Hi everyone. First, sorry for not updating the site in such a long time, I just haven't been in the "update ICO" mood for a while (it comes and it goes, it's like a yoyo), hopefully it's gone now :)

As I'm sure you know, a lot has been going on. The Google Summer of Code is in full swing and reports have been posted (mostly) regularly by the student participating. You can read the latest on IPv6 implementation, Services Kit and LKL support over at the Haiku Blog-o-Sphere. Also there you can read Pulkomandy's progress on the locale kit that he's been going through in this year's Haiku Code Drive. He just updated the blog a couple of days ago and as you can see he's been working hard.

Also working hard (as usual) is Axel. This basement-dweller was hired once again by Haiku to work full-time on the project and he's focusing his efforts on the network stack (including for example WPA, which should be coming soon). He also updated the blog with the work he's done so far and what's in store for the upcoming hours and I for one can't wait to see the final result of the 120 hours.

On another note, we'd like to congratulate Darkwyrm for having the first (that I'm aware) published book on coding for Haiku, both in traditional format and ebook. Congratulations and well done, I hope it sells well. The book is called "Learning to Program with Haiku" and is available from Lulu.com. And if you get it before August 15th there's a 15% discount by using the code BEACHREAD305.

Ars Technica posted yesterday a retrospective on the BeOS File System, since its beginning to its latest incarnation in Haiku. They cover its technical advantages of the time (and present) and include a couple of interviews, the first with one of the original BFS coders (though he remains anonymous for the interview) and the second with Axel himself. It's a great article, very interesting to read and provides an insight into the file system us BeOS/Haiku users have loved (and sometimes hated) for a long time. Enjoy the reading everyone.

It's that day of May, that day you marked on your calendar. Haiku Alpha 2 is now available to everyone out there who've been waiting to get their hands (little or otherwise) on it. Eight months after Alpha 1 was released comes Alpha 2 with some important improvements, namely:

• WiFi support with WEP encryption introduced
• WebPositive - a native Webkit based browser
• New Locale Kit allows localization/translation
• Improved USB mass storage performance
• ACPI enabled by default
• Bash command-line shell updated to version 4.x
• Message Signal Interrupts (MSI)
• Increased POSIX compliance
• Increased performance

Of course that's not all there is to Alpha 2 and you can read even more from the release notes. What am I saying... first start your download and then read the release notes. What are you waiting for? Click away and get your groove on.

Congratulations to everyone involved, you deserve it.

Once again this year Haiku is participating in the Google of Summer Code, which as you well know, allocates students to many open-source projects (this year there were 152 accepted organizations, out of 367). As usual there were several project ideas which, unfortunately, had to be slimmed down, and from those proposals 7 remained, along with its mentors. And now, students have been chosen, and they are:

Atis Elsts

    * Mentor: Alexander von Gluck IV
    * Project: IPv6 implementation for Haiku

Janito Vaqueiro Ferreira Filho

    * Mentor: Jérôme Duval
    * Project: Implement ext3 support for Haiku

Lucian Adrian Grijincu

    * Mentor: Niels Sascha Reedijk
    * Project: lkl-haiku-fsd: Haiku file system drivers for any Linux supported file system

Christopher Humphries

    * Mentor: David McPaul
    * Project: Improve and Extend Media Player

Christophe Huriaux

    * Mentor: Stephan Assmus
    * Project: Creating Services Kit core elements

Nathan Mentley

    * Mentor: Michael Lotz
    * Project: Haiku x86_64 port

Alex Wilson

    * Mentor: Adrien Destugues
    * Project: Taking the Haiku Layout API public

Of the seven projects, one jumps at you straight away and that is the IPv6 implementation. That is one huge task and not an easy one to say the least. Another one is the x86_64 port which no small feat itself. But all of them are important to Haiku and we wish them all the best for their project. We hope there are no "real life" complications this time, allowing for everything to go down smoothly. Congratulations to the seven students and to Haiku itself.

