unethical blogger

Voici les nouvelles du front Openmoko, avec un peu de retard.

Actualités

Voici une sélection d'informations intéressantes :

• Sortie de EFL version 1.0
• Une page wiki FOSDEM 2011 a été créée sur openmoko.org
• Dernières nouvelles de SHR : il est question de FSO, SMS, VoIP, EFL 1.0, Palm Pre, HTC Dream et Nokia N900
• Sorite de Qtmoko v32
• Open Silicium est un nouveau magazine des éditions Diamond dédié à l'embarqué et à l'opensource

Consultez également la dernière page Community Updates pour plus d'informations.

En janvier a été publiée l'annonce du FOSDEM 2011 qui se termine en ce moment même.
J'ai une pensée pour les chanceux qui s'y trouvent, comme Asthro qui nous a fait un retour en direct.

Asthro avait également rédigé un article sur le nouveau thème Faenqo pour QtMoko.
C'est vrai qu'il est plutôt réussi :

Voici l'état actuel du forum :

• 15 744 messages
• 783 inscrits
• 1 383 discussions

Souhaitons la bienvenue à : lsam, WhilelM et robin

Voici une sélection non-exhaustive des nombreuses discussions du mois.

Communauté :

• Bonjour ! (5 messages)
• Nouveau et emballé (3 messages)
• Cyberesprit se présente (1 messages)
• FOSDEM 2011 (3 messages)

Logiciels :

• Neoinput (9 messages)
• Android 1.5 "impossible d'installer ... sur ce téléphone" (8 messages)
• [QtMoko] v31 : pb Wi-Fi et autonomie ? (8 messages)
• QtMoko v31, un peu paumé... (7 messages)
• [QtMoko] nouveau theme : AsthroMod (7 messages)
• SHR-U et GPRS (6 messages)
• QtMoko v32 (expérimental) (6 messages)
• [QT V31]Pb connection web (5 messages)
• nouvelle SHR-T (4 messages)
• [SHR-T] internet (3 messages)
• Android Froyo daily : 05-10-2010 (3 messages)
• [SHR] pymail : Notifier de mail (2 messages)

Matériels :

• GTA04 (18 messages)
• [touch] ecran tactile pété ... moi aussi (7 messages)
• Geeksphone à 159€ : bonne affaire ? (5 messages)
• De la concurrence pour Always Innovating (3 messages)
• (VDS) Open Moko FreeRunner Paris (1 messages)

Projets :

• MiniMoko : smartphone Openmoko / Allways Innovating (1 messages)
• Sleepytux : Une application android pour définir des profils. (25 messages)

Divers :

• nouvelle freebox - freephonie (6 messages)
• Geek'sPhone one un concurrent du FreeRunner? (4 messages)
• Linuxconf.au, conférence sur la téléphonie (2 messages)
• spammeur(s) supprimé(s) (1 messages)

RAS en janvier !

Statistiques du site

• Graphique des visites : 

• Nombre de visites par mois : 

(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)

• Répartition par pays : 

• Visites par jour :

• Statistiques du forum :

• Les statistiques du wiki :

Bilan

Je n'ai pas grand chose à dire ici (et je veux qu'on le sache ! ) si ce n'est que j'attends avec impatience les retours du FOSDEM 2011.
Une fois de plus je n'y suis pas allé je vais encore le vivre par procuration.

Mais l'année prochaine j'en suis sûr, ce sera la bonne !

Un petit message pour vous donner un petit apperçu du FOSDEM. J'écris en pleine conférence sur Qt pour mobiles.

J'ai fait le tour des stands, on trouve plein de choses sympatoches, et on rencontre des gens qui ont plein d'infos.

Nos amis de TuxBrain sont là, avec plein de matériel (le NanoNote entre autre), et se présentent cette année sous la bannière de Hackable:Devices, qui est une plateforme regroupant les acteurs commerciaux du matériel libre (TuxBrain, KD85, Golden Delicious, Bearstech...) 

J'ai pu voir et jouer avec  les protos de OpenPandora, (belle bête), du MilkyMist One etc.

C'est à côté que j'ai rencontré Dr Nicholaus Schaller, qui présente le GTA04 ! Enfin un proto... C'est pas encore fonctionnel, il y a quelques problèmes d'alimentation, elle fonctionne entre 2secondes et 10mn ! Mais le projet sera dispo à temps. Il y aura aussi un port série (un vrai !) directement sur la carte. Le Chip GSM sera bien le Option 601, qui a une tronche phénoménale. 

Bref, que du bon, autant en terme de contenu (matériel) que d'aspect social (organisation Hackable:Device)

Voilà pour maintenant, la conférence commence, je reposte d'ici ce soir, pour la buzz/autonofix party de ce midi. 

(Désolé j'ai pas d'APN aujourd'hui)

 

Hello! I wanted to write some more News before going to FOSDEM tomorrow... because I guess we'll have lots of new interesting stuff to show once we are back home :-)


So here we list what the shr community has done in the last few days:

enjoy:
A patch was sent upstream to add basic FSO support. Basically it requests CPU resource automatically at startup so you won't need to disable suspend manually anymore. We already have this improved version in shr-unstable feeds.

sms receipts:
mrmoku has been working to support sms receipts in phoneui. Support is not complete though, as there are still some fsogsmd/opimd related bugs. Anyway, you can try it and give feedback to developers. You can enable it by default in phoneui configuration file or you can enable it on the fly by calling a dbus method.

VOIP:
There has been some efforts to start adding VOIP support to FSO. The chosen approach is integrating sflphone into FSO.

EFL 1.0:
Shr-unstable is now using the recently released EFL 1.0 libraries.

Palm Pre (plus/2):

• libmsmcomm is now able to handle basic sms messages.
• WiFi is now more reliable, but still fails sometimes when transmitting big files.
• Initial steps towards bluetooth support have been done in the form of a fsodeviced plugin.

Htc Dream:
US "extended" keyboard is now activated by default in xorg.conf. if you want DE or IT keyboard you'll need to adjust your xorg.conf manually.

Nokia n900:
A new rebase branch was pushed by GNUtoo that has all the 2.6.37 patches on top of it, but has alsa issues that need to be solved.

QtMoko étant une des distribution les plus actives en ce moment (1 version par mois!), il semble normal que la communauté participe aussi.

Et c'est en  créant un thème que Cyberesprit a concocté une interface d'une grande fraicheur pour cette distrib.

Je vous laisse apprécier cette capture, le thème et d'autres étant disponible sur le sujet dédié forum ou sur la son site : https://cyberesprit.fr/faenqo/

Il va sans dire qu'une telle qualité devrait plaire à Radek Polak, développeur de QtMoko et qu'il serait bien judicieux de l'intégrer dans la distribution de base.

Avec un autre thème par votre serviteur, et surtout la traduction Française de Judge_Gregg, openmoko-fr se montre très productive sur cette distrib' qui n'a plus grand chose à envier aux OS "commerciaux".

May you rest in peace, and catch all the birds in heaven – my furry little friend.

Yes, some good news! While this blog was apparently abandoned (just look at last post.. 6 months ago!), SHR has been evolving... and is still getting better with every new day.

So from now on, I'll be writing in this blog some of the hard work we, the SHR community, are doing so everyone both inside and outside the community will have an idea on what we are spending our efforts, what's done and what's still on the TODO list so someone who is eager to join in can help.

For your information, I will be writing these newsletters from information I'll collect in this wiki page:
http://shr-project.org/trac/wiki/News
At the moment I'm not a omniscent, so I'd appreciate your contributions to this wiki page when you discover some interesting information related to SHR ;-)

Enough introduction. Let's start!

migration to gdbus:
First of all, for those who didn't know, last weeks have been a bit problematic for shr-unstable, since all FSO framework was moved from dbus-glib to gdbus, and thus phoneui had to change some of its code to work properly and is now using gdbus too. A patch was applied to Iliwi to work with gdbus too.

shr-settings:
For those who love features, a new module has been added to shr-settings which lets you switch between fso alsa scenarios manually without having to fight against terminal and dbus.

Palm Pre (plus/2):
Lots of great new stuff on palm pre devices. First of all, libmsmcomm has been rewritten to vala. Wifi should be working since today. And to help users and development, we have 2 interesting little projects:

• fso-installer: GarthPS has been working in a bash script which configures and installs SHR in your palm pre phone. Even your aunt can now run SHR :P
• Bootr: Slyon wrote program which lets you dual-boot between SHR and webOS. You can see a video of bootr in action here.
  

Nokia n900:
This is one of the devices with better expectation at the moment. libisi is going to be rewritten in Vala to bring an easier and faster development. GNUtoo and mrmoku are working on the kernel side too, where patches are beeing rebased on top of the omap PM branch.

