Development, Open Source, Technology, Work

Snaxx delivers

A pint of guinnessLate in the year 1999 I quit my job. I handed over a signed paper where I wrote that I quit and then I started my new job first thing in the year 2000. I had a bunch of friends at the work I left and together with my closest friends (who coincidentally also switched jobs at roughly the same time) we decided we needed a way to keep in touch with friends that isn’t associated with our current employer.

The fix, the “employer independent” social thing to help us keep in touch with friends and colleagues in the industry, started on the last of February 2000. The 29th of February, since it was a leap year and that fact alone is a subject that itself must’ve been discussed at that meetup.

Snaxx was born.

Snaxx is getting a bunch of friends to a pub somewhere in Stockholm. Preferably a pub with lots of great beers and a sensible sound situation. That means as little music as possible and certainly no TVs or anything. We keep doing them at a pace of two or three per year or so.

Bishops Arms logo

Yesterday we had the 31st Snaxx and just under 30 guests showed up (that might actually have been the new all time high). We had many great beers, food and we argued over bug reporting, discussed source code formats, electric car charging, C64 nostalgia, mentioned Linux kernel debugging methods, how to transition from Erlang to javascript development and a whole load of other similarly very important topics. The Bishops Arms just happens to be a brand of pubs here that have a really sensible view on how to run pubs to be suitable for our events so yesterday we once again visited one of their places.

Thanks for a great time yesterday, friends! I’ll be setting up a date for number 32 soon. I figure it’ll be in the January 2015 time frame…If you want to get notified with an email, sign up yourself on the snaxx mailing list.

A few pictures from yesterday can be found on the Snaxx-31 G+ event page.

cURL and libcurl, Network, Open Source

Daladevelop hackathon

On Saturday the 13th of September, I took part in a hackathon in Falun Sweden organized by Daladevelop.

20-something hacker enthusiasts gathered in a rather large and comfortable room in this place, an almost three hour drive from my home. A number of talks and lectures were held through the day and the difficulty level ranged from newbie to more advanced. My own contribution was a talk about curl followed by one about HTTP/2. Blabbermouth as I am, I exhausted the friendly audience by talking a good total of almost 90 minutes straight. I got a whole range of clever and educated questions and I think and hope we all had a good time as a result.

The organizers ran a quiz for two-person teams. I teamed up with Andreas Olsson in team Emacs, and after having identified x86 assembly, written binary, spotted perl, named Ada Lovelace, used the term lightfoot and provided about 15 more answers we managed to get first prize and the honor of having beaten the others. Great fun!

cURL and libcurl, Firefox, Mozilla, Open Source

Video perhaps?

1 Comment

I decided to try to do a short video about my current work right now and make it available for you all. I try to keep it short (5-7 minutes) and I’m certainly no pro at it, but I will try to make a weekly one for a while and see if it gets any fun. I’m going to read your comments and responses to this very eagerly and that will help me decide how I will proceed on this experiment.

Enjoy.

Firefox, Mozilla, Network

HTTP/2 interop pains

At around 06:49 CEST on the morning of August 27 2014, Google deployed an HTTP/2 draft-14 implementation on their front-end servers that handle logins to Google accounts (and possibly others). Those at least take care of all the various login stuff you do with Google, G+, gmail, etc.

The little problem with that was just that their implementation of HTTP2 is in disagreement with all existing client implementations of that same protocol at that draft level. Someone immediately noticed this problem and filed a bug against Firefox.

The Firefox Nightly and beta versions have HTTP2 enabled by default and so users quickly started to notice this and a range of duplicate bug reports have been filed. And keeps being filed as more users run into this problem. As far as I know, Chrome does not have this enabled by default so much fewer Chrome users get this ugly surprise.

The Google implementation has a broken cookie handling (remnants from the draft-13 it looks like by how they do it). As I write this, we’re on the 7th day with this brokenness. We advice bleeding-edge users of Firefox to switch off HTTP/2 support in the mean time until Google wakes up and acts.

You can actually switch http2 support back on once you’ve logged in and it then continues to work fine. Below you can see what a lovely (wildly misleading) error message you get if you try http2 against Google right now with Firefox:

google-http2-draft14-cookies

This post is being debated on hacker news.

Updated: 20:14 CEST: There’s a fix coming, that supposedly will fix this problem on Thursday September 4th.

Update 2: In the morning of September 4th (my time), Google has reverted their servers to instead negotiate SPDY 3.1 and Firefox is fine with this.

