Dear Last.fm fellows, I’ve just released Vagalume 0.8.5.
These are the most important changes since the previous version:
This makes 0.8.5 the first Vagalume to support GTK+ 3, and this without even needing to break backwards compatibility. So now it compiles with any GTK+ version from (at least) 2.6 till 3.0
Last week I got the news that I’d been accepted into Nokia’s community device program and would be receiving a Nokia N950 so that I could help produce some nice open source MeeGo apps ready for the launch of the Nokia N9 later in the year. The device hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ve already started on the first of my projects which is to create a Libre.fm radio client. Most of the basic functionality now works including authentication, tuning to stations, playing, pausing and skipping back and forth through the playlist. I won’t be making a release until after I’ve had a chance to actually test it on the device itself, but the code is all in the GNU FM git repository. Here’s a quick video of it in action:
The new Dropbox TOS reads, starting with 1st of July 2011:
1) “We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files).“
False. There should not be any “we” implied. “We” is the service itself, not some humans asking for your permission and then passing it to the “Service”. Imagine Microsoft asking for your permission to translate the movements of your mouse into GUI actions.
2) “By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.“
A short note here: where was this point when I started using Dropbox, last year? What you see here is plainly illegal: there is no automatic sub-licensing shit these guys dream of.
This paragraph says that whatever I’ve put in Dropbox servers, now it already belongs to the public.
On a second thought, why would you consider there’s something you think it’s “necessary for the Service” without me thinking the same?
3) “You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.“
What? I don’t! Say I have already stored enterprise secrets in my Dropbox account, and that was in perfect conformity with the TOS I acknowledged one year ago. Now I have to let you make my secrets public because some stupid lawyer told you that you have to change the TOS? Or should I just delete my account because it’s no longer conforming with the TOS? Isn’t it too late, given the fact that I’ve read the new TOS only after you’ve published it?
.
The only way to deal with people’s stuff should be this: Your stuff hosted on our servers is your responsibility and yours alone; we may grant access to a third party should that third party present us with a court of law written order. End of TOS.
Wake up, Dropbox, what you’ve published as a TOS update is worse than lame; you’re being advised by a person that’s putting you on a shortest course to lose your customers.
Update: What you witness is not Dropbox shooting themselves in the leg, but Dropbox firing three times at their own head… Do you still think it’s a suicide…?
Dan Sawyer on Dropbox new TOS: “I’d rather steer clear and not be in the position where I have to decide I want to be a test case“. (in comments)
Mike Puchol on the same TOS: “[...] this smells of a lawsuit gone bad resulting in bulletproofing a service, maybe someone noticed his files were being served from servers in another country and sued the storage provider on non-permission to copy/distribute grounds. Then, every other lawyer copied the TOS to match. Remember that case with a woman spilling hot coffee on her lap, resulting in all take-away coffee cups showing large “this stuff is hot” labels? Yeah“
Reading this, it stroke me; the online storage is becoming something it should never be: some kind of a Facebook Directory, instead of a Swiss Bank.
The second you pay a dime for your online storage, it should transform into a Swiss bank account: it shouldn’t matter what’s in your box, it only matters that your stuff is secured and accessible only for you.
Any other definition of the online storage is either obsolete or wrong and you should not spend one bit of your life thinking about it; for sharing and publishing there are plenty of other services that don’t pretend to be secured storages in the clouds.
On Dropbox’ blog there comes a post, at blog.dropbox.com, willing to clarify the mess they’ve made. But it doesn’t.
You see, now it’s even worse, as one comment goes (its author is “ITS”):
“You must choose, either our property is ONLY our property – because you can’t do ‘any derivative works’ – on any circumstances, or you choose to make our property public without our explicit written consent on any item. For example I don’t wish my source code become public, it may be unique and, if I choose to back it up, that doesn’t mean I choose to make it public. Don’t play dirty or, you’ll screw your own business and reputation for good and forever. “
Their blog’s Disqus plugin returns a fatal error now.
One of your editors, Ryan Abel has started the conversation about what's necessary to ensure the N9/Harmattan and MeeGo communities work together: "The lack of interesting devices shipping MeeGo is currently the platform's biggest problem. Despite the technical differences between MeeGo and Harmattan, leveraging the N9, its users, and its developers is likely to play an important part in determining future success for MeeGo. If Nokia's plans for MeeGo end with the N9, we want to retain as many of those users and developers as we can when they decide to buy new devices. So capturing them early and ensuring they're welcome in MeeGo.com is important." Discussion is trying to capture the obstacles and differences between Harmattan and MeeGo proper, to ensure a seamless adoption of MeeGo for developers enticed by N9.
