Over my many years in ministry I've worked with all sorts of people dealing with all sorts of losses – many of them utter tragedies. The pain of loss is different for each person, and never to be minimised. One of the worst things that people say is that you will get over it, or that time is a great healer. It's not. So I developed my bereavement theology of the mineshaft. It should probably be noted that I live in Cornwall, where the experience described is perhaps less unlikely than in other parts of the world!A

Imagine you have a garden, a beautiful garden, that you have tended, worked in and enjoyed for a long time. And one morning you wake up to find that an old mineshaft has opened up in the middle of your garden – a great yawning hole, into which many of the things you cherished have fallen irretrievably. And now you have to start finding your way around the garden with this bloody great hole.

In the earliest days, you find that you can barely set foot in the garden. Whichever way you try to go, you find the mineshaft is in your way, and you fall in, causing yourself bruising, pain, broken bones. And you rely on others to lift you out.

Then you start to find ways of getting yourself out of the hole, pausing while you're there to look around at the bits of your garden you have lost.

As time goes on, you start to make new paths around your garden: you find a way to get down to the raspberry canes at the bottom without actually falling in the hole. You realise that you still have the camellias if not the roses, and that you can still enjoy what is left of your garden. You build some new paths, lay fresh paving and even plant new rosebushes.

But just occasionally you forget the hole is there, walk the wrong way, and fall in. And when you do it hurts every bit as much as it did on the first day. Never believe people who try to tell you it should hurt less: that hole stays as deep and painful as ever. You just get on with living and fall in less often.

So you get on with living with the hole. Your life goes on around it.

And if you are really, really lucky, it will fill with water, acquire rushes at the edges, and you can float water lilies on it in memory of the one you have lost. And that's the point when you realise that your garden is more beautiful for having loved, even if you have lost the one you love.

Over my many years in ministry I've worked with all sorts of people dealing with all sorts of losses – many of them utter tragedies. The pain of loss is different for each person, and never to be minimised. One of the worst things that people say is that you will get over it, or that time is a great healer. It's not. So I developed my bereavement theology of the mineshaft. It should probably be noted that I live in Cornwall, where the experience described is perhaps less unlikely than in other parts of the world!A

Imagine you have a garden, a beautiful garden, that you have tended, worked in and enjoyed for a long time. And one morning you wake up to find that an old mineshaft has opened up in the middle of your garden – a great yawning hole, into which many of the things you cherished have fallen irretrievably. And now you have to start finding your way around the garden with this bloody great hole.

In the earliest days, you find that you can barely set foot in the garden. Whichever way you try to go, you find the mineshaft is in your way, and you fall in, causing yourself bruising, pain, broken bones. And you rely on others to lift you out.

Then you start to find ways of getting yourself out of the hole, pausing while you're there to look around at the bits of your garden you have lost.

As time goes on, you start to make new paths around your garden: you find a way to get down to the raspberry canes at the bottom without actually falling in the hole. You realise that you still have the camellias if not the roses, and that you can still enjoy what is left of your garden. You build some new paths, lay fresh paving and even plant new rosebushes.

But just occasionally you forget the hole is there, walk the wrong way, and fall in. And when you do it hurts every bit as much as it did on the first day. Never believe people who try to tell you it should hurt less: that hole stays as deep and painful as ever. You just get on with living and fall in less often.

So you get on with living with the hole. Your life goes on around it.

And if you are really, really lucky, it will fill with water, acquire rushes at the edges, and you can float water lilies on it in memory of the one you have lost. And that's the point when you realise that your garden is more beautiful for having loved, even if you have lost the one you love.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2010-12-27 through 2011-01-02

Front Page

First MWKN of the new year

Welcome to 2011! The eagle-eyed (rather than the bleary-eyed) will have spotted the lack of an issue last week. This is due to the (now) traditional one week Christmas break for MWKN. Apologies for the lack of notice. Thanks to Ryan Abel, as ever, for helping edit the issue; and special guest editor, Sebastiaan Lauwers, who helped us get over the line (click the "read more" link if you'd like to get involved yourself). This year is going to be an interesting one: a Maemo 5 Community update programme; two official MeeGo Conferences; at leastone MeeGo(ish)/Maemo(ish) device from Nokia; a firming up of the Qt developer story and - hopefully - 51 uninterrupted issues of MWKN.

I wrote another guest article for the VisionMobile blog last week, which just went live yesterday, titled “Open Source community building: a guide to getting it right”.

Exerpt:

Community software development can be a powerful accelerator of adoption and development for your products, and can be a hugely rewarding experience. Working with existing community projects can save you time and money, allowing you to get to market faster, with a better product, than is otherwise possible. The old dilemma of “build or buy” has definitively changed, to “build, buy or share”.

Whether you’re developing for Android, MeeGo , Linaro or Qt, understanding community development is important. After embracing open development practices, investing resources wisely, and growing your reputation over time, you can cultivate healthy give-and-take relationships, where everyone ends up a winner. The key to success is considering communities as partners in your product development.

By avoiding the common pitfalls, and making the appropriate investment of time and effort, you will reap the rewards. Like the gardener tending his plants, with the right raw materials, tools and resources, a thousand flowers will bloom.

After focusing recently on a lot of the things that people do wrong, I wanted to identify some of the positive things that companies can do to improve their community development experiences: try to fit in, be careful who you pick to work in the community, and ensure that your developers are engaging the project well. If you are trying to grow a community development project around a piece of software, then you should ensure that you lower the barriers to entry for new contributors, ensure that you create a fair and just environment where everyone is subject to the same rules, and don’t let the project starve for lack of attention to things like patch review, communication, public roadmapping and mentoring.

The original title of the article was “Here be dragons: Best practices for community development” – I’ll let you decide whether the VisionMobile editors made a good decision to change it or not.

Some time ago I wrote a post about a project we were working on called Ubuntu Liquid. Well since then a lot has happened.The Bossa Conference came to Manaus with a great plasma mobile talk, the project changed its name to Kubuntu Mobile, the awesome KDE and Kubuntu communities became involved and we managed to finally get a Technology Preview release out of the door for Ubuntu Maverick!.

I had thought I was "almost done" with the rewrite of DialCentral from GTK to Qt.  I've even started investigating my Meego ports and started helping package / develop a new project.  Oh the joy of rewriting software and reimplementing old bugs and the creation of all new ones.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile and window.console Support - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 7 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

In addition to my old PySide tutorials, there is now a proper PDF guide for PySide development on MeeGo available. Except for packaging, all steps apply to Maemo as well, and this is the document that includes the first gPodder QML UI code example (the final gPodder QML UI will be totally different and "much cooler", though).

As part of the new year's cleanup, I also dug out the old MTF UI demo of gPodder and put its source online here - for third party applications, QML is now the preferred UI over MeeGo Touch, so this might not be of much use for you now, but maybe somebody can put it to good use.

Invest in sharing! by Toban Black

Following the awesome work done by our sysadmins, I implemented a backend for the share data engine that supports the use of KDE’s official pastebin service: http://paste.kde.org .

This way people using trunk will already have this support upstream and people using earlier versions (which includes 4.6 !) can also use the script provided by Andrea Scarpino thanks to the brand new Get Hot New Stuff support that I integrated into the Pastebin applet for 4.6

Today I also signed up to Flattr, in order to test this micropayment service that sounds like a great idea to donate small amounts to people that do great work and create awesome content. I must say that I signed up after wanting to Flattr the work done by Lydia (aka Nightrose) and Tom Albers (aka toma).

Of course I don’t expect to earn a lot of money this way, but It’s awesome to be able to help some great workers and also add the possibility of earning a little bit of money, specially in the year of your wedding

Tim Bray on the new mobile market:

Tablets and handsets can displace computers as play and reading devices, but they really can't become dominant as work tools until we have a better solution for high-speed low-friction text input. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised to see dramatic progress in this area; it’s so obviously the number-one usability barrier for everything that isn’t badged as a "computer".

I've seen some interesting approaches at solving the text input problem. But the other option is of course that other means of communicating become more prominent: videos, audio messages, etc. A flickr is worth 50 tweets, after all. But how do you program then?

