Back to work

So, it is a little more than one week that I came back from holidays and things are almost back to normal.

Mexico :



What to say : a beautiful country, with very nice people (even for tourists like me who only speaks 10 words of spanish) and excellent cooking. My 15 days tour (from Mexico to Playa del Carmen) was great but unfortunately, I didn't find the magic receipe to become a genius hacker like Federico or Miguel. All my photos are available as always on my Flickr account (I haven't commented photos yet, I hope I'll be able to do it in the following weeks).

Shuttle :
About 6 weeks ago, I gave my gateway system (Shuttle Zen, very system) for repair because fan was stopping after some time and this issue was known as one of the various defect of this specific Shuttle model, where motherboard power for fan dies after about 13 months of use. Fortunately, mine was only 8 months old, I gave it back and put back an old Pentium MMX 233 as gateway. Last saturday, I was able to get back my Shuttle. And guess what : they didn't repair it properly ! When I gave it for repair, I specified it was a problem on the motherboard but the guy wrote "fan problem" and Shuttle replaced fan and box (serial number is different) but NOT the motherboard and after only several hours of use, the problem is back. I waited 6 weeks for that and now, I'll need to return it and wait for another 6 weeks before getting a working system. In the mean time, I'm using another fan plug on motherboard but it isn't calibrated correctly in the BIOS and it is running much too fast, causing much more noise as expected. My advice : don't buy Shuttle Zen (ST62K), they are known to be defective..

Coverity :
I already talked about it but today, I checked back Coverity reports on GNOME and those guys added all jhbuild dependencies for building GNOME into their tool (and sometime too much, so we end up with defects from Mozilla in our own count :( ). Anyway, I spent part of today checking fontconfig defects (since 2.3.95 is expected next week to prepare 2.4.0 soon) : there are 38 defects, I only checked 12 defects for now, got 2 false positives, 2 missing checks for null pointers and 8 memory leaks (most in corner cases but some in non error cases). Patrick already merged all my fixes and I hope to get all defects reviewed by the end of the week (and probably before that). And the most funny (or strange) part of that is I enjoyed doing those code reviews ;)

Jhbuild / Ekiga :
Since I decided to please Luis before he asked, I hacked jhbuild support for pwlib and opal last month but I didn't find time to get it merged upstream. So, patch is available here. Enjoy.

GNOME 2.14:
Today, I started integrating GNOME 2.14 into Mandriva Cooker, using Götz Waschk excellent packages as basis. Everything should be complete before next week (I hope).

Mexico, here I come

Hmm, again I haven't logged for some time. I guess the problem is that it hasn't yet become a reflex to blog often, as I usually think I don't have many interesting things to share with readers.

Coverity
The nice people of Coverity (with help from a DoD grant) have started to release their findings about various open source softwares, including GNOME. This is great (even if some of the tested code is no longer used like libxml1 or imlib) but this will be fixed soon.

Firefox theming
Following my previous post, I finished porting GNOMEStripe, as well as KDEStripe for Firefox 1.5. My big problems were caused by syntax error in CSS I wrote, but Firefox was not complaining at all (no error, nothing). Unfortunately, some icons are still missing from gnome icon theme, so I grab some from GnomeFX theme (which is really nice and also add icons to menu entries). GNOMEStripe and KDEStripe are part of firefox Mandriva cooker package, as well as autosense desktop environment, which causes firefox to switch automatically to KDEstripe if started under KDE or GNOMEstripe if started under KDE, improving consistency. Of course, if you really want a consistent browser under GNOME, don't use a copy, use the only reference aka Epiphany ;)

Holidays
I'm going to visit Mexico (from Mexico city to Cancun) for a 2 weeks trip, starting next Thrusday. Time to prepare my luggage and my digital camera.

Solar digicam
I thought about experimenting solar recharge for my digicam (Canon S60, which use proprietary batteries) during my trip (mostly because I won't have any power problem on this trip) but I haven't found any good informations / tests about it, except "buy AA batteries" (which won't work, of course). So, if you have any experience about solar recharge, feel free to comment.

Linux everywhere
Funny, while reading iaudiophile, I discovered one of their latest video product (Cowon iAudio A2) is linux based and with source available !!

