C ä n n e ' s N o t e b o o k

Two for the price of one

Cänne — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:09:45 +0000

The first and the last MeeGo phone from Nokia (?), the awesome N9 has been published (without a price and date, but with specs and with a UI developer’s guide).

What might Nokia think about the investors’ intellectual capabilities when they made this early announcement?

I don’t care, personally I want one ! Just to play with its MeeGo like this.

Gorgeous candy stack

Zeroshift transmission – get out quicker from that corner!

Cänne — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 09:05:59 +0000

As a (retired) racer I can remember the clashes out of the corner, heading to be the first arriving to the next one. Boy, did I treat bad my gearbox changing gears up without hitting the clutch in attempt to keep up the torque. Still, you need to flip the throttle a bit and your acceleration is not constant.

This year in MotoGP Honda’s bikes seem to get out of the corner quicker than their rivals. Is it all about electronics? That would be strange, all teams are quite advanced in that field.

Maybe they have a mechanical solution like this unbelievable Zeroshift transmission from Zeroshift Ltd. As the below video illustrates, with just a five moving parts on a single power shaft three different speeds can be obtained without loosing the torque during the gear change. Now let’s see, how to fit that in my Ducati 350 MkIIID classic racer’s close ratio gearbox…

Set Sail for Open Source – OpenCPN on MeeGo opens new possibilities

Cänne — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:42:26 +0000

I wanted to install OpenCPN (a maritime chart plotter and GPS navigation software) on my MeeGo 1.1 running on my Samsung N150 notebook instead of using the easier path of using a M$ box or even using Ubuntu. Too easy for me, as usual I prefer challenges – but I have also something else in my mind. Tablet computers would be ideal for heavy sea conditions, provided that some rugged models will pop up as I expect. Certainly some nice applications will appear in A-store but not for me, thank you. If I go overseas, I want to know everything in my ship, including the navigation system. No way to have dependencies to Mr. G. or Mr. J. in my vessel, for sure. MeeGo is designed for small handheld devices so why not test if one can run OpenCPN on it, as an initial test to see if it can be used on a Linux powered tablet computer (why not on a tablet powered by Ubuntu – that exists – but I believe MeeGo approach of netbook being the highest platform range being more appropriate to what I am looking for).

The installation of OpenCPN on MeeGo took me some four hours but then I moved instantly from the rainy Provence to the sunny waters of Virgin Islands hacking the N95 GPS over a Bluetooth connection ! Of course, I would not take this installation in my boat, but now I know that my (future) overseas boat can navigate with the traditional methods and some common sense, with some very helpful aide provided by an open source running tablet computer.

Some words about the OpenCPN MeeGo port (or hack) – head down and no notes, I must admit. First I installed xf86-video-intel-2.12.0 from source of intellinuxgraphics.org (to get some libraries for GTK, the version 2.12 was a conclusion of trial-and-error method). wxWidgets-2.9.1 was the next installation from the source. The /etc/ld.so.conf.d needs to be modified for /usr/local/lib shared libraries. All other dependencies can be found from the MeeGo repositories during the process using zypper search.

OpenCPM-2.3.1 uses cmake. Some errors appear in the gpxdocument.cpp compilation, but they are simple cast problems, which can be resolved by writing, for example, instead of

if (name && name.Lenght() > 0)
if (name!=(const char *)NULL && name.Len() > 0)

There was also a run-time error, a segmentation fault in wxWidgets, but with gdb I quickly spotted that by putting the following statement in comments in chart1.cpp, the welcome dialog still looks good but the crash goes away…

//mldg.CentreOnParent();

Brilliant. Really good job Captain of the Bigdumboat, thanks a bunch for your help to me keep my dream alive!

Goodbye my friend

Cänne — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:54:14 +0000

I bought my first Nokia in 1995 when GSM was still grizzling and battery life was about 30 minutes. I bought my first Communicator in 1999 and was e-mailing with astonishing facility from the Brick. I got my N95 swiss knife in 2007. It took me about two days to learn how to use it but that time was well spent. Now I got almost free 5230 which is doing its job. My next phone will not be a Windows 7 or whatsoever. I feel strangely ashamed and deeply disgusted. It is difficult to explain. I mean, the loser selects a sucker, Nokia marries with Microsoft. What next for me, an Apple? Beurk. an Android? Google is evil. I’ll need to stick up with Chinese Symbian clones then. What the heck, why should I worry, I got no shares, anyway. But still – I feel sad to see how the modern industry does not have any values and shamelessly kick out a couple of thousand engineers. And how many of past M$ telecom partners have been successful? Motorola? LG? I say, a Kiss of Death!

Under the Disguise of User Friendliness Lays the Control

Cänne — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 10:14:17 +0000

For those who still use their brains to analyse the consequences of their choices as consumers.

Under the disguise of user friendliness many existing products and on-going projects are based on violating our privacy. Nah, “they want only good“.

Sure. Read first this hair raising article of Daily Mail about the planned Google Picasa facial recognition feature. Then think about the same feature in Facebook. Next, take a deep look into your beautiful handheld terminal, iPad or iPhone and think how (at least part of) its wonderful user friendliness has been reached. By vendor locking of the application servers which keeps collecting data about and your habits.

Of course, non of the above data will be ever collected or used against you.

What if the contrary would actually happen?

Let’s see, the CIA agent observing the screen of the drone flying over the L.A. and filming the crowds. And the facial recognition program will spot .. you to pop-up your Facebook account ?

Orwell was not stupid. Be careful out there, my friend.

2010 in review

Cänne — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 09:28:15 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 76 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 774kb.

The busiest day of the year was October 5th with 77 views. The most popular post that day was Nokia Music Shop – N95 – MTP – WMP11 – WMA – DRM – Arrgh!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were forum.dailymobile.se, usp-forum.de, chimac.net, google.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for sigma 70-300, ethernet cable connection, phone cable, canon eos 450d, and telephone cable.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Nokia Music Shop – N95 – MTP – WMP11 – WMA – DRM – Arrgh! July 2008
1 comment

Sigma 70-300m APO zoom – problems with Canon EOS 450D October 2008
1 comment

Ethernet on phone cable June 2007
-

Wait dynamic javascript loading February 2008
-

Force Internet Explorer to reload embedded SWF December 2007
-

Thanks, everybody – and Happy New Year 2011 !!!

Cänne

MeeGo 1.1 on Samsung N150 Netbook

Cänne — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:46:29 +0000

2011-12-11: Warning update: Nokia has dropped MeeGo and in September 2011 Intel did the same. The MeeGo 1.2 is the last MeeGo available, unless the community take over. So follow the below instructions only if you know what you want to do. (but it still works fine for me).

MeeGo 1.1 is out since a couple of months now. I got bored during the holidays and decided to sacrifice a rainy day to see what it is all about.

My motivation was two folded. First, I was tired of the original Windows 7 “Starter“, the original installation on my netbook which I have bought from my French network operator. It really sucks, too big OS for such as small machine. Second reason was a simply curiosity of what can be the base OS of my future smart phone (who said “Nokia”?).

Conclusion

Was it worth of it? Yes. Definitely, my netbook has a new life and I can do much more things with it. Don’t expect to get out of it without some headache but the installation is pretty easy, but with some usual specific “features” which I will explain below.

Market analysis

Will MeeGo and MeeGo powered devices make it against the iOS and Android? Of course, as a pure operating system (Linux) and as a distro (MeeGo) has nothing to be ashamed when compared to the two commercially successful big brothers. It is very convenient to use, quite stable (but not yet stable enough) but as a experienced Linux user I can still feel the disguised Gnome behind the multi-menu drop-down toolbar. Compared to iOS it can have some technological edge but it will never reach the smoothness of the Apple’s products. And there are so many hiccups which require opening of the command line prompt (the feature which I greatly appreciate) that I am not all surprised to hear that Nokia will come up with a MeeGo powered product only in 2011, if they can make it. They have so much work on this platform to make it simply reliable, easy to use and to make sure it integrates easily with Ovi.com services that one year is short time for all that work. And Nokia knows as well as everyone over here that it will not be any Apple killer machine.

