Ia Ora, GNOME, photography

Ia Ora:
During last month, I've been working with our graphist on a new theme for soon to be released Mandriva 2007.0, since our previous theme (Galaxy) needed to be refreshed a little (it was already 3 years old). So, we prevent Ia Ora (which means hi for french polynesians). And because different people have different tastes in colours, we will provide it in 4 colors : dark blue, light blue, yellow/orange and gray. GNOME/GTK 2 engine is already available in Mandriva 2007.0 beta2 (beta 3 should be available next week) and KDE engine will be available soon. And of course, mandatory screenshots are available here. Dark blue version is considered almost final, other colored versions will be tuned next week, they are not dark enough for controls.

GNOME:
As part of release team, I did RC1 release of GNOME 2.16 (2.15.92) last tuesday. I must confess it was quite painful, mainly because it was the first release I managed (even if I'm part of release team for quite some time) and getting a complete build to succeed and work from scratch using tarballs is not easy at all (we are using jhbuild for that, not GARNOME whose maintainers take care of the various caveats of building a entire stack). And doing that when you are working in parallel on fixing bugs for next beta release of your distribution is really stressing. Anyway, release is out, please test it and reports bugs as early as possible, so maintainers have enough time to fix them before 2.16.0. (Subliminal ad : 2.15.92 is already available in Mandriva cooker and will be available in 2007.0 beta 3 released next week ;)

Photography:
Since last GUADEC and my visit of Barcelona, I've been doing a lot of reading and research about my photography needs. Trigger was this photo and Kathy Siera keynote about passionate users. You can clearly see a nice but unwanted) distorsion which made me release I needed to learn a little more about photography basis and maybe change my camera (my Canon S60 is still nice but not as powerful as a digital reflex). So, I bought and read both "National Geographic Practical Photography Guide" (a small and good guide you can take even when travelling) and the excellent "New Manual of Photography" from J. Hedgecoe (a must, very complete and understandable). And I've been trying to apply some lessons learned from those readings since then in two walks in Paris. And now, I've almost convinced myself to buy a new camera. Initially, I thought about Canon 350D (aka Digital Xt) but with Canon 400D announce this week, I'll probably wait a little and buy this one. The though choice will be lenses one, since I mainly shoot landscapes and town building (in this case, often some details). If you have some hints (and please, don't tell me to buy only Canon EF L IS lenses, my budget is not infinite ;), feel free to comment. And to test this soon to be bought camera, I plan to visit my native neighbourhood (something I never did as a tourist) next October, ie la Lozère and probably Montpellier too, since I never went back there since I was a student.

GUADEC, Barcelona

So, I came back from Barcelona on Saturday evening, after a two days visit of Barcelona, following GUADEC.

GUADEC
It was awesome, for serious stuff (presentations, talks), for fun (Fluendo and Maemo parties) and for people (I can't name everybody, but sharing GUADEC with Damien, our beloved Ekiga hacker). Photos are available here. Feel free to add comments or notes on them. I think Kathy Sierra keynote was enlightening, not only for GNOME community, but also from a distribution POV. It would be great to have the slides from this talk (I couldn't find them on guadec website :( .

Barcelona
My three days visit became a two days visit since I stay most of Thrusday at GUADEC for various talks but I still found enough time to do a Gaudi visit of Barcelona, including Sagrada Familia, Casa Ballto and Casa Milà (Pedrera). Following my tourist guide book, I tried a great cremery called Viader to taste "mel i mato". All my Barcelona photos are visible on my Flickr Barcelona set.

Guadec, Fridge, Wordpress spam

Guadec
Ok, my bag is almost ready, I borrowed a laptop from work (and fixed a bunch of issues in cooker since monday while upgrading and testing it) and my 770 is also ready. I have to be at Roissy airport at 6:00 morning tomorrow (too early for my taste) and I land in Barcelona at 8:25. I also plan to visit Barcelona from Thursday (maybe only after Maemo presentations) to Saturday.

