The N810 built-in memory card bug

Hello. Today I want to introduce you my iconset for OMWeather called «Contour» The main feature of this set is that it looks very familiar with Maemo OS’08 interface. And also it’s 100% readable both on bright and dark backgrounds. Feel free to post your comments and suggestions here :) Right now you can download it here but [...]

My friend Urho Konttori is at it again - this time making a USB Host Mode program to switch between USB Client, USB OnTheGo, and USB Host. It's fantastic.


Installation: Now that it's added to the repositories, it's a one-click install and worked fine for me. The hardware requirement is the included USB cable with the Internet Tablet and a "Female to Female" USB adapter. I got one at Fry's Electronics for $4.


The application is simple: Three buttons on the bottom allow you to select host mode, OTG mode, and (the default) Peripheral mode. OTG mode is for cameras and related devices supporting that protocol. Peripheral mode turns your tablet into a card reader to look at the internal and card storage. Host mode allows other devices (such as flash drives and keyboards) to be connected.

I tested it with a variety of devices:

• USB Flash Drive - Success
• USB Hard Drive - Limited success: External drives must be both fully powered externally (not just through one of those USB power splitters) and must not be formatted with NTFS. I tested an ext2 filesystem and a FAT32 filesystem and they worked fine.
• USB DVD-ROM - The device recognized, but the filesystem did not.
• USB keyboard - Worked fine.
• USB Mouse - Was recognized but did nothing.

When an error like the above appears, it means the filesystem is not recognized. To save space and speed, the N810's kernel was compiled with only a few types of file system supported.

Thank you for making the tablet that much more functional, Urho.

Our browser team is looking to hire Project Managers and Software Developers (C/C++/Linux).

The position below describes the browser technology specialist but we are also looking for a project manager to work for the same domain.

Apply online for this position.

Engadget's official 2007 Engadget Awards aren't posted, but the vote count shows that the N810 won the Handheld of the Year tally. Of course - they have to do some tallying for fraud and then announce their own picks. I think they're going to choose the Kindle, but it's good to see more people chose the N810.

IMAP’s biggest problem is poor server implementations and big vendors who are not really supportive towards each other being the ones defining it. Not because they are the only ones at IETF who are vocal about the protocol. It’s because if the big players don’t implement the new enhancements, it basically boils down to not being used and the E-mail clients not adopting it. Quite funny is the fact that all those big players have their own closed protocols for E-mail too. That all those big players seem to consider their IMAP support to be of secondary priority.

Introduction

Hi. Before starting our discussion I want to tell some ideas that will explain the features that I want to suggest now and later. So, let’s begin. Freedom is a great thing. Freedom allows you to do anything you want whenever or wherever you want. But not all humans can use freedom in the right way. [...]

Miguel has a good status update on Moonlight. Complementing that I recorded a few simple demos presenting current state of our Moonlight trunk.

While talking to friends at FOSDEM I noticed that while everybody pretty much heard about Moonlight/Silverlight, not so many people have actually seen it in action. This is understandable — at the moment building Moon from source is not trivial. Hopefully those little videos will help a little.

Microsoft showcase — a website collecting links to various Silverlight-enabled pages and web apps. Users can browse sites and rate them. Built with Xaml and Javascript. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

Podium — A dynamic mashup of various news related to US election candidates. Shows some more advanced text-flowing and formatting capabilities. Again — Xaml and Javascript. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

Surfaces — A very simple surface manipulation/D&D example. Clutter has a similiar demo. Watch demo / Download high-res avi.

This is only a small selection of Silverlight-enabled sites which was easier to record (ie. not using media playback). A bigger list we use for testing is available at Moonlight 1.0 test sites.

My first daughter born last sunday at 8 am GMT+1.
Her name is Bruna, this is the catalan word for brunette.
We are very happy with her arrival and the new vital experience that we are living.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeptorra

Next week I’m flying to San Francisco to take part in the Open Source in Mobile USA conference and spend some extra days meeting people in the Bay Area. My role in product management at Nokia is evolving and I’m taking more responsibilities over open source in general, beyond the maemo development platform. Ari Jaaksi (director [...]

Well why not? I was thinking about the Contribution Pack and it got me thinking further, would there be any benefit to having a standard similar to iso9000, only must less rigid and feature rich. Why not setup a small organisation that looks at the documentation available to volunteers or communities and awards the open source project a compliance standard. What does it mean for the project? Well it means that people who want to contribute should be able to expect the same level of documentation on procedures that they get from another approved project.

The OpenMoko people were so kind to put my blog on the planet. Now I can use also this channel to keep you informed about the Jalimo project and the distribution Integration.

Jalimo is a project for enhancing the Java support across the different mobile&embedded distributions. Over the years Robert Schuster and I where missing continuous Java support in the Linux mobile distributions, we were playing with. Off course there was always a way to get a free JVM running but no one was searching and solving the problems, Java programmers had on targeting those devices. As we also noticed the need for a Java mobile platform in our company, we started Jalimo (approx. one year ago).

Since the beginning of the project we had maemo and OpenMoko in focus, as the primary target platforms. They have different toolchains (Scratchbox vs. OpenEmbedded), which both had no proper Java support. After a period of experimenting we now have a very clean Java support and support for generating maemo packages in OpenEmbedded. So now, beyond maemo and OpenMoko, all the other OpenEmbedded based distributions can use those recipes too, so that we don’t have to redo the work for others.

OpenEmbedded is great for generating a complete distribution but will most likely never be the tool of choice for a usual Java application developer. Those people nowadays mostly use maven. For this reason we have created a packaging plugin for maven. This plugin allows a Java developer to generate .deb or .ipkg packages out of a usual maven project, using a single command. Since the plugin has special support for our target platforms, it allows a smooth integration e.g. it translates the maven dependencies to clean distribution dependencies. With this, we hope, any Java developer can write and deploy Linux mobile apps without changing their used toolchain.

The main packages of Jalimo (which are already integrated in the official OpenMoko repositories) consist of: cacao, gnu classpath and SWT (with GTK peer) for the GUI. This is a set which fulfils the most common requirements, but we support alternatives and additional packages in our extra repositories. e.g. jamvm (with a faster startup), midpath, Swing, java-gnome bindings (unfortunately no recent version), java-dbus and some more. If you like to see support for something not included, please get in touch! For example sometimes I think we also should include the Sun PhoneME, to show the people that we also could choose a very fast JVM, if we want to but since it seems, that nobody needs it, we don’t have done this integration for now.

I report this news from Andrew Jorgensen (Monologue):

The Map application for Nokia’s OS2008 (for N800 and N810) lets you download map data for a number of regions. The USA-West and USA-East regions are very large, though, and I have never been able to download them — it always fails about half way through. I know others have dealt with the same problem.

This morning I got a reply from Wayfinder Customer Support:

Dear Sir,
Thank you for contacting Wayfinder.

If the map download fails through the Internet Tablet, you can download the maps from this address: http://www.navicoretech.com/Consumer/Support/Downloads/tablet/en_GB/wfnavigator/

Best regards,
Annette
Customer Support
Wayfinder

Instructions for installing the map data are on that site. It’s still a slow download but at least you can use a download manager.

Interesting less trivial than expected problem (solved): sorting package version numbers:

import re
import rpm

def get_package_version(name):
    """Return version string of installed package."""

    # note: ts can take an argument that is the root of the installation
    #       typically with a var/lib/rpm directory underneath it.
    transaction_set = rpm.ts()

    versions = [header['provideversion'][0]
                for header in transaction_set.dbMatch('name', name)]
    versions.sort(cmp_versions)
    return versions

def version2sortable(version):

    parts = re.split(r'(d+)', version)
    fields = []
    for part in parts:
        try:
            part = int(part)
        except ValueError:
            pass
        fields.append(part)
    return tuple(fields)

def cmp_versions(a, b):

    return cmp(version2sortable(a), version2sortable(b))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print get_package_version('kernel')

Output:

['2.6.23.8-63.fc8', '2.6.23.9-85.fc8', '2.6.23.14-107.fc8', '2.6.23.14-115.fc8', '2.6.23.15-137.fc8']


Note: Wordpress is screwing up the markup on the code blocks above. If you have any tips on how to fix this please drop me a line.
Update: Using pre/blockquote hack for now and will try out a code highlighter plug-in when I get the chance. Thanks Tim and Lindsay!

To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that N800 owners have upgraded to OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading your N800, click here. If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them

I report this news from Andrew Jorgensen (Monologue):

The Map application for Nokia’s OS2008 (for N800 and N810) lets you download map data for a number of regions. The USA-West and USA-East regions are very large, though, and I have never been able to download them — it always fails about half way through. I know others have dealt with the same problem.

This morning I got a reply from Wayfinder Customer Support:

Dear Sir,
Thank you for contacting Wayfinder.

If the map download fails through the Internet Tablet, you can download the maps from this address: http://www.navicoretech.com/Consumer/Support/Downloads/tablet/en_GB/wfnavigator/

Best regards,
Annette
Customer Support
Wayfinder

Instructions for installing the map data are on that site. It’s still a slow download but at least you can use a download manager.

The announce of the iPhone SDK has revealed some interesting facts; including a particularly ingenious (and simple) way Apple have improved the user experience of starting applications.

It's a bit of a cheat, but with sound User experience Design (UxD) principles behind it: two small waits are better than one long one. It's why we have "please wait" messages on everything from ATMs to websites, and Hildon Desktop's own "Application loading" info messages at the top-right. The user feels the action is progressing whilst complex operations are occurring underneath.

Therefore, Apple's idea is simple: display an image of the application completely empty of content, but with the structure of its window in place as quickly as possible after launch. When the app actually opens its window, it replaces the image.

For example, the "launch image" for the iPhone's Settings app is shown on the left, with the actual app's first window on the right:

...and the Stocks app:

I've just posted to maemo-developers an idea for similar within the Hildon Desktop. For example, imagine the instant you selected File Manager from the launch menu, this image was shown:

The normal "File Manager loading" infoprint would also be shown, and then the File Manager proper would open and replace it.

Although it's "only" a few seconds we're talking about, I think it could really make ITOS feel more responsive. Given we've only got a 400MHz processor to play with, the impression of speed is just as important as the making the startup time as low as possible (but with the overhead of shared libraries etc. there's a lower bound which is achievable).

Comments, as ever, welcome.

A quick follow-up to my post on improving application start-up usability. I've done a very rough & ready mockup:

A higher-quality (but not any better put together) AVI can be downloaded (333KB).

A quick follow-up to my post on improving application start-up usability. I've done a very rough & ready mockup:

A higher-quality (but not any better put together) AVI can be downloaded (333KB).

A few days ago I got this reply on one of my blog posts:

Phil:

Your post — and your work — miss the point entirely. Nobody cares how email works, they just want it to work.

Gmail (and most other webmail applications) makes everything else obsolete. I can’t imagine why Evolution is even shipped with Gnome anymore.

Web-based email clients are the standard.

-Anon

I just finished the E-mail client the guy wants. Here it is!

using GLib;
using Gtk;
using WebKit;

class Web20EmailClient : Window {
	WebView view;
	construct {
		view = new WebView ();
		view.open ("http://gmail.com");
		view.set_size_request (640, 480);
		add (view);
	}
	static void main (string[] args) {
		Gtk.init (ref args);
		var win = new Web20EmailClient ();
		win.show_all ();
		Gtk.main ();
	}
}

I have been thinking about a port of xine to maemo since a long time ago. Maybe you are thinking: "why have xine when you already have gstreamer and mplayer ?" Well, the problem is that it's very hard to use mplayer as a backend for media players but it's actually ...

Feature's already implemented (and landed on microb svn).



--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

I will be participating Open Source in Mobile USA conference in San Francisco.

If you are maemo developer or like to to be one, just come and chat with us. If you have any technical  issues in your mind or you like to talk how Forum Nokia can help you developing maemo applications come and talk with me.

If you like chat with Quim Gill from Nokia internet tablet product management, he will be there also.

We have reserved meeting room called "Lombard" for Wednesday 12th and we have also some small snack there. 

 

Since the Internet Tablet School launched last year, it's had an ever-growing audience and it seems that many people appreciate a tablet site aimed at beginners.

As a bit of an experiment, we've done something new: a book (just a short one though).

A portion of the cover price goes towards keeping the Tablet School going. If you want to show appreciation for what we've been doing, then click on our bookshop link below and buy a copy! :-)

The book is called The Internet Tablet School Companion, and it's been designed to complement the Tablet School website by providing tablet-related reference material which beginners can understand. The idea of the book is that you can look at it while using the site's tutorials or visiting other tablet sites. Most of the book is devoted to a Glossary section which lets you translate any weird tablet-related words you can't understand into plain English. The book also has some features discussing the past and future of the tablets, and an article on why tablets are better devices than smartphones.

The book does not contain any tutorials though, the tutorials will only be on the website.

Marcelo did a nice post on running Canola in vertical mode and has a video demonstrating the result:



The vertical mode is possible by using Xrandr, which has been ported to Mamona and the Chinook version of Maemo (os2008) by our [INdT] Mamona team. Really cool stuff. Great work guys :-)

Now let's hope someone has the time to adapt the interface for vertical usage.

PS: Leo reminded me to tell that not one line of code was made to the Canola2 before filming this video :-)

OSIM USA 2008

I arrived at San Francisco on Monday to attend the OSiM USA 2008. The first day was very interesting. I met partners and colleagues. I found many talks, such as the Access keynote by Kamada-san, and Bill Weinberg’s on communities very interesting.

A tip came into my Email from Harriv (Thanks!) showing me this thread on InternetTabletTalk. User sgoerg got DVB-H television to work on his N800! It's a fantastic post and an even more interesting thread. In this particular post, he explains what is needed. I was unable to reach Stefan before publishing this, but I hope to do a more in-depth feature on it soon. The photo above is his.

In case you missed the software/hardware you need to get USB Host functionality working on your N800 or N810, check this post.


A reader requested I test out a USB to Ethernet adapter on the tablet. I did as requested, but was unable to get the network stack to recognize it. The screenshot below shows more information.


My guess is that it would take a lot of manual configuration even if the kernel or modules supported the USB to Ethernet device directly. That particular USB Ethernet adapter is my favorite as it has worked on every machine and operating system I've tested it on to date. In fact, I used it to bypass some strange firewall issues in Mac OS on a Parallels virtual machine by simply having the virtual machine take over the USB Ethernet adapter.

