Marcelo Toledo

“Lately it’s hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks — the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10″, 1024×600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The innovative G-Key system stores the Mandriva operating system and all the user data on a USB key — nothing is permanently stored inside the GDium. You can use your own desktop and data by plugging the G-Key into any GDium.”

From: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/19/1750243&from=rss

It’s really sad for me to read this, Mandriva few years ago changed it’s name from Mandrake after buying the leader in Brazil, Conectiva, a company that made an impossible mission in an environment with deep complexities, showing strenght, leadership, innovation and positive will.

Mandriva is doing totally the opposite, clearly lost, nobody really knows what it’s doing and not even them when I read news like this, it should be working hard to do what they proposed, Linux. There are so many points to be improved that could make their market share increase, how it’s possible to see RedHat, OpenSuse far away and they doing nothing about it?

They have been still for a long time now and when you think they will do something innovative to shake the market, they present an OEM machine from Taiwan/China/Whatever and expect what? To be another Sun? valinux?

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“Jaiku is now a part of Google. For more details about Jaiku and Google, see the Q&A about the acquisition.

Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.”

Anyways, it’s a micro blogging tool I’ve been trying lately, it’s still closed and I have a few invites, if anyone is interested, mail me.

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I remember the first time I wanted to install Linux, 15 years ago, I had a Compaq laptop where Linux would never work, but I didn’t know that, so I tried over and over again, I knew so much the slackware installer steps that I could do it without looking at the screen.

One day I got tired and changed the approach, sold my laptop and built my desktop computer with the pieces I knew would work, it was the fastest computer I ever saw with Linux working like a charm. After this day, I never stopped using Linux.

And that’s how the market share for Linux started growing. Prior this I used windows and it was funny how people made fun of it, everybody used, but looked like everybody hated, something was wrong.

We all hoped with the time Microsoft fixed all those problems and worked on making our life easier and not boring, but for some reason it simply didn’t, they committed serious mistakes year after year, and this ain’t new, read this email sent by Bill Gates, what they did after 2003?

Now Apple is being recognized for it’s operating system and graphical interface that just works, makes our life much easier then anything available in the market, any person that try it, will be happier.

Being in the market committing mistakes after mistakes without a competitor to take advantage of it was easy, now we’ll see some action!

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You have no internet and you need to find out what is the closest hotspot. What do you do? Imagine an offline hotspot locator, a simple application that will provide fields for searching and a grid to display the results. No matter where you are, if you need to know where is the closest hotspot, just open the application, filter a little bit and voila!

If you think deeper about this, you’ll see that it can be used in many situations, so making it a rock would be a waste of time, latest couple hours I’ve been writing the initial spec of this project, which must be flexible enough to be useful for anyone interested in providing up to date offline content to the user.

Resources:

• Multi-platform (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, Linux, Phones, PDAs, …)
• Display/Search fields customizable
• Everything is remotely updatable, information never gets old
• Easy to whitelabel and release for your business
• Free Software

If you have comments, please email me.

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“As some of the latency junkies on lkml already know, commit 8e3e076 in v2.6.26-rc2 removed the preemptible BKL feature and made the Big Kernel Lock a spinlock and thus turned it into non-preemptible code again. This commit returned the BKL code to the 2.6.7 state of affairs in essence,” began Ingo Molnar. He noted that this had a very negative effect on the real time kernel efforts, adding that Linux creator Linus Torvalds indicated the only acceptable way forward was to completely remove the BKL. Ingo explained:

“This task is not easy at all. 12 years after Linux has been converted to an SMP OS we still have 1300+ legacy BKL using sites. There are 400+ lock_kernel() critical sections and 800+ ioctls. They are spread out across rather difficult areas of often legacy code that few people understand and few people dare to touch. It takes top people like Alan Cox to map the semantics and to remove BKL code, and even for Alan (who is doing this for the TTY code) it is a long and difficult task.”

Ingo went on to describe how the BKL works, how it differs from other locking mechanisms, and why this complicates removing it permanently from the kernel. He noted that the various dependencies of the lock are lost in the haze of 15 years of code changes, “all this has built up to a kind of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the BKL: nobody really knows it, nobody really dares to touch it and code can break silently and subtly if BKL locking is wrong.” He then suggested “changing the rules of the game”, creating a “kill-the-BKL” branch which “turns the BKL into an ordinary albeit somewhat big mutex, with a quirky lock/unlock interface called ‘lock_kernel()’ and ‘unlock_kernel()’.”

