Older blog entries for pycage (starting at number 27)

Impressions of the Nokia 770

Now that I had chance to play around with the new geek toy, here are my impressions:

• Connecting to WLAN is a matter of two clicks. That's plug'n play! :)
• The screen is incredibly sharp and has a 800x480 widescreen on the area of two matchboxes. The contrast is great and you can actually use the device in bright sunlight, where most LCDs fail horribly!
• The stylus is a simple piece of plastic, yet it is a good pen for clear handwriting. This makes the handwriting recognition actually useful, after you got used to it. You can write several words at once and the device tries to guess the characters. The more you practise a clear handwriting, the less mistakes the Nokia makes. If you spot a mistake, just write over the wrongly recognized letter again to correct it. That way you can even insert spaces or delete characters by crossing them out. However, the writing area is limited and only fits two or three words at once. Because of ambiguities you have to manually switch between alphanumerical and special characters modes. If your handwriting doesn't fit the predefined rules, you can teach the device your own rules.
• Controlling the device with the stylus is comfortable but some of the hardware buttons (especially the cursor keys) are awkward to use. They are bad for controlling action games.
• Without zooming in, websites are readable, but most often damn tiny. The Opera browser can either zoom the whole contents (excluding flashs), or just increase the size of characters while still horinzontally fitting the page on screen.
• The browser can only display latin and cyrillic characters. It's currently useless for browsing Asian websites.
• The device seriously lacks RAM and the software isn't rock stable. I saw the desktop hang or crash rather often. Nokia definitely has to work on this! The system also seems to leak memory.
• The speaker is tiny but has a good quality for its size. It sounds better than the speakers of my current laptop. Together with a comfortable "just-works" internet radio "desklet" (yes, the N770 desktop comes with some desktop applets) the device is good for radio streams. Earphones can be connected as well.
• Although the audio player uses gstreamer, it cannot play OGG Vorbis. :(
• I have installed a X terminal and can now explore the filesystem. Rumour had it that the root password was "rootme" but that doesn't work on my device. I guess I have to learn to build .debs to replace "/etc/sudoers" with no-password sudo access for the user.
• I wish the device had a SSH daemon. Using the shell with the on-screen keyboard isn't much fun.
• Battery life is rather short. Especially if you are connected to the net. But putting the protective case over the screen, the device automatically goes into standby mode from which it recovers in less than a second. Nokia states that the battery lasts 7 days in standby mode.
• The applications included are: audio-player, video-player (Helix-based, sometimes states that the file format of the bundled IceAge2 trailer is unsupported, but can play it if you click on play again), RSS news reader, photo viewer (awkward to use), PDF reader (not tested yet), file manager (simple but functional), control center, calculator, world time clock, notepad (for writing simple texts), paint program (comparable to MS paint on diet, but actually useful with the stylus), games (chess, solitary mahjong, a sokoban clone), a search tool for finding your files, a slow help browser comparable to yelp, Opera web browser, a tiny email tool with address book for sending and receiving mails, desktop applets (internet radio, clock, rss reader, quick internet access (simply opens www.nokia.com).

Apparently the device isn't a good replacement for a PDA or a tablet PC, but it does work well for the task it was designed for: browsing the web and sending/receiving emails at public WLAN hotspots (or anywhere else, if paired with a bluetooth-capable cell phone). It yet has to be found out for what else it can be useful, though. :)

When Deadlines rise from the Dead...

It's almost Halloween/Samhain and even deadlines begin to rise from their graves. The submission deadline for the PEPM06 paper has been prolongated until today and I was asked to submit more test results. That was time-consuming work with academic software, which only works in theory (pun intended). ;)

Living la Vida Linux

I'm getting paid for adjusting Redhat's Anaconda installer to work well with gentoo-based VidaLinux OS. If the next release of VLOS installs very smoothly, you know who to thank. :)

I never thought that I would ever install a time-consuming gentoo, until VLOS came around and convinced me. It isn't even time-consuming but works out of the box!

Nokia 770

Like many other GNOMErs around the world, I finally received my Nokia 770 internet tablet with developer discount today. And it's good to know that Nokia is donating my EUR 100 to the GNOME foundation.

The tablet is a nice toy; now I have a compelling reason for buying a WLAN router. If I find time, I'll take a closer look at the maemo development platform for this device soon. I guess it's only a matter of time until I will port gDesklets and maybe gDeskCal to this device in some form.

In Print

The book Exploring Python which has a chapter written by me is currently in print. It will be released in early November by Software & Support Verlag GmbH. Put it on your Xmas wishlist! :D

Thesis and Paper

After months of work I finally finished my university thesis on dynamic path conditions in dependence graphs. I still have to give a talk about it but the date is yet unknown. I expect it to be sometime in late November / December. It's also great that the chair where I wrote the thesis want to hand it in for the upcoming PEPM 06 conference in South Carolina in January. I was invited to contribute to the paper as well and hope my contributions will be useful. Thanks and good luck with PEPM 06, guys! The call for papers ends in a few hours.

GNOME 2.12 and VLOS - A Dream Team!

After finishing my thesis, i thought it would be a good time to upgrade my old Fedora Core 3 box. It's now running a nice VLOS with a fresh GNOME 2.12 on it. Within almost one week of desktop uptime, nautilus did not even crash once on me. GNOME 2.12 is a great and stable release. Things just work! Congrats to all GNOME hackers! :D

Now I'd love to go on holidays, but work calls, and it's calling loudly. So I have to postpone holidays until I can afford them.

gDesklets and my Book

It's also time to resume work on gDesklets again. Before the 0.36 release, I want to make some 0.35.x releases with code and performance improvements.

If you speak German, there will be a printed book covering desklet development available in November. I have contributed a gDesklets chapter to Exploring Python, a new Python book for advanced programmers. My first book contribution! Please be so nice and buy it, if you can read German. Thanks! :)

A Great Day for Democracy!

Today the European Parliament had the guts to act in the sense of democracy and reject the proposed software-patents regulation, which on its way clearly showed up a fascistic dark side of a Europe regulated by big global companies!

Many people don't even know about this war for democracy which lasted three years, but we should let them know that today is not only a great day for us, but for the democracy in Europe! I hope to at least see a news about it on mainstream TV this evening. Only if the people know the disadvantages of the current EU, they can raise their voice to improve it.

Steps which should follow IMHO:

• Investigation of the whole procedure by independent organizations. Why did the regulation come that far without a majority and without democracy?
• A new democratic constitution which people can actually take a look into before they're asked to vote.
• A reorientation of the EU. The current system is not a good example of democracy. Europe must be about people, not about interests of American companies which fear competition.

No Software-Patents?

Remember that today is not a big day against SW-patents. It's a big day for democracy. There's still no regulation about SW-patents to either rule them out or restrict them. Today's rejection only means that it's still left to the EU patents office to accept or deny SW-patents (they already accepted more than 30,000). Europe needs a clear regulation regarding SW-patents, but a good one, which doesn't leave much room for interpretations.

Bribery?

The EU council always stated that they do not want the American patents mess in Europe. The parliament was trying to improve the proposed regulation to exactly rule that out. Why did the council then harshly reject these improvements? Did the council tell lies? Was it bribery? Have they been blackmailed like Denmark claims it had been blackmailed by Microsoft? What has happened? It's time for investigations now.

The world from above

Google Maps now covers many parts of the planet with sattelite images. I tried to visit the beautiful places where I have been last year once again. It's surprisingly easy to find places you already know on a sattelite map. The sattelite images are often blurry and low resolution only, but Beijing was amazingly sharp (just take a look at the Tiananmen Square to count people). Military reasons?

This is what I have found so far.

Microsoft presents IE 7

Firefox, is that you?! :D

Time to hurry

I have to finish my thesis this semester. Taking another semester is not an option for me since it would cost 500 Euros of tuition fee. There used to be no tuition fee in Germany; now Bavaria has them in some cases (which apply to me) "thanks" to our "brilliant" right-wing party leader of Bavaria... :(

I planned to finish it in summer anyway, so there shouldn't be a problem with tuition fee. :)

It has been a very long time since my last blog. I was busy working on my Diploma Thesis (the German equivalent for Master's Thesis) the last few months, and am still working on it for some weeks.

Talk

This year I've been to GUADEC again. About 1 1/2 weeks before the event Dave Neary asked me if I wanted to replace Sandino Flores Moreno from Novell because he couldn't come. He wanted to give a talk about PyGTK, libglade, and his new code generator. Being quite familiar with PyGTK, I said yes and prepared a talk for GUADEC.

The "Haus der Wirtschaft" where GUADEC took place was equipped with lots of beamers who had problems with Radeon graphics chips. They didn't recognize the resolution and always fell back to 640 x 480. My presentation desklet wouldn't have any problems scaling down to that resolution, but there seems to be a strange bug in gDesklets which prevented me from using full-screen mode in 640 x 480 resolution for my slides. So I decided to talk without slides. From what people have told me, the talk still went fine without slides; the major part of my talk was a live demonstration anyway. You can find my slides for download at http://www.gdesklets.org/~pycage/rad-slides.tar.bz2, though. The PyGTK people also want me to add it to www.pygtk.org. I'll do that soon.

