Subclassed

The joys of Python and Qt

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:30:00 +0000

I'm currently working on a tutorial regarding MeeGo, the new Linux-based embedded platform born by the merging of (Nokia-sponsored) Maemo and (Intel-adopted) Moblin. MeeGo is probably the closest thing we'll ever get to a real "Linux for the masses": differently from Android, where Linux is just a kernel for Java to run on top, here we'll have the full GNU toolchain, X display, desktop technologies based on FreeDesktop standards, RPM packages, etc etc.

The main development toolkit for MeeGo, from now on, will officially be QT. This seems to fly in the face of reason, having two existing GTK-based codebases from both "parent" systems which have already been deployed on production devices, but it's actually a very smart choice, as I was reminded just today.

This morning, I was working on a laptop running Windows XP. I built a couple of forms with Qt Designer, then fired up my trusty IDE and wrote the main code, about 150 lines of Python that will download some files, manage a few controls and then display a web page.

After completing a full set of tests on the local machine, I copied it to my (Maemo) phone, and again it was working perfectly -- without any change, recompilation, deployment, anything. Then I went home and copied it back to a different laptop running Kubuntu Linux, and again it was running just fine. Had I had a Mac (or iPad?) laying around, I'm confident it would have run there as well without any change. Consider that the version of QT and PyQt was slightly different on all machines, just to give it a further twist.

Obviously this level of portability has a price. I had to write my code using constructs like QSettings and QNetworkAccessManager rather than messing directly with the Windows Registry or HTTP_PROXY variables. I have yet another (leaky) abstraction layer on top of the OS, which may or may not be to everyone's taste, and the program runs in a sandboxed runtime, which might be slower than natively-compiled code (although this is debatable, these days); but I didn't have to write three different codepaths for each and every interoperation with the OS. I didn't have to worry about having a $HOME or a %HOME%. If I have to worry about packaging is just because I have to write about the ins and outs of a particular platform; in other circumstances I could have simply relied on python tools to do the right thing.

Python and QT could finally deliver the dream of portability that Java promised, if only we give them a sporting chance.

CallBlocker for Maemo

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Last week, Vinu Thomas came up with an ingenious script that will silently drop calls on your N900 if they come from a list of "blocked" callers. I never thought you could do that, but apparently there have been quite a few apps for this sort of things on more established platforms like Symbian and iPhone.

At first I suggested a few minor improvements to the script, then I thought I might as well repackage it in a proper application with a proper GUI. I asked permission to Vinu (something the author of "pycallblocker" didn't bother to do), and then I went ahead and put it on Garage.

So there you have it: CallBlocker 1.0 for Maemo 5. Note that it relies on the python2.5-qt4-gui package, currently available only in the extras-testing repository.

The current feature-set is quite limited: you basically enter a list of phone numbers, and callers (exactly) matching them will be sent a busy signal or redirected to voicemail.

It did get quite a warm reception on talk.maemo.org, so I'm motivated to keep development ongoing (at the expense of other, still-unreleased stuff I have almost ready). The current plan is to release a 1.1 version with support for suffix wildcards (e.g. entering +441234*, all numbers beginning with +441234 would be matched and dropped) and better daemon management. Then, time permitting, I'd like to have a 2.0 with features like blocking all withheld/private numbers, blocking SMS texts, blocking specific contacts from address book, blocking all numbers not in addressbook, blocking only during some hours, and possibly even a "whitelist" mode.

Once it reaches a certain maturity, I'll probably consider moving it to the Ovi Store, at which point PyQt licensing issues might arise, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

KDE 4.4.0 on Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 -- a note of warning

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:56:00 +0000

I just upgraded my Kubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" from KDE 4.3.4 to 4.4.0 using the backports repository. A note of warning: take a backup.

It took me something like 4 or 5 runs of apt-get dist-upgrade / apt-get -f install to get back a working setup. APT complained about a couple of things (python-qt3-doc conflicting with some newer package which includes the same examples, and Bilbo having been renamed Blogilo) but eventually pulled it through.

I was smart enough to backup the .kde home directory before launching a 4.4 session, and I'm glad I was. First run: Plasma crashed hard on a segfault, and didn't restart. Ok, this happened with some past upgrade already, let's just move away the old .kde home... got back a default desktop. Playing around with widgets, I hit another crash. And another. The culprit was always the Plasma Desktop, actual applications were running fine. Eventually, I moved back the old .kde home except the plasma* files under .kde/share/config/. This gave me back all my old KDE settings, except for Plasma. Win, I thought, and merrily set out to recreate my previous desktop arrangement.

Another crash.

