Mi blog lah! Το ιστολόγιό μου

5May/100

Χαρτογράφηση με OpenStreetMap (OSM) και Ελλάδα

Το έργο OpenStreetMap (OSM) φιλοδοξεί να φτιάξει ένα ελεύθερο χάρτη του πλανήτη. Όπως η Wikipedia είναι η μεγαλύτερη συμμετοχική εγκυκλοπέδια, έτσι το OpenStreetMap θέλει να γίνει ο μεγαλύτερος συμμετοχικός χάρτης.

Τμήμα χάρτη Ηλακλείου Κρήτης (OpenStreetMap)

Τα δεδομένα που εισάγονται στο OpenStreetMap διατίθενται με την άδεια Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike.

Τμήμα χάρτη από το Ηράκλειο Κρήτης (Google Maps)

Γιατί χρειαζόμαστε το OpenStreetMap αφού το Google Maps είναι δωρεάν και σχετικά ολοκληρωμένο; Το ζήτημα είναι ότι το Google Maps, για το περισσότερο κόσμο και την Ελλάδα, χρησιμοποιεί δορυφορικές εικόνες και δεδομένα χαρτογράφησης που δεν είναι διαθέσιμα με ελεύθερες άδειες. Δείτε τους περιορισμούς χρήσης των χαρτών του Google Maps, ενότητα Restrictions on Use.

Το OpenStreetMap αποτελείται από τη βάση δεδομένων που περιλαμβάνει όλο το υλικό του χάρτη μαζί με το ιστορικό των ενημερώσεων. Αυτή τη στιγμή η βάση έχει φτάσει στα 8.6GB (αν συμπιεστεί) και υπάρχει διαθέσιμο αντίγραφο ασφαλείας ολόκληρης της βάσης που παράγεται κάθε εβδομάδα. Το αρχείο, planet-latest.osm.bz2, σε συμπιεσμένη μορφή (bz2), είναι διαθέσιμο από το http://planet.openstreetmap.org/ Στην πράξη, ένας τυπικός χρήστης μπορεί να χρησιμοποιήσει ειδικά εργαλεία όπου μπορεί να εξάγει το χάρτη του τμήματος του πλανήτη που ενδιαφέρει, με πιο εύκολο και γρήγορο τρόπο.

Όπως με τη Wikipedia, έτσι και με το OpenStreetMap, κάθε εθελοντής που προσφέρει πρέπει να παράγεια τα γεωγραφικά δεδομένα. Ο τυπικός τρόπος είναι με τη χρήση συσκευής GPS, όπου καταγράφουμε τις διαδρομές (tracks) και τα σημεία αναφοράς (Point Of Interest, POI).

Άφου φτιάξουμε λογαριασμό στο www.openstreetmap.org, είμαστε σε θέση να προσθέτουμε διαδρομές (tracks). Οι συσκευές GPS γενικά παρέχουν τη δυνατότητα καταγραφής της διαδρομής μας, καθώς και τη δυνατότητα εξαγωγής της διαδρομής. Η μορφή που δέχεται το OpenStreetMap είναι το .gpx, και υπάρχουν εργαλεία για μετατροπή από άλλες μορφές προς GPX.

Από τη στιγμή που έχουμε εισάγει τις ακατέργαστες διαδρομές στο OSM, είμαστε σε θέση να δημιουργήσουμε τους δρόμους και τα σημεία αναφοράς του χάρτη. Ένας τρόπος για να το κάνουμε αυτό είναι να χρησιμοποιήσουμε την επιλογή επεξεργασίας (Edit) του χάρτη, από το δικτυακό τόπο του OSM καθώς έχετε εντοπίσει την περιοχή που θέλετε να επεξεργαστείτε. Όλα αυτά γίνονται μέσα από το Firefox σας. Αυτή η εφαρμογή για επεξεργασία του OpenStreetMap  μέσω Web ονομάζεται Potlatch.

Δείτε τον οδηγό για νέους χρήστες του OpenStreetMap στα ελληνικά.

Σε επόμενα άρθρα θα αναφερθούμε στην εφαρμογή JOSM, μια εφαρμογή σε Java, που επιτρέπει τη λήψη των δεδομένων τμήματος του χάρτη του OSM. Με το JOSM είμαστε σε θέση να κάνουμε κάθε είδους τροποποίηση στο χάρτη και είναι το βασικό εργαλείο.

Επιπλέον, ο χάρτης του OSM που εμφανίζεται στο πρώτο στιγμιότυπο παραπάνω είναι μια μόνο παραδοχή του χάρτη· είναι εφικτό να παράγουμε διαφορετικές μορφές του χάρτη (για παράδειγμα, στα αγγλικά ή ελληνικά, με έμφαση τα καταστήματα, με έμφαση χώρους για περίπατο, με έμφαση μόνο τα πρατήρια, κτλ).

Ακόμα, υπάρχει εφαρμογή J2ME (εφαρμογή Java για κινητά) όπου επιτρέπει τη συλλογή δεδομένων για διαδρομής και σημεία αναφοράς.

Τέλος, υπάρχει εφαρμογή που μπορεί να εξάγει το τμήμα του χάρτη που μάς ενδιαφέρει και να το εισάγει σε μια εφαρμογή J2ME (Java για κινητά) ώστε με το κινητό μας να έχουμε ένα ελεύθερο σύστημα πλοήγησης. Ναι, και με φωνή.

8Jan/090

GMail J2ME application for your mobile phone

We talked a couple of years ago about the Google J2ME (Java for Mobile devices such as mobile phones) application that you can download and install on your phone. With this application, you can run GMail on you mobile phone, and access your e-mails with your data plan (GPRS, EDGE or 3G).

http://www.google.com/xhtml/images/screenshots/gmail.gif

To install the J2ME application, visit (with your mobile phone) the URL

gmail.com/app

If GMail recognises that you are using a compatible mobile phone, it will direct you to download and install the application to your phone. The current version of the application is about 260KB.

If you want to save some of your data bandwidth, you can change the User-Agent string of your Firefox (use the User Agent Switcher Firefox Extension) to one of a mobile phone, then visit with your browser. In this case, you can get the application from googlemail-nokia.jar (version 2.0.6/L2). If you can afford it however, it is better to install from gmail.com/app, because this would set a list of reasonable defaults.

16Dec/080

Java plugin 64-bit, now available.

Sun Microsystems announced the 64-bit version of the JRE, which includes the Java Plugin.

This means that if you have a 64-bit version of a Linux distribution, you can now have Java applets running in your Firefox.

Download at https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6uNea.html

You can install in /usr/local/

Then, you need to make a symbolic link, (it’s OK if Firefox is still running)

ln -s /usr/local/jre1.6.0_12/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/

Then, in Firefox, visit about:plugins and check if the new plugin is recognised. You should see the text below.

libnpjp2.so

Όνομα αρχείου: /usr/local/jre1.6.0_12/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so
Τύπος MIME Περιγραφή Επιθέματα Ενεργές
application/x-java-vm Java Ναι
application/x-java-applet Java Ναι
application/x-java-applet;version=1.1 Java Ναι

Finally, test your browser with the demo applets at http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/index.html

I do not know how well some complicated Java applications will behave. If you do not see the applet starting up (there is no loading indication), have a look at ~/.xsession-errors for any hints of a failed applet.

11Jun/080

ANTLR grammar for XKB, and Relax NG schema (draft)

I completed the ANTLRv3 grammar for symbols/ configuration files of XKB. The grammar can parse and create the abstract syntax tree (AST) for all keyboard layouts in xkeyboard-config.

ANTLRv3 helps you create parsers for domain specific languages (DSL), an example of which is the configuration files in XKB.

Having the ANTLRv3 grammar for a configuration file allows to generate code in any of the supported target lagnuages (C, C++, Java, Python, C#, etc), so that you easily include a parser that reads those files. Essentially you avoid using custom parsers which can be difficult to maintain, or parsers that were generated with flex/bison.

