DELL D620, R.I.P...

Last week, I installed the latest Ubuntu 9.10 on my Dell laptop. I had to revert to 9.04, due to some huge instabilities (I was using Ubuntu 8.10 for more than a year before).

So far, Ub9.04 was just fine, I didn't had any problem, beside the problematic support for Flash on FF3.0, and a painfull process eating 45% of my CPU : something supposely helping disabled people to use the computer. Once this process has been killed, everything went fine.

Too bad. Yesterday evening, I had some issues with my power cord (it was said not to be recognized by the system), with the consequence of the battery not being on charge, and my processor crawling at half speed. It lasted until this morning, then it worked again. I already experimented this harsh in Oakland last month...

Tonite, I left the office after having suspended my laptop, and when I arrived at home, it was dead. Switch on, some leds were blinking, I heard the disk spinning a few seconds, and that was it. Nothing on the screen... Hopefully, I did a full backup last week before switching my system !

So I bought a Mac book pro, a 15", 2.8Ghz, 320Gb 7200rpms, 4Gb mem. 1400 €, refurbished. It is supposed to arrive either tomorrow or monday.

My Dell was 3 years old, I didn't paid for it (insurance paid for it, my previous one has been stolen), so it's the first time in 5 years I buy a new laptop. Not too bad ...

If some one is interested in spare pieces, I have 1 Gb of mem, a 160Gb 2.5" disk, a battery. Just tell me !

A F**** disgrace !

So we did it. For the forth time in a raw, France will be present in South Africa. But what a shame this match was !

I must say that I never saw the french soccer "team" (at this point, I don't know if we can call it a team) played so bad. Ever. We have talented players, probably worth half a billion euros if you cumulate their value, and we can't make them play a decent game ?

Last, not least, this ends with an insult to fair play. Really, Irish players deserved a better end...

My apologize for all the irish, this was unfair. Shame on Henry, shame on the referees, shame on the FIFA presidents who keep thinking that video is just good for watching pr0n movies, probably... And shame on Domenech, who admitted to sometime pick players based on astrology studies... ("all parameters have to be considered and I have added one by saying there is astrology involved"...)

This is not soccer. Just a pathetic parody...

Upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10, updated

So after the ApacheCon event, I decided it was a good timing for an upgrade of my 8.10 Ubuntu driven laptop. I was quite pleased with the previous version, except that wifi support was crappy at best, and decided not to upgrade to 9.04,

After a full backup (took 4 hours), installation took only 20 minutes, most of the time was spent to carefully define the partitions so that I keep my /home and /opt safe. It seems that the installer is not happy with a 500 Mb partition for / (it asks for 2Gb), but I went through, without any problem.

I have 9 partitions defined, and even if it sounds a bit too much, I'm quite pleased with this setup. At least, /home and /opt are separate partitions, just because I don't want to update, but prefer to go through a complete re-installation instead (I have been burnt once with an update which ended with a full re-installation , so better spare this time by doing a direct re-installation). Another benefit is that I was able to move from ext3 to ext4 for the formatted partitions.

Then came the reboot, and bang, all was pretty much ok !

I just had to let Ubuntu to update many of its packages, and to add a few missing icons in my menu (xchat, thunderbird). My eclipse shortcut weren't working anymore, too, but that was easy to fix.

Now, the bad : suspend wasn't working anymore. I spent 3 hours on the net checking for a solution (it seems that almost everyone have experienced the very same problem), and at the end, I just found an interesting information. With an NVidia device, once the new driver (185) has been installed, adding this line in xorg.conf did the trick (in red) :

Section "Device"
      Identifier      "Default Device"
      Driver  "nvidia"
      Option  "NoLogo"        "True"
      Option  "NvAGP" "1"
EndSection

Don't ask me why, but it worked (Tm).

FYI, I'm using a Dell D620, a machine probably built and designed by former soviet union engineers : works well, looks ugly !

Update :

This version is probably the worst I ever used. CPU scaling does not work (I'm stuck at 1Ghz), Eclipse is crashing every now and then, many widgets remain stuck and can't be closed, sound does not work correctly, plus many little problems...

