I wasn’t fair in my last post : I did something interesting on Sunday.

I went to to my father’s to help my sister with a USB key problem (which was easy to solve, I just had to install the driver by hand, like real men do). After lunch, I jumped on my motorbike (a light one, a 1998 Honda CRM125R) and enjoy a nice ride in the country.

So, at least, I did something interesting

There are none.

I’ve become quite lazy lately. Waking up, going to the office, working,  going back home, playing Forza Motorsport on XboX, sleeping. Nothing more.

For the moment

As usual, here is my Monday post.

Last Friday was fun A quarter before noon, I went to the boss office, to ask him for an arrangement so that I could go to my night courses during the week. It would have consisted of starting working half an hour earlier an afternoon a week, to leave half an hour earlier the same day.
He told me to close the door, because we had things to talk about.

So we talked about the same things my project manager already let me know : I don’t involve much in the different projects, I would have failed on the first one if they hadn’t helped me, and so on.
My replies were the same : I didn’t know WinDEV was such an horrible language and IDE, I’m still looking for technical documentation, that 70-80% of software lifetime is maintenance - so it’s better to design things correctly to be sure to modify them later.
And his conclusion was : we’re a small company, we don’t have time to work like we should, he wants me at 300% [so I should do three times more hours ?], to, finally, drop his last “let’s see each others in a month”.

Let’s see in a month…

Today it’s the birthday of someone very important to me, and who comes to read this blog from time to time.
So happy birthday ! o/

Yesterday evening, I was cleaning the mess in some of my most populated directories
(recup/, downloads/ and sandbox/), which, by deleting some unuseful files (what the
hell have I kept a 700 MB livecd.iso ?) and moving some others, helped me grow
the free space on /home from 115 MB to 6.3GB.

Then I started looking at photos/, where I store every each picture I’ve taken with
the camera my parents and my sister offered me, last Christmas, a Nikon Coolpix
5600.
This directory is 10 GB heavy, and as I was talking with Clenche, on IRC
(#openbsd.fr @ FreeNode), he asked us what software we used to handle and sort
our pictures albums.
So I started telling him I would like an application to tag my albums, reorder them,
manipulate a bit the images and stuff (yes, something like Picasa, which doesn’t
run under OpenBSD, even with the Linux binary compatibility activated).

Browsing the Internet, I found digiKam (to shorten all the trolls, yes it has a K
as in KDE).
Download latest stable source, bunzip2, tar, cd digikam-0.9.0-beta2, more README.
Damn, dependencies are a PITA !

– DEPENDENCIES ——————————————————-

AutoConf >= 2.5.x http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf
AutoMake >= 1.7.x http://www.gnu.org/software/automake
KDE >= 3.x (>=3.5.x recommended) http://www.kde.org
sqlite >= 3.x http://www.sqlite.org
dcraw >= 8.x (>=8.30 recommended) http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw
exiv2 >= 0.9.x http://www.exiv2.org
libgphoto2 >= 2.x (>=2.2.x recommended) http://www.gphoto.org
libkipi >= 0.1 http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kipi
liblcms >= 1.14.x http://www.littlecms.com
libtiff >= 3.6.x (>=3.8.2 recommended) http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff
libpng >= 1.2.x http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

On Tuesday, 00:07 am, I didn’t want to deal with this… but instead of giving up,
I took a look at the packages.
Great, it exists !
Of course, it’s an old version (0.7.2) but it will help me test it.

[root@september i386]pkg_add digikam-0.7.2.tgz
digikam-0.7.2:gdbm-1.8.3p0: complete
digikam-0.7.2:libgphoto-2.1.5: complete
ddigikam-0.7.2:libkexif-0.2.1: complete
digikam-0.7.2:libkipi-0.1.1: complete
digikam-0.7.2: complete

I love OpenBSD <3

At first launch, it asks you where to store the albums, then it starts.
The interface is clean, but what I quickly noticed is that Album -> Export and
Tools -> Batch Processing are empty.

One pkg_add later…

[root@september i386]pkg_add digikamimageplugins-0.7.2.tgz
digikamimageplugins-0.7.2: complete

The above menus still aren’t filled

Playing with it for five minutes, it seems to be very slow, particularly in menus,
but it does its job, and I’ll give it a try for some time, to see if it fits my needs
(at the moment, I can’t make an exhaustive list of them).

If you use a better application for photo management, let me know !

You may have been told unenumerable times : don’t try to get something, just wait for it to happen or come to you.

