Older blog entries for mallum (starting at number 21)

22 Mar 2004 (updated 23 Mar 2004 at 13:58 UTC) »

Uploaded a few updated Matchbox packages. Nothing really new, just fixes to oddities in the 0.8 release.

Have my module based X Proxy now basically working. The only pluggin so far is a little Xauth spoofer. Finding it hard to motivate myself to do much more on it :(

Autotooled Xtst for freedesktop.org xlibs . The matchbox test stuff and the badly in need of some love, 'xkbd' both need it.

Nokia have an interesting software developer position ( url correct now ).

Some random linkage for today;

Socket now have a Cordless Serial Adapter with Bluetooth . Could be fun to connect with my stinger serial joystick and ipaq.

New mobile computing have Interview with Doug Turner and Chris Hofmann of the Minimo Project . Minimo totally rules especially with it small screen rendering. I really hope GPE start including it in images for high end ipaqs. It royally trumps dillo.

Finally got round to uploading my fosdem 'X Not on the desktop' slides .

On Sids demand got Sky+ installed yesterday which is basically the closest thing to Tivo here in the UK. It works pretty good, though Sid wasn't so impressed when I childishly set it to record all the adult channel 10 minute freeviews.

I also got a netgear me101 wireless bridge so I can reconnect up the mini-itx based mediabox to the TV and catch up on bittorrented 24 episodes missed whilst in the dial up wilderness. Cant seem to get dhcp to work through the bridge though which is odd as everything else seems fine.

Started hacking a simple 'plugin' based X Proxy to experiment with various ideas. Plugin ideas include; 'Allow XYZ to use this display' GUI tool, SSL ( though xlib would need hacking too ), mDNS support ( via howl ), compression, filtering etc ... We'll see how it goes.

Hopefully get a matchbox 0.8.1 release out towards the end of the week with various minor fixes.

Woohoo. DSL just got connected ( with BT in the end ). My 2 week dial up wilderness is over :-)

DSL is beginning to become a complete knightmare.

I phoned the ISP Id ordered DSL from to see how my order was progressing. They informed me the local exchange had run out of ports and it would be 2 weeks before they got any new ones. ( This was after waiting nearly an hour in a stupid phone queue ). So once these extra 'ports' are added the process of connectting me can start - which apparently takes 10-15 more days. So Im probably looking at another month of extremely slow, painful and expensive dial up - how depressing. After 3 years on a nice fast cable modem Id forgotten how slow dial up really is - Even doing a cvs commit seems to take forever.

I dunno what to do to improve the situation. I work from home and having just moved to the other side of London (SE) I have no friends near by with fast internet access I can 'borrow'.

I guess I can ditch this current provider and switch to BT, hopefully somehow finding out if they have free 'ports' at the exchange.

On a better note, getting into town is very quick from here ( half hour ) and the journey is pretty nice. I popped into TCR this morning and got a new battery for the tibook.

So we moved house and then the day after that I headed off to fosdem.

The house move went ok for us, but maybe not for the removal men. It took them nearly 12 full hours to do the move - they hadn't been told it was a 50M uphill trek to the new house and therefore didn't have trolleys etc. Mr Hallski was also a really really big help during the move though he didn't have to be ( He is the perfect guest ). Felt pretty bad about the mess up of move timings with Hallskis but Im pretty sure he still had a good time and made good friends with Sidske and the pugs.

So the morning after the move, Hallski and I headed via the eurostar to fosdem. Felt pretty bad about leaving Sid on her own in strange new house. The first night at fosdem we got maybe a bit too drunk on white beer. The next days hangover was amplified by lack of sleep and the sweaty overcrowded very smelly lecture theatures and hacking rooms at fosdem. It was a pretty bad day.

The next day was much better. I did my talk and though my laptop wouldn't speak to the projector ( dj adams was kind enough to lend me his laptop that did work - owe him beerage ) it seemed to go pretty well. Turnout was good and got asked questions etc.

The best thing about fosdem for me is meeting people in person, putting faces to irc nicks and getting to have fun with nice people in person you unfortunatly dont get to see very often. Also had a really fun time with Hallski and it was pretty sad when he departed back to sweden with the rest of the scandinavian conspiricy.

Now I back home on the dreaded dial up connection and a massive amount of unpacking todo. 10-15 working days till I get DSL again - urg !!

Hacked a very dirty 'mirrored' VNC Server out of LibVNCServer and the new X Damage extension. You can grab it here - its basically a quick reworking of the x11vnc.c included with LibVNCServer tarball ( in contrib/ ). The plan is to use it on the Ipaq as a demo tool for my fosdem talk. It works ok but not as good as Id hoped.

A Side effect of this was remembering vnc2swf - a tool for converting vnc streams into flash movies.So I made a quick little flash demo of matchbox running on my ipaq with composite ext, new minimo ( which is pretty amazing ) etc. You can view it here http://handhelds.org/~mallum/test.swf . Hmm, I wish I could run flash on my laptop ( powerpc ).

Hallski arrives in a few hours for some time here in the UK before we head off to brussles. Hope he can stand the mini zoo we have here at home.

Its good to see people are figuring out how to plugin/rework XInput for kdrive. I need to get in on the act and make sure tslib fits in somehow.

Seems the new matchbox release has gone down well. A few minor issues have cropped up but mostly now fixed in CVS. Will probably make new minor releases after fosdem and house move.

Arg, looks like after house move I'll be at best on dial up for a couple of weeks and there seems to be an unspected lead time on getting a new DSL line set up. This is going to hurt.

Packing for move is mostly done now. Just got to finish writing presentation...

Just finished uplaod of various new matchbox bits - packages, screenshots, website etc - glad its finally done!

Check http://matchbox.handhelds.org/ for the beef.

Now more packing,

Move house day before fosdem ! so Im spending the weekend packing :( I truly have a lot of crap.

I stumbled upon Jim Gettys very cool The Future is Coming: Where the X Window System Should Go paper today. Its been a while since I last read it - but now it seems with the emergence of freedesktop.org Xserver various points made on the paper are beginning to emerge.

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