A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-03-28 through 2011-04-03

The Texas Linux Fest is a new one-day technical conference, just in its second year.  I was not able to attend last year due to it being held at the same time as the 2010 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and this year it was looking questionable also– but thanks to Gabriel Beddingfield all obstacles were removed.  Gotta love the Linux community!

A definite link of interest of for all Nokia users is the Nokia Support Videos channel on YouTube. We’ve posted before about support videos having been posted for individual phones. Now though, Nokia have compiled all of these into a well presented, cover flow-like, custom YouTube page. Digging further into the standard YouTube video listings reveals support videos for other Nokia devices such as the E72 and N900.

Hello planet GNOME, glad to be in this planet after so many years reading it. Probably you were able to skip my Tracker presentations in different conferences… so now I try via blog. And my first post brings good news.

From now on (it has just landed in master), Tracker libraries are accessible via gobject-introspection. You can manipulate the information via libtracker-sparql or write new miners using libtracker-miner in any language with gobject-introspection support (E.G. python). A snipped of code is worth a thousand words:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import gi
from gi.repository import Tracker

conn = Tracker.SparqlConnection.get (None)
cursor = conn.query ("SELECT ?u WHERE { ?u a nie:InformationElement. }", None)

while (cursor.next (None)):
      print cursor.get_string (0)

This is a synchronous query to the store. Note that you have a cursor to access the results: they will be retrieved from the DB only when needed. Using this while building a model for the UI should show quite a performance improvement compared with the old DBus API. And if you fancy more the asynchronous way of coding, the code looks like this. You can open the connection, run the query and retrieve the results all asynchronously.

When it comes to miners (processes retrieving information), here is a skeleton of an implementation: a subclass of Miner overriding few methods. Install with the usual dbus files and you have a miner that can be started/stoped/monitored with the Tracker tools.

libtracker-sparql is our recommended way to use tracker, the DBus API can be considered internal, and now with gobject-introspection it is available from different languages than C or vala. Combine this with libpeas (also using GI) and then we can easily write plugins showing information from Tracker into applications like EOG or totem… Interesting!

Today we announce the availability of the Qt SDK 1.1 Release Candidate. This is a major step towards the final Qt SDK 1.1, building on the beta we released a couple of weeks ago. The final Qt SDK will allow you to submit your Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store.
Summarizing the most important updates compared to the beta:

• Qt 4.7.3 is included for Desktop and Symbian
• Update to Qt Mobility 1.1.2
• Qt Assistant added as separate package (due to developer request)
• Installer can use system proxy on Linux
• Notification API moved from experimental to “Additional APIs”
• Several fixes for the Qt Simulator
• Several fixes for the installation/updating workflow

Furthermore we suggest you read this important article about that Qt 4.7 will not be supported for S60 3rd Edition. Please note that you are still able to create Qt applications for those targets based on Qt 4.6.
Finally, here are the download links for you to try out the Release Candidate. Either download it directly here:

Platform Online Installer Offline Installer Microsoft Windows 15MB 1,5GB Linux 32bit 23MB 687MB Linux 64bit 23MB 690MB Mac OS-X 12MB 680MB

or on the Forum Nokia pages.

As always, feedback is highly welcomed. Please create an item at our bugtracker at http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com if you encounter any troubles or want to share suggestions and ideas. Note that bugs or feedback added as comments to this article might get lost and hence not handled to your satisfaction. Use the bugtracker instead

The Qt labs team has just announced the release candidate (RC) for its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.1. This follows from its recent beta release. The final release, following this RC, will allow developers to take advantage of all the latest Qt features and submit Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store. However, it should be noted that Qt 4.7 will not support S60 3rd Edition, which sadly, but predictably, points to a deprecation of that version of Symbian. Read on for more details.

Firefox for Mobile Bugzilla Happy URLs - http://stechz.com/2011... April 6 from Benjamin Stover - Comment - Like

Well its been a while since my last post, I had to RMA my pandora, it took a couple weeks, It had one faulty SD slot, but this is all another story. I have had it back for a few weeks and I have been a busy penguin, I have setup a cross compile environment [...]

The new maemo.org community council has been installed...

sudo apt-get install  council-2011.1 

...and we've spent some time discussing what we want to prioritize and accomplish this term.

Now that Nokia has put Maemo into "maintenance mode", with no promises of future updates, we would like to see Maemo continue forward as a community project. And we believe there are two projects that are very promising for the future of Maemo as a community-supported project.

