février 2008 Archives

I've been a linkedin user for almost two years now. I use it to maintain my resume online, and to keep in touch with people I work with or that I've worked with in the past. I also use it like a global profesionnal address book - so I don't clutter my phone nor my current address book with entries I'm not using. I've been looking at the other features offered by linkedin, you have question and answers, but I'm usually too late to give a proper answer, someone as probably replied before me. The other feature is that you can belong to groups, I'm a member of Fosdem attendee for instance. I got into the group after finding out that a friend was part of it - then I decided to see if I could fit in more groups and decided to look for groups.
There is no way I could search for groups in the linkedin interface (and if there is it very well hidden).
The only thing available is a group directory, but I can't even find the group I'm a member of in the directory - which seems to not display all groups.
I've tried serachnig for "group keyword site:linkedin.com" on google but was unable to find groups, the only thing I stumbled on was profiles.

Any idea how I could serch for groups on linkedin ?

so thanks to SvZ I got a more open listing at http://dallasblue.com/LinkedIn/groups.htm

Chers lecteurs,

je compte me rendre au groenland lors de mes prochaines vacances, je suis preneur de toute informations, truc ou astuce que je devrais connaître avant de m'y rendre, n'hésitez pas à laisser des commentaires.

So the last afternoon @ fosdem 2008 I ended up listening to a very informative talk on autoconf, automake and libtools. The argument was that they were the tools of the trade - and that it wasn't so complex. The rest was more a walk through and at the end I was not really convinced that those tools where not easy nor complex to use properly. The reason I ended up in this meeting was that the presentation on making robots with 8 bits controllers and linux was so crowed that there was a waiting line in front of the room.
Then I went back to the mozilla room to hear the plans that mozilla had for bringing a browser on mobile devices. The talk draw lots of attention and the room got more people. Max jumped on his chair when the speaker evoked the idea or removing Mathml from the mobile version of the browser.
Once again fosdem was very nice and I'll probably attend next year.

Today I started uploading some pictures from saturday. Then I went to Janson to listen to Hudson by Kohsuke Kawaguchi.
Hudson is a build automator aimed principally at building java apps. It seems the main interest in that project is that you have a nice UI for you build tool and that it's easy to administer through the web GUI, other than that I did not really find anything very interesting on the product itself.
Then I went to meet my friend wolfgang in the OpenSuse room to follow a very interesting talk on the energystar label. I learned that to get the label you need to have the hardware and the software to be correctly setup. The levels of energy that devices can waste and still get the label is pretty high. The talk was mild-technical but complete and yeah interesting.
CMake presentation by one of it's author was nice - but missed one point in the very beginning : what is cmake is about - which I got just a few minutes later. The presentation looked more like a workshop because we where presented with examples and how they worked or were supposed to work. Nice things are ctest and cpack , to unit test and make code coverage and then package the product you are building.

Yesterday evening Instead of the "traditional" mozilla diner we have each year @ Fosdem, we ended up celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Netscape release fo their browser source code. So the mozilla project father of Firefox, Thunderbird, Sundbird, Bugzilla, Camino and a few others has been in businness for 10 years. Wahoo time flies as I remember the announce an thinking to myself that it would not matter much. I also thought that the project was doomed when a few months later they announced the complete rewrite.
Then Beos, my pet project at the time, had a very bad browser named NetPositive, and Be Inc, started working on porting the new mozilla code base to the OS. I could not run beos at that time but as mozilla was cross patform I started reporting bugs . So nice party yesterday at a nice bowling in the center of Brussels, Happy birthday mozilla.

Sitting in the OpenSuse room now listening to a talk on how to package for that version of Linux - the guy talking has a strong german accent, changes from the french one :-).
I've been sitting in the mozilla room for most of the day - the room was smaller than the previous years and that was a pitty because attendance was much higher. It's nice to see people that I have not seen since last year, it's like friend with a common passion - that is what empowers free software communities. The room was so hot that someone came up with a nice joke on the blackboard "sauna.fosdem.org" :-)
The talked started by a state of the mozilla community and software distribution, with nice numbers (53% of downloads are english ones), and information on how firefox beta 3 was used (a very nice graph) and what the plans for the near future might be.

So we had two very nice presentations on the calendar project behind hosted by mozilla, with many questions and usual answer : we need more developing man power. Gave a nice idea of the state of the products and the dev team.

Previous to that Dan Mills talked about weave a project hosted on labs.mozilla.org. Weave is about sharing profiles, personal information and bookmarks. I like the idea - and the concept they are working on, it's a bit like having del.icio.us and other services mashed up together but with privacy options. At the end two technologies were pointed to Dan Mills, one is p3p and the other one is foaf.

The next session was on Thunderbird and what should happen this year in terms of releases and staffing for the newly announced mozilla-messaging corporation. Very nice and very interesting especially if we get Sundbird integration by the end of the year.

