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lundi, février 8 2010

Post FOSDEM 2010

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, février 8 2010, 22:00

So last week-end I was at FOSDEM. First, it’s quite huge. Several thousand geeks in one location (if somebody hates open source, it’s the place to drop a bomb, lots of projects might also die afterward (I’m just saying that it’s not so cool on a risk management point of view, I’m not encouraging anybody to do such a bad thing ;-))). A lot of smart people, good ideas, interesting stuff to see, to hear and free WiFi everywhere (such thing would be illegal in France nowadays :-\).

As usual with conferences, goodies review. What do we get: - conference program (on paper) - a bag (made from biodegradable material)

That’s all good to me. Quite eco-friendy and nothing is unnecessary.

Here is the list of sessions I attended:

Welcome (FOSDEM Staff)

Quick history of the FOSDEM and of course the FOSDEM dance.

Promoting Open Source Methods at a Large Company (Brooks Davis)

Brooks Davis told us how they managed to bring some of the open source way of working in a big aerospace company. I find incredible that in a company working for aerospace (and even any company doing software) some developers are still not using any version control system.

Evil on the Internet (Richard Clayton)

Quick presentation of what “bad people” are doing on the internet and how it works, with live examples of phishing/fake banks/fake escrow websites.

Visit the AA419 website for more information.

Mozilla Europe/Mozilla Foundation (Tristan Nitot/Gervase Markham)

Some info on current status and future stuff at Mozilla. Some discussion about the ballot screen.

Personal note: the ballot screen will appear for every Windows XP/Vista/7 users how do not have installed any other web browser. This is a decision of the European Commission imposed to Microsoft. But what about people working at the European Commission? Are they going to see the ballot screen on their computers? Obviously, like in any company managing their computers, this is going to be blocked in order to keep the “homogeneity” and ease of system administration. Guess what? I am working at the EC (as external contractor). Since I’m a developer, I can install whatever I want^H^H^H^Hneed on my work computer so I don’t have the problem (and in fact since I’m doing a bit of web development I’ve all major web browsers installed). Anyway, I will see if my colleagues get some choice for their web browser.

FLOSS: a key to self-determination in Internet life (Mitchell Baker)

OK, I can’t really summarize but it was interesting. Free and open source software have values, freedom related ones (at least). To some extent we can see those values in how the internet has been built and we need to be sure that those values are still going to drive the future of the internet and even take a more predominant place.

Hackability (Tristan Nitot/Paul Rouget)

Do you want the internet to be a place only for for-profit companies to sell you their products? I hope not (if you do, what the hell are you doing here?). An important thing that will prevent that is to be sure that the internet is hackable. That mean we can do what we want with it, event if it was not designed for.

I would like to give an example of a hackable product by design: a Lego box. When you buy a Lego box, it’s shipped with a manual with one or two (sometimes more) patterns to build what Lego thinks you might want to build with. But obviously, it’s for fun, and Lego does not forbid you to do anything else with it, on the contrary, they encourage you to do stuff they didn’t think you could do with it… and it’s quite normal since Lego bricks are done to build whatever you want.

On the internet it’s quite the same. You have bricks. Different kind of bricks, versatile ones (bits and bytes) on top of which people have created more complex bricks (HTML, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, XMPP, XML, CSS, JavaScript…) allowing you to do any kind of things. But there are some stuff that are not following that concept. Take Flash for instance, here you have the Logo box already mounted and you can’t unmount it, you can play a bit with it but not that much.

Paul did a demo showing that the web is hackable (changing the UI of a website and with the help of Firefox/Greasemonkey change how to interact with the website), that Firefox is hackable (switching from a tab to an other by shaking his wiimote!).

HTML 5 (Paul Rouget)

The “theorical” part of the presentation was done by someone else but I don’t have his name (sorry). Anyway, since most of the stuff I developed so far were web applications, I was quite interested in this presentation (and of course because I have been too lazy to check by myself what’s new in HTML 5).

