Weasel Reader had a feature: it would display marks for all the bookmarks in the indicator line. Handy when you're reading a collection of short stories and want to know how much you'll have to read until the next one.

Today I hacked up this feature for FBReader. Get the .deb in the usual place.

FBReader with Table of Contents marks in the position indicator. The book is An Oblique Approach by David Drake and Eric Flint, from the Baen Free Library.

While I was doing that, bzr decided to shake my confidence in it and started throwing assertion errors right and left (no link, the mailing list archive lags horribly).

Nokia kindly gave me a developer discount code for the N800 internet tablet, a few weeks ago. That was a very pleasant surprise. Actually buying the thing was complicated, to put it politely. I finally laid my hands on the device his Monday. Yum, yum!

Changes I like best: extra RAM, speed, storage space. The built-in stand. Position of the headphone and charget sockets. Screen (shinier, not as grainy, although I think it reflects a bit more ambient light than the 770 used to). The ability to reorder status bar icons. New Opera toolbar. Backup application that works without killing all other applications and entering offline mode. New themes. Battery time estimates.

Changes I'm not sure I like: new stylus (too short). Lack of hard case (without it I'm forced to lock the keys when I stuff it into my pocket, but the tiny power button is hard to press). The new shape (it's harder to hold it in my right hand while pressing the down button, which is how I like to read books sometimes). The tearing effects when panning in Opera.

The new Media Player merits a category on its own. It indexes all the media files (songs and videos) in ~/MyDocs and in all memory cards automatically. That's very nice when it works. It's frustrating when it doesn't. There's no way to force reindexing after you shuffle files around manually, and no indication when the automatic reindexing is finished. You just have to wait and hope that it will catch up. Also, sometimes the user interaction is very strange: bug 1056, bug 1063.

Overall, I like it better than the 770.

My sleep schedule is totally out of whack. I cannot sleep before 3 AM (sometimes I stay awake until 7 AM), then I cannot get up before noon.

As a result I have more free time for hacking. Today I tried to play around with Metacity's compositor, with some mixed success. I also built a patched FBReader with a numeric page indicator tweaked to the size and position of my liking (screenshot). Bzr rocks for maintaining branches!

eazysvn also got a facelift today. It is now installable with easy_install.

<rant>
I do not like easy_install. It wants to install stuff into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. That location is reserved for Debian packages. A sensible default would be /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages or, preferably, somewhere in my home directory, with the caveat that I'll have to set up PYTHONPATH myself. You can force easy_install to do more or less what you want, but that involves reading tons of documentation, invoking arcane multi-thousand line scripts, or sacrificing small animals. Not my definition of "easy".
</rant>

Last night I submitted a patch to add a tiny help topic to bzr. Before that, nights were dedicated to zope.testing and pyspacwar.

In the mean time, actual paying work suffers. Karmic retribution for those three 11-and-a-half hour days I spent at work during the first week of January? No, just lack of willpower to force myself to go to sleep (or wake up) early instead of, for example, blogging.

We finished a rather major restructuring of the internals of a system last week at work. I finally got to experimentally test Martin Fowler's refactoring techniques (small steps) on a big change. It was fun and I tended to stay late at work because I wanted to finish what I was working on. I missed that feeling. Oh, and Subversion is good, but merging is a big inconvenience.

During nights I worked on PySpaceWar: added sound effects, support for background music (but didn't look for freely redistributable soundtracks yet), some visual effects, some more configuration options. And once again playing the game became more interesting than coding it. I can beat the computer with 100 kills to its 50-60. I should release a new version soon.

Today I discovered the cause of a long-standing problem of random reboots of my Nokia 770. Turns out FBReader leaks file descriptors, and once the system runs out, some important process crashes and the device reboots. A patch and a fixed .deb are on my FBReader page (of course I also sent the patch upstream).

Meanwhile Nokia released the N800. *drool*. Twice as much RAM, twice as much "disk" space (flash memory, actually), faster CPU, two full-size SD slots, interesting software updates. I want one, but since Nokia only sells them in a few countries, I'll probably have to wait until somebody I know can bring one to me.

A coworker made me a USB power injector for my Nokia 770 (I'm useless with a soldering iron). Here it is in all its glory, next to the tiny USB keyboard I plan to use it with:

Five days later I discover that it doesn't work any more. Actually, it works, but the battery is dead. I left the battery connected to the voltage regulator, and that was enough to drain it.

Wikipedia says that carbon-zinc 9V batteries have a typical capacity of 400 mAh. ThoughtFix measured the circuit power readings at 4.62 mA with both USB ports disconnected. That's enough to drain a 400 mAh battery in 86 hours or 3.6 days. And here I thought it would last for months...

Time to buy a new battery. And this time I'll keep it disconnected when I'm not using it.

The second Maemo Summit is over.

Nokia surprised everyone on the first day by handing out 300 pre-release N900s to the participants. I'm so happy now that after a long period of wavering I finally decided to come to the summit! The device is much better than I expected/feared (and I haven't even put a SIM card in yet). We're supposed to provide feedback and will have to send the devices back to Nokia in 6 months. (Nokia insisted on loan contracts signed in blood, kidding, but there are contracts.)

The tiny pixels are beautiful. It's what, 266 pixels per inch? Even older 225 dpi devices spoiled me: both the first generation iPhone and the first generation Kindle displays seemed very coarse and pixellated.

