Category: tech

So, a bit of progress since my post about 2007.

• OpenMoko released phase0. Believe it or not, but there are people on our planet, who use fully open/free software based mobile phone right now. And one of them is located in Poland. And it seems even more clear that final, public version will have WiFi with fully open source driver. Whoa…!
• Ubuntu 7.04 beta is out. It’s boring to say, but it simply works. Nothing more, nothing less. I’m totally sure I can advice this OS to absolutely anyone who’s not vendor-locked-in by some very specific windows-only software. It is a great news – Ubuntu 7.04 is another great layer on which we can build new things. There’s nothing more to catch up, the road ahead is to set trends, not follow them. Whoa…!
• Optimus keyboard gets into pre-order mode! I know – 1500$ seems to be quite a lot as for the keyboard. But it simple means that from that moment we can say that the world *has* a keyboard of this kind. There’s no other way but to go forward and wait for it to become cheaper. Use your imagination what could you do with such keyboard. For an example, look here.

I’ve also revisited my Project Watch. I need to update it, and will do that soon, but as for now, little progress raport:

• America’s Army port to Linux is dead. Pitty. Attal is dead. Pitty. Danger from the Deep got 0.2 release, and it looks very cool. I like it! Planeshift is exploiting their 0.3.x line and developing 0.4.x line which should get more user coverage. 0.3.x line is pretty playable, but lacking really addicting stuff for me.
• Graphic software projects got a lot of website updates, but also some significant progress. Crystal Space passed 1.0 mark which is very exciting since it’s one of the most popular open source game engines. CS is now mature and stable! Yake may seem to be dead, but it’s not. They abandoned 0.5 line and went straight forward to 0.6 which is in beta mode and I hope will be released soon. Ogre3D is just step ahead from 1.4 line which is an exciting update. Blender updated to 2.43 which is a huge step forward. Just look at the notes. Most of this are updated from last year Summer of Code, and the work made for Elephant’s Dream movie (Open source movie made exclusively in OS software). Whoa…! Only Gimp is still in wannabe-2.4 mode, while 2.3.x seems to be superstable and usable, and I really think that they should go with this and skip to 2.15 cycle.
• InitNG is back alive once more, with a new maintainer, they’re progressing pretty well. I miss any new benchmarks but I think that InitNG and upstart will became natural choices for all distros one day. Kernel is soon to be 2.6.21, and I hope that 2.6.22 will finally bring reiser4 on deck. Overall it seems that kernel project is super stable and progressing without any problems. KDE4 deserves separate article, as I’m building it every week or so and following their progress very close, but let me just say that they’re totally on the track, a bit behind in terms of front-end GUI apps, but a lot happens under the hood with plasma, decibel, phonon, nepomuk, strigi, and friends doing great work. Every day, my SVN update of core libs is very long. They’re working very hard. It’s soo cool to follow their progress now. I love Dolphin! Koffice 2 seems to be another exciting thing, you can live test how the text in Kword overflows curved based object! Still, front-end is a bit behind, not many visible changes since KDE3.5, it’s rather slow (debug mode etc.) and crashes, but I can see how they’re shaping up for the release, making libs ready and stable enough to switch the focus to front-end, and if the amount of work will stay the same, then I’m sure KDE4.0 will be amazing 🙂 Krusader and Amarok are progressing well with each release, digiKam released 0.91 line which I love, K3b went with 1.0, and MPlayer is still releasing in the lim->1.0 model. I’m a bit worried about GCC though. They’re far behind the schedule, GCC 4.2 is not ready for it’s prime time while 4.3 progresses ahead. It seems that they have a lot of energy to add new things, new optimization models etc., but bug fixing is not trendy and they lack dwarfs to do it. Ardour is really next to 2.0. Ubuntu and SuSe are superstable, superusable and well… great distros. Gentoo is in the “let’s discuss our goals” mode now, as well as Debian. A bit criticizm, a bit arguing, a bit flamewaring, I hope it’ll all settle down soon.
• Firefox is working on Fx 3, not much progress on front-end, but a lot of back-end changes mostly in Gecko 1.9. You’ll love Gecko 1.9, trust me 🙂 There’s also some discussion about Gecko 2.0/Mozilla 2.0/Firefox 4. Just basic concept designs and a bit more specific stuff in JavaScript 2.0 land. Flock is getting ready for 0.8 release and 0.9 code cycle. Similar to Firefox, Flock went through a lot of back-end changes that should make road to 1.0 straight forward. 0.8 won’t contain much new stuff (but it’ll base on Fx 2, so there’ll be new stuff anyway ;)), and you should expect much more new features in 0.9 and then in 1.0 of course 🙂 Bugzilla 3.0 is sooo next to your doors, that you should start using it right now. It’s cute (in this abstraction model in which a bug tracking tool can be cute). Azureus is preparing for 3.0 release which will be a huge change. WordPress released 2.1 and progresses toward 2.2 with my Flock’s friend Lloyd Budd on board. Psi is still waiting for 0.11 release which is a bad thing. I’m using their nightly, and it’s stable enough for the release, I’m sure. Drupal 5.1 and MediaWiki 1.9 are cool upgrades to use, but nothing more. Mozilla Developer Center switches to MediaWiki 1.9, finally!
• OpenOffice started finally releasing updates, we have 2.1 online, and 2.2 RC’s. Not much for Joe Average but it’s faster and more stable. I hope to see big changes soon as they’re working on 2.5 or 3.0 thing.
• Subversion seems to be a bit slowdowned by it’s success. We have 1.4.3, but not much new, no major issues fixed, no big features included, no major speedups anywhere. Waiting for a better security model with per-directory write access (would be perfect for big projects like Mozilla, KDE etc.)

