Here I rant!

Motorola i1 update

2011-03-17T07:20:00.000-07:00

For those like me who own a Motorola I1 with boost mobile, Motorola released an update of the firmware. The update adds youtube support, but doesn't fix the Google Voice outgoing call issue.

https://motorola-global-portal.custhelp.com/app/utils/guided_assistant/g_id/321

TC Electonics G-Major 2 on linux.

2010-11-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

This is a quick post to report that the Editor for the TC-Electronics G-Major2 works perfectly fine on Ubuntu Linux 10.10 using wine. Also, I connected the G-major to my laptop using this $5 midi2USB converter. The experience was plug and play.

Ardour rocks!!

2009-08-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

I have been using linux to record music on my computer for about 7 years now. And let me tell you, it hasn't been easy!
My goal is I guess quiet simple. I like to record guitar riffs and add some drum and a bass line to turn it into a song. I have tried many different setups. Guitar plugged directly into the onboard sound card, I bought a Soundblaster Audigy card, I have tried rosegarden to record bass lines, played with premade linux audio distribution, compiled my own low latency kernel... At the end, I spent more time trying different setups and playing with software than actually record the guitar.
I finally arrived to a setup that works quiet well and allows me to do what I want:
-standard ubuntu 9.04 running on a dell-ubuntu laptop with a core 2 duo 2Ghz
-Here is how I connect my guitar to the computer: guitar->standard guitar cable->Boss GT8 ->Guitar jack to USB cable ($40 in any music store) -> USB port on the laptop
-Hydrogen to create Drum track
-Ardour to record the Guitar and control Hydrogen
-QjackCtl and Jack to connect Hydrogen to Ardour (Jack is started automatically by ardour)

I plan to buy a cheap used bass guitar that I will connect to the laptop with my Guitar jack/usb cable and record it the same way I record the guitar.

And that's it!
Ardour allows me to create tracks, copy/paste pieces and when I'm done I just export it to a .wav and burn it to a cd.

Kmart

2009-03-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

I saw that the other day at Kmart.
I'm glad to see that the netbook market might be bringing some money to the open-source world.

Ohloh supports Bazaar

2009-02-12T13:20:00.001-08:00

Now that ohloh supports bazaar, it added my contributions to gnome-do to my ohloh profile. Cool :-)

https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/guignome

Comments subscription

2008-07-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I wasn't notified when people were posting comments on my own blog...My apologies to all those that left a comment on this blog if I didn't reply to you :-). Of course I enjoy everybodys comments so keep posting!

I'll go fix that right away.

The Neo FreeRunner is out!

2008-07-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

It seems that the cellphone I was waiting for is finally out. The Neo Freerunner is the first phone that runs entirely with open source software and on open hardware. Its has about the same features as an iphone and its price is $399. It runs the openmoko platform, which is nothing else than a linux distribution for cell phone.

I will wait a few weeks to read some reviews and see what people think about it. And if it's positive, the freerunner will be next on my shopping list :-)

Woodstock or Icefaces?

2008-05-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

I recently ran into a tutorial on the icefaces JSF components and it seems to be an interesting technology. I like the fact that they use ajax push for some of there functionalities. Drag n drop and other visual effects seem to be really attractive too, but I'm concern about the overall stability and usability of the toolkit. As I'm developing and maintaining a project that uses the woodstock JSF components, I need stability.

While signing up on IceSoft website to be allowed to download icefaces, I noticed a few usability errors. IceSoft website makes use of Icefaces. Basically, the form where you enter your name and all that uses ajax to autovalidate its content. That sounds like a good idea. The problem is that it drops the content of the form when it receives an ajax update. That means that what you type between the moment when the form decides to run an ajax validation and the moment where it receives the result of this validation magically disappears while you are typing.

That's the kind of usability bugs I cannot afford in my application so I think I will wait before I give a try to icefaces.

OOXML's vote at the ISO, the results should be published tomorrow

2008-03-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of the vote for OOXML's approval as an ISO standard. The different organizations had until Saturday night, to submit the result of their vote to the ISO committee. This is a big deal as numerous governmental organization rely on the ISO to choose the standards they should use. Of course, considering the poor quality of OOXML, it wouldn't make sense to me to have it recognized as a standard. OOXML is microsoft's format and nothing else. It hasn't been designed by an open consortium with the goal of creating an open file format that will suit the needs of people. It has been designed by Microsoft's employees with the goal in mind that Microsoft needed to have their file format listed as a standard so that they can keep selling Microsoft Office to as many people as they can.
The results of the vote should be published in the news tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm back online!

2008-03-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

So I guess I spent a total of 2.5 hours on the phone with verizon. I wanted them to send a technician to my place so that he can fix the phone plug in my wall. I thought that was the reason why internet wasn't working in my new appartment. Yesterday while I was passing by the modem I realized that the light was green and that my internet connection was actually working....I'm curious to see if verizon will ever send me the techician :-)
Anyway, long story short, I'm back online! <:o)

MonoDevelop 1.0 released

2008-03-14T11:58:00.001-07:00

Congratulation to lluis and his team at Novel for the long awaited release of MonoDevelop 1.0. The release notes are available here. I don't have much time to test it right now but that's definitely something that gnome lovers will want to check out.

