Another amazing outcome of human creativity — how would I have loved this a child — of course, it would have had to be even bigger with plenty more buckets.
This thing really detects LEGO bricks and sorts them! Watch yourself:
After having totally networked my home (and after being totally fluent in Android programming), I think this hobby robot platform (TurtleBot) might be just the right thing. They call it “apps on wheels” — sounds like good fun! Have a look yourself:
On my experiment turning an old Thinkpad X24 notebook in a nice internet tablet, I have tried out several things. I have still in mind running in the end Android on this device, but I need more time to understand how the Android X86 system works. At the moment it runs in Vesa mode, but this is too sluggish for real use. There seem to be some issues with the radeon module.
As an intermediate solution, I decided to use Xubuntu which installed nicely without hassle. I have new fancy very small wlan usb stick (rtl8192cu). This made a little trouble until I tired to compile the drivers available on the cd shipping with it, which worked perfectly with the standard Ubuntu kernel.
I had more trouble with suspending the machine. Also here, the radeon module seems to make trouble. After a long search, I found the very simple solution: add radeon.modeset=0 to the kernel command line in grub (edit /etc/default/grub, run update-grub) and install uswsusp. This disbaled the mode switching in the radeon module and now I can suspend — cool! USWSuspend worked a bit better with my wifi and bluetooth driver. I also added the bluetooth-quirk to as extra parameter /etc/pm/config.d/99myown. The file contains now the following:
# my own configs for this here [ulno]
SLEEP_MODULE=uswsusp
ADD_PARAMETERS="--quirk-bluetooth-service-off"
Now also my little bluetooth dongle works again after a suspend.
I also tried out the kde-netbook-plasma remix to check out th eeyecandy there, but even when using –graphicssystem raster, the system feels to sluggish. Maybe a bit overkill for this old notebook.
However, inspired by kde’s eyecandy, I was looking for some more efficient options and stumbled upon glx-dock (former name cairo dock). What a nice clean piece of software! And runs if called with the -c (makiing it use cairo and not opengl) option really quickly. I had to enable compostion manager in xfce, but this is just what the little notebook here can still manage. See yourself:
Looks pretty neat I would say. I think, there is now some life back in this old X24 – maybe I can start thinking now of adding a touchscreen layer to add…
Just struggled over a pretty weird phenomenon. Nowadays multimedia-keys in current Linux distributions usually work flawlessly. When you type the "Louder"-key you usually see a little on-screen display that shows you that you increased your volume. However, when having multiple soundcards and running the XFCE4 desktop it always uses the first mixer-element of the first soundcard available. After searching around a bit, I often read the solution to use System-Preferences-Sound (which is basically the sound setting in gnome-control-panel) to select a default soundcard – it would be automatically used from the multimedia keys — wrong. Does not work in XFCE4. After some more frustrating search (probably should use this one for our search experiment with search-logger), I discovered that xfce4-soundd is responsible for these actions. This one uses settings from xfce4-mixer. However, selecting a soundcard in xfce4-mixer still doesn't do the job.
Ok, how to solve this: If you use pulseaudio, just select in xfce4-mixer the Playback device of your soundcard you want to apply the multimedia-keys to. Then fire up xfce4-settings-editor, go to xfce4-mixer and take a look at active-card and sound-card. They were different in my case. Sound-card hat the entry PlaybackInternalAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer, active-card the name of my first sound cards. I copied PlaybackInternalAudioAnalogStereoPulseAudioMixer to active-card, logged out and in again, and now my multimedia keys control the soundcard selected in pulseaudio for output.
Sound in Linux has still a touch of magic — but I think we are getting closer 
Apr 022011
I am home again and am heading soon to Germany. MoMo-Estonia already released their summary of the event at http://www.momoestonia.com/2011/03/summary-estonian-entrepreneurs-in-st.html and therefore beat me to mine. However, I will still share here my own personal view of the event with you. Just for a short summary, it was a great event with plenty of networking and interesting presentations. I would have wished having more student and academic contacts, but probably I should have done more local advertising in advance. However, I got valuable contacts and look forward to following up with them.
Saturday, 26.03.2011
I just took a bus late afternoon to Tallinn. (Related blogpost.)
Monday, 27.03.2011
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
We start off in Tallinn at 8am in a very spacious and luxurious bus. (Related blogpost.) We made good progress and had only a small delay at the border. Thanks to this, we had an opportunity to do a little bit of sightseeing of St. Petersburg (take a look at the pictures in this blogpost) and enjoy this picturesque city. This was followed by a nice dinner at a Greek restaurant with representatives of the local MoMo chapter.
