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AltOS 1.2.1 — TeleBT support, bug fixes and new AltosUI features Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.2.1. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of cc1111-based micro-controller firmware and Java-based ground station software. The biggest new feature for AltOS is the addition of support for TeleBT, our ground station designed to operate with Android phones and tablets. In addition, there’s a change in the TeleDongle radio configuration that should improve range, some other minor bug fixes and new features in AltosUI AltOS Firmware — Features and fixes There are bug fixes in both ground station and flight software, so you should plan on re-flashing both units at some point. However, there aren’t any incompatible changes, so you don’t have to do it all at once. New features: TeleBT support. Improved radio sensitivity. The TeleDongle receiver parameters have been tweaked to provide better reception. TeleMini now completely resets all radio parameters in recovery mode (with the two outer debug pins connected) — 434.550MHz, N0CALL, factory radio cal. Bug fixes: USB device fixes. This improves operation with Windows, avoiding hangs and errors in many cases. Correct the Kalman filter error covariance matrix; the old parameters were built assuming continuous measurements. AltosUI — Easier to use AltosUI has also seen quite a bit of work for the 1.2.1 release. It’s got several fun new features and a few bug fixes. New Graph UI features: Show tool-tips with the value near the cursor. Make the set of displayed values configurable. Add all of the available data values just in case you want to see them. Added a Map tab showing the ground track of the whole flight. The flight summary tab now includes the final GPS position. This lets you figure out where your rocket landed without replaying the whole flight. Other new AltosUI features: TeleBT support, including Bluetooth connections (Linux-only, at present). Shows the callsign in the Monitor Idle and other command-mode windows so that you can tell what callsign is being used. Show the block number when downloading flight data. This lets you see something happen even for longer flights. Make the initial position of the AltosUI configurable so that you can position it out of the way of the rest of you desktop. Distribute Mac OS X in .dmg format (Mac OS Disk Image); this means you don’t need to explicitly unpack the bits. Bug fixes: Deal with broken networking while downloading map tiles. Tiles are now always downloaded asynchronously so that the UI doesn’t freeze when the network is slow.

Recently we had our online Ubuntu Developer Summit where we discussed a range of topics, defined next steps, and documented work items. The very last session at the event was an overall summary of the tracks (you can watch the video here), but I wanted to blog an overall summary too. These notes are quick and to the point, but they should give an overall idea of decisions made. Client Content Handling - Siloing apps. Main applications will define a “main repo” and provide an API to deliver, share and access the data in the main repo. X.org Want to update to 1.14 or even 1.15 if the video ABI doesn’t change. System Settings Focus on the phone settings defined here. Scopes Scopes that didn’t land in 13.04 should land within 2 weeks. Several scopes will be migrated from Python to either C++ or Go for memory purposes. Chromium Expressed interest in moving to Chromium as default for a better user experience. Gathered feedback on the possible move. Next steps are to take discussion to the mailing list. Unity 8/Mir Preview in 13.10 Want to have a preview of Ubuntu 8 (Phablet UI) running on Mir as an optional session (installable from universe or PPA, most likely). Foundations Reviewed the current 13.10 release schedule found several changes made in 13.04 that mistakenly hadn’t been carried over, such as later freeze dates and one fewer alpha; Adam Conrad will be syncing all this up and sending mail to the ubuntu-release list for review. We discussed the positioning of the development release in light of some conversations last cycle, and put some more flesh on the design for making it easier for people to follow along with the development release all the time. This cycle, we’ll be bringing up a new 64-bit ARM architecture based on cross-building work done last cycle, and we’ll update developers on that once we get closer to the point of starting up builds in Launchpad. Moving forward with click packages. Fleshed out ideas on source package provision, integrating with existing client package management stacks, and clarifying some other things like the security model. For image based upgrades, the team held a demo and Q&A for the current proposed solution, which is split into client, server, and upgrader; client is going well and expected to land by the end of June, server is currently blocked on infrastructure but should be ready around the same time, and Ondrej Kubik has been making good progress at tweaking the CyanogenMod recovery environment for the upgrader. Firmed up the plan for packaging Android components for Ubuntu Touch images. Upstart will be used as the standard way of spawning desktop apps for Unity on touch devices and ideally on desktop too (Unity 7 and 8). This will let us make sure we only have one instance per app, and will make it easy to apply AppArmor, seccomp and cgroup confinement consistently to all apps. Defined a goal to reduce the amount of time it takes to prepare, test and make a Checkbox release, automating more of the process. This will benefit people who use the Checkbox tool as part of their daily work. It’s possible that Checkbox may move to Universe, although this needs some more discussion. The server certification tools are being reengineered to use the new plainbox engine as their core. This will preserve the existing UI, but we’ll have co-installable packages with the new core, and will eventually switch over to the new tools. The cert tools and test suite are being upgraded to work well on ARM for our hyperscale and mobile work, fixing any issues so we can get full, clean test runs on ARM servers. MaaS will be used for provisioning, and tested as a part of the ARM server solution. We will be basing the primary kernels for 13.10 on Linux 3.10, but will strongly consider 3.11 depending on timing. For Ubuntu Touch devices, we already have kernels available for Nexus 4 and 7, and plan to also bring up kernels for Ga