Game Developper Conference

2008-02-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for San Francisco, where I will attend the Game Developper Conference on Friday. I'll spend the week-end there, and I will meet with some people I'm working with at the Emergency Operation Center of SF. I should be back on Wednesday with maybe some interesting things to blog about :-)

Some progress on gnome-do

2008-02-07T20:22:00.000-08:00

So I'm moving along on replacing gnome-do's addin system. Today I added an entry in the menu that opens mono.addins addin manager. I think that it's about the only graphical feature that users will see when using the new plugin system. Most of the work is on the internal behaviour.
Porting existing plugins to the new addin system will be easy. It's just about creating an xml file that describes the addin, and embed it as a resource in the dll.

Now I have to clean up the code and fix a certain number of bugs. I'm still far from being merge-ready. The addin manager window cannot be moved and steals focus to any other application. I also have to set correctly the folder from which addins are read.

For those that cannot wait, I added a screenie :-). If it looks familiar, it's because the addin manager is the same that's used in tomboy, monodevelop or any application based on Mono.Addins.

Enjoy

Hacking on gnome-do

2008-02-06T15:14:00.000-08:00

So I found that the other day and I found it a really cool app. gnome-do is the equivalent of mac's quicksilver to gnome, written in C#. It offers a convenient plugin system that allows anybody to create new actions and itemSources. As a real geek, I couldn't help but reading the source code, and realized they were not using Mono.Addins.
As I had some experience with mono.addins and am familiar with C#, I decided to start hacking a bit to improve gnome-do's plugin system. A few lines of code later, I already started to have something up and working so I published it on launchpad.

It's the first time I use launchpad and bazaar, and I already really enjoy it. The concept of branches really makes it easy to contribute to a project and fits verry well with the opensource development model.

Anyway, there are chances that other posts will follow on gnome-do :-)

Petition to get better via drivers

2008-01-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

There is a new petition to ask VIA to improve their linux driver here.
My take on that? It's a great initiative, but the best way to convince a company is to vote with your wallet. That shows companies that there is a potential market and will make them invest more in this market. So if you like linux, purchase a computer with linux-preloaded like dell offers. And if you want a double boot windows/linux, still purchase a linux preloaded laptop and purchase your windows copy on the side. The more people will purchase linux preloaded computers, the more companies will invest energy to make their hardware works well under linux, the more people will be attracted by the linux preloaded computers, the more......well, you got my point :-)

Dynamic faces not working in Netbeans 6.0 (Update: there is a fix available!)

2008-01-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

There is a nasty bug in the woodstock components shipped with netbeans 6.0, that makes that dynamic faces just doesn't work. If like me, you enjoy refreshing parts of your JSF pages using AJAX, you will see that DynaFaces.fireAjaxTransction() makes your components disappear, instead of refreshing them. The bug has been reported here. So let's hope it gets fixed soon.

If you are just trying to refresh a simple component like a label, have a look at the woodstock documentation (Help->JavaDoc References->Project Woodstock 4.1 Tag Library). You will see that some components have a javascript refresh() method that can refresh them using AJAX.

XML<->Java<->DB

2008-01-18T13:42:00.000-08:00

JPA and JAXB both provide a way to annotate your java classes to tell how they should be serialized. JPA annotations defines how your class is mapped to the database, and JAXB annotations define how your class is serialized to XML. But is it possible to have both annotations on the same classe, to be able to convert your data from the database, to java object, then to XML or any combination of the 3?

Well yes it is, and it works pretty well :-)
Here is what your code will look like:

@XmlRootElement
@XmlType(propOrder={

"brand",
"personId"
})
@Entity
@Table(name = "car")

@NamedQueries({@NamedQuery(name = "Car.findByCarId", query = "SELECT c FROM Car c WHERE c.carId = :carId")})

public class Car implements Serializable {
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

@XmlTransient
@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)

@Column(name = "car_id", nullable = false)

private Integer carId;
@Column(name = "brand")

private String brand;
@JoinColumn(name = "person_id", referencedColumnName = "person_id")

@ManyToOne
private Person personId;

public Car() {

}

public Car(Integer carId) {
this.carId = carId;

}

public Integer getCarId() {
return carId;

}

public void setCarId(Integer carId) {

this.carId = carId;
}

public String getBrand() {

return brand;
}

public void setBrand(String brand) {

this.brand = brand;
}

@XmlElement(name = "owner")

public Person getPersonId() {
return personId;

}

public void setPersonId(Person personId) {

this.personId = personId;
}
}

There are several things to notice about that:

1)The JPA annotations decorate the attributes where the JAXB annotations decorate the bean properties (...the getters if you want...)