1. The Community Seamless Software Update (CSSU)

The PR 1.3 release of Maemo was the the last official release from Nokia. But many developers in the community felt we could keep moving forward, fixing bugs and introducing new functionality. "It aims to deliver fixes which would be difficult to deliver through Extras (like core Maemo packages). It won't, however, bundle software which can be installed through the Extras repositories."

The council wants to see all Maemo devices supported in the future. That's why we're also encouraging the CSSU for older "Diablo" devices such as the N800 and N810, as well. 

The council believes these Maemo OS update projects are the best way to keep Maemo fresh and vital, long after they have stopped receiving official support.

2. The Cordia project

The aim of the Cordia project is to get the Maemo 5 UI running on the MeeGo infrastructure. This is important because the Maemo infrastructure has been frozen, and it is ageing gracefully into obsolescence.  The MeeGo infrastructure, on the other hand, is using current versions of all the components, and, because it is supported by several large sponsors, it will probably stay current for the next while. The Cordia project gives us hope that the Maemo UI will survive on a new, maintained system.

Coding Competition

The council would also like to draw your attention to the community-run coding competition. There are prizes and some associated events; see the wiki page for more information.

Other Issues

There are three other issues we should mention:

First, the previous council did some more research and digging, and it is now certain that there will be no official Adobe Flash updates for Maemo. The main problem, as we thought, is performance. Adobe has not optimized / hardware accelerated the Flash player enough, and the N900 just isn't powerful enough to run it without acceleration.

Secondly, despite some enquiries to Nokia by the previous council, there has been no movement from Nokia on the closed components discussed in the wiki.

Finally, we are also discussing possibilities for continuation of the maemo.org community if Nokia were to stop supporting us. It looks like there's not much to worry about in 2011, and it has been made clear to us that even if things change in 2012, we'll have 6 months to react, but we're thinking ahead anyway. We'll try to take this discussion public in the near future.

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } Today I am just go do a brief review on the NAMCO recreation of Space-Invaders-Style game, GALAGA. Came across this game while I was browsing through the Ovi Store. It is available on the Ovi Store for free. Here it goes: The Start Menu I would like to comment on the gameplay. Playing on a resistive touch [...]

The look & feel of the MeeGo Keyboard (comes with the MeeGo Input Methods) can be easily adjusted to your needs. In the last post I already gave a brief example on how to modify the graphical assets. In fact, you will find that the look is mostly defined by the graphics contained in that one SVG file. The elements' id's are referenced from the keyboard's CSS file, so it is a good idea to just leave them as-is, unless you really need more graphical elements. The CSS file is installed to a slightly different folder than the SVG file:

Open technologies gained a lot of momentum in the past couple of years, but what became of the term Open ? Does it still hold and mean the same values it did previously ? Were the purists speaking about differences between Open and Free right ?

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-04-04 through 2011-04-10

Last week, together with GNOME 3.0, we released Epiphany 3.0. This is the result of many months of work (our last stable release was Epiphany 2.30 in May 2010), so I think a few lines about our present and our future are in order.

If you are one of those N900 users who use their devices for listening to podcasts and audiobooks, please help getting the latest versions of gPodder and Panucci into Extras and provide feedback/bug reports. For Diablo (N800/N810) users, gPodder 2.14 is already available in Extras.

gPodder 2.14 is a bugfix release in the 2.x release series. It includes fixes for YouTube downloads (this fixes the HTTP 400 errors some users were reporting) and adds per-podcast "Keep episodes" settings (to avoid accidental removal of episodes that you want to archive/keep). This release also includes some fixes for feeds that don't include a valid guid element in their entries. Please test and vote for gPodder 2.14-1 in Extras-Testing.

Panucci 0.99.1 is the second experimental release of xerxes2's development branch of Panucci. As announced on t.m.o, this release includes persistence of settings between invocations and a Qt GUI that can be activated by running Panucci with the --qt command-line switch. Thanks to xerxes2 and Helmuth for collaborating on the improvements made to Panucci recently. Please test and vote for Panucci 0.99.1 in Extras-Testing.

When I bought Nexus S in January I was using stock Android for few weeks. But somewhere around FOSDEM I moved to nightly builds of Cyanogenmod which is alternative “distribution” of Android done in more open way.

