The last day. Saw a bunch of interesting talks about freedesktop.org, Ekiga, GNOME and Ubuntu. Jono Bacon's talk was very interesting. I think if Nokia is interested in building a healthy developer community, they would do well to talk to Jono about it.

Got a USB gender-bender from Kees Jongenburger -- now I can plug in USB devices to my N810, provided that they don't require too much power (extra software required: usbcontrol from Maemo Extras). I owe you one Kees!

Discovered that the GNOME booth does in fact have T-shirts for sale, they're just not out on display like in other booths. Sadly, since I discovered that during the last hour of the last day of the conference, only extra large T-shirts were left. Spent my last 10 EUR in cash on the T-shirt anyway. ;-)

Met MaryBeth Panagos from OpenMediaNow, learned about interesting happenings with Gnash, open media codecs and Ubuntu Mobile. Raised my hopes for a brighter future. Showed off my N810 and expressed my hopes for Gnash replacing the closed Adobe Flash player on it. It won't happen any time soon -- everyone wants it now!, but there are few developers actually working on it.

Went to a very geeky cafe/computer club c-base for the Ubuntu BBQ. Almost didn't find the place, but one of the LinuxTag guys happened to be going back at just the right moment to show me the path hidden behind the bushes.

Feeling content now. Well, missing free (or at least paid, but working -- boo, Swisscom, boo!) WiFi at the hotel, but other than that I've had a wonderful time.

Since I don’t use Xcode for editing while on Mac, I’ve been reasonably frustrated by having to switch applications to access the Apple API reference while I can jump to the GNOME API Reference with single keypress in my editor.

Today I decided to do something about it and came up with awful XSLT (I believe it’s impossible to write XSLT that doesn’t make your eyes bleed) that converts the Apple documentation into a nice devhelp book you can browse. I can also get the function/keyword index from individual reference files (e.g. NSOpenGLContext) quite easily. Now I just need to figure out how to list all files automatically and how to organize the results better (all-in-one and class-per-book don’t quite work for 700+ html files.)

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

A draft for the maemo packaging policy has been released for comments by the community.

What is the maemo packaging policy good for?

Like it's Debian counter part, the maemo policy specifies how packages should be built. It will exactly tell you what your package should implement to be a proper maemo package.

The maemo packaging policy is essentially the same as the Debian policy, but there are some changes especially for the tablets as opposed to desktops.

What good does it do me?

Well, not a lot at the moment. But it can soon! We (the maemo community) need to agree on this policy and see how we can implement it.

We want to setup a wiki page where you can annotate the policy draft and talk about things you think should change. This will be done soon, I hope.

Until then, please discuss the topic on the maemo-developers list.

Your input is welcomed.

Over year ago I wrote post about USB — connected most of my devices/gadgets into desktop USB ports and checked how system reacts to it. As Kees Jongenburger gave me USB AF/AF adapter during this year LinuxTag I decided to do the same with N810 tablet.

mdamt posted a photo:

This is the route we took during the cruise as drawn by GPS Visualizer. The GPX data were recorded with Maemo Mapper with my wife's N810. The data then extracted and used to populate the location information in my pictures' EXIF with gpscorrelate-gui, so you can see in the map where exactly the photos were taken.

See the whole set here: www.flickr.com/photos/mdamt/sets/72157605400225787/
You can also see them here: everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=23889

Viva Free Software!

Now that I’m currently working with OpenEmbedded at Mamona, I often have to edit and create new ‘bb’ files (the definition and instructions to build packages or define configurations, like ebuilds for Gentoo).

After working with ebuilds to build a few packages, I was really comfortable with the syntax highlighting and new ebuild templates that I have with Vim, but didn’t found anything like that for Bitbake and OpenEmbedded.

First searching for syntax highlighting for Bitbake, I found that Chris Larson already created a Vim syntax file that covered almost everything I need, but was a little bit different from what we have with ebuilds, so I decided to create my own syntax (based on Chris’) and template plugin.

Here’s the code, I just released the version 0.1, it’s quite easy to install, just like any other vim syntax and plugins, just copy the directories at your ~/.vim (sorry emacs users, but this is only for Vim

I just realized that the promise of ipv6 will create a demand for good clipboard integration in console applications! Imagine the very long ipv6 addresses that many Unix/Linux admins will have to move from spreadsheets into configuration text files!

Therefore I propose that we start thinking about a libclipboard library. As a pragmatic bridging solution we could easily make a small DBus service that not converts but bridges the target requests to the x11 clipboard owner. This service would just play as a proxy rather than something that collects and harvests x11 clipboard targets (the x11 clipboard supports requesting the owner to convert to a desired format, getting a list of available formats, etc - called targets -).

Meanwhile we could let console applications finally enjoy a decent clipboard that can actually make it possible for a console application to request multiple formats. Sounds better than xterm hacks to me.

Before continuing with reading, do this in your mind:

If you are a religious vim user:

export EDITOR=vim

If you are a religious Emacs user:

export EDITOR="killall -9 vim; emacs"

Examples:

• Select text in Firefox, paste as HTML source in $EDITOR
• Select two columns and twenty rows in a spreadsheet application, and paste as a comma separated list in $EDITOR

Maybe even have an easy to configure filter application that on-the-fly converts just a copy source into a format that the admin wants in his configuration text file. You know how management always delivers things like IP addresses in spreadsheet format (it’s just a silly example, really).

We could also let such a library solve the problem of two applications running on the same computer being displayed on a remote X11 server having to transfer large clipboards over the X11 protocol (over the wire).

I still think PRIMARY and SECONDARY are broken concepts by design. But I also agree that this is subjective (but really, let’s be honest about it, it’s broken. Seriously).

Of course I realize that whether or not I’m right about such a solution only depends on somebody (like me) doing it rather than just blogging about it. I have always been tempted to try to start something. Who knows someday I will?

I am here with the rest of the guys from Manaus at INdT

doing some crazily cool stuff with Canola and well, forging

ideas basically.

It is incredibly cool here if you are a nerd but its not

all work, right. Some of us

took off to Maragogi in the next state called Alagoas.

We ended up going diving

which was incredible as we saw so many fish

and very relaxing. A perfect weekend to recharge the

batteries ready for the next coding sprint.

I love Brazil!

Following on from my earlier post, maemo.org: what next?, LinuxTag has now happened (and Quim very kindly used my open source triangle), and the 10 days brainstorm for the 100 Days community action plan, and 2010 Agenda have been launched.

My main focus in the earlier post was more related to the 2010 vision: what should Nokia do as soon as possible to really fully utilise an untapped area of the community.

However, what can the community do to organise itself and present more of a consensus view? Consensus by mailing list posts and wiki-edits just means the loudest - or most pushy - individual voices get heard. So, I suggest a Community Council, elected by the maemo community, to act as a filter/co-ordinating body to present a more unified view to Nokia - and therefore help them to help us.

Comments welcome below, or just make changes in the wiki!

Following on from my earlier post, maemo.org: what next?, LinuxTag has now happened (and Quim very kindly used my open source triangle), and the 10 days brainstorm for the 100 Days community action plan, and 2010 Agenda have been launched.

My main focus in the earlier post was more related to the 2010 vision: what should Nokia do as soon as possible to really fully utilise an untapped area of the community.

However, what can the community do to organise itself and present more of a consensus view? Consensus by mailing list posts and wiki-edits just means the loudest - or most pushy - individual voices get heard. So, I suggest a Community Council, elected by the maemo community, to act as a filter/co-ordinating body to present a more unified view to Nokia - and therefore help them to help us.

Comments welcome below, or just make changes in the wiki!

Some time has passed since we first announced the maemo autobuilder for the extras repositories. Some people have tested it and we got a little bit of feedback. Not as much as we hoped, but I'm sure that is going to get better shortly.

Ed has been working on making the autobuilder more user-friendly. You will now receive a status message per mail when your package has been processed. If there were any errors (md5 sum failed, files missing, wrong pgp key or package not signed), you will find that out in the email.

Some benefits of using the maemo autobuilder:

• Source packages always available in the repository
• i386 packages are automatically added to the repository, so you can use them in the SDK.
• Prevent obviously broken packages from entering the repositories.
  

I have been improving the assistant by adding more checking and fixing more bugs. It turned out that not everybody was able to request rights to upload packages to the repository. Sorry about that!

I would like to ask all developers to try out the autobuilder and assistant, so we can be in a good shape before Diablo gets released. We can only move forward if you get involved!

Feel free to contact me if you need any help or information.

Since my commute went from 15 to 45 minutes, I've been catching more podcasts to get me to and from work. Here are my favorites.

• This Week in Tech - I've mentioned TWiT on this blog before. They do some in-depth discussion on the last week's tech news.
  
• Daily GizWiz - Dick DeBartolo and Leo Laporte talk about current gadgets for four days per week then on "Gadget Warehouse Friday" talk about some ancient gadget. I am putting together something about my ancient SPOT watch to send over. These guys are funny. This is also at TWiT.tv.
• Tekzilla - I've mentioned Tekzilla before too and was lucky when Veronica took the interview for the third anniversary special. I wish this was an audio-only podcast, though. Watching video while driving in Phoenix is a BAD idea.
  
• Buzz Out Loud - CNET's podcast on daily tech news. More interesting than the news itself is the banter and arguments they get in over the direction of the technology.

I just need more MINUTES of podcasts now to fill my morning commute. Suggest something to me?

There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed when I attend conferences. During the conference, the energy of everyone around me pumps me up & keeps me going. I love meeting people & talking to them, hearing about the cool stuff they’re up to and making contacts for new projects. This was true of meeting the maemo guys last week - we had a great evening talking about tablets, maemo, and life in general over mugs of good German beer.

But after the conference, it’s like you’ve been on some kind of artificial high of late nights, early mornings, high concentration & caffeine charged conversations - and you get on the plane to come home, and you just deflate.

