Moved

I live in my new flat in Asnières sur Seine since last Saturday. After some problems with France Telecom, I don't know when I'll be able to subscribe to ADSL. Their eligibilty system still tell me that my phone number does not exist more than one week after the phone started working... Need to call them again...

Meanwhile I can sometimes get an unstable connection using an unknown neigbour's wifi (but I never got it more than few minutes...). I got really surprised to scan 33 different MAC adresses from my flat ! However, only 2 are open and I could only connect to one.

I bought a new harddrive on Saturday (thanks Anne for dropping the bag before I can even use it, you're lucky it still works fine :) ). I may be able to resume all my pending projects soon, especially the PLF Move.

Work at Mandrakesoft is going nicely (a lot of projects, I won't get bored soon).

GNOME GTray

Just spent a few hours getting GTray to connect again to GMail. It now work fine but I think authentification part could be written more robust. I may look at it again later...

Partial move

I'll move to Paris tomorrow evening, not yet a real move as I have not yet found a flat to store all my stuff. I have to find one before October 15, but there is something more urgent now : Wednesday will be my first day at Mandrakesoft :-)

I got a job \o/

I just accepted a job 2 hours ago, I'll become a consultant for Mandrakesoft.I'll start very soon (not yet decided), so I am now really looking for a flat :-)

GMail

My mail server being dead, I started really using GMail after 4 mails over 3 months. I moved some of my mailing list subscriptions there, and when I started really using it, I discovered that the interface is really nice ! There are however some bad points, like the cursor position that want you to reply before the citation but this is minor.

Good news

All is not so bad, after the few days I spent in Paris this week, I may soon get a job !

Hard time

Lost my main harddrive 10 days ago, and when dying my other harddrive which I used for backup got almost all my backup partitions becoming bad blocks...The only partition left is the one I used for the Cooker mirror which is not the most critical data :(So, I lost all my mails and the data in my home (last backup somewhere else than on the second hard drive is quite old...). I spent few days using MandrakeMove but now Nanar lent me a 40GB hard drive, so I can really use my computer again. I plan to buy a new one soon but I really don't have money currently :(

Some real holidays soon

I'll spend 5 days in Montpellier visiting my sister next Week End. Never went there before, so I plan spending at least one day as a tourist walking through the city.

PLF Move

I started hacking an unofficial version of Mandrake Move to replace KDE by Gnome and add PLF codecs. Currently it boots but fails to start X :-)

A small shell script

Someone asked for a way to get the current traffic in the console. I explained him a way to do it and wrote the small script. I guess thousands people did it before, that will be one more :-) Yes, I know I don't handle when the counter goes back to 0, but that will fail 1 second every [insert a long time here].

Ruby roxor

Mandrakelinux has a small perl script to find unused packages called urpmi_rpm-find-leaves. I tried rewriting it using ruby-rpm and got a real surprise : perl version spends 11s while ruby version only 3.3s !OK, the difference is between perl-URPM and ruby-rpm, not between perl and ruby, but I'm happy :-)

Hard weather

Temperature is still over 30°C here, I don't do much except sleeping, drinking and showering.

Yet another Ruby RPM

I just packaged ruby-bdb (Berkeley DB binding) into Mandrakelinux. I needed it for rbot but I don't know if I'll package rbot (installing rbot is just uncompressing the tarball and editing the config file...)

Holidays

Even if that's not real holidays as I'll be looking for a job, I think I won't have much interviews during August, so I may travel visiting some friends. However, nothing planned yet !

Last week

My current job will finish on July 31, if someone has a nice computer science engineer job to offer do not hesitate.Requirements are :

• Interesting job ;
• UNIX environnement, ideally GNU/Linux ;
• Cool people ;
• Close to transports, I don't have driving licence.

Use Perl objects within Ruby !

I discovered ruby-perl yesterday and it works quite fine !

irb(main):001:0> require 'perl'=> trueirb(main):002:0> perl_obj = Perl.new("-MLibconf::Glueconf::Networking::Resolv", "-e", "0")=> #<Perl:0x402b3754>irb(main):003:0> resolv=perl_obj.eval("new Libconf::Glueconf::Networking::Resolv('/etc/resolv.conf');")=> Libconf::Glueconf::Networking::Resolv=HASH(0x820d488)irb(main):004:0> resolv.class=> PerlObjectirb(main):005:0> resolv.writeConf('/tmp/resolv.conf')=>

I still have a few problems with it but I think writing Ruby bindings for Libconf will be really trivial.I also found a ruby-python but I currently don't need it.

RMLL

Back to Dijon after a week in Bordeaux for the LSM. Here is a short summary of the trip. My pictures are available in my gallery.

