Mardy

Teaser: connecting Nintendo Switch controllers to the Wii

Alberto Mardegan — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:13:06 GMT

A few months ago I started playing with the Bluetooth controller embedded in the Nintendo Wii, to see if it was possible to get it to connect to other devices than just the Wii remotes. If you ask internet forums, you might fall into the impression that the Wii is not using a standard Bluetooth controller, or that it has been somehow "crippled" in order to restrict it to connect to the Wiimotes only, but that's not the case: it's an ordinary controller from its era, it's just that the Wii software (both the official SDK and the homebrew libogc) only uses it for the Wiimotes.

I first started looking into lwBT, the bluetooth stack used in libogc, but I quickly realized that it was impossible to get full control over the controller via this library: it has been adapted to work with the subset of the HID protocol used by the Wiimotes, and even if you can issue bluetooth commands to the controller via the HCI layer, you cannot receive the replies, since they are already intercepted by lwBT and there's no way to hook into them.

So I started writing my own little bluetooth stack, bt-embedded which from the ground up has been designed to be used by embedded devices and covering the use case of serving different clients running in a single process, and I've integrated it into embedded-game-controller (though this is not merged into the master branch yet) in order to allow connecting to bluetooth controllers. And in the last couple of days I've written a little ugly program to visualize the controllers in a 3D scene, in order to better test them:

Yes, the 3D model sucks, it was a nice model when I downloaded it from a free site, but then heavily reduced the number of polygons using Blender and went a bit too far; I'll do a better model later. The accelerometer information is not shown yet (I'd like to use it to actually tilt the controller, instead of using the joystick), but that will not be hard.

At the moment, the only supported controllers are the Nintendo Switch Pro controller (I'm using a clone here) and the Joy-cons, so there's still quite some work to do to add more.

It's been a journey in which I learned a lot about Bluetooth and USB and, who knows, maybe this will come handy in the future too.

Choreograph is still alive

Alberto Mardegan — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:42:31 GMT

Back in 2023 I started writing a game -- which is still under development as I'm dedicating very little time to it -- and at a certain point I found myself in need of animating the movement of a few rectangles on the screen. Having decided to code the game in C++ and to use just libSDL as a base (in order to keep the game as portable as possible), I started looking around for existing solutions which would do just what I need: animating points between two values, while being display and platform agnostic.

Choreograph

I was happy to find the Choreograph library, which promised to do exactly what I needed, without bringing in any more dependencies. Integrating it in my project proved to be extremely easy, and it took me a few minutes to implement the animation.

All was perfect, except one thing: the last commit to the repository happened in 2016. I submitted a couple of minor fixes, and there was no reaction. Even though I was very happy with the library, I decided not to get tied to a project that was apparently dead, so I dropped this integration and instead wrote my own implementation -- which was just enough to fill my immediate need, but was unlikely to be reusable as a generic animation framework.

Over time, though, several times I happened to bump into a situation where I would have liked to add some animation, but given that I was not really happy with my home-brew solution, I always held myself back from this desire and focused on more substantial issues: so, no animations. In March this year I decided to write to the author of Choreograph to check whether he was still interested in maintaining the project, but got no answer.

A maintained fork

Well, one cannot certainly accuse me of being impatient in this case, since I waited a few more months before finally deciding that I find Choreograph to be too convenient to let it just rot. Here is my maintained (for how long, we'll see!) fork of the Choreograph project; so far I've added:

A few commits to fix compilation warnings
Recipes for the Meson build system, to make it easier to build the project in Linux
CI via GitHub actions
Updated the tests and the samples to build without libCinder

I'm not yet able to announce what I'm going to work on next in Choreograph; this will become clear as I'll be using it more. For the time being, it's enough for you to know that such a project exists, and I'll be happy to accept contributions in the form of code and ideas.

No, libogc did not steal RTEMS code

Alberto Mardegan — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 13:56:49 GMT

Update 09/05/2025: while the text below addresses a couple of specific blocks of code, after publishing this article I've been contacted by some people providing more evidence pointing that the similarity of the code goes beyond what one might interpret as “inspiration”. There are also a couple of other bits on information that the reader might want to take into account: first, a screenshot of an email in which Shagkur tells his version of how the code came about (which seems to point that, if a copyright infringement actually happened, this was done without the knowledge of devkitPro's maintainers) and a public statement by RTEMS.

