niemueller.de

UniMatrix 1.2 released

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:56:33 +0100

After three years I have released UniMatrix 1.2 yesterday. It fixes two long-standing bugs. UniMatrix is a program for Palm OS that allows for managing courses, classes and exams on your handheld released under the GPL.

Although time is short while playing around a bit with Maemo I got interested again in handheld programming and setup the Palm tool chain once again. That procedure feels more arcane than last time. Have to write that down when time permits. It's awesome though that you can have a free tool chain, besides the SDK containing the system libs to link against and the header files.

Maemo is an interesting platform. I'm still playing with it but most of the application I wanted to port needed only a very few changes. Though I'm disappointed that basically all Gtkmm-related libraries are missing for the arm target by default. Currently building a whole bunch of packages and dependencies...

Back from South Africa

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:39:54 +0100

For the last two weeks I've been in South Africa to work with our fellow researchers and present our robots.

For our participation in the Standard Platform league with the Nao robots we are cooperating with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and TU Graz. I've been to Cape Town to work with our fellows from the Robotics and Agents Research Lab at the UCT. I gave presentations of our robot software framework that we've developed during the last two years to get more students interested. We discussed the future of the project and how to proceed from the current state. Since we have to robots for not even half a year a lot of work remains to be done. I'm confident however that with joint forces we can achieve a good result for next year's RoboCup event.

Along the way we installed Fedora on two Mac Laptops. Once as a virtual machine and once via boot camp. Both worked just fine and allowed for efficient usage of our robot software framework. Although Slackware and Ubuntu are more dominant in that lab Fedora is the only distro at the moment providing all required libararies out-of-the-box, as I maintain a few of the required packages. Our new robot software framework is Open Source software and we plan for a first public release around the end of this year.

After the research meating I flew to Johannesburg were we were invited by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to participate on the German booth at the The International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition 2008 (INSITE). We've been to the last INSITE as well in 2006, so we met a lot of people again that participated a second time as well. It was fun again to discuss with all the science people various topics and get to know what others are doing.

We presented one of our Nao robots and the research cooperation with the UCT. There was a second robotics booth Robotics SA sponsored by the IEEE comprised of several South African universities and research facilities showing their robots. Our colleagues from the UCT were there demonstrating their custom-made small size league robots, allowing remote control by visitors, and another of our Nao robots.

The event attracted more visitors overall than last time. Though the audience wasn't fully what we would have liked to see. There were only a few university lecturers and not as many students as we expected, although Johannesburg itself having two universities and Pretoria with another two international universities only being a one-hour drive away. Besides that we had several interesting conversations and Alex gave a short talk at the Robotics SA booth about the RoboCup idea.

Afterall I'd say it was a pretty successful trip to South Africa,xturl and a fascinating one. In Cape Town I had two days where I could meet with other students and where I saw some of the country side and I went up to Table Mountain which gave a great view over the city. In Johannesburg I had half a day were I went to the Apartheid Museum. Besides the wealth of information about recent South African history it provides it was very impressing. I went there with a friend from India. We bought tickets - and I got one for whites and she for non-whites. A guard was guiding us to the "matching" entrance. That was really weird. You then walk separated ways inside the first building only communicating through a curtain with each other. The texts are different on boths sides so you have to tell each other what it's all about. She said "ok, just get out and take the back entrance to see this picture here". Sounded like a good idea, I left the building and then... realized that you had to get up to an elevated way that guided you past the non-white exit. Just after 10 meters or so you could then go back and down to be able to get to the other side. But by then we decided to go on. A really weird experience that just felt wrong...

There are some photos from the INSITE 2008 in our gallery. We've also recently uploaded pictures from RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou, China.

No Hat Trick

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:11:04 +0100

RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou is over. We became second in the RoboCup@Home league world championship!

After a not-so good stage 1 we really needed a better stage 2 to advance to the finals. We did the "Walk & Talk" test. In this test the robot follows the human which teaches it new locations. When five locations (given by the referees) have been learned the robot switches to navigation phase and has to go to these places in an order specified by the refs. The problem of this test is, that the scenario is re-arranged just before the test is done, so one can not have a pre-generated map of the environment. On the first try one application wasn't started properly after subversion caused some headaches and so we did not get any points. We did the test again on the next day. We got the full 2000 points and were the only team to get the maximum score in any stage 2 test! We also did the party bot, but a bug prevented positive face recognitions to be reported properly so we only got a few points here. After stage 2 we were the team with the most total points in the tournament.

The final is an open test, where each team can do a performance. A jury with three members decide by some given criteria like performance, scientific value and human-robot interaction. The er@ser team from Japan made it first. We became second...

