Now that it’s spring time, Timin likes to go out on the balcony and enjoy the cool night air.

Last night, I found him under the barbecue. Now the barbecue has this little tarp that shelters it from the rain, which makes it very comfortable. So comfortable, that some pigeons had built a nest. Not long after he'd crawled in there, I heard some cooing and a fluttering of wings.

I lifted the tarp to see Timin looking at a lone pigeon egg in the nest. I asked him, “are you going to eat it?”

In response, he rolled the egg off the edge of the balcony. Then he peered over the edge to watch it splatter below. Finally, he looked up at me expectantly and meowed.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

I recently moved out of my old house and into my new one, which is much closer to downtown. Of course this meant I had to change my address on all my credit cards, my bank account, bills and of course I had to get my new internet connection setup.

I dread moving my internet because the last time I moved into a new house I was originally planning on getting a Rogers high speed cable, but the guy who was supposed to install it never showed up. It turned out they called me the next week to confirm my appointment — they had scheduled it a week to late. But by that time I had already booked an appointment for another ISP called 3Web to install the almost identical cable high speed internet.

Finally after 21 days, my internet connection was active and I could get back to IRC, MSN and all surfing when I am bored. I lived in that house for two years and I kept 3Web service the entire time. The connection went out for about a day one time, but otherwise I had no problems with it. It was decent, but it wasn’t spectacular or impressive. Nothing to blog about.

Now two weeks before I moved, I called 3Web to let them know. They asked me what day I would like the service at the new house to be working. I said the first of May and they said okay. I thought, “That was too easy”. But on the day I moved, by the time I had a chance to open up the laptop and try it out, it was already working.

Contast this wonderful example of flawless service with my phone line. Bell recommends that you use the moving form on their site. So I did. However I got no response, no call to confirm from them or anything. When I got to my new house, the phone line was dead and I was still paying for the phone at my old house. As punishment I have decided I will no longer have a home phone. Right now I’m doing perfectly fine using Skype for outbound calls, but I still haven’t found a good provider of incoming VoIP lines for a 613 Ottawa number. I would be nice if SkypeIn was available in Canada. Maybe in the future I will get a cellphone, but it won’t be one from Bell.

There are certain companies which have such terrible service you dread dealing with them, and try anything to avoid it. Unfortunetly in Canada many of the monopolies are these kinds of companies, and these monopolies are so pervasive that everyone forgets what good service is like, or at least assumed there was no possible business model that would allow good support and cheap prices at the same company. My experience with 3Web, and flying with WestJet reminded me that is possible, so now I am voting with my wallet.

Jonathon Carter’s recent post about his recent realization that he needs to make some changes in his life got me thinking about all the changes that have occurred in my life recently.  It was only a year ago that I had the hit lowest point that I have ever hit in my life. It felt like I had lost my job, my family, my friends, and my life to a disease. I’m very much a “goal orientated”, tackle it head on type person and it was very frustrating for me to not be able to apply the same methodologies I usually do to solve my problems. At the time, I thought things would never get better and when your hospitalized for months upon months then it can be difficult to help yourself as much as you’d like to be better. It hasn’t been easy but I can now say that I feel like I’m hit the highest point I’ve ever reached in the last few months and things seem to be continuously improving. Are things perfect? No, never but I’m finally really “okay” and I take solace in that. I have an awesome job, I’m going to Prague in a few weeks, I’ve gotten healthier, I’m more mature, I’m meeting all kinds of awesome people (such as Jonathon) and I can see a future for me. These are all things to be excited about.

What have I learned? Life is is good… it is just that batteries aren’t included.

On a Ubuntu note, I’ve unfortunately been unable to finish the Xubuntu strategy document that I had promised for last Monday due to the flooding. However, I really do hope to have that finished soon. I’ve also realized that we forgot to upload the translations for the Xubuntu docs before the release - I plan to do the upload as soon as I’m done writing this blog post.

