Month: April 2006

On monday, I went to Muenchen for the E*OS3 project, I’m working for. We paid a visit to the LiMux project team which is migrating 80% of the 14.000
municipal desktop to a KDE-based Linux solution. Way to go, Munich. The discussion was quite
interesting, and the people told us that the project was mostly fun. By 2008 they should be done,
and be able to take over the support slowly themselves (they clearly didn’t want to outsource). When
I handed over the KDE card, they smiled and immediately recognized it interestedly. We obviously
have friends there :-)

After the visit to LiMux, we were kindly invited by Till Jaeger, the lawyer of Harald Welte
of gpl-violations.org fame. Speaking with him was quite
interesting, he could bring a couple of new angles into our research for a quality standard for Open
Source services. He also was a nice guy and offered us very good cookies. Who said that lawyers
suck?

The next day, we went to the university to visit the department of business informatics and
talked about modularity of IT services. Interestingly, we came to the conclusion that market share
is one means to measure quality, that immediately brought up my question about how you could measure
it, because that’s where we’re stuck within the freedesktop.org forum at the moment. Not really new
insight, but still, a new wire in my personal agenda… :>

Insane trip though, travelling 1500km by car in two days. :/

Today, it was CodeYard time again. The students of Koning Willem II College in Tilburg (NL) presented their final
projects. They automated different kinds of shops, one of the teams even built a robot which could
be used to compile orders from the magazine, well proof-of-concept, but very nice to see actually.

In other news, we were able to collect sponsors to finally be able to give green light for
the multimedia developers meeting in the Netherlands, second half of may, and I’m proposing a paper
to the DesktopCon committee. Hope I’ll be able to make
it to Canada in July, but that’s still quite far away. It would be a good opportunity to strengthen
our collaboration with other desktop-related projects, though.

Next week, I’ll go to Wiesbaden to visit Linuxtag,
we’re putting together the first version of the KBoothbox there, and it’s a great opportunity to
talk to a couple of people in person, after all, e-mail often just doesn’t cut it. A friend was kind
enough to invite me to his place where I can spend the nights, hopefully getting a little sleep. See
you in Wiesbaden!

Luite visited me last weekend at our (fairly) new place.
We were planning to do some hacking, and that was quite some fun. Luite has been working on a photo
editing tool which makes use of the GPU to do most operations on the image. He was already able to
show editing levels, emboss and brightness / contrast in real-time. His program is using the OpenGL
shader language to do those operations in the graphics card. With his Radeon FireGL T2-128 (Radeon
9600 Pro), 30 FPS was easily possible. Nice, maybe we’ll see this in krita at some point in the
future, it is currently in a proof-of-concept stage.

I myself had been testing a couple of network setup programs during the last weeks, none of
them worked to my satisfaction and I ended up various times with having a bunch of different
configuration files in /etc/network/interfaces.* and symlinking the ones that I’d use to
/etc/network/interfaces. That part has been automated now and put into a systray application that
makes use of the “Debian infrastructure”. It works well until now. I’ve also added the option to
scan for open wireless access points and connect to those. My neighbours were friendly enough to
provide me with a testing environment (although they’re probably not aware of that). :-)
I might polish KNetSwitch a bit more and release it to the public, but I don’t know
if it’s really worth it and if I find the time to make it releasable. If someone is interested,
email me to get the code. It’s written in Python, using PyKDE for the GUI stuff. The program that
does the actual switching is implemented as a console program that’s called via sudo or kdesu
(configurable). Anyway, it seems to work well and does the job at least for me. A possible extension
for this program would be a guidance module that allows you
to edit the config files by hand. Judging by the manpage of
/etc/network/interfaces, you’ll get a lot of useful functionality ‘for free’.

Last friday, I submitted a paper for FrOSCon. It’s
about the work in the Marketing Working Group. Danimo was kind enough to invite me and Adriaan to
his place. Guess it’ll be fun over there. Ow, if the paper gets accepted, that is…

Update: I’ve received quite some requests to put knetswitch online, so
here it is.

On Thursday, my Thinkpad T60 arrived. So I had some fun setting up Linux on too new
hardware, but it went almost well. The only thing that does not work yet is suspend, but I’ll
probably be able to fix this. Right now, some libata driver oopses or hangs the machine on resume.
Luckily, the thing is really fast, it compiles my custom kernelpackage in about 6 minutes, including
drivers needed. Makes debugging driver problems fun. ;-)

Last night, we went out to Doornroosje where a
concert of Tony Allen Bigband
was taking place. Really good stuff, jazzy music with a lot of African influences. After the gig, I
figured it would be a good thing to buy one of their CD’s, I liked the music, and I think it’s a
good thing to circumvent the big record labels in this way. Said, done.
I was asked if I’d
like to have my copy of their album signed, and that I could have done that backstage, sure, why
not.
The female lead singer had a ballpen, so I asked her if she’d sign the booklet. I tried to
make a joke telling her that I wasn’t even asking for her telephone number. She apparently didn’t
get that (admittedly poor) one and was enthousiast that I was asking her telephone numer. She wrote
down her nigerian cellphone number, along with her emailaddress and I had to promise her that I’d
either call or send an email. Totally freaking weird.