Devesh Kothari Blog

Any GLSL Shaders gurus around ?

2011-01-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

I am looking for one. You can reach me at firstname lastname @ nokia dot com I don't work for Nokia anymore

Amazing Vigeland Park/Oslo

2010-12-06T02:24:00.000-08:00

Beside continuing my journey into Qt Quick and qt-components in Oslo last week (29.11-2.12.2010), I took some time off to go and visit The Vigeland Park or Frogner Park in Oslo. Being there and be part of the artists dedication and whole life work, with projects which took 14 years to realize from conception to fulfillment, I wonder if such magnificent projects can still happen in the age of today (read twitter and 5 min attention spans). Just wonderful to get a perspective to life and work.

Qt Web Runtime for N900

2010-08-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

Some might have already noticed the "launch" of the Qt Web Runtime. What is Qt Web Runtime? Simply put Qt Web Runtime provides a runtime environment for web applications, applications written using HTML/CSS/Javascript.

A question which I get often is - what are web applications and how do they differ from just pointing browser at web pages or saving web links as application shortcuts and launching them in a browser (very much like native installed applications) ? Web Application working group is a good place to start.

Web Browser consist basically of 2 parts (simplified).

Browser application/framework (UI /chrome, process model, extensions, settings etc) and
Web Rendering engine. This is the part which does much of the work, like fetching web pages, rendering them, running javascript etc. This is the part which implements the various W3C specifications and standards

Web Runtime shares much of the characteristics of a web browser (in this case webkit/Qt), while focusing towards the needs of an application developer.

Widely deployed, understood and mature web technologies html/css/javascript. (enables rich client side applications to be written by web developers)
Emerging W3C specifications e.g Widget Specifications which provide the foundations for (hopefully) a standardized environment for web application developers in crucial areas missing from the web browser paradigm like widget API, packaging & configuration, digital signing, view modes among many others.
Provides an execution and deployment mechanism (e.g how web applications are installed, executed, transition between various view modes, integration to platform UX/chrome etc)
Rich API's comparable to native application developers enabling the use of e.g sensors, runtime info, calender, file system (among many others) etc while developing rich web applications.

Working on standardizing the various API's and specs through W3C would help unify web application development, which at the moment is quite fragmented (while predominantly using the same web technologies) e.g opera widgets, apple dashboard widgets, yahoo widgets among many others. This would also mean better return of investments for developers (while at the same time enriching choice for end user).

If you are a web developer and own a N900 , you can take the QtWeb Runtime for a ride. It is now available from maemo extras repositories . Writing a W3C complaint widget should be relatively straight forward (Just follow the above w3c specs). You can also find some simple examples in the source code.Code is available here. Developers can discuss and provide feedback at Qt Web Runtime Forum. Remember, this is work in progress !

Good service and Good at what you do, chances are you will succeed as entrepreneur

2010-03-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

In Dec 2009, we decided to renew air system in our house. We engaged entrepreneur Pekka from RakAir to design and renew it. I am happy to say I have not been disappointed yet :) Pekka renews my confidence in what the title of the post says "Good service and Good at what you do, chances are you will succeed as entrepreneur".

Nokia’s Growth Economy Venture Challenge

2010-02-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

Nokia’s Growth Economy Venture Challenge will provide a venture capital investment in the winning proposal of $1 million (USD). Bear in mind, this is not a gift, grant or prize. It’s an investment aimed at creating a strong, vibrant business that will also improve people’s lives.

Forum Nokia Calling All Innovators 2010 contest!

2010-02-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

The Palm Hot Apps Program

2010-02-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

The Palm Hot Apps Program will reward developers of the hottest webOS applications with a total of $1 million. The top rewards of $100,000 will go to developers as follows:

The developer of the free webOS application that’s downloaded the most between February 1, 2010, and May 31, 2010 will receive $100,000.
The developer of the paid-for webOS app that generates the most revenue during the same period will also receive $100,000.

Open position and great opportunity for a talented and gifted web developer

2009-11-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

I am looking to hire (permanent position) a talented web developer. He/She need to be proficient in

HTML (4/5), Javascript, AJAX, CSS (2/3)
Javascript UI & Animation frameworks like dojo, jQuery, script.aculo.us or similar

If you are one and are interested to know more about the position, please send me your profile to Devesh Kothari (email is first name dot last name at nokia.com). Position is based in Tampere (Finland)

Active Web Analysis: Convenience for web masters, growing nuisance for website users?

