Is a complicated place. Statistics on the country are shocking:

• One out of every seven children dies before their fifth birthday
• One of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world
• One out of seven women who become pregnant will probably die from pregnancy-related causes
• More than half of children between the ages of six and 13 are not in formal education
• 84% of women cannot read or write. Only 6% of girls who start school ever finish

The fighting has been going on for so long that the root causes of the violence are difficult to know. South Sudan was established as a country in 2011 following a 20 year civil war with northern Sudan. This war was largely a religious and ethnic conflict which often descended into genocide - most famously in the Darfur region. Millions of civilians were killed.

Three years ago when South Sudan finally achieved it's independence from the north there was a great deal of optimism. But late last year a political battle between President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar ignited a new civil war. Because the two men were from different tribes the fighting has once again broken out along ethnic lines. Ethnic war is an an especially deadly sort of conflict because it can easily spill over into civilian populations.

Fighting in the new civil war is largely between the Dinka and the Nuer - South Sudan's two dominant tribes. When fighting broke out the Nuer stormed the gates of the UN to escape an unfolding massacre at the hands of Dinka fighters. Over the course of a few days thousands of Nuer were gunned down in the capital city where they represented a significant minority. In other parts of the country however Dinka were killed in equal measure in heavily Nuer regions.

South Sudan is of course also a country filled with millions of civilians who are desperately and with the greatest difficulty trying to transcend this history and establish a society based on democratic and egalitarian ideals. Burdened by decades of resentment, revenge and almost ceaseless fighting this is proving to be extremely difficult. I see it as my obligation to support them with this if I can and supporting them means giving them the correct items like seeds, fishing kits and fuel efficient stoves they need at the correct time to start to begin rebuilding their lives.

What is MAGIC

Maybe it helps to think of aid distribution as a sort of e-commerce system where aid items are 'products'. Instead of a 'customer' choosing which items to add into their cart we have to make a decision of who gets what based on the results of a countrywide Food Security Assessment (which classifies areas as either Stressed, Crisis, Emergency or Famine). Conceptually then we can create a shopping cart of items for each payam (a payam in South Sudan is like a District in the UK) and pass this info to other organizational units like LOA (Letters of Agreements or Contracts with Suppliers or NGO's), Procurement, Logistics, Distribution and so on.

Each unit can modify the cart either by updating its contents or changing its geographical location (in a warehouse, with an NGO partner etc). At any point we can establish where the 'shopping cart' of items is and we can generate reports and statistics about its passage through the MAGIC system all the way from food assessment through planning to doorstep delivery

One clear advantage to building the system this way is that we now can establish a link between 'donors' on one hand and 'recipients' on the other. To continue the e-commerce analogy without MAGIC donors would pay for a shopping cart of items and they would not know to whom these items had been delivered. With most L3 donations running into the millions of dollars this is a problem. A second advantage is more subtle but might be useful if we want to try to innovate on aid at some point in the future. If we wanted for example to allow donations not only from Governments but wanted to accept donations from anybody - perhaps raising money with Bitcoin then we could generate a report for each bitcoin donor and add that to the blockchain for historical record

Before all this though the system needs to work and be tested in the field. That is what I have been doing these last two weeks and it was great fun!

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The Bitcoin market is pretty fresh and unstable at the moment. It is greatly affected by any news on this market. We expect slow grow of exchange rates in the long-term. This assumptions is based on the following facts:

• The world requires anonymous currency. It is used not only for illegal transactions (like buying/selling drugs, weapons etc.), but also as a currency which is free from any political influence, not affiliated with any country, etc.
• Close-to-zero transaction fees. If an operation is made within the Bitcoin infrastructure you have no additional fees for running a bitcoin account
• Deflationary nature of bitcoin. The emission amount is fixed and could not be extended. Since (like any other currency) bitcoin's will be lost - the price of the rest should increase to compensate that

Unfortunately, all other *coins (Litecoin, Dogecoin, etc.) have close-to-zero influence on bitcoin exchange rates, while bitcoin exchange rates affects this currencies greatly. Detailed analytics of exchange rates dynamics on 3 different exchange markets revealed 0.00037% probability of getting profit by running exchange operations between different *coins (mostly due to exchange fees of sites)

Our opinion is that it is a nice time to start getting bitcoins :) It's exchange rates have still not recovered after the MtGOX failure, but recent research revealeds that MtGOX may have money on it's account, so we expect constant growing exchange rate of Bitcoin in next 3 months

What needs to be implemented?

