Recently in English Category

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

So the last afternoon @ fosdem 2008 I ended up listening to a very informative talk on autoconf, automake and libtools. The argumnt was that they were the tools of the trade - and that it wasn't so complex. The rest was more a walkthrough and at the end I was not reall convinced that those tools where not easy nor complex to use properly. The reason I ended up in this metting 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 agan 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, personnal 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 shold happen this year interms of releases and staffing for the newly announced mozilla-messaging corporation. Very nice and very interesting especially if we get Sundbird inetgration 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've just installed the latest beta of Firefox because my friend daniel said it rocked on the mac and that he was thinking about not using Safari anymore.
The firts launch is amazingly fast, the windows just pop up, that is very impressive. I like that a lot. It also seems that Firefox is way more responsive on my G5 iMac than the previous 2.0 series. I like the new cocoa dropdown list and the look and feel - looks a lot like Camino :-). I tend to access a few sites with certificates+ssl authentification, and one of the server I go to daily as an expired cert. In 2.0 a alert would pop up and I would just hit enter to access the site. In 3.0b it'a a complete different story, the page does not load and Firefox quives you kind of a 404 page on which you can decide to make an execption or not. I think those "security" changes are very good because they really force the user to acknowledge that there is a security issue.
Things I don't like is firts the fact that non of the extensions I use daily (spell checking ), del.icio.us and a few others are not compatible with the Beta releases. Making the whole experience of testing the beta release a less enjoyable experience. I don't like the new url bar history - it's too big makes it difficult for me to use the down arrow to select the site i want to use. And the biggest bad point is I was unable to access the new Yahoo! mail, I either need to use another browser to access it or to return to the old interface of yahoo mail.

The Library of congress uploaded around around 3k photos on flickr. The idea behind that is to help the library catalogue it's picture. The deal seems quite simple and not that time consuming , it's about adding tag to the pictures. I like the idea which is described in details here. So I've spend some times adding a few tags to the pictures present in the photostream.

I'll be attending fosdem this year. I'll try not to stay in the mozilla room for the complete week-end.

I like to tag my picture when I post them on flickr and I particularly love to geotag them - I think it's nice to be able to locate an area seen on a picture so you can visit it yourself at some point.
My workflow is pretty straight for now as I shoot in RAW, and import the raw files into Lightroom to develop them. I then upload them on flickr and use either the provided map, or tools like maps.yuan.cc (which permits using google maps instead of the one provided by yahoo.). This has three flaws , the first one is that I only geotag pictures that I upload on flickr, the information is only kept on flickr , so the day they die or the day I decide to move away from them my information is lost (well no - i can doanload a kml file and use it with google earth, but it would be a pain to regain that information).
What I would like is to geotag all my pictures, so either I find a GPS that directly plug-ins the camera and tags the pictures when I shoot (and I don't know of any solution to achieve this), the other one is to carry a GPS with me and then based on time stamps tag the RAW files by altering the EXIF data. The data matching seems to be easy to do.
My solve issue is finding the appropriate GPS hardware that will let me tracks my move. I am completely clueless on what my needs are - what I tend to do is go out for the day (maximum 10 hours) and shoot. Anyone willing to give me a recommendation on what piece of hardware I should buy ?

Seems completely broken. I can't browse my phone from my machine. I was able once after a reboot. I believe the issue is when the MacBookPro goes to sleep something is not done correctly os-wise and when the machine is awaken blued or the bluetooth chip is in a strange state. I've tried cleaning up prefs on both side pairing again and again and the only time I've succeeded pairing was after a complete reboot. I know it's not the phone because I can sync, browse the phone from both my machines at work - they both run panther though.

So I now own a new machine for a bit more than a week. I've installed leopard and decided to go with mac ports to give it a try instead of using fink.

I kind like mac ports and for the usage I have of such tools, using fink or mac ports doesn't really make a difference. Since I now have a decent machine I decided to have a look and try to participate to some nice open source project, as my new hobby is photography - I've figured I could maybe be useful somewhere in that area. So I started having a few peaks at libopenraw and exempi which are being developed by a friend of mine. The project aims to bring proper support for the raw file format used by camera makers to linux.

So after installing the dev tools and trying to configure and compile, I was able to achieve it for exempi after hub updated the autoconf/automake files and scripts. This helped configure not to fail so early for libopenraw. It now fails with :

checking for jpeglib.h... yes

./configure: line 20023: syntax error near unexpected token `EXEMPI,'

./configure: line 20023: `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(EXEMPI, exempi-2.0 >=

$EXEMPI_REQUIRED)'

Googling does not really help. What I did though was to use another machine which runs 10.4 instead of 10.5 and uses Fink to manage dependencies instead of Mac ports. On that machine I had no issues due to tooling - a few issues at compile time but they where solved. So I now need to figure out if my issues come from 10.5 or mac ports - good thing I get some vacation time next week.

