pycurl orphaned in Debian

Domenico Andreoli just announced to the world that he’s orphaning the pycurl package in Debian. pycurl is the fairly popular Python binding for libcurl written by Kjetil Jacobsen.

Fans of Debian, libcurl and python now have a fine chance to step forwards and contribute!

Syndicated 2008-05-13 21:02:45 from daniel.haxx.se

libcurl send/recv functions

libcurl’s two newly added functions curl_easy_send() and curl_easy_recv() add a new way of working with data in libcurl. These two are just sending and receiving whatever on a connection previously setup with curl_easy_perform() with the CONNECT_ONLY option set.

I haven’t yet made the web site display the man pages for these functions, as the patch for them was just committed minutes ago.

Get a feel for how it can work by reading the sendrecv.c example source.

Syndicated 2008-05-12 21:55:44 from daniel.haxx.se

Sansa v2 baby steps taken

Dave Chapman just told us that he’s managed to upgrade his SanDisk Sansa Clip to run a customized firmware, which proves that we know the file format good enough. His proof of concept simply did a 5 second delay, but now we should be a pretty big step forwards on the way towards getting Rockbox to the Sansa v2 models.

Syndicated 2008-05-11 18:16:42 from daniel.haxx.se

Wordpress quirks and edits

There’s no secret I’ve had my share of gripes with Wordpress and here comes two more:

I can’t upload images at the moment! I run the “plain” wordpress package in Debian testing and when I try to upload an image using the fancy new ajax way in 2.5, it just sits there for a while and it seems it receives the file but I don’t get the UI up that I believe I should get when the upload is completed… so I can’t confirm the upload etc so it instead it gets discarded!

I’m suffering a bit from trackback spam so I installed a plugin named Trackback Validator to help me reduce the manual work of denying them. It seems to work rather well so far in that I now no longer have to mark very many comments (trackbacks appear as comments within Wordpress) at all, but the annoying part is that even thogh the validator unvalidates the trackbacks I still get information mails sent out to me about them! I’ve now also enabled the Akismet plugin so let’s see what happens. Of course simply disabling trackbacks is an option that I’ll use if this doesn’t work good enough.

A funny side-effect with installing and enabling Akismet was that all of a suddent I could access comments previously marked as spam, and thus I could undo the damages from my accidental mark-as-spam-hiccup the other day!

While playing around with plugins, I also installed a gravatar plugin that shows gravatar-images for users on comments, and I installed a plugin that will automatically set my timezone correctly even when DST changes - which Wordpress can’t do by itself!

Then all of a sudden when I poked around (too much) I managed to somehow ruin the background image I use a the top of all pages on my blog. Somewhat I got a gradient there instead, which indeed is what the theme supports (the theme I use is of course a standard one but I have done some minor edits of it). Took me a while to manage to get rid of the gradient and get back image back… I had to resort to editing the PHP file for the theme!

Syndicated 2008-05-10 04:48:44 from daniel.haxx.se

More fresh Rockbox targets

I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:

Toshiba Gigabeat S - quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.

Philips GoGear SA9200 - PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.

Creative Zen Vision:M - Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!

SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” - The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.

SanDisk Sansa C100 - one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!

SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) - very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…

Cowon D2 - I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.

I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…

Syndicated 2008-05-09 21:26:12 from daniel.haxx.se