Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

Open Source, Web

Java apps froze my Iceweasel

I’ve noticed for quite some time that java apps haven’t seemed to work on my computer when I try to use them with my browser. Whenever I’ve started most java apps, my entire browser has just frozen and gone completely unresponsive and I’ve been forced to kill and restart it.

I run Debian Linux on just about all my machines so of course I do that on my primary desktop as well. And Iceweasel is my browser.

I’ve not really bothered much about the problem as java applets are a bit of yesterday’s technology and I rarely face anything in java that I need. Until today, when I had to login to a customer’s site and use an applet for some work related to my job. There was no decent way to avoid it (apart from perhaps logging in using another machine/browser or similar), so I decided to bite the bullet and finally fix my issue.

I searched around and I tried uninstalling all openjdk stuff and more. I restarted Iceweasel countless times to no avail.

Finally I stumbled over this post by user “almatic” and voila, it fixed my problem. As I just wasted like an hour on this, I’ll help out to make the world a little better by providing the answer here as well:

open file /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf and set net.ipv6.bindv6only=0, then restart the procfs with invoke-rc.d procps restart

here are the corresponding bugs

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=560238
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=560056

Open Source

Community Hack

OWASP Sweden and FOSS-STHLM are doing a joint effort and we’re putting together Community Hack #2 on September 4-5 2010 here in Stockholm, Sweden.

We are looking for sponsors and facilities to use for this event, please get in touch!

The goal here is to gather a group of interested people. Everyone brings their own ideas of what to accomplish, communicate the intentions to the group and then work together during the weekend to try to reach the set goals. Suitable things, hacks, to work on during the weekend will of course be free and open code and not unlikely a fair amount of things will be security related.

The event is two full days, with some kind of social thing happening on the Saturday evening and with final presentations on Sunday afternoon.

Hopefully we can use each others’ competences and cross-feed between our different communities to get inputs, feedback and good spirit into the targeted projects.

This event is number 2 since the OWAPS guys already had Community Hack #1 back in January 2010, but at that time FOSS-STHLM wasn’t involved.

We gather all info about this event at foss-sthlm.haxx.se/mote3.html.

owaspTommy-Nevtelen-FOSS_STHLM

cURL and libcurl

curl vs libcurl

In my mini-series of articles A vs B, the time is up for curl vs libcurl.

For me, the differences are so very clear and obvious but I get a fair stream of questions from users and random people that I thought it was about time to make an effort to once and for all make a page with the facts stated. A fixed home for curl vs libcurl knowledge.

So I did. And now I mentioned it to you. Enjoy! If you have additional content you think belong there or if you think anything is unclear or wrong, don’t hesitate to let me know!

cURL

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

Daniel’s currency exchange is no more

For quite a number of years I maintained a little web service to provide currency exchange rates in a handy format and in a way that was friendly for machines and other machine-exchangers. My personal favorite feature was the “easy conversion” helper that would provide a “easy to calculate in head” formula for back and forth between two currencies based on their current rates. Like “multiply by 5 and divide by 2” etc.

This service goes all the way back to 1997 when I started to work on getting exchange rates downloaded as a service to the IRC bot I ran in #amiga on efnet (even before the split when ircnet was created). Back then I was primarily working on the IRC bot named Dancer. 1997 I started the work on a tool to fetch rates. The tool would become curl and the web site to access the rates was initially hosted by the company Frontec for which I worked back then.One dollar bill

The URL changed a few more times but it has been available at http://daniel.haxx.se/currency for the last few years until a few weeks ago. Well, technically the URL still works but the service does not.

So a few weeks ago the primary site I’ve scraped for this info changed their format and I decided to not play cat and mouse anymore. I was already bending the rules by not reading their terms of service as I feared I wouldn’t be allowed to use their data like this. Also, I really don’t have any use for this service myself so I decided to do myself a service and stop wasting spare time on one of these projects that don’t give me enough personal satisfaction. I’m sure that if there is a demand for such a service I now closed down, there will be someone else out there ready to fire it up and serve users.

So long, and thanks for all the currency exchange fun.

Rockbox

Rockbox devcon is now

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This weekend, in Ghent Belgium, the annual Rockbox developers conference “devcon” is taking place. Unfortunately I’m not there myself this year, but I can get a little sense of the atmosphere by following the live stream. Click the image to get to it. Do note that the stream will only be alive during this weekend June 5-6 2010.

Rockbox Devcon 2010 live stream

Here’s the team that was present at Devcon, picture from petur’s comment:

rockbox-devcon2010-grouppic

Open Source, Web

roffit lives!

