Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 179)

So then I got the N810...

Seems Nokia was kind enough to give one of the developers discount codes. After a bit of a wait as the Canadian store had a few issues to sort out, I have this shiny little device in my hand. Well, I did get on Thursday and writing this blog post a few days later. And what do I have to think? Well, here, in no particular order, are some bits:

The Good

• Size & Weight - It is thinner and heavier than I expected, but about the same size as I had imagined.
• Screen - It rocks. Truly, it is bright and huge, at least for something this big. I have an old Palm Tungsten E and the screen on the N810 runs at about twice the resolution and is only a little bit bigger
• The basic screen layout - Very well thought out, with nice low contrast icons
• The GPS I was pleasantly surprised to see that the resolution of the GPS compares favourably with my Garmin CS. Having it built-in is very cool.
• Word completion - learns as you go, thus my completion now includes words like "maemo" and "openstreetmap". I don't think I need to say more
• Amazing battery life - This thing will go a whole day, even with near constant usage in class, walking around, etc.
• Working power management - I guess I am just used to Linux devices with crappy power management. All this just shows what happens when the OEM gets involved from the ground up.
• "Gentle" notification system - If the screen has gone black, there is a little LED in the upper corner that pulses if somebody has messaged you or something simliar. Only if it is fairly major like power issues or networking disconnecting does it beep at you. Nice for in class or quiet meetings.
• Hardware QWERTY keyboard - Like any small keyboard, it takes a bit of getting used to, but overall the feel is nice. The keyboard is backlit as well, nice for those dark areas.
• Integration of Telepathy and evolution-data-server - This is what we badly need on the desktop. Contacts are contacts, regardless of what app you use them in. However, see below for the ugly side to this.

The Bad

• No native editing software for OpenStreetMap - This is pretty much the perfect device for editing OSM. Built-in GPS with touch screen running Linux.
• No tab key - In this era of endless web forms, where is our tab key? If it is there, I haven't found it yet.
• No hardware scroll buttons on the main body - I keep looking for something like the Blackberry's scroll wheel or even just up and down buttons. Yes, there is a joypad-ish type thing on the keyboard, but you need to pull down the keyboard for that.
• No camera app by default - I see camera but no way to use it by default.
• No tomboy-like app - Given one of the major uses of this type of device is basic note taking, lists, etc., you would think a tomboy-like autosaving desktop wiki would be a first. Not so and no Tomboy .deb either.
• Telepathy is not completely mature yet - I had a few issues with bouncing on and off on my home wireless and by default it only supports SIP and

The Ugly What seperates the bad from the ugly? The ugly are really really stupid things. Small mistakes are not ugly, failures to think, stupid legal issues, hardware that doesn't work, these things are ugly.

• No Pimlico I badly want Pimlico to be shipped by default. The default Contacts app uses evolution-data-server, so most of the working bits are there, but there are some issues. Ross from OpenedHand has more
• Terrible package management - Yes, it has Ipkg and repos. So compared to similar WinCE/Symbian devices it is miles ahead, but that is really enough. There are a whole host of issues, including lack of definitions for categories, millions of repos and more. Makes me feel like I am running Red Hat circa RH8.
• Hardware volume keys don't work - Right. I don't think I will say more
• Default OS is closed source - The default OS, OS2008, is actually Maemo + closed source bits, including drivers. Given they have already dropped support for the N770, how long before I get pissed off at Nokia for dropping support for the N810?
• No OGG support - More CYA from Nokia legal (likely the same issue with eds and pimlico). It also looks like it doesn't use gstreamer, which means the fix has to be hacked in.
• Crappy default media centre, Canola is closed source - The built-in media centre is not the greatest and the closest thing to replace it, Canola, is closed source. Umm, what?
• No sync from GNOME to N810 - Given this is running a huge amount of the same bits as my Ubuntu desktop, where is my sync? Why can't I sync my contacts to and from the device?
• Default notepad app crashes on save - not everytime, about 1 in 3. BUt the worst part is that when it crashes, it truncates the files. So each crash leaves you with less and less.

