www.Vanille.de – Bloghttps://www.vanille.de/2023-10-05T12:12:32ZToolboxBack to C++tag:vanille.de,2023-05-09:2023-back-to-c++2023-05-09T12:00:00ZI learned C++ in the late 1990s, back then with Microsoft's Visual Studio C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes. When I left Windows behind and embraced Linux and macOS, I concentrated on Objective-C, Vala, and (since 2020, being late to the game) Swift. Just recently I started getting into MCU programming (notably the ESP32-series). As I'm (still) not very fond of C, I was pleasantly surprised to see that C++ was supported well. I didn't look at C++ for almost two decades, but I like what the committee did since 2014. Type inference, move semantics, coroutines, ranges, and all that are pretty helpful and can help secure the usability of C++ in an almost saturated world of programming languages. Naturally I started with abstractions, this time for FreeRTOS "objects". FreeRTOS is a simple, yet pretty capable operating system and it provides most of what you will need to write concurrent programs. Although – after stumbling about the most impressive Swift for Arduino – I had wished I could write in Swift, C++ is really fine these days. I have a nice development environment with a capable language now. Stay tuned for a more detailed progress report of what I'm actually building.MickeyActivating an Apple Watch eSIM w/ O2tag:vanille.de,2022-10-06:activating-apple-watch-esim-with-o22022-10-06T12:00:00ZWhen activating an Apple Watch eSIM, the process is usually pretty straightforward. Most providers are using a QR code that you can scan during setup – this transfers the eSIM data and off you go. Not with O2 though – at least here in Germany; they open a builtin web browser and require you to log into your account to order the eSIM from within your account. So I tried this. During eSIM setup in the O2 login form, you can choose between login via E-Mail-Address or phone number. If you try the E-Mail-Address you get an error message w/ "Please register with the O2 App". If you use the phone number here, you'll get a prompt "This device's phone number does not belong to your account. Please use a different account". And now you're stuck. So after investigating several ways (the O2 support not being helpful at all…), I found the culprit: When you have multiple tarrifs in your account, the automated process does not scan all your phone numbers, but only takes the first one, the "main phone number". What you now have to do is to login (best via web portal) and change the main phone number to the one you want to order an eSIM for (you can change it back again after the process). Once you did that, you can finally use that phone number to login during the eSIM setup process and ordering should work.MickeySPM-ifying YapDatabasetag:vanille.de,2020-10-18:2020-spmifying-yapdatabase2020-10-18T12:00:00ZConverting an existing Objective-C/Swift framework to Swift Package Manager I'm a big fan of the database library YapDatabase, which is a collection/key/value store for macOS, iOS, tvOS & watchOS. It comes with many high level features and is built atop sqlite. In the last 5 years, I have used this successfully for many of my projects. It is written in Objective-C and comes with a bunch of Swift files for more Swifty use. Since I recently announced to go all-in with Swift, I want to convert all my dependencies to the Swift Package Management system. I have never been a fan of CocoaPods or Carthage as I found them too invasive. As this point of time though, YapDatabase is not Swift Package Manager (SPM) compatible and all approaches to do this using the current source layout did fail. So I had a fresh look at it and decided to do it slightly differently: If you don't have to work with the constraints of an existing tree layout, the process is relatively straightforward. Read on to find out what I did. Prerequisites Use swift package init to create a package named YapDatabase. Edit Package.swift to make the package create two libraries with associated targets ObjCYapDatabase is going to hold the Objective-C part in Sources/ObjCYapDatabase, SwiftYapDatabase is going to hold the Swift parts in Sources/SwiftYapDatabase. I couldn't name the Objective-C library simply YapDatabase, since this would have required to rename the (then umbrella) header file YapDatabase.h, which I didn't want to. Swift vs. Objective-C At the moment, SPM is not capable of handling mixed language targets, i.e., you either have only Swift files or no Swift files at all in your target – therefore I split the repository accordingly and moved Swift files below Sources/SwiftYapDatabase. Source and Header file locations SPM is pretty rigid when it comes to the location of source and header files. This is the reason why I unfortunately could not deliver this work on top of the original source repository. Fortunately though, the source repository was very well structured. To layout the files in a way that makes SPM happy, I Created two header file directory, include for public headers, privateInclude for private headers. Moved all header files from Internal directories and those with private in their name to the privateInclude directory. Moved the remaining header files to the public include directory. Swift The aforementioned steps were enough to make SPM compile the ObjCYapDatabase. To make the Swift part compile, I had to Edit all Swift files to import ObjCYapDatabase instead of Foundation via sed -i -e s,Foundation,ObjCYapDatabase,g *.swift. This made the SwiftYapDatabase compile. What's Next There are some parts missing: I didn't include the example programs, the tests, and the Xcode project. I don't know Robbie Hanson's (creator of YapDatabase) plans. As it stands, this shuffling around was merely a proof-of-concept to find out whether such an approach is sufficient to SPM-ify YapDatabase or whether to there are more problems to consider. I will incorporate this in one of my projects to put it through a real world test. I have published the repository as mickeyl/SwiftYapDatabase and will report this work via the YapDatabase issue tracker. Let's see what happens next.MickeyProgramming Languagestag:vanille.de,2020-10-03:2020-programming-languages2020-10-03T12:00:00ZWhile I never got much into natural languages (beyond my native tounge, a halfway solid english, and some bits and pieces of french), I have always been fascinated by (some) programming languages – I even wrote books about some of them. I (literally) grew up with BASIC and 6502/6510 ASSEMBLER – on the VC20 and the C64. Later on, learned to hate C and love 680x0 ASSEMBLER – on the AMIGA. During the 90s, I enjoyed PASCAL and MODULA II, and then found a preliminary home in Python. The 2000s were largely affected by C++ (which I always found much more interesting than JAVA) until I got acquainted with Objective-C – which later rised to the 2nd place in my top list – shared with Vala, which I still have a sweet spot for, since it liberated me from having to use C. As I grew older (and suddenly realized that my lifetime is actually limited, imagine my surprise…), I learned to embrace higher abstractions and being able to formulate algorithms clear and concise. While Python allowed me to do that, its reliance on runtime errors as opposed to compile-time always bugged me. During the 2010s, I settled on using Python on the server, and Objective-C on the client – still dreaming about a language I could use for both. Fast-forward to 2020. I have been a vocal critic of Apple's new language, Swift, since its debut – for reasons which I'm not going to repeat. Three months have passed since I started learning Swift and I think it's time for a first preliminary report. TLDR: I like it – a lot more than I have ever thought – and will from now on try to use it pretty much everywhere. Before moving on with some details, let me also confess that I'm pretty glad having waited for so long. Judging from the outside, the road to Swift 5 was a very rocky ride. Were I to begin with an earlier version, I might have given up or wasted many hours following a language that was such a moving target – changing every year in more ways than I would have been willing to participate. Syntax, Semantics, and Idioms Swift is very expressive and rich in syntax, semantics, and idioms – and it has a tough learning curve. As someone who has written Objective-C for almost a decade now, let me tell you that whoever told you that Swift is more accessible than Objective-C is a downright lier. Objective-C is a very simple language, as it adds one (yes, just one) construct (and some decorators) on top of another simple language – C. Once I was beyond my reluctance to look into it, I finally see the beauty. Swift has almost everything I have ever wanted in a programming language. Among many other features, it has type safety, generics, multiple inheritance (in the disguise of protocols with default implementation), closures, type inference, namespaces (ok, not first class, but think enums without cases), rich enums, … On top of that it has a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop), which can't be praised enough – it is the #1 missing feature in most compiled languages – and syntax for building DSLs (Domain Specific Languages). And: It is Open Source – which is the #1 feature that has always irritated me with Objective-C. Interoperability I hate repeating myself. I love generic solutions. Over the last decade, I created a number of reusable frameworks that powered all the apps I wrote. It has accumulated quite a bit of stuff, as you can see here (generated using David A Wheeler's SLOCCount): SLOC Directory SLOC-by-Language (Sorted) 2110719 LTSupportCore objc=2063905,ansic=31423,java=5914,cs=3822,cpp=2772, python=2397,sh=486 106939 LTSupportDB objc=106108,sh=831 35669 LTSupportTracking objc=17443,ansic=12219,cpp=4922,java=902,sh=128, python=55 30331 LTSupportUI objc=30053,sh=278 27116 LTSupportDRM objc=27116 9499 LTSupportBluetooth objc=9365,python=134 6143 LTSupportAutomotive objc=6143 5141 LTSupportAudio objc=5141 4510 LTSupportVideo objc=4510 3324 LTSupportCommonControls objc=3324 679 LTSupportDBUI objc=679 340 LTSupportMidi objc=340 271 LTSupportDiagnostics objc=271 One of the things contributing to scare me before switching to Swift was that I may had to rewrite all that again. But it ain't necessarily so. Calling Objective-C from Swift Being probably the company that has the largest Objective-C codebase in the world, Apple worked hard on interoperability. Calling Objective-C from Swift is a breeze – they'll even convert method names for you. Not much to complain here. Almost every Objective-C construct is visible to Swift. Calling Swift from Objective-C Calling Swift from Objective-C is a tad bit harder. Apart from having to including (generated) extra headers, the whole plane of types with value semantics is more or less invisible to Objective-C. There are ways to bridge (AnyObject), but it's cumbersome and sometimes very for generic code (__SwiftValue__). Beyond Apple In a surprising move, Apple released Swift as an open source project. And although the struggle of combining a product oriented software release cycle with a community oriented evolution process is sometimes obvious (you can follow the tension if you read some of the evolution threads on the Swift forums), they manage it quite well. What catched my attention in particular was the invention of Server-side Swift and the Swift Package Manager, since these two projects have the power to replace my use of Python forever. Foreign Platforms My new set of swift-frameworks will be open source and also support UNIX-like platforms (to a certain degree, since Apple still has their crown jewels like UIKit and AppKit closed), hence finally I can use my reusable solutions both on the client and the server. Unfortunately Google backed somewhat out of using Swift. For quite some time it looked like they would embrace it as another first-class language for their forthcoming Android successor. This would have been the icing on the cake, but let's see – Kotlin is pretty similar Swift, but not it. Conclusion I'm now familiar enough with Swift that I made the decision to go all-in, helping to improve the server-side ecosystem as I go. Speaking about which – I still miss a bunch of features, in particular first-class coroutines for asynchronous algorithms, a proper database abstraction, and a cross-platform logging solution. But what I enjoy the most is to be a part of a vibrant (language) community again. People are way more excited when it comes to Swift as they ever were with Objective-C. And this is great!MickeyFeeling like Don Quixotetag:vanille.de,2020-06-25:feeling-like-quixote2020-06-25T12:00:00ZFor some years now, I have been feeling like Don Quixote fighting against windmills. This is a multidimensional feeling that has its roots in both personal and professional circumstances. With regards to personal issues, I won't go into details as I want to keep this blog free from politics, society, and economics. With regards to professional circumstances, something that bugs me a lot is that I seem to engage in fighting wars that can't be won. Free software lost a lot of wars, most notably though in the mobile sector. As I have complained more than once before, over the last decade, the phone and tablet world has become much less free. Even big companies struggle these days and it looks like we're stuck with a duopoly for a long long time. Today though I want to complain about one of these two players, namely the Apple development platforms. By 2013, software development for Apple devices was a lot of fun. We had a great mature language, nice frameworks, and a big market to try out all kinds of ideas and ways to make a living. For some reason though this changed, when Apple introduced the Swift programming language. It split the developer world and alienated a lot of the veterans. The claims of better readability, performance, and what not could not be achieved. In fact, I (and a lot of people not wearing rose-colored glasses agree with me) think, what has been proposed as a way to flatten the learning curve is actually harder to learn and less readable. For the major part of the last years I ignored everything Swift, hoping that for the remainder of my professional career (lets say 20 more years, if all goes well) Objective-C would be at least well enough supported that I could continue writing programs -- even without a vibrant open source community (since most folks have switched to Swift immediately and despite popular belief mix and match is not a thing) and proper API docs. Last year though the first swift-only frameworks and a whole new approach for semi-declarative UIs appeared. SwiftUI -- they even named it like the programming language sigh. This year they are "moving forward" by deprecating more Objective-C frameworks and introducing SwiftUI as the one and only way in some places. It's now clear to me: It's either I leave the platform or I stop trying to achieve perfection with a certain -- restricted -- set of tools but rather walking their rocky road. And I must confess, I still love the Apple platform so much that I give up fighting aginst the windmills and start from scratch. Learning SwiftUI. Learning Swift. On a slightly related note: For a new contract, I have to revisit the successful build system I co-founded 20 years ago: OpenEmbedded. Though being quite rusty (left the project 11 years ago), I'm looking forward to finding out what the community made out of it. Stay safe and healthy.MickeyWelcome, 2020tag:vanille.de,2020-02-10:welcome-20202020-02-10T12:00:00ZHere's the new decade. 2019 went by as an important year where I regained some of my health, discipline, and motivation. Next to the inevitable iOS development, the most important milestones were the release of the 2nd edition of my Vala book and my first music album after more than two decades of inactiveness. I'm looking forward to this decade. The best is yet to come.MickeyFabrique Noir – Space Traveltag:vanille.de,2019-07-22:fabrique-noir-space-travel2019-07-22T12:00:00ZI'm enjoying creating music since 1981. First on analogue synthesizers (SIEL OPERA 6) and drum machines (ROLAND TR-505), later on with digital synths and workstations (KORG M1, KORG 01/Wfd). From 1986 to 1989 I created my music mainly on the COMMODORE AMIGA. The PC platform almost killed my motivation. Switching from hardware sequencers to a software sequencer was tough for me, later on an abundance of possibilities (I earned money and bought too many devices) somewhat paralyzed me. The birth of my daughter Lara-Marie in 2011 did add a share to my "uncreative pause". Still, I never stopped enjoying (making) music, in the meantime with Pianos, Guitars, and Ukuleles. Over three decades worth of melody and text fragments have continued to haunt me again and again ("use us, finish us, ..."). When I had health issues early this year (everything well now), I finally vowed to my self to start releasing music again. Four months later the first result of these endeavours can be seen. Originally it should've been a completely different thing, but sometimes creative processes take their own turns. My first album after three decades of mostly idling is called "Space Travel", inspired by the legendary Apollo 11 mission from 1969. It is an electronic album and available here: Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Bandcamp, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, Youtube Music, iHeartRadio. As for the aforementioned melody and text fragments… apart from one tiny sequence, there is only new material on this album. I wanted to check whether I still have the mojo before going back in time. A bit of more info with regards to the tracks is here.MickeyHealthtag:vanille.de,2019-05-17:health2019-05-17T12:00:00ZWhen I started this blog in 1999, it contained mostly personal stuff. Blogs were a new thing, Facebook and Twitter were five respectively seven years away, and it felt appropriate to me. Later on, I switched to english and added more about my professional projects – hence the focus moved to rather technical posts. Personal matters felt more appropriate on Facebook. In an attempt to gain back control about my content, I recently moved the blog from Wordpress to Lektor. The next step for me is reintroducing personal matters. Not many, but now and then. I won't bother with adding tags or so, so hopefully my dear readers won't mind stumbling over non-technical content here and there. This is the first personal matter entry. I used to have fairly good health. Apart from being a slight bit overweight for the most part of my life and the obligatory annual cold I never had any serious issues. I went for diet once and then, but the damn yoyo effect always cought me. My height is 165cm and in the last 18 years I went from 76kg (which was okish) to 96kg (which is way too much). Just recently I started to feel sick. I was tired more often and had a little base nervousness that had no obvious reasons. From time to time I had pressure on my ears which turned slowly into a ringing. On the 23th of March this year, I went to bed after a tabletennis match at midnight, being almost shaky. I woke up 5 hours later and felt miserable – very nervous and with an uncomfortable level of ear pressure. I drove to the emergency hospitalization and they found out that my blood pressure and my level of blood glucose were much too high. They gave me 5mg of an antihypertensive drug and released me some hours later. My family doctor dropped the truth bomb: I have the blood values of a 60 year old. I'm weighing way too much and need to start excercising as well as change my nutrition. As an interesting coincidence, I'm now at the same age (47) my father died. I was eleven years old when that happens – and now I have a little daughter and a wife who both need me. I NEED TO TAKE BETTER CARE OF MY HEALTH. This time I'm doing it for real. Since 23th of March, I lost 10kg by eating better and being more active. Here's what I did in detail: No more drinks that contain sugar or fruit sugar. There goes my beloved orange juice. Breakfast on weekdays is a natural yoghurt adding some fresh fruits. Breakfast on weekend is bread with salmon or lean cold meat. I swapped most of the usual meat with lentils, peas, and beans. I'm down to eating meat only on two days per week. I excercise between 40 and 60 minutes a day. Every day. EVERY DAY. No excuses. Usually I'm fast walking 4-6km or swimming one kilometer. Add the occasional weight lifting with dumb-bells. Besides loosing the 10kg, the net effect is I'm feeling way better. My blood values are back to normal, I'm less tired, have more energy and can concentrate better. I'm going to continue with this routine until I'm back at 76kg and then try to develop a balance so that mid-term my weight keeps being stable. So: All is good. I'm more often hungry than before, but I learned to live with it, almost embracing it, before the next meal is due. This is what I wanted to share with you. Look after your health, don't neglect it.MickeyConverting Wordpress Posts To Lektortag:vanille.de,2019-02-19:converting-wordpress-blog-posts-to-lektor2019-02-19T12:00:00ZAs promised in the previous installment of this column, I have now imported all my old blog posts from Wordpress. In case you have a similar requirement, here's how I did it: 1. Export your posts from Wordpress. Login to your Wordpress administration interface and then click on Tools → Export Data. Select the content you want to export (blog posts in my case) and you will download an XML file with all your content. Here's a fragment for a single post without comments: <item> <title>A New Blog</title> <link>https://archive.vanille.de/a-new-blog/</link> <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2006 02:31:04 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator><![CDATA[mickey]]></dc:creator> <guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.vanille-media.de/site/?p=5</guid> <description></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Finally, in coincidence with my new site <a title="VanilleMedia" href="http://www.vanille-media.de">VanilleMedia</a>, I started a new blog. It's not that I was unsatisfied with my last handcoded one, but these days it looks like there is a tendency to use all those nice planet sites -- i.e. <a title="planet.linuxtogo.org" href="http://planet.linuxtogo.org">planet.linuxtogo.org</a> or <a title="planet.maemo.org" href="http://planet.maemo.org">planet.maemo.org</a> -- syndicating blogs from different places, which needs a standardized XML format. I really didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, so after evaluating a lot of content management systems and blog packages, I settled on using wordpress for the complete site. This also marks the start of me blogging in english -- I guess blogging in german wouldn't be all that useful for most of those planet sites.]]></content:encoded> <excerpt:encoded><![CDATA[]]></excerpt:encoded> <wp:post_id>95</wp:post_id> <wp:post_date><![CDATA[2006-06-14 04:31:04]]></wp:post_date> <wp:post_date_gmt><![CDATA[2006-06-14 02:31:04]]></wp:post_date_gmt> <wp:comment_status><![CDATA[open]]></wp:comment_status> <wp:ping_status><![CDATA[open]]></wp:ping_status> <wp:post_name><![CDATA[a-new-blog]]></wp:post_name> <wp:status><![CDATA[publish]]></wp:status> <wp:post_parent>0</wp:post_parent> <wp:menu_order>0</wp:menu_order> <wp:post_type><![CDATA[post]]></wp:post_type> <wp:post_password><![CDATA[]]></wp:post_password> <wp:is_sticky>0</wp:is_sticky> <category domain="category" nicename="general"><![CDATA[general]]></category> </item> 2. Convert the XML file into individual markdown files. For this step, there are a number of tools. I settled on pelican-import, which is a part of the Pelican static site generator. Call it like that: pelican-import -m markdown --wpfile -o posts vanille-archive.xml and it will convert all your blog posts into individual files like a-new-blog.md: Title: A New Blog Date: 2006-06-14 04:31 Author: mickey Category: general Slug: a-new-blog Status: published Finally, in coincidence with my new site [VanilleMedia](http://www.vanille-media.de "VanilleMedia"), I started a new blog. It's not that I was unsatisfied with my last handcoded one, but these days it looks like there is a tendency to use all those nice planet sites -- i.e. [planet.linuxtogo.org](http://planet.linuxtogo.org "planet.linuxtogo.org") or [planet.maemo.org](http://planet.maemo.org "planet.maemo.org") -- syndicating blogs from different places, which needs a standardized XML format. I really didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, so after evaluating a lot of content management systems and blog packages, I settled on using wordpress for the complete site. This also marks the start of me blogging in english -- I guess blogging in german wouldn't be all that useful for most of those planet sites. Note that this process makes you lose the comments from your readers. These comments are super-important for me, so I will soon start working on enhancing pelican-import to render the comments (into a seperate markdown file) as well. 3. Adjust the markdown files to make them work with Lektor. Lektor expects a slightly different format for the frontmatter, so I wrote a quick'n'dirty python script to adjust the necessary things. Here's the script pelican2lektor.py: import os postnames = os.listdir() for postname in postnames: print( f"Converting {postname}...") lektordirname = os.path.join( "lektor", postname ) lektorfilename = os.path.join( "lektor", postname, "contents.lr" ) os.makedirs( lektordirname, exist_ok=True ) postlines = open( postname ).readlines() header = postlines[:6] meta = dict() for line in header: stripped = line.strip() key, value = stripped.split(": ", 1) key = key.lower() meta[key] = value date = meta["date"].split()[0] post = """title: %s --- author: %s --- pub_date: %s --- body: %s """ post = post % ( meta["title"], meta["author"], date, "".join( postlines[6:] ) ) with open( lektorfilename, "w" ) as outfile: outfile.write( post ) Running this creates a lektor directory with the appropriate subdirectories – one for every blog post – and the corresponding contents.lr files: title: A New Blog --- author: mickey --- pub_date: 2006-06-14 --- body: Finally, in coincidence with my new site [VanilleMedia](http://www.vanille-media.de "VanilleMedia"), I started a new blog. It's not that I was unsatisfied with my last handcoded one, but these days it looks like there is a tendency to use all those nice planet sites -- i.e. [planet.linuxtogo.org](http://planet.linuxtogo.org "planet.linuxtogo.org") or [planet.maemo.org](http://planet.maemo.org "planet.maemo.org") -- syndicating blogs from different places, which needs a standardized XML format. I really didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, so after evaluating a lot of content management systems and blog packages, I settled on using wordpress for the complete site. This also marks the start of me blogging in english -- I guess blogging in german wouldn't be all that useful for most of those planet sites. As long as there are still some content errors (missing comments, broken links, missing images, bogus format statements, etc.) left – which I will hopefully fix over the next days – I'm going to leave the archive @ archive.vanille.de intact.MickeyFrom Wordpress To Lektortag:vanille.de,2019-01-21:from-wordpress-to-lektor2019-01-21T12:00:00ZEvery five to six years I'm revamping my website. This is now the 4th major incarnation. I created my first website somewhere in the 1990s – back then handcoded with HTML. I vaguely remember that it looked better than many others due my use of Bitstream's TrueDoc Technology. In 1999, I started my blog. It was a custom development based on the web framework Spyce, something like PHP using Python. To create a new article, I just copied a new file to a dedicated directory and it appeared after reloading the page. Some years later facilities like HTML-based live editing and a proper management interface teased me into migrating the site to Wordpress. Apart from adding content and switching themes once and then, nothing groundbreaking happened though. The longer I had used Wordpress the more I felt uneasy about the "lack of control". I missed maintaining my site with a revision control system. I also fell in love with Markdown as a more agnostic and future-proof way to format articles. And – last but not least – to be honest, I feel that a site that only changes about once a month does not need to be dynamically generated. So I made the decision to get rid of Wordpress and come back to something way more simple. In the meantime, a lot of static site generator (SSG) projects have appeared and so I had a wealth of projects to choose from. Due to my unstoppable love for Python, I chose Lektor. Although automatic export and import facilities are available, I decided to more or less rewrite the site, thus I did not integrate the older articles yet. I really plan to do this though. Until then you can get to the old site via archive.vanille.de.MickeyThe state of things in 2019tag:vanille.de,2019-01-04:the-state-of-things-in-20192019-01-04T12:00:00ZAnd another year has passed – pretty quickly, if you ask me. Last year was the chance to close a bunch of construction sites and start new ones. Next to releasing two iOS apps that I have been working on for a while, I finally got the time to publish another book. I'm currently working on a round of updates to my existing apps in the iOS AppStore, namely Surveillance Pro, OBD2 Expert, and Wellenreiter. With regard to closed source platforms, I'm pretty excited about what's likely to happen this year. In autumn, Apple will release a way to compile iOS apps to run on macOS – something, I have been waiting for since the introduction of the original iPad in 2010. While some folks are fearing doomsday for the macOS platform, I welcome this choice mainly for three reasons: Compared to AppKit, UIKit is a much more modern and convenient approach on a UI toolkit. As someone spoiled by writing apps with UIKit, I could never motivate myself to learn AppKit, since in many areas it feels like "going back" a bunch of steps. Having an app that feels slightly(!) out-of-the-place sounds better to me than having no app at all. I, for one, am willing to make the necessary changes to have my app look and feel good to a macOS user. That said, I hope Apple will take the chance to enhance UIKit where it is lacking to address the needs of "desktop" class computing. I believe macOS as a platform makes sense for about every 2nd app of mine. I'm hoping for widening the target audience with only a minimum of necessary code adaptation. Time permitting, I also hope to continue working on my Retro Computing project "Retroplayer" this year. With regard to open source hard- and software platforms, I'm still waiting for a couple of incarnations of Godot, i.e. Vala 1.0, the Neo900, or another open platform I can port the freesmartphone.org special interest middleware to. Let's see what purism and Golden Delicious Computing are releasing this year. Happy new year!MickeyPet Project Releasestag:vanille.de,2018-06-23:pet-project-releases2018-06-23T12:00:00ZOnce and then I try to sneak work on my pet projects into my daily routine. Today I want to tell you about two projects that I have released this month: SongBook Pro for iOS, and Introduction to Vala Programming. SongBook Pro for iOS SongBook Pro is a complete rewrite of my iOS songbook app for guitar and ukulele players. It's a lean-and-mean songbook app that concentrates on delivering great typography and the best workflow for people playing music. The predecessor of this app ("ChordPro Songbook") has been in the AppStore since 2011, but had to be removed in 2014 when we shut down the company ("Late App-Developers") I had with one of my friends. It was unavailable since then and I dreamed for a long time to publish this again. If you're interested and want to check whether this is for you, just download the trial version for free, or check out an introduction video. Introduction to Vala Introduction to Vala is a book about the programming language Vala. I discovered Vala in 2007, fell in love with it, used it in some projects (e.g. the special-interest middleware freesmartphone.org (FSO)), and started contributing to it. Some months later I wanted to help Vala gaining publicity by writing a book. Due to a number of unforeseen circumstances, this took a bit longer than expected… almost 10 years now, but finally it's done! For this book (which is actually my 3rd one), I used the publishing site Leanpub.com. If you're interested, hop over to the book's site @ leanpub and take a look. Printed copies are available through Amazon.MickeyComing back from FOSDEM 2018tag:vanille.de,2018-02-04:coming-back-from-fosdem-20182018-02-04T12:00:00ZSalut! I usually write a FOSDEM retrospective every year, although, as you might have (not) seen, last year was different. While I'm sure 2017's FOSDEM was a nice weekend I almost can't remember anymore. I had a severe cold (already when coming there, usually I only have a cold when coming home…) and I'm afraid I was only 50% physically present – hence there was no blog post. Anyways, moving on to FOSDEM 2018. This year was one of the better ones. Typically I only select a handful of presentations from the schedule, since neither the presentations nor the stands are my main focus. For me, it's about the people I have the chance to meet. Not only those who I already know, but also those who I don't know (yet). This year it occurred to me (again) what a nice crowd the free software people is. I mean it. Gentle, caring, intelligent, with manners, sometimes revolting, sometimes crazy, but generally "best of the breed". An ornament for humanity. I had great discussions, met many old friends, and I'm coming back not with a cold, but some fresh ideas instead. TLDR: I really enjoyed this weekend. Hats off to the organizers and volunteers who make this extraordinary event possible every year!MickeyOpenMoko: 10 Years After (Mickey’s Story)tag:vanille.de,2017-07-24:openmoko-10-years-after-mickeys-story2017-07-24T12:00:00ZFor the 10th anniversary since the legendary OpenMoko announcement at the „Open Source in Mobile“ (7th of November 2006 in Amsterdam), I’ve been meaning to write an anthology or – as Paul Fertser suggested on #openmoko-cdevel – an obituary. I’ve been thinking about objectively describing the motivation, the momentum, how it all began and – sadly – ended. I did even plan to include interviews with Sean, Harald, Werner, and some of the other veterans. But as with oh so many projects of (too) wide scope this would probably never be completed. As November 2016 passed without any progress, I decided to do something different instead. Something way more limited in scope, but something I can actually finish. My subjective view of the project, my participation, and what I think is left behind: My story, as OpenMoko employee #2. On top of that you will see a bunch of previously unreleased photos (bear with me, I'm not a good photographer and the camera sucked as well). Prehistoric I've always been a programmer. Well... not always, but for a quite some time. I got into computer science when my dad brought a Commodore PET from work home for some days. That was around 1980/1981, with me being 8 years old and massively impressed by the green text scrolling down on a black monitor, depending on what you typed on the keyboard. He showed me how to do small programs in BASIC. It was cool. Unfortunately he had to bring it back after a few weeks, but I was already infected and begged for an own computer. In 1982 – a few months before his sudden and completely unexpected death – he bought me a Commodore 64, which opened up a whole world for me. I learned to program in BASIC, SYSed, POKEed and PEEKed my way through the hardware registers, and had way more fun than with any other toy I possessed. Naturally, not all of that was programming. The Commodore 64 was an excellent gaming machine, in particular due to the massive amount of cough "free" games available. The first game I actually bought was The Hobbit), a text adventure with the occasional graphic here and there. Rendering an image back then took minutes, and you could watch the computer painting line by line, and sometimes pixel by pixel. But I was patient. I was young and time seemed basically unlimited. Fast forward to 1985 – when the Commodore 64 suddenly seemed somewhat obsolete at the time the AMIGA was announced. This machine looked so much more powerful that it found its way into my dreams... until that one great day in 1986 when my mother surprised me with lots of white boxes, labelled Commodore AMIGA, in the hallway. Apart from the natural amount of gaming (which made even more fun on the AMIGA), I learned Motorola 68K assembler and became part of the early demo scene – here's more about my AMIGA history, if you're interested. Back in those days, it was completely normal that a demo shuts down the operating system (OS) and takes over the whole hardware. Usually you had to reboot after quitting the demo. I did some early experiments with working on my own OS. Alas, my knowledge back then was not sufficient enough to really make one, though I quite liked the idea of being able to hack every part of a system. This was one thing I started missing when I migrated to a shock, horror DOS/WINDOWS machine in the early 90s. Found my way doing C++, MS Foundation Classes, Win32-API, and the lot, but it never felt the same as in the good 'ole days of the AMIGA. (A bit of that came back when a few years later I installed Linux a PC and learned a lot of different UNIX flavors as part of my computer science studies.) After completing my diploma thesis, I was asked by a professor (Prof. Drobnik at the institute of telematics, whom I deeply admire and thank for mentoring me!) whether I had interest in pursuing an academic career. I felt my computer science knowledge wasn't complete enough for the "world outside" yet, hence I agreed to work on a Ph.D. in his department. Since by then I had quite a bit of Linux-experience, one of my first tasks was to help a colleague flashing Linux on his COMPAQ IPAQ. His work involved routing algorithms and handover strategies, so they had a test WiFi network with a bunch of laptops and PDAs equiped with 802.11b PCMCIA cards. Since he ran into lots of problems with the locked down Windows Mobile on the IPAQ, he wanted to give Linux a try. So I learned about Familiar Linux, got into GPE and Opie, became maintainer of Opie, helped with OpenZaurus (which was the an open source distribution for the soon-to-appear-on-the-stage SHARP ZAURUS), co-founded OpenEmbedded, and eventually received my Ph.D. for µMiddle, a component-based adaptive middleware for ad-hoc networks. The birth of a project Some months before my graduation though, it was mid 2006, I was working on OpenEZX, an alternative Linux distribution for Motorola's EZX series of Linux-phones. Smartphones had just began to render PDAs obsolete and were the new hot thing. I was adding EZX support to OpenEmbedded and Opie, when Linux-hacker Harald 'LaF0rge' Welte (who worked on OpenEZX kernel drivers) asked me one day whether I wanted to work on a new Linux-based Smartphone project with a completely open distribution right from the start – as opposed to OpenEZX which was based on a lot of reverse engineering due to the closed nature of that hardware platform (Motorola promised a proper EZX SDK for almost a decade, but never delievered...). The mastermind behind the project was Sean Moss-Pultz, an american living in Taiwan, working as a product designer for First International Computer (FIC). Naturally I was excited and started to work on it. I was supposed to be responsible for the Linux distribution build system aspect (e.g. OpenEmbedded integration) and some UI tasks, in particular to create something the chinese engineers could use to base their applications on. It was already decided that we should base the display subsystem on X11 and the UI on GTK+. While I wasn't lucky with that decision, at this point of time I was not strong enough to question and discuss this. In hindsight I view this as my earliest (unfortunately not the last one though) mistake in the project. While doing the first work on some GOBJECTs, Sean Moss-Pultz came over to Germany and we met for one week to design the basic human interface guidelines & streamlining his interface mockups. We decided that we want to distinguish two basic types of applications, so-called "finger apps" and "stylus apps". Here are some of the results of this phase. Note that these have been designed before the actual dimensions of the device (hence display) were finalized. Working on HIGs without being able to create actual paper prototypes (to check finger distances and gesture dimensions) must have been my 2nd mistake. While (in my opinion) these mockups are looking beautiful – even by today's standards – from the viewpoint of a developer who needs to implement these, they're just crazy. Non-rectangular widgets, semi-transparency, shadows, gradients, etc. everywhere. Have fun doing this with GTK+ 2.6 in 2006. I'm not sure it's even possible today with version 4 – let alone the necessary hardware requirements for blending and compositing. Alas, I tried my best to come up with an UI framework which came close to the renderings to give our Shanghai Team (which were supposed to create the actual applications) the necessary tools. I even created a bunch of demo applications. Here's a guitar toolkit application I programmed using an arm development board: Speaking about development boards... as I've mentioned before, a lot of the early UI concepts and prototyping code was done while the final device specifics and capabilities (and the housing!) were still unknown. This lead to a series of expectations which were nowhere to be met by the actual hardware. Back then my idea of the ideal software stack for Openmoko looked like that: If you're curious about the code for the Openmoko Application Framework libraries, feel free to browse the Openmoko SVN. Here is the first successful run of kdrive and matchbox on the 3rd development hardware revision of the Neo1973. The picture was taken on the 4th of November 2006 on my IKEA desk. Next to the PCB you are seeing the glimpse of a SHARP ZAURUS Stylus ;-) The Announcement In November 2006, the OpenMoko Core Team (which at that time consisted of Sean Moss-Pultz, Harald Welte, and me) flew to Amsterdam where Sean made the legendary announcement of the Neo1973 as "mystery guest speaker" on the "Open Source in Mobile" conference. More details about that (including the slides of the presentation) can be found at the linuxdevices article "Cheap, hackable Linux smartphone due soon". After the announcement we received a lot of publicity. The mailing lists were flooding with many great ideas (many of those still waiting to be realized). That one small company had the balls to create something hackable from the start against the ongoing trend of locking down mobile embedded devices was very well received. Many interesting leads were made, Universities and labs contacted us, Hardware vendors approached us, etc. I remember one great quote I picked up from Harald during a presentation that pretty much summed up our approach: WARRANTY VOID WHEN NOT OPENED – Harald Welte However, we had yet to deliver and when the first hardware prototypes approached me, I was devastated. Things didn't look good. The device was tiny, much slower than I had expected (the PXA270 in the MOTOROLA EZX series ran circles around our S3C2410), the resistive touchscreen needed too much pressure, and the display was framed by a massive bezel: We were already struggling on many software layers (in particular to come anywhere near 80% of the mockups with GTK+), but the hardware constraints killed most of our early HIG ideas. At this point, we brought the London-based OpenedHand (later being acquired by Intel) on board to work on the launcher and PIM applications. They already had the Matchbox window manager and a set of applications based around an embedded port of the Evolution Data Server running on arm and were quite experienced with GTK+. They came up with a massively reduced version of our mockups, but at least something that worked on the Neo1973. To handle various low-level device aspects (buttons, powermanagement), I wrote neod. Phase 0 One of the OpenMoko special features was the so-called phase 0, in which we sent out a dozen of Neo1973 pre-versions (for free, without any obligations) to well-known people with a history in open source. The idea was to get some