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Tag: OpenMoko

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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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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How to kill productivity…

How to kill productivity…

So I’m still in Taipei and my productivity on the 9th floor is not as good as I would like it to have it… So we mostly have an empty 8th floor, with silence, no artificial light, and very good air… I assumed I could just walk down, sit in one of the empty (conference) rooms and be productive… it worked… until.. oh well… there was an urgent meeting, suprisingly in the room I was sitting on… and suprisingly the…

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Long overdue…

Long overdue…

A long overdue blog post… I’m currently in Taipei… canceled my original flight back to Germany, instead I will go to Hong Kong and then probably back to Taipei. So if you are in this area and would like to talk about WebKit, Linux, KDE, OpenBSC, OpenEmbedded… drop me a mail.

25C3 is over

25C3 is over

After Christmas I returned to Berlin to be at the BCC for the 25th C3 in time. I was honored to talk to John Gilmore and the German Openmoko population was also present and we enjoyed talking, reading and hacking away on GSM. From the many things I planned to do I have only finished some but as usual I will work on these round robin… But it is time to leave the black hole and return to work.