Chronopost Lost Parcel

Chronopost runs an ad to advise you to use their service to send your forgotten keys on your holiday location. I would definitively advise you against using their service for things with value.

Here's why.

(This post will be updated if anything worthwhile happens.)

I ordered some custom tee-shirts online and they were supposed to be delivered through Chronopost.

My order was supposed to be delivered on Friday 19/07/2013 between 9 and 13 at the address I gave for delivery.

On the preceding Thursday I received an email telling me:

"Vous pensez être absent à cette date ? Cliquez ici, avant ce soir minuit, pour programmer une nouvelle date de livraison ou demander une mise à disposition dans un point de proximité.

Sans instruction de votre part, Chronopost vous livrera à la date et à l'adresse indiquée dans ce mail."

So I changed the delivery address to the post office nearest to my work and received a confirmation email:

"L'envoi XW---------FR sera mis à disposition le vendredi 19 juillet 2013 dans le bureau de poste choisi. Un e-mail ou SMS vous avertira dès que le colis sera prêt à être retiré."

At 08:13 the next day, delivery started:

08:13 PARIS BD NEY CHRONOPOST
Envoi en cours de livraison

Then things went down hill..

At 10:59 the next day, the status was changed to delivered!

ven 19/07/2013
10:59 PARIS BD NEY CHRONOPOST
Livraison effectuée Nom du réceptionnaire:michel
ven 19/07/2013

Delivered to Michel ? Who is Michel ? Maybe the post office man ? I was confused but trustful.

Note that I never received a notification (email nor SMS). Strange, but why not.

• I went to the BOINOD post office at 13:00 and they didn't know where the parcel was and told me to come back
• I went to the BOINOD post office again at 16:30 and they told me the parcel was at Blrd Ney, a nearby Chronopost office
• I went to Blrd Ney (had to pay for bus/tram), and 'Olivier' told me the parcel was a BOINOD. And told me to go back and ask them to call him back. It was now over 1815, I didn't trust going back to BOINOD a third time, and I was already late for a meeting so I tried something else.
• I called support multiple times to try to get some information. Unfortunately I got cut multiple times (sometimes after queing for more than 10 minutes) and didn't manage to get more information before the phone service was closed. BTW, the automated voice recognition system is awfull, only picks up my instructions twice out of 14 tries, doesn't allow you to talk directly to a person (you have to spend ~2/3 min talking to their broken voice recognition system first, etc)
• I called support the next day (Saturday) and they told me the parcel was at La Poste Chateau Rouge. As again I had no way to check if the parcel was there without going there (no direct phone number to POST office). I travelled there (with my family...), queued and got told the parcel wasn't there. The person in charge told me she would call me on the Monday to let me know what was going on.
• On Sunday I left France... Goodbye simple way to retrieve my parcel.
• On Monday no one called me...
• On Tuesday I called Chronopost from Norway, and they told me the parcel had been delivered to the original address. That the ability to change the delivery address is only effective after a first failed delivery attempt, contrary to both what the email I received and the information on the web site. They told me the parcel was probably delivered to the building caretaker, while there's no caretaker at the delivery address. They took my phone number (again), and said they would call the next day after talking to the driver
• On Saturday, I called. Apparently they haven't talked with the driver at all. They asked me again for my phone number (3rd or 4th time!). I give up. Chargeback it is!

To summarize: chronopost doesn't deliver where I asked them to deliver, doesn't deliver to whom I asked them to deliver. Also employees understand the system features (delivery address change) in different ways, read the tracking statuses in different ways, are unable to communicate with each other in a timely manner, are unable to keep me updated when they said they would (not even sure they are able to keep track of my contact information).

No wonder they lose parcels.

On top of that, they have no email address for contact. (*)

I wonder if they even try to do things like e.g. Toyota (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way)

(*) a few cross search on Google and I have the CEO, Quality director and Client director emails. Mailing...

Update: my email helped it seems. Someone called me and a week later the parcel was found again. Note that I don't know where it was (neither Chronopost) and the statuses on the tracking page indicate that the parcel was delivered to the BOINOD post office the day after I went there!? And that information never made it into Chronopost's systems until almost 2 weeks after. Fishy...

Find command - find all files excluding some matching one path

Objective: So to list all files in current directory but those under .git.

