Random mumblings of ARM developer
Today I was in cinema on “Planet Terror” movie. It is second part of “Grindhouse” project of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez — first part was “Death Proof” which I watched some time ago.
From two parts of “Grindhouse” I prefer first one anyway — was more thrilling then second. Personally I am not a fan of zombie movies but this one was nice to watch.
During day I was also at shop with television sets. One which take most of my attention was Samsung 52” FullHD (1920x1080px) one — with very big contrast. It was connected to BluRay disc player with some demos and trailers. I had to admit that some of them really show what high resolution means — sharp screen, all details on furry animals etc. But some of them used a bit bigger level of compression so it was visible on 52” :(
Looks like companies which worked on HD-DVD and BluRay did not get idea that LCD technologies will go into such big screens…
As part of OpenMoko testing I looked into Neod. It is a daemon which handle few interesting functions on Neo1973 phone such as launching Today screen (short AUX press), closing active window on short Power press and two menus.
First one is available on hold of AUX button.
Available options are:
xrandr to rotate screen to landscape)gpe-scap application)Second menu is available on hold of Power key.
Available options are:
Yesterday I looked into source code and pushed few changes to neod recipe — mainly added few runtime dependencies to get everything working. During evening I got idea that it should be GConf key so user will be able to define which direction screen has to rotate when “Swap Orientation” option is used from AUX menu. Resulting patch can be found in OpenMoko bug 929. I hope that it will be included soon.
My other idea is to drop xrandr command usage and use libxrandr directly. But this needs to wait.
Today I have another day of OpenMoko 2007.2 testing. Decided to first look at list of bugs which I reported. Some of them was fixed in last weeks so I checked and closed them.
Now the main problem for me is the ‘GSM daemon’ about which I have a problem to say something good. It is so unreliable, dies in random moments… And cooperation between gsmd and OpenMoko apps is another thing — for example Dialer waits for network registration when phone is already registered. I had to restart Dialer to get it to notify that phone is ready for calling.
Situation does not looks good ;(
Today we have 4th day of OEDEM. Discussed OE Foundation, BitBake development, OE development. Uli Luckas from ROAD company brought their ROAD S101 phone (running Qtopia 2.x as UI). After playing with it I can say that this is interesting device.
Today’s dinner will be sponsored by Tarent, a German company that uses OpenEmbedded. And this time it will be German restaurant not Mexican, Italian or Patagonian.
During GUADEC I decided that I need to buy new battery for my Dell D400 laptop. Current one is giving me 40-50 minutes of working only. According to ACPI informations it is really low charged:
11:44 hrw@maluch:BAT0$ cat info
present: yes
design capacity: 42000 mWh
last full capacity: 11530 mWh
battery technology: rechargeable
So it does not get even half of nominal charge. I wonder how much time I will be able to get from 4400mAh battery (current one is 3800mAh when most of available ones are 3600mAh).
And this time I really need to buy one.
UPDATE: bought one — will get it in few days.
Today we have 3rd day of OpenEmbedded Developers European Meeting. This year we have not only European developers but also Rodrigo Vivi from Brasil and Philip Balister from USA. After weekend with misc stuff (when most visible was Gumstix hacking) we finally started technical discussions.
There are many things on agenda and they are changing so better check them on OE wiki.
This time I will write something about roads on Greek islands and how people behave on them.
First thing which is easy to spot is amount of vehicles on road. There are cars, buses, mopeds, quads, motorbikes driving in any directions in different style. People on mopeds, motorbikes or quads goes without any helmets, in swimsuits only — probably they did not ever see “Live to Ride — Ride to DIE” website. Talking via cellphone during driving is very often — never mind does it is in the car or on motorbike, driving on rear wheel only is popular (I do not know — maybe they wanted to get some chicks?).
Roads are full of curves — many times 180° ones, mountains ones usually do not allow to see how goes road after curve or does someone goes from that side so drivers use horn to warning other side. There are mirrors on some curves but usually vandalized. Many times you get few hundred of meters altitude difference in few kilometers…
People parks cars where it is good for them (people, not cars) — it can be right after curve, on curve (never mind that there is double line on road). Hopefully in the city they tries to park only on one side of the street so buses are able to go. Bus drivers are other thing — they are awesome. With so tight streets they just go into and are able to turn on overparked intersection…
When you go outside of city you gets other interesting stuff like lack of barriers on gorge side, nearly no space to get two cars pass each other on the road.
After our first trip I decided to rather not rent a car…