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Author: hfreyther

Fun reading landline telephony specs

Fun reading landline telephony specs

For various reasons I have started reading the GSM 08.0x chapter. It is mostly about communication between a Base Station System (BSS) and a Mobile Switching Center (MSC). The protocol used is actually based on the SCCP protocol from landline telephony networks (SS #7). The most funny part is the way these specs are written. Most sentences in GSM 08.06 end in “this is of national concern”, or in the Q.71x specification you see classes of reserved fields. One for…

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The WebKit mailinglists

The WebKit mailinglists

In the beginning there was webkit-dev but we were overwhelmed by the feedback we got. Last week Maciej announced how to use the new lists. webkit-dev should be used for the development of WebCore/JavaScriptCore itself. webkit-help should be used for questions on how to use WebKit API in applications, porting to new platforms, building it… webkit-jobs is there to not force one to send job posts to every single commiter but to only one place.

Performance musings

Performance musings

Like many others I enjoy being in Las Palmas at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. It is great to see new and old friends, put faces to IRC nicknames… While sitting in talks I started to feel the performance itch. What code is the moc actually generating, how fast is it… Luckily Qt Software released their internal tests and you will find some benchmarks in the tests/benchmark directory. Looking at QMetaObject and generated code When using QObject::connect currently the following…

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Joel on office space

Joel on office space

I encourage to read this article on how to design a office space for software teams (or any kind of engineer). There is scientific evidence showing the correlation between a good office space and productivity and his main points are: Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation. Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor. We need to…

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Taking over memprof

Taking over memprof

Where did all my memory go? Who is allocating it, how much is being allocated? From where were theses QImages allocated? valgrind provides an accurate leak checker, but for a running application you might want to know about allocations and browse through them and don’t take the performance hit of valgrind (e.g with massif). There is an easy way to answer these questions, use memprof. memprof used to be a GNOME application, it was unmaintained, the website was gone from…

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First ever Gtk+ patch

First ever Gtk+ patch

During my work on Epiphany I was debugging a problem with the “woohoo” bar. It took me not less than three days to understand the issue, write a test case, and a patch and put everything in this bug. Matthias Clasen was kind enough to review and commit the patch and it can be found here. Sadly the –author tag of git was not used and the commit does not carry my name, so ohloh will not list my contribution…

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Bitbake parser performance

Bitbake parser performance

There is one thing in OE that is pretty time consuming. If you try to get some variables right that influence the entire system (SRCREV, DISTRO, MACHINE…) you will find yourself running bitbake over and over again and each run will take several minutes of your time. There are two solutions to this problem and both are very good. Have less data. If you have less data, less data need to be parsed. Apparently poky is doing that with their…

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MontaVista using Bitbake for MontaVista Linux version 6

MontaVista using Bitbake for MontaVista Linux version 6

In case people didn’t notice a small information. According to this video MontaVista has looked into OpenEmbedded and the bitbake task executor. Apparently they liked the idea of cooking a customized rootfs by combining a set of recipes and have adopted this strategy and the tools. They have added extra value by having an easy to use installer, a source mirror and pre-built packages to speed up the engineer. It is not clear how much and if they have used…

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Amused by ofono.foo

Amused by ofono.foo

I’m seriously amused by the recent announcement, I had to go through the irc log and laugh badly. There is one joke our lecturer made in the software engineering class and I would have never assumed that people in the real world would say something like this… oh well… today they did. It made my day.So what uneducated people like to put into a product requirement is a sentence like “The software should be easy to use.”. And you should…

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