As many of you know only two days are left now for Guadec and Guadec-es 2009, which will be located this year in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and which will be a “little bit” special this year because it will took place along with Akademy and Akademy-es. Actually, that’s why this year it’s named “Gran Canaria Desktop Summit”.

Thus, even though I had a great time last year in Madrid and Istanbul, I’m sure this time we’re going to have fun as never before and that it will be a perfect environment for sharing ideas, thoughts, knowledge… and perhaps even some beer at the wild parties social events both with the GNOME and KDE guys ;-).

I’m really really looking forward to being there with the rest of Igalia gang to start enjoying “the Guadec experience“… can’t actually believe I’ll be there just in three days! :-)

See you there guys!

The presentation that I had hoped to show at the maemo summit has been declined. I hope someone can take the idea and make something better out of it - so here's the abstract:

Attracting the Masses

• Intended audience: Developers - but other parties may be interested
• Abstract/description

Tablets have hundreds of applications now - but who are they for? If the Internet Tablets are intended to attract a more mainstream mobile market, the maemo community needs to get in touch with the needs of the target market.

The first part of this presentation will give an overview of the most popular applications on competing platforms. This information will be collected through app store sales/download counts, direct communication with a sampling of mobile consumers, and communication with some other high-profile mobile technology journalists. This will include actual applications, connectivity options, peripherals, interface (touch/keyboard/icon/etc) preferences, and related consumer desires.

The second part of this presentation will give an overview of the state of the existing maemoplatform including commercial partners, independent contributors, and ports of more popular Linux software.

The conclusion will analyze mobile consumer desires compared to maemo offerings and, hopefully, give developers ideas on what they can write to make the platform more appealing.

The feedback from the Dave, Jamie, and Valerio is (in part) as follows:

Thanks for your submission for the Maemo summit, we appreciate the effort.
However, we don't think the content is compelling enough for the summit
as is. And certainly "reaching the masses" will be covered by Nokia
during the Nokia day. So we are sorry to inform you that we are not
accepting the presentation.

Since I'm more of a "put the tablets in others' hands and get a reaction" type and not a "developer" type, I figured that's the only topic on which I am qualified to talk. I'm open to ideas, though. I'm still looking forward to seeing what comes out of the summit.

Qaiku's twitter-like API has been one of the first major contributions I've made to the project, and it is great to see some first applications start to use it. Here are some examples:

Mauku is a microblogging client for Maemo. The new Fremantle version supports Qaiku nicely:

Gwibber is a Linux desktop microblogging client. Qaiku support is now available in the development version:

There is also an XMPP bot that we're going to launch soon for wider use. This enables you to monitor your mentions or some channels and post via any Jabber client:

If you're doing something cool with the API, please let me know! The #Qaiku-api channel is good for usage questions and ideas.

Every now and then people ask me why we're doing Qaiku instead of "just using Twitter". Here are some points why Qaiku just works better:

• Qaiku culture and features promote more meaningful and threaded discussion - in general, people comment much more than start conversations which is a good sign
• Qaiku has language tagging and filtering meaning that when I post in Finnish it will not bother my international friends
• Messages and comments are proper Markdown, reducing ugliness typical of tweets
• Features like feed import and image sharing are built-in, removing need for external tools
• Channels, and especially private channels enable us to do workstreaming in Qaiku

If you want to comment, you'll anyway find me both on Qaiku and on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: mauku, gwibber, qaiku, xmpp

I am going to collect data for the idea I had for a maemo summit presentation even if it is not presented in Amsterdam. My first step is a generic survey posted here. Please help me understand tablet users more by taking this survey.

The GNOME press contact alias got a mail last weekend from Sam Varghese asking about the possibility of new Mono applications being added to GNOME 3.0, and I answered it. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I see now that the reason Sam was asking was because of Richard Stallman’s recent warnings about Mono – Sam’s article has since appeared with the ominous looking title “GNOME 3.0 may have more Mono apps“. And indeed it may. It may also have more alien technology, we’re not sure yet. We’re still working on an agreement with the DoD to get access to the alien craft in Fort Knox.

I’m currently involved in the Tracker project and our project will be presented by Ivan Frade at the Desktop Summit this Sunday.

As per tradition, the new Openismus T-Shirts are ready for GUADEC 2009 (GCDS). They are again unlike last year’s, and simple enough to wear among civilians. We were a little rushed this year but they turned out nice. Thanks to Kat for fixing things in Inkscape and getting them done.

We only printed a limited number, so seek out an Openismus developer over the first weekend to get yours.

Now that we’ve found a place to get these done in Berlin we’ll probably do a new design (2009 1/2) for the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam in October.

I mean Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, an event joining GUADEC and aKademy!

Tomorrow I’ll fly to Gran Canaria to attend this great event and I got lots of good expectations since it’s gonna be my first GUADEC.
I hope to attend many conferences and hang out with fellow Igalians and friends.

A lot of important names in our world of Open Source and particularly, Open Desktop will be there so it can only be great!

I’ll give two talks in there. A lightning talk about my OCR project — OCRFeeder — and another one that gives a practical view on the new Hildon (or “The Fremantle Way”).
By the way, I used ReStructured Text to do my presentation (using the rst2odp script) and save time from using Open Office. You should try it too.

So, thanks to my dear girlfriend everything is packed already (I always think my socks time-traveled to Narnia), the camera battery is charged, presentations are finished and I’m ready to go — I don’t mention my laptop because we’re “symbiotically” connected and where I go “he” goes.

Hope to see you there!

One of my internet tablet-toting buddies posted an editorial on why Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) have not yet taken off. His points have been made before, here and there, but he ties the ends up nicely and I will not argue with the reasoning. I do, however, want to take it a bit further and offer my own perspective [...]

Many of you already have heard the news: Maemo Harmattan will base its application framework in Qt while keeping most of the Fremantle middleware based on GNOME technologies. The goal is to offer an open, efficient and compelling Linux mobile stack with a cross-platform Qt API used also by Symbian and available in other mobile and traditional operating systems. Hopefully a successful step helping free software projects collaborating with each other and also helping free software developers reaching millions of potential users.

At a personal level it was a pleasure and a honor to explain these news to the GNOME and KDE communities in the same place and at the same time in the first day of the first joint Desktop Summit ever! Hopefully the work Nokia is putting in Harmattan will benefit KDE, GNOME and specially freedesktop.org, that common meeting point in need of so much love.

There is not much time (and even less bandwidth)  to blog extensively in the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, but here you have the main sources I’m aware of:

• slides
• audio (25 mins, untested due to slow connection – hopefully works)
• talk.maemo.org discussion. I’m concentrating my comments on feedback there.
• Vincent blogging from a GNOME point of view
• Der Standard was the first media reporting
• Slashdot picked it up

Catch me up and let’s talk!

Tagged: development, freedesktop.org, gcds, GNOME, KDE, maemo, Nokia, Qt, Symbian

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-06-29 through 2009-07-05

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-06-29 through 2009-07-05

Going Home

I’ve spent the weekend at GUADEC in Gran Canaria but I fly back today to be at home for wee Liam who I really miss. I’ve noticed that people didn’t really understand that for the past year and a half I’ve spent half the week taking care of him, and the rest of the week running the company and doing just a little coding. We should have a place in a crèche in our street starting in October so things will eventually get back to normal.

