Honey, I've DSLed my mom

After about 18 months of additional delay (over initial estimate), ADSL is, at last, available for my mom house, in Lozère. And I was able to guide her to install her new DSL box (Freebox, which is running Linux internaly) using my GSM tonight. It tooks about 1/2h to get DSL Box up and running with phone over IP, mostly to tell her where to plug each type of cable, check twice the phone cable (both RJ11 and French plugs are mixed) and an additional 1/4h to get her to configure IP connectivity on her Mandriva box :

• first you plug the usb cable from Freebox to PC (I didn't install a ethernet card on her PC, it will be done later)
• then, you log in as usual, you go to "System / Administration and Configure your Computer"
• you type your administrator password
• you choose Internet, then "Configure a new Internet connexion", you choose Ethernet (since it is usbnet) and you click on the Next button until you are done.
• You insert requested CD to get dhcp client installed
• et voilà

Oh, maybe I forgot to tell you my mom didn't knew how to use a mouse three years ago (or a GUI system) and has been using Google quite often for about 6 months now (over old analogic modem). And she is running Mandriva Linux with GNOME ! Isn't it wonderful ?

Google Reader hacks, Velib', Spring

So, it has been about 6 months since I've switched to Google Reader (from Planet) and I enjoy it a lot. But I have still some issues with it :

• it is almost unusable with n800 web browser, because of its intensive javascript usage,


• it isn't possible to have a offline version of Google Reader.

Why offline, would you ask ? Well, for severals years (must be about 7 years now), I've been using my Palm as an offline web browser to read various news during my commuting time (with is about 30 minutes every morning). At first, I was using AvantGo but I switched to JPluck, associated with Planet, to generate an offline database of webpages to read every morning. It was ok, until I switched to Google Reader, since I still needed to keep Planet running and synced with Google Reader feeds list. Fortunately, some people have been documenting Google Reader unofficial API and this weekend, I took some time to play with it to grab a feed of unread items, just like Planet. And it is really too easy to be true :

First, you need a Session User Id from Google, where you authenticate :

SID=`curl --silent -d service=reader -d "Email=your_google_account@gmail.com" -d Passwd="Your_Password" -d source="lens" -d continue="http://www.google.com/" https://www.google.co/accounts/ClientLogin | grep ^SID= | sed -e 's/SID=//'`

then you just query Google Reader for the items on your reading-list, excluding already read items :

curl --silent --cookie "SID=$SID;domain=.google.com;path=/;expires=1600000000" "http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list?xt=user/-state/com.google/read"

And you'll get a nice Atom feed. It would have been nice if JPluck was able to use Atom feed, but it only supports RSS, so I used XSLT stylesheet to convert Atom to RSS 2.0. Et voilà.

So, what is left to get my perfect offline feed / web reader :

• migrate from my Palm T3 to n800 : I could use FBReader but my initial tests weren't very conclusive, since FBReader doesn't fully support keyboard navigation (I don't like using stylus in the bus, I prefer to keep using hardware buttons) and I'm getting used to n800 browser.


• replace JPluck with something else : this is probably the way to go and I'm thinking about wget and/or some perl script to strip any unwanted html (javascript, applet, flash). It should be easily doable by parsing Atom feed, running wget on the various links, and generating a summary webpage from Atom feed using XSL


• moving the entire process on n800 : wouldn't it be nice to just choose "update feed" on n800 and have it doing the entire job. I'm not sure it will be possible since Perl isn't available on Maemo but I guess I shouldn't be wondering about that now. Instead, I should do the previous steps first ;)

Velib'
Paris City has decided to install low cost bike rental system, called Velib' which looks quite interesting : 1€ per day, 5€ a week or 29€ a year, constraint being each ride must be less than 30 minutes (or there is additional fee required), available 24h a day and with 20 000 bikes over 1500 stations by end of 2007. I'm not a bike person but this might push me to try using them from time to time. Work has begun for building bike stations (launch is for Summer 2007) and I took this opportunity to test Google "My Maps" feature to get a map of in-progress bike stations. And I must say it is really easy to create customized maps with their UI. I'll try to update this map when new building sites are added on Velib' website.

Mandriva 2007 Spring
Month of March and beginning of April have been crazy for me (and everybody working on the distro) but I'm quite happy with soon to be released Mandriva 2007 Spring (I don't have the exact date, should be in very few days). If you want to know what to expect from it, take Spring tour, but I can give you a secret : GNOME 2.18 is in it ;)

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

;)