

We have to get better at communicating with interns, and make sure they get the help and feedback they need. We have different channels of communication in GNOME, mainly IRC and mailing lists. Both are a bit intimidating to the newcomer (I still proceed with extreme care when I use them), so it would be good to have a short tutorial about the main mailing lists around, how to connect on IRC and what to expect out of it.

Always two there are, no more, no less

In order to increase the chances of success for the interns, we need good mentors. Most people underestimate what it takes to be a good mentor: being nice, supportive, competent, enthusiastic. You have to remember you’re helping someone to land in the big GNOME land without too much hassle, so consider it carefully. I encourage you to read this very informative blog post if you’re thinking about mentoring a student.

The Summer of Code administrators at GNOME could perhaps keep an eye on mentors as well as students, not with weekly reports but just by poking them from time to time and making sure everything is going well.

Show me the way

To help students set up their workflow, it would be great to have full-length screen-casts demonstrating how to fix a bug in GNOME, starting on the Bugzilla page and finishing on the same page when attaching the final patch. This means going through cloning the module with Git, using grep to find the faulty line, editing the code, using Git to look at the diff and format the final patch. All this in one video would really help connect the parts and suggest a way to work for students.

GNOME Love bug drive

Please consider attaching the gnome-love keyword when you file or triage a bug that is easy to fix. A selection of current GNOME Love bugs is essential to help newcomers figure out how they can start contributing.

Good GNOME Love bugs are trivial or straight forward bugs that everyone agrees on, e.g. paper cut bugs or corner cases. It’s helpful to specify the file or files that will need to be modified and any reference code that does something similar in the bug. Even most trivial bugs are suitable candidates, because in the end, fixing a GNOME Love bug is as much about learning the process, as about the fix itself!

Get involved

If you want to help us gather more people around GNOME and help them find their spot in our community, make sure to suscribe to the outreach-list mailing list.

Thanks for reading!

And thanks to Marina and Karen for reviewing this post!

Due to unintentional behavior breakage in the newest versions of GUPnP and GSSDP, the UPnP NAT traversal in all VoIP applications that use Farsight2 is currently broken. This includes Empathy, Pidgin, aMSN, etc. I advise distributors to just stay with the older GUPnP 0.16 (and GSSDP 0.10) releases until this is sorted out. For those who care, the details are on bugzilla.

Update: I’ve released GUPnP-IGD 0.2.1 that works around these problems.

After 5 months with GNOME 3.0, I'm really happy with the experience. At the end of work day,
my mind is no more exhausted of windows placement fighting and application finding.

GNOME 3.0 is really stable, except with the Open Source driver on my Radeon 5870 (4 crashes in 2 months).

I really like the behavior of dual-head where the secondary screen has only one virtual screen.
For me, there are just 3 annoying points:

• Ctrl + Del to remove a file in Nautilus, may be it's a Fedora settings but this change is just @!# I've already a Trash to undo my mistakes (http://www.khattam.info/howto-enable-delete-key-in-nautilus-3-fedora-15-2011-06-01.html)
• Alt key to shutdown, no I don't want to waste energy for days and my PC boots quickly.
• only vertical virtual screens, I found a bit painful to move down two screens when the screen is reachable with one move with a 2x2 layout but I understand this layout doesn't fit well with the GNOME 3 design.

To have a good experience with GNOME 3, I use:

• Windows key + type to launch everything
• Ctrl + Shift + Alt + arrows to move the application between the virtual screen
• Ctrl + click in the launcher when I really want a new instance (the default behavior is perfect)
• snap à la Windows 7 is great
• Alt + Tab then the arrow keys to select an app

Don't forget to read https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet or the Help (System key + 'Help').

It's not specific to GNOME 3 but you can change the volume when your mouse is over the applet (don't click, think hover) and a mouse scroll.
With GTK+, do you know you can reach the end of scrolled area with a left click on the arrow and a specific position by middle click?

I'm impressed by the new features of GNOME 3.2 and I'm waiting for Fedora 17 to enjoy it!

Hi all,

I just push a new GNOME 3.0 live image labelled as 1.5.0 (yes, I forgot to push 1.4.0 after I built it, so we are at 1.5.0 now ;)

No big changes, it is based on GNOME 3.0.2 + some additional fixes.

As always, it can be downloaded from http://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/

For people interested, here are some download hits (it doesn't include SUSE Studio appliance nor promo dvd which is also available from GNOME ftp) :

on GNOME 3.0 release day : 4526 hits
April :  145904 hits
May : 46551 hits
June : 24747 hits
July : 23611 hits
August (from 1 to 15) : 13063 hits

Enjoy !