Firefox, Mozilla, Open Source

Firefox OS Flatfish Bluedroid fix

2 Comments

Hey, when I just built my own Firefox OS (b2g) image for my Firefox OS Tablet (flatfish) straight from the latest sources, I ran into this (known) problem:

Can't find necessary file(s) of Bluedroid in the backup-flatfish folder.
Please update the system image for supporting Bluedroid (Bug-986314),
so that the needed binary files can be extracted from your flatfish device.

So, as I struggled to figure out the exact instructions on how to proceed from this, I figured I should jot down what I did in the hopes that it perhaps will help a fellow hacker at some point:

  1. Download the 3 *.img files from the dropbox site that is referenced from bug 986314.
  2. Download the flash-flatfish.sh script from the same dropbox place
  3. Make sure you have ‘fastboot’ installed (I’m mentioning this here because it turned out I didn’t and yet I have already built and flashed my Flame phone successfully without having it). “apt-get install android-tools-fastboot” solved it for me. Note that if it isn’t installed, the flash-flatfish.sh script will claim that the device is not in fastboot mode and stop with an error message saying so.
  4. Finally: run the script “./flash-flatfish.sh [dir with the 3 .img files]”
  5. Once it has succeeded, the tablet reboots
  6. Remove the backup-flatfish directory in the build dir.
  7. Restart the flatfish build again and now it should get passed that Bluedroid nit

Enjoy!

cURL and libcurl

Credits in the curl project

2 Comments

Friends!

When we receive patches, improvements, suggestions, advice and whatever that lead to a change in curl or libcurl, I make an effort to log the contributor’s name in association with that change. Ideally, I add a line in the commit message. We use “Reported-by: <full name>” quite frequently but also other forms of “…-by: <full name>” too like when there was an original patch by someone or testing and similar. It shouldn’t matter what the nature of the contribution is, if it helped us it is a contribution and we say thanks!

curl-give-credits

I want all patch providers and all of us who have push rights to use this approach so that we give credit where credit is due. Giving credit is the only payment we can offer in this project and we should do it with generosity.

The green bars on the right show the results from the question how good we are at giving credit in the project from the 2014 curl survey, where 5 is really good and 1 is really bad. Not too shabby, but I’d say we can do even better! (59% checked the top score, 15% checked the 3′)

I have a script called contributors.sh that extracts all contributors since a tag (typically the previous release) and I use that to get a list of names to thank in the RELEASE-NOTES file for the pending curl release. Easy and convenient.

After every release (which means every 8th week) I then copy the list of names from RELEASE-NOTES into docs/THANKS. So all contributors get remembered and honored after having helped us in one way or another.

When there’s no name

When contributors don’t provide a real name but only a nick name like foobar123, user_5678 and so on I tend to consider that as request to not include the person’s name anywhere and hence I tend to not include it in the THANKS or RELEASE-NOTES. This also sometimes the result of me not always wanting to bother by asking people over and over again for their real name in case they want to be given proper and detailed credit for what they’ve provided to us.

Unfortunately, a notable share of all contributions we get to the project are provided by people “hiding” behind a made up handle. I’m fine with that as long as it truly is what the helpers’ actually want.

So please, if you help us out, we will happily credit you, but please tell us your name!

keep-calm-and-improve-curl

cURL and libcurl, Development, Mozilla, Open Source, Work

My home setup

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I work in my home office which is upstairs in my house, perhaps 20 steps from my kitchen and the coffee refill. I have a largish desk with room for a number of computers. The photo below shows the three meter beauty. My two kids have their two machines on the left side while I use the right side of it for my desktop and laptop.

Daniel's home office

Many computers

The kids use my old desktop computer with a 20″ Dell screen and my old 15.6″ dual-core Asus laptop. My wife has her laptop downstairs and we have a permanent computer installed underneath the TV for media (an Asus VivoPC).

My desktop computer

I’m primarily developing C and C++ code and I’m frequently compiling rather large projects – repeatedly. I use a desktop machine for my ordinary development, equipped with a fairly powerful 3.5GHz quad-core Core-I7 CPU, I have my OS, my home dir and all source code put on an SSD. I have a larger HDD for larger and slower content. With ccache and friends, this baby can build Firefox really fast. I put my machine together from parts myself as I couldn’t find a suitable one focused on horse power but yet a “normal” 2D graphics card that works Fractal Designfine with Linux. I use a Radeon HD 5450 based ASUS card, which works fine with fully open source drivers.

I have two basic 24 inch LCD monitors (Benq and Dell) both using 1920×1200 resolution. I like having lots of windows up, nothing runs full-screen. I use KDE as desktop and I edit everything in Emacs. Firefox is my primary browser. I don’t shut down this machine, it runs a few simple servers for private purposes.

