A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-01-26 through 2009-02-01

Hi all,

Well, "free" in this case is actually $227, but anyway it means that those of us who can't wait until Maemo5-equipped device is released can have something right now.

I've been following the news about buy.com prices, but it was not available for non-US people. Amazon fixed this injustice :)

For all of you who are subscribed to FLOSS Weekly with gPodder, you might have already noticed it: On Saturday, the long-awaited interview with Quim Gil from Nokia has been published. You can grab it from here as MP3 file directly or (even better ;) download gPodder from Maemo Extras and subscribe to FLOSS Weekly.

Hello. Sorry if this post is not 100% maemo related. I want to invite all maemo community to join interesting contest, that’s held within Nokia Innovation Newsdesk. It’s called Nokia n97 Widget Competition. You just have to come up with some fresh idea, some one-touch breakthru, draw it as good as you can and post it! [...]

My son may not be starting as early as Jaffa‘s, but it’s never too late…

My son may not be starting as early as Jaffa‘s, but it’s never too late…

It is coming…

I’ve already posted last year’s video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHM8cUoxmio

I don’t think that you wanna miss it this year.

As always, it will be an amazing conference with great people presenting their projects in a paradisaical place. Besides you will have the oportunity to talk and share experience with great minds

Btw the programme is out:  http://www.bossaconference.indt.org/programme

Enjoy it!

My N800 was running off-line for quite a while. During this time I’d listened to a bunch of songs with Kagu and was hoping that it would immediately scrobble them to last.fm as soon as I went online. After much fiddling around, I discovered that you must play another song in Kagu while online, in order to launch scrobblerd (via dbus). This, in turn, submits all the tracks queued for scrobbling while offline via maemoscrobbler.

I found some helpful maemoscrobbler tips in this #maemo IRC log.

Recently, I almost cried in my desire for an HSPA Internet Tablet or Nokia N97. Here's the story:

First, a confession: Since I moved to Silicon Valley, I've been carrying an iPhone 3G. In an unfamiliar neighborhood, the Google Maps application and ability to easily check mutliple Email accounts have been very handy. I constantly use Twitterific, Devicescape Easy Connect, the Bank of America app, and Crayon Physics. My podcasts sync up easily and all my music/media is managed by iTunes.

I also now own an MSI Wind U100. Having to take frequent trips to the Data Center, I find the weight, resolution, keyboard, and Windows XP OS perfect for the task. A USB to Serial adapter perfect for the task. Some router, switch, and blade server web interfaces still only work in IE with ActiveX.

Enough confession. Now it's time to get to the desire.

I was in a situation where a server needed attention and I was not at my computer. There was no wifi nearby. The MSI Wind does not have 3G and it's not possible to tether my iPhone without playing with experiemental, warranty-voiding cracks. I needed to use a web browser for testing, SSH for server connection, and Yahoo to communicate with my co-workers on status. The iPhone can do all of these, right? Sure... if you don't mind disconnecting both SSH and Yahoo to go to the web browser.

So here I am: Unable to run background tasks and unable to tether to a 3G connection. I need to be rid of these limitations. I can go back to the Nokia N95-3 with the Nokia N810, but the North American firmware seems to have been abandoned by Nokia developers. My N82 was my favorite phone ever except for the lack of 3G.

Please - dear developers at Nokia - put the N97 or the HSPA equipped N8x0 soon so that I may buy them. I wonder if my company would allow me to expense them out....

The Qt widget contest results have been announced and although segway slipped away this time, we got our 15s of fame with AnalogPad!

But what I want to share here is the story behind our entry:

• Most importantly: Although only my name is mentioned there, it was full teamwork with my brother Kim "The Webkit" Grönholm!
  
• All started when I got backflash about the competition due after christmas and decided to hack 5-way analog navigator
• I designed and implemented the thing for 2 evenings, it started to look OK but behaved badly...
• Kimi offered to join the fun, although he happened to be in Korea(!) at the same time
• So last 3 days before the due, I spent my evenings with this, sent sources to Kimi and received fresh code for next evening
• I implemented mostly features, Kimi fixed them to work nicely and cleaned the code. Time difference between Finland and Korea didn't matter, it just added extra coolness into this co-operation as we worked kinda in two shifts!

And the rest is history... Project is now in Github and sources are GPLv3, so fork away!

After quite a while of not doing much maemo related, I finally found the time to build a bit more up-to-date kde packages for maemo. I've now uploaded kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase from KDE 4.2.0 (more modules will follow), and also the just released koffice 2.0beta6 (unfortunately no kspread yet, as I couldn't get it to compile with the old gcc version in scratchbox). If you want to play with kde and/or koffice on your maemo powered device, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://93.157.1.37/~marijn/maemo binary/, and install kde and/or koffice related packages (you probably don't want to install them to the small rootfs, as the packages are still a bit big). The state of maemo/hildon integration for kde applications hasn't changed much since my previous packages (for example applications still don't have a correct icon in the taskbar), but I hope to be able to spend some time in that area as well.
I'll also be at fosdem this weekend, so if anyone has problems getting the packages to work, you could try to find me there :)

KDE Project:

• KOffice
• Distributions
• Maemo

After quite a while of not doing much maemo related, I finally found the time to build a bit more up-to-date kde packages for maemo. I've now uploaded kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase from KDE 4.2.0 (more modules will follow), and also the just released koffice 2.0beta6 (unfortunately no kspread yet, as I couldn't get it to compile with the old gcc version in scratchbox). If you want to play with kde and/or koffice on your maemo powered device, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:deb http://93.157.1.37/~marijn/maemo binary/, and install kde and/or koffice related packages (you probably don't want to install them to the small rootfs, as the packages are still a bit big). The state of maemo/hildon integration for kde applications hasn't changed much since my previous packages (for example applications still don't have a correct icon in the taskbar), but I hope to be able to spend some time in that area as well.
I'll also be at fosdem this weekend, so if anyone has problems getting the packages to work, you could try to find me there :)

Almost works out of the box on Ubuntu. Will work out of the box in the forthcoming 9.04 release.

One curious little detail: according to the manual, a blinking green light means it's trying to find the GSM network (if it's blinking twice every 2.7 seconds) or that it's successfully found a GSM network (if it's blinking twice every 2.9 seconds). I'd like to have been on the meeting when this was decided. "I know! Let's make it blink 0.2 seconds faster to indicate it hasn't found a network yet! Brilliant!"

Update: given its shape and position next to my right-hand USB ports, it should double as a USB mouse.

On an unrelated note, Sweden is a very nice country.

I’m quite excited about the news of the last few days.

First: KDE 4.2 was released. I’m using as my “oficial desktop manager” at work and I’m pretty happy about it.

Second: Debian Lenny might be released this month.  I’m using it too, and I know the result will be very good!

Third: BossaConference agenda is ready. Think about great minds talking about OpenSource, Maemo, etc, in a paradisaical beach. I had the opportunity to join Bossa ’07, and it was great! We can’t miss this one! See you there! =)

John Siracusa talks sense about e-books (via Charlie Stross):

Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

I like the bit about dedicated e-book reader devices missing the point. I'm a huge e-book fan (reading them almost exclusively since about 2002 on various handheld devices), but even I cannot justify to myself buying a bulky one-purpose piece of electronics for $lots for the sole purpose of reading books. Get something universal, like a Nokia N810 or (if you hate freedom) an iPhone. And stay away from DRM-ed stuff.

John Siracusa talks sense about e-books (via Charlie Stross):

Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"—and they never did! And then they died.

I like the bit about dedicated e-book reader devices missing the point. I'm a huge e-book fan (reading them almost exclusively since about 2002 on various handheld devices), but even I cannot justify to myself buying a bulky one-purpose piece of electronics for $lots for the sole purpose of reading books. Get something universal, like a Nokia N810 or (if you hate freedom) an iPhone. And stay away from DRM-ed stuff.

Packages for gPodder 0.14.1 (a podcast downloader for Maemo and Linux Desktops) are now available in Maemo Extras (Chinook at least.. the Diablo autobuilder is busy (broken?) at the moment). The UI experiments (mokoui2 finger scrolling) are not included in this release yet, but will be in a future release. 0.14.1 is a bugfix release, so it's recommended that you upgrade.

I've an opportunity to get to know Pylons. Here's an unsorted list of first (and second) impressions:

• Pylons has great documentation, though I did stumble upon a few broken links
• Pylons has a great development environment (instant and automatic server restarts; interactive Python console in your web browser on errors)
• It seems that nobody using Paste is interested in logging the startup and shutdown time of the web server
• SQLAlchemy overwhelms with TMTOWTDI
• zc.buildout can be replaced by a 4-line shell script using virtualenv and easy_install; this will save you headaches
• setuptools is made of pure crazyness, but we can't live without it

These aren't directly related to Pylons:

• distributed version control systems are great for throwaway prototypes (especially when you want to compare several ways to do it)
• non-distributed version control systems aren't
• py.test is weird and takes some getting used to, but has some nice properties as a test runner; shame about breaking compatibility with unittest
• automated functional tests for system deployment in a freshly cloned Xen virtual machine are cool, albeit slow-ish

Update: About the naive notion that using easy_install instead of zc.buildout would help me avoid headaches? Muahahahahaha. Ha. Haha. Muahhaaaaaa. Wrong.

Also, TMTOWTDI is maybe too strong a word for SQLAlchemy's plethora of choices. And you really want to be using 0.5. And Pylons is even more awesome than I first thought. Obligatory grain of salt (*thud*): I haven't finished writing my first page yet. Integrating new stuff into existing elaborate functional test suites takes time.

