The next version of Vagalume is going to be released very soon. Among other things, this will be the first version with support for the Moblin platform (the support is already available in SVN). Here you can see a screenshot of Vagalume on Moblin (click to enlarge):
Regarding Vagalume, I was interviewed some days ago in a program called Extrarradio in the Galician radio (Radio Galega). Those interested in hearing the interview can get it from here, but note that it’s in completely in Galician Portuguese and that I talk very fast :)
Wanna see Vagalume in action ? Someone has posted a nice video here.
Everytime I wanted to get a console I typed F12, willing to make Yakuake come down. But sometimes I pressed F11 and then Devhelp was loaded. It's ok when you make this mistake one, two or even three times...but It was happening a lot.
I searched my entire KDE's shortcuts trying ...
Thank Baris GUADEC is approaching and I will get a dose of Mediterranean again. You know, the smell and the rhythm. I need to throw here some Maemo related stuff in order to alleviate the weight of my backpack before flying South:
Maemo and Nokia BoF is one of the first GUADEC sessions. Instead of an [...]
Have you ever wondered how it would feel to be Wile E Coyote?
Picture this:
You're Wile E Coyote.
You're twenty feet away from a ledge (off the edge of a cliff).
You look down.
You see you aren't standing on solid ground.
What do you do?
Answer: You Fall.
What else can you do?
Not much.
You can only not fall before you run off the edge of the cliff, not after.
Why is this interesting?
Sometimes, we have users who ask us why we can't just "fix" a crash by
changing the crashing function.
In the example
from the bug, the crashing function,
js_GetScriptLineExtent, has bad data and can't really do
anything useful with it, other than simply crashing.
What can you do?
Report the crash (you know, what goes up, must come down... somewhere).
If you're lucky, the path to the crash will be obvious, such as when
Wile E Coyote takes a wrong turn.
If you're unlucky, then the report won't have enough information, but at
least someone will know to be on the lookout for something which could cause
your crash.
UPDATE:Looks like too many people have the maemo extras-devel repository installed.They should not. Or at least, they should know what the extras-devel repo is.The maemo extras-devel repository is intended as a tool for the developer to test out its code before promoting it to the real maemo Extras repository (the one that's pre-configured in your tablet when you buy it, disable).Today I've
Now that we have the autobuilder in place for Diablo, it is a good time to talk about how to get your package from Extras-Devel into the Maemo Extras repository.
Before a package will end up in Extras and is installable for end-users on their device, it will go through a few steps:
source package uploaded to autobuilder incoming queue
autobuilder builds package and moves it into the incoming queue from Extras-Devel
queuemanager for Extras-Devel will put the package in the Extras-Devel repository
developer checks packages from Extras-Devel and if the package is OK:
promote the package to Extras using the Promoter.
Step 5 is the step where you can use the Promoter to promote your package. Make sure you test your application while it is in Extras-Devel, so you don't promote a broken package. After promotion and a bit of patience, your package will show up in Extras and everybody will be able to download it.
The Promoter is a community project on garage.maemo.org. The code can be found in the svn repository. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the interface or would like to add functionality, please propose and discuss it on the maemo-developers mailinglist.
We are still working on documenting Extras and Uploading to extras in the wiki and of course work towards The Big Plan. Feel free to edit the wiki and improve the articles, this is a community project.
Let's work together to get more applications available in Maemo Extras!
I made a little bit of documentation on reference counting. It’s not yet really finished, but I’ve let two other developers review it now. I guess that means it’s somewhat ready.
The reason I made it was because as I browsed and contributed to GNOME’s code, I noticed that a lot of developers seem to either ignore reference counting or they use it incorrectly all over their code.
I even saw people removing their valid reference usage because they had a memory leak they wanted to solve. As if introducing a race condition is the right fix for a memory leak! Some people have rather strange ways of fixing bugs.
What people who don’t want to care about it should do, and I agree with them, is to use Vala instead.(Or D, or Python, or C#, or Java, before I get hordes of language fans in my comments again. Oh! Or C++ with smartpointers too! - oeps, I almost forgot about the poor céé plus plus guys -)
Anyway, I’m sure my guidelines are not correct according to some people, as there are probably a lot of opinions on reference counting. In general I do think that whenever you pass an instance to another context (another thread or a callback) that you simply must add a reference. If you do this consistently you’ll have far less problems with one context finalizing while another context is still using it.
It’s a wiki page, I’m subscribed. You can just change the content if you disagree. Being subscribed I’ll notice your changes and I’ll review them that way.
After reviewing this document José Dapena promised me he’s going to make a page about reference count debugging in gdb, like adding watches on the ref_count field of instances. To make sure he keeps to his promise I decided to put a note about that here. <g>
Another amazing feat by the master porter himself and the man who brought who you an "early" ;) Diablo, Penguinbait and Qwerty12. Google's Android is now as easy as installing an application. No command line. At all.
I've installed this little puppy and it's awesome. Touchscreen works. The browser is fully functional and pretty smooth. Maps, check. And, best of all, you can install more apps, although that may require a command line. This is an amazing step in the right direction.
In my almost-semi-professional opinion... Install now!
I still can't believe it was this easy to install! Thanks you guys!!! :D
File this under experimental but very cool … There’s a great thread on ITT which describes how to install Android on your tablet. So far it’s pretty simple and straight forward. I had to reboot to get Android to actually launch, but otherwise it’s all there … at least what’s available. Much more to try and will see about installing some apps soon as well.
You see that? That is genius, my friend. That is some good ol' fashion magic worked at the hands of Penguinbait. Alright, so, what is that, really? That is an android application. Now, guess how I installed it?
I downloaded one file to my memory card. Then, started Android.
The Openismus T-shirts for the GUADEC Istanbul conference are ready.
I wanted to do something different again, so I persuaded the people at Brandt to do a kind of Rolf Harris punk thing. It’s a little bit funky. I don’t think it will please everyone but it will be noticed. Each one is different.
There was a shortage of T-shirts in these colours, so we did a small batch of classic retro-style dark green T-shirts too, with white banding and stripes with white flock-print. They are quite nice but less challenging.
Like last time, I chose to do a small number of expensive T-shirts rather than lots of cheap ones. Scarcity adds value.
Its time for my worlds to collide.I have spent the last few months playing with my Nokia N810 internet tablet, and whilst it is an amazing piece of kit I was underwhelmed by the speed of the graphical rendering.Since its a linux box I decided to have a look at what I could do.The results of this is a technology demo called liqbase.It manages to do fullscreen blits and nice kinetic effects which have felt lacking on this device until now.I decided to do a little bit of lateral thinking and ended up creating a small graphics library using the x11/XV YUV overlay which is normally used for movie rendering.I'm impressed with the performance I'm getting (25fps 800*480) and it makes my tablet feel fast.I've picked up C again, and actually managed to use linux properly for the first time and most of all had a great time doing it.So far, its been a closed source endeavour, but thats been not wanting to side track myself with supporting functions which were not staying anyway.I made my decision this morning and I am releasing the code later and whilst I'm nervous I think its the right thing to do.Open source FTW :)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUPp_mE7rwIhttp://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21556http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21259
Just tried to rotate my screen to see an iphone web app and … whoa. I found the menu’s were in order over on the left side, but I had to “use the force” to figure out where to click to get things restored.
There’s a thread at Internet Tablet Talk with amazingly simple instructions. I was up and running in just a few minutes:
Wifi networking worked, as long as you were already associated with access point under Maemo before you run the launcher to start up Android:
It is kinda sluggish on this hardware, there are some keyboard quirks, and I’ve had a few different apps (including the apps launcher app) crash away for seemingly no reason. But it’s a fantastic first effort, amazing they got it working at all. Kudos to the whole team!
