monotorrent api is great !

Monotorrent is really great thanks to the beautiful work of Alan.
I have read the code and it is really easy to understand.

Thanks to this beautiful Api it was very easy to add a lot of features to the core api.

So here is what I have added during the last month (with the help of Alan):

• super-seeding (also known as the initial seeding) it permit to be faster when you have made a torrent and start to broadcast it on net…In this mode the rules to choose where I send piece are different
• uTorrent peer exchange: exchange with the swarm the peers.
• web seeding (getright specification only) This specification allow to download on web site with HTTP and FTP and do not need any script on server side (just a regular link). This specification contain a bonus which is just a nice to have : gap management but I have not implemented it. There is just some basic code on my branch in piece picker class.
• libtorrent metadata support: you can receive the other metadata contain in the torrent file from other peer with this message. this features allow monotorrent to be tracker less. You just download the infohash with a magnetlink and get from other peers the torrent file.

I have code some other things which are not on trunk :

• magnet link: this features is like the edonkey link. It is link to the libtorrent metadata features.
• a basic work for gap management in piece picking process (getright specification)
• Event and function to have chat message usable in lib. This will evolve to support Azureus chat message protocol
• azureus protocol: I have just started it and it is far from compilable but will be soon I need to do the negotiation protocol too!

In the big next TODO there are

• the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) which allow to be fully trackerless.
• make the winform gui look like gtk GUI
• rss fully supported in winform gui
• search engine
• partial seed
• Location-aware protocol

Here you have a list of extension in protocol:

http://wiki.theory.org/BitTorrentSpecification#Reserved_Bytes (technical view)
http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html#draft-beps (official draft)

html5 working draft published!

Since 1999, there is no new features in HTML language.

The language is really poor and have not evolved with the needs of user. To fix that, we can use javascript to manipulate the DOM but it is take a lot of lines of code to do small things. We have AJAX to have better performance by not refresh the whole page.

And we have Flash, Silverlight, Moonlight, XUL,… which are basically plug-in over your browser to add a lot of cool things to your browser.

And a lot of people talked about who will win … but we have forget the HTML standard which have not evolved during a long time. The working draft of HTML 5 seems very promising.

This is a working draft, so all can evolved but we can see what they want to do…

To sum up they add a lot of missing things witch is done with AJAX, javascript, …

So, I will try to sum up what we will have in this HTML5:

• Document structure: section, header, footer, article, aside will be useful to cut your document in area
• Multimedia flag: video, audio will replace the object flag and will be more easier to use and canvas will allow dynamic drawing (ever in Firefox 2)
• forms: the specification of WHATWG show what will be done here. But nothing is currently in the working draft. But we can hope new input attributs: calendar, timepicker, email, … and repeater to avoid to have a list same flags…
• new controls: Datagrid to make tabular or hierarchical set of rows of elements. progress and meter will be cool to show to user that he have to wait. it is better than a GIF or an Ajax progress bar. And we have some other things as command and menu
• area post: it will replace Ajax for a lot of things… here we have datatemplate, rule and nest flag to manage the template dynamically. I have not understand all here but sounds promising….
• storing data in database: but in local and this will be persistant during the session.
• catch drag&drop without javascirpt

This draft will evolved maybe in good maybe in bad way but hope standard will bring a lot of missing things. I do not think we will have all features of flash/silverlight in HTML5 but we will get a lot of cool new things. We will still be far from rich browser plugin but we get lot of cool new things in standard…

ironruby under mono

Today, I have made a patch to fix the rakefile of Microsoft team of IronRuby.

This patch allow ironruby to be compiled with mono with the basic rakefile.

You just have to use mono flag : “rake compile mono=1″.

You can found it on ironruby mailing list.

help for suse

I have found a beautiful blog which talk about Suse Linux in French. It explain all basic and is great for newbies.

Thanks to this great blog, I have found a second great site named www.Kameleon-facile.org which can generate a script to add all repository easily!!

This script is generate for smart but you can just modify a little it for Yast by adding “zypper sa <URL> <name>” where URL is the URL you have and name is the name you want to attach to this repository.(Paid attention to have name in one word)

innovate !!

Who innovate today in desktop experience?

This is a complex question…

Google is the first who come in my mind. A lot of engineer have left Microsoft to Google. Google have make a lot of new things as Google hearth, Google Desktop, Gmail, Google reader, Igoogle, Gcalendar , Google spreadsheet,… But Google video was a badtrip and they have to buy Youtube. Google have nothing really new since few month… Google have done a great job to make a web “Office” but it is just a migration to web not a real new idea.

EDIT: they have just released the google presentation.

MAC OS X have add a lot of new idea in desktop but nothing new since it.Apple have take a strong leadership in mp3 reader and Iphone will be a success. So, Apple is now clearly investing in Iphone, Ipod which bring more money to them.

The big one, Microsoft, fall down. The OpenXML have been refused by International Organization for Standardization.Windows Vista is compare to the Windows Me and Microsoft have provide a downgrade to Win XP.

And Aero is not as good as compiz. Microsoft is good to copy something and make it better for everyone (MACOS->Windows, Lotus 1-2-3-> MS Excel, Java->.NET,…). But Microsoft is in bad way. MS Office and MS Windows are the products which bring cash to Microsoft. MS office is challenged by openOffice, Google spreadsheet,… And MS Windows is left for Linux on server side. and now the last part (but bigger one) desktop environment is more and more challenged by Untubu & Suse who have simplified Linux to make it usable for everyone.

