Where is Ploum ?

Short version : GTG! 0.2 is out

Last year, I met several times with my friend Bertrand to discuss how we imagine a good GTD tasks manager. On October 17 2008, Bertrand told me that he had a funny idea for a name and I immediately created the project and commited my first try with a GTK TextView widget.

2 months later (exactly one year ago), what we had was a kind of buggy monstrous experiment.

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Gpager is a GPLv2 libwnck pager that just float on your desktop, allowing you to do anything you were doing with you panel pager but bigger and stronger.

Back in 2005-2006, my good friend Patrick Rácz developed a small pager for the GNOME desktop. Since then, I've been an happy user of this little application, recompiling it with every Ubuntu release. In fact, I just cannot live without it anymore.

We thought that it might be helpful to other and, for years, we said : "we should publish it". Today, after fixing some small bugs, I'm proud to announce the release of Gpager 0.3 "Scenes From a Memory - Finally Free". I created a Launchpad project and even an Ohloh page.

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Each year, Google is sponsoring a Summer of Code (SoC). During three months, Google pay students to work on various opensource projects. Each student should be followed by a "mentor" from the original project but the mentor is not paid, he receives a tshirt.

3 years ago, I was a SoC student and developed the now abandoned Conseil but I learned a lot from that experience.

This year, one of the GNOME SoC projects was related to Getting Things GNOME!, the software I started with Bertrand. The project was to add the concept of geolocalization to your tasks list so you would be able to see where you can do tasks. The candidate, Paulo Cabido, seemed bright and skilled. I was the mentor. Strange to be on the other side of the fence.

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As I previously pointed out, there's a huge need to have a clear distinction between the user preferences and the user data. This is already covered by the FreeDesktop XDG folders specification.

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Bertrand and I are very proud to announce you the first release of Getting Thing Gnome!, a personal organizer and todo list manager for the GNOME desktop.

GTG allows you to add and edit tasks with nearly no fields at all. It support subtasks and tags that you can use the way you want. It aims for flexibility. Getting Things Gnome! goal is to adapt itself to your workflow, not the opposite. GTG also brings the concept of "workview", a display of tasks that can be done right now, right here.

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Disclaimer : if you don't program in python and don't know what a thread is, you probably want to skip this post as this is highly technically geekish loghorea which is not funny or even understandable in a remotely perverse way. Knowing some Flying Circus episodes might also help.

Say that you have two thread in your python application. One is "TV_speaker" and the other is "knight". Those two threads live in parallel their own live and all is good. But sometimes you want the "TV_speaker" to stop. In order to do that, you will ask the knight to throw a chicken at him. And the first thing that comes to mind is using a "signal".

You cant to call knight.send("chicken") and that, on the other side, tv_speaker.connect("chicken") handles things correctly.

Problem : using google, you find that, since 2.6, the python documentation is barely readable and unusable.

Hopefully, you find your way back to the good old and well organized 2.5 documentation only to discover that those signals are UNIX signals and have nothing in common with signals you can use in a GTK application.

Worse : those signals don't work with threads !

You seat down, cry and wait that a giant foot quickly stops your pain.

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I've been in the Free Software community for years now. I wrote countless documentation, articles, I translated a lot of stuffs, I did a lot of beta testing/bug reporting/bug triaging, including for a secret project called "no-name-yet", wich later became... Ubuntu. Sometimes, I wrote a quick trivial patch or I play with the code of something. But now that you ask, I must admit that there's no non-trivial code I wrote in Ubuntu. I've no problem with that : a lot of developpers are so bright and talented that I can't really compete. I contribute with my own weaponry : promoting, writing books, doing conferences.

Anyway, better late than never. I'm proud to say that Hardy Heron will include an obscure but non-trival patch from me : you will be able to stop the background music in gweled (bug #90499). The five people in the world that play Gweled know that it's a huge improvement !

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Dear GNOME Desktop, I appreciate my new GNOME equation t-shirt and the fact that you care about my choices and preferences. But, could you please care a bit more about what actually is important for me ?

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Hi, there. I want to talk to you about ducts.

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Parmi les longues traditions de la sécurité informatique, on trouve la tristement célèbre obligation de changer son mot de passe toutes les 4 ou 6 semaines.

Cependant, comme beaucoup de traditions, lorsqu'on les applique sans en saisir réellement le sens, on finit par les rendre inutiles voire nocives !

A ce sujet, Bruce Schneier, « Monsieur sécurité informatique », recommande l'excellent article du docteur Gene Spafford, professeur à l'université de Purdue, Indiana.

Changer de mot de passe régulièrement est extrêmement envahissant, ennuyeux et perturbant. Si votre accès à Internet dépend de ce mot de passe, cela peut même relever du parcours du combattant sous des systèmes comme MS Windows où chaque application possède sa propre configuration et nécessite elle aussi de changer le mot de passe bien caché dans les préférences (ennui qui est nettement moindre pour les heureux utilisateurs de systèmes mieux conçus où toutes les applications coopèrent autant que possible). Il en résulte donc du stress, de la perte de temps et de productivité, parfois des appels au helpdesk simplement car l'utilisateur a oublié de changer son mot de passe.



Il ne faut pas non plus sous estimer l'impact psychologique qui amène les utilisateurs à craindre le tant redouté « jour du changement de mot de passe », à développer une aversion grandissante pour l'outil informatique et tout ce qui tourne autour. Beaucoup pensent qu'un utilisateur sans problème implique un utilisateur heureux. Au contraire, je défend qu'un utilisateur sans problème doit être tout d'abord un utilisateur heureux. Le changement imposé de mot de passe est perçu comme une mesure inique qui va à cet encontre.

On pensera donc que cette mesure rébarbative, pour être si répandue, doit être amplement justifiée et indispensable. Cela reste à voir...

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