Read more (forum.meego.com)
You may be already (very) familiar with this picture:
But the next one is new; it shows a MacBook next to the new HP ProBook 5330m (via TechCrunch):
Samsung said the other day they don’t copy Apple, but they are offering what the users want. I guess the users want Apple design, therefore Samsung is building products that resemble Apple’s…
HP may have found the exact trend in their studies, that people want an Apple MacBook; therefore they are building MacBook-like laptops.
This not that dumb yet; it becomes dumb when they cut the R&D budget… Wait! Copying means they’ve already cut the R&D budget!
Here is a quick look at Multitasking on the Nokia N9 powered by MeeGo. When you see a preview of all the apps currently running , it shows you the every app’s current state in realtime and not just a screenshot like in some other platforms. For instance the Compass app reacts to movements even … Continue reading "Video : Multi-Tasking on the Nokia N9"
The post Video : Multi-Tasking on the Nokia N9 first appeared on Fone Arena.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt at CNN Money:
“In eight years of operation, there has yet to be a credible claim of data hacking into iTunes or the Apple Store. What happened over the weekend was certainly not that [...]. It contains what appears to be a list 27 user names and encrypted passwords from an SQL database for an online survey — since taken offline — at the Apple Business Intelligence website. “
He also publishes the list of the “hacked accounts”:
[27 entries] +—————+ | User | +—————+ | admin | | backup | | bnewcomb | | bulkmail | | leung | | masuo | | myapp | | process_super | | rlinton | | sharp | | survey | | web_csat | | spbidb05 | | status_check | | survey_slave | | NULL | | root | | NULL | | admin | | backup | | backup_user | | bnewcomb | | bulkmail | | masuo | | myapp | | root | | survey | +—————+
+——————————————-+ | Password | +——————————————-+ | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | NULL | | NULL | | NULL | | *5DDF97914AE903CD933CFA428E6582A214E66339 | | *5DDF97914AE903CD933CFA428E6582A214E66339 | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *2447D497B9A6A15F2776055CB2D1E9F86758182F | | *758A94318E1CCA45D996610F8A97E6BAA48C02FE | | *758A94318E1CCA45D996610F8A97E6BAA48C02FE | | 2bbe9f0c59e89c66 | | *97757F6F08362A7CBA6F30E72EB90A73C79168EE | | *5B3643923A375B56250D11532289B2675C69AE62 | | *45930B494440B7335C3F98DB0FD14441166B57BB | | *FF642075DCA52A257F8DB745546F1E643D0B07DA | | *FF642075DCA52A257F8DB745546F1E643D0B07DA | | *35D14C41D95FA9DC79DF22641B7F9F98ECFDA55B | | *BAFD507E802E9B17D99E22A1360CECD386149822 | | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | *7AB8AAB1CB14C7997CE400CEA87B443A15FE72E6 | | *5B202DF112417035DF7A62DDC250A9ADB0F22BDD | | *8C69224DCDC9A8FB2122952DF5B57A4AB7FE456A | | *AEEE48760B9DCE2800776CE1FF6915FE91D8C894 | | *406E480B04BF741F3FB65E0C8976FC856BDBF418 | | *3D845C052A1D31F3D8D3E864735E84DF3E07C9D0 | +——————————————-+
This is a totally different story than Sony’s.
There’s an interesting story on HN: a ten year old kid got access to Google+, but Google then discovered the kid was underaged so the entire account was set for deletion in 30 days. That would mean all the email and messages the kid was heavily into.
A very interesting comment by “tybris” escaped though: “I think [the kid] learned a valuable lesson about how to use the Internet: lie about everything”.
That’s one more reason Google ads and search will miss their real target when looking for relevance.
EU regulator decided that cookies should be user explicitely acknowledged and accepted and not implicitly, as they are today.
BBC has run a test asking from its users to accept the tracking cookies: only 10% of them accepted the damn scripts.
Rory Cellan-Jones about this story: “More ammunition, then, for those who argue that the cookies directive could be fatal for the health of Europe’s web firms“.
