Posted by George Wright
Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:28:00 GMT
So I’ve been working at Cendio for a week now; I must say it’s been one of the best times of my life.
Sweden’s a great place, especially Linköping; it’s clean, cycletastic and everyone is so friendly here. Our office is a fantastic place - it’s spacious, cosy, has a hot chocolate machine (!!!) and my colleagues are awesome! I especially like that I get my own office as well.
Over the evenings and weekend I’ve been on the bike a fair bit, having nearly been run over by several buses (silly traffic driving on the wrong side…) and tomorrow I’m going with Inge Wallin (of KDE fame) on some boat thing on the canal which should be great fun.
The cycle routes around here take a bit of getting used to; in the UK I’m quite happy to cycle alongside cars on dual carriageways and take on large roundabouts without any trouble, but with the combination of being on the other side of the road, and not knowing the customs on the road here, I’ve been sticking to country lanes and cycle paths for the time being. I’ve had no crashes so far this year (as opposed to six last year, including 3 pretty major ones…) and I intend to keep it that way!
I shall be sorry to leave on the 15th July.
Posted in Computing, Misc | no comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:48:00 GMT
Today’s been a somewhat hectic day for me; after getting up at 0500 to get to Heathrow by 0700, I managed to get on my 1030 flight to Arlanda and arrive in Stockholm just after 1400. After hopping on a train to Linköping, I was greeted by my contact at Cendio, Peter Åstrand, who has been exceptionally helpful and accommodating with my moving in.
I’m staying in university accommodation which is rather nice; it’s a bit Ikea-y, but not too shabby. There was a particularly bad dead fly infestation in my room but a dustpan and brush seems to have taken care of most of it, and I may have to vacuum around when I can get hold of one. The luxury of an en-suite is always welcome, and I have a 10Mbit/s internet connection which is definitely most welcome!
My room
As for my job out here, I’ll be working on the next release of ThinLinc, Cendio’s flagship remote desktop product. At first I believe I’m mainly doing testing of the upcoming release to ensure it meets quality standards, but Peter is keen for me to dig into the coding side soon.
In my spare time, I decided to bring my bike over and I’ll hopefully spend most of my evenings racing around the roads on it. It really is a delightful little machine. When I’m not on the bike I hope to get some work done on nxcl/qtnx as well.
The bike
Posted in Computing, Misc | 14 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 26 May 2008 21:26:00 GMT
With my parents going on holiday to Taiwan last month I asked them to pick me up an Eee PC to play with. It’s a really nice little machine; I got the 8GB flash/1GB RAM model, and I’m very impressed with how responsive it is. Even Open Office is fairly nippy…
The keyboard is a little small and takes a bit of getting used to, but I can just about touch type on it now. The machine as a whole is very sturdy and seems solidly built, and the touch pad is just about usable (the mouse button isn’t too great though). The screen is a little grainy but very crisp - it seems better than the screen on my X40 (albeit at a lower resolution) - and the default Xandros distribution is quite nice.
Anyway, I’ve built qtnx debs for the Xandros that is on there (I added the Debian Etch repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list to complement the default Eee repositories) and uploaded them to my server if anyone wishes to use them (hit ctrl-alt-T to bring up a terminal, then use dpkg -i to install them). The configuration dialogue doesn’t quite fit on the screen but you can use the alt+mouse button trick to drag the window around.
Posted in Computing, NX | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:24:00 GMT
So today I released what is hopefully something very close to the final release of my NX client, but this time as a branded version for Desktop on Demand.
The Windows client has now been tested a lot more thoroughly, and it shouldn’t freeze anymore (due to some lovely hacks… turns out that the Qt/Cygwin build likes to freeze if you’re using the Windows XP native theme engine, so I told it to use Plastique), doesn’t bring up an ugly terminal window and it no longer fullscreens the NX window in all cases.
The OS X client has had minor usability updates as it was all pretty much working beforehand anyway. It’s generally a lot nicer to use and I’ve confirmed it works on both OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (x86 platforms).
The best thing about both these clients is that they do not need installation to the computer; I tested them by putting them on USB flash disks and taking them to friends’ computers and seeing if they’d connect without any trouble - and they did.
Kudos to NoMachine for being incredibly helpful about the NXWin problems; they created a knowledge base article detailing exactly how to compile it and also updated the source packages as the original ones I used didn’t work at all. I’m very impressed with how quickly they got back to me on this!
The clients are now available from here and their md5sums are:
61c3902c6ae4342b23c303425bfb6718 Desktop on Demand.dmg.zip
f0d24af8e1900cdc7fd4ab9470245113 Desktop on Demand.zip
As for Linux, I’ve yet to package that; I will be packaging a standalone tarball with the NX client statically linked to Qt. For those of you who don’t like that, there’s always the source code in the FreeNX subversion repository and NoMachine’s site.
Posted in Computing, NX | 15 comments
Posted by George Wright
Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:22:00 GMT
So in the process of learning about cygwin/mingw/qt in order to port qtnx to Windows, I concluded that the easiest way would be to compile nxcl using cygwin (which, luckily, compiled with no changes at all), and then to compile Qt inside cygwin and then compile qtnx inside cygwin, linking to both Qt and nxcl.
