Blue Lightning's blog

Desktop Summit 2011

2011-06-15T12:15:00.000+01:00

I'm going to the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin, Germany. The program looks very interesting and I look forward to meeting people from the KDE, GNOME and other communities. Hope to see some of you there :)

Release Day

2011-04-07T09:45:00.000+01:00

So, quite a lot got released on April 6th:

* The Yocto Project 1.0: Woohoo! 1.0 is out the door and it's the best release yet. Yocto now has a new website, and check out the new video explaining what the project's all about.

* Gnome 3.0: This is a big one for most of the people in my office - not so much for me being the lone KDE user, but still it looks pretty good.

* KDE 4.6.2: a bugfix release. Haven't upgraded yet.

* Horde 4.0: you can't tell from their website but Horde 4.0 has just been released.

* Banshee 2.0

Seems it's a good time to be in free software!

Opie stuff

2011-03-20T04:19:00.006Z

So Opie 1.2.5 was released in mid-December, which included the newly rewritten Datebook, working SQLite PIM backends, enhanced syncing protocol and scores of other minor feature additions and bugfixes. Check out the changelog for full details. You can build images including 1.2.5 in OpenEmbedded, and Ångström should have packages soon if it doesn't already.

Late last year, due to the apparent demise of handhelds.org the Opie website had to be moved. (One hopes that handhelds.org might return soon along with some of its content that I and others spent so much time working on; we'll see.) I looked around and SourceForge still appears to be the best choice if you want something actively maintained for free. Being hosted in the U.S. though I did have to jump through a few hoops with export controls - apparently even something that merely launches ssh or has the most basic of password encryption is considered to include potentially sensitive technology and requires that you register it with the U.S. Government; thankfully that process wasn't as onerous as it first appeared and nobody over there objected to Opie being re-exported from the US; amusing considering it was developed almost exclusively outside that country... anyway, I digress.

The new site at opie.sourceforge.net is functional although a few pieces are missing and I'm considering switching away from MoinMoin as a wiki platform (which I suspect has been the reason Google has always ignored the Opie website.) It has been time-consuming getting all the links from other websites updated - if I've missed any then please let me know.

People are always surprised/amused that I'm still keen to continue working on Opie given its age, but I still see it being useful on older PDAs and possibly phones that are far too underpowered to run a modern environment such as MeeGo or Android, and it's become a labour of love for me. Often it also serves well as a place to learn new technologies - earlier it was the transition to git that allowed me to become more familiar with that version control system (to the point where I now can't do without a distributed VCS); in recent releases it was updating Opie to make use of newer kernel interfaces e.g. SysFS; in future updates I will be improving Opie's Bluetooth support by connecting it to BlueZ over DBus. If I get time I may even look at integrating ConnMan for better networking setup (something Opie has always struggled with.)

If you're interested in a lightweight, well-integrated platform for older devices then Opie is your platform. At least I'm still taking feature requests and bug reports ;)

New job

2011-03-19T03:00:00.002Z

As some of you might already be aware, in November I joined Intel's Open Source Technology Centre (OTC) to work on the Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to bring together embedded Linux developers from across the industry. More specifically I am working on Poky, Yocto's build system, which was originally based on OpenEmbedded and has always maintained a high level of compatibility. I've worked with OE for a number of years and working on Poky is really not much different, although I've had the opportunity to dig a little deeper into BitBake and Poky/OE's internals, gaining a greater understanding of how the system works (and of course being able to contribute a number of fixes.) Lately I have also had a chance to test out Poky-built systems on some real hardware, including an eMenlow box and a RouterStation Pro board (usually my runtime testing and debugging is done within QEMU.)

The recent agreement on collaboration between the Yocto Project and OE has been a great thing to witness. At the moment Yocto is closing in on its 1.0 release which is shaping up to be a good one; meanwhile over the last month work has begun in earnest on openembedded-core, the common base for both projects going forward. I've submitted a few patches to oe-core already and when 1.0 is out the door I am keen to get stuck in on further improvements there.

I must say, it's exciting to not only be working with open source / free software technologies on a daily basis, but as a former proprietary software developer for many years, it is also a great privilege to be working on open source projects full time, and to be working alongside some very smart people both within Intel and in the wider community.

Of course, all this open source stuff at work is not going to prevent me from hacking on other things at home; in fact it has given me renewed energy to work on my existing projects and even a new thing or two. More on that later.

FOSDEM

2010-02-01T19:01:00.002Z

Long time no post. Just a quick one to say I'm all booked for FOSDEM 2010 next weekend. Seems like a lot of people are going, and the schedule looks pretty awesome.

Hope to see some of you there!

Opie update

2009-09-27T12:14:00.002+01:00

Wow, it's been a while since my last post (too many people say that on their blogs, heh), so it's probably long past time for an update.

Work on Opie has been fairly solid lately - if you have a look at the commits you can see that. On my end a lot of this has been due to the acquisition of my netbook (a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v) which I can use to write code on the train, and I do that most days. It's only ~40 mins each way, but it's surprising how much you can get done in that time with no real distractions, other than the free London papers that is - sadly of which there is one less as of a couple of weeks ago :.( Anyway, let's cover each part in detail:

Datebook2

Datebook2 is almost finished. There's a small matter of making sure alarms on synced in calendar events actually get registered on the Opie side - I'm still not quite sure how to structure that, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. I'd also like to improve the application visually a bit - perhaps make all of the views use the same colours to draw events, improve text placement, etc.

Opie-Notes

We haven't really had a proper notes application within the Opie application set - Opie-Notes (based on the old NoteZ application) has been around for a while, but was somewhat limited and not included by default in most distributions; most people simply used the Text Editor. No more! Opie-Notes is now a first-class PIM application with the introduction of SQLite backend support (including support for synchronisation), categories, and built-in search. In addition the NotesApplet has been modified to use the same backend as Opie-Notes, so you can also have quick access to your notes from the taskbar if you wish.

Syncing

Synchronisation is boring. It's a fact. Unfortunately for many people (myself included) it's a must-have for almost any device that has PIM data on it. I have been working hard on this over the last few weeks, and the good news is most of the major work on the Opie side is done. There is now the ability to read and write data to and from the SQLite databases remotely, with the option of only reading changes in both directions, for multiple peers (clients) - i.e., proper synchronisation. What I'm now working on is implementing the other side in the OpenSync plugin. I will also make sure everything works with the old Qtopia Desktop and (time permitting) the old IntelliSync for Zaurus.