On a similar note, here is the grammar to parse Compose files (such as en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre). I am not going to be using in the project for now, but it was fun writing it. The Python target takes 18s to create the AST for the >5500 lines of the en_US.UTF-8 compose file, on a typical modern laptop.

I am also working on creating a RelaxNG schema for the XKB configuration files (those under symbols/). There is a draft available, which needs much more work.The Relax NG book by Eric van de Vlist is very useful here.

The immediate goal is to use the code generated by ANTLR to parse the XKB files and create XML files based on the Relax NG schema. I am using Python, and there are a few options; the libxml2 bindings for Python, and PyXML. The latter has more visible documentation, but I think that I should better be using the former.

Update: lxml appears to be the nice way to use libxml2 (instead of using directly libxml2).

17May/080

Parsing XKB files with antlr

antlr (well, antlr3) is an amazing tool that replaces lex/flex, yacc/bison.

One would use antlr3 if they want to deal with Domain-Specific Languages (DSL), an example of which are the text configuration files.

In our case, we use antlr3 to parse some of the XKB configuration files, those found in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/??.

Our aim is to be able to easily read and write those configuration files. Of course, once we have them read, we do all sorts of processing.

The stable version of antlr3 is 3.0.1, which happened to give lots of internal errors. It has not been very useful, so I tried a few times the latest beta version 3.1b, and eventually managed to get it to work. If I am not mistaken, 3.1 stable should be announced in a few days.

When using antlr, you have the choice of several target languages, such as Java, C, C++ and Python. I am using the Python target, and the latest version that is available from the antlr3 repository.

Here is the tree of the gb layout file,

tree = (SECTION (MAPTYPE (MAPOPTIONS partial default alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols) (MAPNAME “basic”)) (MAPMATERIAL (TOKEN_INCLUDE “latin”) (TOKEN_NAME Group1 (VALUE “United Kingdom”)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE02) (KEYSYMS 2 quotedbl twosuperior oneeighth)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE03) (KEYSYMS 3 sterling threesuperior sterling)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE04) (KEYSYMS 4 dollar EuroSign onequarter)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AC11) (KEYSYMS apostrophe at dead_circumflex dead_caron)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX TLDE) (KEYSYMS grave notsign bar bar)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX BKSL) (KEYSYMS numbersign asciitilde dead_grave dead_breve)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX LSGT) (KEYSYMS backslash bar bar brokenbar)) (TOKEN_INCLUDE “level3(ralt_switch_multikey)”))) (SECTION (MAPTYPE (MAPOPTIONS partial alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols) (MAPNAME “intl”)) (MAPMATERIAL (TOKEN_INCLUDE “latin”) (TOKEN_NAME Group1 (VALUE “United Kingdom – International (with dead keys)”)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE02) (KEYSYMS 2 dead_diaeresis twosuperior onehalf)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE03) (KEYSYMS 3 sterling threesuperior onethird)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE04) (KEYSYMS 4 dollar EuroSign onequarter)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE06) (KEYSYMS 6 dead_circumflex NoSymbol onesixth)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AC11) (KEYSYMS dead_acute at apostrophe bar)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX TLDE) (KEYSYMS dead_grave notsign bar bar)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX BKSL) (KEYSYMS numbersign dead_tilde bar bar)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX LSGT) (KEYSYMS backslash bar bar bar)) (TOKEN_INCLUDE “level3(ralt_switch)”))) (SECTION (MAPTYPE (MAPOPTIONS partial alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols) (MAPNAME “dvorak”)) (MAPMATERIAL (TOKEN_INCLUDE “us(dvorak)”) (TOKEN_NAME Group1 (VALUE “United Kingdom – Dvorak”)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX BKSL) (KEYSYMS numbersign asciitilde)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE02) (KEYSYMS 2 quotedbl twosuperior NoSymbol)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE03) (KEYSYMS 3 sterling threesuperior NoSymbol)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE04) (KEYSYMS 4 dollar EuroSign NoSymbol)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX LSGT) (KEYSYMS backslash bar)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AD01) (KEYSYMS apostrophe at)))) (SECTION (MAPTYPE (MAPOPTIONS partial alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols) (MAPNAME “mac”)) (MAPMATERIAL (TOKEN_INCLUDE “latin”) (TOKEN_NAME Group1 (VALUE “United Kingdom – Macintosh”)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE02) (KEYSYMS 2 at EuroSign)) (TOKEN_KEY (KEYCODEX AE03) (KEYSYMS 3 sterling numbersign)) (TOKEN_INCLUDE “level3(ralt_switch)”)))

