I'm in Istanbul since yesterday. The weather is hot.

We have drunk beer on the sidewalk sitting on cushions and carpet: that's what the terraces are in Istanbul. Some North American countries really need some thinking about the alcohol taboo.

I have taken 346 pictures so far. That's a case where I wish I had a GPS to geotag them. I will need to do some sorting though, and that might involve writing code before hand.

More later...

(06 July 2008 à 13:54)

So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along - no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???

Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.

(05 July 2008 à 21:16)

I've been in Mont de Marsan in the last few days for the RMLL (which is actually named LSM in english). This is the biggest community event in France, so it's quite a good place to be! On the bad side, we could have done with a more helpful weather and a better connectivity to the outside world in the boothes area, but it was still an enjoyable event in the end.

While I was the only openSUSE advocate, I was pleased to see french GNOME friends Claude (okay, he's swiss), Frédéric (hrm, he's belgian...) and Dave (err... irish?!?). I guess that's the best example to show that the french-speaking community is far from being a french-only one :-) Yay for francophonie! Of course, there were also most of the usual suspects who usually attend the major french/french-speaking events, so it's always a good time to mix with people from many different projects or organizations. Which explains how I could talk to many people. I got good feedback about GNOME and I think I got quite a fewpeople interested in openSUSE: two simple things to make me happy :-)

There was the usual GNOME booth where I tried to help a bit (only a bit :-)), but I also attended to give three talks (an organizer told me this might be a new record!):

• the first one was about the openSUSE community, and howthe community is growing and how the development process is beeing opened. Unfortunately, the attendance turned out to be low :/ Not really sure why, but it's probably (at least partly) because we started late and it was after a talk from a totally unrelated topic (so people didn't stay). It sill went well, I guess.
• I also talked about the openSUSE build service. There was a track about build forges and infrastructure, and it seemed natural to talk about the build service there. While I'm far from being an expert, I think I still managed to introduce it in an understandable way ;-) We had some great discussion with a few people about upstream, packaging, making some steps easier, etc. I was glad because it was really the right place for this talk.
• and finally, I gave an overview of the release engineering processes in GNOME. Since I've been involved in this area for quite some time, it all seems natural to me, but it's true that people usually don't know what it involves. I simplified a bit some stuff, but I tried to explain our development processes, how the development cycle is organized, how a tarball is rolled and how a complete GNOME release is made available. There are so many things to tell about all this... Good stuff!

I'll put the slides online soonish -- just need to fix one or two typos. However, I guess the slides are nearly useless if you only look at them since I've been using the "one word or very short sentence per slide" rule. I really like to do talks this way, although it's not always possible (really much harder for technical topics, for example). But it really gives me the feeling that it's more inspiring for people who attend the talk. And while you could think it's way easier and faster to write slides like this, it's not always the case (I also love doing photos-only slides, but it requires even more time).

Oh, and Claude had this wonderful initiative. People liked this and had fun trying to build this penguin the right way.

Next steps: a night in Lyon with some friends, before heading to Istanbul for GUADEC for some great time with lots of GNOME people:

(05 July 2008 à 09:31)

For those fortunate people who are attending GUADEC this year, you'll get a nice 4GB USB key featuring Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring Flash, in a special GUADEC edition, with your favorite GNOME 2.22 desktop on it :


Compared to last year Guadec key, it is now possible to use the key to install a new system with Mandriva Linux, just like you would do with a Live CD.

Currently, keys are being processed by Turkish customs at Istanbul, so I don't know yet if they'll be available for Guadec opening on Monday but if not, they should be available during the week. Guadec team will tell everybody when they get theirs hands on them.

However, we discovered (after sending keys to production, of course :( a small bug which will prevent this new install system to work properly (only Guadec keys are concerned, not standard Mandriva 2008 Spring Flash key). To fix your key and be able to use the installer, just follow this procedure :

• download this initrd file 
• if you are downloading the file from a running Mandriva Flash system, copy it to  /live/media/.boot/usb directory and restart Mandriva Flash system. 
• if you have just mounted the key on any other system, copy downloaded file to the mounted key, in .boot/usb directory.
• Here you are, you can now use Live Install feature any time you want.

Even if you don't plan to use the USB Guadec key immediatly (or if you want to give to somebody else, etc..), I strongly advise people to do the procedure so they have a fixed key which can be use whenever they want.

We also found a gdm crash when you boot the key for the first time, after filling configuration steps : you go back to text login, instead of getting autologin. If this happens, as root, just run : service dm restart. You can get the same issue the first time you'll boot a system installed with the key. It appear to be system dependent (it doesn't crash on all systems), probably a race condition where gdm doesn't always like to be told to reload his configuration.

