Olivier's adventures in Wonderland

Why I am into Free Software

Olivier Tilloy — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:43:00 +0000

Some people around me often wonder what makes me so enthusiastic about Free Software. Let me give an example that I think illustrates quite well my motivations.

Last week I got a mail from my mum who is a happy user of Ubuntu. She had come across a bug and was asking for help. Someone had sent her a mail with a .ppsx file attached, and she couln't figure out how to open it. Evolution was unable to find the suitable application to handle it, and when she saved the file to disk, it would open with file-roller as a zip archive. Nasty.

The thing is, OpenOffice is perfectly able to open such files when instructed to do so. A quick search revealed that she was not the first one to experience this issue. There was a bug report on Launchpad. I confirmed it, and since no one seemed to be working on it, I decided to give it a go, out of curiosity.

I first reported a bug upstream, then checked out the sources for shared-mime-info, read the instructions to get started, and in no time I had a trivial patch along with a test case.

This is where the beauty of the community development model comes into play. I submitted the patch upstream and informed Ubuntu developers via the bug report. Less than 24 hours later, the patch had been merged upstream, and it took less than an hour for it to be integrated in the package for Ubuntu Lucid, the upcoming version.

Free Software gives me the essential freedom to fix the issues that bother me (known as freedom 1), along with the needed tools to solve them efficiently and support from a dedicated community. And that is priceless.

Still wondering why I am into Free Software?

pyexiv2 0.2 pre-release testing

Olivier Tilloy — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:20:00 +0000

As I mentioned on the pyexiv2-developers' mailing list, I believe the 0.2 branch of pyexiv2 is now ready for pre-release testing.

Progress on this pet project of mine has been very slow due to the lack of spare time I had to dedicate to it, and constant context-switching. But it finally reached a state where I think it is complete and stable enough to form the basis of a first release.

There are still some missing bits (complete documentation and a windows installer are the two big items on my list), but the functionality is there and I'd love to see it stress-tested and get as much feedback as possible. The bazaar branch can be grabbed from lp:pyexiv2, it should be compiled against the latest release of libexiv2, 0.19. Bug reports and questions are welcome!

Going to FOSDEM

Olivier Tilloy — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:09:00 +0000

I will be in Brussels from the 5th to the 7th of February for the tenth edition of FOSDEM. Kaleo, Guijemont, Ugo and Fernando are also going, it should be a fun week-end.

I'm looking forward to attending interesting talks and above all meeting the Free Software crowd IRL.

Oh, and of course, I can't wait for the Friday Beer Event! If you plan to be there, drop me a line to schedule a round or two of Belgian beer.

Moovida @ GCDS 2009

Olivier Tilloy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:23:59 +0000

I am just back from GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit) where I gave a talk about Moovida. It was a short stay for me, as I arrived on Friday afternoon just in time for the registration process where I got a cool Qt beach towel, and left on Sunday night after the last talk.

Even though I would have liked to stay the whole week to attend more interesting talks and BOFs and to get to know more hackers, I must say I really enjoyed my stay in Las Palmas. I didn't see much of the city and nothing of the island really (except a bit of the coast from the plane), but I really liked eating next to the beach, facing the sea, and the Alfredo Kraus auditorium is an impressive building pretty well located. Good geographical conditions for such a summit, the first of its kind, bringing GNOME and KDE communities together.

It all started on Friday night at the welcome social event sponsored by Canonical (free beer and tapas) where I got to meet a bunch of interesting people, some of whom I knew from the projects they work on, some not. I got back to the hotel reasonably early and reasonably sober to do some adjustments to the presentation I was to give on Sunday.

