With over six months since the previous c-ares release, I’m happy to announce that I’ve just uploaded the 1.5.2 tarball to the usual c-ares project place.
The changes aren’t major in any way, but they’re improvements and they’re pushing c-ares forwards. You can browse the RELEASE-NOTES off the cvsweb.
I read an article at The Register about a Swede called Erik Nordenankar who decided to “paint” the world’s largest painting by packing a GPS in a suitcase and tracking where it goes then download the data and let the computer show the track with a line. Thus, by sending the bag in a creative way he’ll end up with a self portrait of GPS tracks.
Is this the same GPS technology that already has problems indoors of very many buildings? The GPS system that I bet will have a very hard time to function when flown around inside the luggage compartment of a modern jet airplane? I have a feeling that drawing will mostly be a lot of dots to draw lines between…
According to the article, this is a publicity stunt made by DHL.
Back at FSCONS ’07, I asked the guy doing the Openmoko presentation about whether they are going GTK or Qt, as his talk mentioned both and he didn’t really spell it out on what horse they were putting their money on. He then thought it was a really funny question and went on to explain how the Openmoko is like a small computer that can run anything you want. A bit like he was educating us that embedded devices do have CPUs that can run actual software. As if they wouldn’t have a main branch and a main development selecting one of these particular toolkits…
Many moon laps later, I discussed Openmoko with a friend over a few stouts at Snaxx 18, and he explained how he’d got one of the dev boards a long time ago and had kept up and tried a lot of versions of it and that it basically never worked to even make simple phone calls. He gave me the impression that perhaps the project wasn’t really that well run if it after this long still don’t have even the most basic functionality present and running stable.
Therefor I was happy to listen to TWIT 143 about the Dash Express and them telling me about it being based on the Openmoko platform. It felt like solid proof they are moving in the right direction then, so at least parts of the project must be functioning!
Then, to round it up it was with a big grin I read about the recent news that they are abandoning GTK and are now going to use E17 and Qt instead. Not a trace of any “this is like a small computer it can run anything” talk now (although I do understand that the statement was just something from this person and not any public endorsement from the project or so). This very same Ars Technica article says the first Openmoko based phone called Freerunner is going into “mass production stage next month” (that would be June 2008).
Personally, I can still see how making Rockbox run as an application on an Openmoko device would be a very cool thing.
I’ve always been proud of my ability to read and respond to email in a swift and reliable manner. I read and write emails every day, and most days I read mails more or less immediately as they land in my inbox.
However, during the recent year or so I’ve noticed that I’m no longer a reliable mail recipient. The amount of spam I get has made me tighten the screws so hard I get my share of false positives. The kind of mails that I need to rescue from my spam bin as they will otherwise suffer the death by delete. But how many do I miss? How often do I lose legitimate mails?
On some of the mailing lists I participate in, the spammers have started to send posts with my email in the From: field (circumventing the subscribers-only limitation), leading to me having to set my own mails as moderated to prevent spam to get posted… 🙁
As one of the last living dinosaurs on the planet still using text-based email clients, I realized that pine has been replaced by alpine and I upgraded to that. When doing some reading up on the subject, I noticed that there’s another old grumpy guy still using this client. I’m not sure exactly what that says…
Anyway, the upside of this switch is that this client is now distributed under a proper open source license (Apache license 2.0), as that’s what I’ve been getting in my face from mutt users for years when I’ve explained what I use! (I mean the complaint that pine wasn’t proper open source)
I got the latest Linux Journal issue (#170, June 2008) the other day and while reading through it I fell over the article about a guy who found a GPL license agreement among the papers for his brand new Sony TV.
… and there he also mentioned that they use curl! Fun! Apparently in their “Bravia Internet Video Link” product. Whatever that is… “Stream, browse and watch internet video and much more on your compatible BRAVIA® HDTV with the BRAVIA® Internet Video Link. It’s like extra channels for your new HDTV.”
The great guys at scan.coverity.com published their Open Source Report 2008 in which they detail findings about source code they’ve monitored and how quality and bug density etc have changed over time since they started scanning over 250 popular open source projects. curl is one of the projects included.
