I was recently interviewed by Michael Bartholomew for his new podcast, Device Drivers, on omnes.tv. I talked about Haiku, BeOS, some of my efforts in relation to WebKit and the Haiku browser, and other topics. I think anyone who is interested in Haiku and BeOS will find it interesting:

http://www.omnes.tv/devicedrivers/episode1/

It's not just Stippi's project that's a huge success (see the WebKit/Web+ progress documented in his blog posts). Our call for donations for this kind of contractual work is also doing very well!
In the two weeks since our announcement to hire developers for specific projects, donations have picked up significantly. Since then we received over $1,600USD and a few more people opting for small but recurrent monthly funding.

Our thanks go out to all contributors! This shows that our Haiku community is strong and effective when called upon!

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BeOS came with a relatively straightforward browser called NetPositive, or Net+ in shorthand. Especially by today's standards, it can hardly do anything more complicated than rendering basic HTML, so it isn't of much use. Luckily, Haiku has a successor now, born out of the HaikuLauncher conceptbrowser we talked about earlier: WebPositive.

From right to left: Scott, Bruno and myself (the three Haiku stooges?) at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Southern California Linux Expo – or the SCaLE show as it is also widely known – was the very first mainstream open source conference that Haiku exhibited at. This was back in February of 2007, when Michael Phipps, Axel Dorfler, Bruno G. Albuquerque and myself gathered in LA to show Haiku to the world for the first time (photos here). Following the once a year tradition that SCaLE has become since then, Bruno G. Albuquerque, Scott McCreary and myself gathered to represent Haiku at the SCaLE 2010 conference, recently held in Los Angeles on the weekend of February 20th and 21st.

On Saturday morning, the three of us gathered on the exhibit floor at around 9:00AM, one hour before the exhibition was scheduled to open to the public. This gave us plenty of time to prepare the booth, especially because we had already setup the projector screen on the backwall the evening before. We placed the HAIKU table runner over the 7 feet long table that we had at the booth, and then laid out – from left to right – Scott's AMD dual core laptop, my small cube-sized Intel dual core desktop hooked to a projector, and an 8-core laptop that belonged to Bruno's girlfriend. As handouts, we had the new Haiku flier as well as 50 alpha 1 CDs that Scott had burned on Lightscribe media.

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Wow, it's been 10 days already since I posted my first blog entry on my work on WebKit and the native web browser. Of course my continous updates to the package I posted in my first article will probably have spoiled most of the surprise, but HaikuLauncher has been reduced again into just a bare browser shell, while a new codebase, WebPositive, has been split off from it. Using WebPositive has become a whole lot more pleasing in the meantime. For those of you who have not followed the comments to the original blog, these are the things implemented since my first post on the project:

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This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.

It's time to write a bit about my progress on the WebKit browser and the WebKit port itself. It was pretty nice back in the days when Axel was paid to work for Haiku, Inc., that he published regular blog entries to keep everyone up to date on what he was doing. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.

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What's that you say? You made a New Year's resolution but haven't kept it? You vowed to sharpen your programming skills, write a cool application, AND use cutting edge operating system technology? Look no further, you have come to the right place. This article will get you started writing applications for Haiku, the open source version of the advanced BeOS operating system.

The Haiku project rests on the shoulders of volunteer individuals who spend their free time developing, bughunting and in general advancing the system. Unfortunately everyone's time is limited and working for a living takes a major cut into what could be dedicated to Haiku work. It would be great if a developer could take off work for a few weeks to fully concentrate on Haiku development.

And this is exactly what we would like to make possible! Starting now:

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Just came back from FOSDEM 2010, i don't have much to say, since it was quite a flash journey for me, i left home Sunday at 7:30AM and got back at 7:30PM. I originally planned to go on both days but this year Haiku didn't have its own stand, instead Haiku was present Sunday in the Alt-OS (ie: not Linux nor BSD) DevRoom in the form of several talks by François Revol, Olivier Coursière and Niels Reedijk. The Alt-OS DevRoom was a (~50 people capacity) class room, that François entirely managed and organized, he invited other projects to give talks and scheduled the talks.

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There's plenty of ways to introduce subtle bugs into your code that give you a hard time finding and fixing. In this post I'd like to introduce you to malloc_debug, a heap implementation with added debug helpers, and outline how it can be used to find some of these problems.

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And now we're ready to start picking the fruits of Qt being available on Haiku. We reported on the completion of the Qt port to Haiku on January 1, 2010, and now we already have KOffice running on the open source recreation of the BeOS. A modern office suite for Haiku!

In these exciting times, during which Ingo Weinhold is making great progress with some performance optimizations in the Haiku kernel, I felt this strong urge to conduct some benchmark results, even if that caused me great deal of pain in setting up all the test platforms! The results are quite interesting, even though I didn't manage to test all possible combinations of host platforms and file systems.

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As I drag myself from cup of coffee to cup of coffee, led by the soothing sounds of The Eagles, still recovering from last night (happy new year everyone!), it hit me that there is this thing I normally do, this website. Anyway, we've got some good Haiku news on this first day of 2010.

Today there are many operating systems available. Every vendor or community round it tries to make it as good as possible. Having different goals, different legacy and different cultures, they succeed in it more or less. We (end users) end up with big selection of operating systems, but for us the operating systems are usually compromise of the features that we would like to have. So is there an operating system that would fit all the needs of the end user? Is is the BeOS clone Haiku?

In 2003 early, myself and a few Japanese BeOS fans founded the Japan BeOS Network, JPBE in short, a community based user group created mainly in response to the resurgence of BeOS in the form of the ZETA operating system (which was being developed by the German company yellowTAB). While the enthusiasm of the community built around ZETA, I felt it was important to educate the Japanese community about Haiku (then still called OpenBeOS); so I decided to do an interview of Michael Phipps, Haiku's project leader in those early days. I am posting this interview here for historical purposes, but also because I think it may be useful to familiarize newcomers with the history of the project and in some way as a tribute to all Michael gave to Haiku during his tenure. Enjoy!

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I once had a personal blog where I wrote some stuff about Haiku. The blog is now gone, but I kept some of the posts that I thought could still be relevant or informative even afer time. Being that we have had many new comers as a result of the recent alpha release, I thought I would rehash some of these posts for both the newcomers as well as anyboby else who may have missed them in the past. This first one is about Haiku logo; I hope you enjoy it.

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