Montréal

I arrived in Montréal Saturday. Since, I have been quite busy as we had a NITI Welcome Hub BBQ at pphaneuf place, testing the 50 beer, and meeting other NITI folks. We have all had great fun. On Sunday we went with pphaneuf, dilu and mich to a photo store for some magasinage and ended up downtown for diner and movie watching at the office. We watched Love Actually. Oh and I'm being hosted kindly by wlach. Thanks a lot will.

GUADEC

GUADEC was great this year. I'm really eager to return next year. It has been announced as being in Germany. W00t. I'll soon post my batch of digiphotos, and later 4 of 5 rolls of slides I took. I don't have brought my scanner yet, so I'll have to find a plan B for getting them scanned. I'll see with the labs.

Advogato

Whoohoo, Advogato is back. I'll have to spend a NDF to write an advogato to NITLog converter.

Montréal

Yesterday, I found a 2 1/2 fully equiped. I was pretty lucky. I even got the keys before signing everything; the lady did trust me. Amazed. Anyway, these stupid ATMs don't let me get more than $200 (canadian) a day. I got a bank account as well, but I need to get my SIN (Social Insurance Number) to get Interac card and to be on the company payroll. I should get it within 2 days fortunately. I moved away from wlach place (thank you for hosting for this couple of days) to my own. I also biked in Montreal for the first time, going from Old Westmount to the office near McGill.

I have requested a phone line to Bell Canada, but still haven't found the phone plug...

I finally got a PC at work. I did setup SuSE 9.1 Professionnal (thank you SuSE for sending a copy to me). However I had to re-do the whole setup because it sort of froze before while configuring stuff, leading to an unconfirmed system with a really screwed up GNOME. But the second attempt did work. Rule #1: in the graphical installer, don't attempt to ctrl-alt-F2. This is what caused the freeze.

I got unboxed upon arrival in Canada. Apparently customs did not mind.

Switched back to Debian. SuSE was driving me nuts, I don't why. Gnome 2.4 setting went south suddenly, whatever. Debian has bugs, surely, at least I know them. When you have a nForce chipset, don't try USB mice.

Yesterday was pphaneuf birthday. We went out for diner and then for a drink. Lots of pictures taken, lots of beer drunk. We left at 2:00 AM and I ended up taking the night bus to go home.

Abiword

Martin and Luca are working on integrating equations in AbiWord using Luca's GtkMathView and our XP code. Looks very promising. shot 1, shot 2. I'm really impressed. I should find the time to get a hard-drive to install MacOS X for the laptop and then resume work on MacOS X port of AbiWord.

Linux Journal Reader's Choice award

Linux Journal polling readers to pick their choice for the Reader's Choice award. Damn. So much things that I have been involved too, in some way or other, including a product that was Windows only in the past (was in a previous life).

I miss Stéphanie

Québec

pphaneuf, mich, and I went to Québec city for the "Festival d'été de Québec to see the concert of Violent Femmes. I shot 160 pictures of the concert with the Canon 10D camera pphaneuf borrowed for the week-end. I love this camera, but the lens I used is damn too expensive. I have put up a gallery of my selection. After that we went for a night photo session, then for a beer.

Then on Sunday we went to Chutes Montmorency. Read Pierre blog for a more detailled story.

Montréal

I have been in Montreal for more than a week now. I'm about to have almost everything sorted out. I even may soon have a real phone line.

Emacs

I know why I'm not using vim:

(note: this is called "cif", at least in France.)

Canadian Life

I like this country. I have been there for 2 weeks now, and I have lot of fun. But I miss Stéphanie. She is still in France and I miss her. I can't wait September.

I got a phone line, finally, and I went for some shopping on Saturday to get a couple of books for reading when I'm at home. We also went to see the Fireworks of the Mondial SAQ from Jacques Cartier bridge.

Movies

Last week, I watched almost 5 movies. 2 in theaters: Camping Sauvage, un film Québécois, and Harry Potter and the prisonner of Azkaban. We also watched with dilu, pphaneuf, dcoombs and mich 3 DVDs on Sunday night: Office Space, Pulp Fiction and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. This one is a movie made to be worse than Plan 9 from Outerspace, being and 2001 movie, with actors that plays really badly (at will), really bad sfx using ugly miniatures, and a skeleton moving with wires....

Work

I started serious work: hacking the ExchangeIt Evolution plugin. It is interesting.

Free software hacking

For my NDF, I fixed a few bugs and AbiWord and continued my rewrite of the RTF importer in order to get it work better. Now that I have a phone line, I may be able to get ADSL at home aswell. Convenient for remote hacking, even though I live only 20 minutes from the office.

Movies

Recent movie watching: The Delicate Art of Parking a documentary style comedy about parking enforcement in Vancouver, on Thursday, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy the same evening on Friday. Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain on Sunday evening and Anchorman the legend of Ron Burgandy on Monday: really hilarious.

GNOME and scanners (and Linux)

At the office we had an unused scanner. Apparently nobody did bother to use it and when really needed, they just fire up a Windows machine. Nah ! So I took it and did install it on my desk and share it on the LAN, thanks to SANE. Works almost plug and play. I need it because I have to copy some documents that can't fit into the fax machine...

That make me think of more stuff we need to do about scanner than what I talked about at GUADEC. While the support for the hardware is OK, we need support for those nifty buttons and all. And we need more software like a GNOME library and a program to perform copy automatically: put your document start the program, click Copy and voilà, scans to the printer directly. Of course, with the buttons support, we could set up an action to start automatically the program to do the copy.

We also need a nicer frontend to SANE. xsane is fine, but it need more work, some in the imaging area, some in the UI area. Since it is a GTK program, at least we have a good startup base for GNOME.

Ah, and networking the scanner. One good thing would be ZeroConf support, like service registration to have the scanner presence be broadcasted. That way, we could locate scanners automatically.

Life in Canada

This week-end with mich and dilu we drove to Ottawa to join the Niti delegation to OLS and to have some fun (we did not attend the conference ourself). However, since we were at the same hotel, sharing the suite, I could me a couple of people I knew like DV, and clahey.

email: hub@figuiere.net