Older blog entries for Marcus (starting at number 105)

I spent quite some time over the weekend on getting PTP/IP to work... Some restructuring of code, some writing and I now can list files over the air. Then the battery was empty and I noticed that I forgot my charger at home. Well.

Lots of MTP and PTP fixes in libgphoto2 done nevertheless. There are still some hickups in the MTP devices, regarding the 512 byte border problem, filenames longer than 64 characters and some more. But most of the pressing issues have been fixed.

Check out the new and improved gphoto2 --summary for PTP devices. It now shows:

• Storage information (internal and card memory)
• PTP dynamic abilities (like if the camera can capture or not, if it can delete files, etc.)
• Capture / Play formats
• Available Object Properties for MTP.

On t he SUSE side I am currently trying to get all the correct permission handling into our hal / resmgr / libgphoto2 setup. This is difficult, because the usb device abstractions are not really fitting the unix device model (1 device - 1 node), but you have interfaces, now raw devices et.al.

Mood: Tired.

One of those days (or better weeks) where I think whether I shouldn't be working somewhere else.

Spent quite some time on the weekend enhancing the PTP driver. It has better --summary output now, MTP devices work way better, and a user supplied a patch that adds progress support for downloads and uploads.

Next plans: PTP/IP enablement, and more MTP hacks/fixes.

Miguel writes about the speed of Mono, citing the ease of P/Invoke (calling native C libraries from C# managed code via bindings) and its use for speedup as advantage.

In my opinion this loses the advantage of the managed code platform, since from a security standpoint its a nightmare.

Security problems are not in the nice and fancy GUI logic, but happen in lower level routines, like for instance graphic rendering. So programming in C# to be more secure ... and then calling native libs... Does not make it secure.

And rapid prototyping? Why not use a XML based approach like glade or QT Designer does and just write the wrapper calls? *sigh*

Spent Christmas quite relaxing at my parents. Church visit on christmas eve, in the new churchbuilding (that obsoleted a 60 year old church barrack ... which admittedly had more flair). Lots of christmas "Stollen", the traditional goose on the 25th and rabbit on the 26th. Lots of family in between.

Hacking only done on the train traveling between Nürnberg and there. More done in the last days back here.

I found a fast directory retrieval mechanism on the Nikon P2. A camera with 100 files now starts up in 1.5 seconds, not in 12 seconds. No longer O(n), but more O(log n). Need to do this for the Canons too.

Some investigations on the Kodak CX6230. I now have a handle on all the undocumented commands, but so far the only funny thing is that I found out how to display text on the TFT of the camera. Not very useful.

All in all a lot of hacking done, more to come next week.

A week full of work, a weekend of not doing much computer stuff, but more of the non computer one, and now a new week full of work.

Nuernberg has its yearly "Christkindlesmarkt". Even though it is visited by mostly tourists, the locals take a look at it too, drinking the mulled wine and so on :) I just have to be there once a year at least. In this regard, I am trying this year to invite the christmas spirit I remember from my childhood. SO I bought an "Adventskranz" with candles, and some christmas lights for the window. However I am failing to capture it... *sigh*

At work ... lots of kernel update shepherding currently. And I am cursing php4 and repeated test failures.

Went out to indian restaurant tonight with the documentation team and visitors from Dublin (including Antje), who usually writes funnier blog entries than I do.

Oh ... and Amazon finally shipped the P2. :)

Just took the time to try out banshee.

Installing it in SUSE Linux 10.0 with KDE desktop was challenging since it was apparently missing a dependency, but it was not clear which. (AudioCdPlayerEngine not found). I tried some things, but in the end installed the 300MB of GNOME Selection.

It is disappointing in regards to features when one compares it to amarok.

Amarok has (what I did not see in banshee):

• Multiple views of the collection. (filesystem, album view
• Last played songs, newest songs, favorite songs views.
• view of varying playlists
• premade playlist of good webradios
• webradio (mp3 streaming, podcast)
• playlist import from bmp and xmms.
• Look up album cover on amazon.
• Lyrics download.
• Wikipedia references in embedded pages for band and titles.
• visualization plugins using libvisual.
• duplicate detection

All in all ... banshee is a year behind amarok.

This is what I did two weekends ago.... Presenting my teams work to the local Internet community called "Kommunikationsnetz Franken e.V." (dialin provider, content hoster, and meeting place for Internet freaks) where I am a member of. It was quite well received to look into the work of the local Linux distributor.

My slides are available as PDF (in german).

Last weekend I was at home with my parents, helping to work in my grandmothers part of the forest where we want to plant broad-leafed trees (inmidst of the firs).

I also whipped up the first version of the Security Team page on opensuse.org.

Mildly curious.... As security team we occasionaly get request to "tighten" security of the system.

One of those is to change the default umask of the home directory to 077 (readable only for the user).

When replying back that Opensource is about sharing of information we usually get back wild eyed stares from americans.

I think this shows some difference between european and american company culture:

• Europeans assume everything is forbidden (especially looking at other peoples stuff) except when expliclity allowed.
• Americans assume everything is allowed except when explicitly forbidden.

A strange mindset for me as a european.

Also, what is the good thing of creating every user with its own group? And why should it have something to do with security?

I would like to be in Brisbane now. :(
I remember fondly my vacation there and the warm climate. Compared to cold rainy november here in Germany this would be like paradise. *sigh*

Wine 0.9.2 is out, uploaded SUSE RPMs until late night yesterday.

I have nothing useful or cheering up to add.

One week of work past and I only now caught up with processing E-Mail and fiscal year turnover caused distractions.

Sorry to see lots of Novell colleagues go :(

Good to see the earlier KDE vs GNOME decision being revised in favor of our customers who continue to get the choice.

Wine 0.9.1 has arrived just 2 weeks after 0.9! I got 10 small bugfix patches in (vacation pays off ;)

Not much security updates done this week, hopefully more next week.