Hey everyone!
Well, as I’m sure quite a few of you have heard, I am officially a daddy! This is wonderful news, and I am incredibly excited! Well, I wanted to let everyone know what’s going on.
My fiancee and I have been going through some of the best, and some of the toughest times of our lives. While I will say, the birth of our daughter was, put simply, the most amazing day of our lives, we also have been experiencing some tough times. Our beautiful daughter has been admitted to the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) due to being unable to hold her food down well. This has been extremely hard on me, and I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult this is on Jocelyn.
Jocelyn and I have been spending nearly all of our time at her bedside, giving her love and affection. She is expected to make a full recovery and come home, however, they are unable to give us even the slightest idea as to when this will occur. She has been making improvements, but she has also had regressions. The doctors are unsure of what is wrong, and they’re pretty much hoping that it “fixes itself”. I’m really hoping that she improves rapidly, and is able to come home in the near future.
What does this mean for Jocelyn and I? Well, this has been making a serious dent in the amount of time I have been able to work, so this is going to affect us financially, big time. It also means that we will be travelling to and from the hospital every day, to see her. We will be dedicating almost all of our time to her.
What does this mean for everyone else? Unfortunately, over these coming days, I will not be able to dedicate nearly as much time to working on my projects (namely the Samsung Admire). I know you guys have been patiently waiting for the release of both ClockworkMod recovery, my custom kernel, and (most anticipated) CyanogenMod 7.2. I greatly, greatly appreciate your patience. I will be trying to get some time in there to work on the project. But, unfortunately, as of right now, I am tightly split in between having to work, and spending time with my daughter.
As I’ve said before, $10 buys one hour of dedicated time of working on the Samsung Admire. This offer is still on the table. In all honesty, I would rather work on the Admire than going to work. But unfortunately, as this is on a purely volunteer basis, it does not help pay the bills, nor does it help pay the expenses of travelling to and from the hospital, purchasing meals while at the hospital, etc. If you’d like to donate, I will definitely spend some time working on the project, and this should allow me to get things done much, much faster. And, as I’ve said before, no matter how much or how little you donate, every penny is greatly appreciated. And it’s appreciated even more now than ever. If you care to donate, you can do so at the bottom of this post.
Now for the update on the Samsung Admire: I know you guys want to know what’s going on in Admire-land. I have been making great progress with the device. I have ClockworkMod recovery almost 100% functional, however, I am stuck with one naggling bug related to Samsung’s RFS filesystem. As soon as this is fixed, it will be released. I have been consulting with a few people on a fix, and it should be in place soon, so that’s something for you to look forward to. I know some of you have asked: “Well why don’t you release it as it is?” Well, I would, but with the RFS bug, it’s completely unusable with any stock configuration. With there being no custom ROMs or anything out there, it would be (essentially) useless at this point. This also prevents NANDROID backups of your stock image from working correctly. From my findings with the Samsung Admire, if you do not have a stock NANDROID and you have issues, it puts you in quite a sticky situation. I had to restore partition data from another device, using a version of ODIN that was also for another device, get back into recovery, and manually untar all the data to the partitions after doing rm -rf /{system,data,cache}/*. It was about a 5 hour process to get the Admire functional again. But it will be coming soon, trust me. For any of you who plan on developing ROMs, you can get started, it’d be nice to have a couple ROMs (perhaps a cleaned up stock ROM, or a rooted/deodex ROM, maybe some themed ROMs, etc) available at release of CWM.
Now, for CM. I have been making nice progress. A lot of things are working. But there are still quite a few that are not working. Some things are partially working. Notable things that are not working: RIL (radio interface layer), Camera, GPS, light sensor, battery meter. Pretty much everything else is working. I can not provide an ETA as to when a public beta will go out. I’m sorry. Once again, the more time I can dedicate to it, the faster it will happen. That’s all I can say.
I know, also, a few of you have talked about CyanogenMod 9, wondering if I would try to make it happen on the Admire. Of course! Once the CM team works with the code, and betas start trickling out to various devices, I will definitely work with the code, and see what I can do. This is not a guarantee of whether it will be successful or not, but I will definitely be putting in the effort, and trying. I will say, though, that CyanogenMod 7.2 is the priority right now.
Some of you have also asked “How much should I donate?” — Donate as much as you’d like! I appreciate each and every penny, however, the more the merrier. The more you donate, the more time I can dedicate to working on the project. I can not provide an estimate in the amount of hours it will take to finish the project, simply because it is a rather large project, and there are a lot of variables that can affect speed of development. But, please, feel free to donate as much as you’d like. My family and I appreciate it.
Thank you so much for your support, everyone. You, all of you, are amazing. I’ll try to keep you updated!
