Planet Ensigogne

Cela a été annoncé pendant les RMLL 2010 (dont je viens de parler): les RMLL 2012 auront lieu à Liège. J'ai un petit grain de critique à ajouter à cette nouvelle... Mais je tiens à préciser dès à présent que je suis ravi que les RMLL quittent le territoire français (cela les rendra un peu plus mondiales) et que je ne doute pas un instant que le dossier de candidature réalisé par l'équipe de Liège était de grande qualité.

Après avoir discuté avec plusieurs personnes, je m'interroge sur la méthode de sélection de la ville qui accueille les RMLL : il n'y a pas eu, à ma connaissance, d'appel à candidatures et de manière générale, le processus décisionnel est quelque peu opaque. Cela me dérange un peu, donc autant en discuter. Et ayant participé à la sélection de villes organisatrices du GUADEC par le passé, je sais que ce n'est pas toujours facile de décider. On peut tout de même tenter d'améliorer la visibilité depuis l'extérieur :-)

Première étape : en farfouillant un peu (j'ai trouvé un lien sur cette page), je suis tombé sur le site du comité des RMLL, qui offre quelques informations, et notamment la composition du comité ainsi que quelques (maigres) informations en ligne sur comment candidater. C'est quelque chose d'un peu méconnu, je pense, donc allez lire tout cela si vous avez le temps (et que cela vous intéresse, évidemment ;-)).

Le manque d'appel à candidature est, à mon avis, le plus problématique : il semble dommage de ne pas en avoir, en particulier dans la mesure où au moins un groupe aurait aimé candidater. J'avoue avoir du mal à comprendre pourquoi il n'y en a pas eu, mais j'imagine qu'on a pu penser qu'il fallait décider pendant les RMLL, et qu'il n'y a pas eu le temps de réaliser cet appel avant. Était-ce cependant vraiment nécessaire de prendre une décision dès à présent ? Attendre deux ou trois mois aurait par exemple été possible, sans pour autant poser un problème à l'équipe organisatrice choisie. Peut-être y a-t-il une autre explication que je ne connais pas, mais j'avoue avoir du mal à imaginer qu'elle justifierait de sauter l'étape de l'appel à candidatures.

En ce qui concerne l'opacité du processus, le principal problème est qu'il n'y a aucune documentation sur les éventuels candidats, ni de réels critères permettant d'expliquer pourquoi une ville serait préférée à une autre. Par exemple, comment le choix est-il effectué si les dossiers sont tous de qualité ? Ou est-ce envisageable qu'une ville bénéficie d'une sorte de bonus afin d'aider au développement de la communauté dans la région ? Je ne demande évidemment pas que la décision soit prise en public — je peux concevoir sans problème que c'est le type de décision qu'on souhaite prendre en étant complètement à l'aise, sans avoir à se censurer sur ses propos. On peut aussi imaginer la possibilité de recueillir des commentaires auprès de la communauté sur les différentes candidatures, par exemple. Le fait est qu'ouvrir un peu le processus pourrait aider à améliorer les futures candidatures, sans pour autant nuire.

Pourquoi est-ce que je me pose ces questions et pourquoi est-ce que cela me dérange un peu ? Tout simplement parce que les RMLL sont un évènement important pour la communauté francophone, et que s'il est possible d'améliorer un peu une partie de l'organisation, cela ne peut que résulter en des rencontres encore plus utiles à tous :-)

Et vous, qu'en pensez-vous ?

15 July 2010 à 21:57

At the end of last week (assuming it's okay to say that the end of the week starts on Wednesday ;-)), I went to Bordeaux for the RMLL 2010: this is simply the biggest community-oriented event in France. Since I've been traveling often lately and I'm going to leave for GUADEC later this month, I chose to not attend the whole event and to only be there for 3-4 days instead of the full 6 days experience.

Booths

The Mandriva people had a really great idea this year: they proposed to try to share a booth among distributions, and thanks to them, we were able to have an openSUSE presence on the first few days. So walking down the hall where all the booths were, you could see Debian, Fedora, Mandriva and openSUSE all together. Of course, we shared more than just the booths: we're all friendly people after all, so we chatted a lot and enjoyed being together. I really want to thank Michael from Mandriva for pushing me to make sure openSUSE would have a place here.

One funny tidbit is that we never requested a GNOME booth since all the GNOME people coming to the event knew they'd be busy with various other tasks (and I didn't feel I could handle both a GNOME and an openSUSE booth...). However, we still got one this way ;-) It was merged with the distributions booth, and I just put GNOME stickers all around to make sure our GNOME love gets distributed!

openSUSE Booth at the RMLL

The picture above shows the openSUSE booth during the week-end, which was much better organized than during the first few days! I don't think I have a picture of the first booth, so you can't really compare, but it's probably better this way ;-) Thanks to Michael (the openSUSE one) for sending us DVD, stickers and a few t-shirts: it helped make the booth more interesting!

Radio RMLL

A small group of volunteers was broadcasting a radio show during the whole event: Radio RMLL. And guess what? The world-famous Frédéric Péters was part of that team! The archives are online, and you can make fun of various distributions by listening to the distribution roundtable that Frédéric organized: hopefully, the fact that we knew each other made it not too boring!

Talks

Like for Linuxtag, I delivered two talks: one about GNOME 3.0, and the other about contributing to openSUSE. While both were in the Development track, I thought it'd be better to talk about GNOME 3.0 from the user perspective since that's what people were expecting; on the other hand, for openSUSE, I wanted to show that contributions to a project like openSUSE aren't necessarily technical contributions.

One thing that struck me (and the other GNOME people) is that we get much more excitement when we propose a talk about GNOME 3, than when we were trying to present the latest development in GNOME during the 2.x era. It's not the first time we noticed this (it happened in all previous events where we had some GNOME 3 bits too), but the contrast is so important that I'm now convinced the version number is much more important from a marketing perspective than from a technical one. Definitely something to keep in mind for our future roadmap, and for when we'll think about GNOME 4.

I also got interviewed for Linux Pratique about GNOME. During the discussion, I discovered the editors are based in Sélestat, which is a small city a few kilometers away from where my grand-mother lives. Small world.

The people

The best thing about an event like the RMLL is of course all the people you meet. It was good to see old friends (Didier, Frédéric, Michael, Alexandre, just to give a few names) as well as new faces! Being nasty people, we all made fun of each other's projects, but we also learnt the latest news about all those projects and their contributors. Oh, and we managed to bring someone living in London to an Irish pub in Bordeaux — is there a better place to enjoy food in France?

It was interesting to see that there were GNOME-friendly people (not just GNOME contributors) all around, although we weren't present with a real booth. And I was obviously glad to meet some members of the french-speaking openSUSE community: Guillaume, Julien, Jimmy and Jean-Luc. I think it's one of the first time (if not the first) where we managed to make openSUSE really visible during an event, and it was successful. It's a good step in making openSUSE-fr an even more vibrant group!

Come next year!

The event was not perfect, though: I think most people would agree that the wifi could have worked much better (it was down way too often), that having the event split between various building that weren't really close to each other was suboptimal, and that the weather was, well, way too hot ;-) But I'm sure the organizers did their best, and they even succeeded in getting a few drops of rain on Friday!

So not perfect, but it's still one of the two or three times in the year where you can connect with most of the free software community in France, and if only for this reason, that's a must-go event here. Oh, and next year, it'll be in Strasbourg: that's another reason everybody should come!

