Darwin's Theories - Open Source Software category

OpenMoko revisited

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 14:35:00 GMT

OpenMoko was an early open-source (hardware and software) cell phone project. It was designed to be flashed without having to root it or unlock a bootloader; the download tools were open source. It was great, except, it had an A5 CPU, no camera, no 3G and no prospect of it, and no real distribution strategy or scalable business model. So the company (openmoko.com) somewhat imploded.

However, since the hardware was open, another company has picked up the pieces. Golden Delicious Computer (nice name) makes a drop-in replacement motherboard with an A8 CPU, 3G (UMTS) and optional camera, that re-uses the case, LCD and some other components to upgrade your existing OM (or you can buy a complete new phone).

The only downside is the price, which is, ahem, competitive with commercial phone products of the same capacity. But at least it proves that openness can keep projects alive after the originators have moved on... See link to ordering page and current pricing.

Splitting an OpenOffice file or a PDF into 1-page PDFs or Bitmaps

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:34:00 GMT

OpenOffice has this great bug that's been there since before 1.0 requesting this feature, but nothing's ever come of it, even after 3.3. And the community fork LibreOffice is still building (it takes many hours to compile, even on modern hardware). So I needed something in the interim.

My first try was to save the whole document as PDF, and use pdftk to split it.

pdftk 01_About.pdf burst

Did the split, creating 35 nice one-page PDF's so fast I had to check that they existed.
Then copy them over to the next workstation, only to find that the software there doesn't accept PDF's. PDFTK: Success; receiving software: FAIL!

Take II. GhostScript. After a couple of tries due to my own typing errors, this worked:

gs -sDEVICE=jpeg -r100x100 -sOutputFile=01/slides/slide%02d.jpg 01_About.pdf

Bingo! 35 JPEG files of about the right size. Veektory...

Apple and OpenJDK

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:37:00 GMT

Lest anyone doubt Apple's committment to working with Oracle on the OpenJDK project, Apple just emailed me back on a bug that I filed against the Mac implementation of Java... way back... in... 2003?!? Yup. Apple BugID #3179542 has finally been closed, a just about eight years to the day after I filed it.

"Engineering believes that this issue has been resolved. Java 7 for Mac OS X as provided by Oracle will offer the directory structure that you seek."

I'd actually moved on from OS X on my desktop many of those years ago, and had utterly forgotten sending this report, but it's good to see them finally taking Java seriously, or at least making an effort.

Android on FreeRunner

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:26:00 GMT

Android or FreeRunner, that is the question for those who want a mostly-open-source cell phone. At least it used to be. Now that Openmoko have all but discontinued development on the Freerunner hardware, the future looks more and more like Android. And while I had hoped someday to be able to run OpenBSD on the Freerunner, it looks like that won't happen. Fortunately, there is a good implementation of Android for the FreeRunner, available for free download from this Android on Freerunner site at GoogleCode. I've been using this for a few weeks and, while it's not 100% rock solid, it is very close. I think I've had to do the battery-out-to-reset two or three times in three weeks (not counting the time I used the Android as an alarm clock and woke up from such a slumber that I couldn't remember how to shut it off).

Another Top 10

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:29:00 GMT

Here we go again: