CuteSoma (Soma.fm client for Nokia N9) has been available for 4 months now and it's the right time to publish some interesting statistics about downloads. First of all I didn't expect so much interest and I wasn't sure to have so many downloads, due to the fact that Nokia never advertised this device properly. But luckly lot of people don't care about advertising and buy a product anyway if they know it's one of the best available on the smartphone market.

I'm really happy to notice that the number of downloads is growing each month, this motivates me to continue with development (well... when my N950 comes back from Nokia, since I had to send it because it was broken).

I want to thank all the 3658 people that downloaded CuteSoma until now and all the people that are sending me their feedback, ideas and patches (yes Cornelius Hald, I'm talking about you ) you're giving me a big opportunity to learn C++/Qt/QML.

If you try to install Nokia QtSDK on Ubuntu using the Nokia installer (that provides a newer version than the one distributed in Ubuntu Software Center) you could get an error like this:

(Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_3_en.run:3126): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_style_get: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

to fix it, you need to run the installer with a specific parameter:

andrea@centurion:~/Downloads/Qt$ ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_4_en.run -style cleanlooks

and everything should work!

I've been a Flickr pro user for 4 years, but the pro account costs 24,95$/year and I was looking for something cheaper. Anyway I was thinking that after all, even if I don't renew my account, I can always access to all my pictures.... wrong! If you don't renew your pro Flickr account you can only access to the low resolution version of your own pictures. That's not acceptable for me, so I decided to download all my pictures and upload them somewhere else. Here comes the second disappointment: there is no automatic way to download all your pictures.

I simply had no time to write an application by myself, so I started searching on Google to see if there was something available to do this simple task. At the beginning I only found abandoned tools (closed source, the API was expired ecc...), paid tools, Windows only tools ecc... but finally I found this post http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/

There is a Python script that automatically downloads all your Flickr pictures getting the highest resolution available, you can download the script from here https://github.com/dan/hivelogic-flickrtouchr

The usage is very simple

mkdir FlickrBackupFolder
python flickrtouchr.py FlickrBackupFolder

A browser's window will be opened and you'll be prompted for authorization. After that, all you pictures will be downloaded.

In questo periodo diversi conoscenti mi stanno facendo domande su come siano gli ebook e se valga la pena farne uso rispetto ai normali libri cartacei. Recentemente ho avuto modo di acquistare il lettore Kindle di Amazon e devo ammettere di essere rimasto molto soddisfatto. Ho cercato di raccogliere le principali domande che mi sono state fatte al riguardo, sperando di fornire una panoramica completa sui libri in formato elettronico e sui relativi lettori.

Non è scomodo leggere sul Kindke? Assolutamente no. Non dovete immaginare il Kindle come un tablet (anzi, chi cerca un qualcosa che funzioni anche come tablet ha proprio sbagliato prodotto. Kindle è fatto per leggere libri.), lo schermo infatti non è un normale LCD come quelli dei tablet o dei portatili, ma una speciale superficie dove le parole vengono disegnate tramite l'e-ink. Lo schermo del Kindle non è retroilluminato e per leggere, così come per un libro normale, c'è bisogno o della luce del sole o di stare vicino ad una lampada. Gli occhi quindi non si stancano ed è possibile andare avanti a leggere per ore, senza notare differenze rispetto alla lettura di un libro normale.

Quanto costano i libri in formato elettronico? Di solito il costo è di 3-4€ in meno rispetto alla versione cartacea. Potrebbero costare molto meno se la legge italiana (ancora una volta cieca di fronte alle innovazioni) non equiparasse gli ebook a dei prodotti elettronici. L'IVA sugli ebook è infatti del 21% e non viene assolta come per i libri cartacei. Va detto anche che moltissimi libri, per i quali sono ormai scaduti i diritti di autore, sono disponibili gratuitamente. Volete leggere La Divina Commedia, Pirandello, I Promessi Sposi ecc...?! Benissimo. Questi e molti altri libri sono scaricabili gratuitamente. Kindle al momento offre "soltanto" 16.000 titoli in italiano, ma è ovviamente possibile accedere anche a tutti gli altri titoli disponibili in lingua straniera, per un totale di quasi un milione di libri a disposizione.

Quali sono i vantaggi per chi scrive? Gli scrittori, grazie agli ebook, hanno un modo ancora piu' facile e redditizio per pubblicare i propri libri. Attualmente, se uno scrittore vuole pubblicare un libro, deve trovare un editore che lo reputi interessante e decida di investire per pubblicarlo. Visto che l'editore di assume un rischio molto alto, la maggior parte del compenso va a lui. Con Amazon invece è possibile pubblicare un proprio libro in modo economico e veloce. Non c'è necessità di stampare migliaia di copie di un libro, così come avviene per il cartaceo. I compensi inoltre sono molto alti: il 70% del ricavato va a chi scrive il libro, non all'editore. Su un libro da 10€ quindi, all'autore rimangono 7€.

