Category Archives: Open Source

Open Source, Free Software, and similar

24 different targets and 8 beers

This evening we collected all the different targets we have represented here at the Rockbox devcon and made little picture of them. We managed to pull together 24 different models for it. All these devices run Rockbox, although some of them are not really mature ports. 9 different models didn’t make it to the picture since they failed the runs-Rockbox test! 😉

The beers happen to show some the liquids we’ve been enjoying here!

24 targets and beer

See all Petur’s Devcon 2008 pictures here.

You just have to go there to watch the biggest Tower of Rockbox yet. I’m sure it’ll pop up in the tower of rockbox wiki page on the rockbox site soonish.

Rockbox devcon discussion recorded

We had an almost two hour discussion today on Rockbox devcon, and we recorded the thing on ustream and you can enjoy it here.

Topics: release 3.0 about 55 minutes

Some little about gsoc2008

GPLv2 discussions about 1h:00 in

Rockbox steering board

Menu and button discussions

Pluginlib action and buttons in plugins in general

Plugin patches in the tracker

Update: Petur’s recording of the same meeting as 146MB MP3.

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.

Rockbox

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.

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:

  1. 1624 6.0 DS_BODY_DRUGBRAND      BODY: mentions drug brand
  2. 1428 6.0 DS_SUBJECT_DRUGBRAND   Subject mentions drug brand
  3. 828 6.0 DS_FROM_HAXX     spoofed haxx.se address
  4. 769 4.0 DS_BODY_DISCOUNT    BODY: mentions percent discount
  5. 745 4.0 DS_SUBJECT_DISCOUNT   subject mentions percent discount
  6. 415 2.1 DS_TO_OWNER   To contains -owner
  7. 200 6.0 DS_BODY_NODOCTOR  BODY: mentions “no doctor”
  8. 195 2.0 DS_MAILER_THEBAT  sent with the bat
  9. 189 6.0 DS_BODY_DESIGNBRANDS  BODY: mentions designer brand(s)
  10. 158 3.0 DS_BODY_REPLICAS  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.