Following Libcaca 0.99beta17 release (including plenty of new stuff like dirty rectangle framework, troff output, php and java bindings, triangle texture mapping), I uploaded today the first package of neercs into Mandriva Cooker.

Using the power of my new laptop I also captured a video demonstrating process grabbing (ogv, Youtube), and one showing the cube effect (ogv, Youtube).

Process grabbing still only works under Linux x86/x86_64 so help to port it to *BSD, OSX, Windows, Hurd and other Linux architectures is welcome.

neercs is still experimental so actually all tests and bug reports are welcome (patches too of course)

(08 February 2010 à 22:49)

I’m a big fan of short-form presentations, and I like to give one whenever I get a chance. I also like to encourage others to do them for other conferences I’ve organised or run, like  GUADEC, the Maemo Summit or Fostel (site seems to be down now – shame).

I’ve been an admirer from afar of Ignite for years, for the variety and quality of the presentations that you find at their events, and seeing Global Ignite Week announced a few months ago, around the same time that PLOSS Rhone-Alpes started coming together gave me an excuse to do what I’ve wanted to for a while, and host an Ignite Lyon event! The inaugural Ignite Lyon will be held on March 4th in Université Lyon 2 on the quais.

For those unfamiliar with the Ignite talk format, you get 5 minutes for your talk – 20 slides, which advance automatically every 15 seconds. There are lots of Ignite videos on the site.

Once again I’m teaming up with Vincent Mabillot from Colibre, with whom I co-organised Richard Stallman’s recent stop in Lyon last month, and François Aubriot from PLOSS R-A and DotRiver, as well as all of the members of ALDIL and PLOSS R-A who have time to give in this busy month (in addition to school holidays, ALDIL and Colibre are once again participating in the conference Primevere and the week-long “Libre en fête” festival of free software).

I’m looking for presenters! I want to hear cool stuff – personal passions, unusual hobbies or projects, complete with pitfalls and tiny successes that led to a fun conclusion, advice on how to handle difficult problems we all meet, tips on reducing your carbon footprint, how your non-profit group made a difference in your neighbourhood, cries of passion for people to stop doing something you care about *wrong*. Ignite is not just IT, and that’s what I love about it. I will be giving a presentation myself called “hacking your body”, talking about running as performance testing for real life. Of course, it’s also IT, so the geekier and cooler your project, the better If you’re into soldering your own chopper bicycles, I want to hear about it.

As you’ve figured out, I want to hear from you if you have something interesting to say. We’re expecing 100 people from a range of backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, DIY fans and general geeks & freaks (in the nicest sense). If you want to submit a talk, please use the online form I set up.

(04 February 2010 à 17:04)

This year again I'll be at FOSDEM this week-end^[1]. I should be around the GNOME stand/devroom and will, of course, attend the beer event on Saturday night.

Don't hesitate to come and say hi if you want to discuss about Telepathy, Empathy, Moovida or about your favorite Belgian beer.

For those who are lucky enough to own a N900 don't forget to download the FOSDEM 2010 Maemo application. The UI is pretty shit but the features are quite nice and it allows you to easily build your schedule for the week-end. If you are more an Android, iPhone or Palm person the app is also available for those plateforms.

See you there!

(04 February 2010 à 12:28)

Just like Vincent wrote there is a flurry of activity this weekend in Brussels, thanks to FOSDEM, in fact there is even some people already here today, it will be nice to meet all of you.

I just got confirmation from the t-shirt producer (tip top print): they will be ready tomorrow, thanks a lot to them, if you ever need t-shirts printed in Belgium, they are really friendly.

There is a GNOME event in a bar on Saturday evening, it will happen at « La Porte Noire » (The Black Door) where there is a great collection of Belgian beers, and other beverages (with a special attention to all of you whisky lovers). (and there is the FOSDEM party on Friday evening, at the Delirium Café, where there is also lots of different beers (noticed a pattern?)).

The address and more details are on http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2010/Attendees

See you!

[imagine a "I'm going to fosdem" button here]

(04 February 2010 à 11:34)

Du 20 au 23 janvier, c'était semaine radios libres à Marseille, c'était très bien, il y avait plein de gens.

Merci tout le monde, et tout particulièrement à Marie pour l'hébergement.

(04 February 2010 à 11:04)

I'm happy to go to Brussels again this year: it's been a long time since I didn't eat some really good waffles! Of course, I had to pretend I would do something useful there, so I'm participating in two talks, both in the distributions devroom:

• Working with GNOME upstream: this will really be an interactive session, where upstream and downstream people for GNOME can meet, and discuss what can be improved to make the life of both upstream contributors and downstream contributors. It will probably be a good opportunity to also clarify how GNOME 3 might affect distributors, and to get a first overview of how it will be handled downstream. I hope it will be useful for everybody. I certainly hope we'll have a bunch of upstream people attending, and that we'll have representatives for various distributions there (make sure to tell the GNOME people in your distribution to come!).

• Translations of package descriptions: as you can see, I don't have my name attached to this session, so I can pretend I didn't know about it ;-) But I'm supposed to help Anne there as we've discussed this a bit in the past few months. Translating package descriptions has obvious benefits for the end users, but it's a huge amount of work. And therefore we can seriously wonder if it's really worth duplicating this effort in each distribution (hint: probably not). So this session aims to look at what we can do to work together on this, and what it implies.

I'm also eager to have some insightful discussions with the great people that will come to FOSDEM. The hallway meetings have always been productive there!

GNOME

GNOME will have some strong presence again this year. There's the GNOME devroom on Saturday, that will become CrossDesktop devroom on Sunday, and during the whole week-end, we'll have a booth. If you want to help, that's definitely the place where you should go: we need volunteers to run the booth (see Lionel's mail for more details).

The booth should look great again, thanks to the event box, lovely stickers (they'll be free again!) and, hopefully, t-shirts (we're unsure they'll be ready in time, but let's be optimistic ;-)). On Saturday, you'll also find there some information about what is becoming a tradition: the GNOME Beer Event that will occur on Saturday evening.

Oh, apparently, I was volunteered to organize the GNOME group photo on Saturday, at 15:30. So make sure to be around the devroom at that time!

openSUSE

There will also be a good number of openSUSE people, with the usual booth (looking for some openSUSE DVD or sticker? You'll find them there!). This year, there's no openSUSE devroom because there's one big distributions devroom instead; I believe it's a good thing, though: it should help get more collaboration happen, and it's also a nice opportunity to steal good ideas ;-)

I'm happy that most of the boosters team will also attend; I heard it's a great group of people to hang out with!

(04 February 2010 à 10:11)

After touring FOSS events all around the world, I decided to see what’s happening on the local software scene.  I met with the guys from Montreal-Python, the Ubuntu Québec local team guys (after all Montréal is the home of Canonical’s Global Support Services) and the local start-ups at DemoCamp.

They convinced me I should give a talk at Confoo.ca.  In fact I decided to submit 2 talks and both were accepted.  Confoo.ca is a new conference building on the famous PhpQuébec conferences but gathering much more communities together: .Net, Python, Ruby and Web developers. The conference will cover technical topics as well as project management, marketing and social medias.

Based on my personal knowledge and the experiments I’ve been doing lately with Web + Desktop apps combinations, I’ve submitted the following talks.

Django + RESTful APIs as an application server

Application servers are the central part of data applications. They are responsible for mission critical activities of businesses and yet have to be cost effective. Django offers a lot of flexibility by providing rapid application development. Django-piston makes it easy to add RESTful APIs to existing Django apps. Web servers are very common and rather cheap to rent or host in house.

Once your application has a RESTful API, nothing is keeping desktop applications to access your web services. For example, using librest on the desktop, Emerillon accesses on-line databases such as Geonames. Librest simplifies accessing RESTful web services and makes parsing XML fun again (that’s a Robert Bradford quote if I am not mistaken).

Introduction to OpenStreetMap and how to use it

When thinking of online maps, Google Maps is often mentioned as a reference. But you can’t use their data in all the exciting ways you could ever imagine. Enters OpenStreetMap: community built openly licensed map data. You are virtually free to do anything with the data, short of not giving proper attribution of its origins.

With this gained freedom, you can explore and create unique maps adjusted to your needs. You can also simply reuse the default one available on OpenStreetMap.org, in some locations it is way more complete than any other maps anyway.

Come and attend Confoo.ca!

(03 February 2010 à 21:01)

More and more we’re seeing organisations outside the free software world  try to learn the lessons of our success, and integrate “open source” practices into their organisation.

Whether it’s companies adopting transparency and other cluetrain or pinko marketing strategies, proprietary software development companies integrating standard free software practices, or one of the other areas where “crowdsourcing” has become the cool new thing, it’s obvious hat we have gotten some things right, some of the time, and it is definitely worth learning the right lessons from projects like Linux, Mozilla, GNOME, or Wikipedia, and trying to reproduce the magic elsewhere.

Sometimes this feels like the cargo cults in the Pacific Islands, trying to make airplanes land as their ancestors saw 60 years ago, by building airstrips and imitation airplanes. But at least they’re trying to figure out what makes our communities successful.

But are we learning enough lessons from others? It seems to me like we’re charging head first like sharecroppers into undiscovered country, only to find that we’ve run into a highly advanced civilisation.

As developers, we’ve invented our own brand of everything, from scratch. We figure out how to run conferences, or raise money from people who like what we do, when these are not new problems.

This isn’t new in IT. The entire learned history of typography got thrown out the window more or less, because with the advent of WYSIWYG editors and the web, everyone has complete control of their authoring tools and Comic Sans is shipped by default, and if I need to reduce the margins to get the letter to fit on one page then by golly I will.

Merchandising and recruitment of new star talent are more examples of things that some other organisations are pretty good at.

So – as an open question – are we learning the lessons from the past which we should be learning, or is it too attractive to think that what we’re doing is so new that every problem we encounter needs a new solution?

One example of a place where there is a wealth of experience out there is convincing people to give money to a cause they believe in. There are dozens of organisations that do this well – humanitarian organisations, political lobbyists, political parties, universities – the list goes on.

Can we figure out how GNOME is like them, and learn the lessons from their fundraising campaigns?

A typical fundraising drive for an organisation like this has three main steps:

1. Get a list of potential donors
2. Convince them that you are doing good
3. Find a pressure point or argument which will convince them to donate

If you look at a mailing for Médecins Sans Frontières for example, you see all of these points in action. Find potential donors – through sign-up campaigns, former donor drives, referrals. Send them a mail package, with a newsletter outlining good work, but with just enough bad news (new conflicts, new refugees, unfinished projects) and artwork (a smiling nurse taking care of a village vs a child ill from a curable illness) to show that money given to MSF will do good, and the need has never been greater.

Your response rate may be small – perhaps only 1% – but that’s enough.

Whether we’re talking about lobby groups, political parties or humanitarian agencies, the same strategies come into play – construct big databases of potential donors, and get them riled up about the thing they’re passionate about being endangered – show them the shining light of all the good work your organisation does, and then drive the sale home by making it really easy to give money or sign up.

University fundraising is an interesting case – and in fact, GNOME’s fundraising model ressembles it now. Your primary source of donations is alumni, people who have been through the university, like receiving updates every year, maybe a class-mate just became a professor, maybe a friend’s daughter got a prize in the annual awards ceremony, maybe a club or association you were in had a good year? And then you leverage the affection with the flip side of the coin – the need, the things we’d like to do better, the project we’re fundraising for which will allow us to do great work.

All of these organisations invest heavily in direct mailing, in building and maintaining databases of supporters, and in monetising them. I recently read a book by a direct mailing copywriter called “My First 40 Years in Junk Mail” and it opened my eyes to what works in that world – and also gave some ideas on the kinds of strategies maybe the GNOME Foundation should be adopting.

