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I've been interested in Plan 9 for some time now, though never tinkered with it in a significant depth. It may not be the most practical OS for daily activities, but it always sounded like a system worth studying for all the groundbreaking concepts it introduces and eventually gets adapted by other system. But I haven't really expected it to be so much simple in source form. After all, it's a research system; it should be full of incomprehensible coding trickeries, right?
Okay, that was obviously a trick question. But here is what's made me really interested in Plan 9: Having a first glance in the source code of the cat utility and comparing it with what I'm running on my computer.
apt-get source 9base coreutils && emacs 9base*/cat/cat.c coreutils*/src/cat.c
Elegance and simplicity do go hand in hand.
Now, I have a new reason to learn the ways of Plan 9.
This is a duplicate of my post on freetard.net.
Entered the new year coding by myself... No, seriously.
This was, without a doubt, the worst New Year's Eve ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world.
A happy new year to all.
I will do a talk about Free Software GSM implementations at the Free Software Foundation Europe's Berlin meeting on Thursday, December 9th, next week. It will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store.
Here's the abstract of the presentation:
GSM is the most ubiquitous mobile telephony platform in the world, and chances are you are carrying a GSM-capable device with you everywhere you go. Yet, practical implementations of GSM are shrouded in mystery. Their inner-workings are known only to a small cabal of companies away from public and commercial scrutiny. However, there's hope on the horizon. In this talk, we'll have an overall look at the state of Free Software GSM implementations and discuss what they could mean for the hacker and the common man in practice.
The talk will be aimed at those without any prior knowledge of GSM protocols, and I will not refrain from using crude oversimplifications to make my points.
You have gotten used to the idea of Android and Meego? Let's see what you'll think about the possibility of Free Software handling what your cell phone is primarily made for.
The future is here! We have finally reached a point where all men and women of the world can finally communicate instantly. Peoples are no longer divided by their geographical locations or the whims of their rulers... for the first time in history?
From The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage:
As one writer put it in 1878, the telegraph "gave races of men in various far-separated climes a sense of unity. In a very remarkable degree the telegraph confederated human sympathies and elevated the conception of human brotherhood. By it the peoples of the world were made to stand closer together." The rapid distribution of new was thought to promote universal peace, truthfulness, and mutual understanding. In order to understand your fellow men, you really couldn't have too much news.
Or could you? Not everyone wanted to know what was going in far-flung countries. The precedence given to what it saw as irrelevant foreign news over important local stories even lead the Alpena Echo, a small newspaper in Michigan, to cut off its daily telegraph service in protest. According to a contemporary account, this was because "it could not tell why telegraph company caused it to be sent full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia, a missionary banquet in Madagascar, the price of kangaroo leather from Borneo, and a lot of nice cheerful news from the Archipelagoes - and not a line about the Muskegon fire." The seeds had been sown for a new problem: information overload.
Three days after applying, I got my Flattr invitation. For those who haven't heard about it before, Flattr is a web micropayment platform. From The Flattr story:
Flattr was founded to help people share money, not only content. Before Flattr, the only reasonable way to donate has been to use Paypal or other systems to send money to people. The threshold for this is quite high. People would just ignore sending donations if it wasn't for a really important cause. Sending just a small sum has always been a pain in the ass. Who would ever even login to a payment system just to donate €0.01? And €10 was just too high for just one blog entry we liked...
You can use it to send and receive donations for any content you create. It, at least in theory, is especially useful for small payments. There isn't an awful amount of content online supporting Flattr yet and the service itself is still in beta release, but it looks quite promising.
I activated my account by loading a small amount of money to my account and integrated it to my PyBlosxom flavour, so it automatically submits every blog post to Flattr. We'll see how it goes.
Recently, I attended the OpenBTS workshop organized by David Burgess. The 4-day workshop was hosted by Dieter Spaar in his lovely Bavarian farm. Beside the many participants from across the globe with a variety of backgrounds, Harald Welte and Karsten Nohl were also in attendance. I won't get into much detail about the covered material since I'm sure they will be properly summarized in the OpenBTS Blog soon. Instead, I will just share some snapshots.
David Burgess did a superb job at covering a large set of topics.
Dieter Spaar had a neat UNIX-based spectrum analyzer box running.
Harald Welte gave demonstrations of OpenBSC and OsmocomBB.
