cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Google Summer of Code for cURL?

Google Summer of Code 2007 front print

As I was involved in gsoc 2007 within the Rockbox project, I ventilated the idea on the libcurl mailing list just yesterday that perhaps this is a good year for the cURL project to apply to become a mentoring organization to be able to host students doing gsoc work?

If so, this is no point unless we can at least present a bunch of interesting projects to lure students to us to have them work to improve (lib)curl and do stuff we otherwise might have a hard time to get done.

What things would you like to see that you consider would be a good project for a student to work on during the summer 2008?

New protocols? Fixing the last remaining blocking calls within libcurl? Fixing up/replacing language bindings? It’s not strictly a requirement that we come up with the best ideas since students apply with their own suggestion anyway, but we can provide good suggestions and ideas that will make students attracted to us and make them select to work for our project – should we be selected as a mentor organization.

cURL

Electronics

Wiimote head tracking and touch stuff

WiimoteI was shown these Johnny Lee youtube videos of his remarkably cool wiimote hacks and I feel an urge to make sure you lot don’t miss out these gems:

Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

and

Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote

They really make me want one of these to play with. Unfortunately, all the software Johnny’s done for this that is available on his site seems to be C# for Windows! ;-(

Rockbox

Rockbox on gsoc 2008?

GoogleRockbox tinyThere is reason to suspect that there’s an upcoming announcement from Google about their Summer of Code 2008, so for the Rockbox project it might be just about time to start thinking about what particular projects we’d like to see done this time!

Of course it is also time to look back on how we performed last year and to consider what we should improve to make sure we do it better this time (should we be accepted again). After all, we got 4 projects assigned, two are now in SVN, one was a complete failure and one was half-done.

Linux

Audacious it is!

Yeps,

Based on suggestions from friends I did ‘apt-get install audacious‘ and gave it a go. It certainly looks very similar to xmms and it also provides the same simple features I like and use when it comes to music playback on my computer.

Audacious logo

While I’m really not bothering much about looks of software and my computer desktop in general, the default skin in Audacious really is quite awful. But really, mosts skins for winamp and xmms that (rather nicely) work for this player are just graphics-crammed overworked stuff so finding a “bare” and “simple” skin that looks nice isn’t that easy.

I just settled with one that looks a bit better than the default.

Rockbox

Rockbox on the vision:m

4 Comments

Creative Zen Vision:MMaurus Cuelenaere has been doing some great progress recently and is now capable of running custom code on the Creative Zen Vision:M target.

The work is now in full progress to make the Rockbox bootloader actually run on it. The LCD seems to work and buttons are in the works…

If you haven’t joined before, now’s a perfect opportunity to dig up that old Creative’s of yours and join the Rockbox bandwagon as it starts to roll on yet another target!

It is a TMS320DM320 target, and all the hw info you need is here.

Rockbox

Two good ones is better than one half-baked

Rockbox tinyGiven the debate going on about where we should possibly have the “universal devcon 2008”, where lots of euro people have expressed their not wanting to go to the US for economy reasons and/or for privacy reasons, and a fair amount of US people have expressed concerns about the air fares for flying to Europe, I think I’m currently favoring this approach:

Separate devcons this year again

We arrange a European devcon somewhere in central Europe, quite possibly Berlin Germany or Brussels Belgium since it seems we have a few volunteers in those areas and they seem to be good enough “hubs” for Europeans in general.

If the US devcon is setup a suitable period (like two months or so) after the Euro one, it will be good for two reasons:

  1. it has a greater chance to build and work on things already discussed in the Euro devcon
  2. it may give some people the chance to attend to both, or either one that fits the best

Of course we could also do it vice versa with the US one before the Euro one.

Personally, I’m hoping I can get a chance to go to both but it’s really just my hope for now and nothing is sure by far yet. Oh, and of course I’ll then prefer a US devcon on the east coast but quite possibly that doesn’t make sense when it is setup to cater for the US Rockbox hackers primarily.

cURL and libcurl

libcurl built with yassl

yassl is a (in comparison) small SSL/TLS library that libcurl can be built to use instead of using one of the other SSL/TLS libraries libcurl supports (OpenSSL, GnuTLS, NSS and QSSL). However, yassl differs somewhat from the others in the way that it provides an OpenSSL-emulating API layer so that in libcurl we pretty much use exactly the same code for OpenSSL as we do for yassl.libcurl

yassl claimed this libcurl support for several years ago and indeed libcurl builds fine with it and you can even do some basic SSL operations with it, but the emulation is just not good enough to let the curl test suite go through so lots of stuff breaks when libcurl is built with yassl.

I did this same test 15 months ago and it had roughly the same problems then.

As far as I know, the other three main libraries are much more stable (the QSSL/QsoSSL library is only available on the AS/400 platform and thus I don’t personally know much about how it performs) and thus they remain the libraries I recommend users to select from if they want something that’s proven working.

Blogging, Open Source

Excuse my french

1 Comment

I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry but out of no particular reason that I understand, my WordPress installation has started to speak French to me! At least all controls/popup-texts in the text editor are no longer in English! I don’t know any french, but luckily I know most of these things already without actually having to read the labels. Like this “insert link” example:

Insert link in french

(Update: I guess I could mention that this is a plain Debian Unstable installation, and most of the thing is still in English. It is just parts of the UI that went French.)

cURL and libcurl

CA cert bundle or not

Since the dawn of time (at least it feels that long) we’ve included a copy of a ca cert bundle in the curl releases. That ca cert bundle originates from Netscape 4.72 and no cert has been added to it since the year 2000(!)

Instead, we’ve offered things like an easy downloadable version from our web site, and documented that this is what you often need to do.

Anyway, we were recently triggered by a bug report and are discussing updating the bundle in the curl tarballs – we’ll just need to sort out the license situation first but we’re slowly progressing there and I think we’re pretty fine with things as they are right now.

However, the question is perhaps better put the other way: why should we bother to include a ca cert bundle in the first place? Most users will already have one in their system (since basically all SSL-based applications want one) and those that don’t can very easily get an updated one using our online server or a recent perl script added to the curl source tree.

I hope I don’t have to tell you that I value all input I can get on this issue!

tech, open source and networking