The only place where the Playstation 3 Slim is actually more expensive than the regular one (US$ 1,093.25 versus US$814.33 as of today at one of the biggest internet stores here).
September 8, 2009
August 24, 2009
Canola Status Update
This is going to be a long post, I’m going to go over a bunch of stuff, so feel free to go and fetch some coffee before reading it 
We’ll be talking about Google Summer of Code, Project Memphis, a kick-ass community project using Canola and also the pending release.
March 28, 2009
Canola2 Free Software + Maemo’s Summer of Code
Seventy Six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand …
Others have blogged about it already, but I still felt like I had to post something. Canola2 is now Free Software. We’ve been working on it since last year, and it has been quite an experience. As developer and team leader at ProFUSION, I can say that we’ve learned quite alot with this project and that we hope now with the release of the source code it will grow into a nice community.
I once heard that everytime a piece of proprietary software is released a puppy is born and angels sing Hallelujah in the sky. Don’t know if that is actually true, but either way, the source code is here and instructions for building it are here.
Google’s Summer of Code for 2009 has also started, and is now accepting student applications. Maemo got in as a mentoring organization, and I’ll be mentoring possible projects there (as will glima and antognolli from ProFUSION). There are a few ideas of plugins for Canola in Maemo’s suggested projects page. If you are eligible and want to develop for Canola, talk to us on irc.freenode.net at #canola.
February 27, 2009
Real Envido
Yo cito textualmente de Real Envido, obra de Griselda Gambaro:
Rey: Natán, ¿pensás lo que yo penso?
Natán: Siempre.
Rey(agraviado): ¿Leés mi pensamiento?
Natán: ¡No, señor! Jamás me atrevería. Como súbdito, yo veo lo que usted ve, yo pienso lo que usted quiere que piense. ¿Quién disiente con un rey? Nada pienso por mi cuenta, nada veo, nada quiero, nada sueño. Mire, soy un recipiente. (Sacude la cabeza hacia abajo) No cae nada.
Rey(Muy halagado): ¡Asombroso! Natán, te asciendo a consejero mayor.
Natán: ¿Y eso significa lo que usted está pensando?
Rey: ¿Qué pienso?
Natán: ¡Aumento de sueldo!
Rey: ¡Para mí!
Natán: ¡No, para mí!
Rey: ¡Qué pensamiento tan raro! ¿Estás seguro de que es mío?
Natán: ¿Cómo me atrevería a pensar otro distinto?
February 7, 2009
Canola’s new release
After working on Canola for the past couple of months, finally we get to see it released. Hopefully people will like this new version, which is both faster and more stable (or less stable, I’m never quite sure which one we picked). We’re now back following the latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which allowed us to make the UI experience alot smoother (check it out by going to the Photos section). Also there are a bunch of new features and lots of bugs fixed, so try it out yourself and tell us what you think. Hopefully now development of Canola will get back to more regular releases, and we’ll start seeing more external plugins being developed (such as the flickr plugin being done by Thomas Schimdt, available here).
For this release we went above and beyond the call of duty, doing tests that no one had ever done before (at least to our knowledge). That’s why we can say, with much confidence, that Canola works perfectly while drinking in Buenos Aires:
Canola in Buenos Aires
Testing in other capitals will ensue. Cheers !!!
January 30, 2009
Why the Pimsleur method does not work for anime enthusiasts who wish to learn Japanese
Pimsleur Guy: Pretend you’re in the lobby of an hotel and you meet someone. How do you say hello ?
Me: NANDAYO!!!
Pimsleur Guy: And how do you ask if he understands english ?
Me: NANDAYO!!! NANDAYO!!!
January 20, 2009
Using BlipFM with Canola (and possibly other players)
Here at ProFUSION we’re using BlipFM quite a lot to both listen to music and share recommendations with others. Since until now no one has made a plugin for Canola (*hint*), I’ve written a really simple script in Python to parse a page and generate a podcast XML. It’s still quite hackish, but I’m going to improve it later to support more pages and stuff like that. Any comments/contributions are welcome (for all intents and purposes, the code is under the WTFPL).
Source code available here. Example podcast generated from my user here.
