fidzu : Linux-to-go

Busy handling

I made an article about reporting busy status in Tracker before.

But then it wasn't yet possible to queue a query while Tracker's RDF store is busy. We're making this possible following next unstable release. Yeah I know you guys hate that Tracker's RDF store can be busy. But you tell us what else to do while restoring a backup, or while replaying a journal?

While we are replaying the journal, or restoring a backup, we'll accept your result-hungry queries into our queue. Meanwhile you get progress and status indication over a DBus signal. Some documentation about this is available here.

SPARQL 1.1 Draft features: IN and NOT IN

We had a feature requests for supporting SPARQL IN and NOT IN. As usual, we're ahead of the SPARQL Draft specification. But I don't think IN and NOT IN will look much different in the end. Anyway, it was straightforward so I just implemented both.

It goes like this:

SELECT ?abc { ?abc a nie:InformationElement ;
                   nie:title ?title .
               FILTER (?title IN ('abc', 'def')) }

SELECT ?abc { ?abc a nie:InformationElement ;
                   nie:title ?title .
               FILTER (?title NOT IN ('xyz', 'def')) }

It's particularly useful to get metadata about a defined set of resources (give me the author of this, this and that file)

Direct access

This work is progressing nicely. Most of the guys on the team are working on this, and it's going to be awesome thanks to SQLite's WAL journal mode. SQLite's WAL mode is still under development and probably unstable here and there, but we're trusting the SQLite guys with this anyway.

What is left to do for direct-access is cleaning up a bit, getting the small nasty things right. You know. The basics are all in place now.

We're doing most of the library code in Vala, but clever people can easily imagine the C API valac makes from the .vala files here. That's the abstract API that client developers will use. Unless you use a higher level API like libqttracker, QSparql, Hormiga or sparql-glib.

All of which still need to be adapted to the direct-access work that we're doing. But we're in close contact with all of the developers involved in those libraries. And they're all thrilled to implement backends for the new stuff.

Plans

We plan to change the signals-on-changes or class-signals feature a bit so that the three signals are merged into one. The problem with three is that you can't reliably identify a change-transaction this way (a rename of a file, for example).

Another thing on our list is merging Zeitgeist's ontology. To the other team members at Tracker: guys, Zeitgeist has been waiting for three months now. Let's just get this done!

Oh there are a lot of plans, to be honest.

I wonder when, if ever, we go in feature freeze. Hehe. I guess we'll just have very short feature-freeze periods. Whatever, it's fun.

MeeGo in cars

Hey BMW & co, if you guys want to learn how to write music players and playlists for car entertainment on MeeGo, get in touch! This Tracker that I'm talking about is on that MeeGo OS; being the Music's metadata database is among its purposes.

I can't wait to have a better music player playlist my car.

Or maybe some integration with the in-car GPS and the car owner's appointments and meetings? With geo-tagged photos on the car owner's phone? Automatic and instant synchronization with Nokia's future phones? Sounds all very doable, even easy, to me. I'd want all that stuff. Use-cases!

Let's talk!

30 Jul 2010 1:45pm GMT

Een zelfstandige in België hoort zijn sociale bijdrage (bv. per kwartaal) vooraf te betalen. Je bent een debiel als je dat niet doet, want dan vragen ze na vier jaar lekker veel interest op het hele bedrag.

Iedereen die je tegen het lijf loopt wanneer je je firma opstart zal het je ook opnieuw zeggen. De mensen bij Unizo, op de cursus boekhouden, mijn boekhouder, de mensen van de bank en zelfs mijn notaris was het aan het uitleggen bij de oprichting. En allemaal met een dringende toon: doe dit, vergeet dat niet. Vergeet dat écht niet. Écht niet!

Je bent dus onwenselijk dom als je het toch niet doet. Maarja, dat er domme mensen bestaan is geen nieuws.

Wat weinig mensen weten is dat je het zelfs kan omdraaien: in tegenstelling tot voorafbetalingen van vennootschapsbelastingen, krijg je voor voorafbetalingen van je sociale bijdrage wél interest op het teveel betaalde bedrag.

En dat is een interest die momenteel hoger ligt dan wat je op een ferme spaarrekening krijgt.

Uiteraard moet je gokken wat je zoal gemiddeld zal verdienen op vier jaar. Dus uiteraard mag je dat vrij hoog inschatten. Weet jij misschien precies hoeveel meer winst je over enkele jaren zal maken? Nou ik niet. En ik geef mezelf uiteraard meer salaris wanneer er meer winst is, meneer de controleur. Maar ik kon het niet weten dat er na vier jaar toch niet zoveel winst was! Tja!

Dus, schat je dat vrij hoog in. En betaal je vier jaar lang te veel sociale bijdrage. Na vier jaar storten ze het teveel terug, mét een hoge interest.

Netjes toch?

Ik denk dat ik dit ga moeten vieren!

Nu niet teveel van jullie freelancers dit gaan doen he! Ik wil nog een paar jaartjes genieten van hun "probleem" ;-)

29 Jul 2010 12:49pm GMT

• Who-T: xmodmap keyboard deconfiguration
  Now none of the old tools work properly anymore. Not because we've broken them, they still do what they've always done. But the environment has changed and what they do isn't sufficient anymore.
• Who-T: Input event processing in X
  The terms Core Pointer, VCP, extension devices, etc. are thrown around much these days. But they either mean very little or just very little to most. Especially because since X server 1.7 and to a lesser part 1.6, the definitions have changed a lot. So here's a bit of a high-level overview of what happens with input events in the server.

29 Jul 2010 7:00am GMT

The N900 is the cellphone that I'm using since last December and I simply love it. No I'm not a Nokia fun boy, I let this kind of behavior for those who loves design despite of usability, connectivity, reliability, etc..

Well, but as the title suggests this post is just for the N900 users

As you should know the weakness of this device is the battery when you use so much 3G, wifi, bluetooth and GPS. I have to recharge my device every single night to be sure that I'll have enough power for the whole next day.

At least I had, before to find out the Autodisconnect tool. You configure it to disconnect everything that is not really being used and is saves battery.

Well it doesn't do any miracle but at least nowadays I can forget to recharge one night without being worried during the next day.

OBS: I'm not a Autodisconnect tool developer and to be honest I've never seen its code. This is just a tip for the users.

27 Jul 2010 10:50pm GMT

I try to avoid posting about the same subject twice in a row. But I also really think that Wikileaks is worth violating about any such rule in existence. Maybe I should make a category on my blog just for Wikileaks?

So TED has decided to do an interview with Julian Assange:

I'd like to point out that I congratulate and thank everybody, not just but also Julian, who's involved. Thank you.

27 Jul 2010 7:12pm GMT

When I was walking though Prague with my beloved wife the world was celebrating 25th anniversary of Commodore Amiga.

First time I met Amiga in early 90′s. My friends had Amiga 500/500+ models and another one (Rafał Kotyński) just bought Amiga 1200 to replace ageing Commodore 64. And due to him I got impressed by power of AmigaOS and how much things could be done on limited resources.

In September 1995 I bought Amiga 600. It was old at that time but allowed to connect hard drive which I bought on 10th October same year. Why I remember that date? My A600 lacked RTC so each time I booted system it set date of creation of system partition as current one. With 1MB of RAM and ~400MB of storage it was nice platform to learn programming.

My first application was written in High Speed Pascal and it was very simple antivirus as lot of my files was infected with "Happy New Year 1996″ crap. I remember that I compared clean and infected file, disassembled both and removed all entries to virus code. Some time later I got Virus-Z and it cured whole system.

After few years I sold a bit upgraded version (2MB ram) and kept hard drive for Amiga 1200 model. New hardware, new possibilities. Faster cpu, more graphics capabilities which I did not used because my primary display was still 12″ green monitor which I used with my 8bit Atari 65XE in a past. 704×260 resolution was not so great so when something got broken again I bought "new" display for my machine: 14″ vga mono monitor. Move to 720×480 in 16 shades of grey was big change.

I selected all shades to follow MagicWB colour scheme as much as it was possible and converted wallpapers using script in ADPro. Effect was nice and usable.

For most of time I used this computer for programming, entertainment and many others but games (which for many people were main reason to buy Amiga) never took most of my time. There were two exceptions: Civilisation and Angband (including variants). Those took me hours and hours.

What I liked in Amiga was operating system. When it appeared on market there was MacOS, Atari TOS and Microsoft did not yet had usable Windows released. Many things were great:

• multitasking - before it was only in Unix systems
• DataTypes (think "codecs" for any kind of data - open/save files in different formats without having to use lot of libraries)
• localisation - currently *.po files shows that idea was right
• flexible partitioning scheme - no /dev/sdaX, no C:\ but partitions which could have own names (DH0: by default, SH0: on my system) and filesystem labels (Boocik:, Szafa: were what I used)
• Magic User Interface toolkit - user could configure look & feel at a level which no other UI toolkit ever provided
• assigns - all fonts resided in Fonts: but this could be a list of directories (something like $PATH but more advanced)
• ability to replace any library call with own code - this gave a possibility to improve system behaviour in a ways which authors never thought about
• screens - hard to describe for those which never used - extra desktops for use with applications does not even give half of it
• RAM disk which took only required amount of memory
• Reset proof fixed size RAM disk (which could be used as system boot drive)
• two stage icons with application configuration stored inside (in tooltypes)
• comment field in filesystem for any object
• XPK and XFD libraries which allowed to (de)compress any kind of data with any available method

And lot more.

I wrote few applications for AmigaOS. Some of them became popular and I was able to expand my computer with addons with money which I got from registrations (yes, I wrote shareware program). It started with 68000/1MB ram when I had to close code editor (great CygnusEd) to be able to compile to 68040 cpu with 64+2MB of memory at the end. AmigaE was language which was both easy to use and powerful to write programs never mind how complex. Add few libraries to it and you can do anything. Today even 'hello world' takes few kilobytes on my Linux system ;(

I could buy 386sx instead of Amiga 600 but then all I would learn would be how to do things in MS DOS or MS Windows 3.x as there was no x86 people around which would use Linux, BSD or OS/2. This would be lost years as now after few years of using AmigaOS I know what good operating system can give to hardware when resources are very limited.

A dla tych, co dotarli do końca polecam także post napisany przez Opiego.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz 25th anniversary of Commodore Amiga was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. 20th Birthday of Commodore Amiga
2. Am I programmer?
3. Started 10 year with Debian

27 Jul 2010 2:18pm GMT

• India shows off $35 Linux tablet - News - Linux for Devices
  The Indian government has unveiled a prototype of a Linux-based touchscreen tablet it hopes to sell next year for $35, with hopes to eventually lower the price to $10, according to several reports. Aimed at university students in India, the tablet is equipped with 2GB of memory, a memory card slot, Wi-Fi, camera, USB ports, and a web browser, say reports.
• Random notes from mg
  My N900 has a SIM card with a flat-rate 3G data plan. My laptop hasn't. What do I do when I want to use the Internet on my laptop somewhere that doesn't have WiFi? Well, there are many options

27 Jul 2010 7:00am GMT

It has been a while since my last post here but I'm willing to put this blog back to life and write some stuff here.

To restart it I'd like to tell that I've attended Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere-Finland from july 2th to july 4th and it was simply great.
It is always good to met people that you don't know and put faces on the irc nicknames. Talking about people, Here are the group photo.
It was also good to meet other Collaborans and old friends there, which presented good stuff:
* George talked about telephaty
* Fleury came up with great new ideas for Qt and KDE styles
* Artur presented the Plasma mobile

There were other great presentations there as well.

So, what is next here in this blog?

Well, I know that we are far away from the new year's day when people do lots of promises for next year but it is time to promise some posts here in this blog.
Some of these promises are in my todo list for a while and I hope that after promising it will force myself to write them soon.

You can wait to read here on next days/weeks about:

* linuxcon Brasil that is comming soon (Aug 31/Sep 01, where I've just confirmed my participation with a presentation.
* tip for N900 users to save the battery.
* Garmin Navigator impression.
* MeeGo
* Syplifying memory measurement

Not exactly on this order, but to be honest I've already started to write most of them while I'm in an Iberia flight to London through Madri.

