Ludovic's weblog

Hotel et wifi ?

2010-03-08T06:36:59Z

Après une semaine passé dans des hôtel Danois, il y a quelque chose que je ne m'explique pas. Dans tous les hôtels où j'ai dormi, j'ai pu profiter d'internet via le wifi. Le signal était fort, la bande passante abondante (Joost et même youtube en HD, sans aucun soucis). Je n'ai pas vu de restrictions sur les ports (mais bon je n'ai utilisé que 80,443, 587 et imaps). Le tout sans aucun supplément tarifaire.
Maintenant si je compare avec les autres hôtels où je suis descendu récemment à Prague, Bruxelles ou Vancouver, je ne comprend pas que ces hôtels osent demander jusqu'à 15€ les trois heures de connexions avec une qualité de service aussi mauvaise. Pourquoi les voyageurs d'affaires acceptent-ils de payer internet si cher et d'avoir des connections si mauvaises ?

Open Source days 2010 round up

2010-03-07T20:13:01Z

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 :

Greenlandic music

2010-03-06T08:22:48Z

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 ....

J'aime pas la soupe ... enfin .....

2010-03-01T19:20:45Z

Pour moi la soupe a trop souvent été associé, soit a une mixture de légume plus ou moins liquide, du bouillon avec de nouilles en forme de lettre dans le fond, ou un soupe au champignon liquide avec de la crème fraiche et Maggi.
Ce soir j'ai réalisé que j'aimais la soupe , en dégustant une délicieuse soupe jaune (impossible de dire à quoi, le menu était en danois), au restaurant l'estragon. Tout en la dégustant, j'ai réalisé que j'avais aussi aimé, le soupe à la tomate avec de boulettes de viandes, la soupe au cuisse de grenouille et la soupe de pois. Le point commun entre toute ces soupes, elles contiennent quelque chose que je peux mastiquer - du poisson, de la viande, ou bien encore de la saucisse. Donc j'aime les soupes lorsque celles-ci ne sont pas complètement liquides ou pâteuses.

Les moules ça se mange avec les doigts !!!

2010-02-27T19:08:14Z

Je suis à Ålborg dans le nord du Jutland danois. Ce soir j'ai diné à la Provence un restaurant dont une partie de la carte était en Français. J'ai constaté que trois personnes avaient pris des moules (sans frites), un couple et un jeune homme visiblement en famille.
Le couple a eut droit à un seau à champagne pour servir de poubelle de table, j'ai trouvé cela assez amusant.
Puis le jeune homme en famille qui utilise une cuillère à soupe afin de sortir la moule du coquillage .... J'ai trouvé cela hallucinant .. Pour moi les moules se mangent avec les doigts et c'est pour cela qu'il existe des rinces doigts!

Housse de camouflage pour objectifs

2010-02-21T14:07:38Z

Lorsque j'ai écrit mon billet sur l'objectif Canon EF 400mm F/2.8, je pensais ajouter quelques accessoires à ma panoplie de choses à transporter lorsque je veux faire des photos.

J'ai donc acheté une housse de camouflage lenscoat. L'idée derrière cet achat était double. En premier protéger l'objectif lorsque je me déplace en extérieur, contre les petits chocs et les éraflures. Le deuxième objectif étant bien entendu de pouvoir réaliser de meilleures photos d'animaux dans leur milieu naturel.
Lorsque j'ai reçu la housse, j'ai été surpris par le fait qu'elle ne soit pas faite d'un seul tenant mais de cinq parties distinctes. Et donc pour le montage de la housse il faut démonter le pied de l'appareil - chose pour laquelle j'ai eu quelques réticences. Une fois montée, la housse ne bouge pas, et elle protège bien contre les éraflures. L'objectif rentre toujours dans sa valise pour les déplacements en avion ou en voiture. Le premier objectif de la housse est donc atteint.

Dommage que le pied et sa bague de maintien ne soit pas couvert, ça laisse encore une grande zone bien blanche. Pour la partie camouflage je serais bien embêté si je devais me prononcer sur le fait que la housse apporte un avantage - car je n'ai toujours pas pratiqué avec intensité la photographie en affût. J'aurais tendance a penser que cela aide mais je ne puis en être certain.

Testers for Thunderbird 3.1b1 wanted

2010-02-20T14:55:19Z

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 :

Install, shutdown, uninstall

Folder Views

Migration

Updating Thunderbird

Import

Window configuration

Toolbars and menus

Account settings & Preferences (Options)

IMAP accounts

POP accounts (exclude Global Inbox)

Gmail Accounts

.Mac accounts

Global inbox

Mail composition

Spell checker

RSS account & subscriptions

Newsgroups

Message Aging

Navigating and displaying messages

Downloading and saving

Image blocking

Return receipts

Proxies

Offline, disk space

Moving, copying, deleting messages

Views and labeling messages

Message filters

Message search

Address search

Virtual folders

Message Grouping

Quicksearch

Address books

Junk mail

Extensions

Theme management

Help

Printing

Master Passwords & password management

Phishing, spoof detection

Secure connections

Digital signing, encrypting messages

Software Update

Find as you type (FAYT)/Quickfind

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

2010-02-18T09:12:46Z

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.

