Without further ado, here are the episodes so far:

• Arjen Van de Ven – MeeGo Technical Overview
• Quim Gil – A Working Day in MeeGo project
• Greg Kroah-Hartman – MeeGo netbooks
• Henrik Hartz – Qt Quick

<3 <3

First of all Dawn Foster, the MeeGo co-Community Manager from Intel (Quim Gil of Nokia being the other) introduced herself and asked us to introduce ourselves too, with three words. That proved to be a funny experience and it was even funnier looking at my attempted recording of the introductory round (though I succeeded in pointing the camera at the right person with surprisingly high percentage!). There were plenty of Nokians, Intelians (though I had to wonder how many of them know Walter) and even a person from Adobe developing Flash. Of course Bergie was there too, after all, he was the first person I met on previous day, Wednesday arriving to the venue. Ericsson had people attending the workgroup, as did Igalia and Collabora, and, of course, Canonical as well. In my hazy (feverish) state I forgot to discuss with Robert McQueen of Collabora more, it would have been fun to discuss the state of affairs of Linux, open source and Maemo in Cambridgeshire area.

After the roll-call Arjan Van de Ven, Senior Staff Engineer of Intel gave us an overview on the technical aspects of MeeGo. MeeGo is a personal OS for personal devices, and as Imad mentioned the day before, MeeGo plans to integrate upstream projects to be released every six months to nice bundles that manufacturers can use as a basis for the software stacks of their products. The grand plan is to make MeeGo a standard that can be used with standard Linux applications with least effort of porting effort, and Nokia will make efforts in synchronizing MeeGo with Qt releases.

Qt and C++ will be the languages of choice for development for MeeGo. Compliance testing may assume the applications are done on Qt. Judging from this, GTK will be phased out from the stack, which I think is a shame. Python can be used for programming too with Pyside, but it might not be available on every platform MeeGo will be released on. Browser hasn’t been decided on yet, it could be Fennec or Chromium, as it’s just an application. Webkit will be offered as the embeddable HTML viewer.

On the hardware side both ARM and Intel will be supported:

We as MeeGo don’t want to have one-time hardware-specific forks like Android has had.

Hardware patches, as other patches, should be submitted upstream because of this policy. Only devices that agree on the rules set by MeeGo can use the MeeGo logo and trademark: Devices need to ship with the full MeeGo stack and the application-level API must not be broken, so patches should be applied to the stack. There are plans for MeeGo application store as with Maemo has the community repositories, but proprietary stuff will be centralised either on Ovi Store or manufacturer-specific stores. There might be restrictions imposed to what can be installed to the devices by the manufacturers and the operators. [slides]

Next Greg Kroah-Hartman from Novell told us about the netbook UI. There was some video from Beijing that apparently presented the leaked UI. Novell is contributing to the Netbook quite a lot, so there’s a lot of Novell stuff going to the Netbook version: Banshee, Evolution, MobileMe, Tracker. As such, C# is included with the Netbook version and that can be used for development as well. The browser is going to be Chrome, and the aim is to have similar power/battery usage as Windows XP.

Decision making is important in every project. Quim told us about it in his presentation after lunch (Mexican menu in a Japanese restaurant was somewhat… disturbing is the best way to describe it) – by scribbling on the flip board (checking the notes from his N900 now and then). In hindsight someone should’ve taken pictures of all the scribblies Quim drew, but oh well… The basic idea of the decision-making is that there’ll be working groups for specific areas of development that make the big decisions – such as for handheld UX, netbook UX etc – but that for most of the stuff, it will decided as on every other distro out there.

Marcel Holtmann of Intel continued by offering us an overview of the connectivity framework used in MeeGo. It is built mainly on oFono, connman and Bluez with tight interaction: similar user interfaces and functionality overlap in the projects. connman controls all the radio on the device, it handles setting the device to flight mode, and on the todo list for it are for example statistics and counter interfaces, portal and location detection (I really wish this would come to Linux in general, hotel wifi authentication http catchalls are such a pain!) Wimax is a whole separate stack, controlled by connman, but LTE will be controlled by oFono. Currently there is nobody doing the mmsd and there is no open source mmsd implementation. VPN implementation isn’t ready yet, so far it supports Cisco VPN’s but OpenVPN support is coming up soon, too (WOHOO!). [slides]

Later, we were given a treat of hearing a presentation of Qt Quick (QML) by Henrik Hartz, Qt Product Manager. The UI is defined with a combination of “CSS” (even I, a non-coder understood some of that part) and JavaScript, and all the hard byte crunching happens underneath the bonnet with the logic done with C++. To me that sounds like a brilliant idea that allows the design of the UI and the actual programmatic logic be separated better, giving both aspects a fair amount of focus instead of concentrating only to the non-UI parts.

