Tomorrow (Thursday 5th of August 2010), I am going to meet Paola and Ugo on the Camino de Santiago. They’ve been walking since last Friday, and with them, I should try to reach Santiago de Compostela, after about 3 weeks of walking, if we make it to there, that is.
Since I’ll probably have plenty of things to tell from the road, I’ve started another blog just for that, which you can find there: http://santiaguij.blogspot.com/.
Yesterday, I left a message, in French, on the voicemail of my now ex-landlord to set up a meeting to give him the keys back. He uses Vodafone, and they have that nice service where they transcribe automatically voice messages into text messages (they call it DictaSMS). It turns out that it doesn’t work that well for messages in French, as opposed to what they seem to advertise. Here’s the text I received shortly after leaving my message on the voicemail:
DictaSMS ha enviado al [number redacted out]: “Bueno(?) Tomas, yo ___ se si tienes el dinero en mi movil en el bolsillo ser una peli y luego en el super, soy Juan Bou es un profesional para pedirselo papel mas chulo. Chao.”. Servicio ahora dispo en castellano,catalan,ingles,frances,portugues,aleman.
So, well, thanks for the laugh Vodafone :)
Lately, I’ve been working on scratching an itch I have with bazaar. It’s a great tool that I use a lot, but I find myself committing a GNOME heresy: one of the tool I use most, “bzr qlog” (which is great by the way), is a QT application in my nice GNOME environment. Heresy!
The thing is, there is indeed a gnome alternative in “bzr viz“, but it’s got a limitation that is annoying for me. Both tools show the history of a bazaar branch, displaying various information (revision number, first line of commit message, author, …) and a nice graph of revisions and how they are merged together. The big difference being that the whole revision history is expanded in “bzr viz”, whereas “bzr qlog” has each merge revision collapsed, which you can expand by clicking on it. This is an invaluable feature that made “bzr viz” a no-no for me. But soon no more! I’ve worked on a branch of bzr-gtk that provides branch collapsing, and it’s already functional; you can find it at lp:~guijemont/bzr-gtk/collapsed_merges.
Obligatory screen-shots after the jump:
GStreamer had been ported to android for a while by Prajnashi and Edward Hervey (see http://groups.google.com/group/prajnashi), but this has been done on a “platform” level. In other words, to use it, you need a custom firmware. What I would like to see is a way to embed GStreamer in an application that you can distribute for usage on any android phone. The big tasks I see to achieve this are the following:
So far, I have achieved or almost achieved step 1, and a kind of proof of concept for step 3:
I still have to run some tests and get a better understanding of the problem and existing solutions for step 2. As for step 3, the only java binding I could find is based on JNA, which, as I understand it, is not ported to android. Since I don’t feel too much like porting JNA to android (I’m afraid that would involve too much java black magic), I lean towards the solution of a JNI binding generated (most likely statically, at least for a start) using the GObject introspection stuff, especially since I’ve always wanted to play with that.
So, hopefully, I will soon post updates on the advancement of these things, posting this might create some peer pressure to motivate me ;).
If you have any ideas/advice/comments/questions about all that, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me
Ok, I think there are three reasons for me half abandoning this blog:
Today, I have resolved point 3 (or at least made a big leap in that direction).
That old CSS, first with the Union Jack, then with a mix of it with la Senyera and the awful pink background amused me at the beginning, but I think I got tired of it. So, here’s the new style, aimed at simplicity and readability, hope you like it! Of course, (constructive) comments are welcome!
For the nostalgic/masochist among you who know how to use their web browser, the old stylesheet is still available under the name “old ugly style”.
So, my apologies to those who tried to write me to an email address @emont.org recently. It was unavailable since the 12th of September. I had forgotten to renew the domain, and I didn’t get the reminders from gandi.net since my fetchmail wasn’t running any more (and the non-emont.org address I use for gandi is used almost exclusively for that). Everything should be back to normal now, or quite soon, when your name server cache is updated.
