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Saturday, 17 December 2005

Created a skin for Wikipedia which makes is based on the default "Monobook" style, but gives greater width to the main content area.

Also enabled a 24MB swap partition on the MMC card: yes, flash memory cards have limited write cycles, but a) the card was free, b) the extra memory comes in handy.


Wednesday, 07 December 2005

Finally got my hands on my new Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (with no thanks to Expansys).

Testing it on the train was fun (I hate the sealed packaging which must be destroyed to get at the contents). Pairing using the btkeyboard plugin was straightforward once I found out how to get the keyboard into pairing mode (Ctrl+Fn+Fn FWIW). The 770 sits well into the phone holder, both with the cover on and off, although it's only as secure as with the Nokia-provided desk stand.

Once paired the application in the foreground needs to have some trigger to pick up the changed input method properly. Opening the system menu seems to do the trick, however it then works in all apps seemlessly (or will do once the patch from Matthew Allum for triggering input events when the keyboard is used is applied - having the screen dim every 30 seconds and then blank is somewhat irritating without it ;-))

Unfortunately, non-Hildonised apps still won't work with the keyboard - it's still at too high a level to work with the Citrix client. Using kbdd, as recently discussed on maemo-developers, should fix this as it's a kernel-level driver, rather than user-land.

At the moment, none of the "special" keys work, such as "menu" work, but that should be fixable with an .xmodmap. Otherwise, the layout's not too bad. Typing on it is certainly as good as on a netBook keyboard, although a lot of the Fn-based characters will take some getting used to. The only characters which don't work are the non-US currency symbols: £, € and ¥ - but again, this might be fixable with an xmodmap file.

Overall, I'm very impressed: I've got the flexibility of what people now call a &uquot;PDA" format (i.e. a tablet) and a full sun-notebook computer (such as the netBook).

Dad pointed me to the very-cool Pandora.com (which Damian then pointed out is "so last week" ;-/). You give it a song or artist you like and it uses the Music Genome Project to identify other songs that you may like based on the structure of your favourite. It then streams them to you in a very swish Flash player for your own personalised radio station, only playing the sort of music you like.

P.S. This was all typed on the keyboard into MaemoPad on the train :-)


Sunday, 04 December 2005

Birthday. Family round in evening for meal.

Also identified on #maemo that the Musgo ad-hoc wireless network which keeps defining itself is coming from Doom: even if you never use it in multiplayer mode.


Friday, 02 December 2005

A good day at work: a few core problems solved and then lots of plumbing to get a particular feature up and running which was nice and easy because of all the groundwork we put into having a decent framework architecture for the app.

At home, finishing installing the Maemo SDK (based on Scratchbox) on the Linux server: all went well, however it took a few seconds to dig out Simon's post about the home_ap_home_name issue. Then, I got a weird thing in both 1.1rc5 and 1.1rc7 using Xvnc to my Mac as the X display:

osso-xterm[7997]: GLIB WARNING ** default - Keycode not found for keyval ff8d

This appears in the console running Scratchbox when the virtual keyboard's <enter> is pressed. Odd.


Thursday, 01 December 2005

Nokia using Bugzilla to capture issues with the 770 is very encouraging. Unfortunately, however, the prevalence of bugs & RFEs being marked as "WONTFIX" [for the 770, but will consider for the next product] leave me wondering whether or not Nokia'll abandon it as soon as possible: for an updated version, or as a failed experiment. (For example, see Bug #207 and #275)

This'd be a shame, as the 770's a geek's heaven - and it could very easily be popular with non-geeks: David was particularly impressed whilst checking his Yahoo! Mail.

Last day in Redhill for a few weeks, but spent in bed with a bad head. Had a eureka-moment though about validation in a half-asleep, dream-like, drugged-up flash of inspiration.


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