So here is the exact syntax you should use if you want to exclude multiples directories with tar:

tar cvfz myproject.tgz --exclude='path/dir_to_exclude1' --exclude='path/dir_to_exclude2' myproject

Hope it will save you some time!

Hi Everyone

I'm sure you've heard the news: Moblin and maemo are merging! We are taking the best pieces from these two open source projects and are creating the MeeGo software platform. Both teams have worked for a long time to support the needs of the mobile user experience - and MeeGo will make this even better. We want it to be fun, focused, flexible, technically challenging and ultimately, something that can change the world.

We all use mobile devices every day. The power and capability of handhelds has reached astounding levels - netbooks have been a runaway success - and connected TVs, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment, and media phones are fast growing new markets for devices with unheard of performance. Our goal is to develop the best software to go with those devices. The teams behind maemo and Moblin have plenty of experience and even more ideas on how to make things better - and together we will create something special.

So what does this mean for Moblin and its community? It's a huge opportunity. There are some changes (and those are always scary), but I think they are all for the better. Things will quickly shift to the new site, but from a technology point of view, migrations should be smooth. Especially if you are an application developer; everything you have done so far should continue to work - and with Qt and its development environment there are even more and easier options available to develop new and exciting apps for MeeGo.

The MeeGo website is still evolving - you'll run into a few "coming soon" pages as we pull all the content together and get things ready for our first project release in the second quarter. But there's already a lot to see - and a community to join! Please take a look - and come back often as we approach that first release.

We really want to hear from you. Be in on IRC, on our developer mailing list, or through bugzilla. MeeGo is an open project and it will be successful through its developer community. It's my personal goal to make sure that we can all together be successful. And have fun.

I invite you to join us at meego.com.

Imad Sousou

Director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center
(and now also co-chair of the MeeGo steering group)

From a business standpoint, it does make a lot of sense to merge these 2 projects, now let's see if the merge can be handled smoothly technically speaking... might not be as easy as it sounds.

It could not have been an issue if I was not doing web development on my laptop using a local (badly configured) webserver which happened to be worldwide accessible... oOops

A few iptables commands later, everything was secured :

iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P FORWARD DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -s 127.0.0.1 -j ACCEPT

The above lines configure iptables (the firewall) to drop every incoming connexions except the ones corresponding to a connexion I established with a remote server. Indeed, the server you're connecting to needs to be able to send information back to your machine in order for you to get it (blocking all incoming traffic is the same as unplugging the network connection).

I thought it might be useful to some of you too...

And then, a few seconds later, without refreshing anything on my side :

I love it
Now let's go party for 2010!
Happy new year everybody!

• The P'tits déjeuners de la science organised by my engineering school (INSA de Lyon) with Valérie Pécresse and Claudie Haigneré (french politics)
• The Netbook World Summit organised by Mandriva with the presence of Scott Apeland, responsible for the Intel Software Network (read Application Store)
• The World first Bizspark Camp organised by Microsoft with the presence of Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President de Microsoft Corp, .NET Developer Division
• The Annuel meeting of G9+ with the following topic: "L'entreprise face aux Réseaux Sociaux" [quick translation: "Companies and Social Networks"] in the presence of Tara Hunt
• The Life is better on party organised by OpenCoffee Paris before LeWeb
• The Partners & Speakers reception for LeWeb'09 organised by Loïc & Géraldine

Now this is really great but please, next time, let's try to spread that a little over a few days so that I do not have to choose between the events

It's been sooo long since I blogged! The thing is that the activity at Allmyapps is just exploding (a good problem to deal with!) and unless days suddenly get bigger (say 48h a day), there's no way I can keep up-to-date with my todo list. Task prioritization is the keyword right now at Allmyapps

However, I really *want* to write more blog posts... so I'll try to make a bit smaller while keeping their interestingness high. Let's begin now and see if I can manage that in the long run.

Today, I just wanted to share with you the 4 slides we've proposed to pitch Allmyapps at the OpenCoffee Paris which is taking place right before LeWeb09.

I hope we'll be selected to pitch! [Edit: We've been selected to pitch!]

In theory, using Google chart is dead simple: just build an URL with the right parameters and Google will return you an image with your nice looking chart. However, in practice, it turned out a little bit more tricky. If you only want to draw a pie charts then it is pretty straight forward. But if you want to build an XY plot chart, then it gets harder!

Indeed, you should not use Google chart API like you'd use a spreadsheet. Keep in mind that Google chart API is about drawing an image: the X axis and the Y axis are treated completely independantly of your points coordinates.  If you do not pay enough attention, you'll end up with a chart with a completely wrong scale.