It always  seems to take me about the same length to recover from a conference as I spent at the conference. Which meant that I was still in a funk on Monday, when I decided that the first thing I had to do was get rid of some Stuff.

Paperwork had built up over the past month or so, I had bits & pieces all over my desk, in stacks on the floor, in drawers… From what I can tell from Getting Things Done (I’m about half way through! yay!), this is a pretty normal situation - something comes into your hand that you can’t forget, but that you can’t handle right away, so you add it to the top of a bunch of other stuff which you couldn’t do straight away, but which you couldn’t forget, and there it lays until you’ve forgotten it.

And so Monday and Tuesday, I spent ages working through email, expenses, receipts, forms for insurance, tax returns and all of the other things that had been building up. At the end of it, my life feels a bit cleaner, but I’ve got the impression I lost half the week.

I can’t wait until the magic happens and my office space suddenly becomes magically organised so that filing becomes fun and I always have a list of things I can do, regardless of what I’m up to at the time. That’ll be fun (I’m not holding my breath).

Note: This editorial is off topic for TabletBlog but on target for TabletBlog readers. Social networks target US - the always-connected crowd. I know through comments (both positive and negative) that my readers are smart enough to make good strong opinions on either side of this issue. On with the editorial.

Dear lazyweb,

Where's the GNOME applet that can show me my laptop's power usage in Watt? I cannot believe that nobody has written one yet.

Some concrete steps after the invitation to bring the maemo community to a next level: 10 Days of maemo brainstorm. Open invitation to put many dreams and rants into a single plan. Deadline for fast and direct impact: end of this week. 100 Days action plan. A joint exercise between the maemo community and Nokia. maemo.org will [...]

Why do I visit mailing lists?

Often I'm invited.

Why am I leaving your mailing list?

Because it seems that there was a lack of respect for the official target group of the mailing list by some people who joined it.

What's the harm in this?

Eventually my stress level exceeds my tolerance and bad things happen.

What can I do about it?

I'm leaving. If you want to contact me, try irc.

Lifehacker has an interesting story on how location-aware iPhone will change things:

There's a lot of speculation as to what we can expect from next week's iPhone announcements, but there's one thing you can be sure of: The iPhone's location-aware features will change your life. Whether that means pinpointing your location on a Google Map (which iPhones already do), tracking your friends when you go out, or giving you a heads-up on the best place to eat within a three-block radius, the location-aware future is bright.

The scenarios described in the story are very similar to what we've been discussing regarding GeoClue, the framework for making mobile Linux devices location-aware.

With iPhone pushing innovation it is very important that mobile Linux environments like GNOME Mobile, maemo and QTopia pick up the ball and start making location-aware solutions powered by more than just GPS. GeoClue can help there.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, iphone, maemo, qtopia

People interested in Internet Tablets or new Internet Tablet users may not be aware of maemo.org. What began as a web site for development tools grew into a community collaboration project for users and developers of all levels. Here are just some of the things available.

• Downloads - This section is a software repository for both Nokia-sponsored and third-party applications and includes staff picks, user ratings, latest updates, and popular downloads. This should be a first stop for anyone even considering the tablet: Learn what you can do beyond what's in the box.
  
• Community - Mailing lists, a wiki, an IRC chat channel, and more are linked from here to encourage users and developers to communicate.
• News - This includes staff picks and news items "voted up" by community members. The maemo planet news feed aggregates a number of blogs and users can choose to give an entry "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." Popular entries like Quim Gil's post on the future of maemo are preferred by the community thus show up in the "News" page.
  
• Development - If you're a coder, this is your toolbox. Documentation, SDKs, bug lists, and even a place to host your project are all offered here.

Keep up the good work, maemo team!

I’m so glad lcuk has published this liqbase overview video. When Gary showed us his stuff in LinuxTag we were impressed. I told him: the world needs to know. He was totally humble, still calling himself a newbie in maemo development…

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything, but I figure this is a good enough reason to do so. The SD specification has been available for quite a while now, but up until now, the MMC specification has had a $5000 price tag stuck to it. This has kept it out of most people’s hands, although Nokia were kind enough to buy a copy for Pierre. However, they have now made the latest version (4.3) available without charge. I believe this change of heart stems from the standardisation of eMMC through JEDEC (They still charge for their other specs). Despite the focus on eMMC, it is the full specification (minus the section on using MMC over SPI which they have declared obsolete; this isn’t a big deal as there’s enough documentation around explaining how MMC over SPI works).

What does this mean? Not that much in terms of Linux kernel support for MMC; Pierre already used his copy of the 4.2 spec to fix any problems and 4.3 doesn’t really add anything new that affects us. eMMC (Embedded MMC) is mostly just a new form-factor and doesn’t appear differently from a regular card. The one substantive new feature is the introduction of a special ‘boot partition’ which are accessed in a simplified way – presumably this was added to make it easy for a bootloader to load an OS off an eMMC. I don’t really see much demand emerging for this, so we have no immediate plans to support it (and good luck finding a card with a boot partition!) but if the need arose, we’d be able to do it.

So, nothing’s changed in practical terms, but it’s still helpful for us that the spec is now freely available; however, it probably won’t do much to help MMC against the SD juggernaut. Anyone seen a high capacity MMC card despite them being ‘available’ for over two years now? Thought so.

Consequently, I shouldn’t have mentioned that in public either. Well, I’m not going to talk about fight club (even though it is a great movie, and I finally got the book)…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though.

This information also appears on the Ubuntu Mobile Guide

Assuming you have a fairly recent drop of UME, new applications should:

1. install a .desktop file into /usr/share/applications
2. install an icon into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/<size>/<type> (e.g. /usr/share/icons/hicolor/64x64/apps/myapp.png)

If 1 is done correctly, the app should show up in the UI.

If 1 and 2 are done, it will also have the right icon :)

OnlyShowIn

The  freedesktop.org has a standard

OnlyShowIn

for the application to appear in certain environments.

So you can also add

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Mobile;

to the desktop file and the icon will appear on the desktop.

Also something to note:

For example, cheese does not have

OnlyShowIn

but it appears in hildon desktop...others also do not have

OnlyShowIn

and do not appear..it seems that there is some special
implementation for ubuntu mobile which is seen in the gconf keys:

/desktop/hildon/htmlhomeplugin/onlyshowin_filter

Check

OnlyShowIn

value in .desktop. If

_False_

then every .desktop is shown and

/onlyshowin_ignore

Always show these apps, even if they don't have

OnlyShowIn

Cheese is in this list hence it is always shown

Apparently this key should go away when *every* application is a good citizen and complies to the freedesktop.org standards.

I have been eagerly awaiting the N810 WiMAX Edition since news of it
surfaced last year. The N810WE would offer true mobility - a pocket
computer coupled with the excellent bandwidth that WiMAX delivers.
Canada is one of the few places in the world that has an existing WiMAX
network, albeit of the 'Pre-WiMAX' variety. Rogers and Bell offer
'Portable Internet' and 'Sympatico Un-Plugged', respectively. Both are
resellers of Inukshuk's WiMAX network.

After thinking about the N810WE more and more - a thought occured to
me. Did I really need to wait? My two main usage locations for my N800
are at home, where I have WiFi, and at work, where I don't. The reason
I wanted the N810WE was to be able to use it at my second location -
work. My company has a restrictive internet policy, and no WiFi.

Could I not then sign up for Rogers Portable Internet, and use that
service at work? Sure I could. I had my doubts - what would the
reception be like? What if I don't like the service? I don't really
want to spend $100 on a modem that I may not use for that long. How
would I hide a modem and WiFi router at work?

I found a used modem on craigslist - they were asking $50, but they
accepted my offer of $40. I was in business! That night, I spent about
20 minutes on the phone with the Rogers salesperson. They offered me a
deal on the Portable Internet Basic - $19.95/month and no activation.
The price was good for 12 months, and there was no contract. At the
most, I would be out one month of service, and would have to unload a
modem I bought for $40. Pretty low capital outlay for an experiment in
WiMAX. I had a spare FON router lying downstairs doing nothing useful -
time to put it to use and see what this WiMAX thing is all about.

Within 15-20 minutes, the modem had aquired its signal and registered
itself onto Rogers' network - a one time procedure for new modem
activations. The modem showed 3 bars of service, and I logged onto the
FON AP. I was in business!

Stay tuned for the second part of My WiMAX Experiment: First Days
Teething Pains and 'Mobile Setup'.

It sounds like another buzz-word candidate on the internet field is the term "RIA": many big guys commercially interested on RIA seem to concept it differently. My understanding about the term stands on its origin: RIA are applications running of top of browsers essential features and infrastructure: connectivity, interoperability, cloud storage (data available anywhere, any time), responsiveness, and so on, and IMO this is what drives the real meaning of RIA or "Rich Internet Applications".

PS: To avoid ambiguity we are generally referring RIA by "web applications".

In that sense, the Mozilla Prism project was launched w/ the intention of "integrate web applications with the desktop, allowing them to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser". The project implements new concepts including "SSBs" and "distraction free browsers". Ok then, lets analyse what we have here from different perspectives:

1. On the pc (w/ satisfactory processing capabilities), users can have their web browser w/ many tabs opened, their RIAs living each one on their own process and windows, as well as many other OS applications all at the same time and their PC are able to run great.
   
2. But what about it all on the mobile space ? To be honest I am not really sure about the answer, *but* that is what this port job is mainly about: getting feedback about what maemo users get when they can somehow to integrate common WebApps (meebo.com, gmail, gdocs, gchat, ...) with their mobile desktop environment.
   

Although the TODO list is still big, the DONE list is accomplished so that it worth making "Prism to Maemo" project public.