Read more…

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Rafael Ugolini sent me these awesome links about Embedded Linux Conference 2008, all the videos and reports (from all years):

Videos like…

Keynote: The Relationship Between kernel.org Development and the Use of Linux for Embedded Applications, by Andrew Morton (Google)

UME - Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, by David Mandala (Canonical)

Back-tracing in MIPS-based Linux Systems, by Jong-Sung Kim (LG Electronics)

Using a JTAG for Linux Driver Debugging, by Mike Anderson (PTR Group)

…

Go check:

Videos: http://free-electrons.com/community/videos/conferences/
Reports: http://free-electrons.com/articles/conferences/elc2008-report/

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You can printf an integer in many forms, including decimal, octal or hexadecimal. What about binary? This is not the first time someone asks me this, so I’ll just post it here:

>  ./dec2bin 3
3 -> 00000000000000000000000000000011
>  ./dec2bin 4
4 -> 00000000000000000000000000000100
>  ./dec2bin 5
5 -> 00000000000000000000000000000101
>  ./dec2bin 6
6 -> 00000000000000000000000000000110
>  ./dec2bin 7
7 -> 00000000000000000000000000000111

A simple solution could be the function below, note that it is limited to 32 bits:

static char *dec2bin(int dec)
{
        char *str, *ret;
        int i;
        const int bits = 32;
 
        ret = str = malloc(bits);
        memset(str, '0', bits);
 
        for (i = bits-1; i >= 0; i--) {
                if (dec % 2 == 1)
                        str[i] = '1';
 
                dec /= 2;
        }
 
        str[bits] = '\0';
 
        return ret;
}

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When your files are too big, OpenOffice Spreadsheet will ignore anything after line 65536, my suggestion is, split it in other tabs:

marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop$ wc -l foo-2008-04.csv
73538 foo-2008-04.csv
marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop$ split foo-2008-04.csv -l 37000 foo
marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop$ ls foo*
foo-2008-04.csv  fooaa  fooab
marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop$ wc -l fooa*
  37000 fooaa
  36538 fooab
  73538 total

After this, Insert -> Sheet From File…

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My uncle is a person that likes to use technology, he has always the newest computer, television, sound system, etc. I suppose that he has a good camera also, since I’ve just received by email five photos from him, the only problem is that each picture has almost 12MB.

Naturally he will share his images with friends and family, the expected result is for everyone to see the images, so it doesn’t need to be that big, as a user of technology he doesn’t need to know that.

We see a clear situation where hardware evolves much faster then software, we have a family of products that interacts with pictures, in this example email clients, and it yet doesn’t answer this problem. The correct behavior could be this email client understanding the profile of the user/place/recipients to identify the best size for these images and resize them.

Of course size is just a matter of time and location, in Japan where most of the population has very fast broadband internet connection, acceptable average size will be much higher then Afghanistan, where technology takes longer to arrive [today].

And if you think longer, you’ll see that you might have dozen devices on different connections, so what would be the correct behavior if I’ll check this email on my cell phone over 3G?

Will software ever evolve fast enough?

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marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop/storage/projects/linux-0.01$ ls
boot  fs  include  init  kernel  lib  Makefile  mm  tools
 
marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop/storage/projects/linux-0.01$ du -sh .
512K    .

marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop/storage/projects/linux-0.01$ ls *
Makefile
 
boot:
boot.s  head.s
 
fs:
bitmap.c     buffer.c    exec.c   file_dev.c    inode.c  Makefile  open.c  read_write.c  super.c     tty_ioctl.c
block_dev.c  char_dev.c  fcntl.c  file_table.c  ioctl.c  namei.c   pipe.c  stat.c        truncate.c
 
include:
a.out.h  asm  const.h  ctype.h  errno.h  fcntl.h  linux  signal.h  stdarg.h  stddef.h  string.h  sys  termios.h  time.h  unistd.h  utime.h
 
init:
main.c
 
kernel:
asm.s      exit.c  hd.c        Makefile  panic.c   rs_io.s  serial.c  system_call.s  tty_io.c
console.c  fork.c  keyboard.s  mktime.c  printk.c  sched.c  sys.c     traps.c        vsprintf.c
 
lib:
close.c  ctype.c  dup.c  errno.c  execve.c  _exit.c  Makefile  open.c  setsid.c  string.c  wait.c  write.c
 
mm:
Makefile  memory.c  page.s
 
tools:
build.c

Few years later:

marcelo@yogananda:~/Desktop/storage/projects/linux-2.6.25$ du -sh .
340M    .

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