YGingras^.net

I'm giving Gnome a try. I switched from Gnome to KDE around Mandrake 7.0, which is a long time ago. I always preferred how everything was working well together in KDE; with dcop to automate tasks and Konqueror's web-shortcuts, I had a very efficient desktop. Then came KDE 4.

KDE 4.0 lacked so many features that I switched back to KDE 3 instantly. KDE 4.1 had essentially most of that I needed but it was still kind of buggy and slow, but KDE 4.2 promised to fix all of that.

I don't know if it's KDE or Ubuntu who screwed up but Kubuntu 9.04 is simply unusable. It's way too slow for my EEE 1000HE and, the new KNetwork manager won't recall passwords and won't even tell you what access point it's trying to connect to when it prompts you out of nowhere for a new key. KDed randomly crash, I can't type a full path when I save-as in both Konqueror and KMail and worst of all, all applications are fill with garbage when you flip them with alt-tab.

Oh, and Amarok 2 sucks. Ok, that last one is easy to fix but I'm switching anyway.

I want to try something new and I want a fresh view of the other desktop environment. First contact is not smooth so far. As an example, gnome-terminal and metacity have many keyboard shortcuts that clash with Emacs basic navigation. Emacs come with bindings for a lot of shortcuts so it's expected that the desktop will clash on some obscure functionality that is not used too often, like kill-sexp, but clashing on forward-word is sure to break my pace. Jean helped me get started. Let's see how it goes.

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It's been a while since I last brewed beer but I'm finally at it again. As I write this, my apartment is filled with the aroma of fresh hops and barley. That smells always makes me incredibly thirsty; I can't drink any of it for a few weeks but I can write on the pleasure of brewing in the mean time.

Back when I did my last batch, I was a caffeine addicted young programmer, running on Penguin Mints and on dark chocolate. I was looking for something extravagant, something with a kick. I made two batch that summer: a coffee flavored stout and an green tea flavored red. When I say flavored, I really mean it: the stout contained one kilo of really dark and oily espresso coffee and the red was just as excessive but I unfortunately can't find the original recipe anymore. I'm certainly not the first to think of making a coffee flavored stout. Dieu du Ciel was serving one at the time, a 9% monster that was extremely strong on all senses of the term.

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A few months ago I acquired a pair of Beyerdynamics DT770 headphones. Since then I used them everyday at work to isolate myself into my little private bubble of serenity. Sure, I missed many episodes of office entertainment. People who wear headphones with less isolation remove then when people start screaming at each other so then can enjoy the show; with the DT770, I don't even notice that something is going on.

After a few months of using high quality headphones, I started to wonder how much of an upgrade I would get by switching to a more expensive pair. There is virtually no limit to the amount of money that one can spend on a pair of headphones. Either there is something to gain at every price bracket or it's just a status symbol. Considering that Skull Candy produces headphones that are a lot more sexy and a lot more affordable than DT-48, it seems safe to assume that the status symbol is not that important, though I will not pretend that it's not what many are looking for.

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Julien Desrosiers just wrote to let me know that he did put a new aggregator online. Montreal Hackers is a minimalist website where you can see what other hardcore geeks of Montréal are working on. Neet!

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Blogging live from PyCon. Guido van Rossum opened the morning session with the keynote talk. He covered a lot of ground but one idea that struck me is that he wants to more of less freeze the standard library.

He proposes that with a perfectly valid rational: if the Python dev team removes a module from the standard lib, some program out there will break and on the other hand, if a new module is added to the standard lib, it has to be extremely stable since it will now be tied to the somewhat slow release schedule of CPython. That position is obvious but Guido also mentioned that more work is getting done on the specification of modules dependencies and that is the key to a dramatically new landscape in the Python world.

Setuptools already did a very good job at dependencies specification and Guido did acknowledge it. With Setuptools, one can define that his package will depend on some other package with a dependency spec of the form "depname>=1.3.5". Once you know the dependencies of a package, it's almost trivial to write a tool that will install a package and all its dependencies; easy_install is a good example of such a tool.

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Blogging live from PyCon. I'm still at PyCon learning new tricks and meeting pythonistas from around the world. The first conference day went smoothly; the wifi was a bit shaky so I was forced to listen to all the good talks.

With four tracks, there is a lot to variety, no matter what you are looking for. Testing, quality assurance, research, design, games, tales from the trenches: they are all here. There are two one-hour sessions of lightning talks per day; that gives us a really good overview on who's working on what and that makes sure that we know when to go to the open space sessions. Open space is great: we have a bunch of smaller rooms where people can meet to work or talk about whatever they want. There's a pin-board where we can put the subject of a meeting and book a room. Rooms a are booked in one hour slots; the formula is similar to Bar Camp but more oriented toward working groups rather than on presentations.