On an unrelated note, I’ve started listening to music a lot more now that I’m working. I’ve discovered artists such as Newton Faulkner, Peter Cincotti, Two Hours Traffic, Counting Crows, Damien Rice, Anna Nalick, City and Colour, Eisley, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Junior Senior,  Lily Allen, Regina Spektor, Tegan and Sarah, and finally Sara Bareilles. Some of you might say my taste in music sucks (and maybe it does) but if you’re into the above kind of music (ie. I like soft rock, alternative, indie rock, classical rock, jazz, easy listening, pop, blues, techno, house, etc.) please feel free to share some names with me. Heck, I’ll give anything a listen so feel free to throw names at me. I only currently have 151 songs so I’m starting to get annoyed of listening to the same stuff over and over ;]

I just committed some code in libopenraw that allow displaying digital camera RAW files in eog (or anything else using GdkPixbuf). The colors and the gamut are still off, that's because I only perform the demosaic.

Just to be clear, I haven't changed a single line of code in eog. It is the stock version from openSUSE 10.3.

So like we did for 7.10, with the 8.04 release of Ubuntu the Minnesota (USA) LoCo gathered contact information for various local media outlets, and I sent them all a note about the release, Ubuntu itself, and our release party. As a result, I actually got a response, from Jon Gordon of National Public Radio (NPR).

My city is flooding! Power is off in most of the city, access to the bridges restricted, and traffic is horrible!

As a typical north American worker I use e-mail a lot as part of my work. Now if I worked for myself I would be using Google Apps for your domain and enjoying the productivity improving gmail interface, but instead I work for the government, and we use outlook & exchange. blah.

So a while back I noticed that I had several hundred e-mails in my inbox, and I was having a hard time finding past e-mails I needed for reference. I was trying to use categories and search folders to create a gmail like tagging system but I hit the limit of search folders allowed and the adding of categories in outlook is a pain and definitely not a replacement to gmails labels.

I went looking for a better system and found this post by lifehacker: Empty Your Inbox with the Trusted Trio. The article basically states that you try using a three folder organization system: follow-up, hold, and archive, and keep your inbox empty.

Today I emptied my inbox. It’s actually a great feeling.

Now I just need to bring that follow-up folder down to a more manageable level.

Last evening, at around 17h, three apartments in my building got broken into.

Mine was one of them.

In fact, they were so good that I didn’t realize that something was amiss until I tried to pick up my computer and came up with thin air.

At first, I thought I was being absent minded, so I spent a while looking for my stuff. Then I thought that maybe I brought it to the office, or left it somewhere. But no, I bumped into the landlord as he went to fix someone's window.

As far as we can tell, this is what happened:

The thief got buzzed into our apartment building by someone. Since we have no intercom out front, this happens with alarming regularity. The thief unlocked the fire escape door, climbed up the fire escape and broke into #1, #8, and #9.

For the other two apartments, the thief had to smash in the window to get at the latch. For mine, the latch was broken anyway, so it was a simple matter of sliding it open.

When the thief got to my apartment, he or she emptied out my knapsack and stuffed my laptop inside. Then grabbed my camera bag and went back out the window. The other two apartments had laptops stolen too.

After getting the loot, the thief went down the fire escape and waltzed out the front door. Somewhere along the way, there must have been a scuffle with my cat, because Timin is now sporting a black eye.

I lost:

• Thinkpad T60p laptop, model 200793U, serial L3KW212
• Canon EOS 5D camera with a Canon EF 24-105L IS lens, model 0296B114[AA], serials (21)2621200591 and (21)00860552
• Canon Speedlite 580EX II flash, unknown serial number

The police have the serial numbers and will be checking the pawn shops. If you guys want to help, please do a quick search on any online trading sites you use, like Craigslist, eBay, Kijiji, and LesPAC.

Thanks!

Crossposted to montreal and montrealforsale.

Just released a bug fix version of exempi. Version 2.0.1 address issues with error handling and some building issues on non-Linux systems.

This is likely to be the last 2.0.x release. 2.1.0 is on its way.

The Ubuntu crew in Montréal can sure throw a party. We packed a room at Bar St-Sulpice with geeks, nerds, and other awesome characters who shared their love of beer and free software.

I caught up with Etienne and Fabian who were leading the celebrations. Good job, guys!

