LaForge's home page (Posts about misc)https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/tags/misc.atom2022-06-21T07:49:57ZHarald WelteNikolaDHL zones and the rest of the worldhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20161206-dhl_rest_of_world/2016-12-06T07:50:00+01:002016-12-06T07:50:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>I typically prefer to blog about technical topics, but the occasional
stupidity in every-day (business) life is simply too hard to resist.</p>
<p>Today I updated the shipping pricing / zones in the ERP system of my
company to predict shipping rates based on weight and destination of
the package.</p>
<p>Deutsche Post, the German Postal system is using their DHL brand for
postal packages. They divide the world into four zones:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>Zone 1 (EU)</p></li>
<li><p>Zone 2 (Europe outside EU)</p></li>
<li><p>Zone 3 (World)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>You would assume that "World" encompasses everything that's not part of
the other zones. So far so good. However, I then stumbled about <strong>Zone 4 (rest of
world)</strong>. See for yourself:</p>
<img alt="/images/dhl-rest_of_world.png" src="https://laforge.gnumonks.org/images/dhl-rest_of_world.png">
<p>So the <em>World</em> according to DHL is a very small group of countries
including Libya and Syria, while countries like Mexico are <strong>rest of
world</strong></p>
<p>Quite charming, I wonder which PR, communicatoins or marketing guru came
up with such a disqualifying name. Maybe they should hve called id 3rd
world and 4th world instead? Or even discworld?</p>Deutsche Bank / unstable interfaceshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20151030-deutschebank_fileformat/2015-10-30T00:00:00+01:002015-10-30T00:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>Deutsche Bank is a large, international bank. They offer services
world-wide and are undoubtedly proud of their massive corporate IT
department.</p>
<p>Yet, at the same time, they fail to get the most fundamental principles
of user/customer-visible interfaces wrong: Don't change them. If you
need to change them, manage the change carefully.</p>
<p>In many software projects, keeping the API or other interface stable is
paramount. Think of the Linux kernel, where breaking a
userspace-visible interface is not permitted. The reasons are simple:
If you break that interface, _everyone_ using that interface will need
to change their implementation, and will have to synchronize that
with the change on the other side of the interface.</p>
<p>The internet online banking system of Deutsche Bank in Germany permits
the upload of transactions by their customers in a CSV file format.</p>
<p>And guess what? They <a class="reference external" href="https://twitter.com/zecke42/status/656400812273364992">change the file format from one day to the other</a>.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li><p>without informing their users in advance, giving them time to adopt
their implementations of that interface</p></li>
<li><p>without documenting the exact nature of the change</p></li>
<li><p>adding new fields to the CSV in the middle of the line, rather than at
the end of the line, to make sure things break even more</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Now if you're running a business and depend on automatizing your
payments using the interface provided by Deutsche Bank, this means that
you fail to pay your suppliers in time, you hastily drop/delay other
(paid!) work that you have to do in order to try to figure out what
exactly Deutsche Bank decided to change completely unannounced, from one
day to the other.</p>
<p>If at all, I would have expected this from a hobbyist kind of project.
