Category: Study

Short summary of the last months

Now, let me quickly write a second blog-post, as you haven’t read anything from me for a couple of months. In February I announced my extended outtime from Gentoo due to finishing my study. It’s almost over now – I just have to give a final presentation next week. After that I’m going to move as I have to leave the student hostel I lived in for a couple of years. It seems that I will move to Cologne (hey zypher, stkn, wschlich and all other devs in that area 😉 ). If you already want to meet me (and some other devs) in that area, come to FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin tomorrow (Saturday, August 25).

Two weeks ago I managed to attend the Chaos Communication Camp, although I announced to everyone that I won’t be there. It was fun to see the irritated faces of persons who thought they spotted a ghost 😀 And it was relaxing, as I submitted my diploma thesis just the same day I drove to the Camp. I had a look into the Gentoo village over there, but could not find any known person – beside GMsoft who hit me on a road somewhere on the campground.

At some days during my diploma thesis I felt the urge to receive quick motivation kicks by helping users or the PowerPC-team. So I had a run through all open ppc-bugs and managed to kick them down from around 80 to under 25. Unfortunately they rose to 93 now 🙁 Mostly stabilisation-requests, which are quite quick to resolve, especially with the help of gatt. opfer and I with the help of the author of gatt, Matthias, are working on an automated scripting for commiting and changing a bug after a package merged successfully. More will come after our own testing phase. Unfortunately I already packed my Pegasos for the move, so that I can’t help out with testing. Anyways, the ppc-team will survive.

Now to the bad news: I don’t have a job yet. All applications were declined, but everytime I was in the round of the last two candidates. But then the companies decided for the other one. It’s too bad that I didn’t specialised in the past and that I’m an all-rounder. It seems that companies don’t have a need for persons who can jump in nearly every technical position. Now I have to wait for answers to the other applications I wrote. Probably my run of luck ended with the end of my study…

FOSDEM review and my extended outtime from Gentoo

I don’t know, where I should start, but FOSDEM 2007 was the best FOSDEM I have been to. From Gentoo’s view we had the most developers ever crowded at one event. Too bad that I again missed some, but it was nice to meet some of our new German devs, like phreak and jokey, and meet genone I ever missed before (at least at FOSDEM 2005). Then it was a big pleasure to meet the US-devs, starting with wolf31o2 and vapier, and again kingtaco.

Beside Gentoo I had a lot of talks with persons from the Free Software Foundation Europe as I know some of them personally for a couple of years already. Then I met some people from the CCC and had a rather long talk with Tim Pritlove about the future of Pentabarf, a very good tool for the organisation of a conference (and which I know from its early hours). And somehow I got into a situation where three different persons greeted me at the same time, but those three don’t known each other… Am I so famous? 🙄

Now let me collect things which might need to be improved in the future:

  • The booth (well, our tables) looked good at Saturday when we had some nice hardware to show, but on Sunday it was mostly understaffed and we had nothing to show. Furthermore many people asked for T-Shirts and give-aways. Time for an “event-kit”!
  • Too bad that there isn’t an area where you can sit together, have network and squash bugs together with another dev. I think that this is one of the things we can establish in the “Gentoo Village” at the Chaos Communication Camp this summer. Sitting in couches, having a beer and listening to ambient music while working together with users on their pet-bugs.
  • Dinner in a pre-noble restaurant which costs half of the money you spent for the whole weekend should not be repeated. It’s better to have a buffet where you have to go to now and then and have a talk with different persons while you fetch another drink, instead of talking to the same persons at your table for the whole evening as you are somewhat bound to your seat.

Now let me thank some persons, starting with Wolfram, who picked me up in Cologne and drove me back. Then Dimitry and Guy for organising the dev-room and booking the Hostel. It was so relaxing for me that I had not to do this once again like in 2005. And all devs who attended FOSDEM and made this an unforgetable event!

Currently I’m preparing my extended outtime. I finally have to finish my diploma-thesis, which will take about three to four months. During this time I will not be available for Gentoo work. There are still some bugs open on my buglist but I don’t think I can resolve them soon. I already quit IRC as this is a major time-burner. But as faster as I work on my thesis the sooner I will be back 😉 See you again this summer!

Friday: Hacking Contest

Tomorrow, the CIPHER2 contest takes place again. This is a Capture-the-Flag like Challenges in Informatics: Programming, Hosting and ExploRing, organised by the university RWTH Aachen.

Last year I visited the team in Aachen with the fellow devs dertobi123, pYrania and bonsaikitten. We got a nice introduction to the game and I thought, one day I will take part as well.

But things changed and since March I’m mentoring a group of students in the subject “Computer- and Networksecurity” at my university of applied sciences in Krefeld. I told them about CIPHER and they founded a group that will enter the contest. And I’m their