Fred's blog

At Splitted-Desktop, we build Internet Terminals and lately we added a touchscreen option to them. So I started to play with them and I found that it's very difficult to use a web browser with pages not designed for touchscreens (big buttons/areas).

So my idea is to extend the active area to ease the clicking on touchscreen. I started to look around for solutions but I'm not familiar with web browser internals. So I discussed with some Mozilla folks and they come up with the idea to implement something in javascript.

I did some experiments under Firefox with a Greasemonkey script that you can find at userscripts.org. It somehow works but it has some limitations:

• web pages making active elements of non active elements (like LI, EM) like gmail, google calendar don't work. I tried to find if there is way to detect event handlers registered on these elements without success.
• when you click on the browser window to give focus back to the browser it follows the nearest link and I would like to avoid that but it's less important than the previous point. Anyway this information doesn't seem to be exposed to javascript...

If you have any idea to solve or workaround these limitations, let me know.

I have finally found the time to fix the server that is hosting http://hardware4linux.info/. Let me know if it remains some issues with it.

And don't forget to upload your latest hardware or Linux distro compatibilities !

Le site de l'artiste peintre Niankoye Lama est maintenant en ligne à l'URL suivante: http://www.niankoyelama.com/. J'ai fait mes début avec Joomla et je dois dire que c'est assez facile à utiliser une fois que l'on a assimilé les notions d'article, menu, module, section, catégorie et plugin ;-) Tout commentaire est le bienvenu pour aider un webmaster amateur !

Our first motherboard is announced publicly today! The motherboard is a minit-itx format board with the following features:

• 1 S1 socket for AMD Mobile Sempron and Turion 64 X2 support
• ATI RS690E and SB600
• 1 Compact Flash port
• 1 LVDS port to drive TFT panel
• 1 TPM
• 1 mini PCI slot
• 2 internal com ports
• 2 internal firewire ports
• 32 MB Local Frame Buffer to lower power consomption of GPU
• 6 USB 2.0 external port available on I/O backing plate
• 4 USB 2.0 internal port
• 2 Gigabits Ethernet port from Realtek
• Up to 4 GB of main Memory ( 2x So-Dimm DDR II @667Mhz)
• 1 DVI-D port, 1 7.1 analog audio out, 1 SP/DIF Optical port

Of course this motherboard is working perfectly under Linux and is a good solution to build a media center!

More details at:

• http://www.splitted-desktop.com/en/s2350.html
• http://wwwd.amd.com/catalog/salescat.nsf/doclookupweb/21166CC83687F54586257391002C6D8A?OpenDocument&id=Splitted-Desktop+Systems~IMS-CS
• http://hardware4linux.info/component/38287/

I became a big fan of Niankoye Lama's paints in the middle of last year. His paints of African markets from the top are uniq imho. If you know other painters that represents things like that let me know.

Here are my 4 paints from Niankoye Lama for you pleasure:

Nice article at Phoronix about Gwenole's work to add VA-API (short for Video Acceleration API) support in mplayer and ffmpeg.

On Monday, I joined a new adventure at Splitted-Desktop Systems. SDS is a new company started in 2006 by Jean-Marie Verdun to create Internet devices for telecom operators and specialized markets. The company is creating innovative systems from hardware (motherboards, cooling systems, cases), software (based on Open Source of course) up to services. I'm working there with fellow MandrakeSoft/Mandriva mates: Boubou, Warly and Gwenole. I'm sure we'll do some very good work !

The first product of the company has been announced by Orange a few days ago and is called "Pack Internet Facile" which means "Easy Internet Pack". This product is targetting Internet newbies and is realized in collaboration with the e-sidor company. Here is a photo of the device:

I was not really satisfied with the aggregation sites about Erlang so in the open source spirit I started mine at http://www.erlangplanet.org/. Let me know if I missed some blogs about Erlang, OTP, CouchDB, Ejabberd or anything related to Erlang.

I'm flying to San Francisco today to attend the Intel Developer Forum. I'll do demonstrations about a new virtualization use case: delivering the promises of grid using virtualization on workstations. So if you happen to be in the area and want to have a drink, just drop me an email.

I'm toying with the idea of implementing a distributed social networking system. I want to get control back to my contacts and personal data!