15 July 2010 à 13:50

Quel est le plus grave :

• le fait que j'aie la télé allumée sur Un dîner presque parfait ?

• le fait que je reconnaisse immédiatement la musique de Retour vers le futur III jouée par ZZ Top qui passe 5 secondes dans l'émission citée ci-dessus ?

Je m'interroge sérieusement...

12 July 2010 à 16:04

Michael released Miniature 0.1.9-3 to Maemo extras-devel yesterday. With this version, you can play chess with a contact on your N900 without configuring any server thanks to Telepathy. There are still crashes, bugs and UI to polish, but it is demoable and you can already enjoy playing chess with your friends!

The protocol used by Miniature is based on the Forsyth-Edwards Notation. At the moment it sends the whole state of the board to the remote player at each move. Miniature only sends valid moves, but does not have any protections about possible unfriendly other implementations yet.

Miniature implements the standard Telepathy Client interface with the Telepathy-Qt4 library. This enables Miniature to be automatically started by Mission Control on your N900 when a contact invites you to play. Telepathy stream tubes care about the connectivity to the remote device. The Address Book API is used to to show your contacts in the same way as other applications on the platform (avatars, contacts are merged correctly, status).

Quick overview of the integration with Telepathy

Here is how to play chess step by step:

1. Choose “Join P2P Game” in the main menu

2. Select your contact in the contact selector

3. Wait your contact’s answer

4. Your contact is asked whether they want to join the chess game

5. If your contact accepts, you are ready to play!

Feel free to join the Miniature mailing list and IRC channel.

09 July 2010 à 14:40

planetyahoo is moving to a new server and also to a new software. As usual you should observe no disturbance but in case, don't hesitate to contact webmaster AT gobio2.net

Laurent

08 July 2010 à 22:05

Attention billet très technique et très geek : ami lecteur, éloigne toi si la ligne de commande te fait peur ! (Je pense notamment à toi, ami de facebook)

Bon, je possède un Mac avec Leopard installé dessus (et pas de dual boot), et j'ai voulu flasher une clé USB avec Ubuntu Netbook. Las, trois fois hélas, Ubuntu ne fournit plus des images prêtes pour utilisation mais uniquement des ISO à graver (contrairement à Moblin et Meego soit dit en passant).

Et bien qu'il y ait quelques instructions, rien qui ne marche vraiment sous mac !

Donc voici mes instructions pour Ubuntu 10.04 :

1. Récuperez l'ISO dont vous avez besoin
2. Récuperez l'image hd-media de la distribution correspondante, c'est à dire le fichier boot.img.gz : ici pour Ubuntu 10.04
3. Décompressez l'image : gzip boot.img.gz
4. Insérez votre clé usb (attention, elle sera effacée par la suite)
5. Vérifiez à quel périphérique elle correspond : diskutil list (elle doit apparaitre avec un périphérique /dev/diskX)
6. Démontez la clé (mais laissez la branchée) : diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
7. Flashez l'image : dd if=boot.img of=/dev/rdiskX bs=1m (oui rdisk et pas disk, ca accélère beaucoup les choses)
8. Ejectez la clé : diskutil eject /dev/diskX
9. Débranchez et rebranchez la clé : elle doit apparaître sous le finder
10. Ouvrez l'ISO dans le finder
11. Copiez tous les fichiers de l'ISO dans la clé (qui doit aussi apparaitre dans le Finder)
12. Copiez les fichiers du répertoire isolinux (de l'ISO) à la racine de la clé (ca va écraser certains fichiers, c'est normal !)
13. Ejectez la clé, c'est prêt : il ne reste plus qu'à booter et au prompt, appuyer sur Return pour afficher le menu.

C'est sûr, c'est bien plus compliqué que sous Linux ou Windows...

07 July 2010 à 23:13

A couple months ago, Facebook announced announced that their chat system would also be available through XMPP. So it is possible to just configure it like any other Jabber server on a N900. And then to merge Facebook contacts with other contacts and it the address book will store it as a field of type « X-JABBER ».  Since the PR1.2 version of Maemo5, Nokia has added a specific profile for Facebook to the N900 software. But instead of calling the address book field « X-JABBER », they created a « X-FACEBOOK » field (since Facebook Chat is not XMPP in the backend, it can not talk to other Jabber servers). So if you remove your old Jabber account and re-add it as a Facebook account and use Marco’s contact merger to merge back the contacts. You’re still stuck with a bunch of extra « X-JABBER » fields in your contacts. So to clean them up, I wrote a really simple program to remove them. It is based on Marco’s jid-to-email program. You can get the source code or a precompiled binary. You can just put the binary on your N900 and run it from the Terminal as « ~/MyDocs/remove-old-facebook » (if you put it in the N900’s documents root). Be warned that is is not a good example like Marco’s code, I stripped all error handling and it never frees anything. If you want a good example, look at Marco’s code.

05 July 2010 à 05:09

We all know Lennart. No need to mention his last name since there's only one (well, nobody can pronounce his last name anyway). As we all know, Lennart looks like this:

The Lennart we know (note his red t-shirt, did you ever see him with a non-red t-shirt?)

But at LinuxTag, I discovered he was trying to hide the truth, even though I still have no idea why. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Lennart we know is only an illusion! Yes, he was pretending all the time! And yes, to confuse all of us, he's sometimes hiding behind another picture! I know it will come as a shock to everyone, and I know it will be difficult to admit, but here is the true Lennart:

The true Lennart (yes, it's the same person: look at the t-shirt!)

30 June 2010 à 22:46

It's finally time to talk about LinuxTag 2010. It was my third time there, and this year was the best so far, at least for me! And that's most probably because of how amazing our openSUSE booth turned out to be! Or maybe it's because of the invasion of the Geekos?

openSUSE Booth

We certainly didn't have a big slot for out booth, but oh boy... it ended up big! Our booth was always filled with people, who, I guess, got attracted by the touchscreens we have. But attracting people is of no good if you can't get them interested. We did various demos on the touchscreens, but our small secret ingredient were the workshops: four times a day (and sometimes even more), people could sit down in our booth to participate in a session on various topics — those ranged from learning Inkscape, to creating your first package in the Build Service, via playing together with GNOME Shell. That really worked out well, especially at it helps getting the visitors more involved in the discussion.

The world-famous Geeko

Many thanks to Jan (who had to suffer my presence way too much, I'm sure!) and Michael for the organization of our booth!

GNOME Presence

As mentioned in my previous post, there was no GNOME booth at the event. And it didn't go unnoticed: I met various people wondering about this. So I surely hope the German community will make sure it doesn't happen again next year!

Even without a booth, we managed to get a relatively good presence during the event. Of course, it was easy to stumble upon some GNOME people — our friends from Openismus, of course, but also Stormy, Lennart, Tobias and more. Some of us were giving a GNOME-related talk, and Stormy and I participated in a RadioTux interview, so our footprint was present :-)

Talks

I didn't attend many talks. Actually, I think I only attended Stormy's one — Stormy is good at making you raise your hand to keep you connected to what she says — and Lennart's talk about Surround Sound.

The talk Johannes and I gave went quite well, with around 50 people in the room, which is quite good since it was not a keynote and it was in English. We had good questions from the audience, which at least means they were not totally asleep ;-) Generally speaking, I'm nearly always pleasantly surprised by the reaction of people when they get to see GNOME Shell for the first time: I somehow always expect that I have to carefully explain some of the design decisions, but it's apparently unneeded. Most of the persons I meet are glad we're doing something different and seem to be ready to try the change!

