For a few years I have been waiting for an ARM based netbook. Every few months I would hear about all these new ARM devices and how they would be on the market 6 months time. 6 months later and there was nothing and rarely ever an official statement explaining why except in the case of the Lenovo Skylight here.

Yesterday I found the Toshiba AC100 and the initial impression was "Wow! A real smartbook with decent hardware from a real company!" but I was snapped back to reality when I was investigating exactly why I shouldn't have placed an order in the next 15 minutes. There is simply no community that I can find. If I can't work something out with the software who will I complain to? Getting support from the manufactuer is laughable and you have to be completely naive to believe they could support their product anywhere near as well as a community could.

The hardware looks great, build wality seems great but you have to remember that this is not some x86 based netbook. With ARM it isn't quite as simple as just blasting the stock OS away and replacing it with something you like and know. This smartbook runs Android and does not have a touch screen. Using a mouse in Android is... funky, and not in a good way. A full Linux desktop would be nice but I think Android would indeed suffice until somebody works out how to get Linux running nicely on the device.

The Nvidia Tegra T20 chipset which while very awesome is not very common in affordable devices but it seems that Nvidia provides a decent amount of support and documentation that is required to get a hacking community on its' feet. I own a SmartDevices SmartQ V7 which if you want to have access to the chipset you need to illegially acquire software for and the closed source video accelleration driver  and decoders from Telechips is an unreliable blob of crap. I don't think this is the case for Tegra -- at least their proprietary blob of crap seems to be well supported and regularly updated just like their Unix graphics driver. The hackers around the SmartQ devices are severely hobbled by the lack of manufacturer support for the chipset.

The device is quite new so hackers need to get their hands on the hardware and find the appropriate place to congregate. Hopefully one appears or I get drunk enough to buy the device and go start one.

Haiku Down Under is on tomorrow. It is a web conference -- as in you don't have to be physically anywhere.

Australian Haiku Users and Developers Conference 2010 at-a-glance

• When: Sunday 22nd August, 2010 - 9AM (GMT +10) | World Timezones
• Where: Online + Limited VIP Seating
• Registration and chat: via IRC at #haiku-au channel on Freenode
• Website: http://haikudownunder.com
• Live video stream: http://ustream.tv/channel/haiku-down-under-2010
• Videos of past HDU events: HDU 2008 | HDU 2009
• Photo gallery: http://haikudownunder.com/index.php?Gallery&album=1

Schedule

09:00AM - 09:05AM - Registration via IRC Channel
09:05AM - 09:20AM - Introduction / Session 1 - State of Haiku
09:20AM - 09:50AM - Session 2 - I am a GUI. Like my father before me.
09:50AM - 10:05AM - Session 3 - Haiku in Action III: Part 1 - The Web Experience
10:05AM - 10:15AM - Session 4 - Open Slot
10:15AM - 10:25AM - Session 5 - Open Slot
10:25AM - 10:35AM - Session 6 - QT: New Ways to Motivate Them
10:35AM - 10:50AM - Session 7 - Haiku in Action III: Part 2 - The GUI Experience
10:50AM - 11:00AM - Session 8 - Project Rhino
11:00AM - 12:00PM - Session 9 - netPanzer Face Off (Open to Everyone)
12:00PM - 01:00PM - Conference Wrap Up - Time for Pizza and Free Discussion

Note: I nicked the image and half of this stuff directly from the Haikuzone.net article.

Better a little late than never - linux.conf.au is now in the call for papers stage. Go to http://lca2011.linux.org.au and sign in and submit an abstract! If you have not submitted a paper or spoken at LCA before then there is plenty of information under the Programme menu.

In 2010 there will be an additional way to present at LCA! Posters are an easy way to interest and educate people about whatever project or subject you want.

See This Link for an explanation on exactly what a Poster is if you have never heard of this style of presentation before. Simple to prepare and easy to present!

I have also caught wind of Haiku Down Under 2010 which is a "Virtual Conference" based around Haiku OS. It is on 22nd of August - see the site for details. The past year has been very exciting for the Haiku community and there is a bunch of other cool stuff currently in the works such as WPA encryption for wireless and Linux Kernel Library porting to allow diverse filesystem compatibility just to name a few.

I have been very busy lately. My server's HDD died (I didn't get around to raiding the second disk) and so it sat there doing nothing for around a month because I was too tired to get over there and fix it. I'm sorry about any data I have lost!

I have moved to a Jumba VPS (I required cheap, generous and Australian) which costs $10 a month and so far it has been good except that I was not automatically allocated an IP when I signed up. While signing up I pondered whether I should get 10 IPV4 addresses so that I can release them for a certain amount of money. But that would be evil.

Luckily I manually backed up my personal part of the server the night before it died, so I was able to restore my Storytlr instance last night after a bit of fiddling with dependencies. I shall document the exact setup process for Storytlr on my new Wiki, and then probably get that pushed upstream.

Yes, I have set up a wiki.

MediaWiki is pretty nice and I rather it over that crap that Russell prefers. Even if it is PHP. I was holding off creating a wiki previously not only because I was lazy but because I was hoping that they would soon add better static content managment to Storytlr.

The todo list for the next 4 days is pretty long. *sigh*

I watch the Haiku-development mailing list as occasionally there is some quite interesting and informative posts.

Yesterday a tentative GSOC student asked about the current status of Gallium3D hardware accellerated grahpics support in Haiku. A developer called Zenja Solaja replied with an informative and exciting status update.

I've actually started porting the Nouveau Linux HW driver, going by the way
of designing a linux compatibility layer for video drivers.

At the moment, the following is done:
- Entire Nouveau Linux driver compiles and links with no warnings (via
compatibility layer)
- Haiku version of mini-DRM (linked to Haiku kernel) compiles and links with
no warnings.  By Mini-DRM is subset needed to compile Nouveau driver.
- Haiku accelerant for the Nouveau driver is done (minimal 2D support for
now, set/display mode etc)*
- TTM (another memory manager for graphics card resources) is 20% ported -
when this is done, then the whole stack should come alive.
- GEM is implemented via TTM wrapper.

The nasty thing about the video stack port I'm doing is that I cannot do an
integration test until all the components are done.  I expect that
everything should come together once the TTM port is done.

Once all of the above is complete, then it should be trivial to wrap the
Nouveau Gallium 3D driver to the Haiku accelerant calls (which calls the
Nouveau driver via DRM - in our case, via the accelarant).

Since I'm building a driver compatibility interface, I dont forsee any
problems porting the RadeonHD driver as well.

PS. I've actually been working on this for the last couple of weeks full
time (with a couple of high priority interruptions, but thats normal I
guess).

Maybe this is old news, but as I have been a little out of the Haiku loop lately this is new to me.

This fairly short email has a number of interesting points. Firstly it mentions a Linux driver compatibility layer, which is no mean feat to pull off due to the dynamic nature (*cough* instability of ABI *cough*) of Linux drivers but this is definitely not the first port of alien infrastructure to Haiku. The networking stack is sourced from FreeBSD and the Wifi drivers are also ported from FreeBSD thanks larely to the great work of Colin Günther who also driving forward with WPA support. As it stands Haiku has a FreeBSD compatibility layer (view relevant SVN here) and this has been great for networking in Haiku. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer but I have no idea how it is implemented or if it too can be ported across.

The amount of work that would have gone into getting the entire Nouveau driver plus a decent portion of TTM, GEM ported must have meant many nights of research and debugging.

Zenja also mentions that he is creating a Linux driver "compatibility interface" so that ATi drivers can be ported (which he seems to think will be relitively easy). I would speculate that if the compatibility interface is written in a sufficiently extensibile and generic manner this could open the doors for other non-graphics Linux drivers.

There is some bloody talented developers in the Haiku community who I find very inspiring. I really need to get stuck into C++ so I can go work with them, but at the moment all I can really do is donate to Haikuware Bounties and advocate the promising project!

The last month or so has been a real mixed bag so I think I'll start somewhere near the beginning and stumble through to the end.

Firstly, I still haven't finished migrating my site  to Storytlr, mostly because it is difficult to publish static content. It really sucks because you can't just have a few pages organised in any order and you can't have subpages etc which makes organising your static content impossible. You are limited to just 1 page which appears as a tab on your website. I submitted a feature request Here along with a bunch of other bugs and missing features I have noticed. 

