tinyhack.com

I’m still working on the Freebsd port, and haven’t tried to fix the network driver problem in Linux (it only happens on samba 3 which I don’t use daily). The reason to focus my work on the FreeBSD port is because I want to understand more about the network driver. The current Linux network driver was not written from scratch but from modifying existing source. The source was full of things that I don’t understand, which proves to be unnecessary after I gain understanding when writing the Freebsd network driver.

Here is the current FreeBSD port status:

1. Timer is now working, previously the timer tick works, but the time counter was too fast.
2. EHCI and OHCI is working, but there is still some caching problem, so i need to modify usb_busdma.c, this modification is not clean. I can access USB disks, and USB network adapter.
3. Network driver works, but it is still very slow . I am still trying to understand better the DMA handling in FreeBSD. There is still one bug: you can not stop the interface and start it again. The stopping part works, ifconfig ece0 down, but the starting again part doesn’t.
4. Multi user works. I can also activate network services, such as sshd.

I am still waiting for my perforce account. But anyone willing to test it can contact me. I still don’t know the best method to release a patch against CURRENT for people to try, because changes happens very quickly.

Here is the latest boot log: bsd-24-may-2009.txt

I have a small open source project, Symbianbible, a bible reader for the Symbian Platform. This is a small project, with many users, and I am the only developer. Currently, I have ported this application to every Symbian version that Nokia has (Series 60, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Series 80, Series 90). In this post, I am going to tell the story of how I got the funding to port this program for multiple Symbian platform.

Since the first release, many people asked, “can you port it to device X?”. Buying every phone models (at least one for each platform) and their accessories (such as memory card, card reader, bluetooth adapter, etc) is expensive, so I wrote in my FAQ, that I would only port if there are some people that donate or lend me their phone.
Continue Reading »

I have found at least two programs that violated the GPL. I have contacted the companies that broke the license and they have found a way to work around it. I don’t know if this is the correct way to do it. Would the open source community be interested on “damages” that those company has caused? or just let them switch to non open source solution, and we’ll forget about their sin?

The two programs that violated the GPL are Windows programs and you can’t see it unless you reverse engineer it. It is just my reflex to reverse engineer a program to know how it works, and may be I should look on more programs to see if they violated anything. But sometimes, I just don’t know what to do with my finding. Any ideas?