I had a dream

I sometimes wish life was better.

I wish my breakfast was already made when I wake up, so that I would gain some time in the morning.

I wish that Didier Lockwood released "Omkara" on DVD, I wouldn't have to remember the only time I saw this show.

I wish my suspend to disk worked fine with my computer so that I could turn it off and save some nuclear energy from being wasted, that sure would help a little our planet.

I wish 3D was more than fancy, I wish it was practical, and that someday, people would make it usable in an efficient way...

Well...

One of my wishes has been granted ;)

Ceci n'est pas a 3D destkop

I repeat "Ceci n'est pas a 3D desktop"... More on this later ;)

Christmas


Wii has landed in Europe last Friday (and we did a Wii session at lunch time at Mandriva so everybody could test it easily) but it is still very hard to find for people (like me) who didn't book it before launch, with effective availability supposed to be end of december. So, today, I went to a shop to get a coupon for my old GameCube and to book a Wii for end of december. And guess what ? Manager gave me a Wii directly from booked Wii stock (because one booking was canceled), without me even asking for a favor. Nice, isn't it.

Nat little secret

We all know Nat fantastic energy. And now, we know his secret :



he is a Mandriva One user !! And even better, he was able to get 3D on Mandriva 2006.0 ;)
So, I welcome you warmly as part of Mandriva Linux community

;)

Christmas gaming

Yesterday, I was able to preview PS3 (in a Sony event in Paris, which will go on until mid January) and play with it a little. This even is supposed to generate some buzz for PS3 since it will only be available in Europe in March 2007 and Nintendo Wii will be available starting December 8th. Here is a little report about this event : it is taking place in a nice gallery on Place des Vosges, transformed into a showroom with 15 PS3, many Full HD TV (both LCD and retroprojector), some PSP and a Full HD projector too. This is supposed to give you a VIP feeling but you can get an invitation very easily on Sony website and it is running until mid January. Since it was their first day, the entire set was not finished and they were still glueing some part of the decorations ;) Gran Tourismo 4 was offered to each participant and it was also possible to register to win a PS3. 5 games were available among the various PS3 but since about 40 people were allowed in the showroom at the same time, you had to wait for sometime 15min just to play one of the games (and the entire session was 2h only). Not very good for giving you a "VIP" feeling (whatever Sony is hoping). Among the various games, only two were really impressive regarding graphics (moreover on a Full HD TV set) : Gran Tourismo HD and Resistance. The three other games weren't that good, compared to what PS2 latest games are capable of (and I tried GT4 this afternoon and it is really able to use PS2 hardware). Moreover, Sony didn't even used multiplayer over network feature, which is sad since their set was sometime giving the impression you were competing against other people in the room.
Conclusions about this preview : before going there, I wasn't thrilled by PS3, mostly because all its mediacenter features are mostly available for free with my DSL set-top-box (Freebox HD), Linux installation feature, while nice, isn't that useful (you won't be able to run Linux or another OS in parallel to PS3 OS so don't hope to use it as a low end server unless you don't plan to ever play with it). And after this test session, I still don't feel an urge into buying a PS3 next March.

On the other hand, I'm much more impatient regarding Wii console : Nintendo guys are really trying to rethink how to play : after testing differents gameplay like Guitar Hero, Bongo or Eye Toy and DS games, I think they are going in the right direction. Moreover, targeting broad audience (and not pure hardcore gamers) can only help them gaining more market share.
So, Santa Claus, you know what I want for Christmas ;)

Lozère and co

First, a slight correction for J5, a french Soupe à l'oignon (Onion Soup) doesn't always need wine in preparation (except if guy doing cooking is drinking a glass of wine at the same time :) You can either do it without any wine (a lot of people do) or with just a little (usually 1 glass for preparation for 4 persons). Personally, I never used any wine in it. Still on the cooking side, I've bought latest Jamie Oliver book in french ("Version Originale", which took two years to be translated, original name is "Jamie's Dinners") and it is giving me a lot of ideas for easy cooking for my weekday dinners.



My back to the source trip in Lozère went quite well, even if we didn't visit as much as planned initially. But even with 5 days of shooting, I took 3.2GB of photos (argg, it was too much for my Flickr quota) with my 400D. This camera is great, even if I feel like a kid who is starting to learn bicycle without the 2 extra wheels to stabilise the whole thing. I'm slowing starting to get a photographer eye for many things, like light or compositiong, but at the same time, I'm becoming more and more demanding on the subject I'm photographing. And I'm also realizing I still need to learn a lot about photography. I've played a lot with a polarising filter (which is giving great blue sky) but I'm still having some difficulties to compensate ambiant light for landscape using camera only settings or filters (I don't really want to gimpify my photos). Since there are some great photographers reading Planet GNOME, dear lazy web, is there a way to compensate this "fog" effect which can be seen on the following photo : ? I've tried to change exposition but I didn't get good results. Anyway, if you want to comment on my various photos and give me hints, (don't worry if you see several times the same one, I sometime played with exposition while shooting) or if you just want to discover some parts of Lozère, just go there.

