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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?