Ludovic's weblog

Want to understand certs ? SSL and friends ?

2012-02-06T12:21:28Z

My friend kaie made a very nice and explanative talk at fosdem on the subject. It's now available for reading in pdf at http://kuix.de/fosdem2012/fosdem-2012-talk-kaie.pdf

Major Update testday this coming Thursday , January 26th 2012

2012-01-20T10:36:41Z

On January 26th 2012 , the Thunderbird team is organizing a Testday. Our objective is to make sure that we aren't breaking anything for people that will update from 3.1.x to 10.

Instructions on how to participate and how to join are available here : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:QA_TestDay:2012-01-26

What's the best way to announce a pgp / gpg keysigning party ?

2012-01-16T10:38:33Z

I'm organizing a Key-signing party - I've contacted people on biglumber.com. I'll probably post the event on upcoming.org. I will contact the local LUG. What else should I do to get more people to attend ?

The tram got of the rails this morning in front of my house

2012-01-05T17:54:40Z

So I filmed it. Framing is bad and part of the image is missing because I exported the video in HD. I'll do better next time.

Third call for sessions for the FOSDEM cross-distribution miniconference

2011-12-29T06:57:19Z

FOSDEM is a yearly conference that takes place in the campus Solbosch of
the Université Libre the Bruxelles, in Brussels, Belgium. The upcoming
edition of FOSDEM will happen during the first weekend of February, that
is, the 4th and 5th of February, 2012.

During the past two editions, there has been a distributions
miniconference at FOSDEM, inviting talks from all distribution projects.
Distributions that have cooperated in the past include Debian, Fedora,
CentOS, openSUSE, Mandriva, NixOS, and more.

The distributions miniconference will happen again this year, and we are
still seeking proposals for sessions.

I've sent out two previous calls for sessions for the miniconference
that set the deadline for talk proposals to December 22nd, 2011, which
is tomorrow.

A list of current proposals can be found at
.
There are some interesting proposals there, but unfortunately there
aren't enough; we'll have two rooms for two days, which means we'll have
around 32 hours worth of talk slots.

A variety of sessions are welcome; round-table talks, BoFs as well as
presentations, on any subject related to distribution development.
Sessions can be about a subject specific to one particular distribution,
or can be targetted to distribution developers in general.

As said, the original deadline was December 22nd, but I am hereby
extending the deadline until January 1st, 2012.

People interested in holding a talk or chairing a BoF or round table are
hereby invited to submit a proposal to the
distributions@lists.fosdem.org mailinglist (moderated for
non-subscribers), containing the following information:

- their name,
- a (short) bio,
- a title for the session,
- an abstract for the session,
- an expected duration for the session, including time for questions by
the audience.

Note that the distributions@lists.fosdem.org mailinglist may also be
used to discuss possible BoFs or round tables before actually formally
proposing a session, or for general discussion relating to the
miniconference.

Lightning and Thunderbird testing week, a post mortem.

2011-11-22T10:09:48Z

Last week we had our last (to date) community testing effort and the focus was Thunderbird 10 and Lightning 1.0. This was a first for me, dealing with two products during the same week and dealing with a product I don't use too much. I was not too confident that the test cases available for Lightning were up to date - but I thought that some testing was better than none. So I did My usual call to testers using the too many ways we have to do that :

Mail to testers

Newsgroup post

blog post

mozillazine post

And I didn't do that on the same day but on the course of two weeks. And I got a bit stressed and worried because the numbers of answers I got was very low. And then Philipp posted on the Calendar blog and my mailbox got filled with people willing to spend some time testing.
The plan was to send instructions when I would get back from mozcamp in Berlin and start the testing effort. Unfortunately I came back sick and was in bed for most of the testing week. I did send instructions and then left my computer unattended for the week as I was sleeping and fighting fever. The instructions I sent did the job for most of the volunteers that had signed up for Thunderbird testing but were confusing to say the least for the many new comers who had signed up for Lightning.

I would like to apologize to the people who wanted to help but got confusing instructions f from me.
I would like to thanks standard8 for getting into #tb-qa and answering people.

And I would like to point out our results :

Thunderbird - 81% coverage and 15 bugs found

Lightning - 38% coverage and 4 bugs found

And I've learned a lot on something I thought I mastered so next time it won't happen the same way for sure.

Mozilla Camp Eu 2011

2011-11-21T17:37:56Z

Last week-end I had the pleasure to attend MozCamp Europe 2011 in Berlin, Germany. As always those events are for me the occasion to meet the people involved in the product I work on.

