Category Archives: LUUSA

BVG stellt Grundrecht auf Online-Vertraulichkeit fest

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Es noch Hoffnung in Deutschland: Das Bundesverfassungsgericht. Hier macht man sich offensichtlich wirklich differenzierte Gedanken und schmettert die sogenannte Online-Durchsuchung ab. Zum Beispiel im Falle des entsprechenden Gesetzes in NRW, das heute vom BVG kassiert wurde:

Die NRW-Vorschrift, die dem Landes-Verfassungsschutz allgemein den “heimlichen Zugriff auf informationstechnische Systeme” erlaubte, verstoße auch gegen das Gebot der Verhältnismäßigkeit. (tagesschau.de)

Deswegen stellten die Richter jetzt ein Grundrecht auf Gewährleistung der Vertraulichkeit und Integrität informationstechnischer Systeme fest. Online-Durchsuchen sind zwar nicht unmöglich, aber die Hürden werden sehr, sehr hoch angelegt. Nun hoffen wir, dass diese eindeutige Entscheidung nicht wieder durch die Üblichen Verdächtigen systematisch untergraben wird.

(via lawblog)

Report: Release-Party in Bonn

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Cocktail “KDE 4.0 Blue Lagoon”

Ingredients:

2cl Vodka
1-2cl Blue Curacao
2cl Cream
10cl Pinapple Juice
4cl Cream of Coconut
1-2 Ice Cubes

Howto:

Shake well. Decorate glass with a an orance slice. Before slicing the orange, cut and peel vertical stripes off the orange. This creates a nice gear look. Serve with a black straw.

For the non-alcoholic version, use blue curacao sirup and more juice instead of blue curacao and vodka. If you try a bit, you can create a color gradient with the coconut cream, which creates the lagoon effect.

To sum it up: it was an awesome party. We had a decently filled location, which surprised me because this particular party was announced less than one week in advance.

Starting at about 19:00 o’clock local time we saw a great show: Aaron giving an awesome keynote, Benjamin presenting KDE 4.0 apps on the Mac and Holger showing off KDE 4.0 on Windows in the typical understatement way of people from northern Germany :-). Thanks to Google for recording, Franz for organizing the streaming, and Dirk for getting a server capable of actually delivering the stream.


Keynote from the Bonn perspective: Aaaron rocking the show

To me that keynote (which we will hopefully soon be seeing on Youtube), was en par with the ones the Steve’s of this IT world deliver, just a lot warmer and more honest. Yet Aaron managed to present the incredible achievement that is KDE 4.0 in an amazing way.

After the keynote finished, the attendees had time to test KDE 4.0 and discuss various issues. As a special plus for those attending our party, we offered a special “KDE 4.0 Blue Lagoon Cocktail”, which was very well received. (recipe on the right, sorry for the crappy pic). Thanks go to Peter for organizing beer, Natascha for doing an excellent job as a bar tender, the Netzladen for hosting and to AurISP and PBR Systems for providing a projector for everyone to follow the keynote.

Oh, and Qt is (also) GPLv3 now. Yay!

KDE 4.0 Release Party in Bonn

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After Harri started the series of announcements for locations of the KDE 4.0 release party, it’s now up to me:
We’ll have a party on Friday, January 18st, 19 hours. We are partying at the premises of the Bonner Netzladen e.V., a very renown hacker space. We plan to have a live stream from Mountain View and will provide guests with Club Mate, Kölsch and a special surprise drink! Of course, we’ll bring a KDE 4.0 test setup for everyone to play around with.

So if you are from the Cologne/Bonn area (or just closer to Bonn than to any other location, or just like us best…), come and join us. To allow for better planning, please add yourself to the respective Wiki page.

2007 & New Years Resolutions

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Due to some rather strange pains in my back (probably muscle-related, I hope the doc will find out tomorrow), I am somewhat chained to my bed. With my action radius being limited significantly, I am doing what seems popular: I decided to give an update about my personal situation. To sum up 2007, it was a fairly nice but also stressful year, with a lot of changes in my private life, both positive and rather sad (which don’t belong here, drop me a mail if you care).

It also saw the release of the english, slightly updated version of my book on Qt 4 and held an awesome study-related internship at the coolest toolkit-vendor ever. I hope this explains why I remained so silent on the blog and (even worse) on the KDE commit list. I kept active in the background however, keeping TechBase running along with Dominik and setting up other MediaWiki-based websites for KDE.

As for 2008, there is a lot of things I want to do. I won’t bother you with all of them, just the very basic ones:

  • Finish studies (finally :))
  • Get more involved in KDE development again
  • Enjoy real-life even more than last year*

So, to all my friends, readers and KDE-enthusiasts i wish

A happy new 2008!

