I finished Hacktoberfest Last night !!!! Hacktoberfest is a month long hackathon thing run by DigitalOcean and github, in exchange for some open source Pull Requests DO will send you stickers and a tshirt. I tried to do this last year, but found it is really hard to do small commits against projects, I ended only managed 1 commit, but DO still sent me a sticker.

This year I was determined to manage the 4 commits required to get a tshirt, silly me I thought that working on an open source github hosted project for $work would make that easy. Instead I really struggled to manage the four PR's, I only got two via the work project, small commits are hard things to find.

For the other two pull requests I looked at open source software.

gpredict is a cross platform open source satellite tracker, I have used to for following amateur satellites. gpredict has always been super buggy for me, the current packaged build for FreeBSD dumped core when I tried to open the 'sat info screen'. Firing up gpredict with debug symbols and within in gdb made it really easy to find the use after free that was the culprit.

There were a pile of issues like this, I ran the build through llvm's scanbuild tool and it showed up a bunch of potential bugs. They too went into the PR for gpredict.

Last night an email came from DO stating there was still time to get the necessary PR's in. Dern, I had only manage three of the four pull requests so far.

Kaitai Struct is an awesome project for generating code from binary formats, it is a compiler, a visualizer and a declarative language. There is a set of example formats of images, games, media, compression and network packets. I noticed that UDP was missing from the network set and shamelessly added it .

Reading: Little Brother, Autumn 2600

Osmocom can do 3G voice! Look at this awesome article about the new support, it builds on this equally awesome article that gives a status update on the 3G stack. This is excellent news, as we move through LTE into whatever the 5G tech will be called, the open source community is starting to catch up with commercial hardware.

Look at those awesome diagrams:

                                +--------+
                             ,-->| MGCPGW |<--RTP--...
                            /    |        |
                            |    |        |<--MGCP
                            |    +--------+       \
                            /                     |
        +------------+<--RTP     +--------+       `->+----------+
 UE <-->| hNodeB     |           | HNB-GW |          | OsmoCSCN |
 UE <-->|            |<--Iuh---->|        |<--IuCS-->|          |
        |            |     ...-->|        |    ...-->|          |
        |            |           |        |          +----------+
        +------------+<--GTP-U   |        |
                              \  |        |          +------+           +------+
                              |  |        |<--IuPS-->| SGSN |<--GTP-C-->| GGSN |
                              |  +--------+    ...-->|      |   GTP-U-->|      |
                              |                      +------+  /        +------+
                              \_______________________________/

I mean, look at the awesome curved line:

            +--------+
         ,-->| MGCPGW |
        /    |        |
        |    |        |
        |    +--------+
        /
-+<--RTP

I cannot draw lines like that, I can draw lines like this:

               +--------+
               >        |
             -/|        |
            /  |        |
           /   +--------+
         -/     
   -----/

[DrawIT][2], the vim plugin I use for ascii boxes and lines just can't do those amazing curved lines. I bet it is a emacs plugin or something else I can't use making those awesome lines. Man am I jealous.

Reading: Little Brother, Seveneves

For my silly little tablet I got this awesome usb otg hub thing. It has 3 usb ports, a microusb hole and an otg cable, you can you it to connect 3 devices to your phone or tablet and power them all at the same time.

I got this thing so I could install something other than windows on my stream 7, to do that I need power, usb storage, usb networking and io stuff all at once.

It also comes with the most mental instructions I have seen. I am trying to figure out what it says, but man, who knows. I think there was a deal on 3 postition swtiches and they put it in instead of a 2 position one.

Reading: Little Brother, Seveneves

Last night, I drilled some holes in a book case and bricked a pi. That isn't so interesting, unless you really like holes in wood, and it leaves me at a loss what write about.

Okay, fine. I have this awesome eink screen for the pi, I got it to do something like this tide clock . I don't want single purpose things lying around, the same pi is going to be running mpd my music player of choice. It will be using the screen to show cool effects (like the thing on it now) and probably stats about things.

What things, I have no idea. Maybe: * bus times * output from the house sensors * whats playing * network uptime

See, it isn't really fleshed out yet. I do have all the code to write stuff to the screen, it took ages to get working using python, cairo and pango. Now I have holes drilled and audio cables routed through the book case, I need to get the pi up and doing music.

It is not ready yet.

Reading: Little Brother

Last night I finally read this giant interview in the Paris review with William Gibson . The interview is full of great quotes, insights and gems like Gibsons first published story .

The second part of Burning Chrome is available on iplayer about now, the first part was excellent.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Little Brother, Transmetropolitan

If you are geographicaly impaired, I am sure a neighbour help you out.