January 12, 2009
Using clang’s static analyzer to debug Enlightenment
Clang’s static analyzer (description and more detailed information about setting it up here and here) is an wonderful tool that helps catching some nasty bugs and that has not been widely divulged so far. Lately we’ve been using it to help debug the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), and I decided to post this just to help other people try it out.
In order to use it, basically one just needs to get both llvm and clang (preferably from svn, since these tools are being updated all the time) and install them somewhere on the PATH, and afterwards use the scan-build script to build the application/library you want to analyze. The output is a nice set of html files, with the reported bugs divided by type and with detailed information + commented source code.
I’m trying to maintain updated reports on the EFL here, using a really simple script that I made to compile some of the most important libraries, apart from E itself. The script is also available on the same URL, in case someone wants an easy way of trying this out.
October 16, 2008
X.Org and E17 packages for Ltib
Lately I’ve been working on Ltib (Linux Target Image Builder) in order to have Enjoy running on a demo iMX31 board here in ProFUSION. We’ve already published a few videos on youtube demoing our work here and here (more to follow soon), but so far the packages were scattered through different e-mails on the Ltib mailing list. But as of yesterday, Stuart Hughes merged those packages upstream and now it’s publicly available for all users of Ltib. Also, I’ve been given access to Ltib’s CVS and will be uploading more packages there soon (Enjoy and Illume are next on the list, already packaged and just in need of a few clean-ups).
If you are using Ltib and wish to test E17 (or just X.Org), here are the steps necessary (if you find anything missing from this guide or have any other suggestions, please do leave a comment here since this guide will probably be posted later on Ltib’s homepage) :
1) Update to the latest CVS version if you haven’t already.
2) If you’re going to install the Enlightenment packages, you’re going to need a few packages to be available on your host. Luckily you can just use Ltib to install them :
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p eet.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p embryo.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p evas.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p ecore.spec
$ ./ltib –hostcf -p edje.spec
3) Run ‘./ltib –configure’, and inside Package List, there should be two new submenus, one for Enlightenment and one for X11. Choose the packages you wish to install. One package worth mentioning is Expedite, which can be easily used to benchmark your device and see if the installation was OK.
4) If you are going to run X.Org, you might need to patch xorg-server depending on your device’s supported display resolution (on CVS there is already a patch to add support for vga-portrait mode which is the default resolution for our test board, and I’m sending another patch soon to add support for WVGA).
5) Example of how to start X :
$ Xfbdev -screen 480×640 -mouse tslib,,device=/dev/input/ts0
6) Example of how to start Enlightenment :
$ DISPLAY=:0 enlightenment_start
Try it out and tell us if it worked well for you. Cheers.
October 7, 2008
Course on Python for S60
Last week I gave a course on Python for S60 as part of the Mobility Week event in São Carlos, held on the USP (University of São Paulo) campus there. It was a 12 hour course, divided in three 4 hour sessions. Gustavo had already blogged about the event before here, so I’ll just add a few comments about how my course went.
The first day was just an introduction to development on cellphones, and since some of the people who were attending had never worked with Python before, I also gave a really fast Python introduction. We finished this first day with a few examples of software that were developed using pys60. When preparing the course, I wanted to find some really nice examples to show that Python enables people to quickly develop applications that were probably going to take at least a few weeks with C++ or JavaME. One really nice example I found was Cellphabet, a software that uses the Cell Tower information your cell phone provides to transform a path you walked into an english word (his post explains the design alot better than I possibly could in one sentence). Since the source code wasn’t available (it was hosted on a wiki that had to be taken offline due to spam), I contacted the author and he was quite happy that I was planning on using it as an example. We started talking and he asked me what I was going to tell them Cellphabet could be used for. When I replied that it could probably be used for security (which is one of the reasons he listed on his original post), he gave me an answer that completely took me by surprise :
Yes, that was one of my prime concerns, the other was romantic. If a
lover wrote his partner a message by walking for a few hours non-stop,
it would be saying a lot. So the message becomes ‘the medium’. It is
no longer a short message, it becomes a long message.
After ending the first day with this most romantic example, we spent the following session going over the Symbian API and doing small examples. Unfortunately we did not have test cellphones available, so people had to work with emulators.
The final day was open for each student to develop their own project. One of them has already been published, an wordpress tool for S60 devices (blog post in pt_BR here). Hopefully more will follow.