Release often, release fast, ok, but at least : release only when it's READY !!!

Seems that European commision is not happy with Oracle/Sun deal

Today, in a preliminary statement, the european commission has objected that "combining Sun's MySQL database product and Oracle's products could hurt competition in the database market"

That's not a good news for Oracle, but I don't really care. It should have been obvious to them that Oracle + MySQL would harm competition, and that they will face such an issue.

That's not a good news for Sun too, especially for all the fellow developers who are working there, and who have no clear idea about their future. I feel for them.

San Francisco !

So I arrived in SF last monday evening. As I have some family there, I'm enjoying the few days I'm spending with them, as we see each other every 5 years. On tuesday, we did some sight seeing (the weather was excellent !) and since then, I'm stuck in front of my computer most of the day, working on the DIrectory server.

Today though was excellent : we drove to Napa Valley, and did some wine testing. I have been there 20 years ago, and I remember having tested a very good Champagne (Tm), from Domaine Chandon. I was not that much impressed by the other wines we tested back then, but I wasn't the heavy wine drunker I'm now :)

I must admit that what we tested today was wonderful. There are two differences with the french wines I'm used to (actually, four) :

1. when I test french wines, out of 10 bottles, only 2 please me, 3 are average, and 5 can be thrown in the sink. In Napa, They are more or less all pleasant, even if I won't put all of them on my table (it's a matter of taste here)
2. I'm used with 12.5° wines, most of the Napa wines are above 14°C. Some of them are closer to Porto than normal wine. That also mean you have to be carefull not to swallow all the wines you test !
3. There are some local 'cépages' (grapes) that we don't have in France, like the Zinfandel. Not my favorite...
4. We have Chateaux, Grands Crus, 1er Crus, AOC. Napa has Cabernet, Syrah, Chardonnay. Of course, our Chateaux are made of those same Cabernet, Merlot, Viognier, Syrah, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Marsanne, ... but we don't name the wine from the cépages they are made of. Probably a mistake because it's really confusing for the vast majority of people who don't know anything about the Clos de la Roche, for instance (it's a very good burgundy Grand Cru, a Côte de Nuit, made of Pinot Noir)

Are those differences important to me ? Yes, and no.

Yes, because I just find it disapointing that french producers don't understand that quality is a must, and producing mediocre wine is just killing them.

And no, because navigating through all the small villages in Burgundy, a place where 50 different producers can share 125 acres of vineyard (4700 bottles per producer, average), is stunning. Old houses, beautiful landscapes, and of course great wines and good food is part of the pleasure.

However, I would say that there is no reason for any Napa owner to be ashamed from their production : they top most of french wines !

Time to go back to the Directory Server code after this day off !

Boston...

So I'm in Boston, enjoying a short stay with good friends. Zhenya and Alexei are kind enough to welcome me in this beautiful city before I fly to San Francisco, I really appreciate !

Boston is really a nice place to be in October, when all the trees turn red and yellow. Very differnet from Paris !

On the other side, I still have a lot to do on the Directory server, but frankly, with a 6 hours jet lag, plus many places to visit (tomorrow : Newport), I don't have time nor energy to spend more than a couple of hours a day to work on the schema refactoring we are currently working on (but it's still making progress).

I will arrive in San Francisco next monday, with some more places to visit. Time is flying ...

LdapCON 2009 : Portland !

I'm flying to Portland tomorrow where the 2009 LDAP conference will stand, just before LinuxCON. Stefan Seelmann will travel with me, we arranged a common flight (Stefan is one of the guy behind Apache Directory Studio)

This will be the second LDAP conference, the last one was organized in Köln back in 2007. I will present two talks, one about replication and another one with Ludovic Poitou about a new Java based LDAP API.

The most interesting part is that the LDAP community will be there, this is a promize of many interesting conversations (and probably a lot of beers to drink :)

It's a 17 hours flight, with a stop, quite a long journey...

For those of you interested in LDAP, feel free to join us !