In case you are in the Paris area and don't know already, there is a a GNU Hackers Meeting event being held from Thursday 25th to Sunday 28th August, 2011 at IRILL If you are a GNU user, enthusiast, or contributor of any kind, feel free to come. I guess you can still drop an email to ghm-registration@gnu.org.

For folks around on Wednesday (yeah, that's tomorrow), we are having a dinner around 8 PM at the Mussuwam, a Senegalese restaurant in Paris, near Place d'Italie. When you get there, just give them the secret password (which is 'GNU') and they'll show you were the rest of the crowd sits. Be sure to keep that password secret though. No one else should be in the know.

Happy hacking and I hope to see you guys there.

This is just as a reminder for myself, as I keep forgetting about this stuff.

If like me you run a server with services that depends on SSL and need to install a certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) like CACert, this might be interesting to you as well.

On Red Hat based systems the CA certificate for SSL is usually installed in the /etc/pki/tls/certs directory. The certificate is basically just dropped there in a file which name is its hash – built with the openssl program.

I wrote the shell scriptlet http://dodji.seketeli.net/install-ca-cert.txt. Download it, save it as install-ca-cert.sh and turn it into an executable.

Then, assuming your certificate is in a file named your-ca.crt, install it by doing:

sudo ./install-ca-cert.sh ./your-ca.crt

Voila. I don't know how that works on other distributions, though.

Update

A wise person taught me about the c_rehash utility from openssl, that does the same thing as my dirty script above. To use it, you need to install the openssl-perl package. Thank you, Daniël.

Good news for the people who want to access the Desktop Summit Schedule via their smartphone !

I just made it available the xml/pentabarf format, which in practice mean you can use import it directly in applications such as sojourner (for n900) and giggity (for android)

If you have an N900 this is directly implemented in wjt's excellent sojourner (thank afranke for the icon), so you just need to install or update sojourner and it will automatically have the schedule for the desktop summit.

For giggity and others applications (anyone know a proper application for IPhone?) you just need to input the url

I will try to keep the schedule up to date during the summit in case they are modifications (just need some time to wire the website scrapper script to cron)

Again thanks to afranke, wjt and the desktop summit organizers for their help.

Obviously, I'm going to desktop summit too ! see you all this weekend !

Update: There was an error with the favourite not being saved in sojourner once you relaunched the application, it has now been fixed in the xml but unfortunately sojourner don't update it correctly so you need to remove sojourner cache in .config/sojourner/conference/desktopsummit2011 to fix it.

Just like everyone else on Planet GNOME,

You are all cordially invited to my talk: Improving the quality of video calls on the Free Desktop. I will try to explain why Skype’s video calls look so much better than ours and what I’ve been doing to fix it, and how there is much more to do.

Now that WebRTC and RTCWeb are coming, it is more critical than ever that we can have good quality video calls in the GNOME platform so we can stay relevant.

I’d also like to thank my employer, Collabora, for once again sponsoring my trip. And don’t forget the Collabora party on Tuesday night!

I've cooked with other people from #gnomefr channel a Google Map with the various useful addresses for Desktop Summit 2011.

It is available here, you can also get KML file or import this map in your favorite software (for Android users, I suggest using Locus Free which can download offline OpenStreetMap data and merge our map on it, no roaming data needed !).

Next week, I’ll head to Strasbourg for Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre 2011. On monday morning, I’ll be giving my Debian Packaging Tutorial for the second time. Let’s hope it goes well and I can recruit some future DDs!

Then, at the end of July, I’ll attend Debconf again. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to participate in Debcamp this year, but I look forward to a full week of talks and exciting discussions. There, I’ll be chairing two sessions about Ruby in Debian and Quality Assurance.

Almost 9 months ago, Mageia was forked out of Mandriva by many former Mandriva employees and contributors. At that time it did not exist yet, everything had to be done, but we are now happy to announce that it's ready!

The first technical work was to get a build system, and the result is pretty nice. With only 2 build hosts it is faster and more reliable than Mandriva's one, while reusing most of the code. The various improvements could have been done at Mandriva but having to deploy a new one (with less resources) is a good time to simplify the architecture and the code.

Then the massive work: importing rpm packages, fixing them as quite a few did not build, and cleaning them. The result is 7389 source packages (Mandriva has 12390, Fedora has 10283) and mageia 2 will probably have much more as only packages needed/requested by packagers and early testers were included.

