Monthly Archives: May 2008

Development, Linux

Blaming Debian packaging

1 Comment

I happened to read the blog post called Open-Source Security Idiots which really is having a go at the poor Debian maintainer of OpenSSL for causing the recent much debated OpenSSL security problem in Debian and Debian-based distros.

While I think the author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is mostly correct about his criticism, I think he’s being far too specific and trying to pinpoint Debian and claiming that to be a single specific bad distro (and his additional confused complaint on Firefox vs Iceweasel just made the article lose focus).

As someone who’s involved in a bunch of projects that are being packed by a range of Linux distros, I can’t but to disagree. This habit of changing packages without passing the changes upstream is wide-spread and not limited to changes done by maintainers since it also includes mere bug reports. It is something that just about every distro is doing to at least some extent. It varies from package to package and over time, but given an overview I honestly can’t say that there’s a single specific distro that is worse than the others. It is a disease that follows the distros and we must all help out to exterminate it.

Of course, the upstream projects also need to be aware of this and help pushing packagers of their software to behave.

Rockbox

Rockbox downloads April 2008

I counted the Rockbox downloads from build.rockbox.org during April 2008, and while the results weren’t very different from the past results, I thought I’d still show them. This month, 99874 downloads were counted and we had 30 different packages downloaded. Back in January, we still only had 26 versions. The top-5 are identical to the last list.

The most popular newcomer since my last count is the Olympus Mrobe 100 which has more than twice the number of downloads compared to the second newcomer iAudio m3.

The list shows model and number of downloads. The newcomers since the last count are shown bold.

  1. sansae200 22038
  2. ipodvideo 18289
  3. ipodvideo64mb 12392
  4. ipodnano 12261
  5. sansac200 4176
  6. h300 3071
  7. ipodcolor 2932
  8. ipodmini2g 2875
  9. gigabeatf 2848
  10. ipod4gray 2651
  11. h120 2506
  12. iaudiox5 2498
  13. ipod3g 1717
  14. ipodmini1g 1496
  15. ipod1g2g 1411
  16. h10 1361
  17. h10_5gb 1268
  18. mrobe100 1116
  19. player 564
  20. iaudiom3 528
  21. recorder 500
  22. iaudiom5 284
  23. h100 275
  24. recorder8mb 233
  25. recorderv2 157
  26. cowond2 138
  27. fmrecorder 116
  28. ondiofm 108
  29. ondiosp 58
  30. mrobe500 7

Open Source

ipwhere on sourceforge

I finally got around to add my ipwhere project to sourceforge and I’ve just imported the source code into the SVN repo, so now it’ll be a bit easier to cooperate on this project.

ipwhere is a tool that looks up and presents the country and city of a specified IP adress. It has the entire lookup table built-in so the result is instant. Of course the downside is that it needs to be updated every now and then to prevent the data from growing too old and irrelevant! It uses the geomapping info from hostip.info.

It is the 18th project on sourceforge that I’m a member of, and the 16th I admin.

cURL and libcurl

libcurl send/recv functions

libcurl’s two newly added functions curl_easy_send() and curl_easy_recv() add a new way of working with data in libcurl. These two are just sending and receiving whatever on a connection previously setup with curl_easy_perform() with the CONNECT_ONLY option set.

I haven’t yet made the web site display the man pages for these functions, as the patch for them was just committed minutes ago. Update: the man pages is now added and this post has the links.

Get a feel for how it can work by reading the sendrecv.c example source.

Blogging, Open Source

WordPress quirks and edits

There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with WordPress and here comes two more:

I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!

I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within WordPress) at all, but the annoying part is that even though the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.

A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!

While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes – which WordPress can’t do by itself!

Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!

Rockbox

More fresh Rockbox targets

I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:

Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.

Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.

Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!

SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.

SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!

SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…

Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.

I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…

Development, Electronics, Rockbox, Technology

My phone does not replace my Rockbox

I have one of them mp3 capable mobile phones and I have a 4GB NAND flash inserted in it that is packed with music I like. Yet I never end up using it as a music player.

I see people everywhere use their phones for music and I repeatedly read and hear the soon coming death of the portable music player being predicted not far away by opinion-expressing know-it-allers.

My phone plays mp3 files just fine, but there are several reasons why I don’t use it for that. The primary one being that it gets a lousy battery run-time if I do that, and if I’d run down the battery all the way when listening to music then how would I be able to use the phone for regular voice? With a separate (Rockbox) device I can listen to music until the last drop of power goes out without hampering my communication abilities.

In my particular case, my phone’s lack of a proper standard USB port and it’s lack of anything but “full speed” (and yes full speed is less than high speed and is a lot slower than it sounds) when connecting it using the custom cable to my Linux box are two more reasons. Not to mention that it has this “database-only” approach to the music which I really don’t like – but yeah, I can learn to live with it.

Besides, it’ll be a while longer until I can hack my phone to run Rockbox and thus work the way I want it. Let’s hope Android or OpenMoko or similar efforts actually make it possible one day.

Blogging, Open Source

WordPress unmanages comments

Blah, so I get a large amount of spam comments and trackbacks to my blog and I go over them and mark them as spam regularly. They don’t appear on the site, they just end up in my attention queue and I need to deal with them and take care of the occasional “true” comment as well.

When I do this I press the Awaiting Moderation (15) link (assuming I have fifteen comments awaiting), select them all and then press Mark As Spam and I’m fine.

Right now I managed to error. I didn’t press the awaiting link and then I had the list of all comments shown and since there were many comments I got to see the last 20 comments or so. I selected them all (all comments on that page) and marked them as spam. Whaaaaaa. Pain! That was not very clever! Several legitimate comments now went down the drain and…

There’s no way to restore them, there’s no undo the deletion, there’s no “oh wait these aren’t spam really” way.

Grrrr. So guys, if I removed one of your comments you should know that I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll try to improve…