early feedback, perhaps even some contributions, and have those people spread the news about it, hence act as some kind of multiplicator. On 14th of February 2007, the OpenMoko.org website went live, with it all our source code and the tools necessary to build the current flash images. Also the mailing lists and IRC channels were populated. For most of its lifetime, OpenMoko was really run much more like an Open Source project (with all implications, good and bad) rather than like a proprietary corporate project. On 25th of February 2007, we shipped the Phase 0 developer devices – and even though we didn't get as much feedback as we would have liked, we felt it was a good practice to do this. The phase 0 developer devices shipped with Openmoko 2007.1, a pretty bare-bones Linux distribution based on an OpenEmbedded matchbox+kdrive image with the Openmoko GTK+ theme and some rudimentary applications. Neo1973 is shipping We originally planned to ship the Neo1973 in January 2007, but both hard- and software issues made us postpone shipping until July 2007. By then we decided that we would need a faster design to target the general audience. So the Neo1973 was repurposed as a developer's device and the Openmoko (by then someone decided that the capital 'M' had to be dropped) "Freerunner" was announced for early 2008. Apart from a faster display subsystem it was supposed to add WiFi (which was missing in the Neo1973), LED buttons, and removing the proprietary GPS chip for something that spoke NMEA. Unfortunately it had also been decided that there could not be a change in the casing, hence we needed to continue living with the bezel and the physical display size. In June 2007 – shortly before the official launch of the Neo1973 – I had the opportunity to join Harald visiting the OpenMoko office in Taipeh, Taiwan. This is a picture from Computex 2007, where OpenMoko presented the Neo1973 with its slogan "Free Your Phone": This is our room in the FIC building, where Harald and me worked on the Neo1973 phase 1 (general availability through the webshop) release code: The Hacker's Lunchbox, an enhanced version of the Neo1973 release package with an additional battery, debug board, and some more goodies: If for nothing else, for this first visit in Taipeh alone it was worth joining the project. I've never been further away from home, but still felt so much being welcome. Back in Germany, work continued – with a bunch of hackathons and presentations on conferences. Here's the OpenMoko tent from Chaos Communication Camp 2007: Although we were hired by OpenMoko to make sure the software we wrote was working great on their devices, we always tried to do our work in the most generic way as possible. We still had a sweet spot for OpenEZX and tried to make the OpenMoko software work there: On the 15h of September 2007, all the produced Neo1973 were sold-out. Since we already announced the Freerunner for 2008, we had nothing to sell for almost a whole year. And this exactly in the phase where Google and Apple had an opportunity to sell lots of devices. This was another major fault in the project. Another OpenMoko speciality was the release of the CAD data. On the 4th of March 2008, we released the full CAD data to allow for 3rd party cases. freesmartphone.org By the time the Neo1973 was in the hands of developers, I was getting more and more frustrated with the non-UI part of the system: gsmd was unstable, there was still only my prototype neod to handle lowlewel device specifics and I felt there could be much more experimentation if only there was a solid and uniform set of APIs available. I asked Sean whether I could switch my focus to that and he agreed, allowing me to work with my colleagues in Braunschweig Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, and Jan Lübbe as an independent unit. By that time, dbus was spreading more and more and looked like a good choice for inter-process-communication, hence I decided to specify a set of dbus APIs that would allow people to come up with all kinds of cool applications using whatever language they wanted. Since I did not want to tie it to the Openmoko devices, I created the FSO project (in analogy to the freedesktop.org project which did great work in standardizing desktop APIs before). If there was anything I learned out of the TCP/IP vs. ISO/OSI debate in the 1980s, then that APIs without a reference implementation are worthless and it is often more important to create things that work (de facto), than to have huge committees negotiate (de jure) standards. Which meant I had to also come up with code. In order to get things up and running quickly (and to allow hacking directly on the device), I chose one of my favorite languages, Python. The choice of using an interpretated (comparatively slow) language on an already slow device may sound odd, but back then I wanted to give people something to base on as fast as possible, hence development efficiency seemed way more important than runtime efficiency. Within only a few months, we created a working set of APIs and a Python-based reference implementation that finally allowed us to a) make dozens of calls in a row without the modem hanging up, and b) an EFL-based slick proof-of-concept-and-testing UI to evaluate our APIs (eating our own dogfood was very important to us). Here's the server code for an SMS echo service, which illustrates how simple it was to access the telephony parts: For a while, I did regular status updates (e.g. Status Update 5) to keep the community informed about how the framework project went on. Some of this work has been motivated by a very energetic group lead by Michael 'Emdete' Dietrich, which I dubbed the "Openmoko Underground" effort. They showed me that a) Python was indeed fast enough to handle things like AT, NMEA, and echoing characters to sysfs files, and also convinced me to give the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries a go. Freerunner is shipping By Summer 2008, we finally shipped the Freerunner. In the meantime, we were joined by Carsten 'Rasterman' Heitzler, who worked on optimizing Enlightenment (Foundation Libraries) for embedded platforms. Unfortunately the plans to make the Freerunner a much faster version of the Neo1973 didn't quite work out: The SMEDIA gfx chip which was supposed to be a display accelerator turned out to be an actual deccelerator. The chip could (under pressure) handle VGA, but was running much better with QVGA – hence its framebuffer interface was even slower than the Neo1973's. And there were more hardware problems. As the frameworks and APIs increased in stability, they exposed more and more – partly long standing – issues with the hardware design, in particular the infamous bug #1024 (which yours truly originally found). This bug had the effect of the TI Calypso GSM chip losing network connection when in deep sleep mode. Although we later found a workaround, it massively damaged the reputation of the Openmoko devices, since it made the devices lose calls. In September 2008, I visited Taipei again, joined by the FSO team plus Harald and Carsten, to present the current status, fix bugs, and teach the local engineers how to best use the framework APIs. For two weeks, we lived in an apartment rented by Openmoko and coded almost 24/7: Here's a view of the Openmoko office plus the room where we experimented with different case color & material combinations: Trials and Tribulations 2008 was one of the most intense years in the project's lifetime. With more Freerunner devices in the wild, a lot of people (finally) started building alternatives to the "official" Openmoko distribution. As always, this was good and bad. While I personally was satisfied that people tried out different ideas on all layers of the system – after all, this kind of freedom was one of the very reasons why I joined the project and created FSO in the first place – the multitude of possibilities scared many non-technical, but interested, buyers away. (The kind of people who don't want to actively work on open source projects, but want to support them. In the same way as chosing Firefox over IE, or OpenOffice over Word). Here is a bunch of screenshots taken from a presentation I held at the FOSDEM 2010, where we had an Openmoko developer room: Here's a photo (courtesy Josch) from the first Openmoko user meeting in Karlsruhe, which also shows a glimpse of the Openmoko devices' diversity: Freedom of choice truly is a double-edged sword: Many people would have preferred one solid software stack rather than having 10 half-done ones, each of them lacking in different areas. In- and outside Openmoko, tensions arose whether to continue with the Enlightenment-based route, switch to a Qtopia-based system, revive the GTK+-based stack, or just stop doing any work above the kernel and move to Android. Personally, I think we should have limited our software-contributions to a kernel, FSO, and a monolithic application that would have covered voice & messages and super stable day2day operation. Here are some more screenshots of 3rd-party distributions (Thanks, Walter!). One distribution I particulary liked was the one from SHR Project, a community of skilled hackers working closely together with the freesmartphone.org framework team. We did a FSOSHRUDCON (FSO+SHR Users and Developers Conference) in May 2009, in the LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. Even though it was officially "past-Openmoko", we had an incredible time there. If anyone of you still has a group photo which shows all of us, please send it to me! With a much smaller audience, we came back to LinuxHotel in 2011 for the 2nd – and unfortunately also the last – FSOSHR conference. By the way... this was some weeks after my daughter Lara Marie was born and I enjoyed sleeping a bit longer than usually :-) Freerunner in Space One of the most remarkable, nah... frickin' coolest things ever done with an Openmoko device was to mount a Freerunner inside a rocket and send it into space. In early 2009, a german space agency (DLR: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V.) carried out an experiment to measure how accelerometers (and other parts of consumer electronics) reacted to massive changes in velocity. One of the DLR directors, Prof. Dr. Felix Huber himself wrote the Freerunner-software for this experiment. He based it on an FSO image (and also submitted a bunch of patches to FSO and Zhone, but that's another story)! According to him, the Freerunner was the only smartphone where he trusted application software to have control over the GSM part, hence no other device could be used for this experiment. Images (C) DLR e.V.: Afterwards, Prof. Huber invited me to the DLR in Oberpfaffenhofen and gave me a tour. It was a great experience which I'll never forget. If you want to read more about the MAPHEUS experiments, please also see this paper. GTA03 – Our last Hope for Freedom After it was clear that the Freerunner was not the silver bullet we had hoped for, plans to design a successor launched. This one – codenamed GTA03 (and later 3D7K... for a reason I don't want to disclose) – was supposed to be designed free of any existing legacy we inherited from FIC's stock. GTA03 was supposed to contain a new S3C chip, a Cinterion modem, a capacitive (!) touchscreen, and a slick round design with a semitransparent cutout where you could see a part of the PCB (an elegant self-reference to the project's transparency & openness). This device would have made a significant change and put Openmoko into another league. Here's a plastic prototype of the device: Here's the PCB: Here's me hacking FSO and OE to incorporate the GTA03-specifics using development boards: Alas, due to a number of circumstances, the device was cancelled – although it was already 80% done. Nails in the coffin On the OpenExpo 2009 in Switzerland, Sean announced that Openmoko was quitting smartphone development. To me, at the very point, when framework-wise things finally started to look good. The 2nd reference implementation of the freesmartphone.org middleware had just begun and there were many promising side-projects using the FSO API. Here's a screenshot of the freesmartphone.org website back then (thanks to the Wayback Machine): For two more years, I continued to work on FSO in my spare time, trying to find an alternative hardware reference platform to run on, but nothing convincing showed up. All reverse-engineering-based efforts to replace other operating systems with our stack failed due to the short hardware life-time. When I dropped out in June 2011 due to the birth of my daughter Lara-Marie, those projects more or less came to a full stop. It's not easy to pinpoint exactly what went wrong with the project. I think I can mention a couple of nails in the coffin though: Transparency – if you design hardware in the open, every single bug (that can perhaps be worked around in software) is immediately being revealed and talked to death. This scares potential buyers. The financial crisis of 2008 – Openmoko's venture capital dried up when some of the investors had serious cash problems. The competition – With Apple and Google two major players came out very soon after our initial announcement. Apple's iPhone made it tough to compete hardware-wise, and Google's seemingly open Android dragged a lot of people who perceived it as being open enough out of our community. Not enough focus, not enough structure – As mentioned before, the basics (phone, messages, power management) were never stable enough to make the devices really work well as your main phone. I'm afraid we wanted too much too fast. What’s left behind During 2007 – 2011, I travelled a lot and presented on conferences, if I recall correctly I've been in Aalborg (Denmark), Bern (Switzerland), Berlin, Brussels (Belgium), Birmingham (UK), Chemnitz, St.Augustin, Munich, Paris (France), Porto de Galinhas (Brazil) [Summerville Beach Resort, best conference venue ever], Taipeh (Taiwan), Vienna (Austria), and Zürich (Switzerland). It was an incredible time and I rediscovered a spirit that I had first experienced 20 years ago during the early days of the C64 and AMIGA demo scene. I'm glad having met so many great people. I learned more about (prototype) hardware than I would have ever wanted. Over the two years of operation, Openmoko sold ~13000 phones (3000 Neo1973, 10000 Freerunner). Openmoko Inc. rose from 4 people (Sean, Harald, me, Werner) to about 50 in their high-time. Alas, this concludes the positive aspects though. I wished that we could have left a bigger footprint in history, but as things stand, the mobile soft- and hardware landscape in 2017 is way more closed than it was ten years ago. I really had hoped for the opposite. Many projects we started are now either obsolete or on hiatus, waiting (forever?) for an open hardware platform to run on. However, they are still there and could be revived, if there was enough interest. Two notable active projects are Dr. Nikolaus Schaller's GTA04 – which is a completely new design fitting in the Freerunner's case and the Neo900 by ex-Openmoko engineer Jörg Reisenweber – attempting to do the same with the Nokia N900. Both of these projects share the approach to build upon an existing case and retrofitting most of the innards with a newer PCB (think "second live"). While the Neo900 is still in conceptual phase (they just announced the next prototype PCB a couple of days ago), the GTA04 has already seen a number of shipping board revisions and there is still a small, die-hard, community following tireless Nikolaus' progress to keep the Openmoko spirit alive. Basic support for the GTA04 has already been added to FSO and there are people actively working on kernel support as well as porting various userlands like QtMoko and Replicant to it. I really suggest browsing the archives of gta04-owner to understand the incredible amount of problems a small series of custom smartphone hardware brings – including component sourcing, CAD programs, fighting against Linux mainline (people which apparantly are not really interested in smartphone code), defending a relatively high price, etc. It's hell of a ride. While I applaud all these efforts, something broke inside me when Openmoko shut down – and that's one of the reasons why I find it pretty hard to motivate myself working on FSO again. Another one is that Vala – the language of the 2nd reference implementation – had their own set of problems with parents and maintainers losing interest... although it just recently seemed to have found new love). The Future? By now, Android and iOS have conquered the mobile world. Blackberry is dead, HP killed WebOS and the Palm Pre, Windows Phone is fading into oblivion and even big players such as Ubuntu or Mozilla are having a hard time coming up with an alternative to platforms that contain millions of apps running on a wide variety of the finest hardware. IF YOU'RE SERIOUS ABOUT SOFTWARE, YOU HAVE TO DESIGN YOUR OWN HARDWARE – Alan Kay Right now my main occupation is writing software for Apple's platforms – and while it's nice to work on apps using a massive set of luxury frameworks and APIs, you're locked and sandboxed within the software layers Apple allows you. I'd love to be able to work on an open source Linux-based middleware again. However, the sad truth is that it looks like there is no business case anymore for a truly open platform based on custom-designed hardware, since people refuse to spend extra money for tweakability, freedom, and security. Despite us living in times where privacy is massively endangered. If anyone out there thinks different and plans a project, please holler and get me on board! Acknowledgements Thanks to you for reading that far! Thanks to Sean Moss-Pultz for his crazy and ambitioned idea. Thanks to Harald Welte for getting me on board. Thanks to Daniel, Jan, and Stefan for working with me on FSO. Thanks to the countless organizers and helpers on conferences where we presented our work. Thanks to Nikolaus and Walter for commenting on an early draft of this. And finally... thanks to all enthusiasts who used a Neo1973 and/or a Freerunner in the past, present, or future.MickeyComing back from FOSDEM 2016tag:vanille.de,2016-01-31:coming-back-from-fosdem-20162016-01-31T12:00:00ZIn the good tradition about writing a blog post on my way back from a FOSDEM (see earlier installments e.g. for 2012, 2010, 2008, and 2007), here is this year's take. No issues with transportation this time (I'm still in the train, but it looks good so far), other than road construction works at the venue, which itself seems to establish a tradition now ;) This year I stayed in the Be Manos hotel – near to Gare du Midi – which was quite nice. Since I find myself being too old for the pre-FOSDEM beer event, I did not attend it. I had my share of Leffe Bruin (my favorite belgium beer) in the hotel lobby though. The temperature was around +8°, much better than FROZDEM 2012, where it had -20°. I saw 5 presentations, 4 of those which were quite good. That's a better ratio than in previous years. My favorite talk was given by Carsten 'Rasterman' Heitzler, an ex-Openmoko colleague who is now working for SAMSUNG on Tizen's graphical subsystems (EFL-based). Most important though were the people I met, a lot of old and new friends, in particular Phil Blundell, Harald Welte, Daniel Willmann, Jan Lübbe, Marcin 'HRW' J., Paul Espin, Florian Boor, and many more. Seeing all of you alive and kicking gave me a lot of positive energy! I'm returning excited and with many mental notes of things to check out and the motivation to make a major contribution to at least one open project this year. See you all soon!MickeyTowards the end of 2015tag:vanille.de,2015-12-27:towards-the-end-of-20152015-12-27T12:00:00Z'Tis the season to let the year pass by and make plans for the next one. 2015 was what I'd call a "transitioning" year. Although LaTe App-Developers had been shut down in 2014, we still had to spend most of 2015 to work on some things our clients already paid for. This is now finally done and I can move forward looking for new endeavors. Here's a bunch of my plans for 2016: First off, I'll attempt to bring three iOS-apps in the AppStore. These apps will be completely new versions of those that I did while working with my colleague at LaTe, in particular it's going to be a radio station app, a guitar songbook, and a matching game for kids: The radio station app will be the successor to the popular "Volksradio" App, with a clear focus on streamlining (i.e. only a bare minimum of features, but those supersolid) and social recommendations ("listeners who enjoyed 'Space Station Soma' also liked 'Chillout Radio'). The guitar songbook app will be the successor to the "Chord Pro Songbook" app, with the focus on collection 'sets' (a number of titles to perform at a given time) and 'alternates' (variants of songs). My dream would be to incorporate a great edit function (to create new transcriptions right on your device), but I'm not sure whether this will make it. The matching game will be the successor to the "Match and Learn" app. This one hasn't been updated for ages, I have new animals and plan to add a better gameplay as well as incorporate support for new devices. I also have started working on 'retro player', an app that will be the successor to SidPlayer, Module Player, and PokeyPlayer -- I have mentioned this in an earlier installment of this blog. This one is going to be huge and I plan a crowdfunding campaign later in 2016 to make it happen. Note that the campaign will not be launched until the product is in a stage where it is sure that it can be completed. I'm not going to make this mistake -- something that has annoyed me this year as a contributor to some projects. Next to this iOS-related work, over the last year I have seriously reinvested time (and money) into my music again. In 2016 I'm going to publish some new material, consisting of rearranged and enhanced versions of some of my ancient AMIGA MODs), but also completely new compositions. It looks like my writer's block has vanished and after roughly 15 years of sucking on my thumb, I started recording new stuff. Isn't that exciting? :) Professionally, there will be some iOS work, but hopefully also architectures with a broader scope. I really want to do more Python and distributed middleware again. I'm not so sure on Vala (one of my other favorite programming languages) though. This language has flourished between 2008 and 2012 and sadly I'm afraid it's not going anywhere anymore. There's little activity on the mailing list, the original author has moved on, and there is not enough fresh blood. Very sad, but given that state, it looks like my half-done book on Vala will not see the light of day. That's about everything I think of at the moment. I wish all of you a great healthy and successful 2016, may we manage to make the world a bit more peaceful (although I have my doubts). All the best to you! Yours truly, Mickey.MickeyMy "new" issue tracker installationtag:vanille.de,2015-11-10:my-new-issue-tracker-installation2015-11-10T12:00:00ZI'm absolutely relying on working with issue trackers for managing features, bugs, and releases. Although it's always a bit cumbersome to teach (new) clients how to properly use it (it takes quite some hand holding and improving their tickets), sooner or later they all realize that it's way better than the chaos we get by tossing Excel sheets back and forwards. Although we shut our company LaTe App-Developers down last year, my colleague and me are still using our old redmine 2.x installation to support existing clients. For new projects, I recently started to look into the current state of issue tracker offerings. My needs are: Open source – I don't believe in closed source solutions for such a critical thing in my daily routine. Simple & efficient – I don't need a feature monster, I need something that I and my clients can use and that doesn't get in our way. Self-hosted on debian 7.x – I know it's quite some administrative work to get things running smoothly, but once in a while I enjoy these kind of tasks. Configurable task states and workflow – My status flow is usually open => reproducible => in progress => testable => closed. Remote GIT repository integration: A combined activity screen where I see not only tickets, but also change sets. Being able to advance the task state with commit messages. Fetching new data by using git hooks! No cron jobs, no pulling. As I've mentioned, we previously used redmine and this is what I'm familiar with and what I love to work with. In the past (when my requirements were not developed yet), I also used trac, mantis, and bugzilla – but neither of those got me hooked. Despite being somewhat satisfied with redmine, the last time I researched the market was five years ago, so I set out to do another survey – to see whether there is anything better than redmine meeting my requirements. I spare you the itchy details, but after looking and trying for some weeks, there were only three contenders left: Good ole' redmine, this time in version 3.1. OpenProject, a fork of the (now defunct) ChilliProject – hence a 2nd order fork of redmine. Phabricator, the new hotness introduced by Facebook, Inc. OpenProject looked interesting to me since it basically is still redmine, but with a focus on a more streamline UI and better usability (and more frequent releases). Installation was pretty good, since finnlabs (the company that is steering its development and offering professional services around the product) provides packages. Everything worked pretty well, but at the end of the day though, it wasn't that much of a step-up from redmine. Phabricator is pretty impressive. Installation is painless (On most systems, PHP still has the better out-of-the-box experience than Ruby and Rails) and the web GUI looks amazing. Although the individual parts are very strong and it has a lot of features that redmine lacks, the configuration UI is pretty barebones (for custom ticket states, you have to edit JSON files) and it doesn't felt as integrated as redmine. It has great potential though, perhaps I just need to play with it for a longer time. I left my installation intact and will use it for an internal project for a while. For all other projects though, I have decided to come back to redmine. To spice up the look and feel, I'm using the Circle theme from RedmineCRM (who are making some great plugins for redmine) and some of their plugins. One thing that's always a bit of a nuisance is the git repository integration without pulling or stalling when it reads the changesets while you are, say, querying the tickets. Phabricator comes with a dedicated daemon that eases this part, I think that's a way redmine et. al. should look into, as well. For redmine 3.1, I got it working with their new (to me) repository web service. If you don't have the repository on the same machine as your tracker installation, the ideal system has the following parts: I push a new changeset to my repository. A simple post-receive hook on my gitolite installation then calls the redmine web service to trigger the next step, e.g. curl "http://<redmine url>/sys/fetch_changesets?key=$apikey&id=$projectid" & The redmine webservice updates its local mirror of the repository by calling git fetch. This can easily be done with the redmine plugin gitremote. The redmine installation processes the new changesets, checks for special commit texts, and updates its internal databases accordingly. The hardest part of that is debugging, when something does not work (as always...). In my case it was a custom SSH port on my machine, which made it silently fail fetching new changesets until I realized that :) I still recommend redmine, if you have similar needs as me. Yes, it may not integrate the latest web technologies and look a bit rusty (which you can improve by using a theme), but it's solid and does not get in your way. Cheers, :M:MickeyIs anyone still sampling?tag:vanille.de,2015-08-31:is-anyone-still-sampling2015-08-31T12:00:00ZHi fellow readers, this time we’re talking music. For quite some time, I’ve been wondering about the sound of a certain area which seems to be abandoned by pretty much all bands. It was the area when sampling technology became affordable and where a bunch of musicians adopted this (back then very limited) technology in creative ways to use any kind of noise in a musical context. In this period (say, 1984-1990), bands like „The Art Of Noise“, „Jean-Michel Jarre“, „Depeche Mode“, „Moskwa TV“, and many more, emerged, who thrilled their audience with sounds that had been previously unheard. Obviously we lost this form of art somewhere along the way – I can’t think of any currently active band embracing these kind of instruments. Even the aforementioned pioneers have "developed" (why must every successful band „develop“ and lose the distinct quality that made them big? but that’s a topic for another blogpost) and turned their back on this. Is it because listeners became tired or did the massive improvements in sampling quality and length (due to the vast price decline in computer memory we now have hours of sampling time where back in the 80s we only had seconds) thus the limitless possibilities strangled the creativity (again!)? I still love to hear (and produce) those kinds of sound. So let me ask: Is anyone still sampling? (except sample library vendors, that is) Cheerio – Gone fishing, err… field recording!Mickeyfreesmartphone.org API docs live againtag:vanille.de,2015-03-29:freesmartphone-org-api-docs-live-again2015-03-29T12:00:00ZAfter the outage of the VM where freesmartphone.org has been hosted on, we are now almost fully back. I have integrated the DBus API documentation (that has been hosted on the doc subdomain) into the top level documentation which now lives at http://www.freesmartphone.org. The source code has already been moved to https://github.com/freesmartphone and the new mailing list has been alive for a few months at goldelico. Now that the documentation is live again, I have plans for short, mid, and long term: 1. Short-term I'm working on completing the merge to libgee-0.8 and then cut the next point release. 2. Mid-term I want to discuss integrating the unmerged branches to the individual subprojects and continue cleaning up. 3. Long-term I'm looking for a new reference hardware platform, funding, contributors, and decide whether to move the existing reference platform to kdbus (or another IPC.) If you have any plans or questions with regards to the freesmartphone.org initiative and its subprojects, please contact me via the FSO mailing list (preferred) or personally.MickeyRFC: Future of SidPlayer, ModPlayer, PokeyPlayer for iOStag:vanille.de,2015-03-22:rfc-future-sidplayer-modplayer-pokeyplayer-ios2015-03-22T12:00:00ZThis is a post about the state of Sid-, Mod, or PokeyPlayer on iOS. Coming from the background of the C64 and AMIGA demo scenes, I always thought that every platform needs a way to play back the musical artwork created by those great musicians in the 80s and 90s on machines like the Commodore C64, the AMIGA, and the ATARI XL. Fast forward to the iPhone: Being excited about the new platform, me and another guy from the good ole' AMIGA days started working on SidPlayer in 2008, shortly after Apple opened the developer program for european developers. After some months of work, we had the first version ready for the Apple review, standing on the shoulder of the great libsidplay and the HVSC. Due to libsidplay being GPL, we had to open source the whole iOS app. To our surprise, _this_ hasn't been a problem with the Apple review. SidPlayer for iOS was available for some months, then we developed adaptations for AMIGA .mod files (ModPlayer) and Atari XL pokey sound files (PokeyPlayer). In the meantime, iOS development went from being a hobby to our profession (we formed the LaTe App-Developers GbR), which unfortunately had great impact on our pet projects. Being busy with paid projects, we could not find enough time to do serious updates to the players. The original plan in 2008 was to create an app that has additional value around the core asset of a high quality retro computing player, such as a retro-museum-in-a-box (giving background information about those classic computing machines) and a community that shares playlists (important given the amount of songs), comments, statistics, and ratings. Alas, due to our time constraints during the lifetime of the apps, we could only do small updates in order to fix bugs with newer operating system versions. There was not enough time to add features, do an iPad adaptation, nor to unify the three distinct player apps. In the meantime, other apps came along that also could play some of those tunes, although we weren't (and still aren't) very excited about their user interfaces and sound quality. The final nail for the coffin came in 2013, when – much to our surprise – out of the blue (not even due to reviewing an update), we received a letter from Apple where they claimed that our player apps would violate the review guidelines, in particular the dreaded sections 2.7 / 2.8, which read "2.7: Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected." and "2.8: Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected". Although we went past this guideline for several years, this turned into a showstopper – some weeks later, Apple removed our apps from the store. Unfortunately, those sections really apply – at least for the Sid- and PokeyPlayer. Both players rely on emulating parts of the CPU and custom chip infrastructure of the C64 / Atari XL (hence run "executable" code, albeit for a foreign processor architecture) and said code gets downloaded from the internet (we didn't want to ship the actual music files with the app for licensing reasons). ModPlayer actually was an exception, since the .mod format does not contain code, but is a descriptive format, however back then I did not have the energy to argue with Apple on that, hence ModPlayer has been removed without a valid reason. In the meantime, my priorities have shifted a bit and we had to shutdown our iOS company LaTe AppDevelopers for a number of reasons. Still I have great motivation to work on the original goal for those players. Due to the improved hard- and software of the iOS platform, these days we could add some major improvements to the playing routines, such as using recent filter distortion improvements in libsidplay2, audio post-processing with reverb and chorus, etc. The chance of the existing apps coming back into the store is – thanks to Apple – zero. It wouldn't be a pleasant experience anyways, since the code base is very old and rather unmaintainable (remember, it was our first app for a new platform, and neither one of us had any Mac OS X experience to rely on). Basically, three question come to my mind now: 1. Would there be enough interest in a player that fulfills the original goal or is the competition on the store "good enough"? Will it be possible to get past Apple's review, if we ship the App with all the sound (code) files, thus not downloading any code? How can I fund working on this app? To honor all the countless hours the original authors put into creating the music and the big community working on preserving the files, I want this app to be free for everyone. As you may have guessed, I do not have any concrete answers (let alone a timeframe), but just some ideas and the track record of having created one of the most popular set of C64/AMIGA/Atari XL music player apps. So I wanted to use this opportunity to gather some feedback. If you have any comments, feel free to send them to me. If you even want to collaborate on such a project, I'm all ears. If there’s sufficient interest, we can create some project infrastructure, i.e. mailing list.MickeyWayback Machinetag:vanille.de,2015-02-23:wayback-machine2015-02-23T12:00:00ZThanks to the fabulous wayback machine, I have imported my blog from between 1999 and 2006. It's not properly formatted and most of the images are missing, but it's somewhat interesting to read the things my younger self wrote about 15 years ago.MickeyTo web or not?tag:vanille.de,2015-01-26:web-not2015-01-26T12:00:00ZI have pondered a long time whether to learn web programming for my customers' services app, so that they can access their user & device statistics, crash logs, manage service messages, push messages, etc. I now have decided not to pursue this path. Web technology is a mess, even more than mobile technology. It's lacking a clear separation of layers and although many frameworks nowadays are using MVC or similar patterns, I feel I have to do too many things at once (web service, html templating, css design, java script for interactive stuff, etc.) to really make a professional web app. I'm going to make a mobile client instead, using the technologies I already have mastered and in which I'm productive. Yes, I still want to learn something new, that's why I'm working with a NoSQL database now for the first time. Of course the downside is my customers can no longer use their web browsers to manage all that, but since they have their iPhones and iPads always around anyways, I'm sure they can cope with that.MickeySimplify your lifetag:vanille.de,2014-10-23:simplify-your-life2014-10-23T12:00:00ZAfter 6 years being co-director and CTO of LaTe App-Developers, I feel it is time to make some changes. It's not that mobile development is no longer interesting to me, however after doing (too) many small (5-20 person days) iOS projects, I need some new challenges. Project work has been limiting my creativity and enforcing too much regularity in my daily routine. Besides, there's hardly any room to do compelling software architecture work in projects of said size. You're rather constantly working against the time in order to make some profit with those fixed-price projects. This year I took three months off in order to decide on what to do next and finally, I have made up my mind. As per the end of this year, I'm resigning as co-director and CTO of LaTe. I will still be involved as freelance collaborator though in order to continue supporting our biggest client. With the regained freedom, I plan to explore some new directions with regards to own apps and services. I need to catch up with what happened in (Embedded)-Linux and I also want to polish my almost rusty Python and Vala skills. Last but not least, I'm not going to do 40 hours per week any more – instead I want to spend more time with my family.MickeyNew Sitetag:vanille.de,2014-07-29:new-site2014-07-29T12:00:00ZEvery 6 years or so I'm revamping my website. This is the 3rd incarnation now (yes, I started early) featuring a new wordpress theme, a clean layout, and – most important – serious content improvements.MickeyWelcome, 2014tag:vanille.de,2014-02-09:welcome-20142014-02-09T12:00:00ZSo 2013 is finally over and it's been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise. Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source. Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie's 5th and 13th month, she finally began sleeping great, often 12 hours without waking up. She's now 2.5 years and everything is good. Still, she's a demanding little one, enjoying being offered a selection of everything instead of deciding on her behalf. I love her. Building. With a bit of (natural) delay, our new house was finished by November and we did move on 9th of December. We're now 2 months in here and it's feeling mostly great. We had to monitor and decide on a LOT of things during the construction phase, but apart from the usual minor issues, the building quality is good and we enjoy the comfort of having a dedicated room for Lara Marie. Being able to use the living room again after 20:00 is nice :) I took the liberty to install a dedicated server for the house which is living in a 19" rack in the utility room. I'm going to post about the networking infrastructure soon. Referring to my last post, I'm still planning on doing the sabbatical, but due to some unforeseeable circumstances with my wife's health, it had to be postponed for a bit. It's going to happen in 2014 though, which is why I'm sure, 2014 is going to be better than 2013.MickeyThe state of things in 2013tag:vanille.de,2013-07-02:the-state-of-things-in-20132013-07-02T12:00:00ZSalut! I didn't blog for quite a while, since – as I've mentioned before – these days, Facebook seems to me the more appropriate forum for shorter status messages. That aside, let me recap how things are these days. Since the birth of Lara Marie, quite a lot in my life has changed. I haven't been contributing to any open source projects nor did I have time to continue my writing of articles and books. This leaves me being quite unsatisfied. Business-wise, my iOS/Android-company had to struggle a bit in late 2012, since a lot of clients cancelled or postponed their app projects due to the unstable economy in europe. Thankfully we're now being more busy again, however I find myself being pretty annoyed with how our projects are being performed these days. Dealing with customers who try to squeeze more and more features into an app and loading you with change requests while at the same time insisting on the fixed price offer is extremly annoying. Plus the pure nature of many mini-projects we get (typically one or two person weeks) where the communication overhead results in us working twice the amount of time we actually get paid for. Perhaps we need to be more strict and organize the workflow better. On the other hand, it rather looks like the mobile app market is dominated by so-called "full service design agencies" which then outsource the actual implementation to us, keeping us out of the actual decisions, but paying us only a minimal share of what they get. In a world of HTML5 and cross-platform-tools ruining the prices, it also seems increasingly difficult to convey the benefits of a highly device-optimized native app. With 30 years of experience in information technology (heck, I even received a Ph.D ;) – do I really still need to discuss about button placements and whether billing a bunch of additional hours is justified, when all I did was implementing "that trivial feature"? After five years of iOS development, it might be the time for me to move to something new – or come back to old things. That's why I'm pondering about a combination of a sabbatical and a parental leave in 2014.MickeyTowards the end of 2012tag:vanille.de,2012-12-26:towards-the-end-of-20122012-12-26T12:00:00ZHi folks! Obviously I don't manage to update this blog more than a few times a year. I must confess that – for smaller status messages – I find Facebook and Twitter working quite well. So if you want to stay in touch a bit more, hop over to my page @ Michael Lauer or follow my Tweets @ DrMickeyLauer. The biggest tasks this year was getting Lara Marie to sleep well and buying a house, both which we finished successfully. Right now we have a hole in the ground, but it's supposed to be finished by October 2013. I'm going to report about the progress now and then. FOSS-wise I didn't manage to do anything meaningful more than visiting FOSDEM and the OHSW this year. I tried to catch up with what's happening in FSO, Vala, and OpenEmbedded though. Since I do no longer use OE on a frequent basis, I decided to not run for re-election as OE board member, thus also resigning from being OE e.V. president. I'm quite happy to hand the paperwork over to someone else ;) With Lara Marie growing older (she's now 18 months), I enjoy being a father more and more. While mommy was #1 in the first year, it becomes apparent that I'm #1 in the 2nd year, helping the little one to form her individuality and her will. Company-wise 2012 was a bit of a ride as due to the economy some of our biggest clients postponed their app updates and we struggled a bit getting enough contracts to keep the four of us busy. Then again, we worked on our own apps in the free time and I'm happy to announce the next major version of Volksradio / Just Radio, which is going to ship soon. I wish all of you a merry 2013! Yours, Mickey!MickeyComing back from FOSDEMtag:vanille.de,2012-02-05:coming-back-from-fosdem2012-02-05T12:00:00ZAfter having skipped FOSDEM in 2011, I wanted to go this year, especially because of the Golden Delicious stand where we had the OpenPhoenux GTA04 on show. A lot of people came around and were excited that someone picked up where Openmoko had left in 2009. The GTA04 is the true successor of the FreeRunner and I strongly invite all of you to support this movement by buying one. You will not get a more open mobile phone anywhere else. I know that Brussels is always a bit colder than Frankfurt, so I tend to carry appropriate clothing... what I didn't expect though was that it was frickin' -20 on saturday. I have never been freezing more in my life. Lets cross fingers that I won't come back home with a cold. Especially due to the crazy public transportation situation. The Deutsche Bahn managed to accumulate a one hour delay on my way to Brussels – that's ok, however they managed to crash the engine in Aachen on my way back. So badly that we had to switch to a regional train and switch again in Cologne. Man... *sigh* On to some good news... another thing I didn't expect was kind of an Openmoko family reunion. It was amazing to find Jan Lübbe, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Harald Welte, and even Rasterman hanging around at FOSDEM. That was just great. I also happened to share my hotelroom with Boudewijn which was unexpected but again very cool. So despite the freezing, it was a great FOSDEM for me and I'm looking forward to go again next year, perhaps bringing Sabine and Lara Marie as well.MickeyIT has seen a crazy yeartag:vanille.de,2011-12-13:it-has-seen-a-crazy-year2011-12-13T12:00:00ZInformation Technology has seen a really crazy year. Among all the smaller incidents, the big bangs involved Nokia partnering with Microsoft, abandoning Maemo, HP driving with WebOS against the wall, patent lawsuits everywhere. What that means for FOSS-lovers is clear... you can't trust any company to continue working on anything. Business demands are what counts in the world of mass markets. If you want longterm support for a platform, your best bet is to build a community around it. But you will also want to work on hardware support otherwise you'll run into the next dead end. To be honest, right now I don't see much of a future for any mobile Linux-inspired platform other than the mutation called Android. But that's not much of a problem per se. The smartphone market is crazy. To compete in that world, you have to give up on freedom. But is the mass market really what we want? Is it what mobile Linux needs? I don't think so. There are still huge opportunities for using Linux-based mobile software platforms in niches such as machine2machine communication, home automation, research, teaching, and more. That's where a service-based middleware like FSO comes into the game: for special interests. However, even niche-adoption is hindered without a minimal set of applications. And that is where we still lack: Even special interest people want to use their smartphones to manage contacts, browse the web, send mails, play media, etc. We don't have an integrated software stack with a complete set of UI applications that would cover these needs. Openmoko worked on one, but failed. Nokia worked on multiple ones, but gave up (multiple times). What else do we have? With HP's recent announcement about releasing WebOS as open source, the game may have changed. If we could use the WebOS application stack on top of the FSO middleware, we may have a real chance to get something great and usable – and complete – soon. I have always liked the WebOS UI. If it's a bit slower than other UIs, who cares as long as it is free?MickeyTowards the end of 2011tag:vanille.de,2011-12-09:towards-the-end-of-20112011-12-09T12:00:00ZTempus fugit. I can tell you. Even more so, if you have a baby. I must confess I somewhat underestimated the impact the baby would have on my spare time. In some weird mindset I really thought I could continue working as usual on my open source projects... as we know now I couldn't. I completely lost track and have to catch up with all changes that happened over the last 6 months. The first bunch of weeks with the baby were really demanding. I mean, really. She screamed a lot and could only sleep in our arms. Boy, were we tired. We carried her around so much we have Schwarzenegger arms now. But it's great to see her developing, err... growing up, of course. With 6 months now she is a very interested baby, eager to learn new things and always trying to become more mobile. Luckily both my wife and me are self-employed. It so much easier when you can skip some hours at the usual start of the workday and also at the usual end. Of course, the work needs to be done, so we have to compensate when she's in bed. But still, it's very satisfying being able to see her twice a day for a couple of hours -- not all families have this luxury. Plus the existence of our two invaluable grandmas... it's great. Company-wise, the Lauer & Teuber GbR had an amazing year with many interesting iOS (and some Android) projects. We have reached the maximum we can do with the two guys we are, so we decided to grow and hire our first regular employee who's going to start in 2012. We also rented another office and are already moving. I'm slowly getting back into some of my beloved open source projects... it's great that work on e.g. FSO did not stall at all, but continued while I was "away". Last week, I attended the 3rd installment of the Open Hard- and Software Workshop in munich, where the latest development of the very promising GTA04 mobile phone was presented. I had a talk about Vala which was well received. By the way, my Vala-book plans are not dead yet... just in parking position :) Next week I'm attending the FSOSHRCON, a joined conference with the people working on the freesmartphone.org middleware and the SHR software. It's going to be great seeing all the folks again, concentrating a full weekend to agree on some important issues laying the path forward for the next year. Can't wait to be there. What's left is the feeling that an extremely busy year has passed by, spiced with incredibly intense emotions. I'm a happy man and I love my life. I'm given exciting opportunities, but also challenges – and I plan to accept everything :) All the best to you guys!MickeyThe Eagle Has Landed!tag:vanille.de,2011-06-09:the-eagle-has-landed2011-06-09T12:00:00ZAfter letting us wait for a bit longer than scheduled (13 days), the hospital initiated the contractions. For the first couple of hours, everything went just perfect, but then the little one got stuck on the way and we had to resort to a cesarean section. Lara Marie Lauer was born 8th of June at 04:41 (AM) with 3460 gramms and 49 cm. Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can't express the feelings I had in this very moment. I'm still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world. Please bear with me if in the next time I'm not as responsive as usually :) [![Lara Marie Lauer](/images/tbLaraMarie1.jpg)](/images/LaraMarie1.jpg "Lara Marie Lauer")MickeyGerman Post on time!tag:vanille.de,2011-05-30:german-post-on-time2011-05-30T12:00:00ZAnd now for something completely different... while we are all waiting for my baby to arrive (who was scheduled for 25th of May), she just received her first greeting card – together with a personalized bib and a towel (with integrated hood – pretty fancy!) from my good friends at #openmoko-cdevel. Guys, seeing this card was very heartwarming – it means a lot to me that you share my anticipation, thanks a lot! And I'm 100% sure she will appreciate her gifts... now let's cross fingers it won't take much longer... waiting is the hardest part of it :) Yours, Mickey.MickeyTowards the end of 2010tag:vanille.de,2010-10-16:towards-the-end-of-20102010-10-16T12:00:00ZHowdy, dear reader! It's been a while on this blog, mainly due to the fact that many short status updates are better twittered than blogged. Then again, as promised / threatened in last year's installment of this column, I had to spend most of the time this year with iOS development, rather than with FOSS -- and it doesn't look like this will change much (you know, food and things...). Still I do care a lot about projects like OpenEmbedded, Vala, freesmartphone.org, and the like, so here's what has been going on this year: OpenEmbedded (www.openembedded.org) OE moved along quite well this year. I did not have much time for it -- other than taking care about a couple of Vala and FSO recipes -- but I'm especially pleased that the community finally embraced major clean up. Thanks to Frans, Richard, and all others involved, OE is improving heavily -- although it wasn't easy: Over the last couple of years, the OE core contributors developed a resistance against any changes affecting more than a handfull of recipes, however in order to make OE handle even more contributors and various use cases, we had to do some substantial cleanups. This will reduce maintenance and improve the overall quality of recipes in OE, which is the #1 complaint I hear. Vala (www.vala-project.org) During the first half of the year, Vala went through some extremely tiring phases of non-activity, which improved vastly when its main developers opened up a bit, i.e. giving more developers access to the tree, adding branches, etc. There have been many changes in the Dova profile, but also the GLib profile has seen an incredible amount of work, bugfixes, some new features, and more. The pace of changes that affect basic things had also impact on my vala-book plans; apart from a severe lack of time on my side, I think it's better to wait until Vala is closer to 1.0. Otherwise I risk describing a moving target, which -- considering the time I have to work on that project -- would effectively kill it. That said, it's great to see that Vala is getting better every day and gains more and more popularity from all kinds of developers. FSO (freesmartphone.org) The progress on freesmartphone.org is two-fold; on one hand, we have seen quite a nice amount of work to support more devices. On the other hand though, in contrast to all the work I did in 2009, there has been a severe lack of development of the core in 2010. This I plan to change as soon as possible. For 2011, I see myself continuing to develop FSO in the following three dimensions; internal, external, and integration. [Internal]{style="font-style: italic"} | FSO is a heavy DBus consumer. I think by now we are one of the largest projects using DBus, at least considering the amount of API and running processes that communicate with each other via DBus. We always had our share of problems with DBus, especially some concurrency problems and race conditions are still haunting us. Both libdbus and dbus-glib exhibit their own share of problems, obviously this is not much of an issue on the desktop, but it turns out to be a major PITA on embedded systems, such as a phone. That's why I have been excited since I heard that the glib team planned to write their own DBus backend and put it right into the glib. This work has now been released as of glib 2.26. Over the next weeks, I will port FSO to using gdbus in a branch. [External]{style="font-style: italic"} | DBus-signals have some problems. That's why some big projects (BlueZ and ConnMan, to name two of them) adopted an agent-style of API, where the clients have to implement a server API which is being called by the actual servers. While this means some more work for client developers, it has major benefits. I'm going to change some of our APIs to adopt this style. [Integration]{style="font-style: italic"} | To deliver an integrated solution for today's mobile phones, FSO needs to add more glue to work with existing services, such as BlueZ (bluetooth connectivity), Connman (ethernet and wifi connectivity), and some VoIP services. While these services work fine on their own, FSO lacks an API that uses these individual services in combination to achieve higher level tasks. All this means that I will not be working much on the actual ports, but rather use my -- very limited, did I say that yet? -- time to drive the core forwards. I still believe that we will have full FOSS phones -- other than the Openmoko devices -- soon. Please help to make this dream a reality. (And no, please don't talk to me about Android...) Cheers, :M:MickeyGernot Schäfer (1972-2010)tag:vanille.de,2010-09-07:gernot-schafer-1972-20102010-09-07T12:00:00ZRest In Peace, buddy! You will be missed.MickeyFeeling goodtag:vanille.de,2010-08-21:feeling-good2010-08-21T12:00:00ZSince the last post about my growing feeling of uneasiness, I did a couple of things to improve my mood. First, I stopped spending every free second of my spare time at the computer, writing FOSS. Second, I reactivated some other recreational interests I also have, but which have been pushed back for long by freesmartphone.org, OpenEmbedded, Vala, EFL, and the like. I bought a new car and spend more time singing, playing guitar, doing sports, and acting. In short, I'm really enjoying my life these days. This doesn't mean I will stop working on the aforementioned projects -- however, it's very important for me to find a healthy balance between engagement on virtual things and on real things.MickeyVolksradio: Just Radio!tag:vanille.de,2010-07-31:volksradio-just-radio2010-07-31T12:00:00ZEvery now and then you come to the comfortable situation that a client requests you to develop a technology for a product of theirs, which you can then use in your own productions as well. This happened to us in the last couple of months, when we had to create an audio streaming engine for iOS for an internet radio app. Now the internet radio app market on iOS is completely saturated. We browsed through the AppStore and found hundreds of radio station apps, half of them for free, half of them between 1 and 3 EUR. We downloaded quite a bunch and analyzed what we liked and what we didn't like. With regards to the latter, we have seen splash screens, click-through ads, complicated UIs, and -- most annoying of all -- broken stations. Only a few apps actually do well in what they advertise... streaming radio! This is what lead us to the development of Volksradio: Just Radio! A no fuzz no buzz streaming radio app. This is what it looks like: A clean uncluttered UI that focuses on what the app does best... streaming radio. While we have refrained from feature overload, we put a couple of goodies into it, such as: HiFi streaming engine, even via EDGE Headphone remote control support iOS4 background streaming and multimedia dock support Automatically picks up playing the station you last heard Order channels alphabetically or by rating -- either just your own or total rating of all users. We even did a small video to show the features, which you can see by clicking here. Note that right now we focused on german radio stations, so if you don't like german radio, don't buy! :-) If you are missing your favourite channel, please mail us to support app-developers.de. Thanks for listening!MickeySid Player Pro goes iOS4tag:vanille.de,2010-06-23:sid-player-pro-goes-ios42010-06-23T12:00:00ZDespite being incredibly busy due to some nightmare project I have been working on for the last couple of months, I have managed to sneak in some time to update Sid Player Pro to catch up with iOS4's idea of multitasking. Sid Player Pro now can stream audio in the background, just as the iPod application can. Moreover, it also reacts to headphone remote control events and hooks itself with the lock and multimedia dock screen controls. The update has been submitted to Apple for review and we expect it to be posted very soon. Once Sid Player Pro appears in the AppStore, Module Player and Pokey Player will also be updated. Here's a video that demonstrates the new features in Sid Player Pro for iOS4.MickeyUneasinesstag:vanille.de,2010-06-07:uneasiness2010-06-07T12:00:00ZI'm feeling not too well these days. Some extremely bad performing contract projects combined with a general feeling of restlessness, uneasiness, and aimlessness are haunting me. I have the strong desire to simplify my life, getting rid of a couple of construction sites, and focusing more deeply, but on fewer things. I'm afraid this also means my involvement in various open source projects is at stake. I need to find some answers, soon.MickeyJoining twittertag:vanille.de,2010-04-04:joining-twitter2010-04-04T12:00:00ZI'm now on twitter. I'll use that for small status updates on the various open source related work I'm doing, e.g. FSO, OpenEmbedded, Vala, and the like. Follow me, if you can :)MickeyGSoC: Rejected againtag:vanille.de,2010-03-19:gsoc-rejected-again2010-03-19T12:00:00ZLooks like the freesmartphone.org project was rejected again as potential mentoring organization, same as last year. I guess I won't bother applying any more. It's not worth spending the time working on the submission when the whole process is completely intransparent and you don't even get feedback. After having served for other projects as mentor and twice even as project admin for Openmoko, I'm somewhat disappointed about that. Looks like a truly FOSS middleware for embedded systems is nothing Google wants to support. Oh well, less to care about next year.MickeyQt suddenly got interesting againtag:vanille.de,2010-02-27:qt-suddenly-got-interesting-again2010-02-27T12:00:00ZAfter Trolltech dropping the ball with the community back in the old days of Opie, I pretty much gave up on Qt (and C++) apart from accepting some contract work, so my C++/Qt skills would not get too rusty. Since my nightmares with getting something fluid out of Gtk+ (back in the Openmoko days), I did not have the chance to do much UI work -- the freesmartphone.org middleware kept me busy enough. I have been watching Qt progressing though, and ever since they introduced Qt Kinetic and QML it became very interesting for me again. QML looks like EFL's Edje been thought through -- don't get me wrong, Edje was groundbreaking (as most of Rasterman's work) when it made its debut, however in my opinion it got stuck in the middle and never lived up to what I was expecting from it. Once QML ships with Qt -- hopefully in the next minor or at least major version of Qt, I will get back on doing some FOSS work on application level to complete creating a smart phone stack. That's going to be fun!MickeyUpdated Sid Player, Module Player, and Websitetag:vanille.de,2010-02-25:updated-sid-player-module-player-and-website2010-02-25T12:00:00ZNew versions of the Sid Player and the Module Player are now available via the AppStore. While Sid Player just received a minor update with some performance tweaks, Module Player received a major content and performance update. Here's the changelog: Artwork: Module Player has a blueish tone now which leads to better identification if you also own Sid Player and Pokey Player. Performance: Database access has been completely rewritten for improved performance and less impact on the audio engine. It also helps with battery life. Database: Module Player now doubles the amount of available songs, we have added 70.000 songs in multiple new formats, such as 669, ABC, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, FAR, IT, J2B, MDL, MID, MT2, OKT, PSM, S3M, STM, ULT, UMX, WAV, and XM. The database has also been updated to incorporate new MOD songs uploaded since the last release. Authors & Songs: The number of songs per author is now being displayed next to the composer. Since there are so many song formats now, the type of song is shown next to the song title. Playlists: Double tapping on a song moves you into the author's view where you can see all songs of said authors. You can shuffle any of the playlists now. The random playlist will come up with new titles on every query. Player: The currently played pattern and row is now shown. Release notes longer than the screen width are now presented in old-style scrolltext fashion. We also added a seek bar (#1 feature wish), so you can jump to your favourite parts of the songs. The Oscillator view has been rewritten in OpenGL for improved performance. If you still experience audio glitches, you can turn off the Oscillator in the settings. I also finally took the time to work on an updated website for our team. Since I do not fancy direct HTML or CSS editing any more (I'm a big fan of frontends of all kinds), I did a small survey on website creation tools. I have settled down on Freeway Pro now, which is really amazing and allows me to realize my layout without having to care about the nitty details. Update: Sid Player Pro has just been updated as well, receiving all the internal goodies from the Mod Player plus an update to HVSC.52+PSIDMickeyF(SO|OS)DEM 2010tag:vanille.de,2010-02-08:fsoosdem-20102010-02-08T12:00:00ZJust came back from FOSDEM 2010, which -- after skipping the last incarnation -- was a great inspiring and productive event. The Openmoko devroom we originally requested was declined, however thanks to the initiative of Serdar Dere, it turned out we could snatch a last minute 3 hours timeslot that was left open by the Xorg guys. Very shortly we prepared a schedule and managed to get a nice program which was very well received. Due to the short notice, we could not manage to create a video recording infrastructure, so I'm afraid this year we can only provide the slides -- which are a notoriously bad substitute for real talks though. We try to improve for next year -- if we can get a devroom again. The pictures you are seeing are courtesy Dr. Nikolaus Schaller from Goldelico, btw. -- thanks! The FOSDEM team did certainly improve its organization over the last years, I was very pleased to see some of my criticism being taken into account. Apart from the lack of good coffee in Brussels (which the FOSDEM team probably is unguilty for), I can't complain about anything. Even WiFi worked tremendously well on saturday. I still think due to the size of the ever growing interest in this conference that the ULB as location should seriously be reconsidered though. The special service transport on sunday to the main station is a great idea, folks -- thanks a lot! Funnily enough, half of the ICE that took me to/from Frankfurt/Main to Brussels Zuid was filled with hackers, btw. :) I have met some interesting people working on mobile devices, such as dcordes, leviathan, GNUtoo, cr2, larsc, heinervdm, etc. It's great to see there is still momentum in real mobile FOSS architectures (i.e. something besides the Android, Maemo, or WebOS systems). I'm glad to tell you that this year we will see an exciting breakthrough in freesmartphone.org middleware supporting new platforms, i.e. progress on the HTC Dream and the Palm Pre is looking _very_ well. Stay tuned for more details appearing here soon. I wish every conference would be like that. The only slightly disappointing thing was the cross-buildsystem-session in the embedded room. Just when I was expecting the discussion about the problems and potential collaboration to start, the time for the session was over. :( Rather than wasting time watching Andy Green telling us that our projects will die soon and we should all start using Fedora/Embedded now, we could have had some progress... Oh well, perhaps next year.MickeyFOSDEM 2010tag:vanille.de,2010-02-03:fosdem-20102010-02-03T12:00:00ZDue to some lucky coincidences, we got a devroom at this year's FOSDEM. I'll be there, presenting a short overview about the history of the Openmoko project as well as a wrap-up of the latest work on the freesmartphone.org mobile devices middleware. Hope to see you there!Mickeyfso-boottag:vanille.de,2010-02-02:fso-boot2010-02-02T12:00:00ZI'm fed up with booting my Linux-based smartphones like desktop-systems. Two major developments will help me accomplish enormous improvements in boot speed: devtmpfs -- kernel support for the /dev file system dbus system activation -- on-demand launching of dbus-based services I'm going to carry out the following two tasks in OE: Writing fso-boot, a small executable written in C, which mounts the filesystems, brings up DBus and (optionally) launches X11 Setting fso-boot as new init process, that way you still have sysvinit and udev in your root file system, but they're not active unless explicitly asked for I'll do that for the freesmartphone.org adaptation for the HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1, Google ADP-1), which I'm running on 2.6.32 (necessary for devtmpfs) -- stay tuned for the first benchmarks.MickeyiPad? I'm loving it!tag:vanille.de,2010-02-01:ipad-im-loving-it2010-02-01T12:00:00ZSad to see that a lot of people are not getting it. The iPad is a revolutionary device -- it is the manifestation of transit, the transit from the classical desktop paradigm over to the new wave of ubiquitous computing. Applications like iWork for the iPad and the OmniGroup products are going to make a substantial difference. Software developers will now stop with overloading their apps with features (of which the typical user rarely uses more than 20%), but concentrate on streamlining the human computer interaction instead -- hence improving productivity and... fun with computers! We -- the LaTe App-Developers -- are embracing change and will create software for the iPad. Exciting times to live in! Update: Matt Gemmel got it, see his blog post with great insight into the relevance of the iPad. Update II: Joe Hewitt as well, see his blog post.MickeyLiar's Dice XMastag:vanille.de,2009-12-03:liars-dice-xmas2009-12-03T12:00:00ZIn-between coding FOSS middleware such as the freesmartphone.org software stack, my colleague and me are working on iPhone OS projects. After a bunch of retro players (Sid Player, Module Player, Pokey Player), we did a small fun game for christmas. Here's the video of us playing it (sorry for the german voices... didn't have time to do sub titles ;) Liar's Dice is available on the App Store. Enjoy!MickeyDonating my HTC Touch Pro (raph100)tag:vanille.de,2009-11-23:donating-my-htc-touch-pro-raph1002009-11-23T12:00:00ZI bought the HTC Touch Pro some months ago in order to port the freesmartphone.org middleware to it and help to raise an end-user distro. While things began very optimistic (i.e. the modem support was completed after just a few weeks), it came to a relative halt pretty soonish afterwards -- because of missing kernel support. Google releasing the kernel source code for the HTC Dream has enabled the HTClinux folks to quickly come up with some very impressive results, but due to the heavy differences in the baseband firmware it did not spare them from carrying out an amazing pile of reverse engineeering -- just like every other anti-vendor-port. While these guys truly have done great work, I personally think it's not going anywhere soon -- at least not to a point where we have an open GNU/Linux on competitive hardware fully supporting all peripherals of the device. Showstoppers are always Bluetooth, Wifi, Sound, Suspend/Resume, and all the other things where Google didn't care about standard mainline interfaces, but rather decided to put the meat into userland -- stowed away behind a "safe" closed source license. Anyways, this hope/dream/experiment has ended, hence I'm offering to donate my HTC Touch Pro (raph100) to one of the HTClinux kernel hackers as a last act of supporting this anti-vendor-port. If you think you are qualified, drop me a mail. Meanwhile, I'll continue supporting the Openmoko devices and concentrate on the Palm Pre.MickeyTowards the end of 2009tag:vanille.de,2009-11-10:towards-the-end-of-20092009-11-10T12:00:00ZI just came back from the annual OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDEM) which happened to be in Cambridge, UK. It was a very productive meeting and we agreed on some important things to move OpenEmbedded forward as a whole. Please see the mailing lists for meeting minutes and summaries. We also elected a new board for the e.V. and despite the grief that led to me leaving the OE core team (which subsequently lead to the dissolving of it), I have volunteered (and been reelected) to serve a 2nd year as board member. As written in a previous installment of this column, I have dedicated the lion's share of 2009 to the reimplementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs in Vala. Please see the wiki for architectural details, as I don't want to repeat this here. This is an overview of the current status: fsousaged fsousaged has been fully completed and is being used for quite a while now in distributions. All of the plugins are working: dbus_service: Implementation of resource handling as per org.freesmartphone.Usage. lowlevel_kernel26: Low level suspend/resume handling for Linux 2.6. lowlevel_openmoko: Low level suspend/resume handling for Openmoko Smartphones GTA01/GTA02. fsodeviced fsodeviced has been fully completed, but is not yet being used in any distributions. All of the plugins are working: accelerometer: generic accelerometer handling, needs one of the device-specific accelerometer plugins. accelerometer_lis302: lis 302 accelerometer support. alsa_audio: alsa audio PCM output and routing (scenario) support. kernel_idle: system idle notifications. kernel_input: system input handling. kernel_info: kernel information. kernel26_display: display class-device based brightness control. kernel26_rtc: realtime clock, wakeup alarm. kernel26_leds: LED class-device based brightness control. kernel26_powersupply: peripheral power supply control. openmoko_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for Openmoko devices. thinkpad_powercontrol: device-specific power supply controls for IBM Thinkpad devices. fsotimed fsotimed is about half-way complete compared to frameworkd. The working plugin is: alarm: DBus alarm service as per org.freesmartphone.Time.Alarm. fsonetworkd fsonetwork is done with the same level of functionality as in frameworkd. The working plugin is: sharing: internet connection sharing. fsogsmd fsogsmd has been on hold since end of April due to waiting for more Vala language features. When they finally appeared in September, I picked up where I left and furiosly worked on what i perceive as the prime subsystem of FSO :) The basic infrastructure is more or less complete now and we cover about 50% of the DBus API as per *org.freesmartphone.GSM.**, i.e. device info, sim access, network registration, sms, and call handling is working. All work has been done in a generic way, i.e. without taking any care of modem specifics yet -- which is what will be my next task before I go on covering the missing API. fsogpsd I have added a skeleton of that to the repository and adapted some lower-level classes in libfsotransport to work both for fsogsmd and fsogpsd. I would have done more work, but I'm not keen on implementing the Gypsy API, since I think it's not a particular good DBus API fsopreferencesd / fsopimd / fsoeventsd All these have not been started, not even been thinking much about 'em. fsopreferencesd will probably have to wait until dconf / gvariant / gsettings have finally landed in glib. fsopimd is waiting for a redesign of the opimd API. fsoeventsd needs a new architecture, but I have to discuss this with the others before we can start cranking. 2010 will be a very interesting year for Linux on mobile devices, even more so for freesmartphone.org. Due to the lack of someone funding FSO, I will probably not find much time to work on FSO in 2010 -- that's why I'm so furiously working on getting most of it to a state where others can jump in before the end of this year. Apart from that, I hope we can get FSOSHRCON'10 happening very early in 2010 and uplevel kernel support for some of the more interesting semi-open devices such as the Palm Pre, Nokia N900, and the HTC family. FSO would be more than happy to add device-specific support for this hardware once the kernel is up to par. Cheers!MickeyEin Kompliment (unplugged)tag:vanille.de,2009-10-24:ein-kompliment-unplugged2009-10-24T12:00:00ZNot being a fan of the band, but this is touching me.MickeyModule Playertag:vanille.de,2009-10-12:module-player2009-10-12T12:00:00ZAfter bringing the Sid Player (and its siblings Pro and Lite) into the AppStore, we just delivered a new production, the Module Player (and its sibling Lite). The market-situation will be quite different this time, as there are already two other Module Players. We believe we have the highest quality play routine though and a proven user interface. 70000 mods at your fingertips! See the video for a short demo:MickeyPlease Vote!tag:vanille.de,2009-09-25:please-vote2009-09-25T12:00:00ZI'm refraining from any concrete political statements in this blog, since blogs are very lacking as discussion platforms. What I do want to say though is, please vote this sunday! Every missing vote is a bullet in the guns of the radical parties, no matter whether they're positioned left or right. Please take your chance, voice your opinion and vote! P.S. Klarmachen zum Ändern? :)MickeyGSM Palm Pre on the horizontag:vanille.de,2009-09-24:gsm-palm-pre-on-the-horizon2009-09-24T12:00:00ZAs mentioned, the freesmartphone.org team and community has taken the challenge to put the FSO stack on the Palm Pre which is out next month. The goal is to manage a voice call with the FSO stack within four weeks. The idea behind this is a very important one. With only the Openmoko FreeRunner as a platform, the FSO stack is doomed into oblivion sooner or later, since its a very limited hardware platform -- in quantity, but considering the closed alternatives also in quality. Hence, we need to proof that FSO can run on current, competitive hardware -- to embrace companies that want to adopt FSO in their niche. The Palm Pre is currently our major hope -- all other hardware being either too closed (yes, this includes the Nokia N900) or already outdated.MickeyVala gains support for server-side async dbustag:vanille.de,2009-09-13:vala-gains-support-for-server-side-async-dbus2009-09-13T12:00:00ZSomething wonderful has happened! Jürg Billeter -- mastermind of Vala -- pushed support for server-side async dbus into Vala. I hope I didn't annoy him too much (having continuesly pestered for almost a year now), but the net effect is that we can now continue working on fsogsmd, the Vala implementation of our dbus GSM server (see http://docs.freesmartphone.org for an overview of the API). Yay!MickeyToo much broken hardwaretag:vanille.de,2009-08-17:too-much-broken-hardware2009-08-17T12:00:00ZLet me announce the 3rd piece of broken hardware in 3 months. This is definitely too much :( First my Dreambox 7025, then a Denon AV receiver, and now my Linux workstation decided to die. It looks like (hopefully) just the PSU is to blame though -- doesn't react to incoming power any more. As if I had time for such things *sigh* ... Update: It looks like there was a power surge during a thunderstorm. My Dreambox and AppleTV halted as well... aaargh Update 2: A new PSU brings the workstation back to live *phew*. Dreambox and AppleTV did not have permanent damages either.MickeyField Recording Againtag:vanille.de,2009-08-15:field-recording2009-08-15T12:00:00ZAs mentioned in a previous installment of this column, I'm spending more time with music (and related tasks) again. To get some raw material for new samples, I started recording in the field. The best device I can recommend in the mid-budget region is the Tascam DR100 recorder -- this device comes with an aura of "work, not play"; unlike the famous Zoom devices which I found to be very plastic and unreliable. The killer features of the Tascam DR100 for me are: Built-in rechargable Li battery 2 XLR inputs w/ 48V phantom power 4 built-in microphones, two uni-, two omnidirectional. Simple UI, lots of dedicated buttons.MickeyOne week in Paristag:vanille.de,2009-08-07:one-week-in-paris2009-08-07T12:00:00ZSabine and me spent a week in Paris to celebrate our 8th wedding anniversary. It's pretty amazing that the ICE train takes only 4h from Frankfurt/Main to Paris, Gare de l'est -- this is almost the same amount of time it takes me to get to Berlin... Besides walking all around the city and visiting some sites, I took the chance to visit the Bearstech office and chat a bit with the guys there. Unfortunately only few bears were there at that time, but with only 4h to Paris, I'll be surely coming back more often. On the last day, we had a (yummy) dinner with some guys and their gals from SHR and openBmap fame. It was a great evening and a very nice conclusion to our small vacation, thanks guys! {width="320"}MickeyFSO founds BGB companytag:vanille.de,2009-07-29:fso-founds-bgb-company2009-07-29T12:00:00ZWe just released the following statement to various mailing lists: Braunschweig, Germany, 2009-07-29. For immediate release. The freesmartphone.org core-team founds a BGB company to facilitate the further development of free and open source middleware for Linux-based mobile systems: "Lauer, Lübbe, Schmidt, Willmann, freesmartphone.org GbR". The core-team members of the freesmartphone.org project today announced the founding of a legal entity offering consulting, training, and implementation services around the freesmartphone.org middleware platform, also known as FSO. "We now have a single point of contact for both commercial and non-commercial parties who want to use our services to create compelling solutions. This is of interest for groups or individuals creating new devices or freeing existing devices ("anti-vendor-ports") and who decided to incorporate the FSO middleware", says Dr. Michael Lauer, founder of the FSO project. "If you care about the further development of this platform or if you need guidance for tailoring or customizing the FSO middleware, contact us via E-Mail at coreteam\@freesmartphone.org". With todays' smartphones evolving into ubiquituous companions, a gap has emerged between widely used FOSS components like the Linux kernel and core system libraries on one side, and end-user applications on the other side. The lack of a complete free mobile software stack hinders innovation and leads to reinventing proprietary solutions for services middleware. FSO's mission is to close this gap by designing and developing solid middleware for mobile systems in an open fashion; this refers to not only publishing source code under open source licenses, but also to sharing the whole design and development process with the community and giving both commercial and non-commercial entities a way to co-drive and steer the process. Built on top of the Linux kernel, FSO implements high level services for mobile application development, accessible via the DBus interprocess communication standard. Leveraging the FSO APIs allows the developer to concentrate on solving application domain problems, such as business logic and presentation of data, without having to worry about the device specifics and low level details, such as how to access resources, telephony, location awareness, data storage, etc. *About freesmartphone.org: Previously funded by Openmoko Inc, freesmartphone.org is a collaboration platform for open source and open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for Linux-based smartphones. freesmartphone.org operates on the services layer (middleware) and offers APIs and reference implementations that support modern interconnected mobile devices. To provide reference solutions, freesmartphone.org works closely together with various device-specific communities such as the Openmoko, OpenEZX, and HTC-Linux groups. The FSO team honours and bases on specifications and software created by the freedesktop.org community. This means you can hire us (or donate money), if you want to support the FSO middleware development.MickeyUpdating the Recording Studiotag:vanille.de,2009-07-23:updating-the-recording-studio2009-07-23T12:00:00ZAlthough I kept working on my instrument skills, I neglected my recording studio for about a decade now. I guess the root of the problem is that I never got the hang of the modern computer based sequencers. The moment when I sold my KORG 01/W workstation (almost a decade ago) was the moment I more or less quit recording anything. While I'm working with computers for a living, I don't like software instruments much -- with one exception which is the reason for this post. I just acquired a Native Instruments MASCHINE -- which is a dedicated hardware controller for a software instruments (a groovebox, actually). This is slowly bringing back my motivation to do some recordings. As part of this motivation, I sold some of the gear that only gathered dust, namely an Akai MPC 2500, a Roland JD990 w/ VintageKeys extensions, and a BitStream WaveIdea controller. Less is more and keyboardwise, I'm feeling very confident with only a Roland V-Synth GT and a Roland V-Piano now. Stay tuned for some releases... after so many years :)MickeyDreambox 8000tag:vanille.de,2009-07-22:dreambox-80002009-07-22T12:00:00ZAfter the sudden death of my Dreambox 7025, the new OE-based device in the living room is a Dreambox 8000 -- simply the best set top box money can buy these days. Yes, it's quite expensive, but the hardware is fully loaded (heck, there's even WiFi) and the freedom to install what you want is invaluable.MickeyOpenmoko Workshop in Munichtag:vanille.de,2009-07-02:openmoko-workshop-in-munich2009-07-02T12:00:00ZI'll be present at the first Openmoko Workshop in Munich, gracefully organized by Dr. N. Schaller (Goldelico) hosted at the University of applied science in Munich. Topics will be developer-oriented, but beginners are also invited. There are only few seats left, so please contact Dr. Schaller via the freeyourphone.de forum, if you want to be on board. I'll be talking mainly about freesmartphone.org -- the beginning (2002-2008, from handhelds.org to openmoko.org), the present (2009, how to program with FSO), the future (2010-, what the Vala rewrite will bring and how we get FSO to more hardware). This is just a loose gathering to get started. If there is sufficient interest, we will consider turning this into a more formal (professional) training course in the future. Hope to see you there!MickeyPOS will dietag:vanille.de,2009-06-27:pos-will-die2009-06-27T12:00:00ZFrom everywhere you hear the whining and complaints of local points of sale that the internet is taking away their business foundation. Whenever I buy a new device, I try to countervail this effect by going to my local shop to buy it there instead of doing the couch potato buying it over the internet. However 9 out of 10 times I get disappointed by them not having what I want in stock. If I wanted to order it to get it later, I had ordered it online in the first place :( This morning I went to a local shop to buy a new communications device with a contract -- these point of sales get quite a nice provision when people buy contracts. To my surprise, they had the device I wanted in stock and I felt growing excitement. Then I grabbed a piece of paper showing them a special employee rebate code I got from another employee and guess what... "oh, with these kinds of rebates devices can only be ordered at the support hotline"... WTF? With this policy, points of sale will die -- it's inevitable. They are digging their own grave and I have no more symphathy.MickeyLinuxTag 2009tag:vanille.de,2009-06-24:linuxtag-20092009-06-24T12:00:00ZI'm on my way to LinuxTag 2009. Instead of a "real booth" like last year, we settled on a developer table in the hacking area -- there we can present our Linux on mobile projects such as GPE FSO OpenEZX OpenMoko Gnufiish in a more relaxed way -- giving room to dive into some technical issues, when interested folks come around. Find me there, if you're interested in any of the aforementioned projects. I'll be there until Friday afternoon.MickeySid Player 1.2.49tag:vanille.de,2009-06-12:sid-player-12492009-06-12T12:00:00ZWe have just submitted Sid Player 1.2.49 to Apple. Highlights of changes in this revision include: Author Tab: In offline mode, only show authors for which songs are available, Underrun Detection: Relax threshold a bit, add setting to turn it off completely (for you jailbreakers...), Settings Tab: Enable switching between multiple SID models, Files Database: Files are no longer stored on your filesystem, but in a database. This fixes the incredibly annoying iTunes synchronization times. NOTE that we had to wipe all your data during the upgrade to make this happen. and finally the first step towards the #1 wanted feature... Added four playlists: "Favorites", "My Top 50 Played", "Random 100", "HVSC Top 100". Enable reordering all playlists and adding/removing songs from/to the "Favorites" list directly from the Player screen. Although we wanted to ship more smaller updates, this one has become a major update and took us a while. I hope it gets past the review pretty fast, so you can enjoy our latest work! NB: The newest iPhone 3G[S] excited us a lot, especially since we already max out CPU power on the current models. We're looking forward to enabling stereo and to add some nice post processing effects in a special Sid Player version once this model is out. Stay tuned! NB2: Yes, we know that the HVSC team has released v50, however they have substituted a lot of PSID versions with RSID versions, which -- although they might sound better -- do no longer play given the limited CPU power of the iPhone and iPod Touch. I'm sorry, but until faster models appear, we can