Of course, if you have any problem with your Mandriva USB Guadec key, just grab me in GUADEC venue, I'll be attending the entire conference.

Enjoy !

(05 July 2008 à 05:00)

I rebooted my computer and went out for lunch with some friends. When I came back, it was particularly unresponsive, so I went hunting, and top showed me this:

19055 root      20   0 1343m 453m 1524 D  0.3 45.3   1:46.13 rsvg-convert

A quick ps…

dneary@sligo:~$ ps -ef | grep 19055
root     19055 19054  0 12:25 ?        00:01:45
  /usr/bin/rsvg-convert -o /var/log/bootchart/hardy-20080704-1.png
  /var/log/bootchart/bootchart.svgz

Ouch!

Does bootchart run until you log in? Is this normal behaviour? 1.3G of virtual memory is an awful lot…

(04 July 2008 à 14:14)

I know Matthew mentionned it already, but I could not resist.

Garmin are launching their Nüvi 8xxx and 5xxx GPS devices and people are talking about it.
What impresses me is that they are using GNU/Linux, GNOME Mobile, and more importantly, are releasing the source code of the modifications they did to the Free Software components they use.

I logically went to look at what they are releasing. They set up a very simple and accessible web site from where you can get the sources. No ads, no bullshit, no nothing. Just the plain simple source tarballs. They even separated the patches they did from the tarballs. Man, sooooo well done.

I dowloaded this archive from their website. Man, they are really using everything from Xorg to Gtkmm, including a lot of other cool Free Software technology bits that are either GPL or GPL compatible.

Okay, I am not a gizmo geek. I have no Ipod, no camera on my cell phone, no gaming device ... But this time, I think I am going to buy one of these Garmin GPS devices. I wonder if I can update the maps on the devices using my GNU/Linux desktop. I don't mind buying the maps. I just don't want to be forced to use a proprietary desktop software system, just to update those maps.

In any case, well done Garmin. You are taking and you are giving back. And that has to be said.

(03 July 2008 à 08:27)

People still don't understand that I never show up in Red Hat's new UK offices, which is why that little piece of plastic was left for a long while on a desk that I don't occupy: I got my nice little 5-year award today! And I won't have to wait for 5 years for the 10-year on as it will actually be 6 years in September. Wicked!

(02 July 2008 à 20:14)

Until now I was using rsync when I needed to limit bandwith, but on this morning I could read this on IRC :

<la_loOse> scp a aussi un -l pour limiter la bande passante

In english: scp has a -l option to limit bandwidth

And indeed, in the manpage:

     -l limit
             Limits the used bandwidth, specified in Kbit/s.

I have no idea how old is this option...

(02 July 2008 à 08:06)

I will be talking at the RMLL on Thursday afternoon.

Right after the RMLL, I will be flying back from Mont-de-Marsan to Belgium on Friday.

On Saturday, I’ll take the plane to Istanbul for GUADEC.

I will present Ekiga 3.00 to both events : what’s new, what’s old, what’s to expect.

I have just committed a large piece of missing code in the Ekiga engine.

See you there !

(30 June 2008 à 21:08)

Le weekend dernier j’étais à Evreux pour le festival “Le rock dans tous ses états” (et ici pour des photos).

(more…)

(30 June 2008 à 16:09)

I’m slowly switching to Git for my personal projects, and I like it more and more. And it seems that I can only find nice things to read about it.

So, I’m wondering: what are the things that you dislike with Git? That make you regret/prefer another VCS? If Git was redesigned from scratch, what should be changed?

(24 June 2008 à 22:24)

Ah Micro Hebdo. Le premier (et seul) magazine informatique auquel j'ai été abonné, quand j'étais encore sous Windows.

J'ai fini par acheter Micro Hedo n°531 (encore en kioske demain), en vu d'un voyage en train où j'avais du temps à tuer. Bon, le public de ce magazine est clair : le Windowsien débutant ou moyen qu iveut avoir des trucs pratiques. En général ils sont assez objectifs. Ils ont même essayé Linux de temps en temps, (si, si, et même Mandriva Linux, avec quelques bêtises en prime). Bon, c'est clair par contre qu'on y parle plus de logiciels gratuits que de logiciels libres.

Dans ce numéro, donc, on parle des ultra-portables à moins de 400 euros. Evidemment j'ai traqué l'utilisation de Linux dans ces bestioles. On y parle du futur Gdium Liberty 1000, qui utilise une Mandriva Flash rebaptisée pour l'occasion "Mandriva G-Linux". Par contre (honte à eux) ils oublient complètement que le Airis Kira 740 est aussi disponible avec Mandriva Linux (alors que tous les articles sur le sujet en parlent depuis bien 2 mois) !

