Older blog entries for sdodji (starting at number 134)

Nemiver 0.6.5

So Nemiver 0.6.5 is out.

Last release was in late November 2008. Too many things to do I guess.

This release is about pushing out all the little bugfixes that happened since 0.6.4. We have been fixing little quirks here and there as they were appearing during our day to day use of the tool. The result is a tool that a bit more pleasant to use, at least for my personal workflows :)

Apart from that, the Nemiver repository moved from SVN to git and the mailing list moved to the GNOME infrastructure. You can now browse the source code from here and checkout the code by typing:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/nemiver

Fedora 9, 10 and rawhide packages should hit a mirror near you soon, but the impatients can grab them here.

Syndicated 2009-03-01 17:21:00 (Updated 2009-03-01 21:02:13) from Dodji

Catchup

Fosdem 2009

So, Fosdem is over. Yes I am late. As always.

I caught quite a serious cold even before going to Fosdem this year, so I spent the entire event drinking tea and sleeping at 23h30 at worst. Believe it or not, I was able to wake up quite early on Saturday and Sunday, so I didn't miss any morning conference and, although I came back with the flu still, I was less destroyed than after the previous Fosdems.

"Early to bed and early rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise", they say. I still have to practise that one. I am not there yet :)

What is sure though, is that I had a voice extinction quite on time for my talk. yay.

So How did my Nemiver talk go ? Well, I haven't received much tomatoes so I guess either the ton of my voice was okay-ish enough to not disturb the audience during its nap, or the talk was okay-ish, or ...
Well, I guess that question shall remain unanswered for years to come.

In any case, the pdf slides of the presentation are here.

All in all, this Fosdem event was nice. Aside from the talks, I met lots of cool people and hang around with the Mandriva crew. Very nice chaps. They even took some nice photos.

Fedora

So I've finally been approved as a Fedora packager. \o/
The packages I'll be (co)maintaining so far are:

• cloog
  
• geglmm
  
• marlin
  
• nemiver
• ghex

I've always be willing to take part in packaging. I was just too lazy busy to sit dow and get into the approval process. I can tick that as done now. yeeesh.

Syndicated 2009-02-24 14:59:00 (Updated 2009-02-24 16:01:09) from Dodji

I am going to fosdem 2009

So I have booked my train ticket and hotel for this year's FOSDEM.

For those won't don't know, FOSDEM is the biggest european Free Software event, dedicated at contributors and afficionados in general who are not necessarily professionals. At FOSDEM, you don't need to wear a suit or a tie. You don't need to pay to get in. Still, you can attend high quality talks given by core contributors.

Also, FOSDEM is located in Brussels, making it a rather central place to join if you live in Europe. Plane (or train) tickets and hotels prices are relatively affordable if you book them early enough.

Clearly, FOSDEM _is_ the Free Software conference to attend if you live in Europe, are interested in the technical sides of things and would like to meet contributors for real.

I will arrive on Friday February 6th in the evening and I am going to stay at Sabina Hotel. See you all there.

Syndicated 2009-01-12 10:23:00 (Updated 2009-01-12 10:36:32) from Dodji

One more year

So I am 32 years old today, and I still have all my teeth.

I don't like celebrating my own anniversaries because I can't forget how futile life is and how all the things that one might value can vanish at a snap of fingers. I'd rather settle down for a while to think about things that happened during the last 12 months, welcome the joyful events, accept the sad ones that I couldn't change and try to change things I can for the future.

Happy Birthday to all of you who were born a November 30.

Syndicated 2008-11-30 00:03:00 (Updated 2008-11-30 10:20:00) from Dodji

More rhythmbox news on planet GNOME

I came across Christophe Fergeau's (a.k.a teuf) last update about his work on libgpod and its integration in my music player of choice, Rhythmbox. There are some very interesting bits in there. I wish teuf's blog could be syndicated on planet GNOME.

That made me wonder why we don't hear more often about Rhythmbox on planet GNOME. The project is very active and I use it every day. Kudos to its hackers :-) Guys, please, tell to us a bit more often about it. I am not asking for over-pimping. Just keeping in touch with your users :-).

It even looks like we are probably going to be having a nice new and native GTK+ widget coming out of it.

Thanks for that.