not ship the updated SIDs...MickeyI'm in lovetag:vanille.de,2009-05-13:im-in-love2009-05-13T12:00:00Z10 years of sound modelling research have just been unleashed: Roland V-Piano. No Samples Inside!MickeyResigning from OE Core Teamtag:vanille.de,2009-04-25:resigning-from-oe-core-team2009-04-25T12:00:00ZI have just sent a mail to the OE core team that I'm resigning as a member of said "core team". I will also give up administration of mailing lists, my position as OpenEmbedded e.V. board member, and taking care about the git/web/etc. services machine. I have been with OpenEmbedded since the beginning, together with Chris and Holger I founded it in 2002/2003, and although we had our ups and downs, over the years we always managed to keep the spirit of openness and friendlyness alive. However -- over the last 12 months, I have experienced some very unpleasant incidents in how certain members are treating other contributors, scaring them away, coldheartedly enforcing policies that are meant to be bendable guidelines, etc. This is no longer a project where I feel my contributions are welcome. The core team failed to do its job as a moderate and balanced steering committee -- it is apathetic and just bows down to the will of the most vocal single indviduals. I'm utterly disappointed by the amount of carelessness. Whether I will fork OE as a whole or maintain my own branch on the main server or somewhere else I have not decided yet.MickeyBack from Switzerlandtag:vanille.de,2009-04-04:back-from-switzerland2009-04-04T12:00:00ZJust came back from Berne where the bi-annual OpenExpo was held. The OpenExpo is one of my favourite conferences, since it's very professionally organized, has a rich mix of interesting topics and talks while retaining the very friendly characteristic spirit of switzerland -- which I like a lot. Sean Moss-Pultz from Openmoko Inc gave a talk in the "business" track, while I gave a talk in the "technology" track. Videos of both tracks are available here [actually, the business track is still missing, the technology track is already there though] -- please watch them before continuing reading. Sean "shocked" the world with a very honest retrospective and a description of the state of Openmoko right now, while I layed out the fragmented state of Linux on mobile and the way freesmartphone.org attempts to improve this situatin. Most facts have been detailed elsewhere, so I will not just repeat these, but rather state what it means for the movement of Linux on open mobile devices. Neo 1973 and the FreeRunner There is absolutely no reason to worry about support for the existing devices. Both the Neo1973 and the FreeRunner are in pretty good shape these days and will be supported by the forthcoming operating system upgrade, Openmoko 2009. Plus you have access to half a dozen of community distributions. If you happen to be plagued by the gsm-buzz problem on the FreeRunner, please join one of the de-buzzing initiatives -- there will be multiple ones. Other than that, the FreeRunner and parts are still in stock in high numbers. Openmoko, Inc. I have been with Openmoko, Inc. since the beginning. In fact, I'm employee number #3, #2 being Harald 'LaF0rge' Welte, who quit in 2007, #1 being Sean Moss-Pultz himself. I'm sad that things needed to be put on hold, but there are no hard feelings whatsoever towards Openmoko. In fact, I hope that the new product will be a huge success (I will buy one or two), so that the open phone can be restarted -- and if so, I would not mind to be a part of it again. freesmartphone.org As the FSO team is now without funding, we will continue working on it in our spare time, as much as we did work before Openmoko came around. We will however, a) look for new funding and b) slightly change priorities to support more other hardware, like the HTC anti-vendor-ports. All of us 100% believe in the ideas of Free platforms for free people, Unified access to services and peripherals, Solving real user-problems and leveraging creativity through simple and powerful tools. The Openmoko devices are and will remain our reference platform, since they're the only fully open ones. If you want to work on freeing more closed devices, be our guest! We are concentrating on middleware and helping application developers to create compelling applications based on the FSO middleware. We can not cover kernel support though. We will soon come up with a comprehensive table of FSO-compliance levels to indicate what level of support the FSO middleware expectes from the kernel. By that we hope to motivate anti-vendor-port communities (such as OpenEZX, Gnufiish, HTClinux) to uplevel their devices towards standard kernel interfaces and to establish more horizontal communication between those hardware-inspired communities. Epilogue Yes, Openmoko halting telephony is slowing the movement down. No, it's not killing it. Neither is it a sign that free software on mobile phones does not work or lacks demand. Many of us want free platforms. And no, Android is not it. Yes, it may be open enough for some people, and it may take lots of developers from Windows Mobile. But it does not bring more free hardware nor free infrastructure. Cheers, :M:MickeyBack from Aalborgtag:vanille.de,2009-03-26:back-from-aalborg2009-03-26T12:00:00ZJust returned from FOSS.Aalborg '09 where I held a talk about OpenEmbedded. It's been my second time in Aalborg (first time was Mobile Developer Days '07) and it's been a nice and informative experience. Met some folks doing amazing things with embedded. Everything was organized very professional and the presentations were interesting -- particularly the talk about security which was held by two guys from the OpenBSD project. OpenBSD has never really been on my radar, although according to what I've seen in the presentations it seems to be of really high quality. I guess I'll give it a look soon. Next week I'll be in Bern for OpenExpo '09. In May, the first FSOSHRCON and in June LinuxTag'09 are planned and perhaps FrOSCon again in August, but other than that, I pretty much try to stay at home for the remainder of this year. Btw., there's free WiFi on Aalborg Airport -- that's the spirit!MickeyCatching up and plans for 2009tag:vanille.de,2009-02-17:catching-up-and-plans-for-20092009-02-17T12:00:00ZI felt it's time to recap the stuff that kept me busy the last months and give you an overview over the achievements planned for this year -- always focusing the free software movement, of course. freesmartphone.org Let's start with the major project I've been working on, the freesmartphone.org project, funded by Openmoko, Inc. FSO grows, and it grows in the right directions. We get more API customers -- notably the SHR project and the Paroli project -- and refine our API and the reference implementation. The 5th milestone has just been released and apart from a major foobar with read-only partitions, it's pretty good. We are going to fix this OE-inheritance and release a milestone 5.1 in a couple of days. fso-abyss (GSM 07.10 Multiplexing) For some modems -- e.g. the TI Calypso (see my previous post on ogsmd and its modems) -- until now we have relied on pyneo's gsm0710muxd. Over the last weeks we found some severe problems (race conditions, buffer overflows) with this though, so I thought I have a shot at developing my own GSM 07.10 Multiplexer. The result is called fso-abyss and is -- as with all our software -- available at git.freesmartphone.org under a free software license. The major difference to gsm0710muxd is the architecture (and maintainability). While gsm0710muxd combines talking to the serial ports, the pty's, handling dbus queries, and doing modem specific things, fso-abyss went a different route. At the heart there is a minimal protocol engine implementing GSM 07.10. Since there was already something available in Qtopia -- even nicely seperated without any external dependencies -- I took that one and factored it out in a dedicated project called libgsm0710 (available in git as well). The idea here is that different interest groups can collaborate on getting the protocol engine right, since not everyone wants a DBus frontend such as implemented in fso-abyss. The next step was writing a VAPI file for glueing the protocol engine to Vala (more about that one in a bit), which has been used to develop the upper layers of fso-abyss. Last but not least, there was the pty implementation, the serial port communications abstraction, and finally the dbus server. The DBus API originally designed in cooperation with pyneo has been enhanced to feature the additional features (only) present in fso-abyss. Apart from the architecture, fso-abyss also can handle virtual serial port signalling, 07.10 test commands, automatic session handling, has a wakeup service, and more. Next up is adding support for the Cinterion mc75i which has some proprietary extensions to GSM 07.10 Basic Multiplexing. dbus-hlid (DBus High Level Introspection Daemon Modern DBus APIs are pretty dynamic, i.e. objects can come and go at any time. Depending on the hardware, you may find more or less objects of a certain kind. You can now add infrastructure to query the objects (essentially a duplication of what DBus should provide), or just rely on the existing DBus introspection API. Unfortunately this API is missing some critical features to make it really usable, such as querying objects that implement a certain interface. So I took the plunge and factored this out of the freesmartphone.org frameworkd, since it has broader use. This is the API for it (as introspected by mdbus): root@om-gta02:~# mdbus -s org.freesmartphone.DBus /org/freesmartphone/DBus [METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListBusNames() -> ( as:result ) [METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListObjectPaths( s:busname ) -> ( ao:result ) [METHOD] org.freesmartphone.DBus.ListObjectsByInterface( s:busname, s:iface ) -> ( ao:result ) Here are examples of how you can use it (demonstrated within a Python shell): >>> hlid.ListBusNames() [ 'org.freedesktop.DBus', 'org.freesmartphone.omuxerd', ':1.21', 'org.bluez', 'org.tichy.launcher', ':1.13', ':1.0', 'org.freesmartphone.frameworkd', ':1.14', ':1.1', ':1.2', ':1.3', ':1.4', 'org.freesmartphone.ogsmd', ':1.6', 'org.freesmartphone.DBus'] >>> hlid.ListObjectPaths("org.freesmartphone.ogsmd") ['/org/freesmartphone/GSM/Device', '/org/freesmartphone/GSM/Server'] >>> hlid.ListObjectPaths("org.freesmartphone.odeviced") [ '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Audio', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/CPU', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display/0', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Display/gta02_bl', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/IdleNotifier/0', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Info', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/Input', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_aux_red', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_blue', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_orange', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/neo1973_vibrator', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/Bluetooth', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/UsbHost', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerControl/WiFi', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/ac', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/adapter', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/apm', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/battery', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/PowerSupply/usb', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/RealTimeClock/0', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/RealTimeClock/rtc0'] >>> hlid.ListObjectsByInterface("org.freesmartphone.odeviced", "org.freesmartphone.Device.LED") [ '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_aux_red', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_blue', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/gta02_power_orange', '/org/freesmartphone/Device/LED/neo1973_vibrator'] fso-monitord While working on implementing GSM time(zone) support for ogsmd, we found we had too few samples, especially since time(zone) information are only sent by few providers all over the world. Moreoever, we missed a generic means to record all the data the frameworkd is sending out via its signals, such as: Usage statistics Location Updates Diagnostic Data To support this (and more), we came up with fso-monitord, which is available from git as well. fso-monitord logs its data to a flat file format that you can send to us to improve our databases or for debugging. We also figured this would be the best place to add a generic frameworkd watchdog -- monitoring all fso components -- shutting down or restarting components as necessary and also logging incidents such as API violations. What's next in FSO? For milestone 5.5 (due end of march), we have two major features on the roadmap, namely bluetooth networking (headset profile) and extended PIM support. Milestone 6 will then sport full-fledged networking. Beyond milestone 6 -- apart from one major thing, which I'll cover in a second -- we only have some rough plans, such as revamping or refining the subsystems we're not perfectly happy with (oeventsd and opreferencesd come to mind). Also, alsa audio scenario handling is broken by design, but this is something we have to take up with upstream. The freesmartphone.org reference implementation has been progressing incredibly fast. This is partly due to choosing Python as the implementation language (which has been a wise choice) of our DBus APIs. Now you all know that although I truely love Python (I even wrote a book about it) and try to use it everywhere it fits, I'm very well aware that for the future of the freesmartphone.org project, it might be important to come up with a frameworkd reimplementation in a compiled language -- to reduce the footprint and squeak every possible bit of performance out of the (embedded) system. This is why I have decided to encourage a second reference implementation. This one will be written in Vala (I might have mentioned it before, did I?) which is an incredible combination of elegance and performance, featuring a complete lack of any runtime penalties and additional dependencies. It's simply amazing and I'm seriously thinking about writing an introductionary book about Vala later this year. Anyways, back to the topic, the first bits of this Vala implementation has landed in the freesmartphone.org git in the form of the very successful GSoC project odeviced, written by Sudarshan S. Stay tuned for some amazing FSO runtime speedups coming in autumn and winter this year to your device. XeTex Next to writing software for the freesmartphone.org project, I also found some time to pick up working with my favourite writing tool LyX. LyX, which could be described as a LaTeX frontend, nowadays features integration with the new LaTeX variant XeTex. In contrast to other incarnations such as pdfLaTeX, XeTeX can utilize system fonts such as AAT or OpenType, which are the latest technology in computer-assisted typesetting. I can now use my "corporate" fonts FF Meta and FF Meta Serif from LyX -- amazing! Conferences Although still working on cutting down my travelling, I can't miss some conferences this year. I managed to skip FOSDEM, which made me a bit sad, but I'll be compensated by attending Chemnitzer Linux-Tage FOSS Aalborg OpenExpo 2009 LinuxTag 2009 and possible some more... This year my main topics will be OpenEmbedded and freesmartphone.org -- both dedicated to reducing the fragmentation of Linux-based embedded systems and to ease writing software for mobile devices running free and open source software. I hope we'll bump into each other at one of these occasions. Stay tuned!MickeySid Player Updatetag:vanille.de,2009-01-06:sid-player-update2009-01-06T12:00:00ZOur Sid Player application has been on sale in the AppStore for three weeks now. We received quite a nice amount of feedback considering that this is a niche application -- thanks to all of you who downloaded and reviewed or mailed us! Behind the curtains, we have been analysing the feedback and have just started to work on the first update which we expect to be available within the next 4 weeks. This next release is mostly a database update, since we will add the missing songs from the HVSC directories 'GAMES' and 'DEMOS'. This adds about 2000 more classy titles that were left out due to not being present in the appropriate 'MUSICIANS' subdirectories. Apart from that we will add an NTSC-override in the settings tab and -- if all goes well -- add some download-all-the-good-stuff buttons ;-) Stay tuned for more exciting things coming to the Sid Player this year!MickeyVisiting 25c3 for one daytag:vanille.de,2008-12-27:visiting-25c3-for-one-day2008-12-27T12:00:00ZAlthough traditionally the Chaos Computer Congress' schedule is slightly suboptimal for me (12/26th is my birthday), I'm going to be in Berlin from 12/28th to 12/30th and will visit CCC on the 3th day (12/29th). I'm going to attend Harald's talk about GSM base stations, so if you want to talk to me, just pick me up afterwards.MickeySid Player on iPhonetag:vanille.de,2008-12-10:sid-player-on-iphone2008-12-10T12:00:00ZYou all know how much I adore the C64 sound aesthetics. This is the #1 program I was missing in my iPhone. Out now in the App Store!Mickeyogsmd and its modemstag:vanille.de,2008-12-03:ogsmd-and-its-modems2008-12-03T12:00:00ZRecently, I have been working on adding more support for various types of modems to ogsmd. "Why's that?", I hear you say, "isn't that already done since long?". Yes and no. There are two dimensions where modems might differ: The way how the AT interface is exposed, The implemented AT command set. Both dimensions come with their own set of problems: Exposing an AT interface As you might know, there are basically three different means for exporting an AT interface: A single line without mulitplexing support, Multiple premultiplexed lines, A single line with multiplexing mode. Before we go into the details, some notes about what I mean with multiplexing mode. The 3GPP standard 07.10 defines a binary multiplexing protocol that exposes a number of virtual channels over which you can talk AT as defined in v250, 05.05, 07.07, etc. The concrete number of channels modem-specific -- it usually varies between three and four. Let's come back to the three ways of exporting an AT interface now: A single line without multiplexing A single line without multiplexing support is the easiest, however it is also the most limiting way. The reason for that being that quite a lot of commands might take a long time to complete -- during that time the single line is blocked and you can not perform additional commands nor receive the so-called unsolicited responses from the network. These messages usually inform you about changes in the environmental GSM network condition, but also occur as notifications for incoming SMS or calls. In that scenario you will not be able to handle GPRS and voice calls at the same time. Multiple premultiplexed lines In the most simple form, a modem might support two discrete lines, e.g. one for all AT commands, the other one for GPRS connections. Some modems support three, four or even many more lines, however this usually comes with some strings attached. Multiple premultiplex lines usually are non-homogenous, that is you can not perform every AT command on any line, rather there is a line for SIM access, a line for voice calls, a line for network commands, etc. A single line with multiplexing mode In contrast to the premultiplxed line, these kinds of modems support an optional multiplexing mode over the single line transport (see explanation above). While this means that you need support code for the demultiplexing, a usually nice side effect is that the multiplexed lines are homogenous, e.g. the application (ogsmd in that case) can chose how to operate the lines. If you have more than two lines, you might want to dedicate one to unsolicited responses only, so you can react to network events even while dialling out. You might want to reserve one line for GPRS data connections and -- if you have a modem that does not buffer SIM access -- you might want to dedicate one line for the (potentially slow) SIM card retrieval commands. The AT commandset The second dimension of differences is the set of supported AT commands. The GSM AT command set is relatively "old" (in terms of computer science) and has its root in the (even older) command set (e.g. v25ter / v.250) designed for analogue terminal adapters. The GSM standards such as 3GPP 05.05, 07.07 define commands that serve as addition to the ones defined in v.250. Unfortunately, the lion's share of these commands has been tagged "optional" -- also some of the GSM functionality is severely underspecified. This can lead to trouble such as follows: Multiple response format are to be considered "legal", which makes it tougher for your AT command parser. Some important status commands (such as the call status) are not covered by the specification at all. This means you need to rely on heuristics and timers to periodically poll the status. Vendors have extended the standard command set with dozens of additional commands. Your modem abstraction needs to handle these addition commands, but not rely on them. Some vendors even violate the standard to feature additional parameters. Obviously this is actually worse than inventing new commands (not to speak about implementing a multi-vendor modem class here...). Briefly, some examples: TI Calypso The TI Calypso is a 2.5G (no EDGE) modem from Texas Instruments, as found in the Openmoko mobile phones Neo1973 and the FreeRunner. It has a fairly comprehensive AT implementation. All the commands support the query parameter and there are few standard violations. TI invented about 50 extracommands, of which ogsmd is using about 10 -- mainly for extended call progress information and network status. Freescale Neptune The Freescale Neptune is a 2.5G (EDGE) custom modem as appearing in the widely successful Motorola EZX Linux mobile phone family. The AT implementation is a nightmare, there are dozens of standard violations, implicit behaviour all over the place, and as if that wasn't enough, it has about 100 completely undocumented custom commands. And yes, 90% of the commands do NOT support the query format... Cinterion mc75i The Cinterion (previously SIEMENS) modem is one of the latest in a huge family of industry modems, deployed in millions of stationary and mobile devices. It will appear in the next-generation Openmoko device (codename GTA03). Its AT implementation is conforming to all standards and has been canonically enhanced to fill out the missing spots in the specifications. The documentation is a dream. Bringing it all together Supporting an additional modem in ogsmd can take from a day to some weeks, depending on the discussed two dimensions "way of exposing the interface" and "commandset implementation". By the way, one particular ugly area is the call handling. As I have mentioned, the GSM standard only supports little information here (due to the compatibility with analogue modems), so most vendors have added their own unsolicited commands to take care of that. For those who have not though, we have a generic abstraction in ogsmd that uses timings and additional status requests (+CCLC to the rescue) to overcome this limitation. However, imagine a singleline modem with no vendor supported extra commands blocking during an ATD command... welcome to the dark. So all this has motivated you to add a new modem abstraction to ogsmd? Excellent, be my guest! It now boils down to first identifying the way how to talk to it and then either chose to derive from the generic 'singleline' or the 'muxed4line' modem class. If the latter, you can adjust the number of individual channels created based on the capabilities of your modem. If your AT interface is premultiplexed, there's nothing else to do but match the channels to the right device nodes. If your AT interface supports a multiplexing mode, use the gsm0710muxd inbetween ogsmd and your modem (take a look at the TI Calypso implementation which is doing that as well). Second, you need to find out where the standard AT implementation does not work with your modem or is not giving you all the information your modem could provide (think special commands). For such cases, in your new modem class you want to override specific mediators and add new unsolicited handlers. I'll briefly explain what these two are: Custom Mediators In ogsmd, a mediator is a small class that encapsulates a dbus command such as: org.freesmartphone.GSM.SIM.RetrieveMessagebook(), or org.freesmartphone.GSM.Device.GetInfo() ogsmd's abstract mediator module (ogsmd/modems/abstract/mediator.py) contains mediators that are using standardized AT commands to perform their job. If your modem does not support these commands -- or has better commands to do that -- you should override said mediator (ogsmd/modems/mediator.py) to issue different commands in the 'trigger' method. Then, collect the results in 'responseFromChannel', and forward it to dbus -- that's all. Custom Unsolicited Handlers Unsolicited handlers specify what happens on incoming messages that originate from the GSM network, e.g. a +CRING that informs you about an incoming call. The handler then can perform additional queries or just trigger a dbus signal. If your modem has additional (non-standard) unsolicited commands (or violates the 3GPP standards, which happens often enough) that you want to process, write a handler function in the unsolicited module (ogsmd/modems/unsolicited.py) for each of these. Epilogue I hope you have an idea what it means to add a new modem support class to ogsmd now. If you have more questions or want to help, drop a mail to smartphones-userland@linuxtogo.org. I hope you enjoyed this months' tech talk ;-)MickeyPornophoniquetag:vanille.de,2008-10-26:pornophonique2008-10-26T12:00:00ZThanks to my framework team buddy Daniel 'Alphaone' Willmann, I just fell in love with the german band Pornophonique. Everyone appreciating the 8-bit chipsounds we had in the old days of computing will absolutely enjoy their work. My favourite song is 'Sad Robot' from the album 8-bit-Lagerfeuer -- it sounds a bit Everlast-inspired, but hey, that's a very common 4-chord-loop. Did I mention that their music is creative commons licensed? Hats off, guys -- you rock!MickeyCI61 06:50 FRAtag:vanille.de,2008-10-14:ci61-0650-fra2008-10-14T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: 好久不見! Three weeks passed within a blink. Last sunday, we smoothly landed in Frankfurt/Main after 14 hours of a calm flight. 4/5 of the Openmoko Framework Team (while Stefan was on vacation in .au and missed all the fun) met in Taipei to tackle some outstanding issues and synchronize with the plans for the next major Openmoko release. For a start, please refer to the blog postings of Charlie and Daniel, who mentioned some of the things we did in detail. Let me cover the current status and what we are going to work on in the remainder of this year and then step back and talk a bit about the meaning of all this. Right now the framework offers you support for the following tasks, everything accessible via consistent and convenient DBus interfaces: Device control (Backlight, Peripheral Power, Real Time Clock, USB, Switches, Buttons, Audio) covers the basics for embedded systems. Thanks to kernel 2.6, most of these interfaces are working on all devices -- adding a new device should require almost 0 work. In fact the only machine specific module we have in odeviced is *neo-powercontrol* which takes care of the Openmoko specific peripheral devices. GSM Telephony (SIM access, SMS, Network, Calls, Supplemental Services, GPRS) is more or less feature complete minus some of the more esoteric features such as advice of charge (AOC) and GSM time (zone) reporting, which are only supported by few providers. Right now we have support for the following modems: - Generic singleline and multiplexed multiline, serving as start points for your customizations, - TI Calypso, as found in Openmoko devices and some HTC ones, - Sierra USB, as found in Lenovo Thinkpads, - Freescale Neptune, as found in Motorola EZX phones. Support for the SIEMENS / Cinterion MC75i as well as for the Qualcomm-based HTC devices is on our list next. Resource Control for peripheral subsystems, such as GSM, GPS, Bluetooth, Wifi, etc. This provides you with reference counted resource management allowing for a maximum of user level power management (kernel level power management is not covered here). (A)GPS support covering NMEA and UBX devices with downloadable ephemeris and almanac for greatly improved warm- and coldstart performance. Preferences, Events, and Rules. This triade supports a simple way of configuring application preferences as well as defining system behaviour (display dimming, ringtones, sms notifications, battery notifications, and much more) using a set of extendable and customizable rules. The two major things missing until we officially declare a 0.9 release are PIM and Networking. For the former, we're attempting to integrate the results of a Google Summer of Code project (opim API), for the latter, we're (still) evaluating whether NetworkManager, Moblin Connman, or Exalt can fit our usecases and needs -- plus a very limited set of convenient calls on top. All of the above is of course complementing the freedesktop.org initiative and should serve as a natural addition in order to help standardizing important Linux-based embedded APIs, as found in Maemo, Openmoko, LiMo, Moblin, OpenEZX, etc. We are commited to cooperate with said platforms to help defragmenting the mobile device world so that application programmers have it easier to target multiple platforms. Along this line, the recently posted weekly Openmoko engineering newsletter adressed the issue of Openmoko and its relationship to freesmartphone.org. The bottom line is that Openmoko is funding the freesmartphone.org initiative to help fighting fragmentation. Previously Openmoko's strategy was breadth-first to show the amazing versatility of open devices. Their next strike is going deep in one direction to create something that is both attracting developers (thanks to the dbus service level framework) as well as users (thanks to a pleasingly simple, extensible, phone application). We will see both of this in the forthcoming Openmoko 2009 distribution which is going to be the first FSO-compliant distribution ever -- with more (e.g. Debian with pkg-fso, SHR and Rasterman's work) being underway. Lots of them built out of OpenEmbedded, of course. (Speaking of OpenEmbedded -- the long awaited switch to git is happening this week. Open the flood gates and embrace our new revision control system :)) Last but not least some personal remarks. With me being part of the Openmoko family for more than two years now, it was time to reevaluate and redefine our relationship. I'm really glad to announce that Openmoko supports my direction of stepping a bit back from being overall Openmoko platform architect, allowing me to concentrate on the freesmartphone.org framework -- making this part of the Openmoko platform as strong as possible. As said, the three weeks passed too quickly and we found out we need to synchronize more often -- hence I'm looking forward to increase the frequency a bit and next year stay more often at the Openmoko headquarters. 乾杯!MickeySt.Augstin, Braunschweig, Berlin, Taipeitag:vanille.de,2008-09-18:staugstin-braunschweig-berlin-taipei2008-09-18T12:00:00ZAlthough trying (really!) to cut down travelling, it's still a lot. Here's a sweeping swipe of what happened during the past couple of months and what's going to happen soon. Froscon FrOSCon took place at its usual place on the last weekend in August and it was a very well organized conference -- even better and more streamlined than the previous year was. I had the pleasure to listen to the Minix3 talk from Prof. Tanenbaum, which was very entertaining. Unfortunately my Openmoko talk was right after his one, so I had to take people kind of down to earth ;) Since I was feeling pretty weak at this weekend I could only attend the first day. Looking forward to next year's session. Braunschweig Been travelling from Frankfurt to Braunschweig (to work with the Openmoko students on the framework) for a couple of times and I have started to actually use my Openmoko FreeRunner as a GPRS-forwarding device for my laptop. Using the freesmartphone.org framework it's a breeze to do that. I just have to issue the dbus command ActivateContext("internet.eplus.de", "", "") and wait until the context goes online. Then I use iptables to enable NAT and forwarding for the laptop on the FreeRunner and it's done. GPRS is very solid on the FreeRunner -- it works for hours without any disconnections or other interruptions. If the data connection is not 100% loaded you even get incoming call signalling and can take phone calls in between Framework Talking about the Openmoko / freesmartphone.org framework... we had a successful milestone3 release of it, debuting PDU-mode for SMS and phonebook data as well as lots of bugfixes over the place. We also have some nice reference docs now -- i'm still working on introductionary type docs. Unfortunately despite me trying to educate, lots of people still don't get the point of the framework releases -- I get frequent comments on the testing UI zhone, but rarely anyone is actually contributing to the dbus API specification and implementation discussion :( I seriously ponder whether to release console images in the future to make this 100% clear. I say it again: FSO is not about user interfaces, it's about a strong independent dbus service level framework to facilitate 3rd party development. That said, there are four important contributions in the freesmartphone.org world: pkg-fso, fso-gpsd, frameworkd-glib, downloads.freesmartphone.org: pkg-fso is a team coordinating the packaging of any software from the FSO initiative (and, widely, any software related to Openmoko). fso-gspd is a program offering a compatibility layer for the org.freedesktop.gypsy implementation of ogpsd. There are a lot of programs using the gpsd interface and with this compatibility layer, those programs will still work, but benefit from the improved accuracy of the UBX-based ogpsd. frameworkd-glib is a C library offering bindings to the freesmartphone.org framework APIs. Handling modern dbus APIs can be cumbersome in C (think a{sv} and friends), so this library offers you convenience functions for that. We now have official feeds hosted by a machine living in the same rack that serves kernel.org. Thanks to our friends at NSLU2-Linux.org and OSUOSL.org. All software goodies live in our git repository. Mobile Developer Days '08 Last week I had the honor to give an invited talk about OpenEmbedded and Qt-integration into OE for the Mobile Developer Days 08 conference in Berlin. This conference is pretty unique in that it adopts a platform-agnostic approach, i.e. you will find people working on Symbian, Qt, PalmOS, Windows Mobile there. I even spotted iPhone folks. In my opinion, such a holistic approach is important for the future of development on mobile devices. Congrats, folks. Speaking about the iPhone... true readers of this column may remember that I have been a MacOS user since early this year. To add up on this, lately I acquired an iPhone to gain some experience with this exciting new development platform. I have just been looking into what this system provides. I can already say that there's a whole lot of stuff where FOSS can learn and I'm glad to be a part of both worlds, so I can try to be a catalysator. Taipei '08 On Sunday I'm going to fly over to Taipei. It's been a while (12 months to be exact) since I met the folks in person there and there's lots of stuff to catch up on. Now that the framework approaches its 0.9 release at the end of the year, we need to discuss the plan for the next 6 months. Can't wait to meet all the engineers again! It's going to be three interesting weeks. Stay tuned :)MickeyFSO meets EZXtag:vanille.de,2008-07-02:fso-meets-ezx2008-07-02T12:00:00Z{width="200"} {width="200"} {width="200"} Coming soon...MickeyGTK, ASU, FSO? TMTLA!tag:vanille.de,2008-06-28:gtk-asu-fso-tmtla2008-06-28T12:00:00ZWith the new Openmoko Framework initiative (as posted in previous installments of this column) facing its first milestone release (nothing but solid phone calls, so don't be disappointed. If you have no Openmoko device, check out the video in the same directory), we are now facing three different major software stacks for the Neo family (there are special-purpose variants, but I won't go into details here). As there is quite a chance that developers might be confused about that, I want to use this chance to sketch the big picture and answer some of the questions around the future of these stacks. Products Openmoko is selling hardware products. Openmoko funds work on software stacks, so that the actual hardware can be more than just a developer board, but rather approaching a useful mobile compagnion. As with all kinds of products, Openmoko products have a -- more or less specific -- target audience. However, as we learned during all these months since we sketched the first product in the nice summer of 2006, even this specific target audience is not completely homogenous. The existance of the three software stacks is both due to the fact that we all are still learning how to write software for mobile devices, but also because there are quite substantial differences in what people expect from and want to do with their Openmoko devices. Stacks So -- what are these three stacks, where are the actual differences and who should run which stack? In a nutshell, it boils down to the following: The Openmoko 2007.2 Stack, utilizing GTK+ and assorted applications. 