1) Installation

While I am still having trouble to get my upload account to 'Maemo Extras" repository working fine, I've set up one living under my personal web dir: .install file here.


2) Warnings

• I will be working on this more seriously from now on with guys (luckily on #prism - irc.mozilla.org) to see what features are really interesting to have available on the mobile/maemo space.
  

• It is still an "under porting" work. so bugs are likely to be found and new releases are likely to appear.

• .deb sizes 10Mb and installed it takes 30Mb on disk.

Hope you enjoy.

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

I just arrived in Berlin to participate the Handsets World conference. (The Netherlands just scored a goal, by the way!)


I'll have a keynote talk tomorrow, and a panel session. My talk is going to be about our vision -- and how open source can help.






And now it is 2-0!

Who are the players?

• X (alone)
• a dozen guys (on the other side)

Rules

What should someone do if X tosses an egg his way?

Catch it, of course!

Failing to catch it will result in splatter

What happens when the egg splatters?

That guy loses, and you should report his error to his management.

Hopefully that guy will learn to be more careful about how he catches his next egg.

In the interim, he's out, and you've lost a program.

What should X do when someone tosses an egg to X?

Catch it, of course!

Failing to catch it results in every other egg thrown at X falling and you get upset. It's your job to report that X was bad at catching eggs to the people responsible for X.

What about those eggs?

All eggs are created equal, anyone can send the exact same series of eggs to X. It just happens that today it was Firefox which tossed the egg.

But tomorrow it might be someone else. And they might be malicious, or just careless.

Why do we like eggs?

The neat thing about these eggs is that when they're reproducible, people on all sides are happy, because reproducible eggs are catchable eggs. They can be made into poached eggs since you can toss them again and again until you catch them.

This is much better than simple scrambled eggs with no hints and lots of suspects. This can happen if the kernel reboots or X doesn't leave a log and you weren't there to watch (think about a Tsunami or an Earthquake, the world shifts, and there's wreckage when you return but no sign of the culprit).

What can you do?

Help make the world a better place, report that dropped egg and get it caught the next time.

Why not call it dodgeball?

Well, normally in dodgeball, people intentionally would bean X. Here X is more like the reluctant father who was coerced by his family into playing.

Now that everything is official, it's time to look at what Apple has done. iPhone fans may disagree with the points below but they are made from the out-of-box perspective without warranty-voiding jailbreaking and 3rd party apps.

• 3G: A welcome addition, but still without a tethering option. 3G is nice on a phone but truly shines when it can be shared with a laptop.
• Application Store: Okay Apple. You've made a token effort to get 3rd party applications into the iPhone but why stifle innovation by making them ONLY available through your store? Why are you taking 30% off the top for every sale in that store?
  
• Price drop: This is one of the best things you've done with the iPhone. A $199 device is very compelling. At that price, the iPhone looks like a good secondary device as opposed to the normal gauntlet of an iPod touch, an N810, and an N95-3. Sometimes it'd be nice to just carry one device. However, Matthew Miller of The Mobile Gadgeteer points out that the iPhone with the matching AT&T data plan actually costs $40 more than the previous iPhone over the course of the contract.
• GPS: It's nice to have location based services, but don't think you invented it. The N810 comes with a mapping application and has an upgrade option for turn-by-turn voice navigation. Why doesn't the iPhone have that upgrade option?
• Enterprise support: Good work. There's nothing bad that can be said about this new feature - unless it bombs fantastically when put into real use.
• Browsing: Still that same 480x320, 160 pixels per inch (compared to the N810's 800x480, 225 ppi) display. Still no Flash in the browser. While multi-touch zooming helps make up for this, constant scrolling is no solution for full page reading. Keep trying.

Comments, alternate perspectives, and additional points are welcome!

Can independent developers make money in maemo applications? In the comments to the last post about the 3G iPhone, reader MDK writes the following:

Even from the developer/hacker pov the AppStore is a total revolution. It actually allows others to earn some money along with Apple and make some independent business around the platform.

That's a good point. The AppStore allows rapid purchase and downloading of applications and warehouses free applications as well. For the Internet Tablets, maemo.org offers warehousing, application search, and one-click downloads but does not offer any way for developers to monetize their applications. There's also no central source control for these applications: If Nokia decided to make a developer application store, they'd be at the mercy of user charge-backs to credit cards when applications stopped working. In ecommerce, too many charge-backs means you lose your merchant account and your ability to accept credit cards.

There are many potential applications for which Nokia Internet Tablet owners would pay if the applications worked properly. How can maemo developers turn a dime on their work?

Time to finally blog about what Karsten and me have been doing for the last weeks in Maemo Bugzilla. Karsten has been mostly looking at the infrastructure and code side to improve a few things and will blog about it once we have some results ported from the test installation ...

As I mentioned in Part 1, my intended usage for the WiMAX modem is at my workplace, where I do not have WiFi.  One of my main concerns was with concealment of the modem/router package.  I solved this by strapping the router to the modem, and tucking it between my computer and the cubicle wall.  After work, I place the modem and router in my desk and lock it.

The first day brought to a light a few problems.  One was the choice of router.  That FON router would drop connections often.  I recalled that there was an issue with using this router and the NIT's, related to the power saving mode in the WiFi.  I bought a cheap D-Link router that night, and the router issue was solved.

The other problem I had was with the modem dropping connections sometimes.  It would go roaming for a signal, and take a few minutes to acquire it again.  Some twisting and shifting of the modem proved to be useful in securing a reliable spot to place it in.

Surfing on the first day was good.  I used the 'mobile' versions of most sites that I frequent.  Funnily enough, the ITT site was one of the hardest to switch to mobile since the option is in a drop box at the bottom of the page.  Loading the full site on the Basic connection I had was slow.  Gmail, Google, Wikipedia, CBC News, and more were very usable in their mobile forms, or basic HTML versions. 

I was chatting via GoogleTalk with some friends, and even placed a VOIP call via GoogleTalk.  The call was fairly clear, but would cut in and out frequently.  I need to do some more testing of the VOIP when connected via the WiMAX modem. 

The Portable Internet Basic I had was slow, no doubt about it.  But for access at a fixed remote location, and with the usage of mobile optimized sites, it proved to be very usable. 

Stay tuned for Part 3, where I will discuss actual speeds obtained from speed tests and load times of common mobile sites.

If you think you are, consider applying to the position of product manager of the Maemo development platform at Nokia. The mission is ambitious: provide the best environment to develop mobile applications, on top of Linux, an open platform and common programming standards. The competition is tough, and getting better. The person selected will be [...]

At work the functional test suite of our application used up quite a lot of RAM (over 500 megs). For a long time it was cheaper to buy the developers an extra gig of RAM than to spend time hunting down a possible memory leak, but finally curiosity overcame me and I started investigating.

I just caught this video which highlights some UX ideas around the potential for Firefox Mobile and I really like what I’m seeing! It’s a near-future version of Fennec which you can run today on the tablet. While I’m not sure how this would work on a non-touch device, that’s not really something we tableteer’s have to worry about. Note there’s no Chrome and how optimized the experience is around enabling actions on the page and in the key interaction areas like the location bar.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags:
Internet Tablet, Maemo, mobile, N-Series, N800, N810, Frefox, Fennec, Mozilla

I need to take some time to talk about the role of customers, or something like that.

Marius Gedminas blogged an interesting article about memory leaks in Python. On the tablet you don't have much memory available, so memory leaks will annoy the users very quickly.

Python is a garbage-collected language (like Java or C#), so memory leaking is normally not an issue, but there are situations where you should be careful.

Bindings to C libraries

Many modules are bindings to C or C++ libraries, and memory leaking is unfortunately quite common in those languages, esp. in complex libraries. A hot candidate for memory leaking on the maemo platform are the GdkPixbuf operations.

GdkPixbufs get not automatically garbage collected by Python. Always use del on a GdkPixbuf explicitly when you don't need it any longer.


The __del__ destructor method

Classes can have some sort of destructor method in Python.

  def __del__(self):
  
      ...

This is called when you use del on the last reference you are holding. But be very careful! Classes overriding this destructor method are not eligible for breaking reference cycles by the garbage collector anymore! They have to be released manually. It's normally not necessary to override the __del__ method, so you better stay away from it.

Always take special care when dealing with classes overriding the __del__ method. Cyclic references involving such classes cannot be resolved by the garbage collector automatically.

A few weeks ago, a new MediaWiki instance was installed by Ferenc Szekely of the maemo team, in response to numerous requests. Many people were not fans of Midgard’s user interface for the wiki, and missed a number of features available in other wiki software. And so we have been undertaking the second major migration for the maemo wiki (we previously moved from MoinMoin).

Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been organising a small team which has moved over content from the old wiki, has worked on stylesheets, templates and categories which make sense, and we’re now ready to take the wraps off! Head on over to http://wiki.maemo.org and have a look.

This is not a finished work, like most wikis. Content in the “Midgard wiki” category  needs review and editing, and a lot of theofficial documentation of maemo will be wikiised over the coming weeks and months. Some content still needs migrating and categorisation. But we have a decent start, an editing team, and the new wiki has already been baptised with its first couple of pages with over 100 edits: 100Days and 2010 Agenda.

Credit where credit’s due! The following people have been outstanding throughout the migration: GeneralAntilles, jaffa, Niels Breet, ludovicus, trickie and Navi. I’m probably leaving lots of people out but these guys have made their mark with me over the past couple of weeks.

As I mentioned in Part 2, the Portable Internet Basic I have from Rogers is slow, but usable. Slow is a relative thing. They advertise 512 Kbps download and 256 Kbps upload. I found it hard to get a reliable speed test using the WiMAX modem since many of the speed testing sites I would traditionally use on a DSL connection were too slow to load and relied heavily on flash.

I did find a mobile version on DSL Reports that was advertized for use with - ahem - the iPhone. Well, it turned out to be the most workable speed test site to use in this case.

http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html

I found that the download speed was heavily dependant on the reception of the modem. Today, my reception ran anywhere from 1 bar to 3 bars of service. A little fiddling with the modem placement and orientation allowed me to gauge the speed of my connection as a function of the number of bars of reception I had.

Bars

Speed (avg – Kbps)

1

53.5

2

92

3

172.5

Table 1: Average Download Speeds as a Function of Reception



I wasn't expecting much of a correlation, but it seems relatively linear.

Most of the time, I was running at 3 bars of reception. The spread in my connection speed ran from 114-224 Kbps.



Figure 1: An Example Speed Test Result from http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html


The spread in latency was large - ranging from 94 ms to just over 1000 ms. The IP for dslr.net is somewhere in the USA, and the domain is registered in New York. That level of latency is large for a server a few hundred kilometres from me!

Many of the mobile-optimized sites worked quite well, loading relatively fast. I tried out the following:

http://m.gmail.com
http://m.facebook.com
http://www.cbc.ca/mobile
http://internettablettalk.com/forums (using the Mobile II theme)

The mobile facebook site worked quite well, and allowed me to do all of the things I normally do on facebook. That mobile site, in my opinion, should be benchmarked by Google for their mobile optimized GMail. The mobile version of GMail had a pretty poor interface. The Inbox view is OK, but the Compose view isn't. The body of the message that you're typing is very narrow. There is an iPhone optimized GMail site, but it doen't work consistently on my N800, or at least, I could not get it to work consistently. I resorted to using the basic HTML view for GMail, and it didn't get bogged down by my WiMAX connection.

Stay Tuned for Part 4, where I will review the quality I get using VOIP - pumping the calls through WiMAX...

GPS manufacturer Garmin has recently released the modified sources of their nüvi 880 and 5000 in-car navigators. Looking at the packages reveals that these devices are powered by GNOME Mobile and GeoClue, the toolkit for making mobile Linux applications location-aware:

On downloading and Inspecting the large (and nicely organized) 8xx source tarball (list of files here) its very apparent the device built upon a GNOME Mobile based stack (with X, Matchbox and GTK+ etc). Also interestingly it also contains GeoClue, PulseAudio and seemingly both Ogg Vorbis and Flac support.

Great to see GeoClue finally hitting devices!

Via ButterFeet and Jussi Kukkonen.

My post on hunting memory leaks in Python received a lot of feedback via email. And both^H^H^H^H most of them asked for the source code.

As you can check out in the vagalume-devel@garage.maemo.org mailing list archives:

https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/vagalume-devel/2008-June/000151.html

…today I’ve finished the implementation of a new patch for Vagalume which will enable D-Bus support in the desktop version of this nice player, since so far D-Bus interaction was only allowed in the maemo platform (due to using functions from libosso for RPC methods, instead of dbus-glib).

So, this is how the vagalumectl script (formerly known as vagalume-dbus) would work from now on in a “regular” GNU/Linux machine:

mario@bender:~$ vagalumectl
Usage:
vagalumectl
(Vagalume will be automatically started if not already running)

COMMAND:
play:              start playing the current radio
skip:              skip to the nex song in the current radio
stop:              stop playing the current radio
love:              mark the current song as ‘loved’
ban:               mark the current song as ‘banned’
tag :         change to a ‘global tag’ radio.
artist :   change to a ‘similar artists’ radio
group :     change to a ‘last.fm group’ radio
loved :      change to a ‘loved’ radio for a specific user
neighbours : change to a ‘neighbours’ radio for a specific user
personal :   change to a ‘personal’ radio for a specific user
playlist :   change to a ‘playlist’ radio for a specific user
playurl :     just play the specified URL on Vagalume
volumeup [INC]:    increase playback volume
volumedown [INC]:  decrease playback volume
volume :    set the playback volume to a specific value
start:             start Vagalume (if not already running)
close:             close Vagalume (if not already closed)
help:              print this information

Double quotes are REQUIRED when specifying parameters to some commands,
such as TAG or ARTIST, because of the white spaces they might contain, e.g:

$ vagalumectl tag “hard rock”
$ vagalumectl artist “Led Zeppelin”

mario@bender:~$ vagalumectl loved homemaxico
Command ‘loved’ successfully executed
mario@bender:~$

Well… perhaps not a too much useful ‘screenshot’ after all… but believe me, that’s the proof that D-Bus is working fine on my GNOME desktop from now on.

I hope you can enjoy the patch soon (as soon as Berto applies it to the SVN trunk)… perhaps in Vagalume 0.7 ;-), who knows…

...related to the article found here.

The journalist emphasized things his way -- things that he saw important. Fair enough. My points are:

Companies like Nokia need to learn the open source way of working. This means not only fulfilling the letter of GPL, LGPL etc. but also the spirit. In my mind this means integrating the corporate work with the open source community, participating, contributing back the code, building the code in open projects and not only releasing it when mandatory, not forking, etc. Open source is a very effective way to create software together with others; together with other individuals and other companies. This is something that the corporate must learn to really benefit from open source.

The open source community should also be willing to learn. I think it would benefit everybody if people developing open source code would understand WHY certain things are made the way they are. Maybe there are other reasons than stupidity and an evil mind? Trying to understand and learn would benefit both open source projects and corporate to come up with better solutions. As an example, a subsidized business model has it challenges in the context of truly open devices. Understanding why, what to do about it, etc, would benefit us all.

Then, somebody told me that the open source community do not need to listen or learn from the corporate. They do not work for you, somebody said. But actually, many of them do. Let me explain:

The most relevant open source projects have an increasing number of corporate developers. Companies like Nokia, Red Hat, Novel, IBM, Opened Hand, Imendio, Trolltech, HP, and so forth develop code in projects such as Linux, GStreamer, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME etc .. For these companies, open source is not a hobby but serious business. It is a way to get software developed in an open collaborative manner -- to meet their business goals. So if a company pays (as a salary, as a contract to a hacker company or some other way) for the development, then I claim that the developer works for the company. Even if the development happens in an open source project.

We participate in open source projects with individuals, but also with companies like listed above. I think it benefits everybody to understand the constraints, motivations, and limitations each individual, corporate or project may have.

I'm not a teacher, I'm a learner.

I used Windows at work until January 2002, when I changed jobs and went to Linux full-time. I barely remember what life was back then. Driver CDs you had to install before plugging in new hardware, shareware apps that you had to pay for and couldn't see how they worked, web pages full of blinking advertisements. Magic voodoo rituals you had to do to fix your IS when it broke down, that you had to do by rote without full understanding of how it all fit together.

I used Windows at work until January 2002, when I changed jobs and went to Linux full-time. I barely remember what life was back then. Driver CDs you had to install before plugging in new hardware, shareware apps that you had to pay for and couldn't see how they worked, web pages full of blinking advertisements. Magic voodoo rituals you had to do to fix your IS when it broke down, that you had to do by rote without full understanding of how it all fit together.

This is a continuation of Python object graphs.

Bruce had a good comment to this discussion. He call it a bright line system. He says: " The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side."

This exactly the same thing I discussed in my article on our experiences and learning on building consumer products with open source. Section 5.2: "As some components are available only as closed source components, we need to mix open source and proprietary code. This mixing calls for proper architecture management to manage different licensing rules within the product code."

We understood this, of course, from the day one. And it is still the way to do it. Others, like Ubuntu, follows the same rule very well indeed.

Bruce Perens has a good reply to Ari Jaaksi’s keynote, but I am sure that the ‘bright line’ approach is not new to Nokia.

I have not heard the keynote and I haven’t seen a transscript yet, but unless proven wrong, I want to believe that Ari has been misunderstood: with enough determination, you can read what he says as an attack on the mobile phone industry: He might have wanted to say that parts of the Open Source and Free Software communities have a hard time imagining how utterly backwards and behind the mobile phone industry is.

(Just look at what happened when the 3G spectrum licenses were auctioned off.  Insanity.)

When Ari says “Why do we need closed vehicles? We do.”,  I read this as: “I know there are no good reason, only bad ones, let’s not waste time arguing about it and hope the bad reasons go away by themselves.”

When he says “As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules”, he can’t be implying that Nokia is not going to honor the licenses of code that they are using. They have to and they do.  Maybe he means that Nokia can not yet afford to speak out against DRM and device lock-down without being hypocritical, but he knows that people are hoping for such statements.

Yeah, I have nice rose-colored glasses.  I hope Ari clarifies his message in the near future.

(In any case, switching your code to GPLv3 seems like a good thing to do when you are worried about Nokia pulling a Tivo.)

Update: After taking off my rose-colored glasses, I saw this.  Well, what can I say.  Ari, I guess it is better if you let Quim do the talking.

I finally managed to port all the existing C code to Vala. What did i achieve from this exercise? For one thing, the code got much simpler, with LOCs being reduced from 2101 to 1117 (46.8 %). Also this proves that (at least the server-side) GUPnP's Vala bindings are already in a stable/usable state.

Special thanks to Jürg Billeter, Ali Sabil and Jussi Kukkonen for their continuous support during this exercise and for quickly fixing bugs that I reported.

Why server downtimes and flame wars seem to start always on Friday afternoon? As you probably know, this time the well-intentioned Ari Jaaksi got slashdotted and a new wave of discussion around Nokia and its open source involvement began. My conclusion in a nutshell: these things would not happen this way if the community at large [...]

Origami Experience 2.0 was launched for Windows Vista UMPCs last week. This led to the painful experience of putting Vista back on the Q1 Ultra and giving it a try. While it is not impressive enough to keep Vista on that little machine, it does serve as a point of inspiration.

The maemo home screen comes with a handful of applets. Other than the RSS reader, none serve as constant information displays like the OE home screen. This is a potential missed opportunity for developers. While many Internet Tablet owners ARE on the go, it is safe to say that many also spend a good deal of time in front of a computer. Having the Internet Tablet as an auxiliary display for "at-a-glance" information would be nice.

If you want to know more about OE 2.0, take a look at JKK Mobile's video overview.

“We all have some learning to do” - that was the core message of Ari Jaaksi’s presentation, which has turned into a massive shitstorm over the past few days.

Currently Ed Bartosh and I are working on taking all source packages from the extras repository and try to build them on the autobuilder. The goal of this chinook rebuild effort is to get a set of packages buildable 'from scratch'.

Once we are able to build all(most?) packages on chinook, we can try to automatically build them for diablo. So we can have a lot of packages in the diablo repository at release of diablo.

There is a web page up with the first run, which was done over the weekend. All packages are listed in build order, based on dependencies, with their build results for i386 and armel. If a package build failed, a link to the build log is provided.

If you provide a source package in extras, please check if your package is building OK. If you only provide binary packages in extras, we would like to encourage you to provide source packages too! We could really use some help from the community in pushing towards 100% OK build of every package in extras.

When you have updated your package to fix the issues, please use the 'request rebuild' option on the packages list. This gives us the opportunity to track changes as a result of the list. We will rebuild packages on a regular interval and post a summary to maemo-developers. Let's see if we can get all packages to build!

If you're a regular reader of the Internet Tablet School you may have noticed we've published quite a few tutorials lately on how to connect USB accessories such as keyboards, flash drives and hard disk drives.All of these rely on the same method for connection to a tablet: a female-female USB adaptor combined with the free "USB Control" application. Essentially you connect the device to your

- Add tool for generating convenience C wrappers for GUPnP service definitions.
 [Ross Burton]
- Remove xmlDoc argument from gupnp_root_device_new() for simplicity.
 (xmlDocs can still be passed to gupnp_root_device_new_full())
 [Jorn Baayen]
- Better documentation, new tutorials and sample code. [Ross Burton]
- Improved support for Accept-Language header. [Jorn Baayen]
- Various internal improvements. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]

Dr. Ari Jaaksi's recent conversation has sparked some serious response in the maemo community. Read the article and the linked article. We know they're always listening to the users of the Internet Tablets and related devices. What would YOU teach Nokia?

- Correct function prototype. Fixes #940. [Jorn Baayen]
- Include the glib header to satisfy vala-gen-introspect. [Zeeshan Ali Khattak]

network-light:
- Remove the unneeded periodic notification to susbscribers.
 [Zeeshan Ali Khattak]
- Create a new UUID for each instance of network-light.
 [Hugo Calleja, Zeeshan Ali Khattak]
- Use the new gupnp_root_device_new() API. [Jorn Baayen]

universal-cp:
- Display the device presentation URL [Ross Burton]

general:
- Fix `make distcheck`. [Zeeshan Ali Khattak]

GUADEC and aKademy will possibly be arranged together in 2009. As the events are looking for a venue, we at COSS (Centre for Open Source Solutions Finland) decided to apply to have the events in Tampere, Finland.

Tampere is an old industrial city situated between two lakes. It has quite good flight connections (including Ryanair) to Europe, and fast rail link to nearby Helsinki which is the big hub for Finnair. COSS is a seasoned conference organizer with good connections to local and country-level instances, and as venue we can have the University of Tampere campus.

See the proposal PDF.

3 days ago I was forced to leave civilized city and go to the place without Internet(which is 95% of Ukraine, I think). My precious N800 is a perfect toy to spent time with. What I wanted then is to have simple, easy, old, ancient, forgotten. Arcanoid game and I did not find it in . Only via ZX Spectrum emulators, etc...

It's a pity. Had to play Bomberman and NumptyPhysics again all day. So I promise to all who read this. I'll find native arcanoid/krakout and port it to maemo. Because it's classics. It's like to have Windows without solitaire :)

Any idea of what to look for first?

Nearly two years passed since I started to use my current cellphone: Sony Ericsson k750i. It is great device but I feel more and more limited during using it. For example PIM is very simple (no recurrent events, no attenders) and none of my PDA devices has something more extended.

This is just to inform everyone that I do realize that a hard dependency on tracker is not the way to go and this is just a temporary measure. I am writing a gstreamer/gio based metadata extractor as we speak. Although I'll try my best to get this done before GUADEC at least, it might take longer since I do this on my spare-time (something I don't have in abundance).

Disclaimer: I am not against tracker and I *will* keep the current tracker-based media source (as a plugin), though i might need to drop that as a temporary measure for while until i get the plugin system implemented.

Calling to all Graphics lovers. Design the new logo for maemo.org. Win a trip to OSiM World and the Maemo Summit. Bring a souvenir back home. Sounds good? Submit your proposal! EDITED: The first submissions are there already.

Part 4 of my WiMAX Experiment deals with VoIP call quality while using the WiMAX Modem. I have placed a few calls to date and have had some great calls, but also some not-so-great calls. It seems to not only be dependant on my modem reception, but also some unknown factors which I could not quantify.

I thought that I would share recordings of some tests that I did to gauge the call quality relative to a cell phone. Note: they look like flash videos, but there is no video - only sound.

Call #1 - Cell phone call to a Vonage voice mail

• The purpose of this call was to baseline the VoIP call quality relative to a traditional cell call.

Call #2 - Gizmo call via WiMAX to a Vonage voice mail

• The proof is in the pudding, so-to-speak: my first documented test of a VoIP call with the WiMAX modem.

The VoIP call was a little unclear in spots, but I thought it was feasible, even with the latency and bandwidth I can attain with the WiMAX modem. Those initial tests gave me the courage to record a conversation with someone while connected via the WiMAX modem...

Call #3 - a real life Gizmo call to an InternetTabletTalk member via WiMAX!

• I cold-called ITT member, qwavel, by sending him a PM on Internet Tablet Talk. Since he had made some comments on my experiment, I wanted to see if he would be interested in participating in a VoIP call with me. He instantly agreed. Since I did not know of an easy way to record the call on the tablet using Gizmo, he offered to record the call on his end via his Nokia N95. Hats off to qwavel for his enthusiasm and helpful conversation!

The interesting observation I had after listening to this recording was that qwavel sounded pretty clear to me at the time of the call, but on the recording, I sounded distant and broken up frequently. If both voices were relaying through the WiMAX modem, why was there such a difference between my observation during the call, and the subsequent recording?

Stay tuned for Part 5 of my WiMAX Experiment, where I will take the show on the road - literally!

Guys, I need map!

After googling for Maemo mapper format I found only this very useful link at internettablettalk with the list of supported servers. But unfortunately it's not that simple for us, Ukrainians. Google Maps does not have streets map even of our capital, Kiev. Russian yandex's map service is still the best, but its format is not that simple as google's:

Yandex Maps:
http://maps.yandex.ua/map.xml?mapID=1600&mapX=%d&mapY=%d&scale=%d
http://maps.yandex.ua/map.xml?mapID=1600&mapX=3397917&mapY=6491641&scale=4&slices=1

mapsID - city's id(from the set of cities)
mapX/Y - special coordinates in wild format:
Map is a 2^31 2-D array, coordinates are central point + shift * 2^(zoom level+8)

Google Maps:
http://mt.google.com/mt?x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=50.352471,30.256348&spn=4.052146,12.44751&z=7

Very simple: long, lat and zoom :)

That's why is not that simple with Maemo mapper.

May be in a few days I'll test and polish what I got now and create special .deb package for Yandex-only mapper, because there are some changes now which break all other map repositories.

Below is a screenshot(click to see 800x480) of what's working at the moment. To be continued!

UPDATE: Daniel Stone and Quim Gil further explained the status of the OpenGL ES and Java support in the comments to this post.As they've pointed out, the title of my post is misleading in the sense that FOR NOW there is no support and no plan for it.The "WONTFIX" part is, thus, temporary.Daniel also went further and added a new comment to bug #1028I will leave the original post below unedited.--

Initial release of gupnp-vala. Includes Vala bindings for the whole
gupnp stack:

* gssdp-1.0 0.6.1
* gupnp-1.0 0.12
* gupnp-ui-1.0 0.1
* gupnp-av-1.0 0.2.1

- Requires Vala 0.3.3
- custom GUPnP types (like GUPnPURI) are not supported yet, use plain
strings instead. Custom type support will return shortly in svn
version.

We (Tarent) are working in an active project, where we use N800′s mounted in german police cars. We need 20 additional devices and don’t want to switch to the N810 yet (e.g. because of the different form factor). The N800′s are out of stock in the whole world, so we had the following idea:

We buy n810′s and change them n800′s. So, if you have a N800 and want a n810, this is your chance! Please write a short mail to: n800@tarent.de. Our only requirement is to have the device in a very good state (no scratches or damages).

Update:
Thank you: We got nearly 500 offers – much more than expected!!! We have selected our 20 N800′s of them. Thanks a lot for your help!

I just wanted everyone to know that I’ve created a maemo group on LinkedIn. Just go to my profile and click on the group to join.

For some time Carman, the car OBD-II analyser, had been incompatible with the OS2008 release of the maemo platform. Lots of noise and much anticipation was directed towards INDT to get it working with the new OS release and seemingly silently, with no fanfare, it is now available for download. After installing it I can see why.

read more

I unexpectedly acquired an Asus EeePC 900 last weekend. Lovely piece of hardware.

I unexpectedly acquired an Asus EeePC 900 last weekend. Lovely piece of hardware.

I had been hearing stories of Finnish summer cottages ever since I moved to Finland but never got a chance to spend some time in one, until yesterday when we went to spend a day/night at the summer place of Suvi (a good friend of Ansku) in a forest not so far from Tampere. It was really lovely to be there. I am now really looking forward to spend the last week of July in Ansku's summer place, which I've heard is even nicer.

I have been very quiet in the last months, last week i found time to update the gnumeric port to the recent stable gnumeric version, 1.8.3. You can find this version in extras-devel. There are still a lot of issues left, i hope that someone with good c-knowledge might be interested to help out with the port.

You can find the sources at http://git.geekbu.de/.

A more interesting piece of news today was that Nokia has acquired Plazes, the WiFi positioning company. I've been a Plazes user for quite a while and am using it as a position source for my website in addition to Fireeagle.

I hope the acquisition will increase Plazes' resources to develop and expand the service to new areas of mobile positioning. The Rails port of Plazes a year ago seemed to hurt their usage numbers quite badly, but the new directions they've been recently following have been promising.

Maybe a good time to start preparing a new release of MaemoPlazer, our Plazes client for Nokia's Linux platform?

Few things are cooler than being able to work on interesting new stuff. Other people immediately building wild things on top of that work, however, is even cooler.

So, I worked briefly in the GUPnP project, making bindings for Vala. Before I managed to blog about it (hey, midsummer and all…) Zeeshan had ported gupnp-media-server to Vala and Jorn Baayen had built gupnp-media-renderer!

so… what does that mean for people who do not speak UPnP fluently? It means that I just used my N810 Mediastreamer to select the song Måndagsbarn by Veronica Maggio (a flac file on my laptop) for playing on my living room stereo set. Pretty cool, eh?

Now guess how many configuration steps were needed for all three devices to work together?  None, it just worked. Very cool.

Maybe it’s not comparable to the rocket backpack we’re all waiting for and maybe I’m just easy to impress, but I still found Ross‘ response to all this very appropriate: “Welcome to the future!”

PS: Did I mention it also works for video and images? Well, it does!

PS2: Some of the stuff mentioned here has not been released yet and may still change (at least gupnp-media-renderer is in svn only). The GUPnP framework on the other hand is ready and stable: See the documentation for API reference and tutorials.

In other news, Tampere is a host city candidate for GUADEC+Akademy 2009. Go Tampere!

I have a N810 and 3 OS in the same device.

Now you will ask me : How?

The answer is below:

1 – Move your Maemo to the MMC internal

* Advantage : you will have more space.

Steps:  http://maemo.org/community/wiki/HowTo_EASILY_Boot_From_MMC_card/

Now you have the Maemo in the internal MMC.

2 –  Flash Mamona in your flash memory

* Advantage: Nowadays Mamona distro is good for developers.

Steps:  http://dev.openbossa.org/trac/mamona/wiki/Releases/0.1/RunningMamona

3 – Debian XFCE in external MMC

* Advantage:  Debian rocks !!

You should partition your MicroSD in 2 parts:

– partition 1 – 100MB – fat32

– partition 2 – ALL THE REST – ext2

Download the Debian rootfs

wget  http://debian.i2c3.com/debian-armel-n800-xfce-beta3.tar.bz2

Untar the Debian rootfs in the second partition:

tar -xvjf  debian-armel-n800-xfce-beta3.tar.bz2

Boot using your external MMC.

That’s all!!

Carman, our fully open source project here at OpenBossa Labs, aims to give tablet users the chance of analyzing their Car's OBDII protocol was on "hold" for a while with no new versions announced. The fact was that just like Canola, the whole INdT team was going over a lot ...

It has been some time since my employer INdT has released a new version of our car application, Carman. Carman is a OBD-II analyzer for the Nokia Internet Tablet, that presents various car information (via the onboard debug II interface) to the user, such as engine rounds per minute, calculated load value, vehicle speed, cooland temperature etc.


Carman isn't dead though, and a new, much-improved, version is about to be unleashed :-) still fully opensourced! The new version is similar in architecture to Canola and provides a whole new user experience. As Canola, Carman is now based on the EFL framework and spots an integrated touch-based interface, full with animation, maps integration as well as trip reporting!
Marcelo Oliveira has a post, explaining the details and showing off some of the cool new artwork! Though, not yet integrated with Canola, we are definately toying around with the idea, as well as hoping to be able to release Canola as opensource.

Here's a massive press release. Between the Symbian announcement, the Trolltech acquisition, and the maemo project, Nokia appears to be the far-and-away leader in code for mobile devices. Correct me if I am wrong, of course. By the way - they're making Symbian open-source.

What will they DO with all this code? It may take months or years to sort it out, but we can expect some massive changes in functionality of mobile device software. No word yet on if the Internet Tablets will be changed at all, but we've already heard plans on interoperability with Qt, Ubuntu, Gnome, and KDE.

The great desire, of course, is for developers to publish ONE application which is instantly available on Qt, maemo, and Symbian devices. This would take a long time if it ever happened, but it's all under Nokia's roof now.

While it’s been floating around for a while “behind the scenes” Diablo has finally arrived officially for the tablet:

Nokia has published the OS2008 Feature Upgrade for the N810 and N800 Internet Tablets. This release is based on Maemo 4.1 (codename Diablo) and provides the Seamless Software Update feature.

Users still need to reflash the device in order to install this release. Further OS updates will be made available over-the-air, without needing to reflash. Now users will get automatic notifications in the home screen about the availability of OS updates or single applications, including those installed from third parties. This works only over WLAN connections. It is still possible to check for updates manually from the Application manager.

This release brings a new open source email application based on Modest and the tinymail framework. Users will find a simplified account setup and presets for various service providers. Another major improvement is the introduction to Chinese character rendering support in Email, Browser and RSS feed reader. There are numerous issues fixed all over the operating system including updated openssl. Smaller improvements have also been introduced to several areas such improved browser panning performance. [Maemo.org]

I was just about to mess with screen rotation hacks, but this seems like a slightly more substantial change. I’ll try to report back after flashing today if possible.

OK, everyone get flashing.

Diablo, Nokia's latest release in the Tablet OS series, has officially been released. Go get it now.

I haven't had much time to play around with Diablo yet but I'll be posting my thoughts shortly.

If you want to know what's new in this release there is a great (and long) thread over on Internet Tablet Talk discussing the features.

Happy flashing.

EDIT: A comprehensive look at what packages have changed can be found here.

Cool finally they released it!Going to update.You can find it the usual place for the n810 and n800.Here you can find the announcement.

The Maemo Bugzilla scope Currently Maemo Bugzilla is used as a bug tracking system for the "core" software elements shipped in the Maemo platform (to define the term "Maemo" itself, please see this discussion). This includes both Open source and Closed source components preinstalled on the devices by Nokia. Obviously this ...

Zaheer and Zeeshan, though has lot of alphabets common are still two separate names. :) I always took it as a joke when people used to confuse us but recently someone was about to give my money to Zaheer and that i think is serious. :) Good that that dude got my IRC nick right, otherwise...

This is old news — especially if you’re a member of maemo.org and got the four or five email notifications about it — but the fine folks in Nokia‘s Maemo division have decided to support the Maemo community in rebranding Maemo. Part of this process is centered around redesigning a logo for the maemo.org website.

I’ve submitted a number of ideas myself, and I thought I’d post them here too. I’ll keep posting my ideas as I come up with them (clicking the image will take you to a larger version at the maemo.org wiki).

Submission #1:

Submission #1b:

Submission #2:

Submission #3:

Submission #4:

Submission #5
(discarded because it looks
too much like the Palm logo — duh!):

Submission #6:

Submission #7:

Submission #8:

Submission #9:

Submission #10:

Submission #11:

Submission #12:

All of the submissions can be found here (there are some good ones too!).

Good luck everyone!

Been a while since I've blogged nor done anything maemo related. Well, for a change I whipped up a new version of osso-statusbar-cpu. I hadn't built it for chinook previously (although the code would have allowed that) and it was still looking like it belonged to OS2007. I whipped up a new base icon for it (based on the battery icon stretched to bigger square).

I'm not too happy how it turned out, but having approximately zero capabilities in graphics, I decided to let it slip as is. Here's a sneak peek of what it looks like:

.

The .install file is available as usual.

Quim Gil announces why.

Symbian Foundation

As you may have noticed, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create a new open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone we plan to establish the Symbian Foundation as a means to support everybody who wants to use, and/or enhance this platform. Contributions from Foundation members will be integrated to further enhance the platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations.

So Diablo has been released. Wasting no time I set about installing the new SDK under my distribution of choice, Ubuntu Hardy. The process is pretty painless thanks to the installer scripts but there are a few little gotcha's that you need to look out for.

read more

On 24th June 2008, Nokia has released the first huge 0S2008 update for the N800 and N810 Internet Tablets, based on Maemo 4.1, known internally by the name 'Diablo'.


The biggest improvement seems to be the feature called 'Seamless Software Update feature', meaning that future OS updates will be made available over-the-air, without needing to reflash the Internet Tablet. Now users will get automatic notifications in the home screen about the availability of OS updates or single applications, including those installed from third parties.

For those interested in all software packages changes, please checkout following link.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

After patching maemo-mapper application to support Yandex maps Max Lapan, their employee suggested his script that worked as CGI script and converted mmapper's links to yandex's ones. That was really awesome idea as there is no need to update application and contacting its developer all the time, we can just run script on 127.0.0.1 and pass parameters like city ID and x/y/z to it. Note, that Yandex is not that simple as other map vendors - there is no world map with all cities on it. Each city has its own ID and its own set of dimensions - Xs,Ys of upper left and bottom right corners of each rectangle. So I think we(interested people from Russia and Ukraine) will have to create list of supported cities with verified set of dimensions and IDs. So each city will have it's own repository in maemo mapper(see screenshot below).

I'm open to discussions about this implementation as GPS and other features are unlikely to work seamlessly and road traffic service is currenly unsupported. It's not possible to add it without patching maemo-mapper itself. But for me and probably for other people map is the most important feature.