Mandriva 2007.0, RTL, Lozere

Mandriva 2007.0 is out
I guess most people already know about it but Mandriva Linux 2007.0 is available for everybody now, and it is the first distribution to ship GNOME 2.16 (yay). Moreover, if you (or your friends) just want to test it without installing it first, you can now grab Live CD in both GNOME (yay) and KDE flavors, which can later be used to install the distribution on your system. And remember, if you don't like Ia Ora theme colors, there are always 3 other flavors (colors) available.

RTL
While fixing some Ia Ora bugs with vmware and gnomine, I tested it with RTL languages (such as arabic, hebrew and farsi). I knew I didn't had time to do those tests before 2007.0 but better later than never ;) Anyway, there were some bugs, which are now fixed and after discussing with Bedhad, I also changed light direction on theme when used in RTL, so light is now coming from the right side, inversing shadows and horizontal gradients. Result looks a little strange for non RTL readers but I think most RTL languages readers will be pleased. The only thing I didn't change is Metacity theme, since it doesn't support RTL and I didn't want to add 4 other metacity theme just for that (and I'm not sure other OS switch WM buttons positions).

And of course, screenshots (with help of TheWidgetFactory, click for full resolution) : LTR (as reference) and RTL

Lozere
I'm taking a two weeks vacations in my native soil. I'm usually not spending a lot of time there because I really enjoy Paris (which is now my home) and I can't do much things in country land (and after staying there for 18 years, I know there isn't much things to do) but I'm expecting something different this time. Aside upgrading my mom computer to latest Mandriva, I'll be visiting countryside as a tourist (something most people never do) and testing my new 400D at the same time. Let's hope I'll do nice photos ;)

Metro by night, 400D, Google Reader

Paris Metro by night



Two weeks ago, I was able to participate to a very special night, organised by RATP (Paris public transport company, in charge of bus and metro) and Ademas (association of fan of Paris metro) in Paris metro. For one night (from 23h30 to 5h30), we visited a lot of Paris metro stations, including some ghost stations (station which were never opened to the public, such as Haxo or Porte Molitor which doesn't have any stairs to exit station) or closed ones (which are no longer used like Croix-Rouge or Saint-Martin, or used for non public purpose like Porte des Lilas Cinema, used for movie or advertising shooting). The tour was extremely interesting, with a lot of informations on metro history and heritage. Moreover, the tour was done with a single train which was autorized to change from one line to another (something impossible in Paris metro). All my photos for this tour are available here.

Google Reader
As many other people, I've tested the new version of Google (feed) Reader. I tested first version when it was launched some months ago and it was unusable for me (and incredibly slow). For some years, I've been using Planet as my personal aggregator : it is easy to use if you have your own webserver but it is a little too much memory hungry and cpu intensive when refreshing feed and for me who is switching PC between work and home, I need to remember what was the latest entry I read before I switched PC. But I must confess I really enjoy the inverse chronological order associated with a merge all feed style. Moreover, I can fetch aggregated feed on my Palm for offline reading every morning easily. I tried Netvibes but their way of managing feeds doesn't really scale when reading a lot of feeds. So, I tried again Google Reader, not expected anything usable but I was wrong : sorting and merging is done just like I was doing with Planet, automatically mark as read when an article is scrolled is a very smart feature, allowing to star a article (for later reading) is also very useful. And it is not slow (and it works on my 770 too). I've been using it for three days now and I love it. I'll probably continue to use Planet at least for offline aggregation but I might have found the perfect online RSS reader (at least for now).

Canon 400D

After wondering for some weeks on camera and lenses, I offered myself for my birthday a Canon 400D this week, with both a Sigma 18-200 and Canon 50mm f1.8 lenses. Pascal did took the exact same decision on the camera and main lens one day after me (and both bought camera at from one net vendor and lens from another net vendor). And we discovered this coincidence only on monday when, on Mandriva internal irc channel, I said postman delivered my order at home :) Today, after rain decided to stop, I was able to test this brand new camera (and my first reflex) in Bois de Vincennes, around Lac Daumesnil where I do my running session. And I'm quite happy with the result, for my first contact with this camera. Sigma focal range is great (coming from 28-100 on my Powershot S60) for a decent price (even if it isn't stabilized). If you are curious, you can look at those photos here.