The first step  is building and maintaining a list of GNOME fans and supporters, by any means possible, and ensuring that they are made aware of what we’re up to and what we’d like to do. And, of course, continuing to build great products.

(03 February 2010 à 19:54)

I was shocked by the prices announced for electronic books on iPad (USD 12.99 or 14.99). This is more expensive than most books I own...

Today, Amazon annouces that they have to follow and increase prices (which used to be 9.99) on Macmillan books. Given that other major publishers have agreed with Apple on that price they may requets the same from Amazon soon...

I sometimes buy technical books worth $30 or $50 but 90% of my books are between $2 and $10.

Am I stupid and are you ready to pay more for a virtual book than for a physical one that you can easily give (or sell) to someone later?

(01 February 2010 à 15:20)

What a big release week!

First, a quick update to MapBuddy:

• Translations (French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Polish, Slovak)
• A “Add to addressbook” button on merchant’s window (with the help of Jonathon Jongsma)
• A precision circle is drawn around your position
• Kinetic scrolling is turned on

Then, a bigger update for libchamplain 0.4.4:

• API clean up (with API backward compatibility): champlain_view_set_size should have never existed
• Fix to make Python bindings work out of the tarballs!
• Use shared paths by all tiles consumers on Maemo devices to store tiles (saves bandwidth)
• Load tiles in a spiral manner from the centre (thanks to Jason Woofenden)
• Optimizations resulting in
  • Faster start-up
  • Smoother scrolling
  • Energy savings (by doing less computations)

Then, a huge update for libchamplain 0.5:

• First development release with new APIs:
  • Local map rendering (Google Summer of Code of Simon Wenner)
  • New Map Source mechanism à la Pipe and Filter (Jiří Techet)

(29 January 2010 à 05:40)

Ooh, the strain.

(28 January 2010 à 17:34)

Luis already unleashed the word: GNOME 2.28.2 will be released as an online update for openSUSE 11.2 (for reference, openSUSE 11.2 was initially released with 2.28.1). You can currently help testing that everything is fine with the packages by adding the 11.2-test repository and upgrading. Please go ahead and test it, and tell us if it breaks anything. Hopefully, it should work quite fine.

What is really exciting about this is of course not that we're delivering bug fixes to our users ;-) But with 11.2, openSUSE got a new maintenance team, with more community involvement. One of the amazing result is that it is (or at least, feels) much easier now to release online updates for packages, with a process that everybody can follow — it used to be restricted to Novell employees. Another welcome change is that we can finally release new upstream versions as updates, with some obvious restrictions: the new versions should only contain bug fixes, and should fix real important bugs for users.

And this is what enabled the release of GNOME 2.28.2 as an update for openSUSE 11.2: this version bump was lead by Dominique and Magnus. I must admit I'm really glad that I didn't have to do anything ;-) The GNOME policy to only do bug fixes (and updated translations, which is something we also care about!) on a stable branch, and the fact that we're doing a good job at being reliable on this upstream, certainly helped too.

But wait, there's more! If you're crazy about GNOME but still want a stable distribution, you can use GNOME 2.29 on openSUSE 11.2! The Build Service is really helping us here, making it easy to reuse our GNOME 2.29 packages that we have in Factory on 11.2, with nearly no work at all. We have some documentation on how to use GNOME 2.29 on openSUSE 11.2, and testers are welcome. It should work fine and not eat your computer. Testing Factory is also an option, and while it used to be hardly usable in the past, the community is now doing a good job at making sure it works fine most of the time, if not all the time.

Did I mention you can get the latest version of various applications on 11.2 by just adding the GNOME:Apps repository? No need to update the distribution. No need to update GNOME. This is getting insanely cool :-) And both for packagers (nearly no effort to backport packages) and users (latest versions of their preferred applications available on a stable distribution).

(22 January 2010 à 11:04)

I will be at Brussels on 6-7th of February for the FOSDEM.

git tip of day with 1.6.6, forget about git checkout -t -b origin/onebranch, now a simple git checkout onebranch do the job.

(21 January 2010 à 10:08)

Dorénavant,  vous ne lirez plus la question suivante en ligne de commande :

rm: détruire fichier régulier `toto.c’?

mais

rm : supprimer fichier « toto.c » ?

bien que la seconde forme ne soit pas parfaite (limitation interne), elle est d’une des améliorations qui résulte d’un long travail de relecture et de correction des commandes du projet coreutils (rm, ls, df, etc). Il m’aura fallu seulement un an pour terminer cette relecture car 2009 était une année exceptionellement courte en sommeil mais riche en travaux non virtuels.

Ainsi parmi les 530 Kio que représentent les changements, vous n’êtes plus un « usager » mais un « utilisateur », les mots clés de « ls -S » (entre autres) sont en anglais et donc interprétables par « ls », les messages se positionnent avec harmonie dans les 80 colonnes de votre console, la traduction est à jour avec coreutils 8.4, une structure « PEPS » redevient une structure « FIFO », les options ne supportent plus mais prennent en charge, les « invalides » n’ont pas leur place dans coreutils mais à Paris et les « non valides » les remplacent !

Le projet coreutils est très actif et son mainteneur, Jim Meyering, est exceptionnel, la traduction française a ainsi bénéficié de 5 commits sur le projet :

• ls: fix alignment when month names have varying widths
• doc: update tail’s documentation to allow for new -F semantics
• df: add comments to help translators align column headers
• pr –help: add missing space between short and long options usage message
• pr –help: improve a line-break

(21 January 2010 à 02:36)

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.

(16 January 2010 à 18:01)

GNOME will be present at FOSDEM and will have its own devroom on Saturday again. The schedule is now final (at least I hope so ;) ). Thanks to everyone who sent talk proposal to help make this room rock this year again!

On a related note, if you're coming to FOSDEM, let us know! This will allow us to print nice nametags (maybe!) for all gnomies around Brussels :)

(15 January 2010 à 16:49)

Over Christmas, Matthias worked on the first pass at the long awaited user accounts tool.