Not Europe’s. US’ (Happy 7/4! btw)
.
Remember the e-G8 summit in France? No?
How about this one: Whose business is heavily dependent on cookies? E-commerce? No. Users buying stuff don’t really mind being asked each time their username and password; on the contrary, AppStore proves the opposite.
It’s Google and Facebook, guys, how could you miss by that far?!
In harmattan, if you want to access certain resources (E.G. Tracker) you need to ask for permission to the Security FW. It is not as bad as it sounds. You just need to add a file in your package explaining what “tokens” do you need. Then depending on where your package comes from and some other ingredients, the security FW decides if your application is worthy of such a privilege.
Today I was packaging a very first version of Mussorgsky in QML which requires the “TrackerReadAccess” token (to query Tracker via dbus). So far I have been working in the command line tool where a aegis-su -r TrackerReadAccess python mussorgsky.py was enough. But how to do the same when the application is installed?
$PACKAGE_NAME.aegis file under your debian/ directory. There you need to declare what tokens you want for what binary. Example: in mussorgsky.aegis I request “TrackerReadAccess” for “/usr/lib/mussorgsky/mussorgsky-qml.py”, which is the executable that starts my program.
# Add this to the debian/rules file
PACKAGE_TARGETS := $(foreach pkg,$(DEB_ALL_PACKAGES),binary/$(pkg))
$(PACKAGE_TARGETS)::
[ ! -f debian/$(notdir $@).aegis ] || aegis-deb-add -control \
debian/$(notdir $@)/DEBIAN/control .. debian/$(notdir $@).aegis=_aegis
aegis-builder (>=1.4)Then you build your package. It should install nicely and your application run without problems on the device. Still, a couple of remarks:
#!/usr/bin/python on its first line). python myscript.py will not work. The path is absolute.Happy hacking.
Ever since the N9 was announced, the question on everyone’s mind is that for how long would Nokia continue to support something which in all probability is its last MeeGo (Harmattan) device. Here’s something that should cheer you up, Klas Ström, Head of Portfolio Management in Marketing for Nokia tweets that the N9 will be supported for ‘years’ and that they would release several updates. Although, take the ‘years’ with a pinch of salt.
Next, if you are looking at a pure MeeGo experience, then you will also be glad to know that there are plans to bring the MeeGo Community Edition to the N9 as well, its already alive and kicking on the N900, and with the community support, the N9 can also hope to live longer than ever.
Finally, there is even more good news. Nokia India’s My Next Nokia page includes a mention of the N9 in its source code, pointing to a possible India release. Now before you get your hopes up, the information can only be seen in the source code and there is no mention of the N9 on any other visible portion of the website.
If you recall, there were only 23 countries which were slated to the get N9 when it was announced, but may be all the positive reaction is making Nokia reconsider other key markets as well. We’ll know more closer to its launch, meanwhile sit tight and hope.
[Update] It appears as if Nokia is indeed reconsidering its position on where to market the N9, it just popped up Nokia Brazil’s website as well, this time making it beyond the source code. Brazil was also missing from the original list of 23 countries. (via Verythrax in the comments below).
May be Nokia is only taking the N9 to markets which will get Nokia’s Windows Phone offerings next year? May be that 23 country is not definitive after all!
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The first Nokia Harmattan / MeeGo device , the Nokia N9 , has been garnering rave reviews everywhere. However there is one more MeeGo phone ie the developer only Nokia N950. Rumor has it that the N950 was supposed to be launched in 2010 as the first MeeGo device but got canned. Nokia has been … Continue reading "Exclusive : The Epic Nokia N950 Hands On !"
The post Exclusive : The Epic Nokia N950 Hands On ! first appeared on Fone Arena.
We’ve known that the N9 would come with an all new version of Ovi Music very different from the clients we’ve seen on other Symbian devices. But one thing that comes as a very pleasant surprise is that the client on the N9 in-addition to a new UI, also supports streaming radio.
You can browse music by genre as you would normally, but now you will also see a ‘Play genre radio’ button there and with one tap you can have Ovi Music stream tracks from that genre. The streaming service is powered by by Aupeo! and if you like what you hear, you can buy the track there and then right from within the Ovi Store.
Great for discovering new music and experimenting with genres. The obvious question is, when this functionality coming to the N9′s Symbian siblings? Another thing, why is it still called Ovi Music?
