Yesterday I was playing a bit with Mugshot.
I thought it would be great to have a Maemo group there. Unfortunately I only found that there was indeed a Maemo group after I had already created another one .
So if you were wondering how come there’s a second empty Maemo group, now you know . I couldn’t figure out a way to delete it. Maybe it will be garbage collected after some time?

Last GUADEC I had a pleasant Western lunch with five developers of the Sun Desktop team based in Beijing and we concluded that one or more GNOME events had to be organized in Asia. Three weeks later Emily Chen is already starting to pull the strings to get a basic idea for a GNOME conference in Beijing and form a team of volunteers. Excellent!

About the idea, could be something like this:

... not as big as Guadec, focus on East Asia, about 100~ 200 people, last for 2~3days. The best place is university or research institute. The register fee is free. The aim is get local Gnome developers and users together.

About the volunteers: please contact Emily if you are interested. GNOME needs you.

For anyone out there that's interested in the gimp, there's a great set of 10 video tutorials at http://vntutor.blogspot.com, covering everything from the basics to photo manipulation, take a look.

The line up is as follows:

Lesson 1: GIMP Basics
Lesson 2: Selective Decolorization
Lesson 3: Make a thumping picture in GIMP
Lesson 4: Render Images in GIMP
Lesson 5: Make a Superkaramba (A-foto) decoration
Lesson 6: How to make a banner
Lesson 7: Alter an image
Lesson 8: Lightning
Lesson 9: Retouching a Photo
Lesson 10: The User Interface

The title might be totally misleading but let me explain what I mean. Today Business Week has published an update on their list of Best Global Brands (there is a PDF with the top 100 ranking). There are many brands linked to software development in the top positions. Let's see how free software is doing there:

• 2. Microsoft (the expected winner in the software scene, only surpassed by Coca-Cola, still hasn't got free software on top of the strategy).
• 3. IBM (free software friendly).
• 5. Nokia (friendly? see comments).
• 7. Intel (friendly).
• 12. Hewlett-Packard (friendly).
• 18. Cisco (friendly? see comments).
• 20. Google (friendly).
• 21. Samsung (friendly).
• 25. Sony (not yet - or friendly? see comments).
• 27. Oracle (friendly? see comments).
• 31. Dell (friendly).
• 33. Apple (not yet)(friendly).
• 34. SAP (not yet).
• 42. Philips (not yet).
• 43. Siemens (friendly).
• 44. Nintendo (not yet).
• 48. eBay (not yet).
• 50. Accenture (not yet).

As you see, even if Microsoft and Apple Sony Philips would keep their non-openness strategies, free software would be in a different stage if the rest of brands "not yet" would become friendly.

PS: I reckon the friendly/not-yet interpretetation is totally subjective, feel free to improve it. I might also have missed companies in this listing (i.e. should Canon appear or not). Also, I felt too lazy to go beyond the top 50.

The mystery

In previous article, we give stardict as an example to compile deb package on ITOS2007 platform. However, after trying stardict, I found it is slow and bug-full on my 770.

So, I decide to use the text mode version of stardict -- sdcv.

It is relative easier to build sdcv than stardict, as it does not need support of GUI libs, therefore, no need to change config files for automake tools.

The trouble I met is to install libglib2.0-dev on my scratchbox, as it need pkg-config package. Downloading libglib deb and forcing dpkg to install it can bypass this problem.

another problem is the config of libreadline, I do not bother to study into config file, and just replaced all @libreadline@ with -lreadline.

Now, you can download the deb package.

I’ve been working with George Wright the last few days to integrate the WebKit/Gtk+ browser engine into Nokia’s recently announced EAL (Engine Abstraction Layer).

WebKit/Gtk+ will soon be joining Opera and Mozilla as a well-supported alternative browser for the Maemo platform. I believe we are the first to provide SVG support:

 

It’s exciting to hear the Red Hat guys have been experimenting with WebKit/Gtk+ on the OLPC platform — J5 is a competent engineer and his comments have helped to give us direction for further development.

Given also the recent activity on Epiphany/WebKit, these are good signs that we’re working towards a usable browser engine both for mobile devices and the desktop, but there are still features to be implemented and bugs to fix, and I encourage those interested to get stuck in to the WebKit bug tracker, whether filing bugs or contributing patches.

Great credit goes also to Holger Freyther of the OpenMoko project, who is co-maintaining WebKit/Gtk+ upstream in Apple’s SVN repository along with me (we completed paperwork with Apple to become SVN committers about a month ago) and has been dealing with some particularly involved parts of the port involving scrolling, frames and native widgetry.

A (somewhat late) congratulations to the Poky team for their 3.0 ("Blinky") release. Amongst the supported platforms is:

"Nokia N800 web tablet (experimental)".

For those that don't know what Poky is, the official blurb is:

"Poky is an embedded Linux build system, distribution and developer environment which builds upon OpenEmbedded technologies. Poky's focus is purely on building stable optimised GNOME Embedded type platforms (X11/Matchbox/GTK+) together with a streamlined system layer and cross development environment. "

Penso che un po' tutti in Italia abbiano visto la pubblicita' della Vivident, per coloro che non l'abbiano fatto YouTube viene in aiuto:





Ebbene, ci si e' tutti chiesto che diamine centrasse la Finlandia in una pubblicita' del genere. Ecco ora scoperta la verita' (bastava chiedere ad un finlandese qualsiasi, in realta'), che e' piu' semplice del previsto.

La Vivident pubblicizzata e' allo Xilitolo, che e' largamente utilizzato in Finlandia per fare dolci e cose simili. Persino Wikipedia conferma questa teoria. Dice persino che lo Xilitolo e' usato per ridurre la formazione della placca in forma di chewing-gum da masticare!!! E, per chiudere il cerchio, quale e' la fonte per questa affermazione? Un ricercatore finlandese... Verra' fuori ora che lavora alla Vivident...

We've listened. This is our second public release of an updated browser engine. Please keep filing bug reports in bugs.maemo.org. If you don't file them there, there's very little chance we'll notice in time for the next update. We want to thank all of our users for giving us a chance. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to show even more gratitude. In the interim, I'm listing user reports before internal reports.

There's been a lot of interest lately in Ubuntu's initiative to produce an embedded version of its Linux distribution for mobile devices. Initially the consensus was that it would be x86 only, effectively ruling out any chance of it working on the Nokia tablets but pieces of information dotted about the Internet may imply otherwise.

Quoting the Embedded Ubuntu wiki page:

Suggestions were made to build "packages naitively or using pre-built cross-toolchains to build the ARM archive."

Ubuntu Mobile should "consider [the] Nokia 770 as potential platform for development - start with taking software from Maemo.org, strip what seems to be not necessary (try to retain core SW as much as possible), and build on top of it."

From the same page:

"EmbeddedUbuntu will initially cover ARM-based platforms, preferably with a LCD display. This includes ARM-based PDAs and Internet Tablets"

Another bit of information that points to a non-x86 release was Canonical Software spokesperson Gerry Carr's comment that Intel "expects to see the first [MID] (Mobile Internet Device) devices in 2008" which could be up to a year after the initial release of Ubuntu Mobile. This begs the question, what will Ubuntu Mobile be running on in the mean-time?


Initial development has begun on the ia32 platform and continues to gather pace in this direction although a few comments on the Ubuntu Mobile mailing list by Matt Zimmerman provides a glimmer of hope to the arm based crowd.

"If what you're asking is whether an ARM port is planned, that's wide open.
As I noted in the original announcement, this project has begun in
collaboration with Intel with an aim to support their new platforms."

We are committed to the success of UME, and ARM is clearly a relevant platform in the mobile and embedded space.

At present, we have funding for the ia32 platform work, and have plenty of
interesting work to do there in the near term.  However, given a source of
funding for ARM, work on a port could begin very quickly, and all of the
work that we're presently doing to build the framework will carry over to
it.

Open source is all about alternatives. If Ubuntu does become available on the Nokia tablets I can see a lot of users at least trying it. Whether it will be better or not is another question although I do believe that Ubuntu has a more open development model than Nokia's which can only benefit the end user.

In the New York Times this morning, a longish article about e-books begins with discussion of the Sony Reader, a proprietary, monocolor, non-WiFi, non-programmable e-book reader that nowsells for $299.

Or you can read e-books on your Nokia Internet Tablet using the open-source FBReader. Price: $359.

David Pogue, the Times’ star technology columnist, writes about internet radio devices, single-function handhelds enabling you to listen to music over the internet without being tethered to a desktop or lugging around a huge laptop. Prices: Revo Pico $350, Terratec Noxon $330, Roku SoundBridge Internet Radio $300, and so on.

