AvengerMoJo Live or Die but Fight for it!

Creating a Remote Dbus (Part 1)

2010-04-15T03:47:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this idea for some time now. And there are couple reasons that I like this idea, but instead of telling you the reason why I like it. First of all I need define what I mean by Remote Dbus? As a matter of fact, I don't really know what to call it at the beginning with, I kind of demo it in the GnomeSummit as the future desktop combine with web service. You can call it WebRPC or PushBaseMessaging etc. And here is the definition of it and maybe you can help me naming it.

First of all, it can reduce the server bandwidth usage by send information just to the client who is interested and login. By logging in mean you are actually holding a active session in the server. Here is the scenario, our web server want to tell the user that it is going into maintenance mode for an hour. Traditionally you will send out a system wide email to all user and notify them. However, it is kind of like UDP, when the user is not actually using or planning on using within that specific time frame. This email almost act like a spam. And even worst is when the user login to their email account after the fact, this event already expired and it really waste a lot of bandwidth. This specific protocol should allow you to let the server send the message to the client actively interested in this topic ( kind of like twitter) instead of passively subscripted by the client itself.

Second key idea is from the client side. This service can send message from the server and no need the client to pull, which fit the need of reduce network traffic and power consumption. It will greatly improve the battery consumption for different handle client. If you compare current technology that mostly fit our desktop nowaday, you will see lot of pulling and no way to let the device / client going to sleep or idle. With a server active pushing message to the client, we can save not only the bandwidth and the power for the client, but the server can also have reduce load by having lesser hit.

Third key idea is unlike the web service, there will not be any type checking and interface definition. Client know where to call if they know. What to call if they know and How does it return if they know. Meaning when then client starting a call to the server for a service, the client need know the uri ahead of time, know the interface ahead of time and parameter in/out ready ahead of time. If something go wrong, it just goes wrong. No need for error checking over head.

OpenSource China OpenSource Summit

2009-06-30T21:05:00.000-07:00

I participated the summit again this year, and we have Jim Zemlin from Linux foundation, Mark Shuttleworth Canonical and Louis Suarez-Potts OpenOffice.org this year. Just like our past event, we have one day of presentation and one day round table discussion. Lots of vendors talk about the cloud computing and mobile Linux in the first day presentation. The round table discussion mention lot of fundamental problem of open source environment within China. It is all boil down to a couple fundamental problem in china's open source environment.
First of all, education system has not adopt open source very much. Majority of the institution are not teaching or using any open source system or without the knowledge and understanding of the benefit of the open source system. This is also socially link to the second most important problem below. And how could we possible generate a well equip open source users or developers without an educational environment.
Second, the pirate and IP right in china is not well define and protected. Even thought they are increasingly getting better. However, majority of the proprietary software are freely available everywhere in China. How could there be any personal software business going to be created in this kind of environment and who could do any business with small medium business?
Third, government lead most of the business direction which could very possible not being the most market sensitive or needed features or product. And it is mostly funded or sponsor by the government, they urge or making money become less important. So some one suggest we should talk about the business model around open source, rather technical.
Either way, the current environment of open source in china is not doing well. But using open source to do business is still very promising, since it will give you the safety of using "free of charge" software legally.

2009-03-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

Just get a ZTE 3G TS-CDMA modem usb stick, which get some problem in Linux. After looking over the internet. ZTE engineer seem to respond to the kernel mailing list about some issue on other device already. And there is a project call USB_ModeSwitch to help on those issue. Still need to debug and get more info form the device. May even need a firmware for the modem to work at the end.

Developer Distribution

2009-03-10T08:36:00.001-07:00

This is nothing new, but in our monthly meeting in the china open source developer workshop, we have started to talk about building a developer focus distribution. Instead of download SDK for different packages itself, we may wanted to build a developer centric livecd or vm image which can let user start writing code right away. Of course this image creation need to easy and fast, the only thing need is packages list and file that need to add on top of this image. When any developer come to our meeting can start asking the same question could be recorded and put somewhere online and read by other user as well. This is still under heavy development, you suggestion are valuable. Please join us at China Open Source Developer Workshop
We are thinking to produce a openSUSE Moblin base developer version in our first try.