After working on Canola for the past couple of months, finally we get to see it released. Hopefully people will like this new version, which is both faster and more stable (or less stable, I’m never quite sure which one we picked). We’re now back following the latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which allowed us to make the UI experience alot smoother (check it out by going to the Photos section). Also there are a bunch of new features and lots of bugs fixed, so try it out yourself and tell us what you think. Hopefully now development of Canola will get back to more regular releases, and we’ll start seeing more external plugins being developed (such as the flickr plugin being done by Thomas Schimdt, available here).

For this release we went above and beyond the call of duty, doing tests that no one had ever done before (at least to our knowledge). That’s why we can say, with much confidence, that Canola works perfectly while drinking in Buenos Aires:

Canola in Buenos Aires

Testing in other capitals will ensue. Cheers !!!

liqbase is my vision for a usable touchscreen interface.over the last 9 months it has started to take shape into a really comfortable home for all my (and yours too soon!) applications.During the last couple of months I've had my head down coding towards curing the hacks and making liqbase into a polished nice framework for all the applications I want to write for my nokia tablet.I have split the code into 3 main pieces and created a library of the core graphics elements and a host applciation containing the ui manager.The third part is dynamically installable compiled application widgets and dialogs.I can create and use entirely new items quickly and easily and try out ideas without having to even think about the core library or ui application.A new video has been placed on youtube showing my progress.Its by no means finished but its taking shape nicely.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaYI have started to bring in the current applications and will be creating new ones (i need that camera..) and we will have a playground that will make us all smile soon enough :)

liqbase is my vision for a usable touchscreen interface.over the last 9 months it has started to take shape into a really comfortable home for all my (and yours too soon!) applications.During the last couple of months I've had my head down coding towards curing the hacks and making liqbase into a polished nice framework for all the applications I want to write for my nokia tablet.I have split the code into 3 main pieces and created a library of the core graphics elements and a host applciation containing the ui manager.The third part is dynamically installable compiled application widgets and dialogs.I can create and use entirely new items quickly and easily and try out ideas without having to even think about the core library or ui application.A new video has been placed on youtube showing my progress.Its by no means finished but its taking shape nicely.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaYI have started to bring in the current applications and will be creating new ones (i need that camera..) and we will have a playground that will make us all smile soon enough :)

So, as most of you Maemo users and developers must have seen, another release of Canola 2 is out in the extras-devel repository, which was called beta11. It’s been fun to work on it! It is, for sure, one of the greatest media players out there. Soon you’ll also have the pleasure of contributing to the project, the source code release is approaching (we all hope, hehe).

All in all it’s been very exciting to work here, at Profusion. The whole team is too cool and very skilled. So, I finish this quick post, while listening to Johnny Cash on Canola, promising new cool stuff is coming out from Profusion soon, stay tuned.

As planned, I attended today to my first day at FOSDEM ’09, and I have to say my impressions are even better than what I would expected: lots of talks, lots of volunteers, lots of resources to get into (I’d like to congratulate the organization for all the amazing work they have done), and lots of hackers all over the place. In fact, it was sometimes very hard to manage to select and attend to some talks (at least for me, perhaps because I’m a “newbie” here as this is my first year here), since parallelization is very high (and needed, if you think on more than 260 talks taking place in just two days) and timetables are sometimes too tight if you want to move around between different rooms.

But… what the hell? That insane amount of talks and hackers hanging around is exactly which makes FOSDEM great, isn’t it? So, no complaints, only good words for FOSDEM! :-)

As I side note about conferences, I’d like to state I liked a lot the talks I attended, specially those ones in the “GNOME developers room”, which were all great. In a more specific way, I specially liked the talk about the People Framework, which is IMO such an interesting project, which could become a very helpful tool for those kind of people that, like me, suffer the typical problems of having several devices or applications with independent (but related) contact list. Keep going on with that awesome work, guys!

Regarding to the Fosdem Beer Event, needed to say it was just great to be there, talking to so many people (some new people to me, and some already “old friends”) and trying so many different beers, which were very tasty indeed, like the “Delirium Tremens” and “Kasteel”, for instance, which I just loved. The only slightly negative point on this was that trying so many beers didn’t help me to wake up in my best shape precisely, but nothing that a good breakfast and some hours of good talks could not fix :-).

At last, as a picture is usually better than too much text, here you are one: me in the main entrance.

Can’t wait for tomorrow!

Overview of the main conference hall at FOSDEM. The shot comes from the keynote on Debian made by Bdale Garbee – Saturday at 11:30am. Many developers were in other areas of the conference, or trying to get to the venue after an intensive Beer event on Friday night. Tagged: Debian, events, FOSDEM, open source [...]

As I promised some weeks ago, here are the results of our take on optimizing a SDL game (Tennix) for the Maemo devices. All other platforms on which Tennix runs obviously also profit from these optimizations. The presentation with all the details is available here: Optimizing an open source game for mobile devices (PDF). I also have two videos for you: Tennix running on a tablet before and after the optimizations.

Conclusions: Do profile (using oprofile or gprof) your applications to find bottlenecks. Look at callgraphs (using graphviz) to determine function usage. Most of the time, small code changes result in big performance boosts. Some Maemo-specific hints for SDL development are available in Game development in the Maemo Wiki.

The optimized release of Tennix (0.7.0) is available in Maemo Extras already. Go get it! :)

This week-end, I presented a talk at FOSDEM about how “Bringing geolocation into GNOME”.  While giving some background definitions and ideas for geolocation, it mostly covered what are technologies currently available to achieve these goals.

I have the impression that the talk was well received, it certainly boosted my interest into spending long nights infront of the screen pushing libchamplain forward much more!

All of the demonstrated code is already available.  For EOG plugin, see the EOG-plugins svn repo, a release should be available in the Gnome 2.28 timeframe.  For the Empathy Geolocation, it is available in my empathy repo, and the telepathy parts already have been released.  This feature should be merged first thing in the 2.27 development cycle, allowing a smooth testing period before 2.28.  As for Emerillion, it was the first public mention of this promizing application.  It shall be announced in a close future.

To make this presentation, I used clutter-toys/opt, a clutter based presentation tools.  The slides are defined in a xml file.  I enhanced it to support embedded maps.  So if you add the following xml code, you’ll have an interactive map of Brussels, with very usefull places marked, right into your slide! Grab the branch into my clutter-toys repo.

<map width="600" height="500" zoom-level="13" latitude="50.84" longitude="4.37">
      <marker latitude="50.842966" longitude="4.35153">Porte Noire</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.845127" longitude="4.349878">Mannequin Pis</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.848548" longitude="4.353633">Délirium Café</marker>
      <marker latitude="50.821391" longitude="4.39393">Université Libre</marker>
</map>

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-02-02 through 2009-02-08

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-02-02 through 2009-02-08

Seen in FOSDEM, in front of the GNOME stand:

It looks like a original and very visual idea to put many ideas and visions all together, doesn’t it? Pointless to say I agree more with the “love” side, of course :-)

By the way, I took this picture today, the second and last day of the conference… so now I’m ready to give a full and complete opinion about it, which is that it just was great: I had a very  good time and a lot of fun being there, and not only because of the talks, which were amazing in most of the cases, but also because of meeting people and sharing visions and comments with all of them.

So, it seems now it’s time to get back home, so now I’m going to bed, since I’m very tired and tomorrow I’ll have to wake up early to take the plane.

INdT recently published a link to the Canola Theme Maker on the Canola website

This service allows *anyone* to create (and publish if they would like to) a theme for Canola. All you need to do is read the guide (PDF), create your images,zip them up and upload them to the site. The service then handles the creation of the Debian package and offers a choice of Creative Commons licenses should you want your new theme to be submitted for inclusion on the gallery. The resulting .deb can be downloaded and installed on any Maemo powered device

The site was conceived by handful, the UI was designed by giselle, the CSS written by hugo and I did the Django and the Python work (based on a prototype made by Eduardo Fleury). It was really great working as a team and web work really lends itself to working in a distributed manner (in this case between Manaus and Recife)

The Ubuntu Golden Theme written by Marcello Mendes (rapadura) from Debian Amazonas is already in the gallery for you to download!.It is licensed under CC ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL (by-nc)

Enjoy!

Here you go

Hello there. Today I want to announce the release of another piece of software from emu-genius Marat Fayzullin called “Almost Ti85″ (ATi85). It emulates full-functional Texas Instruments Ti85 and Ti86 calculators. Marat has asked me if I can help with image faceplates and… well, you know :) It was very interesting to try to make skins [...]

Update: My changes were merged into the original code.

As services such as DropBox become more mature, it makes again sense to store simple textual content (ie. notes) as files — instead of going for Everything Buckets. For simple text files DropBox provides an actually working synchronization, offline access to the data and a pretty good integration with the native platform (be it GNOME or OSX).

I usually store my notes and other simple text snippets as markdown-formatted plain-text files. The simple markdown format is exactly the amount of syntactic sugar I need to get along. Additionally, the markdown format is supported by all popular editors (gEdit, TextMate, vi…) and many web-writing platforms.

On OSX by default the markdown files (.markdown) have two limitations when compared to standard (.txt) files:

• Can’t be Quicklook'ed
• Contents are not indexed by Spotlight (can’t be searched)

Installing an editor such as TextMate gives support for the .markdown extension but does not solve either of the above problems.

