Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 188)

Mélanie and I are thinking of moving. Actually, we're more than thinking about moving, I'm meeting with a landlord tomorrow to get investigated (this is so much fun). There's definite pros and cons to this. On one side, I'll be much closer to work, downtown and other niceties like movie theaters and the Atwater Market. On the other side, I will be losing my backyard (no more NITI BBQ parties), Mélanie's workplace will be moving to Laval, which is rather easy to get at from our current place, but harder from the new, etc...

Not to mention moving.

All sorts of niggly details, like the possible lack of storage space at the new place (have to get rid of some stuff, find some storage space for things like winter tires), the place comes with a stove and fridge, but I already have a pretty nice stove and an equally nice fridge. While there are some nice trees on the street, there is no lawn of any sort in front of the apartment, so it might be annoying for walking our dog.

The new place is more expensive (but not prohibitively so, less than 40% more), but my current place is pretty damn cheap, so it's more like paying a normal price again after being ridiculously lucky.

I'm being a bit torn...

Lukasz came to Montréal to find somewhere to live at during his next co-op term at NITI. It was pretty damn cool seeing him again and I am eager to have him come join me as my minion!

Uploaded the few last pictures I wanted to put in my gallery, including a portrait of telsa after we stumbled upon her and alan in the middle of the Gatineau Park.

It was a pretty cool year, better than the last, which I felt dipped a bit compared to the other years.

I'm trying to get started hacking on Debrix, try to put XPLC to good use and make it very modular. daniels seemed rather interested by XPLC, as much as one can be by such things.

I'm also learning about TLA (Tom Lord's Arch) at the same time, which is making things a bit difficult, but I wanted to check it out anyway, so now is as good a time as any other. From having a look at planet.freedesktop.org, Adam Jackson seems to know a thing or two about loading modules in the X server codebase, I'll probably have to ask him what went well, what didn't, what he'd like, etc...

XPLC

Apparently also, OpenSync could also use some XPLC lovin', according to some of my illustrious coworkers (incidentally, it looks like a pretty cool project, I was intending on hacking on something of this order soon, but my Palm is broken now). They're planning on putting some work into it, I'm hearing, which, together with Debrix, means that I have to get some C bindings done Real Soon Now. So I need to sit down with libIDL and put something together. Shouldn't be too bad.

Change in the kernel development methodology. Are the even-numbered releases going to be development as well? In a sense, the so-called stable kernel releases already had to be further stabilized by the various distro vendors with additionnal patches. This would just be giving up the idea that a non-kernel hacker could use a kernel right off of kernel.org, which in my opinion was already not so far off from the truth.

Had a pint with a Red Hat fellow from the UK (formerly from Sistina) working on LVM who seemed very keen on using UniConf for LVM configuration. That would be very cool, as we use LVM in our product, it would make it that much easier to use for us!

WvStreams (and XPLC!)

Some interesting activity on the WvStreams side of things. More modularization, some reorganization of the libraries boundaries, creation of a minimal UniConf library, a WvStreams-core library, etc... This handily fits in really well with the XPLCification of WvStreams.

I'm a bit ashamed, as I told myself I'd write the follow-up examples that would show the quite requested component category feature of XPLC (which allows you to discover components at runtime, in the way that is commonly thought of as plugins, among other things) today, and I didn't. I'll make it an extra good example when I do it, I promise! :-)

Damian Conway is a great speaker. I can't wait for Perl 6. I think I'll rewrite Nitix in it. What the heck, even Peter Zion was converted! That says it all!

We're now sitting in the "using the new 2.6 APIs" tutorial, waiting for wli to unbreak the relationship between his laptop and the projector...

Been to the "where 2.7 is going" talk, which was interesting, and to the block IO talk, which seemed generally interesting, but was a bit out of my personal field of interest. I'm hearing from a number of people who went to the SCTP tutorial that SCTP rocks, I should have a closer look at that.

Been to Keith Packard's talk, which was pretty funny and interesting. Skipped the rest of the afternoon talks to talk with Daniel Stone, Jim Gettys, Ryan "icculus" Gordon, Gavriel State, Mike Harris and Chris Lee, which was nice. Daniel is doing modularization work on the X server (in Debrix), so there might be some interest in hooking up with XPLC, but he's pretty caught up in packaging at the moment, so he hasn't got much time to work on that. Ryan was teasing me a bit about "oh no, not more dlopen that won't work!", but I asked him a bit more about that, and I think that he's actually hitting at least some of the problems that XPLC would take care of for you, so it's really all good.

The frenchs really seem to like Maudite! DV had a couple, liked it, and told Michel Lespinasse about it, who proceeded to really push his investigation (yes, the beers on the table are all his!). There's also another new picture, for those who wondered about my fabled lack of pants (dcoombs just couldn't resist my charm, he had to take a picture!).

I went a bit at one of the suites where partying was "de rigueur", then couldn't resist checking out the infamous water balloon launcher that was also seen at Linux-Kongress (wish I had taken a picture, but it was really dark, would have needed flash and we didn't really need the attention), then headed off to a pub that's right at the corner of Les Suites (can't remember the name) with a bunch of cool people, that was quite nice.