I'm attending FOSDEM again this year and already met a few of my fosdem friend, one of them just reminded me that this was the 5th edition of fosdem I was attending. I'm sitting in chavanne, the biggest room (around 1,5 k places) listening to a "How a large scale project works" by Robert Watson from the FreeBSD project. The talk is not really technical but gave a few interesting thing about the social aspect surounding the development of the operating system.
The previous presentation was on the use of linux by the film industry and all the studios use linux in render farms and also on the desktop, some of the visual effect from known films where shown - that part was very interesting, but the rest of the talk was actually quite boring. So seeing what was added and not noticing it was really nice. Also learned that each frame is rendered independantly from all other frames.

A bit more than a year ago I was explaining how I managed our test cases for joost. Things did not change much since then, but are on the verge of changing. After my trip to mozilla, I did spend some time investigating Litmus but found that it was really too tied to bugzilla and did not felt like hacking much on it. I did like the fact that Litmus is written in perl. Since then I we got experienced QA people that joined joost and the first thing they did was search for a tool to use for storing and running test plans. The chosen solution is named Aptest. I've had the pleasure of installing aptest, which is also written in perl. For now I can't really say that we are using it, because we need to spend some time figuring the application. I'll keep you posted on our usage and our tools.

• Offsite Backup The Way You Want It
  Need to investigate my backup needs.
  (tags: offsite backup storage)

Je viens de lire que l'organisateur de la session de signature de clef numérique était prêt. Cette année je n'y participerais pas - en effet j'y ai participé les années précédentes en me disant que le meilleur moyen de combattre les pourriels était de signer tout ceux que j'envoyais. Mais cela ne fonctionne pas - les autres utilisateurs ne comprennent pas ce que la signature représente. Je ne vais donc pas perdre trop de temps avec les signatures cette année.

• Session on Geothermal Energy in Brussels
  (tags: islande ecologie energie publications anglais)
• Twelve Important Rules for Photography
  (tags: photographie trucs anglais)

Just found about http://upcoming.yahoo.com. I like the concept - looking for events, entering events so you can tell the world about thing you like attend. There seems to be export fucntions for ical, yahoo calendar and google calendar, which is probably the type of service I was looking for without searching specifically for it. The other neat feature I like about it is that I can tag my flickr pictures with a machine tag and then the picture becomes relevant to the event. As I'm attending fosdem this upcoming week-end, I registered the event (could not find anything by searching for Fosdem, and for searching events in Brussels). After searching by end (and not querying around for known names), I was able to find the registered fosdem events. I deleted the one I had created. I just hate services where search does not work.
I need to explore the service a bit more and see if it can be a bit more useful.

• Upcoming events
  (tags: conference information social calendar events)

As I reported last year the 2007 edition of that camp was a lot of fun - at least the only day I attended. The 2008 edition as been announced, all the details are here. The program - which is not finished yet - is available here. I'm probably going to attend and take a bit more pictures than last year.

• Gps visualizer
  (tags: geotagging google map)
• GPSPhotoLinker: Overview
  (tags: geotagging software gps)
• AMOD AGL3080: an in-depth review. | Blog-Shmog
  (tags: gps geotagging macintosh photographie)

index.rdf et index.xml ne sont plus mis à jour depuis que je suis passé à Movabletype 4.x, merci de mettre vos lecteurs rss à jour en les pointants vers atom.xml.

I kind of like the idea of not connecting to ebay at all for a week. Relaying the message here as I will do that myself.

Hier je me suis rendu avec Andrea à un rassemblement d'utilisateurs du site de photographie flickr. L'idée est toute simple - un lieu de rendez-vous est fixé, avec une date et une heure, et tout le monde part se balader et prendre des photos. Hier il s'agissait de se retrouver à Amsterdam de l'autre côté du fleuve ( par rapport a Amsterdam Centraal). On a donc emprunté l'une des lignes de ferry qui partent depuis la gare - et à notre grande surprise c'est gratuit. Je n'avais pas pris mon zoom et je l'ai bien entendu regretté. Nous sommes passé non loin de cormorans mais pas assez près pour que je puisse utiliser le 24-70 mm. Ca fait un peu comme en rassemblement de Geek sauf qu'en lieu et place d'ordinateurs ce sont des appareils photographiques.
Une fois tout le monde ou presque arrivé - le groupe c'est dirigé vers un chantier naval désaffecté. Les photos prisent par les différents participant sont visibles la
J'ai beaucoup aimé l'expérience et je recommencerais sûrement

• Webform to contact nokia
  (tags: n73 nokia bug)
• a cruisecontrol like automation tool
  (tags: Automation build software test tools)

Yesterday I passed a simple command :

svn remove XXX
svn commit


The directory I was trying to remove was 3GB in size. It took svn 1/2 GB of real memory and 3GB of VM. The operation took 1,5 hour to complete. The good news is that I don't intend to pass such command every five minutes.

