Going to Shanghai next week, kicking-off an incredibly cool Linux project

Today I found myself being at the Chinese embassy, applying for a business Visa. I'll be travelling to Shanghai Wednesday next week, starting to work on an incredibly cool Linux project. I cannot tell you what it is, probably not for the next four months or so. But it's definitely one of the most exciting things I can imagine right now...

Bought a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200

In order to learn more about OpenEmbedded, end especially GPE and OPIE, I've now bought myself a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200. According to Michael Lauer this is the device that currently has the best support in both user-land and kernel.

Lets hope that by playing with OpenEmbedded/OpenZaurus on the SL-C3200 I can get a somewhat more clear idea on where I think OpenEZX should be heading.

Interview on gpl-violations.org with groklaw.net

There seems to be "interview season", since just after the lwn.net interview, groklaw.net has now published this interview with me on gpl-violations.org.

The interview was taken by Sean Daly, who has also been taking care of the audio and video recordings at the 3rd international GPLv3 Conference in Barcelona last week.

Let's hope that those interviews will raise some more awareness and prevent more violations from ever ending up in our request tracker.

Ridiculous fees for USB Vendor ID

Sometimes you happen to find yourself starting a DIY electronics project, much like a Free Software project. And if that hardware is actually to be plugged into one of the standard interfaces such as the various PCI variants, or USB, then you'll need to give it a USB Vendor and Device ID. Vendor ID's are 16bit, and allocated by the USB Implementers Forum (IF).

Unfortunately, applying for a Vendor ID costs you USD 2,000. Yes, two-thousand bucks US for creating an entry in a table. This might be peanuts for large hardware companies, but it's an awfully large amount of money for any of the many USB hardware projects that people tend to experiment with. Especially since micro-controllers with embedded USB device controller are quite commonplace these days.

In the software / Internet world, there also are unique ID's that need to be applied for. I'm talking about protocol numbers, port numbers and the like. I've already applied for a number of them at bodies such as IANA. Obviously they are for free. This way you can ensure not to use values that get later assigned to other organizations/projects, and everything is clean.

Ridiculous fees such as the USB IF fee for a Vendor ID are just leading to the situation when independent developers will chose random ID's, which will sooner or later clash with other vendors and his devices.

If the USB IF was really interested in stability and unique assignments, they would

• reserve a couple of vendor ID's for experimental/ organization internal use
• create a hand full of vendor ID's which are not assigned to any vendor, but where hobbyists and Free Hardware developers can have individual device ID's assigned to themselves, e.g. like the IANA protocol/port number process works

Chaosradio 114: Software project management

Tomorrow I'll again be participating in Chaosradio. This months Chaosradio 114 issue is about software project management, both in the proprietary and FOSS world.

Barcelona Montjuic cemetery

This morning I've been visiting the Montjuic cemetery in Barcelona. I went there with mixed expectations, since the information I could find online indicated that Spanish cemeteries tend to have these massive walls full of small "urn storage graves", which are not of any real interest to me.

God, was I amazed how different it really turned out to be. Now, after having seen it, I think it has definitely made it into my personal top ten of world-wide cemeteries. Thousands of angels, and other extremely beautiful statues.

Family graves of the wealthy Barcelona families from the late 19th and early 20th century, as rich in architecture, sculptures and details that make many church look extremely plain next to them. And there you have hundreds in one spot!

The whole cemetery is very well maintained, and due to its situation on the side of the Montjuic hill, next to the sea and in direct sun there is very limited vegetation (and therefor no spread of plants onto graves, etc.).

So by now, knowing my affection for cemeteries, you must have thought that I was in heaven while visiting Montjuic. Almost, if there wasn't that stupid "no photography" sign at the entrance. It made me hesitate a bit, but then I thought "well, southern Europeans are generally a bit more open to bending the laws, so let's try it anyway". I took some five pictures, and no later than 10 minutes after entering the cemetery, I was stopped by no less than six cemetery guards, who were constantly patrolling the whole cemetery with their small scooters.

They took my personal details (I wonder whether they will send me a fine to Germany *g*), and asked me to delete those pictures on the camera. I did without hesitation. The technical reader of this blog will know how easy it is to undelete files from a FAT filesystem ;)

Anyway, I didn't engage in any further photography, and I was saddened to see all this beauty, and being deprived of capturing at least tiny bits of it in order to take it home with me, put some more prints to the walls of my apartment, etc.

This really has been the first cemetery I've been to which disallowed photography. And I've been to many hundred cemeteries, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. And they don't even state _why_ they don't allow it. I would pay for a photo pass, I would sign off on no any "no commercial use" declaration or whatever. *sigh*.

I mean I can perfectly understand if people protest against inappropriate photo shootings at cemeteries (you know what I mean... barely naked women tied to graves, etc.), and there is _nothing_ in common between such inappropriate behavior and somebody like me, who basically wants to honour the original artist/sculpturer by taking some pictures for personal use only.

