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Apple just created another social network around music named Ping. So this morning I thought let's give it a try and see what this can bring to my weblife. I'm already using last.fm and Sptotify as social web services. Like these two to access ping you need to download some software - ie the latest version of itunes.

The first thing one needs to do, is to create an account. I already had an AppleID, but didn't remember my password. So after a quick password reset, I tried to connect to ping. But my ID wasn't fully filled according to Apple - so I updated it. This included the need to give away credit card information as the ping service is really tied to the itunes music store.

Second things I usually do when I join a social network is quickly fill in my profile. On Ping I failed to upload a picture - but I can live being faceless. Then I choosed to share everything I was doing with my friend (this includes : Things I like, review or purchase). Added a few things to my bio page relating to music. I then could choose Genres I liked, but that's limited to 3, I don't get why this is restrained to only 3.

Now that my profile was "complete", I started looking around to see how I could connect to people I know (which is what social implies). So Apple nicely promotes artist I should follow - but these don't even fall into the categories of music I had selected (so to me it looks a lot like a marketing push - to try to sell me music, more than anything else), and three users. Frankly I have no clue why three users where presented to me as possible interest in following - so I didn't try following them. I started looking for a few friend, but was unable to locate any, probably because they don't use the service yet. Then I looked into the options I usually have on social networks - ie harvest the other social networks I'm present and find people that I'm connected on these services and also use Ping. Well this is a complete failure, the only thing I can do, is send emails to friend to invite them to join - manually. I don't think my network is going to grow a lot on Ping. Too bad because I do manage my music in iTunes so apple could have done something really nice here.

I've been listening to music and rating two new tracks in order to see if it had any effect on my profile (when I see it ) and the answer is no. So I'm there but no activity is visible. And I'm not willing to buy a track to get some activity.

Then I tried to play around - but ended up way to often on the itune store :-(. I really think that Ping isn't social, because it's not centered around me, but it's more or less centered around the store and selling music.

Things I think could have been done way better :


  1. Import my friend from other services

  2. Import my history to have some activity - I'm not going to rate all my music again whist I think , my music ratings are very social (they define my taste and with that what I might buy)

  3. Let me share my profile with the world from something else than itunes (something a bit more "open").

  4. Be more centered on me than the store.

I don't think I'll use Ping as it is a lot, but will continue to use last.fm and spotify for my social music needs.

I've been using Firefox 4.0b3 for a week or so now. As always when I switch to beta, I usually loose some functionality due to some extensions not being validated with the version of Firefox that I use. I've been using delicious to manage my bookmarks for the last two or three years, because it enables me to share my bookmarks (and I don't have a lot) with other computers, other browsers and with my friends (yes I'm a web social beast).

So this morning I was clearly happy to see that the delicious team had a nice extension in beta for me to try out. I was all happy about it and installed it. My bookmarks where back in place ;-) I then noticed that I had lost mouse gesture. I disabled the extension and woot mouse gesture was back. I then send a little email as a piece of feedback to the delicious mailing list.

Two hours later I was contacted on instant messaging by the Yahoo developer. And we tried to figure out what was going on. The only thing That was left was my personas theme. So I went to getpersonas.com , I then noticed that it solved my mouse gesture issue. Restarted Firefox and yet again lost gesture until I opened getpersonas.com in one of my tabs. So I have this weird bug about an extension, a theme that will work together if I load the web site where I got the extension from, I'd love to file a bug, but I have no idea, where/why/how.

I'm now Usul instead of _Tsk_ on irc.mozilla.org. It's one character shorter. It was available, and I'm a fan so I took it. I did that while watching the Dunes series on TV. I now have a nick that people can pronounce, I sure nobody will pronounce it the same way :-)

A panda walks into a bar and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich and shoots the waiter. Then he starts to leave. The bar tender shouts where you going. The panda shouts I'm a panda; look it up in the dictionary. The bartender walks to a dictionary and looks up "panda". It said " panda-noun.-a Tree dwelling animal that eats shoots and leaves."

If you look at mozilla's crash reported and peek at the crashes Thunderbird get, you'll see that the number of crashes is very low on Linux. That's because people use the packaged version of Thunderbird on Linux which is slightly different from the official release one (so they don't give us build symbols and disable the crash reporter). So from a QA and dev perspective we are loosing a lot of crash information , because we think we have a good Linux installed base. This is about to change, as one of the Major Linux distribution (SUSE Linux and it's sister openSUSE) are about to send us all those crashes that are happening. This won't be in the 11.3 releases per-se, but it will be from any update package that user will install from now on. Thanks Wolfir for making this happen !

Without the support of the community there would be no strong mozilla

I came back from the Mozilla 2010 summit be more like the web edition, two days ago. I'm now still fighting jet-lag but doing way better than yesterday :-). This was a awsome great meeting. I've met a bunch of very interesting people (some of which will unfortunately get spammed on some bugs) working on plenty of position at mozilla. It was nice to finally meet some of the people I've been interacting with online in the last year and a half (Hi , Wayne, rkent, Gary, Archeopteryx, Neil ....). And I ended up having a bunch of very interesting conversations with our contributors. I probably ended up spending too much time with the French contributors (that I've known through previous events like FOSDEM), playing belote contrée. I hadn't play the game for quite a while so no regrets at all. I had setup a PGP and CAcert signing meet. PGP went well as 15 people came and participated while CAcert , only some assurers (not even all of them) showed up.

I'd like to thank all the people who did a amazing job preparing and organizing the summit - it was perfect !

Ho and yes I did make a few pictures while there :

So I've finally picked dates and time for both the CAcert event and the PGP signing party add , these to your summit agenda. Both event will be held on July 8th 2010. Both event will have the same meeting point. The hotel lobby's front desk.


  • PGP signing will start at 11:30 (please add your key to the keyring before coming)

  • CAcert will be at 13:45

While Yesterday I talked about the PGP signing party. I'm also organizing a CAcert signing party. I already have two signed up assurers (and I will do some assurance myself). Time and date are still uncertain but will be announced as loudly as possible a bit before the event. If you are considering participating to it as an assurer, please consider the following points :


  • add yourself to the wiki page

  • Print and bring some blank CA cert form

If you intend to get assurance point, print some forms in advance as this will make the assurance process faster and easier for everyone.

The talks and schedule being done, the slot I had requested to organize a Key signing party (for both CAcerts and PGP/GPG) in during a breakout session is dead. The schedule isn't published yet so it still is a bit difficult to announce a date and time to meet. In order to prepare ourselves a bit more efficiently than with pen and paper, I've setup a Keyring on biglumber.
If you want to participate to the keysigning, please consider adding you keys to the event keyring http://biglumber.com/x/web?keyring=4739. Having everybody that wants to participate on file, will help people find each other in a PGP finding buddy quest. Than you can wander the attendee and try to find the person that you haven't met or signed keys with.
When I get a better idea of the schedule I will announce date and time where people will be able to meet and sign keys either on twitter or in #moz10 on irc.

I've asked for a Breakout Session at Whistler for this - I didn't get an answer yet, but as I need to get things on the grounds, so I'll post this anyway, so people can prepare themselves and if we don't get a room we can do it more informally

What ?

From the wikipedia article : Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of such). As with computer networks, there are many independent webs of trust, and any user (through their identity certificate) can be a part of, and a link between, multiple webs.

The web of trust is in other word , you as an individual, telling the world that you trust someone else and that you've tried to verify that person's identity to your best. And publishing that information so other will have access to it.


Why ?


Having a large group of people gathering from all other the world is the perfect occasion to build a good and very decentralized web of trust ( how often will you have a chance to meet someone from say Africa when you're living in say Northen Europe at the same time you meet a north American citizen). So meeting plenty of people is good makes the chance of meeting people who care bigger.

How ?

As said above there are plenty of ways to build web of trusts - I'm organizing signing parties for the ones I use : PGP and CACert. You'll need to prepare a few things if you want to join our signing event and That's why I'm posting this now, to give you the time to read documentation and prepare the paperwork that is necessary for the signings to go smoothly. As a side note I always find it very amusing that the web of trust is something very digital that requires a lot of pen/paper work. You can participate to both web of trusts of course, but for organizational reasons, I'll split the how and what you need to prepare in two.


CACert


CACert provides certificates that can be used to either sign/encrypt emails, software, or setup a SSL protected webserver.
To participate you'll need an account on cacert.org, two valid government issued ID (one is enough but two is better - most of you will have a passport so it's just about bringing another ID (like a drivers licence etc ..)). Bringing a few filled in and printed CAcert Assurance Programme
Identity Verification Form
(CAP) will help things go smoothly. The CAPs can be found pre-filled when you have an account.
Recap :

  1. An account on Cacert.org

  2. At least one Governement issue ID (two is better)

  3. A bunch of prefilled CAcert Assurance Programme
    Identity Verification Form (CAP).

Note I am a CACert assurer, I'm looking for other CAcert assurers (get in touch with me, to let me know you want to be an assurer there ).

PGP/GPG

OpenPG offers digital signing for software and email. And Also offers email encryption. To be able to participate you'll need to install a OPenPG compatible manager an create a key. Make sure to publish your public key (this will make things easier for the signing part). And we'll use the informal method signing method, so be sure to bring a good number of printed fingerprints to exchange with others.

Recap:


  1. Have a published PGP key

  2. Valid ID(s)

  3. Printout of your PGP fingerprint to hand out to other participants

If you have questions send me an email

This Friday, May 28th 2010, in Munich Germany, there will be Key signing party during the osstreffen event. So if you are in the area, please peek your head there and let's grow the web of trust.

On Saturday July the 17th at 14:00 CET, There will be a key signing event at the Open Community Camp, tha's in Leiden in The Netherlands.. A key ring as been added to biglumber for people willing to use that.

As the QA lead for Mozilla messaging I'm looking for a few users. These should be willing to spend 30 minutes to an hour reading test and entering test results in litmus, mozilla's test management software. Those test are there to make sure that we are not regressing from earlier releases there. There are a few hundred of these tests, splitting the work between participants is a very important key to a successful test run. The more testers the more coverage we get out of these tests. If you're interested in helping just drop me an email with your computer's operating system. I'll send details instructions when we have RC1 builds and that we are ready for testing.

Today I ended up trying to buy mp3's from the french amazon store. I wasn't really paying attention - but after I had added my third track to my shopping basket I realized that none of the tracks had been added to it :-( First thing I did was to install the amazon download application thinking that it would solve my issue. It didn't so I read the error message more carefully and it stated that dues to geographical locations I was unable to buy the mp3 and that I needed to read the page more carefully. I did , but on any song/mp3 page from amazon there is no clue that buying mp3 is geographically restricted.
Now I live in nl and was trying to buy from amazon.fr, so I tried amazon.nl which redirects to amazon.co.uk , and I end up with the same issue. I don't understand why the music industry is making it so difficult for me to just buy music in digital form. If I buy CDs they'll get shipped to me. Why can I buy the CD, rip the mp3 and not just buy the mp3 myself ?

So just because I don't live in the right country I can't buy a mp3 but I can buy the CD form the same store.

I'm wondering if there is a complain filled against the music industry at the European commission ? This restriction is clearly against the European goal, which state that citizen and goods should flow easily across all Europe. Is the music trying to tell me that a digital mp3 file is not a good ? so if it's not a good, it's a service right ? But what applies to goods and citizen also applies to services.
Anybody knows how to file a complain, so I can get the right to buy my mp3 on a french store while living in another european country ? I would love to get some answers to the above questions ......

These days I spend plenty of time online and use web apps here and there. It seems plenty of things are/will be moving to the cloud and that everything will happen in the clouds in the future. So I've asked myself what do I install on my machines these days :

  • Soft-phone for work
  • Multi-IM client
  • Email client
  • Web browser
  • Image manipulation Program

So let's try to see what's different from when my machine was an Atari Falcon.

  • I didn't have a web browser
  • I didn't have a mail client
  • I had a fido client
  • I had a assembler
  • I had games
But then again I didn't have access to the internet, the way I do today. Seeing that , well maybe I'll do most of my things in a web-browser in 10 years , but I doubt that, I don't see myself doing image manipulation in a web browser, I'm maybe just plain wrong.

Over the last year - the Thunderbird QA team, has organized almost every week a triage event - where we were asking for contributors and users to come and give us a hand. The idea is that with more manpower and more people participating, we would get better bug reports and cleaner bug reports in the hands of the developers.
Usually we are very broad in the scope of the day. The few times we haven't been broad, and that we've been very concise on what we would be working on, more people showed up. With that in mind expect bugdays to be more focus on a very small area of Thunderbird in the next few weeks. If you want to participate, this change should make it easier for you to come and give a hand. This week's bugday is about deleting Attachments. Subject of upcoming bugdays aren't defined yet - they are generally announced on the Tuesday of the week. To get notified - either follow this wikipage or read mdat, where I usually post an announcement.

