Del.icio.us, Christmas, PSP, X hacker

Del.icio.us
Yahoo! has done it again : they have announced yesterday they bought Del.icio.us (they bought Flickr earlier this year). They seems to try to get a clue at interesting technologies and Web 2.0. I just hope they won't change Del.icio.us too much (at least, not more than they changed Flickr). Maybe their next shopping will be Technorati (it would be logical, even if I don't use Technorati myself).

Christmas
As Christmas is approching, Mandriva has decided to do a Christmas gift to Mandriva Club member : we will be release a Christmas Edition of Powerpack for x86, with GNOME 2.12 (yes, you read correctly, not 2.10 ;) ) as default environment and an updated theme/bootsplash/screensavers Christmas theme. I don't have the exact release date, but I guess it will be next week or so.

PSP
In these Christmas days, Santa Claus came early and offered me a PSP (yes, I know, I'm weak..). I've been using it for some days and it is great, but having also a Nokia 770, I can see the big difference : PSP sucks as a web browser, compared to N770 (Sony guys should have bought an Opera license, instead of a Netfront one) and their Wifi support doesn't work in Adhoc mode for network access, so I'll need to replace my cheap wifi network done with a USB dongle (based on Ralink rt2570 chipset which is starting to be correctly supported on Linux) with a real access point. I've also tried to convert some videos to be played on PSP : current result is average. I've only been able to generate MP4 file and quality is not as good as the one I can get with N770 (PSP fullscreen mode is much more blurry than N770 one). I've tried generating AVC files but they are not even detected by PSP (and I have firmware 2.01 ie with AVC support) and finding really relevant informations on PSP platform is extremely difficult. I really enjoy Maemo openness compared to PSP.

X server hacker
Mandriva is currently seeking an X Server hacker : so, if patching xorg server is your day (or night) hacking and if you want to work a really cool opensource company, go there. Warning : position is in our Paris office, not remote working.

Fast user switching, Accessibility and Reviews

I had a somehow scrappy but full week at work :
Fast User Switching
It started by a simple test : see what was the current state of fast user switching in cooker with GNOME. Unfortunately, it freezed X server and VT switch. After digging in gdm source, I discovered and fixed a bug introduced in latest gdm release on VT detection. This leds me trying to get one of our patch (settings X background with gdm graphical greeter) ready for upstream merge (it has been in our package for 18 months and I never found time to merge it) and while doing this, I started to clean GDM code to have less (if not none) warnings and it founds two real bugs while doing that (fixed in CVS now), which were hidden in the previous warning flow of gdm...
So, now, fast user switching works in cooker but after discussing with our ergo specialist in the office, I'll try to propose some improvements for both fusa and gdm to James and Callum.

Dogtail and Accessibility
I also found some time to package dogtail for cooker. And of course, while testing it, I found a crasher in gnome-vfs file chooser backend when using gedit with accessibility enabled. I hope enabling accessibility by default for 2.13 will help finding those kind of crasher for 2.14. I demoed dogtail to some people in the office and they were quite excited, because it will allow us to focus on fixing accessibility on the desktop and Mandriva tools (which are perl-Gtk2 based), improve testing and maybe improve user documentation by being able to do take control of an app in help system.

Review
I'm usually not a huge fan of distro review, mainly because they are divided in two categories : either "this distro sucks because it didn't install or this part is broken" or "this distro rules because it installed without any problem and I didn't encounter any bugs so far". As explained by Claudio, distros should be juged on the long term, where you can see (or not see if there are well done) the various changes done by distributions in order to smooth user experience (I hate that expression). Anyway, I was quite pissed off when I read latest ZdNet distro roundup because Mandriva review reports false facts (Ximian Connector is in the distro, I'm taking care of it) and empathises on one particular problem (configuring a remote printer, which could be improved, I agree). I guess I'll stop reading reviews for some time...

bye pybloxsom, hi Wordpress

Blog
So, after a long time not blogging (as always, because of lack of time, urge to post something worth reading by other people), I've decided to switch to Wordpress, to allow easy posts (I'm becoming more addicted to web applications, when they are done properly, like Flickr for instance) and to reduce load (pyblosxom was causing a new python process to be started for each access) and improve security on my personal web server (I got hacked earlier this year by awstats vulnerability, fortunately, I noticed very quickly and no harm was done) by reducing the various web components running on it. Modifying Workpress template to get the same look and feel wasn't very difficult and I have even added some javascript magic to integrate Flickr and Del.icio.us in the Wordpress sidebar. BTW, if you were using RSS feed, new url is now http://blog.crozat.net/feeds/posts/default/-/General . Each time I changed my blog software, I said I'd blog more. Each time, I failed. Let's see if I can do better this time ;)

Bouncy balls

While writing this post, I just saw Sony latest TV ads which was covered last summer in San Franscico on Flickr (check also there ). I really love flickr..

N770
As a lot of developpers, I ordered my N770 three weeks ago and I'm enjoying it a lot. I did some photos to compare it with my Palm T3 (no need to comment about the photo quality, I know some of them suck). Now, we are 5 in Mandriva Paris building to have a N770 and 3 in the same office as me (Sam and Arnaud, stop hacking your N770 and say hi ..). It was quite funny to notice N770 was already out of stocks for french and german version in the afternoon it was available for public purchase. Since then, it is out of stock for ALL european countries. Let's hope it means it will be a success. I did a french review of it on "Le Refuge" which can be read here. I plan to summarize and translate it in the near future.

