Dear Mark,

Your team and you yourself are working on the Jolla Phone. I’m sure that you guys are doing a great job and although I think you’ve been generating hype and vaporware until we can actually buy the damn thing, I entrust you with leading them.

As their leader you should, I would like to, allow them to provide us with all of the device’s source code and build environments of their projects so that we can have the exact same binaries. With exactly the same I mean that it should be possible to use MD5 checksums. I’m sure you know what that means and you and I know that your team knows how to provide geeks like me with this. I worked with some of them together during Nokia’s Harmattan and Fremantle and we both know that you can easily identify who can make this happen.

The reason why is simple: I want Europe to develop a secure phone similar to how, among other open source projects, the Linux kernel can be trusted. By peer review of the source code.

Kind regards,

A former Harmattan developer who worked on a component of the Nokia N9 that stores the vast majority of user’s privacy.

ps. I also think that you should reunite Europe’s finest software developers and secure the funds to make this workable. But that’s another discussion which I’m eager to help you with.

(Or why our project’s name wasn’t wrong after all)

As I got contacted by two different companies last few days who both had questions about integrating Tracker into their device, I started thinking that perhaps I should illustrate what Tracker can already do today.

Recapping from my last blog article; I worked a bit on this concept during the weekend.

Hey former Harmattan peeps. How about we do a little bit of this Jolla stuff after our hours and see where it goes? You never know, and neither have any of the technologies and improvements that we did for Nokia harmed us. It’s at #jollamobile on FreeNode. Btw. Ping me if you are going to FOSDEM. Maybe we can discuss how we can revive some of our Harmattan projects? Personally, I’m thinking about reducing the role of Tracker’s FS miner in Jolla by first refactoring libtracker-extract and adapting buteo to call for metadata extraction instead of letting miner-fs pick the newly added files up. Dead to file system monitoring on phones!

At the same time I’m also working with Calligra a lot lately. Which is by the way awesome stuff. Can’t choose.

Hey Aaron. I mostly agree with your post. I don’t fully agree, however, with “We needed Android because we couldn’t do it ourselves”:

Mostly Qt (and also KDE) developers, and some GNOME developers who where still left developing for Nokia since the N900 and earlier, made the Nokia N9 Swipe phone. Technically the product is a success; look at the N9′s reviews to verify that. Marketing-wise it’s sort of a failure due to, in my humble opinion, a CEO switch at the wrong time and because he didn’t have enough time to learn how good the phone actually was. But even without much marketing, the product is being sold as we speak.

I do agree if you mean with your blog post that for example the N9 happened thanks to local leadership. The leadership that made it happen was employed at Nokia though, and not really a person in either the Qt or the GNOME camp. Rather a group of passionate leadership-taking people at Nokia.

It might have contributed that these technical leaders didn’t see how strong they could have been together during the CEO switch, at the time when Ari Jaaksi left Nokia as soon as Stephen Elop’s plans became clear. I’m not sure.

I think what we can learn from the episode is to put more trust in the person, and the leadership-taking people, who lead the next product developed the way the N9 was developed. Give those people more time onstage at open source conferences.

I’m also sick and tired of Free Software being inefficient and self-destructive due to internal schism. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not working much on Free Software nowadays. As I’m not much of a leader myself, I silently hope some local leader would change this. Maybe somebody at Digia? Jolla? If I can help, let me know.

Up early to follow EDL of Curiosity. Follow it live here. Go NASA!

Edit ‘We are on Mars again. Photo of a wheel and a shadow of the rover’:

I’ll focus on the technical stuff; I think I would only Peter Principle myself if I would try giving management advice.

What I’ve seen too much are community projects, companies or groups who think that the synchronization of Harmattan with Moblin or MeeGo was done well to make what is now the OS on the N9. Luckily is Jolla hiring Harmattan staff, so they understand the situation.

For me it was always clear that “MeeGo” was a more or less failed PR thing between Intel and Nokia. By the time the N9 was first released wasn’t Harmattan synchronized with Moblin or MeeGo technically very much. And after several updates of Harmattan it still isn’t.

The situation on the N9 now is an OS that has relatively few technical resemblance with “MeeGo”. For me is N9′s software Harmattan or Maemo 6. It’s the continuation of the software on the N900: Maemo 5 or Fremantle (after ~ two or three rather big rewrites, that much is true). That the rewrites happened doesn’t mean that during those rewrites Harmattan suddenly became MeeGo. MeeGo is, in other words, a different platform.