All of a sudden the Wii homebrew community is in flames after Hector Martin (marcan, also known in the Linux Kernel community), co-author of “The Homebrew Channel” application, decided to close the project and denounce libogc for its “theft” of RTEMS's code:

It has recently been revealed that the threading/OS implementation in libogc is, in fact, stolen from RTEMS. The authors of libogc didn't just steal proprietary Nintendo code, but also saw it fit to steal an open source RTOS and remove all attribution and copyright information. This goes far beyond ignorance about the copyright implications of reverse engineering Nintendo binaries, and goes straight into outright deliberate, malicious code theft and copyright infringement.

A little below, Hector Martin provides this “proof”: you can compare this function in libogc to this function in a really old version of RTEMS.

While I don't know the truth about libogc's history (I've started contributing to it only in the last couple of years), and I'd welcome a first-hand explanation from shagkur (Michael Wiedenbauer), I can confidently say that the accusation is unfounded, by just looking at the code. To be more precise: I cannot vouch for the whole of libogc, I can only say that this function, that Hector Martin offers as example, actually hints that the code was not stolen.

While it's obvious that the developer of libogc's code did have a look at RTEMS's code, and this can be assumed because the variable names are very similar (and in some cases they are so badly named, that they cannot be this similar by accident!), the code only looks vaguely similar. Furthermore, for some reason Hector Martin decided to pick a rather recent version of libogc's code, but if we look at the first version that was committed (well, to git, at least), we see that similarities are much less striking. Let's look at a small snippet of the function, where the thread object's members are being initialized:

RTEMS from 1996:

  the_thread->Start.is_preemptible = is_preemptible;
  the_thread->Start.is_timeslice   = is_timeslice;
  the_thread->Start.isr_level      = isr_level;

  the_thread->current_state          = STATES_DORMANT;
  the_thread->resource_count         = 0;
  the_thread->real_priority          = priority;
  the_thread->Start.initial_priority = priority;

libogc from 2023:

    thethread->budget_algo = (prio<128 ? LWP_CPU_BUDGET_ALGO_NONE : LWP_CPU_BUDGET_ALGO_TIMESLICE);
    thethread->is_preemptible = is_preemtible;
    thethread->isr_level = isr_level;
    thethread->real_prio = prio;
    thethread->cur_state = LWP_STATES_DORMANT;
    thethread->cpu_time_budget = _lwp_ticks_per_timeslice;
    thethread->suspendcnt = 0;
    thethread->res_cnt = 0;

libogc from before 2004:

    thethread->isr_level = isr_level;
    thethread->real_prio = prio;
    thethread->cur_state = LWP_STATES_DORMANT;
    thethread->suspendcnt = 0;
    thethread->res_cnt = 0;

Let's pay attention to the is_preemtible variable, which is present in current's libogc and in RTEMS, but not in the old libogc: it was added later. Now, RTEMS has it since at least 1996, so, if libogc was actually copied from it, how come this variable was not copied, too, but added at a later time? Note, the accusation against libogc has been formulated in clear-cut terms: ...steal an open source RTOS and remove all attribution and copyright information...; it's clear that this is not what happened. It's much more likely that libogc's developers did look at RTEMS code (which at that time had another license and was known as the Real Time Executive for Missile Systems or Real Time Executive for Military Systems) as a model and source of information, but since the code was heavily adapted for libogc, they didn't feel they were creating a “derivative work”. It's a grey area, but even myself, if I took a project written in C++ and translated it into Rust or C#, for example, I'm rather sure I wouldn't consider my work to be a derivative of the original; I'm not a lawyer, so I might be plain wrong here, but I would be in good faith.

At most, libogc could be accused of plagiarism, but in my humble opinion even that would be a stretch: since we are not talking of some artistic work, but of work of science/ingeneering, it's normal to build upon others' work. Yes, credit should generally be given, but given that we are talking of a US military-related project, I can see that there could be ethical reasons for not wanting to do so.

