2014 just started and already proved to be a challenging year. First thing, I will have to find or create a new job. After 3 years having the luck of managing open source projects at Lanedo, I’m leaving the company. This is an opportunity for me to try something new, to get out of my […]
Last year, during GUADEC, there was that running joke amongst some participants that this was the last GUADEC. It was, of course, a joke. Everybody was expecting to see each other in Brno, in 2013. One year later, most of those who were joking are not coming to GUADEC. For them, the joke became a […]
For centuries, progress was about to make possible what was not. All the technologies, all the inventions were done with the very idea of « Make something that was never done before, that was considered as impossible ». It worked so well in the last decades that we faced an new challenge: things were now possible but incredibly hard to do. Only a few educated minority was able to use the technology.
One of the solution to that problem is to train people. That’s the solution we choose for cars. Driving a car is incredibly complex and dangerous. Yet, most of us manage to learn the basis in a few months. Some kill themselves (and sometimes innocent beings). But we don’t mind and don’t even consider it as a technical challenge, merely an educational one.
Another solution is making the technology easier, requiring less training. This is the path we are following with electronic devices. This became a brand new field of engineering: usability. Ten years ago, a three buttons dishwasher came with a hundred pages manual. Now, your full fledged computer come without any manual at all.
Some of you may be aware that Getting Things GNOME! 0.3 was released. What you may not know is that GTG is now using a python library called liblarch and that liblarch 2.1.0 was released today.
Liblarch is a python library specifically designed to handle complex trees (including directed acyclic graphs) and to display them. A liblarch-gtk component allows you to display different views of your tree in a GTK TreeView widget without any effort.
During the development of GTG, we faced major problems to handle our tree of tasks and our tree of tags. The features we wanted proved to be very complex to implement and very fragile : solving a bug would create two others. And the performance work was a nightmare.
We decided to abstract the whole concept of tree and to make it a standalone, well tested and optimized library. We are very proud of it and we are looking for more applications that would benefit from using liblarch.
Pendant des siècles, la définition de l’innovation était « rendre possible quelque chose qui ne l’était pas auparavant ». Même si cela n’affectait qu’une minorité technologiquement lettrée ou ayant la chance d’être bien équipée. Désormais, un autre type d’innovation prend le pas : « rendre agréable à une catégorie de personnes ce qui est possible ». Imaginons que vous souhaitiez […]
Last week, Lanedo sent me to GUADEC, the GNOME developers and users conference. As you may have read elsewhere, the conference was wonderfully organized, with splendid weather, gorgeous food and awesome people.
But there was a strange feeling amongst participants. Was it the last GUADEC? What is the future of the GNOME project? Xan López and Juan José Sánchez suggested to ship a tablet with GNOME in 2014. But isn’t that too late? Is it really useful?
Is this the end of the world, the end of the road?
For several years now, I’ve been a Summer of Code mentor for Getting Things Gnome, under the GNOME umbrella.
This year again we received plenty of student proposals. GTG being a very small part of the GNOME project and having only few mentors available, we had to choose. That choice was sometimes really hard and it’s a pity to see some students not being selected.
In order to help them for next year, I would like to point what we, potential mentors, expect from the students.
Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.
For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that:
— What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support?
— Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME.
— Indeed. But what is the reason?
— Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.
And, sadly, I had to agree with that.
End of last year, I’ve quit Ubuntu, after more than 7 years, to find out what was the best GNOME 3 Linux distribution. I’ve selected three major distributions: Ubuntu 11.10, Opensuse 12.1 and Fedora 16. I spent more than a month with each. Here’s what I’ve found and learned.
Before asking yourself what is your distribution of choice, maybe you should start by clarifying what you really expect from a distribution. In fact, the list is quite short for me:
But that’s not all. Being a Linux evangelist, I install Linux for a lot of people. Which add completely different requirements.
TLDR: GTG 0.2.9 has been released, spread the word!.
For those who don’t know Getting Things GNOME yet, it is a todo manager. In fact, it is, to my knowledge, the only todo manager that :
As a result, gtg was in the Techradar’s top 50 best Linux application of 2011 despite the lack of regular releases. It is probably packaged as « gtg » in your distribution so it is probably better that you try by yourself.