End of my vacation
My vacation is now over, and I think it is now time for me to summarise what I have done with regards to free software.
First, I have sent my first real contributions to OpenStreetMap, in the area of my small town: http://osm.org/go/0DCaXeZ
I still have a lot of things to learn, but things are already better than they were!
I will also shortly write an article about how to use the GlobalSat DG-100 data logger on Debian GNU/Linux.
Working on OSM is real fun, as it can be done in family.
I have also spent some time to test & improve the Debian packages for DSPAM (available from my repository). I have moved the SVN repository to a new GIT repository available at: http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-dspam/dspam.git;a=summary.
Matthijs Möhlmann (matthijs) is currently reviewing the packages, and will upload them to the official archive if everything is ok.
Matthijs also accepted to be my advocate for my New Maintainer application. Thanks a lot to him! I am now waiting to be assigned an Application Manager: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=julien%40kirya.net
As usual, I have also been quite active at reporting bugs on the Debian BTS. unfortunately, I haven’t had the possibility to fix (RC) bugs.
Back to Adobe® Flash™ Player
After 4 weeks using exclusively Gnash as flash player, I have switched back to Adobe® Flash™ Player.
Though I had found workarounds for major video sites (including Youtube and DailyMotion), I have had a lot of issues with musical websites, most of them being still designed in Flash™.
To use Adobe® Flash™ Player on my amd64 desktops, I have used Bart Marten’s workaround described in the Debian wiki. It works fine though the player randomly crashes on some websites, and the browser needs to be restarted so that it works again.
This 4-week experience was fine, but I am a little bit puzzled that there is still no usable free flash player. Hopefuly, things will improve over time… the sooner, the better!
Adobe® recently announced they have (temporarily) stopped working on the amd64 version of their Flash™ Player for GNU/Linux.
The previous releases contain a big security issue, which makes them totally unusable.
As I didn’t want to wait until the flashplugin-nonfree package to be updated to support the i386 plugin through nspluginwrapper (as suggested in #586273), I have decided to simply switch to the free alternative: gnash.
Goodbye Facebook
Today, I have finally permanently deleted my Facebook account.
I have followed Matt Zimmerman’s procedure, and it seems everything went well.
Now, I just need to not login to Facebook over the next 14 days, which shouldn’t be a problem at all (my last connection was something like 2 or 3 months ago!).
My aim is now to make more and more people use identi.ca as their primary social network. I will also follow the Diaspora project.
My identi.ca profile : http://identi.ca/julienvalroff
DSPAM 3.9.0 released!
The DSPAM team have just announced their first official release, one year after the project was taken over by the Community.
You can download the sources from the SourceForge project.
Unofficial Debian packages are being built right now, but will only be uploaded to my repository after a bit more testing, during the week-end I guess.
They are meant to be uploaded to the official Debian archive once they are considered as ready by the pkg-dspam team.
Hopefully, they will be part of Squeeze.
4 years blogging
My blog has just celebrated its 4th birthday.
161 posts, only 190 comments, but the statistics shows a stable increase in the number of visitors (in average a bit less than 500 unique visitors per day).
During the week-end, I have worked on upgrading WordPress to the newer 2.9 release, and have just finished optimising my apache and mysql configurations. Access to my websites should now be somehow faster.