Je plains mes voisins

2010-02-17T11:00:53Z

Aujourd'hui J'ai réalisé un rêve de gosse , je suis devenu propriétaire d'un flipper. C'est l'une de formes de jeux d'arcade que j'adore. Cela vient sans aucun doute des séjours que j'ai effectués aux États-Unis étant petit. Je crois bien que mon ami Brian avait un flipper dans sa chambre. Ensuite lorsque nous étions à Ocean Grove, j'aimais bien aller jouer au flipper à Asbury Park sur la jetée.
Il y a un mois, comme ça sans vraiment en avoir l'intention, j'ai regardé sur un site de vente d'objets usagés s'il y avait des flippers et je me suis retrouvé sur le site de pinballpindoll.nl, de fil en aiguille j'ai demandé le prix et j'ai passé commande d'un "Tales of the Arabian Night".
Aujourd'hui j'ai été livré d'un excellent Flipper , aux couleurs un peu délavées, par un vendeur qui est lui-même collectionneur. J'ai donc pu tester le flipper avant de donner l'argent - j'ai eu un petit cours sur comment le programmer. Le tout avec 4 boutons. La première chose que nous avons faite a été de tester les contacts, la deuxième de mettre le volume sonore à 1, et même comme cela c'est assez fort, et c'est pour cette dernière raison que je plains mes voisins (voir ici pour quelques sons).
En quelques heures je l'ai déjà ouvert plusieurs fois, une fois pour chercher une bille bloquée, une fois pour tester un contact. J'ai mis mon nom dans les scores ! (bon c'est facile quand on commence par faire un remise à zéro des scores ). C'est sympa à l'intérieur, même si le flipper pue un peu :-) J'ai bien envie de de le bricoler - on peut mettre les roms à jour donc on doit pouvoir les programmer !!! (Faut juste que je trouve la doc).

Après quelques heures j'ai perdu la musique et un flipper sans musique ni effet sonore n'est pas un flipper. J'attend le SAV.

Crédit photos kentdoggydog sur flickr

Presenting the Thunderbird QA team, Interview #5 Nathan

2010-02-16T07:47:46Z

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 !

What is the best bleeding edge

2010-02-09T08:01:38Z

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.

Le système interactif de KLM fonctionne sous linux

2010-01-30T16:56:48Z

Je reviens d'un voyage à San-Fransisco . J'ai voyagé sur un MD-11 de KLM. Comme lors de mon voyages à Vancouver - celui-ci proposait tous les passagers un écran personnel et une télécommande. La télécommande permet de téléphoner, d'envoyer des SMS et des emails (comme je l'ai essayé la dernière fois). Elle permet aussi de sélectionner les vidéos à la demande que l'on peut regarder durant le voyage. Il semble que la version du logiciel avait quelques bug cette fois-ci - car les systèmes ont été redémarré plusieurs fois. Petit logo linux au démarrage et ensuite un démarrage en mode texte, sympa !

Thunderbird Quality Weekly Event

2010-01-20T08:11:09Z

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.

Open Source days in CPH

2010-01-08T16:45:55Z

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 ?

Photographie de Voyage - Guide pratique

2009-12-30T14:41:27Z

De Cécile Domens, Richard Fasseur et Séverine Lacroix.
Comme j'aime beaucoup prendre des photos lorsque je voyage et que j'ai une tendance a trimbaler beaucoup de matériel, que ce n'est jamais vraiment pratique, je me suis dit que je pourrais lire quelque chose sur le sujet. Le livre est divisé en huit chapitres et ceux-ci s'articulent dans l'ordre chronologique d'un voyage. Le livre est illustré de nombreuses photographies prisent par les auteurs lors de différents voyages. En particulier lors de séjours en Mongolie et dans le centre de la France. Les images sont belles.
Le contenu est beaucoup plus décevant en tout cas pour moi. Une bonne partie du livre se retrouve dans beaucoup d'autre ouvrage relatifs à l'initiation à la photographie. Une bonne partie est donc consacrée à la composition sans vraiment être d'un apport pour les voyages - de même les divers conseils sur comment s'organiser dans les premiers chapitres sont trop généraux et peu concis. Malgré tout j'ai appris deux ou trois trucs en lisant ces chapitres d'introductions.
Les chapitres de la fin forment une somme de trucs et d'astuce qui rende ce livre intéressant et qui m'ont permis d'apprendre à me placer afin de faire de plus jolie photos.