Why moved? New features, out of box support for Polish language, no problems with getting root access for applications, big community behind project were main reasons. And more… I have now custom kernel (Netarchy 1.3.0.2), DPI changed to 210 (from original 240) with use of Font Changer and normal font replaced by Ubuntu one (also done in Font Changer).

I was updating my phone from one nightly build to another. From one RC to other and today moved to final version. Upgrading usually went fine, but each time I had to reinstall custom kernel or change back to 210 DPI but that’s how it works. I will probably check other alternative builds one day but today I am satisfied with Cyanogenmod7.

But as this is final version then maybe I will find some time and (after discussions with our Android magicians) will do build of it with Linaro cross compiler — who knows, maybe will give few more percent of speed extra?

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Cyanogenmod7 released was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

source: blogs.msdn.com

#leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } Hi guys, today I’m going to show you what widgets and shortcuts I have been using this whole long for my daily usage. Some of you might already been using it for ages but some may not discover it yet. So here it goes: On my desktop you would see this One of the few important widgets [...]

Firefox for Mobile Phony Featured in Rock Your Firefox - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... April 12 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Firefox Mobile – Monitor HTTP Headers - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 12 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

In the last release of SeriesFinale some nice new features were introduced like live search of TV shows but there was a problem: I messed it up. Basically, you could live search but once you pressed on a show, a different would be selected… good job, I know…

Anyway, the live search is fixed in this new version.

It also has some new cool changes by Juan:
* Covers are now kept back when the application is upgraded
* The database is now saved automatically every 5 minutes
* To prevent database corruption, the database is saved in a temporary file and if everything when well it is then moved to the right file name
* It now checks if other instances of SF are running and hangs newer instances until the old ones are finished
* Buttons whose actions depend on the connection are now only visible when the device is online

Since last version, it is possible to navigate to the next and previous episodes when viewing an episode details but one thing that was a real pain was to have to go back to the full list of episodes in order to mark them as watched so I’ve added a menu that lets users check the episode as watched.

The episodes’ titles are now also stroked when they are watched:

If you use the extras-testing repository, be sure to give it a try and vote to promote it.

The MIR Translator app, borne out of a school project, turns your N900 into a handy translation tool that covers over 30 international languages. All you do is click a picture of the text, select the phrase you want to translate, select the to and from languages and wait for the app to work its magic. Just the kind of app I needed when I was in Hong Kong, traveling with my N900 and trying to order off a incomprehensible menu.

If the recognition is erroneous, the user is able to correct the recognition via manual segmentation, manual thresholding, and manual candidate selection. If that sounds complicated, the developer has an excellent demo and how-to video.

The app is available from Extras-Devel repositories, if you don’t know what that is, have a look here.

Hat tip to @alextootchie.

Similar Posts:

• How To Enable Application Repositories On The N900 With One Click
• BootScreen Lets You Change The N900 Boot Video With One Click
• How To Set A Custom Ringtone For Each Contact On The N900
• How To Create A Physical Task Manager Button For The N900
• Portrait SMS Comes To The N900

This weekend is the first-ever Finnish MeeGo Summit, held in Tampere in the same venue where we had aKademy last summer. Despite some announcements, the conference sold out in a very short time. The program looks very interesting, too.

I'll give two talks:

• Location awareness in MeeGo, Hacks & Tricks track Friday 15:30
• Midgard Create - Content Management System without forms, Finhack Saturday 12:00

Finhack is a Finnish free software meetup co-organized with Free Software Foundation Europe and COSS as a one-day track within MeeGo Summit.
If you're not able to attend the Summit, there are also regular MeeGo meetup groups in Helsinki and Tampere.

Tomorrow I go to the Meego Summit FI in Tampere. I will talk there about Tracker, as usual, but this time sharing happily the stage with Adrien Bustany.

The plan is to talk about what Tracker does NOW in a very pragmatical way, explain the limits we have hit, and give a hint on the more or less experimental ideas we have for the future. Less philosophy, less history and much more pragmatic information, compared with my previous talks. Believe or not, I won’t mention “RDF” or “ontology” at all.

Tracker is nowadays ready to use, and Meego (even if it is only for 1.2) will be the first environment where all its potential can be shown with real information. Combine this with QML and pyside (python bindings) and everything is in place to write very easily surprising applications.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-04-11 through 2011-04-17

Firefox for Mobile Zippity Update – Telemetry - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... April 19 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Nokia has released its Q1 2011 results, reporting an operating profit of €439 million (down 10% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €10.399 billion (up 9% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €439 million, down 10% from last year. Margins in devices and services were 9.8% (down 2.3% YoY and down 1.5% QoQ).

Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were 24.2 million, compared with 21.5 million units in Q1 2010 (up 13% YoY) and compared with 28.3 million units in Q4 2010 (down 14%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 26%, down 5% sequentially and 15% year on year. Read on for more analysis and more details.

This week we published new features for the MeeGo Keyboard, including accent popups (activated through long-press on certain keys) and support for Chinese Input Methods. The latter still requires an IM engine that supports Cangjie for example to be really useful (not provided by MeeGo Input Methods).

Ubuntu users can easily test it out, as I updated the packages in the MeeGo Input Methods PPA. I also enabled all language layouts by default for those packages, as we yet have no real UI for the Desktop to control such settings. You will have to install the additional layouts package manually though (package is called meego-keyboard-zh-layouts).

One can switch to another language by swiping to the left or right (on the keyboard itself), which is admittedly a bit stressful with a mouse (and nigh impossible with touchpads!). It works quite nicely though when using touch screens. I am sorry for the strange transition animation, it apparently needs some adjustments for the desktop.

We'll also have some GNOME3-related news soon, so stay tuned!

Since I’m not a big fan of boring lectures, tribunes or formal declarations of any kind, I’d like to introduce new format for my talk at the San Francisco conference, which, in my opinion, suits the idea of open collaborating community much better. I want those of you, who want their application to be re-designed in a fancy way, to send me links and descriptions of your work and I’ll do it not only for free (as always :), but using techniques that I’ll be talking about on stage. And I’ll use your particular application to show things in real world. To my mind it’s a totally win-win solution. I’ll have great examples to show during the talk, much better than imagining fake ones, and you’ll have nice UI/UX mockups to use (or not to use if you’d like to) in your application. Actual presence in the room during my talk is a great bonus :)

So don’t be shy and post your applications right here in comments!

P.S.: No commercial software is allowed. Sorry, folks.

As some of my past posts have mentioned, the OASIS group is currently working out how it wishes to extend support for change tracking in ODF. The change tracking feature allows you to have an office application remember what changes you have made and associate them with one or more revisions. There are many examples where governments might want such traceability, but small businesses are likely to find this functionality valuable too.

Late last year there was an ODF plugfest held in Brussels where it was decided that an Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee should be formed to work out how to serialize tracked changes into ODF.

There are currently two proposals. One which is generic and tracks how the XML of the ODF is modified over time, and an extension to the limited change tracking that already exists in ODF 1.2.

As my previous posts have mentioned, I'm involved in making abiword able to produce and consume ODF files which contain tracked changes in the format of the generic proposal.
See my github for abiword and its change tracking test suite. Ganesh Paramasivam has been working to make Calligra and KOffice support the generic proposal too, and Jos van den Oever has done some hacking to enrich WebODF for change tracking.

As I have been going along implementing things in abiword, I've been clarifying some points on the oasis office-collab mailing list, and participating in some of the general conversation there too.

Some of the differences between the two proposals can have a large impact to the complexity of implementing change tracking in applications. Folks who are involved in office applications which use ODF might like to read up on the proposals and have their say on the future of this feature before a decision is made for you.

I think it is important for ODT to include a good, complete change tracking specification because it would offer all people the ability to collaborate on documents and businesses the change to know the exact extent of modifications made to documents by each party.

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2011-04-18 through 2011-04-24

I have just published the software I wrote for my MBA in Strategic Management of Technology Innovation.

A slightly customized version of the software is currently in use as a innovation funnel at INdT.

It is a commonly accepted fact in business that social projects bring some tangible benefits to an organization. Unfortunately, even if the project is very successful this often does not impact directly on the financial bottom line. And, in a world of razor-thin margins, a set of activities that drive up corporate cost without any directly identifiable return is a tough sell, no matter how worthwhile and noble the project might be. The business case for social projects is therefore contingent on finding a suitable method for valuation — one that allows managers to understand the implications of an indirect benefit and then make ’intelligent’ decisions about which projects to choose and the most feasible level of resources to commit.

I approached the problem using techniques from agile development. Scrum sizings were run with stakeholders experienced in the type of project under evaluation which estimated the intangible values present in the social project.The values were then passed into an algorithm which ran an economic analysis of the project with its associated series of estimates as projected 'cash-flows'. The economic indicators calculated are net present value, internal rate of return and efficiency of investment

Projects are then ranked on their efficiency of social investment score.