Nexus One:
GNUtoo has been working in an alsa driver for this mobile which you can find here, but it's still quite buggy. Please, note that Nexus One is not in OpenEmbedded yet, but apart from ALSA, all other components look quite usual (for instance gps = NMEA with FLOSS libraries, gsm = AT-commands, wifi = WEXT wifi driver, etc.)

HTC Dream:
GNUtoo has been working a bit on this device lately too, mostly polishing details. For instance, splash screen for the device is now pushed to openembedded, as well as extended keyboard, the last not being activated by default in xorg.conf though.
Despite trying another time, GNUtoo hasn't been successful at having wifi with PSM working. linux-next kernel branch can boot in the device now, but there's no input nor usbnet, so users will have to stick to 2.6.32 till support is improved.

Iphone:
I'm sure most of you didn't know, but it's a true fact that SHR runs on iphones too! Lopi has been working on adding support for iphone3g in openembedded. He has started his own project, which is using SHR at the moment: http://www.projectix.org
You can find a video of an iphone running SHR here.

Last week I was in Dallas, TX on Ubuntu/Linaro platform sprint rally. Like previous one in Prague this one was also spent on nailing workitems to get job done.

This time I was working on backport PPA which contains current (11.04/natty) cross toolchain packages for Ubuntu 10.04 ‘lucid’ and 10.10 ‘maverick’. I got it working and populated recently. After announcement I got first bug reports so now I am trying to fix all issues.

But such events are not only work. It is also good time to meet people which you know, known but not met and others. One day I went to Andrea Gallo to say hi and was introduced to Rajeev Kapoor (also from ST-Ericsson). I was surprised that he remember me from times when I was working on NDK-15 support in Poky (around May–July 2007). I heard some forgotten stories, discussed current ST-E board work and we went to other groups.

Other day I met Jim Huang and Matt Hsu from 0xlab. It was first time when we met face to face but we were working with each other several years ago during Openmoko times. Now they work mostly on Android and shown me hibernation support for ARM. Beagleboard went to sleep and got back to running state in nearly no time.

Wednesday evening was nice. I went to Barcadia with guys from Texas Instruments where we met Texrat (Maemo community). Got some food, beers (“Arogant Bastard Ale” was interesting but even after second one I am still not worthy) and had some discussions. But what that place had was awesome: still working coin-up arcade machines from early 80′s! There were Space Invaders, Moon Patrol and several others. I lost few coins on Galaga just to notice how awful player I am ;D

On Thursday we went for a dinner to Medieval Times. It was a show with some kind of food. Next day someone nicely described it as “good bad experience” — I hope to not having to watch this kind of entertainment again.

It was good event. This time I was not so jetlagged like during UDS-N in Orlando so got sleep times better. And I do not suffer too much now.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Ubuntu/Linaro platform rally in Dallas, TX was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Related posts:

1. Ubuntu/Linaro Platform Sprint in Prague
2. Jetlagged ;(
3. UDS-N day one

A new subway line is under construction next to my apartment. The neighbors hate it – but I love it. Seeing heavy machinery rip up the earth is about the most exhilarating and fascinating thing I can imagine.

A few weeks ago, massive trucks wheeled in a strange looking digging machine that must be 15m in length. I wanted to share a few pictures… and see if anyone knew more about it.

Like an earth-eating monster plucked from a four-year-old’s nightmare, sharp teeth and hydraulics force huge shoveling arms deep into the ground extracting its soil.

Construction doesn’t seem to follow normal business hours in Asia. They’ve been running this machine 24-hours a day, rain or shine, even on Sundays, until they reach a depth of what appears to be about 100m.

At that point, dozens of welders begin work on a rebar structure. Once complete, it’s placed into the trench by the tallest crane I’ve ever seen. Dump-trucks of rock and cement then arrive to fill in the trench. And the process repeats.

They’re making these about every 20m up and down the street.

If anyone has more information on this digger, please let me know. I’m quite curious.

One of my paid contracts required me to start moving directly into the GSM core network, the SS7 domain. While so far I had a fairly good understanding of SCCP, TCAP and MAP (which are required for GSM/3G roaming interfaces), I've now had to look at the actual telephony signalling side of things.

Even in GSM networks, the gateway or inter-working MSC will translate all the GSM TS 04.08 Call Control messages into ISUP, the ISDN User Part, originally designed for call control signalling between ISDN networks.