• tips tricks on how to hakc the iphone
  (tags: hack iphone information)

Et jusqu'à présent l'outil est conçu par l'homme pour répondre à des besoins et on adapte l'outil à l'environnement dans lequel on compte l'utiliser. C'est mon ami Max qui a lancé le débat la semaine dernière alors que nous accomplissions des formalités administratives, sur l'accentuation des majuscules. Et dans la foulé il remet une couche sur le O e dans l'o, un sujet que j'avais abordé. Je suis d'accord avec Max sur le fait qu'il faille agir maintenant, mais je ne penses pas qu'écrire à son député suffise ou au ministère de l'éducation nationale suffise, ce qu'il faudrait à la langue française c'est l'équivalent de taalunie pour le néerlandais, une commission composée de membres des différents pays utilisant la langue de Molière comme vecteur de communication afin de veiller à l'uniformité d'icelle.
Mais je digresse - je disais donc que l'informatique est un outil et l'outil ne devrais pas forcer un changement lors de son utilisation mais devrais être adapté à la tache pour lequel il est conçu, on ne change pas les pies d'une vache pour faciliter la tache des constructeurs de trayeuses. Or il se trouve que de plus en plus de documents sont écris à l'aide de logiciel dit de traitement de texte. Ceux-ci sont proposent souvent une fonction pour corriger l'orthographe et ces fonctions de signalent jamais coeur comme étant une erreur. Donc ce que je propose en plus des lettres aux députés, sénateurs et ministères c'est de faire pression sur les éditeurs de correcteurs orthographiques afin que ceux-ci considèrent les oublis de œ comme de fautes. La liste des gens à contacter est la suivante :

• Microsoft


• Apple


• Hunspell


• Ispell


• Corel

Et je serais très curieux de avoir comment se comportent des produits plus spécialisé comme "le correcteur 101" ou "Antidote" sur ces deux sujets.

Reste ensuite ce que j'appellerais une hygiène de vie : se forcer à écrire proprement. Ce qui se complique pour les expatriés que nous sommes perdu avec des claviers qwerty - il faut déjà se battre pour ajouter les accents, on ajoutera donc les accents sur les majuscules et les œ et æ et les techniques pour le faire sont décrites ici

J'ai jamais été un fan d'orthographe - j'ai vraiment le sentiment d'être un vieux con réactionnaire en écrivant ce billet. Mais j'ai vraiment le sentiment que ma langue est une partie intégrante de ma culture et donc de moi même. En forçant ce genre de petit détail je tente sans doute de faire mon Astérix.

Je viens d'ouvrir un radar chez Apple afin que le problème soit pris en compte - on dit que l'espoir fait vivre - ben je crois que sur ce coup là je vais vivre très longtemps.

I've just updated my MacBookPro to 10.5.2, and I had hoped that the issue I had with the machine would have gone away - but not I still can use this machine to retrieve the pictures on my nokia n73 using a bluetooth wireless connection.
The issue can be described as follow, the setup assistant never finishes once it has paired with the phone.
It goes on loop forever.
You can kill it nothing really happens (at least nothing visible in console.app).
I can try to connect to the phone (it appears in the device list) - but always times out.
The phone works very well with both macs I use @ work.
The phone does register the pairing with the mac.
Cleaning up all preferences using the bluetooth explorer application does not change a thing. I even managed to make the reboot launched from the bluetooth explorer application not work (unfortunately I cannot reproduce this one).
I'm beginning to think that there is either a big bug or a hardware issue. Never the less I should be warned by the application , so I've filled a Radar @ apple - and looked a my old radars (one from 2003 and one from 2001) that are still open.
Next step is to find another bluetooth device and try to pair it with the machine.

• Quotes from crazy christians
  (tags: humour humor religion)
• Firmware versions of Nokia mobile phones - Nokia N73
  (tags: nokia software n73)

Drear lazy web,

I have a few software issue that I would love to repport to nokia so they can make their products better next time I'm going to use. I've searched a bit and was unable to figure out where I should file bugs @ nokia. I understand that it is an issue for a company with a so big Market - but hey I can file bugs to Apple - so why couldn't I do the same thing for Nokia ?
If this needs to stay confidential please email me @ lhirlimann@yahoo.fr.

• Foaf specs friend of a friend
  (tags: foaf rdf metadata specification geek social web technology)

Voila je viens de créer mon fichier foaf.rdf. Foaf veut dire friend of a friend - littéralement "ami d'un ami" . Je l'ai créé en utilisant l'excellent foaf a matic.
Pourquoi m'y suis-je mis ?
Ce fichier contient les liens sociaux que j'entretient sur le web ( toute personne ayant un compte sur livejournal ou bien advogato par exemple ont déja ce type de descriptif social). Et bien je passe du temps sur facebook (pour jouer), sur flickr, copain d'avant etc ... A chaque fois je dois rentrer les mêmes informations (qui je suis et qui je connais, quelle type de relation j'entretient et avec qui) et je n'en suis pas le propriétaire, je ne les contrôle pas. Avec le projet foaf je contrôle ces informations et j'ai bien espoir que de plus en plus de site web se mettent à lire ce type de fichier ). L'autre très bonne nouvelle est le fait que google indexe désormais les fichiers foaf.

taken in Iceland

Ca fait un drole d'effet :http://www.youjob.com/societe/22