(Posted 21 May 2013 by finid)

Keith and I are pleased to announce the immediate availability of TeleBT, a new Altus Metrum ground station product providing the equivalent of TeleDongle plus Bluetooth. TeleBT working with AltosDroid on an Android device provides everything needed to monitor a rocket in flight, record telemetry, and know how to walk right to the airframe after it's back on the ground. The Bluetooth capability of TeleBT is also supported by AltosUI on Linux, and with a micro USB cable TeleBT works just like TeleDongle on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems running AltOS version 1.2.1 or later.

The other day in the Linux Journal IRC room (#linuxjournal on Freenode), I was whining to the channel about no-ip.com deleting my account without warning. My home IP address hadn't changed in a couple months, and because there was no update, it appeared abandoned. more>>

Savor this spring session of CTIA 2013, because it will be the last. In Las Vegas' Venetian Ballroom, moguls of the wireless world took the stage for the show's opening keynote to discuss the expansion of wireless service in North America, the future of the CTIA shows, and women in wireless.After the show closes on Thursday, the Wireless Association will merge the spring and fall CTIA shows will merge to form one session. 2014's show will be a so-called "super show."CTIA as holiday launchpadLike this year's show, the next CTIA session will also be in Las Vegas. Taking place from September 9-11, the time has been chosen to give manufacturers the chance to launch products into the holiday season.This should help CTIA compete with the other Vegas tech show, CES, which occurs in January, after the holiday feeding frenzy.A subdued send offThe last opening keynote of the CTIA spring show began on an appropriately dour note. CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent began his address with condolences to the victims of Oklahoma's deadly tornadoes.Former NFL player Largent is an Oklahoma native himself, and served his state in the U.S. House of Representatives before shifting to a career in the wireless industry. He praised the work of emergency workers in his home state, and urged the audience to text a donation to the Red Cross.Women in WirelessLargent then introduced newly appointed FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. The first woman to hold this position, Clyburn was still in her first week as commissioner when she took the stage on Tuesday.Clyburn was followed by Mary Dilon, president of U.S. Cellular and CTIA Chairwoman. She stressed the need to encourage young women to enter the wireless industry, joking that the CTIA rest rooms are the "only place where the men are waiting and the women just waltz right in."Despite an overall gender imbalance in the industry, the CTIA opening keynote was able to muster an impressive all-female panel of wireless moguls. Executives from Qualcomm, Target and more joined Dilon for a discussion of their own career paths, and their vision for the industries future.

Microsoft unveiled it's all new console today, the Xbox One, and with it a host of partnerships with game companies for new titles heading to market later this year. Of particular note is a partnership between Microsoft and the National Football League to mix the real and virtual world of gaming together. One a user is watching teams on the gridiron, they can seamlessly switch to fantasy football information and displays, as well as receive on screen updates. Developing...

