In Berlin, we’re playing with the webcam and we’re now broadcasting Rockbox devcon live using the fun service of ustream.tv. Check this:
Update: I replaced the actual stream with a capture screen capture after the event.
Category Archives: Open Source
Open Source, Free Software, and similar
Rockbox Devcon kind of starts today
In just a few hours I’ll take off to Berlin to go visit The Rockbox International European Developers Conference 2008. This year is hopefully going to become the biggest devcon so far. If you’re in Berlin this weekend, show up and say hello!
For you people living on a continent more to the west, keep your eyes open for DevconWest2008, probably taking place August 22nd to the 23rd somewhere in the US.
Bright Mobile Open Source Future
There have been so many open source initiatives for mobile phones in recent years it’s not even funny (limo, openmoko, Android to name some of the possibly biggest ones). The amount of actual phones on the market using one of them have been very very limited. Apparently there are some Motorola phones running Linux and you can get the Linux-based Nokia N800 tablets but they’re not even phones!
Obviously something has happened in the market though. Perhaps all those initiatives have pushed the big ones into thinking in more open source ways. The most interesting part of today’s news about Nokia buying the entire Symbian is their stated intension to open source it. (they’ve even already chosen the Eclipse Public License for it). It’ll be intereseting to see if there’s any interesting synergies coming up from Nokia’s previous purchase of Trolltech.
Of course, even Symbian has but a small fraction of the entire phone market as they sold 18.5 millions units in Q1 2008. IDC says 291 million phones were sold in the world during Q1 2008, which thus should position Symbian on roughly 6% of the phones that are sold today in the world!
I’m also curious if this will mean that Nokia will use Symbian on a larger scale on their own phones, as currently they seem to use Symbian only on a very small portion of their high-end phones. With Nokia owning the whole thing, they might see a bigger motivation to consolidate their own use of operating systems.
Rockbox devcon tshirts
As previous years, Haxx is sponsoring the Rockbox team with a set of tshirts for Devcon this upcoming weekend.
If you intend to show up in Berlin and join us, do tell me (on IRC or email) your preferred tshirt size, M, L or XL, so that we can bring along the suitable amount of shirts of proper sizes.
My best spam rules right now
I’ve already before mentioned my antispam setup, but today I just ran a little check on my “hispam” mailbox (the spams with so high spam points that I never even bother to check them for false positives), 43MB of 7900+ spams (received during ~40 hours), to see which ones of my own handicrafted rules that get triggered the most. I use a set of 40+ custom spamassassin rules to help it trigger more mails as spam, since some of the very short mails seem to be hard to catch otherwise, and some of the mails are in many ways looking like mail I would normally get.
Anyway, my top-10 rules are:
- 1624 6.0 DS_BODY_DRUGBRANDÂ Â Â Â Â BODY: mentions drug brand
- 1428 6.0 DS_SUBJECT_DRUGBRANDÂ Â Subject mentions drug brand
- 828 6.0 DS_FROM_HAXXÂ Â Â Â spoofed haxx.se address
- 769 4.0 DS_BODY_DISCOUNTÂ Â Â BODY: mentions percent discount
- 745 4.0 DS_SUBJECT_DISCOUNTÂ Â subject mentions percent discount
- 415 2.1 DS_TO_OWNERÂ Â To contains -owner
- 200 6.0 DS_BODY_NODOCTORÂ BODY: mentions “no doctor”
- 195 2.0 DS_MAILER_THEBATÂ sent with the bat
- 189 6.0 DS_BODY_DESIGNBRANDSÂ BODY: mentions designer brand(s)
- 158 3.0 DS_BODY_REPLICASÂ BODY: speaks of replicas
The first number is number of hits. The second is the “spam points” I assign a match. Then there’s the name of the rule and my description for it. The “spam points” can best be seen relative to the other rules, as what makes a single mail a spam in the end involves multiple factors that aren’t shown here.
Debian Unstable – yes Unstable
For the last few years I’ve been running Debian systems for most of my home machines and the handful of servers I admin. I tend to run Debian Unstable on my desktops and development machines and Debian Testing on the servers.
I have no idea what Debian release names these corresponds to and I really really don’t care. People sometimes ask me or tell me about their Sid or Lenny or whatever the names are and I can just never learn them and I really don’t need to know them.
