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Thanks be to the helpful, redux

As some of you may know our Edit-in-Chief and Glorious Leader, Andrew Flegg, abandoned us to the pitiless whims of fortune last week when he left for a multi-week vacation to France. To best facilitate his temporary replacement by automatons and monkeys, he helpfully set up a series of scripts to handle issue fetching and publication for the duration of his unavailability. Due to confusing timezone interpretations (variously to be blamed on monkeys and unclear emails), a problem arose when the scripts succeeded in publishing the issue, by my clock, an hour early. Unfortunately the result was the perfect excising of Andrew Olmsted's well-earned kudos from last week's issue--due, in no part (I'll note), to my forgetting about my omissions until 5 minutes after the real publishing time.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-07-25 through 2011-07-31

I think it was during MeeGo Conference 2010 when I was first told that I should cover the N900 camera cover's blue and silver bevel with a dark color to prevent them from reflecting the flash light and making the photos worse than they could be. If you don't use the N900 with flash at all, this "hack" doesn't apply to you. Otherwise read on. If you look at the N900's camera cover, you see that the camera hole is surrounded by a blue border on one side, and silver borders on the three other sides:



Now, when you take a photo with the flash, the flash light is reflected, which makes the taken photo to appear as if there was some smoke or fog in front of you. In reality it is the reflection of the bevel. So, take a black marker and take off the back cover of your N900 (you don't want to accidentally cover your camera lens with black color!):



Now carefully cover the silver parts around the camera hole (and the blue part too, ideally) with black color. The result should look like this:



You might get even better results if you take a marker with a finer tip or even use black spray paint or something. If you don't have a marker ready or do not want to paint on the back cover, you can also take off the back cover of your N900 (which has the same effect), but you will probably need a small magnet to trick the magnetic switch into reporting "camera cover opened" to the camera application.

Firefox for Mobile Shrinking startup time for Android - http://stechz.com/2011... July 29, 2011 from Benjamin Stover - Comment - Like

A friend of mine in the MeeGo community brought my attention to an interesting concept he calls MeeGoVerse, which translates common gaming elements to real-life work as a sort of “massive multiplayer” endeavor.  One important aspect is the use of achievements to reward people for attacking necessary community evils, like bug reporting.  I can envision Meegon badges for each achievement.  People love to contribute, and especially be recognized for it.

Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.

Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.

During the last 2 years I worked for Collabora having Nokia as my client. There I was part of the Harmattan Product Performance Team working with Maemo/MeeGo for N9 and N950.

 

The N9 and N950 has been announced. They are just perfect. An amazing design with a great system. Now that I’m sending my proto back I’m already looking forward to receive my N950 dev kit to continue working with it.

I’m also praying for Nokia giving up on M$ and continue working with MeeGo!

 

Collabora was one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life. It is the biggest open source consultancy company based in Cambridge-UK with developers spread all over the world. They are well prepared and organized to have developers doing their best from any part of the world, mainly from their home offices.

Thanks for everything collabora family. I’m going to miss you.

But now it is time for change.

 

Next Monday – Aug 1st I’m starting at Intel being part of graphics development team. I promise that I’ll continue posting on this blog some news about my work there.

No, it wont be necessary to leave São Paulo. I’ll continue living on this huge city going everyday to Intel’s office here located at Market Place.

After almost two years there’s a new version of the Ogg Support in the Fremantle Extras.

The decoder code has changed completely. Where the old one used libvorbis and vorbisdec from the GStreamer base plugins, the new one uses libav (formerly FFmpeg) and gst-av from Felipe Contreras. The impact on performance should be significant because the vorbis decoder in libav is more efficient on the n900 than the libvorbis and Felipe’s gst-av also outperforms the vorbisdec.

Thanks to Felipe for doing all the hard work. I’ve just been updating the version numbers of the dependencies and tracking the bugzilla for the known issues and fixes :)

GObject Introspection is one of the hidden jewels of the GNOME stack: you write a library in C or Vala, and it becomes automatically available to a wide variety of languages and runtimes, including Python, JavaScript, Java and Qt.

Now I would like to bring GObject Introspection to PHP. Why?

For many years we in the Midgard community have been using GNOME infrastructure on the web server side, by building our persistence layer on top of GObjects, and providing D-Bus notifications when content changes. So far this has been done with our own custom PHP extension.

I believe a common PHP extension providing GObject Introspection support would make more sense, as it wouldn't just benefit our own community, but also support efforts like php-gtk.

Alexey Zakhlestin already started a project for this a while back, but unfortunately has been unable to finish it. Because of this, we would be willing to sponsor anybody interested in making the gobject-for-php extension work.

Benefits for the GNOME community:

• New supported development language and a large community of potential contributors
• The possibility of making the GNOME stack relevant in web space. Just think of Telepathy or GStreamer in a web app

Benefits for the PHP community:

• Access to the rich collection of GNOME libraries, many which may be useful when building web applications
• Being able to use your PHP skills to build GNOME applications and bring them to interesting environments like Ubuntu and Cordia

Benefits for the Midgard community:

• No need to maintain our own custom PHP extension
• A more generic GObject Introspection extension has better chances of being included into Linux distributions and being available on hosting providers

Let me know if you are interested. We're coming to the Desktop Summit with Piotras, so for example that is a great opportunity to talk more about this.