Diary of a CrazyFrench

• Time to resume blogging more regularly. Possibly reducing the use of Twitter and identi.ca.
• Second day of work of the year.
• Observing the DVCS flamewar on d-d-l and g-f-l. Some of the arguments are definitely wrong: switching to hack that bridge one DVCS to another while we still don't have any committment from a sysadmin to help maintaining it. My ideal solution would be to set up a git server with gitorious for non core modules and start with that. I actually would happily move Niepce to git.gnome.org if it existed as it is merely an unreleased application (for GNOME) and not a GNOME component.
• Got pointed to an extensive Canon CR2 RAW file documentation. Looks like I have a lot of catch up to do for libopenraw.
• Sunday: opened a pandora box while fixing some warning in AbiWord by fixing dead code, const-ness and a few other insignificant details that will accumulate and make the code more clean. Just committed another bunch.
• Received in the mail the missing card for my copy of the Dracula board game (from the Kosmos 2 players series). It took two emails separated by several weeks to the French publisher. I was feeling hopeless. Ended up playing it 5 times tonight.

Niepce Digital SVN has moved from gna.org to GNOME's.

Details in the GNOME wiki. For the long story short, the history has been lost. Thanks to SVN broken design, git-svn broken experince and my impatience combined.

Just a quick note to announce that I released Exempi 2.1. It was long overdue.

It fixes several bugs, add a few APIs and resync the internals to Adobe XMP SDK 4.4.1. My openSUSE packages have an additional patch that is not in the release (but in git master).

Re-post since he is still not on Planet Gnome

teuf says:

Months go by, and it's once again time to start thinking about the upcoming FOSDEM. It will take place on the 7th and 8th February week-end in Brussels.

This year, we'll have a devroom, we'll be on our own on Saturday, but on Sunday we'll share it once again with KDE and, this is new this year, with XFCE for talks of crossdesktop interest. I just got the confirmation about the room, so organization on our side is just starting, but if you already know you are going to FOSDEM and want to give a talk, please contact me and tell me about it :)

Another good news is that we'll also have a booth (like last year). The not-so-good news is that there is noone dedicated to the organization of said booth yet, so we'd need a volunteer to coordinate everything as soon as possible :) Contact me!!!

See the original post

Smith's Law says this:

Murphy was optimistic

You bet! This morning, my "micro" server light was solid blue, server whose disk I had just replaced ; the console (still connected) was not responding. Reboot hard, freeze after 5 minutes (with a weird click when it happen). Disassemble, clean up the fans, check, as I suspected overheating, let cool down. Retry. Blast! Still the same, but with an even shorter uptime. I still hope it is not the hard drive that is DOA.

The problem is now, what to run the server on. I have a spare PIII that works well, but I want the hard drive as is. Problem it is a 2.5" IDE, I need the adapter. Problem, I need a car. The closest electronic store is La Source by Circuit City née Radio Shack^[1], but they haven't had anything I need or want to buy in forever. Ah yes, because my car has been towed at the shop and I don't have a loaner yet, I can't get the needed adapter.

Update later, I can get a car, the dealership still has to work on mine, send the courtesy shuttle over, drive me there and provide me with a car. In the end I have the adapter, the "new server" is now more silent. It was not without pain. Old BIOS that can't boot on just any drive, grub that fail on said machine (know issue, I still know LILO, so no biggie), and udev mysteries that I solved by forcing to regenerate the "binding" to eth0 by MAC address.

Nonwithstanding that it was the 3rd hard drive to died in a month, when I went to buy a new one, the car broke down on the return. And by broke down I mean the gear got stuck in 2nd. Fortunately it is a stick and I could safely stop the car to get it towed by the roadside assistance. I'll know more Monday when the dealership is actually open: the car is still under warranty.

Since you can read this, that means the hard drive is back in and he machine back up.

From this thread (Google will require you to login):

The G1 is aimed at end users, not system developers. For user security reasons the G1 will only accept properly signed system images. I'm not sure, in this case, who 'owns' the key, whether it is the carrier or the manufacturer, but one or both of them handle insuring system images are signed.

