Andreas' Blog

Fixing smugbatch for new smugmug API

2010-12-11T20:10:00.002+01:00

I'm using smugmug to share my photos and have used the smugbatch command line tool to upload photos directly to albums at smugmug. Recently smugmug made some changes to the API so that the command line tool did not work anymore. Now it needs the _su cookie to be send back with each request. I enhanced the tool, submitted the fixes back and now they are awaiting for the review by Greg KH at github.

I also packaged smugbatch with the changes in the openSUSE Build Service and submitted the fix to the Contrib repository so that others can use the package as well.

P.S. The primary reason for writing this is to evaluate the Blogilo blog editor. I wanted to know how it works - and will now test it some more and then write about that as well.

St. Johann in Tirol

2009-03-22T21:50:00.004+01:00

I spend the weekend with my two women to St. Johann in Tirol where we met a lot of Jana's colleagues for a lovely and relaxing weekend in the snow. Having a baby with us, we enjoyed the snow with photographing and walking.
I think these were the most photographed sunglasses - and an interesting self portrait.

Saturday we saw two sides of the restaurant Grander Schupf: During lunch a normal place catering for skier, and at dinner a first class restaurant - the proper place to celebrate a birthday which three parties did that evening. We also celebrated Jonna's first birthday and she even enjoyed listening to the three alphorns on the stage.

Using the playground was not possible this time.

We had lovely weather and enjoyed the view to the Wilder Kaiser.

Beaver Damage at Altmühlsee

2009-03-17T21:30:00.004+01:00

Last weekend our family relaxed with my parents at the Jahreszeitenhof near Ansbach. Saturday we drove to the Altmühlsee and walked to the bird island. The most interesting thing for us were not the many birds but the damage done by beavers. We've seen in Fürth's Stadtpark now some beaver damage but the damage done at the Altmühlsee was impressive - and in some ways real art, so I had to document it.

The rest of the left tree looks like a fish - quite impressive beaver art.

There are supposed to be at least three beaver families in the area and we think we found the lodge of one of them.

The beavers even used the bridge close to their lodge for practicing.

Visiting the Old Jewish Cemetery

2008-09-14T20:15:00.008+02:00

Today Jana and myself tried to educate Jonna about Jewish burial rites. We took part in a guided tour of the old Jewish cemetery in Fürth. Unfortunately it seems to have bored Jonna, she slept nearly the whole time. Jana and myself were glad to finally be able to visit the burial ground since it's only possible to visit it as part of a guided tour. It has been in use from 1607 until 1906 (some stones are dated up to 1919) when the new Jewish cemetery as part of the new town cemetery was founded. Part of the burial rites is that a cemetery is not changed, so e.g. the burial stones are left as they are. Together with the growing plants and trees, this give the cemetery an interesting atmosphere.

A few more photos are found in my gallery.

Visit in the "Erfahrungsfeld zur Entfaltung der Sinne"

2008-08-31T17:11:00.005+02:00

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with my brother's family at the "Erfahrungsfeld zu Entfaltung der Sinne" (experience area to evolve the senses) in Nürnberg. Not only the kids had a lot of fun but also us adults. I took the pleasure in taking two interesting photos with mirrors:

A self-portrait of myself in a distorting mirror and

a photo of a box with mirrors inside and viewing holes - the reflections were really interesting.

Wintec WSG-1000 and Geotagging under Linux

2008-05-04T18:28:00.006+02:00

I've bought myself a new toy: a Wintec WSG-1000 a GPS datalogger with LCD display. It's compatible on the software side to the Wintec WPS-201 - with a minor detail - so that Linux software supporting the WPS-201 worked for me. I wanted to buy a datalogger for geotagging my photos and favored the WSG-1000 due to it's LCD display with many informative options and the long battery life. An alternative was the Holux M-241 which shows far less information on the small LCD.

Software that I have been using or evaluating so far:
* viking: allows to manage GPS data: You can plot and manipulate tracks and waypoints. The mapping part needs some more love but the rest is rather interesting.
* gtk-g-rays2: Allows to configure the Wintec receiver.
* gpsbabel: An application to download the tracks from the datalogger, convert them to various formats and manipulate them. This needed a small patch to support the WSG-1000. I've added the patch also to the openSUSE 11.0 distribution.
* GPicSync: Allows geotagging of photos. I first had to debug this since it did not want to geotag my directory with photos. It turned out it handled only Nikon RAW files ending with uppercase NEF but my files ended with a lowercase nef. The trivial patch has been sent upstream and the upstream author directly accepted it.
* geotag: Another application to geotag photos. It also allows to display photos and tracks via google earth.

