Salvatore Iovene

One lit­tle known new fea­ture of Maemo5 PR1.2 is the sup­port for cus­tom smi­lies in Con­ver­sa­tions (<bragging>which I implemented</bragging>).

I have made a smi­ley theme based on Tango icons, but it’s not yet in the repos­i­to­ries. Here’s what it looks like:

Tango smi­lies

You can install it by down­load­ing this file: conversations-tango-smilies_0.1_all.deb, and copy­ing it over to your N900.

Then open an X-Terminal, become root and do:

cd /home/user/MyDocs
dpkg -i conversations-tango-smilies_0.1_all.deb

Once it’s fin­ished, switch to Con­ver­sa­tion, go to Set­tings, and you will have a new but­ton, called Smi­leys theme. You can select your newly installed Tango theme.

Note: the theme will not work with SMSs and Skype chats. All the other accounts, and SMSs, will use the new theme.

After set­ting the new theme, go to an IM con­ver­sa­tion and see if the new icons are in the smi­ley picker. If not, a reboot should do.

Enjoy!

Tweakr has been finally pro­moted to Maemo Extras, check it out at http://maemo.org/downloads/product/Maemo5/tweakr/.

You can now eas­ily install it from the App. man­ager. I’ll write up a new tuto­r­ial some­day soon.

Hi. I have released tweakr 0.0.16, which you should be able to install from Maemo Test­ing in a mat­ter of min­utes. A cou­ple of bugs fixed and the Silent pro­file hard­coded is what’s new. Update!

Hi, a quick update on Tweakr: it has now been pro­moted to extras-testing, since the reboot loop bug (thanks, hildon-home!) has been fixed.

Also a new fea­ture present: the Pro­file but­ton in the Sta­tus Menu gets replaced by Tweakr’s own but­ton (which looks iden­ti­cal), so that you won’t have get your Sta­tus Menu too crowded.

A new fea­ture in Tweakr allows you to extend the sound Pro­files to more than just Gen­eral and Silent.

Tweakr intro­duces the con­cept of Pro­file pre­set. Pre­sets are Pro­file set­tings which can be saved, deleted and assigned to the Gen­eral pro­file. This allows you to prac­ti­cally use as many pro­files as you want on the N900.

The nor­mal use-case is to first tune the Gen­eral pro­file for the new pre­set you want to save, then open Tweakr and choose the Save cur­rent Gen­eral pro­file to new pre­set but­ton. This will allow you to save the set­tings of the Gen­eral pro­file with a new name.

After that, you will find a new but­ton in your Sta­tus Menu, as shown in the fol­low­ing screenshot:

You can now select what­ever pre­set you have cre­ated before, and its set­tings will be applied to the Gen­eral profile.

If you’re not using Tweakr yet, go get it from its down­load page!

I have been work­ing on a lit­tle util­ity pack­age for Maemo 5, called Tweakr. It’s a Settings applet that lets you tweak lit­tle known set­tings that could oth­er­wise be changed only by edit­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion files by hand.

It has a plu­gin archi­tec­ture, so you could write your own plu­gin too. The ones I have so far are Desktop and Hardware keys.

Desk­top

This plu­gin allows you to edit the labels of the book­mark short­cuts you have on your desktop.

Hard­ware keys

You can con­fig­ure the behav­ior of the Power Key, and whether uncov­er­ing the cam­era lens unlocks the device.

More plu­g­ins and fea­ture com­ing soon!

Here’s some screenshots:

Dur­ing my cod­ing adven­tures, I have just found myself hav­ing to port an exist­ing Win32 appli­ca­tion to CMake. After writ­ing a mere 283 lines CMakeLists.txt file, and get­ting the appli­ca­tion suc­cess­fully com­pile, I fired it up to see if it worked, of course. I found it fail­ing when doing a WSAA­sync­S­e­lect, and fail­ing there didn’t seem to make any sense. So, to get to the point, I decided I’d just care­fully com­pare the compiler’s options gen­er­ated from CMake with the ones that were in the orig­i­nal Visual Stu­dio project file. After find­ing the dif­fer­ence, I decided I was gonna learn what those flags meant, so I googled for “visual c++ com­piler flags” and guess what? Noth­ing use­ful. The right string to google would be “visual c++ com­piler options”. But before get­ting to it, I had to unsuc­cess­fully go thru “visual stu­dio com­piler options”. You’d think that would cut it, right? Since “visual c++ com­piler options” did it. But, sur­pringly, “visual stu­dio com­piler flags” did actu­ally find what I wanted. Inter­est­ing combination.

