WalterCon Aftermath
Stephen B. - November 3rd, 2006
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This past weekend, Orlando, Florida was the site of the 3rd WalterCon, the April Fools joke that has turned into an annual Haiku conference. Details are popping up around the web – post-WalterCon articles have appeared on HaikuNews, IsComputerOn, and OSNews; there is also an extensive photo gallery on the WalterCon website. This year’s WalterCon also received some attention from outside the usual BeOS / Haiku community. Most notably, Jem Matzan of The Jem Report dropped by WalterCon and he has posted a great article about the Con on his site. In addition to providing a nice summary for those of us who couldn’t go, Jem has also written one of the most fair and accurate BeOS-related articles that I’ve seen from someone who doesn’t use the OS.
Hot on the heels of WalterCon 2006, a winner has been announced in the Haiku Icon Contest – as reported by IsComputerOn and OSNews. The contest, which we reported on back in August, seemed to be a big success – there were sixteen entries to vote on in total and the high quality of the submitted icon sets meant that the voting was certainly no easy choice. Now that the voting has ended, the winning icon set is: Stippi.. It does quite a nice job of reproducing the style of Be’s original R5 icons, and out of the submitted entries, it appears to be one of the clearest at small sizes. Due to some confusion over the contest purpose, it should be noted that the winning icon set isn’t going to become the icon set for Haiku as-is. Rather, the winning set will be used as a guide/recommendation for creating the eventual Haiku icons (as described in the Haiku Wiki).
It’s taken me a shamefully long time to notice, but Sikosis posted the latest installment of the Haiku Podcast – Episode 6 – waaay back on October 8th. Why shameful? Because this episode includes an interview with yours truly – now you all get to hear why I’m a writer and not a radio host. In addition to the interview, Siksosis also gives a rundown of the latest news and announces a new BeBits app of the month: DreamChess. Thanks, Sikosis!
BeOS software tends to be quite stable, but as with any other OS there are times when an unresponsive application will need to be forcibly quit/killed. If you find yourself frequently having to kill specific programs, it can get a bit tedious to go through Team Monitor or ProcessController each time. Fortunately there is a fairly simple way to setup a keyboard shortcut to kill a frequently-uncooperative program – read on for the full details.
Over on ICO, a new article has been posted with details of some promising improvements in ZETA’s support for SMB, the protocol used for file sharing in Windows networks (also mentioned on OSNews). The improvements are currently undergoing testing and are apparently due – in a large part – to porting the lastest stable version of SAMBA, an Open Source impelementation of the SMB protocol. The IsComputerOn article contains some useful first-hand information from frankps, after he had a chance to put the new software through its paces with a Network Attached Storage device. Aside from reporting that standard operations work without problem, the most promising details mentioned is that video & audio playback works when playing files located on network shares. Attempting that with older versions of SMB support for BeOS was often a quick way to enter Kernel Debugging Land.
As already reported by IsComputerOn, HaikuNews, and OSNews, an Intel Pro Wireless 2100 driver is now available for Haiku, courtesy of Michael “mmlr” Lotz . In addition to being milestone in Haiku’s development, the driver also reportedly functions in R5 – which should be very welcome news for BeOS users who own laptops. The Intel 2100 chipset is apparently quite common, found in PCI, PCMCIA, and USB adapters – it was included in the first implemention of Intel’s Centrino “platform” (Carmel), which was used in many portable computers. There has also been some recent progress with Haiku’s network stack, Axel D??rfler has posted a status update on Haik-OS.org:
I *really* hate to use Stephen’s site to promote our latest CD, but he gave me access… ; ) http://www.rhymetorrents.com/halloween We did release volume five last month, as well. No BeOS references lately, but plenty of geek goodness, and High-C is in fact Sandwich Boy, so this is almost on-topic. Peace,
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