Updated: Alex Payne thinks video will replace textual communication:

My generation will be at something of a loss when this new world comes about. In my life, I’ve been rewarded for communicating effectively online via text. I’m a reasonably effective verbal communicator, but not nearly as good as I’ll need to be to compete with the telepresence-native adults that the children of today will grow up to be.

Today’s digital natives will be tomorrow’s telegraph operators. The only way to survive will be to understand the impact of pervasive video communication before it sweeps us under our keyboards.

Version 0.8.0.0 of the Advanced Geocaching Tool has arrived for the N900 and the Openmoko Freerunner. Changes include:

• Fix downloading bug after November 2010 website change.
• Rewritten coordinate handling.
• Support editing and adding of coordinate calculation strings.
• Faster map display.

The downloading bug was already fixed by an in-application update. If you're not using the extras-devel repository on your N900, please check the "about" menu in the application to get the update. This will, however, not update the whole application. The update will come to extras repository until the end of the month.

As I'm currently working on my diploma thesis, I don't have time for larger updates in the next months.

Version 0.8.0.0 of the Advanced Geocaching Tool has arrived for the N900 and the Openmoko Freerunner. Changes include: Fix downloading bug after November 2010 website change. Rewritten coordinate handling. Support editing and adding of coordinate calculation strings. Faster map display. The downloading bug was already fixed by an in-application update. If you're not using the extras-devel repository on your N900, please check the "about" menu in the application to get the update. Th...

Firefox for Mobile Mini Reivew: My New Fitbit - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... January 9 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-01-03 through 2011-01-09

Front Page

Nokia's developer story: not there yet

Your editor has long been a proponent of the idea that Nokia's developer offering needs to massively improve if it was to truly compete in the next-generation mobile OS arena. Qt, Qt Developer and cross-platform SDKs are a big step in the right direction. But, as Johan Paul found, there's still some way to go: "I wanted to try Qt 4.7 on my Nokia N8 device so I headed over to Forum Nokia to grab the developer version of Qt 4.7 for Symbian^3. The first thing you notice is that the page already expects some previous Symbian development experience. "The following files will need to be installed:" and a bunch of .sis files. Ok. How? An educated guess is to copy the files over to the phone when it is in mass storage mode and install them on the phone. I'll get back to this in a moment. But just imagine if this would be the way for Apple to distribute beta framework components to their 3rd party developers. I would like the SDK to handle this for me. For example some add-on that I can install for the SDK and it will do the rest for me after I connect the phone. It would, of course, also update the SDK itself." Hopefully Nokia's SDK team will be aware of these paper-cut level criticisms which mount up to a fairly large stop energy for someone wanting to experiment with a platform.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nokia's developer story: not there yet
2. Development
   • Qt in Education - course material for educational institutions
   • Discussion around N900 Community SSU as it gets closer to viability
   • PySide & QML on Maemo and MeeGo tutorial
   • Third-party components Qt Quick components
   • Modern mobile applications with Qt & QML on Intel's AppUp
3. Devices
   • Install Kubuntu Mobile on N900
4. Announcements
   • Columbus navigation toolkit

I've been taking quite a lot of photos with Nokia N900 earlier and even if I didn't regard their quality as the best ever, these shots were just fine and perfectly acceptable for less important occasions to me. However, ever since I've got HTC Desire Z in my hands, I was quite baffled with its camera quality. Main thought was along the lines of is this really that bad or is it just bad impression?

So I went and did totally non-scientific and hugely subjective comparison of camera capabilities of the most modern mobile devices I currently have at hand: HTC Desire Z, Nokia N900 and Nokia E72, all of which have 5 megapixel camera sensors. Results were, frankly, quite surprising to me.
Read more »

Firefox for Mobile Mobile Add-ons Cup CLOSED - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... January 10 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Mobile Add-ons Cup CLOSED - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... January 10 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Wow, 2010 was quite a hectic year in the Midgard world. Here is a quick summary:

• We held three Midgard Gatherings: one in Lodz, Poland in April, one in Tampere, Finland in July and one in Gothenburg, Sweden in November. In April we announced the new directions of the project.
• The project completed a migration to Git (and GitHub) for Midgard2 and Midgard MVC, together with a change in the development process to facilitate a more decentralized way of working
• The Long-Term Supported Midgard1 series 8.09 Ragnaroek had two releases: .8 and .9. After .9 there have been substantial performance improvements that still wait for release
• Midgard2 had its first Long-Term Supported version 10.05 Ratatoskr, with three releases: .0, .1 and .2
• Midgard2 started providing language bindings via GObject Introspection
• Midgard2 landed into Debian unstable, Maemo Extras and MeeGo Community OBS
• Third generation of Midgard Content Repository had its first release showcasing more flexible model definition and built-in RDF storage. The new MidgardCR is written in Vala
• First version of the Midgard Create content management interface was shown
• Midgard MVC gained a new application installer tool and the ability to be run on the PHP Application Server
• The OpenPSA management suite was forked out from Ragnaroek tree, ported to Midgard2 and packaged for Ubuntu
• On Maemo, Midgard-powered applications like The Tablet of Adventure and MaeCalories provided tens of thousands of Midgard installations on mobile phones

Unfortunately at the same time the Midgard developer community has stayed quite small and insular. This will hopefully improve through easier installation, availability of Midgard libraries in Linux distributions and closer collaboration with the rest of the PHP world as a participant of the Zeta Components ecosystem.

We still also need to solve the project governance question of either running our own association or joining a major organization like ASF. The relation between Midgard and the GNOME project on which we heavily rely on should also be clarified.

See also the Midgard in 2009 post.

I delayed a bit ReSiStance development during last months because we had a lot of work in Igalia’s WebKit team. But I managed to find some time during Xmass to advance some work and to review a couple of pending patches. The most important ones were by far, the Google Reader support ones.

It all started with some sensational work done by Chus Picos. She did almost all the research regarding the status of Google Reader API (check here if you’re interested) and cooked a very nice set of initial patches. Thank you very much for the great work o/o.

Using those patches as basis, I fixed some remaining issues detected during the review process and implemented a couple of (IMHO) nice features I wanted on top. Basically with ReSiStance 0.8 you can:

• One-click import of the feeds from your Google Reader account
• Auto read/unread status sync with Google Reader as you read
• Add new subscriptions to Google Reader
• Remove subscriptions from Google Reader

Note that being a mobile app I tried to minimize network traffic as much as possible, and thus, no synchronization is performed automatically except the read status update as you read.

So this is how the main window looks like right now:

There you could see that the Google Reader patches came with a couple of UI changes. Zooming in the left part of the screenshot

unveils a couple of new UI elements:

• a brand new cell renderer to showboth  feed title with subtitle and small Google Reader like icon for subscribed feeds (Planet Igalia and Fanhouse NBA blog in this case)
• feeds without favicon now get a default RSS one (see Planet Webkit)

Now if we take a closer look at the rightmost part of the main window

we could realize that another new cell renderer was also developed to show the amount of unread items (and yes the background color is taken from the theme) inside a rounded corner rectangles.

Apart from the new UI items and the Google Reader support, there are a lot of other changes like connectivity improvements (with libconic integration), better exception handling, sorting fixes, duplicate entries detection…

Summing up, this new release not only adds some changes in the UI but tons of them in the guts of ReSiStance, so give it a try if you like it and tell me any bug you might find. Take into account that you need to setup the extras-devel respository in your N900 to have ReSiStance listed in the Application Manager. For those interested in the code, you can get it from the git repo as usual.

Nokia XpressMusic devices such as the Nokia 5800 or 5530 have a touch button on the top corner to bring up shortcuts to core apps. This functionality has been introduced to the Nokia N900 thanks to MohammadAG from the Maemo forums. The shortcuts are activated by holding the proximity sensor on the Nokia N900.