Monday, 28.03.2011
Reksoft
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
We started the next day with visiting Reksoft, where we received a very friendly and well-prepared welcome with lots of opportunities to ask questions. They had three speakers from different areas of the company for us. I asked a couple of questions concerning their relation to research and academia. It turned out that they are currently mainly offering services to do interns and teach students, but do not really receive services from universities. However, some of them were openly interested in tighter collaboration wit universities.
Estonian Consulate General
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
After being at Reksoft, we visited the Estonian Consulate General, where we had a nice lunch with fresh pirukas and got an inside view by a local Estonian entrepreneur about dealing with local businesses. I have to admit that I cannot comment much about this part as my Estonian is (still) not good enough to understand a technical conversation.
Mobile Monday St Petersburg
In the evening we had the official Mobile Monday St. Petersburg event, where the Estonian companies presented themselves. I am sharing here my personal notes on the talks which were given. If there is critique involved, I ask potential readers not to take it personally, just blame it on me weird academic and my attitudes.
1. EAS Estonia
As important supporter of this event, Valdar Liive presented Enterprise Estonia. He presented initial facts about Estonia and presented a lot of bullets about successful e-services implemented in Estonia. The Estonian ID-card was also presented, however the number of bullets were a little too much for my taste. I think that the Estonian ID-card, Mobile ID, and related services could have been sold a little bit stronger — I guess we are a little too modest some times in Estonia.
2. Brand Manual
J. Margus Klaar did a nice job branding their own company Brand Manual. If I understood it right, they are helping other companies to brand their products. He was just stressing a bit too much that he stayed under 10 minutes with this talk I also had a good talk with Margus pointing me to a nice government e-eco system, which they currently seem to try out in Viljandi. Maybe there is some room for collaboration with UT here.
3. Technopolis
Technopolis (presented by Jukka Jokinen) seems to be a provider of business space but claims to be more than a real estate agent. They offer support and services in all areas relevant for IT start-ups. The talk was a little hard to follow as the actual point what the advantage of Technopolis in Russia means for local business was overloaded by plenty of bullets on the slides.
4. Garage48 and Mooncascade
Priit Salumaa presented the Garage48 project exploring the possibility to turn an idea into practice on a weekend with a team of passionate developers and designers. He also showed how this way of development inspired the foundation of Mooncascade using and selling this idea and strategy in a commercial way. Priit clearly showed that he personally very much prefers agile development over old school development – -was this our influence on him in his study time in Aachen, Germany?
5. Ericsson
Indrek Petersoo presented Ericcson products like mobile payment, messaging, especially bulk messaging. It was a quick and informative talk. I also had plenty of opportunity to socialize with Indrek on this event and look forward to have other opportunities to continuing this information exchange.
6. Fortumo
Fortumo presented by Andrei Demetjev showed the history of their company their services and a nice demo how their services actually work. Unfortunately the talk got a little too long, but everything presented was very interesting. I kind of liked the bashing on Google’s in app payment and would have liked to see a direct comparison. Of course also the references to Angry Birds and Travian were very impressive. I hope we can win people from Fortumo or Mobi to support us at the University of Tartu executing our teaching related mobile activities starting in next term.
7. Estonian Developerfund
The Estonian Developerfund was presented by S9tanislav Ivanov. Unfortunately this talk was in Russian. I think the audience very much appreciated it, but for me it meant that I did not understand anything. After some networking in the previous evening, I expected Stanislav to be a good speaker and hope to have another opportunity to attend one of his presentations.
8. Oskando, SeeMee
Jaanus Truu presented SeeMee, which I understood being a Software helping in managing any kind of fleets. It can show you which vehicle of your fleet is where and help you plan routes of your other vehicles. The talk was very dense with information and after the Russian talk I had a hard time following. I had a good time socializing with Jaanus later and look forward getting to know his company deeper on other opportunities.
9. Regio/ReachU
Sven Kirsimäe presented the part of Regio concerned directly with GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and LBS (Location Based Services): ReachU (I hope I got the relation of ReachU and Regio right — was not clear from the talk). They provide such services based on data from (for example or only?) Ericsson. As an example Sven mentioned family finder, allowing family members (or parents) locating and checking on their relatives (children). The talk was very dense and I would have wished it would have been a little more crisper and to the point.