The last officially formed session was the MeeGo Technical panel with Sakari Poussa, Dawn Foster, Arjan Van de Ven and Andy Wilson. It shed some light on why MeeGo was formed: the goals and perceived methods to achieve them were considered so similar be the two companies that they figured the benefits of combining the efforts would outweigh the bad, but of course some negotiations were needed to make the most important platform decisions.

The panelists didn’t think working groups would cause a lot of decision making overhead as they are not meant to micromanage everything. Most decisions should be done by upstream developers on mailing lists, bug reports and team meetings in any case.

Although future MeeGo devices willh have the possibility for the operators to lock the phones to their network, Quim did reminds the audience that if a Nokia device is bought directly from Nokia store or online shop, there will be Methos of unlocking it, if it’s not outright unlocked by default.

Finally we had a quite uninformal discussion about translations for MeeGo, led by Intel’s Margie Foster. The discussion was about the translation tool, Transifex, quality control, best practices and teams.

I’ve got some experience on translating software to my native language, Finnish. At one point I was an active member of the translation community of Finland due to personal interest and my job. My line manager at Nomovok, Timo Jyrinki is the team leader of the Finnish translations in Ubuntu and GNOME, and during my more active years in the Finnish translation community some of the knowledge rubbed on me too.

Out of interest I found my way to MeeGo’s current translations and checked out the Finnish translations. Some of the translations were in an abysmally bad they literally made my eyes water. I was horrified when I was told that someone had been paid to do those translations (getting paid for translating open source stuff is good, doing a bad job at it is not). I couldn’t keep my mouth shut but asked what kind of quality control is there for the translations, and how is MeeGo as a project going to make sure that translations pulled from upstream aren’t written over or edited to be worse than they originally were – since I know cases of this happening too. The best way I know to make sure the quality of the translations are consistent is to make the amount of contributors consistent and big enough. If you have done translations for Ubuntu, perhaps you could have a look at doing translations for MeeGo as well?

The evening party was organized by MeeGo and it consisted of drinks and tapas at Dosa on Filmore/Post. I had lengthy discussions with Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Quim Gil and Ronan MacLaverty, and couple of other people whose names I’ve probably managed to forget.

Unfortunately I had a flu at the same time so some of my memories of the sessions are a bit hazy, but not to worry! Before the summit we attended WhereCamp, an unconference about geoinformation, maps and everything related to that. (I’m not too much into location information, but my partner is, and I tagged along.) The organizers gave out five Flip UltraHD camcorders, and we got one! So I naturally used mine to record the sessions, which turned out to be a good thing, since the MeeGo Workshop on Thursday was not recorded by anyone else. I’m still in process of editing the video files into uploadable format – my laptop and Linux applications for video editing seem to be incompatible combination – but I promise I’ll upload the stuff soon! (Keep tuned to this channel!)

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held in San Francisco on the 14th to 16th of April, 2010. Because of the flu I attended only the two first days, but that was plenty of action! Our hotel is down south at Sunnyvale so I had to find a way to travel to downtown San Francisco. I don’t have a car or drivers licence, so Caltrain was the only viable option, and that was plenty of adventure! I did plan to use the public transport in San Francisco, but it was too much for my hazy brain and I ended up using the taxi from the train station to Hotel Kabuki, where the conference was held. Being afraid of heights traveling on Caltrain was an experience, as the carriages were double-decker (see picture).

We visited Japantown on the Sunday previous to the conference so I’d know a bit about my surroundings, and it was a good decision. The hotel the conference was held is very pretty, and it’s next to a shopping centre full of Japanese shops and restaurants. It helped a lot with my navigation later!

Arriving to the venue on Wednesday we got breakfast and while eating my croissant and drinking my coffee, Elizabeth introduced me to couple of people, including Landon Jurgens from GE. I also had a little touch with fame as Bradley M. Kuhn joined our group and we talked, among other things, about Star Wars memorabilia. Geek, me?