2009-07-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

Of late I see a trend in various websites to use site external web analysis products like google analytics or Site catalyst (to name a few) to track web site usage patterns, generate reports etc. All these products mostly work with page instrumentation e.g script injection or similar.

It makes me ponder, what makes web masters adopt external web analysis software compared to passive log analyzers like awstats, webalizer or similar ? Nice looking reports and charts ? Ease of configuration ?

Of what I understood about these products, 2 things concern me

Active intrusion to site user experience in my opinion. Each page navigation generally would cause logging requests to these external sites, which at times can cause page delays. With more and more ad view/serve business models on web sites, it is already becoming painful to get faster and non obstrusively to useful content.
Web 2.0 changes the concept of page views. In web 2.0 paradigm , we are looking mostly web app model, where page views are replaced by dynamic UI/DOM injections and AJAX data fetching etc. So the question, is in such web 2.0 scenarios, how affective is results and reports from such products?

BTW Piwik is an open source project which aims to create open alternative to commerical products like Google Analytics etc with open architecture and API's to extend it to your needs. Most importantly you keep your site usage statistics and data, your own. Maybe that will get some brownie points from privacy advocates.

Impressions : Asuntomessut 2009, Valkeakoski

2009-07-11T00:11:00.000-07:00

Spent yesterday mostly loitering at Asuntomessut 2009 at valkeakoski. Quick impression, focus mostly on energy efficient houses with variety of heating and insulation technologies. With green living and sustainable eco existence topic of urgency and priority all over the world, this event helps consumer understand their options.A WWF report on the same subject maybe a interesting read. Energy ratings and efficient houses are a good step forward but Green living is more than just ulta energy efficient houses, it is about way of living and your consumption pattern.

As a Hindi and English speaking person, its a bit difficult to get too much out of the event, except looking around for new fresh ideas in design & interior design and collecting brochures. So for people like myself the first main source will still remain the internet, but it is useful to know what the local players are (especially since these investments are multi year long investments, where capability in local market for support and maintainence is a crucial buy decision).

Technologies and materials used in building industry have come to a point where I find myself struggling to understand them (myself being engineer by education). It scares me to live in a house which has a life of its own, the one I don't understand. Will I choose to live in a house dominated by technology i don't understand ? I guess in many ways I am still old fashioned, I like simplicity and character. I hope newer generation is better equipped then I am.

The thing which kept haunting me time and again going through house after house, was that technology can only be a enabler, it just can't give what i look in a house - "character".The feeling that houses are built more as technology showcases was hard to shake away (which is understandable, as its a marketing and showcase event for latest and greatest in house building technology and equipment). I guess the "character" kind of goes to the fundamental - "Architecture/design", "story of an era" and the "people who make these houses homes".

The God of small things

2009-07-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

Ever had a feeling about missing out on small moments and happenings around you? like the one which happen in your immediate vicinity or your most visited places e.g a painting competition for kids in the neighborhood, music event at your favorite hang around pub, a community gathering, exhibition at an art gallery or any of millions of small little things which keep happening, and passing us by.

This is where parhaatkoukut.fi comes into the picture. This is a free map based service which has been created by Ferenc Szekely, an ex-Nokian and previously my colleague (with a little help from me, once in a while). The idea of the service is quite simple, users create info pins on the map about what and where "small things" are happening e.g I just created a info pin for "rantauimakoulu" (swimming classes for kids at my local beach) . I also am a registered user, where I have marked areas on the map which interest me e.g area around my home, Tampere city center etc. When someone creates a pin in my areas of interest, i get notified. (see this as kind of saved searches on many other sites except these been geo tied)

The forum is piloted by an ERDF funded Veto Project run by my wife during Asuntomessut 2009 in Valkeakoski, Finland. "Parhaat Koukut" literally means "Best Hooks" a connotation for best offers, and the service provides a window to "those little things" like events and services to fair visitors.

There are already many map based services and providers e.g here in finland, Google Local Business Center (Google business model driven by access to all today and future data to serve targeted ads) while Eniro, Fonecta the other big players mostly geared towards enterprise/directory listing business models. This mostly leaves spontaneous and "all thing temporal" a gap which in my opinion, parhaatkoukut aims to ease in. I hope someday this will become "God of small things". Give it a try.

I am a happy user mostly (service is in beta status), but then I have been in one way or the other been involved with its creation. The code for the service is targeted to be available as open source.

Open positions ...

2008-10-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Its been a while since I last blogged (not that nothing exciting had been going on). Maybe it is not a natural propensity, more like blogging when my job needs me to. Previously it was a tool to reach out to the maemo community, now it is to reach out to developers who may find the following open positions in my team interesting

All positions are based in Tampere, Finland. Some interesting facts and figures related to Tampere and surrounding region can be found here.