Les autres modèles testés:

• Aspire Acer One (Windows XP ou Linux Linpus Lite)
• Medio Akoya Mini E1210 ( Windows XP uniquement)
• MSI Wind U100 (Windows XP et Suse, apparemment)
• PC by Surcouf (Windows XP uniquement, comme je l'avais déjà indiqué sur linuxfr.org)

Eh bien le résultat des tests a l'air sans appel: le modèle d'Acer enfonce les autres au niveau prix (299€), poids (le seul à moins d'un kilo avec le PC by Surcouf) et rapport qualité/prix. De plus, il offre une capacité de 10Go de SSD dans la version Linux, et 8Go pour la version Windows.

Là où ça devient intéressant c'est qu'on peut choisir une version avec disque dur plutôt que SSD (bon, je préfère la SSD pour ce type de machine). Pour un disque de 80Go , on en a pour 20€ de plus dans la version Linux, et 70€ de plus pour la version Windows. Vous me suivez ? On a deux machines identiques sous Windows et Linux, avec 50€ de différence. Idem pour le MSI Wind U100: 50€ de plus pour la version Windows, à matériel identique. Il semble donc qu'il y ait un certain consensus : une licence XP en OEM se négocie dans les 50€. Prenez des notes pour la prochaine fois où on vous proposera 20€ pour le Windows de votre tout PC portable tout neuf (avec l'envoi du portable à vos frais bien sûr).

Pour conclure, vu les caractéristiques du Aspire Acer One, et la politique d'ACER de soutien à Linux, c'est le type de machine qui peut détrôner l'EEEPC d'Asus.

(24 June 2008 à 01:20)

The FreeFA tournament will take place again this year, on Tuesday 8th July. We still have room for a couple of people. Seems like keeping it low-key wasn't enough to get it under-subscribed.

Diego will soon be taking care of setting up the teams. There might be some room left for a couple of people to join, in case we get late cancellations, so please add your name and contacts to the wiki page if you're interested.

(23 June 2008 à 14:06)

This week end I pushed nemiver 0.5.4 out. The release fixes a couple of annoying bugs like this one, or this one that were preventing me to properly debug some programs.

It is impressive how motivated I can be to fix a set of bugs once I get hit by those bugs myself :-)

Hopefully it should be better now - we always hope so after each release, don't we ?

This new release should hit a package repository mirror near you soonish.

(23 June 2008 à 13:28)

Bugfixes and new translations.

To upgrade from previous version, run the following scripts:

1. sql/upgrade-sql-vtm-1.0.1-to-1.0.2.sql
2. sql/upgrade-sql-vtm-1.0.1-to-1.0.2.php

* MAJOR FIX to get the last user who has locked the module
* New $url_hosted_link and $url_hosted_name variables to set in
localconfig.inc.php
* FIX Sending of emails to the committers on ‘Ready to commit’
* New Brazilian Portuguese translation by Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle
* New Czech translation by Lucas Lommer (#237486)
* FIX #237472 reported by Lucas Lommer
VARCHAR > 255 needs MySQL 5.0.3 or later

(22 June 2008 à 20:39)

It's officially out: go grab openSUSE 11.0! You can also use the web interface to help you choose what to download and how to download it.

I'm quite new to the openSUSE world but I've seen great progress in the last six months and I'm definitely happy with the work that is going on in the GNOME team. There are many reasons for that:

• many people are willing to help (and when I say many, it also means more and more) in the openSUSE-GNOME community and so useful things get actually done :-) I'm quite confident that we'll have even more contributions in the future thanks to the new collaboration features of the build service.
• there's an ongoing effort to reduce our number of patches: we want to be good upstream citizen and keeping patches can only hurt us in the long term anyway (they require maintenance, after all). This means we're reviewing all of our patches by making sure they have been sent upstream, and dropping them when we consider they're not worth the effort.
• most (I don't dare saying all, but maybe I should) of the development we're doing is being done upstream. Did I mention we want to be good upstream citizen?
• with all this upstream orientation, you could get the feeling that we're not doing anything useful inside the distribution. But we want to get everything polished and well-integrated with the rest of the distribution, and I hope people will agree we're not doing bad in this area.
• oh, and the people are so great. I won't try to describe howcrazy good the atmosphere is -- just join the IRC channel or the list!

The summary could read: great people, upstream work and awesome result.