Monday

Travel by train from Dijon to Paris, then by car to Bordeaux. I shared Guillaume's car with Dams and Houpla while Nanar and Erwan travelled with Anne. We discovered some usefull stuff (maybe dangerous) during a break on the highway. After dropping everything in the rooms and buying some stuff to drink later, we went to the city to find a place to eat. After looking for a cool place for quite some time, we found a place which looked nice. Food was good but the guy looked drunk and started telling us some jokes (mostly about Samir). We ended drinking some beers on the grass behind the building.

Tuesday

We had to wake up early to set up the booths before 9, however conferences started only in the afternoon so we got really few visitors before lunch. We went to the supermaket and then had a picnic in the cafeteria (and we did the same the 3 following days). At the end of the afternoon, Mandrakesoft employees and foreign contributors arrived and we had dinner together. Like the days before, we ended on the grass.

Wednesday

This was the first day of the first Cooker Meeting. On the morning Michael gave us an overview of the current quality checking tools, then we discussed organization problems.At the end of the afternoon, happened the aperitif of associations. Everyone had brought stuff to eat or drink from her place. Then, after parking the car we went to a nice restaurant in the center of Bordeaux.

Thursday

In the cooker room, Frederic Lepied listed us what is planned for Mandrakelinux 10.1, Dams presented Libconf and Buchan presented DKMS and we discussed how we could use it.At the end of the afternoon, we moved to a really nice exposition about "Le chat" from Gelluck. While going there we could notice that the replacement bus didn't work better than the tramway.We then went back to Talence for the Repas du libre but there were already too much people so we sit in the grass.

Saturday

On saturday morning we only went to the ENSEIRB to clean up the booth and say goodbye (at least for me, as everyone had already been there when I arrived). We went shooping and then went to the sea, at Arcachon.There, we had picnic on the beach, drinking nice wine without a glass. We made pictures of Guillaume for next PLF calendar. Then during the nap, Dams and Erwan made a sand PLF logo. Some children who where impressed by the penguin, asked us to also photograpgy their sculpture.Anne didn't want to swim, and she didn't like having her foot smashed, so I made a picture to store it in the list of place where not to go that we'll start with the restaurant of monday.After a few hours, we decided to try finding a domain to visit (hopefully with some wine tasting). After some time visiting empty places with closed buildings we went to the supermarket, bought some good wine and drunk it in the park where the Diner du libre had occured. After saying hello to the ducks, we had dinner in an Indian restaurant and went to sleep immediatly, everybody being tired.

Today

Now I'm really tired but have some packages late (Alexandria 0.3.1, XChat 2.0.10, XMule 1.8.3, ...) and still a lot of emails to read.

PLF Logo contest

As the contest will end up next tuesday and I will have no time until that, I tried to finish my logo. I don't like the gun I draw, so I went back to dams' version (I only sligthly modified it). So, I end up with most of my logo coming from his work :( Anyway, this was a nice occasion to discover inkscape which is really nice !

ruby-rpm

I just discovered that ruby-rpm was not dead. When I first discovered the binding few months ago, it was for rpm 4.0.4 but I found a version for rpm 4.2 today !I packaged it for Mandrakelinux and tryied playing with it :

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rpm'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> p = RPM::Package.new('/tmp/ruby-rpm-1.2.0-1mdk.i586.rpm')
=> ruby-rpm-1.2.0-1mdk
irb(main):003:0> p.changelog.length
=> 42
irb(main):004:0> p.changelog[0]['name']
=> "Pascal Terjan  1.2.0-1mdk"
irb(main):005:0> RPM.vercmp('1.0alpha2','1.0')
=> 1
irb(main):006:0> RPM.vercmp('1.0alpha2','1.0beta')
=> -1
irb(main):007:0> db = RPM::DB.new
=> #
irb(main):008:0> db.entries[42]
=> drakconf-10-13mdk
irb(main):009:0> db.find_all { |package| package.version.to_vre == '1.2.0-1mdk' }
=> [libgcrypt11-1.2.0-1mdk, ruby-rpm-1.2.0-1mdk]

A thing I had to do quickly

I just payed my hosting for upcoming Libre Software Meeting. I'll spend next week there.

Thanks to them for the online payement system they now provide, sending them in time a check they want before Friday would have been difficult :-)

I have still not received The Official GNOME 2 developer's Guide while amazon.fr sent it 6 days ago with a 2 days delivery system from French Post...

Uploaded some photos

Last Saturday happened a Lea Party (conferences) together with a Traduc party (translation of Free Software and documentation) in Orsay (South of Paris). At the end of the day we had dinner together, here are my pics.

Some Mandrakelinux packaging

• updated gaim to 0.79 ;
• rebuild inkscape on 10.0 after someone asked for it but the package awaits testing before I upload to a more permanent place ;
• created a package for GTray, a Notification Area app to check GMail accounts.