Hacking librfid mifare support in Indian sleeper train

I'm currently on a train ride from Bangalore to Sangli(Miraj Jn), which is a 15 hour ride. Since there's quite a bit of noise from other passengers, and the bed (berth?) is not all that comfortable, I didn't get more than some five hours of sleep.

For librfid users this is good news, since I managed to get quite a bit of work done. First of all, mifare classic authentication is now way more reliable than it was before. With regard to the CL RC632, apparently you have to first issue the LOAD_KEY command before filling the FIFO with the key, rather than the other way around.

Also, mifare classic data block (16 byte) writes are now fixed, so you can finally actually read and write data blocks. Next I've implemented parsing (and compiling) functions for the obnoxious mifare permission bit encoding.

Last, but not least, the auto-detection has been enhanced and it an now correctly distinguish between mifare classic and mifare ultralight.

Stupid extreme AC has made me sick again

Just like the 2003/2004, the insane amount of air condition at J N Tata Auditorium has made me catch a cold once again. This is not a surprise, considering that I had a hard time typing while sitting in there, having to regularly warm up my fingers by sitting on my hands.

This is just something that I will never understand. When there's a reasonable, comfortable temperature outside (let's say 25 degrees Celsius), why would you ever do more than just exchange the air inside the hall (e.g. just blow air from the outside into the room, and remove 'used air')? Of what use is it to chill the room down to sub-20 degrees?

Interestingly, a lot of Indian people seem to be used to it, since they were wearing short-sleeved shirts, while we were freezing even wearing t-shirt plus long-sleeved shirt...

This consumes _a lot_ of energy. The AC in the main hall is at least in the order of 30..50 kW, if not more. No wonder that India wants more nuclear power plants. I don't want to imagine the amount of power consumption by ACs nationwide.

Some ventilation is more than efficient in many cases. Even during two weeks of Kerala in March this year, I was using the AC only once at a single hotel.

Please, think twice before using an AC or even turning it to ridiculous amounts. Is the energy waste and increased health risks (think of not regularly cleaned filters, etc) really worth a slight increase in comfort? How weak have we become if we can't even tolerate temperatures up to, let's say, 30 centigrade?

Sorry

I want to say sorry to the many people whom I had almost no chance to talk to during my FOSS.in visit. I know it's no excuse, but believe me, I'm just too involved with way too many things at the same time. For any rational reason, I should not have attended the conference, because I cannot afford that amount of time. I have even skipped OLS in Ottawa earlier this year, Linuxtag and Linux Kongreess in Germany, as well as I have turned down an invitation from linux.conf.au in early 2007. I always was (and still am) a big fan of lb/FOSS.in, that's why I thought I got to be there, even this time.

My work schedule of the last couple of months has been optimized to work at least 12 hour per day, seven days a week, with no external interruptions and almost no interaction with the outside world apart from checking the most important emails about twice per day. No going out to clubs, no parties, no movies, no TV, and close to zero meeting with friends either. Not even time for filing tax declarations in time.

Now being at the conference, I'm suffering severely since my backlog of work is basically growing by one day every day I'm here. This is very stressful, and I apologize if I cannot respond adequately to those who actually are interested in my work, or even want to offer help. I know this is not helpful, but please accept that this time I just can't help it. My reactions have come down to self-defense. If you ask me anything, even the smallest thing that I'd have to add to my TODO list, you will trigger a defensive reaction, rather than a polite and helpful one.

I hereby ask you for your understanding. I am at the absolute limit. Give me a break. Thanks.

First impressions from day1 of foss.in

The first impressions of FOSS.in/2006 are very positive. Not only were the security guards clueful enough to not have everyone open their bags at the entrance, but also the WiFi network was fully operational even before the opening ceremony started.

So far, everything is running verry smooth and pleasant.

On my way to FOSS.in 2006

I'm now in the final stage of packing my suitcase for my third trip to India this year. The schedule mainly consists of attending the FOSS.in 2006 conference and meeting some potential business partners regarding OpenPCD and OpenBeacon (which is another open RFID related project that isn't really public yet).

This time there will be a five-person "Berlin delegation" at FOSS.in, which is quite impressive. First, there's Tim Pritlove of CCC fame. Next Brita + Milosch of bitmanufaktur, and finally Sarah and myself.