But seriously, from one of the worlds' leading banks? An interface that
is probably used by thousands and thousands of users? WTF?!?</p>Weblog + homepage online againhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20151027-blog_online_again/2015-10-27T00:00:00+01:002015-10-27T00:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>On October 31st, 2014, I had reeboote my main server for a kernel
upgrade, and could not mount the LUKS crypto volume ever again. While
the techincal cause for this remains a mystery until today (it has
spawned some conspiracy theories), I finally took some time to recover
some bits and pieces from elsewhere. I didn't want this situation to
drag on for more than a year...</p>
<p>Rather than bringing online the old content using sub-optimal and clumsy
tools to generate static content (web sites generated by docbook-xml,
blog by blosxom), I decided to give it a fresh start and try <a class="reference external" href="https://getnikola.com/">nikola</a>, a more modern and actively maintained tool
to generate static web pages and blogs.</p>
<p>The blog is now available at <a class="reference external" href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/">http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/</a> (a
redirect from the old /weblog is in place, for those who keep broken
links for more than 12 months). The RSS feed URLs are different from
before, but there are again per-category feeds so people (and planets)
can subscribe to the respective category they're interested in.</p>
<p>And yes, I do plan to blog again more regularly, to make this place not
just an archive of a decade of blogging, but a place that is alive and
thrives with new content.</p>
<p>My personal web site is available at <a class="reference external" href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/">http://laforge.gnumonks.org/</a> while
my (similarly re-vamped) freelancing business web site is also available
again at <a class="reference external" href="http://hmw-consulting.de/">http://hmw-consulting.de/</a>.</p>
<p>I still need to decide what to do about the old <a class="reference external" href="http://gnumonks.org/">http://gnumonks.org/</a>
site. It still has its old manual web 1.0 structure from the late
1990ies.</p>
<p>I've also re-surrected <a class="reference external" href="http://openezx.osmocom.org/">http://openezx.osmocom.org/</a> and
<a class="reference external" href="http://ftp.gpl-devices.org/">http://ftp.gpl-devices.org/</a> as well as <a class="reference external" href="http://ftp.gnumonks.org/">http://ftp.gnumonks.org/</a> (old
content). Next in line is gpl-violations.org, which I also intend to
convert to nikola for maintenance reasons.</p>Hardware outage affectiong osmocom.org, deDECTed.org, gpl-violations.orghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20130329-server_outage/2013-03-29T03:00:00+01:002013-03-29T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
As usual, murphy's law dictates that problems will occur at the worst
possible moment. One of my servers in the data center died on March 20,
and it was the machine which hosts the majority of the free software
projects that I've created or am involved in. From people.netfilter.org
to OpenPCD and OpenEZX to gpl-violations.org and virtually all
osmocom.org sites and services.
</p>
<p>
Recovery was slow as there is no hot spare and none of my other
machines in the data center have backplanes for the old SCA-80 hard
disks that are in use by that particular machine. So we had to send the
disks to Berlin, wait until I'm back there, and then manually rsync
everything over to a different box in the data center.
</p>
<p>
To my big surprise, not many complaints reached me (and yes, my
personal and/or business e-mail was not affected in any way)
</p>
<p>
Recovery is complete now, and I'm looking forward to things getting back
to normal soon.
</p>Update on what I've been doinghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20130208-work_update/2013-02-08T03:00:00+01:002013-02-08T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
For the better part of a year, this blog has failed to provide you with
a lot of updates what I've been doing. This is somewhat relate to a
shift from doing freelance work on mainline / FOSS projects like the
Linux kernel.
</p>
<p>
In April 2011, Holger and I started a new company here in Berlin (<a href="http://sysmocom.de/">sysmocom - systems for mobile communications
GmbH</a>). This company, among other things, attempts to provide
products and services surrounding the various mobile communications
related FOSS projects, particularly OpenBSC, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN, but
also OsmocomBB, and now also OsmoBTS + OsmoPCU, two integral components
of our own BTS product called sysmoBTS. </p>
<p>
Aside from the usual software development, this entails a variety of
other tasks, technical and non-technical. First of all, I did more
electrical engineering than I did in the years since Openmoko. And even
there, I was only leading the hardware architecture, and didn't actually
have to capture schematics or route PCBs myself. So now there are some
general-purpose and some customer-specific circuits that had to be done.
I really enjoy that work, sometimes even more than software development.
Particularly the early/initial design phase can be quite exciting.
Selecting components, figuring out how to interconnect them, whether you
can fit all of them together in the given amount of GPIOs and other
resource of your main CPU, etc. But then even the hand-soldering the
first couple of boards is fun, too.
</p>
<p>
Of all the things I so far had least exposure to is casing and
mechanical issues. Luckily we have a contractor working on that for us,
but still there are all kinds of issues that can go wrong, where
unpopulated PCB footprints can suddenly make contact with a case, or
all kinds of issues related to manufacturing tolerances. Another topic
is packaging. After all, you want the products to end up in the hands
of the customer in a neat, proper and form-fitting package.
</p>
<p>
On the other hand, there is a lot of administrative work. Sourcing
components can sometimes be a PITA, particularly if even distributors
like Digikey conspire against you and don't even carry those low
quantities of a component that we need for our 100-board low quantity
runs. EMC and other measurements for CE approval are a fun topic, too.
I've never been involved personally in those, and it has been an
interesting venture. Luckily, at least for sysmoBTS, things are looking
quite promising now. Customs paperwork, Import/Export related
buerocracy (both in Germany as well as other countries) always have new
surprises, despite me having experience in dealing with customs for
more than 10 years now.