This section describes a scope of the project. The main target of current project is to provide an easy way to perform easy transactions within system. So we need just three points of functionality:

• Adding money to amount (cash-in)
• Transferring money to other person's account
• Cash-out

Additionally to simplify people's life transferring money to other person's account should track "friends list" to simplify multiple transactions to other persons.

Since world is mobile now - all that operations should be available both from web-interface and mobile apps.

What will be great to have in future?

This section describes functionality outside initial project scope, but could be considered in future.

• "Send me money" button. When user click's it a popup appears on site where person could send money in one click
• QR-send. Using mobile you could scan a QR-code and confirm sending money in one click

What about security?

Security is a main concern of the project. Since we're building a system on top of bitcoin - there is no way to reverse any transaction.

So let's review possible approaches.

(rejected) Single bitcoin account managing all users accounts

We have just one bitcoin wallet, which contains all coins owned by our users. All in-system transactions are tracked by our system, same applies to account balances.

Pros: + Very easy to implement + Extremely fast (since there are no "real" transactions when we pass money from one person to other)

Cons: + extremely risky. Let's imagine situation when hacker was able to access account. He will be able to move all bitcoins to other address resulting in system crash

(rejected) Separate bitcoin wallet for each user

Each user has one bitcoin wallet. All transactions are performed by real bitcoin transactions

Pros: + Simplifies client logic. We do not need to "count" money - just retrieve them from bitcoin wallet and display to user + Way more secure - user have no real access to other uses wallet

Cons: + harder to implement + When we make transaction from one user to another we need to receive confirmation from bitcoin network which is not immediate. + risky. If hacker was able to compromise not account, but access to system same risks as previous options apply

Separate bitcoin wallet + cash-in-out wallet

The main problem of the previous approach is that a possible hacker has access to all bitcoins in the system, including bitcoins used by the cash-in and cash-out wallet. The solution is to run the system using 2 separate modules (ideally on two different network machines) - one for in-system transactions and one for cash-in/cash-out. The second one should accept just two operations "Give X BTC to user Y in system" or "Take X BTC from user Y". Since the code of second module will be simple and straightforward - it's easier to make it secure. Compromising client accounts will not compromise real money

How that will work?

AAA (Authorization, Authentication, Accounting) is always a compromise between usability and security. We suggest the following approach:

• User registers with his phone number. He may (or may not) enter recovery email address
• When user signs-in into the application two-factor auth is used by default - login, password + OTP (one-time-password) sent by SMS. Two-factor auth may be disabled in the settings by the user
• Each transaction higher than X$ is confirmed by OTP. If total sum of transactions within one hour exceeds X$ - each transaction is confirmed by OTP (that is done to prevent stealing money by millions of small transactions)
• Password recovery - user will have two options - send recovery info to email or to phone. If he selects phone - recovery information is sent within next 48 hours (but not earlier than 24 hours). That is done to ensure that if phone is stolen - user has enough time to block sim-card.

What is the status of development?

We're currently working on server-side stuff - bitcoin's transferring between two separates system. This part of system will be covered by unit tests to ensure security and reliability. Code should be ready soon if anyone is interested

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Come discover and try out Nokia Data Gathering 4.04! On 16 May 2012, the Nokia Data Gathering team will be at Seton Hall University to tell you all about the new Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 server, the new Windows Phone mobile app, mobile data collection case studies from around the world, and to give you a chance to try out Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 for yourself.

Please join us!

Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 is the result of a collaborative effort between Nokia, the Center for Mobile Research and Innovation at Seton Hall University and Microsoft. Learn more at http://projects.developer.nokia.com/ndg/

For more information about the workshop and/or Nokia Data Gathering, please contact kulsoom.ally 'at' nokia.com 1 3 ]]> Ian Lawrence <vern@riseup.net> feed:f37232ce73d3b53f5ae8169b333a7127 Mon, 07 May 2012 16:02:35 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-08ae94d8988d11e1a95efb62ddef54215421 http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/tangaza-or-announce-in-swahili Despite the rapid growth of mobile data and mobile internet, many (most) people in developing countries do not have access to mobile data. For example in Africa, there are around 45 basic mobile subscriptions but only 2 data subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Peer to peer communication, voice calls, SMS and 'beeping' are the standard communication tools and techniques currently in use.

The success of Twitter and other group communication tools has been undeniable and the development and introduction of mobile app based messaging systems remains active. But would it be possible to design a group messaging system for people who only have access to a basic feature phone with standard GSM features available on every mobile phone?

Tangaza is a mobile phone based group messaging system targeted at moderately low income users. Through the use of missed calls, a basic SMS command set and concise touch tone menu, Tangaza is designed to enable affordable spoken communication among flexible groups of users. Developed in collaboration between Nokia US and African research units, Nokia Tangaza was piloted in Kenya in 2009 and a research paper (.pdf) on this pilot and on Tangaza's design decisions was presented at the 1st Annual Symposium on Computing for Development in 2010. The software has now been open sourced under the AGPL and I have just submitted an ITP to the Debian Bug Tracker. We aim to have Tangaza in the next Debian release and the Debian VOIP team are helping with this effort.

Tangaza runs on Linux and you will need to have

• Perl 5
• Python 2.6
• MySQL 5.0
• Django 1.2
• Kannel 1.4.3
• Asterisk 1.6.2

git clone https://github.com/tangaza/Tangaza

git checkout -b upstream --track origin/master

(The '--track' option alters your .git/config file and adds a [branch "upstream"] section telling Git where you fetched it from. That means you can later just say "git pull" and you will get both the 'master' and the 'upstream' repository merged into your repository automatically.)

git checkout master

git-buildpackage --git-ignore-new --git-builder=debuild -i.git -I.git -us -uc

During the last development cycle we built Tangaza a web enabled administrative interface in Django where the groups, members and organization information can be modified and the messages (called Tangazo's) can be listened to We also wrote some documentation about the API calls we make available through RPC for developers who want to build applications on top of Tangaza.

There is some interest in using Tangaza as an agricultural early warning system in East Africa. A Humanitarian Innovation Fund expression of interest passed through to a call for a full proposal which is pretty exciting both in terms of potential impact and also for the new features which can be developed with increased funding

6 1

A slightly customized version of the software is currently in use as a innovation funnel at INdT.

It is a commonly accepted fact in business that social projects bring some tangible benefits to an organization. Unfortunately, even if the project is very successful this often does not impact directly on the financial bottom line. And, in a world of razor-thin margins, a set of activities that drive up corporate cost without any directly identifiable return is a tough sell, no matter how worthwhile and noble the project might be. The business case for social projects is therefore contingent on finding a suitable method for valuation — one that allows managers to understand the implications of an indirect benefit and then make ’intelligent’ decisions about which projects to choose and the most feasible level of resources to commit.

I approached the problem using techniques from agile development. Scrum sizings were run with stakeholders experienced in the type of project under evaluation which estimated the intangible values present in the social project.The values were then passed into an algorithm which ran an economic analysis of the project with its associated series of estimates as projected 'cash-flows'. The economic indicators calculated are net present value, internal rate of return and efficiency of investment

Projects are then ranked on their efficiency of social investment score.

The customization used at INdT is that instead of using scrum estimates the software has values assigned by answering questions. This makes the software then useful for all kinds of projects.The following questions were used

• What is the quality of information presented.?
• How much does this project align with strategy?
• What is the probability that the project will build competencies?
• The project opens new, significant markets for customers (What is the potential for market and revenue creation?)
• What is the project's capacity to leverage competitive position (Impact on competition)
• If the project is approved what is the span of possible applications that the resulting product might be applied to?
• Are there any IPR implications?
• What is the technological feasibility of the project?
• Assuming the project is implemented the set up costs of it are likely to be?
• What are the technological risks?

