Comments requiring login

Due to the amount of spam I receive in the comments fields of this site, I decided to turn on the requirement for all users to be logged in to post any comments. So far, there has been 770 spams posted and only 38 real comments. It’s easy to clean the spams out for sure (akismet, normal users don’t even have to see them), but just seeing the names of some of the links spammed are making me sick.

As a sidenote, with todays climate, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but if I ever ran into a person with the “quirkiness” required to watch (or for that matter produce) what is spammed these days, I’d probably go completely ballistic and on a killing spree. I definitely don’t condone the type of filtering done and/or tested on national levels, such as in Australia and Germany, but I can definitely understand why less hardened people turn to those extremes. My main reason for disliking that filtering isn’t really the content it is supposed to target, but rather where it is heading. The step from no filtering to filtering extreme sex is much larger than  the step from extreme sex to “rough” sex, and who will draw the line in the end?

What is the difference between extreme and normal? Most humans like to see things in black and white, and we forget about the greyscales. This is trait easily manipulated by people with an agenda (christian and muslim extremists, politicians, law enforcements and so forth) by pretty much saying “Look here, look at that absolute abomination of a thing going on, we can not allow this to happen to XXX. Let’s do something, let’s ban everything remotely connected to it.” In all honesty, that shit scares the hell out of me. Not so much the rethoric used, but the fact that so many falls for it. This whole 0-tolerance, black and white and fight or flight mentallity.

Anyways, just some random thoughts on the matter.

Final thoughts on the embedded Linux seminar

The embedded Linux seminar was held last week, and in general I feel that it went pretty well in line with my expectations. It’s been a long time since I held any real presentations, so the first two presentations in Gothenburg I was very much nervous and lost myself a few times along the line. The two presentations in Stockholm and Oslo went surprisingly well however, and I don’t think I made any huge errors from a pure presentation point of view.

Licensing

Now, that said, we did run into a few snags and after pondering what we can learn from the whole presentation/seminar — and there are a few points I’d like to raise both for the attendees and anyone else who might be interested. Being an “engineer”, I like to consider what went wrong, etc. Most points are of minor interest, but one of the absolute major points that we really didn’t get across properly, licensing issues with open source, or rather, licensing issues are manageable, however this was not the main area that we (or at least me) where there to talk about. Our main error was simply that we forgot communicating properly with each other, and correlate what we where saying. Also, this seminar wasn’t really about licensing issues, Nohau has an entire seminar/course on that topic alone, and you could easily fill out an entire university course on open source licensing.

The main point I tried to get across was that, yes, you need to be wary about licenses and you need to look at what is required of you, but that’s nothing different from any closed source licenses either, and you should be putting policies as well as processes in place to handle it, and push knowledge on how to handle licenses must be disseminated throughout the project.

So, to address some of the main licensing questions we received:

• No you will not have to give away your code if you link the code properly.
• You will have to set up proper procedures to handle any third party sources.
• You will have to create processes for everyone to follow to get any third party sources “accepted”.
• You will have to adhere to third party licenses, if you don’t, be prepared to be forced to and receive some bad publicity for it. (A lot of companies/people do get away with it, but is it worth risking it?)

Reliability

The second large question we got was, when would you use Linux, and when wouldn’t you use it, in a life or death situation? Simply put, I wouldn’t put it in a system where a person or persons would die if the process/hardware/appliance crashes, but that’s me. I would generally speaking make the life supporting/critical system run on a separate hardware, and then make all the critical stuff run in that context/hardware, and then a second piece which communicates with the critical hardware and do the higher end “stuff” that might be interesting (communicate to centrals, user interfaces, settings, etc). This way, the critical stuff can be kept simplistic and reliable (in my experience, reliability is a function of complexity, the more complex, the higher the failure rate).

In most projects, this has to be decided on a case by case basis, and due diligence must most of the time be taken with the laws and standards of each area. What is possible and advisable to do in house and home automation is not the same as in airplanes or medical systems for pretty obvious reasons.

Presentation depth/breadth/focus

Finally, a minor point, I got some criticism for being too shallow, not going enough in depth. Well, I could have stayed on discussing tool-chains and how to make one for hours, or I could have talked entirely about Linux internal boot order and why it works the way it does, but that wasn’t the goal of the entire seminar. That stuff could be studied to death, in the end your better off “getting” the top-down structure of an embedded Linux project and then just experiment on your own rather than get everything served in forum that can not make justice to everyones requirements. Next time however, I will try to maintain a deeper focus on a bit fewer topics, or get more time to speak in.

