Jan
31
2008
Why wait until summer to code and earn $3,000? Funambol has just announced the availability of a $3,000 bounty to develop a plugin to allow Funambol to run on Qtopia devices. Trolltech, the makers of Qtopia, was just acquired this week by Nokia and as a result, Qtopia will become more commonly used.
Trolltech and Funambol would like to make sure that Funambol software works on Qtopia, so we are happy to provide you with a free Trolltech Green Phone or OpenMoko phone, a free Trolltech SDK and, of ourse, Funambol software. This would involve developing a plug-in to sync PIM data (contacts and calendar to start with) and maybe push email later.
If interested, follow the procedure on the code sniper page and submit a proposal.
Developers looking for information on Funambol’s code should look at Funambol’s wiki and at code from other community contributions (like the Android plugin, for example or the simpler Jajah plugin).
Jan
28
2008
Now, this is surprising: Nokia acquired Trolltech, makers of toolkit QT, GTK’s competitor. What surprises me is that Nokia is using GTK on its tablet products (the 770, N800 and N810). So now Nokia has a stake in many platforms: its own flavour of Symbian for its cell phones, GTK/Gnome on the internet tablets and now QT… for what? It’s hard to guess. Is Nokia interested in QTopia, the platform used in embedded devices, including the dead sold out Trolltech Greenphone?
Jan
25
2008
Caduto il governo non è che diminuiscono le speranze di sapere che fine hanno fatto i €10 milioni stanziati dalla finanziaria del 2007?
Jan
23
2008
Flavia mi segnala un evento importante: giovedì 31 gennaio a Roma presso il Dipartimento di Informatica dell’Università La Sapienza parlerà Whitfield Diffie, “padre” della crittografia a chiave pubblica insieme a Martin Hellman e Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems. Sarà per un incontro con quanti nella comunità accademica - e non solo - s’interessano al tema della sicurezza informatica.
Diffie terrà un seminario di un ora sul tema “What’s Ahead in Security” e sarà poi disponibile per una sessione di Q&A. L’ingresso è libero e gratuito.
Mi avrebbe fatto piacere partecipare dopo aver lavorato anni e anni con Werner Koch, autore e maintainer di GNU Privacy Guard, ma il nuovo lavoro e la scuola mi ancorano in Lombardia. Spero ci saranno le registrazioni.
Quando: 31 gennaio ore 10:00
Dove: Dipartimento di Informatica dell’Università La Sapienza di Roma, via Salaria 113 - 00198 Roma
Aula: Aula Alfa (piano terra)
Jan
22
2008
I haven’t been updating the blog too much in the past week and the reason is that I have a new job as community manager at Funambol. The company develops the free/libre software Funambol application server (formerly known as Sync4j). The server allows mobile backup and PIM synchronization to contacts, calendars, tasks, notes and other data, push email (blackberry-like), mobile device management to manage cell phones remotely. Funambol also has clients for most cell phones available on the market.
The software allows also extensions, as plug-ins and connectors. One of my duties will be to help external developers to contribute plug-ins like the iPhone, Yahoo and Gmail connectors.
The office is in Pavia, which is 45 minutes away from my home in Milano. The company is located in Redwood, California, giving the international touch I like in this creative Italian venture.
I am already getting used to the new rhythm and in the next days I’ll start posting more regularly.
Jan
17
2008
Some months ago, during a boring train trip, I plaid iwth famous Janis Joplin’s song Oh lord (Mercedes Benz). Here is the outcome, I hope you like it:
Oh lord, would you teach me to hack gcc
my friends all can do it, I should know that too
please send Mike to my home to help debug routines
so lord would you teach me to hack gcc
Oh lord, would buy me a highdef tv
but please all I want is to be drm-free
no word from the major can stop that to be
so lord would you buy me that highdef tv
Oh lord would you buy me a server machine
my rack is now empty, I need few bogomips
I have plenty of bandwith to suit all my needs
so lord would you buy me a server machine
Oh lord would you bring us GNOME version 3
we need it for desktops to be bug-free
all other annoyances can stay with MS win
so lord would you bring us GNOME version 3
Oh lord would you fix us a perfect GPL3
Linus is angry, and so is HP
we’ll wait for delivery at home until 3
so lord would you fix us a perfect GPL3
If you don’t remember the original song listen to it on youtube.
Jan
14
2008
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Ore e ore di intrattenimento, su Amiga a colori e audio stereo (quando il PC si avviava con uno schermo nero ed emetteva solo fastidiosi beep, a meno di comprare pezzi extra)
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L’agenzia tecnologica per le scuole UK conferma che Vista e Office 2007 non sono proprio pronte per essere usate e che l’interoperabilità delle nuove versioni Microsoft è a dir poco traballante.
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RIAA ha fatto più danni delle cavallette, si merita di sparire.
Jan
09
2008
Ricercando trasparenza Roberto Galoppini e Flavia Marzano hanno coordinato un nutrito gruppo di cittadini interessati al Software Libero per inviare una lettera aperta al Ministro Nicolais e alla sottosegretaria Magnolfi chiedendo trasparenza (come suggeriva anche Stefano Canepa).
[...]le chiederemmo di farci sapere come siano stati spesi i primi 10 milioni di euro previsti per il 2007.
Il resto della lettera con l’elenco dei primi firmatari è su Punto-Informatico. Come cittadini abbiamo il dovere di controllare democraticamente l’operato dei politici a seguito di annunci. Chiedi anche tu Dove sono finiti i €10 milioni? sul tuo blog, copia il codice html qui sotto.
<a href="http://maffulli.net/2007/12/21/dove-sono-finiti-i-fondi-per-il-software-libero/">
<img src="http://maffulli.net/wp-content/uploads/dovesonofiniti.png"
alt="Dove sono finiti i fondi per il Software Libero?" border="0" /></a>
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://maffulli.net/wp-content/uploads/getbutton.png){kind=small}
