Andrew's diary

Thursday, 30 November 2006

So, Canola has been released. Has a quick play before work. In summay, quite nice: the user interface is quick. It didn't detect the UPnP AV server from MythTV (unlike Nokia's Media Streamer which allows browsing, but no playback - "Object not found"); however for the videos, music and pictures I've already got on the device, it seems to work quite well. Streaming and podcasts are interesting features which I didn't have much time to play with.

Managed to get it to crash when trying to browse the two MP3s I've got on my MMC card by genre (I don't think they got any defined). Finally, pressing the home key and then trying to go back into Canola (whilst it was searching for shared music) was very slow, and resulted in a black, unresponsive window; although it was only Canola having problems: everything else seemed fine.

More worryingly is the configuration/indexing daemon which runs at start-up and opens a web server on port 9000, bound to 0.0.0.0. I've raised an issue in their bug tracker, and it's going to be changed to just bind to localhost.

Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Since my Sony Ericsson T630's screen's backlight has broken, and my contract is due for renewal in a couple of months, I've started looking at new phones and contracts. Mobile Checker is very cool for finding the cheapest total price deals for a given phone; but you need to know what you want.

Lots of checking on GSM Arena and a couple of visits to mobile phones shops has me down to two at the moment: the Sony Ericsson W850i and the Samsung E900. My main requirements are for a decent phone, loud ringtone, good for text messages, Bluetooth for data and headsets. I don't really care about MP3 players (Gmini does that) or cameras (camera does that); however something other than a "candy bar" form factor appeals for aesthetic reasons.

The Samsung has EDGE (which apparently Orange has available in some areas), whereas the W850i has 3G (much better for data with my Nokia 770). The W850i is also very similar to David's K800i - which I know has a good UI and OS.

Canola - the extremely hyped Nokia 770 "media centre" is supposed to be launched today - no sign of it by the end of today UK time. Although I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll release it by the end of the day Brazil time; given they say it's all ready, though, that just seems to be a way of garnering extra hype.

Tuesday, 28 November 2006

Engadget has some more photos on the Nokia 770 successor, being called the "870". I like the built-in stand, but I'd agree with others: I'd rather have better (improved/optimised) software + same CPU + more battery life than same software + faster CPU + shorter battery life.

Sunday, 26 November 2006

Moved my Sylpheed patches to Subversion: hopefully I'll be able to merge changes upstream to the trunk to keep up to date. Instead of an external pointing at their repository, each time I'm going to sync with a major release, I'll unpack their tarball over the top of branches/upstream, first removing any files with something like:

find . -wholename '.*/\.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec rm {} \;

Any files which are then "missing" should be deleted, any files which are "unknown" should be added.

Updated 2006 OS/Maemo 2.1 deb package and screenshots on my Nokia 770 page.

For the record, eSVN seems to be the most TortoiseSVN-like GUI client on Linux, which I find easiest when reviewing which files to commit/revert/ignore.

Wednesday, 22 November 2006

Moved with work from dismal Redhill to sunny Watford. A nice and easy commute in the morning (07:05 from Rugby arrives Watford Junction around 07:45); unfortunately the return leg is a little longer (18:11 arrives 19:30ish with a 5 minute layover in Northampton). If you take into account the Tube if I was in London, it works out about the same, I suppose.