My machines (and my kids’) all run Debian Linux, typically of the unstable flavor allowing me to get new code reasonably fast.

Func KB-460 keyboardMy desktop keyboard is a Func KB-460, mechanical keyboard with some funky extra candy such as red backlight and two USB ports. Both my keyboard and my mouse are wired, not wireless, to take away the need for batteries or recharging etc in this environment. My mouse is a basic and old Logitech MX 310.

I have a crufty old USB headset with a mic, that works fine for hangouts and listening to music when the rest of the family is home. I have Logitech webcam thing sitting on the screen too, but I hardly ever use it for anything.

When on the move

I need to sometimes move around and work from other places. Going to conferences or even our regular Mozilla work weeks. Hence I also have a laptop that is powerful enough to build Firefox is a sane amount of time. I have Lenovo Thinkpad w540a Lenovo Thinkpad W540 with a 2.7GHz quad-core Core-I7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD. It has the most annoying touch pad on it. I don’t’ like that it doesn’t have the explicit buttons so for example both-clicking (to simulate a middle-click) like when pasting text in X11 is virtually impossible.

On this machine I also run a VM with win7 installed and associated development environment so I can build and debug Firefox for Windows on it.

I have a second portable. A small and lightweight netbook, an Eeepc S101, 10.1″ that I’ve been using when I go and just do presentations at places but recently I’ve started to simply use my primary laptop even for those occasions – primarily because it is too slow to do anything else on.

I do video conferences a couple of times a week and we use Vidyo for that. Its Linux client is shaky to say the least, so I tend to use my Nexus 7 tablet for it since the Vidyo app at least works decently on that. It also allows me to quite easily change location when it turns necessary, which it sometimes does since my meetings tend to occur in the evenings and then there’s also varying amounts of “family activities” going on!

Backup

For backup, I have a Synology NAS equipped with 2TB of disk in a RAIDSynology DS211j stashed downstairs, on the wired in-house gigabit Ethernet. I run an rsync job every night that syncs the important stuff to the NAS and I run a second rsync that also mirrors relevant data over to a friends house just in case something terribly bad would go down. My NAS backup has already saved me really good at least once.

Printer

HP Officejet 8500ANext to the NAS downstairs is the house printer, also attached to the gigabit even if it has a wifi interface of its own. I just like increasing reliability to have the “fixed services” in the house on wired network.

The printer also has scanning capability which actually has come handy several times. The thing works nicely from my Linux machines as well as my wife’s windows laptop.

Internet

fiber cableI have fiber going directly into my house. It is still “just” a 100/100 connection in the other end of the fiber since at the time I installed this they didn’t yet have equipment to deliver beyond 100 megabit in my area. I’m sure I’ll upgrade this to something more impressive in the future but this is a pretty snappy connection already. I also have just a few milliseconds latency to my primary servers.

Having the fast uplink is perfect for doing good remote backups.

Router  and wifi

dlink DIR 635I have a lowly D-Link DIR 635 router and wifi access point providing wifi for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and gigabit speed on the wired side. It was dead cheap it just works. It NATs my traffic and port forwards some ports through to my desktop machine.

The router itself can also update the dyndns info which ultimately allows me to use a fixed name to my home machine even without a fixed ip.

Frequent Wifi users in the household include my wife’s laptop, the TV computer and all our phones and tablets.

Telephony

Ping Communication Voice Catcher 201EWhen I installed the fiber I gave up the copper connection to my home and since then I use IP telephony for the “land line”. Basically a little box that translates IP to old phone tech and I keep using my old DECT phone. We basically only have our parents that still call this number and it has been useful to have the kids use this for outgoing calls up until they’ve gotten their own mobile phones to use.

It doesn’t cost very much, but the usage is dropping over time so I guess we’ll just give it up one of these days.

Mobile phones and tablets

I have a Nexus 5 as my daily phone. I also have a Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 that tend to be used by the kids mostly.

I have two Firefox OS devices for development/work.

Technology, Work

The “right” keyboard layout

6 Comments

I’ve never considered myself very picky about the particular keyboard I use for my machines. Sure, I work full-time and spare time in front of the same computer and thus I easily spend 2500-3000 hours a year in front of it but I haven’t thought much about it. I wish I had some actual stats on how many key-presses I do on my keyboard on an average day or year or so.

