This past Friday and Saturday I attended the Kansai Open Source Forum (KOF) conference in Osaka, Japan, to represent the Haiku project together with my Japanese friend and BeOS/Haiku developers Momoziro-san. Here are my impressions from the first day at KOF.
ATC complex in Osaka, where the KOF conference was held.
KOF was held at the Asian Trade Center (ATC), located in the waterfront area known as the Osaka Bay Area. ATC is a huge complex of which the KOF exhibit area was only a very small part; the complex has a lot of stores and space for various types of events that are held on a regular basis. Ironically, the KOF exhibit floor was on an area of ATC called the MARE Gallery; I say ironically, because as some may know, Mare is my last name. That and the fact that Japan is like my second home (I lived there for about 23 years) kind of made me feel welcome. ;)
A few hours ago I had my Haiku talk on the Dutch Open Source event T-DOSE, and I’m still glowing all over. The attendence was above all my expectations, around 25 people were in the room. And despite of the last minute all night changes I had to make, the speech went fluently. Someone made a few pictures, which I hope to be able to post soon, and more importantly, I’m on tv!
Excuse me for the brevity of the previous post, it was done on my mobile phone (per experiment), and thus I was limited in the amount of characters I could post.
I just returned from Eindhoven (which, by the way, is the most ugly city in the Netherlands), and all in all I had a fun day. I went to see two talks: one on KDE 4 programming by Adriaan de Groot.
I just arrived at the event location. My first impression: a highly geek audience. So I might have to change the tone of my speech. The venue is okay, and The rooms are enormous. I have no idea how many people are going to be present when I speak tomorrow morning. The time is 11 am by the way, gmt 1, and there is a webcast. Check www.t-dose.org. I’m now going to see some talks, to see what kind of audience I might expect.
You are probably aware of the existance of chkbfs. This tool checks the file system for errors, and corrects them, if possible. Nothing is perfect, so you might not even be asking yourself why a journaling file system comes with such a tool. In fact, it wasn't originally included or planned in the first releases of the new BFS file system. It was added because there is a real need for this tool and you are advised to run it after having experienced some BeOS crashes.
I love Haiku. That probably doesn't surprise anyone. I am phenomenally proud of the progress, both past and present that the project has made. I have lead the project since its creation, including running each of the WalterCon events, doing a great deal of public speaking, starting the non-profit, writing around 100 articles and editorials for the newsletter, fielding hundreds of emails, random phone calls and occasionally even writing some code. I have received a job offer because of Haiku and gotten back in touch with a number of old friends as a result of the publicity that Haiku (and, indirectly, I) has received. I have had the honor of meeting a bunch of the former Be crew and seeing the doubt and question fade as they saw what we had created. I had the distinct honor of being introduced by JLG.
But.
I’ve decided to switch to an update every two weeks, which will hopefully prove more resilient to Real Life (TM). I’ll also start being a little more selective about the changes I report to make it at bit less work for me to write, and a bit less work for you to read!
In brief, this period saw a lot of bug fixing work from the core contributors. A first firewire implementation was committed to the tree, Ingo completed Job Control support, Mail received a much-needed code cleanup, and Marcus continued the initial work on the AHCI SATA driver.
Read on for more on those, updates on mailing list discussions, and to find out how I managed to include a reference to Shakespeare…
On the 8th September, I attended a local Unix user group called HUMBUG, at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
This was their Annual General Meeting, which was very much an informal gathering of 34 unix users and with the Haiku presence we had, we definitely made an impression; certainly more people know about Haiku than yesterday, and that’s gotta be a good thing.
Earlier that day when I was driving to the University, I got stuck behind this white hatchback, which had the license plate letters KDL.
During this summer I had the chance to improve myself, and work on the USB isochronous support of HAIKU. I wrote some code for every layer of the HAIKU USB stack: USBKit library, usb_raw driver, usb bus manager and most of all the uhci driver. I also spent/waisted some weeks with the usb_webcam media addon, but sadly with not success. Anyway here is what I did.
UHCI driver: Basically I added all the necessary code to handle isochronous transfer in both direction (in and out).
So after a few frustrating weeks of very little progress on my WebKit port, I have finally gotten JavaScriptCore running on Haiku!