MohammedAG says this app is more of a proof of concept for now. Head over to the Maemo forum thread for installation and feedback.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• TwimGo for Nokia N900 Updated to 2.0.15, Adds Old/New Retweet & In Reply To
• Nokia 5530 Hands-On Video and Initial Impressions
• Conversations on Nokia N900 Adds Support for Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN & More With Extra Protocol Plugins

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As the momentum builds towards releases of MeeGo devices, TechRadar has taken a look at MeeGo on a an MSI netbook. It's  a very brief review, but encouraging to see other technology blogs start to pay more attention to the new platform. Of course, the netbook UI of MeeGo is still strongly influenced by its Moblin heritage, rather Nokia's Maemo. As TechRadar run through the various zones of MeeGo, they explain why they think this is a much compelling netbook operating system than its competitor, Google Chrome.

There is a new guide on the MeeGo Wiki detailing how to install the MeeGo handset image onto the new MeeGo-powered WeTab. The WeTab is one of the few devices seen since late last year running a bespoke MeeGo UI, and is an 11.6" multi-touch tablet device. The WeTab is only available through a handful of retail chains in Europe, so the risk of bricking the WeTab in this process should be seriously considered . Only recommend for developers and the most enthusiastic of testers. Thanks to Quim Gil for the heads up on this one.

In anticipation of a new browser coming to Symbian^3, it's time to do a little hypothetical thinking about the browsing scene on Symbian. In this editorial, I consider the case for Nokia cooperating with the Mozilla Foundation, for Fennec to be shipped with Symbian devices. This is of course blue sky thinking, as Web is deeply integrated into Symbian and Nokia have already said the future of the Symbian browser is Qt Webkit based. Despite that, there is an interesting, theoretical, case to be made, which I explore in this editorial. Whether you agree or not, read on to see what you make of my arguments - comments are invited.

Significant updates to MeeGo and the MeeGo SDK have been announced at the MeeGo Wiki. Both MeeGo Core and Netbook have received updates in both the 1.1 and 1.0 branches, receiving their second and sixth updates respectively. The MeeGo 1.1 SDK has been updated to verson 1.1.2 which includes accelerated graphics performance for Linux QEMU VM, and numerous of bug fixes. More details were not available at the time of writing. Read on for more details about the Core and Netbook updates.

gPodder 2.12 "The Odyssey of Flight 33" has been released, which is purely a bugfix release for those of you who found an empty podcast list after skipping a gPodder version during upgrades (this release fixes both the initial problem and tries to recover databases for which migration has failed). The updated package is also available in Diablo Extras already for N8x0 users. Please test and vote for gPodder 2.12-1 in Extras-Testing!

A new desktop widget written by Ville Syrjäl has been packaged for Extras. TV out control lets you control advanced features of the N900's TV out such as aspect ratio and scaling - those settings are not accessible from the official control panel applet, which is closed source (vote for that bug if you'd like to see it open sourced and improved through the Community SSU). Please test and vote for the TV out control widget in Extras-Testing!

Developers looking to experiment with the latest Qt Mobility API should direct their attention to Nokia's Qt Labs, where a technology preview release of Qt Mobility 1.2 was announced during the Christmas break. The primary focus of the 1.2 release is delivering backend support for MeeGo. However, there are also some new features, which will be of interest to both MeeGo and Symbian developers. A beta release of Qt Mobility 1.2 will follow this technology preview at the end of January.

Reposted from Neary Consulting

[December] The Meego technical steering group have announced a new policy for dealing with the increasing backlog of vendor-contributed kernel patches relevant to MeeGo waiting to be added upstream. Each of these vendors accumulated hundreds of patches which made managing the MeeGo kernel impractical. To remedy this, the new policy requires specific compliance from vendors, and will entail maintaining a "reference kernel", which closely matches the upstream Linux kernel. Read on for more analysis.

Firefox for Mobile Personas for Mobile Are Here - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... January 14 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Like all touch based devices, the N900 also packs a proximity sensor to kill the touch screen sensitivity when you are making calls. But when you are not making calls, it is still running with no action assigned to it. Fortunately MohammadAG was upto the task and has created a shortcuts bar reminiscent of the Xpress Music devices like the Nokia 5800 which you can bring up by holding the proximity sensor for 1.2 seconds.

In addition to the shortcuts, a long press on the media player icon will bring up media controls. The app is available under the package name MediaBar and you can follow this thread for support and requests.

Similar Posts:

• Truphone Adds Support For Feature Pack 2 & S60 5th Edition
• Review: Grid Touch Lets You Bid Adieu To Symbian’s UI Woes
• How To Overclock The Nokia N900
• Reflections – Nokia N82: Usability, Multimedia and Performance
• Sleep Music – Sleep Mode For The S60 Music Player/Radio Is Finally Here

Reposted from Neary Consulting

Finding the right frequency for your FM transmitter is always a pain, specially when you visit new cities. Fortunately a Qt based utility called E.F.F.(or Empty Frequencies Finder) from BLIZZARD will now put an end to that problem, making EFF a must have for your phone.

E.F.F. (Empty Frequencies Finder) is a utility that lets you choose a range (87.5 FM – 108.0 FM) to scan from, for empty/unused frequencies, using the receiver of N900 and headphones as its antenna. For example you can use this utility to find empty frequencies, so you can easily transmit from your N900 to your radio. If you are not satisfied with the emptiness of the frequency scanning results you can select between modes, to find a better one.

Th app hasn’t found its way to the repositories yet, but you can download the .deb file from here (direct link) and install it manually. You will need to plug your N900 headphones in so that the app can use them as an antenna for the radio. Your N900 also must be running the PR 1.3 firmware.

I would love to see this utility come out for Symbian^3 devices as well, may be Qt can help.

Hat tip to the ever useful @mwkn for the tip!

Similar Posts:

• Mp3 Editor: Create Ringtones On The Phone Itself
• The N900 Includes An FM Radio – Here's How To Make It Work
• The First 10 Applications I Install On My S60
• Hack: Download Any File Via The Default S60 Browser
• Sleep Music – Sleep Mode For The S60 Music Player/Radio Is Finally Here

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile – A Few Add-ons - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 15 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile – Setting Your Own Start Page - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 15 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

TwimGo is a popular Twitter client by Tommi Luakkanen (@tlaukkanen) for the Nokia N900 and has also recently become available for Symbian based devices via the Ovi Store. In its current iteration it is written in Web Runtime, but the upcoming version 2.5 has been rewritten with Qt Quick or more specifically Qt QML.

The end result is that the app now has a pretty snazzy UI, complete with all the bells and whistles that is no slouch when it comes to performance. Here is the video courtesy @mwkn:

The new version is not available for download just yet, but you can follow the developer for the latest @tlaukkanen. This version of TwimGo should also come to Symbian based devices once Qt 4.7 rolls out.

Similar Posts:

• TwimGo Could Be The N900 Twitter App That You Were Waiting For
• Attention Developers: An Opportunity To Showcase Your Application At The MWC
• The Nokia E6 Is Official – Full Specifications Inside
• Walkthrough: Ozone – A New Web Browser For S60
• Demo Of MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition On The Nokia N900

I have had this sitting half-written in my projects directory for far too long, so I present: Imgur Integration version 0.20. imgur.com is a website which allows you to host arbitrary images without creating an account. This program includes a DBus service which allows posting of images to imgur.com, a command-line interface to the DBus service, and an Eye of Gnome plugin to do the same. It is not an official client, but I have talked to the imgur admins and they are happy about its existence.

So when you open a picture, you have a menu option that uploads it and opens a browser at the right page, with no configuration, thus:



You have to turn on the plugin in eog after installation (Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Post to imgur.com). If I package this, I may make it turn on automatically, since it's a little hard to find this.

As originally conceived, it would have also allowed you to use libsocialweb to tweet/dent the resulting URL. I took this out for now because libsocialweb also has API to post pictures, and I wasn't sure how best to do it. There is still a rather useless dependency on libsocialweb. Sorry about that.

eog seems not to look in /usr/local/share/eog/plugins, only /usr/share/eog/plugins. You may therefore have to set --prefix appropriately, or simply copy the files from /usr/local to /usr by hand after installation. Sorry about that, too.

There was a partially-written libsharing plugin for Maemo which used the imgur DBus service, but it's not finished. It could be finished, if people would like it.

