Resumés shall be sent to the e-mail: rh_seleciona 'at' indt.org, with “DesLinux” in the subject field.

*DO NOT* send me CV's.

If you want information about what it is like working in Manaus or what to expect if you are selected (from a foreigners perspective) I will help with that, no problem.

Linux Developer

Academic Background:
Bachelor in Computer Science
Computer Engineering or
Data Processing

Language skills:
Intermediate English.

Solid knowledge in:
- GNU/Linux (Use and development)
- C/C++
- Python

I chose a cool free software project I am involved with and watched it evolving organically over time.

Here is the code swarm for the Autotest project. Autotest is a test framework written in python which I have started using to do some testing on mobile devices.

1. install a .desktop file into /usr/share/applications
2. install an icon into /usr/share/icons/hicolor/<size>/<type> (e.g. /usr/share/icons/hicolor/64x64/apps/myapp.png)

OnlyShowIn

OnlyShowIn

OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Mobile;

to the desktop file and the icon will appear on the desktop.

Also something to note:

OnlyShowIn

OnlyShowIn

/desktop/hildon/htmlhomeplugin/onlyshowin_filter

Check

OnlyShowIn

_False_

/onlyshowin_ignore

Always show these apps, even if they don't have

OnlyShowIn

Apparently this key should go away when *every* application is a good citizen and complies to the freedesktop.org standards.

doing some crazily cool stuff with Canola and well, forging

ideas basically.

It is incredibly cool here if you are a nerd but its not

all work, right. Some of us

took off to Maragogi in the next state called Alagoas.

We ended up going diving

which was incredible as we saw so many fish

and very relaxing. A perfect weekend to recharge the

batteries ready for the next coding sprint.

I decided to GPS mark all of the floating bars along the

Tarumã Açu (which is the first 'tributary' after leaving Manaus).

This is probably not so useful really as floating bars, well, float around the river basically but it is like most enjoyable things in life: good while it lasts.

I rounded up the usual suspects

prepared the technology

and off we set in Clives' amazing GPS

enabled boat, plotting bars

as we went.

Background

Traditionally gps was provided on debian like systems using gpsd (apt-get install gpsd). There are however some problems using gpsd on resource constrained environments most noteably that gpsd is designed to be run at system start, and stopped when the system is shutdown (or a USB/bluetooth hotplug device started when that device is plugged in or removed). Therefore if a client is started before gpsd is running (for example a gps applet is started before the BT device is connected), then the only way for it to know about gpsd is for it to attempt to connect to the gpsd socket and keep trying every so often until it succeeds. This makes gpsd client programs very busy, always having to wake up to check to see if it can connect and on a system that runs on batteries having processes that can't sleep very often is a bad thing which drains away the battery. Also there is a problem with the granularity of the info that gpsd provides, as running clients get notified about everything, even if they don't care about it. GPS emits a new fix on every NMEA sentence received, which for most gps devices is about 5 a second and each time the clients are all woken up even if they don't care about the data that has changed.

gpsd has no way for clients to say that they are only interested in position data, or only in whether the device has a fix or not. Even if the gps unit is stationary, satellite data is constantly changing, and the clients will be woken up on every message. Because of these problems Iain Holmes at o-hand wrote gypsy. This is a gps multiplexing daemon which gives finer control of gps info and allows programs to call the following objects:

• GypsyPosition - for getting location information
• GypsyCourse - for getting course information
• GypsyAccuracy - for getting accuracy information
• GypsySatellite - for getting satellite information

Implementation

Set up a LPIA (Low Power Intel Architecture) image on Ubuntu Hardy. I chose a menlow-lpia platform.Then create a Django project called 'locate' (or something more original), however do not set up apache or postgresql. Both these applications are not suitable for an embedded device. This application will use the cherrypy standalone server (started when the system boots) and SQLite.

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'           # 'postgresql_psycopg2', 'postgresql', 'mysql', 'sqlite3' or 'oracle'.
DATABASE_NAME = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'data', 'locate.db')             # Or path to database file if using sqlite3.
DATABASE_USER = ''             # Not used with sqlite3.
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''         # Not used with sqlite3.