In the meantime it’s been great to see old friends but I can’t talk about doing much public work in GNOME recently, or promise to help with things.

Maemo and Qt

It’s a relief that Nokia finally announced, via Quim, that they will use Qt instead of GTK+ in future versions of Maemo, though the next version, Fremantle (Maemo 5) is still entirely GTK+. Openismus have known about this for some time and have been preparing for it, but we couldn’t talk about it. As enthusiastic C++ developers, this is less disappointing to us than to other GNOME companies, and it’s been great to see Qt’s development gradually open up to the outside world.

However, it’s clearly a rather arbitrary and disruptive decision. I suspect that some managers are dictating the Nokia-wide use of Qt even in projects that don’t otherwise share code, without understanding the difficulty of the change. UI code is never just a thin layer that can be replaced easily, even if it looks like just another block in the architecture diagram. Likewise, hundreds of C coders cannot become capable C++ coders overnight. I expect great difficulties and delays as a result of the rewrites, but Openismus will be there to help.

Openismus T-Shirts

The economy has affected the traditional GUADEC T-shirt supply, making the Openismus T-shirts even more desirable. Introduce yourself to David King if you’d like one of the last ones from his backpack before he leaves on Tuesday. André, Karsten, and Johannes are here too.

This cross-desktop conference is ideal for David because he’s been intensely learning about all of GTK+, gtkmm, and Qt in the past few months.

GCDS started some days ago. It is not my aim to post about the talks, as many other workmates are posting about them.

But I would like to mention one of the talks, made by Ivan Frade, who talked about present and future of tracker. This is a quite important component of MAFW (btw, don’t miss the MAFW presentation!).

Ivan explained tracker upstream is using ontologies a lot. In fact, they chosen Nepomuk, as it’s the ontology used in KDE and also Gnome community agree with using it too. These kind of ontologies help to understand concepts and properties applications are using, avoiding misunderstandings.

Right now MAFW is using properties like ‘Artist’, ‘Album’ or ‘Title’, but as many other applications it is not using neither Nepomuk nor other ontology at all. So I wonder if it would be helpful (or unnecessary at all) moving to Nepomuk, so at the end instead of using ‘Artist’ string, it would use the corresponding Nepomuk property.

CouchDb is a really cool document-oriented map/reduce database that is nowadays an Apache project. Previously we created the distributed CRM application Ajatus on top of the system and ported CouchDb to Maemo.

Here in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit CouchDb has been somewhat a hot topic, as the Ubuntu project is planning to use it as the content repository for desktop applications.

We had a lunch with Jan Lehnardt today and discussed how to make Midgard2 and CouchDb interoperate better, and as it happens, it is actually very easy: CouchDb has a replication protocol that we can support also in Midgard, making the two repositories able to synchronize content with each other.

There is now a first test implementation of Midgard-to-CouchDb synchronization support, with better Midgard integration and CouchDb-to-Midgard coming soon. Check out the Midgard MVC component on Github. Anyway, already pretty cool!

Setting up replication on CouchDb admin UI:

Midgard record replicated successfully into CouchDb:

I'll talk more about this and repository-oriented application development in my Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web talk tomorrow at 16:45. Be there!

Technorati Tags: couchdb, midgard, replication

By now, all readers of this blog have heard that Nokia announced that Qt (instead of GTK+) will be the base of the next development platform for Maemo Harmattan. What does this mean to the non-developer? First: the next generation of Maemo WILL NOT have this change yet. Fremantle is still on track to be more GTK+ based than Qt based. Second: Qt has a long history of attracting developers to make coding life easier across platforms. Qt based apps will be easier to port across tablets, phones, and PCs. While it's not exactly "Code once, run everywhere" it will be much closer than it has ever been before. To the consumer - it means more available apps.

For a more in-depth look, check out Quim Gil's presentation (slides and audio) as he goes into great detail on the subject.

Also in the news: There are rampaging rumors that Nokia will be turning to Android for phones. Nokia officially denied this. I can see why, too. Nokia spent a lot of time and money first creating the Maemo platform, then buying Trolltech for the Qt experience and finally buying Symbian to reformulate it as open-source. In each of those platforms, they have a far more mature code base and developer reach.

The problem, however, is that Nokia has some catching up to do. The N810 is in the 21st month and the interface has not changed much since release. While it was exceptional at the time, competitors like Palm, Apple, and Google have cropped up. Each of those competitors have worked hard to make their OS intuitive, fast-responding, and pretty. The demonstrations I've seen of Fremantle and Harmattan are far closer, but those are not in a product yet. The longer we wait for them, the less traction Nokia has on competition.

On a related note: The Nokia N97 is the finest piece of mobile hardware I've used - but the software needs some serious help. Old dogs in Symbian make the phone less intuitive (thus less desirable) to use. Examples:

• The system defines every potential Internet connection as an "access point" and applications ask which one to use. It should be improved to have applications automatically use WiFi when recognized hotspots are available and fail back to the carrier's data network.
• The 32GB of storage is fantastic, but the "phone memory" (of which there is only 74MB) is segmented from the 32GB "Mass Storage" memory. Applications store data in the 74MB "drive" and it fills fast. The phone should instead present itself as one large 32GB volume and save the confusion.
• There just aren't enough applications for S60v5 yet. The "touch" version of Symbian needs more supported applications to be desirable in face of competition.

Nokia is aware of ALL of these. They just need to accept that they have the best hardware and focus more time and money on code.

The 2009 Maemo Summit call for content has been open now for a few weeks and we have been receiving some good suggestions but we need more!

Currently Dave Neary, Valério Valério and myself have been going over the submissions, ironing out the details and approving (mostly) the talks but the schedule still has plenty room for more. If you have a suggestion for a cool talk, a lightning session or would like to speak but need help, then make yourself heard now!

Make a suggestion with your subject being pitched to either Users, App Developers, or Platform Developers. It doesn't have to be a full 25 minute talk, it can also be a 5 minute Lightning session.

So what are you waiting for?

Finally… back from LinuxTag I had to go through a big pile of mails and write a lot of answers. I hope I didn’t forget too many important replies :-)

I spent most of the time at the OpenEmbedded stand and even with enough OpenEmbedded people at LinuxTag I didn’t manage to attend a single talk. But the OE presentation was much better prepared compared to last year: We had a nice A0-sized poster with the new logo, Marcin brought 2500 printed flyers and we had adhesive tape. (Adhesive tape is useful because people in the neighbourhood of your booth are going to like you :-) Of course we had interesting devices to show: I collected some decices at home and at the office with the focus on useful devices to get started with embedded Linux (such as the BeagleBoard and a Micro2440).

I built a kind of demo stand for the BeagleBoard and the PICO projector to reduce the cable and device chaos a little bit. It is made from an A5 advertisement sheet holder and a cellphone tripod. The photo shows the idea but most of the necessary cables are missing.

