Blogging, Open Source

WordPress quirks and edits

There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with WordPress and here comes two more:

I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!

I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within WordPress) at all, but the annoying part is that even though the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.

A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!

While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes – which WordPress can’t do by itself!

Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!

Rockbox

More fresh Rockbox targets

I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:

Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.

Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.

Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!

SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.

SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!

SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…

Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.

I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…

Development, Electronics, Rockbox, Technology

My phone does not replace my Rockbox

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.

Blogging, Open Source

WordPress unmanages comments

Blah, so I get a large amount of spam comments and trackbacks to my blog and I go over them and mark them as spam regularly. They don’t appear on the site, they just end up in my attention queue and I need to deal with them and take care of the occasional “true” comment as well.

When I do this I press the Awaiting Moderation (15) link (assuming I have fifteen comments awaiting), select them all and then press Mark As Spam and I’m fine.

Right now I managed to error. I didn’t press the awaiting link and then I had the list of all comments shown and since there were many comments I got to see the last 20 comments or so. I selected them all (all comments on that page) and marked them as spam. Whaaaaaa. Pain! That was not very clever! Several legitimate comments now went down the drain and…

There’s no way to restore them, there’s no undo the deletion, there’s no “oh wait these aren’t spam really” way.

Grrrr. So guys, if I removed one of your comments you should know that I’m sorry. I really am. I’ll try to improve…

Open Source

Burn Info, burn!

2 Comments

There’s one thing the GNU project has done wrong (and thus the followers of it, like the Debian Linux distribution and others) and it is with their stupid preference to not provide proper man pages but instead insist that the user runs “info [whatever]”. In Debian you also very often have to install a separate doc package to get those info files, and I fail to see the logic in providing tools and libs etc without the proper docs. (and in fact in many cases the info page shows the man page until you get that proper package installed!)

Man pages may not be the best format in the world for docs, but I rather have a proper man page for all commands and then I’ll go html online for extended information. Info is just plain annoying and we should bury it. The sooner the better!

And yes, it is not a coincidence that no project I’m actively driving as a proper contributor are producing any Info documents…

cURL and libcurl

curl on z/os, symbian and os21

The curl project continues to conquer new markets and it continues to get ported to more platforms and operating systems. Just recently there have been reports about…

  1. A port to the IBM z/OS system, with the official IBM info about it being found here.
  2. Dan Fandrich ported it to the Symbian OS
  3. Christian Vogt mentioned that he had no troubles porting and using it on OS21

I’m trying to maintain a list of all CPUs and operating systems we have known ports being run on and if you have curl and/or libcurl running on another than the ones I list at the bottom of the INSTALL document, please let me know!

Development

Swedish Top Developers?

I find it hilarious that IDG.se out of all publications put together the “best developers in Sweden” and lists the top-75 ones (article in Swedish). It is funny because IDG is not exactly a place flooding over with technical (or any kind of in-depth) knowledge, so obviously they got this list by getting input from others and how on earth can they then compare person A against person B when they’ve been mentioned by different sources? Also, just lumping every kind of “developer” into the same pile and then trying to order them is also an interesting challenge. Clearly some of these devs are more project managers, theorists and similar, while others are hardcore kernel-hackers, C coders or Java dudes.

I don’t mean to bash the people present on this list, as I’m sure I would also liked being present if I had been that. I just think the list fits so well into IDG’s style of populistic journalism. The audience wants top-lists, let’s give them another one!

Or perhaps I’m just jealous that I’m not included! 😉

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

More Means Less

1 Comment

Less is more it is said, and I can certainly subscribe to the reverse: more means less. The two primary open source projects I spend time in have been growing the last years, in source code contributions, but also in amount of users and in amount of contributors. I see the similar effects on myself and on my own role in both Rockbox and curl: I do more and more coordination, planning, admin work, talk (chatting on IRC, responding to mails etc) and “guidance” than actual coding work. My code/non-code work ratio has decreased massively.

This is not complaint, just an observation!

It makes sense to me that early on in a project, and until there’s enough momentum to get the project to more or less drive itself, it is important with a driving core that pushes the project forward. That makes sure every little peace fits together and gets the proper attention to make it a good product and project. As time goes by, more and more people get that knowledge, that ability and the amount of people that drive the project forward increases.

So being an “elderly” in both these projects, I’m more of an advisor, talker, tinker, admin, than a lead programmer now. This is at least most notable in Rockbox, since we have 80 committers now and I think at least 50 of them are active.

I probably spend roughly the same amount of time: somewhere around 2-3 hours/day on my open source projects.

Of course, in my particular case exactly now, I’ve also just recently ramped up my working hours and find myself trying to get accustomed to this life with full-time work, a two-kids-and-wife family and several time-consuming spare time projects. It takes a great deal of juggling and less sleeping.

Nothing is forever so I’m certain my situation will change over time. I’m determined to continue hacking in both projects. And my juggling skills will improve…

IT Politics

Swedish Broadband Usage

The other day I fell over this interesting report published by ITIF called Explaining International Broadband Leadership (108 pages 3MB PDF) that listed USA and 30 OECD countries and their broadband usage and the report came to numerous conclusions and advice why the US is falling behind in the ranks and so on. Quite interesting read in general.

In their ranking table, Sweden is listed at #6. I immediately noticed the column called “Household penetration” (subscribers per household). Hm, isn’t that the amount of households that have broadband? It says 0.54 for Sweden. 54% broadband users among the households 2007?

We have this organization in Sweden called “Statistiska CentralbyrÃ¥n” in Swedish and “Statistics Sweden” in english. They basically work with gathering and presenting statistics on Sweden and Swedish related matters. They’ve produced a huge report (in Swedish – 1MB, 256 pages PDF) called “Private citizens’ use of computers and internet 2007” (my translation). They mention that during spring 2007, 71% of the Swedes used broadband internet from their homes. (Over 80% had internet access in their homes, which makes 12% of the users not using broadband…)

Isn’t there a shockingly huge difference between 54 and 71? And this is just a quick number I could check myself for my country. How off is then the other countries’ values? The ITIF report doesn’t even try to describe how they got their numbers so it isn’t easy to see how they got this. The Swedish report does in fact also contain a comparison with other European countries, and the numbers shown for them don’t match the ones in the ITIF report either! (But the order of top broadband using countries is roughly the same.)

I’m also a bit curious on how they got the numbers for the “average download speed in Mbps” column, but I don’t have any numbers to cross-check for that.

Security

Taking down P2P botnets

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.

tech, open source and networking