Older blog entries for bagder (starting at number 163)

stuff

Phew, this time it took more than three months to produce a new release of cURL. I don't think it has ever taken so long time before... Hm, wrong, it has, but the last time it took this long time I did some pretty major rewrites.

This time it has mostly been an extended period of bug fixes, design decisions and thinking over how things should be done, how they are done and how one might possibly wish that it was done.

Anyway, I need full public releases for people to actually run the code. I fool myself into sometimes believing that releasing pre-releases is enough, but it isn't.

life

Just kidding. Even if I had any, I bet you wouldn't be the least interested.

I'll continue to call it Linux, without any prefix.

There is this company that build mp3-players with a hard disk inside. Let's for the sake of this discussion call the company Archos.

They write the software for their units themselves, but have more or less stopped the development of upgrades.

In come RockBox and since we started coding back in March/April, we have pretty much(*) surpassed the original software in features and stability.

Now, people have the option of getting our free and open firmware, or getting the closed-source one without development from Archos.

We improve the value of their products. We actually make their units a better deal to people. For free. The software only runs on their products and no one else's.

Do they contact us? Do they offer insights and help on details on how things are to be programmed? No.

Every tiny bit has been researched, reverse-engineered and disassembled by us to be able to figure out how things work. They haven't yet contacted any single person in our project. I'm quite amazed by this fact.

Over at their place, they sit on their slowly fading source code with all the info we could've used before to reach this result faster. Now, we don't even need their help anymore.

Is this a perfect example of opensourcophobia or what?

(*) = we still don't offer all features the original firmware does, but the opposite situation is also true. We'll have them all in time. Just give us time.

The asynchronous name resolver library's project name is now set to Denise.

We're now a small team gathered to write an asynch name resolver library with a liberal software license. No name on the project yet, but we're progressing slowly. Feel free to join in if you think our goals sound good to you.

cert inflation?

Comparing yesterday's cert stats with those from one year ago show that while the number of users grew with almost 40%, the certificate distribution hasn't changed that very much. Sure, a higher percentage is Journeyer than before, but it isn't really a big difference.

I'd like to see negative certificates.

RockBox 1.0 was relased this weekend. Some 14000 lines of code makes a basic firmware that runs and can play mp3s. It rocks!

raph, an analog modem has around 130ms latency, 50ms requires ISDN or something.

I mean, if we're talking about the time it takes to for example ping the nearest possible server and get a reply back.

Allow me to introduce this very useful time waster:

hex poetry - the perfect help when you want your poetry to look fine when you od -x it!

RockBox is really growing, counting 7500 lines of code the other day. Björn and Linus work like crazy on the low levels, with the ATA code soon coming, followed by the FAT32. Linus is doing good progress on the I2C with the MAS. We might be able to make the thing play mp3s before the end of this month! LCD code, keypad code, tetris and application code are getting fed into the CVS too. The entire crowd is moving in the same direction... Is this the first commercial hardisk-based mp3-player that gets an open source firmware replacement?

The recent cURL release (7.9.6) has turned out to be quite stable and has not resulted in many bug reports at all, even though it is more frequently downloaded than any other release has ever been before. We are doing good progress in making libcurl a really good library, and recent development and improvemt on the multi interface looks promising for the future.

I did put in some effort and pulled trough my $EDITOR fixes in the Subversion project, so that my "emacs -nw" $EDITOR started working again! ;-) It sure is a lively project. Almost 1000 mails posted on the dev list last month alone. Uh, speaking of that, I now archive all those mails in a separate web page to make web browsing the dev list archives easier.

Found the program 'muh' the other day. Great little app. Perfect to run on my home-box, to allow me to SSH home from work and then IRC through the tunnel to muh and out to openprojects.net. Works great! Good way to avoid the claustrophobia a http proxy can give you! ;-)