It's great that OpenSync development has ramped up again - 0.39 was released last week, just one more version to go until the next stable release which is 0.40. If I work hard I can get everything in order in the opie-sync plugin for that release and we can finally have powerful, reliable synchronisation.

Other bits

Opie has moved from CVS to Git (hooray!); Security settings has had an overhaul with lots of bugs and undesirable behaviour fixed; another big batch of code quality fixes from Erik (thanks Erik!); and more - check out the changelog.

What's next

Make synchronisation fully work; fix the remaining bugs for 1.2.5 (login guest/guest); and of course testing, testing and more testing! There has also been some some interest from a few potential new contributors as well - I won't preempt things but it is certainly an exciting prospect to have some more people on board.

Opie datebook2

2008-11-13T23:15:00.003Z

In Opie news I have been working hard on the datebook/calendar rewrite (aka datebook2). This was a project started some years ago but never finished, but if we are to have SQLite backend support for Opie PIM then it is essential, and it gives me the opportunity to add some more requested features and make the code a lot neater at the same time. Everybody wins!

The skeleton for datebook2 was already in place, and all of the data access classes in the Opie PIM libraries were there and about 98% complete. I must congratulate former Opie team members Stefan Eilers and Holger Freyther for their excellent work there - so far I have only had to make minor modifications to the Opie PIM API code in libopie2, and the original design of the datebook2 skeleton has worked very well as a base to build upon.

My aim is to make the interface almost exactly the same as the original datebook and thus a lot of code has been reused from there, with a fair bit of tidying up. The only remaining pieces from datebook1 not yet implemented are searching, beaming, keyboard shortcuts, a few other minor bits and pieces, and of course testing (!). Additional features on top of what datebook1 provided now include snoozing for alarms, and editing of location & description drop-down lists. I plan to try to improve multiple timezone support, and I may have a go at enabling the linking events together (aka irregular recurrence).

If you want any specific improvements to the datebook feel free to submit requests via the opie bug tracker or mailing list.

Handhelds aplenty

2008-11-13T22:27:00.007Z

I went a bit crazy on eBay recently and purchased a whole bunch of second-hand PDAs:

* iPAQ h1910
* iPAQ h4150
* Jornada 680e
* Jornada 720
* iPAQ h3850, h3870 and an h3660 all three of which I plan to give away to prospective kernel hackers.

All of these devices were chosen not only because they are now quite cheap, but also because there are already existing working Linux ports for them. They still need someone around to support them however, and in the case of the 4150 there is some minor bugfixing work to be done in Opie (eg. the record button not working, although this could be a keymapping issue). The 1910 works almost flawlessly, hats off to aquadran for a very complete port and thanks for choosing Opie as well :)

I really like the form factor of the Jornada devices - having a usable size keyboard is excellent; however the screen in comparison to screens on other devices is absolutely awful - blurry, dimly backlit, and the colour response is somewhat patchy. It does not help that the touchscreen on the 720 is a bit worn out also. Still, it's plenty good enough for testing. I was able to run the JLime distribution on the 720 which is available with IceWM or a slightly old version of Opie (1.2.2). On that machine, some features are missing (most notably suspend/resume and sound). I haven't gotten around to trying Linux on the 680e, but from what I can tell the port is a little more complete.

As for the h3800/h3600 devices, well, they badly need bringing up-to-date (to the Linux 2.6 kernel). This needs the help of someone with kernel hacking skills - see my mailing list post for details.

Opie 1.2.4 is out

2008-09-30T23:24:00.006+01:00

Whew. After over a year of hacking, Opie 1.2.4 is finally out. Thanks to everyone who helped! I hope we can get 1.2.5 out in less time, something like six months perhaps? Maybe if I get a few more patches / other assistance... (hint, hint)

In the mean time my next task is to get 1.2.4 recipes into OpenEmbedded. I will also be trying to get the OpenSync plugin into a more usable state after some fairly significant changes in the core recently. Here's hoping we can have a stable release of that soon as well.

Waking the dead

2008-09-24T21:53:00.006+01:00

No, not the UK TV series - although I have to say I have enjoyed watching it since I've been here. No, what I'm referring to is resurrecting third party Zaurus/QPE/Opie applications. Now that Opie is in Angstrom the next task is to fix up third party applications and get them into the feeds. You can monitor this effort here (fortunately I'm not the only one working on it).

A lot of this is driven by user demand - several users have asked for specific applications to be available. One of the requested applications was qpenmapfe (a frontend for the nmap security testing tool) which is now unmaintained, and does not work very well on high resolution devices either. However, I found an alternative called qpe-nmap which although it was also unmaintained, it just needed a few tweaks to become fully usable on a wide range of devices. I contacted the author, Fabian Bieker, and he was very helpful, even agreeing to allow me to continue maintaining it (I don't envisage much maintenance will be required, but I'm prepared to do what is needed). The (mini-) project has a new website and a build recipe has just been committed to OpenEmbedded on its way into Angstrom.

Moving forward, I would be happy to take on maintainership of some more older third party applications that are compatible with Opie. If you are the owner of some generally useful Zaurus/QPE application project and you'd like to see your application maintained again, please get in touch with me and we'll see what we can work out :)

SparkLAN Wifi card and Linux

2008-09-16T08:57:00.003+01:00

People often ask about which Wifi card to buy to use with Linux, and in the past this was a difficult question to answer. When you're talking about a card to use on a PDA the available selection is even smaller.

However, on a whim I recently purchased a SparkLAN WCFM-100 which is an 802.11b/g CompactFlash card to try it out. Linux compatibility was listed in its product documentation, which is a good start.

It didn't quite work out of the box, however all I needed to do was enable building the libertas and libertas_cs modules in the kernel defconfig in OE, rebuild it, copy the modules over to my Zaurus, extract the firmware (instructions here) and copy that over to the Z, load the modules, and it worked. So I would definitely recommend this product to anyone wanting a wifi card for their Linux-based PDA. When I get some time I will try do document the procedure properly and/or submit some patches to make it easier to get working in Angstrom.

