Update or not update, that is the question

Update or not update, that is the question
It's been a long time since I updated my blog, mainly by lack of time and envy. So, what happened during the past 4 months :
Sport : I'm continuing jogging each week (my doctor gave me some advices to improve my training). I'm still a little frustrated to not be able to go very fast to keep my hearbeat low and prevent any problem but it isn't that bad anyway. Taichi and Chikong lessons are still very interesting, even if I had to drop some sessions last quarter :(
Internet : I've recently discovered (thanks to my boss, FredL) http://del.icio.us/, a social bookmarking website. It allows you to tag your bookmarks, discover bookmarks with same tags by other people, subscribe to other people bookmarks and see what are the most recent or popular bookmarks in the system. Web interfaces is quite simple but many web API are available and nice apps are emerging (still no epiphany plugin yet...). Another discovery in the taxonomy world is Flickr. They were able to hook me (their web interface is really nice, with javascript so well integrated you don't notice it, for renaming photos, for instance). I started to upload some of my photos there and I'm not sure if I'll switch my photo hosting there. I planned to (using a paid account) but with Yahoo buying Flickr, I'm not sure it is such a good idea now, so I'll wait a little until I make my decision.
Work : we are currently finalising next Mdk release, with GNOME 2.8 (no need to complain, many people did and I explained why we chose it on cooker mailing list). With this release, we started our slow transition from Debian menu system to XDG menu system, at least in GNOME and KDE. Since GNOME implementation wasn't complete, I wrote support for Layout optional part (which was integrated in HEAD cvs by Mark, for GNOME 2.12) and Laurent finished KDE implementation. Although tricky, it was quite interesting, mainly because we both discovered errors in both implementations, due to difference in understanding the spec. Hopefully, working in near offices helped in that case (it was just a matter of "hey, I tested that but I don't get the same result in GNOME and KDE"). We still need to write testcases but it looks promising. Also as part of next Mdk release, I had to put Firefox as default browser and I was (well, it still is) a pain to get it working correctly in a Linux distribution environment (Debian dudes are doing a great job fixing it but more work is still needed).

Back from Vietnam

So, I'm back from my 15days trip in Vietnam. People are nice, food is excellent and country is beautiful (photos are available here).
Unfortunately, I had a big problem during my trip : on the 4th day, my 2GB microdrive died (in a bouddhist temple, so it was probably a sign), losing all pictures taken during the first 4 days of my trip. And I was left with only a 32MB flash card for 11 days. I was forced to take low resolution pictures (640x480) with my nice 5Megapixel Canon S60 (fortunately, one of my co-traveller was nice enough to let me use two 64MB cards he wasn't using and I was able to burn a CD during the trip to free space). So, if you are relying on microdrives, be very careful. I know I'll be switching back to 1GB flash card for my next trip, and I'll buy separate cards, just in case if one card dies.

Got it !

It took some time, but this morning, I went to post office and I was able to get my iAudio M3 40GB (this is the Brown model, not the Silver one). No free earphones in the package but I got a better coupon (and my Koss "The Plug" earphones are already great), so everything is fine. After waiting 2 hours to get it charged and updating firmware (just need to put file in the correct folder and restart the device), I started playing with it. It is really great (I didn't had time yet to use it a lot with my ogg collection) but audio quality is nice, remote control isn't that bad (controls are a little small and need some time to adapt but nothing serious). I also had to enable back USB2 module for my system (I had disabled 6 months ago because they were freezing my system when using card reader) to get speedy transfer (and I was wondering why copying files on SD card was slow.. :) but now, everything is fine...
More photos are visible here.