So uhm. I'll try to track down what exactly Plasma doesn't like in my setup (which was, for the record, with two panels on left and right edge; Lancelot and a couple of QuickAccess widgets on the left, task manager and shutdown button on the right; two Plasma "views" and 4 virtual desktops), but if you are planning a similar upgrade, make sure you put aside some time for it, and get a good backup beforehand.

(I guess the question now would be "is it worth it?". Well, KDE does look more polished, applications are faster to launch and more responsive... it does look like we're finally at the point where one could upgrade from a 3.5.x release to 4.x and feel a bit awestruck.)

Mobile applications for Nokia phones with... javascript ?!?

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:16:00 +0000

A few days ago the lovely folks at NSManchester, an Apple user group, gave a chance to "the enemy" (i.e. Nokia) to present their technology stack and business strategies for attracting developers.

The two presenter were a bit underwhelming (understandable after they went through the usual, hellish experience with British railway services), and there was little talk of my beloved Maemo, but it's hard to dismiss the technology stack they have chosen to go forward. Key element seems to be the QT library they acquired last year, which I know and love through the original Python bindings. It's powerful and as cross-platform as it can be, with a lot of mindshare in the Linux and Windows communities; this said, it's still C++, and it's hard to get excited about C++ these days. Also, the runtime will gradually appear on new and recent phones but probably won't make it to older ones.

The second development platform they are pushing, however, was more of a surprise to me. Apparently, you can use JavaScript to write applications for recent smartphones (S60 5th ed. -- N97 and 5800 -- and S60 3rd ed. FP2 -- e.g. E72, N85, N96 etc). You can access GPS coordinates, contacts and calendar items, as well as having complete freedom to design the UI with standard HTML and CSS. You don't need to sign the resulting packages, the barrier to entry is lowered dramatically. This is potentially a game-changer, and I don't know why Nokia are not shouting it from the rooftops. Early adopters include Netflix, which uses a basic JavaScript interface to stream their Flash content (!) -- so yes, you can use flash as well. My head simply went "boom"; I must look into this stuff.

One other thing I noticed was the presenters' style, typically European: self-deprecation and brutal honesty about things that work and ones that don't. It was refreshing, after weeks of Yanks propaganda from Google and Apple pushing their new gadgets as "fantastic", "amazing", "revolutionary" etc etc etc...

Backupify

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:17:00 +0000

Thanks to the lovely gPodder on my Nokia N900, I've recently discovered the net@night podcast by Leo Laporte. Like many regular podcasts, it's mostly full of random chatting and showmanship. In this respect, "new media" tend to be exactly like "old media": forced by their own schedule to blabber for the sake of it. But I digress.

The best segment of Laporte's show is usually an interview with someone from a startup, which is a good way of finding out about new services. Yesterday, it made me sign up for Backupify, a "social media backup tool" which will scrape your GMail / Delicious / Facebook / Flickr / Twitter / Blogger / Wordpress etc etc and store all the resulting data in a safe place on Amazon's cloud. Not a bad idea: the first 20 years of the Age of the Internet should have taught us, if anything, that data is ephemeral and can disappear at the flick of a switch. What happened to Geocities is proof that today's giants won't necessarily be with us tomorrow. Conscious of this state of things, Backupify gives you the option to drop your data on your own Amazon server, so that it will still be available if they go belly-up; quite a honest approach for a startup. It used to be a pay-only service, then went free to accelerate growth and get some venture capital; they will move to a freemium model after January 31, so you better try it out now if you can.

Good "Web 2.0" services usually expose APIs that make backups relatively easy for a programmer, but who's got time to write dedicated scripts AND the foresight to run them regularly? Myself, I've probably written half a dozen GMail scrapers, but I hardly ever ran them more than once. I've exported this Blogger-powered site once, and it was a nightmare. Backupify makes it very easy to "set up and forget", and that's good. The data will only be as good as what the various sites will allow; for example you will never be able to "restore" a Twitter account, so Backupify will only give you a PDF of your (and your friends') twits, which is the best you can expect. For Google Spreadsheets you get XLS files, for Blogger you get a big XML containing all your posts, etc etc.

The only problem with the site is the password anti-pattern: in order to get at your data, they often have to ask for your login details, and will store them on their servers. They do use OAuth if the service supports it (like Facebook or Google), but otherwise you'll have to trust them with your credentials. This makes them a very good target for black-hat hackers, among other things. I do hope they know what they are doing.

How the Nokia N900 is improving my life

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:18:00 +0000

(Small things, but...)

Today I had to took my car to the garage, so had to tell my manager I'd likely be late (public transport is not terrible in our area, but it still takes me about twice the time to get to the office than it would with the car). I'm also down with a laryngitis and I can barely whisper.

