Rodrigo Vivi – vivijim

For the very first time the Linux Foundation is organizing the Linuxcon Brazil. It will happen on August 31th and Seeptember 01 in São Paulo city at WTC.

I’m already confirmed to do a presentation in Portuguese-br: A Maturidade do Linux no Mercado dos Celulares e de Serviços: Rumo ao Domínio!

I was also invited by Klaus Kiwi to participate of a mini-sumit to discuss about Linux development as a professional activity, which I’m not sure if it is already confirmed.

Helio Castro will  be there as well doing a presentation about Meego!

Ok ok, maybe you don’t want to hear what we have to tell there, but what about listen to Linus Torvalds at this keynote

I’m pretty sure that there will be other good presentations and talks over there.

See you there?

To whom didn’t know I’ living in São Paulo city now. When I was looking to apartment here I was using the Nokia maps at my N900 to guide me trough the streets that I didn’t know.

Well I cannot blame Nokia maps hard because it really helped me to find lots of places in this huge city.
However, last month I bought a simple Garmin Navigator (Nuvi 1053T) and I have to write that developers have a lot to learn with Garmin, regarding to the usability.

The usability was the main reason that I’ve chosen this brand instead of the other one available in the market. At this point you must be willing to ask me:

“if Nokia Maps at your N900 helped you to find all places you wanted when looking for a new apartment, why the hell did you spend money in a navigator?”

Well, for some reasons:

* Due to the Murph law, always during a decision taken the phone rings and I got lost
* After get lost my Nokia Maps didn’t recalculate the route by itself
* When the 3G internet was slow it was a pain to wait to see the maps and the path (Ok I know that there is solution/workaround for this issue)
* It doesn’t warn me when there is speed camera

and the main reason:

* My wife didn’t like the Nokia Maps usability and couldn’t use it very well and since I work at home she will use more the Navigator than me.

Well, due to this reason I’ve started to take a look to different brands and models.

The first one that I’ve played with was a Tom Tom of a friend. I didn’t agree with
the most of path it took and I saw that this friend and I had some difficulties to use it even been computer engineers.

Later,  I played with a my cousin’s garmin. Well, he is a smart and intelligent doctor but he admit that he can’t use computer and other electronic devices so well.
Although he got his garmin and use it so easily that I couldn’t believe. I had also agreed with most of the paths and than I was almost decided to buy one of this.

When I was in a store in Finland looking for a Garmin to buy I found a demo device on the shelve but it was in Russian and even in a complete strange language I could with few taps
to change the language to Portuguese and use it very well.

Then, obviously I bought it.

So most of my problems I had with my N900 in São Paulo streets have already been solved. But this is not the main reason that I decided to write about it.

I believe that all developers should learn a little bit about its interface.

= Developers in general

* Leave the interface as clean as possible. On the map screen there is few information; next step with street name, distance and directions and the map itself. It also doesn’t show the small streets when it is not really necessary.
* Use few buttons as possible. On the main screen there is only two buttons: “Where to go” and “Settings”
* is it touch screen? So prepare it for fingers. Really. Use big icons. If you have to get a pen to touch it is simple wrong. As a friend of mine would say: It is so 5 years ago.
* Use meaningful buttons so people can use even in strange languages.

= To the Navigator developers

* Recalculate route is essential
* Talk and speed cameras are not easy but important
* If the device is for multiple usages, add an option that allows it to ignore automatically incomming calls or other service when you really need the navigator.

The N900 is the cellphone that I’m using since last December and I simply love it. No I’m not a Nokia fun boy, I let this kind of behavior for those who loves design despite of usability, connectivity, reliability, etc..

Well, but as the title suggests this post is just for the N900 users

As you should know the weakness of this device is the battery when you use so much 3G, wifi, bluetooth and GPS. I have to recharge my device every single night to be sure that I’ll have enough power for the whole next day.