Anyways, I think it was fun and a huge experience. I hope most people visiting found the seminar interesting and had something out of it.

Website downtime

As some people may have noticed, the servers was down for almost a week. This was due to several hardware problems at my host, which where very unfortunate. When I put up the new webpage a few weeks ago, we also moved the daemons/hosting to a new one running on a new machine. This machine has been misbehaving for several weeks, and we switched over to another identical machine to rule out hardware error. In the end, we managed to get it solved. Last week both servers where killed due to power fluctuations (I believe if I interpreted it correctly). As a replacement, two new machines where ordered in, and they where both DOA (Dead on arrival). On top of this, I was told they received a faulty 20×500gb harddrive batch a few months back, which has had a 50% failure rate so far.

All this being said, I want to also extend my gratitude to these people for hosting this site, and for the wonderful work they do in running it. In 7 years of hosting this domain/host, I have rarely had a single breakdown, and this is the first time any major problem has existed with the hosting. In short, the wonderful fellows in the Netherlands that keeps hosting this site has had a really rough week, and I really wish them the best of luck getting everything back in order. Until then, please be patient with the site if it’s down or something is not working correctly, or even better, throw a mail in my general direction.

Using Ubuntu as Media Server for Xbox360

I got a Xbox360 since about a year and I just noticed it had some way of connecting to a PC, using the PC as a Media Server. Unfortunately it required a Windows Media Center installation to work, or so it claimed at least. This is probably not news to anyone, but it was very easy to get Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro as a matter of fact) to serve media for the Xbox 360. Xbox 360 uses UPnP to get media from the Windows Media Center PC. To make any recent Ubuntu able to serve UPnP suitable for the Xbox, do the following:

1. sudo apt-get install ushare
2. sudo dpkg-reconfigure ushare
3. sudo vim /etc/ushare.conf
   1. Make sure all the settings are correct.
4. sudo vim /etc/default/ushare
   1. Make sure it contains USHARE_OPTIONS=”–xbox”.
5. sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart

You should now be able to find the PC by searching for it from the Xbox interface (the name you set in ushare.conf should show up in the list of found PC’s). Now that that’s said, I should hint that the Xbox360 has a really shitty availability of audio and video codecs, and I don’t know if it’s possible to resolve this problem. There are hints that there is something called a UPnP Media Adaptor on the ushare website which should be able to convert to proper file formats as necessary, but ushare does not have that ability. Of course, that would give a shitload of cpu load on the fileserver as well, something which sounds less good in my opinion.

My personal opinion so far, Xbox 360 media center is really simple to use, but the available codecs, flexibility and scalability is catastrophically bad in comparison to my MythBuntu installation (still running 9.04 though). The Mythbuntu installation is a bit heavy on the configuration, but much more flexible, handles almost all codecs I’ve run into without even a hitch, and very scalable.

Thoughts on Intellectual Property

A few days ago I watched a show on swedish television where two doctors in IP and creativity went visiting badly running companies and helping them get creativity back in to the company, and hence making the badly running companies back in game. The methods they used seemed fairly straight forward and I can’t really say much about them, except it seemed to be how it should be done. Bring in the people who matters, talk things over, get ideas for new business areas, get ideas on how to improve efficiency in the employees work, how to run the company, new retailable products and services, and so forth. All this is just perfect, however, there was one comment on a subject that struck me hard.

They where complaining that Sweden is one of the countries putting the most money into research and development, yet we get the least IP out of it, and for some reason they could not understand why. I work with development, and to some extent research and I’m not the least bit shocked about this. Lack of cooperation, simple as that. Humans are in a sense made to cooperate, to work as a team and to throw ideas back and forth, especially in this day when the mass of information is simply impossible to keep tabs on. There are probably more research and development papers published every day than I could read in an entire lifetime and I will never be able to read more than a small bit of everything out there in my specific area of expertise, and not even there will I be able to read everything. The problem stems, in my humble opinion, from all the IP lawyers and lobbyists getting their messages across all too well.