More than the number of packages, the interesting data is that they all got built recently, and there are 0 broken dependencies or orphan binary packages! For comparaison Mandriva currently has 4059 src.rpm older than 6 months, 1065 binary packages without matching source, 4756 binary packages with broken dependencies.

Of course this could have bben done inside Mandriva again, but when you see a list of 4756 problems, and spend a week-end fixing 100, the list still look the same size. If you only have a few to fix then you can spend an hour fixing everything! Growing from a sane base is much better and easier than trying to cleanup the huge mess.

Given the amount of work to get everything in place, don't expect much bleeding edge stuff in version 1. No GNOME3, no switch to systemd, ... the goal was to have all the infrastructure and teams setup, and have a strong basis for a great version 2, and I think the result is quite nice!

All the teams did a great job, and thanks to everyone Mageia 1 is now out!

It is available as DVD, LiveCD or dual-arch CD as Mandriva used to be. Enjoy!

Inspired by my friend Bram's script Mobify which convert a webpage to a Kindle Ebook, I decided to made my own version in Python.

I used to keep a ton of open tabs in Firefox as a list of articles to read later. This script allowed me to transform all of them into kindle ebooks and read them later at my ease in public transportation, instead of always keeping them around and never getting the time to read them. As a result I got a lot more reading done.

The general mechanism of this script is to download the page and all its affiliated images, pass it to decruft (a python implementation of the readability algorithm to extract the content of a webpage) and convert it with kindlegen. The nicest improvement over Bram's script is that it doesn't create any files in the current directory but instead write everything in the /tmp directory and move the generated book in a common directory. It also automatically determine the name of the file.

The source code is available on GitHub

It’s been a long time since I blogged about Libgda (and for the matter since I blogged at all!). Here is a quick outline on what has been going on regarding Libgda for the past few months:

• Libgda’s latest version is now 4.2.4
• many bugs have been corrected and it’s now very stable
• the documentation is now faily exhaustive and includes a lot of examples
• a GTK3 branch is maintained, it contains all the modifications to make Libgda work in the GTK3 environment
• the GdaBrowser and GdaSql tools have had a lot of work and are now both mature and stable
• using the NSIS tool, I’ve made available a new Windows installer for the GdaBrowser and associated tools, available at http://www.gnome.org/~vivien/GdaBrowserSetup.exe. It’s only available in English and French, please test it and report any error.

In the next months, I’ll work on polishing even more the GdaBrowser tool which I use on a daily basis (and of course correct bugs).

Ouch, it seems I didn't wrote any blog entry for nearly 2 years, since our wedding. Well I would say that I have been fairly busy :-) !

Baby Cheng 程

Our son is born end of last august, so obviously this tends to keep the parents busy, but it's such a pleasure too !

libvirt project

this has been a wild ride ! The project has grown a lot, in community and contributor size, as well as code and features during the last couple of years. It acquired support for most well known virtualization hypervisors (QEmu/KVM, Xen, ESX, VitualBox, ...) the only notable exception being Microsoft Hyper-V I think. Our latest release is 0.8.0 so we are not at 1.0 yet, but we are really getting closer, for example this release now adds snapshotting support which was a big feature request.

About updates to Fedora

There was a discussion last month about forbidding direct built to the stable branches, and I really think this makes sense, except for security erratas, one really should not push directly an updated build onto the users without some testing. But on the other hand we entered beta on Fedora 13 and apparently it's too late to push libvirt latest release and features, meaning users who don't try to update either via the virt-preview special repository or by rebuilding from the source rpm, will see libvirt features when Fedora 14 is being released i.e around the end of the year. I see people bouncing between both extreme of the features vs. stability tradeoff, and I wonder if there isn't a better way than building absolute rules. Maybe a general profile per machine where the user indicates whether he want updates, just bug fixes or just security errata, and let him do the picking. This would require some policy from package builders, and some changes at the repo level I guess, but having the user ultimately in control might be worth it.

I have been toying with webkit lately, and even managed to do some pretty things with it. As a consequence, I haven’t worked that much on ekiga, but perhaps some of my experiments will turn into something interesting there. I have an experimental branch with a less than fifty lines patch… I’m still trying to find a way to do more with less code : I want to do as little GObject-inheritance as possible!

