My first Slashdotting

They say you always remember your first time.

Slashdot posted a link to my previous post, GP2X needs a GPL lesson. This, of course, unleashed the beast known as The Slashdot Effect, which has been known to bring many a web server to its knees. I must say, though, that Blogger held up wonderfully. I know a lot of people knock this place, but I've got no complaints. My biggest problem during the peak was that I have the Bjimblog configured for moderated comments, which means I have to manually approve each comment for publication. This is unfortunately necessary to avoid comment-spam, but I published everything I got that even remotely approached the topic.

Mind you, I purposely brought the Slashdot Effect upon myself. I was the one who submitted the topic to Slashdot. The intended purpose of this was to raise awareness among people who don't own a GP2X that those of us who do are in need of some assistance getting the source code. I think that in those terms, the post was a success. The slew of comments, both here and on Slashdot, were also quite useful. If you get enough geeks shooting off their mouths, someone will say the right thing. (I believe this is a corollary of Linus' Law.)

So, I've got some leads on where to take this next. Thanks to everyone who participated in the free-for-all.

Oh, and I'll say this one more time, in case anyone missed it. I know about the early December source code release. It is an early pre-release version. I mentioned it in the initial post. But it's not the droid we're looking for. The code we're looking for is something that can be compiled to create the released binary. We don't have that yet.

Update: There are quite a few posts suggesting that the situation is close to being resolved by some good folks taking a more diplomatic approach than mine. I appreciate their efforts and hope they are successful. The site to watch now is http://source.gp2x.de/, with expectations for a code release some time this week.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, slashdot, gpl

GP2X needs a GPL lesson

I mentioned some time back that I was going to get myself a GP2X for Christmas. And so I did. Well, actually, under the Rules of Christmas at our house, my wife officially "got" it for me, just like I "got" her present for her. After seventeen years of marriage, shortcuts are allowed.

First impressions: I love this little unit. Runs a Linux 2.4 kernel, plays movies with mplayer, already has MAME ported to it... Really, it has everything in a handheld game/media machine that a hacker-in-the-old-meaning could want. Except for one thing. The kernel source code.

How could this be? This is Linux we're talking about! The open source poster child! (It most likely is GNU/Linux at that. I haven't poked around enough to see what other components surround the kernel. At the very least, bash is present.)

Well, it seems that the company that created the GP2X, Gamepark Holdings, is a couple of guys in some office space in Seoul. Perhaps some of you who follow the popular blogs remember Cory Doctorow's posts on BoingBoing.net when the GP2X was announced. He noticed the dreaded acronym DRM on their website, and raised alarms. Later, it was explained by the only person at Gamepark Holdings who speaks English that they didn't really understand what they were saying.

Apparently, they don't seem to understand the GPL, either. They (and their subcontractor Dignsys, who actually did the Linux port for the GP2X) have been approached repeatedly for release of their modified version of the Linux kernel. Reluctantly, they finally did so, releasing an early, out-of-date prerelease version of the source, which is useless to the developer community who would like to hunt down some of the current bugs. There are active discussions on the GP2X developer boards on the topic, as people try to find the best way to get Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to comply with the GPL by releasing source concurrently with each new release of the GP2X kernel. Of course, as these sorts of threads tend to do, accusations have flown about all parties involved, most of it totally speculative.

So, herein lies the problem. This handful of early adopters, mostly in Europe and the Americas, is searching for a way to convince Gamepark Holdings and Dignsys to do what the GPL requires of them, without taking down the companies. This is a niche product, and they could complain until the cows come home and never get timely releases of the source. Someone with a bit of PR clout must be brought into the picture. But who? Linus? RMS? Cory? Larry? CmdrTaco?

After puzzling for a while (and yes, my puzzler was sore afterwards), I figured it was time to test the blogosphere. I decided to write a post about the situation as I saw it. This post. Now, I'll submit it to the tastemakers and see if anyone is interested.

Tags: gameparkholdings, dignsys, gp2x, linux, gpl

No one wants crippled CDs

Back in this post, I made a pledge not to buy any more Sony CDs because of their apparent hatred of their own customers. Well, the meme is spreading, and a lot more people are making the decision that crippled CDs are not worth buying.

In fact, there's a pledge drive going on now at PledgeBank. I've signed it. It's not really a petition, just a statement of fact. I won't buy crippled CDs. Apparently, neither will a few thousand other people.

There are plenty of other ways I can legally buy music. Like Magnatune, which is a much better deal for the musicians than they will ever get with a major label.

Tags: sony, rootkit, drm, boycott

Icons, feedicons, and favicons

A long time ago, when I first started dabbling with Windows programming (Windows version 2, for the new 286 machines!), I first learned about the .ICO file. These files provided the icons that represented your programs. Of course, the interesting thing about the file format was that it wasn't a single graphic, like a .GIF or .BMP file, but a container for one or more graphics.

Fast-forward to today. Every time you visit a website, using a reasonably modern browser like IE6 or Firefox, a little 16x16-pixel icon shows up next to the URL for the site, and that same icon often ends up in other places, like your bookmarks. This is generally known as a favicon, because it was originally introduced by Microsoft around the same time they decided that bookmarks should really be called favorites, much to the dismay of spelling teachers in the UK. Anyway, it turns out that the file needed on a website to make this particular magic happen is, as my foreshadowing may have indicated, a .ICO file.