Status update on Synaptic Package Manager for Maemo

2007-02-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Off late I have not been able to put much time to this project. Today I manage to uploaded first initial version of the port to mistral/Maemo 2.x (have not tested it for Maemo 3). Give it a spin.

Known problems

I have not been able to fix maemo/sapwood theme related problem, probably related to Gtk program running as sudo (caution, this is a bad idea ). This happens only when invoked as sudo :( but theme works ok, when for e.g synaptic is launch from xterm. So for now when invoked from the desktop, you will be welcomed by good old gtk look and feel :)

This version does not support single deb installation (install from file) and "1-click" .install file support as available in the official version.

Enabling thumb mode for your ARM binaries

2006-12-21T00:42:00.000-08:00

While cross compiling binaries for maemo, I wanted to enable the thumb compile option, but didnt really knew how to, jumped to #maemo irc, and there I could quickly get the info I needed. (Thanks to tko), so I documented it (I hope it will act as a starter, for other to add info). It would also be nice if this kind of info is also available in official maemo documentation

N770 packaging needs to improve

2006-12-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

I had been playing around with Synaptic for maemo, just ran into some use cases where i wanted to remove and reinstall some pre-installed packages. I picked up few theme and locale packages. To my surprise, uninstalling a theme package would uninstall quite a few important packages!! (check some xterm screenshots, showing the symptoms).

I think before packages are released by each team, it should be MANDATED to try simple use cases of install and uninstall there packages on device to atleast get rid of ridiculous package dependencies. Atleast it is quite a valid use case atleast for me to remove language localizations for languages I dont need like french or italian and themes,sounds, preinstalled videos and media, which just occupy my much needed and useful flash space.

Maybe maemo community can come to help here and file bugs against improper packaging.

Maemo developer platform team gets some fresh talent

2006-12-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

I would like to welcome Quim Gil as my successor :) and wish him lots of good luck as the next Maemo Development Product Manager. People active in the GNOME community know Quim quite well already.

When I now look back, I think it has been a tremendous adventure where we did many things right, many things that didnt go as well as we planned and lots of learning. I thank all the community members (i am including here Nokia internal developers also) who made working on maemo so enjoyable. Good luck ! I will now continue my journey as a community member.

Synaptic Package Manager for Maemo

2006-12-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

I have been working on porting Synaptic for Maemo. Here are some screenshots

I have tried to make it as friendly without sacrificing any of the features. I would have to say that porting had been a lot quicker and easier (except the time wasted on designing hildon related workarounds) due to well structured code and UI seperation using glade files.

I have also incorporated some great feature IMHO from the osso-application-installer, the default (and a lot more user friendly) application manager on IT OS 2006.
- Added ability to show application icons

- Ability to see a brief description about the package in the main row view

This is still very much a work in progress so not yet ready for public release :(
Keep tuned.

New Nokia 770 media campaign

2006-11-11T06:13:00.000-08:00

Latest Nokia 770 media campaign takes maemo community applications center stage. I think the campaign hit bulls eye to emphasize in my opinion the most unique sell point for Nokia 770 Internet Tablet - Hackability. Now that would not mean so much to technology agnostic end consumer, but it sure means a lot to technology savvy consumers (especially those, who have an itch and know how to fix it :) .

This campaign further highlights how vitally important an active development community is for device success, especially when different consumers have different expectation from the device (read itch). Therefore it is hugely imperative for Nokia to listen, nurture and be truly a part of this community.

Maemo GAIM for IT OS 2006 edition

2006-07-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly surprised to find that maemo-gaim has been nicely packaged by Santtu Lakkala (and some bugs fixed too) for IT OS 2006 edition. Thanks Santtu. You can get the instructions how to install here

It would also be cool if the packaging could further be broken down at IM protocol level e.g gaim-protocol-irc or something like as done for locales.

Things I am planning for maemo gaim (only if I get some time off enjoying my summer :)
- integrate gaim-galago (I guess only thing that need to be done is package it)
- enable gnome-presence-applet for maemo as a status bar plugin [ I have already now kind of ripped off the libpanelapplet to make a bonoboo-less lite version]. I have it kind of running on desktop but need to clean/fix up stuff. As an idea maybe this presence status bar plugin can be further enhanced to communicate with gaim using gaim-remote to do simple things like sending quick message to a contact etc.

