Ice and Fire - by J-C Berthon

This blog will have a new home

jcberthon — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:25:55 +0000

I’m moving the blog to the root of the web site. So this is the latest post you will receive via RSS/Syndication/Feed (aka Google Reader and al) unless you update your feed settings.

All previous links should still work.

The new feed URL is: http://www.berthon.eu/feed

Garder plusieurs Firefox synchrones

jcberthon — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:34:41 +0000

Il y a quelque temps j’ai eu l’occasion d’écrire pour Libre et ouvert un article en deux parties sur la synchronisation des données (historique, cookies, etc.) sous Firefox (version 4.0 et suivante) : 1^er partie et 2^e partie.

Got a new computer

jcberthon — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:09:42 +0000

My old rusty thorsmork couldn’t play flash HD video any longer. Although I do not plan to retire it yet, I needed a new computer.
My wife was not that happy to have another ugly PC in our apartment, and thus she offered me an iPad! Not really open source, but she chose well as there is no satisfying foss solution for a tablet PC yet, IMHO.
A tablet cannot replace a complete PC, but I use my PC much less now, it can be a week without using it. And it would be even less if I would have a real keyboard for the tablet!

Flash Player “Square” is out on preview for Linux

jcberthon — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:57:22 +0000

Adobe Flash Player 64bit

Adobe released yesterday a preview of Flash Player “Square”. It includes native 64bit support and IE9 hardware acceleration enhancement. Yes, you’ve got it! Adobe is again supporting a 64bit release of their plug-in and for all 3 platforms: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

I have updated my previous article on surfing the web in 64bit with the new details.

To get more information, jump to Adobe Labs.

Note: there is a free (libre) alternative to Adobe Flash product called Gnash, however it is still far from being stable enough on all web sites to be widely use. But anyway, it is a highly interesting project which have made recent huge improvements towards reliability and speed. You should try Gnash first and if it doesn’t work for you, then go for Adobe.

Update: Flash Player “Square” is now Flash Player 11, and there is a second beta released this August 2011.

An Icelandic Saga

jcberthon — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:33:31 +0000

We are on the edge to write a new Icelandic saga. In a few days, we will embark on a plane direction: Iceland.

10 years ago we were leaving Iceland after an incredible time there. Now we are going back with our bicycle to explore it differently.

Iceland is an amazing place, but it is a difficult one too, especially on a bike. The weather is harsh, the wind strong, the roads are tricky and bridges only exist on road #1! But Iceland is a magical place, it’s wild, it’s colourful, it’s warm and cold.

Just let’s go exploring it!

Small facts about Iceland

Population: 317 000
Area: 103 000 km2
Density: 3.1/km2
Sheep: 500 000

Yes, after New Zealand, this is another country that we will be cycling where they are more sheep than humans!

Source: Wikipedia

Small facts about our bicycle tour

Distance planned: 1000-1300 km
Total number of days: 25
Out of which:
- Sunny days: 25
- Rainy days: 25

Indeed, Iceland is known to have a very unstable weather. Icelandic are telling that if you do not like the weather, wait 10 minutes and you might like it better.

And here below, you can find the planned route.

Bike route 593919 – powered by Bikemap

How do geeks have fun?

jcberthon — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:23:53 +0000

How do computer geeks have fun?
Warning: If you are not a geek, you better not read further for 2 good reasons:

you will not find that funny at all!
you will be scared about the psychic health of geeks and ask the police to arrest them.

While installing a software, I stumble on this small message:

If you are a hardcore computer nerd staring at this file through your favorite text editor, you are probably hunting [the build instructions!] Well it’s not here. [...] Because all the build instructions are now in Apache’s cool web-site.[...]

Continue reading to learn more about the context.

I just wanted to quickly install Xerces-C, a C++ XML parser. So I wanted to do the traditional UNIX steps: download the source, untar, read the manual, compile and install.

At the third step, while trying to find the installation instruction, I looked for an INSTALL or README file, there was just a Readme.html. Crap! As I was on the command line, launching the web browser to read it is too slow! So I just fired my favourite command line text reader, HTML is just text anyway! And this is what I found:

XML4C2 Readme

Click here to read the Xerces-C documentation

The file is pretty simple, there is a link to the documentation and otherwise there is a nice piece of text that is commented, so it would not be visible inside the web browser. It’s just for us, geeks, and it makes kind of fun of us.

This made me smilled and was a good start for a work day!

Testing DNS response time

jcberthon — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:36:21 +0000

Since Google released its Public DNS, I was curious about how it would really perform. Thus, I have looked around and I have found a script on the internet that I ran at home, here are the results:

+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| Domain           | My ISP | Google | OpenDNS|
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| lifehacker.com   |  17 ms |  68 ms |  68 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| facebook.com     |  18 ms |  69 ms |  68 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| manu-j.com       |  19 ms |  79 ms |  70 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| reddit.com       |  58 ms |  88 ms |  66 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| tb4.fr           |  16 ms |  64 ms |  67 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| bbc.co.uk        |  55 ms |  65 ms |  67 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| lemonde.fr       |  58 ms |  63 ms |  78 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| dailymotion.com  |  58 ms |  66 ms |  68 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| faz.de           |  57 ms |  65 ms |  99 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| gmx.de           |  56 ms |  62 ms |  68 ms |
+------------------+--------+--------+--------+

Google Public DNS and OpenDNS performed quite similarly. However, my own ISP is still quicker to respond, a possible answer is that Google DNS in Europe are located in Frankfurt, Germany.

N.B.: these tests were performed on a wireless link under Mac OS X Leopard in Toulouse, France. If you want to run the script on a Mac, you should change the first line of the script to #!/bin/bash

Update 2009.12.10:

Another article about how to increase DNS speed by caching the information on Linux.
(French) et pour les lecteurs français de ce blog, un autre article très intéressant sur une analyse plus en profondeur de l’intérêt de Google DNS.

Surfing the web in 64 bit

jcberthon — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:01:12 +0000

Adobe Flash plug-in 64bit

The major problem faced by 64-bit Linux users is getting Flash Player to work properly on the platform. With the latest version of Ubuntu, it installs the 32-bit release of Adobe Flash Player along with the necessary 32-bit libraries so it can work.

However, using 32-bit Flash is sometimes buggy (when it is working). What about a 64-bit version of Flash Player?

Gnash, the free (libre) alternative is not enough mature to work on all web sites. But Adobe is currently working on a 64-bit version of its player. It is now available in the labs for download. This is still a beta, so using this plug-in could make your browser unstable (also see warning at the end of this post).

Before installing it, you should remove any previous installation of Adobe Flash Player, you can use Synaptic (System -> Administration) for this purpose.

The downloaded file has the extension .tar.gz, it is a compression format like ZIP. You can double-click on it and extract the file (libflashplayer.so) to your home directory, or use the command line: “$ tar zxf flashplayer11_rc1_install_lin_64_090611.tar.gz“. Now, you need to copy the extracted file to a system directory, close all internet browsers before doing so. It is assumed that the extracted file is in your home directory.

$ sudo cp $HOME/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

You can now launch Firefox or Chromium on your 64-bit system and watch Flash media content. My own experience is a more stable system! But do not forget, Flash is not a free software.

Updated 2010-06-08: Adobe issued a security warning for all Flash players (all platforms) covering 10.0.45.2 and earlier release. Which most probably means that it includes the 64bit version as well (this is not confirmed). The only safe version (recommended by Adobe itself) at the time of writing is Flash 10.1 RC which is sadly 32bit-only.

Updated 2010-09-16: Adobe released yesterday a new preview of its 64bit capable Flash Player. Links in this article have subsequently been updated.

Updated 2011-08-13: Adobe released a second beta of Flash Player 11 which as 32bit and 64bit implementation. This release includes also an Adobe Flash system preference. Just uncompress the .tar.gz file in a temporary directory and copy the uncompressed usr folder to your root ‘/’ directory.

Updated 2011-10-01: Updated for the first release candidate of Flash Player 11.

Making Chrome flashy on Ubuntu

jcberthon — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 22:46:01 +0000

Giving Chrome its wings

After making the chromes shine on Ubuntu, let’s make them flashy! In the previous article you learned how to have Google Chrome and Chromium installed, now that you have used them for awhile, you perhaps find out that you cannot play video on youtube.com or dailymotion.com, that you do not have annoying advertisement, etc. Yes, Google Chrome and Chromium Linux versions do not yet support Adobe Flash!

However, since you are not afraid to try a test version of these browsers on your favorite OS, you will not mind activating a test feature: plug-ins.

Now you probably have already installed Flash plug-in for Firefox? If you haven’t done yet is here how to do it. You have to install the Flash plug-in package. This package is available with the “Add/Remove Applications” (directly accessible under your Applications menu), simply type “flash plugin” in the search box and scroll down a bit to find the entry, you can either choose “Macromedia Flash plugin” (recommended) or “Adobe Flash Plugin”, both are version 10 of Flash.