Phil Toland did a great work and created a markdown quicklook plugin. I took his code and improved a bit on it. In particular, my version does 3 things more:

• Uses discount C library to render markdown (instead of calling-in Perl)
• Styles the output a little bit (Helvetica vs. Times)
• Adds spotlight indexing

To get going you need to install the compiled binary plugin in ~/Library/Quicklook/ (create if it doesn’t exist).

Links

• Phil’s original repo
• My fork
• Compiled plugin

Thanks to the prompting of fellow Maemo Community member Andrea Grandi (first via private email and then on the maemo-community mailing list), we have begun planning the particulars of the next Maemo Summit. If you're interested in joining the discussion, head on over the the Maemo 2009 wiki page and add your two-cents (thanks to Manrique Lopez for starting the wiki page). Also, be sure to join the maemo-community mailing list if you haven't already -- we discuss a lot of community-related issues there.

If you were at Maemo Summit 2008 , you understand why it is well worth the time and effort that it takes to plan this yearly gathering for Maemo and open source champions. Whether you're a developer or a just a user (like me), I highly recommend getting involved. If you weren't there last year, this is your chance to jump into the mix of an amazingly talented and diverse group of people. I'm glad I went for more than one reason (you can read some of my post-Summit thoughts here ), but probably most importantly because I was able to forge real-life friendships with so many people that I usually only have the opportunity of speaking with in the digital space.

Do yourself (and the Maemo Community) a favor and join in on the Maemo Summit experience!

I have bought an Asus EeePc 1000H which is one of the new popular netbook – a very small and light weight notebook. I chose the Asus EeePc 1000H for several reasons: I travel a lot, often by motorcycle and kayak,  and need something compact and lightweight for mail, internet, blog updates and social networks; […]

Most of the index engine implementations in libferris will detect when you try to add the same file again, and when it hasn't changed in a meaningful way will just skip reindexing it. This makes it really easy to just use the below command to update the index for a specific filesystem.

$ find /Data | feaindexadd --filelist-stdin

The trick comes in when /Data is an NFS share with 400,000 files on it that you are accessing from a Nokia n810. Or when /Data is a file server that you are indexing from your laptop over wifi or another sluggish, higher latency network.

feaindexadd can be told to directly traverse one or more directories and so you don't have to use find in the above command. But separating out the find from the indexing has a really big advantage: you can update indexes of extremely large, but infrequently changing NFS shares very quickly -- Even over slow networks.

The trick is to do the filesystem traversal on the server side, and just pump the URLs that are interesting to the client machine:

ssh lowaccess@server 'find /Data -mtime -10' \
| feaindexadd --filelist-stdin

Of course, this relies on /Data being the same filesystem on both the server and the client. Otherwise you're in for some fun with sed or awk to mangle the paths to be what the client expects.
And the 10 in the above means that you'll have to run the command from cron within 10 days to maintain a complete index. You might find that doing a "time find /Data" on the client and server has significant performance differences, particularly if the filesystem has many files.

You can always store and search the index from the file server, but for disconnected searching, you really need to have the index itself stored on the maemo device.

I have a Philips SHB6100 bluetooth headset which I have only used with my mobile phone.  A long time ago I tried getting it to work with Debian, but it was too much work for too little. Today I tried again, and things has changed quite a bit. I had it working in less than […]

I wanted to pass along some info about Maemo’s participation in the Google Summer of Code program. Valério says;

“Hi,

This year the Maemo community will try to join the Google Summer of
code[1] program again. Google Summer of code can be a very good
opportunity for the Maemo Community, and can also give a lots of good
things, like new projects/features and new people developing for
Maemo.

In order to apply to Summer of code, we need help from the community,
we need project ideas, mentors and interested students. The mentor
organizations submissions starts in March 9.

I setup a wiki page[2] with some information regarding the Maemo
participation in GSoC, feel free to add more information to the pages,
especially for people that participated in previous editions of GSoC.

In 2007 some Nokia employee offered their help as mentors and backup
mentors, will be fine if that happens this year also .

[1] – http://code.google.com/soc/
[2] – http://wiki.maemo.org/GSoC_2009/

Best regards,

–
Valério Valério

http://www.valeriovalerio.org“

This year the Maemo community will try to join the Google Summer of code program again. Google Summer of code can be a very good opportunity for the Maemo Community, and can also give a lots of good things, like new projects/features and new people developing for Maemo.

In order to apply to Summer of code, we need help from the community, we need project ideas, mentors and interested students. The mentor organizations submissions starts in March 9.

There is a wiki page with some information regarding the Maemo participation in GSoC, feel free to add more information to the pages, especially for people that participated in previous editions of GSoC.

In 2007 some Nokia employee offered their help as mentors and backup mentors, will be fine if that happens this year too.

Note: I reported this news thanks to Valerio Valerio who wrote this on maemo-community mailing list.

It’s been a while since the last time I blogged. I won’t promise to do it more often from now on though, that way I might save myself from the Ghost of the Internet’s Clichés.

Some of you already know that I quit litl last year, but most of you probably don’t. I left in excellent terms with them, and I still think that what my old colleagues are doing there has the potential to be something, only that now I get to wait and wonder when they’ll release it like everyone else. Fortunately some of the things that we were working on are already public, like gjs, so nobody can say litl is a black hole anymore .

The most important reason to quit was a desire to spend some time working on some things that had been floating around my mind for a while. They involve Lisp and the fantastic Web technologies, are still in progress and I might have more to say about that in the future (although it’s probably a bit off-topic for the Planet).

Anyway, another thing I’ve been trying to do is to spend more time with Epiphany/WebKit. I’m pretty happy with the progress we have done in the past few months (thanks to all, you know who you are), major pieces are already in or being actively worked on (deep libsoup integration, downloads, http auth, gobject/c dom bindings, a11y, …) and our current hope is to have it ready for general use in time for GNOME 2.28. I’ll make another post soon talking about this a bit more in depth.

Which leads me to the last, but my no means least, point. Since this monday I’ve joined Igalia, part-time, to work on upstream WebKit and Epiphany. I’m quite excited with this great opportunity, not only because I’ve long admired Igalians and the way they work, but also because I’m really looking forward to spend my time trying to improve GNOME’s platform, where a solid GTK+ port of WebKit could be an important player.

Happy Hacking, and hopefully it won’t be another 8 months before I post again. Ouch, here comes the Ghost of the Clichés…

PS: This should be my first entry on Planet Igalia, hi guys!

Today I’m releasing Tegaki 0.1. Tegaki is an ongoing project which aims to develop a free and open-source modern implementation of handwriting recognition software, that is suitable for both the desktop and mobile devices, and that is designed from the ground up to work well with Chinese and Japanese.

Screencast video: ogg or youtube.

This release features desktop and SCIM integration. However, the main “innovation” brought to you by this release is the user interface. It uses two drawing areas for continuous writing. The user can eventually fix recognition errors by choosing alternative candidates or editing characters. Since a video is worth a thousand words, see the screencast above. This interface is largely inspired from the Nintendo DS game “Kanji Sono Mama Rakubiki Jiten” (漢字そのまま楽引辞典).

Tegaki is designed to be able to use several recognition engines. However so far it only supports Zinnia, which is the only recognition engine that I know with acceptable recognition accuracy and good performance on mobile devices. One challenge of the project in the future will be to create a new recognition engine that can yield better results than Zinnia.

A take that I have on this project is to use Python whenever this is possible and only use C or C++ when performance is critical, like in recognition engines. Compared to Tomoe, which implements everything in C and provides bindings for several languages, this means less reusability of the components but I hope this will make the project go forward faster.

There are still a lot of things that can be done in various areas but I really wanted to release the code I’ve put together so far because I think it can already be useful to end-users. By the way, Maemo supports both pygtk and SCIM through third-party projects, thus Tegaki is just a few Debian packages away from being available on Maemo.

For further details:
http://tegaki.sourceforge.net/

This post started as a comment to Michael Rooney's question: Failing tests: When are they okay?, and then it became a bit too long for a comment.

Last week I went to Brussels to help representing the OpenEmbedded project as FOSDEM. I did not manage to attend all the interesting talks but we had a pretty good time at the OE stand too. Luckily I managed to atted a talk about running Maemo on the BeagleBoard at least.  I brought the two ‘projecting peripherals‘ and my BeagleBoard with me which gained quite some interest. I somwhow got the impression that quite a lot of the people at FOSDEM now think that OE does sell keyboards ;-) Just to make this very clear: OpenEmbedded is a community driven project about compiling software for mobile and embedded devices – no hardware sales at all!

OE booth with some devices and visitors

But even if we PICO beamer and laser keyboard are not our key competence these were quite well eyecaters: It was very interesting to watch people using the projected keyboard and beamer and find out what they like about it and to get to know for which needs this set of devices does not fit. Combining these into a single case starts to become a very appealing project. I have a (big) case for an initial test already, but making all components fit into it is not that easy – especially if you do not have time and resoures to make a custom board layout for it and you want GSM network connectivity included as well.

Beagleboard and keyboard engine with parts of the case

My Telit GSM modem evaluation kit would have been nice to use but its too big to fit into the case. I have ordered an UMTS modem with USB connector instead.

But back to OE:

I have to thank all the OE developers who helped to man the booth – most important Phillip (Crofton), Mans (mru) and Graeme (XorA) who where at the booth almost the whole time. And of course there is Atmel – they sponsored some NGW100 evaluation boards for interested OE developers and one for a raffle among our visitors.

Have a good time…

Maemo on BeagleBoard project announced in FOSDEM 2009.

