Category: Uncategorized

after debbugs, bts-link works now over mantis…

… well, at least on my machine 😉

The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).

Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***

And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.

When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :

This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***

The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.

The code is here (git), for the curious ones.

EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.

I’m going to Debconf 9… but before, I’ll go to RMLL/LSM

Yeah, I’m also going to the Debconf9 :

Actually, it will be my very first real Debconf as a contributor to Debian, even if I was around at the Debconf 0 and 1 in Bordeaux, which were held during the early editions of the RMLL/LSM.

And I’ll start the July conferences with the LSM/RMLL where I’ll chair a track on development (where Debian will be discussed, btw).

See you in Nantes and in Caceres, to discuss Helios, bts-link, UDD, bugtracking on the Semantic Web, forges, and other interesting matters.

Presentations on multiple displays in OOo Impress really awesome

For a while I’ve configured Xinerama to be able to properly use the two video outputs on my laptop (the standard internal laptop screen and the VGA output for video projector). I can then switch to a mode with a wide virtual desktop split on two monitors which is 2 times 1280×1024 wide, and being able to slide windows from one to the other. I’m using that mode when making presentations on a projector.

Since OOo 3.0 there has been a new feature allowing to use the two “monitors” / outputs to project something different for the audience and for the presenter (Slide show | Slide show Settings | Mutliple Monitors).
And it has even been recently improved, in offering some nice features for the presenter (apparently called “Sun Presenter Console“), like a display of the notes or thumbnails of all slides, of the next slide, or of the time of presentation, all appearing only on monitor 1 (the presenter’s screen) while the audience will only see the traditional slide in fullscreen. Excellent to know what the next slide will be and prepare oral transitions. Definitely a must have extension (available in the openoffice.org-presenter-console Debian package in testing).

Presenter Console

Still there’s one issue with this setup if you want to quit the presentation and show stuff to the audience, for instance in a browser : the browser will be on your presenter’s monitor and you’d have to slide it to the other display, but then you’d have to use it only on the other display, which is usually in your back : no mirroring of such apps to the external projector in an easy way.
But then, there’s a workaround, in using x11vnc to export the presenter’s part of the desktop so that you can launch a vnc viewer on the audience’s part, which will mirror the other one : then you’ve got best of both xinerama and OOo to display separate views on the different monitors, and still be able to replicate some elements from the presenter’s desktop to allow the audience to view it.

Definitely great for conferences, lectures, and all public presentations with a laptop and a beamer. You’ll love it

okular 1 – adobe reader 0

At OSS 2009 last week, I attended the IFIP 2.13 WG business meeting.

During the presentations, made on Windows XP PCs of the venue (yeah, it’s always like that in conferences on OSS, where hardware runs only proprietary software… who knows why), one presentation of a PDF file couldn’t be completed : Adobe reader displayed some strange memory-related error.

Adobe reader FAIL !

But fortunately, the organizers were able to instantly launch Okular (from KDE), which was able to complete the slideshow (still with some glitches on some of the contained images) on the broken PDF.

So, even on Windows; KDE wins ! 😉 Install it if you want to test.

P.S.: Hi Paul, you see, I’m saying nice things about KDE 😉