Starting a business with sickness

2009-03-02T01:16:00.000-08:00

Flu....sleeping on the bed for 4 days and finally getting better. Human is so weak, even you know you are going to be sick but you can't do anthing about it. Just set there and wait to get sick, drink water and sleep it over. Having to start my own business is not a easy thing to do. Doing opensource and working on low budget project doesn't help either. But I don't know how to work for someone else when I get so many idea in my mind that I wanted to achieve. This week I'm going to work on the odonata and sdljava layer and hopeful get it to work on my VIA C3 cle266. the patcher2k new viafb work very well. I'm able to produce a direct PAL 720x480 and NTSC 720x576 fbmode. Hopefully I will able to produce some screen shoot here.

Confused

2009-03-02T01:10:00.000-08:00

I had a hard time coming up a resolution this year. I'm not sure it is just because my relationship having problem or my career is not clear. Linux and hackers are just too simple, sometime I don't know I actually have growth up or not. When we spend time on a project, a program or a community it growth naturally. However, in real life you don't know the people surround will do what they said. They trap you, cheat you, tease you giving you wrong direction. I'm at a point of lost and even scare I'll go crazy.

I'm looking for 12 opensource apprentices in 2009

2009-02-28T02:52:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about this topic for a long time. Mainly because of my own personal experience, I'm feeling the needs of getting technical "ethic" out to our professional area. This has been my goal for a long time.
A lot of people ask for my help before, but with my limited two hands, I can only do so much. Education take a lot of time and resource and running it as a business will make our focus change to money making business instead.
At one point, I'm planning on making a technology professional agent which train and bring up engineers like movie star and trade with different company or industry. But it may end up doing just marketing and missing the idea of making our industry more profession.
Right now I'm working on writing a book of open source and meanwhile I think adopting 12 apprentices will give me some inspiration of topics and direction.
The main idea of the mentoring program is different from intern. My requirement for those apprentices are no older then Freshmen level and willing to join this program for at least for one year. Meeting up once a week to communicate with me for assignment and once a month community activity. Blog entry required at least once a week for learning record. ( Hopefully I can keep up myself :) )
This project is still under development and looking forward to hear your input, feel free to contract me if you want to join or know someone may be interested.

Google Blogger tryout

2007-03-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

Once again, trying to blog is not that easy, since we all very picky about the blog functions. Looking for API to expend their usability. But let trying something is already on your table, google are really good at delivering applications right in front of you and make you difficult to not try it out.
Compare with Linux distribution, you save alot of time from installing software, learning this and learning that. Just get used to the interface and start doing what you mean to do. I really havn't pay much time on the web technology for a long time, but I guess google does give a different view for me right now.

Filename Iconv

2005-10-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

After 3 days of OSDL I think I need to relax my brain a little so I start picking out some old Hong Kong sound and trying to listen to some music. But all of those big5 chars is not display correctly on my SUSE10 of course, so I bring out a script that I wrote before for converting gb filename to utf8 filename and see it will work. Of course it is not working :) So I start working on the script and see what is the problem. I discover my script was not handling space correctly, and some how it take more over 2 hours to finish it...what a pain... or my shell script really need some work.
Here is the script if anyone is interested.

OSDL Meeting

2005-10-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

Getting into the second day of OSDL meeting, I have been attending the Data Center Linux group. It is a difficult topic to get into, since a lot of the technical questions are not being solve yet. When we are trying to figure out some promotion solution, it become difficult.
Mission critical, virtualization, file system, drivers are the hot topics in the technical part.

openSUSE work?

2005-10-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

Since I'm using SUSE10, scim is the default chinese input method in the system. It is wonderful, with a lot of plugins including my favourite dayi 大易. But I was using the 4 code method to input and it is using the 3 code. Anyway I may try to put the 4 and 2 code in and make the SCIM work better with the existing framework.

Work Work Work

2005-10-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

One day you wake up, it is saturday! 7 continuous working days after Oct 1st holiday is not cool. Busy can no longer express my condition, Novell work is starting to pickup, Niche doesn't really get much time left, and more projects are stacking up against me.
Hire people is not going to solve the problem, but release some pressure. OpenSUSE.org.cn game plan is ready, but it is a little complicated. I need to make a simple one to show the boss.
Niche finally solve the on memory capture problem and starting to get the continuous capture ready. Also getting the firewire 1394 to work on niche is going to be painful.
Last night going to have hotpot with follow co-workers, it was ok at the beginning. However when we almost ready to go, we saw something blue flowing in the pot.... It is the pot sticker. Then I stop and feeling sick .. :) well half price make us just feel a little better. Next time really don't go to a brandnew hotpot store.

