[OFF] Et si j’étais un prof de philo ?

by pounard

19 10 2008

.. je pense que je donnerais comme sujet de dissertation des citations chinoises !

Et oui, en balladant sur le net, j'en ai repéré une ou deux que je trouve tout à fait juste, mais libre à chacun d'avoir son opinion sur le sujet.

Petite note, elles sont toutes de Cofucius (étonnant tiens!).

en lire plus


Vertimus 1.0.2

by Stéphane

22 06 2008

Bugfixes and new translations.

To upgrade from previous version, run the following scripts:

  1. sql/upgrade-sql-vtm-1.0.1-to-1.0.2.sql
  2. sql/upgrade-sql-vtm-1.0.1-to-1.0.2.php

* MAJOR FIX to get the last user who has locked the module
* New $url_hosted_link and $url_hosted_name variables to set in
localconfig.inc.php
* FIX Sending of emails to the committers on ‘Ready to commit’
* New Brazilian Portuguese translation by Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle
* New Czech translation by Lucas Lommer (#237486)
* FIX #237472 reported by Lucas Lommer
VARCHAR > 255 needs MySQL 5.0.3 or later



Saving power with Linux and reducing the boot time

by Stéphane

12 06 2008

There are a great web site and some tools about this subject (thanks to Intel and their great developers)
http://www.lesswatts.org

Services

The first step is to remove some useless services or rarely used, I chosen the following ones :

apt-get remove bluz-utils hplip* scim* tracker*

update-rc.d -f pcmcia remove, for mysql, apache2, postgresql-8.3 (it’s easy to launch when necessary)

You can really check the impact of your changes with bootchart and view the result with eog /var/log/bootchart/*.png (my laptop starts in 27 seconds).

In gnome-session-properties, I also unchecked Applet Tracker, Evolution Alarm Notifier, Bluetooth Manager (don’t forget to save in the third tab).

Settings

You can measure the number of wakeups per second with the wonderful PowerTop ($ sudo powertop), on my computer the main guilty was the proprietary nvidia driver (around 60 fps like the refresh rate of my screen), I added the following line in my xorg.conf to resolve that issue (~ 2 wps after) :

Option         “OnDemandVBlankInterrupts” “true”

I also blacklisted some modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist pcmcia
blacklist yenta_socket
blacklist rsrc_nonstatic

With no Wifi and no USB mouse connected, with my GNOME Desktop, a gnome-terminal and Emacs, I have only 20 wakeups per second (not bad :).

I wrote a little script to test some more aggressive settings if they works fine I will add them to sysctl.conf:

# By setting this to ‘1′, under light load scenarios, the process
# load is distributed such that all the cores in a processor package
# are busy before distributing the process load to other processor
# packages.
echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_saving

# From 500 by default
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

# SATA
echo min_power > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy

# Sound
echo 1 > /sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save

I don’t use the laptop_mode or hdparm because I don’t want to stress my hard drive with too many spin up and down. It’s not necessary to insert the ‘noatime’ option in fstab with Ubuntu Hardy Heron because the new ‘relatime’ option is already activated.



Vertimus 1.0

by Stéphane

22 03 2008

GNOME translation teams,
Vertimus is the perfect tool to follow each translation, translate, proofread and enhance the quality of contributions.

https://launchpad.net/vertimus

===================================
Overview of changes in Vertimus 1.0
===================================
tab: vertimus-1-0 (2008-03-21)

* XHTML and CSS pass the W3C validator
* New tool to download all PO files of a release
* Show informations about other modules with the same name in the
module page (Javascript)
* Move old files in a backup directory
* Add some maintenance scripts
* Display the authorized extensions in module page
* Add a search tool
* Reduce require_once calls
* Add informations about APC installation
* FIX Backup of files
* FIX No error message when the extension file isn’t valid
* FIX Web site title translation
* FIX call to date_default_timezone_set
* Fix #189903 - RSS feed error

New and last release wrote in PHP! Take it while it’s hot! The next version will be in Python to integrate features from Damned-lies and Transifex.



Cairo-Clock is now really faster!

by Stéphane

3 03 2008

capture-cairo-clock-par-macslow.pngCairo-Clock is CPU intensive and consume around 13 % of CPU on my Core 2 Duo (on one CPU), the workload is spread on Xorg (10 %), compiz.real (2 %) and cairo-clock (1 %) with a smoothing value defined at 30 (default). The second hand drawing is disabled (default).

I wrote some patches to reduce the CPU consumption and now, Cairo-Clock doesn’t appear in ‘top’ list, woooh! The solution was simple, it useless to refresh the clock at 30 Hz if the second hand is not drawn. I also use common code to manage timeout and g_timeadd_seconds reduce the number of interrupts when many applications use this function.

I prefer bzr to git but I published my patches on github so MacSlow can take my patches here: http://github.com/stephane/cairo-clock/tree/master

PS: I couldn’t resist to translate in French (and fix Cairo-Clock for translation).



Vertimus 0.4, ‘Hello, Zend!’

by Stéphane

28 02 2008

Vertimus is an Open Source web tool to manage a workflow of translations, each translation has a status which changes at each step. You can create an account, book any translation and communicate with your team. If you want to catch a glimpse of Vertimus in action, go to http://gnomefr.traduc.org/suivi (used by the French team).

This is the first release with support for localization, two languages are included in this release English (thanks to Phil Frary) and… French of course :).

Now, I think Vertimus is ready for world domination, so I urge you to translate Vertimus into your language and deploy it on a web server near to you (see the INSTALL file to follow the easy steps).


===================================
Overview of changes in Vertimus 0.4
===================================
tag: vertimus-0-4 (2008-01-15)
* based on the Zend Framework:
- Zend_Mail
- Zend_Translate
- Zend_Locale
- Zend_Db (PDO_MySQL)
- Zend_Auth
* new look & feel (CSS)
* separate specific settings in localconfig.php (URL, menu entries)
* translated in English and French
* mail encoded in UTF-8
* show a information message (editable by the administrator)
* use a sort order for the releases
* simpler session management
* the user can reset his password via an activation key
* licence is now GPL only
* cleanups
* FIX #158764 - Mail sent about status being changed to "Translated"
when cancel ing an action
* FIX #174698 - Angle brackets should be converted in comments

To checkout the latest version: bzr co lp:vertimus



HIG Frames with GTK+

by Stéphane

3 02 2008

It’s painful to follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines in plain GTK+ so I wrote some functions to make this task easier. I wrote this code one year ago and I’m suprised we don’t have such API in the current GTK+ version.

Screenshot HIG GTK+ Frames

The Launchpad branch is https://code.launchpad.net/gtk-frame-hig. libsexy is maybe the right container for that code.

PS: libmodbus 1.2.3 is out!