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Author: hfreyther

Programming for Android

Programming for Android

In previous lifes I have done development for Windows Mobile, the iPhone and now it is time to use Android. In general I had a negative bias towards Android because of the fact that they create an island on an island and have shown poor interaction with many upstream projects. The Poor The Android SDK GUI is really really poor, it is worse than my Opie SDK attempts I did within a couple of days. It is really schocking how…

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Recipe for desaster

Recipe for desaster

I really hate closed source systems, every time I have to deal with it, it turns out to be a waste of time dealing with it. Right now I’m dealing with a closed source BSS (I wish I could call names), I can make it fail by sending a very simple message, a message that is crucial for everything (SMS, Call) to terminate on the MS. Of course an expensive support contract was signed but apparently it does not buy…

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Thoughts on Fedora 12 and 13

Thoughts on Fedora 12 and 13

I was a bit unhappy with the performance of Ubuntu Karmic and Ubuntu Lucid (mostly the start scripts to handling filesystem errors at all…) and decided it is time to try a RPM based Distribution again. I really don’t like to wait for a download of a DVD and then to upgrade the whole system with new software after the installation. Coming from Debian I totally love the slick network installer. This means I have to install my RPM based…

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Got a new MSI X340 Laptop

Got a new MSI X340 Laptop

After the break down of my beloved Macbook I decided it is time for a new notebook. So I went out to the various markets and searched around. I was in search for something slim but still powerful. So it could be a Macbook AIR? Looking at the specs revealed it contains NVIDIA GFX, so that is a no go. Then I saw a Sony X-Series… very very slim… then my math failed and i thought it is cheap… well…

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GSM RACH Bursts and Paging Requests

GSM RACH Bursts and Paging Requests

Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying OpenBSC on a real network and the result was desaster, but honestly what else to expect when trying it the first time. It is not that OpenBSC was crashing, leaking memory, or not recovering from failure it is just the load of the network was differrent than what I assumed and that leads to problems. What happens is one is seeing a lot of location updating requests, which will load the SDCCH but…

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Traveling woes..

Traveling woes..

I’m just back to the flat. On this trip (in order) my luggage didn’t arrive witht the same airplane, my cellphone broke during the flight (the headset speaker is dead), my laptop backlight broke and my luggage didn’t arrive at the final destination… So after doing a backup of the data and removing the disk I will bring my laptop to an Apple dealer, and for the weekend I try to get my phone replaced… any my luggage should be…

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Hacking on OpenBSC

Hacking on OpenBSC

I was invited to visit the On-Waves (they have a shiny new website) office in Paris this week and I was quite busy hacking away on the OpenBSC codebase. On-Waves allows me to play a bit with their MSC and learn more about GSM and in exchange OpenBSC gains a more and more complete and stable GSM A-Interface. When developing code for OpenBSC we are mostly sitting very close to the BTS, only have one active subscriber, test one thing,…

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GSM Fail…

GSM Fail…

Hi, okay… I have a simple task… dial some numbers, drop some SMS. Right now I’m using a whacky mix of shell and chat script to do it but it is not as nice and reliable as it should be. So I was trying ofono and fso to use my serial device to do some calls for me… Or at least I tried to. FSO was relatively easy to install on Debian, having a nice readme, picking a GSM driver……

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Using oeaudit.py

Using oeaudit.py

In the last days I have cleaned up my OE Audit tool and it should be usable by everyone now. The tool requires two inputs, one is the list of packages to be build by OE for the given configuration (distro, machine) and the other is the FreeBSD auditfile. This FreeBSD auditfile can be automatically downloaded. Without much more overhad, here we go. $ bitbake -s > available$ export PYTHONPATH=/place/bitbake/lib$ /OE/contrib/oeaudit/oe_audit.py -fThis will fetch the auditfile from the FreeBSD project…

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Dealing with security issues in the context of OpenEmbedded

Dealing with security issues in the context of OpenEmbedded

One thing that has bothered me while being at Openmoko is the lack of Security Response by the OpenEmbedded Crew. In one way a security issue is just like any other bug and distros don’t upgrade each package for each bug fixed upstream but it is getting worse when the security issues exists in the default installation, in a daemon listening to network traffic and such with ready to get exploits on the network. I think it is really unethically…

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