Other thoughts on how the program could develop are in the README. You can download the program or look at the source control. This is quite a rough draft. Patches and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

comments

I have had this sitting half-written in my projects directory for far too long, so I present: Imgur Integration version 0.20. imgur.com is a website which allows you to host arbitrary images without creating an account. This program includes a DBus service which allows posting of images to imgur.com, a command-line interface to the DBus service, and an Eye of Gnome plugin to do the same. It is not an official client, but I have talked to the imgur admins and they are happy about its existence.

So when you open a picture, you have a menu option that uploads it and opens a browser at the right page, with no configuration, thus:



You have to turn on the plugin in eog after installation (Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Post to imgur.com). If I package this, I may make it turn on automatically, since it's a little hard to find this.

As originally conceived, it would have also allowed you to use libsocialweb to tweet/dent the resulting URL. I took this out for now because libsocialweb also has API to post pictures, and I wasn't sure how best to do it. There is still a rather useless dependency on libsocialweb. Sorry about that.

eog seems not to look in /usr/local/share/eog/plugins, only /usr/share/eog/plugins. You may therefore have to set --prefix appropriately, or simply copy the files from /usr/local to /usr by hand after installation. Sorry about that, too.

There was a partially-written libsharing plugin for Maemo which used the imgur DBus service, but it's not finished. It could be finished, if people would like it.

Other thoughts on how the program could develop are in the README. You can download the program or look at the source control. This is quite a rough draft. Patches and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

comments

Here is a small demo of QML animations combined with OpenGL shader effects, running on QML Scene Graph:



At first, everything is gray and plain. But once you enable QUIt mode, the whole world feels a lot more colorful and dynamic. Some call this feeling velvet, I call it.. exciting 2011!

The N900 recently became capable of Packet Injection, and this mean that the popular network security tool Aircrack-ng just became a whole lot more potent. While this means that you can now use your N900 to crack WIFI networks, cracking a WIFI network of someone other than your own can still land you in jail.

Meanwhile FRuMMaGe on the TMO forms has ported his shell script to work on the N900 which automates many of the functions of the aircrack-ng suite, making it much easier and faster than using aircrack-ng directly to compromise WIFI networks. He is also working on a GUI for the script which will make things even more easy.

FRuMMaGe‘s script features:

• Enabling/disabling monitor mode and the package injection drivers.
• Scanning for APs with airodump.
• Fake authentication with aireplay
• Package injection with aireplay
• Decryption with aircrack.
• Changing mac address (depends on macchanger being installed).

As well as WPA specific functions such as:

• Deauthenticating clients (for handshake capturing).
• Bruteforcing with aircrack using wordlists (wordlists not included).

It also is capable of the following functions, but these have not yet been tested extensively since porting:

• Chopchop attack.
• Fragmentation attack.
• Building a custom ARP from results of frag or chopchop.
• Bombarding AP with custom ARP.

If this aspect of the N900′s prowess interests you, he has a complete tutorial up which you can follow here. Hat tip to @mwkn for the find.

PS: As FRuMMaGe put it, ‘Use at your own risk and only for legitimate purposes. (And no, desperately needing to check your facebook while in a local internet café without paying is NOT a legitimate purpose)!’.

[Image via Flickr]

Similar Posts:

• Faster EDGE Performance On The Horizon?
• WiFi Without Routers on Windows XP
• WiFi Without Routers!
• Bluetooth As A Proximity Badge!
• How To Set A Custom Ringtone For Each Contact On The N900

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-01-10 through 2011-01-16

Front Page

Second maemo.org/N900 coding competition in the works

Cosimo Kroll, one of the organisers of last year's successful "maemo.org coding competition" has mentioned that they're working on the infrastructure for the next competition, and are talking to Intel about a potential partnership: "This site will make it easier to submit code/screenshots/description and let the user vote. Also we are in contact with Intel for a partnership (it looks really good). Thanks for your patience and I'm sorry for the lack of information. We plan to start the competition right after the mobile world congress." Your editor suggests ignoring the coincidence of "after MWC" and the Harmattan device announcement rumours. If he's learnt anything in the last five years, it's that holding your breath for the next device is not a good idea (you're likely to suffocate).

Read more

LWN editor "predicts" "MeeGo will be a surprisingly big success" in 2011

What Jonathan Corbet says almost always never comes true. However, it's still interesting, and a sign of how much work MeeGo has to do, that his 2011 predictions in Linux Weekly News (the inspiration for this pale knock-off) contain this at number three: "MeeGo will be a surprisingly big success. Android is increasingly looking like the Windows of the handset world - a universal operating environment which turns the hardware into a boring, low-margin commodity product. Manufacturers will be keen to see a competitor which allows them to differentiate themselves and to limit Google's control." Some of the commenters point to Eric S. Raymond's portrayal as webOS and MeeGo as "doomed, no-hopers".

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Second maemo.org/N900 coding competition in the works
   • LWN editor "predicts" "MeeGo will be a surprisingly big success" in 2011
2. Applications
   • TwimGo gets moved from Web Runtime to Qt Quick - shiny interface results
3. Development
   • QML - caching network resources
   • Trying to use RDS to auto-tune car radio & N900 FM transmitter
   • QML Scene Graph demo
4. Community
   • Cambridge (UK) MeeGo meet-up
   • Product management wiki for MeeGo
5. Devices
   • Poking through mce.ini for next Nokia MeeGo device
   • Porting MeeGo to Nexus One & Toshiba AC100
6. Announcements
   • ReSiStance RSS reader updated with updated GUI and Google Reader support
   • Media Bar for Maemo 5 (XpressMusic-esque)
   • TV-out control home plugin
   • ...and 8 more

Those of you who have used qmake to build projects for any length of time on Linux will have probably come across the PKGCONFIG feature by now.

For those of you who haven't, here's a quick recap:

CONFIG += link_pkgconfig # enable the PKGCONFIG feature
PKGCONFIG += glib-2.0 # link against glib-2.0

While this looks simple, it has two small problems which aren't all that fun.

Firstly, it had what was really quite easily arguably a bug in that it didn't halt the qmake process if a requested package didn't exist. It would happily tell you it didn't exist, and then continue as if nothing had gone wrong, a very annoying problem in large projects:

$ cat test.pro
CONFIG += link_pkgconfig
PKGCONFIG += foobar

$ qmake test.pro:
Package foobar was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `foobar.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'foobar' found

$ echo $?
0

Secondly, it wasn't possible to (easily) check for optional dependencies and enable/disable functionality depending on the result of that check.

This has now changed! Thanks to Oswald for merging merge request 1022 into Qt, PKGCONFIG will, in the future, stop on error, and (even more fun) - we can now use the shiny new qmake packagesExist() test function to detect whether a library is installed:

CONFIG += link_pkgconfig

packagesExist(glib-2.0) {
    DEFINES += HAS_GLIB
    PKGCONFIG += glib-2.0
}

// and in the code:
#ifdef HAS_GLIB
    // use glib here
#endif

Much thanks to Marco for prompting me to finally try fix this (I've eternally been annoyed by it, but someone else being frustrated by it made me leap into action), as well as to Oswald, Marius and Arvid for their review and comments during writing, and finally to Murray and Mathias for respectively reporting and trying to patch the first issue in this post, a fact I only became aware of *after* finishing my patch. Great minds think alike, it seems!

Firefox for Mobile Bootstrap Jones – Adventures in Restartless Add-ons - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 17 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Hello all!

I promised this new release for the end of the last year, but I delayed it a bit due some changes in my professional and personal life.

Anyway, basically this release is about bug fixing and performance improvement. It’s using less power now, and playing faster.

If you want to try this version, you can get the package here.

And bugs reports are always welcome, and needed ;)

ps.: I’m still trying to upload it to OVI, lets see…

I'd like to draw your attention to blog post by a MeeGo community manager Jarkko Moilanen (aka kyb3R). This is a great story of how someone with an interest in the Hacker culture, and a background in attending Ubuntu LUGs went on to be responsible for building the "MeeGo Network Fi", the Finnish community for MeeGo development. In the post he explains how events unfolded for him to be in his current position, and the things that worked well, and not so well. I would rate this as a must read for anyone aspiring to form their own regional MeeGo group.