I don’t really feel like blam­ing Google on this. Repro­duc­ing the same search pat­tern in the inter­nal Help func­tion of Microsoft Visual Stu­dio gave me the same success/no-success scheme. Besides, the whole point-and-click pro­ce­dure is a ter­ri­bly uncom­fort­able expe­ri­ence. Not only I have to get my hands off my key­board (inher­ently a waste of time), but also do I have to (mind: have to) wan­der my mouse around for a while to get to the information.

So, I won­dered, is there an alter­na­tive? I went to my rxvt ter­mi­nal emu­la­tor (which I run through Cyg­win, can’t really be both­ered with using the native Win­dows Ter­mi­nal), and tried to get some help from cl.exe. No luck. After some try-and-fail recur­sion, the least use­less thing I would find was cl.exe -help which would give me 106 (one hun­dred and six!) lines of doc­u­men­ta­tion. Wow, impres­sive, isn’t it? Com­par­ing, gcc’s man­ual page is 7820 lines, as for the lat­est stable.

In order to ful­fill what has been a propo­si­tion of mine for quite a long time, as of Decem­ber the 1st 2007, I will no longer use any Instant Mes­sag­ing ser­vices based on a closed pro­to­col, e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM or Yahoo. The only way you will be able to con­tact me (besides con­ven­tional meth­ods such as phone and email) will be through my Jab­ber ID: salvatore.iovene at googlemail.com (replace “at” with “@”). This also works from GMail.

Rea­son

Pro­pri­etary IM sys­tems have a ter­ri­ble flaw: MSN users can’t chat with Yahoo users, AIM can’t chat with ICQ, and so on. So if I have friends who only use MSN and other friends who only use ICQ, I will have to use both to keep in touch with every­body. The rea­son for this is the cor­po­rate greed tak­ing advan­tage of the net­work effect. Wikipedia says:

The net­work effect is a char­ac­ter­is­tic that causes a good or ser­vice to have a value to a poten­tial cus­tomer depen­dent on the num­ber of cus­tomers already own­ing that good or using that service.

This also reflects the fact that cor­po­rates are valu­ing their own profit bet­ter than the final user’s sat­is­fac­tion. More­over, I don’t like the idea of using a closed pro­to­col. “Closed pro­to­col” means that the data (e.g. chat mes­sages) exchanged by two com­put­ers involved in a trans­ac­tion, is rep­re­sented with a secret for­mat, that the user is not allowed to study. Jab­ber, on the other hand, uses an open pro­to­col, based on XML. Every­body is allowed to study the pro­to­col, and write clients or servers that sup­port it. This allow col­lab­o­ra­tion and coöper­a­tion. Greedy cor­po­rates, instead, keep the pro­to­col secret in order to be the only ones able to write a client and a server for it, so they impose you the use of their clients (such MSN) which might be bloated with spy­ware and advertisements.

Since I’ve decided that I don’t want to sup­port this kind of behav­iour, I will unsub­scribe from the closed pro­to­col ser­vices that I use. You don’t have to do the same, but just get your­self a Jab­ber account in order to keep in touch with me, and, pre­ferrably, con­vince your friends to do the same.

What is Jabber?

When you hear some­one (prob­a­bly me) talk­ing about Jab­ber, they are usu­ally refer­ring to one of the following:

• The XMPP (Jab­ber) Protocol
• The Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Net­work (PFJN)
• The Jab­ber Plat­form (which includes the pre­vi­ous items, as well as jab­ber chat clients, devices, trans­ports, etc.)