That little programming was done while studying class field theory, which is pretty nice on the high-level principles and somewhat awful on the more technical aspects. I also read again some old articles on modular forms, but I can’t say that was “studying” : since it was one of the main objects of my Ph.D, that came back pretty smoothly…

I found a few minutes to enter a brick-and-mortar shop and have a look at the ebook readers on display. There was only *one* of them : the sony PRS-600. I was pretty unimpressed : the display was too dark (because it was a touch screen?), but that wasn’t the worse deal breaker. I inserted an SD card where I had put a sample of the type of documents I read : they showed up as a flat list (pain #1), and not all of them (no djvu) (pain #2) and finally, one of them showed up too small… and ended up fully unreadable when I tried to zoom (pain #3). I guess that settles the question I had on whether my next techno-tool would be a netbook or an ebook reader… That probably means I’ll look more seriously into fixing the last bug I reported on evince (internal bookmarks in documents).

Bonjour à tous,

je vous délaisse depuis quelques temps. Est-ce le temps qui fait cela, une période dans ma vie ou simplement autre chose, je n'en ai pas la moindre idée.

Je tenais juste à vous annoncer que je vais quitter mon employeur actuel qui est un Agence Gouvernementale pour chercher de l'expérience dans le secteur privé. En effet, je suis de plus en plus déçu par l'Administration.

Depuis quelques années, comme vous le savez, je me passionne pour la sécurité de l'Information. Ceci ajouté à une formation en Management de la Sécurité de l'Information, j'ai l'ambition de faire valoir mes expériences auprès d'un employeur (à définir) qui pourrait me permettre de les améliorer tout en lui faisant bénéficier de mes compétences.

Si vous avez de bonnes adresses, je suis preneur évidemment. ^^

With the beginning of the year comes new releases of Libgda:

• version 4.0.6 which contains corrections for the stable branch
• version 4.1.4, a beta version for the upcoming 4.2 version

The 4.1.4′s API is now considered stable and except for minor corrections should not be modified anymore.

This new version also includes a new database adaptator (provider) to connect to databases through a web server (which of course needs to be configured for that purpose) as illustrated by the followin diagram:

The database being accessed by the web server can be any type supported by the PEAR::MDB2 module.

The GdaBrowser application now supports defining presentation preferences for each table’s column, which are used when data from a table’s column need to be displayed:

The UI extension now supports improved custom layout, described through a simple XML syntax, as shown in the following screenshot of the gdaui-demo-4.0 program:

For more information, please visit the http://www.gnome-db.org web site.

For the third year in a row, I’ll be flying to Brussels, Belgium next month to attend the XMPP Summit/FOSDEM combo. I didn’t look through the FOSDEM schedule yet but when it comes to XMPP, I’m looking forward to some discussions on Jingle Nodes and Publish-Subscribe. I’ve been working more and more with XMPP in the past months, especially hacking on ejabberd, and attending is a good motivation to get some of my Jingle Nodes related code shaped up on time. See you there!

Le hacker est un passionné d'informatique, souvent très doué, dont les seuls objectifs sont de "bricoler" programmes et matériels (software et hardware) afin d'obtenir des résultats de qualité pour lui-même, pour l'évolution des technologies et pour la reconnaissance de ses pairs.

Les conventions de hackers sont des rassemblements où ces férus d'informatique se rencontrent, discutent et comparent leurs travaux.

Depuis de nombreuses années, la tendance est de confondre à tort le hacker avec le cracker, dont les buts ne sont pas toujours légaux.

Or, on ne le répétera jamais assez, les objectifs du hacker sont louables et contribuent de manière active aux progrès informatiques et aux outils que nous utilisons quotidiennement.

I have been a little stuck for some weeks : a new year started (no, that post hasn’t been stuck since january — scholar year start in september) and I have students to tend to. As I have the habit to say : good students bring work because you have to push them high, and bad students bring work because you have to push them from low! Either way, it has been keeping me pretty busy.

Still, I found the time to read some more maths, but got lost on something quite unrelated to my main objective : I just read about number theory and the ideas behind the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (Taylor and Wiles’ theorem now). That was supposed to be my second target! Oh, well, I’ll just try to hit my first target now (Deligne’s proof of the Weil conjectures). And then go back to FLT for a new and deeper reading.

I only played a little with ekiga’s code — mostly removing dead code. Not much : low motivation.

I just released the first version of gwt-strophe, GWT bindings for the Strophe XMPP library. Nothing much to say else than it is pretty young, with all that can imply. The project is hosted at https://launchpad.net/gwt-strophe

So, I’m back from the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre, which took place in Nantes this year. It was great to see all those people from the french Free Software community again, and I look forward to seeing them again next year in Bordeaux (too bad the Toulouse bid wasn’t chosen).

The Debian booth, mainly organized by Xavier Oswald and Aurélien Couderc, with help from Raphaël, Roland and others (but not me!), got a lot of visits, and Debian’s popularity is high in the community (probably because RMLL is mostly for über-geeks, and Debian’s market share is still very high in this sub-community).

I spent quite a lot of time with the Ubuntu-FR crew, which I hadn’t met before. They do an awesome work on getting new people to use Linux (providing great docs and support), and do very well (much better than in the past) at giving a good global picture of the Free Software world (Linux != Ubuntu, other projects do exist and play a very large role in Ubuntu’s success, etc). It’s great to see Free Software’s promotion in France being in such good hands. (Full disclosure: I got a free mug (recycled plastic) with my Ubuntu-FR T-shirt, which might affect my judgement).

I gave two talks, on two topics I wanted to talk about for some time. First one was about the interactions between users, distributions and upstream projects, with a focus on Ubuntu’s development model and relationships with Debian and upstream projects. Second one was about voting methods, and Condorcet in particular. If you attended one of those talks, feedback (good or bad) is welcomed (either in comments or by mail). Slides are also available (in french):

• L’écosystème du Libre: interactions entre projets amonts, distributions et utilisateurs – l’exemple de Debian et Ubuntu
• Méthodes de vote: Comment consulter un groupe de personnes sans fausser le résultat ?

On a more general note, I still don’t understand why the “Mondiales” in RMLL’s title isn’t being dropped or replaced by “Francophones“. Seeing the organization congratulate themselves because 30% of the talks were in english was quite funny, since in most cases, the english part of the talk was “Is there someone not understanding french? no? OK, let’s go on in french.“, and all the announcements were made in french only. Seriously, RMLL is a great (probably the best) french-speaking community event. But it’s not FOSDEM: different goals, different people. Instead of trying (and failing) to make it an international event, it would be much better to focus on making it a better french-speaking event, for example by getting more french-speaking developers to come and talk (you see at least 5 times more french-speaking developers in FOSDEM than in RMLL).

I’m now back in Lyon for two days, before leaving to Montreal Linux Symposium, then coming back to Lyon for three days, then Debconf from 23rd to 31st, and then moving to Nancy, where I will start as an assistant professor in september (a permanent (tenured) position).

Dear Lennart,

You should probably know that typing the correct URL would work better for cloning a bzr branch (yes a branch, not a repository).

This is what I get when I try to feed git a random invalid URL:

$ git clone git://github.com/idontexist
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/asabil/Desktop/idontexist/.git/
fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got ‘
*********’

No matching repositories found.

*********’

Now is probably the time to stop this non constructive “my DVCS is better than yours”, and focus on writing code and fixing bugs.

The first beta of Ekiga 3.1.0 is now available on GNOME FTP.

Please note that I started the development of Ekiga 9 years ago.

Here is the list of changes :

• Added support for the G.722 audio codec: G.722 is a 16 kHz wideband audio codec advertised as HD Voice by the famous Polycom. It is a great boost in quality and interoperability.
• Added support for the CELT ultral-low delay audio codec: CELT delivers high quality audio at 32 kHz or 48 kHz, allowing to transmit music in high quality, with low delay and low bitrate.
• Added support for SIP dialog-info notifications: they allow displaying notifications of incoming calls in the roster. With software like kamailio or Asterisk, it allows being informed of incoming calls reaching your colleagues.
• Largely improved LDAP support: the OpenLDAP guys contributed several patches to provide state-of-the-art LDAP support in the Ekiga address book. The new code even supports authentication.
• Added support to disable STUN detection: some routers do not need it anymore as they implement NAT traversal for SIP.
• Killed the gconf_test_age test: when GConf was released, Ekiga was among the first to adopt it. That annoying ‘gconf error’ was a relique of those early times.
• More efficient memory handling using gmref_ptr.
• Better handling of multiple network interfaces with dynamic addition and removal.
• libgnome is not required anymore when using GTK+ 2.14.
• Many code cleanups, new GObjects, …

The Ekiga developers team is also working on interesting new features that should be available after the 3.2 release :

• XCAP support & Resource List support: It allows storing the contacts list on the Ekiga.net server.
• GStreamer audio and video capture support.

Stay tuned for more news!

