Linux

With the release of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) I found myself in a tough spot, I liked certain features added into Leopard, but I couldn't stand some of the stability issues I was having and the other bugs that would interrupt my normal workflow during the day. In an effort to alleviate some of my frustrations with Leopard, I experimented for a week with running Gnome (with Compiz) on my openSUSE workstation. In general all the important bits were there, By this point, I had already switched from using any sort of GUI editor to work, but instead had switched over to using vim on a shared development server here at the office. Given that Drosera still wasn't fast enough for my normal day-to-day web development debugging, I was also using Firefox and Opera for most of my web browsing as well. Chat was covered by Adium, so using it's Linux/Windows counter-part, Pidgin was no trouble at all.

I thought I'd dork around a little bit with recording videos featuring the Neo1973, running OpenMoko. This video is running an older version of OpenMoko (2007.1) so it isn't current. It's also worth noting, to use the phone, you don't have to do a full shutdown and bootup, you should really only ever need to do either if you're a developer, or when you first receive the phone.
Hello Moko.

I bit the bullet last thursday and started playing with some of the 2007.2 OpenMoko snapshot images, 2007.2 denoting the next iteration of the software. Whereas my previous photos were from 2007.1, the interface was a bit weak, and wasn't much to be proud of. The direction that the interface is now heading in is not only sleek, but much more usable. One of the most important changes, in my opinion, is the addition of acceleration-incluenced scrolling throughout the interface. The new scrolling allows you to do a quick swipe with your finger and have the interface scroll quickly and then slow to a stop, as if your scroll had momentum behind it.

OpenMoko Boot screen

2007.1	2007.2

I'm not going to try to explain too much here, but I received my Neo 1973, the OpenMoko-based Smart phone today. While it's a developer preview, it's incredibly exciting. So far I've been able to use my Cingular SIM card, if you use AT&T/Cingular, you can check if yours is supported on the wiki. I can run the general built in suite of applications without too much trouble, I also made a phone call, which worked! Unfortunately however the latest build that I have on my Neo doesn't have sound properly working, which sagacis from the #openmoko channel on Freenode is helping me with currently. I'm a bit over-excited so I'll let the images do the rest of the talking for me.

Meet OpenMoko

Some Assembly Required

I've been wanting to play with IronPython for a very long time, but never really got around to it since most of my days are either consumed with Python or Mono to some capacity, but never both.

Despite my initial instinct to flee in terror after looking over some of the IronPython examples I found on various blogs, I decided it would at the very least be worth an install just to check out the interpreter, and to see how well it performs on top of Mono.

ccnet% ipy
IronPython 1.0.2467 on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>>> 

Scary! But familiar, so I forged ahead undaunted, wanting to start hashing some strings, I figured I'd import the md5 module and get to work.

ccnet% ipy
IronPython 1.0.2467 on .NET 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
>>> import md5
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File md5, line unknown, in Initialize
  File hashlib, line unknown, in Initialize
  File hashlib, line unknown, in __get_builtin_constructor
ImportError: No module named _md5
>>> 

Alright, so there are still some holes in the IronPython bridge into Python, but this is fine by me, I can call into .NET code! One other thing that seemed to be missing was the 'select' built-in module, which in turn made my little 'telnetlib' based project fall on it's head.

I've already ordered my OpenMoko-based phone already and anxiously await its arrival to the U.S. from FIC. The first order of business will of course to see if I can use it as a real phone, which I'm not holding out for since it's very obviously both beta hardware and software. More importantly however, I'm very excited at the idea of getting Mono running on the mobile, Linux/arm-based device.

In the meantime, I've been playing around with the OpenMoko platform inside of the QEMU-arm emulator. Enjoy :)

Meet OpenMoko