A wilder Geeko, built by yours truly

The live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution was the second talk I was involved in, with Henne. With 26 letters in 30 minutes, you might think it's plenty of time. But we actually had to rush to talk about everything! The goal was really to show that there are tons of areas where people can contribute in openSUSE, while most people think it's just packaging. And 26 was our limit, but I'm sure we could have gone on and on for a long time: everyone can help (packaging, sure, but also presence at events, support, bug triage, helping with screencasts, contributing to a positive atmosphere inside the project, etc.). Most of our items were actually not specific to openSUSE and are common to most free software projects... I really like the format Henne found for the talk; that's something I'll keep in mind for future talks.

Meeting people

LinuxTag is also a great opportunity to sit down with a few people. We had both GNOME and KDE people (Stormy, Claudia, Frank and I) all sitting around a table to discuss the organization and the bids for Desktop Summit 2011. Thanks to our experience with GCDS, we have a good basis for the organization since we know what worked well and what didn't. We came out with an aggressive timeline to take a decision during this summer, which should help the organization team start the work early.

Johannes, Stormy and I also chatted about the GNOME developer tools and what we can do to improve our story there. That's something where the Foundation wants to help, but this can only happen if our community wants to improve them, of course. We wondered for a bit while our own developers don't use a tool like Anjuta. Is it just a matter of habits? Or is it missing some features? (I know that, in my case, I just can't live without vi-like keybindings...)

c-base

On Friday evening, the GNOME folks were invited to a barbecue organized by LXDE people at c-base. I had heard about c-base for quite some time, but it was a first for me. Lennart insisted that I should go through the main entrance to truly enjoy the experience, so Andre guided me there (okay, he nearly got lost ;-)). And indeed, I can only recommend that you do the same if you ever go to visit c-base. And I know for sure I'm human now!

The highlight of the evening was undoubtedly the learning of a new card game: skat. I watched people play, and it somehow felt a bit familiar; that's because it's somehow similar to belote (although it's also completely different, but well...). Tobias offered to teach me, and it all went well. I mean, it made sense. And then I was explained how the bidding works. I'm still trying to figure out why it works this way ;-) I understand how it works, but... it just feels totally arbitrary with no reason. I was glad that I managed to help Stormy and Kat learn it later on (well, Stormy had understood most of the rules already by watching the game). So we were three complete beginners playing skat at some point :-)

Attack of the Geekos

But the best thing about LinuxTag was the omnipresence of Geeko, the openSUSE chameleon. I must admit I enjoy Geeko, and that's something I sorely miss in GNOME: our GNOME foot is nice, but that's not the same. We should probably talk more about our beloved Rupert, I guess. (And I still don't have any Rupert at home, that's a tragedy for me!)

As seen in the pictures in this post, we had several versions of Geekos, and I managed to bring some of them home. One of the workshop we had everyday at the openSUSE booth consisted of creating your own Geeko-ified object: the wireframe Geeko was one of them, but people also had the opportunity to create a pin, a shopping bad and a magnet. You can recognize Henne's creative mind behind all this.

But that's not all, we had a balloon clown, who created tens of balloon Geekos:

Our amazing balloon clown by Thomas Schmidt (see more pictures)

And the balloon Geeko can survive a flight trip, here's mine a few days after the event:

A light Geeko

The stuffed Geekos we had were highly-demanded: everybody loves it! And I understand, really: how can you not love it? At some point, I took 3 or 4 of them and hid them in various places in the venue. Actually, they were not really hidden, but integrated: it just felt like they belonged there. And I'm sure it made some people smile ;-)

Yes, LinuxTag was big this year, and I'm happy that Novell let me go to the event! I hope you'll want to come next year, now :-)

30 June 2010 à 09:55

About a month and a half ago, I had a smallish bike accident, I did not have a single scratch, but I managed to fall right on my N900 and crack the LCD. So I’ve used a Nexus One as a replacement until I managed to fix the N900. That gave me a chance to compare them.

You should also know that I am entirely biaised as I was paid to make the VVoIP calling on Maemo incredibly awesome. I have no relationship with  Google and they did not pay me to make their stuff awesome (so it is not awesome). The opinions stated here are mine and mine only. They are not approved by my employer Collabora, any of our clients or competitors, the Queen or anyone else than me.

I’m comparing both devices with the latest software version as delivered by their respective OTA update system. So it is Maemo 5 PR1.2 for the N900 and Android 2.1 (Eclair) for the Nexus One. I make no claim of fairness. This is not a guide to chose which phone to buy.

Browser:

• Extensions: The N900 browser supports (badly) a few Firefox extensions (like Adblock Plus or Greasemonkey). That said, they’re already quite useful. Maemo +1
• Windows:  Maemo 5 also handles multiple windows as regular windows, while the Android browser has them hidden in a menu. I did not discover that menu until I had a « Too many windows open, can not open new window » pop up. Also, the way « popup windows » appear in Android is really annoying, especially the fact that they are hard (impossible?) to zoom. Maemo +1
• Flash:  It’s not really usable (more like really unusable). Flash video playback is really slow (since all decoding is done in software). Steve is right, Flash is a disaster on mobile devices. Maemo -1
• Text column width cheating and reflowing: The Android browser has a nice feature where it scales the width of text columns to the screen width to be nicely readable. It tends to break the layout of some sites, but it’s well worth it. Opera Mobile seems to do the same thing. But the Maemo browser doesn’t. Newer Firefox Mobile builds seem to also lack that. This means it is also unusable in vertical mode. Android +1
• Scrolling performance: The Maemo browser uses tiles for when scrolling, so if you scroll too fast, it has to work real hard to render the next tile. It was much smoother on Android. That said, I heard the Mozilla people are trying to fix this in Fennec 2. Android +1
• Rotation: The vertical mode of the Android browser just works better than the half-baked rotation support in Maemo 5.  And holding it in one hand is much easier if its vertical. Android +1

Browser totals:   Maemo 1- Android 3

Contacts & IM:

• IM protocols: Android only supports Google Talk out of the box, while Maemo supports  Skype, SIP and XMPP (including Google Talk) right of out of the box. And it is easy to add 3rd party support for other protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, etc) and it integrates fully into the existing system. Maemo +2
• SMS/IM integration: SMS and IM are entirely separate in Android, but they are the same app in Maemo. Maemo +1
• Metacontacts: Both platforms have metacontacts. Sadly, they are both incomplete. Contacts in both platforms include the basics: name, nickname, phone, email. Maemo can also link contacts from all IM accounts together, while Android only does it for Google Talk. But Android applications can put their own info in the contacts, so you can link in Facebook and Twitter contacts easily. On Maemo, well you can do it with Hermes, but you still don’t get the phone number or email address from Facebook (blame them for it). Equal points
• Synchronisation: Out of the box, Android only supports synchronization with Google’s servers. Maemo only supports SyncML over USB (not over http) or Mail for Exchange. No points.

