Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

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…

Open Source

Burn Info, burn!

2 Comments

There’s one thing the GNU project has done wrong (and thus the followers of it, like the Debian Linux distribution and others) and it is with their stupid preference to not provide proper man pages but instead insist that the user runs “info [whatever]”. In Debian you also very often have to install a separate doc package to get those info files, and I fail to see the logic in providing tools and libs etc without the proper docs. (and in fact in many cases the info page shows the man page until you get that proper package installed!)

Man pages may not be the best format in the world for docs, but I rather have a proper man page for all commands and then I’ll go html online for extended information. Info is just plain annoying and we should bury it. The sooner the better!

And yes, it is not a coincidence that no project I’m actively driving as a proper contributor are producing any Info documents…

cURL and libcurl

curl on z/os, symbian and os21

The curl project continues to conquer new markets and it continues to get ported to more platforms and operating systems. Just recently there have been reports about…

  1. A port to the IBM z/OS system, with the official IBM info about it being found here.
  2. Dan Fandrich ported it to the Symbian OS
  3. Christian Vogt mentioned that he had no troubles porting and using it on OS21

I’m trying to maintain a list of all CPUs and operating systems we have known ports being run on and if you have curl and/or libcurl running on another than the ones I list at the bottom of the INSTALL document, please let me know!

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

More Means Less

1 Comment

Less is more it is said, and I can certainly subscribe to the reverse: more means less. The two primary open source projects I spend time in have been growing the last years, in source code contributions, but also in amount of users and in amount of contributors. I see the similar effects on myself and on my own role in both Rockbox and curl: I do more and more coordination, planning, admin work, talk (chatting on IRC, responding to mails etc) and “guidance” than actual coding work. My code/non-code work ratio has decreased massively.

This is not complaint, just an observation!

It makes sense to me that early on in a project, and until there’s enough momentum to get the project to more or less drive itself, it is important with a driving core that pushes the project forward. That makes sure every little peace fits together and gets the proper attention to make it a good product and project. As time goes by, more and more people get that knowledge, that ability and the amount of people that drive the project forward increases.

So being an “elderly” in both these projects, I’m more of an advisor, talker, tinker, admin, than a lead programmer now. This is at least most notable in Rockbox, since we have 80 committers now and I think at least 50 of them are active.

I probably spend roughly the same amount of time: somewhere around 2-3 hours/day on my open source projects.

Of course, in my particular case exactly now, I’ve also just recently ramped up my working hours and find myself trying to get accustomed to this life with full-time work, a two-kids-and-wife family and several time-consuming spare time projects. It takes a great deal of juggling and less sleeping.

Nothing is forever so I’m certain my situation will change over time. I’m determined to continue hacking in both projects. And my juggling skills will improve…

IT Politics, Rockbox

playogg without Rockbox?

playogg logoI find it noteworthy that the FSF runs a campaign they call playogg in which they detail the importance and stuff why people should avoid non-free formats and instead use Ogg Vorbis in preference to mp3 for example.

Yet, they document a number of alternatives for Mac users, for Windows users etc on the front page, but there’s not a single word of advice for people with portable music players. Then again, it is very hard for people to find free software alternatives to their portable music players and FSF being so very anti-closed source this makes me wonder why there’s no mention of Rockbox, ipodlinux or even sansalinux to be found?

The only place with this info that I could find when following links from their site, was about three clicks away on xiph.org’s PortablePlayers wiki page but the majority of the stuff mentioned there is non-free…!

Electronics, Licensing, Open Source

Open platform but not free tools

As I suspected and guessed in my blog post yesterday, Jason Kridner of Texas Instruments responded to the mailing list and confirmed that the “open platform” currently doesn’t even have a free-to-use assembler for the DSP in the DaVinci (which thus has less free tools available than the DM320 series!) and the gcc port seem to be mostly an idea so far:

I’m not aware of any solid plans on a gcc port yet, but I can confirm that TI plans to offer C64x+ C compiler and assembler tools similar to the way we provide the C54x tools for the current OSD. The restrictions and registration might not be exactly the same, but my view is that the important thing is to get something out there that any hobbyist can use for free. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for someone doing coding for use in their own living room to need to pay $3000+ for a full set of development tools when all they need is a C compiler they can run on their Linux box.

I acknowledge that Neuros really seem to make efforts to make things truly open and free, but TI’s ways are often far from straight-forward and obvious. Jason refers to his presentation from Lugradio live, but I don’t see how that clarifies anything on the openness front.

Electronics, Licensing, Open Source

TI and Neuros but is it open?

1 Comment

Neuros put out a press release yesterday saying that
“Neuros and Texas Instruments create new bounty program for next-gen Open Internet Television Platform“, and Joe Born of Neuros said on their mailing list that “it will be a complete open platform that will allow developers of all levels to contribute and port applications.”. You can also read some additional thoughts and ideas in the ARS Technica article called “TI and Neuros team up to build open source media platform“. It is basically a hardware platform based on TI’s TMS320DM644x DSP system-on-a-chip line, also called DaVinci. There’s no coincidence of course that the Neuros OSD 2.0 will feature that.

Personally, I’m not convinced when I see TI speak of Open Source since I’m fully aware of their history and I even believe that this brand new “open” platform still requires TI’s restricted-but-free compiler for the DSP. Of course it is more open than many other platforms, but I dislike when someone tries to sound all fine and dandy while at the same time they’re trying to hide some of their better cards behind their back.

A truly open platform would not give TI an advantage. It would offer anyone wanting to do anything with it the same chance. This platform does not. After all, having it built around one of SoC flagships should be enough for them and should be a motivator for them to make this as successful (and thus as open) as possible.

I think it is sad that Neuros repeatedly does this kind of statements. Their original “open source” player was never open source (to any degree). Their OSD player is largely open source but huge chunks of it is not. Now they try to announce even more openness for an entire platform and yet again they fail to actually deliver a truly open product. Neuros shall forever be known as the company who seems to want to do right, but always fails to in the end nonetheless.

Update: Joe replied on the list to my question about the DSP tool(s) and it certainly sounds as if TI may in fact release a more open tool and/or even a gcc port!? If that turns out true it will of course squash most of my complaints here!

Rockbox

4 gsoc projects to Rockbox

It was just publicly announced that Rockbox will get 4 slots from Google for this year’s Summer of Code:

  1. Accessibility and localization improvements for Rockbox, which bascially means work on getting speech and translations work for plugins. I will personally mentor this project/student.
  2. ARM Emulator and a set of peripherals, to allow a real ARM-based firmware to execute and run in an emulator. Should be handy for reverse engineering, debugging and optimization. Most likely this will be based on SkyEye.
  3. Rockbox as an application on a Unix based smart phone – the student mentioned a Motorola Linux-based phone, but I’m not sure if that is carved in stone yet.
  4. WPS/Theme Editor – a PC based tool to help designing WPSes and themes for Rockbox.
Rockbox

Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008 in Berlin

Rockbox logo

We should soon have the official wiki page updated to properly mention that the European Rockbox Devcon 2008 will be in Berlin June 28-29th. The exact address being

the HQ of VAMED Deutschland (www.vamed.de)
Schicklerstr. 5-7, D-10179 Berlin

I certainly am gonna go there and I hope as many as possible of all Rockbox hackers will too, at least you who live on this continent.

There’s also a Devcon West 2008 planned, due to be sometime after the summer around the US west coast or something. Personally, I hope to be able to go to that too, but we’ll see how things look later on when they have a fixed time and location.