Now you need to open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and type the following commands (check that you have read the conventions before proceeding).

$ sudo updatedb

$ locate libflashplayer.so

Check the output it should be on Ubuntu 9.04 either /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so or /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so. Now you only need to create a shortcut in Chromium plug-ins directory to one of these files. the following line is an example, replace the correct path by the one given in output of the previous command:

$ cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins/

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/libflashplayer.so

Note: Both Chromium and Google Chrome seem to use the same plug-ins directory.

Now, you have installed the plug-in, it will be automatically updated when a new version is available in the repositories, this is because we made a shortcut (a link) instead of duplicating the file (a copy).

It is now time to enable plug-ins (a testing feature) in Chromium and Google Chrome. Just add ‘–enable-plugins’ to the command line when calling chromium or google-chrome. Example:

$ chromium-browser --enable-plugins

You can update your icons in the menu bar by right clicking on them, choose “Properties” and in the command field write (without the double quote): “chromium-browser –enable-plugins %U” (for Chromium) or “/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –enable-plugins %U” (for Google Chrome). Proceed in the same manner for your icons in the Applications menu, but you will have to use the menu editor located in System -> Preferences -> Main Menu.

Now, restart your browser and go enjoy this nice music clip: Playing for change – Don’t worry!

PS: you do not want the Flash plug-in (it is not free/libre) and the flashy advertisement bothering you, but still you would enjoy watching some streaming video? Well, then check the OpenVideo effort from Dailymotion, no Flash, just plain HTML5, compatible with Chrome/Chromium/Firefox! Here is a fine example: 36th below, animation movie (French).

Updated ’09-09-05: both Chromium and Chrome seem to now look in the Mozilla plug-ins directories for available plug-ins. It is no longer necessary to copy/link individual plug-in – like Adobe Flash player – in the Chromium directory. Hence, the part removed in this article. I will explain in a next article to come, how to have a 64bit Flash player for those out there having a 64bit OS!

Making Chrome shine on Ubuntu

jcberthon — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:30:41 +0000

Chromium

Google Chrome is an internet browser (or navigator) based on the free software project Chromium. Chrome is long available on Windows, but only really recently is it available on Mac OS X and Linux, though still under “beta” (meaning testing/experimental) stage.

I have been using Chrome or Chromium without any obvious differences (at least on Linux).

So why Chrome/Chromium when there is already Firefox? First it is a matter of choice, I could answer you why so many different vehicles? Second, I like the look and feel of Chrome, it optimises the use of screen real estate, it is not cluttered with many menus or actions on the toolbar and it seems to always know where I want a new tab to be opened. Third, it launches really fast.

How to install Chrome (a binary version based on Chromium and packaged by Google) or Chromium?

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is still unstable, but you can download it from Google’s web page, it is available as a .deb archive in 32 or 64bit. Once downloaded, just double-click on it (you will need to use a system that is based on Debian) and follow the standard Ubuntu instructions for installing packages.

Google Chrome is now installed in your Applications->Internet menu. It has also added a new repository so you can keep up-to-date with newer release of Chrome. This is especially handy as it status is still beta. But if you do not like that, you can disable this repository from the Synaptic Package Manager.

Chromium

The open source version is slightly more difficult to install, but none-the-less and if you follow the instructions anyone can achieve it. In addition, the package archive, where Chromium is available, is a highly experimental one, that one reason why it is updated daily. Though, that should not scare you away as I’m using Chromium for almost a week with out a crash yet.

Chromium is available for Ubuntu in a PPA (Personal Package Archive), go the the Chromium for Ubuntu PPA and choose your Ubuntu version.

Choosing the right Ubuntu version from the Chromium PPA

Now, copy the line that is highlighted in blue and start Synaptic Package Manager (from System->Administration). In Synaptic, go to the menu Settings->Repositories, a dialog box should appear. In this one, go to the “Third party software” tab and click on the add button. Now copy and paste the “apt line” that is highlighted in the figure above (you only need the line starting with “deb http://…”). Validate the dialog box and reload the list of packages.

Now search for ‘chromium‘ and install it. You might get warnings about unauthenticated files, just ignore them for now. Chromium is available for both 32 and 64bit architecture natively (no use of ia32lib for the 64bit version).

You can now try and hopefully enjoy Chrome/Chromium. More on Chrome/Chromium will follow. Check back!

Chrome with wings, comics-style picture

Update: 2009-08-27

To remove the warning about the unauthenticated package, you can follow this tutorial video on the Launchpad blog – Adding a PPA’s key.