Let’s face it, marketing hype is more important than the actual usability. If we take the upcoming, Ubuntu powered tablet computers they will never make it against iPad, marketing wise. Not that they would be worse to use. They would not just appear sexy to the grand public. It is so much cooler to own a shiny iPad, or iPhone than any of the Chinese, Taiwanese or whatsoever Nokia tablets. Apart of the geek like me, who cares about the Ubuntu, MeeGo, Linux or the OS name in general? All that matters is the coolness.

You cannot believe how much of doctorat level people I have met explaining me with their eyes shining how they can send photo attachments to their parents directly from where it happens and how great it is that their parents would be able to answer them the same way (they never do). Yawn. But it is precisely the grand public and the media who eat the pill and amplifies the hype. How you can imagine that MeeGo, Ubuntu or any other open source software could do that?

Installation of MeeGo on Samsung N150

When I got the netbook, it auto-installs Win 7 Starter. I wisely selected to split the big hard disk in two data partitions, C: and D: instead of the usual C: only installation. I was thinking already that I can use the D: partition for some Linux hack. If you haven’t done the same, the C: can be resized during the installation, if you like to keep the Win7 for dual boot, like I did. But in case, it is perhaps worthwhile to use Samsung’s Recovery tool to take a full backup image of your system and put than on a (big) external USB disk or such. If you just hit through the installation brainlessly, you would end up to remove all the partitions of the original installation, including the Recovery partition. Therefore, if you want to make it sure, you would be better to make also a boot disk for your Samsung Recovery file. And perhaps even test that it actually boots.. Well, I didn’t, but you have been warned.

Get and boot MeeGo 1.1 installing image

I installed the MeeGo version with Google Chrome. You need a minimum 1GB USB stick to sacrifice. Follow the MeeGo Windows installation instructions how to make a bootable MeeGo installation image USB stick. If you have that infamous D: disk which you can sacrifice, it is now a good idea to right click on the My Computer icon and select “Manage”. Go to the disk management, find out the partition for D: and remove it. There is no space on the disk to install MeeGo without messing with the Windows installation. If there is no D:, the C: “disk’s” partition must be resized, and there is always a risk. Or what the heck, you can decide to remove the Windows altogether, what do I care …

Shutdown the system, put the MeeGo USB disk in a USB port and power the thing up. When the system starts up, when you still see but a black screen, repeatedly and steadily hit the F2 on your keyboard to get into the BIOS setup.

The picture above is perhaps not what you will you see, you would have just the splash screen of Samsung. I have selected in my machine to show more information at BIOS boot time, the Linux way (because we are geeks, we want cryptic messages flowing around all day long).

Once in BIOS, you need to make a few changes. The first thing is the boot order, the first device must be the bootable USB disk. Remember that it must be inserted at boot time in order it to shown in the boot device menu (click the image for full size screenshot).

While in the boot menu, you may want to change the screen brightness into the maximum, for your convenience. Use the Fn key and the up arrow key for that. Oh, because the brightness adjustment does not work with MeeGo 1.1 on this computer. You can only change the screen brightness once in the BIOS. There is the following setting you should use for that in the Boot section:

Still in BIOS settings, you may want to check the below wake-up setting for the opening of the lid, in the Advanced section. Otherwise it might happen that your system will not wake up when you put it in sleep by closing the lid. There is another modification related to this problem, explained below but it can be done only after the installation, please read further.

Save your changes by pressing F10. The system will boot from the USB disk. You should see the MeeGo installation disk’s boot menu.

It is now a good idea to boot on the MeeGo’s Live Image, which is on the same image. This way you can verify that MeeGo will actually work in your system, you can play around with it a little and in general, you can decide do you really want to install it. If you still want it, reboot the system and this time select the installation.

