So, I’m doing it after all. Reverse engineering the cache files. The format is actually surprisingly simple once you determine the identifiers of all the data fields (and their lengths). No reverse compiling or digging into the EVE runtime was performed, simply educated guesses and a knowledge of CPython internals.
Progress is good. Relevant data identified. More results to be posted, and then an open source code release 
EVE-Central.com has always sought to provide an in-game browser usable implementation (as usable as the in game browser can be). This has in the past severely limited what can be done in terms of dynamic user interfaces. There are numerous hooks for alternate display methodologies to prevent locking up the IGB browser when loading large pages (say, a global Tritanium listing). Its also responsible for the somewhat “ugly” look of EVE-Central, since maintaining two presentation layers is a fair amount of work.
How many of you are currently actively using the in game browser for browsing EVE-Central? How much would it hurt if you had to switch to using an external browser?
This question comes up every now and then, for the clued in folks who try to determine how the pricing aggregates (median, average) are produced, especially when they notice it vary across the site. This quick guide is designed to settle some of these questions, which undoubtedly will lead to more questions.
Confused yet?
Zed Shaw has launched Microturfing.com, with a great parody of the Microsoft “hip” culture blogging.
Fun read, if not a bit immature.
The FSF has said no thanks to the .Net community promise. Not surprising in the least, and their points are all good. As I’ve said before, the promise is worth only the paper it is written on – it has no legal implications. Microsoft likes sinking their partners (see: Spyglass), and would likely continue to do so.
Zed Shaw has posted a well written discussion of why he uses the GPL series of licenses.
I have to say I agree with his reasoning on all counts. I have licensed software under the BSD or MIT series of licenses in the past, but often for small little utilities that I don’t think contain much intellectual worth or don’t represent new concepts or major time investments. Anything “big” comes under the GPL.
This is a good point to discuss the applicability of the Affero GPL license. If you are developing software which will likely never offered or downloaded to a client machine (the “distribution” step in the GPL, which is absent in most web applications and SaaS), but would like to force users to offer the modified source code to your product, this is the license to use. There are very few pieces of software which carry the AGPL license to date, however with the growing trend of cloud computing, it is well worth considering.
The only downside to the AGPL are libraries, which carry the full force of the GPL license. There is no “ALGPL” version, allowing linking of code into other products without bringing the requirements of the GPL with it.
Looks like our friends at Microsoft have come up with a Community Promise governing the core of the C# and CLI architecture.
Here is the text of Microsoft’s announcement:
I have some good news to announce: Microsoft will be applying the Community Promise to the ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specs.
ECMA 334 specifies the form and establishes the interpretation of programs written in the C# programming language, while the ECMA 335 standard defines the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) in which applications written in multiple high-level languages can be executed in different system environments without the need to rewrite those applications to take into consideration the unique characteristics of those environments.
“The Community Promise is an excellent vehicle and, in this situation, ensures the best balance of interoperability and flexibility for developers,” Scott Guthrie, the Corporate Vice President for the .Net Developer Platform, told me July 6.
It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions.
You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications.
The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created the implementations, the type of copyright licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated business model.
Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.
You can find the terms of the Microsoft Community Promise here.
I told you this was good news!
Of course this isn’t a legal document by any means. But if you take it for what its worth, its a decent step forward. The problem with .Net and this agreement however is that it doesn’t cross over to the vertical components of their runtime, like Windows.Forms and ASP.NET. So I guess you can feel free to write free and open source code while using the Mono libraries which are not re-implementations of the Windows counterparts (like Gtk#)
You can read more about this on Miguel de Icaza’s blog here.
More of the beginning of the end for Java?
If you’re into DIY electronics, you’ve probably heard of SparkFun before. Their original kits and reseller products, such as the Olimex development boards are a great tool to get up and running fast.
It looks like SparkFun is now hopping on to the Open Source Hardware bandwagon, licensing under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 License. This is great news! Hopefully more of their products could use this upgrade, and allow people to create derivatives (like fixing the bad analog signal quality on the Logomatic v2).
For reference, their ClockIt kit is now open source. A number of projects come with GPLed microcontroller source code, but not an open source hardware license.
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