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After nearly three years, I'm finally winding down all the home-improvement projects that have been bogging me down and consuming the time I haven't devoted to my family, friends, job, and immediate community. I also have Haiku running on my iMac, virtualized in VirtualBox. I am working on getting the data from my old UW SCSI development disc to an image on this machine as I type this.

That's the good news.

Now for the bad (well, for you, not me).

I feel like I should apologize for not having invested more time in the Java effort. This is not how I'd envisioned things would go, this is not how I'd wanted them to. I've seriously neglected this project and for that, I'm sorry. Judging from the total lack of gnashing of teeth, I'm going to guess it's not that big of a deal to anyone else either. Just know, this isn't how I'd wanted it to go.

As many of you may know my wife, Kylene and I are expecting our first child in early December. I've got about six weeks before my life totally changes forever. I'm not worried, I'm not sad, and I'm not regretting a dang thing. The last three years have been a trip and I'm sure the ones to come will be just as interesting.

So while it's nice to try and ignore reality and wistfully believe you can accomplish everything you've ever set out to do if you just get that one next small thing finished, eventually reality bites you in butt, and you have to turn around and face it.

Which is why, some two weeks ago, I sent an email to Mark Reinhold of OpenJDK (and Sun) asking to transfer ownership of the OpenJDK Haiku port project to Andrew Bachmann. Still no response on that, but we're working toward it. Basically, I cannot commit to leading the charge here. I can't even really commit to ever being able to work on this again. I'd like to think I'll have at least some time to dedicate to this in the coming year, but for some reason I don't think I'll get much coding done at 1AM while I'm trying to get a screaming infant to quiet down. I'm also selling off (or giving away) all my old hardware from the glory days of R5.

If anyone would like my Adaptec 2460UW, the cable, and the 8GB drive attached to it that contains all the source for the java 1.4 port (and a few other java-based apps that I got working on BeOS) feel free to drop me a line. I would rather send it directly to someone who will make use of it than to send it to Haiku to redistribute. It'll reduce costs, and I'll know with whom to follow up. So speak up, if you want it.

I also have an assortment of graphics cards, network adapters, an UW SCSI2 RAID controller... I plan to catalog all these parts this weekend. If anyone is interested in these for driver-development, I'll donate the hardware for that kind of cause.

It's been a bit since my last status update, so I guess it is time for another one.

First of all, I'd like to inform you that I received the first half HCD payment. Since it's a (fantastic) community based effort project, I thought you wanted to know where your donations ended up.

As of commit r27159 you should be able to read data from an UDF partition. The module has not yet been added back to the image, as I'd like to do some more tests, but as far as I can tell, the port of UDF to the new FS API is close to complete, and you can start testing by adding the module to the image and trying using DVD formatted with UDF, or iso image made with mkisofs. Feedbacks are welcome.

As for the other part of my HCD, in case you missed, bonnie++ was added in r26920 and it is available for the braves one, for testing purposes.

In r27052 I also fixed another BFS deadlock that would lock the file system when more then one thread was writing in the same directory. See this for more info.

Ok, going to back to UDF now. ;-)

Haiku made its "big stage" debut at LinuxWorld for the first time this year. If you follow the feeds on our website, you have probably already read the nice reports that Urias posted on the website during and after the show (day 0, day 1, day 2 and day 3). I thought I would give me own personal recount of the event, in order to perhaps bring a little bit of a different perspective, and hopefully also complement what Urias has already written about the show.

I had never been to LinuxWorld before, but I knew from reading about the conference that it was bigger to other open sources conferences we have exhibited in the past. I also had an idea of the demographics of the event, as I had done a little bit of reasearch before proposing our attendance last year. Average attendance was said to be more than 10,000 people, and by the size of the exhibit floor at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and the duration of the show (three full days), this seemed just about right; this was obviously a very compelling number from the point of view of getting exposure for Haiku.