Now, as the web progresses and morphs, one of the most important concepts to come along is that of the feed. Rather than surf to a bunch of different news sites, blogs, and boobie galleries web comics to see if there's anything new to peruse, sites provide feeds — basically, a place on the website that a computer program can look to see what's new. Then, such a program, called an aggregator, can provide a central place to see today's web at a glance. Aggregators can be installed programs or web-based. I use a web-based one called Bloglines.

You may think I'm rambling a bit, but the topic is still icons. You see, the Firefox browser understood that feeds were important, and provided a special icon to show whether a web site had a feed available. By default, when clicked, it would create something called a "Live Bookmark", but you can install a Firefox extension (and I have) which will add the feed to Bloglines for me when I click. This icon is known as a feedicon. Now, Microsoft has a new version of IE coming down the pike, and they've gotten the feed religion as well. In an unprecedented show of good sense, Microsoft has decided to use the same icon as Firefox.

To capitalize on this lining up of the planets, a website has been established to crown this icon as the standard identifier of feeds: feedicons.com. Now, I thought this was a good idea, and wanted to use the standard icon over on my left sidebar here in Blogger land. So, I wondered. Will the HTML IMG tag work with a .ICO file? If so, all I have to do is reference the favicon of feedicons.com!

Well, I've done so, and it works with Firefox 1.5, at least. Please let me know if you see the little icon next to the "XML (Atom)" over on the left.

Tags: icons, feed, favicon, feedicon

Bush law-flouting makes techies speak out

There's a website called memorandum.com, that keeps track of what topics bloggers are writing about. They keep it segregated into two sections: Politics and Tech. Watching this site recently, an interesting phenomenon emerged. The general topic of President Bush's secret authorization of domestic spying without warrants was fairly active on the Politics side, but absolutely exploded on the Tech side! I think I can understand why, too. My personal blog here would usually be considered a tech blog. I'm a geek and I write about the geeky things I like to do. But even I posted about Bush and the NSA.

Maybe it's the cryptography background. I was a crypto programmer for a few years, and maybe that makes me pay just a bit more attention to what the NSA is up to. Another associate of mine from those days is the always-good-for-a-security-soundbite Bruce Schneier. Bruce has weighed in on the issue as well, giving some important historical perspective in his blog post Schneier on Security: Project Shamrock.

Maybe I'll start writing other people's Congressmen. I dunno -- we gotta do somthing here.

Tags: politics, bush, civilrights, schneier

A letter to my Congressman

Perry Metzger, a bright man whom I recall from my days years ago as a crypto engineer, wrote the following editorial piece on the Cryptography Mailing List: A Small Editorial About Recent Events. In case you don't follow links, it's about President Bush's unapologetic admission that he has been authorizing domestic surveillance without court orders for years, and that he intends to keep doing so. This outraged me when I first read about it, but the news often outrages me and I do nothing about it. Perry's editorial struck a nerve. He's right, we all should be doing something about this one.

So, I wrote my first-ever letter to my long-time Congressman, Bill Pascrell. It went like this;

Congressman Pascrell,

You've been my Congressman for an awfully long time, and I've always
admired the job you do, and have never felt the need to write to you
before.  Today, I feel I must, even though I expect you are already
feel as I do.

I'm contacting you in regards to President Bush's recent admission
of surveillance of U.S. citizens without benefit of warrants or court
orders.  This is clearly a violation of the law (U.S. Code 50 USC 1801
- 50 USC 1811), and the President must be held accountable.  Please do
whatever you can.  The rule of law is the most important precept in our
republic, and no one can be allowed to ignore it, no matter how noble
the reason.

Thanks for your attention.

Jim Russell
Nutley NJ

I'll be following up with letters to Senator Lautenberg and Senator-in-Waiting Menendez. I realize that having a Democratic Congressman and two Democratic senators make my letters a bit like preaching to the choir, but I want to make sure they understand the level of anger and fear that the President's actions have instilled. There were plenty of legal methods to accomplish what he wanted. No one, especially the President, should be able to ignore the law.

Tags: politics, bush, civilrights, congress

Google's Blogger Web Comments: Legal bugs, coding bugs?

In the posting Getting to Know You, Tristan Lewis speculates on Google's motives for providing their new Firefox extension, Blogger Web Comments. The analysis makes a lot of sense, and is probably close to the mark. I'm glad someone is reading the License Agreements for me.

I had already installed the extension before reading the post, and probably would have taken the risk of keeping it installed for a while. However, I've recently been having runaway memory problems with Firefox on my Debian GNU/Linux system. At first, I had attributed it to upgrading to the latest "firefox" package in the Debian Unstable repository. Then, it struck me that it was quite possible that Google's extension was to blame. The timeframe seemed right — the swapfile thrashing and glacial response in Firefox has only been happening for the last few days.

So, I've uninstalled the extension. So far (a couple of hours), no more runaway memory problems. I tend to believe that the Google extension was the culprit. If the memory problems come back, I'll update the post and try to lay the blame elsewhere.

UPDATE: The Google extension has been exonerated. Firefox caused another memory-eating episode today, with the extension removed. In the meantime, Debian Unstable has moved their "firefox" package from the repeating-decimal version 1.4999... to version 1.5. I've updated, and now I wait to see if anything has been fixed. You know what would be nice? If Debian's package-management system would show some sort of changelog.

Tags: google, firefox, debian, linux