As you are aware, a few months ago Michael had to take a step back from Haiku due to RealLifetm. The good news is, he's now back and back to coding as well. Matt published yesterday a news piece over at the Haiku website with this information, along with some... artistic improvisation (in the very large sense of the word, ahem...). And today, just a few minutes ago actually, Michael has published a new blog entry detailing the project he's currently working on and I must say, it's damn interesting: generating QR codes from KDL. QR codes have been used more and more for the past couple of years and nowadays you can find them almost everywhere, from app markets to advertisement (with people now including them in CVs as well).

The idea is to simplify the process of capturing the KDL information displayed on the computer screen, without the need to, for example, writing it down by hand. Michael goes on to describe the limitations to this and the possible way to overcome such limitations, e.g. generating several QR codes instead of just one. As I mentioned above is damn interesting, so head over and read his full post.

Welcome back Michael, it's great to have you in our midst again.

As you are all aware, 2012's Google Summer of Code is well under way and in some cases, very well under way. The quarter term reports for 3 of the projects have been now posted over at the Haiku website: the OpenJDK port, the x86_64 port and the cpuidle project.

While both the x86_64 (even though xyzzy had exams until recently) and cpuidle projects have been making good progress, the latter already showing some great power savings, I'd have to say the most impressive work so far has come from Hamish and his OpenJDK port. At this time it's already stable enough to run plenty of Swing applications out of the box, which is in fact impressive, as you can see from this screenshot he added:

jEdit and SwingSet

Can't wait to read the missing quarter term reports and most of all, can't wait for all of the projects' final results. Great work everyone.

Update: And another report has come in. Pawel posted the quarter term port for his NFSv4 project. Him too has been making good progress and his next goal is to implement write operations and client side caching. Good stuff.~

Update 2: And the final report's in. Andreas posted this afternoon the quarter term report for his BFS Partition Resizer project. He has pretty much reached his goal of having inode-moving working and will now work on the rest of his plan. Check his progress right here.

Alexandre Deckner has been hired to work on the WebKit port and, if time allows, WebPositive. Alexandre ("aldeck") primarily known for his work on Tracker -- squashing bugs, rewriting sections for better performance and updating it to utilize the Layout API. As Alexandre states, "Good web support is something crucial for any operating system these days, it is for some users the main software they will use on a computer and one of the first things a new user will try on Haiku. To summarize, Haiku has to provide the best web experience possible and i believe i can help to go in that direction."

Alexandre's contract will be for 160 hours during one month for €2,000 EUR.

If you appreciate this contract and would like to see more, please consider supporting Haiku, Inc.

For more information, please visit Haiku-os.org.

BeGeistert 25 has come and gone and a report has surfaced. Humdinger was one of the (few) presents - it was a small BeGeistert, attendants wise - and has taken the time to write a report for our reading pleasure. Since the number of attendants was so low, this time around there weren't any presentations, all the time was taken with coding and some more coding, which is great for the project of course. Axel for example worked on some KDL bugs (presented by Humdinger himself) while Olivier dug into the Freepascal port. Oh, and they got their picture taken by a professional photographer for an upcoming article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine. Fancy. From the report, although it was a small BeGeistert, it seems it was a productive one, which is always nice.

Also nice is that the next Begeistert, number 26 named "Marathon", has been already dated which should give everyone planning to attend plenty of time to get everything ready. Number 26 has been dated for the weekend of November 3rd and 4th with the coding sprint (yes, there will be one this time) set for the week immediately following. Good stuff.

Tomorrow marks the start of the first ever Haiku's Bugfix Weekend, during which developers from all over the world, old (so to speak) and new (hopefully), get together using BeShare and get their coding skills working at full speed, trying to squash as many bugs as possible. This idea was first layed on the table over at Haiku's developer mailing list and quick gained traction. You can take part of course from Haiku using the beloved BeShare and even from other OSes by using JavaShare.

This falls squarely and nicely on BeGeistert 25 which has actually already started! Since internet access is now available during BeGeistert, we're hoping all of those devs together in one room might put even more power behind the bugfix weekend. Good luck everyone and happy squashing.

P.S.: It's really, really great to see BeShare again in the news and being used, whenever I used it in the past few months (and more) it was always empty. Ah the memories...

