Recent blog entries for gc

I usually post one diary entry every 2 years.. so time has come now :).

Two years is also the period of time for which I've been living in Switzerland. My previous life and work at Mandriva, downtown Paris seems so far in the past! I've enjoyed a lot changing colleagues and technical work environment. Additionally, I can only thank my luck to now live in a small town down the Alps with snowboarding and hiking only minutes away.

Rare enough to be noticed, the new web-album project I was talking about in my previous diary entry is now mature as time has passed and I decided one year ago to seriously work on it. I am even lucky enough to host the project under its own cool domain, http://booh.org/. I like to build web-albums out of my photos, and it would be difficult for me now to live without the cool features of booh, which are preloading of next images in browser, handling videos, and using a nice GUI to build and edit the album (and more!).

Well, see you in two years time :). Hope I finish the new release of Frozen-Bubble by then!

Wow. So much time passed without a diary entry...

It's been nearly two months now that I moved from MandrakeSoft in Paris to MNC in Switzerland (so that I could live with my love). Things begin to calm down a bit in the work field (e.g. I can now do some real work, instead of reading documentation and trying to figure out what it's all about), but we still have to find a new apartment. Of course, they are horribly expensive compared to France (around 1200 CHF - that is 800 Euros - for a 70 m2 apartment with 2 bedrooms), but as my salary also increased a lot here it should be fine (well it needs to be, anyway). And as I'm a foreigner, the company itself pays all my taxes before paying me, so no bad surprise next year :).

I'm currently preparing a new release of Frozen-Bubble (you may suggest changes in the appropriate thread of the Frozen-Bubble community at Orkut.com).

I am also working on an HTML web-album generator (in Ruby). Yes, I know, there are already too many of them? But none is fine because I want they preload the next image (spending half browsing time waiting for next image to load is horrible), I don't want the browser to "move" up-down between images (it does when it opens a new web page - most web-albums do), and I want they handle videos as well, not only pictures.

I don't know when/if these things will be ready.. not even considering the fact that I read a book on objective caml during each commuting train travel.

Ogg Vorbis 1.0 - quality is just amazing!

The Ogg team announced 1.0 on Friday 19 July 2002 - this is 3 days ago. And, proudly, they proposed a page that would show the very good quality of their software...

Now, what's really amazing is that the quality is... just amazing :-). Over two first tests, I could not hear any difference from the original music when I encoded using the lowest quality! This means the codec produces quality 50 kbps files! I still can't believe this...

If you wanna hear out my music tests, you can jump to a small page I've written about that.

"You know that gnus will save your soul."

My howto-adopt-gnus has upgraded; it was previously aimed at people willing to switch to gnus, the best mail and news reader out there; it now extends, with an advanced section, to be a resource for more skillful gnus users: it would help you to get the most out of this fabulous tool, with a collection of the 20 most useful key bindings, how to set up different signatures, how to easily include in the article the text contents of msword attachments, how to use footnotes, etc.

And please submit to my email any errors or missing features...

Mandrake serious problems?

Yesterday, our management at MandrakeSoft decided to publish information about our short-term money problems, asking that our users possibly subscribe to our on-line Club membership. I still remain shocked about the behaviour of the older management, who spent large amounts of money to build what they thought need to be a successful dotcom/linux company, and now we're in deep trouble about money.

I seriously hope a company like Mandrake, who publish 100% of its code under the GPL license, can survive. The problem is that we need money to pay our salaries, whereas our product is freely downloadable.

And what surprises me, is that the most generous people are not french or european people, but american, whom I thought would say "walk or die, this is the american spirit anyway". The true situation is that american are much more generous when it comes to supporting things they like, even if they're not obliged to pay money. In french/european mentality, most of the times it's "I'm not obliged to pay, you've had a bad management, this is your problem, you may die I don't care".

Let's hope MandrakeSoft can survive this money crisis. I think we're a great accelerator of Linux acceptation in the public. We'll see!

Celebration Day!

Today is the Initial Release date of Frozen Bubble, the game I've been working on during the last 4 months. Since the game is already pretty mature, and features commercial quality graphics and sound/music, I think it can be a real success. After a few announcements including on main french linux news website linuxfr, I already recorder 2700 hits, in only 6 hours...