*(well actually, that looks like bad resolution at first sight, since 1 and 2 conflict with 3, but after all it’s all about the right balance, right?)

Qtopia Phone Edition on OpenMoko

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When the news about Qtopia on the OpenMoko made its round in the news, I was eager to find out how it would be, especially because the only platform I had seen it on was the Greenphone. Thankfully my friend Lars lent me his Neo 1973 to help me getting an impression. It still had one of the first OpenMoko Firmware images installed and couldn’t even do GSM. So I took it home and flashed it with the binary release from Qtopia.net. I booted it up and… wow, it asked for my PIN, logged into the network and I had GSM working. So after two days of using it, here is a list of cool stuff:

  • It’s astonishingly usable without a stylus already (scrolling, dialing, etc), with exception of the querty keyboard (must-have #1)
  • The adoption to keyboardless handling is very good, e.g. games that need one have been removed, applications got adjusted (must-have #2)
  • Telephony just worked (not that obvious these days)
  • The graphics look really polished
  • and of course: the lock/unlock mechanism is really cool and a funny idea

So what did I notice? (Please bear in mind that this is the first public release of the OpenMoko-based firmware, so this is something that can be fixed)

  • Suspend doesn’t seem to work properly yet (issues with the OpenMoko kernel?)
  • Without suspend, battery life is only about 6 hours
  • Some redraw errors in the unlock application
  • Speaker volume too silent, even when pushing everything to max

Now this is stuff that certainly can be fixed, and if there would be Marble available on Qtopia, too, that would even make for an awesome geo-location-based-services tool (Nokia seems to belive it’s the future, and so do I). Awesome work, Brisbane trolls, and of course all the other devel trolls in Berlin, Munich and Oslo! I hope now that Qtopia is GPLed, Qtopia might become an interesting alternative to OpenMoko.

By the way: I was approached a few times by friends who asked me of the whole Qtopia on OpenMoko thing spoiled the OpenMoko development. Here is my view. The OpenMoko firmware is for those who like to have their X11 and all the crap running, Qtopia is for those who just want to have stuff working, without caring that its even Linux underneath. They don’t need X11, the framebuffer is good enough and less complex to draw on (also, nobody keeps you from adding an X-Server to Qtopia or port Qtopia to Qt/X11. It’s GPL, after all).

OMG, FrOSCon!

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Do you know the feeling? For some reason, you need to detach from something you were involved in, and suddenly, after a while of not being deeply involved with it, you realize its just workling perfectly — at an amazing pace. If you know that feeling, you can share what I feel when I think about this years FrOSCon.

Looking back at the past two months, Berlin has turned out to be a nice place to live, even though I hardly found time to explore the city yet. The downside is that I have to travel the republic, and that takes quite some time.

Thus the conference seems to be approaching at the speed of light: Only about 30 hours to go until the coolest Open Source and Free Software Conference under the sun (we expect great weather with sunshine in the afternoon at bearable 25°C on saturday) kicks off.

As previously announced KDE will be there, sharing a booth and a room with the Amarok and Kubuntu Germany guys.

In the room, we’ll have a broad program to offer on Sunday.

  • 13:00: Marble: more than a virtual Desktop Globe
  • 14:00: Amarok :: Forming the Core 2
  • 16:00: Kubuntu in Deutschland :: gestern, heute und morgen

    • In addition, we might add some BoFs, stay tuned! On Saturday, there is even a talk on KDE 4 by our beloveth board member and promo guy Sebastian Kügler, who will give you an update on the current status. Earlier the day, I’ll be talking about a Qt-related Wikipedia Offline Reader written by students of our University.

    An of course the present developers take their time to answer your question on the project and can help you to get inolved if you join us in our room!

    PS: Make sure to be there to receive a personal surprise. All you need to do in addition is to bring in a USB stick.

    Seltsames beim SSH-Portforwarding

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    Zugriff auf den Fachbereichs-LDAP gibt es leider nur innerhalb des des FH-Netzes. Da ich im Moment für ein Projekt aber auch von ausserhalb Zugang benötige, wollte ich mir einen SSH-Portforward einrichten. Die Zeile

    ssh -Nf -L:1389:ldap.inf.fh-brs.de:389 dmolke2s@home.inf.fh-brs.de

    sollte es eigentlich leisten: auf Port 1389 sollte nun der Zugang zum LDAP liegen. Doch bei jedem connect: Fehlanzeige:

    bind: Address already in use

    Das Kuriose: Egal wie ich Ports und Rechner variierte, die Fehlermeldung blieb die Gleiche.Die Ausgabe von lsof -i : blieb ebenfalls leer. Hatte ich mir also ein Rootkit eingehandelt? Die Lösung lag diesmal nicht in panischem googlen, sondern im besonnen Review der Ausgabe von SSH im Verbose-Modus (-v). Dabei fiel mir folgende Zeile ins Auge:

    debug1: Local forwarding listening on 0.0.0.0 port 1389.

