GNU Hackers Meeting 2011 in Paris

In case you are in the Paris area and don't know already, there is a a GNU Hackers Meeting event being held from Thursday 25th to Sunday 28th August, 2011 at IRILL If you are a GNU user, enthusiast, or contributor of any kind, feel free to come. I guess you can still drop an email to ghm-registration@gnu.org.

For folks around on Wednesday (yeah, that's tomorrow), we are having a dinner around 8 PM at the Mussuwam, a Senegalese restaurant in Paris, near Place d'Italie. When you get there, just give them the secret password (which is 'GNU') and they'll show you were the rest of the crowd sits. Be sure to keep that password secret though. No one else should be in the know.

Happy hacking and I hope to see you guys there.

How to install a digital CA certificate on Red Hat based GNU/Linux distributions

This is just as a reminder for myself, as I keep forgetting about this stuff.

If like me you run a server with services that depends on SSL and need to install a certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) like CACert, this might be interesting to you as well.

On Red Hat based systems the CA certificate for SSL is usually installed in the /etc/pki/tls/certs directory. The certificate is basically just dropped there in a file which name is its hash – built with the openssl program.

I wrote the shell scriptlet http://dodji.seketeli.net/install-ca-cert.txt. Download it, save it as install-ca-cert.sh and turn it into an executable.

Then, assuming your certificate is in a file named your-ca.crt, install it by doing:

sudo ./install-ca-cert.sh ./your-ca.crt

Voila. I don't know how that works on other distributions, though.

Update

A wise person taught me about the c_rehash utility from openssl, that does the same thing as my dirty script above. To use it, you need to install the openssl-perl package. Thank you, Daniël.

Nemiver in Google Summer of Code 2011

For those of you who might not know it already, Nemiver has
been granted two Summer of Code projects.  This is exciting
news for me, and I am grateful to all the people who helped
make this happen.

In this post I'll present the hackers who presented those
two projects and give you some perspective about their
proposals.

• Seemanta Dutta

Seemanta has been active on the mailing list of the Nemiver
project for quite some time now.  He has shown great
interest in the project and has contributed ideas and code.

When you are debugging a program and you hit "Quit" in
Nemiver while the debugged program is still running, the
debugger kindly reminds you that said debugged program is
still around and alive.  This has saved me from accidentally
quitting the debugger quite a number of time.  Seemanta is
the person to thank (warmly) for this feature.

At some point in time some people have shown interest for
having a command line interface in Nemiver, coupled with a
way to script debugging actions.  I have kind of dragged
feet in that matter because my attention is taken by
nurturing more basic features.

I was excited to see Seemanta rolling up his sleeves and
proposing to look into supporting (Python) scripting in
Nemiver.  Think about it for two seconds.  This could have
some interesting impacts in debugging interactions for
Nemiver users.  Imagine a command line interpreter for the
graphical debugger, totally written (and extensible) in a
scripting environment.  I like the fresh air that this new
horizon is bringing.

• Fabien Parent

Fabien has been active in the Nemiver project for a while
now.  He has been instrumental in testing and providing
astute feedback for features like remote debugging and, more
recently, the integrated disassembler of the debugger.  It
took me quite some energy to add that disassembling feature
so I did really appreciate the feedback of Fabien -- and
others (hey Luca Bruno!) -- about corner cases that I left
over here and there.  Without them the damn thing would
certainly be less streamlined than it is now.

More recently he added support for GSettings to the code
base, effectively taking his share of the effort of porting
Nemiver to the GNOME 3 platform.  Not only did he do that,
but he did it in a clever and maintainable way.  The code
base basically supports GConf *and* GSettings.  Both of
which are "just" backends of the internal configuration
interface of the Nemiver project.  And there is zero #ifdef
in the client code of said configuration interface, for
those who care.  This allows me (as a maintainer) to
contemplate -- with some serenity -- the support of Nemiver
on systems that will not necessarily jump to GSettings soon.

Looking at the Bugzilla activity around Nemiver, one could
sense that the way it uses the screen estate is not
necessarily optimal today, especially when you consider the
use cases of "wide" monitors that is getting more and more
the norm rather than the exception.  In other words, there
are people out there who would like to make a better use of
their horizontal screen space, during their debugging
sessions.

I was thrilled when Fabien stood up to tackle this task of
providing Nemiver users with a better way of managing their
horizontal space during their graphical debugging sessions.

