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.
We had a lot of fun in the group, the renewed Youth Hostel facilities are great. Like at the BeGeistert in Berlin, there is now a table soccer installation which we used from time to time to dope us with adrenalin and relax a bit from coding. But all in all, the coding absolutely dominated. It was actually quite intensive, on Wednesday, I realized that I had not been outside since Sunday evening. Ingo and Oliver were the most strict with getting up early, even though they stayed up late into the night. Poor Ingo was searching for a bug for a large portion of the sprint. But after the sprint, he was able to finally commit his hard work and now Haiku builds Haiku with twice the speed as before. The bug was actually a missing underscore, so that he used an unnamed auto locker, which then didn't lock at all... Overall, I'd say that this coding sprint was at least as successful as the one in January. And Haiku has taken another great leap towards the first alpha release. I want to thank everyone who was present and also the many developers who could not come, but who intensified their work during the sprint. This was very motivating. Many thanks also to the new contributors who send their patches! One of them, Clemens Zeidler, actually came by on two evenings and worked with us. He has contributed a large patch, which I need to commit ASAP, that enables broad support for Synaptic touch pads, including a preflet and two finger scrolling! Yay!
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.
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.
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 LW2008Today, 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.
Trekking back to the Moscone Center
Haiku Booth - Day 1At 8:15AM, my sister gave me a ride over to the Moscone Center. We picked up Art Yerkes (from ReactOS) on our way, and proceeded down to the exhibit floor once we got there.
We arrived an hour early, and started with a few finishing touches on the booth. I think it turned out pretty well :)
LinuxWorld Day 0I set out on my 3+ hour trip to San Francisco at 9:30AM the morning of August 4th. My trip included stopping and picking up Jorge Mare (a.k.a. Koki) during my drive along with the rest of the supplies and equipment that he was providing for the event. My car currently has no air conditioning, and the majority of my trip was in 95F (35C) heat - so I was quite sweaty when I arrived at Jorge's house.