As apparently always in SS7, there are many, many different standardized and proprietary protocol stackings that can be seen in the wild. I'm now working on a stack that looks like IP->SCTP->M2UA->MTP3->{ISUP, SCCP->TCAP->MAP}.

Luckily, for now there is no need to do any fully-fledged implementation of it, simple message parsing and encoding routines are sufficient for the task at hand.

It's been about time that I'm closing those last gaps in the knowledge of GSM core network protocols. The only part that I'm still missing so far is CAMEL. I know roughly how it works, but I've never played with it or implemented any part of it.

The last couple of days I've been hacking away on reverse-engineering the proprietary Abis-over-IP variant of the HSL Femtocell. This is required to get this latest newcomer in the GSM femto/picocell market to work with our OpenBSC (and later OsmoSGSN) software. Progress is quite good now, apart from their custom RTP multiplexing format, everything required for signalling, SMS and Voice is working from OpenBSC.

The HSL Femto is a nice and powerful piece of hardware, containing a TI DaVinci ARM+DSP chip, 128MByte DDR2 memory, a Spartan-3A FPGA and 275Ms/s DAC as well as 65 Ms/s ADC. Much too powerful for a single-ARFCN GSM system. This really looks like the vendor wants to do multi-ARFCN software updates later. More details and some initial PCB photographs can be found in the OpenBSC wiki.

The Software side looks a bit like it is still maturing. Most bugs I have found so far are apparently fixed in the SR1.0.1 firmware. The A-bis dialect is quite different (and more simplistic) from what I've seen in any other BTS. More details can once again be found at a page in our wiki.

What's exciting is that there now is a commercially available traditional BTS product at relatively low cost. By traditional I mean it is still only a BTS and not a Um-SIP gateway like OpenBTS.

I hope this will enable more people to use and experiment with OpenBSC, as the cost and availability of the ip.access nanoBTS has always been an issue for many people without a four-digit budget available.

Comme chaque année le FOSDEM se tiendra à Bruxelles, les 5 et 6 février.

La liste des 33 stands et 33 lightning talks tous plus intéressants les uns que les autres vient d'être publiée.

Voici une petite sélection au hasard

• Stands : beaglebord, enlightenment, Hackable Devices, OpenEmbedded, ...
• Lighning talks : Android, MilkyMist, Flashrom, ...

Notez également les rendez-vous traditionnels :

• le Beer event du vendredi soir
• la possibilité de passer une certification LPI au tarif exceptionnel de 75€ seulement
• la key-signing party

2011 est arrivée, meilleurs voeux à tous pour cette nouvelle année.

Hé oui, je fais d'une pierre 2 coups et j'enchaîne avec le billet mensuel, synthèse du mois dernier.

Actualités

Voici d'abord quelques informations glanées sur le web :

• La forge projects.openmoko.org est fermée, a priori définitivement
• une RC1est annoncée pour SHR-testing 2011.1 sur la liste de diffusion Community.
• QtMoko est sortie en version 31, voir la liste de diffusion Community.
• NeoTool 1.3 apporte le support de ubifs.

Consultez également la dernière page Community Updates pour plus d'informations.

Pour le blog, ça va être vite réglé puisqu'il n'y a eu qu'un seul article depuis le dernier billet mensuel (merci Asthro).

Mais l'information est d'importance car il s'agit des dernières nouvelles du projet GTA04 qui propose de mettre à jour l'électronique interne du Neo Freerunner (alias GTA02).

Le forum compte maintenant :

• 728 membres
• 1373 discussion
• 15553 messages

Il y a eu pas mal d'inscrits en décembre mais la plupart restent silencieux.
Difficile de différencier les spammeurs potentiels de ceux qui s'inscrivent juste pour le suivi des fils de discussion.

Souhaitons néanmoins la bienvenue aux nouveaux qui se sont manifestés : cirdec et korbé.

Voici une sélection non-exhaustive des nombreuses discussions du mois.