The real stuff started on Saturday morning with three very interesting keynotes. Robert 'r0ml' Lefkowitz spoke about Liberal Software, what it is and what it is not, why he doesn't like to give credit to people and how he has a very medieval point of view in that regard. Pretty interesting and impressive as an orator. Then Walter Bender talked about Sugar and the work they are doing at Sugar Labs to promote the use of free software in education, especially in developing countries. I sure would get involved in that kind of project the day I have children. Finally Richard 'rms' Stallman took off his shoes and talked about software patents, about how evil the Spanish government is in that matter, how evil Microsoft is, why we should not write applications in C# and why we should even discourage people to do so. It would have been interesting indeed to have a confrontation with the guys behind Mono at Novell, but it seems they were not there, being kept busy with a release. And he sang the new version of the Free Software Song. And wore his costume of Saint IGNU-cius of the church of Emacs. And held an auction for a stuffed gnu that sold for 170€ (proudly acquired by Zaheer).

After a quick lunch break the afternoon was dedicated to a series of lightning talks (5 minutes each) on various topics, among which I found the following ones of interest: the Open-PC announcement by Frank Karlitschek, "Common interface bloopers and how to avoid them" by Matthew Paul Thomas, designer at Canonical, "Usability Testing for the Rest of Us" by Celeste Lyn Paul, OCRFeeder by Joaquim Rocha, and "KDE Bugzilla: Using the new options" by Alex Spehr. Of that last one I particularly liked the following statement: "~90% of the crash reports are unusable". Reminded me of a tool of ours that got a heavy face-lift recently but still needs a lot of work to produce really interesting results.

After all the conferences I got to meet Brian whom I knew through Launchpad and his multiple bug reports on elisa and moovida. Together with Philippe we sat down, had a look at a couple of problems he had running Moovida on OpenSolaris, and in no time we managed to understand and fix bug #381417. On the way back to the hotel he gave me some interesting insights on Sun's plans about OpenSolaris, his work to integrate GStreamer-based applications in it, and how from the feedback he got from users people seem to appreciate Fluendo's codecs and DVD player. It's always good to hear that of course.

After a refreshing nap I rehearsed one last time my presentation and went to sleep as there was no specific event on that night and I wanted to get early to the conference hall to test the setup of the room.

I spent the whole Sunday morning in the multimedia room and saw among others Lennart speak about audio on the free desktop, Jan on the direction GStreamer is taking towards a 1.0 version after more than 3 years of an ABI and API stable 0.10, and Olivier on integrating video conferencing in applications using Farsight.

And I gave my talk about Moovida, focused on its ease of use, the immersive experience it provides and how easy and cool it is to extend it writing plugins. I demoed some important features of the new version, and got overall some very positive feedback and interesting questions. That was a very good experience for me as my first talk in such an event, and despite the little bit of stress that may have resulted in a weird pronounciation and me forgetting things I wanted to say, I really enjoyed it. I can't wait to see the video of it to learn from my mistakes (and show it to my mum), and I'm looking forward to doing more of this in the future.

After a quick lunch in front of the sea where I joined Mark's table, I saw the opening of GUADEC with Owen presenting GNOME Shell, the presentation of GNOME Zeitgeist, a talk on how successful GNOME was in Google's Highly Open Participation Contest, and a series of lightning talks on the current state of Clutter, by Emmanuele. As the day was over for GNOME hackers I decided to attend the last KDE talk on semantic contextual menus, by Laura Dragan. They seem to have this interesting RDF data store mechanism in KDE which I'd need to have a look at one of these days.

With that it was already time to catch a cab to the airport to fly back to Barcelona. Let's make Moovida rock even more for the next event of this type!

Moovida 1.0 is out

Olivier Tilloy — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:53:15 +0000

Good news everyone!

After a very intense design and code sprint, we finally released Moovida 1.0, formerly known as Elisa. A lot has changed in this release.

The name of course, meant to better reflect the spirit and image we want to give to the project: it is fun (to use and to work on), it is moving (fast), it targets a wide audience (from your little brother to your grand mother).

The visual appearance of the whole thing is a revolution in itself: designed from the ground up with ease of use, professional look and consistency in mind, it offers a much better media experience and a world of possibilities for us to build upon and extend its functionalities.

A huge number of bugs were fixed, overall performances improved and the code was cleaned up a lot.

The last two weeks were very intense, we had a tight deadline to stick to and I think we managed quite well considering the constraints. Kudos to Florian and David who invested an incredible amount of time and energy in this milestone, and of course to the whole team: the result we achieved is a great piece of team work.