This was my first attendance to OSD (the former linuxforums I believe). The event is held on a yearly basis (almost) in the beautiful city of Copenhagen. Other events of the same kind I've attended previously include Apache Con Europe and Fosdem.
I've enjoyed the opening keynote and loved the closing one by Dan Klein, who I think made a really nice point about starting things from scratch instead of always patching everything we build - and he compared software with one town in Ohio, who's name I forgot. Funny and making a very interesting point. The other talk I attended on the Saturday was the one on the peek at google's infrastructure - didn't learn much at that one - but the earth/map demo at the end about image recognition was just awesome. The announced but not organized GPG/PGP keysigning party and CACert signing went pretty well (I think I got around 10 new signatures).
On Friday I followed a talk in danish on the evolution of computing over the years, I stayed in that room just because I loved the name of the talk Sarfarissoq - the slides where a mixed of english and danish which help to follow and understand the talk. One other talk was about using google wave as a replacement for email to manage scrums and computer related projects in general. I must say I disagreed with the talker even though I think that having a few specific widgets in your wave might help to make it easier to use. But the two or three times I've tried to use wave myself it was a complete disaster.
The two Other talks I followed in the afternoon were email related. One was a presentation of a product developed in the Netherlands called Zarafa and which acts as an alternative to Exchange. It mimics perfectly the web UI of Outlook , works with outlook if you deploy a special mapi dll before using it. Of course if works with Thunderbird even if the screenshots were from the 2.x era. The second talk was way more interesting and was given by Ralf Hildebrandt & Patrick Koetter - who have been mail admins for mail.python.org. They explain the various techniques they developed and put in place in order for that server to have a good reputation. The higher the reputation the better deliverability. The interesting point in the talk was how some users would interact with their webmail ui. Some just use the spam button to remove the email from their inbox - but by doing so they also damage the reputation of the server sending the emails, solution found was to unsubscribe the user from the mailing list so he wouldn't mark messages from the mailing list as being spam. Same thing for people who can't unsubscribe to mailing lists - but a new standard is being worked on to make management of subscription to mailing list easy for users.
On top of that I got a two nice new T-shirts, one from the event the other from the OpenSolaris enthusiasts. Overall I had fun and managed to learn a few things at the same time. So I would qualify the event as being informative.

Pictures I took of the event :

So I'm traveling in Danemark this week. While I was there I've been trying to find out of print CDs from Greenlandic musicians. My reasoning behind that was that, as Greenland is still a Danish territory - and most of the young greenlanders and up studying in dk. Meaning that some of them could have sold some of their music and that I could find some of those old titles that I've been looking for, for more than a year now (In case you're not following, I'm looking for the Initial Zikaza CD, two unnuaq band CDs, and a few other rare stuff).
So I've been in Århus and Copenhagen and I visited some second hand shops carrying old CDs and old LPs - In the first I visited I found a very old CD from Rasmus Lyberth (made by Rasmus Lyberth). The second shop I visited, which had a way bigger collection of CDs, I asked the store owner - who looked at me and said : "huh, greenlandic music ?". I had a quick look and didn't find any title. In CPH I started in Accord.dk and was told no, we have nothing, but try the shop at the next corner. I went in it asked and was looked with a " Why would I have such music here", and I didn't look. I came back to that same shop the next day to have a look , but was unable to find anything. While the shop owner did recognized he knew about Sume, Julie and Rasmus Lyberth. He was very helpful. Then I ended up in another shop, whose shop keeper looked like an old grown up hippie. I started looking and then went to the shop owner and asked. Man was he nice - we started talking about music and Greenland and he gave me one website where I should contact a shop owner and then told me that back in the 60's he had participated in the making of a release of a group from Greenland called "The eskimos" and gave me a place where I could find the music. So It seems sume wasn't the first group of rock from Greenland as I though it was. Next step in my quest, get that earlier piece of Greenland music and organize a trip to Greenland to raid shop and try to find if they don't have any leftovers ....

We are going to release Lanikai 3.1b1. I'm looking for volunteers to work on a complete test using litmus. These are the areas that need to be tested :


  1. Install, shutdown, uninstall

  2. Folder Views

  3. Migration

  4. Updating Thunderbird

  5. Import

  6. Window configuration

  7. Toolbars and menus

  8. Account settings & Preferences (Options)

  9. IMAP accounts

  10. POP accounts (exclude Global Inbox)

  11. Gmail Accounts

  12. .Mac accounts

  13. Global inbox

  14. Mail composition

  15. Spell checker

  16. RSS account & subscriptions

  17. Newsgroups

  18. Message Aging

  19. Navigating and displaying messages

  20. Downloading and saving

  21. Image blocking

  22. Return receipts

  23. Proxies

  24. Offline, disk space

  25. Moving, copying, deleting messages

  26. Views and labeling messages

  27. Message filters

  28. Message search

  29. Address search

  30. Virtual folders

  31. Message Grouping

  32. Quicksearch

  33. Address books

  34. Junk mail

  35. Extensions

  36. Theme management

  37. Help

  38. Printing

  39. Master Passwords & password management

  40. Phishing, spoof detection

  41. Secure connections

  42. Digital signing, encrypting messages

  43. Software Update

  44. Find as you type (FAYT)/Quickfind

  45. Windows Search and Spotlight integration

Like I did in the past, can you send me a private email to ludovic@mozillamessaging.com, telling me on which os you would use to participate and three areas you would like to test ( I suggest that you make your choice in that way , 1st area something you care about and are eager to test, 2 area something you can easily test, 3rd something you never used before ) so I can organize things. The last two times this worked pretty well - except for some people ending up testing things they didn't care about. So i'm trying to make this better by letting you choose before hand. I still need to aim for 100% coverage so you still might end up testing areas you didn't ask for.

Fosdem 2010

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Like every year since 2004, this year I attended Fosdem. Like last year Fosdem was half work half fun - It's half work because I represent Mozillamessaging. I gave a talk, and the content of the talk is nicely summarized by my boss in his Thunderbird in 2010 blog post.
Then I gave a lightning talk on how to create a PGP key and sign emails - as I think signing emails is a nice feature that helps protect your identity - this was done in 5 minutes and I even made the audience laugh , when I started to generate random data by typing on the keyboard as I was running against time.
As usual I spent most of my time with Patrick the author of the enigmail add-on, and spend a lot of time in the mozilla room. I did go to some of the lightning talks (one was on certificates, the other on yet another linux distribution). I missed the very good talk about evil on the internet - but watched it since on youtube, a very interesting talk about fishing and how it works.
I attended the pgp signing party and got cold - next year I'll make sure to take my coat when attending the party:-). Of course I took many pictures around 146 but only kept only 17 to display. I met quite a few interesting people and had many interesting conversations - so on that social side it was very interesting. Plus I saw many ex-collegues and that was fun.

Me :Hello Nathan, you've been doing a lot of triage work over the last few weeks, could you introduce yourself to our readers (age, location ... things you think a releveant) ?

Nathan :Well, I'm a 21-year-old software developer, living in sunny California - I don't specialize in C++ code, unfortunately, though. As a number of Mozillians seem to be, I'm a committed Christian.

Me :How long have you been a Thunderbird user ? What was the first version of Thunderbird that you used ?

Nathan :I've been using Thunderbird ever since I switched over from Outlook 2007 in mid 2007 - I must have gotten a pretty brand-new version of 2.0, but I didn't notice that at the time

Me :From that answer am I concluding correctly that you are a windows user ?

Nathan :Indeed so - I've been reasonably happy with Windows for half my life, though I've dabbled in Linux a good bit also. I even find Vista to be tolerable.. whether out of misplaced stubbornness, or some other reason, I don't know.

Me :As said earlier you've been giving a much appreciated help over the last few weeks, can you tell us why ?

Nathan :Well, I really started to dig into Bugzilla, finding and commenting on bugs I'd noticed, during the 3.0 release cycle, starting about b2. Then in December last year, I realized I had some extra time, so I volunteered for Litmus testing. One thing led to another, and just a couple weeks ago, I started watching my first QA contacts (only half a dozen, right now), and here I am!

Nathan :That, at any rate, is the sequence. My motive, on the other hand, is mostly that I know I can track down problems in and around Thunderbird fairly effectively, and there's definitely a need for help, so I'm trying to fill that as much as I can.

Me :Indeed , was the learning curve time consuming ? Was it difficult to get into it ?

Nathan :There's a fair amount of policy and guideline material to read first, but I actually like the formalization of it - it makes common sense and experience a lot faster to get a hold of. Filing bugs is definitely an art form, as it requires so much communication in such a small space.
That said, I don't think it took me more than a few weeks of a few hours a week to get into triaging, if even that - maybe because I'm already a developer? And it's not difficult, really, it just takes some persistence.

Me :Do you enjoy doing it ?

Nathan :Most of the time, yes, it's quite satisfying. I suppose that's because I'm taking a load off other people (developers, other QA), and also because I'm helping the reporters in most cases. On the other hand, I see some genuinely unclear and frustrated reports, and that's troubling, partly because I can't do much to fix those - maybe no one can, in fact. But it all balances out, and I'm still on the plus side of the ledger.

Me :How much time do you spend helping the QA effort , say weekly ?

Nathan :A good question. Right now, I'm probably spending maybe 5-15 hours a week on it - I'd give you more specific data, but my time-logging program seems to have gone kaput, so that's just my best guess. If I had to, I could easily reduce it just by watching fewer components - maybe down to 2 hours a week, or even less. But that'd be no fun!

Me :Any advice you would like to give to someone pondering about giving a hand ?

Nathan :Dive in. Like Wikipedia says, be bold! Any mistake can be fixed. But do read the instructions first, and spend some time looking at existing bug reports before making major changes - it'll save a lot of embarrassment later.
Oh yes, and one more thing:
Get another email account for bugmail!

Me :Lol !
Are there areas where you have more interest in than other ? if so which one(s) ?

Nathan :Right now, I'm mostly focused on the visible front end and the IMAP support - perhaps because I have nearly two dozen IMAP accounts, and am definitely a power user. (Scratching the ol' itch, you know?) Some of TB's internals and soon-to-be internals (Gloda, Jetpack, STEEL, etc) strike me as really cool, but they don't touch me as directly; maybe soon, though!

Me :Power user heh ! Do you use extensions ? If so can you lists the one you use ?

Nathan :Sure thing! But there's quite a lot..

Nathan :Add-on Compatibility Reporter, Nightly Tester Tools, Lightning Nightly Updater

Nathan :Bugmail, CompactHeader, CustomizeHeaderToolbar, Display Mail User Agent

Nathan :Mail Redirect, Signature Switch, jsLib, TagZilla, The Real Reply

Nathan :Diccionario español Argentina, Addressbooks Synchronizer, Duplicate Contact Manager, FiltaQuilla, JunQuilla, Lightning, TaQuilla, ThunderNote, ToneQuilla

Nathan :I keep trying ThunderBrowse, but for some reason, I can never quite get used to it.. I guess I'll probably never be a Suite/SM type of person. Seems a good extension, though.

Nathan :Those are just the enabled ones.

Me :What version of Thunderbird do you actually run ?

Nathan :3.0.1 mostly; I have a copy of 2.0.0.23 (re-installed just the other day, in fact) for troubleshooting, and maybe a nightly or so scattered around for the odd regression test. I'll probably start using 3.1b1 soon after it comes out, though I'll still maintain a 3.0.x install for testing.

Me :Anything you would like to add ?

Nathan :Hmm.. well, I would like to mention, on behalf of every QA person in existence, that it really helps if you follow the instructions on the Bugzilla entry form.. really really.

Nathan :I'd also like to thank the whole MoMo team for hanging in on the long road to 3.0! It's a great release.

Me :Thanks for helping and taking the time to do this. Next Time I'm in Mountain View we'll go for a drink !

At the moment If you want to run a bleeding edge version of Thunderbird, you need to choose between running 3.2x and 3.1x builds. In fact, it appears that most people willing to run bleeding edge are now running 3.2x builds.

Whilst our most dedicated testers are running 3.2x builds, the engineering team is working on bringing features and bug fixes to the 3.1x branch. There's a discrepancy here. This means that the issues that might exist in 3.1x have a greater chance to be discovered after releases rather than before. It's easy to fix that, instead of running 3.2x builds, we would like our bleeding edge user to use the 3.1x builds (you can find them at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/). By doing this simple switch you'll help to make the 3.1 series a great series.

The people in charge of the quality of Thunderbird , are organizing on a weekly basis a quality team event. These event cover most of the area where quality is involved. This means testing new feature, testing pre-release version of the software, and maintaining the known bug database. If you come to think about it, none of these activities require to be done on a given date, so why bother with an "event" ?

First of All the event is virtual, it happens online - this is for practical reasons, it would be very difficult to have people living in Singapore, the US east coast or The Netherlands to meet and work in the same physical place. We do bother to have an event because sometimes when looking at a problem or at something new being able to ask other if they see the same thing is valuable, because they might know something you don't or might have encountered the same issue earlier etc ... The value of the event is communicating with other people doing the same thing as you do, but with a different perspective. This is specially true for people who want to join. Asking the people that have been doing quality for quite some time will be available to help new comers.

We are using a distributed chat system called IRC, which is available with dedicated clients or through a web interface. As all the people available for a chat are not always in front of the chat window, you might not get an immediate answer. Typing a name a person being in the chat room will help you get noticed and get a faster answer. And don't be afraid to ask or participate , it's not that difficult.

Now that you know how those events take place, you might be interested in figuring out the subject that is going to be going on during the event. We publish a wiki page for each event that take place, and we have an other page referencing all past and future events (well most of the future events are being announced on a weekly basis). This week for example will be focused on duplicate events. I'm also announcing the events on Thunderbird dev mailing list.

I'm wondering if going to Opensource day is worth it. They are having they Call for papers right now. Anybody willing to share how it was the previous years ?

After reading this interesting article, I decided to figure out If I needed a new key and if it was worth the trouble to start a new stronger key.
My needs are much simpler than the debian project's. I don't sign software and I don't encrypt email much. Over the last 5 years I might have sent and received maybe 4 encrypted emails. I'm not a big fan of encryption per se. I am however convinced that signing emails is a good way to fight impersonation. Something that spammer tend to over use these days. So my primary need is to sign emails. For that I don't really need a stronger key - I just need to make GnuPG's default a bit stronger.

I've edited my my gpg.conf file and added the following to it :

enable-dsa2
personal-digest-preferences SHA256 RIPEMD160 SHA1


This ensure that the signing algorithm is stronger - without going through the hassle of creating a new key.

Dear lazy web,

I'm looking for a keyboard with the following :


  • Bluetooth

  • Mac Keys layout

  • trackpad - as I hate moving my hand to get the mouse

If I can choose a french layout that would be a +. Google isn't really helping there.

And are a Enigmail user - please update to the latest enigmail nightly. As previous versions or some previous nightlies (from a few weeks to a few month) , might crash Thunderbird. Actually we believe that our top crashers is due to incompatible versions of enigmail being installed.