10. Nutiteq
Nutiteq, presented by Jaak Laineste is a company also offering GIS and LBS services. Jaak explained that his switch from reach-u to nutiteq was a switch from developing for the server side to developing for the client side. He advertised a freely available toolkit supporting multiple mobile platforms (I promise, I will take an intense look) and presented several interesting examples like Trapster and Navteq. Jaak is a passionate and capturing speaker. It was very interesting to listen to his talk and network with him. I hope we can win him or one of his colleagues as a supporter of our teaching related mobile activities at the University of Tartu. He seems to be also involved in creating a mobile curriculum and I hope we can merge our efforts here.
11. University of Tartu, Institute of Computer Science
This was my own talk. I presented our mobile related research activities and tried to advertise possibilities to study with us and benefits of doing joined research with us. I inquired in the talk how many students and academics were present and found out that there was less than a handful. This was not what I was expecting after experiences with local Mobile Monday events in Estonia, where we usually have quite some students and some academics present. However, when asking for people who are involved in research activities more than half of the audience committed to this. My slides can be downloaded on http://momo.ulno.net.
12. Positium
Mart Uibo presented Positium with a very flashy (prezi.com-based) presentation. They deal with mobile positioning and evaluate position data of customers via their mobile profile. They can provide interesting data for shopping centers in terms of showing them where their customers live and where they also go shopping or provide valuable data in emergency situations, meaning using positioning data and finding out where people come from, and where they go. Priit mentioned here that he had a bad feeling about this being a legal way of using data. I am pretty sure that this would be discussed in for example Germany very controversially. However as a researcher, I have to admit that being able to harvest such data in such ways, offers very interesting perspectives. Maybe Mart could have sold this as a clear advantage of the location of an open minded Estonia and resulting in possibilities for start-ups, which would be not possible in other parts of Europe.
13. Networking
As usually the Mobile Monday was concluded by a networking session. Most people here were talking in Russian. English seemed to be a very uncomfortable choice for a lot of the present people. I had not expected this, making the networking very hard on my end. Nevertheless, I made some interesting contacts to local companies and got some offers to put me in touch with local academics — I hope my personal follow-ups of this event will be fruitful.
Tuesday, 29.03.2011
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
The next morning, we first visited the recently renovated Jaanikirik (St. Johns Church) in St. Petersburg. We were educated about its history and got a tour to the bell-tower, enjoying a gorgeous view over the city.
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
After this, we continued to Technopolis Pulkovo. It was a pretty long drive out there from our hotel — reminding me of how nice it is to live in a small but culturally still thriving city like Tartu, where it takes me five minutes on foot to go to work. In Technopolis Pulkovo we had the second part of the Mobile Monday, where Russian companies presented to us. The first striking thing here was the possibility to do stereo presentation (the same presentation on two projectors – one left, one right)! Not sure, what effect it has, but it was kind of cool.
1. Russoft
We started with the presentation by Rusoft, presented by Valentim Makarov. Russoft is an association of software development companies from Russia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. We were presented a lot of impressive data. However, I did not understand how we – as Estonians – could collaborate with them.
2. UFT, member of i-free
Andrey Kupryakhin presented UFT. They seem to do a lot of game development, have lots of partnerships, and offer some nice contacts to operators. Due to so much information, the talk was a bit hard to follow, so that I might have missed here some points.
3. e-legion
e-legion is presented by Alex Zverev. He is visibly a little nervous as this is his first English talk – in my opinion he did a very good job. e-legion seems to be specialized on mobile application development for iPhone OS, Android, and WP7. He presented some of the games that they develop and stressed their capabilities in agile development.
4. Generatum Software
Igor Rodionov presented Generatum Software. He presented and demonstrated bubuta — a new mobile world of interactive amusing chats. It allows to pay for special message gimmicks. Bubuta could attract over 70,000 user in its first two month. It seems to use a proprietary chat protocol (why not use XMPP?). The talk is very entertaining but for me there is still the question, why we need another chat client – however, maybe 70000 user is a good argument. He presents some interesting facts: j2me generates the most revenue for them, Android up to 15%. To me it felt as if we could do something similar based on F2F Computing in a more interoperable way and even allow features for the future.
5. IT-Dominanta
IT-Dominanta is a recruiting company and presented by Ekaterina Durkhisanova. She presented some very interesting numbers in terms of developers available and demanded for different mobile platforms and their respected salaries. It was interesting to see that the salaries seem to be comparable to Estonia, but have very few benefits.