Or you could listen to the same stations on your NIT. While reading an e-book in FBReader.

The devilishly well-executed iPod seems to have misled everyone into regarding single-function devices as viable — single-function e-readers, single-function internet radios. But when you see how poorly every single-function music carryaround fares compared to the iPod, you realize that execution — usability, design, stylishness — carried Apple over the single-function barrier and not that no such barrier exists.

Then there’s the opposite phenomenon: the companies that treat you like all you want is a phone or PDA and everything operates from there.

Different misconception: that we love every single thing we do being monetized by greedy mega-companies.

In Pogue’s column about internet radio, he points out that it’s so hard to tolerate commercial radio because of all the commercials. “These days, it seems as though AM radio has 52 minutes of ads an hour,” he writes.

So one of the lures of the single-function internet radio device is simply to restore the balance of pleasure against monetization of music. The New York Times is preparing to abandon its Times Select pay service because it has discovered (finally!) that we readers can find just as entertaining writers are all over the web without charge.

If there’s a course to be charted between the Scylla of single-function and the Charybdis of one-device-for-everything, Nokia seems to be following it: The internet tablets do several related things really well, with the form of its devices (no hard disk, super-high-res screen that’s 800 pixels wide, under 8 ounces) rigorously matching the real needs while keeping every possible subsidiary use available (e-books, chess, even spreadsheets and word processing for goodness’ sake) without charging for it.

Introduction

I've been developing a browser based community calendar for maemo users. It is done on top of midgard.
The original baseline was:
"The idea of the project is to build a web-based calendaring application for the Maemo community. GPL-licensed OpenPsa Calendar group calendaring application is used as the basis. The project focuses on adapting the calendar user interface to fit the Maemo devices (Nokia 770 and N800), taking into account the screen resolution and limitations like difficulty of drag-and-drop with the stylus. The worldwide nature of the Maemo community must also be taken into account by adding good timezone awareness."

If you're a growing Bugzilla installation, you sometimes need to create groups. Groups enable you to isolate products, people, and bugs from one another.

In modern versions of Bugzilla, you can even use them to share queries, and in current versions of Bugzilla, it's possible to configure a couple of very special groups: insider, timetracking.

This leads to a big question, that I've been asked regularly:

How do I create a group which automatically includes people?

1. Use group inheritance. (But that of course requires the group to already exist and have the people you want)
2. Use a regular expression.

You can probably guess the next couple of questions.

What kind of regular expressions are these?

Perl

So how do I ...?

I'll answer that in the follow up.

Building Groups

How do I make all my Spartans and Athinians members of Warriors?

Good question, obviously you need to edit groups, but you don't know if you should be editing Spartans + Athinians, or if you should edit Warriors.

You're going to want to edit Warriors and check the Inherit column next to the Spartans Group and the Athinians Group.

1. Load editgroups.cgi
2. Find the Warrior Group and click its Edit link
3. Find the Athinians Group (it's sorted alphabetically ignoring case)
4. Click the [ ] Inherit checkbox to the left of Athinians
5. Find the Spartans Group (it's sorted alphabetically ignoring case)
6. Click the [ ] Inherit checkbox to the left of Spartans
7. Click [ Save Changes ]

This means that Warriors includes all people matching the Warrior regexp, all members of the Spartan Group, all members of the Athinian Group, and all users manually added to the Warrior Group using editusers.

How do I make a group of all people who aren't related to Microsoft?

You're really anti-microsoft. Oh well.

1. Load editgroups.cgi
2. Click Add Group
3. Group: Outspoken Minority
4. Description: People who haven't gotten the one true message
5. User Regexp: ^(((?!microsoft).){9,}|.{1,8})$

Could you please explain that regular expression?

I'll try my best.

First, you want to allow anyone whose account name isn't long enough to contain microsoft: .{1,8}. If you don't do that, you'll find people like tim@q.bt complaining.

Second, you want to look for individual characters: . that aren't the first letter in microsoft: (?!microsoft).

Third, you want at least nine of them. Well, perhaps you don't need that, but it makes the other logic easier. ((?!microsoft).){9,}

Fourth, you don't really care which case applies: (((?!microsoft).){9,}|.{1,8})

Lastly, you want those rules to start at the beginning of the string and run to the end, so ^...$.

And now you've excluded your enemy.

There's a great interview with "Nokia's open source director", Ari Jaaksi at linux devices which includes some background information of how Nokia conceived the 770 Internet Tablet.

You can also find slides from his LinuxWorld 2007 at: http://www.linuxdevices.com/files/misc/LW2007_Jaaksi.pdf.

So In response to all the interest I am getting about Internet tablets and UMPC's in general I scooped up the http://www.webtablet.org domain name. At the moment it just points right back to my blog but I hope in the very near future to be taking my observations on this potentially immense market further afield and reviewing other mobile devices.

Why? Well, my work position lends itself to a very inviting and appropriate prospect. Not only do I get to travel the world with my current employer, I'm also a senior software developer. What this all means is that I get to test out devices in a multitude of weird and wonderful countries and also that I can fix and develop for the device itself. For example the Nokia 770 gets to travel to the Netherlands next week closely followed by a trip to India a week after. I have a long background in Linux (1995-present) and also Windows (http://www.webtablet.org will be a news and user portal for all things Internet tablet and UMPC. If you are a company or have ties to a company who produce (or would like to produce) Internet tablets or UMPC devices (the two terms will merge sooner or later mark my words!) then I am available to give you my unique insight on to how your device performs in the real world and maybe contribute to the development itself.

Naming no names to start off with (Nokia N800, Samsung Q1 e.t.c) if you want to see an honest, thorough and constructive insight, and hey, I even give review units back!, then get in touch. Or if you want, as a user, to lend me a device for a week I will pay postage each way and give you credit online. Unless you live in Outer Mongolia or somewhere similar and the postage is roughly about the same as buying the device itself.

The Internet Tablet and UMPC market is about to explode. Lets hope, as a community, somewhere like http://www.webtablet.org can voice our opinions, good or bad.

This is both amazing and completely harrowing.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/technology/e7e48a137b144110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

It's carrier neutral and costs half as much as the iPhone and being China I'm sure they can russle it up 10 times as fast! Note the comment about Linux development and the relatively small development team!

The officially recommended way to create .deb packages for the maemo platform is to use dpkg-buildpackage within Scratchbox. For me, Scratchbox is a pain to install for two main reasons. First, there is no RPM package of the scratchbox environment, so apparently I need to run some scripts as root, let my system get a little messier, which I am not willing to do. Second, the docs advise to turn off SELinux in order to get the Scratchbox environment to work, which again I am not keen to do.

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, there is probably a cleaner approach, but I am currently using Fedora, so I just rolled my own method using the command line. Copy the following files to your project directory:

• deb_hand.mak
• deb_hand_example.mak

Then rename deb_hand_example.mak to Makefile, and adjust the variables in this file to match your project.

Setup the required files (referenced in these makefiles) for packaging. There some pointers on this in the Python Maemo howto in the packaging section.

Note the ${PACKAGE_DIR}/data: ${SOURCE_DIR} target in the makefile. This must be modified to layout all files as you wish them to be installed on the target system. The example makefile rule should be a reasonable guide.

Then once you are ready, do ‘make PACKAGE_DIR= deb’ and if all goes well a shiny new deb package should be sitting in release_dir. If not, fix your settings in the Makefile, run ‘make clobber’ and then try again.

A

I was looking at my N800 the other day and considered that I've had it for over 7 months now. I wiped down the fingerprints off the screen and realized that there was not a single ding, scratch, scuff, or crack in it. Think of how much I use my N800: easily 3-4x as much as a "normal consumers" would.

I thought about writing more on the topic but couldn't think of how to make a full article from it. Thank my readers for dropping it in my comments at just the right time:

Has anyone ever noticed how solid the N800 is? Unfortunately, a car just drove over mine a couple of days ago, and the LCD screen broke in two places. The touch-screen still works, as well as all the hardware, and except for the two black lines on the LCD, there is no other visible damage, and the software works like a charm, just like the wifi, buth sd, audio bluetooth, charging and usb.
I would imagine that if it fell with the screen downwards, nothing would have happened.

I guess I should mention that it was a pretty light car (by American standards anyway), the Toyota Prius.

That's from reader Razvan in a comment on this post. If anyone knows where to buy a replacement LCD module by itself or has another broken N800 with a good LCD, give him a shout. Though a Prius has 700 pounds or so more than my Yaris, I won't be driving over the N800 any time soon.

