I never did any serious Linux kernel work until now. I was busy enough with all my open source userland activities and there were already enough skilled people working on kernel things for the devices I own. After seeing how the OpenEZX project is progressing, I decided to buy a Motorola A780 and a Motorola E680 and to contribute to help getting this exciting project forward.
While Harald Welte, the project leader and main developer, is currently concentrating on getting the AP (Application Processor, responsible for everything non-GSM) and BP (Baseband Processor, responsible for the GSM stuff) interaction done, I thought I could help a bit with OpenEmbedded integration and “non-critical” stuff like drivers.
As expected, OpenEmbedded integration was a breeze -- we can now build Opie, GPE, and Enlightenment images for the phones and can boot them via SD or NFS-over-USB. Doing kernel work was much more tough for me -- although I have been doing low level programming in the old COMMODORE C64 and AMIGA days, doing sensible things with the Linux kernel has a steep learning curve. Anyway, once you get the hang of it, it's actually fun and a nice change from doing userland stuff.
My first results are available through the OpenEmbedded repository. I did kernel drivers for
Next things for me will be to find out why touchscreen and MMC are not quite behaving on the E680. After that I'm planning to take a shoot at camera drivers.
The World Cup is over. We lost the semi final against Italia but defeated Portugal. The 3rd place is a major achievement considering the state of the german team when Jürgen Klinsmann took over. He did not just formed a team that is among the four best teams worldwide -- much more important he showed the way to go for our future. And I'm sure this team definitly has a great future.
Apart from this "final of hearts", Italia won the cup over France in the "real" final in penalty shooting. Congratulations, however the french team dominated the game for a good part, so I'm a bit sad about that result.
I didn't experience any other World Cup so intense -- thanks to Kaiser Franz for his part in bringing it to Germany. Thanks to all teams, the fans and the supporters that made most of the past four weeks a giant party. Now back to everyday life... until the European Championship in 2008!
I have a hard time believing it, but it looks like we made it past Argentina -- 5:3 (penalty shooting). It was a really tough and hard-fought game and for more than 30 minutes I really thought we were out... until Klose made his most important goal in this tournament.
There is nothing to be said about the penalty shooting, it's a german tradition and we remain unbeaten... seriously though, Lehmann was great! My personal match winner though was David Odonkor -- his exchange turned the game. He brought the spirit and the will to catch up. Yes!
For us, it's going to be Italia in the semi final -- the Ukraine played a good 2nd half, but shortly before they could catch up to 1:1, the Italians made their 2nd goal and this more or less broke their will. Bummer.
Germany defeated Sweden with 2:0 in a marvellous game -- the best first half time I've seen from Germany in the last two years.
Argentina vs. Mexico was a pretty hot game as well -- Mexico played their best 90 minutes in this tournament, but in the end couldn't stand the Argentina team. The 2:1 is justified and I'm in pleasent anticipation of Germany vs. Argentina in the quarter final.
Although I should really be working on my Ph.D. thesis, I keep finding myself in front of the TV -- watching a lot of soccer games these days. With us having won against Poland, our way to the round of sixteen is free -- although it's not sure which team our next opponent will be.
The mood here in Frankfurt am Main is just great -- lots of cool people having fun together watching the games. It's much more calm than I would have expected.
My personal favorite was Argentina vs. Côte d'Ivoire -- although Argentina did win 2:1, 1:2 or at the least 2:2 would have reflected more of my impression of these two teams.
Finally, in coincidence with my new site VanilleMedia, I started a new blog. It's not that I was unsatisfied with my last handcoded one, but these days it looks like there is a tendency to use all those nice planet sites -- i.e. planet.linuxtogo.org or planet.maemo.org -- syndicating blogs from different places, which needs a standardized XML format. I really didn't want to reinvent the wheel here, so after evaluating a lot of content management systems and blog packages, I settled on using wordpress for the complete site.
This also marks the start of me blogging in english -- I guess blogging in german wouldn't be all that useful for most of those planet sites.
Ein Tag zur Freude! Die beiden Open Source Projekte, denen ich in den vergangenen drei Jahren sehr viel Zeit gewidmet habe, sind auf Platz 1 und Platz 2 des ersten TuxMobil GNU/Linux Award 2005 gelandet. OpenZaurus ist komplett offene alternative Linux-Distribution für die Sharp Zaurus PDA-Familie, OpenEmbedded ist ein Metadatensatz und eine Entwicklungsumgebung für die Konstruktion von Linux-Distributionen.
Sowohl OpenZaurus als auch OpenEmbedded sind absolut konkurrenzfähige Softwarepakete, die so manches mehr leisten als alle verfügbaren kommerziellen Alternativen - und so langsam scheint die „Welt“ davon Notiz zu nehmen. Jetzt müssten wir nur noch ein wenig Venture Capital für die Weiterentwicklung rekrutieren können und dann wäre ich wirklich glücklich.
Nach einiger (mir ewig erscheinender) Verzögerung durch die Firma TomTom ist endlich das Standalone Navigationsgerät TomTomGo 500 bei mir erschienen. Seitdem ich meinen 3er ohne Navi gekauft habe, war ich sehr lange am hadern, ob ich das original BMW Navigationssystem nachrüsten (lassen) sollte oder doch auf ein externes System zurückgreifen soll. Aus Kostengründen habe ich mich dann doch für die TomTomGo Lösung entschieden - optisch ist sie zwar nur halb so schön wie das BMW Original, angesichts 1/5 des Preises kann ich darüber aber gut hinwegsehen :)
Die Software an sich funktioniert wie erwartet sehr intuitiv und auf das wesentliche reduziert - prima! Da die neuen TomTomGo auch als Freisprecheinrichtung für Bluetooth-fähige Handys fungieren können gibt es sogar einen echten Mehrwert gegenüber der BMW-Lösung - die natürlich noch mal einen saftigen Aufpreis gekostet hätte.
„Die seit einiger Zeit monatlich stattfindende Jugendgottesdienstreihe der Dreikönigsgemeinde erfreut sich steigender Beliebtheit. Grund ist neben der ausgezeichneten musikalischen Untermalung von Jacob Hellwig und Michael Lauer die Spiel- und Glaubensfreude des Juniorteams, die verkörpern, dass Kirche nicht langweilig oder etwa uncool sein muss. Hier macht Gottesdienst Spass!“
War beim jährlich stattfindenden LinuxTag in Karlruhe und habe ein paar nette Leute vom z-portal getroffen sowie einen Kollegen vom Opie Projekt.