There’s a thread at Internet Tablet Talk with amazingly simple instructions. I was up and running in just a few minutes:
Wifi networking worked, as long as you were already associated with access point under Maemo before you run the launcher to start up Android:
It is kinda sluggish on this hardware, there are some keyboard quirks, and I’ve had a few different apps (including the apps launcher app) crash away for seemingly no reason. But it’s a fantastic first effort, amazing they got it working at all. Kudos to the whole team!
The first Maemo Summit! - Free registration - Who is attending
Berlin, September 19-20 @ c-base - right after OSiM World
We aim to get the interesting people:
Maemo community rock stars.
Maintainers of related upstream projects.
Professional developers familiar with the platform.
A good representation of the Maemo SW team @ Nokia.
You.
The schedule is open to proposals. No formal call [...]
Over the last two years, a couple of people have had problems sending email to my openismus email address. They never received any failure message, but the mails never arrived. This was annoying and mysterious, but the problem was obviously with the senders’ systems so there wasn’t much I could do.
This week one more person had the problem. All three people were German, which made me suspicious. We discovered that all three people were using bytecamp’s email servers. For instance, gnome-de.org email addresses are hosted at bytecamp (for free, I believe). Major clue.
openismus.com was hosted at bytecamp a couple of years ago, but I moved it away because I found their services limited and rather ad-hoc, though it seems to have improved since then. It turns out that they forgot to update their MX records, so they were just swallowing any email to openismus.com from their remaining customers. Some emails to bytecamp solved the problem, so bytecamp customers can now send email to us again.
I do hope that several German GNOME developers (with gnome-de.org email addresses, for instance) have been trying to email me about working for Openismus. If you didn’t get a reply before, please try again.
I wrote in a previous post about my first experiment with applying a modern technique, namely Hidden Markov Models, for handwritten Chinese character recognition. I’m quite motivated in making this more than just a single isolated experiment so I decided to give a name to the project. I named it Project Tegaki. This is going to be the codename for the effort starting from now. Tegaki means Handwriting in Japanese.
Another interesting thing in the conference will be that the location of next year's GUADEC and aKademy will be announced. I'm keeping my thumbs up for Tampere, Finland. You should too!
So the Maemo Summit registration is now open. Registration is free and if you can make it to Berlin on September 19th and 20th then it will most definitely be the place to be.
Quim Gil's post covers it all but one of the less covered aspects is that of promotion. This event is the first one the Maemo community has seen. Traditionally these events start small and grow but this summit has the potential to be an important part of the mobile and open source space that it deserves to be big from the start.
Now, earlier, I had told you guys about Debian for the Tablets, right? Well, now, everyone can install Debian with the click of a button. Just like that Android install ;)
All you do is install a deb, then run the installer from the Extras menu. Boom!
No partitioning, no command line, no worries. Your files on your tablet and memory cards stay completely intact! Nice! With Debian installed you of course get Firefox 3, Java, Open Office, Abiword, and IceWM. Pretty sweet, eh?
I don't want to steal Qole's (the genius who built this baby) thunder, so here it is: Easy Debian for Everyone!
Tardy to the party post: It is widely reported that some brilliant minds over at InternetTabletTalk (great job, penguinbait and qwerty12) packaged Android to install properly on the Nokia N810.
In trying to do anything interesting with the install, I've failed. This is a great tool for developers, but only a curiosity for normal Internet Tablet owners so far.
In any event - it raises the question: Can Internet Tablets have non-maemo/OS2008 Linux systems available to them? We'll see. Any alternative Linux OS on a device serves to inspire innovation across the whole platform.
Velocity, the rapidity of motion, describes the speed at which we move as community. It describes the speed at which we can make changes to the Maemo world. We need to understand a few things about velocity in the community in order to function properly.
Understanding more about maemo velocity. First of all velocity can be hard to measure. We want to measure the progress Maemo is making. You might think that it is easy enough to measure but it is not.It is NOT is the sum of all the work that is done (work doesn't mean progress). It is not the sum of all the progress that is done either as not all the progress results in Maemo moving. It is the intersection of the progress made(more on that in the next paragraph). What would be a good measure to measure our velocity? Thinking in terms of maemo 5.0 would be wrong as 5.0 without 3rd apps would be useless. I think that "new users / week" or "new developer / week" might be a good unit as it makes everybody happy( Nokia and US) .
Given an amount of people we have in the community we have a certain amount of available horse-power that we can spend moving Maemo to increase it's velocity. The problem is that velocity != horse-power. And certainly Until LinuxTag the amount of horse-power we had available was not changing that much. What did we do with that power? We tried to keep up that's all we where not able to move forwards and spread our wings. We are an eco system that works at a certain speed and there is not much you can do about that can we? Would it help to enter more bugs in the bugtracker? I don't think so.
So we had LinuxTag and now have Niels and Dave. I am very happy to see them so busy. They certainly make progress in the documentation and packaging area. They also surely will increase our velocity in the end. What is this post about then? Niels and Dave are doing stuff we really wanted for a long time. Can we keep up with them as community or must we help increase the velocity by doing different things? can we simply wait for new developers to come? I certainly have a hard time keeping up with then.
Drizek at the iTT forums has let everyone know that KDE 4 runs on Maemo. Sweet.
A KDE dev (by the name of mkruisselbrink) has ported it to Maemo, and is even working on a way to have right click on a touchscreen alone. This guy is good.
Check out his post and the original article! Maemo and the tablets have been getting much more interesting over the past week. :D
The maemo.org downloads section now automatically picks up updated versions from the Maemo Extras repository. The 'Fresh' list will show the applications that were recently uploaded or promoted to Extras. Developers used to need to update their application entry themselves. By doing the updating automatically, users should not see outdated information about applications.
For the automatic update to work your application needs to be:
Available in Maemo Extras
Available in the maemo.org downloads section where the 'Project ID' equals the name of your debian package.
Package updates are fetched from the most recent repository for each OS we support. Diablo for OS2008, Bora for OS2007 and gregale for OS2006.
One enhancement I would like to add is automatically update the 'Changes in latest version' field for the entry in downloads. I would like comments from the community on how developers should supply this information.
One option would be to fetch it from the changelog. Problems here are that there aren't many packages using a changelog at the moment and we would need to filter out the real changes from the packaging revision updates.
Another option would be to let the developer enter this data while promoting the package to extras. We could add this step to the promotion interface.
The new profile page is now only available on the maemo.org internal testing server, but should be rolled out later today. In the meanwhile, I made a quick screencast of how it works. Shame favoriting doesn't work on the test server due to missing SSL setup, so the screencast ends in an error message ;-)
Pam preprofile is a PAM module that ensures that some program or script is run each time a user logs into the computer. It’s suited for network administrators when they can’t rely on a particular shell to execute the user’s .profile, .bash_profile, .bashrc or similar… because sometimes the user home directory doesn’t even exist yet.
There are already many PAM modules out there, each one suited to a particular need (mounting shares, creating tmp dirs, etc.), but the real advantage of pam_preprofile is its versatility. Pam_preprofile can be used to satisfy any need not being implemented by any existing PAM module at this time but which can be written as a script by the system admin.
The configuration is simple. Just install the module at /lib/security/ and add this line at the end of /etc/pam.d/common-session:
That will call /tmp/myprogram.sh every time the user starts a session (logs into the desktop), passing it a “/usr/doc” parameter, plus an extra parameter with the username being authenticated.
In the previous version of the module, the script was executed always at the session stage. It was very helpful to create the user account. But some weeks ago, a network administrator presented me a scenario where he needed to execute the script each time the system asked the user for a password (that is, at “auth” stage), because the user info could have been updated meanwhile and some local configuration should be updated based on that.
