There have been fierce activity in the dusty corners of the Rockbox project known as the SanDisk Sansa v2 hackers guild (no not really but I thought it sounded amusing) and this has so far resulted in early code like LCD drivers and NAND drivers on three new upcoming targets: The e200, Fuze and Clip.
There’s still work to do before the celebrations can start for real, but it’s still nice to see good progress.
Now run over and help out!
(picture by Bertrik Sikken)
There’s yet another blog aggregator on the internet now, and this time it’s fnoss.org which includes blogs from a bunch of “Nordic” (I would assume that means people from the northern parts of Europe) people writing about free software and related matters. I am one.
My blog is since previously also seen in the advogato aggregation.
This of course makes my blog get more read but like the rss feeds it also makes it harder for me to know how many readers/visitors I have since it’s all distributed. Not that this number matter very much anyway…
The Metalink guys host a list of project ideas and one of those ideas is to add metalink support to curl, and I recently bumped the stakes a bit by raising the bounty with an additional 200 USD so that the offer is now 500 USD for the person or team that brings the feature as described.
My primary motivation for doing this is that I like the metalink idea and I’d like to help making sure it gets used more widely.
… I don’t want my employer/wife/friends to see that I’ve contributed something cool to an open source project, or perhaps that I said something stupid 10 years ago.
I host and co-host a bunch of different mailing list archives for projects on web sites, and I never cease to get stumped by how many people are trying hard to avoid getting seen on the internet. I can understand the cases where users accidentally leak information they intended to be kept private (although the removal from an archive is then not a fix since it has already been leaked to the world), but I can never understand the large crowd that tries to hide previous contributions to open source projects because they think the current or future employers may notice and have a (bad) opinion about it.
I don’t have the slightest sympathy for the claim that they get a lot of spam because of their email on my archives, since I only host very public lists and the person’s address was already posted publicly to hundreds of receivers and in most cases also to several other mailing list archives.
People are weird!
Trying hard to maintain the bimonthly release schedule we’ve been keeping up with for quite some time by now, we therefore now proudly announce the release of curl and libcurl 7.19.1
This release includes at least 24 bug fixes and the following changes:
One of the “big guys” in Sweden on issues such as this – Patrik Fältström – apparently held a keynote at a recent internet-related conference (“Internetdagarna”), and there he addressed this topic (in Swedish). His slides from his talk is available from his blog.
Indeed a good read. Again: in Swedish…
In summary: the state is currently bad. There’s little being done to improve things. All alternatives to ipv6 look like worse solutions.
I’d never heard about the Open Source Census before when I fell over a mention of their recent report somewhere. Their mission is to get “enterprises” to install their little client which scans computers for open source products and reports the findings back to a central server.
Anyway, their current database consists of a “mere” 2300 machines scanned but that equals a total of 314,000 open source installations. 768 different packages are identified. The top-10 found products are:
Ok, as an open source hacker and a geek, there are two things we need to do here: 1) find out how our own projects rank among the others and 2) how the scanning is done and thus how good it is. Thankfully all this is possible due to the entire data set being downloadable for free and the client being fully open source.
find out how our own projects rank
“curl” was found on 18.19% of all computers. That makes it #81 on the list, just below virtualbox and wireshark, but immediately above jstl and busybox. This includes “All Versions” of all tools, and for curl’s sake that was 22 different versions!
I found no other project I do anything noticeable in. Subversion is at #44.
how the scanning is done
It’s quite simple. It scans for file names based on a file name pattern and then it pattern matches contents of those files. It also extracts version numbers for the files using those regex patterns. You can see the full set of patterns/rules in the XML file straight off their source code repository: project-rules.xml.
how good is it
With this specific patterns for binary contents they of course need special human treatment for many versions and that is of course error-prone. That could explain why no curl version of the latest version (7.19.0) was reported. It will also cause renamed tools to remain undetected.
In my particular case I would of course also like to know how much libcurl is used, but they don’t seem to check for that (I found several projects besides the curl tool that I know use libcurl).
All this said, I didn’t actually try out the client myself so I haven’t verified it for real.
Finally I pulled myself together and made c-ares.haxx.se the new official URL for the c-ares project, and to celebrate the occasion we now also have an “official” project logo (thanks to Jeff Pohlmeyer):
[image has been lost]
I’ve played a bit with statcvs lately and I generated reports for the curl repository. It turned out rather interesting (well, assuming you’re a statistics geek such as me) especially in comparison to the data and stats ohloh.net presents for the same code:
[the images have been lost in time, like tears in rain]
Executive summary:
Oh, that initial big bump at late 1999/early 2000 was due to a lot of “wrong” files such as configure, config.guess etc were committed and subsequently removed. It is a bit annoying to have there as it ruins the data somewhat but I’ve not managed to fool statcvs into ignoring that part…
The Nordic Free Software Award 2008 went to Mats Östling for programverket.org which is “a project operating with open software and open software development in the public sector. The purpose is to achieve more collaboration and more efficient IT application within the public sector“. Congratulations Mats!
The FSCONS official site (the award was handed out during that event) keeps up with its tradition with being totally behind the schedule and isn’t even mentioning the winner yet…
I’m not sure only two awards is enough to draw any conclusions, but with Skolelinux last year and a public sector open source project this year it certainly gives a feeling what the jury has prioritized so far.