It was interesting to listen to old face that were ranting. It was nice to see and meet new people or people I wouldn't expect to see in Berlin (nice idea to mix an AMO editors meeting with the event). I arrived a bit late on the first evening, but not as late a some, so I had the pleasure to enjoy a german-like diner and the time to meet most of the french crowd that was around. Giving us a taste of history as our first social act was nice - even If i had seen the video before. Ended up having drinks with a few old timers and that did wrap up the evening.
Like in whistler I shared my room with Tonnes - a contributor from the Netherlands. Tonnes mind you translate most of the knowledge base article from both sumo and sumomo. While we chatted he told me that was roughly around 20 hours of his time devoted to the task on a weekly basis (a good part of it being sucked into following what Mozilla does and where it goes).
The next day started with a bunch of updates on where Mozilla was going and that was quite interesting - even if I skipped the end to go sign up some pgp keys with two Berliners.
The afternoon was pretty packed - with JB presenting's his vision of where Thunderbird will go. Then Protz giving a 101 demo on how to build and make interesting extensions for Thunderbird - Both presentation had full rooms (room name was mosaic) - which was better than what we had achieved at the last mozcamp. I then followed Florian's presentation of Instantbird - and I still owe him a why I prefer Adium email.
We ended the day having diner in a cave - diner was nice but the place was a bit crowded and very noisy for some. I did meet a new mozillian over diner - but I believe that it was more due to luck than anything else (big hello to mcsmurf).
The next day was more based around private conversation and introducing people to each other. Overall a very long week-end but very productive too. Of course I ended up taking pictures and they are available on flickr.

Test event centered around Thunderbird 10 and Lightning 1.0

2011-11-09T08:40:33Z

It's been a while since we had a testing event. Some of it was probably my fault as I needed to adjust myself to the new release process we adopted since Thunderbird 5.0. Since then I've been lonely testing releases and new features as they came out. It's time to spend a good amount of time testing Thunderbird more thoroughly. We will use litmus as our main testing tool. In litmus you will find groups of test (eg one for address book, one for imap, one for news). Each group is made of one or more tests that needs to be run. As I want to distribute the workload and not only have a few areas tested, I would like you to sign up and tell me that you want to participate to this event.

What is required to participate :

An email account that can be used for testing
a litmus account
an account on bugzilla.mozilla.org
some time in the week of 13Th November to 20th November 2011

What will the workflow of this event look like

You read this
you reply to it - telling me you want to participate
On the day the event starts (times will be Central European time) You'll receive an email with:

what to test (eg groups of test I've assigned to you)

a link to the test in litmus

a bugzilla bug number which we will use to track bug found during this event

more detailed instructions on how to use litmus and bugzilla

You organize yourself to run the tests when you have time

You do the tests and give us reports and file bugs if the tests aren't successful

That's it. I will Post results in the middle and at the end of the event.

At the same time we would also like to run the same kind of event for lightning as it's the most used extension with Thunderbird. The workflow will look exactly the same. Just make sure that you tell me you want to test Thunderbird, Thunderbird/Lightning or just Lightning.

Right now the number of people who signed up is below 10 and it would be nice if I could get a few more volunteers in order to be able to have a large coverage of our tests. The best way to reply to this is to send me an email.

Are you using Thunderbird in an enterprise environment ?

2011-10-30T12:13:45Z

If so we would like to get some feedback from you - see this Thread on the Thunderbird enterprise mailing list.

How to Geotag pictures on flickr

2011-10-17T13:14:34Z

I'l try to go thru all the techniques I know and I've used to add geographical information to pictures, so they can be mapped to an actual point on a world map.

Why flickr ?

Because it's the online service I use to expose my photos to the world. Some of the techniques explained here can be used with other services - but as I don't use them you'll need dear reader to find the tweaks needed.

