As I mentioned I saw Steve's Nokia E70 at Linux Expo and was quite impressed. After various bits of investigation into the cost of an unlocked version I thought I'd try ringing Vodafone to ask about an upgrade (thinking that I had 6 months left on my contract, but that they still might be able to do me a better deal than £290). Turns out my contract had expired back in August. Excellent. So I've been the owner of an E70 for a couple of months now. First, the bad. AFAICT this is mainly Vodafone's fault. There's a new version of the E70 firmware out, v2. However only certain variants of the E70 have been approved for this version. Vodafone haven't yet done this for their handsets. The main manifestations I see of this are the phone being slow to rotate the screen when it's opened up (at least a few seconds) and the wireless being flakey. In particular it really doesn't like my WEP enabled house network - it'll associate, get an IP address via DHCP, exchange some packets and then stop. It can see my neighbour's non protected wifi fine, and another WEP network I tried (though I saw pauses with that). This is a pain, but as most of the time when I'm using wifi out and about it's not WEPed it's not a showstopper. As a phone it's fine. I'm not a demanding user; I expect it to make and receive calls. It does. The addition of the keyboard is very useful for the few occasions I send SMSes. I haven't tried the funky SIP stuff (partly due to the WEP issue, partly as I already have a SIP hardphone). Where it's really neat is mobile web and ssh. The web browser is quite nice (suitable for checking airport flight departure boards and cinema times as I discovered last weekend). The addition of PuTTY really makes the phone for me. It's small enough that I carry it with me most of the time, and yet it has a screen that can do 80x43 (even if it's very small) and a keyboard. It's really neat for checking my mail/irc while on the move. And because it's all built in I carry it with me in a way I never managed with the Zaurus. Battery life seems better than my old v600i; with 3G turned on that managed 2 days max whereas with 3G enabled the E70 can happily manage at least 3 days and that's with a bigger screen and probably more use in general. I haven't felt the need to try it with 3G disabled yet. The main thing I need to do with it still is get round to putting some games on it. Of the sort suitable for playing while waiting for a pizza order to be ready, or waiting for one's wife[0] to do whatever it is she's doing. I'll get round to it. I like the phone though. Oh, I have a rant about the firmware upgrade. I emailed Vodafone to ask when they might approve the upgrade and moan about the wifi. They got confused about my mentioning wifi and assumed I meant GPRS, but pointed me at Nokia for firmware upgrades. I rang Nokia and they pointed me to my local Nokia Service Centre. I went to them and asked for a firmware upgrade and they said no problem and took my phone off me for 24 hours. In order to reflash the same bloody version I already had back on wiping my settings (which I'd backed up, but that's not the point). Muppets. [0] I need to blog some more on the whole wedding thing, but I thought I was due something slightly more technical.

I am totally married, dudes!

What The Register doesn't tell you about the Nominet EGM today is the evil leftist elements that are controlling it. No less than 3 of the 5 board members present are left handed. Muhahahaha. We're taking over the world you know. Plus, it appears that deprived of the school market turkey twizzlers now have a new role being provided by hotels for conferences. And finally, once again, if you're a Nominet member, I hope you bloody voted.

I read El Reg's article about the BCS complaining about the lack of IT skills. And found myself wondering once again what purpose the BCS actually serve. I mean, it's a great idea, a professional organisation that serves the needs of IT professionals. Except, what exactly are our needs? And what exactly does the BCS do? No one I know has been able to explain the point of them, and that include a few people who've been members. All their blurb sounds much more tailored to IT management than people who actually hack on stuff. What am I missing?

Paramount Comedy silences the word "ass" in That 70s Show before 9pm. Trouble quite happily leaves it un-silenced even when shown at midday. For a show that contains the phrase "dumbass" at least once per episode the Paramount Comedy approach is very annoying.

I received a Freecom DVB-T stick last week (early wedding present). I've not actually played with DVB-T before, so I wasn't sure how much of a hassle it would be. My first act was to plug it into my laptop, with the aim of finding out the USB ID and thus which driver I'd need to compile up (I have a tendancy to build my own kernels with only drivers I think I'm likely to need). I did so and was greeted with:

dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)
usbcore: registered new driver dvb_usb_dtt200u

Interesting, think I. I'm more organised than I thought and have already compiled up all the various v4l bits I thought I might end up using. So I go looking for the firmware file, find a copy, dump it in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/. Replug the device. And get:

dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw'
usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 15
dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 16
usb 1-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in warm state.
dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)).
DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...