Let me give an example of what I mean, for the last 3-4 years, I’ve worked on 4 different projects at 4 companies. At every single one of them, we have all been brought to a big meeting with the entire project/department/company where some “IP department” representative or lawyer has stood up and told us, whenever you get an idea:

1. Shut up about it, don’t talk to anyone.
2. Send an e-mail (or preferably sealed envelope or actually come talk to them in person) about the idea to the IP people.
3. They’ll discuss the idea with you, then wait for half a year or so.
4. If the idea is patentable, wait another 2-3 years for the patent to go through.
5. Now you can implement and start talking about the patent, and hopefully cash in on all the suckers who re-created your patent while you where biding your time.

I hope you can see the problem here. The whole idea is so completely remote from how creativity for most of us normal people work that it’s not even funny. For my own part, the best and most inventive days I’ve had, has been with friends. During my education, for example, we went out by the sea and talked mostly crap, but this is where and when we cross-breeded our ideas about cool things and how you could do them. How does a submarine work, what/how do you make it (sub)merge, how could you make it autonomous, how do you navigate, how does INS systems work, and so forth. Or whats the cheapest and simplest way to crossbreed a bicycle with a floating device so that you can bike around on water.

Not being able to talk to fellow colleagues about ideas and solutions to problems is probably among the biggest speedbumps in the entire system imho. One of the reasons I believe Google (for example) has been so successful is that the level of trust bestowed on their employees, and the level of openness within the company. People dare talk to eachother without the imminent threat of being fired or scalded for talking about the wrong thing, with the wrong person (this is actually not unheard of, where I am right now). Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s one of the impressions I have gotten, without ever being a google  employee myself.

Finally, don’t get me wrong on this subject. To live in a world, you have to adapt to the world. I’m not about to go divulge ideas and patentable IP on a whim that I hear about while at work. It is a fine line to cross between understanding and sympathizing with an ideology/theory and actually trying to live like an idealist, and it’s not one I would cross at this point of my life.

If/when I do get ideas on my own however, I would most likely not even consider the possibility of patenting it. I’d rather publish it openly so that it could benefit the world rather than try to suck the living bone marrow out of my victims. As a final thought, has anyone considered making an open source/open media “prior arts database” to, which would gather data and ideas on prior arts to patents, hence rendering current/future patents unusable?

embedded Linux seminar 25-27/11 2009

On the 25-27 of november I will be on tour with nohau.se and hold a embedded linux seminar. The entrance is free, but requires a registration, see the embedded linux seminar webpage. according to the following schedule:

• Göteborg 25/11, em 13-16. Plats: Centralhuset Konferens, lokal Orientkusten
• Stockholm 26/11, em 13-16. Plats: Kista Konferens, lokal Alfa
• Oslo 27/11, fm 8-12. Plats: Thon Hotel Vika Atrium, Munkedamsveien 45, Oslo

I will specifically do the Development using Embedded Linux track, which will be 50 minutes long. The presentation is still fairly crude and rough around the edges, but some of the bulletpoints I’m going to talk about is:

• When to use Linux/ When NOT to use Linux
• Pitfalls of open source vs closed source and vice versa
• Hardware vs Development time cost decisions
• Choosing the right hardware
• Choosing the right software
• Security.

I hope to see some of you at the seminars!

LG KC910 woes

As I’ve already said in earlier postings I relatively recently got myself a LG KC910 Renoir phone. The phone has been the cause of a lot of woes and problems so far and I’m afraid I must say I regret not getting a proper Android or iphone from the beginning. As it is, I’m stuck with this phone for another year+ until the subscription runs out – or get some other phone on my own tab.

The one really great part that I love about the KC910 so far is the absolutely wonderful camera, it has a 8MP camera that takes rather splendid snaps for a cellphone camera. Also, the video recording function, and video/music playback is rather nice.

For the really really bad part, well, look at the rest. Three of the main reasons I got this phone was for the ability to get some websurfing done “on the go”, and to get a good calendar that could be synced vs my work and private calendars, and finally I wanted to use the phone straight off for connecting to the internet instead of some dongle. Both these functions are completely botched in the KC910 as the, the webbrowser lacks a lot of functionality practically making most of the internet unusable on the phone, and the browser is also horribly slow, taking tens of seconds to “calculate/draw” complex webpages after its loaded. This problem should be easily solvable by downloading and installing another browser such as Opera you say, sadly, the install process hangs halfway through on the Renoir, and I have so far to find another browser that installs at all, which kind of brings a fourth point up (applications/third party market).

