Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

Electronics, Rockbox

Rockbox on Sansa View?

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Sansa ViewOk, since we have Rockbox on Sansa e200 and e200R working and the support for the c200 series in the pipe, I feel it is about time to make a statement about the possibilities to get Rockbox for the new Sansa View player: it is (most probably) a totally different beast hardware-wise, so it will require a new port with all the associated hard work.

And no, SanDisk has not been in touch with us any further, so I would say it is highly unlikely they will donate any players or similar to us this time.

Once we get to see a detailed dissection with nice hires pictures we can tell for sure, but their talk about 30fps H.264 video in 320×240 resolution implies a major change.

As a summary, the View is indeed SanDisk’s iPod Nano killer with double the flash size for the same amount of money, with a microsdhc-port, claimed longer battery life and only slightly thicker.

A funny detail: SanDisk previously did another player called Sansa View that they put on hold just before the summer!

Electronics, Rockbox

Dissecting iPod Touch

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iPod TouchiFixit ripped apart an iPod touch.

Unfortunately these guys continue to just publish lores camera images instead of hires scans, but this pic shows the (Samsung) chip with the Apple logo on it.

Apparently this has a Wolfson codec while the new iPod Classics use a Cirrus chip!

The touch and the iphone seems to have a lot in common internally. Not too surprising really…

The touch is a whopping 120 grams beast, while I thought the SanDisk Sansa e200 players were heavy with their 75 grams…

Rockbox

GSOC Mentor Summit 2007

Rockbox was a participating mentor organization of Google’s Summer of Code 2007, and I was the organization administrator in our end. It turned out to be a rather easy job and in the end I didn’t end up mentoring anyone.

GoogleNow they’re arranging a Summit in Mountain View, California in the beginning of October (like they obviously did last year) and Rockbox as organization is invited to send three representatives. They are even graciously funding people to go there, and they pay for a night at a hotel and food. Very grand indeed.

If my life had been different at this point I would’ve been thrilled to go there. Now, with two small kids it’s just not practically possible. I’ve already stretched my “allowance” from my family by the upcoming week-long trip to China in mid-October. So while it wouldn’t cost me personally much money-wise, it unfortunately doesn’t fit right now.

cURL and libcurl

curl and libcurl 7.17.0

Just a short while ago I uploaded the 7.17.0 packages to the curl site, updated the front page, mailed the announcement and submitted an update on freshmeat.

The previous release (7.16.4) was done in haste due to the security issue we got reported, but this time we took our time and I think we’ve done a pretty good job. The upcoming weeks will tell for sure…

cURLChanges this time include the new OS/400 port, the fact that curl_easy_setopt() now will copy all strings passed to it (previously it referred to the strings the application still had to keep around), SCP and SFTP support now requires libssh2 0.16 or later, the LDAP libraries are now build-time linked like all other third part libs and no longer run-time dlopen() like before and LDAPS is now supported. We also have at least 27 mentioned bug fixes, and possibly a few more actually done but not detailed in the release notes.

There’s no soname bump this time, although there have been a fair amount of return code name changes (with backwards compatible #defines added to make older programs still possible to compile), but we have started to add stuff in the TODO that we want to do the next time we actually decide to bump again. The previous bump did cause some havoc so I’ve learned to not use that card too often…

Unless something bad creeps up, I’m hoping for a good two months or so until 7.17.1 is due. With my autumn plans it might just take a little while longer as well. Time will have to tell.

Enjoy!

Rockbox, Technology, Windows

DOS means Text Based

I find it very amusing that Windows users all so often refer to the command line as DOS, and I’ve tried to figure out how we still today frequently get to read users refer to the ancient operating system.

It was in fact still called “MS-DOS prompt” back in windows 98, as shown in this little picture:

windows 98 MS-DOS prompt

I found that even Microsoft themselves refer to the commands you use on the command line as “MS-DOS commands“, so perhaps this is a primary reason? Even the producers of Windows confuse and mix the terms “command line” and “MS-DOS”…

When they launched Windows XP they no longer called it MS-DOS Prompt, it was then plain and simple “Command Prompt”:

Windows XP command prompt!