Then, one of these hot summer days this summer I left the roof window above my work place a little bit too much open when a very intense rain storm hit our neighborhood when I was away for a brief moment and to put it shortly, the huge amounts of water that poured in luckily only destroyed one piece of electronics for me: my trusty old keyboard. The keyboard I just randomly picked from some old computer without any consideration a bunch of years ago.

So the old was dead, I just picked another keyboard I had lying around.

But man, very soft rubber-style keys are very annoying to work with. Then I picked another with a weird layout and a control-key that required a little too much pressure to work for it to be comfortable. So, my race for a good enough keyboard had begun. Obviously I couldn’t just pick a random cheap new one and be happy with it.

Nordic key layout

That’s what they call it. It is even a Swedish layout, which among a few other details means it features å, ä and ö keys at a rather prominent place. See illustration. Those letters are used fairly frequently in our language. We have a few peculiarities in the Swedish layout that is downright impractical for programming, like how the {[]} – symbols all require AltGr pressed and slash, asterisk and underscore require Shift to be pressed etc. Still, I’v’e learned to program on such a layout so I’m quite used to those odd choices by now…

kb-nordic

Cursor keys

I want the cursor keys to be of “standard size”, have the correct location and relative positions. Like below. Also, the page up and page down keys should not be located close to the cursor keys (like many laptop keyboards do).

keyboard with marked cursorkeys

Page up and down

The page up and page down keys should instead be located in the group of six keys above the cursor keys. The group should have a little gap between it and the three keys (print screen, scroll lock and pause/break) above them so that finding the upper row is easy and quick without looking.

page up and down keysBackspace

I’m not really a good keyboard typist. I do a lot of mistakes and I need to use the backspace key quite a lot when doing so. Thus I’m a huge fan of the slightly enlarged backspace key layout so that I can find and hit that key easily. Also, the return key is a fairly important one so I like the enlarged and strangely shaped version of that as well. Pretty standard.

kb-backspaceFurther details

The Escape key should have a little gap below it so that I can find it easily without looking.

The Caps lock key is completely useless for locking caps is not something a normal person does, but it can be reprogrammed for other purposes. I’ve still refrained from doing so, mostly to not get accustomed to “weird” setups that makes it (even) harder for me to move between different keyboards at different places. Just recently I’ve configured it to work as ctrl – let’s see how that works out.

The F-keys are pretty useless. I use F5 sometimes to refresh web pages but as ctrl-r works just as well I don’t see a strong need for them in my life.

Numpad – a completely useless piece of the keyboard that I would love to get rid of – I never use any of those key. Never. Unfortunately I haven’t found any otherwise decent keyboards without the numpad.

Func KB-460

The Func KB-460 is the keyboard I ended up with this time in my search. It has some fun extra cruft such as two USB ports and a red backlight (that can be made to pulse). The backlight gave me extra points from my kids.

Func KB-460 keyboard

It is “mechanical” which obviously is some sort of thing among keyboards that has followers and is supposed to be very good. I remain optimistic about this particular model, even if there are a few minor things with it I haven’t yet gotten used to. I hope I’ll just get used to them.

This keyboard has Cherry MX Red linear switches.

How it could look

Based on my preferences and what keys I think I use, I figure an ideal keyboard layout for me could very well look like this:

my keyboard layout

Keyfreq

I have decided to go further and “scientifically” measure how I use my keyboard, which keys I use the most and similar data and metrics. Turns out the most common keylog program on Linux doesn’t log enough details, so I forked it and created keyfreq for this purpose. I’ll report details about this separately – soon.

See also: fixing the Func KLB-460 key

Development, Mozilla, Technology

I’m with Firefox OS!

8 Comments

Tablet

I have received a Firefox OS tablet as part of a development program. My plan is to use this device to try out stuff I work on and see how it behaves on Firefox OS “for real” instead of just in emulators or on other systems. While Firefox OS is a product of my employer Mozilla, I personally don’t work particularly much with Firefox OS specifically. I work on networking in general for Firefox, and large chunks of the networking stack is used in both the ordinary Firefox browser like on desktops as well as in Firefox OS. I hope to polish and improve networking on Firefox OS too over time.

Firefox OS tablet

Phone

The primary development device for Firefox OS is right now apparently the Flame phone, and I have one of these too now in my possession. I took a few photos when I unpacked it and crammed them into the same image, click it for higher res:

Flame - Firefox OS phone

A brief explanation of Firefox OS

Firefox OS is an Android kernel (including drivers etc) and a bionic libc – simply the libc that Android uses. Linux-wise and slightly simplified, it runs a single application full-screen: Firefox, which then can run individual Firefox-apps that appears as apps on the phone. This means that the underlying fundamentals are shared with Android, while the layers over that are Firefox and then a world of HTML and javascript. Thus most of the network stack used for Firefox – that I work with – the http, ftp, dns, cookies and so forth is shared between Firefox for desktop and Firefox for Android and Firefox OS.

