Entries from November 2005 ↓

Had a nice team building day by way of karting at VM Karting Center. I came in third after Karl and Jakub, but I had the best lap time \o/

Karl confessed being a seasoned pro so he doesn’t count. Jakub managed to get most track time by driving slow enough during warmups to drop into the B-finals, and then fast enough to get into A-finals as well. Damn him =)

Dinner was Mexican though a bit tasteless. If it doesn’t make your nose run it’s not spicy enough.

Speaking of plugins I was testing Jakub‘s load-applet (among all the INdT games) and felt it needed some tweaks. I was thinking about adding a trivial Screenshot saved infoprint for feedback and widening indicator bars a little to make them more visible.

But where is the source?! Come on!

Eek! I’m no longer even sure I’m allowed to install the plugin. Looking at the package contents shows in interesting copyright file:

Copyright: (c) 2005 Nokia Oyj

Confidential. You are not free to do anything with this package,
unless you have a permission from Nokia Oyj.

Jakub, maybe you should discuss with someone about the copyrights? Guillem and Marius can give you some pointers, I’m sure 🙂

PS. I’ve never been to Australia or have any affiliation to the university…

Just noticed an interesting bit in philipl‘s Gweather-Maemo README:

- Gconf schema is not properly installed - I'm not sure how this
  is supposed to be done on the device. I don't see other apps
  doing it.

As far as I’ve understood it, there’s no way to run any postinstall scripts for AI installed packages, so no schema installation is possible. The other alternative, pre-generating the xml-files, fails because GConf isn’t configured to look in /var/lib/install 🙁

Oh well, we all know AI is making mockery of package management anyway. A trivial update to /etc/gconf/2/path might make pre-generated schema installation work, but in the longer term you just need to keep kicking Marius to get the next generation AI actually work. Come to think of it you should to kick him even for a short term solution 🙂

Fortunately GConf will still work without the schemas, you’ll just lose the defaults set in schemas. The code must have defaults of its own to survive broken GConf anyway, right?

BTW, that dialogs only shrink when the input methods is shown and not grow back when the IM goes away is (broken?) as designed.

Also, the LD_PRELOAD trick is only meant as a fallback. maemo-af-desktop (including plugins) is supposed to not be needing it… (on related note, LD_PRELOAD disables any benefits prelinking would otherwise have)

Had the Thank deity it’s finally shipping! party yesterday. Interestingly enough the place was a greenhouse. (Gardenia)

I got a reward (framed board with a picture of 770 showing an older UI mockup that everyone signed) for trying to drive people crazywork more in the open. While it sometimes takes a long time to see changes happen concretely I hope this says something about where we’re heading.

Feeling kind of tired still. I wonder if I forgot to wake up today. Wonder when I get around to reply to all the mails, blogs and comments that keep piling up.

Erm… instead of having one ApplicationCatalog there’s now another one. What a wonderful way of guaranteeing neither one is going to be complete or up to date as their roles don’t seem to be complementing each other but are apparently completely overlapping.

And same goes for the maemo wiki – instead of using the (more or less) well known wiki there’s now a new wiki on the block, ironically to collect all how-to’s, tips and tricks from various sources (forums, blogs, web sites… funny that wikis weren’t mentioned.)

I’m all for having complementary sites (like maemo vs. Nokia 770) as it helps everyone to maintain focus in their own areas. But doing overlapping work without coordination is at minimum duplicating effort, but at worst fracturing the user base (think IM protocols) when no one knows for certain where to find all relevant information.

Personally I’m anticipating confusion. Where can I find all announced applications in the future? ApplicationCatalog used to be that place. If there are two wikis collecting tips and tricks from different sources, could someone set up a third one to collect them all in one place?

Note: after re-reading the original announcement more carefully it seems that maybe the focus is on the Nokia 770 and its users and not the development platform, but the relationship to maemo.org wasn’t explained too clearly. (Software Section as an alternative place to post their application to inform the Maemo community confuses me…)

So maybe the ApplicationCatalog should be moved to ITT, and keep moving applications from the ApplicationCatalogWip when they reach user friend maturity?

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think we’ve sold somewhere between one and two billion 770’s by now.

(with apologies to Dilbert)

philipl, have a look at
hello-world-app (user: guest, pass: guest – *sigh* that mandatory guest login is starting to annoy me) It might miss the more deep philosophical points (no updates when in background, etc.) but should be enough to get a plugin running. The tutorial should of course have more substance about everything. Bit weird to omit home (and apparently TN) plugins from the Maemo tutorial but include status bar and control panel plugins, but I guess there’s a reason.

Is it just me or shouldn’t all the How to … chapters in the tutorial be available in the How-To’s section in the website?

Hmm.. the return value for hildon_home_applet_lib_properties differs between the hello-world-app (void) and the API docs (GtkWidget*). Marius, your example code is broken!

Last week we finally got a clear yes-no decision regarding publishing more stuff. After fighting with the legal department about a wrong shade of pink etc. we got green, or pink, light to publish UI performance results comparing gtk+ 2.6 and gtk+ 2.8 on 770, as well as the postprocessing scripts that are generating the reports. (The code that measures and generates the data are already available in the tools repository on stage.)

Now just need to find someone who knows how the website templating system works in order to get the stuff uploaded. And find the latest revision of the scripts and put them in the repository. I think a warning is in order: do not look directly at the code, you might go blind…

Update: The UI performance measurements are now published.

Halfway to the work I get a flat tire, and when I finally get there I notice I lost a glove. At least I got blisters to compensate the loss. And the mudwater^Wcoffee seems worse than usual. Yeah, it’s Monday alright..

Had father’s day lunch at parents house today. My brother cooked eggrolls and something wok-ish. Quite interesting taste, pretty mild, almost tasteless at first, but some spices kick in later. And the cake was great as usual, self-made of course.

Watched Ocean’s Twelve, what a waste of potential. I think the basic idea was rather clever, but the delivery falls short. Too little depth in characters and plotlines made the whole thing too confusing. Few good bits here and there, but also some events were completely predictable. I liked the original (remake) better.

Between here and there I rode past a company called PGP-putki (PGP-pipe for the Finnish challenged) … wonder what they’re selling 🙂