First keynote was held by Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation, justifiably. He welcomed us, and talked about the State of the Linux Union. He told us about the reasons why Linux is so successful, but reminded us about the challenges the ecosystem faces too. As a funny sideline he showed us a video comparison of Steve Jobs describing the iPad: “wonderful, amazing, magical, easy” and beloved RMS describing GNU/Linux: free, freedom, freedoms, be a good neighbour…

I think one of the biggest reasons Linux is becoming more and more successful is the omnipresence of electrical and information technology related equipment. Even if personal computers might be running Windows or OS X or other non-Linux operating systems, there’s plenty of appliances, mobile phones, networking hardware, cars and DVR’s around.

The biggest problem with the heterogeneity of the open source community and projects – especially those who are responsible to the paradigm shift of computing infrastructure from locally owned and operated hardware/software combinations to computing as a service industry – is that there has to be extra vigilance to fit and finish what has been started and not lull into complacency with releases of half-baked services. This problem can be addressed with proper management of the project, setting targets, tasks, having testing at the heart of things and making quality assurance a top priority. [video]

Following Jim’s presentation, Daniel Frye with his IBM keynote discussed the lessons the company has learned through their decades of commitment to Linux and open source development. I found this presentation probably the most interesting of the morning sessions and enjoyed the view to the history of the IBM participation. One of the most important points that can be seen in retrospect are that it’s a lot easier to join an existing community than to create a totally new one, and that code drops are a difficult and dangerous way of participation; incremental edits for delivering change is usually better! [video]

The last presentation before lunch break was a panel about cloud computing. To my great disappointment Mark Shuttleworth wasn’t at the conference and didn’t take part in the discussion (although there were plenty of Canonical employees, including Pete Graner). I’m not a great connoisseur of cloud computing, but there were couple of points I managed to catch up: There’s vendor lock-in with the different cloud providers! I hadn’t really thought of that before, and it surprised me a bit. This makes it a bit risky business to trust your stuff to cloud services, but an idea of smaller vendors to create a standard by sharing code and infrastructure sounds mighty good to me. I’ll definitely need to add cloud computing to one of the subjects I need to read more about! [video]

After lunch Ari walked on the podium wearing a Maemo shirt to give his keynote about MeeGo, the free and standard Linux for the mobile industry. As we know, MeeGo is the result of the recent co-operation incentive of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. There’s great hopes for this one, but I have been more or less out of touch of the real ideas behind MeeGo since I happened to be very, very sick on the week the new project was announced.

Having been watching the Maemo development from close range for quite some many years, the fact that MeeGo is aimed at not only smartphones but also TVs, tablets, car systems (and trains, planes etc) and netbooks requires some mental adjustment. MeeGo will be using Qt, Telepathy, WebKit, Fennec, RPM and GNOME, so there are some changes to Maemo. I’ve looked at the community response and the change to RPM has been the hardest to digest so far by the people.

Linux Foundation hosts the some work under MeeGo workgroup and there’s already considerable amount of collaboration going on with the platform, as Acer, Asus, BMW, Cisco, Careland, CS2C, Ericsson, DeviceVM, Gameloft, EA, Kingsoft, Linpus, Mandriva, Metasys, MontaSys, Neusoft, Novell, PixArt, Red Flag and others have already joined the MeeGo community. In the meantime first release of MeeGo has already been done in form of a code dump. It’s not really usable yet as it doesn’t have a GUI yet. N900 is the first reference device for MeeGo though, so there’s some hopes for the “older” devices :-P [slides, video]

The kernel panel was mainly uneventful. The new kernel will have better SSD support and some other new features such as a Linux equivalent of DTrace. Even if there are new features in kernel, the kernel developers keep getting older and there might not be as many new contributors to it as there has been in the past. Part of the problem is that the it’s not regarded as cool to be a kernel developer as it used to be. The code the old developers are writing into the kernel is so specialized and done by long time experts that it might be hard to understand and get used to by newer contributors. Long time contributors are well motivated and dedicated to their work on the kernel though – partly because most of them are employed to develop the kernel – so perhaps all isn’t lost after all. [video]

Imad Sousou of Intel and MeeGo technical steering group spoke after the kernel panel. He started off by mentioning his wish that since Ari had talked earlier and covered most of the topics he had in his presentation, perhaps he wouldn’t be asked the hard questions since Ari had already answered them. (This wish the audience later broke, by asking hard questions about proprietary blobs Maemo has had in the past. Ari answered them as diplomatically as possible, telling that while the project itself aims to be 100% open source, there might be proprietary components, such as device drivers, Skype etc. distributed by the vendors of the devices. Nokia will be one of the vendors, so, there will be proprietary components in the devices Nokia ships. This didn’t come as a surprise to me.)

What Imad stressed in his talk is that MeeGo plans to work very closely to the upstream.