For now I'll stick with gpsbabel to download tracks from the datalogger and with geotag for the tagging.

For basic visualization of tracks, geotag does fulfill the needs I have right now - and for more advanced work, both viking and gpsbabel allow track manipulation - viking in a graphical interactive way, gpsbabel via command line.

I do not know my logger good enough to figure out how useful gtk-g-rays2 will be - but it's good to know that it exists.

As openSUSE user I was interested to note that GPicSync is available from the openSUSE BuildService and gpsbabel is part of the openSUSE distribution. I needed to compile gtk-g-rays2 and viking myself - and geotag comes as a jar archive that I could easily launch.

If you know some better applications, please tell me.

Spring in Fürth's Stadtpark

2008-05-04T17:46:00.004+02:00

Thursday was public holiday in Germany and I took Friday off as well. This gave Jana and myself some time for walks around Fürth and we especially loved the signs of spring in Fürth's Stadtpark.

There were a lot of beautifull tulips everywhere.

This morning Jonna and myself enjoyed watching a family of geese having breakfast.

First week of our new life...

2008-03-29T18:18:00.007+01:00

Our daughter Jonna is now 8 days old - and since Wednesday both of my girls are at home and I'm slowly getting used to nights with changing diapers instead of sleeping. On Wednesday it was snowing when I awoke and I had to dig out the car since it was covered with more than 5cm of snow - an interesting parallel to her birthday when it was also snowing but the snow did not stay. Now it's getting warmer, so perhaps we can soon show Jonna the Stadtpark in sunshine!

She fascinates me every day - the way she sleeps, cries or makes a grimace. She also seems to enjoy cuddling with her parents. She's eating well and gaining weight daily.
For those of you with kids, that's hardly something extraordinary - but for me everything is exciting ;-). I'm glad to have some more days of vacation to see her grow - and to find a rhythm in domestic live.

She's sleeping now in the same cradle that I slept in already, just the curtain has been sewed especially for Jonna by Jana.

I've been encouraged by all the kind words and congretulations we have received. Thanks a lot!

Jonna Ylvi Jaeger

2008-03-22T20:47:00.007+01:00

Yesterday - on the 21st of March - was our personal beginning of spring: Our daughter Jonna Ylvi was born. The name Jonna (for pronunciation listen to http://www.sci.fi/~kajun/finns/Samples/jonna.wav) is a Finish female version of the names John, Jan or Jana, Ylvi means little female wolf and is Norwegian - and when we choose it we did not know that she would be born at full moon.

The first night she tried to check how sharp her finger nails where. During the day the scratches started to heal.

Jana thinks that she has the eyelashes from her dad. She looks really peaceful when sleeping - and can also cry rather loud.

She's 55cm long (21.7 inches) and weights 3750g (8.28 pounds). Compared to her daddy's hand, she's still tiny!

Jana and myself are happy and grateful to have our daughter!

Geese Chase

2008-02-10T17:12:00.000+01:00

The Stadtpark in Fürth is home for two dozen or so geese - both Canadian and Graylag Geese. Today my wife and myself enjoyed watching some geese. Around a dozen were grazing on the meadows and suddenly started to fly to the river in groups of three.

They flew straight to us,

but luckily over us and turned to the right,

and landed directly - three meters behind us in the river.

It was quite impressive to see the birds flying that close. I'm glad that my camera was up to speed for capturing this.

Large sizes of these photos are available here.

openSUSE Community Manager Starts

2008-02-04T14:00:00.000+01:00

After three months of interviewing and one week of setting up everything for the new openSUSE community manager, I'm looking forward to actually work together with Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. Read more about him at his openSUSE blog: http://zonker.opensuse.org and this blog entry.

I was impressed by the many enthusiastic people that applied for the job and the comments they made about the project and how they wanted to get involved. For all of us interviewing, it was tough to choose between these interesting candidates - it looked like comparing apples and oranges. I'd like to thank all that interviewed and were interviewed!

The last days I've had quite a lot discussions with Zonker and I'm enthusiastic about working with him. I also look forward to drinking a beer or two with him soon in Nürnberg.

Happy Birthday Klaus, Gary,...

2008-01-27T10:03:00.000+01:00

Walking around in Fürth I found the perfect motive for all of us who are celebrating their birthdays today:

A special happy birthday to my colleagues Gary and Klaus!

Stadtpark Photowalk

2008-01-13T17:41:00.000+01:00

This morning Jana and myself went for a walk through Fürth's Stadtpark with cameras and attached macro lenses.

