Weblog

Last week was critical. Due to some problems with our Freifunk mesh network I was offline for some days. Well, not really offline. If I urgently needed Internet connection I had to take my girlfriend's laptop (mine is still unable to deal with ad-hoc mode), walk to the Traveplatz park and start the OLSR daemon. Still this does not really help updating the various SVN, Mercurial and Monotone repositories on my desktop computer. :-)

On the other hand I worked on the JIT Cache which is thanks to Twisti and Andreas Krall, now my diploma thesis topic. I wanted to fix the issues it had before LinuxTag and was successfull doing so: The JIT Cache is now working on ARM!

What massively helped me achieving this goal was the good old GNU Debugger. It cannot tell you when you forgot to flush the system's instruction and data caches (this was the final issue) but for everything else GDB was just great. Being an (x86) assembler addict in my young years I really enjoyed single stepping through JIT compiled code and watching the codegenerator emiting machine instructions.

I find it interesting to see how working on the Cacao virtual machine brings two of my otherwise quite unrelated interests together: Namely playing around with assembler stuff and working with a high-level programming language like Java. :-)

On related news: I committed MIDPath 0.3RC1 recipes to OpenEmbedded. These provide a fully configured and correctly set up installation of MIDPath. That means if your repo contains the binaries (I hope OpenMoko adopts those quickly) you just need to tell your package manager to install 'midpath' and that will install all of the mandatory packages and provides a suitable configuration (screen size, button mapping, GUI/sound provider, ...) that lets you start MIDlets right through MIDPath's SuiteManager.

Hint: Install 'midpath-demos' instead and you get everything from above plus a bunch of demo midlets to try out the platform.

MIDPath 0.3RC1 still has some rough edges but it is definitely maturing well. I hope that with the recipes more people will get to know about it.

Last week I worked on packaging MIDPath for Jalimo. That work is now complete and you can install everything (including source :-) ) from the repository.

I have put a bunch of images in an online folder here at fsfe.org.

Special notice goes to this one:

That is a free (as in freedom) MIDP game on a free runtime with free class libraries and a free MIDP implementation. Isn't that sweet?

And this one should be noticed, too:

The image shows the MIDPath demo application 'TextField' running on cacao-cldc. This means no more GNU Classpath but Sun's CLDC-implementation (taken from the phoneME project). It was a long and hard way until that worked but now it is done and everyone can repeat the steps. Just download the source packages. :-)

There are still a few bugs and Guillaum Legris of MIDPath fame already sent me some patches. I will be mostly offline the next 2 weeks because I am preparing for another exam. However when I am back I want to clean-up the rough edges and provide patches to all affected projects to make building and running the software even nicer.

Happy hacking!