Rockin'. Now I need to tune it. I find Adam's DVB page which has the initial tuning file for the Tacolneston transmitter in Norfolk. I type scan uk-Tacolneston. It fails to find anything. I wonder if I'm using the wrong transmitter. I decide the supplied antenna is probably to blame and go to see about sorting out the one in the attic. I try again. I get a channels.conf containing 91 channels. Wooo. Copy this into ~/.mplayer/ and fire up mplayer dvb://. And have Freeview on my laptop. Nice. Unfortunately this requires me to have the loft aerial plugged into my laptop, which isn't very portable. Paddy tell me this will get better when the analogue transmitters get turned off and the digital power ramped up, so I look forward to that. Until then it should still prove useful to have a portable DVB-T stick - I intend to see if I can pick up BBC HD next time I'm staying in London, and check if Freeview coverage has made it to my parents' yet. Writing this all down makes it seem quite convoluted, but actually the process was a lot smoother than I expected; plug in stick, copy firmware, replug stick, scan for channels, watch tv. The issue that took most time to sort was the aerial. It's really quite cool to think about how easily you can get yourself an MPEG2 stream of TV to play with.

Well, I've survived my stag weekend. I did have some fears I might not. TFM did a great job of arranging it; 15 of us ended up in 2 cottages at Park Farm Barns (most of us for Friday and Saturday, with a handful of us there until today). Paintball was played at Skirmish. Much meat was eaten (possibly the largest piece of beef I've seen up close). Much alcohol was consumed. And my arteries are going to take a while to recover from 3 mornings in a row of fried bacon for breakfast. All good though. Thanks to everyone who managed to make it.

I am familiar with the Xanadux project which is working on porting Linux to various WinCE based smartphones. However I'm not aware of anyone doing the same for Nokia or SonyEricsson phones. Are there no such projects or have I just not found them? I'd have thought phones running Series 60 were likely candidates to have other neat stuff ported. Is this not being done because it's harder to get into Symbian, or is it not being done because Symbian is much more functional than WinCE?

I spent the past couple of days at LinuxWorld UK, mostly on the Debian stand. I'm not sure I'd go as a punter these days; I don't think a lot changes year on year. However I do think it's good for us to turn up and show our faces so people can come and talk to us and realise we're wonderful people. Plus it's always good to see people I haven't seen in ages. We sold a lot of T-Shirts (even the red one with yellow writing that looks like something Phil would come up with after too much vodka [I bought one of these myself]). We didn't sell a lot of DVDs, but that's been happening since broadband became more pervasive. There were a reasonable number of people who just stopped to chat (shouting "Use Debian, it's great!" at people as they walked by was surprisingly effective). Lots of questions about how we felt about Ubuntu. Not really many about why we hadn't released yet which is a change! I also found a new toy I think I want; the Nokia E70. Steve has one of these and it looks pretty sweet; 3G+WLAN, a keyboard and a screen that, while not that big, manages a pretty good PuTTY session in 80x43 or so. And all of this in something not that much larger than a normal phone. That's appealing. I'd been sort of lusting after an HTC TyTN, but reports of poor reliability have put me off. And Simon has put me off the 9300i by saying it's quite slow as a phone. Finally, courtesy of Trexy, I present a new, work safe, goat sex: And now I will spend the next week sleeping I think.

Tony tagged 2.6.18-omap1 yesterday. This has nearly got to the point where all the "easy" devices on the E3 are supported out of the box. I need to clean up the modem bits for inclusion - currently it's done with early_serial_setup which I'm sure is wrong but my attempts to do it with a platform_device haven't met with much success. I'm sure half an hour with a hammer will do the trick. That basically leaves the more intrusive or non fully functional drivers; Matt Callow's mailboard and camera work and Mark Underwood's sound driver (unfortunately still not complete :( ). All of these are currently against 2.6.16. I tried to get the sound working under 2.6.17 but didn't get anywhere with it. If I can manage to find some time I'll try again with 2.6.18. Not that I have a lot of time at present it seems. Spent last week in Northern Ireland, Cambridge, London and Reading and this week I've got LinuxWorld (I'll be on the Debian stand, of course). I've had a bunch of things to try in terms of getting SA1110 UDC working for the Balloon which should probably take priority over the E3 sound. Meh. Can I have more hours in the day? Or a teleport would probably be better.

