I’ve finally gotten around to listing all Waypoints (Geocaches, Opencaches, Closedcaches, Earthcaches, Terracaches including Locationless, Navicaches, etc.) I’ve found a box, enjoyful, educating, a good place to hide one myself, etc. and putting up a list and, of course, generate my own statpic.

I’ll put them up for the other project members, too (already made a picture for gecko2@ but bsiegert@ still needs one; we also need to collect offline lists of found, owned and attended waypoints)…

A bit of background story: I decided, years ago, to have an offline list of cache finds in case something would happen. Just, I had found way too many already, so this was a huge bit of work. Oh well… I of course procrastinated, and then something did happen (Opencaching wanting to force a Restricted Commons licence; me disagreeing and suggesting a change; some trigger-happy person immediately deleting my account without waiting for the discussion or the decision period to end; weeks of forum discussions; Opencaching allowing dual-licencing; them telling me they can’t restore my data – probably never heard of databa…sorry, MySQL backups). And I still didn’t have the list. Now I do; recreated even the OC information from what was still accessible and with help from one OC supporter (“mic@”, thanks); merged caches that are co-listed on several platforms, etc. (still need to put in the FTF/STF/TTF/4TF/LTF and voting/favourites information) and a statpic, all in Open Source and Open Data, in cvs(1) with mksh(1) and… a… frontend for libgd2 I admit, but we had been using that for the MirWebsite for a while already.

I suggest every geocacher keep an offline or local record of all their finds (and hides and attended logs) for things like this, in case some platform decides to… let’s say, “put your data into the cloud… where it is? I don’t know”.

Since a while…

I am a proud

On the other hand… I should probably put up my own, local, list of found caches, considering what happened to me on “Open”caching. And maybe write intros for people new to geocaching, since it’d be virtually no work now had I done it initially. (And for fanfiction readers! I wish I’d kept a list of read fics, not just of these I currently read and/or are currently unfinished.)

Es gibt eine Literaturverlosung im Themengebiet Geocaching auf dieser Geocaching Franken Seite. Man kann dort zwei Fachbücher „Geocaching – GPS-Freizeitspaß für Abenteurer” und zwei Exemplare der Zeitschrift „Outlife“ zu ebendiesem Thema gewinnen.

Nun hoffe ich natürlich, einen Gewinn zu reißen, gerade weil ich der Meinung bin, dies als stolzer Opencacher (und damit meine ich das echte OpenCaching-Netzwerk und nicht den billigen, ungepflegten Garmin-Ripoff (OC.COM alias OXnnnnn), der vor einiger Zeit eine feindliche Übernahme des guten Namens versucht hat. Stets im Kampf gegen diese, die unseren Sport zu kommerzialisieren versuchen mit Premiummitgliedschaften bei GC.COM; gekauften Anwendungen für Windows®, um ihr Profi-Navi besser bedienen zu können; und dergleichen. Außerdem hoffe ich, hierduch einen besseren Einstieg in die Rätselcaches, die mir bisher, durch Mangel an Kontakten in der Geocacher-Stammtischrunde (fühle mich dort ein wenig wie ein Windows®-Nutzer beim Linuxstammtisch…), sich nicht erschlossen.

Außerdem bin ich gerade, auf Basis der OC.de-Karte, an einer „MirKarte“ am basteln, die einfach nur eine Google-und-OSM-Karte, die auch in älteren Browsern wie Opera 9 funktioniert, ist (relativ statisch, aber mit einigen Features wie der supergenialen Anzeige der Koordinaten unterm Mauszeiger). Bin noch nicht fertig, da ich mein ECMAscript erst auffrischen muß und auch die Maps-API-Dokumentation nochmal lesen will, aber immerhin. (Außerdem mag ich minimalen Code, und was ich bisher habe ist bloated. Und buggy.)

Vielleicht weiß man auch meine Beiträge zu den ganzen Open Source Projekten zu schätzen?

(maps.geocaching.de scheint down zu sein, und weder die neue neue noch die neue alte GC.COM-Karte tun im Opera… somit kann ich im Moment sowieso, von CacheWolf und Umkreissuche mal abgesehen, nur nach OC-Caches Ausschau halten.)