I wanted to do quite a few things to celebrate this release, but I unfortunately lost my internet connectivity at home, which makes me quite less productive (but it might be good to help cure the addiction ;-)). Anyway, I'll keep those (not so) secret ideas for the next release! Because, you know, I've the feeling that 11.0 was only first step and 11.1 will get some pure love :-)

(19 June 2008 à 13:48)

in main:

in universe:

Those graphs (found on http://merges.ubuntu.com/) show the number of unmodified vs modified packages in Ubuntu main and universe. Interesting.

(19 June 2008 à 09:27)

Le CSA, Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel, de la Communauté française de Belgique, vient d'annoncer le nouveau plan de fréquences, qui définit (enfin) quelles radios, à quelles fréquences.

À Bruxelles, Radio Panik et Radio Air Libre gardent leurs fréquences (105.4 et 87.7) alors que Radio Campus déménagera du 107.2 au 92.1.

Ailleurs, radios avec qui se fait la radio éphémère du festival Esperanzah, 48FM à Liège et RUN à Namur seront toujours sur les ondes.

C'est super cool.

(18 June 2008 à 20:01)

Ian Lance Taylor has posted his gcc summit slides, one set about gold, the new ELF linker for gcc that he wrote in C++, and the other one about writing gcc in C++. Very interesting and short.

(18 June 2008 à 16:21)

EEE PC
Maybe people are not aware of this fact but we, at Mandriva, really love EEE PC. We love them so much that Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (released on April 9th 2008) is fully compatible with EEE PC 700/701, out of the box (no patch needed), with all features working. And as a bonus, we give you about half an hour more of battery autonomy, compared to the distribution bundled with EEE PC. For EEE PC 900, you need to upgrade kernel and hal-info packages from security / bugfix update media (if you are installing from Mandriva Free or Mandriva Powerpack installer, just accept security updates at the end of install). We haven't got a EEE PC 901 in our hands yet, but we will make sure to fix any incompatibilities found, if any.

Even better : if you have Mandriva Flash 2008 Spring edition (released last week), you can use the new "install from flash key" feature to install Mandriva on your EEE PC (no USB CD/DVD drive nor network install required) and it will work on 700/701/900 EEE PC (no changed needed).

Hint : if you are coming to GUADEC at Istanbul, you should be happy with GUADEC USB key this year ;)

Mandriva Linux 2009
We have just posted technical specifications for Mandriva 2009.0 (scheduled for early October), based on both internal and community feedbacks. Now, we just need to implement as much as possible of them ;)

(17 June 2008 à 13:02)

Aujourd'hui est la date officielle du lancement de Firefox 3. Rejoignez le projet de record du monde en participant. Update : il semblerait que cela commence à 10:00 PDT soit 19:00 CEST.

(17 June 2008 à 06:35)

Le petit Jean S. est attendu par son papa.

(16 June 2008 à 23:08)

L’info est dans le Morgen de vendredi passé (13 juin 2008). Selon un rapport de la KU Leuven présenté à La Haye lors d’un congrès e-Identity, la carte d’identité électronique belge “n’est absolument pas sûre et son utilisation doit être déconseillée.Les chercheurs estiment qu’il faut arrêter d’utiliser la carte électronique et que le logiciel doit être redeveloppé.” Outre les problèmes liés à la puce, les scientifiques mettent également en garde contre les risques d'atteinte à la vie privée, de fraude et de chantage. En cause, le mécanisme de sécurité de la carte qui peut être facilement détourné et le fait qu’on puisse utiliser la carte sans installation ou mise en marche du logiciel reconnu par la Fedict.

(16 June 2008 à 14:10)

GNOME is smart, efficient and beautiful; it was the running line for the 2.8 release, it is even more so today. I really love it and all of the improvements we get done each and every release.

Smart. Efficient. Beautiful. We got there.

We have a desktop, and people are using desktops. But that is not enough, increasingly they are also using web applications; and doing so they don't use Free Software, they don't control their data; they are at the mercy of company closing services, changing terms of services, selling their data, and so on.

The fundamental definition and goals of GNOME should be to provide smart, efficient and beautiful software; and not just desktop applications but also web applications. But the GNOME project, at the moment, is not capable of this; we do not have enough people with those skills, or interest (just look at the pain to get the new www.gnome.org or art.gnome.org going).

We need free web applications just like we needed a free operating system and a free desktop years ago.

As we are lacking skills, we have to reach out to and share our idea(l)s with existing web development communities, I do not know them all, I would like to talk about this idea with the Django people. (I'll point them to this weblog entry once I am done writing it). There are already great free software web applications, they should be considered too.

Email and calendaring (what happened to Hula btw?), weblogs, photo galleries, bookmark sharing; we need them and as they will use standard protocols and formats we will integrate them nicely into the desktop.

Bridging web applications and the desktop, that is my main point; I'll be shorter for the two other points.

