pterjan's diary

  Pique Nique du libre à Paris

Sorry, this post is only for French people, and worse, for parisians!

Comme chaque été, Parinux organise encore cette année des pique-nique du libre. Celui de juillet aura lieu demain de midi à 17h à la tour eiffel.

Je ne sais pas encore si j'aurai le temps et la motivation d'aller jusque là-bas, mais peut être à demain dans l'herbe :)

  GUADEC 2008

I have now came back from GUADEC almost one week ago and I have finished uploading 400 photos so it's time to write about it (before I forget).

To make it short, it was great, I really loved Istanbul and I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again.

Now let's start the long version.

On the way to Istanbul I spent one day in Bergamo (Italy). It's a nice city in the mountains and I could easily have a walk in the hills, they also have a nice natural sciences museum (free entrance, photos allowed). I did not visit the modern art gallery as I arrived in the middle of the very long lunch break and I did not want to wait for 1h30 (I tried but was falling asleep as I had not slept the night before).

Then on Friday I arrived in Istanbul and easily found a bus which was going to a Metro station, but then I faced a nice trick. I was at a station called "4. Levent" and I din't know that "4." was part of the name and that another station was called "Levent" but after some time Elcin understood the issue and found me :) I spent a nice Week End with her and her fiance visiting Istanbul and tasting local food!

On Sunday evening I joined Elvin and Tuçe on the asian side and we went to a very nice bar there. On monday morning we reached the University by boat, it's nice to enjoy a tea during transportation :)

Monday was really quiet with not much talks (I only attended "Distributed Version Control System BoF" and "Evolution Memory and Disk Summary") but that gave time to talk with people (mostly with Luis and Christian). Then another friend of Elvin joined us and we went for dinner, and then we joined everyone for the first party. We were supposed to only have the first beer free but thanks to people who did not come and the ones who had additional tickets, I think I only paid 2 beers until we left at 3am. We finished the night at a narguile and then I could check in at my hotel at 7am and sleep for a few hours.

On Tuesday I only attended OpenMoko talk and was quite disappointed (I was expecting something more technical, I don't need someone to convince me to buy one). Dinner and bar again, I did not regret having my hotel in Taksim where we ended up most of the nights :)

On Wednesday the GUADEC really started with a lot of good talks (Clutter is getting better and better, Leisa Reichelt's keynote was great, GEGL seems to get ready for use and Christopher Blizzard also did an impressive keynote). We could then seat on the nice "chairs" in front of the university to eat something and wait for the nice party to start on the roof. After that, Taksim again !

On Thursday, there was the GTK talk with the announce of GTK 3, followed by the announce about GNOME 3 by the release team. The webkit keynote was also great, it was actually quite fun to compare the demos in the webkit keynote with the ones in the mozilla keynote the day before. Once again blue chairs to wait for the great Collabora party on the boat. Then, again, Taksim :)

Friday was the closing day but I was too tired and missed the talks in the morning (I was interested by "Measuring the GNOME footprint"), so I only attended the lightning talks, GNOME Foundation meeting, Federico's keynote and the closing. After dinner we managed to find the place for the Google sponsored party which was very disappointing (they rented a club which was probably very expensive, with a DJ working hard to ensure that we can't talk and gave us 3 coupons for the cheap beer in paper cups, all the other drinks being very expensive). Thanks to that party, I went back to my hotel before midnight for the first time!

Having slept 8 hours, i was totally awake for "Evolution: The road ahead" on Saturday :) In the afternoon I left early to visit the city and then Taksim, and Electronica festival. Sunday and Monday where really quiet :)

As I said in the beginning I really like Istanbul and that week. Thanks to all the people who organized the GUADEC and the parties and to my local guides :)

Among the things I enjoyed, I can list the fresh orange juice (made manually in front of you) for 0.5 euros, the cheap tea and tea gardens, the city being very busy but people taking time to talk even if you don't want to buy anything, the overall relaxed atmosphere... The bad thing is transportation but taxis are cheap :)

  Limiting speed with openssh

Until now I was using rsync when I needed to limit bandwith, but on this morning I could read this on IRC :

<la_loOse> scp a aussi un -l pour limiter la bande passante

In english: scp has a -l option to limit bandwidth

And indeed, in the manpage:

     -l limit
             Limits the used bandwidth, specified in Kbit/s.

I have no idea how old is this option...

  Another busy Week End

It started on Friday evening with a party on the first floor of the Eiffel tower to celebrate 10th birthday of Mandriva. It was great, with a lot of nice people including some foreign colleagues and contributors who I had never met before, and some former employees.

