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.

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 ?

OggTube, please

Today, Hub was pointing to this blog entry. As I understand, it basically means that soon, people will be able to read Ogg/Theora audio/video content in their Mozilla based browsers, whatever the underlying Operating System is.

In one word WOOOOOOT!

So now, could some ubercool web developer stand up and provide us with a server that would allow people to share Ogg/Theora based videos ? Because if anything else, I am fed up with having all these videos around the web, available in flash only, just because the big players don't want to distribute Ogg/Theora.

What would be really nice is to have access to the code of a so called OggTube server that I could install and host on my own machine to share content with my friends. If I really have more friends than bandwidth, I guess someone will come up with a decent infrastructure to host it for me. After all, everyone wants to sell ads these days.

If even teuf blogs now ...

My good friend Christophe Fergeau a.k.a teuf has finally decided to blog about the technical bits he is moving around my music player of choice, Rhythmbox. I hope he'll also move his **ss to talk about what he is cooking on the libgpod library as well. I won't buy an ipod anytime soon and using a player that doesn't support the Ogg format is a no-go to me; but still, spending so much time trying to reverse engineer how to talk with those devices has always seemed amazing to me. I do respect that.

No pressure teuf :-)

Garmin playing the GNOME Mobile game

I know Matthew mentionned it already, but I could not resist.

Garmin are launching their Nüvi 8xxx and 5xxx GPS devices and people are talking about it.
What impresses me is that they are using GNU/Linux, GNOME Mobile, and more importantly, are releasing the source code of the modifications they did to the Free Software components they use.

I logically went to look at what they are releasing. They set up a very simple and accessible web site from where you can get the sources. No ads, no bullshit, no nothing. Just the plain simple source tarballs. They even separated the patches they did from the tarballs. Man, sooooo well done.

I dowloaded this archive from their website. Man, they are really using everything from Xorg to Gtkmm, including a lot of other cool Free Software technology bits that are either GPL or GPL compatible.

Okay, I am not a gizmo geek. I have no Ipod, no camera on my cell phone, no gaming device ... But this time, I think I am going to buy one of these Garmin GPS devices. I wonder if I can update the maps on the devices using my GNU/Linux desktop. I don't mind buying the maps. I just don't want to be forced to use a proprietary desktop software system, just to update those maps.

In any case, well done Garmin. You are taking and you are giving back. And that has to be said.

nemiver 0.5.4

This week end I pushed nemiver 0.5.4 out. The release fixes a couple of annoying bugs like this one, or this one that were preventing me to properly debug some programs.

It is impressive how motivated I can be to fix a set of bugs once I get hit by those bugs myself :-)

Hopefully it should be better now - we always hope so after each release, don't we ?

This new release should hit a package repository mirror near you soonish.

Sorry, but my desktop rocks

"Why are all the decadent people only talk about what we need to do and not about what they will do themselves? "

Well said, Benjamin.

/me goes back to fixing his bugs.