I’m proud and happy to once again having been voted into the Rockbox Steering Board. Thanks for your trust and confidence in me, friends! I’m hereby starting my 4th season in this role, which also happens to be all years the RSB has existed.
The RSB has really only had to act once. I don’t foresee any drastic change in this regard this year. The complete board consists of:
Alex Parker
Björn Stenberg
Daniel Stenberg
Frank Gevaerts
Jens Arnold
I served as Google Summer of Code admin this year again, doing as little as possible, for the Rockbox project.
As usual, us volunteers are given a tshirt for our efforts and this year’s version looks like shown below. My son Rex was very happy to do the modeling, even though I think the size is slightly too big for him…
First, allow me to mention that I like FSCONS. I’ve been there several years, I’ve spoken there every year I’ve been there and I know and like a bunch of the persons in the team putting it together. Good stuff!
I wasn’t supposed to do any talk at FSCONS this year, and I did feel a little empty and lost because of it.
… then an empty slot appeared, a question was asked, a subject was suggested and suddenly I ended up having agreed to do a talk and the void has been filled again. I’m glad. I hope someone else will be too and I will try to excite the audience with a talk titled “SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web” or something like that. It will have to do for now. It is currently planned to take place at 17:15 on Saturday 12th of November.
My thinking is to explain SPDY in detail, explain the reasoning behind it, the problems that have lead up to its creation and I’ll try to shed the lights on the alternatives and make some guesses what I think the future will hold in terms of web transports and what we will NOT see… I might even manage to acquire further insights of this from my ventures into libspdy.
If you have any related thoughts or questions, feel free to ask me ahead of time and I might be able to adjust my talk for it.
It has been a little over 1500 days since I started this (wordpress’ed) version of my blog. During this time, I’ve posted entries, people have submitted comments and most of all there have been spammers posting “comments”.
During these 1500 days I’ve posted over 600 blog entries. Roughly one entry every 2.5 days. We can see that my visitors aren’t that talkative in comparison as I’ve received some 550 comments in total to my blog posts.
10,000 spam comments have been submitted. That means roughly 20 times more spam than legitimate comments. The world can indeed be a sad place at times! 🙁
SPDY is a neat new protocol and possible contender to replace HTTP – at least in some areas and for some use cases. SPDY has been invented and developed mostly by Google engineers.
SPDY allows better usage of fewer TCP connections (since it sends multiple logical streams over a single physical TCP connection) and it helps clients overcome problems with TCP (like how a new connection starts slowly) while at the same time reducing latency and bandwidth requirements. Very similar to how channels are handled over an SSH connection.
Chrome of course already supports SPDY and Firefox has some early experimental support being worked on.
Of course there are also legitimate criticisms against SPDY as well, including subjects like how it makes caching proxies impossible (because everything goes over SSL), how it makes debugging a lot harder by using compressed headers, how it is impossible to extract just a single header from the stream due to its compression approach and how the compression state buffers make each individual stream use more memory than plain old HTTP (plain TCP) ones.
We can expect SPDY<=>HTTP gateways to appear so that nobody gets locked into either side of these protocols.
SPDY will provide faster transfers. libcurl is currently used for speed reasons in many cases. To me, it makes perfect sense to have libcurl use and try to use SPDY instead of HTTP exactly like how the browsers are starting to do it, so that the libcurl using applications will get their contents transferred faster.
My thinking is that we introduce some new magic option(s) that makes libcurl use SPDY, and for normal easy interface transfers it will remain to use a single connection for each new SPDY transfer, but if you use the multi interface and you enable pipelining you’ll instead make libcurl do multiple transfers over the same single SPDY connection (as long as you speak with the same server and port etc). From an application’s stand-point it shouldn’t make any difference, apart from being faster than otherwise. Just like we want it!
Implementation wise, I would like to use a reliable and efficient third-party library for the actual SPDY implementation. If there doesn’t exist any, we make one and run that one independently. I found libspdy, but I found some concerns about it (no mailing list, looks like one-man project, not C89 compliant, no API docs etc). I mailed the libspdy author, I hoping we’d sort out my doubts and then I’d base my continued work on that library.
After some time Thomas Roth, primary libspdy author, responded and during our subsequent email exchange I’ve gotten a restored faith and belief in this library and its direction. Not only did he fix the C89 compliance pretty quickly, he is also promising rather big changes that are pending to get committed within a week or so.
Comforted by what I’ve learned from Thomas, I’ll wait for his upcoming changes and I’ll join the soon to be created mailing list for the libspdy project and I’ll contribute some ideas and efforts to help shape it into the fine SPDY library we all want. I can only encourage other fellow SPDY library interested persons to do the same!
Updated: Join the SPDY library development
It seems the US-centric world of date geeks have noticed the 09/10/11 12:34:56 time stamp, but I prefer doing the dates in the only order that makes sense, the ISO8601 order: year month day hour minute second. So I have to celebrate the same day at a different time!