From an email to the enigmail mailing list :
I am starting to prepare a new version of Enigmail for Thunderbird 3.0.
I think that after more than 8 years of development, it's about time to
finally call it "1.0"!

For this, of course I'd like to have as many translations as possible
:-) Please send your translations directly to me. In case you don't know
how to translate Enigmail, instructions can be found here:
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/download/langpack.php#instruct

Attached is the diff file between v0.96.0 and the next version -- as you
can see it's really not much. In case your language wasn't updated from
v0.95.7 to v0.97.0, I have also added the previous versions' diff.

Please het in touch with patrick if you want to give a hand.

If you are crashing or having error messages while trying to send email, and that you are using a shredder nightly, and using enigmail to sign/encrypt your emails, consider updating to the latest enigmail nightlies which fixes those issues.

I'm going to start a new meme - as I find these funny and sometimes useful.

Rules :


  1. Copy the rules in the beginning or at the end of your post

  2. Link to the person who tagged you

  3. Give the 5 websites you find useful, or that you use the most. Try to explain why !

  4. Tag 5 people

  5. The meme doesn't need to stay in english :-)

My Five favorite/most useful websites are :


  • flickr, as photography is my passion , I couldn't share my pictures so easily without flickr.

  • Le monde, a French newspaper, a good way to stay in touch with what's going on in my own country.

  • upcoming , a nice service to find what's going on around , easily share it with friends.

  • google - without which the internet wouldn't be what it is today I mainly use maps and search

  • This website, which gives me the freedom to express myself and broadcast it to the world.

Now the fun part, people I'm tagging :
Flore , because becoming a mother doesn't imply stopping blogging.
Stéphane, because he uses the internet in a very different way than I do.
Allan , because he's moved on the other side of the pond and as been quiet since.
Smokey, because without him Camino wouldn't be in such a good shape.
Davida, for his vision.

If everything goes well By next week we should be building Thunderbird 3.0 release candidate 1. Once that version of Thunderbird is ready it needs to be tested. The testing effort is nothing but reading, doing reading and pressing buttons on a Web page. As there are good chances for that build to become the final 3.0, the Thunderbird Quality Assurance (QA) team wants to make sure that this build is tested to the maximum extend possible. For that we are organizing a week long effort to cover the Full Functional Test (FFT) suite Thunderbird has.

A FFT is made up of 45 areas of tests. Each area containing from one to thirty tests. Each test looks like the screen-shot below :
A test in litmus
As you can see there are two columns. One containing what to do on the left. While the right column contains what to verify. The lower part of the screen being used to report how the the product behaved with regards to the test. Nothing really complicated.

As stated above there are a good amount of testing. To test Thunderbird 3.0 RC as extensively as possible the QA Team is looking for volunteers that are willing to devote from 20 minutes to an hours to do some tests. The idea is to divide work. Instead of having everybody concentrating on the Installation phase - we can have people looking at some parts of Thunderbird that are not tested so often. To Participate to this effort you will need :


  • From 20 minutes to an hour.

  • An account on Litmus - the tools where the test are and the result will be.

  • An account on bugzilla - so you can report bugs if you find some.

  • To send me an email (see below) so I can divide the work and let you know what to tests.


As you might have noticed I'm asking no more than one hour, while I said the effort would last a week. This is to give you future participants more flexibility on when you can/should do your tests. It will also let myself and a few other plenty of time to run as much test as possible. And lastly we will offer our help online.

I'm asking people to sign up so I can divide the work, and send them an individual email when the builds are ready. That email will contain precise instructions on what to test, on how to get in touch with the QA team if you have an issue while testing and don't know what to do. To sign up send me an email at ludovic@mozillamessaging.com , with the following information :


  • What OS you'll be testing on (we need a few more mac users and linux users btw)

  • What kind of account you have (ie. POP, NNTP, RSS, IMAP)

  • Anything you would like to test in particular (your interests)

Testing now is the best way for you to enjoy the new features of Thunderbird 3.0 and to make sure the things you care about are working.

Can you introduce yourself abit to our readers :
How old are you ?

37 years old (too old I know :-( )

Where do you live ?

Calabria in southern Italy

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?
How long have you been using it ?

Thunderbird is my default (and only) email-client since 2003.

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Windows XP

What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?

Now I'm interested at all areas, anyway at the beginning I was
interested in particularly .at address book component and tabs

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

I love TB and I like to try to improve it , as I can

Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?

It's very funny... and instructive.

What do you think about TB3 ?
Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Yes a little bit... and I like it too much

How do you use Tb yourself ?
Extensions ? - Which one ?

I use TB in my environment works (I'm a developer in my real life).

My extension are:


Anything you would like to add ?

Thanks to Mozilla and Thunderbird QA boys.

Me:
So can you introduce yourself and gives us your age , the place you are from ,  the OS you use thunderbird on daily ?

nshopik:
my name is Nikolay Shopik, I'm 27 years old was born and grow up in Moscow, Russia. I'm on XP but have plans upgrade to Windows 7 as soon it will available

Me:
How long have you been using Thunderbird , what do you use it for (Email, Rss) ?

nshopik:
If I'm not mistaken since end of 2006 or early 2007, I only using Email. I was doing RSS in stand-alone app till 2004 and replace it with web based rss readers.

nshopik:
forgot to add I'm reading news too

Me:
Now let's get to the QA specifics part ....

Me:
How long have you participated at triaging Thunderbird MailNews bugs ?

nshopik:
I've been "signed up" in April 2008

Me:
can you described your sign-up process ? was it complicated ? was it hard to become an active member ?

nshopik:
My first bugs dates back to 2007, so I know little bit. Well it's not so difficult at all. I have done QA in my past for my own programs and friends of mine. Only problem you will face to be active member is free time

Me:
How much time do you spend helping Thunderbird quality assurance ?

nshopik:
When I was started in 2008 it took about of 8-12 hours per week. Now I have little bit lower available time and change my priorities on component specific bugs this takes no more 3 hours per week

Me:
Which components do you have special bonds with ?

nshopik:
I'm mostly interested in enterprise/universities environment specific bugs.You know every year TB is losing more and more regular users who tend to use web-based email. They already have problems understand all type of technologies and to know what IMAP or SMTP servers are and what its hostnames. People can barely remember their passwords contain 8 charters.

Me:
nshopik:  this mean Ldap, kerberos . Is it fun participating ? what do you get from helping (joy , pride) ?

nshopik:
Yeah - LDAP, Kerberos, Certeficated based auth, Autoconfiguration via MCD and core IMAP, SMTP protocols. I'm really enjoying helping resolving issues, there some of pride. I'd like to help someone to resolve issue, this encourage people to suggest such product to others instead switching app. And others could be another user or who can even help with providing patch to resolve issue. Also I...
...don't like monopoly of Microsoft email-based products in enterprise segment. But I'm not MS hater I was Microsoft ONLY IT guy in past.

Me:
So do you feel like Thunderbird 3 is something that you've helped build ? do you feel like it's a bit your baby ?

nshopik:
Definitely. Yeah little bit.

Me:
Do you use extensions ? if yes can you list them ?

nshopik:
Not much, nightly tester tools, gcontactsync, that's it.

Me:
Anything you would like to add ?

nshopik:
I wish enterprises spend more resources on open source app like TB instead of throwing it out just after they find out it doesn't support just one feature or has some imporant bug for them unfixed. They do have much more money and/or money to do this.
and/or manpower to do this

Me:
Thanks a lot for your time

nshopik:
Sure, always welcome

Just received an email from Thawte :

Dear Ludovic Hirlimann, Over the past several years, security compliance requirements have become more restrictive, while the technology infrastructure necessary to meet these requirements has expanded greatly. Despite our strong desire to continue providing the Thawte Personal E-mail Certificate and Web of Trust services, the ever-expanding standards and technology requirements will outpace our ability to maintain these services at the high level of quality we require. As a result, Thawte Personal E-Mail Certificates and the Web of Trust will be discontinued on November 16, 2009 and will no longer be available after that date.

Deciding to conclude these services was a difficult decision for us to bear, specifically because of the community that has been built around these products over the years.

To express our gratitude and sincere appreciation for being a part of our Thawte community, we would like to offer you up to $100.00 off the purchase price of our SSL and/or code signing certificates.

If you would like to take advantage of our offer, please forward this email to our sales department. Their contact details are listed at the foot of this message. Please note that this offer expires on November 16, 2009.

We have also made a special arrangement with VeriSign regarding replacing your personal email certificate. VeriSign's exclusive offer to you is for a FREE 1-year replacement personal email certificate - a $19.95 value. This offer will be open for 2 months after the service is discontinued and will no longer be available after January 16, 2010. Simply follow appropriate link below to request your certificate:

That email is not even signed - while the service was about digitally signing emails. But let's see the nice point in the email, they give you an alternative which is free for the first year. A good initiative, plus if you used to be involved actively in the Thawte web of trust, you get a free bonus.
I browsed quickly on the verisign website and it took me a while to locate the equivalent cert (and that page states that Apple Safari is a compliant email client).
The bad part is the lost of the community aspect of Thawte's certificates - the web of trust is gone. I was unable to find a web of trust mentioned on verisign's website.

If you are looking for other alternative - I know of Two. The first one is from Startcom, which offer the same Free certs Thawte will cease to offer. StartCom also offers Web of trust services using http://www.startssl.org/ as a website. The other good news about startcom is that the founder is involved with Thunderbird's qa process.

The other is the of course Pretty Good Privacy, Gnu Privacy Guard :-) which is based on the web of trust concept.

Next Thursday , the Thunderbird quality assurance team is conducting an online social event. The goal of that event is to migrate some volunteer users from their current 2.0.0.x Thunderbird profile, to the new 3.x series. If you are running older versions like 1.5 or 1.X series, you are welcome to join too :-)

The QA team wants to find out any issue(s) that might come up when people are upgrading, so the developers have time to fix them before we ship 3.0 final.

We are doing this on a specific date in order to provide support to the people who want to participate and figure out with them how to fix, report the issues they are having post-migration. This will happen online through a web based real time chat (the same discussion will be available on irc in #tb-qa)

So we are looking for brave souls willing to give a try to Thunderbird 3.0b4 and actually running Thunderbird 1, 1.5, 2.0 ...... so if you use any of those versions to :


  • Read newsgroups

  • Read Feeds

  • Pop email

  • Imap email

  • or any combination of the above


Consider joining the event and come enjoy the new features of the Thunderbird 3.0 series (even if it's still a beta).


This event will be held on Thursday October the 15th - The team as set up a web page with more information. So write down this date on your calendars and join us next Thursday and switch from older versions of TB to the latest.

If you are wondering the team as switched a long time ago - we still have a few machines that we will migrate along side other people who come and participate.

  • A very nice album with : Mariina Unnuaq Band Ulf Fleischer G-60 Zikaza Ole Kristiansen Century Schoolbook Taaq

    Two tracks per artist



Quick reminders

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Email address ?

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I wonder why ludovic.news@gmail.com never receives any email.

The first test builds of Thunderbird 3.0b4 are available here (hint for windows users they are in the unsigned directory.)
Along many bug fixes and improvements the major new feature is the way Thunderbird handles search and search results :

faceted_search

For a full list of what's new, please take a look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Thunderbird_3_for_users

We need our users to give it a try. Any bugs found with these builds should be marked blocking bug 515237.

If Thunderbird crashes, make sure to send the crash report and make sure to add a comment (as those comments really help).

If you could monitor Thunderbird's memory usage and report if it looks ok or not. For report please make sure to monitor Real+Virtual+ ... not just real memory.

OpenSuse users can fetch it from the mozilla:beta repository.

<a href="http://www.joost.com/33dil6a/t/Tekzilla-Firefox-Safe-Mode">Tekzilla - Firefox: Safe Mode</a>

Interview conducted over email with Gary Kwong.


Can you introduce yourself a bit to our readers :

Hi! I'm Gary Kwong, now a 3rd year college student at National University of Singapore. I come from Hong Kong, and I love traveling around the world to meet people and visit new places.

What age you are ?

I'm 23 this year, I started touching Mozilla stuff in-depth when I just started high school, back when Thunderbird just branched out from the old Suite in 2003.

Where do you live ?

Singapore for school, Hong Kong for summer (usually).

What's your relationship with mozilla and thunderbird in particular ?

I started off creating Thunderbird installers in 2003, then started The Rumbling Edge in 2004. QA gradually increased since then, and there's nothing more fun than squishin' bugs. :)

How long have you been using it ?

4-5 years - Thunderbird taught me more about the email stuff (POP, IMAP, SMTP, eml format, etc.) way more than school did, wrt. the practical usage aspect. Even the QA process came out of Thunderbird too - it makes sense when generalizing and applying to other products in the IT industry (with some modifications, of course).

What os/platform do you use it on ?

Usually on the Mac Leopard, but recently on Ubuntu Linux too. I've touched Thunderbird on WinXP and Gentoo Linux as well.

What are your area's of interest when doing Quality assurance ?

Squishin' bugs - and especially being able to help others triage and resolve bugs too, so we have more manpower. Second opinions are sometimes needed.

Why do you participate in the quality effort ?

It's part of the grand open source crusade - my development skills aren't as professional as some others, so I found my calling in QA.

Why ? What do you get from it ? Is it fun ?

I find it exciting when I get a crash. No, seriously, it shows that anybody, as long as "If you put your mind into it, you can accomplish anything." (-quote from Back to the Future)

I learn a lot from the QA process, the bug filing procedure(s) and subsequent remedial action (be it a patch by others, or otherwise). I hope others can learn through QA too - it opens up doors to their lives, as they interact with people around the world working towards a common goal. One might become a better person, learn more skills, meet more people, etc.

(yeah, this sounds very philosophical but that's the way it is)

What do you think about TB3 ?

