A poem for Device Atlas API ?

Hi folks,

Still on the "OS test" tour, I recently took a look on Haiku. Regarding Wikipedia, that originally means "a Japanese poem of seventeen syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five, traditionally evoking images of the natural world" .... Sounds great ! more technically speaking, it is the direct descendant of BeOS, multimedia focused operating system which was quite advanced ... for its time (end of the nineties...). With an unbeatable boot time (less than 10 seconds in my VM ...) Haiku is the only remaining BeOS clone ... It is not an Unix-like (more something on it's own I'd say) but with a posix compatibility layer. Shipped originally with GCC 2.9 (the last time I dealt with this version was 13/14 years ago and as far as I remember it was quite buggy) so no chance at all to compile Device Atlas C++ APIs ! But it is also shipped with alternative GGC 4 as well, so once set with this one then once cmake and such are installed, everything is alright (ie Haiku has its own package manager with sufficient software/libraries to cover basic needs).

Like Minix 3, I would not use it as my daily OS, too much lacks of features I need but it pleases to many hackers who are interested by something different. It has interests on its own (one of the few OSes written in C++ ...), with a guenine "nineties" look, I wish great luck to the project to raise its expected funds and to be able to release it.

Various things ...

Hi folks.

I was glad to write an article for Device Atlas the last time, hopefully I may do it again about a completely different topic :-) and will do my best to make it helpful ...

Besides, Bundy, the DNS server from ISC for which I have contributed a little bit, is still under development. In the end of the summer, I will probably go back to it, I have another some few ideas which can be useful I think. We will see, they accepted PostgreSQL support the last year after all ...

For last, I made another version of Geoloc daemon for FreeBSD/DragonflyBSD. The latter I don't know much, quite discovered it since some few months. What I know it is more than "just" a FreeBSD fork but also, in my point of view, the most innovative among all BSD. Matthew Dillon (not the actor ;-))  and the other core developers' priorities are less clear than others. But they try some different directions, DragonflyBSD has a very good specific filesystem (Hammer, which can challenge ZFS and Btrfs ... ), has clustering capabilities ... Besides, Dillon himself is very skilled, and always has reasonable, fair words and points of view ... never insults other competitors. Kind of behaviour I appreciate pretty much.

But for now vacations' time :-)

Geoloc and OpenBSD

Hi folks,

once again a rainy Sunday in Dublin but with my first significant open source contribution on my own : Geoloc daemon for OpenBSD which you can checkout in my github space here ...
It uses imsg's libutil (quite smart IPC system) like other system's daemons as an local unix socket service though. As its name suggests, it serves Geolocalization informations with some popular backends (Maxmind's GeoIP API, Device Atlas's Carrier Identification, might add IP2location's support pretty soon with some polishing).

I had considered other OSes before but then I decided to give a try to OpenBSD which I knew only as an user until now and was amazed by the consistency and the clarity of the whole source. So now I understand more why OpenBSD's folks are hard to people, it is for the better good :-) But some few ports to some sibling OSes are planned (at least another BSD ...), depends how things will go ... Besides doing pure C for awhile was not that bad, I really liked it :-)