Nour

Restaurant Nour
20 Boulevard Richard Lenoir
75011 Paris
Metro Richard Lenoir
Tel: 01 43 55 37 93
Fermé le lundi

Un restaurant libanais de quartier, testé par une amie (coucou Sophie) : excellent, très frais, très bon, très sympa, décor intime.

Mise à jour du 4 décembre 2005 : j'ai eu la chance de tester Nour avec Sophie et ses copines hier soir (encore merci au patron de nous avoir ouvert sa porte malgré l'heure tardive). Que dire sinon que les plats sont excellents (Mezze), le thé à la menthe et à la fleur d'oranger à tomber par terre et les prix tout à fait raisonnable. Une excellente adresse, il faut juste penser à appeler le patron si on compte arriver après 22h00.

West US photos, TranquilPC, XSettings and randoms things

As always, I forget to blog as often as I should. I sometime wonder if I should continue this blog..
Western US :

My trip in June was great, National Parks were awesome, as well as Las Vegas and San Francisco. I did a lot of photos (791, available here), and thanks to Hugin, Autopanog and Enblend, for the first time, I was able to generate panoramas without using Windows and Canon proprietary software !
Tranquil PC :
Unfortunately, my Tranquil PC has died, after almost two years running 24h a day, 7 days a week (the first one died after 6 months of operation and was replaced by the manufacturer). Concept was good but not that reliable. I've replaced it with a Shuttle Zen (which uses an fanless external power supply, just like laptops) which ended to be more powerful than my main PC.
Xsettings from KDE
As part of new features for the upcoming Mandriva 2006 (beta 1 is out, try it now), we wanted to better integrate all GTK+2 applications (such as all Mandriva tools, which are written in perl-GTK2) in KDE. To do this, using Owen reference implementation of Xsetting protocol, I wrote a small xsetting daemon for use in KDE, which reads KDE configuration files, make it available through XSettings (when applicable) and monitors KDE "KIPC" (which are just notification done using X atoms to tell KDE applications they should reload their configuration and apply it) to change XSettings accordingly. With this, when changing font in KControl, all GTK+ applications change their fonts too. This will allow us to put back stock buttons in our tools (ie better integration in GNOME) since they won't be shown when used under KDE (better coherency).Oh, and when doing this, I discovered a bug in libgnomeui2 (not filled yet) which discard Xsetting for toolbar style.
Randoms thoughts:
Oh, BTW, Bastien, it has been this way since we shipped Totem as a supported software, ie August 28 2003, because Totem is available in Video menu (titled as "Totem Movie Player") and Sound menu (titled as "Totem Media Player"). Why ? Because at that time (and even now in my opinion), Totem is one of the best player for movies and also for music files (when playing a random file downloaded on the web, not for playing your song library, in that case Rhythmbox is more appropriate) or webradio. Too bad for you, you wrote such a good application :)
The flickr folks did it again : they added some datamining in their databases so they could propose "interesting" photos for each day and also cluster tags. Now, each time I go there, I know I'm going to spend too much time looking at beautiful photos.

Flames, gallery migration, Nokia and travel

Wow, I didn't thought I would start such an active flame^Wthread on desktop-devel about GTK 2.8 and GNOME 2.12 by explaining my concerns but in the end, the important points were raised, discussed and understood by everybody so we will have a rocking (c)jdub GNOME 2.12 release.
I've just finished migrating all my photos to my Flickr account. It was much easier than I expected, because you can upload a bunch of pictures at the same time by just using curl (for people interested, just use curl -F email='your_login' -F password='your_password' -F photo="@photo.jpg" -F tags="space separated list of tags" -F async=1 http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploader_go.gne et voilà). I was nice to review some of the photos, but I really need to comment and tags all pictures. And this time, I was able to get mod_rewrite working to redirect all requests to flickr.
I've also send an application for Nokia 770 Developer Device Program (Arnaud, our Mandriva kernel hacker who is doing ARM development on his iPaq on his spare time also applied), we'll see if we are eligible (and fund GNOME Foundation at the same time :)
Travel is approaching, take-off is Monday morning and I still haven't packed my stuff. Maybe I should do that instead of blogging.

GUADEC, Flickr and holidays

This is a friendly warning for all GNOME hackers, check twice if you ever want to invite Mikael for a drink (Hopefully, I wasn't paying the drinks :)
I had a very interesting GUADEC but as always, I missed interesting talks because they were at the same time other interesting talks. Hopefully Fluendo streams allowed me to catch those talks.
For people interested, my GUADEC photos are available here.
For those who checked the photos, you probably noticed they are now hosted on Flickr. Last Sunday, after about 6 months testing Flickr, I've decided to subscribe to their services (1 year for $24.95, unlimited photo storage, 2GB upload quota per month). I was a little afraid when Flickr announced Yahoo bought them but since, they have demonstrated their are still a great company (lowering price, increasing quota and getting rid of Flash for the standard/notes photo views). I've only put my GUADEC6 photos there yet but I'll migrate my old gallery progressively.
Holidays are approching : on Monday, I'll be flying to the USA for a 12 day tour in West USA, mainly in National Parks. I hope I'll take nice photos there :)