Opie now supported in Angstrom

2008-09-16T08:54:00.002+01:00

Opie 1.2.3 is now supported in the Ångström Linux distribution. Check out the announcement.

Woot! :)

IntelliSync testing

2008-09-07T01:22:00.003+01:00

I had a go with IntelliSync (the SL version) connecting to Opie on my Zaurus this evening. I found that despite being a little hard to find, IntelliSync is in fact still available for download, which is good because the CDs that came with my Zaurus are in Japanese only. Thankfully the installer does not require any licence keys or device presence in order to install.

The next thing was to get the USB network connection working in Windows. I plugged in my Zaurus, Windows popped up the usual dialogs and I fed it the usual linux.inf file which it accepted. Unfortunately though after a delay the result was the error "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". There are numerous references to this error message on the web, but I couldn't find a satisfactory solution amongst any of them. (Of course USB networking between my Z and my laptop when running Linux works perfectly.)

I decided to simply press on and try to get IntelliSync to connect to my Z over WiFi. Despite only having USB and Serial options for the connection type and it insisting on not allowing the IP address of my Z (192.168.0.5) I was finally able to coerce it into connecting by specifying an address of the same length that it would allow (eg. 192.168.1.1), and then editing the file NetStat.dat with a hex editor to change the address. If you then go to the connection settings and click OK the change should be permanent.

This is not enough to actually get it synchronising however - it's obviously connecting, however all you get is a quick flash of the sync screen on the Opie side and then an error with the suggestion to "check the application version" from IntelliSync. Presumably this means that Opie is not sending the responses that IntelliSync expects. I suppose I will have to analyse the traffic in order to fix this.

Opie

2008-09-01T23:10:00.006+01:00

I've been doing a lot of work on Opie lately. So far I have managed to achieve the following:

* Fixed Konqueror-Embedded (albeit the 20070316 version) to work with the nice new GUI. I have issues building it from OE .dev though and SSL doesn't seem to be working, so there is work to be done yet. Getting the 20080319 version working would be nice (currently segfaults on startup). A lot of people have asked for this one so it's nice to make some progress.

* Improvements to the new opie-cardapplet. It should now manage removeable cards with ease and won't let you do anything silly like ejecting the card your system is running from :)

* Fixed *a lot* of minor bugs for the 1.2.4 release, which is close at hand.

* Fixed a few package building issues in OE, mostly for packages outside the core set built for images (including third-party applications). I still haven't got Portabase or QPDF2 building though, and I haven't even looked at kopi/kapi yet.

* Tested and pushed for Opie 1.2.3 to be supported in Angstrom. We're almost there, the "machine mentors" just need to get into gear and accept the already built images.

I also bought a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 from Japan on eBay, which has given me not only a new burst of inspiration but also some extra items for my task list (mainly to do with improving Opie's high-resolution support), and given me another machine to test Opie with. It's really quite a nice device - great screen, usable keyboard, CF, SD, and USB host. Built-in bluetooth and wifi would be nice, but at least you can get those with an additional CF card.

Next thing is to get back into sorting out the syncing situation. Opensync has moved on a little bit lately and I need to catch up. I would also like to test the copy of Intellisync that I received with my Zaurus - OK, it's commercial software, but lots of Zaurus users will still have it and no doubt expect it to work. With any luck it should just work out of the box.

LRL '08

2008-07-02T22:46:00.002+01:00

So, LugRadio is ending :( but I'm going to LugRadio Live :)

Should be entertaining.

Hello from sunny England

2008-07-02T22:21:00.003+01:00

So I've been in the UK now for about three and a half months. There's tons of things going on here at the moment and so far I'm quite happy with my decision to move. Of course I miss NZ, my family & friends etc., but this is my chance to see the world. On that front so far I've been to Wales for a few days (freezing cold) and Rome for a week (awesome), and I'm off to some mystery destination for a weekend soon. For longer holidays I'm limited by work for the next few months but I have a few places on my list for after that.

I stayed with friends and relatives for a bit initially, but before too long I needed to find a job and a place of my own. I found a job in Croydon (doing Delphi still) and a flat in Brockley (south east London) which was about the right price and convenient for getting the train to work. Public transport here is pretty good but it's damned expensive - more so than anywhere else in Europe apparently. I miss my car already :/ (although petrol is also damned expensive and shows no sign of getting any cheaper). At least I got paid in pounds for the first time the other day :)

The Big OE

2008-03-10T09:11:00.002Z

In less than a week now I am leaving New Zealand to go to the UK, for what us Kiwis refer to as "the big OE" (OE being Overseas Experience). The UK makes a good base for taking trips to Europe, which is what I plan to do in addition to working (most likely in London) for the next 1-2 years. Several of my friends are already in the UK and I have plenty of relatives there so at least I won't arrive in the country knowing nobody. I'm sure I'll miss home - the nice weather, having my own car, and of course being able to see my family and friends. Still, you don't find adventure on your own doorstep as someone once told me. Very true.

This week is already shaping up to be a busy one at work, winding things down. In many ways it's sad to be leaving there - I've been there just over six years now, and they are like family to me. I would have liked to get to know several new team members who joined recently better as well. There are plenty of fine people there to pick up where I'm leaving off though, and I've left them with documentation that should suffice when I'm not there to answer questions :)

Being the procrastinatory individual that I am, I still have a list of things yet to do before I go. I haven't packed yet, although I have most of the things other than clothes that I plan to take with me (much less stuff than I expected, actually). Four days left in the week - should be plenty of time ;)

In case anyone is wondering I will still be involved in my various projects (Opie, OpenSync, etc.) - being that these are run over the internet I can still participate wherever I am in the world. In some ways it will make things easier - a lot of the open source / free software conferences are in Europe anyway.

Where did my collection go?

2008-03-10T08:46:00.003Z

So I was trying to move my music collection in Amarok to a different machine. I simply moved all of the MP3 files from machine A to machine B, taking care to preserve the same path structure, and then copied the configuration files (~/.kde/share/config/amarokrc and ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/* - for clarity, I'm using sqlite backend to store the collection). Then I opened Amarok on the second machine, only to find that my collection was empty. Now, this is not a situation that I'm unfamiliar with - the same thing happened one time when I upgraded Amarok, although somehow I managed to recover from that one. What confused me initially though was that I thought it might not be successfully reading the collection database file; however, after some searching and investigation I figured out what the real problem is and how to solve it.