Riassumiamo i vantaggi degli ebook

• economici (costano 3-4€ in meno, molti sono persino gratuiti)
• ecologici (non c'è bisogno di stampare migliaia di copie)
• maggiori introiti per chi scrive i libri
• un e-reader è leggero, può contenere oltre 1000 libri, ottima autonomia con batterie che durano 1 mese
• comodità di poter acquistare un libro direttamente da casa ed averlo in pochi minuti
• nessun pericolo di acquistare un libro che non ci piace: con Kindle è possibile avere una copia dei primi capitoli del libro, senza spendere niente, in modo da valutare se il libro valga veramente la pena di essere letto

Se posso aggiungere un vantaggio, del tutto soggettivo, ma che personalmente è il piu' importante: gli ebook mi hanno fatto tornare anche la voglia di leggere!

Tomorrow Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) will be released officially and I decided to test the RC (release candidate) version on my desktop PC. Being involved in Unity-2D development I used only that desktop environment on my development virtual machine so I didn't have much time to test Unity (3D version).

I must admit that there have been a lot of improvements from 11.04 (Natty Narval) release, but also a lot of bugs and regressions have been introduced. I've noted all the problems I found in every day use and as soon as possible I'll also submit proper bug report on Launchpad for each of them. In the mean time you can give a look to the following list.

Bugs and regressions

Notifications broken: on Ubuntu Natty when an application wants to notify of a new message it popups an icon from the Launcher, then displays a small blue triangle in the top-left corner of the screen. Oneiric doesn’t have the small blue triangle anymore. In this way, if the user is looking away when he gets a notification, he can miss it for hours. There’s no way to know that there is a notify without manually going with mouse to the left and making the launcher to appear.

Launcher visibility: on Ubuntu Natty when the user moves the mouse in the top-left corner the Launcher is shown. Oneiric doesn’t show Launcher if you move the mouse in the top-left corner. You can’t use the top 30-40 pixels (the height of the panel).

Notify area icons: often in Oneiric when you click an icon in the notify area (for example the volume icon, the network manager icon ecc...) the popup is shown and suddenly hidden. You have to click a second time to view it.

Notify icon - Empathy: in Oneiric you cannot open Empathy from the notify area. If you click on “Chat” Empathy is open and visible on the Launcher but not on the screen. You have to move to mouse to the launcher then click on it to view the application window.

Empathy: “Automatically connect on startup” doesn’t work. If you enable this option in Empathy it doesn’t start anyway when the system start.

Launcher doesn’t work as expected: sometimes when you move the mouse on the left, Launcher is not shown. You can try it many times and it still doesn’t appear. I’ve to SUPER+D a couple of times (to show/hide Desktop) to show view it. Even the opposite problem happens: sometime you cannot hide the Launcher.

Boot failing: every time I boot Oneiric the first boot fails. I cannot know what happens because nothing is shown on video. I press CTRL+ALT+CANC, the system reboot and then boot normally.

Showing Skype: on Natty you just need to double-click on Skype icon in the notify bar to show it, now you need to click once on the icon, choose “Activate” from menu and you show it. Why the need to complicate an easy thing?

Webcam problems with Skype: with Natty I could use my webcam with Skype without any problem. Now I can still use it but if I activate the view of myself during a videcall, the video completly locks and it doesn’t work anymore. Skype is always the same version, so probably there is a problem with the new driver used.

Window manager: sometimes moving an application window doesn’t work. You drag a window around the screen then suddenly the window stop moving and the mouse icon starts vibrating. You have to release and click again to move the window and stop mouse icon vibrating.

Conclusion

CuteSoma is a client of Soma.Fm streaming radio that I wrote using Qt/QML for Nokia N9 and Nokia N950. Previously it was available as a .deb only, now you can install it directly from the OVI Store. It's only a 0.1 version and even if it's quite stable it may contains some bugs: please report me any bug so I can try to fix them as soon as possible.

CuteSoma is opensource and released under the GPL v.3 license. You can find the complete source code here: https://github.com/andreagrandi/CuteSoma

There is a poll available to let the final users choose the new icon for this application, you can find it here: http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=4619
I asked for help to design a new icon and I received two, so I'm letting the final users choose which one they like most.

To get this application you need to search "cutesoma" on OVI Store client or visit this link http://store.ovi.com/content/205737

Please remember that CuteSoma is free, but if you want you can make me a donation or offer me a beer using the "Donazione" button on the right column.

