Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
Posted by Boris in Video Games on January 17th, 2010
This day has been particularly nice, at least in term of weather. And, in order to be in a as-good-as-possible-mood, I’ve decided to listen to the fabulous Beyond Good and Evil’s OST. But after a half-dozen loops of the entire album, I’ve decided to listen to my entire video-game music collection, including the flawless vampire: the masquerade – Redemption main theme :
This game is simply marvellous, it’s one of my favourite ones. It’s sometimes a bit repetitive, a few bosses are pretty hard, and you have often to travel a bit too much to finish a mission; but if you ask me, this great game has one of the better ambiance I’ve seen this far. And, also, the game has a lot of areas with different and surprising atmospheres. It still suffers from common defaults (not enough NPC, not realistic towns and no in-game-social-life, etc.) of games of this epoch (2000), but it’s easily forgiveable given the feelings you can have while playing at it.
Have a nice game! 
Ubuntu Party 2009 @Cité des Sciences de Paris la Villette
Posted by Boris in Open Source, Free licensing, Software and Development on January 2nd, 2010
Last year (2009) I went to the Ubuntu Party 2009 in the Cité des Sciences de Paris la Villette. It was nice, and I had a great dinner with most of the staff. I didn’t expect much from this event, I have just been there by curiosity; because I didn’t like Ubuntu a lot. And yet, I was impressed by Mark Shuttleworth’s conference¹, which changed my mind and my considerations on it. I thought and I still think it is a crappy Operating system which is also simple to deploy and to use. What has changed is that now, I know that this “imperfect” software is based on very good ideas, and that the Ubuntu team seems to be very dynamic (which means that the correction of any bug or defective design is just a matter of time).
First, Mark told us about cadence (or to plan releases on milestones rather than functionalities). He said that it:
- Energizes a project
- Regularises project releases (on a 3/6/12 months basis; adapt the time cycle to the project)
- Force developers to release their work to the project
- Gives a rapid feedback from users
- Makes collaboration between projects easier
- Allows users to help each other (since they have similar versions of software)
I think this might be a good practice for middle-sized and big projects; while I would prefer “when it’s done” releases for little projects, since it allows more flexibility and give me much more free time when I work alone on a project.
Then, he spoke of the quality of a project, and said that:
- Projects witch have tests are more open to contributions
- Automated package creation from stable software branches increases the number of people who really use an up to date version of the software and allows a great feedback on latest versions.
- It’s important to be aware of the difference between a new software development and the maintenance of the current version of an existing one.
- There is less pressure to back-port new features (rather than to maintain stable branch) when people know when the next version will be out (see cadence).
- More aggressive changes can be done since more accurate feedback is available from more users.
- Automated crash reporting gathers all crash information (mainly from log-files) and spot all problems as they happen.
And finally he got into design, or the way you approach a problem.
- Best open source software are made by people who instinctively understand (grok) good software design.
- Design as skill is a profession.
- Creating both a design and engineering space on a projects make the project healthy.
- Ask tests from unexpected (aka. random; as instance, people picked from street or at a shop, friends of friends, etc.) people gives a more complete feedback
- Design is also about functionalities integration into the window manager and all its parts.
In the end, I liked to be there, I learned a lot of things, and now, I still use Ubuntu, but I don’t grumble as often as before about it. 
So, see you at the next Ubuntu Party²
¹ A post on Mark’s blog about time based release and cycles in free software.
² For the moment, the page doesn’t exists.
Nautilus SVN plugin
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on November 11th, 2009
Today, I had to checkout some SVN repository, and so, I downloaded subversion. But I reminded that when I used windows, a while ago, a sort of GUI plugin was available for explorer. So, I started to seek for the same thing for Nautilus. And I found out this.
P.S.: I also sorted out this, for those who don’t want to use rabbitvcs. But I haven’t tested it yet.
The closure of The Pirate Bay seems to have done nothing to stem the flow of potentially copyri… ORLY?!!!