I then improved the module and the new 1.1 version is out. It allow scripts to be executed in the PAM stage you want (account, auth, password and session), not only at the “session” stage allowed by the previous version.
Are you a network administrator? You can download it from:
GUPnP is an object-oriented open source framework for creating UPnP devices and control points, written in C using GObject and libsoup. The GUPnP API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible.
GUPnP MediaServer is an implementation of the UPnP MediaServer V 2.0 specification based on GUPnP and tracker. It is written (mostly) in Vala language.
Now we are half of the way to accomplish what we wanted. The team in Manaus already submited all their logos. I have 2 favorites among those. Now the team recife is finishing creating the custom Fonts (as they need to be free) and have also some submissions coming. I am quite happy with the [...]
I finally got some time to update my development tree to the new Diablo code and built a new kernel with my high-speed SD/MMC patch. Additionally, it will speed up access to the internal 2GB flash (eMMC) in the n810. For those with long memories, the Maemo bug which slows down card access when the CPU is idle is still present although there has been a little bit of activity on the Nokia side recently (They have an internal bug open for it now)
You can find my custom kernel, patches and instructions here.
Today I have noticed that the Maemo team accepted my sponsorship application for the Maemo Summit 2008 in Berlin, September 19-20!I was not expecting it. I am very glad about this.I am still trying to figure out what to actually do there.My idea was to talk (but not a real talk where you listen and I speak,but rather a session where we both speak, ask and listen) about issues in porting desktop
Uploading the large audio file of the Maemo BoF at GUADEC is taking more time than expected… I’ll try again tonight.
In the meantime here are some comments about the topic that seems to raise more interest: Qt approaching Maemo. Summarizing things said here and there… Nokia is investing now more than ever in GTK+ and [...]
Follow both links to see what all the buzz is about.
This hack, the Android installer, KDE and XFCE, and all the applications, hacks, and conversations make the Nokia Internet Tablet community full of awesomeness.
Speaking of the community: If you have experiences with the Internet Tablet Video Converter (especially the SDK,) please share them in the comments. I hope GOOD feedback will encourage Nokia to spend more time developing desktop application companions for this platform.
Many times after disconnecting my i-Go Bluetooth keyboard, I am faced with a problem - The on-screen keyboard does not pop-up when required. This happens sometimes, and I am not sure what events lead to this behaviour.
It turns out, I am not the only one experiencing this. Maemo Bug 2850 deals with the same. I found comment #8 interesting, as it provided the fix.
It turns out that you can type the following within xterm, and the on-screen keyboard will re-appear:
I added this command to the list within osso-statusbar-cpu. Now, whenever my on-screen keyboard disappears after I use my bluetooth one, I am a few clicks away from restoring it. Sure beats having to reboot or to use the command line!
Yes, it's that great time of the year again: GUADEC, the GNOME conference, this time at Istanbul, and now it's time to provide a very quick summary so far.
guenther and me had arrived on early Monday morning at the airport that is located in the Asian part of the town. ...
For example: Nokia has long-since had the technology to make a GSM/HSDPA Nokia Internet Tablet. They have chosen to go against this despite popular demand and skip right ahead to WiMAX. Non-WiMAX markets are effectively cut out of this product progression. Besides the fear of Linux, what is stopping another phone maker to release an Internet Tablet running maemo?
Specifically regarding that example (and now with the ability to post polls) the options are as follows:
A 3G/HSDPA Nokia Internet Tablet should be available.
3G/HSDPA is over. WiMAX is the right choice.
Internet Tablets should have 3G/HSDPA AND a regular phone radio.
Internet Tablets don't need carrier services. WiFi/Bluetooth is enough.
The results of the last poll are in. Do you carry your Internet Tablet around with you?
Yes - the Internet Tablet is always in my pocket. 117 (43%) Usually - It's handy to have, but I can leave it behind. 81 (30%) Sometimes - When I think I'll need it. 51 (18%) Rarely - Only in specific situations. 13 (4%) Never - It's used at home or at the office exclusively. 7 (2%)
GUADEC is held in Istanbul this year, and as has been the custom in 2006 and 2007, I again came there to discuss making the Linux desktop location aware.
With Linux devices hitting more and more pockets time was finally ripe for the talk, and hopefully soon we shall see GeoClue in places like the GNOME Panel Clock and Telepathy.
Silverback is an usability testing application for OS X that records user's actions and expressions (via the computer's camera) for study. Once it is released it should really help with user experience design. Before that, Jing can be a good alternative
A few times now on the N800 I have found myself wanting to do something more than finger type with the on screen keyboard (OSK). Usually I can type quite fast with it but when you are doing complicated character, symbol and number input it can be a royal pain in the (you can guess the rest). So my solution?
Do you like cookies? I like cookies and I like cook cookies.
Yes, I like cook very much and I like to have my recipes always to hand, but the paper is already gone out of fashion, so I wrote a new application to manage my cooking recipes in the Internet Tablet.
And today I have released Pyrecipe’s first version. It can create, edit and show recipes. Actually it can import recipes in the Gourmet and Krecipes formats. It can export to HTML, Gourmet, Krecipes and Mealmaster formats. More formats are coming.
It has other functions as Timer, where you will be able to control the time you are cooking.
Also it has a small Shopping List. It has a basic interface, with options to add, to delete and to mark items. You can save shopping lists in a file to open them in another moment.
Pyrecipe is in beta state yet. Actually it only run in OS2008. Soon it will support previous versions.
If you want to try it, you can install pyrecipe pressing in this arrow in your Internet Tablet browser:
It will add the extras-devel catalogue with beta software to your application manager. I recommend that after installing pyrecipe you should deactivate this catalogue. You can do it with the following way:
Go to the application manager.
Menu ->Tools -> Application catalogue.
Search the ‘maemo Extras Devel’ catalogue and select it.
Press Edit button.
Check Disable.
OK and Close, and it’s all.
I would receive charmed comments about the application as well as international recipes or even a lunch invite
Recently, I began using Jott. It's amazing, first of all. Basically, it's super accurate speech to text from your cell phone. For free. That's right, it'll translate what you say and put it into an email, text message, or twitter/blogger/whatever and send it out automatically.
It can also read your favorite RSS feeds to you over your cell phone, again, for free. (You can now get RMUG through Jott! Check out the button on the right side of the site.)
I've been using it to call from my cell, then send an email to myself with any notes I might have. "Wow, Fernando Botero is at the Museum, maybe I should volunteer there again... Call and see."
Then, later, when I look at my tablet, it's flashing a deep blue. "Oh, I have a message." It's from me. Speech to text, there is my message to myself about that museum. Very, very nice.
And, since Jott has applications for the Blacberry and iPhone, I thought I'd write them about the tablets. This would make the N810 so. freaking. cool.
Hopefully they'll write me back and I'll post the scoop here. Until then, check out the site, sign up, and be amazed. (Oh, and don't forget to subscribe to RMUG so you can hear it over your phone!)
UPDATED: I didn't repost this, I only update the older blog entry with a rotated by 90 degrees clockwise version of the same image. Blame planet GNOME if you don't like seeing this again. :)
Reportlab paragraph hyphenation is in a sorry state (nothing in the core,
several extensions that sort of support it but are incomplete or hard to
integrate); I should take a closer look at Dinu Gherman's work.
Capistrano is interesting (and the
slides were very pretty); shame I missed most of the talk. It was recorded, so
hopefully I'll get a chance to see it.
Eggs and zc.buildout
are getting traction despite their rough edges.
The Asus EeePC is convenient at conferences, if there are enough power
sockets around, or if you're careful and suspend it often.
Won a Wing IDE licence in the raffle. Not going to use it myself (vim is the
best, and I should publish my plugins). Also, I avoid closed-source software
when I can.
