In this first entry in the "Android and dreams undreamt" rambling, I'll briefly go through the Linux history to date, touch on fragmentation, and mention some of the work we did at Progeny (the reasons will become apparent soon :-)

The Linux community and its associated industries has been a very interesting thing to observe lately. It's gone from an underground hit to an extremely mainstream staple in the 15 or so years I've been working with it, and we have Linux-based devices and platforms which are truly bizarre and unique even in the diverse landscape that is the Linux-verse.

It's no secret that I've spent the last two years in a self-imposed Windows development environment, but it was never my intention to abandon my free software love completely. At Funavision, we've spent two years building some high-quality, first class, gaming technology in the form of an engine we call "Mimicware". This engine is currently closed source and proprietary, however we are seriously considering the pros and cons of releasing it under a free or open software license (since, honestly, our intended business was not centered on this bit of technology).

Mimicware currently is mostly written in C#. This was a practical decision to bootstrap our technology against Microsoft's XNA, but our intention was never to stick with C# ad nauseum. Our intention was to eventually rewrite the core of Mimicware in something more portable and then provide bindings for it in several high level languages (including C#, and using our existing Mimicware engine code).

In fall 2009 we began the work of rewriting our core in a more cross-platform way. Admittedly we haven't completely finished this rewrite, and we have a way to go before we can utilize it in our games, but what we have so far is already fairly impressive as it technically allows us to develop applications which can run on a diverse range of platforms including the Xbox 360 and Google Android (in fact, to my knowledge, we're the first to actually be able to do that :-) If we do ultimately release the source to this engine, I think we'll likely be the first free/open-source multimedia game API to target such a wide range of platforms.

Well, as we've been working on this cross-platform core, I've been learning more and more about Google's Android platform. What I've learned is completely and utterly fascinating, so I thought I'd share...

In my general browsing today I encountered the following very useful post from Carlo Wood concerning recovering deleted files from an EXT3 filesystem. I've never done an "rm -fr ~" on any of my machines, but I've certainly had enough filesystems die on me, and done enough stupid things to appreciate and fear the ramifications of lost data. Hell, not two weeks ago I had my desktop die on me in a spectacular way.

Anyway, I began to wonder what I'd do if I encountered a similar problem as I use XFS instead of EXT3. (Several years ago, I used Reiserfs, but after a catastrophic Reiserfs-related meltdown I switched.)

Then I realized I use rdiff-backup and have incremental backups of all of my data since Summer 2007 (when I started using rdiff-backup :-) So I probably wouldn't need to go through the pain of having to restore low-level XFS transactions.

I am very enamored with rdiff-backup. In fact, if rdiff-backup were a woman, it would be a no brainer to cheat on my wife with her (unless she already was my wife, of course). I also think I have a pretty clever system set up for my backups, so I'm going to share it with you all...

VirtualBox presentation to be given at CINLUG 6 June meeting.

Recently I've had a need for virtual machines as I have to run various distros for work-related testing. Traditionally I probably would have just chrooted all my work and called it good, but I was very busy with other things, and decided to try real VMs instead.

The problem is, I didn't want any high maintenance ones that required a lot of tweaking and configuration (like bochs or qemu) and I also didn't want any proprietary hunk of shit like VMWare. So it was with great delight that I found VirtualBox.

Friends and regular readers of this site know I have had numerous and continual problems with email. Part of it is that spam is such a prevalent problem (and has caused me to create several
iterations of an anti-spam system).

Another part has always been the email clients themselves. I've tried everything, but it's been very hard to fit my needs exactly.