blogs

Oliver Ruiz Dorantes:

http://urnenfeld.blogspot.com/2008/11/5th6th-milestone-phase-1-reached.h...

has recently committed:

http://cia.vc/stats/author/oruizdorantes

the last parts and completed phase 1 of Haikuware's bluetooth bounty:

http://www.haikuware.com/bounties/bluetooth-bounty

As such, he was transferred the bounty's pool of $1820.47 (he also received some RAM for his hardware donated by haikuware admin thenerd). The bounty fell a little short of the $1950 he requested, but all in all I think he'll be happy with that sum.

I'd like to thank all the bounty contributors that made this possible, as well as Oliver for the hard work he put in to give Haiku the code for a functional bluetooth base! Congrats all around.

I just finished (finally) consolidating the two R2-related RFCs that I've written and revising them, and I'd appreciate comments, criticism, etc. You can get it from this link. If you have an opinion on what Haiku should look like, I'd genuinely appreciate your input. :)

Last week I received a mail telling me MSI wanted to hear from me what I wanted on their next products on their forum. Frankly, I didn't even remember having an account on that forum, where I registered to help someone on a BeOS SMP question. So I jumped in and started telling what I, as an Haiku developer, really expected from a hardware manufacturer, trying to explain, with humour but determination, why open hardware is so important to me.

Then after some other's post I replied a second time, first to someone mentioning the need for HDMI support on why I didn't agree because of DRM, then a maybe-rantful-but-oh-so-true digression about the availability of specifications. Sadly, neither post are available for your reading pleasure, a moderator found them to be "rubbish" and removed them altogether, who obviously doesn't use alternative Operating Systems, never wrote a driver with only uncommented Linux code as reference, doesn't live in France, and never saw a TV set manual from before 1980.

Since my views weren't welcome there, I'll try to at least make them clear here, and either MSI (and other vendors) read them or not, but I'm used to the latter anyway. Please note that was the act of a moderator, which might or might not be part of MSI, nor reflect their own policy (I wish).

I have some happy news: I'll be able to start coding the cheap hardware for Open Source catalog soon, I expect by the middle of the coming week.

For reasons of personal preferences as well as sharpening a salable job skill, I'll be doing it in Python. I have a friend who is an expert web programmer who could advise me on the design of the database schema.

I will also start by reviewing the available Python code libraries to find components that I can reuse.

Rèmi Grumeau said:

Would you see such a program hosted on the Drupal Haiku-OS.org ?

At least for now I would prefer to host it on SPARE's website (Students Promoting Awareness of Recycling and the Environment). That's the name of the Branham High e-Waste club. (They have registered a domain name, but have not yet created a website. I'll be helping with that.)

What I envision though is to define some kind of network data interchange format, perhaps using an XML schema. What I would do is get Version 1.0 working just on SPARE's own website. But then a later release would periodically submit catalog updates to a central server.

The way it would work is that one would search a local site - Silicon Valley residents would search SPARE's website, because they could obtain the cards just by visiting the school.

But if the desired card cannot be found on the local site, the web application would offer to do a broader search, and would pass the inquiry to the central server. It would search first the current state or province, then the country, then the entire world.

The idea being to find a participating e-Waste recycler that is as geographically close as possible, to reduce shipping expense and speed delivery time.

A list of sites with available cards would be presented, then one would go directly to the local site to actually order and pay for the card.

An important reason for ordering directly from a local site is that every organization would need to have its own procedures for handling the transaction. SPARE is a high school club, with students and a teacher volunteer, and now me volunteering technical expertise. I'm afraid the process is going to need to be much lower-tech than your typical e-Commerce site.

When I get the first cut of the web catalog working, I'll Open Source it. I'll clearly document that the catalog will be isolated at first, but that a later upgrade will provide data interchange with the central server.

The central server would provide the same interface. One would register for a free account, and enter one's location - ZIP or Postal Codes would be the best. So if one does a search at the central server, again it will search locally at first but then more widely if a card isn't found at first.

Matt Zehner, a teacher at Branham High School in San Jose, sponsors the school's SPARE e-Waste recycling program: Students Promoting Awareness of Recycling and the Environment.

Their focus is on putting discarded hardware back into productive use so it doesn't enter the waste stream, as many electronic products are full of toxic materials like lead and arsenic.

His club was featured in the Cambrian Times' article Branham High School club masters art of turning trash into treasure.

He is also one of my two housemates.

When I killed my PC's motherboard with a failed firmware upgrade, he suggested I help myself to his goodies. I came home with six Pentium III boxes, the fastest being 700 MHz.

I've only examined two so far, but the only problems with either of them were worn out CD-ROM and floppy disk drives. Such drives are so cheap these days that I replaced the CDs on both units with Dual-Layer DVD Burners! Oh, Man, I remember when my first 4x SCSI CD burner set me back four hundred hard-earned bucks...

Matt was very excited about my proposal to offer salvaged AGP, PCI and even ISA cards to Open Source developers. They could supply whole working computers, but shipping wouldn't be economical outside of Silicon Valley. But for motherboards with onboard video, sound or ethernet, it would be economical to ship just the motherboard, CPU and memory.

(Complete computers could be provided to those able to pick them up at the school.)

SPARE would ask for a modest donation, but it would be way cheaper than buying such cards from a computer dealer.

I'm going to propose that we develop a web application that would catalog all these cards in a way that would aid developers in finding specific products.

What I have in mind is a very stripped-down Linux install on a floppy, CD or USB Flash drive. It would boot, scan the PCI bus then record the slot numbers, PCI Vendor and Device IDs in an XML file on a Flash drive, then shut back down. The student would then insert this Flash drive in another computer dedicated to this purpse, that would upload all the ID numbers to their website's database.

The web application would have a textual description of all the products in the database - there is someone who maintains such a listing specifically for Open Source use - so each card would be listed according to its function, manufacturer, model number and possibly revision number.

One problem they have is that the hard drives in their older computers aren't really big enough for use with "modern" operating systems like WinXP and Vista - they're typically ten or twenty gigabytes. Thus they're not able to put these hard drives back into service, so they have to be scrapped.

But it occurred to me that the kids could pre-install Ubuntu and Haiku on them, which would do just fine with such small drives. I vaguely recall that back in the day most of my own BeOS drives were only two gigabytes. (And one of those two-gig drives cost twelves hundred clams!)

Wow. What a week. The Coding Sprint is over and I am very excited at what we achieved together! Haiku has become much more usable and polished thanks to all the fixes and improvements. For example, I can now use Beam to read and send my e-mail, which is obviously quite important for me to be able to use Haiku on a day by day basis. But that was certainly not all. Read on for a detailed listing of all the achievements.

Please forgive the crosspost, but I already wrote all this up, and I'm too lazy to do it again.

http://www.varnernet.com/~bryan/2008/10/20/good-books-need-a-good-home/