Front Page

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Despite additional timing difficulties Maemo Community Council election is now running
   • Launching the Summer'12 Device Program: N9s and N950s to giveaway
2. Applications
   • Showing current song in N9 standby screen
   • FM Radio updated with new theme and RDS capability
   • Official ESPN Formula 1 app for Harmattan
3. Development
   • How to have service-specific notification icons in Harmattan
   • CSSU decides how to ship rewrites of non-core Maemo Nokia binary components
   • Demo of Cordova (PhoneGap) Qt version running Wikipedia Mobile on Nokia N9
4. Community
   • Speakers and programme announced for Devaamo Summit
5. Announcements
   • Wazapp public beta for Nokia N9 - access WhatsApp IM from Harmattan
   • Ogre 3D engine and example game to Harmattan
   • PushUp - fine-grained DLNA/uPNP content sharing on Harmattan
   • reset-root-password for times you've forgotten your root password

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Twitter’s last Privacy Policy Update helpfully informs all users that they do now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which aims to stop the collection of information at the user’s request (a collection which Twitter is actively engaged into).

Spurred by all this I sat down and added DNT support in Epiphany, which thankfully is an extremely simple spec to implement. It’s now in master, so anyone willing to enable just needs to go to the Privacy tab in Preferences and click:

Now the pages that choose to respect this setting (unfortunately not everyone does; by a long shot), should be able to detect your request. We can see that things are working in the donottrack.us page itself.

Note that the page claims our browser does not support the feature, yet it is enabled; this is because DNT being an HTTP header extension the only way for the page to tell you whether you browser supports it in theory is by having a hardcoded list of supported browsers, which does not include Epiphany. Oh well. Either way, enjoy your newly untraceable goodness, which should make its way into the next unstable release.

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Last month I mentioned that a community based solution for bringing WhatsApp to the Nokia N9 was in the works, and today it is finally available for download. Its developer Tarek Galal had realsed a first look video of it running on the N9 a while ago, and now you can grab the .deb file and install it on your own device.

The application is still beta so there might be a few bugs here and there, but its a pretty great accomplishment for the community. Head over the Wazapp.IM and download the app.

The lack of a WhatsApp client was a huge blow to the N9, and I hope WhatsApp reaches across to the developer and helps him in his efforts, rather than try and kill the unofficial port.

[via: My Nokia Blog]

Similar Posts:

• WhatsApp Coming To The N9 With Wazapp
• WhatsApp Coming To Windows Phone Mango
• Nokia’s ‘Drop The Pin’ Campaign Takes On BlackBerry’s BBM With WhatsApp
• MeeGo 1.2 Summer Release For The N900 Out Now
• WhatsApp For Symbian Updated – Now Supports Multimedia & Location Sharing

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As I already said the other day in Twitter, I became Qt Ambassador because of Aura. The only problem is that is a project-person program, meaning that it is granted to a person because of having worked on a project. Aura was a project developed by three Igalians, who were Miguel, Víctor and me and I consider a bit unfair that it was granted only to me because they deserve it as much as I do.

The procedure I followed was:

• Applying with Aura
• When that was accepted, I submitted Aura project page.
• After the publication I was told that I was going to receive the Qt Ambassador Merchansise

Does anybody know if more people can become ambassadors for the same project and how?

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Overview

Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.

To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.

The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.

When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.

Screenshots

Video

Download

funguloids_1.06-1_armel.deb

Source

Modified version of Funguloids 1.06 Modified version of Ogre 1.7.4

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In the last few weeks, as part of my work here at Igalia, I’ve been playing a bit with the concept of hybrid applications. In this case, I’ve created a basic prototype of a mail application, with its user interface completely written using JQuery Mobile, and with backend code in C and GObject. The result is iwkmail.

Though it’s a simple experiment, I’ve added some mail basic functionality, so I could try to catch as much as possible of real requirements for how  we could improve the developers WebKit+GNOME experience creating hybrid applications.

My first conclusion is that it’s surprisingly easy and fast to develop such applications. Second, I could reuse tons of source code and modules from my old projects. This approach surely provides a way to create cool GNOME applications, using the most fashionable web client technologies.

So, you’ll get:

• Browsing messages
• Read/unread flags
• Deleting messages
• Creating and deleting mail accounts.
• Storage protocols supported: IMAP and POP.
• For sending mails, we support SMTP. There’s support for an outbox holding the messages to be sent.
• A plain text composer, allowing to add attachments.

The UI is completely written in Javascript + HTML, using JQuery Mobile.

The backend side is done using Camel library inside Evolution Data Server, so we rely on a library well tested for more than 10 years.  All the code related to this is implemented in C+GObject, and I reused a good set of code from Modest, the default mail client for Nokia N810 and N900. I’ve got involved on its development for 3 years, so that’s a bunch of code I know well enough.

For communication, I use the AJAX-like JSONP protocol, and custom SoupRequest URI scheme handlers. Basically I expose some methods as iwk:addAcccount, iwk:getMessage, etc, and arguments are passed as usual in a web request. The result I obtain from this calls is a JSON object with the results of the call. Simple, and works very well.

