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.
I’ve had some time to play around with Haiku R1A4.1 and got it working nicely in VirtualBox, running under Windows, and also on real hardware. Along the way I made a few notes (InstallingHaikuR1A4.html) on how to get it going. I’ll describe the significant things you need to know in the rest of this blog post.
A bit late, but finally I managed to process my recordings of the talks at BeGeistert 026 “Marathon”. The quality isn’t terrific, looks like the picture was much better last time at BG 024, when we apparently didn’t darken the room so much. Audio might be slightly better, as I have used compression and a bit of filtering following advice from Haikollegue Sean Collins. I used Avidemux under Linux for de/muxing the audio track and encoding the final AVIs, and Audacity for processing the audio.
The ARM keeps moving... For people not watching the commit list closely, I’ve continued to find time to work on Haiku/ARM. So far, things look promising. No new screenshots of any kind though, but more investigation work done to get an idea of what I’m getting myself into. All in all, I’m actually quite pleased…
In my local repository (of which most is actually in the Haiku repository as well, bar some really nasty hacks that not even I dare to commit publicly) I’ve been able to get to the point where all content for a standard Haiku image is being built (the famous haiku-image target, for the devs reading this).
As you may recall during August, Ingo Weinhold and Oliver Tappe were each accepted for two-month development contracts relating to package management[1]. Originally, their start dates were slated for sometime around November or December. Due to their current contractual obligations with other employers, they will not be able to begin as early as planned. The revised start date is now around February or March.
As seen in Ingo's excellent presentation on Haiku's built-in debugging tools, our graphical debugger, while getting quite capable, is still missing a number of important features. As such, I made it my goal this week to try and resolve as many of those as I was able to.
The ARM is moving
After porting the basic VM code from X86 to our ARM port, it has been pretty much 2 years since I worked on it. Last weekend, BeGeistert 026, gave me a chance to work on it again, for a couple of days (nights?) in a row, and I tried to make the most of it.
Besides working on Haiku/ARM it was great to meet up with many of the people I already knew but had not seen for a long time, as well as finally meet the new people behind the names and posts I had followed over recent times.
Hi there ! This week was the BeGeistert coding sprint. I assume you already read the great report at IsComputerOn about the conferences for this week-end, so here’s just a summary of the work done durint the coding sprint.
ARM Port - Ithamar Adema, René Gollent, Adrien Destugues Ithamar was holding the keyboard on this one. He's working on low-level Android stuff as his paid job, so he has a good understanding of the hardware and the Linux kernel that serves as a reference.