I did my bit and committed this afternoon the new icon selection popup, which allows you to capture and crop a picture from your webcam (through my earlier cheese work). I also committed the ability to save your fingerprints, as was available in gnome-about-me.

Screenshots below. More information on the Fedora Features page.

(15 January 2010 à 16:37)

(08 January 2010 à 11:55)

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.

(30 December 2009 à 19:25)

Few weeks ago I released a new plugin for Moovida. This little brother of my RTBF plugin brings content from the ARTE+7 website to Moovida.

ARTE is a cultural Franco-German public TV network providing lot of very interesting documentaries. Unfortunately, because of legal reasons, most of the documentaries are only available from Germany, France and Belgium. That's a shame because the content is generally pretty good. So if you are lucky enough to live in one of those countries you should really install Moovida and give the plugin a try (it should be installed by default now).

Three weeks ago Fluendo and Mandriva organized a plugin developement contest. The contest ended last week and I won! To celebrate that I wrote a small text introducing myself and my FOSS contributions on the Moovida blog.

(23 December 2009 à 22:00)

Mon titre ne rimant qu'en français, cet article sera en français. Sorry, english folks !

Samedi 28 novembre 2009, c'est jour d'install party pour nos confrères Ubuntistes. À cette occasion, leur gourou (meditation), j'ai nommé Mark Shuttleworth sera à Paris, à la Cité des Sciences pour nous éclairer pauvres mortels. Je compte donc infiltr^W m'intégrer à la communauté Ubuntu pour voir ce qui fait le succès de leur install party, et aussi comment améliorer celles de Mandriva (je serai également à l'install party de la semaine suivante). Ça me donnera aussi l'occasion de voir un peu les différences entre une Ubuntu et une Mandriva/GNOME (6 ans que je tourne avec ce tandem de choc), et tenter de comprendre les raisons de la popularité d'Ubuntu (autre que "ils ont un patron milliardaire", "ils t'envoient des cd chez toi", ou "ils rendent ta femme plus fertile"). J'ai vu qu'il y aura une présentation éclair de Mandriva Linux, il y aura donc d'autres chevaux de troie :-). Ubuntistes, tremblez. ! Et tapez pas trop fort :-p

(26 November 2009 à 22:49)

Long time no blog, but as everyone does it, I've got to announce (a bit late) that I turned 30 a few days ago, on November 1st. These days have been a bit tough, as my grandmother deceased the day just before. She would have turned 94 years on November 20th. I was sad of course, but she lived well, and didn't suffer in her last days. She had a peaceful detah; my mother told me she vanished as a candle you blow.

Thanks to all the friends and family that supported me.

I was nonetheless happy to celebrate my birthday on saturday 8th with my sisters and friends, some of them having never been in my new home, wich I entered... 8 months ago. I should really get some time to have a kitchen...

(09 November 2009 à 23:58)

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.

(05 November 2009 à 12:44)

(15 October 2009 à 22:06)

I’ve spent a lot of time lately to improve the user experience with the GdaBrowser tool which will be included in Libgda starting with version 4.2.

The idea of this tool is to give database administrators a small and powerfull tool to “do stuff” on their databases, limited for now to browse the database schema and execute some SQL statements. Even though it still has some bugs, I use it regularly for my day to day needs.

The schema browser now displays database tables in a cloud style view which makes it easier to spot tables which have a lot of relations with other tables and to search, as shown in the following screenshot where the search highlights (in blue) tables beginning with “c”, shows the one having a “c” in a dark gray color, and almost hides the ones which have nothing in relation with the searched text:

The query editor can now propose a completion list when CTRL+Space is pressed, as shown in the next screenshot. Also note that each favorite query now displays the name of the favorite, the query type (SELECT here) and the variables used by the statement.

All of these improvements are now only available from the sources in git (git.gnome.org) but will be part of the next unstable release.

(01 October 2009 à 18:59)

Bonjour à tous,

certains de mes fidèles lecteurs m'ont fait remarquer que mon blog n'était plus trop alimenté ... et ils avaient raison. Faute avouée est à moitié pardonnée ... dit-on.

What's up Doc' ?

• J'ai bien terminé mes examen pour la formation Infosafe et je les ai bien réussis. Il me reste à présenter le travail final. Celui-ci se base sur un cas réel d'entreprise. Je suis en train de négocier avec ma hiérarchie concernant un sujet pratique que je pourrai aborder.

• Depuis fin juin, j'ai commencé à jouer au Go. Il y a un club à Liège pour les personnes intéressées ... C'est un jeu assez prenant que je vous convie à découvrir ;-) Mon objectif est avant tout l'intérêt du jeu et le perfectionnement mais pas la compétition pour la compétition. Malgré qu'il soit bien intéressant de jouer avec une autre personne que l'on connait moins. Il est d'ailleurs de tradition de souhaiter une bonne partie à l'adversaire avant celle-ci et de le remercier pour celle-ci après. Tradition et politesse asiatique oblige même si on est souvent naturellement enclin à le faire vu que sans adversaire, pas de jeu et pas d'amélioration possible.

• Je ne reprendrai pas pour l'instant l'arbitrage de football américain. En effet, c'est une activité très intéressante mais qui prend beaucoup de temps (comptons une journée entière) pour un ou deux rencontres. Cela m'écarte énormément de chez moi et de ma femme ce qui n'est pas vraiment très positif quand c'est très régulier vu qu'en plus de la saison senior, il y a les juniors, la saison High School, les matches amicaux, ... Mise en stand-by donc.

Pour le moment, selon différents conseils de joueurs de Go, je résous des problèmes de Go (appelés Tsumego) presque tous les jours (25 à 50 si possible). Le plus complexe est de pouvoir rester 2 à 5 minutes devant un problème pour tester toutes les variations possible et être sûr de sa réponse. Cela améliore la lecture du jeu d'après eux ... faisons leur confiance.