It's a long time comin'. There's more coming after that, I'm sure, so it's not like TB3's the end of the world. However, our route to TB3 has been long and hard, so I hope it won't have to go through the same large obstacles again.

Do you think you own part of it because you do QA ? Do you like it ?

Sure - being part of a vision that other people around the world also have, is a satisfying experience. :)

How do you use Tb yourself ?

Shredder - feel free to shred my bugmail (it has only eaten up some mail once, that was a few months back), else stable with many Gbs of data in various mailboxes. I use Archive often, but seldom touch Filters / Spam filtering.

Extensions ? - Which one ?

Bugmail, DOMi, Gloda Plugin: Bugzilla, Lightning, MozMill (it's the future in automated QA UI testing, folks!), Google Calendar provider, ViewAbout.

Anything you would like to add ?

Yeah! Thunderbird QA welcomes contributors from all walks of life, with all sorts of skills. As long as you have the passion and the willingness to learn, there's sure to be something available for you to be a part of.

As I explained a some days ago, emails can be signed and/or encrypted. To build your web of trust it's nice to participate to Key signing parties. In order to make this efficient for the people attending Eu mozcamp 2009, I've decided to organize a Key-signing party during the event. We will sign keys Saturday October 3rd during the afternoon coffe break at 15:00 CET.
You will need a few things to participate :


  • a key of course

  • an ID (passport is prefered)

  • a pen

  • a printed version of the keyring (see below on how to get it)

  • Follow the instructions given when the event will take place.

Getting a key is explained in gnupg's manual and all over the web.
You'll probably already have an ID with you as you'll be traveling to Praha (Prague) to attend the mozilla event.

To create the list of keys and participant we will use the biglumber service. I've chosen to use it both to try it and experiment with it as a key-signing service.
You'll need to register with the service this is achieved by uploading you public key there. Uploading the public key will create an account tied to the main email of your key. Once your account is created you will need to add your key to the event keyring. As other participant will do that the information needed to do the party will grow on it's own.
Keys submitted after October 1st 12:00 CET (Central European Time) - might not end up being signed by some participants. I'm setting this deadline so people have reasonable time to add their key, and time to print the keyring before coming to Prague.

Before leaving for Prague, you'll need to print the keyring and bring it with you. We will use keyring listings for the signing party.

As you can see the keyring already has my key, and the author of enigmail's key. Enigmail is the extension used by Thunderbird and Seamonkey to sign/encrypt emails.

Wayne as been dealing with many aspects of QA, he organized events and structured qa for a long time. His irc nickname is wsmwk, mine is _Tsk_, the interview was conducted over irc. I'll present other community members here in the next coming weeks and month.

_Tsk_:
Hi wsmwk , can you present yourself a little bit and tell us :


  • Your age

  • The Main OS you use

  • And How long you've been a Thunderbird user

wsmwk:


  • age 50 - on top of the hill!

  • currently using win XP and Vista

_Tsk_:
How long have you been involved with Bugzilla and Thunderbird ?

wsmwk:
Thunderbird user since 2004 and before that the Suite and Netscape and it's ancestors.
Filed first bug in 2001. But became more active in 2005 when seeking an address book sync solution for Thunderbird.

_Tsk_:
How much time do you spend doing some triage per week ?

wsmwk:
It doesn't seem like much because it's a fun challenge. But probably 20-30 hours average per week

_Tsk_:
How big is your mailboxe(s) ? do you also use Thunderbird for News/RSS ?

wsmwk:
urk - TB crash
I have about 20,000 bugmail messages of bugmail, about 100meg of space of all mail related to mozilla. Total message store is ~1.5 gig, not including news.


wsmwk:
I do use Thunderbird news, preferring reading via news to google groups. (But I do miss my tin news reader)

_Tsk_:
I was a slrn user :-)

wsmwk:
RSS only for a few essentials. And worth noting, I use filtering on both news and RSS.

_Tsk_:
What do you find funny in the challenge of doing qa for Thunderbird ?

wsmwk:
The fun in the challenge is the satisfaction of ultimately helping someone (or the product) by getting a resolution to a problem, and of course the process of getting to the resolution - both the intellectual/sleuthing challenge of the detective work, and working with others all over the world.


_Tsk_:
are you still running 2.x are only running thunderbird nightlies at the moment ? Besides achieving a great work in cleaning up bugzilla last year - what is your best memory involving QA and Thunderbird ?


wsmwk:
Until mid 2008 I ran both version 2 and nightlies (on a controlled basis, not auto update) - on different machines. But for a year now I have used trunk builds exclusively.
A few great memories:


  1. helping QA a release of bugzilla a few years back with the great folks that drive bugzilla,

  2. helping to get palmsync working for Thunderbird 2

  3. managing QA for TB alpha 2 release which was led by Mark Banner - building off of Gary's work in alpha 1


And various odd fun a few years back with things like threadmanager, and timer problems affecting chatzilla

_Tsk_:
Do you feel that the upcoming Thunderbird 3 is like one of your creation/baby ?

wsmwk:
Yes indeed. Much like creating and performing great music with other people (a challenging but rewarding process), improving Thunderbird with other people to build a substantially improved and more stable product is quite stimulating. And I am anxious to see many other people get to use it.

_Tsk_:
Do you consider yourself like an advanced Thunderbird user ? or more like a normal average user ?

wsmwk:
Advanced, yes. Although I don't use or understand all aspects of the product, I do tend to push products I use to their limit. In doing so, and through helping other people, I know more tricks and bugs than I care to think about.

_Tsk_:
Are you a extension user ?

wsmwk:
The short answer is yes. The long answer is that's an problematic story. As a tester, and trunk user one prefers to run with no extensions, or as few as possible both for ones own stability and to be assured that when you see a problem you know it's the product and not an extension. But running trunk as production basically makes it impossible to not run extensions.

_Tsk_:
can you list the extensions you use ?

wsmwk:
The ones I run are all highly stable ones (even though many are force enabled using tester tools): Addressbooks Synchronizer, Bugmail, Bugzilla Link Grabber, Clippings, Console², Crash Me Now!, FiltaQuilla, glodaquilla, JunQuilla, MozMill, Nightly Tester Tools, ProfileSwitcher, Restart Thunderbird, STEEL, TaQuilla, TEBE, ViewAbout.

_Tsk_:
Do you report a lot of bugs yourself ?

wsmwk:
Honorable mentions that I've also run in the past year: Display Mail User Agent, JS Console output redirector, Show InOut, and ThreadBubble,
Roughly 450 bugs since 2001, almost all of them in the last 4 years.

_Tsk_:
I think I don't have no more question, anything you would like to add ?

wsmwk:
Two things to add.
I wish more people understood how easy and fun it is to be involved.
And I'm looking forward to a great Thunderbird 3 release, and then address book syncing capability in Thunderbird.next
I missed an important extension - quotecollapse

I formatted a bit to make this chat readable

Once upon a time, a long time ago I discovered something called Pretty Good Privacy (pgp in short) and tried to use it on my Atari to communicate with a friend - that really never worked.
10 years later I installed gnu-privacy guard and started using it so sign emails. The idea at that time was - that if every email was signed then we could easily filter for spam. I have encrypted a few emails - but my correspondence doesn't need to be generally encrypted. With signed emails we would come back to emails without spam - a useful tool to communicate. So I started trying to install gpg on my families computers so we could all signed our emails. That failed - they didn't see the point. And I myself got tired of having all my emails look like spam as they were all starting like :
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

So I stopped using gpg and signing emails as I didn't see the point in putting those in my emails and making them harder to read for their recipient.
I recently picked up interest in signing email again, as there are a few ways to do it that are not intrusive for the other users. Both methods are involving S/mime, one will work with certificates. The other works with pgp. So I've started signing my email again with my key. This let's me know for sure if the email I'm getting is signed and I can encrypt emails containing sensible information easily (say I need to share a password, I will then encrypt the email.).

So why do I use gpg over certificates ?


  • Setting up gpg is way easier than a certificate at least for my geek mind. Certificates are the solution for big corporation where HR/IT can ensure a proper process for certificates. For my personal use or for my family domain it would be too much of a hassle.

  • One feature that is provided easily with gnupg is the web of trust, which will let me know if/how I can trust the sender of that specific email (email as to be signed of course).

  • Last but not least I can use my key to sign software

.

Today my ISP was down for a few hours. I work from home - so having a connection is important for me and my work.
This is very annoying when some of the work you need to accomplish happens online. It's not the first time, but last time it was over six months ago and I had kind of forgotten.
Next time I'd like to have a backup plan. I have a few options :

  • Add an ADSL line (cheapest as can be.).
  • Get one of those 3G dongles.
  • Figure out where I can get Free Wifi in my area and move there when my line as an issue.
I'm wondering which of these solutions I should adopt. Any ideas, sharing of experience is welcome.

Last week the Mozilla Messaging Team met in Vancouver for a All-Hand. This was a good opportunity for me to take pictures of the people that work for Momo. If you want to have a look at what some of the people in #maildev look like here's your chance : (and yes it's in Flash, bash flickr for that).

Update: for planet readers the flash slideshow is not visible you'll need to come to the blog entry to see it :-(

Like me you are probably very annoyed when the application that you are using crashes. This usually means loosing work, or loosing data. When this happens, the system or the application usually launches a crash reporter - this will gather information and send it to the developers. With that developers will be able to try to figure out what is going wrong, or how you are using the application in a way that they don't.
But some time they can't figure it out for a lot of reasons. One thing you as a user can do to improve that is write a small comment before sending the bug report. That little comment should say what you where doing when the crash occurred. For you filling in that little box and telling us what happens is maybe 30 seconds , for us in qa, for the developers it can be a very good indication on how to reproduce the bug and thus fix it.

So next time your application crashes take the time to fill in a comment before sending the crash report.

Over the last few months I've been traveling a bit and I've started using website that aim at making the process easier. I've dent a few things already when I started using tripit a few months back, in the last month and a half I've been traveling quite a bit, to Thailand, Finland and Canada. I've invited my linkedin contacts to join tripit as I like the idea of sharing my work related trip with present and past co-worker. The other point that made me invite was the fabulous feature of plans@tripit.com.
This feature is the feature that will make me continue to use tripit.com. For every trip I book, I usually end-up having an email confirmation in my mailbox. If I forward this email - it's most likely going to be processed by tripit. Trip it will then create a "trip" with the dates and then write down a summary with flight numbers, hotel reservations, and phone numbers. So before boarding I can print that and have everything on one sheet of paper. I could also synch that information to my iphone (bat as I don't own an iphone, for the moment I don't). I can also export all that data to a calendar - that I can then synch to my nokia phone. You can also see where you friends are going, make sure your trips are not shared. For each destination, you'll get the wikipedia page with the best images from flickr tagged with the name of the place you are going to visit. And if you wish to figure out what is going on tripit propose a few upcoming event from the eventful website - so if you feel like attending a Jazz concert while staying on the other side of the planet, you might find where to go.

I had been using dopplr before I used tripit. My network on dopplr is smaller than on tripit, but overall dopplr offer way more features that I use and will use than tripit, and I can easily get the benefits of tripit ported to dopplr.
The first thing I get from dopplr is the ability to import calendars. The first thing I've set up is a bridge between tripit and dopplr - this let's me use the plans@tripit feature and get the trip imported and showing on dopplr. This feature also let's me import events I've subscribed to on the upcoming.yahoo.com website. So with dopplr I can aggregate some of the calendars that are exported from other websites I use. Of course it would be simpler If I could use plans@dopplr.com.
One other thing I like about dopplr is that I can use my OpenID to authenticate on the website - I don not need to give more credential and more personal information to use the website.
Besides calendar integration, the other feature that I love about dopplr, is that dopplr let's me add and publish content. I can easily add , restaurants, hotels and place to visit for any destination dopplr knows about. For some of these destination, it seems that dopplr has partnered with lonely planet and has imported some places and tips and trick from that website. One other benefits of having places is that for every place know by dopplr you can find a specific tag. That tag can be used to tag pictures for instance - and on flickr , this will add a little badge on the picture page. So people seeing your picture will be able to figure out details about it (These can be phone number, url for a website - reviews). I also like the fact That I can easily add a mini-review for a restaurant for instance. One thing I dislike in the current version of the website is that places are paginated : say that for instance you are looking at the City of Vancouver , British Columbia and looking at restaurants, if there are three pages of restaurant you need to go thru the three pages (maybe, if you are unlucky) to find it if it's on the website, it would be nice if these places (restaurants, hotels, sites to see) would be searchable from within the place I'm looking at.
Dopplr is also present on the iphone and integrates with both linkedin and Xing (tripit does linkedin only.). The social features in dopplr are richers as I can see who in my network visited the place I'm looking at - I then can fire them an email to figures a few things out. When I'm preparing a trip I use dopplr to see where to stay and eat, read reviews, ask questions - use their flickr integration to figure out what's to see and how other fellow photographer took the pictures.
As to dealing with trip details I use tripit make sure that the trip is exported in a calendar so I get it on dopplr. If I feel like attending a concert or anything else in that vein I'll have a look at both tripit and upcoming.

Yesterday while I was flying from Amsterdam to Vancouver and discovered that I could send SMS and/or Emails from within the MD-11, using the individual console that is provided to each passenger. So the process of sending an email goes like :

  1. Take out the console controller
  2. Navigate to the SMS / email item
  3. Pass your credit card into the console
  4. decide between SMS/email
  5. Write your email with the virtual keyboard
  6. Send it
each item sent is factured $2.5. The emails are supposed to be short like sms messages (not really clear on that). So I wrote a message to my self to see how it worked ! Using the virtual keyboard is clumsy, as you use the four direction arrows to select each letter. The virtual keyboard doesn't offer any option to support accentuated letters.

