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!

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.

After a few hours with it, I am now able to use most of the websites I usually visit, including Youtube and Dailymotion.

Note that I use Iceweasel, which does not support WebM (for now), nor H.264 (which will never be supported by Mozilla).

Youtube support is brought by a Greasemonkey user script available at: http://turanct.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gnash-youtube/
The only tiny drawback is that the videos load in pause mode. For now, everything else seems to work fine.

Users of other browers (Chromium, Safari, Opera) can try their HTML5 beta: http://www.youtube.com/html5

It is even easier for Dailymotion, as the videos on their HTML5 beta program are encoded in the Ogg Theora format, which is natively supported by Iceweasel/Firefox >= 3.5.

To ease things, I have written a small Greasemonkey script which simply automatically redirects www.dailymotion.com to openvideo.dailymotion.com. This script can be downloaded here.

The drawback is that videos won’t play before they are loaded completely, which is not a big problem anyway.

I still cannot play the videos avilable on Vimeo, and have noticed while wirting this post that the Flash™ file uploader of WordPress didn’t work with gnash (obviously, WP provides an alternative way for file upload).

I will go on with this experience as long as I do not see major issue with gnash.
I will also update this post, or add comments, if I encounter other issues, or find any alternatives.

I would be curious to read your comments if you have run similar experience.

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.

This is not a real surprise, as it has also happened with the HADOPI I law last May, but this time, I will take the time to write him a letter to express my feelings.

I will only quote the following parts of his letter, referring to the amendments proposed to this law, following to the partial censure of the Constitutional Council:

[...] ce qui me laisse plus que très dubitatif sur l’efficacité du dispositif. [...] cette procédure me semble tout à fait inadaptée.

Which can be translated as follows:

[...] I doubt this disposal will have any effect. [...] I think this procedure is absolutely not adapted.

Now, let’s bet what will be his vote in September!

For my personal email, I use a setup based on Postfix, RBL and WL, grey listing, and DSPAM (by the way, you can find unofficial packages of current development version in my personal repository).

To better train DSPAM, I have removed all other filters (except some very basic controls at SMTP time), and I am very happy of this setup (grey listing delays receipt of email, which I am not very satisfied with, and relying on third-parties RBL is also not the best thing imho). This lead however to much more mail in my DSPAM quarantine queue.
I will hence re-enable more advanced filters at SMTP time once DSPAM bayes are large enough.

I have also played a bit with SPF, and configured my DNS server for my main domain to use it. It now passes the recommended tests. However, I haven’t implemented SPF checks in my Postfix setup.

For work, we rely on a (very old) MS Exchange setup, which is about to be replaced soon by a newer MS based solution. The costs for this replacement is quite high for a small company (about €7,000 including the hardware, the required software licenses, and the costs for setting this up by an independent worker during our summer closure).

I have hence tested Google Apps Standard Edition with one of my domains. I am always very much impressed by Gmail, which is really fast, seems reliable and easy to use. I haven’t tested it carefully in “work conditions” though (ie. using MS Outlook client for calendar sharing etc.), and the cost of the premier edition is €40 per user and per year, which means €1,600 per year for 40 users, ie. it would take more or less 4.5 years to reach the cost of our replacement server. Considering the current server is about 10 years old, I am wondering if Google would really be an alternative (other factors would also play a role, like our low quality DSL connection, 10 years for a mail server seems to be much too old, considering we cannot run any good anti-spam software on it etc.).

Note that an opensource solution was not considered, nobody could administer it (this is not my function in this company).

SaaS (Software as a Service) seem to be the future of software (this is at least what major companies in this sector tend to say, like Microsoft, Adobe, Google to only list some examples), is it already mature enough for small companies largely depending on their email like us?

I have tried installing sun-java6-plugin, which allowed me to go one step further, but I was still unable to choose the certificate with which I had to sign my declaration. Actually, it was only a display problem (the combo box was simply not displayed).

Guess what? I had to use the Windows 7 RC version I had installed in a VirtualBox to be able to sign my declaration!

