Posted by Tim
Filed under: SoC 2006
Google Summer of Code 2006
My proposal for this year's Summer of Code by Google has been accepted which is awesome! I will implement dialup connection support in NetworkManager. So by the end of the summer you will be able to connect via Bluetooth a mobile and GPRS, via DSL and Modems, so basically most PPP connection types. If I find a way to test (basically a PCMCIA ISDN adapter) I will implement support for ISDN as well. Jeremy Katz and Dan Williams from the Fedora Project will be the mentors for this project. You can see the other projects that have been accepted on the Fedora Wiki SoC page.
It's pretty cool to work on an interesting project doing useful work and getting paid for this. Sounds like fun and a lot of work for the summer. I need a better display to be able to work outside in sunlight :-)
So have fun to the other SoC hackers.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Automatica 2006
Last week I have been on the Automatica 2006 fair which is about automation, robotics and computer vision. I have been there with my boss from the AllemaniACs robocup team. We had been invited by Festo Didactic to demo our robots. They sponsored the parts for our new powerful kicking device. This device enables us now to kick the ball into the goal from the other half of the field (given that we aim in the right direction and no opponent catches the ball before...). Before that we could just jostle the ball a few centimeters.
Automatica was pretty cool. Festo had a small platform of 4m by 5m or so 50cm over ground that they thought we could play on. But 70kg of live robot mass prevented this from happening and we played on the ground. In the end the new Robotino robots from Festo used that area. Quite interesting platform - and they have a real design and not these scratchy boxes that already fought some soccer battles that we have...
We setup our lowlevel system quite quickly (if we take into account that on real events there are usually other better trained guys recording and postprocessing the environment map etc.). To compile the mapping tool we needed some missing libs so I setup an Internet connection via my mobile and Bluetooth and GPRS. The colormap was ok so nothing of my usual business had to be done. But they had a 2m strip of orange carpet around the booth, not a good combination with a ball detection that has an orange ball as the main feature... After we had the map I could get the path planner alive. In combination with our collision avoider and the localization that demonstrated quite well how good the software works. Sometimes we just let one of the robots drive and an hour later we remembered that we started it and looked after the robot for the robot again - it was still cruising around in front of the booth. Especially some asian guys liked it to jump right in front of the robot and see it avoiding collisions and planning a new path around him. Some school kids quickly found a way to freeze the robot by jumping around the robot all the time. So that was fun! We demonstrated the mighty kick a few times and would have scored some goals against the human (!) goal keepers. The kick is damn fast!
The booth was the mechatronics booth with several different projects presenting their work. On one day we mounted a big sign of the booth on one of the robots and drove around with it over the whole fair. Of course this was just a plea to be able to see the fair by ourselves. But on the evening they told us that quite a few people came afterwards to the booth telling them about the robot they had seen and the curiosity this caused. On our tour we stopped by at several companies. A robot attracts men, a robot that can play soccer even more! So it was quite easy to get in touch with people and talk to them. In the end we had quite a few interesting contacts that we will have to talk to in the near future now.
We were lucky to have pretty good weather so we went to beer gardens on every evening eventually creating plans for our high level system on the soccer robots. Stay tuned and come to RoboCup 2006 in Bremen in mid-June!
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Trivial Pursuit
"Coding is like Trivial Pursuit: if you don't know something, it's not because you're stupid."
Taken from a presentation about the Mortal Kombat Model of Software Development. Great read! Another thing that I will remember is that there are more bad ideas than good ideas...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Personal
Tempus Fugit
I'm currently staying with Tob at Buck for about a week. As Buck will finish his studies in Sweden soon this was the last chance to visit him.
We arrived pretty late on Tuesday and got welcomed with a nice dinner (at 11 pm!). Nice! It took some time and a few lines of patch to get NetworkManager to connect via OpenVPN and a proxy to my intranet server, but eventually I had internet access again. Expect this in CVS sometime next week, need to tweek it a little bit to be able to use the Gnome-wide proxy server.