You should see MeeGo’s Anaconda installer’s splash screen.

Click the arrow on the lower left corner and start the installation. After going through the usual language and keyboard selections (I selected US International as keyboard even if my machine has a French keyboard, you can swap between the keyboard layouts after the installation) you would get the crucial question about the partitioning. You have two possibilities. If you have managed to leave an empty space in your disk, like I did by removing the D: “disk’s” partition your selection is the following (make sure to check the Review layout check box):

If you don’t have the space, you can take the risk of resizing the C: “disk’s” partition. There is not much to loose. Except your Windows 7 installation and only you can estimate how valuable it is for you. Anyway, if everything fails, you can restart the installation and select the “Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout”. That would make at least a clean installation and you do not have to wonder with the below explanations about the dual booting.

What you should get as partition layout on Samsung N150 is something like this:

In other words, Samsung Recovery system is on the first primary partition (1), the Windows 7 boots from the second primary partition (2), the C: “disk” is on the third primary partition (3). The fourth primary partition (4) is further split to extended partition layout by the MeeGo Anaconda installer (btw. used in Red Hat, makes pretty good job with partition tables). First extended partition (5) is the /boot mount. “extlinux” boot loader is used. Second extended partition (6) is / (root) mount partition. You may notice that the file system is btrfs. It means that your home directory can be crypted, there is a selection for that. This will lead to a known bug that the applications you have used will never get registered as used. It is Ok, you will just see “this application has never been launched” under the icons, not a big deal. Go ahead, accept the “btrfs”. The last extended partition (7) is the swap partition. Oh, yes, extlinux boot loader can boot on an extended partition. We are in 2011 soon.

You should be ready to boot. You’ll get into the MeeGo quickly enough. No hint on the Windows boot? Don’t panic, that’ll be explained in the below section.

Changing boot menu for the dual boot

Once you have been tired of the wonderful world of the MeeGo and would like to get back to Bill’s, you need to do the following in order to activate the dual boot option, which is there but hidden from you:

In the Application’s, find the command line prompt to open a console. If you are not familiar with “vi” editor, you can use “gedit” editor alright. Make yourself as root by issuing a command “su -” (no I do not like to type all the time “sudo”, I think that real system administrators should work as “root”; If you edit the boot menu file, you should understand your responsabilities anyway, using “sudo” does not protect you from your own mistakes). Ok, type now ”su -” and use your own password as “root” user password, that’s the way MeeGo sets it.

vi /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

Make sure that you make the following changes

...
timeout 30
...
# menu hidden
...
append ro root=/dev/sda6 quiet vga=current nohz=off highres=off
label win7
     menu label Win 7
     kernel chain.c32
     append boot 2
label RestoreWin
     menu label RestoreWin
     kernel chain.c32
     append boot 1

The “30″ is actually 3 seconds, you may want to change to that to your own taste. The “nohz=..” stuff is a kernel option which is required to overcome the bug of MeeGo never waking up on Samsung N150 once the timeout of a idling system puts it in sleep. The actual boot menu now looks something like the below screenshot:

Last but not least, do not forget that the partition “1″ is to boot the Samsung Recovery system. If you ever go there, the first thing Samsung Recovery system will do is to restore the MBR with its own, Windows boot loader. No way back to MeeGo after that (I will explain how to recover from that situation below).

How to synchronize with Ovi.com

The out of the box MeeGo 1.1 will not work with Ovi.com. You need to get from the http://repo.meego.com the SyncML packages from the trunk. I got

buteo-syncml-0.4.9.52-1.2.i589

(and the equivalent buteo-syncml-devel package).

I created a new device on Ovi.com, when it sends the SMS, there appears a link “manual settings”. I followed the instructions and got the Ovi.com synchronization working with the MeeGo Sync utility. But it is all useless, since e-mail addresses in Contacts did not get sync’ed correctly! I dropped it and used Google Chrome on Ovi.com, it is much more interesting way of doing it, especially since I am already synchronizing Ovi.com with my phone, which is synchronized from my corporate Exchange server, … To many syncs will kill the sync.

