mardi 31 mars 2009
dimanche 29 mars 2009
Why is so hard to find a blog post title?
GSoC 2009
GNOME is a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2009. If you are a student who wants to get paid to hack all summer on free software, now is the time to apply, the deadline for application is on Friday, April 3rd.
You can find a list of ideas that have been proposed by GNOME contributors here but this list is in no way exhaustive so you can apply for any idea you care about and you think would improve the GNOME desktop!
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox 0.12 was finally released a few weeks ago, it contains a lot of bugfixes and new features compared to the aging Rhythmbox 0.11.6. And development and bugfixing is going on in svn contrary to the impression some people had
There are 2 ideas proposed for the GSoC, one about media player synchronization (to keep Rhythmbox library and you favourite media player in sync), and one about getting information about the currently playing song (to know everything about your favourite group, get stats about the song that is playing, ...). You can find more details on the GSoC idea page on live.gnome.org
Solutions Linux
Solutions Linux will take place in Paris on the 31st March, 1st and 2nd April (this is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this week). This year it has moved from CNIT/La Défense to Paris Expo/Porte de Versailles so this will be an exciting new experience for exhibitors ;) Mandriva and GNOME-FR both have a booth, you should definitely come to visit us, entrance is free! And there will be tshirts and stickers on the GNOME booth, and plenty of good stuff on the Mandriva booth!
GNOME is a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2009. If you are a student who wants to get paid to hack all summer on free software, now is the time to apply, the deadline for application is on Friday, April 3rd.
You can find a list of ideas that have been proposed by GNOME contributors here but this list is in no way exhaustive so you can apply for any idea you care about and you think would improve the GNOME desktop!
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox 0.12 was finally released a few weeks ago, it contains a lot of bugfixes and new features compared to the aging Rhythmbox 0.11.6. And development and bugfixing is going on in svn contrary to the impression some people had
There are 2 ideas proposed for the GSoC, one about media player synchronization (to keep Rhythmbox library and you favourite media player in sync), and one about getting information about the currently playing song (to know everything about your favourite group, get stats about the song that is playing, ...). You can find more details on the GSoC idea page on live.gnome.org
Solutions Linux
Solutions Linux will take place in Paris on the 31st March, 1st and 2nd April (this is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday this week). This year it has moved from CNIT/La Défense to Paris Expo/Porte de Versailles so this will be an exciting new experience for exhibitors ;) Mandriva and GNOME-FR both have a booth, you should definitely come to visit us, entrance is free! And there will be tshirts and stickers on the GNOME booth, and plenty of good stuff on the Mandriva booth!
vendredi 6 février 2009
FOSDEM!
It's this week-end in Brussels, so make sure to go there if you don't already have plans for the week-end! I'll arrive in Brussels on Friday evening, not sure I'll be able to attend the beer party. Then I'll enjoy most of the great talks in the GNOME devroom and spend some time on the Mandriva booth as well. And am not sure yet what I'll be doing on Saturday evening, I guess something with the GNOMErs. Or the Mandrivians, we'll see ;)
If you are a GNOME contributor, don't forget the group photo on Saturday at 3.45pm. And there will be cool GNOME tshirts on sale as well.
Well, that's it, I don't really have much to say, this is just some shameless advertising ;)
If you are a GNOME contributor, don't forget the group photo on Saturday at 3.45pm. And there will be cool GNOME tshirts on sale as well.
Well, that's it, I don't really have much to say, this is just some shameless advertising ;)
vendredi 23 janvier 2009
Bloody spammers
If you are subscribed to a GNOME mailing list, you probably got a really long and off-topic email from me. Except it wasn't me who sent it.
Yesterday, I was spending a nice evening enjoying some good home-made sushis, and when I went back home, I was really surprised to see lots of emails about waking up the world, meeting the new boss, ... And I got very annoyed when I realized that these emails had been sent from my email address to most GNOME mailing lists existing on earth. I felt really bad when I saw some replies showing that some people thought this email really originated from me. So I did the only thing I could do, some limited damage control. I replied to the persons who mailed me directly and to a few select mailing lists to make it perfectly clear that this mail didn't originate from me despite what it seemed.
By looking at the headers of the email, it's quite clear (at least to me) that I didn't send it: it was sent from a US ISP and I'm living in France these days and mainly using gmail as a mailer. Moreover, careful readers of the email (I haven't even read it myself ;) will have noticed that this email is signed "david duke" which is not my name ;).
I think some guy box was taken over by a trojan and that it crawled gnome.org mailing list archives, got my email address from there and gathered the addresses of most mailing GNOME lists and then blindly spammed them. I sent an email to the abuse contact of the ISP, but I don't really expect too much from them.
Now you know about as much as I do about that embarrassing email that some spam bot sent impersonating me. If you know people who got this email and think it was really from me, please spread the word and let them know that I had nothing to do with that. I'd never sent some political email to dozens of mailing lists where it's off-topic, especially not a really controversial one like this one.