The morning was a bit foggy, it had frozen during the night and now the sun came out. Some plants still had some ice on them, and others only had water drops from the unfrozen ice. It was a really nice morning - I just would not call this winter.

We finished the walk with a visit to our favorite bakery (Cafe Barbante, Jakobinenstr) to buy some pieces of cake.

KDE 4.0 Release - and openSUSE Packages

2008-01-13T08:23:00.000+01:00

On Friday the KDE community has released a major new release: KDE 4.0 (click here for the announcement). The release is the result of more than two years of coding, debugging, documenting and creating artwork.

I have installed openSUSE factory (our developement version) together with the KDE 4 desktop on my Laptop and gave it a quick test this week: The desktop looks much cleaner and polished, the new icons and the oxygen theme have a fresh look. Gwenview - the image viewer - has been greatly reworked and streamlined. The desktop gave audible feedback for many actions - something I would personally rather disable but others might like it.

The System Configuration has been redone and the modules look really nice. Changing underlying libraries does not always give visible results - but in the case of KDE4, you can see that the new libraries and frameworks have been rewritten and enabled the developers to write better applications and tools.

The "Zoom out" feature confused me, I don't know what the real benefit of it is. I also hit some bugs, e.g. the desktop effects did not work for me directly (I'm glad that this is so nicely integrated and finally easy to setup). I also missed a few features, e.g. the panel is a bit too large for me and I have not found a way to create a smaller version of it.

I suggest to look also at the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide which provides a quick overview of various new and improved KDE 4.0 technologies.

Not all packages have been ported to the new framework but you can use KDE 3 applications easily on the KDE 4 desktop. I could use the 4.0.0 release for my work without major problems.

All in all, it looks to me like a promising .0.0 release - it is the foundation for a great desktop and I look forward to see major KDE3 applications ported to KDE4!

Testing KDE 4 with openSUSE

You can install packages directly from the openSUSE Build Service. On openSUSE 10.3 you can use 1-click-install to get the KDE 4.0 desktop environment:

Alternatively you can choose to install a more basic KDE 4 desktop.

qtpfsgui - HDR under Linux

2008-01-03T22:03:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Adrian, the openSUSE Build Service has now pre-build binaries for the HDR tool qtpfsgui. The packages can be downloaded and installed with 1-Click install directly from the Build Service.

I went out tonight and took some photos in Fürth - and then played around with qtpfsgui:

Grüner Markt, Fürth.

Using a different toning algorithm, the same photo can look quite different, far more like a painting.

I do like both of them - and guess I'll have some fun in the next weeks exploring qtpfsgui.

Fall in Fürth - and Evaluating Flock

2007-11-04T14:30:00.001+01:00

I'm writing this article with Flock. I downloaded Flock 1.0 from the Flock website yesterday, setup my Blogger and Flickr accounts, uploaded the pictures to Flickr (using Flock's easy upload) - here's my complete Fürth photostream -, opened the media stream in Flock and used drag and drop to get the photos in Flock's blog editing window. Flock is much nicer than using Blogger's photo upload directly. One downside is that Flock needs quite some space on your desktop - and my laptop has a small screen.

During the last weeks I took some morning walks through Fürth's lovely Stadtpark and really enjoyed the fall.

This first photo shows a sunrise over the meadows. A red sunrise was really difficult to photograph. We had many days with fog in the morning but without any sun :-(.

The fog here gives an interesting fall atmosphere, this is at the big pond in the Stadtpark.

I don't know the name of this fruit - I just know it really looked interesting with the fruit having been protected by the flower and I'm thankful for Jana to show it to me.

Blogged with Flock

Survey Time

2007-10-25T09:45:00.000+02:00

It just struck me that this months seems to be survey time - I have participated in the following that are relevant to me. The surveys are still open and I encourage everybody's participation.

We recently started for our openSUSE distribution a survey on our installation and systemsmanagement framework YaST and have already over 7000 participants which I consider rather impressive. The results will help us in development and focus of YaST.

Jan Frederik is a masters student at the University of Oslo and currently visiting the SUSE Linux offices in Nuernberg. He researches about firm-sponsored open source
communities and kindly asks openSUSE contributors to fill in a short survey to help him with his thesis.

The Linux Foundation has started their 2007 Desktop/Client Survey. It will assist the Linux Foundation to focus on the relevant areas.

openSUSE 10.3 Goldmaster...

2007-09-27T20:54:00.000+02:00

Christoph,

Coolo,

and myself at our desks waiting for the DVD9s to burn before we can send them to the fab for producing.

