Jamie Bennett Speaks

Yesterday, the Entertainer developers released version 0.3 of the excellent media center application, Entertainer.

This version fixes one of the most important bugs (for me anyway); it will now only index all content once rather than at every start up. Of course new content is indexed and added to the database but old content is not re-added. This may seem like a no brainer but since the start of the project Entertainer always re indexed everything, which, if you have a large amount of content, became somewhat annoying.

Other fixes include performance enhancements, memory reduction and language translations.

This version marks the start of the 4 weekly release cycle. From now on you should see a new release of Entertainer regularly with bug fixes and features being added at a rapid pace.

There is still a lot to do and the team could always do with more contributors but momentum is building.

A recent post to the Entertainer-Developers mailing list by Karl Lattimer highlights features that many would like to see added to Entertainer in the future, lets hope we see some of them soon. In the meantime, download 0.3 and get testing!

Update:
If your running an Ubuntu 8.10 install then you can just add the Entertainer PPA to your /etc/apt/sources.list. Edit the file using sudo and your favorite editor and add the following two lines to the bottom of the file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/entertainer-releases/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/entertainer-releases/ubuntu intrepid main

and do a

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install entertainer - 0.3-1ubuntu2~ppa1

or

sudo apt-cache search entertainer

to see all entertainer packages.

Silica are holding a free ARM OMAP seminar in Cambridge on the 21st and 22nd of January. I will be attending the seminar on the 21st. If anyone else is going that wants to share a coffee, please get in touch.

The day starts at 8:30am for registration and ends at 17:00 with a fully packed schedule planned.

There may still be places left on one of the days so if your interested get in touch with Lee Allen on lee.allen@silica.com quickly.

See you there!

So, it seems that everyone is making their new years resolutions around about now, I guess its my turn. In no particular order.

Wow, that was a long list and I still have more that I would like to do. I will commit to the above list and aim towards the many other things I would like to do.

Lets hope 2009 is a great year for me, and of course all of you too!

To carry on my initial education with the CurrentCost unit, last night I played around a little with RRDTool using Paul Mutton’s tutorial. I must say I’m pretty impressed with the outcome.

Last nights power consumption

The output above is from last night, starting around 19:50 and ending around 06:45 this morning. The peeks at the start of the graph are the dishwasher, the sustained 500w or so afterward are the XBox 360 being used to stream video from my Linux box.

The peaks early morning are the rumblings of the family, using the toaster and kettle and generally going about our morning routine. The only unexplained part of the graph is the increased usage around 23:00 until around 03:00. My only guess is that its the laptop charging the battery and at around 03:00 is was full?

At rest, the house with laptop, CurrentCost meter, fridge freezer and small night light for the kids, sits at around 65w.

The next step is to interface the CurrentCost meter with a spare Beagle Board I have sitting idle. The Beagle Board draws just 2 watts so it seems like the perfect partner for this experiment.

I received my CurrentCost unit today from the Eco Gadget Shop. I’m impressed with their service, it only took a few days to arrive. Anyway, as soon as I unpacked the unit and installed the cable grip, it was time to have a play.

As any self-respecting Linux geek would do, the first thing I did was try to hook the unit up to my Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex box. Theres quite a bit of information out there on logging the data that the CurrentCost unit spits out but most of it tends to lean towards the Windows/Mac OS X side or concentrates on the serial port interface of the older cables. What I wanted was a Linux and USB serial cable solution.

The first thing you need to do is setup the USB serial cable. This is pretty trivial if you know what you are doing but can be quite daunting if you don’t. First plug in the USB cable and verify that it has indeed been recognised.

A lsusb should show something along the lines of this (your output will vary but the important bit is the part that reads:

Bus 004 Device 002: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port

Take note of the ID, its in two parts, the 067b bit and the 2303 (your numbers will most likely be different). Then its time to modprobe the USB serial driver in.

Notice that the two numbers from the previous command have been used with a ’0x’ added to the front of them. Issuing the dmesg command should show you that the USB serial driver has been loaded (look near the end of the output) and that /dev/ttyUSB0 is now available for you to read.

