Today, almost 9 months since my last release, I am happy to release an updated version of the program. The new updated version will allow users to upload PDF documents, a very much requested feature.

You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.

I had been doing everything I could to get Google to add PDF uploading capabilities to their API. I even submitted an official issue, which generated 73 comments and 136 stars, making it “the most requested feature.” Last Friday, Google finally responded by releasing version 3.0 of their API which supported PDF uploading.

The entire development of this project happens in my free time, on an old iBook G4. Unfortunately, because the latest version of OS X will not run on this old laptop, I cannot ensure that the app works on Snow Leopard, nor can I fix it if it doesn’t. I’ll probably think about creating a cross-platform version of the app which would run on Windows, Mac, or Linux through Adobe Air, providing greater platform stability.

If you would like to send me a monetary thank you gift for developing this, please consider donating through paypal.

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Today I released an updated version of the program.  In addition to bug fixes, this new version supports video uploads to Picasa.  Additionally, this new version makes it much easier to upload multiple files at the same time.

You can download the new version from the Google Code project site.

The entire development of this project happens in my free time, on an old iBook G4. Donations would help me feel good about continued development of this project.

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i = ((unsigned int)(crcAccum >> 24) ^ *dataBlkPtr++ ) & 0xff;

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Generally, it is well NOT accepted to write to files from the kernel. If you ask how, people will tell you “don’t.” I completely agree with all of the reasons provided, but I decided to do it anyway.

The hardware I’m writing data to isn’t readily available. I wanted to be able to test my code well without having to have the hardware available. So I wrote in some non-release, non-production code that writes data to a file instead of to hardware, but only for testing purposes. When in this simulation mode, the user can interact with the driver and data gets written to the file instead of to hardware, and then the file can be checked for accuracy.

User writes to driver -> kernel driver handles write -> driver writes to file

Easy enough? I thought so until I tried writing to the driver as a regular system user. I chmod’ed the driver so that the user had full privileges to read and write to the file. When root would write to the driver, everything worked, when the regular user would write to the driver, the kernel would crash.

The problem was that the user didn’t have write permissions to the test file that the driver was writing to. I thought the kernel level driver could write to any file it wanted, but apparently, the user’s permissions to the file permeated through the kernel driver. Changing the files permissions fixed things so they didn’t crash any more.

The caps lock and scroll lock lights blink on the keyboard when the kernel crashes. Not quite fireworks, but still kind of cool. Development in a virtual machine is key, so that you really don’t crash your computer, just the virtual machine.

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Adobe has done a good job at allowing Air applications integrate well with the desktop.

Adobe isn’t the first to use internet delivery technologies for desktop applications. Mozilla’s XULRunner allows developers to create and package multi-platform programs based off the same technology that powers Firefox. However, Adobe has done a good job at making it simple to publish very traditional AJAX apps as desktop apps.

Adobe’s big problem is they only support Windows and Mac. There is no Linux support, at least not yet. One of Adobe Air’s big selling point is that it makes it easy to create cross-platform applications. However, without Linux support, the most Adobe can advertise is dual-platform apps.

For a great demo Air app, look at this complex YUI example.

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SCO has been in loosing in law suits it brought against Novell and IBM.

I couldn’t think of better news. I mean, from the people perspective, any good engineers still left at SCO might not loose their job. From another people perspective, now SCO has money to pay Novell, so they don’t have to lay off people.

All in all, I think all this means is there is a bigger turkey to roast and cut up.

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A lot of the ideas for features have come through my experiences with Plone, a content management system written on top of Zope in Python. Plone is an excellent CMS, but it is a little complicated, and my CMS should be quite a bit easier to hack on.

I’m calling my project Harvest or Harvest CMS, I haven’t decided which one yet. It goes along with my domain, peargrove.com which I use for various project hosting.

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“Software architecture is the set of design decisions which, if made incorrectly, may cause your project to be cancelled.”

Eoin Woods

Incorrect open source software architecture decisions may cause your project to fail.

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• New patches are tested with Andrew’s mm kernel, and if they work out, then they are sent to Linus’ kernel.
• Time between kernel versions should be about two months.
• 1475 unique contributors in one year alone
• Grew kernel 6% in one year
• 2.6.18.y kernels are bugfixes only
• Powerful to have a set list of rules so it is easy to say no to people
• Day job: in charge of all SuSE kernel developers. All work remotely around the world.
• Distros like to maintain an enterprise kernel for up to 7 years, which is crazy
• E*Trade uses Gentoo because they can control it.
• Modular kernel which little interconnectedness which makes it easy to have module maintainers who don’t
• Tools: git, quilt, sparse
• Linus’ main job: say no
• Linux isn’t developed, it evolves. This means that there really isn’t a firm development plan.
• Can’t go by time anymore with git
• Signed-off-by is a blame path which create a reputation based system for submitting patches
• The IDE module guy three times has gone crazy
• Contributors have to defend their code
• No development tree makes the engineering process more careful. Things have to evolve gradually with small changesets.
• All the drivers are in the tree. This means that if you change an API function, then you can go and change all the drivers that use that API just like that.
• People who work on open source projects are much more likely to get jobs, because you have currently shipping code.
• Learn about licenses, they are very important.
• Xen is a good example of running an open source project the wrong way. There are political and social reasons why.

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