Summing up

I'm consciously omitting the other old accusations about “stealing” Nintendo's code, first because they are not new, and secondly because I don't consider reverse-engineering as stealing. What I found most disturbing about this story is that it smells hatred from far away, since I have a hard time to understand why someone felt the need to look into libogc's origin and publicly smearing the project and ultimately harming the whole of the Wii homebrew community.

Porting OpenGL games to the Nintendo Wii: chro.mono

Alberto Mardegan — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 15:35:25 GMT

More than one year has passed since my last blog post, and I'm a bit ashamed to confess that today's post is again about porting games to the Nintendo Wii — I always tell to myself that I'm soon going to move to something else, possibly less geeky than this (by the way, there is something else I could write about, but I'll leave it for another post!), but the problems posed by porting games to an old console are just way too stimulating, and my brain gets attracted to them in a way that I cannot resist.

Anyway, have you ever heard of OpenGX? It's a project aiming to write an OpenGL driver for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii's GX API: while these consoles have good (at the time, at least) 3D capabilities, they were programmed via an API not even remotely close to OpenGL, so back in 2013 one developer by the name of David Guillen Fandos started a project to investigate the possibility of wrapping the GX API in OpenGL. The project was abandoned after reaching a very basic state, but it's author was diligent enough to write a PDF file describing its design and some implementation details. Having bumped into this document, I was inspired by it and felt it was a pity that such a project had died -- especially given the fact that this didn't happen because of some technical infeasibility. So exactly one year ago, in the spring of 2024, I picked it up and tried porting the game BillardGL to the Wii; I had to add quite a few things to OpenGX, and adjusting the lighting pipeline, but after less than one month the port of BillardGL was ready. In the following months, I ported several other OpenGL 1.x games, gradually enhancing and expanding OpenGX, until I got most of OpenGL 1.4 supported.

A 23 year old game was just ported to a 19 year old console.

Should I have stopped there? Probably. Because indeed the Wii's GPU, despite allowing a good degree of complexity in setting up its shading engine (called TEV, Texture Environment), does not support the modern GL shading language, and trying to have the CPU compile the shaders into something that GX could understand is a task doomed to fail, in part because this would eat up all the computing power, but especially because there simply isn't an algorithm that could translate GLSL into GX commands. Is this the end of the journey then?

Well, the fact that OpenGL 2.0+ shaders can not be machine-translated into GX commands does not mean that this task is impossible: we've still got the human brain to use! The idea is the following: let the deveoper who is porting the game write the GX code corresponding to the GLSL code by hand. Saying it like this might feel like this is no better than saying “Just port the whole rendering backend to GX!” but as a matter of facts, there's a big difference: with this approach all the rest of the OpenGL code stays untouched, and the way I have design this shader substitution to work in OpenGX allows one to keep the GX code isolated in its own source file, without having to change a single line of the program, save from adding a line near the beginning (in main(), typically) to install the GX hooks. This means that your program will still call glUniform*(), glVertexAttribPointer() and so on to setup the rendering pipeline, but when the program will get to execute glDrawArrays() OpenGX will pass control to the hooks previously installed, which will receive the uniforms and the attributes, and setup the pipeline using GX commands. It might seem complicated, but it really isn't (well, if you can deal with the GX API), and it's even more efficient than the fixed pipeline of OpenGL 1.x, since here the GX commands are reduced to the bare minimum required by the shader, whereas in the fixed pipeline we have to follow predefined steps.

chro.mono running on a Nintendo Wii.

The first (and for the time being, the last) OpenGL 2.0+ game I've ported to the Wii is chro.mono, a nice puzzle game from 2013 whose source code has been released in 2021. It uses the FBO feature from OpenGL 3.0, so I had to implement it in OpenGX as well. I'm quite satisfied with the result, not only because the game runs at 60 FPS, but because it shows how rather complex shaders (the game has more than a dozen of them) can be realized in GX; to tell the truth, in couple of cases I had to implement the fragment shader by converting its code to C and drawing to a temporary texture, but luckily these shaders are used only during program startup to draw to an FBO and don't negatively affect the game performance. You can download it from here.

Summing up, if you get really bored and would like to engage in something unusual (read: useless), porting games to older consoles would definitely keep you active for some time. Unfortunately there aren't that many OpenGL games which are open source, so the candidates for porting are not that many (by the way, feel free to suggest in the comments — well, not for me, but maybe someone else will do it).

libSDL2 and VVVVVV for the Wii

Alberto Mardegan — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 17:50:44 GMT

Just a quick update on something that I've been working on in my free time.

