Happy coding

Meiga 0.3.2 released

This new release doesn’t use GtkBuilder anymore, so the GUI problems caused by incompatibilities between GtkBuilder versions shouldn’t be noticed now.

Files are now iterated instead of being mapped into memory. This makes Meiga a little bit slower but allows execution on low memory machines, as suggested by Steven.

Meiga now also works in Karmic. Just use the Jaunty packages and they will work fine. You can get it from http://meiga.igalia.com.

Connecting a laptop to the internet with Yoigo trough N900 using bluetooth

Some simple steps to do tethering over bluetooth to connect to Yoigo Spanish carrier:

Enable the Maemo Extras-devel catalog (URL: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel, Distribution: fremantle, Components: free non-free) and install “Bluetooth Dial-up Networking”.

In your computer, edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf to look like this, but using your own bluetooth device address (use hcitool scan from your laptop to get it):

rfcomm1 {
        # Automatically bind the device at startup
        bind yes;                                 

        # Bluetooth address of the device
        device 00:11:22:33:44:55         

        # RFCOMM channel for the connection
        channel 2;                         

        # Description of the connection
        comment "N900";
}

Channels 1 and 3 are also available and can be defined as rfcomm0 and rfcomm2, but the scope of that is out of this post.

Now edit the file /home/youruser/.wvdialrc in your laptop (using your own username) to look like this:

[Dialer YoigoBT]
init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet"
Username = ''
Password = ''
Modem = /dev/rfcomm1
Phone = *99#

To connect to the internet, simply open a terminal and type:

sudo wvdial YoigoBT

To disconnect, just press CTRL+c and it’s done.

Thanks to this post, which was used as a reference on how to connect using Nokia devices.

Fedora official package for Meiga

Great! Due to Rajeesh K Nambiar effort and dedication, Meiga is now an official package for Fedora.

Thank you very much, Rajeesh!

Meiga 0.3.1 (Halloween edition) released

This weekend I’ve taken advantage of our hackfest sessions at Igalia winter summit and have prepared a new “Halloween” version of Meiga.

The new version solves the bug pointed by xvi82 and ensures that Meiga compiles properly on Ubuntu Karmic (but no Karmic packages are provided yet). In addition, it has improved HTML headers to show a page title and set the proper character encoding. It also has a pending/total transfer counter, so you will know when you can safely exit Meiga without breaking any download.

Meiga can be downloaded from http://meiga.igalia.com.

Contact sync between K800i, sonyericsson.com and gmail.com

Today I’ve finally figured out how to syncronize my contacts, calendar, bookmarks, tasks and notes between my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone and Gmail, learning how to synchronize them with the data utility in sonyericsson.com in the way.

I’ve googled around and read so many web pages that I can’t list all them here. I’ll just post the result here as a recipe for people having a similar phone model:

For sonyericsson.com:

Just go to http://www.sonyericsson.com/cws/cws/community , create an account, tell them your phone model and number and follow the instrucions. They will send you an SMS, but if you don’t receive it (as it was for me), there’s a link to get the connection instructions by hand. These are my settings:

Server address: http://sync.sonyericsson.com/sync
User name: A random alphanumeric sequence that they create for you
Password: Another random alphanumeric sequence that they create for you
Connection: Choose your default internet connection here
Applications: Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Bookmarks (choose the ones you want to sync)
Apps. settings: Use the following database names for each one of the services: con, cal, task, pnote, bmark

Sync interval: disabled
Remote initialization: Always ask
Remote security: leave it empty

For Gmail:

Server address: https://m.google.com/syncml
User name: Your gmail name without “@gmail.com”
Password: Your gmail password
Connection: Choose your default internet connection here
Applications: Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Bookmarks (choose the ones you want to sync)
Apps. settings: Use the following name for the contacts database: contacts. i don’t know if the other services are available.

Sync interval: disabled
Remote initialization: Always ask
Remote security: leave it empty

I hope this post to be useful for other people struggling around out there to do the same task. I’d liked very much to have found it while I was googling. If this info is useful to set up other phone models/brands with slight variations, I’d also like to know about them. Please, post a comment about your own experience.