It was a pretty exhausting event. Now we're heading to see some night life of Suzhou before we leave for Shanghai tommorrow. I will write more about this RoboCup later, also something about our involvement in the Standard Platform League with the Nao robots -- after I got some sleep after the last week with an average of about 4 hours of sleep or so per night...

Fedora at RoboCup

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:14:04 +0100

We arrived on Sunday in Suzhou, China. All went pretty smoothly and there are dozens of volunteers and staff that makes it a pleasant stay. There is a 20 min bus shuttle that we take every morning to the venue. A continuously updated short report is on our RoboCup website.

As you can see on the photo we have put Fedora stickers at prominent places on our robots (there is one at the back side as well). It fostered some interest. I was talking to a member of the executive committee for the RoboCup@Home league. He liked the idea of a LiveCD with robotics software on it. A few other guys were asking "what is that T-Shirt about?"... Quite cool, hope to spawn more interest in Fedora in the RoboCup community.

The first tests didn't went as smooth as expected. In the first test, where the robot introduces itself to the audience and other teams, showing its abilities, sensors and actuator we needed a restart. A textile cover of the robot hang into the laser scanner which put it into "escape mode", a mode where it's moving forward slowly to get away from the obstacle. After the restart it went smooth but time was short. The fast follow went pretty well. Masrur "ran" through the environment with the robot following. Unfortunately the other team from Koblenz didn't make it in time so they started late an we couldn't demonstrate our passing capabilities. So after the first two tests we were first.

The next two tests we screwed up because of wifi problems. Yesterday we had the lost and found test, where the robot has to find three objects that are randomly placed in the environment. We implemented a new object detection and were quite keen to see it in action. But then the wifi broke down for no visible reason and we couldn't start the application... Today we did the who-is-who challenge. Also a challenge were we introduced new code, now for face detection and recognition and using a new way to formulate the application. We had wifi problems - again. Just after that we found out that it was the microphone that was put on the robot to make the text-to-speech output heard. We did a test with a busy ssh session. If you turned the microphone on the session would immediately stall, and when you turned it off it would continue immediately. The other microphone isn't as bad, this is why it worked in the first two tests flawlessly...

After the first days with two screwed up tests we are currently third (results). Tomorrow will be the open challenge, where every team can demonstrate what it can do best with their robot. After that the stage 2 tests will start where only 10 of the attending 14 teams are allowed to compete. From these 5 teams will compete in the finals on Sunday. Let's see how this works out.

China here we come

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:15:14 +0100

RoboCup 2008 is only a few days away and we're preparing for our journey...

My stuff is packed, at least most of it. I have an additional suitcase containing one of the Nao robots that I will have to take to China. This limits the weight we can take about half...

Max Spevack's package with Fedora goodies arrived today, juts in time for the event. Thanks Max! So I will place some Fedora stickers on the robots and I hope to foster some questions and spawn some interest for the Fedora Robotics SIG. We have put this SIG on our team description poster as a community contribution! Next year we will have that funky robotics LiveCD!

Stay tuned for more, will take some pictures and do some blogging, given that we have Internet access in China...

Naos arrived! (1 comment)

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:33:03 +0100

Finally our four Naos arrived! Yeah! If it wasn't for Alex they would still be anywhere. He had to fight hard to get the financial stuff in place. Thanks for this!

We are currently charging and waiting to wake 'em for the first time to see them in action. Now going to get the tool chain running on Fedora, yay! The Naos themselves run a Linux derivate -- nice. Unfortunately the access to hardware isn't that open. Let's see how it works out. I'm now going to port our software framework to the Nao -- to be released to the public at some point in time this year!

Oh, the sign reads "Nicht streicheln, nicht füttern", which means "Don't pet, don't feed!" :-)

Stay tuned for more exciting news! You might want to have a look at the Fedora Robotics SIG page to see what's currently going on in Fedora regarding robotics. Maybe you even want to join!?

A new Goal for Open Source

Tue, 20 May 2008 17:24:25 +0100

An article titled A new Goal for Open Source has been posted to the Red Hat Press Blog. It gives an overview of RoboCup and the efforts of the AllemaniACs to use Fedora on robots and how we give back. Thanks to the nice people at Red Hat who pushed this article!

Have a look and if you are interested consider joining the Fedora Robotics SIG to improve the situation of available robot software in Fedora.

Fedora 9 Feeling (5 comments)

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:07:01 +0100

Now that I've used Fedora 9 for a couple of days I want to share some insights and rant a bit.