If you remember, we recently wrote about Ingo coordinating the R1 Alpha 2 release and here's progress being done. Ingo wrote to the development mailing list and proposed May 10th as the release date for Alpha 2, starting the launch for the launch sequence. Today he created the Alpha 2 branch in the code tree,to which only the coordinator (him if no else is chosen) will have commit access. He also proposes that this week a vote is carried out by the developers so that the optional features to include are chosen.

Great news for everyone and another milestone in bringing Haiku closer and closer to the long antecipated R1. Good job everyone.

Gerasim Troeglazov updated the QT project page a few days ago with the news that the port has been updated and work is being done to bring it up to QT version 4.7. He reports as well that the move to git has been completed. Nothing more is said by Gerasim but he did include a screenshot. Good job guys.

BeGeistert 022 was last weekend (with the Coding Sprint this week) and Humdinger wrote and published his report on the happenings. He reports on the progress made by some developers like Ingo for example and also Stephan with his Webpositive work (which he just a few days ago reported on as well).

BeGeistert 022 was one for returns. The name given to this edition was "Return of the Cola-Coder" and Ithamar was there alright. He brought with him a lot of code concerning printing, which he's been commiting into the tree. Another return (remember I mentioned a surprise when introducing BeGeistert 022 a couple of weeks ago?) was the return of yellowTAB. You read that right. yellowTAB is planning something around Haiku and is (will be) commiting a lot of code into Haiku itself.

Pictures. We all love pictures (pervs) and since we're on BG, here are some BG pictures for you to enjoy.

Update:  Here are five more photos by Humdinger himself.

Well folks it's that time of the year again. A time where geeks from all over (well, Europe mostly) gather around and drink coke or other similar beverages. And damn how I wish I was going. Unfortunately BeGeistert 022 will be a miss for me and it's a shame because this one will have some surprises up its sleeves. Oh yes...

BeGeistert 022 "Return of the Cola-Coder" starts tomorrow with the early birds who usually begin to arrive in the afternoon and as usual it'll be held in Dusseldorf's Youth Hostel (if you haven't been there since they renovated it, let me tell you, I was impressed with the work they did), so if you're close by or have time off work, you can still make it! Charlie and the team will be there to help you with whatever you need as always, even if to do that he has to take the jacket off his own back (yep, true) :)

I'm sure it'll be great fun as always and like I said before, damn how I wish I was going. Have fun everyone.

Haiku's been prolific with the news as of recently and the latest are (as usual), good news. First, there's another developer working full time for Haiku, this time it's Ingo Weinhold who'll work for 160 hours (with rests in between of course). He'll continue to set his sights on low-level stuff, like the kernel. But that's not, oh no. Part of his job description is to take care of "R1 Alpha 2 release coordination". That's right, Alpha 2 is creeping closer and closer though there's still no date set in stone yet.

What has allowed this recent developers to get payed in order to work full time for Haiku? Donations. And donations have increased quite a bit, especially in the "one time" category, during the month of February. To give you an idea, between January and February the donations increased around 2030%!Impressive stuff indeed and everyone deserves a pat in the back. And speaking of donations, Haiku is working the kinks out so that they're able to receive donations not only from Paypal (currently the only way) but also from Google Checkout.

Stippi posted this Saturday a status update on the work he's doing on WebPositive. As he himself recognizes, a lot of work is left to be done (obviously) but a lot of work has already been done as well, and he mentions a few highlights:

• Added General page in settings window with option to specify the maximum age of URLs in the browsing history and the download folder location.
• Fixed some graphical glitches when scrolling sub-frames.
• Fixed problems with programmatic opening of new windows/pages. The GSoC Melange web app was unusable before. The Haiku User Guide translation site is working now. Closing programmatically opened pages will no longer close the entire browser.

These 3 were just randomly selected from his list, as there are many others he listed. He continues to work on the browser so improvements should be seen steadily coming the user's way. Head over and read his full post where there's a download link as well.

I can't use WebPositive yet unfortunately, since WiFi doesn't work even with a new laptop I bought *smacks Colin* :)