Contacts & IM totals: Maemo 3 – Android 0

Calling:

• Ringtone: The Nexus One ringtones are just not loud enough. I’ve missed many calls because I just didn’t hear it. My colleague complained it wasn’t loud enough to wake him up making it useless as an alarm clock. That’s a pretty big fault for a phone. Nexus One -2
• Voice quality: I did not do any objective testing, but I feel that despite the active noise cancellation of the Nexus One (with a second microphone), I can still hear calls better on the N900. N900 +1
• VoIP:  Android only has Google Voice (only works in the US) built in. Skype is only available from select providers. And I could not get any of the 10 SIP apps in the Market to work with SipPhone.com (a Google service). So no VoIP on Android for me. On the other hand, the N900 has excellent VoIP support (I know its excellent, it uses Farsight2, my project!). Out of the box, it supports Skype, SIP as well as XMPP Jingle calls. That means Maemo support Google Talk compatible calls, but not Android. How ironic. Maemo +2
• Video calls: There is no front-facing camera on the Nexus One. The N900 has awesome video calls, including GMail compatible calls (a mobile first)! As well as Skype compatible video calls (another mobile first). Maemo +1
• Accepting calls: The « incoming call » screen on Android has slide buttons. On Maemo 5, it has push buttons. Combined that with the fact that is auto-unlocks the screen when it rings and with the resistive screen, it means that I sometimes accidentally hang up or answer in my pocket. Really annoying. Maemo -1

Calling totals: N900 3 (Maemo 2) – Nexus one -2

E-Mail:

• Both devices have email clients supporting IMAP. Android also has a separate application for GMail. Since I don’t use GMail, I did not try it seriously.
• Combined inbox: Android has a nice feature where the inboxes of all account are shown at once. Android +1
• Searching: It’s a funny thing. The Android mail application does not have any search feature. At least, Modest (the Maemo email client) has gained minimal searching in PR1.2. Maemo +0.5
• Performance: The android mail app just feels faster and doesn’t get stuck waiting for God knows what all the time. Android +2

E-Mail totals:  Maemo 0.5 – Android 3

Maps:

• Overall: The Ovi Maps application for Maemo is a disaster, Google Maps just works on Android. Android +1 Maemo -1 (I’m giving a -1 because Ovi maps is so disappointing, they should have released the device without it)
• Network access: That said, Ovi Maps has one nice things, you can download maps, while Google Maps is just pre-rendered tiles, which means it always requires Internet Access.  Maemo +1
• Navigation: Google has free navigation (in select countries), Ovi Maps for Maemo does not have navigation. Android +1
• Voice commands: Android has them (including search), Maemo does not. Android +1
• Search: Google Maps has Google search.. Ovi Maps has some crappy search that fails half the time if you don’t spell the address exactly the way it expects it. Ovi Maps can not search for things that are not addresses (like a restaurant ou a gaz station). Android +2
• Extras: Google Maps also does nice things like public transit. I wish they had bike routes in Canada. Android +1

Maps totals: Maemo 0 – Android 6

Camera & Photos:

• Camera Hardware: Both devices have 5 mega pixel cameras and they seem to have more or less similar performance. That said, I did not do any serious comparison. Equal points
• Photo browser: The Android Gallery has a bit more bling, but it is the only built-in app that I’ve seen crash on the Nexus One. But functionality-wise, they seem pretty similar. Equal points
• Button: The N900 has a hardware camera button. On the Nexus One, it is an on screen button. Touching the on-screen button while holding the camera in the right direction is really hard. N900 +1

Camera & Photos total: N900 1 – Android 0

Hardware:

• Size: The Nexus One is quite a bit thinner, the N900 is a pretty bulky device. Good thing I don’t like thigh pants. Nexus One +1
• Keyboard: The N900 has one, the Nexus One doesn’t. I though it was a fatal flaw until I discovered Swype, which is really awesome… if you only write in one language. But I write in both French and English.. Sometimes I send one message in French and the next one in English.. Sometimes I mix languages in the same message. Swype only does one language at a time. That’s not a problem with the keyboard. So N900 +1
• Screen resolution: The same. Equal points
• Touch screen: The N900 has a resistive touch screen, the Nexus One has a capacitive screen. Everyone is saying that capacitive touchscreens are nicer… I’m unconvinced. Yes, you need more pressure on the N900.. But the Nexus One’s screen sometimes strangely fails to react. It is also much less precise. That said, resistive screens have the annoying habit of reacting to pockets (especially annoying when it rings). Equal points
• Digital compass: The Nexus One has one, N900 doesn’t. Nexus One +0.5
• Volume buttons: On Android, when not in the music app or in a call, the volume button control the ringer volume. That means it’s really easy to turn it even lower than it already is. This is especially annoying sine the Nexus One volume buttons are too easy to push. Nexus One -1
• Included Flash memory: The N900 has 32 GB. The Nexus One has none. Both have a microSD slot. The Nexus One did come with a 4GB card. That’s just not enough, I have 7 GB just for music on my N900, and that replaced a full 30GB iPod. N900 +2
• TV out: The N900 has TV-out, the Nexus One doesn’t. I though it was completely useless (its just analog low def). But it was really useful when I cracked the LCD. N900 +0.5
• Bands: The Nexus One is available in both AT&T/Rogers/Bell/Telus (850/1900) and T-Mobile USA (900/1700) bands for 3G. The N900 is only sold for the T-Mobile USA band (900/1700). Which mean no 3G in Quebec until Videotron launches its network (and they are one year late already). Both phones support the European 2100 band. And they’re both quand-band for GSM/EDGE. Nexus One +1
• FM transmitter/receiver: The N900 has a FM transmitter and a FM receiver. I’ve only used them briefly. N900 +0.5
• Speakers: The build-in speaker of the Nexus One is terrible, the N900 has some of the best stereo speakers I’ve seen on this kind of device. N900 +1

Hardware totals: N900 5 – Nexus One 1.5

3rd Applications:

• Availability: There are lots of apps on the Android store. There are TWO paid games on the Ovi store for the N900 as of today (when it is not down). That said, Maemo has a lot of ports of existing Open Source apps in Maemo Extras. That said, many of the apps in the Android Market are terrible…  Android +1
• Application installer: The Android Market (which also acts as an app installer) just works. The Maemo 5 application installer is a complete disaster. It is user hostile and developer hostile. Maemo -1
• Developer story: Nokia decided to scrap most of the Maemo 5 platform and review everything with a brand new toolkit. They’re completely unable to get a straight story about developer APIs. I think that is in part because they also want people to do Symbian apps. Nokia please, please, just forget about Symbian apps, just use J2ME like on S40. Google has provided a stable Java API.. But not a stable C/C++ API. Maemo -2
• Python: A lot of the Maemo apps are in Python and therefore are memory hungry (on a memory starved device). Maemo -1

3rd Application totals: Maemo -4 – Android 1

User experience:

• Maemo’s greatest weakness is the out of memory handling. There is only 256 megs of RAM and 768 megs of swap. That means that as soon as you do too many things, it starts swapping and the performance becomes terrible. This is made even worst by the fact that application startup is really slow, so many applications are in pre-started. Nokia should put a lot more memory in the next device and seriously fix the application startup time. Android has a nice thing where apps can serialize their content and be shut down when the system in under memory pressure. This leads to a much better impression of performance. Android +4
• CPU speed: The Nexus One has a 1Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, much faster than the 600Mhz TI OMAP 3430 of the N900. Nexus One +1
• The real « multitasking » is much nicer in Maemo5, Android just fakes multitasking by having applications save their state and restart at the same point. That means you can not load two web pages at the same time or anything like that. Maemo +1
• Both have multiple desktops with applets. Sadly, when I load my N900 desktops with applets, the system becomes sluggish. Maemo -0.5

User experience totals: Maemo 0.5 – Nexus One 6 (Android 4)

Geek experience:

• Maemo is the ultimate mobile Geek OS. Having an x-term built-in is just amazing. Maemo +3
• Maemo is a real Linux desktop-like operating system. To anyone who knows Linux, it just feels right. Android is the Linux kernel + Android. It was done in secret in a corner and Google has not made any serious attempt to join the great community. They re-wrote everything from scratch all the way to writing their own libc. Maemo +2
• The choice language on Android is Java (beurk!). On Maemo is it C (or C++). Maemo +1

Geek experience totals: Maemo 6 – Android 0

Other stuff:

• Media player: I didn’t really try the Android media player since there isn’t enough space on the SD card to hold any significant amount of music.
• Notes: Android does not seem to come with a built-in notes apps. The Maemo Notes app is just pretty bad. They could have just shipped ConBoy instead…
• PDF reader: the PDF reader on Maemo 5 is terrible, the Android one seemed kind of ok (but not great either)
• RSS Reader: Does Android have one? I use the web-based Google Reader anyway

Total: N900 16 (Maemo 9) – Nexus One  17.5 (Android 17)

The Nexus One is really being dragged down by its its hardware. Especially when it comes to the bad speaker quality and the low ringer volume.. Did I mention how much it annoyed me ? That said, Android is pretty good. Better IM integration would be a  big plus. And some VoIP too.

Our Nokian friends have their work cut out for them. First, they need to fix the memory handling story on Meego. Running out of memory and swapping all the time is just annoying. An almost desktop-class operating system requires desktop-class amounts of RAM (that means more of it). Ovi Maps needs a lot of work, hopefully they can work a deal with Google to get decent search in there.  The browser could get its share of small screen friendliness and a performance upgrade. If they fix these few problems, Meego (as the future of Maemo is called) could very well be a success.

Were it not for its high geek factor (built-in X Terminal!), the N900 would have lost badly. That said, it’s still my favorite phone ever (did I mention I was horribly biaised?)

27 June 2010 à 03:16

In case you missed the news, the GNOME Foundation is hiring a system administrator, and this is happening thanks to many individual donors and Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia! I covered all this in a previous post already, so go read it if you never heard of that before. But I'm sure you've heard of it ;-)

What's important today, though, is that the deadline to apply for the job is nearing fast! It's June 22nd. Yes, this Tuesday. Had you forgotten about it? I sure had... So make sure your resume is ready and send it to the board before this deadline! Sure, we've already received applications from various candidates and we've started looking at them, but it could well be that you are the one! Not this one (well, if you are, I have several questions for you), just the person who'll help tame the GNOME infrastructure.

And no, it doesn't mean that the current candidates we have are bad; it just means we want to make sure all candidates apply before the deadline :-)

21 June 2010 à 00:14

Brandenburger Tor by Wolfgang Staudt (Creative Commons by)

It's slowly becoming a tradition for me, since it's the third year in a row: I'm in Berlin for LinuxTag. I'm sure there will be some great fun there!

The openSUSE presence will of course be amazing: just take a look at our wiki page. Many contributors will have a talk, but we'll also have workshops on the openSUSE booth (I recommend Robert's Learn Inkscape Vector KungFu) and various interviews on RadioTux. And of course, you can just come to the booth to meet us: we'll be happy to share our enthusiasm with you!

On the GNOME side, we apparently couldn't find enough volunteers in time to run a booth. That's a sad news, but we'll still have many people attending the event, and we'll have several talks in the Desktop track on Saturday. I know I won't miss Stormy's one :-)

Since I knew I was going to the event, I submitted talks, and I was happy to see them accepted. While I do enjoy speaking, I think that having more than one people on stage can make the talk much more entertaining for the audience. That's why I'm excited that I'm sharing those two talks with great people:

• Johannes and I both submitted a GNOME 3.0 talk, and after some discussion, we decided to merge our talks in one: The Road to GNOME 3.0. It's a one-hour talk, and hopefully, that length will allow us to discuss most of the changes in 3.0 and I hope this will contribute to getting people excited about this release!

• to boost openSUSE, Henne and I will have a live A-Z Guide to openSUSE Contribution. I can't wait for this one, since it'll be a fast-paced talk, in a format I'm not used to. That's where you want to be if you don't know how to contribute to openSUSE, or to any other free software project, since some of our points are in no way specific to openSUSE.

If you're attending LinuxTag and you're interested in chatting about GNOME, openSUSE, desktops or distributions in general, or if you want to challenge me with an ice cream contest, leave me a message or come to the openSUSE booth! You can just come and say hi too, obviously :-)

08 June 2010 à 22:57

If you are a Debian developer and need realtime interaction with an Ubuntu developer about the state of your packages in Ubuntu (or vice-versa), #debian-ubuntu on irc.oftc.net might be useful. I had forgotten about that channel, but it resurfaced during the discussions about improving communication between both projects.

06 June 2010 à 11:09

I recently (during a UDS lightning talk) discovered EtherPad. It’s a collaborative editor (like gobby), but uses a browser instead of a standalone application. It’s free software (Google open sourced it after buying the company that was developing it), and there’s a free online instance at ietherpad.com. Setting up a new pad is as simple as going to http://ietherpad.com/foo and clicking Create Pad. It’s written in Java, and not packaged in Debian (yet).

06 June 2010 à 11:00

So, this morning, I did my first video call over XMPP between two N900.

However, so far, I failed to do an XMPP video call from an N900 to something else. When I try to call pidgin on my laptop, pidgin simply crashes, but of course that’s not a serious bug if people can DOS your pidgin instance since, according to the Debian bug:

Assuming your XMPP settings require that users must authenticate with you before being able to send you messages, only your authenticated users would be able to freeze your client, assuming they knew you were actually affected by this bug.

The upstream pidgin bug hasn’t seen a lot of activity lately. :-(

04 June 2010 à 09:50

Two months ago, the GNOME Foundation started a fundraising campaign to get money to hire a part-time system administrator. Actually, we started this effort much earlier, but we made it much more visible with this campaign. Thanks to all the donors and to Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia, we were able to reach our objective. It was actually too fast for me and I wasn't even able to blog about the campaign in time! Once we realized the money was there, we moved on to the next steps — actually, we had those steps ready in the past, so it was mainly a matter of making sure everything was still okay.

We asked around and confirmed three names to form a hiring committee: Bradley Kuhn, Jonathan Blandford and Brad Taylor. With their help, Paul updated the job description that Owen had written some time ago. And after some discussion to define the whole hiring process, Stormy announced the job today. I really love that there have been so many people involved in this, with everyone targeting the same goal.

So if you love GNOME and if system administration has no secret for you, then go read the job description and if you're interested in the job, make sure to send your resume to the board before June 22nd! It's worth mentioning that an important part of the job will be to lead the sysadmin team (which is made of volunteers) and empower the community to make sure our infrastructure gets even more amazing. As you might know, our infrastructure could certainly do with various improvements, and the person we'll hire will make a difference for our project!

On a personal note, this topic has been something that was on my radar for a long time: I looked in my mail archives and found out that I sent a first mail on this topic in September 2007. Yes, that's nearly three years ago! Of course, in the meantime, this idea was put on hold so we could hire Stormy (a very good decision) and until we managed to raise the money for it (launching the fundraising campaign took much more time than originally planned, unfortunately). Phew. And I still can't believe this is finally happening :-)

01 June 2010 à 23:23

One month after initial release of Neposync, I've just released version 0.2.