When traversing the tree, we can then pretty-print the layout at wish:

partial default alphanumeric_keys xkb_symbols “basic” {
name[Group1] = “United Kingdom”;
include “latin”
include “level3(ralt_switch_multikey)”
key <AE02> = { [ 2 , quotedbl , twosuperior , oneeighth ] };
key <AE03> = { [ 3 , sterling , threesuperior , sterling ] };
key <AE04> = { [ 4 , dollar , EuroSign , onequarter ] };
key <AC11> = { [ apostrophe , at , dead_circumflex , dead_caron ] };
key <TLDE> = { [ grave , notsign , bar , bar ] };
key <BKSL> = { [ numbersign , asciitilde , dead_grave , dead_breve ] };
key <LSGT> = { [ backslash , bar , bar , brokenbar ] };
};
… snip …

The code is currently hosted at code.google.com (keyboardlayouteditor) and I intend to move it shortly to FDO.

13May/080

thersa.org.uk, infected.

Probably through SQL injection, this page of thersa.org.uk links to a javascript file from some server in China

The screenshot shows the thersa.org.uk website has been infected, and users that visit it end up running in their browsers malicious JavaScript code. The code loads Javascript files from the .cn and the .la domains.

There is a reference in one of the files to a cookie named killav (Kill Antivirus?) that may disable some antivirus programs.

In addition, one of the JavaScript files checks which browser you have. If you have Internet Explorer 6 or 7, it loads some exploit which attempts to run binary code. If this succeeds, you are infected. If you have Firefox, it does not attempt to perform an infection, and it goes to the next phase.

The next phase is to open up pages to sites in China. It appears to me that the bussines plan in that case is to generate revenue from ad hits.

The worst thing however is if you get infected. Unpatched windows systems are at the mercy of these attackers.

One way to mitigate such risks is to use Mozilla Firefox, and have the NoScript add-on installed.

Update 5 June 2008:

The RSA updated their website by moving it away from Windows and ASP, to open source software. They are using Centos Linux, Apache, and an open-source CMS. Therefore, the above security risk does not apply any more.

13Feb/080

Writing J2ME applications in Linux

Here is an interesting article on writing J2ME applications in Linux. ;-)

J2ME applications is software that runs on mobile phones that support Java applications. Most phones support such Java applications, and it’s good to get your phone to run at least your own Hello, World! program.

11Dec/072

ert-archives.gr: “Linux/Unix operating systems are not supported”

ERT (Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation) is the national radio/television organisation of Greece.

ERT recently made available online part of its audio and video archive, at the website http://www.ert-archives.gr/

When browsing the website from Linux, you were blocked with a message that Linux/Unix operating systems are not supported. This message was appearing due to User-Agent filtering. Even if you altered your User-Agent, the page would not show the multimedia.

There has been a heated discussion on this on local mailing lists, with many users sending their personal polite comments to the feedback page at the ERT website. Many individual, personal comments have value and are taken into account.

Since today, http://www.ert-archives.gr/ does no do filtering on the User-Agent, and has changed the wording at the support page saying that

Σχετικά με υπολογιστές που χρησιμοποιούν λειτουργικό σύστημα Linux σχετικές οδηγίες θα υπάρξουν στο άμεσο μέλλον.

which means that they will be providing instructions for Linux systems in the immediate future.

