UTF-8 support added to dftpd

Thomas Brushington has send me patches adding UTF-8 support to Symbian builds of dftpd. In case someone might want to use such functionality, he also provided a new build.

http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/dftpd-utf8.SIS

(note that I have not checked if it actually works).

Dumb FTP Server now on N900

Dump FTP Server is now available on the N900. It uses QT 4.6, which currently is only available in extras-devel, so beware.

Download location: http://team.pld-linux.org/~wolf/dftpd_0.1.3_armel.deb. Hopefully will be in extras soon.
Source repository: http://gitorious.org/dftpd

Changelog (0.1.2):
- Workaround for Firefox handling of PASV command.
- Maemo port.
- If binding to port 21 fails (for example as a result of lack of root priviliges), the server will try to listen on port 2121.

Changelog (0.1.3):
- Passive mode should now be working. Because of the used workaround only WIFI connections are supported.
- Bigger icon in application manager.
- Upload speed should now be at par with download speed.

Impossible?

UAC considered harmful

I have switched from XP to Windows 7 on my work machine recently. Everything was working fine until this has happened:
A quick research revealed the following (source):

Before a 32-bit process is created, the following attributes are checked to determine whether it is an installer:

• The file name includes keywords such as "install," "setup," or "update."

This is confirmed by changing the file name of the offending exe:
The executable of course is not an installer of any kind and does not require any extra privileges. It just reads two files and creates a third one. Furthermore, it's a third-party application and I can't just change its file name without breaking things for everyone else. There seems to be some kind of white list of trusted applications, but nobody other than Microsoft can modify it.

Without the ability to take that application out of UAC "protection" the only viable thing to do is to turn the UAC off. Great work! I feel more secure already.

dftpd 0.1.1 available

New version of symbian FTP server has been published.

Changes:
- Empty directories are now listed correctly.
- Directory creation and removal is now implemented.

Download.

Major sound handling improvements in S60 SDL

Audio handling in S60v3 SDL port was thoroughly broken. Well, it managed to play something, but the way it did that was just horrid.

In case of OpenTTD, the difference between the 'sdl' and 'null' audio drivers was very much visible. The game had that smooth feeling to it when no audio was playing, but was jerky with the sounds enabled. To make things worse there were cracks and pops just about all the time, which added more of that unpleasant "the phone can't handle it" feeling. Fortunately, these problems are now a thing of the past.

The taxation problem was fixed by these commits. The original author has some really weird ideas there. Introduction of multiple audio buffers increases the audio lag without any benefits. And the handling of audio buffer is just crazy. I will quote the commit message here:

Audio buffer size is there to allow a balancing act between smooth sound playback (ie. big buffer) and low latency times (ie. small buffer). The original author clearly didn't understood this concept, as the buffer size here always was 256 bytes, which resulted in playback system that had all the minuses of the two approaches but no pluses.

With one problem handled, the next one was just around the corner. The cracks and pops may not be easy to hear, but you'll for sure get a feeling that something's wrong. I even have a waveform plot with the gaps in audio data shown: The solution of that problem was to remove some never-correct delay time calculations and use a mutex-like mechanism to handle internal SDL audio wait. With that done the sound is now flawless.

There's also some new functionality added:

• With silent profile enabled SDL will mute the audio. Mixing will still be done, for the need of games expecting audio-timer synchronization.
• When the game is out of focus the audio will be disabled as well as mixing, to reduce energy usage.
• In out of focus situations the video blit incurs a 0.1s delay to reduce power usage. The wait time is rather short for better responsivity when focus is regained and for some rare situations when the screen needs to be redrawn.

Thanks to the above changes the phone with OpenTTD in background now consumes just 0.13W of energy. Comparing it to total idle consumption of 0.11W and previous OpenTTD consumption of 0.5W it's a substantial improvement.

OpenTTD battery usage

Energy usage (ie. battery life) has been brought to my attention recently. As can be seen above, OpenTTD running in background doesn't handle things nice and battery drain is much greater than it should be.

The average value for "OpenTTD running" is 1,07W, for "OpenTTD in background" it's 0,51W and for "Idle" it's 0,11W.

Other Symbian SDL ports also will have this problem. So, quick advice: don't leave OpenTTD, C2Doom, ScummVM running on the phone in background, your battery will die very quickly if you do so.

Edit: The background energy usage of my SDL's port has been reduced to 0,13W.