In addition to bugfixes, this release brings two interesting features:

• Ratings of MP3 files can be copied from Nepomuk to files metadata, and vice-versa (first version only supported image files).
• Neposync can now connect to your Amarok collection, and synchronize Amarok ratings with files metadata.
  Syntax is intuitive: type neposync --amarok-to-files to copy Amarok ratings to files, and neposync --files-to-amarok to do the opposite operation.

You can find strange for the tool to perform synchronization with Amarok, which is far from the original goal, but needs are similar: will you spend hours to rate your MP3 files in Amarok if you have no guarantee these ratings will be kept if you move your files ?

Moreover, the two features brought together allow to copy Amarok ratings to Nepomuk:

neposync --amarok-to-files
neposync --files-to-nepomuk

or to copy Nepomuk ratings to Amarok:

neposync --nepomuk-to-files
neposync --files-to-amarok

The only drawback is that neposync now needs libmysqlclient to compile.

Download

Neposync moved from gitorious to github, to benefit from its own bugtracker and downloads page. So if you had cloned the gitorious repository, please update your URL.

Neposync is a simple Qt C++ program, using KDE libs. At your choice, you can:

• download the source tarfile
  To compile, just type qmake && make
• retrieve git sources: git clone git://github.com/ericpignet/neposync.git
• install the ArchLinux package from AUR: just type yaourt neposync

Once again, please tell me if you use the tool, if you find bugs, or if you'd like to see a new feature. I'm also interested by packages for other Linux distributions.

31 May 2010 à 21:21

I recently noticed the new Ubuntu and Debian link on every page of http://www.ubuntu.com/. That is very nice, and much better than the previous situation. Debian is also mentioned on the pages about Easy administration and Security.

Canonical has clearly improved a lot in the way they communicate about how Ubuntu bases its development on Debian’s.

29 May 2010 à 13:38

The PR1.2 update of the N900 firmware is now officially released. The big new feature is video calls. It is also the world’s first phone to offer Skype video calls as well as Google Talk compatible video calls!  And all of this uses Farsight2, the GStreamer based voice and video calling library. The whole Farsight2 team is very proud to have been able to participate in this world first. And just like all other calls on Maemo, video calls use the Telepathy framework. We obviously also support Jingle (aka Jabber aka XMPP) and SIP just like the N800 and N810. But we also add H.264 support.

As a side note, my colleague Sjoerd (who now has a  blog!) has made VP8 work with RTP. The Googlers are working hard to make some kind of standard. So hopefully, with Google’s clout, we’ll be able to have calls between a fully free platform and a hardware phone!

25 May 2010 à 18:15

I’m playing with the idea of booting ISO images and USB key images stored in a disk partition directly from Grub2. That would allow to install Linux or test liveCDs without even using a USB key. It seems that Grub2 has everything needed for that (with a combination of drivemap and chainloader), but I can’t seem to get it working and, as usual with boot stuff, it’s a pain to understand what’s happening.

Has somebody recently tried that, or can point me to a howto?

25 May 2010 à 16:29

Empathy, the GNOME Instant messaging program, can publish your location to your contacts and show their location on a map as explained on Pierre-Luc’s blog. Can you have the same on your N900? It should not be too much work since all the needed software is available on the platform: Telepathy with XEP-0080 (it works well on most Jabber servers including Ovi, but not Google’s), libchamplain, Azimuth and Map Buddy. But it still needed some integration.

Here it is! You just need to install two packages from maemo extras-devel:

• Azimuth 0.2
• Map Buddy 0.3

Some screenshots:

Map Buddy with a few contacts

Azimuth configuration in the control panel

Click on a contact and you will be able to start a phone call or an IM conversation.

To debug it, I used the telepathy-ashes Jabber bot. I added the two commands “!setlocation” and “!unsetlocation” so you can see the contact marker moving on the map. You can try it by adding the bot echo@test.collabora.co.uk in your contacts.

If you want to help, join #maemo on Freenode, I am albanc.

21 May 2010 à 12:21

Je travaillais tranquillement hier soir quand, soudain, le drame : paf, plus de connexion à Internet. Évidemment, dépendant comme je suis, je pense que c'est la fin du monde, l'apocalypse, le jugement dernier. J'imagine Eyjafjöll qui recouvre le monde entier de ses cendres. Je vois des crevasses s'ouvrir au milieu des villes, des Katrina détruisant les côtes, des raz-de-marée jusqu'au milieu du Canada, la lune qui s'écrase sur notre planète, l'invasion par une race extra-terrestre loin d'être amicale, l'effondrement de notre cher soleil, l'apparation soudaine d'un trou noir, voire le big crunch.

Mais après cet état de panique, je réalise qu'il s'agit simplement de la freebox qui ne semble plus vraiment connectée, même si elle affiche l'heure tranquillement. Naïf comme je suis, je me dit qu'il suffit de la redémarrer. Chenillard lent, chenillard rapide. Tout va bien, on est sur la bonne voie. Puit lent à nouveau, avant de redevenir rapide. Ouf, c'était chaud. Rectangle clignotant, rectangle fixe. Allez, ça va le faire, il y a peut-être juste une petite mise à jour de firmware. Mais... mais... non, rien, on reste sur le rectangle fixe. Convaincu qu'il ne s'agit que d'une erreur temporaire, je réessaie. Résultat identique. Je m'obstine. Sans succès. J'insiste. La petite boîte me nargue. J'envisage des solutions alternatives, créatives, innovantes. Un marteau, par exemple. Mais un bout de raison se réveille et met en doute l'efficacité de la méthode.

Je tombe à genou, j'implore les dieux de toutes les religions. Et à ce moment précis, à la télé, j'entends la publicité : "Il a Free, il a tout compris".

Épilogue: en allant me coucher, je me dis qu'ils ont pensé à gérer le cas où une freebox est bloquée sur ce rectangle fixe et que ça va se débloquer tout seul à un moment. Au réveil, aucun changement. Il fallait redémarrer encore une fois la freebox. Donc, quand cela arrive, soit on débranche la freebox et on doit la rebrancher, soit on la laisse branchée et on doit quand même la rebrancher. Bravo, clap clap clap.

21 May 2010 à 09:32

Next month, the GNOME Foundation membership will vote to elect a new board. It's that time of the year where we think about how the Foundation is doing, where it's going, and who should help run it. Yeah, we all have to plug our brains for a few weeks :-)

I first want to highlight two important points:

• as many probably didn't notice, I want to remind everybody that the deadline to announce candidacies is May 23rd. That's next Sunday. You can see the full timeline in the announcement.
• the Membership & Elections committee will again do an amazing job organizing the elections. So a big thank to them for their unsung actions!

If you're thinking of running for the elections, then stop thinking: this mere fact is an indicator that you should run. Else, well, think about it now :-) I've written about the job last year and Paul has written about his experience as a new board member. I can only tell you that it's an amazing position to be in if you care about GNOME: it gives you a different perspective on what's going in the project, you get to work with great minds and you can at least slightly influence the project (by working on new initiatives, or deciding how to allocate the money, among other examples). And you do feel rewarded for your work: you can see how it makes a difference.

If, after reading the previous paragraph and the linked posts, you still wonder whether you should submit your candidacy for the elections or not, I invite you to come talk to any past or current board member. And do the same if you have questions or need details about what it involves to be on the board (meeting over phone every two weeks, very active mailing list, action items to complete, etc.). I obviously can't talk for the others (although I strongly suspect they're like me), but I'll make time for you if you contact me about this. It'd be a shame if you don't run because you're in doubt!