Going through the HTML code of http://www.ert-archives.gr/ one can see that the whole system would work well under Linux, out of the box, if they could change

<embed id=”oMP” name=”oMP” width=”800″ height=”430″ type=”application/x-ms-wmp

to

<embed id=”oMP” name=”oMP” width=”800″ height=”430″ type=”video/x-ms-wmp

Firefox, with the mplayerplugin, supports the video/x-ms-wmp streaming format. You can verify if you have it by writing about:plugins in the location bar and pressing Enter. For my system it says

Windows Media Player Plugin

File name: mplayerplug-in-wmp.so
mplayerplug-in 3.40Video Player Plug-in for QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player streams using MPlayer
JavaScript Enabled and Using GTK2 Widgets
MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled
video/x-ms-wmp Windows Media wmp,* Yes

I am not sure if the mplayerplugin package is installed by default in Ubuntu, and I do not know what is the workflow from the message that says that a plugin is missing to the process of getting it installed. If you use the Totem Media Player, it instructs you to download and install the missing packages. I would appreciate your input on this one.

A workaround is to write a Greasemonkey script to replace the string so that Firefox works out of the box. However, the proper solution is to have ERT fix the code.

I must say that I would have preferred to have Totem Movie Player used to view those videos.
ERT Ecology
I just finished watching a documentary from the 80s about ecology and sustainability of the forests on my Linux system. It is amazing to listen again to the voice-over which is sort of a signature voice for such documentaries of the said TV channel. The screenshot shows goats in a forest, and mentioning the devastating effects of said animals on recently-burnt forests.

Update (22Mar08): The problem has not been resolved yet. Dimitris Diamantis offers a work-around at the Ubuntu-gr mailing list.

16Jul/070

GUADEC Day #2

(see http://www.guadec.org/schedule/warmup)

At the first presentation, Quim Gil talked about GNOME marketing, what have been done, what is the goal of marketing. He showed a focused mind on important marketing tasks; it is easy to get carried away and not be effective, a mistake that happens in several projects.

The next session was by Tomas Frydrych (Open Hand – I have their sticker on my laptop!) on memory use in GNOME applications. Many people complain that XYZ is bloated. However, this does not convey what exactly happens; pretty useless. In addition, the common tools that show memory use do not show the proper picture because of the memory management techniques. That is, due to shared libraries, the total memory occupied by an application appears very big. A tool examined is exmap. This tool uses a kernel module that shows memory use of applications by reading in /proc. It takes a snapshot of memory use; it’s not real-time info. It comes with a GTK+ front-end (gexmap) that requires a big screen (oops, PDAs). However, it is not suitable for internet tablets and other low-spec devices. Therefore, they came up with exmap-console which addresses the shortcommings. It has a console interface based on the readline library.

Here are the rest of my notes. Hope they make sense to you.

. exmap –interactive
. ?: help
. Head: quite useful (dynamic allocation)
. Mapped:
. Sole use: memory that app is using on its own (rss?)
. “sort vm”
. “print” or “p”
. “add nautilus”
. “clear”
. “detail file” (what executables/libs loaded and how much consume)
. “detail none”

Sole use
. valgrind, to analyse Sole Use memory?
. “detail ????”

Lots of small libraries: overhead

Looking ahead
. Pagemap: by Matt Macall
. http://projects.o-hand.com/exmap-console/

Python
. Sole use: ~18MB ;-(

Tomas was apparently running Ubuntu with the English UK locale. The English UK translation team is doing an amazing job at the translation stats. Actually, most messages are copied, however with a script one can pick up words such as organization and change to organisation. The problem here is that, for example, the GAIM mo file is 215KB (?), however for the British English translation the actual changes should be less than 2-3KB. Messages that are missing from a translation mean that the original US English messages will be used. I’ll have to find how to use msgfilter to make messages untranslated if msgid == msgstr. Where is Danilo?

After lunch time (did not go for lunch), I went to the Accerciser session. Pretty cool tool, something I have been look for. Accerciser uses the accessibility framework of GNOME in order to inspect the windows of running applications and see into the properties. A good use is to identify if elements such as text boxes come with description labels; they are important to be there for accessibility purposes (screen reader), as a person that depends on software to read (text to speech) the contents of windows.

