Boston, meet litl.

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

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Try 1

First they were delivering a TV and I was looking forward to having someone else deal with carrying 25kg to second floor using stairs. Delivery was to be on Wednesday. As they were incapable of providing any more accurate estimate I got to wait home the whole day.

Nothing.

Thursday morning before I managed to start calling around myself I got a call from the store explaining they made some mistake with the delivery address and next delivery would be attempted on Friday. Fine, mistakes happen. I’ll work from home again on Friday. (At this point I had no opinion about City Link yet.) Thursday evening I get home from office. Someone rings the door bell, asks who I am and if I could come down. It turns out to be the owner of a shoe repair store nearby and he might have something for me.

This is when it dawned on me. There’s something wrong with City Link. Not only did they deliver the wrong day, but to wrong address as well. And considered it job well done I’m sure.

Try 2

Around New Year I bought a cheap camera on impulse. Made the order just in time for next day delivery which was confirmed within the hour. I was positively surprised to hear they’d be delivering on New Year’s Eve.

Nothing.

I figured someone had holiday spirits or something already. They’d try again the next working day. So on Friday I was pretending to work while waiting for the delivery. Again nothing. I contacted the store to figure it out. (At this point I actually thought Royal Mail was handling the delivery as the store uses both, and I had been looking at their Christmas season delivery times.)

On Tuesday the store replied delivery is handled by City Link (bad memories starting to come back) and “the delivery has failed due to the delivery point being closed.” With tracking number now at hand I get to see the tracking information:

15:43 - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - Delivery point closed (Carded)
12:24 - Friday, January 2, 2009 - Delivery point closed (Carded)

Having been home the both times, not hearing anyone ring or seen any cards, I’m left wondering what have they been smoking, and more precisely where. (Attempting delivery and leaving cards at unknown addresses seems to be recurring theme in reviews. There was a good one about trying doors with different colors.)

Not having learned my lesson yet I call City Link (not toll-free) to arrange new delivery. They can’t delivery to other addresses, including neighbors, unless instructed so by the store. (WTF?! You silently dropped off my package to some not-exactly-neighbor the last time I had to deal with you.) Can’t deliver on Saturday either without extra cost. (No way do you deserve any money.) Not interested at all in epic fail with finding the right address. I get new delivery attempt for the next day (today) and try to guess how one could fail to find the right building and give some hints. (There’s two entrances in essentially the same address.) See before for ‘Not interested’. In retrospect ability to find $number $street might’ve been too much to expect from delivery company. (Oddly IKEA – or whatever delivery company they use – had no such problem. They visited me a few times and always found me.)

11:24 - Wednesday, January 7, 2009 - Delivery point closed (Carded)

…

As they seem to be incapable of finding my place I’m trying to get the store to change the delivery to the office (which would be preferable anyway since I should, you know, be working) before canceling the order. Should be easier to find as it’s a bigger building with building number out front. Then again, Lucas might disagree…

Now, Clutter needs OpenGL (ES). Hardware support on n8×0 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 n8×0, everything is peachy.
• yes-ish – Clutter is optional on n8×0 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 n8×0, then you know. Otherwise it’s a definitive “maybe” until Nokia figures out how to break the news.

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.)

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?

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.

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.