Last year for Christmas, there were two technology toys I was most interested in. One was the Nokia N900 and the other was Roku. The N900 costs much more than Roku, but can do much more as well. In fact, I wondered, would it be possible to recreate something like Roku as an application for the Nokia N900?

After a bunch of political blog posts, I’m on a roll of technology blog posts. Perhaps it is just part of my way of decompressing. Anyway, today I am writing about IPv6. IPv6 is Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Currently, most people use Version 4 of the Internet Protocol.

Earlier this week, the latest major update to the Nokia N900 came out, PR 1.2. This has been a long awaited release, particularly by developers. So, as soon as I had a moment, I decided to tackle upgrading my N900.

A month ago, I wrote a blog post about mobile media sharing in response to press releases about NearVerse. I brought up the idea of using uPnP to facilitate some media sharing. Since then, I’ve played with a bunch of different packages and figured it is time for an update.

How does Frederick P. Brooks new book, The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist compare to his classic, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)? How much time do I want to spend trying to find out?

Yesterday, both DigitalMediaWire and Digiday:Daily ran stories about NearVerse securing $1 million in seed funding. I had written about NearVerse a few weeks ago so I thought I’d find out what is new.

Really, there wasn’t much news. The company sent out a press release about funding they had received last year. Their iPhone app, which was supposed to be the hot item of SxSW just didn’t get all that much buzz, and most of the people that tested it for me where unimpressed. Yet I still think they may be on to something.

This thought was reinforced as I read through various blog posts about the Nokia N900. Zach Goldberg has been writing some very interesting things about UPnP and the Nokia N900 on his blog, BlueSata. In one post, he wrote about the Sonos multi-room sound system. It is worth noting that the Sonos page talks about being able to control the sound system from an iPhone. By the sounds of Zach’s blog post, you can probably do the same from a Nokia N900 and his UPnP software.

Yet it is the idea of mobile media sharing that gets me. Could some of Zach’s work on UPnP on the N900 be used to facilitate sharing music and other media between N900’s, and perhaps even iPhones and people’s home music systems? Could Zach’s code be used to take the idea of NearVerse’s LoKast to a whole new level?

I don’t know enough about UPnP and it’s hard to tell how Zach’s code might work with my idea. I haven’t managed to get Zach’s code to run on my machine yet, and even if I do, I haven’t found any N900 owners around where I live so I wouldn’t have a great chance to test out some of the ideas.

So, anyone else out there experimenting with UPnP on their cellphones? With LoKast? With other ways of sharing media from mobile devices?

Recently, the first development version of MeeGo became available and I figured it was time to turn my Nokia N900 into a Chameleon. This blog post will recount some of my experiences. Non-geeks might want to skip the rest of this post.
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First, let me point to a couple of the other blog posts about MeeGo. Digital Trends compliments the MeeGo team because “it’s transparency that’s very uncommon in mobile device development.”. Ari Jaaksi, who is heading MeeGo Devices and MeeGo operations @ Nokia blogs, “So, it is an invitation for hackers who want to participate in MeeGo development, not for end users ;-)” and a lively discussion opened up there in the comments. This ‘developer’ focus is also echoed in the Nokia Blog which warns ‘end users should stay away’, and provides a screen shot of ‘text on black and white screen’.

The Maemo Community, that is, the community of people using devices like the Nokia N900 and its predecessors is holding elections for its community council. Instead of looking at this like a beauty contest of geeks, I thought, as an old political organizer and blogger, I would look at it from a political standpoint. For my regular readers who are not interested in geek politics, feel free to skip this. However, if you are interested, read more below.
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There are currently ten candidates running for five positions on the Community Council. They are for six month terms.

One of the first questions I came up against when I started working with the Nokia N900 was, “Can it run Java?” According to the Java page on the Maemo Wiki, the answer was, “It’s not supported, but here are a few things you can try.” So, I poked around and made a little progress.
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I figured the best starting point would be Sun (Now Oracle)’s Java, so I went to their Java SE for Embedded Downloads. There, I went through the steps to download ARMv6 Linux - Headful (Early Access), EABI, glibc 2.5, Hard Float (VFP), Little Endian. I figured I would start with a headful installation, and if that failed, try the headless install.

When Nokia and Intel announced plans to merge Maemo and Moblin into Meego, one of the great issues was what format of packages should be used, DEB or RPM. It prompted me to see if I could tweak my N900 to install RPM packages. I also loaded a memory stick with Moblin to boot up one of the laptops around the house to use Moblin. Since then, there has been a meeting of MeeGo community to discuss the infrastructure for the MeeGo community and some interesting discussions on different mailing lists.