Innovation come from open source today. Power of community get bigger!

The console is left for beautiful GUI on linux. Microsoft have seen the trap and contract with Novell to save him for future but revolution come fast and who know what will be the future market-share of desktop?

Imo, It will take time.I am switching to Linux as many other people. I am an engineer and for moment most of people who switch to Linux are IT engineer but they are prescriptor. When someone want to buy a computer and know nothing about it, he ask for advice to prescriptor. The other sign is that administration switch to Linux. A lot of project improve compatibility (Mono, Moonlight, cygwin…) and other products are on both plate-form (OpenOffice, Firefox,…). So all this things make migration easier but a lot of issue is still there because of the lack of support for Linux.

Compiz Fusion video

Compositing have bring a lot of thing in desktop experience.

Beryl which is a fork of Compiz have now fusion with Compiz Extra for plugin package part and have bring some features in compize core. To sum up, compiz is core with just few stable plugin and Compiz Fusion is a package of plugin which can be unstable on some plugin but which bring a lot of features to desktop.

Some video to show you progress of Compiz fusion and Compiz:

Microsoft Monopole

In US you have the antitrust law in France we have the anti packaging law.

This law just said that you can not sell 2 products together without selling each products.

In France, you can only found PC with Windows on it and a lot of constructor do not allow consumer to buy PC without it. So we have a petition to warn our country about this issue who do not let a change to other product of the market. The cost of software installed on your PC is about 20/25% of the total cost. This not only for MS windows, you will have a lot of installed software

So you can sign the petition to stop this bad practice which make price expensive and do not let the choice for your software.

When firefox bring the web2.0 revolution…

Firefox is really a great browser with tabs , plugins, Anti fishing, RSS, … and many more things.

But the last Alpha 8 of Firefox bring a really cool thing: the web based protocol handlers.

This system allow people to register web service to open mime type. So you can open a file without local rich client to open it. The power of web service will do it for you.

Imagine you want to open a document .doc, but you do not want to install MS word, you will use the Google document web service to open it!!

This system is great because no issue about multi-OS support. Most of plate-form have a browser and this is the only thing needed!

PDF file is a pain to open because Acrobat reader is really slow and have to many module to load whereas it is quite never used. I have never understand why acrobat open all module even if not needed and why it will not check file content to see what is needed… I use Foxit reader to open PDF but now I will use WebService to open it.

Your computer will no more need extra application than a browser and access to web;)

A lot of web service is outside to help you to open document. In my opinion, it is the future for a big part of application. But this system is not perfect to do complex things (coding, compile, .. for example) but it is cool to view any format. So, you will no more need viewer because all will be online.

Great tool

I will talk about a great tool which is not a lot used by developer. This tool is not recent but it is not a lot used. So I will try to make people used it!

A lot of developer use only Visual studio in DotNet project but you have a lot of other IDE(or build tool) to manage your project:

• sharpdevelop
• monodevelop
• nant
• make (autotool)
• …

You can even used some IDE with plugin (eclipse for example…).

And for VS you have VS 2002, VS2003, VS2005 and VS ORCAS in beta2.

So when you start an open source project, you have to said we will all worked on the same IDE. If you want to support more than one IDE, you will have to synchronized the solution file and it will take a lot of time for nothing.

An other case, you want to switch from VS2003 to VS2005. So you will have dev on the older one and some on new one. This is now not a big issue because you have VS Express but at start you have to buy your Visual studio. For a open source developer, it is so expensive.

DotNet PreBuild is the tool to save your time. It is a project file generator based on XML.

This tool is great because you have to maintain only one XML project file and you target Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, 2005, SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, NAnt and Autotools.

My favorite feature is that you can said take all file with name as “*.cs” in this folder.

With that you have nothing to maintain only have to put file in good folder and when you want to not used a file rename it or delete it.

To make project file you have to call the Prebuild.exe with /target:MyTarget where MyTarget can be all target writen previously.

So quite easy to done batch file for each project and just have click it and a project file of your choice is generated.

The only missing features for me is the possibility to parse a project file to generate the prebuild project file.

In my opinion, this project is good for mono because it make project file not linked with an IDE (So, with an OS).

JavaScript compiler go ahead…

Today, I have fixed thanks to my new unit tests 3 major bugs in the compiler.

I guess now that my tokenizer (lexer) is bug free (else than regular expression which is not finished)

I have done a small sample test but I have still issue because RowanGenerator is far from finished.

I have discover that regexp is not finished too.

In fact to sum up we have :

• Engine and RowanGenerator class to finished
• Strings, parser for expression, Engine, RowanGenerator, IdentifierTable ot unit test
• And a console compiler to test all

With the recent anouncement of Miguel, I will maybe have MS unit test to test my code (so exiting!)

UPDATE:

here is a screenshot myconsole compiler. As you can se, I am not ready for released ;(

But it is funny to check it for first time. I am pretty sure that rowan generator is in big part responssible for that.

For life side, I leave officialy Pepsico France.

I will be free the 26th october. I will join SAGE which is a software editor. It is a real step in my life. I want to be in firm where software is the core of business, where I will have chance to improove myself and climb step by step the hierarchical structure .