Pain

Had an extremely painful and lengthy tooth extraction today. The local anaesthetic is wearing off and the pain is increasing. Damn all you people that reassured me it wouldn’t be painful. [Update]: OK, I just read planet gnome and feel a bit bad at complaining about tooth pain when some people are recovering from cancer… Congrats to Manu on his recovery πŸ™‚

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Fix-it Saturday

Fuelled by the outrage, anger and misery caused by not receiving my Metroid Prime 3 pre-order (I was hoping for a little enjoyment before having my tooth pulled out on Tuesday :(), I’ve fixed a couple of things today. First was my Wii’s crappy component output; I’ve read that it’s out-of-spec, which sounds about right given the two TVs I’ve had have both had problems with it. Long-story short, the problem is bright colours are over-exposed (causing detail to be lost) and no amount of brightness/contrast adjustment will fix them – added a resistor to the luma channel of the component cable, Bob’s-your-uncle, sorted πŸ™‚ Second fix, been using a rapidly-failing wireless track-ball to interact with my ‘media-box’ (in quotes, as it’s just a stock Ubuntu gutsy machine). I would be using Elisa and my lovely media centre remote a friend donated to me, but it would appear that Elisa has resigned itself to being outright sucky (sorry Elisa guys, but 0.1 series was usable, 0.3 series can’t even keep a video in sync and navigation is a complete mess.. but I’m sure it’ll get better, right? :)) Anyway, I took the time to look up how to configure totem with lirc (completely undocumented, nice!) and sorted that out. That wasn’t enough, however, I wanted some basic desktop-wide navigation with my remote-control, so I hacked up ‘presskey‘ using libfakekey. Just a crappy short C app that uses libfakekey to send key presses. In combination with my ~/.lircrc, I can now navigate through folders, start watching videos, seek through videos, switch through apps, etc., all with my remote and all without installing some horrible media centre. Further potential good news, daf was messing around with libjana and python and found a shortcut to instantiate jana widgets through python without bindings… Perhaps he’ll work on starting up some jana bindings?? πŸ™‚

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Splitting up with libjana

Jana (libjana, libjana-ecal and libjana-gtk + tests and examples) are now in their own separate repository, away from openmoko-dates2. I doubt anyone has checked them out, but just in case, new repository URLs: https://svn.o-hand.com/repos/jana/trunk
https://svn.o-hand.com/repos/dates/branches/openmoko2 It is also now configured and installed as a dynamic library. As multiple applications are using it (openmoko-dates, openmoko-today, openmoko-worldclock) and it gradually increases in size and functionality, it makes less sense to link it statically. I’ll try and update my PPA on the weekend with some more of these OpenMoko applications, but no promises – my desktop computer is temporarily broken (:() and Metroid Prime 3 is out this Friday (:)). I did take on some of the ‘suggestions’ made in my previous blog with the digital clock in libjana-gtk, but I’m going to refrain from posting a screenshot. If anyone’s genuinely interested in helping (either with patches, or real criticism), they’re more than welcome πŸ™‚ Thinking of patches, Iain wrote an excellent patch for JanaGtkWorldMap that I hope to integrate tomorrow and use in the world clock application… Unfortunately, didn’t get too much done today, just been one of those days… Think I might be coming down with something again, was a heck of a struggle to get out of bed this morning :/ Looking forward to a relaxing weekend. On the subject, last weekend I went back down to Southampton to visit a couple of friends, and got to complete Portal. Which is just about the best game I’ve played in years, definitely a reason to either own an Xbox 360 or a reasonable PC running Windows (seriously!) It just about off-sets the disappointment that is the Halo 3 single-player/cooperative campaign… And it was good to see uni friends again of course.

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OpenMoko bling

Its been decided (from demand) that libjana be compiled as a dynamic library in OpenMoko/OpenEmbedded, due to the difficulty/breakage of staging a static library, and the fact that it gets used in multiple apps; so that makes it more viable to use in other apps. With that in mind, I’ve added a bit of bling to the Today app, in the form wallpaper support and JanaGtkClock: Also, I finished off the digital display πŸ™‚ Of course, the wallpaper is optional and, as always, the theme controls the colours.

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