If you’re looking to hear more about how the N9 performs as an entertainment device, hit this post from Nokia Conversations.
In my previous blog I had introduction to MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Qt Quick components, in this blog I wrote about porting components to other platforms than MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan and in next one about porting applications to different Qt Quick Components like MeeGo-Ux, Symbian or desktop.
Last week there was Ubuntu platform sprint in Dublin, Ireland. I was there as one of invited Linaro guys (we got own room). What for we went there?
I’ve always liked the Scratchbox approach to cross-compiling. Run ./configure && make and you have an ARM binary, no need to explicitly tell the configure we are cross-compiling nor fix the bad behaving build scripts.
MeeGo doesn’t provide an SDK for the (ARM) platform. There’s an SDK for building Qt applications and there’s an QEMU for emulating the ARM device environment. For building the lower level components (Qt itself, GStreamer, etc) you are expected to use OBS. OBS is a very good build infrastructure tool, especially as you can link your own OBS to upstream OBS instances like MeeGo or OpenSUSE and have your OBS build only your own components or modified upstream components.
But OBS is a bit overkill when you are developing your own component that you don’t want to be a part of anything bigger yet. The OBS client side tool, osc, allows you to build components locally in a chroot but still you need an OBS account and those aren’t automatically available for everyone, not even in the community OBS.
I took the chroot created by osc build and modified it a bit with the help from stskeeps @ #meego-arm. The produced chroot is capable of building ARMv7 hard-float binaries without OBS or OBS account. It includes a minimal set of dependencies to make it smaller for easy download (it’s still 162MB), and the project specific dependencies can be installed normally with zypper from the standard MeeGo repositories.
The benefit from using a chroot over a QEMU image is the installed speed tools; many of the components taking time during a build are actually x86 binaries. These include e.g. bash, compilers and bzip2. Running these as emulated ARM binaries (or natively on an ARM hardware) would be much much slower.
I’ve used this approach with my own Qt + GStreamer project and it has been working well but that’s only a small use case so there can be all kinds of issues still. I use the same account inside the chroot and outside and bind mount my $HOME to the chroot so I can build project under my $HOME.
Current known issues:
If you want to try it out, it’s available via BitTorrent at http://tuomas.kulve.fi/tmp/torrent/ (temporary location). After extracting the tarball, see the readme file in the root directory.
RM Bauer, a member of the current Maemo Community Council has posted thoughts on the the N9 launch on the Council blog:
"There are numerous directions in which the community may move. For example, the Swipe UI/UX layer of the N9 is closed source and so there will be interest in developing an open source community alternative. Alternatively, the community can simply continue on with support for previous versions of Maemo. The staying power of maemo.org in the two year interim between the N900 and the N9 has been recognized even by Nokia. There are approximately 1 million downloads per week. A minimal level of support will continue to be provided by Nokia for at least a year. In keeping with its history of open governance, the community itself must decide the best direction forward."
The most interesting pieces of news are that Matti Airas is the new Maemo community liaison from Nokia and that another year of support is going to be provided. Given Nokia's budgetary process has previously been based on six month cycles, this is an improvement.
Read more (maemo.org)
The Nokia YouTube page has just been updated, its all about the N9 now. But Nokia doesn’t believe in simple videos these days, remember the pretty cool interactive N8 unboxing? This time they’re bringing something new to the table, 6 ads in less that 60 seconds, making them perhaps the world’s Quickest ads.
Hit the page to see a set of 6 ads that run for about 9 seconds on average covering the N9′s design, camera, maps, social functionality, browser and its general awesomeness. You may be surprised how the message can be conveyed in such a short amount of time. Infact, it’d be great if all ads were like this, we’d save a lot time!
The idea behind the ads seems to be to show how the N9 can become an integral part of your life, yet be innocuous, letting you focus on what you’re doing rather than making the phone the center of your attention.
Its a fun watch!
Want to stop productive bug reporting in its tracks? Want to get the trolling rolling? Toss a flaming “Works for me!” into the mix and stand back.
I’ve often described the title of this piece as the most devastating insult one techie can inflict on another. It’s surely one of the more popular. And while in many (maybe most) cases it’s dropped in perfect innocence, this little innocuous phrase tends to land with the force of a nuclear bomb.