There’s MUCH more going on around. It’s just a short update on some of the things I’m tracking. Show me any other part of software world with so much going on so fast.

Hope you like it 🙂

Maybe it’ll serve someone, one day…

1. Download Nokia S60 SDK, 3rd Edition, Maintenance Platform.
2. Install Wine.
3. Ensure you’re on Linux.
4. Download latest ActiveState Perl MSI file. (notice, that you can ignore the step with contact details)
5. Download Windows Script Host 5.6.
6. Download mfc42.dll.
7. Remove .wine – rm -rf ~/.wine
8. Recreate .wine – wineprefixcreate
9. Copy mfc42.dll to system32 folder – cp mfc42.dll ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
10. Install WSH – wine WindowsXP-Windows2000-Script56-KB917344-x86-enu.exe
11. Install ActiveState Perl – msiexec /i ActivePerl-5.8.8.820-MSWin32-x86-274739.msi
    
12. Add perl.exe to the %PATH%. I did it by manually editing ~/.wine/system.reg, key [System\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager\\Environment], PATH to: “PATH”=”c:\\windows\\system32;c:\\windows;c:\\Perl\\bin”
13. Install the SDK – wine setup.exe, custom, I installed the additional thing it asked me about
14. Launch the app – wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Symbian/9.1/S60_3rd_MR/Epoc32/release/winscw/udeb/epoc.exe
15. Watch as it launches, loads the emulated phone, and crashes because of some timeout at random moment…
16. Think that it’s soo near, and promise yourself to retry in a few months with next Wine releases

If you thought that with SLED 10, Ubuntu 6.10, X.org 7.1, Firefox 2 or anything else in our open source/free software/geeky world, the year 2006 was “tha best”, just sit down and enjoy 2007 🙂

With it’s Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, next Fedora, next Suse, next Mandriva, X.org 7.3 (real time hotplug!), Firefox 3, Flock 1.0, Azureus 3, KDE 4.0, Grub 2, Reiser 4 in mainline kernel, next releases of Ogre 3D, Blender, WordPress, MediaWiki, and things like OpenID gaining momentum, not mentioning progress with Compiz/Beryl/Metisse and everything else that’s too eyecandy to write about it we’re like a fullspeed TGV that is just passing by Microsoft world focused on “Vista” bus stop.

