colin@
colino.net

This post by Miguel de Icaza makes me wonder whether it’s April 1st already.

I could export [my photos] to a folder and then scp the files over, but thats just because am a beautiful and unique snowflake. Other non-hacker types might not be able to pull the scp trick.

Non-hackers types will have, I’m sure, no problem using Gnome VFS to “mount” distant FTP or SSH sites (File/Connect to server... menu item). If said non-hacker has no remote web space, sharing locally is bound to fail as soon as the user is NATed or firewalled, so this is not a solution.

F-Spot coult have a “File/Web Share” which would basically run an HTTP server. In the particular case of F-Spot it can just embed our embeddable web server and expose the pictures with an ASP.NET application.

Embedding web servers in apps is a terrible idea, not only with regards to feature duplication but also security. Web-servers already provide easy means for users to publish stuff (~/public_html for Apache for example), they’re powerful and well-tested.
Mentioning ASP.NET is just the icing on the cake…

For this particular case [music sharing], a general purpose web interface can be cooked, and the media playback could be a Flash-based MP3 player (these are very easy to produce with FlashMX).

Flash-based, sure! What the hell ? Flash is proprietary, works like crap on Linux-x86, doesn’t work on any other arch or free operating system. Last I heard, GNOME was still about free-software, have things changed while I was not looking or are you a bit off there?

Please tell me you were joking…

Wine
I got a bottle of south-african wine in the mail, as promised at gapingvoid.com. This is a marketing experimentation: provide samples to bloggers and let word-of-mouth advertise your product. Nice idea, I have to say, especially since the wine tasted good!

Car
Trying to get my rear brakes changed. Not as easy as it sounds, as I have an old Mazda. No one never has the spare parts handy and I always have to wait over a week to have things done.

Sylpheed-Claws
We’re heading towards 2.0 quite nicely, the CVS commits have really slowed down and it should be a good release. The new manual got some big progress over the last week, it may be ready soon!
The development pace slowed a bit less in the external plugins world. I finally got enough motivation to finish to implement webcal subscriptions in the vCalendar plugin. It works fine for me, and i didn’t get much feedback so everything should be OK.
In the same kind of stuff, Ticho is progressing nicely on a brand new RSSyl plugin that looks great – RSS feed subscriptions directly from your favorite mailer! I can’t wait to have some code to test. I already saw promising screenshots. go Ticho, go!

So, Sony/BMG released some audio CDs with a new DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) system to prevent their copy. The problem is that this DRM system comes in the form of a rootkit (a piece of software that is used to take control of a computer, that is: a pirate tool), and this has been widely published even in mainstream press. Blackhats (pirates) already started exploiting this rootkit. After this fiasco, Sony/BMG put a tool online to allow uninstalling the rootkit, but, bad luck! it comes with worse problems putting Windows users at risk when they simply surf on the web.

Microsoft reacted by stating that they will update their anti-spyware tool to uninstall the rootkit. Interestingly, this is circumventing a copy-protection measure, also known as a DMCA violation. Will Sony/BMG dare to sue Microsoft on this ground?

One last thing, this DRM system includes parts of LAME, a free (as in freedom) mp3 encoder which is licensed under the LGPL. Of course, they don’t offer to download the source code as the license requires them to do. Will the LAME developers dare, as copyrights holders, to sue Sony/BMG?

Or will they just shut up, as the MP3 algorithm they use is patented, to avoid drawing attention to them and risk getting sued by Fraunhofer and THOMSON, the MP3 patent holders ?

Lu sur l’article Wikipedia traitant des émeutes actuelles en banlieue parisienne:

Le journal de Munich SÌddeutsche Zeitung (centre-gauche) s’en prend à Nicolas Sarkozy, “devenu un visage de haine pour tous ceux qui sont sans espoir dans les banlieues”. “Sarkozy a jeté de l’huile sur le feu” en déclarant qu’il fallait “nettoyer” les banlieues et lorsqu’il a insulté les jeunes en les traitant de “racaille” estime-t-il.

Sans blague ?

I finally got around to upload precompiled packages for Ubuntu Breezy. Users of this (great) distribution can just add the following to their /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://claws.sylpheed.org/ubuntu/breezy/ ./

There are packages for libetpan-0.39 (libetpan3) and sylpheed-claws-1.9.99 (sylpheed-claws-gtk2).
Enjoy!