I could have booted my home laptop to send an email or IM, but meanwhile the bus would have come and gone. So I hit the road anyway, and thought I would somehow email from the phone.

But then, the Nokia N900 is no Blackberry; it's a full-fledged linux desktop in your pockets. When I enabled the 3G data connection, the button nearby was the one to set your IM status(es) to Online; so I fired that up, looked up my manager in the wonderfully integrated address book, and she was online, so while I sit on the bus, we had a friendly chat about things to do, without having to share them with other commuters or strain my poor throat.

All the while, I was listening to the latest Python 411 podcast about the (apparently terrific and currently-slashdotted) Sikuli project, updating expenses on the little program I've developed (which I'll upload to the Ovi Store in a few weeks, I promise), and browsing Google Reader. The 30-mins commute was over in what seemed like seconds, and the experience was basically the same I could have had while sitting at my desk with a regular laptop.

This little thing is simply outstanding. Apple's new "iWhatever" better have a SIM slot, or they can kiss goodbye to their iPhone marketshare.

The personal-GPS market has just died

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Nokia just announced that the turn-by-turn navigation addons to their (underwhelming) gps software, Ovi Maps, will now be offered free of charge, completely undercutting TomTom and friends. They can do this thanks to the recent acquisition of Navteq, the top map-making company in the world (which is still selling map data to competitors at a hefty price, by the way, including Google); and they have to do it, because Google is doing it as well on Android and iPhone.

If Nokia can really deliver (i.e. actually improve Ovi Maps, which is quite frankly not as good as commercial competitors yet), 2010 will be remembered as the year that GPS devices became obsolete, like it happened to PDAs about three years ago. TomTom shareholders better run for the hills.

Remote shutdown on Windows

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:54:00 +0000

This might sound useless or obvious to many, but i didn't know it and it made my life easier today...

If you ever need to shutdown a remote Windows machine, and you can't access it with Remote Desktop or similar tools, you can use Shutdown.exe from another Windows machine, like this: shutdown /m \\my-remote-host

Additional parameters can be seen with /? but the most useful ones are:

/r: reboot after shutdown
/f: force shutdown -- useful when the machine looks stuck, which is what happened to me today...
/d xx:yy: give a reason for reboot. See /? for the available codes.

I hope this means I can say goodbye to dangerous hard-reboots...

Nokia Ovi Store Policies on SaaS / subscriptions: fail

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:51:00 +0000

(Chances are that nobody will answer this question, like it happened to this developer on forum.nokia.com, but what the hell)

I have an interesting business idea. I'll develop a mobile application with some interesting functionality, and I'll give it away for free. The application will contain an option to upload some data to a remote server, which you will then access from any computer as a regular site. The website will have some advanced features to analyze the data etc etc. The site will operate as SaaS, with a free 30-day trial. Basically, the site will make the real money, in a way similar to what FeedDemon and NewsGator tried a few years ago in a different market.

Now, if I wanted to do that on Nokia platforms, I would try and put my mobile app on the Ovi Store as a free download, right? After all, it will be a useful program in its own right, with the online services being 100% optional. Nokia / Ovi get a free, useful app enriching its (crappy) customer experience, the developer gets a big distribution channel, it's a win-win!

Except that landlords don't like uppity sharecroppers. From the Ovi Terms & Conditions:

4.7. Free Content Restriction

You are prohibited from collecting future charges from end users for Content that those end users were initially allowed to obtain for free. This is not intended to prevent distribution of free trial versions of Your Content with a later upsell option to obtain the full version of the Content. Such free trials for Content are permitted. However, if You want to collect fees after the free trial expires, You must collect all fees for the full version of Your Content through the Program. In this Agreement, "free" means there are no charges or fees of any kind for use of the Content. All fees received by You for Content distributed via the Program must be processed by Nokia.

Now, I can see the motive behind such a "racket clause". Nokia doesn't want Ovi to end up a cesspool of trialware, or to be associated with "click once and pay forever" scams. But the rule is too broad, and it reads like any SaaS scenario is simply out of the question (especially when you consider that Ovi does not support "subscriptions" at the moment, only one-off payments). SaaS is probably the best revenue model in the software world at the moment, and Nokia is telling developers they can't use it.

I honestly do not know if Apple put similar restrictions in place on their store. They probably did (and then some), control-freak as they are, and this is why I wouldn't want to touch the iPhone ecosystem with a barge pole. But Nokia was supposed to be trying hard to regain developer mindshare...