Please join me in congratulating Seemanta and Fabien!

Happy Summer Hacking!

SG45H7 power supply failure

A few weeks ago my shuttle box stopped booting. For the record, it's a one year old core2quad box with 8 gigabytes of memory and 1.5 Terabytes of hard disk. All packed in a little box that is no wider than an A4 sheet of paper.

When I hit the power button the fans would start rotating a little bit, maybe 25° and then nothing. The LEDs of the motherboards stay lit but nothing happens.

I opened the box, wiped the dust from the fans, measured the voltage and current coming out from the pins of the power supply. Both current and voltage were a bit lower than expected, but to my surprise, the box did boot again. I made sure my hourly incremental backup (rsync powered!) was doing OK, and I went back to hacking G++ as usual.

Then last Tuesday the box stopped working again. This time I removed most of the parts from the motherboard: Hard disk, DVD burner, memory sticks one by one. Each time I remove of a part, I'd try to power the box on. Still nothing.

At that point, I thought it was either the mother board or the power supply that was at fault. But how would I know? I bet it was the power supply as it was the less expensive part to replace :) So I did the "power supply paper clip test" and it appeared that the odds of the power supply unit being broken were quite high.

I figured I should probably order a more powerful power supply as the 300 Watts of the current one were probably a bit too tight for my usage.
I ordered a 500 Watts PSU (power supply unit) and got it two days later. And yes, the PSU was indeed the culprit!

Let's see how long is this new PSU going to serve.

Nemiver 0.7.2

Nemiver 0.7.2 is out. It is a bugfix, minor feature and translation update release.

NEWS | tarball | Fedora Packages

Nemiver 0.7.1

The first bugfix release of the Nemiver 0.7.x series is out.

This version addresses various nits here and there, takes care of some low level details to make sure Nemiver works well with the Archer branch of GDB and contains some updated translations.

News file and tarball are available from the usual places.

Thanks to the continuous good work of my fellows distro packagers, the binaries should appear on a mirror near you in a couple of days.

For what it is worth, Fedora 10, 11, and Rawhide packages are available for the impatients.

Happy hacking.

Maker's schedule, Manager's Schedule

I stumbled accross this gem from the always excellent Paul Graham.
It's a nice model to grasp how programmers and managers use their time differently. I guess we all felt this intuitively, but it takes a Paul Graham to express it clearly. A must read.

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.

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.

Les "open space", mauvais même pour la santé

Je n'ai jamais aimé les "Open Space".

De manière empirique, j'y ai ressenti une grande difficulté à me concentrer et une propension à être plus fatigué. De plus j'ai horreur qu'une personne regarde mon écran derriere mon dos. Non pas que j'ai quoi que ce soit à cacher, mais j'ai tendance à préférer faire face aux gens, plutôt qu'a les avoir dans mon dos. Sinon, j'ai tendance à vouloir me retourner. Bref, les Open Space, pour un codeur, j'ai toujours trouvé cela vraiment moyen.

L'argument en faveur des Open Space que j'ai le plus entendu était, en gros, qu'ils favoriseraient une "meilleure communication entre employés" me paraissait, somme toute, assez faible. Dans des Open Space, lorsque l'on veut discuter avec un collègue, on est obligé de se rendre dans une salle de réunion. Sinon, on dérange tous les autres.

Bref, la raison qui me parait la plus valable est tout simplement celle qui tourne autour du pognon. Il est moins cher d'avoir un Open Space plutôt que de permettre à chaque employé d'avoir un bureau individuel. Faire attention à l'oseille n'est pas honteux, au contraire. Simplement il faut le dire, et ne pas se cacher derrière des pseudo arguments distillés par des DRH qui répètent à tue-tête le sermon qu'ils ont reçu à leur dernier séminaire de formation.

Quand bien même, il faudrait peut être un jour étudier le gain net entre ce que l'on paie financièrement à court terme en bureaux individuels, et ce que l'on gagne en productivité, performance, santé (eh oui la santé a un coût, partagé par toute la société) des employés.

D'ici la, une étude Australienne révèlerait, entre autres, que les Open Space sont perçus de manière négative par les employés, causent une augmentation du stress, de la pression artérielle, ainsi qu'une élévation du taux de turn over. En ces périodes de crise, j'imagine que la composante turn over risque de paraître moins visible, ceci dit. L'étude n'en demeure pas moins intéressante cependant.

A bon entendeur, salut.

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.

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 ?

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 :-)