Last month on the [haiku-inc] mailing list, Arman “Kulluminatii” Chahal suggested adding Haiku to Goodsearch. “What is Goodsearch?”, you may ask. It’s a Yahoo! powered search engine that will donate money (about a penny) to your favorite non-profit or school. They provide other ways to help earn money – shopping online, participating in online surveys, completing special offers and more! This past week, the registration process completed and Haiku is now a participating non profit!
In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful.
Starting with hrev45522 address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP) are available in Haiku. These two features, which have actually become a standard in any modern OS, make it much harder to exploit any vulnerability that may be present in an application running on Haiku thus generally improve system security.
It's been almost three weeks since the previous blog post and some people start wondering what the current status
is and what were working on exactly, so it's time for an update. Incidentally the time is perfect for an
update anyway, since we've just reached our first important milestone: haikuporter supports hierarchical
building of packages.
After quite some delay Oliver and I have finally started our contracts with Haiku, Inc. to continue our work on package management. Each of us will work 320 hours in total, i.e. the equivalent of 2 months of continuous full-time work.
Earlier this week NFSv4 client I have been working on during the last year Google Summer of Code has been merged into the main Haiku repository and is now available in nightly images. The client supports all caching mechanisms available in the version 4 of NFS what means that it can get the most out of network connection and the server. Unfortunately due to limitations of the NFS protocol itself extended attributes are not supported yet.
An unexpected change has necessitated a delay to the start of the package management contracts. Ingo recently posted the update to the [haiku-inc] mailing list. To sum it up, the parts he is responsible for need to be updated to match changes by the customer. At this time, the delay could be anywhere from a few days of work or could be several weeks. The current plan is for Ingo and Oliver to start at the same time. While that asks for patience among us, having both working in tandem is expected to have a synergistic effect. As more information becomes available, I’ll try to keep everyone up to date.
Haiku participated in Google’s Code-In for the third year in a row. This year’s event was a bit different than in 2010 and 2011. Google changed the rules a bit to make the contest better than in previous years. One of the changes was to remove the translation tasks as it seems for many of these tasks students were using Google Translator and other such tools. This meant that the biggest category for Haiku in GCI2010 and 2011 was gone, so we would have to adjust things a bit. For 2012 we had students complete 168 tasks, with ten students completing six or more tasks each. We focused more on coding and coding related tasks than in the past.
Most operating systems and desktops are moving to the “search to launch” style of starting applications. After using these for a while, I do think they speed up my core desktop usage.
I also think everyone is doing it wrong. Below are my general thoughts on this kind of application launcher:
- Search to launch shouldn't distract the user.
Gnome 3, Windows 8, and Unity. All of these user interfaces distract you from your work by bringing up a full-screen launcher. While I think some focus is needed on the "search to launch" interface, it should only distract you enough to let you think about what you want to start.