HTML 5 syntax, very pragmatic. HTML has been slaughtered on so many web pages that web browsers are now very good at understanding the understandable. So of course, instead of imposing a drastic syntax (like XML based stuff requires usually) that nobody is going to apply, HTML 5 is quite “user friendly” (in the way that you can type whatever you want, it’s going to work (uppercase, lowercase, it doesn’t care, you don’t close your tags? not a problem…)). I think web browsers (except IE of course ;-)) are the perfect example of “be strict in what you send, but generous in what you receive”.

Anyway, lots of new tags like header, footer, aside, of course video, canvas…

Paul did an amazing demo with a “simple webpage” turning out to be an interactive presentation with CSS transitions, video playing, 2D transformations, 3D ones… impressive.

Amarok 2.2 Rocking (Sven Krohlas)

I was an Amarok user for a long time but since I switched to the Mac it’s not the case anymore (even though Amarok runs on Mac). Anyway, the moodbar is back!

I haven’t played a lot with Amarok 2.x, but I don’t feel very comfortable with the UI. In 2.2 it’s a bit better. Maybe a part of the problem is that I don’t like KDE’s default theme.

It was a conference on free (as in free speech) softwares, but there are not only softwares that are free, there is also music. Go to Jamendo and listen/download a bit of music, you might discover good music under Creative Commons licenses (I recommend: Diablo Swing Orchestra and David TMX)

NoSQL for Fun & Profit (Tim Anglade)

A quick overview of what is NoSQL, no technical details, more a presentation for managers. Anyway, like lots of people I have suffered of SQL. For several reasons, first, it’s hard to find a project where a relational database is not badly used, a RDBMS can be very good at what it does (like PostgreSQL), it still needs to be used correctly, and secondly, because it was almost the only way “managers” did know about storing data. Who have never seen that kind of situation:

The manager: “On our new software we are going to use this programming language and that relational database.”

The developer: “I can understand that we need a programming language since we are going to write a software, but we don’t need a relational database for it.”

The manager: “Of course we need a relational database, every software use a relational database.”

The developer: “Well… no.”

The manager: “I’m the one deciding, you are only the mindless developer coding the stuff I ask so shut up.” (OK, maybe not that part)

Well anyway, NoSQL is a good idea to make sure that people know that we have choices on how we store data and that there are some ways better for some kind of tasks and others ways better for other kind of tasks.

Mozmill (Henrik Skupin)

A quick presentation of Mozmill, a tool used to do automated functional tests on Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird…). Each version of Firefox in fact 225 versions of Firefox (75 languages on 3 platforms) and all of them should/need to be tested. It looks like at Mozilla they are not really in the test driven mindset (yet), and they are lacking of tests. Wait… sorry, when I say tests, I always think “automated tests”, it’s inhuman to make a person run a test suite manually, unfortunately to many people are paid for that. From what I understood they have some manual test suites for Firefox and fortunately they are trying to automate them.

You can see the mozmill generated reports for Firefox here: http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/couchdb/mozmill/_design/reports/_list/summary/summary

Towards GNUstep GUI 1.0 (Fred Kiefer)

GNUstep has been in development for ages and there is still no 1.0 version. So the question was “do we need to do one and if yes, what needs to be in”. Obviously, the answer for the first part is “yes” (so it will attract more developers, *BSD and Linux distributions will update their packages…). The second part of the question was not really solved. One proposition was to name the version 10.2 and has complete support of Cocoa 10.2.

L20n (Axel Hecht)

I’m not a specialist of internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), I know some issues regarding that but quite frankly, I didn’t really understood the presentation. It’s a bit more clear after a look on the l20n wiki. Sounds interesting to me since I think that the current way of doing (key/value) sucks a lot as soon as you have some non ultra-trivial stuff to do.

Étoilé: Where it is, where it’s going, why it isn’t there yet (Quentin Mathé/David Chisnall)

What have they done since the beginning in 2004? This is a project with few people but lots of ideas. One thing I find interesting is the CoreObject framework. Well in fact not the framework, but the ideas behind. From a user point of view, having to save your documents sucks. Why the default state is “in case of problem you are going to lose all your unsaved work” and not “in case of problem all your work is saved”? So here the idea is everything you change on your document is recorded, so you can do/undo/redo modification, close your document, open it again, ask to undo stuff you have done before… the history of your changes on the document have been saved all along.

