Do you remember I went to Grenoble to have a job interview with one of Teamlog agency director ?

As she told me, I was phoned by their human ressource manager, on Monday afternoon, to set up a new interview.

So i’ll be in Grenoble on Friday, November 10th. Let me know if you’re in the area, we could go for a drink somewhere at the end of the afternoon.
I’ll be in Lyon to visit Ruby France members the evening, after what I’ll immediately come back home, as my CNAM courses have^W might have started on Saturday morning.
On the other hand, someone I’ll meet at Paris on Rails offered me to talk about my job search…
wait & see…

My Livebox still lives.

What’s a Livebox ?
It’s basically an ADSL modem, a router and a pretty web interface packed together in a plastic box. Many ISPs offer to lend their customers “their” “box”, which, depending on where you live and which connection you choose, also let you phone (for very cheap or even free) and watch TV. Those are called “triple-play boxes”.
The Livebox is the triple-play box of Orange, a major (and historically the oldest) Internet services provider in France.

Two weeks ago, after many powercuts due to my fight with the coffee machine in the kitchen, my Livebox lost her firmware. I was glad to be able to phone my ISP technical support, at half past midnight, so the extra money spent in this ISP services are worth, and get the information needed : how to flash the Livebox to put back the firmware. Of course the call was longer than expected, because the tech wanted to know the brand of my computer O_o and the operating system I ran. I tried to explain that OpenBSD was like Linux (please, readers, don’t hurt me for having said that) and, after waiting for some time, I finally got him explain me what was wrong and how I could fix it under Windows, the day after, at work.

First part ends here.

So I flashed the Livebox with the firmware I had on the ISP CD-ROM and brought it back home.

At first connection, the Livebox updated her firmware, then I hit the “update firmware” again, to be sure to get the latest one. Finally it was running the latest and orangish-coloured Web interface (as opposed to the previous gray, green, red and blue old one, when the company was named Wanadoo).

And since then, I could hardly use the IP phone : the service was either down or avalaible until I dial a number. So I called back the technical support, explained what happened and got an exchange number (the Livebox is their property, not mine, which is useful when it’s broken ).

I was worried, because there are two brands of Liveboxes : Inventel and Sagem ones. I have an Inventel, which are said to be more reliable, which I like much for the ease of use, the clean and understandable interface and so on.. the Sagem Liveboxes are the worst routers I’ve ever seen.

Ever.

I can tell because my mother has one, and guess who configured it ? You can’t change the Livebox IP address on the LAN, you have unuseful and weird menus… to be polite, I stop here. Just say it’s like WinDEV.

Second part ends here.

As I didn’t want to exchange my Inventel for a Sagem, I wait for a week, being able to phone from time to time, missed the opportunity to get the new one on Saturday.

It was worth waiting, the Livebox updated its firmware two nights ago, and now the IP phone works perfectly

Really, it’s a relief not to have to exchange it. i love my Inventel Livebox

Like, I guess, thousands of bloggers, here I write about the all new, all shiny, all free (both as in “freedom” and in “free beer”) Firefox 2.0.

Tristant NITOT presented all the new features of this second major release at the JDLL.
Sexy (the features !).

As the official announcement will only be made in few hours (it’s 5 minutes before midnight here in France), the 2.0 version is already avalaible, according to various sites and (best source) Mozilla public ftp server.

Of course, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 will be avalaible soon (if not already), but, after trying for some months both Firefox 2.0 (release candidates) and Internet Explorer (beta 2), the latter is not even equal to Firefox 1.x series.

Get your copy… if you can :
[zifro@september ~]ftp ftp.mozilla.org
Connected to manna.mozilla.org.
421 There are too many connected users, please try later.


Ouch. 00:53 am.

I’ve just finished writing our last French speaking Ruby users, Ruby France, e-gathering, during which we dealt with… administrativia.
It wasn’t long, but I’m not very productive when I spend the evening watching Prison Break and chatting on IRC.
Anyway, we’re on our way to building a strong Ruby community in France (by the way, we need a logo, so, if you’re a graphist, feel free to contact me (zifro@ this site) to show me something ; in my idea, and hexagonal Ruby will be perfect, as France is also called the Hexagon).

I wrote I was at the JDLL last week-end.
It’s time to point at a stand I particularly liked : LinuxChixFrance (who claimed to be also grep|grrl too).
It’s a group of women, willing to see more girls involved in the open source community (like Debian Woman, Gnome Women). They were explaining to every each guy coming to their stand what goals they target, and were selling very, very nice A3 (European size, more than twice the US Letter size) posters, which you can see there.

As most of this blog readers are not French reading ones, here is the translation of the texts of the posters, from left to right :

1. I code, You code, She codes, We code, You code, They (women) code

2. One can love to take care of animals without even dreaming of becoming a vet.
3. This woman uses Free Software. It makes her : [ ] sexy [ ] independant

4. This womand hates mouses. She prefers command line interfaces.

I was well-dressed (I wore a suit and a clean shirt) so I suppose the girl (zopeuse ?) thought I wasn’t a techie (but I may be absolutely wrong…) and explained me more precisely what LinuxChixFrance wanted.

To support them, I bought five of each posters they were selling, plus a small Tux pendant (I bought a pink one, I think I’ll offer it to my sister). The girl didn’t believed it at once, then she was truly happy to see someone would spread their message by pasting and/or distributing posters.

The fact is there aren’t enough girls in FLOSS (Anne Ostergaard made a neat conference about “Women in Free Software - Findings from the FLOSSPOLS report on gender 2006″ while she was at the 2006 RMLL). All that those girls say are sadly the truth : from kindergarten (toys play an important role in mind development, and girls are given dolls while boys are playing with construction games, tools and stuff) to university, girls are more or less forced to other ways than computing.
So whatever we could do will be a first step to welcoming more girls in our community.

I’m waiting for the first girl to join Ruby France

It looks like I’ve always an American girl in my dreams.

Last night I dreamed of Amy Davidson (!), which I knew from the TV series “8 Simple Rules…” (“Touche Pas A Mes Filles” in France) ; a strange dream of course. I was living in a huge shed, just using a small area (and I was considering parking my car inside, at the opposite side). In my dream I met the girl, we got friends, and as she was to leave France, I managed to get in the US, where she gave me a fake passport, without a visa.

When I write I make weird dreams from time to time…

(By the way, reading AlloCine.fr page about the series, I learnt there is no season 4. It is over. It gonna ruin my week-end :-\ I loved it)

Modular, distributed, pluggable, extendable.
Today applications are more communicating than ever. They offer to exchange data internally (modules, plugins) or externally (distributed computing, communication with other programs).

More than a fashion, developers now tend to make their application comunicate (who never yelled because he or she  couldn’t work with a good app just because it wasn’t opened to the world ?).

fredix works on Gtk signals to perform actions in his killer-app, Geekast, a gnome interface to Peercast.
jd and guiguilinux are starting a new implementation of dbus, a library aiming at making applications communicate.
And I’m working on a modular framework, as written here before

The result ?

We’ll soon or later provide frameworks, documentation and howto for the community !

It was a very good three days week-end.
I left home early (around 7 am) on Friday morning, and drove to Lyon.

The job interview went fine ; I think I was quite good, and I’ll soon have a phone call from their recruitment service, to be interviewed by another person. Wait and see.

The JDLL were very interesting, especially the Mozilla security conference made by Tristan NITOT and Paul ROUGET’s presentation about XUL & XPCOM. Yes, I like Mozilla stuff.
Lucas NUSSBAUM gave a lighting talk to present Ruby, but it was too troll-focused ; at least he did it.

I have a great time of fun with fredix, alexis, pouype, Fraifrai and jsh. They are people I knew on IRC only before this day (except for Fraifrai). We had lunch and dinner together, talked about all and nothing, Ruby France, Linux, OpenBSD, and so on…

fredix asked me if I would present something about Ruby next year… why not ?

Do you remember I was contacted by Teamlog, an IT service provider ?
After a 27 minutes phone interview, I sent them a modified version of my resume, based on their model, and wait for another technical call. I was still waiting until yesterday afternoon.

The recruiter phoned me back, apologized for things not going right with their new recruitment process (I also told her I was busy a lot, and didn’t try to contact the tech again) and speaking of a possible meeting, I offered to come to Grenoble, as I would already be in the area on Friday and Saturday (I’m going to the JDLL where I’ll meet fredix and pouype).

So we planned an interview on Friday afternoon, 2:00 pm.

Wish me luck !