Maddler's Rants 'n' Raves

Usually I don't like to advertise "commercial" {sites|resources} but this time its something different. I'm talking about MagnaTune. What makes it "different"? Well, first of all it's an independent music store, sporting a lot of good music, I have to admit. But what makes it really interesting is the chance to download and/or listen to high quality full versions. The price you have to pay for that is a voice telling "this is track N of ablum X at Magnatune.com", but that's fine if you want to evaluate before you buy. And it's when you chose to buy that comes tha very very very nice part: you are free to make the price! Yes, there is no fixed price. You are free to decide how muce you want/can pay for the album you want to download in a range fro 5$ to 18$ or 4eur. tp 7eur. (50% of the price you pay will go straight to the band/singer). This way you will be able to download your music and share it with your friends. Yes, the license allows to make up to three copies of every CD you buy and give it to your friend.
Look, I'm not sayig those guys are the "good" guys. What I see is a different way of doing business. Being able to listen to the music before I buy will make me happier to pay the maximum if I find something good. That's the lesson majors should learn and understand, instead of complaining against peer-2-peer and losses!

Maddler • Other raves

Google just confirmed slots assigned to Maemo for Summer of Code. The four project assigned:

• Ruby Maemo Bindings: by Michael M. Martin Jr., mentored by Jay Phillips
• GeoClue for Maemo: by Jussi Kukkonen, mentored by Henri Bergius
• Smoove - Instant Desktop Migration Suite: by Paolo Durante, mentored by William Maddler (YESSS!!!)
• Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition on Maemo: by Mathieu BLONDEL, mentored by Makoto Sugano

More infos on Google SoC pages.
Stay tuned!

Maddler • Maemo

Some time passed since Godot arrived and I started playing with it and, yes, I have to admit I’m happy with it! It is about 2 years since when I first discovered Maemo and sounds like things are going better and better every day.
Yes, maybe something should be fixed on Nokia’s side, but (maybe?) we should look at Maemo from a different point of view, I mean the same point of view we would look at a (new) Linux distribution: still “something” needing to be fixed, but things are growing fast! And if everything will go well with Google Summer of Code we will also get some iteresting and somehow intriguing pieces of code as well. The current list of ideas:

• Ruby Maemo Bindings
• GeoClue for Maemo
• Smoove - Instant Desktop Migration Suite
• Japanese/Chinese handwriting recognition on Maemo
• Improve the phoneME JVM, to integrate well with Maemo and GPE enviroments
• Last.fm radio player
• Dasher via Maemo Device as Keyboard for PC
• Geolocation-based Transit Maps
• VPN integration that Just Works
• Enterprise-class cryptographic filesystem

Only 4 of them will get a slot for SoC (and I hope Smoove will get its slot, since I’ll mentor it), but neverthless it clearly shows how the interest is growing.

And in the past few weeks Jlbrd did what I think is a GREAT job, porting Claws-Mail to Maemo and also making it part of the “official” Claws Mail release (IMHO, one of the best mail clients around!).

Another (imho) good news is that Nokia is now member of Linux Foundation as Ari announced. I mean, if they (Nokia) will move in the right direction we could see something very interesting happening in the next months. It would be nice to see the same attitude Nokia sported with Maemo applied on other “devices". We will see.

In the meantime, I keep having fun with such a great environment and device!
Stay tuned!

Maddler • Maemo