Yes, it's that time of the year again, and Charlie Clark and the Haiku Support Association e.V. are once again ready to host developers and users at youth hostel in Düsseldorf. There will not be a coding sprint this time, but many of Haiku's core developers will be attending.

BeGeistert is a social event where Haiku developers and users come together to share their ideas, experiences and discuss the future of Haiku. There will also be workshops, and presentations for those interested.

BeGeistert will take place from from 30th March to 2nd April 2012. For visitors who are not staying over night, BeGeistert is open from 9:30 to 19:00. Attending BeGeistert costs EUR 45 whether for all three days or just one. This includes lunch for both days and is part of the organizers' contractual obligation with the Youth Hostel. Bed and breakfast costs EUR 27.50 per night.

Usually up to 50 people can be expected to attend. Will you attend this spring?

For further information, please visit BeGeistert.org

Six in a row, that's now six years in a row that Haiku is selected as a mentor organization for Google's Summer of Code 2012. Impressive and a testament not only to Haiku itself but to those who work behind the scenes, with a special mention of course to Matt Madia.

For the students interested in taking part in this year's GSoC, your window to apply for a spot runs from March 26th up to April 6th and of course, you'll need to check the ideas page which you can find right here. This year it ranges as usual from kernel work (filesystems improvements and BFS partition resizer for example) to applications (WebPositive and Virtualbox are two high profile projects), not forgetting of course drivers (ACPI video extensions), network (BT and IPv6 improvements), media (streaming support and merging CDPlayer into MediaPlayer), user interfance (preflet GUI work and modular view edit) and miscellaneous (improving the mail system and adding compositing support to the app_server are just two of the list).

It's a big list and some are quite big tasks but if you feel you're up to it you now have about 3 weeks to prepare your application. Good luck to everyone and hopefully by the end of August we'll have some great code sitting in Haiku's repository.

 

In case you're unaware it's that time of the year again, it's... BeGeistert time!! And this is a big occasion for BeGeistert, since it's celebrating it's silver anniversary, edition 25. Once again it'll be held in Dusseldorf's most excelent Youth Hostel and it's only two weeks ago, number 25 will take place on the March 31st/April 2nd weekend. Why the extra Monday you ask? Well, unfortunately there won't be a coding sprint this time so one extra day was arranged for some crunching and bug squashing time.

If you're all booked and ready to go, the wait is almost over. If you're still undecided... what are you waiting for? Book your place, book your flight or bus/train/bike and get ready for little sleep, some coding and lots of fun... and coke drinking. And here's to 25 more BeGeisterts!

Update: Registrations are now open!

As you are all aware (if not... wake up!), Michael Lotz is currently working full time for Haiku under a six month contract. He's been posting monthly updates on his progress but his latest update isn't of the kind we all look forward to. Unfortunately, due to some health issues, Michael and Haiku have paused the contract, pause which has been in place since the beginning of the year.

It's great that Haiku is giving Michael the time he needs to fully recover, which is what we all expect him to do, afterall, health is health, so for now we all wish Michael a speedy and full recovery, we look forward to what's coming down the pipeline for the duration of his contract. Get well soon!

P.S.: How great is it to have Frank writing for ICO again? \o/

Voptop client beta 1Voptop is developed by Robert Stiehler, as part of his bachelor thesis. The aim of Voptop is to create the possibility to telephone anonymously within a closed network and to hamper the tapping of phone calls by hiding them. The use of Voptop is free of charge.

The developer first planed to publish Voptop with VoIP functionality only, but found that a lot of sound cards in Haiku just supported "line out". To be able to do VoIP you of course also need a working "line in"/"microphone in". Because of this issue, instant messaging was implemented as well. The IM part is using its own "Voptop protocol" for keeping also the messaging secure and anonymous.

This first version of Voptop is a beta release for Haiku OS (clients for other OS might follow), but the client includes most planned features for the final release. Have in mind, being a beta release, stability and security have not been tested sufficiently. In order to install Voptop, simply unpack the archive under "/boot". After this is done you will find a reference in the start menu of Haiku under "Applications". A user manual can be found in the program directory at ("/ boot/apps/Voptop").

Download the client, have some fun and help improving Voptop by registering bugs in the bug tracker.

(This is my first post in years, but I have followed the development of Haiku all the time and I hope to start writing again)