Planet maemo: category "feed:50099e93e923f805928f0a734f257e77"

Forgotten this blogging thing altogether… well, here goes:

Kesäkoodi is a “Google Summer of Code”-like program for Finnish students (university and univ. of applied science).  Bergie just reminded me that the project plan deadline is Feb 20th — that’s next week.

The project areas are not defined beforehand, but some “areas of special interest” are mentioned:

1. social media
2. location and context sensitivity
3. mobile apps
4. system management
5. operating systems

About #2 and #3: I’ve got the feeling this summer would be a good time to work on Geoclue. We’ll have the new API finished Real Soon Now™  (promise), and there should be lots more developer interest when we reach summer.

If you’re studying in Finland, have some coding skills and are interested in a location-related programming project, stop by #geoclue irc channel (on irc.gimp.org) or ping me on jabber. Do stop by even if you don’t have a specific idea — maybe we can figure something out…

After getting feedback from osso-gpsd maintainer and some more testing, I think that I was probably seeing a placebo effect with the gpsd leap-year fix — the patch does fix the leap-year bug but I  believe the fix time improvements were statistical anomalies and placebo. Bruises the ego to admit I was fooled, but that does fit the evidence best.

Not only that but in my attempt to be a responsible (non-maintainer) packager I’ve also done a mistake: I made my testing package version 1.0-25-jku0 to show that it’s not the original 1.0-25 version. This installs just fine, but later on upgrading will fail because osso-software-version depends on the exact version 1.0-25 :(

I strongly suggest everyone who installed my testing package to install version 1.0-25 from the same place (I don’t think it’s actually available from anywhere official). Like the version number implies, this is the non-patched version so your GPS time will be a day off until March. Really sorry for the trouble folks and thanks to Owen Williams for notifying me about the problem.

I’ve been playing with a possible solution to the time-to-fix problems of the Nokia N810 GPS, and it looks good: Getting a fix used to require 5-15 minutes even in very good conditions. Today I have experienced fix times between 30 seconds and 3 minutes — even from the window which was previously almost impossible.

I’ve been trying to test the GPS on my newly-arrived N810. So far I have not succeeded in getting a fix from my window. Time-To-First-Fix while walking outside (with very good view of the sky) has been 5-10 minutes.

Several interesting news reached my sensory organs today:

Gypsy released
Iain Holmes just released Gypsy, a more elegant GPS daemon for a more civilized time. Full API documentation, a tutorial and even experimental packages are available (shocking, I know).
Gypsy is a good match for mobile devices if you ask me, and to that end I’ve tested it with N800 and a Nokia LD-3W bluetooth GPS — works fine.

Experimental user position support for Pidgin
I haven’t tested this proof-of-concept yet, but it is interesting: Geoposition sharing for pidgin on maemo. Doesn’t use geoclue but doing so might save several hundred lines of code…

Jaiku client released with source code
Henrik Hedberg released Mauku 0.3 (Jaiku client for Maemo) a few days ago. The source code is now available at Garage. Hmm, I smell a small geoclue project here… stay tuned.

I haven’t posted in a while, so some news first: I’ve joined the OpenedHand crew. So far it’s been great: interesting projects, smart people and a really nice and telework-approving atmosphere (I had some doubts about working several thousand kilometers and two timezones away from the office, but it’s been very smooth so far).

Summer of Code has now practically ended. I’ll post a more detailed look at my original plans and actual accomplishments soon, for now I’ll just say that I’m fairly happy with the results: some things we’re left undone, but other unplanned features got implemented. What I’m wondering is how the rest of Maemo SoC went — according to Mathieu Blondels last post he’s doing ok (although that was a month ago), but the other two projects seem to have been dropped in the mid-term evaluation.