Travelling to a gpl-violations.org related court hearing tomorrow

Tomorrow morning I'll have the pleasure of travelling to Frankfurt, where the first court hearing in a particular gpl-violations.org case will happen.

Those of you who follow my actions closely (closer than the practically non-existing PR work of gpl-violations.org allows) will notice that this is actually the first 'regular court case'. So far we settled everything either out-of-court, or sooner or later after a preliminary injunction, or an appeals case thereof.

In this particular case the defendant claims that the GPL is not applicable to them for a number of reasons, but at the same time argues that he still has the right to use the software, despite not having obtained any kind of license.

I don't yet wan to disclose the identity of the defendant yet, but I'll certainly post some more information on this pretty soon. You will all know the company, though. A very popular vendor of embedded networking gear.

Retrospective on Shah Rukh Khan

The much-to-be-thanked Rapid Eye Movies cinema movie distributor for Asian cinema brings a retrospective on SRK into German cinemas. It includes the movies Baazigar, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dil Se, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Swades and Pardes.

They start with showing those movies from July 20 (today!) to August 8th in the Babylon Theatre Berlin.

I've seen most of those movies before, but on DVD. And I'm definitely going to watch many of them in the cinema, since Bollywood movies are just too colorful and rich in detail to watch them on something as "low-res" and compression artefact encumbered as DVD...

So I'd expect some drop in productivity over the next two weeks, but I can't help myself...

Getting hooked once again by Techno

Just last weekend we've had (once again after two years break) the Love Parade, basically a huge open-air rave. Now fully commercialized (but that's a totally different story). I didn't attend it, but somehow the publicity surrounding that event prompted me to look into my 15GB archive (and corresponding CD collection) of early nineties Techno music.

Little of my blog readers will know me for that long time. Most of you will think, yeah it's that Goth guy, he listens to strange dark wave, industrial, ebm, music. Some of you also know that I enjoy a fair share of popular Hindi music.

But actually when I first started to actively listen to music, maybe at the age of 12 and up, I was a _huge_ fan of the then-popular electronic music in Germany: Techno. In a very short time this genre made it mainstream, creating a new youth culture in mainly Europe, but particularly Germany.

It was an euphoric time. German had just reunited. People were enthusiastically looking forward at the supposedly-bright future, now that the cold war was over. Everything was looking bright. People still mostly had job security, unemployment was low (compared to now), the negative effects of the neoliberal globalization did not yet affect the public at large.

At the same time, technology was en vogue. Home computers had started to become public in the second half of the eighties, the BBS scene existed, a small minority of people had access to Usenet, later the Internet. Music that used (mainly) synthesizers, samplers, sequencers and the like was very modern/futuristic.

So this was the kind of setting in which I spend my teens. Obviously I was too young (and shy) to attend any of the big raves at that time, but I was listening to music from Westbam, Marusha, DJ Dick, Hardfloor, PCP, Sven Vaeth, Sunbeam, RMB, Star Wash, Underworld, Cosmic Baby, Members of Mayday etc. I spent literally hundreds of Sunday nights recording the (in)famous "Techno Club" at the local radio station N1. God, how often did I watch the recordings / live shows of the cult "Mayday" raves.

So this was about 1991 to 1996. After that time, this kind of electronic music became less and less mainstream. I listened to Dutch "Rotterdam" hardcore for some time, but gave up on that very soon, too. Disappointed by the perceived in-availability of any good electronic music as I knew it, I resorted to classical music for a couple of years, until I got more and more into the "all etc. kinds of dark music" in which I still feel at home today. Music that is much more depressive/negative/destructive than the "happy partying" kind of Techno music. This sort-of resembles my change of mind-set during the same period of time. Reading up on world poverty, globalization issues, north/south conflict, environmental issues, the neoliberal model, increasing unemployment, increasing divide between rich and poor, the constant destruction of civil liberties, etc.

Anyway, so given that recent love parade revival, and me listening to "L.A. Style - James Brown is Dead" at some Industrial/Gabber/Minimal Electronics party last month, I decided to tune into that collection of old music once again.

I'm almost overwhelmed by the amount of feelings and memories this has triggered inside me. Basically it teleported me right back into how I felt 10-15 years ago. A life still in school, not knowing the [evil] world as I know it now, a life full of dreams, hope, happiness and the corresponding music.

This "trip back in history" is now basically going on for the better part of one week. It's going to end soon, and it will leave me longing for the corresponding sorrowlessness. Depressive reality will reclaim its terrain...

Avision AV-220 sheetfed scanner and Linux

Especially for gpl-violations.org, I've been dealing with more and more paperwork in my office. Such paperwork for example includes scanning signed contracts consisting of many pages, before being able to fax/email/.. them in advance of the original document.

So far I've been using a good old Canon flatbed scanner for this job, but with 20-page documents this gets increasingly annoying (and time-consuming) over time.

So I've been pondering to buy one of these HP Paper-to-PDF devices (forgot their name), where you can just put in a bunch of paper and it would email you the result as PDF. Unfortunately they're quite expensive, and even used ones (with probably half-way damaged mechanics) are very rarely found on eBay.

