More details on the new release are available on sourceforge and so are the downloadable files.

And the first big news is that there is a version compatible with Python3 at last !

Another big news is that this gave me the occasion to search a bit over the internet and realise that there are actually people talking about yapsy here and there.

You find traces of it already on the famous stackoverflow (yes as far as I can tell, and as of 2011/12 they are all mentions of ‘my’ yapsy, very moving indeed :) ), on this quick inventory of Python plugin systems and more anecdotally on pastebin

And for the specific projects that use this library, so far I’ve found:

• Relo by cwoebker: a search engine that seems to be targeted at what is (was?) called desktop search. It’s intention reminds me of the tools like http://www.gnomejournal.org/article/41/deskbar-a-bar-for-your-desk, though here Relo would be more like a foundation library for such tools I guess.
• A mysterious desktop application by a no less mysterious “tinkerer”
• A tool to manage webservices by a “big data” company

And of course this adds up with the great people I already had the occasion to thank in my latest post about yapsy.

Let’s face it, this ridiculously small piece of code is h-y-p-e… (ok I may be overdoing it a little but if I don’t do it who will ?)

Whatever its (lame) scientific significance, this will remain the very first book I’ve ever written, and, what’s more one that took me 3 years of hard work to gather its content.

After waiting 3 more years for it to come out the “confidential” closet in which it had been put, this is afterall a nice occasion to rejoice.

Hail the beast: Modelisation and prediction of the topography of flat carbon steel[fr] (abstract in english)

And while we’re at it some more details about my past crimes are also available on my former lab’s website.

For the celebration to be even more special I’ve also made available online a description of an image correction technique I’ve developed during my PhD. Half-way between research work¹ and an engineering work² this technique hardly found any place for publication in scientific reviews.

So, I decided to give it its chance by setting it free in the wild territory of reproducible research. That’s why, at the other end of the following link you’ll find not only  detailed explanations about the techniques, not only examples of its application on real life images but also and above all (Python) scripts making it possible to test it on just about any image:
Polynomial Form Correction with Autocorrelation

1. because the purpose was to find a problem that has proved difficult to solve with modern techniques and still had no solution at the time
2. because  it worked (sorry :) ) the solution consisted in a tiny piece of heuristics wrapped around some well-known and old-school mathematical tools

Many thanks to Roberto Alsina for these kind words and for the very nice tutorial he wrote about yapsy.

To be honest, Yapsy is above all just an absurdly tiny piece of code, and , even with that, still has a long way to go before I dare qualify it as awesome, but one thing is sure the developpers who use it already are undoubtedly the awesome ones !

Yapsy is a project I started 3 years ago on my free time, and put on SourceForge “just in case” it could be helpful… It went dormant several times but was waken up by requests and suggestions sent by developpers like Peppy’s Rob McMullen, MysteryMachine’s Roger Gammans and now Aranduka’s Roberto Alsina who all deserve a big thank you.

In its latest release (5 days ago) I corrected some bugs and tried to make the documentation as useful as possible. All in all, I wanted to highlight the ways in wich yapsy could be used to simplify the development of a plugin manager, but Roberto beat me to this. I’m especially proud of two of his comments:

• “One of the great things about Yapsy is that it doesn’t specify too much.”
• “it helps you write better code.”

The first one was clearly indented but also known to be hard to get right (and IMHO yapsy’s not quite there yet).

The second is way beyond yapsy’s initial scope, but it’s really sweet to read, especially from somebody who — as it seems — has already tasted Qt development¹

More info about Yapsy at ohloh

1. Qt is well known among GUI toolkits for helping you write better code so that compliments from Qt developpers are worth twice as much :)

A nasty bug found its way in the latest release of BackupMonitor which caused the program to suddenly exit when something went wrong during the execution of one of the backup script.

The bug has been corrected  (a problem with threads and a method call that should have been asynchronous) and the “correct” behaviour is back: when something goes wrong an error log is displayed and the program “hiberantes” until the user wakes it up.

The updated version can be downloaded from the project’s page.

A new version of backup-monitor has been released including:

• bugfix for when the locale is not defined, or when playing a little with the script’s command line options
• refactoring of the GUI to give the user more feedback and to give more hints on where to click (GUI inspired by Ubuntu’s update-manager)
• using OptionParser to ease the command line handling
• change in licence: for the GUI changes I’ve look and taken ideas from many GPL project, so it’s just fair (if not plain compulsory) to release this new version under GPLv3.