Cheers, Justin Android Team @ Google

Surprising? Not! Yet another chimera Google wanted people to believe in. And, people, don't point to the OpenMockup. The damn thing does not even do quad-band GSM, let alone 3G, non-withstanding the "port" is not done yet.

(Thanks to mako for the hint)

As I stated Android source code got released almost at the same time as the G1 HTC phone was released to "consumers". I welcomed it because the held their promises, even though, after looking a bit closely, it seems to contain binary blobs.

But the problem is still about Freedom.

One would have thought that Google would have thought differently, but they don't. First the phone availability: the phone is only available from a single carrier from a single country, with a 2 year contract attached. Also the phone is apparently not hackable: there don't seem to be a way to upload a custom firmware image. Not so open as other write.

Disclaimer: As you have understood now, I don't have such a phone. See reason above. Even if it was available through the monopolistic GSM carrier here I'd not have it as they'd surely require a 3-years contract which is a no go.

Also the phone require a Google ID. Not that it is hard to come by or that it is another money pit, but the requirement is awkward, seem unnecessary and raise some privacy concerns, or some red flag about tying feature of the phone to Google application hosting.

So what do we have left?

Nothing much. At least you can upload any application you wish, and you are not at the mercy of a vendor that decide life or death on your application... but there is still a kill-switch. Said application is also written with Android own toolkit in its own language and sandbox, making it hard to port anything from an existing application^[1]. And that's it. Not a huge step for the Freedom to tinker.

I must admit I was suspicious of Google Android's openness and still considered it as a vaporware. But today they kept the promise and released Android source code. I was not the only one being skeptical. Kudos to Google and the Android team! I was wrong on that.

So far it is the most promising open platform for cellphones.

Now where do I get a handset in this third-world country? And without signing my life away to a state-sanctioned monopoly....

Dom:, just make the predicate a functor class that will accept both comparison operators. I know it looks ugly, but at least you can work around the bug.

Or use STLPort :-)

For the first time I'll be at the GNOME summit in Boston. See you there.

Not so hot news, but Atheros finally released the HAL source code under a Free Software license. Given that they always claimed it was because of the FCC, I now wonder where that argument will stand now.

Update: it appears that it is not the ath_hal source code. (source) As I understand it, it is the same source code that make ath_hal in MadWifi. This means that we can get a really Free Software madwifi. Apparently the ath5k authors are already using it to fix issues with the in-kernel driver.

Kudos to Atheros, you did the right thing.

I arrived yesterday in Paris. I'll be there for a little bit more than a week, on vacation. I have been told that their will be a beer BOF with local GNOME people :-)

Dear lazyweb,

I have this EEE PC 2GB, and I'd like to install something I can be productive with, not the clunky s*** that come with it^[1].

So far I tried the following:

• Mandriva Flash: would be good, but the Live flash from GUADEC does not install on the 2GB model as it needs more space. *sigh* FAIL
• openSUSE 11.0: installed from the DVD after reducing the packages and end up with a non-functionnal system: YaST does not start, no wifi^[2], no Ethernet, etc. Gotta have to debug it and fix it. FAIL
• EEE-Ubuntu Ubuntu-EEE: I don't like their statement bashing open solutions. Sorry guys I use Linux for the freedom. Anyway it seems to not like to be installed on 2GB either. FAIL
• EEEdora: the long list of hacks did deter me.
• Debian: they upstream broke the kernel. Not a good sign idea.

So what else?

I'm not installing on an external SD card as I want to keep that for useful removable storage

Thanks.

Update: I got ahold of an iso for EEEdora from this howto. It did install almost without glitch (I actually had to make a symlink for the live CD to find the DVD drive, go figure). Did install but I get a functional but akward system without login and without a proper user (it can't even sudo), where either logout or reboot do an actual shutdown.

Update 2: it is Ubuntu-EEE I tried not EEE-Ubuntu. How confusing!

Update 3: kernel is broken in upstream no Debian.

Google get a Fail for their comic strip to present Chrome. It is simply unreadable on a computer screen because it is formatted to be in portrait orientation like in a paper book and not in landscape orientation like on a computer screen.

And the Reg has parodies, because not everything is a rant. :-)