Older blog entries for gc (starting at number 3)

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.

6 May 2002 (updated 21 Apr 2004 at 09:54 UTC) »

"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...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!