LeMMA is now open-source

It has been my intention to open source LeMMA for some time already, but I’ve been sitting on it. I’ve finally got around to releasing LeMMA under the GPL. The codes are now at https://github.com/geksiong/LeMMA.

What’s next? I admit I have not been updating LeMMA and have not been keeping up with MMA development. If anyone has ideas how to take LeMMA to the next level, I would like to hear from you.

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LeMMA 0.9 alpha

I’ve been sitting on a couple of features for quite a while now. Here they are:

• Want to play in different key? Now you can transpose chords!
• Added support for PyGame midi engine. PyGame’s timidity player is a bit outdated, but it’s an alternative to using an external player software.

Also, for python 2.4 users who found that the last version broke for you. This release should fix that problem.

Download the latest version of LeMMA.

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Hands-on with the Asus eeePC 1000HE

Got myself an Asus eeePC 1000HE yesterday. It’s a 10-inch Atom N280-powered “netbook”. I chose this one over other netbooks mainly because of the better keyboard (I tried but can’t type properly on the others) and the longer battery life (claims to run for 7.5-9 hours). The keys are large and flat (aka MacBook style) compared to the smaller bevelled keys on most other netbooks.

First thing I did was to downsize the Windows partition and install Ubuntu 8.10 via USB. It took me a while to figure out how to boot from the USB drive: plug into the left port, then turn on the machine, quickly press F2 to get into BIOS, and set the boot order for hard disk. That’s sooo intuitive… Anyway, the partitioning and installation went smoothly, and after that I could still boot into Windows without it realising it has been packed into a smaller room.

The Wifi, touchpad and soundcard worked out-of-the-box. Ubuntu can’t seem to detect the special Fn function keys though, and mistook the “external monitor” toggle for “increase volume”. I mapped them to the Windows key which is not used anyway, so no worries. Not sure what happened to the external monitor toggle though. Frankly, despite having used Ubuntu for a number of years now, I still have yet to try attaching an external monitor. 🙂

The touchpad is actually an Elantech, not a Synaptics. It has multi-touch capabilities, but it’s a little erratic (under Windows too). I also missed edge scrolling – the two-finger scroll is novel but I personally don’t find it very practical. I’ll have to experiment to see if they can be worked around.

Performance-wise, there’s not much to expect – it’s an Atom after all. It does seem to perform a little better than my venerable Pentium M laptop.

So far, other than the weird USB boot setting in the BIOS, I think I don’t really have anything to complain about.

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Port forwarding not working in VirtualBox 2.1.0

Update: This problem has been fixed in Virtual 2.1.2.

This must be wrong season to try out VirtualBox. Previously I had the problem with shared folders in a WinXP guest, then I decided to set up a minimal Ubuntu guest on my Vista machine at work, to act as a development/test server, but I ran into another problem – port forwarding is broken in VirtualBox 2.1.0!

It took me the better part of the day to figure that one out. I eventually switched to Virtual 2.0.6 which works. Sure I can use the host network interface, but I’m using dhcp and I don’t want to keep looking up my latest dynamic IP…

Yep, it’s definitely not yet ready for prime time, but hey, it’s released under a ‘Personal Use and Evaluation’ license, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

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VirtualBox 2.1.0 shared folder freezing in WinXP

I’ve been a happy Ubuntu user for a couple of years now. Just for fun I was trying out VirtualBox to see how well WinXP will run in a VM on my old Dell laptop, when I encountered a nasty problem with the VM hanging and hitting 100% CPU when I tried to access a shared folder. Then I found out there was a bug with the Guest Additions driver for WinXP. You can find details and instructions here. Seems to work well. And I found out that audio performance sucks in a VM, which was one of the reasons why I wanted to try this in the first place – I still occasionally run a few audio-related Windows apps under Wine but imperfectly.