DATABASE_NAME = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'data', 'locate.db')

import os,sys
path = os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0])
full_path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path, '../media'))

STATIC_ROOT = full_path

from django.conf import settings

 (r'^media/(?P.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.STATIC_ROOT, 'show_indexes': True}),

wget http://svn.cherrypy.org/trunk/cherrypy/wsgiserver/__init__.py -O wsgiserver.py

import wsgiserver
#This can be from cherrypy import wsgiserver if you're not running it standalone.
import os
import django.core.handlers.wsgi

if __name__ == "__main__":
    os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'locate.settings'
    server = wsgiserver.CherryPyWSGIServer(
        ('127.0.0.1', 8000),
        django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler(),
        server_name='Lowkate',
        numthreads = 20,
    )
    try:
        server.start()
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        server.stop()

/usr/bin/ume-xephyr-start

echo "Starting Locate"
export PYTHONPATH="/home/ume/Web/django_projects/locate/:$PYTHONPATH"
export PYTHONPATH="/home/ume/Web/django_projects/:$PYTHONPATH"
export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=locate.settings
python /home/ume/Web/django_projects/locate/server/run.py&

python /home/ume/Web/django_projects/locate/server/run.py&

root@ian-laptop:/home/ian/Dev/Ume/menlow-lpia/targets/target1/fs/home/ume/Web/django_projects/locate# ls 
data media server __init__.py  manage.py  settings.py  urls.py

Test the Gypsy to GPS Connection

sudo apt-get install bluetooth bluez-utils  bluez-gnome gnome-bluetooth libbluetooth2 libbtctl4 libgnomebt0 nautilus-sendto

ian@lawrence:~$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...	
00:19:B7:8C:A7:F7 IansPhone
00:02:76:C5:58:B2 Nokia LD-3W

This returns the address of the GPS device - 00:02:76:C5:58:B2 There is a nice GUI for this here

Add this address into gypsy.py

59    dbus.mainloop.glib.DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
60
61    gps = GPS("00:02:76:C5:58:B2")
62    gps.Start()

export DISPLAY=:2
python status.py

D-BUS and HTTP Requests

It is not possible to query DBUS without starting some sort of a loop - such as the call to

DBusGMainLoop

XMLRPC_METHODS = (
    # List methods to be exposed in the form (, ,)
    ('locate.django_xmlrpc.views.handle_xmlrpc', 'handle_xmlrpc',),
    ('locate.django_xmlrpc.views.handle_gypsy', 'handle_gypsy',),
)

@xmlrpc_func(returns='string', args=['string', 'int', 'int', 'int',])
def handle_gypsy(timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude):
    """Take the values we need from the the gypsy XML object and store them in a database (or file system) """
    data = Raw(time=timestamp, lat=latitude, long=longitude, alt=altitude)
    data.save()
    # This returns the values passed in (useful for debugging)
    return "The timestamp is %s, the latitude is %i, the longitude is %i, and the altitude is %i." % (timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude)

 2 import xmlrpclib

 63     gps.Start()
 64 
 65     server = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://127.0.0.1:8000/xmlrpc/')
 66 
 67     def position_changed(fields, timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude):
 68         server.handle_gypsy(timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude)

  1 # Create your views here.
  2       
  3 from django.http import HttpResponse
  4 from locate.django_xmlrpc.models import Raw
  5 from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
  6      
  7     
  8 
  9 def get_position(request):
 10      latest_GPS = Raw.objects.all().order_by('-id')[:1]
 11 
 12      return render_to_response('location_list.html', {'latest_GPS': latest_GPS})
 13

{% if latest_GPS %}
   {% for co in latest_GPS %}  
     I am located at <a href="http://geohash.org/?q={{co.lat}},{{co.long}}">this</a> URL.
   {% endfor %}
{% else %}
    No coordinates
{% endif %}

Further Research and Ideas

Free software development rocks.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ubuntu hardy main

apt-get update
apt-get install liferea

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local# cd autotest/
root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest# ls
client        conmux  Documentation  mirror  results    server      tko
CODING_STYLE  DCO     LICENSE        queue   scheduler  server.old  ui