Such ideas are not new, we have been talking about that for decades (well, not me, I’m talking about it only for years, I’m not that old ;-)), but mainstream operating systems are still not implementing it.

Women and Mozilla (Delphine Lebédel)

Quick presentation of WoMoz.

Nepomuk (Sebastian Trüg)

Recent operating systems are now indexing datas so it’s fast and easy to search for stuff on your computer. Nepomuk is a “semantic” way of doing so (using RDF and so on).

Several functionalities are similar between Nepomuk and what I think Étoilé’s CoreObject do. But Nepomuk is based on “standards” like RDF and SPARQL.

Mozilla Panel Discussion (Mitchell Baker/Tristan Nitot/Mark Surman)

A discussion on Mozilla’s mission. Lots of questions about privacy. I confirm, Mozilla’s people have the right mindset (at least the mindset I like) and I’m glad that they are caring about the Internet.

Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch (Greg Kroah-Hartman)

A live example on what you need to do and how to do a patch for the Linux kernel.

That’s all

There are several presentations I would like to went to but we still have not invented a device giving us ubiquity.

I now have a lot more thinks to thing about, I may write down some of my thoughts here soon.

Anyway, a big thank you to the FOSDEM staff for organizing all that, to all the speakers and finally to all the people attending the event.

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mercredi, février 3 2010

FOSDEM 2010

Par Laurent Desgrange le mercredi, février 3 2010, 07:00

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting) 2010 is happening this week-end (6-7 february) in… Brussels! At ULB, about 10 minutes by foot from home. So guess what? FOSDEM 2010

I never had the opportunity to assist FOSDEM before, so this time I’m not going to miss it.

I haven’t look at the planning seriously yet, there is a huge amount of stuff going on there, it’s going hard to make choices. At least I have seen that Mozilla is presenting some stuff, I hope I will be able to see Tristan at last (though I’m not sure it’s really fulfilling to listen to someone I always agree with (well, I’ve been reading his blog for several years now and I don’t really remember not agreeing on something)).

This reminds me I should find a way to start sharing with the community. I have been using open source softwares for years, on my day to day work, what frustrates me the most is each time I’m struggling with proprietary softwares (which I tend to avoid) while I know that the same problem with an open source software would have been solved much more easier (because of the help of the community and the availability of the source code).

So, are you coming?

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lundi, février 1 2010

<video>, H.264, Theora, Firefox and patents

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, février 1 2010, 22:00

Some quick thoughts…

In HTML5 there is is new video tag allowing to embed a video in a web page as we do for a picture. As for the img tag (for pictures), the W3C (who defines HTML) does not say which format should be used for the content itself. So in a img tag you can put PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF… whatever you want, as soon as it is recognized by web browsers.

Internet Explorer does not support video, Firefox supports it but reads only videos encoded in the Theora format, Chrome and Safari support the tag but read only H.264 encoded videos.

Technically, for the moment H.264 seems to be better than Theora. But Theora is an open format while H.264 is crippled with patents and using it requires paying huge royalties (depends of what kind of license but some people are talking about 5 million dollars).

I don’t remember seeing any “official” position from Mozilla why they do not support H.264 in Firefox, but from people working at Mozilla, they usually provide good arguments like:

  • the web is based on open, free and patent-free standards (this is very important, changing that will fragment the web)
  • they would prefer doing more useful stuff with 5 M$ than paying for a codec
  • supporting H.264 is not a good idea since it will be valid only for the version distributed by Mozilla, not the one embedded in your Linux distribution for example

I completely agree with that.

I wonder why lots of people on the internet would like Mozilla to support H.264 while they don’t ask Google and Apple to support Theora. For images, they are all able to read different formats, while should they be limited to only one video format? Google and Apple have nothing to pay in order to support Theora (except their developers to include it).

The other thing, why MPEG LA (licensing H.264) does not make H.264 a patent/royalty-free codec? OK, because MPEG LA was created to collect fees for patents covering MPEG technologies.

And the nasty idea, why Mozilla does not make a Firefox Europe Edition? In Europe, software patents are not allowed (kind of, it’s not really clear, it looks like quite often software patents are granted while they are not respecting european legislation). Doing a Firefox version including H.264 but distributed only in countries that do not allow software patents could be interesting. First in Europe, it may clarify what the status of software patents is, then it will hassle the MPEG LA and finally it may show to the US and US companies that they are not dominating the world and imposing their rules everywhere (and maybe make them change their patents laws (yes, sometimes I’m overly optimistic ;-))).

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lundi, juin 22 2009

Open Instant Messaging

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, juin 22 2009, 22:00

Email protocols history

A long time ago there was several protocols to send a message from a computer to an other one. There was a protocol per network (the internet was not really born at that time). Those protocols were not compatible between each others. So for instance, if you were using FidoNet, you were not able to send emails to people using BITNET. Hopefully some people created some gateways to transfer emails from a network to an other one (but it looks like it was quite a nightmare). At some point in time, ARPANET and its email protocol became the standard and other protocols started vanishing. People were now able to communicate with each other easily.

Instant messaging

Instant messaging (IM) appeared much more recently (email started in the late 60s, late 80s for IM). Personal IM became very well known in 1996 with ICQ (I still have my ICQ account! (but nobody to talk to on it anymore)). Then several other protocols appeared:

Of course you can't chat with somebody using MSN Messenger if you use Yahoo! Messenger. ICQ was bought by AOL, AOL created AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) based on ICQ protocol. At some point people using ICQ were able to speak with people using AIM.

In 2004, XMPP, the protocol used by Jabber, became the official IETF instant messaging standard (IETF is the group defining the internet standards (like HTTP for the web, SMTP for emails, FTP for file transfer…)).

Jabber/XMPP

XMPP as been the standard for 5 years now, but still, most of my contacts are using MSN Messenger. Why? Because they also use a Microsoft Windows based computer and Microsoft MSN Messenger is the default instant messaging software installed on those computers.

XMPP allows creating gateways to other protocols (like MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ…). The situation looks a bit like the email status in the old days. But the email standard imposed itself as the killer application of ARPANET. So, what will be the thing that will wipe out all proprietary protocols and impose the XMPP open standard?

The problem with standards is that it take time to be developed. History as shown that new versions of a standard are not implemented by all software vendors quickly, nor they are deployed as fast as possible. So changes to the standard must not happen everyday and having it quite right at version 1.0 take time.

In the meantime, other protocols evolve faster because vendors have a captive market and a better control on how the software is distributed/used (and they don't have to wait for others to implement changes).

While XMPP was on the way to be standardized, other protocols got voice then video functionalities. I had a lot of hope in 1995 when Google released it's own IM software Google Talk. GTalk is based on XMPP and add some voice extension and video extension later.

Then AOL started an experiment to allow XMPP connections to its network, Yahoo announced that they were interested by XMPP too. The chat in Facebook uses XMPP (but the network is closed, you can only talk to Facebook users), several other community websites do the same.

Nowadays

Last week, the specifications for voice/video in XMPP were released. The biggest missing features making people stay with their proprietary IM is going to be old story soon. But I'm not sure it will be enough to see a big migration to XMPP.

Those last few years, XMPP interest increased a lot and nearly all IM vendors are now looking at XMPP… except Microsoft. It looks like you will soon have the choice between speaking to nearly everybody except MSN Messenger users or speaking only to MSN Messenger users.

Of course there are lots of softwares allowing you to use several accounts at the same time (so being connected to MSN, Yahoo! and Jabber at the same time). I also have several emails account. The difference is that from my professional email account I can send emails to everybody, same for my personal email. I'm choosing the email account I'm using depending on what my "role" is. If I want to send a message to a colleague, I will use my professional email address.

In IM, you can't do that, except if you open several accounts on each protocol you use. Having a professional and a personal account on MSN, on Yahoo!, on AIM, on Jabber… With all those protocols I currently have 9 accounts. And you know what? I like keeping things simple. For my email addresses I have started closing several accounts, keeping only the mandatory ones (my personal email address and the ones I have to use for my job). And I would really like doing the same for IM but you know what? Here I can't do what I want. Why? Because if I close my MSN account, I will lose contact with a lot of people.

I feel a bit like in jail. Worse, I feel like my friends are in jail too but they are saying "Where do you see a jail? There's only walls and fences".

Anyway, lots of people are using GMail now, and there is a chat embedded in GMail. Of course this chat uses Google Talk so it uses XMPP. Even if I don't really like GMail, I prefer having my friends using GMail/Google Talk than Hotmail/MSN Messenger (or whatever the name of those services are this week).

ejabberd

Since XMPP is an open protocol, anybody can implement it. There are several XMPP clients (Pidgin, Adium, Kopete, Trillian, iChat…) and there are also several servers.

In XMPP servers there is well-known one: ejabberd. This server is open source and written in Erlang. Ejabberd use the power of Erlang to be fault-tolerant, redundant, scalable, <add here any cool property a server should have>.

And since XMPP is a decentralized system, I can install my own server (as I did for my email server for instance).

Installing ejabberd on debian is as easy as usual:

$ sudo apt-get install ejabberd

To configure it, you just need to change the domain name to serve in /etc/ejabberd/ejabberd.cfg. If your domain name is example.org change the following:

%% Hostname
{hosts, ["example.org"]}.

And set the admin user:

%% Admin user
{acl, admin, {user, "admin_user_name", "example.org"}}.

Add a user with the following command:

$ sudo ejabberdctl register user_name example.org password

Restart the server. Done.

Of course there are a lot more parameters to change if you want to fine tune it. You may also need to create a SRV entry in your DNS if your server is not the one serving "example.org" (but "im.example.org" for example).

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lundi, juin 15 2009

Killing Flash

Par Laurent Desgrange le lundi, juin 15 2009, 22:00

No, not that one:

flash_character.jpg (Photo from Cryptonaut used under CC license)

I'm talking about Adobe's Flash.

Like a lot of people, I don't like that technology at all (for building internet websites). It's a proprietary software with all the usual drawbacks (you don't know what the software does, you are not allowed to find out what it does, you can't use an alternative software for playing Flash content, you are tight to Adobe's fate…). You should know that Flash is installed on something like 99% of computers, much more than Microsoft Windows, so it's a very interesting target for pirates, a security flaw in Flash player (and it already happens) is a very good opportunity for a cross-platform virus/malware.

So it has nothing to do on an open web. Read more about this in this article: When you see Flash, duck and cover.

But unfortunately, Flash is used a lot, especially for playing audio and video on a website. Have a look at Youtube or Dailymotion.

Even on my blog I have used it for playing videos and songs (for instance in my Roomba and OpenBSD posts).

For a long time I was hearing about new "audio" and "video" tags in HTML 5 specifications. Sounds interesting for building websites using open standards and not depending on Adobe's Flash anymore for this usage.

Those of you knowing a bit the world of video/audio codecs may wonder how we can have an "open standard" about audio and video. In fact codecs are crippled with patents (a lot of them). Even on HTML 5 specs it's written that the codecs situation is problematic.

So replacing a closed proprietary technology with patented codecs is not really an improvement.

You might be interesting reading why we need open video.

Fortunately, there are some good open source, patent free codecs. On xiph.org you can find ogg multimedia container, the vorbis audio codec and the theora video codec. Vorbis and theora are high quality codecs, but yes, you can find better video codecs than theora, but they all use some patented algorithms.

Few weeks ago mozilla released a beta version of Firefox handling those new tags for vorbis and theora content. One of the most used web browser will now be able to play videos that way. The question is "Will people (webmasters) use this technology?". The answer seems to be "YES".

Dailymotion is trying a version of its website using the new HTML5 tags and vorbis and theora codecs. If you have installed Firefox 3.5, you can try it on Dailymotion demo video or even using Dailymotion openvideo website.

This is very good news for web's future.

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