BeagelBoard Demo Stand

We experienced some trouble with my old B4 BeagleBoard and latest filesystem images but the nice guys from the BeagleBoard/TI booth helped us out with a shiny new one – many thanks!

While we are on it… some more people deserve thanks: Marcin for flyers and his presence at the booth, Philip Balister who spent a lot of time at the booth too as well as pHilipp Zabel, Henning Heinold and Robert Schuster. Then there is Tarent who sponsored and organized the Embedded Area and managed to bring a pretty good supply for coffee :-)

The next important event for OE will be the upcoming OEDEM (the OE Developer Meeting). Please take part in the poll for the date when it should take place. We are still searching for a good location – in central Europe preferrably… suggestions are very welcome.

Have a good time…

PS: If someone has a good picture of the OE booth… I’d like to attach one here to this blog.

Update: Marcin has a photo he took at the OE stand:

Another photo - by Petra Kirchner

Yesterday the GNOME Party took place and we all had a lot of fun there. There was food, drinks, live music performed by a bunch of “gnomies” and even the Ice Cream Deatchmatch took place there as well, and all this stuff “dressed” with a wonderful warm night to enjoy in a nice terrace here in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria… so looking backwards I think we can feel very satisfied of how things finally gone.

By the way, and talking about the Ice Cream Deathmatch, I have to say this was my first time taking part of such a contest and now I understand why it is a DEATH-match… as today I woke up with a “sugar-overflow failure” which will probably keep me away from more ice creams for some days :-)… you know, I need to survive yet another year to take part in the next edition of the contest :-)

At last I’d like to share with you a nice picture of the Jam session performed by some GNOME musicians:

Jam session at the Igalia Party

Keep on rockin’ me baby…

Hi,

IDE Integration Beta 2 has been released, including Pluthon Beta 2 release :)

Since PluThon uses Internet Tablet environment as programming environment, most of programming tasks (except coding) are performed on your device. Then, launching/debugging are done directly on Internet Tablet.

Generally, we use distutils utilities for pymaemo to generate Debian packages on device. On this method, you need to create a setup.py script and insert a lot of information regarding to your project. You may face some problem during your first experience on debian package creation or even you may forget to insert some important information. Once your setup.py is properly created, you need to generate your debian package using pymaemo python interpreter.

PluThon also helps you to create Debian package from your project with distutils for maemo utilities. With helpfull graphical wizards, you can create Debian packages from your projects at a glance ;) For more information about this interesting feature, you can check it at PluThon User´s Help.

Try PluThon and give us your feedback!!

Hi from GCDS! Now that both my normal talk and my crazy talk are done I guess I can break the radio silence and say what’s going on like everyone else is doing. I spent a couple of crazy days with Fer preparing our GNOME 1,2.3 talk, although to be honest it was great fun to make up all those jokes and find those videos. For those who asked, he’s preparing a technical ‘Making of’ of the talk, so stay tuned. Because of that I missed some talks and parties, but now that that’s over I’ll try to attend to as much stuff as possible! For starters, yesterday’s Igalia Party was great.

One thing I’ll try to do before I leave is to spend some time with the WebKit guys and try to get some serious hacking going (in my case, I’ll try to finally kill my a11y nemesis bug, which shall remain linkless), so if you want to join us or want to ask anything about WebKit just grab me and ask if you see me.

So, it has been announced that Nokia is to adopt Qt as its preferred toolkit for the next-but-one iteration of the Maemo platform, Harmattan. This has stirred up a little developer concern as GTK and C developers contemplate switching to Qt and C++ but is this really warranted? and what are Nokia's reasons for the switch? Well, it seems that Nokia has no other choice if it wants to continue to compete in a very different world from the one it has dominated for the past several years and here's why.

read more

I gave my Midgard2: Content repository for desktop and the web talk yesterday in GCDS. The slides are available on SlideShare. The main idea was that any application that deals with structured data could benefit from using a content repository like Midgard2 or CouchDB.

So, what is a content repository? It is a service that sits between an application and a data store. It provides several advantages:

• Common rules for data access mean that multiple applications can work with same content without breaking consistency of the data
• Signals about changes let applications know when another application using the repository modifies something, enabling collaborative data management between apps
• Objects instead of SQL mean that developers can deal with data using APIs more compatible with the rest of their desktop programming environment, and without having to fear issues like SQL injection
• Data model is scriptable when you use a content repository, meaning that users can easily write Python or PHP scripts to perform batch operations on their data without having to learn your storage format
• Synchronization and sharing features can be implemented on the content repository level meaning that you gain these features without having to worry about them

Midgard2 is a content repository library that is built on top of glib, libgda and dbus, making it fit the general free desktop infrastructure very well. You can use it in any application that is written in C, Objective-C, Python, PHP, or soon Mono. Learn more from the slides!

Technorati Tags: couchdb, gnome, midgard, mono

stlc45xx (the fully GPLv2 WLAN driver for N800/N810) was included to the staging tree in Linux  2.6.30. Now it’s possible to use linux-omap kernels with an in-tree WLAN driver. (Unfortunately N800/N810 support is broken in linux-omap tree currently, but that’s another story.) This means that the stlc45xx gitorious repository will be phased out and all development should happen in the staging tree instead. I just need to port the remaining patches from gitorious to the staging tree.

Also it was concluded that stlc45xx has so much in common with p54 driver that stlc45xx code should be merged with p54. Christian Lamparter and Max Filippov have merging code from stlc45xx and created a new driver called p54spi. As soon as p54spi is found to be good enough stlc45xx will be removed from the staging tree and p54spi should be used instead. I don’t know yet when this will happen.

So WLAN support is now better in mainline kernels and the next challenge is to get N800/N810 support to mainline kernels.

I was elected today by the foundation to become a member of the Open Web Foundation.

What is Open Data and the Open Web?

Open Data is increasingly important as services move on-line, indeed data is becoming as important as the actual source code itself.
The Open Web then is all about the data and protocols behind web services - an Open Web needs Open Data and Open Data needs Open Specifications.

The Web as the Platform

Some initiatives such as Microformats, OpenID and OAuth have come about recently and gained popularity.
Although they come from different backgrounds they share some of the same goals and have gained widespread adoption on the web. They are also characterized by an agile (for want of a better analogy) development process -OAuth for instance was a matter of weeks between the drafts and the actual specification shipping. As well as sharing goals they also share some of the problems too - there is no clear licensing for specifications, no standard way to deal with Intellectual Property Rights and no overarching community that transcends the projects with a social contract for all to adhere too.

What is the Open Web Foundation?

It is a non-profit foundation, largely modeled after a hybrid of the Apache Software Foundation and things like the OpenID foundation which will create new open specifications for the web.
It will also importantly think about how to create community responsibility and recognition for defending the "Open Web".
 It already has considerable industry and community support and I am incredibly proud to become a member. I am looking forward to working with everyone on our important tasks!.
More about the foundation is here

On monday we (Sergio and me) had the talk about Modest for Fremantle in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Good to see some people interested in our work.

Just Modest is getting a really pretty good shape. Definitely, it’s really cool what we could do with Hildon 2.2/Gtk toolkit. We moved to a really great UI in a few weeks! Also, lots of bugfixes, so Modest is far more reliable now, and also more easy to use than ever.

The slides: Modest talk at Guadec/Desktop Summit 2009

And the  screencast of Modest in Maemo5/Fremantle SDK

Now you can just drop an http URL on the pastebin plasmoid and it’ll give you a tiny url Nice and small feature…

Also I just committed the change of name from plasma-mid to plasma-netbook to avoid problems, confusions and all questions regarding mid devices that are not the focus right now.

Later I’ll post more news about GCDS and about my presentation/paper.

I last wrote about what companies could do to make large-screen Mobile Internet Devices (regardless of producer or actual name) more attractive to consumers. To spare you having to read the epic piece, in summary my analysis is that everything comes down to the out-of-the-box experience. Average users do not want to configure or code-- at the most they want to install and go, with a ready path to any available installations [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAZh0BBOfs8

Yesterday I received a feedback comment here, saying that BlueMaemo can be used to control games in some S60 devices (Thanks Hath!!!), so just tried with my 5800 and the result is in the video above . Playing those games with the tv-out feature of the phone is even cooler

Required software and instructions here.

Note: In order to play Quake 2 in the 5800 you need to turn off OpenGL ES in the game menu.

So, for me and some other Igalians, today was the last day at GCDS.

I also gave an introduction to Hildon 2.2. On this introduction, I talked about how to use the new widgets introduced on Hildon 2.2 as well as ways of accomplishing the same functionalities when porting an application to Maemo Fremantle. To better illustrate this, I compared the EOG for Maemo with the desktop version.

The presentation slides are below:

Hands On The New Hildon View more documents from j_rocha.

And that’s it, I must say I really liked my first GUADEC and I’m willing to go for the next one!
Maybe I’ll be able to write some post-event posts to compensate the lack of blogging during these days.

Hi,all:

In the past two weeks, the major work is to mine user interest via observing user behavior in the gpodder. I try to record top score keywords of one episode which user chooses to download in the behavior model. Then use a mining algorithm to pick up top-n keywords from this model to populate the user profile.

I also tried to re-design the recommendation score algorithm. I want to use new social tag feature in opencalais to score each episode.

I think until now, the basic work of recommendation has been done. In the next phase, I would focus on the context-aware module which will not only be in charge of user-awareness but also be aware of device and environment context. I will try to design a framework to implement basic functions and then other developers can easily use this framework to add context-aware funtions into their applications.

In the next two weeks, I will do some paper works. I will document the new score algorithm and the framework. At the same time , I will fix some bugs in current code then release a new version of gpodder , then get some feedbacks from the community.

If you are interested in my project, then you can find much more information on http://garage.maemo.org/projects/newssprite. You can also check out the code on the svn repository.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome.Thanks.

Hello everybody. Today I’d like to show you some results of my work with Valério Valério on his famous BlueMaemo. We’ve done great ammount of job and I’m pretty happy with what we have  got. Mostly I’ve made just general restyling but some useful features was also added. Hope you’ll enjoy it too when it will [...]

Today in the State of the Map conference I gave a lightning talk introducing Till Harbaum's OSM2Go, a wonderfully simple tool for contributing to OpenStreetMap.

If you want to contribute to a freely available map of the world, download OSM2Go to your tablet and start mapping! My slides are available on SlideShare.

See also my Qaiku notes for SoTM day 1 and SotM day 2. Really amazing to see how far the project has advanced since the 2007 conference. Much of Western countries is already mapped, and many NGOs are working to get the developing world mapped, in many places for the first time ever in digital format.

Technorati Tags: maemo, openstreetmap, sotm09

Back in Helsinki, after a week in Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. This year it was great, and i enjoyed it a lot probably because i am more involved in the community.

It was a pretty active week, starting with my talk on Sunday in the cross-desktop track (slides). I explained there what did we do in tracker 0.6 , and what do we plan for tracker 0.7. This can be interesting for maemo-fans, as far as tracker 0.6.9x is the version available in Fremantle, and 0.7 is in the roadmap for Harmattan.

During the week, i was talking with some of the Zeitgeist project people. In few words, Zeitgeist will monitor and store the activity of the user, analyze it and extract relations between documents, applications, tags, etc. (E.G. “every time i edit doc1, i read webpage2″). Tracker has already the information about documents and applications, so instead of building their own database, they can set the “relations” directly into it. Zeitgeist is one of the hype projects now in GNOME and i am very happy to see Tracker participating in such an ambitious idea. [Note for hackers: if the things work fine, be ready to write a maemo UI for it!]

Taking advantage of the Akademy-GUADEC co-location, we (tracker team) also had an informal meeting with Sebastian Trueg, from the Nepomuk-KDE project. We are sharing ontologies and we agreed on how to distribute them and organize the documentation. The idea is to have a shared-desktop-ontologies package for all desktops and platforms with the nepomuk core ontologies, allowing applications to install extensions.

And finally after some parties and more talk with developers, i had another presentation in the Spanish GUADEC, explaining again tracker (slides in spanish), but this time showing the tools, code and examples.

I expect to see some results (i.e. more information into tracker from different apps) sooner than later. Stay tuned!

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-07-06 through 2009-07-12

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-07-06 through 2009-07-12

As I hinted in my previous post, I started working on adding N800 and N810 support to mainline kernels. I have now a four week long summer vacation (the best part living in Finland) and this is a perfect vacation project, simple enough so that I can work only for an hour at a time.

I created a wiki page for what needs to be done and what problems there will be. Please take a look and update it as needed. I also sent an email to linux-omap list in a hope to get contributors. It would be nice to finally have mainline kernels supporting N800 and N810.

Disclaimer: This is a personal project of mine, Nokia is not involved in any way. So expect progress to be slow.

After the many discussions the Tracker team did at the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria I think a lot of people will start trying out Tracker’s master. We will indeed start making 0.7.x releases somewhere this or next month.

Meanwhile I’d like to point out that among the decisions that we made during the meetings and at the Ontology BOFs is that we wont use the URL of resources as the RDF’s subject field anymore. Instead we’ll use the nie:isStoredAs predicate for storing the URL.

Right now we already set nie:isStoredAs, but we still use the URL as subject. This will change, though. Just assume the subject to be something you should only use as an unique piece of data about the resource, pointing at it (in the RDF store). More details can be found here. If you want the thing itself (the file, the E-mail, the .desktop file, the website’s URL), ask for nie:isStoredAs.

For example:

<file:///tmp/myfile.png> a nfo:FileDataObject .
<urn:nepomuk:file:d7ea...> a nfo:Image ;
	nie:isStoredAs <file:///tmp/myfile.png> .

And to query:

tracker-sparql -q "SELECT ?url WHERE { ?subject a nfo:Image ; nie:isStoredAs ?url }

We know that many people want these 0.7.x releases to happen soon. I can only invite those people to just join coding. Awesome stuff is indeed taking place, but at the same time there is a lot of work and decision making to do.