Posted by Boris in Networks, Server administration and Security, Open Source, Free licensing on November 3rd, 2009
Connect to server with Nautilus – Samba
Posted by Boris in Networks, Server administration and Security on October 8th, 2009
This is the correspondence between Nautilus dialog fields and url:
smb://domain;user@server/share/folder
As instance, if you want to connect to IUT of Annecy’s ‘winserv’ server using xxx user, and open the xxx folder, just connect to:
smb://iut-acy;xxx@winserv.iut-acy/xxx
xkcd.com
Posted by Boris in Miscanelous on August 11th, 2009
D-ie6, die!
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on August 8th, 2009
From a nice web-log on which 404 errors are awesome
Customers, their ambitions vs. their needs.
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on August 6th, 2009
Few days ago, one of my friends told me a short story which happened to him a very short while before:
My friend is a web developer, and so, his customers usually want him to code online software. One of his customers, though, wanted an e-commerce website «Like another one». So, my friend immediately thought at a huge web application which was dedicated, would have scaling abilities, advanced features, etc. The customer then told him that he only had slightly more 700 bucks to start the project. My friend, conscious of the fact that the price of something like that application would cost at least ten times more, told his client that he could do something «light» to start, on what the client agreed. So, he started to work, hard, and got something working, then he put the stuff online. All has been okay for some weeks, ’til the customer wanted to do some slight modifications on his website… These slight changes would have been so if my friend would have done a complete and finished product, what he obviously hadn’t done for this little amount of money. So, despite the fact that his work has been thought to be evolutive, he had to recode most of the website in order to make the site suitable for these slight modifications. So he told that to the customer, who didn’t accept the quote. After arguing a short while, they both agreed that a simple e-commerce website would be sufficient.
So, my friend migrated his customer on an e-commerce website solution, and him and his client are both satisfied with that. The moral of this story is to NEVER trust a customer on his needs: they always are either distorted by the customer’s ambition, or, rarely, willingly lowered, in order to pay less (and, unfortunately, have less) than really needed. The role of a developper is also to understand his customer’s needs, and to explain them why and what they really need.
About ‘work’ and it’s generally misunderstood use
Posted by Boris in Miscanelous on July 16th, 2009
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and that’s mainly because I started a lot of drafts, but finished none of ‘em. I’ve observed that, excepted for articles you prepare during a looooo[...]ong time, short abstracts (or excerpts) are the only way to post something on a web-log without talking about your personal life. So, I’ll make this post short.
The word “work” is used to designate and talk about a lot of things, in various situations, but mainly, it means “labor”. And I remarked something interesting: people advocating about “work”. I say, those who regularly publicly and loudly tell that work is great and that people should work more. I don’t talk here about persons who simply say “I work hard and I have merit” (even if sometimes, people who advocate “work” say that too), but about those who pretend to work hard and complain about others, who, obviously, don’t work hard enough.
The fact is: you work for money (since we live in a capitalist world), and you live FROM money. So, basically, you live from your work (the money intermediate is not the matter here, and it’s a whole subject). So, if you don’t work, you can’t expect to live comfortably. Okay, but…
To work is NOT to do, I mean, IT IS NEITHER to do what others, nor you qualify as “work”. It is simply something that had to be done (for someone else…) and that nobody would have done for free. And, most of the time, people are lying: their work can easily be done, with a reasonable learning time, by anyone (exceptions are medical doctors, lawyers, etc.). For instance, «playing or composing music» is not working until someone ask you for some.
If I post about “work” and its meaning, it’s because I think that too many people are pretending to work (doing noting but fooling others, and earning money from their ignorance), and overwhelm other people about their pretended “laziness”. Actually, I generally have observed this kind of behavior from people who think that, for any reason (political, religious, theological, etc.), they are superior to the rest of humanity. So, when I hear “people should work more”, it’s either from a tired labor-worker, or from a dumb-ass who wants to slave us all. Work isn’t necessary enslavery, but if you don’t pay attention, you’ll be enslaved before even having a chance to understand it.
That is simply a though I had, feel free to give feedback, I’d greatly appreciate to discuss about this.
XBox gamepad driver for Linux
Posted by Boris in Software and Development on June 19th, 2009
Tonight I plugged my Xbox controller to my freshly installed Ubuntu setup. I have been using Windows Xp for at least three years, and I didn’t know it should work natively; so I started to look at existing drivers. I founded out that a project exists, but source code was two years old. I contributed to it and it seemed to work.
After encounting some problems I have to debug this driver. I’ll post any further information here.