felix (fkr) kronlage: not just hazardous.org

thanks to mother nature (and the low-pressure system kyrill), I am stuck in the middle of nowhere. Coming back from a java course I was teaching in Hamburg, I am now somewhere between Hamburg an Bremen. All trains germany-wide have effectivly stopped running. Thank god, I was quick enough to get a hotel room and don’t have to spent the time sleeping on the train.
However, on my way to Hamburg this morning, I saw a little gem at Oldenburg trainstation that enlightened me and really made my morning….

Tags: cellphone photos, life, nerd et al. by fkr
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well, this week I’m teaching a java class in hamburg for three days. Yesterday morning, I had some spare time
before the class, so I took couple pictures of the location “Landungsbruecken”. Two of the pictures are taken with a sepia color scheme.

Tags: cellphone photos, life by fkr
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finally I unslacked and put the slides from my OpenCON 2006 talk online. Subject of my talk was ‘3G Technology and OpenBSD’. The slides can be found here. OpenCON is a very nice conference completly dedicated to OpenBSD. The conference takes place in Venice and is organized by the cool guys from the OpenBEER OpenBSD usergroup. Make sure to put OpenCON 2007 on your agenda, it is definitly worth the trip, especially since this is one of the conferences with a high percentage of OpenBSD developers, quite few of them giving talks, just check out the OpenCON 2006 list of talks on the events.html page from OpenBSD: events.html.

Tags: 3G technology, Conferences, OpenBSD by fkr
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it’s hilarious that history always repeats itself, or put different: people continue to repeat the same stupid mistakes. As reported here on heise newsticker (att. german article, there is an english summary here ) Digital Playground (a porn producer in the US) tried to publish their movies on blue-ray discs instead of HD DVD, but the manufacturer in the US refused them, since they got threatened by Sony to have their blue-ray license revoked, if they manufacturer porn discs. Let’s recall why VHS was so successfull and killed its competitor Beta completly… indeed, it was because the porn industrie chose VHS back then, since it was cheaper to produce. Now, HD DVD is already cheaper to make than blue-ray and now the people behind blue-ray make it even worse and disallow the production of blue-ray discs with porn contents, how stupid can one be? I’d say it’s 1:0 for HD DVD now.

Tags: life, nerd et al. by fkr
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by accident I started hacking on ieee1394 support for OpenBSD. First I started to port NetBSD’s firewire driver, then I started talking to tdeval at openbsd.org who was hacking firewire couple years ago (and who’s work can still be found in the attic of sys/dev/ieee1394). He gave me his code (which was actually newer than what we have in the attic) and so I got working on that. The first round of fun was to adjust it to -current. The code is a bit rearranged than what netbsd has, the main stuff now lies in sys/dev/firewire. Thierry wanted to go closer to the FreeBSD model of firewire, I’m not really sure wether that is 100% the road we should take, but then: I hardly have a clue about firewire yet. However it’s a nice adventure. The code compiles on i386, macppc and sparc64 (these are the only
platforms I tested so far) and attaches to a large-variety of controllers. However, attaching any devices does not
work yet, so don’t get your hopes up too far :)
If you want to have a look at what there is so far: http://hazardous.org/~fkr/openbsd/ieee1394/ has it.

Tags: OpenBSD, code, nerd et al. by fkr
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Right before christmas I made myself a nice present, a Siemens Gigaset SL75. This was the beginning of me diving into the world of VoIP. Instead of just picking a commercial voip provider, I chose to take it all the way and started playing with Asterisk, an open-source pbx system, as well. Pretty soon, I discovered that asterisk is a lot of fun (I will elaborate more on that in the future). However, configuring the Siemens phone was hell. Whoever designed this phone deserves to be fired. The phone works with profiles for wireless-networks. Each profile has an associated 802.11b/g SSID and a SIP provider. However, you are not able to create a SIP provider with the phone directly, you have to configure that through a web-interface that you get by connecting to port 80 on the phone’s IP address. Everytime the profile is switched, the phone needs to reboot. Do I have to mention, that the boot process takes about ONE minute? it’s a phone…my laptop boots faster! Oh, and when the phone starts up, you can not choose the profile. Turned off the phone with the profile set to office and arrive at home? Bad luck, you have to boot the phone, switch the profile and REBOOT! for christs sake! This is just one of the major flaws. Now that I’ve used the phone for two weeks more and more things pop up. Here is a nice list of why the phone sucks balls:

• display backlight does not turn of while charging
• the battery is very weak, have the charger close-by always!
• typing in SIP urls can only be done if you add a contact to the phonebook
• typing in SIP urls is painful!
• the speaker is terrible and the ringer as such sounds very, very cheap
• why does a VoIP phone need a camera? leave the camera out and save weight, space and 10 seconds of boot time
• navigating through the menues is awful, usability factor of minus twenty

Despite the terrible experience with the phone, VoIP is lots of fun and I will report more about it!

Tags: nerd et al. by fkr
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