Because I cannot easily publish articles in a desirable format I have not published my Storytlr review. I think it will have to be rewritten becauase the whole "1 week with Storytlr" approach doesn't quite work a month later.

Something fairly major has been bothering me lately and few of you have probably heard me vent about it. My employment situation is starting to not be funny anymore. It is half way through February and I have not officially ended my traineeship, and my hours are still minimal. I had a brief conversation two weeks ago in which we discussed my likely employment situation. To help me gain an overview of my situation I put some notes into text file and then said to myself "well it looks like I am probably screwed". I think the worse part of the situation is that I am in limbo , half in a job, three quarters out and I have no idea what is happening. There is no date set yet for an interview/meeting to straighten this out. It's not that my employer is bad, its just that the situation I am in is. Ideally, I want to stay with this employer as it looks like I could possibly have some great opportunities in the near future but the bottom line is that I need money to live on. I am getting very tired of having no money and work is NOT fun anymore.

On a positive note it seems like there is some jobs out there for me which even though they are only entry level pay multiple times better than my current one and some of them seem pretty interesting and a hell of a lot more inducive of a stable lifestyle.

Back to the technical stuff. I am looking at doing more work on my Python based CMS as I don't know how long until either I or somebody else gets around to hacking in better static content support into Storytlr. I think the issue with my project is that I pretty much suck at Python. I think I may need to go back to actually studying the language. Doing one simple task and then  googling for example on how to do the next is far too innefficient and just plain embarrassing.

The other day I thought I would see if I could parse the CUPS print history file as a way of billing. To do this I intended to make a web based interface so that customers could log in to keep an eye on their usage and so that administrators could generate bills and manage users. So the first thing I did was start designing a basic site with authentication and access control using CherryPy. I found this as it seemed to be the only decent piece of documentation on the subject. The trouble is that it seems to be written against neither CherryPy 2 or CherryPy 3. With CherryPy2 you cannot use the quickstart stuff (as far as I can see)  so the example fails and with CherryPy3 the auth tools have changed since that was written. I read more into the matter and found that there has been some changes to do with the auth tools which have not been documented very well so I can't work out how to upgrade the example code so that it works!

Poor documentation of FOSS software is a very annoying issue. Nobody actually likes to write or really even to read documentation; but why would you bother releasing your code into the wild without adequate documentation that people can use what you have provided!?!?!?

Moving away from Python and back to Storytlr. I have been browsing the code a fair bit lately pondering how I can hack in certain features. At one pointed I attempted to hack Zend Captcha into my live site and this did not go so well. I need to set up a development server at home and I have a virtualization capable sever except that I do not want to re-build it because I suspect the power supply is the root of all the problems I have had wiht the machine. It doesn't seem to be a very good idea to damage more hardware and waste time and money just for a few weeks of development which would might be lost when a  hard drive starts spewing corrupt data into the array...

I have been in contact with a few people in regards to creating an actual Storytlr community. Thankfully the Laurent (one of the creators of Storytlr) has been on the ball and is soon to help the community building process by recreating Storytlr.com to help enable a community to grow around it. See the mailing list thread here where this was briefly publicly discussed.

I don't think I will write another blog entry in this style. If people really want to see my random crap they could browse my lifestream at http://ddevnet.net

I decided that my python based CMS is still a fair way from being completed so I knew that I had to get rid of my placeholder page and replace it with something.

While checking the morning news today I saw the storytlr CMS mentioned on ars technica. I thought it looked interesting, and it seemed to have the features I required so I decided to give it a go.

It took a bit of setting up due to the very immature documentation which is somewhat expected for a newly open sourced piece of code. I plan to create an article describing how to set it up on CentOS 5 as it has a few issues with PHP.

I am still working out the features as storytlr is not your usual CMS. It is heavily social-media oriented. As you can see by the main page of the website it can hook into RSS, microblogging (it has native support for Identi.ca!) as well as publishing blog and microblog style content from storytlr itself.

The thing I like about the social media integration, despite not being very active with social media is that it means that the site is very up to date with not just my contents (I post a few times a week on identi.ca) but with things I am interested in.

Static content in storytlr is a little tricky though. As I am finding out now, you cannot just upload images into a blog post... However it seems that you can upload pictures, audio and video to create galleries. Perhaps I could get my hands dirty and fix this, or somebody else will soon no doubt.