*edit* My good friend Steve (aka Chippy) of UMPCPortal talks with me quite often about UMPCs and the N800. Of course, he reminds me of the time he dropped his N800 from 5cm and it required a costly screen replacement. Naturally your mileage may vary. Take good care to not put pressure on the screen or subject the device to any bending or twisting.

Image credit: crushed cars from a tornado courtesy NOAA

Ok, so another issue which has taken me a while to get around is getting GTK and Gstreamer working properly with python2.5 in my development environment. Ok, so my program isn’t working properly yet, but that’s another issue altogether. Before, I couldn’t even get python programs running properly.

There are guys at INdT who have been doing wonderful jobs but they still don't have their blogs syndicated in any planet. This way, I thought it was a good idea to have a post with some interesting news and links:

• LLVM performance tests
  
  Lauro has been working on the ARM backend of LLVM for quite some time. It's been a year since the backend was included in the project. After lots of improvements, tests and bug fixes, it's now possible to compile complex programs and libraries.
  
  Lauro has just started his blog and has already published quite impressive results of tests comparing programs built with GCC and LLVM. I just can't wait for whole distro built with LLVM. :)


• Hildon bindings for Vala
  
  Marcelo Lira (aka setanta) introduced this brand new language called Vala for us some time ago. He's been posting about it since then, including the following diagrams illustrating the basic differences between Mono and Vala.
  
  Mono
  
  Vala
  
  Vala bindings are growing really fast. One of the latest additions were the Hildon bindings Marcelo has provided. It's approaching the day we won't need to code GObjects in plain C anymore.


• Maemo SDK Applicance
  
  Marcelo Lira (again) has published a cool screencast of Maemo SDK appliance running. The video is on YouTube but I'd recommend you to download the Ogg/Theora Version available in Maemo garage project page.

That's all folks! (At least for now). ;)

Kate sent me email about this and I decided to blog about it because it was cool:
http://www.galacticsuite.com/

Interesting similarities in the spaceship concept - windows do resemble one another space ship. Or it is just a
coincidence… However, cool stuff (IMO).

From this day on, I'll never play Wii Sports Bowling anymore.





Thanks Vivi for playing as my sparring. :)

Today we published the calendars beta version to the maemo community for testing.
The testing period will last approx. 4 weeks in which time we hope for a lot of feedback, both bad and good.

There is also a bugzilla for the calendar so, feel free and post bug reports or feature requests in there.
I will be commenting and prioritizing them during the testing period. More info and the calendar can be found at http://maemo.org/community/calendar.

Also the beta documentation can be found in this blog. 

maemo

Today has been a big day for maemo.org: not only was the Maemo Community Calendar released for beta testing, but we also launched the new Social News section on the site. Social news is an area where users can easily with one glance see all interesting things happening at the moment in the maemo world.

We syndicate data from a lot of sources: official Nokia announcements, Garage project news, Tableteer, Flickr maemo group, YouTube maemo tag, Application Catalog updates, community blogs from Planet maemo and possibly in the future also ITT threads. However, Social News is not your ordinary aggregator. Instead of just showing everything in a single stream, we do some interesting relevancy calculation to determine what items are important at the moment and give those more prominence. Older and less prominent items slowly fall out of the news listing as time passes.

Relevancy-based display gives us a place where everybody can see the current topics. Social media is used for promoting items on the list. Here are some methods users can utilize the promote an item:

• Comment it on the maemo.org site (applies only to Application Catalog and Announcements)
• Add it to favorites on the site (by clicking the heart icon)
• Digg it or comment it on digg
• Blog about it and ensure the blog is listed by Technorati
• Bookmark it on del.icio.us

The more work-intensive methods like commenting and blogging are given the greatest value.

In addition to the "current news highlights" list, we also keep track of all-time favorites (starting from about two weeks ago), which can be seen in the Best Of list:

Social News is currently being beta tested as we tune the relevancy algorithms. Feedback is obviously welcome.

Thanks to Lasse Larvanko and Andreas Nilsson for the design!

Updated 2007-08-17: Lasse has a very good write-up of the service in Finnish.

Technorati Tags: blogpaper, maemo, midgard, rss

Need some help. I’ve been working on this app since yesterday, and it’s working ok. I was going to announce it once it was complete, but I’ve been having issues that require more brain power than I have access to. I’m pretty new to GStreamer, and I’ve gotten this far. Basically it’s a virtual guitar of sorts. Codenamed Tigla.

It basically works like so, the samples variable holds the start/end nano second markers for each of the sample files. These hold 5 notes from each string, and basically….make the sound.

The GUI will obviously need work, it’s just a test base right now. The problem is that when pressing any button in quick succession, the program crashes. If you wait about 3-4 seconds before pushing each button, it’s generally ok. Please can someone help me out here. I can’t wait to start polishing this app.

Code and samples available here.

Last week I had a problem with MPlayer using the option "-wid" while doing some test applications: every time that the video came back from fullscreen (while playing on a given window) it crashed. After some a lot of tests with the help of Leonardo Sobral, we discovered that Maemo's Xv ...

I just logged into my beta account for Scrybe, an AJAX-powered, interactive planner (calendars and todo lists) and “Thoughtpad” (journal, image library, bookmark organizer, etc.). A while back, it was pretty big news because of this video.

And, I have to admit…

It’s pretty slick! The interface is clean and intuitive. Everything works very quickly. There aren’t any weird browser bugs. Creating new events is simple. Displaying different views of the calendar was engineered in such a way that feels completely natural.

And, best of all… Everything I do online in Scrybe gets saved to my computer for offline viewing. (I can’t wait to get home and try it on my N800!)

For all of you GTD freaks, Scrybe can also do a PaperSync (pictured): it can print out all of your Scrybe information onto an easy-to-fold paper format for carrying around in your pocket.

Of course, Scrybe can alert you of upcoming events via email or SMS too, which all too few calendaring systems can do these days.

I’m looking forward to delving deeper into Scrybe. If it does work on my N800, then it may be time to say, “goodbye,” to the various other calendaring systems that I use.

I tried to post this a few days ago, but the blog application choked on my post and refused to regurgitate it. Having finally recovered from my nuclear fit, I'm ready to give it another go (backing up the contents in a text editor, of course!).

I recently realized that many users are unaware of some wonderful Nokia 770 and Nokia N800 resources that are made available by Nokia. A lot of work has gone into providing these resources and, though them, users can make the most of their Internet Tablets.

I am trying out this blog thing, so that I can rant in color.

I've finally come back from the summer vacation and I've had the time to look into UKMP again for a while.

After having looked into the hardware-accelerated bezier curve computations I checked something more difficult and closer to the reality: hardware-accelerated arbitrary polygon tessellation with OpenGL. This topic has been covered by Zack some time ago, spawning a lot of flame (as most of the GNOME vs. KDE performance comparisons do). All benchmarks are flawed, of course.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was using the beta version of Scrybe. I still think it’s as slick as I said it was, but there are definitely still some bugs that need to be worked out. I tried following the instructions to the “t,” but I still can’t figure out how to import events from another calendar (as you can see by the picture, I’ve figured it out). And, when using Flock, the ThoughtPad is a bit b0rked (i.e., I can’t see what I’m typing). Also, inviting contacts to share calendars and notes only seems to work for me in Internet Exploder (although, I need to give that subject some more testing)...

The main thing I wanted to try last night was using Scrybe on my N800. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to do this. I did find out a couple of things, though:

• The Scrybe UI (Flash and all) does work in the N800’s new, Mozilla-based browser, MicroB
• While the UI works, it doesn’t scale to fit the N800’s screen. (Scrybe developers, please create a moble interface!)
• It is my understanding that, for Scrybe to work in offline mode, one must first login to Scrybe (in online mode) and then switch their browser to offline mode. This means that the user must leave their browser open all day if they want to use Scrybe offline. This seems odd to me. (Can someone correct me if I’m mistaken?) In any case, the N800 doesn’t really have an “offline” mode, unless it can’t access any wifi access points. This is fine, but the aspect of leaving the web browser open on the N800 isn’t really feasible (the browser does crash from time to time, restarting the device is sometimes required, and what if one has to turn the device off altogether?). So, it would be my advice that Scrybe be made into a tool that can actually be downloaded to one’s device. It should still be web-based, but contained on one’s computer.

Anyway, as I said, I didn’t get too much time to test yesterday, so I will post another update when I have the chance.