Firefox OS is made to use a small footprint to allow cheaper smartphones than Android itself can. Hence it is targeted to developing nations and continents.

Both my devices came with Firefox OS version 1.3 pre-installed.

The phone

The specs: Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHZ dual-core processor, 4.5-inch 854×480 pixel screen, five-megapixel rear camera with auto-focus and flash, two-megapixel front-facing camera. Dual-SIM 3G, 8GB of onboard memory with a microSD slot, and a 1800 mAh capacity battery.

The Flame phone should be snappy enough although at times it seems to take a moment too long to populate a newly shown screen with icons etc. The screen surface is somehow not as smooth as my Nexus devices (we have the 4,5,7,10 nexuses in the house), leaving me with a constant feeling the screen isn’t cleaned.

Its dual-sim support is something that seems ideal for traveling etc to be able to use my home sim for incoming calls but use a local sim for data and outgoing calls… I’ve never had a phone featuring that before. I’ve purchased a prepaid SIM-card to use with this phone as my secondary device.

Some Good

I like the feel of the tablet. It feels like a solid and sturdy 10″ tablet, just like it should. I think the design language of Firefox OS for a newbie such as myself is pleasing and good-looking. The quad-core 1GHz thing is certainly fast enough CPU-wise to eat most of what you can throw at it.

These are really good devices to do web browsing on as the browser is a highly capable and fast browser.

Mapping: while of course there’s Google maps app, using the openstreetmap map is great on the device and Google maps in the browser is also a perfectly decent way to view maps. Using openstreetmap also of course has the added bonus that it feels great to see your own edits in your own neck of the woods!

I really appreciate that Mozilla pushes for new, more and better standardized APIs to enable all of this to get done in web applications. To me, this is one of the major benefits with Firefox OS. It benefits all of us who use the web.

Some Bad

Firefox OS feels highly US-centric (which greatly surprised me, seeing the primary markets for Firefox OS are certainly not in the US). As a Swede, I of course want my calendar to show Monday as the first day of the week. No can do. I want my digital clock to show me the time using 24 hour format (the am/pm scheme only confuses me). No can do. Tiny teeny details in the grand scheme of things, yes, but annoying. Possibly I’m just stupid and didn’t find how to switch these settings, but I did look for them on both my devices.

The actual Firefox OS system feels like a scaled-down Android where all apps are simpler and less fancy than Android. There’s a Facebook “app” for it that shows Facebook looking much crappier than it usually does in a browser or in the Android app – although on the phone it looked much better than on the tablet for some reason that I don’t understand.

I managed to get the device to sync my contacts from Google (even with my google 2-factor auth activated) but trying to sync my Facebook contacts just gave me a very strange error window in spite of repeated attempts, but again that worked on my phone!

I really miss a proper back button! Without it, we end up in this handicapped iphone-like world where each app has to provide a back button in its own UI or I have to hit the home button – which doesn’t just go back one step.

The tablet supports a gesture, pull up from the button of the screen, to get to the home screen while the phone doesn’t support that but instead has a dedicated home button which if pressed a long time shows up cards with all currently running apps. I’m not even sure how to do that latter operation on the tablet as it doesn’t’ have a home button.

The gmail web interface and experience is not very good on either of the devices.

Building Firefox OS

I’ve only just started this venture and dipped my toes in that water. All code is there in the open and you build it all with open tools. I might get back on this topic later if I get the urge to ventilate something from it… 🙂 I didn’t find any proper device specific setup for the tablet, but maybe I just don’t know its proper code word and I’ve only given it a quick glance so far. I’ll do my first builds and installs for the phone. Any day now!

More

My seven year old son immediately found at least one game on my dev phone (he actually found the market and downloaded it all by himself the first time he tried the device) that he really likes and now he wants to borrow this from time to time to play that game – in competition with the android phones and tablets we have here already. A pretty good sign I’d say.

Firefox OS is already a complete and competent phone operating system and app ecosystem. If you’re not coming from Android or Iphone it is a step up from everything else. If you do come from Android or Iphone I think you have to accept that this is meant for the lower end spectrum of smart-phones.

I think the smart-phone world can use more competition and Firefox OS brings exactly that.

firefox-os-bootscreen

curl, open source and networking