Easter was last week but that doesn't special easter eggs to be given and in this case Haikuware presented Haiku Inc with a very tasty egg. An egg filled with $2000 dollars, donated to Haiku by Haikuware and its supporters, who had previously donated this money for possible bounties.

Haikuware had a poll over at their site and the majority of voters chose this option, on the condition that the money be used for coding contracts, such as the ones Haiku Inc had in the past (with Axel for example). Speaking of it, it hasn't been easy for Haiku Inc to find developers interested in taking on coding contracts (at least in this point in time), so if you're a dev with free time in your hands at the moment, why not get in touch with them and submit your proposal? You'll be payed for your efforts and will in turn be loved by millions!

Back on topic, great job Haikuware.

A few weeks ago Haiku announced it would once again be part of Google's Summer of Code and finally the accepted students/projects are in. Eight is this year's magic number and we're all hoping they bear fruits. Here's the list of the eight students who will be mentored in 2011's GSoC along with their projects:

  • Dario Casalinuovo - Services server and Contacts files integration
  • Gabriel Hartmann - USB Video Driver for High-end Webcams
  • Sean Healy - Language bindings for the C++ API
  • Nathan Heisey - SDL upgrade
  • Jian Jiang - Add USB 3.0 support to Haiku
  • Jack Laxson - Bâtisseur: a build server for all
  • Ankur Sethi - Port ZFS to Haiku
  • Mike Smith - VirtualBox guest additions for Haiku

Best of luck to all and their mentors. I hope every single projects come to a happy ending and the students stay with the project for the long run.

This was posted over at the Haiku website at the beginning of the month. After a long process and wait, Haiku was finally awarded the trademark for the Haiku logo, by the USA Patent and Trademark Office. This is great new for Haiku, Inc. since it will allow them to better protect their logo and brand, in case future infringements occur.

Great news indeed and congratulations to Matt for all of his hard work.

Google Summer of Code 2011 has now started, althought for now only behind the scenes. Organizations are applying and anxiously waiting for the date where the chosen ones are revealed. And of course this year is no different, Haiku has applied for a spot in the mentoring organisation group. If they get it it'll be the fifth year in a row, let's keep our fingers crossed (just as soon as i finish typing this).

Haiku's GSoC 2011 page is up and there you can see the ideas available for students to apply for, among which:

  • Updating AbiWord
  • Filesystems: general improvements
  • BFS Partition Resizer
  • USB 3.0 support
Those are just four among twenty four so there's plenty of choice with diverse areas to cater to everyone's likings.
Silly me, I just noticed the timeline and TODAY is the day when Google announces the accepted organisations! So as soon as we have word, we'll update this piece with the (hopefully good) news. Stay tuned!

Update: According to Google's GSoC 2011 website, Haiku was just accepted as a mentoring organisation for the fifth straight year. Congratulations to everyone who worked hard to make this a reality!

Martin H. Pedersen is to present Haiku at the Norwegian UNIX User Group Oslo first coming Tuesday, February 8th. The presentation will be held at Høgskolen i Oslo, Pilestredet 35, from 18:30 CET. Free entrance for members and non-members.

The presentation will be broadcasted to NUUG Stavanger, but can of course also be viewed by all interested. Address to the video stream is: http://www.nuug.no/live.m3u (Ogg Theora). The presentation will be held in Norwegian and give a short introduction to Haiku, with focus on what differentiate it from other operating systems. Martin will also present the project, and it's visions and goals.

For more information, please visit NUUG (in Norwegian)

 

Two days ago in Australia, Google's Carol Smith announced that Google will for the 7th straight year hold the Google Summer of Code. As usual, GSoC will be used to introduce students from around the world to open source projects. Haiku has you know has been part of GSoC and this year the aim is the same, to be one of the chosen organizations. This year Google wants to increased the number of students by 25% and will therefore also increase the number of mentoring organizations. Good news indeed.

Haiku as you are well aware has been part of GSoC for several years now and this year the goal is the same. Ideas are already being thrown around in the GSoCIdeas page and although it gives a good idea (ah!) of what's to be expected, until the final proposal is done changes are likely to happen. Over the years the GSoC results for Haiku have been up and down, some years better than others which is only natural. Let's hope 2011 becomes the best one so far, but for that Haiku needs to be one of the mentoring projects. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Good luck!

Some of you are already on it, some of us are getting closer and closer and some of you are still hours away. Whichever the case might be, we here at ICO would like to wish you one and all a very happy 2011.

What can 2011 bring us when t comes to Haiku? Well, it can be one of three things or all of them actually. It can bring us a new alpha, a beta or a final R1 release. I know which I would prefer and I have a feeling it's the same as you.

Whatever the Haiku gurus brings us, I hope you all have a GREAT new year and that you're able to fulfil your new year resolutions. Happy 2011!

As you probably know by now, a while ago Axel accepted Haikuware's WiFi bounty and has been working on it on and off, as "real-life" allows him. The bounty ends tomorrow and so Axel posted today an update about his work on the bounty. Bottom line: 2 out of 3 conditions have been met, but he plans to continue his work on this. In his own words:

The bounty was divided into three parts: the first was porting the wpa_supplicant, the second one was to design, and implement a C++ API to use WLAN functions; the WLAN functionality is pretty much completely covered by the new BNetworkDevice class. The final part was to integrate the WiFi functionality into userland applications like ifconfig, net_server, NetworkStatus, and the Network preferences application.

While there is always room for improvement, I at least completed the last two parts of the bounty. I have not published the wpa_supplicant port anywhere yet, as I need to clean it up a bit before, and I haven't decided where to put it yet. In any case, I intend to work on this over the next weeks.

Good work indeed, although I'm sure Axel would prefer to have it all wrapped up (ah, see what I did there?) by now. As usual, follow the link to his blog update to read it all.

Over at the Haiku website, there's a new post, a post I'm sure everyone will find quite interesting indeed. How do I know that? Because the post is about R1. And not only about R1 but about you helping to shape up R1 yourself. In this post there's a poll with over 20 different proposals for Haiku R1 (final, not Alpha nor Beta). For each proposal you can choose 3 degrees of commitment, basically from "I don't know that this specific proposal means" to "don't you DARE release R1 without this in!!!!!!!". There are, in my opinion, some obvious ones that fit right in with the second option, but others will be up to your judgement.

There has been some talk about this over at the development mailing list for some time and it's nice to see the poll finally up and running and waiting for everyone's input. So what are you waiting for, still reading this? Head over to the post and cast your vote.

Received an e-mail from Dane the other day with the news that BeOSRadio is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Not only that but it's getting a name change, from BeOSRadio to Fair Harbor Radio. Check past the break for the full press release.