I recently refurbished my old Nintendo Wii, and for some reason I cannot yet explain (not even to myself) I got into homebrew programming and decided to port libSDL (the 2.x version -- a 1.x port already existed) to it. The result of this work is already available via the devkitPro distribution, and although I'm sure there are still many bugs, it's overall quite usable.

In order to prove it, I ported the game VVVVVV to the Wii:

During the process I had to fix quite a few bugs in my libSDL port and in a couple of other libraries used by VVVVVV, which will hopefully will make it easier to port more games. There's still an issue that bothers me, where the screen resolution seems to be not totally supported by my TV (or is it the HDMI adaptor's fault?), resulting in a few pixels being cut at the top and at the bottom of the screen. But unless you are a perfectionist, it's a minor issue.

In case you have a Wii to spare, or wouldn't mind playing on the Dolphin emulator, here's the link to the VVVVVV release. Have fun! :-)

Un canto russe, in italiano

Alberto Mardegan — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 06:21:09 GMT

Io vos propone mi traduction del canto russe “Porta me, fluvio” (Ты неси меня река es le version original):

Mi voce es un pochetto debile, alora si alicuno vole recantar lo melio, io esserea solmente felice de isto!

Will the internet forget russophobia?

Alberto Mardegan — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 07:41:02 GMT

I've often wondering what will happen when this horrific war in Europe will finally be over. I won't be discussing politics here, but what is mostly interesting to me is how (and if) all the companies who made high proclaims about not doing business with Russia will justify their getting back into the Russian market. They will probably count on the fact that the war will be long, and that people will forget what these companies' stance was. After all, the world has forget about all the companies who collaborated with the Nazi regime, so we can expect the same to happen with this war.

But I don't think that's right: if you made a mistake, you should be held accountable for it. You might be wondering what is the “mistake” I'm talking about: that's russophobia, indeed. To put it simply, and make a concrete example: if The Qt Company stops doing business with Russian companies and blocks its downloads page to Russian IP addresses because of the war, without being forced by the government to do so, but does not take similar measures against other countries who wage wars which have caused way more deaths and displacement of individuals, well, that's what I call “russophobia”. Of course, I'm aware that there's way more than that, and that the hatred for all what is Russian (including culture and sport competitions) is an even bigger issue, but in this blog post I'm especially focused on the IT world, so please forgive my semi-intentional narrow-mindness on this topic.

Now, I'm fully aware that we live in a mediatic bubble that directs our decisions in a way that is almost automatic, and I'm sure that most people working for companies who took russophobic decisions are not themselves russophobic at all (and I'm not dismissing the possibility that even the very same people who took these decisions might not be russophobic) and that these decisions were taken on impulse, because “everyone else is doing the same” and due to the media pressure that if you don't do that, you might get accused of supporting the “wrong” side of the war.

But that's not an excuse, especially for “smart” people like IT engineers (and I put the adjective between quotes for a reason), and especially after the initial heat has passed and when, after more than one year of war, we should have been exposed to different point of views and be able to evaluate the situation more rationally. It has been therefore especially stunning for me to learn that the Linux Kernel community, and hence The Linux Foundation, has recently given room to russophobic behaviours, refusing a patch coming from the Russian company Baikal (a CPU maker). For the record, the incriminated patch was not related to supporting hardware produced by this company (not that this would make the deed less serious, but at least one could have argued that there could be some spot of logic in it):

From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
To: Serge Semin <Sergey.Semin@baikalelectronics.ru>
[...]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2023 01:42:24 +0300 Serge Semin wrote:
> From: Serge Semin <Sergey.Semin@baikalelectronics.ru>

We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating 
to hardware produced by your organization.

Please withhold networking contributions until further notice.

(here the link to the original discussion). One week later, someone denounced this as a violation to the Code of Conduct committee (unfortunately the only link I could find to this is coming from a Russian IT forum, and any other references seem to have been removed from DuckDuckGo and Google), only to receive a reply that it was all fine.

