marcusmeissner

libgphoto2 2.4.9

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:45:42 GMT

Nice weekend without any further need-to-do's so I worked on the due release 2.4.9 of libgphoto2.
(And a dinner invitation to friends, and some biking through the south part of Nuernberg.)

News of 2.4.9 can be found here if you are curious.

First time I used a (more or less ad-hoc) testplan for the ptp2 driver.
I went through the currently 3 major types of remote controllable cameras and tested
generic common scenarios of remote control.

And I actually found I had to fix some EOS stuff before release during testing.

Testplan ptp2 driver

Canon Powershot series (currently: Powershot SX100IS)

        --capture-image-and-download
        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0):                          PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1):                           PASS
                - Card configured, but not inserted (capturetarget=1)   PASS

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download                 PASS

        --list-config                                                   PASS


Canon EOS series (currently: Canon EOS 1000D)
        --capture-image-and-download
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (SD) (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          xxxx
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    xxxx
                - no SD card inserted
                        - JPEG                                          FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)

        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card insert
                        - JPEG                                          FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download                 PASS

        --wait-event-and-download
                - JPEG                                                  PASS
                - JPEG + RAW                                            PASS

        --list-config                                                   PASS
        --get-config somevalue                                          PASS
        --set-config somevalue=value                                    PASS


Nikon DSLR series (currently: Nikon D90)
        --capture-image-and-download
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (SD) (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card inserted
                        - JPEG                                          PASS reports error
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS reports error

        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card insert
                        - JPEG                                          PASS reports error
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS reports error

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download 
                        - SDRAM mode                                    PASS
                        - Card mode                                     FAIL/IGNORE (returns PTP Device Busy)

        --wait-event-and-download
                - JPEG                                                  PASS
                - JPEG + RAW                                            FAIL (deleting NEF also deletes JPG I think)


        --list-config                                                   PASS
        --get-config somevalue                                          PASS
        --set-config somevalue=value                                    PASS

Prague Visit

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:54:59 GMT

Finally found the time to travel to the Prague SUSE Office, together with Thomas who was holding a 2 day security design lecture there.

I myself did not have much tasks except to meet people, say hi and see if anything
comes up to discuss, so I mostly did my regular work.

Thomas lecture was a success as far as I see, the hospitality of our SUSE colleagues was very great and the hotel nice.

I took several trips into the inner city to take pictures.

Tuesday: Trip with the 50mm lens on the Nikon D90. Found that 50mm is not well suited to architectural photography, only long shots really possible. Took some nice perspectives though.

Wednesday: Trip with the 35mm lens. Better, I also took some more shake-free pictures of the castle. Enjoyed the Globe Bookstore, recommended by skh.

Thursday: Trip with the 18-200mm Zoom Lens. Went up to the castle, took an interesting cathedral entrace shot, some panaromas and a bit of voyerism shots ;).

hmm

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:47:17 GMT

Fall happened, Winter started happening, Snow fell and thawed, Christmas came and went,
New year came and went.

Oh, and I became godfather to my niece 2 weeks ago.

Nothing much more interesting to see here, move along.

Vacations

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:30:58 GMT

Last 3 weeks were spent with a week of vacation, a week of work, and another week of vacation.

First vacation week ... I went to the Linuxbierwanderung (Linux Beer Hike), this year happening in Helmbrechts, Upper Franconia, Bavaria, Germany. Nearly no Linux (except running on Laptops and in some smaller discussions), not much walking (for me personally no walks), but some sightseeing, and quite an amount of beer. Saw the German-German wall museum in Moedlareuth.

One week of busy work, including hurrying out another kernel fixing a new local root exploit.

And another week of vacation, this time going to Maurach at Achensee in Tirol, Austria with my best friend Bianca. Nice hotel with good food, wellness area and in easy distance from the lift. We spent two days walking in the mountain, one week of relaxing in the sea bath at the Achensee, and one day shopping in Innsbruck. Also took a ride with the local Steamrailroad. Nice and relaxing week, pictures here.

Hackweek

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:48:50 GMT

During Hackweek, I:

- released Mozilla Firefox 3.0.12.
- released a SLE11 / 11.1 Kernel Update.
- helped watching that we do not miss critical security issues...

Err, wait... That is not what Hackweek is about ... so what did you "hack"?

