Looking back to 2009

The second year as part time freelancer has passed.

Looking back the most significant things are:

• Signing the contribution agreement for gdb and glibc with the Free Software Foundation and trying to contribute to both projects. So picking future work will always have to be compatible with this.


• Hacked on OpenBSC. At first just simple stuff like a telnet interface, paging and later doing paid work for On Waves to add SCCP over IP, GSM 08.08 and other things for "toy" integration of OpenBSC into a real network.


• Mid this year I asked Nokia if they have work for me in Asia, later I started focusing on QtWebKit performance. Allowing me to improve QtWebKit and Qt (which will benefit a lot more users), but also to look into various tools like OProfile, memprof, memusagestat and just know netfilter queue's... more on this later.


• I have done my usual things on OpenEmbedded, working on landing patches through the patchwork queue, finally redoing the Bitbake parser and working on the Qt recipes.


• I didn't manage to make a Linux Kernel contribution. I wanted to write a i2c driver for a fm radio chip but I fried my hardware with a broken power supply, my MIPS patches are not yet done. So if you know of any Kernel work where stuff can be released/upstreamed please let me know!
  

Kafka's Briefe an den Vater

I used to read books of Franz Kafka a lot, I loved his struggle with his father as I could relate to it. I loved the idea if writing letters in form of liberating myself. But in recent years as I got older and parents became less important.

So the last thing I will ever say about my "father" (and in case he reads it, as even old people can use computers...). I have no memory left of you, I have no picture left from my youth that displays you, I have no gift from you left in my posessings, I will get rid of your last name, You are a lonely old man. Good bye, I don't care for you.

(Qt)WebKit Sprint in Wiesbaden

The sprint is over for some time. You can see summaries of the different sessions and some slides in the wiki. Besides talking about QtWebKit and how to improve it (API, features, speed, make people aware that they can contribute, influence the release schedule, policies.. *hint*) the thing that has impressed me the most is unrelated to coding.

We all hear when someone from our Community is leaving the Qt department, and we always wonder how life will continue, who will fill the gap. In the last year a couple of new people got hired at Oslo and I'm really impressed how they find such capable people that are technically skilled and willing to move to Oslo! kudos!

hawkboard.org

Apparently TI wants to continue its' success with the beagleboard and apply it to the OMAP-L138 product in terms of hawkboard according to a presentation at FOSS.IN the coolest thing about the hawkboard and the OMAP-L138 is the floating point DSP.

Talking about performance measurements at foss.in

It is the second time I'm at foss.in and this time I was talking about the current work I'm doing on QtWebKit. Nokia is kind enough to give me enough time to explore the performance of QtWebKit (mostly on Qt Embedded Linux and ARM) and do fixes across the stack in WebKit, Qt or whereever we think it will be necessary.

Performance for me comes in memory footprint and runtime speed (how long does it take?) and for this I have experimented using OProfile, Memprof/Memusage, QBENCHMARK but also wrote some WebKit specific tools. E.g. a tool that allows me to mirror webpages to turn them into a benchmark (which still has quite some problems), a simple http server to serve the content, some test case reductions in order to look into specific areas like networking, image decoding, painting, fonts.

The slides and links can be found here and they link back to the WebKIt wiki where you can find an introduction to the (Qt)WebKit specific tools, a set of bugs and pending patches, and a set of issues that are known but not yet handled.

The main message of the talk is to not do optimisation by myth, but to use a stable environment and one of the existing tools to see what is going. It is really easy.

Attending foss.in

Thanks to generous sponsoring I managed to make it to Bangalore for FOSS.IN and Girish kindly agreed to provide accomodation. It is really great to be in India again, to see the streets, the local market, catch up with friends from India and Europe.

Girish is currently struggling with plugin code in QtWebKit for Mac, Win and X11 in both window and windowless mode, in the good ole wold and in QGraphicsView... I'm analyzing the loading behavior of a particular website and now I need to find out why we take a whole second to do layout and sometimes just actively do nothing... It is really awesome to have some clever company here in India.