My second point would be about free content, just look at OpenStreetMap and KDE Marble, closer to us GNOME folks just look at Rhythmbox and its Jamendo plug-in. Free content exists, let's bring it to the desktop.

My third point is simply to continue the trend to networked applications, hooray for AbiCollab.

Keep the existing community, interested in the desktop, bring a new community, interested in the web, shake.

(16 June 2008 à 13:03)

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)

There are a great web site and some tools about this subject (thanks to Intel and their great developers)
http://www.lesswatts.org

Services

The first step is to remove some useless services or rarely used, I chosen the following ones :

apt-get remove bluz-utils hplip* scim* tracker*

update-rc.d -f pcmcia remove, for mysql, apache2, postgresql-8.3 (it’s easy to launch when necessary)

You can really check the impact of your changes with bootchart and view the result with eog /var/log/bootchart/*.png (my laptop starts in 27 seconds).

In gnome-session-properties, I also unchecked Applet Tracker, Evolution Alarm Notifier, Bluetooth Manager (don’t forget to save in the third tab).

Settings

You can measure the number of wakeups per second with the wonderful PowerTop ($ sudo powertop), on my computer the main guilty was the proprietary nvidia driver (around 60 fps like the refresh rate of my screen), I added the following line in my xorg.conf to resolve that issue (~ 2 wps after) :

Option         “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “true”

I also blacklisted some modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist pcmcia
blacklist yenta_socket
blacklist rsrc_nonstatic

With no Wifi and no USB mouse connected, with my GNOME Desktop, a gnome-terminal and Emacs, I have only 20 wakeups per second (not bad :).

I wrote a little script to test some more aggressive settings if they works fine I will add them to sysctl.conf:

# By setting this to ‘1′, under light load scenarios, the process
# load is distributed such that all the cores in a processor package
# are busy before distributing the process load to other processor
# packages.
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_saving

# From 500 by default
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

# SATA
echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy

# Sound
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

I don’t use the laptop_mode or hdparm because I don’t want to stress my hard drive with too many spin up and down. It’s not necessary to insert the ‘noatime’ option in fstab with Ubuntu Hardy Heron because the new ‘relatime’ option is already activated.

(12 June 2008 à 20:52)

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)

Andy, I’m sure there are more than 100 new features in Ekiga 3.00. I’m ready to write them down.

However, I’m not sure to have enough spare time (yes, I’m not paid to work on Ekiga) to finish everything at perfection for the next release of GNOME. Do you want to join forces ?

(07 June 2008 à 16:43)

I have been pretty surprised (and somewhat disgusted) to see ekiga listed as an example of a project trying “not to bite too much” : ekiga 3.00 isn’t just a new release, it’s a new major release!

And it’s not because we changed the version number that it’s a major version, but rather the reverse : many things have been changed and improved, the code structure has been heavily modified. The codecs have been improved by so many order of magnitudes the video output needed rewriting, for instance!

(07 June 2008 à 15:59)

It started on Friday evening with a party on the first floor of the Eiffel tower to celebrate 10th birthday of Mandriva. It was great, with a lot of nice people including some foreign colleagues and contributors who I had never met before, and some former employees.

Unfortunately it did not end very well as our beloved giant tux was stolen :(

On Saturday, there was an Install Party at Mandriva Paris office, which was followed by a picnic (inside given the weather) and a DDR +WII party.

On Sunday, I had to wake up at 6 to follow some friends whose march band was playing in Thésee (close to Blois/Tours). This was a great day (full of free wine!) even if I was falling asleep :)

(04 June 2008 à 21:15)

Eiffel : tearful future ahead

As I explained some time ago, I spent quite some time doing financial simulations lately. At first, I was using python, which is pretty nice to do a simple and direct simulation, but I always feel it’s too toyish for serious use.

So I made my more complex simulations using eiffel, and more precisely smarteiffel’s compiler. This language has many good features :

• it’s garbage-collected (wink),
• does inheritance right (hint: no virtual keyword to make the concept half-stupid — yes, I know, optimisation : C++ is 0.001% faster in not doing the right thing!),
• including multiple inheritance (undefining methods, renaming them),
• allows determining which API parts of an object are visible to whom (not limited to a simple public/private or public/protected/private di(tri)chotomy of the world),
• does pre/post conditions at the method and object level (and they do get inherited correctly, and you can refine them if needed : it’s not just a hack!) ;
• it does generics with constraints (ie: you can tell your generic container will only accept objets of base class something — for example the compiler will let you use a SOMETHING[RECTANGLE] because you said SOMETHING[A->QUADRILATERAL] and RECTANGLE is a QUADRILATERAL, but won’t let you use a SOMETHING[HEXAGONAL]) ;
• it does functions-as-values (called agents),
• since typing is pretty strict (the only automatic/implicit ‘conversion’ is if you consider a descendant class as an ascendant), the compiler is generally able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is in the sources, so a compilable source is generally good,
• but even if by a surprising accident it doesn’t, then the trace you get will tell you exactly where you made a mistake.

