Daniel Veillard

French coder in Grenoble, France

I am trying to keep a diary on advogato

In any legal system that you take seriously, coerced judgments are considered invalid, but in the international affairs conducted by the powerful, coerced judgments are fine - they are called diplomacy.
       Noam Chomsky, March 21 2003

Your lips move, but I can't hear what you say.
       Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb, The Wall

I am working for Red Hat, and used to work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). I'm based in Grenoble France and working primarily on RedHat Network and XML especially libxml2/libxslt maintenance. This page used to be hosted on rpmfind.net a rather large Linux FTP/Web server, this keeps me busy but this is fun too. The key points of my involvement in the Linux and Free software world are as follow:

• Involvement in Linux
• Writing code
• Maintaining public services
• Gnome foundation
• XML standardization
• Public talks and presentations
• Teaching and education

I usually help anybody willing to reuse my code, I also made the software licence for the code I produce friendly to the computer industry as a whole, and in general do as much as I can to promote and help the use of Open Source Software. However based on the fight against the extension of software patents in Europe, some companies clearly took side against the development of Open Source Software, and as a result I will not help those (ab)use Open Source projects code.

Involvement in Linux:

I use Linux on a regular basis (this server runs on a Linux box) and try to promote the use of this excellent and free Unix reimplementation. I am somewhat proud of having started using Linux in it's very early stage (0.12). Following the growth of this free software project was amazing and still make me dream of a better (computing) world. Working for Red Hat allows me to fullfill both my Linux advocacy needs and being paid to work on (mostly) Linux free software. You can find a recent release of my software for various Red Hat operating systems on the Red Hat People server.

Writing code:

I try as much as possible to develop only free software but I'm rather agnostic about how it's called and I appreciate loose licences like the MIT Licence:

• An XML parser <-> document tree written in pure C (no lex/yacc) initially used to validate WebDav spec examples.. It has been integrated in GNOME and I'm still trying to improve it and add a DOM interface. Among the functionnalities available are SAX, DOM, validation, external entities support, XPath, XPointer, HTML support, etc... While developped and mainly used under Linux, it should be fairly portable.You can find RPMs, it's called libxml2, or you can download the source archive. There is copy of the documenatation on-line, and a mailing-list with archives (old ones). The autogenerated (through gtk-doc + jade) docs are available on-line too.
• An XSLT processor, based on libxml2 and written in C too, it is complete now, relatively fast and conformant.
• I have written mostly complete Python wrappers for libxml and libxslt, althrough they would still need a bit of glue to give them a more mative Python feeeling those should be pretty stable and maintain the speed advantage of the underlying C libraries.
• rpm2html : extract meta-informations from RPM software packages and dump it to HTML pages.
• rpmfind : a tool using metadata to allow the automatic lookup/upgrade and download of RPM packages. Uses XML, RDF and HTTP for the data exchanges. Rpmfind and rpm2html are included in the RedHat distribution :-)
• For memory debugging of C code, I rely on the memory wrapper of libxml2 and valgrind for heavy duty memory corruption checking and debugging.
• For general purpose editing I use VIm, the VI syntax is really hard but fast and now so deeply engraved in my typing habbits I don't think I would be able to switch.
• I got the crazy idea (some time ago) that an HTTP filesystem for linux could be a good idea. Once WebDav is widely available (i.e. as soon as it will be a "default" Apache module) this will be simple. Well it seems this time is coming, apache-2.0 embedd Greg Stein mod_dav module by default and at the UI level it seems that the Gnome graphical shell Nautilus has WebDav support and will be able to handle the filesystem metadata !

Maintaining public services:

• An old project is a Linux package metadata project, read the small introduction for this project. This turned to be larger than expected, see rpmfind .
• I maintain the machines rpmfind.net (MIT), fr.rpmfind.net (France), speakeasy.rpmfind.net (Seattle), all serious network hog, and also extremely harsh testbed for linux kernels (especially IDE and network support). They also serve as prime example of new Linux technologies like the Ext3 journaling filesystem and the TUX kernel based FTP/HTTP server.
• If you maintain linux servers remotely, a watchdog is a good thing to have, this one is cheap, I use it in rpmfind.net and wrote a small daemon for it
• Also one of the nightmare of a remote sysadmin is a server hung due to a failing fsck that's the reason why I use Ext3.