More specifically, meet Jeremiah Foster . In fact, while Jeremiah is the Maemo community's first official debmaster , he may actually be the first debmaster anywhere...ever. (Don't believe me? Try Googling it .)

But, it's cooler than that... This means that we, the Maemo community, now have a paid employee whose sole job is to help developers package1 their applications for mainstream consumption. So, if you're beginning to develop for Maemo and would like to learn how to package your software, contact Jeremiah . If you're a developer who just doesn't like the packaging process, contact Jeremiah . If you're just interested in what Debian packaging is in general, contact Jeremiah . I'm not telling you to abuse Jeremiah, of course, but... Ok, abuse him. No, I take that back. His contract isn't supposed to start until Febeuary 16, so wait until then to start the abuse.

Jeremiah has a history in programming in Perl, Python, and more. He's attended Harvard and Boston University, just to name a couple of schools. He's worked for some major Fortune 500 companies. He's written articles on Graphical Toolkits for Mac OS X. He gave a great presentation on packaging Perl from CPAN for Debian at FSCons in 2008. He knows what he's doing has has a passion for open source software and Debian packaging.

I'd like to thank Maemo SW (i.e., Nokia) for seeing need for an official, paid debmaster. The more we can do to present the public with Maemo applications that are clean and easy to install, the more we will spread the word about how cool Maemo is.

Please join me in welcoming Jeremiah to our community.

1 See Debian Packages .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8bMNEHVBxE

Thanks to astrogirl for the video and the tutorial.

I’ve installed Debian with Gnome on my new Asus EeePC 1000H, and for some reason the Gnome Power Manager preferences wouldn’t let me decide on what cpu frequency scaling governor I wanted to use. I’m trying to squeeze as much time as I can out of the battery, so I wanted it to be “powersave” […]

If you've been following the updates in extras-devel repository you might have already noticed that we've been working on the new releases of the Maemo EFL stack together with Canola and Carman. Important to say, now that we have more applications (FTW!) depending on the core Enlightenment libraries we need to ensure that the upgrade won't break anything.

Anyway, it's unbelievable what Raster and the guys from E can do in order to optimize things. They are real freaks (in the good way)! Each and every new version released we have noticeable improvements in our user interfaces. And this time it wasn't different. You'll find the animations in Canola in Carman a lot snappier.

So, what's new in Canola?

• Updated to latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries


• Videocasts support


• Allow user to reset database


• New configuration options added


• Entire albums or directories can now be added to the OnTheGo playlist


• New simple grid available for the Photos screen


• Load images asynchronously, r


• User can choose to scan for new media on startup


• Fixed album cover discovery


• Indicator of which music is being played in the list view


• Improvements in Ogg and FLAC scanners


• Improved feedback while scanning media, fetching album covers and generating video thumbnails


• Bug fixes and optimizations


• Pretty names in application manager


• Canola theme maker. This is something that certainly deserves an exclusive post.

Yet to be released:

• Home applet, where you can launch Canola and scan for new media, just like the good ol' Canola1. The code is ready, it's just a matter of providing the packages for it.


• Source code!!! Yay!! Can't wait to close maemo bug #3881.

What about Carman??

Another topic for an exclusive post. Must sleep now. :)

After seeing Axel’s Meyer interview (youtube’s video), could new maemo device look like, or be, one of the “leaked phones” on the designer table? If this is the form factor, it would be wonderful.

There is more info in GSM Areana website… Time for rumors until Nokia press releases something.

Last week we went to Porto and had Tokamak II, the plasma's developers meeting. It was just a wonderful time and it was great to meet some people again and to put faces in some nicks. I mainly worked on Plasmate, the new "plasma IDE" for writing scripted plasmoids. Specially in ...

One of the economic and cultural developments I’m more pleased to see happening is that of artists putting some or all of their work online, with the plan or hope of attracting followers and being able to capitalize on them in the future in one way or another. It’s not like giving away free samples is a revolutionary idea, but in an era of adamant (and, IMHO, misguided) defense of “intellectual property” by some sectors it’s certainly refreshing to see some people embracing the wave rather than fighting it.

I’ve always enjoyed science fiction, so in this post I’ll list some great stuff that I’ve found around in the past:

• Accelerando: by Charles Stross. Follows the story of a dysfunctional family through the coming of a sort of Singularity. I downloaded it in my N810 and read it in a couple of days, and although the pace seems a bit uneven in some places it’s for sure a great journey full of interesting ideas (Matryoshka brains! Turing oracles!). If you like it make sure to buy Glasshouse,  a delightful novel by the same author where the action happens in the same universe.
• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: by Roger Williams. A post-Singularity novel (by now it might seem I’m kind of obsessed with the topic. Not really. Or rather, I’m obsessed with many other things) that deals masterfully with a classic thought experiment: what does it mean to be human in a world where all your wishes can be fulfilled without pain or struggle? A real page-turner, and it seems a sequel might be published some day. We can only hope.
• Greg Egan: the left-side of the brain companion to Philip K. Dick. Some of his novels will bend your brain, and some of the ideas he elaborates have literally changed the way I see the world. His homepage is full of technical notes for his work and a collection of free stories, which are a perfect way to get hooked and decide to buy his books (if you want suggestions, my personal favorites are Permutation City and Diaspora).
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, …: Cory Doctorow might be the most famous science fiction writer publishing some of his works under free licenses, but I must admit I haven’t yet read any of them. Rumour has it they are pretty good, but if you don’t like them you can have your money back.

Well, that’s it. There’s probably more, but I can’t think of any more off the top of my head. If you know of other great stuff published online by its authors please tell us in a comment!

… you’re lucky today, cause Marat “fms” Fayzullin presents you the support of 3 more Ti calculators: Ti-83, Ti-83+ and Ti-84+. All of them are packed with my faceplates aswell :) Comming soon to the Extras repository near you :)

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-02-09 through 2009-02-15

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-02-09 through 2009-02-15

As many people should know, today Nokia has released Ovi Store and Ovi Publish, its own marketplace for developers to monetize their apps. There is nothing related with Maemo on the site yet, but it has been said that Maemo platform will be suported (not in May but on the shorter term roadmap). So, think about it, because this will add another chanel for third-parties to increase the number of apps for our beloved platform, and make it competitive. So, at least, there were Maemo related news from Mobile World Congress.

Voting is open for the 3 referenda around the election procedure for Maemo community council elections.

A wiki page has been created for each referendum, where arguments for & against each of the options can be listed. For the moment, these pages are skeletons, but feel free to debate in the Talk page, and perhaps add some arguments for & against in the main page (but they will be heavily moderated to avoid flame-wars).

A reminder of the 3 referenda:

1. Election procedure for the next Maemo community council elections: The choices are the status quo in the election procedure document (25 karma + 3 month), or removing all requirements. The council is recommending a vote to remove requirements.
2. Election procedure for future Maemo community council elections: The choices are the status quo, lowering the karma requirement to 10, and maintaining a 3 month requirement for accounts, lowering the requirement to 10 *or* 1 year since account creation, whichever comes first, or removing all requirements of karma and account age. The council is recommending lowering the karma requirement to 10, and maintaining a 3 month account creation limit.
3. Counting method: Three choices are proposed: first past the post, preferential voting using single transferrable vote, or reweighted range voting.

Voting is open now, until midnight UTC next Monday, the 23rd of February. As we used to say in Ireland in the ’80s, vote early, vote often!

After much discussion, there are now three referenda open to decide who will be able to vote in the next - and future - Maemo Community Council elections, and how the council members are chosen from the ballots.

[ VOTE ]

Those of you eligible to vote (karma of 25 or over, and a maemo.org account older than 3 months) will have received your tokens. The next step is to read over the proposals and vote: you enter your anonymous token for each of the referenda and vote accordingly.

Dave Neary's done a fantastic job in pulling this together for us, and hopefully we can finally put arguments over karma requirements and counting methods behind us before the next election in only a few weeks time.

More info is available in Dave's excellent post on the maemo-community mailing list.

Well, I was a bit optimistic about keeping up with the bi-monthly updates, so I'm switching to a monthly format. Unfortunately there'll be more time between updates, but the updates will be longer and will (hopefully) be on time.

debmaster

As many of you might have noticed, we have a new debmaster. Please give a warm welcome to Jeremiah Foster. He'll be working to implement new autobuilder and Extras improvements, and helping developers to improve the overall quality of Maemo packages. Many thanks to Nokia for facilitating another maemo.org position. Especially in these hard economic times.

Maemo Summit 2009

Andrea Grandi was kind enough to kick off the discussion for the 2009 Maemo Summit. The discussion is taking place on maemo-community if anyone is interested in joining in. Progress from this discussion can be tracked on the wiki page.

Mer

Mer has just released 0.8. The new release brings many improvements to usability and stability, as well as improved N810 support, easier application installation. This release is also shipping with Extras enabled, offering application developers the opportunity to test their applications on Mer. Details are available from the wiki and discussion is on itT.

Fremantle SDK

The Fremantle pre-alpha SDK has been updated. This new release includes the new Media Application Framework (MAFW), the newly-open sourced DSME, Upstart, and an http://garage.maemo.org/projects/busybox4maemo/">BusyBox that will be developed in the open from here on out.

This release is still primarily only of interest to platform developers, as the APIs are still unfrozen and it is still using the Diablo UI. This is the last pre-alpha release, and the first alpha release should be forthcoming soon.

