Small is beautiful: JDLL 2009

Small event the JDLL 2009 ? Well yes of course, it’s not in Paris, doesn’t present big names. So what ! Very interesting presentations were made there, such as Bruno Bonfils on Open Solaris. Some other where more looking like a catalog of tools (Cloud, HA), so a bit less useful, or strange, such as the dmoz one, which provides an alternative in the way to search on the web, but in a close environment, with free content provideed by numerous contributors.

But the session which was probably the most interesting for me was the one delivered by Alix Cazenave (April) and Benjamin Bayart (FDN). Not that I didn’t know the subject – Net neutrality. But they always give you the latest news from what happens behind the scene, keepping a very accessible talk, even for newcomers, but provinding as well deep content for those already aware, and thus still learning on the topic.

And I also appreciated greatly the conversasions I had there (why do you want to be there live, if not to talk to and meet new people) on OmegaT a promising tool to help translators, professionals as well as non-professionals and also with the folks on the April booth that I met for the first time there.

And speaking of April, please, consider reinforcing your Open Source and Free/Libre Software associations near you (April, AFUL), or less near. When you see the results around Hadopi in France, it’s definitely worth paying a small fee so that those people may work tirelessly to defend FLOSS, and explain to our representatives the importance it has for our technological, and also cultural independance, as well as for the defense of work based in Europe.

A lot of legal fights are in preparation, and we, Net-citizens and also State-citizen, should not let those debates be held without our voice to be listened to, and understood.

Présentation MondoRescue aux JDLL

Je présenterai le logiciel de Disaster Recovery MondoRescue lors des prochaines Journées du Libre de Lyon le 16 Octobre à 9h30. Venez pour discuter de ce projet, ou d’autres chose avec moi lors de cette journée !

Latest ideas around Mondo Rescue

I have recently passed a lot of time on the MondoRescue project and have some thoughts to share about it.

First I tried hard to publish version 2.2.9, before my vacation end of July. But a resistant bug didn’t allow that. And since I’m back mid August, I’ve been unable to finalize a version for which no bug is immediately reported by one user or another (in fact around 10 different reports through various means) ! On one hand it is a sign that the software is used, tested, in multiple very different configurations, and thus is helpful. On the other hand, the code base also shows it age, and it’s difficult to cover an test in an efficient way the multiple combinations of context + the rapid evolution of distro/kernel and related tools. Of course automatic testing is planned, but hey days only have 36 hours and I need at least 6 hours of sleep

Anyway it seems that I finaly suceed in stabilizing something useful, and I’ll probably publish it this week end. And it’s necessary, because lots of small (or big) annoyances have been reported and now fixed, and they harm users. So it’s more than time. Which made me think to a second aspect.

There is a need to publish versions more regularly. Now that I have project-builder.org to help me make easily packages it’s quite easy, so why not doing it more often. Well lazyness, is probably the bad answer I could give. So it’s time to be less lazy and propose a new approach, hopefully beneficial for all users.

And I don’t want to invent something new, so I’ll reuse a model which seems to be beneficial for its community, which is (again) the one of the Linux kernel. I’ll publish this week end (promised !) 2.2.9. If anything justifies it (bug, driver support, …) I’ll then publish 2.2.9.1 based on it, and so on… I will not create new SVN branches for that, as I don’t want to go backward on that path. But this is the insurance to have more regular releases, bringing essentially bug fixes.

As a side note, I’m not too found of Mark Shuttleworth abour fixed time release for small projects such as the one I manage. Of course, when you have a large team of developers, testers, translators, documentalists, it’s probably a sane approach. But in my case, for major realeases at least it’s not convenient, as I really can’t planify the evolution in advance, and I’m the one which makes the project progress. So you have to deal with my feelings !!

Then the development path of MondoRescue (which has already started) will be done in another SVN branch. And some backports will occur. Not too much to allow me to work most of my time on the devel one, but sufficiently to have people doing support around MondoRescue happier (some friends at HP as well as some partners), distribution integration easier, and more stable versions for enterprise usage (I know for sure they have that concern).