Gnome foundation:

• I serve on the board of the GNOME Foundation, elected in 2000, re-elected in 2001 and 2002.
• You can see my candidacy statement on-line
• You can read more about me from a GNOME perspective in the on-line interview done by Steve George for the GNOME web site.

XML standardization:

• I used to be co-chair of the XML Linking working group and worked to get XPointer, XML Base and XLink specifications finished, succeeded for XLink and XML Base, but not XPointer.
• I am still part of the W3C XML Core Working Group as Invited Expert, mostly due to my work on libxml2 and my knowledge of the W3C background and process.

Public talks and presentations:

• I maintain here the copy of some Talks I gave, here is a more complete references of Talks given at W3C, and the slidemaker tool used to generate those
• For HTML authoring I use the following:
  • amaya (RPMs) to edit pages, vim when I want ot make large changes or use macros
  • the W3C validator to check that the HTML is valid and has no broken links
  • the W3C slidemaker tool (documentation) to quickly make slides when I have a presentation to do

You can find here some of the talks I gave in the last few years (using the W3C slidemaker tool):

• Seconde presentation sur la virtualisation sous Linux au tutoriel JRES/ séminaire Aristote, Mars 2008
• Presentation sur les contributions de Red Hat a l'Open Source a Solution Linux 2008
• Presentation sur la virtualisation sous Linux a Solution Linux 2008
• Presentation sur la virtualisation Xen a Solution Linux 2007
• FUDconII at LinuxTag 2005: Xen: OS virtualization in Fedora the current state of Xen in Fedora Core 4 and background informations.
• FOSDEM 2005: The Gamin Library a 5mn speed talk on gamin.
• FOSDEM 2005: Libxml and Libxslt: current status and future work the state of the XML libraries.
• Solution Linux 2005: Avantages du bureau Linux a talk in french on why a desktop on Linux makes sense.
• ENSIMAG 2004: Logiciels libre: une perspective industrielle a talk in french about free software use in the industry
• FOSDEM 2004: libxml and libxslt, a small presentation to in the KDE room.
• Solution Linux 2004: GNOME Project Overview, a 50,000 feet presentation of the GNOME project in French and targetted at the trade show audience, talk given on Novell, IBM and Red Hat booths.
• EuroPython 2003: libxml and libxslt python bindings: from the XML specs to running code, a reduced version of the Xerox presentation with more focus on Python bindings
• GUADEC-4 June 2003: update on libxml2 and libxslti status with a focus on the new Reader interface and the Relax-NG validation.
• Talk at Xerox: Libxml: from the XML specs to running code, general presentation about libxml2 and libxslt with a number of (Python) examples
• Keynote at XML Europe 2003 : overview of XML usage within the Open Source community
• O'Reilly Open Source Conference 2002 : talk on libxml2 and libxslt and lessons learnt in the process
• GUADEC-3 April 2002: talk on libxml2 and libxslt
• GUADEC-2 April 2001: talk on libxml2 and libxslt
• A presentation in french on XML and related specification
• Presentation of XML Linking WG work: Talk on XLink, XPointer and XML Base
• a presentation on RPM, rpm2html and rpmfind
• Libre Software Meeting: packaging formats
• Journees du Libre: another libxml2 presentation
• XML'99 december: 2 presentations focusing on XLink and XPointer
• A short presentation on libxml at WWW9
• A presentation of W3C open source software at WWW9
• A Jigsaw presentation at WWW7 in 98
• An Amaya presentation back in 97

Teaching and education:

I used to help manage a student project (wich consists of building a realtime systeme on bare PCs -- this used to be MVME 162 Motorola cards) at the ENSIMAG in collaboration with Bernard Cassagne (Bernard.Cassagne@imag.fr). I obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Grenoble. The dissertation was about the design and the implementation of a portable and efficient multicast protocol for Ethernet LANs. I used to work on Amaya especially CSS support and Amaya-Java.

I enjoy playing badminton, cooking and writing code, as well as sailing and snorkeling when I have the opportunity ! I have a fantastic cat.

My public key for "Daniel Veillard <Daniel.Veillard@w3.org>"

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