As I’m sure you know, 8.04 was finally released this past Thursday. Boy, what a day that was! Quite the rush After I had some time to sit back and relax, I reflected on what I’ve learned and the people I’ve met and my plans for the future. Did I learn a whole bunch? You bet. Did I meet all kinds of people? Sure did. Do I have plans for the future? Still working on that. More specifically, I’m finishing up my strategy document for Xubuntu which I’ll be sending Jono tomorrow for commenting and further brainstorming. If you’ve been following the recent developments in the Xubuntu community, you would know that a community meeting is supposed to be planned once I publish my strategy document.My question to people is: Do we want to have the meeting before the Ubuntu developer summit, during the summit, or shortly following the summit? I can see why people might have different opinions so I’d like to get some feedback. Regardless, the strategy document will be posted within the next seven days.

Focus back on Hardy, I’d just like to take a few minutes to thank and show my appreciation for a number of individuals who I feel have been instrumental in producing Xubuntu and more specifically Xubuntu 8.04. This list is by no means exhaustive - feel free to add the names of other contributors in a comment (or in your own blog entry) who you feel should receive some appreciation. In no particular order:

Jim Campbell - Jim is an amazing guy who I personally consider a friend. The Xubuntu documentation finally got the attention it deserves thanks to Jim. In previous releases, Jim headed up the testing team. It doesn’t matter how Jim helps out, I know that what ever component he gets involved with will flourish.

Dave More - Dave is a machine! Dave did an excellent job helping test the Xubuntu ISOs for Hardy. I think we got the best coverage we’ve ever had thanks to Dave and another awesome dude Daniel M.! I’m hoping Dave will fill the currently vacant Xubuntu testing lead position for Intrepid.

Lionel Le Folgoc, Gauvain Pocentek, and Jani Monoses - Bigs thanks for past and present contributions. These three dudes have done an awesome jobs. Kudos to Lionel and Gauvain for helping me with Xubuntu packages (Xubuntu simply wouldn’t be in the state it is today without them). Kudos to both Lionel and Jani for their previous periods of leadership. These people really deserve a *lot* of credit. I’ve gotten a lot of “You rock” or “Good work” type comments when Xubuntu was released but you should really tell it to Lionel and Gauvain and not me :).

Ubuntu Release Team - You guys rock. Enough said. Steve did an excellent job as the release manager.

Jmak - Jmak was nice enough to take care of the artwork for Hardy. Thanks Jmak!

Cory Kontros - Cory took me under his wing and has taught me a lot about being a leader of a Ubuntu derivative. A great guy who I look forward to meeting in Prague.

Jono Bacon - Jono is another great guy who does a lot of hard work. Big thanks for helping Xubuntu and me out!

Big hugs and thanks to Daniel Chen, Vincent, Jelle de Long, Jonathon Carter, Stephen Arts, Jeremie Corbier, The-Kernel, Radomir Dopieralski, Odd-Rationale and extra bug hugs and thanks to Jerome Guelfucci.

Kudos to the folks who help others folks in the #xubuntu support channel.

All the above people would be great candidates to nominate for the 2008 Open Source Awards.

So, Xubuntu 8.04…. what do you think of it? I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, concerns, etc. There are a few bugs that slipped through unfortunately but I intend to fix a number of them early this week. If you’ve encountered any show stoppers dealing specifically with the Xfce4/Xubuntu desktop then feel free to get in a free nag for me to fix it ;].

Also, I tried to get the Xubuntu website redone for Hardy but it unfortunately fell through. Is there anybody out there who would like to take that project on? If so, just get at it and let me know when you have something for me to review!

Anyhow, I need to get to work. I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend (I know I did). You’ll be seeing a few more blog posts from me over the next week, so until next time… chow!

Just because I won't be at LGM 2008 to show this in a corner, here is a teaser screenshot:

It is still pretty much a work in progress, and is not actually up to the point where I can use it. Some keywords: XMP, digital camera RAW, non-destructive, asset management, GNOME, C++

The second edition of Montréal Python was held at the Standout Jobs office, upstairs from where I work.

It’s the first chance I’ve had to attend, but I’m glad I did. It’s awesome to see so many people interested in the Python programming language.

When Arach first talked to us about holding a regular gathering of people interested in the language, we were really enthusiatic. At the office, we were bemoaning the fact that it was quite difficult to get in touch with people in the city who really knew the technology we were using. So of course we wanted to help out.

I counted at least fifty people showing up. And I think we’re going to get many more.

Every year, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal holds a dance party to raise some funds.

This year, it was a masquerade. I couldn’t help but snap a few photos before we left for the party.