Really everything related to technology
In the most recent Lugradio podcast Episode 19 Season 5 at roughly 1h30 into the show, we got to hear a user’s write-in explain to the hosts about the benefits of using Rockbox on your ipods. Although the hosts aren’t very impressed… They also later on mention that they did get “a lot of mail about Rockbox” so obviously it is getting quite known out there.
I read an article at The Register about a Swede called Erik Nordenankar who decided to “paint” the world’s largest painting by packing a GPS in a suitcase and tracking where it goes then download the data and let the computer show the track with a line. Thus, by sending the bag in a creative way he’ll end up with a self portrait of GPS tracks.
Is this the same GPS technology that already has problems indoors of very many buildings? The GPS system that I bet will have a very hard time to function when flown around inside the luggage compartment of a modern jet airplane? I have a feeling that drawing will mostly be a lot of dots to draw lines between…
According to the article, this is a publicity stunt made by DHL.
Back at FSCONS ’07, I asked the guy doing the Openmoko presentation about whether they are going GTK or Qt, as his talk mentioned both and he didn’t really spell it out on what horse they were putting their money on. He then thought it was a really funny question and went on to explain how the Openmoko is like a small computer that can run anything you want. A bit like he was educating us that embedded devices do have CPUs that can run actual software. As if they wouldn’t have a main branch and a main development selecting one of these particular toolkits…
Many moon laps later, I discussed Openmoko with a friend over a few stouts at Snaxx 18, and he explained how he’d got one of the dev boards a long time ago and had kept up and tried a lot of versions of it and that it basically never worked to even make simple phone calls. He gave me the impression that perhaps the project wasn’t really that well run if it after this long still don’t have even the most basic functionality present and running stable.
Therefor I was happy to listen to TWIT 143 about the Dash Express and them telling me about it being based on the Openmoko platform. It felt like solid proof they are moving in the right direction then, so at least parts of the project must be functioning!
Then, to round it up it was with a big grin I read about the recent news that they are abandoning GTK and are now going to use E17 and Qt instead. Not a trace of any “this is like a small computer it can run anything” talk now (although I do understand that the statement was just something from this person and not any public endorsement from the project or so). This very same Ars Technica article says the first Openmoko based phone called Freerunner is going into “mass production stage next month” (that would be June 2008).
Personally, I can still see how making Rockbox run as an application on an Openmoko device would be a very cool thing.
I’ve always been proud of my ability to read and respond to email in a swift and reliable manner. I read and write emails every day, and most days I read mails more or less immediately as they land in my inbox.
However, during the recent year or so I’ve noticed that I’m no longer a reliable mail recipient. The amount of spam I get has made me tighten the screws so hard I get my share of false positives. The kind of mails that I need to rescue from my spam bin as they will otherwise suffer the death by delete. But how many do I miss? How often do I lose legitimate mails?
On some of the mailing lists I participate in, the spammers have started to send posts with my email in the From: field (circumventing the subscribers-only limitation), leading to me having to set my own mails as moderated to prevent spam to get posted… 🙁
As one of the last living dinosaurs on the planet still using text-based email clients, I realized that pine has been replaced by alpine and I upgraded to that. When doing some reading up on the subject, I noticed that there’s another old grumpy guy still using this client. I’m not sure exactly what that says…
Anyway, the upside of this switch is that this client is now distributed under a proper open source license (Apache license 2.0), as that’s what I’ve been getting in my face from mutt users for years when I’ve explained what I use! (I mean the complaint that pine wasn’t proper open source)
I got the latest Linux Journal issue (#170, June 2008) the other day and while reading through it I fell over the article about a guy who found a GPL license agreement among the papers for his brand new Sony TV.
… and there he also mentioned that they use curl! Fun! Apparently in their “Bravia Internet Video Link” product. Whatever that is… “Stream, browse and watch internet video and much more on your compatible BRAVIA® HDTV with the BRAVIA® Internet Video Link. It’s like extra channels for your new HDTV.“
The great guys at scan.coverity.com published their Open Source Report 2008 in which they detail findings about source code they’ve monitored and how quality and bug density etc have changed over time since they started scanning over 250 popular open source projects. curl is one of the projects included.
Some highlights from the report:
And the top-5 most frequently detected defects are:
For all details and more fun reading, see the full Open Source Report 2008 (1MB pdf)
Robert Menes uploaded some photos of an early Rockbox port running on his SanDisk Sansa m240 (v1), and this much thanks to Dave Chapman’s early work. This port still lacks NAND driver and various important things so you still need tcctool to get code onto the target, but at least there’s evidence of progress now!
I have one of them mp3 capable mobile phones and I have a 4GB NAND flash inserted in it that is packed with music I like. Yet I never end up using it as a music player.
I see people everywhere use their phones for music and I repeatedly read and hear the soon coming death of the portable music player being predicted not far away by opinion-expressing know-it-allers.
My phone plays mp3 files just fine, but there are several reasons why I don’t use it for that. The primary one being that it gets a lousy battery run-time if I do that, and if I’d run down the battery all the way when listening to music then how would I be able to use the phone for regular voice? With a separate (Rockbox) device I can listen to music until the last drop of power goes out without hampering my communication abilities.
In my particular case, my phone’s lack of a proper standard USB port and it’s lack of anything but “full speed” (and yes full speed is less than high speed and is a lot slower than it sounds) when connecting it using the custom cable to my Linux box are two more reasons. Not to mention that it has this “database-only” approach to the music which I really don’t like – but yeah, I can learn to live with it.
Besides, it’ll be a while longer until I can hack my phone to run Rockbox and thus work the way I want it. Let’s hope Android or OpenMoko or similar efforts actually make it possible one day.
Five german/french researchers wrote up this very interesting doc (9 page PDF!) called “Measurements and Mitigation of Peer-to-Peer-based Botnets: A Case Study on StormWorm” about one of the biggest and most persistent botnets out in the wild: Storm. It is used for spam and DDOS attacks, has up to 40,000 daily peers and the country hosting the largest amount of bots is the USA.
Anyway, their story on how it works, how they work on infecting new clients, how the researchers worked to infect it and disrupt the botnet communication is a good read.