OpenBSC-supported Siemens BS-11 BTS
USRP with an external duplexer used for OpenBTS
The OpenBTS base station I had the pleasure of configuring and messing with during the workshop
I have been watching the Free Software tinkerers' much needed approach to cellular phone networks for the past few years, albeit from a distance. Cellular telephony seems to be the biggest network implementation (bigger than the Internet in means of user base) that has been surprisingly closed to inspection and experimentation despite its age. Lately, I've started actively getting informed about GSM network protocols and their free implementations such as OpenBTS and OpenBSC. Both projects provide very promising opportunities for various scenarios. However, even if the two projects are combined with a free mobile operating system, one still wouldn't have control on a very important part of his digital telecommunication. This is because the client side (i.e. the mobile phone) of the GSM connection would still be handled by proprietary chipsets whose innerworkings are unknown and out-of-reach.
About two months ago, Harald Welte announced a project called OsmocomBB which intends to close what might be called the missing link between the free GSM network implementations and the free mobile phone operating systems. When accomplished, the projects aims to have a fully functioning and free GSM baseband software stack in the mobile phone.
What I wanted to share was a paper titled Anatomy of contemporary GSM cellphone hardware released by Harald Welte today. Even though most of the concepts are still above my head, I very much enjoyed having a concise overview of all the processes going on in a phone. A tip for beginners: Print out the article if you can. It is bound to host a bunch of small side notes as you research around and come back to it.
Here are two paragraphs from the ending personal rants section to whet your appetite:
The GSM industry is one of the most closed areas of computing that I’ve encountered so far. It is very hard to get any hard technical information out of them. All they like to spread is high-level marketing information, but they’re very reluctant when it comes down to hard technical facts on their products.
All the various vendors do more or less the same. The fundamental architecture of a GSM baseband chip is the same, whether you buy it from TI, Infineon or from MediaTek. They all cook with water, like we Germans tend to say. The details like the particular DSP vendor or whether you use a traditional IF, zero-IF or low-IF analog baseband differ. But from whom do they want to hide it? If people like myself with a personal interest in the technical aspects of mobile phones can figure it out in a relatively short time, then I’m sure the competiton of those chipset makers can, too. In much less time, if they actually care.
Very exciting times are awaiting us.
As planned, I did my talk about the thriving fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement at yesterday's FSFE Berlin Fellowship meeting. I started with the basics of the Free Software ideal, moved on to the problematic issues concerning mainstream GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian and then discussed the solutions to these problems. I also had the chance to share some of my favorite fully free GNU/Linux distributions.
The interest in the topic was amazing, and the Q&A discussion after the presentation turned out to be more interesting than the presentation itself. After the event, I even managed to get my share of the FSFE's Hug A Developer campaign!
I can has hugz! (Original picture from Matthias Kirschner's weblog)
Fortunately, I had brought a microphone with me and recorded the talk including the engaging discussion afterwards. You can find the Theora/Vorbis OGV video of the talk below.
Those who prefer to only have the audio can download the Vorbis OGG of the talk as well. Both the video and audio are licensed under the free CC-BY-SA license.
If you, your friends or your organization might be interested in this topic, please note that I would love to give an improved and updated version of this presentation to any group as long as my travel expenses can be met.
While at it, I compiled a list of interesting links relevant to the talk below.
I will be giving a talk about the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement in the Free Software Foundation Europe's Berlin meeting on Thursday, February 11th, next week. The talk will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystraße 48. Hopefully, we will have a chance to continue discussing the topic over a few beers right after the meeting, too.
Here's the abstract of the presentation:
For the past few years, a growing number of GNU/Linux distributions have been started with the specific goal of ensuring users' software freedoms before everything else. In this presentation, I will try to draw an overview of the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement and provoke participants to think about software distributors' ethical responsibilities. What aspects of mainstream GNU/Linux distributions does this movement not find sufficient? Which distributions align themselves with the movement? What is their rationale for limiting functionality of their software offerings in the name of upholding user freedoms? What does a binary blob mean and what does the Linux-libre Project claim to accomplish that the vanilla kernel Linux doesn't? How does the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement affect the rest of the free software ecosystem? I am planning to keep the overall tone of the discussion newcomer-friendly while also providing some food for thought for the technically inclined.
The wording has been deemed "clunky" by Karl Goetz, the lead developer of gNewSense, but it's the best I managed to do in a busy week. If you are in Berlin next week and interested in discussing this new movement inside the free software world, you're welcome to join us.
I have just got this message in Pidgin from a friend over the MSN Messenger Service:
"dude, my internet connection is fucked up. i'm getting disconnected every time i open msn."
Predictably, he was offline when i saw the message.
© Ali Gündüz 2008 - 2011 CC-BY-SA
