First out is the announcement of the new Italian Haiku Usergroup, so Giuseppe is finally back writing Haiku news for the Italian community.

Second out is JiSheng Zhang (alias absabs) with great news about his GSOC project: Firewire support for Haiku. In his latest blog entry he tells that "Currently, almost 100% of the revised project goals has been completed. The firewire stack such as link layer, transaction layer and bus manager has almost been completed. Isochronous transmission and asynchronous transmission works OK. I also tested my minidv : Canon MV920, it works OK. The screen shot is attached, the received DV data can be found here. We may use mplayer to play it."

http://mail2.ustc.edu.cn/~jszhang3/mini.dv

The screen shot:
http://mail2.ustc.edu.cn/~jszhang3/screen1.png

For those of you who wonder if you know can connect your Firewire hard drives to Haiku, the answer is no. According to JiSheng Zhang hard drive support needs sbp, but that is something that he plan to develop. He could also tell ICO that his development has been done on the Texas Instrument chip TSB12LV26, and that his driver implementation excists of 13 parts.

Last out in this roundup is our Russian friend, Troeglazov Gerasim (alias 3dEyes**), with two examples on how mature the network kit in Haiku has become. First of all, the latest version of his IM client Romashka is now running on Haiku. An even greater achievement is his port of Samba 3.10 to Haiku. From the screenshot below you can see that he has been capable of accessing files stored on Haiku from Windows!