Here is a heads-up to anyone who uses the formerly WRT based Twitter client, TwimGo, on their N900. The author Tommi Laukkanen (@tlaukkanen), as moved development of his comprehensive Twitter application to the Qt QML framework. This means that we can hope to see it released for MeeGo and even perhaps Symbian^3. This is yet another great example of what can be achieved with the Qt framework. As seen in the video below (click through from front page), the 3D-like transitions are smooth and fast on the N900, with no discernible penalty for the overhead of Qt.

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile – Managing Profiles - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 18 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Introduction There are cases and then there are luxurious cases like the ones manufactured by PDAir. The Nokia N900 Cases from PDAir are- A Leather Book Style Case, Leather Flip Style Case and a Leather Pouch Style Case. I will be reviewing the Leather Book Style Case today. Out of the three cases I feel … Continue reading "Review-PDAir Leather Book Style Case for Nokia N900"

The post Review-PDAir Leather Book Style Case for Nokia N900 first appeared on Fone Arena.

I stumbled across a website talking about GNOME 3 today, with a few screenshots. It's not really my first exposure to gnome-shell and friends, but it's the first time I sat down and really looked at it, and imagined myself trying to work with it.
(Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried GNOME 3 as a user yet. Thus, quite a lot of my opinions might be completely off the mark, but I'm not going to be biased by having actually used it.

Nokia today announced the release of the Qt 1.1 SDK Technology Preview. The new SDK, based on Qt 4.7, is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the previous Qt SDK. The release gives developers an early opportunity to familiarise themselves with the next version of the SDK. A key theme of the release is to allow developers to easily get started with Qt Quick development on Symbian, Maemo 5 and the desktop. The new SDK also makes it easier for Symbian developers to use native APIs in their code.

A potentially interesting artefact of me playing around with a Canon DSLR is that libferris now has some initial support for CR2 "raw" files. Complements of course go to the dcraw library and tools for the heavy lifting. The upshot is that ferriscp ~/cam/foo.CR2 flickr://me/upload now works as expected. Once I update my maemo build, this should also let me use an n900 with 3G to upload from RAW while on the move.

I need to include stuff for ICC profiles and the like but at least the Web services get what they expect and everything runs smoothly, and it will for you too next release (TM). I really should look into mounting the kipi plugins as a filesystem sometime, they offer some awesome Web import/export functionality, ripe for a filesystem I tell's ya.

I still need to add "rgba-32bpp" metadata support for CR2 files. As you can imagine from the name, if you read this metadata for a jpeg, png or other supported image file, libferris decodes the image to 32 bit RGBA byte values for you. It might also be interesting to create another "file as filesystem" design where a bunch of virtual files are offered to see the small thumbnail, the roughly 1080p sized thumbnail or the ICC corrected rendering of the CR2 and others. Such virtual files are really handy for drag and drop to other filesystems ;)

I might hunt around for some Nikon raw files to add support for those too at some point. Though there is nothing like having a camera generating files to make you want to make your software support those files.

Firefox for Mobile Congrats Mobile Add-ons Cup Winners! - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... January 20 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Six New Featured Mobile Add-ons for Firefox! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2011... January 20 from Missmobile's Blog » Six New... - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Add-on Develoeprs – AMO is Firefox Mobile Beta 4 Ready - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 21 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

If you want to publish your applications on Ovi Store for Maemo 5, you have to fulfill certain criteria for the package to be accepted. The technical ones are listed in the document Maemo™ 5 Applications: Ovi Store Entry Requirements. Here are some problematic entries that were not clear to me in the beginning (coming from Extras QA and a Debian-based background):

• The file must be named myapplication_1_0_1.deb (for an application that is called "myapplication"). Interesting factoid: The version number must include three digits (one can interpret that as "no less and no more"). That's different from the Debian standard naming of myapplication_X_armel.deb (where "X" can be any format version number, and "armel" specifies the target architecture). So if you have packaged your application, make sure to rename the file after upload.
• The relation of the file size of /opt compared to the files in /usr must be greater than 1:80. Here's an example from That Rabbit Game: /usr contains two files: The icon (7kB) and the .desktop file (128b) and /opt contains one file: The binary (658kB). However, the difference between these two is not a factor of over 80 when compared with "du -sh" (depending on the filesystem settings).

With that said the structure of the testing criteria in that document is very clear and (apart from some problems with the detailed specs), everything is understandable, well thought-out and can be tested by following the instructions in the document. Some of these could be use to "formalize" the Extras-Testing QA checklist here on Maemo.org or at least provide an easy-to-follow guide for carrying out the basic tests.

One of the biggest challenges facing the MeeGo venture will be creating tangible interest around its (eventual) offerings.  iOS and
Android enjoy the buzz right now, the latter now benefiting more than the former.  At some point MeeGo as a product (or family of products) needs to establish the same sort of excitement if it is to seize significant market share.

It’s only natural to assume that any corporate entity utilizing MeeGo in some manner would craft unique marketing campaigns for their implementations.  But grassroots or community-led marketing is something else entirely.  

Grand Canyons

As shown on MeeGo’s wiki page for marketing, there is no shortage of activities and areas needing attention from the MeeGo community.  Some parts are already gaining traction, such as the local meetups (and even one national), but there are still gaps looking for filler.

The biggest potholes lie between idea and execution, and questions around funding expose the most noticeable hole.  That was a major hangup for Maemo outreach.  Volunteers traditionally don’t mind spending time on an effort in which they believe, but expensing materials, travel fare and hotel rooms can be a blocker.

Following email list discussion on this topic, a “bug” report was created yesterday to get this rectified for MeeGo community outreach.  Hopefully the recent addition of A Linux Foundation employee chartered to manage policy and process will go a long way toward addressing this need.  More on that in a future article.

Echoing Examples

Funding aside, presentations are a relatively easy method of sharing the MeeGo story.  Generic and reference examples already exist to get speakers started, and surely more will come.  I have in mind a multi-part series that starts with the development of community marketing resources and processes, and then guides hopeful community marketeers down the road to compelling presentations.

The plan is to share this series of successes, ideas and iconic practices at various MeeGo-relevant events throughout this year as well as on the usual venues such as this blog and Slideshare.  Feel free to reuse or reference any materials I create for this purpose.

Getting Grounded

MeeGo advocates need to be prepared to face a significant amount of cynicism, especially while the solution is so immature.  Tempering enthusiasm with solid facts and maybe a little humility should help defuse that sort of response.  Still, passion is an important part of effective marketing so don’t lose the fire completely!

Stay tuned for a continuation of this subject, and I hope to see you at future events!

Filed under: Into Outreach, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Write Stuff, Views and Reviews Tagged: community, forumnokia, grassroots, LinkedIn, Linux Foundation, market, marketing, MeeGo, open source, outreach

This is going to be a long post, and probably obscure for anyone not familiar with D-Bus. When I started thinking about this idea, I decided that I wouldn't write about it until I had some code ready; but a recent thread in the D-Bus mailing list urged me to publish my ideas, in the hope that some people might be able to see through all this vapourware and possibly (but here maybe I'm hoping too much) encourage my employer to let me work on this as a R&D project. It's about an IPC system with somehow similar functionality as D-Bus, but whose main describing features would be:

• low latency
• local only
• message data passing happens via shared memory
• simple
• lock-free
• match rules are tags lists
• peer-to-peer, with central server acting as a baby sitter :-)
• client API as compatible with libdbus as possible

Firefox for Mobile Restartless Add-ons – More Resources - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 22 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

A few days ago, version 0.8.0.3 of the Advanced Geocaching Tool hit the repositories. This version is also available for the Openmoko Freerunner.

It fixes a couple of minor bugs which were found in the versions before. It also includes a new feature to set a default text for fieldnotes.

If you're using the N900 and if you have extras-testing enabled, please vote for the application to get the update into extras.

And if you want to buy me a beer or two (via PayPal), please feel free to do so :-)

A few days ago, version 0.8.0.3 of the Advanced Geocaching Tool hit the repositories. This version is also available for the Openmoko Freerunner. It fixes a couple of minor bugs which were found in the versions before. It also includes a new feature to set a default text for fieldnotes. If you're using the N900 and if you have extras-testing enabled, please vote for the application to get the update into extras. And if you want to buy me a beer or two (via PayPal), please feel free to do...

