I attended FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Belgium last weekend. It was my first FOSDEM, and as such, I was quite positively surprised about the location/setting (big University with too many rooms and tracks to visit them all) and reach of the event (open source projects from every different corner you can imagine).

It was also nice to catch up with old friends from Maemo/MeeGo times like Quim, but at the same time it was impossible to say hi to everybody, as the location is so big, the event only lasts two days and everything is quite hectic and crowded. Still, I managed to meet community celebrities like rzr (of Harmattan Community Repository fame) and e-yes (of Nitdroid-on-N9 fame) in person at the event, which was really nice.


Apart from meeting people and having a good time in Downtown Belgium (so many beers to choose from), Jolla Mobile was also present at the event, and I managed to attend two talks (QML App Development and Porting Nemo to new Hardware), where I found out about Sailfish.Silica 1.0 (Jolla's Own Version of Qt Components), and Open Source Components of Jolla (really good to see Sailfish Silica open source'd and also good to see maliit and contextkit used as middleware).


The photos of the weekend, including a quick sightseeing tour on Monday as well as your usual dose of food porn can be found on Flickr.

Developing CuteSoma and maintaining it for three different platforms (Nokia N9, Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10) is really taking me a lot of time. I’ve many features in mind to add but I can’t dedicate much spare time to them and to do it I should take time from other paid projects. I’ve also discarded the idea to make CuteSoma a paid app, because it’s been always free (except the Windows Phone one that was non-free for just a month, but only 6 people “SIX” bought the app).

So I decided to open a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo that is a service like KickStarter, but it’s available all around the world (not just in USA and UK like Kickstarter).

What do I Need & What You Get

I would like to raise at least 5.000€ to be able to keep maintaining the existing features and to implement new one. Developing for 3 different platforms really takes a lot of time. I also need to find a way to get a Windows Phone 8 device because at the moment I cannot test some features using just the emulator.

What the application currently does:

• You can view the list of Soma.fm channels
• You can listen any channel

Features I would like to add:

• Scrobbling song to Last.fm
• Write a new MediaSource for Windows Phone (the default one is quite bugged and I need to implement one from scratch)
• Port the BlackBerry10 version to the native CascadesUI

The Impact

Funding the development of CuteSoma you will make thousands of people really happy, because they will be able to listen to Soma.fm on their Nokia N9, Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 devices. You will also make me feel apreciated for all the hours I’m spending to write the code

First off, if you came here looking for a eulogy for Pope Benedict, you found the wrong page. I didn't know much about the man, was wary of his life-story, and what little of his theology I encountered I disagreed with.

A short introduction about N9 camera stack:
Camera stack for N9 is built on top of V4L2 subdev and media controller interfaces.

read more

A couple of weeks ago, Han-Wen Nienhuys, the author of go-mtpfs, pointed out to me that Android’s MTP implementation includes a set of methods that allow you to do normal read and write operations on files without having to do the whole download/upload dance. With these extensions, you can expose files in the way that most people expect – you can just open a text file, picture, video etc, make changes and save it back. As a bonus, this functionality also allows you to do very useful operations like copy or move a file on the device.

I’ve now had a chance to put together an initial implementation of support for these extensions, and my PPA is in the process of rebuilding packages, so people can try them out easily. I’ve not started the upstreaming process on the GVFS changes as I still need to get the libmtp changes approved and upstreamed, but the libmtp maintainer has been AWOL for a few weeks now.

Obviously, it’s important to remember that these extensions are Android specific and won’t help you if you have a non-Android device, nor if your Android device doesn’t use Google’s MTP implementation (which, unfortunately, includes most Samsung devices).

You can grab Ubuntu packages from my ppa and the source is available on my github page.

If you've been playing with Nemo Mobile on your N950 recently, and wanted to do more than just swipe around the Lipstick UI, you might have noticed that while there's a music player app, it can't playback MP3 files (OGG files seem to work fine). This is a quick'n'dirty log of what I had to do to get MP3s playing (I've checked in the repos for something similar, but couldn't find it):

First, install the Mer Platform SDK:
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK

Then, get SB2 (for armv7hl, as this is what Nemo-on-N950 uses):
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK#Compiling_with_the_SDK

Then, set everything up so you can use "nemo-n950" as target with sb2:
https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Platform_SDK_and_SB2

Install build dependencies (you might need more than these, use "zypper se " to search for package names):
sb2 -t nemo-n950 -m sdk-install -R zypper in gstreamer-devel gst-plugins-base-devel gst-plugins-bad-free-devel gstreamer-tools orc-devel zlib-devel

Get the gst-ffmpeg sources (use version 0.10.11, due to bug 655238):
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/src/gst-ffmpeg/

Extract the sources, then do:
sb2 -t nemo-n950 ./configure --prefix=/usr
sb2 -t nemo-n950 make
mkdir tmp
DESTDIR=$(pwd)/tmp/ sb2 -t nemo-n950 make install
cd tmp/
scp -r . root@192.168.2.15:/

The last step obviously assumes that your device is connected and USB networking is properly set up. And then we hear somebody say "Well, but why not package it properly?". Ok. Take this modified gst-ffmpeg.spec file (based on gst-ffmpeg.spec already included in the sources). Then build a package using:

mb build -t nemo-n950 gst-ffmpeg.spec

This will leave you with gst-ffmpeg-0.10.11-1.armv7hl.rpm in ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/armv7hl which you can then scp and rpm -i to your device.