Video: How to build Rockbox

I recorded a 10 minute screencast on how to build Rockbox from SVN (on Linux) just now. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time since I believe a lot of users need to get this shown rather than just a static text describing it. It really is easy and I think my video shows that.

rockboxbuild

The video is available as:

This recording was done using recordmydesktop. I did resize down my browser and reduce the font size to make it look decent in the smaller window. I consider this shot a bit of a test on how it works, and what I can do with it.

The web shop timeout mystery

Another one of the things in the modern world I’ve not yet understood:

why on earth do some web-based shops timeout your shopping and automatically clear you “shopping cart” if you just leave it around for a few hours/days? Why why why? What harm does it do them if I don’t hurry on to purchase?

I love being able to press ‘buy’ on lots of stuff (that then are added to the “cart”) and then ponder a few days if I want more stuff, if I selected the right models, alter a few things and similar. So when they time-out on me like this, it’s like a blow in the face and I need to start over again. It’s simply crazy that I have to backup my list of things to buy just in case they’ll flush me before I’m done!

Yes, I’m aware that some sites offer “save lists” etc if you’re registered and logged in and all, but I don’t want to have to do that.

I can imagine that at times things run out of stock or they even change the prices of merchandise that’s in my cart, but they could still solve that in other ways than just clearing everything.

Adding known hosts support

… to libcurl and libssh2!

I’m about to start this little mini adventure, so if you’re one of the guys out there who’s been looking forward to be able to do even more (Open)SSH-like things with curl and libcurl when we use SCP and SFTP then consider this a little notification to start listening!

This will require improvements and changes in both projects, and funnily enough I’m already involved knee-deep in both so that shouldn’t cause any problems. I do however greatly appreciate feedback and reviews of my pending implementation proposals! I want this done in a way that benefits many and that isn’t too likely to break at least within the nearest future.

Ok, enough of that. Stand by for posts to the mailing lists. I’ll start off with the libcurl one which will thus be a slightly higher level API for all this. I’ll update this blog post later on to feature direct links to my proposals. Please consider posting responses to the suggestions to the appropriate mailing list!

The libcurl proposal

The first mail to libssh2-devel

Top Free Software persoject 2009?!

As two years before this, FSCONS is again looking for nominees for The Nordic Free Software Award 2009.

If you know any fine persons or projects you think are fitting and are from “the Nordic countries“, head over to that web page and submit!

And btw, this year’s FSCONS is set for November 13-15 although their site is still pitch black. I hope to be able to go there this year. Perhaps even do a talk about something!

Update: the word ‘persoject’ is not a mistake, even though it looks weird and wasn’t explained in this post. It was just a word I made up last year when I blogged about this award, and I re-used it now without thinking much about it… I won’t do it again. I promise! 😉

Mine is More than Yours

So Redhat created and made this very interesting Open Source Activity Map available. It rates 75 countries’ open sourceness based on “Government, Industry, and Community” and how good the countries are at open source. Sort of. The numbers are based on research done by Georgia Institute of Technology.

What does it give?

I’m a Swede who lives in Sweden and I can see that we’re not generally that much into open source, but we’re also a very small population compared to lots of other countries. But no, I cannot see how Finland or Norway are any further than we. What also puzzles me is how they even rate China before Sweden. The numbers that are provided don’t appear to take population into account, or even participation level in open source projects.

Of course I realize I have but one view and my view is deeply skewed by the projects I work in and by the people I meet and I have never even tried to compare different countries’ governments against each other in regards of open source so I figure I can’t make a good comment on these results. What is weird is that there’s simply almost no participants in open source projects from China (and several other Asian countries) and I’ve always thought that’s primarily due to language barriers. Is this map then suggesting that those missing people make up for it in projects within their own language regions?

Or isn’t it so that this map is more a map of comparing legislations and governments against each other, and no so much what actual people from these countries do in various projects? I would otherwise assume that us people in the western world have a small benefit from being close to the English language. Not to mention how those speaking native English can easily jump into most projects without thinking twice about language problems.

I think however that this is a very good idea. It brings issues to the open. What makes a country good for open source? What’s needed to make my country better?

oss activity map

bittorrent vs HTTP

A while ago I put together my document FTP vs HTTP that compares data transfers done using those two protocols. Similarities and differences.

Today I’m taking the next step in this little series and I offer you Bittorrent vs HTTP! This document discusses differences in areas such as:

  • Transfer Speed
  • Streaming
  • Uplink
  • Firewalls
  • Redundancy
  • Server Load
  • Encryption
  • Protocol Standards

As usual, I’m all ears for your valuable input and help on making it more accurate and more detailed than I manage to myself. Point out my mistakes, my weird use of words or whatever. Post a comment here or email me.

bittorrent vs http

HTTP Status Report

Mark Nottingham Mark Nottingham held a very interesting one hour talk on the status of HTTP and the work on HTTPbis on a QCon conference recently, and luckily for us HTTP geeks there’s this great video/presentation from that.

curl is mentioned at least twice in the slides, unfortunately it has a wrong fact on the second mention where it says curl uses “Pragma: no-cache” as it isn’t true anymore. It used to do that, but we’ve stopped doing it in curl since a while ago.

I’m a subscriber to the httpbis mailing list and a casual contributor, but nonetheless his summary and overview of the state was refreshing as I’ve not been able to keep up with all the details and I haven’t been tracking that working group from its start either.

Rockbox gsoc2009

So finally it went public that this year Rockbox will be mentoring five students to reach their

individual goals and get their projects turned into realities.Gsoc 2009

The projects are new codecs, one is a new port, one is USB HID work and finally there’s this “make Rockbox an instrument” project.

Personally I’m admin for Rockbox gsoc effort for the third year, and this year I’m also co-mentoring a student (Robert Keevil) in his project to bring Rockbox to the Sansa View.

Let’s make this a great gsoc year!

Not social enough

There’s this concept that’s very popular these days. Social networking web sites. I’ve always been intrigued by the six degrees of separation idea so I joined Facebook and I’ve given it a try. Result: yawn.

Of course I realize everything depends on who you are, how your social network works and so on, but for me the Facebook experiment has only proven to me what I already suspected: I’m not “social enough” to care about all my friends’ teeny weeny little issues and expressions. I don’t have many friend added (35 at this particular moment) but already at this low number I get terribly uncomfortable after reading too much personal goings-on. And I’m not interested in everyones’ top-lists, what IKEA furniture they would be or which of the characters in the Muppet Show they resemble the most. I’m not going to use Facebook much until something changes.

Twitter is another one of the more trendy sites and services. This is very chaotic and most of the stuff posted there is utter crap. But there are some interesting people to follow and I do my best at following the tradition and contribute with my junk: My Twitter feed. More seriously I kind of use and view twitter as chatter around the coffee machine at a virtual office. You can select who to listen to. You can say whatever you feel like and the ones who might care could be reading it… The good part – for me of course – being that I can stay all geeky and techy and avoid that facebookish stuff I don’t like. Oh, and if you’re a friend in this manner, do tell me so that I can follow you!

LinkedIn is different. Here’s a site with a different goal and perspective, and keeping in touch with people I’ve been involved with professionally is a totally different matter. This makes a lot of sense to me, and it’s actually proven to pay off – several times. I believe me being a contract developer of course also make me value having a large network to reach out to so that I keep getting myself interesting assignments on a regular basis! My LinkedIn page.

tech, open source and networking