Some of you might have heard about Google’s Android team proposal to introduce wakelocks (aka suspend-blockers) to the Linux kernel. While there was a real issue being solved in the kernel side, the benefits on the user-space side were dubious at best, and after a huge discussion, they finally didn’t get in.

As part of a bigger effort to get my Nokia N900 in good shape for development, I decided to track down an issue with the keyboard; I could type ‘a’, but not ‘A’ or any special characters, so no ‘shift’ or ‘ctrl’ or anything special. Trying to figure out what was going on took me through an unexpected journey, which is not remarkable, but I think it’s a good example of what many kernel developers (and low level developers) constantly go through, and as such, might be interesting for some people to read.

Version 2.0 finally moved to Fremantle stable, so everybody can start using it

If you are not familiar with it, this package will see what music you are listening on Maemo devices, and scrobble to your favorite service, either last.fm, libre.fm, or both.

I already explained the features in an earlier blog entry, along with an explanation of how to make use of the “love” feature.

But now I also managed to port this to Harmattan, and it works perfectly on my Nokia N9. Interestingly enough, the new UI has a “favorite” feature directly integrated, it took me some time, as it’s not publicly documented, but I finally managed to hook into it, so everything works seamlessly

I was rather impressed by how easy it was to port it, I was able to leave all the GLib bits intact, even libsoup is still supported, and libconio, so I only had to make changes regarding the new qmafw. Thanks to the Qt guys for using the GLib’s mainloop by default, it certainly made things easier for me

Update

You can find a debian package here: maemo-scrobbler 2.0-2.

Then, you would need to create a file ~/.config/scrobbler like this:

[lastfm]
username=foo
password=bar
            
[librefm]
username=foo
password=bar

That’s it

Ed Page recently blogged about his idea to improve the Swipe UI. Fortunately for him, a bunch of people and I had the same idea inside Nokia

Some time ago I received a private email directly from Elop (just me, nobody else in CC, I am not going to go into details as to why), in which he explained that the biggest problem was the small amount of MeeGo devices in the years immediately ahead.

gst-av is a GStreamer plug-in to provide support for libav (formerly FFmpeg), it is similar to gst-ffmpeg, but without GStreamer politics, which means all libav plugins are supported, even if there are native GStreamer alternatives; VP8, MP3, Ogg, Vorbis, AAC, etc.

In addition, it is much simpler (2654 vs 16575 LOC), has better performance, and has a bit of extra features (such as less latency), and doesn’t use deprecated API’s. In a previous post I measured exactly how much improvement compared to gst-ffmpeg there is; it’s not much, but it’s some.

IOW; it’s possible that gst-av is the only GStreamer codec plug-in you would ever need

Compared to the previous version, now there’s video decoding (H.263, H.264, MPEG-4, WMV and VP8), and video encoding (H.263 and H.264), plus a fix for audio decoding with playbin, and better integration with the official FLAC parser.

For Nokia N900 users, ogg-support is going to use gst-av for 1.0.7, which you can test now, now.

BTW. It works both for libav and FFmpeg.

There’s now a project page hosted in Google Code where you can find all the juicy stuff.

Enjoy

Hi,

This is an important maintenance release, everybody should update. Apparently Microsoft shut down the Nexus servers that were used for authentication, which meant msn-pecan stopped working completely. Fortunately I found a trick to circumvent the problem without requiring an update the protocol used; use Passport 3.0 authentication. Had I known the fix would have been so easy I would have tried earlier. Sorry for the long delay.

Plus:

• Fix authorization; Passport 3.0 instead of nexus
• Fix offline message reception
• Improve reconnection/disconnection detection
• Ignore reverse-list; the server returns wrong info
• Show correct alias in chat window

Enjoy

Demétrio (1):
     Ignore reverse presence

Felipe Contreras (19):
     plugin: show proper alias in the chat window
     contactlist: fix for existing "null" group
     Improve disconnections
     ns: add time out detection
     Ignore reverse list completely
     Update libmspack to 0.2 alpha
     libmspack: fix compilation warnings
     libsiren: fix compilation warnings
     Fix some compilation warnings
     build: check for more warnings
     Fix authentication
     Improve auth parsing
     auth: reorganize to have a callback
     auth: add private header
     oim: use generic auth stuff
     oim: improve and fix message parsing
     Get rid of pn_auth_start()
     hack: mingw32 workarounds
     win32: tag 0.1.2

Download from the (usual place).

Here’s another post that for some people is obvious, but there are other (e.g. high level managers) that might not necessarily see the importance of Linux, in fact, I have been surprised by many open source developers who don’t seem to be familiar with how Linux works (they think it’s just something that works?). The fact of the matter is that Linux is light years ahead of any other software project, open or closed, I’ll try to explain why.

To me, and a lot of people, it’s obvious why MeeGo scales to a wide variety of devices, but apparently that’s not clear to other people, so I’ll try to explain why that’s the case.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this decision to use WP7 from Nokia, as I’m sure many people have, but I’ve wanted to wait for the dust to settle down before blogging, so here’s what I think; it doesn’t make any sense from any point of view.