The next session was GNOME accessibility for blind people. Jan Buchal gave an excellent presentation.

My notes,

. is from Chech republic, is blind himself. has been using computers for 20+ years

. from user perspective
. users, regular and irregular ;-)
. software
. firefox 3.0beta – ok for accessibility other versions no
. gaim messenger ok
. openoffice.org ok but did not try
. orca screenreader ^^^ works ok.
. generally ready for prime time
. ubuntu guy for accessibility was there
. made joke about not having/needing display slides ;-]
. synthesizer: festival, espeak, etc – can choose
. availability of voices
. javascript: not good for accessibility
. links/w3m: just fine!
. firefox3 makes accessibility now possible.
. web designer education, things like title=”", alt=”" for images.
. OOo, not installed but should work, ooo-gnome
. “braillcom” company name
. “speech dispatcher”
. logical events
. have short sound event instead of “button”, “input form”
. another special sound for emacs prompt, etc.
. uses emacs
. have all events spoken, such as application crashing.
. problems of accessibility
. not money main factor, but still exists.
. standard developers do not use accessibility functions
. “accessor” talk, can help
. small developer group on accessiblity, may not cooperate well
. non-regular users (such as blind musician)
. musicians
. project “singing computer”
. gtk, did not have good infrastructure
. used lilypond (music typesetter, good but not simple to use)
. singing mode in festival
. use emacs with special mode to write music scores (?)
. write music score and have the computer sing it (this is not “caruso”)
. gnome interface for lilypond would be interesting
. chemistry for blind
. gtk+
. considering it
. must also work, unfortunately, on windows
. gtk+ for windows, not so good for accessibility
. conclusion: free accessibility
. need users so that applications can be improved
. have festival synthesizer, not perfect but usable
. many languages, hindi, finnish, afrikaans
. endinburgh project, to reimplement festival better
. proprietary software is a disadvantage
. q: how do you learn to use new software?
. a: has been a computer user for 20+ years, is not good candidate to say
. a: if you are dedicated, you can bypass hardles, old lady emacs/festival/lilypond
. brrlcom, not for end-users(?)
. developer problem?
. generally there is lack of documentation; easy to teach what a developer needs to know
. so that the application is accessible
. HIG Human Interface Guidelines, accessible to the developers
. “speakup” project
. Willy, from Sun microsystems, working on accessibility for +20 years, Lead of Orca.
. developers: feel accessibility is a hindrance to development
. in practice the gap is not huge
. get tools (glade) and gtk+ to come with accessibility on by default
. accessibility
. is not only for people with disabilities
. can do amazing things like 3d interfaces something

These summaries are an important example of the rule that during presentation, participants tend to remember only about 8% of the material. In some examples, even less is being recollected.

16Jul/070

GUADEC Day #1

I am writing this in the morning of the second day (posted at the end of the second day). Just had breakfast and there is a bit of time before making it to the conference venue.

Yesterday Sunday, was the first of the two days of warm-up for the GUADEC conference. At 11am the registration started. I was in front of the queue and got my badge quickly, then picked up the bag with the goodies; three cool t-shirts, a copy of Ubuntu 7.04, Fedora 7 Live, Linux stickers, two Linux pens, a mini Google Code notebook (no, that’s an actual notebook (not that type of notebook, it was just the paper-based thing)).

During registration I met up with Dimitrios Glezos (of Greek Fedora fame) and a bit later with Dimitrios Typaldos. It was the first time I met both of them in person.

Between a choice of two sessions I went to the one on X.org developments (XDamage, xrender, etc extensions and how to use them). Ryan Lortie gave the presentation.

Next was lunch time, and Dimitrios T. recommended a pub for traditional English food and drink. Sayamindu came along.

The next session I went to was the Hildon desktop, which is what we used to call Maemo; GNOME for internet tables such as the Nokia 770 and Nokia 800. There are special technical issues to solve. Lucas Rocha mentioned refactoring issues with the source code. In addition, as far as I understood, there is an issue with the internationalisation support for the platform.