Si vous souhaitez vous améliorer en Go voici quelques liens :

• Guide To Become Strong
• Ideas on improvement
• Improve Fast In Go

Mes objectifs sont de me préparer pour les préliminaires au championnat de Belgique 2009 qui auront lieu le 21 et 22 novembre 2009. Cela sera le moment rêvé pour jouer avec des joueurs de toute la Belgique dans une ambiance conviviale même si toutes les parties risquent d'être stressantes. On ne se refait pas ... :-D

(28 September 2009 à 07:21)

Nemiver 0.7.2 is out. It is a bugfix, minor feature and translation update release.

NEWS | tarball | Fedora Packages

(12 September 2009 à 21:14)

No, Cody you aren't alone (but I can't comment on your blog, it asks to login and I don't have an account on blogs.gnome.org) : I have the same feeling regarding Nokia N900 and I'm not impressed by a "already obsolete" product (or should I say platform), by Nokia own words (but not expressed in that way) . The good point is the money they injected in free software companies isn't lost and morphed in improvement in various projects (Telepathy, etc..) but that's it.

I'm much more impressed by Palm Pre and I'm waiting for it to be available in Europe.

(29 August 2009 à 08:35)

Class field theory

I’m still diving in mathematics ; I’m not very happy with my level of understanding on class field theory yet, so I think I’ll take some more… I don’t feel like I’m making good progress, but that’s not a big problem : I know things generally work that way with the brain — pieces don’t take their place until there are enough of them.

Game

I didn’t touch the code for my kids since the first draft : not good. I think I’ll dump soya and find something else.

Freebox issues

I would like to show photos on my somewhat big TV — photos which happen to be on my computer with a somewhat small screen (life is full of those situations…). The special type of modem used by my ISP (called a freebox) has gained a wonderful feature lately, which I had never tried : uPnP. So I quickly installed mediatomb, then configured it (incredibly easy…), and tried to see it from the freebox.

It worked! I could see my media collection ;  I was so thrilled! But :

• trying to look at photos gave awfully pixellized images — unbearable, unusable ;
• trying to play music failed because the files don’t even show up : I only have ogg, flac and a few mp3 — nothing appears in the list ;
• trying to play video failed because even if some files show up (the .avi files — without the extension), I only get a black screen.

So in short : there’s a wonderful feature, but it just looks cool : it won’t see most files, and the few it sees won’t get anything correct.

I’ll either have to find out how to make the “freeplayer” feature work… or find a way to tell gstreamer : “here is a list of image files I want you to turn into a video diaporama with pretty transitions at that speed” (that later solution would be great!).

(25 August 2009 à 13:06)

For some time, I've been working on adding Plymouth support for our next Mandriva Linux 2010 release, as graphical boot splash and I thought it could be interested to do a recap of the various solutions we used in our distribution over the years.

Mandriva Linux (Linux-Mandrake then) was one of the first Linux distributions to ship with a graphical boot :

• in 2000 (yes, 9 years ago !!), for Linux-Mandrake 7.2, we integrated Aurora (written by Egil Möller who joined Mandrakesoft to work on it at that time), allowing users to control and follow boot with keyboard and mouse, before X was started. 
• in 2002, we switched to Bootsplash, which was kernel based and allowed also to polish VT (a nice touch).
• in 2008, we switched to Splashy, mostly because Bootsplash was becoming deprecated by Splashy and could not run on non-x86 platform and was a pain to maintain in kernel.
  
• yesterday, we switch to Plymouth. It will be available for the first time in Mandriva Linux 2010 beta (available tomorrow). 

Why did we switched to Plymouth :

• it supports Kernel Mode-Setting, which reduces screen flickering, permits smooth transitions between boot phase and X startup. 
• it still works on VESA framebuffer. For chipsets not yet supporting KMS, we can still have graphical boot, so no feature regression.
  
• Plymouth is much more customizable than Splashy, allowing nice UI effects.
• It has a nice and simple script language (from Charlie Brej) : you don't need to code in C to write a theme. I was able to write a theme which looks like our current splashy theme in about a day (discovering the language at the same time and with examples from Charlie).
  
• Plymouth authors are extremely responsive and inclusive : I got commit privileges only two days after sending my first patches (and after my fd.o account was fixed ;)
• We are not alone to use Plymouth : our Fedora friends were the first to integrate it and we can share our experiences and expertises in graphical boot, thus improving the entire Linux ecosystem.
  

So far, we are extremely happy of the result : Mandriva Linux 2010 beta looks very nice (even if plymouth for this beta doesn't feature text support, it does now on cooker).

We hope you will like it, so don't forget to test Mandriva Linux 2010 beta when it is released (and did I say it will have GNOME 2.27.90 in it too ? :)

(19 August 2009 à 21:30)

The first bugfix release of the Nemiver 0.7.x series is out.

This version addresses various nits here and there, takes care of some low level details to make sure Nemiver works well with the Archer branch of GDB and contains some updated translations.

News file and tarball are available from the usual places.

Thanks to the continuous good work of my fellows distro packagers, the binaries should appear on a mirror near you in a couple of days.

For what it is worth, Fedora 10, 11, and Rawhide packages are available for the impatients.

Happy hacking.

(01 August 2009 à 12:55)

The more I hack on libgpod, the more I realize that having iPod models from various generations would be really helpful. When implementing support for setting the iPod time, for parsing the iPod timezone, for figuring out which information is useful in SysInfoExtended, ... I always end up running after people with various iPod models to make sure the code works as expected both on new and old iPods.

I'm sure some of you have old iPods they no longer use hidden somewhere in their room, if you are in this situation, a donation would be really welcome and helpful :) Even iPods with dead batteries or broken screens might be useful.

And while I'm at it, it would also really really help if I could get my hands on an old iPod touch or iPhone. Because this is where most of the work is to be done today, and without one such device, I cannot test thoroughly and get into shape stuff like that.

So if you're feeling generous today and want to help support iPods on linux, drop me an email or leave a comment below!