I didn’t want to lose more time with this, but my girlfriend hasn’t yet made her declaration, hence any hints on how to do this on GNU/Linux would be highly apprciated.

As expected, my local representative voted in favour of this law.

I had however kept a secret hope that he would abstain for this vote, following to the email I have received from his assistant following to our meeting. Mr Vannson planned to take the floor during the finale discussions. He had sent me for review the text they wrote, which perfectly matched my arguments, and even referred to the law as a “Rube Goldberg machine” (“Ma conviction est que nous avons monté une usine à gaz” in the original version). This text also stated that he was netiher convinced nor satisfied by the law.

His speech planned for the final discussions of the law never happened, and was replaced by a single line question to the Minister, during a meeting of the Law Commission.
This question was even technically incorrect as he refers to firewall, whereas I had (with a great help from other members of APRIL) amended this part of the text to refer to “usage control software”:

M. François Vannson. Les logiciels « pare-feu » ne risquent-ils pas, madame la ministre, de nuire aux logiciels libres ?
Mme la ministre. Il n’y a aucune menace sur les logiciels libres, qui peuvent tout à fait accepter des logiciels de sécurisation.

From: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/rapports/r1626.asp

Which could be approximately translated as follows:

M. François Vannson. Mrs Minister, aren’t firewall a threat on Free Software?
Mrs Minister. There is no threat on Free Software who can accept well accept securisation software.

I must hence express my real disappointment.
Now, let’s hope this law won’t be applicable, following the idea of most of its opponents.

I won’t write to my local representative, as I think it is totally hopeless. I guess he will get the pingbacks from this blog post, as his own political weblog runs on Free Software!

This half an hour meeting allowed me to explain my fears regarding this “firewall” which could be set up on French citizens’ computers to enable them to prove their non-culpability (provided their computer runs a popular proprietary OS).

My representative kindly listened to me and his assistant understood the situation very well. I was even impressed that they have worked a lot on this law before the meeting.

They both proposed to raise this issue to Christine Albanel, the current French Minister for Culture and Communication, who is at the origin of this law. They agreed to say that this wouldn’t be changed for the next lecture (planned for the end of the month), as this particular chapter was meant to be detailed in further texts.

They also admitted that this law had little chance to be really applied as is, as they consider some aspects to be anti-constitutional – they hence think that the French Constitutional Council will prevent this law to be applied, at least as it is when writing this post.
My representative also admitted that this law was somewhat outdated (even if not yet voted!). Actually, this kind of law will ever be outdated…

I kindly thank my representative for his time and his frankness (even if on the bad side for this law, he was very open to my thoughts).

Good to know France is still a real Democracy!

The Portuguese Magalhães Project lead to provide 300,000 netbooks to Portuguese children aged of 6 to 10, for a fee varying from 0€ to 50€, depending on the earnings of the family. These netbooks have a dual boot, with Windows and Linux (a distribution based on Mandriva called “Caixa Mágica” – Magic Box in English).

The problem has begun when some opponents to this project pointed out that the Portuguese translation of GCompris, a free educational software for children from 2 to 10, contained some grammar, syntax and spelling faults, and did not reach the level of quality expected to be distributed to Portuguese children. This story was even published by some major Portuguese newspaper, which is a very bad publicity not only for GCompris, but also for free software in general.

Caixa Mágica Software have also published a press release explaining the situation.

The Portuguese Government have even published a document explaining how to uninstall GCompris, whereas work for correcting the translation was running, and automatic updates being set up on all Magalhães netbooks.

The GNOME Portuguese translation team have made some hard work during the week-end to review and correct the existing translation, following to a call for help raised by GCompris lead developer. The new version released yesterday already include an updated Portuguese translation.

I have noticed that this problem was already reported on launchpad 2 years ago, but people got lost as the translation was not made through Rosetta (a closed source platform for open source application translation). This should have been reported upstream or at least to the main translator!

I take the occasion to thank all translators, l10n and i18n coordinators of the various free software projects I enjoy using in French!