Nokia N900 – Linux based mobile phone

I’m quite excited about the newly announced Nokia flagship product N900. It is described by Nokia as a mobile computer which can also be used as a phone. It has very powerful hardware, with 600MHz CPU, 256M internal memory, resistive touchscreen, full QWERTY keyboard, 800x480 resolution screen, GPS, 3G network support and many more. I don’t care about the camera, however, it is nice to have one. It may be useful occasionally for not very serious task like making a copy of your passport. So 5M is enough for me. The user interface also looks great.

The most exciting point for me is that its operating system is a special version of Linux called Maemo. It is different from Google’s Android OS which only uses the Linux kernel. While for Maemo, it is a full fledged Linux. Basically, it means that any programs that can run on a desktop Linux can be used on maemo. In fact, I found that most of the software that I used everyday has already been ported to maemo, such as emacs, vim, latex, gcc, etc. If your favorite software hasn’t been ported already, you can easily do it by yourself, as long as it is open sourced.

Currently, there is no MMS support. Some people say that it can still receive MMS, just can’t send. Anyway, I have never sent MMS before, so it is not a big deal for me. Video call is not supported yet, which I do want to have a try. The problem with video calling is that it needs both parties to be in the 3G network with video calling capable devices, which is normally not the case. Chinese is not officially supported. A CJK project aiming to provide Chinese support is under development. There are some discussions on OTG support of N900. It is said that N900 doesn’t support it. With OTG support, we can connect other usb devices to the phone through microusb port. It would be pretty cool if it is possible.

This device can be preordered in a few countries. Sadly, Australia is not one of them. Even it is, I suspect the price would be very high. I’m eager to buy one as soon as possible, maybe by importing from the US, though I’m a little worried about the warranty issue.

Royal National Park Bush Walking

It has been a long time since last time I updated my blog. One reason is that I have lost some interest in photography and been concentrating on other things. Now suddenly, my enthusiasm on photography is back. So I decide to walk around Sydney each week since now on and take more pictures, to justify my purchase of more lens anyway. Yesterday, I went out with my friend to Royal National Park on the south of Sydney. The park is very large. As I can’t drive alone now, we took train to Heathcote, which was a one hour journey from the city. I thought that there should be an information centre at Heathcote, as it is a major entrance to the park, where we can get some maps. However, it turned out that I was wrong, or maybe we just didn’t find it. So we ended up into the jungle without any map. Even though I had taken my GPS with me, it was almost useless as there was no detailed map of the park. I can only use it to obtain my position, which maybe useful if we need someone to rescue us.
The first one-third of the trip to Karloo pool was straight forward. No side walks on the way. The pool is really nice. The water is very clear. I tried to take some pictures of the pool. However, as it is back lighted with a mountain behind, it is hard to get an evenly lighted scene. A graduated ND filter would be very helpful in this situation, which was not available for me at the moment. I do need to sharpen my skills on creating HDR images though.

At the pool, we met an old couple, who suggested that we should take the track to Uloola fall and take the train back. They also recommended us to watch out marks on the rocks, which proved to be very helpful later on. We continued our trip to the Uloola fall. When we reached the top of the hill, we missed the trace marks and found ourselves lost in the jungle. We headed south for a while, however, it was very difficult to move through the shrubs. So we turned back to find our original path. Luckily we found that and were on the right track again. Otherwise, we may find ourselves on the headline of today’s newspaper as joked about by the couple who noticed that we didn’t even have a map with us.

We had some lunch on the way. Last time when we did the manly beach bush walking, we didn’t bring enough food and water. At the end of that trip, I can hardly move my legs due to starvation and thirsty. This time, I took a whole set of Lebanese bread (一种饼), a salami and 1.5L water which made the trip very pleasant. When we arrived at the Uloola fall, it was almost dusk. The waterfall is small, less than 10 meters high. As we were in a hurry, we didn’t try to find the route down to the bottom of the fall.
We found an even smaller version not far away.

Passed the fall, the road became wide and less interesting. It took another hour for us to finally leave the park and reach the Waterfall station. It was a long trip and it is worth while to come back again. Maybe I will try the coastline track next time when I get my driver license.