I’ve pushed the work on github: https://github.com/jdapena/iwkmail. Feel free to try it!

Oh, I guess it’s very obvious that I did not spend too much time thinking on the project name… So, anyone proposing something that matches the IM acronym (I don’t want to rewrite the class names!) would deserve a beer.

Last, lots of thanks to Igalia for giving me the opportunity to do this experiment. As usual, fun stuff to work with.

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The number of available phone applications is growing at top speed. I am trying to learn new languages and love traveling, so a good grasp of several languages is what I really need. Recently I came across a superb course of English language history and begin to understand better grammar rules and language phenomena. Hopefully there will be more other applications for language learning and I will review them with great pleasure. 1 0

Front Page

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started
2. Applications
   • Plonk running on BlackBerry Playbook
   • Update on reverse engineered WhatsApp port to N9
3. Development
   • Qt Creator 2.5.0 released
   • Why bundling apps which can be installed via Extras is a bad idea for Maemo CSSU
   • Why "shell apps" and HTML5 apps are a bad idea
   • Sending emails in Harmattan with Qt/QML
4. In the Wild
   • First Tizen Conference gets mixed reviews
   • Nokia N9 removed from Nokia's Finnish website
   • N9 increasingly available direct from US retailers
5. Announcements
   • Late - real-time public transit info for North America
   • Mobile check-in app for SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) now available to download for N9
   • KhtSimpleText editor available for N9
   • last.fm client under development for Harmattan
   • USbS - Useful Standby Screen - gives configurable N9 sleep info

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The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr. As with last year's MeeGo Conference 2011, the Tizen Conference took place in the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, the same hotel that's also featured in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety from 1977. I arrived on Sunday evening, but in contrast to last year's event, there were no weekend activities (the Hacker Lounge was already open, though), and the event itself only really began on Tuesday, with Monday afternoon and evening used for registration and a keynote by Jim Zemlin. Tuesday started with a proper keynote that showed actual Tizen demos, which was nice (it was the Tizen Conference, after all). Throughout the day, the demo sessions were open where companies like ProFUSION showed off demos like a fridge interface and experimental JavaScript bindings to use EFL (not as nice as QML, but better than using EFL from the C API). On Wednesday morning, the Linux Foundation was giving Tizen developer devices to attendees, with a remote shell accessible via the "sdb" tool from the Tizen SDK (similar to "adb" in the Android world). Oh, and basic X11 tools like "xeyes" and "xclock" were pre-installed, allowing for quickly checking how normal X applications would work in the window manager. Also on Wednesday was my talk about gPodder on mobile devices and the gpodder.net web service - I'll post the slides soon. On Wednesday evening, Quim Gil and the local Qt chapter Silicon Valley organized the Qt Overlapping event for Qt developers being in town for either the Tizen Conference or the Ubuntu Developer Summit. After coming back, the Hacker Lounge was still open, so we played a round of ping pong until the early hours. I left on Thursday evening and had some time for sightseeing in the afternoon - check out the photos if you are interested. After coming back from the conference, my first goal was to get Python and some GUI running. That's done now: You can run Python and PyGame on Tizen. Similar to this, PySide should also be possible once one takes the time to get it to compile it using the Scratchbox2-based SDK. I've also got Qt 4.8.1 running on the device, but of course it needs some more polishing and integration. Still, Tizen has a long and challenging road ahead until it will become useful (from what we see now), but maybe they will get something good going. As for now, there's still Harmattan and all the great things about it (and compared to the supposed-to-have-a-future Tizen, the supposed-to-be-dead Harmattan looks very, very good today and works really great, no question about that!). It was good to meet again some people that I knew since the beginning of Maemo events in 2008 and new people that have been involved in MeeGo recently. Looking forward to doing some more hacks on Harmattan, and maybe also looking forward to that wind-named future OS from that company that already brought you wind-named OSes a few years ago. Thanks for the great time so far :) 0 1

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla 2012-05-07 through 2012-05-13

As of 2012-05-14 Extras contains:

• total items 2861 (1)
• • total open items 932
  • open bugs 518
  • • critical/blocker 42
    • "easyfix" 3
    • "moreinfo" 6
    • "crash" 1
    • "patch" 5
    • reopened 7
    • unconfirmed 309
  • open enhancements 414
  • • "easyfix" 3
    • "moreinfo" 0
    • "patch" 6
    • reopened 1
    • unconfirmed 181

Top Tens

Ten biggest open bugs by number of votes (unchanged for 9 weeks):

1. (7%) 7334 [FM Radio] audio disappear using other device functions(connecting-disconnecting wi-fi,hspa)
2. (5%) 7351 [Recorder] Recorder app closes automatically after few mins
3. (4%) 6511 [Canola] Unable to type text in Canola on N900
4. (4%) 11031 [PyMaemo] python-all depending on specific python version breaks updating python modules
5. (4%) 11842 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] RDesktop halt on connection screen
6. (3%) 6847 [gPodder] gPodder does not attempt to connect to internet if no ambient connection
7. (2%) 7505 [Mauku] Claims to be free, but ships no license and says 'You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.'
8. (2%) 8508 [The One Ring] Integration with System Contacts isn't working
9. (2%) 7500 [BlueMaemo] Hardware keyboard doesn't work in Maemo5
10. (2%) 7938 [BlueMaemo] Connection dies immediately on Mac OS X 10.4.11

Please visit Bugzilla to vote. Registration is easy and free.