Introduction

Even if it's not a new model, the HTC Desire is still a very good Android device, thanks to its 1Ghz CPU and 512 Mb RAM, but one of the biggest problems of this phone is that it comes with only 148Mb available in the ROM. Once the operating system is installed (ROM I mean), after installing few useful applications you'll end the available space very soon. There are many apps available, like App2SD that move your applications to the SD card, but it's not enough because only the application is moved, not the data. To move the data to the SD card, there is a very nice utility called Data2SD. Please note that this procedure requires you to reflash your device and partition your SD card, so please do a complete backup before proceding.

What you need

• a rooted HTC Desire (you need to have a rooted phone with a recovery already installed)
• a 4Gb (or bigger) microSD, at least class 4 (class 6 is even better while class 10 is reported not working with this phone)
• a microSD card reader
• CyanogenMod 7: http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.3-Desire-signed.zip
• Data2SD: Data2SDInstallerX1.zip and Data2SDReInstallerX1.zip
• Google Apps: http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Latest_Version#Google_Apps
• GParted: you can use the version available on Ubuntu Linux or you can download a live Linux image with GParted installed: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Procedure

Backup your data

Prepare the microSD card

CyanogenMod 7 installation

Even this morning I didn't wake up early because I still felt sick (I already know this sore throath won't abandon me untile I go back home).

I had a light breakfast at 10:30 and then I finishes uploading some pictures and published articles on my blog I already had written before.

While waiting to attend a session, I found Mark Shuttleworth around and I congratulated with him for the effort he is putting into Ubuntu. Without a similar distribution, I'm pretty sure that Linux would not be so popular today.

We had lunch at 13:00 as usual and after that I attended a couple of presentation. The first one on Eucalyptus, then "Cooking Recipes" for Ubuntu and another one dedicated to Wine. The Wine session was so funny! They had a little problem with video projector and all the images appeared with a blur effect so that you could think to be drunk

After these sessions I had to go back to my room since I didn't feel very well, but I was able to attend "Unity's relations and dependancies on GNOME" thanks to audio streaming, IRC for asking questions and etherpad to take notes.

I attended also "desktop-dx-o-unity-a11y" where there was a discussion about the state of Unity and what can be improved before Oneiric release. Lot of work has to be done yet, in particular about accessibility.

Last session of this day, a Q+A with Mark Shuttleworth. The session was very interesting! He replied to all questions coming from the public and from IRC.

This day at UDS started a bit late for me, since i woke up pretty sick (damn air conditioned!!!). I did not follow any conferences in the morning. I relly wanted to follow the Wayland one, but when I arrived the room was already full and it was almost impossible to enter, so I decided not to enter.

I attended "What's wrong with UDS and how we can fix it" session before having lunch. We discussed the possibility to improve all the session in general, for example giving them a proper order so that a team can first discuss some API interface, then another team can discuss how to design them.

We had another wonderful and tasty lunch, even if I didn't eat so much, but food was very good anyway.

During the afternoon I followed an interesting track: "Recommend music based on current song playing or on users media library". We discussed the possibilities to implement a music suggestion service, based on user's tastes.

I spent the rest of theconference time writing these blog posts and uploading pictures.

After the sessions we had the Linaro Showcase: lot of demo running on Linaro and ARM processors. I was really impressed by a robot with Kinect that was able to follow people recognizing their faces. During the showcase there was a very nice dinner.

After dinner I went out with my friend Manrique Lopez who is here in Budapest for another conference, so we decided to meet for a good beer.

Before coming back to the hotel me, Marco Trevisan and Andrea Azzarone had a nice talk with Jorge Castro. He really make us feel part of the Ubuntu family!

My day started at 7:30 with a very nice breakfast! I was alone with just another guy this morning, in a very big breakbast room.

After it I grabbed my badge to avoid queue later and went back to my room to wake up Marco Trevisan (he was still sleeping ).

The keynote was opened by Jono Bacon (the Ubuntu Community manager), followed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. The most interesting (and tweeted) part of the keynote was "how to prounounce Oneiric" (Oeniric will be the next Ubuntu release).

The keynote finished with a bit late, so all the other tracks were shifted forward. I followed "Unity 2D Oneiric Improvements", it was interesting because there were some Nokia/Qt guys and they looked very interested in helping the Unity 2D team and collaborating with them.

Now following "Shaping a strategy for Ubuntu user assistance", I just had the possibility my involvement into helping people that require Ubuntu assistance.

The lunch has been very tasty, I had the possibility to eat some local recipes, not bad at all.

After lunch we had a short session on Qt. The version 4.8 is going to be released in a couple of months, while 5.0 is announced to be released in 1 year from now: it will be almost code-compatible with 4.x, it will have an improved support for Qt Quick and QML.

As last track of the day I decided to follow "Personal Cloud". Not a perfect track, since the person who should have been here was only talking with us using Skype and it was more difficoult to hear what he said.

At the end of this day there was the "Meet & Greet" party, sponsored by Freescale and Openstack. They offered a dinner and we had some good music after it.