As for me, I won't run this year. Although I decided this after the last elections, I actually had to repeat this to myself many times to make sure I really won't run — I have this bad habit of taking this exact decision and then changing my mind at the last minute (usually for a good reason). It's not an easy decision since I care deeply about the Foundation. But it's also because I care that it's the right decision. I've been on the board since January 2006, which is a long time; a long time that makes things feel too much like a daily routine, and that means a break is a good idea. It's also time to leave my seat to some new blood: putting aside the fact that the new board members can easily be pushed to do a lot of work ;-), there's my belief that we should have more different people involved at this level and knowing some of the internals of our community. Good reasons, but difficult decision; it's stupid, but unsubscribing from board-list won't be easy.

I feel the board has been doing a good job over the past few years, which hopefully means I've contributed to that. I could be worried of leaving, but I'm not: there will likely be some continuity thanks to some current board members running, and Stormy is rocking with her job, so the Foundation will most certainly be in good hands. I'll surely miss the constant flow of information (average of 97 mails a week), but on the other hand, it's also an opportunity to try to help the board from the outside, now that I know how things work.

Now, I'm just eager to see who's going to be elected. Aren't you?

20 May 2010 à 03:17

Maintenant que j'ai un compte sur facebook parce que, comme Stan, j'ai cédé à la pression sociale , (mais attention, facebook, c'est le mal, il vaut mieux quitter tant qu'on peut) et plein de nouveaux amis qui sont en fait des anciens amis qui le sont encore mais qui ne le savent pas forcément parce que je ne donne signe de vie qu'à chaque passage de la comète de Halley, il est peut être temps d'officialiser un peu les choses en ce qui concerne mon avenir professionnel et par ricochet mon avenir personnel, voici donc une brève annonce :

• Après 5 ans passés dans mon petit village de campagne, où je me suis fait mes premiers amis en même temps que j'apprenais à lire Oui-Oui dans sa voiture jaune, à prendre mes premiers cours de clarinette au sein de l'Harmonie et mes premiers cours de judo qui me valurent tant d'orteils cassés,
• Après 7 ans passés dans la sous-préfecture d'à côté (au lieu d'aller au collège de la fôret parce que je me distinguais déjà à l'époque), où d'autres amis ont rejoint les premiers, où j'ai débuté le badminton, j'ai eu mes premiers diplômes et mes premiers voyages à l'étranger (comme l'Allemagne - oui, en Lorraine, l'Allemagne et le Luxembourg, c'est un peu le département d'à côté, l'Italie, la Grèce, la Bretagne) qui sont peut être responsables de mon envie de bougeotte,
• Après 3 ans passés à la préfecture (remarquez la progression géographique, à défaut de sociale :-) ), à subir les affres de la classe préparatoire (intenses, certes, mais pas si désagréables), à parfaire mes connaissances cinématographiques, et à découvrir la plus gratuite des bibliothèques privées de France,
• Après 2 ans passés à Grenoble à enfin transformer ma passion de l'informatique en mon futur métier, à constituer ma bande de potes (oui, l'informatique, c'est relativement masculin malheureusement), à vouer un culte à la wrapette,
• Après 1 an passé chez nos cousins québécois, parce que le sirop d'érable (et les cowboys fringants), c'est trop bon, et bien plus loin que l'université de Karlsruhe, parce qu'à présent je peux dire "Oui, j'ai fait Polytechnique" et "J'ai survécu par -30°C",
• Après plus de 6 ans passés de nouveau à Grenoble pour commencer ma carrière professionnelle chez un site de comparaison de prix, puis chez un major d'Internet qui a décidé malheureusement de fermer son site de développement, à comprendre que les montagnes, ca peut servir à plein de choses différentes, à voyager à l'étranger et notamment au Japon, à tenter peut être de comprendre le sens de la vie,

Bref, après toutes ces années, si je continue mon aventure chez Yahoo!, j'ai décidé de quitter la France, de traverser un océan et d'aller m'installer près de San-Francisco en Californie, dans cette région que l'on nomme Silicon Valley. Pour l'instant, je ne sais pas encore quand je pars exactement (très certainement cet été), je n'ai aucune idée de combien de temps je vais y rester, tout juste ce que je vais y faire :) Je sais que je vais manquer pas mal de choses (parce que la distance physique n'est pas moins présente lorsqu'il existe un lien virtuel) mais bon, la vie (la mienne en tout cas) est ainsi faite, et je compte bien garder un œil sur ce qui se passe en France !

Pour les nouvelles, en plus du mail (soyez indulgents pour mes réponses tardives), du téléphone, de facebook (oui, c'est pour cela...), il y aura bien sûr ce blog pour des articles détaillés comparant les deux cultures...

Finalement ce n'est pas un au revoir, puisque nous ne nous quittons pas vraiment...

PS: Une tournée exceptionnelle avant mon départ sur l'autre continent avec plusieurs dates en province est bien prévue, don't worry...

17 May 2010 à 21:23

It is now possible to subscribe to Ubuntu bugmail for the packages you care about, without having to use Launchpad (and subscribe on a per-package basis there). This is implemented as a new opt-in Package Tracking System keyword: derivatives-bugs.

To subscribe for all your packages, use keyword [email] + derivatives-bugs (as documented in the Developers Reference). You might also want to subscribe to derivatives (Ubuntu diff, etc. also opt-in).

Of course, if other derivative distributions are interested in providing such data, don’t hesitate to contact me or the Debian QA team.

Also, if you are like me and never remember about subscribing to packages you maintain, you can use that UDD script to check for missing subscriptions.

14 May 2010 à 15:00

It looks like I'm good at blogging about the first day of a hackfest and then not continuing that, so I'll continue this trend ;-) I just want to state publicly that I have a few GSettings-related posts in mind to write, though: schema, gconf backend, porting your application, etc., so now I'll have to deliver those posts about the results of this amazing GSettings hackfest!. But I am now in Zaragoza, attending the Marketing Hackfest, so let me write a bit about it.

Andreas hard at work by Licio Fonseca

Sumana wrote about the first day quite extensively, so I won't repeat here what she wrote: just go read her post! We're working on the plan and roadmap for the 3.0 launch, but we're not just about the high-level ideas: we're working on design and content (of websites, brochures, etc.), so we'll have results to show. And don't hesitate to send us feedback about what you're reading in blogs or on the wiki: you can leave a comment here, send us a mail, join #marketing on IRC — there are many ways to reach us!

It's exciting to see the whole plan and the many ideas, and here a few things I want to highlight (obviously, much more is worth highlighting!):

• Marketing Roadmap: having a marketing plan is good and already makes me happy. Turning the plan into a roadmap is just the logical next step to make sure everything gets executed.

• GNOME 3.0 Website: there'll be a specific GNOME 3.0 website to introduce this new version of GNOME, and get people excited about this new version. In the long term, the content will be moved to the main website, but we feel a separate website is the best way to build momentum for the 3.0 effort. The target audience is existing GNOME users and there is already a good sitemap. Work is ongoing for the exact content and design, and the hard work will be the creation of videos. If you're interested in helping there, raise your hand :-)

• GNOME Ambassadors: we're preparing materials to help everyone talk about GNOME at events, or at a university, inside a company or just to friends. We've always said that anyone can help represent GNOME like this, but it's a hard task if you have to start from scratch. With talking points, slides, a template for new presentations, business cards, a great shirt for ambassadors, we want to lower the barrier here and help all GNOME enthusiasts share their love for the project.

