Advogato blog for bagder

Interview with me

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 21:06:40 GMT

I spoke to Anthony Bryan from the metalink project over Skype the other day, and the 16 minute recorded interview was recently posted so I thought I’d just announce my local copy of the 14MB file.

The topics should be of no surprise to readers of my blog: me, curl, Rockbox and metalink basically.

Rockbox on the Onda VX747

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:14:54 GMT

Maurus Cuelenaere has been very busy lately with his work on porting Rockbox to the Onda VX747 player. This 3″ LCD 4GB/8GB flash player isn’t just touch screen and very ipod touch-looking, it is also equipped with the Ingenic Jz4732 chipset. This is particularly interesting because this baby boasts an XBurst processor, which has a MIPS core clocked at 240 to 400MHz.

In other words: this is the first MIPS-based target Rockbox is being made for. Maurus has custom code running on it, we have rockboxdev.sh adjusted to build a MIPS toolchain and there seem to be a handful of other Chinese PMP players using this chip family so this is a good chance to get a whole bunch of new targets at once. Just join the fun!

Get all the latests news on development for this target and chipset family in this forum thread.

Normally I would link to the company’s official page about a player but this image will take you to a gadget blog site, simply because I cannot find any official site or page for this device!

“Nordic” Projects?

Mon, 7 Jul 2008 12:12:11 GMT

It did struck me why the idea of handing the Nordic Free Software Award to a project feels like a bad idea: Free Software projects really aren’t geographical in general.

People tend to live at a fixed location for a specific time and thus you can say that N is living in a Nordic country or not.

Free Software projects however, are not even allowed to exclude people from other places and even projects that may origin at once place or even have its largest user-base in a particular geographical spot.

Last year’s Nordic Free Software Award was handed to Skolelinux since I believe the project origins in Norway (a nordic country) and some of the leading persons in the project are Norwegian. But is that then a nordic project? I don’t want to claim that it isn’t because I honestly don’t know, but their web site certainly says nothing about it being restricted or limited to nordic countries in any significant way. If it does, I couldn’t find it.

I am the primary person and maintainer behind curl but I wouldn’t dream of calling it a “nordic” project. The trio who started Rockbox are all Swedish but calling it a nordic project would just make me laugh.

Isn’t it so, that if you can come up with a “Nordic” Free Software project that currently only lives and strives within one or more Nordic countries without spreading itself over the world, isn’t that then more likely to be a proof of a failure of said project than anything else?

Your favourite Free Software persoject!

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 09:08:43 GMT

So they’ve opened the nomination process for the Nordic Free Software Award 2008.

Now’s the perfect time to run over and submit your favourite “nordic” free software person and have him/her get some of the appreciation he/she deserves.

Ah you can in fact also nominate teams or projects for this award as well, as last year the Skolelinux was awarded the price. I’m actually not really sure that I like that. I think the price should either be for single persons or for teams and projects.

If you rather be in the jury for the awards, the guys are also looking for such people!

This is the type and I mean it

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 22:09:25 GMT

So someone pointed out this IEBlog entry for me, and I find it so hilarious I felt a need to share the fun. See the “MIME-Handling: Sniffing Opt-Out” paragraph towards the end.

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and earlier just don’t care much for the Content-Type: header that servers reply, but they instead scan the body and guess what type it is. Thus “knowing better” than the content provider what content it truly is.

So in IE8 they’re (according to that blog entry) introducing a new attribute to the Content-Type header. If the site also sets “authoritative=true” it means it really means the type and the browser will then actually believe the site. I can’t stop giggling.

And yeah, some of the other craziness on that page is also good reading and they truly make you wonder what they are smoking during their brain storm meetings.

Lugradio gives in

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:07:59 GMT

Jono Bacon just announced The end of Lugradio on his blog.

It find it sad since I’ve considered this show to be one of the best Linux and open source related ones and I’ve been a fan for quite some time by now.

I hope this encourages others to step up and fill out the hole these guys are leaving.

Rockbox devcon 2008 summary

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:09:07 GMT

As it has become somewhat of a little tradition of mine, I’ve put up a little summary of devcon 2008 page to round up the previous very intense weekend we spent in Berlin. And I just feel a need to include the tower picture here as well:

24 different targets and 8 beers

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:08:21 GMT

This evening we collected all the different targets we have represented here at the Rockbox devcon and made little picture of them. We managed to pull together 24 different models for it. All these devices run Rockbox, although some of them are not really mature ports. 9 different models didn’t make it to the picture since they failed the runs-Rockbox test!

The beers happen to show some the liquids we’ve been enjoying here!

See all Petur’s Devcon 2008 pictures here.

You just have to go there to watch the biggest Tower of Rockbox yet. I’m sure it’ll pop up in the tower of rockbox wiki page on the rockbox site soonish.

Rockbox devcon discussion recorded

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:12:13 GMT

We had an almost two hour discussion today on Rockbox devcon, and we recorded the thing on ustream and you can enjoy it here.

Topics: release 3.0 about 55 minutes

Some little about gsoc2008

GPLv2 discussions about 1h:00 in

Rockbox steering board

Menu and button discussions

Pluginlib action and buttons in plugins in general

Plugin patches in the tracker

Live from Devcon

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:10:13 GMT

In Berlin, we’re playing with the webcam and we’re now broadcasting Rockbox devcon live using the fun service of ustream.tv. Check this: