Ikke's Blog

Archives for: April 2005

Apr 30
Kolab

I just installed Kolab on my desktop machine, just to play around with it, and I must say I'm impressed. This is the most integrated groupware-like suite I've ever worked with.
Based on existing open source solutions like

  • Postfix
  • Cyrus Sasl
  • SpamAssassin
  • Amavis
  • Apache
  • Cyrus IMAP
  • Mysql
  • OpenLdap
  • Sieve
  • PHP

and others, you get a completely integrated mailserver, userbase, calendars,... with a nice webinterface for administration purposes.

I installed Horde as user frontend, which took some time, but now it's working almost well. Using Horde the user gets a well-integrated web interface to his email, calendars, address books, Sieve mail filters, notes and tasks etc.

This is definately something we should look into at VTK. When using Horde as user interface, we could even allow our users to access their Eduserv email from the same interface etc, which would be really nice. The implementation could easily be done in a multiple steps: first get all email stuff working, then addressbooks, then calendars,...
I wonder whether it could be possible to extend the "standard" Kolab "User" LDAP object so it can also be used for Samba3 LDAP authentication? If that'd be possible, this is definately the application to use on our new server :-)

Screenshots might follow later ;-)

Apr 28
Evince, new vinyl and more

Evince
(click on the image to enlarge it)

I got Evince working :-) I had some troubles with it (wrong library naming: shell/Makefile.am adds -lt1lib when compiled with t1lib support, where t1lib only installs libt1.so on my system (default Gentoo t1lib build), resulting in a linker error. A symlink could have solved this, but that's an ugly solution, so now I patch shell/Makefile.am in the ebuild. I could even use sed, actually, because it's a one-line patch) but now everything works fine, including the popplet, dvi en djvu backend.

PDF font anti-aliasing works fine, but I couldn't get previewing (i.e. the feature enabling you to put a PDF file on your desktop, displaying not the icon assigned to PDF files, but the content of the file, as if it were an image or a plain text file) working yet :-( Guess I'll have to dig around some more, or is this a -cvs only feature? I got evince-thumbnailer installed, and it seems to be working fine though...

I bought the vinyl of Shameboy's first release, "Re-choque". The track has been hyped on Studio Brussel, a Flemish radio station, for a long time now. Shameboy is a project around Jimmy Dewit aka "DJ Bobby Ewing" (of Dicobar Galaxy fame), Luuk Cox (Budcemi's drummer) and a mysterious guy called "Mr. Morceau". Some phat beats blended with 80's electro synths and some great producers provide all ingredients for a great dance track. Guess that's the reason why this track is #1 on the Belgian dance charts for several weeks already :-)


If you want to hear some part of the track, check this.

I'm thinking of replacing my current b2evolution install with some other engine. b2evolution's development seems to have stalled completely, and some other products look very appealing. Some of the features I certainly need:

  • Multiple blogs hosted by one engine
  • Multi-user capabilities, with access controls (who can write to which blog?)
  • Themes (and preferably lots of themes available on the net ;-))

The main issue I'm facing is converting all current posts we got here to the new system...
If someone got a good suggestion, let me know :-)

Last but not least: we're making progress with the FedoraStateless@University project :-D Finally... :oops:

Apr 26
Software highlights of the day

Now VMWare Workstation 5 for Linux is being packaged (and will be released soon, if I'm not mistaken) Christian "ChipX86" Hammond (who's working for the VMWare Corporation, must be an interesting job) released some screenshots.
As I blogged before this release is based on GTK+2, so it integrates nicely into your Gnome desktop (although the software seems not to be 100% HIG compliant?).

On the "free" side of FOSS desktop applications, Evince seems to make great progress. Now the "all-in-one-viewer" proposition has been shot on desktop-devel-list@gnome, all work seems to get into document viewing (duh, nothing else to do ;-)).

This is what's possible in evince-cvs for now:

I guess I should get Evince on my system, maybe not -cvs but at least some released version. This should need 2 ebuilds: one for Poppler, and one for Evince. Maybe they're in b.g.o already, who knows?

Oh, and I forgot: Hi to Planet Gnome-NL! I'll create a hackergotchi ASAP, but taking a decent picture of me is a hell of a job ;-)

Apr 24
Screenshots in gallery

So, finally I added a "screenshots" album to my gallery. Currently only some desktop screenshots have been imported, more to follow soon (I hope).

This is my current one:

People in #gnome-nl@GimpNet seem to be very nice, jay :)

Apr 22
Other blogs

I was unable to read all other blogs I read normally for several days, and read most of them by now.

