Blogs

Coding Sprint Results

Blog post by stippi on Tue, 2008-10-21 09:01
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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!

Reality Bytes

Blog post by BryanV on Wed, 2008-10-01 03:53

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.

[HCD]: status report

Blog post by emitrax on Sat, 2008-08-23 08:51
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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. ;-)

LinuxWorld 2008 as I saw it

Blog post by koki on Thu, 2008-08-14 00:14
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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.

Haiku Down Under 2008

Blog post by Sikosis on Tue, 2008-08-12 02:29
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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.

Day 3 at LinuxWorld - Filled With Excitement

Blog post by umccullough on Sun, 2008-08-10 21:02
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Jean-Louis Gassée visits us!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.

R2 R&D: The Filer

Blog post by darkwyrm on Sat, 2008-08-09 21:55
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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.

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