totalueberwachung

GUADEC has been over a while now, but I still wanted to say how much I enjoyed being there. The atmosphere was really friendly and I enjoyed the lectures and the talks afterwards at dinner. If I have time I definitely want to come again next year. So thanks to all who crossed my way in the UK and made this. You know who you are.

Yesterday has been really busy. I'd say bad, but lots of good things also happened to us this day. Alex and I were driving to London after sleeping somewhere close to Weston super-mare. We found the Wookey hole by accident and decided we should take the tour. The caves were pretty impressive with lots of LED lighting inside which made for a really nice atmosphere.

London, however was a completely different story. We spent something around 6 hours searching for a B&B we could afford (I had realized that I lost my debit card at that time). Two really nice people we met in Harrow went through a lot of trouble to get us a cheap place for the night. Many thanks to you two! We finally managed to find something quite nice - by that time it was about 2230.

I'm now sitting in London in an Internet cafe with free wireless internet access and Avenue Q starts at 1700 GMT and all is well again. I even found my debit card which is really embarrassing (such things are known to happen to me) but nonetheless I'm happy we can afford the musical and the fuel for the way back to Birmingham where our plane leaves tomorrow. :-)

In a couple hours my plane is going to leave from Hanover to Birmingham and I will be attending GUADEC during July 15th through 19th.

I hope to talk with many interesting people (known and unknown), finally meet some of the o-hand guys face to face and have a great time. :-)

My flight back is at July 22nd so I'll have a little time to visit the UK with my girlfriend and finally watch a [musical][1] I've been wanting to watch for some time now. [1]: http://www.avenueqthemusical.co.uk/

Some time ago I got a 19" computer rack for free from a bank branch that closed. Actually Stefan spotted the offer on our local LUG mailing list and planned on installing it in his server room, but unfortunately the rack was too big.

Lucky me :-)

I disassembled it completely, but even then the inner frame was too large for the elevator. Jan, Stefan and I had to carry it 12 storeys high. Thanks again guys, I owe you (and I hope you'll be there when I move out ;-).

I recently installed a UPS and two shelves in my rack and threw out the big 17" monitor. I think the result looks a lot nicer.

Here's a before/after picture:

The rack now consists of (from top to bottom):

• CMC Rittal rack monitoring and security system. The door is locked with a keypad, but you can open it anyway, if you know where to place a strong magnet (so much for security)
• Two shelves with computer related books and CDs
• Rittal KVM switch (unused)
• Fonera access point
• Nortel BayStack 450-24T 24 port 10/100 switch
• My server, an Athlon TBird 800MHz (so if you ever wondered why this site is so slow here's the answer), which is housed in an old SCSI storage controller. That controller had some cool features like a LCD text display, 18 dual color LEDs and 5 big fans not to mention the 18 5.25" slots. I already have a PCB designed to control all of this with an ATMega8 chip but it will be some time until I find the time to finish that project.
• APCSmart 700 uninterruptible power supply

A comment recently asked:

Any bunch of thoughts about protecting blog from hijacking?

Yeah, I'm disabling comments. Sorry, but this spam just annoys the hell out of me. If anyone wants to contact me, please use e-mail instead. I do get lots of spam mails, but I can deal with that in a far more efficient manner than with the comments on this blog.

I finally configured my local jabber server for multiple domains. And the whole procedure was really painless, too. I just followed the instructions on: http://www.jms1.net/jabberd2/

My previous domain, thebe.orbit.homelinux.net, will still remain active in parallel to totalueberwachung.de as there are quite some people registered (mostly friends and their friends) and I don't want to force anyone to switch, especially since migrating the contact list is not trivial.

Anyone can join that server, so if you are in need of a jabber account feel free.

Last weekend Michael 'Mickey' Lauer came to Braunschweig for a small meeting (5 people). Mickey has already outlined the topics covered so I'll just add to some points.

The first day was spent with some status reports from OpenMoko and OpenEZX and updating the bugs in the bug tracker - closing ones that have been fixed in the past and asking about bugs where progress seemed halted.

The second day we continued cleaning up bugzilla, but didn't have enough time to go through all the bugs. Stefan, Jan and I will finish that soon.
The most important issue for me was discussing what needs to be done with regard to openmoko-libs. I now have a fairly good understanding (I hope!) what the current issues are. I will first file bugs / add descriptions to existing bugs so the APIs are accurately reflected in bugzilla and then start working on them. This should keep me busy for the next months.

Marek was responsible for the nice ambiance by improvising on the guitar to some of Mickey's mods. He also made good progress on the sound theme. I hope he'll finish the startup sound soon. :-)

The meeting was really great. I'm really looking forward to the next one (when-/whereever it will be).
Jan also pointed out that we should think about running a sprint like python did in the past. I think this is a great possibility to channel the development potential that we have after phase 1 into the appropriate directions.

Today Stefan's, Jan's and my Neo1973 arrived and we got together in my room for an all day hacking session.

Check out the pictures at http://www.sicherheitsschwankung.de/gallery/v/openmoko/.

Today someone on the openezx channel reminded me of a linux phone I had almost forgotten about. I first saw the ImCoSys smartphone at the CeBit and after talking to the representative I had the impression that they were not very open source friendly. After I asked him about their modifications to GPL'd software he replied that they were keeping GPL contributions at a minimum and developing most of the software on their own.

Since the phone is on the market now I decided to send them a mail and request the source code that is under the GPL. The first pleasant surprise was that they answered my question and they did it fast. I sent my mail at 1:15 (am) and I had an answer at 1:28.

According to that mail the source code will be distributed with the phone on a CD/DVD.

I will have to get one of these phones and see for myself. With things like bluetooth, wifi and GPS it does have a pretty high hack value.