- I ported libgphoto2 using applications to the next and upcoming major version. You can find the results in GPhoto:UNSTABLE buildservice repository. Was actually easier than I thought though. (f-spot is however not ported, adapting the C# bindings will be not just some 2 liners.)

- I hacked stuff in libgphoto2, especially Canon EOS and Powershot stuff, and some cleanups.

- On Sunday evening I ported my internal package update notifier to the openSUSE buildservice Factory mechanisms.

I am running internally some perl scripts hooked up to procmail and cron that look for new package versions and send nagging mails to maintainers. I already did in Caldera days and moved and improved those over the years.

What are they looking at:
- the freshmeat daily digest mail via procmail.
- sourceforge release notices (I am subscribed to every package we want updates for, since there seems no global RSS feed for it) via procmail.
- GNOME , KDE and CPAN RSS news feeds via cron job.
- (not run these days... a perl script looking up all Factory packages in the buildservice for newer versions.)
- Versions currently in Factory (cron job).

If a newer version is spotted, the maintainer is emailed and entry stored in the database.

What I changed was the migration from using the old internal PDB (package database) to use the new datasets in the openSUSE buildservice metadata. This means that all community packagers will now get nag emails.

You can now look at these pages in HTML form, in CSV form, or visual enhanced integrated in Coolos Factory Status page.

Linux Bierwanderung 2009

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:05:59 GMT

This years Linux Bierwanderung will return to its origins, namely Upper Franconia with its breweries and nice country side.

There is no entrance fee, you just have to pay your own hotel+food+travel ;)

It is not too late to join, in fact you can even just drop by, say hi and join in.

I will probably go, even though I have not booked yet. ;)

Update

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:02:33 GMT

Was at LinuxTag in Berlin last weekenend.

Two main goals fulfilled:
- Met and talked to the Redhat security folks, who I had never met before in RL. All the Opensource security guys cooperate and work together friendly, it was nice meeting them.
- Hold another talk on Wine in front of a full hall again. Should have shown demos perhaps. Thanks for listening! me in front and the audience. Also on Flickr (follow stream right).

Otherwise lots of work and business as usual, just more of it ... tiring.

Also saw my newborn niece for the first time 2 weeks ago while visiting parents. And yummy strawberry pie.

Otherwise I rewrote the libgphoto2 object handling on the trainride and committed it. It allows greater flexibility in dynamic loading of the objectinformation from the cameras, on-demand loading, and features binary search. Still not happy with some of the datastructures.

10 years

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Today marks the 10th anniversary of me starting to work in the Linux business. 3 years 1 month at Caldera and 6 years 11 months at SUSE/Novell.

I had some sarcastic and depressing comments here, but I deleted them.

(Just for the record ... I like my job and I don't intend to stop doing it.)

Vacation / Trip report

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:58:56 GMT

Had 1.5 weeks of vacation to travel with 2 friends, a certain mouse, and various Fluffs to Denmark to visit a friend of theirs.

Friday (24th april): Roadtrip starting at 10:00 in Nuernberg ... We drove straight to Hamburg as the first days stop. Spent the evening at the Aussenalster, lounging at a jetty cafe and enjoying the setting sun over the water. Tried not to get run over by Joggers and Bikers. Hotel was a nice one in St Georg, except I could listen to everything happen in the neighbouring rooms and the staircase.

Saturday: Walked around the Binnenalster and the City. Met by chance my brother who lives in Hamburg. Met an old study friend of Edith and spent more time walking around and looking at St Pauli / Landungsbruecken, Ferries, Oevelgoenne and Blankenese. Then we drove on towards Luebeck. Luebeck was quieter and emptier then we imagined (or we did not really find the cool places). So Steakhouse first, and Irish Pub across the nice Hotel (Alter Speicher) later on.

Sunday: Visited the Guenter Grass House and the Figurenmuseum (funny enough, lots of hand puppets from all over the world ... but no Muppets (r).) ... Then drove on towards Denmark, where we spent the night in the even quieter costal town Fredericia.

Denmark smelled strongly of Guelle everywhere, farmers have been busy getting it to the fields apparently.

Monday: Drove on to visit Lindholm Hoje, a Viking grave site and after walking around it a bit, drove on the Ålbæk, near the northern most tip of Denmark. We had rented a vacation flat for 4 nights at a farmers place, quiet and nice. Lots of drinking and chatting.