If you want a kernel patch into MeeGo, send it to kernel upstream instead of MeeGo. If you want a Qt patch into MeeGo, send it to Qt.

MeeGo will also have a six month release cycle. First one is going to be released really soon (hopefully) as the schedule is aiming to release every May and November. [slides, video]

Why Your Life Might Depend on Your Code from the DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung (that’s the German Air Traffic Control) was mind-boggling. I’ve not watched the video yet, but I know it includes the video they showed us, and instead of yapping about too much about what the presentation was about, I suggest that you watch the video of the presentation. I can’t make justice to it by trying to condensate the points. [slides, video]

The presentation about how to prevent communities and co-operation was hilarious. Josh Berkus engaged the audience with his Over The Wall presentation. He had condensed how to stop global warming in a few easy steps that make sure you’ve built a wall between your developers and the community and stop contributions. The first premise you need to apply to the rest is that your developers do not take part in the community and all the releases are done in code drops, as thrown over the wall.

Ingredients include: difficult tools, preferably proprietary, homegrown, outdated or non-gui stuff, going all the way from CVS to CMS, via buildsystems and bugtrackers. The team needs to be overworked, and you need to make sure it’s kept that way: otherwise they’ll be babbling with the community! To make sure no communication happens, meetings need to be closed too – teleconferences make things hard, but make stuff impossible by having closed meetings. If you have a means of communication, obscure it as much as you can, and feed the trolls to make the community work against itself. Leave everything to be managed by one person, one person for webpages, mailing lists, etc. Use legalese everywhere where possible, but if you really want to tick people off, just be silent. [slides, video]

Chris diBona used Josh’s slides backwards to tell how Google does Open Source. Basically everything is in reverse! But in the end, Chris started using his own slides. Mootpoint was, that Google has released so far 915 projects as open source, and that more than 200 Google employees are patching and contributing to upstream projects. The message that also was included was that looking for enemies within the Linux and open source community isn’t beneficial. For Android to succeed MeeGo doesn’t have to fail, and indeed, in Android there’s plenty of stuff that has been originally contributed by Nokia employees. At the end of his presentation Chris won over the hearts and souls of the audience by giving every attendee a free Nexus One! [slides, video]

The first day of the event was brilliant, and we moved to a Japanese restaurant to an afterparty. I was getting tired after waking up at five o’clock and left the party around eight o’clock, to recuperate from the day to be ready for the next day. That’s up in my next blog post, coming up soon on this same bat channel! If you want to read a more accurate description of both the first and second day of Linux Collaboration Summit 2010, I highly recommend reading this Qaiku thread, written by Henri Bergius.

• Ubuntu Fridge Events
• Facebook friends birthdays
• Facebook event invitations
• Finnish Open source events
• Finnish public holidays and events
• My friends travel schedule

I also hate Evolution, and have a dislike for Sunbird after using both for several years. Currently my desktop calendar system is mainly Google calendar, my phone and for quick looks while offline, orage. Orage doesn’t currently come with an option of subscribing to online calendars, but that can be easily solved.

What I don’t like is synchronizing these by hand. Things should be automatic, easy and happen without me noticing a thing. Here in picture comes my home server, bluetooth dongle, crontab, msynctool and wget.

Most important part of this setup is msynctool. I use it to synchronize my phone with Google cal automatically with cronjobs.
53 */8 * * * msynctool --conflict n --sync google-phone 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
msynctool needs configuration:

1. first of all, you need multisync-tools and some plugins for opensync, and of course software for bluetooth. My pesky Dell Optiplex GX50 running as my homeserver runs with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1 LTS, to which I’ve installed multisync-tools from a PPA:
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/debian-opensync/ubuntu hardy main
   and have installed atleast opensync-plugin-file opensyncutils opensync-plugin-google-calendar opensync-plugin-irmc opensync-plugin-syncml multisync-tools
   In Intrepid the needed tools are available from the normal intrepid repositories.
2. figure out your phone settings. Make sure your phones bluetooth is visible to outside queries, and do a scan to acquire the bluetooth MAC address:
   myrtti@kengu:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
00:1C:D4:4C:93:AA Nasu
   and check the channel for SyncML:
   myrtti@kengu:~$ sdptool search --bdaddr 00:1C:D4:4C:93:AA SYNCML
Searching for SYNCML on 00:1C:D4:4C:93:AA ...
Service Name: SyncMLClient
Service RecHandle: 0x1000b
Service Class ID List:
UUID 128: 00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002
Protocol Descriptor List:
"L2CAP" (0x0100)
"RFCOMM" (0x0003)
Channel: 10
"OBEX" (0x0008)
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x454e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
"" (0x00000002-0000-1000-8000-0002ee000002)
Version: 0x0100

   In this case the channel is 10.

