koki's blog

Haiku Article in Software Design Magazine

Blog post by koki on Mon, 2008-03-24 03:48
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As some of you may know, in the ZETA days I worked for yellowTAB in a consulting capacity. At that time, the market I was involved in was Japan, and as a marcom specialist, I make it a point to develop relationships with representatives of the media of that country in order to gain exposure for the product. Of all, there was one magazine in particular that always showed a lot of interest in our platform, and that was Software Design magazine (SD).

The April 2008 issue of SD carries an article titled "Writing Haiku: Begun in 2001, an open source replication of BeOS finally nears its alpha release" as part of the PACIFIC CONNECTIONS series of articles written by Bart Eisenberg. This is an eight pages long article that includes a full interview of Axel Dörfler, as well as comments from Bryan Varner (Haiku Java Port team lead) and Dane Scott, of TuneTracker fame. I think it is a good read, so go ahead and read the English version of the article available here.

Haiku at SCaLE 6x: Overall impressions

Blog post by koki on Mon, 2008-02-11 23:56
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Haiku booth ready for the showHaiku booth ready for the showThis past weekend Bruno G. Albuquerque, Joe Bushong and myself represented Haiku at the sixth Southern California Linux Expo conference, best known as SCaLE 6x, held on February 9 and 10 in the city of Los Angeles. This was the second year in a row that we organized a presence for Haiku at this event, and since we had so much fun last year (here are two reports and photos from 2007), we were all looking forward to doing it again this time around.

I picked up Bruno from San Francisco airport on Wednesday February 6 at around midnight; he was supposed to arrive a few hours earlier, but he missed his connection flight in New York. The next day, Bruno and I prepared everything for the booth, including setting up our own demo machines (he had Haiku running in VMWare on a MacBook Pro, I had it running natively on my HP Pavilion zv5000 laptop), testing the projector with my (oldish) small cube computer running an AMD XP 1.7G CPU with 1GB RAM, and finishing up and printing the Haiku flyers to handout at the booth. We also could not resist the temptation, and ended up buying a projector screen (we split the cost) so that we could show Haiku running on the backwall of the booth. My wife also did her part, and volunteered to iron and nicely fold about 15 Haiku t-shirts to sell at the booth. By dinner time, we had almost everything ready.

Webkit port: talking to Andrea "xeD" Anzani

Blog post by koki on Sat, 2007-12-22 01:19
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Webkit rendering bebits.comWebkit rendering bebits.comIt looks like the Haiku Webkit port initiated by Ryan Leavengood has entered a productive second stage of development, and thanks to the recent work by one of the new project team members, Andrea "xeD" Anzani, tangible progress has been made as shown by the recent screenshot showing the HaikuLauncher application rendering bebits.com (shown to the right). I was curious about his work, so I went directly to the source and asked a few questions to Andrea; here are his answers.

Andrea: From the questions you wrote, it looks like you think we have a working browser here. Well, we don't. I'm sorry to tell you but what you see it's just a proof that the webkit is working. Still incomplete and with a lot of bugs. The webkit is, in short words, a framework for loading, parsing and drawing an html page (including net connections and javascript interpreter). We are working on fixing and finishing it. When we are done with porting the webkit, then we can speak about the development of a web browser.

Kansai Open Source Forum: Day 2 Report

Blog post by koki on Tue, 2007-11-20 07:13
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Demo machine at KOF Haiku boothDemo machine at KOF Haiku boothNot surprisingly, it took me much longer than originally planned to find the time to write about the second day at the Kansai Open Source Forum conference (KOF). But no worries: memories are still quite fresh, as it's usually the case when things go well and you have fun. The second KOF day started earlier, especially for me. The exhibits were scheduled to open at 10:00AM, so with Momoziro we decided to meet at the hotel lobby at around 9:00AM. But I was up way before that, at around 5:30AM (compliments of my very jet-lagged old body). So I sat in front of my laptop to write some emails and then went through my Haiku presentation slides again, making little changes here and there, changing the order of a few slides and even adding a couple of slides based on some of the questions that I had received during the first day at KOF.

Impressions of the Kansai Open Source Forum Conference: Day 1

Blog post by koki on Sun, 2007-11-11 01:29
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This past Friday and Saturday I attended the Kansai Open Source Forum (KOF) conference in Osaka, Japan, to represent the Haiku project together with my Japanese friend and BeOS/Haiku developers Momoziro-san. Here are my impressions from the first day at KOF.

ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.

KOF was held at the Asian Trade Center (ATC), located in the waterfront area known as the Osaka Bay Area. ATC is a huge complex of which the KOF exhibit area was only a very small part; the complex has a lot of stores and space for various types of events that are held on a regular basis. Ironically, the KOF exhibit floor was on an area of ATC called the MARE Gallery; I say ironically, because as some may know, Mare is my last name. That and the fact that Japan is like my second home (I lived there for about 23 years) kind of made me feel welcome. ;)

Settings, BeOS style

Blog post by koki on Tue, 2007-05-08 18:05
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In his Popular Network Preferences applications and comments blog post, GSoC student Andre Alves Garzia gives a great comparative overview of network preferences apps in OS X, Ubuntu, Windows and ZETA, as a means to look for the ideal approach for Haiku.

Andre's post actually reminded me of a few ideas that I had quite some time ago about a BeOS-like way for handling network/email/printer settings (in ZETA, back in the days when I was using it), that I think would still apply for Haiku. I don't know if they are within the scope of what Andre is doing and, not being an engineer, I don't either have a clue whether these ideas can be implemented or not. But I will present them anyway, even at the risk of exposing my sheer ignorance. :)

haiku-os.org Slashdotted

Blog post by koki on Sun, 2007-02-18 04:57

This morning we were discussing by email with Waldemar what could be causing some DB errors from the photo gallery and a general slowness of the website. Waldemar contacted our service provider, and their response was "your site has suddenly become too popular" (something that effect). Well, no wonder: I just noticed that we were Slashdotted (Haiku Tech Talk at Google a Success). I checked the logs, and it looks like the site received about 10,000 hits from /. in less than 12 hours!

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