Tuesday: Visited Skagen withs its art museum, and the tip of denmark in Grenen, where Skagerrak (Nordsee aka North Sea) and Kattegat (Ostsee aka Baltic Sea) meet each other, and the
a large aquarium in Hirthals.

Wednesday: A walk through the woods.

Thursday: More sightseeing around the area, visited to only left-as-is wandering dune Råbjerg Mile, various beaches on both the North and Baltic Sea. Enjoyed local fish in the evening.

Friday: Drove (mostly with a Ferry from Fredrikshaven) to Goeteborg. Spent the afternoon walking around in Goeteborg, drinking beer and watching the local girls who obviously are accustomed to walk around in shorts and tshirts at 10 degree celsius. Nice hotel called Vasa.

Saturday: Drove through south sweden and denmark to Gedser and then ferried over to Rostock. Found a nice hotel in Warnemuende and relaxed with beach walking and beer/wine.

Sunday: More refreshing beach walking, saying good by to the sea... Drove southwards, with a lunch stop in Potsdam to visit Sanssouci, then onwards back to Nuernberg.

Monday-Wednesday: Washing, helping Rasmus with his home network and getting barbeque as thanks, fixing libgphoto2...

Images are here.

hmm

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:36:23 GMT

There hasn't been much encouraging happening the last weeks to write about, sorry. But let me summarize some points:

I have meanwhile released libgphoto2 2.4.5. Bugfixes, mostly for Nikon and Canon Capture code, first try at Nikon LiveView support, some under the hood fixes. Spotted some more problems in the meantime of course, so perhaps a new release soon.

Worked on libgphoto2 2.5 API stuff a bit, added a new trigger capture method (not really working well yet), and a CameraFile type for download_to_function(). Quite some work in PTP event handling.

Not much Wine work, but built releases 1.1.18 and 1.1.19 as usual.

Lots of security incident work currently, due to large input of issues. But nothing really noticable different than usual.

Last week after work I waited for the tram, listening to music on my earphones and was so tired and lost in thought that I did not notice the tram pulling up, but only as it left the station... Time for vacation I guess.

NASA TV and openSUSE

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:16:32 GMT

As you might know, the Shuttle Discovery is currently in space, docked to the International Space Station and delivering the last large solarpanel+battery set.

NASA is streaming most of the time live from the station / outside / shuttle via its webcast
engine on www.nasa.gov.

So, how to watch with openSUSE 11.0?

- Realplayer plugin - does not work on x86_64
- no windows media player
- no quicktime player

After several more tries to get Opera, Konqueror or Firefox to work and display video, I found the best solution.

as root (if wine is not yet installed):
zypper in wine
as user:
winetricks firefox3
... follow the dialogs for installation
winetricks quicktime72
... follow the dialogs for installation

there will be a now be new Firefox icon on the desktop and in the Programs menu, start it.
open http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html?param=public.

=> Voila, instant space goodness.

(and yes, it is very sad that while it offers _3_ ways of video, _none_ work by default.)

Club Koma

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:05:11 GMT

With 35 I am usually not going out that often to late night venues, but last night we went to Club Koma, a local gothic club/disco for a medieval music age event. (Met und Miezen - Met and chicks ;) Strange people, but fun and dancing happened. (And the taxi drive was around 13 euros back to my flat, twice as much as the entrance fee)

I also bought some new / old cameras from ebay, a Kodak DC 240, Kodak DC 210, HP Photosmart C200 and (from the NORMA supermarket around the corner) a Disney Micropix. All below 20 Euro, and I even had to fix the DC240 driver to make it work.

Nothing much interesting to speak about at work, except I am writing an OVAL description emitter for our updates. Long planned, still not done.

update

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:31:56 GMT

Some frustration and so drinking the last 2 weeks for, well, known reasons.

Bought some new digitial cameras. Two cheap from eBay for gphoto2 testing, and one Nikon D90 to replace the D70s to take good pictures. Not much pictures taken yet with the latter one.
Spent two trainrides with more improvements of the libgphoto2 API to come to a clearer API and one without fixed size buffers...
My API adjustements are not done yet though. One new CameraFile type (beside memory and fd style) missing, and some more cleanups necessary.

And I am ready for spring, just the weather throws snow at us still here in Nuernberg.

So much for Friday afternoon.

FOSDEM

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:14:30 GMT

We went to Brussel to look at FOSDEM over the weekend. D-ANFL on the way to BRU and on the way back.

