MeeGo (Nokia/Intel): Openness does not seem to be very important for Nokia and Intel. They develop their stuff behind closed doors and then do a large code drop (once dropped, stuff gets developed in the open). In terms of professionality, it does not look much better: If you look at the meego-dev mailing list, you feel like you are in some kind of a kindergarten for open source developers - Things like HTML emails and top-posting appear to be completely normal for them, they don’t even follow the basic rules for emails and they also appear to ignore any advice on this topic. ... Read more 》

In the past weeks, I was looking at several build systems. As it turned out, there is not a single sane generic build system out there. Autotools: Autotools are ugly, slow, and require an immense amount of code copies in the source tree. WAF: WAF is not as ugly as autools and it’s faster and does not generate Makefiles or stuff like this. But it has serious issues: It requires one to copy it to the source tarball, has no stable API, and requires Python for building. ... Read more 》

Wednesday, after some weeks with a flickering screen (or more precisely, something is causing GTK+ to redraw and the kernel to print ^@ in the terminal when you touch the screen, see http://jak-linux.org/tmp/20100628_002.mp4) in my 3 years old HP Compaq 6720s (which seems to be a software-hardware combination problem, at least it works in Ubuntu); I decided to buy a new laptop. It took me a few minutes to find the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 15 NVL7VGE; which I ordered at notebooksbilliger. ... Read more 》

So, yesterday was my 0x14 (20th) birthday and Germany won the Eurovision Song Contest 2010. Next up is Formula One in Turkey and Sebastian Vettel starting from position 3, hopefully he manages to overtake Hamilton and Webber and win this race. Let’s see…

The 2.30 version of gnome-icon-theme is really one of the worst icon themes I’ve ever seen in the last years. First of all, it does not fit into the system due to the colors chosen. I was always satisfied with the GNOME icon theme, but with the 2.30 release I can’t use it anymore since it makes my system look like a piece of sh**. Secondly, it just does not fit with the tango icon theme. ... Read more 》

I wonder why the federal minister for consumer protection (hopefully a good enough translation for “Verbraucherschutzministerin”) Ilse Aigner has concerns about Street View, because those concerns are completely unrelated to protecting the consumer, because the consumer is the one viewing the images in the browser, and not the person being photographed. I have no reason to believe that Google Street View is illegal, I see no difference between a photo taken by a company and a photo taken by a single person. ... Read more 》

It seems that the N900 is able to run for > 3 days in standby, I unplugged it Friday on 7:00, and it lasted until Sunday 23:50. I used it for browsing the web a bit and to listen to music via FM transmitter.

My brother and I just replaced the keyboard of my HP Compaq 6720s with a new HP replacement part (a christmas present). The old one had no characters on some keys anymore and it did not look very well. Replacing the keyboard was a matter of removing two screws, and then just ‘clicking’ the keyboard out. The old keyboard lost a few keys during the process, but this is not really important anymore. ... Read more 》

Yesterday, an N900 I bought from Amazon Warehouse Deals arrived. The device is great, but I discovered today that the AV output only outputs sound on the right speaker and nothing on the left one. So it seems that I have to send it back and will thus not have a N900 during Christmas. Appart from that problem, the device works almost perfectly. The internet browsing experience is faboulus, the camera is good, and the device is fast; the screen is great and the speakers are great as well. ... Read more 》

If Oracle owned MySQL, it would not make a big difference with regards to competition on the database market. Oracle would then own 2 relational databases. But there is also the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL, the world’s most advanced open source database with several enhanced products from companies. If Oracle closed MySQL, the community would step in. I truly believe that the free software community is strong enough to support MySQL. There already is MariaDB and I believe that this project could serve as the base in case Oracle closes MySQL or stops MySQL completely. ... Read more 》