Openmoko

Some Free Software projects have already moved to Github, some probably plan it and the Python project will move soon. I have not followed the reasons for why the Python project is moving but there is a long list of reasons to move to a platform ... [More] like github.com. They seem to have a good uptime, offer checkouts through ssh, git, http (good for corporate firewalls) and a subversion interface, they have integrated wiki and ticket management, the fork feature allows an upstream to discover what is being done to the software, the pull requests and the integration with third party providers is great. The last item allows many nice things, specially integrating with a ton of Continuous Integration tools (Travis, Semaphore, Circle, who knows). Not everything is great though. As a Free Software project one might decide that using proprietary javascript to develop and interact with a Free Software project is not acceptable, one might want to control the repository yourself and then people look for alternatives. At the Osmocom project we are using cgit, mailinglists, patchwork, trac, host our own jenkins and then mirror some of our repositories to github.com for easy access. Another is to find a platform like Github but that is Free and a lot of people look or point to gitlab.com. From a freedom point of view I think Gitlab is a lot worse than Github. They try to create the illusion that this is a Free Software alternative to Github.com, they offer to host your project but if you want to have the same features for self hosting you will notice that you fell for their marketing. Their website prominently states “Runs GitLab Enterprise” Edition. If you have a look at the feature comparison between the “Community Edition” (the Free Software project) and their open core additions (Enterprise edition) you will notice that many of the extra features are essential. So when deciding putting your project on github.com or gitlab.com the question is not between proprietary and Free Software but essentially between proprietary and proprietary and as such there is no difference. [Less]

Imagine you run a GSM network and you have multiple systems at the edge of your network that communicate with other systems. For debugging reasons you might want to collect traffic and then look at it to explore an issue or look at it systematically ... [More] to improve your network, your roaming traffic, etc. The first approach might be to run tcpdump on each of these systems, run it in a round-robin manner, compress the old traffic and then have a script that downloads/uploads it once a day to a central place. The issue is that each node needs to have enough disk space, you might not feel happy to keep old files on the edge or you just don’t know when is a good time to copy it. Another approach is to create an aggregation framework. A client will use libpcap to capture the traffic and then redirect it to a central server. The central server will then store the traffic and might rotate based on size or age of the file. Old files can then be compressed and removed. I created the osmo-pcap tool many years ago and have recently fixed a 64bit PCAP header issue (the timeval in the header is 32bit), collection of jumbo frames and now updated the README.md file of the project and created packages for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, SLES and I made sure that it can be compiled and use on FreeBSD10 as well. If you are using or decided not to use this software I would be very happy to hear about it. [Less]

Imagine you run a GSM network and you have multiple systems at the edge of your network that communicate with other systems. For debugging reasons you might want to collect traffic and then look at it to explore an issue or look at it systematically ... [More] to improve your network, your roaming traffic, etc. The first approach might be to run tcpdump on each of these systems, run it in a round-robin manner, compress the old traffic and then have a script that downloads/uploads it once a day to a central place. The issue is that each node needs to have enough disk space, you might not feel happy to keep old files on the edge or you just don’t know when is a good time to copy it. Another approach is to create an aggregation framework. A client will use libpcap to capture the traffic and then redirect it to a central server. The central server will then store the traffic and might rotate based on size or age of the file. Old files can then be compressed and removed. I created the osmo-pcap tool many years ago and have recently fixed a 64bit PCAP header issue (the timeval in the header is 32bit), collection of jumbo frames and now updated the README.md file of the project and created packages for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, OpenSUSE, SLES and I made sure that it can be compiled and use on FreeBSD10 as well. If you are using or decided not to use this software I would be very happy to hear about it. [Less]

