Yann Kerhervé's blog

My own iPhone 4 dropped calls statistics

Now, that it seems pretty much granted that the shinny new iPhone 4 has big antennas problems. I've decided to look into the details and real data.

I logged in on my AT&T and pulled the data from my wife calls log and extrapolated about the one that have potentially dropped. It was easy... I looked for communications with the same number around the same time. Then I went through the data with her to confirm. Here is the raw data:

 

So it looks like roughly 2/3 of the calls dropped. It's waaaay more than before we switched to the iPhone 4.

Now, I, and she, needs to decide if we're going to return the phones or not. The lack of clear acknowledgment for the problems from Apple is not really encouraging. I know, it's a tough issue, and I'm sure it's hell on earth at Cupertino. But we only have 30 days to return the phone, why should we take the risk to be stuck with a semi-working phone? My wife rely on that phone for business, she hates dropped calls. Why should we have faith on Apple to be fair and honest about resolving that problem, eventually (Remember Airport Express issues)?

What is your experience with this? Is 2/3 a wide spread number or is it high just because we were unlucky?

installing a linode server using opscode chef and a stackscripts

I've published two linode stackscripts supposed to work together to speedup the installation of a server ultimately controlled by chef. You can find them here:

• http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=476
• http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=480

The first one sets basic networking up including the private ip that is asked upon image creation, the second one installs chef using gem.

once the linode is up you can track installation progress by 'tail'ing

/root/stackscript.log

You can automate further if you wish, like auto-validating the client but for obvious reason I wouldn't recommend to publish the stackscript publicly. Otherwise the next steps are to copy 'validation.pem' in /etc/chef/ and assign a role to the new machine. Then wait for chef-client to run or run it manually.

Spammers now use image distortion technics, too

I guess they plan on reusing the opensource technology to defeat this kind of spam to solve CAPTCHA, once it exists?

 
 

Triggering ScreenSaver (and lock) with a shortcut on Snow Leopard

I've been using this for a long time, but lately I've found that it wasn't working so well (The screen saver would launch and then stop right away).

Initially, I was using quicksilver and the guts of the ScreenSaverEngine to run something like that:

 open '/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app'

There is a better way to launch the ScreeSaver, it's to use the following applescript

tell application "System Events"
start current screen saver
end tell

Finally, the main problem was that I was previously using this trigger with the key combination ⇧⌘L 'on press', but it's much better to use 'on release', solving a race issue making the screensaver exit almost immediately.

So to sum up:

1. install Quicksilver (of course)
2. enable triggers (maybe it's only in Beta?)
3. make sure you have the "Run as Applescript" action (might be in a plugin?)
4. add a trigger
5. in the item section, hit '=' (to type a text, instead of triggering a search)
6. paste the apple script above
7. select the "Run as Applescript"  action
8. select a 'on hold' hotkey

Smoke testing: Continuous Integration Feature Matrix

CI Feature Matrix - CruiseControl - Confluence

I've found this HUUUUGE matrix of a lot of software doing similar things: Smoke testing/Continuous integration.

Fortunately Kevin (hinted by Miyagawa-san) installed Hudson and said it was awesome. And indeed awesome it looks! So no need to evaluate them all, looks like almost every aspect of hudson make it nice.

My take on installing gerrit (git code review tool) on ubuntu

I've used one main resource, but comments are closed, so I've decided to throw random remarks in this post, for myself and for you dear googler.

The reference is here:

http://gregmeiste.com/2009/06/gerrit-code-review-installation/

It looks much better than the official documentation, at least if like my you don't usually touch java stuff.

• I used ubuntu 9.04 (xen)
• apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client postfix
• I've started installing java packages (sun-java6 sun-java6-jre libcommons-configuration-java libservlet2.4-java un-java6-javadb) not sure all are usefull though
• Step 4: I didn't use phpmysql to create gerrit2 user but:
  'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON 'gerrit2'.* TO 'gerrit2'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTIONS; FLUSH PRIVILEGES;'
• Step 9: when you are done editing GerritServer.properties you should move it to /home/gerrit2/cfg and chown it to gerrit2 user.
• Step 11: though jetty7 should work (using the distribution package?) I went for the latest 6 version.
• Step 12: I'm not sure about this 'plus' directory. I've done what she said, but l've also put stuff into 'jetty/lib/ext/' 
• Also, in addition to the two packages to add, I've also moved the stuff I've apt-getted previously:
  
  •  cp /usr/share/java/commons-pool-1.4.jar jetty/lib/ext/ 
  •  cp /usr/share/java/commons-dbcp-1.2.1.jar jetty/lib/ext/
• Step 13: The documentation says:
   java -jar gerrit-*.war --cat extra/jetty_gerrit.xml >gerrit.xml
  But with my version it was more 'extra/jetty6/gerrit.xml' find out for yours using 'java -jar gerrit*war -ls'
• Step 15: I installed jetty on 0.0.0.0:8081 instead of 127.0.0.1:8081

Tada! I had gerrit UI at the address above.