Second problem was the calendar, which is unfortunately totally borked. For basic calendar tasks it works fairly well, but very soon you will realize it doesn’t work very well. It lacks good support for reoccuring activities, the sync applications has a bad habit of screwing up timezones and moving activities/entries around based on timezones and at occasions it deleted entries entirely, and worst of all, LG has chosen to go all the way with their PC Suite set of applications, which essentially bars you from using anything but officially supported Microsoft Windows XP/Vista and Outlook. This goes for pretty much all functionality in the phone. Getting it to work with thunderbird, well, good luck. This is one of the reasons I had to work very hard getting Funambol setup at home to sync the phone and thunderbird with (I can not use a third party server as some calendar entries may in worst case contain sensitive data). The functionality of this setup worked out to be “semi-decent” to crap at best, and in the end I winded up reverting to just using my computer calendars.

My third problem has been internet connections. The only supported way of connecting to the internet is (again) via their PC Suite crapware. All other phone manufacturers support Bluetooth DUN or serial port connections without a problem, but not LG. It halfway supports DUN connections, I get a connection the first time that doesnt work, then get disconnected, and after that it takes 2+ days until I can connect again, and get disconnected again, exactly the same thing happened in Linux, Vista, XP, with/without PC Suite, over USB/Bluetooth, in accordance with 3’s and LG’s support etc. In the end, after 3-4 weeks of messing with this, I winded up getting a Huawei E180 HSPA USB stick, 30 seconds to unpack, plug in and click two buttons in Ubuntu and I was connected to the Internet.

My final annoyance is the lack of a third party aftermarket of some kind, I’m talking anything like the Iphone/Android app-store. A smart phone without a serious aftermarket support is pretty much as dumb as any old “dumb phone” ever was. LG has some eclipse based SDK’s available for download, but they only work for Windows, which has stopped me from trying them out at all so far, as I quit using windows completely half a year back. Anyways, the big problem is that there is no coordinated effort to make a decent app-store or app-store-a-like place to go for your applications for this phone. As always, the phone producers completely fails at understanding this part, in this day and age, you need to create officially endorsed systems of managing, getting and paying for applications. Whom the problem should fall upon is a hard question, but just dumping the problem on someone elses porch is not sufficient in this day and age, especially if you want to make phones that tries to emulate the success of “the big one”, you need to at least try and understand what made it big. It wasn’t a good camera or a nice looking (but slow) gui. It’s the ability to be adapted to my requirements, and to perform my required tasks. You can not predict it all (my needs are not your needs), hence adapt to standards (make shit plug and play with others), and make every effort you can to create a third party aftermarket that works (signed downloads, payments, etc etc).

As a verdict, if you’re looking for a smartphone/iphone/android, dont get an LG.

Inproductive productivity

For a while I’ve been stuck in slow speed mode again, not really doing great work, just being on average. It feels weird. Don’t really get much done, but I have on the other hand had a great deal of time to test some “new” technologies, well, new as in only 10-15 years old I guess . I’ll get back to that later. Also, I’ve begun a new contract at “a big company”.

This is my first time at a really giant hunk of a company, the biggest I’ve seen before was circa 500 people in all, and it moved slower (the beaurocracy) than this in all honesty. This BigCompany is quite interesting to me. Started off with almost 4 weeks of introductions, courses, and so forth. They have a dedicated TEAM of CM’s, that alone is just… wow . I’ve just been put up to speed and started working a little before this weekend so I might be a bit premature, but I like it so far. The weird part is, things happen, but not as I’m used to it. I’m used to 13+hour days and frentic coding/hacking to get things to happen, everyone here eschews away with their 8 hour days — only working overtime at very special occasions — yet slowly things get done, new functionality gets added and so forth.

Another thing that kind of amazes me — and worries me to some extent — is the kind of planning that is done. I’m used to small scale projects with workpackages or task based development, where no workpackage should ever take more than 4-5 days to implement. This place uses a workpackage development structure where each package takes up to 6-7 weeks for 6-10 people to implement. We’ll see how it works out — at least their “stand-up meetings” works .

