Almost offline for holidays

I'm hereby announcing that I'll be offline most of the time between March 3rd and March 26. This is the longest time that I've been offline for quite some time - and it's a much deserved holiday after the intense work of the last year.

I'll be doing quite a bit of travel in Brazil through those more than 3 weeks, meeting some old friends and ex-colleagues from my time in 2001 at Conectiva. I'll also be spending some time at the beach, plus exploring a bit of Parana and Pernambuco by [rental] car.

This also means that I'll likely end up being forced to use my horrible Brazilian Portuguese again. But well, at least for me, unless forced to speak a certain language, I won't speak it at all. So this must be a good thing, then.

Please don't expect any reaction to e-mails, snail mail, phone calls, faxes or any of the like during that period of time. I won't even have my German GSM phone online to avoid roaming charges killing me.

Thoughts on FOSDEM 2008

I really have been disappointed quite a bit with my visit to FOSDEM this year. In fact, many of my observations might actually apply to Brussels as a whole, I really don't know.

It all started with arriving at Bruxelles Central station on friday, where the entire station was so crowded it took me ages to fight my way through the crowds. Then something like only the fourth idle cab driver was willing to actually take us to the hotel. The others for whatever reason didn't want to earn those 15 EUR. Aren't there some regulations forcing them to transport paying passengers?

Then, let's talk about the social event on friday. How can you hold such an event in a place that's about one third of the required size, and which has a music volume level that effectively prevents any form of communication. I left after about 10 minutes there, since there just was no point at all. One wonders what happens if there is a fire. Aren't there some kind of regulations of the max number of people you are allowed to cram into tiny places like that pub?

At the conference venue the problem seemed to re-occur. All the rooms are significantly too small. Combined with the lack of ventilation and the lack of a PA system it was not possible to stand more than a single talk in the X.org devroom, before I had to get out to get fresh air.

Getting in and out of the DevRooms is also a challenge by itself, since the hallways are over-crowded and full of noisy and loud conversations. Opening the door for even a small amount of time is barely impossible, since that would expose the talk on the inside to the enormous noise levels on the hallway. Especially since the DevRooms don't have any PA system, it's already quite a challenge to understand the speaker inside the room. Somebody opening the door just completely kills the communication flow

The entire idea of putting up all the projects with tables in the hallways seems questionable to me. They do nothing but block the path for other people (also blocking emergency escape paths). Furthermore, cold air gets in all the time since many people have to use the doors in order to walk between the different buildings. It would make much more sense to keep the hallways for what they are: Ways where people walk between rooms. The project tables should be inside rooms. Those rooms would self-contain the noise generated by the tables, be more comfortable (warm, no wind) and keep the hallways free for people to walk on.

The same problem exists for the "BAR" where you get food and drinks. It's too small, too crowded, and absolutely not comfortable at all (cold wind coming in through the permanently open doors, ...)

And then consider the public transport "performance" on weekends. It took me regularly more than an hour for something that was a 2.6km distance between hotel and venue. That's quite ridiculous. Given how crammed those few trams are that actually run, it doesn't seem to be a shortage of passengers that makes them operate so few trains per hour.

All in all, I could not do anything else but to attribute FOSDEM 2008 as something like "the most inefficient event", i.e. where I wasted a lot of time for reasons stated above, rather than actually attending lectures.

Flying from Berlin to Brussels without showing any ID

It was really surprising to see that there was absolutely zero control of any ID on the flight between Berlin and Brussels. I'm well aware of the marvels (and data protection nightmares) associated with the Schengen agreement. However, zero form of identification on air travel was really a big surprise to me. Not even my flights inside Germany had this 'feature'

How did this work? First of all, I booked the tickets through a travel agent quite some time in advance. No form of ID required (though he has my banking details). Next, I did a Lufthansa online check-in from my home, printed the boarding pass. On the airport, used the self-service luggage drop-off counter. Then directly went to the security check, and then to the gate. During the entire time, nobody asked for any form of ID.

So if I did buy the tickets on cash rather than with bank transfer, it would actually still be possible to travel under false name and thus anynomously. Amazing. Am I missing something?

flu provides opportunity to watch linux.conf.au video recordings

A quite serious flu hit me four days ago. While this prevented me from getting any serious work done (my doctor actually explicitly asked me to refrain even from mental work), it provided me with ample opportunity to watch through all the exciting video recordings of linux.conf.au 2008.

The various technical X.org driver side related talks were really good to hear, and I'm happy that there is so much innovation and development happening there now.