The nvidia driver does not work out of the box in Ubuntu Gutsy, Ubuntu Hardy boots to graphical UI but with 3D features disabled. To get everything working properly you need to do the following steps:

If you don't read UltraMobileGeek, check out this editorial on the death of the WiFi Hotspot.

Yesterday I posted how to make a Web 2.0 E-mail client. Although a joke, some people kinda agreed that this is the future.

It's been a while since I've done a poll! The last asked what readers thought of Nokia's purchase of Trolltech:

It's great! The more Linux development, the better! 98 (56%) I'm indifferent. 48 (27%) It's bad! Qt and Qtopia are not open source! 26 (15%)
Even though my answers were slightly faulty (There are more open components to Trolltech's software than I thought) still the majority cheered for the merger.

As I mentioned a couple days ago: Podcasts on technology are taking over music listening in my life. I subscribe with iTunes not because it's the best solution but because I happen to have my iPod touch with me everywhere and sync it regularly. Now I'll ask my readers: What are podcasts to you?

• What's a podcast?
• I am not interested in podcasts.
• I listen to a few regularly.
• I listen to at least 5 podcasts per week.

If you read me through RSS (as at least half of you do,) head to TabletBlog.com and cast your vote in the right navigation bar.

I hope I can get enough bandwidth to keep blogging and stay up-to-date while I am in Brazil next week. For those tuning in late - I am giving a lecture (which will likely be more of a guided conversation) called "Noise to Signal" at Bossaconference in Porto de Galinhas next week. The topic will be about how developers (through tools and community interaction) can facilitate good feedback from users and filter out the garbage. If you (as a user or developer) have any comments to make as I polish up this speech, leave them here. Also leave comments on your thoughts about podcasting and why it rocks and/or sucks.

p.s. Yes, I know I recycled the image in this post from the iPod touch vs. Nokia Internet Tablet article.

I know this is and old topic by blogging standards, but because I found so simple and cheap to use external usb flash-drives with N810, I decided to write a quick walktrough.

1. Get yourself a female-female usb adapter. I ordered from this funny sounding store on eBay, and it took 1-2weeks for it to ship to Finland. Total cost: 2-3€ delivered. Plus the package is often very pretty if you order from Hong Kong Just search for example “usb female to female adapter” and sort by price.
2. Install Kate’s usb-otg-plugin.
3. Select host mode.
4. connect your usb cable, adapter and the flash drive.
5. Enjoy the warm pseudohackerish glow deep inside…

This image shows dmsg output after connecting the drive. My N810 opened the file manager automatically upon connecting. The USB flash key is a 2GB Kingston DataTraveller Mini.

Next up arduino….

Check out Nokia’s point of view on What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help, in the words of Ari Jaaksi (listen - read - slides). Building upstream following community rules is in the heart of this plan. This is what Nokia has been doing, learning and contributing back a lot. Now it’s [...]

The second day of the conference was awesome.

It is great when you can contribute to others work. It is amazing to have access to the code, read and improve it.

But it is amazing when you see that there are other people improving your own work.

Jott has improved my Linux patch for Xomap Rotation and created an applet to make our lives easy when rotating. Take a look at his install instructions.

I hadn’t published my compiled kernel and .deb packages for chinook yet because I found a bug when switch screen on after automatically switch off, but Jott’s patch has fixed it.

Thank’s Jott.

Marcelo has recently posted a Canola portrait test video on his blog.

The most impressive thing it that almost of Canola fits on rotated screen without any extra efforts by Canola team. These guys are doing a great work and I believe that as soon as possible they will release full support for vertical screens.

You can test it installing Canola and following Jott instructions to install xrandr and Xomap screen rotation support.

Have fun.

If you're wondering why I haven't weighed in on every other tech blog's WiMAX N810 speculation, it's because readers here know how this is last year's news. Yes - they may show a black-and-orange N810 at CTIA and say it's the WiMAX tablet, but it won't mean anything until WiMAX service is available for purchase. I hope to have a functional WiMAX N810 by the end of summer but, in the meantime, I'm happy with my Bluetooth tethering to AT&T's HSDPA network through my Nokia N95-3.

Also in the news that I am not ready to cover: Nokia promised Microsoft Silverlight functionality on both Internet Tablets and phones. It's interesting to see a Linux implementation of a Microsoft product coming from an ACTUAL PARTNERSHIP with Microsoft. I contacted Microsoft's PR and will see what they can teach me about Silverlight. I call Silverlight "Flash on lots of steroids." I don't yet know if Silverlight will suffer from "steroid rage" though. If you need to know more about Silverlight, read here.

What is ACTUAL news: InternetTabletTalk has a fantastic post on noBounds which promises to extend the tablet (and phone) display over USB and WiFi to large, high-resolution displays. THAT could be handy. Read the post!

That's not all InternetTabletTalk gave us lately. Ari Jaaksi is speaking again on what Open Source means to mobility. Look. Listen. Comment!

On a final note: I cannot personally attend CTIA to get the scoop on the products there, but am in direct contact with others on two different fronts regarding what is coming. No, I can't tell you about any of it. However, attendees to CTIA MUST check out Nokia's display. Whether or not there's a WiMAX tablet at the show, we'll still see something for which we've been waiting.

Am here in the LHR lounge. In a couple of hours, we take off for the INdT Bossa Conference, Pernambuco, Brazil via Lisbon. Bumped in to Pippin who will be presenting Clutter. Also looking forward to Lennart‘s PulseAudio talk amongst others.

If you happen to be going, drop by on my WebKit Mobile presentation, 14:00 Room 01 this Monday. We have a small surprise waiting for Maemo developers.

If you want to track my trip to Bossaconference 2008, watch my Jaiku. I an currently at Miami International awaiting my plane to Brazil.

NIN recently released Ghosts I-IV, an instrumental concept album… With it comes a 40-page booklet. If you like NIN, you can download the first nine tracks (out of 36) for free, including a digital version of the booklet (which is basically an image for each song).

I’ve taken some time to convert ever page of the booklet to 800×480 Background images, usable on the Nokia Internet Tablets. The Zip file is a 17MB download, but it’s well worth it.

Download the Zip file here.

For more info about what Trent Reznor wants to do with Ghosts, watch this.

Already back from the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest (managed to not blog even once from there, a bit lame). All the awesomeness that happened has been covered by our fantastic hackers, so I’ll focus an what happened in the ”Web Room”, where hacking on webkit/gtk+ and epiphany with tko, alp and chpe went on all week long.

We did some great advancements that week: we landed the pango font backend, the soup http backend, more progress on the plugin patch (first time I personally see youtube working on webkit/gtk), plans for glib-based unicode management, better windows support for the GTK+ port, a long nice chat with Company about native flash integration with swfdec… we also had some long discusions about the future of Epiphany, and an announcement will be made soon

By the end of the week I decided to get started with the cookies support for the soup backend. When I had a working parser (based on code from the old gtk-webcore, really nice) I decided to contact Dan Winship to talk about my plans. As it usually happens, he already had most of the work done, which he kindly published on a branch (see the bug). Around this point I got hit by libc ‘happenings‘ in Ubuntu, and I spent most of the remaining hackfest time restoring my laptop.