Digging into the data structure of Amarok's collection.db (by running "sqlite3 ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/collection.db"), it seems that Amarok records the device where each track is stored so that you can have tracks on removable devices, and they appear when you plug the removable device in and disappear when you unplug it. When running Amarok with the same collection data on another machine, the device that it thought contained all of my tracks (ie, one of my hard drive partitions) no longer existed and thus the collection was shown as empty.

Once you know what's going on here it's not hard to fix the problem, simply by fixing up the device links. In fact, in collections created in newer versions of Amarok (at least in 1.4.8 - my collection has been around for quite a few versions now) it seems to put the files against no device at all (device_id of -1). A few SQL statements later and I had simply cleared out the contents of the devices table and set all of the device_id values in other tables to -1 instead of a specific device, and voila - the next time I started Amarok my collection was restored :)

It seems to me though that there ought to be a nicer way of exporting your collection so you don't have to muck around like this. It might make a good summer of code project for someone... ;)

Angstrom Opie 1.2.3 testing

2008-01-13T04:20:00.000Z

Testing images of the Ångström distribution containing Opie 1.2.3 are now available for many devices, see this page for details. If your device is listed, we would welcome your testing and feedback.

This has been a long time coming, and I'd like to thank everyone who helped make it possible. Of course this is just a step towards Opie becoming supported in Angstrom - we'll allow at least a month for people to test and then we'll evaluate the situation, and possibly after further tweaking be able to release final images, populate feeds and finally declare Opie as supported.

Meanwhile, over the holidays I have been making quite a few fixes in Opie CVS to be included in 1.2.4 - many of them fix bugs that have annoyed me and no doubt others for a while now, which is very satisfying. Included were changes to make VMemo actually usable, many small improvements in AdvancedFM, better alarm sound playback in the Clock, and some others. Once Opie 1.2.3 becomes supported in at least one distribution we can start to think about doing the 1.2.4 release.

LCA 2008

2007-11-30T10:57:00.000Z

Kind of at the last minute I decided to go to linux.conf.au in Melbourne next January. I missed the last earlybird ticket by mere hours, but oh well. As usual there are plenty of interesting talks on, a few people to meet up with and a new city to check out as well. Flights, accommodation and the conference itself are all booked and paid for, so now all I need to do is wait. Should be an interesting trip :)

Wake me up before you go-go

2007-11-15T09:10:00.000Z

I was playing around with the Opie clock today and I discovered to my dismay that alarm wakeup is not working at all on my iPAQ h2200 running a self-built Angstrom + Opie image (2.6.21-hh17 kernel). It turns out that most of the pieces of the system are working fine up until the point when opiealarm (which gets run just before suspend) tells the kernel to set the rtc wakeup time. According to the rtc info in /sys it is being set to a date somewhere in 2035, which is not particularly useful especially if you really do want to be woken up early for that meeting tomorrow morning.

I have looked at the code in opiealarm and it looks OK to me, and hasn't been changed in a long time. It is using the old ioctl() based method of setting the alarm but that really ought to work properly. I suspect this is a bug in the kernel, but with the handhelds.org kernel discussion mailing list being down I'm not sure where to report it. Setting the wakeup time through /sys does work so at least that's something - if it comes to it I suppose I could modify opiealarm to use that method if it is available.

CMake in OpenSync, Opie 1.2.5?

2007-10-28T00:45:00.000+01:00

So I did some more work on OpenSync/Opie lately - fixed a few issues in Opie's sync authentication code, finally changed the todo list to show some reasonable icons, etc. The most interesting change for me though was to do with CMake - OpenSync has just moved over to it from scons (having previously moved from autotools to scons a couple of months ago). I was reasonably impressed with scons when I came to move the opie-sync plugin over to it, in that it removed a lot of the complexity of autotools, but CMake just blew me away. It's even simpler and requires even less files in my source tree, and switching over was a breeze. Build systems are often the bane of software developers, particularly in the free/open source software world, so kudos to Kitware for making a build system that doesn't make my head want to explode :) Thanks also to Daniel Gollub of SUSE/Novell for all his recent hard work on the OpenSync core, including the decision and the effort to move OpenSync over to CMake.

I've started some tentative plans for Opie 1.2.5. I know, I know, 1.2.4 isn't out yet and 1.2.3 isn't even available to a lot of people, but we're working on that too. I think it's important to be looking ahead. Take a look at the recently updated Opie roadmap for details.

Click-click-click-click... uh-oh...

2007-10-12T10:15:00.000+01:00

I have not exactly had great luck with hard drives lately. First, a Seagate 320GB SATA drive in my main PC started acting up - fortunately only a few files were unreadable and I managed to copy the rest of the data off without issues. Then, just days later a Seagate 120GB IDE drive in my parents' PC (of which I am the de-facto maintainer) began to bite the dust - it was pretty much unreadable and making lots of nasty noises. After trying a few other options I attempted copying the entire drive using Acronis Disk Director, and following several hours of constant grinding to my amazement it seemed to have copied all of the data successfully, this time onto an IDE RAID 1 array to avoid further faulty hard drive hassles.

You would think that the story would end there. Unfortunately not. A week later Windows XP on my parents' PC begins to report corrupt files, so it seems that one of the drives or the cheap no-brand IDE RAID controller is faulty. If it is one of the drives then it obviously isn't serious enough to make the RAID controller fail the drive out of the array, because it helpfully reports that everything is OK. Should I mention that the two drives in the array are both brand new Seagate 160GB IDE drives?

Right, that's it - no more Seagate. I used to be a loyal Seagate buyer, but two confirmed failures and one possible failure in two weeks, plus at least four previous failed drives in the last seven years is just too much to bear. To replace the failing 320GB drive in my machine I've gone for two Western Digital Caviar "RAID Edition" 320GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-1 array. (The RAID Edition drives have some added reliability features, but also have a 5-year warranty and aren't all that much more expensive than the standard WD drives). Since I've just moved to a new PC I've given the old one to my parents, and tonight I have rebuilt it for them using two new WD RAID Edition 160GB SATA drives in RAID-1 using the onboard Promise RAID controller. Third time's a charm...

