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!

Rockbox

Rockbox International Devcon 2008

Rockbox devcon logo

(I dug up the old “devcon 2006” logo and I like it so much I thought I could use it again!)

I’d like to suggest that we set a date and place for the Rockbox International Devcon 2008 soon so that we all can start planning for it properly.

Personally, I would claim that having it near an international flight hub is a good idea (why Stockholm Sweden is ruled out this time), and since the dollar is dirt cheap now it is probably a good idea for both US-citizens and non-US citizens to have it in the US.

Within the US, I would suggest that the east coast and New York is among the best choices due to it being a frequent and often cheap destination from several places in Europe.

But of course, this requires that we have a volunteering person or preferably more than one person in that region who can hunt a suitable place and do some basic arranging for this kind of event. Any takers?

And if not New York, is there any other friends near an international flight hub that think they could work as “host” for devcon2008?

I would also suggest that we pick a date in the latter half of June. Around the weekends 21-22 or 28-29.

What do you think?

Please take answers/responses to the Rockbox forums.

cURL and libcurl

Make Them Pick Us

Given that there are an endless series of open source and free software projects around. What makes companies and projects likely to chose to depend and use one of the existing ones rather than to write it themselves or possibly buy a closed-source solution instead? I’ll try to answer a few of the things that might matter, and deal with how curl and libcurl relates to them.

Proven Track Record

The project needs to have been around for a while, so that external people can see that the development continues and that there is a continued interest in the project from developers and users. That bug reports are acknowledged and fixed, that it has been scrutinized for the most obvious security problems etc. The curl project started almost ten years ago, have done more than one hundred releases and there is now more developer activity in the project than ever before.

Certified Goodness

With companies and associations that “certify” others, you can get others’ views on the quality of the projects.

The company named OpenLogic offers “certification” of open source software for companies to feel safer. I must admit I like seeing they’ve certified curl and libcurl. You can get their sales-pitch style description of their certification process here.

Of course I also like to see curl going to rung 2 on the scan.coverity.com list as it would mean a second (independent from the first) source would also claim that there’s a reasonable level of quality in the product.

If they did it so can we

With a vast list of existing companies and products that already are using the project, newcomers can see that this and that company and project already depend on this, and that fact alone makes the project even more likely to be a solid and trustworthy choice.

Being the answer when the question comes

Being known is important. When someone asks for help and guidance about what possible solutions there are to a particular problem, you want a large portion of your target audience to know about your project and to say “oh for doing X you could try project Y”. I want people to think libcurl when asked a question about doing internet-related transfers, like HTTP or FTP.

This is of course a matter of marketing and getting known to lots of people is a hard thing for an open source project with nothing but volunteers with no particular company backing.

Being a fine project

Of course the prerequisite to all points above is that the project is well maintained, the source is written in a nice manner and that there’s an open and prosperous community…

cURL and libcurl, Open Source

Distros Going Their Own Way

Lemme take the opportunity to express my serious dislike about a particular habit in the open source world, frequently seen performed by various distros (and by distro I then mean in the wider sense, not limited to only Linux distros):

They fix problems by patching code in projects they ship/offer, but they don’t discuss the problem upstream and they don’t ship their patch upstream. In fact, in one particular case in a project near to me (make a guess!) I’ve even tried to contact the patch author(s) over the years but they’ve never responded so even though I know of their patch, I can’t get anyone to explain to me why they think they need it…

So hello hey you packagers working on distros! When you get a bug report that clearly is a problem with the particular tool/project and that isn’t really a problem with your particular distro’s way of doing things, please please please forward it upstream or at least involve the actual project team behind the tool in the discussions around the bug and possible solutions. And if you don’t do that, the very least you should do is to make sure the patches you do and apply are forwarded upstream to the project team.

How else are we gonna be able to improve the project if you absorb the bug reports and you keep fixes hidden? That’s not a very open source’ish attitude, methinks.

Recent example that triggered this post.

curl, open source and networking