Anyway, already on lovely Finnish soil and while waiting for a movie in a nice cafeteria near Kamppi I fixed some bugs in the libsoup code for cookies, massaged some APIs and added enough glue in WebKit to get this going:

When we finish and commit this and get authentication going (integrated with GNOME Keyring of course!) I think I’ll switch to it as main browser; brave souls from all over are of course welcome to do the same so we can find and fix as many bugs as possible before 2.24. Exciting times ahead!

As promised in my previous post. So this one was a bit harder to implement, because I couldn’t find working kernel modules, and had to compile them myself. There is a good discussion about arduino in ITT forums, and other blog posts, but still this was something I wanted to try.

This article also appears on the community UME Guide

Ok, I promised several blog entries about GARMONO. However, for the last couple of weeks I've been busy fixing some issues with the WinForms DataGrid, which I will talk about in another entry. Today, let us talk about GARMONO and how it can help us automatically create Mono packages for Maemo.

One of the problems I ran into when I created the first set of Mono packages for Maemo was that it was a hard task with lots of procedures. A few weeks ago, during hack week, we decide to automate the process using GARMONO (when I say "we" I mean, Torello Querci, Jae Stutzman, and myself) and it has proven to be a very good idea. For those of you that may not understand what GARMONO is, think of it as a build-script that works within scratchbox to automate some of the more tedious tasks that would have to be done by hand or with other scripts. GARMONO provides a single "make" command that takes care of downloading mono src and creating deb files, etc. However GARMONO alone will not produce maemo packages, this is where Scratchbox comes in.

Maemo uses Scratchbox for cross-compilation. Scratchbox provides a build environment with all of the maemo provided dependencies so that developers can produce Maemo binaries. We need to use Scratchbox to create the platform (ARM) specific things that the mono runtime requires. Scratchbox uses QEMU for ARM emulation, the problem is that some ARM syscalls (242, 264, 299) are not yet implemented in QEMU. These missing syscalls can cause problems in MCS, making it impossible to compile assemblies for ARM. The solution is to create a Scratchbox devkit. It provides a set of tools that can be executed on the host instead of target device and thus reduces the time needed to build packages.

Instead of providing the instructions on how to build the devkit in this blog, I will just point you to the wiki entry that we created on the Mono Wiki:
http://www.mono-project.com/Scratchbox

Please know that in order for you to execute these instructions you must first to have Scratchbox and Maemo SDK installed, instructions can be found here.

Again, I would like to credit Jae Stutzman and Torello Querci for their support of the work in GARMONO and Maemo.

A quick taster of how splendid the latest ukmp looks. Of course, an image is not enough to show how nice UI candy it contains, but it's a taster. As you can see (and deduce the rest), vanilla SDL and python are able to do some pretty nice stuff. Oh, even though there is the reflection, fps is still nice and above the blitting limit of the device.

Bergie just blogged about initial MidCOM3 architecture. He included nice and very easy example of midgard-php API. And while he mentioned some python based solution I decided to add short and working example of midgard-python in action.

All in all, it's good to have, especially now, when Midgard2 is already an alpha and available also as packages for maemo.org platform.

This time in my mini series of testing USB on the N810 tablet - I bring you external webcam. The following video shows mplayer playing v4l stream from the device. See details after the jump.

Nokia N810 + Creative webcam + USB OTG + mplayer on Vimeo.

All you need really, are the basics set up, and some custom modules and mplayer. This mplayer build is based on .24 and has no optimisations whatsoever. So don’t try to use it for anything else.

The module my Creative webcam uses is the ov511. Other modules are available also. Installation from the command prompt:

insmod ov511.ko

Mplayer starts the new video device from command prompt with the following:

mplayer-v4l -cache 128 -tv driver=v4l:width=420:height=240:outfmt=i420:device=/dev/video1 -vc rawi420 -vo xv tv://

Thanks to google and brainwagon fro the syntax.

ps. You might have to try a few times before the video looks right. Sometimes I get only b/w or some weird colors.

Our browser team is looking for a Technical Project Manager to join us working on a web browsing technology software for a Linux software stack based on an open source.

Apply online for this position.

A couple of days ago Dr Ari Jaaki gave a talk on "What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help" at the Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) conference, San Francisco. In the talk Ari covers Nokia's stance when it comes to open source and how they are 'learning from their mistakes'. I was impressed by Ari's honesty when he pointed out Nokia's shortfalls in the open source community and the fact that they are trying to improve.

The talk can be heard on btpodshow.com. Its light on details but does skim over the higher level stuff quite well.

The reaction to this talk does highlight a few key points. Nokia started off on this 3 year journey (so far) with a different methodology to the one they have today. I think their past mistakes have forced them to re-evaluate their stance with the open source community but even now they are still doing things that really nark the community as a whole. Their continued stance on Ogg support on the web is worrying and even recently some code that were once open has being made closed source. Clearly Nokia still has some way to go.

Nokia is heading in the right direction, lets hope they continue.

This was already mentioned on Slashdot, and my workmate, Gabriel was first to mention it here at work too, but I mention it here on my blog if there are some people who don’t read Slashdot: My all time favorite science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at age of 90 according to msnbc news.

I have spent numerous hours with his books and writings and he have given me lots of inspiration in life and somehow spending so much time with his books made him feel like I knew him although I never had the privilege to meet him or contact him - on the other hand, what would I have said if I had his email, I don’t know. A bit same issue than the thing that I have Burt Rutan’s email but have never written to him because I don’t know what to say. I am sure he was already receiving enough fan-post.

Arthur C. Clarke was not just yet another science fiction writer, but the man who invented telecommunication satellites. I rate him highly over the other writers on this area, he was not just one of them but the best visionary of them all. I am proud to own a collection of his books.

It is unfortunate that he couldn’t live long enough that he would have experienced space, that he loved so much, e.g. on Burt Rutan’s space ship, before the life discontinued on staying on his body.

According to Google search, he was not a member of Alcor (I would have hoped and expected he was). Now he is gone and this is very sad thing. It is sad that human genome has this unfortunate code that makes the life so short - it has served human evolution, but now is a bug in our software. It is like a light on a candle. Little blow and it is gone or it just burns out.

Here is his 90 years birthday speech from youtube, it is highly recommended for everybody. Watching this may be a bit sad, because it is quite much a farewell as well, so be warned:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLXQ7rNgWwg

Here is the original msnbc’s article where the Slashdot article links to:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23697230/

I’ll be leaving Nokia by the end of next. It’s been a sometimes fun, sometimes strange ride, but it’s time to move on to new and bigger (or maybe not so big?) challenges.

Long live to the three-letter toolkit team! (fer, mdk, tko, luc, xan).

 Update:  Now, that’s a coincidence

I’m leaving Nokia, it’s time for me to move on. Next week will be my last week as Nokia employee.

This marks an end of era for me for I’ve been working for Nokia almost a decade (had my interview in Nokia House May ‘98 — Hi Patrik!) latter half of which I spent in a great team, excited to be able to help Nokia evolve into something new and wonderful. Unfortunately lately I’ve lost the excitement and work has become too much of an energy drain for me. The energy I feel like I’ve been putting in isn’t paying off and I’m unable to sustain it any longer. To some extent I had already given up which I find an alarming sign.

I’m fully confident Quim and Ari will carry on making maemo an exciting platform to work with. It’s just time for us to part ways.