Fremantle Stars

From the list generated by the community, Nokia has selected several community applications to be featured in Fremantle. Nokia will be providing support to these applications and their developers to help make them ready for prime-time by the time Fremantle is released.

maemo.org redesign

The work to redesign the maemo.org website is still ongoing. The graphics and layouts are just being finalized, and the implementation will begin in earnest soon. Anyone interested in following the progress closely should subscribe to maemo-community.

Well, I was a bit optimistic about keeping up with the bi-monthly updates, so I'm switching to a monthly format. Unfortunately there'll be more time between updates, but the updates will be longer and will (hopefully) be on time.

debmaster

As many of you might have noticed, we have a new debmaster. Please give a warm welcome to Jeremiah Foster. He'll be working to implement new autobuilder and Extras improvements, and helping developers to improve the overall quality of Maemo packages. Many thanks to Nokia for facilitating another maemo.org position. Especially in these hard economic times.

Maemo Summit 2009

Andrea Grandi was kind enough to kick off the discussion for the 2009 Maemo Summit. The discussion is taking place on maemo-community if anyone is interested in joining in. Progress from this discussion can be tracked on the wiki page.

Mer

Mer has just released 0.8. The new release brings many improvements to usability and stability, as well as improved N810 support, easier application installation. This release is also shipping with Extras enabled, offering application developers the opportunity to test their applications on Mer. Details are available from the wiki and discussion is on itT.

Fremantle SDK

The Fremantle pre-alpha SDK has been updated. This new release includes the new Media Application Framework (MAFW), the newly-open sourced DSME, Upstart, and an BusyBox that will be developed in the open from here on out.

This release is still primarily only of interest to platform developers, as the APIs are still unfrozen and it is still using the Diablo UI. This is the last pre-alpha release, and the first alpha release should be forthcoming soon.

Fremantle Stars

From the list generated by the community, Nokia has selected several community applications to be featured in Fremantle. Nokia will be providing support to these applications and their developers to help make them ready for prime-time by the time Fremantle is released.

maemo.org redesign

The work to redesign the maemo.org website is still ongoing. The graphics and layouts are just being finalized, and the implementation will begin in earnest soon. Anyone interested in following the progress closely should subscribe to maemo-community.

Nokia's MWC event has come and gone, with no mention of Maemo much less a 4th generation Maemo tablet. I was just plain wrong.

It's a crucial time for the Internet Tablet product line. Something special needs to appear to set the device apart from tiny computers (like the VIAO P) and superpowered phones (like the Nokia N97.) Something must burst forth to convince consumers to adopt the Maemo platform instead of buying into other established Linux, Windows, or Symbian platforms.

After thousands of blog comments and hundreds of conversations with mobile device enthusiasts, I have come up with the following: Purchase decisions are made on several common factors:

• Function: Does it do everything I want it to? Does it do it well? The features in Maemo 5 are built for social networking with a rich web browser, content creation, and content consumption. With that, it needs to grow to include the latest in new media like Netflix On Demand, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer. This will give it an extra leg up over Apple's lame duck version of Safari on the iPhone.
• Form: Is it comfortable, usable, intuitive, and small? The Nokia N810 did a lot "right" but could do better. I remember (and agree with) a comment suggesting a capacitive touch screen and total removal of the stylus.
  
• Price: Am I getting what I am paying for? Will I wish I had spent less money on another device or more money on a different device?
• Trust: Does the company behind this device have the experience and follow-through to justify the money I am going to spend? Nokia is by far the dominant mobile handset maker in the world, but their high-end Nseries seems to be only a small part of that. North American consumers are especially wary since our carriers use several different frequency bands for calls and data. NAM versions of Nseries phones (like the Nokia N95-3) only get 3G from AT&T Wireless. Even so - some of us swich to AT&T to get the sweet N95 action only to later be left out to dry when the NAM firmware stagnates while the European firmware gets new updates and features.

In the best of times, Internet Tablets were a hard sell. With US $299 "netbook" class machines flooding the market, Maemo tablets need to break away and pull out ahead. Let's hope for an 800x480 capacitive touchscreen, integrated/searchable application catalog, comfortable keyboard wth a D-pad that allows for light gaming, good cameras with video capture, and a fast enough CPU to handle the latest in new media. Let's also hope that it doesn't come out too far past US $299.

Yes - it is unrealistic to expect all of the above to fit into one product. Sacrifices will be made in design. The price will have to match the components and development costs. It's nice to hope, though, isn't it?

There is a good, but short, article about the state of power management on the next generation Maemo devices at lwn.net (subscription required or free but you have to wait until Thursday).

In the article, Nokia's Peter De Schrijver talks about the 4 modes of power management that will be available in the next platform, "on", "inactive", "retention" and "off". These modes will govern how the device draws power and careful optimizations will ultimately dictate how long the battery life of these new devices will last.

read more

Hello everyone. Today I’m not gonna show you new calculator faceplates (surprise!). Today I’ll show you the evolution of Mer UI design, that was inspired by Mer’s scalability. Though Mer is targeted mostly to portable touchscreen platforms, such as MIDs, Pocket PCs and NITs, it still can be installed on variety of devices, including beagleboard and different [...]

I’m no expert on security. As a debian GNU/Linux user I have been spoiled by a dedicated security team that looks after all the packages in debian, both stable and testing, so I don’t have to be an expert in security. I just rely on the security team to keep me updated.

I have done a little security work however and I understand how difficult it is, especially when you have a complex system. One of the mantras that I hear is “security is a process.” I think this is true, security is a process, not just an add-on or a patch. Security has to be thought of from the beginning through development to deployment – not just when the end user has it in their hands and is started to hack on it.

I would like to tap into the views and expertise of the community and try to establish a discussion around security in Maemo and in its ecosystem. Since Maemo is built upon a foundation (Debian) known for stability and technical quality, Maemo inherits some of Debian’s infrastructure regarding security. But what more could be done? Furthermore, what should be done?

I hope that we can bring forth the ‘best practices’ and innovations that the community around Maemo has, develop methods to protect users, maybe even hammer out policy. But all of this has to be done in the open I feel, it has to be driven by the community.

So what do you think? Do you worry about exploits? Do you test your code for buffer overflows or run it through valgrind? What would a Maemo security team look like? How does one balance open access with system integrity?

I look forward to the discussion.

EDIT: More info on Maemo security policy here.

There was a lot of fallout in the comments to my last post.

The first thing I want to clarify is that Ryan Abel is absolutely correct on his summation of capacitive touch displays. Having a high-precision resistive touch display gives Maemo tablets a wider degree of functionality than a capacitive display could. These are little computers, after all. Capacitive touch is for low-precision operations like phones, media players, and kiosk displays.

Second: I know damn well that my aspirations for a Maemo 5 tablet are far out of line with reality. The features I described at the price I mentioned are simply not possible with today's technology. There's simply no way to stuff all those features into such a small device without killing battery life and skyrocketing the price. I know it was a pipe dream. The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was years ahead of its time. Years have passed, however, and the next Maemo tablet needs to be far ahead of existing technology to stand out as a device consumers actually want to buy.

Finally: I haven't lost my lust for internet tablets. While technology is catching up with Nokia's innovation, I still believe that Maemo developers can pull something out of their hats that will make jaws drop worldwide. I believe this because I've had the pleasure of meeting a good number of them. They're really THAT brilliant. If they pooled their minds and decided they wanted to build a Mars rover of their own, I am sure they could do it.

After reading Alexander Larsson's post on de-bloating nautilus I thought it would be interesting/useful to see what apps are eating my RAM, as a statistical data point if nothing else.

Today we released a new version of QEdje and QZion (0.4.0). This release includes a lot of bug fixing and also the change from qmake to cmake :-). We did some code refactor, fixed a LOT of bugs, improved a little bit the python bindings, improved support for mouse events and ...

The last few posts and comments have sparked a good level of discussion on both sides of the Internet Tablets' future. I'd like to highlight some very good points made to contradict my first critical post and follow-up. Some of these are responses to the comments and some are from direct conversation with other Tablet users.

In the first post, I mentioned the importance of Hulu, NetFlix, and the BBC iPlayer. While these are fantastic developments in new media, very few users would actually require what is essentially a "mobile internet TV" in the purchase decision. Netflix in particular requires a DRM-heavy platform that is contrary to the ideals of the tablets. While it would be "cool" to have those features, they're not as important as I initially painted them.

In the second post, I mentioned that the hardware requirements are out of line with "reality" but are required. That may not be entirely true either as evidenced by the next realization:

Recently, Nokia's growing relationship with Facebook has been discussed (link to wsj.com - subscription required) especially in relation to Nokia's Ovi. This helped me to realize that the marketing of the N97 put the purpose (specifically - a social networking optimized mobile device) ahead of the features. What does that mean to consumers?

I've recently seen ads for the Apple iPhone, the Blackberry Storm, Samsung Omnia. They all have something in common: They claim to be the best choice for music, communication, mobile internet, and more. This is all too confusing for the consumer. If the Nokia N97 is marketed as "the perfect phone for social media" and then they tack on stuff like "Multimedia player, camera, keyboard, and a ton of other features" it will be far easier for consumers to picture themselves using it.

Why limit that approach to just the N97? Maemo tablets have a higher resolution display, better keyboard, and (currently) work independently of phones. With a software layer optimized for social networking, the Maemo tablet can potentially be the single greatest non-phone social networking device. Here are some features that could do it:

• Good camera (already promised at OSiM) for photo-video sharing.
  
• Lightweight photo editing for cropping and posting photos (software only)
  
• Improved GPS for geotagging and location-aware applications.
  
