Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

I went yesterday to a RFF meetup in Toronto. I had the occasion of testing out the Epson R-D1, the first digital rangefinder camera, and I must say I'm pretty impressed.

Here is one of the shot, straight JPEG from the camera:

For this picture the lens (a L mount Canon 50mm f/1.5 that belong to the pictured camera) is not as sharp, the two other lens I tried are much better.

Oh and libopenraw now support the Epson ERF RAW files (code in git).

Thanks to Jack for the camera and lenses, as well as Joseph for the other lens (used here).

Elephant & Castle, Yonge Street, Toronto, ON, Canada - December 29th 2007

Alvaro: I hate to be the devil advocate, but claiming that Java is a Free (-Software) platform is a bit inaccurate. So far, Sun still hasn't released a fully functionnal JDK under a Free Software license, and AFAIK the Free Software re-implementation of Java are not up to either, even though IcedTea is probably going in the right direction.

Dear LazyWeb,

I'm looking for a proper documentation on how to add "books" to DevHelp. The current DevHelp documentation is inexistent, and said documentation isn't generated by gtk-doc.

Thanks

One of the problem with boost is to detect it in configure as there is no pkg-config and there are several modules that some distro tend to split out.

I ended up finding boost.m4 which is a simple m4 file that contain various macros to detect the various boost modules. It also take into account the various flavor of boost, etc.

Did anybody notice Turbo Linux Wizpy? It is a Linux based music/media player, and unlike some well known Linux based internet tablet, it seems to support Ogg playback (likely Vorbis encoded) for music files, out of the box. Not even sure how available it is outside Japan, its country of origin.

I'm on vacation until new year. That does not mean I'll be un reachable, but just that I have a lot of copious spare time.

Maybe I'll have time to push some new release for exempi, libopenraw and hack on my pet project.

You have a checkout of the OpenOffice.org tree with a specific workspace. That means you have all the individual modules either stuck to the milestone of the CWS or in the branch of the CWS.

When the CWS get resynchronized to a new milestone, you'll need to update your tree. Two solutions:

1. For each module, cd into that module, if the module is not in the CWS, cvs update -r NEWTAG -Pd. If the module is in the CWS, cvs update -Pd. Maybe there is a faster solution, but I don't know it, so look at solution 2.
2. Use cws-cvsrebase. Just call cws-cvsrebase NEWTAG and it will do what is described in 1.

It proved to be helpful this time again to update xmlfilter02 that had been resynced to SRC680_m239.

You'll find cws-cvsrebase in the ooo-build tree. See in the subversion tree

Things I still have to do:

• report CVS conflicts. For now, check the update.log file in the current directory.
• use EIS to check the status of the modules instead of poking the CVS directories.

Looks like a recent edit of the HTML5 draft about video support bent to the pressure of some corporation: Ogg Vorbis and Theora removed from the HTML5 spec.

See the diff. It is interesting to read the commit message:

Lift the cat who was amongst the pigeons up and put him back on his pedestal for now. (remove requirement on ogg for now)

I'll let you make your own opinion on the matter, but this is clearly not the right direction.

I ran into this bugzilla comment for Maemo, concerning the lack of Ogg support in Maemo on the Nokia internet tablets (it is really more about that specific comment and the linked PDF file than the bug itself).

Thanks to our friends at Freedesktop.org, there is a mailing list for Exempi