That's all folks, let's go back to hack now :)
Yesterday, I was spending a nice evening enjoying some good home-made sushis, and when I went back home, I was really surprised to see lots of emails about waking up the world, meeting the new boss, ... And I got very annoyed when I realized that these emails had been sent from my email address to most GNOME mailing lists existing on earth. I felt really bad when I saw some replies showing that some people thought this email really originated from me. So I did the only thing I could do, some limited damage control. I replied to the persons who mailed me directly and to a few select mailing lists to make it perfectly clear that this mail didn't originate from me despite what it seemed.
By looking at the headers of the email, it's quite clear (at least to me) that I didn't send it: it was sent from a US ISP and I'm living in France these days and mainly using gmail as a mailer. Moreover, careful readers of the email (I haven't even read it myself ;) will have noticed that this email is signed "david duke" which is not my name ;).
I think some guy box was taken over by a trojan and that it crawled gnome.org mailing list archives, got my email address from there and gathered the addresses of most mailing GNOME lists and then blindly spammed them. I sent an email to the abuse contact of the ISP, but I don't really expect too much from them.
Now you know about as much as I do about that embarrassing email that some spam bot sent impersonating me. If you know people who got this email and think it was really from me, please spread the word and let them know that I had nothing to do with that. I'd never sent some political email to dozens of mailing lists where it's off-topic, especially not a really controversial one like this one.
That's all folks, let's go back to hack now :)
mercredi 21 janvier 2009
First news of 2009 :)
New job
In my last post, I was looking for a job. The good news is that I started working at Mandriva 2 weeks ago. I'll be working on the core distro to (partially) replace pixel which means I'll hack on urpmi and bootloaders among tons of other things. Thanks to everyone who helped me with job opportunities!
libgpod
After far too much time, we finally released libgpod 0.7. It contains tons of improvements, the most noticeable being support for the latest Nano and iPod Classic, but there were lots of other improvements: writing of compact artwork files making the iPod more responsive, chapter data support, better iPod model detection, updated python bindings, improved API documentation, ...
There aren't many changes in this release for iPhone/iPod Touch support. However, in addition to the great work from the iFuse team, marcan figured out how to add songs to a jailbroken iPhone using amarok/gtkpod/rhythmbox/. If you add to that the iPod Touch is on its way to being jailbroken, this means that people really insisting on buying those devices will at least be able to use them without iTunes.
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is only a few weeks away now (7th and 8th of February), the GNOME and Freedesktop devrooms are booked and their schedule has been published. You should definitely plan a trip in Brussels if it's not done already :) And don't forget our group picture on Saturday if you are a GNOME hacker!
In my last post, I was looking for a job. The good news is that I started working at Mandriva 2 weeks ago. I'll be working on the core distro to (partially) replace pixel which means I'll hack on urpmi and bootloaders among tons of other things. Thanks to everyone who helped me with job opportunities!
libgpod
After far too much time, we finally released libgpod 0.7. It contains tons of improvements, the most noticeable being support for the latest Nano and iPod Classic, but there were lots of other improvements: writing of compact artwork files making the iPod more responsive, chapter data support, better iPod model detection, updated python bindings, improved API documentation, ...
There aren't many changes in this release for iPhone/iPod Touch support. However, in addition to the great work from the iFuse team, marcan figured out how to add songs to a jailbroken iPhone using amarok/gtkpod/rhythmbox/
FOSDEM
FOSDEM is only a few weeks away now (7th and 8th of February), the GNOME and Freedesktop devrooms are booked and their schedule has been published. You should definitely plan a trip in Brussels if it's not done already :) And don't forget our group picture on Saturday if you are a GNOME hacker!
jeudi 4 décembre 2008
FOSDEM!!
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!!! It's not complicated, you just need to ask for the GNOME Event Box, think about what can be shown on the stand, find a few volunteers to be present on the stand during the FOSDEM, ... All that is needed is a bit of time, there are lots of helpful people who can give really good advice about the organization :)
mardi 25 novembre 2008
Autumn update
Rhythmbox
In the last weeks, I finally landed a few patches for Rhythmbox iPod plugins that had been waiting for too long.
The first one adds a dialog to setup new (empty) ipods, courtesy of gtkpod. This was bug #358029 and the initial patch was made by James Doc Livingston.
The second patch was written by Ed Catmur and Paul Drain. Its purpose is to avoid copying duplicate tracks to the ipod. It's currently a bit simplistic, 2 songs are considered duplicates if they have the same title/album/artist. And the code doing that is factored in a generic function in the RBRemovableMediaSource class so other DAP sources can easily get the same behaviour. The fact that the duplicate check is made in a single function also means that we can easily replace this check with a more elaborated one (using audio fingerprints for example) in the future.