Some highlights from the report:
And the top-5 most frequently detected defects are:
For all details and more fun reading, see the full Open Source Report 2008 (1MB pdf)
Robert Menes uploaded some photos of an early Rockbox port running on his SanDisk Sansa m240 (v1), and this much thanks to Dave Chapman’s early work. This port still lacks NAND driver and various important things so you still need tcctool to get code onto the target, but at least there’s evidence of progress now!
Only a few years ago (autumn 2005) I was awarded a grant by iis.se (“The Internet Infrastructure Foundation” in Sweden) and in my subsequent work on the code for that project, I used libevent and implemented a high performance API for libcurl when dealing with very many simultaneous transfers.
Recently when I’ve read about people using the curl_multi_socket() API, I’ve seen mentions of the libev library and today when I’ve finally read up on the subject I fell over their very interesting performance comparison document comparing libev with libevent, including charts and all. Perhaps not a surprise when coming from one of the main the libev authors, but it seems libev does perform from some to significantly better than libevent depending on the circumstances.
When I get some time over I think I’ll try to port some of the example source codes over to use libev and see how it plays for me.
Update: I like how libev.com is used by Long Island Beverage Systems Inc… 🙂
We have a sort of symbiosis between the curl project and the PHP project, at least we in the curl project get a lot of people learning about curl the first time when they hack PHP. This happens to the extent that to a lot of people, curl is but the name of a PHP extension.
So while we can thank the PHP project for referring us a bunch of users that might not otherwise have found us, there is also quite some “friction” or perhaps better called “disagreements” between our projects and how we (don’t) interact.
name
CURL vs libcurl vs cURL. We only ever use the funny casing cURL when referring to the cURL project. The cURL project produces curl and libcurl. curl is a command line tool and libcurl is a file transfer library.
The PHP team provides and distributes an extension they call CURL which is a libcurl binding for PHP. This naming causes a great deal of confusion to PHP users who go to the curl site only to find that it isn’t at all devoted to (just) the PHP extension but instead there’s mostly a lot of other curl stuff there!
I’ve discussed this naming issue with the PHP team on several occasions but they don’t agree with me that this causes confusion, and even if it would cause confusion they seem to be of the opinion that it doesn’t matter since the PHP users should find all their info about CURL and related matters on the PHP site and thus it doesn’t matter what the curl site shows or not. (Or something similar to that, I really don’t mean to put words into their mouths so you better ask them about this to get their real and unaltered view – see my link to an old conversation for some info.)
I tend to call it PHP/CURL just to make sure it is clear that we’re talking about the binding. This of course also confuse users since that’s not what it is called in the PHP documentation…
irony
PHP themselves recognize the problem of related projects borrowing the name, so they forbid derivate projects to include “PHP” in their names. Clearly stated in paragraph 4 of their license.
versions
The binary build of PHP for windows have libcurl built in statically with the curl extension code, so people can’t easily replace the libcurl version used by PHP. And in general, Windows people using open source are much less likely to ever build anything on their own in my experience.
PHP 5.2.6 was released on May 1st 2008 still has libcurl 7.16.0 built into the Windows version. That libcurl version was released in October 2006 and right now we have released eight (8) releases after that one. All of them including many bug fixes. This is more than slightly annoying.
support
This isn’t anyone’s fault but… there really aren’t many PHP people who are involved or care about the libcurl binding so those who have PHP/CURL problems tend to ask questions on the curl-and-php mailing list and in the #curl IRC channel but there aren’t any PHP insiders around in those areas to answer PHP questions…
development
Is it just my imagination or isn’t there a lot of PHP users that have asked for the same features in the PHP libcurl binding for a long time by now, but really very few actually step forward and make a difference? So these features remain unfixed and not added. This is even “just” a binding, nothing of the really hard work is done in the binding itself… It might just be me and my head, but the ratio for doers/plain users in the PHP world seems to be exceptionally low in comparison to many other open source areas I see. Of course this is tainted by me only really seing the PHP/CURL side of the PHP world.
future
I have no reason to expect anything to change, nor do I know how I can make anything of this change on my own so I assume things will just continue working exactly like this in the future as well…