Things like a user interface like the T-S-T (Tracker Search Tool) from Tracker 0.6, documentation with a lot of examples. SPARQL, SPARQL Update and Nepomuk all have quite a lot of documentation by themselves. But people are still asking for even more examples. Anybody interested in making that? Maybe if somebody who was at Rob Taylor’s BOF could write down his and Jürg’s lectures on RDF and SPARQL? I think they explained it all very well.

So many things happened during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit that it’s impossible to summarize them all, but here’s a list of the ones that come to my mind now:

• Alfredo Kraus auditorium is a great venue, and its location couldn’t be better.
• The University was less spectacular, but from a functional point of view I think it was more suited to this kind of conference than the auditorium (to begin with, Internet connection worked better). Its main problems: distance to the city center and lack of places to have lunch.
• When Jos van den Oever said: we not only share specifications, we also share code, and everyone in the room started to applaud.
• Despite that, and at least for me due to the packed schedule, I couldn’t attend any of the KDE talks. I don’t know if other people had the same feeling, but I left Gran Canaria a bit skeptical about the actual usefulness of having both conferences together.
• All keynotes were good.
• Moblin 2 looks promising.
• GNOME Shell, Zeitgeist, Clutter, WebkitGTK+, client side windows.
• The hacking sessions at the hotel lobby.
• Nokia’s announcement that Maemo will switch away from GTK+. While this is a complex decision with a lot of causes (probably some of them political and some of them technical), I think it’s fair to say that this is (at least party) a failure of GNOME/GTK+, and deserves some debate inside the GNOME community.
• Few women giving talks. I hope there comes a day when the number of women in free software conferences is not a matter of mention.
• The weather was too hot for me (although at night it was fantastic).
• The beach at night.
• Canarian food at the dinner with the GNOME Hispano team.
• Fernando and Xan’s GNOME 1, 2, 3 show.
• The GNOME band.
• Kimmo using a whiteboard for his talk.

Starting with Fremantle, packages can now be managed by developers through the maemo.org packages interface. Community testers can help in the QA process by testing applications in the queue and giving thumbs up/down for a package.

At the same time we open the extras-testing and extras repositories for Fremantle for promotion through the interface.

The interface has the following features:

• Package search
• Package listings per repository
  
• Only allow maintainers to promote a package
• Request package maintainership
• Automatic package maintainership assignment on first upload of a package
• Automatic dependency tree checking
• QA queue for testing repository
• Promotion unlock to stable (Extras) repository based on karma score
• Leaving comments when you encountered problems with a package

We index all Fremantle Extras*, SDK and Nokia-binaries repositories, so we can check for availability of every dependency. A warning will be shown on a package information page, when there are missing dependencies. Package promotion will be blocked until the issue has been resolved.

At this moment the interface is in beta testing mode, so please be aware that there might be some rough edges. Promotion will happen manually for the first few promotions, so we can make sure that everything is working. Feel free to file bugs in bugzilla, if you encounter any.

Improvements will come in the next few weeks. More integration with the autobuilder is already coming next week.

In a later post, I will discuss the new promotion process for Fremantle a bit more in depth. This is still something that needs to be refined a bit.

Let’s start with a relatively simple graph. The graph shows the relationships between John, Fred, Max and Picca. John and Fred are humans who we’ll refer to as contacts. Max and Picca are pets. Max is a dog and Picca is a parrot. Both Picca and Max are owned by John. Fred claims that John is his friend.

Modern Linux system have all sorts of fake filesystems cluttering the output of df and mount: tmpfs, bind mounts, fuse for ~/.gvfs, etc. I have only one real partition on my laptop, yet mount returns 22 lines of output.

Question: are there any df-like utilities that filter out all the crap and show only interesting bits? The standard df as well as pydf both display 8 lines instead of 1. Discus is worse: it shows 20. GUI utilities like Baobab also suffer from this confusion, especially bind mounts.

Ironically, Ubuntu's update-motd gets confused by Ubuntu's private user directories and displays disk stats for ~/Private as if it were a real partition.

I’ll not talk about GCDS on this post: others said everything one could tell about the conference! It was really awesome: meeting KDE people is just an awesome experience. It was good also to see more brazilians in the conference (after FISL, the brazilian kde community seems to have started to grow or at least organize more itself) . Ah, during GCDS I joined for the first time the e.V. assembly and it’s really good the feeling that I’m helping the KDE community a little bit more. KDE is all about it’s community and it’s community is great! Well, enough with the sentimental part. Let’s talk about the theory behind the code of plasma-netbook.

For those that missed the presentation, here are the slides

The summer season is finally here after a bunch of exams. Time to think about how to spend a part of my free time working on some open source projects that have been on the back-burner for some weeks now.

Since my last post, the thing about Qt has been announced, and the Fremantle SDK beta 2 has been published. Last time I tailored gPodder to run on Fremantle, everything worked in the SDK, but reportedly not on the devices - it's very difficult for developers to really test and develop for Fremantle with different versions in both the SDK and on the device (it works fine in the SDK!).

So, instead of spending time on the Fremantle version that might not be really worth it after all, I decided to improve the core of gPodder and make it work fast and reliable on both Desktop computers and N8x0 devices. When the final version of the SDK is released, I can always re-evaluate and get the code running in a few days, depending on how much has changed in comparison to the beta SDK.

Even though I'm not actively working on gPodder for Fremantle, keep reporting bugs so that I know what to start working on when I decide to continue development on it in case the first "stable" version of the SDK is released or a device is announced. Again, the time will be better spent working on improving gPodder for both the N800 and N810 until that happens.

Note: I actually wrote something like this already in GNOME Blog, and a combination of the Intel graphics freezes in Jaunty and GNOME Blog not creating a local copy of in-progress entries cost me the lot. Funny that Wordpress, a web-app, offers better transparent data retention across unexpected events than a local client. I have resolved to use Tomboy for drafting blog entries off-line now, and to figure out how to patch GNOME Blog to save drafts.

What defines good Contacts application? Some will say that it depends on device which runs it, but I think that it is not true.

I am using Nokia E66 phone. It is running Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1 (what ever it means). As a phone it has phone book called “Contacts”. Simple application which allows to have unlimited amount of entries with quite big set of possible fields. But phone also has GPS unit and is able to connect to Internet via WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM. Why I mention it? Because default address book ignore those elements…

So what should good Contacts application do? Except standard fields like phone numbers, SIP “numbers”, email addresses, web addresses, home/work addresses, birthdays, anniversaries, pictures, notes… I think that things like GPS coordinates for each address would be nice — add “Drive/Walk to” functionality and you get phone which can really be named “Navigator” (IIRC there was PalmOS powered PDA with that function).

Next thing which would be nice (especially with flat rate for GPRS) would be integration of IM communicator. Why I have to launch separate application to check who from my friends is available on Jabber, Skype, ICQ, GaduGadu, AIM, MSN etc. Why not have device auto login into those networks to check who from entries in address book is available to chat/talk with. And then let me choose do I want to make GSM call or Skype, SIP or other VoIP call. This will also remove situation which is present in most multi-protocol communicators: few entries for one person just because it use 7 accounts on 5 protocols. And let integrate all chats in one application with SMS/MMS stuff — this is done on Palm Pre according to their promotion videos.