Overwhelmed by the press coverage

jcberthon — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:21:50 +0000

First of all, as a free(dom) software advocate I am obviously biased towards all proprietary software makers. Anyway, this position can sometimes make me see things from a different perspective.

Now here is the big news these days: Microsoft had Windows 7 in pre-order for a bargain price, but only a limited amount of licences (e.g. 76 000 licences for France). And they were overwhelm by demands from users!?!

Wait a minute, how come overwhelm? Basically, many users (no numbers were published) connected to Microsoft servers to go through a couple of pages in order to pre-order Windows 7. Basically, this is just a few requests to some servers to download web pages (a few kilobytes). Does Facebook, Twitter, Gmail or even Windows Live (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) services just collapse because people are using them? In comparison, Facebook handles 120 millions connections per day!

So there are three solutions to the fact that Microsoft servers could not handle the amount of requests :

Microsoft Windows servers are too poorly performing for such a job as handling web pages: obviously wrong as Windows Live seems to be able to handle such loads ;
Because of the rarity of the amount of licences on sale, people rushed to be able to buy one. Thus, servers could be overwhelm by demands for a really short peek periods ;
Microsoft purposely under-scale its servers for the big sell, so the web will relay the info.

First solution seems wrong. Perhaps it is a mix of the second and third solution, both can create a buzz around Windows 7 sales, and this is what exactly happened as many news related Windows 7 high popularity because so many people tried to buy it that even Microsoft could not handle their requests. Congratulations to the marketing guys, the operation reached its goal!

You have 4 followers

jcberthon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:19:45 +0000

Counting until 4 is accessible to most people, and ought to be mandatory for any computer related software or web pages.
It seems that this is not the case for Twitter!

Twitter indicates 4 followers, but only 2 are listed.

Microsoft vs. the European Union: let’s boycott Opera!

jcberthon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:18:17 +0000

Butterfly browsing, Nepal

First of all, no I do not boycott Opera, but some persons do want that for the reason that Opera Software triggered the whole antitrust browser case in Europe. In support of Opera Software, I am now writing this news using their browser!

The big news that triggered it all is that Microsoft, in response to the EU antitrust browser case, will be removing Internet Explorer 8 from Windows 7 in Europe.

I have to say that I am happy and delighted to hear this news. My point is that Microsoft should only be shipping a raw Windows. The computer manufacturer should then integrate Windows with a software solution of their choice, a software solution that integrates of course a browser and other tools. Just like Windows does not shipped with an office pack, but major computer vendors are adding office software applications to their computers offers.

In the competition, when you get Linux, you only get a kernel. The rest is just added software. Then, a company or a community gather and they create a distribution. A distribution is the OS (the Linux kernel) + a bunch of software so the whole is usable by any end user. Nowadays, computer manufacturers offer their hardware with such distribution. In this game, everyone is a winner: the customer (there is a free competition and usually all the applications feel better integrated in a distribution) ; the computer hardware vendor (they have competitive offers with little investment to do for the human interface part) ; and the distribution makers (they get a broader audience). When you buy a computer with Windows it usually sucks! You need to install a lot of software so it is usable, every shipped application looked different (get a Dell/HP/etc. computer with Windows, it is shipped with Norton antivirus which has a completely different HMI than the other applications, it has WinDVD or something similar again with yet another HMI, and so on), the interface does not feel consistent at all, the applications are not integrated with each other, etc. If you use a computer shipped with a Linux distribution, or we could even consider an Apple computer (though the model is different, closed and there is no free competition), the applications are well integrated, there is a common look & feel, they are much more polished, etc.

Maybe, the time has come when we will start seeing Windows distributions made by communities and companies! A time were Windows desktops will feel consistent and complete.

Now, a few lines about this Opera boycott. Why should we boycott Opera? Imagine that an hybrid engine manufacturer in the US – let’s call it Oprius – would open a case against the main car company – let’s call that one Microcar – because they ship their cars with only high consumption termic engines.

Some proponent will tell : Heck, with Microcar’s next car generation, they will have a termic engine that is more efficient and that is being developed internally. Why should they choose another external – albeit more innovative and environmental friendly – technology?

But the case starts and the US court is trying to persuade Microcar to use other technologies in their cars, in order to reduce the environmental impact of such vehicles. At this stage, Microcar gets the idea: ok, we agree, we will ship our next gen cars without engine. Of course, the car dealers network will add engines before selling the cars to customers. Thus, of course, no cars will be sold without an engine. Except for those few adepts of tuning who will be happy with the news because they could have the choice of their engine and build that themselves.