My Best friend is in Hong Kong

2005-10-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody, I'm back again working this new blog engine SimpleBlog.
I had a wonderful time last month when my best friend in Texas Heather come to HongKong for a visit with his cool boy friend Chris.
Then I'm back to Beijing for my never finish project Niche :)
The Novell work is start picking up and I'm going to German next month. Before that I may need to go to Taiwan also. It is going to be busy before the Christmas.

Birthday Party 2005

2005-08-12T16:01:00.000-07:00

Birthday party is always fun. This has been a very difficult year for me. It is not so difficult that could drive me crazy, but lot of patches and updates for my life. New working environment, new friends, new directions, everything seem to be going smooth. The embedded linux project is going along but team is still a little behind, their skills and their speed need to be improve. OpenEmbedded has been a pain to get it working. Qtopia is really a great tool for embedded GUI. Don't know how long will we able to build something to compete with them??? :) Wiki and the Forum for Novell is almost ready to go, just waiting for the LinuxWorld China. Will I end up working in Novell... I don't know, but I'm still looking forward to build the best team in Beijing.

OpenJava and Embedded

2005-04-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

The open source jvm and java tools have been around for a long time, but still not many people supporting or using those technology. Kaffe, Kawt, Odonata, SDLjava are something that I'm trying to use for my new project. Of course, Ofbiz, Struct, Hibernate are something on the web application level tools that I have been using. Also Laszlo and Luxor is some GUI interface I would love to see when I'm making an interfafce. Putting BeanShell into those tools library are very helpful for testing and debugging of course, I would love to have some runtime interpreted GUI library being build. Let me know if you are also interested with the tools above.

Thiz Research Center

2004-09-15T00:24:00.000-07:00

OK ... it really has been a long time since I blog here... I know I'm kind of busy.. but what have I been doing? Well, first the Thiz Research Center has been establish...(so called) and still get lot of stuff to work on. Especially how to manage the students and giving them direction. Anyway it is not much fun. Looking at it from the the other side, it is kind of cool because I get to hack some crazy shit before I can hand it to those students. Anyway, I'm getting my hand on the directfb shit, security stuff... ( get some buffer overflow shit going ), some game j2me stuff, some project managment stuff...etc etc. Don't know when can I start to do my own research again!!

Topless Laptop

2004-05-01T00:57:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been working on my Topless Laptop to help me do my presentation and watching DVD. This is just the first version, after all the related software being stable and reduce inside, I would like to put it into the compat flash and drive by solar power.

Chinese Linux Standard

2004-04-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, is the day to join the Chinese Linux Standard, right now I'm tring to be a real hacker again and get my old mojoco php module running in new php src. I realized just a couple years of development could make a project growth so big. It is very difficult to keep track of all the development in the open source world. But many people do expected you to know them all.
Here is a link to my mojoco if you are interested.

The Database Book is done

2004-03-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

Finally get the first half of my book finish. Chilling down watching online meg and find out how to hack your ipod on Popular Science. Also I find something I have been looking forever! The flex display on PC Meg.

You get iPod?

2004-02-21T05:04:00.000-08:00

While I'm digging around the movie collection online, I find something online and started to rethink about getting an iPod. Can we trust nobody?
My book is still going slow and I'm rewriting the install guild for MySQL again, lucky it is in chinese and I guess you won't be interested, will you? :P

Database book Chapter4

2004-02-20T06:08:00.001-08:00

Well Well just get my Chapter 4 finish and I think it is time for a break! Writing book is not as fun as I was expected.... :P Some new update for my silly web site, get my Link working and some update for food special.

The AvengerMoJo is Back

2004-02-12T04:12:00.000-08:00

Finally I get myself together and make this stupid homepage again. I guess I haven't been doing web for a long time because of my line of work. But somehow I'm doing it again. This time no more dynamic flying php with crazy blanking object on css plus javascript exporting w3c xhtml covering MoJo standard but plant'O me. Right the AvengerMoJo is back.
I'm moving all my old blog to this new one and see how it goes