Turns out getting Qt 4 to compile inside cygwin is a non-trivial task. Thankfully, however, the LyX guys have done most of the work. It just needed a minor alteration to the source, though, otherwise a linker error occurred during compilation of Qt/Win 4.3.3.
In src/corelib/codecs/qtextcodec.cpp, there is an #ifdef block starting on line 528. You just need to add
&& !defined(Q_CYGWIN_WIN)
to stop the Asian codecs from being compiled in; there’s probably a better solution to this, but I don’t see this as being particularly problematic. After that you can follow the instructions in the LyX wiki and link to Qt just fine.
From this you can probably tell that I now have QtNX compiling inside cygwin on Windows. Well, yes, it works, but I haven’t yet tested whether it will actually connect to any servers. Theoretically, it should so long as I set the PATH properly to point to the directory where nxssh and nxproxy are, and hopefully all should just work fine! I may need to append “.exe” to the binary names in nxcl though, but all in all I think it should be fairly trivial from now on (so long as nxproxy behaves as expected and doesn’t start making annoying noises about X11 and Win32).
Gratuitous QtNX on Windows screenshot
Posted in Computing, NX | 101 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:35:00 GMT
Now that they’ve released the Nokia N810 in the UK, I ordered one yesterday and it arrived this morning; hurrah for prompt delivery!
My initial impressions are mixed.
Good things:
- the screen is fantastic
- it came with maps for the GPS for free
- it has a keyboard
- it’s responsive
- it’s nice and small
Not so good things:
- the battery cover is incredibly hard to take off
- the battery doesn’t clip in - it just sits there and is held in place by the cover
- the GPS takes ages to lock
- the keyboard feels a bit mushy, and the top row is hard to type on
Anyway, I’ve now installed Maemo Mapper which works like a charm (a bit of hackery is needed to get the internal GPS to work with it though), and ssh from xterm is very usable with the new keyboard. Haven’t installed our WebKit stuff on it yet, but the Gecko-based MicroB engine isn’t too bad.
Overall a very nice piece of kit, and I’m very pleased with it.
Posted in WebKit, Computing | 11 comments
Posted by George Wright
Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:19:00 GMT
With the recent announcement of the Google Android mobile phone and the subsequent release of their SDK, I couldn’t resist downloading it and giving it a play.
First thoughts are very positive; the user interface is clean, uncluttered and I think it makes good use of the screen space. One of my favourite gems is the iPhone-like scroll bar mechanism, which only appear when you’re actually scrolling and disappear, thus not wasting a valuable column of pixels on needless information!
As anticipated, there are still a few rough edges, but as it’s still very early on this isn’t surprising. Nonetheless, I’m very impressed with their SDK (which is only a 55MB download!) and I hope to have a look at the actual APIs soon. Hopefully some day I’ll be able to put this on the HTC Universal!
In unrelated news, a Google Summer of Code 2007 shirt arrived for me at home today; thanks Google!
Posted in Computing, Misc | 3 comments
Posted by George Wright
Sat, 10 Nov 2007 19:03:00 GMT
So in the spirit of Freedesktop.org I was added to Planet GNOME yesterday. Thanks Jeff!
This doesn’t mean I’ve converted to GNOME or relinquished KDE, but as the work that I’m doing these days involves both KDE (in the form of my NX stuff) and GNOME (WebKit/GTK+), I figured it was time I had myself added to Planet GNOME.
Here’s to exciting times ahead!
Posted in WebKit, Computing, NX | 5 comments
Posted by George Wright
Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:23:00 GMT
Yesterday, Collabora finally put the WebKit EAL code that Alp and I worked on over the summer into a public git repository on git.collabora.co.uk! This is great, as our development is now done in the open instead of behind closed doors, which is the way it should be done in my opinion.
At some point I hope to put online a method of building and installing this EAL which doesn’t involve a ridiculous amount of pain, but we at Collabora are currently concentrating on working with upstream on implementing missing features in WebKit/GTK+.
Some exciting new stuff that has appeared upstream is Rodney Dawes’ work on implementing NPAPI support in WebKit/GTK+ as well as the platform independent new CSS transformation work by Apple. This effectively obsoletes my work on full page zooming as we should hopefully be able to reuse their scaling code for these transformations and create an API function which sets a scale factor on the <html> element.
Personally, I am now concentrating my efforts on implementing a backing store for WebKit/GTK+ which should hopefully substantially increase scrolling performance, as well as investigating and looking into writing this zooming wrapper around the new transformations code.
Posted in Computing, Misc | 12 comments
Posted by George Wright
Sun, 12 Aug 2007 01:06:00 GMT
Today I updated the WebKit checkout and rebuilt it. Had a few hiccups because recent commits depend on GTK+ 2.8, whereas the N800 only has GTK+ 2.6, but in the end I managed to get it to work. Now we have Google Maps (which was broken in the previous WebKit)!
WebKit displaying Google Maps
Thanks go to Holger Freyther for his work on WebKit which has made this possible.
Posted in Computing | 9 comments