And all those things should sync with external servers of course. So if I have Facebook account then let it fetch my connections from there and merge into address book — this is done on Palm Pre already. But let it be also second way (if user choose to) — so phone will check who from my contacts have a Facebook account and send join request.

Next thing: groups… Symbian has groups support and this is working, user can even define conferences numbers for groups and few other things. Next step should be linking contacts — you know: wife, kids, secretary, co-worker who do your job when you are on vacations… PalmOS Agendus had something like that, Symbian has only imitation (it is possible to enter person name but thats all).

Will there be such application? Maybe one day…

Related posts:

1. Calling on Maemo?
2. Choosing next cellphone
3. Syncing mobile devices

Introduction

The next msn-pecan release started as 0.0.20 but there are so many changes that
it’s going to be 0.1.0. It is way more stable than 0.0.19 but we still would
like to do more extensive testing, so we are rolling a release candidate in
order to fix critical bugs that might be lingering. Hopefully it will be the
only release candidate before the actual release.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-07-13 through 2009-07-19

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-07-13 through 2009-07-19

Registration for the Maemo Summit 2009 has been opened.

The summit will have free entrance, but registration is required to grant you food, drinks, a maemo.org shirt and a seat. Please register as soon as possible, so we can get a clear picture of how many people are expected.

The registration form also has an option for sponsorship requests. Details about sponsorship will be published later and requests will be evaluated after this. You can always change your registration entry at a later point in time if needed.

The event location details and a list of participants can be found here.

See you all in Amsterdam at Maemo Summit 2009!

As Maemo 5 (Fremantle) gets closer I’m worried about Nokia implementing a buggy untested “3rd party policy” without having a dialog with the maemo.org community before. It was again the community running into problems and then finding out about it. Very annoying that Nokia does not learn to do better. Documentation for developers. It is unclear which widgets [...]

Registration for the second Maemo Summit, to be held on the 9th, 10th and 11th of October at WesterGasFabriek, Amsterdam is now open. It promises to be a great event just like last year, so go register now!

On a related note, the schedule is filling up but there is still time for you to submit a talk proposal. If you have a cool subject to talk about, either in a lightning session or longer talk format then you should edit the wiki as soon as possible.

read more

I had this post planned for a long time, but here it goes.

When we were developing the renderer some time ago, we saw that code was getting out of control because handling state changes was becoming hell, so we decided to rework it applying the State Pattern. Though Zeenix thinks it was my wife’s idea, it was actually Iago’s.

The other day I found a function that was sinning against that pattern. It was _update_playcount_cb. When it was written, the call had been place in a central point where every media change going thru, but it was a bit ugly as it was using an if statement checking for the current state. This application of the state pattern is not completely canonical as we keep the current state but only because state classes are stateless and we want to keep them as Singleton’s, so the easiest way was keeping that variable to point the current state, but of course using it in an if statement is ugly.

Fortunately, I checked where it was needed to call that function and it saw it was in couple of places, so I reworked the code a bit and place the calls in the exact places where it was needed, so i didn’t need to make that function support the state pattern (in fact it would have been stupid).

But this state pattern still needs some finetuning. We’d need to remove the worker and increase the number of states and add substates to control for example the buffering and hide properly some GStreamer state changes that would make the code easier to understand and maintain.

With the latest Beta2 SDK for Fremantle, GTK+ was updated to 2.14 from 2.12. We (Openismus) made a new release of Gtkmm and Glibmm, which are both packaged and uploaded to extras-devel, as you can see with the new maemo.org/packages. There is also an updated hildonmm release, with improved documentation. Many thanks to Claudio and Alberto for applying patches that I submitted, to improve the Hildon C API reference (and our C++ API reference, which is automatically generated from it). If you spot any bugs, please email the Gtkmm mailing list about the problem, and we'll fix it.

Finally, there is a testing release of libhildondesktopmm, available from the Maemomm garage page. It's not finished yet, and does not appear to work well in Scratchbox, but with some testing and bug reports, we're sure that it will improve.

People often complain that autotools is complicated. But the alternatives generally involve a learning curve, require large changes to existing projects, and don’t provide the features or the command-line interface that we’ve become used to with autotools, making life difficult for people building tarballs, and for distros’ packaging tools.

One of the biggest annoyances with traditional autotools has been the need for a Makefile.am file in each sub-directory, and the need to create (and link) non-installed convenience libraries in each one. That leads to lots of repetitive Makefile.am code. More code means more errors, less clarity, and difficult refactoring. I had forgotten how much I hated that about autotools when I first learned it.

One of the advantages often mentioned for alternatives such as cmake is the ability to define the build in just one text file. However, automake has supported the non-recursive way for a while. Now you can have just one top-level Makefile.am. The configure.ac is still separate, but that’s fine with me.

Daniel Elstner changed Glom to use a single Makefile.am, removing 47 annoying little Makefile.am files while preserving our special stuff for client-only, Maemo, and Windows builds, with no disruption for developers using the source from git or for people building from the tarball. It’s a great improvement that shows how attractive non-recursive automake can be. OK, so Daniel is an autotools expert, but I’d still rather move from autotools to non-recursive autotools than take the leap of faith needed to move from autotools to something completely different.

Apparently this is also more efficient, leading to faster build times, particularly when building in parallel with the -j option, with more correct dependencies. And there’s no need to mention those convenience libraries repeatedly to work around linker errors.

Together with autoreconf (replacing hand-built autogen.sh files), autotools can be much nicer these days.

On the debian developers mailing list madduck asked about various package checking tools in debian. The resulting discussion revealed how many tools there are in debian to check packages; tools like piuparts, PET, and packagecheck. In contrast to Maemo, debian hackers seemed to be obsessed with the quality of their packages. The mantra “Policy is your friend” is ubiquitous in debian.

I don’t want to place the differences between the two projects in a negative light since the goals are so different. Debian aims to be an easy to use operating system whereas Maemo is a device. Maemo developers often want the device to do cool things, for them packaging is an after-thought. This is why there is a maemo.org debmaster of course; to help developers with packaging and integrate into the operating system so they can focus on cool features and libraries.

Having a debian background I am constantly thinking about the overall system, trying to assure that packages install well, that things “just work” for users. This sometimes makes me wonder if I am doing everything I can for maemo developers and what is the most effective way to encourage best practices and assure quality. While I am excited by the work Niels has done with package promotion and the potential that maemian has, I feel there is more that one can do. While I am sure it is boring to many developers, packaging policy is critical for building the kind of tools that Niels has built. You need to know that the developer has submitted the right email address, declared the correct dependencies, etc. Policy truly is your friend.

