Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Hmm… Need to learn to leave the office earlier, if I leave too late, the sun will shine straight to my eyes on my way home.

Had a performance hackfest today. You know, lock up all the performance loonies in isolation, preferrably in some exotic place away from the office, hack and solve performance problems while having abundant supply of coke and pizza available.

Well, it didn’t quite work the way some might’ve expected. There wasn’t much hacking, coke or pizza, and we were in the business center next door. We even had lunch in our own cafeteria. We did have all us loonies locked away working on performance, though.

Watched the first chapter of I.M.P.S. – The Relentless. Pretty good CGI and funny little details. You can enjoy familiar characters making their appearances and some witty dialogue:

Aren’t you a little short for…

Finish that sentence and die!

I noticed there’s more fan made Star Wars related films at Star Wars Fan Films. Hmm, that was somewhat redundant. Interesting phenomenon this whole Star Wars thing is.

And I still haven’t seen seen the Revenge of the Sith.

Planning how to use public bugzilla and subversion (under construction) in daily Hildon widgets development. Oh, boy, what fun it is to try to make corporate policies and processes, and open source way of working play along smoothly. On one hand we want to work as much as possible in the open, but on the other hand there are still things we can’t disclose. At the moment such culture clashes are making my life interesting.

Since we’re apparently missing a convenient screenshot gallery of all the widgets in maemo I guess I’ll have to post a few here. Starting with date and time widgets since someone asked.

The first screenshot shows
HildonDateEditor
and
HildonTimeEditor
in
HildonCaption (the Captions are on the left holding the label and hilighting the focused element, Date: being currently focused.)

Clicking the calendar icon on the HildonDateEditor pops up a HildonDatePicker which is really just a slightly modified/enhanced GtkCalendar

Similarly clicking the clock icon on the HildonTimeEditor pops up a
HildonTimePicker (excuse the fonts, something funny with the skin.) Clicking on the arrows or the am label lets you change the time.

My current fridge is working very well except for one little thing, it can’t keep anything cold anymore. Fortunately the warmest days in the year are only coming.

Maybe it’s only better this way. I’ve been planning to get a new one for a long time, but I have trouble buying anything new while the old one still works. Hmm.. maybe I should blow a whole in the floor as well, then I’d probably get around to renew it as well.

Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to find a Nokia phone with three features: Bluetooth, camera and FM-radio.

To me it seems typical that vendor’s own site falls short on actually being useful. Nokia site does have a way to search for phones by feature, but you can only pick two (sure, why would anyone need more than two features anyway…) Thanks to koen on #maemo (@ freenode) for pointing me to nieuwemobiel.nl where one can apparently search for phones based on any combination of features. The page was in some incomprehensible language, but yet I managed to get a list of phones supporting all three features.

I think I’ll be ordering a Nokia 6230i, I like a phone resembling a phone instead of gameboy or something. I just wonder what’s included in the sales package, for some reason I couldn’t see it on the web site.

Day 43: Are we there yet? gag still not funny

Nokia develops a new browser for Series 60 by using open source software

Nokia announced today that it is using best-of-breed open source software as the basis of a new mobile browser for its world leading smartphone software, the Series 60 Platform.

A key component of this development has been Nokia’s cooperation with Apple, as the Series 60 browser will use the same open source components, WebCore and JavaScriptCore, that Apple uses in its popular Safari Internet browser.

OK, I may be biased, but seeing the title I was expecting to see Mini Mozilla (minimo) announced. Oh well, WebCore probably isn’t that bad either. Maybe this will improve the situation of the Gtk+ WebCore port as well.

I cooked up a quick patch to fix some issues with ScummVM on maemo I mentioned earlier. The magic numbers are interesting, surely everyone knows the keycode for F5 is 319, right? Except that in another place the keycode is 63.

The good is that now it’s possible to exit the starting room of Beneath a Steel Sky. The bad news is that the inventory system really throws off the cursor and one needs to “recalibrate” constantly. The cursor confinement is pretty strange to begin with, can’t quite understand why it’s done that way. It’s probably better to fix it once and for all, but I’m also considering hacking zoom in/out hardkey for accessing inventory just for BASS. But that would be little weird.

On related news, I learned that The Secret of Monkey Island can be played through on maemo without any (additional) difficulties. Funny game, I bursted laughing out loud maybe a couple of times.

It took surprisingly long, but eventually people figured out what the Nokia 770 is good for: playing retro games, of course. Some weird people like C64 emulators, I much prefer ScummVM.

Compiling ScummVM for maemo/ARM is very easy, see below. You only need to manually define the SCUMM_NEED_ALIGNMENT configuration variable, possibly because QEMU is taking some shortcuts or the configure script is missing a check or something.

% ./configure
% perl -pi -e 's,#undef,#define, if /SCUMM_NEED_ALIGNMENT/' config.h
% make

So far I’ve tried playing the following games on Nokia 770, more or less thoroughly, and they all seem to be quite enjoyable:

• Day of the Tentacle
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Random observations:

• Sounds and especially music are too silent for the speaker. Sound effects and speech are OK with headphones, but music is barely audible.
• There is no F5 key so you can’t save or restore games, which is likely to become very annoying very quickly. Small tweak to make use of the Menu key (i.e. F4) would be nice.
• Since there’s no input method support one should create savegame files beforehand which can be selected in game instead of having to type new names.
• The cursor gets easily offset if you tap outside the game area. It’s easy to recalibrate with the arrow keys, but it’s still annoing.
• Beneath a Steel Sky requires right mouse button, which 770 does not have. (IIRC Last Crusade requires it also for the balloon ride.)
• The copy protection in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge requires keyboard, or at least some way to enter numbers.
• It might be good for performance if pixel doubling and the sounds could be handled in hardware rather than software.

I am yet to try more games, but so far it seems that ScummVM, like many other applications, mostly works without any modifications. To integrate with the platform really nicely changes, some more complicated than others, are required. Especially the input methods for non-gtk+ applications are somewhat a challenge.