For the moment, the devel branch is called 2.2.10. But I will change that. First because of changes in interfaces, also because all the memory management system has been touched, so will initially create instabilities in the mondo part. So I’ll create a new devel branch to support it, copy of the current 2.2.10 for that. And I’ll derive a future 3.0.0 version from it when time of publishing it arrives. At last we will have a SVN setup meaning something

And of course, the more I look at the code, the more I think of rewriting it, keeping the good ideas, but refactoring the code again, taking benefit of my perl modules written for pb, and that language would provide much more adapted code, due to its clever caracteristics to treat all the character strings mindi and mondo are doing. mindi has already been changed and simplified in its current shell form, but now that I have a much more fine grained view on it, it’s time to rewrite. mondo will be done later on (I invested too much in the C improvement to throw it away so quickly

Looking at the differences between 2.2.9 and current 2.2.10 I already have more than 30000 lines ! But I already have a similar number for 2.2.9 vs 2.2.8. So time to stop writing and to publish !

Ok last point: if you really want to try delaying again 2.2.9, then test the beta available at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/test and report bugs at http://trac.mondorescue.org. But It’ll now be difficult to make me change my mind on the new process

Magnifique début de saison à Grenoble

Le mois de Septembre est celui de la rentrée ,mais aussi celui où je reprends avec plaisir le chemin des salles de spectacles. Mise en bouche familiale avec la famille moralles. Cette troupe fait partie de ces artistes qui renouvellent le spectacle circassien en y mêlant un humour corrosif et une musique variée, jouée en direct par ses membres et omniprésente tout au long du spectacle. Bien sûr, il y a acrobates, jongleurs, clowns (officieusement en tout cas), mais aussi de beaux moments de tendresse, ou de franche hilarité ! On ne n’ennuie pas une seule seconde, les enfants comme les parents ressortent sourire aux lèvres en pensant soit à cette interprétation si particulière du Boléro de Ravel, soit au numéro de trapéziste du bêta de service. Chaudement recommandé.

Le lendemain, reprise des concerts dans notre magnifique salle à l’acoustique exemplaire de l’auditorium de MC2, pour une nouvelle série de Symphonies de J. Haydn par les musiciens du Louvre. Toujours aussi inspiré et énergique, Marc Minkowski ne tarde pas à mettre le feu aux poudres, et pousse l’orchestre dans ses retranchements, même si ceux-ci semblent jouer avec le chef dans leur capacité à suivre ses tempi endiablés. J’ai même été surpris sur certains mouvements, me demandant si cela ne manquait pas un peu de respiration, ou d’attendrissement. Mais lorsque l’on regarde les mouvements métronomiques indiqués sur le programme, il est vrai que Vivace et Presto sont de rigueur. Ce qui tend à donner raison au chef En tout cas, on sort étourdi par la virtuosité affichée et assumée de cet orchestre que nous avons décidément bien de la chance de pouvoir entendre sur Grenoble (et plus cette année que l’an passé) !

La semaine suivante, grosse affiche au grand théâtre de la MC2: le ballet de l’opéra de Paris est invité à se produire en nos murs dans “Joyaux” série de 3 ballets de G. Balanchine. Le meilleur tout d’abord: les costumes somptueux de C. Lacroix qui a eux seuls valent le déplacement. Le choix des formes et des couleurs parent mes danseurs et contribuent à réhausser la beauté des chorégraphies. “Emeraude” m’a laissé sur ma fin. Quelques ratés chez la soliste (visibles, même pour moi qui ne suis pas spécialiste), et augurait bizarrement de la soirée. Heureusement, “Rubis à la suite, sur une musique d’I. Stravinsky se révélait un véritable joyau quant à lui. Originalité de la chorégraphie, implication totale des danseurs, beauté des costumes (ah, je l’ai déjà dit , tout est réuni pour une demi-heure d’exception. “Diamant” à la suite est moins prenant, si ce n’est les effets grandioses du corps de ballet à la fin qui emporte l’adhésion. Ok, la danse classique a tendance à m’ennuyer un peu, donc les fans doivent passer outre et s’y précipiter. Pour les autres, “Rubis” est vraiment à voir comme un accomplissement.

Vivement la suite !

Am I Interdependent ?

Reading the brilliant article that Kartik Subbarao wrote recently on Open Source and Interdependent IT , I was questioning myself to see where I was in this model.