• Better CPU (already promised at OSiM) for a faster overall experience
• Social network applications or application layer to speed up status upates, location sharing, and photo/video sharing (software only)

Look at that. It's a device that people can actually see themselves using for a very popular task and it's no further from reality than what has already been promised.

Could the next Maemo tablet be "The Facebook Tablet?" Maybe.

Not on the desktop but on mobiles I think the era of E-mail clients will soon be over. Just like the era of filemanagers will be over. A person who’s using a mobile or a phone doesn’t really want to start and stop applications. Those users don’t start and stop applications to receive phonecalls and text messages. Why would they want to start and stop E-mail clients?

Today I am happy to announce the release of Quick Clip 0.2. If you've been following along with Quick Clip's development, you'll know that I've been actively working to make it more robust and user friendly.

Jono asked on the AOC blog for successful governance stories, and while I’m happy to comment on the blog, now that I’ve taken the time to write some down, I thought I might as well share them

Preview of what's coming out later in the week. A v0.2 drop of inkface-pygame package for maemo and others should be ready in coming few days.

I recently posted some data about applications taking up the most RAM on my laptop. That was after 9 days of uptime, while this is after 12 hours:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
16033 root      20   0  527m 109m  11m S    3  5.5   6:52.82 Xorg
17834 mg        20   0  244m 105m  24m S    6  5.3   3:26.49 firefox
26425 mg        20   0 96872  58m  12m S    0  2.9   0:01.71 evince
16747 mg        20   0 90704  54m  19m S    0  2.8   0:10.70 tomboy
27169 mg        20   0  166m  53m  23m S    0  2.7   0:07.05 banshee-1
27167 mg        20   0 77392  31m  17m S    0  1.6   0:01.16 pidgin
16706 mg        20   0 86508  27m  18m S    0  1.4   0:35.35 gnome-panel
16708 mg        20   0 75196  20m  14m S    0  1.0   0:02.80 nautilus
20092 mg        20   0 61880  19m  11m S    1  1.0   0:07.08 gnome-terminal
16614 mg        20   0 58456  15m 9836 S    0  0.8   0:09.82 gnome-settings-

I don't have GNOME Do any more, and I've only one of the two PDFs open in Evince. I don't see multiload-applet on the first page of top output, which seems to indicate a slow leak. Evince has the same two documents. That concept doesn't quite apply to Banshee or Pidgin, but Pidgin's numbers are quite striking anyway (from 70 megs VIRT to 1.6 gigs VIRT in 9 days; thankfully RES only grows 2x during that time).

OS: Ubuntu 8.10, up-to-date with all the updates from -security, -updates, -proposed-updates and -backports.

Incidentally, I have 12 hours of uptime because my battery died while the laptops was suspended during my flight back home (either that, or it work up in the backpack, which is a scary thought). Apparently Ubuntu tried to hibernate when the battery was very low, which was a nice gesture. This didn't work out so well when resuming, since the kernels didn't match -- I had installed a kernel update, but hadn't rebooted. I don't think I ever used hibernation successfully in Linux.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-02-16 through 2009-02-22

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-02-16 through 2009-02-22

Changes since 0.2:

- Use the new (0.6.9) Tracker API.
- Priority of gio-based streams are based on requested DLNA transfer mode.
- GIO-based/like asynchronous plugin API.
- Adapt to latest changes in gupnp-vala API.
- Serialization of media objects isn't done by media objects themselves anymore, but by a new separate class, Rygel.DIDLLiteWriter.
- Internal API is marked 'internal' so it doesn't get to our (Vala) API.
- MediaObject now derives from GLib.Object.
- Generic AsyncResult implementation, SimpleAsyncResult.
- StateMachine interface that all state machines classes implement.
- Visible performance improvements in Tracker plugin by proper use of Tracker APIs.
- Use Filename.to_string() and therefore make Bastien happy.
- Require lastest version (0.1.5) of libgee to use List.slice().
- Don't limit the number of objects returned to a client, let it decide that on it's own.
- Proper handling of update notification to the client by use of a very simple bubble-up mechanism for containers to signal updates.
- Decrease needed gconf version to 2.16.
- Set application name and therefore make Lennart happy.
- Require latest version of vala (0.5.7) and gupnp-vala (0.5.3).
- Allow multiple URIs for each media items.
- Response for seekable media request is now sent buffer by buffer so the whole file is not put into memory.
- Some improvements to build system.
- Lots of other improvements and bugfixes.

Download source tarball from here:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel/0.2/

Rygel is an implementation of the UPnP MediaServer V 2.0 specification
that is specifically designed for GNOME (Mobile). It is based on
GUPnP and is written (mostly) in Vala language. Project was
previously known as gupnp-media-server.

More info at: http://live.gnome.org/Rygel

A big congratulations to Adam B whose Kobayashi Canola theme is the first to be published in the gallery. It is licensed under ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL (by-nc) and is available here(.deb)

If you want to create a theme:

1. Download the design sheet. (.psd)

2. Download the guideline (optional but recommended)(.pdf).

3. Replace the images in the sheet. Note that some images are going to be resized inside Canola (like the scrollbar) and the graphic needs to be designed with that in mind. Consult the "Stretch axis" column of each image for details. Also, when replacing the images in the sheet make sure to respect the sliced areas (View > Show > Slices).

4. Save your images(File > Save For Web & Devices) using the PNG-24 preset. A dialog is going to appear asking where you wanna save the files. Select a folder and hit the save button.

5. Open the selected folder on finder/explorer/terminal/etc, you are going to see a subfolder called "images", open it. If you properly follow all the step until now, your theme's images are going to be here.

6. Compact all the archives inside this folder(zip or tar.gz). Here lies the trick, compact only the images, not the whole folder. In other words, if your open you zip package IT MUST ONLY CONTAIN IMAGE FILES.

7. Go to Theme Maker site and upload your package.

8. Enjoy your new theme

Finally I took the time to respond to multiple requests about providing mmpc 0.2.1 packages for Diablo. That also gave me the possibility to try the maemo autobuilder to upload my packages to the extras repository. And well, it worked out. It’s especially useful for those people not running debian based systems, because with autobuilder you don’t have to care about signing and uploading the packages with debian tools like debsign and dput.

So, this is not a new release, these are just new packages build for the Diable 4.1 distribution. I still did not manage to find the time to enhance mmpc further. There are just too many other things like work and university I have to care about. Either download the packages from Maemo Garage, or just get it through the extras repository as usual.

Over the last month or so our two trainees, David King and Michael (not Mathias) Hasselmann have made good progress getting familiar with GTK+ and associated tools on Linux. They are on an intensive schedule, but they have the time to learn how things really work, so they don’t have to feel that any part is a mystery. For instance, they know now how to create custom GObjects and GTK+ widgets rather than just how to put widgets together in Glade. Now they will move on to C++, moving through gtkmm and then to Qt, with detours through Maemo and Scratchbox.

We hope to offer training to customers in the near future and this is giving us a good idea of what to cover and how.

Beyond just coding, Daniel and I are helping them to form good open source habits, creating developers in our image, so they can be creators of quality and fighters against entropy. I’ve encouraged them to blog about the experience and generally get involved in the community as an important part of their training, so don’t hesitate to give your advice.

It’s also interesting to see how the move to Germany has been for David, registering for various things and finding an apartment. It seems easier in Berlin than in Munich, and easier now than when I moved to Germany 10 years ago. Daniel’s help has been a big time-saver, I guess.

I set up planet.openismus.com to show their blogs and all our others too.

The voting is now closed in the Maemo Community Council referenda on election procedures for the upcoming and future Maemo Community Council elections.

The provisional results, which will stand unless successfully challenged within the next 7 days, are as follows:

1. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to the Maemo Community Council elections to be held in March 2009?
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (71 votes)
   • No karma requirement, anyone with an account for more than 3 months
     may vote (64 votes)
   • None of the above (4 votes)

   139 votes were cast of an electorate of 601 (23%)

   We will maintain a 25 karma requirement for the next elections.

2. Which of the following criteria do you want applied to future Maemo Community Council elections?
   • 10 karma and 3 month old account (48 votes)
   • 25 karma and 3 month old account (status quo) (46 votes)
   • 10 karma or 12 month old account (22 votes)
   • No karma or account age requirement - everyone with a maemo.org account may vote (13 votes)
   • None of the above (0 votes)

   129 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21.5%).

   For future elections, voters must have a karma of 10, and have created their maemo.org account more than 3 months before the closing date of the election.

3. Which of the following voting systems do you want used for Maemo Community Council elections?
   • A single transferable vote preferential system (60 votes)
   • No change - single vote, with top 5 candidates elected (51 votes)
   • A reweighted range voting system (score candidates between 0 and 100) (13 votes)
   • None of the above (3 votes)

   127 votes cast of an electorate of 601 (21%).

   Future elections, including the election to be held in a few weeks, will be by preferential vote, and will be counted using the Single Transferrable Vote system.

I will be modifying the Maemo election system (stolen borrowed from the GNOME Foundation) before the next elections to implement preferential voting, and we will likely be using OpenSTV to count ballots after the next election.

The 15th International LinuxTag will take place during June 24–27, 2009 in Berlin. The LinuxTag 2009 has officially ended the call for papers, but there is still room for interesting talks about mobile & embedded systems. So, if anybody has a nice mobile & embedded topic to talk about, we will consider contributions until March, 5th.

