colin@
colino.net

Bonjour à tous qui aimez bien Apple...

Je voulais juste vous dire un mot à propos de leur nouveau gadget,
l'iPhone, et des raisons pour lesquelles vous ne devriez pas en
acheter :-)

http://www.apple.com/fr/iphone/

L'iPhone est beau, il est classe, shiny, fashion, et tous les trucs
cools qui font que ça va être un best-seller comme l'iPod l'est... Mais
contrairement à l'iPod, avec lequel on peut faire ce que l'on veut,
même sans iTunes... l'iPhone vous bloquera de diverses manières:

Tout d'abord il est vendu exclusivement via Orange en France, avec un
forfait à engagement sur deux ans à des tarifs dignes de 2002:
http://www.apple.com/fr/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html
(notez le retour bien malvenu des heures journées / soir et week-end...)

Une fois votre engagement terminé, vous pourriez rester chez Orange ou
rechercher un autre forfait ailleurs. Il vous faudra un forfait avec
l'option Data illimitée, qui coûte très cher, étant donné que l'iPhone
vérifie, même lorsqu'il est en veille, les boîtes emails configurées,
la météo, cartes, etc. Pas mal de gens se sont déjà fait des factures
mirobolantes en partant à l'étranger avec leur iPhone:
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzappl0908,0,2929341.story?coll=ny_home_rail_headlines

Enfin, l'iPhone est une plateforme très puissante, sur laquelle on
pourrait installer pas mal d'applications sympathiques développées par
de tierces parties... Sauf qu'Apple ne préfère pas, et l'iPhone est
verrouillé contre toute installation de logiciel ne venant pas d'Apple
lui-même - sauf à le pirater, ce qui annule la garantie.

D'autres smartphones tout aussi classe devraient sortir en début
d'année prochaine, sans tous ces inconvénients, comme par exemple le
Neo1973, basé sur une plateforme logicielle libre, OpenMoko:
http://openmoko.com/

Ce téléphone n'est pas encore disponible à la vente, mais il
permettra de faire tout ce que l'iPhone permet, avec quelques détails
supplémentaires, comme un GPS intégré. Il sera vendu sans abonnement
(donc sans engagement de deux ans) au prix de l'iPhone avec abonnement,
permettra d'installer n'importe quelle application développée par qui
le voudra (ce qui amènera sans nul doute des innovations
intéressantes), et ne fera rien dans votre dos!

En deux mots, l'iPhone c'est shiny mais n'est là que pour remplir les
poches d'Apple et Orange (heh! c'est fruité) en ne vous permettant pas
d'utiliser votre matériel comme vous l'entendez, tandis les plateformes
libres sont pensées pour le plaisir et le confort de ses utilisateurs.

Claws Mail’s Printing support is implemented, optionally, via libgnomeprint. Output looks rather good, but it has the drawback of requiring an extra library. It was still better than the old ‘lpr’ support :)

Anyway, we now had the possibility to remove this dependancy without removing the feature, as the GTK developers added a new API, GtkPrintOperation, to do printing. This is available with GTK+ 2.10 or greater.

We’ve waited a few monthes before implementing that, because their API is quite generic, and they didn’t provide a way for application developers to easily print a GtkTextBuffer — the GTK widget used texts spanning multiple lines. We thought it would be nice for a lot of application developers to be able to do that easily, and that it would spare them reimplementing the same thing again and again, in every app wanting print support.

I submitted the idea on their Bugzilla, but almost six monthes later with no activity at all on the bug, it’s quite clear that they don’t care.
So, Holger Berndt, one of our developers – author of the Notification plugin, the Perl plugin and the Synce plugin – decided to stop waiting, and implemented text printing of emails via GtkPrintOperation. His patch went into CVS, and the next day I added support for image printing, and a crappy preview. The next day again, Holger rewrote my preview code and turned it into a really nice preview. (Yes, one has to write the preview code, because the GTK developers decided it was better, by default, to do previews using “print-to-pdf-file and run Evince”, thus forcing a runtime dependancy on Evince.

Here’s the mandatory screenshot of the new preview:

So, I must say that even if GtkPrintOperation works fine, it feels half-done. The GTK developers did the bare minimum, in my opinion, to help application developers. We had to write 994 lines of code to implement that, and other people will write other 1000 lines of code to do the same thing…

• Lose one hour thinking this RAID controller driver must be buggy because “mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1” errors out with “No such device“. After this hour, figure out from man 2 mount that ENODEV means “filesystemtype not configured in the kernel.” instead. Duh.
• Accept the fact that some gigabit switches from an anonymous vendor that has a name remarkably similar to Hell, switches that cost more than a thousand euros, just lose all their configuration after a power loss. Just reconfigure switches.
• When replacing a failed RAID disk, either make the new disk’s partition table with”sfdisk -d /dev/sda | sfdisk /dev/sdb” (if you’re replacing sdb), or if you have to do it by hand, don’t forget to set the partitions type to fd (Linux RAID autodetection) instead of 83 (Linux). If you don’t, your partition will be kicked out of the array at each reboot.

Finally fed up with SF.net’s multiple downtimes and “hardware problems” that brought down anoncvs for a month, dev cvs for a week, and mailing-list lagging for multiples days without even an announcement… We moved CVS and mailing-lists to dotsrc.org.

The change went really smoothly, apart a little glitch, where I forgot to manually remove the subscribers from the new mailing lists when they had ‘nomail’ set on.

Apart from that, the nice guys at dotsrc.org seem to do a wonderful job, and it really makes a refreshing change. So, thanks guys !

You can see updated info about CVS and the mailing-lists on our website.

Yesterday – or was it the day before… – I finally upgraded the server(s) running colino.net and a few other sites…

Before	After

The old ones were nice and fun, being kind of rare Suns – an Ultra1 with a 170MHz CPU and a SparcStation 5 with a 110MHZ CPU. But they were also a pain, with their SCA SCSI disks costing about $100 for 4GB, and their slow CPUs. Plus, they were running a Debian installed in 2001 and full of unmaintainable patched stuff. Plus the fact that MySQL kept crashing on the Ultra1, which is why the SparcStation was still around: database server…
The new one is simply the less pricey stuff I could find, an AMD Sempron at 1.6GHz with 512MB of memory and two 40GB disks. That way I’ve been able to setup RAID1 partitions and don’t worry about one of the disks overheating. The only thing where I spent more than necessary is on the box itself, I wanted a little and well-ventilated one. I got an Antec Minuet which is nice, but not made for RAID :-) I had to put one of the disks in the CDROM slot.

The time needed to transfer the data and configuration, and fix the configuration to match the newer upstream versions, has been a bit too much to my liking, and I didn’t get any sleep between Monday and Tuesday. 36 hours straight without sleeping is something I hadn’t done since I was a student, and it’s not something I missed too much to be honest!
Given the upgrade (10x CPU speed ! ;-), you’ll probably notice the speed increase on this WordPress installation or in Sylpheed-Claws’ bugzilla…

Thanks to Yann for selling me the new server at a really friendly price!