Yes­ter­day, I unin­ten­tion­ally deleted the (mas­ter) ext4 super­b­lock of one of my (vir­tual) server’s par­ti­tions by acci­dent­ally executing

pvcreate <device>

Only some seconds later, I real­ised that I defin­it­ively chose the wrong lvm volume. Some more minutes later, I found out that this can be (partly) rever­ted by let­ting e2fsck recre­ate the mas­ter super­b­lock by first going through the inform­a­tion stored in one of the backup super­b­locks. Their loc­a­tions can be cal­cu­lated by mke2fs, given the para­met­risa­tion is still known. Given, as in most cases no cus­tom val­ues were used, the list of backup super­b­locks is revealed by running

mke2fs -n <device>

The -n argu­ment makes e2fsck carry out a dry run only. Finally, the mas­ter super­b­lock is restored by issuing

e2fsck -p <backup superblock offset> <device>

Some error mes­sages will be dis­played and some cor­rec­tions will be car­ried out. In the end, how­ever, I got back a fully func­tional filesys­tem with all the data … at least it seems so :)

Quite another lame day is almost over. Instead of doing use­ful things, I browsed through some pic­tures I took dur­ing our Spieker­oog trip in Novem­ber. Admit­teldly, I also played with the idea of repla­cing my good old (men­alto) gal­lery by a remotely hos­ted one. Any­way, like by a strange coin­cid­ence, while brows­ing the pic­tures I came across this ultra-short series of vis­ion­ary ges­tures below. I then remembered that I wanted to do a small col­lage back then but didn’t (as usual) man­age to do so until now.

It’s quite simple but still I some­how like it :)

Back in 2005, we decided to use Sub­ver­sion scm for the source code man­age­ment in the Carpe Noctem pro­ject. This decision sur­vived the last four years but based on what we exper­i­enced dur­ing this time – we even man­aged to some­how blown up our repos­it­or­ies –, the team decided to switch over to git after the World Cham­pi­on­ships 2009. We’ll have to see how things work out now and if people man­age to come to grips with the new system.

Today, I tried to merge some changes for the new Spica ver­sion. As I main­tained a sep­ar­ate repos­it­ory for this pur­pose, I wasn’t sure about how well git merges these data. Sur­pris­ingly, it went just smooth. Only about eight simply con­flicts needed to be solved. This res­ul­ted in my first lightly more com­plex git tree. Looks inter­est­ing in gitk :)

git his­tory

I just read an art­icle on heise.de that sum­mar­ises the res­ults of the 13^th Rob­oCup World Cham­pi­on­ships. With a big sur­prise I dis­covered that Ger­hard and his team the b-it-bots won the Rob­oCup @home tour­na­ment and became world cham­pion! A really great achieve­ment, my con­grat­u­la­tions — no, con­grat­u­la­tions from the whole team!

Just like the b-it-bots, the 1. RFC Stut­tgart man­aged to win both, the Rob­oCup Ger­man Open and the World Cham­pi­on­ships 2009. It was a great match against Tech United! Our con­grat­u­la­tions to this great success!

Exult­ant Mood after RFC’s Second GoalFea­tur­ing Andi

It’s been nine years since I first atten­ded a Rob­oCup tour­na­ment. Back in 2001, the Ulm Spar­rows par­ti­cip­ated in the first Rob­oCup Ger­man Open in Pader­born as well as in the Rob­oCup World Cham­pi­on­ships in Seattle. Until 2005, when I finally left the team, we took part in one more world cham­pi­on­ship – in Padua, the social event of which nobody of us will ever for­get, I sup­pose – and four Ger­man Open tournaments.

In 2006, the Ger­man Open didn’t take place in favour of the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Bre­men. In this year, Kobotroll and I par­ti­cip­ated with our own team, the Carpe Noctem Robotic Soc­cer team. We atten­ded with a cus­tom built robot plat­form and soft­ware writ­ten from scratch, but fin­ished sev­enth out of 23 par­ti­cipants. It was really great. Since then, we joined all Ger­many Open tour­na­ments and in 2009 the World Cham­pi­on­ships in Graz.

Because the scene of Rob­oCup World Cham­pi­on­ships is very inter­na­tional, each time in another coun­try, mostly the logist­ics behind the scenes of a team but also the Rob­oCup regis­tra­tion fees are very expens­ive. This is why the Ulm Spar­rows as well as Carpe Noctem were not able to take part in every such tournament.

This year seems to be the last for me in Rob­oCup. As I do not have any act­ive role within this com­munity any more, it’ll be hard for me to con­tinue as before. Carpe Noctem may be kept alive for some addi­tional year(s). I’m nev­er­the­less no mem­ber of the team any longer and thus can­not par­ti­cip­ate the same extend as the past years. Maybe some former co-workers want to con­tinue our work in some way. We’ll have to see, don’t know what’s com­ing next. Maybe it’s the best solu­tion to simply switch over to do some­thing real, some­thing more use­ful than build­ing soccer-playing robots?