The other day I read about the current c’t programming contest and got addicted immediately. The task is to create a program which plays the Atari Asteroids game from 1979: Unfortunately they do not send that gem to everyone :-), but they do send the original 8 KB of ROM, so you can play it on the MAME emulator. So far I got the emulator and the game running, and have a Python script which tracks the objects and their velocity vectors. ... Read More

Today I was playing with python-coverage, which seems to be the tool of choice for code coverage measurement in Python. Since I am constantly hacking on Jockey’s test suite, I want to strive for perfection and cover everything, so it does sound like something worthwhile. First I tried to use it like documented: python /usr/share/python-support/python-coverage/coverage.py -x tests/run which just caused the tests not to run at all, for no immediately obvious reason (it worked fine with real Python modules in apport). ... Read More

After 17 hours of long flights and hectic interchanges I made it to Austin, Texas last Saturday, yay! Admittedly there are much fewer cowboy hats around here than I anticipated (but then again, Austin is said to be the most non-Texanian city in Texas). Instead I have to readjust my mental scale of the size of everything; the country itself, the vast cars, the hilariously big TV in my giant hotel room. ... Read More

After having (happily) lived without a TV for about 8 years, I now bought a DVB-T USB stick (cheap Hauppauge Nova WinTV). Not so much because I would actually watch TV a lot, but I’d like to improve Ubuntu in the future to support them out of the box. That turned out to be much harder than I anticipated: Even if Hardy is not even released yet, the kernel is already too old to have the necessary modules, so I built the modules from the upstream development tree, which fortunately worked flawlessly. ... Read More

I’m really looking forward to go to Austin next Saturday, for my first LinuxFoundation collaboration summit. I’m particularly interested in bringing forward the work of the Driver Backport workgroup, where my focus is on delivering drivers to the user.