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest# apt-get install mysql-server-5.0 python-mysqldb python-gd gnuplot
(on ubuntu this will prompt for a root password for mysql)

$ mysql -u root -p

mysql> create database tko;
mysql> grant all privileges on tko.* TO 'autotest_tko'@'localhost' identified by 'a_password';
(change a_password if required)
mysql> grant SELECT on tko.* TO 'nobody'@'localhost';
mysql> grant SELECT on tko.* TO 'nobody'@'%';
mysql> quit

ian@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest$ cd tko/

$ mysql -u autotest_tko -pa_password tko < create_db

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest/tko$ vi .priv_login

autotest_tko
a_password

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest/tko$ chmod 600 .priv_login

ian@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest/tko$ cd ..
root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest# client/bin/autotest client/samples/all_tests 

root@ian-laptop:/usr/local/autotest/tko# ./parse /usr/local/autotest/client/results/default

/usr/local/autotest/tko/parse.py:113: DeprecationWarning: raising a string exception is deprecated
  raise "Could not figure out machine name"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./parse", line 153, in 
    do_parse(jobname, path)
  File "./parse", line 103, in do_parse
    job = parse.job(path)
  File "/usr/local/autotest/tko/parse.py", line 91, in __init__
    self.get_machine()
  File "/usr/local/autotest/tko/parse.py", line 113, in get_machine
    raise "Could not figure out machine name"
Could not figure out machine name

# for ubuntu machines
 try:
     if os.path.isfile("/etc/hostname"):
         hostname = "/etc/hostname"
     self.machine = open(hostname, 'r').readline().rstrip()
     return

100     def get_machine(self):
101         try:
102             hostname = os.path.join(self.dir, "sysinfo/hostname")
103             self.machine = open(hostname, 'r').readline().rstrip()
104             return
105         except:
106             pass
107         try:
108             uname = os.path.join(self.dir, "sysinfo/uname_-a")
109             self.machine = open(uname, 'r').readline().split()[1]
110             return
111         except:
112             pass
113         # for ubuntu machines
114         try:
115             if os.path.isfile("/etc/hostname"):
116                 hostname = "/etc/hostname"
117             self.machine = open(hostname, 'r').readline().rstrip()
118             return
119         except:
120             pass
121         raise "Could not figure out machine name"

=====================================================
/usr/local/autotest/client/results/default/dbench
===================================================== 

STATUS:                 GOOD    dbench  dbench  timestamp=1199817550    localtime=Jan 08 14:39:10       completed successfully
GROPE_STATUS: ['GOOD', 'dbench', 'dbench', 'timestamp=1199817550\tlocaltime=Jan 08 14:39:10\tcompleted successfully']
set group_subdir: dbench
incorrect indent level 2 != 0, ignoring
+ Parsing /usr/local/autotest/client/results/default/dbench
* jobname, kernel version: dbench 
COMMITING

Setting up Apache

root@ian-laptop:/var/www# ln -s /usr/local/autotest/tko mobile-tests

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

<Directory /var/www/mobile-tests>
 Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>

Set up

root@host:/var# mkdir packages;cd packages
root@host:/var/packages# mkdir ubuntu;cd ubuntu
root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu# mkdir conf;cd conf
root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu/conf# vi distributions

Origin: Ians
Label: Ians Personal Debs
Codename: gutsy
Architectures: i386 amd64 source lpia
Components: main
Description: Ians Personal Debian Repository
SignWith: yes
DebOverride: override.gutsy
DscOverride: override.gutsy

root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu/conf# vi options

verbose
ask-passphrase
basedir .

root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu/conf# cd ..
root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu/# mkdir override;cd override
root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu/override# touch gutsy.override

Adding a deb

root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu# $ reprepro includedeb

root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu# $ reprepro includedeb gutsy /home/debs/liferea_1.4.4-0ubuntu4_i386.deb

Setting up Apache

root@host:/var/packages/ubuntu# cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
root@host:/etc/apache2/sites-enabled# vi 000-default

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	
	DocumentRoot /var/www/
	<Directory />
		Options FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride None
	</Directory>
	<Directory /var/www/>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride None
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
		# This directive allows us to have apache2's default start page
                # in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
                #RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
	</Directory>

	ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
	<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
		AllowOverride None
		Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
		Order allow,deny
		Allow from all
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

	# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
	# alert, emerg.
	LogLevel warn

	CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
	ServerSignature On

    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>
    Alias /packages/ "/var/packages/"
    <Directory "/var/packages">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        DirectoryIndex index.html
        AllowOverride Options
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
     </Directory>
     <Directory "/var/packages/*/conf">
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
        Satisfy all
     </Directory>
     <Directory "/var/packages/*/db">
        Order allow,deny
        Deny from all
        Satisfy all
      </Directory>        
</VirtualHost>

root@host:/etc/apache2/sites-enabled# cd ..
root@host:/etc/apache2# vi httpd.conf


<location "/packages">
    SetHandler None
</location>

deb http://<somehost.com>/packages/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://<somehost.com>/packages/ubuntu gutsy main

The key thing about packages in ubuntu and debian is that we both deal with the source
package and what users install are binary packages.

We only do source changes and only do source uploads to the build daemons, which
(hopefully, if we do everything alright) turn our source packages into binary packages.

Getting a random source package to play with

 apt-get source xicc

less xicc-0.2/debian/control

Source: xicc
Section: x11
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Ross Burton 
Build-Depends: debhelper (>=4.1.16), cdbs, libxt-dev, libglib2.0-dev
Standards-Version: 3.6.2

Package: xicc
Architecture: any
Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}
Description: set the ICC colour profile for an X display
 This utility lets you set an ICC colour profile for an X display, so that
 applications can use it to display colour calibrated images.  Applications have
 to specifically look for this atom but several applications such as Gimp and
 Eye Of Gnome already do.

 ${shlibs:Depends}

apt-cache show xicc

 libc6 (>= 2.3.4-1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.8.0), libice6, libsm6, libx11-6

In depth analysis of 'the libraries the binary in the package links to'

        aptitude download xicc
        dpkg -x xicc_0.2-2_i386.deb test
        ldd test/usr/bin/xicc

lists all the binaries that the that the built xicc binary links to

{misc:Depends}

${source:Version}

apt-cache showsrc pidgin | head -n 3

Depends: pidgin-data (= ${Source:Version}), ...

More Resources

• An APT repository of up to 1 gigabyte

• Binary packages built for x86 and AMD64 architectures against Ubuntu.

• A web front-end where Launchpad users can browse and search for your packages.

It was a little jumping through hoops because libgtkhtml2-0 and libgtkhtml2-0-dev are not available (yet?) in the maemo repositories so he need to apt-get the source from debian/ubuntu and build it inside scratchbox with

 --disable-accessibility

Also he added:

AC_CHECK_LIB(gthread-2.0, g_thread_init)

into configure.ac and did a

aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake

For more info check out the project home page

I have been working on Open Source Software for mobile phones and MID / Tablet devices.

So far I have identified the following areas:

Background

If you ask a U.S.-based activist the most important technical development of the past five years, they’ll likely tell you about the rise of citizen media, the use of blogs and Web community sites to disseminate information, organize events, and raise money. Bloggers helped make Howard Dean a contender for the democratic nomination for president in 2004, and many of the people involved with his online campaign have gone on to develop increasingly complicated software, helping support efforts towards Congressional transparency as well as political organizing. Because blogs were such a visible manifestation of political discourse, they’ve been extensively studied and reported on, which leads to a sense of the importance of these media for the campaign’s impact.

Ask an activist from the developing world the same question and you’ll get a different answer: the most important activist technology of the last five years is the mobile phone. The reasons for this are simple: for most of the world, mobile phone penetration vastly exceeds Internet usage. (In China in 2005, there were 350 million mobile phone users, and 100 million Internet users. In sub-Saharan Africa in 2004, there were 52 million mobile phone users and approximately 5 to 8 million Internet users.) While analysts in the North talk about users receiving information on three screens — the computer, the television, and the mobile — users in the South are usually looking at two screens, and users in rural areas of the South are looking at one: a mobile phone that might be shared by all the residents of a village.

