Older blog entries for carey (starting at number 1)

X3270 is definitely non-free. Bummer. I'm not even sure if Debian can keep it in non-free.

According to Kevin Wozniak at GTRC:

The source code that you inquired about may not be incorporated, bundled, packaged, or accompany any other product that is sold, licensed, or provided to another user for commercial purposes....

I do feel a little guilty about not really looking into this until there was a Free (GPL/LGPL) program available to do 5250 emulation. It may be a little pointless getting this worried about a product that is only used to access the very proprietary IBM AS/400 system.

More cool stuff:

It's a definite sensation that I've done all this before...

I should probably have signed up with Advogato a while ago, but I've been a bit busy recently. Now that I've got a bit of spare time (gained partly from staying up too late) I'm going to try to dedicate a bit more time to free software work.

Current projects are:

  • Work out what to do about recode's IBM870 character set, which doesn't have the same definition as IBM's CCSID 870. This means that tn5250 does the wrong character translations between Polish EBCDIC and ISO-8859-2.

  • Update my Debian tn5250 package. Given the time since the last release, I think I'm going to have to package a CVS snapshot, and I also want to separate out lib5250 as a separate package. This will take some time and work, which is why I've been putting it off.

  • Bug GTRC about the x3270 license again. Does anyone have any contacts there?

  • See if I can handle any more Debian packages, or helping out in other areas. tn5250 uses Robodoc to generate some of the documentation, and it's not packaged...

  • Buy more RAM so that I can run Gnome, XEmacs and Mozilla all at the same time. *g*

No doubt I'll think of more as time goes by. Feel free to bug me if nothing seems to be happening with these ones.

Cool things:

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!