To do this, here are the requirements I see for the system:

1. personal data and contacts are kept and controlled by each users.
2. information should be available differently to contacts and contacts of contacts than to others. So we can call one version restricted and the other one complete.
3. information should be searchable.

Interesting components to implement the system are:

• openid and/or gpg could be used to authenticate the users.
• foaf could be used as a standard format to store data and exchange data.

Requirements lead to the following points:

• To satisfy point 1, the data could be published on the personal web site of the user.
• The data could be in FOAF format to satisfy point 3.
• Point 2 is the more complex. One idea could be to publish on the web only the restricted version that will be searchable by search engine. Then we need a way to handle the complete version of the data. We could use an email automate for this or a web service or a kind of web proxy that will act for the user. Anyway what we need is an agent that will act for the user to answer requests from contacts and contacts of contacts. I have to think more to find what is the best way to go.

Some news on the development of http://hardware4linux.info/:

• You can now rate Fingerprint readers, Cameras, Webcams, Scanners and Laptops. The classification of these components is based on heuristics so report any error to me.

• You can now use direct links based on hardware info if you need on your web sites for PCI and USB components. For PCI, you can use the following url: http://hardware4linux.info/pci/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/ and for USB: http://hardware4linux.info/usb/<xxxx>/<xxxx>/.

• An RSS feed for the comments is now available.

Mon amie Pascale vient de lancer un site d'information sur le commerce équitable en Ile de France: http://equitecho.org/. Vous y trouverez:

• des dossiers,
• le recencement des différents acteurs,
• le calendrier des évènements à venir.

Some news on the development of http://hardware4linux.info/ :

• You can now navigate in the association between kernel modules and devices.
• Display the names of OEM manufacturers for PCI devices.
• New version (0.8) of the collector.

And the current stats in term of Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu 7.04 : 36 systems
• Debian lenny/sid : 22 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2007.1 : 17 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2008.0 : 11 systems
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 1.12.9 : 10 systems
• Debian 4.0 : 7 systems
• Arch Linux Duke : 6 systems
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 1.12.10 : 6 systems
• Mandriva Linux 2007.0 : 6 systems
• Arch Linux (Duke) : 3 systems
• Fedora Core 5 : 2 systems
• Ubuntu 6.10 : 2 systems
• Ubuntu 7.10 : 2 systems
• openSUSE 10.2 : 2 systems
• Arch Linux 0.8 : 1 system
• Debian 3.1 : 1 system
• Fedora Core 6 : 1 system
• Frugalware 0.6 : 1 system
• Gentoo Gentoo Base System release 2.0.0_alpha3 : 1 system
• Mandriva Linux 2012 : 1 system
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 : 1 system
• Scientific Linux SL 4.4 : 1 system
• Slackware 10.2.0 : 1 system
• Slackware 11.0.0 : 1 system
• Ubuntu 6.06.1 : 1 system
• Zenwalk 4.0 : 1 system
• Zenwalk 4.6 : 1 system

Thanks to all that have uploaded systems!

I'm working on a new site to lookup and report hardware compatibility with Linux distributions. I'm in the early development stage. Only the reporting layers are done. I need help to validate that this is working correctly on various hardware and Linux flavors.

If you want to help, just try to report your system. You have to do the following steps:

• create an account on http://hardware4linux.info/accounts/register/
• install an LSB package from http://hardware4linux.info/server/download/
• launch /opt/hardware4linux.info/bin/hwreport /tmp/report
• upload the generated file to http://hardware4linux.info/server/upload/
• report me any problem (crash, upload problem, missing hardware, wrong hardware category, ...)

Any feedback welcome.

To use the photos from email2photo.net in Thunderbird, you have to install the MessageFaces plugin and configure it to use a Local folder to lookup photos. Then use the following script to download the photos to the local folder.

Quick start info for the script:

• mbox2photo.py dest ~/MessageFaces # configure the local folder to store the images
• mbox2photo.py add ~/.thunderbird/avgp3z8c.default/Mail/Local\ Folders/Inbox # add the mbox to be checked (you can add multiple ones)

Then start downloading images:

• mbox2photo.py

I have only tested the script under python 2.4.3 and Linux, let me know if it works for you.