Bug triage is a progressive process. After the initial report, others join in to share their experience and a living, breathing, sometimes-viral organism develops. Those afflicted with the bug take co-ownership of the report, as do those working to resolve it. They may see anyone poking in to coo a cavalier “works for me!” as an affront. A theft of discourse and productivity. And a blatant example of trolling.
It’s especially an issue in open source communities, where much if not all of the work involved is strictly volunteer. Pointless infringements on precious time are not taken lightly. And unless the poster is a sociopath, they surely don’t want to develop a troll’s reputation.
But what if the alleged agent provocateur really is innocent? There’s actually value in the remark if it’s sincere. A valid “works for me” becomes a control, an example of an environment or set of conditions where the bug has failed to manifest. A bug-free control can aid in troubleshooting by enabling investigators to better identify critical environmental differences. In fact the more “works for me” contributions there are, the quicker the culprit can be identified. It lurks in the unique shadows of the bug originator’s domain… and can often be something really simple.
Obviously bug triage depends on collaboration and, to some extent, healthy competition. But successful bug resolution is best accomplished by avoiding ego-driven contributions on either side. That means no taunting, and no rash assumptions. Consider your words carefully. If you have no stake in the bug, just observe from the sidelines if at all. And if personality conflicts emerge, they’re best taken out of the bug stream and handled between the adversaries.
Keep on (de)bugging!
Remember yesterday’s 9 second Nokia N9 ads? Yes, the ones that are over if you decide to blink. Well there’s more to them than what meets the eye. Accompanying the ads is a brand new contest that can win you a Nokia smartphone, I’m guess a N9! Hit n9seconds.com and you’ll see the following screen awaiting a six character code.
The answer to this code it seems is hidden the videos, there’s 6 of them so I’m guessing each video gives you one character, fill them in and perhaps you’ll be the smart cookie who cracks this. There is also the following at the bottom of the page, more not so easy to understand hints.
Finally, there are 20 codes in total, only two of which have been unlocked so far. There’s also a @N9Seconds Twitter account that keeps track of codes that have been tried. The contest is open to everyone over the age of 15, worldwide. It closes once all 20 codes have been found or on 31.12.11 if no one’s able to crack it, but I won’t bet on it lasting for so long. If you want a N9, get cracking now.
Good luck!
Three weeks ago, the N9 was announced. Little can be added to what's been written: it's a great achievement, but also a bitter one. Still, I really think that great things can be done on this platform, and that's why I applied to the N950 Devkit Program.
My initial idea was to port Maevies from Fremantle to Harmattan, keeping the same architecture. In the week or so that went between the N9 announcement and the filtering of the candidates for the devkit program, I resumed the development on the client side, bringing the ability to save and load favorite movies, as well as other minor UI fixes, and also updated the D-Bus service so that it would compile on HARMATTAN target.
When I knew I was selected for the program, I started using PySide (specifically Harmattan Python) to quickly get a working UI which could connect to the D-Bus service... but it turned out that I didn't need it, thanks to the powerful way to deal with XML models inside QML. Today I've uploaded "Butaca" application to gitorious. Still a draft of what I expect it to be, it lets the user search and browse through movies, and get detailed information about them. I also created an entry at the MeeGo Wiki at User:Spenap/Butaca.
Butaca - Welcome View
Butaca - Search View
Butaca - Results View
Butaca - Detailed Result
When mapping Qt/C++ API's to QML, or, to put it more precisely, making a Qt/C++ API available to QML, road bumps are to be expected. One such bump is the mapping of C++ enums.
If you happen to create enums inside a QObject, then it will be exported to QML via the Q_ENUMS helper:
SomeEnumsWrapper
: public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
Q_ENUMS(SomeState)
public:
enum SomeState {
BeginState, // Remember that in QML, enum values must start
IntermediateState, // with a capital letter!
EndState
};
};
You will still need to declare this class as an abstract type for QML to be able to use enums from it (put in your main function for example):
qmlRegisterUncreatableType<SomeEnumsWrapper>("com.mydomain.myproject", 1, 0,
"SomeEnums", "This exports SomeState enums to QML");
Now in QML, the enums can be accessed as '''SomeEnums.BeginState'''. Note how the enum is accessed through the exported type name, not an instance.
