Another short post.

I added some forums to my blog. Nothing much – if you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to talk away, feel free to do so.

Well, it’s a short post.

Since I was around the area and was more or less free during the time, I attended a short meeting with a local Linux Users Group at the G2iX Techbar, IT Park, Cebu City, of which I am a member.

There was basically a short talk on Liferay, an Open Source Portal, Collaboration, Social Networking tool written in Java. After the talk was a discussion between the members about activities within the year.

Like I said, nothing much. People like Tom Wickline, head of the Bordeaux Group (a front-end to WINE), and writer to Wine-Reviews attended the meeting.

It also allowed me to show off my netbook running Moblin.

For those who don’t know who G2iX is, they’re a company headquartered in Manila, and specializes in Ruby on Rails development, Java, Dev Automation and Cloud Platform Deployment. They have also received awards like the Top Asian TechnoVisionary Awardee for 2006/2007 by ZDNet Asia, Top 20 Open Source Companies by Red Herring, among others.

The OS which powers my E51 and E61i phone is now open sourced.

From the Symbian.org wiki site, the whole system platform is ready for download and development.

Amounting to about 25 million lines of code (38 million lines if you include the tools used to create the platform), Symbian now becomes one of the largest projects ever to be moved from proprietary to open source.

The not so good news is that you cannot reprogram your existing phone with Symbian 3 (this is symbian with all the proprietary 3rd party IP removed). However, you can take pieces of the individual applications, modify and extend them and install them back in the phone.

Greater news is that it is possible to build a Symbian phone now. The Symbian foundation provides template base ports for certain types of hardware. This includes an emulator run in QEMU.

All in all, this is great news for an OS installed in a majority of phones worldwide.

An interesting development happened during the release of the 2.6.33 linux kernel and generated some heated discussions on the lwn comments section. The android code in the linux kernel tree was deleted.

Why was it deleted? Greg Kroah-Hartman in his blog stated in a nutshell that:

In short, no one cared about the code, so it was removed. As I’ve stated before, code in the staging tree needs to be worked on to be merged to the main kernel tree, or it will be deleted.

There was a more serious problem though, as stated by Greg:

Now branches in the Linux kernel source tree are fine and they happen with every distro release. But this is much worse. Because Google doesn’t have their code merged into the mainline, these companies creating drivers and platform code are locked out from ever contributing it back to the kernel community. The kernel community has for years been telling these companies to get their code merged, so that they can take advantage of the security fixes, and handle the rapid API churn automatically. And these companies have listened, as is shown by the larger number of companies contributing to the kernel every release.

But now they are stuck. Companies with Android-specific platform and drivers can not contribute upstream, which causes these companies a much larger maintenance and development cycle.

On the lwn comments section, Greg further stated that a number of hardware companies approached the kernel development community for help due to this problem.

Apparently part of the problem is the problem is that Google created a new kernel core infrastructure which in order for it to be placed into the mainline kernel, numerous changes in kernel and userspace have to be done. Google has essentially created a fork of the kernel.

Cris DiBona stated:

To sum up: I think that Android is an unusual use of Linux that doesn’t match up with what is normally done, and I think that a fork isn’t unwarranted in these cases. I should point out we didn’t use glibc , either, or a ‘standard’ VM. We built android.

The aforementioned fork was mostly in the implemention of wakelocks, a process of bringing a system out of various low power states.

Google found the current implementation inefficient, and due to time constraints and pressure to produce a product, made their own API implementation.

The downside of this is that in order for linux drivers new and current ones to work on Android, one has to hook up to the new wakelock mechanism. This causes lots of distress in maintaining current userspace and kernelspace development.

It was generally agreed that the problems of power management was an issue that needed to be solved. However, a number disagreed on the way that Google handled the solution, including the kernel developers.

The reason mainline hasn’t accepted the wakelock infrastructure is that Google has still failed to demonstrate why it’s necessary. Almost identical benefits can be obtained using the kernel’s existing range timer functonality, which has the added bonus of removing the need for the strong userspace/kernel tying that Android requires right now.

Interestingly enough, Nokia handled the problem more maturely than Google. Whereareas, Google basically sent a large number of patches and left it hanging, one user noted:

I can’t remember significant interaction between Google Android developers and mainline kernel developers before early 2009. Contrast that to Nokia who have been *all over* the kernel upstreaming their OMAP patches for the N8xx and N900.

It was further noted that:

But they both have to solve the same problems (power management) and the fact that Nokia seems to get good battery life out of their devices appears at first glance to be a counterpoint to the necessity of wakelocks.

The discussion went on, without resolution. Time will tell if the Android code will be resubmitted back to the kernel, and the issues that hamper it being in the mainline kernel tree will be resolved and taken care of.

A few days ago, I received a wall post from the Facebook blog, that they have teamed up with Google Real Time Search. I did a little research on what that truly meant and found this post here on the official Google blog.