At least I had, before to find out the Autodisconnect tool. You configure it to disconnect everything that is not really being used and is saves battery.

Well it doesn’t do any miracle but at least nowadays I can forget to recharge one night without being worried during the next day.

OBS: I’m not a Autodisconnect tool developer and to be honest I’ve never seen its code. This is just a tip for the users.

It has been a while since my last post here but I’m willing to put this blog back to life and write some stuff here.

To restart it I’d like to tell that I’ve attended Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere-Finland from july 2th to july 4th and it was simply great.
It is always good to met people that you don’t know and put faces on the irc nicknames. Talking about people, Here are the group photo.
It was also good to meet other Collaborans and old friends there, which presented good stuff:
* George talked about telephaty
* Fleury came up with great new ideas for Qt and KDE styles
* Artur presented the Plasma mobile

There were other great presentations there as well.

So, what is next here in this blog?

Well, I know that we are far away from the new year’s day when people do lots of promises for next year but it is time to promise some posts here in this blog.
Some of these promises are in my todo list for a while and I hope that after promising it will force myself to write them soon.

You can wait to read here on next days/weeks about:

* linuxcon Brasil that is comming soon (Aug 31/Sep 01, where I’ve just confirmed my participation with a presentation.
* tip for N900 users to save the battery.
* Garmin Navigator impression.
* MeeGo
* Syplifying memory measurement

Not exactly on this order, but to be honest I’ve already started to write most of them while I’m in an Iberia flight to London through Madri.

http://www.meego.com

“MeeGo is an open source, Linux project which brings together the Moblin project, headed up by Intel, and Maemo, by Nokia, into a single open source activity.”

Ari Jaaksi has written a very informative announcement. Read it.

Some Highlights:

• “The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project.” (Ari Jaaksi)

So, I hope to see the build system open also…

• Use the Qt Creator to create your applications: How to create a basic meego application.

This is a quick post to announce that I left INdT and joined Collabora.

These 3 last years at INdT was simply fantastic. Thank you (INdT) guys for everything. I wish the best for all of you guys.

Now it is time to move on. I joined Collabora today. Thank you (Collabora) guys for the good reception. Let’s rock.

I intend to write more technical posts related to the work at Collabora. (latter/in the future)

GVT

GVT is definitely coming to Recife: I took this photo here in my street (Mamanguape – here in Recife) this morning when they were installing this optical cable.

For those that don’t know: Here in Recife, the fastest internet is provided by Oi (1 Mb)… No, I’m not kidding: 1 (one) Mb only.

This week we were talking about GVT and someone asked: “how much does GVT 1Mb plan cost?” Everybody else start laughing because GVT has plans from 3Mb to 100Mb.

We,ll have fast internet in Recife, finally.

I’m from Platform team and I’m not working directly with Qt here at INdT, but it is amazing to see other people here engaged with Qt and doing an amazing work:

Recently, Qt Labs Americas was created. It is an openBossa initiative aiming the growth of local Qt and KDE communities all over America, starting in Brazil.

It was cool to see our Python team working hard on PySide which is a project that provides LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework.

Congratulations guys.

* English Version below *

Versão em Português:

Este será meu primeiro “post” escrito em Português e em Inglês ao mesmo tempo, a fim de atingir o maior número de leitores para esta minha crítica. Os usuários desse “Fenix Systems” provavelmente se sentirão mais confortáveis lendo em Português e talvez alguns donos de empresas ou investidores prefiram em Inglês.

Minha namorada estava procurando um notebook para comprar e eu como um computeiro devia ajuda-la. Nesta procura eu fiquei feliz de ver que havia muitas marcas vendendo notebooks com Linux. Não que isso fosse uma novidade para mim, mas é legal ver de perto uma quantidade imensa de notebooks com Linux nas prateleiras. Fiquei ainda mais feliz ao ver que ela estava disposta a comprar e usar o notebook com Linux. No final, ela comprou um Notebook Intelbras com Linux.