</p>
<p>
Also significant amount of time is spent on evaluating suppliers and
their products, e.g. items like SIM/USIM cards, cavity duplexers,
antennas, cables, adapters, power amplifiers and other RF related
accessories for our products.
</p>
<p>
The thing that really caught me off-guard are the German laws on
inventory accounting. Basically there is no threshold for low-quantity
goods, so as a company on capital (GmbH/AG) you have to account for each
and every fscking SMD resistor or capacitor. And then you don't only
have to count all those parts, but also put a value at them. Depending
on the type of item, you have to use either the purchasing price, or the
current market price if you were to buy it again, or the price you
expect to sell the item for. Furthermore, the trade law requirements on
inventory accounting are different than the tax laws, not often with
contradictory aims ;)
</p>
<p>
In the end it seems the best possible strategy is to put a lot of the
low-value inventory into the garbage bin before the end of the financial
year, as the value of the product (e.g. 130 SMD resistors in 0402 worth
fractions of cents) is so much lower than the cost of counting it. Now
that's of course an environmental sin, especially if you consider lots
and lots of small and medium-sized companies ending up at that
conclusion :(
</p>
<p>
So all in all, this should give you somewhat of an explanation why there
might have been less activity on this blog about exciting technical
things. On the one hand, they might relate to customer related projects
which are of confidential nature. On the other hand, they might simply
be boring things like dealing with transport damage of cavity duplexers
from china, or with FedEx billing customs/import fees to the wrong
address...
</p>
<p>
Overall I still have the feeling that I was writing a decent amount of
code in 2012 - although there can never be enough :) Most of it was
probably either related to OsmoBTS, OpenBSC/OsmoNITB or the various
Erlang SS7/TCAP/MAP related projects. The list of more
community-oriented projects with long TODO lists is growing, though.
I'd like to work on SIMtrace MITM / card emulation support, the
CC32RS512 based smartcard OS, libosmosim (there's a first branch in
libosmocore.git). Let's hope I can find a bit more time for that kind
of stuff this year. You should never give up hope, they say ;)
</p>Why I hate phone calls so muchhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20130116-i_hate_phone_calls/2013-01-16T03:00:00+01:002013-01-16T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
The fact that I have more than 20 missed phone calls on my land line
telephone after only half a day has passed triggers me to write this
blog post.
</p>
<p>
It is simply <b>impossible</b> to get any productive work done if there
are synchronous interruptions. If I'm doing any even remotely complex
task such as analyzing code, designing electronics or whatever else,
then the interruption of the flow of thoughts, and the context switch to
whatever the phone call might be about is costing me an insurmountable
amount of my productive efficiency. I doubt that I am the only one
having that feeling / experience.
</p>
<p>
So why on earth does everybody think they are entitled to interrupt my
work at any given point in time they desire? Why do they think whatever
issue they have rectifies an immediate interruption in what I am doing?
To me, an unscheduled phone call almost always feels like an insult. It
is a severe intrusion into my work-flow, and has a very high cost to me
in terms of loss of productivity.
</p>
<p>
Sure, there are exceptional absolute emergencies (like, a medical
emergency of a family member). But just about anything else can be put
in an e-mail, which I can respond to at a time of my choosing, i.e. at a
time I am not deeply buried into some other task that requires expensive
context switching and the associated loss of productivity. And yes, a
response might be the same day, some days later, or even a week or more
later. There are literally hundreds of mails of dozens of people that
need to be responded to. I can never even remotely answer all of them
in a timely manner, even if I'm working 12-14 hours a day up to 7 days a
week.
</p>
<p>
Right now I'm doing the only reasonable thing that is left: Switch off
all phones. And to anyone out there intending to contact me: Please
think twice before calling me on the phone. Almost anything can be put
in an e-mail. And if you really want to have a phone call, please
request a scheduled phone call in an e-mail containing a very detailed
agenda and explanation of the topic.
</p>Having Fun with DHL Express!https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20120117-dhl_bouncing/2012-01-17T03:00:00+01:002012-01-17T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
This is what I got when tracking one of my inbound shipments:
</p>
<center>
<img src="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/fun/dhl-hk-leipzig-hk-leipzig-hk.jpg" width="66%">
</center>
<p>
It seems DHL is having fun bouncing the package back and forward between
Hong Kong and Leipzig(Germany). So far, it started in HK, then arrived
in Leipzig on January 8, went back to HK, back to Leipzig, back to HK,
back to Leipzig and is currently allegedly again in Hong Kong _after_
succesfully passing German customs clearance on January 15.