Music Player, Extensions and more

Wow, it's been a very long time since my last update.
Music Player
For some time now, I was annoyed after my Palm T3 as a Ogg player (no remote control, small capacity). So, I started looking for a new player. And I think I found my twin : Jakub :) I ordered my iAudio M3 40Gb last Wednesday in the UK (because it is 150Euro cheaper there and not very well distributed in France) and I waiting for it anxiously. Cowon (the creator of iAudio) seems to be very reactive : for their last firmware update, they have added partial FLAC support ! (Well, for me, Ogg + USB storage was a obligation, but it is nice added value).
Nautilus Extension
For quite some time, I wanted to port one of mdk biggest patch on nautilus asan extension (initial version was written almost 3 year ago for Nautilus 1.x), which allow quick file sharing from nautilus using NFS or SMB. Using nautilus-vcs as a basis (thanks ) and after tweaking initial UI, I was able to port it as a fully working nautilus extension. Since cooker is frozen at the moment, I can't upload this extensionin the distro but it is available on mdk cvs (soft/nautilus-filesharing module) right now.
Next trip
Only 14 day until my departure : I'll be visiting Vietnam for a two week tour from Saigon (Ho Chi Min Town) to Hanoi. I hope to do nice pictures with my brand new Canon S60..
Sports
End of september always mean for me the return of my taichichuan lessons, and this year, our teacher has also added a 1h chikong lesson. This is really great. We filmed demo last june and a DVD presenting our taichi association should be available soon. Since I'm also having some endurance problem (I'm really not a sport person), I've decided to do some jogging to correct this problem. I've started 3 weeks ago (only one session per week), starting from 1/2h three weeks ago to 1h last sunday (at very low speed at the moment, I'll only increase speed in several weeks, once I'm ok with current speed) and I must confess I'm astonished to be able to run for one hour (with a 5 minute break at mid time) without being a zombie once it is finished. I also thank Lenny (one of my co-worker) who gave me lot of advices.

New digicam, EsounD

Last week, I bought a new digital camera to replace my old Canon A20 I sold to a friend one month ago. I had an opportunity to get a CF 2Gb harddisk for a very interesting price so I choose a Canon Powershot S60 which is a nice compact camera but 3.6x optical zoom and ability to use CF type II card. My first photos, taken at Paris Plage 2004 are here (unfortunately, sun wasn't very present when I took the photos).

Yesterday, I did a new esound release, mainly because some interesting patches were waiting in CVS for some time now (like MMAP support for esddsp, so you can now play Quake with esd). I've also sent a search for new maintainer mail because I really don't have time nor interest in maintaining esound (and I never have). Let's hope somebody will be interested.

gnome-bluetooth and various fixes

Did a good bugfixes day yesterday :
-crasher in gnome-bluetooth was quite tricky to find, so let's share it with all GNOME hackers who are using gob. Be extra careful with destroywith, because it requires as parameter a function with void (*func) (void*) signature (ie like g_object_unref). If you were using it with gdk_pixbuf_unref or gnome_vfs_file_info_unref, with older gcc, it was ok. But with gcc 3.4, you'll get a warning (easy to miss when not compiling with -Werror) stating program will abort if this code is reaching (I wonder why it is only a warning), and guess what : your program will segfault as stated.. So, get prepared, use g_object_unref when possible or handle finalisation yourself with destroy command.
-fix a crazy bug in latest magicdev : cooker users where complaining k3b was starting without them doing anything when they login. Magicdev was supposed to only mount CDs at login, not also run cd burner or player :)
-found a missing i18n init by chance in nautilus-cd-burner nautilus extension. I'm quite afraid to discover nobody ever found it, probably guessing translation for this module wasn't complete in their language. So, if you find part of a module which is not translated, when this module is run inside another one (nautilus extension is a good example), check po file for your language and if it is translated, bugzilla !!
-with our XFree86 security update, our support guy discovered strange behaviour with fonts disappearing in fontconfig. It seems we are are to fool fontconfig dirty cache detection. Will fix today.

TreeView and BlueTooth

TreeView/Menudrake
After spending a good part of last week trying to finish menudrake port to TreeView, I've decived to postpone this port, since I couldn't get DnD working between two treeviews without spending at least another week on it (this is the first time I'm hacking on TreeView and menudrake is using its own flat datamodel, incompatible with TreeModel). Moreover, the added value would be only aesthetic since menudrake is supposed to died when we well be able to switch to vFolder menu to replace Debian menu system.
BlueTooth
There are days where I really enjoy working at Mandrakesoft, being able to fix stuff I usually don't work on. Today, I took my new USB BT dongle and I was able to get Mdk bluez packages working out of the box (after integrate some Fedora patches and fixing other problem), with dbus powered PIN gtk2 helper. So, now, both my Palm T3 and my cellphone are able to bind with BT USB dongle without having to configure anything on the distro. gnome-phone-manager is working correctly (thanks to pam_console), I still need to investigate crash in gnome-obex-send and gnome-bluetooth-manager seems to be a little broken in the distro (need to check code).