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-01-17 through 2011-01-23

Front Page

Gtk+ on MeeGo Handset bidders selected by GNOME Foundation

Following a donation of a large sum of money by Nokia, the GNOME Foundation have selected Igalia to conduct the work: "We received a number of very interesting bids for the project, but Igalia's bid was the one that focused the most on integrating elements of Hildon into GTK+ upstream. This should mean easier porting of older Hildon/Maemo applications to the new MeeGo Handset platform, as well as easier porting of existing desktop GTK+ applications to the handset." Claudio Saavedra, one of the developers working on the project, said "will spend the next months trying to bring the best from the Hildon user experience to upstream GTK+, to make sure that the good old Maemo applications can be easily ported to GTK+".

Read more

Qt SDK 1.1 (Tech Preview) has Qt Quick/QML, Symbian, Maemo & desktop app support

Nokia's Qt strategy take a step forward with a preview release of Qt SDK 1.1, which merges the numerous separate SDKs into a single install bundle: "The new SDK is a merge of the Nokia Qt SDK 1.0 and the last Qt SDK, based on Qt 4.7. [...] The new Qt SDK 1.1 Technology Preview enables developers targeting desktop platforms to use the same setup, features and environment as developers targeting [mobile] platforms. This eases the migration of desktop applications to mobile platforms." With installers for Windows, Linux (32- & 64-bit x86) and Mac OS X, and the integration of cutting edge Qt technologies and fully supported Maemo development this is what Maemo's been waiting for. Unfortunately, it's a few years late, but hopefully will put MeeGo (if/when Nokia release a handset running it) in a better position.

Read more

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Gtk+ on MeeGo Handset bidders selected by GNOME Foundation
   • Qt SDK 1.1 (Tech Preview) has Qt Quick/QML, Symbian, Maemo & desktop app support
2. Applications
   • Beat Maker - call for testers for drum sequencer
   • Status of PlayStation emulators
   • Qt-based TwimGo 2.5 runs "smoothly" on Symbian N8 "as it does on N900"
   • Open Media Player gets playback and seeking support
3. Development
   • Ovi Store requirements vs. maemo.org Extras QA
   • NTFS MeeGo feature and conspiracy theories
   • Desaturate, rather than blur, to emphasise UI context
4. Community
   • Meeting log for MeeGo Community Office catch-up
5. Devices
   • Fixing prioritisation of Application manager slowness & Media player choppiness
   • Prototype MeeGo Nokia device photos?
6. Announcements
   • Pingus (Lemmings clone) released for N900
   • Blobby Volley 2 updated from N8x0 to N900
   • TxPad code editor

Questions have been raised in the MeeGo community recently over the support for Microsoft's NTFS. Clearly, support for this in end-user MeeGo netbooks would be expected as this is often the file system that external hard drives are shipped with. Therefore, in the interests of interoperability, consumers should expect MeeGo to work with such devices. The lack of support was recently raised as a bug in the MeeGo community, to which the response that productised installs may have a licensed NTFS driver added on top of the open source core, but that NTFS support would not be added to MeeGo Core OS. Read on for more.

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Qt libraries will ship in the Ubuntu 11.10 CD. Ubuntu has always been a GTK based Linux distribution (not withstanding its Kubutnu sister distribution). The obstacle for Qt developers to write for a GTK based operating system was because of the system settings framework, in the case of GTK this is the dconf system. Canonical are now funding work to crate Qt bindings for dconf. This will allow Qt applications to run in the GNOME desktop on Ubuntu without breaking the cohesive look and feel of the application set. Read on for more.

Firefox for Mobile Restartless Add-ons – Default Preferences - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... January 24 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Every contact database program I know has a "nickname" field. Today I was thinking that I use the same values in that field for EXIF tags, and what I'd like to see is a plugin (or better, to see it coming out of the box) with a button on each person's contact record. The button would query Tracker, and then launch gthumb or the local equivalent to show images of that person. The button would not display if there were no such images.

Something like this (on Maemo, though the principle is the same for GNOME):



(It's interesting to consider whether the plugin should assemble the list and then pass it to gthumb, or whether gthumb should be extended so that it can be passed a switch to display all pictures known to Tracker with a given tag.)

Of course, Tracker also tracks things other than images, so you could also have buttons for wordprocessor documents, emails, and so on. I could do this (in a while, when I have some time); would any of you want it?

comments

Every contact database program I know has a "nickname" field. Today I was thinking that I use the same values in that field for EXIF tags, and what I'd like to see is a plugin (or better, to see it coming out of the box) with a button on each person's contact record. The button would query Tracker, and then launch gthumb or the local equivalent to show images of that person. The button would not display if there were no such images.

Something like this (on Maemo, though the principle is the same for GNOME):



(It's interesting to consider whether the plugin should assemble the list and then pass it to gthumb, or whether gthumb should be extended so that it can be passed a switch to display all pictures known to Tracker with a given tag.)

Of course, Tracker also tracks things other than images, so you could also have buttons for wordprocessor documents, emails, and so on. I could do this (in a while, when I have some time); would any of you want it?

comments

I just realized that one year ago, I was giving a talk about Maemo Development at the Metalab here in Vienna. Back in January 2010, things were still very much different from today:

• Scratchbox was the SDK - Linux only, VMs for everything else
• No proper IDEs for Hildon development (there was Eclipse integration, but I never used it)
• Qt still was "the new stuff that's coming up" for Maemo development
• Mer was still something to look forward to
• MeeGo didn't exist - Maemo 6 was the future ;)
• MADDE was in Technology Preview state - not widely used
• Direct UI (now MeeGo Touch) was thought to be the future toolkit
• Qt 4.6 was just released in December - no QML in Qt yet

It turns out that we are in a much better position now, we've got a nice cross-platform IDE (Qt Creator), a proper SDK (Qt SDK) that works on Windows and OS X the same as on Linux and the "low-level" issues (optification, packaging, ...) are handled by Qt Creator mostly.

Today, the issues are different - I'm complaining about Qt Creator (from the Qt SDK 1.1 Preview) crashing a lot in QML design mode, I can deploy my apps to Symbian devices without much effort (didn't think I would ever do that) - even though there's no proper toolchain for Linux or OS X (Remote Compiler doesn't count). The Qt Quick Components are still not released, even though I'd love to create some great apps with them. And most people forget in the N9 rumor jungle that we have still got the best Linux-based mobile OS (with Linux userland) that exists in an actual product that you can buy right now (that's Maemo 5 on the N900 if you didn't get that hint..). Just like Duke Nukem Forever, a MeeGo handset will be announced and released eventually - give it some time.

Back to the "Qt Creator shouldn't crash when editing QML" developer story: We're not there yet, but comparing the current state with the state one year ago, that's some progress right there! Looking forward to those bits falling into place in the upcoming months.

This morning I finally got around to testing the rewritten MeeGo version of robotfindskitten on the N900. It works passably well:



You see that the text is missing.



There are a few other things wrong (we need to use Maemo banners, not dialogue boxes; the vibration at the end needs reimplementing) but I think it will be good to go in a week or so of snatched moments here and there. If you'd like to test, let me know.

(I'm thinking of making the title page dark grey, and losing the text across the top, to look more Maemo-like than MeeGo-like.)

comments

This morning I finally got around to testing the rewritten MeeGo version of robotfindskitten on the N900. It works passably well:



You see that the text is missing.



There are a few other things wrong (we need to use Maemo banners, not dialogue boxes; the vibration at the end needs reimplementing) but I think it will be good to go in a week or so of snatched moments here and there. If you'd like to test, let me know.

(I'm thinking of making the title page dark grey, and losing the text across the top, to look more Maemo-like than MeeGo-like.)

comments

Last year, I threw together a primitive FOSDEM schedule application for the N900. A year later—just in time for FOSDEM 2011, which I am attending!—it’s back, with more polish and a catchier name: Sojourner.

New since last time around:

• You can refresh the schedule from within the app;
• It works in portrait mode;
• It generally looks a bit better, with margins and button sizes matching other Fremantle applications more closely;
• It has, yunno, icons and packaging.