Easier panning for one-mouse-button users (Shift+drag).
Better edge navigation close to the borders of the graph.
Renders small fonts too.
Then I hit some limitations: it's either impossible or very hard to get
pretty anti-aliased output or smooth text scaling with Pygame. It's impossible to
support all dot features using the plain
intermediate format.
Hacked on XDot,
which uses PyGtk/Cairo and the xdot intermediate format and thus sidesteps the
limitations I encoutered working on
dotviewer. My changes are in a Git branch created with git-svn. Get it
here:
I have been working on a new release of isearch-edit in the past days, it will mostly only fix some usability issues, but i think this is better than nothing.
Part 5 of my WiMAX experiment deals with the in-car use of my N800 with the WiMAX modem. This is actually not a usage case for me. I only use the WiMAX modem at work. As you'll see, the setup is large, cumbersome, and totally impractical.However, I thought that it would give us all a taste of what is possible with the N810 WiMAX Edition. Disclaimer: I do not recommend that anybody try this on their own. Driving, tabletting and filming do not mix!
Video #1: Maemo Mapper
The video didn't turn out as well as I would've liked.... mostly due to the ambient brightness and the fact that the N800's screen is not trans-reflective. I deleted all my downloaded maps, and then started driving around to show off the fact that Maemo Mapper was downloading them as needed while I drove. If you are familiar with Maemo Mapper, I used the 'auto download' option for the maps, and if you look closely, you can periodically see the download progress bar in the upper right part of the tablet's screen. My in-car setup is quickly shown in this video also. Unfortunately, my PDA mount is broken, so I rested the tablet on the cup holder.
Video #2: Application Download
Another neat thing I tried was downloading and installing the bomberman application while driving. It was a fairly quick thing to do, but I was caught starting off in 3rd gear!
When the modem enters the coverage of a new cell tower, the connection gets dropped. In my experience, I could not reacquire a signal until stopped. The Rogers Portable Internet is called 'Pre-WiMAX', and cannot handoff to another cell tower. I am not sure if they have started to upgrade to the flavour of WiMAX that will be used by the N810WE.
If they have upgraded, I would sure love to test out a pre-production N810WE as part of my experiment. Alas, that would require some generous folks at Nokia and Rogers to be reading my blog.... :)
Stay tuned for Part 6 of my WiMAX experiment, where I will summarize my thoughts on this technology and its use on Nokia's Internet Tablets.
If you didn’t read my previous post, for short, project Tegaki is a framework for handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) written in Python. It includes reusable components and is a placeholder for experimentation. The goal is to create the next-generation open-source HCCR software but it may be useful for academic researchers as well.
To get the most out of this tutorial, watch the video above and then read the text below. The tutorial assumes that all tablet owners have upgraded to the latest version of OS 2008. If you want to find out more about upgrading your tablet, 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
Last week was the GUADEC Conference in Istanbul. Overall it felt like one of the best GUADECs, just because I like Istanbul so much. It’s a proper city.
That’s despite the organization of the registration, accommodation, travel instructions (to the venue) being a near disaster (as they usually are). For people who made it to the venue, the University was a perfect location - efficient and clean and well equipped, with many helpful volunteers keeping things organized.
It was great to have all the Openismus employees together in one place for the first time, sharing apartments in a building near the Galata tower in that wonderful maze of narrow streets. It turns out these are great people to hang out with, particularly when you have a rooftop terrace looking over the city and a fridge full of beer on a summer night.
On Thursday morning I fly out to Helsinki with Sigi and baby Liam. I have a day of meetings on Friday, also with Jan Arne from Openismus, and then some touristing until Tuesday, including a night in Tallinn. I’m looking forward to seeing our Helsinki friends.
On a rare rainy Friday morning in Phoenix, the AT&T store on Cave Creek and Beardsley in Phoenix had coffee, water bottles, some folding chairs, and donuts for those in line. The store only had 40 iPhones. I was number 37 in line. It finally activated later in the afternoon.
Without actual world experience, previous comparisons between the N810 and iPhone were incomplete. $199 is finally the right price point to make the purchase for the sake of comparison. After a few days, I see distinct advantages and deal-breaking disadvantages. I know that the tech crowd here is sick to death of iPhone coverage so any comparisons will be posted "elseblog." As soon as I have some, I'll post a link on TabletBlog - but only once.
Back to Helsinki. GUADEC was great but you already know that. Also, in no specific order:
Actually my preferred topic of discussion was freedesktop.org and how to help the critical projects there.
GTK+ 3.0 will come and break. Finally. I liked how the GNOME Release Team was there shoulder by shoulder.
Chris presenting Gecko/Firefox and Alp presenting WebKit [...]
With 232 votes cast and nine days left to vote, the current poll stands as follows:
A 3G/HSDPA Nokia Internet Tablet should be available. 104 (44%) 3G/HSDPA is over. WiMAX is the right choice. 23 (9%) Internet Tablets should have 3G/HSDPA AND a regular phone radio. 40 (17%) Internet Tablets don't need carrier services. WiFi/Bluetooth is enough. 62 (26%) Other opinion (in comments) 3 (1%) The discussions in the comments are rather insightful, especially Karri's post on how developer space and telco space need to be divided. I hope more developers can chime in on this. Does anyone work on the OpenMoko platform around here?
In the comments to the last post, the mention of the iPhone price as "US $199" ticked off some readers. This is true: The iPhone will end up costing more over the life of the contract. The international price on purchase is also far more expensive. That should roll into the discussion about a 3G or WiMAX Nokia Internet Tablet: Does the lack of carrier service keep the "total cost of ownership" down and continue to give users freedom of carrier choice? I think so - but it comes at the price of filling another pocket. In the end, users must decide what is most important.
My two unique holidays weeks this year are being busy. Some party with friends, good sessions of one of my hobbies (maemo development), a well-deserved rest and even sport.
In the last days I have been porting some applications to the Internet Tablets.
Firstly, the most bored application for the users (but I like more :P), EasyChem. EasyChem is an application to draw chemical molecules in 2D. It’s a very simple app but that do very well its function. It can export to .fig and .eps. I will try add a .png exporter.
Though I am a python guy (and not very good at it) and I never learnt C, I have come to a point that I can read C code, and even I can write some GTK and Hildon in C code (but not too much). So with little effort I hildonized EasyChem and now it’s perfectly integrated in maemo: hildon window, menus, fullscreen, filechooser dialogs and so on.
You can download it from the extras repository in your application manager or in its downloads page in maemo.org: Easychem
Another available application in the extras repository now is Hex-a-hop. Hex-a-hop is a very funny puzzle game.
I have got the debian sources and I added a few modifications by pipeline (he was the first one who ported this game to the tablets and put it in Internet Tablet Talk). I modified the icons to the sizes used in maemo, the desktop file, and added a couple of code lines in order that it had an icon in the task navigator. And so it was to the extras repository. My next challenge is add sound to the game.
I hate to give attention to Sam Varghese, but he is, after all, my favourite free software Shock Jock - always looking for conflict, or the controversial angle on the most innocuous statement.
Ok. So, I am pretty flipping excited. Nokia has just approved sponsorship for me to travel to Berlin (as in Germany) this September for the OSiM World and the first annual Maemo Summit conferences!
I am excited for several reasons:
OSiM World is rad.
I get to meet a bunch of my fellow maemo.org cohort. (I can’t wait to see all of you!)
I get to immerse myself in two straight days of Maemo goodness. (Maybe even document it in some sort of special way.)
And, well… I’ve never been to Europe! (Really.)
Seriously… This is more exciting than I could ever express here.
Thank you Nokia/Maemo — and, most notably, Quim — for continuing to support this community in such an amazing way.