I’m going to miss some people I’ve grown to know, others not so much, and some I’ll be seeing again soon enough. There’s an exciting opportunity I’m following. More on that later.

I really enjoyed my time at Nokia and Finland. I was very lucky to directly work with very talented and generous people. I’ve made some good friends here and it will be hard to say goodbye soon. My last day at Nokia is March 28th.

It’s too early to tell about what I’ll be doing in the near future. Exciting stuff, for sure. :-P

Update: Xan, Tommi and Johan (who doesn’t have a blog) are leaving too. See you around guys! :-)

I sat down with GeoClue maintainer (and my former SoC student) Jussi Kukkonen to discuss how the project has been moving forward, and the situation is looking quite good. To those unfamiliar with GeoClue, here is a quick intro:

GeoClue is a modular geoinformation service built on top of the D-Bus messaging system. The goal of the GeoClue project is to make creating location-aware applications for mobile Linux devices as simple as possible.

Last summer with the Summer of Code we were able to make a first full implementation of GeoClue and release it for the maemo platform. There were also GeoClue sessions held in the State of the Map and GUADEC conferences.

However, as that implementation did not provide a master provider to abstract away the different position sources, it was still a bit cumbersome to develop GeoClue-powered applications. So when Jussi got hired by OpenedHand, a decision was made to change the API.

Now finally the API change work starts to be complete, and a new release of GeoClue should appear pretty soon. There are lots of ideas for location-aware applications floating around, and at least Mauku and Telepathy developers have expressed interest in using GeoClue in their apps.

If you're developing a mobile Linux application, GeoClue might be a good thing to take a look at. Location is a powerful piece of contextual information that can make your application more usable.

What I don’t like about it, is that it more or less requires each client of the service to keep a local copy of the calendar or contact data in its own memory. At least all the data that matched the search query. This data is not really small per item. In fact, it’s quite large. It never really surprised me a lot that both the calendar component of Evolution’s shell AND the Evolution Data Server consume quite a lot of memory.

Federico, I’m not going to make yet another long and technical blog post about this, because it’s rather obvious how it works. But you can make a db-cursor or a cursor-like API for a query that is solved at the service and kept in a session.

It seems there is a new feature in the maemo downloads page, bug 2155. (And other new bugs)

So if you have your application in the extras repository, now you have a measure of your application downloads from the repository:

Undoubtedly it’s a very good news and I hope now that we have this option more developers upload her packages to the extras repository. It’s a small feature but the progresses they will do in this field soon, surely will be more reasons for upload packages to the extras repository.

I have two photo sets from Bossaconference 2008. The first is on my Flickr account and those are the photos taken with my Nokia N95-3. The second is over on Picasa with photos taken with my Canon Powershot S5-IS. I hope you enjoy them.

My presentation at the conference, "Noise to Signal - Improving User Feedback in Open Source Software Projects," could have gone better. The Monday morning crowd was not as lively as I had hoped and I mistakenly prepared for more audience interaction. I am going to restructure the presentation and make it available online.

The biggest take-away I have from this event: Developers are real people. They have challenges and goals and do the best they know to meet them. Sometimes they have writer's block, flashes of inspiration, and corporate BS to balance. The best part: They know their responsibilities to the end users and do their best to meet them.

I had a fantastic time at Bossaconference 2008. I found great inspiration in simply listening to developers talk about their ideas and challenges. Thanks, INdT, for hosting this event!

So BossaConference ‘08 is over, what a great conference! Lots of great people, some are still around, doing some hacking with us at INdT office, it’s really great to have some time to discuss new ideas, drink some beers and play jokes

Let’s hope next year we can keep it to the level! Congrats to all the organization members.

Word Processing on the Nokia N800 & N810

To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that N800 owners have upgraded to OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading your N800, click here.If you want to comment on this tutorial, please post in the comments section at the end. If you have any questions or problems regarding your tablet, please post about them on

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

There is a runaway thread on InternetTabletTalk that started with Krisse reporting three Nokia departures. What followed was a great deal of speculation about the death of the Internet Tablet team.

Having just returned from Bossaconference, I can honestly say that the development of the tablet platform is VERY strong. I personally met with a good number of developers working on the next generation of enhancements and improvements on the tablet platform. I wish I was in a position to talk about all of them, but I promised some secrecy. Still ... JUST WAIT. It'll be NEAT.

To the three departing Nokians, I wish you the best in your future endeavors.

It's been about a month since I first downloaded Maemo 4.0(Chinook) SDK and tried to compile something like stardict. But there is much more difficult thing left to do - add .deb packages to maemo repository and create .install file.

Nokia did the right thing I think - usual user only needs to click on green button and choose place where to put an link in menu. The whole work is left invisible behind - to provide easy setup developer has to:

• create SSH RSA private/public keys
• create GPG keys
• upload public key on maemo garage
  
• write changelog info
• sign changelog files
• upload packages onto "extras" repository
• create installation file

Of course, Nokia has half-draft tutorial for this. So after the long process sleepy contributor finally gets this pretty arrow:
Note: still beta!

Since a while I've being paying some attention into the promising Mozilla Prism project (old WebRunner), specially over a mobile developer perspective. Prism is a Mozilla Labs advanced development project that provides "a simple XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface". More interesting over is that the project came to me at the same time philip van hoof blogposted about "Web 2.0 email clients" (or something like this). My post could even get titled "mozilla-based web 2.0 email client" (or something like this), but Prism goes far away forward from that.

Main concepts here are two: Site Specific Browsers (SSB) and Distraction Free Browser:

• SSB: applications with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application (whereas typical browser chrome are rarely used). It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser . An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

• Distraction free browsing: "This is nice for those times when your have to have your web based email and docs open but you don’t need the distraction of the rest of the Internet keeping you from your work. Plus the memory footprint is kept to a minimum because it isn’t the ‘full’ browser and all of its extensions."

Could that interest users of mobile devices ?

Not sure about the answer, but I put some effort on that these days to answer this question with some practical stuff. First, I got blassey's xulrunner armel build for maemo, checked out prism source from svn, pulled Firefox 3 pre beta 5 source base (to work as my mozilla build system), built them all together and after some hacks I got Prism running on maemo OS 2008 w/ some webapps (meebo and gmail for instance).






I will try to get some thumb enabled set UI for it, as well as making a .deb/.install available for Prism to see how things go from a mobile user perspective ...

PS: Prism has nothing to do with web application development, it's simply providing a more desktop-application-like interface for web applications. Mozilla claims: "Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we're not building a proprietary platform to replace the web ... Prism isn't a new platform, it's simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don't have to target it separately, because".

UPDATE: Greetings to MFinkle and other for all work on this.

UPDATE2: Here is Prism as a Firefox 3 addon.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Last year when i visited Karachi, I talked about Linux+Gtk-based ATM machines being actually deployed and used in my blog. Plenty of people asked me for any pictures but I didn't have any at that time. No worries, here you go:




If you are interested, please contact Aero-car which still makes these.

I have been in Karachi for the last one week. My mom is much better now and seems to be recovering fast. The doctor says she still needs a few chemotherapy sessions are there are still some microscopic tumours left but she said this is nothing much to worry about.