Ten biggest open enhancements by number of votes:

1. (6%) 8224 [Hermes] Support for getting orkut contact details with Hermes
2. (5%) 7738 [FM Radio] Scan and auto-preset feature
3. (5%) 5453 [Hermes] Add google as a source for contact information (feature request)
4. (4%) 5823 [Personal GPRS Monitor] programmable auto-reset
5. (4%) 11976 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] viewing sms conversations in portrait mode without horizontal scrolling (patch)
6. (4%) 5045 [Conboy] Add undo and redo
7. (4%) 5452 [Hermes] Don't overwrite pre-existing contact info
8. (3%) 6383 [PasswordSafe] Add support for V3 Format
9. (2%) 7374 [FM Radio] Record FM radio to file
10. (2%) 5018 [StockThis] Create a Desktop widget to display portfolio

Please visit Bugzilla to vote. Registration is easy and free.

Ten hottest open bugs:

1. 7505 [Mauku] Claims to be free, but ships no license and says 'You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.' (+1 this week)
2. 10227 [Batlevel] Batlevel uses extremely high amount of power as normally installed. (+1 this week)
3. 10238 [stopwatch] Uses, and causes services to use lots of CPU, even when display blanked. (-2 this week)
4. 7351 [Recorder] Recorder app closes automatically after few mins (+1 this week)
5. 4089 [Canola] SystemProperties plugin error crash after upgrade to beta11 (-1 this week)
6. 12424 [Miniature] [Discussion] OnlineBoard: Implement a better game's end dialog (+2 this week)
7. 12367 [Miniature] Seek search filters don't work (+2 this week)
8. 11490 [Hermes] Expired OAuth tokens cause crash at start-up (new this week)
9. 9969 [BlueMaemo] cant install BlueMaemo (+1 this week)
10. 4083 [Canola] cannot access to video and internet files after upgrade to 2.0.b11 (-3 this week)

Ten hottest open enhancements:

1. 11890 [Quicknote] Improved Meego Integration (new this week)
2. 11895 [Multilist] Package for Meego (new this week)
3. 12411 [Miniature] OnlineBoard: Implement game end dialog for abort during move 1 (+7 this week)
4. 11653 [Gonvert] No way to get unit description (new this week)
5. 12356 [Miniature] Miniature should remeber the value used the last time (new this week)
6. 11897 [Waters of Shiloah] Package for Meego (-2 this week)
7. 11896 [nQa Audiobook Player] Package for Meego
8. 11891 [Multilist] Improved Meego Integration
9. 12341 [Miniature] Filter buttons for FICS seeks could be simpler (new this week)
10. 11894 [Quicknote] Package for Meego (-8 this week)

Ten oldest open bugs (unchanged for 108 weeks):

1. (1394 days) 3472 [Advanced Backlight] LCARS and Hildon iconsets aren't complete
2. (1269 days) 3886 [Canola] Interface buttons disappeared: video, podcasts, internet media
3. (1231 days) 3974 [Browser Extras] webaddons category applications have inconsistent name convention
4. (1215 days) 4005 [Canola] AudioBroadcast UPnP items not showing when browsing
5. (1207 days) 4036 [Canola] Canola cannot properly merge multiple tracks into one album
6. (1203 days) 4050 [mNotes] random comments about make/mnotes_framework
7. (1191 days) 4083 [Canola] cannot access to video and internet files after upgrade to 2.0.b11
8. (1190 days) 4084 [Canola] Intermittent hangs on audio play
9. (1189 days) 4087 [Canola] There is no GUI way to discover podcast URLs after creation
10. (1189 days) 4089 [Canola] SystemProperties plugin error crash after upgrade to beta11

Ten oldest open enhancements (unchanged for 23 weeks):

1. (1207 days) 4037 [Canola] Ability to switch between "Play Random Track" and "Album" mode
2. (1200 days) 4058 [Canola] Vertical lists are not scrolled properly
3. (1189 days) 4090 [Canola] Own radio stations and playlists are not supportet by canola last.fm plugin
4. (1185 days) 4117 [Canola] Tracks in playlists should be sortable by album and track
5. (1132 days) 4255 [Canola] libre.fm support (instead of last.fm/audioscrobbler)
6. (1067 days) 4662 [BlueMaemo] Ability to connect to Windows Mobile/Symbian devices
7. (1067 days) 4663 [BlueMaemo] Configurable buttons Zoom -/Full screen/Zoom + on the N8*0-side
8. (1067 days) 4664 [BlueMaemo] 770 support
9. (1067 days) 4665 [BlueMaemo] drag&drop and digitizer mode
10. (1067 days) 4666 [BlueMaemo] Add scroll bar feature to keyboard mode

New Items

1 bug was opened:

• 12611 [Conboy] Could not parse server answer. Probably server error.

