Next Wednesday I will be attending the Automotive Linux Summit 2012.

It will be a good time to meet the key people pushing the usage of Linux in the automotive arena and I hope to have a great time at the Heritage Motor Centre in Warwickshire.

If you happen to attend the event and want to have a good chat with an Igalian about any of the technologies in which we are strongly involved: WebKit, rendering, compilers, Grilo, GStreamer, the kernel, Qemu, Yocto, OSTree, Skeltrack, OpenCV, a11y, Qt, Gtk+ and so on. Just poke me whenever you see me around

After a very pleasant experience in Finland (Tampere), I’ve finally come back to Italy. I had the opportunity to work for three months in Nokia as “Qt Expert” in “Nokia Developer Forum” and it’s been an amazing job!

To be more precise I left Finland on August 31th, but I didn’t have much time to blog about this. Finally I can use my desktop PC again and I’m not anymore limited to my small netbook. Trust me… spending 3 months with a 11” netbook and pretending to work normally is really frustrating.

Now I have more spare time (too much :\ ) to contribute to Ubuntu and to play with some new technologies: I’m working on a project that uses Arduino, Android and some “robotic” parts, with people of Pistoia Linux User Group and it’s really an amazing learning experience!

Talking about Ubuntu, if you have never contributed to it and you would like to start with something easy, I suggest you this interesting initiative https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/BugFixingInitiative

In the mean time I’m also looking for new opportunities and challenges (aka = looking for a new job), so if you think you may be interested in me, take a couple of minutes to give a look to my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreagrandi

I will attend next UDS in Copenaghen (99% sure) and I already have a couple of topics I would like to work with, but I will talk about these later, first I want to properly create a blueprint in Launchpad so we will have a starting point.

Overview

Erudite makes it possible to use Amazonâ€s Cloud Reader service under MeeGo. You can either read books online, or download them for reading offline. Your progress in a book is kept synchronised between your N9 and other Kindle devices.

Name change

Unfortunately since Amazon own a wide range of “Fire” themed trademarks, and the application’s operation is heavily related to the same areas that these trademarks are used in, Amazon couldn’t really let me carry on using the name “Firestarter”. It was entirely my own foolishness that caused this hassle by going for a “clever” name without even considering the potential trademark implications, thankfully the lawyer who got in touch with me was very understanding and patiently helped me work through the various issues. I’m just glad that Amazon handled everything so amicably, rather than wading in with heavy-handed legal threats as some companies might.

So from now on the application is called “Erudite”, a name that’s clever in a different way.

New features

Added in 1.2:

• The application name has now changed to Erudite.
• A number of buttons and menu entries have been made larger and easier to press.
• You can now switch in to and out of fullscreen mode by pressing a toggle button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

Added in 1.1:

• The application can now start up completely offline. You still need to be online for the very first usage and to download books, but once you’ve downloaded some books you can now always access them offline.
• A progress indicator shows when the application is loading.
• Keyboard bug is fixed. Previously you needed to tap on text fields twice to bring up the virtual keyboard, now it pops up on the first tap.

Download

Available for the Nokia N9 and N950 in the Ovi Store: http://store.ovi.com/content/307241

Looking for a business development manager.
Just go to  http://careers.us.samsung.com. And use the information bellow to look for the position:
- Post title : Business Development Manager
- Company : SISA
- Location : San Jose, California

This is quite an important position to substain/steer our research and development from the business point of view. You need to have imagination and you need to know the silicon valley ecosystem.
Send me your application by mail.
Please forward this blog post or retweet if you know about somebody who might be interested

It’s that time of the year again where we have a look at what happened in the project in the last 6 months. In mere weeks it will be released with the shiny GNOME 3.6 (best.release.ever), but since release notes don’t write themselves here’s a sneak preview of all the new toys in Web-land.

Front Page

Upcoming Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation board member elections

Craig Woodward, current chair of the Community Council, has announced that the council will be curtailing their term (slightly) to have an election

"While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time. [...] This year there are two elections to be run in parallel."

"COUNCIL MEMBERS - The council is a body of volunteers taken from the Maemo community that acts as a focal point for the community. [...] The role of Council will continue to be as it was before, as a group to work with the Community, and act as a focal point for communication with group in charge of services needed by the community to continue, whomever that turns out to be."

"BOARD MEMBERS- Due to Nokia's state, its funding for maemo.org in 2013 is uncertain. The community is working on bylaws for a new legal entity (currently with the working title “Hildon Foundation”) that can legally inherit the domain name or have donations (monetary, hardware and/or data) from Nokia."

Obviously both elected groups will have to work closely together, and the creation of the "Hildon Foundation" will fundamentally change the nature of maemo.org. They are, therefore, crucial elections to follow and participate in (whether by questioning candidates, nominating people, standing yourself, or just plain voting).