Update: It turns out that Scrybe and the N800 don’t really jibe well together. I opened Scrybe when connected to wifi and then turned off my access point so that the N800 couldn’t connect even if it tried (which it will always do). After that, when I attempted to change something in Scrybe, it told me that I couldn’t do anything until I connected. Arg. Well, I suggested a fix for this above. Maybe, someday.

Have you tried iphone.facebook.com on your N800 yet? Sweet!

The two pictures above don’t show much of how the “iPhone” interface actually works, but if you click on the link I provided (and have a Facebook account, of course), you’ll see that navigating the interface scrolls and slides around just like on an iPhone.

Now, I’m definitely not one of of those people who wishes that my N800 was an iPhone. In fact, if you didn’t already know, the Nokia N800 is not a phone! But, this is a pretty good example of how web interfaces can be optimized for easy use on mobile devices. Great job, Facebook!

We have two GUI dictionary tools for N770/N800 (or ITOS 2007, or maemo 3.1/3.2) --- stardict and sdictviewer.

sdictviewer is based on python, and runs slowly on the slow devices. It even takes several seconds to search a word. I also prefer dictionaries provided by stardict.

However, stardict.garage.maemo.org hasn't release anything so far. I tried a version compiled by a friend, and found it is slow too. What even worse is lots of bugs cause it always crash on 770 with 2007 HE.

So, the command line version of stardict may be a good alternative. The latest source deb from ubuntu can be compiled on maemo development environment (scratchbox), without any change.

The problem is the compiled binary can be executed on scratchbox smoothly, but crashs on 770 device. I spend hours to figure out the bugs, and now it works great on 770 device.

So, it should be good idea to share the patch. A new project at garage.maemo.org is opened, named sdcv (StarDictCommandVersion). Source and binary will be uploaded soon. Welcome to test it on both 770 and 800.

$ cd `pwd`

Birunko saw I typing this command and asked me: “Are you crazy?”

I believe that the best answer for that question is: “not yet”, because in a single day I used:

• gcc to compile gcc
• wget to donwload the wget (source package)
• find to find the findutils package
• tar to unzip the tar package

(hmm it remembered me that another day I used apt-get to reinstall apt package that was corrupted)

So, what is the problem about to use the ‘cd’ command to “change” my current directory to my current directory?

ok, let me try to explain that. I was using 2 terminals. In the first one I had OpenEmbedded building Mamona packages and in the second one I was seeing the files generated on work directory. During the build my directory was deleted and recreated by OpenEmbedded, but my second terminal couldn’t know about that. The ‘pwd’ command still returns the full link correctly, but ‘ls’ and other commands tries to access something in memory that doesn’t exist anymore, so ‘cd `pwd`’ command takes me to the right current directory in memory.

But, if you thought that my strange day had a happy end you were wrong, I finished my day finding a bug on a bug tracker.

So the current question that is driving me crazy is: “how can I report a bug tracker bug in a bug tracker that has a blocker bug?

I couldn’t have a better end, could you?

I’ve updated the C++ gtkmm bindings for Maemo for the unstable Chinook/Sardine release, which will one day become the new stable Maemo release. That’s hildonmm (previously hildon-libsmm) and hildon-fmmm.

Some links:

• The hildonmm NEWS file and the hildon-fmmm NEWS file, listing API changes.
• The unstable Maemomm documentation.

If you are running Maemo Sardine then you can add the extras repository by adding these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ sardine free

deb-src http://repository.maemo.org/extras/ sardine free

and then install them like so:

fakeroot apt-get install libhildonmm-dev libhildon-fmmm-dev

Packages are only available for the x86 target for now, but I’ll create ARM packages fairly soon.

Feedback is welcome. Add a comment here, please, because there doesn’t seem to be any bug-tracker for Maemo extras projects.

I have been using this release for at least couple of weeks.
It is much more stable and has many big fixes for annoying bugs from the previous release. See more about improvements here.

The second public release has also support for Google Spreadsheets.

This is how it was in the 1st release:

Now it looks much better:

Yesterday, while waiting for Julianna to get prepped for Lasik, I noticed that my watch was acting very odd…

I attempted to record some video (below) on my N800 with the “unofficial” Camera video app available at the Maemo Garage. Annoying thing, though… While the video looks great on my N800, it looks horrible on my Mac. So, you get the horrible version (MP4, 748k). Sorry.

If you can’t tell, the second hand is pausing for anywhere from three to five seconds and then speeding up to catch up to the correct time. Is this what happens when Swiss Army watch batteries give out? I mean, the second hand thing is weird, but my watch hasn’t actually lost a second of time. Crazy!

Yeah, so, Julianna got Lasik yesterday! I wish I could have taken pictures of the procedure, but they wouldn’t let me. I did get to watch the surgery, though, which was pretty spectacular. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything like when the doctor removed the lenses from Julianna’s eyes. Wow.

I’ll leave you with the “before and after” pictures of Julianna’s day.

The Lasik procedure was a success, by the way, and we had a very positive follow-up appointment this morning. It’s so weird that someone can be nearly blind all of their life and then after twenty minutes or so, see perfectly.

My stepfather gave me one of his old cameras. It's only 3 megapixels, but it has a VERY good macro mode for those close-ups. I've had difficulty with my usual "blogging camera" with that in the past. I decided to share the picture above and give it to the public so you all can use it however you wish. Click for a higher-resolution version.

10 years of GNOME! I mostly missed the first half. I only remember reading about a Mexican guy challenging Microsoft with a free alternative desktop. That was around 1999-y2k. I also remember trying to install Linux in my laptop by then and leaving it for later. One day I installed successfully Debian Woody with GNOME 1.4 inside and... 5 years later here we are.

Congratulations and big thanks to the people that started this one-time-in-life story. Thanks to ustedes dos and hundreds of contributors, I'm a happy active user - hopefully also a better citizen. I am learning a lot and it's great to be here with you.

My wish for 2017: each of us, in a situation unimaginable today, will remember the time when GNOME was 10 and will feel (again) a satisfaction for the big progress done.

Petonàs a tot@s.

It is well known that the camera is the least utilized feature of the N800. Since the last firmware update (and the discontinuation of the "Call Invitation Beta") the ONLY way to use the camera was for either the feature-lacking Camera application or for N800-to-N800 calls. Since the primary messenger programs for the N800 (Google Talk, Skype, Gizmo Project, and Pidgin) have not implemented ways to video call between the N800 and other systems, the camera is currently just wasted space.

In a conversation with another N800 owner, we both realized we'd love the ability to either stream live video or video blog directly from the N800 tablet. Matt Faulkner of GottaBeMobile.com also noticed this during his uStream.tv live unboxing and introduction to the N800. The Flash implementation on the N800 supports the microphone but not the camera. I asked other users at InternetTabletTalk what they thought and there were two primary reactions: Either developers need to code more camera support or they shouldn't have included the camera to begin with.

Since preliminary rumors indicate that a webcam WILL be included in the third generation tablet, this is what we would like to see:

• Webcam support for the Flash browser plugin, allowing live streaming to uStream.tv and live video blogging to YouTube.
• Webcam-to-PC support for any popular messengers, especially Skype.
  
• Perhaps an installable lightweight N800 video server, like this one.

After a long time with nothing new here I’ll try to post something at least once a month (I hope I can do it :-).

Now let me say a few words about what has happened in the first half of 2007. After being directly involved with BlueZ and CarMan development I went to Germany for three months to do a consulting work on Maemo and embedded Linux in general. Overall, it was a nice experience but I’m really glad to be back in Brazil among my friends and relatives.

I’m back in Brazil for over a month now and I’m working on the new version of Canola with the rest of the team. I’m working in the infrastructure of this new Canola in Python and also in the low-level integration of CarMan (see this post from Marcelo). I’ll try to post later some of the glitches and things I’ve been working on lately. Stay tuned, because we’re working hard to make this new Canola rock even more! :-)

sdcv is a lightweight console version of StarDict dictionary.
Now, sdcv for maemo has a simple GUI, which can speak words, and this page is depreciated! plz visit http://sdcv.garage.maemo.org/

Releases

For all releases, please download at its maemo garage project site

Usage

After install, please execute sdcv from console (osso-xterm). type "sdcv --help" for details.
Please goto stardict dictonary page to download dictionaries, and install following its instruction.

Changes

Version 0.4.2-2
Minor bug fix based on the same version of ubuntu

After a long time without any layout modifications I've spent some time renewing PyMaemo webpage. Now it has more menu entries, a (small by now) FAQ, examples, screenshots of Python based apps, etc. A roadmap will be added soon. I hope you enjoy it.

