July 2009 Archives

I've made an older project of mine available via my Git server.  TuxMessenger is a client for MSN Messenger (.NET Messenger Service), primarily aimed at the GNU/Linux platform.  I started writing it back in 2003, when I was dissatisfied with the clients currently available on the platform.  It has some nice features:

• Uses a recent version of the MSN protocol (MSNP12).
• Support for MSN7-style 'custom status messages'.
  
• Support for avatars ("display pictures").
• Support for sending and receiving 'nudges'.
• Decent internationalisation thanks to GTK2 and Pango.
• Drag and drop multi-way conversations.
• Support for message fonts and colours.

TuxMessenger was designed from the outset to be fast and "business-like". You won't find the word "buddy" anywhere here!  Also, TuxMessenger is an exclusively "single-network" client, since it arose partly from a dissatisfaction with many "multi-network" IM clients and the way they impose they sometimes semantics of one network onto the use of another.

TuxMessenger is licenced under the GNU GPL.  Development has mostly stopped because the "itch" which I was scratching has faded.  Not because better alternative clients have become available, but because - for me - TuxMessenger works fantastically.  It's become part of the furniture on my desktop, with me barely noticing it's there.  Nevertheless, I'm happy to be contacted with bug reports/praise/criticism and so on regarding it.

I've now got bored enough of SDL problems (as described here) to start work on a version of OpenMooCow which uses ALSA directly.  Development can be found in the "alsa" branch, here.

It basically works, but still uses SDL only for loading the WAV file and converting the sample rate of the sound.  After removing the SDL dependency altogether, it'll be released as version 0.5.

Thanks to the release of a second batch of tickets since the first lot sold out, I was able to see Mew at the ICA in London this week.  In short: most fun I've had at a concert since about 2003.  Great music, high audio quality - powerful but without the metallic overtones which seem to be far too familiar, and a great atmosphere.

Use those liquid washing tablet things, rather than powder, when washing your "Washable Suit".  Otherwise, the powder crystallises to give a white, dusty appearance that's hard to get rid of.

I imagine that's what you want for more normal clothes, so that the fluorescence stuff can work, but it's definitely not what you want for a suit...

This is just to report that, as of a few days ago, KMS (kernel modesetting) is running on Openmoko.  There's a piece of slightly bodged memory mapping to fix, and suspend/resume needs some experimentation to work, but otherwise it works enough to get a framebuffer console and for X to start up in fbdevhw mode.  The next step after fixing the problems is to allow X to run in "KMS mode", making full use of the power of the new infrastructure for its rendering.