We went for a tasty snack and few beers at People and Slice in Chicago (they sure love generic names in here). Fortunately, downtown Chicago is not at depressing as the area around the hotel. It's pedestrian friendly with lots of pubs and cafés.

Looking forward for another day of dynamic talks. More to come.

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Blogging live from PyCon. One thing that I found really interesting during the tutorial sessions was to see what kind of development environment other Python hackers were using. At first, I found it quite unusual to see Joe Gregorio using gedit, an editor that I found very limited compared to the very rich traditional Unix editors like Emacs and Vim. Then Joe started giving us and overview of what appengine can do and I was blown away.

I mean, I was blown away by appengine but I was also really impressed by how efficient Joe was with his editor. One feature that was pushing him quickly from one from-scratch example to the next was the snippets plug-in for gedit.

Snippets are templates for typical programming constructs. There are things that we code over and over, boiler plate, repetitive code, almost always the same but not quite. You know what I mean, classes, for-loops, method definitions, test-cases. Python do well without most of the boiler plate code that is mandatory in other languages but you still have some of it and when you code all day long, it adds up to a lot of boiler plate at the end of the week.

I'm not ready yet to move to gedit so I looked for the snippet modes available for emacs; there's a lot of them. I know ELisp but as some people commented on the emacs wiki, a template language that is Lisp based tends to become too syntax heavy and hard to read for the kind of small pieces of code that you use snippets for. After looking at the non-sexp options, I decided to go with YASnippet. It has a very engaging demo screencast and unlike most of the contenders it's both actively maintained and easy to setup. I haven't used it much yet but I really like it so far.

update: the former link to the screen cast was obviously wrong. Sorry about that.

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Blogging live from PyCon. I'm still in Chicago having quite a good time learing stuff related to Python. My second tutorial for the first day was on functional testing with twill and selenium. I already do a lot of that stuff but it was nice to see a good overview of what a mostly automated test suite for functional tests can look like. There was a lot of nice tools that were used to glue everything together. I was a casual user of nosetest and I really look forward to unchain all the powerful features that I didn't know about.

Day two started full speed with a tutorial on Tosca Widgets by Chris Perkins. The level was perfect for me and I like the fact that the framework used for the hands on session was Pylons. It's not just that I already know Pylons quite well, it has something to do with the fact that Pylons is so light as a framework that you can really understand what's going on. Many exercised with a very tight feed back loop and one-on-one help. Wow! Why can't universities hire people like that to give the lectures?

After my second dinner at PyCon, I know that the vegetarian menu, no matter how tasty it is, is sure to keep me slim. It must be the first time that I ever go back to get a second serving of salad.

Last tutorial was on advanced SQLAlchemy with Michael Bayer and Jason Kirtland, the main implementors of Alchemy. That one was quite unique as it featured interactive slides: the slides consisted of a Python scripts that execute code with syntax highlighting when you moved from one slide to the next then give you an interactive interpreter so you can play with the new classes and objects that were just created. That's great but the pace of the presentation was extremely fast and I had a hard time to catch up. When the Alchemy guys say "advanced", they really mean it. Fortunately I still have the slides with me so I can decipher them when I get some time.

I'm now waiting for Francis to get out of his plane so we can go for a beer. What a day; I feel like just one week ago I didn't know anything about the language that I use everyday. That conference is worth it more than I expected. More to come.

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Blogging live from PyCon. Here I am attending PyCon in Chicago or at least somewhat close to it. The Hotel is very nice but the location is somewhat depressing. My room as a good view on both the train track on the highway; I can't see a single point of interest at a walking distance. It's a good thing that meals are supplied and that the bar at the hotel is filled with Python super stars.

The tutorial on Google AppEngine is very interesting; it moves fast and the presenter know his stuff extremely well. What else to expect when you get the opportunity of being trained by an AppEngine implementor. More to come.

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Blogging live from Libre-Planet. Yet another very good breakfast at the Irving House. Home made bread and other bakeries, cheese from a local farm, and fair trade coffee.

If you've attended Bar Camp Montreal, you know that a wiki kind of "unconference" can go extremely smoothly and efficiently. Nothing like that in here. Lots of people running around, the schedule is somewhere on the wiki but no one knows quite where, people are jumping on the stage to ask the audience if they can do a lightning talk at the end of the day. Oh my. But still, it works. We are running three tracks in difference conference rooms: Free Software activism, Important Projects, and Web Services. There are smaller rooms where people can get together and work and there is a lot of coffee and snacks. Our plan right now is to skip some of the lightning talks so we have time to go to the Cambridge Brewery Company, which was vigorously recommended by many, including my manager.