</p>
<p>
For the TCP/IP nerds among the readers: I wonder when the TTL expires.
</p>Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?https://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20110611-gmail_and_co/2011-06-11T03:00:00+02:002011-06-11T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday morning I was reading through the logs of my exim-based
mailserver and noticed _how_ many messages were delivered to
Google/Gmail. This is mostly related to the various mailing lists that
I'm hosting at <i>lists.{gnumonks,osmocom}.org</i>.
</p>
<p>
Now if those lists were general-purpose mailing lists for let's say a
group of environmentalists or a local model train club, I wouldn't be
surprised. But almost all of those lists are about <i>very</i>
technical projects, where the only subscriber base should be people from
either the IT security community, or the Free Software community. The
former is typically extremely security and privacy aware, whereas the
latter is at least to some extent in favor of what I would describe as
'being a producer rather than just a consumer of technology.
</p>
<p>
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups? I
really don't get it. Let me illustrate why this is a surprise:
</p><ul>
<li><b>you give away control over your personal data</b>
<p>
Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard
disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium. Control over your
data also means that somebody needs a search warrant to your home in
order to get to it. It also means that you decide when or how to shut
it down, not a large corporation in a foreign country.
</p>
</li>
<li><b>you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction</b>
<p>
Depending on where you are, this may or may not be an improvement.
I don't want to start a political debate here, but you have to be aware
what this means specifically, especially in terms of government
authorities or private companies getting access to your mails. I myself
would not even say that I understand enough about the US legal system to
determine the full outcome of this. Also, in case there was a subpoena
or other legal action in the US, how would I defend myself? That's so
much easier in my home country, where I know the laws and regulations.
</p>
</li>
<li><b>you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom,
but also the full content of that communication</b>
<p>
Now Google may have privacy policies and other rules that this data is
not to be mined for whatever purposes they deem fit. But first of all,
what guarantees do you have on it? Definitely less than if you ran your
own mail server on your own hardware. Secondly, whatever Google
promises is always within the scope of the US jurisdiction. In the
10-year aftermath of 9/11 there have been a number of alarming
developments including wiretaps to phone lines without court
review/order, etc.
</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>
Now I don't want this to be a bashing of Google. The same applies more
or less to any email hosting company. I also don't want it to be a
bashing about the US. The above is meant as an example only. In Europe
we have our own problems with regard to data retention of e-mail related
data (who is mailing whom). But those only apply to companies that
offer telecommunications services. If you host your own mail server,
you are not providing services to anyone else and thus are not required
to retain any data.
</p>
<p>
There's also what I would call the combination effect, i.e. millions of
millions of people all using the same service. This leads to a large
concentration of information. Such concentrations are ideal for data
mining and to get a global 'who is who'. This information is much more
interesting to e.g. intelligence communities than the actual content, as
it is much easier analyzed automatically. It also doesn't help to
encrypt your messages, as the headers (From, To, ...) are still
unencrypted.
</p>
<p>
Furthermore, this concentration leads to single points of failure. I'm
not speaking physically, as Google and other web-hosters of course know
how to replicate their services using a large-scale distributed system.
But all is under control by the same company, maintained by the same
staff, subject to the same jurisdiction/laws, etc.
</p>
<p>
There was a time when the Internet was about a heterogeneous network,
de-centralized, without a single point of failure. Why are all people
running to a very few number of companies? The same question goes for
sites like sourceforge. All the code hosted there subject to the good
will of the hosting company. Subject to their financial stability,
their intentions and their admin staff. They've had security
breaches, as did apparently Google. Sure, self-hosted machines also
have security breaches, but only the breakage of a very small set of
accounts, not the breakage of thousands, hundred thousands or millions
of users simultaneously.
</p>
<p>
Now hosting your own mailserver on your own machine might be a bit too
much effort in terms of money or work for some people. I understand
that. But then, there are several other options:
</p><ul>
<li>You team up with some friends, people you know and trust, and you
share the administrative and financial effort</li>
<li>You look out for NGOs, societies, cooperatives or other
non-for-profit groups that offer email and other services to their
members. At least in Germany we traditionally have many of these.
</li><li>You use a local, small Internet service company rather than one of
the big entities.
</li></ul>
While you still give up some control with those alternatives, you keep
your data within your jurisdiction, and you still keep the spirit of
de-centralization rather than those large concentrated single point of
failures.Travelling to Belem/Brazil to talk about OpenPCD and OsmocomBB at UFPAhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20110311-travelling_to_belem/2011-03-11T03:00:00+01:002011-03-11T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Tomorrow I'll be leaving for a 10-day trip to <a href="http://laps.ufpa.br/">the signal processing lab of UFPA (Federal
University of Para)</a> in Belem, Brazil. I was kindly invited by Prof.
Aldebaro Klautau to hold some lectures and lab exercises regarding Free
Software (+Hardware) RFID projects like <a href="http://www.openpcd.org/">OpenPCD</a> as well as Free Software GSM
projects like <a href="http://bb.osmocom.org/">OsmocomBB</a>.
</p>
<p>
I would love to use that opportunity to spend some more time in Brazil for
holidays, but my schedule really doesn't allow for anything like that at
this time. It's always sad to have to miss such a chance. It would be exactly
the right time of the year to spend some time at the beaches of Pernambuco or
Alagoas... *sigh*
</p>Heading for a business trip to Nairobi/Kenyahttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20110122-heading_to_nairobi/2011-01-22T03:00:00+01:002011-01-22T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm about to leave for a 1-week business related trip to Kenya... so please
excuse any [additional] delays in reaching me. I really need to focus on my
work in order to keep up productivity.
</p>UPS sends me an invoice over 1 Euro-centhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20100528-ups_invoice-1cent/2010-05-28T03:00:00+02:002010-05-28T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Yesterday I received <a href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/photos/ups-invoice-1cent.png">this
letter</a> from the local UPS subsidiary in Germany.
</p>
<p>
This is nothing uncommon, as I often import some electronics parts or other
equipment from outside the EU, on which I need to pay customs duties and/or
import VAT. In such cases, they typically collect an estimated amount as COD
(cash on delivery) and then send an invoice about the difference (if any).
</p>
<p>
The funny part in this case now is: The grand total after subtracting my COD
payment is <b>EUR 0.01</b> - in words: One Euro-cent. They really want me
to do a bank transfoer or write them a cheque over 1 cent !?!
</p>
<p>
One wonders to what grand total the expenses for the paper, printing, postage,
banking transfer fees and accounting fees on the UPS side will amount to for
processing something like this.
</p>
<p>
I wonder what would happen if I didn't pay that 1 cent. Would they actually
try to sue me? Probably simply stop delivering packets to me, which I cannot
afford and thus rather pay that single cent...
</p>The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphershttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20091125-the_emperors_codes/2009-11-25T03:00:00+01:002009-11-25T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
During the last weeks, I've read the book <i>The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking
of Japan's Secret Ciphers</i>. As you can guess from the title, the book
relates to the various UK, American and Australian code breaker teams working
on breaking the encrypted communication of Japan during the second world war.
</p>
<p>
There have been plenty of books about the history of breaking Germany's Enigma
ciphering machine, but information on how the Japanese codes were broken so far
didn't seem to be as widespread - despite the resepective archives being opened
up during the last decades.
</p>
<p>
It has been a most interesting reading. As you can imagine, at that time almost
nobody had a sufficient understanding of the Japanese language, not even thinking
about how to encode Japanese writing into morse code.
</p>
<p>
Nonetheless, all of the Japanese merchant, diplomatic, army and navy codes have
been broken during the war. And surprisingly, the Japanese never really
assumed something is wrong with their actual encryption method. All they did
is to replace the codebook or the additive codebook.
</p>
<p>
Also, just like in today's GSM (A5/1) crypto attacks, even back then the
importance of <i>known plaintext</i> could not be underestimated. The verbosity
of Japanese soldiers addressing a superior officer and the stereotypical nature
of reports on weather or troop movements gave the cryptographers plenty of
known plaintext for many of their intercepted message.
</p>
<p>
What was also new to me is the fact that the British even back then demanded
that Cable+Wireless provides copies of all telegraphs through their network.