Earlier this year I read two interesting articles on hard drive reliability (which are summaries of two research papers) on the StorageMojo site:

Google’s Disk Failure Experience
Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

In my case, the comments regarding how useless SMART is were definitely borne out - SMART reported no errors at all before the problems started. In fact when I was attempting to recover the 120GB drive using SpinRite it was still reporting no errors in the SMART status as it was clicking away. Brilliant.

I guess the only lucky thing to come out all of this is that no significant amount of data was lost. It has also been a bit of a wakeup call in that I realised I hadn't done a backup in ages. Needless to say I have since rectified that oversight :)

OpenSync hacking

2007-08-19T13:57:00.000+01:00

I've spent quite a bit of time over the last week or so getting the Opie plugin for OpenSync ported to the latest 0.3x branch (ie, trunk in svn). 99% of the job is done, all that is needed now is testing and a few fixes here and there. If you're brave, and make backups, you can check out OpenSync from svn and give it a try :)

In the process of porting I've also fixed a few things:

* scp support now actually uses scp/ssh instead of sftp, so that you don't have to install additional packages to have a secure connection (it works with dropbear that is included in most handheld distros by default). You will need to set up key-based authentication however - there's no mechanism to enter an ssh password at sync time.
* scp can now sync notes
* Improved error handling in a lot of places
* Lots of refactoring and code tidying

The 0.3x branch will eventually become the next stable version of OpenSync, 0.40, but there's still quite a bit of work to be done before then (see the TODO list). There are a few things I'd like to add to the Opie plugin, mostly along the lines of making it more robust, but also some minor features eg. supporting the Opie-Notes application. In the near future I'd like to also look at adding support for the SQLite backend in Opie, however at the moment the SQLite backend has no mechanism for retrieving data remotely for syncing purposes, so that will need to be added in Opie as well.

I've probably mentioned it before, but I have to say I'm pretty excited about OpenSync - it's a powerful syncing platform and one that has a huge amount of potential. We need to not only keep pushing the development forward, but we also make it more visible and accessible to people. KitchenSync with OpenSync as a backend is now in KDE 3.5.7, gnome-sync has just been released, and I think once KDE 4.x comes out with Akonadi and OpenSync support makes it into Conduit (which I understand is on the cards) we will have a bit more exposure.

Opie 1.2.3 is out!

2007-07-28T13:07:00.000+01:00

So finally we've released Opie 1.2.3. It's been a long road, but a lot of people helped out (some of whom are new to Opie) and that made all the difference. It's nice to have something to show that the project is still alive :)

Next on the agenda: 1.2.4, naturally. I hope we can improve synchronisation, and that includes not just working on the OpenSync plugin, but also fixing up PIM bugs on the Opie side and likely fixing problems syncing with Qtopia Desktop as well. In general I'd also like to get a few of the long-standing annoying bugs fixed too. If there's something annoying that prevents you from using Opie on a daily basis, please report it - or even better, try to help us fix it.

KonqE & Opie 1.2.3 again

2007-07-22T05:31:00.000+01:00

OK, so thanks to some work by Marek Vašut (Marex), Paul Sokolovsky (pfalcon) & polyonymous in fixing the OBEX regression, we are nearly ready to release Opie 1.2.3 - mid next week is the target. I hope the release will breathe some new life into Opie - certainly there has been quite a bit of activity over the past week or so.

Part of that activity was to do with getting the new version of Konqueror Embedded working (which is not actually part of Opie, although one might say it is the unofficial flagship browser of the platform). Thanks again to Marex it is now almost completely working:

As you can see the window style needs to be fixed and a few other bits might need some work, but otherwise we've now got a working modern browser :) See the Opie wiki page for further details.

NetworkManager, Wireless cards and WPA

2007-07-01T04:27:00.000+01:00

So, I was setting up a PC for my sister running Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) and she needed wireless to be able to connect to the internet. I had a spare NetGear MA311 PCI card, and I figured it's fairly old, it's been well supported for ages using the hostap driver - so it should just work out of the box, right?

Wrong. I couldn't even see any networks using KNetworkManager. After fiddling around I discovered that not one, not two, but three wireless drivers were dueling to access the card, and the one that won was the old linux-wlan-ng driver which doesn't support any wireless extensions that NetworkManager needs. After searching through the bug reports at launchpad.net and blacklisting the prism2_pci, prism2, hermes, orinoco, and orinoco_pci modules, I eventually got it so that hostap was the only driver in charge of the wireless card. I tested all of this on a spare machine at home and it connected to my wireless just fine.

I drive back over to my sister's place in full anticipation that it will now work with no hassles. Nope - I discover the network at her flat uses WPA, and inexplicably KNetworkManager can see the network but thinks it's only WEP. Unfortunately I had not tested making a WPA connection at home beforehand or I would have discovered this problem immediately. I tried connecting manually with KNetworkManager, I tried running wpa_supplicant directly (again, it could see the network but insisted it was WEP), and I tried putting the connection settings in /etc/network/interfaces; nothing worked.

I knew I could connect to the wireless network at my sister's flat just fine with no configuration from my laptop (running the same version of Kubuntu, but with built-in Intel wireless using the ipw2200 driver), so I knew it could work. So after looking through what was available for purchase here and checking up on Linux support, I bought two more PCI wireless cards - an Edimax EW-7128G and a Netgear WG311T.

At home I tested the Edimax card first. It was detected (using the rt61 driver) and again could see my now WPA-encrypted network, but again it told me that it was encrypted using WEP and not WPA, and would not connect to it. Sigh.

The Netgear card was another story altogether. The test machine I had at home wouldn't even get past the BIOS screen with it plugged in, which was disturbing. However, I tested it in another machine I had using a Kubuntu live CD and to my surprise it connected first time with no configuration. Next weekend I put it into my sister's PC and it connected out of the box. Wireless problems solved!

So, if you're looking for a PCI wireless card that should work out of the box with Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux, then the Netgear WG311T could be the answer - assuming your PC will boot with it plugged in, that is. I'm sure there are other cards that work well, too, and with the introduction of the new wireless stack in the soon to be released 2.6.22 kernel, things will hopefully get a lot better for wireless under Linux in the next 6 months. Still, right now it can be a little frustrating :(

Kubuntu on a laptop

2007-05-20T09:56:00.000+01:00

I just installed Kubuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn" for those who like those codename thingies, which I don't) on my laptop, a Toshiba Satellite M50. I rarely use my laptop, but when I do use it I want it to "just work" (TM). I use Gentoo on my desktop but given the amount of messing about that requires it was obviously not an option for this machine.

I've been through the Kubuntu install process before and it was fairly smooth - the only hitch being that it told me it was unable to create the first partition layout I gave it, without telling me why. I chose a different setup and it continued. Once everything was installed the laptop booted into Kubuntu, complete with nice smooth startup screens. I was very impressed to see that I could plug in my ethernet cable and even switch on the wifi and it happily connected automatically to both of them with no problems. Plugged in a mouse, digital camera, USB stick - all detected and worked immediately. It even suspended and resumed with no hacking required, which is a first as far as this laptop is concerned.

However, I would be remiss if I did not mention the problems that I had after installation:

Setting up DVD playback using the instructions in the help documentation did not work. After a visit to Google and installing xine-ui the problem went away.
The version of vim installed by default, vim-tiny, is horrendously broken. Arrow keys and backspace don't work in insert mode - I mean, WTF?! Eventually I got sick of this and installed the proper "vim" package and it worked as expected.
Hibernate didn't work - when it booted back up it brought up a grey bar on the screen and froze up. Hibernate is something I can do without at the moment so I'm not too worried about this one. (I was able to recover simply by selecting the built-in recovery mode from the boot menu and then restarting).
The worst however was when completely on a whim I attempted to plug in an external monitor. After fiddling with the System Settings application I succeeded only in completely borking up my xorg configuration, without trying too hard I might add. After changing the settings and rebooting I was greeted with the primary screen being the external monitor (which was not what I set it to) and both screens stuck at 640x480, which on a laptop screen with a native resolution of 1280x768 does not look very good at all. So I thought I'd just log in and disable the second monitor - but no, as soon as I logged in the power manager applet crashed, and when I tried to run the System Settings - Monitor and Display settings, it also crashed. After a bit of searching it seems that this is a known bug - the xrandr library that both of these things use (which allows changing screen resolutions on the fly) just crashes when Xinerama (ie, multi-monitor support) is enabled. After much fiddling and cursing I found the only way to get back to a configuration where the laptop's widescreen video mode was detected and available was to restore a backup copy of the xorg.conf file, which fortunately the Monitor and Display settings applet had saved.

I'd have to say I'd still recommend Kubuntu to people looking for a nice desktop distribution, since apart from the problems mentioned above it seemed very well polished - for inexperienced users it certainly beats all of the other Linux distributions I have tried.

Opie 1.2.3, Konqueror Embedded: The Resurrection

2007-03-15T10:17:00.000Z

The Opie 1.2.3 release has been delayed - we are currently looking into some issues around recently added Bluetooth support, namely that it's somewhat broken. Hopefully these issues will be sorted out soon since there's a fair bit of useful stuff in the release.

The version of Konqueror Embedded for Opie in Familiar is from 2003, and since it has sat unmaintained for so long I had figured that was it. It turns out that a company called basysKom, who you may well have heard of since it is staffed by several KDE developers, has released an updated version just recently including most interestingly a version backported to Qt 2.x. It's not quite compatible with Opie out of the box since they are targeting Qtopia 2.0, but it's close. I have started trying to hack it to work with Opie, and if you are interested you can keep up with progress by monitoring the KonquerorEmbedded2007 page on the Opie wiki (you can even subscribe to the page so you get emails about changes if you want). Better still, grab the source and the patch and give me a hand :)

I've just signed up to be a mentor in the Google Summer of Code for Opie (under handhelds.org). If you're a student interested in working on Opie or something else handhelds-related under the handhelds.org banner, please have a look at this page and start thinking about what you might like to do. There are a bunch of suggestions up there but we'd love to hear any new ideas so please let us know if you have any.

OpenMoko

2007-03-14T11:27:00.000Z

A couple of months ago I got a surprise email asking if I would like to be part of the of the OpenMoko Neo1973 development phase 0. Naturally since this involved me being sent a free phone - and one of the first truly open phones at that - I graciously accepted. Thank you very much to FIC and the OpenMoko team!

A week ago my Neo arrived. It's a little larger than I expected, but then that's probably a good thing since it allows for a more readable screen. The software is in the very early stages and there are some issues with charging, but already you can start to see the potential of the device. I've nearly bricked it once already by updating the bootloader incorrectly, but fortunately the USB DFU (Device Firmware Update) was still working and I was able to flash a new working bootloader. Unfortunately though at the moment my desktop system is suffering from problems with USB devices which seems to be triggered by connecting the Neo. It's not nice to plug in a new device and then suddenly find that your mouse has powered down, and won't power up until you reboot. Mousekeys just aren't quite the same.

Hopefully I will be able to find a way to contribute back to OpenMoko soon - perhaps in the area of apps development, which is my forte, although I admit I would prefer to be developing with Qt than GTK. Still, that is the platform they have chosen (and not without good reason), and if it can be polished up to a state where it looks like the mockups on the website it should be quite a nice environment indeed.

Note that this does not affect my commitment to handhelds.org or Opie. In fact, on the latter front I hope that one day I will be able to run Opie on the Neo.

Perled tongues, the scientific method, and impending releases

2007-02-17T12:44:00.000Z

This video is absolutely hilarious. Admittedly he is trying to do something that the Vista speech recognition wasn't designed for, but it still made me laugh so hard it started to hurt. It looks to me that under the right conditions and with the right training it would work well for writing letters and other documents, but I honestly still can't see speech recognition taking off in a huge way - a perfectly quiet environment is not something you usually find in the average office.

On Friday at our usual work lunch at Nando's we were discussing the difference in taste between Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke, and the perceived taste difference between soft drinks out of a can and out of a bottle. After much discussion it was resolved that some blind testing had to be done to resolve the issue. Five of us did a blind test using four identical glasses of Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero all out of glass bottles, and Coke out of a can. We found that (a) almost all of us had no trouble discerning "real" Coke (with sugar) and the others; (b) Diet Coke and Coke Zero have a very similar taste but that the slightly unpleasant aftertaste that you get with Diet Coke wasn't as noticeable in Coke Zero, so they aren't quite the same; and (c) there was absolutely no difference between the coke out of a can and out of a bottle, so it must be just the drinking experience that influences the taste perception. Case closed :)

The Opie code is "frozen" at the moment in preparation for the Opie 1.2.3 release which should happen very soon. There's been the suggestion of another minor Familiar release including it (among other things) in the near future as well, which I would definitely support (and try to help with). Actually I'm looking forward to when the freeze period ends so that I can have a look at committing a few bits of code I've been sitting on - such as by external keyboard (kbdd) control stuff.

Opie-ate of the masses

2007-01-23T11:22:00.000Z

Thanks to Lorn Potter I now have Opie CVS write access, so I've committed almost all of my patches. Most notably, after sitting stagnant and buggy for some time, TinyKATE is finally usable - only minor changes were required such as providing access to the already written find/replace functions, and prompting the user to save changes (very important). OpieRecorder is now a lot easier to use as well, and I've fixed a number of minor bugs in various parts of Opie that have annoyed me for a while. There's lots more stuff to be done, I just need to keep finding the time and the motivation.

The OpenSync Opie plugin gained initial support for syncing of notes this week. Since Opie provides a text editor rather than a "memo" application like most other platforms, the plugin just looks for and writes .txt files in the user's home directory on the handheld. It seems to work fairly well in testing for me - try it and let me know how it goes.

In other news, the "new" Battlestar Galactica rocks! I hadn't seen it until last weekend and I was really impressed. All those people who told me it was good previously weren't kidding.

Some random cool stuff I discovered lately:

A PDA in the hand...

2007-01-08T13:09:00.000Z

It's now the beginning of week 3 of my holidays. So far I've had a fairly quiet break - I've taken the opportunity to do lots of reorganisation at home and do a bit more of my own coding. I've been submitting patches for Opie itself, which I've done before, but this time I'm delving into lots of different applications and areas. Most of the fixes are fairly trivial, but the bug reports they address (some of which were submitted by me, some by others) have been around for several years (!) Hopefully now one of the developers can spare the time to review the patches.

Some people have been suggesting that Opie is dead. While it's true that many of the developers have moved on to other things, and Opie II is now on the horizon, I think Opie still has some life left in it. I imagine it'll be a while before Opie II reaches the level that Opie is at in terms of application availability and features, so there'll still be users around that are interested in using the original Opie for some time to come, and that justifies me spending time working on it. I'm hoping also that the recent development of a viable syncing solution (at least for Linux, anyway) might increase interest levels amongst users.

In related news, I've bought yet another second-hand PDA for Familiar testing and/or actual usage - this time it's an iPAQ h2200 (that's my fourth iPAQ now). It's slightly smaller than my other iPAQs, so it should fit in my pocket. Linux support for this model looks good, though I'm not sure about Opie. At least if I have any problems with the latter I'm a bit more confident I can help debug them now.

OpenSync progress redux

2006-12-07T10:04:00.000Z

More work on the Opie plugin for OpenSync. After testing synchronisation with KDE PIM it seems there are still a lot of bugs. I fixed quite a few obvious ones, but a major problem that still remains is UID mapping. If you create an entry on the non-Opie side it doesn't have a unique ID that Opie understands, so when that entry is synced across and subsequently modified by Opie it gets assigned a new one. At the next sync it appears to OpenSync as a new entry and so you get a duplicate item. This pretty much makes the plugin useless at the moment, but I think I know how to fix it.

It's nice to finally have a few users testing the plugin too - it gives me some motivation to keep working on it :)

I am

2006-10-04T11:55:00.000+01:00

You are Geordi LaForge

You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.

Geordi LaForge	75%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)	70%
Jean-Luc Picard	60%
Worf	60%
Spock	54%
Data	43%
James T. Kirk (Captain)	40%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)	40%
Mr. Scott	40%
Chekov	40%
Beverly Crusher	35%
Deanna Troi	35%
Uhura	30%
Mr. Sulu	30%
Will Riker	30%

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

Which OS are You?

Which File Extension are You?

Which 24 Character are you?

No, I'm not kidding, I really am Jack Bauer (according to multiple tests even!) although I think I'd rather be Tony Almeida - and with a wife like that, who wouldn't... :)

And, as you can probably tell, I'm bored...

OpenSync progress

2006-09-05T12:41:00.000+01:00

It's surprising what can be acheived with a solid weekend's worth of hacking. The Opie plugin for OpenSync now syncs contacts, todos, and events. I still need to sort out categories, alarms for events, and a few other fields, plus improve robustness (improve error handling, etc.). Still, it's getting towards the point where it will actually be useful.

Update

2006-08-31T13:27:00.000+01:00

Well, here we are again, 8 months down the track.

LCA was good, met a few cool people and I definitely enjoyed my stay in Dunedin. One thing I did not like however was how all of the recordings of the talks have somehow been lost or weren't even recorded correctly. Yes, I know the people helping out were volunteers, and I know from my own experience how difficult running a large event like that can be. On the other hand, I paid a fair amount of money for the conference and having been promised recordings of all the talks, that's what I expected. I have to say I am less than enthusiastic about making a special trip to Australia for LCA 2007, although I won't necessarily rule it out.

Over the last little while I haven't had much motivation to do work at home, but in the last week or so I have managed to fix up the Opie plugin for OpenSync a little bit - syncing contacts (or at least, retrieving them from Opie) is now working again. There's lots more work to do and hopefully now I've figured my way around the recent internal changes in OpenSync itself I can start to make some headway, possibly with help from a few other people. It would be nice to have a real syncing PDA again, I have missed that from the days of my old Palm.

For the last few weeks I have been going to a local pub quiz every Tuesday night, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm not so great at the sports questions, or "Who's that?" picture rounds, and the music round seems to consist of mostly 1950s stuff that I've never heard; but often there's someone in our team who can fill in the answer. I've been surprised by how often a guess turns out to be right as well :) We've managed to come second or third a few times.

Turns out I was wrong about the X-Files seasons 8 and 9, which on the whole were surprisingly good. The new characters worked, and a lot of the stories were just as engaging as in the previous seasons. The "mythology" (conspiracy storyline) gets weaker in the later seasons though which let the show down a bit.