The 3rd (and last) patch has been made by John Daiker and adds a property dialog to the iPod source to see how much space is available on the ipod, to see the ipod serial number, device name, ... This code is specific to the iPod source for now, but seeing bug #561955 which asks for the same feature for MTP devices, there is probably some factoring to be done...
And, more or less related to this last bug, in the last days I worked on porting the Banshee SegmentedBar widget to C to be able to reuse it in Rhythmbox. After writing the GObject boilerplate for a new GtkWidget, the porting was pretty straightforward since Cairo/Pango mono bindings are really close to their C counterparts. The end result can be seen on this screenshot :
The code can be found in bug #561955 as a patch to Rhythmbox source. However, the widget code doesn't depend on any Rhythmbox code which means it should be easy to reuse in any GTK+/C project if you need such a widget. If you do so, please let me know about any bug or API issues you encounter since the code is really young and hasn't been tested much :)
Libgpod
On the libgpod front, not too many news. svn trunk is in a satisfying state and is probably releasable as is. The lastest ipod nanos and ipod classic are supported (with artwork and photos). As always, any testing with the latest ipods is welcome. We are also missing a few serial numbers for the new 16GB nanos, so if you own one, it would be great if you could send us the last 3 digits of its serial number (printed on the back) as well as its color.
The iphone 3g and the ipod touch with 2.x firmwares are not supported at this time, the song database needs to be checksummed to be valid, and noone has reverse engineered the hashing scheme yet. Moreover, Apple is making things difficult through code obfuscation and legal hurdles.
UPDATE: the EFF published this really interesting analysis of the issue
On a brighter side, the iFuse guys have made great progress to make USB communication to non jail-broken devices to work. Before their work, one had to jailbreak his phone and to talk to it through wifi to do anything with it. Now that's no longer necessary thanks to those guys.
Personal life
After a few years working as a team leader on Anevia's Video-on-Demand server, it's time for me to move on and to look for new exciting job opportunities. So if you are looking for an experienced C/C++ Linux developper, you are very welcome to contact me. My resume is available here.
In the last weeks, I finally landed a few patches for Rhythmbox iPod plugins that had been waiting for too long.
The first one adds a dialog to setup new (empty) ipods, courtesy of gtkpod. This was bug #358029 and the initial patch was made by James Doc Livingston.
The second patch was written by Ed Catmur and Paul Drain. Its purpose is to avoid copying duplicate tracks to the ipod. It's currently a bit simplistic, 2 songs are considered duplicates if they have the same title/album/artist. And the code doing that is factored in a generic function in the RBRemovableMediaSource class so other DAP sources can easily get the same behaviour. The fact that the duplicate check is made in a single function also means that we can easily replace this check with a more elaborated one (using audio fingerprints for example) in the future.
The 3rd (and last) patch has been made by John Daiker and adds a property dialog to the iPod source to see how much space is available on the ipod, to see the ipod serial number, device name, ... This code is specific to the iPod source for now, but seeing bug #561955 which asks for the same feature for MTP devices, there is probably some factoring to be done...
And, more or less related to this last bug, in the last days I worked on porting the Banshee SegmentedBar widget to C to be able to reuse it in Rhythmbox. After writing the GObject boilerplate for a new GtkWidget, the porting was pretty straightforward since Cairo/Pango mono bindings are really close to their C counterparts. The end result can be seen on this screenshot :
The code can be found in bug #561955 as a patch to Rhythmbox source. However, the widget code doesn't depend on any Rhythmbox code which means it should be easy to reuse in any GTK+/C project if you need such a widget. If you do so, please let me know about any bug or API issues you encounter since the code is really young and hasn't been tested much :)
Libgpod
On the libgpod front, not too many news. svn trunk is in a satisfying state and is probably releasable as is. The lastest ipod nanos and ipod classic are supported (with artwork and photos). As always, any testing with the latest ipods is welcome. We are also missing a few serial numbers for the new 16GB nanos, so if you own one, it would be great if you could send us the last 3 digits of its serial number (printed on the back) as well as its color.
The iphone 3g and the ipod touch with 2.x firmwares are not supported at this time, the song database needs to be checksummed to be valid, and noone has reverse engineered the hashing scheme yet. Moreover, Apple is making things difficult through code obfuscation and legal hurdles.
UPDATE: the EFF published this really interesting analysis of the issue
On a brighter side, the iFuse guys have made great progress to make USB communication to non jail-broken devices to work. Before their work, one had to jailbreak his phone and to talk to it through wifi to do anything with it. Now that's no longer necessary thanks to those guys.
Personal life
After a few years working as a team leader on Anevia's Video-on-Demand server, it's time for me to move on and to look for new exciting job opportunities. So if you are looking for an experienced C/C++ Linux developper, you are very welcome to contact me. My resume is available here.
Inscription à :
Articles (Atom)