A lot remains to be done, and we are already hard at work on fixing critical bugs to make this release as stable as possible, introducing new features, polishing some parts of the UI that didn't get as much love as would have been needed, communicating, planning... In a word, making moovida better every day.

Don't hesitate any longer, try it out, you will love it. A Windows installer is available on our website, and Ubuntu packages (for Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty) are in our PPA. Questions, suggestions and bug reports are more than ever welcome: Moovida is your media center, we need your feedback!

I will be speaking of Elisa^W Moovida at GCDS in July: desktop integration and fancy UI experimentations with 3D interfaces will be on the table. GNOME and KDE folks, see you there!

Bicing Barcelona

Olivier Tilloy — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:06:30 +0000

One of the things that make life easy in Barcelona is its efficient public transportation system. Living in the suburb, every morning I take the train to go to work. When I arrive at Plaza Catalunya, I am almost there but there is still a good 20 minutes walk to go to the World Trade Center. That would be without Bicing, the community bicycle program that allows me to get a bike with my RFID card, cycle down the Ramblas and drop it at one of the stations next to the entrance of the WTC. Well, in theory...

Like many good ideas, Bicing is a victim of its own success. In the morning, a hell of a lot of people use Bicing to commute to work, and as there is quite a lot of people who work in the WTC, the two stations, with merely 60 spaces, are very early full of bikes. The solution comes in the form of vans that patrol the city, collect bikes from the full stations and repopulate the empty ones, to equilibrate the flow. Unfortunately the action of these vans is not fast enough in rush hours, and in the morning it is not uncommon to have to wait for quite some time before the van, awaited as the messiah by a dozen of commuters, shows up.

So I came up with the idea of collecting data about the stations I am interested in as a user. This data would, hopefully, help me predict in a reliable manner when and where I am sure to find some space to park a bike, so as to adapt and optimize my morning routine (that is, which train I should take). Bicing provides on their website a map of the city with the stations and the availability of the bikes in real-time. They are using Google Maps' API to build this map, and although the result is quite fancy, everybody seems to agree it is not really usable because too small (and really slow). There are some alternatives provided by users, more usable but still not quite what I am looking for. Until Bicing decides to provide an open API, let's scrape some data!

To the point directly, the two questions to answer are:

Where to get the data from?
How to get it?

Once this is answered, it is just a matter of writing a quick script that will do the job. Now, here are the answers:

http://bicing.com/localizaciones/localizaciones.php
A regular expression: exml.parseString\('(.*)'\);, and an XML parser

In fact when one browses the map and clicks one station to get the information about the availability of the bikes, the data is not updated real-time. One has to reload the page for fresh data. And all the data is stored as XML in a piece of Javascript, in a call to this exml.parseString method.

I wrote a quick Python script that retrieves the data, parses the XML and populates a list of stations with the available information (name, GPS coordinates, bikes available and free spaces). It is licensed under the GPLv3, well documented and available as a bzr branch on Launchpad at: lp:~osomon/+junk/bicing (you can also browse and download the code at http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~osomon/+junk/bicing/files).

Now I need to find how to make the most of this data. I was thinking of regularly polling for a given set of stations over a given period of time, storing the data and then drawing a graph, to better understand the data. I will probably publish my findings in a next article, stay tuned!

Roadtripping Andalucía

Olivier Tilloy — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:45:35 +0000

Malgré un titre prometteur mi-anglais mi-espagnol, une fois n'est pas coutume c'est en français que je recommence à écrire. Je n'ai pas trouvé de traduction accrocheuse pour roadtripping (ça sonne bien non?), car c'est bien de ça qu'il s'agit : un peu plus de 2500km en voiture, pendant deux semaines sur les routes d'Andalousie, à la découverte de la région.

