Julien Valroff's weblog and personal homepage
Posts tagged Weblog
iPod nano video
Dec 26th
My girlfriend received an iPod nano video for Christmas.
As for music, it works fine with rhythmbox from experimental rebuilt against latest libgpod library.
But I can’t find any Linux software which would allow us to transfer pictures. I have tried gpixpod, but it seems the iPod is too new as it doesn’t even detect it. iTunes does not run with Wine.
I think I will try to set up iPod Linux some day…
Etch to Lenny upgrade
Dec 26th
I have just upgraded one of my system from Etch to Lenny. The process was very fast and I had no problem, except hal which refused to start because of SELinux. This is now fixed thanks to audit2allow.
I have also lost some time due to the fact I had forgotten to install the headers of the upgraded kernel, preventing me from building the module of my wireless card.
Two years blogging
Dec 26th
It’s been two year since I started blogging on 12th December 2005. I have posted 118 entries, ie. an average of almost 5 posts per month. Not that bad!
#455196: DM application for Julien Valroff – closed
Dec 11th
It seems like my application to become Debian Maintainer has been accepted. This means that in the near future, I will be able to upload myself the updated packages I currently (co-)maintain.
All of them still need to be uploaded by my current sponsors with the DM-Upload-Allowed field.
Again, many thanks to Micah Anderson, Christoph Haas and Loïc Minier for their advocacies and, in a more general way, for the help they bring on a day-to-day basis.
OOoCalc limitations
Nov 24th
I have brought some work with me to be able to catch up during the week-end. Usually, I take a laptop running Windows which allows to connect to our network through a VPN the credentials of which I am not in possession of.
This time, I just want to make some analyzes on spreadsheets (created on MS Excel). I have tried to use OOoCalc for the first time in “work conditions” – ie. I expect a little bit more than the basic features, which was source of disappointment.
Autofiltering feature does not allow wilcards in the conditions. Even advanced filters do not seem to allow them. I want to select columns which contents end with ’00?’ (ie ’00′ followed by any unique character), and I can’t. I have read some posts talking about regular expressions in filters in the old 1.x series, but can’t find anything related in the documentation of the current series – regular expressions seem to be used only for the ‘find & replace’ feature.
Moreover, you cannot set more than 3 conditions in autofilter, which is not a lot (I am not sure that previous releases of MS Excel were better). I am fully aware of the advanced filters which do allow up to 8 conditions, but I must say they are not easy to use on a day to day basis.
Filters are mostly considered as visibility filters, which means if you apply a filter and use the ‘Fill down’ feature, hidden cells are also filled in. At least it is not the case with copying & pasting: only visible cells are copied.
These limitations (bugs?) as well as the old existing bug regarding the decimal separator make it impossible for me to use OOoCalc for my work.
I guess I could easily achieve to do my work thanks to OOoBase, but the data I want to extract need to be used and amended by collaboarators who exclusively use MS Excel.
Are there any advanced users able to work around these issues?
VirtualBox fun
Nov 11th
I have had some fun during these 2 rainy days thanks to VirtualBox.
I have first tried the latest Fedora 8 (upgrading from the previous release). Though the upgrade was painless, I was stucked with the Linux Guest Additions which weren’t working, due to SELinux being enforced (by default or by mistake, I am not sure).
I had even opened a bug for this issue…
Then I have tried OpenSuse, which also needs tweaking so that the additions run ok – the solution was on the VirtualBox forums (disabling concurrency for init scripts by changing RUN_PARALLEL=”yes” to “no” in /etc/sysconfig/boot file).
Well, I haven’t extensively tested these distributions, but I particularly like the new Nodoka theme used by default in Fedora. I have even begun to work on Debian packages for both the GTK+ and the Metacity themes (I know there is already someone working on this, I will e-mail him to propose a co-maintenance if he accepts).
On the other hand, I was very surprised that OpenSuse uses GNOME as default WM (maybe it isn’t new, but I haven’t seen a Suse desktop for years). Their gnome-main-menu is really nice, but really unusable for me!
I guess I will try more distros in the coming weeks to compare with Debian – for now, I get the feeling I have made the good choice, except maybe for the default artwork, which is hopefully improving…
Compiz Fusion: first tests
Jul 13th
I have been playing with some unofficial packages of the brand new Compiz Fusion, and must say I am quite impressed. Although I do agree it is totally useless, I have had a lot of fun when trying all the new plugins and features. I really like the shadows and the transparency effects.
Here is the mandatory screenshot (expo plugin):
Everything seems stable for the moment.
If you have nothing better to do, just give it a try!
Iceweasel is not Firefox!
Jun 24th
VirginMega.fr is a one of the French music download service which offers MP3 files (without DRM). They previously prevented all the browsers except MS Internet Explorer on MS Windows platform from accessing their website. I (we) used to change the browser id thanks to the FF User Agent Switcher plugin.
It now seems they have changed their mind under the pressure of Linux users.
However, it seems there is still a problem for me (us) to access their website as they do not use the engine (Gecko in our case), but the user agent name…
No, Iceweasel is not Firefox! Nor is Galeon! But why blocking access to a website which works perfectly with these browsers which share the same engine?
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