Mini Interview - François Revol

Thursday, 17 September 2009 06:03

François recently won our August Thank You Award. Like all winners, we asked him a few questions with regards to his activity in the Haiku community:

Q1: How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

30

I've worked some years ago for yellowTAB before it went under, since then I've been working on some opensource projects for a local company, first a Java based "Enterprise Resource Planning"(ERP), then some PHP website for a change, and I'll hopefully start doing a Ph.D this year.

Q2: In your nomination, it said you: "Organized Haiku's presenceonce more at the RMLL conference and there educated other free software enthusiasts about Haiku in general and for his work on the port to the ARM platform especially." How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks?

Well the RMLL is really fun to participate in, but a whole week manning a booth is exhausting, so the first step is to make sure you're not alone, so you can also see what others are doing. Then some mails to ask for one and hopefully get it. Plus this year I was allocated two slots for conferences, one about the Community transition from BeOS to Haiku, the other one about the ARM port, which takes some time to prepare even more when you don't have anything visual to show, but I've become aquainted with the process :) You also have to endure repeating yourself (No, Haiku is not GNU/Linux...).

As for the ARM port, well I mostly mentored someone else to do it, so I'm not the first one to thank. Still, it takes some time to make sure things go the right direction, information is found fast enough, and make people feel integrated with the team.

Q3: What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

More time :P

More specifications available from hardware vendors would be nice too, though most are finally getting the point. You can help by asking for them when you buy something, it might eventually get them understand that hardware must come with the manuals.

My laptop is a bit old but still doing the job, hopefully I'll make the switch soon and it'll build faster than under ZETA. Though, I might resume working on the webcam driver someday, so if anyone wants his webcam supported maybe we could make a poll to pick up the most wanted. Currently it supports Sonix-based webcams (very cheap), like the ' Macally Icecam1' (not so cheap for what it's worth though, but at least it should work in R1/alpha), and Ithamar Adema started adding USB Video Class support, but I can't help him there as I don't have any UVC model yet.

Also, I miss a good PIM application I could synchronize a smartphone with so I could handle my agenda from within Haiku... (3rd party opportunity!)

Q4: What interesting book, band, TV show etc. would you like to recommend?

I've grown fond of Dr Who that I discovered recently with the new series.

As for french stuff, ugh, well... oh yes, the french national assembly debates are really top-level soaps, we've seen it recently again with HADOPI2... There is a live stream, and records of the HADOPI debate somewhere, sadly no english subs yet. :D

Also, I invite anyone close to Tain l'hermitage in november to pass by and say hello at the Alchimie demo party, I should be demoing R1/alpha here.