From this point on I really recommend you read the excellent how-to by Paul Mutton over on his website. The perl script he supplies only needs two lines changing. Change:

my $PORT = "/dev/ttyS0";

to

my $PORT = "/dev/ttyUSB0";

and

$ob->baudrate(2400);

to

$ob->baudrate(9600);

The first change is to point to the USB serial port and the second to set the baud rate to the newer units speed of 9600.

The rest of Pauls how-to will get you up and running, logging the data and producing nice looking graphs.

I’ve just installed ScribeFire to my Firefox browser to make it easier to blog. So far I’m pretty impressed to say the least. There are not that many blogging tools out there that integrate well with Drupal but ScribeFire is one of them. Well worth checking out if you have a Drupal, or any other kind of blog.

So, Linux is now running on the iPhone and I presume the ipod touch. Maybe its time to buy some hardware and dump the software ala the original xbox?

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

It was only a matter of time. Rupesh Gujare today announced that he has successfully booted Google’s Android operating system on the highly hackable Beagle Board.

A video of the boot process can be found below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cetZMUWBHY&hl=en&fs=1]

His announcement is reproduced in full below with the full thread accessible here.

Hi All,

We have successfully ported (custom) open source Android to beagle
board. This is very initial version. We have tested it on MMC card
and on NFS.
Please find below link for uImage and root filesystem.

So, its kind of official, Ubuntu is coming to Maemo.

Today, Canonical announced that they are to officially create a ARMv7 version of their most popular software product, Ubuntu Linux, but what does that mean?

There has been a lot of talk lately about a merge of technologies in the Maemo and Ubuntu camps with the ‘unofficial’ word being that a somewhat arranged, but welcome marriage between the two has been coming for some time. The move today from Canonical signals a clear intention that Canonical, with “demand from device manufacturers” (hello Nokia), are targeting the very popular net book and tablet markets.

The press release is full of thinly veiled statements that hint at the fact that Canonical have had more than a few exchanges with the big boys in the mobile space.

“This is a natural development for Ubuntu, driven by the demand from manufacturers for an ARM technology-based version,” said Jane Silber, COO of Canonical.

Canonical are clearly in collaboration with major manufacturers.

The time frame given for the ARM based Ubuntu release also fits in exactly with Nokia’s Maemo 5 plan’s. The alpha version of Nokia’s new Maemo platform SDK (Software Developer Kit) is due this month, followed by a beta release March/April next year. This will mean a summer release at the earliest for Nokia’s flagship Linux device and the statement today firmly aims the Ubuntu release at April 2009, coincidence?

With Nokia’s admission that they are making steps to work more upstream, collaborate rather than invent, the writing seems to be on the wall. But is that a such a bad thing?

Nokia will benefit from the huge support that the most popular Linux distribution has gathered over the last few years and having the backing of a major commercial Linux entity such as Canonical can only propel Maemo far more into the mainstream than anything Nokia could do.

“The combination of a commercially supported, optimized Ubuntu distribution for ARM, together with Canonical’s ability to tailor solutions to specific ARM technology-based devices and OEM requirements, ensures that highly-optimized systems can be rapidly deployed into the fast growing mobile computing market”.

Its been nearly 4 months since the last release of Entertainer but now version 0.2 RC (Release Candidate) has been made available. This release has many bug fixes, some minor enhancements (slide show feature, video playback eye candy among others) and some code clean-up but the real story is how Entertainer is progressing.

This release indicates the Entertainer projects approach to early development. Instead of rushing off adding feature after feature at the expense of code cleanness and correctness, Entertainer is building up slowly on a solid base. It is progressing with a test driven development approach which is ensuring that as Entertainer grows, the code quality doesn’t diminish.

So whats planned for version 0.3? Well some things the developers have talked about are a more agile development approach, more code clean-up, bug fixes, complete Clutter 0.8 support, a new backend indexer, and we may even see an appearance of the plug-in architecture, but that one is more likely to be postponed until 0.4.

As 0.3 is being worked on by the team, my personal goal is to get the interface as finger friendly as possible for the Maemo supported released. The infrastructure isn’t really there yet to allow the touch interface but with some work it will come.

With the Maemo 5 Alpha SDK slated to be released November time, and the Beta some time early next year, now is the perfect time to get this excellent Desktop media center application tablet friendly.

So what are you waiting for, go get the software from launchpad or wait a little while for the PPA archived version which will be made available soon.