But what if you've put your enums into a dedicated C++ namespace? Then the same mechanism can be used. Let's start with the namespace:
namespace SomeEnums {
enum SomeState {
BeginState,
IntermediateState,
EndState
};
}
We can re-use the idea of wrapping enums in a QObject type, with one tiny change:
SomeEnumsWrapper
: public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
Q_ENUMS(SomeState)
public:
enum SomeState {
BeginState = SomeEnums::BeginState, // Keeps enum values in sync!
IntermediateState = SomeEnums::IntermediateState,
EndState = SomeEnums::EndState
};
};
The process of forwarding all your enums through this mechanism can be tedious, but being able to use enums properly in QML properly will improve the readability and maintainability of your QML code.
For a fully working example check Maliit's Qt Quick support
Nokia Sweden is looking for 30 people to test drive the N9, and by test drive they mean – they give you the device, you play with it, you talk about it, and after all that is done, you get to keep it. That’s not all, they’ll even award one person from the lucky 30 with a weekend in London if they think he or she did the best job in that role. Brilliant.
So whats the catch? First, the contest (English translation) is only open those of you in Sweden, there’s nothing in the terms and conditions about that (as far as Google Translate and I can tell!) but I’m assuming that anyway. Next, to enter you need to make a strong pitch and then get your friends on Facebook to back you up. After August 21, they’ll pick 30 people who’ll get to rock the N9 as test pilots in September and October. There’s also a N9 Summer Tour that kicks off on the 15th of month and passes by a bunch of Swedish cities before ending in August.
All of this at least tells us one thing, the N9 will probably be in stores come September. For the rest of the world, you can still win a N9 here.
Tracker writes back certain metadata to your files. It for example writes back in XMP the title of a JPeg file, among other fields that XMP supports.
We had a service that runs in the background waiting for signals coming from the RDF store that tell it to perform a writeback.
To avoid that our FS miner would pick up the changes that the writeback service made, and that way index the file again, we introduced a D-Bus API for our FS miner called IgnoreNextUpdate. When the API is issued will the FS miner ignore the first next filesystem event that would otherwise be handled on a specific file.
That API is now among our biggest sources of race conditions. Although we wont remove it from 0.10 due to API promises, we don’t like it and want to get rid of it. Or at least we want to replace all its users.
To get rid of it we of course had to change the writeback service in a way that it wouldn’t need the API call on the FS miner any longer.
The solution we came up with was to move the handling of the signal and the queuing to the FS miner‘s process. There we have all the control we need.
The original reason why writing back was done as a service was to be robust against the libraries, used for the actual writeback, crashing or hanging. We wanted to keep this capability, so just like the extractor is a portion of the writeback system going to run out of process of the FS miner.
When a queued writeback task is to be run, an IPC call to a writeback process is made and returns only when it’s finished. Then the next task in the queue, in the FS miner, is selected. A lot like how the extracting of metadata works.
We have and will be working on this in the writeback-refactor branches next few days.
I’m going to confess something that’s likely to cost me Twitter followers, kill future career prospects and launch a mild Comment war:
I’ve just built some Box2D and Box2D-QML packages for Harmattan. The Box2D-QML package is especially interesting, this wraps the Box2D API as QObjects allowing them to be made use of directly from within QML. So you don’t need any extra C++ to handle physics simulation for simple games or similar. Here’s a short video of one of the demos running on an N950:
The source code for the above demo can be seen in the Box2D-QML repository here: Monera Example and thanks to these wrappers is very simple.
Packages for the N9/N950 can be found in my OBS repository, simply download elleo.list into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and run apt-get update to make the repository available on your device, or just download the packages you’re interested in directly from http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/elleo/Harmattan/armel/.
Many thanks to the Box2D and Box2D-QML teams for creating such nice tools, I’d certainly recommend them to anyone interested in 2D game development on the N9/N950 phones.
One of the original requirements for the software powering forum.meego.com was that it allowed offline participation, preferably through people's normal email clients. Reggie Suplido, who manages talk.maemo.org, suggested that vBulletin allowed this; but activation of the feature was delayed because of the potential load on the server.
With the MeeGo IT team now managing the upgraded servers, the discussion about enabling the feature has moved on. After a few prods from Andrew Flegg and David Greaves, Reggie has started a thread on how it would work, and the potential limitations: "I'm starting this thread to discuss the Forum <-> Email Integration that has been planned for quite some time now. This was recently brought up on the July 12, 2011 Community Office Meeting (starting at the 14:49:47 mark). This might be the best time to discuss if we really want these features, what really needs to be implemented, propose features, and help with the coding and testing."
