A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-10-03 through 2011-10-09
Planet maemo
Declaring MMPC unsupported, nearly deathlike
Quite surprised by receiving yet another feature request about the Maemo Music Player Client for the Maemo platform. I always got some mails here and then, but didn't receive one in quite a while. But just that everybody knows:
I hereby declare MMPC officially unsupported, not to say dead, stone-dead in particular.
Nevertheless, it's nice to hear that the project still has (at least a few) users, so that I can say it has been a success after all.
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Have you ever seen meedieval castle with lots of potraits hanging around? Every single one reminds of great man, someone who did something really significant for country, region or family. Today let’s focus on some other portrait, the one related to our favourite phone, Nokia N900.
Portrait dashboard is something we could already see after previous [...]
Last week from 29-Sep to 01-Oct we had the amazing 7th PythonBrasil conference, for the first time in São Paulo.
Since I’ve start to use Python in 2002 I loved the language, but after getting introduced to the PythonBrasil community in 2004 I’ve boosted my development skills, got some friends and even my first job (INdT-Recife) was a kind recommendation from Osvaldo Santana in 2005.
By 2005 we had the 1st PythonBrasil Conference, then called PyConBrasil, here in Campinas with the help of UNICAMP and our amazing non-stop contributor Rodrigo Senra. It was very cool, I even presented a talk there… and it motivated me to go to following conferences in 2006 and 2007 as well.
However if starting to work at INdT reduced my spare time since late 2006, after ProFUSION was born in 2008 I had no time to participate in the lists or even go to conferences. What a shame!
I couldn’t see how shameful it was until I did this PythonBrasil in 2011. I’ m yet to see a conference with so kind people. People still remembered me and I was ashamed when I couldn’t remind their names… although they did remember mine (NOTE TO CONFERENCE: bigger names next year!) Some would even let me know they still use Eagle-Py, something that I already forgot about. And people I had closer contact before were willing to talk as if we had met last week. Amazing.
During these talks I’ve catch up with Rodrigo Senra, Luciano, Osvaldo, Erico, Marco André, Sidnei, Fernando and many more I couldn’t remember. However one of the talks was very special: talked to Gustavo Niemeyer about Go programming language. That’s right, people were so kind and open we had a keynote about Go, and we talked a lot afterwards without problems! 
Gustavo showed me some nice details about the language and my mind is now burning! I must do Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) + Go = EGO, a perfect GUI tool.
But I was of use… not just a leecher! I went there to present 3 talks (slides in Portuguese!):
- Tudo que você sempre quis saber sobre Bindings
- Python em sistemas embarcados: Sim ou Não?
- Canvas-2D extremamente rápido usando EFL
Last but not least, I’d like to thank everyone that did this amazing conference possible!
Last week from 29-Sep to 01-Oct we had the amazing 7th PythonBrasil conference, for the first time in São Paulo.
Since I've start to use Python in 2002 I loved the language, but after getting introduced to the PythonBrasil community in 2004 I've boosted my development skills, got some friends and even my first job (INdT-Recife) was a kind recommendation from Osvaldo Santana in 2005.
By 2005 we had the 1st PythonBrasil Conference, then called PyConBrasil, here in Campinas with the help of UNICAMP and our amazing non-stop contributor Rodrigo Senra. It was very cool, I even presented a talk there... and it motivated me to go to following conferences in 2006 and 2007 as well.
However if starting to work at INdT reduced my spare time since late 2006, after ProFUSION was born in 2008 I had no time to participate in the lists or even go to conferences. What a shame!
I couldn't see how shameful it was until I did this PythonBrasil in 2011. I' m yet to see a conference with so kind people. People still remembered me and I was ashamed when I couldn't remind their names... although they did remember mine (NOTE TO CONFERENCE: bigger names next year!) Some would even let me know they still use Eagle-Py, something that I already forgot about. And people I had closer contact before were willing to talk as if we had met last week. Amazing.
During these talks I've catch up with Rodrigo Senra, Luciano, Osvaldo, Erico, Marco André, Sidnei, Fernando and many more I couldn't remember. However one of the talks was very special: talked to Gustavo Niemeyer about Go programming language. That's right, people were so kind and open we had a keynote about Go, and we talked a lot afterwards without problems! :-P Gustavo showed me some nice details about the language and my mind is now burning! I must do Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) + Go = EGO, a perfect GUI tool.
But I was of use... not just a leecher! I went there to present 3 talks (slides in Portuguese!):
Last but not least, I'd like to thank everyone that did this amazing conference possible!