Many moons ago I created a little tool I named roffit. It is just a tiny perl script that converts a man page written in the nroff format to good-looking HTML. I should perhaps also add that I didn’t find any decent alternatives then so I wrote up my own version. I’ve been using it since in projects such as curl, c-ares and libssh2 to produce web versions of the docs.

It has just done its job and I haven’t had any needs to fiddle with it. The project page lists it as last modified in 2004, even though I actually moved it to a sourceforge CVS repo back in 2007.

Just a few days ago, I got emailed and was notified that Debian has it included as a package in the distribution and someone was annoyed on some particular flaws.

This resulted in a bunch of bugs getting submitted to the Debian bug tracker, I started up the brand new roffit-devel mailing list to easier host roffit discussions and I switched over the CVS repo to a git one on github.

If you like seeing man pages turned into web pages, consider joining up and help us improve this thing!

cURL and libcurl, Network, Web

My talk Optimera Sthlm

30 minutes is a tricky period to fill with contents when you do a talk, and yesterday I did my best at confusing/informing the audience at the OPTIMERA STHLM conference in transport layer performance. Where time is spent or lost today in TCP, what to think about to get things to behave faster, that RTT is not getting better even though brandwidth is growing really fast these days and a little about some future technologies like WebSockets, SPDY, SCTP and MPTCP.

Note: this talk is entirely in Swedish.

My slides for this is also viewable with slideshare.net like this:

OPTIMERA STHLM! Daniel Stenberg
Open Source

Foss-sthlm on Internetdagarna

Yes, I’m very happy to say that our good friends at .SE (who run and admin the .se TLD and more) like FOSS a lot and they are organizing Swedish perhaps biggest conference on internet-related stuff annually in October: Internetdagarna. This year, they’ve reached out to cooperate with us – the foss-sthlm foss network – to arrange and hold a meeting of our own during the conference.

The foss-sthlm meeting will not be within the actual conference, but will be held just next door. We intend to hold the meeting admission-free just as before – the way we like! I hope and think that we will be able to arrange another kick-ass meeting then and with .SE’s help we will get the arrangements done in style. I just very well may end up doing a talk myself at that meeting. (We call that meeting #4 for now, but it’s by no means decided that it actually will end up being the forth one this year.)

Let me again just mention that foss-sthlm is no formal organization and it has no leaders and no actual members. We’re all just individuals. However, I work to get things to happen within the network and I thus sometimes appear to “speak for” us, although in the end I of course only speak for myself and I help out to arrange things that I hope others will appreciate as well.

cURL and libcurl, Development, Web

OPTIMERA STHLM

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Our friends at .SE are once again putting together an interesting conference-style day with talks, and this time the title of it is “OPTIMERA STHLM” (yes they use all caps) and it is all about optimizing web-related things.

I’ve been invited and I will do a 30 minute talk during that day about the transport layer and stuff on top of the transport layer. In other words it’ll include things to consider for TCP, DNS, HTTP, handling sockets, libcurl and a quick look at things such as Websockets, SPDY, MPTCP and SCTP.

The full day’s program is now available on the linked page. Enjoy!

Open Source

foss-sthlm second meetup

Within the network of people we call foss-sthlm, the time is closing in towards our second meetup. Or “Möte #2” as we so imaginatively call it (translates to “meeting #2”), to be held in the same great place as the first one, on May 19th 2010.

Our first gettogether was an astounding success and I don’t expect us to be able to repeat that massive attention and number of attendees this time. Things still look good and the number of attendees just reached 80 with exactly three weeks to go, so there’s still good time for more people to decide.

This time we’ve lined up 5 speakers and we’ve made an deliberate effort to not re-use any of the speakers from the first metting to make sure more people get the chance. Unfortunately, that means I won’t do any talk! 😉 Topics this time (for those lazy enough to not visit the link or if you for any reason think Swedish is hard to digest) include:

Smalltalk, FOSS legalities in Sweden, Cross platform Qt, Women in Open Source and FFmpeg.

I’m glad that we once again have sponsors that will let us use the room for free, provide sandwiches and coffee for the break without charge so that we can do this thing admission free once again. We learned from the first meeting that we need a little break in the middle.

If you’re in the area and still haven’t signed up, please go ahead. We’ll get a full afternoon with hardcore FOSS talks, followed by the rest of the evening at a pub talking FOSS with Stockholm’s FOSS hackers that matter.

Logotype Competition

We’re also throwing out different logo alternatives on the mailing list as a kind of competition and I guess we’ll just vote for a winning contribution at some point. My personal favorite so far is probably this version created by Tommy Nevtelen:

Tommy-Nevtelen-FOSS_STHLM