Great news - Fring is now available for maemo platform. Fring is an application that combines a number of protocols such as Skype, ICQ, GTalk into one handy program. You may find it following this link. Here is the screenshot I took from Fring's russian blog. It should work for both chinook and diablo. The announce says about N810, but I'll give it a try tomorrow on my N800.
Time flies and it's already been a few days that I am back from Istanbul. It was a lot of fun. Great presentations, discussions and hacks in the mornings and Shisha and beer in the evenings.
Had lots of discussion with a lot of people about GUPnP, how it can be used for UPnP integration in GNOME and what features they would like to see in gupnp-media-server. My talk went pretty well and this time the demo really did work on the wireless network available at that time. :) The only issue was that it was scheduled at the same time as the Lightning talks and because of that only a few (~10) people could attend.
Talking of talks, my favorite was Michael's talk about Moonlight. There were many other nice talks as well like Quim's BoF, where he nicely explained Nokia's relationship with Open Source world in general and GNOME in specific, and OH people's talk on Clutter and the cool new features in Clutter 0.8.
There was a big debate going around on git vs bazaar. Although I was on git's side myself, I couldn't help but appreciate how reasonable the bazaar advocates/developers were. I had a lot of discussion with them and bombarded them with lots of straight questions. Unfortunately, I felt that I failed to convey my concerns about bazaar and how they (my concerns) can not just go away by simply me trying out bazaar myself.
Regarding next year's GUADEC/Akademy on one hand, I am very sad about Tampere's bid to be rejected but on the other hand I am really glad that it'll be in Canaries. Before you get me wrong, I don't think Galicia would have been less than perfect spot either. One thing that many people don't know about Canaries is that it's "the" vacation spot for Finnish people. So if you look even a bit Finnish or hanging around with Finnish (looking) friends in there, don't be surprised if the locals start to talk to you in (very broken) Finnish. :) Seriously, I am speaking from experience. So much for keeping GUADEC away from Finland. :)
A slight change of direction now. The Internet Tablet School proudly presents a guide to crocheting a wool pouch for the Nokia N800 and N810 internet tablets.The model for the pouch was an N810, but the N800 will fit just as snugly. It's not a high tech slim streamlined case, but it's thick and cuddly and looks very nice.Here are some photos, click on them to see the full size versions:How to
CompUSA now has the Nokia N810 at $299. That's not bad for an 800x480 web browser with Flash, a Skype phone, an Email and chat device, a music and video player, and a GPS with a navigation upgrade. Nope. Not bad at all. I hope the international community gets some price-cut love soon too.
Further proof that the Internet Tablet community is awesome and can do anything: InternetTabletTalk forum member jmayson showed off his working installation of Windows 3.1 on the Nokia N810.
Can Apple's new holy grail emulate whole other operating systems? I think not!
One of the reasons for the complaints about the user interface for the Internet Tablet is that it is not linear enough. If you will, programs are designed to solve a problem, but have many side roads exposed to the user when they are on the way to solving the problem. And in some cases, [...]
It’s been a hectic week, but I really wanted to write up some notes from this year’s GUADEC for posterity, and to share some of the great stuff that happened that people might not know about.
These latest weeks we’ve been working to get the virtual keyboard on Mamona. We first studied Hildon Input Method and it’s framework, but it was not exactly what we wanted.
After researching a little more, with suggestion of trickie, we decided to try matchbox-keyboard, and realized that it was almost what we wanted, it’s simple, fast and doesn’t depend on any toolkit.
Then, we got to a final solution, that’s to let matchbox-keyboard working with enlightenment, and with the same behavior as maemo with hildon-input-method.
Here it’s a demo of what you get if you build the latest version of mamona (running on N770 :-):
We’re still working on to get matchbox-keyboard patches upstream, but, if you need them, you can get at mamona git repository.
Please, use it and test if everything is working fine, or at least as expected :-). In case you want to report any bug, please open a ticket at mamona’s trac and we’ll work on it as fast as we can :-).
Thanks Aloisio for working with Matchbox-Keyboard and Enlightenment, Lauro for working on the first draft of mamona-input-methods and Tiago Buarque for the applet icons!
Although I’m very busy these days getting ProFUSION up and running, I managed to be accepted by two excellent events:
Maemo Summit and OSiM world September 16-20th, Berlin (Germany). I’ll do a lightning talk about rich graphical user interfaces with efl and try to setup a bof about rich/alternative graphical user interfaces for maemo. Kindly sponsored by Nokia, thanks!
Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2008 November 6-7th, Ede (The Netherlands). I’ll present about rich graphical user interfaces using efl and guarana (more to come about guarana later!). Still looking for a sponsor
The ELCE presentation will continue from last year talk, with more demos and also covering real world use cases. It will also be the first presentation to cover Guarana, an open source framework on top of EFL developed by ProFUSION to aid development. I’m sure you’ll like it. [Guarana is to be released soon, stay tuned!]
If you plan to attend these events, please let me know so we can schedule some beers.
I have been trying to follow the intense debate tagged GTK+ 3.0 and actually covering a lot more, from the longest post to the shortest. If I was into film criticism I would say that the story is evolving from decadentism to apocalypticism, with elements of final time, esoterism, conspiracy, dualism and reincarnation. It’s confusing… [...]
Hello there.
Today I will show you some results of real Community Collaboration. Real transcontinental developing experience. Just a few months ago I had no idea how Community works, what shall I do to participate in it’s life. Few months ago I had an honor to meet such great developers as Vlad Vasiliev, Oleg Fialko and [...]
I am on a one week vacation starting from tomorrow afternoon. I'll be in a summer cottage in the middle of a forest and might not have any internet connection at all. I am taking my laptop with me, but I'll try to resist hacking. Lets see how successful I am. :)
Hello everyone.
Today I want to make a very small post. it will not be about UI or design. It will be about community. Maybe you heard about Maemo.org logo contest (it’s coming to the deadline soon so post your submissions!) and i’ve submited some logos too. i’ve put very much sense in each, to make [...]
Tonight I decided to reflash my N810 … I don’t normally decide to reflash a device too easily as the re-install process is always a pain. With the arrival of 2008, that process has gotten easier, but finally with Diablo dare I say it’s almost friendly.
I had to reflash in order to get video playback working again. Apparently either the rotate or Android hacks I’ve installed (no idea which) caused a glitch that made clear video impossible. Since I use my tablet for movie viewing on planes, this was a non-starter.
My process tonight was to remove the things I did not want restored (5 min), run a backup (5 min) and then reflash (< 1min). After setting the date and time, I followed the prompts on startup to restore from backup and choose the one I'd just made. The restore process too somewhere between 5-7 minutes and I would have been quicker if I'd just clicked "yes to all," but I prefer to watch what's going on a bit during these times. From there the tablet prompted me to restore my applications. I chose update all and it then proceeded to download everything and install in sequence. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my custom folders from my prior build were ready to receive my freshly installed apps. This used to just add even more time to the process of rebuilding ...
My wireless connection failed at one point during the restore process which stopped the installations. The fail was on my router not the tablet and when it was ready for connections again, I simply choose, Tools / Restore Applications and the installation process resumed.
I’m back up running without worrying about anything for my trip tomorrow. No time wasted getting things back in order, just a fresh tablet yet familiar with all my apps, settings and prefs restored! This is great work by the Maemo Team!!
BTW - If you’ve been waiting to get an Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, Amazon (and others) have them as low as $299 which is a great price!
Nokia Chat is a new beta labs release from Nokia for their handsets, but because it’s a jabber based chat system, you can easily take advantage of the basic features on your tablet as well. In my case, I’m extending my usage on the E71 through my desktop (Adium and Digsby) and also on the N810.