So what’s the catch? Well, it has a few shortcomings.

One of them is that you have to give each type explicitely, which can become cumbersome when you deal with something like a COLLECTION[PAIR[INTEGER, COLLECTION[STRING, STRING]]… even though the problem is a little dampered with syntactic sugar in the form of anchored types (ie: once you told it foo was of type FOO, you can tell it that other_foo is of type “like foo”, so if you change your mind about an api, it’s easy to just change one place).

Another one is that too few people know about it to reach a critical mass although it’s much much much easier and coherent to read and/or write than other more mainstream object-oriented languages (or claimed as such… wink).

This last problem has gotten worse recently (since 2005) when the smarteiffel (GNU compiler for the eiffel language) people decided they didn’t like the way ECMA (yes, that ECMA) was pushing the language, and forked it.

A few weeks ago, all smarteiffel-related debian packages got orphaned, and no other eiffel compiler is in debian anymore, which means it’s getting harder to install too.

Lisaac : future ahead (!)

There is another language, with many common points with eiffel, but still pretty different, since it’s a prototype-based language : you define base objects, by declaring “slots”, which you can either write for the new object or “inherit” from a base object. Again, multiple inheritance is no problem and you can export the various API parts an object has to whatever prototype-object you want.

An important difference with eiffel is that the compiler will do auto-casts for you. The main difference with C++ is that you will need to explicitly declare that casting FOO to BAR is possible (not at the place where you use obviously, or I wouldn’t call it ‘auto’), and it will only do one single cast, and not a series of them.

The compiler does a quite thorough analysis of the sources, so it can spot more issues and optimize more completely, which probably explains why it’s so well-placed in the computer language shootout.

Both the language and its compiler are pretty young though, so stability isn’t as good as with smarteiffel : I’ve seen it crash on some simple code (reported, of course).

OCaml : precious!

Well, I haven’t written financial simulations with OCaml : since I made some simulations with python, others with smarteiffel and others with lisaac, I do have a better view of how I should manage the little money I have! [no, I didn’t just write the same simulation in several languages over and over]

Still, I couldn’t blog about languages without mentioning that one! Again, it’s a garbage-collected language, it does inheritance and multiple inheritance (not as good as eiffel, even if it has constrained inheritance), unfortunately only with a public/private dichotomy (there are ways to offset that issue using ‘modules’). It won’t cast behind your back.

It’s time to mention the two main points of the language : it is a functional language, and it does type inference. The former is quite well-known, since hopefully everyone has heard of lisp and scheme, so I don’t need to tell that much about it : it’s pretty renowned to lead to terse and elegant code.

The type inference can be new to some. If you decide to write a prepend function which takes two arguments : the first is an object, and the second a list containing elements of the same type as the object, which will just prepend the element at the start of the list, you’ll just write (in the interpreter) : “let prepend obj lis = obj :: lis;;” (the ‘;;’ is unneeded if you do it in a file you compile — only the interpreter needs it), you’ll get back : “val prepend : ‘a -> ‘a list -> ‘a list = <fun>” which means : prepend is a function, which takes an object of unknown (polymorphic) type (denoted ‘a), a list of object of the same type (’a list), and returns a list of objects of that same type.

Some say its syntax is hard : take a look at C/C++ code with an eye as fresh as you use reading OCaml, and you’ll see none wins.

Ekiga

I spent most of my spare time thinking about making more money by managing it better, so it has been quite some time since I seriously worked on it : I saw new things mature, bugs get fixed, little improvements here and there… exciting things I haven’t taken a serious part — hopefully they left some bugs for me to work on!

(04 June 2008 à 20:14)

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)

(31 May 2008 à 00:47)

On May, 8th, my ibook fall from the table and hit the ground 40cm below. I saw it fall, saw it instantly poweroff :/

Disk reconstruction began. It's a 60GB disk, with a 58GB reiserfs /. It could still boot but i got read errors everywhere and reiserfsck reported 81 corruptions. I have a one month old backup, that's not good enough. I needed a live cd in order to copy the disk, run badblocks and eventually try to fix it if it's not totally destroyed. The best i could get was an Ubuntu 5.04 live cd. I pluged in my 250GB USB disk. I then started to run badblocks (with the wrong blocksize...). I then tried to dd it, but that was taking ages. I was looking for GNU ddrescue but it was not present. I wondered a bit, but then realized that the / was writable: spent 10 minutes looking for a valid ubuntu mirror, apt-get update g++, grabbed the ddrescue sources, compiled it. I would have extracted the disk if i could found the righ screwdriver (thank you Apple).