3. Try if the connection to your phone works with:
   syncml-obex-client -b 00:1C:D4:4C:93:AA 10 --slow-sync text/x-vcalendar Calendar --identifier "PC Suite" --wbxml
4. you need to configure the synchronization group. As stated in man msynctool, this is done by:
   msynctool --addgroup <groupname>
   in this case, let’s do two groups, google-phone and file-backup.

   After creating the groups, you need to add members to them:
   msynctool --addmember google-phone google-calendar
msynctool --addmember google-phone syncml-obex-client

   msynctool --addmember file-backup syncml-obex-client
msynctool --addmember file-backup file-sync

5. Now that you have members added, you need to configure them. For the first group we added, google-phone, the configuring happens with commands
   1. msynctool --configure google-phone 1
      which will open up a file in your favorite editor that looks roughly like this:
      <config>
<url>http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/USER@gmail.com/private/full</url>
<username>USER@gmail.com</username>
<password>PASSWORD</password>
</config>

      Replace the USER and PASSWORD with your own.
   2. msynctool --configure google-phone 2
      which will open up a file in your favorite editor that looks roughly like this:
      <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<!-- (Only for bluetooth) The bluetooth address if the bluetooth mode is selected -->
<bluetooth_address>00:1C:D4:4C:93:AA</bluetooth_address>
<!-- (Only for bluetooth) The bluetooth channel to use. `sdptool browse $MAC` to search for the correct channel -->
<bluetooth_channel>10</bluetooth_channel>
<!-- (Only for USB) The usb interface number of the SYNCML-SYNC target. use syncml-obex-client -u (you will need access to the USB raw device) to find it. -->
<interface>0</interface>
<!-- The string that the plugin will use to identify itself. Some devices need a special string here. -->
<identifier>Google Calendar</identifier>
<!-- The syncml version to use: 0 for 1.0, 1 for 1.1 and 2 for 1.2 -->
<version>1</version>
<!-- if the plugin should use wbxml -->
<wbxml>1</wbxml>
<!-- The username to use. Leave empty to not require a username -->
<username></username>
<!-- the password for the username -->
<password></password>
<!-- sets the connection type to use. 5 means obex over usb, 2 means obex over bluetooth -->
<type>2</type>
<!-- If wbxml is enabled, defines wether the wbxml should use string tables -->
<usestringtable>0</usestringtable>
<!-- Never send ADD command, but send REPLACE (not needed normally) -->
<onlyreplace>0</onlyreplace>
<!-- Workaround around for mobile phones which only use local timestamps and _no_ UTC timestamps! -->
<onlyLocaltime>0</onlyLocaltime>
<!-- Sets the maximum allowed size in bytes of incoming messages (some device need this option set). Example: 10000 -->
<recvLimit>0</recvLimit>
<maxObjSize>0</maxObjSize>
<!-- The name of the contacts db. Must be the same as the phones sends -->
<contact_db>Contacts </contact_db>
<!-- The name of the calendar db. Must be the same as the phones sends -->
<calendar_db>Calendar </calendar_db>
<!-- The name of the note db. Must be the same as the phones sends -->
<note_db>Notes </note_db>
</config>

      Save this file to your home directory or somewhere else accessible, because we’ll need this for configuring the file-backup group!

   and for the second group, file-backup, with

   1. msynctool --configure file-backup 1
      which will require the exact same configurations as google-phone member 2 did, so now just replace the dummy file with the one you saved in the previous step WITH ONE EXCEPTION:
      <identifier>File Backup</identifier>
   2. msynctool --configure file-backup 2
      which will be a XML file a bit like this:
      <?xml version="1.0"?>
<config>
<!-- directory path for file-sync -->
<path>/home/myrtti/.phonebackup</path>
<!-- should care of subdirectories (TRUE or FALSE) -->
<recursive>FALSE</recursive>
</config>

