This is a bug fix week in curl land, trying to get everything sorted and fine to be able to release a really fine 7.17.1 release within a week or so. We got some nasty memory-related problems with changed protocols re-using the same easy handle, but it was good that they crept up and I think we’re doing good changes now that stabilize curl.
Release date now targeted perhaps around October 28-30.
A few guys are now discussing Rockbox for the D2 in the Rockbox forums.
The D2 is a Telechips equipped 2/4GB flash based player with a 2.5″ 320×240 touch screen and an FM tuner.
Recent progress are thanks to the tcctool that can upload code to a telechips MCU and execute it, thanks to the “usb-boot” mode.
Obviously Trolltech announced their killing of the Greenphone, a Linux and qtopia powered GSM phone. I was seriously trying to get one when they launched it, but during the time they had troubles providing me one I rethought my position about it and decided I didn’t really have time nor energy to work on it and thus I never ended up getting one…
So for the eager hackers wanting an open phone to hack on, I guess the Openmoko Neo1973 is now the evident “winner” of this moment.
Dave Chapman once considered a Rockbox port to this device, but has recently decided to skip that idea. So whoever were holding your breath: get another target model and start breathing again!
Or possibly get someone else interested enough to get the porting back on track again!
Still in China… I find it quite amazing that at the markets I’ve visited there are hoards of salespersons trying to sell me “ipods” that are almost exclusively all fakes. The fake/real ratio must be something like 20:1 or so!
While here, I’ve enjoyed a talk/lecture by a man called Fredrik Härén who lives here in Bejing. He talked about how China is developing at a marvelous pace and that we in the western world have “settled down” and if we don’t wake up and realize how things actually are, we are going to be overtaken by the asians a few years ahead. I think I’m quite prepared to agree with Fredrik on that. The Chinese are all hungry, eager and developing. We are full, laid back and more eager to teach others about how good we are…
Bejing is currently one gigantic construction area . They build countless skyskrapers, buildings, centers, streets, houses in preparation for the olympic games that will take off here in August next year. They also seem to more or less build the entire olympic setup: arenas and buildings etc from scratch. People who were in Bejing 10+ ago witness about how nothing is the same anymore. And quite frankly: Bejing is just another modern city with large buildings, streets and concrete. There are hardly any signs of anything Chinese, asian or eastern left in the city. I bet you can fool anyone that this is New York or Singapore or any other no-cultural-aura-left-world-city for quite some time if you’d just take a city tour. Amazing, but a bit boring. Impressive skyskrapers. I’ll love to see how the CCTV buildings will look like when they’re ready – two leaning towers currently under construction meant to be ready before the olympics.
Hey, I and Linus are blogging a bit about our week in China (in Swedish) on this separate blog.
It has been another busy week, and this time people brought up a range of stupid and annoying bugs:
…but also included Patrick Monnerat’s cool internal re-arrange to use handler structs for the various protocols.
Upcoming dates to check for:
As usual, post curl-related stuff on the mailing lists and not to me personally!
In Rockbox we’ve seen the gcc 4.2.x series introduce warnings on C code that really is perfectly fine, and also compiles warning-less on all other versions of gcc. (We use the 4.2.x series in Rockbox only for the simulator, built for running on host.)
In the linux-mips project, they’ve found gcc 4.2.2 to not even be able to build their kernel…It has been suggested that perhaps the best thing is to just skip to 4.3. Bugzilla entry.
MrH updated his Semi-Independent DMA Interface docs for the PortalPlayer PP5024, now at 0.6.
Yeps, it seems people these days do “4K” (4096 x 3112) movies when they want to be on the bleeding edge of digital movie resolutions. That’s more than 6 times the number of pixels of full HD (1920 x 1080).
Jonathan Schwartz of course sees an excellent opportunity to tout ZFS in this world of really really huge data amounts, since as he puts it “the digital master for an average 4k film is roughly 9 Terabytes” – and with working material included of course a lot more.
Now, I figure this of course is a perfect market for huge data storage and file systems that can deal with this, but my gosh this will stretch their backup systems to the limit – not to mention the problem with data longevity. How will this material and data live and be stored for future generations to be able to take advantage from it? I already have thoughts about this for my digital images and video snippets, but when the world is going towards insane data amounts and for almost every part of life, I can see how we in the future risk having less traces left from the past than what we have today from our past…
Also, if bluray/HD-DVD is suitable for HD content, what on earth will we need for 4K content?