To me this is not fine. The war will end, sooner or later, but it bothers me that we never learn from the past and repeat the same mistakes over and over. We apparently know a lot about propaganda, yet we fail to recognize it when it influences our own mind and actions. My humble contribution is the creation of a page where I list the companies who have taken russophobic actions, and, on the opposite side, companies (like Flickr and Zorin OS) who have stood out for positive messages and helpful actions. My hope is that some of the listed companies will find the courage to review their actions, and either correct their stance, or at least clarify their reasons. So, I hereby present

Denouncing russophobia

where you'll find some of the good and some of the bad companies. I'm sure I'm missing plenty of them: I just started recollecting my memories and searching online a couple of days ago. I created this as a GitHub project, because indeed I'm looking forward for contributions, to help me make the lists more complete. I need to stress that the fact that a company has announced the suspension of its business in Russia does not automatically make it russophobic: what we need to look at is the reason for that decision: companies like LEGO and Nintendo, for example, have suspended their operations citing logistic and financial reasons; no judgement involved.

Let me repeat it once more, just to make sure there are no misunderstandings: it's perfectly fine for businesses to take a stance on politics, and sometimes it might be even praiseworthy; but if a company is international, and does not apply the same reasoning to other armed conflicts, or seem to care only about certain human rights violations and not others, then it's a case of double standards which we need to be aware of, and make the company think twice about it. And that's also the reason why you won't find any Ukrainian company among the “bad” ones, because in their case the reaction is perfectly understandable and they can hardly be accused of adopting double standards (well, technically speaking, they are adopting double standards, but when you are so directly impacted I think it does not deserve a blame): if it's your house which burns, you should definitely scream about it, even if you previously have been silent about your neighbour house's burning.

I'm especially looking forward for more “good” companies, who have shown empathy towards the people affected by the war (and maybe even collected money to help them) while refraining from taking the judging role and forgetting about all the injustice and suffering that other wars have caused (including on that very same piece of land that suddenly appeared on all newspapers' front pages on February 24th, 2022). I hope that these companies can serve as an example of positive action, humanity, and love.

Un editoriale di Marco Travaglio

Alberto Mardegan — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 17:37:28 GMT

Nonostante io non legga più Il Fatto Quotidiano (per i motivi spiegati qui, che restano tuttora validi), continuo a imbattermi negli editoriali di Marco Travaglio, che spesso apprezzo. Oggi invece mi sono imbattuto nell'introduzione del suo nuovo libro “Scemi di guerra”, e ve ne riporto un estratto che ho trovato particolarmente incisivo.

Abbiamo abolito la storia. È vietato raccontare ciò che è accaduto in Ucraina prima del 24 febbraio 2022: gli otto anni di guerra civile in Donbass dopo il golpe bianco (anzi, nero) di Euromaidan nel 2014 e le migliaia di morti e feriti causati dai continui attacchi delle truppe di Kiev e delle milizie filo-naziste al seguito contro le popolazioni russofone e russofile che, col sostegno di Mosca, chiedevano l’indipendenza o almeno l’autonomia. Il tutto in barba ai due accordi di Minsk. La versione ufficiale, l’unica autorizzata, è che prima del 2022 non è successo niente: una mattina Putin s’è svegliato più pazzo del solito e ha invaso l’Ucraina. Se la gente scoprisse la verità, capirebbe che il mantra atlantista “Putin aggressore e Zelensky aggredito” vale solo dal 2022: prima, per otto anni, gli aggressori erano i governi di Kiev (l’ultimo, quello di Zelensky) e gli aggrediti i popoli del Donbass. Fra le vittime, c’è il giornalista italiano Andrea Rocchelli, ucciso dall’esercito ucraino… Abbiamo abolito la geografia. Proibito mostrare la cartina dell’allargamento della Nato a Est negli ultimi 25 anni (da 16 a 30 membri)… Eppure, che la Nato si sia allargata a Est, accerchiando e assediando la Russia, minacciandone la sicurezza con installazioni di missili nucleari sempre più vicine al confine, in barba alle promesse fatte a Gorbaciov nel 1990, fino all’ultima provocazione di annunciare l’imminente ingresso nell’Alleanza dei vicini di casa della Russia – Georgia e Ucraina – è un fatto storico indiscutibile…