Frige is out
aka MandrivaLinux 2007.0 Alpha. A lot of brand new stuff in it, including X.org 7.1, GNOME 2.15.x (based on latest tarballs available this week). Yes, you didn't misread, we decided to switch to the latest version of GNOME for MandrivaLinux 2007.0, thanks to almost non clashing schedule this time. The most interesting things for me are of course the migration to full XDG menu system (we are dropping the old Debian menu system), which is still in progress. And a good news for GNOME users : we will be now providing installable LiveCD (so you can test if the distribution works fine on your system without installing it first) for GNOME too ! Warly gave me one Fridge GNOME x86 liveCD as well as an more recent snapshot (which fixes some issues from Alpha) so if you want to test it when attending Guadec, just ask me and I'll let you test the CD (but you'll have to give it back to me after..)

Wordpress spam
Since I switched my blog to wordpress, I got too much comment spams for my taste. I tried Askimet plugin but I still had several spams to moderate each day. So I tried WP-Hashcash and since then, I got zero spam (well, only one while I upgrading to WP 2.0.3 and disable wp-hashcash for about one minute).

Shuttle Zen
I forgot to blog about it : so, I got back my Shuttle from repair and this time, they fixed it correctly (I don't know how they did it without replacing mainboard) but since the first repair changed the quiet fan with a loud one, I decided to buy a quiet fan : a Zalman ZM-OP1 (it is supposed to be a graphic card fan) and I got back a quiet system.

Guibine

Guibine
50 Boulevard de Picpus
Paris 12eme, Métro Bel-Air

Ouvert du mardi au dimanche midi.

Excellent petit restaurant coréen familial ; la patronne est d'une gentillesse extrême et aux petits soins pour tous ses clients et il ne faut pas hésiter à lui poser des questions sur tel ou tel plat, surtout lorsqu'on découvre la cuisine coréenne. Côté prix, les menus sont très abordables et je n'ai pas encore testé autre chose que les différents menus avec le barbecue coréen au boeuf, tant je m'en régale.

Au Paradis Tropical

Excellent restaurant pour déguster une cuisine familiale haïtienne et antillaise. Je conseille en dessert le blanc-manger coco. La réservation est conseillée, le nombre de table étant limité.

Au Paradis Tropical
24, Rue Notre Dame De Nazareth
Paris 3eme, métro Temple ou République
Tel : 01 42 72 08 92

Fermé le dimanche.

Attention, soirée dansante (avec beaucoup de musique créole) les vendredi et samedi soir.

GNOME 2.14.1, Shows, SIP

I had a somehow busy week :

GNOME 2.14.1:
I'm happy to announce migration for MandrivaLinux cooker to GNOME 2.14.1 is finished. Now, we'll see how much bugs cooker folks will find and report ;)

SIP :
My ISP announced this week (as long with other nice things like HDTV) it will allow its customers to plug on their phone account using SIP from all over the world, as long as you have Internet access (including Wifi). It will allow calling almost any phone number in France and 20 other countries (USA, Canada, Spain) for free, from anywhere. They will also sell GSM/Wifi-SIP phones soon. Cool thing will be with next major update of Nokia 770 which will include SIP support. I hope it will push more people to use open standard like SIP instead of Skype...

Shows :
A little french centric, but it might interest people : last sunday, I watched Renaissance, a french B&W full CG and motion capture animation thriller, which take place in Paris in 2054. Scenario was a little too easy but the film in itself was quite interesting. On Tuesday, I went to a concert of three french female music bands (their collective is called Les Filles Se Demerdent). The first band wasn't so great but second one, Velour (music here) and third one, Marjolaine (music here) were great. On Wednesday, I went to see Dany Boon, a french comic and I was quite dissapointed (I won't suggest this particular show to anyone).

Easter Monkey

Easter Egg
So, yesterday, we (Mandriva) decided to do a nice gift to all cooker Mandriva users for Easter: Mono is now available in Mandriva main cooker (and now longer in contrib repository). This mean we will be able to ship Mono (and Mono based applications) with the next release of MandrivaLinux (2007) which is scheduled for fall 2006.

Shuttle
I gave my Shuttle Zen for repair this morning to get motherboard will be replaced. Before giving it back, I checked fan which was replaced and Shuttle replaced it with a noisier model than the original one. I also discovered the support guy had only one line of text to describe the problem. Now, I have to wait at least one month, so my gateway where this blog is hosted is running on a Pentium 233 MMX.