And now, there is a consumer group (by the way, who is backing them? ) that is screaming and crying: oh my god cars without engines, how can we do it?!? Let’s boycott Oprius, they are no good!

Now what do you think of that my readers? Myself, I am for the hybrid engine manufacturer! It is innovating and has a more efficient engine in terms of impacts on the environment. In Europe, we would say that the government should regulate (i.-e. make laws) so that in a near future hybrid engines are mandatory, and Oprius would be a precursor and well renowed.

Déjà Dup, an easy backup tool! Déjà vu?

jcberthon — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:47:01 +0000

Déjà Dup

Déjà Dup is a Gnome-based backup tool that aim for easiness. It provides transparent encryption of your data, can store to an external hard disk or a remote storage (SSH server or Amazon S3) and offers schedule backup.

The tool is extremely simple to use. It offers two big buttons, one for manual backup and one for restoring. Those two functions are accessible in the menu too, as well as preferences and help. That is all.

So how does it work?

Installation

To install it on Ubuntu 8.10 and earlier release, follow the instruction about adding a Personal Package Archives (PPA), the specific data for Déjà Dup are on the project PPA page in Launchpad. Once done, just install Déjà Dup like you would install any other software on Ubuntu: Applications -> Add/Remove…

For newer Ubuntu release, just install it it is already there waiting for you!

First launch

Déjà Dup is located in the Applications -> Accessories menu.

Main window

In the preferences of the application (menu ‘Edit’ -> ‘Preferences’), you can set the default destination storage. The choice is ‘Amazon S3‘, ‘SSH‘ or ‘Local folder‘. Local folder is probably misleading as this can be an external hard disk. SSH means that the storage is a distant server using the SSH protocol, if you do not know what it is, forget it for now. I will perhaps explain in a future post what is SSH. Finally, the last choice is Amazon S3.

Amazon S3 is a cloud storage, a form of cloud computing but only for storing data. The user pay a monthly fee in proportion to the storage area used, to the amount of traffic generated and the number of request performed. To get an idea, I have backup about 770MB, 200 files, it took about 3 hours to upload the data, and Amazon is going to charge me 0.11 USD (not including the tax) for that.

If you select Amazon S3 for storage, you will be asked to provide your access key and a folder. The access key can be found on you Amazon account, look for the Access Identifiers section. As for the folder, this is a virtual concept, but it is wise to set it to something like /[machinename]-[username]/ where machinename and username are the computer name and the user who perform the backup. Thus, you can manage backups from multiple computer and users on a same Amazon S3 account.

The rest of the preferences is straight forward. You can set what folder to backup or exclude, if you want encryption of your data or not (this is recommended if you store your data on a remote server) and if you want to schedule regular backup.

Backup

This is as simple as clicking the big backup button. You might be requested to enter a password to encrypt the data (if you choose so in the preferences), and then you will be asked to enter your Amazon secret access key. That’s it, now you can watch the data transferring or do something else.

Backup progress

Restore

As simple as the backup! Click on the restore button. You might be requested to enter a password to encrypt the data (if you choose so in the preferences), and then you will be asked to enter your Amazon secret access key. After that you will be requested which point in the past you want to restore data from, and then where you want to restore those data (original location or new one). That’s it, your data are being restored.

Known issue and things to take care of

For the moment, you cannot restore part of a backup. You have to restore it completely and then pick up your precious data. As of now, Déjà Dup is more oriented for disaster recovery (get back all your data) than finding back a particular document that you accidentally deleted.

Déjà Dup won’t (yet) check your filesystem if it has enough disk space to restore the data. Furthermore, it is restoring your data in a temporary folder under /tmp before moving the file to the destination folder. Which means that you must have enough space available on /tmp to be able to restore your data.

What is cloud computing?

jcberthon — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:35:26 +0000

What is?

For a short and quick answer, cloud computing is moving your computer experience from your desktop to the internet (the cloud!).

From the consumer of computing services perspective, it means having those services accessible from the internet:

Online application (e.g. Google Mail, Google Docs, etc.) ;
Online storage (e.g. S3Fox + Amazon S3, Flickr, Apple MobileMe, etc.) ;
Online services (e.g. Google Maps, Airline reservation, etc.).

From an IT person or software developer perspective, it means that you deploy your application on a (potential virtual) infrastructure or platform on the internet:

Virtual infrastructure or grid (e.g. Sun Grid, Amazon EC2, though both have their own specificities) ;
Platform (e.g. Google Apps Engine) ;
Identity verification, storage, payments, etc.

Learn more: Cloud computing on Wikipedia