Older blog entries for pycage (starting at number 38)

Boldog új évet!

I have spent the last few days in Hungary visiting a friend in Szeged. She and her family were originally from Siebenbürgen (better known as Transylvania), so I had the chance to taste both, Hungarian and Transylvanian food. It was very tasty!

Unfortunately the weather was cold and bad, but still it was a great week with sight seeing, ice skating (I managed to learn it without falling), cinema (German movie with Hungarian subtitles), music concert, Silvester party, etc.

Budapest is also a very beautiful city, but I better come back when it's summer to not get wet feet again. :D

gDesklets now in Fedora

Thanks to Luya Tshimbalanga, I can happily announce that gDesklets is now officially in Fedora Extras for all supported architectures!

Now with our shiny new website, this very comprehensive Developer's Book, and even a handy printed reference (still in German only, sorry), what are you waiting for? :)

I am still planning to bring gDesklets to the Nokia 770 in some form. Maybe as a simple way to create your own home screen applets. That would require a slimmed down version of the core, which could also become the base for gDesklets 0.40.

DVDs on Train

I successfully tested my Nokia 770 for watching DVDs on long train trips. With a 512 MB memory card you can take two DVDs encoded in reasonable quality for the 770's screen with you. The screen is actually big enough for watching movies comfortably; and with headphones, you don't annoy the others. Battery life is not an issue as you can watch several movies with a full charge.

My next train trip will be to Hungary, so I'm looking for some DVD to purchase for that.

White Christmas?

Experience shows that while we usually have a green Christmas in my area, there's always quite some snow a week before; today as well. Maybe we should have Xmas one week earlier here. ^^;

GNOME vs KDE

In other news, Linus Torvalds was trolling about GNOME. I wouldn't have expected such dumb statements by Linus, but who cares? His domain is the kernel, and I don't care about what desktop he uses.

My preference still is GNOME because I can use the apps without needing a map and GPS to find the options I'm looking for. Nonetheless, KDE has some good applications, and a more mature VFS layer (more responsive, more stable).

I'm sometimes impressed by KDE's enthusiasm and technology, but disappointed by how they put it all under a IMHO sick overloaded user interface design. Maybe the ideal desktop would be a KNOME, featuring KDE's quick progress and technology along with GNOME's clean design. But that isn't going to happen soon, and diversity is good.

I'm sure GNOME is on the right path and 2.14 will rock!

The Hidden Feature

One of the most criticised issues about the Nokia 770's browser is that the cursor keys jump from link to link instead of scrolling the page. Thus scrolling requires using the touch screen.

However after getting home tonight, I took my 770 and fired up WLAN to read some news and planet.gnome.org on the bed. This page requires lots of scrolling and by coincidence I somehow found out that the cursor keys can be used for scrolling. You simply have to hold down the key. To sum it up: short key presses jump from link to link, while holding down the keys scrolls the page in all four directions.

This makes surfing with the 770 a bit more comfortable. And since I can use my finger to click URLs, the stylus isn't needed for websurfing at all. That's the way it should be. A great surfing experience! :)

New gDesklets Site

Thanks to our sponsor VidaLinux and our web designer, we finally have the new gDesklets site online. It's still in a testing state, though. It's usable already, but strange things might happen. ;)

For the time being, the official gDesklets site remains gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org until www.gdesklets.org will be ready.

Ogg Vorbis Player

I have just released version 0.12 of my Ogg Vorbis player for the Nokia 770. Seeking in streams has been implemented. The next version might already feature [play] and [stop] buttons. :)

Xiph.org

My Ogg Vorbis player caught the interest of Xiph.org (the home of Ogg Vorbis). So it is going to be hosted there. That's great! :)

Ogg Again

It's been a week since I last touched my Nokia 770 Ogg player code. Now I switched from libao to SDL (which is an integral library of the 770 anyway) for audio output, and CPU load fell down to 5% - 20% for Ogg Vorbis playback (44.1 KHz, stereo, ~200Kbps). This is getting better and better. :)

The first installer-ready Oggplayer release seems to be just around the corner. After that I'm gonna add some more features like seekable streams and some control buttons.

The VESA Trick

Today I gave my talk on my thesis. And as expected, the beamer didn't like my notebook, or the Xorg radeon driver. Luckily, from last GUADEC, I know the trick to fix this problem: switch to the VESA driver!

Autotools broke my App

Now that my thesis talk is over, I want to get out a release of my Ogg Vorbis player for the Nokia 770. So I took my code and autotoolized it. Strangely enough, it compiles fine, but crashes when loading any file. I traced this problem back to the Tremor decoder, and even a simple Tremor test program crashed when compiled with autotools. I'm still investigating what autotools did wrong... or what I forgot to add, perhaps... :/

More Ogg

After spending some time on threads-tweaking, I finally got a reasonable CPU load between 15% and 30% for Ogg Vorbis playback on the Nokia 770. Two ring buffers are doing a great job decreasing the CPU load and ensuring fluent playback. :)

My Ogg player is currently just a simple GUI without much functionality except for opening a file using the file chooser. But now that the threading stuff looks fine, I will work on the GUI. Maybe I can get out a first release before the weekend.

Btw, my Ogg player is only meant as a temporary solution until the Nokia 770 will be able to playback Oggs using its DSP. Rumour has it that Nokia is working on this. The player is just a good exercise for me to learn developing for the maemo platform.

Tremor for my Nokia 770

The Nokia 770 cannot play OGG Vorbis files. With the CPU being a 220 MHz ARM processor lacking a FPU, it's not strong enough for that. So cross-compiling ogg123 did not bring fluent playback.

Fortunately, there exists an alternative OGG decoder, called Tremor, which uses only integer arithmetic. So I wrote a little C program using Tremor, and voilà, OGG playback is technically possible on the little device! top showed a load of 20% for the OGG decoder in CD quality.

My implementation uses only the CPU. But as the Nokia 770 also has a DSP, OGG decoding could be implemented much more efficient (and thus less battery-draining). This little hour of hacking showed that Nokia has no valid reason for not providing OGG support on the device! Let's complain! :)

I guess, I'll add a little GUI and make an installer package since so many people desire OGG support.

Thesis Talk

Next Friday I have to give a talk on my thesis. LyX in conjunction with the LaTeX beamer package looks like a good tool. I already wrote my thesis with LyX; it rocks!

r00t

Found a way to become root on my N770 without patching the firmware. Now I can break everything I want! Scary... *g*

My first N770 App

Without any modifications gDeskCal is running on the N770. Now I have to "hildonize" it, i.e. use Hildon widgets to match the device's look & feel. Right now it's just a very tiny white box with a calendar in it where I can add/edit/remove appointments.

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