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Blogging live from Libre Planet. Second part of day-one was quite busy. Here is briefly how it went. The supplied lunch was really good. There was some kind of bean salad and brochettes, both chicken and vegetarian ones.

The afternoon session started with a panel on Free Software activism with Brian Gough, Ryan Bagueros, and Bradley Kuhn. The panel somewhat lacked of focus which is bad considering the very interesting set of panelists that we had. The second presentation was really good. Evan Prodromou talked about his experience at offering Free Software web services. He had a very colored view of being free in all sense of the term: making the source only available under the AGPL license so that other service suppliers can't withhold their improvements; making the user data easy migrate and transport to a supplier; making the software easy to interoperate with by developing it's API as an open standard. Truely a moving and enlightening talk.

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Blogging live from Cambridge. I like to sign my emails with GPG but the default configuration and the integration with kmail is so annoying that I always ended up ditching it. At least it was the case until I took the time to dive into arcane documentation and to find how to make it work for my kind of usage.

I use GPG add a cryptographic signature to email that I send with kmail, the KDE email client. Kmail uses kwallet, the KDE password manager to store passwords so I don't have to type them every time that I check if I have new emails. This what you would expect from a non-baroque email client and that's the way I like it. When you configure kmail to use GPG to sign outgoing emails however, it leaves GPG to handle his passwords by itself. Now the annoyance begins.

GPG being an advanced security and privacy tool is somewhat paranoid regarding how it stores passphrases used to unlock private keys. It defaults to send the passphase to the gpg-agent with a timeout of five minutes. That means that every five friggin minutes, I need to retype my GPG key when I send an email. If that was not annoying enough already, the password prompt window is not modal to kmail and it is not always raised on top of the windows stack. That means that I have to alt-tab through a few windows every five minutes when I want to send an email. Don't get me wrong, the benefit of signing my emails does not warrant that much pain.

This is where reading the doc did help. The GPG documentation is really hard to read but if you manage to decider it, you will gladly learn that there is a setting to increase the timeout for the passphrase cache. I order to use it, you first have to make sure that you are using the GPG agent. To do that, edit your ~/,gnupg/gpg.conf file and make sure that you have the use-agent line. After that, edit or create your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf file and add the following lines:

   default-cache-ttl 86400
   max-cache-ttl 86400

Now logout and log back in and you're done: GPG will only prompt you for your pass-phrase once a day. Enjoy!

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Blogging live from Libre Planet. Here I am in attending Libre Planet in Cambridge with Pascal Charest. I will probably write a longer wrap-up later on but here is how it goes so far.

A very busy morning session starting with Jeremy Alison from the Samba project with a very nice presentation on what kind of strategy Microsoft is using to attack Free Software and how we can defend ourselves.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on the Affero GPL and how the definition of Free Software needs to be revised in a world where web-services makes it increasingly easier to let users work with your software without actually distributing it.

At this very moment, Alexandre Oliva is presenting Linux-Libre, a fork of the Linux kernel that is free from binary blobs and other non-free parts.

The laptop distribution in the audience is interesting in itself. I see at least height eight Thinkpads, as many EEE 1000 of various flavors, one EEE 700 that is impressively actively used, and at least 3 macs.

More to come.

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I'm typing this on an Asus EEE 1000 HE laptop. You've probably read a lot of good things on it and I have to say that it's definitely a very nice little laptop.

Since last October, I was using an MSI Wind U100 and before that I was on a Thinkpad X61. I love little laptops with big batteries. I'm now typing with the computer on lap, very reclined sideway on my couch. That's not the best position to code or to work on a graphical design but somehow I really like it for writing prose, that is, blogging and answering emails. When the summer will be back, I look forward to type using the very same position but in my hammock this time. You can't do that if your computer is heavy or if you need to carry a power cord around.

I don't work much on the road. It happens that I put my laptop in my backpack and that I hit the road with my motorcycle. When it happens I end up working from a café in a remote town or from the side of a lake in a provincial park but that is far from my typical usage. Nope, nothing that fancy. I'm just a lazy bum with a hammock.

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March is a busy month in the Free Software world. From 2009-03-21 to 2009-03-22 I'll be attending Libre Planet in Boston then from 2009-03-25 to 2009-03-29 I will be at PyCon in Chicago. Lot's of great speakers and two days of advanced hands-on tutorial by the leaders of the industry. You can't go wrong with that.

I still don't know how I will travel to Libre Planet though. Traveling by train would require going up to New York then back north to Boston and all the bus fares that I found so far take 12 hours or more to reach Boston. I might end up taking the plane but the best option would be to find someone else for car pooling. If you are in on around Montreal and that you plan to attend Libre Planet by car, let me know.

update: I'll be car pooling with Pascal Charest from Laboratoires Phoenix. Woohoo!

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