This how to will explain how to add a radio station to the MPlayer CE application, a Wii Homebrew Channel application.

Note: How to edit the MPlayer_CE configuration files is not covered in this how to.
Note: MPlayer_CE supports the following streaming protocols, HTTP/FTP, RTP/RTSP, MMS/MMST, MPST and SDP.

Solution

1. Edit the “menu.conf” file located under /apps/mplayer_ce/ on the memory card using your favorite text editor such as Notepad, Metapad, Notepad++, etc.
2. Browse the contents of the “menu.conf” until you find the following cmdlist radio tag below.

   1 2 3

   <cmdlist name="radio" title="Radio" ptr="<>" > <e name="../" ok="menu cancel"/> </cmdlist>

   We will be adding a new line after the second line shown above and within the cmdlist tag.

3. Add a new line (radio station) in between the opening tag and closing tag like so.

   1	<e name="OldSchoolFM" ok="loadlist 'http://78.129.250.9/castcontrol/playlist.php?id=104'"/>

   Replace “OldSchoolFM” with the radio station name and then replace “http://78.129.250.9/castcontrol/playlist.php?id=104″ with the radio station stream feed.

4. Save the file and now test radio station you just added on the Nintendo Wii.

If the radio station does not play go back and ensure you have the correct station stream feed link. If indeed you have the correct stream feed link then it’s possible it is not accessible in the manner you are trying to access it or the protocol for the station is not support by MPlayer_CE.

Example

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<cmdlist name="radio" title="Radio" ptr="<>" >
          <e name="../" ok="menu cancel"/>
	  <e name="OldSchoolFM" ok="loadlist 'http://78.129.250.9/castcontrol/playlist.php?id=104'"/>
	  <e name="CBC Radio 1" ok="loadlist 'http://radiostreams.cbc.ca/cbc-cbcr1reg-96.m3u'"/>
	  <e name="CBC Radio 2" ok="loadlist 'http://radiostreams.cbc.ca/cbc-cbcr2wpg-128.m3u'"/>
	  <e name="CBC Radio 3 (rock)" ok="loadlist 'http://webradio.cbcradio3.com/rock.m3u'"/>
	  <e name="CBC Radio 3 (electronica)" ok="loadlist 'http://webradio.cbcradio3.com/electronic.m3u'"/>
	  <e name="CBC Radio 3 (Pop)" ok="loadlist 'http://webradio.cbcradio3.com/pop.m3u'"/>
	  <e name="1.FM - Blues" ok="loadlist 'http://blues.1.fm/energyblues128k'"/>
	  <e name=".977 The 80s Channel" ok="loadlist 'http://scfire-ntc-aa01.stream.aol.com:80/stream/1040'"/>
	  <e name="Big R Radio - 80s Metal FM" ok="loadlist 'http://livestream2.bigrradio.com/80sMetalFM'"/>
</cmdlist>

This how to is a tribute to OldSchoolFM, “Let’s Make it Personal!” A dream, a vision, a quality radio station that never got a fair chance.

To access the template system just click Folder > Edit layout template in the Midgard toolbar:

This will take you into Asgard, the Midgard administration interface. There you'll be shown what elements are used by the components running on your site:

Clicking on an element name will let you create it. Then you'll be shown the default contents of that element to make overriding them easier. The language used in the templates is obviously PHP:

When you save your element it will replace the component's default output in the folders using that particular style. You can also do nice things like including contents from another page using Dynamic Loading.

What about file attachments?

Asgard also allows you to add files (images, CSS, javascript, whatever) to your template. To do this click the Attachments button when you're in the style. There you'll be able to manage existing file attachments and to add new ones:

If you're dealing with a text-based file (CSS, javascript, XML, ...) Asgard will also allow you to edit it directly on the web:

...and finally when you're done with your file and want to use it in some of your templates, the URL is available easily from the interface:

The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the right-hand side, which is relevant as Qaiku allows channels and profiles that are private or invitation-only:

Technically the new version is also remarkable as it is the first major website to run fully on top of the legacy-free Midgard2 platform. So yes, every entry you see there is a GObject. And D-Bus signals fly when you post.