So the question I'd like to ask, before I shell out for the Ovi "publisher" license, is: dear Nokia, my application does something useful on your mobiles. It will then, optionally, send some data to my server, and I will personally collect money to have people access that data on the web, aggregated in various ways. Can I put the app on Ovi?

More notes on N900

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:41:00 +0000

The N900 is lovely, but the more I use it, the more I get the feeling that releasing it as a mass-market phone might have been a bit premature.

Take the "grid" icons. Technically, you can sort them: each icon can be given a "priority" number, and the lower it is, the higher it will appear. Technically, you can create additional subfolders and even auto-sort icons depending on the application classification (office, media etc). Unfortunately, all of this must be done *by manually editing an XML file* (/etc/xdg/menus/hildon.menu) plus several other text files (the .desktop and .application files in /usr/share/applications/hildon). For a consumer-grade device, this is shocking. It's even worse: if you mess up said files, the system goes in a "reboot loop" from which is very hard to escape (hint: get the flasher tool and use it with only parameter --enable-rd-mode, then fix the file, then use flasher again with --disable-rd-mode; if that doesn't work, you'll have to do a full reflash).

Also, it does not work with the SIM cards from network Three in UK and Denmark; considering that Three is a favourite of data-heavy users, who should be the main target for this device, this was a big mistake.

Some applications are clearly half-baked (Maps), and the Ovi Store is still closed. You make a big launch taking over the entire ad-space on Gizmodo for a day, and your supposedly flagship applcation store is not working ?

Nokia are slowly addressing these issues by releasing over-the-air updates, which is good, but the overall feeling remains: as released (late), the N900 is for hackers and hobbyists. Which, considering the platform potential and role, is a crying shame.

N900 first impression

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:21:00 +0000

Cool. Feels sturdier than iPhone. Opening the battery compartment is shockingly hard, which is surprising if you think that Nokia always paid a lot of attention to battery slots etc. The hardware keyboard is undoubtedly better than virtual ones, and key size is about right for my clumsy fingers. Desktop navigation is da bomb, incredibly better and more customizable than anything seen before. Default browser is lovely if a bit idiosyncratic, mostly due to the erratic touchscreen. Ah, the touchscreen: worse than iPhone, sorry. The stylus is still quite handy. Apps: quite a bit of them, after enabling the extras repository, and decent quality. Will try the ovi store later. The feeling is that, finally, Nokia built a device for the internet: the network is taken for granted and integrated everywhere. The web experience is so good that custom clients (e.g. for twitter or facebook) are hardly needed. I'm writing this post from MaStory, but I could have used blogger.com and the experience would not have been much worse. And of course, this phone runs linux. Which means that you can hack it to death, and that the market is fully open. S60 developers can officially retire, Maemo is simply on another planet. Now let's hope Nokia won't blow this massive chance...

Plasma + Python + QThread = bad

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:52:00 +0000

DOM manipulation performed in a QThread launched from a KDE Plasma applet written in Python is officially a very bad idea. Minidom: crash. QDomDocument: crash. !Fun.

If you can't fix it, rebrand it

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:17:00 +0000

The reputation of the KDE ecosystem was tarnished by a crappy release process for KDE4. Essential desktop components simply weren't ready for release in 4.0 and 4.1 (some of them still are mostly vaporware) after a huge barrage of hype had massively raised expectations, and this generated a lot of (well deserved) bad publicity. The answer?

Go and rebrand it, so that the development process can be broken up more easily and people will be persuaded to blame the right developers for each component. And while we are at it, let's throw out KDE's well-earned reputation for deep integration, the idea of the DE as a complete platform for users and developers. Let's give users the idea that KDE is just a "compilation" of bits and bobs thrown together for no particular reason, on the way overlapping as much as possible with the concept of "distribution", making it fun for companies to explain the difference and for developers to understand what they can and cannot rely on for their apps. Now KDE is supposed to be just a "community", a "club" of like-minded (C++) people hanging out in Gran Canaria and the like.

Yeah, that will be fun.

Honestly, I've been a big KDE fan for ages, but the development process for KDE4 was clearly wrong on so many levels. Developers' reactions to user feedback in the last two years have been astonishingly patronizing, and this is just another instance of it. Just admit that errors were made and get to work, please, instead of wasting time jet-setting from one "conference" to another (preferably in remote islands with good nightclubs), talking about marketing b*llocks.

Akonadi vs Plasma: a tale of disorganized, randomic development

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:20:00 +0000

The Akonadi::ItemView class, which should provide a default, out-of-the-box view of data stored by Akonadi (KDE 4 technology), depending on the type of resource it represents, cannot be included in a Plasma.Applet (KDE 4 technology) but only in a KXmlGuiClient or KXmlGuiWindow (KDE 3 technology).