Now I discovered (and bought) an Avision AV-220, which is a sheetfed scanner that can scan up to 50 sheets (at 25sheets/minute). To my biggest surprise, that device actually contains two image sensors, so it can scan duplex in one go (unlike a laser printer where for duplex you have mechanics that rotate a page and process it a second time for the backside).

Thanks to the Avision SANE back-end (by Exactcode), there is excellent Free Software support for the device, too.

And what made the biggest impression on me: They actually ship the scanner with a small rubber/plastic spare part. "Please replace this after 15,000 pages". Isn't that great? I've never bought a laser printer or similar mechanical device that included a replacement of any wearing part.

Adding better S3C2410 support to u-boot

Starting today, I'm working on adding NAND controller (and Steppingstone), as well as frame buffer and USB host + device controller support to the u-boot boot loader.

For some strange reason I'm having quite a bit of trouble wit all of these tasks, maybe I'm misreading the documentation, I'm missing some errata or it's plain old stupidity. Especially stuff like the NAND controller driver are supposed to be extremely easy and fast tasks to implement, and I'm already spending way too many hours on a seemingly way too trivial task :(

Let's hope there is some progress soon...

Shanghai Food

While on my business trip to Shanghai, my business partners have been extremely well taken care of me. This includes assisting me obtaining some rather unusual souvenirs that I wanted to bring back, taking care of the sight seeing programme, but found it's most explicit expression in food.

While I'm extremely fond of Indian and Thai food, I never really enjoyed Chinese food too much, at least not what is sold in the western world as Chinese food. To me it's ok, but nothing spectacular. Before getting to China, food was my biggest worry. Remembering all these documentaries about seafood (which is basically the only kind of food I refuse to eat), and all the snakes, frogs and various insects that the Chinese cuisine tends to have.

Anyway, so my hosts knew about this and took me out to eat twice every day (yes, I'm probably now back to my weight of the Brazil trip in March). The food was always very interesting (as in, interesting ingredients, interesting taste, interesting structure, mode of preparation, ...) and also enjoyable. I kept asking them about spicy food, keeping in mind my preference for Indian and Thai. They promised me to have some spicy food at some point, they themselves not being into it at all.

Two days ago it finally became true. We've been to one of these "hot spot" places, where you have a boiling pot in the middle of the table. The boiling pot contains all kinds of spices, and you put raw ingredients such as tofu, meat, mushrooms into it. Pretty much like a Chinese version of the "Fondue".

However, that pot was split (2 thirds/one third), and one side would be exclusively for me. My side was ordered to be "medium spiced", and it had something like at least 12 red chili peppers in it :) I took a photograph of it in its initial state. The chilies basically disintegrated into tiny little pieces while they were boiling with the remaining food.

God, was that good. The best food I had since my last trip to India. It really was "medium spiced" in a way that there was no pain whatsoever, and it was just extremely strong-tasting, but not just spicy for the purpose of being spicy (if you know what I mean).

Since my business plans will include some more travel to Shanghai during the next couple of months, I _have_ to go back to that place, multiple times :)

Motorola ROKR E2

I've found the ROKR E2, which is yet another Motorola Linux GSM/GPRS phone exclusively sold in china so far. Apparently since June 22nd, so it's a quite new thing. It's very different from the A7xx/E680x series in that it doesn't have a touch screen, but many more buttons. Also, it features a full-size SD card slot, which makes it theoretically SDIO compatible (I'm pretty sure they use some SDIO compatible SD host controller in there).

Let's see whether I can work with the Chinese language firmware. I already found out how to get it into boot-loader flash mode (by pressing the camera button on the upper right side while powering the device up). It looks completely different than the blob on the A780/E680, but that doesn't really mean anything.

As of now, I don't have any technical proof that the device runs Linux. I'll probably not find time to play with this toy before I get back to Germany. But if anyone has hints or further information on how to dig deeper into the ROKR E2, don't hesitate to send me an email about your findings.

Motorola A728 and A732

Just next to my hotel, there is a book store that also sells mobile phones. Among the Motorola models are the A728 and A732, both Linux based. They're about 160EUR each. I don't yet know whether that is a good price, but now after checking with some online shops I think it is.

So I guess I'll get one of each in order to investigate whether we can hack them from an OpenEZX point of view. Also, this finally allows me to obtain proof whether they're still shipping GPL incompliant or not.

I'll continue to look for an A768 and E895. Let's see whether I'll find some time to do some more serious 'shop browsing'.

Experiencing China's Internet censorship

I've always wondered how China actually implements their Internet censorship, and how effective it is. I could have probably found out by doing some online research, but as with many things it just never happened.

Since I'm now using it every day here in Shanghai, I think I have a pretty clear picture on what is going on. Apparently all they do is some URL based HTTP filtering, and black-holing those requests. I'm not sure whether they actually filter all traffic to the black-holed IP address (which could shadow thousands of other virtual hosts on the same address), or actually only filter individual requests.

So apparently they're just blocking the technically unsophisticated regular user. Anyone with some basic network knowledge could easily work around those restriction - though it probably would be highly illegal.