With your account created, you can simply add a new jabber IM account on the tablet using chat.ovi.com as the server and stay in touch just like any other IM account. Nokia chat offers some very cool location based stuff along with address book integration which unfortunately does not extend to the Tablet just yet. I have no idea if we’ll get to see anything connect with the pretty limited contact list on the tablet, but certainly the location settings would be very cool to use. On the handset, you can use Landmarks saved from either Nokia Maps or Google Maps. I’d imagine we’ll have to wait until the launch of Nokia Maps on the web which will hopefully also include Plazes integration.
I’m atmasphere [at] ovi.com if you’d like to connect.
- I got Mamona 0.1 and it boots up!!! But… How can access the terminal? - You can’t, there is no terminal.. - Bad.. but why? - There is no virtual keyboard. - And how can I play with Mamona? - USB serial, USB net, … Yeah, as you can see, we actually were providing [...]
I'm taking several weeks off. Up here in the north, summer time is so valuable that I want to dedicate as much time as possible to my family and to myself.
So I've been sailing with my family and doing other relaxing stuff. (Lasse, thanks!)
You may know that up here in Scandinavia we have something we call "every man's rights". In essence, I can hike on any land, spend a night in any forest, or moor my boat to any island I please -- as long as I'm not in a close proximity of anybody's home or summer cottage. Open access to our beautiful country!
10 pm!
You need proper tools for docking in the wild!
So I'm getting ready for the fall. One important occasion will be the Maemo Summit right after the OSiM world in Berlin. I hope we can -- once again -- initiate some fruitful discussion around open source (I know we will ;-) ), do some real work, meet interesting people and have fun. See you there!
As Nokia has a promised during the release of Diablo - OS2008, the automatic notifications feature in the home screen about the availability of OS updates or single applications, including those installed from third parties, is working fine !
This is really a quality improvement for the end user. With this feature the end user will be informed automatically when a new version of installed software is available, especially important for security updates.
The only thing that should be improved further in the future is the 'repository management'. Sometimes it's still required to tune the repositories manually in order to install some of the applications. Not really user friendly when becoming more and more a product for the mass.
One of the main requests heard again and again about the Nokia tablets is that they should have a calendar. It's actually rather odd that the tablets don't have one, because almost all of Nokia's phones and smartphones do.Well, if you are looking for a calendar there's now an extremely easy way to add one to the tablets. In fact there are two methods, and they're both completely free.Method 1:
Mobile Tablets! is pleased to announce an exclusive Q&A session with Internet Tablet Talk member, qwerty12.
qwerty12 is one of the newest members of itT. In the short time that he has been involved with the tablets, he has made a real impact on the community.
Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest.
Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved.
When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before & after.
Where: Berlin.
Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the Maemo Summit has answered.
Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms.
But why?
Ok, let me explain. We have some [...]
Matthew Miller of ZDNet Blogs responded to a popular article by TechCrunch outlining what they think is the ideal web tablet. Matthew says that it's already here in the form of the N800 and N810. Take a look at both articles and decide for yourself.
Sam feels I was unfair in my characterisation of him as a “shock jock”. He may be right… he says himself that the definition of a shock jock is “a slang term used to describe a type of radio broadcaster (sometimes a disc jockey) who attracts attention using humor (sic) that a significant portion of the listening audience may find offensive.” Clearly, since Sam’s not funny, I was unfair. Sorry Sam.
I take issue with Sam’s massive leap (which reminds me of when my maths professors used to say “obviously it follows…” at the end of complicated theorems) when he says that I “have to fight the perception that any of [our] major sponsors is making nice noises to the other camp”.
First, as I have told Sam on numerous occasions when he contacts us for answers to leading questions, we do not think of KDE as “the other camp”. Second, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t exactly avoid a perception that he’s a fan of KDE. Later in the same article, he says that he thinks that KDE have got a nice rate of development going, and are driving innovation better than GNOME. He’s the first top-paying member of KDE eV, which is roughly the same amount of money annually as Canonical gives to GNOME.
And Mark’s not alone. Nokia are sponsors of both Akademy and GUADEC, as well as investing heavily in both GNOME (through Maemo) and QT (and paying the wages of some KDE developers).
What Sam has trouble understanding is that I have an issue with sloppy journalism. I like the KDE developers, we get on well, and I’ve done a lot of work bridging gaps between projects - whether it be through the organisation of Libre Graphics Meeting or FOSTEL, or my participation in the FLOSS Foundations group, or the numerous conversations I have with KDE board members about any number of subjects (including Akademy & GUADEC colocating).
So when Sam sets me up as a shill, or as someone who has a problem with KDE (or considers them competitors) he’s ignoring a body of evidence that suggests otherwise. But then, with Sam, that’s par for the course.
Good news for me… after missing GUADEC and other interesting events it looks like I’ll make it to the first Maemo Summit in Berlin. The list of participants is quite impressive – I guess this will be a really interesting event. Just join us there :-)
I read a few lines about odeviced… anyone else who thinks that using something like this for Maemo might be a goo idea?
I do not have much time left for blogging and coding currently – family and work keep me busy these times. But a few good things are in prgress – OpenSync’s roadmap indicates that they are close to a new release. This will be a much better base for MaemoSync than current SVN trunk. Even GPE makes a little bit of progress. Graham continues fixing various PIM bugs and gpe-memo is close to become ready for its first release.
Picked up from Internet Tablet Talk, there're a couple of videos showing how bad the OpenMoko UI is on basic usability challenges.
What's interesting is that the small comparison with the iPhone shows how poor hardware (pressure-based touchscreen, bezel around the screen) combines with poor software implementation (separate apps => slow start-up times, little thought to the size of a usable target area) to emphasise the poor user experience. And, frustratingly, how many of the issues raised cut quite close to the bone for Maemo devices too :-(
Hopefully the UI changes in Fremantle (for example, #2564) will be a big help; and a concentration on finger usage may allow a more sensitive, different, touchscreen technology to be used in the N900. Will be very interesting to see the UI talks at the summit - see you there!
Picked up from Internet Tablet Talk, there're a couple of videos showing how bad the OpenMoko UI is on basic usability challenges.
What's interesting is that the small comparison with the iPhone shows how poor hardware (pressure-based touchscreen, bezel around the screen) combines with poor software implementation (separate apps => slow start-up times, little thought to the size of a usable target area) to emphasise the poor user experience. And, frustratingly, how many of the issues raised cut quite close to the bone for Maemo devices too :-(
Hopefully the UI changes in Fremantle (for example, #2564) will be a big help; and a concentration on finger usage may allow a more sensitive, different, touchscreen technology to be used in the N900. Will be very interesting to see the UI talks at the summit - see you there!
OSCON has been pretty cool this year so far. It’s been really weird, since I haven’t been in North America too often in the past, and this is my first ORA conference, to be meeting people I’ve exchanged email with for years in the corridors, and bumping into people that I’ve been hearing about for ages. There’s also a decent scattering of people I already knew, too. Far too many to name individually without leaving people out & insulting somebody…
I arrived on Friday, and to help get over jet-lag, I decided to go out for an hour-long run. After losing all sense of orientation, and going North when I thought I was going East, that ended up being a 2 hour run. Which was nice.
Over the weekend, the FLOSS Foundations group met, and we talked about lots of stuff - accounting, membership, CRM & donor management software that non-profits can use (there isn’t any that works well enough), merging foundations, and how umbrella foundations work (targeted funding, etc), best practices for dealing with donors (big and small), merchandising, CLAs, trademark policies, and a really interesting discussion on university outreach, the creation, aggregation & distribution of open course materials and university outreach.
All in all, a very valuable 2 days.