Syndicated 2008-11-25 16:09:00 (Updated 2008-11-25 22:36:06) from Dodji

My trip to "Journées du logiciel libre" 2008

• Woke up around 5h in the morning.
• Arrived on time at the train station to pick up the TGV for Lyon
• TGV departed on time, at 6h57 in the morningCaught Frédéric Peters at the bar, in the train. We took two petit déjeuner, café/croissant. You need that when you woke up at 5h something.
• Went to seat near Frédéric's place so we did chat during all the journey to Lyon. Nice.
• Arrived in Lyon on time at 9h00. Off to the tramway station.
• Arrived at CPE around 9h30. We were lucky, the opening session of the JDLL was late so we were there on time for it...
• Met some usual suspects like Rodolphe Quiedeville, Frédéric Couchet, Dave Neary, Fredix, Lucas and Misc (get yourself a web space!).
• Attended the OpenOffice.org talk. Interesting.
• Off to the GNOME booth. Met some new faces with whom we had some nice chats. Thanks to Dave, we could have some nice posters as well as a couple of Nokia tablets to show off GNOME Mobile. At some point, the Mozilla folks did even borrow us an N810 device to install Fennec on it to show it off. Nice.
• Did my Nemiver talk. It went quite well. I had some nice questions at the end, even about the new stuff coming up in GDB. This alone could be the subject of a dedicated talk. Anyway, the slides of the talk are here.
• After the talk Fredix took us (Frédéric and Guillaume Desrat, of Ruby fame) to a bar, near the train station. Had some nice chat there as well.
• Took the TGV at 20h00, arrived on time at 22h00 in Paris.
• Nice and exhausting day. A nice event all in all. I just wish there were more technical talks though. I think that event could gain in traction if more technical speakers could be invited. It'd have been nice to have an update of the last released Linux kernel, X.org, GNOME, etc. I am quite confident that this could raise the awareness of this event amongst french speaking free free software enthousiasts.
  
• Today (Saturday) the other GNOME folks have taken care of the booth there. I hope everything went well.

Syndicated 2008-10-18 17:00:00 (Updated 2008-11-04 15:38:04) from Dodji

The perfect jewel

Reading Christian's blog entry about what the Free Desktop needs to grow in market share made me smile a bit because I have been thinking about this exact thing a couple of times.

I agree with Christian that we have the technological base to rise and shine today.

I do think however that Free Desktop Software bits alone will have hard time taking over this market. I Think we need more than that, even if our software can flip cubes around and do fancy things when you snap your fingers.

You need a device which the software will be integrated with. And tightly. You need disitribution channels for that device and for the software bits that run on it. You need to build an ecosystem of applications that integrate well on the device. You need to assure people that things keep working when they upgrade the hardware and the software. You probably won't be able to do that alone, so you need partners. Lots of them. Partners who can make a living by writting and distributing apps for the ecosystem.

I believe there is an opportunity for an organization to focus on these tasks today instead of focusing on cost saving shortcuts that make our Free Software Desktop just look as a cheap alternative to today's established monopoly and thus eroding our image capital a little bit more everyday.

The funny thing is that even once you have all those hard things done, end users don't see it. They don't see the hard work. They might only see a nice device on which applications do work. Assuming the device is so cute that even my little sister will be wanting one in her bag, some users might see it as a jewel. Just a perfect jewel.

That shall be time for all of us Free Software Lovers to rejoice. But until then, until such organization(s) emerge I believe hard work is due.

Syndicated 2008-10-16 18:18:00 (Updated 2008-11-04 15:38:29) from Dodji

Nemiver at "Journées du logiciel libre"

This Friday 17th and Saturday 18th the "Journées du logiciel libre" event is being held in Lyon, France. It's an interesting French Free Software event where you can meet users and people from different communities.

I will be talking about the Nemiver debugger on Friday afternoon. The talk will cover the history of the project, the features and architecture of the debugger as well as its future perspectives.

On Saturday, there will also be a GNOME booth where you can meet the folks from the French GNOME squad. So if you are around Lyon and are interested, please come and say Hi :-)

Checkout the planning of the talks here.

Syndicated 2008-10-07 20:04:00 (Updated 2008-10-08 08:51:58) from Dodji

New Dad

My first daughter is born yesterday at 18h03. Mother and baby are doing great. There are times like this when I just want to say: "What else".

I was nevertheless surprised to see a father there, playing with his EEEPC, running GNU/Linux, while waiting for his son's birth. He had a 3G internet connection and was eagerly browsing the web.

Times are changing all the time.

Syndicated 2008-08-20 10:15:00 (Updated 2008-08-20 10:25:00) from Dodji

Knock nock ... door closed

How do you do to avoid depending too much on one-stop-shop services like google's to shield yourself against problems like this one ?

There are very very few webservices (even paying ones) that can compete with google in terms of coolness in their offering. I mean, I know no email hosting service that has a web interface as powerful and easy to use as gmail. None of those I know lets you pump your emails from another imap/pop imap server. None of them have an anti spam as poweful as the gmail one. None of them lets you tag your emails like what gmail does. None of them provides you with a Jabber chatting service that lets you connect to the server using your own jabber client etc ...

To avoid loosing my emails when google shuts my access down for whatever reason - like what happened to Nick Saber - my emails are stored on an imap server that I pay for. I then kindly ask gmail to pump the emails from there, anti-spam them, filter them, tag them, and I read the resulting emails back via imap, using Thunderbird.

I don't really want to administer my own server because I prefer hacking code in my free time instead ...

Does anyone have a better ways to handling emails nowadays ? Any webservice that can really compete with google today ?

Syndicated 2008-08-06 14:36:00 (Updated 2008-11-04 15:38:55) from Dodji