This week end I’ll be attending and participating to FOSDEM. I am looking forward to meet the people I’ve been working for in the last months. There are many interesting talks, I hope to have time to watch them all.

I am very excited about this, not only because it is my first conference, but also because it’ll my first step into Europe. While being there, I’ll take a week off to visit Bonn and Köln in Germany.

I didn’t know there was a Star Trak LCARS theme for my N810. Thanks to Internet Tablet School for pointing it out to me. The guys who created the theme did a really good job copying the Star Trek user interface elements known as LCARS. They even changed the volume icons, battery and luminosity indicators, some are even more clear.

Surprisingly, my N810 feels much faster with this theme. I guess flat colors are less job to render than the default theme. Making an application fullscreen is now fast. There are even animations I never saw: did you know that the address bar was nicely resized when the progress bar appears in the Browser? I recommend this theme for every one who wants a faster tablet.

Congrats to the creators:

• LCARS PADD - Synthesize.us

I am surprised I didn’t encounter this bug myself since I use a keyboard layout with dead keys (French Canadian): until yesterday, it was possible (but with no good results) to input complex or some case of simple text in a web page with WebKit/Gtk+. For example, if you don’t have a ‘à’ key on your keyboard, you have to use a dead key ‘`’ first, then press ‘a’, well WebKit/Gtk+ would simply flush that ‘`’ you first entered. A 20 line patch completed the work started by Alp Toker and Christian Dywan among others to get Input Method Context supported.

I didn’t know dead keys were processed by the input method. It did require some searches to finally find how this works (I have to say, the GtkIMContext documentation is minimalistic or lacks an overview).

Now, the news is that not only can you enter accentuated characters like ‘à’, but you can now also use the other exotic (to me anyway ) Input Methods and they’ll actually work. With the upcoming fix on Asian fonts, we’re going to have a fully working world class web rendering platform.

Update: There seems to be some quirks left with Japanese for example, but I can’t be blamed, unfortunately I don’t understand it. I couldn’t know it wasn’t completely working.