We just got her an apt on rent in more secure and less polluted area which obviously costs a lot more money but I've agreed with my Canadian sister to only pay the rent and she'll pay the rest of the expenditure. The biggest reason for this was to move her so close to Saima that Saima could take care of her while her children are at school.

The most recent event is that yesterday, someone robbed my biggest sister (who also lives in Canada but is currently visiting pk) of her bag at gunpoint while she was travelling in a rickshaw. The bag contained amongst other things, all her documents and cards. Normally she doesn't carry important documents in that bag but since it was her last day, so she made an exception. Now most probably, she'll have to go through a long process to get a new passport and Visa. I wonder if the authorities can make an exception in this case and let her travel with some other temporary document but we'll only know till Tuesday because they are closed for easter tomorrow.

While I was having fun with the extremely slow Internet connection here and other family issues, Jorn rolled-out another GUPnP release. Here is the release announcement:

GUPnP 0.8
=========

- New API allowing for subclassing of resource types.
  [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]
- GUPnPDeviceInfo returns subresources with version greater or equal than
  requested version. [Jorn Baayen]
- Servers announce versions less or equal than implemented version.
  [Jorn Baayen]
- Make gupnp_context_get_server() public. [Jorn Baayen]
- GError arguments added to all error signals. [Jorn Baayen]
- Improved resubscription handling. [Jorn Baayen]
- Various other fixes and internal improvements
  [Ross Burton, Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen].

One big reason to roll out a release at this point was to make way for a gupnp-av and gupnp-tools release, which will follow shortly so stay tuned. :)

The rumor mill surrounding changes in Nokia's team keeps going strong. One rumor that has crept to the surface was the introduction of more closed components to the maemo platform.

To start: The Internet Tablet OS isn't 100% open source. Also, some of the best applications (Skype, Canola, and more) are closed source. Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech means that there will be more Linux development (both open and closed, probably) and so far we haven't heard if this development would approach the Internet Tablets. After thinking long and hard about the rumor, I have to ask: What would it really do? I present a poll:

If the Internet Tablet could be made 100% reliable, work faster, and offer more functionality by using up to 30% closed-source components, how would you react?

• It's a good thing. The tablets are awesome and they need better software.
  
• It's a good thing ONLY if it doesn't impact 3rd party development.
  
• It's a bad thing. The tablets were born and raised on open source.
• It's already bad. The tablets should be 100% open.

As for myself: I don't even know how I'd vote. The poll, as usual, is on the right side bar of tabletblog.com right above the "donate" button.

The results of the last poll on podcasts are split:

What's a podcast? 8 (5%) I am not interested in podcasts. 44 (30%) I listen to a few regularly. 46 (31%) I listen to at least 5 podcasts per week. 48 (32%)

I took a bit time off to polish the Theme Maker. The latest version, 1.1.3 now supports also background images. Background images will appear in the image list of the the 'select background image' dialog.

So, what is the Theme Maker anyway?

It's an easy to use tool for creating themes for the Maemo devices like N800 and N810. All you need is a image editor program like gimp of photoshop and a little patience. It works on OSX, Windows (all versions) and Linux. You'll need java from Sun to run it.

Basically, it's all about editing one single image file like this (this is a small part of a theme template only):


and then setting the theme details in Theme Maker like this:

And Clicking build in theme maker. It will produce a nice installable .deb file of your theme. Just copy that to your device (or publish it ... whatnot) and install it as normal. Now just set your theme on your device and it will transform to something like this (well, for NuvoPearl it looks like this):

And, as stated in the first paragraph of this blog, now themes also include the backgrounds so that your theme is more complete. Icons are still not changeable, but let's see what I can do about them in the future...

If you have a bit of artist in you, please try out the theme maker (install java if needed):
ThemeMaker1.1.3.zip

And if you liked NuvoPearl theme pictured above, you can install the latest version from here:
NuvoPearl

Eugenia posted a look into the N810 and compares it to the N800. Also are comparisons between Internet Tablet OS 2007 and OS2008.

She covers strengths and weaknesses as well - including a problem she and I tried to root out with h.264 videos. Everything I convert with the Internet Tablet Video Converter works fine. Some things I convert with my Elgato turbo.264 work but the tablet chokes on high bit rates.. Downloaded files are a gamble.

Overall, she gives the tablet an 8/10. I agree with her gripes about Internet Tablet OS changes breaking previously-ported applications. Her luck with the GPS module surprises me - Most users I've talked to (including myself - I talk to myself a lot) have had problems getting satellite locks.

Also note: My video overview of the N810 is posted in there. If you want to re-post any of my stuff, just let me know you did it. I try not to be overzealous of protecting my content unless it is reproduced in whole or without credit. On a few occasions, my content has been reproduced in whole but translated to another language and I am OK with that too as long as there is a link/credit to the original article. Most of my YouTube videos have the credit in the opening titles, so have at them.

Following Nokia's mention that Microsoft Silverlight will come to Internet Tablets, I reached out to Microsoft's PR department asking if someone wishes to discuss what it means to tablet users.

Their PR department was very fast in responding and following up, but the response was not what I had hoped for:

Thank you for your patience as I looked into your request. I have connected with my colleagues and learned, unfortunately, we are unable to accommodate your interview request at this time. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We do want to offer the attached reviewer's guide and encourage you to visit www.silverlight.net for more information on Microsoft Silverlight.

We hope that in the future, we will able to assist with any requests you may have. I know that you specified that you did not have a hard deadline on your request and I have shared this with my appropriate colleagues should an opportunity present itself to arrange an interview.

I will continue to cover this unperturbed. If we all have to wait for it, then we all have to wait. After all - Silverlight still needs people USING it first, right?

Today I was thinking...that while waiting for me to finish the Xournal port, you guys should have something to do with the beta released so far :)To help came the folks at Internet Tablet School who made a nice tutorial (Nokia N800 & N810: Take notes and doodle with Xournal) on some of the features you can find in Xournal (even though they missed the most important feature for me: Annotate PDF).

Yesterday's poll got some attention. I wasn't exactly clear on what I meant by the poll. I was simply asking users if they'd be OKAY with closed source components being added IF they made the functionality better and more stable. It's a pure hypothetical.

I'm going to post Quim Gil's comment here:

Hi, I'm sorry to tell this poll doesn't make much sense. "Reliable, faster, and more functional" are not qualities of closed source software... nor open source. There is good software and there is bad software, and in fact openness has helped a lot of open source components to be reliable, fast and functional to industry levels. This is why Linux and many other OSS components are used in the maemo stack.

Let's cut those rumors about more closed source coming to maemo. Can someone point to a source telling something sensible about this? Wasn't Ari Jaaksi saying few days ago in OSiM USA that Nokia wants to dive deeper in its relationship with the Open Source community? (Stefan already points to the link in the first comment of this thread).

I'd find much more interesting a poll asking about the currently closed components people (specially developers) would like to see opensourced. See my last comment at http://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1584

Even better than polls are good reasons to opensource a closed component (owned by Nokia - Skype and Canola are out of the maemo game: ask their developers). For instance, Intel/Ubuntu had good reasons to have Hildon Input Method framework open since they needed this for their platform development and the component was open.

Indeed - the poll is only topical because some people left Nokia and because there is speculation why. It is not a reflection of the reality of the situation - just a conversation. Thanks to everyone for the comments so far. Keep them coming - this is a good conversation topic.

