Free software

I’ve been spending the last month or so at Mozilla prototyping a new project called Eideticker which aims to use video capture data and image/frame analysis for performance measurement of Firefox Mobile. It’s still in quite a rough state, but it’s now complete enough that I thought it would be worth spending a bit of time describing both its motivation and how it works.

I've often wondered before why hackers avoid journalists, even the ones with the most positive intentions. I wonder no more. Seriously.

1. As you may or may not have noticed, hbus.ca has been down for the past few weeks. Halifax updated the data but I didn’t have a chance to update it. Well, I finally did, and hbus is now up in its former glory (minus a small issue with stops named ’6016_merged_3300509′: thanks Metro Transit, time to update that script to massage your data again!) .

Just a quick note to say that I just opensourced the software behind hbus.ca, nicknamed “Routez” under the Affero GPL. You can get the code on github.

bspan style="font-size: large;"The Problem /span/bbr /br /In case you didn't already figure it out, the title refers to a quite popular a href="http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/27250/"idea on Ubuntu Brainstorm/a. It also refers to a bug report against NetworkManager in a href="https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/386900"Launchpad: bug #386900/a.br /br /This is one issue I'd particularly like to solve soon.

We had a table at this weekend's GeekFest geek festival in Montreal. It was awesome! Tons of people, and even better, tons of interest about Ubuntu and our LoCo team.br /br /We gave out CDs, stickers, some extra FSF stickers I had in my backpack, and generally told people all they wanted to know about Ubuntu, gaming on Ubuntu (we had a demo of World of Goo running on one of the laptops for a good part of Sunday), and the Ubuntu Quebec LoCo team.

A few weekends ago, there was a Montréal Ouvert hackfest at the Notman House. I decided to take a bit of a break from my usual transit hacking and built up a mobile friendly interface to the wonderful Déchets Montréal, which lets residents easily get information on their garbage collection schedule.

Those who’ve known me for a while have probably heard about my first major open source project, libwpd. In a nutshell, it’s a parser for WordPerfect documents with the primary aim of converting them into something usable by the major opensource office programs out there. It’s used by LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, and KOffice.

We are restarting the Free Software Workshops, aka APL -- Ateliers populaires du libre -- each last Sunday of the month. Software installations, development, upgrade, discussions around free software - all will take place this Sunday.

This month, we will devote the workshop on informal discussion regarding the future of the workshops - the rebuilding of a new website, moving the mailing-list, plans and ideas for presentations and training.