I dist-upgrade most of my machines frequently so I’m really not on any of Sid or Lenny or similar. I’m truly on Testing and Unstable, and even if I think Unstable possibly is a rather unfortunate name I think they are more describing as they are mere labels on very moving targets and remain the same over the years independent of Debian doing releases or not. Which is just a reason for me to just not care at all if Debian does infrequent releases or not, as long as packages go into these repos without too much lag.
Sound on the D2!
Rob Purchase just blurbed the news on IRC that he has now made Rockbox on the Cowon D2 produce its first 10 seconds of (ear-blasting) sound!
Portably Yours
One day in late 2001 I had a talk with my brother Björn and our mutual friend Linus about how their portable MP3 player was very cool but the software/firmware on it was rather limited and lame in many ways. (Correct, I didn’t own any portable music player at that time). As usual, we brought up the idea about being able to hack it yourself and oh how good couldn’t you make it then? Not very long afterwards, we had a mailing list setup for discussing how to reverse engineer and improve the Archos Player firmware. Personally, I had no device yet but it sounded like good fun so I subscribed and participated from the start. After a few months, I got myself an Archos Recorder to be able to get down on the metal too, and the Recorder was also slightly different and thus brought some more challenges to the team.
Archos Recorder
The Recorder was a step forwards since it provided better sound and a (gasp!) graphical LCD. Some of the first work I did in the Rockbox project was to work on the code for the LCD, to bring text to it using fonts and to provide line drawing routines etc. Keeping the entire screen in a separate “frame buffer” that is updated to the screen with a lcd_update() call was an early design decision that has stuck ever since.
We took the Rockbox a long way supporting more and more of the early SH-based Archos targets, including the V2s, the FM and the Ondio series. But eventually of course the models started to get hard to get and out of production. It was time to start looking into moving to other targets, and other targets would more or less force us into a world with software audio codecs!
I got my original Recorder stolen, but I had it replaced and put in a 80GB disk and it was much rejoicing.
iriver h140
We did scan the market for targets that used somewhat standard components for which we could get specs and docs and we found the iriver h1x0 series and the work began. As usual we got plenty of help from everywhere and it didn’t take too long to show the nay-sayers that we could indeed transition Rockbox into the future with software codecs. We also took it to the h3x0 series with its color screen not that long after and my golly, didn’t an entirely new world of opportunities open? 40GB of disk was just about enough to hold most of my music collection.
iAudio X5
What’s the fun of Rockbox if I couldn’t follow along? I got the iAudio X5 early on in the porting effort and joined in and got my first color-screen target. Of course I didn’t like how the mere 20GB disk narrowed what music I was bringing with me, but hey some sacrifices had to be made for the greater good of advancing Rockbox! 😉
Rockbox was now booming and flourishing, coming to new targets all over and getting more and more developers involved.
Sansa E260
A guy from SanDisk contacted us asking about a Rockbox port to their Sansa E200 series, and even though they sent me a bunch of targets etc they never provided any docs or actual help on the effort of porting Rockbox to these babies. Not even the figuring out the firmware format, as that was instead made by our own secret super-hero MrH.
Meizu M6
Time flies and soon enough (like in the late 2007) none of the targets Rockbox ran fine on were no longer being manufactured and started to get hard to get in shops all over the world. The eternal race to get Rockbox ported to a currently manufactured model of course just got more important.
It was almost two years since I got the Sansa e200 series from SanDisk and it was time to join in the efforts of bringing Rockbox to some Meizus. The amount of interested people and the existence of a (leaked) data sheet for the main SoC helped me settle for buying this.
Cowon D2
As I’ve already explained, I bought a D2 too at the same time I got the Meizu so that I could do comparison for people and just play around some extra.
Of course, my timing is dubious as I got my two new targets exactly at the same period in my life when I went back to work (almost) full-time from having been on paternity leave for six months. Together with my extra “admin duties” such as the euro devcon and gsoc 2008 happening, I really haven’t had much time to actually dive into low-level fiddling with the ports yet. Hopefully I soon get adjusted and get some time to really help out.
Rockbox on Sansa C100
Marc Guay has been doing great progress on the SanDisk Sansa C100 port of Rockbox lately, and today he showed-off some recent proofs of the state of affairs with this early and crude screen shot:
Countdown to Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008
Here’s a very useful page I hacked up for all you people going to the Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008. It should help you keep control of the time and the excitement!