How to setup a new repository:
URL for the map is "http://127.0.0.1:8000/?map=NUMBER&layer=1&x=%d&y=%d&z=%d"
where NUMBER is a special code for each city(Kiev=1600, Moscow=2000, St.Petersburg=500, and so on)
Download Zoom Steps: 1
View Zoom steps: 1
Downloadable zooms: min: 6, max: 14

So then we may download map for offline use as usual. I use 11,9,7 zoom levels + 6 for city center. It's about 50mb on a flash. It's better to move data file from "/home/user/MyDocs/.documents/Maps" to somewhere at /media/mmc* and create a symlink instead.

Python script can be downloaded following this link. To run simply put it somewhere in home dir and:

$ python yandexmap.py

Roadmap for the script:

1. Configuration file with a set of cities, dimensions, etc...
   
2. deb package in extras repository
3. install file on http://maemo.org/downloads unless I receive too many complaints about how stupid my script is.
4. Easy way of running script - probably it will be launched by maemo-mapper's .desktop shortcut and killed when mmapper exits.
   

Screenshots(clickable):

06242008023
Originally uploaded by thoughtfix I don't know what Nokia did differently with the Diablo release, but they did it right. Instead of taking hours, the new firmware downloaded in under 15 minutes.

At the end, Maemo Diablo release for N810 is out. But if you have valuable information, programs or configuration on it maybe you’re worried about what you’ll loose in a reflashing. In fact, if you’ve done the upgrade yet you’ll notice that the main part of the apps from Extras repository are missing in Diablo for the moment. Fortunately, there’s a way to install the apps from the old Chinook repository.

Here are six simple steps to perform the upgrade process and restore all your current applications:

1. Backup your /home/user to a safe place by hand. Standard backup tool won’t
   backup every file you’ve at home and maybe you could need them later…
2. Do a backup using the backup tool.
3. Reflash the device with the new image using the flasher tool according to the reflashing instructions
4. Restore the backup. Some old apps will remain grayshaded because the backup
   tool can’t find them in the now current Diablo repository.
5. Open Application Manager. Menu, tools, application catalog. Maemo Extras,
   edit. Distribution: chinook, uncheck the “disabled” checkbox, Accept. Close.
6. Menu, tools, restore applications. Accept.

That’s all. Enjoy your updated device!

Diablo has only been out for a day, but there are some notable changes. Here is some exploration of the experience in pictures:

With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!

If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.

Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:

• GNOME Do: This is an amazing application! Its plug-in system is what makes it really great - add all music by an artist to your Rhythmbox playlist, tweet that you’re at your computer, send an IM to a contact, all with just a few keystrokes
• Hamster: I discovered this app recently, and have been very impressed. A plug-in for GNOME Do, and it’d be perfect
• Tasque: For the GTD wannabe that I am.A clean, small app to handle TODO lists.
• Cheese!: Now that this is in the desktop, I guess everyone knows about it. A PhotoBooth clone with an authorwith a sense of humour - especially on April 1st.
• Vagalume: My absolute favourite Last FM client.
• Pimlico: A mobile suite of applications. I tried out Dates and Contacts on my N810, and was very impressed. Everything I personally want in a PIM - simple, functional, intuitive, beautiful.
• Transmission: After using the old GNOME bittorrent client for so long, I was really happy to see someone put the work into making a sensible BT client for GNOME, and Transmission is it. Bravo.

Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common - a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.

Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour - when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.

Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user  coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.

I got totally into visualizing commit histories during the holidays of the Festa of São João in the North East of Brazil

I chose a cool free software project I am involved with and watched it evolving organically over time.

Here is the code swarm for the Autotest project. Autotest is a test framework written in python which I have started using to do some testing on mobile devices.

It starts off with just one or two developers 'mbligh' and 'apw' and over time the role of the central node is taken over by others notably 'showard', who wrote the Django frontend.
These patterns are also observed in other key open source projects like python and django where developers cluster around a central developer or team of developers whose quality attracts other developers and so the ball starts rolling

. It also shows the qualities needed in a lead developer i.e the ability to love your creation so much that you can let it go.
The fireworks on the project are really starting to pick up as we reach the explosions of the last month. Its one project to watch, that is for sure. :)

Mango Lassi is a GNOME program that lets you painlessly share keyboard & mouse (& clipboard too!) between computers. It's not packaged for Ubuntu yet so you have to build it from sources.

Big fat warning: Mango Lassi has no authentication and does no encryption, so use it with extreme care. Don't type any passwords over your unsecured WiFi network!

Here's how to get it working on Ubuntu Hardy:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core curl build-essential intltool \
    automake-1.9 libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libxtst-dev \
    libavahi-glib-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-ui-dev \
    libnotify-dev libglade2-dev
$ git clone http://git.0pointer.de/repos/mango-lassi.git/
$ cd mango-lassi
$ ./bootstrap.sh

Press Enter once at the prompt.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Now you can run it with

$ mango-lassi

When you're tired of it, go back to the source tree and type

I was looking the entries for the Maemo logo and I was really happy to see how many people have contributed already. But I also gave some laughs, because I could recognize at least 6 or 7 famous brands there :) Amazon, Palm, Engadget, etc and 2 guys being ...

After a day of use I am feeling that my N810 has received a serious tune up! System performance is a bit faster but the browser, has received a big boost. Scrolling and flash performance have been great for me as I moved through wifi and DUN connections alike. Given the amount of time I tend to spend in the browser, I am very pleased.

The email client has been updated quite substantially as well. While I’ve been using Modest since it was initially released, having it as the default system preference is great. IMAP performance is stellar on my gmail account and the settings wizard certainly makes it easy to get going very quickly. My only nit is that there is still no support for graphics in HTML mail which renders very well otherwise.

I noticed some excellent updates to the Applications Manager also which now not only proactively reports that updates are available, but can also update multiple things at once. I look forward to putting this to a more serious test when the next OS update hits and I don?t have to reflash my device.

As to be expected with any update there are a few bits worth watching for like repositories that are now seeking Diablo when Chinook might still work. I’ve just tweaked the Mauku repository setting and have that back running without issue.

All told this seems like a great step forward for our Nokia Tablets. With non-destructible firmware installed we can finally start moving more mass. Though I’ll still probably have to help my dad update things on his N800 …

While many still question the need for a device like the Nokia Tablet the converted, like myself, see no way but up for this platform.

Technorati Tags: maemo, nokia, nseries, diablo, chinook, mauku, mobile, mid, n810, n800

OS2008 for Nokia tablets comes with Skype installer pre-installed to make installing it as easy as possible. But how to remove it if you do not use Skype at all?

The solution is not so simple if you do not know anything about how dpkg works. But if you know then you probably do not need to read rest of post :)

I looked at that “problem” and here is a solution:

1. run X-Terminal
2. became root (sudo gainroot or any other method)
3. edit dpkg status file: vi /var/lib/dpkg/status and search for “skype-installer” - it will be listed once and you have to remove it.
4. back in shell run dpkg --purge skype-installer

And that’s all — no more “Skype” entry in menus.

---

Copyright © 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz
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Related posts:

1. Calling on Maemo?
2. Nokia N800 emulation
3. Merging stuff from Poky into OpenEmbedded

Our new hires (André, Karsten, Jan Arne) are nicely settled in now, so it’s time to find some more. There’s exciting development work to be done at Openismus using GTK+ and GNOME code. I think our employees like how we work. I try to keep them happy and not too stressed but you can probably track them down and ask them yourself.

As usual, we prefer people who live in Germany, or EU citizens who want to move to Germany. Please tell me about yourself in an email or grab me for a chat at GUADEC.

After the most recent update to the ACCESS Garnet VM for Nokia Nseries, I decided to collect a bunch of the questions others have asked me and take that collection directly to them. While they couldn't answer all questions (as is normal when asking about product releases,) ACCESS Company gives us some insight on the purpose and goal of the Garnet VM. I thank them for their time in answering these questions.

The maemo.org logo competition is going strong, and we now have many dozens of logo contest submissions.

Some of my favourites so far:

The very first one, Attila’s butterfly

Jussi’s first effort - particularly with just the A and the E:

And Jussi’s second entry, with the Möbius strip. You can see the evolution of this idea, and his collaboration with Thiercito, on the latter’s talk page, which provided some insights into the creative process for me. It’d have been nice if he had trimmed some excess whitespace off the images, mind:

Think you can do better than these or other entries? There’s still lots of time left to get your entries in before the deadline! We’ll be announcing the selection process over the next week or two once the last details are sorted out.

I will spit my vodka in your eyes if all you come up with is speed

WTF? If you can't compete on a very important (to me at least) point, you don't want to listen? Git (especially if you use git protocol) is so fast because they first sorted out the basics and design right and then worked on the UI. Git is not just faster but tons of magnitude faster than bizaar.

I used to think that 'speed' is irrelevant in this context but when I started to use Git, I realized how important it is for me as a developer.

Also the stories of learning curve of Git are extremely over-exaggerated. For example, i recommended Git to a darcs user (who was pissed at darcs taking hours do clone a repo) and after three hours he came to thank me for that. I was surprised to see how quickly he learnt it but then realized that if you just give a bit of information how it's different than other VCSs out there before a newbie actually starts to learn/try it, he/she finds his way very easily into the Git world.

I tend to do a lot of travelling abroad and the internet tablet always comes with me. I've been looking for a currency conversion application for Maemo for a little while now and the only offering seemed to be an repackage of gcur with slight tiding up to fit the smaller screen. The original repackager seems to have abandoned it so, spurred on by a request from users at the Internet Tablet Talk forums I decided to implement a conversion application of my own. I present to you ... mCurrency.

read more

This is such a simple tip I can’t believe I did not discover it sooner, but thanks to reader Mobiledivide, I’ve learned how you can very easily enable graphics in the Modest mail client. This should work for Diablo as well as pre-Diablo installs of Modest.