Clearly dogfood isn't as tasty as apple pie.

Passaporto obbligatorio per i bambini da oggi?!? Classico caso di cattivo giornalismo

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:32:00 +0000

(Apologies, this post is only in Italian)

Questa mattina il Corriere della Sera ha fatto risparmiare qualche litro di caffe' ai poveri genitori di bambini italiani all'estero. Il pezzo "Anche i bimbi avranno il loro passaporto", infatti, conteneva abbastanza allarmismo da provocare diversi casi di tachicardia acuta in adulti con prole, quasi tutti in fase di preparazione per l'inevitabile rientro natalizio sul Suolo Patrio.

Tutto grazie alla seguente affermazione (screenshot per i posteri):

"Dal 25 novembre, tutti i bambini in viaggio all'estero avranno in mano il loro documento con nome e foto, così come prevede la nuova disciplina comunitaria."

Panico. Fino a ieri per i minori bastava essere presenti sul passaporto dei genitori. Per avere un nuovo passaporto ci vuole piu' di un mese! Natale e' il 25 dicembre e il nostro aereo e' fra X giorni! Possibile che il Ministero degli Esteri si sia creato dal nulla una montagna di lavoro proprio sotto Natale?

La risposta e' no. Peccato che il giornalista/scribacchino/redattore che si e' preso la briga di riportare la notizia (probabilmente di agenzia) non abbia nemmeno provato a fare un minimo di verifica o integrazione, magari sul sito della Polizia di Stato (organismo preposto al rilascio dei passaporti), magari leggendo un aggiornamento dal titolo "Nuova disciplina in materia di passaporti":

"I passaporti contenenti l'iscrizione di minori rilasciati fino ad oggi rimangono comunque validi fino alla scadenza e tutte le richieste di iscrizione del figlio minore sul proprio passaporto pervenute fino a ieri saranno evase fino al 15 dicembre."

Ergo, l'affermazione che "dal 25 novembre, tutti i bambini in viaggio [...] avranno in mano il loro documento" e' palesemente falsa. E il preoccupato genitore puo' finalmente rilassarsi con una bella tazza di caffe' fumante, magari (per oggi) decaffeinato.

How to Replace VmWare Server 2.0 Console with VNC

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:50:00 +0000

VmWare Server 2.0 ships with a web-based user-interface that is, to put it bluntly, an abomination. Supposedly, it is that way in order to simplify requirements: gone is the command-line API-based interface of 1.0 (which is now only available in the pricier products, what a coincidence), now the only thing you need is a web browser and a plugin that will display the consoles of virtualized instances.

This is all well and good when the plugin works. Which is, considering the constant flow of browser updates, not quite often. In particular, it seems that after upgrading to Firefox 3.5, the plugin stopped recognizing my arrow keys (of all things). I tried running it as a standalone client, which is surprisingly simple (just locate vmware-vmrc in your Firefox profile folder and use it to connect to the main server on port 8333), with no success. I've even followed some blog advice to add something to /etc/vmware/config, but that didn't do it for me.

Then I remembered what everyone in the VmWare world knows: these virtual consoles are VNC-based. So there must be a way of using a "proper" VNC client, bypassing the godawful plugin. And indeed there is, just drop the following lines in the .vmx file of the virtual machine you want to VNC-enable:

RemoteDisplay.vnc.port = "5900"
RemoteDisplay.vnc.enabled = "TRUE"
RemoteDisplay.vnc.password = "password"

Reboot the instance and voilà, you will be able to connect with a better client, like xTightVnc, where arrow keys do work properly. You can obviously change the port and password to suit your needs.

Amarok 2 revisited

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:01:00 +0000

Considering the sort of negative person I am (I'm sure scientologists would classify me as "suppressive personality" in zero time), it doesn't come as a surprise that one of the most popular items on this blog is a rant about Amarok 2. Having recently upgraded my Linux laptop, however, I found that Amarok was also upgraded to release 2.2.1, and I decided to give it a go. The experience was, overall, a positive one, so I thought I owed to the developers a follow-up to my previous rap.

Amarok 2.2.1 finally addresses 99% of the problems and regressions that plagued 2.0. The terrible default layout is now highly customizable (click on View -> Lock Layout to unlock the widgets, then drag&drop them where you want), so you can recreate the much-saner 1.x disposition. You can also customize the top toolbar (which by default is wasting so much screen real-estate, you could probably display three different applications in the same amount of space) to be more compact, by selecting View -> Slim Toolbar. Support for radio and podcasting is now first-rate (I don't know about external disks/mediaplayers), and plugins for various Internet services are quite good. MySQL is back to being an optional back-end for the internal music catalog. In short, if you still are on 1.x and can upgrade to KDE4/Qt4, you should probably give it a go.