How to get the MeeGo boot back if Windows overwrites it

Simply boot back to the MeeGo USB Live Disk and launch it (and not the installation). Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a command prompt. The root password seems to be “meego”…

Now mount the root file system of your installed MeeGo system, remember it is on the partition (6).

mount /dev/sda6 /mnt

Install the extlinux (syslinux) bootloader in the MBR of the disk.

cd /usr/share/syslinux
cat mbr.bin > /dev/sda

Reboot and test

init 6

Problems

I have lost the DNS (name services, which are strangely served by the “localhost” 127.0.0.1) and quite often the wireless network connection. But otherwise, there was no problem with the network installation in general, which is a good thing. I have somehow managed to block the entire system (perhaps X11 or Gnome) by doing something on Google Chrome. The way out of this is either to reboot. Otherwise you can do the good old run-state recycling, just to see if this is System V compatible installation: hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as “root” (your password):

init 3

(wait)

init 5

Conclusion #2

I hope you have enjoyed with your MeeGo installation as much I do. Hopefully you have avoided some pitfalls with these instructions. Let’s see, there will be a MeeGo phone out for next Xmas, right ? ….

Parallel computing is not enough?

Cänne — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 21:04:18 +0000

I learnt from this article http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19882-future-computing-boosts-will-need-a-revolution.html that while we are struggling to parallelize our algorithms we would never reach any usable level of application before actually we would run out of steam!

Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG for my Canon 450D

Cänne — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:57:02 +0000

In a post from September 2008 (Sigma 70-300m APO zoom – problems with Canon EOS 450D) I told that I could survive with the old, non-DG Sigma telephoto zoom lens with my Canon EOS 450D, despite the fact that in many occasions, especially outside it just made the camera to hang. Well, now the time has come to make an end to this miserable situation, since I am again interested to use a the wonderful (overall quality/cost ratio) APO lens more often. Therefore I purchased from Amazon a Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 APO DG. Not too expensive with its 226€. There was a non-APO model for about 155€ but I picked this one, because I have so good experience with my old APO lens.

Old, non-DG model on the left

Click the image to see more details: the old model is made much better, and it also feels much more robust in hand. But the new one is lighter.

Important improvement to the old model is that with the new model you can use macro function in 200-300 range. That helps a lot, having used the old model for years and cursing not being able to zoom at all but myself and the camera instead. Take a look at the zoomed macro example shot of my Crassula-family plant below.

I am very pleased with the Sigma products. Of course, you take a risk with non-Canon products because there is no backward compatibility guarantee when you change your EOS camera. Thumbs up also for my new tripod Velbon CX 560 3D.One day when I will in lottery, I will go and buy that EOS 5D plus some 10 k€ worth of best Canon lenses. Until then, I will enjoy of what I got !

Church tower at sunset full zoom 300mm

My Crassula plant seen through the new APO DG

Cannot delete a directory because Thumbs.db is locked by a process in Windows XP – Remedy

Cänne — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:47:30 +0000

If you have used thumbnails to view the folder and/or the sub folders the process is actually explorer.exe. There are some good, simple and reliable unlock utilities out there, but since I am on corporate Windows XP with no admin rights, I have to use another trick:

Warning : by killing the process that uses the Thumbs.db file the problem is resolved. The process is usually the Explorer. But to operate the Windows XP you need the explorer.exe process. If you fail to start the Explorer, you have to reboot using Ctrl+Alt+Del which does the same thing anyway, releasing the Thumbs.db file .

Right-click on the task bar – start Task Manager from the menu
In the Task Manager, select Processes tab by clicking on it
In the Processes tab, select Image Name to find quickly explorer.exe
Click on the explorer.exe to select the process and press End Process
To the are you sure question, answer Yes
All your desktop icons will disappear
Don’t panic
Click Applications tab in the Task Manager
Press New Task… button
In the Create New Task dialog, type explorer and press OK
Close the Task Manager
Delete the stubborn directory (don’t open it first)