And that's some 70-80 years before data retention on communications networks
becomes a big topic ;)
</p>
<p>
Overall, definitely a very interesting book. I can recommend it to anyone with
an interest in security, secret services, WW2 history and/or cryptography.
</p>TXL-CDG-BLR-DLH-TPEhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081115-txl_cdg_blr_del_tpe-and_back/2008-11-15T03:00:00+01:002008-11-15T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
This was the route that I was taking to Taipei this time: Berlin, Paris,
Bangalore, Delhi, Taipei... with 7 hours in Bangalore and 4 hours in Delhi,
resulting in a total travel time of about 38 hours.
</p>
<p>
Everything went surprisingly well and I did a lot of work. However, my
day/night rhythm is basically completely gone by now. Need to try to
synchronize with local time.
</p>
<p>
Oh, and if you're asking yourself "why"? Because airline ticket pricing
is the most ridiculous thing on this planet, even worse than stock exchange.
Any more 'direct' asymmetric Germany->Taiwan->India->Germany flight would have
been about three times as expensive as both a Germany->India->Germany and a
India->Taiwan->India round trip ticket together.
</p>German Post paper form shows HTML font taghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20081101-german_post_helvetica/2008-11-01T03:00:00+01:002008-11-01T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Something fun for a change: This morning I had one of those "you were not
present when we tried to deliver something to you, please come to the post
office to pick it up" cards in my mailbox.
</p>
<p>
However, <a href="http://laforge.gnumonks.org/fun/post-abholkarte-helvetica-10-2008-marked.jpg">as the scan of this very card shows (check for the red arrow)</a>, they inadvertently show half of a HTML FONT tag for the font "HELVETICA" on the actual printed card.
I wonder how nobody could notice ;)
</p>Playing around with the HTC TyTN II / Kaiserhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20071213-htc_tytn_kaiser/2007-12-13T03:00:00+01:002007-12-13T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
For reasons that I cannot yet disclose, I have obtained a HTC TyTN II (aka
Kaiser). This is my first (and hopefully last) Windows Mobile based device.
</p>
<p>
So far I've taken the device fully apart, unmounted all the shielding covers
and took high-resolution photographs of each and every part of the phone.
The resulting information is now that I'm aware of all the major components in
the device, and I've started to do some data mining on those components.
</p>
<p>
As everyone knows, HTC used a Qualcomm MSM7200 based chipset in this device.
The MSM integrates both the GSM baseband (DSP+ARM9) as well as the application
processor (ARM11) and many other things. What's less known is the further
peripheral configuration.
</p><ul>
<li>The Bluetooth and WiFi chips are from Ti (BRF6300 and WL125, respectively).</li>
<li>The power management unit is a Qualcomm PM7500</li>
<li>NAND+DRAM are in a multi-chip module (1.8V, 2GBit NAND x8, 1GBbit DRAM x32) from Samsung</li>
<li>The 3G/GSM RF part consists of Qualcomm's RFR6500 (receive with integrated GPS) and RTR6275 (transmit) as well as AWT6280, AWT6273 and AWT6273 amplifiers</li>
<li>There furthermore is a CPLD: Xilinx XC2C128 (3000 system gates, 128 macrocells).
</li>
<p>
For those interested, I'll go through my PCB photographs and will edit and
publish them soon.
</p>
<p>
I am now digging through all the various XDA/WM6 hacker information out there
and trying to understand the various tools that can be used for further taking
apart the software side. I've already managed to get into the bootloader,
which apparently offers a standard USB serial emulation that can be accessed even from a Linux PC.
</p>
<p>
Unfortunately the MSM7200 is a highly proprietary/closed chipset, and there is
very limited public information available. I've already ran into this while
evaluating potential hardware for OpenMoko at some point in the past. I became
curious about this MSM7xxx chipset family when they were first added to the
ARM-Linux machine type registry many months ago.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, meanwhile Google seems to be doing a lot using this chipset, as they
have <a href="http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2007-November/043153.html">recently announced</a> the availability of a <a href="http://git.android.com/?p=linux-msm.git">linux-msm.git</a> tree. The source code should document many things such as GPIO assignments, IRQ's and contain drivers for most of the hardware (on the application processor side).
</p>
<p>
Now if some of you ask yourselves if I have turned my back on OpenEZX and
OpenMoko: No, that's not true. I'm just looking at this for a very peculiar
reason. Hopefully I'm able to reveal more soon.