(26 July 2009 à 19:05)

The part of the socket(7) man page about setsockopt(.., SOL_SOCKET, SO_PRIORITY…)  says:

« For ip(7), this also sets the  IP  type-of- service  (TOS)  field  for outgoing packets. »

I wanted to know how exactly it mapped the socket priority to the ToS field, so I looked in the kernel code for a while, and it turns out that in recent Linux 2.6 kernel, this is a lie. The ToS field is never set when the application selects the socket priority, only the internal priority of the packet is set. That said, the reverse is true, setting setsockopt(.., IPPROTO_IP, IP_TOS…)  sets both the ToS header field and the internal priority of the packet.

So the question here is: Who is wrong, is the kernel buggy? Or is the man page incorrect?

Also, dear lazyweb, is there any support for applications to set the DiffServ field? Or are they only settable through iptables?

(24 July 2009 à 18:09)

So someone broke into my car the day before i left for my holidays in Spain and stole my life^W^W^W laptop.
I'll probably buy a new MacBook or a Dell in September. I'm looking for a 13" with a fast CPU, 4GB of memory, 500GB HDD and a good GPU (to play WOW ;).

(23 July 2009 à 02:55)

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).

(11 July 2009 à 09:11)

J'y étais presque, j'allais enfin partir en vacances depuis 3 ans. J'avais tout: des tas de fringues, une nouvelle paire de lunettes de soleil, retiré plein de liquide. J'avais tout prévu. Plus qu'un vendredi à travailler et j'étais bon.

Ce matin, je me gare devant mon travail, je reviens avec mon portable d'astreinte, mais j'oublie de prendre mon ibook et même mon portefeuilles rangé avec. Quand je suis revenu vers 12H00, plus rien. Vitre cassée. Plus de portable, plus d'argent, plus d'identité. C'est arrivé près de chez vous.

Après-midi au commissariat, banque, assurance, carrossier, etc.

Donc voilà, je repars de zéro, même au niveau de mon compte ça va se sentir. Demain je taille la route vers Madrid et avec un peu de chance, je me ferais arrêter sans papier aucun.

Bonnes vacances à tous !

(26 June 2009 à 18:41)

Just a reminder, we are approaching the June 29th deadline for WASL, http://www.systemloganalysis.com/

(11 June 2009 à 19:41)

You can find the slides for the lecture Philippe and I gave at Eicar for download.

Enjoy! (feedback greatly appreciated)

(25 May 2009 à 21:59)

(26 February 2009 à 10:40)

(17 February 2009 à 07:31)

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!

(05 January 2009 à 21:44)

I’m in Bangalore for foss.in. First, the country is awesome, the Indian food is amazing, etc, etc. The weather is also pretty nice this time of year, not too warm, not too cold, just right. Although it has been a bit rainy in the last three days.

But its not only the country that is nice, it is also an awesome conference, the organizers are really doing a great job. The venue is nice, the speakers are really well treated, etc. But more importantly, the level of the conference is also quite impressive. It is a great place to meet lots of good developers that we rarely meet in the « western » conferences. Free Software is really alive in India and it is great to meet the people here. After my Farsight 2 talk (slides), there were some really good questions, from people who had actually tried to use it. It’s the fourth (and last) time that I give this talk in front of different audiences, and I really got the best questions and the best interaction. The organizers wanted to make it into a truly developer oriented conference and they’ve really succeeded.

(28 November 2008 à 12:14)

(19 November 2008 à 14:13)

(19 November 2008 à 13:27)

I’ve been a member of April, the french association for promotion and defense of Free Software, for a bit more than a year, and I often regret not becoming a member earlier. (I was feeling so guilty and shameful about not being a member that I actually postponed becoming a member.)

Stop feeling guilty and shameful, become an April member today!

Why Is becoming an April member so important?

• Clearly, April doesn’t address the same problems as your local LUG. April is a country-wide organization, and it works on country-wide problems. It’s the only group able to work on such problems at this scale (I’m not sure of the situation in other countries, but I think CCC shares a similar role in Germany for example).
• Each time I talk to people really involved in April (which I’m not), I’m amazed by how powerful they have become. They are able to talk to french or european deputies or ministers’ cabinets, and are considered important. They are doing a fantastic job spreading what matters to us to legislative and executive powers in France and Europe.

Some of the things they worked on recently (from the top of my head):

• Lobbying on :
  • OOXML
  • General announcements about politics (Plan France Numérique 2012, aka Plan Besson).
  • European telecom package and HADOPI law (french graduated response) law, through Quadrature du net. (OK, it doesn’t have anything to do with April, but most of the people involved in Quadrature du Net are also involved in April :-)
  • vente liée : the fact that it’s not possible to buy a computer without a Windows license. It’s illegal in French law, but still the de facto situation almost everywhere.
• Organization of a campaign where candidates to elections in France where asked questions, or asked to sign a declaration about Free Software. In 2007, 8 out of the 12 candidates of the french presidential election answered April’s questions.

So, really, become a member today. It’s only 10 EUR, and you already know they will be well used. April is trying to reach 5000 members by the end of 2008.

(Apparently, if you use that address, April will now that you came from me. No benefit for me at all.)

(13 November 2008 à 17:07)

Few people know that maintaining Ekiga also means maintaining Ekiga.net, the VoIP service platform for our users.

Today, we upgraded Ekiga.net, and that’s a lot of work !

Ekiga.net is now running Kamailio as frontend (recently renamed to SIP Router due to the merge between Kamailio and the old SIP Express Router project)
and Asterisk 1.4.

Among others, it allows to run the echo test with codecs like H.264, and better SIP presence support.

The old WEB interface has been replaced by a more intuitive one thanks to
Yannick Defais. The look and feel is now similar to the one you can see on the
brother ekiga.org website.

I would also like to thank Jan Schampera who helps me daily maintaining
ekiga.net and who helped a lot for the upgrade.