Communauté :

• À la recherche d'un vrai linux phone (4 messages)
• Moi (1 messages)
• Bonjour la communauté, (1 messages)
• Bonjour Bonjour !! (1 messages)
• guisemau . sujet distrib linux? . pas beaucoup d'amateur ? (1 messages)

Logiciels :

• Qtmoko V30 ! (18 messages)
• Neoinput (4 messages)
• [SHR-T] internet (4 messages)
• Navit 0.2.0 est dispo (3 messages)
• nouvelle SHR-T (3 messages)
• [SHR-T] LANG navit (2 messages)
• [SHR] navit osd (2 messages)
• DeforaOS est dispo pour le Moko (2 messages)
• [hackable:1] petites questions d'utilisation quotidienne (2 messages)
• La nouvelle rev5 de Hackable:1 est là ! (1 messages)
• Androïd 1.5, sms longs (1 messages)
• Android - Connection PC pour passer à autre chose... (1 messages)
• Vidéos de démonstration de CellWriter et de la Webcam sur le FR (3 messages)

Matériels :

• Geeksphone à 159€ : bonne affaire ? (12 messages)
• FR et température hivernale (8 messages)
• GTA04 (6 messages)
• [touch] ecran tactile pété ... moi aussi (4 messages)
• Batterie naze ? (1 messages)
• (VDS) Open Moko FreeRunner Paris (1 messages)
• A vendre contre bons soins : freerunner GTA02 + buzzfix (1 messages)

Projets :

• MiniMoko : smartphone Openmoko / Allways Innovating (2 messages)
• Sleepytux : Une application android pour définir des profils. (3 messages)

Divers :

• nouvelle freebox - freephonie (1 messages)
• 27c3 et confs sur le gsm (1 messages)
• Un moko à la poubelle .. (1 messages)

Le wiki a été victime de vandalisme de la part des derniers inscrits.
Le blocage de ces indésirables et la suppression des pages est facile, encore faut-il qu'un admin les découvre (merci Mangr) car elle sont souvent cachées dans les pages des utilisateurs ou les pages discussion.

Sinon, Trim a importé 2 nouvelles captures d'écran sous DeforaOS : les applications Bluetooth et Dates.

Statistiques du site

• Graphique des visites : 

• Nombre de visites par mois : 

(Cliquez sur l'image pour l'agrandir)

• Répartition par pays : 

• Visites par jour : 

• Statistiques du forum : 

• Les statistiques du wiki : 

Bilan

Chaque changement d'année est propice à un bilan.
Mais celui-ci ne sera pas aussi optimiste que les précédents.
En effet, le projet Openmoko semble moribond et toujours pas de remplaçant sérieux et complet à l'horizon de 2011.

Le problème est que la liberté, on y prend goût.
Personnellement, j'aurais du mal à revenir vers un smartphone trop fermé.

Alors quoi ?
Le GTA04 qui nécessite un GTA02 ?
Le GeeksPhone qui n'est pas complètement ouvert ?
Un éventuel hack du Smart book ?
Quoi d'autre ?

Ma crainte est qu'aucun des projets en vue ne soit à la fois aussi ouvert que Openmoko mais également assez fiable pour un usage quotidien.
Alors je garde mon neo pour l'instant et j'attends, encore, mais ma patience s'amenuise ...

En ce début 2011 je suis perplexe, c'est vrai.
Mais seulement pour les smartphones "Free and Open Source Hardware" car heureusement tout n'est pas si sombre du côté des logiciels.
La preuve avec la sortie des nouvelle version de QtMoko et de SHR testing par exemple.
Il y a encore de quoi s'amuser avec ce Freerunner pour patienter

Well my Freerunner does not seem to become my primary phone (again) any time soon.
And my old Nokia 6100 battery has seen better days, okay it is not as bad as a smart phone just yet.

So I could either keep the old N6100, buy a new low end feature phone or get a fancy smart phone.

Until recently I thought that I would end up buying a new feature phone.
But disappointment in the evolution of T9 (none) on dirt cheap phones and the continued desire for a computer in my pocket lead me back to smart phones.

So I ended up ordering a GeeksPhone One.

Just for completeness some pro/con thoughts about the alternatives.

Nokia N900

Pros:

• Very cool hardware (it even got a hardware keyboard).
• Runs a Debian based distribution.

Cons:

• Quite expensive.
• Nokia left me for dead with the Nokia 770 tablet (NO I will never forget this).
• Closed source just like the Nokia 770 (I can’t build a firmware for it, see above).
• Maemo 5 has a relative small user base.
• Maemo 5 is dead? Long live MeeGo?

IPhone

Pros:

• Good question… highest sex appeal perhaps?

Cons:

• Steve (Apple) wants to decide how and for what I use the phone.
• Oh, and it is expensive.

Android phones (HTC, Samsung, etc.)

Pros:

• Decent to very nice hardware.
• Large user base => lots of applications.

Cons:

• “They” want the same control as Apple.
• Not free and hacker friendly.
• Can be quite expensive.

