keesj

I have never liked to use dos or windows. Perhaps it is because I am a Dutch an honest guy and did not want to run illegal software and neither did I want to pay for it. The possible communication I was able to have with real (windows running) people has always been compromised. When I used pine , they used html based emailing. GnomeNeeting and other hacks never worked because of NAT problems. nokia video calling beta also did not work as expected. That is why i have been asking my parent who live in France to install different programs over the years. But last week it happend

BIG SUCCESS: Skype video calling beta for linux worked with skype for windows and my kids where able to talk with their grand-parents. If that works I call it Ubiquitous! we had no problem with echo's and we talked for about one hour. for me this is really a big step in the right direction.

In the same week I have a good working gizmo video call with a other n800 user. That was a smaller success of course.

So guys. The real problem currently is that all that software has some constraints,
Skype video is not there for the n800 , gizmo video is not there for a normal linux distro and google/nokia beta calling is not usable.

Who will introduce Ubiquitous video calling?

A few brave men announced software and hardware in a fashion and openness I have never see before. I can not understand that we as community can even think about complaining about "Delays and Discount codes". We are informed in an unusual open fashion. With the it2008 beta for the N800 we even get a software preview. What more do you want?

Please have some respect for the people that offer such openness and think about what it means for a developer to be working against such an open deadline with open kitchen beta's

PHD: Pre Holiday disorder

A disorder that start when the holiday is first planned. In you head you overview the timespan between now and the holiday and evaluate if you can finish your current project(s) at work. it grows stronger every week that passes. two things can happen, A) you can finish your project in time. and the last day's before the holiday can be filled with a sense of emptiness because you don't want to start a new big project. B) the project planning does not go as planned and the project will not be finished in time.

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If you are programmer in a large company chances are you boss not not even know in what kind of
trouble you get yourself to get the software running. The boss will care about sales and time-to-market.

Suppose you write that great piece of software. Something really keen that might even be useful outside the scope of the your miserable application. If the sales guys don't know how to sell it you will not get rewarded, not by your boss and not by other (the product is a failure and so are you).

Writing open source software can be so much more rewarding. The rewards come in different taste, but they are always welcome. I consider that receiving a bug report already is a great reward. That is only if people know who is responsible for creating and resolving the bug.

I have seen great changes in the last month or so in the way nokia people are handling maemo and communication. I am starting so see names behind the components and I value that very much. For a company this must be hard (what happens when somebody goes away etc). But for the developer it must be a rewarding but pressuring experience. Please keep on the great work and keep popping names, you deserve it!

When I am not in front of my computer I am an outdoor person. I like to hike and climb.

As kids we learn the important question “Why?”. It is the perpetual search for the answer to live, earth and everything. I know two answers to that question and both come from England. The first and obvious ultimate answer was given by Douglas Adams and is 42. This is clearly an answer that is correct only if you live in England and use the English “non-metric” system. Maemo users will like this answer as comes pretty close to reality.

The second answer is buried inside each of us. Why do we do things. George Mallory answered this
question in a way that I have felt while walking back from the store this morning. “`Because it's there.'

I really hope to have some fun with this card. the pack was about 60 Euro. let's hope it works.

P.S.
Actually I know 4 answers the two others come from the USA:
“I'll get back to you” -> The Pragmatic programmer (Andrew Hunt and David Thomas)
“I don't know” -> The Career programmer (Chistopher Duncan) both great books and recommended readings

An exited developer like me invents a killer app every week. Killer apps tend to take more then a week to develop. What remains are cool hacks.

So after reading quims blog I wanted to view the walking internet flash demo on my computer.

The sound om my pc did not work. This happens a lot. Sometimes it is the fresh new kernel that misses the sound module. This time the speakers just where lost.

I asked on irc if the n800 could be used as a pc speaker. the answer was yes. now that is what i call killer hacks. I wish somebody would create a great app for this

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This post is about downloads.maemo.org

I have been programming Java for the last 8 years. The Java community is very well educated in terms of design patterns, documentation and testing. Almost every project I started used a different, newer technology and I have learned an awful lot of different development techniques. As developer it is very nice to work with new technology. It is a real shame that you don't know the anti-patterns until your in the middle of the project, and that is the moment where you realize that the next project I will run will use a different technology. There are only two components I really used a lot in the past years, one is the spring framework and the other is MMBase. The spring framework really is a brilliant piece of software I wish I would have created. For MMBase it is a different story, it is a ugly piece of software that gets the jobs done and that I partially created :p . MMBase is full of weirdness and hacks. Still what those have in common is that they get the job done.

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Support for the Lua programming language was added to the mud svn.
“Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language. Lua is free software.”

Together with this I added wxWidgets and the wxLua bindings to the mud svn. Why? I think many command line tools lack a simple gui interface to make them usable on the tablet. wxWidgets is a cross platform gui framework that is mostly ported to hildon (keyboard input works). Lua is simple and can be integrated with c code.

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Yesterday I went to my loved but non-geek friends. The kind of people who use computers and are happy with MS-word. Because I spend most of my free time on the maemo platform, I had to explain to my friend why I was spending all this time on this device. I have been training myself to answer this question the right way but the answer has never been very convincing (I love embedded devices , programming etc...). The problem is that 99% of that time was spent programming on a normal computer. They ended up asking what I was doing with device. This time the answer was more convincing and they understood me. I have been using the device to check my gmail and chat with people on the net. That is what the device excels at. It introduces a new way of thinking about client software. I don't need alarms, pim, and email sync.
This is why the N800 was the first thing I picked up this morning simply to check my mail before I turn the computer on.

This all makes me feel like creating a new trainspotting parody like adminspotting

Choose Live, Choose a PDA, Choose an exchange server, choose a f*cking big screen, choose printers service packs, and free updates , choose an anti virus,
Choose Live

Developers, developers, developers.

There is one thing I really don't like and that is being a user. Calling myself a user
would imply having a different relationship to maemo community. Users don't help each other,
Users have problem and expect somebody else to fix it. Users don't care about how things work. Being a user is just uncool. I see myself as an average N800 “user”: geeky, command line fanatic, and there is nothing I would like more then being able to program while on the road. I guess that what I am trying to say is that the average maemo user really is a developer and the average maemo developer is really a Nokia employee. There has bean some discussion on the maemo mailing list about splitting the mailing list. The current proposal look like this:

- platform (current maemo-developers)
- applications (new list)
- power users (current maemo-users)

Apparently nokia wants to to communicate about the platform with external “developers” I don't know how this will work since they their policy is to not announce future development (perhaps a platform NDA accessible to developers can help?)

Platform , applications and power users all sound pretty bad to me. How about
maemo-distro (about the distributions)
maemo-developer nothing changes here developers are people like me
maemo-users (newbie stuff, perhaps merged with maemo-developer)

Of course the term that really makes me feel at home is maemopeople because it does
not tell what your status it withing the community but emphasizes the community felling. And that feeling is quite strong for this “power end user”