You can enjoy to the new infrastructure daily by signing up for an account at
http://www.ekiga.net.

(11 November 2008 à 18:32)

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

(22 July 2008 à 08:29)

A new release: libvirt-0.4.3

After two months a lot of patches had accumulated, including a lot of improvements for Xenner and Linux container support. But this release brings a massive set of code cleanup, and just looking at the patches there there is a lot of obscure case failures which should now be properly handled (or at least better handled, like out of memory situations). I'm pushing testing updates for F-8 and F-9 if you have time and use virtualisation please review them, thanks !

A new name ?

I got married to Miss Wei LI last saturday, it was kept a simple family event with just a few close friends, everything went well except for a bit of rain ! For the name I wouldn't mind being called Mr Li, but it's probably not very practical at this point (ah and good luck getting the li.com domain, and I guess hijacking li.org would not be well accepted either ;-)

A very simple picture, people interested for more should know where to look for already. Oh it also made me fight with the Panasonic HDC-SD9 'new' MPEG-4 output, to get videos to render properly on that other OS, I didn't expect to learn so much about video format so quickly. I will post recipe and scripts later.

(13 June 2008 à 13:36)

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.

(10 June 2008 à 01:32)

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.

(01 June 2008 à 21:56)

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!

(22 April 2008 à 12:21)

Releases

I pushed a bunch of releases on Tuesday, trying to catch the Fedora-9 train (I nearly missed it, it led to a not so fun curl_is_failing_to_upload debug session which led to nss3 for firefox3 is not compatible with nss3 for fedora8 curl), thanks to everybody who helped catch that train !

The releases are mostly bugfixes, libvirt-0.4.2 leading the pack, but libxml2-2.6.23 has a lot of fixes too thanks to various people reporting bug and giving patches, notably the Huawei team. Libxslt-1.1.23 includes the dozen or so fixes since last summer.

Developments

Clearly libxml2 and libxslt are in maintance mode, the focus is on libvirt, maybe I will just add support for the latest Proposed Recommendation of XML-1.0 in libxml2 before the Summer.

For libvirt, clearly we need to extend the number of hypervisor supported, maybe update and clean up the OpenVZ support too. IBM is actively contributing the Linux Container driver, I just commited a second set of patches today, you can expect good support in Fedora 10 I guess. On the high end side Sun just posted the patches for the lDOM virtualization on their Niagara based machines, lot of patch reviews those days. I also want to get a complete set of bindings for Java integrated, and now that Fedora java packaging guidelines are out, this is a good opportunity to add this.

History meme

that one is interesting, here is my contribution, as you can see I'm an old fashionned old fart, main workstation at home:

paphio:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
319 vi
257 ssh
255 cd
156 cvs
130 make
125 ls
79 svn
60 scp
48 su
43 ping
paphio:~ ->

and on my second workstation in Annemasse:

wei:~ -> history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in
a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
362 vi
263 cd
262 make
136 cvs
115 svn
105 ssh
78 ls
67 scp
40 xmllint
38 grep
wei:~ ->

(10 April 2008 à 09:57)

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.

(28 January 2008 à 23:12)

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

(14 November 2007 à 13:09)

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 !

(03 November 2007 à 16:43)

De retour des RMLL, cette année à Amiens, j'allume enfin mon PC après 15 jours d'absence... En réalité, je n'ai pas fait un vrai break informatique, j'avais mon portable ;o)
Comme d'hab, une très bonne édition. Dès que j'ai mis mes photos en ligne, je fournis l'URL.

Les points forts de cette édition : un nouvel étalon pour le terme "cocktail dinatoire", un repas du libre qui n'a pas démérité, des nocturnes sympathiques et bien sûr les confs et ateliers où j'ai pu faire de nouvelles rencontres intéressantes. Cerise sur le gateau, j'était logé en VIP, au même titre qu'Alan Cox (rien que ça), au QG de l'équipe d'organisation. Un lieu calme entouré de verdure et bordé par un canal. Idéal pour récupérer des longues soirées mais qui n'incite pas à se lever tôt pour assister aux premières confs.
On m'a invité à y rester une semaine de plus pour prendre le temps de visiter Amiens et sa région, invitation que j'ai malheureusement du décliner à cause d'un emploi du temps hélàs peu favorable :((

J'avais entre autres prévu d'assister aux festivités nocturnes du 14 juillet à Paris. Étant hébergé chez un copain qui habite prés de Montparnasse, ce fut déjà une immense galère pour arriver chez lui en voiture... tout le centre de Paris étant coupé à la circulation, et bien sûr pas un seul symphatique policier pour indiquer courtoisement et avec le sourire par où passer pour arriver à destination. 2 heures de perdu dans des embouteillages à la con et la pollution qui va avec ! Enfin arrivé, visite touristique de Paris en vélo... départ 19h... on tourne, on tourne, on tourne, pour info, Notre Dame de Paris ne vaut pas sa renommée en comparaison de Notre Dame d'Amiens. Les parigots devraient sortir du périphérique de temps en temps pour gagner en humilité... vers 23h on se dirige vers le Champ de Mars et là, on voit une marée humaine gigantesque qui visiblement quitte les lieux. J'ai loupé les festivités !!!!!! Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ce délire, il parait que Paris est une ville nocturne et ils font un feu d'artifice à 10h30 !!! Aucun village en France ne fait ça si tôt !!! Je m'en foutait complètement du concert d'un vieux qui vient finir sa vie tranquille en France après s'être exilé à l'étranger pour ne pas payer ses impots, mais pas le feu d'artifice, pas ça !! 'Fin bon, j'aurais au moins vu de près ce que représente 600 000 personnes (selon la police). À traverser en vélo à contre sens, c'est GIGANTESQUE, SANS FIN, INIMAGINABLE. À déconseiller ABSOLUMENT aux ochlophobes ;o)