      Note that you need to create a directory for the filesync, in this case it would be /home/myrtti/.phonebackup
6. To configure your phone, go to Menu – Tools – Sync and add:
   1. Synchronization profile for File Backup
      1. 
      2. 
      3. 
      4. 
   2. Synchronization profile for Google Calendar
      1. 
      2. 
      3. 
      4. 
      5. 
7. now you should be able to synchronize your phone using the commands
   
msynctool --conflict n --sync google-phone
msynctool --conflict n --sync file-backup

   and add it them to your cronjobs as in the example in the beginning of this entry.
8. As the final touch for those of you who use Orage, do a cronjob:
   10 * * * * wget -O ~/.personal.ics http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/USER%40gmail.com/private-eaq193204802357106916067/basic.ics
   where the URL fetched is the private iCal URL that you can get from your Google Calendar sharing settings. Similar procedure can be done with other iCal’s you find on the web, after which you can import them to your Orage with the foreign file import:
   

   those of you who use Gnome and have evolution-data-server installed, but don’t use Evolution itself for your calendar events (and use Sunbird/Lightning or some other calendar application instead) and still want to make the events to show up in the Gnome clock when you click it, try and enter on your terminal prompt:
   /usr/lib/evolution-webcal/evolution-webcal http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/USER%40gmail.com/private-eaq193204802357106916067/basic.ics
   where the URL is again the one acquired from the Google Calendar settings (thanks to topyli for this one!)

BWUH! I’m fairly sure this HOWTO contains more than one mistake, so you might need to fiddle around with your phone and computer more than this lets you assume. I’ve managed to make mine work though with this. A word of warning, though! Keep a good copy of your stuff elsewhere too, and study the meaning of the
[--conflict 1-9/d/i/n] Resolve all conflicts as side [1-9] wins, [d]uplicate, [i]gnore, or keep [n]ewer

The theme I currently use on my phone is Glamurv3

1) Installing applications to my phone was previously something I really hated. I remember how horrible it was trying to get oggplay installed to my phone, typing the url to the darn things browser. But hey, atleast my N95 already came with the solution (which I didn’t know how to use properly and in an actually useful way before): 2D barcode reader. I used 2D barcodes to my book catalogue (more about this later in this post) entries, but not on much else.

This is where The Most Excellent Mobile Barcoder comes into play… or would, if I’d use Firefox (*DOH*). But despair not, all you users of Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari or even Opera or IE! Since I happen to know the developer of the extension personally *cough*, I asked if he could do a nice little bookmarklet (to be dragged to the bookmark bar of the browser) for me :-) and so he did. It works on Firefox too ;-) I made a smart bookmark of it myself for my personal use; I’ll leave making of it as an excercise to the reader.

2) Fire Eagle and Twitterfeed are a nice way to inform your microblogging friends what is going on. Especially Twitterfeeds add some of the missing features in Twitter and Identi.ca that Jaiku (my absolute favourite microblogging service) already has. Fire Eagle allows me to update my location in multiple ways and to also publish it in many ways. My favourite updating tools are Plazes, dopplr and J2ME updater, and my favourite publishing tool is Eaglefeed.

3) Book/CD/DVD/perfume/shoe/jewelry database is what I’ve been thinking of lately. I’ve already catalogued my books and my CD’s, but I still haven’t entered my perfumes nor my DVD’s or the few games I have to any database. I desperately need a place to database them all, if for nothing else, for letting other people to know what not to buy for me. I was pointed to thinglink.org which might just be what I need. I’m planning to move my music/book collection to there, but what I’m thinking is that since thinglink is open source, it should be expanded and clusterized and clients for it should be made and and and… if only I knew how to code! I’ve not yet studied the whole thing throughly so I don’t know which of my ideas have already been implemented, but damn.

4) Hardware acquisitions are so difficult these days. About two months ago I purchased a hard drive for my laptop in the hope that it would solve my laptops sluggishness (as smartctl suggested my hard drive might be dying). I spent most of my still hangoverish Monday to go to Pirkkala verkkokauppa.com by bus from Hervanta to purchase a hard drive, they didn’t have the model I wanted on the shelf so I paid for a bigger model. I checked the hard drive and the laptop specs before I opened the package, and good thing I did. The laptop uses SATA, the drive I bought was IDE… >____< I just got the new correct hard drive a week ago, I still haven’t installed it, but will soon. BUT.

I need to buy more RAM, and this is where things start to get tricky: I have no idea what kind of RAM this thing eats and how much I should/could purchase. This document (PDF) tells me I could max to 4GB, but I’m still uncertain of the type of RAM.