Ao liga-lo vi que o sistema era um tal de “Fenix Systems” e achei q fosse mais uma distribuição Linux. Antes fosse. “Fenix Systems” é uma gambiarra completa. Eles pegam uma distro qualquer e enchem de tranqueiras deles que não funcionam direito e inserem muitos erros e problemas. Neste caso, era baseado em um Ubuntu, mas ouvi dizer que antes disso eles se baseavam no Kurumin.

Eu irei enumerar os erros encontrados:

1 – Tudo é muito feio, desde o primeira imagem de “splash screen” até o fundo de tela.

2 – Durante o boot várias mensagens de erros exibidas.

3 – Video mal configurado. Não usava a resolução indicada e fazia com que as letras ficassem embaçadas.

4 – Ambiente muito poluído com uma mistura dos ícones de desktop do MS Windows com uma mesa do MacOS X

5 – E o mais tosco de tudo: Um HD de 120Gb com apenas 12Gb acessíveis, decorrente de um particionamento mal feito.

Pelo amor de Deus, quem é que me vende um produto sem estar configurado a 100% da sua capacidade?  Uma empresa que não liga para seu consumidor ou uma empresa que acredita que 100% dos usuários só irão comprar o notebook com Linux pelo preço e depois instalar um MS Windows pirata nele?

Além disso as empresas contratadas para colocar o Linux deviam se preocupar mais em entregar o produto a 100% do que a colocar seus gráficos feios. E isso seria bem simples: Instalar o Ubuntu/Kubuntu como eles são.

Após passar algum tempo brigando com o  “Fenix Systems” eu desisti e instalei o Kubuntu com a instalação padrão e magicamente tudo estava funcionando a 100%. Mais simples, não?!

English version:

This is the first time that I use Portuguese and English at the same time in order to get lots of readers. Probably the Fenix Systems users will fell comfortable reading it in Portuguese and maybe some company owners or investors prefer English.

My girlfriend was looking for a notebook to buy and I as a computer guy should help her. I got happy when I saw lots of brands selling their notebooks with Linux on it. Ok, there is nothing new on it (at least here in Brazil), but it is cool to see by yourself a huge quantity of notebooks running Linux on the shelves anyway. I got happier when I noticed that she was willing to buy and use a notebook running Linux. In the end she bought one.

When I turned it on I noticed that Fenix Systems was running on it. I thought it was yet another Linux distribution. I’d prefer that. Fenix Systems is a complete workaround. They get any Linux distributions and put their trash that doesn’t work properly and add lots of errors and problems to this system. In this case it was based on Ubuntu. I heard they used Kurumin in the past.

I’m going to enumerate the problems I faced:

1 – Everything is very ugly, since the first splash screen image up to the background image.
2 – Lots of error messages during boot.

3 – Video was not properly configured. It wasn’t using the best resolutions and the letters was blurry.

4 – Polluted environment using a mix of MS Windows desktop icons with MacOS X table

5 – And the worst thing ever: A 120Gb HD with only 12Gb accessible due to a bad partitioning.

For the God’s sake who the hell sells a product without being at 100% of its capacity? A company that doesn’t care for its clients or a company that believes that 100% of them will buy the notebook running Linux by the price and will illegally replace Linux by MS Windows?

Besides the companies hired to put Linux on it should worry about delivery a 100% functional product instead of put their ugly images. It would be simple: Install Ubuntu/Kubuntu as they are.

After spend some time fighting against  Fenix Systems I gave up and installed Kubuntu using its default installation and magically everything was working at 100%. Simple, isn’t it?

Marcelo has recently posted a Canola portrait test video on his blog.

The most impressive thing it that almost of Canola fits on rotated screen without any extra efforts by Canola team. These guys are doing a great work and I believe that as soon as possible they will release full support for vertical screens.

You can test it installing Canola and following Jott instructions to install xrandr and Xomap screen rotation support.

Have fun.