So, 18 months down the line, Amarok is basically back to where it was in release 1.4, plus some eyecandy and (we are told) a better, more modular infrastructure. In order to achieve this, developers endured a year of bad publicity and hate-mail from their own users, lost market share, and basically looked hapless at prioritizing features and designing interfaces.

Was it worth it? To me, it still looks like another proof that benefits of "big rewrites" are dubious at best, like Joel Spolsky said so many years ago. I suspect we will eventually come to say the same about the whole KDE4 process, but I guess the jury is still out on that one.

Programming children

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:23:00 +0000

Children are to parents what Big Rewrites are to programmers: the occasion to start from scratch after taking into account all the hacks and bad decisions from previous versions, resulting in a superior implementation of a well-known solution. Or so parents (and programmers) like to think.

Except that children and programs tend to have a life of their own, and the most successful strategy is often to just get along doing whatever the little monsters are successful at, which may or may not be what the previous release intended to do.

How to demotivate your workforce

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:26:00 +0000

tell them they are "high cost" compared to Egyptian, Indian or Rumanian counterparts.
tell them that, despite the company being afloat in cash, there's no money for pay increases for the N-th year running.
tell them that the money is "reserved to the mergers&acquisitions strategy". We don't reward our workforce, we reward our competitors; as soon as you can, please go and become one.
tell them that "promotions with no pay increase" are perfectly normal. Same for workload increases. Imply that you should count yourself lucky to still have a job. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
tell them that, if you don't like it, they have a choice (i.e. walking). But at the same time, "we have to get better at sharing knowledge". Sure, I'll get to that right away (not).
give them new internal systems that don't work. When workers complain, dismiss them as whiners. Make sure there is no plan-B after The Big Go-Live. Once TBGL results in complete customer-affecting disaster, panic.

Time to work on personal projects. Big time. Dear SUN employees in Europe, you really really should cheer for the EU. May you be spared a terrible fate.

Kubuntu Karmic Koala and Radeon 9600 Mobility M10 (RV350) xorg.conf magic

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:15:00 +0000

The upgrade to Kubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" threw me back to the glorious 90s, when installing Linux would invariably require long battles with the infamous XFree config files. Hours and hours wasted trying out magic incantations in order to escape the brutal world of command-line interfaces. !FUN

Anyway, here's a bit background: basically, ATI stopped releasing proprietary Linux drivers for their old cards. So you can either use the old drivers, or move to the open-source ones (a complete rewrite, which only recently got good enough for real use). But here's the problem: the version of (KDE window manager) KWin shipped with Karmic crashes horribly with the old ATI drivers, and recent Xorg releases don't really work well with them anyway. So you haven't much of a choice: move to the free drivers and thank Stallman for inventing the cure to the annoying problem of manufacturers dropping support for products after less than five years.

The problem with the open-source drivers, however, is that running with default parameters will give you shockingly bad perfomance, especially for 2D (weird). I was forced to delve into xorg.conf and turn on all the "turbo-boost" switches I could find. At the moment, I'm getting decent result with the following parameters:

Section "Device"
Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
Driver  "radeon"
Option  "AccelDFS"              "on"
Option  "AccelMethod"           "XAA"
Option  "MigrationHeuristic"    "smart" # "greedy" works well also
Option  "EnablePageFlip"        "on"
Option  "EnableDepthMoves"      "on"
Option  "ColorTiling"           "on"
Option  "FBTexPercent"          "0"
Option  "AGPMode"               "4" # this is the real kicker
Option  "TripleBuffer"          "true"
EndSection

Note AccelMethod being set to XAA. In the future that will probably be EXA (which apparently is a newer algorithm), but my experiments with it included too many crashes for my taste.

There are a few other parameters that I scavenged from Google and man radeon, but they mostly resulted in crashes on my machine (tbh, I'm not sure they were always the guilty party, but better safe than sorry):

"AGPSize" "128" -- from what I understand, this should just be the amount of video RAM you have.
"EXAOptimizeMigration" "on" -- relevant only if you use EXA
"XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "on" -- no idea what this is, but my card doesn't like it
"BIOSHotkeys" "on" -- my screen-related Fn-* hotkeys work anyway, even without this parameter
"AGPFastWrite" "on" -- this hangs X on my laptop (Rock Pegasus Ti)

I put this here so I may remember to search my blog next time instead of wasting time going through random forum threads, but I hope it may be of help to fellow Radeon linuxers. All in all, KDE 4.3 is lovely, but it kinda reminded me that five years is quite a long lifespan for a laptop.

