My (almost) perfect portable audio player

For almost 3 years, I've been enjoying my iAudio M3 player. But it seems its life is coming to a end slowly : power adapter died two months ago so I switched to USB recharge but an entire night is needed to refill battery. Moreover, it forces full internal harddrive rescan when booting the device (which scans for new tracks) and battery is also showing signs of age (It lasts for about 1 or 2 hours and the full rescan at startup doesn't help). It is still a great device, with Ogg/Vorbis support but I was hoping to change it with iAudio X7 (when/if it ever announced), because I want a portable USB OnTheGo drive as additional storage for my camera.

So, until there are news about X7, I decided to try to use my n800 as my portable audio player. And I must confess I kind of like it, even if it isn't perfect :

• I've tested the various alternative media players available and I've switched back to Nokia default media player. Why ? I've been hit by Canola battery eating background process with my 770 and I don't think installing a webserver to configure it is a good idea for a mobile device. Kagu is playlist based (I'm a "shuffle all my tracks" person) and way too long to startup. UKMP was nice until I discovered it was issuing poll on the device (thanks strace) when not playing and minimized, which is bad for autonomy.
• I'd like to have native Ogg/Vorbis playback but even with additional gstreamer tremor packages ; there are even two different versions available and none is working properly with default media player, so it might be a bug in Nokia media player. But it would be nice if both "ogg support gstreamer" packages could be merged (I've already sent some fixes to one of the packages author). So, for now, I'm back to encoding to MP3 when copying music to the device. Not perfect but it has the pro to increase battery life since decoding is handled by internal DSP.
• Audioscrobbler support : that is THE missing feature from M3. I enabled it in UKMP (thanks to maemoscrobbler), which was nice but since I reverted to Nokia player, I missed it. I guess somebody needs to write a small daemon listening to Media player D-Bus event (to notice when a file playback is finished) and kicked a maemoscrobbler D-Bus event.
• LastFM support : it isn't that important (since I can't use it in bus/metro) but it would be nice. For a long time, I was waiting for this and it is now over, thanks to Alberto Garcia and Vagalume. It is only missing lastfm: uri support in browser and love/ban buttons in the main UI. I guess I should fill bug reports :)
• Podcast support : I listen to a small list of podcasts but getting them automatically would be nice. Unfortunately, RSS internal client is horrible in that regard. But thankfully, Nokia VideoCenter can be used as a Podcast client and it isn't that bad (even if it does use a non standard UI). Now, the only problems remaining are missing bookmarking in a playback file (audiobook for instance) and podcasts being listed as available tracks in Media player main shuffle list :)
• Screen protection : I think every n800 user agrees the shipped case "protection" is awful, moreover if you compare with 770 screen casing. For some time, I've been using my DS case protection which is nice but too big. So, I ordered the official Nokia case for n800 (which is exactly what I want) but it is still in out of stock for one month now ; I even got a call from Nokia Store explaining they were expecting a shipment for October 15.. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting.

Overall, using n800 as a audio player is a nice experience which could be improved somehow (let's hope IT2008 will be better in that regard). It might even fill my need for next iAudio audio player...

MandrivaLinux 2008.0 One GNOME edition available

Like all stars who are always a little late, Mdv 2008.0 One GNOME CD (ie installable LiveCD) is now available for download either on ftp mirror (for instance on Proxad or through Bittorrent). If you never tried MandrivaLinux and you like GNOME, this version is for you.

At last GUADEC, I discussed with many people who told me they went to Linux thanks to Linux-Mandrake and later switched to other distributions, feeling we lost our connection with the community. I can assure you we didn't (but maybe, seen from outside the company, it might have feel that way) and with this new release, I'd like people who used to be Mandrivians or people who tried our distribution years ago and were disappointed (and think it didn't change since) to try our new release. Just do it ;) And now, with Free Software virtualization solution available like VirtualBox, it has never been easier to test a new distro (and you will discover MandrivaLinux 2008.0 installs and configures VirtualBox addons automatically for even better experience, thanks to Blino hard work).

GNOME 2.20 is out

Excellent news (but I'm guessing most people know now) : GNOME 2.20 is out and it seems I didn't screw the release (I'm always a little anxious when I'm cooking a new GNOME release as part of GNOME release team). Thanks you for everybody who helped this release, including developpers, translators, bug reports, documentation writers and I forgetting people, as always.

As a side note, GNOME 2.20 is already in Mandriva Cooker and will be available in Mandriva Linux 2008.0 RC2 which should be released next week.

Done with GUADEC photos

I've finally finished to select, sort and "develop" my GUADEC photos (available on this flickr set). It took me too much time to complete it for various reasons :

• sort my photos and only publish relevant ones (until then, I was just pushing all photos on my flickr account to let people sort my mess ;) ),
• experiment with RAW photography (which is extremely time consuming when you aren't sure which settings you should tweak),
• tune results with GIMP (Cropping, Levels, Curve and Tone Mapping),
• make sure all photos are titled correctly and geopositionned too (I don't have a GPS received yet).

