Monthly Archives: July 2008

Blogging, cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Vacation days are slow days

I just wanted to drop a note saying that the biggest explanation for the silence and slowness of my blog the last couple of weeks have been my ongoing vacation, which is still going on for another two weeks.

Of course things are happening still, but due to my lack of computer time right now I tend to prioritize actually working with those things rather than posting here writing about the stuff I do/read/fix.

The Rockbox Steering Board vote is over, results will be published soon (spoiler: I’m voted in as one of the members). There’s a curl release coming up for August and we still have a few outstanding issues to fix. More on these topics later!

Electronics, Rockbox

Rockbox on the Onda VX747

7 Comments

Maurus Cuelenaere has been very busy lately with his work on porting Rockbox to the Onda VX747 player. This 3″ LCD 4GB/8GB flash player isn’t just touch screen and very ipod touch-looking, it is also equipped with the Ingenic Jz4732 chipset. This is particularly interesting because this baby boasts an XBurst processor, which has a MIPS core clocked at 240 to 400MHz.

In other words: this is the first MIPS-based target Rockbox is being made for. Maurus has custom code running on it, we have rockboxdev.sh adjusted to build a MIPS toolchain and there seem to be a handful of other Chinese PMP players using this chip family so this is a good chance to get a whole bunch of new targets at once. Just join the fun!

Get all the latests news on development for this target and chipset family in this forum thread.

Onda VX747

Normally I would link to the company’s official page about a player but this image will take you to a gadget blog site, simply because I cannot find any official site or page for this device!

Open Source

“Nordic” Projects?

4 Comments

It did struck me why the idea of handing the Nordic Free Software Award to a project feels like a bad idea: Free Software projects really aren’t geographical in general.

People tend to live at a fixed location for a specific time and thus you can say that N is living in a Nordic country or not.

Free Software projects however, are not even allowed to exclude people from other places and even projects that may origin at once place or even have its largest user-base in a particular geographical spot.

Last year’s Nordic Free Software Award was handed to Skolelinux since I believe the project origins in Norway (a nordic country) and some of the leading persons in the project are Norwegian. But is that then a nordic project? I don’t want to claim that it isn’t because I honestly don’t know, but their web site certainly says nothing about it being restricted or limited to nordic countries in any significant way. If it does, I couldn’t find it.

I am the primary person and maintainer behind curl but I wouldn’t dream of calling it a “nordic” project. The trio who started Rockbox are all Swedish but calling it a nordic project would just make me laugh.

Isn’t it so, that if you can come up with a “Nordic” Free Software project that currently only lives and strives within one or more Nordic countries without spreading itself over the world, isn’t that then more likely to be a proof of a failure of said project than anything else?

Open Source

Your favourite Free Software persoject!

2 Comments

So they’ve opened the nomination process for the Nordic Free Software Award 2008.

Now’s the perfect time to run over and submit your favourite “nordic” free software person and have him/her get some of the appreciation he/she deserves.

Ah you can in fact also nominate teams or projects for this award as well, as last year the Skolelinux was awarded the price. I’m actually not really sure that I like that. I think the price should either be for single persons or for teams and projects.

If you rather be in the jury for the awards, the guys are also looking for such people!

Web

This is the type and I mean it

1 Comment

So someone pointed out this IEBlog entry for me, and I find it so hilarious I felt a need to share the fun. See the “MIME-Handling: Sniffing Opt-Out” paragraph towards the end.

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and earlier just don’t care much for the Content-Type: header that servers reply, but they instead scan the body and guess what type it is. Thus “knowing better” than the content provider what content it truly is.

So in IE8 they’re (according to that blog entry) introducing a new attribute to the Content-Type header. If the site also sets “authoritative=true” it means it really means the type and the browser will then actually believe the site. I can’t stop giggling.

And yeah, some of the other craziness on that page is also good reading and they truly make you wonder what they are smoking during their brain storm meetings.