I know that it’s tiny and insignificant, and I can see entirely why there isn’t room for the extra dot, but it’s still been driving me absolutely mental.  Perhaps I should write an add-on to fix it.

(Is it obvious that making sure things line up is my job?)

First up – with the help of another enthusiatic coder – here’s a couple of (admittedly as yet unexciting) proof-of-concept applications running under the OpenLazarus (that’s Pascal/Delphi for people old/mad enough to remember) framework for Maemo 5.  I didn’t do much but test and run these, so here’s the results:

OpenLazarus app running on Maemo 5 using standard widgets

OpenLazarus app running under Maemo 5 using Custom Widgets

…and then there’s what I’ve been fiddling with.  Thanks to the frankly magnificent Wonko from the talk.maemo.org forums, we have a working Java/SWT stack for the phone.  That means that my ShinySlots project can run out of the box and look like this:

You can see that the forced window-size has exposed my slightly-cheating repeating background, and sadly it’s not that performant at the moment, but it works as advertised, and improvements are in hand…

I can only assume that if you collect all 8 phone colours and get 50 text messages you’ll go bright yellow, your hair will stand on end and you can run around for the rest of the day making people explode until your battery runs out.

(Click for full-size.)

So: that’s Shinypixel up there being rendered as it would be on (an old version of) a N900, in a virtualized Maemo OS, running in a virtual image of Ubuntu, which is in turn running in VMWare under Windows XP.  And after all that, it still renders like it’s meant to.  Look how far we’ve come.

Well, that was probably the geekiest thing I’ll do all month.  I reckon I ought to go and lie down.

In the UK the Nokia N900 will be free on a two-year contract at £35 monthly plan from Orange, or for £10 on a £30 per month plan at O2 (with a two-year service agreement). … the UK will get a release date of November 16.

Ooooooh…

It’s hard to shed a tear for the demise of GeoCities, even though I should as it started my web design career.  It’s difficult to mourn that which is long-forgotten, though – it’d be like becoming upset about for my cat who died years ago.

The truth is that I once had a GeoCities site, but all I recall about it was that the background was black, the URL was impossible to remember, the web FTP interface was unbelievably bad even for those days, and they had some Javascript that stuffed a shuddering GeoCities logo into the bottom-right corner.  I have no idea what it was actually about, and slipping peacefully away into history is the best thing for it.

The Archive Team are to be applauded for their efforts, though.  They’ve rescued all the under construction GIFs that they could possibly find and whacked them on one eye-bleeding page for posterity.  I haven’t seen so much irritating crap in one place since I was last in a Starbucks, so naturally I picked out a few of my faves and archived them here too, y’know, just in case…

“More updates to come once I’m back from primary school”

“Who turned out the lights?”

Nothing says class like a 3D rotating construction sign (with only one side)

Nothing says “we’re not quite sure what we’re archiving” like saving ancient Javadoc .gifs for posterity

Hey, quit ruining my childhood memories!

This is just a little bit like that Catchphrase episode.

I seriously have absolutely no idea what is meant to be going on here.

Believe it or not, this was actually about as reliable as Mac OS 9 dialogs got in my experience.

Achtung!  Awful designen!

Actually, I know a couple of people who could use this.

Stranger things have happened.  Runs an impressive-looking GTK/Linux OS, has a slide-out keyboard, nice (not grey!) UI,  and appears to generally not suck.  Looking forward to seeing some real-life demos, to see whether it lives up to its promises…

Thanks to OscarTheGrouch for the heads-up.

Nokia N900 Product Page

Nokia N900 Features

Turns out that a typical customer-service masterstroke by Google meant that feedburner.com – which they acquire a couple of years ago – disappeared sometime recently, and thus everything broke.  I wondered if it was just me being thick, but then I noticed that some of the actual blogs are still giving out the knackered URLs, so they probably haven’t noticed either.  There don’t seem to be any redirects, so any Feedburner feeds I had were now completely broken.

Anyway, here’s how to fix it:

1.  Find any of your RSS feeds that have feeds.feedburner.com in them.

2. Replace this with feedproxy.google.com

3. Refresh.

4. Relax.  Make tea.

* Sage-too is excellent, though turn off “Render Feeds in Content Area”, which isn’t.