The Karlsruhe Cemetery

On Sunday morning the weather was fine (sun shining but not too hot), so I finally went to the Karlsruhe Hauptfriedhof (main cemetery) for some photo shooting. For those of you who don't know it yet: Photography [especially of historical cemeteries] is one of my hobbies.

To my big surprise, there were a number of beautiful graves, angels, statues, ... Normally 99% of all cemeteries in Germany look the same, since most of the graves are from 1950 to present - and apparently nobody has the money (and the taste) for something different than a standard grave stone.

Also, this was one of the first occasions to get some more experience with my new digital SLR camera, the EOS-300D. I really hope that the convenience of digital photography won't prevent me from still doing real chemical b/w photography... Especially with my lack of time, I fear this possibility.

Now you may be asking yourself: Where are the pictures? Well, I really want to show you all of them, but first I need to get the database-enabled photo repository finished. Stay tuned.

LinuxTag 2004

The annual LinuxTag... Germany's biggest Linux / Free Software event. Well, apparently I start to get bored by conferences, especially mostly end-user or sysadmin oriented ones. The only interesting part is meeting with old friends, talking to fellow developers, ...

Unfortunately no Brazilian Linux hackers present, so I ended up talking Portuguese to a German guy who lives in France ;) Discovered that my pt_BR is really really rusty these days. I should find myself some conversation classes at home in Berlin.

If it wasn't for Astaro (whose main office is in Karlsruhe), I guess I wouldn't have been at LinuxTag anymore.

Apparently even shareware authors disrespect the GPL

I just received an email claiming that there is a proprietary shareware program called "DVDxDV" sold for USD 80. The author of the email claims that DVDxDV includes code from the GPL licensed liba52 project (formerly known as ac3dec).

While I didn't do any tests on this alleged infringement (yet), there seems to be more information about this issue on http://gpl-cowboy.blogspot.com/

Maybe I'll find some time to investigate soon...

Initiative for Freedom of Information Act in Germany

As I became aware today, there is a new initiative for something like a Freedom of Information Act in Germany at pro-information.de.

Surprisingly, this apparently has not been communicated a lot, considering the small number of about 2000 signatures so far.

If you feel like Germany should enact a FOIA in order to give citizens, journalists and historians access to all kinds of files of the administration, please support support the pro-information campaign by signing it.

Interview about my GPL enforcement efforts

The German IT News Portal "golem.de" has just published an Interview with me, entitled "The freedom of the GPL has limitations".

I wish I had sometimes used less complex sentence structures - but hey, I'm not very used to give interviews anyway.

Sorry for you English speaking people out there. I would love to give that interview in English, but no English news portal asked for one ;)

New iptables-1.2.11 and patch-o-matic-ng-20040621 release

I have just released iptables-1.2.11 and patch-o-matic-ng-20040621 on the netfilter homepage.

Seems like we'll never have an iptables release that doesn't introduce some severe bug that requires releasing another version immediately later. To some part, I blame the users. Seems like not enough of them try the CVS snapshots and report bugs back to us.

GPL enforcement efforts honored by Prof. Eben Moglen

At the WOS 3 conference during a panel on the future of copyright, Prof. Eben Moglen (Columbia Law School, Chief Legal Counsel to the Free Software Foundation) honored our efforts to enforce the GPL within the German jurisdiction.

I'll be speaking at WOS3

Wizards of OS is a conference on the future of the digital commons, to be held at Jun 10 to Jun 12 in Berlin, Germany.

I'll be participating on a panel on the future of copyright, where I'll present my recent success in enforcing the GNU General Public License.

Extremely busy

I've been horribly busy during the last week(s), so I didn't even have five minutes per day to fill this weblog. Apparently things have now settled down and I will start to have some more time again.

Bought a new camera: Canon EOS 300D

In the past I've been doing only chemical b/w photography, using SLR cameras from the mid-80s. Recently I decided to explore color photography, too - but certainly not with chemical film. Developing color prints in your own darkroom is way more complicated than b/w, and it requires to buy completely different equipment.

The entry-level digital SLR cameras have just gone below the EUR1000 line, so I decided to go for the Canon EOS 300D. Despite not having had much time for exploring it, the pictures it produces are really great.

The only thing I don't like is the physical quality of the case. Coming from metal cased chemical SLR cameras, the plastic case of the EOS 300D feels extremely volatile. Also, the lens frame made from plastic is really disturbing... I'm sure this camera won't last 20 years like my two existing chemical SLR's.

Maybe finally I'll also find some time to work on www.cemetery-photography.org - which is still empty at this point. Not that I'm lacking the [digitized] photographs, I just don't have the time to set up the website, design the templates, and so on.

WLAN Router project

I've started to work on a WLAN Router project based on the PC Engines WRAP.1C platform.

I decided to go for the wisp-dist LEAF branch, modified to work with uClibc and a 2.6.x kernel.

The major part, however, is adding the required WDS functionality to the madwifi driver.

But this definitely is a fun project to work on :)