Author Archive

So, a few days ago, I kinda forced my wife to use gaim instead of using both MSN Messenger and ICQ on her computer. While it has the advantage of integrating every protocol she was using (plus the bonus of having access to jabber, now), it has some flaws on UI usability, and, more importantly, for japanese transmissions.

One could argue about this choice, but well, this is the only multi-protocol and jabber client I know that has been ported to Windows. Besides, it's the one I use on my Debian desktop.

I knew that gaim had some issues with mojibake, because I experienced them. One of them is when you receive messages while offline. The messages coming at login time are all mojibake. While it can be annoying, it doesn't happen that often, so...

But here, there was one I never experienced, for a simple reason : I don't use MSN. And here is the big problem : everything in MSN is just mojibake, which is, well, very annoying.

There I was, forcing people to use free software that doesn't work like expected. But hey, I told my friend Google something like "gaim MSN 文字化け", and guess what ? I found a patch, addressing some mojibake issues, including the MSN one, and some other japanese related issues (such as shortcuts conflicting with input methods keys...) !

Next step was to actually build the stuff. Pervert as I like to be, I tried to used cygwin under wine to cross-compile it. Didn't do the trick... bash doesn't even want to start. Since I didn't really want to spend that much time to figure out all the possible ways to cross-compile for windows under linux, I just went to the easy solution : building directly under Windows, following the build instructions. If you want to do it by yourself, be aware that you have to use the standalone MinGW, even the one provided with cygwin won't work, believe the build instructions.

If you can't or don't want to build gaim for Windows by yourself, you can get the installer for the patched version. And if you're a Debian user, you can also get the package.

The strange thing about this patch is that it's being maintained for a long time, and never got applied upstream to fix these mojibake issues. Why ? Maybe they just never heard of it... I'll try to drop them a note.

I finally got seriously into the xulrunner packaging today (see ITP) and managed to get something that is able to run the MyBrowser sample XUL application (provided that you change the MaxGeckoVersion in the application.ini file in the mybrowser directory) and to gracefully let mozilla-browser run, while we override quite a few of its libraries.

As the long term plan for xulrunner is to be the XUL runtime for some (all?) mozilla.org applications, I moved all its libs to /usr/lib, overriding mozilla-browser's libnss3 and libnspr4. Upstream has this special feature that it doesn't support libraries versioning, so that it is usually a mess, but they are supposedly trying to freeze the API, which will hopefully fix a lot of the current issues with mozilla releases.

Anyways, xulrunner provides its own libnspr4 and libnss3 packages (actually, libnspr4.6 and libnss3.10), while diverting the original mozilla-browser files into /usr/lib/mozilla, and provides a libmozjs package providing spidermonkey, and a libsmjs1 compatibility package. The standalone spidermonkey package will have to be removed, it's outdated and redundant.

While libnspr4 and libnss3 from mozilla-browser could be removed and mozilla-browser could use xulrunner's ones, the contrary is not possible for libnspr4 because of some missing symbols. libnss3 is fine, though, maybe I'll allow xulrunner to use it. On the other hand, xulrunner's libmozjs makes mozilla segfaults...

When everything will be ready, I'll make an upload to experimental and will ask galeon, epiphany and other maintainers to check out if they can build their browser with the libgtkembedmoz provided by xulrunner, which is IMHO, the thing we'll have to do some day.

... when you :

• close the wrong bug in your changelog,
• close again the wrong bug when trying to actually close the good one,
• send a mail asking what to do in such case, considering the changes to the BTS... to the wrong adress.

Enough Debian work for today.

Update [2005-08-14 19:07:33+0200]: ... and can't add the correct feed address into Planet Debian on the first try.

There's nothing more annoying, when you want to send mail, than to receive the a "550-rejected because some.ip.add.ress is blacklisted at some.random.crap.rbl".

Actually, there is something more annoying : setting up an email alias to an external address and realize some weeks later that the server dealing with the external address does use such rbl. In such cases, senders get an error message and no way to warn about the problem. And the message is not queued.

