Archive

Archive for March, 2008

thumbtribes distance daemon

March 30th, 2008

Intro:

thumbtribes has now morphed into a D-Bus daemon. More details will appear at thumbtribes.mobi. In short, thumbtribes is a low-bandwith distance calculation daemon. A typical use case would be to obtain the distance of a specific user and trigger a alert on the phone when they are within a certain distance. The daemon has been designed to continually run and attempts to minimize the amount of traffic by using encoding techniques based on ASN.1 Packed Encoding Rules.

Features:

  • Simple interface
  • Self clocking location updates
  • No account sign-up or web access needed
  • Low bandwidth protocol optimised for phone connections
  • Runs on low end hardware such as the Neo 1973

Todo:

I need to work on some documentation for the interface and also do some testing. I have briefly tested on my desktop, Openmoko phone and Nokia tablet. I need to create some binary packages.

The binary built does not have any special dependencies. It is large as it includes the Chicken Scheme runtime etc (make sure you strip the binary). This eliminates the requirement for a separate library and makes it more straight forward to distribute. The benefit of having Chicken as a shared library would come into play if there are other applications using it at the same time. This is unlikely on my phone for example. Looking at memory usage on my phone, thumbtribes appeared to only clockup about 1.6% of memory. If the size of the binary is an issue I may look at separate libraries and/or re-writing the Scheme parts in C.

What next:

I intend to start work on some other D-Bus utilities and clients to make use of this daemon.

thumbtribes

D-Bus

March 14th, 2008

Recently I have been climbing the steep learning curve of D-Bus. I will be experimenting with turning thumbtribes into a D-Bus daemon and possibly eliminating any web service. I intend to hack something together for Maemo first then Openmoko. D-Bus uses a binary protocol locally which I will extend to communicate with the outside world in an efficient manor using packedobjects.

I will be attending Over The Air and hope to do a bit of hacking there.

thumbtribes

packaging lighttpd for maemo the quick way

March 2nd, 2008

I needed to install lighttpd on my N810 but could not find a packaged version. I wanted to find the least painful way of solving this. I noticed that the OpenEmbedded (OE) project had a bitbake receipe for lighttpd. I already have OE running on my desktop so in theory I could edit local.conf to specify the correct machine and distribution and build the package. It sounded to good too be true but did in fact work. I replaced some OpenMoko specific settings in local.conf with the following:

MACHINE = "nokia800"
DISTRO = "chinook-compat"

and then simply issued the command “bitbake lighttpd” to generate a bunch of debs. Depending on how you configure lighttpd you will require a selection of modules. Everything is available here. Note, installing the debs gives some post install type errors relating to update-rc.d but everything will still run.

Handhelds