On Wednesday Buck shows us Lund. We walked straight through the city. Lund is a nice city which a lot of cool buildings. In the park we passed some birds which seem to have been the template birds for the Pixar short filem "For the Birds". They looked and sounded exactly like the birds in that :-) The university is quite impressive, especially the rooms Buck showed us in the library. That's a library I would like to have in Aachen! Then we heard a lecture with the Buck about renewal processes. this kind of mathematical content wasn't what I had in mind for that day so in the break I decided to explore other parts of Buck's university live - the campus in front of the math building... Tob joined and so we slept for about an hour in the meadow.
In the evening we had a barbecue. We had chicken and I made potato salad (the version with lots of mayonaise). Then we tested Tob's new sauce: The "Possible Side Effects" sauce with impressive 280000 Scoville (german article about the Scoville Scale is slightly better). I only dipped my fork veeery slightly into the sauce and tasted it with plenty of potato salad. Damn, that was already hot! Buck and Tob had a lot more. While Buck apparently has a somewhat broken sensoric systems for hot Tob got a little bit dizzy... Beer helps to cool it down - it really does as the article about Capsaicin (german Capsaicin article) shows as alcohol dillutes the Capsaicin, as does fat.
On Thursday we went to Kopenhagen. I like the European idea. We just got on the train and drove to Denmark. No passport control or whatsoever. Great! We drove over the Öresund bridge to Kopenhagen. We walked around the city for the day and did a quite classic sight-seeing tour. We ended up in Christiania drinking a beer and chilling and amusing about all the dogs everywhere going over tables and banks. Great! They didn't find us very interesting, until we got burgers from the grill. Since it is pretty easy to impress dogs with a piece of meat it was simple to get them to react to "Sit!". Tob was quite impressed. After explaining that this was more or less just a reflex he tried it himself - and it worked! So Tob teached his first dog :-)
We were back home late in the evening. A good time to try one of Buck's White Russion drinks. I liked it. I used the time to give Enlightenment 17 a try from the Fedora e17 repository. This went pretty smoothly and e17 is really a lot of fun to play with. It does not (yet?) seem to be as suitable for my daily work as Gnome but it's definitely a great technical demo which raises expectations toward more eye-candy on the desktop. At some time Tob just fell asleep, half on the floor, half in the bed... At about 4 it was then time to get some sleep.
On Friday we started the day easy, sleeping long, catching up with mails and news. The weather was great (as it had been for all the time that we were there!) and so we sat outside in the garden, surfing, hacking on stuff and planning the rest of the day, listening to some country songs (which resemble other pop songs, not our favorite type of music, but music that matches a nice summer day). In the afternoon we went to Lund city once again. We had lunch eating pizza (cheap and good) and went to an asian shop selling hot sauces. The kind of "don't try" hot sauces. Buck and Tob stared for ages. We wandered around looking here and there and were back home in the evening - where we instantly fell back to nerd habits, until we made Kötbulla with curry, pretty good. After that we had to watch a trash movie, "just something stupid" was a criterion, Scorpion King got chosen. So with a white russion and a few gaming consoles we prepared for the movie. Buck had an old console which could play Street Fighter. Great! Had fun.
On Saturday we went back home. We had to get up really early (8:00 is damn early if you go to bad at 4:15!) and it took some time to get Buck and Tob out of their beds. We had about 2.5 hours in Göteborg but were not in the mood for some real sight seeing. So we just walked around. We ate at a McDonalds where I was shocked - they don't have 20-packs of Chicken McNuggets. When I ordered this the girld behind the counter was looking as if I'm a little green alien from Mars...
Now I'm back in Germany and doing some university stuff... Tempus fugit.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
Freeing tabs
Since I have the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension I use tab as pseudo-bookmarks. Because this extension has a session saver and crash recovery tabs that I think I might want to view again later stay open forever.
One of those tabs that I now want to close is a deep link to the FreeBSD FAQ. It contains a nice answer to the question Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?. Very entertaining is chapter 17. So finally I posted it and can close that tab...
Another page that is now opened for a long time is about Snake Oil Warning Signs. It's rather old and a lot has changed about how crypto is handled nowadays, but if you visit the CeBIT for instance and stop by at some "security" companies you can still have some fun keeping this text in mind...