Jab­ber is, strictly speak­ing, the infor­mal name of an open-standard decen­tral­ized instant mes­sag­ing pro­to­col offi­cially called XMPP.

NOTE: It is also the name of a com­pany called Jab­ber Inc., which sells Jabber-based prod­ucts. How­ever, the Jab­ber plat­form is much larger than this sin­gle com­pany. Don’t let this con­fuse you! If you want to go to the author­i­ta­tive web­site about jab­ber, that would be jabber.org, not jabber.com!

The net­work of inde­pen­dent Jab­ber servers on the inter­net make up the Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Net­work. If you have an account on a server on the PFJN, then you can com­mu­ni­cate with any­one else who has an account on a PFJN server. This means that Google Talk users can com­mu­ni­cate seam­lessly with Gizmo-Project users (and vice-versa), as both of these ser­vices are on the Pub­lic Fed­er­ated Jab­ber Network.

How can I use Jabber?

To use Jab­ber you need a Jab­ber client and an account on a server. Here’s a list of pop­u­lar clients:

MS Win­dows

• Pan­dion
• Psi
• Google Talk Client (works only with google talk, sup­ports voice chat via jingle)
• Gizmo Project Client (Works only with gizmo project, sup­ports SIP/VOIP)
• Gaim
• Tril­lian Pro

MacOS X

• iChat AV
• Adium
• Psi
• Gizmo Project Client (Works only with gizmo project, sup­ports SIP/VOIP)

GNU/Linux

• Gaim
• Psi

Then you will need an account. Most of the listed clients will allow you to cre­ate a Jab­ber account choos­ing from a list of servers, or, if you want, you can run your own server.

Google Talk

If you have a gMail account, then you have a jab­ber id via Google Talk! Your jab­ber id is the same as your email address. You can use either the native google talk client or any other jab­ber client.

Gizmo Project

Also, if you use the Gizmo Project, you too have a jab­ber account. Your jab­ber ID is login-name@chat.gizmoproject.com.

jabber.org

The Jab­ber Soft­ware Foun­da­tion is prob­a­bly the best known Jab­ber server out there. They just recently switched over to ejab­berd for their soft­ware, so they should be quite solid now.

I found myself in the process of real­iz­ing a dual-boot sys­tem on a lap­top, with Win­dows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. After wip­ing out the con­tent of the disk and par­ti­tion­ing it appro­pri­ately, I pro­ceed to the instal­la­tion of Win­dows XP (know­ing that I needed to install it first, since it would over­write the MBR and com­pletely dis­re­gard and dis­re­spect user’s free­dom), so I put in the so-called Recov­ery Disk pro­vided with that par­tic­u­larly Fujitsu-Siemens lap­top. After a lit­tle while, the Recov­ery Disk was propos­ing me to install Win­dows XP either using the full disk, or in two par­ti­tions, with a 10 GB “data” par­ti­tion. I was aston­ished and out­raged. It seems that the Fujitsu-Siemens peo­ple were think­ing that the user wasn’t smart enough to be able to choose what par­ti­tion use for his or her Win­dows install. They would rather limit the user’s free­dom, and not give him or her some choice. I sus­pect this was the result of some pres­sure from the Microsoft end: this “trick” basi­cally stops the user from installing other Oper­at­ing Sys­tems along Win­dows, unless he or she buys a new non-branded copy.

Fujitsu-Siemens and Microsoft: shame on you!

After all the dust raised again by Microsoft about Linux and the Open Source com­mu­nity allegedly com­mit­ting patent infringe­ments (235 this time, they were 228 in 2004), I really feel the need to spend a few words about the mat­ter, or then, a few images.

It looks like the jeal­ous Redmond’s zealots, avidly fight­ing to pro­tect the unique­ness of their work (sar­casm intended), didn’t real­ize that they have been play­ing copy­cat for a long time, rein­vent­ing the wheel and doing a bad job at it. Do the fol­low­ing screen­shots tell you anything?

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