With the announcement of Tizen (pronounced, I learned, tie-zen, not tea-zen or tizz-en) recently, I headed over to the website to find out who the project was aimed at. I read this on the “Community” page:
Lots of systems do not support multi-window on their own, consider standard Linux Frame Buffer (FB) or the PlayStation3. This makes it cumbersome as you're restricted to a single window, likely you'll have to rewrite your apps to behave well in this scenario.
Traditionally this problem is worked around by toolkits like Qt that provides QWS, a great help for developers. Considering QWS I decided to help our PS3 friends with something similar which I shamelessly called EWS (Ecore + Evas Single Process Windowing System).
Ecore and Evas already made 99% of this work: they abstract rendering, abstract windowing and so on. There is even support for "inlined windows" in Elementary, these are rendered to buffers that are visible inside other windows. Actually the first version of EWS was a 30min hack in Elementary called "eland" (making fun of wayland). But as not everyone would use Elementary it was better to move it lower in the stack: Ecore_Evas.
Ecore_Evas is a glue layer between Ecore and Evas that takes care to configure actual windows and setup Evas on them, to capture events from various sources and feed them to canvas, etc. If you cope with its API you'll work with most EFL libraries and applications out-of-the-box.
Ecore_Evas_EWS was created as a new engine that builds on top of others. It will use a backing-store engine like X11, FB, DirectFB, WinCE or PS3 to create an internal Ecore_Evas. Every new window created with ecore_evas_ews_new() is rendered to an Evas using the buffer engine and its pixels end as the image source in the backing-store engine, displaying it. This is very similar to existing ecore_evas_buffer feature ecore_evas_object_image_new(), however it will handle more things automatically.
Among the new features are events to allow window management. Things like "window created", "window moved" and "window resized" are placed in the main loop for interested peers, they may handle these and decorate the windows, offer window management (close, maximize, ...). To exemplify that I've added support in Elementary with basic controls such as move, maximize, restore and close. Unfortunately it looks ugly like hell and then I'm not posting any screenshot or screencast ;-) Let's wait for people doing themes to make a great work.
The work is far from complete, bugs remain, optimizations could be applied for OpenGL... if you consider the rules "20/80", 80% of the code was written in 20% of the time, now we'll take 80% to make it work for sure :-D But it's not bad considering it took me 2 days, 1421 lines in ecore_evas_ews.c, 543 in elu_ews_wm.c and 317 in ews.edc...
That's why I keep saying that EFL is an amazing technology to build products. It runs fast, it's slick and it does not get in the way. Give it a try! :-)
Lots of systems do not support multi-window on their own, consider standard Linux Frame Buffer (FB) or the PlayStation3. This makes it cumbersome as you’re restricted to a single window, likely you’ll have to rewrite your apps to behave well in this scenario.
I'll be at the N9 Hackathon this weekend in Vienna. Sunday morning (October 9th) at 10am, I'll give a presentation about Woodchuck. I'll talk a bit about Woodchuck's motivation and a fair amount about Woodchuck's architecture as well as what we hope to learn from the user study and how we planning on using it to evaluate different scheduling algorithms. If you are around, you should come by!
I've finished an initial port of Woodchuck to Harmattan. To get it,
you need to manually add the source repository: Harmattan's
application manager does not support .install files. Add the
following to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hssl.list:
deb http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/woodchuck harmattan harmattan
Then, run apt-get update.
The following packages are available: the Woodchuck server (package: murmeltier), the Python bindings (package: pywoodchuck) and the Glib-based C bindings (libgwoodchuck and libgwoodchuck-dev).
smart-storage-logger, the software for the user behavior study, has not yet been ported: I'm still trying to figure aegis out.
If you are interested in adding Woodchuck support to your software,
see the HOWTO and the documentation. You
can also email me or visit #woodchuck on irc.freenode.net (my nick is
neal).
Front Page
Intel forms new Linux venture with Linux Foundation, LiMo & Samsung: Tizen
As you'll no doubt have heard, Intel is forming a collaboration, in conjunction with a hardware vendor and hosted by the Linux Foundation, to produce a new Linux-based mobile OS. No, not MeeGo; this is "Tizen". The main difference is that the buzzword of "HTML5" is being used as the preferred/primary application development framework, rather than MeeGo/Symbian/Harmattan's Qt. Andrew Savory has an in-depth summary of the announcement:
"In order for Intel to bring other companies on board, they needed to cut all ties with Nokia and make a concession by losing Qt. But if you're throwing out Qt, the value proposition of MeeGo needs to be reconsidered. Without Qt, MeeGo doesn't have the rich developer story - no APIs, SDK, documentation. You need an alternative."