Overall

Would I buy one of these things at full price? If I had the money, absolutely. The hardware and software are slick, excepting the issues above. The legal issues surrounding Pimlico and Ogg are not the Maemo teams fault. Nor are some of the hardware decisions, I imagine.

A short primer for new British Columbia residents

Dudanogueira, I am glad to see you have moved to the proper coast of Canada. As a new West Coaster, there are a few things you should know:

1. After the Canucks lose (and they will lose), it is acceptable to cheer for the Flames or some other Canadian team, with the exception of the Maple Leafs.
2. In every conversation with your friends back east, remind them of how we have no snow here.
3. In the event that the previous is false, do not communicate with any of said aforementioned friends, as all your will hear is laughing.
4. Persuant to 2 and 3, it is also acceptable to remind aforementioned eastern friends that rain does not need to be shovelled. Right after that April snowstorm is usually an excellent time. They will, after all, have had an entire winter to bond completely with their snow shovels and become one with the pain that is watching the snowplow come by five minutes after you finish shovelling out your driveway.
5. The universe does not revolve around Toronto. Some of your Toronto friends might forget this and need reminding occasionally.
6. Ottawa is very far away and satisfaction with the government there is inversely proportional with the distance to said city. However, too much griping about the Federal Government is too Albertan, so avoid excessive amounts of this.
7. Albertans are rich and are driving up our land values by spending their illgotten gains on big 3rd houses. Focus on the fact that they are running away from Alberta, not that they got rich there (and you aren't), and you will be much happier.
8. All of the aforementioned advice should taken with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

I was going to say nice things about Firefox 3...

Well, I have tried Firefox 3 and I really like a lot of the things that I saw. The "awesome" bar really isn't that awesome for an Epiphany user, but hey, it is a first cut. The GTK integration really makes me happy. Mozilla has been working on Linux support. Then I hit this dialogue:

Now I am very angry. Not only did Firefox prevent me from going to site I know is safe, there is no easy to way to say "I trust this page". And yes, that defeats the point of this dialogue, but the reality for the Web consumer is that I have no control over these kind of websites. Now what do I do?

This little change also breaks Epiphany because if you hit one of these sits, it refuses to render anything until you restart the browser. Guess I will go back to waiting for that Webkit backend to Epiphany.

(Sorry for blogging twice on Planet Ubuntu and OpenStreetMap)

Bits and bobs

My life has been pretty crazy with school recently, 5 classes and all. Thinking never stops, so here are things that passed through my head (sanitized) over the past little while:

• I have an N810. Is cool. Will blog later more about it.
• Congrats to Fedora for all the cool community work they have been doing. Many transitions have been happening, with Max Spevack resigning as Project Leader and Paul Frields taking over. Red Hat has also added Tom Callaghan to the Fedora team and it looks like that a formal "Fedora community" team is in the offing. Fedora have always pushed us technically and I am glad to the see the community prosper as well. A stronger Fedora (or OpenSuse, Mandriva, etc.) makes a stronger Linux.
• Common Desktop Infrastructure - what the hell is this thing? How does it fit into the Portland Project? Is this another useless Linux Foundation buzzword project?
• The next edition of "the book" is coming along. I have been massively busy recently, so if you emailed me, I have your email and will respond this weekend, I promise.
• It appears that Victoria might actually be getting some decent transit. Well, if you call Bus Rapid Transit decent...
• Nick Ali (boredandblogging) has been doing an absolutely amazing job with the Fridge recently.
• The Ubuntu Weekly News is still going strong. John Crawford and the aforementioned Nick, as well as many many others, have been doing a stellar job here.
• A question: Aside from Dell, why are most of the new preinstalled Linuxes "home built"? I can think of gOS, the Asus EEE and of course the N810, none shipping with any of major Linux distributions or DEs, really. Yes, I know that gOS is based on Ubuntu, the EEE is Xandros and ships KDE and the N810 is Debian-based. They all use custom UIs and only bits and pieces of the underlying OS. The closest is probably the EEE, with KDE in the Advanced mode.
• KDE got 4 out the door. Haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks very cool.

One final note: If there are any dropped n's or missing spaces in the previous post, I cleaned my keyboard recently and have been having issues since...

Greenpeace finds the Japanese fleet

It is great news that Greenpeace has found the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. It has already been an interesting lead up to the whaling "season" with Japan announcing that it would hunt Humpbacks then deciding against it, Australia getting very publicly getting annoyed at Japan over whaling (a first, thanks to a change of government in Canberra) and the Sea Shepard's boat Robert Hunter being renamed the Steve Irwin. All in all this is probably the most media attention whaling has had for several years.

This time also has great personal interest to me as the doctor aboard the Esperanza is Clive Strauss, a longtime family friend, whom my brother house sits for when he is gone on his often absences.

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KDE in Ubuntu is not dead

Daniweb has a hilarious article about "GNOME killing KDE" all because of Kubuntu 8.04 not being an LTS. The distinction that Daniweb fails to note is that Canonical considers KDE 4.0 to not be stable enough, not KDE as a whole. If they did, they wouldn't have shipped Kubuntu 6.06 LTS.

As for KDE 4.x, I think it will it be a pretty crazy and cool release. I worry slightly about some of the new tech not being stable enough and that hurting the image of KDE, but 4.1 and beyond should truly rock. And all this new tech should keep GNOME on its toes. Now how about a stable release schedule?

More on Knitting

Martin, the correct answer is actually either. Having been blessed with dating two knitters in a row, I have seen books with one or the other.

Knitting

Martin, it is perl, not pearl.

Zimbra: Not so nice after all

Ivoks, Zimbra has major problems. The first issue is that they have an evil license. And then you get to what they bundle with Zimbra, in hacked versions of Postfix, MySQL, apache, Cyrus and more. You can see it all in the ThirdParty section of their svn. A beautiful security nightmare, if you ask me.

Then there is their Evolution conector:

Zimbra is hardcoded against Evolution 2.6/2.8, and not 2.12

see this mail posted to the evolution-hackers list.

All of this points to an "all mine, none for you" development ethos. When I asked a Zimbra rep at either Ubuntu Live or OSCON 2007 about their massive patches, the only response was "they didn't do what we wanted and the patches are not suitable to go upstream".

And yes, Ubuntu is far more than Canonical. I was specifically referring to where Canonical should spend it's money in the next year. It should also be noted that in most cases Canonical use cases align very nicely with community ones.

As for Evolution, I widely suspect the only bit we will still be talking about in 5 years will be Evolution-Data-Server (or a succesor).

Canonical's focus in 2008

It seems that there is some discussion of where Canonical should focus their effort in 2008. The Enterprise Linux Log started this all off with The Big Three of Linux: Looking ahead to 2008. They get it bang on with this statement:

The ultimate achievement would be when Canonical finally creates an Active Directory-like system to integrate its server OS and desktop OS into a single, manageable environment.

However, Linuxloop.com disagrees with this, saying in a blog post Canonical’s Future: Enterprise or Consumer?:

Instead, I believe that Ubuntu should continue to pursue the consumer desktop and, for now, leave the enterprise customers to big companies like Red Hat and Novell.

. Now, aside from this issues that this not an either/or situation (office works need usable desktops as much as home users and look at the amazing things Dave does at the City of Largo with Compiz on thin clients) it is also ignoring why Microsoft won large numbers of customers from Novell and others with Windows 2000. Simply put: Active Directory destroys the competition. The tight integration of client and desktop is a major win for admins. Tie this in with integrated messaging via Exchange and you easily see why we have not made major inroads.

However, all is not lost. Apt-get, our repository system and the integration it offers is unsurpassed. A few server bits and an LDAP schema and we could have the beginnings of a highly integrated software control system. OpenChange with OpenLDAP are going to allow us to catchup and maybe one of these days Evolution will support mass config.

We (Ubuntu) also have a major advantage: you. There is no free (or Free) integrated solution for this out there. MS and Novell both charge and RH isn't there yet. Enterprise Linux Log correctly points this out, saying:

Canonical is in the unique position of having herds of passionate users behind them.

Imagine what a one toe installation of a directory-managed Ubuntu will look like...