Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo writes that I've not put a licence on my fakecat plugin for pyblosxom. This has now been fixed. Also, please do send me patches even in the cases where I have forgotten to licence it appropriately.

As Benjamin Drieu noted, ccache is a wonderful tool. He complains about the configuration needed, which in the Debian package is really, really small. Just do PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH in your .bashrc or .zshrc and it will be used for all compilations. Very useful and less cumbersome than creating the links in ~.

It seems like all I can ever get myself to post about personal stuff at the moment is that I'm tired and busy. I have a lot of fun, but it's exhausting to try to fix the whole world at once. Everything from cleaning up random junk we have lying about to de-icing the freezer, fixing the door to the freezer (finally, it has been hard to close since we got it), changing all the knobs in the kitchen (including putting some new ones up) to trying to play with some personal projects. Exhausting.

I'm hoping it calms down a bit after Christmas, but I'm absolutely not sure. It's also scary to see the speed Christmas is closing in at. Not looking particularly forward to it, since I there are so many things about it I don't like. I wonder what it will be like to celebrate it in Molde. Seeing family again will hopefully also be nice, but I wish I could have that part without all the commercialism and such of Christmas itself.

Ian Murdock writes a bit about OpenSolaris and the Nexenta people who are creating a GNU+Solaris based OS. He writes a bit about the fact that the Debian community hasn't exactly embraced their efforts, but have rather been rude to them. A small thing caught my eye though:

It seems to me the argument that linking a GPL application to a CDDL library and asserting that that somehow makes the library a derivative work of the application is, to say the least, a stretch—not to mention the fact that we’re talking about libc here, a library with a highly standard interface that’s been implemented any number of times and, heck, that’s even older than the GPL itself.

It's not so much that you make the library a derivative work of the application as that you are making the application (that is, the binary /usr/bin/dpkg or whatever you are linking) a derivative of both the dpkg source code as well as the libc binary) and this is problematic when the libc in question is under the CDDL and dpkg is under the GPL.

which is what was shipped with it, and I think there might be a newer firmware out there which fixes some of the issues.

I just got my Nokia 770 and I must say it's a nice device. Some initial experiences are:

• No pen calibration on bootup. Nice and cool. All other handheld devices have that, but the 770 seems to work just fine without it. Kudos.

• It's not a PDA. No PIM thingy built-in, the device asks for its own name, but not the user's.

• It doesn't show that it's running Linux. I find this quite cool, as it shows that you can produce devices which run Linux and feel like they're targetted at non-geeks.

• The device feels sluggish and lacks feedback when doing stuff, whether it be closing an application, launching an application and so on. This makes it sometimes hard to know whether it has caught your action or not. Also, sometimes menus pop up for half a second, then goes away.

• The 770 has support for multiple applications at the same time. Works well enough, I guess.

• I want something to protect the screen, or I know it will develop scratches from the pencil over time. I guess I can get something from a shop in not too long.

• When putting the lid on, it's quite neat that it turns off the screen the moment the lid closes. I'll have to investigate how they do this. Hub thought it might be a magnet. Getting an X-Ray of the whole device would probably show.

• The feed reader needs work, I want to mark stuff as "read" explicitly and not just have a rolling list of news where I need to know where I was.

• Reduced-size MMC cards appear to be cheap. Around 30€ for a 512MB card which should be enough for a fair amount of music. I need to find an Ogg Vorbis player as well.

All in all, mostly happy, but there are still a bunch of rough edges which should be smoothed away in a few more revisions.

I'll see if I can get a development environment up and running on it, as well as getting a newer firmware onto the device (if I can find it; I wonder if the developer rootfs on maemo.org is newer or not..), but all that's for tomorrow.