I hope to get the chance to speak about packaging at the Maemo Summit, I have submitted a talk anyway, we’ll see if it gets accepted. I also would like to encourage developers who target the Maemo platform to think more about making life easier for their users – after all, it will bring you more users if you can easily install and use your application. I would also like to know more specifically where the pain is, what sucks about the QA process, what sucks about packaging (aside from having to do it at all. :P) Let’s make packaging policy a tool to make everyone’s life easier.

Went to EuroPython, met new people, had a great time.

Updated gtkeggdeps, the interactive Python package dependency browser. Collaborated with Thomas Lotze, who maintains the engine (tl.eggdeps) that gtkeggdeps wraps, to resolve API mismatches. Moved the sources to launchpad.net, added a test suite, made it use zc.buildout for convenient development.

Moved the source repository of gtimelog, the simple desktop time tracker, to launchpad.net. Failed to do anything else with it. :-(

Tried to work on xdot, wrestled with git-svn merges, failed abysmally. Asked upstream to upload xdot to PyPI.

Released ZODB Browser, but this deserves a separate post.

Sent a bunch of pyflakes patches from my old branch upstream, created trac tickets for the rest. Wrestled with bzr-svn merges, failed abysmally.

This summer I'm working for 2 months at Igalia, a spanish free software company, and they assigned me the project of writing a Python binding for MAFW (a new multimedia library that will be included in Freemantle).

After few days I discovered that PyMaemo team was already working to it, so I asked to join them and they accepted me!

I really love Python language and since I think other developers love it too, I think we should provide good bindings for every library available in Maemo, so lot of developers can start writing their applications in this language.

I'll work to this project full time until the first week of september, so I hope to be able to learn a lot and to contribute as much as I can to this project.

If anyone else want to join PyMaemo team and help us to develop Python bindings, I think he will be welcome!

A technique that we started using in Tracker is utilizing the mainloop to do asynchronous functions. We decided that avoiding threads is often not a bad idea.

Instead of instantly falling back to throwing work to a worker thread we try to encapsulate the work into a GSource’s callback, then we let the callback happen until all of the work is done.

An example

You probably know sqlite3’s backup API? If not, it’s fairly simple: you do sqlite3_backup_init, followed by a bunch of sqlite3_backup_step calls, finalizing with sqlite3_backup_finish. How does that work if we don’t want to block the mainloop?

I removed all error handling for keeping the code snippet short. If you want that you can take a look at the original code.

static gboolean
backup_file_step (gpointer user_data)
{
  BackupInfo *info = user_data; int i;
  for (i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
    if ((info->result = sqlite_backup_step(info->backup_db, 5)) != SQLITE_OK)
        return FALSE;
  }
  return TRUE;
}

static void
backup_file_finished (gpointer user_data)
{
  BackupInfo *info = user_data;
  GError *error = NULL;
  if (info->result != SQLITE_DONE) {
    g_set_error (&error, _DB_BACKUP_ERROR,
                 DB_BACKUP_ERROR_UNKNOWN,
                 “%s”, sqlite3_errmsg (
                    info->backup_db));
  }
  if (info->finished)
    info->finished (error, info->user_data);
  if (info->destroy)
    info->destroy (info->user_data);
  g_clear_error (&error);
  sqlite3_backup_finish (info->backup);
  sqlite3_close (info->db);
  sqlite3_close (info->backup_db);
  g_free (info);
}

void
my_function_make_backup (const gchar *dbf, OnBackupFinished finished,
                         gpointer user_data, GDestroyNotify destroy)
{
  BackupInfo *info = g_new0(BackupInfo, 1);
  info->user_data = user_data;
  info->destroy = destroy;
  info->finished = finished;
  info->db = db;
  sqlite3_open_v2 (dbf, &info->db, SQLITE_OPEN_READONLY, NULL);
  sqlite3_open (”/tmp/backup.db”, &info>backup_db);
  info->backup = sqlite3_backup_init (info->backup_db, “main”,
                                      info->db, “main”);
  g_idle_add_full (G_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, backup_file_step,
                   info, backup_file_finished);
}

Note that I’m not suggesting to throw away all your threads and GThreadPool uses now.
Note that just like with threads you have to be careful about shared data: this way you’ll allow that other events on the mainloop will interleave your backup procedure. This is async(ish), it’s precisely what you want, of course.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-07-20 through 2009-07-26

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-07-20 through 2009-07-26

I'm back from vacation, summer went fast as always! Tried to stay away from computers, spending the time with family & friends and enjoying the weather while it lasts... But I did have little coding fun also, testing how well "multitouch" would work in N810 ;-)

Here comes video:



Update: Like all respected magicians, I'll show how this trick works for the ones who didn't already know the behavior of (resistive, single-touch) touchscreens under multiple touches. As thp first commented, it is "using the 'merged' blob position that you get with the single touch screen and interpreting it as the middle of two or more equal-pressure points".

Now here is a video showing the same demo in PC, with "cheat mode" turned on:


So it's mostly useless... but somewhat f-f-f-fun :)

[...] The largest US telecommunications companies, Verizon and AT&T, have struggled to fit wireless access into their business models (although AT&T has done better of late). The concern, of course, revolves around monetization-- once a widespread, reliable and easy-to-access WiFi infrastructure gained traction, smaller service providers would have the incentive and the means to compete with the bigger players... the latter of which appear to develop allergies to free markets once they reach critical mass. [...]

After run the cool Qt/s60 demos produced by Ariya on my phone, I decided to test if Qt is really cross-platform . Well, I’ve to say that I’m really impressed, the demos run smoothly on my desktop and as you can see below on my n810

Digital clock

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

Runs out of the box, I only made a small change in order to assign the device volume buttons to the three animation effects: Slide, Flip, and Rotate, because the menu doesn’t work, probably need some integration with hildon (I’m a Qt noob : ) )

Weather info

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB04orP25iM

An propriety used in this demo (setOpacity) only exist in Qt 4.5 onwards, and the available version on the maemo repositories is the 4.4, so I commented some lines of code, my changes led to a bug as you can see in the video, the main weather state icon isn’t correctly updated. Note that the demo runs out of the box without any change, but due to the old Qt version used, the animations aren’t shown without a small fix.

The third Qt/s60 demo requires more changes, because of the use of  input methods,  let’s hope that everything run out of the box in Fremantle.

More information and the videos of the demos running on an s60 device: http://ariya.blogspot.com/2009/07/like-startling-sign-that-fate-had.html

Update: Qt 4.5.x is actually available for maemo4 under the extras-devel repository, see comment below (Thanks Kaitsu).

Kaj Grönholm's post about multi-touch motivated me to implement my previous idea of using two tablets to emulate multi-touch input (which should allow for 2 "real" multi-touch cursors). So, I quickly hacked together a modified version of the SimpleSimulator from TUIO_CPP and loaded it on a N800 and a N810. The result works quite well: (link to the video)

Again, the multitouch version of NumptyPhysics uses two cursors for dragging and three cursors for deleting, which works nicely on a multitouch table. Oh, and if you crank up the volume on that video, you will hear the sounds that we have added to NumptyPhysics recently in order to give some audible feedback about the user actions. Stay tuned for more in a few days.