Nokia 770 talk at MIT

2005-11-22T02:29:00.000-08:00

Last week I had a great time to talk about the Nokia 770 and the Maemo Story at MIT, and as usual Nokia 770 evoked a great response. It was also great to meet and discuss with the handheld guys about maemo. This was also my first time to Boston and weather being excellent I enjoyed the city and especially the duck tour ,which is basically a world war II amphibious vehicle which gives a great tour of boston on and off the road (when it plunges into the charles river)

Maemo Streamripper Control Panel Plugin

2005-11-13T05:38:00.000-08:00

Some time ago just to dig into hands on maemo programming I started to write a control plugin which would allow me a easy way to rip streams. So I started with Streamripper and modified it to run as a daemon and controlled by DBUS. Then wrote a simple UI and control panel plugin to rip streams

I started a berlios project here https://developer.berlios.de/projects/streamripper-ui/ which still awaits for me a cleanup code and import in SVN. some day !! (well code is quite dirty, so I dont think it will every get into mainstream, but the changes to streamripper itself are quite small, just modification to the console utility). Code could also be useful to people looking for sample D-BUS code and sample code for writing Maemo Control Panel Plugin

At some point I thought I could also put some nice feature like the Streamripper32 where it can list the stations and tracks available for ripping.

Btxfer : Simple tool for Bluetooth OPUSH/OBEX transfer

2005-11-13T05:24:00.000-08:00

This had been pending for a while, gathering dust. I wrote a small utility originally intended for Maemo , but I found it quite useful for my Linux desktop too, especially when I have to transfer tons of pics from my phone to laptop. There are offcourse other utilities and tools for the same purpose, but then I just decided to test how quickly can I write one.

Now on Nokia 770, the device announcement is turned off, but now with so many developers with root access, can simple turn that on in their /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf

BtXfer
- Simple UI for discovering devices
- Select a device and select files (you can select multiple files), and send. It will send if the other receiving device has OPUSH profile. The utiltiy also has SDP query capability to get the right channel number on the receiving device
- You can also receive
- Nice little progress bar for send/receive progress
- Multithreaded so, send and receive happens independent of each other

I ripped most of the code from the obex-apps
Some features I really would like
- a simple tray for droping files for transfer

Code exist here : https://stage.maemo.org/svn/btxfer
so feel free to hack

New minor release for Maemo GAIM

2005-11-13T04:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, whats happening on Maemo GAIM
1. I opened berlios project for maemo gaim, so now if someone wants to join in improving the port for maemo feel free https://developer.berlios.de/projects/maemo-gaim/
2. Made another minor update release which is available from http://download.berlios.de/maemo-gaim/maemo_gaim_1.5-dk-1_arm.deb

New features
- Hildon stype toolbar and menues (did a real bad hack) more on that in a bit
- Preference dialog is now a Appview, so its quite convinent to use
- App should now be able to also work in non-fullscreen mode
- Should be more stable :) [since when has stability become a new feature ;)

Ok, now about the hack
GAIM makes extensive menues using the factories, and I just couldnt find to sew the existing menu widget to the appview. while there is an API to get the menu widget e.g to attacj menuitem etc, there is no API I could find for repacing the menu with a user provided menu.

So I started to dig into the hildon_appview.c file to see what is the magic. The widget is having a pointer to priv struct , the first member of it is the menu widget, which I wanted to change, so using brute C pointer force, I just changed the pointer of the internal structure to contain pointer to my menu widget :)

void **ptr = HILDON_APPVIEW(app_buddy_view)->priv;
*ptr = gtk_item_factory_get_widget(gtkblist->ift, "");

Hopefully I wont have to rely on this hack and HildonAppView widget would have an API to enable this.

GAIM 1.5 for Maemo/Nokia 770

2005-11-01T01:55:00.000-08:00

Finished port of Gaim 1.5 internet messenger for Maemo/Nokia 770. This had been my hobby project and took me not long to get all the dialogs etc work nicely for n770 screen size.

DISCLAIMER :) This is my hobby project and Nokia has nothing to do with it.

It works in full screen mode only
To switch, use the home key to switch between other apps
[+/-] zoom keys are mapped to get as much screen estate to chat window as possible. It will work when the converasation window is in view, so you can pretty much get the entire screen for chat
[fullscreen key] is mapped to switch between buddy window and conversation window
I left the menu as they are (i.e did not oconvert them to hildon menues), didnt see a need why as the app works in full screen
Modified most dialogs and windows to reasonable sizes and where possible use the tabs

Here are some of the screen shots (eye candy)