Most of these modification were motivated by the first feedbacks I got from a friend, thanks to him then ;)

For more info and download, please go here.

I’ve just written a short presentation of a set of scripts that I’ve been using for some time now, and which makes it easy for me to do regular data backups. The whole lot is now fairly easy to install and customize.

The project’s page is here.

There are always more applications that help in doing regular backups and even if Backup Monitor is quite extensible, it is certainly not the most generic nor the most complete solution. However it works for me :) and it was the occasion to experiment with some interesting aspect of application development for Linux desktops:

• how to use “xdg” specifications like xdg-users-dir with the “user” install that should be done in ~/.local, configurations in ~/.config and the definition of folders like Documents, Pictures etc by environment variables that adapt to the user’s language.
• how to handle internationalisation with gettext
• how to install your own icons with xdg-icon-resource
• how to make your application start at each new session (put a .desktop file in ~/.autostart)

But first of all a great thanx to Miro’s developer that did a great job in tackling the two major problems I had with the software: impossibility to navigate the list of feeds, while playing a video (or audio) and performance. The only remaining thing on my whishlist would be that Miro handles image feeds (ala CoolIris for instance).

Now for the list of podcasts I listen to, most of them are in french, so here is a quick selection among the english speaking ones:

• ESOCast some info on the southern observatory in Chile
• Martin Bailey Photography Podcast: nice podcast about Martin’s work

• Jeff Curto’s Camera Position : about the “creative side” of photography

• TED Theme: Tales of Invention : high-tech fancy conferences

For a more exhaustive list see my OPML subscription file: miro_subscriptions

It’s nice too see so much efforts put into innovation, especially since it’s based on open standards and open source software. It also makes the browser and the web itself more and more interesting which is a good reason for big web companies to support them (like Google’s funding¹ ). Anyway with so much openness also in the research projects, it must be fun to be a developper at Mozilla Labs.

On a side note, with the prospect of integrating Ubiquity into Bespin IDE , I guess I’ve been right to set Ubiquity’s keybinding to Alt+x (aka M-x) right from the begining :D

1. and also Microsoft’s cooking ;)

Pour commencer wacom fourni des programmes d’installation pour Wnidows et Mac sur des jolis cd, mais pas pour Linux (c’est pas tellement une surprise, ca fait juste d’eux des blaireaux ordinaires). Apparemment Bamboo fun est encore un peu jeune pour être supportée par défaut sous Linux et il faut donc se faire des manips à la main :S Heureusement, on trouve tout ce qu’il faut sur internet en particulier avec ce tutoriel:

• Installation de la Wacom Bamboo fun sur Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) [en]: il y a juste à copier-coller les commandes indiquées et tout marche (ça s’est passé sans encombre de mon côté, et plus en 5-10min que pendant 2h comme indiqué par l’auteur)
• Wacom, Ubuntu et les applications [en] : infos plus générales et qui vont jusqu’à indiquer comment configurer (facilement) la tablettes pour Inkscape et Gimp.
• Réglage de la détection de pression [en] : une petite interface graphique pleine d’avenir pour configurer la sensibilité de la tablette à la pression du stylet (j’en ai pas eu besoin, mais j’ai qd mm testé l’appli et elle me plait bie: simple et efficace).

La seule info que j’ai pas trouvée de façon très claire sur internet est sur la configuration des boutons de la tablette (le “pad”) et pour ça je propose comme exemple le script suivant (à modifier suivant les préférences de chacun):

# Setting the pad's buttons functionalities for Wacom's Bamboo tablet.
 
# First name correspondance:
#  "< " == button1
#  ">"  == button3
# "FN1" == button2
# "FN2" == button4
 
# Set "< " to ctrl+z (that's "undo" in GIMP)
xsetwacom set pad button1 "core key ctrl z"
 
# Set ">" to ctrl+y (that's "redo" in GIMP)
xsetwacom set pad button3 "core key ctrl y"
 
# Set "FN1" to ctrl (for instance: used with the scrolling pad, it gives zoom in/out in GIMP)
xsetwacom set pad button2 "core key ctrl"
 
# Set "FN2" to shift (for instance: used with the scrolling pad it makes it possible to go left/right in GIMP)
xsetwacom set pad button4 "core key shift"

Ce script peut par exemple être exécuter au début de chaque session pour que les réglages s’appliquent systématiquement.

Et tout ça pour dire que finalement y’a rien de neuf à raconter…