Marc Fleury, JBoss
founder joins the ranks of
Tonnerre,
me, and other people requesting that MySQL (and MariaDB!)
please
finally die. Everyone, don't even fork it. Use
a real database instead. Or, at least,
SQLite. Really.
We're going to
FOSDEM 2010 (of
course I've been at every FOSDEM that was not just an OSDEM,
Benny and gecko2 are regular attendees as well, as are other projects
of mine such as FreeWRT and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, by proxy). There will
be a recent MirBSD snapshot I've yet got to build, with the new floppy
format ustarfs (idea, but no single line of their stinking ridiculously
huge code, stolen from NetBSD ) and other improvements (albeit less than
I wanted to get done by then). The days before, I'll attend the first
FusionForge
meeting to break up the French Cabal, with my work hat on. That is
also my first time in France (outside of the Elsa ). People, make a good
impression on me to overcome the classic prejudices ;-)
This
weekend I'm going to meet my Debian Application Manager zack, have
some good beer (ugh... first this, then Paris, then good belgian beer...)
and fix some bugs, all while learning even more. Sounds like fun, but I
almost feel overwhelmed, in contrast to the years of much less travelling
from my past. I've also started sort-of mentoring Simon, one of our
apprentices at work, into the Debian processes. (On an unrelated side
note, formorer recently said bpo will become bp.d.o soon. Great!)
Please don't laugh at
this excuse
for a webpage, as I've yet to fill it in, but my CLI for the KDE
Wallet is hereby deemed ready for public consumption, with a bug-fix
release
2.01 (bugs actually found during preparation of a
port to Debian sid and KDE 4, which is much much worse than KDE 3, plus
it looks so absolutely disgusting I'm not even sure Windows Mistda is
worse). I hope the package will end up in NEW soon (and once progressed
to testing I may be able to make the KDE 3 variant official via lenny
backports;
my WTF
*.deb repo will hold them until then.
There are more webpages I need to fill in...
mksh's TaC, arc4random (which needs some major redesign as well) and
BSD::arc4random, the RANDEX protocol (entropy exchange over IRC) and
its plugins and patches, ...
Not just Mac
OSX (and, I hope, iPhoneOS) will soon come with mksh(1), but also
Android (I prepared patches to make it /bin/sh, which works
quite well although I need to find out how to make a hardlink
so that #!/bin/mksh scripts will run) and Maemo, for which I
wrote an mksh package in a garage project,
which also needs some love w.r.t. testing on actual devices, menu
integration, etc. (Please contact me if you can help with either of
the three.) We also have lewellyn:#ksh making a package
for the new OpenSolaris system (thanks again). People persuading
Apple to put it on the jesusPhone are also welcome. (This does not
mean I endorse any of these right now, I'd probably get the
most of a WinCE PDA with built-in GPSr, WLAN and maybe GSM/GPRS.)
English and French native speakers, please review, and Dutch native
speakers may contribute a translation of, our flyers. (Source code for these is
not available, sorry. Benny makes them in Quark on System 7
in Basilisk II, used to be Classic until Apple yanked it. But still,
they use only free fonts, free imagery or such the MirOS Project is
allowed to use, and beat every single other FOSS project flyer I've
ever seen by far!)
There's probably more I could write, I bet I forgot half of it
anyway, but I'll leave it at that for now. Get yourself a nice cup
of hot chocolate, pour an Espresso into it, and enjoy the mix with
a piece of cake (I'd say strawberry or mousse-pear but all they had
was cassis-cr me) and pity me for not knowing any French next month.
The current version of mksh
had use of arc4random(3) removed, including set -o arc4random , to
speed it up (on some architectures, a lot) this will break
some existing scripts (such as /etc/rc *cough* on MirBSD ).
Hence I decided to publish the next version of mksh(1) as R40 based
upon current development, and defer plans for associative arrays (and
multidimensional arrays) for mksh R41. There s also already the change
to Build.sh arguments, so this suits me quite fine.
(Read: if running MirBSD, don t upgrade mksh at the moment.) There
will be a new MirBSD snapshot once this is fixed, maybe a few more
changes to the shell for better POSuX compliance, and the recently mentioned
patent on LFNs (long filename) in FAT will be taken into account with
a patch to msdosfs.
I ll travel to LSM/RMLL 2010,
the Libre Software Meeting (Rencontres Mondiales
du Logiciel Libre) tomorrow until the weekend, to hack some on
FusionForge (this is worktime for me), visit XTaran, Uriel,
and maybe a couple of other usual people .
Thundersday, between 10:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, eurynome will
be shut down by gecko2@ due to power supply maintenance on the host
system data centre.
We have a new mirror in the Americas, thanks a lot to Mike 'Fuzzy'
Partin! Benny will mention it on the webpages once it s working.
Google has had a very nice idea today, to celebrate Pacman s aniversary: they made their logo become a playable 
I love bugs that are just confusing and/or break your mental model of how you think the software works.
Here is a good example: Given the following HTML in Gecko, what happens when a user clicks the button?
Debian maintainer:
Some days ago I had the great announcement that my 
Is there any way to provide an alternate CSS stylesheet for GoLive CS2 only,
not for regular browsers? Because there are some things in that layout that
are too difficult for the GoLive renderer, it doesn't display them right.
The pages are still editable (just plain XHTML), it's just not looking
right in GoLive (advanced CSS).The site already has alternate stylesheets for browsers such as the broken
Internet Explorers, so if I could convince GoLive to use their stylesheet it
might be looking a lot better in the editor, too ...I am aware that GoLive CS2 has been abandoned in favor of DreamWeaver.
Still it's going to be used in a project I help with the web templates.(Other options would be 
Reading Kyle's view on 
Lately, I've been pondering how to solve one annoying aspect of the FreeDesktop, namely how to eject the piece of bloat called Firefox from the picture and get myself a fast web browser that I can rely on and that yet offers a similar UI experience based upon native GTK2 widgets rather than XUL components.
Just to investigate possible options, I tested Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror. My conclusions were than a Gecko-based Epiphany or Gaelon is incredibly fast and that Konqueror offers a similarily efficient experience albeit using QT, rather than GTK2 widgets.
Why is Firefox so bloody bloated then, if it uses the same Gecko engine as Epiphany and Galeon? The only possible conclusion I could come up with is that its crappy XUL implementation, rather than leverage existing native GTK2 or QT widgets, tries to reinvent the wheel with its own UI toolkit running as a gigantic RAM blackhole.
One option that I wanted to investigate but found too deficient was a Webkit-based port of Epiphany. Unfortunately, at its current stage, the GTK2 port of Webkit simply isn't mature enough to consider, although the fact that Webkit has been succesfully ported to a number of platforms and constitutes the basis for Safari on Mac OS suggests that the potential is significant.
That only leaves one single aspect on which Firefox wins hands-down: its UI concept; it just works well, whereas Epiphany simply has a UI concept that is utterly inadequate, because it is too crude, lacking basic necessities such as a session saving feature that also works when purposely unloading the application, rather than only as a crash recovery measure. Simply put, Epiphany's premise that a browser should never be closed and thus ought to always remain open in the background of a desktop session is utterly flawed; it doesn't work like that in real life and Firefox acknowledges this, while Epiphany stubbornly doesn't because someone wreaked Havoc in our desktop paradigm.
Anyhow, to me the solution is clear: regardless of which rendering engine it uses, Epiphany's UI concept needs to become more like Firefox, before it can truly gain acceptance as the default browser among Linux distributions.
As you can guess from the screenshot above, it now has plugins support.
It is also