Older blog entries for Elleo (starting at number 50)

Jokosher Crash Recovery

I’ve just finished adding a new feature for the 0.10 release of Jokosher (scheduled for August). Jokosher can now recover a user’s project after a crash:

It still needs some testing, but it seems to work acceptably well at the moment and doesn’t appear to cause any problems with editing while backups are being saved.

Also, thanks to the great work of Sebastian Dröge fixing bugs in the GStreamer audioconvert and deinterleave plugins, when I get home in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to finish the work we started over a year ago on getting support for multiple simultaneous inputs in to Jokosher.

Syndicated 2008-05-25 16:05:13 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Floating Free - Web Comic

Who hasn’t dreamt of living aboard a Zeppelin and leisurely cruising around the world? Lacking the millions of pounds necessary to actually do this I decided to have a go at producing a little web comic along similar lines. I don’t know how long I’ll continue it for as it has taken the best part of a week to get a single strip finished. I’d like to at least try and produce a complete storyline, even if it’s only short, but updates may be rather sporadic.

Hopefully having something that requires me to draw vaguely regularly will help me to improve my drawing skills.

I won’t post any further strips on my main blog, if you want to follow it further I’ve knocked up a quick site for it at http://www.floatingfree.org.

Syndicated 2007-10-26 21:14:37 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

New LUGRadio Forums Theme

Just in time for the new season of LUGRadio starting on Monday, I’ve created a new PHPBB3 compatible theme for the LUGRadio forums. The hard working trig should have it up on the official forums soon, until then you can have a peek at it on my development installation, although that might not be around for long.

And here’s a quick screenshot of it for posterity:

Syndicated 2007-09-18 11:20:41 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

OpenMoko on a Treo 650

Following on from yesterday’s post I now have have OpenMoko running on my Treo.

When I next have some time to spare I’ll have a go at hacking support for the Treo’s GSM chip into OpenMoko’s gsmd, then it’ll be possible to make phone calls through OpenMoko’s phone application .

Syndicated 2007-07-01 14:40:23 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Im in ur Treo, Linuxin’ ur phonez…

With much help from the chaps in #hackndev I managed to get Linux installed on my Treo 650:

You can see a video of it booting and running a few applications here:

http://mirror.video.blip.tv/Elleo-LinuxOnATreo650996.ogg (Ogg Theora)

For anyone else wanting to do this, the steps are as follows:

1. Download and unpack P3t3’s Treo image.
2. Overwrite the zImage with my version. This is a more up-to-date kernel and has the initramfs built in to the kernel image (because of some buggyness in the MMC driver loading an initrd image from an SD card can be unreliable).
3. Run the following command: dd if=/dev/zero of=swap.swapfs bs=1024 count=32768
4. Copy AngstromOPIE_t650-v01.ext2, linux.boot.cfg, zImage and swap.swapfs to the root of your SD card (make sure you unmount it cleanly after you’ve finished).
5. Download P3t3’s Treo version of cocoboot and install it to your Treo.
6. Run Cocoboot on your Treo, delete the line saying “init=/linuxrc”, then hit “Boot”.
7. Enjoy the geeky goodness .

It’s still not amazingly fast, but adding the swap makes it just about usable, and there’s still a lot of work needs doing before it can actually be used as a phone. I believe P3t3 has worked out how to switch the GSM chip in to AT mode (PalmOS uses some odd binary mode for talking to the chip), but I don’t think things have gone much further than that yet.

To get back in to PalmOS just hit the reset button. It shouldn’t touch any of your files in any way, but it might be a good idea to backup first just in case .

Update: The speed can be increased greatly by passing the parameter mem=32M in Cocoboot, for some reason without this the kernel only makes use of about 16MB of RAM.

Syndicated 2007-06-30 19:42:56 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Jokosher Network Instruments - Contacts Integrated

Now that I’ve got most of the libempathy and libempathy-gtk functions I need working as python bindings I’ve finally been able to get on with some fun hacking on Jokosher itself. A user’s contacts (managed by Telepathy’s Mission Control) are now offered as possible instruments which can be added to a project:

Next I’ll see about fixing some problems with the python bindings so that the avatar pixbuf generation works correctly, rather than just assigning everyone with a generic avatar.

Also, hello Planet Gnome .

Syndicated 2007-06-18 14:50:03 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Every time a bug goes unreported in Jokosher…

… Jono Bacon kills a kitten.

Which is to say, Jokosher 0.9 has now been released and we’d really love anyone with some spare time to have a go at testing it and report any bugs. We’d like 1.0 to be a really polished release which works correctly for just about everybody, and for that to happen we need as much testing done as possible. Bugs can be reported here: https://launchpad.net/jokosher/+filebug

Syndicated 2007-05-24 07:19:00 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Jokosher SoC

I’ve begun work on my Summer of Code project for Jokosher. My task is to integrate VoIP facilities, making it possible for people to treat their contacts as if they were just another instrument. Hopefully making life simpler for podcasters interviewing guests, or for podcasts who’s presenters are all remote.

To start with I’ve been creating python bindings for libempathy and libempathy-gtk. The initial use of these libraries is for the accounts dialog, so that Jokosher can share the same accounts dialog (and actual accounts) as any other libempathy based applications. The bindings currently wrap approximately 75% of libempathy’s functions, which is far more than I need myself, but I’d like to try and make the bindings as complete as possible so that they can help other GNOME developers wanting to make use of VoIP functionality.

Here’s a quick screenshot of Jokosher displaying the libempathy-gtk accounts dialog. There’s still some bugs to work through, but things are starting to pick up momentum .

Syndicated 2007-05-07 20:50:08 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Speaking At LUGRadio Live ‘07

The schedule for LUGRadio Live ‘07 has now been announced and it looks like I’ll be giving my talk at 2:00pm on Saturday, just after lunch. I’ll be discussing a little project I’ve been working on for a while called SabreGL; this is an attempt to bring the easy 3D game creation offered by proprietary products such as DarkBASIC and Blitz3D to the Free software world.

SabreGL’s still a long way from being perfect, but I think LUGRadio Live will be a good chance to introduce it to the world and get a little feedback on how people would like to see it grow.

I’m hoping to be able to show off SabreGL’s current features by hacking together a small LUGRadio themed game, I shan’t be revealing the full details of this before my talk, but to whet your appetite here’s a little screenshot:

(Yes, I know they look slightly like zombies, I suck at texturing ).

I’m looking forward to meeting up with various of the #lugradio denizens again, although I’m a tad worried that since I’m on at the same time as The Angriest Man In The Universe some of my potential audience may be too intimidated to turn up to my talk .

Syndicated 2007-05-05 19:02:27 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff

Korenwolf

The Korenwolf (Corn Wolf) is a breed of wild hamster native to Belgium and some parts of Germany.

Syndicated 2007-01-02 00:05:50 from Michael Sheldon's Stuff