Enjoy it! 🙂

Meiga 0.3.0 released

After some inactivity time, I’ve started to devote time to Meiga again and developed a set of new cool features, apart of solving some bugs. The result is this new 0.3.0 release.

The most significant new feature is the support for multiple forwarding backends. Now the user can choose not only UPnP, as before, but also SSH forwarding or no forwarding at all (direct connection). What the new SSH forwarding backend does is to connect to a central SSH server and forward the Meiga serving port on it. This way, all the users in the remote SSH server or having direct connection to it, can access to the forwarded port. This connectivity for users having direct visibility of the server is only possible if it’s allowed by the SSH server configuration, though.

The second new feature is the addition of “Share on Meiga…” context menus for Nautilus and Konqueror. That way you don’t have to bother about finding the right folder path in the file selector. For improved security, this context menu will only work if Meiga is already running. No share will ever be served without the user noticing it by seeing the Meiga icon shown in the system tray.

The rest of the changes are minor fixes or collateral changes needed to implement the main ones.

I hope you to enjoy this new version. As always, it’s available for download from: http://meiga.igalia.com

Guadec 2009 conclusions

This has been a very intense week at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’m very glad about the good reception that Meiga talk had among the Gadec-ES public. Now it’s time for taking advantage of all this work and update the Meiga website with the slides prepared for the talk. I’m sure that anyone wanting to contribute or to understand the project will find valuable information on them.

But not everything has been about explaining our work. I’ve learnt a lot of new things and found new ideas to improve Meiga in the future. I’m not going to talk here about the rest of the talks given by Igalia people. You can read about that on the planet. I prefer to focus on some of the other most interesting talks I’ve attended to:

Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs (Will Thompson): Will showcased a graphical profiling tool that shows that D-BUS can be a slow protocol when there is a high amount of calls. One alternative to speed up things is to expose methods to do vectorized calls, performing multiple queries and getting multiple results at once, instead of doing N consecutive calls.
Sipping Mojitos and thinking RESTful thoughts (Rob Bradford): Rob spoke about Mojito, an interesting library to access remote REST web services in a convenient way.
I can has aliens too? Client side windows in Gtk+ (Alexander Larsson): Alex and his workgroup are making the effort to collapse some X-Window windows into a single big one managed by the client. This reduces flicker and has interesting applications for offscreen rendering.
Thinking Outside The Box (Bringing the Network back into GNOME) (John Palmieri): Apart from being a good guitar player, John reflected about some interesting ways for the desktop apps to interact with online services. It’d been nice to integrate the Meiga ideas of “offering directly from the desktop” instead of relying on central services, as he exposed.
Vala: Compiler for the GObject type system (Jürg Billeter): The Vala author showed the language I’m in love with. Apart from the already known features, I could see the new asynchronous programming features, which implement coroutines in some way. This concept is a very interesting tool to do clean asynchronous programming and could solve one of the problems I found in Meiga when coding a serie of asynchronous action. My alternative was to code a programmable step interpreter.
The Hynerian Empire and beyond (Zeeshan Ali): Zeeshan showed us the features of Rygel, a UPnP media server for Gnome.
Let’s make GNOME a collaborative desktop (Guillaume Desmottes): People is using Telepathy (XMPP) to exchange not only messages, video and audio, but also files and using the framework for other kind of communication/sharing uses between applications.
Personal Media Networks with Coherence and Telepathy D-Tubes (Philippe Normand): This guy demonstrated Coherence, a framework that is able to link two UPnP networks (eg: two homes) by using one of the UPnP devices in each network as a proxy. This proxy would forward the UPnP messages encapsulating them into DBUS calls and transmitting them over the Internet using D-Tubes, a networked implementation of DBUS. This D-Tubes technology also appeared in other talks and seems to be very interesting.
How to play libnice-ly with your NAT (Youness Alaoui): This guy explained how libnice uses NAT punching to make NAT traversal possible for UDP packets. They are currently trying to make it work for TCP also, which would be of immediate application on Meiga. Anyway, in that talk I knew about the existence of TURN servers that play the role of a central communication point as a last resort when direct visibility isn’t available between the peers.

  python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8282

The funny thing is that… it works on the N810 also!

More info about SimpleHTTPServer here.