We’ve also seen end users in the Rockbox project refer to the interface as DOS or DOS-style, and there is really nothing what so ever in common with MS-DOS in Rockbox. It is just (by default) a basic text-style interface. It is clear that to many people, a text-based interface be it a music player or a command line window, means DOS.

People are weird.

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

I am Rude and Mean

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I’m the maintainer and admin of a few different open source packages, perhaps most notable in the curl project but I also poke on c-ares and libssh2 and I do a fair amount of work on Rockbox and hang around in a few other projects as well.

I write around 400-500 emails a month, the majority of them to the mailing lists of the projects I’m involved in. I try to respond to questions I know the answer to.

A stop signI’m not sure if I’ve grown even more grumpy recently or if the world is going downwards, but I’ve recently been called rude and a scammer in public mailing lists after having answered to mails with a meaning that the guys asking the question isn’t exactly trying hard to read up on this, understand the area nor are they reading my answers very good. So what if I’m not always the perfect gentleman or say the right “social” words, I am a hard core tech guy and I answer and talk technical stuff and specific details all day long. That’s what I do and that’s who I am.

So, I just wanted to let the rest of you know: I am rude and mean and you should know better than to ask anything in a forum I frequent. Or then you can of course stand up against the whiners and help educate the world on how to ask questions and why spoon-feeding users on mailing lists isn’t a good idea.

Sticking out your chin in the harsh internet reality, one should expect to get hit like this every now and then and you need to grow pretty thick skin to not let the bad guys get to you. Nonetheless, people in general are nice but it is just too easy for people to get upset and send away very rude mails without any kind of aftermath.

(But I must admit I found the threat to discuss me at a future Zend conference hilarious!)

Electronics, Rockbox

Picture Rockbox on a Camera

Canon Powershot A550Obviously the CHDK guys have working code for Canon‘s (and other’s) Digic II powered cameras, and reading their wiki they use plain arm-elf for the job and… yeah so does Rockbox and… yeah, well it certainly at least opens a possibility for a Rockbox branch for these toys!

Of course there would be porting involved and I don’t know how these cameras have on the audio front, but those are all just details…

Open Source, Technology

Email wins over Forums

Wherever there are mailing lists, some people eventually bring up the suggestion to move to or to at least offer a web forum alternative as well.

As a subscriber to over 100 mailing lists, receiving several thousands of emails every day I’m a violent opponent of web forums. Why? I’ll entertain you by stating a few reasons for my opinion on this:

  • If all my 100 lists would be forums, I would have to visit 100 sites to check for new messages. Some forums offer mail notifications on new messages, which would remove the need to poll all sites unconditionally, but that’s still just a detail.
  • There’s no way to mark individual message to deal with at a later time.
  • You’re forced to use each and every specific forum “client” instead of a single dedicated and at your choice selected email client that was written and perfected for this purpose.
  • There are people who prefer mailing lists and those who prefer forums, I’ve come to accept that fact. Thus, when introducing forums as an alternative means for communication, you also risk draining people (and thus talk, opinions, facts) from the mailing list.

By reading thousands of mails per day, I’ve worked out a system on how to deal with them all. Like I filter them in 20+ inboxes on arrival and I read them in a prioritized order and I mark interesting mails as “important” to deal with them later in case I don’t have time at the moment to reply or catch all details.

Several of my inboxes are automatically (renamed and) archived every month to make them not grow inconveniently large.

So please, don’t start more forums. Use mailing lists. Oh, and don’t top-post and/or full-quote on those lists…

Rockbox

Installing Rockbox on e200R is Scary

The initial way of installing Rockbox on the Sansa e200R series seriously scare away lots of people, and some of those who have attempted to perform the install really should better have been scared, judging from their desperate cries for help in the forum etc.

Another downside of the initial procedure was that it required the user to download a binary-patched version of the original bootloader, a bootloader that is the property of SanDisk that we have no rights to redistribute – especially not a modified one.

The current work-in-progress method is to build an installer program that can be uploaded to the player and then it does the necessary patching live in the target, removing the need to download anything that isn’t clearly a product of the Rockbox project.

We still lack a working way for this on Windows though, so the current plan is to initially provide a live CD with Linux and the e200R installer on for the Windows crowd, but we’ll see how things evolve…