So basically all the websites I want to access - including those that definitely contain content that the Chinese government would dislike. The only thing that is lacking from the web for me is wikipedia. But well, if you google for the term that you're searching in wikipedia, then Google will happily give you the Google cache of that page ;)

But there's definitely no filtering on ports such as SSH or IMAPS. I can transparently access my IMAPS-secured mail server, I can ssh to my machines in Germany, everything working quite fine. Obviously any kind of tunnelling would give me access to the free world.

So all in all, (luckily!) not very effective, from my point of view.

Now I hope that the Chinese authorities don't see that posting before I leave the country, interpreting it as a 'censorship protection circumvention technology', or actually put my blog into their filters ;) This page is uploaded via HTTPS, so at least they won't see this message _leave_ the country.

Visiting armzone.com in Shanghai

Today I had the pleasure of visiting armzone.com in Shanghai. Now if that was like visiting any other hardware or electronics store, I wouldn't be blogging about it. It might actually be that visiting any shop like this in China is a similar experience. But I'll write it anyway, you don't have to read it.

So we were there to buy some S3C2410 based development boards (full-featured, basically PDA development boards, including 65MB SDRAM, 64MB NAND Flash, Ethernet, USB host and device, a CPLD, IDE, 2xSerial, JTAG, SD-Card, ..). The first thing to notice was the price. Including a touch screen LCD panel they were something like USD 180 each. Actually less than any PDA based on them would cost in the western world. Aren't devel boards usually at least one order of magnitude more expensive than the actual systems you're going to design with them?

Then we were looking for some JTAG adaptor compatible with that devel board. The boards ship with a wiggler, which is supported by OpenOCD and also some s3c2410 version of JFlash, but which is slow as hell. Sort of the least interesting option. They had a number of USB and parallel port models available, some of them clones of well-known modules such as MultiICE, some others being developed by themselves.

The main problem was that they all seem to require some RDI server to run on a windows box. Hey, If I'm doing Linux target development on a Linux host system, they ask me to run a windows box just for that daemon? They must be kidding me. So my Chinese contacts engaged in some almost two hour debate on whether he couldn't release the source code to their own RDI server so I can port/re-implement that code on Linux, and why it might be a benefit to them to get that Linux version back to ship with further products. The debate also seems to have included all kinds of other options. Going as far as to the shop wanting to sell us a Raven compatible device, to which we almost agreed, only to learn that he needs a week to produce some more apart from the engineering sample.

One other thing we'd need for the parallel port versions is a PCMCIA parport card. Yes, such things actually exist, and you can buy them even on some Chinese eBay like site whose name I forgot. Rather than buying that, armzone offered us to wait two weeks, until then they will have built (!) their own parport adaptor for only a part of the price. Yes, they would have gone all the way down to molding a case for the parport connector sticking out of PCMCIA, etc. And that for us buying a max of 5 of those cards. Hey, we're talking about electronics / PCB / case design here, not about whether I want ketchup with my french fries!

This seriously made me wonder whether when you buy a car in China they also ask you if they should be personally just for you build a different car radio from scratch. These guys are crazy...

The wonders of Vienna airport

For my trip to Shanghai, the both cheapest and most convenient flight schedule was offered by Austrian. I mainly use KLM / NW / Air France / Lufthansa for my flights, so Austrian was definitely a new experience.

So here I am, connecting to my int'l flight at Vienna airport. Free 802.11b wireless Internet access, unfiltered, with a DHCP server that provides you an official IP. Guess I'll never connect voluntarily at Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam again. Finally somebody understood how you can make an airport much more attractive to the [IT] business traveller, without any big investments.

Krrish

Yes, apparently it's Bollywood season in Berlin, thanks to rapideyemovies.de who has brought Krrish at least for one week into one of Berlin's smaller cinemas.

I definitely enjoyed the movie quite a lot. I believe it would be a good example for a "masala movie". Love, Romance, Action, Eastern, Sci-Fi, Thriller: all-in-one. And that with the most excellent dancer and "India's Schwarzenegger" Hrithik Roshan and former Miss India Priyanka Chopra as the two lead actors. And despite all the action scenes, the film actually is still cheesy enough to fulfill the Bollywood cliche :)

I also think it marks a new milestone in the area of special effects for Bollywood cinema. As a sequel to "Koi Mil Gaya", it definitely goes way beyond its prequel.

Rang De Basanti

It doesn't happen very often that one of the many Berlin cinemas shows Bollywood movies. Last Thursday, even two of them started simultaneously. So yesterday I had no chance but to watch Rang De Basanti. I had to go, even though I had seen that movie in Bangalore before. Obviously at that point without any subtitles, so there certainly was a lot of the plot that I didn't realize yet.

The movie was as good as the first time. There are very few movies that don't get overly pathetic when it comes to telling/interpreting a story about [past] heroes. But in this one, everything feels real. The strong emotions, the incredible pain, hate...

Definitely one of the top Indian movies that I have seen, even though it isn't not a very typical cliche Bollywood movie at all ;)

On Monday, I'll be watching Krrish. Let's see how Hrtik Roshan plays Krishna ;)