It’s now been confirmed and set in stone that I will do a 20 minute talk (in Swedish!) on curl and libcurl on April 27th on an event arranged by Dataföreningen Stockholm’s open source network.
My guess is that if you’re interested and involved enough to read this here on my blog, you already know just about everything I can fill my short talk with…!
I’m happy to announce that we now have a version 1.1 of libssh2 released! Noticeable changes this time include:
The library is rapidly maturing and is getting really usable. I’m happy to see that there’s a community slowly building up around this and I’m also grateful for my sponsor paying for parts of the fixes that contribute to make this release the best ever in libssh2’s history.
I’ve played around with a possible new design for the libssh2 web site and I’ve put it up on libssh2.haxx.se for everyone to play around with and comment (on the libssh2-devel list please).
The original and actual home page for the project is still over at www.libssh2.org but I’m not happy with that because of a few things:
The wiki duplicates info that we these days write in man pages and hardly anyone updates the wiki so it lags behind or just contains false or outdated info. I also think having the entire site a wiki a bit problematic for things like menus and generic site layout etc.
I want daily snapshots, web versions of the man pages and mailing list archives to be somewhat integrated in the site to be easier to find.
I already hosted libssh2-related stuff anyway so I’ve just packaged it in a slightly more friendly way. In my view.
What do you think?
So our company is named Haxx and it has been named like this for more than a decade, but the name is considered by some people be a mark of evil or something.
In my closest circle of friends we’ve kind of “always” liked using silly names and we’ve since long had a fascination with double Xes. Once upon the time in the early 90s we teamed up under the name Frexx and we did some funky programs on the Amiga. Most notably a programming language called FPL and the text editor FrexxEd.
When we then during the second half of the 90s needed to start an actual company to easier cater for our “spare time businesses” we wanted a new name but still one in a similar spirit. Being big friends and practitioners of writing “quick hacks” (“hack” in the sense that it is a quickly done program/script that perhaps isn’t always written very solidly or nice but works for the moment) to solve our own problems both at work and at home, we found Haxx to be a perfect name for us – Hack in pluralis, spelled with double-x.
Already at the time we took the name we knew about this bad habit at places that seemed to lump Hackers with Crackers or similar so we knew there would be a risk that some could assume us to be something else based on our name, but what the heck, we liked the name and we are and were hackers and we do and did a lot of hacks. Haxx it was. Haxx it is.
These days we get some minor problems due to this. At some companies (let’s not name any specific but you know the kind) they have black-listed haxx.se web sites (presumably because of the name ‘haxx’ in the domain name), some people get mails from us our the mailing lists we host easier filtered as spam and we get our share of strange suggestions etc.
I guess the upside of it is that we get our chances to whine on people and systems who decide to filter contents purely based on the presence of a single 4-letter word, either in a domain name or in web page or mail contents, and that is actually hilariously stupid.
Thomson apparently brought the new mp3hd format for music the other day. “HD” is apparently the thing we need to have included when a new term is announced. Why does the world need another lossless music format?
It seems they’ve introduced a crafty dual-format thing where they stuff MPEG-4 SLS lossless encoded data in a new id3 XHD3 tag within the mp3 and then stuff a “regular” mp3 as the normal data in there. This way it is supposed to still work fine with existing and older mp3 players. Of course the total size of all id3v2 tags is limited to 256MB, which could be a limiting factor for it.
As usual, you can find a thriving discussion on this topic on hydrogenaudio.
Rockbox should of course be possible to at first use the mp3 parts and if this truly is an existing established lossless codec there’s a chance it might be able to play that part in the future.
The never-ending flow of creativity in the Rockbox project was today turned into a release that we label 3.2. The goodies this time include the things below. The three-months release cycle does prevent the list from growing terribly big…
What didn’t get included:
A more detailed list can be found in the Release notes for 3.2.
Back in 2003 I wrote up support for the HTTP NTLM authentication method for libcurl. Happy with my achievement, I later that year donated a GPL licensed version of my code to the Wget project (which also was my first contact with the signed paper stuff with the GNU/FSF to waive my copyright claims and instead hand them over). What was perhaps not so amusing with this code was when both curl and Wget 2005 were discovered to have the same security flaw due to my mistakes in this code shared by both projects!
Just recently, the neon project seems to be interested in taking on the version I adjusted somewhat for them, so possibly the third HTTP code is soon using this. Yeah I posted it on their mailing list back then so it has been sitting there in the archives maturing for some 6 years by now…
I also happened to fall over the SSH Tunnel Creator tool, which I’ve never used myself, that apparently snatched my neon donation (quite according to what the license allowed of course) and used it in their tool to do NTLM!
It’s actually not until recent years I discovered libntlm, and while I don’t know how good it was back in the days when I wrote my first NTLM stuff I generally think using existing libs is the better idea…
This is a full quote from a genuine email I received just moments ago:
Subject: Installer What URL do I put in to get free apps ?plese tell me Sent from my iPhone
I have no words to describe it further.
This very date, eleven years ago, the first curl release was brought to the world.
I’m still enjoying working with it, and I’m quite pleased with both the products and the community around the project.
I’ll stick around for a while more!
Happy birthday curl!
For the third year in a row, the Rockbox project participates in Google’s Summer of Code and has just now officially been accepted as a mentor organization.
This is a great chance for every student or others who have been looking for a good chance to join in an open source project, and in particular if you’re interested in embedded systems developing for (relatively) low-resource devices.
The Rockbox project also has a very large developer base, a very large community and a healthy and friendly surrounding that is welcoming to newbies.
If you’re even just the slightest intrigued, please don’t hesitate to read further on the Rockbox gsoc 2009 page.
The two previous years we’ve had four students each year with 15-20 applications.
Let’s make this a great gsoc year!