48H later: at first ddrescue found 130MB of dead blocks out of 58GB. The damaged blocks are located around 20GB, 40GB, and 60GB, so clearly, the heads hit the platters. After trimming errors, it's down to 30MB. reiserfsck has this very nice '--rebuild-tree' which scans the whole partition, rebuilds the filesystem and reports which entries are damaged, using real filenames. This is so great because you then know which files are damaged (and there's of course a lost+found).

...
After days of dd_rescue and badblocks, i recreated the fs and copied back all my data. I had the nice idea to double-check the copied data and found a lot of corruption. I took my laptop to the nearest apple center, and got it back 2 days later (May, 28). 220€ later, my laptop was back with a new 120GB harddrive and OS10.4 on it (although i asked for a clean drive). Booted ubuntu, partionned the disk, formated in ext3 (with 256B inode, ready for ext4), installed yaboot, copied my rescued /. Tada ! it booted OK. I eventually found that some /var files were damanged which made apt unhappy.

FIN

(30 May 2008 à 16:08)

(30 May 2008 à 11:50)

Quand j’étais à la petite école, j’ai appris que dans une démocratie, on avait une personne, un vote. Mais ce n’est plus le cas au Québec. Le vote d’un électeur de la circonscription de Matane vaut 1.75 fois celui d’un électeur de Vaudreuil[1]. Bien sur, les gens de la Gaspésie veulent garder leur privilège, mais qui défend les habitant lésés de la région montréalaise. Je trouve inquiétant de ne voir aucun politicien, même pas notre maire, défendre nos intérêts.

[1] Deux comtés choisis au hasard, Vaudreuil et Matane

(28 May 2008 à 17:35)

Bon pour justifier que mon blog soit affiché dans le planet Gnome-FR, voici quelques nouvelles de mon travail sur Ekiga…

Depuis quelques semaines j’ai essayer de me réinvestir dans Ekiga. J’ai commencé à m’intéresser à Ekiga (alors en ce temps encore appelé GnomeMeeting) dès octobre ou novembre 2001. D’abord à la recherche d’aide à la configuration et à l’utilisation de cette jeune application très prometteuse, j’ai rapidement été conquis par le petit nombre de gens gravitant autour. Les plus anciens auront la larme à l’oeil en lisant les nicks suivant. Tristan, kikov, manty, migras, cristiano et j’en oublie certainement. J’ai rapidement eu l’envie de participer moi aussi à cette aventure. Après ma première visite au FOSDEM en février ou mars 2002 et la rencontre avec Damien, je me suis lancé dans la traduction française de l’application et en assurant une présence quotidienne sur le canal IRC pour assurer un peu de support quand je le pouvais. J’ai ensuite été en charge de la coordination de toutes les traductions de l’application avant que le projet n’intègre le GTP. J’ai aussi ponctuellement produit de petits patchs, surtout basés sur des modifications mineures de la GUI. Jusqu’à la fourniture il y a déjà quelques temps du fr.po traduit à 100% pour la dernière version stable.

Malheureusement des déménagements successifs, différents événements (je sais pas pourquoi mais j’ai toujours préféré l’orthographe évènement pour ce mot) personnels et professionnels m’avaient obligé à prendre un peu de recul par rapport à ma participation au projet. La vie quoi…..

Or depuis quelques semaines, j’ai recommencé à m’investir dans Ekiga. une présence plus régulière sur le canal IRC pour du support, submission de quelques nouveaux patchs pour la GUI et surtout, la fourniture d’un nouveau portail pour le site des snapshots que l’on essaye de ressuciter.

Voilà…. un peu d’autocongratulation de temps en temps ça ne fait pas de mal ;)

(27 May 2008 à 22:00)

I tried to download a propriertary JDK6, worst download experience ever ... clicked download which gave me a JNLP file (???). I first thought it was a bug, so i reloaded the page. No, it's the "Tvo Download Manager". You need to read the "download" button's tooltip to understand what was going on.

This started a 3 tab download manager:

1. Download: you configure where the file is to be downloaded, the number of retries, the logfile size (???), whether it has to unzip or not, etc
2. Proxies: HTTP and FTP proxies configuration. I failed to enter any valid proxy there (it always claimed the proxy was invalid). At first this "tool" must have inherited browser settings.
3. Authentication: totally failed to configure this tab with host authentication list, etc

You want to dowload a zip and you end up with a bloated java downloader for HTTP downloading which doesn't handle transparent proxy configuration and authentification. So i haven't downloaded anything and i'm going to stay as far as possible from this unethical crap. (If that zip was to be downloaded bia bittorrent, i would have understood the need for a downloader.)