I registered the first user with openid.

Then it turns out I had to add an admin group, the SQL from the official guide wasn't working, so I did this:

 insert into account_group_members (account_id, group_id) values (1, 1);

After having verified that my id was 1 and the admin group id was 1 too.

I declared my email address, which I confirmed.

I declared my ssh public key.

I declared my ssh username.

I restarted gerrit.

I confirmed that my ssh key was taken into account by: 

ssh -p 29418 yann@codereview.local # should say: 'no shell something'

ssh -p 29418 yann@codereview.local gerrit ls-projects

Then I created my first project:

ssh -p 29418 gerrit@codereview.local gerrit create-project --name findlib

Then I had to give my group (Administrators) the right to push into this new project (using the UI)

 
Then I pushed my 'my-review' branch, should be something like:

git push ssh://yann@codereview.local:29418/findlib my-review

Then I worked.

Then I committed the work.

Then I used the magical refs to create a review:

git push ssh://yann@codereview.local:29418/findlib HEAD:refs/for/my-review

That's all, I hope this helps, comments are wide open for addendum to the above, but don't ask for help since it's merely chance that I went through all these steps without killing myself, so the mailing list would be a better place to ask.

I've done something bad: I broke backward compatibility

I broke backward compatibility of Find::Lib. It's not on CPAN just yet, but it will be soon.

I know that potentially breaking other people's code is bad but on the other hand, what I'm deprecating was a serious stupid idea of mine. I think it's better that way. Besides, it will be version 1.0: major release *blink* *blink*.

Now you can do:

use Find::Lib 'lib1', '../lib2'; # much simpler!

print Find::Lib->catfile('path', 'to', 'somefile.txt'); # convenient!

In case you wonder, the stupid idea was to write:

use Find::Lib 'mylib' => 'MyBootstrap' => 'bla';

instead of:

use Find::Lib 'mylib';
use MyBootstrap 'bla';

I'm sure nobody relies on that anyway.

more review-board and git

I tried to read more of review-board documentation, and it looks like the post-review tool I was talking about in an earlier post doesn't do exactly what I want... Besides, it doesn't work when there is a relative path on the subversion server. I've dirty patched it (no guarantee at all that it doesn't break something else) to make it do something instead of failing (see gist below).

On the other hand, it looks like it still insists on using 'master' one way or another which doesn't really work for me. Ideally I would have to modify that too, or maybe add an option to the tool to make it accept a svn diff in input, because surprisingly it doesn't exist (post-review really wants to do the diff itself, which is... noble).

Posting a patch.diff based review right from the command line instead of using my browser would still be a total win, anyway.

 

SPAM: maladresse ou malveillance?

Je me suis inscrit il y a plusieurs années sur le site LAMBDA, pour voir, et je n'ai jamais consenti a ce que mon adresse email soit partagée. Et ce matin, je reçois un SPAM d'un site qui n'a rien a voir si ce n'est qu'il est hébergé par le même contact technique.

Que ce soit de la négligence ou un acte purement criminel de la part de Mr. FC, le gérant de ce site: c'est tout simplement lamentable.

update:

En plus des commentaires ci-dessous avec FC et Renaud Varoqueaux., des mails ont ete echanges, et j'attends d'y voir un peu plus clair.

update 2:

J'ai censure ce post, ne voulant pas porter trop de prejudices a quelqu'un qui n'avait pas d'intentions malveillantes (mais qui a porté prejudice a de nombreux internautes). FC a fauté professionellement et est responsable de cette erreur, en admettant qu'il s'agisse bien d'une erreur, meme si ce n'est qu'un prestataire qui l'a commise.

Git-svn hack to import original committers from an svk import of svn

I don't recall exactly what was the context but on one of your repo at Six Apart we had the beginning of the project imported into the public repostitory using an external tool (svk I think), I made a patch to git-svn (quick and dirty) to look into the subversion log message and correctly attach the commit to the original author.

The original commit messages have this format:

        # r123@host (orig r1234):  author | 2006-05-17 17:07:42 -0700