Kubuntu 9.10 / KDE 4.3.3 first impressions

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:26:00 +0000

Upgrade installer choked on finding out that python2.6 was already installed. Had to fall back on hardcore dpkg commands to fix it. I understand most "upgraders" had similar issues. -1
Keeps complaining that it can't find my uid-identified partitions straight away (slow HAL?). Considering it eventually manages to mount them just fine (and that the uid scheme was forced upon me by a previous Kubuntu), it just seems stupid. Any idea how I could stop the nagging? Meanwhile, -1
Sluggish. Maybe because KWin would crash on ATI drivers and I had to switch back to the free ones. -5
Eyecandy is fabulous, and very consistent. Much better than Vista.+1
Managed to recreate my old desktop setup almost flawlessly. Most 4.0 regressions due to Plasma have finally been addressed. +1
Many (most?) widgets are useless. Only few of them "get" what Plasma is about. I guess this will be fixed in time. +0
The Widget Dashboard, once you "get it", is fantastic. Makes things like Quick Launcher absolutely redundant. +1
Configuration utilities have been somewhat cleaned up, in a long-overdue effort. +1, but for the love of God stop with the Gnome-like zealotry.
Looks like KNetworkManager won't properly manage my wifi. Somewhat balanced by forcing people (me) to rediscover the joys of full-speed cabled access. Still, -1 (and I'm being generous)
KPackageKit finally gives us a Qt-based alternative to Synaptic. +1
the gmail-plasmoid. Never found a decent counterpart for 3.5. +1
UI to Power Management features is finally as good as anything in the Windows world. Maybe better. +1
Shortcuts every-flipping-where. One day, I might even use them. +1
Lots of good repositories for fresh software, without having to jump through hoops. And the ppa/apt-add-repository combo is a winner. +1

Total: +1. So I guess it was all worth.

(posted with this newfangled Bilbo / Blogilo thing. Could this be the day I get a decent blog-writing application?)

Berkeley hills

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:22:00 +0000

(on music from Weezer's "Beverley Hills")

Where I come from isn't all that great
My mailserver is a piece of crap
My admin scripts are a little whack
And my friends are just as screwy as me

I didn't go to any cool schools
tech startups never looked at me
Why should they?
I ain't nobody and got nothing in my webblog

Berkeley hills
That's where I want to be
Livin' round Berkeley hills
Berkeley hills
Coding like a celebrity
Livin' round Berkeley hills

Look at all those geeky stars
They're all so intelligent and smart
When their companies get floated
they get more buyers than Wal-Mart...

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi Is The Perfect Example Of Why The BNP Can Win

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:46:00 +0000

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the current Tory Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion, exemplifies why we will always have racist and intolerant fringes in any civilized country.

Her Pakistani parents were allowed to settle in Britain and prosper, so much so that she could go to university in Leeds (when tuition fees were capped, by the way, thanks to public subsidies), then attend the York "Collage" [sic] of Law and rise among the ranks of a Tory party desperately looking for credibility with previously-shunned Asian communities. She's one of the sharpest careerists in the country, and was recently nominated as the most powerful Muslim woman in Britain by a magazine poll.

So you have this fantastic example of positive immigration/integration/equality story, a first-generation Pakistani-English woman (!) making waves in a traditionally white/male-dominated right-wing party.

Then she goes on TV, in a debate with the leader of the Inbred Party, and she says "we need to have a cap on immigration numbers, we need to drastically reduce the amount of immigrants". In other words, she wants to stop other people from enjoying the sort of opportunities that her parents (and herself) enjoyed.

The astonishing short-sightedness of her statements would be ironic, if it weren't so incredibly sad. It fits very well in a certain stereotypical profile: the American Bush-supporting hardcore Republican with an unmistakably Italian or Irish surname; the Italian member of the Northern League with a Southern face and lots of money from Northern businesses; the Israeli farmer with a Russian accent that won't let Palestinians work his land... Even my Italian-Japanese wife, who studied and settled in Britain thanks to EU subsidies, constantly falls in this sort of rhetorical trap, this idea that there is an emergency (there isn't), social services are collapsing (they aren't), and the country is too full of people (it isn't), so we have to "defend" our hard-earned wealth by kicking out a few poor souls who are slightly different from "us". We "made it", and we have to stop people from competing with us on an equal foot. Jesus and his thing about casting stones has to be "temporarily" put aside.

