Random ramblings of Tommi Komulainen

First litl appearance in public. Wednesday November 4, 10:30am-12pm at Starbucks (755 Boylston St. Boston)

Somehow I got stuck in planet maemo aggregation even after I stopped working on it almost two years ago. IMO that planet is too narrow minded and not much like the original (planet gnome) so I’m not sorry to finally get removed from it.

Boston, meet litl.

Come say hi to litl. This Wednesday, 10:30am-12pm at Starbucks (755 Boylston St. Boston).

The litl webbook gets you online and more. It’s an internet computer that works great with your favorite websites. But the litl also flips over to create a new view of the web. Our intuitive interface and no-maintenance approach make it simple and carefree.

litl.com (@litl)

This is mostly to remind myself as probably all of UK and anyone who’d google for city link review already knows to stay away. Far far away. And then some.
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Will maemo5 run on n8x0? Based on what I’ve read from blog posts from OSiM and Maemo Summit there’s no straight answer from Nokia so far. We’ve learned that the interface for Fremantle will be Clutter based though.

Now, Clutter needs OpenGL (ES). Hardware support on n8x0 has some issues and software rendering leaves something to be desired. So will maemo5 run on current hardware? I don’t know, but I see few options:

• yes – Fremantle comes with GLES driver for n8x0, everything is peachy.
• yes-ish – Clutter is optional on n8x0 like Compiz in Ubuntu. That wouldn’t be exactly “Clutter based” though.
• yes-as-in-no – Clutter with software rendering. Right…
• no – simple as that. Get a new n9xx or whatever it’s called when it’s out.
• Kanada – nevermind
• maybe – well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

So when Fremantle is out as seamless software upgrade for your n8x0, then you know. Otherwise it’s a definitive “maybe” until Nokia figures out how to break the news.

Since I don’t use Xcode for editing while on Mac, I’ve been reasonably frustrated by having to switch applications to access the Apple API reference while I can jump to the GNOME API Reference with single keypress in my editor.

Today I decided to do something about it and came up with awful XSLT (I believe it’s impossible to write XSLT that doesn’t make your eyes bleed) that converts the Apple documentation into a nice devhelp book you can browse. I can also get the function/keyword index from individual reference files (e.g. NSOpenGLContext) quite easily. Now I just need to figure out how to list all files automatically and how to organize the results better (all-in-one and class-per-book don’t quite work for 700+ html files.)

Life with Clutter on OSX

First there was massive breakageimprovement to support multiple stages in clutter. It’s really good news for like clutter-gtk, allowing you to have multiple clutter embeds in an application. The bad news was that it changed the backend API and broke OSX build.

Somehow somewhere in the middle of relocating myself to London I managed to get the OSX backend back working again. But not before the shiny new cogl, another big rewrite landed, and broke the build again.

Good news

Little hacking later cogl is building again and multistage works on OSX. Once those, and a couple of other minor patches have been reviewed and committed clutter can be built on OSX again.

On top of that there’s a patch to make it possible to build clutter on OSX without gtk+ using instead Core Image (Quartz) to load the textures. Should make it a little bit easier to bootstrap the building process. It’s not as big a deal as one might think as clutter is in MacPorts now.

Bad news

The bad news is that with all the patches to make clutter build on OSX again it can produce weird artefacts or plain crash. I was assuming it had something to do with NPOT textures but after poking around with OpenGL Profiler I’m not so sure anymore. Using OpenGL Profiler can crash some clutter test programs, even the ones before cogl rewrite and multistage, with invalid memory access. Seems to happen only with the native driver and some combination of extensions and whatnot.

My totally unfounded guess is that I’ve gotten some reference counting wrong or missing locking somewhere, but so far any attempts to tweak things haven’t worked and I’m running out of ideas. Help?

So, I’ll be joining LiTL together with some familiar faces and jobi. Can’t go much into detail what we’ll be doing, see the jobs page for info, but it’s going to be cool. I’m litl excited.

Since leaving Nokia I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the team and hunting an apartment in London (still can’t quite believe the prices!) Found myself a nice-ish place in Fulham where I’ll be moving this week. My mobile number will cease to function, send me a note if you want my new number.

The bureaucracy involved with moving to a different country is interesting. Fortunately as EU citizen I don’t need a visa, or basically any permit or notification to move to another country in EU, but the dead tree mess is still annoying. Basically in order to get a bank account you need a UK address, in order to get an address you need a UK bank account. Fortunately relocation agency was able to help there somewhat, though not with the 18 page lease I had to print and scan.

But still, I couldn’t get phone line activated as BT can only handle local VISA… weird, need to get some local to pay initial deposit. And you can’t even order any reasonably priced Internet connection without a phone line. I’m already feeling disabled for the lack of Internet.

Anyway, this is going to be an exciting year.

I’m leaving Nokia, it’s time for me to move on. Next week will be my last week as Nokia employee.

This marks an end of era for me for I’ve been working for Nokia almost a decade (had my interview in Nokia House May ’98 — Hi Patrik!) latter half of which I spent in a great team, excited to be able to help Nokia evolve into something new and wonderful. Unfortunately lately I’ve lost the excitement and work has become too much of an energy drain for me. The energy I feel like I’ve been putting in isn’t paying off and I’m unable to sustain it any longer. To some extent I had already given up which I find an alarming sign.

I’m fully confident Quim and Ari will carry on making maemo an exciting platform to work with. It’s just time for us to part ways.

I’m going to miss some people I’ve grown to know, others not so much, and some I’ll be seeing again soon enough. There’s an exciting opportunity I’m following. More on that later.