The IT team took this weekend's meego.com maintenance window to create the necessary aliases, so hopefully we'll see a trialling of the feature shortly.
Read more (forum.meego.com)
This time, some screenshots before heading to bed.
Browsing by genres
Browsing Sci-Fi
Searching people
You can check out the full set of screenshots at Picasa, the code at Gitorious, and -only for the braves!- a Debian package. Thanks a lot to Tuomas Siipola, who sent me the placeholder icons for persons and movies, and to Felipe Erias, who is guiding me on the UI design.
EDIT: Also uploaded the screenshots to Flickr, with descriptions in each view.
EDIT 2: You can follow these steps to use my OBS repository and keep Butaca updated
Last Thursday I received a package containing something called the Nokia N950 development kit. Sweet sweet hardware, shame it's not going to be sold to end users. The software is visibly an unfinished pre-release version, but shows great potential. There are almost no 3rd-party apps, which is why Nokia is loaning these N950s to random developers.
I intend to port GTimeLog to it. Although my more immediate need is to have FBReader, so that I can stop carrying both this one and my N900 with me everywhere. Also, vim would be nice.
I've already hacked up Lithuanian support to the virtual and hardware keyboards, thanks to the very nice design of Maliit. As a comparison, I've had my N900 for a year and a half, and I still can't type Lithuanian on it. XKB is not fun.
Last Thursday I received a package containing something called the Nokia N950 development kit. Sweet sweet hardware, shame it's not going to be sold to end users. The software is visibly an unfinished pre-release version, but shows great potential. There are almost no 3rd-party apps, which is why Nokia is loaning these N950s to random developers.
I intend to port GTimeLog to it. Although my more immediate need is to have FBReader, so that I can stop carrying both this one and my N900 with me everywhere. Also, vim would be nice.
I've already hacked up Lithuanian support to the virtual and hardware keyboards, thanks to the very nice design of Maliit. As a comparison, I've had my N900 for a year and a half, and I still can't type Lithuanian on it. XKB is not fun.
Lately, I’ve been developing some software which makes an intensive usage of QUrls as resource locators for local files. Nothing wrong here. QUrl is a powerful way of sharing the locations of those in an universal way. The problem is when you construct those QUrls from QStrings and you actually forget that QUrls are meant for much more than representing local file locations.
Nokia has released its Q2 2011 results, reporting an operating loss of -€487 million, with net sales of €9.275 billion (down 7% YoY). Nokia's Devices and Services division's losses were -€247 million. Margins in devices and services were -4.5% (down 14% YoY and down 14.2% QoQ). However, non-IFRS operating profit was €391 million (down 41% YoY and down 44% QoQ), with Devices and Services non-IFRS profit at €369 million, and margins at 6.7%. Total smartphone device sales were 16.7 million, compared with 24 million units in Q2 2010 (down 34% YoY) and 25.2 million units in Q1 2011 (down 31%, QoQ).
The people at the helm at Nokia could see this and say, heh, do you even know our N9 strategy? Or may be that you’re missing the bigger picture, and how its now a war of ecosystems. I get that. This is in part a rant and in part a post on thinking aloud about what could Nokia do to stem the impending bloodbath that the next two quarters would bring.
Finally I could get a little time to finish SF 0.6.8 release.
Right now, probably all of you know IMDb. The Internet Movie Database is "the place" you'd go to look up a movie or check the filmography of an actor, writer or director. Some of you will also be familiar with IMDb Android and iOS applications, which allow you to check out that very same information on your mobile device, providing the means to settle any arguments (who directed The Terminator? And Aliens?). However, IMDb doesn't provide a free API: it provides a big ZIP file that you can download and parse to get that info. Then... -if you don't want to get a commercial license for the API- what are your chances as an Open Source developer willing to get the same functionality?
TMDb was started in the fall of 2008 as a side project in order to help serve high resolution posters and fan art for the popular XBMC project. What started as just a simple single page linked with some zip files has morphed into one of the most active user built movie databases on the entire Internet.
themoviedb.org is a free and open movie database. It's completely user driven by people like you. TMDb is currently used by millions of people every month and with our powerful API, also used by the world's most popular media centers.