So it seems the message is first sent to a gateway and then to the users, the headers look like :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623508wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.78.19 with SMTP id f19mr1236114ybl.182.1249838547080;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:27 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 5si6771352gxk.115.2009.08.09.10.22.25;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: Message from a passenger onboard a KLM flight
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 13:22:24 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090809172224.AC1D1662F@post1.aircom.aero>

Your message has been submitted for delivery.
Message delivered to Email Gateway

------- OriginalMessage -------
To: yyyy@xxxxx.net,me@xxxxx.net
From: me@xxxxx.net
CC:
Subject: depuis l'avion
Body Text: ams-yvr coucou
- Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft

An then the headers for the full message look like :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs623507wej;
Sun, 9 Aug 2009 10:22:26 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.151.46.3 with SMTP id y3mr2710025ybj.133.1249838545258;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:25 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
Received: from mconnect.aero (mx3.gmsmail.com [57.250.220.30])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 3si5665141gxk.105.2009.08.09.10.22.23;
Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:22:24 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) client-ip=57.250.220.30;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.250.220.30 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of 300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero) smtp.mail=300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero
X-SITA-SMTP-ID: QhhOXlML62FUQS9A+yvT2g
X-Junk-Score: 2 [X]
X-SpamCatcher-Score: 2 [X]
Received: from [10.4.143.48] (HELO sms-gw1jao.prod1.gmsmail.com)
by imail1jao.mconnect.aero (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.2.13)
with ESMTP id 37964392; Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000
Message-ID: <3190310.1249838544256.JavaMail.root@192.168.220.37>
From: ludovic hirlima <300411GDWWZDYB@message.aircom.aero>
To: xxx@xxxxx.net, me@xxxxx.net
Subject: depuis l'avion
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: inflight@message.aircom.aero
Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:22:27 +0000

The good news is that you don't get charged if the message is not sent before you land.

Update

As noted in the comments I had not obfuscated my email address , I'm now getting spammed - using that email that I had not obfuscated !!! here's the spam :

Delivered-To: me@xxxxx.net
Received: by 10.216.17.200 with SMTP id j50cs678458wej;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:15 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.150.215.20 with SMTP id n20mr9291591ybg.135.1249943234261;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:14 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path:
Received: from post1.aircom.aero ([57.77.136.81])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 4si10896287gxk.114.2009.08.10.15.27.12;
Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:27:13 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) client-ip=57.77.136.81;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 57.77.136.81 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of Fly-KLM@aircom.aero) smtp.mail=Fly-KLM@aircom.aero
From: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
Reply-To: mrsamkwame@gmail.com
To: me@xxxxx.net
Subject: GOOD DAY
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:27:11 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <20090810222711.E9C3E6661@post1.aircom.aero>

From Sampson Kwame Dear Friend, My name is Sampson Kwame I am the regional manager of Standard chartered bank of Ghana tarkwa branch in the western region of - Message sent on board KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. You can reply during the flight; this will be delivered directly to the sender's seat on board the aircraft

Unlike previous Years. I came of open community camp a bit more this year. I gave a talk on the Mozilla ecosystem on Monday and listened to a few others.
One nice talk was about how the sysadmins at optiver are using Django and Puppet, to do some asset management. The kind of asset management they do is geared towards unix/linux based servers. The information is gathered with templates from Puppet and feed into a custom build DB - django is used to access the data in the db and feed nagios and custom admin scripts. Very interesting way of doing asset management.

started yesterday. I'll probably be working from there most of the week. Want to talk about Thunderbird, QA, Mozilla, just drop by and I'll listen.

Build1 can be grabbed, and it needs love from Thunderbird users, in particular from pop3/Pop users.

If you take the time to download the build and find issues with it - make sure to file a bug in bugzilla and mark that bug blocking bug 489128

Like last year and the year before I'll be attending the Open Community Camp that is organized near Leiden, The Netherlands.
This year however I will be speaking about what mozilla.org is and provides , it's missions etc .....
If you are involved with Thunderbird (Mvl, MacMel, ...), I'd love to have a beer face to face with you guys, I think the Camp is a great place to meet you. What do you think.

I use Jaikoz to tags my mp3 and make sure I have a clean music collection. In the last two weeks I had issue retrieving PUID from musicip.

Musicip had a few server issue as their MusicIP Mixer was unable to analyze the new tracks I wanted to submit. That got fixed. I even used MusicIP Mixer to listen to new songs.


  • While last.fm bases recommendation on what people listen, musicip does it by analyzing the music - results are different but it's another good way to discover new artists).

  • Their iTunes plugins is only available on windows.

  • Would also be nice to have a songbird add-on.

So back to my issue - I could not retrieve those puid that are unique to a piece of music :-(. I thought It was a bug in Jaikoz - but I updated Jaikoz twice during that time period. I then into reading the documentation to log what was going on. I then discovered that jaikoz had a local database. I removed it and Jaikoz was able to retrieve the Puid !

For those who are wondering why Thunderbird 3.0 b3 is not out yet the explanation is available at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dmose/archives/2009/05/thunderbird_3_beta_4_added_1.html

This upcoming Thursday the QA team of Thunderbird is organizing a Linux Bug day - we will try to target and add information to bugs that affect the linux platform. With the help of packages maintainers from Fedora, OpenSuse and Ubuntu, people using these distribution will be able to install a nightly build of Thunderbird using the systems package management tools. The bugs that we would like people to comment on are in the UNCO state - meaning - they need more information (crash stats, steps to reproduce, etc ...) for to be able to be fixed by the developers.

More information on the event and how to participate is available at : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-05-14

So yesterday Joost released a new version of jigsaw. Jigsaw is a music box that uses last.fm to aggregate metadata - and figure out what music video you might enjoy (it find music I really like when I use my last.fm account). So now when last.fm does not play what I want I can use Jigsaw. This new version as a few more control than the previous one. Things that are still missing :


  • scrobbling what I listen to via joost to last.fm

  • being able to use identi.ca (identi.ca as a joost group)instead of twitter

  • link to my joost account so what I listen to goes to my joost feed

Since last Friday, auto-configuration as been enabled in Thunderbird nightlies. This means that configuring an email account will just be - in most cases - your email , your password and your name and Thunderbird is going to "guess" the settings. Sometimes guessing works - sometimes it does not. When it does not we get the information from a list that we maintain. Unfortunately we can't have account for all Internet service providers all over the world - this is why I'm writing all this, you can help us by making the list bigger, adding your ISP will help (especially with security settings for authentication.) Instructions and list are editable.

So the release date for Thunderbird 3.0b3 the last beta of Thunderbird 3.0 is approaching. This means that features are landing, and that we need to make sure that everything works correctly. To do so two things need to happen, first the new features needs to be tested on a broader scale than the development team can do (more hardware combination, servers combination, more extensions etc ... ) and at the same time nothing else should regress.

To achieve the first task - we have organized a Testday. It's a day where we invite everybody to test the new features recently added to Thunderbird. Why do we do it on a specific day ? It's easy to gather people on one day. It's easier to give people interested in joining the test effort information on what's new, how to test the new features and describe them. It's also a great way to have different people testing the same part to talk to one another. We traditionally do that on irc on #bugday. I think the communication while testing is important for at least two things - it helps you get the help of other people if you are having some issues while testing. It might help you file your first bug - if you are unsure of things just ask some people will be glad to help. As a way to communicate more efficiently, mozillamessaging as setup a web base chat, if you don't want to use irc just point you browser to chat.mozillamessaging.com and talk to us there.
Thursday April the 23rd 2009 is the day where the new features are going to be tested. Information on what will be theres to be tested is visible here.

To make sure that Thunderbird 3.0b3 will be of the highest quality available we will also run a series of tests, that have been run for alpha1 and for beta2. We don't organize an event for that - because it takes much more time to do regression testing than testing the new features. To participate to this testing you will need an account on litmus, some time, and a build dated from the 28th of April 2009. To test you need to point your browser here, and decide which of the tests you want to run, read the instructions to run the test and report the results from your run. If the test is not clear - say so , so we can try to make the test clearer. If the test does not pass, meaning you have found a bug, please make sure to create a bug in bugzilla. Not creating the issue in bugzilla means that the testing you have done is going to be lost .

Thanks in advance for the time you are going to spend to make Thunderbird a great quality product.

The Thunderbird quality assurance team is most of the time available on irc, so if you have question just come and ask. As stated above the web based chat is an experiment.

So I'm building a CD collection of CDs from Greenland - because I got caught in a concert last year while I was visiting. On most of the CD covers you'll be able to find Tal/Erin or a variation of this. I've guessed that Tall was lyrics but to be sure I asked the owner of Atlantic music and the answer is :

  • Taalliortoq (Taall.) means the person who's written the lyrics.
  • Erinniortoq (Erinn.) means the person who's written the music.

Linux users use their distro's provided packages to install mozilla related software. These unfortunately do not send stack traces back when the program crashes. OpenSuse, Fedora and Ubuntu provide instructions on how to provide stack traces. How about gentoo or whatever linux distribution you are using ? I'm trying to collect such instructions if they exist for other distribution and have started at discussion at : http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/0ec23dd5960f31a9. If you use one of the distribution not listed I would love to have instructions on getting stack traces for that distribution.

As some of you might have noticed last week, the Quality Team (Wayne, Gary, Joshua, Wada, Magnus, Phil, Hansen, and a few others (and I'm sorry that I forgot your names)) of Mozilla Thunderbird is celebrating one year of bugdays. Last year as been amazing as the bug database for Thunderbird as been cleaned up a lot (that database is accessible to anyone at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org).

In order to celebrate we've setup a nice deal for you, if you comment on two bugs , or change status on two bugs - The idea is to revive bugs that have not been active for some time now. Once you've done that come to the #tb-qa irc channel on irc.mozilla.org, and give us the bug number you would like us to have a better look at, and we will make our best the bug gets in the state were it can get fixed by the developers. We are providing list of bugs and hints on how to join and do it at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2009-04-02

This week marks one year of bugday for Mozilla Thunderbird. Bugdays are days where the QA team maintains and tries to clean up as much as possible the bug database for thunderbird. The result over the last year are quite impressive :
One Year

Specially what we try to achieve is get rid of old bugs, make sure bugs get the proper component and make sure they get the proper status. To celebrate we are organizing two special bug days, more information on those bug days can be found on Day1 and Day2. Feel free to join and celebrate with us on #bugday on irc.mozilla.org

Bug days

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The way we maintain the bug database for Thunderbird is mainly through volunteer work. People that care enough to report bugs, people that care enough to read bugs and people that care enough to follow bugs. Helping the classification of bugs - finding duplicate bugs and making sure that all the information provided is there.
Some people who would like to join can't because :

  1. They think there constributions are not worth it
  2. Think they are going to make mistakes
  3. Don't have buzilla rights
  4. Think that their english is too bad

And that's why we organize events so people that are not too comfortable or that want help can find other users that have more experience and that are willing to help new users. We call these events bug days.
We use a wiki page to announce what the focus of the day is. We also use quality.mozilla.org to announce the events and make them available in ics format.
Our next event is this Thursday. Feel Free to Join.

Interested to know before hand how the next version of Thunderbird (be that a beta release, a full release ) is going to look like ?
Interested in experimenting with new features before they are made available to a wider audience ?
Well it's possible and kind of easy, the QA team of Thunderbird as setup a low traffic [1] mailing list where we announce Test days (which are
when new features get tested by a wider audience). Those announces are made when the feature is ready, and unlike on nightly builds it should be fairly stable when the announce is made.

So how can you join this mailing list ?


  • On the web by subscribing here

  • by email by clicking here.


[1] can be verified here : https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/thunderbird-testers/

My name is Ludovic Hirlimann, I'm the new QA lead for Mozillamessaging. I started a bit over a week ago. My email is ludovic @ mozillamessaging.com.
I have of course an IRC nickname : _Tsk_. It's the contraction of The softkid, and the underscores were added because Tsk was never free on ircnet back in the days where I was hanging on #atari. The softkid was chosen when I started computing - trying to crack Apple ][ software. At that time one of the games that I had copied had been cracked by The softman from the solex crack band. I just loved the name of the band too much - hence my nickname.
I've been playing, using computers since 1982 - when my dad got an Apple IIe home. I've been using email for 16 years - using my dads account on a unix box. I've owned a few pieces of interesting hardware, and ran Linux, OS/2 and Beos. Beos had a crappy web browser named Netpositive, and Be decided to port Mozilla in 1999. I was only able to run mozilla on Linux and Windows at that time but I did it because I thought that bugs that I would find would benefit the browser as my OS of choice. At some point I got interest in MacOS X - and the browser situation was bad with a special version of IE for the mac - and then I got hocked into Chimera/Camino and the mozilla world.
I have a few interest online - they are available in form of a Foaf file.
My immediate goals are to make sure Thunderbird 3.0 ships as bugfree as possible. My Long term goals are to ensure that the quality of the product does not decrease over time.

So identi.ca update their XMPP support last night, which caused the contact update@identi.ca not to be visible in my list of online contact (I'm using adium 1.3.2). While looking at the contact - adium told me it was online - it only showed grey (offline) and thus did not make it to my online contact list.

the solution is simple :


  1. remove identi.ca from your contact - in your jabber compatible client

  2. login to identi.ca

  3. go to settings/IM

  4. remove your Jabber account

  5. add your Jabber account

  6. reply to the message send by identica

and things will get back to normal

I was tagged by flore.

The rules:

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged.

Seven Things:

1. I use to grow cristals - I loved the blue one, that I made from Iron sulfate.
2. I wanted to be archeo-chimist when I was younger, making history and chemistry (which I loved at that time) into my work.
3. I started doing more computer stuff on My apple II e for making Character sheets for Reve de Dragon - a very good RPG.
4. I regret not staying at islandsbanki in 1998 when I was offered to.
5. I've started photography two years ago - trying not to end up like my grandpa, who takes way too many pictures and then does a montage with sound , while reading "guide bleu"
6. I made a very crappy comics strip when younger - whish i never did it.
7. I owned pigs in Madacasagar - using the http://www.zob-madagascar.org/.