The customization used at INdT is that instead of using scrum estimates the software has values assigned by answering questions. This makes the software then useful for all kinds of projects.The following questions were used

• What is the quality of information presented.?
• How much does this project align with strategy?
• What is the probability that the project will build competencies?
• The project opens new, significant markets for customers (What is the potential for market and revenue creation?)
• What is the project's capacity to leverage competitive position (Impact on competition)
• If the project is approved what is the span of possible applications that the resulting product might be applied to?
• Are there any IPR implications?
• What is the technological feasibility of the project?
• Assuming the project is implemented the set up costs of it are likely to be?
• What are the technological risks?

and the software also has a 'stage-gate' built in now so that projects can be eliminated early on if some basic requirements are not met. Things like the project conflicting with the current portfolio or not adding value fit this description.

The software is published under the AGPL and it uses a standard Django set up. It should be relatively bug free but YMMV depending on what you want to do with it. The full thesis - How to choose social investment projects by calculating their efficiency of investment using agile software development techniques - is available to download here. Enjoy!

Firefox for Mobile Newly Recommended Mobile Add-on: Foursquare - http://blog.mozilla.com/mobile... April 25 from Mobile Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Newly Recommended Mobile Add-on: Foursquare - http://cmlooney.wordpress.com/2011... April 25 from Caitlin Looney's Blog » Newly... - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile css, screen, and display ports. oh my! - http://dougt.org/wordpre... April 26 from dougt » mozilla - Comment - Like

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Nokia today announced that it plans to cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of 2012, as part of the restructuring resulting from its recent strategy changes. The majority of the cuts will take place in Finland, Denmark and the UK. They are part of the previously announced measures to cut Nokia's operational expenditure by €1 billion. In addition, a further 3,000 employees will move to Accenture as part of the transfer of Nokia's Symbian software activities, which was also announced today.

Over the past several weeks I've been hitting one concept over and over again: "reference".

The ‘will LG, won’t LG’ game around has been going on for a while. First it was Valtteri Halla (a member of technical steering group of MeeGo and former Nokia employee) who commenting on Nokia’s exit said  “It’s opening opportunities for the others to come in. Discussions are taking place. You’ll see things coming out this year, pretty soon.”

Then the ‘LG fills Nokia’s MeeGo void’ stories started, but LG quickly poured water on that rumour by saying that they have no definite plans to ‘mass produce’ a MeeGo smartphone this year. This was interpreted as a pretty cold stance. However, a pretty interesting session has just popped up on the MeeGo Conference website, that proposes to “show LGE MeeGo Devices and present porting experience of MeeGo 1.2 into multiple LG devices”.

But if you read further into the abstract:

“To present how LGE’s works on MeeGo IVI/Tablet/Smart Phone and how/what LGE will contribute for the future of MeeGo platform. Also some proposal on SW architecture will be presented. This session will include demonstration of prototype devices. (Will be updated)”

So there you have it, MeeGo on prototype LG devices. It still doesn’t mean that LG will be mass producing a MeeGo smartphone this year, but it does open the doors to it. I will be at next month’s MeeGo Conference and keeping an eye on things.

Meanwhile I wonder if we’ll hear something about Nokia’s only MeeGo device anytime around the same time?

Hat tip to @brainimpact.

Similar Posts:

• MeeGo 1.2 Release Now Out – N900 Developer Edition Release Set For MeeGo Conference
• MeeGo Gets A Second Conference: May 23-25 In San Francisco
• Registrations For The MeeGo Conference In May Now Open
• Intel Disappointed With Nokia’s Move, But Puts Its Weight Behind MeeGo
• Live From The MeeGo Conference

Firefox for Mobile Writing browser chrome mochitests - http://stechz.com/2011... April 28 from Benjamin Stover - Comment - Like

You'd probably like me more if I had spend my time testing the upcoming release of MeeGo Tablet UX on this shiny new WeTab (I ♥ Openismus), but Jon couldn't resist to test-drive GNOME3 first. Well, and since we like our virtual keyboard so much, we just had to make it work of course.

Jon also wrote about the features shown in the video.

Firefox for Mobile NPAPI on Android status update. - http://dougt.org/wordpre... April 29 from dougt » mozilla - Comment - Like