Other news: I'm planning to launch a new PyMaemo revision this week, before my vacation period. This week I will try to upload PyMaemo packages to run with SDK 4.0 (Chinook) too.

If your anything like me, you love your desktop bling and nothing comes close to the bling that Compiz Fusion brings. It's way ahead of even the effects you see on a Mac at the moment.

Projects like this bring a smile to my face. Projects like this justify why we, as Linux users are among the (growing) minority. Projects like this encourage people to go ahead and install Linux, even if they had no intentions of doing so before; and this can only be a good thing for the Linux community.

This leads me a more sobering and UMPC related point. If Linux is to be a viable alternative to Windows on the next-generation UMPC platform, it not only has to do as good as its peers, it has to blow them out of the water.

Life Hacker has an interesting article on Compiz Fusion which is definitely worth a read.

As more and more of our life propagates onto the web, what will the technologies of the future really look like?

Click to read 2982 more words

Hi, I’ve hacked initfs of my n800 to show my name and email as you can see in this picture. I know that it is not a big deal, but it can be useful to avoid undesired changes/mistakes when you work in a team that has more than 1 n800.This post is not only to show, but to describe how to do this hack.

• Download the image and flasher. (You can use the 0xffff if you prefer)

• Unpack the image:

flasher -F <image name> -u

• Mount the initfs.jffs2:

sudo modprobe mtdblock

sudo modprobe mtdram total_size=65536 erase_size=256

sudo modprobe jffs2

sudo modprobe loop

sudo dd if=/pathtoimage/initfs.jffs2 of=/dev/mtdblock0

mkdir /mnt/jffs2

sudo mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt/jffs2

• The /mnt/jfss2 directory is read only, so you need to create another dir and copy everything preserving the files:

mkdir $HOME/myinitfs

sudo tar pcf - -C /mnt/jffs2 . | tar xvf - -C $HOME/myinitfs

• edit the $HOME/myinitfs/linuxrc using your preffered text editor. Look for “want_menu=0″ and add something like the text below just before it.

text2screen -t “Your Name” -H left -y 12 -s 3 -B 0xffff

text2screen -t “your_email@server” -H left -y 50 -s 2 -B 0xffff

• Create your new initfs image:

sudo mkfs.jffs2 -r $HOME/myinitfs/ -o $HOME/myinitfs.jffs2 -e 128KiB -l -n

• Flash it:

sudo flasher -n $HOME/myinitfs.jffs2 -f

That’s all. Enjoy it.

Another thing that I want to talk about is that I’m using the OS 2007 entire in a memory card (MMC) leaving free the main flash memory where I’m going to put Mamona. But this is a topic for another post…

So I was generating Python wrappers for some GObjects in C with h2def.py/codegen.py/scanvirtuals.py and I wanted to access a class variable in my classes (if you don’t know the difference between class and instance variables in Python, read the programmer’s note on this page). However, I couldn’t find an easy way of doing this until I found this function:

pyg_register_class_init(GType, PyGClassInitFunc)

It can add a function to be called when the class for that GType is initialized. That solved my problem because I only had to register a class init function for my base class. This function verifies if my python class has a specific variable and just uses it if it has or raises an exception if it doesn’t. Simple and to the point but if someone has a better way of doing this, just post a comment, please. :-)

MicroB is composed of a number of Nokia engineers as well as many more unmentionables. Since the unmentionables are well unmentionable, I'll start by describing what would make a normal team.

What does it take to make a product?

1. Managers! (lots of them, the more the merrier)
2. An Architect (one is a good number)
3. User Interface Designers (the fewer the better)
4. Engineers
   1. Release Engineers (one is usually sufficient)
   2. UI Engineers (a couple will do)
   3. Core Developers (a handful is best)
5. Testers (the more the merrier)
6. Localizers (perhaps a couple dozen, but you'll never meet them)
7. More Testers (to complain about the same things that the other testers were testing, but claim that they're problems with the localized versions)
8. Webmaster
9. Add-ons (OK, these are optional, and aren't really part of the product)
10. Platform developers (these are an external resource who if you're lucky might be around to ask for features when you don't have time to talk to them)
11. Triagers (you can never get enough)

So who can you actually meet?

Some of our managers have introduced themselves publicly, so I suppose they're fair game:

• Ari Jaaksi
• Leonid Zolotarev

Who's the architect?

• That's me, timeless

Who is the User Interface Designer?

• Sorry, he doesn't seem to have a presence.
• So all I will say is that it isn't tigert, but he's a public figure, and I think he'll occasionally answer questions. So, I suppose you can ask him. :)

Who works on the User Interface?

Well, our team is actually quite small, so most of us do double or even triple duty. So I'll list someone here:

• Anton Rogaynis

Who is a core Developer?

• Oleg Romashin

Who are the Testers?

• timeless
• This is where you come in, please join us :). We can always use more testers.

Why do you have a web designer?

We were just lucky, I guess.

• Markus Berg, a summer intern helped us out

What Add-ons?

• Adobe Flash, it's not made by our group. Yes people work on it. But they're not in my group, so I can't say.
• Mozilla Add-ons. Definitely not really a part of our group. And to use these, you'll need someone to repackage them.

Who triages browser bugs?

• Kevin Zhang
• timeless
• You could join me

This site is gonna contain some stuff related to Mozilla development in mobile area.

When I posted just a pretty little picture of my N800, users asked me what all those little things on my home screen were. Not one to disappoint my readers, I decided to take a better picture and walk users through what I keep as default apps on my N800.

We'll start with the Status Bar:

• The black triangle is new to the latest N800 firmware. It's a drop-down toggle that hides my Bluetooth, Brightness, and Devicescape applets.
• The next one is my CPU/Memory/Screenshot applet
• Apparently I am "Not Available" on Google Talk
• My WiFi is connected
• My battery is full
• My volume is way up
• and finally my GMail box is being monitored

Now on to the real applets:

• Google Search is and will always be there.
• Below it, my RSS reader is showing headlines from Engadget, Slashdot, Planet Maemo, and Lifehacker
• Topping the right column is a shortcut to Navicore.
• Below that is my Canola applet
• Finally, there's my clock.

What's with all those icons on the bottom, though? That's not standard! Of course not - it's the SimpleLauncher bar, configured to be transparent. The icons, left to right, are:

• Navicore again,
• Connection Manager
• Web Browser
• Notes
• Contacts
• Canola
• Sketch
• XTerm
• Control Panel
• File Manager
• Camera
• Carman
• Pidgin
• Skype

Didn't know you could stuff that much on your home screen, did you?

Seems like the N800 page is having some problems today ;-)

Suomi: Tuoll' on neitoset kisassa, Kaunokaiset karkelossa. Noilla Väinölän ahoilla, Kalevalan kankahilla.

English: There is an interest in organizing a GNOME 10 Years celebration in Helsinki. Let's get organized in the wiki page.

Oh no, my little app. Before it’s even in an alpha stage, the future for the virtual guitar for the N800 is looking bleak. To put it simple the python gstreamer combination is running the N800 out of memory. The samples are not big, and I don’t know if the entire sample is loaded into memory. But, well, it doesn’t work.

Guess it’s time for another C++ porting project.

In recent years video sites have come on in leaps and bounds, though I don’t know the entire history of how things started, I know of a few sites that I use on a fairly regular basis, and the reason why I visit them. The aim of this blog is to entice YOU, the reader, to think about what you really want from a video site that is not already being fulfilled. Adobe announced recently of it’s intention to add in AAC and MP4 support directly to the flash player. So, why do I visit video sites.

• Youtube - Well, this is a toughie. I guess I visit YouTube to see clips of favourite videos, to see video demos of new technology, and often to see instructional videos about things I’m interested in. I’ve also used it occasionally to post to in order to get a video in a nice format I know people will be able to use. I’ve used YouTube over GoogleVideo, purely because of the quality of the resulting uploaded video.
• GoogleVideo - Google Video seems to be geared towards more commercial usage, rather than just posting a video of your and your mates destroying a bin in your garden, a la Youtube. I have a few videos posted up here of my talks at HantsLUG. If I can’t find what I want at YouTube, I normally will go to google video as my second choice. Google also seems to have a much longer clip length available, which makes it excellent for some applications
• Stage6 - The Stage6 site is awesome, most noteably because of it’s high-quality videos, which are just staggering. Last time I used it, it worked well with Totem, which should please most open source enthusiasts. I go there primarily for the high-quality videos which sometimes is a must for my work. DivX also provide a web player, which at the moment is only windows and mac supported.