GeeksPhone ONE

Pros:

• Decent hardware that includes a hardware keyboard.
• Rather cheap, they had them on sale for €159 (out of stock right now).
• No need to “root” the phone as it is not locked.
• You can build new firmwares for them (rmcc has created quite a few new firmwares).
• They encourages people to do so.
• As it runs Android there should be a large selection of applications.

Cons:

• Firmware contains closed binary blobs (as far as I know)
• Currently only runs Android, no Debian, SHR or FSO yet.
• Open schematics and chip documents would have been nice.
• The community is VERY Spanish, “Google Translate” is really a useful tool here.
• The “One” is soon to be replaced by two new models.
• Why god, why did they have to write “GeeksPhõne” on the back of the unit?

Copyright Peter Ward and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

RIP

Before or during the holidays I noticed that projects.openmoko.org were down.
As no one seemed to take action I decided to attempt to locate the person(s)  that had the power to do anything about the problem…
Long story short, I eventually received the following e-mail:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Harald Welte <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 1:00 PM Subject: Re: openmoko.org services / projects is now down.. To: "Risto H. Kurppa" <[email protected]> On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:41:47PM +0200, Risto H. Kurppa wrote: > Hi Harald! > > There has now been some reports about projects.openmoko.org being down.. > > I this permanent? If yes, it'd be good to create a forward to take the > users to a wiki page telling what's happened and why. If it isn't > permanent, some kind of announce would be useful. As far as I know, > there is code that the developers / users would definitely want to > backup before removing the whole projects.openmoko.org.  The change is going to be permanent, as the current installation is unmaintained for about a year and poses severe security risks. Anyone who's interested in backups should contact gismo and/or roh, they will then provide snapshots of the requested information (e.g. cvs/svn/git repository) If somebody steps forwared to take the existing information and put all of the repositories + downloads online somewhere (read-only) for historic reference, I'd be more than happy to provide the respective account/data. Regards, Harald

Which is also available at: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2010-December/064043.html

Maybe not entirely dead yet.

I am not subscribed to that particular mailing list, but I noticed that Alfa21 might have stepped forward to host and maintain it…

 

Running my own

It also made me reconsider running my own private FusionForge
(I am quite happy with SourceForge except for the fact that it is hosted in the USA, which has silly software export laws)

Also an idea struck me.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there existed a sort of BitTorrent for hosted projects?
Something that enabled anyone to set up a “project”.
The bug tracker, Source control, everything should then automatically be “cloned” to the network of hosts.
This would allow the network to help load balance the setup.
But most importantly if the original host dropped the interest in the hosting/project the network could ensure the continued availability of the software.

Well one is allowed to dream…

During the last week I was busy with

• December 22nd though 24th: Preparing OpenBSC to be ready for the field test at 27c3, i.e.
  • improving the output of the log at "INFO" level to be not too verbose at the expected network load
  • Implement the interface to LCR using a Unix domain socket rather than linking LCR with OpenBSC
  • Configuring all 6 BTS, put them in multi-TRX config, test the setup
  • Manufacturing nanoBTS stacking cable (with their weird RJ-69 plugs that you have to mill a notch off)
  • Install all required software on the machine that will run OpenBSC
• December 25th and 26th: Setting up the network
  • Physically mounting the nanoBTS units
  • Patching cables throughout the building, installing PoE switches
  • Configuring LCR
  • Interfacing with the Phone Operation Center (POC) via E1 / DSS1
• December 26th through 30th: Running the network
  • Fixing bugs as they appear (see e.g. zeckes mailing list post
  • Making sure users are happy
• December 30th: De-installing the network

I don't have much time now, still have to unpack lots of boxes full of gear. However, I have finally completed my scripts to graph some of the statistical data of the field test. You can see the graphs in the OpenBSC wiki.

Unfortunately we don't have the same body of statistical data for the previous field tests at 25c3, 26c3 and har2009. However, for all of those three events we have now graphs about the IMSI/Country distribution of all the phones that have ever tried a LOCATION UPDATE with us: 25c3, 26c3, HAR2009, providing some nice statistics on what nationalities are attending the respective events.

C'est donc mardi 21 décembre que le Dr Nikolaus Schaller (Golden Delicious), a annoncé avoir recu, testé et (déjà) patché la première carte mère du GTA04 !



La version actuelle GTA04A2 n'est pas encore 100% fonctionnelle, d'où les patches, et sert déjà de base à la version GTA04A3, qui elle sera commercialisée en tout début d'année (février). Mais dispo pour mars 2011 (fabrication, commandes etc...)