The software is published under the AGPL and it uses a standard Django set up. It should be relatively bug free but YMMV depending on what you want to do with it. The full thesis - How to choose social investment projects by calculating their efficiency of investment using agile software development techniques - is available to download here. Enjoy!

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The software is competing in the category ‘Most Strategic Use of Philanthropic Funds’, disputing the prize with other three companies – Nature’s Path Foods, Oracle Corporation and Barclays PLC.

“The initiative to submit NDG to the prize came from Nokia's Corporate Social Investment team. Those involved believe that the work done recently with the software has brought many positive effects to communities in need worldwide and for this reason we have the potential to compete,” explains Ian Lawrence, a software developer at INdT, whom along with Rodrigo Ramos – also an INdT developer – works on the NDG project in Manaus, developing new features and offering support to NGOs and companies which wish to use the tool.

NDG was launched in 2008, and it is used for the collection of field data, substituting the use of paper survey forms and allowing the secure transfer of this information to a server, in real time. In 2009, the State of Amazonas’ Secretary of Health (SUSAM) adopted the software to conduct a campaign to fight Dengue Fever in Amazonas.

The results were so significant that NDG was adopted worldwide by many different organizations. Examples are the Philippines’ Government who along with the WWF use the tool to map the agricultural sector in the country and the Kenyan Government who run child birth registration programs in rural areas.

8 1

I remember promising some instructions on how to install the release onto a device. There are already some canonical instructions available on the Kubuntu wiki to get started so I will updated this with the things I discovered as I was playing around with this install.

The N900 has a Texas Instruments OMAP3 microprocessor with an ARM Cortex-A8 core. Unlike all of the Nokia models which preceded it - 770, N800 and N810 - the N900 has full phone functionality (quad-band GSM and 3G UMTS/HSDPA). It is quite interesting therefore to get Ubuntu running on it. Be aware though that Kubuntu Mobile is *not* yet ready to replace Maemo on an N900. Unless of course you really know what you are doing or even better you really know what you are doing and want to help out - either upstream or with the actual distro itself. Our current target is to have Kubuntu Mobile fully working on the N900 in time for the 11.04 Natty release.

Requirements

1. An N900 with Maemo5 pr1.3 installed
2. A MicroSD 8GB, at least, class 6 or better - a lesser class will run but then Kubuntu Mobile runs very slowly.

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB$ mkdir Liquid;cd Liquid
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ wget -c http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-mobile/ports/daily-preinstalled/current/maverick-preinstalled-mobile-armel+omap.img.gz

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-mobile/ports/releases/10.10/release/

Partition the MicroSD card. I used gparted (apt-get install gparted). The three partitions on the card are

1. An ext3 partition (using the most part of the MicroSD)
2. A linux swap partition
3. A small VFAT partition

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ gunzip maverick-preinstalled-mobile-armel+omap.img.gz
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo dd bs=4096 if=maverick-preinstalled-mobile-armel+omap.raw of=/dev/sdd1

root@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid# sudo fsck.ext3 -cy /dev/sdd1

e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
Checking for bad blocks (read-only test):  14.18% done, 0:15 elapsed

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo apt-get install qemu-arm-static                          
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /media/a6c5c4e9-555c-4565-ba1d-ceea8d5a953f/usr/bin/

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sync

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ wget -c http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/trunk/1.1.80.11.20101221.1/handset/images/meego-handset-armv7l-n900/meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ bzip2 -d meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo fdisk -l -u meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw


meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw1               1     3515625     1757812+  83  Linux
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 3, 32) logical=(27465, 3, 10)
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw2         3516416     3891199      187392   83  Linux
Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(1023, 3, 32) logical=(27472, 0, 1)
Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 3, 32) logical=(30399, 3, 32)
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw3         3891200     4016127       62464   83  Linux
Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?):
     phys=(1023, 3, 32) logical=(30400, 0, 1)
Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(1023, 3, 32) logical=(31375, 3, 32)