In May this year, I wrote to the Haiku Mailing List, proposing that the Australian Haiku Users and Developers hook up with an existing Open Source event to generate some Haiku interest in our Country. It was decided that the cost of heading to a central event, would be too costly and as we are spread out all over Australia, I then started thinking about plans of doing something online - a Virtual Conference, so to speak.

As Haiku's Anniversary is coming up on the 18th August -- I figured, we'd try and have an annual event centred around this date. Due to the short notice, I thought it would be best to keep it as simple as possible, and as this is the first event, it can then be used to generate more interest and discussions around Haiku.

Jean-Louis Gassée visits us!

Day three at LinuxWorld Expo 2008 started off with Scott McCreary dropping his car off at my sisters' apartment, and catching a ride to the Moscone Center with me. Despite nearly running over a few pedestrians, we made it there with plenty of time to get ready. Jorge Mare had to leave for home the evening before, so it was just going to be Scott and me this day. I had updated my laptop with a slightly newer revision the night before, and spent some time getting it setup to run live queries before the show started (which seemed to be broken for some reason before the rebuild.)

Special Visitors

It started off like the other days, didn't seem to slow down as much as I expected on the last day. We did have a couple of interesting visitors on this day indeed. Amy Bonner from IDG stopped by our booth to say hello. Amy helped us secure the booth space after we were turned down for a space in the .Org pavilion. She said she was really happy we could make it, and shared some ideas with us for next year's .Org submission. We gave her a complimentary T-shirt for helping us out this year. It was great to finally meet her in person, and we snapped a shot of her standing in front of the booth.

Being a go-getter kind of person has, on occasion, actually gotten me somewhere besides into a mess. With having significantly more free time than usual because of being on summer vacation, I decided to work on a document which combined two RFCs I have already written, which can be found here and here. Knowing how it seems like discussions on R2 usability seem to be both endless and unproductive, I decided to put some the ideas into code before publishing it in an effort to demonstrate that most, if not all, of the ideas I propose are practical, reasonable, and worth implementing for the second version of the community's beloved OS. The first of these to see public eye is the Filer.

Back to the Moscone Center

Haiku and ReactOS at LW2008

Today, Scott McCreary was nice enough to swing by and pick me up on his way to the conference. We cruised by my company's corporate headquarters to pick up a package I was expecting, and then went directly to the Moscone Center from there.

Before the conference was under way, we re-arranged the layout in the booth a little bit, putting Art and the ReactOS machine up in front next to ours a bit more. We felt this might increase the ReactOS-related questions and demos a bit, and I believe it did help. I should note that without Art Yerkes and ReactOS, the event wouldn't have been possible for us this year.

Interest still strong

Today was similar to the first day, but the clumps of visitors were less, and we had more focused and genuinely interested visitors. We did get the usual: "Is this another Linux distro?" questions, but we also got several: "Wow, you re-created BeOS? That is awesome!"

Matt flew 5.5 hours to see us

Later in the day, we were visited by Matt Martz who flew 5.5 hours across the U.S. to see us. At least, this is what we'd like to believe, but perhaps he actually did want to visit a few other booths as well. In any case, he posed for a picture in front of the booth, and laughed when we told him it would probably show up on the website. (I don't think he believed we were serious)

Into the belly of the beast

With the addition of Scott, I was given a chance to finally walk through the floor and see what the other exhibits looked like. There was a Linux "InstallFest" sponsored by Untangle. I briefly considered taking a USB stick loaded with Haiku over there and installing it on a couple machines, but due to lack of time (and courage), I didn't get a chance to do this. Perhaps tomorrow ;) There was an abundance of server and hardware products using Linux on the exhibit floor, and it was clear that Linux on desktops was not a major focus for the event at this point.

All in all, the day was pretty solid. I have begun to lose my voice, unfortunately - mostly due to a recent cold I have been fighting I suspect, but also due to the massive amount of talking I have been doing over the last couple of days. Hopefully it will improve overnight and I will sustain another day.

Day 3 report will likely be delayed as I will not have the opportunity to write anything up tomorrow night.