MùPùF.org

Well, it's been a long time. This post will be dedicated to explanations on how to draw graphs in Qt's QGraphicsScene, using GraphViz. We're not talking about rendering an SVG graph with GraphViz and then printing it in a scene, however. What we will do, instead, is:

• represent a graph, using a C++ wrapper class for libgraph
• tell GraphViz to compute positions for each node, and the path of each edge
• draw our graph using QGraphicsEllipseItem and QGraphicsPathItem

The whole thing is used in a computer security research project on which I'm not allowed to give any information, so I will be vague on some parts of this tutorial, and I will not provide a whole bunch of ready-to-run code. I'm still going to give you the hints for fulfilling the three tasks above, and I will publish the class I wrote for my project (it is, of course, not generic at all, since it was designed for my particular needs).

This tutorial assumes you have a decent knowledge of how Graphviz works, and basic knowledge of the QGraphics API.

Today I was asked to write an article for my English lesson. It was asked to me about a week ago but of course I wrote it this very morning during my Shell programming lesson (yeah, I love Shell programming).

Here are the instructions of the exercise:

You see this notice in an in-flight magazine and decide to enter the competition.

What forms of transport will we be using in 50 years' time?

Where will we take our holidays?

Write us an article, giving us your views on both of these questions. Science fiction writer John T. Price will choose the most original article, which will receive a prize of $1,000 and be published in our magazine next year.

If I win the prize, I'll make sure to hire an actual artist in order to achieve the redrawing of our sexy header. Long life to the Invisible Pink Licorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

As I pointed out in previous blog entries, I've been running short on time in the last few months. The reason is that I put quite a lot of time into a project that was assigned to me as part of my studies. The goal of the project was to create an application allowing graphical monitoring of various system and network security tools, such as SELinux, PIGA (currently under development in my school, ENSI of Bourges), Osiris, Snort, etc.

While I was beginning to starve tonight, I noticed I had no idea what I'd cook. I was getting a bit fed up of noodles, and didn't eat vegetables for a while. I can already hear you saying (actually, I can't, unless I'm hooked to your micro, but that's very unlikely, isn't it?) “Hey wait, vegetables are dull”... No, they're not! Not when you cook them properly, and it kind of accidentally happened to me just about an hour and a half ago.

You may also be wondering what the hell a kesäkurpitsapaistos can be. Well, it's the Finnish name of gratin de courgettes. My Finnish friend Pasi took some time to find out what a courgette is, and he blamed me for not telling him in Finnish (well, now at least I know a word of that weird wonderful language).

So, shall we now get into the technical details?

This post is just a quick tutorial on how to modify NotifyOsd's display colours, font size, and bubble position. It includes source code edition, and thus is not advised for beginner users.

Also, if you're interested into a GConf-Xfconf customisable Debian NotifyOsd package, please leave a comment on the blog, and I'll see what I can do (there is already a patch for that, but I have to update it to the latest version of NotifyOsd).

As a Free Software developer, there is of course one thing that i cherish very much: Freedom.

Not only Freedom in software, but also Freedom of individuals in a society. Freedom is often used by politicians to justify abuses made to other people: unjust wars in the name of freedom of a country, disastrous economical decisions in the name of the freedom of so-called entrepreneurs – I prefer the term parasites (if this shocks you, I am truly not sorry – I am not afraid to state that there are much more efficient systems than those in which we let a minority of spoilt children ruin thousands of workers' lives just for their personal profit).

Freedom is also often flouted by totalitarian regimes – whether they assume their totalitarianism or not. There are perfectly valid and worrisome examples of this right now in France. But people do not seem to care that much, here and elsewhere, about their Freedoms. Nor do they care about the world which they live in. I'll probably, some day, write about that, and the limits of Democracy when you're surrounded by selfish idiots. But it's not today's subject.

Today, I'm going to talk about my involvement in some particular FOSS projects – and how I think my freedom to contribute to and use these projects has been restricted, in a way that I can not accept anymore.

Today, I heard another one. Just a little one. I heard another yesterday. I hear them, in fact, everyday. And there is no day for them to make me laugh. And every single day, when they reach me, when they go through my shell of indifference, they hurt a part of me. Tremendously.

I'm talking about jokes. Sexist jokes. Racist jokes. All those discriminatory jokes, that titillate the beast¹ and are outrageous to the grown-up human inside us. Today, it begun with the evocation of that wonderful thing HTCPCP is:

• Me: there is a protocol to control coffee machines from your PC
• Some guy: I know, it's called wife[...]