mod-support for the Nokia N900

For good old old-school demo/scene/etc music on your N900, install mod-support. Now with proper metadata extraction so the media player will show you titles (and creates a fake artists/album so all your mods go nicely into one "Album" for easy separation from those silly mp3s :)
Latest version is waiting to get built, should be available soon in extras-testing. Please vote on it so it gets into proper extras.
(While at it, I upgraded the libmodplug package and built it with proper optimizations and optification)

gst-dmtx 0.10.2

Tagged and released gst-dmtx 0.10.2, a gstreamer element for decoding datamatrix barcodes using libdmtx.
Download here: gst-dmtx-0.10.2.tar.gz

gstreamer + libdmtx = yay :)

I've been thinking about writing my first ever proper gstreamer element using libdmtx, it took a while to get there but now it finally works, see the screenshot:


Update:
Sources are available in my git repository.

N900 feature enchanments

Added some request to maemo bugzilla:

• #5378


• #5379

My Nokia N900

Maemo Summit 2009

I was lucky enough (sponsored, yay) to be able to attend Maemo Summit this year. The event was really nice and had many interesting talks and presentations. You can find a lot on the maemo wiki, pictures on flickr, tweets and blogposts. Just google and you will find.

The absolutely biggest surprise at the event was that everyone (well, 300 was given away) attending got a N900 for 6 months to play with. I didn't switch my SIM card directly so I first used it just like any of the older tablets. Now that I'm home again I switched over and using the N900 as my primary phone. One of the nicest phone related things are that Skype is now fully integrated with the rest of the telepathy stack and works just like, well, a normal cell phone. I tried it already at the summit (didn't work that well, the WiFi network was pretty overloaded I think). On the way back I tried is from the Helsinki airport and called my girlfriend, it was just perfect. Very nice indeed.

Anyway, I there are some bugs/strange/missing things that I will blog about later (and report to the maemo bugzilla).

I was also a good OpenStreetMapper and did some mapping at the summit venue (mentioned there too). Relating to OSM, Till Harbaum presented OSM2go and the OSM project in general, with some nice examples of why OSM rocks :) Look here (at about 10:45)

Tablet software idea

Fridge/Freezer inventory system, with barcode/qrcode scanning. Would need a bit of discipline, but would be handy checking at the store that "yes, we have fries in freezer", or "no, we don't have any frozen veggies" or "we xxx boxes of blueberries/mushrooms/etc left".

I came up with this idea when we started wondering what we have in the freezer as it's full of stuff but no idea what exactly. (We are thawing our freezer right now to get rid of all the ice and also check what it has eaten the last year or so.. :)

Sun tower

Some of my Sun workstations

Looking for new components for upgrade

Trying to find a nice new motherboard to go with a nice AMD Phenom II x4 is hard. I'd like to have one with NVIDIA SLI and DDR3 memory but no go. Any hints?

XP and proper drivers

I'm the fix-my-computer-please around here, and got to fix a friends XP on a laptop. Nothing special, after being quick enough to read the bluescreen that was displayed for under a second before rebooting... sigh. Anyway, a simple boot from XP CD, run chkdsk, reboot and it was ok again.

But then I just had to fix it a bit more because the person that had installed XP on it didn't install proper drivers for the display. And my friend had just wondered why her computer is so slow, for about half a year or so... nice going again M$, how about fixing your bundled drivers so people don't need to hunt around for stuff.

Mapper things

I've been working on a partial-rewrite/splitting of Mapper into libraries and components. Unfortunately it takes a bit more time than I have and delays releasing a Mapper 2.0, so I decided a couple of weeks ago to work a bit on the old Mapper branch instead and fix some of the most annoying bugs and add a couple of features to make it nicer to use.
A new release is already out, available at mapper.tal.org tablet repository. Sources can be there too for those who need them.

Oh, and I will probably release a new version today, fixing a couple of bugs in the above :)

N900 is out

And it looks really nice, I like. My good old N73 will be retired and I'll switch as soon as it's available. Release date seems to be October, but who knows when it is available in any stores around here.

Finding roads to map for OpenStreetMap

Even if there is still a lot of mapping to do here in Finland, we already have most of the major roads done. I at least are having a problem finding roads to map when I'm not driving just for mapping anymore.
For example, our family summer cottage is a 240km away from my home, and all the roads that it makes sense to drive trough have already been mapped. And it doesen't help that the fastest way is the E18, starting 100m from home and going almost straight to the summer cottage, with only about 7km of some smaller roads to drive so you tend to prefer that fastest route instead of smaller roads. Not that I personally don't like driving on them, it's the others in the car (read: girl friend :) that like to get there fast.
So I've been trying to find some way to get myself on smaller roads and I think I've found a nice way that also requires a GPS. And, you guessed it, it's geocaching! I try to look for caches in obscure places so that I need to drive on smaller roads. And the gf, not eager, but at least she likes geocaching and tags along.

Working around buggy ALi IDE on ultrasparc hardware

The Linux ALi IDE driver (at least 2.6.23) does not have a proper workaround for a hardware bug that makes DMA transfers sometimes produce garbage. The simple workaround to get these sparc up and running has been to boot with the "ide=nodma" kernel parameter. That is fine, but performance will really suck.
Anyway, I run my personal production mail, proxy, tunnel, build server on a Netra-AX and it has the buggy ALi IDE chipset. My first workaround was to just have the basic root system on a small IDE disk on the primary channel and all data disks on a SATA controller. This was alright for a while but on some heavy compilations and swapping made the system crawl. I had made the stupid mistake to put my swap on the no-dma disk, plus loading binaries and libraries from the nodma disk was slow. But what to do then ? The PROM will only boot from the internal IDE and I didn't like to move the system to another disk. Digging in my hardware stash I found a nice IDE-to-CF converter that can be plugged directly into the motherboard, plus a 32Mb CF card, just enough for a kernel or two. And the CF card is PIO only so the kernel handles it alright. So now I boot the system from the CF card and have the disk plugged into the external PCI IDE card.

N73 software update done

A short follow up to the earlier N73 update post. I was able to find a copy of XP and installed it on a old Athlon XP machine. First the updater just froze and I was already sure that I now have a nice black brick, but fortunately the phone booted with the old firmware still intact. Ok, second try: This time the update was uploaded properly and my phone was running the latest firmware. Oh joy! :D
But wait.. all didn't go well at first.. Nokia data restored ok, but after restarting the phone a got message like this "Phone startup failure." and it froze there. Fortunately a quick google found a "4 finger salute" reset operation that fixed the bootup. And skipping restoration of my previous settings made the phone finally work OK.

MySQL is teh shit or notes to self on how to fix dumps

Just a note to self:

Notes on Importing mysql database dumps:
When using InnoDB tables to get a proper database disable foreign keys when importing:
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;

ERROR 1005 (HY000): with error number 139
A Text/Blob field has a too large index prefix in CREATE TABLE