moiji-mobile

So I have been working on this Qtopia integration. Being a good Free Software citizen I report the issues (most of the time with patches) upstream. Because I don’t like non public tasks and prefer discussions on patches I had to decide to use the qtopia-interest mailinglist (note the increased volume since february). The amount of feedback, even on obvious issues is kind of low, admitingly disappointing. I understand creating a generic framework which is easy to customize for very different kind of devices is very hard. But this is what Trolltech decided to do with Qtopia, so I ask for advice how I can achieve my customisation as it is currently not possible, the feedback is zero, none, nada. This is something that engineers, creators of frameworks should love to discuss, use cases, approaches to API… no interest at all from Trolltechs side.

But where the frustration starts is copy and paste. Their approach to platform integration is, copy an existing platform, sed -i s/THEIR_NAME/YOUR_NAME/g, hack on it until it is working, copy code from the Qtopia libraries and change one line, add device specific code to the core Qtopia libraries, have five copies of yuv blending code (unaccelerated, bytewise…, we had to call the ambulance for raster…). So I have had to fix bugs/asserts/crashes on copy and pasted code where someone fixed the original code in qmodemsiminfo.cpp but forgot to update all places where they copy and pasted the whole class to. In this case certain modems send different responses when no simcard is inserted, a perfect example for abstraction (removal of copy and paste, fix without copy and paste).

With C and C++ you have languages where you can change/extend the behavior of so called “objects” (coming from Object Orientated Programming) with something called “subclassing”. You do not need to copy the sourcecode to achieve that.

With Linux we have gained generic input systems (started in 2.4, really used in 2.6), sysfs (2.6) and I’m specially proud that a couple of device classes (battery, backlight, led…) originated from our handhelds community and found their way into mainline. So instead of writing one class for one battery, you can create one class that is going to work for every battery, with a stable userspace interface. When raster saw that, he read the battery class specification and implemented it. And it doesn’t look like Qtopia will gain support for these ‘classes’ of devices anytime soon, instead you, as an integrator, have to manually parse your special device, no help is coming.

When doing hardware development, you don’t follow the waterfall model. You create hardware, write drivers, work on GUI stuff, have iterations on everything (new hardware, new kernel, new GUI). The kernel gets better suspend resume handling, the initialisation order of drivers change. The input device numbering in userspace change as well (/dev/input/eventX). Because the kernel developers knew that these numbers in userspace will be random, they added ioctl’s to get the vendor id, product id, version and name. So sane code would have a class/factory where you create an input device handler for a given Vendor and Product ID, or name of the device (e.g. “Neo1973 keyboard”), I would hide this behind a nice API where you only have to deal with the actual handling of keyboard data. Qtopia’s approach to this is… Right, Copy and Paste and using hardcoded device numbers. So in the neo case you have four copies of this code, they don’t include linux/input.h but duplicate the struct and use magic numbers instead of the defines..

You have to rush, you do mistakes, you do stupid things and this is kind of acceptable but what really frustrates me is that they justify their behavior. They justify copy and pasting the same code to four places (and changing the class name) as a way to avoid bloat (which the abstraction would add) and that hardcoding the random device number is the right thing to do and that finding the right device is bloat and not needed.

So dear people can someone explain me where the world of someone who has grown up in the Free Software world, started to program here, getting review and comments, creating patches, polishing them, reworking them due feedback is disjunct with the world of copy and paste. As a buddhist I know that my world is not better than their world, only different. So please can some one help me to understand how their world is different, how I could understand them, how one can help them to recognize that copy and paste and layering violations create more problems than they solve?

I safely returned from Taipei and was almost in time. As I don’t have a hitchhiker guide to transatlantic traveling I had to learn it the hard way. Don’t take the arrival time for granted and plan the evening. If anyone knows how to legally get a rental copy of I’m a Cyborg but that’s ok. please tell me.

Taipei is great and I hope this was my first visit in many to come. It was a pleasure to see the Openmoko offices, catch up with the local engineers (too many to name them and I would forget one and would feel really bad about it). My short-term goal for tick and jeremy is to make them start a blog, take videos of their apps (assassin, diversity) and expose themselves to the public. It was a pleasure to meet the other foreign engineers and I’m specially honored to have met Werner Almesberger, received a talk on kboot, and rasterman and enjoyed the training on the graphic pipeline, state of XRender and general musings on object orientated programming.