FOSDEM is ... strange. Lots of people, everything crowded, hot devrooms (cooling probably not paid for the weekends). Listened to some of our talks and the Debian keynote. With the task of finding out more about motivating our community I was a bit at loss.

My Wine talk on Sunday noon was well received, around 110 listeners according to Juergen. I do not understand why so much people are interested in the topic, remembering Security with just 20 listeners 3 years ago...
The video will show up tomorrow on the FOSDEM 2009 overview page.

And here are is my Flickr Set of images.

status update and FOSDEM

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:52:53 GMT

Spent the last days fixing Wine issues after a new Coverity run. Submitted ca 35 patches in a hack frenzy, but only 14 got in for now. But Wine is at 0 UNINSPECTED issues now!

GPhoto hacking wise not much work done.

Oh, and I bought a Nikon D90 (to upgrade the D70s) and a 50mm/1.8 lens (for better photos). Hopefully better photos will happen. :)

I will be on FOSDEM 2009 on the weekend, hold a talk on Wine and hang around the openSUSE booth. If you have cameras able to remote control drop by for debugging :)

libgphoto2 2.4.4 released!

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:02:58 GMT

I just released libgphoto2 2.4.4, after fixing some small bugs I missed previously.

So get it while it is hot. :)

- Improved Canon and Nikon remote capture, lots more to configure.
- Lots of bugfixes in the ptp driver.
- Faster startup in the ptp driver (but not as fast as it should be able to get).

And last but not least, translation updated, so you can say:

"Фотоаппарат не обнаружен" or "无法检测到任何相机" or "Impossible de détecter aucun appareil" or "Konnte keine Kamera finden", which hopefully all mean something like "Could not detect any camera".

And after 1 hour of uploading and updating news sites, I go to bed now. :)

Saturday evening

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:30:59 GMT

Had a very nice day over at friends who had a family celebration.

What I want to mention is however that on the way back there were 3 young men sitting beside me in the bus who wanted me to take along into the nightlife of Nuernberg ... Age around 20ish. To places like Schmelztiegel and WON (World of Nightlive, a disco), both having visitors of average age of 18 or less ... Well guys, sorry to disappoint you, but I am not just tired from the day, I also am nearly double this age. (It is a bit sad though, since I would enjoy saturday nightlive occasionly ... but ... well.)

Work heavy week as usual, notably we brainstormed enhancements for the GPG key import dialog when adding new repositories to YaST2. It is difficult to secure and it is difficult to make it right, so that users can do good choices (and not just click "OK" to every question). We did not find an all dancing and singing solution, but hopefully some improvements can be done.

Wine 1.1.13 released, some more GPHOTO Nikon property additions and fixes done.

January things

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:06:16 GMT

It is cold outside ... but for the ones longing for spring or summer, well there is time for every season and sunny cold winter is better than rainy fall.

Just the cold feet suck.

Relaxed a lot between the holidays, spent new years eve at colleagues with yummy food and relaxed chatting, watched various of 25c3 talks, but did not visit Berlin.

At work since 5th of January again, with the 6th being a public holiday here.

On the 6th we ventured to Pottenstein, where they hold a catholic procession through town ... and burn hundreds of fires around the valley... The latter is the reason for the large number of visitors :) Took and uploaded some pictures (go right in the photostream).
Pretty cold there, nice fires, but well .. i like easter fires more :)

Wine 1.1.12 packages published, lots of security updates released as usual.

Relaxation mostly gone after 4 days of work. :/

Christmas

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:05:44 GMT

Is over now. Hope everyone had a relaxing time.

As for work... Since December 10:

- We released openSUSE 111!!!11!elf1 (since every says openSUSE 11 to openSUSE 11.0 a little bit freedom here).

2 hours later we started releasing security updates for it, complete with delta support etc.
7 security updates after 24 hours.

- Slow down for Christmas break... Over Christmas break we of course do not close the SUSE and
throw the keys away, but most developers are on holidays. We are of course checking E-Mails
and reacting on critical issues. So far no critical issues yet.

- Wine 1.1.11 released, RPMs as usual on the buildservice.

But now I am on vacation, spent a week at my parents place, helped dig up the forest of grandma for planting new trees, eat lots of food, tried showing the Nintendo Wii to my family (so far no one has played with it, only the husband of my sister), and sleeping long and general relaxing.