In the past I have written about my usage of Tufao and Qt to build REST services. This time I am writing about my experience of using the TreeFrog framework to build a full web application. You might wonder why one would want to build such a thing ... [More] in a statically and compiled language instead of something more dynamic. There are a few reasons for it: Performance: The application is intended to run on our sysmoBTS GSM Basestation (TI Davinci DM644x). By modern standards it is a very low-end SoC (ARMv5te instruction set, single core, etc, low amount of RAM) and at the same time still perfectly fine to run a GSM network. Interface: For GSM we have various libraries with a C programming interface and they are easy to consume from C++. Compilation/Distribution: By (cross-)building the application there is  a “single” executable and we don’t have the dependency mess of Ruby. The second decision was to not use Tufao and search for a framework that has user management and a template/rendering/canvas engine built-in. At the Chaos Computer Camp in 2007 I remember to have heard a conversation of “Qt” for the Web (Wt, C++ Web Toolkit) and this was the first framework I looked at. It seems like a fine project/product but interfacing with Qt seemed like an after thought. I continued to look and ended up finding and trying the TreeFrog framework. I am really surprised how long this project exists without having heard about it. It is using/built on top of Qt, uses QtSQL for the ORM mapping, QMetaObject for dispatching to controllers and the template engine and resembles Ruby on Rails a lot. It has two template engines, routing of URLs to controllers/slots, one can embed any C++ in the template. The documentation is complete and by using the search on the website I found everything I was searching for my “advanced” topics. Because of my own stupidity I ended up single stepping through the code and a Qt coder should feel right at home. My favorite features: tspawn model TableName will autogenerate (and update) a C++ model based on the table in the database. The updating is working as well. The application builds a libmodel.so, libhelper.so (I removed that) and libcontroller.so. When using the -r option of the application the application will respawn itself. At first I thought I would not like it but it improves round trip times. C++ in the template. The ERB template is parsed and a C++ class will be generated and the ::toString() method will generate the HTML code. So in case something is going wrong, it is very easy to inspect. If you are currently using Ruby on Rails, Django but would like to do it with C++, have a look at TreeFrog. I really like it so far. [Less]

Berlin continues to gain a lot of popularity, culturally and culinarily it is an awesome place and besides increasing rents it still remains more affordable than other cities. In terms of economy Berlin attracts new companies and branches/offices as ... [More] well. At the same time I felt the itch and it was time to leave my home town once again. In the end I settled for the bicycle friendly (and sometimes sunny) city of Amsterdam. My main interest remains building reliable systems with Smalltalk, C/C++, Qt and learn new technology (Tensorflow? Rust? ElasticSearch, Mongo, UUCP) and talk about GSM (SCCP, SIGTRAN, TCAP, ROS, MAP, Diameter, GTP) or get re-exposed to WebKit/Blink. If you are in Amsterdam or if you know people or companies I am happy to meet and make new contacts. [Less]

In the past I have written about my usage of Tufao and Qt to build REST services. This time I am writing about my experience of using the TreeFrog framework to build a full web application. You might wonder why one would want to build such a thing ... [More] in a statically and compiled language instead of something more dynamic. There are a few reasons for it: Performance: The application is intended to run on our sysmoBTS GSM Basestation (TI Davinci DM644x). By modern standards it is a very low-end SoC (ARMv5te instruction set, single core, etc, low amount of RAM) and at the same time still perfectly fine to run a GSM network. Interface: For GSM we have various libraries with a C programming interface and they are easy to consume from C++. Compilation/Distribution: By (cross-)building the application there is  a “single” executable and we don’t have the dependency mess of Ruby. The second decision was to not use Tufao and search for a framework that has user management and a template/rendering/canvas engine built-in. At the Chaos Computer Camp in 2007 I remember to have heard a conversation of “Qt” for the Web (Wt, C++ Web Toolkit) and this was the first framework I looked at. It seems like a fine project/product but interfacing with Qt seemed like an after thought. I continued to look and ended up finding and trying the TreeFrog framework. I am really surprised how long this project exists without having heard about it. It is using/built on top of Qt, uses QtSQL for the ORM mapping, QMetaObject for dispatching to controllers and the template engine and resembles Ruby on Rails a lot. It has two template engines, routing of URLs to controllers/slots, one can embed any C++ in the template. The documentation is complete and by using the search on the website I found everything I was searching for my “advanced” topics. Because of my own stupidity I ended up single stepping through the code and a Qt coder should feel right at home. My favorite features: tspawn model TableName will autogenerate (and update) a C++ model based on the table in the database. The updating is working as well. The application builds a libmodel.so, libhelper.so (I removed that) and libcontroller.so. When using the -r option of the application the application will respawn itself. At first I thought I would not like it but it improves round trip times. C++ in the template. The ERB template is parsed and a C++ class will be generated and the ::toString() method will generate the HTML code. So in case something is going wrong, it is very easy to inspect. If you are currently using Ruby on Rails, Django but would like to do it with C++, have a look at TreeFrog. I really like it so far. [Less]

Berlin continues to gain a lot of popularity, culturally and culinarily it is an awesome place and besides increasing rents it still remains more affordable than other cities. In terms of economy Berlin attracts new companies and branches/offices as ... [More] well. At the same time I felt the itch and it was time to leave my home town once again. In the end I settled for the bicycle friendly (and sometimes sunny) city of Amsterdam. My main interest remains building reliable systems with Smalltalk, C/C++, Qt and learn new technology (Tensorflow? Rust? ElasticSearch, Mongo, UUCP) and talk about GSM (SCCP, SIGTRAN, TCAP, ROS, MAP, Diameter, GTP) or get re-exposed to WebKit/Blink. If you are in Amsterdam or if you know people or companies I am happy to meet and make new contacts. [Less]