6. Nevaline
Nevaline was presented by Alexander Lebedev. They are content provider and seem to do a lot with VoIP. Alexander was a very nice presenter but he presented so many facts for his company that his call for fresh ideas as a mean of collaboration lacked a bit the focus in what kind of ideas they might be interested.
7. Networking
After the sixth talk, there was some time for networking in which had similar language issues as on the previous day. After networking we could enjoy a tour through Technopolis facilities and have some lunch at their cafeteria.
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| From 2011-03 MoMo St. Petersburg |
Summary
Overall, I enjoyed this Mobile Monday Event in St. Petersburg very much. I definitely think that this is a good start for possible collaboration and exchange in the mobile market for Estonia and Russia. It would have been nice if I could have made more academic contacts, but I hope the contacts I made will allow me to follow up and get in touch with others. Thanks a lot to the organizers and I am looking forward to meeting people from St. Petersburg in September in Tallinn.
For more reading, here is some press coverage, we got in St. Petersburg and links to MoMo in Estonia and Russia:
- Press coverage by http://www.spbit.ru: here and here.
- MoMo Russia: http://www.mobilemonday.ru/
- MoMo Estonia: http://www.momoestonia.com/
Mar 282011
Just uploaded my slides for the talk today to http://momo.ulno.net (under resources) or download them directly from http://ulno.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/momo-st-petersburg.pdf.
Mar 282011
Mar 242011
Just something, I would like to write down her, because it cost me a lot of time to figure out. I couldn’t talk to the Android simulator in eclipse after upgrading my system. I had to change in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf the variable net.ipv6.bindv6only from 1 to 0. This seems also to concern other networking problems in Java – not so sure if it is at all 64 bit related, but it happened with this update.
On my way to getting Android running on the Sony Vaio P, I thought I would first try to get Android running in a virtual machine. I was going to try kvm and virtualbox. To make sure to run with maximum speed, I wanted to switch on hardware virtualization as I found out that the built in Atom processor should actually be capable of it. Sadly I found out that Sony disabled this feature in the Bios and didn’t expose any setting in the Bios to switch it on – what an odd choice (reminds me that I should write a huge rant about Sony concerning taking away the linux support for my Playsations, I am running here for interested students in the office).
I already installed a ubuntu maverick (10.10) on it to avaoid all the hassle I had last time configuring the poulsbo graphic chips (TODO: rant on Intel). This was also my reason for thinking about using a virtual machine as I assumed this would be easier than getting poulsbo support in Android running again (I tried to compile the S5 target – but it of course failed, when compiling the poulsbo support – anybody out there having Android running on a poulsbo equipped netbook?).
To give credit to Sony they changed their support for virtualization in the meanwhile, so there is an updated Bios for the Vaio P giving youo the option to switch it on. However, this update only works in Windows 7 or Vista. Ah, already installed Ubuntu.
As I didn’t want to re-install windows, I was looking for different ways to accomplish such a bios update. I foudn some hacks for it in the net, but they seemed to dangerous. So, what about a Windows 7 live CD? Is such a thing possible? It turns out, if you have an original Windows Install DVD, this is in deed quite possible. I used http://www.ubcd4win.com/. For this I had to install from teh Win 7 DVD first a windows environment itself (used qemu/kvm for it). From there, you can install the software from the beforementioned website and give it access to your DVD (the files, not the iso). Then it works a while and in th eend you get a small 250MB iso image, which actually runs a Windows 7 tiotally from CD, amazing!
I booted the Viao P with this and was able to flash the bios. Qemu/kvm and virtualbox now run accelerated. However accelerated might be a bit too strong word for my following Android -experience. It runs unbearably slow. OK, back to the drawing board – trying poulsbo in android x86? Any pointers how to do this?
Maybe there is an option to run android somehow chroot?
Will keep you posted on my progress.
I have a small Sony Vaio P, which is very pretty but seeks for new tasks in my humble home. So in terms of diving deeper into Android, I started taking a closer look at the Android X86 project. I tried to run the image in virtualbox and qemu/kvm.
For kvm, you can do something like this:
kvm -cdrom vm.iso -m 512 -boot d -net nic,model=e1000 -net user -vga std
I also managed after finding the right set of development libraries (I basically downgraded everything to gcc-4.4 and the oldest libc) to compile the vm-android target myself.
Sadly the s5-target, which should support the poulsbo (graphicchip on lots of Atom netbooks, making running Linux there not much fun), fails to compile. Maybe I will try a strip-down ubuntu 10.10 with a kvm on it – it looks like as newer atoms would support hardware virtualization.