https://blog.l0cal.com/ Recent content on etix's weblog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 14 Dec 2017 15:23:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/about/ Ludovic Fauvet Startup founder of STORM INC, founder and ex-CTO of Videolabs SAS. Developer of VLC media player, ex-treasurer and system administrator of the VideoLAN organization. Maintainer of mirrorbits, the geographical download redirector. Contact GPG Fingerprint: 2C48 9FD4 F549 2474 ED45 0A1D 40F6 0825 6F52 F1CE Donations I welcome donations in the Monero crypto-currency. 4AXZUSmbPy1FYrvafCbGCjWBPq8xLBSwwcjwH4FQViNPYVVbDfgK8FtCgE5EYXKmrCi2HPhWEy6sv8auajdxb5cg5cvwFNU https://blog.l0cal.com/2017/12/14/update-on-crypto-currency-donations-at-videolan/ Thu, 14 Dec 2017 15:23:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2017/12/14/update-on-crypto-currency-donations-at-videolan/ After receiving much requests, the VideoLAN organization finally started accepting Bitcoin donations in February 2014. Since then, we received around 12 BTC. During the past year, the price skyrocketed and today we still hold more than 10 BTC. This unexpected surge of the Bitcoin market price makes it difficult to HODL securely. The volatility adding up to the processing time makes it quite impractical to spend. The introduction of the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 was an amazing breakthrough and is already reshaping the future of payments and banking as a whole but we don’t think BTC (and derivatives) will be the de facto crypto-currency the world will use for daily transactions. https://blog.l0cal.com/2016/09/02/unveiling-interesting-numbers-about-vlc-downloads/ Fri, 02 Sep 2016 15:40:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2016/09/02/unveiling-interesting-numbers-about-vlc-downloads/ Every year in September the VideoLAN community organize the Open Multimedia Conference also known as the VideoLAN Developers Days or for short VDD. This year it will take place in Berlin the 3rd and 4th of September. For this occasion I gathered some interesting data from the VideoLAN download servers. First, let me start with a bit of context. VideoLAN is a (French) non-profit organization with 31 active members as of today. https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/10/26/vlc-ambient-display-prototype/ Mon, 26 Oct 2015 11:48:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/10/26/vlc-ambient-display-prototype/ TL;DR: See the bottom of the article for the video of the working prototype. I’ve always been interested in electronics but never had the opportunity to learn it much until the last few months. As a software developer I discovered the world of electronic few years ago with the awesome Arduino ecosystem and I did quite a few small projects since, many of them involving leds and wireless communication. I don’t have much time to work on personal projects but I must say that I love tinkering with electronics now and then. https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/06/02/what-happened-to-sourceforge/ Tue, 02 Jun 2015 21:57:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/06/02/what-happened-to-sourceforge/ Disclaimer: I’m a VLC developer, member of the board of VideoLAN and managing the infrastructure behind the distribution of VLC. Views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not express the opinions of the VideoLAN organization. You may have heard all the recent fuss about the Sourceforge vs Gimp controversy. If not you should read this great article written by a member of the Gimp team. The full story between VLC and Sourceforge In 2010 the VideoLAN team decided to delegate the binary distribution of VLC media player to Sourceforge. https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/04/30/using-dns-as-a-cheap-failover-and-load-balancer/ Thu, 30 Apr 2015 12:19:10 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/04/30/using-dns-as-a-cheap-failover-and-load-balancer/ I’m currently testing the upcoming version of Mirrorbits with clustering support to be finally able to achieve high-availability for the VideoLAN downloads infrastructure. We’re now running two servers for powering the downloads: get.dc2.videolan.org and get.dc3.videolan.org. And today I’ve been struggling finding a simple and cheap way to distribute the load on the two servers while having some kind of failover. The two servers are located in two different datacenters under the same AS but without physical access or service allowing us to add a load-balancer. https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/02/27/vlc-2.2.0-weatherwax/ Fri, 27 Feb 2015 17:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/02/27/vlc-2.2.0-weatherwax/ The VideoLAN community is proud to announce the immediate availability of VLC 2.2.0 codename WeatherWax and for the first time in history on all supported platforms simultaneously (see related press release). In addition to the release of the desktop version of VLC media player 2.2.0, a new version of the mobile ports is also available on their respective stores: VLC for iOS 2.4.1 VLC for Android 1.1.0 (Beta) VLC for Android TV 1. https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/02/10/vlc-and-mirrorbits-at-scale-13x/ Tue, 10 Feb 2015 14:25:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2015/02/10/vlc-and-mirrorbits-at-scale-13x/ The thirteenth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 13X) will take place on February 19-22, 2015 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport (LAX). It’s without doubt one of the greatest conference related to Linux and Free Software that I attended in the USA for the past few years. Three members of the VideoLAN team will hold a booth this year again for the duration of the event to demo the latest improvements and platform supported by VLC and of course, discuss with the visitors! https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/08/18/using-a-git-hook-to-rebuild-your-hugo-powered-website/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 20:28:50 -0700 https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/08/18/using-a-git-hook-to-rebuild-your-hugo-powered-website/ Yesterday I wrote about my recent migration from Wordpress to Hugo as my static website generator. All of the content, configuration and themes are stored inside a Git repository so I can keep an history of all changes and update it easily using a standard Git workflow. In order to be as lazy as possible I wanted to be able to rebuild my website after each git push so I don’t need to ssh to the server every time I wanted to do an update. https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/08/18/refreshed-website/ Mon, 18 Aug 2014 02:41:43 -0700 https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/08/18/refreshed-website/ It’s been a while that I started this website, at the time Wordpress was the undisputed leader and it’s still very popular among bloggers today. Don’t get me wrong, I truly think it’s an awesome product for managing content with multiple writers but can’t we do better? The other day I was asking myself few questions while browsing my blog. Do I really need to generate a web page for every single visitor that came to visit it? https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/07/11/mirrorbits-is-now-on-github/ Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/07/11/mirrorbits-is-now-on-github/ Few months back I started working on a new project for the VideoLAN organization called Mirrorbits. Fast-forward, now in July 2014 it is finally online and open-sourced on Github! Mirrorbits is a geographic download redirector written in Go. Let me rephrase that, it’s an application server that finds the best mirror to redirect a given user based on its location, pretty much like a CDN but using a pure software stack. https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/05/23/from-gmail-to-fastmail/ Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2014/05/23/from-gmail-to-fastmail/ Email is crucial to me, I can’t even remember the last day I didn’t check my inbox. It’s my preferred channel for communicating and interacting with other people “electronically”. Like many developers I also use emails to keep track of the activity of all the projects I contribute to. I also receive all sorts of emails from machines, sometime server alerts or even from my Arduino powered home automation. Finding a good email provider is a hard task. https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-infrastructure/ Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-infrastructure/ Around 2005 when we started to gather some statistics about VLC, download numbers were around 150,000 downloads per day. Since then this number has increased significantly to reach more than 1M the good days. In the beginning we used few mirrors to handle the file distribution and it was an hassle to manage since back in the days it required a lot of human power to do a VLC release. Mostly because we had to wait several hours (if not days) until all mirrors were synchronized. https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/10/16/worldwide-network-measurements-with-ripe-atlas/ Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/10/16/worldwide-network-measurements-with-ripe-atlas/ The RIPE NCC is the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia. It’s an administrative and technical organization in charge of allocation and registration of Internet number resources (AS numbers and IP adresses) in its region. In december 2010 they started a new experimental project named RIPE Atlas. The aim of this project is to “produce a collection of live Internet maps with unprecedented detail” by distributing small probes across the region to collect details about the network from thousands of different locations. https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/07/07/these-companies-that-mislead-our-users/ Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/07/07/these-companies-that-mislead-our-users/ Some thoughts about the people who use the name of VLC media player to spread adware/spyware while infringing the VideoLAN‘s intellectual property and brand… At VideoLAN we’re really fed up with all those websites/companies that are tricking our users to download malware and violate our IP by distributing misleading versions of VLC without conforming to the GPL license. What bothers us the most is that many of them are bundling VLC with various crapware to monetize it in ways that mislead our users by thinking they’re downloading an original version. https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/03/08/irssi-remotely-attach/create-a-screen-in-one-line/ Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/03/08/irssi-remotely-attach/create-a-screen-in-one-line/ If you’re a big fan of irssi and you’re running it on a remote server over SSH and inside a screen, then this a tip you might be interested in. Just put the following line inside your .zshrc or .bashrc file: alias rirssi='ssh user@your.server.com -t screen -dRUS irssi irssi' This simple alias will allow you to: Connect to your remote SSH server Attach to your existing irssi screen named “irssi” If the screen doesn’t already exist: create a new screen start irssi inside it attach the newly created session Pretty cool isn’t it? https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/03/05/server-migration-please-welcome-storm/ Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2011/03/05/server-migration-please-welcome-storm/ Today I finally moved my blog from my ageing server to a new – blazing fast – Xeon Quad Core aptly called Storm. Some important changes occurred behind the scene; previously the website was running on a simple Apache + mod_php configuration that was overloaded very often, mostly because I’m hosting some high traffic websites. We’ll see how it goes in the upcoming weeks. I still have some other domains and applications to transfer before I can definitely shutdown the old server. https://blog.l0cal.com/2010/02/11/vlmc-schedule-for-the-first-release/ Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2010/02/11/vlmc-schedule-for-the-first-release/ Last weekend during the FOSDEM 2010, we planned to release our first technical preview of VLMC. This version will be tagged as the 0.0.1 and will be made available simultaneously for Windows and Unix. Next steps: February 17th: Feature freeze March 3rd: String freeze March 24th: Release A feature freeze means that no new features will be accepted in the trunk after that date, only bug fixes and improvements of existing features will be merged. https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/12/17/videolan-movie-creator-cross-platform-video-editor/ Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/12/17/videolan-movie-creator-cross-platform-video-editor/ After 9 months of hard work, VideoLAN Movie Creator (aka VLMC) will be unveiled to the community during the VideoLAN Dev’days 2009 in Paris! VLMC is a free, cross-platform, non-linear video editing software based on the famous VLC Media Player. Made by a team of 6 students, the project started in March 2009 as an end of studies project and is now (almost) ready for its first public alpha release. Expected for early 2010, it will provide a new alternative for editing videos on Linux, Windows and even Mac. https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/07/12/create-an-ebook-using-images-on-gnu/linux/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/07/12/create-an-ebook-using-images-on-gnu/linux/ Today, my girlfriend had to create an ebook (in pdf) using some images acquired from a scanner. After searching for a while on google how to do it I ended up on the ImageMagick website and remembered that it was the tool to manipulate images, so I gave it a try and luckily (for me) it worked! After this brief introduction, it’s time to get your hands dirty! Acquire the documents The first step is to scan all of your documents using xsane. https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/07/07/vlc-1.0.0-goldeneye/ Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.l0cal.com/2009/07/07/vlc-1.0.0-goldeneye/ After more than a year of work, the VideoLAN community is proud to announce that VLC 1.0.0 is finally out ! This release has been delayed many times since February (the original release date chosen during the VideoLAN dev’days 2008) but reached its goal today. More stable, tons of new features, this release is definitely the best and most advanced release of VLC ever. Take a look at the impressive changelog, and give it a try!