I’m disappointed to have to tell you that the Kogan Agora has to be delayed indefinitely. This delay comes due to potential future interoperability issues.
Sounds like this was partly due to wanting to keep the device compatible with future Android versions needing better screens:
One of the potential issues is the screen size and resolution. It seems developers will be creating applications that are a higher resolution than the Agora is currently capable of handling. [...] In order to fully appreciate the feature-rich applications Android developers will be creating in coming months and years, the Agora must be redesigned.
I hope that whatever they come up with still has a real keyboard..
Just a quick note that Linus merged the btrfs unstable repository into the mainline kernel. I’ll cut a new stable release of btrfs-progs on Monday to go with it (for now the unstable repo is the best choice).
I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the code, tested, reviewed, documented, helped organize and otherwise helped Btrfs get as far as it has. It wouldn’t have been possible without you.
There is a lot of work to do before we can really declare Btrfs finished, but this is a huge step forward.
I’d previously posted a patch for echo suppression for Qt Extended on the OpenMoko Neo, but it was completely bogus!
So I went back to the drawing board and changed it to use the AT%N0187 command to enable both noise reduction and echo suppression in one hit as I worry that the original method of using a command for each would result in the previous command being undone. I also added them to a couple of other places where
they looked like they’d be important such as on initialisation and on wake from suspend.
I’m using a slightly earlier version of the attached patch (only removed two comments and inserted some blank lines) on my Neo at the moment and it seems to be working fine – on a test call from a train I was told there was no echo (with the volume at max and mic gain right up) but that I “sounded like I was in a bathroom”, i.e. there was a bit of reverb.
I’m not convinced that it’s completely foolproof as I don’t know if it’ll remain enabled if I get two incoming calls without a suspend in between.
But it’s still a lot better than what I’ve been having to put up with since I got this going!
I’ve attached both the echo patch to this post and the compiled version of the Neo plugin that is running on my phone. To use it you will need to scp it onto your Neo and then:
You’ve heard of lots of extreme sports by now and probably the Extreme Games, but you’ve probably not heard of Extreme Ironing..
The sport that is ‘extreme ironing’ is an outdoor activity that combines the danger and excitement of an ‘extreme’ sport with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt. It involves taking an iron and board to remote locations and ironing a few items of laundry. Our Guinness World Record attempt will be for the most number of divers underwater ironing at the same time.
Having previously posted some nice XFS Bonnie++ numbers on the work Dell E4200 I use I thought I’d redo these after having migrated to a RAID-1 configuration of the experimental btrfs filesystem. As SSD’s are not necessarily as reliable as spinning disk yet for data integrity I wanted a system that could spot this and correct for it, so I created two equal size partitions on the SSD and created the filesystem with mkfs.btrfs -d raid1 /dev/sda10 /dev/sda11 before mounting it with the ssd mount option.
Whilst the raw numbers are nowhere near as good you have to remember that this is doing checksumming of all the data and mirroring it across the two partitions I created for it and, if it finds a problem with the data, will try and recover using the data on the other partition. It’s also still in development!
There’s an interesting article by a BBC correspondent on the BBC website talking about “Propaganda war: trusting what we see?” that raises doubts about the veracity of a YouTube video put out by the Israeli government claiming to show a rocket attack on a lorry being loaded with Grad missiles.
The Israeli response was that the “materiel” was being taken from a site that had stored weapons.
Sadly the Israelis are deliberately making it hard for people to confirm or refute their claims:
Israel has bolstered its approach by banning foreign correspondents from Gaza, despite a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court.
which immediately makes you wonder what they’re trying to hide.
Unfortunately as the reporter is being critical of Israels policy of denying foreign correspondents access he gets accused by readers on that article of trying to side with Hamas (same strategy as accusing those being against the stupid useless mandatory content filtering proposal here in Australia as being pro child porn), which obviously gets his goat, his response to that is:
I do not believe anyone’s “propaganda.” We seek to verify all claims, from whatever source. One of the main claims in Gaza at the moment is the serious situation for the population. Having reported from Gaza many times over the years, I know how crowded parts of it are and how dependent the people are on food aid from the UN. This means they have no other source of supply but equally, if the system is working, they should be getting enough to get by on. The problem is that foreign correspondents cannot get in to establish the exact situation for themselves.
Before I get accused of similar pro-Hamas leanings I’d just say that I consider all violence by both sides to be wrong, unjustified and completely counter-productive. As Ghandi said “An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind”. I have my doubts that there will ever be a lasting peace in that area.
It includes a rather interesting section (book 1, pages 18 and 19) on how, in 1947, the UK foreign intelligence agency, SIS, decrypted some KGB messages from Canberra that turned out to include classified UK intelligence military estimates. This caused the US to break off crypto intelligence sharing with Australia putting the British in an awkward situation; as Clement Attlee put it:
The intermingling of American and British knowledge in all these fields is so great that to be certain of of denying American classified information to the Australians, we should have to deny them the greater part of our own reports. We should thus be placed in a disagreeable dilemma of having to choose between cutting of relations with the United States in defence questions or cutting off relations with Australia.
It took 5 years, the establishment of ASIO and a change in government from Chifley to Menzies before the US would reestablish full resumption of cryptologic exchanges with Australia and the author of the history concludes that this has a very bad effect on early American intelligence efforts against China.
The cause of the original leak to the KGB ? Two “leftists” in the Australian diplomatic service…
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
They’re part of the Digikam Experimental Personal Package Archive (PPA) and so track the latest development releases (0.10.0-rc1 as I write this) and work for me on Ubuntu Intrepid with KDE 4.2 (at the moment) – remember to install Marble!
Note
Many thanks to Maarten Fonville who previously provided packages that this story originally pointed to, and who commented with the above alternative archive.