While working on the maemo.org package interface, I noticed that quite a few package's developers didn't notice the changes in Fremantle regarding maemo-select-menu-location.

Fremantle changes the way applications are visible in the menu. There are no sub menus like "Extra" or "Utility" anymore. All installed 3rd party software will be visible under "Applications" by default.

This means that maemo-select-menu-location is obsolete and has been removed from the SDK. More info about the removal can be found in this bug.

There are currently about 60 package instances in Fremantle Extras-devel that depend or pre-depend on this obsolete package. These packages can not be promoted to Extras-testing until their author updates the package.

Daniel has started working on a Porting to Fremantle QA wiki page, which should point out some changes needed when porting to Fremantle. I hope this will help developers with the problems they encounter for now.

The wild bunch at maemo talk know well by now that I've been a hardcore advocate of Nokia's internet tablets ever since a fellow engineer quietly placed a preproduction 770 on my desk a few years ago. I have been on a rabid one-man mission to promote the touchscreen tablets ever since [...]

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday were the “core” days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, with cross-desktop and KDE & GNOME specific presentations throughout. I caught a number of presentations, but mostly I was chatting in the hallway track, or doing work on the schedule, or actually working.

Nearing the end of the series on the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.

On Wednesday morning (after SMASHED), we had to get to the new location for the conference. I missed the bus window of 8am to 9am, so I took a taxi, without knowing the address of where we were going, other than knowing that it was the “Gran Canaria university, informatics building”. Turns out that’s not enough information for a taxi driver Anyway, got there eventually, late for the opening session, and a little more expensive than expected. I also lost some change down the back of the bucket seat, so he even got a tip.

Anyway, the rest of the day went pretty well, and we had some great mobile related presentations (to compliment all of the other mobile related content in the conference):

• Multimedia in your pocket, by Stefan Kost: Nice presentation on using MAFW to build complex multimedia applications
• Designing Moblin-Netbook. A free desktop on a 7-10″ Screen, by Nick Richards: Great overview of the Moblin platform, and the design principles guiding it – from design requirements, personas, and dealing with constraints.
• Hildon desktop in Maemo 5 by Kimmo Hämäläinen: An overview of the Hildon desktop on a whiteboard by Kimmo.
• MAFW: the Media Application Framework for Maemo by Iago Toral: Drilling down into the details of MAFW.
• Why its easier to re-invent rather than participate on the mobile? by Shreyas Srinivasan: My favourite presentation of the day. Shreyas laid out what he had expectied from GNOME Mobile, the problems he encountered, his understanding of the issues, and some proposed solutions to those problems. All in 15 minutes. I really appreciate people who don’t pad out the content that they have to present and instead focus on making a high-impact presentation.
• GNOME Mobile BOF, led by myself: We talked about how far we’ve come, the original goals of the initiative, and identified a bunch of things that we can improve short-term and medium-term.

Had a great dinner again on Wednesday, in a tapas bar with some Red Hatters and Michael Meeks, and then on to the party. Wednesday night was the golf club party, sponsored by Collabora, with a free bar until 1 (of which I mostly did not avail – I was being good), and I was in bed by 2. It was a great party, and I picked up another couple of cyclists for the outing I had been planning for Friday, before they wimped out on me.

MDK laments the demise of the simple file in the onslaught of storage services:

Sure, the applications still give you a way to share things and take them out of the storage. You can export a contact out of your address book as a vcard file. But the role of The File here is slowly being reduced to a role of an intermediate storage medium. The business card is temporarily put in the .vcf file before it gets injected into somebody else’s database (another address book?).

As more and more applications operate on databases, the computer is becoming a monolithic black-box that “has things”. How exactly (and where) the data is stored is becoming less clear. The application and the interface becomes united with the user data. It becomes one.

This echos the sentiments of Alex Payne when he warned against what he calls Everything Buckets:

Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?”

And yes, I agree that obscure application-specific databases are not really better than obscure proprietary file formats.

This is exactly why I've been talking about content repositories, services like Midgard2 and CouchDb that not only can provide superior content storage and organization, but do it in a way that multiple applications can share. You can easily write your own scripts to perform batch operations on the data, and receive D-Bus notifications when something changes.

And good repositories also provide easy synchronization tools so you can have your data available on all of your computers, and even on the web. If they can also do peer-to-peer sharing, we're close to achieving the fully free cloud.

Technorati Tags: couchdb, gnome, midgard

Today I implemented the str() function for our SPARQL engine.

This makes it possible to use a <subject> just like a string.

Let’s first insert some data into our SPARQL store.

tracker-sparql -u -q 
   "INSERT { <urn:baaa> a rdfs:Resource }"

Following query doesn’t work, as variable ?s isn’t assigned with a xsd:string here, but a rdfs:Resource.

tracker-sparql -q
"SELECT ?s WHERE {
	?s a rdfs:Resource .
	FILTER REGEX (?s, '.*baaa', 's')
}"

This version works, because we introduce the str() function.

tracker-sparql -q
"SELECT ?s WHERE {
	?s a rdfs:Resource .
	FILTER REGEX (str(?s), '.*baaa', 's')
}"
  urn:uuid:94baaa45-99a6-e0f4-0bd9-f83ca90a9039
  urn:uuid:6e909006-a6ac-baaa-2ae4-cc01adcd5de7
  urn:baaa

You can also use a direct match, of course.

tracker-sparql -q
"SELECT ?s WHERE {
	?s a rdfs:Resource .
	FILTER (str(?s) = 'urn:baaa')
}"
  urn:baaa

By the way. Ivan made a cute tool in Python for typing in your queries:

It even does some code completion. If you type nco:[TAB] it’ll show you the NCO ontology. Nice!

Over the last months ProFUSION worked hard on building Memphis, an in car entertainment system. Now we can finally publish the first preview of it, it is real and runs on couple of hardware we will demo later, including Nokia N810 (OMAP 2420) and Freescale iMX27, iMX31 and iMX35 with displays ranging from 4 to 7 inches, from 640×480 to 800×480.

The product is based on free software Canola2 platform, which we support as well. While some parts of it were made available over these months, including our optimized thumbnailer “Ethumb”, some parts will be available later, under the same license. It’s not an issue as you’re unlikely to get it from Volkswagen and running it BMW, what matter for clients is the product as a whole, not just software interface.

Work done so far is not just a face lift of Canola, it goes deeply in optimizations, platform roots and changes plugins as well. The roadmap includes fast UPnP server and control point, as well as GPS/maps and other car useful services.

Theme is just a demo, we call it “ProFUSION theme” as we use our own colors and font. Clients will get an unique look and feel as well as custom changes, such as integrating with real panel keys, text to speech and voice recognition systems.

Read more at http://profusion.mobi/node/17.

Back in 2007 I had what I thought at the time was a unique brainstorm in the area of computing and communications. Noting the quickening convergence between PCs and cell phones, I suggested that the obvious next step would be to bridge the two in a way that had not yet been done: shrink the PC down to a credit-card sized contraption about 5 mm or so thick and encapsulate it in a format that allowed it to pe plugged in, PC card style, into an array of device "skins" [...]