Revenons un instant aux RMLL. Je vais donner un coup de projecteur sur un projet qui en vaut vraiment la peine : OpenStreetMap. Ce projet consiste à créer des cartes routières libres. A partir des traces relevé par un GPS, on établi des cartes qui peuvent êtres ensuite utilisé librement pour tout type d'usage. Aux RMLL précédentes, à Nancy, le projet UPCT avait déjà retenu mon attention mais il me manquait à l'époque le GPS. Entre temps je me suis acheté un module GPS Bluetooth et j'ai profité du stand OpenStreetMap et de la présence d'Amaury Jacquot pour configurer mon portable pour acquerir les traces de mes déplacements. Mission réussi, j'ai publié sur le serveur mon parcours Paris - Bordeaux - Pau ainsi qu'un paquet de déplacements sur l'agglomération de Pau. Il ne manque plus maintenant qu'à reprendre ces traces au propre pour indiquer le type, sens et nom des routes, rues et voies. Les points d'intérêts et toutes autres informations utiles.
C'est un projet aussi ambitieux et fou que Wikipedia, mais c'est un enjeu d'avenir ou tout le monde peut contribuer. Téléchargez JOSM, regardez si il existe déjà des traces GPS aux alentours de chez vous, et mettez les en forme.

Voilà, voilà, vivement la prochaine édition des RMLL...

(25 July 2007 à 19:14)

Samedi dernier, j'ai assisté à la conf de Michaël Latour au Festival du Film Web d'Oloron sur le thème "Comment faire un film de A à Z en utilisant uniquement des logiciels libres". Excellente présentation, j'ai découvert des nouveautés. Décidément on trouve vraiment TOUT dans le Logiciel Libre :)

Mais c'est surtout ce qui s'est passé après cette conf que j'ai envie de vous faire découvrir...

Après la conf on m'a invité à rester à la Compétition Officielle du Festival pour voter avec le public le meilleur des 10 films sélectionnés pour cette édition 2007 parmi 300 autres. J'étais pas très chaud, fatigué au point de somnoler durant la conf de Michaël :( Mais j'ai accepté et je ne le regrette pas, vraiment pas :)

Pour commencer, j'ai trainé dans l'espace multimédia du festival ou des ordis connecté sur Internet était en libre service. On m'a présenté Second Life. Pour simplifier, je dirais que Second Life est un logiciel de chat/irc où on dirige un avatar dans un univers virtuel en 3D inspiré du réel que l'on peut soit même construire de toute pièce. Le client Second Life existe sous GNU/Linux, et qui plus est sous license GPL depuis peu. Par contre le logiciel serveur est lui propriétaire et les serveurs uniquement hébergé par Linden Lab. Ils en aurait aujourd'hui plus de 3000 !!!
Le Festival du Film Web s'est créé un espace dans ce monde virtuel dans lequel les internautes peuvent assiter à la diffusion des films en streaming dans un décor 3D simulant une diffusion en plein air. Bluffant !
Vous visiter cet espace suivez cet URL particulière secondlife://Riviera/211/138/26

Il y a 10 ans j'avais appris à manipuler le VRML et j'avais même candidaté pour faire un stage chez Canal + pour travailler sur le Deuxième Monde [1] [2]. 10 ans après le concept n'est pas mort, il manque juste la libération des serveurs 3D pour laisser libre court à la créativité des internautes et faire exploser ces commaunautés virtuelles 3D aussi fort qu'on explosé les simples sites Web !!
Hélàs, techniquement, le client Second Life pour Linux est carrément poussif par rapport à un UT2004. Il parait que c'est pareil sous Windows. Même avec le code source disponible, je doute que l'on puisse améliorer véritablement les performances sans modifier profondément le protocole de communication avec les serveurs. Une raison s'il en est de libérer aussi le code des serveurs...

Après m'être fait invité au restau, vient enfin la compétition elle-même, et là, Whaooo, le niveau des films en compétition est impressionnant. La claque !!
Je m'attendais à ce que ce festival soit un pretexte à la déconnade et la grivoiserie. ET ben non, enfin pas seulement... de la même manière que derrière des geeks barbus, mal lavés, les yeux tirés a qui on donnerait volontiers une pièce et un sandwich, rencontré au hasard d'une manifestation style RMLL ou FOSDEM se cache un hacker de génie, une référence, une pointure... Il y avait plein de génie de la caméra présent à ce festival

Si vous en doutez, prenez vous aussi une claque en visionnant Le trophée (42 Mo) et en visitant le site de ce court métrage.

Un compte-rendu du festival et une critique des 10 films en compétition avec les liens vers les courts-métrage en compétition...
Si regarder les films sur le Web ne vous satisfait pas, vous pourrez acheter le DVD du festival 2007 quand il sera prêt ou planifier dans une séance de rattrapage en achetant les DVDs des éditions précédentes ;o)

Et enfin, pour couronner le tout, J'ai gagné un voyage dans le désert des Bardenas. Je n'ai décidément pas perdu mon après-midi, ni ma soirée qui s'est achevé à 4h du mat :))

Félicitations à Matthew Tyas et Isabelle Lassignardie pour l'organisation de cet événement sympathique, bon enfant et de qualité :)

(11 April 2007 à 21:10)

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 !

(22 January 2007 à 04:12)

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.

(20 December 2006 à 05:41)

Eye of Gnome comes with some nifty features like support for EXIF data in jpegs. But this depends on a library that isn’t a part of Gnome.

So what do I write in the user manual for EOG?

‘You can see EXIF data for an image, but you need to check the innards of your system first.’
‘You can maybe see EXIF data. I don’t know. Ask your distro.’
‘If you can’t see EXIF data, install the libexif library. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how you can do that as I don’t know what sort of system you’re running Gnome on.’

The way GNU/Linux systems are put together is perhaps great for people who want unlimited ability to customize and choose. But it makes it very hard to write good documentation. In this sort of scenario, I would say it makes it impossible, and we’re left with a user manual that looks bad.

I’ve added this to the list of use cases for Project Mallard, but I don’t think it’ll be an easy one to solve.

(05 December 2006 à 08:08)