Next, Don Scorgie talked about the GNOME documentation project. Several things can be improved and one of them is the introduction of a simplified XML schema for the needs of GNOME documentation. When compared to DocBook XML, the new GNOME documentation schema has only 6 elements (or do they call them tags?). In addition to this, there is a documentation editor with a special rich-edit widget for this schema. Mallard is a type of duck(?).

I also attended the last 10 minutes of the presentation on project Jackfield (sadly no special significance between Jackfield and what the project is about). Jackfield is apparently a way to run Javascript scripts on the desktop. OS/X is supposed to have it, and there are already scripts available. With Jackfield, you can run those scripts unmodified on Linux. The demos where really impressive.

The final session for the day was a presentation by Richard Rothwell on free software for the socially excluded. No, you do not have to go to Africa for this. His work relates to families in Nottingham, UK. It reminds me the situation and effort in Farkadona, Greece, that was described by Kostas Boukouvalas. I think it would have been helpful if Kostas Boukouvalas could have attended this. Richard is running a 3-year project that provides a number of PCs (in the hundreds?) with Linux to socially excluded families. Even in the UK, funding is hard to come by.

4Nov/064

GMail J2ME application for your phone

Update 2010: Link to .jar file (if you want to install using phone cable or Bluetooth): http://m.google.com/mail/download/binaries/L1/2.0.6/mail_n60-3.jar

Older post continues…

Google started offering a new service for GMail users; you can download a J2ME application to your mobile phone and start browsing your mails. You do not need to connect through the web interface.
You can install the J2ME applicaiton by visiting (through your phone’s browser) the URL http://gmail.com/app/. This page will automatically detect which phone you are using (from the User-Agent string) and redirect to the correct .jad file so that the installation can take place.
If you want to install the J2ME application the traditional way, you can go directly to the URL http://gmail.com/app/v1.0.0/en/gmail-nokia-g.jar. (Of course, this URL is for a specific bunch of Nokia phones).
Quite strangely, the application gives me the error java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cause unknown, which does not help a lot.
Did anyone manage to install the thing?

Update (26Nov06): I managed to get the applet to work on my phone. Apparently my first mobile operator uses a strange proxy configuration that alters downloaded files (???).

15May/060

Free Alaa!

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Alaa is a young prominent Egyptian blogger that was arrested and jailed among 47 activists on 7th May 2006 during a peaceful demonstration in Cairo.
His personal website and blog, shared with his wife Manal, is http://www.manalaa.net/ has the latest news about his condition.

There is a petition by Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance (HAMSA) to free Alaa, which I copy:

Demand Egyptian Regime Release Alaa from Tora Prison

Alaa Abd El-Fatah is one of Egypt’s most prominent bloggers and free speech advocates. He and his wife Manal run the popular blog BitBucket, which collects posts from dozens of Egyptian blogs and which won a “Best of the Blogs” award in December from Reporters Without Borders.

On Saturday (May 7), Alaa was arrested with a group of activists during a peaceful demonstration outside a Cairo courthouse. The rally denounced disciplinary hearings for two reform judges and arrests of protestors at previous demonstrations. Alaa and a group of other demonstrators were cornered by Egyptian police, and security agents then apparently handpicked individual protestors for arrest.

Alaa seems to have been targeted because of his high profile: he helps organizes the protests and spread the information through the blog aggregator he runs. He is now being held in notorious Tora Prison — and his arrest seems designed to both shut down his blog aggregator and scare other Egyptian bloggers. But you can send a message to the Egyptian government through the petition below (you can edit the petition text), which will generate an email to political leaders who can secure Alaa’s release.

The petition will be sent to:

  • Egypt’s Ambassador to the US Nabil Fahmy
  • Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif
  • Egypt’s Interior Minister Habib El Adly
  • US Ambassador to Egypt Francis Ricciardone
  • US Assistant Secretary of State David Welch

This campaign has been signed 1047[check page for latest figure] times. Click here to see who’s signed.

Join the Campaign

Alaa is speaking (has the mic) at an event about Open-Source software for NGOs in Africa.

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