Most of those fall firmly into the “well of course it should be like that”. I told you it was primitive the first time around.

It has been a long time since we wrote propaganda about the Tracker project. That has a lot to do with both the holiday-season and the fact that we’re preparing for a stable release. This means that we are increasingly reluctant to new features.

We still made quite some progress, though. We for example ported almost everything from dbus-glib and dbus-1 to GDBus and GVariant. This was quite a work; next few weeks will be used for cleaning up and regression fixing. Jürg decided that it was more easy to simply port ~ all of tracker-store to Vala than to port tracker-store’s dbus-glib and dbus-1 C code to GDBus. This should please contributors who will now have a much more easy to understand codebase.

Tracker’s tracker-store is mostly an IPC layer above libtracker-data plus the signaling mechanism. The public libtracker-sparql is a API layer above the same private libtracker-data that protects you from doing things that you should not do. Like trying to do writes without going over the IPC layer.

This week we’re working on transient properties and adding tracker:modified to the journal and backup file. The tracker:modified property is an auto-incremented value. It’s useful for synchronization purposes. Right now when you replay the journal or restore a backup, we reset the count. This means that in between journal replays and/or backup restores you wont have the same tracker:modified values for your resources. This is what we are changing. We plan to restore the tracker:modified value during journal replay and backup-restore.

Transient properties are properties that are reset after restart of tracker-store (per Desktop session), they aren’t backed up (and therefor not restored either) and they aren’t journaled. They are useful for for example presence status of a contact.

The nice guys and girls at the QSparql team are working on a simple cursor that doesn’t do any buffering nor uses any threads. This is useful for Qt applications that want maximum performance while reading the results of a query.

Last week we introduced and ported to our newest location ontology, SLO.

Firefox for Mobile “Best in Show” Add-on Developer Gives Back! - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... January 26 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

So... lets say we have some device that run MeeGo; what else can it do? Where are the apps?

Firefox for Mobile Personas Go Mobile - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... January 26 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

I am looking for one. You can reach me at firstname lastname @ nokia dot com I don't work for Nokia anymore
Read more »

Nokia has released its Q4 2010 results, reporting an operating profit of €884 million (down 23% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €12.65 billion (up 6% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €1090 million, up 10% from Q3. Margins in devices and services were 11.3% (down 4.1% YoY and up 0.9% QoQ).

Nokia sold more than 5 million Symbian^3 devices. Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were up, at 28.3 million, compared with 20.8 million units in Q3 2009 (up 36% YoY) and compared with 26.5 million units in Q3 2010 (up 7%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 31%, down 6% sequentially and 9% year on year, due to the overall smartphone market growth, estimated up by a huge 63% YoY. [Post updated with extra charts and quotes]

In my religion (Quakerism), we have no hired professional priests. The problem with hired priests is that their job gets mutated from one of helping the flock struggle with the burden of discerning Gods will, into one of keeping their job. The fire gets lost.

I think that Nokia has a similar problem with the 770. When you have a large full-time staff, they lose their fire. And yet, what else is Nokia to do? If they are going to build hardware, it needs software, and they surely cannot rely on the goodness of strangers for their software, can they? And that is exactly what they are already doing, by using the Linux kernel.

So lets explore this fantasy, wherein Nokia builds hardware and the rest of us write the software. I am firmly of the opinion that open source solves some problems poorly. The work that Tigert does (art and design) is not done well by the ordinary developer. If left to their own devices, they will also neglect usability.

There is definitely room for a paid staff. But I think that if you want to write the best software, most of it has to be written by the people who will be using it. Of course, that leaves Nokia with a chicken and egg problem. With a new product like the 770, how do they have users without any initial software?

Like all open source projects, you need to prime the pump. That is best done through contractors. Pay them to write the initial build, and then get out of the way. If the spec that they build to is fux0red in the usual way that most software designs are, it will get fixed. But in the meantime, users will at least have something which is minimally usable.

Nokia can get developer attention just as they did -- through subsidised hardware. They would also have gotten developers involved sooner, just as the OLPC has done. If you are building a really cool product, people will be lining up for early hardware. And, if they do not, then maybe the product is not as wonderful as initially conceived?

Nokia will probably not take this advice, but if they do not, I fear that they will continue to publish software that sucks.

The N800 has stereo speakers, in comparison to the N770's mono speaker. That alone should make them sound better. But Nokia has done something even more clever. If you look at the position of the speakers, you can see that they're at the bottom of the device, unlike the N770's speaker at the top. A speaker works by moving air. If you can reduce the amount of air that needs to be moved, you'll get better bass response from your speakers. With the integral stand on the N800, and speakers at the bottom, when you place it on any hard surface, you reduce the amount of air by half, and double the bass response.

You can see this for yourself now if you have a N770. Play some music and hold the 770 in free space with the button end down. Now lower it until it's sitting on your desk. Instant big-boy speakers! Well, okay, I exaggerate, but the bass sounds better, doesn't it?

The Nokia Internet Tablet Connection Manager has UI issues. Since they're all separately fixable, I'll give each one its own paragraph.

When I want to go online away from home, I frankly couldn't give a darn which access point I associate with. Thus, I want to have an option in the "Select connection" dialog which says "Any working connection". It should go through the available connections, one by one, until it finds one which returns DHCP information that successfully lets it ping the default router, and resolve some standard name like "testconnection.nokia.com".

The previous paragraph's issue, if fixed, would make this one go away, but I'm treating them independently. When I select a connection, if it isn't listed in the Connections, I am immediately offered the opportunity to save the connection. Well, what if it doesn't work? That's an extra interaction with negative value to me. Put "Save connection" on the menu for the "World" icon.

The speaker volume is immediately apprehensible from the number of bars. The backlight intensity is immediately apprehensible from the number of bars. A Nokia cellphone gives me the signal strength in the number of bars right on the main screen, all the time. So why is the wifi signal strength not visible in the icon?? It's nice in IT2007 that it's there underneath the menu, as well as the AP name. But that's not half good enough.

The Connections dialog has a sillyness which is endemic to Internet Tablet dialogs. If you pick a connection, and then Delete it, it asks you if you want to delete it! Stupid computer! I just told you exactly what I want you to do! Weren't you paying attention?? Yes, I know that this is an attempt to save people from deleting connections that they actually wanted. So the UI designers put a two-step process to protect people from accidents. That's what's wrong. Next paragraph explains the fix.

The Connections dialog problem should be fixed. When you click on "Delete", it marks that connection for deletion by drawing its name with strikeout. It's not deleted until you click "Done". That's the two-step needed to actually delete. If you select a deleted connection, the Edit button is greyed-out, and the Delete button becomes "Undelete". Or maybe that's wrong, and the Edit button causes undelete?

Got my discount code (thanks, Nokia!) and immediately ordered it from Nokia USA. I gather that some people had trouble entering the discount code, but I didn't. Order went through, credit card got charged, everything looked fine. However, on the trackit page they gave me in the confirmation email, I had "Order status:" followed by whitespace. I was patient, but to no avail. The order got stuck somewhere in the process. I had to call NokiaUSA at 1-866-596-6542 option 5. The call center staff gave it a "kill -HUP" and now it's been shipped. Just FYI in case this happens to you.

I need more experience building my Chordite keyboard. So, I will build two custom keyboards for two Nokia Internet Tablet users who send me a letter with a photocopy of their hand along with an explanation of why they should get a free keyboard. Note that this keyboard only supports Linux, and it's only been tested for the Nokia N800. Send the letter to:

Free Chordite Offer Crynwr Software 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. Potsdam, NY 13676

Include your return shipping address, and email address so that I may notify you of your acceptance. This offer closes September 10th, so if your letter may take that long to get to me, send it now. I considered doing this on a time priority basis, but I want to get the keyboard to the people who want it the most, not the people who happen to read it first. Plus, I need the hand scan no matter what.

[Tags bluetooth, chording, keyboard ]

Aza Raskin writes Never Use a Warning, in which I count him as agreeing with my assessment of the Connection Manager's warnings.