Market estimates suggest that there are over 2 billion mobile phone users in the world today, heading towards 3.3 billion in 2010. The parts of the world where mobile use is growing the most quickly — the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and South, and Southeast Asia — are markets where the mobile isn’t a replacement for existing landline technology, but is allowing people to have a personal communications channel for the first time. 97 percent of people in Tanzania reported that they could have access to a mobile phone — their own, a friend’s, or one they could rent — as compared to 28 percent who could access a landline. (A map of mobile phone coverage in Uganda from MTN gives you a sense for how thoroughly some nations have become connected via wireless technology.)

The only technology that compares to the mobile phone in terms of pervasiveness and accessibility in the developing world is the radio. Indeed, considered together, radios and mobile phones can serve as a broad-distribution, participatory media network with some of the same citizen-media dynamics of the Internet, but accessible to a much wider, and non-literate audience. Interactive Radio for Justice, a participatory radio show in the Ituri region of the DR Congo uses SMS to let listeners ask questions about justice and human rights to a panel of Congolese and U.N. officials, who answer the questions over the air.

The questioners to Interactive Radio for Justice are anonymous. The producers ask callers not to identify themselves for fear that some pointed questions — “Are soldiers allowed to stay at my house and eat my food without paying for it?” — may lead to retribution. In general, the anonymity of mobile phones is one of the key reasons they’ve been so useful to activists. In the United States, we consider most mobiles to be highly traceable — generally, mobile users have a phone number associated with a permanent address and a credit card. But mobile phones in most developing nations are sold on a pay-as-you-go basis. Some countries require registration of a phone’s SIM card using a validated ID, but most don’t, either for the SIM or for “top-up” cards. As a result, it’s not difficult for an activist to have a single phone with multiple SIMs, one which is closely correlated with her identity and one which might be used to send messages to organize a protest or promote a cause.

Anonymity makes these protests unusually difficult for police or other authorities to block. “Smart mobs” of activists, brought to demonstrations by text messages, have led to political change in the Philippines and the Ukraine. In 2001, SMS messages about political corruption helped turn the tide against Joseph Estrada, and led to SMS-organized street protests and Estrada’s eventual ouster. (Filipino activists have organized subsequent text-based protests, many focused on lobbying for mobile phone user’s rights. The organization TXTPower started as a consumer rights’ organization and has now become active in broader political protest.) SMS messages in Ukraine helped mobilize tens of thousands of young demonstrators in the streets of Kiev in late 2004 to protest election fraud and demand a revote.

In both cases, calls to take to the streets spread organically — virally — with recipients forwarding the messages to multiple friends. Blocking the ability of a single phone to send messages would likely do little to stop the spread of the message. (Activists have discussed the wisdom of using SMS gateways, Web-based services which can send SMS messages to hundreds or thousands of phones. An argument against using gateways is the fact that they are single points of failure that could be blocked by a government anxious to stop the spread of a smart mob message.)

To stop virally spreading messages, concerned governments might order SMS networks shut down. Some Belarussian activists reported shutdowns of the SMS network in March 2006 to prevent activists in Minsk from making contact outside the capital and encouraging Belarusians in the countryside to come into the city. Similar accusations come from Ethiopian activists, who report that SMS was blocked during election protests in June 2005. Concerned about political text messages, the government of Cambodia declared a two-day “tranquility” period before governing council elections, shutting off SMS messaging and prompting accusations that the blockage was an unconstitutional limitation of speech.

Observers from the National Democratic Institute report that the Albanian government attempted to block SMS throughout their network for a week before recent elections.

[UPDATE:]The NDI recently wrote to me to say they *do not* believe the Albanian government blocked SMS before the elections there. One of the mobile providers had intermittent blockages, possibly due to their spam blocking policies, which they noticed and addressed during their tests the week before the election.

Iran may have blocked SMSs sent from Internet gateways as a way of preventing “defamation” of candidates prior to elections in late 2006.

The Shanghai police have tried another technique for controlling SMS-spread demonstrations — they used SMS messages to warn potential protesters away from anti-Japan street protests. (The technique was a mixed success — the message from Shanghai police was so ambiguously worded that some recipients took it as encouragement to protest.) Belarusian authorities attempted something similar during the October Square protests, sending SMS messages warning potential march participants about their health and safety if they appeared at marches, stating that “provocateurs are planning bloodshed.”