But we’re bigger than that. With last years distros we’ve reached the level of “fairly usable OS” and now we’re exploring new areas, inventing new technologies and exploring new worlds. And 2007 is for me mostly about OLPC, OpenMoko, Optimus keyboard. I played with OLPC during FOSDEM and I’m absolutely amazed. It’s cute, it’s powerful, it’s amazing how they mixed new technologies with open source and with “making the world a better place”. OpenMoko is something I’m dreaming about for a few years and I hope to receive my phase1 phone late this month, while Optimus keyboard is something so obvious I cannot understand why nobody made it for so many years.

One of the most important (not surprising, but long-term important) changes in 2006 was that for the first time we came to the situation when Joe Average was able to buy a laptop/PC, get a free linux distro, install it on his own and start using without having to perform a single command-line task or miss any Windows-only app.

Of course there are tons of cases when it’s not possible. People still need Corel, Adobe, sometimes Microsoft Office – true, but Joe Average (and my Mum) uses Ubuntu 6.10 on his/her Toshiba Portege R200 with Firefox, Open Office, Jabber, SIP and needs nothing more to be a happy user of today’s computer world. And we’re still speeding up…

… so please, think about those poor folks vendor locked-in in Microsoft empire, that will be exploring the “exiting” world of already exploited UAC, DRM, and shiny translucency for the next 5 years. Wave your hand while we’re passing them.

It’s so scary. I really don’t know what to think about it. I’ve met Hans once, I have very deep respect to his work, and I believe that reiser4 is the future of file systems.

I think it’s the first time ever, when open source, computer world breaks so deeply into the real life for me. I always try to split those two, having the Real Life and the Virtual Life go side by side, but rarely crossing each other.

Whenever I read about someone passing away, it shocks me a bit. It’s like a moment of change when you realize that the guy who commented on your blog, the guy you spoke on IRC for so many times, they guy you drank with talking ’bout future of the Internet or even a person you just read news posts of is really not alive anymore. It probably touches somehow my personal problem with dealing with an issue of death, but I always remember that I feel very strange at those moments.

And now, Hans, a man with the vision, a man who spent so many years to make the world a better place by introducing next era of file systems is arrested, accused of terrible thing, flattened into one event which will change his whole life and how we’ll remember him.

He might be innocent, I know. But what rings in my head is that this person, famous Hans Reiser, is not working on reiser4, he’s in jail, his wife is probably dead, his children are probably in deep trauma. It’s so far away from what should be happening now.

I hope, hope so much that he’s innocent. That she’s alive. That there was some huge mistake made by a lot of people leading into current situation, and that it’s possible to revert it all.

Yea… naive one, right? :(((

Yea, I know. It’s a shame. It should be lecture number 1 (just after lecture number 0 by Eric Raymond). Yesterday I was lurking at the EMPIK in Warsaw looking for something to read, and found “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig.

It’s hard to review the whole book after reading just a half of it, but I kind of like it. It’s a good book as an overview of the ideology we/I believe in. Just like CatB is a great overview of how do we think about code, FC is great as a sociologist overview of the relations between the law, culture, corporations and society that tries to preserve as much capitalism as possible while bringing back the “good of humanity” back into the game.

When I’m talking with my friends who’re on the opposite side of the fence, about open standards, p2p networks, patents law, they always claim that “we” are the ones who hate patents, who are against private property. It’s a bullshit no 1. Lawrence writes a lot about the mechanisms oligopoly corporations use to shift the conflict from “corporation good vs. innovations” into “private property vs. piracy”. Of course, the piracy is a problem, and I do understand they want to fight it, but what they’re doing is also putting free world into the same group as pirates. That’s a huge marketing lie, that people tends to buy. I hope that books like this will make it easier to understand what’s the position of Free Software/Free Culture movements.

One thing that Lawrence didn’t write about (at least in the first half), that drives me crazy, is how corporations use society good will to help them keep their rights, to push the law into the anti-human direction.

The ultimate rule we all use in all civilizations is a presumption of innocence. Another one is that you can do whatever is not forbidden by the law.

And today, the corporations trying to preserve their rights, are violating the two above with so many people silently agreeing on that. Look. Piracy is bad. We all do agree. But p2p network can be and is used not only for piracy, but also for legal file sharing between people. Forcing p2p to close in the name of corporation rights is a violation of presumption of innocence.
DRM promoted in the name of protection against piracy is violating rule of my freedom to do anything which is not forbidden by law.

They’re acting like if they want to say “Because we have technical and algorithmic limitations to find a way to block the bad without blocking right things, we’re going to block them all, because then we’re sure that we also blocked the bad things“.

Now. I do understand THEM. I’d do the same. Cut costs (preparing better solution would cost more), keep control, control makes sure that you’ll stay on the market etc. The only problem I see is that so many people support them in this so much that they agree on everything, they agree to limit their own freedom in the name of corporation’s good.

There is one more problem. Once you restrict in the law, it’s very hard to revert it. Once the corporations have what they want, we’ll suffer a lot before finding a way to remove those restrictions. It’s natural. Who the hell would allow us to do this once they have what they want? And they have payed people who lobby, not we. They have amazing amounts of money, not we. And it’s far too serious game for them to be “good”. If they’ll loose, they may wake up in the world which moves forward leaving them behind.
DRM is a method to workaround the law about culture products. The law that says that you can buy it and use it. You can buy a movie, music, book, and use it because you bought it. In many years timeframe, the book, music, movie will go to public domain, and new artists will be able to reuse your art to create something new. Just like Shakespear did, Walt Disney or fantasy does with legends of the old days.
With DRM, they give you the art, but the art can be used only together with a piece of software to decode it. Instead of buying a music, you’re buying a licence for a software to present you this piece of art. Everything is encoded so you don’t have access to the art you bought directly, only through that piece of software. Thank you. They pwned you. They say when, how often, how many times and where you can listen to your song. They can even decide if you can play it loud or not. If you can play it on sundays, it’s a software. They can do anything. In the name of fighting with piracy, they just took over the control on how you can use what they sold you. And there’s no public domain, cause they want to sell licenses forever. Can you call it a better place to live? Can you say that they’re making that in the name of preserving choice and innovation? Do you think that humanity will benefit or loose on this? Who is the winner? Does it win only with piracy?

Why the world agrees on such an overkill?

We finally got to the WordCamp. It’s a bit late (4pm), and we’ll be on time for only like 2 sessions. I’m going to try to fix the bug 343032 during this weekend, but because of the afterparty session that can last… long, I’m not 100% sure if that’ll happen. Blame wordpress for this, not me!

All attempts to enforce people to pay for art (books, movies, music) in digital era are making one huge bad thing. They try to go the short way. They accept to limit people rights to do with what they bought whatever they want, just because it would be hard not to limit them and still enforce payments. That’s wrong. It’s once more prove that business puts money in the first place, and customers are only the way to goal nr. 1.

But what they did with DVD region codes is soo stupid. I’m traveling to US every few months. I’m spending here a lot of time. And I can change the region code of the DVD player in my laptop 5 times. How can I use legally bought/borrowed DVD movies here? How the market could accept such limitation of my rights just because “they want more money”?

It pisses me off,how was it possible that those huge companies were allowed to enforce some “standard” that limits people right to use however they want whatever they bought. It shouldn’t ever happen. Next time they limit your right to breath because in some situations it may harm their budget… :/
On the way to enforce their rights they’re allowing themselves to break my rights, and that’s something I cannot accept. It makes me once more worried about how the world will work once those bastards get their DRM :/

The Witcher is a fantasy hero from Andrzej Sapkowski‘s books. I love them, because I find Andrzej’s writing style perfect (not sure about translations), and the characters he creates are incredibly interesting and expressive.

He’s style is to write about fantasy world with very modern thinking. It’s a bit strange at the beginning, but mostly because people tend to think of fantasy worlds as medieval+magic (you know, swords, knights, dragons, it must be medieval, right?) while there is no rule. It’s fantasy. It’s not anywhere in our history. The results are very interesting while he adds great piece of humour, a bit of philosophy and keep it so easy to read, you can do a book per evening.
Anyway, let’s get back to the subject. So, basing on the books there was a movie. Movie was Class D, horrible, pathetic production that costed ~4,5 mln dollars (it’s pretty much as for polish market) and should simply never ever happen.

Years later, polish publisher, CD Projekt, basing on their success decided to create a game development studio – Red Studio. Red Studio decided to start working on The Witcher as their first game. It’s good, they’re very talented, motivated, gathered a great group of fantasy writers, RPG authors and the best coders, designers in Poland, to work on the game, that’s bad, because they have no experience. They decided not to work on multi-player, not to work on Linux version, not to make it extendable (writing own modules to the game), just to focus on the story line. Lack of experience resulted in many changes late in the project. For example they first tried to develop their own gaming engine (in 2004?) then decided to buy Aurora from Bioware (Neverwinter Nights engine), but soon decided to activly co-develop Aurora 2 and it looks pretty good I think. There are many delays of course, the game was planned to be released around Q4 2005, now it’s Q1 2007 but you can watch videos from the E3 and it looks pretty much ready now.

I overall think that the game is worth waiting for, and I cross-fingers for those folks to create something really amazing. But what recently surprised me, was their Wiki. The Wiki is for gathering-around community to create knowledge base about The Witcher sage and story, to share their knowledge etc. It might be usefull later, to build in-game KB, but I don’t know if they’ll do this. What I know, is that they decided to use FDL as the license for the Wiki. And it wasn’t random decision as they describe it. They want to be able to share the data with Wikipedia. To be able to get the data from, and push it back to them.

I really think that we’re somewhere around the new age. Commercial, closed source as hell, game, made by poles who are usually very conservative in “I prefer to hide everything than to give anything” way of thinking, starts using a public MediaWiki with an intention to share the knowledge with Wikipedia, and uses open license.

I’m very happy to see this, and I hope that slow adoption of open ideas, licenses and freedom will happen, not even on the production level yet, but on the mental level. The Witcher made a small, but very important step in this direction 🙂

Since the first news about Opera 9, we all knew that there will be a widget system. Since the first preview build, users can touch them. But until now, Opera community and Opera company, failed to clear the signal about what the widgets are for at all.

I thought that it’s my personal problem, I just couldn’t understand the idea behind widgets. It’s nice, it’s great that it works, but what for? In my opinion, they could also add a small car racing game and/or guitar tuner. But few days ago I found (nota bene on Polish Opera Planet) Szymon Teżewski’s post where he confirms my doubts.
The only result is the praises like “Look, even with the widgets Opera is still the smallest and fastest browser!” – ok, that’s great, but it doesn’t answer the question about the usage of widgets. I can hardly imagine anyone using widgets on a daily routines (of course, there WILL be such people ;)), or that someone will use Opera because of the widgets. It makes no sense to me. Opera needs unique feature set for a longer term. To stay alive they need features that no other browser will want to have or be able to have. I don’t think that Opera will be able to attack IE’s market with them…

But the most crucial review was the C|Net one. I started watching it only because I was hoping that the man will explain the reasons for which he likes the widgets, the bright future of widgets and will show me how can I rise my internet experience with them.

Quote: “One of the exciting new features in Opera 9 beta 1 is widgets. And widgets stay with you, after you close out of your browser. And You can move them around the screen, or disable them completly. And there is a whole page of other widgets that you can download.”

Really, a musthave for any Joe Smith. I’m wondering how it’s possible that I used the web for so long without this great feature.

Update: I did not say that Widgets makes no sense to me. I love Mac OS X widgets, I use Karamba, I can’t wait for KDE 4 plasmoids. Do you follow? It’s a part of desktop, not a part of a software app. I feel strange when someone advertises a feature of some app that works because you can close this app and it still serves you. So why it’s a part of this app???

Great self-joke from Microsoft folks. The style vs. fashion again?