Using Solr With TYPO3 On Debian Wheezy TYPO3's default search extension called "Indexed Search" is fine for small web sites, but if your web site is bigger (> 500 pages), it is getting very slow. Fortunately, you can replace it with a search extension that uses the ultra-fast Apache Solr search server. This tutorial explains how to use Apache Solr with TYPO3 on Debian Wheezy.

It's been all over the internet, so you probably heard it already: Google Hangouts no longer receives messages from XMPP users. Before, you could easily chat with "federated" users from other Jabber servers. While of course the various open-source people are not amused -- for me, most of my contacts disappeared, so I then uninstalled Hangouts to get back Google Talk (apparently this works if Talk was preinstalled in your phones firmware) -- this bears some larger risks for Google: Reputation: Google used to have the reputation of being open. XMPP support was open, the current "Hangups" protocol is not. This continuing trend of abandoning open standards and moving to "walled garden" solutions will likely harm the companies reputation in the open source community Legal risk of an antitrust action: Before, other competitors could interface with Google using an indepentend and widely accepted standard. An example is United Internet in Germany, which operates for example the Web.de and GMX platforms, mail.com, the 1&1 internet provider. By effectively locking out its competitors - without an obvious technical reason, as XMPP was working fine just before, and apparently continues to be used at Google for example in AppEngine - bears a high risk of running into an antitrust action in Europe. If I were 1&1, I would try to get my lawyers started... or if I were Microsoft, who apparently just wanted to add XMPP messaging to Hotmail? Users: Google+ is not that big yet. Especially in Germany. Since 90% of my contacts were XMPP contacts, where am I likely going to move to: Hangouts or another XMPP server? Or back to Skype? I still use Skype for more Voice calls than Google (which I used like twice), because there are some people that prefer Skype. One of these calls probably was not using the Google plugin, but an open source phone. Because with XMPP and Jingle, my regular chat client would interoperate. An in fact, the reason I started using Google Talk the first place was because it would interoperate with other networks, too, and I assumed they would be good at operating a Jabber server. In my opinion, Google needs to quickly restore a functioning XMPP bridge. It is okay if they offer add-on functionality only for Hangout users (XMPP was always designed to allow for add-on functionality); it is also okay if they propose an entirely new open protocol to migrate to on the long run, if they can show good reasons such as scalability issues. But the way they approached the Hangup rollout looks like a big #fail to me. Oh, and there are other issues, too. For example Linus Torvalds complains about the fonts being screwed up (not hinted properly) in the new Google+, others complain about broken presence indicators (but then you might as well just send an email, if you can't tell whether the recepient will be able to receive and answer right away), but using Hangouts will apparently also (for now -- rumor has it that Voice will also be replaced by Hangups entirely) lose you Google Voice support. The only thing that seems to give positive press are the easter eggs... All in all, I'm not surprised to see over 20% of users giving the lowest rating in the Google Play Store, and less than 45% giving the highest rating - for a Google product, this must be really low.

If you're running an Android device with GNU userland Linux in a chroot and need a network over USB cable, here's a quick primer on how it's setup.When doing Openmoko hacking, one always first plugged in the USB cable and forwarded network, or like I did later forwarded network over Bluetooth. It was mostly because the WiFi was quite unstable with many of the kernels.I recently found out myself using a chroot on a Nexus 4 without working WiFi, so instead of my usual WiFi usage I needed network over USB... trivial, of course, except that there's Android on the way and I'm a Android newbie. Thanks to ZDmitry on Freenode, I got the bits for the Android part so I got it working.On device, have eg. data/usb.sh with the following contents.#!/system/xbin/shCHROOT="/data/chroot"ip addr add 192.168.137.2/30 dev usb0ip link set usb0 upip route delete defaultip route add default via 192.168.137.1;setprop net.dns1 8.8.8.8echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> $CHROOT/run/resolvconf/resolv.confOn the host, execute the following:adb shell setprop sys.usb.config rndis,adbadb shell data/usb.shsudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.137.1sudo iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.137.0/24echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward sudo iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPTThis works at least with Ubuntu saucy chroot. The main difference in some other distro might be whether the resolv.conf has moved to /run or not. You should be now all set up to browse / apt-get stuff from the device again.