These are some things you must check out:

  • A movie demonstrating Soft Bodies in Blender. It's quite long, but it's worth your time.
  • We got Windows binary DLL codec support for GStreamer, which means every movie you're able to watch in WMP9 will be viewable in Totem or another GStreamer based application too, even if no free codecs are available.
  • Spyderous got great insight in some of the shortcomings in Computer Science subjects in education

Did I mention our concert yesterday was quite ok?

I forgot this one:

  • Never trust lawyers. Mind the name of the person writing this. If you don't know Greg KH: he's the author of udev, the Linux USB subsystem maintainer (one of Linux' trustees) and coder of lots of other kernel parts.

I hate blog comment spammers. Guys, get a live.

Apr 22
The future of X

This German article (bad BableFish translation) gives a great overview of what's currently possible using X11, on the field of eye candy. Some of the presented technologies are just technology previews, still nice to see though.

It's some sort of bundle about thingsI blogged about before:
- Xrender and Xdamage (alpha blending)
- Xgl (X server based on OpenGL)
- Luminocity (the wobbling windows, you know...)
- E17

Make sure you check the provided screenshots and demo movies.

Apr 16
Gnome 3 mockups

I really like this (don't just look at the screenshot, make sure you read the whole article, it's not too long).


Thumbnail is link to original image

Apr 15
Vim TNG


Imagine...

Apr 13
DSP coding and groupware troubles

Yesterday I did some DSP-related code again after several years (those AtomixMP3 days...). Read Stephan M. Bernsee's "The DFT a Pied" to "get" the DFT/FFT again, and then started to concentrate on beat detection of acoustic signals. Read Eric D. Scheirer's paper on acoustical beat detection, which is kinda heavy and theoretical (although very interesting at the same time :-)), and then found this article originating from this fantastic website. The article builds up things very well, it's very easy to understand everything as long as you got some very basic math knowledge. The author starts with some very simple energy based algorithm, then builds it up to more complex analyse methods.
I implemented algorithm #2 from that article together with some simple wave file reader/player in C yesterday, it needs some more tweaking, but the basics do work. Once I get it working fine I'll implement it as a GStreamer plugin. Lots of thanks to the people at #gstreamer@freenode.net for helping me out at coding the thing, I really need to learn some more about primitive data types and their size ;-)

Next task: use my current code to implement #3, enhance the visual beat tap, and make the code better (it's not optimized at all right now). Then I can put it into a GST plugin (after I read the GStreamer Plugins Writers Guide).

I've been testing several free groupware applications at VTK lately, none of them do everything I want untill now :-( egroupware comes close thanks to it's integration with LDAP, but it's buggy as hell (on our system at least): I can't even add a simple event to my calendar, and some of the "applications" just generate PHP errors and die. If anyone got experience with FOSS groupware applications (especially if they got support for LDAP as account and/or addressbook backend, or even Evolution and/or MS Outlook support) please let me know which apps I should try.

Apr 7
Gentoo and fdo standards

Sven just made me feel good. If Gentoo devs will stick to freedesktop.org standards and maybe even actively contribute to them, it'd be of great value for Gentoo Linux as a desktop distribution.

Apr 7
Call for votes

Hija,

I just received this email from Jono Bacon:

Hi all,

Right, my band Seraphidian (www.seraphidian.com) is
involved in a competition to play the Download
festival. We have been finalised as one of the top 10
bands, and I really need your help to push us forward.
This is a huge deal for us.

Please could you go to the following URL and click on
the red VOTE link to vote for the band:

http://www.snickersunsigned.co.uk/snickersunsigned/voting/votedetail.asp?bandid=952&startat=0

Also, if you run a website or weblog, could you
*please* write an entry encouraging you to vote. You
will know how important music is to me, and we really
want to push through to win this!

Also, could you please *not* write a script to bombard
the site with votes or they may accuse the band of
cheating, which we really don't want to do.

The vote closes on monday, so time is of the essence!!

Thanks a lot folks!

  Jono

Maybe some of you know him, read articles by him, whetever. I met him IRL at FOSDEM, he's a great guy (who doesn't know the hilarious LugRadio webcasts?), so if this can help him forward, I urge you to click the link and vote for his band (even if you don't like the music ;-))

CP: Fatboy Slim - Going out of my head

Ikke • LifePermalink 6 comments
Apr 6
Fun @ desktop-devel-list@gnome

Methinks this is funny :-) Make sure you check the preceding message too, so you know what this is all about.

CP: Gotan Project - Joy

Apr 5
Back

So, I'm back, but will leave again on friday ;-)

Napoli was quite nice, lots of Roman things of course ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompei]Pompe

Ikke • LifePermalink 2 comments

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