A successful project will have to work with what Harmattan is, and not try to replace it with what MeeGo is today. If they do want to end up with “MeeGo” on an N9 they will have to progressively improve Harmattan towards that goal by for example asking Nokia to open closed components, by developing fixes for softwares that are already open source (a lot are), by repackaging them and by explaining N9 owners how to add a repository and how to upgrade their phone safely.

I understand the idea isn’t to deploy on an N9, but if you want a new phone or device that resembles what the N9 is; the N9′s software is in my opinion not MeeGo but Harmattan. Rewrites have happened too often already. It’s my opinion that yet another rewrite of Harmattan isn’t a good idea at all.

For example replacing the Debian package management system with RPM doesn’t sound like a viable option to me at all. Nor is replacing any of the major middleware really doable within the timeframe you’d have to deliver to be relevant.

Instead software project per software project improve the phone’s OS. Kinda like how Ximian did Red Carpet many years ago (which also supported multiple package management systems).

No more big rewrites, no more starting from scratch. No more politics about how it should have been done. Start with the platform as it is. There are reasons why the OS is good, and among the reasons is that good middleware choices and compromises were made.

Kind regards, good luck.

Tired of the fact that my N9 had few battery time I decided to “as a developer” investigate my device a little bit. Last time I did that I was still contracted by Nokia and a few days later I had to fly to Helsinki to help fix a Tracker in combination with contactsd bug. I’m btw. no longer working for Nokia since a few months. So this time I can’t fix it for everyone. Lemme write it here instead.

It’s pretty funny what is going on: I installed Battery-Icon at some point. The software is writing periodically to /usr/share/applications/battery-icon.desktop. Having been a developer at Nokia for the metadata subsystem I know that tracker-miner-fs will reindex .desktop files that change. You don’t really need to be a developer to know that: Tracker’s FS miner is, among other things, responsible for keeping up to date a list of known applications.

Because of Battery-Icon, which people are probably installing to monitor their battery, tracker-miner-fs wakes up to update the metadata. That in turn wakes up tracker-store to store the metadata. That in turn wakes up smartsearch which will fetch from Tracker some textual data. All three will consume power periodically because of this .desktop file write trigger. I’m guessing the power consumption is triggering Battery-Icon to update the .desktop file. And circular power consumption was born.

I guess I should file a bug on Battery-Icon and tell its author to update the .desktop file less often. I think he could  for example wait ten minutes before doing that write. Or is the user really interested in accurate battery information each and every second? Looks like Battery-Icon is even writing to the file more frequent every hour. Interesting behavior for a tool monitoring battery to do things in a way that influences power consumption significantly.

Btw, while it’s not fixed: devel-su (enable developer mode, install terminal and password for devel-su is rootme) on your N9 and chmod -x /usr/bin/smartsearch, reboot, then uninstall Battery-Icon and your battery will last longer. I know the guys who were or are on the smartsearch team are going to hate me for that advice. Sorry guys.

At Tracker (core component of Nokia N9‘s MeeGo Harmattan’s Content Framework) we extract album art out of music files like MP3s, and we do a heuristic scan in the same directory of the music files for files like cover.jpg.

Right now we use the media art storage spec which we at a Boston Summit a few years ago, together with the Banshee guys, came up with. This specification allows for artist + album media art.

This is a bit problematic now on the N9 because (embedded) album art is getting increasingly bigger. We’ve seen music stores with album art of up to 2MB. The storage space for this kind of data isn’t unlimited on the device. In particular is it a problem that for an album with say 20 songs by 20 different artists, with each having embedded album art, 20 times the same album art is stored. Just each time for a different artist-album combination.

To fix this we’re working on a solution that compares the MD5 of the image data of the file album-md5(space)-md5(album).jpg with the MD5 of the image data of the file album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg. If the contents are the same we will make a symlink from the latter to the former instead of creating a normal new album art file.

When none exist yet, we first make album-md5(space)-md5(album).jpg and then symlink album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg to it. And when the contents aren’t the same we create a normal file called album-md5(artist)-md5(album).jpg.

Consumers of the album art can now choose between using a space for artist if they are only interested in ‘just album’ album art, or filling in both artist and album for artist-album album art.

This is a first idea to solve this issue, we have some other ideas in mind for in case this solution comes with unexpected problems.

I usually blog about unfinished stuff. Also this time. You can find the work in progress here.