Yesterday I realized I had fucked up my dns data , and wanted to ssh to my box which gave me :

percent_expand: NULL replacement

Which according to google is macports issue :-( I got on my box using my older laptop (the one running 10.3) and fixed the issue, but I'm being annoyed by those issues I'm encountering.

Last issue I had was getting pictures out of my Nokia 73. Launched the bluetooth browser and was unable to connect to my phone. Killed the app and tried to pair the phone and the machine which failed (console.app is empty ) so I might retry tonight after a reboot to see if the first kill didn't leave the bluetooth hardware in a unknown state that prevented the pairing afterwards.

Only thing I'm not complaining too much is civ IV (except that I don't see the point of having 3D graphics for that game, it does not bring much to it.)

We've just release a new version of Joost. As we finally implemented properly breakpad server side, we now collect all the crashes that people are having outside the company and outside QA. The good news is that we where able to fix one of the top crashers. So if you had had issues with joost crashing - give a try to our new version.

Today I once again verified that the world I live in is small very small. I attended Atlassian's user group meeting today, as i use daily both confluence and Jira. It's interesting to meet other users and exchanging on how they use the products. We had some heads up on the upcoming versions - I made a point to tell what I didn't like about both products. I think I would have gotten more about the meeting if I was developing plug-ins or administering the products, but nevertheless I gave a few tips here and there and I really love doing that. Pepijn probably got some information he wanted, and he took note of a plug-in I was interested in. At some point in one of the talks, semapedia was mentioned. When the project was described I immediately recognized semacode, which I know the founder from mid-2003 when I started working on Camino. So some guys from Australia , talk about a Canadian known to a Frenchman that moved to the Netherlands , yep the world is very small.

Today I went to an Apple Ddeveloper Connection hosted event in Amsterdam about leopard. I can't tell what the presentations were about – because of my ADC, NDA. But as the name implies it was centered about leopard and the new features that came with the new release of the OS – for me most of these were new things as I don't have a leopard running machine yet. And for mt daily job I might come up with a few ideas on some features I need to take care of. The morning sessions were not technical at all – they were more are less sells speeches – in order to have applications that are out there – to use leopard specific features – but the presenter skept all the etchnical details – which I believe is a pitty.

So I found a bug in one of Hewlett-Packard's printer manuals. I've been poking around HP's website but was not really able to find a simple way to report this issue on page 51 of LJCP3505_use_ENWW.pdf which in the section of Use features in the Macintosh printer driver one can read :

Use automatic duplex printing
1. Insert enough paper into one of the trays to accommodate the print job. If you are loading special
paper such as letterhead, load it in one of the following ways:
● For tray 1, load the letterhead paper face-up with the bottom edge feeding into the printer first.
● For all other trays, load the letterhead paper face-down with the top edge at the back of the
tray.
2. Open the printer driver (see Change printer-driver settings for Windows on page 38).
3. Open the Layout pop-up menu.
4. Next to Two Sided Printing, select either Long-Edge Binding or Short-Edge Binding.
5. Click Print.
Print on both sides manually
1. Insert enough paper into one of the trays to accommodate the print job. If you are loading special
paper such as letterhead, load it in one of the following ways:
● For tray 1, load the letterhead paper face-up with the bottom edge feeding into the printer first.
● For all other trays, load the letterhead paper face-down with the top edge at the back of the
tray.
CAUTION: To avoid jams, do not load paper that is heavier than 105 g/m2 (28-lb bond).
2. Open the printer driver (see Change printer-driver settings for Windows on page 38).

As one can see through my emphasis a bad copy/paste was done from the windows section to the mac section. So that's really minor, but I would like to report it so HP can update it's manual when they decide to release a new version of the drivers.

Today the Qa lab I work in Finnaly got a machine to connect to our very big HP screen that was lying around for some month in our office without being used. So today we connected one machine with a NVDIA 8800 in it and ran joost in 1920x1200 and it really looks nicer than on my IBM x60 in 1024x768 - I was clearly amazed.

Joost trick
And for those willing to follow what new show make it to joost we now have a feed which get updated when a new piece of content reaches the platform.