Tagging:

* Allan : Great Hacker and Project lead.
* Alex : Being a great Hacker too
* Max : for using SVG.
* Hub : For standing for his ideas - even if I don't stand with all of them
* Wolfgang : For being the great build engineer he is and passionate by everything he starts.
* Danbri : for being so knowledgeable and spread this meme
* Simon : for being what he is.

I've been trying for almost a year to synch - via bluetooth my mac and my nokia n73. Tonight I tried again after having upgraded the firmware of the Nokia phone earlier in the day. It now works like a charm. So upgrading the firmware to v4.0839.42.0.1 dated 25-09-2008, RM-133 fixes the issue.

So I've been using identi.ca to microblog for the last month or so, I've even convinced a friend or to to try it or give it a second try. I still need to log on twitter to read some replies I get to my one liner posts - because identi.ca does not read twitter and only posts to it , if this gets fixed , I'll never read twitter again - well one should never say again :-)

HP quality center

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Yesterday I attended a sales speech by some HP representative willing to sell HP quality center to us.We've been dealing with tools issue for a very long time in joost. Last year we settled on Aptest - to deal with our test cases, test reports and so on. When we bough the product we should have done two things :


  1. make sure we understood how to use it

  2. spend some time training to use it

We did not do that and tried to use it but eventually we failed.
So getting back at the presentation from HP- it was nicely done , they had actually tried to understand what my company does. So as most tools that deal with quality, defects etc ..., the first thing QC does is deal with requirements. Requirements is something that has never really been formalized here. I then realized that we should have involve product management into our tools, and change a bit the way our company works.Maybe our use of those tools would have been broader and better if the complete chain would have been involved : PM, developers and QA. But doing this is a big cultural change and would not happen overnight anyway.

So the first bad news about HP QC is that you need to use Internet Explorer from Microsoft to use it - it appears - but not really clear - that you can also use a client to access the application. Unfortunately the client seems to be written in .net, so exist Mac OS support and Linux support. Our company almost does not use IE, we would also need support for our developers working on Linux and Mac OS X. So while this might sound weird to some of you , it makes sense for most of HP's customers. Big Corporation - like some I've worked at (BNP, Societe Generale) maintain their desktops and they are IE only companies (some of them still deployed IE 5.5 back in 2006). So form a market and business perspective it makes sens for HP not to support anything else then IE.
The product is based on the following work flow (roughly) Requirements -> Test case -> test scripts -> execution -> reports and defects. So writing test case seems easy even If i did not really like the interface - which really looks complicated but that main impression might comes from my lack of use of the tool more than anywhere else. Most of the scripting is based on record/replay, and you can easily edit add and change a the way the scripts works. There is nothing much new here that I have not seen in other tools , like Grinder, OpenSta. It is just nicely integrated and playing with parameter is just easy , a few field and a keywords and you can easily with the same script/scenario test things like :


  1. too short password

  2. password with non ASCII characters

  3. etc ....


Running the scripts is easy - it populates results automatically. We where also shown how to run those test cases manually, which is a bit cumbersome but way better than anything we've been doing here with our use of csv files and confluence pages, because you stay focus on testing itself.
Then the discussion drifted on load testing and performance testing where HP QC integrates with loadrunner - and you can reuse your functional test in those load/perf tests.

The product is able to do some testing on flex based flash objects - I really find that interesting. The good news is some of that flex support is provided by adobe itself. The bad news is dev need to switch to flex and they also need to plug a special agent - but it works really nicely and as more and more websites are using flash , it's really a great feature to have.

In the end I liked the presentation which was really honest - but I personally think that the product does not meet our needs for the following reasons :


  • you can only test web based application

  • you can test Windows application with the proper extension (ie winrunner)

  • you can't do multi-browser automated testing as only IE is supported

The product is really aimed at HPs traditional customers who are big large corporations that control internal applications and eb application. For a startup it would make sense to use the product when it breaks even, or just after that, but the product would need to be way more open.

I'm very happy with my monopod - but sometimes I want to shoot from the same place and aim at the same point. With the monopod this is tedious to achieve. I'm looking for a good tripod on which I'll be able to attach my monster lens. My aim is to shoot birds and other forms of wildlife. I also need to be able to shoot at a very low level, so it needs to be able to go low and does not need the column.
My monster lens weights 5+ kg so the tripod needs to be able to support it. Last but not least I need to be able to carry it while I'm on the move. I've briefly searched a few flickr groups - and did not find the answer I am looking for.

Whales

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If you've been wondering what I was working on in the past few months, have a look below:

A smaller day with an excellent keynote - very funny and very interesting. A great talk about performance by Robert Watson. I met a few interesting people. A great Day. The slides and recorded session will be available online pretty - soon check out http://2008.eurobsdcon.org. I of course took a few pictures they are available on a flickr set.

Converting File Systems to Services

Started with an introduction on how File system interact with the kernel. Only kernel solution seems to perform correctly all the time. The idea is to do that in UserSpace - because makes it way easier and expandable when written in user-space. Writing in user space using kernel interface of course. Presentation was a bit boring because it was barely audible.

UTORvpn: A BSD based VPN service for the masses

Great demand for of campus access hence why the speaker started working with vpn. Encapsuale -> encrypt-> send. PPTP is the most used protocol , the RFC was not taken into account by IETF. Many open source implementation of it. L2TP RFCs with v3. Create the tunnel and then use standard open protocol to encrypt (IPsec), tunnel easy. 100 mouse clicks doing that on Windows. Does not work for the Masses. IPsec : suite of protocols , 10 years olds, it's done at the kernel level. It's transparent to the user. Issues with Firewalls and Nat gateways. And it's native in IPv6. Many commercial clients available. Layer 4 technologies -> ssh, TLS. Open VPN uses TLS, Open SSL , certificates. For our large institution, openvpn seemed to be the solution, because it would be scalable. It's been designed as client and server are the same software. Does layer 2 and 3 encryption. UDP tunnels - TCP also supported. Very easy to configure, confs can be pushed to the client. It's been running for 4 years - initially on debian and it's now running FreeBSD, using Php+Mysql+Apache for managing - those tools are available email Russel to get them.. 9/1 users use windows, so having NSIS service was nice to use and build our installer - one package per user with your personal credentials. First time package creation is 10 seconds. No cpu issues. Ports are globally filtered except maybe for the president of the university. Then Rusell gave us a nice demonstration. 70% of the library transactions at the university of Toronto are done electronically. Very interesting presentation with demo.

Isolating Cluster Jobs for Performance and Predictability

Clusters using Freebsd from 6.3, 6.4 and going to go to 7.x ... Clusters needs to be shared for cost issues - but it implies risk. How to use virtualization in a cluster ? How to make the best use of the hardware in the clusters. Mostly focused on sun's grid.

Had a very interesting with Michael dexter of bsdfund.org about hardware.

eXtreme Programming: FreeBSD a case study

You first start with unit tests because they come directly from the specification. It forces developers to write them. Once written you write the code - and as time passes tests are passing. I think that I really like this concept - you of course need the time to implement that. Ha but extreme programming does not require QA :-( FreeBSD is not an XP project. FreeBSD is agile.

Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2

Most of the things are done in memory before being committed to disk. this speeds up Directory Lookups. A nice return of experience on a SOC project.

Quotes :
"NFS was nice 20 years ago"
"malloc(3) vs. malloc(9)"
"VPN are built using tunnels"
"Managing keys is the biggest problem in Cryptography"

And for obvious reasons I upgraded my machines - not all of them I still need to be able to test with older versions of flash. The upgrade went well for most of the things I use except for the pro-upload that lets you do multiple file select on flickr. I ended up being redirected to the old HTML interface, that's ok for me, because at the moment I upload pictures one by one and roughly one a day.

The conpany I work for - just pushed out all the work we've been working on for the past few months. Basically joost changed from being a client based video player to being a webbased video player. Many people back when we did the initial release complained that joost was not available for Linux nor for PowerPC Based mac, we are now using flash. This means that the content on Joost is now watcheable from Linux, and older mac powered by PowerPC - and yes I'm aware that flash on linux sucks.

One of the other complains we had in the past was that finding the content was near to impossible. This is already better - as we changed completely the way search was implemented. It will improve over time too as we have added tagging. Tags are searcheable, so for instance here is the content taggeg with dolphin.

Just in case you might be interested we have some nice documentaries, music videos, and car stuff.

Ho and for those french speakers, there ia a french group, you are welcome to join !!

Yesterday I started installing FreeBSD, on an old Mac-mini G4. The install broke just after partitioning the drive with the following error :

Error mounting /dev/ad0s3 /mnt Operation Not Permited

And I could not get past that step in the install. After fumbling a bit - I got back at reading the docs and discovering that the partitioner did not really work for the PowerPC port - and that booting directly in FreeBSD was not possible :-( That made FreeBSD/PowerPC something unusable for what I had in mind. I might If I ever get such a machine at home , and find the time try to fix that but .....

A few minutes after that I went to ask a question to a colleague about the ads network and the delivery of ads - to which he replied that I should have carefully read the email he had sent that same morning. I had read the email up to 66% of it and the information I was asking for was lying in the last 30% of the email.

When I start anything by reading the documentation I often get bored and confused - but I think that after those two "issues" in the same day I will read some stuff more carefully from now on.

I'm still playing with data and metadata - I like using last.fm ever since I discovered they knew nothing about the rock album I brought back from Greenland with me. So I've inserted the needed data into the musicbrainz database a few weeks ago, and as the band is knew I tend to listen to it's tunes a bit more than the other artists I usually listen to.
So my funny founding of the day are :
* search for "Unnuaq Band" in music or group - and no result pop up.
* there is a page for the artist which contains a picture and a bio of the band.
* the page contains a 'Top Albums' item, If you look in the album tab of that group it's empty.

I find it very funny that last.fm knows about the band - but searches fails. One album seems to be known but not completely. I think last.fm did not synch with musicbrainz yet. Or that the data I've added to musicbrainz is not available to last.fm, anyhow I find it funny that the data shown is not consitant at all from one page to another.

Nvu/Kompozer now has a successor, the name is bluegriffon or so it seems. Some source code is available, so those of you who know how to build mozilla should be able to try it.

Registrationfor EuroBSDCon 2008 in Strasbourg, is finally open .

The talks schedule is available here, the tutorials schedule is available here.

There is a 20% discount for students (use discount code Student when
registering).


If Like me you want to use MusicBrainz Picard metadata tagger, and are running Mac OS X, you'll probably encounter ticket 3532, which displays this nice little message box :
Error opening library: dlopen(libdiscid.0.dylib, 6): image not found which says : "Error opening library: dlopen(libdiscid.0.dylib, 6): image not found ".

Now if you read the ticket you'll see that the issue is fixed but that a new version of Picard as not been released yet. Fixing the issue is easy.

First you need to have the developer tools installed , which you can download from connect.apple.com. Once they are installed do the following in a Terminal window "

curl -O http://users.musicbrainz.org/~matt/libdiscid-0.2.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf libdiscid-0.2.2.tar.gz
cd libdiscid-0.2.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

After the sudo command you will be prompted for a password - enter your password.
This will fix the issue, you'll need to start restart Picard - but picard was probably already closed when you started doing this.

On a side note if you are running a PowerPC machine (G4/G5 based macs) the musicbrainz folks are looking for feedback on the PPC build of picard.

Nice skype trick

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I've just found out the best feature about skype's messaging system. In recent version of skype you can edit old messages using the mouse and a right click on the timestamp of the message - that's boring an slowwwwwwwwww.
Today I wanted to correct muself, as I tend to be unable to write anything properly in any chat window I'm involved in and did it irc style using :

s/lov/love/

after typing enter I did not see a new message as I expected , but my previous message was edited and the mistake corrected. That is so cool.

My rss feed is not updated anymore. Please update your bookmarks to point to http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/atom.xml.

As a flickr user I add metadata to my pictures as much as I can. There's three way to achieve that on flickr (well four when you include geotagging). Using a title, adding some description on what the picture is about, and tagging. Tagging is the easiest way to describe a picture with a few simple word. You add keywords to you pictures when you tag them. Some of these tags are a bit specila as they may link your pictures with other websites or with data that does not reside on Flickr itself. Flickr uses special tags called machine tags - with these you can link to events that are posted on the upcoming service by yahoo or with concerts that are annonced on last.fm, tagging enhances the content and makes it findable. There is probably more use with other sites but I don't know it.


While I was on vacation in greenland and ended up in a concert in a bar in Ilulissat.I took a few pictures and really liked how the guys were performing. So I asked them if I could buy a CD to which the answer I was given a small piece of paper was an URL. Url Which I ended visiting and buying the their unique album which to my surprise dates from the beginning of the 90's.


I imported the CD into my music collection and started playing it - as I'm a last.fm user I had a look at the data that last.fm maintained on "Unnuaq Band". It was quite empty so I made the first two versions of the wiki page added a scan of the group's logo that I took from the album. Actually I needed to add wiki information before the upload of the scan was taken into account by last.fm's software. Then I made sure that the group was connected with the Greenland group.

After two weeks of playing the band's song I looked at my stats on last.fm and was suprise not to see the album name in what I was playing. So I kindly ask on the forums where the data came from, and the answer was musicbrainz. From time to time, last.fm synchs it's data from Musicbrainz. So I created an account and started adding data about the album. Using the taggers provided by last.fm did not do much because the music was unavailable on musicip. So I gave musicip a look and would have done sampling with Music IP if their software supported my os :
Thank you for visiting musicip.com. A Mac version of the iTunes plug-in is
planned but not currently in development. If you sign up for our beta testing
program you can be one of the first to try out the new plug-in.

http://www.musicip.com/beta-join.jsp

Let me know if you have any further questions.

So I can't provide all the data/metadata, and need to do that by hand, at the moment but will probably do.