I am often using find in combination to grep to exclude some of them:

    find . -type f | grep -v .git

but today I needed to move the logic under the find expression. It's a bit confusing to go from one tool to another when regular expressions don't work exactly the same. I spent a while getting this right so here's my findings.

This won't work:

    find . -type f -and -not -path ".git" -print

It should be -path "./.git*"

In other words this will work

    find . -type d -and -name .git -prune -o -print
    find . -type d -and -path "./.git" -prune -o -type f -print
    find . -type f -and -not -path "./.git*" -print

Now I can list all extensions of our project files in one line

    find . -type f -name "*.*" -and -not \( -path "./.git*" -or -path "./Library*" \) -print0 | xargs -0 -L1 basename | sed 's/.*\.//' | sort -u

Useful before starting to update a .gitattributes file.

Livebox2, episode 2

De retour chez mes parents qui ont changé leur Livebox d'Orange, et encore des problèmes de connectivité...

Malheureusement, le mode telnet n'étant plus disponible, les scripts de monitoring que j'avais écrit précédement ne fonctionnent plus...

J'ai jeté un oeil et l'interface de la livebox expose ses donnéees en REST au format JSON. Il serait dont possible de faire un programme qui récupère les données de manière automatique. Ici une preuve de faisabilité en 2 lignes de curl. Aussi sur le gist, une copie du javascript qui tourne sur la boite pour les curieux.

Je devrais pouvoir facilement mettre a jour mon script initial, mais au final celui ci est difficile d'utilisation sur d'autres plateformes.

Je me demande si je ne devrais pas faire un programme plus générique, capable de faire du monitoring des différentes Box ADSL. J'hésite entre une solution nodejs+highcharts ou une solution ruby... Suite au prochain épisode.

Mise à jour: ce projet python ligne de commande permet d automatiser le site speedtest.net en ligne de commande. Pratique.

[...]
Hosted by MEDIACTIVE (Toulouse): 1034.339ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 0.69 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload speed: 0.37 Mbit/s

Lexmark S305 on Ubuntu 11.04 and 12.04 - fixing the packages

My parent's S305 Lexmark printer was sitting unused in the 1.5 years since it had been purchased.

Yes it was compatible with Linux claimed the box, but the installation scripts we had were not working with our Ubuntu 11.04 computer.

Thanks to an update in Lexmark packages, I finally might have something that works.

A year ago, the printer was malfunctionning. Oh yes, you could download the packages from Lexmark's site (lexmark-inkjet-legacy-wJRE-1.0-1.i386.deb.sh), but first you had to edit the installer, and even then the printer was not working on our Ubuntu 1104 computer. The lexmark programs were either crashing, being unresponsive, or going 100%CPU. In the best case, half of the page was printed.

I gave it a last try today, before returning it to the shop (we re patient here).

I found out that Lexmark had new packages, downloaded them (lexmark-inkjet-legacy-1.0-1.i386.deb  lexmark-printer-utility-1.0-2.i386.deb  lexmark-scan-legacy-1.1-1.i386.deb), and installed them (dpkg -i lexmark*.deb)

Alas, the printer utility installer is broken:

Installing %%JARVIS_VENDOR_PREFIX%%hcp backend ...
cp: impossible d'évaluer «/usr/local/lexmark/printer_utility/bin/%%JARVIS_VENDOR_PREFIX%%hcp»: Aucun fichier ou dossier de ce type

You can fix the installer using this script. To install it, run this from the directory where you have downloaded the debs.

wget https://gist.github.com/raw/4374626/e946d2a3ad2e24657ddd32a84f31927970773745/fix_lexmark.sh
chmod +x fix_lexmark.sh
./fix_lexmark.sh
dpkg -i build/lexmark-printer-utility_1.0-1_i386.deb

You will notice that the new package is one revision below the original, that's because the DEBIAN/control in lexmark-printer-utility_1.0-2_i386.deb was invalid I guess...

Now from the first time the printers installs and prints without crashing. Unfortunately my black ink dried, and I get garbage out, but it does exactly the same from my Mac, so I guess it works now. Update as soon as we change the ink...

Lexmark, you still have work to do to claim you support Linux. The quality of those Ubuntu packages is crap.

Merging most of one git branch into another, without history rewrite

This little post explains how to partially commit a feature branch into a stable branch in git, without rewriting the history of any of the branches.

