Wine 1.3.8 debs

I've tried uploading Wine to extras now a couple of times, but the build crashes with some cryptic debhelper error that does not happen on my own scratchbox so it's a bit hard to debug. And it takes ages to build wine so debugging this is not funny at all.

Anyway, download wine 1.3.8 maemo packages here.

Anyone know how to get around this?

dpkg-shlibdeps: error: couldn't find library libwine.so.1 needed by debian/wine/opt/wine/lib/wine/notepad.exe.so (ELF format: 'elf32-littlearm'; RPATH: '').
Note: libraries are not searched in other binary packages that do not have any shlibs or symbols file.
To help dpkg-shlibdeps find private libraries, you might need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
dh_shlibdeps: dpkg-shlibdeps -Tdebian/wine.substvars debian/wine/opt/wine/lib/wine
... MANY DLL FILES ...
/bin/winegcc debian/wine/opt/wine/bin/wrc returned exit code 2
make: *** [binary-predeb-IMPL/wine] Error 9
dpkg-buildpackage: error: fakeroot debian/rules binary gave error exit status 2

Been coughing for a couple of weeks now

Yes, I think it started about 2 weeks ago, with the usual sore throat that I usually get when I catch a cold, even had a slight fever one Thursday and stayed home from work. But this is starting to really annoy me as I've been coughing really bad couple of nights, especially last night was terrible, I almost didn't sleep at all. I stayed home to rest.
Watched some arduino and other electronic clips on youtube, so not a total waste of time :)

I'm 33 now

So I'm 33 now, didn't even had a chance to celebrate it on the day (the 26th) as the workplace pikkujoulu was on the same day. My sweet girlfriend gave the best card possible, stating I'm 26 as really, that's how I feel. I really can't believe I'm already 3 years over 30.

abook-qrcode 0.4

Uploaded a new version (0.4) of abook-qrcode to extras-devel. Plenty of new exciting features! :)

Now instead of saving the QR Code directly, you will get a nice preview QR Code image that someone can read directly from the phone screen. From the menu you have the option to Save or Share. Share uses the N900 sharing service so you can send the QR Code as an e-mail, using bluetooth or any configured sharing service like Facebook or Ovi.

New release of QR Code contact export plugin (abook-qrcode)

abook-qrcode is an address book extension, for the N900, to export your contacts as vcards encoded in a QR Code image.
I uploaded a new release, version 0.3 of abook-qrcode and it is now in extras-testing for you testing pleasure. New in this version:

• Selection of location and filename of exported QR Code image
• Export enabled in "My information" too

Planned for the next version is the ability to import contacts from any image containing a QR Code.

Spare parts for 770, N800, N810 and N900

Someone was asking for where to get spare parts for the older tablets in Europe. Quick google did not find anything, but after digging I found one place. I am posting it here just in case anyone needs spare parts, and as a note to myself. So here.

Updated: 21.10.2011
Looks like the link when I posted this is broken, but the site has still spare parts available for all older tablets (770, N800, N810), and the N900 too.

Wasting time ranting and not doing it

This is just silly, the time used to rant about how hard it is could have been spent making the .deb. It is not that hard to create and you can always use another source deb as a template. There are plenty to choose from.

Wine 1.3.4 on arm (N900)

After reading the announcement of wine 1.3.4 and particularly this on winehq: "Winelib now supports the ARM platform" I just had to try it.

Builds fine in sbox, no problems there. Initial run takes a while of clicking on cancel as winedbg crashes but after that the built in programs runs, but the window manager is not doing such a great job with the wine windows and dialogs.