0 bugs were critical/blocker.

0 enhancements were opened.

Resolved Bugs

0 bugs were resolved "fixed".

1 bug was resolved "invalid":

• 12611 [Conboy] Could not parse server answer. Probably server error.

0 bugs were resolved "wontfix".

0 bugs were resolved "duplicate".

0 bugs were resolved "worksforme".

0 bugs were resolved "moved".

Resolved Enhancements

0 enhancements were resolved "fixed".

0 enhancements were resolved "invalid".

0 enhancements were resolved "wontfix".

0 enhancements were resolved "duplicate".

0 enhancements were resolved "worksforme".

0 enhancements were resolved "moved".

Confirmed Items

0 bugs were confirmed.

0 enhancements were confirmed.

Reopened Items

0 bugs were reopened.

0 enhancements were reopened.

Unloved Items

10 bugs were needing love:

• 7346 [Zoutube] Progress bar freezes when selecting a point on it
• 12176 [Erminig] Erminig 0.2.12 - Crash on Sync / Auto-Sync
• 12296 [Erminig] Recent Call Bug
• 12322 [MediaBox] Mediabox keeps files in index even when they've been deleted
• 9440 [PasswordSafe] Enhancement of user interface
• 12474 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] With Desktop locked to landscape and phone to portrait, phone launches in landscape mode
• 12186 [Maetronome] crashes after start: maemo-launcher/invoke problems with environment/default theme?
• 12042 [Ukeyboard] Small character on uppercase layouts.
• 11610 [mplayer] Multiple problems/incompatibility
• 11510 [Transmission] Create new torrent causes Transmission to freeze

10 enhancements were needing love:

• 9875 [Personal GPRS Monitor] function to set an start value
• 9885 [StockThis] using GRAPH the pictures are too small
• 10116 [Multilist] Enhance search by supporting regular expressions or wildcards
• 6926 [OmWeather] Add visual moon phase to the applet
• 8621 [Pyrecipe] synchronized shopping list with web interface
• 10434 [FM Radio] Cannot enter frequency with keyboard
• 12112 [Call Forwarding] when setting all forwards cannot specify the number of seconds
• 9648 [Extended Call Log] Add portrait mode
• 12276 [Hermes] 401 Unauthorized
• 8999 [BlueMaemo] Add WiFi connectivity support

Keyworded Items

(glossary)

0 bugs were tagged "crash".

0 bugs were tagged "easyfix".

0 bugs were tagged "moreinfo".

0 bugs were tagged "patch".

0 bugs were tagged "performance".

0 bugs were tagged "security".

0 enhancements were tagged "easyfix".

0 enhancements were tagged "moreinfo".

0 enhancements were tagged "patch".

0 enhancements were tagged "performance".

This summary is also posted to the Maemo developers' list and talk.maemo.org. 0 0

The Linux Foundation sponsored me to travel to and attend the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco and as part of this sponsorship, I'll be blogging about the conference and my insights and thoughts of the talks and keynotes at it. This is my last post in a two-parter about the conference. 0 0

In the context of a personal ad-hoc app (I will come to that later) that I wrote for my Nokia N9, I needed to send an email to a specific person with an attachment. After the first research at Harmattan APIs you come to QMessageService.

The first thing I did was writing Mixed QML/Qt object that I could instantiate from the QML code so that I could do something like:

Message {
    id: message
    from: "my@Address"
    to: [ "destination@Address" ]
    subject: "This is not Spam for sure!"
    body: "Trolled! Enlarge...!"
    attachments: [ "/a/path/to/an/attachment" ]
}

Button {
    onClicked: message.compose()
//    onClicked: message.send()
}

There we have an object with two send and compose methods, three string properties representing the from, subject and body and two string list properties representing the to and attachments (we leave the CC and BCC as an exercise ). As I already explained how to create the objects with the properties in previous posts, I’ll go directly to the compose and send methods.

const QMessage Message::createMessage()
{
    QMessage message;

    message.setFrom(QMessageAddress(QMessageAddress::Email, m_from));
    QMessageAddressList toList;
    foreach (const QString &item, m_to) {
        toList.append(QMessageAddress(QMessageAddress::Email, item));
    }
    message.setTo(toList);
    message.setSubject(m_subject);
    message.setBody(m_body);
    message.appendAttachments(m_attachments);

    return message;
}

bool Message::send()
{
    QMessage message = createMessage();
    service.send(message);

    return true;
}

bool Message::compose()
{
    QMessage message = createMessage();
    service.compose(message);

    return true;
}

Easy, right?

If you want to be completely trolled stop reading here. If not, please continue.