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo mount -o loop,offset=512 -t auto meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw /mnt/

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo cp -a /mnt/lib/modules/2.6.35.3-13.10-n900/ /media/a6c5c4e9-555c-4565-ba1d-ceea8d5a953f/lib/modules/ -a
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo cp /mnt/lib/firmware/* /media/a6c5c4e9-555c-4565-ba1d-ceea8d5a953f/lib/firmware/

meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw2         3516416     3891199      187392   83  Linux

3891199*512=1992294400

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo mkdir /media/teste1
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo mount -o loop,offset=1992294400 -t auto meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.11.20101221.1-mmcblk0p.raw /media/teste1/
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ cp /media/teste1/* /media/B68E-53AB

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sync

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo umount /mnt
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo umount /media/teste1

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo chroot /media/a6c5c4e9-555c-4565-ba1d-ceea8d5a953f/
root@lawrence:/#

root@lawrence:/# echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" >> /etc/resolv.conf

root@lawrence:/home# exit

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ mkdir meego;cd meego
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid/meego$ git clone git://gitorious.org/meego-device-adaptation/n900_nokia-n900-configs.git
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid/meego$ git clone git://gitorious.org/meego-device-adaptation/n900_udev-rules-nokia-n900.git
ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid/meego$ cd ..

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ wget -c http://ianlawrence.info/downloads/liquid/essential-kubuntu-mobile.sh

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ chmod +x essential-kubuntu-mobile.sh

MPATH="/media/a6c5c4e9-555c-4565-ba1d-ceea8d5a953f"
GITPATH="/media/80GB/Liquid/meego/"

chroot $MPATH adduser ian

ian@lawrence:/media/80GB/Liquid$ sudo ./essential-kubuntu-mobile.sh

1. Navigate to the application menu (tap the title bar)
2. Select ‘Application catalogs’
3. Enter a catalog name of ‘Maemo extras-devel’
4. Enter a web address of http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel
5. Enter a distribution of ‘fremantle’
6. Enter components of ‘free non-free’
7. Select ‘Save’

~ $ sudo gainroot

/home/user # apt-get install uboot-pr13

4 0

The road mapping meetings are open to the public, but they are not conferences, exhibitions or other audience-oriented events. Rather, they provide an opportunity for software developers -- who usually collaborate online -- and technically orientated system integrators to work together in person on specific tasks related to the planning of the next Nokia Data Gathering release.

We were really fortunate for 3.04 that the University of Nairobi allowed us to hold the meeting at the Computer Science Department and that so many passionate staff, students and users came along and made the meeting so special. I think we all (well I am sure I did anyway) learned a powerful lesson about software development.

Build features which people want, need and will actually use rather than what we think people want.

We came with many great shiny new ideas for data gathering but it was simplicity, accessibility and security which were requested.

When that new feature I wanted to build (to scratch my own itch in all reality) falls over and a field worker in Liberia for example cannot send a Birth Registration Form no-one recognizes that child as a member of society able to receive medical treatment, go to school or find legal work. I can sleep well hungry, penniless, lonely or cold but I cannot sleep well knowing that is because of me.

Maybe itch scratching is an easy trap to fall into after working for so long on free software projects but it nearly bit me here and I am eternally grateful to Africa and to our community for the heads up and guidance. A big shout also must go out to Peter Wagacha and the rest of the team at the University for giving us this chance to learn and finally special congratulations and new mobile phone go to Bryann for the winning proposal for the release name. The next release will be called Brave Batian and it promises greatness!

The peak of Batian (17,057 feet) is the highest peak on Mount Kenya, the second highest mountain in Africa. Mount Kenya has a girth of about 95 miles at 8,000 feet, from which it rises boldly to its restricted summit zone. Mount Kenya is the source of the name of the Republic of Kenya.

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It's called the Open Innovation Africa Summit and it's happening the week of November 29th 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya!