</p></ul>incommunicado for a whilehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20071203-ganesha_problems/2007-12-03T03:00:00+01:002007-12-03T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
It seems like my main mail server, ganesha.gnumonks.org, is facing some severe
problems (ext3 corruption on a 3ware hardware RAID-1, i.e. something that
clearly should not happen.
</p>
<p>
As per Murphy's law, this had to happen exactly while I was in-flight on my
trip to Bangalore for <a href="http://foss.in/2007">FOSS.in 2007</a> :( Had it
happened 2 days earlier, i would have actually within physical reach of the
machine in question.
</p>
<p>
Luckily, all my hosted servers have remote consoles and actually even remote
access to the BIOS setup. So I'm trying to recover what's to recover. The
exim mail spool is on the affected /var partition. The much more important
cyrus IMAPD spool is not affected. What a relief.
</p>
<p>
Still, everyone who tried to contact me: Please expect some delays in email
based communication through the next few days. Sorry for the inconvenience.
</p>Short updatehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20070420-update/2007-04-20T03:00:00+02:002007-04-20T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
The last couple of weeks have again been so busy that I didn't find the time to
update this blog. After returning from the Taipei trip, as usual, there were
tons of things to be done for OpenMoko. Later I spent about one week on a
business trip to Bangalore, from which I've returned monday afternoon.
</p>
<p>
Now I'm only home until thursday next week. Next friday, I'll once again
depart for Taipei to speed up and coordinate OpenMoko/FIC development.
</p>Apple can't even properly translate their SPAMhttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20070307-apple/2007-03-07T03:00:00+01:002007-03-07T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
I just received SPAM from apple: "Mit dem Mac ist Codieren immer und überall
möglich." and further down "Codieren. Kompilieren. Berechnen."
</p>
<p>
Seems like a multi-billion multi-national company cannot even afford some
native speaker to proof-read their advertisements. Quite embarrassing.
</p>G5 Quad broken one month after warranty: The big banghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20070304-g5-big-bang/2007-03-04T03:00:00+01:002007-03-04T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Last night, I was once again annoyed by the slow build time of our dual AMD64
2.4GHz build server, and I wanted to use my Apple G5 quad again as a
build/compile system.
</p>
<p>
So I pressed the power button, and immediately in that instance there was an
extremely loud BANG!. No smoke, no smell, just that bang. Standby/trickle
power was still there, the LED's kept shining.
</p>
<p>
I quickly opened the case, too off the covers, etc. There is no visible
component that has suffered any damage. No leaked/exploded capacitors, no
residue from some electrical spark, nothing.
</p>
<p>
And then I found out: The machine <a href="http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2006/02/01/#20060201-quad_g5">arrived
on February the 2nd</a>, and now it's exactly one month after the 1 year
warranty has expired. I wonder how they can time their system failures that well :(
</p>
<p>
A little bit later I found out about the <a href="http://www.apple.com/support/powermac/powersupply/repairextension/">Apple
Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues</a>. It seems like
this is a common bug, especially when you see things like <a href="http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/powermacg5/topic4026.html">this
lengthy list of people who report a similar effect</a>.
</p>
<p>
Seems like I'll have to call some local Apple dealers the first thing Monday
morning....
</p>Federal "Express" - One month to get a customer accounthttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20070201-fedex/2007-02-01T03:00:00+01:002007-02-01T03:00:00+01:00Harald Welte<p>
Since sending hardware to <a href="http://www.almesberger.net/">Werner
Almesberger</a> in Argentina using DHL seems to be suboptimal, I decided to
give FedEx a try. So I went to their web-site, and tried to register for a
customer account / number. </p>
<p>
What struck me first, is that they require you to enter both land-line AND
mobile phone number. As if everyone had both these days. I know a lot of
people who either only have land-line, or mobile. And obviously there are people
like myself, who would never want FedEx to contact them via mobile at all.
</p>
<p>
Anyway. What I then got back was an automatic email (in German) indicating that
the respective employee is "Out of Office till 21st of February", and that
"e-mails to this address will not be processed during this time".
