moiji-mobile

Taking a step back from my current death march project to list the wishlist features of the next generation OpenMoko. As I learned from Steve Job’s iPhone presentation Allan Kay once said if you take software development serious create your own hardware and now to the feature set.

• A gyroscope. We have played with such things in the late 90s of the last century. And with Rock ‘n Scroll we have seen a nice usage of this feature. We have used auto-rotation in Opie already and we have played games using this device. I don’t know what Apple patented but I’m pretty sure we have prior art. We are doing this stuff for almost a decade.
• Light Sensor, we have used that in Opie for a long time…
• All sort of network connectivity. We use X, we all have seen teleportation of applications. A couple of years ago I have started automatically adapting look and feel of widgets/applications dynamically depending on host operating system, screen resolution and available input devices. I think for any patents to come this is pretty good prior art! So let us combine these two technologies. Connect your OpenMoko device to a TV, pair with a bluetooth keyboard and a mice and export your applications to the big screen and they will adapt look and feel automatically! Go to a public terminal and export your applications. It is secure! Your private data will not leave your device, you will not use network infrastructure not operated by you. You will just use the peripheral and your application will adjust, automatically!

Right I can’t count!

So yesterday was my birthday and I received plenty of presents. Well I did not ask for any but got a lot of them. I’m the proud owner of the Probot Music CD, various Design and Implementation of the XXXBSD Operating System (4.3,4.4,FreeBSD), finally I’m a owner of “Peopleware” and some old Monty Python tapes/DVDs.
My comrades in the office gave a pair of slippers, so my socks don’t get as dirty, and a pair of gloves. Also I got the ingreidents to create a Hurricane cocktail *delicious*.
I was a bit bored so I wanted to read/scan this perl book we have in our shelf, I did not get past the foreward by Larry Wall. This made me once again aware of why I do these weird things under the name of Free Software. It is obvious that one enjoys working with the elite and other highly skilled people but there is more to it. As Larry said in his foreword I want to give something back to society and I believe technology can change society so I try to create longlasting free and public technology that can help the society to progress.
Well I need to reevaluate this statement in twenty years and see if we have achieved any progress.

z.

The Future is OpenMoko. Sean sent a rather nice announcement to the list. And once again they just get it (in contrast to Trolltech and their Greenphone campaign)! Their decisions in itself and the way they do it and transport them is just the right way. And everyone within the Free Software Developer Community should be very familiar with. So OpenMoko is compatible with the Free Software Community and we can make a huge leap ahead in progressing Free Software and Free Infrastructure. The selected software is just about right for the consumer and business. Evlution Data Server solves so many problems. Problems we are facing within KDE, we have faced in Opie and Qtopia is still facing. Evolution Data Server is easy to synchronize, and even stuff like direct exchange access seems possible. Together with the planned email push access and the open Linux platform this just seems to be right for companies caring about security and sanity in their IT Infrastructure. No more punching holes and installing unknown server software at the heart of your infrastructure.

For the launch in september we will likely face some tough decisions, specially when directly working with Mobile Operators. Themes like DRM, Flash Over The Air, Branding will be on the agenda but that is OpenMoko’s and FIC’s job and I trust them to handle these topics carefully.

I’m really looking forward to hold one of these devices in my hands. Finishing another fast init system, implementing an Gtk+ backend for the JavaME, or just working on WebKit/Gtk+ looks like fun and challenging projects, or just plainly meassuring and comparing performance sounds like fun as well. So fun is ahead!

Hmm I should order a greenphone just to let OpenMoko run on it :}

PS: Trolltech sadly failed to respond to my questions about how they want to handle a community and to gurantee that future Qtopia releases will be Free. What a waste of resosurces, seriously I doubt many people within Trolltech, even within the Qtopia team, have the insight and knowledge of the Qtopia platform that I have…

During the last two at the 23rd congress Daniel Molkentin and me have hacked on WebKit and to integrate with the OLPC GUI called sugar.