5) Intrepid Ibex is out and since I’ve been running it on my laptop since August, I didn’t for once feel the odd jittery feeling and anxiety of a new Ubuntu version. I did attend the release day madhouse at #ubuntu and #ubuntu-release-party as a good IRC op should, but that was about it. I guess I’m a bit blind to the new and cool stuff in it, though I do appreciate seeing the fruits of the project I looked over during the summer by one of my Finnish Summercoders who I later recruited to work for Nomovok to be included in Intrepid.

I’ve had my share of problems with Intrepid though – and I’m sad to confess my tight schedule on both work and personal life stuff has prevented me from looking up most of them. My laptop has no wireless in Intrepid with the latest kernel of 2.6.27-7, for reasons I’ve not checked. Might be that I’ve blacklisted a module, though I doubt it as 2.6.27-6 works nice-ish (cuts the signal in a way that, for example, Skype calls hang up from time to time). My laptop has Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01), which works fine with ath5k.

6) Out of professional interest I’ve got a sudden urge to install Gentoo, LFS and/or *BSD on a virtualized system. Odd. Some may speculate I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps I have.

7) I want Nokia Internet Tablet n800 really bad. Not n810, I want especially n800. People have asked me *why*, but the answer is actually quite simple. I don’t need GPS, as my phone has GPS. I don’t want moving slided keyboard, as the hardware keyboard doesn’t have *the* Finnish keyboard layout I wish it had. I don’t want moving sliding keyboard, as it would be yet another moving part that would break when dropping the thing, or yet another moving thing collecting guinea pig hair or crisp bread crumbs in between the moving parts. The hardware specs are really better for me in the older model than in the newer one. Anyone care to sell me one cheap? I want to play Numpty Physics, do Ekiga calls, have Flash on my browser for watching youtube and Skype to work on a mobile device. These are the things my trustworthy 770 can’t do.

8) OMG OMG I want zebra to Ubuntu, too! VOTE FOR IT! (and if you can contribute in the development, please add support for QR/DataMatrix, plz?)

9) YES!

10) I’m still an emacs fangirl

even if someone has tried to bribe me in multiple ways ;-)

And in the end, the process was very painfree. With some google-fu the settings were found – all I needed was to ask a friend how the network connection should be handled as mine didn’t seem to work because of the NAT in my home network. And the answer to that problem was obvious – use 3G instead. The sound quality is astoundingly good with even the lowest bandwidth provided by my mobile phone service provider, Saunalahti.

Anyway – here are the settings and the steps documented in a nice neatly fashion:

1. navigate to: System/Tools –> Settings –> Connection –> SIP Settings
2. Create a new profile:
   • Name it as, for example, ekiga.net
   • Service-Profile: IETF
     Public Username: sip:$YOURUSERNAME@ekiga.net
     Compression: no
     Proxy: none
   • Registrar:
     Registrar-Adress: sip:ekiga.net
     Domain: ekiga.net
     Username: $YOURUSERNAME
     Password: $YOURPASSWORD
     Transport: UDP
     Port: 5060
3. stop and think how do you want to be contacted:
   • about all the time – Registration: Always on; only when you call or want to be contactable on your phone – Registration: When needed.
   • On the move – Default access point: Your (hopefully cheap / monthly subscribed / unlimited) data transfer plan access point*; Mostly at a known wifi hotspot – Default access point: Your wifi hotspot.**

Here be the disclaimers:
* I tried with my own 3G connection provided by Saunalahti – 384kbit/s (lowest speed there is), and the sound quality was sufficient.
** for me my home network is configured in a way with NAT that using wifi doesn’t work. It would require fiddling with some ports, if you have access to your router and know what you’re doing, this page might give you some hints what to do – it also may not. I’ve not tried.

I tried these settings with calling to the echo service (that’s sip:500@ekiga.net for those of you who didn’t already know) and ended up giggling at my own voice like a maniac – and then tried it twice more just for the giggles. As a friend hadn’t tried his settings (the same as mine) on his E51, I called him to get confirmation on the sound quality, which was amazingly good.

These settings were found from here, if you’re wondering what theme I’ve got on my phone, it’s found from here, and the programs that are in the first screenshot as quick launchers are BusWatch, Enhanced Calculator for s60, alarm clock, synchronisation and mirggi, s60 IRC client I use to connect to my irssi-proxy handling my connections to IRCnet, freenode and my bitlbee, which in turn handles my connections to MSN, ICQ, jabber.org- and GoogleTalk- XMPP connections.