So I guess my questions are what should we be expecting and demanding from the next generation of video sites and video players? Are there aspects of a web player which would make it viable to download? If people started making Linux versions to these players, why would we want them? Now that handheld devices like the Nokia N800 are out and using Linux, I thought it was about time we put down some ideas.

Some people like the community side of things. Sharing videos with others.
Some people like the quality side of things. Getting the most for your buck.
Some people like features. Just having the most fun things available.

What do you want in a video site, what interests you?!?

A

A note on this entry: The links only work if you have a bugzilla account and are logged in. It doesn't cost you anything and they are good with privacy.

*UPDATE* - you may wish to defer some feature request posts as the maemo bug reporting system is due for some reorganization in the near future. Continue discussing them on InternetTabletTalk and other resources, but wait for an announcement before submitting feature requests to bugzilla again.

In my conversations with maemo developers, their repeated frustration is that people rant about feature requests without filing feature requests in the bugzilla. I just found myself guilty of the same - whining about a missing feature without so much as searching for a bugzilla entry.

Previously, I wrote a bugzilla introduction and howto. This applies not only to bugs but to feature requests as well. I decided to check to see if there was a feature request for a Flash plugin by a simple search. I noticed that there was no entry for camera support in Flash but did notice a popular feature request for N800 to PC Calls. I voted on that one. (See the bugzilla introduction for information on voting.)

I've changed a bug to a feature request in the past by writing a proposal on what to do and why it is a good idea. Nokia (Quim Gil, specifically) responded by adding it to the Wishlist section of the Product Roadmap.

Now I want to add a new feature request into a new "bug" entry. The first step would be to choose a product. I chose N800. If I get this wrong, I am sure the developers will fix it.

Once I was done filling the whole thing out, a new bug was created. It helps when you talk to other tablet owners (say, on InternetTabletTalk) and tell them to vote on it as well.

Then it's a waiting game. Maybe Nokia will pick up the request and maybe the won't. It never hurts to ask and it helps the developers know which are the most wanted of features.

Reminders: Bugzilla is not for technical support, complaints, arguments, or support on 3rd party software. Adding that to the bugzilla just slows down development on actual maemo bugs and feature requests.

This is not official support by any means, and perhaps you're better off using 2007 Hacker Edition instead, but we've packaged a build of MicroB for OS 2006.

What's special about it?

Not much, it's basically the same MicroB as you would get on OS 2007.

How does it work?

The same way it works in 2007, it integrates with the system /usr/bin/browser, you can still switch back to Opera (8.0 in the case of 2006, instead of 8.5 on 2007) at any time.

What's the catch?

• Plug-ins. The plug-ins MicroB uses are basically standard NPAPI plug-ins. For 4.2007, updated plug-ins were shipped that were compatible with MicroB. Unfortunately, we don't think we can get a license to ship the 2007 plug-ins for the 770. So officially, if you want Flash 9, you'll need to buy an N800 and install 4.2007.

What does it take to get Flash 9 working?

Flash 9 requires:

1. the actual Flash plug-in
2. a library (libplayback) that provides support for cooperatively sharing the sound device. It's sort of a bug-fix response to problems involving Flash and Media player.
3. a symlink so that it can be found by consumers (Flash).

How do I install it?

• Use this install file
• As usual, you'll be prompted to add a repository if you don't have it
• As with OS 2007, if some of your repositories are unavailable, the installation won't work. If that happens, you'll need to select microb-browser from the installable applications section of Application manager.

GUADEC 2007 was a place where the first MicroB - Mozilla based browser for maemo was presented.
Yesterday we celebrated this event in a ristorante Gastone - a taste of Italy in Helsinki. Some shots.

I tried Sardine long time ago on my n800 and didn’t get it running. Now Maemo 4.0 Chinook alpha SDK is released and I decided to try again. I want to have a working n800 always with me, so I put the Chinook on the second partition of external mmc (first one is still a normal vfat for OGGs etc).

Who has been looking for Arabian and Chinese fonts for N800? Fonts are available for Mozilla browser. Click, install and use it with your N800.

Summer of Code has now practically ended. I’ll post a more detailed look at my original plans and actual accomplishments soon, for now I’ll just say that I’m fairly happy with the results: some things we’re left undone, but other unplanned features got implemented. What I’m wondering is how the rest of Maemo SoC went — according to Mathieu Blondels last post he’s doing ok (although that was a month ago), but the other two projects seem to have been dropped in the mid-term evaluation.

Smoove “Instant Desktop migration” and the Ruby bindings project have had no activity at all as far as I can tell (there’s some progress on the Ruby front, but it seems unrelated). Now, a sample size of four means that we can’t draw too much conclusions, but a half-way failure rate of 50% still seems high — compare with Gnome’s 2 out of 29 = 7%. What went wrong?

Eminently employable

Conveniently at the same time as SoC ends, I’ve found out that I won’t be getting either of the two jobs I’ve applied for. Naturally the application processes took about nine weeks to finish… So, if you’re looking for a developer or development support person with any/all of these qualities (preferably around Helsinki), let me know:

• Involved with maemo from the beginning, familiar with development on the platform
• Understands open source tools, processes and communities
• Experience in closed and open source development in several languages on multiple platforms
• Lots of knowledge and hands-on expertise in Geographic Information Systems

Full time, part time, freelance — I’m not too picky as long as the job is interesting.
Contact information
LinkedIn profile

We have just released Python-GPSbt and Python-abook, providing access to GPS and address book data. Both modules are available through Application Manager as separate packages. We will collect all user opinions about them and possibly these packages will be included as part of a new PyMaemo release.

GeoClue bindings will be provided as soon as it gets a bit more mature. In fact its possible to access its API using D-Bus calls.

Finally, thanks to Eduardo Rocha for suggestions on how to improve py-gpsbt.

The Chinook desktop with Plankton theme looks quite ok. It has some transparency as you can see from the desktop screenshot.

It seems to work decently although is has some minor and some major issues. They are probably solvable but at least didn’t work out of the box for me. For upgrading your application to match the Chinook’s APIs it’s stable enough, imo. Although I’m not sure which new APIs the Chinook alpha SDK includes, in addition to the new Hildon Desktop.

The Navigator application menu has a new big look. I’m sure some people will love it and some hate it, as usual. The menu behaviour seems a bit odd, like it remembers my last position in the menu when I reopen it, but is buggy.

Some of the old apps work, some not. I could get screen shots with my screen grabber, I could play OGGs with kilikali but although evince started up, it just jammed there. Mirage didn’t even start. And I couldn’t find File Manager from anywhere. Opera works OK when started from the application menu but the Hildon Desktop crashes when I try to open the Browser menu from Navigator. The most important app, osso-xterm, luckily works :)

Connectivity (wlan, bt, usbnet) seems to work.

Power saving, on the other hand, does not. Or at least for some reason the battery didn’t last even for a day when it lasts easily several days on the latest official release. I might have had the usbnet running though which can affect the situation.

As I wrote in an earlier article (#2), that there are a number of ways to help the browser team improve MicroB.

The browser team and maemo.org would like to encourage contributions. To that end, I am happy to announce that I've sent George Kibardin a maemo.org t-shirt, in appreciation for the good bugs he has filed. And with the hope and expectation that we will continue to receive good reports from him.

I can't guarantee that we'll send shirts monthly, but I hope to be able to. Note that we also would like to encourage people to make patches, and code contributions, it's quite likely that the next shirt will be sent to someone for contributing a patch or two that improves our code.

With the latest release of HandBrake and the improvements of Konttori's Media Converter, it's easy to get a DVD on to the Nokia 770 or Nokia N800. The screen shots are for Mac, but the same software is available on Windows.

First, rip the DVD using Handbrake to an MPEG-4 AVI with MP3 audio. Attempting to rip it to an .MP4 file H.264/AAC as shown above didn't work, but ripping it to an .AVI worked fine. In short- make sure your settings match this paragraph, not the screen shot.

Once the movie is ripped, use the Media Converter to optimize it for your internet tablet. Since I am using an N800, I set it with default N800 settings. I am quite pleased with the results - as can be shown in image on the top of this article.

This took hours on an Intel Core2 Duo 2.0 iMac, as these rippers/recoders are not multithreaded and video recoding is an intensive operation. However, with a dual core CPU it is possible to rip one film while re-coding another. Set it up and go to bed. When you wake up, just copy the file to a memory card.