Been to the "device drivers in user space" talk, which was okay. I think it's a bit ambious to go right after PCI devices when there's a lot of low hanging fruit in the form of USB devices and such. But we need someone looking into this, so that when we get there, someone has a clue!

I'm now at the X (re)architecture talk, still in the intro which I've seen a million times by now, but the body of the talk should be good.

If you want to hook up with me, I'm wearing a Ximian t-shirt, and I'm wearing pants, unlike yesterday. For the record, I'm not alone!

Usually, I forget one thing when I go off on a trip, but this time, I forgot three: my table-top tripod, my swimsuit (Les Suites has a nice pool) and my business cards. Considering that I find conferences such as this one to be very useful for networking with other people, the lack of business cards is rather annoying. I might get myself a small run printed at some cheap place, that'd be better than nothing.

On the subject of networking with people, I'm wearing a bright red Kraftwerk "The Man-Machine" t-shirt today, so if any Advogato people want to say hello, come right up!

Retrospectively, maybe I should have gone to the Desktop Developer Conference, apparently there has been a lot of people saying that they'd need some modular/component thingy, exactly what XPLC does, notably Debrix and MultiSync. I'll try contacting these people and see what's going on...

I will also be posting pictures as the conference goes on.

Arrived in Ottawa, checked into Les Suites, registered for the conference and found some decent enough signal on the balcony. Now there's some nice light rain which scared dcoombs inside (not a rain person, he says!), and we have a good view on the south side.

Will be going to the pub tonight for the pre-conference meet and greet at Patty Bolands.

There's talk of hosting some sort of party in our suite... ;-)

XPLC

Did a new release of XPLC, with a nicely refactored module loading system which not only works better and should be easier to extend, but is also easier to use as well! So it's a nice win...

Also improved the simple examples, to make ripping code out easier.

It's that time of the year again where we head off to the Linux Symposium. Preparations are going pretty badly, I think I'm going to turn up pretty badly prepared, maybe having to take advantage of Les Suites' availability of a clothes washing machine. Oh well.

If anyone want to discuss matters of system programming or component-related stuff (like XPLC or one of the 25 other things almost like it in the open source world), hook up with me. I'm the guy with no pants.

hub, mich and I went to Québec City this weekend. I mainly wanted to go see Violent Femmes, which turned out to be awesome, but going to the Old City once in a while is just a plain cool idea!

I asked my good friend Jean if he could lend me his 70-200mm/f2.8L USM lens. He offered to lend me a month ago or so but had to retract his offer because he had forgotten that he was going to need it for the Formula 1 racing in town, but I was just thinking that this would be a perfect lens for some concert photography. So I asked him.

He ended up lending me his Mini Trekker bag filled with the 70-200 lens, but also the 24-70mm/f2.8L USM lens, an ImageTank G2 and Joëlle's Canon EOS 10D. So Jean and Joëlle are probably going to make it to my very good friends list. ;-)

We first walked around the Old City a bit and went to eat some crêpe with cider (as hub tells us is the tradition, and is indeed an excellent idea, as the cider seems to diffuse when it contacts the hot food, try it!) at a wonderful place called "Casse Crêpe Breton", then we headed out to the show.

The show turned out to be excellent, with the previous band, Tarmac (from France, founded by a couple of the guys from Louise Attaque, but I'm not linking because their web site is evil) joining them for one of the encores, doing a spontaneous song in french (with Gordon singing, not one of the Tarmac guys!). I didn't take much pictures of the show at all after all, letting hub have some fun with the 10D and the 70-200.

Photo: Violent Femmes (shot by hub).

After the show, and pretty much running the 10D out of batteries, we switched to film for some night photography. I don't think this will yield too interesting stuff, but we had some fun walking on top of the Old City's fortifications (trivia: Québec City is the only fortified city left in North America), and we ended it up with a nice cool-off beer at a pub, where we had an extra-cheerful waitress.

The next day, we went to the Montmorency Fall Park. We had some pretty good weather, and decided to climb up the staircase leading to the top. Now, while all this fancy photo equipment Jean and Joëlle lent me is awesome, it is also equally heavy. I usually like to travel light, so this was quite the change, and I've got a few aching muscles now to remind me of how stupid carrying this much equipment up a cliff is.

Photo: Montmorency Fall.

Thankfully, after crossing the suspended bridge over the fall and amazing mich with the amazing powers of a polarizing filter, we awarded ourselves some ice cream. As the we heard some thunder in the distance, we thought it would be a good idea to get back down and not be stuck in a rainstorm.

Before getting back to the car, I wanted to give the platform that is right next to the bottom of the fall a try, so I left my stuff to hub and mich, and went there. Boy, that's a lot of water, I should have wore my swimsuit!

Photo: Escaping from the roaring waterfall (shot by hub).

We gave Orlean Island a try, but the weather was proving to be difficult and there was a lot of traffic headed out of the island's narrow bridge, so we didn't really stay long, just drove around one half of the island. It started pouring like crazy while we were waiting in traffic.

We tried going to the Place de la Capitale shopping mall, which is one of the largest in Québec, but silly us, we got there at 6 PM on a Sunday, it was closed. Back to the Old City for some good food at the St-Patrick Pub, followed by some wandering around town, mostly along the fortifications. We then left mich to head back to Montréal (the bastard is starting his vacations just now!)...