On Monday, I attended OMX, the first edition of the Open Mobile Exchange. Myself & Paul Cooper stepped in at the last minute to give a tag-team presentation on GNOME Mobile which went, to my mind, very well. Having 2 people was great, because it meant that all of the things we wanted to say got said (usually I end up being quite non-linear and saying “oh, earlier, I forgot to mention…”, with Paul that didn’t happen). There was a decent amount of GNOME Mobile presence in any case - Jim Zemlin had nice things to say about us, and Jenny Minor from Vernier and Lefty Schlessinger from Access gave presentations from the perspective of a device manufacturer and a platform developer.
Tuesday was a quiet day for me - finally got to have quality phone time with Anne, and attended the Maemo sprint meeting on IRC before eating with Stormy - we talked about a couple of cool things I’ve been working on for the past two days that I hope to be able to announce in the next few days.
All in all, a great conference, social & work merged, mixed, mashed, and with a spot of early-morning running & Tour de Francing.Happy happy joy joy.
This should be of interest to mobile Linux developers. Intel switched from Ubuntu to Fedora for their moblin project both because they wanted the .rpm package manager instead of .deb (what maemo uses) and because they wanted more community drive.
It is unclear if this will effect Ubuntu Mobile's use of maemo's Hildon framework. I hope they don't do too much to stray from the established base of talented Nokia Internet Tablet developers. The goal SHOULD be to have more applications available on more devices with less development time required. Whenever any company decides to "do their own thing," that goes against the goal.
(Thanks to Benson on the Internet Tablet Talk newbie forum for coming up with the method used in this article - click here to read the original message.)There's a public network of wi-fi routers called Fon. The idea of Fon is that everyone who owns a Fon router (also known as a "La Fonera") can use other Fon owners' routers too, with the ultimate aim of building a worldwide network of free wi-fi
Reading some blogs and forums, I noticed that some guys (and girls) are interested in having User Agent Switcher ported for MicroB. So tonikitoo, Tomaz Noleto and I rolled up our sleeves and got it to work! The result you can see below:
MicroB as Firefox 3.0
MicroB as Internet Explorer 7.0
MicroB as Opera 9.25
Get the installer here and check it by yourself. Remember to restart your MicroB browser twice and then configure it according to your preferences by clicking here or manually loading chrome://useragentswitcher/content/config.html.
Mauku has long been the best way to stay connected to Jaiku regardless of platform and today we’ve received a very nice update that adds Twitter into the fold as well. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how to stay connected to twitter from the tablet and outside of IM which has not worked for months, the web site was the only solution until now.
In the above screenshot, Twitter updates are green and Jaiku are yellow. In one view, you’ve got a simple dashboard into the social conversation. The Mauku UI is optimized for finger touch over stylus and supports gestures as well if you’ve never seen it in action. For now the update is only in the unstable repository (change user to unstable in the repository setting after you install), though I’d imagine with the excitement around this release, we’ll be able to sort out the bugs and move it to release very quickly.
I released eazysvn
1.8.0, the helpful syntactic sugar wrapper that makes using Subversion branches
almost not painful. This is the first release with full on-line documentation
(at last).
I also bumped the version number of restview, my ReStructuredText viewer, to a
solid 1.0.0. I've been using it for years now without problems, which was not
immediatelly apparent from the old version number (a modest 0.0.5).
Before that I made my first ever bugfix releases of a couple of Zope 3
packages (zope.component 3.5.1 and
zope.app.testing
3.4.3). Blame me if anything is wrong with them. Kudos to Philipp von
Weitershausen for his release
process documentation.
The Maemo platform is growing up day by day and its good software and hardware attract every day new people.
Unfortunately not all of these people are able to program in GTK, since they don’t use linux or because they are KDE people.
Qt4maemo was born as a natural answer to this leak. I compiled and uploaded the first Qt4 packages when I hadn’t got a Maemo device yet. Less than 2 months ago I was contacted by Nokia to work fulltime on this project. Obviously I accepted and now I spend most of my time behind a monitor hacking Qt!
Thanks to an awesome travel deal I struck with Marcelo I am now for sure able to make it to Argentina. I am totally over excited about going to my third Debconf. I am also pleased to see that Nokia are Platinum sponsors this year
Debian Conference is the annual Debian developers meeting, an event filled with coding parties, discussions and workshops - all of them highly technical in nature
There is also the usual day trip and a chance to play the Assassins game apparently!
While I am there I hope to do some work on the Debian Eee Project stuff which is about making Debian work optimally on the Eee including support for the later 901 and other Intel Atom-based models (1000 and 1000H).
I am back. Had a very relaxing one week in the Finnish summer cottage. Lots of fishing and plenty of nice food to eat. Yes! there was Sauna almost everyday and yes! 'swimming in the lake naked' breaks were included. I had a crappy GPRS connection so I did some twittering for the past few days.
I just received e-mail informing me about the successful processing of my application for GNOME foundation membership. Thanks to all the people who vouched for me. My agenda as a member will be to:
continue contributing wherever/whenever possible.
make sure GNOME has full-blown support/integration for UPnP.
not let the people who think of Mango Lassi as an original desi drink and are agaisnt the idea of GUADEC in Finland, gain power in the foundation. :P
I started writing a flickr-plugin for Canola last week, you can see the current status on the screenshots below. There is still some work to do before i can do the first release, for example the most important part still does not work, it can not display any image yet.
So, you've bought a Nokia N810 or N800 internet tablet and you're now wondering what to do with it. To help you out, here's a brief guide to the first things you should do after getting it home.1. Check everything is in the boxThe box should contain: - The tablet itself (probably with a plastic film across the screen for shipping) - Two styluses (one of them may be inserted in the tablet, the
Lets welcome Keppler and Eduardo Valentin! The new comers are working from INdT Manaus site and they already achieved GREAT results! Thanks guys! The news: Midori: Webkit based browser running with Mamona Firefox 3 running with Mamona Mamona working with Beagleboard Enjoy the links! What’s next?? SDK and Network daemon. Mamona 0.2 is coming…
The results of the most recent poll are in: What do you think of a 3G Internet Tablet?
A 3G/HSDPA Nokia Internet Tablet should be available. 186 (42%) 3G/HSDPA is over. WiMAX is the right choice. 47 (10%) Internet Tablets should have 3G/HSDPA AND a regular phone radio. 77 (17%) Internet Tablets don't need carrier services. WiFi/Bluetooth is enough. 123 (28%) Other opinion (in comments) 4 (0%) Only 10% think WiMAX is the right direction while over four times that number want a 3G Internet Tablet. 17% wanted the Internet Tablets to be a 3G device and a phone as well - bringing the total desire for a 3G radio up to 59%.
Come on, Nokia Give us what we want! WiMAX won't be rolled out to a wide enough audience before the N810 WiMAX Edition is obsolete anyway!
After some extensive Google work this morning, I was unable to find a "bluetooth HSDPA/HSUPA modem" of any kind. Is there enough market for that kind of device? I'd love one to allow me to share a data connection with a MID, UMPC, and Internet Tablet interchangably without having to rely on extra hardware.
Today's poll closes in a week because it's the absolute deadline for me to make a decision:
Are you interested in Intel Developer Forum coverage on TabletBlog?
Vote on the right side of TabletBlog.com. Apparently they will have more about Moblin 2.0 for Mobile Internet Devices including their switch to Fedora. I have to make a decision on this as my last day with a "day job" is tomorrow and I need to know if I should justify the money it'd take to fly and stay in San Francisco for the event.
For me, the lightning talks are one of the best things in GUADECs. These 5-minutes presentations are very dynamic and you can get all the relevant information about the projects (what we have done, what we plan to do). The usual presentation is done by developers showing their code and prototypes, showing what has been [...]
The subprocess
module in Python 2.4 has a race
condition. If you're doing process.communicate() on more than one pipe, on
a Unix-like system you may end up getting an exception (4, 'Interrupted
system call') when the child process terminates, if the SIGCHLD signal arrives
at an inopportune moment.