Se7en (as shown in widescreen above) is 2 hours, 6 minutes long and takes 528M on my memory card. Remember to only do this with movies you own (and not your latest NetFlix rental) as this kind of backup may be a violation of copyright law. Check your local laws.

Where to test your browser???

1. BrowserSpy will tell you who are you and what your browser can.
2. One of the oldest tests is Acid2.
3. Gunlaug provides some interesting cases.
4. The test generates random pieces of malformed HTML.

Since the MicroB beta was released, people have expressed excitement about the web sites which are now accessible because of the Mozilla engine. Although MicroB is not yet ready for its official release, I feel it is mature enough for users to use. Not simply use, but take advantage of the power of a real desktop browser on a small device.

I have been thinking of ways to improve the browsing experience on the N800. So I started packaging, developing, and porting components to enhance the MicroB browsing experience, including fonts that support other character sets. There will be more detailed posts when I have news about available add-ons.

I hope you enjoy it.

I have just uploaded two True Type Font packages: Arabic and Chinese, with Arabic and Chinese character sets respectively.

To install one, click it and select open. Application manager should open. If you don't have the Browser Extras repository installed, it will ask for your confirmation to add it. If your repositories are all in working order, it should then ask to install the font package you've selected. After installing, the font may not work immediately. In this case, reboot your device and try again.

The latest version of packages will also be available on the downloads page.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending some time writing a document called, “An Unofficial Guide to Creating a Most Excellent maemo User Interface.” Maemo, if you don’t know, is the open-source development platform that applications are created under for the Nokia Internet Tablets (currently, the 770 and the N800). The document has just gone to beta, so I thought it would be a good time to mention something about it publicly.

An experimental release of PyMaemo is available for SDK 4.0. To use it just include these lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list file and disable ALL repositories remaining:

http://repository.maemo.org bora free non-free
http://repository.maemo.org/extras sardine free non-free

To install use 'apt-get update' then 'apt-get install python2.5-runtime' as root inside your device.

Marcelo got an iPhone and I could use it for a while, my initial idea was to compare my virtual keyboard with their (mine is “better”, easier to type, because the screen is larger!), but I also paid attention to graphics effects, and other things that I could use to improve my own skills… BUT what impressed me most was the number of 3rd party applications already available for it!

Apple has invested no money to create a public development infrastructure, community resources and not even a cross compiler toolchain. Actually, they tried hard to avoid people writing native applications, but even with these factors they got to the point they have more useful (IMO) applications than N800, with Nokia creating Maemo, funding scratchbox, tons of resources to improve Gnome and related tools.

Sure, they already ship with great apps by default, as an excellent media player and browser and simple but good enough mail client, maps, PIM… but you can already install game emulators that works (I’m talking about on screen controls, due multi-touch) and even some web applications through Python/Django. See some apps at http://iphoneapplicationlist.com/.

Although there is no documentation on HIG or even widget API, these applications look integrated, they benefit from graphical/physics effects, support screen rotation and more, and if you consider the timeline, it is 2 months old and the cracks to install home brew software is even newer!

I still have no conclusion on what we did wrong and they right, but IMO things are more favorable for them. Maybe it’s about they touching the hackers egos (forbidden is always cool), maybe it’s about better infrastructure, … What’s your opinion?

PS: the device is neat, things seem well integrated, they did just the simple things, but did they right, really. Their attention to details, not just for user interface, is incredible.

We have just got to a first milestone of the maemo wiki, thanks to the priceless help of some big hearts at #maemo (details to come in a next post):

• We have gone through most (all?) of the content.
• All the good content is now linked from the main page.
• There are still pages with an uncertain future (pro-official docs, candidates to be deleted, pages probably irrelevant today, content in non-English... All of them are located at WikiReorg. The priority now is to clear up this page.
• We got rid of all the orphans
• Now we have a big list of pages to delete. If you find there content worth to be kept move the link to WikiReorg. We can always recover old content from the old wiki.
• We have also gone through the functionality expected in a wiki nowadays, in order to know in details what we have got and what is missing. The Midgard developers are reviewing the bugs submitted and commenting/resolving them.

From a content point of view, we will reorganize the wiki main page in topics: multimedia, connectivity, etc, as we plan to do with the official documentation. On the wiki tool side, once the situation of the open bugs is clear we will decide the next steps to do in order to put the maemo wiki in shape.

We will need to invest more time/money in the tool. How much, when and how will depend also on the interest we perceive from the maemo community using the wiki and expanding its content. As usual, all feedback is welcome.

For some years not I’ve been waiting for the mobile phonemultimedia computer you can’t phone with…

Thanks to guys at internettablettalk, I noticed that youtube had changed the way video files are referred on the page source code. Thus, uktube stopped working until this problem had been fixed. I was just able to fix and test it a few minutes ago and I wanted to let you all know that the problem has been fixed and there is a new version for you to download.


So, once again, thanks for letting me know of the uktube bug. UKMP 1.62 only fixes uktube bug in downloading youtube videos. So, don't expect any fixes related to ogg files.

It seems that ogg installation at the moment is missing ogg demux for some users. I'll try to get oggs working again in ukmp for the 1.63 release some time next week

EDIT: LINK FIXED

Download here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp/

Nokia 770 is currently the bargain of the day at eCost. The price is $129. Want it for somewhat less? You have to register with a deal-seeking site FatWallet, then go to their eCost section, and click through to go to eCost, earning 2.1% (roughly $2.50) payable to you 90 days after the purchase. Before buying make sure it’s really something that you want as eCost is one of those few merchants that rapes you on return policies, refusing to accept any returns, claiming all sales are final, and making you jump through the hoops of manufacturer phone support if the product you got in the mail is defective.

Nokia has released MOSH, a create - collect - share website with mobile users in mind. From the popular content and tags it is easy to deduce that this is not just another Nokia-promo site (look this screenshot to see what I mean). I have been following the internal development from a distance, with interest, and I'm looking forward to see its evolution in the Tough Tough Web.

We have a potential opportunity to direct maemo content there, increasing the visibility of third party applications among the usual/enthusiastic users of mobile phones. I mean doing this officially with maemo, users alone can upload what they want and they are already posting stuff like Tomiku (a sudoku game for maemo).

We haven't thought much about this yet, since wanted to see the real MOSH in action and the maemo community reactions (if any). What do you think?

Nokia 770 owners could now try our latest Mozilla based browser.

More information is available here: MicroB for 770.

Some public statements allow me to now mention some work I’ve been doing recently for Openismus, for Nokia, though the heavy cloak of secrecy still hangs over many Nokia things by default.

Maemo Modest

Since Nokia’s Dirk-Jan Binnema talked about Maemo’s new Modest email-client at the GNOME conference (his slides), I can mention that some of the Openismus people (myself, Armin Burgmeier, Johannes Schmid, and Christian Kellner) have been working on this project quite intensively since May 2007. It consumes most of my time at the moment.

Modest is an email client for the Nokia Internet Tablet that’s actually usable, meaning it can handle real world amounts of email, via both POP and IMAP, and it has presets that make it easy to set it up to use many common email accounts, such as Yahoo and Gmail. If we can get everything done (Nokia’s quality requirements are sensibly high) then this will be used by a lot of people.

It uses Tinymail, which uses Evolution’s camel code, so we obviously get most of the functionality that Evolution has, without using Evolution’s UI, but everything is much faster and responsive. It is by far the best way that I can imagine to write an email client now, not that there’s a lot of competition. I say that even though I think that tinymail is currently not a lot more than a glorified wrapper for camel. It’s just that it’s a very good wrapper. Good APIs cause applications to be better and save developers time. It will get really interesting when there’s a future version that can use something other than camel. Philip Van Hoof knows the Tinymail and camel code very well and is incredibly responsive to our needs. While I might be up all night worrying about a problem, Philip has usually been up all night fixing it properly.

We’ve made some small but significant changes to tinymail’s version of camel (camel-lite) - a big investment of time. I think that Evolution should be ported to our camel-lite in the near future, to get some improved stability (general fixes and better thread locking to avoid intermittent hangs and crashes) and improved error codes (allowing better error messages), and obviously to get the performance improvements (though a one-time cache upgrade would be needed, I think). That would be useful even if they never decide to use Tinymail, which they probably should do too one day.

Maemo C++

The updated C++ bindings for Maemo, which I mentioned recently, will be released and supported by Nokia (with help from Openismus) as part of their regular SDK. This means that people can feel safe about using C++ and gtkmm to develop Maemo applications, should C++ be their programming language of choice.