The user interface is very smooth. Having a composition manager improves apparent responsiveness: even if the app is swapped out and not ready to redraw, switching between windows appears to be instant since the picture is cached. And there's no flicker while the apps are redrawing. (Flickering during redraw is one of the main reasons I did not buy a S60 phone and stayed with good old S40.) Speaking of swapping, it's barely noticeable. You can run more apps than fit in RAM without having to suffer. The flash memory is noticeably faster than in a N810. And there's more of it (32 gigs: 28 gig partition for user data, the rest for the system: swap, applications, config files, etc.)

The design and usability of the user interface have improved a lot since the N810. The UI is pretty. Many of the apps are now convenient to use. Pervasive kinetic scrolling is sweet (except when you have really long lists or web pages, then it takes forever to reach the end).

Finally there are PIM-y things people missed in older Maemo releases: calendaring, contacts that can record all kinds of information (such as phone numbers).

All right, enough gushing. There were some irritating things too. For example, Bluetooth support is buggy/incomplete in the pre-release firmware, so it's hard to transfer files. Calendar/contacts sync with S40 phones does not work either. GPS is utterly useless when you're offline (no maps, or at least I haven't found a way to pre-download and cache them; also very long fix times without network assistance). Since I have no desire to pay extortionist roaming charges of my provider (2.5 EUR per megabyte), and haven't had a chance to go look for a prepaid SIM card, I usually have either WiFi or GPS coverage, but not both.

As you can guess, playing the device diverted a part of my attention from the presentations somewhat. I tried to compensate for that by reporting on the talks on IRC (using xchat on the device). I think the strategy backfired; IRC is rather disruptive and the channel is quite busy lately.

The second Maemo Summit is over.

Nokia surprised everyone on the first day by handing out 300 pre-release N900s to the participants. I'm so happy now that after a long period of wavering I finally decided to come to the summit! The device is much better than I expected/feared (and I haven't even put a SIM card in yet). We're supposed to provide feedback and will have to send the devices back to Nokia in 6 months. (Nokia insisted on loan contracts signed in blood, kidding, but there are contracts.)

The tiny pixels are beautiful. It's what, 266 pixels per inch? Even older 225 dpi devices spoiled me: both the first generation iPhone and the first generation Kindle displays seemed very coarse and pixellated.

The user interface is very smooth. Having a composition manager improves apparent responsiveness: even if the app is swapped out and not ready to redraw, switching between windows appears to be instant since the picture is cached. And there's no flicker while the apps are redrawing. (Flickering during redraw is one of the main reasons I did not buy a S60 phone and stayed with good old S40.) Speaking of swapping, it's barely noticeable. You can run more apps than fit in RAM without having to suffer. The flash memory is noticeably faster than in a N810. And there's more of it (32 gigs: 28 gig partition for user data, the rest for the system: swap, applications, config files, etc.)

The design and usability of the user interface have improved a lot since the N810. The UI is pretty. Many of the apps are now convenient to use. Pervasive kinetic scrolling is sweet (except when you have really long lists or web pages, then it takes forever to reach the end).

Finally there are PIM-y things people missed in older Maemo releases: calendaring, contacts that can record all kinds of information (such as phone numbers).

All right, enough gushing. There were some irritating things too. For example, Bluetooth support is buggy/incomplete in the pre-release firmware, so it's hard to transfer files. Calendar/contacts sync with S40 phones does not work either. GPS is utterly useless when you're offline (no maps, or at least I haven't found a way to pre-download and cache them; also very long fix times without network assistance). Since I have no desire to pay extortionist roaming charges of my provider (2.5 EUR per megabyte), and haven't had a chance to go look for a prepaid SIM card, I usually have either WiFi or GPS coverage, but not both.

As you can guess, playing the device diverted a part of my attention from the presentations somewhat. I tried to compensate for that by reporting on the talks on IRC (using xchat on the device). I think the strategy backfired; IRC is rather disruptive and the channel is quite busy lately.

Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:

• It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually usable on the N800.
• Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very slow.
• It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system starts swapping.
• The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory problems are fixed.
• Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
• It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes the application organizer in the control panel look weird.

JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs) and ended up with 5 megs free.

I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad and my N810 for some reason.

Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, released a new version (beta 1) for the Nokia N8x0 Internet Tablets recently. Here are my first impressions after about 15 minutes of use:

• It supports the virtual on-screen keyboard now, so would be actually usable on the N800.
• Panning the page is very fast! Unfortunately, opening pages is very slow.
• It eats a lot of memory rather quickly and bogs down when the system starts swapping.
• The user interface is going to be awesome, once the speed and memory problems are fixed.
• Going back in history is cumbersome when you have to pan to the side of the page. The hardware back button doesn't seem to work.
• It has a nice large icon, but there's no small version, and this makes the application organizer in the control panel look weird.

JFFS2, which is the file system used for internal flash memory on NITs, compresses all data, which makes free space comparisons weird. I had 5 megs free, freed up 20 more, then installed Fennec (which, the Aplication Manager assured me, required 10 megs) and ended up with 5 megs free.

I'd include a screenshot, but ad-hoc wifi doesn't work between my Thinkpad and my N810 for some reason.

John Siracusa talks sense about e-books (via Charlie Stross):

Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

I like the bit about dedicated e-book reader devices missing the point. I'm a huge e-book fan (reading them almost exclusively since about 2002 on various handheld devices), but even I cannot justify to myself buying a bulky one-purpose piece of electronics for $lots for the sole purpose of reading books. Get something universal, like a Nokia N810 or (if you hate freedom) an iPhone. And stay away from DRM-ed stuff.