Pour l'instant, le projet se cantonne à refondre complètement la carte mère, le projet GTA04 sera donc une mise à jour d'un téléphone GTA02 (ou GTA01!) existant. Le coût exhorbitant de la fabrication d'un boitier rebute toujours les concepteurs. (et le volume à produire aussi, qui va générer un risque financier que personne ne peut/veut prendre pour l'instant).

Il y a donc au programme :

• UMTS(HSPA)
• GPS
• Wifi
• BlueTooth
• Altmitere
• Gyroscope
• Boussole
• FM (avec emmeteur il me semble!)
• Accéléromètre
• APN optionnel

Pour dégager un peu de revenu, il est proposé un achat par souscription du GTA04A3 pour 280€. Le prix n'est pas celui final, c'est  juste une idée. plus d'info : http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04-Early-Adopter


Donc tout  va très vite maintenant, plus d'infos dès que l'on peut vous en donner !
A très bientôt !

Quelques photos :

http://download.goldelico.com/gta04/images/DSC00710.jpg
http://download.goldelico.com/gta04/images/DSC00708.jpg

Lien vers la BeagleBoard :
http://projects.goldelico.com/p/ombeagle/

Une video de la carte :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjFKQx18DgA

Le wiki du projet:
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/GTA04

La page chez Golden Delicious
http://projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/

The major Austrian newspaper Der Standard was yesterday featuring an an Interview with me on GSM security related issues. Being in Austria, the interview is obviously in German language, sorry for all non-German-speaking readers of my blog.

Behind the scenes, we've been working on preparing the experimental GSM/GPRS/EDGE network at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress. The regulatory authority was nice enough to grant us 6 ARFCN, which we will split to 3 BTS (2 TRX each), resulting in one BTS with 2 TRX on each of the 3 conference building floors.

I've started a page in the 27C3 conference wiki about the GSM network. Please notice that this information is still preliminary at this point.

The wiki page also contains detailed instructions on how you can participate in the test network. I'm hoping a lot of you will bring a dedicated cellphone that you can put the 27C3 SIM inside and participate in the network.

I'm particularly excited about GPRS/EDGE support. We will be handing out official, world-wide routed, unfiltered IPv4 addresses to each and every phone. This means you are free to run port scans or other attacks (please: No DoS) over an unfiltered IP network directly into your mobile phone.

I've not blogged in a while, and though I've said I'd try to make my blog less of a platform for public bitching and whining, I figure it's Christmas, I should get to do what I want. So this is a blog post on why all 'gestures' in applications suck, 'gestures' are always a bad idea and if you're implementing 'gestures' in your application, you're doing it wrong. Of course, this is all my personal opinion and I've done only the most cursory amount of HCI study, so take it with a pitcher of salt.

Great user-interfaces are made great by working on a user's familiarities. This makes a lot of sense. If someone designs an icon to represent an action, they find the nearest every-day analogy that has a clear and identifiable visual, and base it off of that. Mail icons involve envelopes, print icons involve printers, search icons involve magnifying glasses (ok, that last one relies pretty heavily on cultural knowledge which is probably questionable nowadays, but bear with me). This should follow on to all aspects of HCI. People will find things easier if they can apply a skill they already have, or they can relate it to something they're already familiar with.

Touch-screens are becoming a much more common input-device these days, and they're one I've been interested in for a very, very long time. Now that they're becoming more common, more people are trying to retro-fit their applications to work better with this new interface. And this seems to be where 'gestures' come in. People see pinch-to-zoom, or dragging on the iPhone/Pad/Pod (and I'm just going to reference those, as as far as I'm concerned, they're the only devices that have gotten touch-interaction close to being right), and they seem to think "Hey, that's cool, I should put those actions in my application!" STOP.

I have a newsflash - and I'm sure this is just pointless ranting for a lot of people, but I'll say it anyway - pinch-to-zoom and dragging are not 'gestures'. They are physical manipulations that have a logical result. You don't 'execute a pinch-to-zoom gesture' when you zoom in on a web-page or photo on an iPad. You put two fingers on the screen and you move them closer or further apart, because it makes physical sense. When you put your finger on the surface, it responds instantly and with minimal latency - it immediately establishes that placing your finger on this surface attaches your finger to that point on the surface. From there, pinch-to-zoom makes perfect sense and follows logically. These aren't 'gestures', these are direct and logical manipulations of a surface. And that works. Having instant and reliable response to an action is a very powerful device.

