Calling All Innovators N900 prize winner(s!) announced
A few days after the announcement of the overall winners of Nokia's "Calling All Innovators" competition, the special prize for the "Best application for the N900" has been awarded to two separate projects: Stellarium Mobile by Fabien Chéreau (Germany) and FrontView900 by Ben Lau (Hong Kong). Congratulations to both. Hopefully this will encourage the developers of Stellarium to continue its development (there is only one version in the maemo.org Extras-devel repository and it hasn't been updated since June); Ben Lau's FrontViewN900 has been stable in Extras since July.
Prevent battery drain with suspendprocess
Battery drain is a frequent issue for application developers targeting mobile platforms (especially when those developers are working with code from a desktop environment). To assist with these issues, Mikko Vartiainen released suspendprocess which simplifies process suspention when, for instance, the screen turns off. Attila Csipa writes: It has been difficult for many developers to comply with many of the recommended power-saving practices for Maemo, especially those porting apps from desktop environments. I'm not sure how many of you noticed already, but in the best hack-tradition of the N900 mikkov made a suspendprocess package, not unlike what was talked about on this list - which could allow many of these power-guzzling apps to become a little more suspend-power-friendly with little to no effort. If you're an application developer looking for easier ways to powersave (especially for SDL), be sure to check it out.
Recent security email reports lost, please re-submit
According to a post to the Maemo Developers mailing list, a mail server issue has resulted in emails to several of the maemo.org aliases being lost: There was a misconfiguration in the email forwarding on maemo.org that caused email to get lost without a bounce being sent back. We detected that about two weeks ago and got it fixed. However, we have lost all mail sent to this address during the breakdown, and would kindly request that you resend them if possible. This was really unfortunate and in a hindsight, we should have had a system in place where we would have detected this sooner. We now have a "heartbeat" pinger which should be able to alert us if something like this happens again. If you've sent a security email in the last couple of weeks, be sure to resend.