Dimanche 14 septembre 2008 : Sabadell - Tarragona

Pour s'échauffer, une première étape très tranquille et un premier arrêt chez mes amis Jordi et Camille, fraîchement revenus de Nouvelle Calédonie, à Tarragona. En plein coeur de la Catalogne, nous déjeunons d'un copieux boeuf bourguignon accompagné d'un non moins copieux gratin dauphinois! Ballade dans Tarragona, sans rien calculer nous sommes arrivés le premier jour des fêtes de la ville qui pour l'occasion est en effervescence, nous assistons donc à un concert de rue en buvant la boisson locale qui coule à flot pendant une semaine : la mamadeta.

Avec Jordi et Camille, à Tarragona.

Lundi 15 septembre 2008 : Tarragona - Cabo de Gata

Cap sur l'Andalousie et la province d'Almería. Après une journée de route, nous arrivons au camping de Cabo de Gata en début de soirée. Le lendemain matin, changement de camping, nous déménageons à las Negras, un joli petit village sur la côte est du cap. Le Cabo de Gata est un parc naturel, la côte est très bien protégée et donc sauvage, les paysages y sont grandioses : un désert montagneux qui se termine en falaises qui plongent dans la Méditerrannée. Après-midi détente à la plage du Playazo, quasi déserte en cette saison. Le jour suivant, nous décidons de visiter l'intérieur des terres en voiture, ce qui nous vaut une mémorable traversée de la sierra de alhamilla et ses virages à n'en plus finir. Nous arrivons finalement à la célèbre playa de los muertos. La nature majestueuse y est malheureusement défigurée au nord par une immonde centrale thermique. Le soir nous assistons aux fêtes du village de Níjar, sorte de banquet populaire d'un autre temps où tous les villageois, du plus vieux au plus jeune, sont habillés en costume traditionnel andalou (robes colorées pour les femmes, chemise, chapeau et bottes de cavalier pour les hommes). Le lendemain, après une matinée farniente au Playazo qui nous a décidément vraiment plu, nous reprenons la route.

Coucher de soleil au Playazo.

Jeudi 18 septembre : Cabo de Gata - Pitres

Après le bord de mer, la montagne. Nous faisons étape au camping de Pitres, dans les Alpujarras de Granada (versant sud de la Sierra Nevada). Les villages perchés de ces montagnes sont, comme les fêtes de Níjar, d'un autre temps. Un ingénieux système de canalisations et de fontaines, hérité des Arabes, les alimente en eau de montagne. Tous ces villages subissent actuellement un profond changement de population, les enfants du cru ayant presque tous fui pour la ville, et les nouveaux arrivants étant pour la plupart des étrangers qui viennent chercher l'air pur. On peut même trouver dans les parages des communautés de hippies qui vivent au plus proche de la nature. Le bureau de tabac du coin d'une petite place de Bubión et son unique ordinateur valide nous permet de nous connecter à internet et d'acheter des entrées pour la visite de l'Alhambra et pour un concert de la Biennale de flamenco de Séville. Pour cause de pas de choix dans la date, changement d'itinéraire : nous passerons d'abord par Séville, puis Cordoue, pour terminer par Grenade. Quelques superbes promenades dans la nature plus tard, et un déjeuner dans un restaurant où le chef irakien nous explique le secret de l'hummus, nous voilà en route pour la capitale de l'Andalousie, Séville.

Vue sur les Alpujarras depuis Capileirilla.

Samedi 20 septembre : Pitres - Sevilla

Arrivés pas franchement tôt à Séville, nous avons tout juste le temps de trouver une pension (le centre ville en regorge) et de reprendre la voiture pour aller au concert Rock Andaluz, un hommage aux visionnaires qui il y a trente ans commencèrent à mélanger le rock et le flamenco. C'est pour moi une découverte complète, je manque de culture mais les groupes comme Pata Negra, Cai, Tableton, Imán Califato Independiente, m'ont bien plu. Couchés vers 4h30 du matin, nous ne commençons notre promenade dans Séville que tard le lendemain, pour visiter la Cathédrale et sa célèbre tour, la Giralda, seul vestige de la mosquée qui occupait l'endroit avant la reconquête, la Plaza España, le parc Maria Luisa, et passer de nuit au pied de la célèbre Torre de Oro qui garde la rive est du Guadalquivir. Le lendemain, retour à la civilisation oblige, matinée shopping de rigueur, puis visite du quartier gitan de Triana de l'autre côté du fleuve, et nous terminons la journée à la Carboneria, célèbre tablao où nous assistons à un spectacle de flamenco. Le mardi avant de reprendre la route, nous visitons le Real Alcázar, palais-forteresse des rois musulmans puis chrétiens.

La Giralda vue depuis le Real Alcázar.

Mardi 23 septembre : Sevilla - Córdoba

Arrivés en fin de journée à Cordoue, l'ancienne capitale du royaume arabe dans la péninsule, nous nous installons dans une pension tenue par un personnage doté d'un débit de paroles incroyable. Toujours un bon mot ou une histoire à raconter, au bout de 5 minutes d'attention constante je suis épuisé! Moment détente avec un passage par le hammam, une expérience inoubliable, puis dîner de tapas dans le quartier juif. Notre étape à Cordoue étant courte, la matinée suivante est consacrée à la visite de la célèbre Mezquita, la mosquée-cathédrale. Construite par les musulmans c'est un lieu de prière et un labyrinthe de colonnes immense et d'une beauté envoûtante. Après la reconquête par les rois chrétiens, contrairement à leurs habitudes, les nouveaux maîtres des lieux décidèrent de ne pas détruire la mosquée, mais de construire une cathédrale dans la mosquée. L'histoire dit que l'empereur Charles Quint, qui avait autorisé les travaux, se repentit en voyant le résultat, admettant que l'édifice gothique en plein centre de la mosquée avait brisé l'harmonie du lieu. Il n'en reste pas moins que ce complexe, seul du genre au monde, fait rêver en évoquant des splendeurs d'un autre temps.

La Mezquita.

Mercredi 24 septembre : Córdoba - Granada

Arrivés à Grenade en fin de journée, nous nous installons dans une pension aux portes de l'Albaicín, le quartier arabe. La journée de jeudi est consacrée au repos et à la visite de l'Alhambra l'après-midi. Cette imposante forteresse qui domine la ville fut construite par les rois musulmans et abrite plusieurs palais d'un raffinement extrême et des jardins luxuriants. C'est au sommet de la plus haute tour, la torre de vela, que les rois chrétiens Isabelle et Ferdinand firent hisser leurs drapeaux en 1492 comme symbole de la fin d'une reconquête longue et sanglante. Comme partout en Andalousie, de massifs édifices gothiques (ici un palais, une église et un couvent) côtoient les arabesques, dans un mélange architectural étonnant, presque dérangeant. Du souvenir de cette journée je déplore l'afflux touristique et les informations très compliquées et contradictoires sur les contraintes de la visite, et j'envie un diplomate américain, Washington Irving, qui dans les années 1820 séjourna dans l'Alhambra à l'époque où le tourisme n'avait pas encore été inventé, et y écrivit ses célèbres Contes de l'Alhambra. La journée du lendemain est consacrée à une grande promenade dans la ville et dans l'Albaicín. Depuis le mirador de San Nicolás, où on peut écouter la complainte de quelques guitares gitanes, on jouit d'une vue d'exception sur l'Alhambra et son palais d'été, le Generalife. Nous décidons de renouveller l'expérience hammam pour le plaisir des corps, puis nous trouvons un bar où, conformément à la tradition (que je commençais à prendre pour une légende urbaine), pour chaque demi commandé on vous sert une copieuse assiette de tapas. On y resterait toute la nuit!

L'Alhambra. Imposante, majestueuse, envoûtante.

Samedi 27 septembre : Granada - Sabadell

Une journée complète dans la voiture, de midi à minuit, en passant par les petites routes andalouses avant de rejoindre les grands axes autoroutiers. Et retour au bercail, des souvenirs plein la tête. L'Andalousie est magique.

News from Elisa

Olivier Tilloy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:35:11 +0000

I still don't have internet at home and little spare time during working hours so I'm blogging asynchronously. Reminds me of the good ol' days when I was writing my mails at home, then pushing them on a USB stick to send them from wherever I could find a connection... A lot of things happened since last time I wrote about Elisa and my work at Fluendo Embedded.