Thanks to all contributors and welcome to Eugen Dedu, our new release manager!

On September I finish my studies of computer science, so I start to search a job. I really enjoyed my current job at Collabora maintaining Empathy, I learned lots of things about the Free Software world and I would like to keep working on free software related projects if possible. My CV is available online here.

Do you guys know any company around the free software and GNOME looking for new employees? You can contact me by email to xclaesse@gmail.com

On peut, au regard des concepts développés par Slavoj Zizek dans "La Parallaxe", tenter une nouvelle interprétation, plus fondamentale, des aventures de Suzumiya Haruhi.

La mélancolie de Suzumiya Haruhi est due au sentiment de malaise créé par l'incomplétude fondamentale qui nous caractérise tous. Haruhi part donc à la recherche du grand Autre, réponse censée venir combler ce vide, ici fétichisé dans les extra-terrestres, extra-lucides et voyageurs dans le temps. Ce comportement peut être vu comme semblable à ceux des individus cherchant la réponse à leur malaise constitutif dans la religion, voir, et nous y reviendrons, dans la philosophie et la politique.

Cependant, la réalité du monde de Haruhi est qu'il n'existe pas de grand Autre, aucun extra-ordinaire comblant les vides ennuyeux de la réalité, aucun personnage tirant les ficelles dans l'ombre. Ou plutôt, de façon plus importante, que ce grand Autre est Haruhi elle-même, ce qui constitue la réponse fondamentale : c'est bien elle-même qu'elle cherche en voulant résoudre cette incomplétude.

Selon ces hypothèses, le récit de ses aventures peut donc ultimement être vu comme celui de la recherche de la Vérité par les humains, les réflexions autour de son comportement précisant de façon très intéressantes plusieurs problématiques liées à ce processus.

L'interprétation de la fin de la série, où Haruhi semble trouver son bonheur avec Kyon, reste toujours problématique. Il n'existe pas de grand Autre, le manque ne peut donc pas être réellement comblé par quelque chose d'extérieur, donc pas par quelque chose qui soit matérialisé dans un fétiche, même humain, comme Kyon. Cependant Kyon n'est pas non plus quelque chose d'extérieur, puisqu'il est, comme tous les objets du monde de Haruhi, un produit de son imagination. Il s'agirait donc d'une pure matérialisation à figure humaine de la véritable réponse à son manque, ce qui ferait de Kyon une partie de Haruhi et non un personnage distinct. On peut donc avec un peu d'audace avancer que Kyon et Haruhi ne sont qu'un, qu'il est réellement sa moitié, ce qui n'est pas sans rappeler tout en lui redonnant une piquante nouvelle perspective le "happy end" chrétien par excellence. Malgré tout, le fait que Haruhi ne le reconnaisse pas comme tel, puisqu'ils sont clairement toujours deux personnes distinctes, laisse supposer que le problème n'est pas réglé.

On ne reconnaît habituellement qu'une religion pose problème que lorsqu'elle constitue un risque potentiel pour le système capitaliste libéral dans lequel nous vivons. De fait, ces religions ont donc on potentiel subversif.

C'est à cause de celui-ci que les nombreux individus touchés de plein fouet par le malaise créé par cette société se tournent en nombre de plus en plus important vers ce type de communautés religieuses.

Or, qu'est-ce que le processus de laïcisation tel que nous l'entendons dans la bouche des libéraux, sinon le fait de rendre les religions aptes à rentrer dans le cadre libéral, ou, à défaut, de marginaliser et stigmatiser celles qui ne le feraient pas, leur retirant ainsi tout aspect nocif pour lui ?

Ce processus peut donc être vu comme la condition sine qua non du fonctionnement de l'opium du peuple comme instrument des puissances qui font l'ordre social, même si la résurgence des intégrismes en période de crise nous montre qu'il est de toute façon voué à l'échec.

L'attitude ambivalente de la laïcité promue par la droite, qui dit oui à, voir encourage, la croyance qui se veut inconditionnelle, et simultanément y porte des restrictions, reflète d'ailleurs cette contradiction.

Pour illustrer ceci, on peut prendre l'exemple des lois interdisant à la religion tout caractère visible en public, par lesquelles on leur enlève tout caractère choquant pour ceux qui n'y prennent pas part, tout en ne faisant rien contre leur effet idéologique sur les populations concernées.

La gauche radicale n'a donc aucun intérêt à aider l'ordre libéral à se maintenir en normalisant la religion pour l'intégrer, puis se renforcer, par cette laïcité.