The summit aims to promote creation of new innovation services and collaboration models, which ensure continuous alignment between different players of the innovation ecosystem as well as to embed end-user driven co-creation and open innovation as critical elements to African innovation systems.

They've launched a great ideation platform as part of it that revolves around the four main streams for the event:

• Ecosystem for Innovation
• Emerging Market Business Models
• Mobile Services Revolution
• Human Capital - Education for All

We're launching official communication about the event next week but I wanted to let readers of this blog know about this extraordinary initiative and to get your help providing insights and ideas (there are also 8 seats dedicated to the top contributors and readers here could for sure contribute greatly at the event itself, so I thought I'd give you all a heads up :)

The road mapping meeting for the 3.04 Nokia Data Gathering release takes place directly after this event at the School Of Computing And Informatics, University of Nairobi. 4 0 ]]> Ian Lawrence <vern@riseup.net> feed:f37232ce73d3b53f5ae8169b333a7127 Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:22:07 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-cf7c2748e36111dfac2ad12d8d0de610e610 http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/nokia-data-gathering-open-source In January of this year we began discussing the idea of releasing Nokia Data Gathering under an open source license - 8 months later, a couple of days early and here we are. All the legal and IPR issues have been resolved, the corporate site has been updated and we have a new project home on Forum Nokia with training guides, documentation, and a tutorial on setting up a development environment.

To celebrate this achievement we decided to scratch an old itch and package the NDG server for Debian. It was fun learning about the state of Java packaging in Debian and the awesome work of the Debian JBoss team. Jon and I managed to get some of the work done at Debconf in NYC (thanks Nokia) and the rest, well most of it in fact was done by Rodrigo, a new member of the NDG Open Source team.

http://people.debian.org/~jbernard/debian unstable/

/etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ndg

Reaction to the source code release has been great with a nice review up on Mobile Active and a lot of new users on our playground

The positive feedback has inspired us to be creative and we have some great ideas for the future of data collection on mobile devices including porting the mobile client to Series 40, scoping out the design of a 'legacy connector' to talk with existing data sources and integrating Bluetooth sensor support into the server and mobile client.

In the second half of 2010 we will also further develop our university collaborations, particularly in Africa. Here the University of Lagos is already working to select 15 - 20 of its more promising students to work on a data gathering project to assess the extent and nature of patronage enjoyed by alternative medicine practitioners in Nigeria.

Indeed the university collaborations have already been a great success. Rodrigo was one of my students at the INdT/FUCAPI Mobile Linux Development Center and his application Tweego recently won the Maemo Coding Competition.

His prize is a trip up to Ireland to the Meego conference. Well done Rodrigo, for sure you deserve it and watch out for great things from him (and NDG Open Source of course) in the future

4 3

I need someone to work on my team creating, maintaining and supporting a community of open source developers and implementers around the world. The full job spec is pasted below but the most important skills are experience working with open source development, fluency in English and some experience working with social projects in the areas of Education, Health or the Environment.

Please, if you would like to be considered either send me your CV or get in contact directly with our human resources department at INdT.

Please pass this opportunity on to anyone you think might be ideal for this role and I am looking forward to meeting some really cool people at the interviews :).

Mandatory

Education Level: Degree - but exceptional candidates without will be considered
Desirable Experience: 0-1 year
English: Fluent
Must Have: Demonstrable open source community involvement preferably as a committer to an open source project.
Would Like But Not Essential: Java, Debian, MySQL, ECMA script, Previous voluntary work in the fields of Education, Health or the Environment

Job Role

You will evangelize the adoption of our developer products and support implementations of our solutions worldwide. You will bring strong and well-rounded coding skills in a wide range of open source technologies along with excellent writing, presentation and support skills. You will be measured on growth in adoption of our developer products and customer satisfaction in our implementer communities. You need to be able to work equally well answering simple questions with NGO's, highly technical ones with developers at our partner companies as well as reporting accurately to senior managers.

Key Responsibilities

• Actively tweet, blog and write sample code, developer articles and tutorials for our products as well as provide support online through our forums.
• Provide on-line support and advice.
  