So I'm having fun these days figuring out how I will tag my picture when I'm going to upload it to flickr. Shall I use machine tags like lastfm:band= or should I create musixbranz:MBID=, shall I use both ? I would rather use the later, so all sites using musicbrainz's data would benefit from my tagging and could, if wanted show my flickr pictures on their website.
Now I don't mind adding more than one tag, but was wondering what the best approach would be. Ideas, comments welcome.

V8

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Continuing looking at the code which Chrome is built upon, I had a look at V8 the javascript engine that compiles js code to native code.
In particular at cpu-ia32.{h|cc} and cpu-arm.{h|cc}. So the good news here is that v8 is available for ARM on top of x86. It seems that adding PowerPC support is doable. I was looking for a cool project to work on during my free time as I have not been involved in computer stuff outside my work for quite a while now. Just unsure I have the time required to do that. I'm quite puzzled by the lack of ia-64 support too.

Chrome and 404's

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So yesterday I bitched about the fact that Chrome, replaced 404 pages with a input box that would let user perform google searches. I did not like the idea , that 404 where replaced by a search box.
Today I downloaded the source of Chrome and had a look inside and found this interesting comment :

// When the frame request first 404's, chrome may replace it with the alternate
// 404 page's contents. It does this using substitute data in the document
// loader, so the original response and url of the request can be preserved.
// We need to avoid replacing the current page, if it has already been
// replaced (otherwise could loop on setting alt-404 page!)
bool is_substitute_data = loader->substituteData().isValid();

// If it's a 404 page, we wait until we get 512 bytes of data before trying
// to load the document. This allows us to put up an alternate 404 page if
// there's short text.

in http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/webkit/glue/webframeloaderclient_impl.cc?view=markup&pathrev=1359 around line 252.

This simply means that if you want to keep your 404 pages they need to be 513 byte in length. If they are 513 Chrome considers that the page contains interesting bits of information for the user and does not replace it with a google crafted page.

Chrome

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So like many people yesterday I've been amused by the announce of Google's chrome browser. I like the way it was done - the comic is a very good idea !!!
Reading the comic was great fun - and very informative - especially on their QA process - each build is tested against the cache content that google maintains, bug can then be ranked based on google's rank page algorithm
I was disappointed that it's win32 only for now, but since mike blogged about the fact he was working on it, I'm reassured. I just hope we will see a PowerPC version - but I'm not holding my breath there. It seems that most of the ex-netscaper working @ google are working on this project. A few things are annoying - like certificate handling - which prevent me to use it for work stuff. Anyhow it's good to see something borrowing one of BeOS concepts of one thread per window and changing it to one process per tab, in beos all applications were snappy because of that. I'm pretty sure that on the long run Chrome is going to rock.

There is one thing I don't like. It's that it transforms 404 into google search pages :-( That is bad I think.

Like last year, I'm only attending the saturdays. Considering the program, I would probably have been interested by a few other session - some of the solar cooking ones and those geared to the BSD family of operating systems. But this year My work schedule was really busy and I was tired most of the week - so I decided to attend a complete day, saturday August the 16th, and spend the day and beginning of the evening there. Unlike Last year, this year I took a laptop with me, and might participate to the wireless scanning contest.

The first speaker was late which was a good thing - this gave me time to find a version of KissMac that would not crash ! The trunk version I had is crashing after a few network are found - and goes into an infinite loop when in the debugger :-(

(gdb) backtrace
#0 0x936636e4 in objc_msgSend ()
#1 0x0002c3eb in -[WaveNet SSID] (self=0xf8378e0, _cmd=0xa5880) at /Users/Ludo/Documents/sources/trunk/Sources/Core/WaveNet.mm:1275
#2 0x0002d523 in -[WaveNet cache] (self=0xf8378e0, _cmd=0x936645f4) at /Users/Ludo/Documents/sources/trunk/Sources/Core/WaveNet.mm:1519
#3 0x000076a2 in -[ScanController tableView:objectValueForTableColumn:row:] (self=0x35de00, _cmd=0x9369e778, aTableView=0x352580, aTableColumn=0x353570, rowIndex=4) at /Users/Ludo/Documents/sources/trunk/Sources/Controller/ScanController.m:283
#4 0x95f87dce in -[NSTableView _dataSourceValueForColumn:row:] ()
#5 0x95f0a100 in -[NSTableView preparedCellAtColumn:row:] ()
#6 0x95f09f64 in -[NSTableView _drawContentsAtRow:column:withCellFrame:] ()
#7 0x95f0949a in -[NSTableView drawRow:clipRect:] ()
#8 0x11007944 in -[ColoredRowTableView drawRow:clipRect:] ()
#9 0x95eae90c in -[NSTableView drawRowIndexes:clipRect:] ()
#10 0x95ead3f0 in -[NSTableView drawRect:] ()
#11 0x110079c9 in -[ColoredRowTableView drawRect:] ()
#12 0x95f3d984 in -[NSView _drawRect:clip:] ()

Looks like the SSID is not set or something. As I did not really have the skill and time to debug it, I'll just hope that the issue is due to a very local network and that I will be able to scan while on the boat.

The program was not what pushed me to attend, nevertheless I did attend a few sessions that where programmed :-)

Workshop Wifi and Latency by Dougal Featherstone

The title of the workshop was not interesting and the presentation of what it meant to be too short. So I did not bother listening too much as people where trying to measure latency in a closed circuit network, where packets travelled on a wire then on wireless network. Two routes where taken and the idea was to measure the time difference it took fro the same packet to reach both destination, after the What time is it presentation from the afternoon I would have invested myself a bit more in the workshop.
I did learn the following though while people where fighting some bash scripts:

bash can do expand on kills ie kill 123{2..7} quite boring because I did not really participate.

Now if bash could do as this korn shell trick, I would switch to bash.

Boat Trip

After the nice boat trip in Leiden, trying to sniff as many network as possible , I must say I did not even try to run KissMac, I did however filed a bug repport about the issue as I can't reproduce it @ home - but both me and Ed would crash around the OCC infrastructures.


IT and Trading by Chris Tazelaar


A nice introduction of what stock trading his, what the economics around it concerning IT are. Where it is going and where that specific branch of the industry is going. He explained many thing using the Tulip mania, an internet like bubble, that happened in Holland 400 years ago. A very good introduction to the next presentation.


Latency and global timestamps by Dougal Featherstone


A nice speech on time, and how to keep computers on time. As trading is a race, you need to make sure that your machines are keeping time precisely.. 'Meten is weten', How to measure , it transmit it and keep the information on the time it is. Very interesting presentation where I learned that using GPS is the best way to keep a clcok in synch, but that other protocols were being developed:
PTP nice protocol being worked on since 2005 (Precision Time Protocol).
IRIG is on the electrical level, ad trying to improve time synching.

The BBQ was nice but I was a bit in a hurry to go to the Final of the Firework competition in Scheveningen. The BBQ and the boat trip where sponsored by Optiver - and the optiver guys where wearing nice T-shirt , where some code about using GPU's to do financial computation was printed.

Pictures of the event are available.

I've just registered myself for the WWC 2008 - I loved so much the 2007 edition - that I am going to attend the last day again. Why do I only attend the last day and not the complete camping week : the answer is quite simple - I just want to participate to the boat trip and capture open networks, or maybe open bluetooth devices.

Mais il est en anglais :
When a GIRL is quiet ... millions of things are running in her mind. When a GIRL is not arguing ... she is thinking deeply. When a GIRL looks at u with eyes full of questions ... she is wondering how long you will be around. When a GIRL answers " I'm fine " after a few seconds ... she is not at all fine.

When a GIRL stares at you ... she is wondering why you are lying. When a GIRL lays on your chest ... she is wishing for you to be hers forever. When a GIRL wants to see you everyday... she wants to be pampered. When a GIRL says " I love you " ... she means it. When a GIRL says " I miss you " ... no one in this world can miss you more than that.

Life only comes around once make sure u spend it with the right person .... Find a guy ... who calls you beautiful instead of hot. who calls you back when you hang up on him. who will stay awake just to watch you sleep. Wait for the guy who ... kisses your forehead. Who wants to show you off to the world when you are in your sweats. Who holds your hand in front of his friends. Who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares about you and how lucky he is to have you. Who turns to his friends and says, " That's her!! "

If you open this you have to repost it, guy or girl, or you will have bad luck for the rest of your life!!!!!

If I don't get this back I guess your not my friend. If you have a lot of love for someone. copy and send this to your whole list. In 5 minutes your true love will call or message you.

XP SP3

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Just installed windows XP SP3, besides the fact that the install process was long , I liked the fact that after the reboot the first thing I was prompted for was to turn automatic updates ON.

A friend of mine sells his house in leiden the netherlands. Details available on his website at :http://martenvijn.nl/trac/wiki/huis

For the last two week twitter@twitter.com has been "offline" in AdiumX. It looks grey - but you can send IM messages to it and that will update your twitts (I'm lhirlimann on twitter; gosh I need to update my foaf file), but you don't get any twitts from people you are following, and you need to log into the twitter website to see them. For a normal user , it looks like the jabber twittering gateway is offline and does not work anymore.This issues just made twitter unusable for me.
Looking around I found this interesting thread : http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/not_receiving_notifications_in_jabber_or_gtalk, with mostly peopel trying to delete the IM interface on twitter and readding it. I tried that a few times - but twitter stayed offline. While trying to get more information I found out that the account was waiting for an auth request - that seemed to never get through.
This morning I booted a machine where PSI was setup and found out that twitter@twitter.com did not appear in PSI's buddy list. So I started the whole add an IM device to your twitter account - and much to my surprised it worked ! So there is an issue somewhere in libpurple - because I also treid to do the same thing from within ichat (which to my knowledge uses libpurple). Issues is I have no idea on how I should properly report the issue to libpurple developers.

So you've got a brand new computer with Windows XP installed and you just patch it up to the latest level. When it's done you realize that what you need on your machine is not version 7 of internet explorer but version 6 and you want to revert - or go back to version 6 without screwing your all machine. There is a simple solution but I'm not sure if it works on all installations. if you are lucky enough to have the following file : C:\WINDOWS\ie7\spuninst\spuninst.exe on your machine, you are saved.
Just double click on it and you will be prompted about the fact that IE7 is going to be removed and that a few patches have been applied on top of it. Just tell the machine that you are sure of yourself. IE7 is going to get properly removed from your machine and you will end up in a "clean" install with IE6.

Note that the best way to achieve a nice Internet explorer 6 machine is to reinstall and handy pick the updates that you want to apply on top of service pack two, and make sure you refuse to install version seven of IE.

Yesterday I attended the last day of Apachecon Europe 2008. I listened to a few talks on Hadoop but to my dismay did not learn much at these talks - I would have liked more technical oreinted presentations getting into the guts of using Map/Reduce and HDFS efficiently.
Then I went to the APR presentation prepared at the last minute by Colmmac - because the person that was supose to give the presentation was "missing".
Any how it was a nice days and I had a few conversation with people - and that was really nice. I'll try to attend again next year.
My pictures of the events are here

Flickr just annonced that people would be able to post video and share them. And I think it's a bad idea - because you just don't mix videos and photos - it's not the same demographics creating pictures and movies.
The thing that make me use flickr is that I can learn a lot from other and then make better pictures - it's also a show off , where I can tell the world : "hey look how good I amd at making pictures" (and then my ego goes down the drain because nobody else really likes my pictures.). And when I want to buy equipement - or when I decided that I would try to properly geottag my pictures, I just searched flickr and posted a few notes here and there. Same thing when I wanted to shoot RAW and decided to look for raw processing software. Up to now flickr as been a great resource for anything photography related. It's also a great resource when travelling - because you can ask local users what to see in a country, city a- that is worth taking a picture.
If I wanted to get into making videos, I would probably read Eugenia's blog first and then use siet that are dedicated to videos - because the community is already there - and people doing video are not the same as those taking pictures. I'm for sure not going to use flickr to view or post videos - I hope a majority of users will do the same and flickr will reconsider it's offering.

I've just noticed that my Internet Explorer 6 had tabs at work. I'm pretty sure that the original IE 6 does not have tabs. So how did I manage to add this feature in my IE 6 installation ?
I just tried IE 8 beta one on that machine - which was still running IE 6 for testing puposes. Then I decided to see if I could go back to my original IE and asked windows to deinstall version 8. To my surprise the uninstaller was present and did not really say no to deinstall. uninstall wen fine and I frist checkjed that IE was back to version 6.
It just took me a while to realize that I had gained tabs in the UI.

Today I needed to report a bug on a piece of software that ran on a linux system. The bug report form asked for a version of the system I was running. On traditional unix system (By these I mean Solaris, HP-UX, Aix), I would run uname -a and the third or fourth argument would be the os name and version. Done I could report my OS version number. I could always run a few other command that would be specific to learn a bit more about the version - but uname -a would give me the information straight away.
so on my Ubuntu system it gave me :

ludo@toto:~$ uname -a
Linux toto 2.6.22-14-server #1 SMP Tue Dec 18 05:52:24 UTC 2007 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Which did not help a lot. After poking a bit I found the following, each distribution as a file in /etc which gives this information :

etc/redhat-release
etc/SuSE-release
etc/gentoo-release
etc/yellowdog-release
etc/mandrake-release
etc/whitebox-release
etc/debian_version

As Ubuntu is a debian derivative it uses the etc/debian_version file - but this might not be enough, the real nice command to run is lsb_release. On OpenSuse this gives :

toto0:~ # lsb_release -a
LSB Version: core-2.0-noarch:core-3.0-noarch:core-2.0-x86_64:core-3.0-x86_64:desktop-3.1-amd64:desktop-3.1-noarch:graphics-2.0-amd64:graphics-2.0-noarch:graphics-3.1-amd64:graphics-3.1-noarch
Distributor ID: SUSE LINUX
Description: openSUSE 10.3 (X86-64)
Release: 10.3
Codename: n/a

and on Ubuntu it gives :

ludo@toto:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 7.10
Release: 7.10
Codename: gutsy

As one can see the lsb_release command is the command to figure out which version of linux and which distribution your system is running.
To be complete on AIX the command that gives you more information is oslevel. On Mac OS X it's sw_vers. I currently can't recall what it is for sun, nor for HP-UX.