L’altra cartina proibita è quella dei Paesi che non condannano o non sanzionano la Russia, o se ne restano neutrali: quasi tutta l’Asia, l’Africa e l’America Latina, cioè l’87% della popolazione mondiale. Ma al nostro piccolo mondo antico occidentale piace far credere che Putin è isolato e noi lo stiamo circondando. Sul fatto che Cina, India, Brasile e altri paesucoli stiano con lui o non stiano con noi, meglio sorvolare: altrimenti lo capiscono tutti che le sanzioni non funzionano… Solo abolendo la storia si può credere al presidente Sergio Mattarella quando ripete che “l’Ucraina è la prima guerra nel cuore dell’Europa nel dopoguerra”. E Belgrado bombardata anche dall’Italia nel 1999 dov’è, in Oceania? E chi era il vicepremier del governo D’Alema che bombardava Belgrado? Un certo Mattarella… Abbiamo abolito il rispetto per le altre culture. In una folle ondata di russofobia, abbiamo visto ostracizzare direttori d’orchestra, cantanti liriche, pianiste di fama mondiale, fotografi, atleti (anche paraolimpici), persino gatti e querce, soltanto perché russi. E poi censurare corsi su Dostoevskij, cancellare dai teatri i balletti di Cajkovskij, addirittura estromettere la delegazione russa dalle celebrazioni per la liberazione di Auschwitz. Come se il lager l’avessero liberato gli americani o gli ucraini e non l’Armata Rossa… i trombettieri della Nato propagandano la bufala dell’“euroatlantismo” e gli scemi di guerra se la bevono, senz’accorgersi che mai come oggi gli interessi dell’Europa sono opposti a quelli dell’America.

A peace plan for Ukraine

Alberto Mardegan — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 19:33:56 GMT

Among the peace plans proposed by various European and U.S. politicians, to be frank, I haven't read a single one which I would consider even remotely feasible. My impression is that such plans have been redacted more for a need to fool one's voters and present onself as a peace operator (whereas one factually supports sending of weapons and tightening of sanctions) than for a genuine peace effort, since every politician that had spent even just a few minutes to document oneself on the situation around Ukraine would perfectly know that these peace plans are not just unacceptable by the Russians, but plainly unpresentable.

A believable peace plan must first and foremost take into account the reasons that pushed Russia to invade Ukraine and, above all, those who push the Russian people to support the war. It's certainly legitimate, and even reasonable, to doubt the official reasons: on the contrary, it's very likely that the reasons who push Russia to continue this “special operation” are, at least in part, others, economical in nature and to the benefit of a few especially powerful individuals (arm producers above all). We can put our heart at rest, and accept the fact that we'll never get to know the real reasons; but, on the other hand, it's not even so important to know them, after all.

What we really need to know is the mood of the Russian population, and especially the reasons why president Putin's popularity has risen after the invasion of Ukraine. The mainstream information we get in the West is not helpful at all in this, because it's since 2014 that it omits reporting important facts about the war in Donbass. Well, nowadays the Russian people are constantly fed images of civilians dying in Donetsk and in other cities of the Donbass, right in the center of the cities, where there are no military targets. We can call it propaganda, sure, but the facts are real and are just an aggravated continuation of what has been happening for the past 8 years, all well documented by the OSCE mission and by the Office of the High Commissioner of the Human Rights of the United Nations¹.

Besides, the massive transfer of weapons and the episodes of discrimination against Russian artists, athletes, personalities of the culture and entertainment, sometimes against the very Russian language, these are all widely publicized by local mass media and get the Russians convinced that their country is fighting an existential war against a horde of fascists, and, militarily, against the whole of NATO.

If the West had really the will to restore peace it should work to destroy this representation of itself and disarm the Russian propaganda by removing the facts on which it's built. Specifically, I'm persuaded that many of the following points would be well received by the Western population and would demotivate the Russian people (including many of the soldiers stationed at the front) in fighting this fratricidal war:

Removal of every discrimination against Russian culture and its representatives and performers.
Promise that Ukraine won't be let into NATO or in other military alliances that would go beyond the commitment to reciprocal defense (that is, no to joint military drills or foreign bases in the territory of Ukraine, yes to a promise of military intervention in case of attack).
Pausing the shipment of weapons until Ukraine removes the title of hero of Ukraine to Stepan Bandera and other members of the nazist organisation UPA.
Pausing the shipment of weapons until Ukraine stops bombing civilian settlements devoid of military installations.