As part of the Osmocom.org software development we have a Jenkins set-up that is executing unit and system tests. For OpenBSC we will compile the software, then execute the unit tests and finally run a bunch of system tests. The system tests will ... [More] verify making configuration changes through the telnet interface, the machine control interface, might try to connect to other parts, etc. In the past this was executed after a committer had pushed his changes to the repository and the build time didn’t matter. As part of the move to the Gerrit code review we execute them before and this means that people might need to wait for the result… (and waiting for a computer shouldn’t be necessary these days). sysmocom is renting a dedicated build machine to speed-up compilation and I have looked at how to execute the system tests in parallel. The issue is that during a system test we bind to ports on localhost and that means we can not have two test runs at the same time. I decided to use the Linux network namespace support and opted for using docker to achieve it. There are some hick-ups but in general it is a great step forward. Using a statement like the following we execute our CI script in a clean environment. $ docker run –rm=true -e HOME=/build -w /build -i -u build -v $PWD:/build osmocom:amd64 /build/contrib/jenkins.sh As part of the OpenBSC build we are re-building dependencies and thanks to building in the virtual /build directory we can look at archiving libosmocore/libosmo-sccp/libosmo-abis and not rebuild it all the time. [Less]

As part of the Osmocom.org software development we have a Jenkins set-up that is executing unit and system tests. For OpenBSC we will compile the software, then execute the unit tests and finally run a bunch of system tests. The system tests will ... [More] verify making configuration changes through the telnet interface, the machine control interface, might try to connect to other parts, etc. In the past this was executed after a committer had pushed his changes to the repository and the build time didn’t matter. As part of the move to the Gerrit code review we execute them before and this means that people might need to wait for the result… (and waiting for a computer shouldn’t be necessary these days). sysmocom is renting a dedicated build machine to speed-up compilation and I have looked at how to execute the system tests in parallel. The issue is that during a system test we bind to ports on localhost and that means we can not have two test runs at the same time. I decided to use the Linux network namespace support and opted for using docker to achieve it. There are some hick-ups but in general it is a great step forward. Using a statement like the following we execute our CI script in a clean environment. $ docker run –rm=true -e HOME=/build -w /build -i -u build -v $PWD:/build osmocom:amd64 /build/contrib/jenkins.sh As part of the OpenBSC build we are re-building dependencies and thanks to building in the virtual /build directory we can look at archiving libosmocore/libosmo-sccp/libosmo-abis and not rebuild it all the time. [Less]

For many years I've always been wanting to do some motorbike riding across the Alps, but somehow never managed to do so. It seems when in Germany I've always been too busy - contrary to the many motorbike tours around and across Taiwan which I did ... [More] during my frequent holidays there. This year I finally took the opportunity to combine visiting some friends in Hungary and Bavaria with a nice tour starting from Berlin over Prague and Brno (CZ), Bratislava (SK) to Tata and Budapeest (HU), further along lake Balaton (HU) towards Maribor (SI) and finally across the Grossglockner High Alpine Road (AT) to Salzburg and Bavaria before heading back to Berlin. It was eight fun (but sometimes long) days riding. For some strange turn of luck, not a single drop of rain was encountered during all that time, traveling across six countries. The most interesting parts of the tour were: Along the Elbe river from Pirna (DE) to Lovosice (CZ). Beautiful scenery along the river valley, most parts of the road immediately on either side of the river. Quite touristy on the German side, much more pleasant and quiet on the Czech side. From Mosonmagyarovar via Gyor to Tata (all HU). Very little traffic alongside road '1'. Beautiful scenery with lots of agriculture and forests left and right. The Northern coast of Lake Balaton, particularly from Tinany to Keszthely (HU). Way too many tourists and traffic for my taste, but still very impressive to realize how large/long that lake really is. From Maribor to Dravograd (SI) alongside the Drau/Drav river valley. Finally, of course, the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, which reminded me in many ways of the high mountain tours I did in Taiwan. Not a big surprise, given that both lead you up to about 2500 meters above sea level. Finally, I have to say I've been very happy with the performance of my 1996 model BMW F 650ST bike, who has coincidentally just celebrated its 20ieth anniversary. I know it's an odd bike design (650cc single-cylinder with two spark plugs, ignition coils and two carburetors) but consider it an acquired taste ;) I've also published a map with a track log of the trip In one month from now, I should be reporting from motorbike tours in Taiwan on the equally trusted small Yamaha TW-225 - which of course plays in a totally different league ;) [Less]