One of the features I like the most and that bugs me the most at the same time is PackageKit. It's awesome to be able to allow installation once and not be asked again (with this I can finally grant install permissions to a few people without giving them full root, awesome!). What is the most annoying is that I cannot prepare a transaction by marking a few packages for installation, and possibly some others for removal and then say commit or execute or whatever and it does it. No, for every package that I install it starts a new transaction immediately (someone else reported this on the devel list and was pointed to the FAQ so I hope this will getter over time).
Another thing that is annoying is that I can't see what dependencies get installed. I like to know what is installed. But after all I can use the console then I guess.
I'd like to filter out i386 packages on x86_64 altogether unless I explicitly request them. An arch specific filter seems reasonable for this. Also trying to install an i386 package where the x86_64 has already been installed fails with a message that the package has already been installed.
Another bad point is the time it takes to show info about an update if I click on the package name. I cannot quickly grasp through the updates as I used to. Also the text should be wrapped for better readability. What I like is the way bugzilla entries are referenced. Why was the "Add/Remove software" entry removed from the applications menu? This was much more obvious for users.

Another really bad experience is the new default firewall. My arguments went overheard, multicast DNS (used by Avahi) is no longer allowed by default. This way for instance Gnome file shares do not just work anymore and contact to the robots is lost. Additionally the CUPS port is no longer open. So automatic browsing of printers won't work. Another "just works" experience gone. Security is a good thing, but these crucial points of usability should have been respected. (#446828).

The next thing I tried is virt-manager. I had to find out that the virt-storage feature is not yet available as I had somehow expected. I tried installing OpenSolaris 2008.5. Interestingly when selecting i686 as machine type I was not able to choose KVM as hypervisor on x86_64 (#446817). When I tried to create a logical volume I couldn't find system-config-lvm anywhere in the menu (#446774). OpenSolaris is faster on F-9 than it was with F-8, but still it's not much fun using it in the VM. Also the network won't work, this seems to be related to the note on the KVM guest support status page that you have to use e1000 and not the rtl adapter. This had been switched back just recently in Fedora and you can't choose. There is still no entry for FreeBSD 7 in the menu, using the FreeBSD 6.x entry makes it work just fine though (#446819).

The new Firefox 3 is quite nice overall. The tabclearsearch extension is no longer available so I patched the one I had to allow installation on Firefox 3, and it still works! You can get it from my fedorapeople.org webspace (XPI installer). Annoying is that Firefox will pop to the foreground whenever it opens an URL. That means that I cannot click the current ten news entries in Liferea anymore and then switch to Firefox and read them. Rather I have to switch back and forth all the time. The same for links in emails opened with Thunderbird. Is there any way to turn off this behavior?

All special IBM keys are just supported. Even Fn-F2 locks the screen! What does not work is enabling/disabling Bluetooth with Fn-F5. This used to work at the beginning of F-8 but after some kernel upgrade it did not any longer. There is a workaround that I documented in #399601.

Overall I'm quite happy with Fedora 9. Especially that my Intel wifi just works and that support for an encrypted root partition has been added to Anaconda is great! Suspend to RAM and hibernate are working again which is awesome (turning your computer off or hibernating, but not putting it to soft sleep will prolong battery life, not for the daily cycle but it will last a couple of months longer before it's totally broken).

On the development side we were running a rawhide build slave for the last couple of months migrating our sofware to the new GCC is easy now. Though I expect some vendors to block harder when asking for new library or driver releases for a while, they are usually already picky if you ask for x86_64 packages. Point Grey for example provides their software only for Fedora Core 1 and 3 on 32 bit systems, can you believe that?

While searching through the bugs to see if something has already been filed I couldn't find a search plugin for Firefox for this. So I created a Red Hat Bugzilla search plugin and submitted it to Mycroft. Maybe it's useful to others as well.

Fedora community keep on rocking, we still have got a lot of work to do.

Fedora Robotics Mailing List (1 comment)

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:51:51 +0100

After Fedora 9 has been released admins found some time to catch up with infrastructure tickets. Thank you!

A new Fedora Robotics mailing list has been created. It should serve as a meeting place for the Fedora Robotics SIG in particular and for discussions to running Fedora on a robot or to develop for a robot on Fedora in general. If you are interested and/or want to get your hands dirty join the list! There is plenty of work to do.

What's your Greendex? (1 comment)

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:11:48 +0100

Today I read an article on heise about the Greendex. It's a measure to rate how environment-friendly your living style is. Germany is only in the middle with 50.2 points, Brasil and India rank best with 60 and the USA are last with 44.9 points.

There is a Greendex Calculator that you can use to calculate your own score. Mine is 56, what's your's?