That does not work, at least I could not make it work. I might be missing something, but I could not. I hooked to the signal and saw the state changes, that were going from sending to Ok and no email composer was showing up. No error was being returned either.

Finally, I got an easier solution by using Qt.openUrlExternally and mailto: directly from QML. You can use obscure parameters to compose the message the way you want. Example:

Button {
    onClicked: Qt.openUrlExternally("mailto:destionation@Address" +
                                    "?subject=Subject" +
                                    "&attach=/path/to/the/attachment" +
                                    "&body=Body")
}

That does the job and it is less complicated than creating a whole class. I leave the whole message class code in a pastebin in case somebody wants to try it or develop something from there in a platform where the QMessageService really works.

Ad-hoc program

My wife tracks all our finances using Home Bank and I needed an easy way to write down the cash expenses. I decided to code a simple program easying me to manage expenses by adding them to a list (and deleting them) and export them as CSV in order to be sent through email when she requested them. As the CSV and the expenses type were so ad-hoc, I decided not to complicate it and cable them in the code and database.

I don’t think it can be interesting to anybody, but I might end up uploading it to some git repo so that it can be maintained by someone else or even forked.

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Turns out I’ll get to spend the next two weeks in Tokyo, starting next Sunday. It will be third time I visit this weird and fascinating place, but I’m still excited to be there again.

Some time ago, in another trip, I proposed anyone who might be reading me to meet up and talk about all things GNOME or WebKit. Turns out I met some interesting people that way (hi everyone from Caixa Mágica!), so let’s try again: if you are reading this, are in Tokyo, and would like me to talk to your friends/colleagues/whatever about GNOME or WebKit I’d be happy to do so. We can also improvise a hackfest or anything else we can come up with. In exchange I only ask of you to show me around (always better with a local) and an unwavering commitment to freedom and justice.

Drop me a line at xan AT gnome DOT org, or leave a comment in this space.

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During my stay in Oakland, CA (due to Ubuntu Developer Summit) I decided to attend also Tizen Developers Conference. Not that I have any relations with this platform — just wanted to meet some friends from Maemo times. And I did not had plans for Tuesday evening while Tizen visitors had social event planned in The California Academy of Sciences.

It is hard to tell was conference success or not because I did not attended any sessions there — just opening keynote by Jim Zemlin. On first day I also came for technical showcase and partner demos. But they were squeezed in very small room so it was hard to discuss with people showing their work. Maybe next time organizers will give at least 4m² per demo — this should be a minimum.

But today I got Tizen Developer Platform device and thumbdrive with SDK on it. So decided to play a bit with it. It was not enjoyable experience.

First ugly part was Tizen SDK “so-called” installer. 823MB shell script… I thought that those times passed long time ago. Anyway tried to run it. All I got was message that 64bits systems are not supported. Good to know that, but my x86-64 systems are able to run x86 binaries without problems. Ok, I made workaround and then got message about missing qemu, rpm, libsdl packages. No, I will not install rpm on my Ubuntu systems.

So I decided to cut that crappy shell script and take a look at tarball. Fast “tail -n+122 tizen-sdk-0423.bin >tizen-sdk.tar.gz” and I was able to extract SDK. Got 26 zip archives.

One of them contains rootfs created from packages based on Debian/Ubuntu packages. Some are from times when dinosaurs ruled the Earth (debianutils 2.17 was released in 2006), some are more fresh (like gcc-4.5 based on version from May 2011). In other words tradition started by Maemo is continued in Tizen and developers are given mix of fresh tools with long time forgotten ones. And Scratchbox 2.

To connect with device there is “sdb” tool. It introduces itself as “Smart Development Bridge” but in past it was named “Samsung Development Bridge” (run ‘strings’ on binary). And it’s father has a name “Android Development Bridge” and has some more options.

Anyway if you want to connect to device then few steps are required:

1. On device go to settings and set USB to ‘USB debugging’ mode. This will switch it into cdc_ether gadget.
2. On host do “sudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.129.1″ to configure networking.
3. Connect to device: “ssh root@192.168.129.3″

And then you can enjoy system which is a mixture of few Debian/Ubuntu versions. And forget about updates — unless you know how to get to 165.213.180.233 and know password of “kb0929.kim” user there (taken from /etc/apt/sources.list file).

Device uses Linux 2.6.36 kernel with unknown patches on top including CMA and Android ones. Quite old one but works. Hope to get newer one from someone.

What I do not like is availability of sources. There is review.tizen.org website with git repositories but I want to vomit when I see commits like “let’s add 2.6.36 kernel in one commit”. Lovely lack of ideas how to help developers.

What I will do with device? Not decided yet. Waiting for instructions how to get into bootloader to boot own kernels. Then who knows… replacing Tizen with Android or Ubuntu?