Unfortunately it did not end very well as our beloved giant tux was stolen :(

On Saturday, there was an Install Party at Mandriva Paris office, which was followed by a picnic (inside given the weather) and a DDR +WII party.

On Sunday, I had to wake up at 6 to follow some friends whose march band was playing in Thésee (close to Blois/Tours). This was a great day (full of free wine!) even if I was falling asleep :)

  Week End

Despite the weather, I have spent a nice Week-End with my Chilean guest Gabriela.

On Saturday afternoon we went to Buttes Chaumont park and Montmartre, and starting at 6pm to the Museum night (Museums open until midnight or 1am, and free). We started with Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou, and then moved to Trocadero to see the Eiffel tower by night and visit Musée de la Marine. We then walked to Invalides and attended in the dome the great show telling the story of the building.

On Sunday we joined some friends to watch Vide Accordée on top of the canal Saint Martin. That was the first time I saw someone swimming in this ugly water!

  End of vacation

I spent 5 great days in Saint Petersburg this week!

This was my first visa and I was worried about the needed paperwork (insurance, hosting certificate, ...), and then the registration after arriving. Getting the visa was not easy as you need to go to the embassy on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday between 9:00 and 12:00 and spend some time there (queuing 3 times...). Then you can chose to get the visa as soon as it is ready (the same day) for 70 euros, or wait 7 days before picking it up and only pay 35 euros...

At the airport I was welcomed with huge queues for passport checks (I think I spent about 30 minutes there) and then by Ирина which was better :)

Apart from usual buildings and museums (I admit I haven't visited some major ones), I visited a great bar/club on the first evening, which I enjoyed even if I had not slept the night before (We went there again the next day and it was much better :) ).

I can now pronounce most letters (not all) and often understand the word when it sounds like French or English (or other, like CYШИ for sushi) but reading letter by letter is so slow... And I can't manage to read anything hand written :(

I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again!

Photos are already online!

  Bash and horizontal-scroll-mode

On my machines (Mandriva cooker, bash 3.2+upstream patches, readline 5.2+upstream patches) bash now displays the long command lines on a single line and handles scrolling.

This means I can't read all the command line without scrolling, and I can't copy it...

After some search on this topic I found a readline option called horizontal-scroll-mode which exactly does this, but is off by default (at least according to the doc).

Our packages changelog does not say anything about it and grep "horiz" in the patches or the config files does not return anything related. The upstream changelog of readline and bash also does not say anything about it...

Worse, I tried "set horizontal-scroll-mode off" in .inputrc and then in /etc/inputrc, without any effect...

Any idea on how to fix this ?

  Tip of the day: tar is now smart

As toady pointed out on IRC, you no longer need to tell tar that it needs to uncompress an archive with gzip or bzip2. So, instead of calling tar xzf on tar.gz archives and tar xjf on tar.bz2 ones, you can now call tar xf on both.

Update: To answer Beranger, this was introduced by tar 1.15 on 2004-12-29, and should be available in all recent distributions (According to Distrowatch: Mandriva since 10.2, Debian since Etch, Ubuntu since 5.10, Fedora since FC4).

  Taiwan photos uploaded

At last, I finished uploading the photos of the 3 weeks I spent in Taiwan in February! I had taken more than 1000 photos (Meaning I had more than 1024 files in a directory and libgphoto2 did not want to import them), so after a difficult triaging I uploaded a set of 512 photos, and then for people in a hurry, a subset of 100 photos.

  Funny download stats on ftp.free.fr

Here is the download count for Mandriva iso images on ftp.free.fr yesterday:

$ GET ftp://ftp.free.fr/stats/mandriva.daily.20080409.txt | grep iso/
/official/iso/2008.1                    6741   2656708887348     2.42      83.92
/official/iso/2008.0                     753    205020960820     0.27       6.48
/devel/iso/2008.1                         35     18410545367     0.01       0.58
/official/iso/2007.1                      22      3233336546     0.01       0.10
/official/iso/2007.0                      26      1270717545     0.01       0.04
/official/iso/move                         6       795533110     0.00       0.03
/devel/iso/contrib                         3          492062     0.00       0.00
/official/iso/2006.0                       4           36204     0.00       0.00

Can someone explain me why some people are still downloading iso from 2006.0, 2007.0, 2007.1, or move ?

  PLF stats

It looks like 2008.0 was much more successful than previous distros. Previously we had a lot of downloads when a new release was out, but on 2008.0 it increased during the life of this distro !

  Photos

Now that I have fixed a very annoying but simple to fix bug in Flickr::Upload, my other Taiwan photos are arriving much faster :)