Some small A780 progress

I've continued my work on porting the ts07.10 from Motorola's mux_cli to 2.6.x. It now compiles, although I have no idea whether it actually works as expected.

Since Linux 2.5/2.6 has undergone quite some sophisticated changes in both scheduling/context area (no more struct task_queue) as well as the tty layer (dynamically allocated and managed flip buffers, etc), the task has been a bit more challenging than the usual copy+paste+minor_fixup task.

I'll also be releasing the -ezx6 kernel soon (2.6.17 based) in the next couple of days, where I plan to merge mickey's various driver bits (LED, backlight, keypad fixes) and the above-mentioned mux_cli.

Last librfid ISO 14443-4 chaining bug eliminated

Ok, I finally found the [hopefully] last bug of librfid's ISO 14443-4 PCD side tx side chaining bug. It only occurred in combination with WTX reception.

I also tested CID (card-id) support for multi-activation. If anyone has ever seen a 14443-4 PICC that actually offers NAD (node address) support, please do let me know (samples even more welcome).

To my surprise I discovered, that higher baudrates are actually already negotiated between PCD (reader) and PICC (transponder). Thought there was some practical problem, but it actually worked all the time.

GPLv3 and Steve Ballmer's blood pressure

I'm currently having the pleasure of being part of the GPLv3 Conference Europe. It's been a pleasure to meet folks like Georg Greve (FSF Europe), David Turner (FSF GPL compliance lab), Eben Moglen (FSF, SFLC) again.

There seems to be significant progress in the GPLv3 process since my latest status updates at the 2nd international conference in Porto Alegre (Brasil) some months ago.

To one part, the second draft of the license is supposed to be published in roughly one month from now. As Richard Stallman pointed out, the most significant changes that we're likely to see are:

• Renaming of the "liberty or death" clause to "no surrendering others freedom"
• More precise wordings on the frequently-misinterpreted DRM clause, removing the section on provision for "unencrypted output". The latter clause is basically superfluous, since if you have access to the full source, and a means to install a modified version of the source, you can easily remove any encryption routines for the output.
• Probably an option that if you only distribute binaries, then it's sufficient to provide the source code on a network server, rather than having to provide it per mail order. This still requires some feedback. I personally disagree with this, sine there really are many [both real and potential] users of Free Software who live in low-bandwidth areas. Yes, there might be services which download software from the net and write CD-R's for you, but do we know that such services exist (and will continue to exist) in all those areas?
• There was some necessity to rewrite the explicit patent license. There is no change in function.
• Introduce some new wording such as the concept of "conveying a copy" rather than using the term propagation (or even the old US-centric "distribution"). This wording tries to depart from any US legal terms and rather defines some own terms. As a side-effect, it cleanly solves cases such like peer-to-peer sharing networks (where every downloading user also distributes [partial] copies to other users.

Also, as I figured from conversations with Eben and David, to my personal pleasure and acknowledgement, the wording of the "60 days clause" has been changed in a way to make its intent quite a bit more clear.

Another interesting point was the fact that I learned about a detail in GPLv2. Apparently the Section 3b (accompany object code with a written offer to provide the source code later on a physical storage medium) was never intended for online distribution. This paragraph was only meant for physical distribution. All online object code distribution should actually also have online source code distribution. Unfortunately this intent didn't actually become visible in the license, and now we have cases like Buffalo, where the vendor tries to actually make it as hard as possible to obtain source code (only one product source code per cd, have user send a CD-R with return envelope, plus some fee for copying, for each version of the firmware).

Oh, and how does Steve Ballmer's blood pressure fit into the picture? Eben Moglen gave one of his most eloquent and visionary presentations, in which he interpreted recent and current events in and around Microsoft as the signs of the eve of the downfall, and that Free Software will be keeping Mr. Ballmers blood pressure at high levels ;)

librfid tx chaining fixed

After a couple of hours restructuring the ISO 14443-4 (T=CL) transceive code of librfid, we now have working TX chaining support. Quite embarrassing that this fundamental mode of operation was broken for so long. Seems like people have been mostly running read-intensive applications, where no larger chunks of data are sent to the PICC.

LWN publishes gpl-violations.org related interview

Linux Weekly News has just published the second part of an interview with me. This part is on gpl-violations.org.

netfilter.org releases (almost), update on my netfilter involvement

It's been terrible to be away from netfilter development for about two months now. This really has to change, I have to cut down on other stuff if I don't want to loose track completely.

Anyway, I finally did what I wanted to do at least for many weeks: To push new releases of libnfnetlink, libnetfilter_log, libnetfilter_queue, libnetfilter_conntrack and conntrack. The files are available from their usual location. Haven't been in the mood to write changelogs yet, so if you're really interested in them, you'll have to wait for a bit more.

The main architectural change is that the internal api between libnfnetlink and libnetfilter_* has changed, e.g. caller-allocated structures are now callee-allocated. Apart from that, a very important bugfix was made in libnfnetlink, one that actually affects future-compatibility of the kernel/userspace interface.