So I'm about to add some content to flickr, and I want that content to be found. So the idea is to add tags as these will serves as keywords for searches queries. The issue I have with tags is when the tag itself is build with more than one word. Say for instance "Golden Circle" will be the tag for a few pictures I have taken. My issue is with the way I can add a multi-worded tag, I can add "Circle" + "Golden", or "Golden Circle" or the three of them. I think that adding the three of them is not efficient and I like things most of the time to be efficient. The issue is that flikr will change "Golden Circle" to "GoldenCircle". Anybody as hints on how tags should be used in this case ?

I've been kindly asked by email to share my views on Open letter to the Thunderbird community, and I will comment on the tb issue as a whole.
First of all I would like to thanks David and Scott for making tb, I wish them luck for whatever they are going to be working on in the near future. I started using tb in around 0.6 because at that time Apple's mail.app was not really happy when exchanging some file formats with other users (and in particular with something called Lotus Notes). I've used it ever since on my home machine and at work with the latest job I got. I remember why tb was created back in the early days of Firefox, basically because one big administration company contacted mozilla when mozilla decided to drop the suite and that company/administration wanted a replacement for email, hence was born Minautor. Ever since it's birth the project never got main stream attention while Ff was getting all the lights. In the last year getting TB releases as been something tedious, and at last fosdem a few of us where saddened by the situation. Things got worst when API where rewritten with only Ff in focus breaking tb, as I will try not to argue when it comes to camino for API breakage, I tend to disagree for tb as it's a supported product from MoFo. Now I was thrilled by the MailCo announce, meaning that tb would get the proper work force for some low level issues to get fix (UI is pretty stable and as been worked on for a long time, but some low level issues and code have not been touch in year). I'm now sad because the main devs, those who know how the product works are leaving, meaning that the team that is going to take over will have a hard time catching up on all those internal things - Which means that tb development will get a slowdown in the next few month - for that I am very sad.
So comming back to the letter, I whish we learn why the guys where leaving, I whish we had some goals other than making tb suck less expressed in public on the future of tb. And a nice milestone planning would have been a very good thing (and I would have expected a planning without dates).

So the company I've been working for for more than a year went public today. We've launched joost beta 1.0, so you do not need invitations anymore - and can watch tv on your computer. Joost runs on windows and Macos X (Intel), can be downloaded from here, and we do have some content (for instance CSI).
Here are a few things you might want want to try to enhance your experience with joost.

When the content is not full screen (and has black borders), try to press the v key.

In Channel chat (in our My Joost Section), the following commands are available from the keyboard :

• /nick to change your nickname


• /clear to make your screen visible again


• /clr as clear


• /leave leave the chat you are in


• /exit does as leave


• /switch when changing channel you will stay in the same channel


• /people list people in the channel


• /join join a new channel


• /j as join

At least they are hiring people to at maintain the groups. I just love using mailing lists and usenet over web based forums.

I just tried to synch calendars using their tools to my ical installation and I lost most of it. Zimbra you just suck.

Yesterday I attended the Wireless Community Camp 2007 organized by http://www.wifisoft.org, Held in Oegstgeest the Netherlands. I attended because I was curious on what two of my colleagues where up to - while they did some infrastructure work in June. The Camp Lasted one week, but I only attended Saturday. So I arrived late and came in the middle of a presentation of FON.
Fon is a project aimed at sharing your bandwith with others over a WIFI network. The benefit you get by doing so is that you can use all other FON hotspot around the world for free. If you are not a member of fon you can become a member for a small fee. The idea is to broadcast two networks from the same Wifi Access point, one is going to be the FON network, the other one which is open (but supposed to be protected by the first one), is your personal network.
I was temped to join but as I live on the 6th floor people in the street would probably not benefit from my FON access point. Then I discovered that I would probably need a La Fonera device, a small access point. While the device looks nice and cool I have two issues with it. I usually like to be able to plug cables in my routers not just Wifi ones, and on that thing I just can't. It heats to much. But nevertheless the project seems interesting and I was able to spot two Fonspots, one in the apartment building I live in den Haag, the other one near my parents.
There is also a bunch of software being develop to turn your mac or your PC into a FON access point, the Mac version does not on PowerPC :-(.
Then the camp headed two the center of Leiden to take a boat tour. The idea was to detect as many WIFI signal as possible. The boat trip was fun and I discovered parts of Leiden I did not know. I did not participate to the detection contest.But while we where cruising the canal that split the central market in two, the guy looking for discoverable Bluethooth device food 300 of those !! Then we went back to the camp to get a nice barbecue. I really enjoyed my day and will probably spend more time to WCC next year.

I've just listened to Mike's interview at the Mozilla digital bank. He talks about the release of Netscape's code in 1998, and then goes on the errors of netscape 6.0, what the community does, and how it works. Talks about Camino's relation with MoFo/MoCo. A very interesting interview, take the time to listen.