MeeGo's stated selling point compared with, say, Android was its open development and governance. This was, however, never realised. Tizen seems not to be repeating this "mistake" (promising something they can't deliver) and participation is on an invite-only basis. That raises the question of Tizen's advantage compared with other HTML5-capable runtimes, such as Android, iOS or Windows.
Read more (andrewsavory.com)Mer relaunched to take over from MeeGo
Carsten Munk, Robin Burchell and David Greaves have relaunched Mer to provide a focused successor to MeeGo: "How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration community for devices sound? After all if "upstream is king" - then contributions will end up the same place, no matter if it's Tizen, Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE." Governance, deliverables and focus of Mer are being discussed. In your editor's opinion, the clearer definition of the "Core" of the project - delivering something which can boot and provides the basis of other, clearly defined, projects is something which MeeGo never got right.
Read more (lists.meego.com)In this edition (Download)...
- Front Page
- Intel forms new Linux venture with Linux Foundation, LiMo & Samsung: Tizen
- Mer relaunched to take over from MeeGo
- Applications
- VLC for Nokia N9
- Matchbox hacking enables title swiping
- Development
- Cordia Tab hardware hits a roadblock with Chinese manufacturers' lack of respect for GPL
- H-E-N9 USB hostmode enabler N9
- Community
- New Maemo Community Council makes themselves (slightly) public
- Devices
- Nokia N9 starts shipping
- MetaWatch incoming call notification from N950
- In the Wild
- More info on Nokia's Meltemi surfaces
- Plonk wins "Best Apps for Tablets" in Intel's AppUp Developer Challenge
At the recent GNU Hackers Meeting, I gave a talk about Woodchuck. (I'll publish another post when the video is made available.) The talk resulted in a lot of great feedback including a question from Arne Babenhauserheide whether Woodchuck could be used to automatically synchronize git or mercurial repositories.
I hadn't considered using Woodchuck to synchronize version control respoitories, but it is a fitting application of Woodchuck: some data is periodically transferred over the network in the background. I immediately saw two major applications in my own life: a means to periodically push changes to a personal back up repository; and automatically fetching change sets so that when I don't have network connectivity, I still have a recent version of a repository that I'm tracking.
I decided to implement Arne's suggestion. It's called VCS Sync. To configure it, you create a file in your home directory called .vcssync. The file is JSON-based with the extension that lines starting with // are accepted as comments. The file has the following shape:
{
"directory1": [ { action1 }, { action2 }, ..., { actionM } ],
"directory2": [ { action1 }, { action2 } ],
...
"directoryN": [ { action1 } ],
}
That is, there is a top-level hash mapping directories to arrays of actions. An action consists of four possible arguments: 'sync' (either 'push' or 'pull'), 'remote' (the remote repository, default: origin), 'refs' (the set of branches, e.g., +master:master, default: 'master') and 'freshness' (how often to perform the action, in hours).
Here's an example configuration file:
// To register changes, run 'vcssync -r'.
{
"~/src/woodchuck": [
// Pull daily.
{"sync": "pull", "remote": "origin", "freshness": 24},
// Backup every tracked branch every few hours.
{"sync": "push", "remote": "backups", "refs": "+*:*", "freshness": 3}
],
"~/src/gpodder": [
// Pull every few days.
{"sync": "pull", "remote": "origin", "freshness": 96}
]
}
VCS Sync automatically figures out the repository format and invokes the right tool (currently only git and mercurial are supported; patches for other VCSes are welcome).
After you install the configuration file, you need to run 'vcssync -r' to inform Woodchuck of any changes to the configuration file.
You can use this on the N900, however, because this is a programmer's tool and you need to edit a file to use it, it is not installable using the hildon application manager. Instead, you'll need to run 'apt-get install vcssync' from the command line (the package is in the same repository as the Woodchuck server). If you encounter problems, consult $HOME/.vcssync.log.
I also use this script on my laptop, which runs Debian. Building packages for Debian is easy, just check out woodchuck and use dpkg-buildpackage:
git clone http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~neal/woodchuck.git
cd woodchuck
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
This (currently) generates eight packages. In addition to vcssync, you'll also need to install murmeltier (my Woodchuck implmentation), and pywoodchuck (a Python interface to Woodchuck).