So, dann mal Gruß nach Franken aus der Eifel. Ich werde auch den Franken, die ich kenne, den GAV-Button nahelegen.

As written about here earlier, cats have a nice life. I walked into my home seeing three cats in a row, all black: two lazing around, the third (with white spots, and belonging to a different neighbour from the other two) ambulating. I went up and got my PocketPC with the already mentioned camera application to take a shoot. Sadly, the more shy cat went away, but I got some pictures of the other two – here they are, internet photo stars ☺ follow the hyperlink to get a large version.

Later I came back from geocaching (2 GC.COM-only, 1 OC-only *yay!* found, one not found due to not taking any hardware with me) the bigger guy lazed around in the bush next to where I usually park my bike. Lucky…

On Day 0, we were at my favourite Jugoslawian restaurant, and during eating and verpeiling, Andi took some pictures:

Take special note of the fun expressions everyone has…

Day 2, nothing of note at the conference itself – according to Jana, the only interesting talk (that tcpdump(8) GUI) was cancelled, and everything else was PHP and Web 2.0 crap. The food also was different, at least what I got, from Day 1. But it wasn’t as hot as on the previous day, and we did more socialising. I also managed to get the MirBSD ISO distributed some more.

Then I took my fellow DDs Enrico and madamezou geocaching for their first time, together with benz; they then took a Travelbug I found on Day 1 (with rsc) to Italy so it’ll end up in Rome, a next step on its mission.

Other rarely-seen people, such as Dr. Pfeffer, made an appearance, but overall the second day was quite relaxed. Ah, and Benny is a Doctor in Germany now as well.

On Monday, I slept quite a bit ☺

Built the ISO in the morning, today. Finally. Whew. It was much too warm in the mēnsa, and why did I have to get up so early anyway? Real Conferences™ don’t start before 10 o’clock, and there are no sensible activities before 11 o’clock anyway…

Talked to a lot of people, introduced my favourite Fedora Packager to Geocaching. Now my throat is sore and I’m tired. Social Event was not my case, as usual. (And even the vegetarian food now costs money as opposed to, I think, two years ago.) At least dry and not too loud. Still, best thing of FrOSCon is the Friday Evening Jugoslawian Food Mealtime ;-)

Two DNF out of four geocaches, well… one was too muggled, the other was no longer there, judging from the previous visitors’ log entries. Cached with natureshadow and bought his book on how not to cycle across Germany.

CLT was a blast, and it’s refreshing to attend an event without having to drive a booth of our own. Talked to lots of people. Since the boss was paying, even did some mingling in that area.

My ADSL line has been hiccupping ☹

Will drive to Chemnitz now. Maybe meet me there. No booth, just visiting to meet everyone again, rather spontaneous.

mksh was merged into Android (both AOSP and Google’s internal master tree) in the night 24/25th August, and is expected to be the one shell to rule them all, for Gingerbread.

mksh(1) now also has a cat builtin, for here documents mostly. It calls the cat(1) command if it receives any options. The shell is nevertheless smaller than yesterday because of improved string pooling.

There’s another reason to use the MirOS OPTU-16 encoding instead of PEP 383, on which I already wrote: try passing a wide-char filename to a function such as MessageBoxW, or create a filename on a system using wide chars, such as FAT’s LFN or ISO 9660’s Joliet, or one that only allows Unicode (canonically decomposed – ü → ü – out of all things) like HFS+. OPTU-8 at least maps to somewhat reserved codepoints (would, of course, be better to get an official 128 codepoint block, but the chance’s small of getting that in the BMP). Still.

Oh well, the torrents. I’ve remade them all, using one DHT seed node and OpenBitTorrent as tracker and put them on a very rudimentary BT page that will be completely redone soonish. Please re-download them. I currently do not believe f.scarywater.net will return.

Finally, I fell victim to a selling-out and may have just bought a Windows Mobile 6 based phone (Glofiish X650) and an SDHC card and an extra battery with double capacity. Well, at least it’s said to run CacheWolf well. I still would like to have something like Interix, Cygwin, UWIN, coLinux, or maybe some qemu-for-WinCE variant that runs Android, Maemo, Debian/armhf (or armel or arm) at near-native speed (and is usable – the device sadly doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, but it comes with SiRFstar Ⅲ GPSr). It only has 64 MiB RAM, like the Zaurus SL-C3200 and the jesusPhone, though. ☹ Any chance to get MirWorldDomination onto that device as well?