On to the challenge, then

To highlight Qaiku's threading, conversational nature I started a new "On my travels, I have" thread for sharing your most extraordinary travel experiences. This is not on Twitter or Buzz as with Qaiku it is so easy to keep the conversation together and accessible for the future as well.

To contribute, sign up on Qaiku, go to the thread and add your experiences as a comment. If you have a link or picture to include, you can also do so. My first entry was:

seen ice descend from the heavens and provide us with cold beer on a hot day in Lesotho

Will be interesting to see what comes out of this :-)

The idea of a content repository is that instead of coming up with new, isolated file formats or database setups for your application you can just work with objects and signals, and let Midgard handle the rest. This is something that lots of people are doing with CouchDB as well, but we feel Midgard, with its light footprint and native APIs for languages like Python, C, Vala and PHP fits better in the mobile applications context.

Installing Midgard

Midgard packages are available for many different Linux distributions through the OpenSuse Build Service. To find the right repository for your setup, go to the OBS project page. For example, on my Ubuntu Karmic netbook the URL to add to apt sources.list is deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/midgardproject:/mjolnir/xUbuntu_9.10/ ./. Then I just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-midgard2

Midgard is also available in Maemo extras and for OS X on MacPorts.

Defining a schema

The first thing when developing a Midgard application is to define your storage objects. This is done using the MgdSchema XML format. In this case we're doing a simple "attendee" object that amends Midgard's built-in person record with information related to the conference:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Schema xmlns="http://www.midgard-project.org/repligard/1.4">
    <type name="openbossa_attendee" table="openbossa_attendee">
        <property name="id" type="unsigned integer" primaryfield="id">
            <description>Local non-replication-safe database identifier</description>
        </property>
        <property name="person" type="unsigned integer" link="midgard_person:id">
            <description>Person attending the event</description>
        </property>
        <property name="registration" type="datetime">
            <description>Registration date of the attendee</description>
        </property>
        <property name="likesbeer" type="boolean">
            <description>Whether the attendee likes beer</description>
        </property>
    </type>
</Schema>

Then we just save this XML file into /usr/share/midgard2/schema/ so that Midgard will find it.

Initiating the repository connection

Once the MgdSchema is in place it is time to import antigravity and start hacking in Python. The code works pretty much in the same way in other languages Midgard is available for, but Python is used here for the sake of simplicity. First we load the Midgard extension:

import _midgard as midgard

Then we setup the repository connection. With these settings we will store our content into an SQLite database located in ~/.midgard2/data/midgardexample.db:

configuration = midgard.config()
configuration.dbtype = 'SQLite'
configuration.database = 'midgardexample'

# Open a Midgard repository connection with our config
connection = midgard.connection()
connection.open_config(configuration)

As this is the first time we're interacting with the repository we need to tell Midgard to prepare the storage for itself and also for our new openbossa_attendee class:

midgard.storage.create_base_storage()
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_person')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('midgard_parameter')
midgard.storage.create_class_storage('openbossa_attendee')

Interacting with data

First we create a person object with our attendee:

person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
person.firstname = 'Leif'
person.lastname = 'Eriksson'
person.create()

Then we create our attendee object and link that with the person we just created:

attendee = midgard.mgdschema.openbossa_attendee()
attendee.person = person.id
attendee.likesbeer = True
attendee.create()

Querying data

Later we'll want to find out about all Leifs attending the event. We do this by using the Midgard query builder:

qb = midgard.query_builder('openbossa_attendee')
qb.add_constraint('person.firstname', '=', 'Leif')
attendees = qb.execute()

The query builder returns us a list of matching attendee objects. We can go through them and also fetch the associated persons:

for attendee in attendees:
    person = midgard.mgdschema.midgard_person()
    person.get_by_id(attendee.person)
    if attendee.likesbeer:
        print "%s, %s is attending the event" % (person.lastname, person.firstname)

Then we can update the persons with their email addresses:

    person.email = 'leif@vinland.no'
    person.update()

For basic data handling, that's it! When you need more, you can extend objects with file attachments or parameters. You can also create joined records using Midgard views. Midgard provides D-Bus signals, transactions, centralized metadata, synchronization and many other things.

First, the MeeGo. I always second all open source projects. It was my path for independant consultant and developer. The excellent idea of killing or borders and constraint, opening your inventions to the world and grabbing others' ideas to adapt and adopt is unbelievable. More... open source projects are by the definition open, so everyone can join at any moment and everyone IS invited. The more hand, the better evolution on the way.

What about MeeGo? It's brand new effort initiated by Intel & Nokia towards building a decent, powerful yet lightweight, universal operating system for mobile devices like netbook or phones. Why so excited? Because it's open. So don't wait for anything proprietary that your phone manufacturers would (or not) provide to you in your black speaking box. Stand up, join the community and make your phone/netbook/GPS device or whatever you want work your way.

Having that, I already made my first step and got involved into MeeGo L10N area. Since I am more like PHP and web-oriented guy I can't so far find a place among all those geek programmers and I decided to apply Force to localization subproject. I've seen many badly translated UI's they were introducing more confussion than help and I don't mean to allow my new phone talk to me 'po polskiemu' because nobody took care of checking if translated string are suitable, or make any sense either way.

The other thing that woke me up this spring was and article that came to me thru Google Buzz. OMG! They are running Midgard for ten years already. See? Good stuff :)

This also remided me about my first commercial Midgard implementation. Back in 2000 when MS NT server made me cry and tear my hair off, I accidentally stepped into Midgard website. Those days it was kind of version 1.2, without any knee bending features but had something... user-friendly URL handling. No more index.php?id=123&style=456!

The bad news was that the only admin UI available was old Asgard and was not a tool for real rich content editing. Anyway, it took several months to put things together and Midgard combined with my home-brewer Nadmin Studio clone started to work for Poznan International Fair website including some 50 microsites - one per each exhibiting event. Whatever.

Today, reading the article, I just quicly pointed my browser to www.mtp.pl and, hey!, they are still runing some kind of Midgard. No idea what version, or if they use MidCOM or own solution but look at it. Another ten years old, pure and special Midgard website :)

Those days Midgard evolved a lot. Version 2 has been released, the design has changed a lot by moving towards independent content management solution that can be a web site or a desktop application, but one thing remains - Midgard is still a hell good and powerfull stuff.

The answer is, we use an open-source platform called "Midgard." We picked it nearly ten years ago, and it has held up fairly well.
...

One of the things we like about Midgard actually makes it rather unsuitable for many simpler publishing scenarios: it is highly object-oriented. This allows us to run multiple sites off largely a single codebase -- at the cost of quite user-unfriendly administrative and authoring facilities.

Also, Midgard is very much a development platform, and we have had to create a fair amount of custom code, especially to handle structured content. In that regard, our CMS experience probably resemble yours. As an industry we remain very far from plug-and-play content management technology for all but the simplest of websites.

While the post contains many negative points about older Midgard (the UIs are a bit better now than they used to be, quite a lot of development has since been happening especially in the LTS branch), it is remarkable that CMS Watch has been able to run their services through the same CMS setup for ten years. This really shows the durability and commitment to long-term stability we have in the Midgard community. We've been doing this for more than ten years, and will likely keep going for quite a bit longer.

As for usability and popularity of Midgard, there is quite little we can do about it in the Midgard1 area, as that is now in long-term support phase that won't allow major changes. But Midgard2 is a new world with new opportunities. Midgard's content repository is pretty much there already, as is the MVC layer, and this spring we should be able to unveil the new, quite revolutionary CMS concept as well. Watch this blog for updates!

First and foremost, evolution doesn't have a direction. It doesn't steadily go towards a conclusion as that would require some intelligence to plan forehand the play. Evolution is an eliminative process, pointing always only towards current moment, letting only those who are right there and then having some kind of an advantage in procreating.

Even those that appear as living fossils like platypus or Coelacanth have had exactly the same time to evolve. Platypuses appear as less evolved than other mammals as they

1. lay eggs instead of give birth to living babies
2. don't have nipples, but secrete milky substance straight on the skin
3. have a beak instead of a nose

How about its evolved traits like electrolocation that is so sensitive that it can locate a shrimp by the electric signal shrimp's muscles transmit when contracting? Or that platypuses are the only (known) poisonous mammals?

And for all of those who ever have heard that "I can't believe that we humans evolved from chimpanzees": it's all true. We didn't. We branched from common ancestors and we really aren't any more evolved than chimps, only different. Chimps and bonobos aren't our parents, they are our cousins.

Second, changes in genes and in appearance do not correlate. Genetic changes can be very subtle and small but still have dramatic effects (e.g. comparing Homo Sapiens to Chimps) or they can be very big while phenotype remains apparently unchanged (platypus compared to any other mammal group, according to genetic sequencing). There are numerous factors that can alter the phenotype while keeping the genes relatively unchanged, like pedomorphosis (changing the time when species becomes fertile) in Axolotls.

P.S. This all reminds me of a very educating and entertaining video that tells what really makes us different from any other animal: Robert Sapolsky on the Uniqueness of Humans.

Finally got my domain issues worked out. For long time the domain was pointing to wrong server and for many weird reasons I couldn't get it to update.

Next I'll start transfering this blog to my own server and to a new and improved platform.
Also hopefully finally get some time to actually update it also...

First of all, go to meego.com and click login:

Select the "Log in using OpenID" option, and provide your maemo.org OpenID URL:

Then the request will be redirected to maemo.org where the site will check your credentials and ask whether to relay your information on to meego.com:

And that's it, suddenly you can use your maemo.org account with meego.com!

The same OpenID provider component can also be utilized on any other Midgard-powered website.

Here are some other submissions I made:

The idea behind the Midgard content repository is that instead of coming up with your own file formats you can just keep working with objects and signals, and let the repository deal with the rest.

It is always fun to go to Brazil and meet the vibrant free software community there. The plan is to fly over this weekend, spend a few days in Sao Paulo and then head for the Amazon. Feel free to ping me if you're around.

Unlike Android, both Moblin and Maemo stacks have been very promising in the sense that they've been closely aligned with existing and well-known Linux desktop technologies. All RPC communications happen through D-Bus, Qt or Clutter is used as the GUI toolkit, there is Telepathy for integrated VoIP and IM communications, and Moblin even comes with the GeoClue location service.

So far the discussion about this merge has very much focused on technical terms: what toolkit to use (Qt is recommended), what package manager (RPM) and so forth. However, what hasn't been discussed yet is what will happen to Maemo's excellent infrastructure for community involvement:

• Brainstorm is a tool for proposing ideas and solutions to them, and then voting to qualify them. This is a very good way to gather ideas and feedback from the community, and some brainstorms have even ended up having community-led free implementations available, freeing Nokia from having to write all platform functionality
• Talk is the very popular forum for both Maemo end users and developers. Having an open forum to discuss it all, and having also people from Nokia and Intel there would help to communicate the aims and decisions around the platform a lot better
• Packages and Downloads provide a fully open and crowdsourced "app store experience" where the community is free to develop, upload and install Maemo applications through a consistent service that provides quality control, nice installers and a free API for browsing the software available
• Community Council and the Sprint process have been the way Maemo's community infrastructure has been designed and developed out in the open. The various tasks have been documented in the Wiki, and people have been able to follow the progress through a Qaiku workstream
• Karma is a way to credit community members for their involvement. The involvement can be technical (for instance, developing a popular Maemo application) or social (publishing popular blog posts or helping people on Talk), and has been used as a criteria for Community Council and other elections. Karma also helps Nokia to qualify community members, to find the people who should have access the developer devices for instance. In a large community it is hard to identify the people who are just loud and the people who are doing actual valuable contributions from each other without such tools
• Social News and Planet are a way for the community to aggregate and promote important posts around the project. We look at things like social bookmarking, blog links and votes happening on the Maemo site to determine the most important stories of the day, to provide an "automatic newspaper" for the project