Happy New Year to all

2006-01-11T07:28:00.000Z

Happy New Year!

I'm off to linux.conf.au in Dunedin this month. I figured it would be shameful not to go on the one year they decided to hold it in NZ :) I've never been to Dunedin and there's lots going on at the conference so it should be quite interesting. Maybe I'll get to see a few of these people whose names I keep reading all the time.

I have been a bit slack lately - emails going unanswered, open source stuff I should have been doing not getting done, etc. and for that I apologise. Maybe it has something to do with the pile of DVDs I got for Christmas, most of which I actually bought myself in the after-Christmas sales. In particular I now have seasons 1-7 of The X Files, which at 45 minutes an episode and ~25 episodes a season is quite a lot of sitting in front of a screen. It's a lot better than I remembered it, though, and I've found that my earlier impression of the series was clouded by just a few not-so-great episodes in the later seasons. I'm still holding off on seasons 8 and 9 though, I'm not convinced that wheeling in other characters to replace Mulder & Scully was such a great idea. Then again by the time they started screening those episodes on TV here I had stopped watching it regularly, so maybe it's not as bad as I think.

Anyway, back on the "stuff getting done" thing, I have started using KOrganizer (part of the KDE PIM suite) more lately which should help me remember things I need to do, and hopefully soon I will be able to spend some time finishing off the OpenSync plugin for Opie so that I can sync my Linux-powered iPAQ with it.

Conference, VMware

2005-08-17T13:21:00.000+01:00

Obviously I'm back from the Citrix iForum conference (about 3 weeks ago in fact). I had a great time, and it was worthwhile from a business perspective as well - I got to see all of the new Citrix product features first hand, talk directly to Citrix engineers and developers about specific problems, and listen to Kevin Mitnick give a fascinating talk about social engineering. The party with free drinks on the second night didn't go amiss either ;) After the conference was over I did a few touristy things in Sydney as well. Once I sort out web hosting that will actually let me install a gallery, I'll see about putting up some pictures.

Citrix had an expo running during the conference, mostly for the benefit of their partners. Most interesting to me was the presence of VMware. VMware Workstation is a product I knew about previously, but had never used, mainly because it was too expensive for me to even consider. However, at the stand they were giving away free copies of VMware Workstation in exchange for filling out a form, which I did. I finally got around to installing it last weekend, and I must say I'm very impressed. It's fast, stable, and it's one of the most polished commercial Linux applications I have used so far. The best thing about it though is it lets me do Windows development without having to reboot, which is a big help as all of my other important stuff (emails, CD burning software etc.) is in Linux. I'd certainly recommend checking it out if you need something that works well for doing testing or cross-platform development.

Off to Sydney

2005-07-19T09:03:00.000+01:00

I'm heading off to Sydney tomorrow for the aforementioned Citrix iForum (returning on Sunday evening). Should be interesting. Weather permitting, I plan to do the Sydney harbour bridge climb as well as a few other non-conference things while I'm there.

Apple, fbvncserver

2005-06-09T10:34:00.000+01:00

The Apple move to Intel

I can't believe the amount of rubbish that is circulating about the Apple move to Intel processors. Examples of the drivel I have heard so far:
"Ooo, it'll make it easier to port PC games to Mac" - ever heard of DirectX? It'll be no different than porting games to Linux, and that doesn't happen that much yet (sadly).
"I'll be able to run OS X on my PC!" - Apple have clearly stated they will not support this, and they might even go to extra lengths to prevent people from hacking around it. Besides, you'd be missing out on half of what makes Macs what they are - the standardised hardware platform.
"Is there any point in starting Mac development now?" - the situation now is no different to what it was before. All of today's Mac applications will run on the new Macs thanks to Rosetta. Besides, most of the time you're coding to an API, not to the processor, unless you're writing in assembly language.
"This will kill Linux" - No. Linux will be unaffected on the server. It might take a hit on the desktop, but only if the move makes Macs significantly cheaper, or the normally PC-buying public decides that Mac-on-Intel is somehow more appealing to them despite being much the same thing.

It's quite simple - almost nothing has changed. Macs will still be Macs, PCs will still be PCs.

fbvncserver for iPAQ working again

fbvncserver has been updated to work on Familiar 0.8.2, and works brilliantly. For a while I was trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to it using VNC and then I realised some new icons had been added to the Opie launcher to start and stop the server. Last I checked, there isn't a working free PocketPC VNC server, so there's yet another win for Familiar. Woot! :)

Look, it's a blog

2005-06-08T13:23:00.000+01:00

My first blog entry. Well, actually I was kind of blogging long before the word "blog" existed, but I guess I didn't really update it often enough to count. Maybe this time round :)

Anyway, work's been pretty busy lately as it's release time again. I'm still enjoying it though. The application I'm currently working on (Pocket RAMM) has given me an opportunity to do some good OO architecture work, building on our previous "Pocket" applications except redoing a few things properly this time, internally that is. It has the potential to be a very useful application for our clients as well, which is always motivating.

Looks like I'll be heading off to Australia next month for the Citrix iForum conference. I decided to take the weekend as well so I'll have to find some interesting things to do in Sydney (hope I get some good weather!).

Movies seen lately:

Hostage - not bad. I went and saw this because I was locked out of the house one evening, and it was time well spent. Some great action, although Bruce Willis's acting was a little weaker than usual in parts, but still good.
Revenge of the Sith - about what I was expecting. Visually spectacular, and it had some great moments, but Hayden Christensen's acting was so bad it spoilt the whole movie. I can't understand why they cast him as Anakin Skywalker. Oh well, I don't suppose George Lucas really cares, the film is still raking it in.
And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself - highly recommended. Antonio Banderas gives the performance of his career.
Parallax View - good story, but the direction and production left a lot to be desired. Still, I guess it was 1974; a lot of films from that era have a similar feel.
The Quiet American - worth seeing. Great performances and a compelling story.
Garden State - very entertaining. I was particularly impressed by Natalie Portman, and Zach Braff shows his skill as a writer/director as well as an actor.

As usual I've bought a few DVDs recently as well, including The Butterfly Effect. I saw it at the movies when it came out, and it's a great film, although the DVD I got was the director's cut and they have changed the ending and a few other parts to match. The new ending works, but I'd have to say I prefer the theatrical ending.