An exciting development for Haiku, we talk to developer Rob Judd about bringing more support for TV cards to Haiku. This was one of those areas that Haiku lacked and BeOS had. Many of us still have such cards (myself included). Rob talks about his experience with programming, and how the driver he's programming potentially covers 45% of all TV card hardware!

Q. How old are you, where do you reside, and what do you do for a living?

A. I'm 56 and live in Melbourne, Australia. Currently looking for work, like so many other people these days.

Q. Could you please tell us about your background in regards to BeOS and programming in general. I see you're registered at BeBits as a developer and had written quite a few applications and drivers for BeOS.

A. My first contact with BeOS was when a guy came into my business to buy a hard disk. It was 1993 and he was lugging a BeBox with him. I remember commenting that it looked great, and that it was a pity it only ran on special hardware.

My programming background? Wau, that's a long story. Started at college on teletypes attached to a DEC PDP-8. Then after a while I went to work as an engineer for Wang Computer, and in my spare time rewrote some of their utility programs for efficiency. My first personal computer was a Sirius I (also known as a Victor 9000 in the USA). It had MS-DOS 1.0a on it.

Most of the applications I've posted on BeBits are ports of other people's work. That was all done when I was still getting a feel for the system, it's a great way to learn the limitations.

Q. As a (former) community member, you were most likely aware of OpenBeOS/Haiku for some time. Given the many other advanced operating systems to develop for, what was it that brought you  back to developing for BeOS' reincarnation?

A. As a matter of fact I predicted the possibility that the BeOS would be rewritten, and found an early interest in Travis Geiselbrecht's NewOS kernel. Unfortunately he was working from Linux and upgraded all his compilers, and it was too difficult to keep working on that directly due to compatibility problems.

Meanwhile, the OpenBeos team formed and the NewOS kernel was chosen as the basis of a rewrite. I accessed their early repository in 2002 but could only check stuff out, not in. I also had some business ideas in progress so gave up programming for several years to pursue those. What brought me back was having the spare time to do some more work on it, there was never really any lack of interest.

I've tried, and worked on, probably a hundred different operating systems and BeOS is still the only one I actually *enjoy* using.

Q. What is your current development environment? I also recently read the difficulty you had setting up the build environment under BeOS ;)

A. There are two PC's here right now, a Duron 800 and an Athlon 64 3000+. Until a few days ago I tried to develop on the Duron but there were too many problems, so I'm shifting over to the other machine.

There were a few small issues early on, mainly to do with outdated information on the website. As of this week I'm developing on a native Haiku platform. This was only possible when I changed to the faster machine, I can't create an image or burn a CD on the Duron yet.

Q. Do you find Haiku's current developers quick to respond to questions, helpful? Is there anything that could be done to improve development on Haiku?

A. The Haiku development team have my undying admiration, they're very bright people. The main thing that can improve development is to have more people writing code. The project has been going a long time, and the thing that inspires me most is the dedication of that core of good developers. These are the same names I saw involved with BeOS in the 1990's.

Q. I recently read that you're developing an analog TV driver for Haiku. Could you please explain which chipset (s) this will cover and the potential hardware it supports?

A. The chipset I'm covering is the Philips SAA7130/33/34/35 series. This range of chips is used in about 45% of all TV devices worldwide, and the features range from basic analog TV with mono sound (saa7130) to DVB-T plus FM radio (saa7135).

Q. Why did you choose to write this driver, and will you be getting any support and or code from other projects?

A. As is usual, personal need drove me to it. :) I have two cards based on this series of chips, one in each machine. There is an abandoned project started by Oscar Lesta in Argentina. I tried his driver first, but couldn't get the tuner to work, and anyhow he never did finish the video part. He has offered me the code to work from once he cleans it up a bit, and is happy to contribute his work to the Haiku project.

Meanwhile I have already gathered tons of documentation and written the basic kernel interface, and have both of my cards being recognised when the driver is loaded. The funny part is that I don't even watch TV very often.

Q. Do you have any future projects planned for Haiku?

A. Future projects... how many would you like? In the past fortnight I've ported about a dozen packages including a Rexx interpreter, a CD burning program, a Pascal compiler, some media libraries... and there are some other surprises coming.

One that holds great personal interest is the software I wrote for the SDR-1000 amateur radio, I'd love to get that running under Haiku. It was written in Delphi, which is why I started off by porting Pascal.

I also have some ideas for decoding digital broadcast radio, like DRM and Eureka 147. And then there are a few half-finished drivers I started about 8 years ago, for the RME Digi96 card and some ancient Raylink wireless cards.

Q. Your nickname is 'haiqu' - coincidence? :)

A. Well, I was using that nickname while the project was still called OpenBeos, so yes. :)

Thanks for the interview, and best of luck with the driver!