Category Archives: General

Accessible cellphones

General

I forgot to blog this at the time. A few months ago, I was looking for a cell phone for my girlfriend’s grandfather, so he could always contact his family when he needed help. He doesn’t hear so well, he’s not from the computer generation, and he’s not eager to use a magnifying glass and a tooth pick just to call his kids. The market for a simple, usable, large-button mobile phone, must be huge. But, amazingly, there’s almost nothing on the market. Don’t their salesmen ever get tired of people telling them how difficult the phones are? Don’t they want these customers, with their regular incomes? One O2 salesgirl maintained that older people just need to spend longer to learn how to use them. Complete muppetry.

The best I could find was this 3-button Vitaphone from Vodafone. The 3-button idea is good (1 button for a helpdesk, 2 for friends/family, and 2 (superfluous) buttons for on/off and key-lock). It’s cheaper than the 50-euro-per-month alarm-button-thingy that many people have. But it’s a bit annoying that you’re forced to pay the extra 5 euros per month on top of a normal contract just to get your hands on this simple piece of hardware.

And, incredibly, this phone has no vibrate mode, and even the helpdesk can’t change the volume or activate a speakerphone mode. Surely this is not the first time an elderly person had hearing difficulties.

In other news, my father, who was largely deaf for most of his life, seems to have near-normal hearing after his stroke.

Push-scrolling

General

I really like how the 770‘s Opera browser lets you scroll by pushing the page up with the stylus. This is a lot easier than trying to hit the little scrollbar – see Fitt’s Law. It conflicts with the idea of clicking-and-moving to select text, but maybe epiphany/firefox could switch to scrolling after a long click? Some applications in Windows seem to do this with middle-click, which might also be an option.

Maemo with C++

General

I’ve checked in my C++ bindings for Nokia’s Hildon libs (guest, guest), for Maemo, on the 770 . I just have a few signals and properties more to wrap. The build can generate doxygen html like the gtkmm documentation, but I dont’ have doxygen and dot (graphviz) in the scratchbox session. I guess I should build them from source.

They do need some fixes in the C code, to use properties so we can g_object_new() everything properly without using the *_new() C functions, but apparently those fixes are on the way already.

Also, it’s probably time to start looking at reducing the gtkmm code size and objects size of gtkmm. I think there’s lots of space to save, and I have some ideas about how to do that. Still, people are apparently already using gtkmm for embedded stuff, though they haven’t been able to name their projects so far.

linking to older glibc ABI

General

Hello, lazy web.

So, I have a program that’s linked against glibc 2.1.3 (I think). My system has glibc 2.3.3, but that’s OK because glibc (since glibc 2.1) also provides the older (partly incompatible) ABIs, so already-built software keeps running. Opinions differ about that, but that’s another vague discussion that you can have elsewhere.

But the program can uses a shared-library plugin that I provide. But if I build this shared library on this system then it will be linked against glibc 2.3.3, and it would surely be bad for a program that uses glibc 2.1.3 to use a library that uses glibc 2.3.3. So, how can I tell the linker to use the older glibc ABI instead of the latest ABI that glibc has to offer?

I am (stupidly, but it makes things simpler for now) ignoring the possibility of API changes which would require me to compile against the older glibc headers.

Sabayon and Pesselus

General

I am so pleased that Sabayon and Pesselus will most likely be in GNOME 2.14, and that Sabayon already uses Pesselus. I do hope that they show up in menus for humans as something like “Administration/User Profiles” or “Administration/Lockdown Editor” or something even clearer. They bring GNOME’s beauty to the system administrators.

I like to think that the Lockdown Editor was created finally in response to a suggestion I made after I visited a small rollout . This other little feature (easy keyboard preview) was also needed by that rollout. I coded no part of them. My point is

  • If you visit someone to do a rollout report, you can discover important (but easy) stuff that should be done.
  • If you invite someone to do a rollout report, your life might get even better.

I met several people at the GNOME stand at Systems in Munich who were planning their own small GNOME rollouts in colleges, schools, and small businesses, in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. I gave them lots of Ubuntu CDs and told them all that I’d love to visit and do a report after a few months. I hope they all get back to us.

Switched to WordPress

General

I’ve switched my blog to wordpress to try to reduce the processor resources needed with pyblosxom, and to get a working captcha (the pictures of letters) system for comments, to avoid spam.

To keep the old rss feed url,

https://www.murrayc.com/blog/?flav=rss

working, by pointing it at the new feed url,

https://www.murrayc.com/blog/?feed=rss

I’ve tried the following RewriteRule in my blog/.htaccess file,

RewriteRule ^(.*)?flav=rss $1/?feed=rss [R]

and this

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} flav=rss
RewriteRule ^blog blog/?feed=rss [R=301,L]

but neither seem to have an effect.

Update: This seems to have fixed it, though I’m sure it’s not perfect:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} flav=rss
RewriteRule ^(.*) /blog/?feed=rss [R=301,L]

Getting out of the way

General

My project to win back my time is making good progress.

  • John Palmieri has taken over from me on the release team. He'll be good at it.
  • I've announced that I'm not standing for the Board this year.
  • I've announced that I'd like someone to take over from me on the GNOME Germany board.

I intend to enjoy doing more software development for a while. Glom coding should restart in January.

I was pleased by the discussion around the board size referendum. The next board will definitely feel more empowered to create decision-making processes and to delegate more tasks.

New gtkmm applications

General

Lots of gtkmm (GTK+ C++ API) applications have popped up recently:

  • VMWare Player (closed-source, but gratis). People already love VMWare's ability to emulate complete operating systems inside other operating systems, and to clone them and rollback. Soon (now available as a beta) we'll be able to distribute one of these sessions without charge, like sending someone a PDF to view in their gratis Acrobat Reader, but this time it's like getting a full computer in a window instead of a document. LiveCDs suddenly seem difficult in comparison. The linux version uses gtkmm for its GUI, and I expect to see it everywhere. The developers have already given back considerable time, code, and cleverness to the open-source platform that they use.
  • Gobby is a collaborative text editor plus chat thingy. More and more people are mentioning that it's truly useful and works. They seem interested in an ueber-reusable C API for the underlying collaboration protocol.
  • Synfig does 2D vector-based animation. It seems to be a serious tool for professionals. It looks impressive and seems to create impressive animations. This is almost, but not quite, as cool as when the Muppet Workshop used gtkmm (I will never stop mentioning that.)
  • Gideon Designer seems to be yet another next-generation Glade replacement with some extra cleverness for gtkmm programmers. It looks impressive, but we all know that we don't need one of these in C (glade-3), C# (stetic), python (gazpacho) and gtkmm (Gideon). It's silly. However, I assume people are doing this for themselves for fun, and not seriously losing time that they would spend on more productive things, so don't let me spoil your fun.

I haven't used any of these applications yet. Blogging takes time, you know.

When we add Inkscape and my Glom project (finished some day when I get the time or money), I don't think we need to keep asking the gtkmm developers (mostly me) to also code a killer application to justify gtkmm being available on distros (available everywhere now anyway) so that people can code killer applications. That had annoyed me.

This is not a wave of gtkmmification, nor a sign that C++ makes everyone an order of magnitude more productive, or that we should all start using C++ and shouting at the people who don't want to. It just shows that, with GNOME, you can _really_ use just about whatever programming language you are comfortable with.