Advogato blog for mallum

26 May 2005

Thu, 26 May 2005 00:08:43 GMT

Stop the press !! I've moved my blog here; http://butterfeet.org/blog

2 May 2005

Mon, 2 May 2005 23:17:56 GMT

Me Too!

3 Nov 2004

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 10:32:11 GMT

I have been doing some major reworking of matchbox wm internals specifically the window stacking and focusing code. Much of the code for doing this kind of stuff was really basic and unchanged since very early matchbox versions. With handhelds nowadays having quite largeish resolutions, people have room for more complex multiple dialog setups ( rather than the single dialog per app palm os type model matchbox originally aimed at ). The old code, though it worked, just didn't work that well imho. The rework has made something more flexible and powerful yet so far uses less code. So I guess the amount of time and pain involved to get the rework done has been worth it... Expect it in the upcoming mb 0.9 release ( with other goodies ).

The Firefox Live-CD appears to be using matchbox - cool!

SoftGun is an interesting, linux booting, software emulated piece of ARM hardware.

Nokia are looking to hire GNOME/freedesktop.org hackers. Jobs ads here and here.

1 Sep 2004

Wed, 1 Sep 2004 14:57:22 GMT

Thought it was about time I posted a diary entry with some of the newer stuff I've been hacking on in the last few months.

DidiWiki is a tiny (25k) self contained simple wiki engine. It has its own webserver and is written in c. Its pretty useful it you want something for keeping notes etc thats sharable between machines and is very simple to setup ( just compile and run, theres no deps other than a libc ).

Yesterday I committed some new kdrive stuff into freedesktop. kdrive now does XRECORD which is needed for things like Xnee ( useful for automated testing ). More interestingly I also committed a new kdrive backend - Xephyr. It basically uses a window on a host X server as its framebuffer. kind of like xnest but with support for modern extensions like randr, composite etc. Heres a quite large screenshot of lots of Xephyr's in action.

Matchbox work recently has been mainly small fixes and minor new features as I try and get things super nice for nearing 1.0 release. One new thing I wrote is matchbox-nest which provides a definable graphical ( with working buttons! ) background around Xnest ( or Xephyr ) - its basically a cheap handheld or whatever device 'simulator'. screenshot and Source.

Picked up the pony from the mechanics today - no more annoying gearstick rattle - but will it get me to France this weekend ?

7 Jul 2004

Wed, 7 Jul 2004 10:25:43 GMT

woohoo advogato back :-)
Now running a linkblog too, http://del.icio.us/mallum .

14 Apr 2004

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 15:46:57 GMT

Some more quick hackings for the mighty fine treo 600 - treo-grab-calls.c pulls the call logs from the phone and dumps them as csv data to stdout.

10 Apr 2004

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 20:42:29 GMT

Hacked a little code today to pull images off a Treo 600 camera phone ( nice piece of kit ). The code is here . You'll need the pilot link libs for it to work.

22 Mar 2004

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 18:03:35 GMT

Uploaded a few updated Matchbox packages. Nothing really new, just fixes to oddities in the 0.8 release.

Have my module based X Proxy now basically working. The only pluggin so far is a little Xauth spoofer. Finding it hard to motivate myself to do much more on it :(

Autotooled Xtst for freedesktop.org xlibs . The matchbox test stuff and the badly in need of some love, 'xkbd' both need it.

Nokia have an interesting software developer position ( url correct now ).

11 Mar 2004

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:52:30 GMT

Some random linkage for today;

Socket now have a Cordless Serial Adapter with Bluetooth . Could be fun to connect with my stinger serial joystick and ipaq.

New mobile computing have Interview with Doug Turner and Chris Hofmann of the Minimo Project . Minimo totally rules especially with it small screen rendering. I really hope GPE start including it in images for high end ipaqs. It royally trumps dillo.

9 Mar 2004

Tue, 9 Mar 2004 20:59:37 GMT

Finally got round to uploading my fosdem 'X Not on the desktop' slides .

On Sids demand got Sky+ installed yesterday which is basically the closest thing to Tivo here in the UK. It works pretty good, though Sid wasn't so impressed when I childishly set it to record all the adult channel 10 minute freeviews.

I also got a netgear me101 wireless bridge so I can reconnect up the mini-itx based mediabox to the TV and catch up on bittorrented 24 episodes missed whilst in the dial up wilderness. Cant seem to get dhcp to work through the bridge though which is odd as everything else seems fine.

Started hacking a simple 'plugin' based X Proxy to experiment with various ideas. Plugin ideas include; 'Allow XYZ to use this display' GUI tool, SSL ( though xlib would need hacking too ), mDNS support ( via howl ), compression, filtering etc ... We'll see how it goes.

Hopefully get a matchbox 0.8.1 release out towards the end of the week with various minor fixes.