For sure, since I discovered FLOSS in 1993, and learned the impact of licenses choices, I’ve never been dependent anymore … as long as I stay in a FLOSS environment.
It has literally changed my life:

• First being able to learn more by myself, through the outstanding work of thousands of people documenting the projects, on top of the possibillity to access the code in itself, with its comments to better understand what it was trying to achieve.
• The second change is my ability to do system and network administration up to the end: whatever the issue I encounter, I know I can go up to the code (which in practice I rarely have to do) in order to solve it.
  It has changed and also greatly improved my ability to debug even complex situations. And it’s much more interesting in such an environment, as each time you learn something, instead of just rebooting for the error to disappear.
• Third, it allows me to align my personal ethic about knowledge sharing, science improvements with a reality such as providing feedbacks to projects, or patches, or even further, as time passed leading projects, then starting new ones. Each time corresponding to new relationshop with more people, so more opening on different configurations, environments, solutions, finaly giving benefit back to me.

So I’m clearly independent, more and more, which is as important to me as my freedom of speech and thinking. Now am I interdependent ? Well I do my best, but still think this is a progressive evolution, that will never really end, as the broader my knowledge has become, the more I realize so limited number of things I know, even in chat people could tend to consider as the small world of FLOSS.
But frankly it’s worth trying, already at an individual level, as it’s so rewarding. Transfering that at the enterprise level, especially in my case in HP, is another story

At least, I’m interdependent with Kartik, and I’m gratuful for the numerous occasion I had to discuss live (the best) or remotely (when you can’t do something else) with him about FLOSS as, as prooved by that article, his thoughts always make you progress.

If you’re lucky to be at LinuxCon, go and listen to him live and say hello for me !

Entrepreneur: espèce en voie de disparition ?

Depuis longtemps je pense qu’une déviance de notre système est à l’oeuvre qui fait nommer à la tête des sociétés des personnes ayant une vision financière de l’entreprise au détriment d’une vision autour des produits et services que l’entreprise doit produire pour accomplir son rôle.

Historiquement, les patrons de sociétés sont leur créateur, qui le font le plus souvent, non pas pour gagner de l’argent, mais pour avoir une structure leur permettant de créer ce qu’ils ont envie de réaliser et en vivre (bien sûr le mieux possible !)

L’actuelle prise de participation dans les sociétés de fonds financiers conduit de plus en plus de monde à vouloir un retour rapide de son investissement en capital, au détriment de la bonne marche à long terme de l’entreprise, de ce qu’elle apporte comme innovation à notre monde, et à ses employés en leur permettant de vivre décemment. Et ce bizarrement y compris des “petits porteurs”, ceux-là même qui subissent les licenciements boursiers tant décriés !

J’ai été agréablement surpris de lire dans l’Express une interview de Nicolas Hayek, qui, quoique patron du groupe Swatch, est exactement sur cette même ligne de pensée. Lisez-la, car dans ce monde, il est rafraîchissant de trouver des personnes de son envergure, de sa clarté de pensée et surtout de son éthique !

Il est juste triste de voir qu’il ne représente pas l’essentiel des membres des PDG des grandes sociétés, et on ne peut que se demander si finalement ce type de patron entrepreneur (à la Bill Hewlett et Dave Packard) n’est pas une espèce en voie de disparition ? Avez-vous encore la chance de travailler dans une entreprise dont la direction se soucie des employés, de ses produits, et de ses actionnaires à parité ? Faut-il que chacun d’entre nous crée sa structure et en garde le contrôle pour arriver à ses fins ?

Loving trac, hating spammers

I love the tool called trac which allow development teams to easily follow the life of their project, manege Bug Report and Enhancement requests, wiki, link to SVN, ….

But I hate spammers who are stupid enough to think that creating a bunch of iki pages on my trac will help them sell more.

I tried to find an easy way to avoid them doing that. In trac 0.10 it doesn’t seem so easy. So I removed wiki page creation, even for authenticated person. They will have to ask me to create the page first.

And then I wrote that smal script to remove all the pages from trac. Feel free to adapt and reuse. Fight against spammers is a good one !

#!/bin/bash
# Provided under the GPL v2
#
if [ "$1" = "-f" ]; then
        doit=true
else
        doit=false
fi

# replace with your list of trac DB
for pj in /mondo/*/trac/* ; do
        for p in `trac-admin $pj wiki list |
            awk '{print $1}' |
            grep -E '_download$|_buy_|_buy$'`; do
                echo "Deleting $p..."
                if [ $doit = "true" ]; then
                        trac-admin $pj wiki  remove $p
                fi
        done
done

Launch it first to see what it will do. Then relaunch with -f to see the spam wiki pages disappear !
I hate spammers.