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 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.

Aptest

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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.

Ebay strike ?

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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.

Firefox 3.0b2

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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.

Fosdem 2008

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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.)

1.0.3 is out

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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 '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).

Joost 1.0 beta

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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 hate zimbra

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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 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.

Thank you

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samuel sidler
samuel sidler,
originally uploaded by lhirlimann.
Sam for making the Camino f2f meeting happen. I've uploaded a few pictures of that event.

I'm currently visiting Mozilla's Office in Mountain View - meeting the QA and release engineering teams. It's like a Dream come true - I started using mozilla in 1999, on linux. The idea was to report bugs on linux so that the BeOS port would become a reality (I really could not use beos at work). I then got more involved in 2003 to make sure Camino would not die - that involment got me my current job and gave me the opportunity to meet some of the mozillian. And it's very nice to here people you highly consider say that the product you work on daily is great.

Dear lazy web,

I'm looking for a good shop selling camera gears near Mountain View California, as I will be there mid june and plan to buy some equipment.

Thanks you dear web.

and I think it's bad for the Mac ecosystem - but since apple, is not Apple computers anymore, it might not be an issue with them anymore. So why do I think Apple is bad with numbers ? Well it's because it's very difficult for ISV to figure out, how the apple ecosystem is, and those figures and numbers are important for the product management process. So what numbers should apple give to at least it's developers :


  • Intel-PowerPC ratio

  • OS repartition, from update dowloads

  • OS support roadmap with clear end-of-support dates


Both of those last numbers are almost always available from vendors be they microsoft, be they Linux vendors. But Apple does not give any numbers. And I don't even want real numbers I would be satisfied with a pie chart saying 10% of Apple users still run Mac OS X 10.1.5. The same goes for the Intel/PPC ratio.
The support roadmap is just a matter of publishing internal decision - But I really believe this would help product management discussion like this one.
As for the numbers that can be gathered for instance on the AdiumX users base, I believe these are biased. I believe normal end ussers use iChat and not Adium - so to me Adium's numbers represent some of the geek space in Apple's users but not the majority who uses the tools provided by Apple. Apple please do something to make your ISV's life easier - it benefits the mac ecosystem - meaning you are the main benefactor of it.

This week my company released a new version of our client. We fixed a few crashers and added a nice feature named Joost links, which will let you share easily what you are watching with friend. Let me share with you what I like to see on the platform :

The first one is the first program I was able to see from begining to end back in September 2006. The second one was one of the largest channel we had - and I could let the client play it while I went home for sleep.
For these links to work from the web you need joost to be installed on your computer - I still provide invites, if you need one.
If you are in Joost, you can also share these joost links from within the Instant Messaging system - to access it press the ">" key, Click on the left hand side corner widget menu button and choose Instant Messaging. If you already have a jabber account you can use it - if Not you might want to create one using a regular Jabber client, or you can use you google account to chat via google talk.

Today I've received a strange email :

From - Wed May 23 03:38:55 2007
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
Received: from localhost (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
by zimbra.mycompany.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6CCBB3268564
for ; Wed, 23 May 2007 03:38:54 +0200 (CEST)
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at
X-Spam-Score: 2.605
X-Spam-Level: **
X-Spam-Status: No, score=2.605 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6
tests=[BAYES_00=-2.599, HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_16=0.497, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001,
HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_2=1.582, HTML_TEXT_AFTER_BODY=0.115,
MIME_HTML_ONLY=0.001, URIBL_OB_SURBL=3.008]
Received: from zimbra.mycompany.com ([127.0.0.1])
by localhost (zimbra.mycompany.com [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024)
with ESMTP id 7rxxf9Y88GGD for ;
Wed, 23 May 2007 03:38:54 +0200 (CEST)
Received: from smtp.mycompany.com (xxx.mycompany.com [213.207.101.239])
by zimbra.mycompany.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B5F543268439
for ; Wed, 23 May 2007 03:38:53 +0200 (CEST)
Received: (qmail 11323 invoked by uid 89); 23 May 2007 01:38:53 -0000
Mailing-List: contact xyz@xxx.mycompany.com; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
X-No-Archive: yes
Reply-To: xyz@xxx.mycompany.com
Received: (qmail 11308 invoked by uid 0); 23 May 2007 01:38:53 -0000
X-Qmail-Scanner-Mail-From: msant@alpha.connectserver.org via garbo.mycompany.com
X-Qmail-Scanner: 1.25 (Clear:RC:0(89.251.0.85):SA:0(?/?):. Processed in 4.349745 secs)
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at
X-Qmail-Scanner-MOVED-X-Spam-Status: No, score=5.428 tagged_above=-10 required=6.6
tests=[AWL=-2.283, BAYES_50=0.001, HTML_IMAGE_ONLY_16=0.497,
HTML_IMAGE_RATIO_02=0.463, HTML_MESSAGE=0.001,
HTML_SHORT_LINK_IMG_2=1.582, MIME_HTML_ONLY=0.001,
RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET=1.558, REPLY_TO_EMPTY=0.6,
URIBL_OB_SURBL=3.008]
To: 07015qa@cccc.mycompany.com
From: Firfox Product
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Message-Id:
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 02:38:17 +0100
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - alpha.connectserver.org
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - jobs.mycompany.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [32331 32002] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - alpha.connectserver.org
X-Source: /usr/bin/php
X-Source-Args: /usr/bin/php index.php
X-Source-Dir: msant.net:/public_html
Subject: [QA] New FireFox 2008








Download The Firefox Now & Surf faster and smarter!



The innovative Firefox browser
makes surfing the web faster and safer. With the included Google Toolbar, features like AutoFill and SpellCheckwill make browsing more convenient.

Together, they'll change the way you use the Internet - for free.


TRY IT NOW YOU WILL SEE THE DIFFERENCE



Which links to http://pspcolls.co.uk/Firefox.htm , Where there is a simple page on which you have two download links : http://firfox.bravehost.com/ which is suspended. I wonder what was there.

Where is the money in this scheme ?

Today and yesterday I attended europe 2007, in Amsterdam. Previous conferences of such type I attended included : Be's European developers conference, Geektea's at beeurope's headquaters and a few FOSDEM (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007). I wanted to go to Apachecon for two reasons, the first and foremost is the fact that many of my collegues are apache members, or affiliated with some kind of Apache project. Coming from the client side of things (Camino, mozilla), I wanted to see how things where organized on the other end of the web software land. I've never been to mozilla held conferences so I can't really compare. The entrance price tag to the Amsterdam conference was an issue for me - 500 € per day is a bit excessive from my used perspectives of Free conferences.

The first day I arrived early, which was good because it gave me the opportunity to get my T-shirt, and then connect to the Wifi network and start reading my emails and finish releasing our beta for friends release. I then attended a few tracks :
Lucene
Explained what it is, gave a few examples on how to use it and who uses it (technorati wikipedia).
Presentation is available here.
Lucene Advanced
Gave a few hints on getting better results and performance out of Lucene's indexes. And out to configure it. Specifically to have a look into contrib/benchmark. Better indexes can be built with the stopword option : it removes a word from having weight in the index process so if all the document you index talk about say HTML - it might be a good idea to use the stopword onHTML.
Semantic web without calling it semantic
A Nice presentation about what actually RDF is, what it should be used for, and some of the tools, available to manipulate (things like ANT. Then I followed a presentation on ivy which is a dependency manager that work pretty well with ANT. Key thing to remember from this is that ANT+ivy should be compared to Maven 2, and not maven against ivy alone.
Then back to do or try to do some work - now that we are live we still need to test a few things.
Then Came the presentation on - which is used at Yahoo!, but not on production systems.
I have issues with the fact that hdfs master nodes do not do any kind of fail over - so if you are not careful and that node crashes, you've lost your file system. The presentation was oriented more torwards the map/reduce computations than on the hdfs - which I would have interest in.
But the Question and Answer part of that talk was very very interesting.
The last thing I assisted was a presentation of Apache Directory Server, which is a "new" OpenLDAP implementation. This brings competition to current LDAP implementation and that is always a good thing. The presentation was done by the project leader so it was fresh and up to date.

Lightning talks is a thing not to miss. And I had the pleasure to see a living legend : Wilfredo Sanchez.

Using banana

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And peanut butter to prove that


  1. Gode exists

  2. Evolution is not a proper theory

Thanks Scot for pointing it out. My favorite is this anwser.

to l10n.caminobrowser.org, we will keep the mailing list and its archives on mozdev at the moment.

Recently our admin updated our to a newer version. So I revisited my homepage to see If I could updated a few presence macros. These macro let people now your IDs on a few IM services. In the previous versions only AIM and Yahoo! were supported, now Skype is supported as is gtalk, and a few others I dont' know nor ever heard of. And The macros have been cleaned up, no need to use a specific macro per service, now you just need to use {im:username|service=servicename}.
I regret that jabber is only recognized as being a googletalk service - but some support is hear so I'm not going to complain.

My fosdem photos are now avalaible here.

- 85+ Million users
- FF 40+ languages
- every localization is based on voluntary effort
- 55% uses en-US, then German, French (download for the stats gathering)
- 16% market share
- less than 100 employee
- History of the project

- more features to defend users against phishing and other social security threats

- lots of interesting stats on downloads, 500k download per day at the moment and other stats.

- local mirror for cvs/svn installed in Amsterdam for people in europe - it's an automatic thing. no need to configure thing for the developers.

- http://wiki.mozilla.org/DeveloperDays

Software patent in Europe

An interesting talk where a nice effort was announced ethipat.org for an ethical patent system. Which want to make sure that in the EU we get a decent system patenting system.

One laptop by child

Very interesting presentation, with new wireless network protocol - the problems encountered are around energy consumption - and we where explained how the screen works which reminded me how the memory mapping for the graphics was done on the Apple II. The project takes everything into account not just software hardware issue. Very very interesting project - oplc.org

Liberating Java

Java should be completed released under GPL v3 by spring. They will use Mercurial as SCM. You will need a few binary plugs - because some of the code is licensed to third party and SUN does not own the rights to release it.
And if some people think sun is screwing up things, Fire an email to simon.phipps@sun.com, they prefer to resolve the issue than having people complaining on webpages.

gpg_fosdem2007_pays.PNG

Here is the repartition of users attending the signing key party at FOSDEM 2007. This is all but scientific - because for instance CH has one entry but I know for sure two person will be coming from switzerland - it's based on the TLDs of the emails used for PGP.

We've just released Joost 0.8. The good news is that now there is a Mac version. It has a bit more bugs than the windows version - but it's here, we are working hard on finding these and fixing them. It's Intel only. The other very good news is that we now have a National Geographic channel which is part of a batch of new content.

I'de like to make it clear I don't have Joost™ invites to give away - please stop asking.

at fosdem 2007, the subject will be QAing xulrunner based applications. I need to start writing it. I've decided That I woud'e use s5 from eric meyer, because it works and I used it last time I gave a talk.

It's something called bridezilla. And you need to search it in order to see it.

So Fosdem is heating up.
I've been granted rights to edit http://eu.mozdev.org - which I did update. I also plan to host some of the slides from the mozilla room. The planning of the mozilla room is getting there - There will be a presentation by the maintainer of enigmail - on making extensions for Thunderbird. FireBug will be presented, but not in the mozilla room.
I will probably renew my membership to the mozilla europe association.
I'll join the Keysigning Party in order to get my keys signed.
And this year I donated to fosdem via a bank transfert before the event starts - The other years I used to give money at the event - I figured out they might need some money before it , in order to be able to better organize it.

Invites

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I have a few Invites I'm willing to give away for Joost our TV over the internet product. Leave a comment here. And I'll send invites.
Updates : I don't have anymore invites.

we are hiring

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We have a few jobs offerings. One of them I have more interest in is the QA opening. And by the way, we just changed named from the venice project to Joost(tm)

Fosdem 2007

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Fosdem 2007 is heating up.

More information on Fosdem 2007.
There will be a mozilla room

Fosdem is a nice place to get Face 2 face with other Open source people and other mozilla guys.

Previous Fosdem looked like

If you can make it you won't regret it.

As some of you may know I work in the QA department at the Venice Project. Up until recently I was the QA department by myself. This is no longer true. We do all our testing manually which is bad - because humans do fail - whereas software is predictable and will always fails the same way.
Up until now we are using Confluence to track our work and our test cases and testings. But this has limits. I would like to add steps to our buildbots build processes to do unit testing and keep track of those - and I would love to keep track of the memory and disk footprint used by our application. There are a few plug-in for confluence that I could use, but they are more oriented in a manual reporting - people click to say if test was successful or not - this is not really compatible with the use of bots to do unit testing. I've done my bits of googling and found many pages describing software that might achieve what I want. I also asked my question on usenet - and up to now had one answer giving me the name of the type of software I'm looking for and a link to a german study/comparison of those pieces of software. Still I would love to get live feedback about the usage of such software so I could make a choice. My needs are :

  • Document test cases.
  • Write test plans.
  • Track test plans - manual testing - .
  • Get input data from external source to track what my bots are doing.
  • Be Able to track performance for clients (memory, disk footprint).
  • Be Able to track performance for Server applications (Stress testing, memory usage, cpu usage)
I need to be able to extract reports on a weekly basis, and do some stats on at least an annual basis (choosing from month y to month x - see the number of test runs, with failure/pass, memory usage changes over a long period etc ...).

Integration with svn, Jira are pluses.

This interview as been sitting on my HD since 2006-09-28. Sorry for the delay.

<_tsk_> Would you please introduce yourself ?
I'm S