In smart-mob scenarios, mobile phones function as an impromptu broadcast network — if activists had access to radio stations with sufficient footprint, they could achieve similar goals by broadcasting information about rallies over the airwaves. Other activist uses of mobiles take advantage of the ability of mobile owners to create content as well as forwarding it. Activists with the pro-democracy Kefaya movement use mobile phones and their cameras to document demonstrations and other news events, including a government crackdown on Sudanese protesters in Cairo — they call, text, or use MMS to send messages to the administrator of the Kefaya blog, which compiles reports into blog posts much as a newsroom turns field reports into finished articles.

A dispersed group with mobile phones — especially mobile phones equipped with cameras — becomes a powerful force for “sousveillance.“ Coined by Dr. Steve Mann, “sousveillance” refers to the monitoring of authority figures by grassroots groups, using the technologies and techniques of surveillance. The use of mobile phones to monitor the 2000 presidential election in Ghana is a good example of sousveillance — voters who were prevented from voting used mobile phones to report their experience to call-in shows on local radio stations. The stations broadcast the reports, prompting police to respond to the accusations of voter intimidation. Had voters called the police directly, it’s possible that authorities might not have responded — by making reports public through the radio, voters eliminated the possibility of police announcing that there had been no reports of voter intimidation. Similar techniques have been used in Sierra Leone, Senegal, and even in the United States — American voters used mobile phone cameras and Websites to record reports of voting irregularities during the 2006 congressional elections.

Sousveillance has a way of trapping authority figures, even when they’re the ones holding the cameras. Egyptian blogger and activist Mohammed Sharkawy was beaten and sodomized while in police custody — his tormentors filmed the incident and threatened to humiliate him by posting the video on the Internet. The video, posted at sites like YouTube has now become a document demonstrating the brutality of Egyptian police, leading to criticism by the U.S. State Department of Egypt’s human rights record. In a future where most citizens carry cameras with them at all times and have the ability to spread them phone to phone, or by posting them to a Web site, there’s tremendous potential for sousveillance to serve as a check to people in power. (Needless to say, there are hundreds of more worrisome scenarios made possible by the same technology, including noxious phenomena like “happy slapping“.)

Mobiles are powerful because they’re pervasive, personal, and capable of authoring content. An intriguing new dimension emerges as they become systems of payment as well. Kenyan mobile company Safaricom has introduced a new system allowing mobile phone users to send money to other users of the network — it’s called M-PESA and has moved from pilot to full-scale implementation rapidly. Once Vodaphone, Safaricom’s international partner in the project, makes it possible for people outside of Kenya to deposit money into the network, it’s likely that M-PESA will become a major tool for remittance as well as for cashless payment. Activists armed with M-PESA-type phones could do more than organize a dispersed protest — they could fundraise, making it possible for groups of activists to fund the travel of an activist to a protest or the cost of leaflets. Similar projects, like Wizzit in South Africa, suggest that mobile banking is likely to become widespread in countries with a large “unbanked” population.

These mobile payment systems have a high degree of centralization and identification — M-PESA users have to register with Safaricom with a government ID. But other emerging payment via mobile systems look more like hawala, the informal money transfer system used through much of the Middle East and South Asia. Nokia anthropologist Jan Chipchase tells a story about Ugandan mobile phone users and a system called “sente”: A caller purchases mobile phone airtime cards in a major city, then calls his home village — he reads the recharge codes to the person in town who owns a mobile phone, giving her the credits to use. She enters the credits into her phone (validating the transaction), then gives a large percentage of the value of the credits to the person of the caller’s choice, usually a member of his family. Systems like this allow for virtually untraceable money transfer, unless phone card vendors are forced to check identification before selling phone cards.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that the powers unleashed by the mobile phone can affect all sides of a political situation. Protests organized by SMS helped unseat Joseph Estrada in the Philippines and bring President Gloria Arroyo to power. When Arroyo found herself embroiled in a corruption scandal involving tape recordings of phone calls to voting commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, one of the tools activists used to spread information was a ringtone. The ringtone featured a snippet of dialog between Arroyo and Garcillano and rapidly became one of the world’s most downloaded ringtones and spawning over a dozen remixed versions. The personal nature of mobile phones makes them the perfect venue for protest, even if the protest is as innocuous as having your phone chirp “Hello Garcia?” in the President’s voice every time you get an SMS. What the mobile giveth, it can taketh away.