    Moment mal: Auf alle Interfaces binden? Ich hatte die entsprechende Option doch gar nicht angegeben! Normalerweise bindet SSH den Forward nur auf das Loopback-Interface.

    Doch was war geschehen? Der Übeltäter ist der subtil platzierte Doppelpunkt direkt hinter -L. Für SSH liest sich das nun wie

    ssh -Nf -L0.0.0.0:1389:ldap.inf.fh-brs.de:389 dmolke2s@home.inf.fh-brs.de

    wobei der Parameter vor dem Doppelpunkt die Adresse des Interfaces angibt, an die SSH sich binden soll. 0.0.0.0 bedeutet unter Unix, sich an alle Interfaces zu binden. Somit entspricht dies dem Kommando

    ssh -gNf -L1389:ldap.inf.fh-brs.de:389 dmolke2s@home.inf.fh-brs.de

    das übrigens ebenfalls fehlschlägt. Warum beides nicht funktioniert bleibt jedoch weiterhin ein Rätsel. Ich habe alle Interfaces bis auf Loopback und mein WLAN heruntergefahren und kann erfolgreich an beide einzelnd binden. Nur auf alle Interfaces zusammen zu binden klappt nicht. Hinweise willkommen…

    Übrigens: Wer sich über Parameter N und f wundert: Sie sorgen dafür dass ssh keine Shell startet (N) und sich nach dem Login in den Hintergrund verabschiedet (f). Die beiden Parameter hatten keine Auswirkungen auf meine Experimente.

    Spontantrip, oder: Wie man sich Verantwortung aufhalst

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    Ich habe mich gebeugt. Ich bin der Aufforderung meiner lieben LUUSA-Kollegen nachgegangen und hab mich wirklich um halb acht in den Zug nach Essen gesetzt, um noch einen Tag an der Planung der FrOSCon 2007 teilnehmen zu dürfen. Die positiven Dinge zuerst: Derjenige mit den offiziell flachesten Witzen bin nicht ich, und auch sonst haben wir viele Dinge getan, die uns und die Veranstaltung weiterbringen.

    Ich wurde zur Begrüßung erst mal mit einem Haufen Accounts beworfen: rt, Wiki, Mailinglisten und gefühlte 3000 andere Dienste bedeuten aber wohl auch, dass ich in Zukunft mehr als bisher mit der FrOSCon-Orga zu tun haben werde. Aber wenn man mal genauer überlegt, ist Freizeit sowieso völlig überbewertet…

    Düsseldorf Hbf, in völlig veraltetem Intercity

    Blogs now consollidated

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    After seeing that there is way to few content for two blogs, I decided to close down my blog at KDE Developers and migrated the majority of its contents to my new one at my private homepage, which I used for my german blog entries. To the folks at Planet LUUSA: I will now blog mostly in english, except for entries not relevant to non-german folks. I hope that’s fine for you. The rest of you doesn’t need to worry: Planet KDE will only carry my english posts.

    Additionally, I will blog more frequently again. After a stessful period of exams and other stressful things that I am going to report on later, I will have more time to dedicate to the KDE 4 make-it-cool-forces.

    Mein Fazit: Linuxtag 2006

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    So, endlich komme ich auch mal dazu, was über den diesjährigen Linuxtag zu schreiben. Ich scheine zu einer Minderheit zu gehören, wenn ich sage, dass Wiesbaden der für mich praktischere Ort für einen Linuxtag ist. Mit dem Auto oder dem ICE bin ich 1,5 Stunden in der Stadt — eine ziemlich vertretbare Zeit, wenn man sie gegen die knapp 3 Stunden nach Karlsruhe hält. Das das aber nicht alle so sahen, äußerte sich in der doch recht geringen Besucheranzahl. Hoffentlich setzt sich der Besucherrückgang, es waren dieses Jahr ca. 9.000 Besucher, nicht weiter fort.

    Was die FrOSCon anbelangt, so war dieser Linuxtag sehr lohnenswert. Auch KDE und Kubuntu gehen gestärkt aus der Veranstaltung hervor.