But now I love my new shiny trac again ;-

tellico: Open Source the way we love it

I’m collecting a lot. CDs (I have thousands of them, especially in early music), DVDs, books, Comics. And when you have a large collection, and a declining brain, you need a tool to help you managing those data efficiently.

I looked at different ones, and chose tellico. Beacuse it’s a KDE apps, so fit well in my desktop env. But because it’s just a very clever apps ! You know that the person writing it is using it, and has the reall needs someone collecting has. Completion in almost every field, possibility to add, remove change fields at will, nice out of the box choices, templates, Amazon and lots of other sites download feature, CDDB import… You name it ! And good performances, even without a RDBMS. Very impressing.

But that’s not sufficient. The most important for me, is the reaction of the community (here the dev team is mainly one person, Robby Stephenson) when you ask for an evolution, propose a patch, …
Back in August 2007, I proposed a patch to add Amazon comics import which was accepted in a couple of days, and was part of the next release 1.2.14 ! Robby is following the project very well, is friendly on the mailing list, and thus has created a good tellico community.

More recently I migrated my desktop to KDE 4.2. Not that I’m found of it, but that’s the way to go forward, even if not everything is working the way I’d liked in KDE 3.5. So I also tried the tellico provided with my Mandriva 2009.1 distribution, and realized the version was still under dev, even if mostly working. But in that case the “mostly” wasn’t sufficient for me. 2 annoyances and one major bug was preventing me to use tellico at all with CDs So I wrote again on the mailing list to report those issues, and Robby did as usal, a very quick and efficient analysis of the problems, and now the latest SVN version has fixes for 1 annoyance and the major bug. So in return I pushed back that SVN version into cooker so that further Mandriva users may benefit from it !

It’s not so difficult to make a community happy: listen, discuss, take, patch, fix, publish. I know by my other projects it takes time, and that you’re not always able to do it the way you even would like. But the result is worth the work ! Robby can enjoy trusted users, ready to do more around the project and help him as much as he is helping us. So I wish he’ll continue for a long time this good job around tellico.

Now back to filling the DB with the numerous remaining CDs. For one month I had a good reason to not do it, but now I can’t

Packaging is a core project task

I’ve seen in the past a lot of small FLOSS projects which were not doing their job up to the end. Work is not done when your code is compiling and begin to work the way you design it. As a project lead, and because you know the project best, it’s your task to take in account the installation procedure. Using Autoconf, is clearly the optimal approach, but for just a couple of script, a simple Makefile, or even an install.sh script could be perfectly sufficient. That way your potential user, has a helper to guide him in the installation of your software on his system, and it’s more easy for him to test it as a consequence, so hopefully to contribute in any way.

But that’s not the end again. Most of the users and system administrators are not using projects out of Version Control Systems (VCS) or Configuration Management Systems (CMS). Neither are they using tar files that you upload, even including a decent installation procedure. What they prefer, and at least that’s how I react, is a package for their distribution. It’s so handy ! All dependencies are taken in account and with tools such s yum, apt or urpmi it’s so easy to install a set of packages and their dependencies that it’s a real pleasure (compare to the boring configure; make; make install). But more over, as it’s easy to install, it’ easy to remove, to test momentarily, to avoid impact on your running system by a well controllled installation process. It’s even easy for newcomers, that have at their disposal graphical interfaces to search and install packages even more easily (at least for them )

So even if of course, this is a technical task (who said burden ) of packaging your project, at the end of the day, you should also perceive it as a marketing activity which helps you promote your project by making it so easy for hundreds of people to just download install and test, even with little system knowledge. More users, more testers, more reports, better software. Here is the virtuous circle in place.

Last point, if you think it’s difficult to package, then have a look at my packages for project-builder.org It’s here to help you !

Will present at upcoming RMLL

This year, I’m again lucky enough to not have conflicting events with the upcoming RMLL ! Since the last 20 years, I”ve not missed the Académie of Renaissance Music directed by Jean Belliard in the south of Paris, and don’t want to miss it ! It’s always the week of the 14th of July. And this year, RMLL is just before ! So I’ll be there presenting 2 conferences on Mondorescue and project-builder and also attending other conferences (again a very interesting program as evey time I’ve been able to attend) and meeting various people I know on their booth. If you want to meet with me, don’t hesitate to attend a session, or drop me a mail !