Web 2.0, Ajax and co
I recently tested Digg as additional tech news source. Concept is interesting, implementation too (but I would prefer more ajax interface in it, such as being able to digg a story after I read it without going back to digg page) but it doesn't integrate well with my current news process which is heavily based on Planet : I read all RSS feeds at home, at work and in the bus (for this, I'm still using Plucker + JPluck on my T3, while experimenting with my Nokia 770) from my own personal planet. Process could be improved (bookmarking all opened links for future search, mark read/unread feeds, archiving feeds) but it isn't so bad.

Firefox theming (continued)

Garret, Firefox 1.5 contains half of the stock icon theming for GTK+ : the gtk-stock icon code has been merged and toolkit part of Firefox ships with GnomeStripe theme, which use stock icons (which is why you might have noticed why default buttons have icons). Unfortunately, it seems the browser part was not merged upstream. I've started porting the 1.0 gnomestripe theme to 1.5 this week and it is almost working ; there are still some glitches I'll try to fix next week (which can be hard since there is no error output anywhere nor good documentation on theming. And I hope part of the theme will be merged upstream one day.

I'll also port kdestripe which is a Crystal only port of gnomestripe (ie it doesn't follow KDE icon setting). It should be ready next week if everything go smoothly (and I doubt it will).

Google Talk opened

Oh my god, Google just did it : Google Talk (which is XMPP/Jabber based) is now able to communicate with any other users using jabber accounts on server other than Google Talk (see here).
If you already have a Google Talk account, you can add anybody jabber-id to it (I've tested with Gaim) and you will be able to communicate with them, without worrying on the server used by your friends.

This is probably the big boost for a really interoperable and open IM system (like SMTP) as Jabber is, done by a big player.

RTFM, Firefox 1.5

RTFM
Sometime, I should really read user manual (and I swear, I read Nokia 770 manual when I received it !). Yesterday, I discovered by chance two very nice features of 770 regarding button shortcuts :

• pressing "back" button for a long period of time (about 1 or 2s) close the current window. At first, I thought I discovered a bug in the browser but I checked manual first and I discovered it is documented (but not easily discoverable IMO).


• pressing "home" button for a long period of time popup the application switcher. By itself, it isn't really useful (since you can get the app switcher on the standard UI) but when you are using browser in full screen mode and you have several windows opened for the browser, you really enjoy it (specially associated with the previous shortcut).

Firefox 1.5

Last friday, I found enough time to finish upgrading cooker package for firefox 1.5. Unfortunately, I discovered theme was completely changed, which means I'll need to rewrite both GNOME and KDE themes we are shipping with our package (GNOME theme being gnomestripe for the fedora dudes, which hasn't been ported yet). And of course, there is no real documentation on how to port 1.0 theme to 1.5. The more I work on Firefox, the more I prefer Epiphany (but people who know me already know that fact ;) )

WP2, N770...

Wordpress 2.0:
Sorry for the spam, Planet GNOME or Mandriva users, it seems upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 (which worked like a charm) changed RSS feeds publish date, causing blog spam. At least, it is a good way to detect people upgrading their blog ;) After my 10 days holidays at my family house in south of France (Lozère for those insterested), I found 35 comment spams waiting on my blog. I enabled SK2 plugin to clean that and now with WP2, I'll use integrated Akismet antispam plugin and see how effective it is.

Nokia 770:

Today, I found a 1GB RS-MMC card for my Nokia 770 : they were not available in France and can now be found easily in the Montgallet neighbourghood (which is a little like Akihabara in Tokyo, were you can find cheap computer parts) in Paris. Another good new for N770 owner : Brando Workshop, a famous PDA accessories vendor, now sells N770 screen protection (either the simple one or the UltraClear one, which I recommend). They are located in Hong-Kong but ship worldwide (usually takes 2 weeks to receive a by-air envelope with a nice hong-kong stamp on it). All my electronic devices wear Brando Ultraclear protections (my mobile phone, my Palm, my Canon digicam, my PSP and soon my N770).

Nokia has released a new firmware last Friday but still without any changelog, let's hope Nokia dudes will get clearance for at least a NEWS file in future releases ;)

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.