I have finally a result of the automatic build of Qtopia/X11 that is not segfaulting (yeah!) and the experience feels like wasting time. I think I have spent almost of the last week on this thing as the turnaround times are so heavy. E.g. I managed to compile Qt for the target without fontconfig and the apps were only able to display numbers but not any glyphs. So I had to pass -fontconfig and the includepath for fontconfig to the configure script. This results in a five hour penalty as Qt for the desktop (totally unrelated), Qt for the target (not only the two classes knowing of fontconfig) and then the full Qtopia stack (I assume the Qt with and without fontconfig is binary compatible… so another waste of time). Anyway I have a GTA02/Freerunner (with GPS, WiFi, GSM, without a working bluetooth) that is powered by enlightenment, which is of importance for buddhists, and Qtopia/X11. We need to polish the packages and configuration, make sure that qpe is launched as part of the Xsession start and then let our “black team”, allan, do the testing and secure my job by finding bugs. The modem gets powered on, Qtopia finds it, I see the PIN Dialog and once raster is finishing his keyboard we can enter stuff. Pal hurry up!

What is so cool about Openmoko? In contrast to many other companies, specially in the hardware industry, is that the relevant stuff is public, our failures with hardware, our stupidity, our brilliancy, our success, our progress, our vision. This allows you to track it and be part of it and contribute. We are open, and mean it, and this commitment to openness is important. This is showing with our platform strategy. We are not only a Gtk+ company, we are not only an EFL company, we are not only a Qt/Qtopia company. We have enough flash to make it possible for you to carry your favorite toolkit and language in your pocket, show it to your friends. So our platform strategy is different, it is toolkit and language neutral, in the current age this implies DBus and yes we are interested in reusing and creating DBus Interfaces around GSM/SIM, Networking, PIM, Journal, Location, Communication,… This effort is lead by former Opie colleague and close friend Dr. Michael ‘mickeyl’ Lauer who currently enjoys the sun in Recife and is attending the Bosa Conference with a bunch of other Openmoko people (raster, stefan, daniel).

So consider contributing, your open phone is waiting for you. And remember warranty is void when NOT opened.

I’m writing this on one of these roundtrips when waiting for the Qtopia buildsystem to finish. I changed the mediaengine from helix to gstreamer, this means in one library another implementation gets compiled and the library is linked, maybe the other part of Qtopia needs relinking after it and that would be fine. The truth is, I switch the engine now configure of Qt desktop, Qt target and Qtopia is ran and I’m compiling Qt for the desktop, Qt for the desktop and the Qtopia libraries and applications from scratch. If anyone knows how to stop these stupidity and get me acceptable roundtrips times for such minor changes please comment.

To everyone that say QWebKit, the Qt WebKit integration is called QtWebKit and please use that when referring to this module. As communication is done by blogs these days I have seen this workaround. If you experience a crash on exit with QWebView, please tell us, there is no need to add a workaround to your application, Qt4.4 is not final. So please write a small application that is crashing on exit and the Qt WebKit inside and outside of Trolltech will take a look and fix it. What did you make believe this is an bug in amarok and is needing fixing there? The cool thing with the Free Software world is you can fix the stuff where it has to be fixed and we should utilize this, so please show us the problem.

Urs, I’m glad you had a go at the QtWebKit KPart and yes QNetworkInterface is not present if you compile QtWebKit with Qt4.4. You want to look into the QNetworkManager and provide an implementation using KIO. If you need any help, I’m here to help and I’m sure Simon and thiago will help you too.

raster left taipei yesterday, he is probably packing and leaving to the bossa conference soon, he has been busy working on illume, our window manager module for the GTA02/Freerunner, tick has created a project for our EFL based installer application (using PackageKit) and last, but certainly not the least application we are going to develop in our GForge is diversity. This application is combining GPS, GeoClue, Jabber, your Journal with each other and providing a bling-bling interface using EFL. When walking around in a foreign city you can see where you friends are, were, where they haven taken their cool pictures that you have seen on flickr, get routing with OpenStreetmap to find your way, see people with the same interests as you, take a city tour people like you have enjoyed, let your Freerunner guide you through the city, go sight-seeing or just chat with your relatives back home (and certainly be able to control your privacy). I hope we will have some more videos up in the next couple of weeks.