Using the provided map

Is probably the best solution. You just snap the picture and when you upload it you move it to the proper spot on the map.
Pros:

Easy to use
Fast

Cons:

Some maps are incomplete so you can't geotag that way
Where do you put the picture , where you where or where the subject was

Using an external GPS source

This requires a little bit more of hardware than your camera - but you will be able to geotag pictures where the map isn't accurate enough (like for say this picture). You'll need your camera, a gps device capable of logging gps coordinates and some software. The software will match pictures and longitudes and latitudes. The way this work is quite simple : each time the gps write a log entry it also logs the time. When you press the shutter button, the camera also records the time. The Piece of software will read both files and do a matching based on those time stamps (I use GPS photo linker on my mac, and heard good reviews from geosetter).
Pros :

Not too complex
Tags anywhere on earth

Cons:

More post processing
cost of the device
need to think about some extra batteries for the device

Using alternate services

I know of at least two. They both use google maps which is the most accurate maps available for free online (AFAIK). And they will geotag your pictures using the flickr API. These services are http://loc.alize.us/ and http://maps.yuan.cc/. They both use the same data , and I have noticed any differences using those services. I did use use these services because I didn't always have a GPS, or the gps with me.

Last but not least I've just found out a nice way to geotag pictures taken while flying on planes the explanations are here.

How I started being involved in mozilla

2011-10-15T08:18:52Z

Once upon a time I used to be a Desktop linux user , and OS/2 user and a BeOS user. Back in 1999, around the M8 release - Be Inc. did a port of mozilla. This meant that my favorite os would have a better browser than Netpositive that couldn't even render /.

At this time I was working for ITSgroup, installing, deploying Computer Associates software at clients - and my laptop was able to only run Linux or Windows. My home only had a slow modem with very pricey access fee to the net. So I decided that I could use the bandwidth available at work ( a whooping 2 MB ) to test Mozilla on either Linux or Windows and report bugs. I thought that fixing bugs on linux, windows would also fix bugs on the product Be would release.

And Be went to the toilet, and I switched to the then very nice toy os that Mac OS X 10.0 was. I tried to participate to opendarwin, tried mach-o builds when they were experimental. But Mozilla at that time was really unusable on mac os. But I kept using it on my work machines because of the tab feature. Trying to report bug when I could.

One day I stubble upon something called Chimera. Ho and that was able to browse the web, and it was fast, slick and efficient, so every now and then I would download the latest version and run it. I don't remember how, but at some point I made the connection with Camino and Mozilla - something I was familiar with. That was just before the release of Camino 0.7. The Camino effort almost got killed when Apple released Safari. Unfortunately Safari didn't let me log on my favorite site at that time the mighty ubix.org. So I kept using he browser that worked for me: Camino

In July of that same year, the mozilla/netscape teams got fired and I wanted Camino to make progress , so I started to annoy Mike Pinkerton, Simon Woodside to make Camino more a community effort. I started this blog for that purpose - see my post from that time in the mozilla/camino section. #camino appeared on irc.mozilla.org and we started working towards 0.8. A few months later the build requirement changed, and I couldn't help with dev so I started working on making l10n work for Camino. At the same time I needed a proper email client so I used Thunderbird and tried to report bugs.

In 2004 Tristan made more noise about Fosdem, and agreed to give me a ride back from Brussels if I attended. So I went and had a blast - I met Patrick the author of enigmail, Alex from svg and jssh fame.

In 2006 my personal life went upside down so I decided not to continue Camino related activities, I got a job offer in Holland from Alex who I had met at fosdem again in 2005 and 2006. I took the offer as QA lead for Joost a video client based on xulrunner. That started my professional life doing quality assurance. In 2008, we stopped doing mozilla related things and at fosdem I talked to Peterv and he simply said send a resume over if you want to do more Mozilla related things. That got me thinking - It reminded me david's email about the start of mozillamessaging and I ended up applying for their QA lead position. After tow rounds of interviews (I refused after the first round because I was starting to see someone and thought I wouldn't have the time to do a proper job) I started in February 2009 working full time on Thunderbird.

Runkeeper vs sports tracker

2011-10-10T13:21:20Z

Lately I have been doing more sport in my daily life than ever before. This is a direct effect from my life style, as if you didn't know I work from home. Doing a daily period of sports, sports is good for my body and sometimes it also clears up my mind. It started by me deciding to go to the swimming pool on a weekly basis. And then I'm in Holland so I decided to bike and try to do it on a daily basis. As I don't really get any pleasure from the biking itself I started using an application on my phone to track down how much I was exercising - and I really have a things for stats (be it what kind of music I like etc ...).

Run Keeper

I started using runkeeper as some of my friends where using it. Runkeeper runs on either your iphone or android powered phone and records, your speed and your gps coordinates. So you are able afterwards to look your activity. On top of that when you break a record , they send you an email telling you that you've been the fastest this week or the furthest this month. Runkeeper is based on a fremium model - most of the services are free. But some aren't like :

Aggregated stats (how much calories did I burn this week).
Training lessons (ie lessons to achieve something with training.