For anything else, it's mainly a maintenance release.

libnetfilter_queue doesn't yet contain the bits required for the 'upcoming' libnetfilter_cthelper (userspace helpers), because I felt pushing that code without having the rest of the infrastructure plus some test cases running isn't really worth it.

So please include in your prayers that there are not too many gpl violations during the next couple of weeks, that I finally get hold of that stupid PPTP problem that is bugging me for many weeks. If that happens, I think I'll be back to netfilter stuff early next week after returning from the Barcelona GPLv3 event.

Not sure whether I mentioned it already: I'm actually skipping OLS (and kernel summit) this year in order to gain some time. Meeting folks and attending talks is a lot of fun, but it also (including the travel overhead, jetlag, drinking, etc.) eats a lot of time. So I'll actually take my long-announced pkttables holidays when the rest of the Linux kernel developers are in Ottawa. For those not familiar with the term: The idea is to 'go on holidays' (i.e. abandon anything else like reading emails, etc) and stay focused working on netfilter stuff for at least one week in order to finally see the ideas so far known as pkttables to finally materialize in one way or the other.

Meanwhile, I have to extend my deepest thanks to Patrick McHardy, and all the work he's been putting into netfilter maintenance over the last year or so.

Geek Pr0n

See for yourself at http://photos.jibble.org/GeekPr0n30. I really like them, not only because it is geeky, but also because the photographic ideas behind at least some of those pictures. How the aesthetics of the body mix with the geometry of certain object, and sometimes even play with some cultural connotation that we might have...

My personal favourite of that set is this one.

Looking for historical cemeteries in Barcelona

I'll be travelling to Barcelona for the 3rd international GPL conference. As usual, I'd like to take pictures of historical and/or otherwise interesting cemeteries.

For the first time, I'd actually like to use this blog/journal to ask for suggestions. So if you can recommend any particularly beautiful cemeteries in Barcelona, do let me know.

Interview on OpenEZX at LWN.net

For those interested, lwn.net is featuring the first part of an interview withe me on the status of the OpenEZX project. The way longer pert of the interview on gpl-violations.org will be posted within the next two weeks.

Now let's hope that I'll be able to fix that nasty netfilter bug that I'm hunting for weeks now and get back to OpenEZX kernel hacking...

KRISH in German cinemas

Thanks to rapideyemovies.de, the follow-up to the Bollywood sci-fi "koi mil gaya" called "krish" will be shown soon in cinemas all over Germany (well, at least in all major cities).

I'll certainly make use of it, especially since I'll be missing the Bollywood night at Filmmuseum Potsdam because of my trip to the GPLv3 conference in Barcelona.

Invited to participate in panel on GPLv3 at Barcelona event

Later this month, the FSF+FSFE will be hosting the 3rd international GPLv3 conference. I have the honour to be invited to participate in panels on enforcement and DRM related issues.

Motorbike fixed

Since people have already seen me using my motorbike again and almost complaining about my blog still stating that I have problems repairing it: It's all fixed now. Seems like indeed it only was the anker of the starter engine plus the battery. must have been one hell of a short-circuit to first fry the magnet wire and then the battery.

During my repairs I misplaced a washer which led to the blocking of one axis (which in turn prevented the starter engine to do its job). Luckily somebody else did the same mistake before and documented it in some F650 related web forum.

More problems with my Motorbike

As it seems, the anker of the starter motor was not the only thing that is broken with my F650ST. The battery is OK, the starter motor running fine if it's running freely, the engine can be started by towing the bike. At least while the generator cover is removed, I can also manually put the gearwheels and all other parts in motion without too much effort.

So what am I missing? No, the brushes and the case of the starter engine don't have a short-circuit, and yes I already bridged the starter relay to make sure it's not faulty.

Now the only idea left I have is that something is mechanically blocking the starter engine, once all parts are mounted together. Will give it a (risky!) try to run it with open generator case.

Not working on OpenEZX at the moment

Due to lots of other "real life" and "real work" constraints, I'm not able to work on OpenEZX for at least another week :(

Returned from WGT 2006

I've just returned from the 2006 incarnation of Wave-Gotik-Treffen, the worlds largest festival on all styles of dark music.

I was very happy with the music, and in fact discovered a number of very interesting projects, such as Dark Sanctuary, Protagonist, Maschinenkrieger KR52 vs. Disraptor, S.K.E.T., and last but not least Omnia.

The weather though was an embarrassment. We had something like six degrees centigrade during the night at the camp site, definitely much colder than anybody would expect from June in Germany. Seems like the climate changes really become visible :((

As many of you will be asking: Did you take pictures? No, I was forbidden to. It seems this year they were only allowing non-SLR cameras for people who are not accredited press. This usually only was the case at concert stages, but now they extended this to all of the festival area. Since I don't own any non-SLR (either chemical or digital), I didn't take pictures. Need to check whether I can get accredited next year (*sigh*).