Providing all or some of these services as part of the MeeGo infrastructure would enable the community to feel involvement, and even ownership in the new project that is shaping up. This is critical for a project that has such a big reliance on new innovation and connectivity with the upstream, especially at the time of such big change.

I first went to the airport and took some pics of the her side profile with my N900 and sketched some ideas with pen and paper and finally in Inkscape where I opened a 5.5 meter by one meter canvas...

The flight manual of the plane contains a three-way view of the aircraft, so scanned the page and used Inkscape's excellent tracing tool to turn it into a base for my design, and resized it to the corrent size of the aircraft.. This must have been the largest canvas size I have had so far in a design project...

Design work done in Inkscape

The design evolved a quite a bit and I always had a bunch of the latest sketches in my N900 to show to club members who gave me good feedback... And eventually we had something we were happy with, and  a PDF file of the design was sent to the paint shop a while ago. Stripping a plane from the old paint is quite a lot of work, and takes a while, so they sent us back some photos of the work in progress..

Aircraft partially disassembled before paint stripping

Paint stripped, masked for spraying

Empty canvas!

And finally today we got the much anticipated message in our mailboxes, the work was nearing completion!

Stripes in place!

It's always nice and rewarding to see a design work transform from bits and bytes into something physical. Even better if you can strap yourself into it and go flying...

Will be fun to have more time to sell and maintain projects that has been in the background for a couple of years.

First thing on spare time is to continue to make integration between our pbx system and openpsa. And se if we can open up the pbx system some to more developers.

If anyone has any leads on companies that might need a pbx that can integrate with their on systems please give me a call :)

This is another case of location context being used to serve users better. To figure out where the user is coming from the site uses a combination of IP positioning and browser geolocation, while weather information comes from Foreca's feeds. Map visualization uses CloudMade's OpenStreetMap-based maps. And of course the whole thing runs on the stable Ragnaroek series of Midgard.

In other news, Jos et jaksa is another pretty interesting recent site launch, especially for the fact that it is the first-ever website running on the legacy-free Midgard2 platform and Midgard MVC.

First of all, you have to have Midgard2 installed. Then, all you have to do, to have vapi file is to run simple script in vala directory . And finally, you can try example. Note, you must have database created. Midgard.Storage is excluded from vala bindings at this moment.

I hope to see mono bindings soon.

I tried to track down the author of this poem but I was unable to determine who the author was. However there is some claim a little girl wrote this poem. If anyone can prove the author or further history please contact me.

Source: Mary had a little lamb

Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The Lamb was sure to go.

He followed her to school each day,
T’wasn’t even in the rule.
It made the children laugh and play,
To have a Lamb at school.

And then the rules all changed one day,
Illegal it became;
To bring the Lamb of God to school,
Or even speak His Name!

Every day got worse and worse,
And days turned into years.
Instead of hearing children laugh,
We heard gun shots and tears.

What must we do to stop the crime,
That’s in our schools today?
Let’s let the Lamb come back to school,
And teach our kids to pray!

Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

The success of iPad will mean more than just a completely new level of App Store economy. Other companies will certainly seek to emulate the model, coming up with their own post-WIMP devices and their own content and software ecosystems. This all will be a challenge for the free software movement.

The world of free software is still very much stuck in what computing was in the 90s. We think of desktop computers, we do not integrate with the web. And we do not get the transformation that is happening with personal computers. Taught by smartphones and cloud applications, users are moving from desktops through simple netbooks towards information appliances.

