Enrique just posted about the Mobile and Embedded BarCamp happening alongside the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it down till the afternoon on Wed, but sometimes getting a second wave in fresh for the evening helps keep the momentum going ;-) You don’t need to be participating in the MEDD to go to BarCamp (I’m not going to the conference myself), so come by and check it out if you’re in the area.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for OS2008 software that I was using on my N800, and last night I just saw that Subversion is now available. That’s a killer bit of software for me. I use my own svn repository to sync up the stuff I’m working on, keep notes and little scripts, etc. The N810 (now with hardware keyboard) I expected to be killer for little bits of hackery here and there. And it has been, just getting the stuff onto and off the device hasn’t been as braindead as I had hoped. Now it is. Can world domination be far behind? I expect not.
I haven’t quite made it to the point of keeping everything in Subversion. But enough stuff is creeping in that direction that I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to give it another try.
Via John Kern:
Homebrew Mobile will be meeting at the Tech Shop in Menlo Park on January 16th. The topic is OpenMoko and Andriod.
After the fantastic meeting we had on open source in mobile at MoMo I’m sure this will be a great gathering. The date has been punted around a few times, but I this one is firm.
I just updated the Mowser Wordpress Mobile plugin to add an option to include a link to a handheld stylesheet when generating headers. I put up a minimal stylesheet that you can point the plugin to if you just want the default, it’s at http://pub.mowser.com/media/stylesheets/wordpress.css. Or you can copy down the stylesheet to your server, modify as you want, and change the URL to point to your own version. The difference is actually pretty pleasing, even with the simplistic stylesheet I have up now. Compare the mobile version of this blog to mobilized Wordpress blog without a stylesheet at all.
Looks like Eric Rice is experiencing some frustrations dealing with Nokia. Not the same frustrations that I had when trying to get my N95, but the theme is familiar. Nice to know I’m not the only one.
Good luck figuring out the answer to your question Eric, but also keep in mind:
One of the most kick ass plugins for Wordpress is the Open Web Analytics plugin, I hear people raving about it pretty frequently. Unfortunately I also saw it causing some issues with blogs mobilized through Mowser. There were a few problems actually, which I’m about to send over to the OWA folks to hopefully get patched up in future versions (strings not getting trimmed when there are multiple factors in the X_FORWARDED_FOR header, and skipping localhost when trying to pull out a remote IP). In the meantime here’s a patched version of OWA 1.0.8, the latest stable release.
All the folks who presented at the January 2008 Silicon Valley MoMo have agreed to share their presentations. We had a great event overall, the discussions that sprung up and the questions that the audience asked were spectacular. One of the things that interested me the most as a fan of open Linux systems in mobile was that the ecosystem is pushing toward single core systems for mobile Linux.
Currently just about the only way to get a consumer device onto a cellular network (unless you’re Motorola or have similarly deep pockets) is to use a premade GSM module to interface with the network and then include your standard embedded CPU for running Linux. That’s where this “two core” comes from, there’s normally a DSP of some kind in the GSM module and the general purpose CPU you have running Linux. So why not just have your general CPU handle most of the stuff the DSP does instead of building in a custom module? It’s not like software radio is unproven ground.
The reason is this archaic system run by a cult called the FCC (here in the US at least, other areas have their own issues). If you don’t have the cellular functions walled off in their own little area in a device that the FCC can approve then you’ll never be allowed to give your device to consumers. People who do integrate the baseband functions into the generic CPU need to take their whole packaged system and with every rev send it through FCC approvals. Not something that’s very small company or startup friendly. Fortunately, innovation isn’t too high on the list of things the FCC needs to provide for, so they’re cool with that.
Apparently some of the silicon vendors and people working on embedded Linux are pretty sure that with the right setup for hard realtime Linux we can get approvals for the base system on a single core and not need to resubmit for every release. There’s a technique floating around out there that runs a hard realtime kernel under Linux and effectively runs all of Linux in a thread (see, virtualization really does apply to everything from servers to embedded systems) that would be able to firewall the entire Linux kernel off from the functioning of the baseband processor. That’s great news that there’s interest in moving the solutions in that direction! I think it would really open up a lot of doors for small and medium sized businesses to start releasing cellular devices.
I was looking for a description of the PointingResolution attribute in the UAProf vocabulary, and I hit this:
Yea, yea, I know, it’s in the drafts section. Still, how funny is it that a document called Ontology Data hosted at the W3C would be unparsable? It would be slightly more amusing if it were called “Welcome to RDF, bitch.” But only slightly. It’s nearly perfect as is. I might have to take back all the bad things I’ve said about the W3C.
Russ just posted about a new version of domain mapping we just released for Mowser. There are a bunch of little bug fixes in there as well. One other thing that made it into this version was mobilized feeds. Now when you’re viewing an adapted page that has an RSS feed we’ll add a header that lets you subscribe to the mobilized version of the feed on your device. For devices with the Nokia Open Source browser the action appears under the “Options” menu on the page, you’ll see an entry for “Subscribe” which should have “Mowser version of ….” in a submenu. In Opera Mini it appears at the very top of the page when you load something that has an associated feed.
In the mobilized version of the feed (something Russ posted about when talking about getting bookmarks onto a mobile) the content is left as originally presented, but links are passed through Mowser. I’m not sure how much use there is among the mobile crowd when it comes to feeds, but I’ve always been a big fan of RSS use from mobiles. If this helps even just a little bit with respect to making RSS more useful for mobile users I’ll be a happy camper.
There’s a storm currently rolling through the Bay Area. Not really a major storm for most places, but we don’t get weather too frequently. My power had been flickering, and just a few minutes ago finally knocked off completely. I was starnding at the window for a few minutes before I realized I have no idea what to do with myself. “I can still blog with the N810 over the N95s internet connection” was my first full thought. Probably not a healthy state of affairs in retrospect.
I have programming I can work on, but being mostly disconnected from the network its hardly as effective. I’m feeling the isolation and dumbness of being cut off from my external storage devices pretty sharply right now.
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