Way back at Steve's Debian BBQ I had a late night conversation with Wookey about the fun I'd had hacking on the E3 and how gradually getting more bits into the linux-omap or mainline kernel gave me a bit of a kick. And he talked about the Balloon and how someone who would do that for it would be quite useful. I, of course, foolishly volunteered if presented with suitable hardware. The next day came and I thought no more of it until the following weekend when I got handed a board. Ooops. I got stuck for a long while fighting with the major NAND changes in 2.6.18, but thanks to Vitaly Wool's YAFFS cleanups eventually got a board that would boot and mount the rootfs. This allowed me to start looking at drivers. Today I finally got USB host working. In addition I have the CF slot working (and have had networking going with my CF network card [which doesn't bloody get detected if the dongle isn't inserted. Grrrr.]). As far as I'm concerned that's significant progress (even if it's largely been as a result of being able to use Nick Bane's existing work). The main item left to get working on my board is USB client (sa11x0-udc), so that's my next task. I have a driver but unfortunately it doesn't seem to want to work. I shall kick it. I've also got LED and I2C drivers to write, but they should be a doddle.

I've been thinking about getting a trackball for a while, to see if I found it any easier to use. However finding a cheap one didn't seem possible - everything was at least £30 even before P&P. However last week I found the Logitech Marble Mouse which despite the name is really a trackball. It came to £18.03 inc VAT and P&P which I deemed a reasonable amount to try it out (I wasn't sure a trackball would agree with me). So far I've been quite pleased. I haven't found myself wishing for the mouse back. It has 4 buttons but only 3 are easily usable (one ends up under the palm of my hand - if I used the other hand then it'd be the button on the other side that got covered). However that's fine. The lack of a scroll wheel I miss a bit - mainly in JOSM for zooming in and out. I think I can do cunning button mapping to allow it by scrolling the ball, but it hasn't been that annoying yet. I don't (thankfully) have RSI, but I've read various things that suggest a trackball instead of a mouse is a good way to prevent it. Given that I've found it easy enough to use I think I'll be sticking with it for the moment.

I've been quiet recently. I spent a week with the cold, then a week being stressed. I'm hoping this week is uneventful. One thing I've been meaning to post about for the past month or so are some positive supplier experiences I've had. Like most people I'm quick to whine when things go wrong and I've had a few things I didn't expect to go smoothly be fine. First up, eBuyer. I mentioned in my initramfs post that I had a disk that had been damaged in transit (according to the manufacturer's diagnostic tool). I wasn't looking forward to trying to return this, as I feared eBuyer would try to weasel out of the RMA. However it all went smoothly. Took them a couple of days to issue the RMA authorisation number, but after that I sent it off including the receipt for the posting and they sent me an email to confirm when they had it and when they sent me out the new one. And credited the postage back to my credit card. I was gobsmacked. I've been using them as a cheap box shifter for a few years and always assumed that the instant I had any problems it would all be pain, but no. It wasn't the quickest of processes, but it did all proceed without me having to chase anyone. Next, Scan. I've hated them for years. Pre 2000 I vowed I'd never use them again for reasons I can't remember. In 2000 I capitulated and ordered a Scan 2000 DVD player from them (which is still going strong). However despite being stiffed £10 for next day delivery it didn't turn up, nor the next day and eventually I had to ring them and find they'd failed to authorise my card and hadn't bothered to contact me. I vowed I'd uphold my pledge never to use them and until recently had done so. And then I needed some 1U heatsinks in a hurry and the initial supplier I'd found were being slow about getting stock. Scan had enough in stock so I decided to risk it. And they turned up next day, with several text messages keeping me informed about progress. I'm won't be using them in general, but I might try them again at some point. Finally, regular readers (all 4 of you) will remember the pain I suffered at the hands of Xinit. Black Cat needed some new dedicated servers and I was having problems finding what I wanted (Xeon LVs for low power usage goodness). Neil had some good things to say about Sentral Systems (well, actually Flexiserv who morphed into Sentral) so I figured I may as well drop them an email. I wasn't really expecting much, so when they got back and said they thought they could do exactly what I wanted within a week I was sceptical. Especially as that was a complete server whereas even looking for the bare chips I was getting quoted lead times of at least 4 weeks. To be honest they didn't manage it in a week - it was more like a week and a half (I think the order was confirmed on a Nonday and delivered Wednesday week later). Damn fine. Plus they kept me informed throughout the process and the one time I considered ringing them to ask what the status was they sent me an email within an hour of me thinking it anyway. The servers are nice and nippy too. :)