It should be noted that none of these points require collaboration or agreements between states (even joining NATO can only happen after the unanymous vote of all current members, as Turkey reminds us), so they all could be immediately implemented by any willing state. The bigger the number of Western countries pushing forward these policies, the more uncertainty will grow among the Russian population, and will ultimately transform into incomprehension and dissatisfaction, since this would destroy the ideological reasons that make the Russians support the conflict.

If we are to speak of a peace plan, agreed among NATO, Ukraine and Russia, then it could be developed along these lines:

Ukraine condemns the nazist ideology (therefore Bandera and friends), accepts to open an international commission of inquiry (including Russia as well) over the massacres of Maidan square and Odessa.
Ukraine grants the status of second official language to the Russian language, similarly to how Swedish language is treated in Finland².
Ukraine enacts laws to guarantee a limited autonomy to the 5 regions currently under Russian control (including Crimea) and amnesty for all those rebels that are not found guilty of war crimes (in other words, a sort of Minsk accords extended to all the occupied regions).
Ukraine promises not to host military forces or equipment from other countries in its territory, and to not participate in joint military drills, without the consent of the Russian federation. It can, however, join defensive military alliances.
Ukraine promises to never enact sanctions against Russia, nor to require visa from Russian citizens in order to cross its borders.
The Russian army withdraws and gets temporarily replaced by the army of a third country, not member of NATO, chosen by Ukraine.
New referendums, under the supervision of international observers (including Ukrainians and Russians) in the 5 contested regions. Times will be established by Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine commit to recognize and implement their results.
The peace mission introduced in point 6 gets wrapped up.

It's of fundamental importance understanding that territorial questions are only a secondary matter, and that what is most pressing for the Russian people is to have good relations with the neighbouring countries: not having to worry about coups, colour revolutions stirred up by the West or about other attempts to use Ukraine as a weapon against Russia. If, for example, there were a Russian region that desired to separate itself from the federation and join Belarus, I'm convinced that this could happen in a peaceful way without serious repercussions, since the relationships between the two countries are good and Belarus is not perceived as a threat. This was also the situation with Ukraine before 2014³, and it's the situation to which we should strive to return to.

See for example the report for the period May-August 2018, page 5, point 22. More reports can be found in this list. ↩
Note that Swedish in Finland is the native language for just 5% of the population, whereas in Ukraine Russian is the native language of about 30% of the population. ↩
Not exactly, since there had already been attempts at colour revolutions resulting in anti-Russian governments. But I hope you'll pass this oversimplification of mine here. ↩

Back to Maemo!

Alberto Mardegan — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 19:48:52 GMT

New year, new job. After leaving Canonical I'm back to working on the same software platform on which I started working back in 2006: Maemo. Well, not exactly the vanilla Maemo, but rather its evolution known as Aurora OS, which is based on Sailfish OS. This means I'm actually back to fixing the very same bugs I introduced back then when I was working in Nokia, since a lot of the middleware has remained the same.

At the moment OMP (the company developing Aurora OS) is mostly (or even exclusively, AFAIK) targeting business customers, meaning corporations such as the Russian posts and the railway company, whereas the consumer market is seen as something in the far away future. Just in case you were curious whether there were any devices on sale with Aurora OS.

I should also explain why I've refused several very well paying job opportunities from Western companies: it's actually for a reason that has been bothering me since last March, and it's a very simple one. The fact is that because of the sanctions against Russia I already had to change bank once (as the one I was using fell under sanctions), and in these months I've always been working with the fear of not being able to receive my salary, since new sanctions are introduced every month and more and more banks are being added to the blacklist. That's why I've restricted my job search to companies having an official presence in Russia; and to my surprise (and from some point of view, I could even say disappointment) the selection and hiring processes were so quick that I received three concrete offers while I was still working my last weeks at Canonical, and I joined OMP on that very Monday after my last Friday at Canonical.

I mean, I could have rested a bit, at least until the Christmas holidays, but no. ☺ Anyway, I'm so far very happy with my new job, and speaking Russian at work is something totally new for me, both challenging and rewarding at the same time.