What I did in OSS stuff:
- You can now dump and configure most of the Nikon D70s properties. (also used by the other Nikons). So every aspect that can be remote controlled is (will be) remote controllable with a nice interface. Also planned for the other Nikon DSLRs.
- Fixing the KDE4 camera:/ ioslave and configuration module. Still ingoing, but the kcontrol module was completely broken at least due to some automagic conversions run over it.
The kioslave troubles seem related by yet more semantic changes in KIO behaviour. I rewrote parts of kio kamera already to make it less prone to such unclear behaviour, not yet finished / committed.

Snow, Christmas bells ...

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:19:16 GMT

Its snowing outside, lets see how many stays until tomorrow. White Nuernberg would have something (except car chaos :)

It is the time for Gluehwein at the Christkindlesmarkt, early sun down, Christmas Party, and closing down work for the Christmas break, etc...
Oh and openSUSE 11.1 is done, Wine 1.1.10 released (RPMs available in the buildservice) as usual, openSUSE 10.2 is nearly done.

Oh, and we had one interesting user report of a gphoto2 user ... http://archive.org/ has now scanned 98 million (!) book pages of 294.000 books using Canon EOS 5D cameras controlled by libgphoto2. See
this mail. Some more technical details were inquired too, they went through like 75 EOS 5D cameras...

I don't really have much special to write currently though, so perhaps more in the new year. ;)

back from egypt

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:31:07 GMT

Had a nice vacation in egypt, without computers nor internet. :)

The tourist agencies have night flights into Hurghada, so the vacationers can have full days of vacation... So we arrived at 2:45 in the morning. Hard to find sleep at 4:30 in the hotel though.

Very nice and clean hotel, nice eating, nice beach, lots of sun and so on was had.

Just one day trip, where we did some snorkeling to watch riffs and fish.
Originally we wanted to do a trip to Luxor/Valley of the Kings ... but it would have been long hours of bus travel and then lots of tourists ... so we passed this on this time.

So we got lots of sun and relaxation done, and arrived back on Sunday morning in misty Nuernberg.

Tooks some images, can be found in this flickr set.

Off to Egypt!

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:02:31 GMT

So, off to Egypt ... staying at the Grand Resort Hotel, so be jealous now. :)

But to keep a bit SUSE relevant ...

We (well mostly Novell Technical Support Developers) now put my CVE index in an official place! It is updated once daily.
If you find incorrect stuff or older CVEs not yet linked, do not hesitate to mail us at security@suse.de (be aware that new published issues take a some days through QA usually).

Also, Wine 1.1.8 has been released and is in the openSUSE buildservice repository as usual.

Vacation

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:02:03 GMT

After some weeks of regular work (excepting a 3 day manager seminar) I am on vacation now. 1 week chilling in Nuernberg, 1 week warming up on a beach in Hurghada, Egypt.

Released libgphoto2 2.4.3 in the meantime, polished up my camera page.

Spent the week working on a nice halloween party, role playing with friends, and lots of relaxing, also in a thermal bath. I also worked up libgphoto2, joining the Canon SDK developer program, and integrating some of the documented stuff into libgphoto2.

Wineconf 2008

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:45:33 GMT

The yearly Wine Conference took place this year in Minneapolis, USA, home of Codeweavers.

So I traveled there on Friday, spending 24 hours of total awake time due to some rerouting,
arriving at 23:00 in the hotel. Now the first government body has all my fingerprints, and
its not Germany. :/

Conference was on Saturday and Sunday, starting with the keynote from Alexandre as only fixed
agenda item, and then went on with all-hands introduction, and other sessions collected ad-hoc.

Our group photo with names is on the wineconf wikipage.

I took some more pictures now uploaded to my gallery.

All in all it was nice seeing all the developers again, and having some fun inbetween.

Traveled back on Monday, arriving at 10am in Nuernberg on Tuesday.

Fog

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:54:28 GMT

My, doesn't time fly.

Fall has come to Nuernberg, evident by this mornings fog.

I was on the SUSE Labs Conference in the Czech Republic for a week, and on the SUSE.cz organized social event before... First time climbing up a tree with safety (and then jumping down from it in the end). :)

I will be flying to WineConf 2008 in Minneapolis/St. Paul over the next weekend, lets see what weather they have over there.

Work continues as usual. Life too.