My next photos to take care of are those I took in Thaïland in June. Hopefully, they aren't in RAW format (I have 830 to sort) and I did a lot of try & errors for some monuments, so maybe it will be done for end of September ;)

Improving patches management at distro level

Federico, your remarks about patch management for distributions are quite similar to a mail I sent two years on Mandriva maintainers list, about my dream process for patch management. At that time, Git wasn't really on the radar but I thought it could be interesting to share it with everybody, now we might have tools to help :

Here are some ideas I've been having on how we could improve maintainer workflow concerning patches integration (which is quite critical for GNOME or KDE, for instance). I've been influenced by Mark Shuttleworth keynote about some stuff Ubuntu is working on (I was refering to Mark keynote at GUADEC 2005, about Launchpad).

Most of the time, maintainers are applying various patches on upstream source to generate its packages. For a good part, patches are extracted from CVS/SVN/whatever versioning system is used by upstream software maintainers, either in HEAD branch or other branches. Other potential patch sources are other distributions packages, upstream bugzilla or maintainers own brain.

Extracting patches from various CVS can be quite time consuming (this has improved with SVN since the original writing) and keeping history of patches, when upstream partially merged them is very time consuming.

When patches are written by maintainers, upstream integration is usually slow because it requires either submitting bugs upstream with patches or committing patches on upstream CVS once review process has approved it.

In order to improve this, maintainers could use a versioning system and/or magic scripts doing the following :

• upstream revisions and branches would be accessible in the repository just like using upstream repository

• Mandriva patched source would be using a separate branch containing source with all patches applied. Each patch could be done applied in a separate sub-branch, Mandriva top branch would merge all those sub-branches (this last point might not be that useful, since we are already using "Repository System" for building packages.

• When Mandriva patches are supposed to be merged upstream, branch relevant for each patch could be published for upstream integration or committed directly on upstream repository if approved by upstream maintainer.

• When fixes are needed for Mandriva package and are already available upstream, merging from upstream branch to a Mandriva sub-branch would ease package maintainer job, while keeping history and origin of the fix.

• When new upstream release is made available, it is merged into Mandriva branches and if some patches were merged upstream, they are removed automatically, since revision history is kept in each branch and the versioning system is supposed to be smart enough to deal with that.

In order to integrate easily when new Repository Build system, there might be some scripts magic to convert Mandriva patches sub-branches into subversion Build Repository (I'm refering here to Mandriva build system which is SVN based).

In an ideal world, each distribution could have their own branches and maintainers from each distribution would be able to access another distribution published branches, to easily find patches. And we would have a free (as speech) way to have a complete view of bug reports and available patches :) And I'm not even talking about migrations of bug between bugzilla (but at least, with Mandriva switch to Bugzilla 3, we will be ready for the future).

(end of mail, italic are comments I added today)

Comments welcome ;)

Gastronomie moléculaire

This morning, while reading my daily RSS feed, I was delighted to read a great article on Wired about Hervé This (and I guess it is not by chance it hitted Slashdot too). As a lot of geeks (no need to hide, J5), I enjoy cooking and knowing and understanding how those things work it really interesting both intellectually and to improve your cooking technique. I've known about Hervé This for a long time (I have almost all his books at home and I was able to attend one of his sessions some years ago) and it is always a pleasure to read about his research. After all, everbody should know how is composed a mayonnaise and how you can recover it, when you think you screwed it :)

Anyway, I highly recommend his first french book Les Secrets de la Casserole or this english book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (I can't comment on this one, I only checked his french books).

(PS: I swear this post was written before I saw J5 announce of GNOME cookbook project opening :)

GUADEC post-op

No, Ross, you're not the last one :)

I wanted to blog only when I finished processing all photos I took at GUADEC (since this time, I tried using RAW) but my Gimp-fu and Ufraw-fu is still a little low so I'm still not finished (but the first photos are online here). And next UFRaw release is scheduled today, with noise reduction and full color management, so I'll probably need to re-process my old photos.

Anyway, it has been a great week in Birmingham, very instructive (I was able to attend 33 talks !) with wonderful people all around (a special thanks to organization team).

It seems Mandriva / GUADEC USB key was well received, even if we found some bugs (like no boot on two laptops, including Frederic one or incorrect informative message reported by Hub). Another information regarding startup on the key : you can disable the "welcome" webpage after logging by GNOME editing session property.

But I want more feedback !! So, if you haven't formated your USB key yet (or even if you did ;) , tell us if you like it or not, bugs you found, features you miss, everything. Either comment on my post or blog yourself and add a trackback here.