I was very happy with it with the exception that sometimes it had issues finding the gps - which made using the app sometimes difficult. And entering swimming data was kind of a nightmare as I couldn't really use the phone in the water. And sharing to facebook was broken for me

Sports tracker

Was recommended by my cousin, so I decided to give it a try. They offer the same free services and I like them better for the following reasons:

Gps is detected automatically
The application as a smoother Users Interface
The website is more polished
I can share to facebook
It's available on iphone, android and Nokia phones

So I recently switched to using them. I don't know what their business model is as the site is not loaded with ads. I'm not sold premium features. The only thing they seem to be selling are hardware devices to track my heart beats. So I'm a little suspicious about how they are making money but for now it really works better for me. I haven't tried swimming with it yet so I can't really say if swimming is easier to tack with this application than with the runkeeper one.

Started my day by writting an email to remeberingsteve@apple.com

2011-10-06T06:46:07Z

Here is the verbatim copy of the email :
Message-ID: <4E8D4F41.2050100@hirlimann.net> Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:48:33 +0200 From: Ludovic Hirlimann Organization: Famille Hirlimann User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:9.0a2) Gecko/20111005 Thunderbird/9.0a2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ludovic Hirlimann Subject: Thank you for the Apple II, for call -151 X-Enigmail-Version: 1.4a1pre



I would like to say a big thank you to Steve for making the Apple II,

that got me started into computers. The call -151 function embedded in

basic gave me the power and tools to understand how computer worked. And

boy that was fun , really fun, that got me into programming for my

pleasure - small and crappy projects - but still it was fun. I was

hooked and never looked back ever after.

Thank YOU Ludo

I've removed my PGP/Mime signature to make it a bit more readable.

Flickr's Android App versus flickroid

2011-10-03T08:33:26Z

Last week flickr announced that they were releasing an application for Android devices.

I use two devices a Tablet from Asus and a phone from Samsung. So I went to both devices and decided to install the app and see what it had to offer. I also wanted to compare it to the tools I was using on these devices to access flickr.com (a web browser and flickroid). Unfortunately the official apps is only available on phone devices and not on tablets.

So let's try to define my needs when I'm using a mobile device like a tablet or a phone and access flickr :

Be able to post, tag and file pictures in my sets and groups

Read/reply to comments made on pictures

See my stats

And the importance is in that order, exactly in that order. I really can wait to be front of a computer to see my stats. I prefer to use my computer to reply to comments, see other's pictures, fav pictures and comments on pictures (and I use a bunch of extensions to make those experience better at least on my desktop).

Flickroid

is more a small utility that plug itself into Android and adds flickr share buttons proposed and used by other apps. Exporting photos to flickr with it is a nice experience. You can tag, file the pictures into your sets or even create sets. It works nicely over wifi and 2g/3g. When upload fails you can retry the uploads and all the metadata that you added on the initial upload try are kept.
Flickroid has two flows that I can list :

It's painfull to upload more than one image at a time which is what Roland does

It remembers your tags from one photo to the other and editing tags on the phone or tablet isn't the best experience.

For all my other needs, I will use the browser (except for organizr which doesn't support tap events)

Flickr's official application

Let's me do plenty more things, like read comments easily consume my friends images. I can consume way more with it - comments are made easy.
Pros:

Favoring is easy too.

The UI is nice and really made to have the full flickr on the small screen.

The application let's me use the camera from my device and upload it ( I can even add some filters to have nice effects on the pictures).

When the image is geotagged and you are willing to share that, tags based on the location are automatically added.

Cons:

I can't add my pictures to sets

Without wifi uploading fails - this might be fixed by the new version that got published today.

Failed uploads are not easily re-try-able - you need to re-enter all the metadata - if it's available in the application - I didn't find where it was.

Consuming photos is easier on tablets with bigger screen than phone and the app isn't present on the tablet android market.

So overall I like both for different usage. In an ideal world I would use flickroid on my phone to create content. And I would use the official flickr application on my tablet to comment and interact with my photographic social graph. For now I use my phone more than my tablet so I will stick with flickroid.

Finding firefox for Android slow ?

2011-09-27T07:50:22Z

Then I've got good news for you, using a nightly build will make anything you do on your mobile faster. To install it just read the instructions at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_Nightly. The speed difference is very, very noticeable - worth installing.