Toutes mes excuses à ceux qui ont pu essayer de m’écrire à une adresse email @emont.org ces derniers jours. Le domaine n’était plus disponible depuis le 12 septembre. J’avais oublié de renouveler le domaine, et je n’ai pas reçu les emails de gandi.net parce que mon fetchmail (qui ne sert pratiquement que pour gandi) ne tournait plus depuis des mois, sans que je ne m’en sois aperçu… Tout devrait être désormais revenu à la normale, ou dans pas longtemps, quand le cache de votre serveur de nom (enfin, celui de votre fournisseur d’accès) sera mis à jour.
Long time no blog!
So, lately, the big news is, at work, we’ve just released Moovida 1.0. Moovida is what used to be called Elisa, with more cool in it :). We’ve totally reworked the interface, and I must say it now rocks! Kuddos to everyone involved, we’re starting to have something quite cool. Just check it out, tell me what you think and report bugs if you find any.
Also, for those who don’t know, I’m now on identi.ca and twitter, and I’ve been updating quite a bit today about how the release was advancing, with some pictures posted here.
J’ai deux cousines que j’aime beaucoup[1], qui ont eu l’idée saugrenue, mais pleine de bonne volonté, de me faire suivre l’e-mail decrit ici. Je leur ai rapidement expliqué (peut-être de façon expéditive, j’ai beaucoup de courrier à traiter chaque jour, du fait de mes nombreux fans) que non, ça ne sauvera pas la planète, en leur envoyant le lien ci-dessus (il ne fait pas que décrire l’e-mail, il explicite aussi pourquoi il ne vaut pas grand chose).
Voulant en savoir plus, l’une d’elle m’a demandé:
Alors peux tu expliquer à l’inculte en info que je suis ce qu’est un hoax ? Ça doit être un virus quelconque non ?
Je me suis alors senti obligé d’écrire un roman, grand défenseur que je suis de la veuve, l’orphelin, la cousine perdue dans son outlook et ma boite e-mail qui n’arrête pas d’exploser, j’ai commencé à écrire, et j’en ai fait un roman, que je vous copie ici.
Here and now at work, I have to do stuff under windows (obviously, we want elisa to work under windows). On the machine I have at work, that means Vista Home in Spanish (that’s what was installed). To do that stuff, I need some tools, like the excellent bzr, written in python (this detail has its importance).
A while ago, for some reason, I wanted to use bzr-svn on that setup, so I installed it in C:\Program Files\bazaar\plugins. I don’t remember if I managed to make it work or not (did I say it was a while ago?), but I eventually uninstalled it, as well as any dependency that I might have installed for the occasion. Ever since that day, whenever I ran a bzr command, I had the following output preceding the expected output of said command:
No Python bindings for Subversion installed. See the bzr-svn README for details.
Unable to load plugin u'bzr_svn' from u'C:/Program Files/Bazaar/plugins'
Even though I don’t have any bzr_svn plugin in that directory! Yes, I tripled checked!
This had been driving me crazy for months now, and today, by pure chance, I stepped across a directory called C:\Users\guijemont\AppData\Local\VirtualStore that contained a Program Files directory. Having a look at it, I discovered, after months of struggling with that awful and undeserved error message that there was a:
C:\Users\guijemont\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\bazaar\plugins\bzr_svn
Yeah, really. And it was full of .pyc files. What happened is that, whenever a user program tries to write somewhere where it shouldn’t (such as Program Files), UAC gives it the impression that it succeeded, and write the stuff in that VirtualStore instead of the real place. That is a convenience that might save the day to some programs that don’t behave and write in places where they shouldn’t.
Enters python. Python writes .pyc files, which are slightly compressed versions of the original .py files (and therefore faster to load). It writes them in the directory where the .py file resides (I guess it makes a lot of things easier to manage).
Then you mix both. Install bzr-svn, use it as a normal user, remove it: it’s not removed! Because the .pyc files are still there, hidden in VirtualStore.
And they say that OS is user-friendly? As I user, I find it friendly that a directory is deleted when I delete it…