Techlogg just announced that Rockpod 08 Lite now has N800 (and N810, by inheritance) and N95 compatibility. I am in the middle of some other articles now and have yet to try it. Readers: Anyone want to give it a go and report on results?

It's been quite a long time with not even a update in my blog. Shame on me!!! Since last December, lots of things happened and if I tried to tell everything, you would be surely bored to death. So here goes some highlights of the last 3 1/2 months:

So it’s that time of the year again, almost summer in North, winter here in South and Google helping free software projects with its Summer of Code. I’m glad some projects I’m involved were accepted, including: Enlightenment and BlueZ.

I’ll be a mentor for Enlightenment and we have great ideas, if you’re interested in them, mail me or go to #edevelop @ irc.freenode.net so we can discuss your ideas, experiences… It’s a great way to get involved in computer graphics and a platform that is growing everyday on mobile systems, with adopters like Canola2 and now OpenMoko!

As for BlueZ, I’m not mentoring, but some friends are, they also have great ideas, things that will benefit every GNU/Linux bluetooth user, from mobile to desktops to laptops, some are really interesting like better audio support. It’s a way to get into kernel and low-level user space world, and get paid for it

A while ago I reported a shortfall of the http://planet.maemo.org site to bugzilla (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2789). Clicking on the heart of a post to indicate that you like that particular one was a long winded process. A click first took you to a login page if you weren't already logged in. Then you would be asked to confirm the 'add to favorites' and finally you were dumped back to the planet site at the very top of the page, regardless of where you previously were on it.

Now after some love the planet site does a much more UI friendly 'ajaxy style' inline add. I encourage everyone to test it out and give some love to the people who post useful information to the site, if for nothing else, to give them a small ego boost so they keep on posting :-).

Now if only they would fix my other long standing bug https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2481

edit: w00t looks like the karma bug is fixed aswell!

You might know that INdT released Youtube plugin as free software, it’s great feature-wise and touches almost every part, providing new models, views and controllers, those with complex use cases like threaded models so GUI will not block during HTTP requests and even options menu.

That’s cool because one can do lots of things (and some users are already showing us some nice plugins!), but we still need some base text introducing people to the concepts, with smaller code, so here it is: Canola URLBookmark source code and text.

This introduces you to some concepts, explains about “plugins.info” and how plugins are loaded and in the end you have a list of URL to play. Of course this hard coded list of URL is on purpose so you take some time to change it to something more useful. If you ask me, I’d like to see UPnP, MPD, Samba, Avahi, Shoutcast and lots more.. I did my part, everything you need to know is there, now it’s your turn.

Mario and me have just arrived from our trip to San Jose (California) for the Mobile Rules! awards ceremony. Unfortunately we had no luck this time and we didn’t get the award.

We had a great time nonetheless and I’d like to congratulate Nokia for having organized the event and all the other participants (namely the winners, specially the people from MyStrands who beat our Vagalume in the Multimedia category). The trip was great, we enjoyed it a lot and we met some cool people.

A thing I’m more sure about now is that Vagalume still needs lots of improvements. I’ll continue working on it very soon (but it’ll take me some days because I’m starting teaching this weekend in our Master of Free Software). So it is time to get back to work!

Oh, no, we didn’t get the award!

I have just upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy (I know I'm very very late) on my laptop. The installation went fine but when I connected an external monitor with a higher resolution than my laptop has, gdm and GNOME were not able to detect this, and instead displayed the picture in the upper left corner of the screen.

This was especially funny with GNOME, because the desktop actually used the full resolution, and I could move windows over the whole screen. Only the panels were stuck in the middle of the screen.

Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem, so let me tell you what I found out and how to fix this.

Everything was fine with Ubuntu Feisty. When I connected an external monitor, the laptop screen switched off and the higher resolution was used. But now when I connect an external monitor, the laptop screen doesn't switch off automatically.

Because the laptop screen is still on, the system now has two screens and GNOME will automatically adapt to the screen with the lower resolution.

The moment I manually switched off the laptop screen with the tool xrandr

$ xrandr --output LVDS --off

the GNOME panels jumped to their correct position. So let's investigate this xrandr a bit more.

xrandr is a powerful tool for managing multiple video outputs, rotating the screen, and setting up multihead displays.

You can get a list of what the graphics driver thinks it has connected by invoking

$ xrandr -q

This will give you something like this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 1680 x 1200
VGA-0 connected 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 433mm x 271mm
   1680x1050      60.0*+   60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0     59.9  
   1440x900       75.0     59.9  
   1280x960       59.9  
   1152x864       74.8  
   1280x720       59.9  
   1024x768       75.1     60.0  
   800x600        75.0     60.3  
   640x480        75.0     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right)
   1024x768       60.0 +   60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
S-video disconnected (normal left inverted right)

The interesting entries are LVDS (the laptop screen) and VGA-0 (the external monitor). Both are connected. VGA-0 might be called VGA or similar on your system, as this name is driver-dependent.

If I wanted to check if an external monitor was connected, I'd just run

$ xrandr -q | grep "^VGA.* connected"
  
VGA-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 338mm x 270mm

I want the system to switch off the laptop screen whenever an external monitor is connected, so that GNOME will use the higher resolution. This easily can be done by adding the following lines to /etc/gdm/Init/Default just before the

exit 0

line:

xrandr -q | grep "^VGA.* connected" >/dev/null
RC=$?
if [ $RC = 0 ]; then
  xrandr --output LVDS --off
fi

It will also make gdm use the full resolution.

Not strickly maemo related but I'm sure the two communitites overlap, LugRadio Live UK has been announce for 19th and 20th July 2008 at Wolverhampton University Student Union, Wulfruna St Wolverhampton, WV1 1LY.

From the reputation of past LugRadio's I'm sure this will be a blast. Be there if you can, I will be! If you can be there too get in touch and we can arrange a maemo/linux/drinking fest.

One of the Modest developers!

Following Gustavo, I'm posting this "tutorial plugin" that was created with the help of Caio (cmarcelo @ Freenode). This is a presentation tool, where each slide is a Model and each presentation is a ModelFolder. It's very simple, but supports transitions and uses some very basic concepts of Canola's plugin ...

Tomorrow afternoon, I am hopping a flight to Dallas to participate in a Lunch and Learn session with Nokia. Except for my flight and hotel information, that's literally all I know about the trip.

One thing I do know: I've never had a meeting with Nokia that I did not enjoy. Next post will be from Dallas!

I mentioned that my N810 took a trip to Amsterdam with a friend. Well - some things happen in Amsterdam, as shown by the photo above.

He told me Wayfinder was precious to him on the trip even though that device was not upgraded to include the route navigation. I haven't retrieved the device from him yet - but I will make sure I clean it up well when I do. Clearly, I (and Nokia and Wayfinder) do NOT endorse drug use. I will say that a good GPS and internet tablet could be very handy if you find yourself (legally) baked out of your gourd in a foreign country.

Reminder: Wayfinder is still hosting a contest in which a sweet Sony VAIO laptop and more prizes in a video competition. Has anyone tried their Facebook application yet? I want to but only three of my friends in Phoenix have Internet Tablets and it's hard to coordinate a test of this with them.

