Older blog entries for Marcus (starting at number 77)

Carpal tunnel syndrom gone now, after 1.5 weeks of not touching keyboards. Spent most of the time relaxing and reading Cryptomonicon again, and Robert Asprin.

As for comments on some planetsuse.org posts, Seb:

• openSUSE should be seen as "opening SUSE developement to the community" which is probably the best fitting way to describe it.
• package management: You consider this easy to change, but it is not. Changing the package management is a very big effort.
  However you might be enlightened to hear that we will be supporting YUM repositories.
• the ilove rnotify kernel is no longer necessary, all is in mainline now and will be in 10.0.
• As for your suggestions on the development model, just hold your breath.
• SuSE is SUSE is suse is SUSE is SuSE....

My team has been busy and released kernel updates today ... so go and run the online update! :)

Scotty dying is kinda sad... but well, we all grow old and he was pretty old during the movies already.
Speaking of the movies, Mueller (german drugstore chain) had several startrek movies at 5 euro a piece, so I bought ST 2, 3 and 5. Watched ST 2 (Wrath of Khan) ... still not the full speed of the later movies, but starting too. And plotholes you could fly a romulean warbird through.

Did not doo much hacking over the weekend, just some bits of 16bit OLE. 16 bit compound storage handling is pretty broken and either needs to be fixed or thrown away.

Went to visit the Nuernberg Dungeons. A very large underground area of caves built into the sandstone. Several hundred years used for necessary cool temperatures for brewing beer, it was used for bombshelter during 2nd worldwar. Now the caves are mostly unused except for showing tourists round.
Am I the only one thinking 'server rooms'? :)

Long week now over.

Cleared up a bit of the HAL confusion. Apparently all is work in progress, but at least I now do it like Fedora does, so perhaps we can establish a semi standard.

Not much security updates released this week due to internal deadlock caused by releases of some important service packs to our main maintained product.

Worked on a 16bit WINE application and found several regressions and lacking features. Sent patches and caused Alexandre to fix stuff ;)

Hands still hurting to some degree.

Things I hated today... Can't remember.

Bought a USB keyboard. Nice, shiny and black.

At work ... after talking to some HAL knowledgeable guys I found out I need to change my SUSE libgphoto2 package to use HAL better.

Then I found out that HAL has this evil libgphoto2 usermap to FDI converter. WTF? Those guys never even said a single word to the gphoto developers that they need the map in this format, they just went and wrote a script? Another example of NIH syndrome... :/

So I now just added a FDI map output to print-usb-usermap, the program we have for dumping such maps and have it work the canonical and correct way.

Things i hated today: hal.

Monday morning, promising to be very hot again.

My hands hurt, likely originating from either overusing my Laptop keyboard in the last months and/or the PowerMac G5 keyboard. This is the first time in my long life as programmer so I am a bit terrified. I will get a USB keyboard for the laptop at least and see if it will help.

Did not get sunburned on the weekend, did not do much opensource wise.

Kernel updates, mozilla updates will make this week again one to remember. badly.

Todays hate: Acrobat Reader version upgrades.

Released a Acrobat Reader Upgrade... waiting for the next buffer overflow.
Our Mozilla maintainer in some frustration of the huge mass of firefoxes and mozillas he has to update in the next days.

In my spare time...
I bought a new camera from eBay and ported the standalone program to libgphoto2. After some cleanup (shrinking the original .c file down to 700 lines) I then put the windows driver into the disassembler ... and behold, the camera can not just download and delete pictures, but also remote controlled capture and other wild things. So more fun to have next weekend.

Long time no write.

I am security teamlead for quite some time now. Does this mean visionary leader? No... these are the other guys.
No, my day job is fixing all the security holes in others peoples software and getting these fixes out to the customer. And to some degree avoiding these updates "pro actively" as the american slang goes.

Things I started to hate:

• Acrobat Reader. Binary dreck with x known and xxx unknown buffer overflows and other security problems. Almost every one of them a potential worm vector.
  No source code to audit.
• Real Player. Binary dreck with x known and xxx unknown buffer overflows and other security problems. Almost every one of them a potential worm vector, just web based instead of e-mail based.
  No source code to audit.
• Mozilla. Huge piece of s...oftware designed with flashiness in mind but not with security. While not much overflows, a lot of design flaws exposing problems.
  Monthly security updates.
• OpenOffice_org ... just like Mozilla, but much much larger.

*sigh*
And then we get new interacting programs via dbus and the like... more interesting things to come.

And the whole heap of whole Novell Sourcecode to be opensourced ... I am full a fear.

I want to be a simple developer again ... sometimes.

Its way too hot.

We have like 33 degrees celsius in germany now, which turns the brain to mush and reduces motivation to a minimum. Sadly I still have to work, puzzle out LSB failures and problems and similar.

Spent some time looking at enhancing the agfa cl20 driver in gphoto2. The CL20 produces JPEGs with EXIF data, however this EXIF data is broken. So I will regenerate the EXIF data using libexif from the driver and basically just reuse the data already inside the old data, including the thumbnail. Bit of a pointless exercise, I have to admit. But the code will be cleaner afterwards.

Hi!

Long time no see, dear diary.

Well, a lot of things happened during the last year.
I was laid off from Caldera during the outsourcing of the UnitedLinux development effort towards SuSE. So not really laid off, but migrated to some degree.

At SuSE I am doing a bit of packaging work (gPhoto and WINE related things), but mostly I am associated with the PowerPC architecture maintenance team.
The PowerPC team does not do work for little Macs, G4s, iBooks or similar, but for IBM iSeries and pSeries machines. So we unfortunately do not do colorful products, but a part of the Business product SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and its maintenance.
I am responsible for the toolchain (gcc, binutils...) and glibc. That does not mean I hack things in there, but that I get people to fix the bugs and fix the packages.
However I can now read PowerPC assembler and reduce any gcc bug to small testcases.

As for OpenSource work, I am doing more work in the region of gPhoto now. For instance I now own a small number of digital cameras. Not all of them have drivers written by me, not all of them work yet.

Not much WINE work in the last year. I don't have the time anymore, even though I would like to do more.

Long time no write.

My worklife has changed completely. Or it does not. Choose one.
Basically Caldera is closing his Erlangen Office and laying off its Linux Distribution Development Team. You would not really know that from this otherwise inconspicious press release.
My first job ever. It held 3 years, so its at least something good.

But why no changes? Well, there is this other Linux company, just 1 hour bus drive away. Where I will be starting to work first of July. So I will be still be working in the Linux Distribution Business. :) I know a lot of people there (from roleplaying, studying and Linux fairs) so it won't be that hard a change.

On the WINE side, we had the first WINE conference, end of March in San Diego. Check this the WWN issue for more details and pictures, and this link for seeing the talks (including mine).

Next week I will be holding a WINE lecture (4 times) for GFU (german link). For software development decision people. I will have to go with a suit. Lets hope I can skip at least the tie.

Real Life continues. Did I mention I moved to a 3 times as large flat? With 2 full rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, et.al.. 56 square meter, still in walking distance from the town. I very much like it.