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White Christmas

It’s been 10 years since I did a guitar arrangement of this song, and it’s been a while since I last recorded anything. So finally here’s the “official” recording done by yours truly, 32Kbps low bitrate version since I want to save bandwidth. This is played on my electric, which I still can’t get the hang of (I very much prefer the feel of nylon strings). I recorded this to minidisk first, then recorded in Ubuntu, using Kristal over Wine, but there are some skips due to buffer underruns. I remember there are some tweaks I’m supposed to do but I think they were lost with the last OS upgrade. This is the one thing I missed from Windows. Anyway, enjoy and merry christmas!

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CSS Frameworks

I just found out about BluePrintCSS, a CSS framework. Interesting idea. CSS purists might not like this because it breaks the ideal of clean separation of form and content, but I’ve yet to really see people adhere to the ideal in practice. At my day-job, I have already started to introduce the use of JQuery in my projects, so that my developers can hopefully write more maintainable javascript. Perhaps this might be a way to get them to build nice-looking websites quickly. At least I might free them from having to struggle with convoluted table layouts, and horrible CSS styling (I’m not referring to visual aesthetics here) created by so-called “web designers” armed with Dreamweaver – a dangerous combination if you ask me.

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Quote of the Day

A little addition to the widgets. I missed my quote-of-the-day javascript since I moved to wordpress.com, which doesn’t allow javascript. So I took the quote-of-the-day javascript I used to use, converted it to a simple Python application spitting out RSS, and deployed it on Google App Engine. I needed an excuse anyway for my first Google App, and “hello world” doesn’t count.

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Lost your Symbian applications?

Update 2008-11-15: Sadly, I lost my apps again. This time it seems the installed apps folder was wiped out, along with data. Looks like another re-format is needed. This is very frustrating. None of my other mobile devices have been this unreliable. Being a long time user of Nokia phones, I’m very disappointed in Nokia. I’m using an N81-3 with latest firmware, and a Kingston 4Gb micro-SD…

____

I got a Nokia Symbian phone about a month ago, and I soon discover that one major annoyance is that applications installed on the memory card may disappear. After a few trials and errors, and having had to reformat the memory card a few times (and painfully re-installing everything), I deduced the following:

• The Nokia Symbian OS apparently keeps a filesystem cache on the card. It is this cache that causes the card to get corrupted.
• This worked for me at least the last time it happened to me: When the applications appear to be lost, and re-inserting the card doesn’t seem to work, remove the card and do a filesystem check. I use Linux, so it’s fsck for me. I don’t know about chkdsk/scandisk/whatever. The recovered lost clusters are from the Private folder and are probably the newer one. fsck will put them in a folder called “000”. Rename the “Private” folder to something else and rename the “000” to “Private”. Do another fsck to ensure the filesystem is all nice and proper. Re-insert the card and hopefully you’ll find the apps all back again.
• Based on the above observation, I believe it is probably a good idea to backup the “Private” folder every now and then.
• The right way to remove a memory card is as instructed by the phone – remove the card first and then click ok. I don’t know what are the chances of filesystem corruption if you don’t adhere strictly to this procedure, but better safe than sorry…
• When re-inserting the card, wait for a while. Don’t rush to open the Applications menu.
• Don’t remove the card while in the Applications menu. I believe the last time I corrupted my card is because of this. I think you should not remove the card while using the file browser too. Likewise, don’t re-insert the card when in these places too.
• Removing the card every now and then may not be a bad thing, so that all apps are closed and all open data flushed to disk, provided you heed the above point.
• You may want to check your filesystem everytime you need to take out the card.

Please note that the above are empirical observations and some of them may simply be superstitious behaviour from a paranoid soul. Your mileage may vary. I hope this is the last time I lose my apps. Boos to Nokia and Symbian for coming up with such a lousy OS design.

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Goodbye Blogger, hello WordPress!

I decided to shut down my old blog on Blogger and move over to WordPress. I missed Blogger’s ability to modify the CSS and include Javascript, but I was getting somewhat tired of my custom theme and didn’t feel like doing another one. I decided on WordPress for the following reasons:

• Blogger doesn’t do pages – something I want
• Blogger doesn’t have private posts – the entire blog must be private
• Don’t feel like tinkering with custom themes at this point in time, and there are some pretty nice WordPress themes here
• Everyone’s using WordPress, and this is a good choice if I ever get a domain and host my own website

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