The most hilarious talk according to my scale of humor was Matthew Garrett's presentation on suspend to disk. I had to watch it twice, just because it's so entertaining. Rusty: Even you'll have a hard time competing against that level of entertainment :)

Something is wrong if your mail client is using 13.0GB of memory

On my fairly new quad-core 4GB RAM system I noticed that suddenly closing tabs in the web browser resulted in tons of disk accesses, which I [correctly] attributed to swap usage. This is quite a big surprise, since I don't use any integrated desktop and generally only run lots of uxterms in ion3 (over two 1600x1200 heads with 8 virtual desktops on each head) plus firefox.

As it turns out, earlier today I started thunderbird (Debian calls it icedove) in order to do some cleanup (moving folders around) on my IMAP server. After about half a day, I was looking at the following line in top:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                               
 3474 laforge   20   0 13.1g 3.1g  10m D    1 81.7  47:49.91 icedove-bin                                                            

This is ridiculous. 13GB virtual, 3.1GB resident set size. And all that with something like roughly 3 million e-mails spread over about 200 IMAP folders.

Who is supposed to use those programs? What do they use for testing? People with 10 mails in their inbox? Also, if you actually download the headers of a new folder, or headers of new mails in a folder, it takes _ages_. It looks actually like they individually request the headers of each email, without using the tagged command features of IMAP, thereby removing all the pipelining effects and being bound to one complete thunderbird-through-kernel-through-network-through-imap-server roundtrip per message. I haven't actually looked at the code, but just from observing the application, this seems to be the case. Also, every time I use the 'search messages' feature for any header that the IMAP server does not have an index for, thunderbird refuses to wait long enough until the server responds.

So far I always thought mutt's memory usage of 40-80MB is already excessive, considering all it does is displaying a bit of plain-text emails. Well, for once I've been happy again that I'm not a regular user of those kind of bloated GUI programs. firefox somehow being the sole exception to that. It's barely useable on my 1.06GHz / 512MB laptop, where you already notice quite considerable lag in the responsiveness of the UI. :/

Guess next time I have to move folders, I'll probably revert to something like cyradm (that's a minimalistic imap client with command shell, not unlike the old 'ftp' command for FTP).

Working on ISO15693 support for librfid

It's really been bugging me for a long time that librfid was lacking support for the ISO15693 protocol. The supported reader hardware ASIC can do it, but librfid always was lacking the respective code. It has been on my agenda even three years ago, but there were always higher priority items to pre-empt it.

In December 2007, Bjoern Riemer submitted a long patch to add partial ISO15693 support to librfid. The size of the patch reflected the huge amount of work that must have went in that code. So I couldn't really afford to let all that work bit-rot. I went through several iterations of code cleanup, starting with cosmetic issues, and digging deeper and deeper. I think it now doesn't really look all that similar to what Bjoern originally did, but at least now we have a working and fairly well-organized ISO15693 anti-collision implementation in librfid.

However, ISO15693 has many different options with regard to speed, modulation, coding, etc. All those combinations have to be carefully tested. What's also missing is a way how to iteratively cycle through all available ISO15693 tags within range, similar to what we do with ISO14443A and B.

Once that work has been finished, the actual higher-level standard commands, as well as the nxp I*Code2 and TI Tag-it vendor-specific extensions can be implemented on top. This can probably be done on one or two more days of additional work. Stay tuned...

Meeting between gpl-violations.org and FSFE FTF

The last two days, I enjoyed a meeting between gpl-violations.org and the FSF Europe Freedom Task Force.

Participating were Armijn Hemel (whom I have to thank to assure gpl-violations.org doesn't die while I was in Taiwan for OpenMoko), Shane Coughland (who is doing an excellent job coordinating the FTF) and myself. For a couple of hours we've also been joined by Till Jaeger, who has handled all the legal cases of gpl-violations.org so far.

This meeting has been over-due, mostly because I basically dropped off the planet for way too long time. We've discussed all the current matters regarding strategies for license enforcement, current cases, progress of the FTF legal and technical networks, as well as future plans for incorporating the gpl-violations.org project.

Yes, you have read correctly. I've been planning to do this for quite some time, and I'm confident that 2008 will finally be the year in which this happens. It's too early to talk about any details, but this is the logical step to assure both financial and legal independence of the project from my person, as well as scalability. As you might know, we have a couple of hundred reported violations and can only cherry-pick those we consider particularly important.

In any case, it was a very productive meeting. I seriously believe it has helped to make all of us work together in a coherent manner, i.e. increased productivity and effectiveness for a long-term strategy to increase the amount of free software license compliance in the industry.