IT2007 has added the signal strength to the connection menu (underneath the 'world' icon on the applets). Yay! But why isn't the IP address listed there as well? Why do I need to bring up the Connection Manager, and then use its "IP Address" entry to tell me the IP address? It's not like the connection menu is full or anything. It's not even a variable-length menu.

I thought I'd report on the status of my offer of two free keyboards. Curiously, I only received three keyboard requests. I meant to impose a barrier to entry, but maybe not that high a barrier!

I decided not to choose, but instead to make three keyboards. I have ordered and received the electronic parts. I've decided that while I might be able to produce keyboards from the hand photocopies the winners sent in, it's too uncertain a process. Still tinkering with the design, but I think I've settled more on a "kit" for a keyboard.

The trouble with the Chordite is that it really needs to fit your hand. And yet, as a portable device, it needs to be sturdy. Adjustable yet fixed. Malleable yet unchanging. This is not a new problem for people to have faced. Screws, nuts and bolts, glue, clay, plaster, wood, plastic, metal, and rock are all substances which can be changed and yet which are sturdy.

Hands are variable in two ways that matter: in finger length and spacing and in palm width. The chordite needs to be stretchy in both those dimensions, and yet, if you drop it, it shouldn't fall into pieces. It needs to be lightweight so that you can carry it. In order to make all this work, I think that I'll put the switches on little PC boards interconnected with 18 gauge copper wires, covered with a layer of polycapralone. The copper for stiffness, and the polycapralone for sturdiness.

I've done some testing, and an ordinary hair dryer puts out enough heat to soften a fairly thick layer of polycapralone. Once softened, the keys can be moved around, with the copper wire keeping the keys in position while the polycapralone is soft.

Once I've made the PC board with the bluetooth module at the heart of this keyboard, I'll ship these to the lucky winners. We'll see what they have to say. If it's not good, then back to the drawing board.

[Tags bluetooth, chording, keyboard, chordite ]

Why does the N800 have a unibutton and a hidden button on the top? The 770 had three separate buttons on the top. The left button is now in the middle on the N800. The rocker switch (press left, press right) is now split into two buttons, on left and right. The power menu button on the 770 was arguably too easy to press, so I count the hidden button on the N800 an improvement.

But to merge the two buttons into one unibutton which is practically impossible to distinguish?? Why? The only way to distinguish between the buttons is to slide your finger back and forth a few times, trying to feel the subtle slope from the left to the middle and back down on the right. Only then can you take a guess at which button your finger is on.

Going back to the 770's buttons would be an improvement. Let's hope that the N830 (or whatever) makes that change.

The internal N800 battery is pretty studly, but there are contexts in which I don't want to have to swap out the battery for a spare. Have to reboot the machine to do that and if you're trying to run a program for a long time or continuously, that's not acceptable. Plus you have to notice that the battery has run low and replace it.

Watching events unfold on the world stage, I find myself wondering exactly how much responsibility lies in the hands of the Finns.

Watching events unfold on the world stage, I find myself wondering exactly how much responsibility lies in the hands of the Finns.

The Maemo Community Council and Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh are pleased to announce the launch of the Maemo 5 Community SSU project. It is currently in a testing and elaboration phase, and your help is required.

I spent perhaps too much of today coding. I didn't really mean to spend quite that long on it, though it was a lot of fun. Will Thompson's help fixing DBus problems was invaluable. Version 0.50 of imgur integration will be coming to a Maemo repository near you soon:



Later, since it's my birthday tomorrow, we went out for a curry. It was pretty good, but rather mild. I was amused that the people at the next table to us were clearly English as well. Then we went to the bookshop, came home, and had some coffee. A pretty good day, all told.

comments

I spent perhaps too much of today coding. I didn't really mean to spend quite that long on it, though it was a lot of fun. Will Thompson's help fixing DBus problems was invaluable. Version 0.50 of imgur integration will be coming to a Maemo repository near you soon:



Later, since it's my birthday tomorrow, we went out for a curry. It was pretty good, but rather mild. I was amused that the people at the next table to us were clearly English as well. Then we went to the bookshop, came home, and had some coffee. A pretty good day, all told.

comments

Anyone fancy beta-testing imgur upload for Maemo? Let me know how you get on.

Deb: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~tthurman/imgur/tmp/imgur_0.50-1_armel.deb

Source: https://github.com/tthurman/imgur-integration



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↓



Instructions are included.

Update: Now in extras-testing.

comments

Anyone fancy beta-testing imgur upload for Maemo? Let me know how you get on.

Deb: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~tthurman/imgur/tmp/imgur_0.50-1_armel.deb

Source: https://github.com/tthurman/imgur-integration



↓



↓



Instructions are included.

Update: Now in extras-testing.

comments

TigerSpike is a Sydney, Australia, based business — with offices in London and New York — that has been offering solutions in the personal media space for eight years. The company has recently started working with Qt and I (Richard Bloor) caught up with Chris Watt, product director at TigerSpike to find out about the company’s initial impressions.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-01-24 through 2011-01-30

Been away from the testing scene lately because I have been carrying my new Blackberry from work instead of the N900. I tried carrying both together for a while but it turned out to be too inconvenient. Anyway, the testing queue is growing ever longer. Its good in a way to see apps actively being […]

Another week, another release of Sojourner; this time in glorious 32-bit colour, and featuring its first community contribution!

The eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that, in the favourite talks in the screenshot above, Andrew‘s Django talk sadly clashes with Raúl‘s Folks talk. I hadn’t noticed, until Joaquim Rocha sent patches adding a button that shows which of your favourites clash with the event you’re viewing. Now I have a dilemma on my hands… Joaquim also cleaned up some of my less-beautiful code. Thank you!

The event lists are now easier to skim-read, with subheaders for the day and coloured swatches representing the track the talk is part of. I don’t know if in practice people will actually associate the colours with tracks, but I do think than the pastel stripe at the left-hand side makes the list easier on the eye. I initially wanted to re-use the colours on the official schedule, but didn’t really want to hardcode a massive list of colours (and the schedule XML doesn’t include them), so they’re generated based on a hash of the track name. (Thanks to Sjoerd Simons for the “vary H, fix S and V” tip for generating a palette.)

The package should be available from extras-testing by the time you read this.

After the publication of Nokia's 2010 Q4 results, there has been much fevered discussion across the Internet about why Nokia, with (ex-)Microsoft's Stephen Elop at the helm, may turn to other operating systems for its phones. The alternative operating systems in the spotlight being Android (Q4's biggest seller) and Windows Phone 7. Here at All About Symbian, we have been considering these options and finding that they just do not stand up to a reasoned analysis. An article entitled "Should Nokia Be Looking At Android or WP7? Not Yet", over at Gigaom, broadly agrees with our appraisal of the options.

A few months ago we added the implicit tracker:modified property to all resources. This property is an auto-increment. It used to be that the property was incremented on ~ each SQL update-query that happens. The value is stored per resource.

We are now changing this to be per transaction. A transaction in Tracker is one set of SPARQL-Update INSERT or DELETE queries. You can do inserts and deletes about multiple resources in one such sentence (a sentence can contain multiple space delimited Update queries). An exception is everything related to ontology changes. These ontology changes get the first increment as their value for tracker:modified. This is also for ontology changes that happen after the initial ontology transaction (at the first start, is this first transaction made). The exception is made for supporting future ontology changes and the possibly needed data conversions.

The per-resource tracker:modified value is useful for application’s synchronization purposes: you can test your application’s stored tracker:modified value against the always increasing (w. exception at int. overflow) Tracker’s tracker:modified value to know whether or not your version is older.

The reason why we are changing this to per-transaction is because this way we can guarantee that the value will be restored after a journal replay and/or a backup’s restore without having to store it in either the journal nor the backup. This means that we now guarantee the value being restored without having to change either the backup’s format nor the journal’s format.

Having a persistent journal we actually make a simple copy of the journal to deliver you a backup in a fast file-copy. But let this deception be known only by the people who care about the implementation. Sssht!

We’re already rotating and compressing the rotated chunks for reducing the journal size. We’re working on not journaling data that is embedded in local files this week. A re-index of that local file will re-insert the data anyway. This will significantly reduce the size of the journal too.