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.