Okay, you may have been told that about girls (or boys). It seems to be the same for job opportunities.

fredix, the President of our beloved Ruby France association (yes, there are many French Ruby users), was contacted by a recruiter whovia the website Monster.fr. For various reasons, he didn’t want to go further with that company, and then, via GTalk offer me to tell us about me.

So, Teamlog’s recruiter phoned me, for about half an hour (she had a so charming voice that it was a delightful interview) to present me the company for which I would work (Teamlog is a service provider), their goals, their state of mind (the founders are all former Sun workers). She also tested my English speaking for five to seven minutes, and I think I was good enough because she wrote it in the email she sent me back after
It seems very interesting ; they deal with European mobile operators and telecommunications, to provide a common web portal for travelers, and want to hire a Ruby/Ruby on Rails/Perl/Python (w00t !) teammate very quickly. The job is based in Grenoble, a nice (but expensive) place.
I sent few minutes ago my resume, converted to Teamlog’s format, and two recent pictures. I’ll soon know much about it (salary, …), and I try not to lure myself.

It’s kind of weird to have been recommended twice recently
Anyway, “wait and see”, and thanks a lot fredix !

As usual, it’s a pleasure to wake up on Friday, knowing I’ll recover all the lack of sleep the day after. Okay, it becomes a pleasure only after spending a Willpower skill point to achieve the action

Anyway, I’m sitting down here , wondering if I’ll manage to debug the copy/paste work I was told to do (yes, it’s one of this company “best pratices” : if it already exists somewhere and it’s not reusable because it’s not a library or a class, copy paste it then !). The biggest fun of it was when I noticed the code I had to merge from two windows (yes, former developers put code into windows) use global procedures for the first and local ones for the other, which had the same names
[EDIT : as I keep on working while I write this (or the reverse), I found the bug]
Best of all, I let my project manager know I’m in trouble with the old code, and he said “weird… you just had to copy paste it”. How useful.

He had told me this job would be a good experience, that I’ll learn to solve problems like anywhere else… oh true… sadly true.

If I need some more sleep, it’s partly because I went out Thursday night, to meet a former colleague, who worked with me for more than a year when I was a techie, installing hardware and configuring software in our shops, Europe-wide.
He now lives in Saint Barthélémy, doing quite the same job, for local prestigious hostels and companies, earning more money (but life’s more expensive over there). As we talked about my current company, we agreed that it didn’t fit us both : too little will to evolve and we wanted (and I want) more.

Two girls and a guy from the accounting dept. came as well, the tapas, the sangria and the beer ; it was really nice, and we’re considering organizing new events (a girl offered to go to the paintball).

As my favourite Friday evening party is going to Nîmes‘ car meeting and drag races, I thought I’d enjoy it today. Too bad the weather’s not suitable. This week-end is about to be uneventful.

It doesn’t matter, I have much work to achieve

As I wrote in this previous post, I’ve started working again on some Ruby code.

I’m currently extracting the micro-kernel part of YAIB to turn it into a framework for developing modular Ruby applications.

The goals of the project (simply called “uKR” until I find a good name) are to provide a complete-but-expandable, clear and clean, well-documented and well-commented, framework for event-driven modular applications.

A modular architecture based on an applicative micro-kernel allows the developers to share the tasks between each others, code separate stuff with a common communication message (read about it on OSNews).

It also allows to intercept crashes : if the sound module of an application has unexpectedly terminated, the micro-kernel is up to detect it, and rerun it a number of time.
It can also handle updating running applications : a module downloads its update, ask the micro-kernel for being reloaded ; its message queue is saved, the module is reloaded, given back its message queue, and run.
Other idea : a module can choose to offer many services to other, like authentication ; it sends messages to other modules anytime someone logs in, like “hey, this one is approved, you can process his/her requests”.

Truly, there are many applications of the micro-kernel paradigm to software applications, not only operating systems. Of course, I haven’t detailed why some people *HATE* them, I’ve just explained why I’ve used it for YAIB and why I’m about to write this framework.
Want examples ?

A multimedia player : one module for the user interface, sending events like “play”, “pause”, “next”, “stop” events to the module playing the music or the video, while another one is downloading the new version of the UI module.

An IRC bot : one module handle the connection to the server while other focus on dealing with channels managements, authentification, serving news to chatters, …

The first work is to clean the code from what hasn’t to be in, and re-design some of the internals, with the developer needs in mind. If you have any idea about it, please leave a comment or email me (zifro@).

I might release it (in an early version) by December (at last !).

YAIB will be based on it - sort of “hey, look, it works” application - as soon as it becomes usable.

PS : thanks anamorph for having motivated me yesterday. You’re a friend to me.