So this time just happened. Move on.
On November 8th 2011, foss-sthlm has the honors of welcoming Richard M Stallman to Stockholm and we invite you all to come and listen to what he has to say. RMS, as he is commonly known, is of course the founding father of both GNU and FSF and he has served his role of non-compromising believer in and the torch-bearer of the Free Software movement ever since he started it.
Date: November 8 Time: 18:00 Where: Aula Magna at Stockholm University
To get to enjoy this talk, and to be able to perhaps ask a question of your own, you must register and book your seat. You do this by going to the foss-sthlm nov2011 web page and reading the instructions.
We have this required booking concept for this only to make sure that we don’t overbook the room. Please make sure that you “return” tickets that you won’t use. Please help us pull this event through in an excellent manner.
This event is made possible thanks to our sponsors South Pole AB and DSV. We arrange this in cooperation with the great FSCONS team.
Update: we switched to a much bigger place!
Last year I posted my report of what I and my fellows did at Haxx after the first year of true and real independence. As I probably mentioned before, we registered our company 1997 but it was just a side project for over a decade.
Now, when we’re slowly approaching two years it is time to look back and what we’ve done during the past twelve months and what we’re doing right now.
We have firmly established ourselves even more as expert developers within embedded systems. We’re over and over again being hired by the teams that themselves are hired by companies to provide services or products. During the last twelve months, we’ve written software and software designs for a huge medical equipment company, a small video equipment manufacturer, a major international telecom, a market-leading embedded systems provider and a global chip manufacturer. We’ve debugged simulation software, designed video streaming servers, done video subtitling magic, poked on Linux kernel code and we’ve done old-school 8051 and 16bit x86 assembly. I’ve also managed to do a Embedded Linux development (in user-space) training course – twice. All this, in just the past year!
Haxx was (and presented) at FSCONS in Gothenburg, we went to (and presented at) FOSDEM in Brussels and we went to the Rockbox devcon in London. We did lots of work within the foss-sthlm community.
Oh, and we’ve revamped our logo and graphical design.
Haxx consists of three full-time employed senior expert embedded systems consultants. We’ve all been in the industry for over twenty years: Daniel Stenberg, Björn Stenberg and Linus Nielsen Feltzing.
We continuously work with partners in the area to reach out to new and existing customers. As we’re very small and rather spend our time on working in our actual assignments we appreciate the help with sales and marketing. If you’re in the Stockholm area and ever end up needing devoted and skilled embedded software hackers, call us!
I’m gonna do my very best to make sure we get another great year! I’ll report back and tell you how it went.
The FOSDEM 2012 dates were recently revealed (4-5 February 2012).
I’d be happy to arrange a get-together for libcurl hackers at Fosdem this year. To me, Brussels, Belgium seems mid-europe enough to be able to attract a bunch of us:
Potential subjects to discuss at such a meeting:
I would like at least 4-5 people voicing interest for this to be worthwhile for me to actually try to do anything. Please speak up on the libcurl mailing list, tweet me or mail me privately! The more people that are interested, the more planning and stuff we’ll do for it.
Things went southwards already this morning. My wife was about to work from home and called me before 8am asking for help to get online as the wireless Internet access setup didn’t work for her.
As this has happened at some occasions before she knew she might need to reboot the wifi router to get things running again. So she did. Only this time, when she inserted the power plug again there was not a single LED turning on. None. She yanked it out again and re-inserted it. Nothing.
Okay, so she was not able to use the wifi and the router was dead.
At lunch, I took a short walk in the sunshine to my nearest “Kjell & Co” and got myself a new wifi router and brought it back with me home after work and immediately replaced the dead one with the new shiny one. I ran upstairs (most of my network gear is under the staircase on the bottom floor while my main computer an
d work space is on the upper floor), configured the new router with the static IP and those things that need to be there and…
…weird, I still can’t access the Internet!
I then decided to do the power recycle dance with the ADSL modem as well. I could see how the “WAN” led blinked, turned stable and then I could actually successfully send several ping packets (that got responses) before the connection broke again and the WAN led on the modem was again switched off. I retried the power cycle procedure but the led stayed off.
I called customer support for my ADSL service (Bredbandsbolaget) and they immediately spotted how old my modem is, indicating that it was probably the reason for the failure and set me up to receive a free replacement unit within 2-3 days.
This left me with several problems still nudging my brain:
I guess I will find out when the new hardware arrives. I may get reason to write a follow-up then. I hope not!
Update on September 23rd:
A new ADSL modem arrived just two days after my call and yay, it could sync and I could use internet. Unfortunately something was still wrong though as my telephone didn’t work (I have a IP-telephony service that goes through the ADSL box). I took me until Sunday to call customer service again, and on Tuesday a second replace modem arrived which I installed on Thursday and… now even the phone works!
I never figured out why both devices died, but the end result is that my 802.11n wifi works properly with speeds above 6.5MB/sec in my house.