Screenshots of winemine below:

Update 15.10.2010:
Using desktop mode makes using wine much nicer and keyboard input works too. Running winecfg is a bit problematic as it won't fit the screen properly but editing ~/.wine/user.reg and adding the following lines in the end enables desktop mode:

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer] 1287126526
"Desktop"="Default"

[Software\\Wine\\Explorer\\Desktops] 1287126530
"Default"="800x480"

GPS information widgets

I've been busy with splitting out and rewriting the GPS information widgets from Mapper. I've also removed all the gdk rendering code and using cairo only.
Below is a screenshot from testing app:

Creating a large map from OpenStreetMap map tiles

We where planning at work to print large maps of the BSR on plywood and create a puzzle out of it, I think it was 1x1 meter. I made the following simple bash script to download and stitch the tiles using ImageMagick:

#!/bin/sh
#From
#http://c.tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/7/66/26.png
#To:
#http://b.tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/7/76/42.png
Z=7
URL=http://tile.cloudmade.com/fd093e52f0965d46bb1c6c6281022199/3/256/

download_tile() {
 FILE=tile_${x}_${y}.png
 if [ -r $FILE ]; then 
  echo .
 else
  curl --output tile_${x}_${y}.png ${URL}/${Z}/${1}/${2}.png
 fi
}

for ((x=66;x<77;x++)) do
  for ((y=26;y<43;y++)) do
   download_tile $x $y
   sleep 0.1
  done
  montage -geometry 256x256 -tile 1x17 tile_${x}* map_${x}.png
  sleep 1
done

Unfortunately printing and large sticker or directly on plywood was out of the budget so in the end it wasn't needed. The fallback was handpainting, not as accurate, but looks pretty good still.
Anyway, I post this tiny script in here in case someone else might need something like it as I didn't find anything suitable when I was searching for a quick and simple solution. The best would of course had been to create a custom map using mapnik and all that, but it would have take too much time (and I don't have any hardware to play with at work, only my laptop with a tiny disk)

Signatures

My workplace is tied to environment protection and such and I've been wondering now for a while now, how much resources are wasted on processing e-mail signatures? We have a policy to have all kinds of crap in the signature, about 25-30 lines... sigh, fortunately nobdy enforces it so my signature is a whopping 2 lines, but I digress.
Anyway, many thousands (millions?) of servers need to process e-mail all the time, checking for spam and filter to folders and so on. So if the body of the mail is 1-2 lines and the rest is just baggage, how much energy is now wasted just to move the useless signature around ? One e-mail may not be much, but when you think about how much e-mail is transferred all the time and going to many routers and servers. It must add up to quite a lot don't you think?

The problem with maemo (and meego in a way too)

I've been a happy user of both the original Nokia 770 tablet, the N810 and N900. From the point of view of a normal user I've been very happy with all of them, they have done what they promised and as a user I don't have that much to complain about. But..

As a developer I was drawn to the original tables as it was gobject/gtk+/gnome based with no bloat of C++ or some java stuff.
Made it easy to create software and somewhat easy to support both desktop and tablets in the same software, with some ifdeffing for maemo specific parts (gtk/hildon). That was more or less working in 2007-2008, but currently it's a blody mess.
Trying to support Gregale, Diablo, Fremantle and normal desktop gnome in the same app is these days such a pain that I've almost lost interest to do anything at all (one reason for Mapper developing at a snail pace currently).
Even Fremantle, that should use the latest technologies, (and Diablo) is stuck in the stone ages, gtk is in the 2.10 series (3-4 yeras old) Gregale is even worse with 2.6. Same with glib. Then we have gnome-vfs and gio mess.
And tablets specific Hildon changes, 3 almost compatible versions. Then we have 3-4 different UI styles to support.

And now upstream gtk+ is moving to version 3.0 and GNOME applications should move over to it. GConf is going to be deprecated with GSetting/dconf.

Now what the fuck are you supposed to do as developer wanting to support all tablets and desktop in the same app?

How to change hildon context menu content depending on context

Mainly as a reminder to myself, but if you need to change the content of a context menu set with gtk_widget_tap_and_hold_setup() connect the "show" signal and do you show/hide in the signal handler.

Create your menu, connect signal and setup tap-and-hold:

menu=GTK_MENU(hildon_gtk_menu_new());
g_signal_connect(G_OBJECT (menu), "show", G_CALLBACK(menu_items_visibility_cb), NULL);
gtk_widget_tap_and_hold_setup(widget, menu, NULL, 0);

Then in your handler, check what you need and hide/show menu items:

static void
menu_items_visibility_cb(GtkWidget *menu, gpointer data)
{
if (foo) gtk_widget_show(menu_item_foo); else gtk_widget_hide(menu_item_foo);
}

Mapper 1.0.6.7 released

Available now in extras-devel for both Diablo and Fremantle. Below some recent screenshots.
More information about Mapper can be found at its home page.

mod-support video

Below a short video demonstrating mod-support:

Hemsedal Panorama Wallpaper for the N900

I'm going to Hemsedal, (in Norway) next week with the Hupellus gang and I was checking out some of my pictures from the last trip in 2008 and I found out I had taken a nice panorama.

So I created a nice N900 wallpaper was made from it, you can find it in extras-devel now (and soon in testing too).

Easy wallpaper slicing for N900

First, create a 3200x480 png file (For 4 desktops), and using ImageMagick slice it up:

convert wp.png -quiet -crop 800x wp_%d.png

Or you can use this template makefile when your working on your wallpaper:

BASEIMAGE=wp

all: $(BASEIMAGE)_0.png

$(BASEIMAGE)_0.png: $(BASEIMAGE).png
 convert $(BASEIMAGE).png -quiet -crop 800x  $(BASEIMAGE)_%d.png

Mainframe in your pocket

I just uploaded hercules, an S/390 emulator, to extras-devel. Now you can enjoy your favorite mainframe operating system on your N900, N810 and N800, be it an original mainframe OS or Linux.

Below an screen shot of Slack/390 install disk booting up.

One of those weekends

It was one those weekends when everything get fucked-up one way or another. Or actually it started on Friday, at about noon. First some background:
I run my own two servers for everything, mail (with spam and virus checking), vhosts, mysql and postgresql, cvs and git repos, storage and stuff you might need for your generic home server. Also some friends have their mail and vhosts running on my servers. So a lot of stuff.

And everything important stored on RAID-1 and RAID-5 of course to be on the safe side. RAID-5 as you might know can suffer from 1 disk failure quite nicely, but 1 disk only.

And guess what happened on Friday? Simultaneous failure of 2 out of 3 disks on my primary server. Mail server is fortunately ok! And as there was waay too much stuff to backup anywhere properly, the last full backup of my /home (and cvs+git repos) was from 2008. A total disaster as you might imagine.

But, thanks to git all my source repositories are cloned here and there. So in that way nothing important got lost. Also I had almost stopped using CVS in 2007-2008 so the cvs backups from that era is pretty much ok. (And I had also move everything to git so no problem with that.) Work stuff I have on my work laptop anyway, so nothing work related got lost.

Still, getting everything up and will take some time. And the best of all I can't even live at home properly right now as the apartment house I'm living in is having a pipe renovation that will be ready after Easter, more about that in another post maybe.

Anyway, what this means is that my Mapper and TA-Linux sites will be more or less down until I get everything sorted.

gst-dmtx 0.10.3

New release of gst-dmtx out now. Major change is that buffers are handled in a thread so the pipeline won't stall if "skip" propery is set larger than 0. Set "skip=0" to use the old behavior, for example when analyzing a one buffer only image.

Get it here: gst-dmtx-0.10.3.tar.gz.

mydicto 1.0.1

Finaly uploaded to extras builder, a very simple application to record speech. Uses the libdicto library to do the actual work.
For now it supports recording, playback (with seeking), removing and sharing of recordings in fixed 8Khz, 16-bit, mono format.

Upcoming versions will have:

• format selection support
• recording of phone calls
• diablo and gregale (N8x0/770) support

libdicto & mydicto

For some time now Mapper has had integrated support for taking dictations that then can be used for example in JOSM when editing maps. The dictation component was quite generic so I split it out and made it into a library and widget that can be used in other applications.

libdicto repo can be found here and release here. I just uploaded 1.0.6 to maemo extras builder.

As the widget is quite generic I also made a simple dictation app for the N900 (and soon for the N800/N810/770 too), called mydicto. As soon as libdicto is built I'll upload mydicto to the builder too.