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Tizen: first impressions was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

2 1

The Linux Foundation sponsored me to travel to and attend the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco and as part of this sponsorship, I'll be blogging about the conference and my insights and thoughts of the talks and keynotes at it. While some people might think this, I don't see Mer as a competitor to Tizen, in fact, I see the benefit for Tizen of the entire community that they're pushing a proper, fast and working, standards compliant web runtime for Linux based devices. And I hope we'll see people putting this on top of Mer. Mer plays a different game - a solid mobile core that everybody can build on and most importantly, rely on despite the moods of corporate giants, to make their devices - where solid delivery, ability to productise and code is king. There's always a challenge in how to properly launch a commercial open source project. Especially in mobile Linux, there is unnecessary high media and developer expectations to the features and ability of a mobile handset stack that often enough causes mobile OS projects to break it's neck and die. But Rome wasn't built in a day. And so weren't the mobile stacks you see around the today - Android took over 3 years to get to a remotely functioning stack. And this has a tendency to make mobile OS developers develop in 'closed mode' in order to launch properly on day one. Tizen has drawn a lot of crap from their complete silence and secret cathedral building behaviour up to 1.0 release. But I can say that if I was in their shoes, having to launch a handset device .. and handset stack. I would probably end up doing the same things as they had. In a world where you will see your semi-ugly alpha release screenshots laughed at in news articles about your 1.0 launch, when you have a perfectly working and very shiny final release that nobody seems to bother to even check out, it's hard to argue for transparent development from day zero. Luckily I'm not in their shoes and I can concentrate on technical core side of things and make it easier for people to make exciting new devices. I'm not a fan of whole-stack projects - for the reasons listed above. And that's why Mer doesn't contain UIs and hardware adaptations - we let people base and develop on a sane core that we can maintain the openness of, while people work on exciting new devices and UIs in seperate projects from the Mer project. Reputation and history matters a lot as well - There was a lot of disappointment in the demise of MeeGo and the messaging on MeeGo site was that Tizen was the new direction. And people expected there'd be some kind of relation. But there's not - Tizen, at least the handset side (IVI is more related on the Core side), is so very different from anything you knew in MeeGo - your employees would need complete retraining to work with it. The stack is based off Samsung Linux Platform and actually says it's that, when booting up. That should lead to interesting discussions with company lawyers. And with reputation and history in mind - many from MeeGo remember last years keynote, Monday Morning with MeeGo.. February 11 had happened months before and there was still a fighting spirit in the community, we needed people who were showing passion in their work, the same fighting spirit. And we got something that was closer to Monday Mourning with MeeGo. Which left many people depressed and unimpressed. A talk that spoke more about the fantastic deployments of the platforms that MeeGo was in practical competition, than about MeeGo itself and it's qualities and achievements. When a last moment change in the Tizen conference schedule came in, that moved the first keynote which was supposed to be Imad from Intel and JD from Samsung to the morning after and instead, we got a recycled keynote, void of genuine and documented passion for Tizen, with the same recycled material as in the Monday Morning with MeeGo talk and the same speaker as last year - with him even talking about that if people had noticed he would be on schedule, there'd probably be fewer in the room. I was left unimpressed and depressed, again. I'm ashamed to say it, but I've grown to appreciate the famous "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance. Somebody showing passion for their work - people who truly believe in their product and their stack. Someone who wants to stirr excitement in developers, CTOs and platform integrators alike. And I harbour a lot of respect for people who truly believe in what they do and that they want to do a good product and good software. And we got that in the morning after keynote, Imad, the head of Intel OTC and JD, EVP of Samsung, the Tizen technical steering group. They showed their excitement about what they were doing, they understood the challenges in presenting a mobile OS and explained to depth both the challenges and reasoning behind their choices for the Tizen stack - even the controversial ones. I can recommend watching the video when it comes back online. This is what the first keynote of the conference should have been like. And I was more excited again. The second keynote, from Tizen Association was interesting, showing the need of operators to provide and control content. Which is funny, when there were also talks about "The web always wins" .. that in practice, the walled garden never wins, the properitary standards. I might be an idealist, but I have difficulty seeing the word 'open' together with the working method of the Tizen Association. When their terms of membership states at http://www.tizenassociation.org/en/tizen-association/board-of-directors that there is an annual due of membership of Two Hundred and Twenty Thousand USD. And talking about confidentiality. But I was reminded of a quote from my former boss, Harri Hakulinen, from his MeeGo blog, speaking of Nokia's choice of WP7: "... What I had witnessed from the side, thanks to Sami J. Mäkinen, was of course the birth of Linux. And, in so many ways, I feel that we have now "replayed" the same with MeeGo in last 12 months. Co-incidentally, at that time I had a summer job where we replaced some ancient Nixdorf and IBM mainframes with another new OS, called Windows NT. It was hard to explain to Sami and others, that from the point of view of those companies I worked for, Windows NT was, in fact, like "open environment", compared to those things that they had been using before." And perhaps this is how it's like with Tizen. That compared to how it has been before, this is actually more open than the previous situation for the ecosystem. At least the code is open, actively developed, with a proper code submission process. So perhaps that's an improvement on top of what we have had with Symbian and Android. What I am more encouraged by, is what I learned in the Tizen Architecture talks, where there is a strong push towards that there will actually be as little Tizen specific WebAPIs as possible. That there's an active desire to use W3C standards where possible and to submit APIs to the standards. Which makes me hope that for the parts that really matters - the developer facing APIs, that there will no vendor lock down. In the end, the winner would be the Web. And even if Tizen did go away one day, that the code would be living on. Just like MeeGo's code has. Because it's open source. From an entirely architectural point of view, Tizen architecture (SLP-based) has a lot of NIH in it - it's own telephony stack instead of oFono (though I hear that's coming), and a lot of self-made libraries and methods. Which may impact the portability of the web runtime. I'm hoping that Tizen will realize the importance of separating the web runtime from OS stack. That one of the reasons that the web standards have developed so fast, has been the ability to get many people to upgrade their browsers over the air. We probably cannot assume we'll see Tizen 1.0 to Tizen 2.0 upgrades on our handsets - aftermarket hardware adaptation is really hard.  But we should make sure that at least for a few generations, we can keep on delivering the web runtime to older devices. To foster a standards compliant and secure web runtime for our apps - just like the browsers has fostered it for the web. And I think this is one area Tizen could potentially be very agile in, comparing to other platforms. The last talk of the day was on Tizen security - Ryan Ware was presenting along with his Samsung counterpart, where compared to many other platforms, the focus has been to ensure end-user privacy, and not on the need to protect content owner content. That's the right direction - especially in a world where devices are turning very promiscuous and interacting in sometimes unsafe manners with other devices. One of the most important parts of a conference is not so much the presentations, but the people there and the discussions in the hallway - the 'hallway track'. This is a concept that any conferences doesn't always understand - the importance that people can discuss outside the conference rooms. Tizen conference has as usual done a great job on this (thanks to Amy Leeland's fantastic work), providing good space and hacker lounges with whiteboards for people to properly discuss. I've sat down together with many key people in my line of work and had intellectual discussions about the challenges we meet. And I've gotten to get to know more people that I previously didn't. And of course - when working on a distributed-across-the-world project, I've been able to go out and have our traditional icecream shop visit (since 2009) with the rest of the participants of my project. So far it has been a good conference, looking forward to be seeing more presentation today. 0 0