I have been enjoying my time in Taipei, I’m definitely coming back soon and if we work hard Openmoko can have a bright future, we can start a Software Industry in Taiwan solely based around the concepts of Freedom and Free Software, this is really exciting!

Many people don’t know what my nickname means even german speaking ones. The direct translation would be tick, these animals that sit on leaves, bite people and suck the blood, the ones that can cary scary deseases. But there is another side to the word, a political one. In my youth this word was used to refer to punks and similar associates by right wing people, I was labeled this way. And this is nothing to be ashamed off, the view of kids with weird haircuts (or none), not washed hairs, broken and dirty clothes probably disrupted their lovely right wing world, but their world deserves disruption, change.

When joining irc I had to pick a nick and the most often used word for me not equal to holger or freyther was zecke so I settled with that. And looking at it now, as a discordian pope, it was a good choice.

Like many hackers I started to work from home, communiciated through irc, started to work on projects, collaborated, learned (thanks to a guy named tronical willing to answer any question), grew, got better, continued to make stupid mistakes. Saw Mr. Eilers and Lauer finishing their PhD. I believed an ideal FLOSS career would be to work remotely from home, little did I know, little do I know.

I started university, joined the RoboCup team, started internships and got hooked to the power of teams in one physical place. Having many brilliant people at the same place working together, sharing success and helping each other to recover from failure is the best way of working. At least I have not witnessed something better than an awesome team.

In december I decided to resign from my current part time job, we/they are an awesome team, because I wanted to work on FLOSS again. So my constraints for finding a new job are now FLOSS + awesome team.

I had the opportunity to visit the Oslo trolls (they do not live caves, in contrast they are close to the sky, the 5th floor to be exact) and it is an awesome team. Brilliant, international people, there is little more you can ask for. And even if you do ask, there are soft drinks (no Club Mate though), food and vegetables, and some people have chocolate… I started to verify if the requirements of FLOSS and awesome team are fulfilled and oh my god, they are. The only downer was. Oslo trolls live in Oslo, and I’m in Berlin (at least 2 to 4 more terms). After a lot of flirting, tears and counseling (or eating spaghetti at Berlin based usability experts) I was forced to accept that Oslo trolls live in Oslo and even with the power of the mind of fooling myself applied, Oslo is not another name for Berlin and is really not referring to the same place. Looking at the size of the universe the difference from Berlin to Oslo is really minor, but if you happen to be in one of the two cities you recognize that even this minor difference is significant. Specially working with simon would have been ueber cool, it looks like it has to wait some more years. So yes Trolltech has the simon factor and its weight is really really heavy.

To keep a long story short, there are two other companies that I really like because of doing FLOSS and having an awesome team and these are o-hand.com and OpenMoko. To stop the flirting and crying tears I’m going to do a project for OpenMoko, I want to see them finish the GTA02, ship it to the people and want to see OpenVG capable hardware with open drivers coming.

Harald Welte helped in drafting the NDA of OpenMoko and at no surprise there are exceptions for FLOSS. I agree with rms that NDAs have victims, like he was victim of a donated Xerox printer and not able to fix the driver for ITS (awesome book, a must read), this NDA is going to have victims as well, victims that need to know the pricing of hardware, business plans, and all the stuff I do not care about. There is no doubt that the software I write will be FLOSS, will be released on day one and I can talk and discuss about it as much as I want as it is definately not covered by the NDA! You certainly know when not to argue. Oh and on to the team. I had the pleasure to listen to a discussion of Werner Almesberger and raster yesterday, a bit disturbing but totally awesome! I’m looking forward to meet some of you after FOSDEM in Taipei! So let there be Qtopia, Qtopia on X11, next to Java,Gtk+,FLTK+,EFL,FooToolkit and any other Free Toolkit all buildable from OpenEmbedded!

Let us be productive, innovative and provide prior art for mobile computing for years to come! With all the cool people working at OpenMoko it is a pleasure to say… “Hello Moko” as well.

PS: Ironically almost one year after I considered joining initially.