2007.2, since it was the 2nd iteration of the GTK+ user interface that we released in 2007. The ASU Stack, the combination of a classical smartphone stack based on Trolltech's Qtopia ported to X11 and enhanced with an EFL-based launcher and new applications. You may have seen the term Illume which is the launcher of ASU. The FSO Stack, also known as the Openmoko Framework initiative. This one is called FSO, because it's an implementation of the freesmartphone.org APIs. You may also have seen the term Zhone which describes the framework testing user interface and is a minor part of this stack. Openmoko 2007.2 is for people who are familiar with the GNOME Mobile initiative and who want to write applications that run on multiple devices running (parts of) GNOME Mobile. This includes Maemo, which runs on the Nokia Internet Tablets. The strength of the GTK+ stack is a UI and programming environment similar to what you run on your Linux desktop, if you're into GNOME. The GTK+ has PIM applications based on the Evolution Data Server and runs the gsmd phone server. Although you can use them, the applications are still pretty rough und unfinished. Some people have problems with the stability of the phone server. ASU has been started to integrate the Qtopia stack -- ported to X11 -- with a new set of graphically pleasing applications based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. Qtopia is a more mature product than the GNOME Mobile stack and you can expect all the standard feature phone applications to work in a solid way. It uses the Qtopia phone server. Since -- contrary to standard Qtopia -- it does not directly use the framebuffer, non-Qt applications can safely share the screen with Qt applications, that is until you are writing applications that do not communicate with the framework. If you want to integrate, then you're back to C++ and Qt. FSO has been started to overcome the deficiencies both of the 2007.2 and the ASU stack, namely to come up with an extensible framework that gives developers the infrastructure they need to create solid and exciting software products based on the Openmoko platform. An infrastructure that supports competing UIs while we can collaborate on developing services, making the framework strong . Here, the focus is on stable highlevel services that you can access from whatever language or UI that supports dbus. People report that despite its infancy, e.g. the phone server part in FSO is already more solid than anywhere else. Future Right now, Openmoko's priority is getting the ASU to a point where it is stable and satisfies the every-day use with the FreeRunner product. In parallel, Openmoko recognizes the framework initiative as critical for further iterations of their software stacks. The goal is to be able to take one application from one stack and replace it with an application from another stack. Once all applications are framework-aware, this goal can be reached -- which also implies userdata compatibility between software stacks, of course! In practice, this means once the framework has reached a certain extent (see http://trac.freesmartphone.org for our tasks, issues, and milestones), we can expect it to be seen in all kinds of products, likely including further releases of the ASU. Until then, the FSO image is already your best bet if you want to write something that is tailored for your special usecase. If you want, you could also help us shaping our framework-testing-toy Zhone into something that fulfills the daily needs :) Of course, Openmoko would also love to see Openmoko 2007.2 getting more love, but they don't have the resources to do it. If you are interested in working on it, here's a strategy I'd recommend: Remove neod, gsmd, and phonekit. Integrate the framework phone subsystem and make the dialer talk fso.org OTAPI (substituting gsmd and phonekit). Integrate the framework device subsystem and make the launcher use it (substituting neod). Debug and polish the PIM applications. (optional and only when it's ready) Integrate the framework PIM subsystem and make the PIM applications talk framework. I hope that answered most of your questions. If not, feel free to add more via commenting this article.MickeyMomentumtag:vanille.de,2008-06-16:momentum2008-06-16T12:00:00ZMomentum is something really strange! It's hardly predictable and you have to run to catch it before it goes away -- but when it's there, things are progressing like there's no tomorrow :-) There's a whole lot of momentum present in some of the projects I care about: OpenEmbedded OpenEmbedded will abandon monotone and move to git as its primary SCM. This will increase the wide-spread adoption of OE and attract new people. We will have more (shortlived) branches and merges will be easier. We will also revamp the commit policies a bit to introduce more stability to both the stable and the unstable branches. Setting up the non-profit organization (german registered association e.V.) is progressing and we will soon have our legal entity. Some couraged people are revamping our website into something that's more accurate, structured, (and pretty). Good for both OE-novices and experts. OpenEZX OpenEZX developers started to push for mainline inclusion. This will greatly increase the visibility of our project. OpenEZX developers are working on a 2nd stage bootloader that overwrites the MOTO kernel, but leaves the rest of the flash file system untouched -- by this we can boot both an OpenEZX kernel from SD as well as the original system (with its kernel on SD), which makes testing a relief. We found security holes in the MOTOMAGX kernel, which may enable us to put our own code on these systems. Motorola has released new devices, apparantly running EZX. More devices for the platform! Openmoko's Framework and Zhone phone UI is going to provide a slick looking -- working -- featurephone userland for OpenEZX -- the first releases are just a couple of days away. It's now important we get kernel work finished, so we can release something that is a real alternative to the closed source MOTO system on EZX devices. Openmoko Openmoko successfully went into mass production of the Neo FreeRunner (GTA02) device. Finally, people will have the 2nd generation of the first truly open source hardware platform in their hands. The Qtopia/Enlightenment based next generation software update is progressing nicely. I expect a release in the next couple of weeks. The new dbus-centric Openmoko framework initiative as well as the Zhone bread-and-butter application will see a release within the next 48 hours. Exciting times for Linux on mobile platforms, n'est-ce pas?MickeyState Machines -- Resistance is Futiletag:vanille.de,2008-06-09:state-machines-resistance-is-futile2008-06-09T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: So I'm rewriting the call handling in the Open Phone Daemon for the second time now. Cowardly, twice I tried to get away without implementing a full state machine, but it always came back to me. Telecommunication stuff is all about state machines, and honestly... they are your friend, not your enemy. Yet another reason to see that my third semester in university with all the finite state machines was not superflous :DMickeyChemistrytag:vanille.de,2008-06-02:chemistry2008-06-02T12:00:00ZI seem incapable of working together with some people. I tried hard, but it just doesn't work. Everytime we discuss anything my blood pressure is raising and we run into arguments. I'm sick of that. Perhaps it's just me -- I'm afraid the older I get, the less patient I get. Then again, it could be just a matter of chemistry -- some pairs function, some not. Might be nature.MickeyFroscon Submission Deadline in 10 daystag:vanille.de,2008-05-23:froscon-submission-deadline-in-10-days2008-05-23T12:00:00ZI just realized it's only 10 days until the Froscon call for papers has its deadline. You should better get started submitting a paper -- I will do the same. Looking forward to seeing you at one of germany's nicest OSS conferences!MickeyOpenmoko Framework Initiativetag:vanille.de,2008-05-05:openmoko-framework-initiative2008-05-05T12:00:00ZI have not been posting about my work for Openmoko for quite a while. There are multiple reasons for that, ask me privately if you want to know... Today though, I want to post about a high-priority project inside Openmoko, Inc. -- the new framework and middleware initiative which me and some guys will be working on. I have been talking privatly about this to people on conferences, but now it's going to be an official project. It's something we attempted to do when we started back in 2006, but for some reason, we did it the wrong way. We tried taking existing components to make them fulfill our usecases and to fit our needs, which in some cases turned out to be impossible. This time we're moving the other way round. We will take our usecases as the goal and create the necessary infrastructure to make it happen. If -- while we're on the way -- can integrate existing efforts, even better. If not, we will eventually see how to merge with existing efforts. The goal is to get things done -- now!. Basically all this is about two components, which are independent, but closely related. The framework. A bread-and-butter application. The Framework ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: The purpose here is: Give people the infrastructure to create solid and exciting software products based on the Openmoko platform, Support competing UIs while collaborating on developing services, and Encourage framework users (e.g. application developers) to also contribute to the framework. With this in mind, we define the following requirements: Make it simple, Concentrate on core services, Be programming language agnostic, Be UI toolkit agnostic, and Try to reuse existing technologies as much as possible, but not at the cost of a bad API. Our way to achieve this on a technical level is through dbus: Chose dbus as the collaboration line. Below dbus, we can work together. Above dbus, we can differentiate. Expose features through dbus APIs implemented by UI-agnostic and language-agnostic services (daemons). Optimize for Openmoko devices, but support multiple architectures (OpenEZX, Xanadu, ...) and purposes through plugin interfaces and suitable hardware abstraction mechanisms. Be not afraid of reinventing the wheel for a wheel-barrow if all the existing wheels are made for sports cars. ;-) The framework is not going to cover everything but the kitchen sink though, especially it's not about: Bootloader, Kernel, or System Init. X-Window-System, Window Manager, UI Toolkits, Application Launchers, Applications, or Fancy UIs. The Bread-and-Butter application ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: The framework initiative is related to developing an application that uses the framework to turn a Linux-phone into a usable feature phone. The main goals for this application are: Make it simple, Concentrate on core features, Have a beautiful, efficient and consistent UI, Be easily extensible through scripting, and Show the power of the framework. This application is developed in tandem with the framework, because when you write framework APIs, it's important to have existing API consumers. Without API consumers, APIs are just specs, could be awkyard, or plainly unusable -- that's why this bread-and-butter application is of central importance to the framework project. I'm looking forward to spend a lot of time on this project and I invite all of you to participate. Most of the discussions will happen on the Openmoko developers mailing list and the FreeSmartPhone standards list We already have achieved some important basics thanks to great contributions by the moko underground people that are grouped around the neo1973-germany.de site and the IRC channel #neo1973-germany. I'm also looking forward to great results from this years' Openmoko Google Summer of Code. As for the current status, we will update the wiki page OpenmokoFramework frequently and sent status updates once and then to the mailing lists. Good speed!MickeyBossa Conference Videotag:vanille.de,2008-04-28:bossa-conference-video2008-04-28T12:00:00ZThe guys from INdT posted the Bossa Conference promotional video for next year's installment: Yours truly can be found a couple of times... so -- how many appearances do I have in this video? :DMickeyLast day in Braziltag:vanille.de,2008-03-23:last-day-in-brazil2008-03-23T12:00:00ZSitting in the business center of the Beach Class Suites hotel trying to fix some strange bugs in ecore-native. In a couple of hours I'm leaving to the airport, travelling back to Frankfurt, Germany. This week in Brazil has been an amazing experience, especially the friendly guys at the INdT. There's a spirit of freedom and creativity hanging over the whole installation and it's not surprising at all that the results just rock. One of the key elements of successful software products is the communication between designers and developers -- and they got this one completely right. The Mamona team worked on an own branch of OpenEmbedded for quite a while now and we had a lot of diffs to go through. We started with merging EFL and Python since these are also important for Openmoko. We now have granted Vivi commit access and Aloisio will be on board soon as well maintaining some of the recipes upstream at org.openembedded.dev. By that we reduce further divergence and improve collaboration. Although we did work most of the time, we also had the chance to hang around a bit together in the after hours, watching soccer, playing table-tennis, table-soccer, pool, etc. We even spent a couple of hours playing guitar and singing along -- that was real fun. Thanks a lot guys, I really felt welcome! And yes, I'm trying to come back later this year, preferably when it gets cold and windy in Germany ;)MickeyFrom Switzerland to Braziltag:vanille.de,2008-03-18:from-switzerland-to-brazil2008-03-18T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: As I have mentioned previously, I'm really trying to cut down the number of conferences I go to this year. However, both the OpenExpo in Bern (from which I returned last friday) and the Bossa Conference in Brazil (which I'm there since saturday) are too important to skip. OpenExpo went very well, I had some good talks with people regarding further platform development. I had a talk where I outlined three major factors of OpenMoko (Freedom, Experiments, Innovation) and the forthcoming middleware initiative. If you manage to understand german, have a look at the video. ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: The second of three days Bossa have passed now and I'm really enjoying Brazil. My talk about OpenEmbedded was on the first day and since then I'm more relaxed. I have never been a fan of the climate in Germany, so what I'm being exposed to here (an average of 29 degrees) is just about right :) Apart from the most amazing venue I've ever been to, it's the people and the topics which are completely right on spot. After the conference I will work for a few days with the INdt guys on merging our OpenEmbedded trees and collaborate on Python and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. On a more personal note, OpenExpo and Bossa were partly responsible for bringing fresh new motivation into me and my middleware work for OpenMoko. All the developers I have met agree with me that -- for the time being -- there's hardly anything more necessary than a solid framework for people to get started with their own approaches on how to improve how we interact with mobile devices. Services like telephony, PIM storage database, network, location, and context, need to be there -- no matter which UI toolkit or applications we are going to focus on. ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: I'll be heading back to Germany on saturday, looking forward to a spring full of refreshening infrastructure development (and some shiny bread-and-butter applications, of course -- middleware development needs to be application driven). Let me finish with some more great news... The price range for the Neo FreeRunner has been published, it's going to be less than 400 USD -- which is quite a substantial improvement over the estimated 650 that was published last year. Given the features (Wifi, GPS, GSM, BT, Accellerometers, VGA) and the openness (priceless!) I think it's pretty decent price. OpenMoko Inc. has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2008. I'm looking forward to mentor some exciting projects. Please start submitting student applications now! Cheers!MickeyBack from Fosdem 2008tag:vanille.de,2008-02-26:back-from-fosdem-20082008-02-26T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: Just returned from Brussels where FOSDEM 2008 took place. For the second time, the OpenEmbedded team had a booth where we presented embedded devices and talked about build systems and software for mobile and embedded devices. On show were some Zaurus models, an iRex Iliad, two Chumbies, and a Neuros OSD. We also demoed some FIC Neo1973 models with OpenMoko which received lots of attention -- the most frequently asked question was (of course) when the new hardware would be ready. I can't really comment on that, however John and Will from OpenMoko Inc. just brought me a brand new FreeRunner prototype and apart from some minor issues, it is really looking very well. By the way, I will demo this prototype next month on the OpenExpo 2008 in Bern, so if you have a chance, just drop by and take a look. ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: Between talking to people, I managed to unbrick three devices. Unfortunately I forgot to reseat the TORX screws on one device, so if you want your screws back, come over next year. Luckily, the Neo1973 case fits very well even without the screws, so you will probably not miss them ;) During a very remarkable meeting with a resident of the #neo1973-germany channel we improved the freesmartphone.org telephony API and also recorded a video of the moko underground software pyneo. Note: If you don't have sound on the videos, you need to install h264/mp4a codecs. A recent gstreamer-faad with libfaad2 should be sufficient. High Quality (63 MB) [mpeg4] Mid Quality (39 MB) [mpeg4] Low Quality (4 MB) [3gp] On Saturday evening, team OpenEmbedded had the constitutional session for the forthcoming OpenEmbedded e.V. There's still some bureaucracy pending which I hope will be done around late April / early May. I'll keep you posted. By the way, this was the warmest FOSDEM ever! I'm very amazed that I managed to survive it without a cold -- which is quite an achievement considering our booth was right opposite the main entrance resulting in a constant unpleasent flow of air. As for the general FOSDEM appearance I have to agree with Harald Welte's assessment though, especially his comments about the beer event venue and the public transportation. I want to thank all of the people who helped organizing our appearance -- you really did a great job, guys!MickeyConferences Aheadtag:vanille.de,2008-01-22:conferences-ahead-32008-01-22T12:00:00ZSo I have promised to travel much less this year, however some trips are inevitable. For the first two quarters in this year I'm looking forward to participate at least at the following conferences: February: Fosdem'08 (Brussels) -- standing at the OpenEmbedded booth. March: OpenExpo'08 (Bern) -- giving a talk and standing at the OpenMoko booth. March: Bossa'08 (Recife) -- EFL/OE code camp. May: LinuxTag'08 (Berlin) -- applied for a talk, but visit anyways. August: Froscon'08 (St.Augustin) -- will apply for a talk and visit anyways. If you have a chance, then drop by and lets have a chat. Don't be shy -- people say, I'm a nice guy :)MickeyThe Nokia N810tag:vanille.de,2008-01-18:the-nokia-n8102008-01-18T12:00:00ZAs reported in previous installments of this column, the Maemo team picked me for a developer discount on the new Nokia N810 internet tablet (thanks again, folks!). I also own a 770 but skipped the N800, so this has been a huge jump for me. The good The N810 hardware is pretty good. It features a fast processor, a nice display (not as highres as the one in the Neo1973 though), and a superb audio subsystem. The overall look and feel of the device is very convenient -- well done, industrial designers at Nokia. Maemo grew a lot during the past years, I'm looking forward to write a couple of applications (in Vala, of course) and do my share to make Maemo and OpenMoko share parts of the platform. The bad I'm not feeling good on the keyboard. Don't get me wrong, for me it's pretty important to have one, but I miss the feel. The Zaurus C3x00/C1000 keyboard was better, let alone the Psion 5mx/Revo series. So there's room for improvement. Also, I'm still not satisfied with battery life during real-life usage. This device is so great that I want to use it... a couple of hours a day. If you really do that you need to recharge daily. The ugly This device is so fast that -- together with nice software -- it could be an incredible user experience. Alas, Maemo still thinks Gtk+ is the way to go and this is a seriously limiting factor. Thankfully some bright guys from Nokia Research, namely the INdT, already started going a much more promising route. Canola2 on the Nokia N810 shows two things: The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries provide a great subsystem for fluid interfaces on Linux. Modern devices are fast enough that coding application logic in Python is a viable option. An annoying factor is also that there's still a whole lot of closed source contained in the operating system distribution. Also, scratchbox is cumbersome -- I prefer OpenEmbedded which makes it more easy and standard to compile additional packages. Summary All in all, it's a good experience and a very nice device. We can learn a lot from this nice project. And I hope that eventually we can do better... but watchout: Nokia doesn't sleep ;)MickeyTempus Fugittag:vanille.de,2007-12-31:tempus-fugit2007-12-31T12:00:00Z2007 was a very busy year for me. There has been great progress in the projects I care about, e.g. OpenEmbedded, OpenMoko, OpenEZX, Enlightenment, Maemo, Ångström, and some more. In 2007 I travelled more than in all the previous years in sum -- lets see whether I recall where I have been: Berlin (CCC, to meet colleagues), Bermingham (once for GUADEC), Bonn (for FROSCON), Brunswick (twice, to meet colleagues), Brussels (for FOSDEM), Denmark (for Mobile Developer Days), Siegen (to meet colleagues), Taipei (to work at OpenMoko Inc.), Zürich (for OpenExpo), and some more which I forgot about :D A couple of weeks have been spent by my wife and me moving into a new apartment, my office room drowned and dried, I received dozens of parcels, and I saw (too) many new PCBs. I saw a 3-man project growing into a company (with some unfortunate collateral losses on the way) and did a tiny little share to bring the Asimo robot forward. I met many interesting people on various conferences and in Taipei, and made some good new friends. Oh, and last but not least I (finally) got my doctoral degree. It was a good year, albeit a bit too hectic for my taste. For next year, I'm trying to focus on less things, but more intense. Bringing forward my dreams of ubiquitous computing, high level application frameworks, and fluid user interfaces... I wish all of you who read this a blessed 2008 -- may health and success be with you. See you next year!MickeyFirst encounter with Valatag:vanille.de,2007-12-30:first-encounter-with-vala2007-12-30T12:00:00ZI just rewrote the openmoko-terminal2 application (a lightweight terminal for the OpenMoko environment using Vte) in Vala. Please compare with the source of the C-based incarnation here. In my opinion, Vala is nothing more and nothing less than the future of application coding for the GNOME platform. Vala combines a nice high level syntax (modelled after C# and Java) using GObject as the object model and compiles straight away to plain 'ole C. Yes, that means no runtime libraries, no bloat, no performance drawbacks. Vala removes the need of typing run time typecasts and endless function names and adds compile-time type checking. This will boost your coding-efficiency a lot. Vala has an enormous potential for the C-dominated GNOME platform and I hope people will realize that and be giving Vala a chance. Yes, I still prefer Python (and C++) -- but now I have a sane escape route for some projects where I had to do stuff in C. Which I consider being a very good thing :D P.S. Of course OpenEmbedded supports programs written in Vala as well -- I added the compiler a couple of weeks ago. Sane autotools-based projects don't need to do anything but add vala-native to the DEPENDS line.MickeyUsability through Blingtag:vanille.de,2007-12-15:usability-through-bling2007-12-15T12:00:00ZLet me point you to two publications I found interesting: Interaction Designer Peter Sikking shows the necessity of a holistic approach in order to create stellar UIs. Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri compares UI toolkits for "fancy embeded interfaces".MickeyFramebuffer vs. X11tag:vanille.de,2007-12-08:framebuffer-vs-x112007-12-08T12:00:00ZPutting some new fuel to the neverending fire -- whether the (undebatable) performance drawback of using a full-blown window system like X11 outweighs the benefits in flexibility; Just recently I built the Expedite benchmark utility (from the Enlightenment project) for my Neo1973 (266MHz armv4, VGA display, unaccellerated framebuffer). Thanks to the Evas canvas abstraction, Expedite has tons of rendering backends, including ones for the framebuffer and X11. And here are the results of the jury: I this is is quite shocking (I expected the framebuffer to win, but not by that far). With an average frame-per-seconds of 17 for the framebuffer backend and 11 for the X11 backend, this looks like X11 introduces an overhead of about 50% on my platform.I wonder how the directfb and SDL backends would score -- I'm going to do these eventually. I'm also curious in the results of Gtk+/X11 vs. Gtk+/fb as well as Qt/X11 vs. Qt/Embedded. I'll do that once I have nice benchmark utilities for the respective toolkits. Surely this result only applies to unaccellerated framebuffers, hardware-accellerated xrender may win by far, but this is what we don't have right now. The question is, did we bet on the wrong horse here? Do we really need all the goodies X11 give us? Do we really need a windowing system abstraction on a phone? Do we really need to run multiple toolkits in parallel? What do you think?MickeyJava for OpenMoko moves forwardtag:vanille.de,2007-12-05:java-for-openmoko-moves-forward2007-12-05T12:00:00ZFSFE fellow Robert Schuster informed me about his progress bringing Java to OpenMoko and presents an interesting free software view of OpenMoko.MickeyCollaboration Launch on PhoneServer and DeviceDaemontag:vanille.de,2007-11-27:collaboration-launch-on-phoneserver-and-devicedaemon2007-11-27T12:00:00ZWith a subtle delay of something like 11 months, I managed to visit the friendly guys from Kernel Concepts in Siegen last week. The most important subjects were how to move forward with regards to a phone server and device daemon collaboration. Here is a short summary what these two things are, why we need them, and what we are going to do. PhoneServer A phone server encapsulates the access to the telephony subsystem. It is necessary to allow multiple clients query the state of the subsystem and to perform operations taking non-functional requirements like concurrent access, security, information caching, and quality of service, etc. into account. Similar components can be found in lots of closed source smartphone platforms. The free software community is still missing such a component. Yes, there are first approaches in OpenMoko (libgsmd), Qtopia, GPE Phone Edition, and probably more, but neither one supports all our requirements on such a component. I have been reluctant to think about a phone server until being more certain about its place in the platform and the way it should talk to both the upper layers and the lower layers. As reported in previous installments of this column, by now I am sufficiently convinced that dbus is the proper abstraction (and collaboration) line, hence the phone server needs to talk dbus. We will now start to work on a minimal dbus interface specification of the phone server. Since the folks that brought us the GPE Phone Edition have good contacts to the Linux Phone Standards forum, we are expecting input from people who have tons of experience with telephony APIs. However, this will not just be a completely free and open specification process, but also backed up by code -- in the good tradition of FOSS projects. So, I'm inviting everyone and their brother to collaborate on this telephony API. Especially application programmers, please tell us which syntax and semantics you prefer. I have just opened the freesmartphone.org wiki and will fill it with some of our initial thoughts soon. The first milestone will be a phone server that talks to libgsmd, although I'd love to see a backend for the Qtopia gsm code as well. I'm very happy to see Ixonos' work on gsmd2, I'm sure this also will be some valuable input for us -- perhaps even an alternative backend or more! DeviceDaemon The other thing everyone wants but seems reluctant to work on is a peripheral device daemon. Throughout my involvement in the embedded Linux community I have seen dozens of those daemons in different flavours, all more or less device specific, hardcoded, not extensible, etc. I myself have implemented more than one hardware abstraction layer from scratch. The desktop world has HAL, OpenMoko has neod, GPE Phone has machined, the Zaurus guys have zaurusd, Opie had odevice, and more! All that duplicated work should really end now and be consolidated into one extensible lightweight machine and peripheral daemon. As with the phone server, over the next couple of days I will add some initial thoughts into the freesmartphone.org wiki. Please see Florian's blog post here and this wiki page for some more details. Right now it's not even clear whether we need something completely new -- we also consider stripping down HAL or reimplementing it using the same dbus interface to be able to reuse OHM. Again, I'd be delighted if we can could quickly start adding some real world requirements and dive into coding. Please feel invited to contribute.MickeyMaemo & OpenMokotag:vanille.de,2007-11-10:maemo-openmoko2007-11-10T12:00:00ZI've been accepted to the N810 Internet Tablet developer device program -- thanks Nokia! I'm going to use this opportunity to work on sharing more technology between the Maemo and the OpenMoko platforms.MickeyOpenMoko Media Player and Web Browsertag:vanille.de,2007-11-01:openmoko-media-player-and-web-browser2007-11-01T12:00:00ZOn the last day I was in the OpenMoko Office, MokoNinja visited me and we recorded videos where I present the state of the OpenMoko Media Player and the Web Browser.MickeyAlmost back in Germanytag:vanille.de,2007-10-28:almost-back-in-germany2007-10-28T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: 你好! My stay in Taipei is almost over and I want to update you all on some news around my work here in the OpenMoko, Inc. office. During the past couple of months, I have dedicated lots of my resources to improving the current incarnation of the software stack for our existing users, the GTA01 early adopters. We have now come to a point where the OpenMoko SmartPhone Stack is almost there. Especially Telephony, PIM and the mediaplayer have gotten much better throughout the last months. We even have a nice new webkit-based browser with a slick and simple interface. All in all it's getting better every day and I'm very confident, we'll iron the last problems out within the next couple of weeks... and this is where the actual fun begins -- once you guys can implement all your crazy ideas on top of this platform. ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: To support this, the management and me agreed that for the remainder of this year, I suspend my position as overall platform architect to become the head of the new tools group. As such, I'm going to concentrate on improving and streamlining the developer's experience (read: SDK). Once the most important problems in this field have been solved, I will get back to my original role. As for the future of GTA01, we have yet to ship a GSM firmware update and a working GPS driver. This is pending some legal issues at our end which I would have hoped were resolved by now, but once the ball is in the court of the lawyers, it's rolling very slooooooooooow. Structure-wise there has been a lot of friction -- disagreement, fear, uncertainty, doubt, you name it -- while OpenMoko migrated from being that crazy open source project inside FIC to being an independent 50-something-people-company whose upmost priority is to stay in business. We grew so fast that we couldn't scale, hence the only way that got us back to operational mode was to impose a renewed and improved structure on it. I guess this is an almost inherent effect of rapid growth. ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: The actual outcome of it is that we engineers can now safely step down from being part-time network administrators, product managers, marketing experts etc., since we now co-work with dedicated people that perform these tasks. Which is good. Even better is that I really enjoy working with the local engineers. It took us a while to get started communicating well, but now it's great. We have so many bright guys in this company that I'm proud of being a part of it. With the improved structure and a respectful passing of ideas, specs, and code forth and back, our engineering teams will perform much better implementing exciting new software products for OpenMoko. All in all I have enjoyed this stay in Taiwan very much, a lot of my pleasure courtesy to the great weather, my health, and all the nice buddies in the OpenMoko Apartment and the Office. Thanks guys, you know who you are -- 谢谢! :DMickeyOn to Taipeitag:vanille.de,2007-10-17:on-to-taipei2007-10-17T12:00:00ZTomorrow, I'm heading over to Taipei for a while. I have mixed emotions here, on one hand I'm really looking forward to meeting all the guys again and seeing the shiny new OpenMoko office -- on the other hand, there is quite a bit of internal disagreement which may only be resolved by some serious discussions. Being the optimist though, it is my hope and utter belief that I will return from this journey with a renewed vision and plan for the next 12 OpenMoko months.MickeyBack from OEDEM'07tag:vanille.de,2007-10-13:back-from-oedem072007-10-13T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: The second annual OpenEmbedded DEvelopers Meeting took place in Berlin from the 6th to the 10th of October 2007. Due to the slight overlap with my vacation in Portugal, I couldn't attend the coding sprints on 6th and 7th, however I could make it to the technical discussion days on 8th and 9th. On 9th, the generous folks from Tarent sponsored our dinner for which I'd like to say a big "Thanks, folks!!!" This time we not only had the core developer team on board, but also key people from the various communities and interest groups, i.e. Stelios from Digital Opsis, Robert from Tarent, Graeme and me from OpenMoko, Florian from Kernel Concepts, Uli from ROAD, Philip for the Gumstix community, and more. I'm not going to repeat all of the discussions we made (that's what we have the meeting minutes for), however this is the executive summary from my point of view: ::: {align="left"} OpenEmbedded has four major issues that prevent even more wide spread acceptance. In a nutshell, it boils down to ::: ::: {align="left"} Too much progress: org.openembedded.dev keeps constantly changing and (temporarily) breaking. Too much flexibility: If you want to use it as the base for your product, you're overwhelmed by the amount of options. Not enough documentation: The reference documentation is nice, but it lacks actual workflow based tutorials and a general overview. Bad reputation about being too complex: If all you want is building applications, the learning curve is a killer. ::: ::: {align="left"} We sat together to come up with a plan of action to fix most of these issues. Briefly: ::: ::: {align="left"} Last year we agreed to releasing metadata snapshots. Most of the infrastructure (autobuilder, regression tests, etc.) is in place now, so we can actually start doing these releases early next year. The snapshots will be known-good for a certain -- documented -- combination of image targets and target architectures / machines. Once the snapshot gets tagged, we will branch and only apply very critical bugfixes to this branch. People can then base product work on such a snapshot. We believe it's going to be two or three releases per year. We will add more product-based templates as examples, e.g. images like wlan-router-image.bb, nas-image.bb, set-top-box-image.bb, ... Once the OE foundation work has been installed, we will use these resources to hire someone for improving the documentation. At the end of the day, there are lots of people using OpenEmbedded who really shouldn't. OpenEmbedded gets (ab)used as a development environment, which it is not -- although there is the incredibly useful command bitbake -c devshell. This can be fixed by handing out prebuilt OpenEmbedded toolchains to the people. People then can use these for application work without having to deal with OpenEmbedded at all. Alternatively -- once they feel more brave -- they can again use OpenEmbedded, but speed it up since they won't have to go through the complete toolchain generation. ::: Once again, the issue of creating a registered non-commercial non-profit foundation was discussed. And this time, we finally agreed on the legal form and the statutes. We will create a german e.V. (eingetragener Verein) and the statutes will be based on the statutes of the KDE e.V.. The actual founding work will take place at FOSDEM'08 in February.MickeyOpenExpo 2007tag:vanille.de,2007-09-22:openexpo-20072007-09-22T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: Just returned to Frankfurt after visiting the OpenExpo 2007 in Zurich/Oerlikon. Benjamin 'C7' Hagen organized a small but fine OpenMoko booth (next our friendly GNOME colleagues) and we had two very good days with lots of interested people stopping by. My talk on Thursday also attracted quite some people (as you can see in the photo). To silence all the "it's cool, but doesn't work as a phone" nay-sayers, I demonstrated a phone call during the talk :D ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: On to some bad news... Benjamin got his backpack stolen, including a Laptop and his Neo 1973... *sigh* I will make sure he gets one from the next batch of GTA01. OpenExpo was very organized and agile. Although it's just the little brother of the Topsoft business fair -- which occupied four times the space -- I dare to say, it looked as most of the visitors (me included) found OpenExpo much more exciting than Topsoft ;-) Leaving to Portugal tomorrow for a two weeks vacation -- after that, I'm going to visit the 2nd annual OpenEmbedded developers conference in Berlin. Then back to Taipei for a bit.MickeyHello (again), Qtopia!tag:vanille.de,2007-09-21:hello-again-qtopia2007-09-21T12:00:00ZSo Trolltech recently ported the Qtopia application suite to the Neo. Right after the release, the community almost immediately started to join one of three camps -- two being huge, one being small. The first camp is the ultra-pro's: They embrace Qtopia and demand OpenMoko Inc. to halt all efforts working towards a non-Qt/Embedded-based platform immediately. The second camp is the ultra-con's: They are afraid of C++, have not forgotten the less-than-optimal community relationship during the last five years, or claim Trolltech stealing attention from the "sole real free way to write software" in order to facilitate their "dubiously dual licensed" stack. More modest people join the third camp, the pragmatist's: They realize that Trolltech has a four year's advantage with their stack and that this is the very reason for it to be more polished, more complete, and more usable compared to what OpenMoko can offer right now. If there's one thing we learned from the GNOME vs. KDE war, then that the overall benefits of the competition (inspiration, innovation, ...) outweigh the disadvantages (duplicated work, reinvented wheels, ...). We also learned that there are ways to collaborate -- see for example all the great work that happens around the freedesktop.org standards, among them Dbus, which Qt recently accepted as the new standard Unix way to do high-level interprocess communication (IPC). I see Dbus being an important technique for the future of the (mobile) Unix ecosystem. It is what I would call the [collaboration enabler]{style="font-style: italic"}. Below this dbus line, we can collaborate, above this line we can compete. Once we have agreed about interfaces to all the low-level services we offer (telephony, networking, device control, user preferences, PIM database, you name it...), we can call these dbus interfaces from whatever language or toolkit we can imagine. This is my idea of freedom. Along this line, I sincerely welcome Trolltech's initiative. To be honest, it didn't came as a surprise to me anyways, since all the major free software players kind of stay in loose contact -- after all many of us know each other personally since lots of years and while we not necessarily agree about the technical way to move forward, we all share the vision and work towards open platforms. Having Qtopia on the Neo improves the visibility for Linux-based mobile open hardware (read: more demand for FIC) and this draws more of attention to all of us (read: more demand for mobile open source developers). Which is good. Then again, not yet everything is bright and shiny. Qtopia still is based on Qt/Embedded which in turn means it relies on exclusive framebuffer access thus preventing other UI-toolkits from running in parallel (yes there is an X-server for Qt/Embedded, but this is a scary indirection). Also, it has its own GSM multiplexer code, hardware device abstraction layer, etc. etc. I would really like to see us collaborating in the lower services infrastructure. Being an optimist, I'm sure this will happen eventually.MickeyOpenMoko and OpenEZX at Mobile Developer Days 2007tag:vanille.de,2007-09-04:openmoko-and-openezx-at-mobile-developer-days-20072007-09-04T12:00:00ZThe Mobile Developer Days are a new conference aiming to create a platform where developers, network operators, service providers, and mobile manufactures can exchange their ideas and visions in the field of mobile communication. This year was the first shot at what is hoped to be an annual event. I was invited to give a presentation about the OpenMoko project and the FIC Neo1973 mobile phone. Stefan Schmidt was invited to present the OpenEZX project. Besides performing our talks, Stefan and me installed a kind of an ad-hoc lab in the lobby of the venue at Aalborg University where we worked on OpenMoko (and later OpenEZX), demonstrated the devices, and answered questions for people passing by. Due to the relatively small scope (~40 participants), it was a very productive gathering focused on direct communication between the participants. We had a pretty good time there and everything was well organized. Since the audience was quite heterogenous, the results of the discussions were quite inspiring. I'm looking forward to the next installation of this conference. OpenMoko ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: While we were at MDD, we worked on a lot of OpenMoko issues. We went through the bugtracker, applied some patches, fixed bugs, etc. To improve the OpenMoko appeareance on non-VGA devices, I reworked the panel plugins to scale to different panel sizes. The neod now monitors headphone insertion and removal events and adjusts the mixers accordingly. I also started working on a first-usage wizard to make some of the most important preferences accessible. After switching to mrxvt, we no longer get the automatic opening/closing of the keyboard (since mrxvt is no Gtk+ application). To fix this, I did a new openmoko-terminal application wrapping the VteTerminal widget. This should be useful very soon. Last but not least, we also found time to do some testing on the forthcoming GTA02 device... OpenEZX ::: {.img-shadow} {width="200"} ::: As promised to the OpenEZX hacker's community, Stefan Schmidt and me took a day off to hack on OpenEZX. It's been a while for both of us and the amount of achieved progress since last year is really cool. Using an OpenMoko root file system, we managed to boot a Motorola A780 via root-over-nfs right into the OpenMoko user interface. OpenMoko simply rocks on the Motorola Ezx Platform, especially the kinetic scrolling is very fluid and intuitive -- even more so than on the Neo1973 GTA01 phone where a slower processor has to take care about 4 times the pixels. Thanks to the new Alsa SoC patch we even heard the A780 playing the OpenMoko startup sound. I added pH5's work on the QVGA adaptions to the OpenMoko theme into SVN and adjusted some missing things in the OpenEmbedded bugtracker. It is our goal to release an OpenEZX preview image before the end of September. The major showstoppers right now are the missing libgsmd integration for the EZX platform. I'll post more pictures or probably rather a video of OpenMoko running on A780 and A1200 soon. Denmark To close with something completely unrelated... it was my first time in Denmark and this country has a lot of merits -- did I mention that I fancy cool blondes? :DMickeyFrOSCon'07tag:vanille.de,2007-08-30:froscon072007-08-30T12:00:00ZI have seldomly seen a conference that was better organized than this years FrOSCon 2007 in St.Augustin. It was amazing -- a good technical program, interesting booths, nice catering, and a solid venue. One of the notable chats I had was with some guys from Tarent GmbH -- they're doing Java consultancy and already made some good progress in bringing Java to the Neo1973/openmoko "Robert Schuster's Blog"). By the way, since adding a screenshot utility to OpenMoko, people are uploading their screenshots to scap.linuxtogo.org. Be sure to check it out regularly, it's amazing what people are running on their Neos -- and this is just the beginning :-)MickeyConferences Aheadtag:vanille.de,2007-08-23:conferences-ahead-22007-08-23T12:00:00ZNow that we successfully released the OpenMoko 2007.2 August Snapshot which was quite a huge undertaking since we changed a lot of things at once, we can continue improving the platform gradually and adding more functionality to it. The first batch of devices has been out in the wild for some time, so I'm going to talk about OpenMoko at some conferences and hope to gather some feedback from early adopters. We have a lot more stuff in the pipeline :D Next weekend, I'm going to be present at the FrOSCon 07 in St.Augustin, Germany and right after that in Aalborg, Denmark for the Mobile Developer Days 07. For the latter, yours truly will travel ~10 hours by train *cough*. Thankfully I have good company -- Stefan Schmidt from OpenMoko and OpenEZX will join me and I'm sure we will see some productive hacking on OpenMoko and OpenEZX.MickeyPython 2.5 in OpenEmbeddedtag:vanille.de,2007-08-15:python-25-in-openembedded2007-08-15T12:00:00ZDue to my overall workload, I have not had a chance to look much after the Python packages in OpenEmbedded. For the OpenMoko distribution, we want to stay neutral against scripting languages, that is, there won't be an official recommendation. However, my personal take on that should be well known. At the time I'm writing this, I'm working on a major Python upgrade in OpenEmbedded, bringing all Python packages up to date and adding some optimization patches I have been working on. Unfortunately, this also means I have to deprecate some of the packages which are end-of-life and won't work with Python 2.5 -- notably this involves the Python Qt Bindings for Qt/Embedded 2.x which I have been maintaining for quite some time. I no longer work on Opie though and I am not even sure if there were other people than me using these bindings.MickeyChaos Communication Camptag:vanille.de,2007-08-08:chaos-communication-camp2007-08-08T12:00:00ZI decided to visit this years Chaos Communication Camp near Berlin for a day or two. The mission is to have a coding sprint there that brings the first OM-2007.2 snapshot image up to par. I expect to meet some OpenMoko and OpenEmbedded guys there, i.e. Zecke, Stefan Schmidt, Alphaone, Shoragan, LaF0rge, Roh, ...MickeyBack from Guadectag:vanille.de,2007-07-20:back-from-guadec2007-07-20T12:00:00ZThis year's GUADEC was very successful for me. I managed to attend to a lot of talks while still having time to perform several business meetings. OpenMoko Inc. was present in the GMAE meeting and contributed a tiny little bit to the discussions. GUADEC refreshed and renewed my interest and confidence in many GNOME technologies. My talk about OpenMoko and the Neo1973 was very well received and although I called for flames by stating that GTK+ as the heart technology of GNOME is also its weakest spot, I hardly received any. To the contrary -- other talks and discussions pointed out the same. The Gnome Mobile Platform is progressing nicely and I'm looking forward to integrating the best libraries and frameworks into OpenMoko. On to some personal notes... I really enjoyed the 4 days, spending some time with Stefan Schmidt and Daniel Willmann and my OE buddies, however both the Formule1 Hotel and (some of) Birmingham's taxi drivers (not to mention the public transportation system) were quite suboptimal...MickeyNeo 1973 Phase 1 startedtag:vanille.de,2007-07-11:neo-1973-phase-1-started2007-07-11T12:00:00ZSo we are finally selling hardware now. This is mainly a good thing, since we show that this device is not just vapourware. However, it is also a dangerous thing, since now people may buy this under false assumptions, being very disappointed because it (more or less) doesn't do anything... To put this very straight: THIS IS NOT AN END-USER DEVICE! IT IS NOT (YET) THE IPHONE KILLER WE ALL ARE WAITING FOR! THIS IS A DEVELOPER RELEASE, NOT A CONSUMER PRODUCT! It may not even always be a phone -- since thanks to all the distracting hoops and roadblockers we had to jump through, the result is a software that's really not up to par yet -- everything is in an amazingly unsatisfying and rough state and I won't bet on its ability to make or receive calls all of the time. However, this doesn't prevent it from being a revolutionary device -- it is a canvas that will enable you developers to draw your own ideas upon -- thus shaping the future of mobile communications and being a part of a great community. And it won't be alone, there will be many more canvases to follow. The really good thing is that not only are we super-committed to making this hardware and software platform a rocking success, but we also got some big guys standing behind us and supporting us. It may take a while for OpenMoko to really get off, but we already seem to scare some of the big players :D If you ask me how long we will take to get to a device that is end-user friendly, then I will answer you: At least 6 months from now, perhaps