Adam's site

Arbeit an einem Unity 5.5 projekt namens Elma

Die Entwicklung erfolgt in meinem Github Repository: https://github.com/kaliszad/elma
Die binären Builds sind hier zu bekommen:

• Linux AMD64
• Linux x86
• Windows AMD64
• Windows x86

Announcement, Technicolor published source code for TC7200, TC7210 and TC7230

The sources to the Technicolor TC72XX cable modem very frequently used in Europe in Ireland, Germany and Czech Republic e.g. have been published on Github. Here is the story:

Because the bridging capability on my Technicolor TC7200 was awful, I was interested, what I could do to fix this for me. The advice in various forums was mostly trial and error kind of stuff. But I also noticed, that Technicolor and UPC CZ are probably not in compliance with the GPLv2.

After about half a year of back and forth with those companies, I convinced Technicolor to comply with GPL an embrace the open source more, or at least make a code drop. Technicolor TC7200, TC7210, TC7230 should have their codebase open sourced and available on Github (including firmware):

eCos Library

Linux

As you will notice, there is no licence notice in the root directory, but this should apply: and click on the "TC7200, TC7200.U, TC7210 and TC7230" tab. There are further notices in the files. Some do seem to be proprietary, so please double check.

As for the TC7200, the problem with a missing firmware seems to have been fixed and the specific BCM3383 firmware can be found after a short, high level inspection. This could also mean, the BCM33843 chip has a publicly available firmware now, since that chip is pin and software compatible with BCM3383. But that would need to be verified.

One has to note, that the product is probably still infringing on GPLv2, since there is no source code offer or licence with the product and the source code was made available under questionable conditions this week. Even if this was corrected, that doesn't reinstitute the rights to redistribute to the company. For more information, see the recent court case reported at Opensource.com.

There exists an email address, which seems to generate some answers from Technicolor. That email was given to me by my ISP. If you are interested in contacting Technicolor about open source, don`t hesitate and ask me or your ISP for the email privately.

Thoughts about public shaming and Twitter

While I think, there are many interesting people to follow on Twitter, who are posting technical posts and are mostly inert to social outrage and public shaming. Sometimes, it is just hard to fit the right words into 140 characters and then you may find yourself in a position, where you wrote something explosive. A good example of what might happen to you afterwards can be seen in this video by Jon Ronson named "When online shaming spirals out of control". Written on 27th of July 2015

Computer not booting past operating system loading screen

I just recently took an older computer with the Asus P5N7A-VM mainboard from my parents and wanted to clean it up a bit. I plugged-in the USB cable from the Dell Ultrasharp U2412M USB hub, to which my keyboard and mouse are connected, into the mainboards USB connector. After that, the computer just wouldn't boot past the Windows startup logo or past just after beeing out of GRUB in GNU/ Linux. I did every possible thing I could think of including resetting BIOS, unplugging pretty much everything I could, I even applied new heat-conducting paste on the chipset and the CPU and cleaned the computer very thoroughly. After reading through some forums, I got the idea, there might be something wrong with USB. And that was it. Just leave out hub mentioned, connect your peripherals directly to the computer and that's it. It works! Written sometime in November 2015

A paper on OpenACC and heterogeneous systems programming

This is the promised paper about programming for accelerators basically. It is the final draft, but I still might get it back. Also, should you find some mistakes or have anything to say about the paper, I will gladly accept your feedback!

Facebook - leave - note

The reasons for leaving Facebook?

• I realize, I don't need Facebook for being in contact with people I want to be in contact with. For that, email is just as good and much more "personal", almost like a letter in a 21st century.
• I strongly disagree with the policy that users are goods for consuming advertisement. I also don't like the idea, that my data isn't under my control and that I can't really do anything I want with Facebook, besides providing more information about me (which I am always reminded to do in not very subtle ways).
• The quality of about 80% of the posts is horrible and is actually spam. And I must say, I already filter a lot and have people in my contacts, who do post reasonable stuff (the other 20%) but it's the minority.
• I waste time on Facebook, even if I look at it once in a few days or so. Also, the app and its constant updates eat my smartphone battery. I have better ways to spend the extra mWh, such as reading quality content.

What maybe the reasons for you to leave Facebook?

• You generate money for Facebook and don't get anything from that, besides the feeling, that you are in touch with people. Actually, you are not. Go out and talk to people or send them a nice email or post-card. Having hundreds or thousands of "friends" doesn't mean anything. Your best friends can probably be counted on one or two hands and the other important people will not outnumber them significantly.
• Facebook lets NSA use your data or even gives your data to NSA (and other firms) and helps governments and big companies keep track of the data on the internet. You shouldn't support that and yes, even your data is significant. Facebook can track your logins for years and it probably knows better, where you have been last month, than you do. (The implications are probably scary, if you have any secrets to keep.) You will notice, when the airport staff will undress you, because you have been to Egypt last year or something like that. (They will not tell you, that this is the reason, but the computer processing big data will command the staff to search you because of that.)
• Maybe you don't actually read interesting stuff on Facebook anymore. You just have it and keep track of meaningless things, when you could spend more time reading a book or go out with your best friend or partner.

A small update to contacts

While I am still working on my proseminar, which is taking longer than expected due to some PGI compiler problem (OpenACC 2.0 atomic directive not implemented in PGI 14.1 available at my university What maybe the reasons for you to leave Facebook? 1. You generate money for Facebook and don't get anything from that, besides the feeling, that you are in touch with people. Actually, you are not. Go out and talk to people or send them a nice email or post-card. Having hundreds or thousands of "friends" doesn't mean anything. Your best friends can probably be counted on one or two hands and the other important people will not outnumber them significantly. 2. Facebook lets NSA use your data or even gives your data to NSA (and other firms) and helps governments and big companies keep track of the data on the internet. You shouldn't support that and yes, even your data is significant. Facebook can track your logins for years and it probably knows better, where you have been last month, than you do. (The implications are probably scary, if you have any secrets to keep.) You will notice, when the airport staff will undress you, because you have been to Egypt last year or something like that. (They will not tell you, that this is the reason, but the computer processing big data will command the staff to search you because of that.) 3. Maybe you don't actually read interesting stuff on Facebook anymore. You just have it and keep track of meaningless things, when you could spend more time reading a book or with your best friend or partner. If you want to be in touch with me, send me an email to the address provided in the contact and provide information you want me to have such as a phone number, or home address. I will add those to my contacts I keep secured well.

Still work in progress

I am still working on this site, but I have some ideas and the work is continuing.

So what is it, that I am so busy?

I am writing a paper about OpenACC and a bit of OpenMP which I hope, I will be able to publish here as well. That is also work in progress and should be for about a week at least.

The next thing, that's keeping me busy is my occupation at AG DSN. At AG DSN I learned many lessons and had a great deal of hands-on work in many areas ranging from hardware setup, server builds, soldering SMD like crazy to scripting, networking stuff etc. I didn't do everything, there are others, who do much more than me, but I do my best in the time I can spend there.

Sometimes, I get to do some music, or I just want to 'have a life'. Which means, I don't configure Mutt, or don't fiddle with some routers or XMonad tiling manager and actually go out, or meet my girlfriend or my friends.

That's about it, I will keep you posted on what is currently going on as soon, as I find some time and energy to do so. :-)