If you're a gestures fan, you may now be thinking "Well, the difference is academic, surely?" and I would disagree very strongly with that. A gesture, by definition, is when you make a movement to express an idea. With a gesture, it's ok that you would do one thing, and then, afterwards, something happens. With a gesture, it's ok that whatever gesture you make, what follows may not be directly linked with that gesture. And this is often the feeling you get when you use an application that has 'gestures'. You make a gesture, and then, after the application has considered things, it does something. There is no guarantee that what you do will have an instant and well-defined reaction. And as long as we continue to call these actions 'gestures', this will always be ok, because this is the definition of a gesture. A gesture does not imply any kind of reaction, or make any implications about latency or reliability.

I bring this up now, as my Android phone (see, I'm not an Apple fanboy!) recently updated to the latest Android market, and this is a damn good example of bad HCI (and bad several other things too, but I want to focus my bitching). For those that have the application, open it up and check this out - There's a carousel at the top of the application. You can drag this to scroll it, and when you release, it sort-of maintains your momentum and sets it spinning. Except there's a problem (which is why I said sort-of) - When I drag it, there's no relation between where my finger is and what's under my finger. I'm not physically dragging the carousel, I'm performing a 'drag gesture'. Similarly, when I perform a quick drag gesture and I let go, there's a small pause, and then the carousel starts spinning with the momentum I gave it - except it isn't the momentum I gave it, it's a similar, but not quite right, momentum. The list at the bottom of the application is better (due to it being a stock scrolling widget I imagine), though not much, because they seem to do blocking I/O while you dragging, breaking the direct relation between your physical interaction and the on-screen response.

I don't mean to pick on Android Market especially, as it's something you can see in touch-based interfaces all over the place (Android is bad, but feature-phones are often far worse). But in my eyes, this sort of thing shouldn't be acceptable. Apple proved that it isn't that hard several years ago now - it's not an innovation anymore, someone's gone and done it - we can just copy them!

So, if you have an application that you expect to work on a touch-screen, or you're planning on writing one, think first, "What physical analogy am I making here?" What common familiarity are you taking advantage of? And if your application involves taking advantage of the fact that most people are used to manipulating things with their hands, then do try to realise just how important making the feedback instant, reliable and logical are. Then realise that you must NOT call these physical interactions 'gestures'.

Back one or two years ago, when I first discovered the RRLP as a mechanism how operators can get very precise GPS positioning of a mobile phone (without any authentication or a way for the user to prevent or at least notice it), I was frankly speaking shocked.

We've done some experiments at HAR2009 and obtained a number of great position fixes, mostly from iPhones. The nice aspect of RRLP is that it is buried down inside Layer3 of the GSM protocol stack in the baseband processor. This is at a much lower level than all the web or App based location based services that are running in an application program in userspace of the application processor.

Now RRLP comes in a number of different flavors. What we have done so far is called ms-based positioning, where the phone works as an autonomous GPS receiver, pretty much like a personal navigation device or any hand-held GPS receiver. So the network simply asks "tell me your GPS coordinates if you know them" and the phone will respond. Some phones ask for assistance data in order to do A-GPS. But that's it.

What has been more of a mystery to me is the ms-assisted GPS RRLP mode, where the phone just performs some measurements and forwards the resulting data to the network. I never really understood the details of how it works, but always wanted to. Last week I finally found some time to do the research required to fully understand it:

The network tells the phone the exact bit timing, Doppler shift and other parameters for each of the satellites that it _knows_ the phone would be receiving given the current cell the phone is registered to. The phone then performs some measurements within very narrow time/frequency/synchronization windows, and passes back the timing of those received signals relative to the current GSM cell signal. Using this information, the actual position estimate will be completely computed inside the network, not inside the phone.

Presumably this ms-assisted mode was implemented to not have to put a full-blown GPS receiver into every phone, requiring sophisticated processing in either hardware or software. Also, this method should be much quicker as the network _knows_ all the current ephemeris data and GPS signal timing, whereas a stand-alone GPS receiver would have to take quite a lot of effort to acquire a signal from cold-start, even if there is some assistance data.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to actually implement the network side for this. It would be a fun project, but I have already way too many of them (and customers who only pay for other features in our Free Software GSM stack).

There's now a RRLP wiki page at security.osmocom.org. As short as it is it still contains more information about RRLP than I could find on any other public source on the network - except the protocol specs.