Nominations open from next Saturday (15th September) and run for two weeks.

There is more discussion on the TMO thread linked to from the bottom of the blog post.

Read more (maemo.org)

Videos and slides from Devaamo Hack Day

Videos of the presentations given at the weekend's Devaamo "Hack Day" have been posted. The event had

"The response on Twitter was positive, so those with interest in seeing more about Mer, Nemo Mobile or Jolla should watch."

Read more (devaamo.fi)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Upcoming Maemo Community Council and Hildon Foundation board member elections
   • Videos and slides from Devaamo Hack Day
2. Applications
   • Easy Chroot/Debian for Harmattan
3. Development
   • Setting up a development target for Nemo Mobile and Mer development
   • Assistance available for those interested in porting Qt apps to BlackBerry & BB10
4. Community
   • Meeting between Nemein and Community Council about maemo.org handover
5. Devices
   • Leaked Nokia "Lauta" shows keyboarded version of N9 - i.e. production version of N950
6. In the Wild
   • "Unique" Lumia apps already existed in MeeGo
   • Nokia apologise for "confusion" caused by new adverts being "not shot with a Lumia 920"

While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time.

While it's been just over 5 months, the current Council feels that due to timing considerations the next Community Council elections are due at this time.
This election will be a very special one, considering the state of Maemo and Nokia and how things have unfolded over the past few months.

In an effort to increase transparency and access for the community, Council holds public meetings each Friday at 18:00UTC. This was an specific meeting with Nemein about infrastructure.

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs) at 15:00 UTC

Attending:  SD69, X-Fade, merlin1991, ivgalvez

 

Summary:

## Transference of administration to volunteers.

Merlin1991 was granted with some administrative rights on repositories (delete and promote applications), however it's not yet working correctly. X-Fade will dig into it.
We have also requested to add more administration permissions and more people to the working group. Next meeting will take place at same time next week.

## Current needs for voting system

- Council elections might take place beginning October, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.
- By-laws approval might take place beginning October at the same time than Council election, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.
- Coding Competition will need voting mechanism by mid September, we'll need X-Fade support to setup voting process.

## Situation of servers and contracts

- Council will talk to Henri, from Nemein, to know the required budget for hosting Maemo services.

- New Council, if by laws are approved should decide about keeping servers with Nemein by end October, so a proper decision about continuing with Nemein will be ready beginning November.

- Servers are paid by Nokia until the end of December so contract could be transferred to legal entity in the beginning of November.

- If decided, migration could begin in November, to avoid getting too close to December and holidays.

 

Next meeting with X-Fade will be held #maemo-meeting next Friday September, 7th 15:00 UTC

Front Page

Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation

Last week Quim Gil announced he will be leaving from Nokia after more than five years with the company and joining the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation: "There I will help improving the volume and quality of community contributions in technical areas like QA, sysadmin and development of features for Wikipedia and related projects. I don’t need to tell you how excited (and impatient) I am about diving into such massive and complex project full of openness and freedom."

Quim has been a fantastic link between Nokia and the Maemo community, by being *part* of the community. It's been a real pleasure to work with him over the years - including the exciting times when Maemo/MeeGo was Nokia's future. We wish him well, and poignantly stop to think what could have been.

Read more (flors.wordpress.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Quim Gil leaving Nokia, joining Wikimedia Foundation
2. Development
   • Last week of the maemo.org coding competition
   • Reverse engineered open source version of N900 virtual keyboard
   • Lipstick-powered Maemo 5-style homescreens for Nemo Mobile
3. Devices
   • New Nemo Mobile release for N900, N950, N9 and x86
   • Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean - alpha release for N9
   • Leaked details of RM-581 - the N8-like Harmattan device from 2009
4. Announcements
   • Mini-web server for wifi transfers updated for N900 and N9

Another project that has been on the back burner for a while is the new NumptyPhysics port to Harmattan ("new" because Aapo has ported it once before). One of the most important bug fixes (avoiding the multi-touch drawing error) has been committed a month ago, and

So, this weekend, Numpty Physics 0.3.3 has been released. This version includes some basic Harmattan integration work (single-instance, swipe lock integration, pause-in-background, squircle-style icon by flopjoke, ...) that will - hopefully - allow the application to also go into Nokia Store as free app (as Apps For MeeGo is still down).

NumptyPhysics is available as download on Github, or you can wait until it gets approved by Nokia Store QA and install it via the client. It's yet another project that used the shared "harmattan" organization on Github: https://github.com/harmattan/numptyphysics - feel free to improve the code and send pull requests :) Also, please report any integration issues or minor things that could be improved for Harmattan integration on the bug tracker.