The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

So I have been contemplating this surge in traffic on the maemo-developer mailing list since 8 January and concluded that some people must know something I do not, namely that the 500 lucky developers to get their discount code for the N800 will be picked up by an automated judging system based on the number of emails posted to the maemo list since the initial announcement on the 8th.

Now, my rational self is telling me that this could not possibly be the case, but my spiritual self is advising me to hedge the bets, just in case my rational self happens to be mistaken. So, I have hacked upcarefully crafted this amazing bulk email tool for the 770, that will make sure that my presence is truly felt on the list.

I am very pleased with the results; the engine has been hand-optimised to run on ARM processor, and is achieving throughput that is only slightly behind that of similar (and expensive) commercial tools for the desktop. Furthermore, the automatically generated messages are virtually indistinguishable from human generated text, and fit well among other messages on the list.

In case you are interested, Application Installer-ready packages for the 770 are available here.

P.S. Packages for the N800 will made available as soon as I get my discounted device.

P.S.S. Just discovered a small bug; for some reason sender is being generated at random — will definitely maker sure this is fixed in an upcoming 0.2 release.

So after a few days of tweaking, I have managed to build the necessary packages to get the latest stable version of AbiWord working on the tablet; now we just need to setup a repository so the package can be installed smoothly from the Application Installer.

Fixed the backspace bug in the CVS maemo port. Updated package is here; as usual this is CVS Head, hence unstable, etc. (If you notice bugs, please do not report them in my blog, but in the bugzilla.)

Time to head off for FOSDEM.

The AbiWord CVS now contains basic hibernation code; installable deb package is here, with the usual disclaimers about unstable CVS code, etc.

Done quite a bit of work on the 770 port of AbiWord during the past three days: AbiWord now runs as a multiview application (i.e., you can have several docs opened at the same time), and the ability to hibernate is in the works. I have also made changes so that the Pango-based grafics class in not used by default, considering the limited available resources on the 770, I am likely to keep it that way (it can be enabled via the AbiWord.profile the usual, undocumented, way).

It took me lot of time to work out how to get the views working; this part of the maemo framework is not much documented and rather ideosyncratic (really a polite way of saying it is a major PITA).

You can download an installable deb package here, based on today’s CVS, just keep in mind that this is unstable version, etc., etc.

Tonight I started working on state saving in AbiWord so that we can handle gracefully hibernation on the N770.