My Athlon XP 2000+ died at the end of July; it appeared to the be the CPU. I had a 1GHz EPIA-M Via board sitting around, so I installed that and figured I'd have a look at sexy Core 2 Duo kit eventually. I did, and I've ordered some, but I suspect it's never turning up and I have to cancel the order and place a new one (combination of wanting an Intel G965 based board given their decent Free driver support as well as a silent case that wasn't in stock but was a lot cheaper than elsewhere). However, I cracked and bought an XP 2200+ CPU off eBay. The Via just worked out too slow and the hot weather has passed so I'm less concerned about heat generation. Even though this CPU is only slightly faster than what I've had for the past 3 years the 2 months on a slower box makes me really appreciate it. Aside from the raw speed increase the Athlon also has 4 times as much level 2 cache (256k vs 64k), twice as much RAM (the Via only has 1 DIMM slot so had 512M, while my Athlon mobo has 2 so gets 1G) and a real video card (the Via CLE266 seemed quite poor; even when the system was unloaded I was sometimes seeing a couple of seconds lag in focus-follow-mouse. My ATI 9200SE is much nicer. And doesn't steal system memory.) Plus there's the fact I can put my 4 port serial card back in. Living with 1 port is so primitive. :) I know that what I've got now is still a lot less powerful that what lot's of people have on their desktop (and conversely I know people who'd be glad of the Via), but my point is more about just how grateful I am for it after only a couple of months on something slower.

I have been fighting YAFFS on and off for the past week or so. Well, not quite fighting, more trying to persuade to work happily with 2.6.18-rc5 and the updated NAND driver I've written for my balloon (more on that at another time). Anyway. I'm now getting the following error message: yaffs tragedy: existing chunk < 0 in scan Which keeps making me think of the Bee Gees. Or worse, the Steps cover of the Bee Gees. Update: Just for JD, who is too lazy to read the comments, I meant the Bee Gees not ABBA. Which means I'm hearing Steps in my head. Argh.

Kathy came back for the weekend (and we went to Vix and Richard's wedding somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Kent), bringing her contract so I could have a peer. It's not a 9 month contract. It's a permanent contract with a 3 year probation period. Which I guess means they can get rid of her easily enough at the end of each academic year, but is still somewhat different than we were both expecting. I'm ignoring it until the wedding is out of the way. There's not really a lot of point doing otherwise until we find out how she settles in.

With Kathy being away I thought I'd have a look at setting up webmail so she can get hold of her mail easily whatever setup she ends up with. My only experience so far is sqwebmail but it's not that great UI-wise and ties to Maildir. This is good because it means it's lightweight, but I figured if I was investigating systems I should keep Black Cat (who currently use sqwebmail along with various other bits of Courier) and the (which is largely mbox at present) in mind. apt-cache search webmail produces a list of things to try. My heart sinks as I realise lots of them require PHP. And others want MySQL. I go and have a look at Prayer, which I've vaguely prodded before. It's not packaged, but I decide to try it out. It builds easily enough, I wrestle with roughly packaging it up into a deb to make removing it less hassle and install it. It doesn't like my earth.li CA signed cert on localhost. I eventually find the novalidate-cert option and manage to connect. My home box runs dovecot with Maildirs. This leads to my next problem; Prayer wants to create a folder called .prayer for it's config info. This doesn't work with Maildirs as folder directories tend to start with a . Changing it to prayer-config fixes that, though leaves it visible in the web interface. It's possible I can hide it if I look harder. So, I'm ready to send a mail. I do so. It gets delivered (modulo me remembering not to try to send from my internal domain to the outside world). A sent-mail folder gets created. Prayer failed to show any messages in it. I verify there is a message there by looking on the filesystem. I curse. I try creating another folder and sticking a message in it. No joy. I try Prayer against a Courier server. Same thing; it shows the mail folders as directories but no messages. I try it against a Dovecot server with mailbox. It works fine. I curse some more. At this point I decide the statement "Consequently, the user interface distinguishes between mailboxes and directories: this will not work well with servers which provide dual use mail folders." on the Prayer website should be heeded. So I decide to try postman, which the Prayer docs suggest they'd have used if it had been around when they started (it also does persistant IMAP connections with a backend daemon). I give up once I actually start trying to figure out the config file and how it all fits together. So. Out come the IMAP RFCs. I attempt logins to the different servers I have access to and I find that the mbox server reports \NoInferiors for mailboxes while the maildir server reports [\=HasNoChildren]. And that \NoInferiors implies [\=HasNoChildren]. So I hack Dovecot to always return \NoInferiors. And it works and I can see messages in folders. Yay. But hacking dovecot is annoying and won't help me with Courier. Leading to the following patch to Prayer:

--- prayer-1.0.18.orig/prayer/dirlist.c
+++ prayer-1.0.18/prayer/dirlist.c
@@ -172,7 +172,8 @@
 
     dl->next = NIL;
     dl->name = pool_strdup(callback.pool, name);
-    dl->isdir = (attributes & LATT_NOINFERIORS) ? NIL : T;
+    dl->isdir = (attributes & (LATT_NOINFERIORS   LATT_HASNOCHILDREN)) ?
+               NIL : T;
 
     /* Insertion sort algorithm */
 

ie if there are no child folders we assume the current folder is a mailbox rather than a directory. Now to actually run it for a while and see if it does the job.

I have been abandoned. Just over a week ago Kathy was offered a job at the University of Ulster, in particular on their Coleraine campus. She starts tomorrow (they wanted her to start last Friday) as a Lecturer in English, so yesterday she flew back to Northern Ireland. Leaving me in Norwich (well, actually I was in Cambridge, but I'm back in Norwich now and will continuing to live here). We've done the long distance relationship thing before, while at university. It wasn't particularly fun and I'm not really looking forward to doing it again, but her contract is only for 9 months and as such it doesn't make sense to have a massive upheaval for what's a relatively short period of time. If she gets extended then we'll need to rethink, but at present that doesn't look that likely given that it's maternity leave cover. One thing is that I'm a bit worried I'm going to become very strange. Working from home will mean I'll not see anyone during the working day and there won't be anyone else around in the evening. I'm going to need to make more of an effort to seek out human contact otherwise I'll turn into an odd hermit. Especially given the fact I've a whole bunch of tech toys to play with (more on which later). Overall I'm very glad Kathy's got a job; it may be in a bloody inconvenient location, but she was understandbly getting a bit down about the lack of English lecturing jobs that are out there. Hopefully now she's had one the next will be easier to get hold of...

I went wedding list creating in John Lewis yesterday. It was fun for about 5 minutes and then the novelty of a Palm with a barcode reader wore off. They'd told me to be careful where I pointed it, so I didn't get to see just how good the range was. :( During the lengthy process a Hauppauge MediaMVP caught my eye (it's a hardware MPEG2 decoder with SCART socket, ethernet and remote control - the idea being you stream content to it from your PC and watch it on the TV), reduced from £79.99 to £39.99. I'd considered buying one of these in the past, so I took a closer look. And discovered one marked down to £25.00 at the back. Took it to the checkout to confirm the price, got told it was right, and bought it. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with it just yet. :) I've already got a hardware MPEG2 decoder on the DVB card hooked up to the TV, though the MVP is a fanless device and might make a better choice than the living room PC. mvpmc is a potential option, and there's a plugin for VDR as well. Or there's just the prod it and see what I can make it do approach. It's an IBM PowerPC 405 with 32MB RAM (though only 16M for the OS it seems) and an SMC 91C111 ethernet chip. The interesting bit of the MPEG2 decoder has no source which is a pain though. :( Still. Fun toy! \o/

The weekend started off with a visit from Simon - we'd begun to get more and more grumpy with each other which is usually a sign we actually need to meet up. A trip to the Fat Cat and laughing at VH1's "Top 100 Dance floor fillers" seemed to put us in a better mood. We then headed off on Saturday to Cambridge for Steve's annual Debian UK related BBQ. I took some photos though Dave took many more. There were loads of people this year - it's amazing how many people Steve's house/garden can fit! As we've come to expect it was a fine weekend with plenty of food, drink and chat. Thanks Steve! Monday was mostly spent invading Dave and Becca for the purposes of constructing wedding invitations. They look fab! Just a few little bits to finish before getting round to sending them out. And now today's been a virtual Monday and I think it's almost time to stop...