This year’s Summer of Code has already started, and Epiphany has been lucky enough to get two students assigned. Let’s see who they are and what they’ll be working on.

William Ting, Data Synchronization

William is a last year student of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. He’ll be helping to alleviate a paradigmatic first world problem: I use Epiphany from so many computers that all my data is scattered around and I suffer a permanent pseudo-memory loss condition.

The battle plan is easy. We’ll reuse Firefox’s excellent design for a data sync protocol plus their free-to-use servers (we assume that’s what they were hoping for!), and will integrate the feature right into our browser. Since all the specs and implementation are open GNOME could host in the future a sync.gnome.org instance, but for now we leave that out of the scope of our summer project. Hopefully by 3.6 you’ll be able to optionally enable this functionality, cruise through the web from your tablet, bookmark that hilarious XKCD comic strip, and have it show up in your good old laptop just like that.

I’ll be mentoring this project myself, which was initially proposed by Igalia’s very own Joanmarie Diggs.

Yann Soubeyrand, Anti-phishing Support

Yann is a first year student at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble. His task will be to solve a complicated problem that Epiphany has suffered for a long time: for most users the information provided in the URL entry is not enough to judge whether the page they are visiting is safe. The SSL or certification data is useless for most people, and by showing scary warnings about things they don’t understand at best you’ll train them to just click through to get to the content. To make things worse, most of the time those warnings do not actually indicate someone is trying to scam you, just that apparently setting up web servers correctly is difficult. So all in all, while useful, the information we currently show in the UI is really not that great for the 99% out there.

With this in mind, we’ll try to do the following: using the Google Safebrowsing APIs we’ll try to request authoritative information about the potential “phishiness” of the pages you visit. If we get a warning through this channel we can be confident about there being a security threat, so we’ll show a big, clear message on top of the web content. No jargon about outdated certs or VeriSign trying to take over the planet, just “Listen, our best people tell us this page is almost certainly not safe. Let’s not go there.”. We think this will significantly increase the safety of the browser without violating the user’s privacy, since Google’s API do not require you to disclose the pages you are visiting to validate them (magic? no, science).

Sergio Villar will be mentoring this project.

That’s it, let’s roll

That’s it for now. We’ll make sure to keep you updated about these and other developments in GNOME’s very own web browser. Thanks to GNOME for choosing our proposals, to Google for sponsoring Summer of Code again, and of course to Igalia for its continued support for GNOME and for allowing us to spend our time mentoring the fearless next wave. Happy hacking!

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After 5 wonderful years working with passionate and skilled people I am now moving to São Paulo to work at Facebook’s office for Latin America. My official role will be Partner Engineer.