After Coolo released openSUSE 10.3 this morning (he started testing at 6am), we did the final tests. I concentrated on the bootloader. This time an update from 10.2 did not try to boot from my non-existing floppy but used the right default - yeah!
In the evening Coolo and Christoph found a package that shouldn't be on the media, so we removed it and moved some packages from the second DVD9 to the first DVD so that all packages in the patterns are on the first DVD.

We have mastered now the media and will now prepare our staging server and then give the mirrors some GBs to download and distribute. The official launch of openSUSE 10.3 will be the 4th of October, a few days later you will find the box product in the shops as well. The box product will contain 2 DVD9 - each nearly 7 GB of RPMs. The downloadable installation media are a 1 CD GNOME, a 1 CD KDE and a 4 GB DVD5 - and in addition both a GNOME and a KDE LiveCD.

We're currently hanging around at the #opensuse-project irc channel on freenode. I've just read the tuxmachines review and heard a lot of praise on the irc channel about 10.3. Thanks to everybody that made 10.3 that good!

Lizard Stone 2007

2007-09-16T20:37:00.000+02:00

Once every year our Czech colleagues have a weekend event and invite us to join them. This year's event was called "Lizard Stone" and was in Rejštejn. We stayed in the Cabin's from the Pension Klášterský Mlýn.

On saturday we had a full day game searching for the mythical Lizard Stone. It was described to us as:
"The myth of a mysterious gem, called the Lizard Stone has spread in numerous modifications into neigboring countries and exists in many variants today. The oldest documented version talks about an immense gemstone of unfathomable value, which was deposited in a well guarded place in Rejstejn. According to later sources the stone was transported during the departure of the Kints from Rejstejn, after the last great ceremony. It's alleged that this ceremony is related to the SuSuSu festivity, still held regularly today. The reader can find more detailed information about this important event in the "Treatise on Lands of Wirm" by prof. Verdal."

We've been walking for over 12 hours through the forests, over some meadows - and quite often up and down the hills.

We met a lot of interesting characters including a dragon, a ranger, some sages and a lumberjack and collected various items and lots of information about the Lizard stone.

It was a really long day and I really enjoyed the sunset near Castle Kašperk.

Once we had everything together and reached the final place in the night, we found the melody needed for the ceremony that is needed for the Sususu festival.

The role play ended with a big party and some fireworks.

A really fun day - thanks to all that organised it!

Visiting Fürth's Hidden Secrets - its Yards

2007-09-02T21:16:00.001+02:00

As part of Fürth's 1000 year celebrations, more than seventy yards were made available to the public. Normally you can sneak into them if the door is open but for most of them I would not have known at all that they exists if nobody pointed them out.

Thorsten joined Jana and myself for the saturday tour. We started in our own street - with a small and very green garden that I would not have expected in our neighbourhood.

This rose was found besides a narraw path - the Pfarrgasse.

Fürth has lots of old houses, some of them - like the Stadlershof - have been nicely restored in the past years.

To reach most of the yards, you had to walk through the front house. These passways have quite often been really nicely decorated.

The contrast between the yards is amazing: there are more modern ones like the last one, some are totally green, others just used for parking cars,... In most of the yards was some kind of activity where the inhabitants played with kids, served food, sold art, played music etc. This was some kind of big neighborhood party with friendly neighbors inviting you in. A special thanks to the owners of these lovely yards!

The last two yards are just of the main pedestrian area. Jana and myself went today out to visit some more of these yards and were surprised to see the streets and yards crowded with visitors.

Novell Hackweek is over

2007-06-29T15:46:00.000+02:00

This week we had for the first time Hackweek at Novell. During this week everybody in the engineering group of the Open Platform Business Unit of Novell was encouraged to work on some innovate and cool ideas - and not look at the usual work. This was not for engineers only but also for documentation, testing, and managers.

I started a day late since I landed on monday from the US, and started directly working on Michael's patch for ldconfig to clean it up (details are here and sent it upstream. After the first review comments I reworked nearly everything, introduced some bugs, debugged and fixed the code and sent it upstream again and wait now for review from the other glibc maintainers. Afterwards I tried to get some statistics out of bugzilla...

I also met a few guys from our community. Francis, Benji and Frank were invited and sponsored to join us - I hope we can invite more people next time and do it with more planning so that they have a chance to join. Francis and Benji have been hacking on the openSUSE Software Portal and Frank launched SUSE-Art.org. On tuesday a car of developers from Prague came over to talk personally with Benji and Francis about the portal.

