Gaia resurrection //at 20:35 //by abe

On Thursday, 24th of November 2006 evening (about one and a half week ago) we got an anonymous Symlink submission about gaia 0.1.0, a simple, but free (GPL‘ed) client for Google Earth, solely based on reverse engineering. Liked the idea of a really free client for such a popular service, so I posted it as Symlink article (German) quite shortly after noticing the submisson.

Since it’s under GPL and uses only libraries already being in Debian (OpenGL, SCons, cURL, SDL, libjpeg, libpng, libgps and Doxygen), I really would like to see it in Debian. But since I have never programmed with most of them, I did not try to compile gaia but instead took the easy way for myself and filed an RFP bug for it in Debian.

The next day in office, Gürkan, a coworker of mine and currently in NM, told me that he tries to package gaia for Debian and that it doesn’t compile on Sarge. So I gave him access to my Sid chroot and asked him if he has read about the RFP at debian-devel or debian-wnpp. To my surprise he answered that he didn’t read about it on Debian lists at all but on Symlink and therefore didn’t knew about the RFP at all.

So I pointed him to the RFP just to notice, that it wasn’t an RFP anymore but already an ITP. Strangely I didn’t get any mail notice about this change although the retitling happend only shortly after the initial RFP… Of couse, Gürkan wasn’t very happy about this, since he planned to maintain gaia himself, but at least he provided his working proof of concept package for Sid to Jordà Polo who intends to maintain an official Debian package of gaia. We then also met Jordà on the #debian-games channel in OFTC. He told us, that he’ll check some more licensing issues before uploading a package of gaia.

Well, since I had a working gaia package installed in my Sid chroot, you can probably imagine what I did half the evening? Right: Surfing around the earth with gaia and visiting my favourite places on earth. While virtually visiting places here and there, I listened to Venty’s first podcasts and seem to have downloaded 444 MB of Google Earth images (at least according to du -sh ~/.gaia). Goddamned addiction! ;-)

During the night from Friday to Saturday, I got a mail that the RFP/ITP has been closed and that Jordà was right with his suspiciousness: Google has sent a cease and desist letter to the gaia developers and they removed the downloads from their site. (So how was that Google motto? “Don’t be evil”? Well, good joke! Yet again the monopolist clearly shows that it doesn’t really mean what it says.) Since the gaia developers were allowed to post the mail from Google on their website, you can read parts of it there. I really wonder what was written in the left out parts of the mails. Job offers? ;-)

But it’s interesting to see that until one week ago gaia 0.1.0 already made it into the FreeBSD ports as well as into the ArchLinux User Repository. Both noticed, too, that gaia version 0.1.0 has been withdrawn by the authors.

Today in the morning Gürkan noticed that there’s a new version (0.1.1) of gaia at SourceForge using free NASA WorldWind / OnEarth imagery. Although the imagery is far away from the detailedness of the Google Earth imagery, this has one big advantage: There wasn’t really a X port for the windows-only client from NASA until now. (No real wonder, since they use proprietary and operating specific libraries such as .NET and DirectX…) And now we have gaia, a free client for free imagery on free operating systems. That made my day!

I hope that this will revive the packaging of gaia, at least Gürkan has already built a new proof of concept package of 0.1.1 for Sid. (Today in the afternoon, they released 0.1.2.) And if everything goes fine and Dunc-Bank manages to delay Etch until gaia has been 10 days in Unstable without bugs, we’ll have it even in Etch. ;-)

MSIE und Geldautomaten //at 19:27 //by abe

Mir sind ja schon die Haare zu Berge gestanden, als ich von Geldautomaten mit Windows 95 als Betriebssystem hörte, aber das hier ist einfach die Höhe: Ein Geldautomat der Berliner Spaßkasse, bei dem bei der Geldausgabe der Internet Explorer einen Skript-Fehler meldet. “Zum Glück” lautet der Fehler “Zugriff verweigert”. Aber wir wissen ja, beim Internet Explorer ist selbst about:blank gefährlich.

Note to myself: Wenn Du das nächste Mal in Berlin bist, meide Geldautomaten der Berliner Spaßkasse.

WML builds and runs on cygwin //at 01:26 //by abe

For a long time the Website Meta Language (WML) did not build on cygwin, but nobody knew why or how to fix it. At the end of last year, the WML maintainer changed to Shlomi Fish and one of his goals was to get WML run under cygwin.

Many probably didn’t expect it to really happen since WML developement has stalled for the last three or four years, but the Subversion 2.0.x maintenance branch of WML now builds and works on Windows under cygwin. This shows that there is really something going on in the WML developement again.

Congrats and thanks to Shlomi!

Last day at work //at 19:00 //by abe

As some of my friends already know, I’ve quit my current job and will start working at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich in May.

Today is my last day at work here and I feel a little bit sentimental. Most co-workers became friends during the last four and a half years and I’ll move away from a bunch of friends at Darmstadt and from some friends in Mainz and Frankfurt/M. And I’ll leave the Rhine-Main area just shortly before LinuxTag moves in. Fsck.

But it had to be. Although I like creating dynamic web pages with Embperl and Apache, I became sick of working with SuSE Linux, sick of developing with OpenLDAP, sick of developing web applications which must (also) run with Apache under Windows or with MS Access. Since I understand that for the success of my current employer the use of these products can’t be changed that easily, the only solution for me was to quit the job.

My new job at the ETH Zurich will be administrating mostly Unix systems at the Department of Physics as well as some Unix user training. I won’t get rid of Windows and OpenLDAP there though, but I won’t have to develop software with them. What I’ll get rid of is SuSE: I will have my beloved Debian around me (which I can use here only for building Debian packages for customers) and some FreeBSD (no change here ;-), too. So I really look forward to my new job.

Therefore I’ll move to Zurich soon. And since I have down there a lot of friends, too — not only through Symlink and the Linux User Group Switzerland but also people from the 2CV scene — it’s not so hard to the leave the current environment and jump into a new one. Another advantage of moving more southwards is that I’ll be closer again to the rest of the Beckert family, at least the part I’m related to. (The biggest number of Beckerts seem to live near Chemnitz according to Geogen, so perhaps I should pay attention to this when visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage the next time.)

But I’ll come back and visit the Rhine-Main area probably quite often, not only for LinuxTag.

P.S.: It maybe that further blog postings about my move to Zurich only appear in the German written part of my blog and therefore not on Planet Debian (but Planet Symlink).

Stöckchen fangen: Vier Dinge //at 01:27 //by abe

Nu mussich aber, nachdem jetzt nicht nur Priska sondern auch dyfa mit Stöckchen um sich wirft, und Jiuka seines auch schon recht flott gefangen hat. Übrigens haben sowohl dyfa als auch Priska das Stöckchen von der Thildkröte gefangen. Bei SvenK habe ich das Stöckchen als erstes gesehen, dort hieß es allerdings noch “Tag”. :-)

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