I also remember the “informal” parts of the conference, the beach party, football game, concert/football evening, hacking at the camping cottages, salty shower water, and first and foremost – la rambla. Almost every night I ended up eating tapas and drinking sangria (yes, I know, don’t get excited here either) and talking about (among other things) about maemo, COSS, Finland, Nokia, women in ICT and FLOSS, FLOSS in education, problems with bluetooth and GPRS, Tampere and so on. One night a thought occurred to someone’s mind… And now finally, it perhaps starts to bear fruit.

COSS joint together with some first-class Finnish companies, Finnish FLOSS communities, universities located in Tampere together with City of Tampere and other relevant partners have made a proposal to have a joint aKademy/GUADEC conference here. I couldn’t be happier about this!

see also.

Nokia N95 is a LOVERLY phone. I couldn’t have picked a better one to serve my needs. It has a great camera, excellent screen, wifi, 3G and what not. The only things that I’ve got problems with is the battery life (which I’ve deteriorated myself by using the phone for four months as a 3G modem a minimum of 8 hours a day, being attached to the charger all the time) and the position of the audio/video outlet.

Anyway, Nokia N95 comes with a software that allows you to send your photos DIRECTLY to Flickr. Since I’ve used Flickr before and even paid for it before buying my phone, I couldn’t be happier. Now that I don’t have to worry about when I’ll be able to take the pictures from the memory card to put on the net or worry about backups, AND now that I carry my camera (5Mpix Carl Zeiss optics, thank you very much) … err phone around all the time, the amount of my photos has multiplicated since I bought it. There’s only one problem – I’d like to have the pictures on my own computer too.

For a while I had problems with this, and I simply ignored the issue. But since I got flickrfs (yes, it’s FUSE) to work, things have gotten a fast solution. Of course, I could import the whole flickrfs stream to my computer, but that would be

• very slow
• waste of time
• plain awful

So. As I got bored (ie. procrastinated paid bash scripting) I whipped up a script that

1. checks which files you’ve got already in your collection
2. downloads only those missing
3. checks that the files you’ve downloaded aren’t exported to flickr from f-spot (by checking the EXIF Software)
4. sees that it doesn’t import files that might’ve been saved with a different name (by checking the EXIF DateTimeDigitized)

Ain’t that grand or what?

Now you must be seething with anxiety to download the script. HERE IT IS.

I hope it will offer you as much fun as it did to me while hacking it up. If you find bugs (eeek) or preferably, if you find bugs and have fixed them and want to send me a bug fix, please contact me.

Those of you who’ve managed to read this far, here’s a picture of the coding guinea pig mascot, which tried to assist in making of the script.

I’m not that big a fan of Windows, but having it handy inside my favourite OS/distro combination makes things so much easier. The most unexpected thing was, when I decided to try out how VMware, Windows and Nokia’s PC Suite collaborate with my phone. The usual things I did know would work, so having my phone work as a modem straight from Windows shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did! Luckily I had earlier installed ZoneAlarm and Avast to protect my precious Windows ;-)

Having VMware around also gave me an opportunity to try out Novell SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 10. Having been a long time Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu user I felt oddly disappointed by the way how SLE[S|D|SDK] installation and software managment are done. It’s been disheartening to download installation dvd’s and cd’s just to get everything done! Some of the logic around SLES keeps evading me, and it is somewhat disturbing…

I’ve got a great mp3-player these days. Since I left my previous job, I needed a new phone because I had to give the one I used back. I did some research and considered Nokia’s E51 to be about perfect choice. Unfortunately I needed the phone immediately and E51 isn’t yet on stores, so after some more research I ended up with picking N95. And it has been love at first sight, since it has an excellent camera, wonderful 3G, great UI and loverly apps.

There’s been some minor things I’m not that happy with. I’ve been unable to install OggPlay for it. The placement of the handsfree-audio/video-out is very unfortunate. And as all reviews have said, the battery life isn’t exactly good. But aside those, I love it.

I’ve been filling up the memory card I bought with not only the cd’s I’ve bought, but also with music ripped from cd’s borrowed from the local library. I’ve been listening to Sound of Music, West Side Story, Notting Hill, Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve, but also Poets of the Fall. Their both albums are excellent.

Since the release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon the installation of multimedia codecs has been really easy with ubuntu-restricted-extras -package. Now the usage of Soundjuicer to rip mp3′s is really simple and doesn’t seem to require any effort, or then my old configs have magically started to work.

I also have just recently found out about a last.fm online radio client for Nokia’s Internet Tablets called Vagalume. It’s been a great joy and pleasure to have my favorite music with my 770, since not all of my collection fits into the 2GB micro-SD in my phone.

I had to, of course, knit my babies their matching pouches.