Submit a talk

Paul Ferrill has written a serie of three articles about writing a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, using the Maemo SDK, Eclipse and PluThon plugin.

Here is the complete serie:

• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 1: Development environment: Learn how to configure a development environment targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including setting up Eclipse on a target development machine for the Python language.
• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 2: Consider your options: Discover the details of code design, library selection, unit testing, and user interface choices that make the most sense for you.
• Develop a GPS-aware application for the Nokia N810, Part 3: Finish the job: In this last of three installments, you'll put the final touches to the GPS trip tracker and get it ready for release.

We at the Tracker team should in my opinion report more often in our blogs about our progress on things like Tracker’s SPARQL and Nepomuk support.

Mer Midori running in OS2008 Diablo via chroot

Why Mer?

ARM and Movial announced a second stable release of ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) generic repository. ALIP got other updates as well, see a blog post about them in Movial’s Sandbox or the actual release notes.

The Kaze project for n8x0 devices was updated to use the generic-2 branch as well. There are no built images provided, but ALIP is relatively easy to compile if one is already familiar with Scratchbox. The ALIP rootfs works with the Maemo kernel and initfs and it can be booted nicely from an MMC/SD card, so no need to destroy the Maemo from the device just to test ALIP.

ALIP requires newer SB components (and specific toolchains) but the newer SB components should work just fine with Maemo targets and Maemo toolchains. Or the newer SB can be installed in a different directory from tarballs and used concurrently with the Maemo SB.

Follow the From scratch instructions but replace alip-project with kaze-project and don’t pass the -cbeagleboard. You should pass -c multimedia to include 3rd party provided (by me actually) gst-ffmpeg to the build.

If you want to include WebKit engine and Midori UI to it, add “midori” to the components file.

Unfortunately the X driver for OMAPs (xf86-video-omapfb) in the stable branch in omap-repository has a bug concerning n8x0 devices and you should use master branch of it if you want to test video playback. The easiest way to switch using master branch for this component is to clone the n8x0 configuration repository and switch the branch before running the matrix install.


git clone git://linux.onarm.com/git/n8x0/config/n8x0.git
vi n8x0/suite/n8x0-recommended
# Add the branch: Component("xf86-video-omapfb", branch="master")
matrix install -c multimedia


After the install you should include the binary DSP tasks from the device (they are proprietary and cannot be distributed). Use the helper script (get_nokia_binaries.sh) in src/platform-n8x0 that fetches them from the device over ssh and reinstall the component before creating the rootfs image:


matrix install-only -c multimedia platform-n8x0


Lots of things are still broken:

• Power button tries to suspend, which fails and does nothing.
• WLAN encryption keys are not stored succesfully.
• WPA doesn’t work (WEP and unencrypted do work).
• Midori should be started after networking.
• There’s no ssh client (but dbclient as it’s dropbear).
• Power management.
• Default XFCE theme doesn’t look cool.
• Etc.

But I believe that with some work Kaze on n8x0 will become decent enough for everyday use and will provide up to date components long after Nokia has dropped the n8x0 support.

If you have any questions, visit #alip @ freenode.

PS. If you want an open source media engine with D-Bus API checkout the Octopus. It’s a work in progress but handles basic audio and video playback on n8x0 just fine :)

As per the plan for v0.2, I am ready with a working implementation of inkface. I also made few more design decisions after my last design post. Here are the highlights:

1. All code is in python
2. For X11 surfaces, pygame is used.

I found that pygame (python bindings for SDL) is a mature library for drawing on X11 surfaces. It also has some optimizations which help in 2D animations. There is also OpenGL support, but I do not plan to use it inside inkface library. It is also well supported on Maemo.

I have written my favorite twitter client app with the new inkface-pygame library. The following video demo shows, how I could quickly code 2D scrolling animation with the help of pygame.



The v0.2.0 is delivered as a tarball. I have also updated the inkface wiki with some getting-started tips.

After more than a year of heavy work in tracker, here is the brand new tracker release, 0.6.90!! If you are still wondering what tracker is: it is a daemon monitoring the filesystem, extracting metadata from your files and indexing them (and the contents of text files) so that you can search fast and efficiently for [...]

The next Maemo Community Council will be elected between 11th-18th March 2009, and nominations are now open.

Nominations can be made by candidates, or by anyone else in the community; so if you want to get involved in representing the community to Nokia, and help drive the Maemo community forwards - put your name forward!

It seems that (rumor mode: ON) Nokia is working on a Linux based device that is using latest ARM multicore processor called Sparrow(rumor mode: OFF)

I’ve seen this in a post from Unwired about Secrets at Mobile World Congress 2009. There is even a mockup for the device and it seems very promising. If someone understand Russian, extra info can be found on Eldar Murtazin’s blog

Ok, ok, most of us are still waiting for next Maemo based devices that are surely being already tested (I envy testers), but it is always good knowing that Nokia is working on the future (even if it is only for internal research), and since there weren’t many news about Maemo in MWC09, rumors keep us alive

If unwiredview.com is to be believed, Nokia is already showing a Linux based mobile internet device:

The design of Nokia Sparrow device does not follow the current netbook trend, going more the MID way, with some passing resemblance to Nokia N800 internet tablet.

It will have multi-slide keyboard, with different layouts/keys revealed as you slide it in different directions. The display also slides in several directions for different functions – think Nokia N97 tilting display.

The new Nokia computer has a very interesting keyboard with diamond shaped, elevated keys inverted to each other. At first glance it seems very uncomfortable – the keys are pretty small (about half the size of normal key), actually the device itself is rather small. But when you start typing on it, it works very well. It is very difficult to hit multiple keys with a finger, even on purpose.

Hit the link above for more and their own mock-up drawing.

Is this real? Why haven't we heard or seen more? Why do the only Google results for "Nokia Sparrow" go to that page or links to that page?

After this (IMHO) successful presentation at FOSDEM, people spontaneously offered their help.  Many more showed their interest into the ideas or to use it.  Let’s see what is developing from that.

For the new readers, libchamplain is a Clutter based map displaying widget.  It intends to be a light embeddable map widget for all applications with nice eye candy.  For instance, the current API concentrates on how to draw markers and display maps rather than parsing raw GPX data.

Some days before FOSDEM, work started on libchamplain 0.3.  This version will be the development version leading to libchamplain 0.4 (kind of using the same numbering schema than Clutter).  Along with all the promised features (routes, custom map sources and being bindings friendly), this version will have a better code base.  It is already much cleaner than the 0.2 series, and yet a lot of work is left to be done.  I had written a MVC version of the code and I am slowly merging this work (from the MVC branch) back into master.  Also, one of the biggest change is that libchamplain and libchamplain-gtk are now under the same git tree.  Packagers will hate us a little now, but it should provide simpler to maintain in the future.  All bindings will also be under the same tree, in the bindings directory.

There is a new demo portraying an animated marker. See demos/animated-marker.c.

Anders Mørk-Pedersen has been around before FOSDEM working on managed bindings for libchamplain.  With Stéphane Delcroix special touch, they got them running.  They are merged, and I think, ready to be tested.  Now, I am not telling you yet what those bindings are going to be used for… 

Denk Padje offered his help working on the python bindings.  While we got somethings to generate, neither of us are python specialist.  We could use some help.  The branch is bindings-python.  Once the bindings are running, examples will be written.

Libchamplain could certainly profit from Google’s Summer of Code.  Ideas such as having map drawn locally from raw map data and supporting more map sources and map projections (at least one that doesn’t make Greenland the size of South America) will probably be added to Gnome’s pool of ideas.

Now that we have a mailing list, I think a proper web site should come next.  I would also like the project to have a neat logo.  But nothing too fancy as it is a library after all.  May be someone could come up with something like likes of Geoclue’s logo, but may be as a puzzle piece (clearly indicating that it is a library).  Also, I like the Tango colors

That’s it for Febuary.

Scratchbox needs vdso disabled, which can be done run-time with 32-bit kernels. With 64-bit kernels, however, this is not possible... until now. A colleague of mine wrote a (hacky) kernel module to do exactly that, it seeks the vdso-flag and writes 0 to it. I helped him with dkms/deb packaging, and now it's available for download.

Note that this does not help with any other annoyances with sbox on 64-bit system, but at least it is something.

Since first week of 2009 I use Nokia E66 phone. It is nice device and is expandable with many applications due to fact that it runs Symbian (S60 3rd FP1). But as usual there is a problem with it — syncing or rather lack of it (at least under Linux).

Under MS Windows there is “Nokia PC Suite” set of applications. It is heavy and ugly — mostly because vendor had own idea how application UI should look. As usual it is unable to keep device data available in any sensible format — all it do is syncing Phone “installed PIM” (which mean MS Outlook or Lotus Notes). It does not even have VCard import/export which will work good (I had to kill application after attempt to import 32KB file with ~200 vcards in it). So basically all what I can do with it is making backups of phone contents (but for that there is also application on phone which use memory card for keeping backups).

Other option is OxyCube application. But it is too expensive so I do not even bother to check how good it is.

But how to sync under Linux? This is good question… First idea which came to my mind was OpenSync. But which version to use? Last stable (0.22) or current development one (0.38)? Their homepage says:

Releases 0.22 (and 0.2x svn branch) and before are considered stable and suitable for production. 0.3x releases introduce major architecture and API changes and are targeted for developers and testers only and may not even compile or are likely to contain severe bugs.

0.3x releases are not recommended for end users or distribution packaging.

So stable one is recommended but no one supports it as developers forgot how it worked. This is not strange thing because this release is over 2 years old now. So maybe development version should be used? No… I was told few times that it can crash, do dirty things etc. so it can not be trusted at all. And there is no plugin to get KDE4 PIM apps synced (plugin for KDE3 can be used after some tweaks).

Effect is that after firmware update my phone has all contacts restored from phone backup but lost all calendar entries…

Related posts:

1. Year with Openmoko
2. Choosing next cellphone
3. Nokia N900 discount

Last week we finally had the first demo of our current work. We are working on animated layouts with the Qt Software guys. It has been a great great time. We are really happy with this work and the results that will come in the near future. When we talk about ...

I regularly use VMWare on my Mac at home for Windows, but never thought it was even possible to do anything quite like this on the Nokia Tablet platform …

Nokia N800 running VMware from Eric Sloof NTPRO.NL on Vimeo.

Thanks @s_constantine!

UPDATE — here’s a another closer look:

I was just skipping some memes and version control system flames debates when suddenly I bumped on an interesting blog post by Henri Bergius on how he sees integration of the GeoClue project with the desktop.

I’m more into mobile myself, considering a desktop a necessary evil that people don’t really enjoy using. But have to use, because there’s nothing better. Meanwhile is there a trend towards mobile uses. Music players, cameras, in-car entertainment, navigation assistance, movie players, setup boxes. And sooner or later ePaper devices to replace magazines, books and newspapers.

But whenever the desktop’s software gets integrated with a location framework, it wakes me up. That’s because I consider having access to meaningful location clues to be a creator for a large amount of very interesting use-cases for mobile. Use-cases which we might not be seeing yet, today. Because we humans are walking blinded into the future.

Which means that we at the Tracker project must and will welcome such integration. We too want to enable the app developers of tomorrow and today to convert their innovative ideas into elegant solutions. Location clues about events and resources will be very interesting meta information for those apps, indeed.

Such systems can already update the Nepomuk structured meta information that Tracker collects using the SPARQL INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE support that Jürg started working on since a week or so.

It’s actually finished… maybe not sufficiently tested. But isn’t crashing hard pure fun anyway? Gives you a reason to go code and fix it!

Although we are very hard at work to get the indexer working again wont our experimental branch index your documents just yet. We have been testing our query stuff by importing generated Turtle files to be honest.

Nonetheless I kindly invite people to completely break their Tracker install by trying out our experimental stuff. Read a bit about Nepomuk’s ontology and mentally glue that together with the query flexibility SPARQL enables, and you’ll pretty soon grasp how cool it will be.

And yeah, there’s still a lot of hard work to do. But that’s great and a lot of fun.

And you should grow a pointy hat, put on a beard, jolt drink cola, and fun the join!

Ok. That’s enough Tracker propaganda for a day. Let’s now check if Nepomuk’s current stuff is good for storing GeoClue’s info.

Just in case you haven't seen it yet, I'll post the video here so it get aggregated in Planet Maemo. Yesterday at VMworld conference, VMware's CTO demoed the mobile virtualisation platform, using a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The video shows it running Windows CE and Android virtual machines at the same time with impressive performance. Check it out:



If you can't see the video, just click here.

More information in ITPro (here and here), also in Gizmodo and WindowsForDevices.

Warning: this is going to be a long story with a semi-happy ending. Skip it unless you enjoy tales of woe and debugging.

Following yesterday's vdso32 hack. The same colleague now built amd64 packages for maemo4 scratchbox.

Also with debian repo; just add

deb http://www.ipi.fi/~pablo/sbox_amd64 /

to your apt sources.

I've set the ball rolling, and put myself forward as a candidate (the first) in the second Maemo Community Council election.

I'm proud to have been a member of the inaugural Community Council. In the last six months, we've seen a sea-change in the way Maemo is progressing:

• the first Maemo Summit, paid for by Nokia;
• community ownership of maemo.org;
• better use of Bugzilla by both Nokia and the community;
• the realistic vision of a community-led "hacker edition" in Mer;
• a webmaster, docmaster, bugmaster and now debmaster all being paid for for us;
• open communication and - importantly - progress indicators like the Maemo 5/Fremantle pre-release SDKs, which would've been unheard of back in 2006/2007.

The Council has been involved in many of these, but would claim credit for few. I believe we've truly fulfilled our role as facilitators and would like to continue my role there. We've not got everything right, but I think we've proved the idea; and that it can be a cohesive force within the community.

I think there's still work to be done, though. Nokia are being more open, and projects like Tracker and Rygel are being developed openly. Yet, Modest has slipped back into internal development; some patches to Application Manager have been merged, but the community's vision for application management in Diablo - and Fremantle - looks unlikely to have been realised. The system as a whole, and the application environment which so clearly defines the Maemo brand, are architected internally. Design decisions are taken internally.

Slowly, hopefully, we can change Nokia management into utilising the enthusiastic talent at their disposal in a way which is truly ground-breaking in the industry; with a root-to-tip collaboration between us all.

Thanks for reading this, and I'll happily answer any questions anyone has.

I've set the ball rolling, and put myself forward as a candidate (the first) in the second Maemo Community Council election.

I'm proud to have been a member of the inaugural Community Council. In the last six months, we've seen a sea-change in the way Maemo is progressing:

• the first Maemo Summit, paid for by Nokia;
• community ownership of maemo.org;
• better use of Bugzilla by both Nokia and the community;
• the realistic vision of a community-led "hacker edition" in Mer;
• a webmaster, docmaster, bugmaster and now debmaster all being paid for for us;
• open communication and - importantly - progress indicators like the Maemo 5/Fremantle pre-release SDKs, which would've been unheard of back in 2006/2007.

The Council has been involved in many of these, but would claim credit for few. I believe we've truly fulfilled our role as facilitators and would like to continue my role there. We've not got everything right, but I think we've proved the idea; and that it can be a cohesive force within the community.

I think there's still work to be done, though. Nokia are being more open, and projects like Tracker and Rygel are being developed openly. Yet, Modest has slipped back into internal development; some patches to Application Manager have been merged, but the community's vision for application management in Diablo - and Fremantle - looks unlikely to have been realised. The system as a whole, and the application environment which so clearly defines the Maemo brand, are architected internally. Design decisions are taken internally.

Slowly, hopefully, we can change Nokia management into utilising the enthusiastic talent at their disposal in a way which is truly ground-breaking in the industry; with a root-to-tip collaboration between us all.

Thanks for reading this, and I'll happily answer any questions anyone has.

Yo cito textualmente de Real Envido, obra de Griselda Gambaro:

Rey: Natán, ¿pensás lo que yo penso?

Natán: Siempre.

Rey(agraviado): ¿Leés mi pensamiento?

Natán: ¡No, señor! Jamás me atrevería. Como súbdito, yo veo lo que usted ve, yo pienso lo que usted quiere que piense. ¿Quién disiente con un rey? Nada pienso por mi cuenta, nada veo, nada quiero, nada sueño. Mire, soy un recipiente. (Sacude la cabeza hacia abajo) No cae nada.

Rey(Muy halagado): ¡Asombroso! Natán, te asciendo a consejero mayor.

Natán: ¿Y eso significa lo que usted está pensando?

Rey: ¿Qué pienso?

Natán: ¡Aumento de sueldo!

Rey: ¡Para mí!

Natán: ¡No, para mí!

Rey: ¡Qué pensamiento tan raro! ¿Estás seguro de que es mío?

Natán: ¿Cómo me atrevería a pensar otro distinto?

After the suggestion from a member of this community (I don't want to nominate him because I don't want to influence anyone) I've decided to candidate myself for the Maemo Council. Here I'm! You can read something about me and about my motivations in the rest of this post.

Name: Andrea Grandi
maemo.org: Andy80 - http://maemo.org/profile/view/andy80/
Corporate affiliation: none

Introduction: My name is Andrea Grandi, I'm 28 and I live in Pistoia (Tuscany, ITALY). I'm a programmer, in particular very interested in Linux and opensource. I've been working for some years as computer programmer, then I decided to begin studing at university, and currently I'm attending at "Università degli studi di Firenze" to get the Computer Science degree. I spend lot of my time to manage the Pistoia Linux User Group I founded in 2001.

My life in the community: I'm part of the community since I bought my first Nokia 770. I started contributing to the mailing lists, I wrote some tutorials (in italian language, then I translated them to english) and I ported SPIM (a MIPS emulator) to Nokia 770. Later I had the possibility to buy a N810 and I was able to experiment more with the Maemo SDK. I was at the Maemo Summit in Berlin, doing a light talk about Maemo development using Eclipse, PluThon and EsBox plugins.

Motivations: I really would like to be able to do more for the community and one of the best way could be to be part of the council, to help both users/developers to explain their requests to Nokia and Nokia to understand the requests from the community. There are a lot of fantastic ideas comung from the community that could improve what we are doing: the key is to organize them and giving them more attention. This is what I've always looked for: working together to build something great!

I found this project yesterday on IRC and I think it deserves some publicity .

“QTablet is a fully Qt and QGraphicsView based application framework which main target is internet tablets such as N810. It provides QLauncer for launching applications, Home screen called the Wall and Pager for changing between two virtual desktops and placeholders for minimized application. QTablet uses also Qt Animation Framework for doing transitions between Wall, QLauncher and Pager. ”

Check out the video, it features virtual desktops, cool animations (without openGL :)) and is also possible to launch hildon apps inside the QT framework. At the moment the installation isn’t straightforward, but deserves a try at lest .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAwmW6_G0TM

More info at the QTablet website.