Resources

Mobile Phones For Civic Action 

Linux compatibility, synchronization and configuration guides for mobile (cellular) phones 

Default Applications on Ubuntu Mobile

Linux Applications for Nokia Phones

Gnu Box is a small software for your cell phone with which you can create a new Internet Connection (internet access point, connection profile, whatever you call it) on the phone. If you use this connection, the phone does not dial or connect to GPRS, but uses bluetooth (or the USB cradle) to connect to your PC. Thus you will be able to surf the web, download software/data/email/whatever you like without paying any fee to your operator.

Python for Series 60 allows developers to execute Python commands and run Python scripts and applications in devices based on Series 60 Platform. In addition, developers can execute Python commands and scripts in the emulators of Series 60 Developer Platform SDK's. Development starts with an interactive console in a Series 60 compatible device where Python commands can be executed. Alternatively, a developer can write Python scripts, install them to a device executing scripts and applications from the Python Environment." Light Blue Python Bluetooth API for Series 60

Light Blue is a cross-platform Python Bluetooth API for Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and Python For Series 60. It provides easy programmatic access to device and service discovery, RFCOMM sockets, sending and receiving files over OBEX, service advertising, and local device information.

Nokia 5510 Linux Audio Manager allows user to manage MP3 files stored on Nokia 5510 mobile phone. It was written in Python with use of GTK+2 and Glade2 modules. The main platform for 5510lam is Linux.

V Cal One converts v Calendar version 2 data to a limited subset of vCal version 1. V Cal One can convert a calendar saved from korganizer to a format suitable for uploading to a Nokia 6820 cell phone.

Nokryptia converts MP3's to LSE files

Sis open is a tool to list and extract the content of SIS files. SIS files are installation files used in Symbian-based smartphones like many S60 Nokia phones. Sisopen is an ANSI-C program, mainly targeted at Linux and other Unix-like systems. It can be compiled on almost every system with a C compiler and zlib. Sisopen fully understand the SIS file format and is able to show conditionals, installation-time options, and much information about the SIS file, not just the file names.

Maemo

Maemo provides an open source development platform for Nokia Internet Tablets and other Linux-based devices. It is built from components widely used in open desktop and mobile systems.

The maemo SDK contains the tools needed to create and port integrated applications, replicating the Internet Tablet environment in your PC. The Hildon Application Framework is a good entry point to understand this platform.

Familiarity with GTK+/GNOME technologies and the Debian tools helps

This is still a work in progress and so any advice/help/ideas would be great

To create such an environment have a look
at the Moblin site or the Maemo site.

Frothing was originally created for the Ubuntu
Mobile Guide as an example of how to port an
application written in C to the Ubuntu Mobile
Edition.

This guide is available online here and is good
to read for background information.

Compiling from Source

Either check out the source from svn or

grab the tarball to compile

The source can be checked out from the
repositories by:

svn checkout http://frothing.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ frothing

The tarball can be downloaded from
the project page and extracted by:

tar zxvf frothing-0.1.tar.gz

After unpacking/checking out the code, run the standard autotools commands inside your target:

./configure --enable-hildon
make
make install

Dependencies

On Ubuntu the dependencies can be satisfied by:

apt-get install build-essential libgtkhtml2-0 libgtkhtml2-dev libxml-perl libxslt1-dev
libglade2-0 libglade2-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev
libhildondesktop-dev xulrunner

This project is also registered on Launchpad

community and the developers together to

discuss the roadmap, correct bugs and dream

about new functionality. If you never

collaborated with Django, or with any other open

source project for that matter, and you feel

like doing so now is your chance!

Lets' go!!

Pick something to work on and do it.

All sorts of tasks are available, from

hard-core hacking to improving documentation

to fixing small bugs.