Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Bit jammy

Yesterday, I was trying to fix getting the phone's own number on that Sony Ericsson phone using gnokii. It didn't work, and created a new bug in the Sony Ericsson AT variant.

Turns out the responses returned from the phone are encoded using whatever is the current encoding on the phone. So 004D0045 instead of ME, if UCS2 was selected.
Making sure we use the right encoding all along the AT driver means we could remove some Sony Ericsson specific code, and fix in one fell swoop: Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Sagem phones.

Yay! gnokii 0.6.24 should be out tomorrow.

There's also a stupid fix in gnome-phone-manager if you tried to use IrDa or a cable. Expect release soon.

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

Gadgets and gifts

The great sport that is Vincent sent me a copy of Hacking vim for my troubles. Hopefully, I'll be able to get more code written, as requested.


In the free stuff department, last week, a kind soul at Ericsson sent me 2 Sony Ericsson mobile phones, one being the pretty new Sony Ericsson k850i. The other (less interesting) phone is already on its way to one of the gnokii developers without such a device.

I've started playing around with it. It has a good bunch of interesting modes when plugged in via USB, or over Bluetooth, which beg to be (better) supported including:
  • MTP device (Rhythmbox and gvfs)
  • Mass Storage media player (Rhythmbox)
  • ObexFTP over USB and Bluetooth (gvfs, obex-data-server)
  • Serial port (NetworkManager, gnome-phone-manager, gnokii)
Funnily enough, poking people at Nokia didn't get me a test phone in the ~2 years I tried. My wishlist is online :)

Saturday, 1 March 2008

Knock knock. Who's there? Stripes, again! Got booze?

Googling for phone stuff today, I found this great phone. Just for you Ezio!



Ezio provided material of his own. The bestest pasta ever!


And to cap it all off, via sebzen, and "Tendance High-tech" (lamest name ever):

Friday, 29 February 2008

More suckage

Lovefilm ties up with Amazon DVD

Sigh. I actually chose to use Amazon rather than Lovefilm because it was integrated with the rest of the Amazon shopping, including wishlists, and IMDB (look up a film on IMDB, click on the Amazon link, add to rental list).

Lovefilm is also more expensive (I pay £9.99 a month for 3 DVDs at a time, 6 per month), which would now be £9.99/month for 1 DVD at a time, with unlimited rentals, or £7.99 for 2 DVDs at a time, and 4/month. No word about Blu-ray discs counting as DVDs either (as is currently the case with Amazon).

I also wonder about Amazon cannibalising themselves, as Lovefilm also sells DVDs and offers some for download.Bah!

Thursday, 28 February 2008

gvfsd-obexftp

I committed my work on the ObexFTP backend for gvfs yesterday, and fixed a good number of bugs in it today (one deadlock, missing icons, etc.). And it's looking quite neat.

After selecting the device in the Bluetooth applet's "Browse Device..." menu, the device shows up on the desktop with a nice name and a window pops up.

Nice icon!

Photos I need to upload somewhere!

The nice thing is that it'll automatically unmount when the phone is out of range, or the Bluetooth adapter is removed/disabled (such as when suspending).

Monday, 25 February 2008

Saturday, 23 February 2008

gnome-bluetooth nearly dead

After the fun time debugging, I started implementing ObexPush in gnome-user-share, pretty much as planned. Code's in SVN. Next up are notifications, and asking whether to accept transfers for each session.

My little transfer just got started

I also committed the new goom visuals to gst-plugins-good. Better visuals, MMX, SSE2 and Altivec optimisations (I think). Get it from CVS while it's hot!

Hot chips, yummy