In a nutshell, this is what is happening. Google is getting posts and status updates from many networking sites and allowing them to be shown in the search results. How are they gonna do that? I got my answer within a few days.

Facebook had a change in their privacy settings. The time that you log into facebook, you will be notified of the privacy settings page and would suggest you that you change your settings to their recommended one – one that is seen by practically everyone.

Now, I am no privacy freak. Far from that. What I am concerned about is that by allowing your profile to be shown to all, a person will risk being used or taken advantage of by unscrupulous individuals in the net.

I’ve had my cellphone number been sent text messages by people I do not know about some nice deal which was clearly a scam. I’ve had a rise in spam messages when I placed my email in a post or comment in a blog.

Having said that, I strongly agree with Bruce Schneier, a well known computer security specialist, that:

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

in his blog as a rebuttal to Eric Schmitt, CEO of Google, who said a dangerous statement to Maria Bartiromo during CNBC’s big Google special, that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Think about it. You don’t hide things from people you don’t know because you did something bad. It is more likely that you hide things from people you are not likely to trust because they would like to do bad things to you.

On my free time, I like testing out and playing games.  This is because, as a wine applications maintainer in the past, I had to cross test between distributions (mainly PCLinuxOS, and sometimes slackware at the time) and new updates to wine (particularly before it reached version 1.0).  Unfortunately, as work went more demanding, I had to leave all these behind.

** Sigh **

I was even surprised when my name came up on the ubuntu forums one time (archived already of course), regarding wine:

They always say I’m from Canada, even if that’s my Last Name (Distrowatch got my name wrong too)

Back to the topic, I’m getting offcourse…

Anyways, as I’m mainly in windows for testing games now, I’ve noticed an error in my Vista box lately after I updated my Batman: Arkham Asylum game through Windows Live:  800705b4.  This happens when I log into Windows Live, after which, the game would totally become unresponsive and has to be shut down from Task Manager.

After looking for a solution (this was a very cryptic error message, and many users don’t know what to do with it), I found a solution which works for me: open up the command prompt in administrator mode and type in the commands:

netsh winsock reset

and

netsh int ip reset

and reboot your pc.

This should fix your Windows Live problems.  As a side note, I find this one to be the best of all the superhero games I’ve seen so far (good story, albeit not for young audiences – stays mostly true to the Dark Knight stories in comics, depth and actually lets you feel you’re Batman – LOL) – and I’ve played quite a number of Batman games for the NES and SNES and Genesis, and a very nice game to see graphically – it puts the Unreal game engine to good use (which is quite impressive because this game is not a First Person Shooter, which I’m not fond of).

I found this sooo strangely familiar to what happened on the ISO standards committee on the OOXML approval process.

Working for a company that allows you to experiment with different technologies can be a very satisfying (and sometimes stressful, considering the deadlines) experience. Working in such an environment also lets you encounter people that even in your wildest imaginations would never have thought of meeting in your lifetime.

A few years ago, while we were starting out (I was in the company even before it came to be one), my boss in our talks mentioned a familiar name, Jim Everson. For those who don’t know him, he’s the guy who led in the development of several educational games including the classic Broderbund game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”.

Where does this all lead to, you may ask? In a nutshell, last year, Jim was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. Which led to his ex-wife (my boss’ sister) helping him out in whatever way she can – well, she helped design a website for him.

My boss asked a favor from me, to help quickly get some open source auction software and customize it for the website’s use, which I gladly did (as I was acquainted with him, and talked with him through emails in the past).

If it was not for open source software, we would have started programming from scratch, and would have taken much longer to finish (and at that time, I was up to my neck with deadlines at work). And, since the source code was there to see and customize, it was quick enough to implement it to their needs.

To end, if you do see Jim on your travels (he’s now an independent mac consultant), ask him about his mouth watering lamb chops recipe – he makes one mean lamb chops!

Hello World!

This would be my first blog post about Open Source and Tech stuff.  This would also be my personal blog site as well (I’ll try to be figuring out how to categorize these writeups in this blogging site, so please be patient with me )

Funny thing how this came about.  I’ve been wanting to do this for years, but haven’t gotten to it until now. In the past I’ve written articles for wine-reviews like playforlinux, and some other stuff for a friend of mine Tom Wickline, and helped out on a few open source projects like aLinux and pnutproject (even was a wine applications maintainer).

To make the long story short, I landed a job in a small tech company, and got sooo busy, that I had hardly time to tinker around like I used to… until now

So here I am, running Ubuntu 8.10 on my Neo Vivid 1100 (installed through Wubi) on a SmartBro Prepaid Account (coz my internet got messed up).

Anyways, that that.  I’ll be writing stuff for the next few days when I’m not that busy – starting with how to connect to smartbro prepaid – probably