I tried to find some PHP libraries to help me draw my XY chart but found nothing satisfactory, so I finally decided to write my own little PHP function. Let me share it with you:

function getChart($chart) {
$y_max = $chart['y_max'];
$y_min = $chart['y_min'];
$y_step = $chart['y_step'];
$y_grid_step = $chart['y_grid_step'];
$x_max = $chart['x_max'];
$x_min = $chart['x_min'];
$chart_size = $chart['chart_size'];
$title = $chart['title'];
$x = $chart['x_axis'];
$x_nb = count($x);
$x_int = 100/$x_nb;
$first = 0;
if ($chart['x_labels_centered']) $first = $x_int/2;
for($i=0;$i<=$x_nb-1;$i++) { $positions[] = floor($first + ($i * $x_int)); }
foreach($positions as $n => $pos) { $x_values[$pos] = $x[$n]; }
$x_range = implode(',',array_keys($x_values));
$x_labels = implode('|',$x);
$grid_step = $y_grid_step*100/$y_max;
$url = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?";
$cht = "cht=lc";
if (!empty($chart['data_y'])) $cht="cht=lxy";
$chd = "chd=t:".implode(',',$chart['data']);
if (!empty($chart['data_y'])) $chd.="|".implode(',',$chart['data_y']);
$chg = "chg=$x_int,$grid_step,1,5";
$chxt = "chxt=x,y";
$tmp = array();
for ($i=0;$i<=$y_max;$i+=$y_step) { $tmp[] = $i; }
$y_labels = implode(',',$tmp);
$chxp = "chxp=0,".$x_range."|1,".$y_labels;
$y_labels = implode('|',$tmp);
$chxl = "chxl=0:|".$x_labels."|1:|".$y_labels;
$chxr = "chxr=1,$y_min,$y_max,$y_step";
$chtt="chtt=".str_replace(' ','+',$title);
$chs = "chs=".$chart_size;
$chds = "chds=$y_min,$y_max";
$chm="chco=0000FFFF&chm=B,76A4FB,0,0,0";#|s,0000FF,0,-1,10";
if (!empty($chart['data_y'])) $chds ="chds=$x_min,$x_max,$y_min,$y_max";
$url .= implode('&', array($cht,$chd,$chg,$chm,$chxt,$chxl,$chxp,$chxr,$chtt,$chs,$chds));
return $url;
}


Dont' get me wrong: this is really a quick and dirty function and not meant to be beautiful code. Here is an invokation example:

$data_x = array(0,4,5,9,10);
$data_y = array(20,5,7,9,10);
$months_x = array('Jan','Fev','Mar','Avr','May');
$chart_xy = array(
'title'=>"Chart Title", // CHART TITLE
'data'=>$data_x, // CHART DATA (X)
'data_y'=>$data_y, // CHART DATA (Y)
'x_axis'=>$months_x, // X AXIS LABELS LIST
'x_labels_centered'=>true, // SHOULD LABELS ON X AXIS BE CENTERED?
'y_min'=>0, // MIN VALUE OF Y AXIS
'y_max'=>25, // MAX VALUE OF Y AXIS
'y_step'=>5, // Y AXIS INTERVAL (NUMBERS ON THE AXIS)
'y_grid_step'=>5, // Y AXIS GRID INTERVAL (HORIZONTAL LINES ON THE GRID)
'x_min'=>0, // MIN VALUE OF X AXIS
'x_max'=>10, // MAX VALUE OF X AXIS
'chart_size'=>'300x300' // CHART DIMENSIONS
);
$url = getChart($chart_xy);

This code would result in the following graph:

And if I change :

$months_x = array('Jan','Fev','Mar','Avr','May');

by

$months_x = array('Jan','Fev','Mar');

I get the following graph:

What is important to note here is that it is up to you to make your X and Y axis consistent with your data, ortherwise, you'll end up with a totally meaningless chart.

Of course, this code is adapted to my needs so please feel free to copy this PHP function and adapt it so that it fits your particular needs!

Hope it will be useful for some of you...

As you can see, we've also welcomed our first 2 interns : Xiaodong and Feiyu who will work with us all summer. Their first week of work with us was really promising so they will hopefully be of a great help to deliver exciting new releases of allmyapps in the coming weeks !

Here are a few photos that were taken during the conference :

Alain Storck during his speech

The audience in the Abbé Grégoire auditorium

Alain Storck with Arnaud and Daniel at the cocktail

More info on the conference can be found here :
Conférence avec Alain Storck organisée par l'association des ingénieurs INSA d'île de France

I used to blame my laptop for its poor performance but this upgrade made me realize that the problem was coming from Ubuntu Hardy... hmm.. too bad for a LTS (Long Term Support) distribution... My laptop was heating so much that he used to freeze if not elevated 1 or 2 cm above the table! I'm not even talking about battery life...

I tried everything, included BIOS upgrade but nothing solved the problem. Also I had a lot of problem with flash on my firefox, it used to make firefox eat 100% cpu after a while. I was tired of this situation that I even got my old laptop (the best laptop ever) back to life and I was planning to use it as my day-to-day laptop again.

An upgrade to jaunty later (and 1.5Go new packages installed), I can finally feel the power of my Core 2 duo T8300 (2.4Ghz) with 4Go RAM! Even with the most impressive 3D options activated, it still flies and battery life has returned to an "acceptable" level (a little bit above 3h). I can now test some cool 3D games (did you try armagetron?) which were forbidden to me on my old system.

Once the upgrade completed, I was curious about which new applications got included in the ubuntu 9.04 repository (compared to the 8.10 repository) so we put a dedicated page on allmyapps . If you're interested, you can browse the list of the new applications included in ubuntu 9.04 here.

By the way, the dist-upgrade process always amazes me! It so impressive watching an entire system updating itself without a glitch (ok I had to use 2 dpkg -i --force-overwrite but still... ). So congratulations to the developers!