With information appliances you need a seamless user interface. You need an ecosystem where content comes alongside the software to utilize it. You need to move past the old WIMP metaphors and the idea of separation between data stored in a a file system and the software manipulating it.

So far the first convincing attempt towards this direction I've seen in the free software world is KDE's Social Desktop initiative. It allows users to connect with each other straight through the desktop, and it allows discovery of new applications and content to download and use straight in the applications. We also use it with Maemo's new App Downloader.

Threatened by the cloud from one end, and closed-ecosystem appliances from the other, it will be interesting to see how we react. Will we rise to the challenge and start providing new user experiences? Will we build a free cloud? Will we integrate with initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Creative Commons to provide the content integration? Will the open web be our safe haven?

Definitely interesting times to be a software developer.

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

What I find most interesting are the view that the Tablet may bring new computer interaction paradigms. Again from Daring Fireball:

Our “desktop” computers’ human interfaces haven’t fundamentally changed since 1984 — keyboard and mouse/trackpad for input, overlapping draggable resizable windows on-screen, and a hierarchical file system where you create and manage “document files”. Have you ever sat back, scratched your chin, and wondered when the computer industry will break free of these current interfaces — which can be a hassle even for experts, and downright confusing (e.g. click vs. double-click) for the non-experts? Surely no one expects the computer interfaces of, say, 50 years hence to be based on these same metaphors and input methods. What’s the next step?

A touchscreen tablet isn't really suited for the WIMP paradigm as for example text entry is quite difficult, and you probably want larger, thumb-friendly user interface elements. This is where Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative failed, trying to bring the regular WIMP user interface to the tablet.

Instead what seems to be happening is that all the Wiis, iPhones, and N900s are now heading us towards a post-WIMP world. Instead of indirect manipulation by mouse and keyboard we can now interact with our applications using the more natural ways of touching things on screen or moving the device around.

This innovation will not be limited only to mobile APIs, web applications can already now know whether user is accessing them via a WIMP system or a touchscreen device thanks to CSS media queries and Javascript orientation events in latest Firefox.

The user interface innovation that is arriving thanks to these new interaction possibilities is quite promising, though it will probably take a while before we know what things actually work, and what are just fun demos.

If you're thinking about new kinds of user interfaces, it might be a good time to read papers like Noncommand User Interfaces (Jakob Nielsen, 1993) and Magic Ink (Bret Victor, 2006).

I certainly am as we are in the process of defining a new kind of CMS UI for Midgard 2.

Update: Gizmodo has a very nice article on Jef Raskin's information appliance concept and the evolution of GUIs.

The idea is quite good: to replace business directories like Yelp or eat.fi with something that is easily accessible from Google's homepage and uses Google's great relevancy algorithms.

However, the implementation is not quite there yet. My main gripe is that they implemented this using browser sniffing so that the feature can be accessed only with iPhones and Android devices. Even though I'm using N900, a mobile device that has GPS and provides geolocation through the browser I cannot access that site. That reeks of the bad old times of IE-only websites.

Lesson: if you need browser sniffing to provide some feature, implement it based on browser capabilities, not the user agent (which can anyway be spoofed easily).

When trying to print an entire Microsoft Excel workbook to a PDF using Adobe PDF or PDF Creator multiple PDFs are created for each worksheet instead of a single PDF file. This is caused by Excel itself on how the worksheets are setup due to one or all of the following settings, print quality, print area and page orientation for each worksheet.

Applies to:

• Microsoft Excel 2007
• Microsoft Excel 2003
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2000

Solution

1. Set “Print Area” for each sheet under “Page Layout/Page Setup”.
2. Set the “page orientation” under “Page Layout/Page Setup” to portrait or landscape for each sheet as necessary.
3. Right click on a worksheet tab at the bottom of the screen and click on “Select All Sheets”.
4. Now under Page Layout/Page Setup set the paper size and print quality for all sheets.

Source: novaPDF Knowledge Base: Printing an entire Excel workbook to a single PDF file
Source: doPDF Forum: Trouble with Multiple Pdfs with one workbook