This bug appears to be fixed in Python 2.5.2, where all calls to select,
read and write are wrapped in a while looks and ignore EINTR errors.
Maybe this blog post will save someone else the hour needed to
study strace logs trying to figure this out.
Update: It's not fixed in upstream Python.
Ubuntu patched
it a year ago for python2.5, but not for python2.4. Upstream knows about the patch, but so far
only a partial fix
(EINTR guard around select, but not around read/write) has made it into svn
trunk (but not the 2.5 maintentance branch, yet, and I'm not even thinking
about 2.4).
The Summer 2008 ASSEMBLY party starts in Helsinki in less than 24 hours.
From the website - ASSEMBLY is a four day computer festival, in which thousands of people and their computers spend the whole weekend by meeting friends, playing games, surfing on the net, talking on IRC and enjoying the great productions from the demoscene.
Nokia is a sponsor and is getting involved in various ways. Elina Ollila will present on Playtesting mobile games.
There will be some Maemo guys in the party as well. We’ll bring some N810s for people to try out, and some to give away as competition prizes. At least Jaakko, Jakub, Kuisma and myself will show up.
Maemo is hiring. For the Application Framework team we’re looking for skilled developers passionate about two particular technology areas. If you are excited about either, got the skills and are coming to the party let’s meet up.
The results are in on the Tabletblog poll and looks like the majority would love a 3G enabled N810 over the pending WiMax device. I know I’d love the 3G tablet! I tether regularly with my phones (currently the Nokia E71), but having an independently mobile connection would be killer.
Having wireless beyond wifi really makes the Nokia Internet Tablet that much more powerful. The initial plans, as seen in our current devices, were to pair with your phone and extend the online experience. As I think many of us clearly realize there’s been a lot of action in the MID and UMPC space as of late, but I’d be willing to bet that few if any of these devices have yet to match the N810 in capabilities. Sure some have more power on the CPU or grpahics end, but none can offer 5 hours of battery life or fit in your pocket.
3G would certainly impact battery life as it does with everything else, but it seems like an acceptable give, in order to get a considerably greater range of use.
When it comes to portable electronic gadgets, there are three major annoyances.
The three hour limit must fall
There is an unwritten rule when designing portable computers:
The battery will last three hours.
Once technological advances allow the next generation to run longer – be it thanks to more efficient hardware or more powerful battery technology – the manufacturers decide to shrink the battery, capping the device back to the three hour limit.
Three is a nice psychological figure. “Lasts three hours? – not too short!” “Less than three kilogramms? – not too heavy!” After all these years, today’s 3 kg laptops usually still run for 3 hours or less.
This must end.
Three hours is not enough for a true mobile device (especially since the advertised three hours of battery time usually result to less than two in real use).
Batteries should be replaceable
A rechargeable portable device that doesn’t allow the user to replace its battery is a disposable item, it was made to break.
Enforcing planned obsolescence by making it hard to replace the device’s consumable parts is a design choice that should be opposed.
We need a standard battery for gadgets
This is the hardest task for the future and it’s unlikely to happen soon. But we desperately need a new battery standard.
Good luck when you try to find the battery type used in a laptop or cellphone at a reasonable price just few years after its release.
The AA battery‘s format was standardized 60 years ago. Battery technology has improved since then, yet you can still use today’s AA in a 1980s walkman or a 1950s flashlight.
There are several manufacturers. You can buy AAs anywhere in the world. Recycling is possible.
It’s insane: Gadget manufacturers keep a stock of fast-aging device-specific batteries for a limited time and sell them at premium prices. There are no or few competing offers and formats change with every new device generation.
We need standard battery formats just like AA for laptops, cameras, cell phones and other portable gadgets.
#1 is just my personal requirement. The technology exists to design sub-500-gramm computers that run for a whole day, but few customers buy them, so unless people decide that a three hour MID isn’t really such a mobile internet device, the industry has no reason to change.
But #2 and #3 are ecologically disastrous and I’d even welcome government regulation to enforce these if the industry doesn’t come up with solutions by itself.
I got back from Istanbul a couple of weeks ago. We had a really great time there, it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen.
After GUADEC me and other Igalians spent some days visiting the city. Back home I enjoyed the Galician sun and beach (including the Cies Islands, which are wonderful) for some days more.
Regarding the conference, so many things have been said that I don’t think I have much more to add. Congratulations to all the people behind the Gran Canaria bid, I’m sure we’re going to have a great time next year :) (by the way, I uploaded a video of the closing session here and here). Also, if anyone has good quality photos of my Vagalume talk (better than this one) please contact me, thanks !
Getting back to work after holidays is always hard. I’ve got lots of things to do, including some lessons in our Master on Free Software this weekend. So if you have written me an e-mail and haven’t got a reply, please be patient :)
I have had no time to release Vagalume 0.7 yet, although the code is mostly ready (I’d like to see how this Last.fm problem evolves, also). However the development never stops. Luis Garcia Rio has been working with OpenMoko and here’s the result:
Yes, that’s Vagalume running on the Neo 1973. It does work and you can actually play songs.
This is a preliminary version and nothing has been uploaded to the SVN yet, but expect things soon. If you’re interested, join vagalume-devel.
Dear people of the world who are interested in developing with GLib. The type GStrv is a typedef for “char **”. I know C purists will think that it’s stupid to do that. The problem with a “char **” however is that it can mean hundreds of things. That it’s therefore not possible to know for a language binding tool how to deal with it (how get thing things out of it, how to free it and how the content of it will look).
With GStrv all that is known. A language binding generation tool will know that it must use g_strfreev to free it and it will know that your blob of C memory will be an array of strings.
A “char**” can also be a a pointer to the pixbuf of a grayscale image. It can be a binary blob or any kind of array of pointers.
Replacing your “gchar**”s with “GStrv”s wont create API nor ABI problems, so please do it now and make a new release of your fixed libraries’s APIs. Then at least the array-of-string glue code of language bindings can be fully automated.
If you are returning an array of object instances, please don’t use GList, GPtrArray nor GHashTable. By using those you loose boxing (your array type is a blob of unknown C memory that contains unknown things that happen to be pointers to GObject instances - but a tool can’t know that -) and (more importantly) you don’t offer a generic collection API for your blob of C memory to other languages.
Consider using a collection API. Some people are trying to get this into GLib just like GIO got accepted as a higher abstraction for a IO and Stream API. Let’s see what happens.
Thanks!
ps. & edit: On IRC jdahlin mentioned that GValueArrays have type information, because the items get boxed onto GValues. If return performance is not an issue, you can also use that instead of GStrv.
As part of the judging panel for the maemo.org logo contest (along with Peter Schneider, Tim Samoff and David Greaves) I had the daunting task of choosing the winner from the long list of entries to the maemo.org contest. There were 62 people who submitted logos for consideration, and a total of around 120 logos to choose from (excluding variants of the same logo), we had our work cut out for us.
In the end, we went for this logo from glaolivier:
The judges (that includes me!) liked the modernity of it, the clean typeface, the call-out to the current maemo.org colours, and the mixed metaphor of the a and e joined - infinity, a meeting of minds, and openness. And it was pretty. There are a bunch of single-colour and flat variants for things like monochrome print, t-shirts and so on.
We’re very happy with it, and we believe that everyone else will be too.
Hello. First of all I’d like to thank all participants that submitted their logos to the contest. Some of them was really awesome, some of them were not (let’s be honest some of were real crap but who cares :D). But at last we have refreshed logo, made by Glaubert Oliveira
Though there is a rule [...]
(and others) have them as low as $299 which is a great price!
Thanks to all Mamona team, especially Eduardo Valentin.
