n800, nabaztag, Métisse and FOSDEM

n800
So, like other GNOME hackers, this is a mandatory n800 post. Thanks to Nokia (and whoever selected me) for developer discount. I didn't wait very much (about 1 or 2 hours) to order it and I got it one day after (Nokia shop is really fast). I'll also take this opportunity to thanks Quim Gil for giving developer discounts to two Mandriva kernel hackers (Samir and Arnaud) who are both doing a lot of maemo development on their spare time. I've take many pictures of the various themes available for n800 here.

Nabaztag


As most of you already know, I'm a geek (and most of our are geeks too :p ) so for Christmas, my mom offered me a wifi rabbit, called Nabaztag. It is really cute and there is a nice community of people with such devices, customizing them, doing some reverse engineering of the device (it isn't opensource, even if Violet, a small french startup doing it is quite open and is using Linux and Java for the server part of Nabaztag). More photos of my nabaztag and his friends (and some nice customizations doing by PetiteCane) are available here.

Métisse
I've been extremely pleased to see reactions about Metisse. We thought it is an interesting technology to promote and it appears we were right. I did a lot of presentation at Solutions Linux show, two weeks ago and response from the public was huge. Things are moving nicely in the entire X.org community, with David Reveman implementing Input transformations in X server (something which is still unique to Metisse and allows interaction on any transformed window) and Quinn Storm, Beryl author, dropped a nice hello on Metisse mailing list. I'm hoping, in near future, all those modifications will be merged upstream so we could run any compositor, like Metisse, Compiz, Beryl or metacity+libcm, without any hacks needed on X server. I strongly suggest interested people have a look at Metisse research paper which is easy to read but very informative. Oh, don't be fooled by screencasts available on Mandriva website, some very interesting features of Metisse aren't demoed yet. If you downloaded screencasts by bittorrent, I suggest you look at Facades demo (research paper about Facades is here).

FOSDEM
I'll be at FOSDEM next week-end in Brussels and there will be a lot of Mandriva people (both community members and company developers) and we also have a developer room. I'll be doing a presentation about Metisse (not too much technical) in GNOME developer room on Sunday at 9h15. I just hope I won't be alone in the room, because of early schedule ;)

Metisse is not a 3D desktop

I guess most people know now what my dream was : 3D can be more than just fancy.



For some time now, I've been working with members of In Situ team to integrate their Metisse software in Mandriva Linux and it is really exciting. Mandriva will announce very soon (today or tomorrow) Metisse will be part of Mandriva Spring 2007 and is also available as a Live CD based on Mandriva 2007.0 and GNOME (yay) right now so everybody can try Metisse right now and report bugs.
If you want to see what Metisse can do for you, I suggest you download some screencasts I did using Metisse. They are available either using low quality flash on dailymotion (not recommended) or high quality either by bittorrent (preferred) or http. Check http://www.mandriva.com/fr/projects/metisse/download for all options (there is a small error on this page, there are 4 different videos but one has the wrong thumbnail for now, it will be fixed tomorrow).
I tried to answer a lot of questions regarding Metisse on our FAQ , I just hope I have covered enough of them ;)

Oh, and before I forget, even it is written on the FAQ, I remind everybody Metisse is experimental software, with a high focus on research in UI interaction and less in esthetic effects (we had some nice .... discussions with Metisse people about this ;), so don't juge metisse only on its appearance. If you can, try it (after a quick look at documentation, otherwise, you might miss many features which are not always discoverable immediatly).

Enjoy everybody.

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.