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aji cristals from k-market

Creating community friendly embedded systems

Netgear has jumped the bandwagon and released Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L). Like the earlier Linksys WRT54GL, it's an existing model with a Linux "L" added to end. It does not really add any hardware to make it community friendly, the "open source" part feels like just a marketing gimmick.

With just a couple of small features, these devices could really become community friendly:

• Serial port. A kingdom for a router or NAS with a proper serial port! Or at least a pre-solder the serial headers and provide a cable with a TTL shifter.
  
• Unbrickable bootloader. Alternatively, a relatively hard to brick bootloader like Linksys NSLU-2 has.
  
• Mainlined kernel. No "Linux 2.4.22 + binary drivers" crap, like this netgear device.
  
• Widespread availability. The community is around the world.
  
• Documentation.
  

Not as necessary, but nice to have features for a community-oriented product:

• JTAG. So one gets to unbrick it in case bootloader went bonkers. Also allows the community to develop the bootloader.
  
• Extensibility. Just adding a USB port gives any device huge amount of extra possible uses. A SD slot would give loads of storage space. etc..
  
• Contacts with engineers and developers from the manufacturer. Don't just market to the community, be part of the community :)
  

User interfaces and security are HARD

You know what the problem is? Webbrowser developers think they're developing the most important application for any computer. -Wouter

Weeelll.. Looking at the the long posts you and others on planet.d.o have written about a browser, one might get the opposite conclusion :) Considering the amount of work and daily business (online banks, shops, news, other services), browser is the most important application after email - and even for email many people use a browser...

Users are good at noticing usability problems. However, their proposed solutions are usually unreliable.

I'm just as annoyed as the next planet writer about the new self-signed SSL dance of FF3. But I do not pretend to know the correct solution. When dealing with security issues, knee-jerk fixes can lead to disasters. Likewise in UI design, the first idea that gets into mind probably isn't the best one.

horsmia

blog moved

Buch of quickies:

• First, I'm moving from livejournal to blogger. Mainly because blogger allows me to email pictures/videos from my cellphone and automatically converts them to blog entries. To avoid spamming planet with unnecessary entries, only postings tagged with "Debian" be syndicated to p.d.o.
  
• Was invited to UDS and Prague. Quite different from conferences where I've been before (debconf, FOSDEM). Less time spent with one person presenting and rest of room listen, more time people discussing the topic of session. Atleast this was the case in the Mobile track I mostly followed.
  
• Testing scripts now consider Armel a Release architecture. \o/. The armel debian-installer should also be part of debian-installer beta2 really soon(tm) . Only getting testing-security running properly is tricky at the moment...
• fuck I'm old now.