2)There is a catch when you have bidirectional relationships. XML doesn't allow bidirectional relationships (You cannot have element A in element B and element B in element A :-)). So if you convert from XML to Java, then try to persist the object in your DB, you will see that something goes wrong. So just make sure that you restore those missing relationships in your java object (eg, if person.car!=null, then car.owner shouldn't be null) and everything will work fine.

2 things to remember when using JPA

2008-01-18T03:37:00.000-08:00

Java persistence API offers a great Object Relational Mapping framework to develop java application. In combination with a wizzard that auto-generates the entity classes from your databse, it makes an easy, clean, and quick way to store your data in a database. Unfortunately, some or the errors you can get with JPA are not always easy to debug. So here are the two lessons I learned while spending hours trying to debug my code:

1)If you have a bidirectionnal relationthip (annotated with a @mapped_by), it is your responsability to make sure that the two fields that reference each-other contain what they should. I say it again, it is YOUR responsability. And if it doesn't, and you try to persist your object, you will probably get a violation constraint in you database, without JPA telling you that you messed up.

2)If your table has a field table_id, which value is auto-generated by your database, make sure to annotate the mapping java field with @Id and @GeneratedValue(strategy="IDENTITY"). If you don't, everything will work fine when you just persist your table, but things won't work when persisting the table in cascade.

The FSF is looking for new members

2008-01-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

The free software foundation is running a campaign to recruite new associate members.
The free software foundation is dedicated to promote user's right in the IT world. Some of the their most famous activities include the GPL license, the GNU project, freebios or gnash. They also have several campaign to eliminate DRMs, promote ODF or ogg and in general, point out freedom issues as they appear.

So if you want to participate or help encouraging all those good stuffs, consider joining in :-)

monodevelop 1.0 beta 3 on mac

2007-12-20T07:58:00.000-08:00

The team at Novell just released monodevelop 1.0 beta 3 . Beside the usual bug fixes, it seems that some effort is being put to improve the support on mac. It can now run on a mac without X11 using gtk-quartz. I hope that the monodevelop team will put as much effort at stabilizing the project as they do at adding new features. Having a lot of features advertises well, but stability and reliability of an IDE are more than mandatory for it to be used in a professional environment.

Dell shipping new ubuntu

2007-12-17T13:41:00.000-08:00

It seems that dell updated its product line, and now ships ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy gibbon) with its inspiron 1420N. As the proud and happy owner of one of those laptops, I would only encourage the linux enthusiasts to vote with their wallet and purchase one of dell ubuntu computers. It's cheaper than with windows, has supported hardware and comes with ubuntu preinstalled :-). Needless to say that it's the best way to show support for your favorite distribution.

Experimenting virtual box

2007-12-05T19:23:00.000-08:00

So I decided to give a try to Virtual Box, and install ubuntu hardy-heron in it to see how it looks. The experience is really positive so far. Virtual box makes it just so easy to experiment new operating systems. The interface is verry intuitive , so you just have to follow the instruction on screen and it does its job.

Build monodevelop within monodevelop

2007-12-01T18:30:00.000-08:00

There is a monodevelop solution in the monodevelop svn tree. It allows you to build monodevelop from within monodevelop, pretty cool. Look at the screenshot, it shows opening the replace dialog from the monodevelop GUI editor called stetic.
Monodevelop seems to be shaping up verry nicely. It will be cool to finally have an IDE that allows you to create gnome apps without having to read tons of documentation.

No title when posted from gnome-blog 0.9.1

2007-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

So it seems that the little gnome-applet I use to post entries on blogger.com doesn't set the title of the entry. I tracked down the bug and it seems that gnome-blog 0.9.1 uses the old XML-RPC interface to blogger.com, that doesn't support setting the titles of the entries. There is a new API to blogger.com that hopefully will solve that :-)

Netbeans visual webpack, loops and condition in pages

2007-11-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

It seems that there is no built-in way to have a loop statement or a if statement in the jsf library that comes with netbeans visual webpack (prefix webuijsf: and f:). So imagine you have an array of Strings in your session and want to render a list of buttons that have these Strings as text, well you can't do it with the provided libraries. The other idea was to use a table, but it's documentation explicitely states:
" If your application needs to iterate over the same components as in jato:tiledView, use a custom tag. The JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL) forEach tag might also be useful, but there are interoperability issues with JSTL and JavaServer Faces, so use with caution."
So I guess custom tag it will be...

First post from ubuntu...

2007-11-25T18:44:00.000-08:00

So, right after creating my blog on blogger, I figured adding an applet to my desktop to make adding entries to my blog easy would be a good idea. And that was an easy task! I just fired synaptic, searched for blogger, installed the gnome applet that allows you to blog from within your desktop and that was done :-)

Hello world

2007-11-25T18:31:00.000-08:00

Hey, this is the first post of my new blog on blogger.com :-)