Having worked on a feature branch for a few weeks, I am left with 50+ commits on top of the common ancestor point. Yet I cannot merge all those changes back to stable, as some are still feature branch specific. And the feature branch is public (pushed to a remote repo) and used by our CI server. So I don't really want to rewrite its history.

S1                                (stable)

   \                            

    C1-F1-C2-C3-F2    (feature)

Basically I want to merge into stable C1, C2, C3 but keep F1, F2 in my branch.

So to be able to merge most of my changes into the stable branch, I am going to create an intermediate branch containing the changes I can have.

In effect I will have 3 branches

• the stable branch
• the feature branch
• the stable_feature_common branch: where I keep work in sync between the 2 others.

Here's how I did it.

1. Find the common ancestor between my normal branch and my feature branch

$ git merge-base stable feature
0e43ddd8857fdcff0f50258cde194b6dd2ef26ff

2. find how many changes we had

$ git log --pretty=oneline 0e43ddd8857fdcff0f50258cde194b6dd2ef26ff..HEAD | wc -l
57

3. create a new stable_feature_common branch to contain my changes

$ git checkout -b stable_feature_common 0e43ddd8857fdcff0f50258cde194b6dd2ef26ff

4. take note of the current HEAD of my feature branch

 f19869fd6ef69186bb2e8172833b09521e7aacb5

5. create a rebased copy of my feature branch into my common branch.

$ git rebase --onto stable_feature_common stable_feature_common feature

When using git rebase --onto 1 2 3, git rebase all changes between 2 and 3 onto 1. As consequence of this operation, 3 becomes the new 1. In my case, the resulting work is referenced as feature. We will have to rename it.

Note the new HEAD of the feature branch (for the future feature_common branch)

697176ed7370099a9e559b6c82f3ac12caa36d47

6. force the feature branch reference back to where it was

$ git checkout stable_feature
$ git reset --hard f19869f

7. force the feature_common branch reference

$ git branch -f stable_metro_common 697176ed7370099a9e559b6c82f3ac12caa36d47

Now feature_stable_common and feature are identical code wise (but with different commit ids and istory caused by the rebase). I am going to edit feature_stable_common since the branch point commit and remove/edit the things I need only in that branch.

$ git checkout stable_feature_common
$ git branch -i 0e43ddd8857fdcff0f50258cde194b6dd2ef26ff

[lots of editing/commiting]

8. merge feature_stable_common into feature and stable (to easily track future changes)

$ git checkout stable_feature
$ git merge stable_feature_common

$ git checkout stable
$ git merge stable_feature_common

I now have

S1                     S2           (stable)

  \                      /

    C1´-C2´-C3´                (stable_feature_common)

   \                        \

    C1-F1-C2-C3-F2-M    (feature)

C1´, C2´, C3´ are rebased and potentially edited versions of C1, C2 and C3

S2 is my merged common into stable

M is my merged common into feature

This should allow me to track the future commits and merge them back properly.

Some links I've found entertaining:

• http://pivotallabs.com/users/khicks/blog/articles/2118-git-rebase-onto
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5343477/git-how-do-i-do-a-partial-merge-from-one-branch-to-another-one

JUC Paris, Unity3d build pipeline talk slides

A few days ago I was in Paris at the Jenkins User Conference where I hold a talk on how we use jenkins to power our unity3d build pipeline. This can serve as entry point to someone who wants to do CI using that platform.

You can find the slides from the talk in this PDF.

If you wish more editing options or more Unity3d material, this zip file contains the original LibreOffice slides and attachments. The original presentation contain a few hidden slides that are a bit Unity3d specific and didn't deserve to be shown to a Jenkins user audience.

As for the tools used or created to support the pipeline, here are the relevant links:

• Jenkins Unity3d plugin
• Jenkins Xcode plugin
• Ruby Apploosa Client
• IOS provisionning profiles

Feel free to edit / reuse / etc. The slides theme and sponsor logos aren't (obviously) mine.

Unity3d and custom AndroidManifest.xml: post processing when pre-processing doesn't work

In our Unity3d project, we need a custom AndroidManifest.xml. Our first use was to increase the build number. This is required so that our files can be deployed to appaloosa-store. Like testflight the store requires new versions to have an increased version number.