All this clearly illustrates the age-old concept that the last minority to be oppressed is often the first to oppress another, when given the opportunity. Baroness Warsi, in her political brinkmanship, is playing the inbreds' own game. The inbreds' leader Nick Griffin lost the personality battle tonight (he was clearly shaking and twitching throughout the entire programme, and was forced to admit his dabbling in racist and fascist ideologies), but he won the political battle: a tired Jack Straw was at pains to point out that Labour did not start any policy of migration and inclusion, Baroness Warsi clearly illustrated Tory policy as "inbreeding light" (on the much-exalted -- and highly discriminatory -- Australian model, also recently introduced in the UK by the Labour government), and the very intelligent LibDem guy kept as silent as he could on the subject. No one dared to defend the right of future generations to enjoy the same (very few) opportunities as previous ones, the right to fairness. They all waxed lyrical on the rights of current minorities not to be gassed and deported, but not one word was spent on the minorities of tomorrow. This was a political Dunkerque.

Mainstream parties, if they really want to tackle the inbreds, cannot linger in their trenches; they must get to the offensive. The real problem is how to stop people fighting across racial lines what it's always been (and will always be) first and foremost an economic battle for wealth, a war among the poor. This concept has been lost when traditional Socialism was banished from politics in the 90s, but it's the only way to keep tribalist tendencies at bay. Unless we get back to it, the inbreds will keep winning, because people like Baroness Warsi will always be happy to act as the inbreds' own tool.

Metaversing

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:08:00 +0000

Every once in a while, we get an ironic reminder of how mass-literature is fundamentally formulaic. Cartoonists are especially (but not exclusively) fond of this sort of joke, probably because the nature of their work is often dismissed as "repetitive" and they have to get back at (mostly disingenuous) critics. Or maybe they just like playing the smartass.

It is then customary, on my part, to faithfully print the cartoons in question and then point it out to whoever gets around my desk. Some leave in a troubled state of mind, suddenly faced by the emptiness of a universe they hitherto happily inhabited. A few laugh at the old joke. Some think I'm just weird.

Last May, Aaron Diaz's Dresden Codak gave us the already-legendary 42 essential 3rd-act twists by Harvet Ismuths. Today, David Maliki's Wondermark built the phantasmagoric Electro-Plasmic HydroCephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000. They sit perfectly among the other stuff I hang around my pseudo-cubicle, like words by Carlos Williams, Borges and Piñero. Why keeping beauty out of the office, when there is so much of it?

"The Web Startup Success Guide" review, and how to tie-in better

noreply@blogger.com (GiacomoL) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:29:00 +0000

Yesterday, I bought Bob Walsh's latest book, The Web Startup Success Guide. It's the only thing I've found in "mainstream" bookshops that seemed really relevant to my current project, and indeed it is.

As "self-help-business" books go, this is a good one: the fluff is kept low (could have done with a few less interviews maybe, especially from bloody Guy Kawasaki -- if you're thinking of starting up and don't know him already, you haven't done your homework), and there's something for everybody, with plenty of practical advice and real tools you can use. A few ones are very US-centric (like mint.com, which is a real shame), but that's par for the course in this area.

You can also see that Walsh practices what he preaches, and that's always a good sign. Minutes after I twitted on the subject, he "@replied"; he really monitors social media for marketing purposes as much as he says you should do.

Walsh also couldn't miss the chance to pimp his latest shot at startupping, StartupToDo.com; after all, he's a good friend of Joel Spolsky, a master of self-publicity. Clearly the book and the site are part of a coordinated marketing effort. Nothing wrong with that: the book is NOT simply a brochure for the site, it's all good content, probably coming from the extensive research Walsh did while building the site as well as his personal experience (which was also enshrined in his previous effort, the famous Micro-ISV: from Vision to Reality). What I've found a bit disappointing was that the effort is missing the very last bit. StartupToDo is due to launch next week, but has been in private beta (invite-only) for a while now. The book was published in July. It would have been cool for readers to get some sort of password, a "backdoor" to the beta program, so they could sign up while they're still fired up from the book. For two months, "faithful" followers were just able to leave an email to be reminded when the real launch would actually happen. I'm lucky as I have to wait just a few days, but in the age of Internet-time and instant gratification, that's still a lot. So, Bob (and whoever goes for the next book/website combo): you should try to increase your conversion rate by making sure that readers can get in straight away.

UPDATE: StartupToDo.com is now live, as Bob correctly points out below. I'm "toyg" on the site, feel free to "friend me"! I've wandered a bit around the site already... lots of good info, recommendations and links which I'm still trying to get my head around. I'll post a better review later.

And now, back to plotting my startup...