Tomorrow, eight years ago, is the date we now use as birthing point for MirOS. The thing is, we did not really want to create a BSD of our own, fork, or whatnot. We were mostly happy OpenBSD users (really happy before the first eMail exchange with its developers, where Theo de Raadt did indeed stand out but was not the only one – just the one with the authority to deny us), improved it locally and submitted patches and ports. We were flamed for that or, worse, ignored. I begun putting up my “OpenBSD patchkit” on my homepage (back then, at Tripod) and still tried to feed things to upstream and OpenBSD. Then, at some point, Theo de Raadt made it clear he did not want me and the patch kit had grown (from one 4M file into several of them), so I ended up doing a “cvs -d /cvs init” and went from there. Benny’s story is similar – he laughed at me while trying to get ports added to OpenBSD, then discovered his ports were added to the MirPorts Framework and getting commit access there was easier than getting some random developer to commit something of his to OpenBSD. (This trend ended there though… every single person I approached since has become OpenBSD ports committer – I wonder whether they used my invitation letter to blackmail Theo?) It’s often thought that there was a clash of opinions between Theo and me. I think while we might disagree in certain aspects or priorities things should have, in the end we both wanted the same thing, I just was promised to never become a member of the OpenBSD project, so it’s really just “them” being uncooperative. (They (Henning and others) did burn the T-Shirt I gave Theo as a gift some day for making OpenBSD what it was. I won’t comment on that, again, now.)

FrOSCon 5 - 21./22. August 2010 is approaching rapidly. I’m a bit envious at some of the tracks (I mean, really, geocaching (ok, I did the surrounging caches over the last years but still), learning python by means of game programming, etc. really sounds interesting – and I know people who could benefit from a non-kids version of that as well) but this year’s FrOSCon is nothing for me to curse about either: I managed to get both a booth for The MirOS Project (MirBSD, mksh and other subprojects) as well as one for Waldemar’s FreeWRT (although wbx@ – if he comes – won’t join there since he forked his own fork since its conception). Booth staff are, currently: tg@ and bsiegert@ (Developer), gecko2@ (Staff) for MirOS, tg@ and “XTaran” abe@ (Developer), kimnotyze (Hacker) for FreeWRT. (XTaran will probably be helping Debian/Grml too.) This year, it’ll be my job (after 2 years of aptituz) to keep the Altbier-Fraktion watered, I’m thinking one crate of Schlösser Alt and one crate of Hannen Alt?

Have a look at the Program and don’t tell me you won’t come! It will rock! (Except there won’t be Formorer’s Chilli, but that’s no reason, there’s enough other stuff in manageable distance.)

Besides interesting booths and talks, FrOSCon is still looking for helpers who will not only get free entrance but also catering during operation.

Bordeaux was very nice (and towards the end much cooler… it’s actually hotter here at more than 50½° north – too warm to think, or do anything) but the LSM/RMLL was very french. They’ll be in Straßburg and Lüttich the next two years so we can probably be expected to attend. I don’t think I can eat duck (which, in south-west france, is a vegetable) or like all that classic french multi-course food so much, but I had enough Couscous Merguez and Thé à la menthe fraîche… and similar good stuff. Many people spoke English and actually asked me whether I do (probably they couldn’t bear me trying to spea^W^W^Wbutchering the language of the Grande Nation) and in general were a friendly bunch. I did see some people with machine guns in the city on the last day, though. No idea what/why… didn’t dare asking ☻

Just another reason to boycott flying: Mario Lang (one of the speakers) was apparently held on the airport and treated as a terrorist due to his Braille line… they thought it was a bomb or somesuch thing.

Read on for more…

Travelling with the Thalys and TGV was nice (but I loathe the Métro parisienne… they should build a ring train like the Berlin S-Bahn and just put another stop before Paris Nord and Montparnasse for people who just want to switch trains to take the ring train to the other line). And I want air conditioned trams in Germany too!