Ce qu'elle devrait favoriser, c'est la prise de conscience par la classe dominée du fait que son malaise est dû à la structure de la société et que le seul moyen d'y remédier est la lutte politique permettant de le dépasser. Par conséquent, la seule laïcité qu'il ait un sens pour elle de défendre est celle qui permette l'émancipation de chacun, pour parvenir à ce fait.

Enterprise Social Search is a way to search, manage, and share information within a company. Who can help you find relevant information and nothing but relevant information? Your colleagues, of course

Today we are launching at Whatever (the company I work for) a marketing campaign for our upcoming product: Knowledge Plaza. Exciting times ahead!

There was some blog entries this week about GNOME stable updates on Ubuntu. There is no reason new bug fix versions could not be uploaded to stable out of the fact that the SRU rules require to check carrefully all the changes and doing this job on all the GNOME tarballs is quite some work, or the ubuntu desktop team is quite small and already overworked.

There is a list of packages which have a relaxed rules though, we have discussed adding GNOME to those since the stable serie usually has fixes worth having and not too many unstable changes (though the stable SVN code usually doesn’t get lot of testing) and decided than the stable updates which look reasonable should be uploaded to hardy-update.

There was also some concerns about gnome-games, 2.20.3 has been uploaded to gutsy-proposed today which should reduce the number of bugs sent to the GNOME bugzilla. The new dependencies on ggz has also been reviewed and 2.21 should be built soon in hardy.

The FOSSCamp and UDS week has been nice and a good occasion to talk to upstream and people from other distributions. We had desktop discussions about the new technologies landing in GNOME this cycle (the next Ubuntu will be a LTS so we need a balance between new features and stability), the desktop changes we want to do, and how Ubuntu contributes to GNOME.

Some random notes about the Ubuntu upstream contributions:

• Vincent asked again for an easy way to browse the Ubuntu patches and Scott picked up the task, the result is available there
• The new Canonical Desktop Team will focus on making the user experience better, most of the changes will likely be upstream material and discussed there, etc
• Canonical has open Ubuntu Desktop Infrastructure Developer and Ubuntu Conceptual Interface Designer positions, if you want to do desktop work for a cool open source company you might be interested by those

GNOME updates in gutsy and hardy

• Selected GNOME 2.20.1 changes have been uploaded to gutsy-updates
• The GNOME 2.21.2 packaging has started in hardy, some updates and lot of Debian merges are still on the TODO though
• We have decided to use tags in patches to indicate the corresponding Ubuntu and upstream bugs so it’s easier to get the context of the change, technical details still need to be discussed though

Update: Scott pointed that you can use http://patches.ubuntu.com/n/nautilus/extracted to access to the current nautilus version

I’ve been working wit git lately but I have also missed the darcs user interface. I honestly think the darcs user interface is the best I’ve ever seen, it’s such a joy to record/push/pull (when darcs doesn’t eat your cpu)

I looked at git add --interactive because it had hunk-based commit, a pre-requisite for darcs record-style commit, but it has a terrible user interface, so i just copied the concept: running a git diff, filtering hunks, and then outputing the filtered diff through git apply --cached.

It supports binary diffs, file additions and removal. It also asks for new files to be added even if this is not exactly how darcs behave but I always forget to add new files, so I added it. It will probably break on some extreme corner cases I haven’t been confronted to, but I gladly accept any patches

Here’s a sample session of git-darcs-record script:

$ git-darcs-record
Add file:  newfile.txt
Shall I add this file? (1/1) [Ynda] : y

Binary file changed: document.pdf

Shall I record this change? (1/7) [Ynda] : y

foobar.txt
@@ -1,3 +1,5 @@
 line1
 line2
+line3
 line4
+line5

Shall I record this change? (2/7) [Ynda] : y

git-darcs-record
@@ -1,17 +1,5 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env python

-# git-darcs-record, emulate "darcs record" interface on top of a git repository
-#
-# Usage:
-# git-darcs-record first asks for any new file (previously
-#    untracked) to be added to the index.
-# git-darcs-record then asks for each hunk to be recorded in
-#    the next commit. File deletion and binary blobs are supported
-# git-darcs-record finally asks for a small commit message and
-#    executes the 'git commit' command with the newly created
-#    changeset in the index
-
-
 # Copyright (C) 2007 Raphaël Slinckx
 #
 # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or

Shall I record this change? (3/7) [Ynda] : y

git-darcs-record
@@ -28,6 +16,19 @@
 # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
 # Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.