If you are using h2def.py/codegen.py to generate Python wrappers for your GObjects do pay attention to these messages:

Warning: Constructor for <your GObject here> needs to be updated to new API.
              See http://live.gnome.org/PyGTK_2fWhatsNew28#update-constructors

That has the consequence that you’ll have problems subclassing the wrapped objects. That page doesn’t exist but you can see the explanation and how to solve it here.

Some of you may have noticed mail announcing changes to bugs.maemo.org that was sent out over the weekend. While this is not entirely browser related, it was done mostly by me with the hope of improving the Browser team's ability to collect, analyze and resolve bugs in MicroB. As some people know, among my other hats, I am occasionally involved in the configuration of components for another Bugzilla, and while I don't remember the absolute beginning of that Bugzilla, or its community, I'm hoping that we can grow the maemo.org community to be as active and involved as theirs.

Last weeks I played a lot with MPlayer for maemo. First I did that Xv + "-wid" patch in order to ignore those "Bad Values"  when going back from fullscreen on windowed mode. Now it was time of making vo_nokia770 works with "-wid". The first point was that vo_nokia770 was pretty ...

It's time for a break. I worked probably 8 hours a day (in addition to work) last week, plus another 12 hours over the weekend on DragonFear for the n800.

I've made good progress.... (read more)Character generation is finished, and I've got the basic game handling objects in for monsters, weapons, armor and combat. I haven't even made an attempt at working out a game balance yet, in fact I have no experience balancing games so this will be a learning experience. I'm going with a one off from the early AD&D style rules for combat and stats, but a lot is going from memory, and it's been two decades since I played D&D so who knows...

The hardest part is that the development I've been doing for work this week has been in Pascal, not Python, so the daily switching back and forth between languages has been a challenge. I tend to end my python lines with a semicolon, and forget to do that on my Pascal, among other things ;-)

I've taken some pretty interesting strategies with DragonFear. For one, the game data files for maps, graphics and music will end up taking a decent amount of memory space. Rather than place these files into the distributed debian package, I've built in a feature that will download the media files from my web server the first time you run the game. This way it can ask you where you want to place them, and it can auto detect the presence of MMC's and provide those as options for game data storage. You could always manually download the .tgz files and extract them into a certain place on your device, but this makes it so easy. I'm thinking of allowing new game content modules to be downloaded the same way. Check out the screenshots:





As you can see I'm going for the "Least Common Denominator" when it comes to user expertise here. There's no choosing an actual directory. It will go in a subdirectory called "dragonfear" regardless of what device you pick. It also uses the ~/MyDocs/.games/dragonfear/ directory if you choose home.

Thinking to leave the main flash memory free for Mamona tests I looked for a way to have dual boot in the N800. Then I found a good documentation explaining how to easily boot from MMC card.

The only step that I skipped was the “How to install a dual boot menu?”.

To use the system in memory card I’ve edited the initfs manually  to access directly the partition created in the memory card. The only thing that I did was to add the code below in the begin of boot() function in linuxrc of initfs (My last post  explains how to edit and flash the initfs in your pc).

load_mmc_modules
root_dev=mmcblk0p2
root_dev_name=”MMC”
root_dev_set=1
root_fstype=”"
root_fsoptions=”"

As you can easily notice it is hard coded. Actually I’m not using a real dual boot because when testing mamona I need to flash the kernel too, so I prefer to flash a different initfs for mamona every time instead of have to press a button during the boot.

However it is possible to have a dual boot changing the begin of boot() function of linuxrc in initfs to be like that:

boot()
{
load_wlan_module
if ! grep -q new_root /proc/mounts; then
text2screen -t “Press any key for MMC boot” -H left -y 80 -s 2 -B 0xffff
key_pressed 1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
load_mmc_modules
root_dev=mmcblk0p2
root_dev_name=”MMC”
root_dev_set=1
root_fstype=”"
root_fsoptions=”"
fi
mount_device “$root_dev”
fi
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
return 1
fi
…

Or following that step that I haven’t tried.

It is important to clarify that when you flash only the initfs and/or the kernel you don’t loose any data in your main flash memory or in your MMC card.

Another important thing to say is about performance. I’ve been using it for more than a week from  internal MMC slot and couldn’t notice any lost of performance when compared to a system booting from main flash memory.

Are you curious about Mamona booting on N800? This is a topic for another post…

It was nice to meet so many old friends and new people in Guadec. We had lots of great discussions and got valuable feedback and ideas about our Maemo user interface.

We try to take a more active role in the developer community, hoping to better support application developers from UI point of view. And we are also looking forward to participate in the creation of Gnome Mobile together with the rest of the community, sharing our experiences and the lessons we have learned while developing a mobile device with a touchscreen.

Hopefully you were all present in Ari Jaaksi’s keynote speech, where he explained many of the challenges we face when creating a product to be sold in stores. It hopefully made it a bit easier to understand why it sometimes takes so long to get improvements or new ideas included into our products.
We hope to have lively dialogue with you in the future. This is of course meant for everyone, not just those of you who were in Guadec!

Jenni & Tuomas
“Beauty and the Beast”

This great new UME tutorial explains how to import
a UI specified with Glade into Python and then
make the changes required to turn it into a basic
UME/Hildon application in Python.

It also lists and details the files required by such an
app in the UME framework.

It was written by one of the guys from pepper
who are dedicated to making the Web computing
era simpler

[ The full blogging experience, this time drunken as a brick layer.. :-]

Some nice ongoing work happening around MicroB Browser (mozilla for maemo): Browser-Extras is a good example:

• Nice Firefox extensions for MicroB: follow it here ;)
  

• Chinese and Arabic font packages available.

Arabic
chinese

ps: pics from leoz' blog.


--Antonio Gomes

I was able to get Arabic and Chinese fonts rendering with MicroB engine.

1. Go to http://browser-extras.garage.maemo.org/ with your Nokia N800 device
2. Install Arabic True Type Font and Chinese True Type Font
3. Reboot the device

See some screen shots below…

Wikipedia home page before the fonts packages were installed:

Wikipedia home page after the installation:

BBC Arabic and BBC China rendering:

During this summer, I participated conferences such as GUADEC, OSS 2007, and Linux World SF, and met developers and teams in places like India, UK, and US. We also had our closing meetings and presentations for an interesting research project called “Managing OSS as an Integrated Part of Business”. A whole lotta open source going on!




So I’ve been making some observations, too.

First, open source is really becoming an integral part of any software business. It is very difficult to think of any new software product, service, or initiative that would not include significant open source elements. Somebody told me that VCs have included open source into their funding check list. If your new startup doesn’t base its software operations on open source – no money. I wonder if this is true. Anybody knows? Haven’t done fund searching lately.

Second, free software and open source are drifting further apart. There is a practical approach for getting good quality software available through simply sharing code. And then there is a deeper philosophy. ...but...., this topic is a taboo. Thou shalt not have wrong opinions on free software or .... Do you feel the heat?

Third, open source based UIs and end user experiences, build by communities and hackers, are not that good. It is not easy to find community built software that provides UI W-O-W and high level of usability. It seems that high quality integration and user experience requires a stong central mechanism, such as a company, to run the implementation. Now, please, prove me wrong!

I’ve been wanting to run things on OMAP’s DSP processor since the day I tested an OMAP1510 development board some years ago. Finally after a Proof of concept G.711 dsptask mail by Simon Pickering I decided to cut’n'paste that and try.

I’ve been using Gregarius as my primary RSS aggregator for quite a while now. It is simple and uncluttered, it’s AJAXy where it needs to be, it parses XML data very well, and the best part…it runs from my own server. Alas, Gregarius hasn’t been updated in a very long time and, truthfully, it’s been acting pretty buggy for the past few months.

Enter Tiny Tiny RSS...

Tiny Tiny RSS (or tt-rss for short) is another RSS/Atom reader that must be installed on a user’s own server (PHP/MySQL). So far, I have been very impressed.

Tt-rss:

• leaves a small footprint on the server (approx. 2MB)
• is asy to install/configure
• is designed with a clean, AJAXy user interface with three themes to choose from
• is ultiple-user capable
• has plenty of cool aggregation features (like search, article starring, filter rules, tag clouds/editing, an “adaptive” display, three-pane or two-pane view, etc.)

Anyway, I’ve already made the switch from Gregarius to tt-rss. Importing my OPML file was quick and painless and organizing my feeds into categories was a breeze.

• can be monitored with the Tiny Tiny RSS Notifier Add-on for Firefox.

I’d recommend Tiny Tiny RSS to anyone who prefers to store RSS feeds on their own server. (Tt-rss even looks great on my N800!)