The new release will contain lots of new and interesting goodies including new and improved backends and a rewrite of the COGL abstraction layer, support for layouts, multiple stages and multiple devices. Plenty more details in Matthew’s blog post.

Contacts is a small, lightweight addressbook that uses libebook, part of
EDS. This is the same library that GNOME Evolution uses, so all contact
data that exists in your Evolution addressbook is accessible via
Contacts. Contacts features advanced vCard field type handling and is
designed for use on hand-held devices, such as the Nokia 770 or the
Sharp Zaurus series of PDAs.

A special thanks to Adrien Bustany and Gilles Dartiguelongue for their patches that have been included in this release.

Overview of Changes in 0.9 (since 0.8)

Bugs fixed:

• 139: Contacts does not exit cleanly, leaves socket behind
• 169: horrificially non-obvious choices of field names
• 224: Search chokes on non-ascii chars
• 275: tab key behavior inconsistent
• 305: Available labels for email are insane
• 306: Better location labels for us stupid Americans
• 308: No way to view “unfiled” contacts
• 309: Groups dropdown in main window not alpha-sorted
• 310: Contacts does not create “file under” field, not usable in Evolution
• 318: Do not show fields that are blank
• 338: Possible to add duplicate groups to a contact
• 339: Keyboard shortcut conflicts
• 341: Unexpected triple-click behavior in Name/Groups display
• 368: Should import concatenated vcards
• 489: Missing field definitions in Contacts.
• 492: Only installing 26×26 icons when building for Maemo platforms.
• 659: New contacts do not have a N: field - my mobile reject them
• 774: Fails to build from source under Ubuntu Hardy
• 808: All vcards for companies are displayed as ‘Unnamed’
• 885, 42: Attributes not sorted in view mode
• 888: Contacts segfaults when provided with incomplete options on command line
• 890: Typos in source code
• 893: Remove recursive function
• 896: Simple DBus interface

(more…)

In related news, Ross has come up with a tool to autogenerate bindings for remote calls this makes is even easier to use GUPnP within your application with even less typing!

Interested in GUPnP? Ross “The Burtonator” Burton has started a series of articles explaining some of the basics of GUPnP.

The code is currently sitting in the OpenMoko kernel patchset, split into 3 parts: The driver itself, the SDIO stack (from Atheros), and the SDIO host controller .

The GTA02 is running an AR6001 802.11 b/g chipset from Atheros, and the driver is now capable of associating with open, WEP or WPA (1 or 2) access points. It works fine with a vanilla wpa_supplicant and since we’re using the wext driver you’ll need a 0.5.x wpa_supplicant.

The code is GPL and eventually we’d like to push it upstream. This will require a 2 step effort:

1. Getting rid of Atheros SDIO stack and using the kernel’s one. This has been done for Atheros 1.1 firmware based driver (see here), but needs to be done for the new and upcoming 2.0 firmware version.
2. Cleaning the driver code and make it mainline friendly. This will probably need a significant effort as the current code base needs some cleanups…

Its fantastic stuff this is finally upstream and should be a great aid to embedded Linux developers. Together with continued work on OpenMoko Neo1973 emulation (and upstreaming that), we are hoping to soon look at speedups, saving (and then restoring) state snapshots on ARM and even better Poky integration for developers. Watch this space.

We’re big fans of OProfile especially when it comes to optimising code on ARM but it can be a little painful to set up and use at times. OProfile-UI hopes to improve that a little with both its configurable graphical view of collected statistics and support for connecting and collecting data from a remote target machine. See the OProfileUI Projects page for further information and source code.