I met Uriel (invited him for some food and talked lengthy with him and some 9grid guy), XTaran (who was rather busy organising things), and a number of other people. Did some PGP keysigning as well. There’s now an experimental MirOS presence at Launchpad, not sure what exactly we’re going to do with it but, as Canonical does not care (as Jonathan said in his talk – great slides, by the way, really impressive), there’s no harm in having it. Some Perl guy from America (USA… just to make sure ☺) wanted a photograph of me with a sign “I love CVS” just so people back at home would believe him he’s met such a person *grins* of course I plugged in a little advertising but cvs(GNU) is honestly good. The forge hacking session was a little under-visited (but still a success in terms of getting more communication and maybe collaboration underways, especially thinking of common interfaces, DC, semantic web, OSLC-CM) and since the room was (in contrast to my hotel room and the trams!) not air conditioned we didn’t get much hacking done. The Debian booth was about 40% of one FOSDEM style table wide… and subsequently crowded. There were more people (of course, I was trying to get mksh into Haikuports, Mandriva, and other things; talked about KDE 3.5.11 (Trinity), Qt 3 vs Qt 4, and kwalletcli, and in general to a not-so-usual bunch of suspects – like I said, LSM/RMLL really is pretty french-only).

It is too hot, but I still committed src/etc/rc,v version 1.110 which you want to upgrade your /etc/rc to before upgrading mksh(1) in MirBSD. (All in the name of better performance on platforms such as Debian/m68k and not raiding Linux’ inferior RNG… but it does simplify things.)

I could probably write more but at the moment just want to lie down and die until it gets cooler… even the rain didn’t help. My feet hurt (Montparnasse-Bienvenue didn’t help) too.

Due to heavy load at work, as well as some minor things, I'm either taking back interest altogether, involvement altogether, time spent on projects, or any of these on aspects/particulars of projects.

Sometimes, when you're burnt out, it's best to concentrate on living and on core projects. mksh is one of these for me, as is keeping MirBSD userland and MirPorts infrastructure working well, with small, evolving improvements (no big jumps). Other things, no matter how nice, interesting or useful (to me as well as to others) they are, need to stay back. I poured most of the last seven years of my life into MirBSD.

Sometimes, you want to give back, but it's too much effort, or you cannot afford to spend more time on it. I'll close one of my Debian ITP bugs for this reason. (I also rarely send in patches from ports for this reason, but sometimes point upstream to our CVSweb.)

Sometimes, people like Ulrich Drepper, Marco d'Itri, Gerrit Pape let you realise that every project has its Theo de Raadt-alikes. I've still not ported jupp's latest release to Debian (but an OpenSuSE Buildservice SRPM exists), nor uploaded the current mksh(1) version even to my own wtf repo. I will do so, when I feel like spending private time with Debian again, at least for the etch and lenny (and hardy – for work) branches, as dash and mksh in sid have... issues I predicted ages ago. (For one, I'm still waiting for Gerrit to contact me. Maybe our eMail systems don't like each other? Waldi or formorer will probably pass on any messages, as will the trusty BTS.) I'll probably not open any ITP bugs again and send in much less of the bugs I notice, simply because I don't like being ignored (or flamed, but sometimes, being ignored is worse – which is why Benny works on MirPorts, btw). Maybe, if I feel the need to, my wtf repo will grow instead; DDs or DMs are free to take from there if they like.

Sometimes, one realises that he just doesn't fit in. While Cachewolf is a useful project, working together with Java™ developers that communicate over web fora only and don't even see the need for compatibility with Unix or proper processes most of the time (svn:eol-style comes to mind, and switching the source code to UTF-8 is something I've given up to dream of – I would even have fixed bugs where Ewe wouldn't do UTF-8 right, but I run into a wall of bliss ignorance there) proved impossible for me. I won't budge either: web fora are simply not for me to use. Period. This is my fault (for not fitting in) as well as the fault of some of the rest of the team (for ignoring years of experience, or for simply nicht über den eigenen Tellerrand schauen (however one says this in English, I don't know) and not caring of these who do; for supporting the commercial gc.com site over the three alternatives too). I will continue to use it, maybe the iPAQ H3600 a colleague gave me proves useful, otherwise, MirBSD will do just fine.

So, when I leave or pull back a little, no prejudices. Sometimes with reason, but mostly due to lack of available resources on my part. I hope nobody who has been or will be noticing me ceasing to contribute as much as usual thinks ill that's why.