Flash

This is a set of commets to some of the asserts made by Steve Jobs in his Thoughts on Flash. Safari has just ~5.5% of web users share […] Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers. […] Ehm, what about Netscape Gecko? It’s not just Firefox and it’s share of web users, much larger than the one of Safari, but also the fact that the Mozilla Foundation is very much involved in building (W3C) standards like HTML5 et similia. I can see that you used the word “Almost”, but that’s not a good start: Steve, let’s try to be more fair here. ...

If you, like me, have a Android Dev Phone 1 (“ADP1” from now on), you are probably wondering how to take the latest version of the Android Source Code, the “GIT Master”, compile and put on your device. I googled and googled and googled, finding some sparse material. But it’s all messed up: sometimes it was incomplete or partial, sometimes it was a matter of formatting/style, it could get very difficult to read. So, this post is my way of making it organic and organized. Let’s get it started! ...

After some playing with Unslung on my Linksys NSLU2, I realize it was a “very limited solution” for our needs. We need to share 4 (sometimes 5) NTFS (or others) volumes, where everyone of them is 500GB: this is too much even for the modified firmware of Unslung, unable to read the full directory trees (and the contained files) of my massive movie’s collection. [](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign)[The Debian/NSLU2's Reign](http://picasaweb.google.com/detronizator/TheDebianNSLU2SReign) So, I came back to the Debian/NSLU2 solution. This time, with all the intention to make it work. It’s quite pointless to report here all the things I did to make it work in the way I want/need. I’ll just write down the most important bits: ...

Motivated by my friend KM here (sorry, Italian link), I decided to buy a Linksys NSLU2, a Micro-[en:NAS] based on [en:Linux]. Linksys (owned by Cisco) released since day one the source code of the tuned Linux Kernel, instantly allowing the Open Source community to hack this device in a million of ways. My requirements are very simple: I need to share something like 6 external HD using either Samba or FTP+HTTP. I first tried to use the “out-of-the-box” NSLU2 with the latest firmware, but it’s unable to manage more than 2 disks (on an HUB, it just see the first HDD attached). I then decided to use Debian/NSLU2, a very rich distribution for [en:ARM] that is just amazing. The only problem? It seems too much for an hardware like NSLU2, plus, after a normal apt-get dist-upgrade something related with [en:SELinux] and vsftpd happened and I didn’t managed to put it all back to work. I should have disabled selinux passing the parameter selinux = 0 to the Kernel at boot time but… there is no “easily modifiable” [en:Bootloader] to pass parameters to the kernel at boot time (at least, as far as I know). I suppose that I should modify the kernel, recompile and then re-flash it. Too much for something I want to finish in max 2 days. And the NSLU2 is slow. Very slow. It took something like 12 hours to make the full installation of Debian and flash re-flash the firmware. Besides, for what I need to do, it’s not worth it to do all this. ...