So, I was wondering if there was a way, with exim (default mail server on debian, and suitable for my needs), to have a "conditional smarthost", something like "if when trying to deliver a mail, you get an rbl rejection from the remote server, try to send it through my ISP's smarthost".

Why not just use ISP's smarthost all the time ? The answer is simple : I don't see why i should do that while it just works the way it is most of the time.

And now for the irony : when trying to send a message to the exim-users mailing-list to ask for hints, what can have happened ?

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

exim-users@exim.org
SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<exim-users@exim.org>:
host sesame.csx.cam.ac.uk [131.111.8.41]: 550 Access denied - x.y.z.t listed by rbl-plus.mail-abuse.ja.net -

Rhââââââââââ

Currently rolling on Planet Debian

... since I last posted. And we got quite some changes around here.

First, on the real life side, I got married almost 2 months ago.
I met my wife in Japan, and guess what ? she's japanese. Her name is Miki (美希), and she is the most wonderful woman I've ever met. She's been learning french for a month now, and she often surprises me with all she already can say in french.

We are now living together in Colombes, not very far from Paris, and I'm still working for British Telecom in La Défense as an application server expert engineer (buzzwords detected). Finding a flat has been quite a challenge, considering how real estates are expecting you to have a stable and huge income, meaning it's quite hard to get something during your "trial period", which, when you start working as an engineer in France, lasts 3 months (and can even be reconducted for 3 more months). In fact, we got the flat a few days before the end of my trial period because it was almost done ; and actually moved in after it being theorically done. Theorically, because it has been reconducted, but the real estates didn't have to know ;). Anyways, now, it is finally over.

I've been offline quite a lot these last months, because of 1. being stuck in a place without net access (which appeared to be wrong, there was an open WiFi access point with ADSL access in the neighbourhood, but I got my laptop back quite late to figure out), and 2. because of Wanadoo (my ADSL provider) and France Telecom being lame and taking a month to configure an ADSL line... and making me pay for it while not having any access, but this story is not over yet...

Anyways, glandium.org has been migrated to my 3 years-old Vaio laptop behind this ADSL connection, and the site has switched today to a mix between the "old" RDF driven site and a WordPress powered blog. I'm hoping to have my own tool some day, but in the meanwhile, I chose to use WordPress. I gave a try to Dotclear, but support for multiple categories is lame, category hierarchy, not supported, and english support has to be done by hand by creating a custom theme.

I created a lame theme which tries to look like what it used to be with the old RDF driven site (WordPress theming just sucks. Truth is Dotclear is not much better). I must say i didn't put much effort in the comments stylesheet (actually, no effort at all).

So here is an almost new glandium.org site, which, I hope, will improve in the future (but Miki won't like it if I spend too much time on it, so it will take time).

On the Debian side, I managed to upload Firefox Deer Park alpha 2 into experimental a while ago, plus some other updates to my packages in unstable. Some more will be coming soonish (same as above, it might take more time than expected ;) ).

Though I thought it would be quicker, the blog effect happened.

So now, even Google is saying we're living in a Banana Republic ;).

... for a just woken up non-native speaker:

English Genius
You scored 86% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 77% Expert!

You did so extremely well, even I can't find a word to describe your excellence! You have the uncommon intelligence necessary to understand things that most people don't. You have an extensive vocabulary, and you're not afraid to use it properly! Way to go!

(From The Commonly Confused Words Test).

Welcome in a political system where rules are not followed. Welcome in Europe.

Welcome in a Banana Republic (Google bombing in progress, seeing how many blogs link Banana Republic to http://ue.eu.int/).

I signed today my working contract for British Telecom France. A bit more than a month to find a job, it's pretty fast. Okay, I cheated, I'm going back in the company I quit to go to Japan, though British Telecom had not taken over control at that moment. My first working day will be on wednesday. End of the holidays.

バレンタインデーのことなんだけど、美希への花束とプレゼントが今日ちょうど届いて良かった。スカイプで話したら嬉しそうな声をしてた。(^_^)