All that being said, I had the time to write quite a bit of python which is a first, then I’ve looked into d-bus architecture which is also a first, and I also looked into Bluetooth and how to use it — some test applications running, fetching services and graphically displaying info about all units it finds etc. The complexity of Bluetooth is rather saddening imho, it’s a horrible protocolstack to work with in some senses, even though I was really impressed by how much python does for you.

I’ve been unused to the whole concept of python before this, and just a tad sceptical. Mainly because of all the problems with version matching that you always wind up having to do, to make anything work properly (try getting scons, trac and wamp, and some more tools working on a win32 machine some day for some fun).

Anyways, I always figured there has to be an upside, and there really is — python is hackfriendly . In less than 3-4 hours I went from writing my first simple helloworld to having a scratch written class based graphical (tkinter) interface implementing some very fundamental bluetooth commands. In my world, thats not bad at all .

I’ve also had time to learn a lot of new tools at work. I’ll comment on those some other day as I havent seen much other comments on some of them (some is imho very expensive crap with a nice wrappings, while some are completely awesome). Sidenote, I simply adore the systems we are working on 4 xeon with 4cores and 64 gig ram.

I’ll get back later .

Swedish postal services suck

Just a quick note, Swedish postal services suck. They are completely retarded to deal with. Since christmas, I’ve ordered 5 packages sent via “Posten”, 4 of those are lost/stolen.

I’ve spent over 8 hours on hold and in phonelines to posten trying to report these different losses etc. If you read this, and use Posten for package delivery, or you are a company sending packages to Sweden, please use another service. A list of the packages that has been lost so far:

1. An Acer Aspire One + extra ram, stolen over 1,5 months ago, still haven’t received payment for the laptop. According to my research, it could be up to 4-5 months before they get their thumbs out of their asses and pay money to me.
2. Electronics, it was delivered to package delivery, but i never got notified, and after 7 days it was returned — packages are supposed to be left for 14-30 days, and you’re supposed to get notified. Elfa was kind enough to repay me in full.
3. Cell phone, it was delivered in Alvesta since posten claims it’s my closest pickup point. For those not knowing, Alvesta is 300-400km away from me. Again, no notification. No payment done in advance.
4. Replacement cell phone, sent over a week ago. Still no notification, possibly gone?

As you can understand, I’m not happy with the services. The only package that I did receive? It was sent with inWarehouse to their own pickup point, 1,5km extra travel to pick it up, but sooo worth it.

Criminalized generation

So, IPRED is coming to this country, Swedens government is forcing it into effect. Even though there has been quite heavy resistance and a lot of people don’t like it. I agree. It’s a complete nutjob of a law. Before moving on, let me state that I am here discussing the Swedish implementation of the law. This is even further going than the original EU directive COM(2006)0168. The best part is, they just “softened it”. Ie, it was even worse from the beginning.

As has already been said by thousands of others, but it can’t be said enough times. The law moves the burden of the police work from the (almost) objective police to the absolutely partial owners themself. Let’s consider this: We have for centuries had a police force because they are objective. They deal with criminals and they should hopefully not take sides for either part in a case, it’s left to the court to do this.

With IPRED, the entire burden of investigating a crime is moved to the plaintiff. The plaintiff (in this case, the intellectual property owner) or someone working for the plaintiff, finds someone downloading a piece that they “own”. They then move on to demanding the name and contact information of that person from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) of the Internet address of that specific downloader. Current law does not tell the ISP that it has to comply with the demand. IPRED does. The plaintiff can now move on to the next step below.

The plaintiff are then free to send monetary demands to the “defender”, who will find out about the problem with the monetary demand. The monetary demand is formed as “pay us money or we draw you in front of a court and you will loose a lot more”. Basically, you will have a gigantic mass of people just paying out of freight “who knows, maybe my kids/spouse/visitor did download that song on my computer?”. Or how about framing someone you don’t like, it’s not gonna be hard, trust me. Don’t like your neighbour, go download a free program and hack him, then set up a bittorrent client to keep downloading/uploading from their computer.

Now, this is the basic argument people have against this new law. Unfortunately, it has been cobbled together by retards and rather IQ-free people and been compromised by to such a degree that it’s no longer coherent. One of the sideeffects of this law is that it will become illegal to buy an application or download a open source application and then run on your own computer. The same plaintiff above could sue every single owner of a Microsoft Windows Vista license (for example) if they can find a instance where Vista steps on their patent.

This comes to mind, when one reads IPRED:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

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