WTF

PS: I was a proxy admin in my previous job.

(20 May 2008 à 10:01)

I will be in London in two days attending EuSecWest. If you want to share a beer and talk about IDS, Prelude, NuFW or music, feel free to drop me a mail!

(19 May 2008 à 22:06)

(18 May 2008 à 20:36)

The Prelude IDMEF Grapher written to illustrate one aspect of Intrusion Detection Systems for the conference on the subject at CanSecWest this year is getting some attention.



Upon Raffy's request, I added to the excellent Secviz.org the generated graphs from three well-known scanners: Retina, Saint and Nessus.

I attacked my Prelude IDS machine which has two agents: Snort and Prelude LML. Those agents generate IDMEF alerts and PIG connects to the Prelude Manager to listen to any IDMEF event received.

With the power of Python+QT, in one hour I got the code up and running.

If you want to read what Ron Gula from Tenable say about it, you can read his blog post about PIG.

Right now pig's code must be ported to the recent additions from Yoann on top of what Pierre and I wrote to get Prelude easy bindings working. The merge will happen very soon with trunk and then PIG will be improved.

(08 May 2008 à 15:46)

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)

Thanks to the hard work of the Empathy, Telepathy and Farsight teams, VoIP is finally usable with Empathy. So you can now very easily do audio/video calls using Jingle and SIP. There is still a lot of UI polishing to do but it should basically work, so feel free to test and report problems.

You'll need Empathy 0.22.1, recent versions of Farsight, telepathy-stream-engine, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-farsight, and a gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg with H263 encoder if you want video support.

If you're using Debian Sid you should have the right versions of the Telepathy stack but need the Debian multimedia repo for video support (which is optinnal).

On Ubuntu Hardy you have to use Telepathy PPA and Medibuntu repos if you want video support. So just add to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://fr.packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

Happy calling!

(14 April 2008 à 18:41)

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)

(01 April 2008 à 08:19)

Students! There are only a few days left (until Monday) for you to submit your Google summer of code applications. This year, I’m hoping to mentor students working on Farsight 2 or on integrating Farsight in various applications. The most interesting project I’m proposing this year is adding plugins for the various non-free protocols to Farsight (see details), MSN is particularly easy since most of the reverse-engineering has already been done, its just a matter of coding it. GStreamer has a page on how to write a good application (hint hint, Farsight’s project are part of GStreamer this year!). I’m also a mentor on Gnome & Gentoo in case anything interesting is proposed there, so if you have good idea, go submit them now, time is running out!
Update: Google has extended the application period for one more week, so there’s still time… And we already have a good applicant for MSN, but please do apply for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, etc!

(31 March 2008 à 16:21)

Yesterday Xavier merged my Empathy irc-account branch. You can now very easily configure IRC accounts using empathy-accounts. We ship a XML file containing lot of well know IRC networks so users don't have to care about server address, port, etc.

This is the first step in my "use Empathy as a real IRC client" plan. Now we'll start a new set of libempathy-gtk widgets in order to create a dedicated application for multi users conversations (probably based on the interface of xchat-gnome).

(18 February 2008 à 20:17)

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)

The pope recently said: “A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition – one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made.

Daniel Postel, “Last Words from Richard Rorty,” The Progressive, June 02007

(17 June 2007 à 17:35)

Three different ways of envisioning the future of computer interfaces and data manipulation…

1 – Blaise Aguera y Arcas: “Photosynth”
Data visualization and tag reuse at its best; fluidity and beauty all coming from Microsoft. Who would have thought? Apparently, not even the speaker himself! :-)
7 minutes & 12 seconds.

2 – Anand Agarawala: “BumpTop”
An old idea—the computer desktop as physical space—implemented to mimic aspects of physical reality like weight and momentum.
4 minutes & 51 seconds.

3 – Aza Raskin: “Away with Applications”
The command-line interface meets the desktop and its applications…a long talk but the demos are worth watching.
1 hour, 26 minutes & 30 seconds. Includes two Q&A sections which you can skip. The first one starts around minute 40 and lasts about 15 minutes; the second one starts at the end of the talk proper and goes until the end of the video.

(10 June 2007 à 23:49)

Fedora 7 is released, have a fun

(31 May 2007 à 20:43)

Linux

(29 May 2007 à 13:12)

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)

Bonne année 2007 à tous !

(31 December 2006 à 21:07)

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 doe