Lightning Talks

This year's GUADEC introduced "Lightning Talks" which are actually very cool. Every participant gets 5 minutes to present a project, and may answer one question from the audience. That way you get to learn a lot of new projects in a short amount of time. Our gDesklets talk was the first, so I think people will remember that well. The gDesklets lightning talk went very well. We talked about what gDesklets is and about our plans for the future, esp. about the keybindings stuff.

That nifty Nokia device

The Nokia 770 is an internet and multimedia tablet which is based on Linux (Debian) and GNOME technology. Nokia arrived with an army of about 20 people at GUADEC to introduce and demonstrate this toy. The best part is that Nokia encourages hacking this device and provides a SDK for free.

So, when are we going to see gDesklets running on it? I'm pretty confident that it will happen this year! :)

I had lots of chance to play with the N770. At first at the speakers-only Nokia-Party one day before GUADEC started, and later at GUADEC in Nokia's VIP room.

More about the N770

The N770 is an internet tablet with 64 MB RAM driven by a Strong ARM processor. It's a lightweight device flat as a matchbox and about the size of an O'Reilly pocket reference book. Its display is quite big and very sharp with a fine resolution. Under the hood there was a Debian Linux with 2.6.12rc2 kernel and some patches and proprietary drivers. The user interface was GTK with additional widgets (LGPL) on the matchbox window manager.

My points of criticism are the loooong booting time (Nokia is working to improve this) and the fact that the battery only lasts for about three hours. Also, the system lacks memory and feels a bit slow. Handwriting recognition had problems with my handwriting also, but that might be because of my handwriting. ;)
The device can play videos with RealPlayer but it's not too smooth.

However, since the device is still in beta-stage, and since this is the first device of its kind, there is hope for improvements. :)

Python on the N770

At GUADEC party I had plenty of time to talk to Nokia's Python guy, who is from Germany. They got Python running on the device and are currently in the process of porting PyGTK, gnome-python, and making Python bindings for their Hildon widgets. Nokia is very eager to have Python on this device!

Some strange meat

Some of us GUADEC people have been to "Sidney", an Australian restaurant in Stuttgart. There they were serving strange meat such as kangarooh, emu, or crocodile. I haven't tasted emu, but kangarooh is very tasty. Crocodile is also good and a bit like fish (it's a scaly reptile after all).

Looks like advogato.org doesn't accept inline photos. So I'll just link to them.

Shanghai at night

This is Shanghai at night as I could see it from the hotel room. The night can turn even a dirty city into a beautiful place.

Sunset at the West-Lake in Hangzhou

The air at the famous West-Lake of Hangzhou was always crowded by lots of bats in the evening.

One of my room mates

I don't know exactly what this was, but it was sitting in the bathtub in my room in Hangzhou one morning.

Another one of my room mates

This was found a few days later beneath the sink in the bathroom. I guess it's the sexual counter part of the previous fellow.

On the train to Xi'an

What a comfortable place to sleep. It had 30°C in there.

A sign at the Great Wall

Rubbish will never be homeless!

I still have to blog about my last two weeks in China. :)

The train to Xi'an

The city of Xi'an is about 2000km away from Hangzhou. We went there by train and it took 25 hours. We were lucky to get a sleep wagon, because those who buy their tickets too late have to sit on a very dirty floor full of spit and waste.

The beds in the wagon were not really comfortable. Basically it was a hard plank bed covered by a blanket. In every position I tried, some part of my body began to hurt after a few minutes. Additionally to that, it was loud in the wagon and we had 30 degrees centigrade in it. However, the service on train was good: they sold food, beverages, toys, they even had a VCD player for rent.

Xi'an

Xi'an was the first capital of China in the Qin-Dynasty and is a historic city with a still complete city wall. The city itself, however, was boring and ugly.

The site of the Terracotta-Army is located near the city and was flooded with many many tourists, of course. The salesmen of tourist crap (fake Rolex, Mao watches, mini terracottas, ...) were very aggressive here and even pulled people's arms to get their attention.

In the centre of Xi'an, there is a big bazaar of muslim people at the Great Mosque of Xi'an. You can buy almost everything there from Chinese paintings, fake brand clothes or back packs to red Mao Zedong alarm clocks where instead of the seconds hand, Mao is waiving his hand at you.

We could not really enjoy Xi'an, since rain was pouring every day (except for the day of our departure, of course).

You are tourists! Receive our special treatment.

Travel agencies have contracts with certain so-called "factories". The tourist guide has to drag the tourists in there in order to receive a required token. Such a "factory" is nothing more than a place made for tourists where they demonstrate how certain wares, e.g. jade items, are produced. After a few minutes of demonstration, they lead you into their sales rooms where they want to you to buy their stuff (credit cards accepted, shipping of large items to your house by airmail). They sometimes have a restaurant room with tourist food, too.

