TabletPC

Dudes, to be honest. The last blog entry was not suposed to be a basher on Ubuntu (if it was meant to be as one I would already have gone). It was just meant to remind the Ubuntu people (at least those who read my blog) of the roots.

Another report I just filed today is my favorite right now: Beer for the dude (or dudette) who fixes Internet Radio while Upgrading the System.

I just finished installing Edgy Beta 1 on the Thinkpad and I have to admit that there are lots of things different from my desktop. The desktop has been dist-upgraded regularly and is as up to date as the Thinkpad is, but eg. the desktop doesn't have usplash, I wonder which things are different too. Then I don't have the network manager icon in the systray anymore (I used to have it on the Thinkpad before the disk broke).

24 hours after getting the Thinkpad back, I finished installing edgy on it (from a USB pendrive). It was quite tricky, because Casper is broken (Ubuntu Developer on the question whether he could take a look at it today: »no, I'm not at work today« :'( ).

Not even 12 months ago I got a Thinkpad X41 from a company to make sure Ubuntu works well on this machine.

It did. Until Saturday. The Disk died.

It's really frustrating to have a spare weekend you want to use for some FLOSS hacking and then you don't have a computer to work with (I'm at my parents right now).

I'm still busy cleaning up the handwriting recognition manager but I got bored in the meantime and wanted to finish something new.

I finally managed to get strokes with a changing width rendered using cairo, it only leaves one nasty bug. Self-intersecting strokes will even be gray on these intersections (take a look at the 't'), but I don't think I can do better with cairo right now.

I have been attending my fourth GUADEC this year. As always, it's been a really great time with you guys. I have been doing some really nice hacks (to be talked about later) and you brought up several interesting ideas.

TabletPC rotation

I have been planning to do this for quite some time now. But it's done: Gnome Tablet Tools Website.

I'm planning to finish the debugger (see yesterday's post), then get the feed reader working and ported to Maemo 2.0. And then I'm going to finish the handwriting stuff (I hope to have this ready for GUADEC) to have something that people can use to make Gnome rock the TabletPC world.

I've spent the spare time of the last weeks hacking on something intersting I found in the net.

Sun Microsystems has been developing a handwriting recognition framework (so you can load recognition engines into your applications) several years ago (14). They even included a sample recognition engine implementation with it (based upon a talk from 1991, GPL source code).

Having a TabletPC, I wrote a cairo-based note-taking application (that screenshot is really outdated) to be for university.

But there's still one thing that I really don't like: missing handwriting recognition. Everything's fine as long as one's using the note application and a PDF reader. Files can be opened completely without a keyboard, but not saved.