Thanks to Qt’s GMainContext integration and GtkSocket/GtkPluck and Qt’s XEmbed implementation embedding Qt widgets in Gtk+ is pretty much straight forward. So what we did was to use the WebKit/Qt implementation done by fellow KDE hackers and wrap it into a GtkWidget.

We have created a GtkMozEmbed like pygtk wrapper of a a Qt WebKit widget. So off to the important questions. Why did we do this?

Well personally I think WebKit just makes more sense for the OLPC. It is used today on small resource systems like PDAs or the Nokia Series 60 phone. From our past struggles with minimo WebKit is so much more resource friendly. I’m pretty sure the children will love it.

So where is the code? It is in a git repository:

OLPC stuff contains a sugar.Browser implemtation using WebKit/Qt, and web-activity just kills the hard tied gtkmozembed dependency which is a violation of the sugar.Browser abstraction.

Oh and this is my first published Gtk+ work and I would like to thank mickeyl for helping me the way through inheritance, parent classes and GtkBin/GtkAlignment issues.

rock on!

I tried using libgmalloc of OSX to debug mallocs. This triggered a crash in KDE’s network classes. The reason is quite simple. getsockname is broken on BSD! As of the manpage/POSIX the third argument len is input and output parameter. On input it contains the size of the struct and on output it contains the size of the kernel struct.

But XNU (OS X), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD do not return the size of the internal struct. They return MIN(input, stucture length). Linux and OpenSolaris do the right thing though.

As a workaround on BSD one can take a look sa_len value. Bug reports are pending…

Wow what a week. A lot of companies might have helped to progress Free Software. Nice christmas gifts!

• ACCESS released the first part of their Access Linux Platform. And I pretty much like the ACCESS FAQ as they answer questions Trolltech does not answer
• Trolltech released a incomplete Qtopia4.2 OpenSource Edition
• And the biggest gift is probably from SUN as they released MIDP as GPL! It even has a hack for directFB and a proper QtE backend included. Okay this made me to reschedule my agenda as I will hack on Gtk+ backend during 23c3!

Oh and once again I caught a cold…

Hey, Trolltech has dumped bits of Qtopia into the public. As it is not too nice to say bad things I will just say what is missing and what a personal roadmap could look like if there would be a possibility that these things can get upstream…

What is missing:

• Safe Execution Environment (SXE). Probably they don’t release because security through obscurity rocks?
• DRM, another case of security by obscurity? licensing? One should look into SUNs (L)GPL DRM stuff if this is really needed
• Qtopia Desktop seems missing, This is not even mentioned on the website so it looks like Trolltech doesn’t want Free people to synchronize

What needs to be done:

• Avoid the obvious GPL violations. e.g. use GNU TLS instead of OpenSSL. OpenSSL is GPL incompatible and GNU TLS a usable replacement.
• Make use of tinymail in Qtopia Mail. If Qtopia Mail is done right we will just implement another mail model?!
• Fix the tslib driver of Qtopia Core once again and make TT accept the fix
• Force Trolltech to send the patches to third party applications upstream. Wow this Embedded Vendors don’t send patches theme just sucks. Trolltech break the ciricle and send patches upstream!
• Port my QtE Keyboard Driver to Qtopia Core and finally implement key composing
• Start performance testing of Qtopia Core on real hardware and provide numbers. Integrate this into Tinderbox.
• Define a set of core applications and make them kick ass and usable
• Clean up the ugly big clumpy buildsystem and show them how to use qmake the right way.
• Ensure portability, improve portability and fix a hell lot of bugs.

What will happen:
Probably nothing as it is unlikely Trolltech will accept anything we will create. I have tried to make them accept a fix against an out of bounds array access for years and then just stopped trying, I even offered a formal proof… So Trolltech must show/signalize that they have learned their lesson and will start to work with a community. Judging from their sourcecode release they have not learned their lesson yet. So Trolltech show your commitment to Qtopia Open Source Edition and you might win the community over (again). Good luck and creating a Qtopia Foundation would be a good start.