I have been working on re-designing and implementing the new elisa.fluendo.com, the old website being a customized wordpress, quite inadapted, neither easy to tweak nor to maintain. Not to speak about the contents and this terrible download button which I could not locate the first time I visited the website, back then as an interested potential contributor. The idea was to deliver a true community website with a professional design, and I think that to some extent we kind of managed that. The feedback is pretty good so far. David, our designer, has been working hard at sketching and Guido and I have been working equally hard at implementing it. After two weeks struggling with CSS theming, my conclusion is that CSS, in their current implemented version (2.1), suck. And their implementation in that piece of crapware that Microsoft dares to call a browser sucks incredibly more. To the contrary, coding the backend has been lightning fast and pure pleasure, using Django, of course.

In parallel, we have completed the transition from subversion to bazaar for source code versioning, the migration from Trac to Launchpad for bug tracking and from Trac to MoinMoin for the wiki. We are now using extensively Launchpad and the blueprints system to write specifications. And we have set up a public Bundle Buggy instance (which we were already using privately) to track merge requests and enforce a review process that ensures better code quality.

Meanwhile, the whole team is focused on our next release, Elisa 0.5. The new REST architecture has already proven to be as flexible as expected, yet there are lots of features we need to implement before we can release anything. We are currently designing the brand new user interface from scratch with strong usability constraints, implementing the widgets needed, writing new resource providers (Flickr, Amazon, Youtube, Shoutcast, ...), writing an efficient database backend and a new player, among other things.

Next news from the world of Elisa with the next release, stay tuned!

A big step towards Elisa 0.5

Olivier Tilloy — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:54:50 +0000

The last weeks have been quite busy workwise, and I'm proud to announce that we finally released a first glimpse of what Elisa 0.5 is going to be.

What was formerly known as the new REST architecture is now officialy the 0.5 development series. Elisa 0.5 is a complete rewrite of the core of Elisa to overcome all the problems encountered with the old architecture and make it easily extensible. The plugin system was already in place, but with the new architecture we made it much easier to write new plugins, including pieces of UI, which formerly required nasty hacks and a significant integration effort.

This early release is of course intended for developers, it is not by any means a stable version, it is not packaged and it does not even have the basic Media Center functionalities. But everything needed to start playing with it is present.

If you cannot wait to get your hands on it, check out the bzr branch from launchpad:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/0.5 elisa

You will need a development branch of pigment for the python widgets, see http://elisa.fluendo.com/contribute for instructions on how to get started.

We are aware that so far Elisa's weak point was the lack of documentation, and we have put special efforts in improving this. The API documentation has been updated, and two brand new tutorials will help you write a plugin from scratch.

We have changed a lot of things in the development process of Elisa, and I must say it is a real pleasure to work on this project. We are now using Launchpad in conjunction with bzr to manage our source code. All the bug reports from the Trac are being migrated as I am writing. Working with bzr branches allows a tremendous gain in efficiency and code quality: before merging a branch into the main development branch, the changes have to be reviewed by at least two other developers. The whole review process is tracked by a Bundle Buggy instance (currently private, but the reviews happen on the elisa-commits public mailing list). Code quality has been reinforced with the arrival of a QA manager in the team, we now have better and more relevant tests, and code coverage statistics.

The most exciting is to come though, because we can now start writing the real Media Center features, and trust me, we are not short of ideas!

A quick word on the win32 port, our Windows team deserves it, they invested a lot of efforts into porting to Windows the 0.3 branch (formerly known as trunk). An alpha release with an installer for XP and Vista is now available, we expect to deliver a stable version in June!

Stay tuned for more exciting news and surprises, the coming weeks should not be disappointing.

Never say...

Olivier Tilloy — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:23:02 +0000

... to a proud Catalan that Catalan is just a mix of Spanish and French. He might not take it very well.

What I meant, really, is: to my clumsy ear it vaguely sounds like a mix of Spanish and French. It does.

But well, as all Catalans know, French is only Catalan badly spoken. Or was it the contrary?