+# git-darcs-record, emulate "darcs record" interface on top of a git repository
+#
+# Usage:
+# git-darcs-record first asks for any new file (previously
+#    untracked) to be added to the index.
+# git-darcs-record then asks for each hunk to be recorded in
+#    the next commit. File deletion and binary blobs are supported
+# git-darcs-record finally asks for a small commit message and
+#    executes the 'git commit' command with the newly created
+#    changeset in the index
+
+
+
 import re, pprint, sys, os

 BINARY = re.compile("GIT binary patch")

Shall I record this change? (4/7) [Ynda] : n

git-darcs-record
@@ -151,16 +152,6 @@ def read_answer(question, allowed_responses=["Y", "n", "d", "a"]):
        return resp

-def setup_git_dir():
-       global GIT_DIR
-       GIT_DIR = os.getcwd()
-       while not os.path.exists(os.path.join(GIT_DIR, ".git")):
-               GIT_DIR = os.path.dirname(GIT_DIR)
-               if GIT_DIR == "/":
-                       return False
-       os.chdir(GIT_DIR)
-       return True
-
 def git_get_untracked_files():

Shall I record this change? (5/7) [Ynda] : y

# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD file..." to unstage)
#
#       modified:   document.pdf
#       modified:   foobar.txt
#       modified:   git-darcs-record
#       new file:   newfile.txt
#
# Changed but not updated:
#   (use "git add file file..." to update what will be committed)
#
#       modified:   git-darcs-record
#
What is the patch name? Some cute patch name
Created commit a08f34e: Some cute patch name
 4 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 newfile.txt

Get the script here: git-darcs-record script and put in somewhere in your $PATH. Any comments or improvements is welcome !

Voilà, j’y pensais depuis longtemps et c’est maintenant chose faite, je me suis acheté un tout nouveau ordinateur portable.

Je l’ai acheté sur le site français LDLC.com et me suis renseigné pour savoir si il était possible d’acheter les ordinateurs de leur catalogue sans logiciels (principalement sans windows). Je leur ai donc envoyé un email, et à ma grande surprise ils m’on répondu que c’était tout a fait possible, qu’il suffi de passer commande et d’envoyer ensuite un email pour demander de supprimer les logiciels de la commande. J’ai donc commandé mon laptop et ils m’ont remboursé de 20€ pour les logiciels, ce n’est pas énorme sur le prix d’un portable, mais symboliquement c’est déjà ça.

Toutes fois je me pose des questions, pourquoi cette offre n’est pas inscrite sur le site de LDLC ? En regardant sous mon tout nouveau portable je remarque une chose étrange, les restes d’un autocollant qu’on a enlevé, exactement à l’endroit où habituellement est collé la clef d’activation de winXP. Le remboursement de 20€ tout rond par LDLC me semble également étrange vue que LDLC n’est qu’un intermédiaire, pas un constructeur, et donc eux achètent les ordinateurs avec windows déjà installé. Bref tout ceci me pousse à croire que c’est LDLC qui perd les 20€ et je me demande dans quel but ?!? Pour faire plaisir aux clients libre-istes ? Pour éviter les procès pour vente liée ? Pour à leur tours se faire rembourser les licences que les clients n’ont pas voulu auprès du constructeur/Microsoft et éventuellement gagner plus que 20€ si les licences OEM valent plus que ça ? Bref ceci restera sans doutes toujours un mistère.

J’ai donc installé Ubuntu qui tourne plutôt bien. J’ai été même très impressionné par le network-manager qui me connecte automatiquement sur les réseaux wifi ou filaire selon la disponibilité et qui configure même un réseau zeroconf si il ne trouve pas de server dhcp, c’est très pratique pour transférer des données entre 2 ordinateurs, il suffi de brancher un cable ethernet (ça marche aussi par wifi mais j’ai pas encore testé) entre les 2 et hop tout le réseau est configuré automatiquement sans rien toucher, vraiment magique ! Windows peut aller se cacher, ubuntu est largement plus facile d’utilisation !

I hate having to write about bugs in the documentation. It feels like waving a big flag that says ‘Ok, we suck a bit’.

Today, it’s the way fonts are installed, or rather, they aren’t. The Fonts folder doesn’t show the new font, and the applications that are already running don’t see them.

So I’ve fixed the bug that was filed against the documentation. Now it’s up to someone else to fix the bugs in Gnome.