Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 190)

Went to a party at Deniz yesterday, lots of interesting people. She seems to have a lot of friends on LiveJournal, and made me wonder how social dynamics and how people get to know each others. I'm all right with getting along with people, but "bootstrapping" is somewhat of a mystery to me, it just sort of happens.

Thanks for the party, Deniz!

Now, I'm walking around the apartment in my underwear, drinking some good Gyokuro japanese tea. It's all good.

Photography

Okay, with the 20D, Canon fixed all the problems I had with the EOS 10D, which I already thought had great performance caracteristics, but had a few problems, like the boot lag of 2 seconds, the lack of a joystick or directional buttons, it's large size and hefty weight, etc. They are also making the EFS mount available on more cameras and making new lenses for it, which I guess is a good thing, because it means affordable wide angle lenses for DSLR.

So that's the one I'll get, probably the kit with the 17-85mm/f4-5.6 IS USM. I hope it's not a micro-USM, but I'll probably have to deal with it anyway if it's not...

Palm

I finally got around to have my Palm repaired, but it turned out that for a broken LCD screen on a Tungsten E, you're better off getting a new one! I thought "hmm, I might upgrade to a T2", but no luck, they're all gone gone gone. So I bought another Tungsten E. They now bundle a hard case with it, which is a good thing, but the case isn't so well-done, I find. It makes accessing the power button, stylus, earphone/USB/power plugs rather annoying and difficult. They could have had a different shape, or have notches, something like that. Oh well, it was free.

Some people (hacker, hub) wanted a PalmOS 5 device for various hacking related to syncing, I might lend them my broken Palm, since it otherwise works okay (you can still sort of see some amount of the screen).

While everyone is either gaping at the thunderstorm or fast asleep (Mélanie just fell over a third into the movie), I watched The Barbarian Invasions (in french, obviously!). It is very good, and of the casually leftist intellectual airs that I like once in a while.

Ohm, Sweet Ohm

We're going to stay put until the end of our lease (which, as per Québec tradition, is a year long and started on the 1st of July). This will (hopefully) allows me to save up some money and either have some good fun with it (to compensate for the extra fun this place would have been) or be able to get something really interesting next July.

The "almost everyone moves on the 1st of July" tradition is probably the reason why there was almost nothing for rent. There's stuff all year round, but the best selection is obviously in the 4 or 5 months before July, where renters have to notify their landlords if will be departing.

In any case, I'm pretty much settled on the area around the Lionel-Groulx metro station.

Bloody RSS Aggregators

Tried Forumzilla, which showed a lot of promise, but proved to be rather quirky (probably bugs, so I'm hoping they'll get fixed). Importing OPML didn't seem to work, adding feeds seemed to require closing the feed management window and reopen it for the change to take effect and it didn't produce legal RFC822 messages, and my anal IMAP server (Cyrus) whined about the lack of carriage returns and wouldn't take them.

I think that I'd like some server-side tool that would do exactly this, but reliably and independently of the client. That'd be neat.

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.