I'm looking forward to see how this years incarnation of FOSS.in turns out. It's again in the IISC J.N. Tata Auditorium, where the organizers (and the event) suffered quite a bit a couple of years back. But this time, everything shall be fine.

The new woman in my life: Sarah.

After more than half a year after my separation from Elisabeth, there is a new woman in my life, Sarah. The most amazing thing is, that I didn't actually have to look out / search for a new girlfriend, but she just happened to come into my life. There also wouldn't have been any other chance, since I actually have zero time to go out, and even less time to think about anything not related to paid or unpaid work.

She's intelligent, and probably the most geek-compatible type of woman you can imagine. Not that I would ever consider this an important factor (I'm not a typical geek either), but it definitely helps things a lot, if she just understands the way geeks talk, has lots of experience with geeks from previous relationships.

It's the kind of pleasant small surprises like learning that she's running Linux on her computer[s], and that she understands a lot about the net and the FOSS world, without having to start to explain your whole world from its very beginning. As indicated, those facts in themselves are not really important at all. But imagine: Everything else seems to match, and you get those details [right] in addition to the 'usual' partner compatibility :)

It's been a very intense three weeks, and I have to admit that I never happened to get to know somebody in that short period of time, at least not to that level. Actually, it makes you frightened a bit, if everything goes that fast... wondering whether this is real, whether it is sustainable.

Anyway, it has been extremely pleasant, and I'm very happy about that. I'll continue this "experiment", keeping up the pace of this relationship by taking her along to India for FOSS.in 2006 next week. Before meeting Sarah, I probably would never have considered such a step - taking somebody along a long distance trip, whom you barely know for a couple of weeks. But then, if you can hardly imagine being apart from her during that time, there's probably also a lot of egoistic reasons for taking her along, too ;)

OpenMoko / FIC Neo1973 GPL clarification

Since there have been some misinterpretations / rumors in the press about the amount of Free Software in the OpenMoko / Neo1973 product, I felt obliged to release a couple of further details on the GPL situation.

First of all, I'm surprised that somebody would think that I would engage in a project that would use something like binary-only drivers. I don't think that's ever going to happen ;)

Anyway, looking at the current development version, there is not a single in-kernel piece of software that is not GPL licensed. No proprietary drivers, no proprietary flash file systems, nothing.

In userspace, there only one single component that is not going to be under a Free Software License: It's our GPS daemon. The reason for this is, that the specific high-sensitivity assisted GPS that we wanted is only available in something like a "soft modem GPS", e.g. one that does most of the GPS signal processing in software.

Oh, and yes, the bootloader is u-boot (as the frequent reader of this blog might have guessed). So that is GPL licensed, too.

My no longer secret project: OpenMoko Linux GSM phone

Yesterday, it was finally revealed on what kind of secret project I was working for the last four months: A quite unique, really free and open Linux GSM (smart-)phone produced by the Taiwan-based manufacturer FIC

In this project I'm responsible for the system-level software design and implementation. This means: Kernel, drivers, GSM communication infrastructure, etc.

So why is this project so exciting? Because it's [yet another] Linux phone? No. It's because this is the first time (to the best of my knowledge), that a vendor is

• involving (hiring) prominent community members to do the actual architecture design and implementation
• planning to completely open up their Linux distribution for any contributed development, e.g. use a package manager that can access arbitrary package feeds
• trying very hard to make sure almost everything will be Free Software, from drivers up to the UI applications
• actively providing documentation and interfaces for third party development on any level of the system, from debug interface, boot loader, kernel, middleware through the UI applications
• using X11 to allow users to run any existing X11 Linux application (within resource constraints)

So basically, from a Free Software community level, this is exactly the kind of phone you want to get involved with, and play with. Yes, it's not the perfect phone. It runs a proprietary GSM stack on a separate processor. There are some minor, self-contained proprietary bits on the back end side in userspace. But well, it's probably the best you can do as a first shot of a new generation of devices, and without too much existing market power to put on upstream vendors.

No news is good news

You might have noticed that the posting frequency in this blog has decreased quite a bit recently. In this particular case, no news is good news. There's been a lot of progress in a number of work related projects.