Along with all the videos of all FOSDEM editions, the FOSDEM team put the 2009 videos on YouTube. So here is the video about Gemvid: [youtube &hl=en&fs=1] The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).
This 25th of March, 2009 is Document Freedom Day. Although it’s not as important as starvation in parts of the world, the economic crisis or the continuous deterioration of our privacy and civil rights (in UK and elsewhere), it’s good to take a break and think about our use of electronic documents in our everyday live. Let me just give you an example … A few days ago, I was trying to retrieve data from an experiment. As a well-formatted student, I stored my data in a then state-of-the-art, proprietary statistical software my dear statistical professor taught me to use. As long as I had this software, it was fine. Now that my university stopped to pay the license, that I didn’t installed this software on my new computer, I am stuck with a serie of 1, 0 and other delirious characters in that file. Does that mean I lost all my data? Yes. ...
Sometimes, even if you mainly develop on Unix/Linux boxes, you are stuck with MS-Windows on your desktop. Moreover, although your are a developer (i.e. someone who is supposed to know how to run a computer), you have no administrator rights so you can’t install the right tools that can improve your productivity and enhance your code stability/security. This is for the sad part. Fortunately, Free Software are there and most of them can even be run without being installed on your machine, just copy the software and use it! Here is a list of some of the software I’m using. Feel free to promote your favourite application in the comments. ...
Hi, and welcome back on my blog. Following the progressive migration from epot.org to jepoirrier.net, you landed on the new address for my blog: http://www.jepoirrier.net/blog ( new RSS feed here). The migration process was easy, thanks to the WordPress eXtended RSS that contains posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. But there are two things left I wanted to keep: existing users and images which links are hard-coded in various posts. ...
Mantis is a free web-based bug tracker. As most web trackers, it uses e-mail to notify testers and developers about the evolutions of issues they have reported or they just follow. For that purpose, Mantis uses Codeworx PHP Mailer class that gives you the opportunity to use the PHP mail() function, sendmail or a SMTP server to send those e-mails. The use of the PHP mail() function is the default option. Unfortunately, some web hosting companies limits the PHP mail() function by forbidding the use of the 4th and 5th (optional) parameters. The result is that you can’t use the e-mail functionality of PHP mailer / Mantis because they use the 4th parameter. ...
This year, I only went for the Saturday afternoon session of FOSDEM 2009, the Free and Open Source software developers’ European Meeting. Two years ago, I mentioned the general trend that more women were interested in free/open source software/movement and this trend continues. But this time, I also noticed some really cute babies … and my son Neel-Alexandre was one of them of course! Although he’s only 7-month-old, he was really interested in the FreeBSD, Linux and Firefox mascots (respectively a red daemon, Tux the penguin and a fox). You are never too young to taste the truth ;-) ...
After a while, here is why I got a TV tuner for my Linux laptop, took screen captures and wrote a script to add a timestamp on pictures … I wanted to know how my (then 5-month-old) son was sleeping (his mom can be reassured: I was not planning to put electrodes on his scalp ;-) ). Get the Flash Player to see this player. var s1 = new SWFObject("../videos/player.swf",“ply”,“360”,“240”,“9”,"#FFFFFF"); s1.addParam(“allowfullscreen”,“false”); s1.addParam(“allowscriptaccess”,“sameDomain”); s1.addParam(“flashvars”,“file=../videos/081129-night.flv&image=../videos/081129-night.jpg”); s1.write(“container”); ...
Fosdem is “a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software”. I will be presenting Gemvid during a lightning talk on Saturday :-)
If you want to know the name of files containing a special string, grep -c is your friend. But you also get names of files not containing your string (with count = 0). If you only want the names of files containing “mystring”, awk can help you: grep -c "mystring" * | awk ' !/:0/ ' And if you don’t even want the number of times “mystring” appears (on 1 line): ...
Here is a short script (1.6kb) to add a timestamp on all PNG pictures in a directory. It requires Python and the Python Image Library ( PIL). In order to use it, modify some parameters in the beginning to suit your needs (images directory, font file and size, etc.) and launch ./timestampFiles.py. Here is a before/after example (size of pictures is reduced to fit in this blog): ...