Singapore Navy Show

I'm not a fan of military, so I was not that excited to see the show. Anyhow just wanted to go there to take some photos. I haven't used my 18-200 VR lens for a long time, because I have bought two new lens in the last two month, which have much bigger apertures. Now I most often use my new 105 micro lens to take photos of everyday life, especially bugs, flowers, and human beings. I am fond of macro photography as you don't need to ask for permission to take photos of those little guys, and there are a lot of things that you can shoot. I strayed a bit far. As to the navy show, I have fun to take the tour in the transport, which looks the same as the one in civilization. The tour is about 30 minutes. If it is longer than that, I'm afraid I would feel seasickness again. Luckily, It finished soon enough. In the afternoon, a celebrity of Singapore came to perform on the stage, who is an idol of my friend. A lot of photographers went to the front to take pictures, so was I. Here is one

Copy VCD under FreeBSD

First, scsi device support should be enabled by adding atapicam_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf, then do a cdrdao scanbus to get the device number, followed by cdrdao read-cd --device 1,0,0 --driver generic-mmc -v 3 v to copy the vcd file to data.bin. A lot of options are available in the manual page of cdrdao, just read it to choose the relevant options. The options I have used is from http://www.k4ml.com/node/76, with a device number modification, which works for me.

Gnucash slowness solved

After some trial and error, I finally solved the Gnucash startup slow problem. For FreeBSD system, the devel/libltdl15 port should be built with the environment variable libltdl_cv_sys_dlopen_deplibs=yes. Now my Gnucash can be ready within 10 seconds, which is reasonable.

Working with two monitors

Got dual monitors work simultaneously on my system. As my thinkpad has a radeon 7500 card (or 7000? not sure), I can use MergedFB option in controlling the two monitors with xorg. The result is quite good. My xorg.conf is

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/URW/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/webfonts/"
FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
FontPath "/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.2/SystemFiles/Fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/5.2/SystemFiles/Fonts/BDF/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "extmod"
Load "glx"
# Load "dri"
Load "dbe"
Load "record"
Load "xtrap"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "radeon"
Load "drm"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "keyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "MonitorLCD"
VendorName "IBM"
ModelName "Thinkpad"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "MonitorCRT"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
EndSection


Section "Device"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite" "yes"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "yes"
Option "DDCMode" "yes"
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,CRT"
Option "MergedFB" "True"
Option "CRT2Position" "Rightof"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon Mobility M6 LY"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Card1"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Radeon Mobility M6 LY"
BusID "PCI:1:0:1"
Screen 1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "MonitorLCD"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "Card1"
Monitor "MonitorCRT"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 1
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 4
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 8
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 15
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
EndSection

some of the lines may not necessary. As it works, I don't bother to remove those trivial lines.

Input chinese in firefox is solved!!!

Now firefox and other gtk applications' input method is controlled by an environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE, after setting it to scim, and export XMODIFIERS='@im=SCIM', I can use scim directly in firefox, without the hassle of starting firefox under Chinese environment, which causes ugly fonts.

Bee

This picture is taken this morning. The silhouette of the bee looks quite interesting to me.

A visit to bird park

Last sunday, I went to the bird park with my roommate. The park is not quite large, but there are lots of birds in it. With my S3 IS, I took a lot of pictures of the birds. Here are some that I like most.

How to change cursor theme under FreeBSD

modifiy the file /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/icons/default/index.theme from

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=core

to

[Icon Theme]
Inherits=your_desired_cursor_theme_name

which should be installed in the same directory as default.

Sending SMS over irda with my new Nokia 6070

After some struggle, with the help of google, I finally found out how to send sms from my computer over infrared connection with my new mobile phone Nokia 6070. To do this under FreeBSD, I have installed birda. Then connect the phone to my computer with

$ ircomm -d /dev/cuad1 -y /dev/ptypv -v 2

This is my second serial port, which is visible after infrared is enabled in the bios. Now the phone should be detected and connected successfully. The screen shows

query completed
discovered Nokia 6070, address=d2250000, hints=PnP, Modem, Fax, Telephony, IrCOMM, IrOBEX
query completed
115200 baud
LAP connected
comm connected

I use minicom to communicate with the phone

$ minicom -p /dev/ttypv
Welcome to minicom 2.1

OPTIONS: History Buffer, F-key Macros, Search History Buffer, I18n
Compiled on Sep 29 2006, 19:56:44.

Press CTRL-A Z for help on special keys

AT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1 E1 Q0
OK

The last line shows that it connects correctly. With the following command, I'm able to send an sms

at+cmgf=1
OK
at+cmgs="your phone number here"
> hello, a new test
> hope it works
>
(Type Ctrl-Z here to send the message)
+CMGS: 12

OK
Done, I got the message instantly. Good luck for your exploring with your mobile phone.

largest static array size in UNIX

After puzzled by this question for several times, I finally decided to find out the answer. After writing some trial programs, I discovered that the size is related to the system stack limit. Under FreeBSD, the limits can be gotten by limits command. Under other OS, you can use getrlimit function to get various limits of the system.

Line wrap problem for emacs with ecb

It has hassled me for a long time that when using emacs, some times after some action, the line can't wrap around as usual, and I can't reverse back. Today, I finally decided to solve it. After some tedious commenting out and removing comments in the .emacs file, I noticed that it is ecb which causes the problem. Thus I went to ecb's homepage and read the FAQ. The solution is right there, which says "Check the variable truncate-partial-width-windows and set it to nil". What a relieve it is.

A night at Singapore river side

Last Saturday, I spent some time at Singapore river, taking some photos, just to try out my new camera. This picture I love most. As I just begin to learn photography, the photo may be not that great, but I will improve, definitely.

Control multi computers with single keyboard and mouse

I just discovered that there is a program called synergy. With this program, you are able to control multi computers with single keyboard and mouse. How it achieves this is by making a server and many clients. The server's mouse and keyboard is the control one, and other clients will receive signals from the server to do the proper task. What you need to do is simply move your mouse out of the boundary of your display, thus it will enter another one. This program is really cool. More information can be found on the website http://synergy2.sourceforge.net

Canon Powershot S3 IS

My old Canon IXUS II was broken, and was sent to repair. I decided to buy a more powerful digital camera. I find this model -- Canon Powershot S3 IS is just the type of camera I'm looking for. The price is acceptable compared with a dSLR one. It has ultrazoom, which is 12X optical zoom, and the articulate LCD is wonderful.
I bought it last Sunday, and I am very excited about it. There are a lot to learn to catch a beautiful picture, and I'm already on my way to the art of photography.

Flash problem on FreeBSD

I just found this link http://altbit.org/pseudorandom/unixlike_translation.txt gives a detailed solution of how to solve the problem of viewing flash with firefox on FreeBSD. I haven't tested whether it works or not, as my browser has enabled flash with the help of the posts on FreeBSD's mailing list.

Install maple10 on FreeBSD

This version of maple can not be installed directly without effort. The java run time environment doesn't function properly. I have to patch the kernel as pointed out at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=92671 and recompile ther kernel. I don't know whether it will work or not yet. But it seems that it has improved a lot after playing with it a while on another Linux machine.

pam_ssh and kdm

For users of ssh, we can use an ssh-agent to manage our keys and connect to other ssh servers without typing password explicitly. However, you will need to type the password twice each time you login to the system, then start an agent and use ssh-add to get the passphrase. This is inconvenient if your password for login and the key file are the same. We can change this behavior by editing pam files. Here is how I made it with a kdm login manager under FreeBSD.

Edit /etc/pam.d/kde, add lines :

auth sufficient pam_ssh.so no_warn use_first_pass
session optional pam_ssh.so
below

auth required pam_unix.so no_warn try_first_pass

Note that the order of the two auth line is important. For more details, read the manual pam_ssh.

Best download accelerator under UNIX -- prozilla

This software really works. It can automatically search mirrors for a particular software and download it from the fastest of them. It will separate the file to several parts so the download speed can get to the maximum.
I use it to download Knoppix CD which only costs me about 15 minutes. The speed is about 600Kb/s. So try it if you want to download any large open source software from the internet.