George Wright's Blog: Category Misc

Twitter!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:48:00 +0000

I have now joined Twitter! Final year’s going to be a laugh…

Follow me!

Terrifying beauty...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:33:00 +0100

Now my college can wake up to this in the morning:

Dhoom Clock

First week at Cendio

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:28:00 +0100

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.

Sweden at last

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:48:00 +0100

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

zsh, KDE4

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:17:00 +0000

As I’ve heard so many great things about zsh I decided to give it a spin and I must say that I’m quite impressed on the whole. I especially like the less intrusive way it displays possible tab completion values, as well as the vi keybindings that come with it (although I’ve had to bind a few keys which I keep hitting out of habit, such as end/home and delete). The configuration system it brings up on first load is really spiffy as well, and I like the fact that there’s an option to append command history to the log file instead of replacing it - extremely useful given that I tend to have ~10 terminals open at any one time.

I also finally got round to building a more up to date copy of KDE 4 and I’m really impressed with the progress they’re making; it really is astounding how quickly it’s all coming together. I’m currently in the process of installing an SVN build on my X40 so that I can run it full time on there - I think it’s finally hit the stage where I can run it full time.

Giving Android a spin

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:19:00 +0000

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!

WebKit EAL goes public

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:23:00 +0000

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.

Using a Windows Mobile phone to connect to the internet

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:31:00 +0000

As some of you may know, I have a Windows Mobile 5 based phone. It’s possibly got the worst software I’ve ever used in my life but the hardware’s really nice so I put up with it.

One of the major things I use the phone for is as a modem for Linux because I have an (effectively) unlimited data tarriff on my contract, so being able to use it with my laptop is incredibly useful.

Previously, I have been using the USB cable and using wvdial to treat the phone as a dial up modem to connect to the internet. This wasn’t without complications as Windows Mobile seems to require an initialisation string which no other phone uses. This is:

AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","APN",""

Where ‘APN’ is the access point name for your data carrier. In my case (T-Mobile), it’s “general.t-mobile.uk”.

To connect via USB though, you first need to load the appropriate module to give you a serial interface (/dev/ttyUSB0) to communicate through. You’d think this was as simple as running ”modprobe ipaq”, but no - it’s more complicated.

First you have to modprobe ipaq then run lsusb -v. You then need to look up your phone’s entry and record the hex numbers for the vendorID and the productID then rmmod ipaq and load it again passing those identification numbers as parameters to the module, so in my case:

modprobe ipaq vendor=0x0bb4 product=0x00cf

This will then give you /dev/ttyUSB0 to play with. However, it’s still isn’t that simple from here. You need one more fiddle to get it working. You need to set “Stupid Mode” in wvdial to force pppd to start as soon as the modem connects. Thus, the final wvdial.conf is as follows:

[Dialer Defaults] Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 Baud = 115200 Init = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","APN","" Phone = *99# Username = USERNAME Password = PASSWORD New PPPD = yes Stupid Mode = yes

So, after setting up Linux you just need to run the “Wireless Modem” program on the phone and start the softmodem.

Unfortunately, trying to get it to connect via bluetooth appears to be infinitely more difficult. Luckily, I finally managed to get it to connect today after a few hours of research and fiddling, and it now seems rather trivial.

Firstly, Edgy’s bluez packages appear to be sufficiently broken that it doesn’t bring up the bluetooth adapter in discoverable mode - thus resulting in severe breakage when trying to connect the phone. This is fixed by running the command:

hciconfig hci0 piscan

You then need to fiddle some values in /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf to allow the phone to pair.

I set a default passkey using the passkey "xyz"; option in hcid.conf as I couldn’t be bothered to set up a helper application. However, it should work just fine if you do set up a helper application. That’s basically all that needs to be altered.

Now onto the phone.

Going into Settings -> Connections -> Bluetooth, make sure the phone is discoverable and pair it with the computer. Once it’s paired, the Linux box’s ID should appear in the list on the “Devices” tab. You then just need to go into the “Internet Connection Sharing” program and start the connection using “Bluetooth PAN”. Once that’s done, it’s fairly trivial. On the computer, run the command:

pand --connect BADDR -n

Where “BADDR” is the 6-element bluetooth address of your phone, which can be obtained using the command hcitool scan. After that, it should splurt out something like:

pand[8361]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.7 pand[8361]: Connecting to BADDR pand[8361]: bnep0 connected

This means that pand has brought up a new ethernet interface called bnep0 for you to play with. After this, it’s just standard networking. Run a dhcp client on bnep0 and it will give you an IP address and NAT you across to the phone.

Hooray - the phone is connected via bluetooth to the internet. I still haven’t worked out how to get it to act as an actual modem over bluetooth (taking AT commands etc), but to be honest, I fail to see any point if we have Bluetooth PAN instead.

New blog

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:27:00 +0100

As many of you know, Serendipity was spamming planetkde.org with lots and lots of repostings which was driving clee nuts (by the way clee, I still hate you :P ). Anyway, I've now installed Typo as my new blogging software. Hopefully this won't be so broken.