</p>
<p>
Whew, I thought. What kind of express. It takes only three weeks to get a
customer number. Maybe I should resort to UPS next. *sigh*
</p>Dual-Opteron liquid cooling leakinghttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20061006-liquid_cooling-leak/2006-10-06T03:00:00+02:002006-10-06T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I'm not really having that much luck with the liquid cooling system of my main
workstation. Today, one of the CPU coolers (dual socket 940 board) started
leaking. Unfortunately it was the cooler of the CPU sitting above the AGP and
PCI-X slots, spilling coolant on th Radeon 9200 and E1000 cards.
</p>
<p>
Coincidentally all that happened while I was having a bath, but that just as a side-note.
</p>
<p>
Now the box still boots up and is accessible from the network. Just no
graphics output. Pretty bad for what I use as a dual-head compile and
development workstation. So far it looks like at least that AGP card has died.
I already bought a used one on eBay (you can't get any Radeon 9200 these days,
and that's the really last 'free' graphics chip out there [apart from Intel on-board stuff]...). It could also be the AGP socket or something completely different. I don't have any spare AGP cards, just PCI... 5V PCI that don't fit in the 3.3V-only PCI-X slots, so I couldn't test it with a different card right now.
</p>
<p>
Now since this is the second time I'm having quite big trouble with that liquid
cooling system, this is a good time to re-think whether it was that good an
idea. I still think it was. I mean, for the better part of two years, this
system has been running day and night, without any problems. In fact it is so
quiet that I now regard my Quad G5 (unloaded, all fans at minimum) as extremely
loud. And it is that quiescence which I love so much, and it is even worth at
least those two times I've now had problems.
</p>Allnet Allsound / U-Media AudioMatehttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060813-allsound/2006-08-13T03:00:00+02:002006-08-13T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
I couldn't resist any longer to buy a
<a href="http://www.tjansen.de/blog/2006/02/allnet-allsound-audio-mate.html">Allnet
Allsound aka U-Media AudioMate</a>, basically a small 802.11 WLAN capable
Internet streaming radio stand alone receiver. Something that you can just put
into your kitchen / bedroom. It hooks up to your WLAN and plays MP3 radio
streams stand alone. No running computer / hard disk / server / ... required.
IT also seems to support UPnP A/V, but I yet have to look into some Free server
software for this.
</p>
<p>
Oh and yes, you can actually use it as alarm clock, waking you with tunes of
your favorite Internet streaming radio. How cool is that?
</p>The wonders of Vienna airporthttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060705-vienna-airport-internet/2006-07-05T03:00:00+02:002006-07-05T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
For my trip to Shanghai, the both cheapest and most convenient flight schedule
was offered by <a href="http://www.aua.com/">Austrian</a>. I mainly use KLM /
NW / Air France / Lufthansa for my flights, so Austrian was definitely a new
experience.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>Software for paleeograpy of Indic scriptshttps://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20060515-indoskript/2006-05-15T03:00:00+02:002006-05-15T03:00:00+02:00Harald Welte<p>
Those of you who know me a bit better will know that my now
ex-{fiance,girlfriend} is studying indian philology and indian cultural
history at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Now when you think about philology, you
will probably think of old people wading through books and paper.
</p>
<p>
To the contrary. I've always been amazed how much software development they
actually do (or have made) there. Some years back, I learned about <a href="http://www.sanskritreader.de/">Sanskritreader</a>, an OCR (optical
character recognition) software package for devanagari script.
</p>
<p>
Now their latest software is <a href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/%7efalk/index.htm">IndoSkript</a>, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography">Palaeograpy</a> software. It
comes with a ~600MB database of scans of anciend Indic handwritings, where evey
glyph in those scripts has been individually separated, and the scripts are
annotated, etc.
</p>
<p>
Using that software (it's mainly a database software) you can for example check
how a particular glyph was written in a certain timeframe in a specific dynasty
in the Mysore area. Or you can draw [or import a scan?] a glyph and have it do
pattern-matching, giving you a probabilistic analysis of which already-known
glyphs match your new one the most.
</p>
<p>
As of now, it ships with a database of Brahmi, consisting more than 700
scriptures of more than 170,000 glyphs total.
</p>
<p>
It's great that they develop these tools, and it's even better that they are
published as public domain software. What would be even better, is if they
made their software Free Software and publicized the source code. This way
other people could contribute and e.g. add a much-needed non-German localization,
a precondition for any kind of international (e.g. Indian) use of it.
</p>
<p>
Maybe I can find a minute (and a minute of their time) to explain to them the
marvels of Free Software.
</p>