Today I got round to upgrading the Maemo build environment on my Debian home server from SDK 3.x to SDK 4.x, so that I could start building applications for my new N810 which is running ITOS 2008. And all I did was simply:

• Backup the old source build area from within scratchbox so that I had the hand customised Debian packaging files for packages I’d built under SDK 3.x.
• Shutdown scratchbox, remove all scratchbox Debian packages and delete /scratchbox.
• Follow the installation instructions for scratchbox, the new rootstraps and closed Nokia binaries.
• Copy back any potentially handy debian/control, debian/rules and debian/copyright files from my old source tree.

All this went very smoothly, and after which I downloaded the source to Hercules and followed the current build instructions for making a Debian package. This appeared to go well until I ran into a bunch of undefined references to pthread_*. I don’t recall any such problems with the same source under Maemo 3.x and a quick Googling suggests I may need to link with -lpthread. This sounds reasonable, however since the magic of dpkg-buildpackage, configure and friends does literally everything for me I’m not quite sure where to add this option. Perhaps configure should have guessed this is needed, or maybe the environment isn’t set up quite right. I suspect that the most likely cause is novice error, but in any case don’t anticipate it being too difficult to resolve.

More on this once I have the answer!

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Many times when Nokia members like myself try to discuss further on open source involvement the argument on software patents comes back. For instance, in my last blog post about Connecting open source and mobile users - the Nokia plan. There are many good comments about patents in the thread. One puts it in the [...]

Tom Swindell (AKA alterego) created the Maemo bindings for Ruby and they're great. I'm writing a couple of programs with them, including Nibbles, my feed reader. Unfortunately, Tom seems to have vanished and I've not been able to find the source code for the bindings anywhere. Does anyone have it? I'd really like a copy.

In other news, I hear that a new release of ruby-gtk2 is near. This is excellent as it will hopefully fix the battery life problem with the current bindings where Ruby/GTK programs (and, therefore, Ruby/Maemo programs) wake up 100 times a second regardless of what they're doing. Happy days.

I made some progress porting the multisync-gui to Maemo. The idea is to offer an easy to use graphical user interface for synchronizing data between the Maemo based tablets and other devices. The OpenSync framework that is used offers several plugins for interfacing data sources already. The most interesting ones are the two SyncML ones [...]

Midgard is decent CMS framework. Not just yet another PHP based CMS. And as every decent piece of code must have many features. I just added initial test cases with D-Bus support. They use midgard-python and dbus modules.

Usage is simple. You start service as one proccess and client as another one. If all goes fine, client notifies daemon that some object needs to be imported to database, then listener service imports this object to database. Listener is not aware who sent such data and even not aware what kind of language was used to send notify.

So in theory ( it's not yet API implementation ) application written in PHP and using Midgard 1.9 may may send notification and listener may be daemon writen in python using Midgard 2.0. Even on the same machine.

Check initial test code!

Jeff Mancuso, dev of expanDrive : With high-level languages and good libraries, small teams can create great products at a rapid pace. We realized that we could write applications for the desktop in the exact same way. We rewrote SftpDrive from top to bottom in Python, with a GUI in Objective-C. ...

Great job, Krisse! Krisse found that there are "official" product images up even if the spec sheets are not. I guess we don't have to wait until April 1 to hear the news.

Airport blogging now. More later.

PythonLauncher is available for OS2008. It's a daemon to speedup loading time of python scripts using gtk. The original idea comes from Johan Dahlin and now we rewrote it in C. Applications must call "python" instead of "python2.5" to use the launcher. Configuration is easy too. There is a GUI to choose startup method: at boot, at first python app or disabled.

To install use this link.

tablet-encode has had v2.18 released. Notable new features in this release include:

• A new "mplayer" preset with a very high bitrate.
• Ability to define your own presets and options in ~/.tablet-encode.conf.
• Ability to rip all the episodes off a DVD with a single option.
• Add support for Freevo FXD files as pointers to the actual video.

The --episodes option is particularly cool; ripping a TV series' DVD (for, say, a long flight) is now a 3-step process:

1. Attach N810 via USB.
2. Insert DVD to computer.
3. Run:

   tablet-encode --episodes dvd: /media/nokia-sd/Video/
   

It's hard to imagine it being any easier! Of course, at some point the GUI should support showing you thumbnails of each of the titles so you can select the ones you want to rip. If anyone's got any time, and experience with Perl Gtk+, I'd be happy to accept some help in improving the GUI version.

I'd also like to thank GeneralAntilles, rm_you, Marius Gedminas, Mike Lococo and divinerites for all their help with this release.

tablet-encode has had v2.18 released. Notable new features in this release include:

• A new "mplayer" preset with a very high bitrate.
• Ability to define your own presets and options in ~/.tablet-encode.conf.
• Ability to rip all the episodes off a DVD with a single option.
• Add support for Freevo FXD files as pointers to the actual video.

The --episodes option is particularly cool; ripping a TV series' DVD for (say, a long flight) is now a 3-step process:

1. Attach N810 via USB.
2. Insert DVD to computer.
3. Run:

   tablet-encode --episodes dvd: /media/nokia-sd/Video/
   

It's hard to imagine it being any easier! Of course, at some point the GUI should support showing you thumbnails of each of the titles so you can select the ones you want to rip. If anyone's got any time, and experience with Perl Gtk+, I'd be happy to accept some help in improving the GUI version.

I'd also like to thank GeneralAntilles, rm_you, Marius Gedminas, Mike Lococo and divinerites for all their help with this release.

I am back in Helsinki. Regarding my mom, when we last spoke to the specialist she said the Cancer is at the level 3 (4 is last) and therefore my mother has to go through extensive/expensive chemotherapy sessions which will last for 6 months or so. Now me and my canadian sister has to arrange the money and Saima is supposed to take care of the rest. Other than that, it feels good to be back with my love.

What to do if your tablet has technical problemsIf you have technical problems, please DO NOT post about them on the comments sections of the Internet Tablet School. This site's comments sections are just for feedback on the contents of the tutorials, they are not intended as technical support forums.You will get far more help and much better advice if you post about your tablet-related problems

I am creating a new link list of friendly blogs. Mine is woefully out of date. Here are some I am going to add. Suggest more?

• http://www.internettablettalk.com
• http://www.maemoapps.com/
  
• http://tabletschool.blogspot.com/
  
• http://nokiaaddict.com/
• http://www.tablet-guru.com/

Always included are:

• http://thoughtfix.com
• http://maemo.org
• http://nseries.com

One of my home computers exports lot of music over Samba (everything as one share). In next room I have HiFi system where I like to play some of them. So I decided that N810 (or even 770) should be enough for it.

For very unusual reasons, I have decided to give up Linux blogging. If you're betting, put the odds at 364:1. I explain the details over at ultramobilegeek.com.

X-Fade's been working hard and bug #2347 has been fixed. This now means that the official maemo.org downloads catalogue can now contain non-tablet software such as tablet-encode.

Hopefully this'll boost the profile of things like mediautils to a wider audience.

Steps are simple:

1. Go to add new application (logging in if necessary) and fill out the fields as detailed.
2. One particularly cool feature is the ability to put in a direct download URL for the "click to install" arrow.
3. Don't try and attach any screenshots until you've first saved the details; there's an issue with that and it's best done when editing the page after the first save.

I've raised a feature request that the download statistics available to extras(-devel) users are picked up from garage.maemo.org for a more integrated system.