• Advocate for and evangelize our developer products and APIs in multiple mediums.
• Participate in architectural,design and support discussions with strategic partners to speed adoption and ensure best practices during implementation.
• Influence our developer product strategy by working with product management, engineering, marketing, business development and operations.

We are building an outstanding team around our social investment projects here at INdT - if you want to be a part of this write and tell us why.

Good Luck!

4 1

• Rootstock/Rootstock gui – integrated with oem-config
• Qemu-arm-static
• ARM/Thumb2 support - the archive in lucid is built for the ARMv7 architecture with thumb2 support.
• EFL 2D Launcher

Rootstock is a graphical (and command line of course) set of tools to create a fully configured tarball or VM image of an ubuntu rootfs from scratch

so that you can extract it to a root device. One nice thing about this is that various tasks can be included in the image. This is very useful when working with ARM. Other tools such as Moblin Image Creator exist to do more or less the same thing but Rootstock is leading the way in innovation at the moment IMO. If you want to really customize an image then you need to use seeds and germinate a set of packages - for this you will need to read our book ;)

The binfmt-misc module in the Ubuntu kernel makes it possible to execute binaries of foreign arches under linux. This means it is possible to have an arm eabi enabled chroot on a i386 system :) - this is as simple as running

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-arm-static
$ build-arm-chroot karmic eabi-chroot

ARM/Thumb 2 is the instruction set underlying the ARM Cortex architecture which provides enhanced levels of performance, energy efficiency, and code density for a wide range of embedded applications.The whole Ubuntu archive is being ported to Thumb 2 and we still have some some build failures- if you can help with ftbfs (failed to build from source) please help out here.

This has already been covered extensively elsewhere but the new UI for ARM based Ubuntu devices will rock hard for Lucid. The tool will detect hardware and if a device does not have 3D capabilities it wall fall back to the EFL launcher   It is hard to stress why this is rocks so much but a unified user experience across i386/Atom and ARM devices should ring a few bells in marketing departments everywhere, right.

Exciting times.

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After this the major tasks came down to packaging plasma mobile and modifying kwin and kdm for a mobile device.These are the most important things we need to do before Feature Freeze in mid February. We also of course need to do the meta package, default-settings and work on the theme but we can do this right up to the Lucid release of Liquid

I have been travelling and otherwise occupied since UDS so have not had as much time as I would like to hack on this.

Luckily Rodrigo wanted to 'tocar a bola' for a while and he has been working with the rest of the Ubuntu Mobile team on some fancy liquid moves. This included setting up an icecc compile farm which meant that today we managed to finally get plasma-mobile compiled, packaged and put up on REVU for some feedback. The obligatory screenshot on Ubuntu Lucid is here

Any designers looking at this screenshot will I imagine have lots of ideas about how this 'user experience' could be improved. The nice thing about plasma is that according to Caio the whole interface can be changed very easily using just a qml template. If you feel excited by this then join the Liquid Hackers team on Launchpad or if you feel really inspired come to the Bossa in the Jungle in March where more mobile madness is sure to go down.

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After an uneventful trip up to Dallas from Manaus the first thing I did was check out the skyline

photo courtesy of Timo Jyrinki

No UDS would be complete without the customary 'Future of the LPIA port' session which kicked off the week. It would have been killed off there and then I think but I raised the issue of some interesting results I got when writing the testing chapter for our book. There was a 30% improvement when running a 2GB file encryption test on the LPIA kernel when compared to the generic one which I think warrants more investigation. My action point is to re-run all the tests and put the Ubuntu QA team in the loop

Another perennial mobile track favourite @ UDS is the state of ARM soft bootloaders. The problem to be solved is that the current solutions are  limited and mostly incompatible with each other. For the Lucid cycle a new small (<2MB) ARM bootloader will be written which will be easy for device manufacturers to install and which will be placed as the main bootloader option for Ubuntu ARM

Next up was a session to choose the default lightweight browser for ARM. Any potential solution needed to have the following qualities in order of priority

