Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Friday 30 June 2006

Switcher

After Mark Pilgrim (2) and Tim Bray, now Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame decides to switch away from Apple to GNU/Linux. The argument is against the DRM that Apple pushes and the fact that they close data file format.

Welcome guys and Good luck !

Wednesday 28 June 2006

Quote of the day:

Mark Pilgrim commenting on his own post about his switch to Linux:

Yes, as I noted a few weeks ago, I bought the Canon PowerShot SD450. When I plugged the camera into my shiny new install, Ubuntu immediately recognized it and offered to import the photos, which I did, and it worked. I believe this is the work of libgphoto2, which is one of those amazing little libraries that does one incredibly useful thing incredibly well and just keeps getting better for free. Someone out there *really* cares about interfacing with digital cameras, in much the same way that I *really* care about parsing RSS and Atom feeds.

Thanks Mark, you made my day with this user testimonial. I know switching is not easy, and I'm really happy that the libgphoto developers made your life easy for that part.

Tuesday 20 June 2006

libgphoto2 2.2.1

I release libgphoto2 2.2.1 yesterday after getting some report of breakage on non-Linux platforms. Nothing else has been added.

Download

Thanks to everybody for the feedback and help.

I expect to release what is in TRUNK within a month as it improve largely the support of digital audio players and as there is a huge patch to support capture with Canon 5D and 20D.

Sunday 18 June 2006

Stella ! - June 18th, 2006

Stella, her first day in her new home.

libgphoto2 2.2.0

I finally took myself from a huge slacking, and I released libgphoto2 and gphoto2 2.2.0. It was long overdue.

News from 2.1.6 incude:

  • support for USB Mass Storage cameras (one API for all)
  • support PTP over IP
  • support MTP devices (Digital Audio Players, yes)
  • support lot of new cameras
  • fix several outstanding bugs

Download

Friday 9 June 2006

Funny spam

Fun mail I received, that Thunderbird didn't even really detect as spam[1]:

Dear user of figuiere.net,

That would be me.

We have detected that your account has been used to send a huge amount of junk e-mail during the recent week. Most likely your computer had been infected and now runs a trojaned proxy server.

I thought it was your computer that was infected Mr. 86.203.244.53, since you just sent me that.

Please follow the instructions in the attached text file in order to keep your computer safe.

No thanks. A .zip file that contain a .zip file that contain a .scr is already highly suspicious :-)

Sincerely yours, The figuiere.net team.

That would be me as well? Riiighhht.

Sorry for the noise.

Notes

[1] mental note, install bogofilter

Another Linux unfriendly video card vendor

According to Martin, Matrox P series video card are not properly supported and even more ignored by the support staff when it comes to Linux support, despite it being advertised on the box. Looks like we are sort of back to 1996 when Matrox was refusing to provide the spec for XFree86 to write proper MGA/Millenium drivers.

Too bad Matrox, you would be able to gain back some market share with the Linux folks by just making the right decision instead of being worse than your competitors.