Zaragoza is really a fantastic environment to do the hackfest, so a big thanks to all the organizations that are sponsoring this event: the Zaragoza Municipality, the Aragon Regional Government, the GNOME Foundation, the Technological Institute of Aragon, ASOLIF and CESLA. And a personal thank to the Foundation for sponsoring part of my travel and to Novell for letting me attend this event :-)

Time to go back to hackfest work! Oh, and again, send us feedback and join #marketing!

05 May 2010 à 10:18

Due to my work on Ultimate Debian Database, I’m sometimes asked why Debian isn’t using Launchpad.

First, “using Launchpad” can mean two different things.

The first possibility is using Canonical’s instance of Launchpad. That would mean creating a Debian project on launchpad.net, and using Canonical’s infrastructure. Well, that’s clearly not a good idea. We (Debian) do not want to depend on Canonical to fix bugs or make enhancements that we require to improve Debian. For example, Canonical imposes the use of the Bazaar Version Control System in Launchpad: you simply can’t use Git instead (git-bzr hacks don’t count). We want to stay in control of our infrastructure, for obvious reasons.

So the other possibility would be to setup our own instance of Launchpad, given that Launchpad is now Free Software. However, it is not clear if it is actually possible: I was told by a Launchpad developer that they didn’t know of any external (outside Canonical) installation of Launchpad.

Even if this was possible, it is not clear at all that the Ubuntu infrastructure is superior to the Debian infrastructure. The Debian infrastructure has many nice features that are missing in Launchpad, for example version-tracking in the Bug Tracking System, which allows to track (by parsing the changelog) the versions of a package where a bug has been fixed or not (example with iceweasel).

So, when switching to Launchpad, we would have to reimplement quite a lot of needed features in in, with no clear benefit: the Debian infrastructure works fine, and is actively maintained.

It’s also interesting to note that while the Ubuntu infrastructure is centered on Launchpad, there are quite a lot of external services that are not integrated in Launchpad: the Ubuntu popularity contest, merges.u.c, patches.u.c, the various services on qa.ubuntuwire.org and qa.u.c, etc. With the Debian model, it is very easy to add a new service and get it integrated with the various dashboard (Debian Developer’s Packages Overview, Packages Tracking System). Within Ubuntu, those external services are really second-class citizens. All in all, the infrastructures of the two projects reflect their organizations: bazaar model for Debian, with an emphasis on collaboration between the services, controlled by Canonical for Ubuntu.

03 May 2010 à 18:49

When people ask me why I’m so fond of “computers”, I already answer that it’s like being able to build very large buildings or bridges, super-fast cars, etc without having to care about buying the raw material needed, or about the consequences: computers are like a giant Lego box which is only limited by the programmer’s abilities.

What I discovered today is that there’s a quote from Frederick P. Brooks that says about the same thing:

“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.”

03 May 2010 à 18:45

UPDATE: project moved to github, links updated. Plus, new post about new features of neposync.

With KDE SC 4.4 and integration of Virtuoso in distributions, semantic desktop is no more a futuristic project but a reality: I tested tagging, rating, filters in Gwenview, searches in Dolphin, all works fine.

But before starting the long work of tagging my gigabytes of photos, I wanted to be sure the work would not be lost if I change my computer or my distribution. The problem is that there is no utility to backup/export the Nepomuk Virtuoso database at this time. ^{[1] [2]}

So I decided to write a simple tool to:

• read tags/ratings from Nepomuk and store them in files metadata (same metadata used by Digikam)
• read tags/ratings from files metadata and store them in Nepomuk

This is a command-line tool very easy to use. You just cd to a directory containing images tagged/rated via Dolphin or Gwenview and you type:

neposync --nepomuk-to-files

That's it: all tags/ratings for images in the current directory are now stored in files metadata and will never be lost. If you copy these images on another KDE powered computer, you just have to type:

neposync --files-to-nepomuk

to fill Nepomuk database with your valuable manual work.

The tool also allows you to display all tags/ratings stored in Nepomuk, or to clear them (see usage below).

Download

Neposync is a simple Qt C++ program, using KDE libs. At your choice, you can:

• download the source tarfile: neposync-0.2.tar.gz
  To compile, just type qmake && make
• retrieve git sources: git clone git://github.com/ericpignet/neposync.git
• install the ArchLinux package from AUR: just type yaourt neposync

That's all for now.

Please tell me if you use the tool !

Usage

The full usage of the tool is:

Common usage:
  neposync -nf OPTIONS.. DIRECTORY
  neposync -fn OPTIONS.. DIRECTORY
Actions:
  -nf, --nepomuk-to-files    Read tags/ratings from Nepomuk and store them in files metadata
  -fn, --files-to-nepomuk    Read tags/ratings from files metadata and store them in Nepomuk
  -dn, --display-nepomuk     Display all Nepomuk tags/ratings
  -cn, --clear-nepomuk       Clear all Nepomuk tags/ratings
Options:
  -r   --recursive           Recurse into sub-directories
  -f   --force               Copy tags/ratings even if empty on source side
  -V   --verbose             Display all nepomuk output (depending on KDebug settings)
  -h   --help                Display this usage information
DIRECTORY is optional, if absent the current directory is synchronized

Remark: neposync uses IPTC 'keyword' metadata to read/store tags in files (as Digikam)
        neposync uses XMP 'Rating' metadata to read/store ratings in files (as Digikam)

29 April 2010 à 22:13

Voici près de 4 ans jour pour jour que j'ai écris mon dernier post sur ce blog, il concernait le futur de Kubuntu.

Je serai resté environ 5 ans sous Kubuntu en tout, et je dois avouer c'était un plaisir. Pas une seule réinstallation complète pendant ce temps, juste des mises à jour. J'ai fait beaucoup de choses pendant ces années et le plaisir justement, c'était de ne pas avoir à me soucier de mon système d'exploitation, de juste l'utiliser.

Cependant il y a quelques semaines une conjonction de faits m'a convaincu de donner sa chance à ArchLinux:

• un nouveau disque dur avec plein de place dessus
• quelques soucis mineurs sur Kubuntu (les vidéos Flash HD s'affichent... toutes roses!)
• l'envie depuis toujours de tester une distribution en rolling release (toujours des logiciels à jours, et pas de mega-update risqué)
• pas mal de bon commentaires concernant ArchLinux sur LinuxFR
• le test très convainquant du LiveCD Chakra-project, basé sur ArchLinux

J'ai donc installé sans difficultés ArchLinux avec KDEMod, grâce aux wikis français et anglais. La configuration est manuelle mais c'est très relatif: quelques paquets à installer (X, alsa, UDev, HAL...) et deux trois fichiers de configurations... que de toutes façons j'avais aussi dû modifier sur Kubuntu.

Je ne vais pas faire une présentation d'Arch, c'est facile d'en trouver sur Internet. Mais ce qui m'a frappé une fois que j'avais mon bureau KDE configuré, c'est que... Nepomuk était parfaitement fonctionnel et rapide, ce qui n'avait jamais été le cas sur Kubuntu. Ca apporte vraiment un gros plus au bureau: que toutes les applications partagent les mêmes tags/notations de fichier, pour par exemple rechercher facilement toutes les photos de son chat depuis le gestionnaire de fichiers... La raison est simple: ArchLinux package le backend Virtuoso, fiable et rapide.

Si j'ai écrit ce billet, ce n'était pas à l'origine pour parler d'ArchLinux mais plutôt pour introduire le billet qui va suivre, concernant Neposync.

29 April 2010 à 21:16