Blogospheric Refraction

Hi all…

Well, after a long hiatus, I’m working on new stages for the Gentoo/MIPS port.  These new ones will be based on uClibc, and are a compliment to the existing glibc-based stages.  At the moment, the initial seed environment is still being cross-compiled from my i686 host, and for now I’m focussing on mipsel but will soon turn my attention to MIPS.

These stages initially will not operate with a page size of 16KB or more, so unfortunately aren’t much good for Lemote users (I’m working with the uClibc people on this) but Cobalt and SGI users will soon once again be able to use uClibc as their system libc.  The new stages will be based on uClibc 0.9.30… which is yet to be keyworded.

Open letter to Minister Stephen Conroy regarding the proposed internet filter.

Over the last year, we’ve heard a number of people step up, complaining about this proposal, and what it will mean in terms of freedom-of-speech, and internet speeds.  I also heard a rumour that mentioned the blocking of peer-to-peer traffic.

Now, it is very noble of the government to be that concirned with the issues involving pornography and other objectionable material, that they are pushing forward with developing and introducing this filter to the masses.  Others have already pointed out many of the ethical and technical issues with the proposal, which I note, to date, are still not addressed.

The latest proposal however, has been to block peer-to-peer traffic.  I strongly urge those in the government to carefully consider the consequences before taking on such a drastic action.  Ignoring the fact that Bit-Torrent and similar protocols can, and are, used for legal purposes (such as distribution of open source software) as well as for piracy… a lot of other peer-to-peer protocols exist, that many people expect to be able to use freely.

Consider the following applications/protocols:

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Ekiga
• Yahoo! Messenger
• TeamSpeak
• EchoLink
• IRLP
• IRC DCC
• VNC
• RDP
• SIP (most VoIP systems)
• Hamachi
• … etc

All of these, rely on peer-to-peer traffic to operate, and are used lawfully.  Blocking SIP could be disasterous to our telecommunications, since many people rely on this protocol as their primary home phone service! Such a move could proove highly unpopular with the voting public, and deadly to businesses that rely on VoIP services.  In a time of global economic crisis, is this really what you want?!

It is true that many of us absolutely hate it, when a politician breaks an election promise.  However, we are more than too happy to forgive politicians for breaking such promises, when such promises are mearly implementing bad policy.  I urge this government to consider the above, in addition to the comments made by others on this topic, before going ahead with such disasterous propositions.

Hi all… figured I better update everyone on what’s happening on the MIPS front.

Kumba has been working on newer kernel ebuilds to support various platforms, specifically IP30, which has been troublesome of late. At present, the best kernel revision to use is still 2.6.23 on Cobalt, Loongson 2E and O2.

Another alternative, is to download your own kernels from the Linux/MIPS website (not kernel.org), and research the patches needed to get things running yourself… in fact… Lemote Loongson 2E, Cobalt Qube2 and SGI Indy/O2 users should find minimal to no patching is necessary as the vast majority of changes have already been accepted into the mainline kernel.

Stages… there have been no further stages built at the moment from the 2008.0 ones. Partly because some of us have been just too busy. I’ve started to make inroads into a uClibc-based set of stages however, having got a uClibc-0.9.30 toolchain built the other day targetted at mipsel-unknown-linux-uclibc. It is hoped a workable environment can be constructed in the coming months that may turn into a new set of stages available for this platform.

Desktop Applications… have been lagging quite a bit. I have some patches for Thunderbird 2.0 that gets things rolling again… and may just work for big-endian MIPS (which was broken at last check) but due to lack of time, I haven’t been able to investigate further. A similar set of patches got Firefox 3.0 partially working… more work needs to be done.

My own status… I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon… just been extremely busy. As it is now, I’m passed my 8:00PM bed time (need to be up at 4:00AM tomorrow, currently it is 8:35PM AEST), so I’ll leave it at that.