even more. But don't forget -- this is more of an open source project than anything else. We release early and we release often -- now go and flame us for that, because it doesn't live up to your expectations. Or see it as the developer board it is and join us in developing a mobile platform based on openness, freedom and virtually endless possibilities.MickeyEFL related worktag:vanille.de,2007-07-05:efl-related-work2007-07-05T12:00:00ZWhile I was in Taipei, I revamped the EFL recipes in OpenEmbedded. They suffered from a lot of hackish workarounds that were necessary while EFL didn't use pkgconfig and had some bogus autotools usage. This is now history and so we have a more or less clean set of EFL recipes in OpenEmbedded! Related to that, I have recently been contacted by Andreas 'audifahrer' Volz who's going to work with me on refreshing my C++ bindings to the EFL that have unfortunately been stalled since many months. As a first step towards more visibility, we agreed to autoconfigize them (they were using my beloved qmake :-)) and put them into the Enlightenment CVS. Over the next months, we plan to catch up with recent changes in the EFL and enhance them. Lots of cool things forthcoming for ya C++ lovers. This -- of course -- also has some relevance to OpenMoko. By the way, Aaron Bockover joins me with a rant about Gtk+ theming.MickeyBack to DefCon 4tag:vanille.de,2007-07-03:back-to-defcon-42007-07-03T12:00:00ZWe finally switched off the dryer on saturday and almost all of my stuff has been placed into the office again. I'm now fully operational again and can (finally) continue to work as usual *phew*MickeyBack from first Taipei visittag:vanille.de,2007-06-25:back-from-first-taipei-visit2007-06-25T12:00:00ZMuch like the first week, the 2nd week in Taipei really rushed by and I'm finding myself being back in Frankfurt for until the 15th of July, when I'm leaving to Birmingham to attend GUADEC. I will have a talk about OpenMoko there and I'm looking forward to meet a lot of GNOME guys and gals. My last day in Taipei was spiced by a whole day meeting with Carsten 'The Rasterman' Haitzler, whom we invited to visit us -- talking about graphics for next-generation user interfaces, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, and more. Raster is a really nice and competent guy and I enjoyed that meeting a lot -- thanks for your patience with all my questions :) Unfortunately, I also have some bad news. While I was in Taipei, Frankfurt struggled under massive amounts of rain and water poured into my new office room in our apartment :-( Fortunately, nothing important has been damaged, however the whole carpet is drenched and there is now a (really loud) dryer operating in the room for a couple of weeks. *sigh*MickeyFirst week in Taipeitag:vanille.de,2007-06-14:first-week-in-taipei2007-06-14T12:00:00ZThe first week in Taipei has passend and it's really good to be here. FIC is a great place to work in a comfortable and focused way. All people are very kind and helpful. The climate is pretty warm and the humidity is a bit higher than what I'm used to, but then again, I'm spending the lions share of every day in the FIC building anyway :D I didn't have much of a chance to see some sites in Taipei yet -- and I'm afraid that won't change next week, so I have to come back soon. Of course all you Neo-lusty folks are probably not interested in how I feel here, but more in what I am doing here... alas, I can't tell much at this point of time. What we are focusing on right now is not even directly hardware or software related, but more structure related. It's a bunch of good things happening though. I expect OpenMoko to post an announcement pretty soon that will explain what happened in the past weeks, what we are heading towards, and what we can expect from the next months.MickeyBack in Frankfurt/Main for a few daystag:vanille.de,2007-06-04:back-in-frankfurtmain-for-a-few-days2007-06-04T12:00:00ZYesterday night I arrived back in Frankfurt/Main. I'm going to stay until Friday and then head over to Taipei for a while to work on OpenMoko. As usual, the LinuxTag was very exhausting, but fun and productive at the same time. My talk was very well received and a lot of people are looking forward to (finally) get this phone into their hands. If you want to get an idea about what I presented, feel free to read the slides and hear the speech (sorry, german language this time). Once again, I took the opportunity to get some Berlin spirit and Holger 'Zecke' Freyther lead me into a bar. This time the walk was much shorter (very appreciated after two days on an exhibition) and the bar was also pretty cool -- thanks! :-)MickeyOpenMoko on LinuxTag 2007tag:vanille.de,2007-06-01:openmoko-on-linuxtag-20072007-06-01T12:00:00ZWriting this on my way to the LinuxTag 2007 that takes place in Berlin this year. In roughly 9 hours, I'm going to give a talk about OpenMoko -- the backgrounds, vision, and status. Due to all the stress with moving, I couldn't prepare like usual, however I'm sure it'll be good enough to spread the word :-)MickeyConnectivity Problems Sorted Outtag:vanille.de,2007-05-29:connectivity-problems-sorted-out2007-05-29T12:00:00ZAfter Alice and T-Com seemingly wanted to play ping-pong with me -- repeatedly sending me to each other -- I took the matter into my own hands and solved the problem. All DSL and Telephony problems are sorted out now. Don't ask how :D The cable-TV issue has also vanished. I'm now using a satellite dish and the best free (as in free speech) sat receiver money can buy -- a Dreambox 7025 -- thanks to the nice folks @ Dream Multimedia TV, especially one of their core developers Felix 'tmbinc' Domke. Did I already tell you it runs a Linux Distribution built by OpenEmbedded? I'll report about my first sat experiences soon -- stay tuned.MickeyMoving finished (sort of)tag:vanille.de,2007-05-20:moving-finished-sort-of2007-05-20T12:00:00ZI'm writing this post from within the new office room in our new appartement. Obviously the move is now over, although the new appartment is a mess and a lot of stuff is still missing and/or waiting for construction, i.e. the kitchen is scheduled to arrive mid-june :-( The last couple of days were a bit of a horror story. Telephony and DSL were scheduled to arrive @ 18th, which they did -- however not on the proper socket... the plug in the souterrain / office is scheduled to be attached to all the network hardware. It took me about 6 hours to find that out... now all the equipment is (temporarily! my wife is very unhapy with all this) sitting in the hall and I had to establish a wireless bridge to get my computers in the office to the network (luckily I had an unused Linksys WRT54GS sitting in one of my boxes). Next thing that happened was that my Linux workstation refused to boot. It auto-powered off one second after pushing power. I had to deassemble and reassemble it completely -- removing about 2 kilograms of dust from the fans and then it ran again. However, the integrated network adapter no longer appeared on the PCI bus *sigh*. Again -- luckily -- I had an unused USB-Ethernet adapter laying around and so after 3 days messing around I can start being productive again. And of course all of this while the OpenMoko project is in an important phase... once all these temporary problems are sorted out, I promise I won't move for at least another decade... ;-)MickeyMoving updatetag:vanille.de,2007-05-15:moving-update-22007-05-15T12:00:00ZSince last friday we're sleeping in the new apartment. The only missing bits to move are some dishes and the office -- which will be moved on 20th and 21th. After that, the periods without connectivity will be over.MickeyOpenMoko conquers Opietag:vanille.de,2007-05-14:openmoko-conquers-opie2007-05-14T12:00:00ZRecently, goxboxlive from the Xanadux project sent me screenshots that show OpenMoko running on the HTC Universal. The fun part is that it doesn't run native, but on Opie with the Xqt2 X-Server on top. So... OpenMoko boldly goes where no free software platform has ever gone before ;-)MickeyApartment Movingtag:vanille.de,2007-05-01:apartment-moving2007-05-01T12:00:00ZThe serious phase of apartment moving has started last week and I'm right within. Please bear with (even more) latency in answering E-Mails for the next three weeks. I will probably also be completely offline for some days mid-May while the landline and DSL get "moved". In case of emergency, call my mobile.MickeyQt4tag:vanille.de,2007-04-30:qt42007-04-30T12:00:00ZI just finished a four-week contract that involved development with Qt4. After developing in C with GTK+ for the last couple of months, this was quite a refreshing experience. This was my first non-trivial project with Qt4 and I'm quite impressed how well it went. Compared to Qt3 (and even Qt2, which I was stuck with on embedded platforms for a long time), Qt4 is a major leap forwards, especially with regards to concurrent programming (Threads) and separating data management and representation (Interview). Note that you want to use at least version 4.2 though, because earlier versions still have a lot of bugs. In my opinion, Qt is definitely the most-advanced open source GUI toolkit around -- it's probably also even better than most proprietary ones, although I can't say this with certainty, since I don't know anything about Cocoa... yet!MickeyThesis -- the final acttag:vanille.de,2007-04-17:thesis-the-final-act2007-04-17T12:00:00ZToday I've submitted the obligatory copies of my commercially published dissertation to the Doctorate Office for Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. In return I got my certificate presented. This marks the final act of the thesis as I'm now entitled to call myself Dr. Michael Lauer. Sounds good to me ;-)MickeyGoogle SoC 2007tag:vanille.de,2007-04-12:google-soc-20072007-04-12T12:00:00ZOpenMoko is a mentoring organization for the Google Sommer of Code 2007. We received 60 student project applications (minus a few duplicates) and since a whole lot of projects were exciting, it was very tough to rank them. Unfortunately we only got assigned three project slots from Google -- if we perform well this year, then we might get more next year. Anyway, here is the list of accepted projects: ::: {.extern_app} [OpenMoko Music Player core application development](http://code.google.com/soc/openmoko/appinfo.html?csaid=4B963C4F3F275D36) [by Sören Apel, mentored by Michael Lauer]{.small} </div> ::: ::: {.extern_app} [WebKit/Gdk/cairo port and GUI for OpenMoko](http://code.google.com/soc/openmoko/appinfo.html?csaid=B5A2E96741FD60E4) [by Holger Hans Peter Freyther, mentored by Michael Lauer]{.small} </div> ::: ::: {.extern_app} [](http://code.google.com/soc/openmoko/about.html#) [Ad hoc communication via Bluetooth](http://code.google.com/soc/openmoko/appinfo.html?csaid=4DABDDDD4876612F) [by Deepank Gupta, mentored by Werner Almesberger]{.small} </div> ::: I'm looking forward to mentor my two students to get a successful project and contribution to the OpenMoko Software Platform done. To all who didn't make it this year: Thanks for all your proposals and please try again next year -- although if all goes well, we might just contact some of you to realize your ideas in a "private" OpenMoko SoC :-)MickeyOpenMoko Coreteam in Frankfurt/Maintag:vanille.de,2007-04-10:openmoko-coreteam-in-frankfurtmain2007-04-10T12:00:00ZDuring most of the long easter weekend, 3/4 of the OpenMoko coreteam met in Frankfurt/Main at my place. It was a very productive meeting and we discussed a lot of topics. My wife Sabine coddled us with lots of excellent food and had to spend half of the easter vacation alone... sorry for that and thanks for everything :-) We talked about administrative things, schedules, hiring people, supporting OpenEmbedded, and the state of the current hard- and software. Unfortunately most of the really hot topics discussed at the meeting could be classified as confidential, however I think I'm allowed to tell you that we worked on the design of two Neo1973 successors and we came up with something really unique and exciting... Of course, most of you are probably more interested in the present, i.e. how far away the Phase 1 devices are. About two weeks ago I said something like two weeks -- a prediction that was (of course) too shortsighted. My personal take on that is that I plan to work roughly about one more week on adding some needed features and then enforce a two-weeks feature freeze for the phase 1. There will be a pre-phase-1 snapshot image and p0 developers will be requested to help testing and bugfixing to make the phase 1 experience really stable. By the way, I'll make sure that the phase 1 announcement will include enough information about the phase 1.5 hardware refresh so that you can make up your mind whether you want to wait or just go ahead and buy a freed phone. Some of the discussions focused on our mid- to long-term plans with OpenMoko -- both as a hardware and a software platform. UI-wise, the applications you see on the Neo1973 are really just the first iteration of our vision. We are somewhat satisfied with the status of the stylus applications, however it already has shown that we can only realize a part of our UI dreams with a toolkit like GTK+, so for some of the applications (finger, main menu, and panels come to mind) we are closely watching how projects like Clutter and EFL evolve.MickeyOpenMoko p0-Developer Meeting in Braunschweigtag:vanille.de,2007-04-02:openmoko-p0-developer-meeting-in-braunschweig2007-04-02T12:00:00ZJust returned from a tiny OpenMoko p0-Developer meeting in Braunschweig. It was a packed weekend full of work and though we only managed to process 70% of the Agenda I came up with, we made a lot of progress. In case you're curious, here is the list of things we did: Status Report Neo1973-Hardware Mickey (OpenMoko) [done] Status Report Stefan, Jan, Daniel (OpenEZX, OpenMoko) [done] Full update/quickfix pass through the OpenMoko bugtracker [60% done] Review current OpenMoko software state, fix some obvious bugs [done] OpenMoko ring/alarm/sms tones (Marek) [done] Plan of action for the next 2 months (Daniel and Stefan) [done] Brainstorming for Neo1973 successor model [done] The only drawback is that I had zero time to visit a bit of the town... I'll be back though!MickeyProjects, Projects, Projects...tag:vanille.de,2007-03-31:projects-projects-projects2007-03-31T12:00:00ZI'm on overload. Really. After finishing my thesis I was hoping things would calm down by now and that I had a chance to stand down for a couple of months, thinking about my place in the world and how my life should develop in the next years. Alas, this turned out to be a false hope. I end up having no spare time left at all. Things really went crazy, since last year I commited myself to fulfill a contract this March -- based on the assumption that my involvement in OpenMoko would be reduced by now. Just yesterday I even had to cancel my annual visit to the Frankfurt Musikmesse which made me very sad. Anyway, besides the forthcoming move to a new appartment, my commitment for the next months is solely OpenMoko... oh, and that book about software development on Linux-based embedded systems that I'm writing... but that's ok, since writing and developing are different enough to be a good match. By the way, while I'm writing this, it's Saturday 7:30 in the morning and I'm in the ICE 972 Freiburg--Berlin on my way to Braunschweig for a two-days OpenMoko development meeting with Daniel 'Alphaone' Willmann, Jan Lübbe, and Stefan Schmidt (you probably know these guys from the OpenEZX project). So, if you contacted me in the last weeks, please don't expect me to be quick in getting back to you -- I'm trying to clean up the mess I call my schedule...MickeyThings falling into place for P1tag:vanille.de,2007-03-24:things-falling-into-place-for-p12007-03-24T12:00:00ZTwo weeks before the first phase-1 devices are to be shipped, things start to fall into place. The hardware seems reasonably stable lately and we now have a working dialer and basic PIM applications. Just a couple of minutes ago, I got the vibrator to work from userspace. The remaining construction sites before P1 devices are actually usable are the main-menu, task-manager, and the device management daemon. The latter being my primary area of interest -- besides openmoko-libs of course -- for the next weeks. I plan to write a lean-and-mean device manager based on previous work (both code and ideas) such as Richard Purdie's zaurusd, Florian Boor's microHAL, and the GNOME Power Manager. I'm closely following the developments around OHM and HAL as well. Eventually, the neod may as well become a plugin for OHM, however as we need a quick plan of action now, the best way seems to go forward and start to implement something based on what's already out there and running.MickeyFriction Lossestag:vanille.de,2007-03-19:friction-losses2007-03-19T12:00:00ZAfter quitting university and becoming a freelancer in September last year, my life has changed quite a bit. The most irritating thing is the amount of non-productive time I have to spend to be able to do productive work. While I was in university, almost 90% of the time I was in the office was spent doing actual work (not necessarily for the thesis or the faculty, but you know ;-)) -- nowadays I find myself organizing things, doing phone calls, traveling, processing e-mail and snail-mail, etc. for nearly 50% of the time. It's either me being not well prepared for this kind of work or things really got more complicated. I guess I have to hire some kind of assistant to help me spending more time doing actual development and lowering all this organization overhead.MickeyBack from FOSDEM'07tag:vanille.de,2007-02-28:back-from-fosdem072007-02-28T12:00:00ZFOSDEM was unbelievably exhausting this year. Being in charge of the OpenMoko application framework (which I had to talk about and attend way too many "business" meetings) and one of the founders of OpenEmbedded (which had a booth this year), my schedule just completely broke down: Of the 10 talks I wanted to see, I ended up in seeing just one and a half. Then again, I met a whole lot of interesting people this year: The OpenEZX guys Stefan, Jan, and Daniel, Carl 'Cairo' Worth, David 'OpenWengo' Neary, Pedro, the Maemo team, OpenedHand, the tinymail author, Philippe De Swert, Lorn Potter, Knuth Irvin, Wim Delvaux, Liam Girdwood, Graeme Gregory,... to just name a few. Unfortunately though I find myself returning with a severe headache and a cold -- which makes me being sick at a frequency of three out of three times (=100%) after returning from a FOSDEM :-( I'm afraid all the project and thesis defence pressure over the last couple of months starts to manifest. The good thing is if I manage to recover until Saturday, then I'm going to Austria for a one week vacation. And although I have some work to do, I'm sure I can relax a bit. Anyway, back to FOSDEM, I'm looking forward to be there next year, however I really think they need to find a way to allocate more space. OpenEmbedded needs to get a larger booth (or perhaps a developer room), we need to get a larger room for the OpenMoko talk, and considering the Friday beer event, the upper floor at the Roy D'Espagne is no longer a viable option for so many people.MickeyOffence is the best defencetag:vanille.de,2007-02-22:offence-is-the-best-defence2007-02-22T12:00:00Z::: {.img-shadow} ::: Today at 16:00 I was notified that I successfully defended my thesis. Preceded by a 15 minutes report by me and slightly over an hour questioning me. It's an unbelievable relief to know that the hardest part is over and this chapter can be closed real soon now. The last thing I need to do before they'll confer the doctorate on me is to publish it -- which should be done in a couple of weeks. Thanks for all of your wishes, I was overwhelmed by so many good souls bearing me in mind. Now I can fly to Brussels for FOSDEM'07 very relaxed...MickeyEmulating 20 year old hardware on a phonetag:vanille.de,2007-02-21:emulating-20-year-old-hardware-on-a-phone2007-02-21T12:00:00ZDue to my preparations for the thesis defence -- soon over, since tomorrow is "judgement day" -- I have almost zero time to work on OpenMoko. Yesterday though I got one of the very few models with a case prototype, that means I can finally work with the vibrator and the speakers (which sit in the case and not on the prototype boards). The first thing I did is to compile sidplayer and mikmod to play .sid / .mod. It's kind of fun using brand new hardware to emulate 20 year old hardware :-) For the interested: .mp3 takes about 25% CPU load -- size is usually between 2 and 4 MByte .sid takes about 10% CPU load -- size is usually between 1 and 20 KByte .mod takes about 3% CPU load -- size is usually between 20K and 2 MByte So that makes .sid the preferred format for ring tones, right?Mickeyopenmoko.org and the light of daytag:vanille.de,2007-02-15:openmokoorg-and-the-light-of-day2007-02-15T12:00:00ZAs promised, OpenMoko completely opened access to code, specifications, bugtracker, and mailing lists. This is an absolute novum in the industry, since -- to my knowledge -- no company ever published code and specifications during development state. This is even more open than Nokia -- who released Maemo not before the first version was finished. The OpenMoko team sees this as an open invitation to the community to contribute not only in the form of additions and refinements, but also on the core platform itself. We are gathering your input and are commited to get your wishes into the platform. There will be no closed branches, no internal forking whatsoever. This thing will stay open. In the past couple of months, I have been working on the OpenMoko application framework, a set of GObject-derived classes, APIs and libraries for a rich and consistent application programming experience. Getting APIs right the first time is incredibly hard -- especially when all you have is demo applications. I see this unfinished state as a great opportunity for all potential application programmer's to tell us what kind of APIs they want to see in the framework. I have been also trying to realize the designer's idea of the OpenMoko look & feel. And guys... I have been going through hell. Designers are cool, but their attempt to applications is top-down, they think in terms of complete views including absolutely positioned UI elements. Whereas a programmer's approach is bottom-up -- thinking in terms of layout managers, widgets, composite engines, and the like. This cultural gap can be observed by comparing the various Mockups in the Wiki to actual screenshots. Due to the limitation of the both the current hardware (S3C2410 @ 266MHz) and the software (X/Gtk+) in the Neo1973, a lot of effects are just not efficiently recreatable. However, we will retain the Mockups in the Wiki, because they are the manifest of our goal. Eventually OpenMoko will run on faster hardware (Neo v2) and perhaps also a more suitable base toolkit (EFL, Clutter, pure Cairo?)-- then we'll get there. In contrast to a lot of other companies opening their code, this is not the end, but the beginning. OpenMoko Inc. continues to support paid work on the OpenMoko platform, which is necessary to canalize and realize all the valuable input of the community. Although we were plagued by a lot of things going wrong during the past months (see Harald's and Sean's postings), things fall slowly into place now. Shaping the age of liberated mobile computing -- it's an exciting time we live in.MickeyFed up with legacy radiotag:vanille.de,2007-02-07:fed-up-with-legacy-radio2007-02-07T12:00:00ZI can't stand listening to local radio stations anymore. No matter which station or target audience, the playlists are always too small and similar, too commercial-orientated, the moderators are dull, and when I want to know about what happened I rather read a newspaper or go online. Fortunately, there is a very addictive alternative! Since a couple of months, I'm enjoying Soma.fm -- a commercial-free internet radio supported by its listeners. It contains 11 unique channels of underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco.MickeyCultural Shock aheadtag:vanille.de,2007-02-05:cultural-shock-ahead2007-02-05T12:00:00ZWith us moving in April to a new appartment, I will take the chance to fill the gained space in the new office room with a slightly enhanced computing infrastructure. Currently, I own one Windows (XP) machine, one GNU/Linux (Mandriva) machine, and a lot of mobile devices running GNU/Linux (OpenEmbedded-derived). What has been missing since long is an Apple Mac. Not only because this is the 3rd supported platform for the Qt GUI-Toolkit, but also because Apple always had a special touch when it comes to usability, polishing interfaces, and streamlining workflows. I never owned any Apple product, so I'm quite curious how hard this cultural shock will affect me. The only thing I need to decide though is whether I should go for a Mac Pro or a MacBook Pro... any recommendations? (P.S. Of course, I will try to run OpenEmbedded natively on the Mac...)MickeyOpenMoko @ LugRadiotag:vanille.de,2007-01-29:openmoko-lugradio2007-01-29T12:00:00ZLugRadio is a fortnightly British radio show that takes a relaxed, humorous look at Linux and open source. Recently, we talked about the OpenMoko mobile phone platform. It was a fun experience, these guys are really cool! Gosh, I have a hell of an accent. I really need to attend some articulation lessons for american (or rather perhaps british?) english.MickeyAppointment for Thesis Defencetag:vanille.de,2007-01-24:appointment-for-thesis-defence2007-01-24T12:00:00ZI finally have an appointment for the public defence of my doctoral thesis. It will happen on Thursday, 22nd of February, 2007, 14:00 which is good and bad. Good in the sense that it will finally be over in 4 weeks. Bad in the sense that I have only 4 weeks left to prepare for it. Since this is one day before FOSDEM 2007, I will have to hand over the wheel in organizing the OpenEmbedded booth appearance to someone else. Of course, I will still be present there and will also be able to stand at the booth, but I just can't manage to handle all the organization.MickeyA good daytag:vanille.de,2007-01-12:a-good-day2007-01-12T12:00:00ZThree cool events happened today: We got confirmation that we have been selected as new hirers for an appartement we have applied for. That means we will have to move -- which is not so cool per se, because moving is always stressful and exhausting -- however my office room will grow from 15m² to 31m² which is just great! I'm going to buy lots of new devices to fill that room :D I got confirmation that both referees have (finally) submitted their reports on my doctoral thesis and today the circulation of my thesis within the faculty has been launched. If no one objects during the following 8 weeks, I can get an appointment for my defense. I was pointed to http://www.roland.com/V-synth/ -- Roland will announce a new V-synth at the Winter Namm Show. This just rocks, since I have been waiting very long for a successor to the old V-synth. Now where did we put our money for this years summer vacation? :D On a totally unrelated note, the FIC Neo1973 running OpenMoko has been delayed. Which is "good". There is still a lot of things to do software-wise and this gives us the neccessary time.MickeyBack from 23c3tag:vanille.de,2006-12-31:back-from-23c32006-12-31T12:00:00ZThe annual Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin was a really cool event. It was my first Chaos Computer Congress and there were lots of interesting talks and opportunities to meet talented people working on projects. I also found time to work a couple of hours with Harald 'LaF0rge' Welte on OpenMoko and meet some guys from the OpenEZX project.MickeyStar Trek Personality Testtag:vanille.de,2006-12-26:star-trek-personality-test2006-12-26T12:00:00ZI am Jean-Luc Picard At least, according to the Star Trek Personality Test -- do it, it's fun and you may learn something about yourself ;) +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | A lover of Shakespeare and\ | | | Jean-Luc Picard | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 65% | | other fine literature. You have\ | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | a decisive mind and a firm hand\ | | | James T. Kirk (Captain) | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 60% | | in dealing with others. | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Will Riker | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 55% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Beverly Crusher | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 45% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Leonard McCoy (Bones) | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 40% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Uhura | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 35% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Chekov | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 35% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Spock | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 29% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Geordi LaForge | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 25% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Mr. Scott | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 25% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Data | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 24% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Deanna Troi | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 20% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Worf | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 15% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | An Expendable Character (Redshirt) | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 10% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | | | Mr. Sulu | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 0% | | | | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----+ | | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+MickeyCongratulations Madam, it's a phonetag:vanille.de,2006-11-08:congratulations-madam-its-a-phone-22006-11-08T12:00:00ZNow that the cat is out of the box, I can finally tell you a bit more about this project. You probably have seen all the press releases, so I don't need to recap what you can expect out of it as a user. This is about what's in for you as a developer, because this is what has attracted me so much as well. Please note though that I'm not speaking officially for FIC here -- this is my personal take on the project. For years, the embedded open source community has been lusting for a hackable phone. A lot of (more or less successful) open source efforts went around putting Linux on hardware running WindowsCE based operating systems. All in all most of these were frustrating experiences, because reverse engineering is just a terrificly time consuming approach and by the end of the day, it's of questionable legalty as well. If you really manage to put Linux on a phone without the help of a manufacturer it will take you so long that by the time you're done, it has been already obsoleted. This has happened a lot of times in the past and we want to change it -- since although the work being sort of educating and fun (at times), it's a lot of wasted effort that most of us would rather spend working on actual applications. Up to today, there is nothing like an open phone available. Instead, most of the so-called "open source friendly" manufacturers are trying to lock you out -- by using SElinux, booting signed kernels only, etc. The FIC Neo1973 is different. The partnership with FIC is a unique opportunity for developers who care about projects like GPE, Opie, OpenEZX, XanaduX, and friends, since it enables us to make a phone software stack done exactly the way we like it -- "bottom-up" standardization instead of doing it "top-down". The OpenEmbedded community has quite a lot of experience when it comes to integration issues and this is why the OpenMoko distribution will be an OpenEmbedded derived Linux distribution. GUI-framework wise, it has been an easy choice. Most of the application hacker momentum is focused around X11-based frameworks like Gtk+, Qt, wxWidgets, fltk, fox, and the like. There is absolutely no reason to not base your phone GUI framework on one of those toolkits and this is why we chose the X11/Matchbox/Gtk+ combination for this phone platform. Being a strong supporter of C++ and Qt though, I'm very interested in getting this effort to a point where it's possible to write e.g. Qt phone applications that run inside the Gtk+ based UI framework and don't look alien. Consequently, given a GObject-based C framework, adding language bindings should be a straightforward task as well. FIC has understood that this will be an iterative process. We don't expect to present a fully featured phone when we start shipping it in Q1/2007, but we rather adhere to releasing "early and often". By working together with the open source community guys right from the start, I believe in FIC's smartphone division establishing a solid and healthy relationship. This will hopefully include device discounts for developers as well as listening to us about future hardware platforms. If we manage to make this a successful proof-of-concept open source device, we might be in a position where our wishes about the shape of things and the type of hardware to include in future devices might reach very open ears. Update: Some clarifications, since I've seen a couple of wrong facts on various sites: It got a micro-SD-slot and a SIM-card slot (of course, hey... it's a phone) It's got a headphone socket. The only proprietary bits are the GSM modem part (which is not even running on the application processor, but on a seperate certified TI module) and something for the assisted GPS. We have Harald 'Mr. GPL' Welte on board, so rest assured that everything that can be open actually _is_ open. I am 'a' (aka one of three) founder of OpenEmbedded, not _the_ founder.MickeyUpcoming Conference: Open Source in Mobiletag:vanille.de,2006-11-05:upcoming-conference-open-source-in-mobile2006-11-05T12:00:00ZI'm very pleased to be able to attend the first conference on business case and technology: Open Source in Mobile in Amsterdam this week. Not only will this be a great opportunity to discuss the merits of open source with business guys and operators, but also a chance to talk about the project I have been working on for the last couple of months...MickeyGtk+ Theming Woes for Embedded GUIstag:vanille.de,2006-10-28:gtk-theming-woes-for-embedded-guis2006-10-28T12:00:00ZIn the project I'm working on, we want to have a visual user experience that is guaranteed to blow you away. Eye candy and usability combined. This is about eye candy. In theory, the Gtk+ theming capabilities are good. In practice, it sucks. I won't go into complaining about the most underdocumented area of Gtk+, but if you want to attract commercial developers who need to rely on being productive and effective right from the start, then Gtk+ is giving you a lot of headaches. The usage of X11 and Gtk+ as the GUI foundation for embedded devices is increasing steadily, however the Gtk+ theming possibilities are merely adressing the needs of desktop systems. Of course, I am not the first one realizing that. Nokia decided to fork Gtk+ for their Maemo UI -- between you and me, one of their worst decisions as developers really hate having to compile a seperate Gtk+ version for Maemo developing. Consequently, this is a no-no for our project. The worst thing is that Gtk+ treats widgets (instead of images) as first class entities, that means it will scale your images according to the size request of the widgets, not vice versa. Widgets are scaled according to their layout and the internal widget layout and size -- which is defined through hardcoded widget code. If you don't let images to be stretched, they might be clipped (e.g. in a checkbox) or drawn partly outside the parent widget (e.g. for an arrow). This scaling facility is nice for desktop systems, but in embedded systems this is a nuisance, because you usually know your display size in advance and want to have every pixel match the layout given by the designer, and the display size rarely changes (only few people use their mobile phone applications to display via remote-X). Another requirement is overlapping widgets. The Gtk+ team canon is "Gtk+ doesn't support overlapping widgets". Well, this is really bad. A typical use case is a dashboard kind of user interface which contains the static portions of the UI in form of a bitmap. Since you don't want to implement all widgets on your own, but reuse the GUI toolkit logic, you need to overlay stock Gtk+ widgets on top of this fixed bitmap / layout. Gtk+ just can't do that. Even if you think you are smart -- e.g. trying to a set a background pixmap to a GtkVBox or a GtkAlignment, hoping it will shine through the widgets you add to the container -- you lose. GtkContainer derived widgets are transparent widgets by definition, they don't have a GdkWindow and they don't draw anything on their own. So what now? How about forking Gtk+ now? No no no no... there must be a better way... I have found one. After three days and nights wrapping my head around Gtk+ code, I managed to write a couple of widgets which support overlapping. I have derived custom widgets from GtkFixed, GtkAlignment, GtkVBox, and GtkHBox which not only support a background pixmap overlapped by Gtk+ widgets, but also the option to hardcode the size through the style sheet, i.e. style "mydashboard" { bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "dashboard.png" GtkFixedOverlay::size-request = { 0, 480, 0, 120 } GtkFixedOverlay::cargo-border = { 40, 380, 10, 80 } } widget "*.mydashboard-widget" style "mydashboard" It's not perfect, because for some cases it still involves hardcoding inside the application, but it's a huge step forward for dashboard-style embedded user interfaces. These classes have been created for my current client, but will be open sourced soon -- together with the complete project as well.MickeyBack from Trolltech DevDays'06tag:vanille.de,2006-10-14:back-from-trolltech-devdays062006-10-14T12:00:00ZThe two days event run by Trolltech in the Hilton Park Hotel in Munich was fully loaded with a sophisticated technical program, interesting partner exhibits, and really good food (excluding the Trolltech cookies, which only looked cute)! Add two nice giveaways (a Trolltech branded backpack which is really usefully designed + a Trolltech shirt) and a lot of friendly Trolls and you have an event that was really worth to attend. For me, the most impressing issues were: Qt for WinCE in 2008 Advanced Item Views Thread Support in Qt Styling Qt Widgets using Style-Sheets QGraphicsView 1. Matthias Ettrich announced that Trolltech is working on Qt for Windows CE and that it's supposed to be out in 2008. This is an important step that may have serious impact to Embedded Linux. Basically, it means we have roughly one more year left to shape our platforms. By 2008, Windows CE will be a much stronger competitor than it ever was. 2. Thanks to the new Interview framework -- which is slightly based on the Model-View-Controller design pattern -- a lot of new possibilities for presenting and manipulating data in QListViews arise. You are using classes derived from QAbstractItemModel to interface with your data model and you are using classes derived from QItemDelegate to do custom painting per item or derived from QAbstractItemView to control the layout or even the complete viewport. The possibilities are endless and starting by now you can (finally) resuse data models and data views seperatly -- which is a great thing. 3. Qt 4.2 contains a revamped version of Multithreading support. The most useful fact is that there are per-thread event loops now. This makes signalling between threads much more easy, e.g. signals are thread-safe nowadays, because slots are no longer called from the context of the emitting thread. This is one great feature that users probably won't recognize, but it allows for reduced latency and more simple (hence less error-prone) algorithms. 4. Customizing the Qt look previously needed deriving a custom class from QStyle which implements drawing the widgets. In Qt 4.2 Trolltech seperated the widget look description from actual code by using a description language similar to CSS which is parsed on-the-fly when widgets are drawn. This enables designers styling your application, not coders. It blows away Gtk+ RC files. Interestingly, it's quite similar to what Enlightenment's Edje can do -- I guess both used CSS as inspiration. 5. The canvas is back! And it will blow you away. Visualizing complex data has never been so easy and powerful. I can't wait to write the first application using QGraphicsView. The ones of you who know me from the Opie project are probably wondering why I didn't say anything about the GreenPhone yet. Uhm, well, ... I don't feel very excited about that. It's good to have an "open" (it's still not clear whether the libraries will be open source) Qtopia platform, but it comes two years late, the "SDK" is a joke (they really should hire someone with OpenEmbedded experience) and I'm afraid the community has moved on to X11 (that is: kdrive) and Gtk+. I'm looking forward to be on board for the DevDays'06 and want to express my gratitude to Trolltech which made it possible for me (and a lot of other open source developers) to attend this conference - thanks!MickeyBack from OEDEM'06tag:vanille.de,2006-10-09:back-from-oedem062006-10-09T12:00:00ZThe three days in Berlin were fun while begin efficient and productive at the same time. I guess most of it boils down to the small amount of participants. If you are less than 10 people, you can discuss informal without the need of a moderator-operated discussion protocol. This made it an event that I really enjoyed. From left to right: Richard 'RP' Purdie (O-Hand) Thomas Frydrych (O-Hand) Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz (HaeRWu) Michael 'Mickey' Lauer (Vanille-Media) Koen Kooi Florian Boor (Kernelconcepts) Holger 'Zecke' Freyther Missing in the picture are Henning 'Woglinde' Heinold and Rolf 'Laibsch' Leggewie.OEDEM'07 is scheduled to take place in Poland early summer next year. If you want to sponsor this event, contact us.MickeyInstalling Mandriva 2007 on a Thinkpad X60stag:vanille.de,2006-10-02:installing-mandriva-2007-on-a-thinkpad-x60s2006-10-02T12:00:00ZMy recently acquired Thinkpad X60s just arrived a couple of days ago and naturally the first thing I had to do was to install my Linux-Distribution of Choice to get a nice mobile development workstation. Getting there wasn't that easy and since there are already documentations for installing other Linux Distributions, I just thought I briefly share my findings with you. Installation Procedure: The preinstalled operating system is Windows XP. To make room for the Linux OS, you have to shrink the Windows NTFS partition. I did that using PartitionMagic 8.0 from within Windows. I shrinked the partition to be 30G which left me with 40G for Linux. Prepare a medium with an installer. If you have a docking station with an optical drive, this is easy. I didn't, hence I had to prepare a bootable USB drive. I created a FAT16 partition on the USB drive, dd'ed images/all.img from the Mandriva Installer DVD onto the partition and set it to active (bootable) using fdisk from a Linux machine. Boot from the Installer medium. On the Thinkpad X60s, you have to press F12 during boot to chose the boot drive. I did that and then the Mandriva installer started. If you -- like me -- have no docking station and no optical drive, then you need to come up with another storage source for the installation packages. I put the Mandriva Installation DVD into my Windows machine and launched the WarFTPd ftp daemon to serve it. If you have enough space on your USB drive, just copy the i586 directory over to it as well. Unfortunately the Mandriva Installation image does not recognize either the internal LAN nor the internal WLAN adapter of the Thinkpad X60s. Fortunately, I had a cheapo USB-Ethernet adapter laying around which was recognized. You won't need this if you have enough space to put the i586 directory onto your USB hard drive. The actual installation procedure went pretty straightforward. Be sure to chose manual partitioning otherwise you'll ruin your Windows installation. Partition your drive so that /dev/sda5 will contain your Linux root file system (I chose ext3fs), /dev/sda6 should contain the swap space. Sometimes the installer seems to stall for a couple of minutes, but don't be worried, it will eventually continue. If you want to preserve the special ThinkPad Bootloader, then you should choose to install the Grub Bootloader into /dev/sda5, not into the MBR (Master Boot Record). After rebooting, boot into Windows again and grab the latest version of Grub4Dos. This way you can boot Linux from the Windows (special Thinkpad version) Bootloader. Things that didn't work out of the box: Ethernet Wireless LAN Sound SD/MMC Card Reader Post-Installation Hints: Kernel 2.6.17 contains a bug in the e1000 driver that prevents the network card being correctly initialized when you don't have a cable w/ a working link plugged in. This can be fixed by recompiling the kernel with a patch. The ipw3945 driver needs manually installing the firmware microcode and the ipw3945 daemon. You can get both from http://www.bughost.org/ipw3945/. Install alsaconf and go through the menu-based configuration. The X60s contains the AD1981HP as part of the Intel ICH7 chipset. It's a RICOH card reader which needs the module sdhci a recent kernel (>= 2.6.17rc1). Open /etc/modprobe.preload and add this line. After rebooting (or manually modprobe'ing) the SD should be found as /dev/mmcblk0. [to be continued]MickeyConferences Aheadtag:vanille.de,2006-09-22:conferences-ahead2006-09-22T12:00:00ZI enjoy going to conferences. When I was younger, I really loathed travelling. Now that I am much more open minded, I'm having fun seeing other towns and countries and meeting people from all over the planet. Currently I'm looking forward to attending two important conferences next month: OEDEM'06 (Open Embedded Developers European Meeting) in Berlin -- it's the first (of hopefully an annual series) conference about the BitBake Task Executor and the OpenEmbedded MetaData Repository, both in combination enabling to build Embedded Linux Distributions from scratch. Since I'm the co-founder of this project I have the honor to host a couple of sessions. I'm especially happy to meet the OE developer and OpenZaurus maintainer Marcin 'Hrw' Juszkiewicz for the first time. Trolltech Dev'Days'06 in Munich -- a developer conference with a lot of interesting sessions about Qt, Qtopia, and related products. Despite my ambivalent relationship to the Trolltech Brisbane developer group, I'm glad for the opportunity of attending a conference with an advanced technical program -- especially because Opie veteran Holger 'Zecke' Freyther will join me. Nearby... since I need to work during travelling, I have just ordered a Lenovo Thinkpad X60s -- crossing fingers that it will arrive before the first conference is due.MickeyThesis Submittedtag:vanille.de,2006-09-19:thesis-submitted2006-09-19T12:00:00ZToday I have submitted my Ph.D. thesis "Component-based adaptive Middleware for mobile distributed systems" to the examination office! My thesis shows how the encapsulation of distributed systems middleware functionality into components can lead to an adaptive middleware system that -- by the means of a reflective architecture -- features dynamic adaptation to changing application requirements and to changing environmental conditions. Using the developed µMiddle architecture, you can add and modify application interfaces (e.g. RPC, Message Passing, Tuple Space), marshalling strategies (e.g. ASCII, Binary, XMLRPC, SOAP), stream operations (e.g. compression, encryption), transport protocols (e.g. TCP, UDP, ATP), service discovery modules (e.g. SDP), context awareness modules (battery, environmental lighting, CPUload), and more directly within a running middleware system using a highly abstracted graph-based Meta-Object-Protocol that guarantees safe and consistent changes. This kind of capability is of increasing importance for next generation mobile distributed systems and leads to more flexible middleware and application architectures. Subject to the agreement of the board, I will get an appointment for the public defense of my thesis -- hopefully not later than December this year. I want to acknowledge all of you who supported and believed in me in the past 5 years -- thanks!MickeyThe Trouble with NDAstag:vanille.de,2006-09-14:the-trouble-with-ndas2006-09-14T12:00:00ZNDAs are pretty common in freelance work projects. The acronym NDA stands for "Non Disclosure Agreement", which basically means that you are not allowed to talk about anything related to clients, vendors, hardware or software specifications, market strategics, etc. While I understand (and of course respect) the origins and purposes of NDAs, sometimes they're troublesome anyway. For instance, I am working on a really really cool project that is eventually going to be Open Source and have an important impact there, because... I would love to tell you more, but I'm not allowed to :) This is a difference between academics and businesses I will have to live with.MickeyThesis Progresstag:vanille.de,2006-08-07:thesis-progress2006-08-07T12:00:00ZSince May 2006 I'm no longer employed at the Frankfurt University (they have limited 5-year contracts for offspring researchers) and getting time to proceed with my doctoral thesis got much harder. I had to find calm periods between starting my freelancer career and a lot of everyday life things that were to handle. Shortly before my one-week vacation on Ibiza, I handed a release candidate out to my doctoral adviser and -- despite a lot of short comments which I need to take into account for the final version -- I got a fairly well review. In particular this means, that as soon as I found a 2nd referee for the thesis, I will be able to submit it. If all goes well it will happen in September 2006. Polishing the dissertation makes more fun, now that I can see the end of the matter.MickeyDiving into the Linux kernel worldtag:vanille.de,2006-07-16:diving-into-the-linux-kernel-world2006-07-16T12:00:00ZI never did any serious Linux kernel work until now. I was busy enough with all my open source userland activities and there were already enough skilled people working on kernel things for the devices I own. After seeing how the OpenEZX project is progressing, I decided to buy a Motorola A780 and a Motorola E680 and to contribute to help getting this exciting project forward. While Harald Welte, the project leader and main developer, is currently concentrating on getting the AP (Application Processor, responsible for everything non-GSM) and BP (Baseband Processor, responsible for the GSM stuff) interaction done, I thought I could help a bit with OpenEmbedded integration and "non-critical" stuff like drivers. As expected, OpenEmbedded integration was a breeze -- we can now build Opie, GPE, and Enlightenment images for the phones and can boot them via SD or NFS-over-USB. Doing kernel work was much more tough for me -- although I have been doing low level programming in the old COMMODORE C64 and AMIGA days, doing sensible things with the Linux kernel has a steep learning curve. Anyway, once you get the hang of it, it's actually fun and a nice change from doing userland stuff. My first results are available through the OpenEmbedded repository. I did kernel drivers for E680 LEDs, A780 LEDs, and the E680 / A780 LCD backlight. Next things for me will be to find out why touchscreen and MMC are not quite behaving on the E680. After that I'm planning to take a shoot at camera drivers.Mickey2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™ : 3rd Placetag:vanille.de,2006-07-10:2006-fifa-world-cup-germany-3rd-place2006-07-10T12:00:00ZThe World Cup is over. We lost the semi final against Italia but defeated Portugal. The 3rd place is a major achievement considering the state of the german team when Jürgen Klinsmann took over. He did not just formed a team that is among the four best teams worldwide -- much more important he showed the way to go for our future. And I'm sure this team definitly has a great future. Apart from this "final of hearts", Italia won the cup over France in the "real" final in penalty shooting. Congratulations, however the french team dominated the game for a good part, so I'm a bit sad about that result. I didn't experience any other World Cup so intense -- thanks to Kaiser Franz for his part in bringing it to Germany. Thanks to all teams, the fans and the supporters that made most of the past four weeks a giant party. Now back to everyday life... until the European Championship in 2008!Mickey2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™ : Semi Finaltag:vanille.de,2006-07-01:2006-fifa-world-cup-germany-semi-final2006-07-01T12:00:00ZI have a hard time believing it, but it looks like we made it past Argentina -- 5:3 (penalty shooting). It was a really tough and hard-fought game and for more than 30 minutes I really thought we were out... until Klose made his most important goal in this tournament. There is nothing to be said about the penalty shooting, it's a german tradition and we remain unbeaten... seriously though, Lehmann was great! My personal match winner though was David Odonkor -- his exchange turned the game. He brought the spirit and the will to catch up. Yes! For us, it's going to be Italia in the semi final -- the Ukraine played a good 2nd half, but shortly before they could catch up to 1:1, the Italians made their 2nd goal and this more or less broke their will. Bummer.Mickey2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™ : Quarter Finaltag:vanille.de,2006-06-25:2006-fifa-world-cup-germany-quarter-final2006-06-25T12:00:00ZGermany defeated Sweden with 2:0 in a marvellous game -- the best first half time I've seen from Germany in the last two years. Argentina vs. Mexico was a pretty hot game as well -- Mexico played their best 90 minutes in this tournament, but in the end couldn't stand the Argentina team. The 2:1 is justified and I'm in pleasent anticipation of Germany vs. Argentina in the quarter final.Mickey2006 FIFA World Cup Germany™ : Round Of Sixteentag:vanille.de,2006-06-16:2006-fifa-world-cup-germany2006-06-16T12:00:00ZAlthough I should really be working on my Ph.D. thesis, I keep finding myself in front of the TV -- watching a lot of soccer games these days. With us having won against Poland, our way to the round of sixteen is free -- although it's not sure which team our next opponent will be. The mood here in Frankfurt am Main is just great -- lots of cool people having fun together watching the games. It's much more calm than I would have expected. My personal favorite was Argentina vs. Côte d'Ivoire -- although Argentina did win 2:1, 1:2 or at the least 2:2 would have reflected more of my impression of these two teams.MickeyA New Blogtag:vanille.de,2006-06-14:a-new-blog2006-06-14T12:00:00ZFinally, in coincidence with my new site VanilleMedia, I started a new blog. It's not that I was unsatisfied with my last handcoded one, but these days it looks like there is a tendency to use all those nice planet sites -- i.e. planet.linuxtogo.org or planet.maemo.org -- syndicating blogs from different places, which needs a standardized XML format. I really didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, so after evaluating a lot of content management systems and blog packages, I settled on using wordpress for the complete site. This also marks the start of me blogging in english -- I guess blogging in german wouldn't be all that useful for most of those planet sites.MickeyTuxMobil Linux Awardstag:vanille.de,2005-08-02:05-auszeichnungen2005-08-02T12:00:00ZEin Tag zur Freude! Die beiden Open Source Projekte, denen ich in den vergangenen drei Jahren sehr viel Zeit gewidmet habe, sind auf Platz 1 und Platz 2 des ersten TuxMobil GNU/Linux Award 2005 gelandet. OpenZaurus ist komplett offene alternative Linux-Distribution für die Sharp Zaurus PDA-Familie, OpenEmbedded ist ein Metadatensatz und eine Entwicklungsumgebung für die Konstruktion von Linux-Distributionen. Sowohl OpenZaurus als auch OpenEmbedded sind absolut konkurrenzfähige Softwarepakete, die so manches mehr leisten als alle verfügbaren kommerziellen Alternativen - und so langsam scheint die "Welt" davon Notiz zu nehmen. Jetzt müssten wir nur noch ein wenig Venture Capital für die Weiterentwicklung rekrutieren können und dann wäre ich wirklich glücklich.MickeyTomTom Gotag:vanille.de,2005-07-20:05-tomtomgo2005-07-20T12:00:00ZNach einiger (mir ewig erscheinender) Verzögerung durch die Firma TomTom ist endlich das Standalone Navigationsgerät TomTomGo 500 bei mir erschienen. Seitdem ich meinen 3er ohne Navi gekauft habe, war ich sehr lange am hadern, ob ich das original BMW Navigationssystem nachrüsten (lassen) sollte oder doch auf ein externes System zurückgreifen soll. Aus Kostengründen habe ich mich dann doch für die TomTomGo Lösung entschieden - optisch ist sie zwar nur halb so schön wie das BMW Original, angesichts 1/5 des Preises kann ich darüber aber gut hinwegsehen :) Die Software an sich funktioniert wie erwartet sehr intuitiv und auf das wesentliche reduziert - prima! Da die neuen TomTomGo auch als Freisprecheinrichtung für Bluetooth-fähige Handys fungieren können gibt es sogar einen echten Mehrwert gegenüber der BMW-Lösung - die natürlich noch mal einen saftigen Aufpreis gekostet hätte.MickeyJugendgottesdiensttag:vanille.de,2005-06-30:05-jugendgottesdienst2005-06-30T12:00:00Z"Die seit einiger Zeit monatlich stattfindende Jugendgottesdienstreihe der Dreikönigsgemeinde erfreut sich steigender Beliebtheit. Grund ist neben der ausgezeichneten musikalischen Untermalung von Jacob Hellwig und Michael Lauer die Spiel- und Glaubensfreude des Juniorteams, die verkörpern, dass Kirche nicht langweilig oder etwa uncool sein muss. Hier macht Gottesdienst Spass!"MickeyLinuxTag in Karlsruhetag:vanille.de,2005-06-23:05-linuxtag2005-06-23T12:00:00ZWar beim jährlich stattfindenden LinuxTag in Karlruhe und habe ein paar nette Leute vom z-portal getroffen sowie einen Kollegen vom Opie Projekt.MickeySony-Ericsson K700itag:vanille.de,2005-04-07:05-k700i2005-04-07T12:00:00ZNach vier Jahren treuen Dienstes habe ich heute mein Siemens S45 in den vorläufigen Ruhestand geschickt. Abgelöst wurde es nach ausgiebiger Recherche von einem Sony Ericsson K700i. Ein nettes Telefon mit allem Schnickschnack, den moderne Handys so haben. Als allererstes habe ich mal das sogenannte "Branding" entfernt, d.h. die Adaptionen des Service-Providers (in meinem Falle E-Plus), die sich im regelfall nur negativ auf die Performanz des Geräts auswirken. Dabei habe ich mir kurzzeitig bei einem abgebrochenen Flashvorgang das Telefon geschrottet... einen Tag lang dachte ich, ich müsste es einschicken, aber dann konnte ich es mit Hilfe des Davinci Teams wiederbeleben. Nun habe ich die neuste Original-Firmware drauf - wirklich empfehlenswert. Zumal das Telefon an sich durch die Vertragsverlängerung für 0 EUR zu haben war :DMickeyAlice ist da!tag:vanille.de,2005-04-06:05-alice2005-04-06T12:00:00ZHeute war die Umstellung meines Telefon- und Internetanschlusses auf HanseNet. Für 52 EUR Grundgebühr gibt es einen ISDN+DSL-Anschluss mit 5Mbit Downstream sowie 512KBit Upstream und einer Flatrate, d.h. ohne Zeit- oder Volumenbegrenzung. Das Produkt Alice macht seinem hübschen Model alle Ehre, von der Bestellung bis zur Umstellung vergingen gerade mal zwei Wochen und alles hat einfach reibungslos geklappt. Die Hardware kam pünktlich, funktionierte auf Anhieb und die Transferraten sind traumhaft. Fazit: Extrem Empfehlenswert. Da wo es geht (bis jetzt leider nur in wenigen deutschen Städten), gibt es nichts besseres. T-Com, zieht euch warm an.MickeySkifahren in Obergurgltag:vanille.de,2005-03-12:05-skifahren2005-03-12T12:00:00ZZum jährlichen Skiurlaub hat es uns dieses Mal nach Obergurgl verschlagen. Die ersten paar Tage war es ziemlich schattig... -11 im Tal, -20 auf dem Berg und dazu Wind mit 30km/h fröstel. Später wurde es dann wärmer - jedoch fehlt mir immer noch die Sicherheit und Angstfreiheit, um einigermassen solide die Pisten runterzukommen. Vielleicht doch mal ein Trainingslager Ende des Jahres...MickeyFOSDEMtag:vanille.de,2005-02-28:05-fosdem2005-02-28T12:00:00ZIch war in Brüssel auf der jährlich stattfindenden europäischen Konferenz der Free and Open Source Developer (FOSDEM). Ich habe über zwei Projekte einen einstündigen Vortrag im sog. Embedded Developers Room gehalten, der sowohl relativ gut besucht war als auch ganz gut ankam. Von Brüssel selbst habe ich leider nicht wirklich viel gesehen - empfehlen kann ich das Roy D'Espagne direkt am Grand Place - ein nettes Restaurant, in dem man die wichtigsten belgischen Biersorten bekommt. Es gibt übrigens 300 verschiedene Biersorten in Belgien - damit liegt Belgien in diesem Aspekt nicht weit hinter Deutschland. In der Zeit von 3 Tagen war es mir leider nicht möglich, mehr als 3 Sorten zu probieren :) Mein Favorit ist übrigens das "Leffe Brune", ein etwas süßlich schmeckendes Dunkelbier. Auch diese Konferenz hat (leider) wieder zwei Fakten bestätigt, dass a) die Mehrzahl der Computerfreaks sowohl hygienische als auch soziale Defizite hat und es b) (vielleicht auch aus dem unter a) erwähnten Grund :) kaum Frauen in der Open-Source-Welt gibt. Ausnahmen bestätigen wie immer die Regel. Und so habe ich ein paar sehr symphatische - mir vorher nur durch IRC und Mail bekannte Entwickler - getroffen, mit denen es sich sehr nett plaudern und trinken ließ.MickeyLinux Kernel-Programmierungtag:vanille.de,2005-02-11:05-linux-kernel2005-02-11T12:00:00ZKernel Programmierung ist eine der Königsdiszipline bei der Programmierung, denn man muss sich statt mit hoch abstrahierten Konstrukten wieder mit Bits und Bytes auseinandersetzen - sozusagen 'am Blech schrauben', um mal eine unpassende Werkstattmetapher zu benutzen. Ich habe gestern spontan beschlossen, Kernel 2.6 Unterstützung für den Sharp SL-6000 PDA zu implementieren - ein schönes Gerät das aber standardmässig nur mit einem ziemlich grenzdebilen 2.4.18-embedix von Sharp kommt. Momentan tappe ich noch ziemlich im Dunkeln, aber den Kern-Maschinen-Support habe ich offenbar schon mal einigermassen richtig gemacht. Ja, in diesem Stadium freut man sich auch über eine Kernel Panic - um noch eine unpassende Metapher zu benutzen... es ist ein wenig wie der erste Schrei eines Neugeborenen ;)MickeySt.Moritztag:vanille.de,2005-01-21:05-stmoritz2005-01-21T12:00:00ZJa - in der Stadt der Reichen und Alten... auf der jährlichen Konferenz über drahtlose Netze und Dienste WONS 2005. Natürlich auch kurz mal auf der Piste... :)MickeyMissfits – Letzte Rundetag:vanille.de,2004-11-22:04-letzte-runde2004-11-22T12:00:00ZWir waren in der Alten Oper bei dem vermutlich letzten Auftritt der Missfits in Frankfurt. Ein Auftritt, auf den ich mich 9 Monate gefreut habe, da die beiden Frauen leider beschlossen haben, nach 20(!) Jahren ihrer Karriere als Kabarettistinnen zu beenden. Die Missfits sind einfach fantastisch, inhaltlich spritzig und pointiert, schauspielerisch und gesanglich professionell - neben der unvergleichlichen Lisa Fitz meiner Meinung nach das beste, was Frauenkabarett zu bieten hat(te). Wer es noch schafft, Karten für einen ihrer letzten 20 Auftritte zu bekommen, möge sich beeilen - die Gelegenheit kommt nicht wieder.MickeyMitarbeiterfreizeittag:vanille.de,2004-10-10:04-mitarbeiterfreizeit2004-10-10T12:00:00ZAuf der zweiten Mitarbeiterfreizeit des Konfi- und Jugendarbeitsteams von Dreikönig jagte ein Superlativ das nächste... darunter die Gewinnerelle, Wölfe und Dorfbewohner (mit dem Superwolf Katha), "Meine Freunde nennen mich Adorno", Gabi und der Nähmann, Basti und die Bunnies Lia und Laura (inclusive Ehrenbunny Gabi), der wohlgeschlissene Schleisenscheid, und nicht zuletzt Jakobs PornoPasswort.MickeyUpgradetag:vanille.de,2004-09-24:04-upgrade2004-09-24T12:00:00ZNachdem sich der Reparaturbedarf meines 320i Coupe in den letzten Monaten doch unangenehm gehäuft hat, habe ich mich schweren Herzens davon getrennt. Der Trennungsschmerz wurde gelindert durch mein neues 325i Coupe und die erfreuliche Tatsache, dass ich für meinen "alten" beim BMW-Händler noch 5050 EUR bekommen habe.MickeyFrisbee im Museumsuferparktag:vanille.de,2004-09-07:04-museumsufer2004-09-07T12:00:00Z...und dann war da noch der Chef vom Cafe im Museumsuferpark, der sich zweifellos im Ton vergriffen hat, als er versuchte, uns zu kommunizieren dass wir doch ein wenig weiter weg von seiner heiligen Terasse spielen sollen. Wahrscheinlich hat er uns mit seinen Angestellten verwechselt. In dieses Cafe werde ich keinen Fuss mehr setzen (es sei denn es fliegt mal eine Frisbee herein...).MickeyKonfirmandenfreizeittag:vanille.de,2004-09-05:04-konfirmandenfreizeit2004-09-05T12:00:00ZJa, ich weiss, ich wollte eigentlich so langsam mal in "Rente" gehen. Dieses Mal jedoch war ich wieder dabei, und - was soll ich sagen - es war ein Spitzenwochenende. Klasse Spiele, schöne Lieder, und ein traumhaftes Wetter mit viel Sport. Das einzige, woran es gemangelt hat, war Schlaf. Aber man kann ja nicht alles haben.MickeyEnergie?tag:vanille.de,2004-07-11:04-energie2004-07-11T12:00:00ZDas eifrige Ankurbeln ist einem kraftlosen Raunen gewichen. Zeit, die Autobatterie austauschen.MickeyVanille Stadtkochtag:vanille.de,2004-06-15:04-vanille-stadtkoch2004-06-15T12:00:00ZIn Darmstadt gibt es einen französischen Stadtkoch, der für Gruppen quasi "zu Hause" ein fulminantes 5-Gänge Menu zaubert. Der Koch ist sehr symphatisch und erläutert zu jedem Gang, worum es sich im Einzelnen handelt. Es empfiehlt sich, früh zu buchen, denn er hat aufgrund seiner Popularität eine Vorlaufzeit von knapp 6 Monaten. Sehr empfehlenswert!MickeyKaterfrühstück mit Horst Schrothtag:vanille.de,2004-04-02:04-katerfruehstueck2004-04-02T12:00:00ZWar bei Horst Schroth im Unterhaus in Mainz und es war - wie erhofft - fantastisch! Aus der Programmbeschreibung: "Älter werden wir alle. Und auch das ist gut so. Mag sein, dass die Statistik Recht hat, die sagt, dass Frauen länger leben als Männer. Aber bei Männern fühlt es sich auf jeden Fall länger an! Ein Mann merkt, dass er älter wird, spätestens dann, wenn seine Frau zu ihm sagt: 'Komm, Schatz, lass uns noch oben gehen und richtig schön Sex machen!' Und der Mann sagt: 'Tolle Idee, aber beides hintereinander?'"MickeySkifahren in Gaschurntag:vanille.de,2004-03-19:04-skifahren2004-03-19T12:00:00ZWozu man sich nicht alles überreden lässt, nur um dem Partner eine Freude zu machen... :) Ich war mit vier Freunden Skifahren in Österreich: Silvretta Nova ist das grösste Skigebiet im Montafon und dort verschlug es mich nach ~15 Jahren Abstinenz (Skifreizeit in der 9. Klasse) wieder auf Skier. Hier nun der ultimative Reisebericht. Ach vorweg noch etwas zur (vielleicht nicht unbedingt hunderprozentig glücklichen) Zusammensetzung unserer Reisegruppe: 2 Experten, 2 Fortgeschrittene, und... ich. Tag 1: Ich mache einen Skikurs und wir befinden uns in der Ebene. Oja, richtig... ich erinnere mich: Skischuhe sind ziemlich schwer und drücken. Meine Knie waren nach ungefähr einer Stunde absolut hin - Autsch! Pflugfahren ist übrigens mit das anstrengenste überhaupt - und auch unter den Experten, d.h. den Skilehrern nicht ganz unumstritten. Leider habe ich eine Skischule erwischt, die nach der alten Methode unterrichtet, d.h. zuerst Pflug und Pflugbögen erlernen und dann kann man sich davon nicht mehr richtig lösen. In den letzten 15 Jahren hat sich beim Skifahren sehr viel getan - die langen Streichhölzer sind den kurzen Carving Ski gewichen. Damit hat sich auch eine ganz neue Technik des Skifahrens etabliert - siehe z.B. www.Carving-Ski.de. In der Tat fällt das Stehen und Fahren auf Carving Ski den meisten Menschen wesentlich einfacher. Trotz völliger Erschöpfung habe ich nach diesem Tag das Gefühl, es liefe ganz gut. Dann kam allerdings Tag 2... Tag 2: Heute war ein wirklich furchtbarer Tag. Es fing an, dass wir mit der Gondel auf ungefähr 2000 Meter hochgefahren sind. Ich bin kein wirklicher Fan von Höhe und fragil anmutende Technik beruhigt mich auch nicht besonders. Dann kam es allerdings noch schlimmer... die Steilheit der Piste ("Wie, das ist eine Blaue? In meinen Augen erscheint die tiiiiefschwarz..."). Als wir dann den Hang endlich unten waren, wartete allerdings noch das Schlimmste auf mich: Lift fahren. Nein, ich fahre nicht gerne Lift. Weder Sessel- noch Anker. Die Höhe und das der-Technik-ausgeliefert-sein hat mich an diesem Tag wirklich fertig gemacht. Der Tag endete mit meinem absoluten Vorsatz, mich nie wieder solchen Gefahren auszusetzen. Morgen gehe ich nicht mehr zum Skikurs. Vielleicht stelle ich mich sogar nie wieder mehr auf Skier. Tag 3: Heute war schön. Ich habe darüber nachgedacht, ob ich ein wenig fahre, aber mich dann dagegen entschieden. Dafür bin ich allerdings mal mit der grossen Gondel hochgefahren und habe mich mit den anderen getroffen. Soweit so gut. Vielleicht probiere ich es morgen noch einmal auf dem Übungshang - ohne Druck und alleine. Tag 4: Auf dem Übungshang war nicht viel los, ich konnte prima fahren. Ausser mir waren nur noch ein paar Knirpse und zwei offensichtliche Anfänger unterwegs. Letzere hats irgendwie in jeder Kurve (und auch in Geraden ;) zerlegt... seltsam. Bei mir gings eigentlich irgendwie ganz gut - vor allem gibt mir der Übungshang nicht genug Geschwindigkeit her. Hmm... offenbar bin ich hierfür doch zu "fortgeschritten". Während ich dies denke, überkommt mich der Übermut und ich schnalle meine Ski ab... vielleicht gebe ich dem Berg doch noch mal eine Chance. Gesagt getan und in die Gondel gesetzt. Nach der Mittagspause mit den anderen ist die Euphorie allerdings rapide wieder verschwunden. Dennoch fahre ich mit den beiden Experten einmal die blaue 1 hinunter und... eigentlich klappts heute ganz gut :) Tag 5: Nachdem es gestern "relativ" gut ging, haben wir uns entschieden, den letzten Tag mit allen eine kleine Skitour zu veranstalten. In der Tat ging es auch stellenweise ganz prima. Natürlich hats mich ein paar mal zerlegt und ich bin bei einigen Abhängen tausend Tode vor Angst gestorben... aber herunter kommt man ja bekanntlich immer - wenn es auch mit Gummibeinen auf der letzten blauen Piste, die übrigens nachmittags zur Schneehaufen-Buckelpiste mutiert war - echt nicht mehr einfach war. Dennoch waren die Experten und die Fortgeschrittenen ganz zufrieden mit mir. Wieder zurück habe mich dann mal etwas mehr informiert, was man so machen kann... ich will jetzt nochmal von vorn anfangen und mit einer Skischule, die im neuen Stil lehrt, sobald wie möglich wieder einen Kurs machen. Ich könnte mir vorstellen, dabei zu bleiben. Denn... irgendwie macht es schon Spass! Ach ja, bevor ich es vergesse, zum Schluss noch die wichtigsten zwei Pisten-Überlebenssprüche unser Experten: "Im Pflug kommt man jede Piste runter." "Piste ist überall."MickeyUlmtag:vanille.de,2004-03-05:04-ulm2004-03-05T12:00:00ZIch war auf dem Frühjahrstreffen der GI Fachgruppe Betriebssysteme, auf dem aktuelle Forschungsaktivitäten in Deutschland vorgestellt wurden. Es war eine wirklich sehr interessante Tagung, insbesondere weil (für mich etwas überraschend) offensichtlich sehr wenig mit Linux zu tun hatte, das im nicht-akademischen Umfeld ja momentan sehr an Bedeutung gewinnt. Die zwei Haupttrends der Betriebssystemforschung sind meiner Meinung nach momentan 'Virtualisierung von heterogenen verteilten Ressourcen' und 'Minimierung und Verifizierung der Trusted-Computing-Base' Letzteres wird zurzeit mit Hilfe von Mikrokernel-Ansätzen wie dem L4 Projekt bearbeitet. Ulm ist eine nette kleine Stadt an der Donau. Die Universität Ulm ist übrigens die am höchsten gelegene Universität Deutschlands (~600m). Da Ulm total überbucht war (wegen des dort jährlich stattfindenden Dialysekongress) bin ich in Neu-Ulm/Finningen untergekommen - im Landgasthof Hirsch, den ich hiermit wärmstens empfehlen möchte: Sehr warme und gemütliche Atmosphäre und tolles Essen.MickeyWest Side Storytag:vanille.de,2004-01-04:04-west-side-story2004-01-04T12:00:00ZWar heute in der Alten Oper um das Musical West Side Story von dem grandiosen Leonard Bernstein zu sehen. Viele der Lieder haben wir in grauer Vorzeit im Schulchor bzw. der Musical AG selbst gesungen - von daher hat man irgendwie einen ganz anderen Bezug dazu. Extrem negativ ist mir ein neues "Feature" der Alten Oper aufgefallen - jeweils ein 16:9 Flachbildschirm hängt zu beiden Seiten der Bühne und auf diesem werden die Übersetzungen (ja, quasi Untertitel) der gerade gesprochenen bzw. gesungenen Texte angezeigt... das ist sowas von störend. Man ertappt sich dabei, ständig auf die Screens zu schauen, anstatt auf die Bühne.MickeyFrohes Neues!tag:vanille.de,2004-01-01:04-frohes-neues2004-01-01T12:00:00ZFrohes Neues Jahr! Insbesondere an alle diejenigen, die ich diese Jahr nur kaum (oder gar nicht) gesehen habe. Herzlichen Dank insbesondere an Carla, die mit einem Spontananruf um 13:55 mein Silvester gerettet hat, das ich ansonsten mit einem Stück Knäckebrot und einem umgekippten Wein verbringen hätte müssen.Mickey2^5tag:vanille.de,2003-12-26:03-happy-birthday2003-12-26T12:00:00ZHappy Birthday to me... zur einzig' vernünftigen 2er Potenz. Halbzeit bis 2^6 – mal sehen, ob es dieses Logbuch bis dahin noch gibt :-)MickeySextett in der Komödietag:vanille.de,2003-12-11:03-sextett2003-12-11T12:00:00ZWar in der Komödie - das Stück hiess "Sextett" und der Name war Programm. Ein sehr amüsantes Lustspiel, dass man nur jedem empfehlen kann. Es gibt eine Inszenierung von Wolfgang Spier, die vor ungefähr 20 Jahren mal im Fernsehen kam - leider jedoch nie wiederholt wurde. An der wäre ich sehr interessiert... wenn jemand darüber stolpert, bitte ich um Meldung.MickeyOpenZaurus 3.3.5 & Opie 1.0.3tag:vanille.de,2003-11-28:03-openzaurus2003-11-28T12:00:00ZHabe heute den organisatorischen Kraftakt vollführt, OpenZaurus 3.3.5 sowie Opie 1.0.3 für nahezu alle unterstützten Modelle freizugeben. Jetzt bin ich erst mal ziemlich am Ende und brauche definitiv eine OpenSource-Auszeit...MickeyPython und GUI-Toolkitstag:vanille.de,2002-03-29:01-pythonbuch2002-03-29T12:00:00ZR-ledigt! Heute morgen wurden die letzten Baustellen geschlossen, noch etwas poliert und dann nahezu schlüsselfertig übergeben. Nein, kein Haus, sondern das, woran ich die letzten sechs Monate ziemlich intensiv gearbeitet habe: Mein Buch "Python und GUI-Toolkits". Ein Buch über die Programmierung graphischer Benutzungsoberflächen mit Python und den GUI-Toolkits Qt, GTK+, wxWindows und Tk. 500 Seiten im Schweisse meines Angesichts und unter Vernachlässigung meiner Freizeit, des Logbuchs und vieler anderer Dinge. Dies ist nun vorbei - jetzt muss es nur noch erscheinen...MickeyGewichttag:vanille.de,2001-04-16:00-gewicht2001-04-16T12:00:00ZSchockschwerenot! Gerade bin ich auf mal auf eine neue Waage gestiegen... und wäre beinahe umgefallen. Meine alte Waage zeigt 3 Kilo zu wenig an!! Aaargh... jetzt muß es mit dem Abnehmen losgehen. Der Sommer naht...MickeyUnfalltag:vanille.de,2001-02-01:01-unfall2001-02-01T12:00:00ZStatistisch gesehen hat jeder Autofahrer alle 3,5 Jahre einen Unfall. Meine 3,5 Jahre sind wohl heute zu Ende gewesen, da mir jemand, der keine Lust hatte zu schauen, ob ihn etwas am Spurwechsel hindert, einfach diesen vollzogen hat. Voll in meinen rechten Kotflügel. Nun war das auch noch ein Kurzzeitkennzeichen, Kurzzeitführerschein und ein gestikulierender Spanier, der kein einziges Wort deutsch konnte... Uff... wenn's kommt, dann kommt's richtig. Kosten des Spaßes: 2000, vorläufig für mich und wir hoffen die Versicherung zahlt...MickeyRonjatag:vanille.de,2001-01-28:01-ronja2001-01-28T12:00:00ZWelt paß' auf - es ist ein neuer Mensch angekommen! Herzlichen Glückwunsch an Margarete und Timm Knape zur Geburt ihres Mädchens! Willkommen an Bord, kleines...MickeyWintereinbruchtag:vanille.de,2001-01-24:01-wintereinbruch2001-01-24T12:00:00ZWintereinbruch in Deutschland... ich spare mir die Erzählung einer haarsträubenden nächtlichen Odyssee am Wochenende... nur soviel: Nächstes Jahr gibt's ab November Winterreifen und die bleiben drauf' bis März. Mit dem neuen Rechner bin ich wirklich zufrieden. Die Zeiten, in denen man von VIA-Chipsätzen lieber absehen sollte, sind endgültig vorbei. Galapagos - in Zeiten in denen Geld offensichtlich immer noch wichtiger ist als die Sicherheit des - uns die Lebensgrundlage bietenden Ökosystems - laßt uns um jede Art trauern, die von diesem Planeten getilgt wird. :-( TFT-Schirme treten ihren Siegeszug gegen die Röhrenmonitore an, die sich eigentlich nur noch über den Preis halten können... apropos Preis... wenn selbiger keine Rolle spielen würde, wäre dies mein nächster Monitor.MickeyNeuer Rechnertag:vanille.de,2001-01-16:01-neuer-rechner2001-01-16T12:00:00ZWie? Zwei Wochen ohne Aktualisierungen ? Jaaa... viel zu tun! Insbesondere der Aufbau eines neuen Rechners... hier einige Eckdaten für die, denen dies etwas sagt...: ABIT VP6 DUAL PIII BOARD 2 x PIII Coppermine 800MHz 2 x 256 MB RAM 2 x DTLA 307045 Bis jetzt läuft das gute Stück extrem stabil. Mehr dazu und zu anderen Dingen später.MickeyWarteschlangentheorietag:vanille.de,2001-01-13:01-warteschlangentheorie2001-01-13T12:00:00ZWarteschlangentheorie: Ein M/M/2 System ist ein System, bei dem sich Ankunft- und Bedienzeit als Markovprozesse - exponentialverteilt - darstellen lassen. Die Anzahl der Bedienstationen ist 2 und dies sind offensichtlich zu wenige! Denn sonst müßte man bei der KM-Elektronik Filiale in Frankfurt am Main nicht 2 (in Worten: zwei!) Stunden warten, bis man sich von der Tür bis zu einer Bedienstation vorgequält hat. Umpf. Wenigstens war es stellenweise lustig und das corpus delicti war da. Letzte Woche war die Disputation von von Christian Becker, dem Betreuer meiner Diplomarbeit. Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Doktor und viel Erfolg auf dem weiteren Weg!MickeyFrohes Neues!tag:vanille.de,2001-01-01:01-frohes-neues2001-01-01T12:00:00ZMit Prognosen ist das so eine Sache... manchmal treffen sie zu, manchmal nicht. Manchmal ist es auch völlig illusorisch, Prognosen anzustellen. Dennoch ist es sicherlich nicht übertrieben, zu orakeln, daß dieses Jahr Veränderungen in meinem Leben mit sich bringt, wie es sie noch nicht gegeben hat. Mein Sylvester war übrigens klasse! Wir haben in einer mittelgroßen Runde Raclette (wie der Rest der Welt scheinbar auch) gemacht, gespielt, gefeiert und gesungen. Es hätten ruhig noch einige mehr sein können, aber wer nicht will der hat schon... oder auch nicht. Der Stargast war übrigens ein Kamel! Alles alles Gute an alle, die dies hier lesen und an alle meine Freunde... insbesondere an die, mit denen ich dieses Jahr nicht gefeiert habe - vielleicht klappt's ja nächstes Jahr wieder... (sagte ich das nicht schon mal ?), z.B. ANDY, CARLA, MARCO, SU, KERSTIN, TIMO, GABY, OLLI, MARTIN, OLE, ANIKKE, MICHI, GABI, JAN, BORIS, MAGGY, CHRIS, MIRIMAM, KAI, ANETTE, ANKE und an alle, die ich - wie immer - fieserweise vergessen habe!MickeyCaptain's Log 2000tag:vanille.de,2000-12-31:00-guten-rutsch2000-12-31T12:00:00ZWie schnell ein Jahr vergeht. Einen guten Rutsch in's neue Jahrtausend!MickeyA-Hatag:vanille.de,2000-11-30:00-aha2000-11-30T12:00:00ZIch komme gerade vom A-HA Konzert zurück. Es war prima! Wir hatten Plätze im 1. Rang ganz links relativ nahe an der Bühne. Tolle Sicht, toller Sound, gute Band. Es wurde ein Mix aus alten und neuen Liedern gespielt, wobei der Anteil an älteren Liedern leicht überwog... dankenswerterweise. Morten hat sehr gut gesungen - seine Stimme war top in Form, auch bei den schweren Passagen. Probleme hatte er nur mit dem Text einiger älterer Songs (Zum Auditorium: "I guess, you should do that :-)" - und das obwohl er sich einige Texte auf den Bühnenboden geklebt hatte. Mit seinem In-Ear-Monitoring System kam er auch nicht ganz zurecht... es saß wohl ziemlich locker und er mußte es oft wieder festdrücken. Der absolute Konzerthöhepunkt wurde übrigens bei der 88'er Nummer "Living Daylights" erreicht... ironischerweise ausgerechnet bei dem Lied, mit dem A-HA seinerzeit nicht sehr glücklich waren, da sie sich mit dem Komponisten John Barry (der übrigens für den Großteil aller James-Bond-Soundtracks verantwortlich ist) nicht vertrugen und mit dem Endprodukt ziemlich unzufrieden waren. Weitere persönliche Höhepunkten waren vor allem "Manhatten Skyline" (auf Scoundrel Days, 1986) und natürlich die Hits des 1985er Erstlingswerkes Hunting High and Low: "The Sun always shines on T.V." bzw. "Take on Me", welches dann auch den Abschluß der Zugabe bildete. Den Anfang der Zugabe bildete übrigens ein für A-Ha sehr wichtiges Lied, da dieses ihr Comeback möglich gemacht hat: "Summer moved on". Ach ja... das beste am Konzert habe ich vergessen... die Lautstärke! Ich konnte seit langer Zeit mal wieder ein Konzert ohne Gehörschutz genießen... fantastisch! Ach ja... für die Musiker unter uns... folgende Instrumente konnte ich erkennen: Waldorf Microwave Keyboard Masterkeyboard mit 2 x E4 Emulator drunter Clavia Nordlead 2 Yamaha AN1X Flügel Gitarren Irgendeine ZugriegelorgelMickeyWeihnachtsmarkttag:vanille.de,2000-11-28:00-weihnachtsmarkt2000-11-28T12:00:00ZGuten Morgen (es ist 07:45). Morgen! Und da soll man noch sagen, Studenten wären Nachtschwärmer oder würden bis Mittags schlafen... ts... ts... ts... Vorgestern war ich auf dem Weihnachtsmarkt. Man sollte das ja eigentlich boykottieren - jedes Jahr fängt es früher an... die Weihnachtsdeko auf unseren Straßen hängt schon seit Mitte November... und in den Supermärkten gibt's die Nikoläuse wohl bald das ganz Jahr über... das finde ich nicht gut. Auf dem Weihnachtsmarkt kam mir Rudolf Scharping, amtierender Bundesminister für Verteidigung seit 1998, mit seiner neuen Freundin entgegen. Ich habe kurzzeitig überlegt, ob ich salutieren soll... aber als Kriegsdienstverweigerer hätte ich ihm höchstens anbieten können, mal für ihn einzukaufen oder seine Wohnung zu putzen... :-)MickeyTiteltag:vanille.de,2000-11-19:00-titel2000-11-19T12:00:00ZUps. Das letzte Update ist schon wieder über zwei Wochen her... die Zeit geht einfach zu schnell vorbei, wenn man älter wird... und außerdem vor lauter Arbeit zu nicht mehr viel anderem kommt. Apropos zu nichts kommen... ich komme gerade von einer guten Party zurück. Was macht eine Party gut? Schwierig zu sagen - vor allem, weil sich die Wahrnehmung einer solchen mit den Jahren ändert. Als prä- oder auch postpupertärer männlicher Teenager gibt es nur zwei Dinge, die eine Party gut machen: Alkohol oder Frauen - wahlweise bzw. noch besser auch in Kombination :-) Wenn man dann älter wird, ändern sich die Ansprüche (der meisten Leute... nicht aller...) an eine gute Party. Wie auch immer... meiner subjektiven Wahrnehmung nach war diese Party gut. Warum? Hmmm... nur einige Eckdaten: Gutes Essen, geistreiche (hmm... naja... :-) Gespräche, Anekdoten alter Zeiten (Vorsicht! Dies ist nur in geringer Dosis empfehlenswert), gute Musik, nette Leute, herzliches Lachen und einfach eine gute und positive Grundstimmung. Nach einigem Hin- und her habe ich jetzt einen Titel für meine Diplomarbeit, die ich im Frühjahr 2001 abgeben werde: "Softwaretechnische Dienstgüteintegration in CORBA" Apropos Titel... noch jemand hat einen Titel bekommen... hiermit möchte ich meiner Freundin Sabine öffentlich gratulieren... sie hat gestern erfolgreich ihre Disputation hinter sich gebracht und darf sich damit in naher Zukunft (es sind noch einige bürokratische Dinge zu erledigen) Dr. Sabine Ricker nennen!] (Natürlich wäre das ohne meine langjährige Unterstützung nicht möglich gewesen... schon mal eine stolzgeschwellte Brust gesehen? :-))MickeyCygwintag:vanille.de,2000-11-01:00-cygwin2000-11-01T12:00:00ZHabe heute meine ersten Gehversuche mit der CYGWIN-Umgebung gemacht und bin, gelinde gesagt - fasziniert! Was zum Teufel CYGWIN ist? Es ist die Portierung der üblichen UNIX Umgebungs- und Entwicklungstools (autoconf, automake, bash, g++, vi, etc...) auf Win32. Es ist wirklich fantastisch, endlich eine bash auf Windows 2000 zu haben... nie wieder \\... :-) Letzte Woche kam mein bestelltes Buch an... Advanced CORBA programming with C++, von Michi Henning und Steve Vinoski... ein Importbuch... 123 (in Worten: Hundertundreiundzwanzig)... jetzt bin ich pleite...MickeyC++tag:vanille.de,2000-10-28:00-c++2000-10-28T12:00:00ZManchmal nervt mich C++: Da schreibt man ein harmloses: CORBA::ORB_ptr _orb = CORBA::ORB_instance( "mico-local-orb" ); // construct and register transport module transport_client = MAQS::QOSTransportClient::instance(); M_ClientIIOPModule* module == new M_ClientIIOPModule( _orb ); transport_client->register_module( modname, module ); und das Ding hängt sich in der letzten Zeile auf... Es hat mich 5.5 (in Worten: fünfeinhalb!) Stunden gekostet, um zu sehen, daß in Zeile 4 ein Gleichheitszeichen zu viel steht, das Objekt also garnicht instanziiert wird... und dafür gab es noch nicht mal eine Compilerwarnung... (Nein, ich verbringe nicht alle meine Samstage so...)MickeyBuchmessetag:vanille.de,2000-10-17:00-buchmesse2000-10-17T12:00:00ZDie Frankfurter Buchmesse 2000 hat heute angefangen – danke für die Karten, Michi! :-) Zu dem Wirbel um die "Harry Potter"-Bücher fallen mir nur zwei Dinge ein: Die Autorin war vorher Sozialhilfeempfängerin und hat die Geschichte für ihre Kinder geschrieben. Sie hat's verdient. Wenn dieses Buch viele Kinder zum Lesen bringt, dann finde ich das prima, denn das Lesen ist immer noch die intensivste Art in Geschichten einzutauchen, mal von den angenehmen Seiteneffekten wie Verbesserung der Konzentration, des Wortschatzes, des geistigen Auges etc. abgesehen. 18% aller Deutschen lesen übrigens nach der Schule kein einziges Buch mehr!. Was ist los in diesem Land... ach was.... auf dieser Welt ? Ich selbst habe mal wieder mit einem älteren Zyklus angefangen (wer hat noch gleich gesagt: "Ein schlechtes Buch ist eines, das ich nur einmal lese?), dem RAMA-Zyklus von Arthur C. Clarke und Gentry Lee. Geschichten, für die ich jede Simpsons-Folge sausen lasse! Die Programmiersprache meiner Wahl hat ein Update erfahren... Python 2.0 ist da. Apropos Bücher... warum benötigt eigentlich ein Buch aus Amerika drei Wochen um hierher zu gelangen? Muß das erst geschrieben werden? Oder wird das mit einem Äppelkahn hierher geschifft? Wieviele Flugzeuge fliegen eigentlich jeden Tag nach USA und zurück? Hrmpfff... Vom Preis möchte ich erst gar nicht reden.MickeyPokemonstag:vanille.de,2000-10-16:00-pokemons2000-10-16T12:00:00ZGegendarstellung: Es sind 151 Pokemons, nicht wie fälschlich behauptet, 125 (oder so). Danke Kerstin :-) Heute habe ich spaßeshalber mal einen MICO 2.0.3 - Client auf Memory-Leaks untersucht... 397(!), davon 99% Strings. Irgendetwas stimmt da wohl mit der Implementierung der String_var nicht oder mit dem g++... leider kann ich nicht auf eine aktuelle Version aufrüsten, da ich mit nicht CORBA-konformen MICO-Erweiterungen arbeite... zum Aufspüren von Memory-Leaks benutze ich übrigens YAMD (Yet another malloc debugger), sehr empfehlenswert.MickeyDie 80ertag:vanille.de,2000-10-14:00-80er2000-10-14T12:00:00ZDie armen Lieder der 80er... erst werden sie in hunderten von Sammlungen wie "80s Super-Collection", "Pop & Wave #1723b", "Nur hier die besten 80er Hits Volume 93" etc. verwurstet, dann werden sie von debilen Kindertechnoproduzenten wieder ausgegraben, mit 4/4-Stampf, Babysynthplayback und ein paar tanzenden Blondchen versehen und wieder mal zu Geld gemacht... und als wäre dies nicht genug, kommt jetzt die dritte Recycling-Welle - meiner Meinung nach die schlimmste: Heute bin ich in Südwest-3 über eine Schlagersendung gestolpert, in der Karel Gott (ja, der mit der Biene...) das Lied "Für immer jung" gesungen hat... aaaaaauaaaa... es war einfach schlimm. Alphaville würde sich im Grab herumdrehen! Nach langer Zeit habe ich heute mal wieder "Wetten Dass..." gesehen. Es wettete ein siebenjähriger, daß er alle 125 (oder so) Pokemons (ja, diese häßlichen Spielzeuge... und ich dachte schon die Welt geht unter, als die Transformers und später die Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles ersonnen wurden... aber schlimmer geht's immer!) anhand ihrer Nummer kennt, das heißt Name, Gewicht, Vor- und Weiterentwicklung und Eigenschaftstext auswendig kann. Na Toll. Er hat die Wette gewonnen. Da war mir sofort klar, daß dies der Wettkönig werden muß: Kinderbonus! Nur ein Hund hätte ihn noch schlagen können, aber was hätte der wetten sollen ? ("Wuff Wuff Grunz Wuff!" = "Ich erkenne alle fünfhundertsiebenunddreißig Chappi-Sorten am Geschmack!") Mein persönlicher Favorit war eine 5-köpfige Band, die samt Equipment in einer Telefonzelle gespielt haben... das war klasse! Eine originelle Idee und gut durchgeführt - aber gegen den Kinderbonus... Und die Gäste waren auch ziemlich schwach... man sollte davon absehen, zuviele Sportler und Models einzuladen... außer Mittermeier und Mario Adorf (der leider etwas schweigsam war) konnte eigentlich keiner der Gäste sprechen.MickeyMark Shreevetag:vanille.de,2000-09-11:00-mark-shreeve2000-09-11T12:00:00ZHabe ein altes Lied wiederentdeckt... von einem der Pioniere der elektronischen Musik... dieser ist ebenfalls mit dafür verantwortlich, daß ich vor gut 15 Jahren mit Musik machen anfing. Mark Shreeve – Assassin (1983)MickeyFlatratetag:vanille.de,2000-09-07:00-flatrate2000-09-07T12:00:00ZFlatrate.MickeyBowlingtag:vanille.de,2000-09-06:00-bowling2000-09-06T12:00:00ZSchlechtes Wetter, schlechtes Fernsehprogramm... willkommen im Winter! Auf der Bowlingbahn lief's heute wenigstens ganz ok... Tagesschnitt 145 pins.MickeyT-DSL, Teil 3tag:vanille.de,2000-09-05:00-tdsl-32000-09-05T12:00:00ZDie(!) Telekomiker waren da... absolut lächerlich... haben zwei idiotensichere Geräte mit jeweils zwei Anschlüssen mitgebracht, eingesteckt und sind gegangen... und darauf habe ich nun so lange gewartet... das kann jedes Kleinkind. Aber... trotz grüner SYNC-LED funktionierte es natürlich nicht. Zumindest nicht auf Anhieb... es vergingen mehrere Stunden, in denen gar nichts ging... nach einem Anruf bei der Störungsstelle funktioniert es nun aber seit gestern abend. Mal sehen,wie lange :-)] Habe heute erstmalig Napster ausprobiert... ich brauch' 'ne Flatrate... :-)MickeyKundenfreundlichkeittag:vanille.de,2000-09-02:00-kundenfreundlichkeit2000-09-02T12:00:00ZEine Lektion in Sachen Kundenfreundlichkeit: Ich habe einen relativ alten Synthesizer – Roland JD990, wird seit einigen Jahren nicht mehr hergestellt – mit einer alten Betriebssystemversion, die in einigen Betriebsarten Probleme macht. Spaßeshalber habe ich mal der deutschen Roland-Niederlassung gemailt, ob sie irgendwo noch Restposten der letzten Softwareversion haben... mit der Antwort "Klar, kein Problem, wir bräuchten nur ihre Adresse.". Geschickt... und.... heute ist das Teil angekommen (ein kleiner EPROM-Baustein)... kostenlos(!)