The historic museum of Xi'an (what a boring place!) has two entries: a normal one for visitors, and a special one for tourist groups. The one for tourist groups first leads you through a sales room filled with tourist crap, of coure.

Off to the capital

The last location of our journey through China was Beijing, the capital. It took 12 hours on the overnight train to get there from Xi'an. This time, the wagon was a bit more modern with softer plank beds. I could even sleep in there. We arrived in Beijing at 6.30 in the morning.

Our hotel is Beijing was OK, but not as great as the one which we had in Xi'an. This time the hotel personell was a bit unfriendly and even the breakfast tasted as if it was prepared by unfriendly people. The bathtub in the room of two girls looked like somebody was slaughtered in there. Luckily just across the road in front of our hotel, there were a big shopping mall, McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks Coffee.

We had fine weather in Beijing and Beijing is a really beautiful city, unlike ugly Xi'an. :)

The Great Wall

The Simatai section of the Great Wall is about 3 hours away from Beijing. The wall there is steep and has not been reconstructed. Because it's so steep, tourist groups (which often consist of elderly people) don't go there. We were almost alone on the wall. Wonderful!

The Simatai Wall lies beautifully in the mountains and you can watch the wall reaching to the horizon across the mountains. Every three or four people got a local guide with them because of safety reasons (the real reason was that they wanted to sell you books and T-shirts, of course). But those poor women didn't know that we have climbed the Yellow Mountain earlier. A steep Chinese Wall could not shock us anymore, so we were too fast for our guides, wo had problems following us. :D

Food Time

There was a street in Beijing with lots of food booths all selling different types of "Shashlik". For instance, you could eat chicken on a pole, beef on a pole, pork on a pole, chicks on a pole, fried rats on a pole, tentacles, silk worms, dog meat, grass hoppers, sea stars, sea horses, snake, snake skin, frogs, fruits, or the "goat soup of whole internal organs". Yummy! Too bad I already had dinner at Pizza Hut before, so I couldn't taste any "specialties". *g*

After having visited and photographed those boothes, I went went to Karaoke with three others. It was fun for 14 Yuan (1.40 EUR) per person per hour.

Back Home

I'm back in Germany now for already more than two weeks. It was damn cold when I came home, so I immediately caught a cold here. China was so comfortably warm.

Next time, I'll try to blog some photos.

More from my days in China.

Hello

Parents often thinks its funny to educate their little children to say "Hello!" to foreigners. This might be cute for little children, but when teenagers or grown-up people do this with falling in laughter after, it's just silly. As a foreigner, many people stare at you.

Exams

We had an exam for our Chinese course yesterday. I scored quite well and thus am happy. Tomorrow we'll receive our certificates.

Leaving Hangzhou

I'll be leaving the city of Hangzhou on Thursday. The next destination will be Xi'an, after some 25 hours on train. The weather is making it easy for us to leave. It's been raining for days. A typhoon hit ZheJiang province recently, so maybe some rain is caused by this. The typhoon didn't hit Hangzhou, though.

I'm still in Hangzhou, China.

What Hangzhou is Famous for

Welcome to the London of the East. After some days of rain, our Chinese teacher told us that Hangzhou indeed is famous for its rain. Ouch!

Food

We're all totally fed up with Chinese food. Went to Restaurant Muenchen (Munich) two days ago. Although they didn't have German food, they had Western food (Pizzas, Spaghettis, Steaks). It was great there. Yesterday I was at the Irish Pub in Hangzhou. They are quite expensive but have great food there. Aah, what a delicous plate of fresh salad (you usually don't get such a thing in China). The Hamburger was tasty, too.

I bought potatoe chips/crackers with Sushi flavour some days ago. You never find such curiosities in good ol' Europe.

I tasted a chicken claw last weekend. It turned out to be delicious having the best meat of the chicken.

What's GPL in Chinese?

I found an English-Chinese dictionary for IT vocabulary yesterday. It even has entries for "Linux", "GPL", or "KDE". There is no entry for "GNOME", though. How unfair!

What a Waste of Time

There was an excursion to a joint venture in Hangzhou on our program. We visited the CocaCola Company there. What a waste of time! After a free coke and a short summary of the history of CocaCola and some international and national TV ads for CocaCola, they showed us a small part of their production halls, and that was it. It was quite dissappointing.

Economy

We had a lecture about Chinese economy and law this afternoon. After some discussion with the professor, we realized that the current socialistic market economy in China is less socialistic than in many European countries. Funny!

Photos?

I was asked about adding photos to my diary entries. In fact, I have made lots of photos, but I can't upload them in the internet cafe here. The photos will become available online when I'm back home in Germany. Be patient.