And indeed it is a powerful API. Butaca uses it to provide you with all the movie information you could need :). At this moment, Butaca implements almost all the API exposed by TheMovieDb, so you can search and get information from people and movies and navigate through genres: the only thing you need is an Internet connection. Besides, Butaca allows you to mark the content as favorite so you'd keep it in your home screen as a shortcut.
Welcome view with favorites
Detailed Movie View
Other available feature in Butaca is movie showtimes. Right now, I couldn't find any world-wide open showtimes API: looks like there are some local ones, which could serve in some countries (or areas inside some countries) but most of these APIs need to be licensed. So what's the solution at the moment? When the user wants to check what's on the theaters around him, the browser is open pointing to Google Movies. The browser is used also, if you want to check if there are shows for a particular movie. In the future (unless I find some good API), instead of opening the browser, a WebView will be used.
So if at this point you're still interested, please check out the project. You'll find plenty of screenshots there, and instructions on how to add the OBS repository (deb http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/spenap/Harmattan/ ./) to your device so you can install Butaca and start using it. And then, start filing bugs
I wrote in May of last year asking, only partially rhetorically, if this would be
a make-or-break year for consumer electronics giant Nokia. And like many other pundits, I’ve offered my previous employer sound survival advice on more than one occasion [1][2][3] . Based on recent financial reports, nobody listened.
GObject Introspection is one of the hidden jewels of the GNOME stack: you write a library in C or Vala, and it becomes automatically available to a wide variety of languages and runtimes, including Python, JavaScript, Java and Qt.
Now I would like to bring GObject Introspection to PHP. Why?
For many years we in the Midgard community have been using GNOME infrastructure on the web server side, by building our persistence layer on top of GObjects, and providing D-Bus notifications when content changes. So far this has been done with our own custom PHP extension.
I believe a common PHP extension providing GObject Introspection support would make more sense, as it wouldn't just benefit our own community, but also support efforts like php-gtk.
Alexey Zakhlestin already started a project for this a while back, but unfortunately has been unable to finish it. Because of this, we would be willing to sponsor anybody interested in making the gobject-for-php extension work.
Benefits for the GNOME community:
Benefits for the PHP community:
Benefits for the Midgard community:
Let me know if you are interested. We're coming to the Desktop Summit with Piotras, so for example that is a great opportunity to talk more about this.
After almost two years there’s a new version of the Ogg Support in the Fremantle Extras.
The decoder code has changed completely. Where the old one used libvorbis and vorbisdec from the GStreamer base plugins, the new one uses libav (formerly FFmpeg) and gst-av from Felipe Contreras. The impact on performance should be significant because the vorbis decoder in libav is more efficient on the n900 than the libvorbis and Felipe’s gst-av also outperforms the vorbisdec.
Thanks to Felipe for doing all the hard work. I’ve just been updating the version numbers of the dependencies and tracking the bugzilla for the known issues and fixes :)
During the last 2 years I worked for Collabora having Nokia as my client. There I was part of the Harmattan Product Performance Team working with Maemo/MeeGo for N9 and N950.
The N9 and N950 has been announced. They are just perfect. An amazing design with a great system. Now that I’m sending my proto back I’m already looking forward to receive my N950 dev kit to continue working with it.
I’m also praying for Nokia giving up on M$ and continue working with MeeGo! 
Collabora was one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life. It is the biggest open source consultancy company based in Cambridge-UK with developers spread all over the world. They are well prepared and organized to have developers doing their best from any part of the world, mainly from their home offices.
Thanks for everything collabora family. I’m going to miss you.
But now it is time for change.
Next Monday – Aug 1st I’m starting at Intel being part of graphics development team. I promise that I’ll continue posting on this blog some news about my work there.
No, it wont be necessary to leave São Paulo. I’ll continue living on this huge city going everyday to Intel’s office here located at Market Place.
Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.
Andrew Olmsted built the first FBReader packages for Harmattan, after tweaking the build system a bit. The desktop version of FBReader already used Qt 4, and ran almost unmodified, but with some bugs (segfault on task switch) and ugly UI.
A friend of mine in the MeeGo community brought my attention to an interesting concept he calls MeeGoVerse, which translates common gaming elements to real-life work as a sort of “massive multiplayer” endeavor. One important aspect is the use of achievements to reward people for attacking necessary community evils, like bug reporting. I can envision Meegon badges for each achievement. People love to contribute, and especially be recognized for it.