• Quick on ARM
• Touch screen scrolling
• Fast javascript
• Support for Flash
• Good extension support
• Java

as well as a small memory footprint and a responsive upstream. After much discussion of the options (Firefox - good but no ARM optimisation yet, Midori - frustrating to use at times, Epiphany - works but a bit limited, MicroB - great but closed source UI and WebKit - multipleupstream sources) the team decided that it will package Chromium and upload it to the archives. The thinking being that Google for sure will want their browser working well on ARM and judging by the number of people running it @ UDS (80%-90%) it is starting to gain significant traction at least amongst developers. This decision was reinforced later in the week with the news of extensions support in Chrome and the news that Canonical are working with Google on Chrome OS

Midweek saw a session on Ubuntu Liquid. The principal objective of this community based mobile release is to support devices which do not have hardware accelerated graphics and to bring to these devices the latest updates available in the Ubuntu world. It will be built using the Ubuntu infrastructure and so will drop the 'Remix' namespace for the Lucid cycle. There was some considerable interest in the session about creating a common framework for running Android and WebOS applications on Ubuntu and also using QT libraries for this. I am involved in this project in my free time along with some other guys from INdT so we expect to have some long weekends hacking in the coming months.

A definite highlight of the week was the 2D netbook launcher for ARM. This is an EFL based application launcher (soon to be released on Launchpad) which runs well on platforms that do not have accelerated OpenGL drivers for X. It was written in a collaboration between the Canonical OEM team and Profusion. For the Lucid cycle the guys will work on building some intelligence into the launcher to probe X and install either the 3D or 2D launcher at install time depending on device capabilities. It was great to see such innovation @ UDS and to know that Brazilian guys were involved.

Speaking of innovation Friday saw a fascinating demonstration of Ubuntu Server and Cloud on ARM. There was a quad core Ubuntu ARM server running away in the room which created some considerable excitement . The ultimate goal for this project in the Lucid cycle is a build system, bootloader, and installer that supports ARM v7 architectures such as Cortex A8/A9. A question was asked during the session about the benefits of Ubuntu server on ARM and the answer was astounding.

I ran the quad core processor at 90% server load for some hours

and I could comfortably leave my finger on the processor.

Also Friday saw some lightening talks during the plenary sessions where I got up the courage to give a short talk. As far as I am aware our book is the first technology book *ever* written by authors living in the Amazon and for sure it is the first book on Ubuntu Mobile. I got up, said all that and invited everyone to come and visit us and to see our work in Manaus. The recent news then that Bossa 10 conference next year will be

Bossa in the Jungle!

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Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role - however small - in the larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance of both items and in public spaces. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory finance, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans, humans and things and humans and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies - the noise - is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with 'total' connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable with.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues, short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Where: Imal, Brussels

When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00) Workshop 185 Euros (including lunch and dinner)

Register 1 11 ]]> Ian Lawrence <vern@riseup.net> feed:f37232ce73d3b53f5ae8169b333a7127 Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:55:09 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-25d0040cbb5911de8325b7f779e76f406f40 http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/ubuntu-liquid-remix Coming hard on the heels of the news that our mug shots have thankfully been removed from the front cover of the 'Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development' book to be replaced with a Formula 1 racing car (WTF!) comes the news that the Ubuntu MID distribution will have a community release codenamed Ubuntu Liquid Remix during the Lucid Lynx cycle.

We are still fleshing out the goals and the work plan for the Liquid Remix and I expect that this will gain more traction at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this November. We have had a discussion with the Mer guys about maybe using the Open Build System for packaging although we will continue to use the Ubuntu infrastructure and seeds to actually germinate our image.

It seems that there is a great opportunity for collaboration and synergy between Mer and Liquid Remix so I am looking forward to the next 6 months of working together. 5 8 ]]> Ian Lawrence <vern@riseup.net> feed:f37232ce73d3b53f5ae8169b333a7127 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:17:13 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-8b2b3180af5811dea51489ff948ee842e842 http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/maemo/maemo-related-blog Just set up a blog just for maemo related things.

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