metalinguistic musings and other related ramblings

I got MMS running on the nokia 770 today.

Ok so maybe I cheated a little and it was running on my server and I was just using VNC to connect to it. Anyway it’s working great for music playback

Edit: Added instruction on how to get this working

Edit2: Better input method

First one must start a VNC server: Xvnc :1 +render -dpms -s 0 -geometry 800×480 -depth 24 -rfbport 5900 -PasswordFile ~/.vnc/passwd

Then MMS can be started using: DISPLAY=”:1″ ./mms -i keyboard

After MMS starts up, one can use the navigation keys on the Nokia for navigating around and then use the house (bind it to F5 in input config) for action and the back button (bind it to ESC) for secondary action and everything will work perfect.

I had some trouble with the NIC on my new server. It apparently only wanted to run in 100mbit otherwise it would drop the connection at least once each second. And since the motherboard (Asus m2n-mx) only had 2 PCI slots, I had to choose between wireless, internet and TV Anyway I fixed it by connecting my old 100mbit hub and now everything is running fine so I had some time to play some more with the nokia. The house button is no way near perfect since it minimizes the program and thus one has to press it twice each time. Very annoying! Futhermore the vnc client on the nokia is extremely bad and sends all kinds of nonsense commands. Sometimes it will send and F5 after each other command making the device unusable. So I hacked the keyboard input driver to discard these bogus input and added a mouse input so that one can just touch the screen for action. All works much better than before, but it’s still not perfect so I’m releasing the patch here. The patch is against 1.1.0 revno 1028. I might eventually integrate it cleanly but currently it’s a bad hack.

Uses this setup one can have 2 MMS setups running concurrently. One for the Nokia device and a second one for normal display. I havn’t gotten movie playback working yet, but I don’t find it particularly important since one will want to watch that on big screen anyway

New release with about 20 bugs fixed. An Italian translation was added, bringing the total number of languages up to 11.

Download

Changelog

So I’ve been known to rant about bzr before. I got a new machine recently and it came to my attention that it quite a pain to keep two local bazaar branches in sync. So I thought I would have a look at the new breed of revision control systems: git and bzr.

My first preference was git, mainly because of what I said in my rant post. So I installed it and got my arch repository imported. I then tried to see how it handled merging of two branches. To be fair the branches have diverted quite a lot but the change was extremely simple: two identical po files where one of them has been updated. It completely fall flat on its face and I had to manually merge the changes. It also failed to find a merge point between the two revisions so I had to cherry pick changes by hand. After some more testing I tried to merge my local repo to the mms mirror using ftp. Sadly ftp is not supported so that was kind of the last drop that made me think twice about trying out bzr.

So I installed bzr, made it import my two branches and went to sleep (it takes a long time since it takes all my 1000+ changes). After I woke up I played around with the different commands. It’s really a pleasure to work with the system. I guess the clean start was a very good thing. Every command just work like you think they do, you don’t have to use a lot of time learning the system. E.g. when you want to mirror an archive you just do bzr push sftp://somewhere. It will automatically remember that location and just use that path the next time you push. So far it has been working great and I even put all of my cxfe patches into a repo since it’s just so damn easy. It handled the arch import with grace and I have been able to pick of where I left in baz. It can merge the two branches without and problem. The only small bug I have hit so far has been that it won’t work if your ftp server doesn’t support renaming (sunsite doesn’t) but at least it has been confirmed and added to their bug db so there is hope that it will get fixed.

I’ll be attending Fosdem this year, staying at the Atlas Hotel. Let me know if anyone wants to meet, especially if you’re using MMS. I had that wonderful opportunity at Wacken last year and it’s always nice to talk face to face with people that you have only talked to over email.

It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications