Recherche d'un wallpaper pour la Saint-Jean Baptiste
12 days ago
Je cherchais un bon arrière-plan d’ordinateur de bureau (desktop background) pour représenter mon état d’esprit de début d’été, des terasses et des festivités estivales.
J’avais de la difficulté à me concentrer sur un thème qui est facile à trouver sans avoir à regarder plusieurs dizaines de papiers peint et qui représente aussi les thèmes désirés.
C’est alors que j’ai eu l’idée de la Saint-Jean Baptiste. Fête qui, en cas général, débute la série des festivals et qui, de plus, approche à grands pas.
Quelle fût ma déception de constater qu’il est très difficile de trouver un bon wallpaper de la St-Jean. Allez-y tenter un google search!
Finalement, je me suis enligné vers une photo de drapeau. Voici ce que j’ai trouvé chez Flickr qui était libre d’utilisation et de bonne qualité:
from abdallahh. Disponible ici.
from Humanoide. Disponible ici.
from Devinez lequel j’utilise?
Bonne Saint-Jean!
— Olivier Bilodeau
Reading about Donald Knuth
14 days ago
Aside from hearing the name and knowing that he wrote The Art of Computer Programming, I can’t say that I understood why Donald Knuth is such a legend.
Well, this interview and his wikipedia entry informed me a lot on him. What a guy!
Aside from having clear ideas, being extremely intelligent in various fields and thinking outside the box, what impresses me the most is his focus and continuous hard work.
I wish I was more like him.
— Olivier Bilodeau
Great podcast about Web development using the Java EE stack
18 days ago
I’ve listened to a very interesting piece on Java Web development using best of breed practices that I wanted to share. It is an interview done by the Software Engineering Radio Podcast on the development of the guardian.co.uk website.
From requirement gathering, to agile processes, test driven development (Unit / Integration / Performance testing), domain-driven design, continous building and integration, with good tools coverage all along the way, this covers it all!! It is something you would definitely want to hear if you are working or interested in the JEE space.
So what are you waiting for? Go grab it here.
— Olivier Bilodeau
2007 a good year for the linux kernel
31 days ago
Looks like 2007 was a good year for the linux kernel project.
To quote LWN’s article:
Finally, given that we are starting a new year, it is worth taking a quick look back at the entirety of 2007. In 2007, Linus merged just over 30,000 changesets (more than 80 per day, every day) from 1900 developers working for (at least) 200 companies. All told, they changed over 2 million lines of code, growing the kernel by more than 750,000 lines. The kernel developers are, in other words, touching over 5,000 lines of code every day – that is a high rate of change.
Wow! I am having a hard time to believe that this can happen without breaking the project apart. This tremendous amount of work must require a good process and lots of communications. I’m pretty sure no single company could scale that well.
Way to go Linus!
— Olivier Bilodeau
Synchronized releases between upstream and downstream
40 days ago
Anyone relatively following the FOSS community must have heard of the little disagreement about synchronized distro and upstream releases.
In a nutshell, Mark Shuttleworth wants distributors and upstream (kernel, the two big desktop environments, X.org, firefox and OpenOffice mostly) to do releases in a synced 6 months manner.
Arguments are around helping bug smashing and knowing when to put focus on QA and testing for upstream and for distros this would help them work together better and increase quality (again).
Some people have been very vocal about their opposition.
Well, I’m starting to be a little tired of people losing their time and energies to discuss this matter. To me, on the technical side, with a good VCS (and people knowing how to use it), a respected trunk/ and good testing policies I don’t see why upstream are against that. For example, when the distros are ready they said: “Here’s the revision we will use” and upstream could branch it and only maintain big bug fixes in that branch for a given release of each distro. I tend to think it is more complicated right now and could be a time saver for developers.
Another big thing on the marketing side of things is that for an outsider (someone who doesn’t dig free software or linux in particular) this would be less confusing as he would hear: “Linux did his semi-annual +1 release and things looks great!”.
Please note that I have never participated in any of the big upstream projects aside from (some) bug reporting so I might be wrong (read probably wrong).
But still, in the end, why not try it for a year or two and if it doesn’t work we could always go back to how things work right now. What could we lose by trying that?
Edit: Ars Technica has an interesting article on the topic also.
p.s.: Incidentally I just completed my first year as a blogger. Hurray!
— Olivier Bilodeau