... sie wollen nur das alte EPROM zurückgeschickt bekommen. DAS nenne ich Kundenservice! (Hallo, Thomann... hört ihr mich ? :-)MickeySonnetag:vanille.de,2000-08-26:00-sonne2000-08-26T12:00:00ZHeute ist ein schöner Tag... wie selten in Deutschland: Ein kräftiges Lüftchen und eine wärmende Sonne... Fein. Carl Barks ist tot – einer der Männer der Millionen von Menschen Abermillionen schöner Stunden gebracht hat. Danke für alles und gute Reise!MickeyT-DSL, Teil 2tag:vanille.de,2000-08-23:00-tdsl-22000-08-23T12:00:00ZDie Telekom-AuftragsBestätigung ist da! Ein Anruf bewirkt wohl manchmal Wunder...MickeyKein T-DSLtag:vanille.de,2000-08-22:00-kein-tsdl2000-08-22T12:00:00ZNachdem heute (ein bisschen wie erwartet) kein Telekomiker an die Tür klopfte (nein, geklingelt hat auch niemand), habe ich die magische Rufnummer 08003301000 gewählt und dort sagte mir jemand, daß 22.8. nicht klappen würde (ach nee...) und als verbindlicher Termin jetzt 4.9. eingetragen wäre. Die Bestätigung und T-Online-Accountdaten sollten aber schon längst bei mir eingegangen sein... hmm... ob ich denn ein Problem mit meinem Briefkasten hätte... sehr lustig... nein ich habe kein Problem mit meinem Briefkasten...MickeyTischtennistag:vanille.de,2000-08-21:00-tischtennis2000-08-21T12:00:00ZAua... ich hatte gestern mein erstes Tischtennisspiel nach einem halben Jahr ohne wirklichen Sport... ich kann mich kaum noch bewegen... jammer. Einen herzlichen Gruß an Michi und Patrick Sabine und ich sind gut nach Hause gekommen... es war nur etwas regnerisch... plätscher... übrigens - die Stückchen waren wirklich lecker... :-) Heute soll ja ein Telekomiker kommen und TDSL installieren... ich glaub' ja noch nicht dran... da ich letzte Woche im T-Punkt nachgefragt habe und die von nix wußten... und meine T-Online Accountdaten sind auch noch nicht da... die müßte er also auch noch mitbringen, wenn der Termin denn überhaupt wahrgenommen wird... lassen wir uns überraschen...MickeyLiedertag:vanille.de,2000-08-18:00-lieder2000-08-18T12:00:00ZEs ist da! Und es funktioniert auch noch... kaum zu glauben, aber wahr. Damit ist meine Studiorenovierung abgeschlossen. Costa Cordalis fällt auch nichts mehr ein... ich hab' ihn neulich in einer furchtbaren Sendung namens "Wunschbox" gehört, da hat er ein Lied gesungen... "Viva La Noche", in dem alle Melodiephrasen geklaut waren... aus 80er Jahre Liedern... eigentlich sollte er doch annehmen, daß sein präferiertes Publikum sich daran erinnern kann... oder geht es vielleicht gerade darum? Against All Odds - Mariah Carey... der beste Beweis, daß auch eine dünne Piepsstimme ein gewaltiges Lied nicht verhunzen kann. Apropos gewaltige Lieder... es gibt Stunk bei 3P. Xaviour wollte 3P mit seiner Band verlassen, aber Moses zog einen Knebelvertrag aus dem Hut... ojee... wenn's um's Geld geht...MickeyKabeltag:vanille.de,2000-08-14:00-kabel2000-08-14T12:00:00ZZurück zum Alltag... Heute bei Thomann angerufen und diesmal wirklich ungemütlich geworden. "Das Kabel ist am 21.7. rausgegangen". Bitte??? Na toll. Ich weiß schon, warum ich Teillieferungen bei Postnachnahme nicht mag. Jetzt stehe ich in der Beweislast... das blöde Ding ist nämlich mitnichten bei mir angekommen. :-( 10 Minuten später - Rückruf von Thomann "Also ich bitte vielmals um Entschuldigung, da ist bei uns etwas schiefgegangen... es ist nicht herausgegangen. Ich trage es jetzt persönlich zur Versandabteilung und am Donnerstag sollte es da sein." Fortsetzung folgt ... am Donnerstag ...MickeyKonfifreizeittag:vanille.de,2000-08-13:00-konfifreizeit2000-08-13T12:00:00ZDonnerstag bis Sonntag war ich auf Konfifreizeit... wie immer ein wirklich tolles, den Geist stärkendes, das Fleisch schwächende (Schlaf und so...) Erlebnis. Der Höhepunkt war wie immer ein sonntäglicher Gottesdienst, von den Konfirmanden vorbereitet und durchgeführt. Dieses Mal waren alle Sachsenhäuser Konfirmanden zur gleichen Zeit im Freizeitheim Haus Heliand - ein Novum - welches uns ermöglichte einige Aktionen gemeinsam zu machen, z.B. das Geländespiel, das Lagerfeuer und eben jenen Gottesdienst. Dies ist erst der Anfang... ich sehe in einigen Jahren eine vollständige bezirksübergreifende gemeinsame Konfirmandenarbeit aller Sachsenhäuser Gemeinden und wir haben an diesem Wochenende ein eindeutiges Signal dafür gesetzt. Ich war dabei.MickeyWartereitag:vanille.de,2000-08-05:00-warterei2000-08-05T12:00:00ZSo langsam nervt die Warterei, Thomann!MickeyProduktivitättag:vanille.de,2000-08-02:00-produktivitaet2000-08-02T12:00:00ZDie Welt wird unwirtlicher. Aprilwetter über das ganze Jahr hinweg - dies ist erst der Anfang. Ich habe heute eine Kassette (die Dinger mit dem Magnetband, welches um zwei sich bewegende Zahnräder geführt wird) mit meinen Werken zwischen 1991 und 1993 gefunden … … und bin jetzt deprimiert. Es ist einfach unglaublich, wie kreativ ich mit nur einer einzigen KORG 01Wfd war... und heute? Heute habe ich massig Studioequipment, aber irgendwie keinen Output... kreatives Brachland... es ist zum Weinen.MickeyT-DSLtag:vanille.de,2000-07-29:00-dsl2000-07-29T12:00:00ZSoeben habe ich T-DSL beantragt, Bereitstellung erfolgt wahrscheinlich am 22. August. Sie haben mir im T-Punkt zwei(!) T-DSL-Frisbees geschenkt. Ach ja, vor einem Jahr habe ich mal drei zusätzliche MSNs beantragt... die sind auch prompt eingerichtet worden... nur habe ich nie Post von der Telekom bekommen... O jee... Naja, jetzt weiß ich die Nummern ja. Ich warte übrigens immer noch auf ein Kabel von Thomann. Schönes Wochenende - sofern man das bei dem Wetter sagen kann.MickeyStudiorenovierung, Teil 2tag:vanille.de,2000-07-24:00-studiorenovierung-22000-07-24T12:00:00ZDie Studiorenovierung ist nahezu abgeschlossen. Ich warte immer noch auf ein Kabel von Thomann. Glückliche Umstände ließen mich einen Blick auf eine Vorabversion von Windows NT 5.1 (Codename Whistler) werfen. Sehr interessante Neuigkeiten - z.B. eine Skinengine, ähnliche Technologie wie WindowBlinds, nur eben in's System integriert. Mehr dazu später.MickeyStudiorenovierungtag:vanille.de,2000-07-15:00-studiorenovierung2000-07-15T12:00:00ZIch bin bei einer kleineren Renovierung - allerdings nur auf elektronische Komponenten beschränkt - meines Studios. Zunächst habe ich mein betagtes MOTU Midi Express XT (mit Windows 3.1-Treiberkrücke, die irgendwie auch unter Win 9x funktionierte) gegen ein EMAGIC AMT 8 ausgetauscht. Ein guter Tausch - es funktioniert auch unter Windows 2000. Desweiteren habe ich meinem Digitalmixer YAMAHA 03D endlich die lange versprochene Digitalerweiterung CD8AES ( 8 AES/EBU In und 8 AES/EBU Out) samt einem Digitalsignalkonverter auf S/PDIF gekauft. Damit werde ich jetzt (hoffentlich... wenn Thomann endlich mal mein Kabel liefert) meine Audiowerk 8 mit einem brandneuen Windows-2000 fähigen WDM-Treiber digital an den 03D anschließen können. Außerdem habe ich meine Supernova verkauft. Als Nachfolger wird entweder eine Supernova II oder ein Q-Rack verpflichtet. Zu guter Letzt werde ich wahrscheinlich noch ein LINE6 POD PRO (virtueller Gitarrenamp) einkaufen.... wenn ich jetzt nur noch Zeit hätte, mit all den schönen Spielsachen auch zu spielen... Und da sag' doch noch einer mal, ich würde nichts für die Wirtschaft tun... :-)MickeyHonda P3tag:vanille.de,2000-07-04:00-honda-p32000-07-04T12:00:00Z"Gibt es etwas spannenderes als die Zukunft?" Dieser Werbespruch der Expo 2000 ist mir als allererstes eingefallen, als ich gestern zufällig auf eine WWW-Seite aufmerksam wurde, auf der ein sehr fortgeschrittener humanoider Roboter vorgestellt wird: Der HONDA-P3. Hoffentlich werde ich lange genug leben, um den täglichen Einsatz solcher Roboter mitzuerleben. Vielleicht werde ich sogar nach meinem Diplom im Fachgebiet Robotik promovieren – interessant finde ich dies auf jeden Fall schon sehr lange.MickeyWindows Milleniumtag:vanille.de,2000-07-03:00-windows-millenium2000-07-03T12:00:00ZEin paar Tage Nichts machen ist doch wirklich nett. Windows Millennium – die 5. Ausgabe von Windows 95 – ist erschienen und funktioniert soweit wie erwartet. Hoffen wir alle, das dies wirklich die letzte 16-bit Ausgabe ist... denn im Herbst werden bereits die ersten 64-bit Prozessoren vorgestellt.MickeyDiplomprüfung Theoretische Informatiktag:vanille.de,2000-06-27:00-theoretische-informatik2000-06-27T12:00:00ZHier bitte einen Tusch einfügen… Tadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Die Diplomprüfung Theoretische Informatik ist vorbei! Und es sah' die ganze Zeit nicht gut aus... am Donnerstag wachte ich mit 39.6 Grad Fieber auf und dies blieb auch nahezu den ganzen Tag so... die wohlverdiente(?) Strafe, am vorherigen Mittwoch auf dem Informatiker-Sommerfest gewesen zu sein.... Apfelwein getrunken zu haben und danach mit offener Autoscheibe nach Hause gefahren zu sein... am Donnerstag dachte ich wirklich, die Prüfung heute wäre nicht möglich... puuh... aber dank Wadenwickel im Minutentakt (autsch, schon wieder so heiß?) fiel das Fieber am Donnerstag abend und am Samstag früh konnte ich schon wieder lernen... Der langen Rede kurzer Sinn... nach der eher mäßigen Leistung der Vertiefungsfachprüfung (2.0) habe ich eine 1,0 in dieser Prüfung gemacht! Weitere Fragen bezüglich BK1 und PSC bitte an mich :-) tanz, freu, feier.MickeyKeine Updates?tag:vanille.de,2000-06-20:00-keine-updates2000-06-20T12:00:00ZWo die Updates bleiben? Hmm... ich beschäftige mich gerade mit Beschreibungskomplexität (BK) und Theorie der Programmiersprachen und Compiler (PSC). Einige Akronyme für Experten: BK: DFA, NFA, PA, DA, P-DA – PSC: (S)SDTS, FT, PDT, LL(k), LR(k), CYK, Early ... in einer Woche ist es (endlich) vorbei.MickeyTasche auf Autodach, Teil 2tag:vanille.de,2000-06-02:00-autodach2000-06-02T12:00:00ZEs gibt noch gute Menschen: Meine Tasche ist wieder da!!! Zwar unbrauchbar (mehrere Autos sind darübergefahren), aber alle Zettel sind noch drin. Die zwei ZIP-Disketten haben's leider nicht überlebt... aber alle Übungen meiner Studenten :-) Wie das kam ? Ein netter Taxifahrer hat die Tasche einige Minuten nachdem sie mir abhanden gekommen ist, von der Straße aufgelesen, hat alle Blätter im Umkreis aufgesammelt(!!! - bis auf die sieben stark mitgenommenen aus dem Graben, die ich noch gefunden habe), sie in die Tasche gesteckt und die Tasche durchkämmt. Und wie es der Zufall so will, hatte ich noch eine alte Lohnsteuerkarte darin stecken - auf der natürlich Name und volle Adresse steht. Und so kam es, das der nette Taxifahrer die Tasche bei uns abgegeben hat. Es gibt noch gute Menschen! Dafür gibt's nächste Woche einen Kasten Bier von mir! :-)MickeyTasche auf Autodachtag:vanille.de,2000-06-01:00-autodach-22000-06-01T12:00:00ZKennt ihr die Werbung von Aral, in der ein Typ seine Einkäufe auf das Dach seines Autos legt, diese dort vergißt und dann losfährt? ... Wie ich darauf komme? Nun... gestern, 16:00, nach der Uni, ich bin vollbepackt, Order unter dem rechten Arm, Tasche unter dem linken Arm, Wintersachen an (es war kalt morgens) und es ist ziemlich warm. Am Auto angelangt stelle ich meine Tasche auf's Dach um eine Hand freizuhaben, um den Schlüssel aus der Jacke zu holen. Beifahrertür auf, Ordner hereingelegt, Jacke ausgezogen und ebenfalls hereingelegt. Tür zu. "Ach es ist so warm, ich ziehe noch mein Hemd aus", dachte ich mir und tat's, während ich um's Auto herumging und die Fahrertür aufmache. Ich setze mich ein und fahre los. Dem aufmerksamen Leser sollte nicht entgangen sein, daß ich nichts weiteres von meiner Tasche geschrieben habe... nun, die saß fröhlich auf meinem Autodach und harrte der Dinge, die da wohl kommen würden... zu Hause angelangt fällt mir meine Tasche wieder ein - natürlich keinen Moment früher... ich starte also und fahre zurück, in der guten Hoffnung sie an der ersten Kurve wiederzufinden... doch: Fehlanzeige. Nach der ersten Kurve sehe ich ein paar überfahrene und verdreckte Zettel, die zweifelsohne aus meiner Tasche stammen... sie bildeten eine kleine Spur, der ich nachging... irgendwann hörte die Zettelspur jedoch auch und von der Tasche kein Anzeichen... Konklusion: Sie ist in der ersten Kurve vom Dach geflogen, landete auf der Straße, der Wind hat einige wenige Blätter aus der Tasche verteilt und ein freundlicher Zeitgenosse hat sie genommen und .... und? Tja... mal sehen, was passiert. :-( Glück im Unglück: Es waren keine wirklich wichtigen Sachen darin. Ab und zu stecke ich schon mal mein Telefon, meine Geldbörse und die Hausschlüssel in diese Tasche... dieses Mal aber irgendwie nicht... es befanden sich daher nur zwei ZIP-Disketten, zwei Skripten und - ärgerlicherweise - ein kompletter Satz nichtkorrigierter Übungen aus meinen zwei Tutorien, die ich eigentlich nächste Woche korrigiert und benotet zurückgeben sollte... ahem... ein Glück hatte ich sie nicht schon korrigiert... da wär die Mühe umsonst gewesen grins :-) Und die Moral von der Geschicht: Lasst auf Autodächern nichts!MickeyMS Natural Keyboard Protag:vanille.de,2000-04-25:00-natural-keyboard2000-04-25T12:00:00ZHeute war ein richtig schöner Tag. Sehr warm und ich habe den ganzen Tag nur Karten gespielt :-) Außerdem habe ich mein betagtes Microsoft Natural Keyboard gegen ein aktuelles Natural Keyboard Pro getauscht. Sehr gut! Jetzt muß ich die Zusatztasten nur noch unter Linux zum Laufen bringen... ächz ... xmodmap, xev, intputrc.MickeyVMwaretag:vanille.de,2000-04-21:00-karfreitag2000-04-21T12:00:00ZFrohe Ostern! Ich spiele gerade mit VMware herum, einer nahezu unglaublichen PC-Simulation. Auf meinem PentiumPro 200 läuft es zwar nur ziemlich zäh, aber es reicht mir, um festzustellen, daß hinter dieser Software eine ziemlich verblüffende Entwicklungsleistung steckt. Kurz gesagt bildet diese Software einen kompletten x86 PC inklusive der Standardperipherie ab. Auf dieser virtuellen Maschine kann man dann andere Betriebssysteme installieren. Ich installiere unter VMware/Win2000 gerade eine SuSE-Linux 6.2 Distribution. VMware ist mit einer 30-Tage-Testlizenz ausgestattet. Schaut' euch das wirklich mal an! Gibt's übrigens auch für Linux - und eliminiert damit wahrscheinlich alle Interrimslösungen wie WINE, WABI, etc. Der Clou: Das ganze ist nur knapp 6 MB groß. Respekt!MickeyMusikmessetag:vanille.de,2000-04-16:00-musikmesse2000-04-16T12:00:00ZIch bin gerade von der Musikmesse zurückgekommen. Dieses Jahr war es mal wieder richtig nett. Ich habe mit verschiedenen Entwicklern und Herstellern gesprochen, die ich vorher nur via email kannte. Und außerdem... ich bin verliebt! Das Objekt meiner Begierde: SAC-2K - von RADIKAL TECHNOLOGIES – ein motorisiertes Controllermodul für verschiedene Sequencer und Editorsoftware. Waaaahsinnnn... muß ich haben... aber auch ein waaaahnsinnspreis... 3.500 DM :-(MickeyBeOS 5tag:vanille.de,2000-03-31:00-beos2000-03-31T12:00:00ZIch habe BeOS 5 Personal Edition installiert. Sieht ziemlich gut aus. Es wäre schade, wenn dies wirklich die letzte Version von BeOS sein sollte - unglücklicherweise sieht es ganz danach aus. Der Möglichkeit, BeOS 5 als Image-File in eine FAT/FAT32/NTFS Partition zu installieren, ist wirklich gut. So braucht man keine besonderen Vorkehrungen - nur 512 MegaByte Platz - um sich BeOS anzuschauen.MickeyomniORBtag:vanille.de,2000-03-30:00-omniorb2000-03-30T12:00:00ZHabe mit omniORB und den Python bindings zu omniORB - omniORBpy - gearbeitet. Es ist wirklich erstaunlich, wenn man sieht, wie unkompliziert CORBA funktioniert - ein C++ Objekt ruft einfach eine Methode auf einem Python-Objekt auf, das auf irgendeinem anderen Rechner läuft - Interoperabilität pur!MickeyXFree86 4.0tag:vanille.de,2000-03-27:00-xfree862000-03-27T12:00:00ZVon wegen Urlaub... diese Woche habe ich mehr Termine als sonst... Heute bis Mittwoch ist Orientierungsveranstaltung der Mathematik - bei der ich als Ausnahmeinformatiker mitwirke grins. Übrigens: Morgen kommt BeOS 5 heraus - darauf bin ich sehr gespannt. Noch was: Heute habe ich XFree86 4.0 installiert. Sehr schön! Die Multimonitor Unterstützung funktioniert jetzt - insbesondere mit der Xinerama Erweiterung, die aus dem üblichen Schema mit zwei Desktops (unter X: :0.0 bis :0.1) einen einzigen Desktop macht. Jetzt müssen nur noch einige Windowmanager angepaßt werden. Ach ja, die für die neue XF86Config gibt es noch keine Konfigurationsprogramme, das heißt es ist Handarbeit gefragt. Da fühlt man sich an die alten Linux 0.x - Tage erinnert.MickeySonderforschungsbereich 403tag:vanille.de,2000-03-24:00-sonderforschungsbereich-32000-03-24T12:00:00ZSonderforschungsbereich 403 "Vernetzung als Wettbewerbsfaktor am Beispiel der Region Rhein-Main" wurde abgesägt! Während die Teilprojekte mit gut bis ausgezeichnet bewertet wurden, war den Gutachtern der theoretische Überbau des Ganzen unzureichend. Dies war der zweite SFB in einer Woche, der nicht verlängert wurde. Ein herber Schlag für die Uni Frankfurt, vor allem für die Promotionen und Mitarbeiterstellen, die davon abhängen. Also an meiner Demo lag's nicht :-)MickeySonderforschungsbereichsbegehung (II)tag:vanille.de,2000-03-23:00-sonderforschungsbereich-22000-03-23T12:00:00ZSagte ich letzte Woche etwas von "nahezu abgeschlossen ?"... Hah! Naja. Heute war SFB-Begehung und die Demo war ein voller Erfolg. Ein kleiner Wermutstropfen jedoch: Es war wie bei einem Festessen... 4 Wochen lang gekocht und in 5 Minuten gegessen... aber: Die Zweitverwertung wird in meiner Diplomarbeit geschehen und wahrscheinlich zeigen wir die Demo auch auf der CeBIT 2001. Jetzt bin ich erst einmal ziemlich computermüde - deswegen nehme ich auch eine Woche Urlaub.MickeySonderforschungsbereichsbegehungtag:vanille.de,2000-03-16:00-sonderforschungsbereich2000-03-16T12:00:00ZDie Demonstrations-Applikation für die Sonderforschungsbereichsbegehung nächste Woche ist nahezu abgeschlossen. Wie jedes Mal war es eine echte Qual, 8-12 Stunden pro Tag zu programmieren. Sehen wir's positiv... wer viel arbeitet, lernt auch viel... hier insbesondere mal wieder etwas über C++, CORBA, Dienstgüte-Mechanismen und Entwurfsmuster.MickeyImmunologietag:vanille.de,2000-03-14:00-immunologie2000-03-14T12:00:00ZWie jedes Jahr wurde heute anläßlich des Geburtstages von Paul Ehrlich der Paul Ehrlich- und Ludwig Darmstaedter Preis vergeben. Er ging an die Professoren H. Robert Horvitz, Ph.D. und John F. Kerr., Ph.D. für ihre hervorragenden Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der Immunologie. Prof. Kerr und Prof. Horvitz haben die sogenannte Apoptose entdeckt, den programmierten Zelltod. Im Körper des Menschen gibt es neben der vorhergesehene Zellteilung auch den natürlichen Selbstmord von Zellen. Viele Zell-Krankheiten, die auf vermeintlich unkontrolliertes Wachstum von Zellen zurückgehen können auch mit dem nicht funktionierenden Absterben von Zellen zusammenhängen. Einige Hauptergebnisse ihrer langen Forschung haben die beiden Preisträger in ihren auch für Laien verständlichen Vorträgen erörtert: Es gibt Zellen, deren Schicksal es ist, zu sterben - nicht nur während der Entwicklung von Lebewesen, sondern während des ganzen Lebens. Das Fördern des Selbstmordes von Zellen kann in der Zukunft als Alternative zur (grobgranularen) Abtötung der Zellen (z.B. durch Bestrahlung) bestehen. Die Gene, die für den programmierten Zelltod verantwortlich sind, können isoliert werden. Diese sind bei allen Lebewesen identisch. Es gibt eine Art universale Biologie der Lebewesen. Die Entwicklung von mikroskopischen (z.B. eines Wurmes mit ca. 900 Zellen) wurde untersucht und die Funktion jeder Zelle klassifiziert. Diese Ergebnisse können auf andere Lebewesen (incl. den Menschen) übertragen werden. Spannend.MickeyCeBIT 2000tag:vanille.de,2000-02-24:00-CeBIT2000-02-24T12:00:00ZHeute hat die CeBIT 2000 angefangen... mit einem Rechnerausfall und einem Verkehrschaos... Ich weiß überhaupt nicht, was Leute an dieser Messe so faszinierend finden. Z.B. bei der Musikmesse kann ich das ja noch verstehen... da sind jede Menge Instrumente, die kann man ausprobieren - das kann man im Laden nicht. Aber auf einer Computermesse? Es ist voll, die Hardware sieht man sowieso kaum, die Software unterscheidet sich nicht von dem, was man auf dem heimischen Rechner hat und die wirklich interessanten Teile sieht man sowieso nicht auf den öffentlichen Ständen... dazu benötigt man Presseausweise oder ähnliches. Und in den Zeitschriften steht sowieso ein paar Tage später alles interessantes... ohne Streß, Zeit- und Geldaufwand. Etwas anderes ist es, wenn man im "Big Business" tätig ist... zum Kontakte knüpfen oder Kunden anwerben hat die Messe sicherlich ihre Berechtigung... aber für den Privatanwender? Nebenbei: Im Rahmen meiner Diplomarbeit muß ich wieder mit C++ arbeiten... jetzt weiß ich wieder, warum mir Python so gut gefällt :-)MickeyEhrgeiztag:vanille.de,2000-01-31:00-ehrgeiz2000-01-31T12:00:00ZDramatis Personae: K, M, S. 1. Akt – Davor. K, M und S haben sich dazu entschlossen, von nun an mehr oder weniger regelmäßig Schwimmen zu gehen, um der körperlichen Tendenz zum Aufschwemmen gegenzusteuern. K und M haben es auch nötig, S definitiv nicht. K: "Ich will ein bisschen was für meinen Körper tun. Wenn wir nächsten Montag schwimmen gehen, werde ich 40 Bahnen schwimmen." S: "Hihi" M (ungläubig): "40 Bahnen?" K (überzeugend): "40 Bahnen!" M (gönnerhaft): "Hey, also wenn Du 40 Bahnen ziehst, dann ziehe ich auch 40 Bahnen" S: "Hihi" K: "Na dann." 2. Akt – Im Schwimmbad. K, M und S ziehen Bahnen. S zieht ihre Bahnen ungefähr doppel so schnell wie K und M. Während der fünften Bahn: M: "Na, 5 haben wir ja schon - das reicht doch eigentlich, oder?" K: "Wie - 5? Wir haben doch 40 gesagt!" M (genervt): "Das hast Du doch nicht ernst gemeint, oder ?" K (standhaft): "Doch doch... Du wirst sehen" Während der zehnten Bahn: M: "Also mir reichts jetzt" K: "Du willst doch nicht schlappmachen ? Ein Viertel haben wir doch..." M (quengelig): "Och nöööö...." Während der zwanzigsten Bahn: M (am vermeintlichen Ende seiner Kräfte): "Ich kaaaan nicht meeeehr...." M beendet die Bahn und setzt sich auf den Beckenrand. K zieht zwei weitere Bahnen und... K: "Auf! Weiter geht's!" (zieht M an den Füßen wieder ins Wasser) Während der dreißigsten Bahn: K: "Also wenn man so dabei ist, dann läufts doch, oder?" M (röchelnd): "Wie verrückt..." S: "Hihi" K: "Naja, ein bisschen tun meine Beine auch weh..." (unerschrocken weiterschwimmend) K beendet die vierzigste Bahn, M setzt ebenfalls zum Aufhören an] K: "Hey - Du hast erst 36!" M: (am Boden zerstört): "Bitte ???" K: "Ja - zwei hast Du zugeschaut und dann hab' ich dich wieder eingeholt" M (sich in sein Schicksal fügend): "Ok... Du hast ja Recht..." K (gönnerhaft): "Naja, Du kannst ruhig aufhören." M (nun erneut vom Ehrgeiz gepackt... mobilisiert die letzten Reversen): "Nö! Jetzt erst Recht!" M schwimmt die letzten vier Bahnen und kommt mit Gummibeinen und ziemlich erschöpft am Beckenrand an. K und S lächeln ihn freundlich an. K (zu S): "Und - wieviel Bahnen bist Du geschwommen?" S (beiläufig): "80" M (sprachlos): "..." 3. Akt – Der Tag danach. [M trifft K in einem Raum] K: "Naaaa... was machen die Beine ?" M (fröhlich): "Also ich spür nichts... Und Du?" K (unglaübig): "Eeeecht ? Oh Mann... ich kann kaum laufen..." M (wieder mit der Welt und seiner Kondition versöhnt): "Hehe - und ? Nächste Woche - gleiche Zeit, gleicher Ort?" K (zerknirscht): "Och nöööö..."MickeyKulturabendtag:vanille.de,2000-01-26:00-kulturabend2000-01-26T12:00:00ZHeute war wieder Kulturabend der Mathematik-Fakultät. Der Kulturabend der Mathematiker ist eine liebgewordene Tradition, in der Studenten und Professoren diverses, textuelles, musisches etc. zum Besten geben. Er räumt auch mit dem Vorurteil auf, Mathematiker wären nicht künstlerisch begabt.MickeyTeure Folientag:vanille.de,2000-01-19:00-folien2000-01-19T12:00:00ZPuh. Mehrere Wochen Arbeit, endlose Recherchen im Netz - für 25 Folien und 80 Minuten Vortrag "Middleware und Datenbanken" im Seminar WWW und Datenbanken. Ach übrigens... wo gibt's eigentlich billige Overhead-Folien ? Die, die ich gekauft habe, haben 1 (in Worten: eine) Mark pro Stück gekostet... das war ein teurer Schein... und jetzt mit Volldampf an die Diplomarbeit!MickeyWindowBlindstag:vanille.de,2000-01-16:00-windowblinds2000-01-16T12:00:00ZIch hab etwas witziges entdeckt! WindowBlinds - ein Zusatzprogramm für Win9x, NT4 und Win2000 verändert das Aussehen der Windows-Benutzeroberfläche. Fensterdekorationen, Scrollbalken, Icons, Toolbars, etc... ein Wahnsinnstool! Besorgt euch die Shareware-Version bei www.windowblinds.netMickeyFrohes Neues!tag:vanille.de,2000-01-01:00-frohes-neues2000-01-01T12:00:00ZPrognose #1 scheint zutreffend zu sein. Ich sitze hier an einem sehr hochentwickelten Werkzeug, welches offensichtlich immer noch funktioniert. Mein Sylvester war sehr nett - ruhiger als sonst, aber das muß ja auch mal sein. Es begann um 19:30 mit einem viergängigen Menú (Danke an die süße Köchin von hier aus :-), ging dann weiter mit etwas Kuscheln bis 22:30, um auf dem Turm der Dreikönigsgemeinde in Frankfurt am Main um 0:00 den Höhepunkt zu erreichen. Der Blick vom Turm aus war wirklich unübertrefflich... genauso wie das Feuerwerk, was eigentlich schon um 23:00 begann und um 01:00 noch längst nicht vorbei war. Um diese Zeit hab' ich dann mit einigen Bekannten den Abend mit Tee und verschiedenen Salaten ausklingen lassen. Fazit: Schön' wars. Und: Selten so fit am Neujahrstag gewesen. Auf in ein neues, arbeitsreiches Jahr! Alles alles Gute an alle, die dies hier lesen und an alle meine Freunde... insbesondere an die, mit denen ich dieses Jahr nicht gefeiert habe - vielleicht klappt's ja nächstes Jahr wieder: ANDY B (wir wär's mal mit mehr Liebe und weniger Sex?) CARLA B (arbeite nicht so viel) MARCO dB (einer derjenigen, die meinen Technikwahn verstehen :-) Gruß an C) SU G (die wir auch weiterhin für nur zwei Buchstaben mitnehmen) ANJA H (Drei Wünsche für die Toffi-Fee) BIANCA H (wenigstens wir haben ein bißchen zusammen gefeiert :-) KERSTIN H (na - noch einen Fred Ferkel auf's neue Jahrhundert?) TIMO J (dieser Gruß wurde ihnen präsentiert von: Krombacher) GABY L (Ich möcht so gern Dave Dudley hörn, Hank Snow und bla bla bla...) OLIVER L (Viel Erfolg im Arbeitsleben) MARTIN L (Papa in spe, Gruß an die Mama in spe) BORIS M (wann besichtigen wir die neue Wohnung ? Gruß an M) CHRISTIAN M (Sylvester mit Kangurus - auch nicht schlecht) MARTIN M (Was macht die Renovierung ? Gruß an M) GABI M (Die Sylvester-Schweitzerin) JAN M (Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann ?) MARGRET P (Schade, daß Du am 26. nicht dabei sein konntest. Gruß an T) CHRISTIAN R (Papa in spe - Gruß an die Mama in spe) ANJA-MIRIMAM S (Wann sehn' wir uns mal wieder ?) MICHI S (Schönen Gruß auch an P) KAI T (An die Arbeit! Da wartet ein (Vor-)Diplom :-) Gruß an C) ANETTE V (letztes Sylvester war auch nett, oder ? Gruß an D) ANIKKE W (Neues Jahr, neues Glück) ANKE W (Und ich ruf' sie an .... 2000 Jungs ...) OLE W (Und ich ruf' sie an .... 2000 Mädchen ...) und an alle, die ich fieserweise vergessen habe!MickeyNeujahrsansprache zum Jahresendetag:vanille.de,1999-12-30:99-neujahrsansprache1999-12-30T12:00:00ZSo langsam werden alle Rechnernetze abgeschaltet, um die Gefahr von Zerstörung durch Stromausfälle bzw. -schwankungen zu minimieren. Ich weiß nicht, ob auch mein Provider abschaltet, aber höchstwahrscheinlich werde ich vor nächster Woche so oder so nicht zum Aktualisieren kommen, deswegen nun von hier aus einen GUTEN RUTSCH ins neue Jahrhundert (nicht Jahrtausend, wir wissen doch alle das dieses erst nächstes Jahr soweit ist, oder?)! Aus aktuellem Anlaß hier nun ein paar Prognosen zum Jahr 2000 – im Laufe des Jahres werden wir diese verifizieren (und vielleicht sogar falsifizieren :-) können. Wir werden nicht ins Steinzeitalter zurückfallen Ich werde mein Diplom machen Das TV-Programm wird nicht besser Ich werde meine Kreativität wieder mehr ausleben (nach dem Diplom :-) Nun – das sollte reichen. Vielleicht noch einen guten Vorsatz zum Schluß? Ich halte an sich nicht viel von guten Vorsätzen, aber es scheint ja üblich zu sein... um der Tradition willens also... ...ach nein... warum eigentlich? Es macht keinen Sinn, Traditionen zum Selbstzweck entarten zu lassen. Traditionen sind etwas schönes, wenn sie entstehen, weil Kontinuität gefragt ist, deswegen sollten sich Traditionen stets selbst erneuern und dadurch bestätigen. Ich glaube, auf den zweiten Blick (oder Gedanken) steckt in dem vorherigen Satz kein Widerspruch. :-) Bis bald!MickeyWeihnachtentag:vanille.de,1999-12-25:99-weihnachten1999-12-25T12:00:00Z13:00 - Na, reich beschenkt worden? Während gestern schön ruhig war und mit der sogenannten Familiennotbesetzung verbracht wurde, werden heute die Verwandten beglückt werden - und nicht nur die eigenen :-) Und zu diesem Zweck werde ich davon insgesamt ca. 2 Stunden im Auto verbringen. Naja... einmal im Jahr. Ach übrigens: T minus 1.MickeyHeiligabendtag:vanille.de,1999-12-24:99-heiligabend1999-12-24T12:00:00Z00:41 – So, nun kann's losgehen. Weihnachtsgeschenke unter Dach und Fach, Mißverständnisse größtenteils ausgeräumt und den obligatorischen Baum üppig geschmückt. Nur noch ein paar Stunden schlafen... ach ja, und morgen früh noch schnell Pappteller und Pappbecher besorgen - für meine Geburtstagsfeier, die ja nur noch zwei Tage entfernt ist. Frohes Fest, allen die dies hier lesen - von mindestens einem weiß ich jetzt :-)Mickey3. Adventtag:vanille.de,1999-12-12:99-3-advent1999-12-12T12:00:00ZWeihnachten nähert sich... und ich hab' noch keine Geschenke. Oje. Während ich letztes Jahr noch jammerte, vor lauter Streß (Aktionen mit Kirchenmusik etc., die natürlich um die Weihnachtszeit besonders häufig auftreten... naja und noch einige andere Aktionen grins) nicht besinnlich zu werden, muß ich im Vergleich mit diesem Jahr sagen, daß ich letztes Jahr noch wesentlich besinnlicher als dieses Jahr war bzw. bin. (War dieser Satz verständlich? Hmm... Es ist immerhin 2:20 mitten in der Nacht, ich schaue gerade die WDR Computernacht (23:45 - 6:15) und bin nicht mehr ganz so wach.). Es ist so eine Sache mit der Besinnlichkeit: Natürlich versuche ich mir jedes Jahr, die Gründe für unsere Weihnachtsfeier auf's Neue ins Gedächtnis zu rufen. Normalerweise reicht dies in Zusammenhang mit dem entsprechenden Ambiente auch, um dann besinnlich zu werden. Aber dieses Jahr... Vielleicht ist es auch so, daß es jedes Jahr schwerer wird, beim zunehmenden Lebenstempo (sowohl dem Persönlichen, als auch dem Allgemeinen auf der Welt) innezuhalten. Innehalten. Laßt uns innehalten und Dinge bewußt langsam tun. Schalten wir einfach mal MTV und VIVA aus, die uns mit ihrer immer größer werdenen Schnitt-per-Minute-Frequenz nervös machen. Ein Tribut der Langsamkeit. Mehr dazu übrigens nächstes Jahr auf dem Offenen Kanal Frankfurt/Offenbach, auf dem wir dazu ein Feature machen werden. Übrigens: Langsam heißt nicht notwendigerweise langweilig! Und schnell heißt vor allem nicht automatisch kurzweilig!MickeyBeziehungen am Nikolausabendtag:vanille.de,1999-12-06:99-nikolausabend1999-12-06T12:00:00ZWie schnell ein Jahr vergeht... und wie viele Beziehungen in einem Jahr ihren Status ändern können. Schade eigentlich... das einzig Beständige scheint der Wandel zu sein. Trotzdem einen Gruß von mir... wer damit gemeint ist, wird es wissen!MickeyWilly Millowitsch ist tottag:vanille.de,1999-09-29:99-willy-millowitsch1999-09-29T12:00:00ZWenig Zeit für Updates – ich hab's ja geahnt... In der Zwischenzeit ist Willy Millowitsch gestorben... damit der vierte Schauspieler, den ich mochte, in diesem Jahr - hoffentlich der letzte. Und noch was zum vierten Mal in diesem Jahr - ein Erdbeben. Ich denke an all die toten/obdachlosen/kranken/verletzten Menschen und bin wieder mal ziemlich froh, nicht in einem gefährdeten Gebiet zu leben. Dagegen ist es wirklich Peanuts (sic!) zu vermelden, daß die Benzinpreise unglaublich angestiegen sind. Und die RAM-Preise. Und überhaupt - es ist Herbst geworden. Ich mag den Herbst nicht. Es regnet...MickeyWindows 2000tag:vanille.de,1999-09-16:99-windows-20001999-09-16T12:00:00ZHeute war eine Windows-2000 Vorführung in der Uni. Dummerweise wurde sie von einem Marketing-Menschen und keinem Produktspezialisten geleitet – bei vielen tiefergehenden Fragen mußte dieser Mensch leider passen. Es hat sich jedoch gelohnt, da im Anschluß eine deutsche Betaversion (RC2) von und ein Buch zu Windows-2000 verteilt wurde. Ach ja, ich bin fast vollständig wieder gesundet... nur noch ein bisschen Schnupfen und seit heute morgen ein Ziehen in meiner Schulter... oh jeh... ich werde alt... ein Zipperlein jagt das nächste... :-)MickeyKranktag:vanille.de,1999-09-06:99-krank1999-09-06T12:00:00ZIrgendwas hat mich erwischt - ich bin krank! Mit dabei die allseits beliebten Kopf- und Gliederschmerzen, Fieber und so weiter. Bitte eine Runde Mitleid für mich!MickeyCaptain's Log 1999tag:vanille.de,1999-08-29:99-muenchen1999-08-29T12:00:00ZZurück aus München... sehr beeindruckend - München, das Weltstädtchen! Ich habe jede Menge Plätze, Kirchen und Museen besichtigt, z.B. das Deutsche Museum, das Siemens-Museum und das BMW-Museum... wobei ich den BMW-Pavillon mitten in München beeindruckender fand. Ach ja, mehrere richtige Brotzeiten habe ich natürlich auch gemacht... jetzt wird's mal wieder Zeit, ein paar Kilo abzunehmen... summa summarum: München ist eine Reise wert! Back to work...MickeyGeorg Thomallatag:vanille.de,1999-08-25:99-georg-thomalla1999-08-25T12:00:00ZGeorg Thomalla ist tot. Der sympathische Komiker & Schauspieler (u.A.: "Das Spukschloß im Spessart" – mit Lilo Pulver) starb im Alter von 84 Jahren an einer Lungenentzündung. Hmm... wird das hier eine Nachruftabelle für Schauspieler oder ist es Zufall, daß in diesem Jahr schon drei berühmte verstorben sind? Heute abend nehme ich den ICE nach München um den letzten Kurzurlaub in diesem Jahr zu genießen.MickeyBodenseetag:vanille.de,1999-08-19:99-bodensee1999-08-19T12:00:00ZEin viertägiger Kurzurlaub führte mich an den Bodensee. Ein sehr nettes Fleckchen Erde. Besonders schön finde ich das schwäbische Bayrisch... oder ist es bayrisches Schwäbisch? In Wangen hat's 16 Brunnen. Einer davon ist der sogenannte Sprichwortbrunnen, z.B. "Num mäh is koi Sünd, rum reche scho". Ach ja, ich habe 3 Kilo zugenommen in 4 Tagen – Käsespätzle sei Dank.MickeyWintersemester 1999/2000tag:vanille.de,1999-08-17:99-wintersemester1999-08-17T12:00:00ZMorgen geht das Wintersemester 1999/2000 los, welches höchstwahrscheinlich mein vorletztes wird. Ich bin die letzten Tage heftigst am Lernen für meine Prüfung Betriebssysteme & Verteilte Systeme. Sehr viel Stoff, sehr wenig Zeit... immer das gleiche :-) Ach ja, von Mittwoch bis Freitag war mal wieder Erstsemester-Einführungswoche... das war richtig witzig. Ein wenig seltsam ist allerdings schon, wenn man im vorneherein weiß, daß von all diesen 229 eingeschriebenen Leuten wahrscheinlich nur rund 10%, also 22.9 ihr Diplom in Frankfurt machen werden. Was mit den restlichen 90% passiert? Nun, die wechseln den Studiengang, wechseln auf die FH, werden von Firmen abgeworben oder haben sich ein Studium doch ganz anders vorgestellt.MickeySonnenfinsternistag:vanille.de,1999-08-11:99-sonnenfinsternis1999-08-11T12:00:00ZHeute war Sonnenfinsternis! Ich bin in Frankfurt geblieben, was sich als Fehler herausstellte, da außer einem etwas gespenstisch anmutenden Dämmerlicht nichts passierte. Merkbar war allerdings, wie kalt es geworden ist, als der Mond sich vor die Sonne schob. Jetzt kann ich wirklich daran glauben, daß es so etwas wie eine Eiszeit mal gegeben hat – und wohl auch demnächst (naja, ein paar Millionen Jahre sind's ja noch) wieder geben wird.MickeyDiplomarbeittag:vanille.de,1999-07-26:99-diplomarbeit1999-07-26T12:00:00ZSeit heute habe ich eine Diplomarbeit (ächz…) – damit wird das ChordPro II-Projekt mal wieder auf unbestimmte Zeit verschoben... ob ich es wohl jemals fertigstellen werde?MickeyC64 Emulatortag:vanille.de,1999-07-24:99-c64-emulator1999-07-24T12:00:00ZLetzte Woche habe ich mir den C64-Emulator besorgt. CCS64 Version 2.0 läuft hervorragend unter Windows 2000 mit DirectDraw und DirectSound. Die Emulation des Commodore C64 läßt sich mittlerweile als 99.9% bezeichnen. Umwerfend ist, wie trotz der schlechten Graphik (fand ich die wirklich mal gut?) der Spielspaß der alten Hits immer noch ungebrochen ist. Aber es ist wohl vielmehr so, daß gerade wegen der technischen Einschränkungen der Wert auf eine gute Geschichte und ihre detailverliebte Umsetzung gelegt wurde. Also ich ziehe z.B. eine Runde Fort Apocalypse jedem PC-3D-Shooter vor! Außerdem erinnert mich das C64 spielen an meine Jugend... Schnüff...MickeyLove among the ruinedtag:vanille.de,1999-07-22:99-psyche-love-among-the-ruined1999-07-22T12:00:00ZIch habe eine neue CD: "Love among the ruined" von der (leider ziemlich unbekannten) Gruppe Psyche. Sehr schön düstere Wave-Musik. Mein Lieblingsalbum ist "The Influence" von 1989 – neben der großartigen Kombination von Darrin Huss' Stimme und melancholischer Musik wurde es komplett mit einem Casio FZ-1 Sampler produziert. Ein Beispiel dafür, daß man nicht viel Equipment benötigt, um gute Musik zu machen.MickeySiemens S25tag:vanille.de,1999-07-21:99-siemens-s251999-07-21T12:00:00ZAus der Rubrik "Überflüssiger Luxus": Heute habe ich mein drei Jahre altes und ziemlich betagtes (ich glaube, alle diese Geräte haben eine Halbwertszeit von 1,5 Jahren) Nokia PT11 gegen ein hyperaktuelles Siemens S25 ausgetauscht. Die wichtigsten Features sind von der Nokia 61xx-Serie abgeschaut worden und einige neue sind hinzugekommen. Ein wirklich feines Spielzeug!MickeyMal wieder Linuxtag:vanille.de,1999-07-11:99-mal-wieder-linux1999-07-11T12:00:00ZDieses Wochenende habe ich mal wieder damit verbracht, Linux zu installieren. Meine ersten Erfahrungen mit Linux habe ich 1993 mit Kernel 0.98 (oder so ähnlich) gemacht. Damals war das alles noch nicht ganz so komfortabel wie heute. Bei Kernel 1.2 habe ich dann wieder mal geschaut … und zwei Jahre später, jetzt mit Kernel 2.2 und Entwicklungen wie GNOME und KDE ist es wirklich gut benutzbar. Eine sehr schöne Kombination zum objektorientierten Programmieren ist übrigens Python mit den GTK- und GNOME-Bindungen. Mit sehr wenig Aufwand kann man damit komplette Anwendungen erstellen - siehe z.B. Gnumeric!MickeyminiPOINTtag:vanille.de,1999-06-30:99-minipoint1999-06-30T12:00:00ZEs ist vollbracht! Nach nunmehr über sechs Wochen mit 6-8 Stunden Programmierung pro Tag haben wir unser Python & Tk Projekt miniPOINT mit einer erfolgreichen Präsentation (kein einziger Absturz!) abgeschlossen. Nun werde ich mich wieder um sträflich vernachlässigte Dinge kümmern. Z.B. werde ich mein Gitarren-Hilfsprogramm ChordPro II in Python schreiben. Aber dann ganz sicher nicht mit 8 Stunden Arbeit pro Tag! Ach ja, Boris Becker hat heute das letzte (wirklich!) Spiel seiner Karriere gemacht. Von nun an wird er nur noch Nutella essen und sich um seine Familie kümmern. Schade eigentlich.MickeyFreitagsgruppetag:vanille.de,1999-06-20:99-freitagsgruppe1999-06-20T12:00:00ZVorhin bin ich von meinem alljährlichen Freitagsgruppenwochenende zurückgekommen. Die Freitagsgruppe ist eine (mehr oder minder) kirchliche Jugendgruppe, die schon seit über 10 Jahren besteht (ja, sehr jugendlich sind wir alle nicht mehr – mittlerweile sind wir zwischen 20 und 27). Jedes Jahr fahren wir auf ein Spiel, Sport- und andere Exzesse- Wochenende. Dieses Jahr waren wir im Ferienwohnheim Mauloff / Weilrod. Und wie immer war es richtig klasse! Zwei Tage kein Alltag, keine Uni, kein Computer - einfach nur Spaß.MickeyWesternhagentag:vanille.de,1999-06-12:99-westernhagen1999-06-12T12:00:00ZGestern war ich auf dem Marius Müller-Westernhagen-Konzert im Frankfurter Waldstation. Die Musik von Marius kenne ich schon seit über 10 Jahren und diese Tour wird wohl seine Abschiedstour sein. Obwohl ich eigentlich mehr auf andere Musik stehe, war es einfach großartig! Der Sound war gut (nicht zu laut!), die Performance prima, die Stimmung der Wahnsinn und mit dem Wetter hatten wir auch Glück. Dankenswerterweise hat er neben vielen neuen ( die ich nicht so gut kenne ) auch ältere gespielt: "Die Sonne so rot", "Kein Gefühl", "Es geht mir gut", "Mit Pfefferminz bin ich dein Prinz" (mein persönlicher Konzert-Höhepunkt) um nur einige zu nennen. Schön war auch, daß er nicht nur einfach die Titel heruntergespielt hat, sondern zwischendurch immer mal ein paar Faxen gemacht hat (wie zum Beispiel bei "Mit Pfefferminz bin ich dein Prinz", wo er die Kinderliedmelodie des Titels verulkt hat) oder mit den Musikern gejammt hat. Zum krönenden Abschluß gab es übrigens noch "Freiheit" und "Johnny Walker". Insgesamt ein wirklich fantastisches Konzert, auch für nicht hard-core Fans von Marius. Danke an Anette für dieses schöne Geburtstagsgeschenk.MickeySpätprogrammtag:vanille.de,1999-06-09:99-spaetprogramm1999-06-09T12:00:00ZHeute gab es in N3 ein Konzert von Trio zu sehen, welches irgendwann Anfang der 80er stattgefunden hat. Das war klasse: Da stehen drei Jungs mit einer Gitarre, einem Schlagzeug, einer Orgel, einem Schirm und einem Megaphon auf der Bühne und präsentieren "dynamische Inkompetenz" (Zitat Stefan Remmler) – aber wirklich symphatisch! Das hat mehr Laune gemacht als so manche aktuelle Musik. Zur gleichen Zeit gab es in VOX übrigens Brust oder Keule mit dem französischen Ausnahmekomiker Louie des Funés – das hab ich zwar schon zehnmal gesehen, es ist aber immer wieder klasse. Einer der wenigen wirklich Großen des Slapsticks.MickeyEs ist heiß!tag:vanille.de,1999-05-29:99-es-ist-heiss1999-05-29T12:00:00ZEs ist heiß! Und während alle anderen sich in der Sonne braten lassen, sitze ich am Rechner und programmiere... Sehr unentspannt! Aber von Zeit zu Zeit muß man eben mal richtig reinklotzen fürs Studium. Ich arbeite mich gerade in Python (objektorientierte, sehr mächtige Skriptsprache) und Tcl/Tk (GUI-System) ein. Wirklich interessant. Jeder, der ernsthaft programmiert, sollte sich mal mit Python beschäftigen!MickeyHorst Frank ist tottag:vanille.de,1999-05-26:99-host-frank-ist-tot1999-05-26T12:00:00ZHorst Frank ist tot! Der charismatische Theater- und Filmschauspieler fühlte sich vor allem in der Rolle des Bösewichts zu Hause. Er spielte zum Beispiel in der bekannten (Kinder-)Serie "Timm Thaler - der Junge der sein Lachen verkaufte" mit. Ein weiterer der großen deutschen Schauspieler ist nicht mehr. Möge er in Frieden ruhen.MickeyDer Rechner der Nachbarintag:vanille.de,1999-05-18:99-rechner-nachbarin1999-05-18T12:00:00ZWow! Erst ein Tag vorbei und schon ein neuer Eintrag. Heute habe ich den Rechner meiner Nachbarin ("Er stürzt dauernd ab, woran liegt das ?") anschauen müssen... Ich hasse es, an Rechnern von anderen Leuten rumzudoktoren. Das gute Stück war völlig verkonfiguriert, jede Menge Schwachsinnsprogramme installiert, nur noch 8 MB Plattenplatz frei und jede Aktion, die mit Internet zu tun hat ergibt "page fault in wininet.dll". Das macht Laune. Bei solchen Sachen hilft eigentlich nur: Alles löschen und neu installieren. Aber das will ICH NICHT machen!MickeyLogbuch gestartettag:vanille.de,1999-05-17:99-logbuch-gestartet1999-05-17T12:00:00ZHeute habe ich dieses Logbuch gestartet. Mal sehen, wie oft ich dazu kommen werde, es zu aktualisieren.MickeyDeForest Kelly ist tottag:vanille.de,1999-05-16:99-deforest-kelly1999-05-16T12:00:00ZDeForest "Pille" Kelly ist tot. Der symphatische Schauspieler der originalen Raumschiff-Enterprise-Crew ist heute im Alter von 79 Jahren auch von der irdischen Bühne abgetreten. Das Triumvirat Kirk-Spock-McCoy hat in vielen Folgen der Serie für witzige Einlagen gesorgt. Danke für die Stunden der Freude – Ruhe in Frieden!Mickey