Wow!

Its been a long time coming but it looks like Carman, the excellent car OBD-II analyzer for the Maemo platform (from the makers of Canola) is finally being developed again. After 4 months of no messages to the Carman commits mailing list this little gem appeared:

+ * Added support for new Maemo OS2008 (N8xx)

I for one can't wait until the team at Open Bossa integrate Carman, Canola and navigation into one package. From their demonstration at the Brazilian car exposition it seems that this is a proof of concept at somebodies desk already.

The key to solving any problem is straightforward:

1. Identify and characterise the problem
2. Address one after the other the root causes of the problem
3. Evaluate the situation after each change

This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.

The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.

Some examples:

• No, Nokia isn’t all-powerful, and can’t make Google fix Reader so it works better in microb
• Parts of the platform are restricted and can’t easily be replaced with later versions. Let’s get an explanation for that, and talk to the right person to get it fixed. Right now we don’t have the reasoning behind the decision, and that’s what’s missing in characterising the problem
• “Nokia is keeping control of the project” - what are Nokia keeping control of? Let’s identify the list of resources that would be useful to community members, and work, one by one, on seeing if Nokia is actually keeping control of them
• “The N8×0 tablets ship with proprietary components” - my priority is to ensure that you have documentation for everything possible on the tablet, but to me, there are two different things, maemo, the community project, and the N8×0 tablets, which are commercial ventures using maemo [*]

So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.

For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.

My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.

* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this - all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8×0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8×0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.

In this GNOME-Live item I explain how to use GThreadPool for this.

It’s a wiki so if you find any discrepancies in the sample and or text, just correct them. I’m subscribed so I’ll review it that way.

The GNOME-Live item is done in a similar way to the item about using asynchronous DBus bindings and the AsyncWorker item.

The judgement?

"Basically, to learn Unix you learn to understand and apply a small set of key ideas and achieve expertise by expanding both the set of ideas and your ability to apply them - but you learn Windows by working with the functionality available in a specific release."

He goes on to say:

"Put a Solaris guy who’s never used Linux in front of SuSe 10 with a list of complex tasks and [...] he won’t be either intimidated or deterred; and the job will get done because he knows how the tools he needs should work

"In contrast, if you take a guy who’s grown up entirely on Windows 2003/XP and put him in front of a rack of NT 4.0 machines with a similar task list, the chances are good that he [..] won’t get the job done - because NT 4.0 isn’t 2003/XP Server and he’ll end up rationalizing that it simply doesn’t do the things he doesn’t know how to do."

In other words, to be an MCSE you memorize a specific set of functions that you perform to accomplish a particular goal. With Linux, you will more likely need to understand why you perform functions.

My take on this? It validates what I've been saying for years. Most MCSE's I know weren't worth the paper their certificate was printed on and didn't deserve a certification to begin with. Throw them in front of a computer to troubleshoot a problem that wasn't on their test and they spin their wheels for hours before either finally googling an answer or... as I've seen several times in my own (past) employees... screw it up worse.

Give me someone who runs Linux on a home machine, and I guarantee they can troubleshoot any technical problem in both Linux and Windows. Years ago, I stopped hiring based on certificates. One certificate is nice to have, but I weigh a Microsoft Certified Professional equally with an MCSE+I, etc. Just because you had the spare change and the time to memorize hundreds of rote answers doesn't make you a decent technician.

A new version of the Internet Tablet Video Converter has been released to fix bugs, add API support for Python, Perl, and Java, and now support for Mac OS X.

Victor Brilon, Sr. Product Manager, Home Networking Solutions, Convergence Products posted the following at the Nokia Beta Labs Blog:

Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter has been updated and we’re thrilled to bring you this latest version. This latest release includes several major updates, including:

• A version for OS X that’ll run on Tiger and Leopard on Intel and PPC platforms. This is our first release for the OS X platform, so we are eager to hear your feedback on how it could be improved
• The codecs for the Windows version have been updated and hopefully we’ve fixed the bugs that the community has reported to us
• The Developer API has been updated based on user feedback. It now supports Python, Perl, and Java as programming languages to access the API. We’re very interested in seeing what the community can cook up using this feature.

Download here.

Thanks to our great Internet Tablet community, we’ve made some really good changes to this software and we hope you like it as much as we do. Please report any bugs you find at https://bugs.maemo.org.

Thanks,
Victor

Forgotten this blogging thing altogether… well, here goes:

Geoclue 0.11

Geoclue 0.11 was released. I’m fairly satisfied with it and would love
comments from application developers. Some highlights:

• Refined API. Easier to use and includes some nice additions like async-method calls (no more freezing UIs).
• Usable Master provider:
  Geoclue Master provides Address and Position data using the best available geoclue provider. Master may not be industrial quality yet, but it is IMO usable (testing is more than welcome).
  See documentation for usage examples.
• A couple of new providers:
  Gsmloc — uses a cell phone, libgammu and http://gsmloc.org to get a position. No signals though.
  Localnet — uses router MAC address and a local file to get an address. Excellent for often visited places.

Get Geoclue as a tar-ball or via git:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/geoclue

OpenedHand is hiring

Several open positions: We’re looking for people with kernel, OpenEmbedded, GTK+, Clutter, UI design and graphic design skills (not necessarily all in the same person). Take a look.

Guadec 2008

Looks like I will be in Guadec talking about Geoclue! This will be joint operation with Iain and Bergie, and we’ll cover Geoclue, Gypsy and location-aware applications in general. I’m really looking forward to the whole event: I’ve wanted to go for a couple of years, but never really had the chance.

In other news… sorry it’s been a while. I’ve been pretty wrapped up with work and travel. More soon … have a Hava in the house and will have a report to share in the next few days.

Technorati Tags: nokia, maemo, video, conversion