26 Jul 2010 10:05pm GMT

Chris Cole and I will be giving a presentation in Cleveland Tues evening (2010-07-26). Stop by if you are interested.

26 Jul 2010 6:38pm GMT

Today is the day the world is witnessing the most significant military leak in the history of mankind, so I have a feeling that today 's gonna be a good day.

To all the people at Wikileaks, and to all whistle blowers in past, present and future: you are heroes. You guy's ideas will be with us for centuries ahead of us. You'll be remembered in history books. Let's make sure you guys will.

26 Jul 2010 11:56am GMT

I was playing with ASN1 and Supplementary Services over the Weekend. My goal was to provide extended user information during a call setup. So the first step was searching for information of how it could look like, this involved going through the GSM Spec, the 2nd part was wrestling with asn1c to generate some dummy data (as I couldn't find a trace doing that), the 3rd part was being able to generate that from OpenBSC and send it to the phone.

25 Jul 2010 8:21pm GMT

This week I spent in the Hildon Old Town hotel in Prague as Ubuntu Platform Sprint took place there. Linaro project was part of it.

It was good time. I met many developers, connected faces to nick names (as usual) and wrote some patches. Today it looks like my work items for Maverick alpha3 release are "done" - all changes are reported as bugs, linked to my "cross compiler packages" blueprint and discussed with proper developers. The goal of my work is "armel cross compiler" package in Ubuntu Maverick. I know that there are people in team which will make use of it when it becomes available.

But for next event I really need to take isolating headphones as there are too much noise in room - few groups of people speaking, air condition etc.

Evening events were interesting - I met Czech developers from OpenEmbedded project, had occasion to listen to Nicolas's Pitre stories about his developer experience and long discussions on many different subjects. And of course Czech beers ;) Too bad that main one here is Pilsner Urquell as I can buy it in any local shop in Szczecin. But they also had Staropromen which was quite ok.

Prague is nice city. I did not made lot of sight-seeing but this weekend I will spend with my wife Ania so it will be done ;D We plan to see some of popular places and try to find those less popular ones but due to time limits there will be some left for next visit.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Ubuntu/Linaro Platform Sprint in Prague was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Ubuntu cross compilers
2. UDS continues
3. Another job change

23 Jul 2010 2:33pm GMT

• elektranox.org - Debian on N900
  I finally found some time to install Debian on my Nokia N900. As far as I know there is no tutorial about this in the WWW, so I will post it here. The installation will be parallel to the existing Maemo.

23 Jul 2010 7:00am GMT

I'm into Lars Von Trier's movies last few days. First with Dear Wendy, then The boss of it all and yesterday I was watching Manderlay together with a girlfriend.

It wasn't the first time that I saw the movie; I think the third time or something. But I'm still convinced that the movie is even better than Dogville, about which I wrote a few years ago that it's the best movie I ever saw.

Don't listen to the U.S. critics. In their struggle not to see the world from a U.S. point of view, they don't understand what it's about (it's not really about slavery). I guess Lars Von Trier carefully selects his audience.

The movie Manderlay, like Dogville, has a (hidden) morality. Even more than Dogville, which is basically about the moral necessity of assertiveness, is Manderlay a movie that tries to make you think. In my case about the failure of only using assertiveness to educate people (about) a new reality. Also about the failure of using democratic voting for every issue (ownership of a tool). And about the necessity of a law system: no matter how moral, or, immoral; it's still better than absolute freedom - people need a law -. But with "freedom" being some sort of piece of shit ideological word among many readers of my blog, I'm sure many wont understand what I mean with that. I try to carefully select my audience. I'm not against "freedom", just against its naive interpretations. Especially the "anarchy"-ones.

So Manderlay dances with the morals in Dogville. Both movies are part of a trilogy, so I guess that makes sense.

I'm grateful that Lars carefully selects his audience. You don't create art by appeasement.

Looking forward to Wasington, the last part of this trilogy.

22 Jul 2010 2:33pm GMT

22 Jul 2010 1:30pm GMT

Being an Engineer one need to resolve problems and sending a mail to a mailinglist and asking for help is most of the time not the problem solving skill you should use. So here is a list of some easy hints...

20 Jul 2010 7:33pm GMT