Monthly Archive:: January 2013

A Jolla (Sailfish) developer and a Canonical (Ubuntu Phone) developer walk into a KDE/Plasma IRC channel, and fire up a conversation about the QML component API. Not long after, the first fruits of this conversation become apparent. Aaron Seigo (who uses punctuation these days!): "Well, one thing led to another and Zoltan posted an email to the Qt Components mailing list summing up the conversation and proposing we bring our APIs into better alignment. We hope to address issues of API drift between the various component sets out there. This is a pain point others have identified, such as in this recent blog post by Johan Thelin. There is much work to be done before we can even think of calling this a success, but it's the right sort of start." Great news.

Nokia has just sent out a few preliminary comments about the company's performance during the fourth quarter of 2012. Nokia's figures are a good indicator for how well Windows Phone 8 is doing, and, in all honesty, I'm not exactly blown away. Apparently, neither was Nokia itself, since the company decided to redefine their Asha phones from feature phone to smartphone to prop up their smartphone sales figures.

"A senior OpenBSD developer has complained on a mailing list that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change. Marc Espie said this would hurt smaller players by not allowing them to keep up with the changes. Basically what is happening is that numerous changes are being made to Linux and smaller projects like OpenBSD cannot keep up with the changes. And, according to Espie, not all these changes are strictly necessary."

"BORPH is an operating system designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extended version of the Linux kernel that handles FPGAs as if they were CPUs. BORPH introduces the concept of a 'hardware process', which is a hardware design that runs on an FPGA but behaves just like a normal user program. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically. The name is an acronym for 'Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware'."

This is so cool, and defeninitely the future of mobile phone displays. Samsung demonstrated a prototype phone with a flexible display. Flexible displays will be more resilient than the stuff we use today, and if we ever get around to developing flexible PCBs and batteries, we'll be golden. I long for sturdy, shatterproof devices.

Ars 'reviews' Haiku, and concludes that "at the end of the day, Haiku may not be much more than an interesting diversion, something to play with on a spare bit of hardware on a rainy afternoon just for a bit of fun. But even if it amounts to no more than that, Haiku is still worth checking out." The article is a bit scant on content, but it does give me the opportunity to link to my review of Haiku alpha 1 from 3 years ago. I try Haiku every now and then to see if that review needs an update, but it always amounts to 'it got a bit more stable' - which is fantastic, but not a reason to redo it.

Lead developer for Compiz, Sam Spilsbury, says he sees little need to develop Compiz for Wayland due to the increasing fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem. Spilsbury writes "What does compiz actually provide to users of these systems? None of this functionality that user wants really depends on our compositing engine. There's nothing so special about our compositing engine that gives it a reason to exist This is the real practical toll of fragmentation amongst the Linux ecosystem. It's not just that there are multiple implementations of the wheel. There are multiple implementations of entire cars which do almost the same thing, but a little different from everyone else. Some say this is the free software's greatest strength. Now that I know the personal and technical toll of fragmentation, I see it as its greatest weakness."

The Verge got to interview Valve's CEO, Gabe Newell, and the priceless quotes are just flying left and right. "We'll come out with our own and we'll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That'll be a Linux box, if you want to install Windows you can. We're not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination." Others will be making Steambox devices too. Also: "Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. When I started using it I was like 'oh my god...' I find unusable." This last point is something I agree with vehemently. Can't comment on Windows 8 on tablets, but on regular PCs it's a schizophrenic, unusable clusterduck. It got me to switch back to Mac and use KDE (on my laptop). Let that sink in for a while.

Daniel 'Codeworkx' Hillenbrand on why he's not going to work on cm10 for the Galaxy SIII anymore: "Before the release of the Samsung Galaxy S II we were promised support and devices. We received the S2 and the whole community was praising Samsung. To me, that was nothing but a good PR stunt, because there has not been even the slightest bit of support ever since. Actually Samsung vehemently refuses to hand out any information or even a single line of code to us. Our contact at Samsung seems to be willing to support us, but gets blocked by his superiors." His advice to prospective Android buyers is clear. "All manufacturers have an equally bad update policy, so if you like a Samsung device, just buy it. If you want to use AOSP or CyanogenMod on the other hand, you should stay away from Exynos devices, because they just don't meet the requirements. Instead I recommend you to buy Nexus or Qualcomm/OMAP devices that haven't been completely botched by the manufacturer."

It's the beginning of the year, so the Consumer Electronics Show is currently in full swing in the awesome city of Las Vegas. The thing is though - there's so much, pardon my Dutch, crap being announced it's hard to keep up. I have yet to see a single interesting thing to come out at CES so far, and I have little hope the next few days are going to be any better. That NVIDIA mobile gaming thing is mildly interesting, but as usual - no price, no release date. The Verge is spending loads of money on CES, so it has excellent coverage going on. Let's have a contest: if three months from now any of you can name three products announced at this year's CES (without cheating), I will force myself to use iOS for a week.

In 2011 Novell sold the SUSE franchise to Attachmate, who has run it since, and a portfolio of patents to a Microsoft consortium. But now Novell shareholders are alleging the deal was cooked, and Novell's board withheld information from another potential bidder to ensure Attachmate would win. From Groklaw: "Party C actually bid a bit higher than Attachmate. But the allegation is that Attachmate was favored with information that Party C was not given". The news doesn't affect Attachmate, who won the bid. But Novell's Board of Directors is going to have some explaining to do.

"It's taken longer than expected but it has finally happened: unsigned desktop applications run on Windows RT. Ironically, a vulnerability in the Windows kernel that has existed for some time and got ported to ARM just like the rest of Windows made this possible. MSFT's artificial incompatibility does not work because Windows RT is not in any way reduced in functionality. It's a clean port, and a good one. But deep in the kernel, in a hashed and signed data section protected by UEFI's Secure Boot, lies a byte that represents the minimum signing level." Good stuff. Very good stuff.

And so this situation is starting to get ridiculous - and consumers are, as usual, caught in the middle of it all. Google has just blocked Windows Phone devices from accessing Google Maps on their phones. In addition, it also seems Windows Phone users are now restricted to the basic HTML version of the mobile GMail website. While understandable from a defensive perspective - Microsoft's extortion scheme targeting Android device makers and all that - it's still a massive dick move that only hurts consumers. Update: the media attention has worked - Google is backpedalling, and will remove the redirect. "We periodically test Google Maps compatibility with mobile browsers to make sure we deliver the best experience for those users. In our last test, IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users. Recent improvements to IE mobile and Google Maps now deliver a better experience and we are currently working to remove the redirect. We will continue to test Google Maps compatibility with other mobile browsers to ensure the best possible experience for users."

Ralf Rottmann is CTO and co-founder of the largest mobile application developer in Germany, Grandcentrix. He has more Apple devices than an Apple Store and thinks he's a fanboy - yet, he's switched to the Nexus 4 completely, stating that "the latest version of Android outshines the latest version of iOS in almost every single aspect". This line in particular rings true for me as a Windows Phone 8 and Android user: "whenever I grab my iPhone for testing purposes, iOS feels pretty old, outdated and less user friendly". This will most likely be dismissed as a troll by some, but it has to be said: iOS has become stale, bordering on being outdated, and lacks several crucial pieces of functionality, neatly detailed in Rottman's article. Apple has a lot of catching up to do, or it will be Mac OS all over again.