I enjoy going to conferences. When I was younger, I really loathed travelling. Now that I am much more open minded, I’m having fun seeing other towns and countries and meeting people from all over the planet.
Currently I’m looking forward to attending two important conferences next month:
Nearby… since I need to work during travelling, I have just ordered a Lenovo Thinkpad X60s – crossing fingers that it will arrive before the first conference is due.
Today I have submitted my Ph.D. thesis “Component-based adaptive Middleware for mobile distributed systems” to the examination office!
My thesis shows how the encapsulation of distributed systems middleware functionality into components can lead to an adaptive middleware system that – by the means of a reflective architecture – features dynamic adaptation to changing application requirements and to changing environmental conditions. Using the developed µMiddle architecture, you can add and modify
and more directly within a running middleware system using a highly abstracted graph-based Meta-Object-Protocol that guarantees safe and consistent changes. This kind of capability is of increasing importance for next generation mobile distributed systems and leads to more flexible middleware and application architectures. Subject to the agreement of the board, I will get an appointment for the public defense of my thesis – hopefully not later than December this year. I want to acknowledge all of you who supported and believed in me in the past 5 years – thanks!
NDAs are pretty common in freelance work projects. The acronym NDA stands for “Non Disclosure Agreement”, which basically means that you are not allowed to talk about anything related to clients, vendors, hardware or software specifications, market strategics, etc.
While I understand (and of course respect) the origins and purposes of NDAs, sometimes they’re troublesome anyway. For instance, I am working on a really really cool project that is eventually going to be Open Source unavailable and have an important impact there, because… I would love to tell you more, but I’m not allowed to :)
This is a difference between academics and businesses I will have to live with.
Since May 2006 I’m no longer employed at the Frankfurt University (they have limited 5-year contracts for offspring researchers) and getting time to proceed with my doctoral thesis got much harder. I had to find calm periods between starting my freelancer career unavailable and a lot of everyday life things that were to handle.
Shortly before my one-week vacation on Ibiza, I handed a release candidate out to my doctoral adviser and – despite a lot of short comments which I need to take into account for the final version – I got a fairly well review. In particular this means, that as soon as I found a 2nd referee for the thesis, I will be able to submit it. If all goes well it will happen in September 2006.
Polishing the dissertation makes more fun, now that I can see the end of the matter.
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 unavailable, 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 unavailable. 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 unavailable but defeated Portugal unavailable. 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 unavailable 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 unavailable – 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 unavailable in the semi final – the Ukraine unavailable 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 unavailable with 2:0 in a marvellous game – the best first half time I’ve seen from Germany in the last two years.
Argentina unavailable vs. Mexico unavailable 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 unavailable vs. Côte d’Ivoire unavailable – 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 unavailable or planet.maemo.org unavailable – 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.