Via the Maemo Extras repository, download an application called gconf-editor, which will let you control all kinds of interest settings for various apps. I imagine you might be able to do some damage if you are not too careful, but for this purpose, all should be fine.

Once installed, fire it up and navigate to Apps / Modest. You should see something that looks like this:

I’ve already checked the fetch external images option which is what you need to check in order to get HTML mail fully enabled. That’s it. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: modest, diablo, chinook, maemo, html, images email

I am no more a fan of Ubuntu. The reason is their recent demonstration of lack of community spirit. Here is the release announcement of Ubuntu hardy alpha6. If you scroll-down you can see the gnome-system-monitor's new cool "Resources" view featured with a nice screenshot. Since Karl-Lattimer worked really hard to make this happen, he asked to be given personal credit on that page. Don't know about others but I see this as a very reasonable thing to ask. The result of this request can be seen in the announcement of hardy beta. They just removed the feature from the announcement. Shame Ubuntu shame.

UPDATE:It's interesting how most of the comments that are from people who got pissed without actually caring to understand the main point of this blog entry (which me and Karl-Lattimer tried to emphasize in the comments) are posting as Anonymous. :) Acknowledging the possibility that they might not think comments are worth reading before commenting, let me make it clear here: The main point not being that they don't give credit to all the people behind the software they market but silently removing a nice feature from the release announcement after being asked to be given credit. If all the contributors ask for credit, would they remove all features from their announcement? I don't think so.

As some people know, I work for INdT where we develop a couple of applications for Maemo, and we are really fans of the platform and the whole linux mobile in general. So when I read about the contest it was clear I should make a internal competition with the members of the design team. [...]

Some of the stuff I have been hacking on in the background recently finally has been rolled and pushed on bugs.maemo.org — now that the infrastructure issues have been resolved. Thanks, Ferenc.

Besides some nicening up (A bunch of delimiting dashes with HTML and CSS? Yeah, right…), the reporter and some roles are now clearly stated for every comment. No more scrolling and jumping through the page, just to find out if the commenter is the original reporter. No more mouse twiddling, to see if a commenter is a Nokia employee. You now have that invaluable information right at your fingertips.

Yes, I’ve been spoiled by GNOME bugzilla. Probably the best bugzilla out there. There are a lot of features that just make a triagers life much easier. Supporting the workflow rather than being interruptive. And now we got the first set of bugzilla enhancements for maemo.org.

Hope you will enjoy these first custom features. Got some more tweaks like this and larger features on my list, and started working on that already…

Regarding my last blog entry, I thought I should get some things straight:

• I am not a native english speaker so sometimes it's hard to choose the right words and sometimes this leads to confusion. Fortunately! I try to learn from my mistakes and comments on my blog entries really help me in that.



• I've been a big fan of Ubuntu ever since the project started and have been (and still) am a very happy Ubuntu user. In fact I was having the usual Ubuntu is better than Fedxxx debate with him the other day when Karl told me of this. Also I am writing this blog entry using Ubuntu.



• Disregarding what someone said about Ubuntu, I truely appreciate their work and efforts for Free Software and especially GNOME in specific. The world would be a much worse place if Ubuntu hadn't existed.



• The motivation behind this blog entry was not 'anger' but 'disappointment' being an Ubuntu user and advocate myself.

Regarding the discussion between Mark Shuttleworth and Karl-Lattimer, I must agree with Karl that Mark having to defend the 'GNOME About dialog' in the menu doesn't reflect good things about Ubuntu developers (the ones who were against this). On the the hand, I must ask Karl not to resort to insulting language even though I feel he has the right to be angry here (Something Mark also recognized).

This is the announcement of the GUPnP Network Camera project, an implementation of the UPnP Digital Security Camera specification, based on GUPnP.

The GUPnP Network Camera package contains applications that enables V4L cameras to be shared on the network as UPnP devices, and control point software for controlling and viewing images from such cameras.

The software can be downloaded at: http://www.kristell.se/network-camera/

I was wondering why my SU-8W BT keyboard doesn’t work well with pt_BR layout. So, yesterday, I decided to investigate this.

When I was trying to pairing my keyboard, I could see that Su-8W is a pre-configurated keyboard, and with a little of patience, I dicovered the file who manages this: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/su-8w.

With 5 minutes by reading this file you can be familiarized with file syntax. And, with 10 minutes, you can note that THERE IS NOT A LAYOUT DEFINITION FOR PORTUGUESE/SPANISH. So, now I know why the Portuguese layout doesn’t work =).

But, Ok. Lets try to fix it.

If I select portuguese layout, and there is no portuguese layout, I assume that it’ll use us-intl, right? But, in the begining of the intl definition exists a anoying comment: “I can’t belive! It’s not intl”. Hummm…

Lets ignore this, and go on… What do I need? Dead_keys in `,~,",',^, and ç when I press “ALTgr + c”.

I’ll not explain all the changes I did (it’s not too much, just 4 boring lines), is easier to download and replace the old file by this one, or see the diff. [ADVISE: DO NOT FORGET TO BACKUP THE OLD FILE]

And Voilà, Accents and Cedilla working like a charm.

The right workaround for it is create a valid portuguese layout, but just for testing proposes you can alter the intl layout.

Ok, that is it,

Cheers!

- Initial release. This is a reference implementation of the UPnP MediaRenderer version 1 device type, written in Vala. For rendering it uses the video widget from libowl-av. GUPnP Media Renderer can be downloaded here

FreeDroidz

It is one month since LinuxTag but i like to share some cool favourities from there. The LinuxTag was great showplace for many open source projects. In Tarent booth there was demo for Freedroidz project . The Freedroidz are Lego Mindstorm based robots that can be controlled with Nokia Internet tablet with Jalimo Java package. It shows how tablets can find many new innovative areas of use. It looks like tohaving lot of interesting fun to give for both adults and children. 

 

 

LinuxMCE

Other interesting application running in maemo internet tablet was LinuxMCE . You can find client for maemo from pluto-nokia pages from garage  The combines control of the media, home automation and even ip telephony together. You can use your tablet to be general remote control device to control  our Home Theatre, lights, heating or even watch security camera. If you like make very cool StarTrek style house, you can attach some tablets as wall control units in to the rooms. That's not at all so insane idea if you compare prices of tablets to the many home automation systems. I will tell more when i got my system running.

 

BeagleBoard

The Beagleboard  is another cool device. It is small TI Omap3 based board, running full Linux and using just milli wats to couple of wats power. That's magnitudes less than any PC uses. The Beagleboard CPU belongs in same TI Omap family than our Internet Tablet CPU  so you should be able to use maemo SDK with it. I even saw picture that someone already hacked hildon desktop running on it. I have not yet been able to try but hopefully soon. It is easy to find lot of applications to this small energy efficient embedded board.

Maemo with QEMU

If you like to run all maemo, not only user mode applications unde QEMU, there is good instruntions Marcin Juszkiewicz blog

 

 

 

The GPS performance on the Nokia N810 is often criticized. This is for a good reason: It has historically taken a great deal of time to obtain a satellite lock. Often, GPS units could take between two and five minutes to get the first lock and under a minute to get subsequent satellite locks.

Diablo proports to have Assisted GPS support enabled. Often A-GPS is thought to require cell tower triangulation to help the GPS chip along in finding the right satellites. This is incorrect, however. A-GPS can use cell towers, WiFi, measurement of fragmented GPS signals, or even more advanced calculation of the signals it receives. A popular example of this is the Skyhook service on the iPod touch. Skyhook is not perfect, however - it still thinks I am sitting outside my old apartment when inside my new apartmet 30 miles away.

Regardless of the system used by the N810 in Diablo: It helps! The first GPS lock took a very long time, but subsequent tests were better. Here's a little overview:


Test 1: Start Wayfinder software in a moving vehicle from a fresh Diablo installation - 14 minutes to lock.


Test 2: Reboot the same N810 (power off/power on) and start Wayfinder (also in a moving vehicle) - less than 1 minute to lock.

Test 3: Do not use the same N810 for 48 hours. Drive 22 miles away from the last locked position and start Wayfinder software (from a stationary position) - 1 minute and a few seconds to lock.

Stay tuned for additional tests non-Wayfinder software.

INdT need to hire professionals passionate by mobile, internet and technology, with excellent team work spirit.

Resumés shall be sent to the e-mail: rh_seleciona 'at' indt.org, with “DesLinux” in the subject field.

*DO NOT* send me CV's.

If you want information about what it is like working in Manaus or what to expect if you are selected (from a foreigners perspective) I will help with that, no problem.

Linux Developer

Academic Background:
Bachelor in Computer Science
Computer Engineering or
Data Processing

Language skills:
Intermediate English.

Solid knowledge in:
- GNU/Linux (Use and development)
- C/C++
- Python

Nokia will have strong participation in aKademy 2008. Nokia is the platinum sponsor for the event. We have had a strong particiarion in GTK/Gnome community and now we would like to create similar position in Qt/KDE Open Source community and catalyst many Opeopen Source Qt projects for our Internet tablets. There will be multiple maemo related presentations. Kate Alhola and Antonio Aloiso will have a presentation "Adapting Qt for maemo hildon". We try arrange also other presentations like how to develop Qt applications to devices running maemo and how to design mobile UI to Qt/KDE applications, maemo devroom/workshop etc. If you have good ideas or have already made Qt applications for internet tablets, please let us know.

The aKademy will be also a launch event for maemo/hildon Qt port. The port is developed in open source fashion. You can download current snapshot from qt4 maemo garage page.

The Akademy will be a good place to meet maemo/Qt/KDE developers and to start developing your application for internet tablets.

Nokia will be also hiring Qt specialists, please look http://www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo or contact Jakub Pavelek or Carlos Guerreiro to addresses which are in format forename.surnane@nokia.com.