Going through the Nuernberg offices I noticed a lot of cool ideas. Some people would need another hackweek to finish it - but I did not hear anybody speaking about a failure. A few people used it to learn new skills, e.g. C#, and therefore needed a bit longer to start.

Some of the great ideas that I noticed:

"Add a buildservice project that recompiles Debian packages": Coolo and Richi have now the first packages from Debian building in the openSUSE BuildService. They showed me some packages that they installed via rpm and which worked just fine.
Michael worked on a SAT resolver for package resolving (idea: Fast installation tool) . The speed of the examples he showed me was really impressive. Let's see whether and when we can use it in libzypp.
Henne created a "Media Center" edition of openSUSE.
Timo, Martin and Tom created an Laptop Access Panel using some python and an interpreter with both GTK and KDE user interfaces. The panel is extensible in an easy way.
Try design a nice digiKam HTML theme was the topic Jana worked on. It looks fine in Firefox, Konqueror and Opera but Internet Explorer does not seem to look it completely yet.
Holger worked on graphical suspend to progress - showing a sleeping tux while suspending.

The largest team I saw were six people from our server team, they implemented "Create a properly integrated solution for Directory based user authentication/authorization".

It was really a fantastic week - and we also enjoyed the organization by our OPS team - especially the breakfasts and the Indian dinner on thursday (Pawar from Sur Mandir is the best!).

You can find more blog posts about Hackweek at Planet SUSE.

I'm looking forward to HW2!

Linuxtag and Linuxnacht

2007-06-03T20:29:00.000+02:00

The social event at Linuxtag was called Linuxnight and was thursday night. It was in a former transformer station in Kreuzberg and a really cool place to party at. At one wall they were showing running an endless slideshow of some photos from Linuxtag - including the above photo from Martin.

The place had two levels, the lower one with a small fountain and a coffee bar. The party was excellent, I was just a bit tired and left early.

Opposite of our booth was the IBM booth and they had a second life demo running.

At one time, some of us decided to visit the IBM guy at second life. But it was not that easy to go to there place, the "openSUSE kidd" first had to earn some money...

We had a lot of visitors on our both asking for openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise and other Novell products. I'm glad that Joe, Ralf and Christoph were there to answer some of the Novell questions. There were quite some good talks and I've been glad to meet some people.

At friday afternoon I took part in the keysigning session - together with around one hundred folks. Checking identities was as usual some fun. Signing and sending off the signatures via email on saturday, I was suprised that I got quite some mails back as undelivered - I would have expected that people would check that the emails associated with their keys do actually work. So, if anybody did not get my signature, you might want to check that email delivery is working for you.

Linuxtag is over now - and was one of the larger Linux events that we took part in. 9600 visitors came to the exhibition and the talks - and some of them showed up in ours as well...

openSUSE day is over - Linuxtag continues

2007-05-31T10:59:00.000+02:00

In the afternoon we had two mobile computer related talks. Timo's presentation (see photo above) showed in his presentations some areas were Linux has to improve, e.g. he did some initial measurements for suspend to disk that shows that Mac OS X is faster than Vista and both are faster than openSUSE 10.2. Compressing the disk image during suspend gives an improvement of 30 % for openSUSE but we're still the slowest.:-( The question is now on how to move forward here. Timo also talked about fingerprint sensor support - he's one of the main authors in this area -, powermanagement and wireless support.

In the evening Patrick presented openSUSE on the Sony Playstation 3.

Today you'll find us at the openSUSE booth. Matthias Hopf will talk later today about compiz and Larry Ewing will take part in a panel discussion about the future of the desktop.

openSUSE Day at Linuxtag

2007-05-30T15:09:00.000+02:00

Today is openSUSE Day at Linuxtag. Marcus gave an excellent presentation about fotomanagement under Linux, other talks are still ongoing. We have a lot of discussion at the booth.

Christoph has setup a webcam under the ip address of http://217.237.167.137:7070/webcam which we'll try to keep online during the Linuxtag show hours.

Setting up the Linuxtag Booth

2007-05-30T09:13:00.000+02:00

Yesterday Adrian and myself drove through heavy rain to Berlin for Linuxtag 2007. Christoph and Martin were already there and had started setting up the booth.

During the setup we met a lot of friends, like Tux and Stepan. Both were heading for the LinuxBIOS booth.

In the evening all that a large group of us went to Spätzle restaurant off Ku-damm. We even trank "Berliner Weisse" in the Novell and openSUSE colours (Timo choose strawberry, I choose woodruff).

Today is openSUSE day with seven presentations. You can meet us also at our booth which is Halle 12, Stand 52.