Monthly Archives: March 2012

Linux

Linux kernel code on TV

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In one of the fast-moving early scenes in episode 16 of Person of Interest at roughly 2:05 into the thing I caught this snapshot:

person of interest s01e16

(click the image to see a slightly bigger version)

It is only in sight for a fraction of a second. What is seen in the very narrow terminal screen on the right is source code scrolling by. Which source code you say? Take a look again. That my friends is kernel/groups.c from around line 30 in a recent Linux kernel. I bet that source file never had so many viewers before, although perhaps not that many actually appreciated this insight! 😉

And before anyone asks: no, there’s absolutely no point or relevance in showing this source code in this section. It is just a way for the guys to look techy. And to be fair, in my mind kernel code is fairly techy!

Open Source, Rockbox

No summer of Rockbox 2012

For the first summer in many years I’m not doing any admin or mentor work for an organization for Google’s Summer of Code program this year.

I’ve been mentoring, co-mentoring and admined within the Rockbox project the last… 4-5(?) summers and as a result I now have a good collection of t-shirts. 🙂 This year, the project sadly came to the conclusion that there was not a good enough number of mentors and projects ideas gathered for it to apply to become a mentor organization.

Taking care of a student for full-time work during many weeks is not something to take lightly. To do it properly you need a dedicated and qualified mentor. To provide a good starting point for students to figure out and come up with a good project proposal you need an really good and detailed list of ideas.

The gsoc task is hard enough as it is with many mentors and many good ideas, so when there’s a sign of us not being able to fill up both lists we thought it better not to waste anyone’s’ time or energy. We also value and treasure Google’s very fine help with open source over the years thanks to gsoc, and we would hate to end up looking like we try to just take advantage of our role of having been accepted as mentor organization for many years in a row in the past.

In the other end, I was very happy to see that my friends in the metalink project finally after having applied many years got accepted as a mentor organization. I’d like to think that perhaps we (as in the Rockbox project) by standing back this year can let others get the chance to shine and join in the fun.

There is nothing said or planned for Rockbox for next year. If people want to mentor and if we manage to get a good pile of ideas I’m sure we will apply to be a mentor organization again. If not, well then I’m sure other organizations will still participate in the program and possibly I will find myself involved in there via another project. I am involved in a bunch of other open source projects, but none of the ones I’m very active in have applied nor participated as mentor org in gsoc so far.

Haxx, Linux

Travel for fun or profit

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As a protocol geek I love working in my open source projects curl, libssh2, c-ares and spindly. I also participate in a few related IETF working groups around these protocols, and perhaps primarily I enjoy the HTTPbis crowd.

Meanwhile, I’m a consultant during the day and most of my projects and assignments involve embedded systems and primarily embedded Linux. The protocol part of my life tends to be left to get practiced during my “copious” amount of spare time – you know that time after your work, after you’ve spent time with your family and played with your kids and done the things you need to do at home to keep the household in a decent shape. That time when the rest of the family has gone to bed and you should too but if you did when would you ever get time to do that fun things you really want to do?

IETF has these great gatherings every now and then and they’re awesome places to just drown in protocol mumbo jumbo for several days. They’re being hosted by various cities all over the world so often I deem them too far away or too awkward to go to, also a lot because I rarely have any direct monetary gain or compensation for going but rather I’d have to do it as a vacation and pay for it myself.

IETF 83 is going to be held in Paris during March 25-30 and it is close enough for me to want to go and HTTPbis and a few other interesting work groups are having scheduled meetings. I really considered going, at least to meet up with HTTP friends.

Something very rare instead happened that prevents me from going there! My customer (for whom I work full-time since about six months and shall remain nameless for now) asked me to join their team and go visit the large embedded conference ESC in San Jose, California in the exact same week! It really wasn’ t a hard choice for me, since this is my job and being asked to do something because I’m wanted is a nice feeling and position – and they’re paying me to go there. It will also be my first time in California even though I guess I won’t get time to actually see much of it.

I hope to write a follow-up post later on about what I’m currently working with, once it has gone public.

cURL and libcurl

The updated web scraping howto

webbots-spiders-and-screen-scrapers

Web scraping is a practice that is basically as old as the web. The desire to extract contents or to machine- generate things from what perhaps was primarily intended to be presented to a browser and to humans pops up all the time.

When I first created the first tool that would later turn into curl back in 1997, it was for the purpose of scraping. When I added more protocols beyond the initial HTTP support it too was to extend its abilities to “scrape” contents for me.

I’ve not (yet!) met Michael Schrenk in person, although I’ve communicated with him back and forth over the years and back in 2007 I got a copy of his book Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers in its 1st edition. Already then I liked it to the extent that I posted this positive little review on the curl-and-php mailing list saying:

this book is a rare exception and previously unmatched to my knowledge in how it covers PHP/CURL. It explains to great details on how to write web clients using PHP/CURL, what pitfalls there are, how to make your code behave well and much more.

Fast-forward to the year 2011. I was contacted by Mike and his publisher at Nostarch, and I was asked to review the book with special regards to protocol facts and curl usage. I didn’t hesitate but gladly accepted as I liked the first edition already and I believe an updated version could be useful to people.

Now, in the early 2012 Mike’s efforts have turned out into a finished second edition of his book. With updated contents and a couple of new chapters, it is refreshed and extended. The web has changed since 2007 and so has this book! I hope that my contributions didn’t only annoy Mike but possibly I helped a little bit to make it even more accurate than the original version. If you find technical or factual errors in this edition, don’t feel shy to tell me (and Mike of course) about them!