Looking forward to FOSS.in

In a few days FOSS.in 2007 will start. I'm departing from Germany on Monday next week. I have a ton of things to do until then, including a trip to my family in Nuernberg on Friday,, visiting a industrial festival in Chemnitz on Saturday and packing my suitcases on Sunday ;)

So this will be the fifth year in a row that I visit Bangalore in late November/early December for the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore. What once started like a crazy reason for visiting India the first time (after enjoying Indian food and bollywood music from Germany for a couple of years), has turned into a regular mark in every years' calendar for me.

I've been told that FOSS.in this year will be very different from all the previous events. The focus has been shifted from doing just another round of 'this is free software and this is how to use it' event, the focus is now entirely on the community developer.

India still has, to my deep regret, shown relatively few significant contributors to Free Software - especially if you relate it to the size of the IT industry and the number of people working as software engineers in that country. Thus, I very much welcome any effort to nurture and foster the active, contributing part of the FOSS community there.

Meanwhile, the Schedule has been published by the organizers. Looking at the speakers and topics covered, it definitely looks more than promising!

Also: My openmoko-induced absence to the major Linux events in Europe and Canada have resulted in a way too long time since I've last met Rusty and James, my former fellow netfilter/iptables hackers :) Make sure you don't miss any of Rusty's talk. It's going to be fun :) And be prepared to switch your brain's English parser into high-speed mode :)

As a final side note: I'm happy to learn today that my application for a five year visa to India has been granted. During the last five years, I had to obtain a total of seven 6months visas - sufficient evidence to support my argument in favor of a 5 year visa.

Slowly getting back to my normal life

For the last couple of days I finally felt like in the "good old" (pre-openmoko) days. Suddenly things that have been piling up to higher and higher stacks are getting resolved. Tax related issues, various other administrative things like housing, insurance related, etc. I even find time for regular medical checkups like dentist's visit again.

I'm also slowly browsing through the various lists like netdev, which I haven't had time to read throughout the last year or so. Finally I get the feeling of being "in sync" again with what's happening in the rest of the Linux world.

I'm also making quick progress on gpl-violations.org (just ordered two new test purchases of allegedly infringing devices). And I even have time for the occasional homepage update of my various rotting (and rotten) websites.

I'm also almost finished with Ulrich Dreppers excellent paper "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory". Being a kernel hacker, most of the issues have been known to me more or less, but it's good to read about all of them in a concisive paper, together with benchmarking on current hardware.

There ares still hundreds of pending issues here and there, and I yet have to find some time to e.g. finally do a ulogd2 release, work on integrating all the pending patches in librfid, work on ISO15693 support for it, and last but not least work on getting a lot of the work I did for openmoko on u-boot and kernel finally merged mainline. But if I'm able to continue getting things done at this pace, I'm very optimistic

It seems like all the time with OpenMoko has actually made me forget how easy and fast things have been moving all the time before ;)

Leaving OpenMoko "Lead System Architect" position

The regular reader of this blog will have noticed a distinct lack of any OpenMoko related news. This is not a coincidence. As Mickey wrote in a blog entry, there has been quite a bit of internal friction lately.

Adding that to the enormous amount of stress over the last 18 months has made me feel quite a bit demotivated over time. I've tried to cut down on the amount of work I do, but it hasn't helped much. So now I'm at a point where I feel unable to work in any active/leading role inside the project and/or company. My deep apologies to the the project and its community.

But don't worry. OpenMoko is a team, and I'll do everything to help smoothen the transition. I'm more than willing to assist those who will take care of my various tasks.

From today on, I'm nothing more than a volunteer to the project. I'll likely continue a bit of hacking in my areas of personal interest. Just like in many of the other FOSS projects that I have been (or still am) involved.

All the best to the OpenMoko project, the OpenMoko company, FIC Mobility. The last 18 months was an intense experience. Thanks to everyone who has helped the project both inside FIC/OpenMoko and outside. Thanks to FIC for funding and supporting the project. I wish everyone the best, and I'll be the most happy person (next to Sean) at each and every milestone the project achieves in the future.

My last netfilter training

Since I've been doing no netfilter/iptables related work recently, I've announced that the three day training is going to be the last one, at least for the time being.

Though stressful as usual (have you ever talked/presented straight 8 hours on three consecutive days?) it was a quite joyful experience. Apart from the netfilter/iptables workshop earlier this year, the only contact with my former much-beloved project in 2007.

However, the training made me realize how outdated all the existing documentation (and even my own training material) is. Basically everything was written in the early 2.4.x days - and much has changed ever since.

There's all the nf_conntrack / nf_nat related changes, as well as the x_tables transition, which can cause many subtle errors due to old scripts expecting different kernel module names, etc.

None of the HOWTO's or similar documents talk about the conntrack userspace program yet, there's no documentation (and no release) for ulogd2, etc.

So I'll really try to sit down and find some time to improve some of those areas. It yet remains to be seen if I can actually make it. But I feel there's a real gap to be filled...

Slowly getting back to work on gpl-violations.org

Today I've finally started to pro-actively work on gpl-violations.org again. I haven't been able to do any work on it for almost 1.5 years due to my intense involvement with OpenMoko.

Among my first tasks was to update the ssl certificate for our internal Request Tracker, which apparently expired quite some time ago. After that, I went through all RT tickets and deleted tons of spam from it. Now it finally looks like I can start working with it again :)

I'm also trying to catch up with all the gpl-violations.org related email, but please give me a couple of weeks, there's just way too much of it :(