This doesn’t mean that I will go away from KDE, neither from Qt. It just means that I will contribute more on my free time (as it was before Nokia acquired Trolltech) than during working hours.

I am thrilled with this opportunity and I am sure that all of you who know me are also happy with this announcement.

I will be a little bit offline the next days due to my move, but I will be checking emails regularly

 

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Another May, another Ubuntu Developers Summit. This time I am in Oakland, California, USA (even if my tweets shows Dallas, Texas as geolocation).

As usual with US trips this one took insane amount of time. But I was 3cm from not going here… Why? Because I got stuck in toilet at home. Hopefully with help from neighbour I was able to bash door out and get to the bus stop on time.

Then standard set of bus, plane, plane, train and finally arrived in hotel. As my room was not yet ready I got 30$ coupon to bar to not waste time on waiting. Free meal/beer ;)

My room is at 17th floor (which means 15th) and has a nice view in the evening:

On Sunday I went to see San Francisco centre (I saw Golden Gate on earlier visit). Chinatown was interesting experience. Lot of people speaking language which I do not understand, shops full of food which I do not recognize.

Some random photos:

After getting some souvenirs and refilling of my US T-Mobile sim card I decided to go to the cinema for ‘The Avengers’ movie. It was nice experience. Touchscreen operated ticket machines which allow to buy ticket in one minute (but people were standing in long queue to buy tickets in ‘normal way’) made it even better. As in Poland there was big amount of commercials before movie (including some in style “our Army/Navy is great, why not join us”) but what I liked was just-before-movie animation reminding about not talking/texting/tweeting during movie (made with characters from “Madagaskar” series). Have to admit that RealD 3D glasses were more comfortable than Dolby 3D ones used by Polish cinemas. Movie itself was great but I think that will have to see it in Poland due to my English ;D

During evening there was usual Canonical internal plenary and then dinner. I even managed to sleep 6 hours despite jet lag ;D

Monday started with interesting keynote and presentation of Calxeda ARM server using technology they were talking about at previous UDS. Photos:

It is 2U case with 24 Serial-ATA discs and 12 nodes with 4 quad-core EnergyCore processors per node. The only cables inside are power ones as rest of connections is on pcb. Connection with world by four Ethernet connectors.

I went to “Create filesystems for embedded devices” session where we discussed how to make Ubuntu Core even smaller. People mentioned OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT, buildroot as usual, we got some strange use cases too. What will come from it? Time will show.

Plenaries were interesting. First Chris Kenyon told about cooperation with OEMs and ODMs and how it relates with Ubuntu. Laptop in a pizza box picture was nice — reminded developer boards. Then Bdale Garbee from HP shown us that there is no way to go though life without being served by HP technologies or hardware. Both talks were great and I hope that rest of plenaries will be like that.

After plenaries I went to San Francisco to register at Tizen conference and to meet some friends from Maemo times. Technical showcase and partner demos were boring and it was hard to feel that it is something innovative. But who knows… maybe Tizen will be yet another phone/tablet/ivi/etc OS even when Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo did not succeed.

During evening (back at UDS) there was ‘Meet & greet” social event. Our Linaro group (Amber, Ricardo, Paul, me) was showing member boards and replying to misc questions from audience.

What next? Sessions, social events, discussions about my patches with other developers, some sight-seeing.

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All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz UDS-Q was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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We have been hard at work developing and improving the Nokia Data Gathering solution, and will be launching an exciting new version in May 2012. The Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 (Dazzling Dourado) release will include bug fixes and new features on the Java mobile client, as well as a brand new Nokia Data Gathering server and user interface. We will also be launching the first Windows Phone client of Nokia Data Gathering.

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!

Event	Nokia Data Gathering 4.04 workshop
Date	Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Time	09:00-12:00 AM
Place	Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079, USA
Room	Beck Rooms A, B, and C (Ground Floor of Walsh Library)

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 0 0

Some time ago I blogged about using openSCAD do design a wine rack. Well I’ve finally finished the wine rack:

So what took so long? well mostly a lack of time, work keeps me very busy during the week, and I got a little carried away learning some android development. So progress on the wine rack has come in fits and starts. Most recently it was effectively done,painted and sanded, but awaiting the lazy susan bearing required t make it spin. When this finally arrived I realised that I needed a reasonable size ‘foot’ piece for the bearing to provide balance and stability, with heavy wine bottles there was the potential for the whole thing to tip over if unevenly balanced.

A suggestion was made that I simply needed to make sure we always consume wine in multiples of 2 bottles, to ensure even distribution at all times. However I figured a little extra time to make a good foot for it would allow things to be at least a little one sided without tipping.

The completion of this project was also timed with my awesome wife returning from a trip to France, she brought back a couple of cases of wine to help fill up the wine rack

Overall I enjoyed this project and I’m pleased with the result. I’m sure I could have constructed a more simple wine rack with a16 bottle capacity that would have fit in the space, but this was just a lot more fun and I feel like the space is more interestingly used .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jiIWZD0Zzo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: rotating, under stairs, wine rack